A Convenient Hatred: The History of Antisemitism (53 page)

At about the same time, a number of even more unlikely “Zionist traitors” were put on trial: government officials of Jewish descent in the Soviet bloc (nations that the Soviets liberated in 1945 and turned into “democratic republics”). Hundreds were demoted or fired. Others were tried for treason. Among the accused was Rudolf Slansky, the former secretary-general of Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party. In 1951, he and 13 colleagues were indicted for shielding “Zionist criminals,” conspiring against the state, and taking part in a “Zionist plot” that supposedly included U.S. President Harry Truman and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
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Throughout the trial, prosecutors referred to Slansky and the 10 other Jewish defendants as “swine.” As “proof” of their “treachery,” prosecutors revealed that the accused had sold arms to Israel in 1948. They had, in fact, provided weapons to Israel, but what the government failed to acknowledge was that Stalin had approved the sale. All were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death.

According to the
New York Times
, the proceedings were a “show trial”—a trial whose outcome is determined in advance. The accusations were also based at least in part on the long-discredited
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Reporters noted that Slansky and his fellow defendants were convicted of betraying their country to “American imperialism” in order to serve the State of Israel. The
Times
feared the trial was “the beginning of a major tragedy as the [Soviet Union] swings further and further towards anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism.”
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In December 1952, Stalin heightened that fear when he told party officials, “Every Jew-Nationalist is an agent of American intelligence…. Among the doctors are many Jew-Nationalists.”
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A month later, the government arrested nine physicians for trying to “poison” Stalin and other leaders. The doctors were also charged with promoting Zionism—a crime in the Soviet Union.

The well-publicized arrests created a panic. Suddenly millions of people in the Soviet Union were terrified of Jewish doctors. Rumors swirled across the nation, one more fantastic than the next. Some claimed that Jewish physicians were injecting poison into food as well as medicine.
Others claimed that all Jews were involved in the “conspiracy.” As a result, tens of thousands were fired, demoted, or denied employment.

Many in the Soviet Union believed that after the trial, all Jews would be shipped to Siberia for “security reasons.” Before that could happen, Stalin died suddenly. A month later, in April 1953, the government announced that the doctors had been arrested “incorrectly” and “without any lawful basis.” By then, two physicians had been tortured to death, but the rest were released.

Although the “doctors’ plot” had been discredited, hostility toward “Zionist traitors” and “Jewish conspirators” continued. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, who had become the leader of the Soviet Union, denounced Stalin at a party meeting, but antisemitism was not on the list of crimes he attributed to the former leader. Khrushchev and his successors were not as hostile to Jews as Stalin was, but they were just as willing to use Jews as scapegoats.

In the early 1960s, Khrushchev and other leaders repeatedly blamed almost every economic crisis on what they called “Zionist conspirators.” In the Soviet Union, treason included smuggling and other “economic crimes.” Between 1961 and 1963, the government executed about 200 individuals for such crimes. About two-thirds were Jews, and lurid accounts of their activities in the Soviet press often included antisemitic slurs.
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The title of this cartoon is “Proof of the Crime: the Jew Is Unmasked.” The “crime” was the so-called plot by Jewish doctors to poison Stalin and other leaders and to promote Zionism.

The Soviet government supported its claims against the “Zionist traitors” with propaganda that falsely linked Soviet Jews to Israel or the United States. One of the most widely distributed was a book called
Judaism without Embellishment
by Trofim Kichko. Kichko claimed that “Zionists, Israelis, Jewish bankers, and Western capitalists” were taking over the world. Barukh Podolsky, an Israeli scholar who grew up in Moscow, recalled some of the ways Jews responded to the Soviet Union’s anti-Zionism campaign:

Some tried not to stick out, [while] others “went into hiding,” changed their passports and were passing for anything but Jews to get rid of the cursed “point five” [the place where “nationality” was indicated on every citizen’s internal passport]
.

There were others, who wore their Jewishness openly and with pride; but Yiddish was hardly ever heard in the streets.
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As a teen, Podolsky knew very little about Zionism or Judaism. But one day he entered a synagogue near his home, out of curiosity, and he soon became a regular visitor. On one occasion, he noticed a small group that stood apart. An elderly Jew, noticing his interest, whispered that they were from the Israeli embassy.

On another visit, Podolsky approached the Israelis. They gave him a prayer book, which he showed to his parents. His mother later asked him to introduce her to the embassy people, and Podolsky arranged a meeting. At that meeting, the Israelis gave the boy and his mother a few books. The encounter also inspired Podolsky to study Hebrew. In most nations, no one would have paid attention to the gift of a few books or participation in a Hebrew language class. But in the Soviet Union, those activities prompted an investigation. Podolsky recalled:

The Embassy people were kept under constant surveillance, and we were tracked down and photographed, in spite of the precautions we were taking and, on April 25th 1958, all of us were arrested. All of us—meaning my parents and myself, Tina Brodetsky [a fellow Hebrew student]…, her stepfather, Yevsei Drobovsky, and Zilberman the Hebrew teacher.
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Podolsky, his parents, and the others were eventually charged with “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda using national/ethnic prejudices” and “participating in an anti-Soviet organization.” Podolsky’s parents were also accused of high treason for supposedly passing military secrets to Israel. His mother worked at a school near an aircraft plant, and the government claimed that her knowledge of the plant’s existence “proved” she was a spy, despite the fact that everyone in the city knew about the plant. Streetcar conductors even announced the stop near the school as “aircraft plant.”

In March 1959, a military board of the high court of the Soviet Union acquitted Podolsky’s parents of high treason and sentenced them to seven years in prison. Podolsky got five years; his fellow student got two; her stepfather received one and a half; and the Hebrew teacher, who was 82 years old, got one year in prison.
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Although the Podolskys may not have been aware of it at the time, they were part of a movement among Soviet Jews to reclaim a Jewish identity. In many places, that movement was inspired by the need to remember loved ones murdered during the Holocaust. Some Jews put up small memorials at the places where relatives had been murdered. Often, these were little more than a sign nailed to a tree or a few stones surrounding a photograph or other artifact. Each year, people would gather to mourn and remember. From the start, Soviet officials viewed these gatherings as disloyal and insisted that Jews put the past behind them.

After the war, Jews gathered at Babi Yar and other sites of mass murder to mourn loved ones, but there was no monument until 1974.

Holocaust survivors in other nations had similar experiences. When an Italian Jew returned from Auschwitz, she “encountered people who didn’t want to know anything, because the Italians, too, had suffered.” They told her, “For heaven’s sake, it’s all over.” And so she remained quiet for a long time, as did many survivors in the Americas and other parts of Europe.
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By the 1950s and 1960s, however, a growing number of survivors were finding it difficult to move on with their lives without confronting the past. And some perpetrators and bystanders were also feeling the need to face not only the Holocaust but also centuries of antisemitism. The work initiated at interfaith conferences like one at Seelisberg in 1947 (see
Chapter 14
) now began to shape a deeper understanding of that history, and activists who took part in those conferences often led the way. Among them was Jules Isaac, a French Jew who had challenged Christian teachings of contempt for Jews at Seelisberg.

After meeting with Isaac, Pope Pius XII agreed to make a few changes in those teachings but balked when Isaac insisted that far more was needed. After Pius’s death, Isaac met privately with the new pope, John XXIII. After three days of intense discussion, Isaac asked, “Can I leave with hope?” The pope responded, “You are entitled to more than hope.”

That meeting contributed to Vatican II, a council of leaders in the Roman Catholic Church that met between 1962 and 1965 to reform church teachings. Among the issues these leaders dealt with was the “teaching of contempt.” In 1965, two years after the death of Isaac and Pope John, the council approved a document known as
Nostra Aetate
(a Latin phrase meaning “in our time”). It and a number of related statements renounced the myth that today’s Jews are responsible for the crucifixion and reaffirmed the church’s belief that God has an “eternal covenant” with the Jewish people. In years to come, other churches would take a similar stand. Changes in doctrine were reinforced by changes in religious practice. For example, many Roman Catholics no longer spoke of the “perfidious Jews” on Good Friday.

The Vatican II reforms were just a few elements in a series of seemingly unrelated events that led many individuals and nations to confront both the history of the Holocaust and antisemitism. Those events included the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s “expert” on the “Jewish question.” Eichmann was responsible for the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps during the Holocaust (see
Chapter 13
). He hid after the war to avoid prosecution but was captured in Argentina by Israeli agents. Israel charged him with war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, and crimes against humanity.

James Parkes, an Anglican priest and expert on early Christianity, attended the Eichmann trial. In Parkes’s view, the trial revealed that “there is an unbroken chain which goes back from Hitler’s death camps to the denunciations of [Jews by] the early Church.”
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Not long after the trial ended, the Protestant World Council of Churches issued a document condemning antisemitism and stating that contemporary Jews were in no way responsible for the death of Jesus.

Immediately after the war, the Allies had tried a number of Nazi leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Nuremberg, Germany. Those trials were based on the literally thousands of detailed records that the Germans kept. At Eichmann’s trial, however, the emphasis was not on the written record but on the testimony of survivors. Ariana Melamed, an Israeli writer and a child of survivors, said of those who testified:

Most of them had no direct relation to Eichmann’s doings, and in an ordinary trial their testimonies would have been disqualified due to lack of relevance. But their cries, their despair, the exposing of secrets they had carried inside them like malignant tumors—all those were much more important than the trial itself. They enabled the Israelis… to understand something that [had] until then remained out of the public eye: The power of the personal account over that of the official narrative.”
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Melamed was not the only young Israeli who found the trial eye-opening. Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, said of the letters he received during and after the proceedings: