Andrea Dworkin - Scapegoat: The Jews. Israel and Womens Liberation

JEW-HATE / WOMAN-HATE

O n Yom Kippur, the Jews of antiquity would sacrifice two goats: one would be killed as an offering to a harsh and judging God; one would be taken to the wilderness and turned loose, a carrier of the sins of the group. (See Leviticus 16: 7-10, 21-24. ) Murder and exile are the two paradigmatic fates of scapegoats. Murder can be intimate; exile can be internal, being separated from the common life, ones human dignity and social legitimacy denied. Often attributed to unconscious projection, 1 taken as the mechanism that defines a metaphysical other barbarian meaning not Greek, gentile meaning not Jewish2the murder and exile are literal, not figurative.

Hating Jews might be described as racism without color, and as such it is a testimony to the will of people to hate, to create social alienation and antagonismit is xenophobic and includes a mix of envy, contempt, and greed (e. g., the Jews are rich and were not; the Jews are too smart for their own good; the Jews have all the power). This is a collective hatred, often buttressed by legal and social institutions; individuals are contaminated with it, an emotional toxin. The Jews of the Hebrew Bible are militarist, separatist; strong and fearsome children of a wrathful and abusive father; and yet already in Alexandria three centuries before the start of Christ worship, Jewish culture is depicted, says Robert S. Wistrich in Antisemitism: The Longest Hatred, as sterile, having produced nothing useful or great; and further, the Jews are a superstitious, godless people who worship an asss head in their Temple in Jerusalem; once a year they kidnap a Gentile Greek, who is fattened in order to be eaten by their deity in his Holy of Holies... 3 This, says Wistrich, is the first ritual murder charge against Jews known to history. 4

The Jews, forging monotheism in a multigod world, first separated themselves; this was the chosenness, having a destiny that precluded blending in. Dietary laws, eventual descent through the mother, the ethical framework of the Ten Commandments, devotion to a written word, materially differentiated Jews from others; even in the martial world of the Hebrews, scholarship and fidelity to written law were distinguishing marks. This separatenesswith its claims to both dominance and superioritywas turned on its head by pagan and animistic cultures into a stigma, a reason for conquest or persecution. As the militarist Hebrews disappear from legendary history, the scholarly, then the effete, then the effeminate Jew becomes visible. The practices of Jewish devotion become the reason for Jewish identity, the raison detre for Jewish survival, and an unbending form of resistance to the profane, lawless society of non-Jews. The Nazis destroyed European and East European communities of orthodox practice through genocide; and assimilationist strategies of Jews, developed after and as a result of the French Enlightenment, were proved useless against planned murder and organized hate. What are your endless sacrifices to me? /says Yahweh. /I am sick of holocausts of rams and the fat of calves... /who asked you to trample over my courts? 5 Post-Nazi, these lines from Isaiah (1: 11-12) are hard to read.

Christian hatred of Jews is implicit in the origins of the religion; as the Chief Rabbi of Vienna said in 1907: The Christian kneels before the image of the Jew, wrings his hands before the image of a Jewess; his Apostles, Festivals, and Psalms are Jewish. Only a few are able to come to terms with this contradictionmost free themselves by antisemitism. 6 In the beginning, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who came to fulfill a Jewish prophecy of redemption and salvation. Always and everywhere that proposition led swiftly to a division of the worshiping community, writes Roland Oliver about the development of Christianity in Africa, the new way of attracting a minority of ethnic Jews, but a majority of the gentile fellow travelers, who thereafter tended to be strongly anti-Semitic in their outlook. 7 Jews were taken to be the agents of Christs crucifixion, a sadistic drama against a resurrected, living deity, all hope being in the acceptance of his divinity. In rejecting Christ as the Jewish Messiah, Jews were responsible for Jesus failure to fulfill a scriptural promise that was Jewish and prophetic. Jews became the long past against which Christians defined their present and an apocalyptic future. The burden of worshiping a Jew but despising Jews forced the reification of Jew-hate. In time it became not only religion but blood that separated Jews from what became the Christian majorityand not a populous Christian majority but an institutionalized one, part of the apparatus of the state. When the cultural became biological, even conversion to Christianity could not clean the blood; Jewishness became a handed-down trait, inevitable and inescapable.

This new ideology of Jew-hate was an animating dynamic, killing women as witches being the other, of the Inquisition, introduced into Spain in 1480. Those Jews who had converted were called conversos, the pejorative of which was marranos (pigs). Called the descendants of the Jews by the legal authority of the Inquisition, conversos were tainted by Jewish blood. The day was to come in Spain when any taint of Jewish blood was sufficient to affect the purity of any person..., 8 writes Israeli scholar B. Netanyahu in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain. The conversos had mala sangre (bad blood). For the inquisitors, a Jewish past was not merely a factor that establishes contact between generations through certain attitudes, beliefs and customs, but rather the very root of the common attitudes, etc., and their related forms of behavior. 9 This new anti-Semitism, a racial construct, had at its core a compulsive need to establish limpieza de sangre (blood purity). This, according to Wistrich, was the origin of Spanish racism, the first of its kind in Europe. 10 This belief, says Peter Gay in The Cultivation of Hatred, launched the fiction of blood as the carrier of racial qualities. 11 The Inquisition in Spain, in the words of Frederick Cople Jaher, was conducted with unsurpassed savagery.... Many apostates and their descendants died by auto-da-fe or mob violence. Survivors were barred from guilds and government posts and some dioceses and religious orders. 12 Syphilis was called the Peste of the Marranos, and Spanish physicians... claimed that Jewish men had tails and menstruated. 13 Unreconstructed Jews were expelled from Spain and not let back in until 1869.

The Inquisition was Catholic, but Martin Luthers Protestant rebellion did not help the Jews. It is not wrong to see Luther as an ideological precursor of Hitler, as Nora Levin does in The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry 19331945: Where Hitler depicts the Jew as the moral enemy, blocking the road to salvation for a struggling Aryan mankind, Luther charged that Jews hold us captive in our own country. In most of his imagery about the Jew, Hitler is simply reechoing the medieval Christian stereotype of the Jew as criminal, parasite, evil incarnate, aiming at world conquestan image powerfully reinforced by Luther... 14 Luthers heritage is unambiguously borne out in the structure of the church he preached in. [Y]ou can just make out a curious sculpture jutting out from the church wall, like a gargoyle, about thirty feet from the ground, says Ian Buruma in The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. It is of a sow suckling three little piglets. Her hind leg is lifted by a little man wearing a pointed hat. The hat identifies the man as a Jew of the fifteenth century. Above this scene of Jew and pigsthe sow, I was told, representing Satans synagogueis the Hebrew name for God. The ornament is called a Judensau , Jews [female] pig. Many of these used to adorn German churches, as tokens of Jewish humiliation. 15