Not in God's Name (10 page)

Over the course of this period from 1095 to 1945, a number of myths emerged, two of which are of unusual interest. The first was the Blood Libel. In Norwich in 1144 a child named William was discovered stabbed to death. A rumour circulated that Jews were responsible. No one took it seriously at the time, but it became a
cause célèbre
five years later when an account appeared, written by a monk named Thomas of Monmouth.
¹³
It claimed that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood to make matza, the ‘unleavened bread’ eaten on the festival of Passover. It was patently absurd: if anything is abhorrent to Jews, it is blood (a single speck found in food renders it inedible in Jewish law) and child sacrifice. The Blood Libel was officially condemned by several popes – among them Innocent IV, Gregory X, Martin V, Paul III and Nicholas V – as well as by Emperor Frederick II. That did not stop the accusation spreading throughout Europe. There were more than 150 recorded cases, many leading to massacres of the local Jewish population.

The second, some 750 years later, was
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Devised by members of the Russian Secret Police based in Paris, it was a document that purported to be the minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination by controlling the press and economies of the world. Fabricated from works of fiction and conspiracy theories, none of which was originally about Jews,
¹⁴
it was exposed as a forgery by
The Times
in 1921. It nonetheless sold widely, first in Russia, then in Germany, where its use in Nazi propaganda turned it into, in Norman Cohn’s phrase, a ‘warrant for genocide’.
¹⁵

What makes these two myths fascinating is the way they exemplify the splitting-and-projection that gives dualism its unique psychological hold. The Blood Libel is a Christian projection (that is not to say that Christianity embraced it or
was responsible for it: recall the papal rejection if it). It makes no sense within the framework of Judaism. But it made sense to some believers in transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine used in the Eucharist are not symbolically but actually the body and blood of the Son of God. The term ‘transubstantiation’ was first used by Hildebert de Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, around 1079, and the doctrine itself was formalised by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It is precisely between these dates that the Blood Libel appears.

Likewise, the
Protocols
. They were first published in Russia in 1903 when the Jews were undergoing the trauma of the Kishinev pogrom. Following the pogroms that had broken out throughout Russia in 1881 and the antisemitic May Laws of 1882, millions of Jews from the Pale of Settlement were in flight to the West. A pamphlet written at that time by an assimilated Jew, Leon Pinsker, gave full and poignant expression to what it felt like to be Jewish in Eastern Europe at that time. ‘Among the living nations of the earth,’ he wrote, ‘the Jews are as a nation long since dead.’ They are ‘a living corpse, a people without unity or organisation, without land or other bonds of unity, no longer alive yet walking among the living’.

That such a people, rightless refugees, could be engaged in secretly running the world was self-evidently preposterous. Yet if understood as a repressed and projected desire on the part of its fabricators, it made eminent sense. These were the last dreamers of Russian imperial grandeur before the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 ended their world for ever. It explains why Hitler, with his dreams of world domination, was so taken by the
Protocols
, though he was well aware of their exposure as a forgery (the fact that Jews denied their veracity was, for him, perfect proof that they were true). ‘No one could be so brilliant’, Hitler said to Goebbels on 13 May 1943, ‘as to describe the Jewish striving for world domination as well as the Jews themselves.’
¹⁶

What makes these myths relevant today is that they were both subsequently introduced into the Middle East and Islam. The
Blood Libel was introduced to the Middle East in the early nineteenth century by Christians, in Aleppo (1811, 1853), Beirut (1824), Antioch (1826), Hamma (1829), Tripoli (1834), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Damanhur (1877) and Damascus (1840, 1848 and 1890). Until that time, charges of ritual murder levelled against Jews were virtually unknown within Islam. The most famous case was the Damascus Blood Libel of 1840. A Capuchin monk in Damascus disappeared. His fellow monks, assisted by a local French diplomat, accused the Jews of killing him for ritual purposes. Heads of the Jewish community were imprisoned and tortured. Some died. Others confessed. The case became widely publicised in Europe and provoked protests until the Ottoman authorities investigated the charge and admitted that the accusations were false. This did not stop the libel spreading elsewhere and there were further notorious cases in Algeria in 1897–8 and Cairo in 1901–2.

In 1983 the Syrian defence minister Mustapha Tlass wrote a book,
The Matza of Zion
, arguing that the original charge in the Damascus affair was in fact true, and that Jews continue to kill Gentile children to use their blood in making matza for Passover. The book has been translated into English and reprinted several times. On 8 February 1991, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency, the Syrian delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission praised this ‘valuable book,’ saying it ‘unmasked the racist character of Zionism.’
¹⁷
In 2001 the Egyptian newspaper
Al Ahram
reiterated the charge, adding, ‘The bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood.’
¹⁸

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
was introduced, along with
Mein Kampf
in Arabic translation, into the Middle East in the 1930s by, among others, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husayni, who had spent the Second World War in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis and
recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS. It continues to be reprinted and widely sold and read. In 2002 a forty-one-part television dramatisation of the
Protocols
, entitled
Horseman without a Horse
, was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organisation Hezbollah during Ramadan.
¹⁹
In 2003 a similar series,
Al-Shatat
(‘Diaspora’), was shown on Syrian television.
²⁰

The
Protocols
, despite widespread knowledge that they are a forgery, figure prominently in the discourse of the Islamists and appear in the Hamas Charter. In this context an observation made by several recent writers is worth noting. They refer to a discovery made by the FBI in 2007 in the course of preparing for the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing trial (on 24 November 2008, five former officials of the Foundation were found guilty of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists).

During their search they came across a document dated 22 May 1991 prepared by Mohamed Akram, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States. Entitled ‘Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America’, it included the following passage: ‘The Ikhwan (i.e. the Brotherhood) must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.’
²¹
When people accuse others of seeking to control the world, it may be that they are unconsciously projecting what they themselves want but do not wish to be accused of wanting.
If you seek to understand what a group truly intends, look at the accusations it levels against its enemies
.

Which brings us to the present. At the very time Europe was attempting to ensure that the Holocaust could never happen again, antisemitism in the form of its two most effective myths was being reborn in the Middle East, and from there has spread to parts of Islam. As early as 1986, Bernard Lewis issued this warning:

At this time there are some signs that the anti-Semitic virus that has plagued Christianity almost since the beginning may at last be in process of cure; by a sad paradox, the same profound religious hatred has now attacked the hitherto resistant body of Islam. It may be that the moment of choice has gone, and that the virus has already entered the bloodstream of Islam, to poison it for generations to come as Christendom was poisoned for generations past. If so, not only Arab but also Jewish hopes will be lost in the miasma of bigotry. The open democracy that is the pride of Israel will be polluted by sectarian and ethnic discrimination and repression, while the free institutions that are the best hope of the Arabs will be forgotten, as the Middle East sinks under the rule of the cynics and fanatics who flourish in the soil of hatred.
²²

This chapter has been about how dualism moves from being theological or metaphysical to become pathological and a source of violent hate. It happens when a victim – an individual or group – is turned into a scapegoat as a way of projecting outwards the violence that would otherwise destroy a society from within. The paradigm case in the history of the past thousand years has been the Jews. What makes antisemitism central to the argument of this book is that when it becomes violent it represents the first and clearest sign of a civilisation in crisis. With few exceptions, Jews were not massacred during the first thousand years of Christianity, or in Western Europe in the nineteenth century, or classically within the nations of Islam, where Jews often fared better than they did in Christendom.

Dualism becomes lethal when a group of people, a nation or a faith, feel endangered by internal conflict. This happened in Christianity in the eleventh century in the wake of the Great Schism of the Church, in 1054, when the state Church of the Roman Empire divided into its Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches. It happened in Germany after defeat in the First World War, the punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the weakness of the Weimar
system. It began within Islam after its last major bastion of power, the Ottoman Empire, fell in 1924. The tensions then generated between secular and religious approaches to politics, between different groups within the national boundaries arbitrarily imposed by Britain and France, as well as historic tensions between Sunni and Shia, and moderate and radical interpretations of the faith, still reverberate today.

At work in this whole process is the basic principle of group dynamics. We saw in
chapter 2
that we are naturally inclined to favour members of our group and fear members of another group. One result is that
in almost any group, the greater the threat from the outside, the stronger the sense of cohesion within
. People who lived through the Blitz, the aerial attack on London in the Second World War, say they felt a sense of kinship between strangers they never experienced before or after. Our most primal instincts of bonding within the group occur when it confronts an external enemy.

That is why ruthless politicians, threatened by internal discord, focus on and sometimes even invent external enemies. Paranoia is the most powerful means yet devised for sustaining tyranny and repression. If tyrants can invoke religion – persuading people that it is their faith, their values and their God that are under attack – it becomes more powerful still, since religion evokes our most self-sacrificial instincts. The classic instance is antisemitism, and where you find it at its most virulent, there you will find despotism and denial of human rights. The murder of Jews is only one result. The real victims are the members of the host society itself. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with them. No free society was ever built on hate.

The trouble with the use of scapegoats is that it is a solution that compounds the problem. It makes internal tension bearable by turning the question ‘Why has this happened?’ into the question ‘Who did this to me?’ If it is someone else’s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect intact. For at least a thousand years a narrative has been available that blames the Jews. So powerful
is the rapid-response emotional brain that, under stress, it can entirely overwhelm the slower-moving prefrontal cortex, the distinction- and decision-making mind, turning otherwise ordinary human beings into Crusaders in one age, perpetrators of genocide in another, and suicide bombers and jihadists in a third.

And when the violence is over, the problems remain, since the scapegoat never was the cause of the problem in the first place. So people die. Hope is destroyed. Hate claims more sacrificial victims. And God weeps.

A little more than kin, and less than kind.

Shakespeare
, Hamlet
(Act 1, scene 2, line 65)

Yet we are still missing a piece of the puzzle. The phenomena we have described thus far – identity, splitting, projection, pathological dualism and the scapegoat – are general. They could affect anyone. They have no special connection with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They help us understand violence but not the fraught relationship between the Abrahamic faiths. There must be some additional cause to explain the Crusades, jihads, forced conversions, inquisitions, burnings at the stake, pogroms and suicidal terrorism in religions dedicated to love, forgiveness and compassion. What is it that brought Jews, Christians and Muslims, spiritual children of a common father, to such animosity for so long? I want, in this chapter, to track down that factor, the puzzle’s last piece. It begins with a powerful Freudian insight whose significance Freud himself seems to have repressed.

Recall that Freud and René Girard argued that it is not religion that leads to violence. It is violence that leads to religion. We saw in the last chapter how that led to Girard’s theory of the scapegoat as the primal religious rite. However, he went on to ask how violence begins in the first place. Freud consistently claimed that the initiating violence, in both individual and group psychology, arises from the tension between fathers and sons, the Oedipus complex. Girard cast his net wider. Violence is born in what he called
mimetic desire
(from
mimesis
, meaning ‘imitation’).

Mimetic desire is wanting what someone else has because they have it. This is behaviour we often see in children. When one child
is given a new toy, the others suddenly discover that they want it. They may never have wanted it before, but they do now because someone else has it. Mimetic desire is not just wanting to
have
what someone else has. Ultimately it is wanting to
be
what someone else is. Desiring ‘this man’s art, and that man’s scope’, we wish we were them. This is mimetic desire. Often it leads to violence, because if I want what you have, sooner or later we will fight. Girard then suggested that one of the prime sources of strife is not between father and son but between brothers: sibling rivalry.

Myth and religious narrative bear this out. Genesis is full of such relationships: Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. The first murder is a fratricide: Cain killing Abel. In Egyptian myth there are Set and Osiris. The Greek equivalents are Atreus and Thyestes. The story of Hamlet begins with a fratricide: Claudius kills his brother, Hamlet’s father, and takes his throne.

The founding myth of Rome is a story of two brothers, Romulus and Remus, who argue over where the city should be built. Romulus kills Remus and in a famous poem, Horace says that a curse has lain over the city ever since:

A bitter destiny dogs the Romans

The guilt of a brother’s murder

Since Remus’ innocent blood poured on the ground,

A curse on Rome’s posterity.
¹

The irony is that Freud himself knew the significance of sibling rivalry and felt it deeply, but seems to have been so obsessed with the Oedipus complex that he failed to give it its due weight. It was his colleague Alfred Adler who focused on sibling rivalry. Yet whenever Freud spoke about it, he did so with blazing intensity. In
The Interpretation of Dreams
he writes, ‘The elder child ill-treats the younger, maligns him and robs him of his toys; while the younger is consumed with impotent rage against the elder, envies and fears him, or meets his oppressor with the first stirrings of a love of liberty and a sense of justice.’
²

In a letter to the novelist Thomas Mann, he says about Napoleon’s relationship with his older brother Joseph, ‘The elder brother is the natural rival; the younger one feels for him an elemental, unfathomably deep hostility for which in later life the expressions “death wish” and “murderous intent” may be found appropriate. To eliminate Joseph, to take his place, to become Joseph himself, must have been Napoleon’s strongest emotion as a small child.’
³

In a lecture on ‘Femininity’ he said, ‘But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother…we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development.’
⁴

We know that Freud felt intensely hostile towards his younger brother Julius, born in 1857 when Freud was seventeen months old. Julius died before his first birthday. Freud admitted to a lifelong feeling of guilt for wishing to be rid of him.
⁵
Did he displace these feelings by focusing instead on fathers and sons?

What Freud would not have known, since it is a relatively recent biological finding, is that sibling rivalry is not confined to humans. Douglas Mock has assembled the animal behavioural evidence in
More than Kin and Less than Kind.
⁶
In the Galapagos Islands young fur seals attack their newborn siblings, seizing them by the throat and tossing them into the air, killing them unless the mother seal intervenes.

In many species the urge for dominance is part of the instinct for survival. Food supplies are scarce, and the competition to be first in the queue may spell the difference between life and death. Egrets, for example, give birth to multiple young who hatch out at different stages. The first two, born earlier and with an advantage of size and strength over their younger siblings, peck at them aggressively until a mere gesture – stretching the neck – is sufficient to induce submission.

Among birds, chicks quickly establish a hierarchy of their own – the origin of the phrase ‘pecking order’. The older use their strength to get the first bite of food. Some animals, like spade-foot tadpoles, eat their own siblings if starved of other nutrition. Others like the black stork have been seen throwing the youngest of a brood out of the nest, the better to ensure the survival of those that remain.

This is the first point. The primal act of violence is fratricide not parricide. Sibling rivalry plays a central role in human conflict, and it begins with mimetic desire, the desire to have what your brother has, or even be what your brother is.

The second stage of the journey takes us to the post-Holocaust years when a French historian, Jules Isaac, who survived the war but lost his wife and daughter at Auschwitz, began to assemble the evidence of the long history of Christian anti-Jewish teachings that he called ‘the teachings of contempt’. His work came to the attention of Pope John XXIII, and the two met in 1961. This may have been one of the factors that led the pope and his successor Paul VI to institute the process that culminated in Vatican II in 1965, and the document
Nostra Aetate
that transformed the relationship between the Catholic Church and other faiths, especially the Jews.
⁷

Beginning around this time, a group of courageous Christian theologians began themselves to explore the roots of Christian anti-Judaism. They included figures like Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gregory Baum, Edward Flannery, Paul Van Buren, R. Kendall Soulen, Mary Boys and the novelist James Carroll.
⁸
The question hovering in the background of their work was: how was the Holocaust possible in the heart of Christian Europe?

The Holocaust was
not
the result of Christianity; it is important to state this categorically at the outset. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi pointed out, Christianity had an interest in the
preservation
of Jews, not their destruction.
⁹
The history of Christian–Jewish relations is not one of unrelieved darkness.
¹⁰
There were bishops who defended Jews at times of persecution, and popes who rejected anti-Jewish myths like the Blood Libel. And though there were massacres, there were also times when Jews flourished under Christian rulers.

While the Holocaust was taking place, there were Christians who saved Jews, among them the members of the French village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon who, under the inspiration of Lutheran pastor André Trocmé, gave shelter to five thousand Jews. Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses helped Jews to safety. There were Christian opponents of Hitler like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. There were the more than twenty-five thousand individual heroes, memorialised in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, who saved lives. There were collective acts of heroism like the members of the Danish Resistance who saved most of Danish Jewry from death. And it is important to note also that many Jews were saved by Muslims during these years, a story told by Robert Satloff in his book
Among the Righteous
.
¹¹

More than a century before the Holocaust, the poet Heinrich Heine made a remarkable prophecy:

Christianity – and that is its greatest merit – has somewhat mitigated that brutal German love of war, but it could not destroy it. Should that subduing talisman, the Cross, be shattered, the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane Berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame…Then…a play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.

It was Christianity that prevented tragedy, thought Heine, by standing between Germany and its pagan roots. Lose it and the dark gods of blood and brutality would return.

What the post-Holocaust theologians searched for were the
roots of the Church’s hostility to Jews. That is not my concern here: in any case, it is an internal conversation within Christianity. My argument in this chapter will be simple. It has to do with narrative and identity: the stories we tell ourselves to explain who we are. It turns out that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all define themselves by a set of narratives about the factor identified by Girard and felt by Freud to lie at the root of violence, namely, sibling rivalry. This is where we need to focus our attention if we are to understand and heal the hate that leads to violence in the name of God.

Sibling rivalry is, as we noted, a central motif of the book of Genesis: Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, and Joseph and his brothers. It is a key theme of Judaism. However, during the early years of Christianity it became a theme there as well, most notably in the writings of Paul. Something similar happened later with the birth of Islam.

Paul is one of the most complex figures in the history of religion. Thousands of books have been written about him, and there are major differences of opinion about his personality, his theology, and especially his relationship with Jews and Judaism. It is not my intention here to advance any view about these issues, but simply to reflect on his use of the Genesis sibling rivalry narratives.

Paul was a Jew, originally named Saul, who was at first strongly opposed to the first Christians and had been one of their persecutors. He was on one such mission to Damascus when he experienced a conversion experience that changed his life, turning him into Christianity’s first and greatest theologian. Paul never met Jesus: his conversion took place some years after Jesus’ death. Yet his writings, mainly in the form of letters to Christian communities, form the first Christian texts, preceding the Gospels.

Paul took a controversial stand on the nature of the new faith. Many of the early Christians, like Paul himself, were Jews.
Initially they differed from their co-religionists only in their belief that the Messiah had come. Most believed that Jesus’ mission was primarily to the Jews. Accordingly, they kept Jewish law, including circumcision, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath and Judaism’s strict dietary restrictions. Led by Jesus’ brother James, they are known as the Jerusalem church.

Paul thought otherwise. To understand why, we have to set him in context. Israel at the time was under Roman rule. We know from several sources of the period that many Gentiles in the wider Roman Empire were attracted to various aspects of Judaism. To some they were known as the ‘God-fearers’. Josephus speaks about them. So does the New Testament. So do Roman writers, among them Tacitus, Juvenal and Celsus. Seneca saw the irony in non-Jews adopting Jewish ways: ‘The vanquished have given their laws to the victors’, he said. The God-fearers were not full converts. They were drawn to some elements of Judaism, not all. Then as now, the concept of Jewish identity had fuzzy edges. There were people who were not fully Jewish according to Jewish law, but who identified with the people and its faith.

It was among this group that Paul’s teachings resonated, especially when he showed that to be a Christian it was not necessary either to be circumcised or to keep the full Mosaic code with its multiple (613) commands. In fact, he argued, the new dispensation changed the very terms of the covenant. It was no longer a matter of law but of faith. In essence, Paul had founded the Gentile, or de-ethnicised, church. As a result he was faced with an immense problem. How could Christianity be at one and the same time a continuation of Judaism and yet a radically transformed faith – in the people it addressed, the life it espoused and the story it told? This tension haunted Paul and everything he set in motion.

Often he reminded his listeners that he was a Jew. What then was his attitude to his fellow Jews? On this he is notoriously ambiguous. On the one hand, understandably, he was often critical of them. He believed he had seen the light, they had not. He
was convinced that something decisive had occurred to change the relationship between God and the world, but they did not. On the other hand, he was clearly attached to his people and said so. They had been the first to hear the call of God and to enter into a covenant with him. In Romans 9–11, he says that to the Jews belong ‘the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises’ (KJV, 9:4). Theirs is the tree onto which a new olive branch had been grafted (11:16–24). A measure of ambivalence was inevitable, given the path he had taken. In any case, Paul himself said that he spoke differently to different audiences (1 Cor. 9:20–21), as if to remind his listeners and those who read his writings that context mattered in understanding what he was saying.