| |
SPENGLER
When rabbis liked Hitler: A
tale for the Mideast
Anti-Semitic
propaganda redolent of the Nazi era has become
ubiquitous in the Muslim world, complain a chorus of
Jewish commentators. Egyptian television recently
serialized a version of The Protocols of the Elders
of Zion, a notorious forgery alleging a Jewish world
conspiracy. Syrian television shows caricatures of
Orthodox Jews engaged in ritual murder, and Saudi
clerics repeat the old canard that Jews bake their
holiday pastries with the blood of gentile children.
Those interested in the sordid details may
consult www.memri.org, which
translates Arabic print and broadcast media. Other 
commentators,
including Asia Times Online's Marc Erikson, emphasize
the Nazi roots both of the Islamist organizations and
the Ba'ath Party.
Nazi ideology may be gaining
popularity in the Islamic world, but Jews nonetheless
should show a bit more understanding. It was not so long
ago that the orthodox rabbis of Berlin liked Adolf
Hitler for precisely the same reason that many Muslims
do today, namely as an antidote to moral decay in the
modern world. No, this is not an out-take from The
Producers. The story is told in Mark Shapiro's
recent book, Between the Yeshiva World and Modern
Orthodoxy: The Life and Works of Rabbi Jehiel Jacob
Weinberg.
Six months after Hitler seized
power in 1933, several leading Berlin rabbis wrote to
him pledging loyalty to Germany. The rabbis argued that
they, the orthodox, shared the Nazis' moral values, as
opposed to decadent Bolshevism and libertinism, as
opposed to the left-wing Jews who made up much of the
avant garde. The rabbis promised Hitler that they would
do their best to persuade Jews around the world to end a
boycott on German products. In retrospect that seems
like a terrible mistake. Still, one would like to know
whether these rabbis, given complete foresight, still
would have preferred Hitler to, say, Barbra Streisand.
Nor was the rabbis' letter to Hitler entirely
exceptional. A majority of Italy's Jews joined Benito
Mussolini's Fascist party, which espoused an ideology
similar to Hitler's, but without the Jew-hating. Faced
with a catastrophic shift in values in the wake of World
War I, many European Jews looked for a repressive
government willing to impose traditional values.
Jewish readers no doubt will protest that I am
making too much of an anomaly. Haven't Jews identified
with liberal democracy since the time of Napoleon,
provided innumerable leaders to Western democracies,
starting with Benjamin Disraeli in Britain, and created
true parliamentary democracy in the Mideast?
Did
this writer not claim [Mahathir is right: the Jews do rule the
world] that modern democracy stems from the
Jewish notion of "divine humility", a concept alien to
Islam? Didn't Franz Rosenzweig equate Allah, the
beneficent and merciful, with a capricious Oriental
tyrant?
Yes, and yes again, but that strengthens
rather than weakens the point. If even a few prominent
Jews supported Hitler for cultural reasons, a
fortiori, we should expect Muslims to support Hitler
for cultural reasons. It was one thing to support Hitler
in 1933, and quite another after 1945, of course, when
the full extent of the horrors he perpetrated were known
to the whole world. The differences are obvious, not so
the similarities between the Berlin rabbis of 1933 and
today's Muslims. We will learn more by considering the
similarities.
Most people assume that Nazi
propaganda appeals to Muslims because Muslims are cross
at Israel. There is much more to it, and that involves
the sort of thing that attracted the orthodox rabbis of
Berlin. Weimar decadence was an affront to the
sensibilities of traditional Jews, and communism was an
active threat. It was common for German Jews in 1933 to
ignore what they thought was anti-Semitic steam-letting,
and cheer on a bully boy who would put paid to the
Bolsheviks.
Modern
American culture offers a far graver threat to the
Muslim world, bound up as it still is with the mores of
traditional society, 
than ever did
Weimar decade to traditional Jews. When President George
W Bush hectors the Muslim world on behalf of the
American ideal of freedom, traditional Muslims look
askance at him. By Muslim standards, what sort of parent
is he? Mothers in the Muslim world slit their daughters'
throats for less than Bush's twin daughters Barbara and
Jenna have done. For example, young Barbara Bush showers
in the same-sex bathrooms at Yale with men in the next
stall, the New York Post reported on November 3. In most
Muslim countries she would be a candidate for an honor
killing. If that is what the president means by freedom,
most Muslims will have none of it. Move all the Jews in
Israel to North Dakota, and disaffection in the Muslim
world will remain.
Weimar Republic Berlin became
the world's frontier town for sexual experimentation, to
the evident disgust of the orthodox rabbis in 1933. But
that has occurred in all democracies. Where in the
modern world has democracy flourished without the sexual
emancipation of women, the liberty to experiment with
alternative lifestyles, to depict sexual intercourse in
the plastic arts, and so forth? Permissiveness is in the
nature of modern democracy. As the authors of the
American constitution clearly understood, minorities
have the power to forestall the intent of the majority
for democracy to succeed. Otherwise a passing majority
could crush minorities and intimidate opposition. To the
chagrin of social conservatives, this principle applies
not only to economic and regional minorities, but to
sexual minorities as well.
Whether salvation is
of the Jews, as St John wrote, I do not know, but
democracy surely is, despite the orthodox rabbis of
Berlin. Divine humility, the concern felt by the creator
of all flesh for each one of his creations, is what
allows the individual human being to become an entire
universe. The pagan world, I observed in last week's
essay, Oil on the flames of civilizational
war erects a state and community into which
the individual dissolves. That is its great virtue and
its great attraction. One can be sure by yielding up
one's individuality to the mass. The mass in turn
imposes its code of behavior on individuals; every town,
tribe and household conforms.
There never has
been a state solution to the problem that used to be
known as liberty vs license; it is not even clear how
one would describe it today.
To be a little free
is to be a little pregnant. Freedom to terminate
pregnancy at will, to terminate adult life at will
(right to suicide), and the elimination of all stigma
attached to what once was called deviant sexual behavior
may have catastrophic social consequences. Formerly
Catholic countries, including Spain and Italy, as well
as the French-speaking province of Quebec in Canada,
experience birthrates which will halve their population
each century. Not all of the Western world will survive
its experiment with liberty, as freedom turns to anomie,
self-disgust, and the dwindling of the will to survive.
Today's Europe embodies the program of the
Enlightenment. National governments acknowledge the sway
of a supranational body of wise men, governments meet
basic human needs (except perhaps for elderly people
during a heat wave), individuals are left to pursue
happiness as they see fit. Yet by the most fundamental
measure, Europeans are less happy than any people of
whom we have detailed records in peacetime, for they do
not care enough for themselves to reproduce. Tens of
millions of Muslims live or have lived in Western
Europe, sufficient for the Muslim world to take the
measure of the West in its decline. In what way does
Europe provide an example that the Muslim world should
follow?
Americans are fond of saying that
Islamic radicals "hate us for who we are", a phrase
employed by commentators from Thomas Friedman to Victor
Davis Hanson. An Internet search turns up hundreds of
uses of that phrase. That is true, but just what "are
we"? America represents to the world a divine right to
do one's own thing, a proposition which does not enjoy
universal support. It is interesting that Friedman, for
years the best-known advocate of democratization of the
Middle East, now defends the idea of an "Islamic
Republic of Iraq". He is writhing on the hook of his own
conundrum. No society on earth has found a middle
ground. From the Muslim vantage point, the monolithic
state may offer better chances for cultural survival.
That may explain in part why highly educated and highly
motivated soldiers continue to offer bitter resistance
to the American occupation of Iraq.
(Copyright
2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact [email protected] for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
