Dear Spengler, Like
many Jews of my generation (I was born in 1961), I
was completely unprepared, psychologically, emotionally
and in any other way, for the wave of anti-Semitism
which has been sweeping the world these last three and a
half years. I grew up in the United States and moved
to Israel after completing high school, and I never had
any first-hand experience with anti-Semitism (except for
being cursed at once by a bunch of drunk rednecks riding
in the back of a pickup truck in Maryland). So, unlike
my parents' generation, who grew up having to cope with
serious anti-Semitism (my father was in Dachau; my
mother's family fled Berlin after Hitler came to power),
I never had to, and the same is true of nearly all my
contemporaries except those who grew up in the Soviet
Union.
Yet these days, I can't open a newspaper
or log on to the Internet without encountering numerous
reports of either outright, often violent, anti-Semitism
or of vicious anti-Semitism thinly veiled as
anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism. It's very demoralizing.
I take some comfort from your articles, which give me
hope that we'll still be reading the Bible in Hebrew
long after there's anyone left who can read Proust or
Kant or Dante in the untranslated original. But I take
no comfort at all from the realization that if those
writers are read at all it will be in Arabic
translation.
Do you have any advice on how to
develop the emotional and psychological tools for coping
with anti-Semitism? Uzi
Amit-Kohn Jerusalem
Dear
Uzi, Not every day does a columnist at an Asian
publication get a query from Jerusalem about
anti-Semitism. Careful what you ask for.
My
advice is: If you want everyone to feel sorry for you,
move to sub-Saharan Africa and lose weight. If you want
to stay Jewish, toughen up.
On occasion I
eavesdrop on the Jewish debate on the subject, eg the
February issue of Commentary,
where several authorities contend that anti-Semitism
stems from envy of Jewish success. There surely is some
truth to this. In 1965, the same sort of envy murdered a
million ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. No one, though,
imagines that there is a world Chinese conspiracy.
Something else must be at work. More than Jewish
success, I surmise, other peoples envy Jewish
immortality (What the Jews won't tell
you, November 4, 2003). In the midst
of a Great Extinction of peoples, you should expect this
to get worse, not better.
Your best-known
theologian of the past century was Franz Rosenzweig, who
wrote:
"[The Jewish] people, because it trusts
in its self-created eternity and in nothing else in the
world, truly believes in its own eternity. The peoples
of the world, however, must reckon with their own death,
be it at a point in time ever so distant, just as every
individual must reckon with his own death. The love of
the peoples for their own ethnicity is sweet and
pregnant with this presentiment of death. Love is only
so sweet when its object is mortal; only the bitterness
of death can evoke this ultimate sweetness. Thus the
peoples of the world can foresee a time when their land
with its rivers and mountains will lie under the heavens
as it does today, but other people will live there; when
their language will be entombed in the libraries and
their laws and customs will have lost their living
power." (Der Stern der Erloesung, Suhrkamp, p
338, my translation)
Hebrew is the only
language spoken continuously for the past 3,000 years
(and perhaps longer, but let us leave that to the
philologists), and the Jews are the only people who have
come down intact through history. Of the countless
tribes and tongues extinguished by rapine and conquest,
we know the names of only a small fraction. Only a
fraction of that fraction has left behind a trace of
their now-extinct language. An unfathomable amount of
human striving has vanished into the mist - the fury of
warriors, the devotion of priests, the passion of
lovers, the anxiety of parents. Their unremembered lives
have lost their significance. In vain we listen for
echoes of this perished mass of humanity, for an
Assyrian mother's lament over a dead child, for the
clang of bronze at a Scythian battle, for the intonation
of prayers to a Toltec idol now lodged in a museum. But
the extinct peoples will not speak to us; their muteness
horrifies us, warning that one day no one will remember
us either. For the preponderance of humanity, Mephisto's
gloat over the body of Faust applies with a vengeance:
Vorbei! ein dummes Wort.
Warum vorbei? Vorbei und reines Nicht, vollkommnes
Einerlei! ("It's over" - a stupid notion. Why
"over"? "Over" and pure nothing, one and the same
thing!)
As the German language fades, no one
will remember Goethe's Mephisto, either.
The
Jews, on the other hand, recall indignantly every injury
over three and a half millennia. That is a luxury no
other nation possesses. Everyone else forgot about all
the past injuries after the men were killed, the women
raped, and the children carried off as slaves. For most
of humanity, things are getting more dangerous, not
less. I replied as follows on July 8, 2003, to Eric
Garrett of the World Conservation Union:
"Does Spengler know, for
instance, that in the last century 2,000 distinct
ethnic groups have gone extinct?" Eric Garrett asks in
his June 12 riposte, A question of
identity, to an earlier
article of mine, Neo-cons in a religious
bind.
Garrett's
organization, the World Conservation Union, is devoted
to preserving fragile cultures. As a matter of fact, I
reported in this space that in the next decade, yet
another 2,000 distinct ethnic groups would go extinct
(Live and let die, April 13, 2002). Ignore the endangered Ewoks
for a moment, Mr Garrett, and explain why the imperial
peoples of the past two centuries - Germans, Japanese,
French, Italians, Russians, and so forth - have
elected to disappear, through failure to reproduce
(Why Europe chooses
extinction, April 8, 2003).
If (as Emerson said) "the mass of men lead
lives of quiet desperation", what sort of desperation
overpowers whole peoples who fear with good reason for
their continuity on Earth? While you worry that the
world some day will read Dante in Arabic translation
(as once it read Aristotle), the Islamic world labors
under an dreadful sense of its own fragility. Consider
the case of Nigeria's polio epidemic:
ABUJA,
Jan 28 (Reuters) - Nigeria is to test samples of the
polio vaccine next month in the hope of resolving a
dispute with Muslim authorities which has helped
spread the crippling disease to children across
Africa. Three predominantly Muslim states in northern
Nigeria stopped immunizations in November because
Islamic authorities suspect the vaccines of spreading
infertility - which they believe is part of an
American conspiracy to depopulate Africa's most
populous nation. "A meeting has been scheduled in two
weeks' time with all the states that are opposed to
the immunization program," Health Minister Eyitayo
Lambo told Reuters. "There are serious suspicions of a
conspiracy by the US government to depopulate Nigeria,
among other developing countries," he told Reuters.
"Unless a joint examination is undertaken, suspicions
will linger and people will not be forthcoming."
As of
February 26, the boycott continued in some Nigerian
states, at the behest of the state governors. Nigerian
Muslims see their existence at risk, but project this
risk onto an hallucinated American plan to eradicate
them. In consequence of this paranoid delusion they
take steps that in fact endanger their physical
existence.
There are many reasons for Arabs to
hate Jews: the unwanted Jewish presence in the Dar al
Islam, Jewish success, Jewish precedence (the Koran
claims to supersede the Jewish scriptures).
There is yet another reason to hate the Jews, namely
their apparent immortality. How can the Arabs (or the
Germans, or whoever) fancy themselves the eternal people
so long as the Jews hold prior claim to this status?
Paranoia infuses much of what anti-Semites say
about the Jews, for reasons I addressed elsewhere
(It's not the end of the world -
it's the end of you , February
3). More than anything else human beings want their
lives to be significant. The unbearable truth is that
the lives of most people who ever lived are
insignificant; those of many people who live today
threaten to become so. ("I feel so insignificant," said
the ant with Woody Allen's voice in Antz. "That's
a breakthrough," said the ant psychiatrist. "You are
insignificant.") Paranoia inverts this horrifying sense
of insignificance. To the paranoid, everything is
significant. Powerful forces conspire against him. He
imagines himself to be a figure of great importance.
Threaten his protective illusion and he may try to kill
you. What he cannot bear is the notion that he truly is
insignificant.
To cope with anti-Semitism, try putting
yourself in the place of someone who has to cope with
cultural extinction. Your problem, Uzi, is that you wish
to live in an orderly and stable world. The actual world
is disorderly and unstable. For most of the world's
people modernity is a mortal challenge; for some of
them it is a death knell. Where old cultures happily
meld with the new, the Chinese for example,
anti-Semitism is unknown. Translations of anti-Semitic
tracts still circulate in Japan, however, where an old
culture still regards the outside world with foreboding.
Understandably, today's Jews for the most part
have no desire to be a Chosen People, a Light unto the
Nations, the bearer of revelation until that Day when
all peoples shall recognize one God with one Name, as
observant Jews intone in their thrice-daily ablutions.
They want normality, that is, to get on with their lives
and savor the success they have achieved in every field
of endeavor. Mortality weighs lightly upon peoples who
adapt easily to changing circumstances, but it haunts
the waking nightmares of those peoples who cannot.
Normality is overrated. The normal condition of
the nations of the world is to vanish beyond memory. If
you want to remain an exception, you have to be a
hero. Spengler
Mar 2, 2004
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