Historical notes on anti-Semitism
Michael the Great's Notepad
Beyond the invectives against the Pharisees present in some passages of the Gospels and the Pauline letters, the origins of religious anti-Semitism date back to at least the 4th century. After the conversion of the emperor Constantine (313), the enemy of Christianity was identified in the people of the Covenant, and the persecution of the Jews was tolerated by virtue of the "crime committed against Christ" (Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica , 325). The Church of the Gentiles is therefore configured as a community incompatible with the "greedy people, traffickers, merchants and traitors of the poor who inhabit the Synagogues, dens of thieves" (John Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos Orationes ). Chrysostom, and with him also Ambrose (340-397), reiterated the condemnation already contained in the Old Testament, according to which usury was legitimate only if practiced towards foreigners: "You shall not lend your brother interest or money. , nor of food […]” (Deuteronomy, XXIII, 20-21). Thomas Aquinas himself will solemnly maintain that usury was always and in any case a sin, since in any person, Jew or Gentile, everyone is obliged to recognize their brother ( Summa Theologica , 1265-1274).
On this theological premise, in 1199 Pope Innocent III, while prohibiting abuses against property or forced baptisms of Jews, reiterated that "Jewish perfidy" confirmed the truth of the Christian faith, questioning the lending and banking activities carried out by the desecrators of the consecrated host. In the meantime, however, these activities had developed above all in German and Italian cities, where the monetary and credit resources managed by the Jewish banks had become necessary for the financing of commercial transactions. Lending activities were therefore tolerated until the end of the fifteenth century, when the Franciscans convinced Pope Leo The same charge of ritual murder, made between 1147 and 1150 by Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of Norwich Cathedral, was used to justify the closure of Jewish lending banks.
What relationship exists between the Christian anti-Jewish tradition, linked to the controversy over usury, and modern anti-Semitism? Since the early nineteenth century, after the French Revolution, the defense of that tradition has occupied a central place in the language of intransigent Catholic thought. Just to mention the most well-known names, authors such as Joseph De Maistre, Louis de Bonald, René de Chateaubriand, Donolo Cortés, Ludwig von Haller, Father Taparelli d'Azeglio, celebrate the Roman apostolic religion as the only one capable of guaranteeing stability of the social order and to counter the Lutheran claim to autonomously interpret the Bible. But the heresy of the moderns – the Protestants – presupposes the obstinacy of the ancients – the Jews – in their refusal to recognize the Messiah; therefore even the apologia of the free market was attributed by the ecclesiastical press to the ancestral "Jewish thirst for profit". An irrevocable condemnation of the errors of the Enlightenment and of the nascent liberal society which will be codified in the “Syllabus” (1864) and by the First Vatican Council (1870).
Since the first emancipation law, passed in France in September 1791, the freedoms conquered by the Jews, together with the failure to abandon their "perverse" customs, were seen as an attack on Christian unity. Their unamendable "diversity", however, had posed itself as a very serious problem for the Spanish authorities as early as 1492. In fact, it was necessary to prevent the converted Jews and their descendants from gaining access to important offices or even joining the Inquisition. Over the following decades, the statutes of "limpieza de sangre" (purity of blood) were therefore promulgated, which registered Jews on the basis of their ancestors or unchangeable biological characteristics. Theologians and jurists such as Escobar del Corro and Marchando de Susannis had defined them as a "generatio" characterized by "pravorum morum", in which the "macula" of deicide was transmitted from father to son through the "qualitates sanguinis" (Adriano Prosperi, Between nature and culture: From religious intolerance to discrimination based on blood , ESI, 1992).
In 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany, the Austrian philologist Leo Spitzer traced the etymology of the word "race" to the lemma "generatio" used in Spanish statutes. This thesis was later refuted by Gianfranco Contini, who demonstrated in an article published in 1959 that the origin was completely different. According to the illustrious academic of Crusca, the term "race" was in fact a medieval corruption of the ancient French term "haraz", which indicated a herd of horses, a herd, a herd. Perhaps the most symbolic of the words in the name of which the abjection of reason had been produced, its derivation from Latin being replaced by one of a zoological nature, was thus downgraded from a noble sign of excellence (for the Nazis) to a specific certificate of bestiality. In any case, the meaning of any distinction between intolerance by faith and that by race had already been lost before Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, in 1854, arrogantly theorized it: "All peoples retain their character and ideas unchanged: the Jews , the Guebri [Persians], the Copts and to some extent also the Armenians; races that the same system connotes with the mark of greed and vileness” ( Essay on the inequality of human races , Rizzoli, 1998).
The hostility towards the Jews in late nineteenth-century Europe was therefore not so much the expression of racial hatred, but of an atavistic distrust towards citizens who were now equal to others, but who continued to act against others in the underground of the nation , and "who had already threatened Christianity in the past, in the eras in which they had exercised the functions of tax collectors on behalf of the sovereign and of capital lenders to monarchies" (Michele Battini, Il socialismo degli imbecilli , Bollati Boringhieri, 2010) . On the other hand, the presumption of being a chosen people represented the definitive proof of an insuperable extraneousness. And the latter in turn fueled the suspicion of a conspiracy aimed at taking over global economic power. A conspiracy, revealed by the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (1905), responsible for cyclical crises, stock market crashes and banking failures. The documentation of the alleged secret meeting that was held during the first Zionist congress in Basel in 1897 was false, but it was also clear evidence of another conspiracy, which was actually true. The conspiracy of the most aggressive anti-Semitism which, on the obsession for an imaginary Jewish financial imperialism, had projected its own hegemonic plans and domination of the Old Continent.
Anti-Jewish propaganda and the fabrication of forged evidence are different forms of the same imposture. The texts of nineteenth-century literature that offered a false representation of the Jews also provided the real materials for the fabrication of a false document that intended demonstrate an event that never happened, the Jewish conspiracy. But the myth that that false document managed to create was not without consequences. Despite being a product of the art of forgery, it functioned as a true fact that had equally true historical effects. Alexandre Koyrè wrote, in March 1943, that the architects of totalitarian propaganda, since the first edition of Mein Kampf (1925), had always announced their action program explicitly, knowing that public opinion would not give much credit to the persecutory declarations. The lie of the Jewish conspiracy therefore concealed a real conspiracy, "a conspiracy in broad daylight", hatched by anti-Semitic and totalitarian movements: an authentic conspiracy which was obliged to gain the trust of the masses and which, for this reason, could not hide, while he blamed the need to hide on the Jewish conspiracy. From this perspective, Koyré concludes, "the conspiracy in broad daylight, if it is not a secret society, is still a society with a secret" (On political lies , Lindau, 2010).
The lemma "anti-Semitism" began to spread in European political language after the publication, in 1879, of a pamphlet in which the German journalist Wilhelm Marr denounced the "social parasitism" of the Jews. The most impressive anti-Jewish movement, however, developed precisely in the country that could boast secular schools and universal male suffrage. A movement that would culminate in the Dreyfus affair, the Jewish artillery captain accused in 1895 of intelligence with Germany. In the months in which Alfred Dreyfus was arrested and tried, Édouard Drumont's La France juive (1886) had exceeded one hundred reprints. In an era in which positivist scientism was mixed with spiritualism and Satanism, Drumont uses it to explain how betrayal is inherent to the Jew. For the founder of the "Libre Parole" the Jew does not belong to the enemy, he does not belong to anyone: he is "wandering" and conceals himself in the folds of society.
The first openly anti-Semitic election platform was presented in 1879 in Austria by the pan-Germanist Georg von Schönerer. In 1881 a second manifesto was supported by the "Anti-Semitic Society for the Defense of the Manual Worker of Vienna", in the name of the "war on the Jew, on the bloodthirsty vampire […] who beats on the windows of the houses inhabited by German farmers and artisans ”. Before the burgomaster of Vienna Karl Lueger, it was therefore Schönerer who chose as a social reference the radical artisans, the shopkeepers hostile to the department stores and their Jewish owners, the small consumers opposed to the immigration of Russian Jews who had escaped the pogroms. And well before Hitler, Karl Lueger was the founder of a mass party that aimed to plant the seeds "of the anti-Semitic political spell" even in the countryside. He was not wrongly defined as a wizard of crowd manipulation, and French anti-Semites looked to him when the Dreyfus case revealed that the crisis of the liberal system did not only affect the Habsburg empire.
Hannah Arendt placed anti-Semitism among the determining components of twentieth-century totalitarianism. For Karl Jaspers' student, only by recognizing that the Jews of Europe had been selected for a project of ferocious purge of humanity, could the extermination be defined as a crime against "all" humanity. The Jews had been the first victims of the factories of death, but their tragically exceptional fate was to shed light on the fate of "all" peoples. Furthermore, Arendt was convinced that the centuries-old anti-Jewish tradition called into question all European cultural, religious, political and social elites ( The origins of totalitarianism , 1951). He had reason to. Ultimately, as March Bloch understood, the catastrophe of the Holocaust would not have been possible without the defeat of logic. And, as Victor Klemperer understood, it would not have been possible without the havoc of the language: "Nazism [intends] to deprive the individual of his nature as an individual and anesthetize his personality, to the point of making him an element of the herd without thought or will , […] to make it an atom of a rolling boulder” ( LTI. The language of the Third Reich. A philologist's notebook , Giuntina, 2008).
*The paper
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/noterelle-storiche-su-antisemitismo/ on Sat, 06 Apr 2024 05:30:27 +0000.