Book Review: ‘The Devil That Never Dies’

The Devil That Never Dies, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen; New York: Little, Brown and Company, 201

By David Strom

CHULA VISTA, California — Former professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen of Harvard University wrote a stinging and, most likely, controversial book on the rise of global anti-Semitism. His extensive analysis of speeches, newspapers, radio stations, statements by religious leaders (living and deceased) and blogs on the internet produce a very scary picture. Not only has anti-Semitism not withered away, but seems to be growing according to Goldhagen. The old/new anti-Semitism comes mainly from Islamic clerics and political leaders in Arabic and Moslem nations.

Long before the “modern” rise of anti-Semitism there were older forms that dominate/dominated the thoughts of many in the world. The smears against the Jews have been most damaging kind. “Jews have killed God’s son. All Jews, and their descendants for all time (in other words, all Jews forever) are guilty. They are the enemy of God. Jews are in league with the devil. Jews desecrate God’s body, the host…. Jews seek to destroy his Church. Jews themselves are demons or devils. Jews sought to slay God’s prophet Muhammad. Jews are the enemies of Allah. Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for their rituals. Jews kill Muslim children. Jews wreak financial havoc in the countries in which they live. Jews have started all wars…. Jews poison wells…. Jews are all criminal. Jews are fundamentally dishonest…. Jews control the media…. Jews are vermin…. Jews seek to dominate nations. Jews are genetically programmed to be malevolent. Jews invented AIDS….  Jews are responsible for 9/11. Jews control the United States. Jews caused the Iraq war….”

The internet has many useful educational purposes. What it can’t do is teach critical thinking. Thus the Internet can be used and is used by haters of Jews as a place to vomit lies, misinformation, and pure raw hate about Jews and their past and current Jewish history. A small sampling of such sites on the Internet like: Jew Watch and Stormfront, among others, confirm my feeling about the negative face of the World Wide Web.

It is a wonder that Jews have survived these vile tropes. Anti-Semitism’s reach is, at least, historically over two thousand years old and yet it is still alive and quite new. According to Goldhagen, “The Christian bible contains four hundred fifty anti-Semitic verses just in the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, averaging more than two per page.” The Gospel According to Mathew has eighty anti-Semitic verses, “including Jesus calling the Pharisees ‘you brood of vipers, how can you say good things, when you are evil?’

By the early 300’s Christianity had became the official religion of the Roman Empire. One of the Catholic Church’s prominent theologians of the late 300’s was John Chrysotom who delivered eight homilies in 386-387 “Against the Jews.” Theses homilies became influential in the post-biblical view of Jews by Christians. Among its pages and pages of anti-Semitic vilification, it asserts that Jews are devils, and must be treated as such:

Tell me this. If a man were to have slain your son, would
You endure to look upon him, or accept his greeting?
Would you shun him as a wicked demon, as the devil himself?
They slew the Son of your lord; do you have the boldness
to enter with them under the same roof? After he was slain
he heaped such honor upon you that he made his brother
and coheir. But you dishonor him so much that you pay honor
to those who slew him on the cross, that you observe with them
the fellowship of the festivals, that you go to their profane
places, enter their unclean doors, and share in the tables
of demons. For I am persuaded to call the fasting of the Jews
a table of demons because they slew God. If the Jews are acting
against God, must they not be serving the demons?

These are some of the older tropes that have been passed on, and in some cases still are, for generations among active anti-Semites and ingested like osmosis by unquestioning citizens of the world.

A modern trope by Oradawi, an important spiritual adviser to the Muslim Brotherhood based in Qatar, but his fame and influence derive in large part from his popular show on Al Jazeera, the satellite television channel owned by the ruling family of Qatar. Al Jazeera has bureaus in many world capitals and an American cable news network. Qaradawi has been the network’s most famous on-air personality. He is anti-American, but his anti-Israeli rant is extreme.  In a sermon broadcast on Al Jazeera he stated, “Throughout history Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” which is to say, Muslims.

Retired Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is probably the world’s most famous Holocaust revisionist denier, did not praise Hitler, Oaradawi did.

 

Aspects of Qaradawi’s pro-Hitler commentary are noteworthy. First is that he is Muslim, and from the Middle East. Christian Europe not the Middle East, had been the historic breeding ground of “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” The second is that Qaradawi — whose vile opinions would have been heard, in the pre-Internet, pre-satellite-television age, by pockets of extremist followers in marginal places — now has a worldwide audience.

The third troubling aspect of Qaradawi’s comment is that it did not result in his removal from Al Jazeera nor diminish his influence. The most effective and disturbing argument Goldhagen musters in this new book is that the resurgence of rhetorically and sometimes physically violent anti-­Semitism over the past dozen years or so is shocking in part because it does not seem to shock.

In Goldhagen’s view, the United States today is one of the least anti-Semitic nations in the world, but nonetheless, still has politicians and religious leaders who are possibly covert anti-Semites.

In 2002, when a Nixon White House tape recording was finally released, Goldhagen documents how …“Nixon let forth a brief anti-Semitic rant about the Jews’” in a private conversation with evangelist Billy Graham. Nixon was harping about the “total Jewish domination of the media” The President, with the best information available to any human being on earth, could be so humdrum in his ranting’s about Jews could indicate the hidden depth of anti-Semitism in American society.  Graham, possibly recognizing a “kindred spirit” in Nixon agreed with the thesis of “Jews having too much power” added his own thought “They’re the ones putting out the pornographic stuff.” Goldhagen questions the sentiments and attitudes behind these anti-Semitic statements. Are these feelings linked to the general societal American views to Jews in the United States?

The renowned anti-Nazi German Protestant theologian Karl Barth, regarded by many “as the greatest and most personally exemplary Christian theologian of the twentieth century, was a suppressed anti-Semite. To another scholar Barth wrote late in his life: “I am decidedly not a philosemite, in that in personal encounters with living Jews (even Christian Jews) I have always, so long as I can remember, had to suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the basis of my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements, yet still having to suppress and conceal it. Pfui! is all I can say to this in some sense allergic reaction of mine. But this is how it was and is. A good thing that this reprehensible instinct is totally alien to my sons and other people than myself….”

Karl Barth understood his irrational feelings towards Jews but was wise enough to suppress  his “totally irrational aversion.” The political and religious desperately needs more thinking humans like Barth.

Partially anti-Semitism stems from the age old “Christian” teachings of churches, partially it comes from “pseudo” scientific social Darwinism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century culminating in the mass murder of inferior beings (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and many others).

Henry Ford published in his newspaper Dearborn Independent in the early 1920’s his anti-Semitic screed. On one page it could say the Jews are the bankers of the world and on the next page it accused Jews of being communists. Anti-Semitism is also rare in its ability to make otherwise smart people believe fantastical and idiotic things. What other religious or ethnic group has ever been blamed for both capitalism and Communism simultaneously? I believe that questionable distinction goes to the Jews.

One of Goldhagen’s strongest arguments deala with selective outrage as a leading indicator of anti-Semitism. He does not try to argue that criticism of Israeli government policies is necessarily anti-Semitic. But he has appropriate contempt for those who argue that Israel is a reincarnation of Nazi Germany. If it were the Palestinians would have all been all murdered within six months after the 1967 war. The hypocrisy of the inter­national community, which judges Israel by a separate, and higher, standard than it does other countries in existence today.

He cites Turkey as a telling example: “In a rational world, the Turks’ systemic and large-scale violence against and suppression of Kurds’ legitimate rights and national aspirations, not to mention the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians, and mass killings of Greeks and others, not to mention their invasion, dismembering and occupation of half a sovereign country, Cyprus, in 1974, . . . might have brought upon Turkey the world’s condemnation and generated in international organizations, including the United Nations, a preoccupation with its predations and the production of intensively negative beliefs and passions, including prejudice . . . similar to and perhaps far exceeding that against Jews. But it has not — not even 1 percent as much.”

How did he reach the conclusion that Turkey is criticized 1 percent, and not 2 percent, as much as Israel? Hyperbole could lead to inaccuracy, which is particularly unfortunate in a book whose subject, at its essence, is lying.

Goldhagen writes, “Consider the mass murder in 1999 at a Los Angeles Jewish Community Center, where a vicious anti-Semite opened fire with an automatic weapon, injuring five people.” No one at the site died, therefore no mass murder occurred but the murderer was convicted of attempted murder.

But the shooting attack in Los Angeles was bad enough. So too is the excoriation of Israel by countries with terrible human rights records. And so too are efforts, by Muslim fundamentalists and far-right politicians, to make Europe uninhabitable for its last Jews, and to blame certain American Jews for bringing war upon their country.

Canadian Rev. Andrew Long spoke out, in 2012, against the anti-Semitism of the mainstream Protestant churches. Rev. Andrew Love of the United Church of Canada, said regarding a 2002 initiative against Israel by mainstream Protestant sects: “What really emerged from this story was just how deep-seated the hatred [for Jews} is.” According to Love, who knows the Protestant movement as an insider, “The humanitarian concern is the veil that  anti-Semitic ideas and anti-Semitic policies.” Goldhagen believes  Rev. Love should know because Protestant churches are at “the center of the anti-Israel international human-rights movement, as well as at the center of the pan-European anti-Israel public discourse, which share the same ‘universal’ and ‘humanitarian’ principles. Christian groups, many funded by the European Union, are the motor force behind much of the divestment campaign against Israel, with Pax Christi, the most important international Catholic peace movement urging an economic boycott of Israel….”

One of the most chilling parts of the book comes near the end, where Goldhagen reproduces on pages 451-54 the detailed Iranian plan to destroy Israel, listing the regions of the tiny country and the regional capitals — Haifa, Tel Aviv, Nazareth, Beersheba, Jerusalem — and their population figures. In the same section Goldhagen reproduces a document from the Wannsee conference in Germany in 1942 that spelled out in stark numbers the number of Jews in the various countries. Typed neatly (on one of those beautiful German typewriters of the era) it shows a total of 11 million Jews to be murdered. (The Germans ended up murdering more than 20 million people in World War II, including the 6 million Jews that Holocaust deniers say weren’t murdered.

Goldhagen’s book has its uses, but today we need something decidedly better: a book on anti-Semitism that combines original reporting, accessible writing and a sense of restraint. The book is way too repetitious, with about 150 pages of “information overload.” Goldhagen alerts us to the reality that Jews should fear anti-Semitism, but how fearful should we be? Is this the 1930’s of Nazi Germany? Goldhagen’s thesis is that anti-Semitism never went away, but since the turn of the 21st Century it has multiplied beyond what anyone would have predicted. It is openly spread by intellectuals, politicians, and religious leaders in Europe, Asia, the Arab world, America, and Africa and supported by hundreds of millions more. The value in Goldhagen’s book is his deep analysis of the persistence of an as yet untreatable disease — which is what anti-Semitism is – today. Anti-Semitism is stronger and more widespread over the globe than any time since the Holocaust.

Goldhagen’s solution to this is: “People of good conscience unite: Combat the devil that never dies, he is named anti-Semitism.”

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David Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University.  He may be contacted via david.stron@sdjewishworld.com.   San Diego Jewish World seeks sponsorships to be placed, as this notice is, just below articles that appear on our site.  To inquire, call editor Donald H. Harrison at (619) 265-0808 or contact him via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com