Hatred Willard Gaylin (classic novels TXT) 📖

times, and perhaps in all history, is surely Nazi Germany. This is not to say that there have not been other monstrous events of mass slaughter and destruction in the past. But Germany in the twentieth century—with its newfound might and powers—created a Holocaust against the Jews that became the event that redefined that term. In its pathological assaults on the Jew, often to the detriment of its self-interest in the war; in its calculated and perverse technology of mass torture and killing; in its psychotic rationalizations; in its senseless cruelties; in the persistent and unremitting pursuit of genocide to the final moments of the war—Nazi Germany became the defining example of a culture of hatred.

How could the Holocaust have happened? How could such a monstrous policy have been initiated in a modern, highly educated, technological society, in so public a manner, with so little resistance from the outside world of passive onlookers, the Zuschauenden? In other words, why Germany, why the Jews, and what explains the passivity in the face of such evil by the Christian churches and the leaders of liberal democracy?65 These are questions for all times and all disciplines. These are questions that result in multiple, but only partial, answers. Here, I use the Holocaust only as an extreme example to illustrate the psychology of group hatred, without any pretense of explaining its historic meaning or political evolution.

Antisemitism

In an uncharacteristically overwrought article in Esquire magazine in 1974, Cynthia Ozick, the talented writer and brilliant social critic, declared that in the warmest of Christian hearts there is a cold place reserved for the Jews. This was in response to the fact that with the opening of Chinese society (then just happening), antisemitism seemed to be one of the first Western ideas to be heartily embraced by the Chinese, despite an obvious lack of any significant association with Jews. How could the Chinese so quickly adopt antisemitic stereotypes? One would normally expect, as Ozick clearly did, that some contact, some bad experiences, some history of animosity, must antedate a rancorous condemnation of an entire group.

A similar dejected feeling to that of Ozick’s must have permeated the atmosphere at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem, when they were made aware in 1994 of the presence in Japan and Korea of a “mystifyingly positive response to the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a poisonous antisemitic tract then being actively circulated in Asia. These two countries are even more unlikely to have had any extensive experience with Jews than China.

The Jews are the quintessential scapegoats—the oldest pariah population, the most universally demonized people. Antisemitism has been traced back to earliest recorded history. And over the centuries, its ready recrudescence and the intensity of loathing and hatred that has been directed against the Jews have been astonishing.

The history of antisemitism is so well documented that one would expect nothing new could emerge. The literature is so imposing—more than thirty thousand volumes at the Sassoon Center—that one would assume little headway could be made by a new historian or sociologist approaching the subject. Yet each new emergence of militant antisemitism is a particularly lurid reminder of its ubiquitous presence and produces a rash of new analytic studies. The Holocaust, in its irrational extreme and terrifying results, ushered in a new era of scholarship on anti-semitism and, arising in the post-Freudian era, offered new emphasis on its psychological aspects. Earlier attempts at psychological understanding had some perverse results.

In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair—an antisemitic outrage that rocked France at the end of the nineteenth century—a French Jewish journalist, Bernard Lazare, wrote his now-controversial but important book, Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.66 It is now controversial because the text is most likely to be quoted these days in antisemitic literature. It is important because it was a pioneering effort to understand the psychological foundations of antisemitism. The psychological underpinnings of anti-semitism, as distinguished from its sociological and historical roots, are relevant to all forms of hatred.

The Jew haters have drawn comfort and ammunition particularly from Lazare’s first chapter, which deals with general causes. In it he stated:

This race has been the object of hatred with all the nations amidst whom it ever settled. Inasmuch as the enemies of the Jews belonged to diverse races, as they dwelled far apart from one another, were ruled by different laws and governed by opposite principle; as they had not the same customs and differed in spirit from one another, so they could not possibly judge alike of any subject, it must need be that the general causes of antisemitism have always resided in Israel itself [this was written a half century before the creation of the state of Israel, and therefore, “Israel” as used throughout Lazare’s text refers not to a state but to the Jews collectively], and not in those who antagonized it.67

That statement has become a credo of antisemitic literature, and the arguments that follow from it have led to an unfair labeling of Lazare by many as a Jewish antisemite. Nevertheless, he continued in the very next—and less quoted—paragraph: “This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel’s persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.”

As one follows Lazare’s text, the source of the confusion becomes apparent. It stems from the ambiguity in his use of the word “cause.” We tend these days to use “cause” when we mean “the agent that necessarily or ineluctably leads to a result.” We use “reason,” a similar word, to refer to that which might “explain the occurrence or nature of an effect.” Similarly we have the word “occasion” to use for “a situation that permits or stimulates existing causes to come into play.” Although the victim population