"Instead of learning about the Holocaust through the larger

It is the profoundest of ironies that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis may have saved worldwide Jewry from extinction. (In the case of Jewish Hassids, Menachem Friedman notes that "paradoxically, it was the destruction of Eastern European Jewry in the twentieth century that created the conditions which enabled the spread of ultra-orthodoxy.") [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 31] At the very least, judging by common Jewish commentary about their fate in Europe over fifty years ago, Hitler is responsible for a dramatic Jewish revival. Before World War II many Jews were on a slow but steady path of assimilation wherever they resided in their diaspora, particularly in Western Europe, each generation inched further away from the separatist myths of the Jewish past. Religion of all kinds continued in retreat and the rationale for being Jewish was -- at least in some parts of the Jewish community -- steadily weakening. As the Nazi regime came to power, however, many German Jews (if we take what they say at face value) had strayed from a specifically Jewish connection in their lives and were forced to re-examine their identities. In 1935, for instance, the German literary critic Jean Amery (Hans Mayer) supposedly discovered himself a Jew in a Viennese cafe when reading a newspaper about new Nazi laws on the subject. Likewise, in 1938, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein connected to his long lost Jewish identity as a consequence of Nazi dictates. They were both suddenly Jews because Hitler said so. [TRAVERSO, p. 39] Even Albert Einstein found his identity as a Jew in the context of rising political anti-Semitism in Germany in 1914. There had been nothing in Switzerland, he said, "that called forth any Jewish sentiments in me. When I moved to Berlin all that changed." [CLARK, p. 377] (He was helping to raise "funds for the Zionist cause of a Hebrew university" by 1921.) [RHODES, R., 1988, p. 173] "The composer Arnold Schoenberg and many other baptized Jews," notes Nachum Gidal, "now publicly declared their return to Judaism." [GIDAL, p. 425]

Sigmund Freud reflected, at least publicly, the same experience:

"My language is German. My culture, my attainments, are German. I

could identify myself German intellectually, until I noticed the growth of

anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and German Austria. Since that

time, I prefer to call myself a Jew." [GAY, MOMENT, p. 50]

In 1937, an American Jew, Alfred Siegel, wrote in the American Israelite that

"Hitler has been a life-giving stimulant for me. In times when there is no

Jewish flame left in me and I am feeling very cold, I get warm again on

account of Hitler ... I know I shouldn't say this, but ... Hitler [is] helping

me to fulfill my status as an immortal man ... What will become of me

when there is no more Hitler and there is no one to set flames under me

to keep me warm? What if we come at last to a world in which no

anti-Semite is left and everybody loves me? What of my poor Jewish

bones which set so quickly cold without stimulation? Who and what

will keep me warm then? -- May 27, 1937 [in GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]

For today's many Jewish "ideologists," wrote Jacob Neusner, decades after Hitler, "there is no real choice about 'being Jewish' if born one. The Holocaust dictates that there is no escape from it. Hitler knew you were one." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "The gas chambers at Auschwitz," notes Jonathan Sacks, "made no distinction between [Jewish] assimilators and traditionalists, believers and heretics, atheists and Jews of faith." [SACKS, J., p.6] Such comments are terribly true, but always left unstated is the disturbing fact that the same all-encompassing view that "born Jews" (whatever they choose to believe) are inescapably Jewish is a concept intrinsic to classic Jewish identity itself. Hitler did not invent the idea that being Jewish is a racial pedigree, often these days euphemistically referred to as a "community of fate." Was not Hitler following the same path as this 1970s observation by a Jewish theologian, Eugene Borowitz? : "To be a Jew means to have a bond with every other Jew -- and somehow know how to find him." [in SILBERMAN, C., p. 76]

Whatever the case, in attempting to racially define and annihilate the Jewish people, Hitler rejuvenated them. This is exemplified in the famous plea by the Jewish theologian, Emil Fackenheim, who implored his fellow Jews to renew with vigor their sense of Jewishness. To allow it to wane -- post-Holocaust -- was now equated to be a posthumous victory for Hitler. (Even for Jews married to non-Jews, distinctive Jewish progeny is often a burning issue. A liberal feminist professor, Amy Sheldon, notes that "although I had many mixed feelings towards traditional Judaism, there was never any doubt in my mind that our children would be raised as Jews. 'I can't finish what Hitler started,' I told my [non-Jewish] husband before we were married." [SHELDON, p. 82])

We see in Hitler's last breath in 1945 the birth of Israel in 1948, and the conjoining of the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel as the sacred pillars of a renewed Jewish identity rooted in guilt, fear, resentment, hostility, and rage. It was, however, not an identity that took immediate shape after Hitler's persecution of Jewry. The martyr status of concentration camp victims, the heroizing of survivors no matter what they had to do to live, the stress upon exaggerated Jewish resistance to the Nazis, a deeper embracement of Jewish tribalism, and the political exploitation of the Holocaust for Jewish and Israeli myths and manipulations came later. What came to be known as "the Holocaust," says Edward Lilenthal, "was often indistinguishable, in the immediate postwar years, from the millions of noncombatant casualties due to terror bombings of civilian populations, epidemic illness, or starvation. It was considered by most as simply part of the horror of war." [LILENTHAL, p. 5]

In Israel, in the early years after the Holocaust, Jewish survivors were even scorned with contempt by Israeli Jews as "soap" (i.e., feebly passive Jews who were passively turned into bars of soap by Nazi tormentors, [GOREN, p. 159] the fulfillment of demeaning stereotypes about fellow Jews. "With what scorn," noted Georges Tamarin in 1973, "Israeli youth reacts to the alleged faint-heartedness of the six million victims of Nazis!" [TAMARIN, p. 115] The Holocaust was an emblem of shame to Jewry, little discussed, more often avoided. "Even in their extraordinary death agony," notes Haim Breseeth, "the millions of European Jews had not attracted sympathy [in Israel] -- a minimum expectation from an important Jewish community." [BRESEETH, p. 196] "In retrospect," says Arye Carmon," it appears that a disturbing conjunction evolved between the incomprehensible magnitude of evil of the Nazis and the victims who conscientiously were presented as an ideological object to be disassociated from. This conjunction may explain the duality of guilt and shame that has portrayed mourning in Israel." [CARMON, p. 76] A daughter of Holocaust survivors who was raised in Israel remarked at a conference there that

"What I hated and dreaded most when I was a child was summertime.

It was a time when the [tattooed concentration camp] numbers on my

mother's arm would be there for all to see and people would know

that she was a survivor and was one of the despised people. People

like my parents were despised in Israel, and I was ashamed of

them." [EMMETT, p. 147]

"In 1947 a Jewish concentration camp survivor, Primo Levy, could only interest a small, obscure press to publish an account of his experiences and the volume was little noticed. [TRAVERSO, p. 104] Even Eli Wiesel's ultimately influential work about the Holocaust, Night, did not appear in English until 1960, after twenty publishers had rejected it. [WHITFIELD p. 74] "We would look in vain in the 1950s," says Jacob Neusner, "for what some call 'Holocaustomania.'" [NEUSNER, STRANGER, p. 84]

"Many Jews raised in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust," notes Melanie Kaye-Kantrowitz, "experienced it like a family secret -- hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code or casual reference." [BRODKIN, K., p. 141]

In 1961 only two of 31 discussants in a major Jewish magazine's symposium on "Jewishness and Younger Intellectuals" put any emphasis on the Holocaust effecting their lives. In that same year, another important Jewish magazine's theme of "My Jewish Affirmation" overlooked the Holocaust almost completely. [LINENTHAL, p. 8] Even as late as 1966, when Commentary published a forum on "Jewish belief" in its pages, "the Holocaust," notes Nathan Glazer, "did not figure in any of the questions, nor, it must be said, did it figure in the answers." [GLAZER, American, p. 172] In a collection of 1960s-era interviews with Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion "the word Holocaust never appears." [STERNBERGER, I., 8-15-95]

The book that first attracted, and furthered, widespread interest in the particularly Jewish experiences of World War II was the diary of Ann Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), a volume that a Jewish novelist, Meyer Levin, almost single-handedly pushed to fame. Levin urged the diary's publication in the American Jewish Congress Weekly; it was serialized in the Jewish magazine, Commentary. Doubleday eventually published it and Levin himself heralded its importance on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, his editors not informed about his own "vested interest" -- commercially and politically -- in the story. [BLAIR, p. 3] The volume has since sold over sixty million copies in fifty-one languages. [WHITFIELD, p. 72] (There appeared with such revelations a corresponding shame and guilt among diaspora Jews and a rising need to atone for their own sin of doing so little to help European Jewry during the Hitler era. [RUBENSTEIN, p. 24]) The diary of Ann Frank is so well publicized internationally that, note David Goodman and Masanori Miyazawa,

"Ann Frank's Diary of a Young Girl has sold over a four million copies

in Japan, more than any other country except the United States. So

beloved is Ann Frank in Japan that the first Japanese company to market

sanitary napkins designed especially for Japanese women called itself

Anne Co., Ltd., and sold its product under the brand name 'Anne's

Day' (Anne no hi), which quickly became a euphemism for menstruation

       in Japan." [GOODMAN, p. 6]

     The Jewish Telegraphic Agency noted continued popular promotion of Anne Frank in 2001, half a century after her death:

     "A four hour miniseries, following Anne's life from her happy school days
     through her two years in hiding in Amsterdam and to her final days in the
     concentration camp, air nationally over ABC TV on May 20 and May 21.
        The 20th Century Fox studio is developing a feature move based on
    'The Diary of Anne Frank.'
        A new edition of the diary, including five previously unpublished pages
     describing her parents' difficult marriage, was released in March.
       The Helos Dance Theatre premiered 'About Anne: A Diary in Dance'
     in Los Angeles last month.
        An interactive CDROM titled 'Anne Frank House: A House with a Story'
     was released earlier this year, offering a virtual tour of the building and
     the 'secret annex' where the Frank family hid.
        In Boise, Idaho, ground has been broken on a $1.6 million Anne
     Frank Human Rights Memorial Park." [TUGEND, T., 5-13-01]

In formal literature, "apart from the notable exception of [Saul] Bellow's The Dangling Man," says Theodore Ziolkowski, "it was not until the 60s with Edward Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Norma Rosen's Touching Evil, Susan Schaeffer's Anya, Arthur Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern, and later works by Cynthia Ozick and Saul Bellow -- that the Holocaust became a genuine theme." [ZIOLKOWSKI, p. 599] By 1998, however, Sheila Schimpf noted that

"For 10 years Barry Gross has asked Michigan State University students

in his English classes how many have read or seen 'The Diary of Anne

Frank.' Almost every hand goes up. 'It has become almost the common

text for this generation of students,' Gross says." [SCHIMPF, p. E1]

In 1967, with the multiple-nation Arab war against Israel, worldwide Jewry snapped to a new kind of attention and consciousness, one that has since accelerated to our own day into deeply politicized Jewish obsessions with anti-Semitism, the hallowed specialness of the Holocaust, and the absolute sanctity of Israel. During the 1967 Arab war, Jews everywhere (as it is told and retold in Jewish scholarship) imagined the prospect for another Holocaust. "It would be impossible to understand the present Israeli stance toward the Arabs without taking full account of the Holocaust," says Jay Gonen. [GONEN, p. 151] In the Arab armies Jews saw Nazi storm troopers. In the PLO leadership of Yassar Arafat, they stamped the face of Hitler. "Israel," says Melvin Urofsky, "made it possible [for Jews worldwide] to endure the memory of Auschwitz. Were Israel to be destroyed [by Arabs], then Hitler would be alive again, the final victory would be his." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 351]

The old Jewish self-identity of weakness and victimization -- based on the Jewish martyrological tradition of death, destruction, and terror -- became now a conviction of armor, militantly wielded, shaped with the very shame and horror of the Holocaust. The resultant Israeli victory over the Arabs meant a symbolic return to physical power, along biblical lines even, for many Jews, redemption. It also meant the springboard for a new Holocaust-centeredness, aggressive in its character, hostile and embittered to non-Jews everywhere around them. And it was adept in milking communal guilt from comfortable Jews in America who experienced nothing of the risks of 1967 Israel nor the European Holocaust years. A victorious Israel rising up out of ashes of the Holocaust became the cornerstone of Jewish self-conception. The Holocaust was no longer shamefully harmful to the Jewish self-image. It was now a much-heralded building block for the state of Israel and impassioned Jewish vigor, everywhere discussed, everywhere publicized.

Jews who paid little attention to the Jewish annihilation during World War II, and in the early years after, two decades later were increasingly consumed with it. "A profound sense of their status as survivors seized world Jewry," notes Jacob Neusner. [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 976] "The question," adds Hanno Loewy, "which constantly recurs is, 'Why did I of all people survive?' -- a question which pursues the survivor and to which there is no answer." [LOWEY, p. 240] "Every time I attend a gathering of Jewish children," wrote well-known lawyer Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "at a family event, at a Bar Mitzvah, at Simchath Torah -- I imagine SS guards lining up these children for the gas chambers." [DERSHOWITZ, p. 178]

"To some extent," says Jacob Petuchowski, "this preoccupation [with the Holocaust] represents a repercussion of the guilt-complex of the survivors (and perhaps more so of those who survived at a safe trans-Atlantic distance than of the actual survivors of the camp.)" [PETUCHOWSKI, p. 6] The Jew, says James Yaffe, "feels guilty over the six million Jews who were killed by Hitler. What more could he have done to help them? Perhaps nothing, but his guilt stems from his sense that he might so easily have died instead of them." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 59] "The notion of survivor guilt and of resurrecting the dead to greater power than they had in life," suggests Samuel Heilman, "is of course an old one, most dramatically elaborated in Freud's famous essay Totem and Taboo." [HEILMAN, S, 1992, p. 370] It is important for many Jews to diffuse their own guilt by dumping much of it into the laps of others: "I am burdened with collective guilt," said Hans Meyer, "I say; not they. The world, which forgives and forgets, has sentenced me, not those who murdered or allowed the murder to occur." Meyer, Ruth Wisse informs us, "committed suicide, driven 'to the mind's limits' and beyond by the dishonest postwar reimposition of normalcy." [WISSE, p. 48]

"Ironically," says Leon Wieseltier, "for many Jews what remains [of Jewish identity] most vivid and 'ethnically' alive is the Holocaust." [BECHSTEL, p. 118] Rabbi David Novak even argues that today's Holocaust-based Jewish identity (i.e., the peculiar notion that modern Jewish identity is fundamentally defined by its contradistinction from real, and imagined, enemies) ironically owes much of its conception -- in the modern post-Holocaust context -- to the existentialist non-Jew, Jean Paul-Sartre, and his own book about anti-Semitism. [NOVAK, p. El of Is, p. 20]

     With the growing emphasis upon a Jewish identity largely defined by the Holocaust, vacation tours were created for American and other diaspora Jews to visit death camps in Europe as part of an immersion in "the Jewish experience." "At bar and bat mitzvahs, in a growing number of communities," notes Peter Novick,

     "the child is 'twinned' with a young vicitm of the Holocaust who never lived to
      have the ceremony, and by all reports the kids like it a lot. Adolescent Jews
      who go on organized tours to Auschwitz and Treblinka have reported that
      they were 'never so proud to be a Jew' as when, at these sites, they vicariously       experienced the Holocaust. Jewish college students oversubscribe courses on the       Holocaust, and rush to pin yellow stars to their lapels on Yom Hashoah (Holocaust       Remembrance DAy). And it's not just the young. Adult Jews flock to Holocaust
      events as to no others and give millions unstintingly to build yet another Holocaust       memorial." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8]

      The Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, one of the greatest Holocaust centers, built a multi-million dollar high-tech environment to "recreate the Holocaust experience" for Jews who missed it. The director of a Jewish education committee even proposed a high school course about the Holocaust so that all students could be able to understand "what it means to be Jewish." [LIPSTADT, p. 356] By 1986, a quarter of all new books reviewed in Judaica Book News had a Holocaust subject and more college students were taking courses about the Holocaust than any other Jewish concern. [SILVER, p. 460] In 1985, 86% of American Jewry, as evidenced in one survey, believed that "there's no doubt that the Holocaust has deeply affected the way I think and feel about being Jewish." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 33] "For American Jews," notes David Schnall, "Israel has become vitally important not as a living alternative [as a place to live] but more so as a refuge, a final port in the storm of humanity, should the unthinkable occur once more." [SCHNALL, p. 124]

The horror of the Nazi's mass murder of Jews was not just that so many millions of people were sadistically violated, tortured, and murdered. The human capacity for mass atrocity is as old as humanity itself. History is full of Tamerlanes, Genghis Khans, and Crusaders of every type riding into pillaged villages by ruthless exterminators, entire vistas laid waste in carnage. Tribe, clan, kingdom, and nation have, over the millennia, taken turns in being victim and victimizer.

The REAL horror of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe was that this atrocity was elaborately construed and constructed in modern times by a supposedly "civilized" state, Germany. It was not carried out by a band of head hunters or Neanderthal brutes, but by people who drove cars, went to the grocery store, paid taxes, and lived in familiar-looking homes and apartment buildings. Strangely, they were people quite like us, like anybody, wrapped in nationalist institutions. That is what is most frightening about it. All the Nazis needed was a national narcissism about themselves, their past, and their destiny which was the precondition necessary to entirely dehumanize, enslave, and exterminate others. Where have we seen these preconditions before?

To the everlasting shame of our sad species, none of this is new. The rudimentary foundation of the Nazi's "Master Race" self-perception and glorification finds a fanatic precursor, among others, in the most ironic of places: the origins of the Judaic faith itself in the Jewish self-conception as the "Chosen People." What is the essential ideological difference, really, between those who envision themselves to have partnership in a superior racial lineage (in the Nazi case, pure Aryans) and those who traditionally understand themselves to be a likewise hereditary lineage of human beings, in the Jewish case supposedly descended from a single man, Abraham, especially graced and privileged by God (Jews)? Both rely, traditionally and fundamentally -- in origin -- upon racist criteria in their respective belief systems. For the Nazis, it is essential to prove pure Germanic lineage to qualify in the Aryan membership. By Nazi standards, if a grandparent was a Jew, a person was considered racially tainted, and Jewish. For Jews, as legally established in today's secular state of Israel, the racial lineage is matrilineal: a Jew is defined as someone who has a Jewish natural mother. If the father was Jewish and the mother not, the child is tainted and is not, by Orthodox standards, Jewish.

Dr. Joseph Mengele, the horrible Nazi medical experimenter and "Angel of Death" at Auschwitz, echoed this racial antithesis -- at least as he saw it -- when he reputedly remarked "that the [Nazi's] Final Solution was the ultimate struggle for the control of the world between the only two peoples superior enough to vie for it, the Jews and the Germans. [LESHEM, p. 63] Or, as Hannah Arendt saw it, "[The Nazi movements'] claim to chosenness could clash seriously only with the Jewish claim ... Leaders [of Nazism] knew quite well that the Jews had divided the world, exactly as they had, into two halves -- themselves and all the others." [ARENDT, p. 240]

In 1937, amidst the rise of German fascism, Charles Clayton Morrison at the liberal Protestant journal, The Christian Century, (which was a well-known crusader against Hitler and anti-Semitism) wrote that "[it is] this obsession with the doctrine of a covenant race that now menaces the whole world, and Jews themselves are the chief sufferers from it. [The Jewish idea] of an integral race, with its own exclusive culture, hallowed and kept unified by a racial religion, is itself the prototype of nazism." [MORRISON, p. 736] "Nazi racism," notes Richard L. Rubenstein, "was an attempt to reestablish a basis for community on shared archaic roots. The exclusion of the alien was intrinsic to its very nature." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 110] This exclusionism, as we have repeatedly seen, is also integral to traditional Judaism.

The Nazis were indeed conscious of themselves as a counter-Chosen People, based upon their racially Aryan-centered ideology which was antithetical and ultimately violent to the Jewish self-assertion of superiority. Adolf Hitler appropriated for his Aryan Master Race the Jewish notion of being a Chosen People, and then twisted it to his own megalomania, saying:

We [Aryans] are chosen ... [and] whoever proclaims his allegiance

to me is, by this very proclamation and by the manner in which

it is made, one of the chosen. [Emphasis in original; KATZ, p. 9]

Feminist Merlin Stone even speculates, from a linguistic perspective, that Hitler and the Nazis may have known something about the ancient Hittites and Hebrews, arguing that if her theories about the "warlike Hebrews" are right,

"We must certainly view the ... atrocities enacted upon the Hebrew

people of the twentieth century by the self-styled Aryans of Nazi

Germany not only as tragic but ironic. The researches and excavations

of the Hittites culture have been carried on primarily by German

archeologists throughout this century. It was sometimes before and

directly after the First World War that nasili was slowly beginning

to be accepted as the real name of the Hittite language and Nesa, or

Nasa, their first capital ... One cannot help but wonder how much

Adolf Hitler was affected by reports of these finds ... Strangely enough

one more connection between the Hittites and Hebrews is the Hebrew

use of the word nasi for prince." [STONE, M., 1976, p. 127]

Hitler even had a pseudo religious view about Jews as a satanic kind of nemesis. As Steven Katz puts it:

"[In the Nazi view] the struggle between Aryan and Jew is not only

necessary and inevitable but also a clash of world-historical...

significance. Though actualized through blood and time, the depth

of this homicidal encounter is rooted in eternity."

Yoel Taitelbaum, former leader of the Ultra-Orthodox "Guardians of the City" movement, argued that a kind of cosmic struggle inevitably existed between Jews and non-Jews; the Nazis were one such -- particularly brutal -- Jewish nemesis. In this view, "hatred of Jews is inherent in the nations of the world because the choice of God fell upon Israel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]

A more secular allusion to the Jewish Chosen People/German Master Race parallel is reflected in the work of the popular Israeli poet Uri Greenberg who wrote that Jews were "the race of Abraham, which had started on its way to become master." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308] And what of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a seminal Zionist leader, who -- imagining the modern Israeli nation -- poeticized in 1920 that "with blood and sweat / a race will be born to us / proud, magnanimous, and cruel." [FUNKENSTEIN, p. 308]

The Nazi focus in scientifically proving their own racial superiority had respective precedents even in the European Jewish community who were receptive to such confirmation of their own superiority. In the late nineteenth century, Jules Caravallo, an official at the Alliance Israelite Universelle (one of the earliest Jewish lobbying organizations) reported the results of a French study that "Jews constituted a distinct racial type; [and] that the Jewish cranial dimensions were found 'without exception to be superior to the dimensions of the corresponding Christian cranium; and that it seemed to be reasonable to accept a superiority of the Jewish heads over the Christian heads.'" The Jewish Alliance liked the study so much that they awarded a gold medal to its French author and widely distributed the results of the study. [PATAI] ("Leaders of the Alliance Israelite Universelle,' says Albert Lindemann, "warned its members against 'arrogance' yet still implicitly accepted, often in the social-Darwinian language current at the time, the notion of Jewish superiority.") [LINDEMANN, p. 69]

Even in the late 1970's a respected Jewish scholar saw fit to excerpt the following text of a German Nazi, Fritz Lenz, to support his own argument. The new context for this was a discussion by the Jewish author, Raphael Patai, of the possible reasons -- as he saw it -- for Jewish intellectual superiority over other people:

"Jews and Teutons [Germans] are alike distinguished by great

powers of understanding and by remarkable strength of will. Jews

and Teutons resemble each other in having a large measure of self-

confidence, an enterprising spirit, and a strong desire to get their

own way ... [They each] are inclined to diffuse themselves as a

ruling caste over foreign populations. They, too, prefer whenever

they can to have the hard physical toil of life done for them by

others..." [PATAI, p. 328]

"Lenz's attitude to the 'Jewish race,'" declares Patai, "was unsympathetic but correct." [PATAI, p. 327]

Incredibly, this kind of thinking continues to have currency for some influential Jews in our own day. In 1994 another Jewish American scholar, Norman Cantor, in one breath discarded the Nazi scientism that claimed Aryan superiority as a Master Race and replaced them with the innate, genetic superiority of Jews:

"... the further we travel from the monstrosity of Nazi misuses of

the racial concept and the more genetic applications are

investigated, the more does a scientific sanction for viewing the

Jews as a distinct genetic group, and furthermore one exhibiting an

extraordinary creative behavior pattern, come within the

parameters of legitimate discourse." [CANTOR, p.]

In the realms of Orthodox Judaism, (from which claims of Jewish superiority over others stems), there are Jews today who cite traditional Jewish religious texts to argue profoundly extremist, and shocking, ideas. In the last decade three Hebrew "radical right-wing" anthologies published in Israel, entitled Tzifiya, included recent Jewish writings that were, by any standards, echoes of Nazi ideologues. Charles Liebman remarks about a rabbi we have heard from earlier:

"In the last issue [1988] a rabbi from Merkaz Harav [David Bar Haim]

writes on the differences between Jews and non-Jews ... After

bringing proof texts he concludes that ... 'non-Jews are considered

as animals ... The status of non-Jews in Jewish law resembles the

status of animals and there is generally no distinction between

them.' A number of the articles in the anthology are overtly racist,

some are written by rabbis of some distinction. The most

depressing aspect is not that there are learned rabbis who hold such

views but that the religious establishment finds no cause to condemn

them." [LIEBMAN, p. 318]

In 1988 Rabbi Binyamin Tzvielli, the former Director of the Religious Department of Israel TV and Radio, attacked the principle of democracy:

"The democratic psychosis ... has taken control of us for no substantial

and visible reason ... Democracy is part of the culture of the West and

together with this culture it goes down and disappears before our eyes."

In 1985, says Ehud Sprinzak, "Relying on Maimonides and other distinguished Halakhic sources [Rabbi Israel] Ariel maintained that the famous commandment ["Thou Shalt Not Kill"] was never meant to be universal, that only the killing of a Jew qualifies as murder and is punished accordingly. Killing of a non-Jew is not punishable by society." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] Rabbi Ariel even wrote that the Jewish Promised Land extends from the Euphrates to the Nile and sooner or later a war would have to be undertaken against Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq, "with the expressed purpose of their elimination." [SPRINZAK, p. 270] "Although [Ariel] writes in a scholarly manner and eschews policy recommendations," notes Ehud Sprinzak, "any reader familiar with his very dogmatic fundamentalism is left with no doubt: neither Muslims nor Christians qualify as alien residents [in Israel]; both should be expelled from the Holy Land." [SPRINZAK, p. 22]

In 1994, Israeli rabbi Yitzhak (Joseph) Ginsburg produced a treatise "glorifying Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29 Muslims in a Hebron mosque," selling 1,000 copies in its first two days of publication. The author proclaimed that "the crowning glory of [Goldstein's] act is the sanctification of God" and that "God looks more fondly on Jewish blood and therefore it is redder and its life has priority." A second edition of Ginsburg's publication was printed in 1995. Another volume, entitled "Baruch Hagever: A Memorial Volume for the Holy Person Baruch Goldstein," was published by Michael Ben-Horin, Netanel Uzari, Yoel Lerner, and Yosef Dayan. Another rabbi, Ido Elba, faced Israeli charges of incitement to violence in his work entitled, "Clarification of Religious Precepts on Killing Gentiles." [ALON, G., HA'ARETZ]

Rabbi Elba faced Israeli court action for his dangerous views but, as Orit Shochat noted in 1998 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz,

"Elba expounded on the halacha [Jewish religious law], as many others

do. True, he did so at a rather inconvenient time shortly after the

massacre of dozens of Palestinians by Jewish settler Baruch Goldstein

but the halacha itself (which is, after all, immune to charges of

incitement) contains some racist and sinister statements for which

Rabbi Elba is not responsible. Why is there no ban on Sefer Hinuch,

which is given as a bar mitzvah gift to Jewish boys throughout the

country, although it also contains interpretations of these matters, in the

very spirit of Rabbi Ido Elba?" [SHOCHAT]

It must be emphasized that all such commentators as those above are not just aberrant Jews who drag up racist and totalitarian dogma out of the blue: such people, often "learned rabbis," are citing Jewish religious sources to today argue their theses. The crucial questions here, of course, involve how seminal Jewish religious texts can be used to sanction such monstrous material, to what degree it always has been used in this way, and how others -- like the Nazis, reacting to Jewish fanaticism and racial claims -- have built and expanded upon it for their own purposes. And lastly, of course: How widespread is Jewish interest in such religious sources now? Charles Liebman even notes another disturbing example in a more mainstream, and respectable, Orthodox Jewish journal in Israel:

An article in Tkhumin, the most distinguished annual [in Israel]

dealing with matters of Jewish law and public issues from an

orthodox perspective, published a learned essay on the status

of Muslims, according to Jewish law. The author seems to phrase

himself carefully and there is no trace of polemic in the tone of

the article, a fact that makes the conclusions all the more striking.

According to the writer, under the ideal conditions envisioned

by Jewish law, non-Jews in the land of Israel ought to live in

servitude to Jews. In fact, their very right to live in the Land of

Israel is problematic. It is permitted though not required to save

their lives when they are endangered. [LIEBMAN, p. 311]

Overtly racist and fascist-like dogma from Jewish religious texts are finding new receptivity in modern Israel's "religious Zionist" schools. Students are instructed that non-Jews have "inferior biological characteristics." Charles Liebman and Stephen Cohen note that students "learn that the first two [Jewish] patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, each had two sons so that the Jewish son might inherit pure genes whereas the corrupt, impure genes that Abraham inherited from his idolatrous ancestors could be passed on to the non-Jewish son. Only Jacob's son -- those of the third generation -- inherited pure genes and were worthy of being Jewish ... That there is no outcry against [this] being made part of the religious Zionist high school curriculum suggests the level that Jewish ethnocentrism has reached in some quarters." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 60] Which is to say, a level it has been for many for most of Jewish history. (If such material is given credence in some Jewish circles in our own day, what, one imagines, was the Jewish community thinking in the medieval era?)

"There is a strain in Jewish thought," laments London rabbi Mark Solomon, "that says there is a special Godly something or other that is passed down in a certain genetic line which confers a special quality on people and Jewishness is a special quality. I call that metaphysical racism." [KLEIN, E., p. 58]

It is not difficult to find instances where texts can be mined for religious justification of divinely-sanctioned Jewish chauvinism, racism, and dominance over others. Some Jewish religious texts centered on the Chosen People ethos underscore this attitude of Jewish preeminence and control over non-Jews:

"Thus saith the Lord God, Behold, I will lift up mine hand to the

Gentiles, and set up my standard to the people: and they shall bring thy

sons in their arms and thy daughters shall be carried upon their

shoulders. And kings shall be thy nursing fathers and their queens thy

nursing mothers; they shall bow down to thee with their face towards

the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet." ISAIAH, 49:22-23

"Kings shall come from you [Israelites] and shall rule wherever

the foot of the sons of man has trodden. I [God] shall give to your

seed all the earth which is under heaven, and they shall rule over

all the nations according to their desire; and afterward they shall

draw the whole earth to themselves, and shall inherit it forever."

-- Book of Jubilees 32:18-19 [MACDONALD]

This kind of thinking even has credibility in some quarters of American Jewish academe. In 1993, in a book published by SUNY (State University of New York Press), David Novak examined various Jewish religious perspectives, including the idea of Jewish domination over others, and finds that such a notion is irrefutably part of Orthodox Judaism:

"If the Torah is only for the sake of Israel's election, then it appears to be

[in] the interest of her nationalist self-interest ... The practical

implications of assuming that the Torah is solely for the sake of affirming

the election of Israel [by God] is to see no transcendental standard

governing Israel's relationships with the nations [other people] of the

world. The only relationship possible, then, is one where Gentiles accept

Jewish sovereignty and dominance, be it political or only "religious" -- in

the usual western sense of that distinction ... Such a theology can all too

easily lend itself to such a practical program of dominance. Indeed, a

consistent proponent of it would have no theological arguments with

which to argue against such programs, however much he or she might

be morally offended by them." [NOVAK, Elec of Is, p. 25-26]

With the military empowerment of modern Israel and Jewish religious texts in mind, Shalom Carmy notes that

"A decade before the Balfour declaration [the 1917 British decree that

helped to establish the modern state of Israel]," Isaac Breuer had warned

that the power conferred by halaka on male Jews over women, slaves,

and aliens, imposed an awesome responsibility, and that only the most

rigorous discipline would prevent its abuse." [CARMY, Rel Zio, p. 19]

With the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, most Jews were shocked that his killer, Yigal Amir, was Jewish -- a man who felt that the myths of historic Israel and Jewish religious laws were being betrayed by Rabin's peace accords with Arabs. Many were also disturbed to find out that Amir was so deeply and passionately trained in traditional Jewish religious doctrine. Earlier, Baruch Goldstein, another devout Orthodox Jew and a doctor, had machine-gunned to death 29 Arabs as they prayed in a Hebron mosque. Meir Lockshin, a Canadian professor and himself an Orthodox Jew, was so disturbed by the killings that he wrote

"One just can't ignore the fact that Amir and the other famous Orthodox

murderer of the nineties, Baruch Goldstein, attended the finest modern

Orthodox schools and excelled in their studies. They were not

sociopaths. They were well-integrated and respected members of

their communities; it was impossible to tell them apart from their

colleagues and friends. As Rabbi Lichenstein said on the day before

the assassination, the nationalist Orthodox community in Israel would

have gladly shown off Yigal Amir as one of the great successes of its

educational system. It is absurd then for the Orthodox community to

say that he and Goldstein are not representative." [LOCKSHIN]

Within a year of Rabin's death, his imprisoned assassin had "attracted marriage proposals from dozens of young women at home and abroad, including some from wealthy American families." [AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE, 8-18-97]

Baruch Goldstein's terrorist act against random Arabs was not the first such attack in Israel. In 1982 a Jewish American in Jerusalem, Alan Harry Goodman, a veteran of the Israeli army, "shot his way into the Dome of the Rock [the third holiest shrine/mosque in worldwide Islam] with an M-16 rifle, killing one man and seriously wounding three others." "Since Goodman's trial in 1982," noted Amos Elon nine years later, "more than twenty religious fanatics have been caught in the act of preparing one or another violent outrage on the Temple Mount. Many more suspects were charged but released for lack of sufficient evidence." [ELON, 1991, p. 100]

In 1984, 16 Jewish religiously-obsessed men were arrested for their plans to blow up the Dome of the Rock. A few months later, 28 "young yeshiva students from mainstream rabbinical colleges in Jerusalem were arrested one night at the foot of the Temple Mount with ladders and ropes in their hands. Some were armed. The presiding judge in their case allowed them all to go free." Not long after this incident, yet another set of 28 religiously-driven criminals were apprehended "as they were plotting to blow up Moslem shrines on the Temple Mount. Some members were caught in the act of connecting explosives to Arab buses." "Some of the plotters," notes Amos Elon, "had distinguished service records in the army. A few were public figures ... All were devoutly Orthodox. Most were graduates of prominent religious seminaries. They included ranking officers in the army and a veteran air-force pilot." [ELON, 1991, p. 100-102]

Funds for their legal defense came from "hundreds of synagogues throughout the country," "nearly a million" Israeli signed petitions requesting amnesty. "Given the gravity of the charges against them," notes Amos Elon, "most of the defendants came away with relatively light sentences." [ELON, 1991, p. 105] Some of the convicted eventually had their sentences dismissed by the president of Israel.

In view of such events, a troubled Israeli rabbi, Tzvi Marx, worries that "the unwillingness of the yeshiva [Orthodox training] world to allow for moral criticism, on the simplistic religious assumption of the [Jewish Orthodox] tradition's inherent perfection, has spawned an exaggerated, unholy triumphalism as well as racism which bore fruits in the violence of the Jewish Defense League, the [Meir Kahane's] Kach movement, the [Jewish terrorist underground] Machteret, and finally in Hebron." [MARX, p. 95] Such a dangerous Orthodox attitude has counterparts in the United States, as evidenced by Brooklyn's Rabbi Abraham Hecht's religious sanctioning of the Rabin assassination. [GOLDBERG, JJ, p. 260] (Rabin was purportedly murdered for transgressions against Jewish religious law, particularly in his willingness to relinquish conquered land back to Arabs).

In the first half of the twentieth century, a prominent American rabbi, Mordecai Kaplan, found the implications of traditional Jewish views of themselves as a Chosen People so ominous and out of sync with modern universalistic, egalitarian, and democratic values that he founded an entire movement, Reconstructionism, that rejected many of the tenets of Orthodox Judaism. (Members of Orthodox Judaism in turn of course rejected his views; some groups excommunicated him). Kaplan had this to say about the Jews as the Chosen People:

"We cannot fail to recognize in the claim of Jewish superiority a kinship

and resemblance to the similar claims of other national and racial groups

which have been used in defense of the imperialist exploitation of the

yellow and black man by the whites on the grounds that they were the

'white man's burden.' They are the grounds for the German persecution

of Jewry, in accord with the Aryan clause of the Third Reich's

fundamental law. They were in the past the grounds in which our own

people rationalized their conquest and expropriation of the Canaanites...

All such claims to superiority of one race, nation, or caste [are]

detrimental to the interests of humanity, and [are] essentially vicious."

As Jacob Wasserman, a German-Jewish novelist wrote in 1929:

"It is clear to me that no people can continue being chosen, nor

unceasingly designate itself as such, without upsetting in the eyes

of other peoples the normal order of things. The whole idea is plainly

absurd and immoral." [in BARON, J., 1956, p. 209]

This "immoral" and racist "viciousness" is directed by traditional Jewish teachings at any non-Jew. In the particular case of the people of African descent, Jewish racism is well evidenced in the writings of the influential and revered medieval Jewish sage, Moses Maimonides, whose work is so well regarded by orthodox Jews that some of it has become part of Orthodox liturgy. Maimonides said this about Africans:

"The Negroes found in the remote South, and those who resemble them

from among them that are with us in these climes ... the status of those is

like that of irrational animals. To my mind they have not the rank of men,

but have among the beings a rank lower than the rank of man but higher

than the rank of apes." [GUIDE TO THE PERPLEXED]

(While pious Jews are supposed to follow 613 commandments in the Torah, Maimonides even "spoke about forcing" Gentiles to follow seven laws that the Talmud deems anyone must follow, if Jews have the power to enforce them.) [NOVAK, p. 48, E of I]

In recent years African-American scholars in particular have been speculating on the origins of racism as it affected their ancestors and the resultant moral climate that permitted the dehumanization of Africans for exploitation in the New World slave trade. Many believe that the seminal equation of Blacks and slavery is to be located in Jewish tradition, in the so-called "Hamitic" myth. In the Old Testament Noah (of "Ark" fame) had three sons, each brother the patriarch of different racial and social lines of humanity. One of them, Ham, had a son who was eventually cursed by Noah (Genesis 9:25) to be a "servant of servants" (i.e., slave). Jewish tradition links Africans as descendants of this grandson of Noah, Canaan:

"[Canaan's] children shall be born ugly and black! ... Your

grandchildren's hair shall be twisted into kinks ... they shall go naked,

and their male members shamefully elongated. Men of this race are

called Negroes; their father Canaan commanded them to love theft and

fornication, to be banded together in hatred of their masters and never

tell the truth." [GRAVES, p. 121]

"The association of Ham with the African race," writes Tony Martin, an African-American professor at Wellesley College, "made this myth a major rationalization for the European enslavement of Africans ... Christians have customarily borne the brunt of blame for the Hamitic myth and they certainly are not without sin in this regard. Yet, the Hamitic myth (that is, the association of the African with the supposed curse of Noah) was invented by Jewish talmudic scholars over a thousand years before the transatlantic slave trade." [MARTIN, p. 33]

"Since early times," notes Judah Rosenthal, "Noah's curse of Canaan was utilized by the defenders of slavery.... [Jewish] legend was that some Canaanite tribes left Canaan during Joshua's conquest and settled in Africa ... In the Talmud Africans are called Canaanites." [ROSENTHAL, p. 74] Some Jewish religious literature (the Midrash) opines that all descendants of Ham were cursed to be slaves. [ROSENTHAL, p. 76]

This version of the Ham tradition is noted in the Jewish Encyclopedia:

"Ham is represented by the Talmudist as one of the three who had

intercourse with their wives in the Ark, being punished therefore in that

his descendants, the Ethiopians, are black ... Ham was punished by

having his descendants led into captivity with their buttocks

uncovered." [JEW ENCY, v. VI, p. 186]

The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion notes: "The Canaanites are believed to have been descended from Canaan, youngest son of Ham ... Noah cursed Canaan for the depravity of Ham upon his father, destining him to be subjugated by Shem -- thereby foretelling the eventual displacement of the Canaanites by the Israelites (descended from Shem), consistently justified by the Bible as the inevitable outcome of the sexual licentiousness practiced by the Canaanites." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 149]

In modern history, few expressions of Jewish racism towards Blacks were as boldly proclaimed as Norman Podhoretz's infamous article in the 1960's in the American Jewish Congress' magazine Commentary, of which he was editor. Podhoretz, once self-described as a liberal, readjusted Commentary down an increasingly neoconservative path:

"The hatred I feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to

face or admit, and it is the most hidden and most overloaded...

It no longer ... has any cause or justification ... I know it from insane

rage that can stir me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism, I know it

from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a

mixed couple." [LINCOLN, p. 179]

Traditional Jewish racism, based on religious principles, has taken new forms with newer secular Jewish ideologies. Boas Evron, an Israeli writer, traces traditional Chosen People attitudes into its newly secularized mode: Zionism, through the "Revisionist" Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky, says Evron, "poeticized about 'hidden glory,' declaring that every Jew is a potential 'prince' -- in other words, that Jews are noble by their very nature (just as the Germans imagined themselves to be innately superior) ... Indeed, this belief in innate superiority is the basis of racism and of all the varieties of fascism, which is also a reason for classifying revisionist Zionism within the general category of fascist psychology." [EVRON, p. 112]

Even in the years leading up to the Holocaust in Germany, Daniel Niewyk recognizes some world-view parallels between German fascism and the growing Zionist movement among German Jewry:

"At the heart of the Zionist critique of liberal [Jewish] assimilation [into

German society] lay the conviction that Jews constituted a unique race

... That [Jewish marriage to non-Jews] might become a serious problem

for the Jews prompted Zionist leaders in the Berlin Jewish community to

authorize a report identifying intermarriage as a threat to the 'racial

purity of the stock.'" [NIEWYK, p. 129]

Niewyk overlooks what he calls "this [Jewish] racial arrogance" as having roots in the Chosen People ethos; he chooses to frame it as a mirror-like reaction to German fascism: "[it is] nothing other than the photographic negative of anti-Semitism." [NIEWYK, p. 131]

But the former head of the Israel Civil Rights Association, Israel Shahak, does see the connection between traditional Orthodox Jewish racism and its capacity nowadays to violently implement such views in nationalist form, via the modern state of Israel. "Many people," says Shahak, "do not realize where Zionism ... is tending: to a combination of all the old hates of classical Judaism towards Gentiles." [SHAHAK, p. 72] "It is true," notes professor Georges Tamarin, an immigrant to Israel, "that the Bible is one of the greatest creations of human cultures. But it is equally true that it is full of inhuman motives and that, as [Jewish author Arthur] Koestler (who surely cannot be accused of being an anti-Semite) stated, all the bases of the [Nazi discriminatory] Nuremberg Laws can be found in it ... If the segregatory laws of the Herrenrasse were barbarous, the segregatory laws of the Chosen People are equally barbarous." [TAMARIN, p. 24]

Even the German-Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, of "I-Thou" fame, beloved by many American Jews as a benevolent proponent of Jewish mysticism, called Jews "a community of blood [Gemeinschaft seines Blutes] ... the deepest, most potent stratum of our being." Many Jewish authors nowadays have busied themselves with diffusing the most troubling implications of Buber's ideas. "This language," remarks apologist Enzo Traverso, "so surprising today, signifies for him an essentially cultural strategy which ... led inevitably to a reactionary or racist political standpoint." [TRAVERSO, p. 30]

"Of all the doctrines that Buber ever enunciated," notes Maurice Friedman, "this one of the 'blood' is perhaps the most problematic and the most difficult to comprehend ... Buber would have seen no contradiction here, however, for his call to inner decision was a call to the realization of one's uniqueness through the uniqueness of one's people." [FRIEDMAN, M., 1981, p. 132]

Jewish identity, wrote Buber, is not

"just the mere continuity with the past. [It] has deposited something

in us that can never leave us in any hour of our life, that determines

every tone and hue of our lives, whatever we do and whatever befalls

us -- namely blood, the deepest, [most] potent level of the soul."

[POPPEL, S., 1976, p. 129-130]

As Israel Shahak notes, during the rise of Nazism Buber was "actually teaching doctrines about non-Jews not unlike the Nazi doctrines about Jews." [SHAHAK, p. 28] Buber's (Jewish) friend and influence, Gustav Landauer, had addressed the idea of the Jewish community of "blood" earlier:

"What man is by birth, what is his innermost and most secret,

his inviolable uniqueness, that is the great community of the

living in him, that is his blood and his community of blood.

Blood is thicker than water; the community which the individual

discovers himself to be is mightier and nobler and more ancient

than the thin influences of state and society. What is most

individual in us is what is most common in us." [FRIEDMAN, M.,

A British Jew, Emma Klein, in a 1996 book about Jewish identity, led a section called What Is It to Be Jewish? with answers to the question by four young Jews who were grappling with the issue.

"It's two things," said Nichola, "It's a family thing and a thing

that has been imposed on me through blood. It's a genetic

thing, if you like."

"It's something that has been imposed on me," said Claire,

"It's a blood thing. I can't escape it."

"I feel Jewish," said Sophia, "out of history, my blood, and

it's just like a nationality.'

[A young man named Guy summed up the common theme more

ominously]: "Entertaining any idea about racial purity just stinks

of Hitler but it is an issue. I feel all sorts of people have some

pride in their roots and they feel racial mixing dilutes your

heritage. I think I might feel that. It frightens me." [KLEIN, E., p.

Even under Soviet communism and the emphatic destruction of religious roots, this familiar Jewish identity endured. Sylvia Rothchild notes the results of American Jewish Committee interviews (1978-80) with Russian Jews now living in America:

"Many émigrés spoke of their Jewishness as 'a matter of blood,'

out of their control. They felt it as something 'mysterious ...

unfathomable," a wellspring of feelings that inundated them from

time to time. [Some] experience 'inexplicable' Jewish loyalty in

spite of the fact that they were not religious, knew no Yiddish and

had no Jewish education." [ROTHCHILD, 1985, p. 34]

When Jewish author Ann Roiphe read some scientific evidence that suggested that "not much admixture has taken place between the Ashkenazi Jews and their gentile neighbors [in Europe] during the last 700 years," she was pleased. "It is actually comforting," she wrote, "to think of the scientist looking through a powerful lens and finding [Biblical heroines] Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and the unfortunate, unwanted Leah sending their chemical matter into the future." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 37]

In 1973 Rabbi A. Avidan provided the following religious "guidance" for Israeli soldiers. It was published by the Central Regional Command of the Israeli Army. No other rabbi ever challenged its contents. It was eventually taken out of circulation, presumably because it could undermine military commanders' own orders:

"When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or

in a raid, so long as there is no certainty that these civilians are incapable

of harming our forces, then according to the Halakhah [Jewish religious

law] they may and even should be killed ... In a war, when our forces

storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to

kill even good civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly good."

For an outside observer to both groups, traditional Judaism and German Nazism, the the original intention of the two belief systems seems similar: each seeks to maintain group privilege and exclusivity through racial lines of its own. (The likes of Patai, Cantor, Kahane and others extend racist self-glory, one way or the other, to our own day). Each anticipates in-group domination over others. And each ideology -- in origin -- aims to clear their respective land claims of foreign elements. By any means necessary. The Nazi's idea of Aryan supermen stems from a secular, pre-Judaeo-Christian pseudo-pagan revival, tinged with nihilism; the Jews special grace is religiously sanctioned from God, who was originally conceived as a brutal and vengeful Lord of a Kingdom. Each group envisions a special destiny, above all other people.

"The fact remains," says Harold Cruse, "that the European experience shows that when it comes to playing the role of the Chosen People in history, the danger is that two can play this game as well as one. When that happens, woe be to the side that is short on numbers." [CRUSE, p. 483]

For those who might decry with indignation a comparison of oppressed and oppressor as being ridiculously unwarranted, largely due to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust epoch, we need only turn to history to confirm where the atrocious deeds of the Nazis and Jews, in both action and attitude, merge:

When the Lord your God gives them [the Hittites, the Girgashites,

the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the

Jebusites -- all contestant tribes against the Jews for parts of the

ancient land of Israel] to you and you defeat them; then you must

utterly destroy them; you shall make no covenant with them and

show them no mercy ... [Deuteronomy 7:1-6]

This, of course, is from the Jewish Torah, known in Christian tradition as the Old Testament. This is not just ancient history, or legend about ancient history, but part of the most sacred of Jewish religious texts. It is the origin of Judaic belief per their claims to the land of Israel. Many Jews to this day believe such material to be the infallibly dictatorial Word of God, as do many Christians who accept the Old Testament as part of their own religious foundation.

For anyone who takes the time to wade through the avalanche of esoteric minutia in the Old Testament, examples of religiously sanctioned cruelty and atrocity by the Israelites are found to be core to their dogma of "specialhood" and land conquest. The eminent and popular scholar Joseph Campbell (who, of course, is vilified by some indignant Jews as just another in the endless parade of anti-Semites; Jewish scholar Sander Gilman, for example, calls Campbell's work "tainted with the rhetoric of anti-Semitism." [GILMAN, Psycho and, p. 101] spent a lifetime studying world myths and belief systems and calls the Torah tradition "one of the most brutal war mythologies of all time." [CAMPBELL, P. 181] Slave labor, rape, and genocide are, for example, encouraged in the following Old Testament passage:

When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms

of peace to it. And if its answer to you is yes, then all the people

who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall

serve you. But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war

against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your

God gives it into your hand you shall put all its males to the

sword, but the women and the little ones, the cattle, and

everything else in the city, all its spoils, you shall take as booty

for yourself. [Deuteronomy 20:10-14]

When God reputedly gave the land of Israel to the Jews, there were, of course, people already living there. And what, according to the most sacred of Jewish texts, was deemed necessary to clear the place of non-Jews? The text from the Torah quoted above continues:

Thus you shall do to all the cities which are very far from you,

which are not cities here. But in the cities of the people that the

Lord your God gives you for an inheritance, you shall save

nothing alive that breathes, but you shall utterly destroy them,

the Hittites and Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites,

the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as the Lord has commanded.

[Deuteronomy 20:14-18]

Could Hitler and his henchmen improve much on this?

The violent wresting of the Holy Land from others is led by Joshua and begins with carnage at the city of Jericho:

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both men

and women, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass,

with the edge of the sword ... " [JOSHUA, 6-21]

The genocide continued:

"So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of

the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings; he left none

remaining but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God

of Israel commanded." [JOSHUA 10:40]

The parallel between the Israelites' scapegoating of their archrivals, the Canaanites, as prelude to their extermination, and the Nazis' contempt for, and mass murderer of, Jews is striking. "Canaan," says Eric Friedland, "is transformed [by Jews] into a cipher for the worst elements of Israel's social and religious life, a major contributing cause of its degeneration and downfall. A finishing touch is furnished by Isiaiah (23:8) and Zechariah (14:21) when they debase the term 'Canaanite' into a synonym for a merchant or trafficker. Haven't we heard this canard before?" [FRIEDLAND, p. 79]

Modern Jewish reflection upon, and moral reckoning for, their own genocide of the Canaanites, Friedland concludes, has not been forthcoming:

"The ... difficult task is to come to terms from a religious

perspective with that part of our past that, under a less developed

moral standard, was for a long time condoned but in the present

age raises serious ethical questions with profound repercussions."

As Robert Carroll notes:

"Total war can make sense from a strategic point of view, but it

raises serious moral problems; and the genocidal war against

the Canaanites in the Bible has bothered sensitive readers of a book

often thought to express perfect, divinely ordained morality."

[CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]

"I remember," notes Joshua Cohen, "[in fifth grade] asking my [Jewish religion] teacher how it was possible for Jews to have behaved like Nazis, and being told that the attempted genocide in [Torah chapter] 1 Samuel was different in that the Israelites were carrying out a holy command ... [This] is itself an example of the appalling bigotry that can subsist in canonized texts. The biblical paradigm, moreover, confirms our fear that canonization of texts might confer a moral authority on bigotry. For many Jews, the text of the Bible and particularly of the Torah is sacred ... My fifth-grade teacher is hardly alone in regarding the Command to exterminate Amalek as the word of God." [COHEN, J. p. 293]

Although Aryan Nazism was an expressly stated anti-Christian creed, (restructuring German culture in terms of a pre-Christian and pre-Judaic neo-pagan revival, i.e., erasing Jewish and Christian world views), many Jews today ignore a myriad of other variables and stretch medieval Christian antipathy for the "Jews who killed Christ” into a psycho-social basis in the formation of the Third Reich. In this view, a key to understanding Hitler's hatred of Jews was Christianity. Richard Libowitz, for example, states that "the fact that the vast majority of perpetrators of and bystanders to the Holocaust were baptized in good standing of traditional churches, none of whom has ever been formally rebuked by his or her particular denomination, suggests one of the primary non-Jewish challenges of Holocaust study demanding evaluation. Elie Wiesel has confronted the most disturbing facet of that realm with his reminder that 'not every Christian was a killer, but every killer was a Christian.'" [LIBOWITZ, Asking, p. 65] "It [The Holocaust] was Christians who perpetrated it," declares David Wyman, "-- the Nazis who were the products of western Christian civilization." [WILSON, M., p. 30]

Richard L. Rubenstein proclaims that German Nazi

"National Socialism was an anti-clerical movement. It was nevertheless

dialectically related to Christianity. It was the negation of Christianity as

negation was understood by Hegel and Freud. It could have as little

existed without Christianity as the Black Mass of medieval Satanism

could have existed without the mass of Roman Catholicism. The classic

villains of Christianity, the Jews, became the primal object of

extermination of the anti-Christian Christians, the Nazis. Studying the

classical utterances on Jews and Judaism, and at the same time reviewing

the terrible history of the Nazi period, prompts one to ask whether there

is something in the logic of Christian theology that, when pushed to the

extreme, justifies, if it does not incite to, the murder of Jews."

Such a libel is profoundly short-sighted, preposterously convoluted, and loaded with Orwellian doublethink. It asserts that the Nazis' emphatic break with Christianity was really an affirmation of fundamental Christian religious tenets and it ridiculously equates Satanism with the Catholic Church by virtue of the devil cult's very rejection of the latter. (Was Godless communism, Aryan fascism's opposite, an expression of Christianity too -- at the same time! -- because it also took hold in a Christian milieu?) Rubenstein's logic, and so many others' like him, insist that the very assertion of negation is really its opposite, an expression of affirmation. More profoundly, the insistence that Christianity presumed murderous antipathy towards Jews (fulfilled in German Nazism) and is somehow rooted in Christian universalistic teachings, completely overlooks the origins of such institutionalized hatred in western religious tradition. By Rubenstein's own logic (or by any more reasoned analysis), even if we accept the scurrilous premise that the Christian world view is somehow murderous, it did not evolve out of thin air but was itself an outgrowth of Judaism. Even by Rubenstein's own logic, it must be underscored that the initial Christians were themselves Jews who rejected (negated -- by Hegel's, Freud's, or anybody's definition) Judaism. Then, following Rubenstein's own argument, Christianity's negation of Judaism was really its affirmation, and the worst of "Chosen People" Judaism was passed down from its ideological parent from Jewry to Christianity to Nazism.

However one views this scenario, if we are going to seek out, in ancient origins, the presumed roots of Nazism, it is obviously more viable to locate examples of -- and role models for -- "nationalist" violent hate behavior even back further in the religious past, not in Christian universalism that invited others to join their fold, but in the "particularist," exclusionist beliefs and brutally merciless actions of the ancient Jews themselves. Many today will steadfastly deny, and be outraged by, such disturbing Nazi/Israelite parallels. How can one compare the relatively "primitive" actions of a group of people thousands of years ago to those of a supposedly "civilized” group in the 1940's: the Nazis, the consummate, scientific dehumanizers? After all, times have changed; the Jews of the late twentieth century understand their heritage to represent a "beacon of light to the rest of humanity." "The origins of democracy are to be found in the Mosaic code,” so it is claimed by so many Jewish apologists and propagandists, and all the rest of it. But the bottom line is this: If Jewish-instigated genocide is routinely disregarded or trivialized from the ancient past, then why should any of the Jewish myths of that era be taken seriously? To deny the genocidal origins of the Jewish covenant with God as central to the faith is to deny the whole of the Old Testament, the origins of Jewish identity itself, and their link to the land of Israel. Ironically, for all the modern Jewish bitterness against Christianity for its alleged endemic anti-Semitism, the fact that Christianity also accepts the events of the Old Testament as the incontestable "will of God" spares Jews regular inquiries into the moral and ethical responsibility for the Nazi-like misdeeds of their ancient ancestors, a religious foundation that has led in more than one direction to the socio-political dogmas today. Christianity is in fact largely protective of Jewish tradition. To both Jew and Christian alike (and Muslims, for that matter, who also accept the Old Testament) God sanctioned the Israelite's massacres and they are, hence, acceptable and morally unchallenged. The Nazis never made claims that God was on their side. As such, they are everyone's monsters.

(Christianity is responsible for the attempted extinction of the Jewish people? Some have argued the exactly opposite case. As Marcus Arkin notes about the writings of Jewish British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, "[He] reminds the Jews that Jesus Christ has done more for them than anybody else and that had the Church not flourished and Christianity had not become widespread, Judaism may have been forgotten completely." [ARKIN, 1989] Because Jesus was a Jew, and based his teachings on the Old Testament, Christianity is not free in categorically dismissing the Jewish religion. Nor destroying it. As Jewish scholar Samuel Sandmel once even argued, Jesus "was ... a Jewish loyalist ... He was a martyr to his Jewish patriotism.") [JACOB, W., 1974, p. 205]

In the case of yet another ancient Israelite genocide (this one more successful) against the Amalekites, even one of the foremost modern scholars on the Old Testament, Bernard Anderson, turns apologist -- in apparent deference to the all-pervasiveness of Judeo-Christian thinking in Western culture -- when he argues that the modern viewer should suspend moral judgment about Jewish-inspired genocide in their religio-historical origins:

"Through the [Israelite] prophet Samuel, [King] Saul was given a divine

command to utterly destroy [the Amalekites] -- man, woman, child,

cattle, and goods ... According to modern ethical standards, this act of

total extermination was a barbarous thing (though it was scarcely less

refined than modern warfare!) But instead of making a value judgment

from our standpoint, let us try to understand the act within the religious

perspective of ancient Israel." [ANDERSON, p. 172]

As the Torah/Old Testament commands: "Now go and smite Amalek, and exterminate everything that is his. Don't pity him, but kill man, woman, infant and nursling, ox, sheep, camel and ass." [SAMUEL 15:2-3]

Saul in fact initially spared the King of the Amalekites, Agag, and confiscated some prime livestock. For Saul's reluctance to blindly obey the word of the Israelite God and exterminate every living thing, he was considered to have "sinned" and was severely reprimanded by the prophet Samuel. Eventually Saul attempted to make amends by personally hacking Agag "in pieces." [I SAMUEL 15. 1-33] "So decisively did [Saul] defeat [the Amalekites]," says scholar Bernhard Anderson, "that they vanished from the historical scene shortly afterwards." [ANDERSON, p. 172]

"Heretics, false prophets, witches, communities harboring apostates, and the six Amorite nations that occupied Canaan at the time of the Israelite conquest," notes Joshua Cohen, "are all sentenced to extermination in the book of Deuteronomy. But the cherem [the sentence of "extermination"] on Amalek, is the most renowned ban in all of Jewish tradition. It is pronounced twice: in Exodus, Chapter 17, and again in Deuteronomy, Chapter 25." [COHEN, J. p. 290]

Even more troubling, the Old Testament asserts that "the Lord will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages." [EXODUS 17:16] "Amalekites," notes the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "were regarded as Israel's inveterate foes, whose annihilation became a sacred obligation ... Only after the final destruction of the Amalekites will God and his throne be complete." [WERBLOWSKY, R., p. 41] The Old Testament commands Jews to literally "blot out the memory of Amalek," an order that, as part of continuous religious review, ironically ensures that it can never be forgotten. On the contrary, such a religious sanction secures, notes Joshua Cohen, "the enduring presence of bigotry in [Jewish] sacred teachings." [COHEN, p. 299]

A disturbing modern perspective on the Amalekites is their reinvention in some Orthodox and Zionist Jewish minds as Arabs (and any other non-Jews, or even Jews, that are understood to want to "destroy" Israel. Michael Asheri's Amalek, for instance, is generic Germans.) [ASHERI, M., 1983, p. 340]

Rabbi Avraham Weiss (who we will meet again later in this chapter assaulting a convent in Poland) explains that:

"The affirmative Torah commandment is to destroy those who bear the

seed of Amalek. Since the halakha has ruled that Amalek does not

exist today, the commandment cannot be carried out. Rav [Rabbi]

Haim Soloveitchik, however, maintained that there are two forms of

Amalek. There is the genetic Amalek, and there is the figurative

Amalek, which constitutes any nation willing to destroy Israel. Basing

themselves on this position, Kahanists [the followers of Rabbi Meir

Kahane] argue that Arabs are figurative Amalek. Thus, when Arabs

were indiscriminately killed, the classic Kahanist response was, "We

were not involved, but we applaud the action." Thus, after Ami Popper

murdered seven Arabs, Rabbi Kahane suggested that a street be named

after him. Thus, the Hevron massacre [Baruch Goldstein's murder of 29

Arabs at prayer in a mosque] has been defended in some circles not on

rounds of national warfare, but on the grounds of fighting against

Amalek. Rav Joseph B. Soloveitch [says that] every individual who

bears the genes of Amalek must be wiped out. With regard to the

figurative Amalek, on the other hand, one is mandated to engage in

warfare against any nation that attempts to destroy the Jewish people."

Who then, one must inevitably be drawn to wonder, might be included as the (figurative) enemies of (figurative) Israel who seeks to (figuratively) destroy it? "The name Amalek," observes Joshua Cohen, "has taken on a symbolic meaning in Jewish tradition ... To most Jews, Amalek represents the malign genius of anti-Semitism." [COHEN, J., p. 291] Amalek can hence be creatively interpreted to mean virtually anybody. "Anyone who acts to deliberately provoke hatred of God or Torah-fearing Jews," decried an ultra-Orthodox newspaper in Israel, "can be considered 'children of Amalek.'" [JERUSALEM POST, 3-15-92] "Amalek is also an ideology that denies Israel's unique mission in perfecting the world," wrote Shlomo Riskin in 1996, "The spiritual heirs of Amalek include the Nazis, the Soviet Communists and Moslem fundamentalists." [RISKIN, S., 3-1-96]

The immediate modern Amalek nearest at hand in Israel was addressed by Rabbi Israel Hess in a 1980 issue of the campus magazine at one of Israel's pre-eminent colleges, Bar-Ilan University (religiously Orthodox in orientation). Hess was formerly its campus rabbi. The title of his piece was Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah. "Hess," says professor Ehud Sprinzak, "likened the Arabs to the biblical Amalekites, who were deservedly annihilated. The Amalekites, according to Hess, were born socially and militarily treacherous and cruel. Their relation to Jews was like the relation of darkness to light -- one of total contradiction. The Arabs, who live today in the land of Israel and who are constantly waging a treacherous terrorist war against the Jews, are direct descendants of the Amalekites and the correct solution to the problem is extermination." [SPRINZAK, p. 123]

Israeli Knesset member Amnon Rubenstein noted this articles, saying, "Rabbi Hess explains the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek and says that there is no mercy in this commandment: the commandment is to kill and destroy even children and infants. Amalek is whoever declares war against the people of God." [HARKABI, p. 150] "Hess implies that those who have a quarrel with the Jews instantly become Amalek and ought to be destroyed," says Yehoshafat Harkabi, "children and all ... Amalek is not an ancient extinct tribe but a generic enemy that each generation may identify for itself." [HARKABI, p. 150] "It's not just a lunatic fringe," says Rabbi David Hartman, about this kind of thinking in the Jewish community, "It is a diseased element that is capable of infiltrating into the Jewish self-understanding.' [DORFNER, p. 50]

In 1992 Moshe Kohn was mailed a pamphlet in Israel. It's message was, he says,

"Now that we Jews are again enjoying national sovereignty in our

homeland, we at long last again have the opportunity -- and the

duty -- to fulfill the Biblical commandment to exterminate Amalek.

Moreover, only after we have done so will God's Kingdom prevail

over all creation. And who exactly is today's Amalek? According

to our pamphleteer, it is 'the Palestinians.'" [KOHN, M., 3-27-92]

Jewish religious injunctions to mass slaughter are even part of traditional yearly Purim commemorations, particularly on Shabbat Zachor ("the Saturday of Remembrance") -- "the Sabbath on which Jews are commanded to obliterate the enemy of Amalek, the arch enemy of the Jewish people." [FEILER, p. 14] In the wake of the mass murder of Arabs at prayer by Baruch Goldstein, "some Jews," noted the Jewish Bulletin, "say Goldstein was inspired by Purim passages that condone wanton killing." [KATZ, p. 1] Such passages from the biblical Book of Esther celebrate how Jews rose up to kill thousands of Persians who plotted against them, recited twice by observant Jews during Purim. "The tone [of these passages] is not self-defense," complains Rivkah Walton, "but of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter." [KATZ, p. 1] "The concluding chapters of the Book of Esther," adds Peter Novick, "tell of the [Jewish] queen's soliciting permission to slaughter not just the Jews' armed enemies but the enemies' wives and children -- with a final death toll of seventy-five thousand. These 'memories' provided gratifying revenge fantasies to the Jews of medieval Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 5] In the 1960s the Israelis kidnapped former Nazi official Adolph Eichmann from Argentina, and sentenced him to death in the Jewish state. One staff member at the American Jewish Committee worried that, because of the trial, "gentiles might learn that 'for over 2,000 years Jews have cheered joyously in the synagogues when the Megillah readers annually told of the hanging of [Queen Esther's arch-rival] Haman and his ten sons with him.'" [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 1323]

"Objections to the Purim passages don't stop there, however," notes the Jewish Bulletin, "some people oppose the way biblical citations in Exodus (17:8-18) and Deuteronomy (25:17-19) are read on Shabbat Zachor before Purim. These call for the annihilation of the descendants of Amalek, the biblical enemy of the Israelites." [KATZ, p 1] Another Jewish commentator, Ismar Elbogen, noted the traditional emotional climate of such public Purim recitals:

"Often the reading of the scroll [of Esther], was accompanied by

customs intended to release the overwhelming feelings of joy,

and these not infrequently took on wild form ... The noisy

disturbances have been eliminated in every civilized country."

In this Amalek context, what are we to make of the words of Philip Graubart in a 1996 issue of the Jewish Exponent? :

"Baruch Goldstein examined the story of Esther and the biblical

passages regarding Amalek and discovered it was permissible to

murder 40 Muslims at prayer. And we all know in Judaism's vast

corpus of sacred writings, there are a few other texts and ideas that,

in the wrong hands, could lead to further atrocities.... Only Jews

passionately committed to Jewish texts can fall victim to Judaism's

dark side. Only Jews who absolutely revere the Torah as God's word

could accept the biblical injunction to slaughter Amalek as a call to arms,

or take God's genocidal commandments to Joshua to be currently

relevant ... [but] I'm not afraid of passion, I'm terrified of the absence

of passion in my own Jewish culture ... On a day to day basis

I feel a lot more threatened by apathy than by zealotry. And so do most

rabbis." [GRAUBART, p. 5]

Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, an elected member of the Israeli Knesset, and a man even many Jews concede to have clearly fascist tendencies (Hebrew University professor Ehud Sprinzak calls Kahane's political party, Kach, "quasi-fascist," [SPRINZAK, p. 233] Lesley Hazelton calls Kahane himself "openly fascistic") [HAZELETON, L., 1987, p. 19] quotes the following two Old Testament citations to begin one of his books, Our Challenge:

"For thou art a holy people unto the L-rd they G-d: the L-rd thy G-d hath

chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that

are on the face of the earth." [DEUTERONOMY, 7:6]

"Every place wherever the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours:

from the wilderness and Lebanon, from the river, the river Euphrates

even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall be no man

able to stand before you: for the L-rd your G-d shall lay the fear of

you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon,

as he hath said unto you." [DEUTERONOMY, 11:24:25]

Kahane then uses such religious 'authentication' to claim that "we [Jews] are not simply one more little superfluous nation but the heart and the reason for the world." [KAHANE, p. 173] As an Israeli Knesset member, he even submitted a bill that sought to physically separate Israeli Jews from Gentiles; fellow Knesset member Michael Eitan compared his proposals to "the Nazi's racist Nuremberg Laws." [SPRINZAK, p. 239] In 1987, a Van Leer Institute survey of Israeli youth found that "42 percent said they supported Kahane. Among religious youth, the support shot up to 60 percent." [HAZELETON, L., 1987, p. 132] (Kahane was assassinated by an Arab in New York City in 1990).

The problem of racism in Jewish tradition, says professor Moshe Greenberg, "has its roots in the policy of the Bible and the [Talmudic] sages to separate Israel from the [other] nations; it is full blown in the Kabbalistic denial that the Gentile is in the image of God and reaches horrific proportions in the genocidal biblical command to wipe out Amalek and the seven nations of Canaan." [GREENBERG, p. 24] One (secular) Jewish apologetic strategy for this is to argue that the genocides recorded in the Old Testament never really happened. But, as Greenberg worries, "A historical critique of the biblical texts [about genocide] indicates ... [that they] belong to the realm of theory rather than to historical reality. This may salve our conscience, but only aggravates the problem -- that, under no pressure of facts, the biblical authors found compatible with their faith a divine command to commit genocide." [GREENBERG, p. 30]

So how should Jews of moral conscience teach this key part of their religious tradition? They should, says Greenberg, tip-toe around it. "When we teach the [genocide] passages in school (and given the pivotal nature of the book of Joshua we cannot avoid teaching them) we must explicitly neutralize them (e.g., by stressing the ancient context, their obsolete motivation, and the annulling precedent set up by the sages) ... It must be made clear to pupils that our general regard for the Bible as a treasure of enduring values does not extend to these passages. The urgency of such a repudiation corresponds to the evidence that the new empowerment of Israel stirs atavistic longings to act out what existed throughout all of Jewish history ... only in the imagination." [GREENBERG, p. 31]

Meanwhile, the truth about Jewish history and tradition is systematically ignored and distorted by popular Jewish folk mythology about an idealized past and morality. As parroted very typically by Mannie Sher, a Jew and former Chairman of the British Association of Psychotherapists, modern Jewish reification of their tradition of victimhood blames their alleged noble, peaceful morals for anti-Jewish hostility throughout history. Knowing the facts, this posturing reads like an insidious fairy tale:

"The world to which the Jews introduced God and their new ideals of

universal morality, justice, peace, and individual responsibility has

never been appreciative. Jewish ideals, like those of psychoanalysis,

have generally been alien and threatening to the prevailing order.

Judaism gave a vision that 'nation should not lift sword against nation'

to a world in which war and warriors rather than peace or prophets

were glorified. Like psychoanalysis, Judaism sees every individual as

both responsible for himself and answerable. It is little wonder then

why hatred of the Jew developed and ultimately became the greatest

hatred in human history." [SHER, p. 38]

There are others who admit a vast tradition of "hatred" in Jewish religious sources, but seek to dismiss its gravity. David Wolpe, for example, asks his readers in a popular Jewish newspaper:

"Is it good to hate? ... Our tradition does not teach us that all hatred is

bad. The Bible is unambiguous on this point: We are clearly intended to

hate Amalek, whose memory we are instructed to wipe out ... The

subject is raised each year in the middle of the Passover seder ... In

fact there are few things that can be healthier than merited hatred ...

Sitting in a comfortable home today, it is easy to see barbarity in the

words of the Haggadah. When we do, we betray our history." [WOLPE,

Of course all the above emphasis on ancient Israelite savagery is not to assert that Jews and Nazis hold a monopoly on atrocity or were locked in an inevitably trans-historical death embrace. Far from it. History is over-laden with atrocious crimes by one people against another throughout the centuries, exercising respective violent versions of what anthropologists today call ethnocentrism. The idea that "We are the People and everyone else is not" is endemic to world cultures and religions. But the extreme "Kill every thing that breathes" injunction as moral (and religious) policy is rare; after all, for even the most ruthless victor that which is taken alive has at least some economic, pleasure or productive value to the conqueror. The spiteful vanquishing of everything and everybody, repeatedly, in a holy book of all places, and one that is the foundation of Judeo-Christian heritage, cannot be completely overlooked -- as it always is -- in the development of future peoples, world views, and civilizations that stemmed from it.

Arnold Toynbee, the well-known British historian, in arguing that religious "fanaticism" in Judaism has been inevitably passed to Christianity (and its notorious Crusades) and Islam (like its Holy Wars), had the audacity to openly attribute the ultimate cause of discriminatory suffering experienced by Jews throughout history upon their own heads. "The first 'bigots' in history that I know of," said Toynbee, "are ... the Maccabees [a group of rebellious Jews who overthrew Greek rule], if 'bigot' means, as I believe it does, not just any persecutor, but one who persecutes people of another religion on account of his differences from them to religious practice and belief. The Maccabees forcibly converted Idumea and Galilee to Judaism and they brought it about that Herod and Jesus were Jews, not gentiles." [SYRKIN, Toynbee]

Old Testament scholar John Allegro also notes the Maccabean era:

"In the conception of the New Israel, dreamt of by the Jews of the

Exile, propounded by their prophets, and hammered out in Judea by

administrators from Babylon Jewry, there existed a fundamental

conflict between the religious ideal of a world state governed by Jews

and freely accepted by all men, and the practical reality that people

are tenaciously conservative about their religions and take unkindly

to having their gods chosen for them. When this removal of their

freedom of worship is coupled with a particularly uncompromising

racialist domination and tight political control, resistance to the

alien regime stiffens even further, and will yield to naught but the

severest military pressures. From the outset, then, the glorious

New Israel was only likely to be achieved by force of arms, and

maintained by brute force. The Maccabeans were at least realists,

and played the military and political games as shrewdly and

ruthlessly as any other tyrants of the ancient world. When it came

to converting the gentile to the faith, to fulfill the spiritual promise

of the kingdom of God, they simply offered the choice between

circumcision and slavery." [ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 116-117]

Arnold Toynbee takes such history further, leveling to modern Jewish eyes and ears the most profound of blasphemies: "The irony of Jewish history surely is that the Jews have been the chief sufferers from a spirit which they themselves originally kindled." [SYRKIN, p. 177] Elsewhere he argues that, "[Hitler's] main idea -- the fanatical worship of a jealous tribal god, at the bidding of a prophetic leader -- is the original (though not ultimate) Leitmotiv of the Old Testament." [GOULD, p. 454]

"Toynbee," says Jacob Agus,

"regards the biblical notion of a people, set apart from the rest of

mankind, as the source of self-aggrandizement of Christian nations

in the modern world. Ultimately, this narcissistic belief of the ancient

Israelites took root in the minds of anti-Christian Germans, emerging

as the Nazi madness of our own generation ... [AGUS, p. 385] ...

Jews were accustomed to attacks from demagogues, chauvinists,

purveyors of 'mystiques' of one kind or another. But, to be the target

of criticism at the hands of a superintellectual [Toynbee] and a champion

of humanism -- this was a different matter all together ... [AGUS, p. 373]

... Largely because of a 1917 Toynbee article that was a major

contribution to shaping and propagating the pro-Zionist policy in

Britain ... [AGUS, p. 382] .... his views were resented all the more

because he wrote as one who belonged to the traditional friends of

Israel." [AGUS, p. 373]

Needless to say, most Jewish readers -- fixated on their communal identity as victims, and victims only -- typically react with indignant outrage to Toynbee's "anti-Semitic" suggestion. "At the bar of history," complains Marie Syrkin, former editor at the Zionist-oriented magazine, Midstream, "[Toynbee accuses that] the Jewish sufferer is not innocent." Her line of argument against him then notes Toynbee's only historical evidence for this accusation against the Maccabees to be Flavius Josephus (a Jewish apostate to the Romans), who is a standard source for much information about Jews in the Roman-ruled era. Josephus is afforded a lot of credibility by Jews on other subjects; he is in fact a major reference for some of today's Jewish polemical argument. His detailed accounts of the desert fortress of Massada, for example, and the 900 Jews who committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman siege is considered to be a factual account and has become a beacon of pride for many modern Jews. The Massada story has become an important symbol in Zionist nationalist folklore.

The Jewish historian, Hannah Arendt, sides with Toynbee and takes his thesis of Jewish fanaticism even further:

"There is some truth in 'enlightened' assertions from Voltaire to

Renan to Taine that the Jews concept of chosenness, their

identification of religion and nationality, their claim to an absolute

position in history and a singled-out relationship with God, brought

into Western civilization an otherwise unknown element of

fanaticism (inherited by Christianity with its claim to exclusive

possession of Truth) on one side, and on the other an element

of pride that was 'dangerously close to its racial perversion."

The Chosen People tradition "so close to" that of "racial perversion" in dehumanizing others has been consciously usurped by others in recent centuries. As David Stannard notes:

"[In South Africa] the Afrikaner's self-identification with the ancient

Hebrews -- with their own Great Trek regarded by them as a second

Exodus, combines with their own explication of the biblical story of

Ham as meaning that black Africans were divinely ordained to be their

servants -- formed the theologically legitimizing core of the reprehensible

doctrine of apartheid. Thus, the covenantal belief of the Ulster-Scots in

their self-defined status as one of God's predestined 'elect' peoples has

served to justify their occupation of the promised land of Northern

Ireland along with their historical persecutions of that land's native Irish

people. And thus, on one occasion (among many) that the Puritan

settlers of New England laid waste an entire neighboring nation with

barely a pretext of provocation --shooting and stabbing to death every

man, woman, and child that they could find -- they wrote in justification

that 'sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish

with their parents,' and notes that as Chosen People (alluding to

Deuteronomy 20:16) the Lord had given them the Indian's "land for

an inheritance.'" [STANNARD, p. 194]

"Oliver Cromwell's Joshua-like campaign against the Catholics of Ireland in the seventeenth century," adds Scottish scholar Robert Carroll, "which led to bloody massacres of civilians, was inspired by the Bible." [CARROLL, R., 1989, p. 159]

"In the ancient world," says Robert Pfeiffer, "the Jews alone claimed theirs was the only true religion and that eventually it would conquer the world ... the Jewish claim to practice the only true religion, which would be inherited by both Christians and Muslims and then turned against the Jews themselves, was entirely opposed ... to the current attitudes of Greeks, Romans, and Eastern peoples. None of them would condemn the others for worshipping ... false and deceitful gods." [MORAIS, p. 46-47]

A typical Jewish reaction to the likes of Toynbee and his criticism of Judaism's fanaticism and the modern state of Israel, and certainly the disturbing evidence cited herein, is reflected in Oskar Rabinowicz's entire volume against the British scholar, entitled Arnold Toynbee on Judaism and Zionism: A Critique. The author's defensive tirade begins, from his very first sentence, with a justification of Zionism, but the core of his argument originates in the ethnocentric and exclusionist notion that it is absolutely forbidden for non-Jews to speak critically about Jews:

"Judaism rejects racial discrimination, exclusiveness, personal

superiority claims, or earthly uniqueness ... No outsider [to Jewry]

has the right to tell the Jews ... what they do or do not ... believe

in." [RABINOWICZ, p. 66]

*********************************

Modern Jewish American discourse about the Holocaust typically remains myopic, self-obsessed, and one-sided. It is what Jewish scholar Peter Novick calls "collective memory" (i.e., a kind of legend). "Collective memory ...," writes Novick, "is not just historical knowledge shared by a group. Indeed, collective memory is in crucial senses ahistorical, even anti-historical. To undersand something historically is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiplle perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities of protaganists' motives and behaviors. Collective memory simplifies; sees events from a single, comitted perspective; is impatient with ambiguities of any kind; reduces events to mythic archetypes." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 3-4]

Because so much of the Jewish disaster occurred in Poland, this country is especially singled out for attack in Jewish polemic. "Over the last thirty years," notes Lawrence Weinbaum,

"much of world Jewry has displayed a keener sense of hostility to

Poland than to Germany itself. Poland, not Germany, is often seen as

the ultimate place of evil ... Part of the hostility to Poland is based on

the entirely false impression that Germans chose occupied Poland as

the venue for the death camps because they could court Polish

cooperation in carrying out the Final Solution. Although there is

no historical evidence to support this contention, it has gained very

wide currency and credence ... Careless references to 'Polish

extermination camps,' rather than German or Nazi camps, also played

a part in fostering this perception ... Popular literature, not always

based on objective scholarship, has also played a leading role in

shaping the popular image of Poland. Novels (and subsequent film

adaptations) by popular writers such as Leon Uris (Exodus, Mila 18,

QBVII), Gerald Green (Holocaust), and others have done much to

influence the way we think about Poland, and the impression gained

from these books has generally been negative. In such works Poles

are often portrayed in a worse light than the Germans and it sometimes

seems that the burden of guilt for the Holocaust has been shifted to the

shoulders of the Poles." [WEINBAUM, p. 7]

In 1982, Jewish American author Laurence Weschler noted that "over and over, prior to my Polish trip, I encountered sheer hatred [by Jews] of the country and its people, cold fury in reminiscences of the anti-Semitism that, it was claimed, pervaded Polish society in the years before and during the war." [WESCHLER, p. 28] Thus prepared, Weschler was stunned to find that the Jews who actually live in Poland do not share Jewish-American mythologies about the place. As Weschler says, after a series of interviews with Jews in Poland:

"Over and over, I hear the same assertion from this man and his

young Jewish friends, and they all give me substantially the same

reasons for making it. What follows is, in all fairness, a simplification,

but the basic premise is consistent: that the Poles have never been

anti-Semitic at heart. They have always been highly nationalistic,

a proud, suffering people deprived of and longing for their state.

In the past, they were faced with a large Jewish population -- a

population whose very size proves the prior openness of the Polish

people, and particularly of Polish nobility, to Jewish immigration.

The Jews tended to keep to themselves, in ghettos of their own

choosing. It is easy to understand how during the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries the highly nationalistic Poles might have

conceived of these self-possessed Jews as aliens in their midst...

During the late nineteenth century, according to this view,

capitalism, a foreign import, came to Poland by way of the Germans

and native Jews. Many of the most visible and most brutal large-

scale enterprises -- especially textile plants -- were owned by Jews.

'Polish resentment is understandable,' I am told. During the twenties,

this explanation goes on, the Poles finally achieved their state,

but ten percent of the population was Jewish, and the Jews were

still largely concentrated in self-contained communities in urban

centers. Many people -- both Poles and Jews -- felt this presence

to be troubling, at once alien and too large. Zionists had their

Polish supporters. Other Jews, meanwhile, were active in the

Communist Party and were devoted to the Soviet example --

this in a country and among a people who had only recently

thrown off Russian imperialist yoke." [WESCHLER, p. 31-32]

Richard L. Rubenstein also notes that the

"Post-Holocaust awareness of the genocidal potential of anti-Semitism

has also effected historical investigations often with distorting effect.

Because of the objective innocence of the victims, Holocaust studies

have tended to emphasize what was done to the Jews rather than those

elements of conflict and competition between Jews and non-Jews that

could have contributed to the tragedy ... There has been a persistent

tendency to treat hatred of Jews and Judaism as a form of moral and

psychological pathology ... Regrettably, the interactions, economic,

political and social between the two communities, as distinct from the

actions against Jews by Christians, are seldom dealt with in retrospective

inquiries into the evolution of anti-Jewish ideas and policies."

[RUBENSTEIN, R., p. 87]

Many Jews, like prominent polemicist Alan Dershowitz, completely overlook the suffering of the Polish people, their own history, their own culture, and their own nationality to obnoxiously proclaim that Poland (the site of most of the Nazi concentration camps) "can only [my emphasis] be a Jewish cemetery with no tombstone." [DERSHOWITZ] What was the wider story of the sufferings in Europe during World War II? What was the context of the Holocaust? We all know what happened to the Jews; it is heralded everywhere. But what was happening to other people?

In the first two years of the German invasion of Poland, the ill-treatment of Poles was worse than Jews, so much that Poles would sometimes don the Nazi-enforced "Yellow star" marker for Jews to blend in with them. [LUCAS, p. 34-35] On August 22, 1939, Hitler declared the necessary killing "without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need." [GUMBOWSKI, p. 59] Hitler also planned that "the destruction of Poland is our primary task. The aim is not the arrival at a certain line but the annihilation of living forces ... Be merciless! Be brutal! ... The war is to be a war of annihilation." [LUCAS, p. 4]

William Shirer writes that:

"Hitler ... wanted ... a Nazi-ruled Europe whose resources

would be exploited for the profit of Germany, whose people

would be made slaves of the German master race and whose

'undesirable' elements' -- above all, the Jews, but also many

Slavs in the East, especially the intelligentsia among them --

would be exterminated. .. The Jews and the Slavic peoples

were the Untermenschen -- subhumans. To Hitler they had

no right to live, except as some of them, among the Slavs,

might be needed to toil in the fields and the mines as slaves

of their German masters. Not only were the great cities of

the East, Moscow, Leningrad, and Warsaw, to be permanently

erased but the culture of the Russians and Poles and other

Slavs was to be stamped out and formal education denied

them ... As early as September 18, 1941, Hitler had specifically

ordered that Leningrad was to be 'wiped off the face of the

earth.' After being surrounded it was to be 'razed to the

ground' by bombardment and bombing. Its population

(three million) was to be destroyed with it. [SHIRER, p. 937]

As Charles Sydnor notes about the Nazi invasion of Russia, beginning on June 22, 1941:

"A three mile-wide strip of territory stretching the length of Eastern

Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains erupted in

a torrent of fire and flying steel as German aircraft, artillery, and

armor blasted across the Soviet frontier. In the violence of its initial

collision, the immensity and ferocity of its subsequent development,

and the profligacy of its destruction of human life and resources, the

German-Russian conflict transcended anything then in the human

experience. To the men of the SS Totenkopfdivision, who were

to fight exclusively against the Russians until the end of the war,

the campaign became a grim crusade of extermination." [SYDNOR,

C., 1977, p. 138-139]

"The Poles," concedes a rare Jewish author, Eva Hoffman,” in the Nazi hierarchy, were next only to Jews and Gypsies in the order of inferior races -- slated for complete subjugation and, in the more visionary Nazi plans, for eventual extermination." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6] "The Nazi leaders," noted Jewish author Raphael Lemkin (the inventor of the term genocide,"), "had stated very bluntly their intent to wipe out the Poles, the Russians; to destroy demographically and culturally the French element in Alsace-Lorraine, The Slavonians in Carniola and Carinthia. They almost achieved their goal in exterminating the Jews and gypsies in Europe." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 100]

And as Richard Lukas notes about conquered Poland: "The genocidal policies of the Nazis resulted in the deaths of about as many Polish Gentiles as Polish Jews.... this [Polish Gentile] holocaust has been largely ignored because historians who have written on the subject of the Holocaust have chosen to interpret the tragedy in exclusivist terms -- namely, the as the most tragic period in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. To them, the Holocaust was unique to Jews, and they therefore have had little or nothing to say about the nine million Gentiles, including three million Poles, who also perished in the greatest tragedy the world has ever known." [LUKAS, p. ix] (In nearby Ukraine, notes Myron Kuropas, an estimated 14.5 million Ukrainians, including 600,000 Jews were lost... through deaths, deportations and evacuations. The war also destroyed over 700 Ukrainian cities and towns and some 28,000 villages.") [KUROPAS, M., 1995]

Twenty million tablets of cyanide for the gas chambers were discovered after the war in Nazi storehouses, many times the numbers necessary to exterminate Jews only. At one gas chamber site -- Kulmhof (Chelmo) -- a group of 5,000 gypsies were among the first to be murdered. Others exterminated there included convoys of non-Jewish children from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia ("These children were killed just as the Jews were") and even a busload of nuns. [GAS, p. 91-92] At Buchenwald, 250 Gypsy children were the first to be gassed. [HANCOCK, p.55] Throughout the territory of German occupation, people of all nationalities, and specifically invalids, the sick, and homosexuals, were subject to institutionalized murder, by gas or otherwise. The last gas chamber murders at the Mauthausen site were 181 Austrians who were against the Nazi regime.

Nazi Germany had clearly stated policies concerning surrounding European countries and their inhabitants of Slavic descent:

"By October 15, 1940, Hitler had decided on the future of the Czechs, the first Slavic people he had conquered. One half of them were to be 'assimilated,' mostly by shipping them as slave laborers to Germany. The other half, 'particularly' the intelligentsia, were simply to be, in the words of a secret report on the subject, 'eliminated.'" [SHIRER, p. 938]

Nazi mistreatment of prisoners of war, particularly Russian Slavs, was notorious:

"Dr. Otto Brautigam, deputy leader of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories wrote ... It is no longer a secret from friend or foe that hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war have died of hunger or cold in our camps..."

The conceptual dehumanization of the Slavic people by the Nazis was not far behind the portrayal of Jews. Jews, however, were believed to pose a greater immediate threat, an innately alien and antagonistic element within German society, dimensionally international, conceived to be far more powerful in influence than Poles. Jews were to be exterminated first in a "Final Solution," the Slavs later, except those to be used as slaves.

"Martin Boorman, Hitler's party secretary ... wrote a long letter to Rosenberg [another Nazi official] ... 'The Slavs are to work for us. In so far as we don't need them, they may die ... The fertility of the Slavs is undesirable.... Education is dangerous... [SHIRER, p. 939] Chaim Kaplan, eventually murdered by the Nazis, noted the conditions for his maid after the German invasion: "When the Nazis confiscated our apartment, they permitted our Christian maid to remain. She is exempt from the Nazi Nuremberg laws, they raped her. After that they beat her so that she would reveal where I hid my money." [KAPLAN, C., p. 46]

The Nazi occupation of Poland was intended to de-Polonize the entire country and reconstruct it in a Germanic image. Polish names of towns and places were torn down and replaced by German ones (exactly as the Jews of Israel have done in replacing Arabic geographical names with Hebrew ones). "Property in Poland belonging not only to Jews but to Poles was subject to confiscation without compensation." [SHIRER, p. 944] "The planned deportation [of Poles to the Auschwitz concentration] camp," says Franciszek Piper, head of the Historical Research Department of the Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, "of tens of thousands of men, women, and children from the Zamosc region -- foreseen as one of the first bridgeheads for Germanization in eastern Poland -- demonstrated the Nazis' goal of exterminating the Poles, which they only achieved to a small degree." [PIPER, F., Political, p. 15]

Hideously monstrous medical experiments on Jews by sadistic Nazis is well known. But "Jews were not the only victims. The Nazi doctors also used Russian prisoners of war, Polish concentration camp inmates, women as well as men, and even Germans... At the Ravensbrueck concentration camp for women hundreds of Polish inmates -- the 'rabbit girls' they were called -- were given gas gangrene wounds while others were subjected to 'experiments' in bone grafting. At Dachau and Buchenwald gypsies were selected to see how long, and in what manner, they could live on salt water." [SHIRER, p. 979] Priests were also tortured and experimented upon at Dachau. [GOLDBERG, M., H., 1979, p. 223]

There were grandiose medical visions for others who were not Jews: "An S.S. physician, Dr. Adolf Pokorny, wrote Himmler ... that ... the three million Bolsheviks now in German captivity should be sterilized." [SHIRER, p. 979]

The suffering of millions of non-Jewish Poles, Czechs, Russians, Gypsies and other nationals and ethnics during the Holocaust era has been completely forgotten and overlooked in our own time. (Between December 1939 and August 1941, the Nazis even murdered 50,000 Germans -- defined as "mentally sick" -- with carbon dioxide gas in chambers disguised, like other mass murder sites, as showers. [ARENDT, p. 108] Among the murdered were even Germans who protested against the Nazi treatment of Jews -- people like clergyman like Bernard Lichtenberg and philosopher Kurt Huber. [RUBENSTEIN, p 188-189] Even Auschwitz, the notorious concentration camp of Jewish Holocaust symbology, was instituted by sending to the gas chambers 300 Poles and 700 Russian prisoners of war. [LUCAS, p. 38]

The numbers always cited for people murdered at Auschswitz (and the Holocaust in general) are only guesses and estimates -- citing this fragmentary document or that, and then presuming from there -- and they vary widely. While Franciszek Piper claims 90% of those who died at Auschwitz were Jews, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has ascribed 2.5 million Jewish and l.5 million non-Jewish dead to the place. Scholar Norman Davies echoes whatever he read that one-quarter of the Auschwitz dead were non-Jews. Whatever the case, Auschwitz has become the consummate symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and Judeo-centric discourse has completely appropriated the human misery of Auschwitz, the Holocaust, concentration camps in general, and the neglected whole of World War II as an ethnocentric pillar of their own specialized victimization.

As Polish/Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz notes, "the meaning of the word Holocaust [has undergone] gradual modifications, so that the word begins to belong to the history of the Jews exclusively, as if among the victims there were not also millions of Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and prisoners of other nationalities." [LUKAS, p. ix] Unlike other European nations, underscores Milosz, "there was no collaboration between Poles and Nazis. There was no collaboration. This should be said clearly, because there was no Polish pseudo-government under the Nazis. The Polish population was treated by the Nazis as the next to be destroyed and the Poles knew that." [MILOCZ, p. 37]

Although far fewer in numbers, the people most directly parallel to the Jewish situation in World War II were the Gypsies (Sinti and Romani). By any criteria, their own catastrophe alone under German fascism ruins modern Jewish claims to "Holocaust uniqueness." There are numerous surviving documents attesting to Nazi policy of complete annihilation of Gypsies, including a memo from the Office of Racial Hygiene stating that "all Gypsies should be treated as hereditarily sick; the only solution is elimination." [HANCOCK, p. 43]

Ian Hancock, a University of Texas professor and himself of Romani heritage, has struggled for years to call attention to the disaster that befell his people. "It is abundantly clear," he says, "that some historians see only what they want to see, that a very blind eye is being turned in the direction of Gypsy history, and that when the Romani genocide in Nazi Germany is acknowledged, it is kept, with few exceptions, carefully separated from the Jewish experience." [HANCOCK, p. 40]

Hancock has discovered Jewish resistance to the intrusion of the Gypsy story on Jewish sacred turf to be widespread. Sometimes the undercurrent of Jewish exclusionism is revealed to be nakedly racist:

"The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a troublemaker;

another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case

in the Jewish context 'loathsome.' A representative of the United States

Holocaust Memorial Council, whom I have never met, told a researcher

who called to find out how to reach me that I was a 'wild man.' People

have walked out when it was my turn to speak at conferences about the

Porrajmos [the Gypsy "Holocaust"], and one former professor at the

university where I teach adamantly refused even to mention Roma and

Sinti in his regular course on the Holocaust. There is an element of

racism evident in the Jewish response; after all, Gypsies are a 'third world

people of color' ... At one presentation I gave at a Hillel center, I was

interrupted by a woman who leaped to her feet and angrily demanded

why I was even comparing the Gypsy case to the Jewish case when Jews

had given so much to the world and Gypsies were merely parasites and

thieves. On another occasion a gentleman in the audience stood up and

declared that he would never buy a book on the Holocaust written by a

      Gypsy." [HANCOCK, p. 55-57]

     (Adamant Jewish conviction of intrinsic superiority -- and elitist distinction -- over Gypsies is reflected in famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz's autobiography:

     "'I admire old tribes,' said [a German baron], 'I once traveled for weeks
     with Gyspies, and I found them fascinating . You realize Gypsies have a
     tradition as old as the Jews, don't you?' I confessed ignorance of Gypsy
     tradtion, but the next day, as the baron and I sat at the airport, I said
     thoughtfully, 'I've been thinking about the Gypsies and the Jews, and it
     seems to me that for better or worse, the Jews have given the world
     Einstein, Freud, Marx, and for that matter, Jesus Christ himself -- but I
     can't think of many Gypsies who've changed the world, can you?'
     Even that bloody awful baron had to laugh and say, 'Touche.'"
     [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 306] )

Among those few Jews who publicly supported the Gypsy's struggles for attention to their own "Holocaust" history was famed "Nazi-hunter" Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal once described the run-around he experienced at the Washington DC Holocaust Museum in his efforts to get a Gypsy on the museum thirty-member governing board. "I felt the attitude of the Holocaust Memorial Council to be unjust," he said, "... I received a number of copies of other letters in which all kinds of people had approached [Council head Elie] Wiesel with the request that he should support the claim of the gypsies."[WIESENTHAL, p. 222-223] Only after Wiesel left as head of the group was a Gypsy allowed to sit on the Council.

     "The Nazis selected the Jews as their first candidates for annihilation," notes Israeli Boas Evron, "but the Gypsies were extirpated with equal thoroughness and much larger and more ambitious plans were afoot for the enslavement and piecemeal extermination of the Slavs (Soviet losses during World War II are estimated at twenty-five million people, only a minority of whom were soldiers)." [EVRON, p. 51]

    In 1999, in Atlanta, Georgia, Jewish-dominated Holocaust politics explicitly censored the Nazis' mass murder of homosexuals. As the Atlanta Jewish Times notes

     "The Georgia Holocaust Commission caused a rift with the city's gay community.
     The commission made repeated headlines in January with the deletion of two
     paragraphs from a Holocaust teacher's guide about gay and lesbian
     persecution. The incident triggered a confrontation between the gay
     community and the commision ... The drama peaked with the forcible
     removal of gay activist Harry Knox from a commission meeting at
     [Jewish commission director Sylvia] Wygoda's order." [ATLANTA
      JEWISH TIMES, 6-18-99]

Jews commonly claim that 6 million of their numbers were exterminated in the Holocaust. "The 'Six Million figure,'" notes Zev Garber and Bruce Zuckerman, "often invoked in characterizations of 'The Holocaust,' points out the problem of stressing [Jewish] uniqueness over commonality. The truth is that eleven million people were killed in the concentration camps. Nearly half of these are excluded in most characterizations of 'The Holocaust,' and this seems to imply that Gentile deaths are not as significant as Jewish deaths." [GARBER, p. 208]

Wladyslaw Krajewski, another Jewish commentator, today still lives in Poland. He notes his own problems in dealing with uninformed western Jewry who seek confirmation of Jewish myth, a conviction of blanket Polish anti-Semitism, and not the truths of World War II:

"When my wife and I were in the United States [for a visit], we also

had to argue with those who ascribe anti-Semitism to the Poles en

bloc, to the [Polish] Home Army, and so on ... In general, there is

a prevalent stereotype among [non-Polish Jews] according to which

they are always victims (as indeed they usually are). Many people in

Israel, and more so in the United States, think that the terror was

directed exclusively against the Jews during the German occupation

[of Poland] (as indeed it was primarily directed against them). They

are unwilling to believe it when they are told that large numbers of

Poles also fell victim to German terror. They say that such people

may have fought in the resistance movement or aided Jews, but that

only the Jews (and perhaps the Gypsies) were persecuted without

reason. Such judgments result in large part from ignorance (although

no one admits to being ignorant). Such things are not said by the few

Jews living in Poland, who are better informed about the German

occupation of our country." [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 103-104]

Some scholars have suggested between four and five million Jewish deaths in the World War II years. Jewish scholars Gerald Reitlinger and Raul Hilberg, among others, estimate the number of Jewish dead to be between five and six million. They are all guesses and estimates. No one knows anywhere near with certainty an exact figure. No matter, all these sums are unfathomably staggering and the suffering incomprehensible. But rarely heard is the fact that the Nazis also exterminated up to 7 million Christians in these same death camps. For every two Jews executed there, suggests Jewish author Max Dimont, three Christians were slain too. Slavs and gypsies, Russian prisoners, the Polish clergy, the Polish resistance movement and its intelligentsia were also decimated.

15 to 20 million people were killed in Europe. [ENCY BRITT, p. 716] Three million Polish Jews died as a consequence of Adolf Hitler, as did three million Polish Christians. Three and a half million Soviet prisoners of war alone perished in Nazi captivity. Throughout the world, the number of people who died because of World War II is estimated to be a numbing 50-64 million human beings! [ENCY BRITT, 18, p. 716] Where are the monuments to them -- humanity at-large, devoid of clan and tribe allegiances -- a museum that affirms that every single life in that grisly pile was precious, sacred, and unique in human history. There is no such museum. There is no such monument. We never hear about them. There are only monuments to Jewish suffering. Why?

However pained Jews are for their own horrible losses, by the end of the twentieth century Jewish mourning had become a politic that is deaf to the screams of others. To view the atrocities of the Third Reich in the larger view as crimes against humanity do not serve the Zionist and nationalist principles of the Jewish state of Israel nor even the general Jewish religiously-inspired sense that they are somehow "different" than others: "chosen." The fact remains that the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews did not occur in a velvet box protecting others from hideous injury. Violence and atrocity was everywhere, in every direction. It was war, a World War, and profoundly maniacal people were struggling to annihilate anyone not part of their racial and ideological clan. But Zionists and other Jews remind us -- relentlessly and incessantly -- only that the Nazis violated Jews on a profound scale, and ignore the rest of the festering agony of it all.

The Holocaust gave modern Israel final legitimization to be born. For the Zionists, Hitler conclusively proved that life in the Diaspora was precarious and that gentiles could not, in the long term, be trusted. In times of social upheaval, it was believed that Jews might again be scapegoated. The Holocaust effectively united Jews throughout the world in a way that race or religion couldn't. It remains important to Zionists that the extermination of Jews in Europe be viewed myopically, distinct from all other phenomena, distinct from the extermination of all other people. All that mattered to Germany was Aryans. And all that matters to Israel -- and its many Diaspora supporters --is Jews.

In 1979 the head of a Jewish-American delegation to Warsaw, Eli Wiesel, objected to the fact that Poles speak of World War II "victims in general ... We speak of Jews. They mention all of the victims of every nationality, of every religion, and they refer to them en masse. We object ... The Jews were murdered because they were Jews, not because they were Poles ... And so we told our Polish hosts: 'If you forget the Jews, you will eventually forget the others. One always starts with the Jews.'" [LINENTHAL, p. 31] "It wasn't enough to give [Poland] our parents and grandparents, our brothers and sisters," complained another Jewish delegate, Lily Edelman, "... We also had to leave them a billion dollar tourist industry." [LINENTHAL, p. 31]

Not only does Judeo-centric myopia and self-obsession singularly recognize, memorialize, and even celebrate, Jewish victimization in World War II. Not only are non-Jewish co-sufferers ignored; they are, worse, subject to scorn and attack for not "saving the Jews." Many Jews even bitterly complain that the United States should have "done something more" to save their brethren, as if Jewish lives were more important, more innocent, than any of the millions of others who died. It is hard to imagine what such critics have in mind, when America was already engaged in the utmost act of aggression and violence against Germany: war.

The people who are most subject by Jews to insult, complaint, abuse, prejudicial stereotyping, and hatred -- sometimes seemingly even more than the German Nazis themselves -- are the Poles. Polish Christians are commonly accused by Jewish writers to have "handed Polish Jews over to the Nazis" and/or turned their backs from saving them. "Poles were indifferent to, if not supportive of, the ensuing Nazi massacre of the Jews," charges Barry Rubin, in a very, very common Jewish slander, routinely glossing over the mutually desperate situations of Poland, Jews, and enormity of World War II.

Jews, after all, had for centuries positioned themselves as exploiters of the Polish peasantry, in league with the oppressive aristocracy. There was little love for Jews by the Polish people and Jewish reputations were terrible. A pre-war Polish nationalist party, the National Democratic Party, for instance, objected to Jewish influence in the country, that the Jewish ten percent of the population "constituted an alien element detrimental to national unity. It feared that the very high proportion of Jews in the professions (estimated at thirty per cent of the lawyers, doctors, architects, and so forth), the Jewish monopoly in retail trade and finance, and the avoidance by the Jews of physical labor in mines, factories, and on the land amounted to barring the way of poor Poles to social advancement." [KORBANSKI, p. 18-19] Polish feelings about Jews in Poland based upon their historical relationship may be ascertained by some old Polish proverbs about them:

* The peasant gleans, the Lord squanders, the Jew profits.

* The Lord plots the ruin of the peasant with the Jews.

* One mountain will not meet another, but the gentry will

always meet the Jew. [CALA]

With some exceptions among individuals, and with the exception of self-aggrandizing commercial concerns, Jewish communities largely functioned as insular, self-absorbed, elitist, and self-positioned "strangers" in Polish society. The gulf between Polish Christians and Jews was enormous. (In pre-Holocaust Poland the intermarriage rate between Poles and Jews was one per cent). [WISTRICH, Intro, p. 4] It was self-imposed by Jews from the earliest times of their stay in Poland, and echoed by their Polish neighbors. "Ethnocentrism," notes Tadeusz Piotrowski, "was a two way street." [PIOTROSKI, p. 38] Most Jews chose not to assimilate into Polish society whatsoever (many could not even speak Polish) and had few links of good will to the surrounding non-Jewish people.

"In prewar [World War II] Poland," notes Wladyslaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew, "Of course, the majority of Jews did not regard themselves as Poles. Growing up for the most part in Jewish environments, they observed only the Jewish customs and religion, spoke only Yiddish at home, and generally spoke Polish poorly." [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 96-97] Norman Salsitz notes growing up in a Jewish community in a Polish town and discovering that "many" Jews didn't even know what the Polish flag exactly looked like. [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 73] In 1936, Jewish voting patterns in Poland (in their self-governing kehillah organizations) revealed a 38 percent vote for the Bund party (a group emphasizing a Jewish, as opposed to Polish, identity), 36 percent vote for Zionist lists (the return to Israel group), and religious Orthodox (religiously anti-Gentile) and "middle-class" groups at about 23 percent. [GITELMAN, Z., 1997]

Whatever Jewish politics, Norman Salsitz notes that, like many Jewish communities in Poland, the 2,000 Jews in his hometown were "95 per cent ... observant, pious people." [SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 140] This, we may fairly presume, would include all the separatist and anti-Gentile ideology that Orthodox Judaism entails. As far as my district goes," noted Israeli professor Chone Shmeruk, in reflecting upon the Warsaw neighborhood where he grew up,

"it was exclusively Jewish. The only non-Jews there were the janitors

who usually had small apartments near the entrance. Most of the Jewish

residents spoke Yiddish ... As far as Warsaw goes, a street like

Karmelick, for instance, was exclusively Jewish. There was a Bund

elementary school there with all classes taught in Yiddish. There was

no Polish element there and contacts with Poles were few or none. I

did not visit Polish homes and they did not visit mine. I did not really

have any Polish friends. My friends from school or the courtyard were

Jewish ... When a Jew left the northern district, it was perhaps not like

going to another city, but rather going somewhere unknown ... If you

went to a park it was to be a 'Jewish park' ... There was a chasm

between the Jewish and Polish districts in Warsaw." [SHMERUK, p.

Jewish self-segregation was the norm for most Jews of Eastern Europe. Raphael Patai notes the vast gulf between his Jewish grandparents in the Hungarian village of Pata (from about 1880 to 1920) and the non-Jews around them:

"My attention was focused on the almost complete separation that

existed between the life forms of that Hasidic Orthodox Jewish family

and the other five equally religious Jewish families of Pata, on the one

hand, and those of the hundreds of Christian Hungarian families of

the village, on the other ... I received the distinct impression [from

documents and interviews with relatives] that the life of my grandfather

and that of the Hungarian peasants of Pata had practically nothing in

common ... The contact between my grandparents and the peasants

of the village was confined to the occasions when the latter stopped

by [my grandparents'] store to make their small purchases. To this

might be added the twice-daily trips my grandmother had to take to

the village well until about 1902 [until they had a well dug on their

property] ... Apart from this, my grandfather lived entirely in the

world of Jewish tradition, primarily that of the Talmud. He knew

nothing of the cultural traditions of the Pata peasants ... One reaches

the conclusion that this Hungarian Jew lived in practically complete

cultural isolation from his purely Hungarian environment." [PATAI,

     R., 1971, p. 136-137]

     Alan Levy notes famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal's attitude towards his non-Jewish neighbors in Poland:

     "Having lived among Poles from birth, grown up with them, and attended their      schools, Simon knew that 'to them we were always foreigners. Mutual understanding      was out of the question. And even now that the Poles, too, had been enslaved and      were next on Hitler's list for extermination, nothing had changed: there were still      barriers between us.' Sometimes, this estrangement grew so strong that Simon 'no      longer even wanted to look at Poles. In spite of the conditions and the risks inside
     the [concentration] camp, I would have preferred to stay there. But I didn't always      have the choice.' [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 42]

"Jewish separatism," notes Jewish author Eva Hoffman about Poland, "was also an active choice, and it also had its consequences. It means that Jewish individuals and communities cultivated their own alienness, and that although they were willing to engage in contractual relations with the Poles, they did not wish to enter into a shared world with them." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 63] The firm root of this Jewish separatism from Poles endures today. As Jewish American Victor Seidler noted in 2000:

"I know that my father had come from Warsaw but in no sense did

I think of myself as ‘Polish’.... When I gave my lecture at the Polish

Academy of Sciences, I was introduced as someone with Polish

ancestry and I had to clarify that my family was Jewish." [SEIDLER,

Jewish revulsion for Christians in Poland, their classical disdain --even hatred -- for them, and the Jewish enforcement of the huge gulf between Jews and Poles, is reflected in this account by the best known Jewish polemicist about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel, here describing his childhood in Poland:

"[Christian] rituals held no interest for me; quite the contrary. I turned

away from them. Whenever I met a priest in I would avert my gaze and

think of something else. Rather than walk in front of a church with its

pointed and threatening belfry, I would cross the street. To see was as

frightening as to be seen; I worried that a visual, physical link might be

created between us ... All I knew of Christians was its hate for my people

[Jews]. Christians were more present in my imagination than in my life.

What did a Christian do when he was alone? What were his dreams made

of? How did he use his time when he was not engaged in plotting against

us?" [WIESEL, A Jew, p. 4-5]

In a novel Wiesel wrote, called Dawn, Sylvia Barack-Fishman notes a disturbing undercurrent, common -- as we have seen -- in the traditional Jewish worldview:

"Wiesel's protagonist comes to the startling conclusion that Jews must

learn 'the art of hate' in order to guarantee their physical survival.

'Otherwise,' he argues, 'our future will only be an extension of the past.'"

[BARACK-FISHMAN, p. 281]

Jewish "hate," as we have seen, casts a wide net. Even a Roman Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, canonized by the church and heroized in Poland for voluntarily dying at Auschwitz that another man might live, is dismissed by one Jewish magazine these days as the former editor of "a mass-circulation anti-Semitic Franciscan weekly." [TOMASZEWSKI, p. 47]

Reflecting the tone of Jewish disdain for Christians, one of Jewish novelist Max Shulman's characters in Potatoes are Cheaper declared that

"If [my mother] happened to see [a nun] on the street, she made a

circle three times, said Shma Yisrael and ran to kill a chicken." [NOVAK/

     WALDOKS, 1981, p. 96]

     That isn't really fiction. Moshe Rozdial reflects the usual Jewish polemic and apologetic about Jewish racism and hatred of those around them:

        "If I could be really honest, growing up around holocaust survivors, especially
     grandparents who had been part of village life in Poland, my clearest memory
     of anything that relates to churches was the way my grandmother would spit
     three times, you know, tu! tu! tu!, like in Fiddler on the Roof, to ward off
     evil spirits, every time she would walk past a church steeple. The cross has
     really been more a burden to Jews, than for Christians to bear. For my Bubbe,
     my grandmother, it represented the wrath of Satan, swooping down on a
     helpless people when they were not vigilant to warding off the evil eye. She
     saw Nazism as just another version of Christianity, hoardes of Aryan
     barbarians, swooping down with their broken cross, to do the work that the
     church had laid the foundation for, for a thousand years. I remember walking
     down the street with my hand in hers, feeling that tug and knowing, almost
     instinctively that if I look up I'd see a cross atop a roof, as she reflexively
     crossed the street to avoid walking directly in front of the church. Muttering,
     Nevelah! Nevelah!
        Do you know what that means? The impurity of the dead. Any dead thing.
     Any dead thing, that by Jewish law, could not be touched in any way, so
     as not to be defiled by spiritual purity. That's what Bubbe thought of the
     crucifix and ultimately, the church ... She'd spit three times, more if she
     was in a dark mood, and walk out of her way to avoid the site. The
     dead Jew on the cross was a Nevelah to her, a presence that has always
     defiled her life, Jewish life. A symbol of death and human corruptness, to
     to my people. I know it's not politically correct to say these things to you.
     We Jews are always watching our tongues, when it comes to Christianity."
     [RODZIAL, M., WINTER 1999]

A yeshiva student, Rachmiel Frydeland, notes how it was growing up Jewish in the pre-war town of Chelm: "I had no contacts with Christianity at all. On the way to school we passed a Roman Catholic church and a Russian Orthodox church, and we spat, pronouncing the words found in Deuteronomy 7:26, ' ... though shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for it is a cursed thing ... Why should we say such horrible words? The [Christian] people looked so pious. They came from surrounding villages to worship, and they never bothered us." [FRYDLAND, p. 55]

Abraham Sterzer grew up within a Jewish life in Eastern Galicia. "Our rabbi," he says, "insisted that we Jewish children spit on the ground and utter curses while passing near a cross, or whenever we encountered a Christian priest or religious procession. Our shopkeepers used to say that 'it was a Mitzveh (blessed deed) to cheat a Goy (gentile).'" [PIOTROWSKI, p. 39] Anna Lanota recalled that her Jewish community in Poland "had a somewhat unfavourable attitude toward other nations -- maybe even contemptuous. There prevailed the feeling that we were the chosen people." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 39]

The first prime minister of modern Israel, David Ben-Gurion, once recalled his childhood among non-Jewish children in Poland:

"Somebody would perhaps throw a stone, or start an argument, and very

often it was the Jews who started first. We used to get the upper

hand." [KURZMAN, D., 1983, p. 50]

Jewish commentator Elias Tcherikower notes the nature of Jewish shtetl (Jewish community) culture in Eastern Europe:

"Jews were not regarded, nor did they regard themselves, as

Russians or Poles who differed in religion and occupational

concentrations from the majority population ... Jews constituted

an autonomous, isolated, self-enclosed, and collectively

responsible social entity. The goings-on in the outside world

certainly impinged upon the Jewish community, but were regarded

as being as the same order as natural events; most often, as natural

catastrophes. There was, relatively speaking, little social interaction

that mattered between Jew and non-Jew. What was of significance

was what went on in the Jewish world, in the world of the shtetl...

Above all, the shtetl was a community of rigid religious orthodoxy...

The shtetl's frame of reference was the Jewish community. Outside

was the world of the goy, the alien ... Loyalty to this hostile, alien

world was nonexistent." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 4-6]

As Jewish Holocaust survivor Nechama Tec notes about traditional Jewish separatism, self-imposed estrangement from non-Jews, and resistance to assimilate into Polish culture (which had virtually insurmountable consequences when any Christian Pole sought, at constant risk of his or her life, to hide Jews from the Nazis):

"In 1939, of all the European countries, Poland had the highest

concentration of Jews. They made up 10 per cent of the country's

population. As the largest community of Jews in Europe, Polish Jews

were also the least assimilated. They looked, dressed, and behaved

differently from Polish Christians ... In prewar Poland, more than half

the Jewish children attended special Jewish schools. Enrollment in

religious school, in turn, discouraged mastery of the Polish language.

Thus, in answer to a 1931 census inquiry, the overwhelming majority

of Jews mentioned Yiddish as their native tongue (79 per cent) and only

12 percent gave Polish as their first language. The rest chose Hebrew.

Jews and Poles lived in separate and different worlds, and their diverse

experiences made for easy identification. It has been estimated that

more than 80 percent of the Polish Jews were easily recognizable,

while less than 10 percent could be considered assimilated." [TEC, N.,

Jewish anthropologist Samuel Heilman notes that the Hasidic ultra-Orthodox literalist movement, founded in the eighteenth century, became the dominant Jewish world view in Eastern Europe. "In several generations," he observes, "[the Hasidic movement] absorbed huge numbers -- perhaps a majority -- of the region's Jews." [Heilman refers here to the "region" of Eastern Europe, including Podolia, Volhynia, Galicia, Poland, Russia, and the Ukraine] [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 21] In 1992 Heilman wrote a book about the Hasids in Israel (whose ancestors were from Eastern Europe) and, even there, the following is the profoundly separatist and ethnocentric world view he found still reflected by 11- and 12-year olds in the Hasidic school system. Showing a school class a map of Israel,

"I asked each boy if he could tell me what lay to the east, the south,

the north, and the west [of Israel], each time pointing my pencil to

the area in case they did not know the bearings of the compass.

Again, no one knew ... Next I asked each boy to tell me the names

of the surrounding countries, without necessarily specifying where

they were in relation to Israel. In response, one boy began to list

cities in Israel ... Perhaps the most revealing answer came from one

youngster who, in reply to the question of what bordered on Israel,

confidently answered that Israel was surrounded by 'chutz la'aretz.'

'Chutz la'aretz' is the Hebrew expression that most Israelis use to

refer to the rest of the world. Literally, it means 'outside of the Land

(of Israel),' abroad. In this boy's mind the world was neatly divided.

Just as there were goyim and Jews, so similarly there was Israel and

chutz la'aretz ... It struck me that in the world they inhabited, the

information I had asked them was simply not important. They had

a different map of the world ... The large territories were not Russia,

Germany, or Poland. They were named after cities of importance

to the hasidim of Zvil: Apta, Lublin, Mezerich, Berdichev, Chernobyl.

Cities had become countries." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 233]

Stephen Bloom's 2001 book about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave (the Chabad Lubavitchers, founded in Lithuania) in Postville, Iowa, give a clear example of what relations must have been like between many Jews and Poles and Eastern Europe before the rise of the Nazis. Jews in the Iowa town don't want to touch Gentiles [BLOOM, S., p. 96], they resist eye contact with them as they walk down the street [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 86], they have no knowledge or interest in Gentile life around them [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 114], they appeared "obnoxious and imperial" to local people, [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 161], they cheat local merchants [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 323], and they use oil in their candelabras because oil, which doesn't mix with other liquid, symbolizes Jewish separateness from all others. [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 182] "Wherever we go," one Chabad leader said, "we don't adapt to the place or the people. It's always been like that and always will be like that. It's the place and the people who have to adapt to us." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 209] "Postville people, by and large, were tolerant," says Bloom, "... [But the Hasidic Jews] were downright rude. They seemed to go out of their way to be obnoxious, especially when it came to business dealings ... At first, the locals welcomed the Jews, but even the simplest offer -- a handshake, an invitation to afternoon tea -- was spurned. The locals quickly discovered that the Jews wouldn't even look at them. They refused to acknowledge even the presence of anyone not Jewish." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 48, 51]

As Norman Salsitz notes about his Jewish youth in Poland:

"Most Poles were devout Catholics, and we Jews followed in

the path of orthodox Judaism. Poles who were Catholics were

automatically Poles; Poles who were Jewish were never

referred to as anything but Jews. In look, in dress, in behavior,

there was usually no mistaking the Pole and the Jew. Then, too,

Poles all spoke Polish, Jews mostly Yiddish ... Acquaintances

among Poles and Jews were common, indeed nearly

inevitable in a town the [small] size of Kolbuszowa; but close

friendships were practically nonexistent." [SALSITZ, N., 1992,

Another Jew who a survived World War II as a child in Poland, Yehuda Nir, notes that when the Nazis came it was in the best interests of his affluent family to pretend that they were non-Jewish Poles but

"we kept delaying our move to the 'Aryan world.' Our hesitation reflected

a fear of the unknown, an inability to project ourselves into the role of

Christian Poles, Catholics. Although we had known many Catholics quite

well and have lived with the Nowickis for almost a year [Nir doesn't

explain this: they lived in the same apartment building? In the same

house? Why?], they were always seen as strangers, goyim, the

people on the other side of the fence. We felt we didn't know enough

to fully identify with them, that at best we could only mimic them." [NIR,

"The Poles never thought of us as Poles," says prominent Yiddish novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, "and we didn't either." [RUBIN, p. 192] Nonetheless, before the war, when Poland was still able to assert its nationalist will, on April 12, 1933, the German Ambassador to Warsaw, Hans Moltke, reported to his superiors that "the Polish foreign minister warned him that any retaliation against Polish Jews or any others of Polish extraction living in Germany would be met with dangerous Polish countermeasures." [BLACK, p. 112]

Poland was invaded by the Nazi war machine in 1939 and totally overcome and decimated in a matter of weeks. The Nazi blitzkrieg consisted of 1,800,000 soldiers, 2,500 tanks, over 2,000 aircraft and naval warships. Three million Polish Christians died during World War II, a figure equal to that of Polish Jews who perished. 40% of the national wealth was destroyed, 10% of the non-Jewish population was killed. [BART. p. 16] How were Poles to save Jews when they had first to struggle for their own lives and families?

In 1989 Stephan Korbanski, the "last surviving leader of the Polish Underground State during German occupation," wrote a book complaining that "the charges leveled by the Jews against the Poles for allegedly sharing responsibility for the Holocaust by not preventing the slaughter of the Jews are groundless, unfair, and slanderous. An individual or nation can be blamed for denying help which could be given, but not for failing to do the impossible." [KORBANSKI, p. vii]

Korbanski notes that German ordinances declared the death penalty for anyone (and often his or her family) caught helping Jews and that, nonetheless, the Jewish Historic Institute in Warsaw has documented by name 343 Polish Christians (and 101 others who cannot be identified) who were murdered for helping Jews escape the Nazis. The Association of Former Political Prisoners, mostly inmates from Auschwitz, estimates the number of Poles murdered for helping Jews at 2,500 (the Maximilian Kolbe Foundation has identified by name 2,300 Poles). [KORBANSKI, p. 67] Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes that an "incomplete list of Poles executed for sheltering Jews numbers 521 families." [WIESENTHAL, 1989, p. 216]

The Jewish-American author Jerzy Kosinski wrote:

"My parents and I were saved by Poles. I was hidden and transferred

from one place to another and that with my looks! I look ... like the

stereotype of a Jew on a Nazi poster." [KORBANSKI]

Korbanski underscores the fact that all Polish secondary schools and colleges were closed by Nazi invaders, the Polish language was forbidden, libraries and book shops were burned, the Polish language press was outlawed, Polish cemeteries were destroyed, and everything Polish was renamed in German. "Only one church was left in each county; all others were burned or closed." [KORBANSKI, p. 23] In the early days of the Nazi invasion, Polish priests, political leaders, landowners, officials, teachers, lawyers, and doctors were routinely executed. Many of those who escaped were sent to Polish concentration camps to die. In the town of Bydogoszcz, over 20,000 inhabitants were liquidated for their defenders' role against the initial Nazi onslaught. 9,000 Poles were shot in the streets of Warsaw in one year alone. During Nazi occupation Poles were killed for "not getting off the sidewalk to make way for a German approaching," for "illicit fishing, for slaughtering a pig for their own use, for stealing fruit from orchards, for riding a train without a ticket." [KORBANSKI, p. 24] Ethnic Germans, indigenous to parts of multi-ethnic Poland, served as spies.

Even the Pole Jan Mosdorf, head of "a right wing organization of a nationalist and anti-Semitic character," who was imprisoned at Auschwitz risked his life to help -- and sometimes save the lives of -- Jewish prisoners. [SWIEBOCKI, p. 206] Mosdorf, said one Jewish prisoner, Mojzesz Maslanko, "had a big heart and helped Jews. I personally received a large amount of help from him, which perhaps decided my survival." [SWIEBOCKI, p. 206] Mosdorf was executed by the Nazis in 1943.

Meanwhile, while the Poles were invaded and occupied from the West by Germany, communist Russia attacked from the East. Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland resulted in the confiscation of everything from banks to sawmills. Churches and other religious centers were closed or destroyed. Over a million Poles were deported, mostly to Asiatic Russia. Among the deportees, some 500,000 ended up in labor camps where many died. [BART. p. 18] Members of Poland's religious and political infrastructure were executed; Korbanski notes that up to 100,000 Polish political prisoners were murdered by the Soviets by mid-1941.

Korbanski, as a leader of the Polish underground, and others began to report to the outside world what was happening in Poland, including the situation of the Jews. They even had a Jewish liaison in the Warsaw ghetto. Members of the Polish "Home Army" even made a number of attempts to blow up the walls and open the Jewish Warsaw ghetto, but were repelled by German defenses. [KORBANSKI, p. 57]

In a review of Korbanski's book by David Engel, a Jewish professor at New York University, Korbanski's first-hand account and perspective (and the suffering of the Polish people) were summed up with these last sentences:

"Mr. Korbanski will never have to deal with the problems raised by the

book; he passed away shortly after it was released. How sad that the

final work of a man with so much to his credit is a splenetic diatribe,

falling at times far below acceptable scholarly standards to the level of

gutter literature." [ENGEL, A New Jewry p.]

This kind of arrogantly insulting attitude is not unique to Mr. Engler, but reflects an important current in post-Holocaust Jewish thinking. The "problems raised in the book" are not with Korbanski's defense of the Polish people against continuous and relentless Jewish impugnment; it is with the likes of modern Judeo-centric propagandists like Engler.

What especially grates Engler the wrong way is this kind of comment from Korbanski:

"The [Jewish] consensus which emerged (in the early periods of Nazi

occupation) was the unanimous belief that only total submission to all

the Nazi orders and industrious work for the Germans might offer

chances of survival until the end of the war. The [Jewish] watchword

was: "This is not our war; it's the war of the Poles against the

Germans." All the Jewish problems were to be dealt with by the Jewish

Council (Judenrat), headed by former Polish senator Adam

Czerniakow and formed by Germany themselves. That doctrine of

submissiveness remained in force for two years, during which the Jews

in the ghetto did not ask the Poles for any help or weapons."

The well-known Jewish historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, supports such a notion that "the reaction of the Jews [to the Nazis] is characterized by almost complete lack of resistance ... [Jews] had learned (over 2,000 years) that they could avert danger and survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies." [HILBERG, p. 662, 666] Well-known Jewish psychologist Bruno Bettelheim concurred:

"A certain kind of ghetto thinking has as its purpose the avoidance of

taking direct action. It is a type of deadening of the senses and

emotions ... One can ... degrade oneself so that one will be permitted

to survive." [HOROWITZ, p. 143]

A Nazi lieutenant and head of an execution squad wrote that "the execution of the Jews is simpler than that of the Gypsies. One must admit that the Jews go to their deaths very composedly; they remain very calm. The Gypsies, however, scream and wail and move about incessantly as soon as they get to the place of execution." Desperate Gypsies were known to even use stale bread as last resort weapons. [HANCOCK, p. 48]

A Polish-Jewish historian in the Warsaw Ghetto, and eventual victim of the Nazis, Emmanual Ringelblum, expressed bewilderment that Jews did nothing to resist their fate. "Jews," he wrote in 1942, "were evacuated under a guard of Jewish policemen. Not one of them escaped, although all of them knew where and towards what they were going ... One gendarme is sufficient to slaughter a whole town." [BART., p. 19]

While Jews en masse simply acceded to their horrible fate, engendering the contempt and disdain of Poles, about 350,000 Poles sustained a continuous fight against the Nazis in underground resistance groups throughout Poland. Another 100,000 were members of the Polish Armed Forces in the West and by the end of the war the Poles constituted the fourth largest Allied army. And, unlike other European countries under German rule, there was never organizational Polish collaboration with the Nazis. [BART, p. 16]

"The Jews did nothing [to resist the Nazis]," says Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, "until they had nothing left to lose, when they started an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto on April 19, 1943 and in Bialystok shorty afterwards." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 20] The Warsaw Uprising is the cornerstone of modern Jewish/Israeli mythology about Jewish "resistance" to the Nazis in World War II. The last surviving member of the uprising, a doctor who never left Poland, Marek Edelman, has been visited by many Jewish delegations over the years who sought insights and details of the last stand of Warsaw's besieged Jewry. "On several occasions," notes Norman Davies, "[Edelman has recounted] his sense of dismay at numerous meetings with people who only want him to confirm their preoccupations. ... Edelman [however] had made his terrible gaffe, 'Do you really think it can be called an uprising'"? [DAVIES, p. 22]

Dow Marmur noted a visit by Edelman to Canada to give a talk to the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, and the clash between Diaspora mythologies and those of first-hand experience in Poland. Edelman, says Marmur, was

"the last surviving member of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and, in

that capacity, he has earned an important place in twentieth century

Jewish history ... He said relatively little about anti-Semitism in Poland,

although he answered all the questions put to him. The reaction from

Jews was often hostile. We wanted him to say something else

and when he did not, we were furious and let him know it ... I

am pleading for a general effort to understand him and people like

him; they are our fellow Jews, and his personal contribution to Jewish

history surpasses that of all his Canadian opponents put together."

Stephan Korbanski was central to Polish underground resistance activity and his perceptions are highly credible. As critic Engler himself concedes from his professorial armchair:

"[Korbanski] transmitted a number of radio messages to the West

concerning the systematic murder of Polish Jewry ... including the

operation of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Korbanski was also

responsible for arranging the trial and execution of collaborators,

including some of those who blackmailed Jews in hiding ... In

recognition of these activities, in 1980 he was honored by Yad

Vashem as a Righteous Gentile ..." [ENGLER, p.]

But Engler just doesn't like Korbanski's centrally located view of Polish affairs and that Poles have their own perspective of history. Korbanski's indictment of Jewish communists of the secret police agencies in the post-war destruction of Poland is especially galling. Korbanski writes that

"To realize his plan of seizing total control of Poland, Stalin formed

two teams: one to satisfy appearances and the Western Allies, the

other to actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the Polish

communist Warda Wasilewska and the other by Jacob Berman, who

The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish origins, which

exonerated him from suspicion of Polish patriotism and advocacy of

Poland's independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as cosmopolites,

whose loyalties would be to Zionism rather than the country of their

residence ... [KORBANSKI, p. 73]

The principal instrument of Berman's power was his total control of

the Ministry of State Security, which began -- under Stalin's

instructions -- to liquidate all centers of Polish opposition, often by

simply murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland's

independence. [KORBANSKI, p. 74]

Jewish historians Pawel Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek also "admit [that] the Jewish youth and proletariat played an important ('although not exclusive') role in the apparatus of oppression." [BARTOSZEWSKI, p. 18] One Jewish veteran, Wladyslaw Krajewski, of the earlier pre-World War II Communist Party (KPP), estimated that half of its leadership was of Jewish origin. [KRAJEWSKI, W., p. 94] With Jews representing about 10% of the Polish population that was mostly Catholic with relatively little interest in communism, "in the large cities the percentage of Jews in the [Communist Party] often exceeded 50 per cent and in the smaller cities, frequently over 60 per cent. Given this background, [the] statement that 'in small cities like ours, almost all communists were Jews' does not appear to be a gross exaggeration. [SCHATZ, p. 96]

In Warsaw about 65 per cent of the Communist membership was Jewish. In 1930 "Jews constituted 51 percent of the [Communist Union of Polish Youth], while ethnic Poles were only 19 percent. (The rest were Bylerussians and Ukrainians)." [SCHATZ, p. 96] In 1932 Jews were 90 percent of the International Organization for Help to Revolutionaries. [SCHATZ, p. 97] They were also 54 percent of the communist field leadership, 75 percent of its propagandists, and "occupied most of the seats" of the Central Committee of the Communist Workers' Party and Communist Party of Poland. In pre-World War II Poland, many communist activists were jailed. Polish researcher Andrzej Zwolinski fond that "in Polish court proceedings against communists between 1927 and 1936, 10 percent of those accused were Polish Christians and 90 percent were Jews." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 36] [SCHATZ, p. 97] Not surprisingly, the formal positions of the Polish Communist Party included a "firm stand against anti-Semitism." [SCHATZ, p. 100]

Furthermore, the symbology of three very high level Jewish officers -- Minc, Berman, and Zambrowski -- in the post-war oppressive Communist institutions, "became a lasting part of anti-Semitic vocabulary." [SCHATZ, p. 206] "All three communist leaders who dominated Poland between 1948 and 1956, [Jacob] Berman, Boleslaw Bierut, and Hilary Minc, were Jews." [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 63] As the Catholic Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, noted in 1976, ethnic Polish anti-Jewish sentiment was now "due to the Jews who occupy leading positions in Poland's government and endeavor to introduce a governmental structure that the majority of Poles do not wish to have." [SCHATZ, p. 207]

Chaim Kaplan even noted with sarcasm in 1939 the Russian representative to the Nazis in a pre-war German-Soviet treaty: "Representatives of [the Nazis'] former arch-enemy, the Bolshevik-Jewish government, are now guests in this zone and have been received with royal honors. The head of the Soviet delegation is a Jew, the Nazi's 'friend' Litvinov. When it is time to engage in politics, nobody cares about race." [KAPLAN, C., p. 84]

Stephan Korbanski also notes that the Soviet Communist secret police

"team assembled by Berman [whose brother Adolf was chairman of

the Jewish Committee in Poland till 1947, when he immigrated to Israel]

[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 85] at the beginning of his rule were all

Jewish -- Vice Minister Natan Grunsapau-Kikiel (Roman

Romkowski) [who once interrogated Korbanski], and other high officials

like General Julius Hibner (David Schwartz), Anatol Fejgin, security

police chief Joseph Swiatlo, Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg), 'Colonel

Czaplicki,' and Zygmut Okret. These were not the only Jewish officials

who oppressed Poles in the name of communism. Victor Klosiewicz, a

member of the Communist Council of State, has stated that 'it was

unfortunate that all the department directors in the Ministry of State

were Jews.'" [KORBANSKI, p. 78]

"Jacek Rozanski," notes Polish author Jacek Borkowicz, was "director of the Investigative Department of the Polish State Security Ministry" and was "sentenced in 1955 to five years imprisonment [a later trial in 1957 sentenced him to fifteen years]" for "using inadmissible means of persuasion during interrogations ... Son of a prominent Warsaw Yiddish-language journalist (on the pro-Zionist 'Hajnt'), Rozanski was a dedicated communist who .. maintained his Jewish identity until the end." [BORKOWICZ, p. 343-344] "All the detainees described [Rozanski] as an exceptionally cynical and sadistic psychopath who liked to torture prisoners needlessly," notes Jewish author Michael Checinski, "... Rozanski's Jewish origin was then common knowledge, in spite of his Polonized name." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 80]

The aforementioned Anatol Fejgin was head of the "Tenth Department of the Polish State Security Ministry -- the special unit answerable to the Party First Secretary and concerned with spying on the communist leadership [and he] was sentenced at the same trial in 1957 to twelve years' imprisonment." [BORKOWICZ, p. 344]

Jewish author Michael Checinski notes the post-World War II case of Semyon Davidov who

"held the relatively modest post of head of Soviet advisers in Poland.

But no serious operational decisions on any question pertaining to

political provocations or police terror could ever be taken without

Davidov's consent. On the one hand, Davidov and his personal

network supervised the activities of the Soviet advisers in all the

mainstays of real power in Poland (the armed forces, security

service, party apparatus, state administration, and industry). But

he also was responsible for overseeing the entire Polish apparatus

of terror." [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 51]

Abel Kainer (a pseudonym of Stanislaw Krajewski, a Polish Jew) adds that

"The archetype of the Jew during the first ten years of the Polish

People's Republic was generally perceived as an agent of the secret

political police. It is true that under Bierut and Gomulka (prior to 1948)

the key positions in the Ministry of State Security were held by Jews or

persons of Jewish background. It is a fact which cannot be

overlooked, little known in the West and seldom mentioned by the

Jews of Poland. Both prefer to talk about Stalin's anti-Semitism ....

The machinations of communist terror functioned in Poland in a matter

[sic] similar to that used in other communist ruled countries in Europe.

What requires explanation is why it is operated by Jews. The reason

was the political police, the base of communist rule, required personnel

of unquestionable loyalty to communism. These were people who had

joined the Party before the war and in Poland they were predominately

Jewish. " [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

"The feeling that Jews are oppressors probably sounds absurd to many westerners," wrote Stanislaw Krajewski, under his own name. "The only sense it has derives from the Jewish participation in the oppressive rule in Poland, and in particular the fact that a lot of Jews looked favorably at the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in 1939." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 50] Most Poles did not look favorably at such a scenario. World War II was a struggle for them on two fronts -- in the West against the Nazi fascists, and in the East against the Russian communists.

Even a Jewish scholar/polemicist like Robert Wistrich, who expresses astonishment that one-third of West Germany after World War II still felt that anti-Semitism was primarily caused by "Jewish characteristics," concedes that

"After the Polish communist seizure of power in 1948 there were

indeed a number of Jews like Jakob Berman, Hilary Minc, and

Roman Zambrowski, who did play key roles in the party, the

security services, and economic planning. No doubt they were

considered by Moscow as being less susceptible than the Catholic

majority to Polish nationalist feelings, though in the eyes of many

Poles they were little better than agents of a foreign, semi-colonial

power ... the anti-communist underground was convinced that

Jews were deliberately betraying Poland." [WISTRICH, AIE, p. 271]

In another, related, example of the usual sharp double standard of Jewish morality and responsibility, in an article entitled, "Lithuania May Charge Jews for Crimes Against Humanity," in December 1997 the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported the Lithuanian response to a Jewish-lobbied letter by thirty United States Congressmen to the president of Lithuania, insisting that he "put suspected [World War II] criminals on trial." Kazys Pednycia, the prosecutor general of Lithuania, "alarmed local Jewish leaders" by announcing that his office "would not only study the massacres of Jews committed by both Germans and Lithuanians during the war, but also crimes committed by Jews against Lithuanians when the country was under Soviet control." "Of course there were Jews who suffered from Lithuanians," said Pednycia, "But there were also just the opposite cases, and we all know that." "The presence of Jews in the Soviet secret police," noted JTA reporter Lev Krichevsky, "has prompted many Lithuanians to share the sentiments expressed by the prosecutor general." The chairman of the Jewish community in Lithuania, Simonas Alperavicius, responded to the prosecutor's comments about Jews by declaring them "absolutely false," "non-ethical," and "historically wrong." [KRISCHEVSKY, Lith, p. 16] In 2000, Lithuanian requests for the extradition of Nahman Dushanski and Simion Borkov from Israel, for the mass murder of Lithuanians during World War II, were denied by the Jewish state. [MELMAN, 2-10-2000]

Jewish pre-eminence in communist terrorist police organizations in the Ukraine was the same. A Canadian of Ukrainian descent, Lubomyr Prytulak, notes a 1997 volume published in his homeland entitled "The Jewish Conquest of the Slavs." It was produced by Security Service of the Ukraine, today's state police agency. In tabulating the nationalities of 183 biographies in the volume of leading officials in the terrorist Soviet secret police agencies (the dreaded Cheka-GPU-NKVD), Prytulak notes, on average, about six out of ten such people were Jewish. This percentage doesn't include, of course, those who successfully hid their Jewish identities, a practice common in Eastern Europe. As Prytulak concludes,

"One possible reason that Jews incessantly paint the false image of

themselves as victims of Ukrainians is because of the reality that

Ukrainians have been among the foremost victims of Jews ... A

more thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism

reveals many reasons for viewing it -- at least in some of its

manifestations -- not as an irrational and unexplainable and

gratuitous hatred, but as a natural and understandable antipathy

from an acquaintance with Jewish misbehavior." [PRYTULAK]

Richard Rhodes notes the prominence of Bela Kun and other Jewish communist elite in Hungary, and future (Jewish) nuclear bomb scientist Edward Teller's family there:

"The leaders of the Commune and many among its officials were

Jewish ... Max Teller warned his son that anti-Semitism was coming.

Teller's mother expressed her fears more vividly. 'I shiver at what my

people are doing,' she told her son's governess in the heyday of the

Commune. 'When this is over there will be a terrible revenge.'"

[RHODES, R., 1986, p. 111-112]

Bela Kun, notes Louis Rapoport,

"a Jew, [was] the cruel tyrant of the 1919 Communist revolution in

Hungary and later Stalin's chief of terror in the Crimea." [RAPOPORT,

In Russia, the "home" of communism, the preeminence of Jews in oppressive state departments, including the terrorist secret police, and the enforced starving of millions, was the same. [See details -- Genrikh Yagoda, head of the secret police; Lazar Kaganovich, head of the "Apparatus of Terror," Jewish dominance of the Soviet concentration camp system, et al -- earlier] As Richard Pipes notes: "Unlike the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, every aspect which is known in sickening detail, even the general course of the Communist holocaust of 1918-1920 remains concealed." [PIPES, R., 1990, p. 823]

The following observation is written by a Jewish author, Shmuel Ettinger, with the normal Jewish framing of Russian perception about the subject as irrationally anti-Semitic:

"There is a tendency in Russian intellectual circles "to view the

Bolshevik Revolution as an essentially non-Russian phenomenon,

which took place under the influence of the minority nations in the

Russian empire, chiefly the Jews. There are those who regard the

political terror as a phenomenon connected mainly with the Jews

(this element is to be found in, or inferred from [Nobel laureate]

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, the [communist] oppositionist, and

Valentin Kataev, the official writer). Such an attitude is also

behind militant anti-Semitism, born in publicistic writings and

in belles-lettres, portraying the Jews as plotters who, since Peter

the Great, have sought to harm Russia and are now corrupting

Soviet society. In this manner anti-Jewish pogroms and measures

in the past are presented as protests against exploitations." [ETTINGER,

In communist Poland, according to Pinek Maka (a Jew), the Secretary of Security for Silesia, the number of Jewish officers in the dreaded OSS (the secret police organization) was 150 to 225 (as much as 75% of the total) -- merely in his own jurisdiction. [SACH, p. 175] Another Jewish OSS officer, Barek Edelstein, estimated that 90% of the Jews of Kattowitz disguised themselves with Polish names. Josef Musial, the Vice Minister for Justice in Poland in 1990, suggested that most officers in the OSS throughout Poland had been Jewish. [SACK, p. 183]

In 1992, when Shlomo Morel, a Jew still living in Poland, was interrogated by Polish authorities who were looking into his past as the commandant of a post-World War II communist concentration camp for Germans and nationalist Poles, "Shlomo went home, wrote a cousin in Israel, asked him for $490, and the next month, in January 1992, took the first plane that he could to Tel Aviv," leaving his Catholic wife behind. [SACH, p. 166] In an interview with Jewish journalist John Sack, Morel advised him that he must not write about the story of Jewish dominance and brutality in the OSS "because it would increase anti-Semitism." [SACH, p. 169]

Surviving prisoners under Morel's rein had testified that:

* "The commandant was Morel, a Hun in human form."

* "The commandant was Morel, a Schweinehund without equal."

* "The commandant, Morel, appeared. The clubs and the dog whips

rained down on us. My nose was broken, and my ten nails were

beaten blue. They later fell off."

* "The commandant, Morel, arrived. I saw him with my own eyes kill

many of my fellow prisoners." [SACK, p. 167]

After World War II, writes Richard Lucas, "Jews in [Polish] cities and towns displayed Red flags to welcome Soviet troops, helped to disarm Polish soldiers, and filled administrative positions in Soviet-occupied Poland. One report estimated that seventy-five per cent of all the top administrative posts in the cities of Lwow, Bialystok, and Luck were in Jewish hands during Soviet occupation ... The entire character of the University of Lwow changed during the Soviet occupation. Prior to the war, the percentage of students broke down as follows: Poles, 70 per cent; Ukrainians 15 per cent; Jews 15 per cent. After the Soviets, the percentage changed to 3 per cent, 12 per cent, and 85 per cent, respectively." [LUCAS, p. 128]

"The evidence, "observed Jewish commentator Aleksander Smolar, "is overwhelming: large numbers of Jews welcomed the Soviet invasion, implanting in Polish memory the image of Jewish crowds greeting the invading Red Army as their liberator." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 50] "Thousands of Polish survivors' testimonies, memoirs, and works of history," notes Polish scholar Tadeusz Piotrowski, "tell of Jewish celebrations, of Jewish harassment of Poles, of Jewish collaboration (denunciations, manhunts, and roundups of Poles for deportation), of Jewish brutality and cold-blooded executions, of Jewish pro-Soviet citizens' committees and militias, and of the high rates of Jews in the Soviet organs of oppression after the Soviet invasion of 1939." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 51]

Testimony to the Jewish Polish response to the Soviet invasion of Poland includes the following Jewish accounts, from the archives of the Yad Vashim Holocaust organization in Israel:

"When the Bolsheviks entered the Polish territories they displayed a great

distrust of the Polish people, but with complete faith in the Jews ... they

filled all the administrative offices with Jews and also entrusted them with

top level positions." [from the town of Grodno]

"I must note that, from the very first, the majority of positions in the

Soviet agencies were taken by Jews." [from the town of Lwow]

"The Russians rely mainly on the Jewish element in filling positions,

segregating, naturally, the bourgeois from the proletariat." [from the

"A Jewish doctor recalled how local Jewish youths, having formed

themselves into a 'komsomol,' toured the countryside, smashing

Catholic shrines." [near the town of Jaworow]

"Whenever a [pro-Soviet] political march, or protest meeting, or some

other sort of joyful event took place, the visual effect was always the

same -- Jews." [from the town of Lwow]

[PIOTROWSKI, p. 49 - As Piotrowski notes, these comments have

been edited out of an English translation of the source volume,

originally published in Polish]

"The victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and carried out by his Jewish subordinates," says Stephan Korbanski,

"during the first ten years of the war numbered tens of thousands.

Most of them were Poles who had fought against the Germans in

the resistance movement. The communists judged, quite correctly,

that such Poles were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet

rule and were therefore to be exterminated. The task was assigned

to the Jews because they were thought to be free of Polish patriotism,

which was the real enemy." [KORBANSKI, p. 79]

Korbanski then goes on to name and detail 29 more Jewish officials (beyond the ones earlier mentioned) of the communist elite that held positions in suppressing Polish nationalism. But political winds in the communist world shifted drastically. Between 1967 and 1968 over 900 Jewish communist officials were purged from Kremlin ranks; Korbanski sees a direct link to Israel's 1967 military victory over the Arabs. Russia had backed the Arabs and Jewish Russian loyalties -- per Israel -- were put into question. [KORBANSKI, p. 85]

"In places like Gleibwitz," writes John Sack, "the Poles stood against the prison walls as Implementation tied them to big iron rings, said, 'Ready! Aim! Fire!,' shot them, and told the Polish guards, 'Don't talk about this.' The guards, being Poles, weren't pleased, but the Jacobs, Josefs, and Pinteks, the office's brass [of the Office of State Security] stayed loyal to Stalin, for they thought of themselves as Jews, not as Polish patriots ... Stalin ... had hired all the Jews on Christmas Eve, 1943, and packed them into his Office of State Security, his instrument in the People's Republic of Poland. And now, 1945, the Poles went to war with the Office, shooting at Jews in Intelligence, Interrogation, and Imprisonment." [SACK, p. 139]

All this, of course, including the Poles own struggle for survival under Nazi rule, the role of Jews in the brutal communist oppression of Polish nationalism, traditional self-imposed Jewish estrangement from Polish society, and Jewish docile acquiescence to Nazi rule is part of the unscholarly "gutter literature" that the likes of David Engel and mainstream Jewry speak.

In 1984, a Polish journalist, Teresa Toranska, had this interchange with Jacob Berman, the despised Jewish former "Minister of State Security" in post-war communist Poland:

Berman: "I was against too large a concentration of Jews in certain

institutions ... it wasn't the right thing to do and it was a

necessary evil that we'd been forced into when we

[communists] took power when the Polish intelligentsia

was boycotting us...

Q: In 1948-49 you arrested members of the [Polish] Home

Army Council of Aid to Jews, the 'Zegata' ... Mr. Berman!

The security services who were all or nearly all Jews arrested

Poles because they had saved Jews during the [Nazi]

occupation, and you say the Poles are anti-Semites. That's

Berman: ... It was wrong that that happened. Certainly it was wrong ...

It was a small group, but very dedicated, and it took

enormous risks to look after Jews during the war."

Toranska also talked to Roman Werbel, a prominent Jewish communist ideologue and editor of major Polish communist journals, who discussed the implications of the brutality wrought by Jewish security officers upon Poles in fomenting anti-Semitism:

"Beating causes degradation not only in the person who is beaten,

but in the person doing the beating as well. So it's better to shoot

someone than to beat him ... There are principals you have to

stick to in beating, however Johnny has to be beaten by Johnny

and not Moshe ... I can see now that there were too many Jews in

the security services." [TORANSKA, p. 109]

Jewish apologist Michael Checinski (whose world view of Poland is fed by the omnipresent anti-Semitism model, whereby even in the act of oppression of Poles, Jews are themselves considered victims of an anti-Jewish plot concocted by an anti-Semitic communist regime) argues that

"while by coincidence or evil design, Jewish officials were often placed

in the most conspicuous posts; hence they could easily be blamed for

all the regime's crimes ...[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 62] ... Jews -- and

especially those with Jewish names or striking Semitic features -- could

be placed in the most controversial posts (for example, those dealing

with Church affairs or the campaign against the political underground)

and thus deflect antiregime feelings into anti-Semitism. This policy was

implemented not only in Poland, but throughout Eastern Europe, where

the new [communist] governments, ruling only with the military support

of the Soviet army, were seen by their own peoples as puppets."

[CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 63]

In 1999, the government of Poland was still seeking to try a Jewish woman, Helena Brus (now living in England), who in the post-World War II communist regime was Poland's chief military prosecutor. Polish investigators, noted the Jerusalem Report, say "that Brus ... played a key role in the trial and execution of a hero of the Polish resistance, General Emil Fieldorf ... The anti-Communist Fieldorf, hanged after a one-day trial in 1953 but posthumously pardoned in 1989, was an intelligence officer in the underground Polish Home Army in World War II." [WINNER, D., p. 37]

In 1994, the New York Times discussed the case against Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a well-known German Jewish literary critic who had emigrated from Poland. "He was forced to admit his involvement with the Polish secret police from 1944 to 1950," says Carol Oppenheim, "after his name turned up on the front page of a Warsaw newspaper publishing excerpts from a secret Polish intelligence archive." [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

"Hundreds of Jews," writes Jewish author John Sack, "were operating in all of Poland and Poland-administered Germany ... [SACK, p. 6] ... Many [officers of the OSS] were Jewish boys but few used Jewish names ... [SACK, p. 39] ... The talk was in Yiddish, mostly ... About three out of four of the officers -- two hundred rowdy boys -- in the Office of State Security in Kattowitz [Poland's large industrial city] were Jews ... They used names like Stanislaw Niegoslawski, a name that belonged to a [Polish prisoner]." [SACH, p. 40]

There is a profoundly disturbing -- and continuously recurring -- Jewish moral double standard behind Jewish efforts nowadays to impugn the Poles, in order to shirk their own responsibility for Polish "anti-Semitism" and the terrible Jewish situation under the Nazis. Jewish propagandists/scholars regularly charge that Poles were immorally complacent during the Nazi extermination of European Jewry (as Poles themselves were being slaughtered). They are still looking, a half century later, for scapegoats for the shame of their own people. Few can face the extremely sensitive issue of Jewish complacency -- and even active participation -- in their own liquidation.

Stanislaw Krajewski, Jewish and still living in Poland, notes that the traditional separatist tenets of Judaism even engendered a willing acceptance of their push by the Nazis into the doomed Jewish ghetto of Warsaw: "The self-separating orthodox circles have been criticized for their cultivation of a ghetto mentality. How strong this mentality was may be seen from the fact that when the ghetto was established in German-occupied Warsaw in 1940 some Jews expressed satisfaction: at least Jews would be separated from the goyim [non-Jews]." [KRAJEWSKI, p. 15, CJ REL, no. 3, 87, pp. 8-25]

Chaim Kaplan notes the many Jews who had the chance to flee to Russia immediately after the Nazi invasion of Poland: "The so-called leaders of Jewry fled for their lives early and three million Jews have been left orphaned, abandoned to the claws of a cruel beast that knows no pity. Unorganized emigration to Soviet Russia has therefore increased ... In tens of thousands our youths flee to this 'Russia' from the inferno waiting them under the rule of Nazism ... Finally the Soviet government noticed them. True Bolshevism cannot live side by side with financiers, middlemen, black marketeers, exploiters, and extortionists. Didn't Communism come to uproot all such things from the world?" [KAPLAN, C., p. 77]

The Israeli social critic Israel Shahak -- who spent his own childhood in a Nazi concentration camp -- notes with cynical irony the fact that so many Jews today express outrage that, as they see it, "the whole world stood by" as the Jews sunk into the Holocaust. Shahak severely points out that according to the double standard moral dictates of Orthodox Judaism, Jews are, incredibly, themselves forbidden from saving non-Jewish lives. Citing talmudic references, current rabbinical writings in modern Israel, and the great Jewish religious philosopher Maimonides, Shahak writes that "the basic talmudic principle is that (non-Jewish) lives must not be saved." [SHAHAK, p. 80] "As for Gentiles," wrote Maimonides, "with whom we are not at war ... their death must not be caused, but it is forbidden to save them if they are at the point of death; for example, one of them is seen falling into the sea, he should not be rescued." [SHAHAK, p. 80]

The profoundly divisive nightmare of Jewish-Polish relations under Nazi rule -- each people terrorized into the basest struggle for self-survival -- might be epitomized in the testimony of Z. Maszudro, immediately upon his liberation from the Buchenwald concentration camp:

"Then the gaze of the [Nazi] construction officer fell upon two Jews

whose strength had given out. He ordered a Pole named Strzaka to bury

the two men, who could hardly stand on their feet. Strzaka froze with

horror and refused. The construction officer took the shovel and beat

him with it. He ordered him, 'Lie down in the trench immediately!'

Thereupon he forced the two Jews to cover with dirt the prisoner lying

in the trench. The two men did it out of fear for their lives, hoping to

escape the same gruesome fate themselves. When only Strzaka's head

still peered out, the construction officer called, 'Halt.' and had him

pulled out again. Now the two Jews had to lie in the trench, and the

construction officer again gave Strzaka the order to cover the two with

dirt. Slowly the trench filled with dirt; one shovelful after another was

dumped in. The face of the Polish comrade was contorted with terror

... But the construction officer stood next to him with the look of a

wild animal that hypnotizes its victims." [HACKETT, p. 195]

A few Jewish scholars have surfaced over the years to lay the unpleasant story of the Jewish role in their own European extermination on the table. The Jewish historians Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt -- both widely maligned and vilified by the mainstream Jewish community -- were among the first to explore Jewish leaders and organizations that were used by, and cooperated with, the Nazis to betray and exterminate their own people.

"The Jewish Council of Elders were informed by Eichmann [a high-

level Nazi administrator] or his men of how many Jews were needed

to fit each train, and they made out the list of deportees. The Jews

registered filled out the innumerable forms, answered pages and pages

of questionnaires regarding their property so that it could be seized

the more easily; they then assembled at the collection points and

boarded the trains. The few who tried to hide or escape were rounded

up by a special Jewish police force." [ARENDT, p. 102]

"The final rounding up of Jews in Berlin was ... done entirely by a

Jewish police force.... To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the

destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter

of the whole dark story ..." [ARENDT, p. 104]

"In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the

highly assimilated Jewish communities of the Central and Western

Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East ... Jewish

officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and their

property, to secure money from the deported to defray the expenses

of their deportation and extermination ... They distributed the Yellow

Star badges.... In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestos

that (Jewish leaders) issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their

new power." [ARENDT, p. 105]

"[Nazi official] Eichmann mentioned, "says Arendt, "and there is no reason to not believe him, that there were Jews even among the ordinary S.S. men, but the Jewish origin of [important Nazis like] Heydrich, Milch, and others was a highly confidential matter." [ARENDT, p. 178] Such commentary elicited a firestorm of outrage from fellow Jews, including attacks from the Anti-Defamation League and the World Jewish Congress. "Arendt was accused of virtual treason against her people," says Jeffrey Isaac, "for effacing the line between the gulf between the guilt of the Nazis and the innocense of the Jews." [ISAAC, p. 23]

Yet even as severe a critic of Arendt's views as Zionist author Marie Syrkin concedes that "in regard to the evil role of the Jewish police there can be no dispute." [SYRKIN, p. 191] And the Jewish leadership (the so-called Judenrat, the administrative Jewish Council) at-large under the Nazis? "Whatever the heavy sins of the Jewish Councils," continues Syrkin, "let those certain they would have first chosen death for themselves and their families judge them." [SYRKIN, p. 192] Fair enough. So why not accord this judgmental leeway and same moral standard to the Poles too, whose complete family unit was subject to instant execution for any individual caught helping a Jew?

"One of the most important historians of the Warsaw ghetto," says Haim Breseeth, "[was] Emmanuel Ringelbaum. Writing about the Warsaw ghetto Judenrat, he criticized the co-opted leadership with the seminal words: 'We are going like lambs to the slaughter." [BRESEETH, p. 195] Most Jewish leaders kept the horrible truth of what was in store for their people hidden from them, either for "humanitarian" reasons or fear of resultant panic and chaos. Arendt notes that Leo Baeck, for instance, the head rabbi of Berlin, "believed Jewish policemen would be 'more gentle and helpful' and would 'make the ordeal easier' (whereas in fact they were, of course, more brutal and corruptible, since so much more was at stake for them.") [ARENDT, p.]

Which is to say, their own skins. "Everywhere," notes Anthony Heilbut, "Amsterdam, Warsaw, Berlin, Budapest -- it was the same. Jewish leaders compiled lists of persons and property, 'secured money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination,' and organized the efficient evacuation of whole communities. On occasion the leaders even selected a few people to be saved -- and those tended to be 'prominent Jews' and functionaries." [HEILBUT, p. 421] Earlier, complained Chaim Kaplan in 1939, "the Joint's [a Jewish help organization] official representatives have all left us. The leaders of Polish Jewry pushed themselves to the fore in peaceful days when a monthly salary of 1200 zloty, equivalent to that of a senator or a deputy, attracted them; but in time of danger to us -- and to them as well, if the truth be told -- they fled for their lives. Will their sin be remembered on the Day of Reckoning? I doubt it." [KAPLAN, C. p. 96]

Kaplan later wrote about conditions under the Nazis in the Warsaw Jewish ghetto in 1942, as he knew and experienced them:

"To go from one matter to another on the same subject -- from the

Judenrat to the Nazis; that is, from the actions of one degenerate

to those of another degenerate; they are both on the same ethical

plane ... There are lists of ‘suspects,’ and for everyone on the list

the sentence is death ... Sometimes the greedy Nazis conspire with

some worthless Jew. They share one pocket; both lie in wait for the

loot of innocents and for their blood; both fill their houses with the

wealth they have stolen and robbed ... But robbing doesn't last forever,

and when the partnership breaks up it is not convenient for the thieving

Nazi to have a Jew know his secrets. The remedy for this is to get rid

of him ... Thus Perlmutter, the president of the Judenrat of Mlawa,

was killed by his German overseer, whose hand had never left his

while both of them looted and robbed and grew rich. And so it was

with the 'Thirteen.' ["A group of Jewish Gestapo informers headed by

Abraham Gancwajch"] ... They thought that they could live in the

shadow of the Gestapo, that it was a special privilege to be close

to an iniquitous, wicked regime. And behold -- they have gotten their

just deserts. Thus may they be destroyed!" [KAPLAN, C., p. 339-340]

Among the most notorious so-called "elders" of the Jewish community, appointed by the Nazis, was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who was a child molester at a Jewish orphanage before the war. [LEITER, R., 7-20-2000, p. 27] Despite his allegiance to Nazi directors, he too met his end in a concentration camp. Some Jewish Council members, notes Simon Wiesenthal, "did the only thing they couild, under the circumstances, by following Nazi regulations to the letter. Others were corrupted. They accepted favours, juggled names, hoping against hope that they might save their own skins. Other Jews collaborated with the Nazis of bartered others' lives for their own. Some Jews were concentration camp trustees. Sometimes they helped their fellow inmates; sometimes they didn't." [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 85]

As long as such people in the Jewish leadership, its sycophants, and Jewish prisoners were cooperative with the Nazis in helping to exploit and kill other Jews, there was always hope -- rarely realized -- that the betrayers might come out of it all alive. But just on this count alone -- that the Nazi might kill anyone for as little as a sidewise glance, why should Poles -- who had been in competitive conflict with Jews for centuries (while Jews maintained themselves as essentially a separate country in Poland), and who were actively fighting the Nazis while the Jews did virtually nothing -- be held to a higher moral standard than Jews about Jews, when some Jews themselves sold off their own people with little or no moral compulsion at all, and despised Poles?! And why on earth should Poles have been expected to rescue Jews at every corner when their own life situations were also in doubt, when Jews themselves were even turning in their own kind, in huge numbers, primally straining for personal survival?

Jewish author Norman Salsitz noted three well-known Jewish betrayers to the Nazis in his small hometown, Kolubuszowa (total population 4,000; half Jewish), in Poland:

"Enemies there were among our own ranks -- not many, mind you, but

with nearly everyone else against us betrayal by fellow Jews was all

the more devastating ... When we saw [one] speaking to German police

and going in and out of military headquarters, we understood that he

enjoyed a privileged position ... When bribes had to be given to German

officials he served willingly as an intermediary, taking a portion of the

money as his 'share.' He warned of upcoming raids on our houses and

seizures of property and persons, but suggested how, for a sum of

money, all might be averted. We paid him, suspecting that most of the

time no such raids were planned, that such talk was merely a device

to line his own pockets. But who could be sure? ... Regarding a second

informer in town, Shmul Czolik, no one was likely to be surprised by his

actions ... Money put into Czolik's hand hands usually meant an end to

that [Nazi] 'threat' ... That he terrorized the town for a time is certainly

no understatement ... Then there was Pearlman, a thoroughly

contemptible creature who also joined in the ranks of the informers in

town ... Though Jewish, he identified his fortunes with the Germans."

[SALSITZ, N., 1992, p. 261-264]

Upon liberation of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, prisoner Jacob Rudinger told Allied interviewers of an incident that shocked him deeply. Near the end of the war,

"Senior block inmates decided to destroy the documents of all Jews

since the SS [the elite Nazi killing corps] had threatened to force all Jews

out of the camp [to their extermination] the next morning. The next

morning the SS carried out roll call ... They ordered all Jews to move to

the left wing of the block. I explained to the two SS men that I had no

documents to show who was a Jew and who was not. About 200 of the

400 Jews moved to the left wing ... My room attendant and I were able

to bring approximately 100 of the 200 Jews into the block again. Then

something happened I would not have believed possible. A Jew

approached an SS man and declared that there were still many Jews

in the block. The two SS men went back into the block and brought

out approximately twenty more Jews." [HACKETT, p. 325]

Jews could even betray their own over petty arguments. As Dana I. Alvi noted:

"In November, 1944, one of the Jewish women we saved argued with a

group of Jews and brought the Germans who then killed 18 people,

including her nephew and her elderly sister. One man survived ... For

us, and the Jews who passed through our home, the greatest fear was

that someone from the [Jewish] ghetto would betray [us]. The names of

Jewish traitors are a record in the history books authored by Jews. The

photos of Jews being pulled out of their hidings in the ruins of the

Warsaw ghetto are testimonials to such betrayals. No other people but

their own Jewish acquaintances knew of those hidings." [PIOTROWSKI,

"Two [of my] relatives," adds Eva Hoffman, "died because of an act of betrayal by a fellow Jew -- a man who, in the hopes of insuring his own survival, led the Germans to a hiding place." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 6]

There were even predators like Stella Goldschlag, also Jewish, who worked undercover for the Nazis searching for hiding Jews. "Stella," notes Peter Wyden, who knew her, "had stalked fellow Jews throughout Berlin and betrayed them to the Gestapo which deported them to die in concentration camps. She functioned much like an executioner on behalf of the Fuhrer's 'final solution' of the 'Jewish problem.'" [WYDEN, p. 17] Goldschlag survived the Nazi era and has been living -- unlike former Gentile Nazi collaborators hunted down by international Jewry all over the world -- an undisturbed life in Europe.

Even in the art world, the Jewish Wildenstein family (prominent European art dealers) have come under fire in recent years for evidence that they had undercover dealings with the Nazis. As the Jewish Week noted in 1999,

"The Wildensteins aren't the first Jews to be accused of profiteering

off Nazi plunder ... Such incidents weren't uncommon in the chaos

of postwar Europe. Countless more cases have surfaced of Jews

who worked for the Nazis to save their own skins." [GOLDBERG,

J. J., 6-18-99 p. 14]

Tadeusz Piotrowski notes the dimensions of the Jewish Holocaust little heard about these days:

"There were Jewish szmalcowniki (blackmailers). There was a Gestapo-

sponsored Jewish militia (Zagiew-Zydowska Gwardia Wolnoschi, or

Jewish Guard of Liberty, led by Abraham Gancwajch) and the Society

of Free Jews (Towarzystwo Wolnych Zydow, under Captain Lontski),

whose members spied on the Jewish underground. There were the Jewish

Gestapo brigades and Jewish Sonderkommando units. There was Jewish

police force (Jupo). There were camp 'trusties.' (Kapos), retrievers

(Abholder), raiders (Ordner), stool pigeons (Spitzel), scouts (Fahnder),

and catcher (Greifer) of Jewish descent ... At his trial [prominent Nazi

official] Adolf Eichmann testified that the Nazis regarded Jewish

collaboration as 'the very cornerstone' of their anti-Semitic policy."

By the beginning of 1942, the Gestapo-directed Zagiew alone had about 15,000 Jewish agents. [PIOTROWSKI, p. 74] "Former inmates of the Nazi concentration camps," adds Norman Finkelstein, "typically testify that the Kapos were, in the words of Auschwitz survivor Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, 'harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did." [FINKELSTEIN, N., 1998, p. 63-64] (For what it's worth, although of enormously less gravity, this harsh treatment in some ways echoes that afforded fellow Jews by Jewish overseers in an immigration barracks in America in 1882: "The Father, or manager and taskmaster over the immigrants, was an American Jew who looked down upon the earthly beings, as the immigrants were called and not in a friendly tone. His assistant, the Hungarian Jew, was a brazen scoundrel and treated the immigrants like cattle. The other Russian Jews, who through flattery managed to secure soft jobs, imitated them in behavior ... [Leading to a an eventual riot of Jewish immigrants that was quelled by 100 policemen], the Father's assistant slapped a weak woman who had implored him [to give her] several drops of a certain medicine. He also threatened her lady friends with a revolver when they reprimanded him. After breakfast, a delegation went to see the Father with complaints agaisnt his assistant, but the latter gave them a rude reception.") [SHPALL, L., 1957, p. 103, 107, 108]

Emmanuel Ringelbaum wrote with disdain about the Jewish police who suffocated his people under Nazi rule:

"Jewish policemen also distinguished themselves with their fearful

corruption and immorality. But they reached the height of viciousness

during the resettlement [transfer of Jews to concentration camps]. They

said not a single word of protest against this revolting assignment to

lead their own brothers to the slaughter. The police were

psychologically prepared for the dirty work and executed it thoroughly.

And now people are wracking their brains to understand how Jews,

most of them men of culture, former lawyers (most of the police

officers were lawyers before the war), could have done away with

their brothers with their own hands ... Very often, the cruelty of the

Jewish police exceeded that of the Germans, Ukrainians, and Letts...

Victims who succeeded in escaping the German eye were picked

up by the Jewish police ... Those who didn't have the money to

pay off the police were dragged to the wagons ... For the most part,

the Jewish police showed an incomprehensible brutality ... Merciless

and violent, they beat those who tried to resist ... Every Warsaw

Jew, every woman and child, can cite thousands of cases of the

inhuman cruelty and violence of the Jewish police. Those cases

will never be forgotten by the survivors, and they must shall be

paid for." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 68]

Israeli human rights activists, and Holocaust survivor, Israel Shahak, notes that

"My memories (and memories of all survivors who are honestly

'talking among themselves') tell me that at the time [of the war]

we Jews hated the Jewish policemen, or the Jewish spies for the

Nazis in the Ghetto, much more than we hated anybody else."

[PIOTROWSKI, p. 75]

Holocaust survivor Marcus David Leuchter recalls that "the brutality of the Jewish police force was unexpected; in the number of people they caught, they even exceeded the demands of the Germans." [LEUCHTER, M., 2000]

Of course, times have changed and things are recontextualized. Such stories are a grotesque embarrassment to the myths of the Holocaust, they are only rarely addressed in obscure academic corners, and few people today are aware of them. And while angry Jewish scholarship fingers Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and other Nazi collaborators as moral beasts to be hunted down still today throughout the world, parallel Jewish criminals are never even mentioned. Popular Jewish convention demands collective Jewish innocence and a correspondingly collective Gentile evil. Period. In this context, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski addresses today's chronic double standard held for Jews and Poles in the World War II situation:

"While the Polish masses are criticized or condemned for their

reluctance to help the Jews ... a double standard is applied towards

those members of the Jewish community who worked in Jewish

Councils ... [They] are excused, on the grounds that they had little

choice, much more willingly than those Gentiles whose caution or

fear prevented them from offering help to Jews ... Most Poles

particularly resent this application of a double standard to those

Jewish individuals who were active in, and high-ranking members

of the Communist Party, and especially the security police ... No

one ... can claim that he or (very often) she had to be a member of

the Stalinist political force or judiciary and, for one reason or another,

had no choice but to torture and kill their innocent political

opponents." [BARTO, Conv, p. 29]

Still another Jewish enforced double standard of moral judgment is that going on today in today's Czech Republic. As Carol Oppenheim notes, there is "the struggle in the Czech Republic by Jews and Sudenten Germans for legal restoration of homes that they were pushed out of almost fifty years ago. Germans are challenging the [Czech] government over a law that gives homes back to Jews making claims but refuses to consider the claims of Sudenten Germans for houses taken between 1945 and 1948, the very period when Jews figured prominently in the [then ruling] communist administration." [OPPENHEIM, p. 39]

Despite all the historical conflicts between Poles and Jews, some Poles did rescue Jews from the Nazis. Some Poles did die for basic human principles. In fact, more than 2,500 Christian Poles were executed for aiding Jews. [CERAMI] Over 2,000 Polish Christian citizens are honored as Righteous Gentiles at Israel's Vad Yashem. (This does not include the many that cannot be formally documented). "Every Polish Jew who survived in occupied Poland," notes Eva Hoffman, "(rather than in the Soviet Union), did so with the help of individual Poles and of organizations set up for the purpose of aiding Jews. This was help offered at enormous risk, since sheltering Jews carried with it the penalty of death." [HOFFMAN, E., 1997, p. 7] But few Jews don't want to hear about Christians who saved Jewish lives. Rabbi Harold Schulweiss, who has lectured on the subject to many Jewish audiences, notes that: "By and large, in most audiences, I found a resistance to my message. What was my obsession with 'them' [Poles] they seemed to ask." [CERAMI] (Even Liwa Gomulka, a Jew, and eventual wife of post-World War II Polish communist head Wladyslaw Gomulka, "refused to see an old Polish woman who had hidden her during the Nazi occupation and had come to her for some small favor.") [CHECINSKI, M., 1982, p. 143]

So where were the Jews, before things got worse for them, who saved a Polish life, in any way in those times? Where is just one? As Norman Davies notes, "to ask why the Poles did little to help the Jews is rather like asking why the Jews did nothing to assist the Poles." [DAVIES, Playground, p. 264] And it was not the Poles who, in the end, were performing the absolutely unthinkable. If Poles and others are collectively held responsible for what they did, or did not do, under Nazi occupation and enforcement, what about the following? As Hannah Arendt's observes:

"The actual work of killing in the extermination centers was usually

in the hands of Jewish commandos ... They ... worked in the gas

chambers and the crematories ... they pulled the gold teeth and cut

the hair of the corpses ... they dug the graves and, later, dug them

up again to extinguish the traces of mass murder ... Jewish technicians

had built the gas chambers at Theresienstadt, where the Jewish

"autonomy" had been carried so far that even the hangman was a

Jew." [ARENDT, p. 109]

Wolfgang Sofsky observes that this was part of the Nazi process to dehumanize Jews:

"The SS deliberately had Jews burn Jews, as though it wished to

prove that the members of the subrace accepted any degradation

and even killed one another: as though it wished to shift the guilt

onto the victims themselves ... Those prisoners were left alive for a

time in order to dispose of relatives, neighbors, and fellow Jews.

Their behavior cannot be judged by the conventional moral conceptions

of civil society. The institution of the sonderkommando shows to

what point human beings can be brought by permanent threat of death

... The Kommandos were subordinated to Jewish Kapos, who had

unlimited power to mete out punishment." [SOFSKY, W., 1993,

Jews are automatically excused from the unspeakable horrors they were forced to do in their struggles for survival, and who can morally condemn them? Who among us today can swear with absolute certainty that we would not have done the same when trapped in Hell? But why the double standard? Why are only Jews, among all other people trapped in the Nazi net, afforded blanket forgiveness while everyone else stands relentlessly, to this very day, accused?

Germany, says Richard Rubenstein, "demonstrated that a modern state can successfully organize an entire people for its own extermination." [ELLIS, M. 1990, p. 39] "Over the whole way to their deaths," says Robert Pendorf, "the Polish Jews got to see hardly more than a handful of Germans." [ARENDT, p. 117] "Prisoners from a special work detail, the so-called sonderkommando," notes Franciszek Piper, "had to perform all the auxiliary work: removing bodies from gas chambers, cutting the hair, tearing out gold teeth, and burying corpses. The sonderkommando consisted mainly of Jewish prisoners originating from the countries from which the latest transports were arriving." [PIPER, The Mass, p. 169] Literary agent Barbara Rogan recalls moving to Israel and reading a manuscript submitted by a former Jewish sonderkommando, who --among other things he did to survive -- burned concentration camp bodies. "What fixes the book in my mind," says Rogan, "... [was] his attempt to deal with overwhelming, abiding guilt ... someone ought to have published it, but as far as I know, no one has." [ROGAN, p. 320]

At the peak of the Auschwitz murder process, there were nearly 1,000 Jewish sonderkommandos -- 450 from Hungary, 200 from Poland, and 180 from Greece. They were overseen in the hierarchy by 19 Russian prisoners of war, five Poles, and a German kapo. [SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 268] Wherever they were in the hierarchy of death, all were subject to immediate execution if they refused to fulfill their assigned role in mass murder under the Nazis. At the Treblinka concentration camp, about a thousand Jewish sonderkommandos ran the daily routines. [De Beavoir, S., 1967, p. 8] The Totenjuden ("Jews of Death") were "those who handled the bodies, those who took them out of gas chambers, extracted their teeth, and carried them to the ditches." The Platzjuden ("Jews of the Square") were in charge of "herding the Jews out of the cars, collecting their baggage, and clearing the cars." Another group of Platzjuden's task was to aid "these convoys undress and to carry their clothing into the sorting square ... The world of these two commandos obviously had an indelicate side, since they participated directly in the final process of liquidation." The Goldjuden sorted out valuables and "subjected [new arrivals] to an intimate search." Hofjuden ("Court Jews") were involved in the "upkeep of the camp and the personal service of the Technicians [Nazi overseers]." [STEINER, J., 1967, p. 92-95]

At Auschwitz, Nazi doctor Carl Clauberg performed experiments on Jewish female prisoners. "His medical and nursing staff," notes Irene Strzelecka, "consisted mainly of female Jewish prisoners." Beginning in late 1943, his head doctor was "surgeon and gynecologist Alina Bialostocka," a Polish Jew. [STRZELECKA, p. 90] Another Jewish doctor, Maximilian Samuels, was among those who performed castration experiments on male prisoners [STRZELECKA, p. 93] and "Jewish prisoners had to assist [Nazi doctor] Mengele in his scientific research on twins." [STRZELECKA, p. 96] Another Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, was one of those "who would carry out autopsies [of those murdered in Nazi experiments] and give their scientific appraisals." [STRZELECKA, p. 96]

"In the women's camp at Birkenau," notes Wolfgang Sofsky, "along with the German Asoziale [asocials], for the most part prostitutes, the ranks of the prominent prisoners included the small number of Jewish women from Slovakia who had ... survived a series of selections. In Monowitz and the attached satellite camps, several hundred Jews from the first transport were part of the [prisoner] aristocracy, along with German prisoners." [SOFSKY, W., 1993, p. 147]

      In 1987 a former Jewish kapo (a kind of foreman for the Nazis among prisoners), Jacob Tannenbaum, faced deportation from the United States for brutality in concentration camps. He was accused by fellow Jewish concentration camp survivors of ordering 300 Jews to their deaths in 1945, for raping women, and torturing and killing male prisoners, including a rabbi. "He was a nasty, nasty guy," said a former head of the Office of Special Investigations, Martin Mendelsohn, "There were a lot of witnesses who remembered him and his bestiality." [MAGIDA, p. 4] Yet, notes the Jewish Week, "most [Jews] agreed, in the words of Elie Wiesel, Auschwitz survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, that 'the kapos were victims. They were chosen by their enemies. It is true that some were very, very cruel, but even those were acting as instruments of the enemy." [BOROSON, 5-22-87, p. 17] Tannenbaum was eventually stripped of U.S. citizenship, but not deported. "This is the best solution for all concerned," said Tannenbaum's lawyer, Elihu Massel, "It will also avoid a truly ghastly trial in which Jews would have had to testify against Jews, none of whom really want to remember." [JW, 2-12-88, p. 34]

     Famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal notes the case of an "ex-Gestapo agent named David Zimet -- a Jew!" Zimet was "the right hand of a very known Gestapo sadist with the name of Grunov ... In one truck of Jewish women [deported by the Nazis] were the wife and the daughter of Zimet. And the hatred against him was so great that the Jewish women in that truck taking them all to die killed his wife and his daugthter then and there' ... Years later, Wiesenthal was looking over a confidential list of cases being investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when he read: 'ZIMET, David. A policeman in ghetto in Tarnow. Witnesses have attested to his brutality.' 'Zimet!' Wiesenthal exclaimed. 'This is my old case!' He informed the Canadian authorities of his evidence against Zimet, but they proved unwilling to prosecute a Jew for Nazi crimes. The Canadian Jewish Committee intervened and Zimet agreed to submit to a council of arbitration established by the committee. 'Nothing ever came of it,' says Wisesenthal, 'because the Jewish community was reluctant to publicize the case since Zimet was himself Jewish.'" [LEVY, A., 1993, p, 83, 84]

     (As Jewish scholar Peter Novak notes about Jewish collaborators with the Nazis: "With only one exception known to me -- an article in Life in 1950 about a New York rabbinic court proceeding against a surviving Jewish camp official accused of beating another person to death -- discussion of the phenomenon was confined to Jews. Much of [Jewish scholar Hannah] Arendt's offense [to fellow Jews] was that she had written of these matters before a large gentile audience.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 140-141]

"The true lords and masters of the kommandos were the kapos," notes Wolfgang Slofsky, in his study of the Nazi death camps,

"They were always on hand ... They kept the work sites under

surveillance, distributed work tasks, and were responsible for

their groups being complete ... They were to blame for a great

deal of excessive drudgery and a great many of the killings ...

[SOFSKY, p. 192] ... Kapos shouted louder than the guards

and were quicker to swing their clubs and strut around like petty

potentates, reading on their masters' lips their every wish. At times, a

symbiotic relationship developed between masters and servants. The

supervisors hardly needed to take action themselves: they were able

to leave everything to their servile lackies ... Often there was no real

need for a gesture from the master -- the servants took the initiative

on their own ... They imitated the master because the latter would

never punish what the master did. They acted like their master

in order to remain what they were -- privileged prisoners. They

      followed this model in order to survive." [SOFSKY, 1993, p. 137]

     The authors of articles that dare to discuss the Jewish Councils that functioned as bureaucracies for Nazi overseers, notes Polish scholar Piotr Wrobel, "have been accused of slander, ignorance or even anti-Semitism ..." [WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 225] Wrobel's own article in 1997 addressed the profound double standard applied to Jews on the question of Jewish responsibility during the Holocaust epoch. In Holland, for example, two presidents of the Dutch Joodse Raad, Cohen and Asscher, "were arrested by Dutch authorities. The prosecuting attorney stated that 'Cohen and Asscher, as Jews, collaborated with the enemy, and shall not see the light of freedom.' Eventually, the Dutch Miniser of Justice decided to drop the case, adding that 'this should not be construed as a rehabilitation of the party in question.'" [WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 227]

     Under post-war Jewish "Courts of Honor," which tried Jewish collaborators with the Nazis, notes Wrobel,

     "punishment tended to be lenient ... Altogether, between 1946 and 1950, there were
     about 160 trials of former members of the Jewish Councils, their officers, Jewish
     policemen and kapos ... According to its governing statute, the Court could
     pass only relatively mild sentences: exclusion from the Jewish community for
     a period of time from one to three years, withholding someone's electoral rights
     in a Jewish community, and public reproach ... It appears that major Jewish
     collaborators, who managed to survive, left Poland very soon after the war or
     changed their identitites and the People's Court tried only a small fraction of
     them." [WROBEL, P., 1997, p. 228-230]

     And Wrobel's perspectives about all this, as a Pole, and the incessant Jewish condemnation of the Polish people for an alleged reluctance to save Jews? "How can non-Jewsh bystanders," concludes Wrobel,

     "be condemned for their passivity when Jewish Kapos, policemen, and
     former Judenrate leaders were rehabilitated? Many similar questions appear when
     we study the Holocaust and most of them have no satisfactory answer yet.
     This aspect of the Holocaust is still far from settled." [WROBEL, P., 1997,
     232]

There are even more profound Holocaust-era facts that the Jewish community vehemently strives to bury. While on the one hand the Jewish community wields the "We Shall Never Forget" injunction about their Holocaust, the facts of Jewish-created mass murder are forcibly covered up. In 1993, for instance, Jewish journalist John Sack published the results of his interviews with 23 Jewish OSS (the communist secret police in post-war Poland) officers and 55 family members or friends of Jewish members of the dreaded OSS. The book, not surprisingly, has been subject to a concerted and massive censorial effort [see later chapter]. Sack was shocked with what he found in his seven years of research on the subject: 60,000-80,000 Germans and Poles were murdered in Jewish-run concentration camps, "more than the number of [Jews] who died at Belsen and Buchenwald." [SACH, p. 14]

"Jews," says Sack, "were sometimes as cruel as their [Nazi] exemplars at Auschwitz, and they even ran the organization that ran the prisons and ... the concentration camps for German civilians in Poland and Poland-administered Germany ... The Jews who committed [atrocities] covered them up ... I learned that in 1945 they killed a great number of Germans: not Nazis, not Hitler trigger men, but German civilians, German men, women, children, babies, whose 'crime' was just to be German ... The Germans lost more civilians [this way than] ... the Jews themselves lost in all of Poland's pogroms. So I had learned, and I was aghast to learn it." [SACK, p. x] Sack notes Jewish torturers sticking toads down peoples' throats, whippings, and some buried alive in potato sacks. A hundred non-Jews at the Myslowitz concentration camp, for instance, were murdered each day. [SACK, p. 110] The death rate in some Jewish-controlled camps was 80%. [SACK, p. 206]

Simply the reporting of facts is, for many Jews, a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Note this letter by a Polish Jew to a Jewish magazine in 1998:

"Recently, [Polish] Panorama TV News showed a report about

Jaworzno camp, where members or suspected members of

independence fighters groups (many of them were Ukrainians),

were imprisoned with the statement that it is difficult today to

find traces of the camp, for the buildings which had housed the

inmates had been converted into regular housing, the barracks

have been dismantled and the former commander had left for

Israel. My husband was outraged by this conclusion, and he

said that such a blatantly anti-Semitic statement on a public new

broadcast is sheer manipulation." [MAKOWIECKA, A., p. 3]

Among other unpleasant Holocaust stories is that of a Jewish leader, Yisrael Kastner, a senior European Zionist official and eventual immigrant to Israel, who collaborated with the Nazi SS in its mass murder program. He did so, two Israeli researchers wrote, "in return for the freedom of a few hundred relatives and friends." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 154] "Kastner was eventually assassinated," notes Noah Lucas, "as though proof of the intolerable tension which the probing of Holocaust history could engender." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 155]

After World War II too, bands of Jewish assassins calling themselves Nokmim (Avengers) "secretly sought out and summarily executed several hundred SS and Gestapo men and other Nazi officials in Italy, Austria, and Germany itself ... They operated for about a year and a half, identifying and locating Nazi war criminals and summarily executing them." [BLACK/MORRIS, p. 189] One such band of Jewish killers was called Din (Judgment). Led by Joseph Harmatz and Abba Kovner, their "overall objective [was] the death of 6 million Germans as vengeance for Jews who died in the Holocaust." [DAVIS, D., 1998, p. 9] Kovner visited Tel Aviv to garner support from Israeli officials to carry out a mass scale extermination action against post-war Germany. Reviewing at least part of the project, the President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, noted Harmatz, "approved of our plans and recommended a scientist who would make poison for us." [DAVIS, D. 1998] Initial Din plans were to poison German food supplies and the water supply of the entire city of Nuremberg. Returning with Israeli-supplied poison to carry out the plan, Kovner was arrested on a British ship by police who learned of the terrorist plot.

Nonetheless, members of Din managed to return to Germany and taint 3,000 loaves of bread with poison, intended for German prisoners. Harmatz estimates that the bread successfully killed 300-400 people. "The 300 or 400 we poisoned was nothing compared with what we really wanted to do," he said in later years. [DAVIS, D., 1998, p. 9] For Kovner's part, he moved to Israel, and "gave up dreams of vengeance, becoming one of the great poets of the new state." [DAVIS, D. 1998, p. 9]

Reviewing the moral crimes of the Jewish leadership under Nazi rule, Hannah Arendt faces squarely the hideous, sordid mess of it all, points the finger to those who look to blame others beyond the Nazis for an answer (Ukrainians, Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, and others who were --to use Elie Wiesel's phrase of pardon for Jewish Nazi collaborators -- also "chosen by their enemies"), and poses the gnawing rhetorical question to the European Jewish community itself: "Why did you cooperate in the destruction of your own people and, eventually, in your own ruin?" [ARENDT]

Such an accusation and such revelations in the 1960's engendered a storm of outrage from the worldwide Jewish community, anger that was less directed at the Jewish perpetrators of their own victimization under the Nazis, but, rather, at harbingers of bad news like Arendt (and a few others like Raul Hilberg) for daring to cite evidence that profoundly threatened sacrosanct Jewish myths about the Holocaust years and even earlier history, in most quarters myths that still hold popular currency. Vehement Jewish resistance to the writings of these two Jewish scholars exists to this day. In recent years Hilberg committed to text his bitterness to his community's reaction to the facts:

"For thirty years ... I was almost buried under an avalanche of

condemnations. [HILBERG, p. 137] It has taken me some time to

absorb what I should have always known, that in my whole approach

to the story of the destruction of the Jews I was pitting myself

against the main current of Jewish Thought, that I did not give

in, that in my research and writing I was pursuing not merely

another direction but one which was the exact opposite of a

signal that pulsated endlessly through the Jewish community."

Trying to get his seminal work, The Destruction of the European Jews published in 1958, Hilberg faced the "first negative reaction to my manuscript and these bullets were fired at me from Jerusalem." [HILBERG, p. 111] Israel's Vad Yashem, the memorial center created to mythologize Jewish victims of Hitler as "martyrs," rejected the manuscript on the following grounds:

"1. Your book rests almost entirely on the authority of German

sources and does not utilize primary sources in the language

of the occupied states, or in Yiddish or Hebrew.

2. The Jewish historians here make reservations concerning

the historical conclusions you draw, both in respect of the

comparison with former periods and in respect of your

appraisal of the Jewish resistance (active and passive) during

the Nazi occupation." [HILBERG, p. 110]

Hilberg quickly understood that the results of his research into German archives went against the grain of Jewish institutionalized dictate concerning the Holocaust. "To discover the source of his [Dr. J. Melkman, General Manager of Yad Vashem] argument about 'resistance,'" says Raul Hilberg, "I merely had to glance at Yad Vahem's letterhead which proclaimed the parity of the disaster and heroism." [HILBERG, p. 111]

In the 1980s, John Sack paid a visit to Yad Vashem to search for information about the hundreds of Jews who ran the murderous post-war concentration camps under the auspices of the Office for State Security for Germans and anti-communist Poles. Virtually all former Jewish OSS members have successfully hidden their past and many had moved to America. One such person has become the "vice-president of the United Synagogues of America and a chairman of the United Jewish Appeal." [SACK, p. 151]

Yad Vashem's repository, writes Sack,

"had fifty million pages, five, on the average, per [Jewish] man, woman,

and child, a mile-long tunnel of pages, all indexed, all catalogued, so I

was surprised it had nothing at all on the Office of State Security [of

Eastern Europe] or the Jews who had run it." [SACK, p. 148]

The director of the Holocaust center told Sack the facts he had thus far uncovered were "imaginary":

"'Impossible!' the Director said ... [He glowered] at me as though

he would choke me, a man who might someday write that the Jews

sometimes killed the Germans [and Poles] when all the fifty million

pages said it was the other way around." [SACK, p. 148]

Sack's investigation at Vad Yashem did turn up, however, the intriguing fact that the vice-chairman of this vast Holocaust propaganda post had himself served as an officer in the notorious OSS. He had even been a torturer, a "heavy-handed interrogator" at the Neisse concentration camp. "I was terrible," he told Sack. "But better not to speak about this." [SACK, p. 148-149]

(Note: famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wisenthal once noted that even many Jewish administrators for German Nazis ended up as officials in American Jewish organizations: "[I] in many cases, such people after the war found jobs with Jewish organizations. Maybe they were trying to atone; maybe they thought this was the best place to hide. Once, I was going special to Paris to see the director for Europe of the [Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee, because working for him was a man -- a Jew! - who had been in a concentration camp the head of the transports to the death camps. According to Wisenthal, the JDC director, an American, responded, 'So what? This was a time when everyone had to serve.'" [LEVY, A., 1993, p. 85]

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