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Unless correspondents ask us not to, this Website will post selected letters that it receives and invite open debate. |
Anti-Semitic Nazi postcard, "The Boss" (IRVING COLLECTION / RASMUSSEN)
Anthony
Stadlen
attended the
public lecture in December 2000 by Prof. Hyam Maccoby,
called to answer David Irving's fundamental Holocaust
question: "Why are the Jews not Liked?" He
writes:
Are Jews Disliked? and Why?
I'VE just come back from a lecture by Hyam Maccoby (about which, incidentally, I first heard from your informative website). He is one of my heroes. He is one of those people who are so lucid and simple that one feels one has always known the obvious truth they are speaking; and yet it is the fruit of a lifetime's reflection and investigation. He undertook to answer your question, 'Why are the Jews hated?' Unlike so many other people who disagree with you, he said your name as if you were just another human being who had asked an interesting question, and who had suggested or implied an answer with which he disagreed, for reasons which he was going to give. He did not impute motives to you, call you a Nazi, or demonize you. He focussed on the question, and gave his answer, the distillation of many decades of his research. I feel he is someone you might respect, even if you disagree with him, as you respected Christopher Browning. Do you know his books? The one most relevant to his lecture tonight is A Pariah People. But it builds on his many earlier books.
His lecture was packed with information; it will, I think, become available as a video. I thought you might like to know that his answer to you has three main stages. (1) He points out that your question begs another question, namely, whether the Jews have always been hated everywhere; and he gives evidence that they have not. (2) He explains when and where they have been hated. (3) He explains why.
- (1) He says the Jews of India and China were not hated. The Jews of Cochin, for example, were greatly respected by the local Hindus, even though, or perhaps because, the Jews kept themselves in many ways separate, having very strange and interesting practices from the point of view of the locals, and not assimilating. The Rajah protected them and admired them, and they fought in his army, with dispensation for the Sabbath. The Indians were amazed, and protested, when the Christian Portuguese arrived and started badmouthing the revered Jews of Cochin. Similarly in China, where the Jews were treated with respect and affection.
- (2) It is broadly speaking in Christian or post-Christian lands that there has been hatred of Jews. In Muslim countries the Jews were relatively mildly despised as the losers of some battles with Mohammed, but after Israel defeated the Arabs in modern times the Jews were seen as powerful and became hated.
- (3) The Christian hatred of Jews is rooted in the Gospels and other texts of the New Testament, developed by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. It is based on the allegation in the New Testament that they are the murderers of the incarnate God.
The Muslim hatred (as opposed to the earlier mild contempt for them as weaklings) is rooted in having to find a reason why the Jews managed to defeat the Arabs; this was supplied by the deduction that the Jews could only have managed it with the help of Satan.
To sum up: Hatred of Jews is primarily a phenomenon in those lands whose religions have mounted a take-over bid for Judaism, and specifically for what Christians call the 'Old Testament'. This does not apply to India (Hinduism) or China. (A member of the audience objected that there was anti-semitism in Japan. Mr Maccoby said he had dealt with this special case in his book; it arose from Japan's alliance with the Nazis.) Christianity and Islam both try to take over the Hebrew Bible. Christians take it over unchanged, though with reinterpretations; Muslims reinterpret it and claim that there are significant omissions in it. Christians claim to be the 'new Israel'. Hyam Maccoby said there was a letter in 'The Times' when Israel became independent, saying, 'I don't mind the Jews having their own state, but why should they take a Christian name, like Israel?' (I intend to check this out . . .)
I hope this just about does justice to the skeleton of his argument, which he fleshed out with massive detail. Of course, it is no substitute for the lecture itself, which again is no substitute for the evidence and argument presented in Professor Maccoby's still developing, and truly 'revisionist', oeuvre.
Here, in any case, is a profound body of work by a Jew who has, for decades, and with the 'hands-on, shirtsleeves, work-face' approach you (and I) prefer, been publicly addressing the question you urged Jews to address.
David Irving