Marek Halter - Why the Jews?: The Need to Scapegoat

Copyright 2020 by Editions Michel Lafon

English-language translation copyright 2021 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

First English-language Edition

Originally published in France under the title Pourquoi les Juifs? by Michel Lafon Publishing.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Halter, Marek, author. | McQuillan, Grace, translator.

Title: Why the Jews? : the need to scapegoat / Marek Halter, Grace McQuillan.

Other titles: Pourquoi les Juifs? English

Description: New York, NY : Skyhorse Publishing, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048099 (print) | LCCN 2020048100 (ebook) | ISBN 9781951627430 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781951627584 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews--Persecutions--Europe, Western--History. | Antisemitism--Europe, Western--History. | Anti-Jewish propaganda--Europe, Western--History.

Classification: LCC DS146.E85 H3513 2021 (print) | LCC DS146.E85 (ebook) | DDC 305.892/404--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048099

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048100

Jacket design by Brian Peterson

Printed in the United States of America

In memory of Clara Halter, my forever companion.

The topic of this book was a source of disagreement,
but perhaps, presented this way,
we might have seen eye to eye. Who knows?

Contents

THE RETURN OF ANTI-SEMITISM?

Hatred for Jews is showing its face again, everywhere, to staggering degrees.

We thought an awareness of the Holocaust would be our greatest stronghold against fanaticism. We were wrong. With the disappearance of witnesses and the erosion of time, tempers are raging, stoked by a joint assault by the propaganda of a few totalitarian states looking for enemies and a tireless mob of negationists, racists, xenophobes, and conspiracy theorists of all kinds on social mediawho are helped, it must be said, by the ignorance of the majority of our contemporaries and the passivity of a few who know what is happening but are too afraid to come forward.

Seventy-five years after the Second World War and its tens of millions of deaths, seventy-five years after hatred of Jews decimated a people several thousand years olda people I belong toseventy-five years after swearing This will never happen again! in an almost unanimous voice, this is spilling from our gutters.

The situation today is most concerning in Western European countries, the part of Europe that fashioned the very notion of the rights of man. In Germany, for example, where until recently the word anti-Semite was still unpronounceable because of Nazism, violent acts against Jews increased by 70 percent in 2018 alone.

According to the European Jewish Congress (CJE) in Paris, three out of four Poles believe Jews talk too much about the Holocaust, 25 percent of Hungarians think Jews want to weaken the national culture by supporting immigration, and 72 percent of Ukrainians claim that Jews are too great a burden on the economy. In England, the home-land of Benjamin Disraeli, anti-Semitism manifests itself in everyday life: in poorer neighborhoods first and foremost, but also in universities and within the Labour Party. Even the United States, home to the largest Jewish community in the world and a country that over the years, thanks to powerful organizations like Bnai Brith, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the World Jewish Congress and its unique network of education and mutual assistance, has been able to fill the role that the Babylonian community played in the Diaspora at the end of the sixth century BCE.

Yet in this same country, where two centuries ago Portuguese-American Jewish writer Mordecai Manuel Noah had wanted to establish a Jewish state, when American Jewish college students were asked, Have you witnessed or personally experienced anti-Semitism? 54 percent said yes, according to a poll conducted for the American Jewish Committee.

In 1825, Mordecai Manuel Noah purchased land on Grand Island in New York. In front of an enthusiastic crowd, he laid the first stone for a city he called Ararat, from the name of the mountain between Turkey and Armenia on which, the Bible tells us, God made Noahs ark run aground at the end of the Flood.

In the United States, where just yesterday my American friends said, That will never happen here, two deadly attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Poway, California, in 2018 and 2019 stunned American Jews who until now had felt safe. This was followed in December 2019 by a shooting at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey, and a stabbing at the home of a rabbi in Monsey, New York, during a Hanukkah celebration. This attack led President Donald Trump to sign an executive order on December 11, 2019, aimed at fighting anti-Semitism on American campuses, the first in the countrys history.

But the danger is most immediate in Europe. In writing these lines, Ive stumbled upon an interview Primo Levi gave in 1983 to Anna Bravo and Federico Cereja (Le Devoir de mmoire [The Duty of Memory] [Paris: Mille et une nuits, 2000]). Levi seems wary of what appears to be a lack of clarity in the Jewish community about the wave of anti-Judaism at the time. He was right.

How do we alert our friends and neighbors? How do we make them understand that even with multiple media sources and noble initiatives, we are still not immune to evil?

I have often been to talk in schools, Levi says, and Ive found interest, horror, pity, sometimes incredulity, amazement, incomprehension... I wouldnt know what general diagnosis to propose, at present I feel that too much time has passed, I dont willingly accept invitations to schools anymore because I feel like an old survivor, like one of Garibaldis men, a greybeard essentially.

I know what he means. I wonder what dear Primo would say if he knew that in Francethe country where non-Jews, it should be remembered, saved two-thirds of the Jewish community during the Occupationseventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, according to figures from the French Ministry of the Interior and the SPCJ (Service de Protection de la Communaut Juive, the Jewish Community Security Service), 541 acts against Jews were recorded in 2018, an increase of 74 percent from 2017. These acts represented half of the hate crimes documented on French soil.

A report from the Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry states that in 2018, the number of Jews murdered worldwide in a single year was the highest it has been in several decades.