Published: 19 April 2015
Last updated: 4 March 2024
By Colin Tatz
Absence makes the heart grow fonder — a nice enough proverb but not always true for Jews.
We are accustomed to books on Jews in the arts and sciences, in medicine, in the financial fields. We have libraries of books on the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, and the Middle East 'problem'. There is also an immense but still incomplete and growing literature on antisemitism, including Robert Wistrich’s recent A Lethal Obsession, meticulously presented in almost a thousand pages. It deals, inter alia, with the Nazi Judeocide, the Soviet war against Zion, France's Liberté, Egalité, Antisemitisme, Britain's Judeophobia, Jews in Eurabia, bigotry at the United Nations, Shylock meeting Uncle Sam, lying about the Holocaust, the holy wars of Hamas and Hezbollah, the jihadism of Ahmadinejad and Radical Islam. However Wistrich touches only fleetingly on the anti-Jewish beliefs and values in several nation states that no longer have any Jews or have never had any, the phenomenon of “antisemitism without Jews”.
David Nirenberg in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (2014) deals with this special kind of antisemitism: a mythology of imaginary Jews. He tells us about the negative characteristics of these imagined people: hyper-intellectual, with a predilection for tyranny, but paradoxically, for subversive radicalism, and worldly materialism. He shows us the indelible, ineradicable conceptualisation of 'the Jew' even in the absence of a Jew. Shakespeare is unlikely to have met a Jew (during the era of their expulsion from England in 1290), yet was able to give an audience a vivid picture of an imagined but quite absent Jew.
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Senegal in West Africa was a French colony that gained independence in 1960. Of the 14.4 million populace today, 94 percent are Muslims of many ethnicities, five percent are Christians. The first president, Leopold Senghor, was a poet, philosopher, and a preacher of African socialism. He initiated Senegal's now traditional involvement in humanitarianism and international peace-keeping. He and his colleagues showed a concern for differences in humankind, and a respect for different viewpoints and cultures.
A Senegalese archaeologist has 'unearthed' a total of 100 'registered' Jews in West Africa; 75 victims of the Holocaust were born in Senegal, which today has a Jewish population of 50. Yet the antisemitism emanating from Senghor's society is remarkable, ranging from mobs burning Israeli flags (egged on by elected parliamentarians), to the Senegalese UN ambassador declaiming that the major news organisations in America are 'dominated by Jews'. Antisemitic literature abounds.
Today's Malaysia has 28 million people. By all accounts, fewer than 100 Jews inhabit that domain. The official Penang census of 1899 showed the presence of 172 Jews, reduced to 30 by 1941.. Ezekiel Aaron Menasseh arrived from Baghdad in 1895 and claimed he was the only practising Jew in Malaya until after World War I. A synagogue opened in Penang in 1929, and closed in 1976 for want of a prayer quorum of ten adult men. Today there is state-sponsored antisemitism, instigated in the 1980s in part by the fanatical president Mahathir Mohammed. He banned the New York Philharmonic because they listed Ernst Bloch's Shlomo: A Hebrew Rhapsody on their tour program. He forbade the film Schindler's List as 'pro-Jewish propaganda' in the 1990s. Jews, he proclaimed in an astounding inversion, are 'the most gifted children of Goebbels'. The Zionists, he insisted, were the source of his country's economic woes. Their airport bookstores take pride in pushing the sale of the notorious forgeries that emerged from the Paris offices of the Russian secret service in 1903, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Pakistan, with 150 million Muslims, has no Jews. Yet the anti-Jewish vitriol and venom, said one eminent journalist, 'flows as easily as water'. Jews are said to have conspired to destroy the World Trade Centre in 2001, and a widespread belief there is that all Israelis and Jews who worked in those buildings were given advance warning not to go to work on 9/11. We now know that Pakistanis were behind the attacks on Mumbai in India in 2008, with a very specific targeting of Chabad House, a Jewish centre, barely a pinpoint in a city of 15 million people. In a country where three-quarters of the people are illiterate, the teachings, preachings and sayings of the religious leaders hold almost total sway.
The Japanese however are not illiterate, not dependent on mullahs, not Muslim jihadists. Japan, with 127 million people, has had no visible Jews — from 1,000 maximum according to one source, to 100 from another. They began to learn about Jews when they came across the Protocols from Russians during military campaigns after World War I and, by the start of World War II, were 'aware' that Jews were 'smart'. They devised the 'Fugu Plan', a little-known footnote in war history, named after fugu, the dangerous puffer fish delicacy that chefs have to prepare for tasty ingestion without the deadly toxin breaking out of its sac. The Fugu Plan involved capturing Jews in the Dutch East Indies and environs, taking them to occupied Manchuria and politely enslaving them, treating them with some kindness, and putting them to work to smarten up the economy and the administration. The clearly implied risk however was that they could turn out to be poisonous.
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In 1996, the noted historian Bernard Wasserstein wrote the Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945. 'The Jews are vanishing from Europe — and not only because of Hitler.' In 1939, there were close on ten millions Jews. More than half were murdered, but emigration and low birth rates reduced those remaining to fewer than two million by 1994. Pockets of ultra-Orthodox Jews, the haredim, he forecast, will remain, but they will be 'picturesque, like the Amish in Pennsylvania'.
His figures for Jewish diminution in some countries are startling:
Germany has the fastest growing Jewish population in the world today, with some 118,000 souls. Perhaps they take comfort from the way Germany has admitted guilt, held thousands of trials, made apology and reparations, instituted anti-discrimination laws, criminalised Holocaust denial, and built great museums as reminders and memorials. Germany, it seems, is the most aware society of a Jewish absence — and the reasons for it.
Diminution notwithstanding, antisemitism in Europe has not only continued but escalated. In the first decade of this century, the old Jew-hatreds have emerged, often masquerading as anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli politics. The rampant and increasingly physical antagonism often goes without comment let alone punishment. A few Europeans still retain a sliver of memory and seeming remorse, as in the building of Holocaust museums in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Warsaw. I visited Lithuania in 2003 and was impressed by the way the government has erected historical memorials and memorial plaques across the country. The now 3,400 Jews in Vilnius have a cultural and religious life but are assailed daily in the media and in parliament.
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What does all this tell us? Certainly, about the historicity, longevity, the eternity of disliking Jews. In a lifetime of reading works on antisemitism I have yet to find a society that doesn't have, or has never had, an inescapable, prevalent dislike, disdain and denunciation of Jews. The books abound: Leon Poliakov's four-volume history of antisemitism (1972–1976), Bernard Glassman's study (1973) of imagined Jews and their stereotypes in England between 1290 and 1700; Jacob Katz's From Prejudice to Destruction: Anti-Semitism, 1700–1933 (1980); Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism and Robert Wistrich's monumental Lethal Obsession. There is overwhelming evidence of a pervasive, ever-present hostility to Jews.
Antisemitism is ever there, and despite the unceasing efforts of anti-discrimination bodies world-wide, the best one can hope for is some form of amelioration, of alleviation, part of the time. Some friends, colleagues and readers of my writings question this very assertion about the ubiquity and eternity of antisemitism. Has it ended with our world today, the era of globalisation and secularisation, and a greater than ever concern with human rights? No, it grows, as evidenced by radical Islamic jihadism, which has taken on the whole panoply of earlier Christian antisemitism, and the resurrection of Christian Jew-hatred (and imminent violence) in Hungary and Ukraine.
The only possible 'treatment' is to criminalise antisemitic behaviour because we can never get to the prejudiced mindsets part of it. Our Attorney-General George Brandis tried to change such protective laws as we have, by insisting we have a right to be bigots. If one suggested that all Western and Eastern nations criminally outlaw antisemitic actions, one can readily wager that the overwhelming masses would fight to protect their right to hate Jews, into eternity.
