The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (9 page)

Otto Frank was the only occupant of the Secret Annexe to survive the war. He was in Auschwitz when it was liberated on January 27, 1945 by the Russians. After the war, Otto resumed his business and devoted himself to the memory of his youngest child, publishing her diary, which was found in Anne’s hiding place undisturbed. He died in Switzerland in 1980 with the knowledge that Anne’s diary had been translated into dozens of languages and read by millions of people. In grade schools throughout the world, the diary is required reading. By the freshness of its language it retains the power it exhibited when first revealed.

Anne Frank’s diary is a great work of world literature. Her story is powerful and meaningful not only because it tells a heroic story but also because it is so well written. Her warmth and simplicity of expression and her ability quickly and directly to relate her innermost emotions and thoughts mark her as a brilliant talent. That she used the convention of a young girl’s private diary does not reduce her accomplishment.

She asks us important questions. What should we feel for her? Poignancy, anger, regret, deep loss, admiration, astonishment, amusement at her teenage fantasies, affection for her loving. We must always respect her courage, writing in constant fear of being discovered. Where was the rest of the world when humanity’s brightest lights were being snuffed out? Her message is one we must never forget, that the most beautiful and good can be destroyed by the great evil of hate unless resisted with the strongest means. Anne’s example should influence us never again to forget that it is always possible for a people to be singled out for destruction, and that the slaying of countless human beings via cold modern technology is just too easy.

In 2012, Anne Frank would have been eighty-three years old.

R
eligions develop not only through the interaction of like-minded believers, but often require the cleansing presence of great spirits to reduce into prophetic visions the clearest paths to righteousness. In the ancient world, these spiritual leaders were called Prophets.

They were mostly men who viewed mankind as defined only through its relationship with God. To the Prophets, history was the story of man’s involvement with the Lord. Knowing the mind of God was a prerequisite to knowing one’s own mind.

From a painting by Sargent of the Prophets: Zephaniah, Joel, Obadiah, and Hosea.

Prophets seemed to be everywhere in biblical times.

After the Patriarchs, Matriarchs, and Moses, names like Joshua, Deborah, Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi populate the Scriptures. These extraordinary souls were markedly different from the visionary holy men of the Buddhist or Hindu faiths or the Christian saints who attempted to purify their lives in sanctity and compassion.

The Prophets were angry, annoying, questioning, endlessly debating, uneasy with man’s plight, furious with his failures and follies, disgusted with his ignorance of godly ways. During periods of great crisis and disorder, they rose seemingly from nowhere, demanding that the people act as God’s chosen, to set an exemplar of behavior for mankind. Their idea that Jews were specially chosen to be a “light unto the nations” (in the words of the later Isaiah) was later appropriated by both Christians and Muslims for their own use and represents one of the central organizational forces of civilization.

The Prophets also helped establish religion as a faith of ideas, not just practice. When people began to think of morality, of helping the poor, doing good, observing laws, rather than killing birds and lambs in rituals of sacrifice conducted by high priests, the Jewish religion could survive the destruction of a great Temple and dispersion into foreign lands. The Prophets’ insistence on bettering man’s behavior into righteousness made Judaism a religion that could move to any place. High priests became rabbis or teachers, prayers replaced ritual, and one great Temple was replaced by countless synagogues, all served as models for Christian and Muslim piety in church and mosque. Jeremiah prophesied that Jerusalem would be destroyed by Babylon and for this was scorned by his people. Yet despite captivity in Babylonia, he asserted that God’s covenant with Israel would be as promised to Abraham, unbroken and everlasting.

The Prophets such as Jeremiah preserved Judaism. When an idea is simple enough, simply right, it can be held onto, even in the face of terrible suffering. Ritual separated from morality is false; it spawns cults. The Prophets defined Judaism as a religion of humane thought, peace, and justice. The spiritual voice of Jewish thinking was for all peoples to hear. The worst periods in western history have occurred when mankind has been deaf to Judaism’s special message.

In Abraham Joshua Heschel’s words, the Prophets expressed the “understanding of an understanding.” They operated on many levels. They spoke of this world and of visions transcendent. In their attempt to reconcile man to God, the Prophets raged during periods of prosperity against temporal power, shouting against the total futility of it all. Only by believing in one God and God’s law would man overcome his addiction to many gods and waging war. In the great words of Isaiah:

H
is very name aroused hatred. It is synonymous with treachery, deceit, and greed. Think of the progression Judas Goat, Judas Kiss, Judah, Jude the Obscure, Judas, Judaism, Jew…

Some scholars, including the eminent Hyam Maccoby (in his
Judas Iscarìot and the Myth of Jewish Evil),
believe that Judas the traitor did not exist. Paul himself makes no reference to Judas in the Epistles. It is possible that the character was created by the Pauline Church in Antioch for propaganda purposes. Especially after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E. by Titus’s troops, the Pauline Church sought to separate itself from the rebels in Judea and the Jewish Christians once led by Jesus’ brother James. The Gospels were written during and after the Judean War. Roman centurions were made to appear more appealing than the Jewish masses. Borrowing instances of Hellenic anti-Semitism, the authors of the Gospels assumed a pro-Roman stance, denying that Jesus was a rebel against Rome but asserting that he was an opponent of Judaism. To the anti-Semites, Jewish denial of Jesus’ divinity established Jewish guilt in his death by crucifixion.

The foundation of Christian hate for the Jews was laid in the Gospel According to Saint John. Unlike the earlier Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, John refers to Jesus as divine. Judas is set forth as fundamentally evil, terrifying, and avaricious. For such a divine figure as Jesus to fall, someone almost as divine must bring about his demise: the Black Christ, the Antichrist, Judas, with a full head of red hair, sporting a yellow robe, corrupt treasurer of the Apostles, money bag always in hand, ready (after haggling) to sell his Master for thirty pieces of silver. For those believing in John’s words, Judas was allied with Satan, the fallen archangel. The foul lie of an unholy trinity of Judas-Satan-Jews became implanted in Christian consciousness from the earliest years of the Pauline Church.

Many pagan religions directly preceding Christianity shared a common theme of the godly figure sacrificed by a closest friend or brother. First by official synods of the Church and later by parish priests and passion plays, Christians were instructed that Judas had betrayed Jesus to the Jewish authorities with a kiss. The Church argued that those authorities then exerted political pressure on the Romans to crucify him. Betrayal by someone Jesus deemed most intimate made all Jews enemies of all men for all time. Through its preaching, the Church emphasized that Jewish resistance in recognizing the Christ symbolized the murder of Jesus over and over again by every Jew in every generation.

With increasing savagery, Jews were dubbed by Christians a Judas nation, a people basically evil, of negative spirituality and obscene materiality. In religious literature (Saint Jerome, Martin Luther), folklore (the Judas myth), drama (Passion, Easter, and morality plays, Shakespeare’s Shylock and Iago), and literature (Dickens’ Fagin), the Judas character became the emblem of the demon Jew. Jewish people were characterized as stinking (Jewish stench), grotesquely shaped and lecherous (with grossly enlarged sexual organs ready to rape), homeless (the Wandering Jew), sadistic vampires (the ritual killing of children for their blood), scapegoats (horns protruding from their foreheads), treacherous (Alfred Dreyfus), usurers (never bankers), Satanic (wearing pointed hats), and unclean (Judaism as a filthy sow sucked by Hebrew piglets).

Judas Iscariot’s name is full of meanings. “Iscariot” is close to the Latin
sicarius,
which means “dagger man.” Judas is identified as an assassin, someone who sticks a knife in your back. He may have been a rebel against Rome like another apostle, Simon the Zealot. Judas is the one name among all of the Apostles that sounds like the name of the Jewish people. These relationships (especially the name Judas) were stressed by the Church to reveal what it viewed as the fundamentally Judas-like nature of Jews.

Whatever the connection between his name and his people, his role as the traitor selling his closest friend, confidant, master, for money, has endured as a potent and dangerous symbol. Modern movements of the left (Communists and Third World nationalists) and the right (Nazis and skinheads) with no professed ties to the Church, have utilized and institutionalized with horrible force the image of the Jew as traitor to the father-or motherland. For the Nazis and far rightists, the Jews were all Communists (see Trotsky!). For the Communists, every Jew was a capitalist (look at Rothschild!). In the post-Christian era of totalitarian regimes, ethical principles founded in New Testament beliefs have been cast aside. Jews are totally expendable in such an environment. In a religious vacuum the Judas tale continues to flourish.

Maccoby has urged that anti-Semitism, founded in the Judas myth, will disappear only when the Pauline concept of atonement is eschewed in favor of observance of Jesus’ teachings when he was
alive.
So as long as the death of Jesus is viewed as the central event of Christianity, the psychological need for the traitor, the Jew Judas, will never disappear, even in possible post-Christian ages of assimilation and atheism.