Howard Jacobson - When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? (Kindle Single)

WHEN WILL JEWS BE FORGIVEN THE HOLOCAUST?

HOWARD JACOBSON

Copyright Howard Jacobson, 2014

Based on a speech given at the BNai Brith World Centre in Jerusalem in 2013

In his book Straw Dogs the English philosopher John Gray puts a terrible question. It has long been known, he writes, that those who perform great acts of kindness are rarely forgiven. The same is true of those who suffer irreparable wrongs. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?

The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust?

Never.

But Gray is only using the Jews as an example. The shocking psychological truth he asks us to consider is universal. It isnt just Jews who will never be forgiven the wrongs done them, its everyone. By Grays reasoning, we all stumble morally in the face of obligation. We reject the burden of gratitude or guilt, in the case of the latter by turning the tables on those we have wronged and portraying ourselves as the victims of their suffering.

Theres a throwaway line in Jane Austens novel Mansfield Park that describes this perverse transaction in miniature. Of Mrs Norris, the least sympathetic character in the novel, Jane Austen writes that she disliked Fanny the novels heroine because she had neglected her. A lesser novelist might have put that the other way and seen the neglect as proceeding from the dislike. Jane Austens universe is crueller. Where we have neglected or undermined, she understands, we cannot love.

The Roman historian Tacitus spells it out. It is part of human life, he wrote, to hate the man you have hurt.

So much for the generality. Now introduce this everyday weakness in our natures into the exceptional drama of the Holocaust and it becomes clear why atonement is so often strenuously resisted. Those we harm, we blame mobilizing dislike and even hatred in order to justify, after the event, the harm we did. From which it must follow that those we harm the most we blame the most.

In all its forms Holocaust denial obeys this pattern. For foisting the lie of the Six Million upon the world, Jews are accused of compounding the wickedness that was the just cause of the Holocaust had it only happened in the first place. You wouldnt think it possible simultaneously to deny and justify but thats what Holocaust deniers do. And you have to have quick feet to keep up with them. When do you ever hear a Holocaust denier come out from behind the piles of books and documents in which he spends his days immured, lay down his rulers and his set squares, and present his findings as a gift to the Jewish people?

My dear friends, I have the most wonderful news for you: you got your numbers wrong! In the whole time the National Socialists were in power not a single hair on a single Jewish head was harmed. Mazeltov and shalom!

No: making Jews feel good would defeat the object of Holocaust denial, the intention of which is to make Jews feel doubly bad. There are many ways denial sets out to do this, the most common being to deploy the logic of retrospective guilt. You will be familiar with the strategy: by virtue of the way Jews cynically exploit the Holocaust to serve their political and financial purposes today, are they shown to be deserving of what they suffered yesterday or, rather, since there was no Holocaust, what they ought to have suffered yesterday?

Interesting, how every denial of the Holocaust throws the shadow of a Holocaust that should have been. Very few deniers want the Holocaust not to have happened. They only argue that it didnt. Behind which argument (which is more a refutation of what is seen as Jewish propaganda than a refutation of the event itself) we hear a deep longing that the Holocaust had been executed more ruthlessly a perfect Holocaust being one that left no Jew behind to profit from it.

We can speak of such a perfected Holocaust as the wish fulfilment of the denier.

But lets go back to our original formulation: when will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? John Gray is not the first to have posed that question. In his 1986 book The Eternal Anti-Semite the German Jewish writer Henryk Broder quotes an Israeli psychoanalyst, Zvi Rex, as saying, The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. And as early as the 1960s Theodor Adorno and Peter Schnbach are employing the term secondary anti-Semitism to describe a recent form of anti-Semitism the cause of which is not any one of the age-old charges brought against Jews, but Auschwitz. This secondary anti-Semitism doesnt flourish in spite of Auschwitz or somehow alongside Auschwitz, but because of Auschwitz. All these writers direct us to the same extraordinary reversal of moral obligation: for what we did to you, we cannot forgive you.

I think its important not to confuse this with compassion fatigue. I recall travelling with a young German taxi driver back from Dachau to Munich some years ago. He wondered, more politely than curiously, what I thought of what Id seen of the camp. Had I enjoyed my visit?

Enjoyment is not exactly the word Id use, I said, but I was more interested in hearing whether hed been inside Dachau and if so what he thought of what hed seen. Hed been many times with his school, he told me. Too many times. He was, since I asked, getting a bit bored with it all now. He said it in a matter-of-fact way, assuming Id understand. And I did. But I also felt I had to find a way of saying that if it was his bad luck to have to go on hearing about and visiting Dachau, it was even worse luck for those whod been interred there. Occasionally ones patience must be tried, I said giving him a good tip.

Of some events there can be no hearing too much. The Ancient Mariner in Coleridges great poem of obsession must tell the wedding guest his tale, over and over and over again, and if that means the guest misses the wedding party well, life isnt all fun.

Its frequently argued that this insistence on telling the story is self-defeating, that eventually it will weary even listeners more sympathetic than my Munich taxi driver. We are to learn from the boy who cried wolf cry it too often and in the end no one will come to our assistance. But what if we arent crying wolf? What if we arent telling lies or exaggerating even a little? And anyway who came to our assistance the last time?

On occasions, when I have addressed the subject of anti-Semitism and if you address it once you are accused of addressing it all the time people have written to me insisting that while they dont have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies, if I dont shut up about it I am in danger of turning them into the very thing I fear. Odd to think thats all it takes.

Were I to write back Id ask where they would find in themselves, since they dont have an anti-Semitic bone in their bodies, the wherewithal to hate Jews. Does it simply float freely about the stratosphere, like a virus, waiting to infect even the healthiest bodies? Or can one manufacture it out of nothing but impatience, as the Golem of Prague was manufactured out of nothing but mud and prayer?

In fact, I know too well what this end-of-ones-patience anti-Semitism is manufactured out of it is manufactured out of the reflux of irreparable wrong. It is, if you like, the regurgitation of guilt another expression of that refusal to forgive Jews whats been done to them.

Remember Tolstoys description of Tsar Nicholas in Hadji Murad: He had done much evil to the Poles. To justify that evil he had to feel certain that the Poles were rascals, and he considered them to be such and hated them in proportion to the evil he had done them.

In 2009 Roland Imhoff and Rainer Banse of the University of Bonns Department of Social and Legal Psychology published the conclusion of experiments they had conducted into that