16 No. 69 JUSTICE he term “antisemitism,” or “Anti-Semitism,” is nonsensical because there exists no Semitism one can oppose. There are no Semites. There are people who speak Semitic languages because there exists a group of languages we call Semitic, but the groups that speak those languages are of widely different origins, have different cultures, and do not necessarily look alike. Arabic is a Semitic language, but some groups of people living in Mali and speak Arabic follow different traditions from those practiced by Arabs living in the Yemen and have different skin color. Some non-Arabic people speak languages closely related to Arabic, e.g., Eritreans and Tigrayans. The term Antisemitismus in its original German was used and popularized around 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German nationalist, racist, atheist and violently anti-Jewish journalist who was looking for a pseudo-scientific term (with an “ism”) to replace “Jew-hatred” (Judenhass in German), and similar terminology in different European languages. The point, of course, is that opposition to Jews is an ancient phenomenon. Usually, the explanation offered regarding the origin of this group-hatred is connected to the rise of Christianity and its struggle against the group from which it sprang, and the need to differentiate itself from that group. But there is clear evidence of anti-Jewishness before the Christian era, in the Hellenistic world. Post-Alexandrian Hellenism was not only political. There was an attempt to unify the different groups under the rule of the Hellenistic kings culturally, by accepting the polytheistic beliefs of the different ethnic units within an inclusive framework. You could call your gods by different names, but they had basically the same functions. Zeus and Ba'al were really the same deity, and the Hellenistic kings assumed the roles of the gods' representatives and/or claimed divine status for themselves. A united culture was a tool for political supremacy. The Jews could not live with that. Jewish culture, originally polytheistic, slowly developed, as a result of intense internal conflicts, into a belief in a God who was both tribal, i.e. concerned with that small ethnicity that developed into a Jewish people, and universal; some parallels with the polytheism that surrounded them continued to exist. The god that developed among the Jewish elites could not be represented by statues that were the results of human creativeness. He was unseen, though he had human qualities. This was anathema to Hellenistic concepts. One can see this conflict in the Scroll of Esther. That legend supposedly described events that took place in Persia, where opponents of Jews wanted to get rid of them. The Jews are described as a dispersed minority living among others. The reason why the Jews should be eliminated is stated in Chapter 3, verse 8: “There is one nation dispersed and separated among the nations in all of the countries of your kingdom and their customs are different from those of any [other] nation and they do not observe the customs of the king” [my translation]. In other words – the Jews must be eliminated because they are different in their culture and belief system. The scroll purports to describe the situation in Persia in the fifth century B.C.E., but that is clearly out of context. The Persian Empire was not anti-Jewish in any sense, and under Cyrus and his heirs the Jews were a protected minority. Nehemia was sent by the Persians to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and establish a protected Jewish vassal unit. It seems obvious that the scroll was written under Greek, not Persian, rule, and the story was transposed into an earlier time to avoid problems with the Greek Seleucid rule. The Seleucids did indeed act against those Jews who opposed their policy of unification under one culture, and therefore one political rule. The Hasmonean rebellion, which began in 161 B.C.E., was the result. If this is correct, we can place the origins of what we today call antisemitism in Hellenistic times, and the most basic reason for it is the cultural, and hence the political, difference between the group that came to be defined as Jewish (and identified itself as such) and the surrounding groups. This theological argument can be seen as based on social and political foundations. Antisemitism: A Fresh Look* T Yehuda Bauer * This is a slightly edited text of a webinar with Prof. Yehuda Bauer: “Antisemitism — A Fresh Look,” as part of the Beinner Family Speakers Series, January 15, 2023, sponsored by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, Indiana University Bloomington.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgzNzA=