Nicholas Lyssson

Then there’s the widely-reprinted article that Rabbi Israel Hess, campus rabbi at Bar-Ilan University, wrote for its student magazine, Bat Kol, entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” (Feb. 26, 1980). Rabbi Hess took as his text Deuteronomy 25:17-19 (“[T]hou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget [to do] it”). Amalek, he said, is any people that declares war on Israel. The Israeli state rabbinate has never taken direct issue with Rabbi Hess—as it has for example with Reform Judaism.[xiv]

In 2001, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, formerly Sephardi chief rabbi, and founder and leader of Israel’s third largest political party, Shas, called sweepingly for “extermination of the Arabs,” saying “it is forbidden to be merciful to them.” Shas M.K. Eli Yishay (later Ehud Olmert’s vice prime minister) said Rabbi Yosef was merely echoing Ariel Sharon. BBC News, April 10 and 11, 2001, available online.

Desire to escape the Jewish condition—with its ethical double standards, its “virtue of hate,” its abhorrence of “the curse of friendship,” its obsession with “total eradication of the nations,” and the consequent esotericism of the rabbinical literature—motivated those early secular Zionists who longed for direct labor on the land and disparaged intellectual and commercial occupations reminiscent of the arendar role. Lenni Brenner discusses such attitudes in Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, ch. 2 (1983), available online. See also Slezkine, The Jewish Century, above, pp. 327-28. That group of Zionists hoped to make Israel a “normal” nation.

But their religious successors, returning to Judaism’s roots, have countered that normality is precisely what Israel can never have, because of its unique relationship with God. See Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, above, p. 71:

The Gush Emunim [Bloc of the Faithful] argument is that secular Zionists measured. . . “normality” by applying non-Jewish standards that are satan-ic. . . . [According to] one of the group’s leaders, Rabbi [Shlomo] Avner: “While God requires. . . normal nations to abide by abstract codes of justice and righteousness, such laws do not apply to Jews.” . . . Relying upon the Code of Maimonides and the Halakha, Rabbi [Israel] Ariel [of Gush Emunim] stated: “A Jew who kill[s] a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment and has not violated the [religious] prohibition of murder.”[xv] (Emphases added.)

On the other hand Shahak and Mezvinsky say (id.) that “the murder of a Jew, particularly by a non-Jew, is in Jewish law the worst possible crime.”

Such contemptuous attitudes and narcissistic double standards were very much alive at the time of the holodomor. In 1932, the first year of the famine, the great Eastern European Hebrew poet Chaim Nachman Bialik published the poem “My Father,” which Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4 n.9) says is still “taught in all Israeli schools.” The poem depicts Bialik’s “righteous and upright” father dispensing vodka in a “den of pigs like men,” to Slavic peasants “rolling in vomit” with “faces of monstrous corruption.”

Bialik calls them “scorpions” for good measure. The father’s “whispered syllables,” meanwhile, audible only to his adoring son, are “pure prayer and law, the words of the living God.” The poem nowhere acknowledges the common complaint that the Jews encouraged Slavic alcoholism, which brought in revenue, exposed peasants’ remaining assets to foreclosure, and made them easier to control.

The poem is missing from Bialik’s supposedly Complete Poetic Works (1948) published in English 14 years after his death. That brings us back to Shahak and Mezvinsky’s point, above, about books and translations that falsify by omission.

VI. SUPPRESSION OF CAUSES OF ANTI SEMITISM

A related point: A search of the Library of Congress catalog under the keyword “arenda” brings up 37 apparently relevant items, not one of which is in English. By way of comparison, a search under the combination of “United States” and “slavery” brings up more than 10,000. A search under “Ukrainian famine” brings up all of ten items. A search under “holocaust” brings up more than 10,000.

More evidence of ineradicable attitudes (“. . . I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance. . . . Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel”) was recently seen on Israeli television in the series “The Oligarchs.” The series was most definitely not shown in the U.S. Uri Avnery describes it in an article entitled “How the Virgin Became a Whore” (2004), available online:

Some of its episodes are simply unbelievable—or would have been, if they had not come straight from the horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.

* * *

[The oligarchs] exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state. Six of the seven are Jews. . . . [Boris] Berezovsky boasts that he caused the war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective [oil] pipeline there.

. . . In the end there was a reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, [and] caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, [and] another, Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here [in Israel]).

In short, then, the history of Jewish relations with Slavic peasants—together with the much longer history of Jewish attitudes toward “the nations”—has enormous rele-vance in explaining why hereditarily-Jewish Bolsheviks in the 1930s, using supposedly scientific Marxist terminology, defined the Ukrainian peasantry as the “class enemy” and carried out a policy of genocidal starvation. In The Jewish Experience, p. 364 (1996), Norman Cantor freely admits as much:

The Bolshevik Revolution and some of its aftermath represented, from one perspective, Jewish revenge. . . . During the heyday of the Cold War, American Jewish publicists spent a lot of time denying that—as 1930s anti-Semites claimed—Jews played a disproportionately important role in Soviet and world Communism. The truth is until the early 1950s Jews did play such a role, and there is nothing to be ashamed of. In time Jews will learn to take pride in the record of the Jewish Communists in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. It was a species of striking back. (Emphases added.)

These words are part of Cantor’s introduction to a chapter by the Russian Jewish writer Arkady Vaksberg, entitled “Stalin’s Jews.” It is most unlikely that Cantor, a professor of history at New York University and a former Rhodes scholar, wrote in ignorance of the scope of Soviet state homicide. Leaving aside issues of pride, shame, and ethnic or religious loyalties, this passage puts Cantor in full agreement with Churchill, Robert Wilton, and Ambassador Levko Lukyanenko, all above.

Edwin Schoonmaker, Democracy and World Dominion, p. 211 (1939) confirms Cantor’s point:

Fifteen years after the Bolshevist Revolution was launched to carry out the Marxist program, the editor of the American Hebrew could write: “According to such information [as] the writer could secure while in Russia a few weeks ago, not one Jewish synagogue has been torn down, as have hundreds—perhaps thousands—of the Greek Catholic churches. . . .” (American Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, p. 12.) Apostate Jews, leading a revolution that was to destroy religion as the “opiate of the people,” had somehow spared the synagogues of Russia.[xvi] (Emphasis added.)

Thus the long cycle of violence: (a) throughout the middle ages, the Ashkenazim prayed for divine extermination of the goyim, as described in Two Nations; (b) the atti-tudes reflected in such prayers were reflected as well in speech, conduct and demeanor, plainly intelligible to the goyim themselves, as described both in Two Nationsand at greater length in Three Thousand Years; (c) Jews as slave-traders and arendars, in Chaim Bermant’s words, “sow[ed] a terrible harvest of hatred”; (d) peasants responded by killing Jews in great numbers in revolts and pogroms over the centuries; and (e) Jews as Bolsheviks ultimately responded, in Cantor’s phrase, with “Jewish revenge.” That revenge consisted of mass murder on a scale far beyond any theretofore imposed on Jews by Christians, or on the civilians of any European nation by their own government.

Apart from war as such, there has there been no terror on that scale since, either, at least in Europe. (Asia, and particularly Asian Communism, is another matter.) See the numerical estimates in The Black Book of Communism, p. 4, and in Harvest of Sorrow, p. 306. The former set of estimates puts the overall number of deaths from Communist “crimes against civilians” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe at 21 million. Martin Malia of the University of California at Berkeley, in his foreword to the Black Book, p. xx, says “. . . it is at last becoming clear that our current qualitative judgments are scandalously out of line with the [20th] century’s real balance sheet of political crime.”

There has been little Jewish willingness to accept responsibility for any part of the long cycle. Cantor “learn[ed] to take pride in. . . a species of striking back,” and Shahak (Three Thousand Years, ch. 4) says of the Khmelnytsky rebellion that:

This typical peasant uprising against extreme oppression, an uprising accompanied not only by massacres committed by the rebels but also by even more horrible atrocities and “counter-terror” of the Polish magnates’ private armies, has remained emblazoned in the consciousness of east-European Jews to this very day—not, however, as a peasant uprising, a revolt of the oppressed, of the real wretched of the earth, nor even as a vengeance visited upon all the servants of the Polish nobility, but as an act of gratuitous antisemitism directed against Jews as such.

An example demonstrating Shahak’s point is Louis Finkelstein, ed., The Jews: Their History, Culture and Religion (3d ed., 2 vol., 1960), which tells of the massacres of 1648-49 (pp. 250-51, 388-89), but says nothing of the arenda system. Finkelstein’s index has no entry under that word. Nor, for that matter, does Geoffrey Wigoder, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (2d. ed., New York University Press, 2002). The essay on Khmelnytsky in the Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), ignoring even Graetz and Nata Hannover, actually denies the existence of evidence the Jewish arendars were oppressive. None of these recent works, of course, says so much as a word about the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 or its perpetrators.

In The Sacred Chain, pp. 14-16, passim, Cantor says that “. . . rabbinical Judaism prefers silence on history,” and that after the intense historical emphasis of the Bible:

Judaism [swung] radically to become a religion without history by not later than the second century A.D. . . . By and large the Jewish blackout on historical writing continued into the nineteenth century. . . . What was not blotted out was diminished and narcotized into a recital of unprovoked victimization [of Jews]. . . .

To similar effect, see Three Thousand Years, ch. 2, esp. notes 8-14 and accompanying text; and Samuel Grayzel’s preface to The Abyss, above, at p. ix. Even today, Cantor says (p. 15), “realistic, truth-telling history of the Jews is not welcome in the ruling circles of the American and Israeli Jewish communities, among the rabbis, the billionaire patriarchs. . . and the prominent politicians.”[xvii]

See also chapter 8 of Separation and Its Discontents, above (“Self Deception as an Aspect of Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy”). MacDonald begins that chapter with a quotation from Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, pp. vii-viii. Arendt notes the “strong polemical and apologetic bias” in Jewish historiography (a matter that also interests Cantor, and especially Shahak), and then says:

When [the] Jewish tradition of an often violent antagonism to Christians and Gentiles came to light “the general Jewish public was not only outraged but genuinely astonished,” so well had its spokesmen succeeded in convincing themselves and everybody else of the non-fact that Jewish separateness was due exclusively to Gentile hostility and lack of enlight-enment. . . . [T]his self-deceiving theory. . . actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness. . . .[xviii]

Arendt’s interior quotation in this passage is from Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance, above, p. 196. Compare chs. 11 (“Ghetto Segregation”) and 12 (“The Attitude of Estrangement”) in that book. Such self-persuasion as to non-facts may be why Guenter Lewy, above, can argue that the Gypsies brought down genocidal wrath on their own heads with their moral and ethical double standards. Lewy has apparently repressed all awareness that Judaism has, in Katz’s words, its own “ethical duality—following different standards in . . . internal and external relationships.”[xix]

VII. TREATMENT OF JEWISH 'INFORMERS'/INTELLECTUAL TERRORISM

The preference for silence about Jewish history may be also be a corollary of din moser, the law—rooted in Deuteronomy 17:8-12 and openly enforced in the Pale of Settlement through most of the 19th century—under which those suspected of betraying Jewish information to gentile authorities were subject to death without notice, by order of the rabbis and other community leaders. See Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, above, pp. 140-47. At pp. 146-47 Shahak and Mezvinsky say that:

The new Israeli historians have presented evidence showing that until the 1880s the killings of Jewish informers by Jews in the Tsarist Empire were numerous. . . . [T]he writer Shaul Ginzberg. . . wrote in his autobiography that during the nineteenth century hundreds of Jewish informers were drowned in the Dnieper, the largest river in the “Pale.” These informers were charged and convicted under the law of the informers simply because they were suspected of informing the authorities about something. * * * [A] Jewish informer was condemned to death in secret without being able to say anything in his own defense. This mode of execution was employed for hundreds of years until the recent time.

Again, as Hartung says, “the half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often under-appreciated.” Shahak and Mezvinsky discuss din moser in the context of Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a religious zealot, heartily encouraged by othodox rabbis, only a few years short of the 21st century. Also as to the Rabin case, see Allan C. Brownfeld, “Growth of Religious Extremism in Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Aug.-Sept. 2000, available online. Din moser may have some-thing to do with the enormous antipathy with which some regard Shahak himself, and with the death of Livia Rokach. It may also illuminate some of the matters discussed in the endnotes below.

While truth-telling is silenced, ad hominem vilification is amplified. David Horowitz of FrontPageMag. com, to pick just one example, calls former President Jimmy Carter a “Jew-hater, genocide-enabler and liar” for saying Israel imposes “apartheid” on the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also accuses Carter of “blood libel.” But Horowitz surely knows that Ariel Sharon told former Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema—at length, according to D’Alema—that Israel means to force the Palestinians into “Bantu-stans.” Ha’aretz, May 13, 2003 (available online). See also Shulamit Aloni (formerly Israeli minister of Education), “Indeed There is Apartheid in Israel,”Jan. 5, 2007 (avail-able online):

On one occasion I witnessed an encounter between a [Palestinian] driver and [an Israeli] soldier who was taking down the details before confisca-ting the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order—this is a Jews-only road,” he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign. . . instructing [non-Jewish] drivers not to use it. His answer was. . .: “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign. . . and let some anti-Semitic reporter. . . take a photo so he can show the world that apartheid exists here?” (Emphases added.)

Horowitz’s invective is aimed, of course, not so much at Carter as at politicians and others still worried about their jobs. It’s meant to intimidate—which it does—and its style is not new. Esau’s Tears, above, reports complaints of such “intellectual terrorism” (Franz Mehring’s words) from the early 1880s. See p. 136; compare pp. 138-39, 193. There’s no reason to suppose such character-assassination began only then, or that it’s unrelated to the essential, unifying cycle of provocation and revenge discussed above.

VIII. THE NAZIS AND THE HOLODOMOR

The Nazis, no less than the Bolsheviks, regarded Slavic peasants with murderous contempt, an attitude not traditional in the army general staff, but brought to exceedingly full flower in the SS. See, e.g., H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, pp. 5-8 (1947). Arendt says the Nazi plan, on which time blessedly ran out, “aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian people, . . . 170 million Russians [and] the intelligentsia of Western Europe.” The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, p. 411. The Ukrainians learned what the Nazis meant to do with them after they initially greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators in 1941—a greeting the holodomor goes far to explain.

It would be interesting to know what the Nazis made of the holodomor, which was still very much in progress when they came to power in 1933.

They surely knew about it. The German intelligence services, even on the unlikely assumption that they had no sources of their own, could hardly have missed the story in the British press as reported by Muggeridge, by former Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s heroic protégé Gareth Jones, and by A.T. Cholerton of the News-Telegraph and the Sunday Times; in the American press as reported by Lyons, by Ralph Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune, by W.H. Chamberlin of the Christian Science Monitor, by William Stoneman of the Chicago Daily News, by Harry Lang and Richard M. Sanger of the New York Journal, and by Adam J. Tawdul of the New York American; in the French press as reported by Suzanne Bertillon of Le Matin; and in the German press as reported by the liberal (and Jewish) Paul Scheffer of the Berliner Tageblatt, and by Otto Auhagen in the scholarly journal Osteuropa, VII (Aug. 1932). Even at that early date, Auhagen said Ukrainian peasants were reduced to eating the cadavers of horses, from which they contracted infectious diseases.

The Nazis could hardly have failed to notice, moreover, when Theodor Cardinal Innitzer of Vienna called in August 1933 for relief efforts, stating that the Ukrainian famine was claiming lives “likely. . . numbered. . . by the millions” and driving those still alive to infanticide and cannibalism. See the New York Times, Aug. 20, 1933, reporting both Innitzer’s charge and the official denial (“in the Soviet Union we have neither cannibals nor cardinals”). The next day, the Times added Duranty’s own denial.

Other sources can be found by searching on the combination of “Innitzer” and “Ukraine” and “famine.” Also, P.C. Hiebert and the Rev. Charles H. Hagus tried to organize relief efforts on behalf of the German Mennonite community. None of the proposed relief operations had any significant success.

Most likely, the lesson the Nazis drew was how safe, easy, even acceptable it was to murder whole populations. That was demonstrably Hitler’s own conclusion about the early-20th-century Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks (“Who speaks any more [of that]?”)[xx] and the annihilation of the American Indians (“Treat them like redskins”). Likewise, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky actually spoke of the “good name” Hitler himself had supposedly given to forced “mass migrations.”

Just before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky justified “transferring” the Palestinian people out of their homes on the ground that “the world has become accustomed to the idea of mass migrations and has become fond of them. . . . Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name in the world.” Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 406-07 (2000); see generally Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992). Twenty-one years after Jabotinsky’s back-handed compliment to Hitler, Adolf Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. Two of the counts on which he was convicted alleged mass forcible expulsion of people—non-Jews at that—from their homes. Those counts (nos. 9 and 10) both carried the death penalty. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 245 (1963).

Israel is now concerned both to cultivate its relations with Turkey and to preserve the claim of Jewish exclusivity for “the” Holocaust (capital “H”). There is also a Jewish tradition in which the Armenians, for obscure reasons, are equated with the Amalekites; see Reckless Rites, above, pp. 10, 122-25. Accordingly Israel not only maintains a diplomatic silence about the slaughter of the Armenians but also lobbies against its commemoration in the U.S. See Larry Derfner in the Jerusalem Post, April 21, 2005 (“[O]n the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some U.S. Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers”); and Jon Wiener in the Nation, July 12, 1999 (“Lucy Dawidowicz, a leading Holocaust historian, argued that the Turks had ‘a rational reason’ for killing Armenians, unlike the Germans, who had no rational reason for killing Jews”).

Note carefully Dawidowicz’s “rational reason” for killing 1.5 million human beings; Kopelev’s “historical necessity” and “revolutionary duty” to kill 7 (or perhaps even 10) million; Koestler’s “mind conditioned to explain away what [he] saw”; and Cantor’s mature judgment that “there is nothing to be ashamed of.” Bernard Lewis, by the way, a Zionist professor emeritus at Princeton, actually has the distinction of having been convicted in a French court of “holocaust-denial” as to the Armenians. See Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, p. 59n, above.

The late David Roth, national ethnic liaison of the American Jewish Committee, once testified before Congress—in 1966, when Israel was describing itself as a bastion against Soviet influence in the Middle East, rather than as a magnet drawing it in—that “it is outrageous to think that the death of 7 million Ukrainians is somehow less important than the death of 6 million Jews.” We should, he said, “deny the Soviets the ultimate victory of our silence.”

Nicholas Lysson

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1. In 1920 Wilton and Churchill both expressed hope that through Zionism, Jewish energies could be channeled constructively (that is, one is tempted to say, against non-Europeans) rather than destructively (that is, on the same interpretation, against fellow Europeans, their social and economic order, and their royal houses). Hence the title of Churchill’s article. Churchill’s views evolved as Britain descended what Robert Fisk calls “the bloody staircase”—as to which see my companion essay, “On the Origins of the Balfour Declaration.” Note in that essay threats made by both Chaim Weizmann and his protégé Samuel Landman about the destruction Jews might wreak if frustrated as to Palestine. Weizmann wrote of “overthrow[ing] the world,” and Landman of “pull[ing] down the pillars of civilisation,” a metaphor obviously inspired by Judges 16:21-31. Whence came these ferocious energies? Part of the answer involves traditional eschatological doctrines and attitudes toward gentiles, as discussed in the present essay. Another part involves the Jewish population explosion in the Ukraine during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It swamped the occupations traditionally thought suitable and—together with the pogroms that followed the czar’s assassination in 1881—led to massive emigration, heightened revolutionary activity, and other attempts to recover those occupational niches. See, e.g., Subtelny, above, p. 276:

   Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the Jews experienced a tremendous rise in population. Between 1820 and 1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by 87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank [of the Dnieper] this rise was even more dramatic: between 1844 and 1913 the number of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to famine, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted for this extraordinary increase.back

2. Similarly, the Soviet Union put Jews in charge of camps for German POWs in the immediate aftermath of World War II. For the torture and killing that ensued, see John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (1993). Sack’s book was denounced by Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress on the CBS program “Sixty Minutes,” Nov. 24, 1993. Steinberg accused Sack of “blackening history,” as if such a thing were possible.back
3. For more on Dmitri Panin, see, e.g., David Remnick, “Seasons in Hell: How the Gulag Grew,” the New Yorker, April 14, 2003. A search on his name, in quotation marks, also brings up considerable material.
4. The Law of Return is based on heredity and ethnic affiliation, and ignores issues of religious belief and practice (or lack of either) so long as no other religion has been willingly adopted in lieu of Judaism. Sec. 4A(a) and (b), enacted by Amendment No. 2 (1970) permits qualification through certain Jewish relatives by blood or marriage. Some have suggested connections through which Lenin, and even Stalin, might have qualified. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 8-9 (1994) as to Stalin’s suppression of information about Lenin’s Jewish antecedents; compare Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, pp. 17-21, 28-29 (Harvard University Press, 2000). Stuart Kahan, The Wolf of the Kremlin, pp. 169-71 (1987), alleges that Stalin was married at one point to Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar’s sister. As befits a regime that regularly “blot[ted] out the remembrance of [inconvenient people] from under heaven,” the record is unclear. Some have denied even that Lazar had such a sister. She is depicted, though, in Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, pp. 410-12 (1965), in connection with the apparent suicide of Stalin’s second wife.
5. See, e.g., Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, p. xix, discussing the centrality of this theme in Lurianic Cabbalism and in the views of its recent followers, including particularly Avracham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine, 1920-35. They quote him: “The difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” They add that “according to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.” Such tribal narcissism pervades the various teachings discussed by Johann Eisenmenger (p. 9, above), by Shahak in Three Thousand Years, and by Israel Jacob Yuval in Two Nations in Your Womb (pp. 11-12, above). Biblical passages quoted herein, by the way, are taken from the King James Version, but the bracketed reference to penises in Ezekiel 23:20 is based on the Revised Standard Version, where the word is “members.”
6. See also Elisheva Carlebach, liided Souls: Converts From Judaism in Germany, 1500-1750, pp. 212-13 (Yale University Press, 2001)(“Eisenmenger did not fabricate. . .; he quoted accurately and translated literally. . .”); and Henry Hart Milman, The History of the Jews, vol. 3, p. 49 (1871 ed.)(“[Eisenmenger’s] reading was vast, his industry indefatigable. . . . I have never heard his accuracy seriously impeached”). Having granted those points, Katz and Carlebach are left to argue—most indignantly—that Eisenmenger errs by assuming Jews are aware of rabbinical writings and take them to mean what they say. On publica-tion, Eisenmenger’s book was suppressed by official decree; influential Jews had complained that it might lead to the sort of massacres seen just 50 years before in the Ukraine. The English-language version even now has a habit of disappearing from libraries (see, e.g., the online catalogue of the New York Public Library) and is available in many university libraries only online, with access restricted. It is, however, available for purchase in a facsimile edition published in 2006.
7. See Genesis 25:31-34 (Jacob’s taking advantage of Esau’s mortal distress to acquire his birthright—“I am at the point to die,” answered with “swear to me this day”), and the immediately following verse, 26:1, about “famine in the land”; and 27:15-44 (Jacob’s theft of Esau’s blessing by outright fraud). Note the grandiosity of the blessing (Genesis 27:29): “Let people serve thee and nations bow down to thee: be lord over thy brethren, and let thy mother’s sons bow down to thee; cursed be every one that curseth thee, and blessed be he that blesseth thee.” In Genesis 32:28 and 35:10 Jacob is renamed Israel. In Genesis 33:1-13 Esau good-heartedly forgives his twin. Jacob (Israel), though, retains Esau’s birthright and blessing. Esau remains eternally in liine disfavor (see the sources just cited in the text). This continues the subservient status God ordained not just for him, but also for his “nation” or “manner of people,” even before his birth (Genesis 25:23). Esau’s murderous but transitory rage at being defrauded (Genesis 27:41) puts him afoul of the stolen blessing: “[C]ursed be every one that curseth [Jacob!].” Apart from that, Esau’s only obvious fault is naïve trust in his own mother and his own twin. Esau’s “manner of people,” i.e., mere “m[e]n of the field” (Genesis 25:23, 27) can expect little from that twin, who prefers to stay in his tent (id.), “flee[s],” at the mother’s direction, from the victim of his fraud (Genesis 27:43), and deals underhandedly with Laban, the uncle who gives him refuge (Genesis 30:31-43). Jacob is to be “lord over [his] brethren,” and to him even “nations [are called to] bow down.” This foundational myth may be the earliest record of the “hatred and contempt” referred to by Shahak (see p. 7, above). Later Pharisaic contempt for men of the field is discussed in Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above, pp. 29-30. Evron thinks the reaction came in the form of Christianity and its spread among the disfavored. For talmudic vilification of Esau, a metaphor for Rome, then Christianity, see http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view_friendly.jsp?artid= 457&letter=E. And see Alastair G. Hunter, “(De)nominating Amalek: Racist Stereotyping in the Bible and the Justification of Discrimination,” in Jonneke Bekkenkamp and Yvonne Sherwood, eds., Sanctified Aggression, p. 92 (2003). Hunter writes of the expropriator’s invariable dehumanization—not to say demonization—of those he expropriates.
8. Yuval is a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University in the spring of 2004. His ventilation of the matters covered in Two Nations has not been uniformly well received. His introduction (p. xiii) quotes Ezra Fleischer’s reaction to an earlier article Yuval wrote on the same themes: “This article is of the type that it would have been better had it never been written; and once written—it would have been better had it never been published; and once published—it would have been better had it been forgotten as quickly as possible.” Another version of those last five words is “sentenced to oblivion.” See Israel Shamir, “A Yiddishe Medina,” available online. Compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.
9. This is one of the milder translations. Others include “totally impure and evil” and “totally satanic.” (See generally Eisenmenger as to such matters.) Yisrael Meyerowitz, “Hasidic Primary Works in English Translation” (2004, available online) says that “due to the difficult homiletic style of most primary Hasidic works, a mere translation will not properly convey the author’s intent.” (Emphasis added.) Three Thousand Years (esp. chs. 2 and 5) might suggest that the supposed futility of “mere translation” is quite intentional, allowing simultaneous (a) practice of the “virtue of hate,” (b) denial to outsiders—especially gentile authorities—that any such thing is actually meant, and (c) assertion that any outsider who perceives hostility does so only because of the anti-Semitism imputed to all gentiles.
10. See also, e.g., BBC News, July 18, 2004 (“[Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon said that his advice to French Jews was that moving to Israel was ‘a must and they have to move immediately.’ * * * A week ago, President Jacques Chirac rushed to condemn an apparently anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train that turned out to be a hoax”); Jewish News Weekly of Northern Calif., July 23, 2004 (“Three months after an arson fire that their son has admitted to igniting charred their home, Rabbi Yosef and Hinda Langer are turning their lives right side up again”); Agence France Presse, Aug. 30, 2004 (“French police confirmed that a man arrested in connection with what was first believed to be an anti-Semitic arson attack on a Jewish social center a week ago was a Jewish man who had worked there. . . ”); Associated Press, Sept. 19, 2004 (reporting that Kerri Dunn, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, was convicted of attempted insurance fraud after spray-painting her own car with anti-Semitic slurs); cbsnewyork.com, Oct. 19, 2004 (reporting that Olga Abramovich was caught after a spree of painting swastikas through Jewish sections of Queens and Brooklyn, and that her motives were not as might appear); and an FBI notice issued in mid-Sept. 2005 for Adam Pearlman, a/k/a Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu Suhayb, and Yihya Majadin Adams, wanted for questioning about “Al Qaeda” terrorist threats against the U.S. Pearlman’s grandfather, with whom he had lived, was Carl K. Pearlman, M.D., a prominent Orange County, Calif. urologist and Anti-Defamation League board member. See also note xi, below.
11. As to Zionist false-flag terrorism, designed to look like the work of others and (generally) to create the appearance of external threats, see, e.g., By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception (including plot to assassinate Pres. George H.W. Bush and frame Palestinians for the crime after Bush froze loan guarantees for Israel); Ari Ben Menashe, Profits of War:Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (1992)(S.S. Achille Lauro attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, and an attempt to blow up an El Al airliner in England, successfully blamed on Syria, after which “Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy in London”); Patrick Seale, Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (1992)(City of Poros ferry attack, successfully blamed on Palestinians, assassinations of Palestinian moderates, shooting of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in 1982 to provide pretext for invasion of Lebanon); Naeim Giladi, Ben Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews (1992, available online) (Israeli bombing of synagogues and libraries in Baghdad in the early 1950s to stampede Iraqi Jews into moving to Israel, and a scheme to paint an airplane in Egyptian colors and use it to bomb Israel); Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (1986)(bombing of Iraqi Jews); Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East (1980)(same, also Israeli sinking of U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967: Eveland was a high-level CIA official in the region); Cdr. Elmo H. Hutchison, Violent Truce (1956) (Hutchison was the American chairman of the Israeli-Jordanian Joint Armistice Commission, which the Israelis walked out of in 1954, taking as their pretext killings that appear to have been false-flag); Stephen Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (1984), and Living by the Sword (1988); Rabbi Moshe Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on Jewish War Criminals (1977)(Haganah’s blowing up of S.S. Patria in Haifa harbor in 1940 to embarrass British over policy on Jewish immigration to Palestine, falsely blamed on Masada-style mass suicide of passengers, who would otherwise have been taken to safety in Mauritius); Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 2002 (Israeli false-flag attempt to assassinate John Gunther Dean, once himself a Jewish refugee, and by then U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, in 1980); Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal, fall 2005 (Dean’s accusation in 1988, when he was U.S. ambassador to India, that Israel assassinated Pres. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Arnold Raphel, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, by sabotaging their plane—following which Dean was declared mentally unstable and relieved of his office); Procuraduria General de la Republica de Mexico, Boletin No. 697/01 (Oct. 12, 2001)(attempt by Israeli agents to bomb the Mexican legislative palace a month after 9/11); Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, ch. 10 (1982, available online) (Lilienthal, a lawyer who advised the U.S. delegation at the founding of the UN, is mostly concerned with overt Israeli terrorism that the American and European media refuse to acknowledge as such, but also describes letter bomb campaigns that he thinks were false-flag); Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (1973)(reporting Zionist attempts to assassinate Pres. Truman, various of his aides, and British politicians such as Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin with letter bombs); Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet (1990) (Israeli plan to use Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League to embarrass U.S.- Soviet relations by assassinating Soviet diplomats in the U.S.); George W. and Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment (1992)(same: the senior Ball was undersecretary of State in the 1960s); many sources on the blowing up of the King David Hotel on July 26, 1946 by Irgun Zvai Leumi agents disguised as Arabs; and Rokach herself, above, on such subjects as the 1954 Lavon Affair, in which Israeli agents bombed USIS libraries, theaters and other sites associated with the U.S. and U.K. in Cairo. This list is hardly exhaustive; nor perhaps could the subject ever be exhausted.

12. At the same time, of course, it’s perfectly acceptable—no evidence whatever of bigotry—to use terms like “Islamofascism,” or to trace problems to the very nature of some religion (so long as it’s not Judaism), e.g., the supposed anti-Semitism of such passages as John 8:37-44 and Revelation 2:9—even Luke 10:29-37!—or “jihadist” exhortations in the Koran. Many have remarked on the explosive reaction that would ensue if anyone spoke of Jews in the terms the Talmud uses for gentiles, to say nothing of the terms Maimonides uses for blacks. As to the former, see Eisenmenger. As to the latter, see A Guide for the Perplexed, bk. III, ch. 51 (12th c.); cf. the Talmud tractate Sanhedrin, which as quoted by Eisenmenger (Eng. tr., pp. 105-06) teaches that:

    . . .Three different Kinds mingled carnally in the Ark of Noah: And . . . they were all branded and punish’d for it: Namely the Dog, the Raven, and Shem. The Dog (in Coition) is linked to the Bitch. The Raven emits his Seed by the Mouth. And Shem was punish’d on his Skin; for from him has sprung the Black Cus [i.e., Cushite; compare the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Numbers 12:1, using that word, with the same verse in the King James Version, which more forthrightly—not contemplating sales in the American South—says “Ethiopian”].

13. Hadas, pp. 81-82, quotes a well-known passage from Plato, Laws 942ab (360 B.C.?), which he says provided a model for both Maccabean and then talmudic Judaism:

    The principal thing is that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him, and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in earnest or in jest, on his inliidual responsibility. In peace as in war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer, following his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions. In a word, we must train the mind not to even consider acting as an inliidual or know how to do it.

    Hadas says Jewish religious leaders, unlike Plato and his “Nocturnal Council,” have genuinely believed in liine revelation as a basis for this model. (For Plato, the claim of liine authority was only a necessary lie.) For Shahak’s comments on Hadas, see Three Thousand Years, in the concluding paragraphs of ch. 1. Shahak sees Israel, unless it changes course in a most unlikely way, as becoming “a fully closed and warlike ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the labour of Arab helots.” The resemblance of the Spartan model to Soviet Communism is also obvious. Some have noticed a similarity between Israel and the Soviet Union of the 1930s in terms of the ideologically-blindered style of their respective apologists, particularly in excusing state terrorism—e.g., Arthur Koestler and Lev Kopelev in their days of hope and illusion, Daniel Pipes and Alan Dershowitz today. That seems understandable in terms of Boas Evron’s point, above, that “the backgrounds of the two groups were much the same.”

14. Not only have the rabbis reacted indulgently to such verbal expressions. They have also endorsed mass killing directly after the fact, a time when sober second thoughts might be expected. See David Hirst in the Nation, Feb. 2, 2004 (online only) on Dr. Baruch Goldstein’s Purim 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians and wounding of scores more, children included, by machine-gunning them in the back as they bent heads-to-ground in prayer (whereupon Israeli troops killed 25 more as the survivors rose to retaliate):

    Many were the rabbis who praised this “act,” “event” or “occurrence,” as they delicately called it. Within two days the walls of Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods were covered with posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and lamenting that the toll of dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction extended well beyond the religious camp. . . ; polls said that 50 percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less approved of it.

15. See id. at p. 43 for a similar statement by the head of a yeshiva near Nablus, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does not constitute murder in the Jewish religion. Ginsburgh wrote this in his contribution to a book of essays praising Baruch Goldstein. The interesting point is that “[n]o influential Israeli rabbi has publicly opposed Ginsburgh’s statements.” At p. 63, Shahak and Mezvinsky quote Rabbi Yehuda Amital—whom Shimon Peres considered a moderate and appointed to his cabinet in 1995—as saying “our war is directed against the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.” (Emphasis added.)
16. The term “Greek Catholic” refers to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (or “Uniate”) church formed in 1596 under the rule of Roman Catholic Poland. The rite is Greek Orthodox, but the church recognizes the pope. At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution it included a substantial proportion of the peasantry at which the holodomor was directed, especially in the western Ukraine.
17. Power is spoken to truth. See Noam Chomsky, “The Fate of an Honest Intellectual,” available online, on how Norman Finkelstein, then a Princeton doctoral candidate, became a non-person there after he exposed as fraudulent Joan Peters’s hugely successful From Time Immemorial (1984), a purported proof that there had been no significant indigenous population in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement. See also Tony Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley Battlefront (1993) on what happened when Martin, using Jewish sources, tried to explore the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade that arose more or less contemporaneously with the arenda system. Search on the combination of “Mark Roberts” and “Columbia University” as to the ongoing Zionist “witch hunt” at that institution. Search on the combinations of “Juan Cole” and “Yale,” and “Rashid Khalidi” and “Princeton” for Zionist vetoes over faculty appointments. See Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out (1985 and subsequent editions) on other academic and political freezeouts. Findley’s first edition also has stories about how Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.—risk destruction of their livelihood if they oppose the official line (as might be predicted by the observations of Moses Hadas in note xiii and the accompanying text, above). Something similar happened to the New York Times, threatening to put it out of business, when Arthur Hays Sulzberger refused in 1947 to run an advertisement by an alter ego of Menachem Begin’s terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi. See Alfred M. Lilienthal, “Book on New York Times Editor [A.M. Rosen-thal] Helps Explain Media Bias for Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 1989 (avail-able online). See also Victor Ostrovsky, “First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism [sic],” Washing-ton Report, Nov. 1997 (available online). Ostrovsky reports threats to the safety of a Montreal law firm’s employees, which forced it to abandon a lawsuit. The suit was based on an Israeli request, televised in Canada, that some “decent” Canadian Jew assassinate Ostrovsky. Ostrovsky also tells of arson that suc-ceeded in burning to the ground his house in an Ottawa suburb. In fairness to the unlamented Joe Mc-Carthy, he never did things quite like those. Again, compare the discussion of din moser at p. 20, above.

18. Such moral inversions are pervasive and seem to form with automatic ease. Three examples: First, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye der Milkhiker” (1895) and its adaptations (most notably Fiddler on the Roof) present Jews in the highly anomalous role of lovable Ukrainian peasants. (Compare Subtelny, above, p. 276: “Traditionally the Jews were an urban people. Tsarist restrictions against their movement into the countryside reinforced this condition”). Second, the movie version (1960) of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958) has Jews, per Lee J. Cobb, “beseech[ing]” Palestinians in 1948 to remain on their land—whereupon the Palestinians depart of their own volition, presumably out of gratuitous anti-Semitism. (Compare p. 577 of the novel: “If the Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced from it. . . . The Arabs had little to live for. . . . This [departure] is not the reaction of a man who loves his land.”) Third, rabbinical involvement in the American civil rights struggle of the 1960s presents baffling anomalies. As Shahak puts it in ch. 2 of Three Thousand Years:

    Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either anti-black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of “Jewish interest” (wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist struggle—and back—and back again.

    At present, Israel’s closest non-Jewish ally is exactly the white “Christian Zionist” element in the Old Confederacy against which much of the civil rights struggle was waged. The alliance is based on shared fear of repressed populations seeking to gain or assert rights. See, e.g., Michael Lind, Made in Texas, p. 156 (2003). Lind also reports (id.) Benjamin Netanyahu’s “contemptuous comparison,” before a Dallas audience in 2002, “between Palestinian Arabs and Mexicans.”

19. Norman Finkelstein gives some examples of that duality at pp. 2-3 of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003), where he describes the progress of the philosopher Michael Walzer, of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from (a) defending Israel on the basis of a universal ethic, in Just and Unjust Wars (1977), to (b) defending it, once that became impossible, on the basis that there is no universal ethic, in Spheres of Justice (1983) and Exodus and Revolution (1985), to (c) arguing, in The Company of Critics (1988), that even if there were a universal ethic, a “connected” social critic would still privilege his “own” people. Finkelstein comments that “for Israel’s ‘friends,’ the ring of Walzer’s message is as welcome as it is familiar: to be ‘connected’ is to ask, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” Compari-sons, of course, run not just to the Gypsy double standards described by Guenter Lewy, but also to the NSDAP slogan “Think with your blood.” The latter parallel has plainly occurred to Finkelstein. He compares Walzer, in the second and third stages of his metamorphosis, to “the fascist ideologues that Julien Benda chastised in The Treason of the Intellectuals” (1969). As to denial of a universal ethic by another prominent defender of Israel, see Hadley Arkes, “The Rights and Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz,” Claremont Review of Books, fall 2005 (available online)(“Dershowitz has insisted that ‘reason’ has no truths to disclose in the realm of morals”). See also Jewish Fundamentalism and Three Thousand Years, both above, for rabbinical pronouncements, not otherwise translated from the Hebrew, that could easily pass as expressions of Nazi ideology if certain proper nouns were changed. It appears, by the way, that the comparison between Jews and Gypsies has occasionally intruded on Jewish consciousness, and that the subject is a sensitive one. See Graetz, vol. 5, p. 197. The comparison with the Nazis, of course, is absolutely forbidden, as became clear when the Israeli politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid told the cabinet that a picture of a suffering Palestinian woman reminded him of his own grandmother. See “Gaza Political Storm Hits Israel,” BBC News, May 23, 2004 (available online)(“referring to the TV picture, Mr. Lapid said he was ‘talking about an old woman crouching on all fours, searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made me think of my grandmother. I said that if we carry on like this, we will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will stand trial at The Hague’ . . .”). Lapid’s remarks produced an uproar. He was reprimanded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and had to deny publicly that he’d intended a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany. More recently, however, he has returned to the theme. See his article “Stop the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 17, 2007 (available online)(“[L]iving here among us are Jews that behave toward Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other anti-Semites behaved toward Jews”).
20. For an excellent—and thoroughly disgusted—account of the Armenian genocide and the general present-day reluctance to discuss it, see Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, pp. 316-55 (2005).

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