To the Editor:
In his excellent article, “Once Again, Anti-Semitism Without Jews” [August 1992], Robert S. Wistrich notes that Franjo Tudjman, President of Croatia, has not only regurgitated the lies of the Holocaust deniers but “even labels Israel a ‘Judeo-Nazi’ state.” Surely Mr. Wistrich knows that when Tudjman was reproached for this particular calumny he had the exquisite pleasure of pointing out that he had learned it from Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Israel’s aging enfant terrible (and Mr. Wistrich’s colleague at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem).
Actually, Leibowitz cannot claim credit for inventing the Judeo-Nazi epithet, which seems to have originated in the British Foreign Office in the 1930’s; but his use of it during the Lebanon war made him an instant celebrity in Europe and a hero of large segments of the Israeli Left (including people who now sit in that country’s cabinet). Why, the Tudjmans of the world may well ask, should they be blamed for repeating the slander that goes forth from Zion itself?
Edward Alexander
Seattle, Washington
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To the Editor:
In his article on the reemergence of open anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe, Robert S. Wistrich asserts that “today, popular anti-Semitism . . . is no longer a government policy.” In Slovakia, this may no longer be assured.
In Bratislava last fall during the run-up to elections I saw anti-Semitic slogans and swastikas on many walls—including a swastika on the building which houses the offices of the Bratislava and Slovakian Jewish community organizations. I learned that the scrawls were Slovak nationalist political slogans. I was told that the leader of the opposition to Slovak separatism was Jewish, and that he had been forced to flee Slovakia for his safety.
A leader of the Bratislava community told me that a new edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published there in April 1991. When his office attempted to file a protest with Slovakian authorities, they were told that nothing could be done because of freedom of the press. And indeed, there was not even an official denunciation or repudiation of the publication. The community has been similarly stonewalled when it protested other anti-Semitic activities.
Immediately after my arrival, I was approached by representatives of the Slovakian nationalist/separatist movement who mistakenly hoped to gain my support and assistance for their cause. I got quite an earful. Although one was a member of the staff of the weekly Redakcia Zmena, which, I later learned, regularly publishes anti-Semitic materials, they dismissed reports of anti-Semitism as “Prague propaganda.” They declined to repudiate the “rehabilitation” last summer of Joseph Tiso, the Slovakian leader (later hanged as a war criminal) who paid the Germans to take Jews to the death camps, nor would they reject his elevation to the ranks of Slovak national heroes. . . .
Slovakia’s staggering economy is dependent on its sole significant export, arms, which it continues to produce and sell, sometimes clandestinely. Its chief customers now are in the Arab world and it is unlikely to refuse to accommodate Arab interests. An independent Slovakia could well become a center for anti-Semitic activities in Europe.
While the major pre-Holocaust communities may be gone, . . . 6,000 Jews live in Slovakia, and, without being unduly alarmist, one can conclude that current developments are not good news for them. At the very least, the situation calls for close and continuing attention.
Moreover, the unembarrassed Serbian use of the term “ethnic cleansing” to justify the appalling persecution of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia-Herzogovina, and the identification of this by Serbian officials as “a religious war without rules,” reveals that racism as policy and even the religious passions of the Thirty Years’ War are not, after all, outside the realm of possibility in Europe at the dawn of the 21st century. Mr. Wistrich has done well to raise a judicious alarm.
Rosanne Klass
New York City
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To the Editor:
As Robert S. Wistrich depressingly concludes, life in Central and Eastern Europe “cannot go on without the Judaeus ex machina” . . . to solve the problem of an angry and frustrated public caught up in the current chaos of political breakup and economic hardship.
It was too much to hope that the Christian world’s conscience would remain long stricken over the Holocaust, and it certainly did not take long for the revisionists to devise a means of mitigation. Any student of the bloody history of Jewish-Christian relations could have predicted the inevitable . . . rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in that part of the world. Its roots are so deep and so firm, and were planted so long ago.
Although most of Christianity’s official bodies have outwardly condemned this ancient curse, it is futile to expect a permanent change at the parish or local . . . level, where it counts. . . .
Stanley P. Kessel
Hollywood, Florida
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To the Editor:
. . . At the risk of incurring the wrath of the world Roman Catholic community and that of the Eastern Orthodox Church, I submit that it is the Jews versus the Catholics in whatever country that is at issue. We Jews have little or no difficulty with the Protestants; it is always the Catholics who are against the Jews.
I am seventy years old, and in my time I have witnessed a change in the Catholic catechism, deleting all references to anti-Jewish dogma. Nevertheless, it was (and is) the older generation which carries on this anti-Jewish propaganda, and instills this dogma of hate in its progeny. Only in America are we generally free from “castigating the Jew” as the villain unto eternity. . . .
[Rabbi] Robert Chernoff
Chambersburg, Pennsylvania
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To the Editor:
In connection with Robert S. Wistrich’s article, it is fitting to note that, according to anti-Semitism, Jews are responsible on the one hand for . . . Communism, and, on the other, for the exploitations of capitalism. When people seek order in chaotic times, a scapegoat is an easy answer to the complexity with which they are faced. . . .
Frederic Wile
New York City
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To the Editor:
I very much enjoyed Robert S. Wistrich’s article. In trying to explain the antagonism against Jews, Mr. Wistrich blamed the perceived “’Judeo-Bolshevik’ amalgam.” Despite the fact that there were Jewish revolutionaries and that Marx himself was of Jewish origin, it cannot be ignored that Marx’s Communism itself was blatantly anti-Jewish.
The most notable example of Marx’s anti-Semitism was his essay, “On the Jewish Question.” This essay was his response to Bruno Bauer’s argument that the Jews can only be emancipated when religion is eliminated from society. Marx believed that Jewish emancipation per se was only a part of the question of how man could be emancipated from civil society. . . . Marx stated:
As soon as society succeeds in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism—huckstering and its conditions—the Jew becomes impossible. . . . The subjective basis of Judaism—practical need—assumes a human form, and the conflict between the individual, sensuous existence of man and his species-existence, is abolished.
In other words, human emancipation, the goal of Communism, can occur only with the destruction of the Jew. In these terms, Marxism is the precursor to Nazism. Just as Marx called for the extermination of the practical Jews, Hitler called for the elimination of the Sabbath Jews.
It is no wonder, therefore, that anti-Semitism flourished both because of Communism and despite its demise.
Nicole Segal
Davis, California
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Robert S. Wistrich writes:
I am grateful to all those who have written in response to my article in COMMENTARY and for the important points they have raised.
Edward Alexander is, of course, quite right about the damage done to Israel by the kind of unrestrained rhetoric indulged in by its own critics from within. However, is Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s folly an excuse for President Tudjman? The Croatian President’s agenda is quite different and his motives for rewriting history have to be seen in their own national context. Unfortunately, all over Eastern Europe, radical nationalism and anti-Semitism appear once more to have become inseparable, as they were before and during the Holocaust.
This is very well brought out in Rosanne Klass’s letter about the dangerous trends in Slovakia today. The examples she cites can only inspire the gravest apprehensions about the future of the small Jewish community living there. The Jews in Slovakia are once again the target of hate-mongers in the Slovak media, and similar phenomena can be found in the Czech, Hungarian, Polish, and Russian press. Indeed, since I wrote my article we have seen further outbursts from Istvan Curka, vice president of the Magyar Democratic Forum (which dominates the governing coalition in Hungary), attacking an alleged Jewish Zionist conspiracy against his country.
It is true, as Stanley Kessel writes, that the roots of anti-Semitism are deeply planted in Central and Eastern Europe, growing out of a longstanding “teaching of contempt” propagated by Church doctrines. I think, however, that it would be misleading to reduce this to an issue between Jews and Catholics, as Rabbi Chernoff does. There were, after all, few more rabid Jew-baiters than the great German Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. This fact contributed to the susceptibility of many German Protestants to Nazi anti-Semitism during the Third Reich. Admittedly, the Protestant tradition in Britain and America also contained important philo-Semitic elements, but it is by no means immune to the anti-Jewish virus.
Nicole Segal is undoubtedly right to point to Karl Marx’s anti-Jewish utterances—a subject I have addressed in some of my other writings. But it is misleading to compare Marx with Adolf Hitler in the way she does. The young Marx used the Hegelian term “aufheben” (to abolish) in the sense of anticipating that general social processes would lead to the disappearance of “empirical” Jews (synonymous here with capitalism) in a classless society. He never called for their “extermination” (“Vernichtung” or “Ausrottung” in German) as Hitler did, already in his earliest political speeches. The Nazis did not merely talk about the “elimination of the Sabbath Jews,” but implemented the mass murder of millions of Jews, whether they were observant or not. This is an important difference. On the other hand, there is no question that anti-Semitism flourished under Stalinist regimes, which must bear some of the responsibility for the resurgence of ethnic hatreds today in the ex-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
