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BOOK REVIEW

A grim account of anti-Semitism and its origins

Anti-Semitism: Myth and Hate From Antiquity to the Present; Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer; Palgrave Macmillan: 310 pp., $35

By Merle Rubin
Special to The Times

February 12 2003

The great 19th century historian Theodor Mommsen (who in 1902 became the first German to win the Nobel Prize for Literature) had ample opportunity to take the measure of the persistent phenomenon of anti-Semitism. For, by the latter half of the 19th century, European anti-Semitism was not merely a simple prejudice but a self-styled political "philosophy" compounded of racist, nationalist and Social Darwinist mythologies.

Anti-Semites, Mommsen sadly observed, "listen only to their own envy and hatred, to the meanest arguments.... They are deaf to reason, right, morals. One cannot influence them.... [Anti-Semitism] is a horrible epidemic, like cholera -- one can neither explain nor cure it." But one can, at the very least, recognize it and try to combat it.

As historians Frederick M. Schweitzer and Marvin Perry inform us in their unsettling, all-too-timely survey of some 2,000 years of anti-Semitism, it is now to be found, not only on extreme fringes of the Right, but also among elements of the Left: "Several British authors rejected Israel's right to exist and Jose Saramago ... felt it appropriate to 'compare what is happening in the Palestinian territories with Auschwitz.' " "[A] cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa depicted a baby Jesus in a manger looking at an Israeli tank and saying, 'Don't tell me they want to kill me again.' "

And in 2001, delegates from Arab states turned a U.N.-sponsored conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, into an anti-Semitic tirade of hatred not simply against Zionists but against all Jews. Few delegates from other nations, apart from the U.S., had the courage to walk out.

Despite the fact that "Semitic" designates a linguistic group that includes Middle Eastern languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, the term anti-Semitic, for all practical purposes, has meant hatred of the Jews as a people and of Judaism as a religion. Like many other immigrant groups -- Irish, Italians, Poles, Puerto Ricans -- Jews in America have been victims of prejudice. But such relatively benign forms of discrimination are not the subject of this book.

Perry and Schweitzer are concerned with the literally lethal kind of irrational hatred that has resulted in killing, from the massacres inflicted on medieval Jewish communities in the Rhineland by Crusaders en route to wrest the Holy Land from Muslim "infidels" to the Nazis' systematic murder of two-thirds of European Jewry. Nor does the story end there. The authors also discuss the alarming way in which this poisonous mythology, born and bred in Europe, has spread to the Islamic world and has even gained currency in America among members of the Nation of Islam.

Beginning in the 1st century AD and taking us as far as the 21st, Schweitzer and Perry examine the origins, manifestations and permutations of this virulent form of hate. Solidly researched and lucidly written, their book makes for compelling, if painful reading. The authors locate the roots of anti-Semitism in the early years of Christianity: the basic myth upon which all the later forms have fed, they contend (concurring with a thesis developed by the Catholic writer James Carroll), was the version of the trial and death of Jesus presented in the Gospels.

In their first chapter, drawing on textual and historical studies by a variety of Catholic, Protestant and Jewish scholars, Schweitzer and Perry contrast what is known about the trial and death of Jesus with the version presented in the Gospels. The Gospel writers, none of whom had met Jesus or been present at the time of his death, were writing a generation later, at the time of the Jewish revolt against Rome (66-70 AD), which ended with the Romans' destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Understandably, as members of a fledging sect with many Jewish adherents, which was dedicated to the teachings of a crucified Jewish leader, early Christians were extremely anxious to assure the angry Romans that the new Christian religion was in no way Jewish. And so, the Gospels present the Roman Pontius Pilate in a favorable light, while casting the blame for Jesus' death on his fellow Jews. Thus was born the myth of the Jews as Christ killers.

From this incendiary, powerful myth sprang, in time, a whole ghastly mythology painting Jews as ritual murderers, agents of the Devil, race defilers, Shylocks, traitors and members of a worldwide conspiracy. In Catholic countries, the conspiracy was said also to include Protestants, while in Protestant countries it was said to include Catholics. Other alleged members of the alleged conspiracy include communists, capitalists, imperialists, anarchists, New England- ers, bankers, homosexuals, Freemasons and members of civic organizations such as the Lions and the Rotary Club.

As Mommsen so eloquently expressed it, the irrationality and ignorance behind such thinking is mind-boggling. More than a few times in the long, sad story, popes and other prelates and rulers explained to their followers that Jews, prohibited by their religion not only from murder but also from the ingestion of blood, would hardly want to kidnap and kill Christian children to use their blood in the making of Passover matzos.

But mythology, once implanted, can be hard to dislodge. As Schweitzer and Perry show us, the myths that flourished in the fertile soil of early Christian anti-Semitism had so permeated culture that they infected even those who thought little of religion, like Karl Marx, or who were anti-Christian, like Adolf Hitler.

On a more encouraging note, "Anti-Semitism" also draws our attention to some of the interfaith dialogues and other efforts being made by people of various religions, races and nationalities to combat the spread of this life-threatening intellectual virus. Myths draw their power from the frustration and confusion that human beings feel confronted by life's pains and injustices. Clearly, it is all too tempting to fix blame on a scapegoat.

"Anti-Semitism" shows us the dangers of this kind of mythological thinking. Aptly citing a verse from Proverbs 18:21, the authors of this book would remind us all that "Death and life are in the power of the tongue."