Anti-Semitism, history and denial

[Behind the Aegis]

According to one respondent to my recent article, Understanding the Holocaust: Shoah in Historical Perspective, Jews should "seek the causes (for anti-Semitism) in our own acts." Self-blame is not an uncommon response to tragedy. Rape victims come immediately to mind. But what motivates the idea that we Jews, by our own actions, invite anti-Semitism and are somehow responsible for the Holocaust?

Several years ago, a prominent Israeli rabbi attributed the massacre of a busload of children by terrorists as divine punishment for the "sins of Israelis." As if god targets children, using terrorists to carry out his will. In the wake of the Shoah, seeking to somehow explain the inexplicable, some orthodox Diaspora leaders suggested that the Holocaust was god's punishment for the sins of our people in Europe. But as in the Israeli bus massacre, most of the Jews who fell victim to the European slaughter, during and for centuries before the Shoah, were mostly the pious and the poor, those least likely to be halachic "transgressors." And was the hand of god also present in the elimination of eastern Europe's famed Hassidic centers? The murder of orthodox communities dedicated to a life of learning and halachic tradition?

Jews have experienced anti-Judaism during most of our Diaspora existence, and at great cost in life. As I observed in my earlier post, one prominent Holocaust research center suggests that, had Jewry not been subject to two millennia of European persecution our numbers today would equal that of the entire British Isles!

Since we had never before experienced anything on the scale of Shoah, though, we could not have anticipated, taken evasive or direct action to the emerging danger. Yes, there were those few, Jabotinsky and Abba Kovner, for example, who by intuition born of their Zionist background were more sensitive and alert to the unfolding events. But Martin Buber was more typical of general Jewish understanding and response: anti-Semitism was a pendulum that was now at its extreme. Germany would, he believed, sooner or later pass through that terrible period and life would return to normal for the Jews. Buber urged German Jewry to remain in place, to wait out the storm.

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[rpannier]

1. Interesting

Thanks for sharing

I had a professor in University who was a Hungarian-Jew and survived the Holocaust.
He touched on this a bit in class one day

[LeftishBrit]

2. Interesting article.

it is common enough for people to think that the victims of a tragedy or crime somehow must have done something to 'deserve it'. Even the victims themselves sometimes seem to prefer self-blame to the notion of an unjust world.