Anti-semitism rears its ugly head with depressing regularity

Assimilation was seen as a good thing, even if it meant the eradication of a separate culture, writes Terry Prone.

WHEN Alan Shatter lays about him with a will, you would want to be paying attention. He generates contradictions, rebuttals, statements of support, and a wealth of headlines. Vindication by the Appeals Court last week put him on TV and radio programmes for several days with his various accusations fully ventilated and endlessly discussed. Except one, which was ventilated and not discussed at all. That one sank like a stone and nobody touched it.

In the middle of his responses to the Appeals Court verdict, Shatter mentioned he was frequently described as arrogant, and stated this was a trope regularly affecting Jewish people. It was a surprising comment, not least as his fame and personality might have led to the belief that he couldn’t be affected by such a comment. Clearly, that belief would be ill-founded. It reached him, big time.

Some of those who would have called him arrogant would be equally irritated by the suggestion that their judgment was against him as a Jew. Those who work closely with Shatter, including civil servants, find him diligent, driven, detailed, and courteous. Friends describe him as owning a riotously self-deprecatory sense of humour. Some of those at a slight remove would experience him as a man who not only doesn’t suffer fools gladly but doesn’t suffer them at all. That’s why, they say, they regard him as arrogant. Not because they’re anti-semitic. They don’t get sufficiently infelicitous as to say “some of my best friends are arrogant”, but they don’t accept that the word has any necessary connection to demeaning members of the Jewish community. Older politicians hiss that neither Gerald Goldberg, once the Lord Mayor of Cork, nor Ben Briscoe, a long-serving Fianna Fáil TD, were ever so described.

Alan Shatter

What cannot be disputed is that anti-semitism is rearing its ugly head once again, with synagogues and cemeteries in the US physically attacked and harassed with bomb threats and Donald Trump heavily criticised by American Jews for his tardy response to these episodes and his whitewash of Jewish victims on the Holocaust in his International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement. This rise in anti-semitism fits in a flowing pattern whereby what has been called “the longest hatred in history” appears in different parts of the world at different times, ensuring that, in virtually every decade, Jews are expelled, killed, disenfranchised, or abused in some country.

Anti-semitism was given an enormous charge by the death of Jesus and consequent portrayal, starting in the Gospels, particularly that of St John, of the Jews as “killers of Christ”. It had, however, existed for several centuries prior to the emergence of Christianity.

Robert Wistrich, an historian of Judaism, roots anti-semitism in the refusal of Jews to fully assimilate with gentile societies as far back as ancient Greece: “They insisted on preserving their own monotheistic religion, their dietary laws, their separate lifestyle and above all their self-conscious pride in their special vocation as people covenanted by God.”

In modern societies that claim to be diverse, this should not be a problem, although the Travelling people in this country, while celebrating their recognition as an ethnic minority, stand as a contradiction. Most humanitarian efforts on the part of the settled community to benefit the Travellers may have ostensibly been based on the concept of equality, but the reality underpinning those efforts was an assumption that once Travellers became equal, they would become more like the rest of us, ideally indistinguishable from us. Their insistence on retaining their separateness, and a culture the settled community doesn’t see as valuable, has always been a challenge.

Similarly, the insistence of the Jewish people on retaining their separateness in antiquity led to their portrayal as a race of lepers cast out of Egypt in Moses’ time.

“Already in Alexandria, in the three centuries before the Christian era,” Wistrich wrote in 1991, “one finds a seedbed of pagan anti-semitism in which accusations which would echo across the centuries are rehearsed by the Graeco-Egyptian intelligentsia of the age. Jewish civilisation is depicted as sterile, having produced nothing useful or great; the Jews are superstitious, ‘godless’ people who worship an ass’s head in their Temple in Jerusalem; once a year they kidnap a Gentile Greek, who is fattened in order to be eaten by their deity in his Holy of Holies (the first ritual murder charge against Jews known to history.) Above all the Jews are exclusivist, their separatism is an expression of misanthropy and hatred of the gods.”

One man carried those myths to ancient Rome, where they surfaced in the writings of some of the great influencers there, including Juvenal, Tacitus, and Seneca. The end result was a pogrom in 38AD when Caligula was the Roman emperor. Ostensibly, the wealth and power of the Roman Jews of the time caused the violence against them, but the central cause was difference: If they were given equal rights, went the thinking, they should properly assimilate, worship the same gods as the rest of the population, eat the same food, and behave in the same way. Assimilation was seen as a good thing, even if it meant the eradication of a separate culture and identity. Or perhaps because it meant the eradication of a separate culture and identity.

Despite all this hostility, 10m Jews lived in the Roman empire, more than 10% of the population. With some lapses, Rome valued its Jews. The arrival of Christianity changed everything, despite the fact that Christ and his apostles were Jews. St Paul, himself originally a Jew, said that while Jews were to be respected for the sake of their forefathers, they must now convert to the true faith. The majority of Jews weren’t having any of this, which recalcitrance was seen by Christianity as a determination to retain their “damnable state”.

One study of anti-semitism says that “the mutual rejection and recriminations of this period and the central role the Jew played in basic Christian theology, set the tone and content of future Christian-Jewish relations. …The more the Christian persecuted Jews or felt hostility towards them, the more he found it necessary to concoct, create, and exaggerate Jewish sins.”

During the Black Death, the Jews were persecuted because they didn’t die in the same numbers as did gentiles, possibly because of Jewish hygiene laws, allied to their relative isolation in nascent ghettoes. In medieval and later times, Jews were excluded from professions Christianity wanted for itself, and, as a result, became outstanding in those areas where they were permitted to develop careers: Medicine, banking, and the arts. Yet at every period of history, Jews have experienced at best contempt and at worst extermination.

It would be interesting to hear the background to Mr Shatter’s mention of an anti-semitic trope. Although the Jewish community in Ireland numbers no more than 2,000 at the moment, that’s rising, thanks to immigration of highly qualified workers. They should not experience anti-semitism in an Ireland that prides itself on pluralism.