Continuing Signs of Anti-Semitism
“…making it
increasingly hard for the heirs of estates that owned confiscated art to
reclaim it. This is especially unfair to
Jewish families.”[i]
So this is what
the article is about., heirs (Jews) not getting the money, even though they
were born after WW2 we must feel sorry for them and give them more money
because some relative might of have [sic] been robbed by Adolf (part Jewish
himself)—can’t wait for a article [sic] on the compensation for Ukrainian heirs
of the Holodomodor in which Stalin and many of his Jewish cabinet killed in the
early 30s, in fact it was Ten Million dead,
easily surpassing 6 Million, makes you wonder why the MSM is so fixated on just
the Jewish Genocide, but take a look at who owns and controls that and it’s an
easy answer.
beyondtherim55008[ii]
The responses to the news that Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment had been
raided by the Bavarian police and tax officials and a vast hoard of art works
discovered which seemed likely to have come from his father Hildebrand’s
collection of treasures obtained by his father, some of which at the very least
came from the Nazi exhibitions of Degenerate Art, looted museums in the German
occupied territories during World War Two and stolen or purchased under duress
from Jewish families contain several classic anti-Semitic charges and rants,
such as the one cited above posted to The
Daily Beast, an online newspaper.
The most familiar of these slanders are that Jews, always deceptive and
immoral, are only interested in money.
Then that so-called survivors of the Holocaust manipulate the guilt-feelings
of Europeans in order to obtain special political favours and financial
compensation for their dubious losses.
To this is added the notion that “enough is enough”, the episode
happened a long time ago, so “get over it.”
Though this particular writer does not play the “Zionism is racism” card
or call Israelis the new Nazis themselves, he does charge Jews with owning
newspapers and other media and slanting the news to benefit themselves at other
nations’ expense. More insidiously, this
character calling him or herself “beyondtherim55008,” accuses Jews of being agents (cabinet
ministers) of Joseph Stalin, who was himself part-Jewish, in the so-called
Holodomor or famine-genocide of 1932-1933 in the Ukraine. This being so, the comment-maker claims, then
the ten million deaths from that deliberate mass murder not only exceeds the
six millions dead of the Jewish Holocaust and therefore constitutes a larger
and more horrible act. By refusing give
recognition to the Holodomor, world
Jewry perpetrates another contemporary outrage, according to this commentator.[iii] But while the Holdomor event did happen, that
does not turn the remembrance of the Holocaust into something merely a type of
genocide or a rather unfortunate but common side-show in the Second World
War. There is no contest about who suffered
most and who does or does not deserve compensation.
But another feature that appears online as commentators leap to respond
to news reports on the Gurlitt Treasure Hoard manifests in claims that everyone
who criticises Israel, who asks questions about Jewish rights to compensation
in complicated legal battles over ownership and provenance, or who raises
doubts about the justice of hashing over issues more than fifty years old is
labelled an anti-Semite. These people
identify themselves as anti-anti-Semites, in the sense that they don’t grant
validity to the term. Sometimes they
play the game of check the dictionary and say that not only Jews are
Semites—all peoples of the Arab world are Semites, as well as many ancient
nations of North Africa. Or they deny
that Jews are actually Semites at all, picking up the canard of The Thirteenth Tribe, suggesting that
most European Jews derive their biological inheritance from the Khazars who converted
to Judaism in the Middle Ages. Or they
suddenly turn literalist historiographer and pedant pointing out that the
nineteenth-century polemicists and politicians who invented the term were
misconstruing a linguistic category, the Semitic Languages, with cultural and
psychological features. So that by calling someone now an anti-Semite merely
because they oppose the foreign policy of Israel or think that Zionism is a
racist ideology or ask for patience and cautious judgments in regard to the
Gurlitt case makes no sense at all. But
that’s the nature of anti-Semitism: it is amorphous, contradictory and
immoral. Its adherents will say
anything, take any posture required by the moment, and make up or distort
evidence from any source, though they prefer to have it from Israeli, Jewish,
or confused liberal.
Take the following comment sent in by someone called l.maiden on 12 November 2013 in reaction
to an unsigned update on Art.info.com
the previous day called “Munich Art
Trove Update: Cornelius Gurlitt Writes to Der
Speigel, is Spotted in Munch.” It
begins with what is called the humitas topos, the pose of a simple, disinterred
observer making a reasonable proposal, not for personal gain or to grind an ax,
but merely to state a common and it is
the German government sense point of
view:
It is my humble opinion that these
master art works belong to the German government[‘s] authority to withdraw
taxes lost over this time; and the rightful process of re-assessing the value…
Though awkwardly expressed—l.maiden
may not be a native English-speaker—the point is clear. He (or she) has faith in the good intentions
and efficiency of the German government (though at this time the matters rest
only part with the Federal Police and more with the Tax Department and the Bavarian
Police, all of whom have dawdled for more than two years and provided
inadequate resources for investigating provenance and likely financial
penalties). What is actually implied
will come out as the commentator’s statement proceeds.
…and placing it in hands of
the German government would be most appropriate not in the hands of those
individuals who want to claim the rights that these pieces belong to their
ancestors during the holocaust in order to make a profit. If these pieces are just given away or just
sold away it would be such a travesty.
When the writer speaks of the “German government” in such vague and egenral
tersm, perhaps what is meant is the German people, the Volk, the real Aryan citizens of the land, and not the
“individuals” who come from other places, who are rootless, stateless and lack
loyalty to the land, the spiritual nature of the soil, and the blood lines that
run back into time immemorial, that is, the Jews. The lower case for Holocaust signals a
questioning or a denial of the event.
The term ancestors suggest that the survivors, their parents or
grandparents belong to an ancient and not very pertinent past. Then the statement comes right out to accuse
the claimants of having only a monetary purpose in mind. In the next sentence, rather unclearly
connected with what precedes, seems to accuse the German government of acting
with undue speed, without consideration of due process of law, and with foolish
acquiescence to these Jewish demands: that would be a travesty of justice.
Then in another apparently disarming remark but actually an exposure of
the lack of consistency in the argument, the commentator writes:
These art works are more than
stolen pieces that need to be “returned” or sold away.. This is another chapter in the German
history, in our world history.
Therefore, these master works are better housed in a German art museum
for the world to see and enjoy not in another wealthy buyer’s palatial estate.
Look at the order of what the statement purports to say: (1) The works
in Gurlitt’s apartment are indeed stolen goods. (2) But they are more than
that. (3) They should not be returned (in inverted commas to indicate that this
is not a true or accurate description of what would happen) to the original
owners nor should they be sold off to provide financial compensation to these
same false claimants. (4) The art works
are more and other than personal possessions or even more and other than
individual; objects of art that can be assessed as to their monetary
value. (5) They are “master works”, part
of German and world patrimony, and they belong to the German Volk, and the rest of the world can come
to Germany to view them, if they want.
(6) The individuals making false claims are rich, greedy, unworthy Jews
who should not be alive today. To answer
these six remarks, we can say:
(a) not all the works in the Gurlitt hoard are by Jews, were confiscated
from Jewish collections or were gained illegally, sin ce some may have been
acquired through proper channels prior to Hildebrand Gurlitt’s collaboration
with the Nazis, though Cornelius Gurlitt, his father and his mother, failed to
declare them as part of their taxable income and lied in saying that they and
the provenance records were destroyed in the bombing of Dresden; all this is
for investigators to discover and then decide what to do.
(b) These thousands of paintings, etchings, water colors, prints and so
forth are indeed more than mere pieces of stolen goods. But what they are specifically depends on an
accurate cataloguing and study by art experts, specialist legal investigators,
and historians.
(c) Because some of the art works once were part of public collections
in museums and other institutions, not only in Germany, there can be no
sweeping decisions as to what to do with them all, but only careful weighing up
of various claims, investigating actual provenance, and consideration of
multiple claims where objects went through many hands before arriving in the
Gurlitt hoard. Other governments may
need to be involved in the disposition war booty and criminal acts by the Nazi
leaders and their collaborators.
(d) As we have indicated in earlier sections of this essay, the vast
number of paintings, prints and so forth, many of them unknown or deemed
irretrievably lost without proper records, represent therefore a substantial
and significant new body of art history to be integrated into the standard
paradigms, corrections needing to be made, and perhaps assessments of the
trajectory and total evaluation of various modernist painters’ oeuvre. In addition, by tracing back these diverse
works to their original collectors’ private galleries and personal homes, the
specifics of their taste can be assessed, their contribution to the formation
of groups and schools of artists studied, and the lines of friendship,
influence and distribution of ideas discovered.
(e) The patrimony discussed has to be considered not as some national or
racial heritage of the Aryan people, nor even of the Jewish people, though in
this case the role of Jewish patronage and influence needs to be replaced or
entered for the first time in the history of modern taste and influence, but on
a truly international scale. In such a case, while ownership should revert to
individuals and their survivors, as well as to museums, galleries and other
public collections, where each painting or print goes permanently has to be a
matter for negotiation. Institutions that
collaborated with the Nazis and which have demonstrated over the past fifty
years a reluctance to cooperate in the processes of monitoring their holdings,
treating claims for restitution fairly, or in other ways soiled their notebooks
should not automatically have first claim on returned works. It may very well be that some existing or new
museum purposely established in Israel is the most appropriate for permanent
showing of some or all of the objects. Certainly,
while the complete investigation into provenance and ownership may carry on for
many years. In the meanwhile the various works in question should be published
(online and with as much information as possible, including
photo-reproductions, so that further claims can be laid, art historians have a
chance to view and evaluate the works in regard to existing knowledge of the
artists involved, and that the general public can enjoy this addition to the
patrimony.
[ii] One of the « top comments » to Dickey
and De Visser, “The Man Who Hoarded Art”.
[iii] There is “ at least one website devoted to the event called “Holdomor:
The Famine-genocide if Ukraine, 1932-1933” online at http://www.holdomorct.org; and others more polemical or openly an tiSemitic, such “The
‘Holocaust’ Versus the Holdomor” at http://www.rense.com/general/85/holdo These
nasty little online sites try to blame the whole of the Soviet programme of
mass starvation on specific Jews, use the figures of deaths fromn the Ukraine
to discredit or deny the Holocuast or turn the fact that more time, discussion
and funds are not made available as an opportunity to vent their rage against
the Israeli secret service or some other Zionist organization. See John-Paul Himka, “The Holdomor in the
Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter Initiative”, online at https://www. academia.edu/499209/The_Holodomor_in_the_Ukrainian-Jewish_Encounter_Initiative
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