Christmas Time is a time to contemplate all kinds of interesting questions while hanging out under the tree in a comfortable winy haze. Questions like the one about our guest of honour – the one hogging the stage big time in this season: Jesus the Jew. Was he one by race or by religion?
As if that were a real question: the Jews, are they a people or a race? I am inclined to follow the most logical and scientific line on this one: Jews are a people. They are certainly NOT a race. And anyone who claims otherwise is – to my opinion – a racist.
This includes the Jews themselves, who are willing to make the above claim. Why? Because in fact, Jewishness is a religion. The Jewish people are Jewish people because they adhere to one common religion: Judaism. The very moment that one of these Jews decides to become secular, or to denounce his god, he is then no longer a Jew, but a religion-less person. Just like me.
The book “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” (1996) by Daniel Goldhagen takes me back to the question above, one I was forced to ponder upon some years ago, because I wound up in a nasty conflict with a woman called “Yael”. Yes, you’ve guessed it: the name is revealing indeed. She was one of those “people”.
The conflict was about my reaction to some graffiti I had found in the building I was living in. The graffiti was dumb and retarded, and scribbled on the lift door. It showed – accompanied by some silly blurbs – a swastika. And swastika’s trigger my Anarcho-Anger immediately, so I quickly hung up a self-made poster in the lift, with a text that said something like: “Fascists, remove yourselves from the Netherlands, starting with this building…” It was slightly catchier, but I should not repeat that here.
So after the poster had been hanging for half an hour or so, there came the Y-woman, banging my door. Her idea was to give me a hard time for igniting a problem between the inhabitants of our nice and cosy and oh-so civilised building. She started by explaining to me that she, as “a one-hundred-percent Jew”, knew how the world turns and that she had the right to tell me my political business. After all, she (in her twenties, but a 100% Jew) knew what it was to be “holocausted”. And besides, my kind of extremism was found all over the Middle-East, where it did no one any good, either.
Well, screw that. Firstly, anyone who tells me that she is a one-hundred-percent Jew, I consider a racist. And I HATE racists. There are no biological features to any religion, and that goes for Judaism too.
Secondly, anyone who tells me that she has the sole rights to “WeltSchmertz” because her family was murdered by the nazi’s, has no good cards in my game any more either. Many people were killed, maimed, removed from their properties, raped or otherwise maltreated by the nazi’s – including some of my own family. And another group of people who were relentlessly prosecuted and exterminated were the Anarchists, for whom I harbour very warm sentiments indeed.
It goes without saying that I have a somewhat disturbed relationship to anyone calling him- or herself a genuine Jew, by race, for a full 100%. Get real…
Well, so much for my brush with egocentric “Jewishness”. The really interesting thing to ask oneself, is when the “Jewish Question” – Die Judenfrage – was actually raised, why this happened in the first place, and what the backgrounds were, against which this occurred.
We all know that the Jews were THE nazi targets, and that they paid for this with over 6 million lives. Goldhagen teaches us how deeply anti-Semitism was rooted in the German culture, society and mentality, and how this could be the prelude to this horrible holocaust. Goldhagen also shows a very interesting shift in interpretation of some of the aspects of the “Jewish Question”, namely: from viewing Jews as a People, to considering them a Race. And – more to the point – WHY this happened.
The “Jewish Question”? Why is there one anyway? If you want to know, read the book. It is a fact that any political mobilisation in the early 1900′s taking place in Germany – for any cause – had to be lined with a serious dose of anti-Semitism. It simply served as an effective catalyst in a time when racial theories were emerging and becoming very popular.
I am planning on reading Goldhagens greatest critic – Norman Gary Finkelstein – too. He wrote the book “A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth” (1998), which might shed an interesting light on Goldhagen’s writing. But whatever the criticism might tell me, my personal as well as my political ties with this topic will remain.
