Miniature showing the expulsion of Jews following the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I of England (July 18, 1290). Marginal Illustration from the Rochester Chronicle (British Library, Cotton Nero D. II.), folio 183v. Via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
Howard Epstein – AGAIN WITH THE JEWISH QUESTION!
Last week, I ended this column with a note of optimism thus: “If the disgraceful performances in Congress last week come to be seen as the highwater mark of wokeism, then – albeit at a cost we should never have had to bear – there will have emerged, from our ongoing pain, some hope of improvement”. I apologise, dear reader, for my reckless positivity.
Within days after one of the Ivy League college presidents’s announcement of her resignation in shame at her inability to condemn naked antisemitism, another of the moral miscreants, Harvard University’s president, who had issued an apology for her response during the congressional testimony, received the good news that more than 700 faculty members had signed a petition backing her, contrary to calls for her removal. Thus was normality – anti-Jewish racism – resumed in the ivory towers of the good ole US of A.
Universities in forefront of anti-Jewish racism? We’ve been here before.
Theodore Herzl (who was to become the founder of modern political Zionism) was born into a middle-class Hungarian family in 1860. A devotee of all things German, Herzl believed that through German culture man would aspire to a higher sense of morality. He also hoped that he, and all Hungarian Jews, could free themselves from their “shameful Jewish characteristics” caused (he imagined) by their history of subjugation and poverty, transforming them into genuine German Kulturvolk.
In 1881, Herzl became a law student at the University of Vienna and joined the students’ union, Albia. In late 19th century Vienna, the burning issue was the so-called Jewish Question. In the German Enlightenment, it was an intellectual debate on what should be the standing in the gentile society of Jews in relationship to non-Jews. Eventually, it came to mean: how could German life and culture be rendered Jüdenrein (Jew-free)? For Jews who had tried to ignore their origins and become completely assimilated Germans, this was deeply troubling.
1881 was also the year in which disgraced former professor at Berlin University, Eugen Dühring, wrote the virulently anti-Semitic: “The Jewish Question as a Question of Racism”. Reading this stimulated Herzl’s serious concern with the Jewish Question.
Herzl fully participated in the life of Albia, even to the point of receiving facial scarring from his opponents’ dueling swords. This outward sign of complete immersion in German culture was not enough to save him, however, from the reality of anti-Jewish hostility. Albia was increasingly infested with German nationalist adherents raising the Jewish Question.
In March 1883, at an Albia student meeting, a fiercely anti-Jewish racist speech caused Herzl to resign his membership and refuse calls to reconsider. Five years later, in Mainz, Germany, upon leaving a bar, Herzl heard raucous jeering and the racist call: “HEP! HEP!”, an acronym formed from the Latin, “Hierosolyma Est Perdita” (Jerusalem is lost). This had a long history: the so-called HEP-HEP Riots were pogroms in Bavaria around 1819. Much Jewish property was destroyed and many Jews were killed.
By now, you will have understood that Hitler and Nazism had been preceded by more than a hundred years of anti-Jewish racism in the universities of Germany (and elsewhere in Europe).
Of course, the descent of the once illustrious German peoples from their dominance in almost every field – from the arts and music to electronics and the pharmaceutical industry – to the nation that would follow an insignificant Austrian corporal to the gates of hell, through which they pushed six million fellow Europeans simply because they were Jews, required some other ingredients. These may be summarised as: nationalist chauvinism catalysed by the indignities of the post-WWI treaties that stripped Germany of all but a rump of an army; widespread unemployment; the hyperinflation of 1922; political assassinations and street-fighting between communists and fascists; massive unemployment caused by the 1929 Wall Street Crash; and purist proportional representation.
By these events, the intellectual anti-Jewish racism fermented and fomented in the universities led to the infection of Hitler and the Nazi party, and the seduction of all branches of German society into a desire (shared today by the Hamas Charter) to rid the world of the Jews.
Could it happen again? The underlying causes are no longer merely festering in the über-woke ivory towers of academia. Since the pogrom perpetrated by the barbarians of Hamas last Simchat Torah, Jews in Christian society have become fair game. Whole faculties, both students and their teachers, are whipping up a great fervour, supporting dogma that blames the Jewish victims of naked terrorism.
It would not take much for it to spill over into everyday life, given the way that social media algorithms encourage hyperbole and extremism. Worried about BBC bias? Children, teens, young adults and young married do not watch “Auntie”. They get their news pumped into their conscious and unconscious from social media on their phones – and, there, opposition to Israel and the Jews is vicious.
Make no mistake: the Jewish Question is alive and sick in western society. We have reached a tipping point. Those aware of the relevant history will be watching to see when the damn, formed by right-thinking politicians and newspaper editors holding back widespread condemnation of the Jews, begins to crack, leading to boycotts of Jews and Jewish businesses, with exclusionary rules in professional bodies and other institutions, and is breached. Then we will see how the Western World proposes to solve its Jewish Problem.
Paranoia? Let us hope so but before dismissing these fears let the experience of our poor, damned and widely-exterminated predecessors in Europe inform your thinking.
No need to panic, however. Today, we have Israel as our ultimate protector; and next week I will explain why its best days are yet to come.
© Howard Epstein, December 2023
