In his 2003 literary masterpiece, The Pity of It All, Amos Elon describes how the Jews came to Germany and made modern Germany into the world’s most cultured and sophisticated nation, only to be destroyed by it.
HOWARD EPSTEIN: JEWISH COMINGS AND GOINGS – SOME LESSONS FROM HISTORY
In his 2003 literary masterpiece, The Pity of It All, Amos Elon describes how the Jews came to Germany and created modern Germany as the world’s most cultured and sophisticated nation, only to be destroyed by it. At the start of that process, he writes, throughout the 19th century German Jews endured periodic outbursts of Jew-hatred. The “Hep Hep” riots (the battle-cry of the rioters and an acronym for Hierosolyma Est Perdita, Jerusalem is Lost) erupted in 1819 and spread throughout the states that would later be unified by Bismarck as Germany. The Latin term rather gave the game away: it had been inspired by intellectuals. Anti-Semitism often begins amongst the intelligentsia. It was in the German universities of the 19th century that the ground was laid for the rise of Nazism. (Two further ingredients were necessary to spark the German war against the Jews: economic hardship and the articulacy of Adolf Hitler. Hitler is dead but his philosophy lives on. Mein Kampf was republished in January 2016 and sold out immediately. Many copies are said to have been bought for scholarly purposes, but we know the habitat of scholars….)
In 1815, at the Congress of Vienna, a German confederation was proposed. Nationalism exploded among the students of the Protestant German universities – and, hand-in-glove, Jew-hatred. The following year, J. F. Fries (building upon the Jew-hatred of Martin Luther), issued from Heidelberg University a pamphlet: How the Jews endanger the prosperity and the character of the Germans, in which he called for the extermination of the Jews, writing:-
… the Jews “were and are the bloodsuckers of the people..” “Thus the Jewish caste … should be exterminated root and branch, because it is obviously of all secret and political societies and states within the state the most dangerous”. … “Any immigration of Jews should be forbidden, their emigration should be promoted. Their freedom to marry should … be limited… . It should be forbidden that any Christian be hired by a Jew” … They should be required to wear “a special mark on their clothing”.
(What did the German Jews of 1935 think – that the journey from Meir Kampf to the Nuremberg Laws took only ten years?)
Despite Fries’ imprecations, as Elon explains, a large Jewish middle class developed in nineteenth century Germany, with Jews attending universities and becoming professionals, many of them doctors and lawyers. Indeed, by 1925, when Mein Kampf was first published, around twenty per cent of all doctors and lawyers in Germany were Jewish; yet Jews constituted only 1% of the German population.
The picture is worryingly similar in the UK today. Jews are massively over-represented in the professions and business, occupying key positions in numbers out of all proportion to their representation (0.40%) in the UK – out of a population of 63 million (and rising), only some 260,000 (and falling). Anti-Semitism, wearing its anti-Zionist garb, is widespread throughout British academia with frequent attempts, many of them successful, to boycott Israeli academics and Israeli universities. In the medical profession too (in which Muslims are heavily represented), in the trade unions and municipal authorities, and on the protestant fringes of Great Britain – particularly Scotland – we see boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) hyper-activity.
Comings and goings. Has there been a history of anti-Semitism in the UK? The Magna Carta, 1215, containing anti-Jewish clauses, presaged the Jews’ expulsion from England in 1290. They did not reappear on that Sceptred Isle in significant numbers until the 19th century.
The French have a long record of anti-Jewish sentiment, some of it so vicious that it is worthy of some scrutiny.
The fin de siècle Dreyfus trial led Theodore Herzl to conclude that Jews would be safe only when they had their own state. What is not so well-known as the events that engulfed Dreyfus are those that occurred after his belated release. The most damning evidence before the kangaroo court that sentenced Dreyfus in 1894 to Devil’s Island was presented by Lieutenant-Colonel Hubert-Joseph Henry, later discovered to be a forgery comprising two separate documents, thereupon dubbed “faux Henry“. Henry, once challenged, confessed and was sentenced to military prison. On the very first night of his imprisonment, Henry was left alone in his cell with a bottle of rum and a shaving razor. He was later was found with his throat slit, half the rum consumed and an incomplete letter to his wife before him. Suicide was declared as the cause. The most extravagant manifestation of French anti-Semitism was yet to come.
La Gazette de France praised Henry for sacrificing his life pour la Patrie. A fund was declared for Henry’s widow and over 130,000 francs collected. According to Professor Ruth Harris, Tutor in Modern History at Oxford University:-
“Accompanying [the] donations are notes… vicious anti-Semitic fantasies and all about how we are going to murder these Jews and defend the cause of Christian solidarity with the wife and the child. … Henry is seen as a martyr .. Charles Maurras of Action Française said: the blades [with which Henry cut his throat] are the new relics of the nation. … Henry is seen as a saint. His deception is a patriotic forgery. … Henry becomes elevated from someone who is a forger to a new hero….”[1]
In other words, according to the French, at a remove of several stages, the Jews killed Henry.
It may be that there are today elements amongst the intelligentsia of France that have not completely forgotten, or forgiven, how l’affaire Dreyfus split the nation, threatened the stability of the Republic and catalysed its separation from the Catholic Church. Certainly, little reluctance was observed amongst the French who saw off the Jews of Paris by trains to the camps and fires of the Holocaust, with post-war expressions of guilt by some to the disgust of others.
All that is a lot of baggage on the backs of French Jews, yet in France today the threat to the Jews is not so clearly from the intelligentsia, not yet at any rate. The clear and present danger is the significant and fast-growing population of Muslims. Whilst Moslem community leaders say that only 1% of their people are radicalised, out of a French Muslim community of some 7 million (out of the French population of 66 million), that would mean “only” 70,000 are inimical to Jewish interests. There is no need to list here the bloody and fatal outrages against the Jewish communities of France in recent years committed by Moslems, which are well-documented elsewhere and in any event fresh in our minds. French Jews are now advised not to wear a kippah in public. Many French Jews are now undecided only about when, rather than whether, they will leave France.
Comings and goings. Jews returned to Germany after the Holocaust. Today they again feel threatened. Presently, the thuggish elements in society do not wear brown shirts whilst they burn down immigration centres in towns and cities across Germany, as an expression of their aggression towards minorities – the newly-arrived from Arab and African countries. The targets of that opprobrium could change.
Comings and goings. Jews arriving in England with the Romans, were thrown out 1,300 years later, returning after an absence of 600 years; Jews arriving in Germany, early in the 19th century, greatly influencing it for the better and then, in the Holocaust, were consumed by it, only to return afterwards; Jews persecuted and castigated in France, deported to Auschwitz, were replaced by north African Jews after the war. We should also observe that in 1492, as Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, so they were welcomed into Poland, only to become reviled by the Poles over the ensuing centuries. In June 2015, Spain told the Jews that all was forgiven and they were welcome to return. There were none who could do so from Poland. Fully half of the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust comprised the Polish Jewish community.
Comings and goings. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and others in Europe put out the welcome mat in 2015 for refugees from the upheavals emanating from the Arab Spring (or Fall). What is unclear is what the reception would have been like had the refugees been refujews. In any event, that gushing acceptance of aliens into Europe has already seen an ugly backlash, with the Danes passing laws to confiscate the jewellery of arriving Syrians (who appeared an unalloyed asset only a year ago) and others, and the Schengen open-frontiers policy lying in tatters alongside the razor-wire fences being erected all over Europe, and with the prospect of far right governments all over Europe on the horizon.
It was economic collapse that catapulted Hitler into power. Now today, stock markets are reeling from the realisation that the Chinese, not the economic and fiscal geniuses they were perceived to be after all, have reached the point where they can no longer fund the Western capitalist system by continuing to buy commodities they do not need. The US having been drained of liquidity, thanks to half a century of multiple traumas on Wall Street and in corporate America, the fear is that, given that interest rates are at the point where they cannot be reduced further, and Quantative Easing (QE, an electronic semblance of the printing of money to bolster the money supply, and to give the impression of solvency) seen to be a busted flush, there are precious few tools available to cope with the next economic disaster.
If financial melt-down should arrive, might we see the return of the Age of the Scapegoat? Whom will the British and the Europeans then blame – the newly-arrived Muslims, or the well-established and well-placed Jews? And if it should be the Jews, and they are made increasingly unwanted, or worse, where will they be welcome? In Spain, with its 25% unemployment rate? In the USA, with its aversion to immigration from the First World, ballots for the lucky few and scarcely more numerous Green Card applications that take years?
Baruchim haba’im, chaverim.
Comings and goings. The Jews were expelled from the Holy Land by the Romans at the start of the Common Era and were unable to re-establish themselves here for the best part of 2,000 years; but Israel is now firmly established and, with substantial strength in fiscal and military matters, in democracy and the rule of law, in culture and the arts, we are here to stay.
Israel does, however, have one very serious problem. There are around a million Jews in France, the UK and Ukraine (a war zone, remember?). What if only 25% wanted to come here over the next five to ten years? What if it were more? In any event, it is obvious that they cannot all live between Gadera and Hadera.
We had better start preparing …..
[1] BBC Radio – In Our Time, 8 Oct 2009
Howard Epstein, LLB, is an English commercial lawyer of some 45 years’ standing. He still practices international commercial litigation on several continents. As such, he is articulate and voluble.
Howard is also a staunch Zionist, having achieved aliyah in September 2005, after a lifetime as “an armchair Zionist”. His parents met at a Habonim function and he was raised with Zionism on a daily basis. He is well-read, knowledgeable and opinionated about Jewish and Israeli history and current affairs.
© Howard Epstein 2016
[1] BBC Radio – In Our Time, 8 Oct 2009
HOWARD EPSTEIN: JEWISH COMINGS AND GOINGS – SOME LESSONS FROM HISTORY
