Hatred (25 page)

Gordon Allport, the brilliant American psychologist, wrote
The Nature of Prejudice
a half century ago. It remains the most profound book on the subject yet written. Still, in the post-Holocaust era, with his deep humanism, he hedged on the reasons for antisemitism:

To think of Judaism as simply a religious choice like Methodism or Unitarianism is to deny the historic meaning of a people. The Jew is the stranger, the disbeliever, the alien—not at your border but in your streets and in your presence. It is not the “high ethical ideals” that offend the antisemites, it is the Jew's ubiquity. Jews are everywhere, everywhere a minority (Israel
excepted), and everywhere identifiable. Their identity is marked not just by their beliefs, but by their very behavior and the practices that sustained those beliefs over the ages—circumcision, dietary laws, Sabbath celebrations, and special historic and religious holidays. These practices—embraced by them as a proud cultural heritage—confront the common Christian culture and its most profound religious beliefs. Jews reject the figure of Christ and deny the revealed truth of the New Testament. For the Jew there is no
new
testament. The very term is anathema to Orthodox Jews, who see in it a rejection of the Scriptures, the very word of God. The name “Old Testament” was indeed coined by Christians and many Jews are careful not to use that term.

In most cultures this denial has been perceived as a stubborn arrogance; a rejection of the customs of the host country; and, particularly offensive, a rejection of the new religion. To some devout Christians, not only do the Jews reject Christ, but they also killed him. And in much of the Christian world, antisemitism has had strong support—even encouragement—from the moral authorities of the Church. The powerful rationalizing effect of such moral authority—exactly like the rationalizing effect of a delusion—gives legitimacy to bigotry. Moreover, it lends passion to bigotry, converting it into hatred. The Nazis had generations of cultural and religious hatred of Jews to draw on when they launched their genocidal assault.

The Nazis did not arbitrarily select the Jews rather than Sunni Muslims or the Zen Buddhists. The Nazis emerged from a European and Christian culture and were influenced by their location and historic traditions. Antisemitism was evident in Europe from the beginnings of the Diaspora in the sixth century B.C. Even the
greatest of the classical writers—Cicero, Juvenal, Ovid, Pliny, Seneca, and Tacitus—all managed to embroider their works with antisemitic observations. But antisemitism never had the central role in the classical period that it would gain with the rise of Christianity.

Greek and Roman culture had the same contempt for early Christians—perhaps more—that it had for the Jews. It was only with the ascendance of Christianity that the Jews were perceived as the primal enemy within, the living symbols of the rejection of the Christ. The antisemitism built into Church writings and Church attitudes accompanied the spread of Christianity throughout Europe. The Nazis, despite their own rejection of Christianity, would exploit the traditional Christian antisemitic stereotypes dormant in most of the cultures of Europe.

The Nazis found rationalizing arguments for their assault on the Jews in the tradition of antisemitism laced throughout the theology of the New Testament and the writings of the Christian churches in Europe. Robert S. Wistrich, a distinguished scholar of antisemitism, pointed out the easy pathways and respectable rationalizations that were readily available to Nazi propagandists in the traditions of the Christian religion.

He noted that there was the rich strain of antisemitism central to the Gospels, themselves, where the Jews are depicted as “as a pariah people, as the murderers of Christ . . . in league with Satan himself.” And the Nazis drew on teachings of the Church Fathers, who persistently referred to Jews as slanderers, blasphemers, an accursed people. Even the most saintly of Christian fathers—Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome, and Cyril—saved “a cold spot in their hearts” for the Jews. Luther, fully embracing the traditional antisemitism of the Catholic church he was rejecting, would offer even further religious justifications for demonizing the Jews.

Wistrich said, “The Nazi hierarchy was laden with paranoid
Jew haters. The Nazis exploited and secularized familiar religious images of the Jew as Host desecrators, demons, sorcerers, well poisoners, and ritual murderers—as usurers, infidels, and insatiable conspirators seeking the destruction of Christian society.”
⁷²

Demonizing the Jews—an essential ingredient of hatred toward them—came naturally to the Nazi leaders. Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and many others in the Nazi leadership truly believed in the demonic and vile Jew. They did not cynically invent a myth for the masses. They offered the
Volk
what was already in their hearts. The secular religion called Nazism, in its selection of an enemy and victim, successfully drew on the centuries of anti-semitism endemic in Christian theology and teaching.

In a religious community, the image of the Jews as the devil incarnate, the anti-Christ, formed an effective means of demonizing them. One could attack the Jews as the forces of evil and label their persecution a noble pursuit and a religious obligation. But in a perverse way, this image of the Jews enhances them. The devil is admittedly the force of evil, but he is a force. He is superhuman. In Nazi philosophy, the role of the superhuman is reserved for the Aryan hero. The Jew must be a creature less than human.

The Germans went beyond demonizing in their particularly virulent form of antisemitism. The Jews were not just evil people.
They were not people
. They were subhuman. They were parasites.

The rules of behavior are changed when one moves from dealing with humans, even evil humans, to lesser creatures. To make the Jew into an animal is to remove him from the limits of protection afforded even the vilest of humans. Most countries these days do not execute even their most feared and detested criminals. People shoot animals, however, just for sport. And if animals
are a threat to us—a rabid dog—we are not just permitted, but obliged, to kill it.

The Nazis found the most effective means of dehumanizing: The Jew would be viewed not just as an animal, but as the lowest form, a parasite. People may romanticize dogs, but no one finds affection for a tubercle bacillus or a smallpox virus. The Jews, who started out as well poisoners—spreaders of disease—now became the disease itself. Hitler, himself, had introduced the idea of the Jew as parasite in
Mein Kampf,
where the analogy is used throughout. Nazi publications characteristically referred to the Jew as bacteria, scum, tuberculosis, cancer, maggots, and viruses.

In his diary for March 27, 1942, Joseph Goebbels wrote: “The Jews will destroy us if we do not defend ourselves against them. This is a war of life or death between the Aryan race and the Jewish virus.”
⁷³

This statement encapsulates almost all the elements that are central to the definition of a paranoid state: (1) It differentiates an us from a them, defining two alternative cultures. (2) It defines the “other” as an enemy. We are obsessed with the enemy who now becomes part of our daily life. (3) It identifies a life-threatening situation, thereby justifying eradication of the enemy as an act of self-defense. (4) It dehumanizes the enemy, identifying him as a virus, thereby denying him his right to the normal protections accorded “our fellow men.” We may respond with satisfaction at the sight of the piled corpses accumulated in the killing fields as a job well done, as an exterminator would respond at a mound of destroyed rats in a garbage dump, as many in the Arab world delight at viewing the results of a suicide bombing.

The sheer intensity and murderous rage of the Nazis eventually transcended all rationalization, taking antisemitism to an extreme and insane end. Robert Wistrich labeled the Nazi hatred of the Jews as a singularly irrational event even in the irrational world of bigotry. What made it remarkable to him was the fact that the Nazis' pathological pursuit of the Jews was independent of Jewish actions or belief:

The insane hatred of the Jews by Hitler and his henchmen was rooted in their individual pathologies, but to accomplish their goals, they required the cooperation of the majority of an entire nation. The intensity of hatred necessary to mobilize that population in support of the Holocaust could not be based on historic data. It had to be in the here and now. It was the job of the psychopathic and psychotic Nazi leadership to supply rational reasons to the population, which was not itself preponderantly composed of psychotic members, in order to gain the people's
cooperation for what objectively can be only viewed as an insane obsession. The Nazi propagandists justified the genocide of the Jews by equating it as we treat our “war on cancer” or, more accurately, our successful campaigns to eliminate smallpox and poliomyelitis. To succeed, to protect the future of their children, they had to destroy the virus to the very last presence on earth. This was to be a universal genocide.

Daniel Goldhagen, while acknowledging that the Nazi leaders represented a degree of pathology unparalleled in modern history, held that the German people were particularly receptive to adoption of so paranoid a view of the Jews. Even before the rise of the Nazis, he claimed, the German people were possessed of a particularly virulent form of antisemitism; they viewed the Jews as biologically different, a race apart. Since, according to the Germans, the Jewish characteristics that they perceived were rooted in genetics, as distinguished from culture, the Jews' evil ways were immutable. Worse, they could be transmitted through generations, and transmitted to purer races. The Jews, all Jews, had to be destroyed. It was a matter of survival for the German people; the Holocaust was an act of self-defense.
⁷⁵

There is a certain reassurance in feeling that a culture of hatred requires such special conditions as Goldhagen outlined: (1) a ruthless and mad leadership; (2) seizing power in a geomilitary situation specific to Germany; and (3) acting out on a particularly susceptible population, the German people. One can take comfort in this hypothesis. It makes the possibility of a recurrence of a horror like the Holocaust that much less likely.

While I remain admiring of Goldhagen's understanding of the mechanisms of hatred, I do not think he made the case that Nazism could only have been a German phenomenon. I am not
convinced that the Germans were more virulently antisemitic than the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Ukrainians, or the French, for that matter. Jedwabne certainly indicates the capacity of the Poles to treat Jews as disposable scum. And while much has been made of the danger posed by the eugenics movement that swept Germany in the 1920s, eugenics was taken seriously in most of the Western world—in the United States particularly—without leading to political policies of racial engineering, let alone genocide. “Genetic engineering,” when discussed in the United States, is limited to the context of medical cures or improvement of agricultural products, not in the preservation of the purity of the race.

A culture of hatred is not necessarily a culture of haters. At least it may not start out that way. Even were every German an antisemite, which we know was not the case, prejudice is still not hatred. The typical antisemite is not an active Jew hater. Like any typical racist, he is relatively unconcerned about the disdained population. He stereotypes them, denigrates them, and for the most part ignores them. He may be a bigot, concerned with protecting himself from the contamination of the pariah population in his clubs and community, even in his schools. He may take pleasure in their humiliation, but he is not preoccupied with them. He wants less involvement, not more. His sin is in his exclusion of an individual from his concerns and compassion on the basis of his prejudice. But a bigot is an easy mark and a ready follower of those who hate. The immense value of Goldhagen's book is in its demonstration of the capacity of a paranoid leadership to convert a mass population to “willing executioners.” All that such leadership needs to expedite its purposes is the absolute power of dictatorship and the precondition of a prejudice within the population.

The Nazi battle against the Jews illustrates another danger that the autocratic state poses for the world at large. Anti-semitism was endemic in Europe and much of the rest of the
world. For centuries it was actively encouraged. Before the Nazis indicated the malevolence that could be unleashed by such latent bigotry, most people tolerated—some enjoyed—the smarmy statements of prejudice and occasional brutal acts of individual bigotry. Until the Holocaust, we were unaware that a determined cadre of haters could ignite latent prejudice and bigotry into a conflagration that might consume us all. But now we see how such bigotry has been used by despots in Iraq, Libya, and Cambodia to consolidate their tenuous hold on their subject populations. They displace the authentic resentment of their deprived populations and divert it to manufactured enemies abroad. This technique—mastered by Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Khadafy, Pol Pot, and their ilk—to subjugate their own people now threatens the security of the entire world. Such leadership must be confronted by the more civilized nations of the world.