Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice

Rating:
Summary: STATUES OF HITLER STAND IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Review: Bernard Lewis is quite the scholarly oddity. As an historian of the Middle East, he's deserving of the widespread acclaim and respect that has been accorded him for over 50 years. However historians often assume (without any qualification) the extremely pretentious roles of political scientist, sociologist, psychologist, and social activist. In these domains, Lewis has earned himself a rather embarrassing notoriety. While he can document historical facts like few others can, he can also exhibit the sort of outright bigotry that is entirely unbefitting for any respectable academic. Lewis exemplifies both of these qualities in this book.

The first chapters deal with the problem of defining such complicated terms as "Jew", "Semite", "anti-Semite", and "Zionism". In these discussions, Lewis offers some illuminating commentary. He states "the Semites were never a race" (p. 50). He mentions that it is debated whether the original language of the Hebrews was even of Canaanite (Semitic) origins (p. 52). Arabic is "linguistically and structurally...the most archaic of all [Canaanite languages] and thus probably the nearest to the ancestral Semitic language" (p.55). He presents a solid analysis of European anti-Semitism, beginning with early Christianity. He argues that anti-Semitism was originally a Christian "disease". There are several quotations from major figures in European history, including Voltaire, Robespierre, Honore de Balzac, T.S. Eliot, St. John Chrysostom, Martin Luther, Pope Innocent III, and the saintly St. Augustine. Christian anti-Semitism begins in the New Testament, in which the Jews are reported to have orchestrated the murder of the messiah. This fable gave Christianity a theological justification for its horrific oppression of the Jews. European anti-Semitism later acquired a secular dimension, with philosophers and scientists publishing speculative tracts on various intellectual, moral, and physical Jewish deficiencies. Christians, meanwhile, were continuously abetting the propagation of anti-Semitic literature.

Lewis provides an excellent analysis of the historical relations between Muslims and Jews. He emphasizes that in the Islamic tradition, the insignificance and powerlessness of the Jew negated any notion of grand-scale, conspiratorial Jewish evil. "In classical Islamic writings, whether religious, philosophical, or literary, there is nothing resembling the concern with Jews that characterizes certain Christian writings from the earliest times to the present day" (p. 126). In sharp contrast to Christian Europe, the Jews of Islam lived relatively dignified lives and enjoyed limited, but basic rights. They were often times trusted at high levels of government. Saladin's personal physician and chronicler was the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides. In Moorish Spain and Ottoman Turkey, the Jews were permitted to implement Jewish laws in their communities. Lewis's portrayal of Jewish life in classical Islam is surprisingly benign.

In tracing the evolution of anti-Semitism into the Arab world, Lewis repeatedly emphasizes the scandalous role of Christian missionaries. "It began with the Christian Arab minorities" and was encouraged by "priests and missionaries" (p. 132). The first Arabic translations of European anti-Semitic literature were published by Christian Arabs. Stories of the infamous Jewish blood libel "for a long time continued to derive exclusively from Christian sources" (p. 137). "Clergymen and missionaries of various kinds" exerted their anti-Semitic influence in Palestine (p. 172). Even American Protestant missionaries played a role in spreading anti-Semitism in the Middle East. In contrast, the Ottomans closed down newspapers that published anti-Semitic incitements (p.134). Lewis makes it clear that anti-Semitism was introduced into the Arab world via the Christian highway and not the Islamic one.

As informative as these discussions are, they are not without severe shortcomings. For example, Lewis's treatment of Zionism is clearly apologetic. Nowhere does Lewis mention the infamously racist Law of Return, which permits any Jew anywhere in the world to immigrate to Israel, irrespective of his or her nationality, while barring exiled Palestinians from returning to their homeland. Lewis downplays the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla as relatively minor and insignificant atrocities. He mentions that the Palestinians were "compelled" to leave in 1948, a rather vulgar euphemism for the destruction of 400 villages and the murder of thousands of people. Lewis also insinuates that anybody who questions the 6 million figure is an anti-Semite. However, according to Raul Hillberg, who is universally recognized as the leading historian of the Holocaust and acknowledged by Lewis himself as such, the actual figure for the victims is 5.1 million (see Raul Hillberg, Destruction of the European Jews, Appendix B). Lewis also fails to mention Israel's support for apartheid South Africa. He appears to subscribe to the scandalous notion that the Holocaust was "unique" in the sense that the ultimate objective of the Nazi's was to "eliminate, destroy, and in the final stage, physically to exterminate his victim" (p. 22). However, this claim to uniqueness is preposterous. The most glaring omission in the discussion of uniqueness is the destruction of the Native Americans, by far the greatest campaign of genocide in human history (for a scholarly analysis, see Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present"). Unless one ignores minor details such as these, Lewis's book loses much of its coherence.

However, the most extreme and dangerous example of Professor Lewis's bigotry lies in his denial of the Armenian genocide. In 1994, Lewis got himself into serious legal hot waters when he advanced this unbelievable denial in a Jewish weekly in France (see "France Fines Historian Over Armenian Denial," in Boston Globe, 22 June 1995), which was followed by an uproar in the French intellectual community. France maintains strict legislation against any denial of the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Lewis's sensitivities to racism are obviously compromised when it involves the Armenians. On this unique brand of Zionist racism, see The Banality of Indifference: Zionism and the Armenian Genocide, by the Israeli scholar, Yair Auron. The French scandal seriously brings into question whether Lewis is morally qualified to be writing so confidently about racism.

This book should be read along with Israeli scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi's, "Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel", which deals with issues that Lewis refuses to discuss.

Rating:
Summary: A must-read.
Review: I call this book "A must-read" because if you are even considering the subject of anti-Semitism, or the Arab-Israeli conflict, or just plain prejudice regardless of what kind of prejudice is analyzed, its 285 pages are the perfect place to start. Bernard Lewis writes about anti-Semitism in his areas of expertise (the Arab world, the Moslem world, the Middle East) as one would write about an illness, a particularly ugly kind of illness. He is like a compassionate physician called to observe and diagnose a patient who has been infected with a horrible disease that is consuming his (or her) body and soul. As a non-Jew and an immigrant in the United States, I have often encountered Arabs who mistake me for someone who will share their hatred of Jews, simply because we share the immigrant experience in the US. This has happened in far too many occasions to be considered unimportant. The vast majority of Arabs that I've met in eleven years in this country, have assumed (correctly) that I have a Christian education, and (incorrectly) that I have been infected by the anti-Jewish syndrome that has, tragically, been most evident in Christian societies for two thousand years. Bernard Lewis' book has helped me understand this bothersome fact of life in my dealings with Arabs for the last eleven years. It was in part this book what provoked Edward Said's reaction against, and verbal abuse of, Bernard Lewis, and this, in turn, made me interested in the work of Edward Said. I have read now several of Professor Lewis' works and several collected articles by Edward Said, and I cannot find validity in the passionate, but flimsy arguments that Said puts forward to attack Lewis, like claiming that the latter has no knowledge of -or intentionally ignores- the problems of the Middle East in which many of Lewis' examples of anti-Semitism take place. If anyone reads two books by Bernard Lewis, it must become clear that the man understands his subject. So, "Semites and Anti-Semites" is a must-read for those who want to see patterns of hatred in order to fight against them. It also showed me two totally different authors, with a completely different set of ethics: on the one hand, Lewis is serious, methodical, and compassionate of both the victims and the hatemongers. On the other, Said has been unmasked recently in "Commentary", in an article by Justus Weiner, as someone who lied about his past to "make up" a biography as a Palestinian refugee. "Semites and Anti-Semites" deals exactly with this kind of people.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightening and disturbing
Review: Lewis writes a persuasive and detailed account of the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. He credits its emergence to European influences, charts the collaboration between Arab nationalism and Nazism and the disturbing proliferation of anti-Semitic tracts following 1948. This is a well-written, powerful book which must be read in order to understand why the Middle East conflict has gone on so long.

Rating:
Summary: A dreadful threat to the future
Review: The bout of Jew-hate that convulsed Europe until the fall of Hitler was in effect an episode, a long-lived but ultimately futile piece of social pathology dependent not on any positive religion - though Bernard Lewis' opening remarks tend to argue otherwise - but rather on a socio-cultural convulsion due to various kinds of cultural maladjustment (among which I would place very high an unconscious desire to neutralize or destroy the Christian religion by striking at its ancestor). In its essentials, I believe it was an episode and no more. Except for the lunatic fringe, it and all its products have been consigned to the dustbin of culture history, and, but for the horror of what arose from them, the PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and such things would be a subject for jokes.
In the Arab world, however, what was a craze - and never without opponents; at no point was the wave of so-called anti-Semitism ever without opponents in the West - has become the consensus; and shows signs of embedding itself into the culture too deep to be removed. What is worse, it has been accepted with no discussion, debate or serious opposition. Debate in Arab culture is difficult - due mainly to the tyrannical natures of most states, that makes it difficult to engage in unperturbed opposition of views which may well have official backing - but not impossible; and many things do in fact get debated with earnest intelligence. The legend of the evil Jew, however, is not one of these things: practically no Muslim voice of any importance has challenged it; and even if anyone did, they would be wasting their time, since Arab and Muslim public opinion simply would not listen. The Arab and Muslim world has eaten, swallowed and digested the sin of the West; metabolised the worst of our social pathologies, as though there was anything to gain by doing so.
The excuse for this, of course, is the rise of the State of Israel; but, quite apart from the fact that the new Arab Anti-Semitism (and yes, I know it is a contradiction in terms) has actually made the Arabs less capable of understanding and dealing with their enemy (witness the widespread conspiracy theory that the Israeli troops and aircraft during the Six Days' War were in fact led and manned by Americans), I think this is to some extent a pretext. Arabs had been flirting with German philosophies, with totalitarianism and racism, well before the foundation of the Jewish State - the root of the Baath party, founded in the thirties, is in a typically Fascist mixture of nationalism and socialism leavened with a mystique of group love. These phenomena arose from the failure of the Arab nation to deal with the modern world, and their embedding in the Arab psyche, with their corollary of conspiracy theory, simply diminishes further their ability to do so. Conspiracy theory is not a way, however pathological, to deal with the complexities of the real world; it is a way to deny them.
This horrendous process is documented in quite intolerable detail in this excellent book, and God knows there is enough to be said about it. Bernard Lewis shows himself, if anything, too fair to the Arabs. Perhaps the most frightening feature is the calm, even polite way in which the most vicious drivel is spouted with no understanding either of its odiousness or of its sheer ignorance; what one might call the innocence of evil. This is a deeply troubling book, not only for what it says about any future possibility of peace with Israel, but for the more basic issue of the Arab attitude to a world they perceive as hostile, ranged against them, existing in a monstrous conspiracy to crush and destroy them. It cannot be healthy for one of the great nations of the world to live in a state of permanent fear and hatred.

Rating:
Summary: A dreadful threat to the future
Review: The bout of Jew-hate that convulsed Europe until the fall of Hitler was in effect an episode, a long-lived but ultimately futile piece of social pathology dependent not on any positive religion - though Bernard Lewis' opening remarks tend to argue otherwise - but rather on a socio-cultural convulsion due to various kinds of cultural maladjustment (among which I would place very high an unconscious desire to neutralize or destroy the Christian religion by striking at its ancestor). In its essentials, I believe it was an episode and no more. Except for the lunatic fringe, it and all its products have been consigned to the dustbin of culture history, and, but for the horror of what arose from them, the PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION and such things would be a subject for jokes.
In the Arab world, however, what was a craze - and never without opponents; at no point was the wave of so-called anti-Semitism ever without opponents in the West - has become the consensus; and shows signs of embedding itself into the culture too deep to be removed. What is worse, it has been accepted with no discussion, debate or serious opposition. Debate in Arab culture is difficult - due mainly to the tyrannical natures of most states, that makes it difficult to engage in unperturbed opposition of views which may well have official backing - but not impossible; and many things do in fact get debated with earnest intelligence. The legend of the evil Jew, however, is not one of these things: practically no Muslim voice of any importance has challenged it; and even if anyone did, they would be wasting their time, since Arab and Muslim public opinion simply would not listen. The Arab and Muslim world has eaten, swallowed and digested the sin of the West; metabolised the worst of our social pathologies, as though there was anything to gain by doing so.
The excuse for this, of course, is the rise of the State of Israel; but, quite apart from the fact that the new Arab Anti-Semitism (and yes, I know it is a contradiction in terms) has actually made the Arabs less capable of understanding and dealing with their enemy (witness the widespread conspiracy theory that the Israeli troops and aircraft during the Six Days' War were in fact led and manned by Americans), I think this is to some extent a pretext. Arabs had been flirting with German philosophies, with totalitarianism and racism, well before the foundation of the Jewish State - the root of the Baath party, founded in the thirties, is in a typically Fascist mixture of nationalism and socialism leavened with a mystique of group love. These phenomena arose from the failure of the Arab nation to deal with the modern world, and their embedding in the Arab psyche, with their corollary of conspiracy theory, simply diminishes further their ability to do so. Conspiracy theory is not a way, however pathological, to deal with the complexities of the real world; it is a way to deny them.
This horrendous process is documented in quite intolerable detail in this excellent book, and God knows there is enough to be said about it. Bernard Lewis shows himself, if anything, too fair to the Arabs. Perhaps the most frightening feature is the calm, even polite way in which the most vicious drivel is spouted with no understanding either of its odiousness or of its sheer ignorance; what one might call the innocence of evil. This is a deeply troubling book, not only for what it says about any future possibility of peace with Israel, but for the more basic issue of the Arab attitude to a world they perceive as hostile, ranged against them, existing in a monstrous conspiracy to crush and destroy them. It cannot be healthy for one of the great nations of the world to live in a state of permanent fear and hatred.

Rating:
Summary: eye opening
Review: The most important thing I learned about this book is that Arab anti-Semitism, although not eternal, precedes the current war. Before the Holocuast, the mufti of Jerusalem urged the Nazis to engage in a "Holy War" against world Jewry, to accomplish the "final solution" to the Jewish problem everywhere. (p. 147, 1986 edition). In 1945, 130 Jews were massacred in Libya and 82 more in Aden (p. 205). In 1964, the state-controlled Egyptian press claimed that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish and "armed by the Zionist organization" (p. 214). In the 1970s, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia claimed that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian and Muslim children (p. 194)

These facts disprove the claim of another reviewer that "Far from being intent on annihilating the Jews, the Arab world is hostile towards Israel's brutal occupation of the Palestinians." Before I read Lewis's book, I too thought Arab anti-Semitism must have arisen from the recent Israel-Palestinian wars. But as the above-quoted examples (and many others cited by Lewis) show, Arabs were massacring Jews, supporting Nazis and fomenting Jew hatred before Israel even was formed in 1948, let alone before Israel took over the "occupied terrorities" in 1967.

Another reviewer complained about the "racist" Israeli Law of Return. The Law of Return has nothing to do with race: it allows Jews from around the world to live in Israel -- not just white European Jews, but Jews from the Arab countries (who, according to Lewis at least, comprised a majority of Israelis as of 1986) and black Jews from Ethiopia.

Rating:
Summary: eye opening
Review: The most important thing I learned about this book is that Arab anti-Semitism, although not eternal, precedes the current war. Before the Holocuast, the mufti of Jerusalem urged the Nazis to engage in a "Holy War" against world Jewry, to accomplish the "final solution" to the Jewish problem everywhere. (p. 147, 1986 edition). In 1945, 130 Jews were massacred in Libya and 82 more in Aden (p. 205). In 1964, the state-controlled Egyptian press claimed that John Wilkes Booth was Jewish and "armed by the Zionist organization" (p. 214). In the 1970s, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia claimed that Jews practice the ritual murder of Christian and Muslim children (p. 194)

These facts disprove the claim of another reviewer that "Far from being intent on annihilating the Jews, the Arab world is hostile towards Israel's brutal occupation of the Palestinians." Before I read Lewis's book, I too thought Arab anti-Semitism must have arisen from the recent Israel-Palestinian wars. But as the above-quoted examples (and many others cited by Lewis) show, Arabs were massacring Jews, supporting Nazis and fomenting Jew hatred before Israel even was formed in 1948, let alone before Israel took over the "occupied terrorities" in 1967.

Another reviewer complained about the "racist" Israeli Law of Return. The Law of Return has nothing to do with race: it allows Jews from around the world to live in Israel -- not just white European Jews, but Jews from the Arab countries (who, according to Lewis at least, comprised a majority of Israelis as of 1986) and black Jews from Ethiopia.

Rating:
Summary: Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict&Prejudice
Review: This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to comprehend the deep passions underlying the Mid-East conflict. In this very readable volume, subtitled "An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice", Bernard Lewis explains how and why hatred of Jews as Jews now inflames the Arab World. First published in 1987 and reissued with a new Afterword in 1999, the book is as timely as tomorrow. In light of subsequent events, the last chapter, "The New Anti-Semitism", and the Afterword are especially chilling.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-Semitism Unveiled
Review: This is a book about Arab anti-semitism (of course Arabs can be anti-semites, because, duh, anti-semitism is a particular form of hatred directed at JEWS, not speakers of all Semitic languages... Akkadians that published the blood libel and translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion would be -- you guessed it -- anti-semites).

The discussion of Arab anti-semitism is preceded by a thorough laying of foundations, consisting of chapters discussing the history of the term "semitic", the history of semitic-speaking peoples, the history of the Jews, and the rise of Zionism. Anti-semitism proper is then chronicled, beginning with the 1648 uprising of the Ukrainian Cossacks and following through to contemporary Arab expressions.

Anti-semitism is not, of course, just disliking or being rude to Jews. It's a form of hatred that characterizes Jews as being uniquely and cosmically evil, and that relies on the repetition of certain core tropes: the Jews drink blood, the Jews conspire to take over the world, blah blah.

What Lewis argues is that, while this sort of treatment of the Jews is commonplace in contemporary Arab media, Arab anti-Semitism is a recent innovation, coming into existence over the last half-century. Medieval Arabs stereotyped Jews as well, but merely as cowardly, and some medieval Arab accounts of Mohammed's victories over his Jewish contemporaries paint the Jews as "tragic" figures and accord them "dignity" in their defeat. Medieval Arab treatment of Jews was, Lewis argues, in the middle of the Bell curve -- both the best and the worst treatment of Jews was to be found in the Christian West.

Until now. The rise of the state of Israel has seen a simultaneous explosion of anti-Semitic writing, ranting and posturing in the Arab states. This book, written well before September 11, 2001, is now more relevant than ever as a guide to understanding the crazed rhetoric flowing around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as the more general muddled meeting of the Arab world and the West.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent study of anti-Jewish fabrications and hostility
Review: Violence is often linked to propaganda, incitement, and biased perceptions of others. That is why I think Lewis was right to begin his book by giving an example of a bomb that was exploded in 1980 in Paris, at a synagogue. As Lewis explains, the French Prime Minister said, "They aimed at the Jews and they hit innocent Frenchmen." Now that is clearly not the way he meant to say it. But the implication that to some extent, many French people view the Jews as neither French nor innocent is worth investigating.

Lewis starts by explaining some fundamentals: who the Jews were and are, where they lived in the past and live now, what Zionism was and is, and who the Hebrew-speakers were and are. He then explains the a little of the history of European antisemitism, or Jew-hatred, over the past few centuries. After that, there is a discussion of Muslim relations with Jews.

This background material allows us to understand a major point Lewis makes: that the close relationship between Germany and the Arab leadership that developed between "1933 and 1945 was due not to a German attempt to win over the Arabs but to a series of Arab approaches to the Germans."

This leads to an explanation of the way most Arabs use the word "Nazi" today. They don't mean by it "antisemite." Such an equivalence would make some Arabs applaud the Nazis while it could make others sympathize with the Jewish victims of the Nazis. Instead, the term is used as a term of general abuse, so that it can be applied to Jews.

Lewis then discusses the Arab war first against Zionism and then against the Jews in general. He shows that many Arabs are outraged at the success of the Jews, who had been a traditionally oppressed minority. And some view the existence of Israel as unjust. But even these views are insufficient to explain the many Arab writers who devote plenty of time and effort to reiterate European antisemitic propaganda and distribute it worldwide. Such efforts are so manifestly counterproductive to everyone, Arabs included, that Lewis feels it is appropriate to see what motivates them. And here, Lewis makes a final point: Israel and Zionism are being judged largely not on what they are but on a caricature of what they are that is provided by wild and arbitrary accusations against them.

I highly recommend this book.