The Challenge of Modernity

Chapter 9AntisemitismTribe

Chapter Nine Modernity ushered in the fall of the Ghetto walls and the relaxation under the sway of secularism of religious persecution. Both Christianity and Islam repaid their debt to the “Tribe” for their inception by persecution, slander and the incessant campaign to prove that they were the true inheritors of the religious revolution that the” Tribe” had produced. It is a fact that in the ancient world there were pockets of anti- “Tribe” propaganda and riot. 1 But it was Christianity in its desire to supplant the faith of the “Tribe” that played the essential role of enemy in the Western World. The fear of Christians visiting synagogues and adopting Jewish practices and, in the end, converting to Judaism was a real fear in the early church. Perhaps the most famous of such a person was Aquila of Sinope who had first converted to Christianity and then to Judaism. He translated the Bible into Greek under the tutelage of Rabbi Akiva. 2 John Chrysostom during his first two years as a presbyter in Antioch (386-387) denounced the Jews and Christians who adopted Jewish customs. He delivered eight sermons in the Antioch church. Chrysostom held Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and he charged them with deicide (Killing God?!). He compared the synagogue to a pagan temple, representing it as the source of all vices and heresies. He described it as a place worse than a brothel or a saloon. 3 The story of the “Tribe” in Christian Europe through the Middles Ages was one of intermittent persecution and pillage. Beginning with the first and second crusades the Jews of Northern France, Rhineland and Israel were massacred. 4 The strange story of the Jews in the French Midi and Provence in the thirteenth century is the relationship between the “tribe” and the Albigensians. On a theological basis the Albigensians were of the belief that the “God” of the “Old Testament” was evil, and the god of the New Testament was good. However, that did not prevent them from holding members of the “Tribe” in high esteem. In cities such as Albi, Beziers, Carcassonne, Toulouse and others had large Jewish populations. Princes were motivated to favor Jews from both an economic as well as tolerant point of view. The region was an island of toleration and independent thought. 4 After the Crusade against the Albigensians, Pope Innocent III and the fourth Lateran Council enacted laws to curb Jews and set them apart by dress and other restrictions akin to the Nazi Nuremberg Laws.5
The situation in the Moslem world was one of degree. According to the Pact of Umar Jews were to be tolerated but only as second class subjects with all other “People of the Book.” 6 But the Jews were also subject to periodic bursts of mob violence, death and destruction. 7 The riots of 1391 and subsequent expulsion of the Jews in Spain in 1492 produced a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity. These “New Christians” disparagingly called “Marranos” rose to power and wealth. They were subsequently subject to an inquisition that deprived them of life and property. The term “race” was not yet current but the thought that as leopard does not lose its spots was now applied to members of the “Tribe.” According to Babylonian Talmud A Jew who sins is still considered a Jew; and now this became true for the “Old Christians in Spain and Portugal 8 The secularization of Western Society vitiated the religious persecution that the “Tribe” faced from the Middle Ages. However, under the guise of modern scientific theory and Darwin’s writings on evolution a new form of prejudice and persecution were devised against the “Tribe.” The author of the term anti-Semitism is accorded to Wilhelm Marr who strangely enough was married to two women of Jewish origin. Marr portrayed “Germanism” in mortal combat with the “Tribe’ and saw only the complete defeat of one over the other would do. 9 Anti-Semitism the new term for hatred of the “Tribe” was not confined to Germany where the term was coined. In France anti-Semitism soon became a concomitant hatred with those who viewed the parties of left with suspicion. Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), a French army officer, was framed and convicted of being a German spy. He was subsequently proven innocent, but the cause became one that pitted the forces of reaction against supporters of the republic. In 1895 Dreyfus was formally degraded and his sword broken his uniform cut in the courtyard of the Ecole Militaire in Paris. The crowd shouting ant-Semitic slurs.

A witness to that scene was Theodore Herzl (1860-1904), a correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna was that the spark or was it the rise to power in 1895 of the antisemitic demagogue Karl Lueger in Vienna in 1895. Whatever the cause Herzl concluded that with the new anti-Semitism the “Tribe” could never be safe in Europe.

Herzl wrote a pamphlet entitled Der Judenstaat 10 the title of which can be translated into English as: “The Jewish State.” Herzl argued that the only solution to the persistent Antisemitism in Europe would have to be the creation of an independent Jewish State. Herzl popularized the term “Zionism” and advised the purchasing of land in the Palestine of that time. Although as far as a “Jewish State” was concerned he was not wedded to the idea of Palestine alone.

Herzl presided over the first Zionist Congress in Basel Switzerland. The reason for the place was the strong opposition from both Orthodox and Reform Jewry in Germany. The fact of the matter was very few Jews thought the idea was practical if not harmful to Jewish interests in Europe whether they be capital, labor, reform or orthodox.

Nevertheless, the congress adopted what was to be known as the “Basel Program.” It stated the goal of securing by public law a home for the Jewish people in Palestine. It urged Jewish settlement with emphasis on the trades and agricultural labor. This was to be brought about by the strengthening of Jewish feeling and national consciousness. They were very much aware of the need for governmental approval. 11 There was little actual response to a Jewish settlement in Palestine until the pogroms of 1881 and the subsequent “May Laws: of 1882 propelled over two million Jews to leave the Tsarist Empire. The formation of the ‘Hovvei Zion-Lovers of Zion” saw an effort to establish colonies in Palestine. 12

During World War One and the need for the British to gather any assist they could in winning the war; the Balfour Declaration prompted Jewish rejoicing and Arab anger. 13

But truth be told it took the greatest catastrophe to overcome any people that brought almost universal demand on the part of the “Tribe” to reestablish a national state in the ancient Homeland-Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel).

There is no need for a numbers game. No other people experienced the concentrated effort to exterminate them then the “Tribe!” What is more of note than the viciousness and thoroughness of the German attempt to annihilate completely the “Tribe” is that when it was possible to save so many at the Evian Conference of July 1938 of 32 countries only one The Dominican Republic agreed to take in refugees. A few months later, in November 1938, the Nazi regime incited violent pogroms against Jews. Even though that news was widely reported, Americans remained reluctant to welcome Jewish refugees. Even efforts by some Americans to rescue children failed. The Wagner-Rogers bill, an effort to admit 20,000 endangered Jewish refugee children, was not supported by the Senate in 1939 and 1940. Widespread racial prejudices among Americans—including antisemitic attitudes held by US State Department officials—played a part in the failure to admit more refugees. 14

Still were the voices of Christian churches as the people of their savior experienced six million crucifixions! It would be an exercise in masochism to describe in detail the horrors that the “Tribe” experienced. Perhaps best is the Yiddish song- “Wo a hin zol ich geyn fermacht is yeder tier-Where shall I go? Closed is every door: Yetz Ikh vais vo zu geyn Eretz Yisroel-Now I know where to go the land of Israel!”

But even in Palestine the Jews were not welcomed. According to the records at Yad VaShem the part played by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust was negligible even though he was a supporter of the Nazi cause. More important was the limitation that the British government put on Jewish immigration to Palestine.

The riots of 1929 and 1936 were Arabs attacking Jews, sometimes inflamed by specious rumors on both sides. But while the British limited Jewish immigration to Palestine Arab immigration was unhindered.

By contrast, throughout the Mandatory period, Arab immigration was unrestricted. In 1930, the Hope Simpson commission, sent from London to investigate the Arab riots, said the British practice of ignoring the uncontrolled illegal Arab immigration from Egypt, Transjordan and Syria had the effect of displacing the prospective Jewish immigrants. The British Governor of the Sinai from 1922-36 observed: “This illegal immigration was not only from the Sinai, but also from Transjordan and Syria, and it is very difficult to make a case out for the misery of the Arabs if at the same time their compatriots from adjoining states could not be kept from coming in to share that misery. The Peel Commission reported in 1937 that the “shortfall of land is, we consider, due less to the amount of land acquired by Jews than to the increase in the Arab population. 15

Unable to deal with the situation in their Palestine Mandate the British government washed their hands by putting it to the United Nations. The result was Resolution 181 (II) a plan to partition Palestine into Independent Arab and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the City of Jerusalem. The Jewish State would get 56% of the land area of Mandate Palestine with about 82% of the Jewish population but would be separated from Jerusalem. It was put to a vote in the United Nations General Assembly with the result of 33 in favor, 13 negative and 10 abstentions. 16

In a cablegram on 15 May 1948 to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States claimed that “the Arab states find themselves compelled to intervene in order to restore law and order and to check further bloodshed” 17 Over the next few days after the declaration, armies of Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Iraq, and Syria engaged Israeli troops inside the area of what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, thereby starting the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. finally ending on 24 July 1949 with the signing of the armistice agreement with Syria. By then Israel had retained its independence and increased its land area by almost 50% compared to the 1947 UN Partition Plan. 18

On May 14th, 1948, The Declaration of Independence of Israel was signed. 19

Many Arabs left, fled or were expelled from, what became Israel. In the Report of the Technical Committee on Refugees (Submitted to the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine in Lausanne on 7 September 1949) – (A/1367/Rev.1), in paragraph 15, the estimate of the statistical expert, which the Committee believed to be as accurate as circumstances permitted, indicated that the number of refugees from Israel-controlled territory amounted to approximately 711,000. 20

In the three years following the 1948 Palestine war, about 700,000 Jews immigrated to Israel, residing mainly along the borders and in former Arab lands. Around 136,000 were some of the 250,000 displaced Jews of World War II And from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War until the early 1970s, 800,000–1,000,000 Jews left, fled, or were expelled from their homes in Arab countries; 260,000 of them reached Israel between 1948 and 1951; and 600,000 by 1972. 21

The point to be made by these statistics is:

Number 1 -There could have been an Arab State in Palestine it was rejected by the Arab population and the Arab States that invaded to destroy the Jewish State that was to be created by the United Nations!!!

Number 2 - As far as the “Nakba” the number of Arabs displaced from the Palestine Mandate was about equal to the Jews displaced from their ancient abode in Arab lands!

The ongoing challenge of modernity for the “Tribe” is support for the state of Israel in the face of unrelenting desire by terrorist groups and the government of Iran to annihilate it.

Footnotes

  1. (See: Anti-Judaism, the Western Tradition, David Nirenberg, 2013, W.W. Norton, New York and London, pp. 19-47). ↩

  2. (See: Ginzberg, Louis (1902). “Aquila (Ακύλας, סליקע)”. In Singer, Isidore; et al. (eds.). The Jewish Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. pp. 34–38.) ↩

  3. A. Roy Eckhardt, Elder and Younger Brothers: The Encounter of Jews and Christians, Scribner New York, 1967, Robert Chazan, In the Year 1096: The First Crusade and the Jews (The Jewish Publication Society, 1996) Shlomo Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders: The Hebrew Chronicles of the First and Second Crusades (KTAV Publishing House, 1996). ↩

  4. From the Jewish Virtual Library online: S. Grayzel, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (1959), index; L.I. Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (1925), index; G. Saige, Les Juifs de Languedoc (1881); Graetz, Gesch, 7 (c. 19004), 8 ff., 53; A. Borst, Die Katharer (1953); C. Schmidt, Histoire et doctrine de la secte des Cathares ou Albigeois (1849); H.C. Lea, History of Inquisition in the Middle Ages (1958); J.M. O’Brien, in: Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10 (1967/68), 215–20. ↩ ↩2

  5. (See: The Church and the Jews in the XIIIth Century: a Study of their Relations during the years 1198–1254, based on the Papal Letters and the Conciliar Decrees of the Period, revised ed. By Solomon Grayzel. Pp. x + 378. New York: Hermon Press, 1966). ↩

  6. Tafsir Ibn Kathir, Vol. 4, p. 406 Publisher: Darrussalam (2007-01-01) ↩

  7. G.E. von Grunebaum, “Eastern Jewry Under Islam, “Viator, (1971) and Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam, (NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). ↩

  8. Talmud Bavli Kiddushin 42a - B. Netanyahu: The Marranos of Spain: From the Late 14th to the Early 16th Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, Third Edition, Cornell University Press, June 22,1999 ↩

  9. See: Zimmermann, Moshe. Wilhelm Marr: The Patriarch of Anti-Semitism. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. March 5th 1987). ↩

  10. 1896-Leipzig and Vienna, M. Breitenstein’s Verlags-Buchhandlung) ↩

  11. Sokolow, Nahum (1919). History of Zionism 1600-1918: Volume I. Longmans Green & Co ↩

  12. See-Simon Dubnow, The Most recent History of the Jewish People, 1789-1914; Russian ed vol. 3; Penslar, Derek Jonathan (1991). Zionism and Technocracy: The Engineering of Jewish Settlement in Palestine, 1870-1918. Indiana University Press). ↩

  13. (Friedman, Isaiah (2017). British Pan-Arab Policy, 1915-1922. Taylor & Francis; Friedman, Menachem (2012). “Israel as a Theological Dilemma”. In Baruch Kimmerling (ed.). Israeli State and Society, The: Boundaries and Frontiers. State University of New York Press. ↩

  14. (United 9States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Introduction to the Holocaust.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the-holocaust. Accessed on 11/25/2025). ↩

  15. (See: Aharon Cohen, Israel and the Arab World,(NY: funk and Wagnalls, 1970, Howard Sachar, A History of Israel, (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979, Moshe Auman, “Land Ownership in Palestine 1880-1948,” in Michael Curtis, et al., the Palestinians, (NJ: transaction Books, 1975),
    Palestine Royal Commission Report (the Peel Report), London:1937).
    Arieh Avneri, The Claim of Dispossession, (Tel Aviv: Hidekel Press, 1984), Yehoshua Porath, The Emergance of the Palestinian-Arab National movement, 1918-1929, (London: Frank Cass, 1974). ↩

  16. UNITED NATIONS General Assembly: A/RES/181(II): 29 November 1947: Resolution 181 (II): Future government of Palestine: Retrieved 26 April 2012 Archived 24 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine). ↩

  17. PDF copy of Cablegram from the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States of the 15 May 1948: Retrieved 13 December 2013 Archived 7 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine). ↩

  18. Cragg, Kenneth (1997). Palestine. The Prize and Price of Zion. Cassel. pp. 57, 116). ↩

  19. Brenner, Michael; Frisch, Shelley (April 2003). Zionism: A Brief History. Markus Wiener Publishers ↩

  20. General Progress Report and Supplementary Report of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine, Covering the Period from 11 December 1949 to 23 October 1950 Archived 20 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine, published by the United Nations Conciliation Commission, 23 October 1950. (U.N. General Assembly Official Records, 5th Session, Supplement No. 18, Document A/1367/Rev. 1). ↩

  21. Schwartz, Adi (4 January 2008). “All I Wanted was Justice”. Haaretz. Archived from the original on 20 March 2016. Retrieved 13 May 2012. Malka Hillel Shulewitz, The Forgotten Millions: The Modern Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands, Continuum 2001, pp. 139 and 155. Ada Aharoni “The Forced Migration of Jews from Arab Countries” Archived 13 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Historical Society of Jews from Egypt website. Accessed 1 February 2009. ↩

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