“Why
Do They Hate Us So Much?”
They envy our intellectual leadership of Europe
whose thought is Jew-born and Jew-bred.
Europe not only think in Jewish terms, but all her enterprises are
motivated by the personalities of Jew…..There is not a program, a sentiment or
a conviction a European can choose to follow but he just follow a Jew—whether
it be Bergson, Marx or Freud.[i]
Samuel Roth continues this statement by asking,
rhetorically, in his conversation with the British Jewish writer Israel
Zangwill, “Why should not the intelligentsia of Europe hate us?”
To which he goes on to say, rather amazingly, given that this booklet was published in 1925: “Time and again we have humiliated them. We began by giving them Christianity and for two thousand years they have trying to live up to it.” [ii] Like José Faur, Samuel Roth and Israel Zangwill see that anti-Semitism is not really based on biology or racism or religion—though these are all rationalizations and inform the discourses of the Jew-haters, with today being added the argument of politics, particularly the suppose failures and illegitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish State. The wandering and stateless existence of Jews in the Dispersion and the abject status as money-lenders, peddlers and inn-keepers having been replaced by the vast variety of professions, artistic careers, and scientific achievements, the old calumnies which therefore should have died out remain notwithstanding and defy all logic and commonsense, let alone historical fact.
To which he goes on to say, rather amazingly, given that this booklet was published in 1925: “Time and again we have humiliated them. We began by giving them Christianity and for two thousand years they have trying to live up to it.” [ii] Like José Faur, Samuel Roth and Israel Zangwill see that anti-Semitism is not really based on biology or racism or religion—though these are all rationalizations and inform the discourses of the Jew-haters, with today being added the argument of politics, particularly the suppose failures and illegitimacy of the State of Israel as a Jewish State. The wandering and stateless existence of Jews in the Dispersion and the abject status as money-lenders, peddlers and inn-keepers having been replaced by the vast variety of professions, artistic careers, and scientific achievements, the old calumnies which therefore should have died out remain notwithstanding and defy all logic and commonsense, let alone historical fact.
And still further, as Roth and Zangwill
discuss, there are two other considerations that are involved with the
persistence of anti-Semitism and its fundamental core of beliefs: the first is
that many Jews themselves are taken in by the belief-structure of anti-Semitism
and out of self-loathing make themselves willing witnesses of the depraved,
vicious and toxic qualities of Jewishness and Judaism, to the point of outright
conversion and confession of supposed depravities in their erstwhile families
and communities (today meaning both the Peopleand State of Israel); the second
is that the standard histories, philosophies and artistic paradigms, having
been shaped by Christians—in a sense, as the two conversationalists indicate,
based on misunderstanding of Jewish ideas of Justice and Truth and on a felt need to reject those core
values and create alternatives that undermine such principles—the would-be
assimilated or secular Jew finds him or herself contending with
deeply-ingrained instincts, attitudes and intellectual modes of thinking.
Then speaking of Theodor Herzl, the founder of
modern political Zionism, Roth explains to Zangwill:
Herzl stood alone in
his own light and the light revealed a vista of terrible, unsurmountable
dangers. But he had taken the first
step. He had pronounced the magic words:
We are a people, one people.” There was
no drawing back.[iii]
And then Roth
says, hardly aware of how understated his comments are in the light of what
would happen within a few years across the face of Europe:
Once uttered these words portended danger as
well as imminent achievement. The world,
after all, was hostile to Jews, the Dreyfus Affair having proved how little it
took to excite Europe into a fury of Jew hatred. No Jew has ever been as sensitive as Herzl to
the physical harms to which his people was being exposed….Who knows but that
the declaration of Jewish unity might tempt the world into more extravagances
against them?[iv]
Whenever possible, the Judeophobes do their
best to deny Jewish artists and authors their rightful place in the history of
European and modern civilization, just as they do their best to claim that the
Hebrew race cannot think or feel in a way that improves—but if at all, that
harms—the real peoples of Europe. If it
is not possible to destroy or suppress the actual artistic works, as in the
case of Heine above, then the anti-Semites reassign authorship, plug the hole
with an alternative history, and very soon the general public and also the
rising generation of scholars are none the wiser.
Another example of this. In February 1939, the
Sephardic-French travel writer and musician André Suarès wrote a brief notes in
La Nouvelle Revue Française.[v] It begins with a notice for 27 October on the
nature of space, the conceptualization and experience of music in various
modalities of art, a rather dreamy and vague little essay. Then comes a notice for the 17th November entitled
“Lorelei”. Suarès starts this piece by
recalling how horrible life was in the trenches during the Great War, not least
of which was the way the Germans would go through the muddy lines they overran,
killing bodies they found still breathing and stripping them of their goods—men
without honour—scavengers without any moral sense or respect for human
dignity. This leads him into a
recollection of the famous poem by Heinrich Heine, a nineteenth-century German writer:
C’est la Lorelei, un chef-d’œuvre où la poésie du
people rhénan, avec toute la rêverie du ciel sur le beau fleuve, palpite dans
le coeur féerique de l’Ondine. La Lorelei est d’Henri Heine.
It is the Lorelei, a masterpiece of poetry
wherein the poetic spirit of the Rhennish nation, with all heavenly dreaminess
on the beautiful river, pulsates with the fairy heart of the Ondine. The Lorelei
is by Heinrich Heine.
Though he does not mention that Heine was a born Jew,
Suarès describes the almost quintessential German Romantic feelings the poem
evokes, feelings that have become part of the German soul.
The writer continues by describing the impact
of Heine’s lyric on the development of poetry and music in Germany.
Toute l’Allemagne du XIXe siècle a chanté
ce poème, la récite ou l’a relu avec délices.
Tous les musiciens l’ont mis en musique.
De 1840 à 1880, pas un
poème n’a parlé d’un ton plus intime de l’imagination allemande au cœur
allemand.
All of nineteenth-century Germany sang this
poem, recited it or read it over and over with great delight. All composers put it to music. From 1840 to 1880 not a poem could speak with
such great intimacy of the German imagination or the German heart.
But then comes the turn in tone and theme.
Quelque cent ans plus tard hier, ce poème qu’on n’a
pas osé chasser des écoles, y est encoure ; mais au lieu de dire qu’il est
d’Henri Heine, on l’imprime et on le répand sous la mention :
« Auteur inconnu. »
Only yesterday a hundred years later, this poem
which no one would dare remove from school curricula remains there; but in
place of stating that it is by Heinrich Heine, it is printed and distributed
with the notice: “Author unknown.”
Without mentioning his identity as
a Jew and indicating that the removal of his name and the replacement by the
anonymous marker belongs to the Nazis who have gained power in Germany, Suarès
begins to pull the first part of his little essay together with this second
part: the Germans who plundered the dead in the trenches are now plundering
their own homeland of its Jewish heritage.
He thus characterizes their actions in strikingly
angry tones:
Une prévarication plus vile, une plus basse infamie ne
s’est jamais vue. Jamais chacals sur un
champ de bataille n’ont dévalise plus ignoblement un cadavre. Jamais hyènes n’ont déchire ni souille plus
salement un mort. Car les chacals et les
hyènes dévorent les reste des vivants : ils ne les tuent pas.
A more vile lies, a more base infamy has never
been seen. Never have the jackals on the
battlefield more ignobly stripped a corpse.
Never have hyenas more grossly soiled a cadaver. For jackals and hyenas eat only the remains
of the living; they do not kill them.
In the event, for all his attempts
to point out the evils of the Nazi regime and to have his fell-writers and
intellectuals stand up against the Nazis, Suarès was almost alone in his campaign. He was isolated as a Jew who could not
understand the reality of politics of the 1930s. Moreover, when he also tried to warn his left-leaning
artistic friends about what the truth was about Stalin’s regime in the Soviet
Union and its pernicious influence elsewhere in Europe and the world, the
reaction was worse. Insofar as almost
all the writers and intellectuals of France were enraptured with Russia’s supposed
progress—those on the right who at first weren’t more than conservative or
monarchist found themselves driven into radical, Fascist and Fascist-type
parties as a way to defend their own positions in universities, newspapers
literary journals, and other media—he stood on the outside and was increasingly
ostracised. Though one of the early
editors of the Nouvelle Revue Française,
he was pushed off by the start of the Second World War, had his books rejected
by familiar publishing houses, and, of course, when the German Occupation
began, was forced to flee to the south.
When he finally returned to Paris in late 1945, Suarès was a sick and
lonely old man, and died soon after.
There has been a small effort in recent years to print his books again
and revive his name amongst the great writers of then early twentieth
century—something that clearly has not been successful. The break in continuity and the long silence
has interfered with the lines of influence he might have had. Here, then, is another example of the
consequences of anti-Semitism in the world of art and letters, where a Jew,
once famous and influential, has been all but removed from the history books,
leaving the real picture of who constituted the corps of authors and what
constituted the corpus of texts that shaped modern literature distorted.
[i]Roth, Now and Forever, p. 28.
[ii] There were some old anonymous rhymes to the same effect. One began the series: “How odd of God/To choos/
The Jews” and the other which responded: “But not so odd/ As those who spurn
the Jews/ Yet choose/ Their God.”
[iii] Roth, Now
and Forever, p. 58.
[iv] Roth, Now
and Forever, p. 58
[v] Suarès, “Chronique de Caerdal,” p. 302.
No comments:
Post a Comment