ISRAEL-A COUNTRY LIKE ANY OTHER? FROM BLOOD LIBEL TO A-S POSTCARDS, TO IRAN’S BOMB

We welcome your comments to this and any other CIJR publication. Please address your response to:  Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, PO Box 175, Station  H, Montreal QC H3G 2K7 – Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284; E-mail: rob@isranet.wpsitie.com

CAN ISRAEL BE A COUNTRY LIKE ANY OTHER?

Manfred Gerstenfeld         

Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2013                                                                                                                                       

The mistaken concept that Israel will become a country like all others has already had a long shelf-life in parts of Zionist history. One tiny but typical example was when Jewish prostitutes in pre-Israel Palestine began their profession, there were ambiguous feelings in society. Some were primarily ashamed, others emphasized that it was another sign of Jewish “normalcy” on the way to statehood.

Israel’s independence established many institutions, similar to other countries. This includes a government, Parliament, Supreme Court, an army, security forces, a central bank and so on. Another normalization of the Jewish people’s reality has been the ingathering of close to half of the world’s Jewish population into Israel.
Further contributions to making Israel “normal” may come in the future, including internationally recognized borders. If the peace negotiations progress somewhat, the idea that Israel will become a “normal” country is likely to become more prominent again. This notion means that Israel will become fairly similar to Western democracies. Many Israelis admire the relative quiet as well as the hedonism of the West, and wish they could live that way too.

However, such “normalization” has its limits. One is that all nations are intrinsically unique. To this one should add that some are more unique than others.  That is the case with Israel. It is one of only a few countries comprised mostly of immigrants. This is largely true for the United States, Australia, Canada, Argentina and so on, yet the main influx of people in those countries came much earlier. A far larger difference is that Israel’s immigrants have ancestors who prayed long ago for a return to Zion, where Jewish generations had lived far more than a millennium before.

A crucial element in Israel’s uniqueness is that its history is radically different from that of any other country. The Jewish people’s long sojourn in the Diaspora represents a development without precedent. In recent history, the same is true for the Holocaust. This strongly enhances Israel’s uniqueness not only today, but also for the foreseeable future. Interrelated with this is Israel’s current reality. The Jewish people’s past has far more bearing on the present than through a few historical remnants. The Jewish tradition, much of which consists of religious elements, also influences the state. So does the centuries- long Jew-hatred in many parts of the world. Historical anti-Semitism – religious or ethnic – has primarily mutated into anti-Israelism. No other nation faces similar delegitimization. Even beyond this, there are genocidal threats coming out of parts of the Muslim world.

There are other factors which contribute to Israel’s uniqueness. They derive from the combination of both a language and a religion not shared by anyone else. Many nations have a language which is not spoken by others. Greece, for example. However, the dominant Orthodox religion of Greece is not unique. This expressed itself clearly during the Yugoslav war when the Greeks – contrary to most European Union citizens –identified largely with the Serbs who are also Orthodox. Related to the desire for unachievable major “normalization” is the promotion by some of an absurdity: Israel should “assimilate into the Middle East.” This superficial concept raises many questions and hardly any valid answers.

What should Israel do to “blend into” the Middle East? Should it glorify the few Israelis who intentionally murdered Palestinian civilians, as the Palestinian Authority lionized the many murderers of Israeli civilians? Should Israel indiscriminately bomb Palestinian villages after terror attacks? Should it deal with Arab parties’ demonstrations like the Egyptian military does with the Muslim Brotherhood? Should Israel develop chemical weapons like Syria? Should it execute common criminals like so many Arab states do? Many essential characteristics of the countries surrounding Israel are so incompatible with Israel’s basic norms and values that this “blending into the Middle East” is yet one more pipe dream…

Finally, the idea that Jews should adopt the dominant culture of their surroundings is an ancient one. It goes back way beyond the desires and behavior of Europe’s many assimilated Jews during the centuries. Already two millennia ago in the last independent Jewish state, that of the Maccabees and in the period immediately thereafter, there were Jews who revered and imitated Roman culture. The contributions by these Hellenists to Jewish history are minimal, if any. The same may also happen with the legacy of those who dream about a “normal” State of Israel.

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THE RETURN OF THE BLOOD LIBEL:

CAN ART STOP THE HEMORRHAGING OF HATE?                              Bernard Starr                                            

Algemeiner, Nov. 8, 2013  

One of the most bizarre accusations against Jews dates back to the Middle Ages, and continued well into the nineteenth century. The Nazi propaganda machine revived the myth in the 1930s. Jews were charged with engaging in ritual murders of Christian children and using their blood in the preparation of Passover matzos. There are at least 150 recorded persecutions of Jews for this ritual murder charge – and probably many others that were not recorded. A particularly notorious occurrence took place in Hungary in 1882. One day in the village of Tiszaezlara, a young Christian peasant girl, Eszter Solymosi, did not return from an errand. After she had been missing for a few days, local Jews were charged with ritual murder. Violence and pogroms erupted and quickly spread throughout the region. A number of Jews were imprisoned, some for more than a year. Two months after the girl’s disappearance, a body was found in the local river. The authorities identified it as that of the fourteen-year-old Eszter, but her mother denied that it was her daughter, although clothing on the corpse was later identified as Eszter’s. Forensic examination of the body revealed that there was no neck incision, thus ruling out a ritual killing. Eventually, the thirteen accused Jews were acquitted.

You might shake your head at this grim piece of history, and then be comforted that those hate-driven persecutions were rooted in a primitive bygone era. But think again. To this day, the girl’s gravesite draws anti-Semitic pilgrimages. In April 2012, many news sources reported that Zsolt Barath of the extreme-right Hungarian Jobbik party sought to reopen the 1882 blood libel case. He questioned the acquittal in a speech in Parliament: “The Jewry and the leadership of the country were severely implicated in the case.” Barath attributed the acquittal to “outside pressure.” Despite a reported Jewish revival in Hungary and a forthright statement by the Deputy Prime Minister of a commitment to fight anti-Semitism, the rise of the far right, with its anti-Semitic platform, is troubling. That’s what inspired Ivan Fischer, conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, to compose his opera, The Red Heifer, which premiered in Budapest in October, 2013. It tells the story of the 1882 blood libel case and exposes the irrationality and anti-Semitism of the ugly episode. For Fischer, the opera represented the artistic expression of an idea that had been percolating in his mind for 25 years…

 While some Jews may be reluctant to resurrect an ancient source of pain and suffering – thus fanning the fires of hatred – Fischer, a Hungarian Jew who lives in Berlin, is committed to confronting anti-Semitism head-on. The “blood libel” has deep historic roots in the antagonism between Christianity and Judaism that began in the first century when the emerging Christianity struggled to separate from Judaism and establish an independent identity. At first Paul, the recognized founder of Christianity, sought to make his brand of Judaism the new world Judaism, with Jesus at the helm. He hoped that it would be easily available to everyone. That didn’t happen, and divorce became the dedicated path. Still, Christianity faced a bumpy road, since it was founded on Jewish prophesy, and there was the pesky fact, documented in the Gospels, that Jesus remained a dedicated Jew throughout his life.

As late as the fourth century, even after the Council of Nicaea established a unified Catholic Church, much of the Jewish/Christian populace didn’t grasp the difference between the two religions. Many Christians continued to worship in synagogues, as evidenced by the homilies of St. John of Chrysostom, which castigated Christians for continuing to embrace Jewish practices. Several Church policies helped to finalize the divorce: the charge that Jews collectively were responsible for killing Jesus, the promotion of the idea that Jesus rejected Judaism, implying that he was a Christian from birth or that he later converted to Christianity, and the popularization of the blood libel charge that demonized Jews.

At the same time, Christian art, perhaps inadvertently, reinforced the distance between Christianity and Judaism by virtually eliminating any Jewish connection or identity for Jesus, his family, and close followers. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, wealthy patrons and Church officials thirsted for art that was thoroughly and exclusively Christian. Images are powerful in framing the way we see reality. In this case, the Christianized images of Jesus strengthened the illusion that Jesus and Jews were of different ethnicities and religions. This is particularly evident in artworks that depict Jews – the “others” – as dark and menacing. In contrast, they pictured Jesus and his family and followers as blond and fair-skinned Northern Europeans, immersed in regal settings and surrounded by Medieval and Renaissance saints and Christian artifacts. Further protecting these distortions, which could not be substantiated in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry, the Church discouraged Christians from reading the New Testament on their own for a thousand years – and forbade the bible from being translated into native languages.

It’s regrettable that many forces converged to obfuscate the common ground of Christianity and Judaism. Perception of similarities or historic ties can have dramatic impact, as Hungarian politician Csanad Szegedi discovered. In 2012, Szegedi, sometimes attired in a fascist uniform, espoused virulent ant-Semitism as the number-two official in Hungary’s notorious far-right Jobbik party. Then he discovered his Jewish roots. His mother and maternal grandparents, he learned, were Jewish. In a stunning transformation, Szegedi is now a practicing Jew. Not only does he celebrate Shabbat and attend synagogue, he is studying the Talmud and is making an effort to follow Jewish dietary laws and the 613 commandments in the Torah. For religious instruction he connected with the orthodox Jewish Hasidic Chabad sect in Hungary; with Chabad, he visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Stories like this make us wonder what would happen if Christians and Jews would recognize the firm common foundation that both religions stand on. What if Jews would look at Jesus and see a faithful Jew (even if not accepted as Messiah), and Christians would look at an orthodox Jew and see Jesus? Would this shift in perception spawn a significant step toward the reconciliation and mutual respect that Pope Francis recently endorsed? Toward this end, I am organizing an important art exhibit – “Putting Judaism Back in the Picture: Toward Healing the Christian/ Jewish Divide” – that embraces the two sides of the Jesus story: Jesus the dedicated Jew and Jesus whose life and teachings inspired a new religion. The exhibit will feature new renditions of Medieval and Renaissance paintings that portray Jesus’ Jewish heritage and place him and his followers in their natural habitat and dress (see examples at the exhibit website). To illustrate the two sides of the Jesus story, it will also include works that integrate Christian and Jewish elements – for example, as in Mark Chagall’s crucifixion paintings…If art can help heal ancient wounds perhaps Ivan Fischer would then compose an opera of celebration rather than of shame.

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IN THE LONG HISTORY OF PICTURE POSTCARDS,

  A LONG HISTORY OF ANTI-SEMITIC HATE  

Salo Aizenberg 

Tablet,, Dec. 12, 2013

The first anti-Semitic postcards were issued in the 1890s at the same time that postcards in general were becoming popular. In fact, there was a convergence between the start of the Golden Era and the Dreyfus Affair. In this famous incident that began in 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a patriotic French [Jewish]army captain, was falsely accused of passing military secrets to the German military attaché in Paris…Dreyfus was convicted in 1895 in a sham trial that featured “secret” evidence that Dreyfus’ lawyer was not allowed to examine; the army invoked national security as a reason to keep the documents hidden. Even after the army became aware of the real spy and of the fact that some of the evidence against Dreyfus had been forged, Dreyfus was reconvicted in a second trial held in 1899 (after he had spent four years in harsh prison conditions on Devil’s Island). Fortunately, Dreyfus was pardoned by the French president 10 days after his second conviction, but he was still not exonerated. Only in 1906 did the court declare him completely innocent.

The Dreyfus Affair reached deep into French politics and society, splitting the nation between those who supported nationalism, the church, and a military that spared no effort to continue the cover-up; and intellectuals, progressives, and a small handful of brave politicians and army officials who wanted to learn the truth and promote an equal society. Underneath the drama was the unmistakable anti-Semitic nature of the affair and its influence on the fate of the entire nation. The Dreyfus Affair was also important as one of the factors that influenced Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, to determine that anti-Semitism could not be eliminated and that the Jews needed their own homeland…

The postcards shown in Hatemail cover multiple nations, every stereotype, and every form of hatred. They depict Jewish men, women, and children with large noses, grotesque feet, deformed bodies, ugly faces, and poor hygiene; money-hungry Jews; rich, crafty, cheap, and cunning Jews; Jews in control of the world; Jews as animals and demons; and Jews as cheaters. They show Jews being ridiculed, mocked, attacked, excluded, and expelled. The reader will not be spared the full extent of the hatred; I believe many will be shocked at what is shown in this book…Germany, France (including its North African territories that had significant Jewish populations), Great Britain, and the United States were the leaders. Austria, Hungary, and Poland were also key participants…Each country’s postcards had a distinct style of anti-Semitism.

As mentioned, Germany ranked first in anti-Semitic postcards, producing images that immediately cut to the heart of the matter: Jews are filthy animals that deserve to be persecuted, expelled, and excluded from society. French postcards were a close second in their vileness. Images of Jews in control of the world or as evil or ugly money grabbers are the main motifs in French anti-Semitic postcards. Those from other nations, especially Great Britain and the United States, were sold almost exclusively as “humorous” souvenirs—but the anti-Semitism was still palpable. British anti-Semitic postcards generally avoided the worst forms of imagery, instead focusing on large nosed Jews as conniving and money-hungry. American anti-Semitic postcards are the least virulent, focusing almost entirely on images of Jews being greedy. American postcards also ridiculed the physical features of Jews, drawing not only large noses, but also large hands and awkward mannerisms…

The more than 250 examples depicted here are only a small sample of the many thousands of different types that were printed, but they will take the reader through the many permutations of hatred for Jews and help us to better understand a phenomenon that still exists throughout the world today.

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STRIKE IRAN NOW TO AVERT DISASTER LATER

Norman Podhoretz

Wall Street Journal, Dec. 11, 2013

Not too many years ago, hardly anyone disagreed with John McCain when he first said that "the only thing worse than bombing Iran is letting Iran get the bomb." Today hardly anyone disagrees with those who say that the only thing worse than letting Iran get the bomb is bombing Iran. And in this reversal hangs a tale.

The old consensus was shaped by three considerations, all of which seemed indisputable at the time. The first was that Iran was lying when it denied that its nuclear facilities were working to build a bomb. After all, with its vast reserves of oil and gas, the country had no need for nuclear energy. Even according to the liberal Federation of American Scientists a decade ago, the work being done at the Iranian nuclear facilities was easily "applicable to a nuclear weapons development program." Surprisingly, a similar judgment was made by Mohamed El Baradei, the very dovish director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The second consideration was that the prospect of being annihilated in a retaliatory nuclear strike, which had successfully deterred the Soviets and the Chinese from unleashing their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War, would be ineffective against an Iran ruled by fanatical Shiite mullahs. As Bernard Lewis, the leading contemporary authority on Islam, put it in 2007, to these fanatics "mutual assured destruction is not a deterrent, it is an inducement. We know already [from the Iran-Iraq war] that they do not give a damn about killing their own people in great numbers. . . . They are giving them a quick free pass to heaven and all its delights."

Nor were the rulers of Iran deterred by the fear that their country would be destroyed in a nuclear war. In the words of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who brought the Islamist revolution to Iran in 1979: "We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. . . . I say let this land [Iran] go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world." (The quote appeared in a 1981 Iranian collection of the ayatollah's speeches. In later editions, that line and others were deleted as Iran tried to stir up nationalistic fervor amid the war with Iraq.)

And here, speaking in particular of a nuclear exchange with Israel—that "cancer" which the mullahs were and are solemnly pledged to wipe off the map—is the famous "moderate" Hashemi Rafsanjani, in an Al-Quds Day sermon at Tehran University on Dec. 14, 2001: "Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world." Mr. Rafsanjani, an earlier president of Iran, is the sponsor and mentor of its current president, that other celebrated "moderate," Hasan Rouhani.

The third consideration behind the old consensus was the conviction that even if the mullahs could be deterred, their acquisition of a nuclear capability would inevitably trigger a nuclear-arms race in the Middle East. Because the Sunni regimes in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and elsewhere throughout the region were all terrified at the prospect of being lorded over and held hostage by an Iran ruled by their ancestral enemies the Shiites, those regimes would rush to equip themselves with their own nuclear arsenals…

Just as almost everyone agreed that Iran must be prevented from acquiring a nuclear capability, there was a similarly broad agreement that this could be done through a judicious combination of diplomacy and sanctions. To be sure, there were those—myself emphatically included—who argued that nothing short of military action could do the trick. But we were far outweighed by the proponents of peaceful means who, however, willingly acknowledged that the threat of military action was necessary to the success of their strategy.

Yet as the years wore on, it became clear, even to the believers in this strategy, that the Iranians would not be stopped either by increasingly harsh sanctions—or by endless negotiations. One might have expected the strategy's proponents to conclude, if with all due reluctance, that the only recourse left was to make good on the threat of military action. Yet while they continued to insist that "all options are on the table," it also became increasingly clear that for Western political leaders as well as the mainstream think tanks and the punditocracy, the stomach for the military option was no longer there, if indeed it had ever been.

And so began the process of what Col. Allard calls "learning to love the Iranian bomb." The first step was to raise serious doubts about the old consensus. Yes, the Iranians were determined to build a bomb, and, yes, the mullahs were Islamist fanatics, but on further reflection there was good reason to think that they were not really as suicidal as the likes of Bernard Lewis persuaded us. That being the case, there was also good reason to drop the idea that it would be impossible to deter and contain them, as we had done even with the far more powerful Soviets and Chinese…

[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link –ed.]

CIJR wishes all its friends and supporters Shabbat Shalom!

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The New Face of European Antisemitism: Daniel Schwammenthal, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 13, 2013— This past weekend [Nov. 9-10]was the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against German Jews, and European commentary focused predictably on the traditional anti-Semitic threats from the far right.                                                          

European Anti-Semitism and the Fear of Muslims : Timon Dias, Gatestone Institute, Nov. 21, 2013— The European Union is singling out Israel for sanctions.

Chagall’s Mirror: Karen Sue Smith, America Magazine, Nov. 28, 2013 — The Jewishness of Jesus has seldom been rendered more clearly in art than in the crucifixion scenes of Marc Chagall.

Rob Coles, Publications Chairman, Canadian Institute for Jewish Research/ L'institut Canadien de recherches sur le Judaïsme, www.isranet.org

Tel: (514) 486-5544 – Fax:(514) 486-8284 ; ber@isranet.wpsitie.com