Hatred (24 page)

Some profound differences in moral values among different cultures are justifiably a matter of opinion and open to debate. Whether abortion, therapeutic cloning, arranged marriage, capital punishment, paternalism—on all of which I have strong opinions—are wrong or right is a proper area for legitimate differences. Decent people can disagree on many important issues without conceding the ethical ground. But there are not “two sides to every question.” With many questions there is only one morally acceptable opinion. There are values that transcend cultural directives and that must always be honored. Immoral behavior cannot be exonerated on the grounds that it was influenced by an immoral culture. He who subscribes to the values of a culture of evil is by definition evil. The white Boers who ruled South Africa were products of their environment. But apartheid was an evil practice, and the fact that Boers were raised in a racist environment does not exempt their racist actions from condemnation.

We consider actions to be a product of an autonomous individual, even while acknowledging the power exerted by the culture on that individual during his formative years. We may be sympathetic to the individual, while still loathing his behavior. We do not have to subscribe to moral relativism. We can insist that there are universal goods and evils that transcend cultural differences.

Violation of those universal values must not be tolerated on the basis of “cultural diversity.” Slavery is wrong always. Racial and religious persecution, child abuse, the subjugation of women, torture, gratuitous cruelty (to people
or
animals), rape, and
pederasty—to list but some—are never justifiable. Were a culture to espouse these values, we would then be perfectly free—morally obligated, I would say—to condemn it as pathological or evil.

We have a significant list of characteristics that by general agreement allow us to define a culture of hatred. The prime example in modern times, and perhaps in all history, is surely Nazi Germany. This is not to say that there have not been other monstrous events of mass slaughter and destruction in the past. But Germany in the twentieth century—with its newfound might and powers—created a Holocaust against the Jews that became the event that redefined that term. In its pathological assaults on the Jew, often to the detriment of its self-interest in the war; in its calculated and perverse technology of mass torture and killing; in its psychotic rationalizations; in its senseless cruelties; in the persistent and unremitting pursuit of genocide to the final moments of the war—Nazi Germany became the defining example of a culture of hatred.

How could the Holocaust have happened? How could such a monstrous policy have been initiated in a modern, highly educated, technological society, in so public a manner, with so little resistance from the outside world of passive onlookers, the
Zuschauenden
? In other words, why Germany, why the Jews, and what explains the passivity in the face of such evil by the Christian churches and the leaders of liberal democracy?
⁶⁵
These are questions for all times and all disciplines. These are questions that result in multiple, but only partial, answers. Here, I use the Holocaust only as an extreme example to illustrate the
psychology
of group hatred, without any pretense of explaining its historic meaning or political evolution.

In an uncharacteristically overwrought article in
Esquire
magazine in 1974, Cynthia Ozick, the talented writer and brilliant social critic, declared that in the warmest of Christian hearts there is a cold place reserved for the Jews. This was in response to the fact that with the opening of Chinese society (then just happening), antisemitism seemed to be one of the first Western ideas to be heartily embraced by the Chinese, despite an obvious lack of any significant association with Jews. How could the Chinese so quickly adopt antisemitic stereotypes? One would normally expect, as Ozick clearly did, that some contact, some bad experiences, some history of animosity, must antedate a rancorous condemnation of an entire group.

A similar dejected feeling to that of Ozick's must have permeated the atmosphere at the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Jerusalem, when they were made aware in 1994 of the presence in Japan and Korea of a “mystifyingly positive response to the antisemitic stereotype of the Jew found in the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—
a poisonous antisemitic tract then being actively circulated in Asia. These two countries are even more unlikely to have had any extensive experience with Jews than China.

The Jews are the quintessential scapegoats—the oldest pariah population, the most universally demonized people. Antisemitism has been traced back to earliest recorded history. And over the centuries, its ready recrudescence and the intensity of loathing and hatred that has been directed against the Jews have been astonishing.

The history of antisemitism is so well documented that one would expect nothing new could emerge. The literature is so imposing—more than thirty thousand volumes at the Sassoon Center—that one would assume little headway could be made by a new historian or sociologist approaching the subject. Yet each new emergence of militant antisemitism is a particularly lurid reminder of its ubiquitous presence and produces a rash of new analytic studies. The Holocaust, in its irrational extreme and terrifying results, ushered in a new era of scholarship on anti-semitism and, arising in the post-Freudian era, offered new emphasis on its psychological aspects. Earlier attempts at psychological understanding had some perverse results.

In the wake of the Dreyfus Affair—an antisemitic outrage that rocked France at the end of the nineteenth century—a French Jewish journalist, Bernard Lazare, wrote his now-controversial but important book,
Antisemitism: Its History and Causes.
⁶⁶
It is now controversial because the text is most likely to be quoted these days in antisemitic literature. It is important because it was a pioneering effort to understand the psychological foundations of antisemitism. The psychological underpinnings of anti-semitism, as distinguished from its sociological and historical roots, are relevant to all forms of hatred.

The Jew haters have drawn comfort and ammunition particularly from Lazare's first chapter, which deals with general causes. In it he stated:

That statement has become a credo of antisemitic literature, and the arguments that follow from it have led to an unfair labeling of Lazare by many as a Jewish antisemite. Nevertheless, he continued in the very next—and less quoted—paragraph: “This does not mean that justice was always on the side of Israel's persecutors, or that they did not indulge in all the extremes born of hatred; it is merely asserted that the Jews were themselves, in part, at least, the cause of their own ills.”

As one follows Lazare's text, the source of the confusion becomes apparent. It stems from the ambiguity in his use of the word “cause.” We tend these days to use “cause” when we mean “the agent that necessarily or ineluctably leads to a result.” We use “reason,” a similar word, to refer to that which might “explain the occurrence or nature of an effect.” Similarly we have the word “occasion” to use for “a situation that permits or stimulates existing causes to come into play.” Although the victim population may seem to offer significant reasons and occasions for their being targeted, they are
never
the cause.

Hatred, to be sustained as an ongoing relationship, is always an attempt by the hater to deal with the humiliating and frustrating conditions of his own existence. The hater is attempting to resolve an internal conflict and requires the victim population to
facilitate his displacement and rationalization. The only reason for examining victim populations is to find clues as to how they serve the unconscious machinations of the haters.

Still, the question remains in some minds whether there might not be legitimate grounds for hatred in which the victim shares responsibility. When we deal with group hatreds, we are often offered authentic grounds as rationalizations, particularly where there is a historic record of some barbaric action on the part of the victimized population. Time heals most of those wounds. Most Serbs did not spend their days obsessing about the genocidal assaults of the Croats in World War II. Even though a historic enmity had been established, both groups lived together as Yugoslavs. Of course hostilities remained, particularly since the atrocities were committed during the lifetime of the living generation. This hostility was readily capable of being revived in the power struggles that followed the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Savage acts of hatred erupted, but under the stimulus and exploitation of a ruling group that found ready usage for such hatred.

Lazare, treading lightly as a Jew in a virulently antisemitic France, started his study with the contributions that the Jews may have made to antisemitism, although he then followed with a broad historic indictment of the bigots. As a product of a bigoted society, he did buy into antisemitic generalizations, as would his fellow student of French antisemitism, Jean-Paul Sartre a half century later.
⁶⁸
Still, he assumed that something in the manner of Jews invites hatred.

Lazare asked: “Which virtues or which vices have earned for the Jew this universal enmity: Why was he ill-treated and hated alike and in turn by the Alexandrians, by the Persians and the Arabs, by the Turks and the Christian nations: Because, everywhere up to our own days the Jew was an unsociable being.”
⁶⁹

What did Lazare mean by this and what was the validity of his observation? He was observing correctly that the Jews in the Diaspora were a ubiquitous and generally unassimilated presence. Edward I in 1290 could make England the earliest
Judenrein
(Jew-free) country in Europe precisely because the Jews were a readily identifiable community within the larger one. They looked different and they behaved differently. One hardly would think to blame these thirteenth-century Jews for their “unsociability,” unless one understands the argument Lazare used when he defined the term.

“Unsociability” as used by Lazare means the failure to adapt to the culture of the majority, not unfriendliness or rejecting behavior. In that argument he found three roots for the refusal of most Jews to assimilate: First, Jews do not submit to the rules of the conqueror the way other subject populations have, where a clear line existed between their “religious teachings which had come from the gods, and their civil laws.”
⁷⁰

Judaism, unlike most other religions, is not simply a theological credo, but a set of civil laws that prescribe everyday rules for hygiene, morality, managing properties, conditions for worship and sacrifice. Obedience to these laws is not a choice but
demanded by God. To maintain religious identity, the Jew must remain secularly isolated and distinguishably different, in conduct as well as appearance, from those around him or her.

Second, Lazare notes that Talmudic tradition sustains these civil injunctions through Halachic rule, the tradition insisting that observant Jews follow a prescribed code of conduct, thus resisting assimilation to the modes of the dominant civilization. To violate Talmudic tradition in any of its details is not stubbornness, it is a breach of covenant with the Lord.

Third, in the religious tradition of the landless Jews, the image of Jerusalem haunted them, demanding a return and making every other home and place a temporary one. Nothing is more destructive of grand theory than the working of time and history. Nineteenth-century France was the reality under which Lazare lived and set the conditions for his observations. Things changed in the twentieth century. The increasing pluralism of less homogeneous democracies such as the United States—while still not free of bigotry—offered latitude for diverse beliefs of an unparalleled nature. The emergence of Reform Judaism, born in nineteenth-century Germany, ironically, cast off many of the Talmudic codes of behavior, allowing for an extent of Jewish assimilation in the twentieth century not imaginable in the nineteenth. But to what avail? The new conditions allowed the German Jew to consider himself a German first and a Jew as a modifying subclass, that is, a Jewish German, but he would still be perceived by the Nazis as just another Jew who must be tortured and exterminated.

Later, the establishment of the state of Israel and the emergence of additional liberal forms of Judaism would completely destroy Lazare's third argument. Modern Jews in droves abandoned the messianic vision. They do not see redemption of their souls as requiring their presence in Jerusalem. Most modern Jews, not followers of an orthodoxy, replaced the idea of messianic
redemption with the liberal cultural idea of leading a moral life. Certainly this was the case with the German Jews, who felt the first blows of the Holocaust.

Still Lazare acutely appreciated the basic conditions that have made the Jews historic scapegoats. Judaism is not simply a religion, it is an identifiable culture, a people without a country. (True, the state of Israel would reinvent the Jewish state, but to what degree the Israeli culture is the culture of the Jew in the Diaspora is still an open and intriguing question.)