Daniel Jonah Goldhagen - The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism

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Copyright 2013 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

Cover design by Allison J. Warner; jacket photograph Photosani

Cover copyright 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the authors intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the authors rights.

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ISBN 978-0-316-25030-6

Hitlers Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust

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Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity

For my parents, Erich and Norma Goldhagen

T HE DEVIL, WITH us for two thousand years, is back. This devil has already insinuated himself into hundreds of millions. He has warped religions. He has inflamed minds and hearts the world over. Unleashed riots and pogroms. Led to the expulsion of millions. He has so perverted peoples sensibilities that he has convinced them to brutalize and torture masses of people in the name of goodness and God. He has gone further, inducing people to commit mass murder again and again, including one of humanitys most cataclysmic assaults, the attempted murder of an entire people, felling six million of them in one historical instant.

The devil, after a period of relative quiescence, has reappeared, flexes his muscles again, and stalks the world, with ever more confidence, power, and followers. The devil is not a he but an it. The devil is antisemitism.

In thinking about how to characterize antisemitism and to open this book, I considered many options before settling on conceptualizing it as a devil. Some may think it a metaphor, and perhaps an overdrawn one, yet I mean it not only metaphorically but also conceptually. Sadly, it is not overdrawn. According to how religion depicts the devil, and how those who believe in his existence have understood him, antisemitism is a devil. Compared with the known doings of the unseen devil of religions, antisemitism has been far more destructive, a far greater plague on humanity. And it threatens similar destruction again.

Whether you believe in a supernatural devil or just understand such a force conceptually and metaphorically, if you are interested in learning about the worlds real devil, this book is for you. Its story is anything but uplifting, but it is importantfor Jews and non-Jews alike, for the religious and the secular, for Christians and Muslims, for humanists and students of politics, for all those concerned with goodness and evil, and for those who want to understand critical aspects of todays globalized world, and want it to be a less dangerous, less devilish place.

A NTISEMITIC EXPRESSION HAS exploded in volume and intensity in the last two decades, particularly in the last ten years. The upsurge has been so meteoric and the canards advanced so prejudicial that if anyone in 1990 or even 1995 had predicted the current state of affairs, he would have been seen as a fanciful doomsayer. This resurgence of antisemitism and its expression has taken place not merely in select countries but around the world, and especially unexpectedly in Western countries. It has taken place in the halls of parliament and in the streets. Among elites and common people. In public media, places of worship, and in the privacy of homes. Where Jews live and where they do not. It has done so with classical tropes and with new ones, in long familiar forums and in recently invented ones.

Antisemitism has moved people, societies, indeed civilizations for two thousand years, and has done so despite the otherwise vast changes in the world and in these civilizations and societieseconomic, scientific, technological, political, social, and cultural. It has been a powerful force, an animating idea, the glue of many societies and cultures for much longer than practically any major belief system or ideology or political form, or many of our major cultural forms. It long predates and, until very recently historically, has been more widespread than genuine democracy as an animating ideology and political system. It long predates the Western idea of liberty becoming widespread, which was not until the modern period. Among intergroup prejudices, antisemitisms longevity is unparalleled. Even the anti-black racism of the West has not existed as long, coming into being in something resembling its classic form much later, when imperial Europeans started to explore and carve up the rest of the world in the fifteenth century. If we consider matters aside from prejudice, antisemitisms singular nature and peculiar power comes into still sharper relief. It long predates the advent of capitalism, and the technological and industrial revolutions that created the foundation for modern economies and prosperity, which have thoroughly altered the world directly and indirectly in every respect. Yet regarding Jews, these changes led not to a diminution of antisemitism but were often used only to deepen and intensify it. Antisemitism long predates the world-altering changes in conceptions of the world that included and were brought about by the Copernican revolution in the earths and therefore human beings places in the universe, by the revolution in understanding the early modern period that the very contours of the world were round, and by Europeans discovery of other continents and their conquest of and incorporation of the rest of the world into a world system with its diversity of peoples and cultures. Antisemitism long predates an acceptance of the general equality of human beings, and the moral standing and capacity of women as social, cultural, economic, and political facts. It long predates the current conception of childhood as a time when human beings ought to have their human capacities cultivated and their moral autonomy and rights respected. Antisemitism long predates the emergence of science, a set of rigorous practices to develop objective and correct bodies of knowledge that permeate education, thinking, social relations, and social practiceswhich, significantly, has barely affected the hold of the nonsense that composes and that flows from antisemitic thinking. Indeed, science has often been perverted to justify such thinking and practice. This includes the foundational revolution in the conception of human beings owing to Darwin, which was used only to intensify antisemitism by merging it with a new body of derivative social Darwinian thought that rendered Jews a biologically based race of evildoers. Antisemitism long predates entire disciplines of thought, including political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience, yet despite the emergence of these sober ways of studying the individual and social world, they have made little dent in antisemitisms spread and power. And it long predates many cultural and art forms, from classical music to the novel to film, each of whichas akin to older art forms, such as drama, philosophy, and historyhas been the vehicle for antisemitic expression, often by some of the most distinguished practitioners of each: William Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, T. S. Eliot, and on and on. Antisemitism long predates, has been more widespread and more powerful until recent times, and in many instances continues to be more powerful, than many of the defining and most essential features of our world today.