Читать книгу Blaming the Jews - Bernard Harrison - Страница 17
ОглавлениеWithin the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value
WHAT KIND OF QUESTION? WHAT KIND OF ANSWER?
In the last chapter, we arrived at a formal definition of the kind of antisemitism—political antisemitism—with which this book is concerned. But that definition raises as many questions as it answers. Political antisemitism in its most general form attributes a range of extraordinary accusations, delusive but profoundly political in character, uniquely to the Jews.1 Supposedly, they are an absolutely depraved people, consumed by hatred of humanity, conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of world domination, and occupied in exercising secret control over the economic, political, and cultural life of non-Jews in an extraordinary variety of sectors, ranging from world finance to American foreign policy, and from Hollywood to revolutionary politics.
But one might ask, why the Jews? These dreamlike terrors neither have historically been nor are today evoked by any of the other alien diasporas—Gypsies, Cathars, Huguenots; more recently the Irish, the British, the Armenians, the Turks, the Chinese, or the Sikhs—that have spilled, over the centuries, into one or another European country. Why has the suspicion of the Other natural to most human cultures never resulted, in their case, in anything like the baroque growth of fantastic indictments, from the blood libel to the alleged direction by the “Israel lobby” of American foreign policy, that fulgurates perpetually and unstoppably around the Jews?
A skeptical reader might well object, “Wait a minute. You say ‘perpetually.’ But that seems to foreclose the discussion by introducing the assumption that antisemitism is a single, unitary phenomenon that persists unchanged across centuries. And that would seem to presume in turn that there must be a single, unitary answer to the question ‘Why the Jews?’ But is that necessarily so? Why shouldn’t there be many different reasons, varying over time and having little in common, why from time to time Jews have found themselves the objects of persecution?”
On the face of it, that is a good question. One theorist of antisemitism who took this line was the late Hannah Arendt. It is not irrelevant, however, that her reasons for doing so were connected with her belief that Jews themselves must bear some responsibility for the twentieth-century version of the phenomenon. In The Origins of Totalitarianism,2 she takes nineteenth- and twentieth-century antisemitism to be strongly causally linked to “‘specifically Jewish functions’ related to commerce and economic circulation that developed in the modern nation-state.”3 If that is the case, of course, then attempts to understand modern antisemitism by relating it to past outbreaks of prejudice against Jews, outbreaks occurring in ages yet to see the rise of economic structures specific to the modern nation-state, are both pointless and misleading. Arendt viewed all such claims as instances, as she put it, of the fallacy of “eternal antisemitism.”
It cannot be doubted that the proportion of Jewish individuals involved in banking and the professions in pre–World War II central Europe was greater than the proportion of Jews in the community. Walter Laqueur estimates that in the 1920s, while Jews in Hungary amounted to 6 percent of the population, Jews made up “about half of Hungary’s lawyers and physicians, and more than half of the banks and leading industries were in Jewish hands,”4 while “half of the doctors in Vienna, and more than half in Warsaw were of Jewish origin.”5 But individual representation has no tendency to support the antisemite’s central contention that the nation is under threat from Jewish influence unless one supplements these figures concerning individual participation with belief in the long tradition of ideological fantasy ascribing to this tiny and relatively powerless people, both the collective will to damage non-Jewish interests and the collective power to put such aims into practice.
The force of Arendt’s argument is greatly weakened, that is to say, if her analysis of the causal roots of modern antisemitism, with its attendant demonstration of the “coresponsibility” of the Jews, cannot be shown to be independent of the idea that the interests that each and every individual Jew has primarily at heart are not those of the country of which he is a citizen but those of a vast Jewish conspiracy in which he functions merely as a humble but faithful foot soldier. David Nirenberg has recently pursued this line of criticism of Arendt.
It was in their special commitment to bourgeois capitalism that [according to Arendt] the Jews were “co-responsible” for the reality to which they fell victim. “[All] economic statistics prove that the German Jews belonged not to the German people, but at most to its bourgeoisie.”6
It is a bit surprising that Arendt so often drew the necessary statistics from work produced by Nazi economists in support of party propaganda. It was, for example, to the “fighting scholarship” of Walter Frank and his “Reichsinstitut for the history of the New Germany” that she owed her indictment of the Rothschilds and other nineteenth-century Jewish bankers as “reactionary,” “parasites upon a corrupt body.”7 But even if her statistics had been less obviously partial and partisan, their selection out of the world’s infinite sea of significance would still be shaped by what her conceptual framework encouraged her to recognize as meaningful. In this case her negative view of “bourgeois capitalism” and its role in the nation state, the ease with which she was willing to assume that Judaism was essentially bound to money, her insistence on the “co-responsibility” of the Jews for the economic order within which they function: these were among the a priori ideological commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of “facts” about the Jews.8
In this drily telling passage, the thought fatal to Arendt’s antiuniversalism is ultimately the one expressed by its final sentence. The problem for Arendt is not whether a viable distinction can be drawn between a “people” and “its bourgeoisie,” or even whether there are sound arguments for regarding “bourgeois capitalism” as hostile to the interests of either “the nation-state” or its “people.” The problem is rather that of showing what on earth the fact that a high but by no means dominating proportion of individuals engaged in carrying forward the affairs of bourgeois capitalism happen to be Jews has to do with any of these vast and imponderable questions.
Nevertheless, to Arendt—and not only to Arendt but also to a very large number of influential German and European figures of the preceding two centuries—much and quite possibly everything concerning the fate of modern Europe hinges on the Jews.
Moreover and more puzzlingly still, similarly disproportionate estimates of the historic importance of this tiny and scattered people had at the start of the modern era already haunted Europe for a millennium and a half.
Contrary to our initial objector, and to Arendt, in other words, we have uncovered what begins to look like a unitary phenomenon consistent across centuries: namely, the strange and persisting obsession of European culture with fingering the Jews as the most ready explanation for its self-perceived defeats and distresses, however diverse the latter. The question “Why the Jews?” now becomes the question, “Why this obsession, this rooted cultural fixation?”
Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, the authors of the best recent book on the question “Why the Jews?” offer closely related reasons for taking that question to demand a unitary, universal answer, rather than a collection of answers specific to times and places.
To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common-sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis—why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions alone do not explain gas chambers.
The very consistency of the passions Jews have aroused demands a consistent explanation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, mediaeval and many modern Christians and Muslims, and Nazis and Communists have perhaps only one thing in common: they have all, at some point, counted the Jews as their enemy, often their greatest enemy. Why?9
Prager and Telushkin note the paucity of scholarly attempts to arrive at a unitary answer to the question “Why the Jews?” understood as we have so far suggested.
Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews?
Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstances. None accounts for the universality, depth and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists.10
In the dozen or so years since 2003, things have improved a little in the last of the respects they mention but possibly not in ways that would have satisfied Prager and Telushkin. What they see as important is not only the issue of universal versus piecemeal explanations of antisemitism. There is also the issue of “Judaizing” versus “de-Judaizing” explanations. They contend that “the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors” is the correct one.11 And they reject “modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social and political factors, and universalise it as merely another instance of bigotry, [that are] as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of antisemitism.”12 It is a problem for Prager and Telushkin, therefore, that the most impressive recent attempt to construct a universal answer to the question “Why the Jews?”—David Nirenberg’s “anti-Judaism”—offers in important respects a conspicuously “de-Judaizing” one.
Nirenberg’s central claim, with which I broadly agree, is that anti-Judaism is by no means an irrational hiatus in the edifice of Western thought and culture but rather an essential element in the construction of that edifice. This sets him, of course, entirely at odds with Arendt. “Her pithy mockery of approaches that looked to the long history of ideas about Judaism to understand modern ideologies—she dubbed these approaches ‘Eternal Anti-Semitism’—could serve as an ironic title for my own book.”13 At the same time, Nirenberg sees both the inception and the subsequent luxuriant development of the Western obsession with Jews and Judaism as minimally dependent on knowledge of or even contact with actual Jews. On the contrary, Nirenberg argues, what has rooted the obsession in Western culture is the fact that certain—for the most part hostile—stereotypes concerning Jews and Judaism have come to afford a means of conceptually articulating a range of issues having little to do with actual Jews or with the actual nature of Judaism but much to do with certain enduring problems and stresses internal to Western culture itself.
Thus, Nirenberg argues that Luther initially has recourse to the concept of Judaism as a means both of opposing and of conceptually bundling together various versions of nascent Protestantism more radical than his own, such as the Sabbatarianism of Oswald Glaid.14 All these people could in one way or another be classed—by other Protestant Christians—as “Judaizers.” And of course the effects of such metaphors, once introduced, are hard to keep within bounds.
For Luther, however, the sectarian struggle was not only against Christian “Judaizers,” but also against “real” Jews. He seems to have experienced the rise of Biblicist groups like Glaid’s as a wave of Jewish proselytism [for which, as Nirenberg later argues, no shred of historical evidence exists—BH] endangering entire provinces of Christendom. His own treatise aimed at such groups, “Against the Sabbatarians” of 1538, began with the claim that Jewish missionaries were converting Christians to Sabbath observance and circumcision. The treatise therefore took the form of a question “Whom should we believe more, the true, trustworthy God or the false, lying Jews?” His answer extended for thirty printed pages of polemic against the Jews, pages that flowed directly into “On the Jews and their Lies” and his other “cruel” works of 1543.15
What sets Nirenberg in opposition to Arendt is his concern as a historian of ideas to trace the interwoven continuity, across centuries, of such conceptually and polemically motivated deployments of the concepts “Jew” and “Judaism” among non-Jews, most often people with no inward understanding of Judaism or for that matter much in the way of contact with “real Jews.”
What sets him in opposition to Prager and Telushkin, on the other hand, is the gap his methodology as a historian of ideas introduces between, on the one hand, the consequences for real Jews of the salience of the notions Jew and Judaism in non-Jewish theological, cultural, and political debate and, on the other hand, the absence of any very evident causal link between those consequences and anything plausibly identifiable as a real characteristic of real Jews. As Nirenberg trenchantly puts it,
I am not interested in contributing to arguments, so often dominated by apologetics and anachronism, about whether Martin Luther was an anti-Semite or an architect of the Holocaust. My point is simply that Luther’s reconceptualization of the ways in which language mediates between God and creation was achieved by thinking with, about, and against Jews and Judaism. Insofar as these reconfigurations diminished the utility and heightened the dangers Jews posed to the Christian world, they had the potential to transform figures of Judaism and their fates. How powerful this potential might be, and what work it might perform in the future, were not Luther’s to control. In the event, his teachings woke into startled ferocity the long slumbering debate about the place of letter, law and work in the Christian world. The conflict raged far beyond the borders of the Bible, invaded many provinces of human thought and action, and ensured that the spectre of Judaism would stalk battlefields in which scarcely a real Jew was left alive.16
Are we to choose Nirenberg’s approach to the explanation of antisemitism over Prager and Telushkin’s or vice versa? Neither, at least exclusively, I would like to think. I shall argue here that both answer to certain aspects of the truth. Nirenberg powerfully confirms my own sense that the actual content of political antisemitism is both deeply delusive and profoundly divorced from engagement with the actual nature of Judaism or the actual character of any real Jewish community. At the same time, it seems to me that Nirenberg’s methods as a historian, sound and skillfully deployed as for the most part they are, work to deepen that divorce more than is entirely plausible. Could a largely un-Jewish Judaism have come to seem to non-Jews over many centuries to constitute as salient a key to the understanding of the world as Nirenberg plausibly makes it out to have been, if “real” Jews and “real” Judaism had not possessed aspects and characteristics capable of renewing and reinforcing, among non-Jews encountering them, the sense of threat and hostility diffused by the imaginary construct?
Such doubts tend to revive the claim central to Prager and Telushkin’s argument: “Antisemitism is, as Jews have always regarded it: a response to Jews”17—that is to say, to “real” Jews committed to the actual outlook known as Judaism, not to imaginary Jews supposedly actuated by some mishmash of fundamentally non-Jewish concerns arbitrarily baptized by their enemies with the name “Judaism.”
What aspects of “real” Judaism might make it particularly repugnant to its enemies? Prager and Telushkin consider the following to be fundamental:
1.Jewish monotheism has challenged the legitimacy of the religious beliefs of others.
2.The affirmation of national identity by Jews has “intensified antisemitic passions among those who viewed this identity as threatening their own nationalism.”18
3.“[The] doctrine of the Jews’ divine election [‘chosenness’] has been a major cause of antisemitism.”19
4.“From its earliest days, the raison d’être of Judaism has been to change the world for the better (in the words of an ancient Jewish prayer recited daily, ‘to repair the world [tikkun olam] under the rule of God’). This attempt to change the world, to challenge the gods, religious or secular, of the societies around them, and to make moral demands upon others (even when not done expressly in the name of Judaism) has constantly been a source of tension.”20
5.“As a result of the Jews’ commitment to Judaism, they have led higher-quality lives than their neighbours in almost every society in which they have lived. For example, Jews have nearly always been better educated; Jewish family life has usually been more stable; Jews aided one another more than their non-Jewish neighbours aided each other; and Jewish men have been less likely to become drunk, beat their wives, or abandon their children. … This higher quality of life among Jews, which, as we shall show, directly results from Judaism, has, as one would expect, provoked profound envy and hostility among non-Jews.”21
I have two worries, of rather different kinds, concerning this list. The first worry is logical and methodological. Prager and Telushkin begin by demanding a unitary, universal explanation of antisemitism, in opposition to those theorists who claim, like Arendt, that the causes of antisemitism change from age to age: that eternal antisemitism is a fabrication. My worry here is simply that the above list of five putative causes of antisemitism is too diverse, too heterogeneous, to figure as the required unitary account.
The second worry concerns the individual entries and whether any of them possess much in the way of explanatory power given the extraordinary, not to say bizarre, character of the attitudes and events they are supposed to explain.
For a start, I can confirm as a non-Jew that the higher quality of Jewish life, in precisely the respects cited by Prager and Telushkin, is quite often remarked on by non-Jews. I recently came across a fellow non-Jew, brought up in the East End of London, who does remember as a child in the 1930s hearing this being cited as one among a litany of grudges against the Jews. Yet until I met her, I would have had to say that I myself had never heard it cited except, in tones of approval, by people one would tend to identify as pro-Jewish rather than the reverse. Of the other four allegedly rebarbative features of Judaism, three (monotheism, national identity, commitment to the improvement of life in this world) are widely shared with non-Jewish sects, national entities, and political movements of many kinds. If such commitments were sufficient to explain the kinds of murderous resentment that Jews have endured, why have not those other groups found themselves similarly afflicted?
That leaves us with “chosenness.” Plenty of casual conversations as well as a brief tour of antisemitic websites will confirm that there is quite a widespread belief among non-Jews to the effect that Jews consider themselves “better than other people.” Equally, people who hold that belief do quite often connect it with the idea that Jews regard themselves as the “chosen people.” But how far will this take us as an explanation? Whatever the accuracy of such beliefs, arrogance and social exclusiveness are scarcely the exclusive property of the Jews. Supercilious snobbery in the non-Jewish world, however, never evokes the bizarre set of responses characteristic of political antisemitism. For the latter, therefore, we must seek some other explanation.
That is what I propose to attempt in the remainder of this chapter and the next. My object is to locate an answer to the question “Why the Jews?” that mediates between the positions of Prager and Telushkin on the one hand and David Nirenberg on the other hand.
To be acceptable, that answer should, on the one hand, satisfy two plausible demands of Prager and Telushkin. It should (1) be universal, that is to say, unitary across time, and (2) consist at some fundamental level in a response to “real” Jews and/or Judaism. On the other hand, it should be such as to leave unchallenged David Nirenberg’s equally plausible and superbly argued account of the centrality to Western culture of an enduring engagement with a range of essentially Eurocentric delusions concerning Judaism and its adherents.
SOME CONDITIONS OF ADEQUACY
The answer I have in mind is, as we shall see, a complex one. It lacks the elegant simplicity and evidence to inspection that compel immediate assent. If it is to carry conviction, that can only be because it manages to meet criteria of adequacy that require it to explain things otherwise difficult to make sense of: things that any adequate answer to the question “Why the Jews?” ought to be capable of explaining.
What might those things, or at any rate some of them, be? For a start, any decent explanation of political antisemitism, at least of the kind we are after, ought to be capable of explaining why the content of political antisemitism is for the most part delusive, if political antisemitism is in any sense a response to real Jews or real Judaism.
Second, an adequate account ought to be up to explaining why the fear and resentment channeled by political antisemitism target the Jews considered as a collectivity, rather than Jews as individuals: why, for example, people terrified by the supposed threat posed by Jews can sometimes say, and even say truthfully, that “some of their best friends” are Jews.
Third, if the discourse of “anti-Judaism” has been as widespread and historically recurrent as Nirenberg shows it to have been, then neither its persistence nor its ability to arise over and over again, in new forms and in very different sets of historical circumstances, can plausibly be accounted for merely in terms of cultural inertia. There must, that is to say, be some advantage or advantages accruing to those who find it expedient either to adopt or to reinvent it. A decent explanation of political antisemitism ought, therefore, to offer some account of what those advantages might be.
Fourth, an adequate answer to the question “Why the Jews?” ought to be capable of addressing the curious fact that while social antisemitism has displayed the appeal to a broad social constituency characteristic of other kinds of social prejudice—prejudice against blacks, say, or against Asians, or the Irish—political antisemitism has found its main constituency among intellectuals. (I use the term intellectual here not only in the broad sense that includes the clergy, and other highly educated groups in Western societies but also, and crucially, in the narrow sense that restricts the term to writers, theologians, philosophers, political theorists, and others exercising major kinds of influence over the content and development of Western culture.) Why, in short, should political antisemitism, from John Chrysostom to Luther, Voltaire to Marx, Wagner to Shaw, Wells to Eliot, have displayed so compelling a hold over the minds of deeply thoughtful people, people highly educated by the standards of their day?22
A fifth question is that of the connection between antisemitism of both kinds and adherence to Judaism. Why, throughout most of the history of antisemitism, up until the invention, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, of the idea that the Jews constitute a biologically determinate race (rather than—like the English, say—a racially heterogeneous but religiously and culturally coherent people), has it generally been possible for a Jew to avoid persecution and in effect cease to be regarded as a Jew simply by converting and abandoning Judaism?
A sixth, closely related question is this: Why, when ordinary social prejudice strives only to maintain the despised outsider in an inferior social position, should political antisemitism appear to its adherents to require the elimination of the Jews, whether by conversion, emigration, or extermination?
A further question concerns the strange combination of stability and variability displayed over the centuries by the content of antisemitic belief. On the one hand, certain very general beliefs, as that “the Jews are faithful only to one another and to their own laws, and are otherwise enemies of all humankind” remain constant from Haman to Goebbels. Once such generalized grounds of resentment descend into concrete specificity, on the other hand, the charges historically leveled seem bizarrely arbitrary. These charges range from child murder to well poisoning; from the imagined consumption of gentile blood in the Passover matzo (despite the fact that the consumption of blood per se is forbidden to Jews by the laws of kashruth) to the murder of gentiles for their body parts; from usury in pursuit of private interest to usury in support of (hated but non-Jewish) kings and states; from obstinacy in avoiding contact with others in order to hug to themselves a despised religion to threatening the Judaization of the non-Jewish majority faith; from secret control of states of whose citizens they comprise a minuscule minority to plotting to subvert the very states they supposedly control; from responsibility for the rise of capitalism to responsibility for its overthrow. The dreamlike heterogeneity displayed by these alleged depravities of the Jews is matched only by their internal incoherence.
Eighth and finally, there is the question to what strange processes political antisemitism owes its power to shift its constituency over time from one end of the political spectrum to the other. Prior to the eighteenth century, principled, political hostility to the Jews was largely associated with the church. In the later decades of that century, it became equally strongly associated with the Enlightenment in its revolutionary phase. In the nineteenth century, hostility shifted back to an association with social and religious conservatism but then in the second half of the century began to acquire equally powerful links with the rising forces of socialist reform. The first half of the twentieth century, on the one hand, saw political antisemitism take on new and this time even more savagely lethal forms in the hands of fascists and nationalists. The second half and the opening years of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, saw it shift its constituency yet again to become a standard element in the discourse of “progressives” and internationalists.
These eight questions are no doubt far from exhausting the puzzling features of political antisemitism. Nevertheless, if we can devise an answer to the question “Why the Jews?” capable of throwing useful light on even this modest collection of puzzles, we shall not have done badly. Let us, therefore, proceed to the chain of arguments that it is the main business of this chapter and the next to elaborate.
SEEING “THE JEWS” AS “A DISEASE”
Recently, in a paper on the causes of the Holocaust by the German sociologist and economist Gunnar Heinsohn (more specifically, on the motives underlying Adolf Hitler’s desire to get rid of the Jews), I came across the following communication from Hitler to Martin Bormann, dated February 3, 1945:23
I have never been of the opinion that the Chinese or Japanese, for example, are racially inferior. Both belong to old cultures and I admit that their culture is superior to ours. … I even believe that I will find it all the easier to come to an understanding with the Chinese and the Japanese, the more they persevere in their racial pride. … Our Nordic racial consciousness is only aggressive towards the Jewish race. We use the term Jewish race merely for reasons of linguistic convenience, for in the real sense of the word, and from a genetic point of view there is no Jewish race. Present circumstances force upon us this characterization of the group of common race and intellect, to which all the Jews of the world profess their loyalty, regardless of the nationality identified in the passport of each individual. This group of persons we designate as the Jewish race. … The Jewish race is above all a community of the spirit. … Spiritual race is of a more solid and more durable kind than natural race. Wherever he goes the Jew remains a Jew … presenting sad proof of the superiority of the “spirit” over the flesh.24
Heinsohn argues, from this and other textual evidence, that Hitler’s antisemitism was not racially based (a judgment that I, as I have argued elsewhere, would be inclined to extend to antisemitism in general).25 Rather, Hitler believed that the Jews must be eliminated as the only way of eliminating the malign spiritual influence of Jewish culture. In what was this malign influence supposed to consist? Heinsohn marshals persuasive textual evidence to suggest that in Hitler’s mind, it consisted in the insinuation into European culture of ethical principles, notably that of the sanctity of life, which had sapped the capacity of the Nordic race (as it had historically sapped, Hitler seems to have believed, that of the nations of the ancient world) to achieve their goals through the merciless destruction both of enemy combatants and of entire enemy peoples. Three of the passages Heinsohn cites in support of this reading of Hitler’s motives are particularly telling. The first comes from an account by the Nazi leader of Danzig, Hermann Rausching, of conversations with Hitler at the start of the 1930s. Rausching represents Hitler as having said,
We terminate a wrong path of mankind. The tables of Mount Sinai have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention. … It is our duty to depopulate, just as it is our duty to provide appropriate care to the German population. … What do I mean by depopulation, you will ask. Do I intend to eliminate entire peoples? Yes, more or less. That is where it will lead to. … Natural instinct commands every living being not only to defeat the enemy but to destroy him. In earlier ages there existed the good right of the victor to exterminate whole tribes, whole nations.26
The second, from Hitler’s table talk, records his belief that the Germans lost World War I only because Jewish ethical inhibitions rendered them unable to pursue their aims with the absolute ferocity that he supposes (arguably falsely, given the actual outcome of such tactics in World War II) would have brought victory in its train: “We experienced it during the World War: the only country that was religious was Germany, and that was the country that lost.”27
The third supporting passage, dating from August 7, 1920, records Hitler’s conviction that it is because the Jew is, spiritually speaking, a disease of Western civilization that he must be treated as such: “Do not think that you can fight a disease without killing the causative agent, without destroying the bacillus, and do not think that you can fight racial tuberculosis without seeing to it that the nation is freed from the causative agent of racial tuberculosis. The influence of Judaism will never fade as long as its agent, the Jew, has not been removed from our midst.”28
Heinsohn has two aims in his essay: first, to elucidate Hitler’s motives as a means of challenging the common view that the Holocaust is simply “inexplicable” and second, to defend the idea that the Holocaust was indeed, in some sense, an utterly new and historically unique event. His proposal is that that what made the Holocaust unique—or “uniquely unique” as he puts it—was that “it was a genocide for the purpose of reinstalling the right to genocide.”29 Hitler wished to abrogate the doctrine of the sanctity of life that he considered the Jews to have introduced to Western civilization and to reestablish a supposedly ancient right to kill without limit in the service of national or racial self-interest: a right extending from the killing of the handicapped and the infanticide of surplus or unwanted children to the wholesale massacre of enemy populations.
The textual evidence that Heinsohn marshals, here and elsewhere, goes far to persuade me that he has much to teach us about the outlook and reasoning both of Hitler and of the party he founded. The main doubt I have concerning the paper under discussion is that it suggests the conclusion that if the Holocaust was indeed unique, it was so mainly because it was the sole creation of one man, Hitler, whose reason for hating the Jews—that they had introduced into Western culture the principle of the sanctity of life—was so singular as to be essentially sui generis.
That this is a direction in which Heinsohn wishes to move is evidenced by the fact that he quotes with approval the following sentence from an article in the New Yorker strongly criticizing Daniel Goldhagen’s (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust: “Hitler was the culprit who gave all the other culprits their chance.”30
The doubts I feel concerning this are fueled by the fact that aside from the issue of the sanctity of life, Hitler’s thoughts on the Jews, as Heinsohn develops and documents them, seem not to have been in the least singular but entirely consonant with the broad current of European antisemitism as that had developed during the previous century. Take, for example, the thought that the Jews are the source of a spiritual disease that cannot be cured without getting rid of the causative agents through which the body—the body politic in this case—is continually reinfected. We find the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein committing to his notebook in 1931 an observation very much along these lines, which he plainly regards as so familiar an aspect of the history of the Jews in Europe as to go almost without saying.
Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life. (& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes [even painful ones]).
We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of the body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it.
You may expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that makes it a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain the aesthetic feeling of his body and also to make the tumour welcome.31
Let us look more closely at these remarks. When both Wittgenstein and Hitler proclaim, in an eerily harmonious chorus, that Jews cannot but be regarded by a nation as a disease, neither, it seems to me, can be regarded as making an empirical claim. Rather, as David Nirenberg’s historical analysis of what he calls “anti-Judaism” would suggest, both are exploring the internal logical structure of a complex myth. Wittgenstein says at one point in the passage cited earlier that one cannot expect a nation to tolerate the diseased state constituted by the presence of Jews, because “it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things.” Not merely does this fail as an observation capable of persuading by its conformity with empirical evidence; it is not even faintly sensible. Why should the Jews be regarded as the agents of a spiritual disease fatal to the integrity of a nation, or perhaps as constituting the disease itself, when no European nation possesses historically the cultural and spiritual integrity presumed by these remarks of Wittgenstein’s? Why do the French not regard the Basques or the Bretons, or the English the Welsh, or the Scots the Orcadians or the Hebrideans as carriers of a spiritual disease? Perhaps it is because, in Wittgenstein’s terms, the former do not constitute (or perhaps do not yet constitute) nations or “real nations”? But if that is Wittgenstein’s answer, then it becomes clear that we are dealing here at best with a pair of arbitrary redefinitions of the terms disease and nation. Neither the experience of the Jew as a sort of disease nor the nation that must, according to Wittgenstein, “experience” Jews in this way are, in short, empirical realities. Rather, they are merely correlative poles within the arbitrary structure of mutually defining notions that serve to constitute the metaphor of “the Jew” as a form of cultural disease: notions provided with the appearance of sense and reference, that is to say, not by their correspondence with anything real but merely by the conventionally established relationships in which they stand to one another.
THE “DISEASE” METAPHOR AND ITS MOTIVATION
The analogy between the healthy state and the healthy human person is a common enough trope of Western political philosophy. Plato begins it with the analogy between the city and the soul in book 4 of the Republic. Analogies between the organization of the state and that of the body are to be found throughout the subsequent history of Western thought, in Cicero, John of Salisbury, Hobbes, Herbert Spencer, and many others. The idea that the healthy state is analogous to the healthy body is commonplace in such thinking, and since the analogical “organs” of the state are necessarily made up of subsets of its citizens, it is also commonplace for the deranged state to be explained in terms of the moral derangement of the citizens who make up such groupings. In Hamlet, Marcellus’s “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is directly motivated by Claudius’s drunken revelry: the state is rotten not least because of the bodily vices of its present king.
In the bulk of such analogies, however, the individuals who constitute the disease of the state are in the full sense citizens of the state whose health their activities threaten. This is of course exceptionally true of Claudius, who, whatever his vices, is not merely a Dane but the Dane. Those citizens whose conduct threatens the health of the Platonic ideal city are Greeks and citizens like anybody else. When the Jews are, as Wittgenstein puts it, “experienced as a disease,” that is no longer the case. It is essential to the metaphor as a trope of antisemitism that the Jew, whatever his passport may say, is not a “real” citizen of the country that he affects as his own but an alien interloper.
This changes the whole force of the metaphor. It is no longer a matter, as it were, of an illness native to the body of the state: something analogous, say, to a failing heart valve or an ankle sprained through the foolhardiness of its owner. Rather, it is a matter of an invasion by some organism altogether alien to the body or institution it invades—as if the Jews were analogous to an infection of bacilli or trypanosomes in the bloodstream, or to rats in the walls of a hospital. T. S. Eliot’s poem “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” famously contains an expression of the latter image that many have found offensive: “The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot.”
That is, the function of the metaphor is no longer to dramatize the idea that some flaw native to the state needs to be set right. On the contrary, its function is to dramatize the idea that the state in itself is without flaw: or would be if it were not for the activities of people who, while they may seem to belong to it as citizens, are in fact wholly alien to it.
The third of the questions raised in the last section but one was, in effect, cui bono: who benefits or profits from spreading the message of political antisemitism? The answer suggested by the foregoing thoughts would seem to be, anyone who has a vested interest in representing the social problems and vices of the age, not as inherent in the societies they disfigure but rather as due to an alien infestation that as such is capable of cure, provided only that sufficiently vigorous measures are taken against it. And if one looks around for people who might satisfy that description, it is tempting to locate them within any ruling group with a vested interest in preventing popular discontent from impacting it or its members.
Certainly, such an analysis seems to fit the National Socialist Party in the period 1933–45. On the one hand, there is the need to project both the party and the Third Reich as the expression of everything that is healthy, strong, energetic, and masculine in the German volk. On the other hand, there is the equally pressing need to represent any acts of the party to which domestic objections might be raised, up to and including war, as measures made necessary by the need to protect the Aryan moral and spiritual purity of the nation against a malign alien force striving constantly to corrupt them: to wit, international Jewry and the world Jewish conspiracy. Hitler’s speeches abound in images of the Jews as disease: “All that which is for men a source of higher life … is for the Jew merely the means to an end, namely, the satisfaction of his lust for power and money. … His action will result in the tuberculosis of peoples.”32 “For hundreds of years, Germany was good enough to receive these elements [the Jews], although they possessed nothing except infectious political and physical diseases.”33
National Socialism was, of course, only one among the many European movements, over the entire period separating us from the ancient world, that have based their claims to power upon a claim to possess a unique capacity to restore society to political, social, and spiritual health. All such movements share with Nazism the need to explain away tendencies in society (private property, for instance, or working-class unrest, or religious dissent) that on the one hand can be made to seem inconsistent with whatever notion of social health the movement in question exists to peddle but that on the other hand are far too deeply rooted in the fabric of everyday human life to suit the political and ideological convenience of the movement.
Therefore, if our analysis of the functions of the metaphor of the Jews as disease is correct, then we should expect the discourse of political antisemitism to appear tempting to any movement aiming at political, social, moral, or spiritual renovation, when that movement finds itself faced with the need to explain away, as externally imposed, social phenomena threatening to its program of redemption that are in fact wholly internal to the society it proposes to redeem.
And that, in fact, is what we find. We have already noted one such example, drawn from Nirenberg: Luther’s transition from seeing Protestant “Judaizers” as a threat to his own conception of reformation to seeing real Jews as the real source of that threat. In the case of the philosophes—Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, whose ideas led to the French Revolution—Nirenberg’s discussion is similarly suggestive. He notes that at a time when actual Jewish settlement in France was negligible, the terms Jews and Judaism occur with remarkable frequency in the discourse of the philosophes. Nirenberg suggests acutely that the idea of “Jews” and “Jewishness,” even in the absence of actual exemplars of either, served the philosophes as a means of conceptualizing the limits of their conception of Enlightenment. In the imagination of the philosophes, Nirenberg argues, the Jews, in their extraordinary resistance to conversion, and the strength of their commitment to what was seen as an antiquated and obscurantist superstition, represented the limits of the power of reason to “regenerate” humankind.34 For Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, the consequence of the medieval Christian forcing of Jews into the credit market had been that “commerce passed to a nation covered with infamy and soon was distinguished only by the most frightful usury, monopolies, the raising of subsidies and all dishonest means of acquiring money.”35
Nirenberg comments as follows on these antique speculations:
Because the Jews were generally imagined as the most fanatically irrational segment of the species (indeed, as the very origins of fanatical irrationality), they provided the perfect proving ground for the powers of Enlightenment. Perfect because Enlightenment won either way. If even the Jews could be “regenerated” then there were no limits to the emancipatory powers of Enlightenment anthropology. But if they could not, it simply meant that reason had reached the boundaries of its authority, and that the Jews lay on the other side [italics mine—BH]. For philosophes bent on exploring the boundaries of their anthropology, the Jews were a “limit case,” an example whose pursuit charts the extremes of a concept. In this case the limits were those of humanity, and the question “Can the Jews be regenerated?” was also the question “Are the Jews human?” In the words of the lawyer Pierre-Louis Lacretelle in his legal brief of 1776 on behalf of the Jews of Metz, “The real question in this case … is whether Jews are men.” Or as the philosophes more often put it “Is the Jew more a human or a Jew?”36
It will be evident how neatly the argument I have been developing in the preceding pages fits with these remarks of Nirenberg’s. If one is committed to the regeneration of humanity, then if humanity, for its part, seems obstinately committed to resisting the proffered regeneration, for example through its obdurate resistance to reason or its devotion to making money, things look bleak. But if irrational fanaticism and cupidity can be seen as vices leaking into humanity from a source located beyond its borders, then immediately things look brighter, the prospects for regeneration more realistic. Blaming such things on the Jews, that is to say, has the useful result of allowing one the luxury of regarding non-Jewish society as, if not altogether healthy, then at least as not suffering from a disease inherent in it, and so as capable of being restored to whatever counts for a given tribe of political theorists as health.
The same interplay of myth and interest is to be found in more recent examples. Bryan Cheyette’s Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875–1945 is a mine of such instances.37 Chayette shows how George Bernard Shaw (1912), for example, in his preface to Androcles and the Lion finds it convenient to articulate the political distinction he wishes to draw between “socialism” and “materialism” in terms of a more general and quasi-religious distinction between “baptism” and “circumcision.” “Throughout his Preface to this play Shaw contrasts the universalist world of ‘baptism’ with the particularist world of ‘circumcision’ which reinforces the binary opposition between a socialist Jesus and a materialist Jewry or, as he puts it elsewhere in the Preface, ‘God and Mammon.’ Shaw defines a ‘Christian’ as someone who ‘to this day’ is ‘in religion a Jew initiated in baptism instead of circumcision’ (483) and, at the same time, points to the need to ‘make Christ a Christian’ and ‘melt the Jew out of him’ (487).”38
Shaw’s political interests in the play, in other words, are in forging a link between Christianity and the socialism just at that point beginning to achieve a foothold in British politics. Britain was at that historical moment an overwhelmingly Christian country; yet it was also a country in which a large majority of people of all classes, while certainly Christian in religion, were sharply opposed to socialism in politics. It is therefore to the advantage of Shaw’s political project to be able to represent a commitment to Christianity as in some sense intrinsically a commitment to socialism.
To achieve that effect, Shaw needs some way of associating the denial of socialism with a denial of Christianity. This is the work done for him by the myth of “materialist Jewry.” The myth works for him in two closely connected ways. By allowing him to equate the distinction between baptism and circumcision with that between God and Mammon, it allows Shaw on the one hand to suggest that socialism is the natural political home for the vast majority of his Christian fellow citizens. But on the other hand, that equation allows him in addition to defame opposition to socialism by associating it with a marginal and despised group: a group, moreover, not only placed by its religion beyond the limits of Christian society but also offering through the mythic association of Jews with money, a permanent source of infection of the baptized Christian world by the world of circumcision with its insidious fidelity to the forces of Mammon.
At this comparatively early stage in Shaw’s thinking, the disease metaphor shows its face in a more or less explicit form in the phrase “melt the Jew out of him”—as if what were required to cure Christian/socialist society of the infection represented by the forces of Mammon/circumcision were somehow analogous to relieving a cold by sitting in a sauna or steam room. But as the century wears on, both the disease analogy and its implications become more explicitly realized in Shaw’s writing.
Shaw, in his later plays, both stressed the pernicious nature of non-universal racial, national or religious particularisms and continued, with added stridency, to suggest “eugenic” means of ending such differences. His Preface to On the Rocks (1933), in this regard, was to state blandly that “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly” (574). Shaw, just as problematically, was to apply this Edwardian eugenicism to the rise of Nazi Germany. In a letter to Beatrice Webb in 1938, Shaw declared that:
We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of states to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanours as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.
Shaw’s letter, rather worryingly, constructs Jews as a potentially “undesirable” “strain” who might, at any time, be thought to be outside of established nation states.39
A couple more cases may suffice to exemplify the extraordinary degree of presence, amounting in effect to near omnipresence in intellectual debate concerning the redemption of society from this or that social evil, both of the disease metaphor itself, and of the characteristic devices of projection and self-deception that the metaphor both dominates and serves.
The first of these cases concerns a well-known passage, italicized below, in After Strange Gods, a book that the poet T. S. Eliot published in 1934, but unsurprisingly, refused to republish, at least as a whole, after World War II. The book discusses the prospects for a society based on the Christian and Catholic orthodoxy that Eliot had long embraced. “The population should be homogenous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious backgrounds; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. There must be a proper balance between urban and rural, industrial and agricultural development. And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”40
Much ink has been expended over the question of whether Eliot was an antisemite.41 That question, for better or worse, I propose to leave on one side. The question that interests me here is a different one—namely, what could have induced a man of Eliot’s intellectual capacity to imagine for a moment that the words italicized above could constitute a remotely sensible addendum to the sentence that contains them?
A number of references in Eliot’s poetry of the period—“Sweeney among the Nightingales,” “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Gerontion,” and “The Waste Land,” among them—combine to create the impression that for Eliot at the time, images of the Jew functioned as a powerful poetic image of the destructive forces of materialism and religious and cultural confusion that that poetry locates at the heart of contemporary Western civilization. An obvious way of exonerating Eliot from the charge of antisemitism would be, indeed, to point out that we are dealing here merely with poetic imagery and hence only with culturally embedded images of “the Jew” rather than with real Jews. Poems, that is to say, being poems and not manifestos, cannot be read straightforwardly as expressions of beliefs or attitudes held by their authors.
On the other hand, After Strange Gods is precisely that: a manifesto. Here, Eliot is talking about actual Jews and their impact on society as he conceives it. We are here, then, entitled to read him quite straightforwardly as contending that the activities of “free-thinking Jews” are inimical to the life of the kind of conservative Christian commonwealth that Eliot wishes to see restored. The reason, according to Eliot, is that the presence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” is inconsistent with the (non-Jewish) cultural and religious homogeneity that must be preserved if there is to be any return to a society soundly based on conservative Christian values. To which, I suppose, a natural skepticism must in all honesty return the answer: “What homogeneity?” The passage echoes, that is to say, with the hollow clap of stable doors closing a century and a half too late, long after the horses of cultural and religious homogeneity in the non-Jewish Western world have definitively fled. The opponents Eliot’s ideas have actually to confront, in other words, are not free-thinking Jews, whose numbers in proportion were very far from large even in the 1930s, but the inconceivably greater numbers of free-thinking ex-Christians who, following Hume and Voltaire, will accept neither Eliot’s politics nor his Christianity and whom it is far too late to cow into silence, let alone submission, merely by the avoidance of “excessive tolerance.”
The function of Jews per se in Eliot’s discourse, as in that of Shaw, Luther, or the philosophes, is in other words to create a delusive appearance of non-Jewish unity in support of certain ideas by exporting, or in Freudian terms projecting, a disturbingly domestic disunity onto a reassuringly external and putatively alien source. If—if only—the Jews were the problem, then the politics of Eliot and those of his political mentor Charles Maurras would be assured of success. That, I submit, is what explains the presence of “free-thinking Jews,” otherwise hardly rationally explicable, in the passage cited above.
Now for one final example of the technique of neutralizing the threat to entrenched theoretical positions posed by inconvenient facts about the non-Jewish world, by exporting, or projecting, those facts onto the shoulders of the Jews. This one concerns Holocaust denial—known in French as négationnisme—on the part of elements of the French left in the concluding quarter of the twentieth century. The best-known figures here are Paul Rassinier (1906–67), whose widely influential writings were instrumental in making Holocaust denial a live political issue in France, and later in the period, Robert Faurisson, a former literary scholar at the University of Lyon, famous for having attracted ambiguously phrased support from no less stalwart a pillar of the American left than Noam Chomsky. Faurisson received support in publishing and popularizing his views from La vielle taupe (The Old Mole—the name comes from Hamlet’s remark concerning his father’s ghost, as recycled by Hegel to refer to the “underground” progress of Spirit), a Parisian bookshop and publishing firm run by one Pierre Guillaume, for whom it represented a continuation of his involvement in the French political upheavals of the 1960s, culminating in the “May events” of 1968.
A fascinating report on this obscure movement based on, among other things, a lengthy interview with Guillaume himself was recently published by the Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira.42 I shall concentrate here on what Yakira has to say about the ideological and (in a certain sense) moral considerations motivating Rassinier.
Yakira notes that Rassinier held throughout his life “pacifist and proto-anarchist views.”43 As a young man, he joined the Communist Party. As a member of the Resistance during the early stages of World War II, he was captured by the Gestapo, tortured, and sent first to Buchenwald and then, along with thousands of other slave laborers, to Dora, a work camp for the construction of the V1 and V2 rockets. At the end of the war, he enjoyed a brief political career as a member of the Socialist Party in which capacity he was elected for a time to the National Assembly. From 1948 onward, however, he began to publish a series of books whose object was to deny that the Holocaust had taken place. What Yakira makes clear is that this project was motivated directly by Rassinier’s lifelong anarcho-pacifism.
Rassinier was particularly opposed to efforts to present a Manichaean view of the modern world, to depict Nazi Germany as the incarnation of absolute evil and what had been done in the concentration camps as uniquely wicked.44 … According to him, Nazi concentration camps were not really a unique historical phenomenon. Not only did they not differ from Soviet camps; they did not differ from French penal institutions either: a camp is a camp, as we were to hear fifty years later from various self-styled progressive writers. It is merely an expression, more or less severe according to circumstances, of the essence of the state as such, not just of the Nazi SS state or even the totalitarian state. For Rassinier, the underlying logic of the essence of the state is the logic of war and enslavement. The task of the intellectual of the left, especially one who himself as witnessed such events, is, on the one hand, to warn against the Manichaeism that places all the blame on one side, thus provoking war, and, on the other hand, to strip the other side of its claim to moral superiority. It is war itself that is the absolute evil, not one warmongering party or another.45
Plainly, the facts concerning the near extermination of the Jews of Europe between 1933 and 1945 are incompatible with this account, both as an account of reality and as an assessment of the duties of the intellectual. But the response of the likes of Rassinier, Faurisson, and La vielle taupe is not to modify their position but to attempt to neutralize the threat to their ideological stance posed by the Holocaust by recasting the latter as a tissue of Jewish lies. As Yakira justly observes, “Reflecting on the story of Rassinier’s life and reading his writings are a lesson in the genesis of a perversion and in the mechanisms by which ideology can triumph over reality.”46
What I have been attempting to show in this chapter is that the entire history of political antisemitism consists of a series of such “triumphs,” achieved through the operation of just such mechanisms. In the next chapter, I shall return to the second main question before us: What is it about the Jews, of all the nations of Europe, that has made them so fatally convenient as a means to such triumphs?
NOTES
1. The present version of this chapter has profited greatly from comments on an earlier draft by Cynthia Ozick and Professor Alvin Rosenfeld.
2. Arendt 1976.
3. Nirenberg 2013, 463.
4. Laqueur 2008, 110.
5. Laqueur 2008, 157.
6. Arendt 2007, 463.
7. Arendt 2007, 95–99.
8. Nirenberg 2013, 463.
9. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
10. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 6–7.
11. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
12. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 7.
13. Nirenberg 2013, 464.
14. Nirenberg 2013, 263f.
15. Nirenberg 2013, 264.
16. Nirenberg 2013, 267.
17. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 11.
18. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8.
19. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8.
20. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 8–9.
21. Prager and Telushkin 2003, 9.
22. See, e.g., Elhanan Yakira, “Virtuous Antisemitism,” in A. H. Rosenfeld 2015. Yakira (2010) is excellent on this phenomenon in postwar intellectual life in France, while encyclopedic studies of its influence in British intellectual circles can be found in Julius (2010) and Cheyette (1993).
23. Heinsohn 2000.
24. Heinsohn 2000, 412. The citation is H. Trevor-Roper and A François-Poncet, eds., Hitlers politisches Testament: Die Bormann Diktate vom Februar und April 1945 (Hamburg: Albrecht Knaus, 1981), 66, 68, 69. The italics are Heinsohn’s.
25. Harrison 2013.
26. Heinsohn 2000, 418. The italics are again Heinsohn’s. The citation is H. Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler [1938] (Vienna: Europaverlag, 1988), 189, 210, 129ff.
27. Heinsohn 2000, 419. The citation is H. Picker, Hitlers Tischgespräche in Führerhauptquartier [1951] (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976), 77.
28. Heinsohn 2000, 424. The citation is, E. Jäckel and A. Kuhn, eds., Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905–1924 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980).
29. Heinsohn 2000, 425.
30. Heinsohn 2000, 414. The reference is to C. James, “The Much Lauded Revisionist Study of the Holocaust [by Goldhagen] Goes Too Far,” The New Yorker, April 22, 1996, 7.
31. Wittgenstein 1980, 20e.
32. Hitler, “Letter on the Jewish Question,” September 16, 1919.
33. Hitler, “Speech before the Reichstag,” January 30, 1939.
34. Nirenberg 2013, 343–52.
35. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (1755). Reprint, Paris: Belles Lettres (1958), bk. 21, chap. 20, 121–22, cited in Nirenberg 2013, 345–46.
36. Nirenberg 2013, 350–51, emphasis mine. See, in Nirenberg, note 38 for the references for his included citations.
37. Cheyette 1993.
38. Cheyette 1993, 113–14. The page references to Shaw are to volume 4 of the Bodley Head edition of Androcles and the Lion (London, 1972).
39. Cheyette 1993, 115. The reference for the preface to On the Rocks is to the Bodley Head Collected Plays with Their Prefaces, edited by D. H. Laurence; that for Shaw’s letter to Beatrice Webb is to D. H. Laurence, ed., Collected Letters 1926–1950 (London: Reinhardt, 1988), 493.
40. Eliot 1934, 19–20, emphasis mine.
41. See, in particular here, Julius 1993, and the extensive subsequent controversy that it unleashed.
42. Yakira 2010. Pages 1–15 are particularly relevant to the present discussion.
43. Yakira 2010, 5.
44. Yakira 2010, 6.
45. Yakira 2010, 7.
46. Yakira 2010, 11.
