Click Here!  history lesson The roots of Arab Anti-Semitism Radical
Islam’s favorite Western tradition.  By David Greenberg Posted
Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2001, at 3:08 PM ET

Since Sept. 11, many Americans have been surprised by the prevalence
and depth of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. Rumors that we recognize
instantly as fabrications—such as the claim that 4,000 Jews were
warned in advance about the World Trade Center attacks—are accepted
unquestioningly in Arab countries. Reporters undergoing Middle East crash
courses are discovering that even states at peace with Israel, such as
Egypt, routinely propagate anti-Semitic propaganda of a virulence not
seen in mainstream Western politics since World War II.

This anti-Semitism isn’t just the sort of everyday stereotyping
or genteel snobbery or even official intolerance that’s familiar,
if mostly obsolescent, in the West. No, this is the strong stuff:
fantasies that Jews ritually slaughter children and oversee secret
conspiracies to rule the world. What’s more, unlike, say, Noam Chomsky,
most Arab anti-Semites don’t bother with the protestations about how
they only oppose Israel’s Palestinian policies and don’t really hate
Jews per se. In their usage, Zionist, Israeli, and Jew are pretty much
interchangeable terms.

Finally, and most important, Arab anti-Semitism isn’t confined to the
fringes of society. Whereas in Israel, as in other Western countries,
overt bigotry is scolded, ignored, or kept out of politics, mainstream
Arab culture promotes extreme anti-Semitic ideas through schools,
newspapers, television, popular culture, and official ideology. It’s
hardly even controversial.

Bernard Lewis’ classic book Semites and Anti-Semites provides insight
into how this condition came to be. As he notes, anti-Semitism in
Arab countries (and non-Arab Islamic states such as Iran) has risen as
Jew-hating in the areas formerly known as Christendom has plummeted. For
example, whatever one thinks of the extent of anti-Semitism still extant
within the Catholic Church, most Westerners consider the 1964 decision
by the Second Vatican Council to repudiate claims that Jews killed Christ
to be a mark of progress, to say the least. In Islam, however, centuries
of teaching that the Jews didn’t kill Christ have now given way to
an embrace of the very claims Christians have renounced. When Vatican
II convened, it was Arab and Muslim organizations that most vehemently
opposed exculpating the Jews of deicide—the Quran notwithstanding.

Traditionally, Islam did not demonize Jews. In Muslim lore, Jews
registered as only minor figures, drawing neither special hatred nor
fondness. It was Christianity, in fact, whose teachings first propounded
anti-Semitism. At first it was a fairly straightforward business: Jews
didn’t view Christ as the messiah, and so they were denounced or
oppressed. When times got bad, they were exiled or persecuted.

Over time, Christian anti-Semitism acquired a racial dimension along with
its religious thrust. This had significant consequences. After all, when
Jew-hating was rooted in religion, a Jew could convert to Christianity
and become, as it were, fully kosher. But when states began forcing
Jews to convert—or face expulsion or execution—the authenticity of
the Jews’ conversions became suspect. After Christians conquered Spain
from the Muslims in 1492, they forced Jews and Muslims to convert, flee,
or die. Many Jews converted yet practiced their old faith secretly,
leading church officials to make new rules discriminating against all
so-called conversos.

In the 19th century, anti-Semitism became increasingly racialized. The
Enlightenment certainly made life better for Jews, at least
in Western Europe, where religious tolerance took hold. Yet the
Enlightenment also brought new “scientific”—or, as we now say,
pseudoscientific—notions that human beings belonged to different races,
some superior to others. Under these notions, Jews (as well as Africans,
Arabs, and others) were deemed to be biologically and thus immutably
inferior to white or “Aryan” Europeans.

Alongside racism, 19th-century Europe also saw the spread of nationalism:
the idea that every people deserved its own state. Nationalism served
to justify the repression of “alien” peoples, especially Jews—not
just in eastern Europe, where Jews lived in ghettos, insulated from their
Polish or Russian compatriots, but even in Western Europe, where many
Jews were assimilated and considered themselves full citizens of their
countries. This new form of ideological anti-Semitism—seeing the Jews
as an alien and inferior people amid Christian European nations—finally
got its name in 1879, thanks to an Austrian journalist named Wilhelm Marr.

By this point, the ideology of anti-Semitism had bred elaborate theories
about the Jewish people’s evil. In some cases, ancient religious
bigotries were updated, as in the “blood libel” that Jews killed
Christian children to use their blood in making Passover matzot. (In
Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ukraine, and elsewhere, Jews were actually
tried in court on such charges.) In other cases, the slanders were new,
as with the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document
fabricated by Russian secret police that purported to divulge the Jews’
conspiratorial plans for world domination.

Until the late 19th century, anti-Semitism as an ideology remained
largely absent from Arab and Muslim culture. In the Quran and in Islamic
commentary, Jews are significant not for rejecting Muhammad but for
succumbing to his followers. In Arab literature, they are sometimes
portrayed as hostile or vindictive, but their humility and weakness is a
much more common theme. Islamic governments did not often persecute Jews
either, the way European states did, and when Jews faced discrimination,
it was no different from what Christians endured. Unlike in Europe,
Jews in Islamic lands were not expelled or forced to convert or, with
a few exceptions, consigned to ghettos.

That all started to change around 1900. First, colonialism brought
a growing European influence into the region, and both political and
religious authorities from Europe promoted the idea that Jews engaged
in ritual murders. Second, traditional Islamic authority was under
challenge from Western liberalism, and the Jews provided a convenient
scapegoat. During the 1908 Turkish revolution, the so-called Young Turks
seized power in the Ottoman Empire and installed a constitutional regime
that expanded freedom of religion. In arguing against the revolution,
Muslim conservatives latched onto anti-Semitic propaganda, claiming that
secret Jewish machinations lay behind the new regime.

Finally, there was Zionism. Starting in the mid-1800s, Jews turned to
Zionism—their own nationalism—as a solution to escalating European
persecution. Since biblical times, Jews had maintained a small presence
in the ancient kingdom of Judea (which in the late 19th century Europeans
began calling Palestine), and Zionists saw the land as the ideal refuge
for them, a Jewish National Home.

Zionist immigration began in earnest in the 1880s, and soon Jewish
settlers ran into conflicts with local Arabs. At first, however, the
friction centered on grazing rights, land titles, and other property
matters; it didn’t carry nationalist or religious overtones. Yet as
crude anti-Semitic ideas circulated more widely, the view of Jews as
greedy, devious, and bent on world domination became bound up with the
Arab critique of Zionism. Possibly the first major expression of the
now-common view that Jewish settlement was really a beachhead for a
takeover of the region was published in 1909 by the Turkish journalist
Yunus Nadi, who warned—without any evidence at all—that the Jews
aimed to establish “an Israelite kingdom comprising the ancient states
of Babel and Nineveh, with Jerusalem at its center.” The conspiratorial
notion of the Jews as plotting to take over the world quickly developed.

Then came the Holocaust, which not only marked the pinnacle of European
anti-Semitism but encouraged it in the Arab world as well. Because Arab
leaders shared the Germans’ hostility to Britain and France—the
dominant colonial powers in the Middle East—they were eager to make
common cause with Hitler, despite Nazi belief that they, like the Jews,
were inferior to Aryans. The mufti of Jerusalem, among others, actively
spread propaganda about “Anglo-Saxon Jewish greed” while praising the
Nazi war effort. Even years later, sympathy for Nazism could be easily
found in Arab culture. When Israel apprehended Adolf Eichmann in 1960,
a Saudi newspaper headline read, “Capture of Eichmann, Who Had the
Honor of Killing Five Million Jews.”

If the Holocaust nurtured Arab anti-Semitism, it also helped to discredit
such bigotry in the West. Indeed, it helped mobilize support for a
Jewish state internationally. In 1948, Israel was finally granted
independence. As if to welcome their new neighbor into the region,
the Arab countries promptly invaded. Israel repulsed the attacks, and
in the three Arab-Israeli wars that followed (1956, 1967, 1973), the
Jewish state managed to survive and even to expand its territory. Most
controversially, it took over the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West
Bank from Jordan, which were home to large numbers of Palestinian Arabs.

With Israel’s military successes and its willingness to occupy
Arab lands until a peace treaty could be struck, Arab anti-Semitism
hardened into official doctrine, as it has remained for many decades
now. Propagandists, looking to rationalize their losses to a supposedly
inferior people, came to depict the Jews as craven lackeys of a
mightier power—the United States—a theme that can be heard in
Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric today. And it was not just propaganda:
Arab countries passed laws that discriminate not against Israelis or
Zionists but against all Jews, simply for being Jews.

Islamic teaching, too, has been radically retrofitted to accommodate
the new anti-Semitism. Whereas traditional Muslim accounts depict the
fate of the Jews as tragic, that of a people too benighted to follow
Muhammad the Prophet, current Muslim scholarship in the Arab world
imaginatively rereads the Quran for evidence of the Jews’ devilish
nature. Meanwhile, films showing sympathy for the Jews or depicting
the Holocaust are censored, while staples of old-fashioned European
anti-Semitism—cartoons portraying greedy hook-nosed Jews, popular novels
with conspiratorial Jewish villains, public lectures drawing on phony
scholarship like the Protocols—became staples of the new Arab culture.

What Americans have been seeing after Sept. 11, we have to conclude,
is hardly new. It’s only new to those who never before bothered to look.

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Nationalistic anti-Semitism found its most famous expression in France’s
Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a French army captain who
was Jewish, was convicted of spying for Germany and sentenced to life
in prison. Dreyfus fought the conviction and eventually, in 1906, was
exonerated. But in the intervening years, the question of Dreyfus’
guilt split French opinion, and the so-called “anti-Dreyfusards”
marshaled anti-Semitic arguments on their behalf, shocking the liberal
Dreyfusards. The raw anti-Semitism voiced by Frenchmen, including
intellectuals, clergymen, and state officials, made the Jews of France
question whether they could feel at home even in what was supposedly
the most enlightened of nations. The Dreyfus Affair also helped foster
Arab anti-Semitism, because French culture exerted a strong influence
on Christian Arabs in Lebanon.

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Out of such pseudoscience sprang the notion that there exists some group
of peoples, including Arabs and Jews, who are all “Semites.” The
idea has no historical or biological basis; it’s purely a cultural
construction. The notion, advanced in recent years by foes of the
Jews that they cannot be anti-Semitic because they support the Arabs,
who are also Semites, is thus doubly absurd: First, the notion of a
“Semite” is itself a racist invention of 19th-century Europe. Second,
the term anti-Semitism has been used overwhelmingly in the sense that
Wilhelm Marr coined it in 1879, to apply only to the Jews. At any rate,
it is preposterous to argue that hating Jews, even when accompanied by
a fondness for Arabs, is anything less than racist.


Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2057949/

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