Channels

Sever Plocker

Because we are Jews

Anti-Semitism doesn’t need proof or witnesses on which to base its arguments of hatred

Because we killed Jesus. Because we don't believe in Jesus. Because we gave loans bearing interest. Because we signed a pact with sorcerers and demons. Because we founded the Sanhedrin (supreme judicial body) that is secretly ruling the world. Because we slaughtered animals by kosher slaughter. Because we dreamed of returning to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem. Because we maliciously spread diseases among Christians and Muslims. Because we ate matzoth on Passover. Because we ate matzoth made from the blood of non-Jewish children. Because we brought communism to mankind. Because we brought capitalism. Because we betrayed the countries we lived in, in the Diaspora, such as France, Russia and Iraq. Because we were the fifth column, an isolated and stubborn minority – and also because we tried to become assimilated and to hide our uniqueness. Because we usurped non-Jewish laborers, the non-Jewish industrialists. Because we were dirty and because we were clean. Because we were. Because we are Jews.

 

Anti-Semitism doesn’t need proof or witnesses on which to base its arguments, and it is not the result of characteristics the Jewish people either have or do not have. As noted by French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in his renowned essay in 1946 "Reflections on the Jewish Question," anti-Semitism is the mental illness of anti-Semites. It is their escape from the harshness of reality they cannot deal with. The Jews are the scapegoat for the failed and weak, the losers and the cowards. Even if the Jews did not exist, wrote Sartre, anti-Semites would have invented them.

 

The effort to wipe out anti-Semitism by refuting the arguments of anti-Semites is futile and humiliating. Should we go from the house of one anti-Semite to another to prove that we don't have horns and a tail, and that we don't hold secret rituals by the light of the moon, that the Protocols of Zion are a fabrication, and that we don't slaughter non-Jewish children so that we can use their blood to make Passover matzoth? And that we didn't do so 530 years ago?

 

Embarrassing research

Professor Ariel Toaff of Bar Ilan University wrote a perplexing book in which he proposed that there may have been a grain of truth in the historic blood libel that took place in the Italian city of Trento in 1475. Professor Toaff tried to support his theory by using the protocols from the torture chambers of the Inquisition; this is a totally unacceptable methodology.

 

From 1936 to 1938 some 700,000 political prisoners were executed in the former Soviet Union. After enduring much torture and intimidation these prisoners admitted the fantastic and baseless accusations they were accused of. When they failed to admit any guilt, the investigation protocols were falsified. No historian would dream of using these protocols as proof, or even as partial proof of the accusations. But this is more or less what Professor Toaff has done regarding the Inquisition protocols.

 

Therefore, Professor Toaff's book has nothing whatsoever to do with academic freedom. The man raised an unfounded argument, which was rejected outright by the world's finest historians and experts on the period the book refers to. The blood libel against the Jews has remained an evil plot.

 

Yet the foolishness of the book's publication does not justify the hysteria surrounding it. Should we care what Professor Toaff wrote? Not at all: His book is an embarrassment to the research of Jewish history, not to the Jews. Anti-Semites don't need the book as proof or as a basis for hating us. Their hatred towards the Jews stems from within and not from the Jews' outwardness.

 

The Jewish people founded their state to realize their national right and to provide a home and a haven for all Jews wherever they may be. It is incumbent upon us to strike back at full force in the event that our enemies and persecutors try to harm us again.

 

All the rest, including the evil plots devised against us throughout history, are the problem of the nations where both old and new forms of anti-Semitism are now being bred.

 


פרסום ראשון: 02.19.07, 10:47
 new comment
Warning:
This will delete your current comment