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THE FUTURE of ANTISEMITISM the 1990 Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture* the Masks That Hide the Ugly Face of Antisemitism Are Increasing in Number

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THE FUTURE of ANTISEMITISM the 1990 Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture* the Masks That Hide the Ugly Face of Antisemitism Are Increasing in Number THE FUTURE OF ANTISEMITISM The 1990 Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture* The masks that hide the ugly face of antisemitism are increasing in number. Yet certain themes remain constant, and under the surface they survive over long periods of time and in apparently hostile waters. It has been dismaying to many to see that after seventy years of avowedly scientific education, after three generations of education and indoctrination in criticism of superstition, after seven decades of intensive revolutionary efforts to root out irrationality and prejudice, antisemitism is still alive and well in Soviet Russia. For some of us, professing Christians, it has been especially dismaying to realize that one of the worst aspects of traditional Christianity has survived during the years when our co-believers have wintered through the frozen years of Bolshevik dictatorship and repression. As the thaw sets in, antisemitism is again emerging as a powerful popular force. Traditional Antisemitism For a thousand years the poets and theologians of Mother Russia praised her identity as the carrier of Christian civilization, of true Orthodox Christianity. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Moscow became the dominant center of Christendom as the Orthodox faithful understood it. *Given at Rochester NY, 20 March 1990 by Dr Franklin H Littell of Philadelphia; board member of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University; author of The Crucifixion of the Jews, American Protestantism and Antisemitism; Ida E King Visiting Distinguished Professor of C Holocaust Studies, Stockton State College (NJ). No one can understand the triumphant, victorious, overpowering resonance of Tchaikowsky's 1812 Overture unless he realizes that it was written to celebrate that watershed event when the armies of Holy Russia threw back the forces of "the Anti-Christ" (Napoleon) from the gates of the "Third Rome" of Christian history in Russian Orthodox eyes. Such is the power of a myth! We make a serious mistake if we think that overt antisemitism - intentional, calculated use of antisemitism as a political tool or weapon - is the most serious dimension of the disease. Modern antisemitism, racial and nationalist and populist, only moves to the center of the stage when its proponents are in power. Across nearly two millenia, the most serious dimensions of antisemitism have been theological and cultural. Only for the last century or so has political antisemitism appeared on the stage. It started when Wilhelm Marr invented the word and developed its political uses, when after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II the Russian rulers used the pogrom to divert the peoples' attention from their real problems. The rapid expansion of Biblical and Patristic studies in the post-Auschwitz era has made us all aware of the extent to which early gentile Christians defined their identity by use of pejoratives toward the continuing Jewish people. The assertions of the affirmative litany have grown familiar: the religion of Love replaces the religion of Law, the New Israel replaces the Old Israel as the carrier of history, the New Covenant supersedes ( Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture 2 the Old Covenant, the Hebrew Scriptures ("Old Testament") can only be understood through the glass of the New Testament... The negative litany is equally deadly of import: with the gift of Jesus of Nazareth to the nations, the historical mission of the Jews is fulfilled; the destruction of the Second Temple gives direct evidence of God's wrath that a majority of Jesus' countrymen rejected him; the Jews are to disappear into the dustbin of history, not even surviving as a "Semitic fossil" (to use Arnold Toynbee's antisemitic term). When it became evident that the Jews were not disappearing, Augustine of Hippo elaborated a hostile explanation: God allowed them to survive as a negative lesson. Suffering, persecuted, wandering and homeless, they showed what happens to a people when it misses the turn in the road, bypasses the moment of decision. With the founding of the Christian Roman Empire under Constantine the Great (274-337), and especially with the imperial codebooks issued by Theodosius II (401-50) and Justinian (483- 565), "Christendom" was established. The repression of "Jews and heretics" became a political and religious duty of all faithful rulers. By the time of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), when the theologians had defined Jesus as one with the Father and truly God, the deicide calumny had become a deadly weapon in the arsenal of Christian apologists. During the centuries of "Christendom," a second layer was laid on the level of theological antisemitism: cultural antisemitism. Eventually words and phrases and caricatures of ( Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture 3 "the Jew" are repeated by persons without conscious malice, including such eminent humanists as William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Let me relate two stories which show the way in which traditional theological and cultural antisemitism are mixed in the mindset of "Christendom." Traditional Antisemitism in Russia The last Tsar, Nicholas Romanov, had his rule reinforced by officers using antisemitism as a modern tool of politics. One of the Tsar's representatives in the Second Duma commented after the Krishniev pogrom that they had prevented a revolution by throwing the Jews to the mob. The Tsar's constitutional adviser, Konstantin Pobyedonostzev, persecuted Jews and Christian minorities vigorously. He was author of the infamous antisemitic formula: one third will convert, one third will be killed, and one third will be driven into exile. For our present purposes, we should remember that he was the presiding officer of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church. During the pogroms, a Russian officer appealed to Tsar Nicholas to stop the cruelty and bloodshed. We have his note on the officer's letter, thanks to the opening of the archives at the time of the 1917 revolution. He scribbled in the margin of the letter: "But after all, they did crucify our Lord!" Traditional Antisemitism in Germany I Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture 4 I shall not forget the shock that came to me when I found documentation of a similar mix of theological and cultural antisemitism in the thinking of a Bishop Otto Dibelius of the Church Berlin-Brandenburg (A.P.U.). Dibelius was truly a great man - an opponent of the Nazis' attempt to take over and manipulate the churches, later an opponent of the Communist regime in East Germany, an ecumenical leader of stature in the Kirchentag and the World Council of Churches after the war. I knew him well during my decade in the American occupation of post-War Germany, and he was later a visitor in my home in the States. While doing research after he was dead I discovered a letter he wrote to his preachers in the Kurmark in 1937, when he was Superintendent, in anticipation of their preaching during the Lenten season. This was after the German Jews had been robbed of their citizenship and their protection at law. Dibelius wrote with scorn of the street-fighting, gutter politics of the Nazis and their vulgar antisemitism. And then he wrote, "Of course I have always considered myself a theological antisemite..." He went on to urge them to use Good Friday and Easter as special occasions to preach conversion to the Jews and salvation only through Jesus Christ. Otto Dibelius was, I repeat, a good man - learned, a gentleman of the old school, a man whose self-respect would never allow him to mix socially with the rabble that infested the Nazi Party nor to approve their violent politics. Yet, as a < Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture 5 theological conservative, he could only repeat what the churches - Orthodox, Latin and Protestant - had taught and preached for uncounted generations. In a certain sense Dr Dibelius' call to evangelize the Jews was an act of defiance in 1937, for the Nazi regime had already ordered the churches to abandon "non-Aryan Christians" and was taking stern measures against "non-Aryan" pastors and priests. But of course, as Wolfgang Gerlach's splendid study of the Confessing Church has shown1, even the opposition of the best and brightest was too feeble. They marshalled in the Barmen Declaration an impressive stand against the idolatry of the Fuehrerstaat, and theologian Karl Barth and Pastor Martin Niemoeller and their loyalists performed well in defense of the integrity of the Church; on "the Jewish issue" (Judenfrage), as they called it, only Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Wilhelm Visscher saw the relationship of the ethical issue to the theological, Visscher died in exile and Bonhoeffer died a martyr. German Antisemitism Today The impending reunification of Germany has naturally set off alarm signals among those people that suffered the most from Germany in World War II, notably the Poles and the Jews. While not all Jews, nor even all Israelis, would agree with Prime Minister Shamir's harsh statement about continuing German guilt, many survivors have expressed articulate uneasiness. Will a reunited Germany threaten the peace of Europe again? Perhaps more to the point, will a reunited Germany so dominate the < Helen M Cohen Memorial Lecture 6 European economy and political scene that it may threaten world peace again? What are the signs of chauvinism, militarism and political antisemitism in Germany? Neo-Nazi literature does circulate in Germany today. Perhaps we should notice that the traffic is illegal, and that most of the materials are translated into German and shipped from Lincoln, Nebraska. There have been several efforts to organize a revanche-oriented neo-Nazi political thrust. But, in dealing with groups not in good faith in the political forum, Germany has developed one of the best Early Warning Systems in the world today.
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