Not in God's Name (9 page)

Chapter 2 argued that violence is born, together with the better angels of our nature, in the phenomenon of human groupishness. We are altruistic to members of our group, and hostile to members of other groups. This gives rise to xenophobia. But xenophobia, though it may cause wars, does not in and of itself give rise to the demonisation of opponents, a sense of victimhood and the resultant altruistic evil. You do not go around murdering women and children because of some biological imperative of survival. That requires culture, and as we saw in
chapter 3
, the specific form that disables the moral sense and leads otherwise ordinary individuals to commit bestial crimes is pathological dualism – itself a mutant form of the theological dualism of ancient Iran and Greece that infected sectarian groups within Judaism and Christianity in the late pre-Christian and early Christian times. Pathological dualism emerged in Germany after the First World War. A not dissimilar dualism, between the faithful on the one hand and the Greater and Lesser Satan on the other, dominates Islamist and Iranian discourse today.

What turns dualism into a pathology? The Gnostics were dualists, but they were not violent. Manichaeism, another form of dualism, won enormous popularity between the third and seventh centuries, spreading from Rome to China and beginning to rival Christianity as a world force. But its adherents were persecuted, many were killed, and by the fourteenth century it had almost disappeared. The Qumran sect and the Christians of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts tended to retreat from the mainstream of society to pursue their mystical speculations and
wait for the true God to defeat his earthly impostor. So what was this further factor?

The scholar who did more than most to provide an answer was the French literary theorist and cultural anthropologist René Girard, in his book
Violence and the Sacred
(1972).

Together with Freud, a deep influence on his work, Girard reversed conventional wisdom. It is not religion that gives rise to violence. It is violence that gives rise to religion. Freud argued that the primal act of violence in prehistoric times came when the children of the tribe combined to murder their father, whose monopolisation of the females of the tribe they resented. They were then haunted by guilt: what Freud called
the return of the repressed
. God, for Freud, was the voice of the dead father, internalised by the children as the voice of conscience.

Girard had a less fanciful explanation. Early societies, he argued, did not yet have a legal system – laws, courts, prisons and punishments – to enforce order. Instead they practised reciprocity, the rule of Tit-for-Tat that, as we saw, was the first principle to emerge from computer simulations of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. They acted generously to others until they encountered a hostile response. They then did to the others what the others had done to them.

The trouble with this strategy – as biologists also noted when they began creating computer programmes that outperformed Tit-for-Tat – is that it gives rise to potentially endless cycles of retaliation. It begins with a single act of murder. This sets in motion a blood feud, vendetta or clan war. It is one of the oldest and most familiar themes in fiction: the Montagues versus the Capulets, the Jets against the Sharks, the Tattaglias versus the Corleones. Short of mass assassination, there is no natural end to the cycle of retaliation.

Girard’s thesis is that
the most effective way by which the two
groups can end the cycle is by killing a third party
, one who is neither a Montague nor a Capulet, who stands outside the feud, and whose death will not lead to another cycle of retaliation. The victim must be, in other words, an outsider, someone either not protected by a group, or the member of a group not in a position to inflict its own retaliatory violence.

By sacrificing the outsider, a revenge killing has taken place, so both sides can feel that justice has been done, but in such a way as to stop the cycle since the victim is not a member of either of the contending groups. Hence Girard’s contentions that, first, the primal religious act is human sacrifice; second, the primal sacrifice is the scapegoat; and third, the function of religion is
to deflect away internal violence that would otherwise destroy the group
.

This, for Girard, is a statement not merely about the ancient past but about the present and future also. All societies generate internal conflict that can become violent and self-destructive. Therefore all societies require religion, which performs the task of ‘casting out’ the violence, deflecting it away from the group itself by placing it on an external victim, thus turning violence outwards instead of allowing it to turn destructively inwards.

As a social phenomenon, the system works only when there is a generally agreed scapegoat. The victim must be sufficiently
like
or close to the feuding parties to be a plausible substitute. You could not end a feud between two Italian families in Verona by going off to China to kill someone there. The victim must also be capable of being portrayed as the
cause
of the present troubles, otherwise killing him would make no sense. Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, witches were blamed for diseases, crop failures and other mishaps. The Illuminati, an eighteenth-century German sect, and the Freemasons have both been accused of secretly plotting to rule the world. In his novel
The Da Vinci Code
, Dan Brown imagined a conflict between two shadowy Christian groups, the Priory of Sion and Opus Dei, the former a secret society, the latter a Catholic sect. Conspiracy theories have flourished for centuries.

However, the particular combination of conspiracy theory and substitute victim involved in the creation of a scapegoat requires a difficult mental feat. You have to be able to believe at one and the same time that the scapegoat is
both
all-powerful
and
powerless.
If the scapegoat were actually powerful, it could no longer fulfil its essential function as the-victim-of-violence-without-risk-of-reprisal
. You do not choose a lion or a crocodile as your sacrificial victim, since if you do, you are more likely than it is to land up as the victim.
But if the scapegoat were believed to be powerless, it could not plausibly be cast as the cause of our present troubles
. You could not, for example, choose a group of illiterate, unemployed migrants as your scapegoat. You could kill them without fear of reprisal, but you could hardly portray them successfully as controlling the banks, the media and the White House. The simultaneous presence of contradictory beliefs is a sure sign of the active presence of a scapegoat mechanism within a culture.

For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christians in a Christian Europe, non-Muslims in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its
victims
but they are not its
cause
. The cause is
conflict within a culture
. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society.

Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence,
wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another
. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars
in the twentieth, and it is what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatising moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come.

From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear.

That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history. It was dualism of the most stark and devastating kind.

Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society.

It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence
of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect
Limpieza de sangre
, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statute appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later.

The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favourably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled
On the Jews and their Lies
that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called ‘our plague, pestilence and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg Laws.

Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty.

It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to
Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain.

Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched’. He added, generously, ‘Still, we ought not to burn them.’
⁹

Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as ‘the vampires of society’ and called for ‘the euthanasia of Judaism’.
¹⁰
Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a ‘slave morality’, unable to conceive or practise a religion of love.
¹¹
By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a ‘fossil nation’, a ‘ghost-race’.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte believed Jews were the enemy of freedom: ‘As for giving [the Jews] civil rights,’ he wrote, ‘I see no other way than that of some night cutting off their heads and attaching in their place others in which there is not a single Jewish idea.’ Alternatively they should be ‘packed off’ to ‘their promised land’.
¹²
Arthur Schopenhauer spoke of Jews as ‘no better than cattle’, as ‘scum of the earth’, and as a people to be expelled. Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the ‘falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticising Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for giving birth to it in the first place.

Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples and think again. Philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularised and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences
were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.