Rabbi Janet Marder
April 20, 2002

On March 12, 1911, the body of a 12 year old Russian boy was discovered in a cave on the outskirts of Kiev. The local right-wing press immediately launched a campaign accusing the Jews of using the boy's blood for ritual purposes. At the boy's funeral, leaflets publicizing the blood libel were handed out. Meanwhile, the police investigation traced the boy's murder to a notorious gang of thieves. But the chief district attorney of Kiev disregarded the police information and instead decided to pursue the case as a ritual murder charge.

In July, 1911, a lamplighter testified that on the day the boy disappeared he had seen him playing near a brick kiln owned by a Jew. He also stated that a Jew had suddenly appeared and kidnapped the boy, pulling him towards the kiln. On the strength of his testimony, the superintendent of the brick kiln, a man named Mendel Beilis, was arrested and sent to prison, where he remained for two years, before finally standing trial. At the trial a Catholic priest testified that the crime featured all the characteristics of ritual murder, but when the witness recanted his testimony Beilis was acquitted.

The Beilis case, made famous by Bernard Malamud in his novel "The Fixer," stunned the Western world. How was it possible for the blood libel, that vicious fabrication, to be revived in modern times?

In reaction to the Beilis trial, Zalman Shneour, a young man who went on to become a great Hebrew poet, wrote a poem called "Yemei ha-Benayim Mitkarvim - The Middle Ages Draw Near." "From medieval oblivion returns the ancient mist," he wrote. "The Gothic murk rises in flames and terrors on the horizon." Written at the outset of the 20th century, the poem is a remarkable prediction of what lay ahead -- the return of medieval anti-Semitism and Europe's descent into a maelstrom of bloodshed and hatred. Shneour's last lines were a passionate outcry to his people: "Cease to be martyrs; learn to be heroes! The Middle Ages draw near."

Several recent articles in the Jewish press have sounded a similar ominous refrain. Jonathan Rosen's piece in the New York Times Magazine last November was entitled "The Uncomfortable Question of Anti-Semitism," subtitled "Waking up to my father's world." As the son of a Holocaust survivor, Rosen writes that "my own private balancing act has involved acknowledging the fate of my murdered grandparents and trying to live a modern American life....My father's refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn't want ancient European anti-Semitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil." "These days," he says, "I find myself on my father's frequency. I have awakened to anti-Semitism." And he adds, "The past has come calling."

Hillel Halkin, a well-known Israeli essayist and translator, confesses in a recent issue of Commentary that he has had a similar awakening. "For the first time in my life," he writes, "anti-Semitism scares me."

It isn't that he was blind to the existence of anti-Semitism in the past. "I knew the history of anti-Semitism better than most Jews," he writes. "New manifestations of it did not fail to anger me. I simply believed, like Rosen, that historically it was, at long last, a spent force.... In places that mattered, such as Europe and the United States, [the] figures showed that anti-Semitism had declined drastically and steadily since World War II. In places where it had not, like Russia and the Arab world there were, or soon would be, few Jews left. I would have agreed with Barry Rubin, a professor at the Hebrew University, who wrote in 1995: "The starting point for any honest discussion of anti-Semitism today is the phenomenon's unimportance. Never before, at least since the time Christianity seized power over the Roman Empire, has anti-Semitism been less significant than at present." And Halkin concludes, "I doubt whether anyone would write those words today."

The Middle Ages are returning. The past has come calling. More and more those words resonate in my consciousness. I grew up listening to older people who described pogroms in Europe; being beaten up as kids in New York or taunted at school for being Jewish. They spoke of prejudice that kept them from getting a good job, of restricted resorts and neighborhoods and country clubs. But I never had a personal encounter with anti-Semitism, and I could hardly believe such things once existed. For me it was part of the dark stuff of the distant past.

But lo and behold: at the outset of the 21st century Anti-Semitism - not casual slurs about Jewish stinginess or pushiness but the genuine article, hatred of Jews -- is now on hideous display before our eyes. The anti-Semitism that we once thought was a vestige of history, the product of ignorance and superstition -- the anti-Semitism of blood libels and blood lust; the wish to see the Jews disappear from the world -- that anti-Semitism has boiled up from the depths of the cesspool once again.

It is, as Jonathan Rosen notes, uncomfortable to raise the question of anti-Semitism. We don't want to sound neurotic or paranoid, hyper-sensitive to any perceived insult, like the stutterer in the old joke who claims he didn't get the job as a radio announcer because he was a Jew. But how can we close our eyes to what's happening today?

Assaults against Jews and Jewish institutions in Europe have increased dramatically. Tensions in France, with its 700,000 Jews and four million Muslims, are especially high. In the past, anti-Semitic incidents in France were often the work of white supremacists; now the perpetrators are more likely to be youths from North African immigrant families who say they identify with the plight of the Palestinians.

Last week groups of Muslim youths stood outside a synagogue in Sarcelles, north of Paris, chanting "Death to Jews." One onlooker, a 23 year old Jewish student named Michael Amar, was alarmed, but not surprised. "I've been insulted like that dozens of times in recent months," he told a reporter. "In fact, almost every time I go out, someone calls me a dirty Jew."

Last week, in a particularly chilling incident in Bondy, a working-class suburb of Paris, youths wearing masks and hoods, wielding iron bars, heavy steel balls and lengths of barbed wire swarmed onto a soccer field and beat up the Jewish team practicing there. The 15 year old goalkeeper ended up in the hospital needing seven stitches in his head.

It was the worst incident in a recent wave of violence against Jews that has seen at least five French synagogues firebombed, a Jewish cemetery desecrated, a pregnant Jewish woman and her husband assaulted, Jewish school buses stoned, a kosher butcher shop sprayed with bullets and an arson attack on a Jewish school. Since the beginning of the latest intifada 19 months ago Jewish residents of Bondy say they have been repeatedly harassed, insulted, and spat at on their way to and from the synagogue on Shabbat.

A truck packed with explosives blows up in front of a Tunisian synagogue, an important pilgrimage center for North African Jews, killing 16 and badly scorching the building. Fifty assailants attack a synagogue in Kiev, breaking windows, hurling stones and beating students in what the Simon Wiesenthal Center has called "an organized pogrom." In Canada two synagogues were targets of arson fires within the past month, and the Canadian Jewish Congress reports "dozens" of anti-Semitic incidents. This past month on Holocaust Remembrance Day, at San Francisco State University over 300 protestors chanted "We hate Jews" in Arabic, and passed out flyers depicting Jews consuming Arab blood.

During the first ten days of April there were 15 anti-Semitic incidents in England, including eight physical attacks on Jews. Writing in the London Spectator, Petronella Wyatt observes with dismay that "since September 11 anti-Semitism and its open expression have become respectable at London dinner tables." She reports that a liberal member of the House of Lords told her, "Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last."

While the public expression of anti-Semitism in Europe is still frowned on in a post-Holocaust world, there is no such taboo restricting the expression of anti-Zionism. Israel is repeatedly denounced as an "apartheid state," practicing policies more repressive and brutal than those of white South Africa at its nadir. And in what is perhaps the most painful manifestation of modern anti-Semitism, many Europeans have felt free to draw on Holocaust imagery in condemning Israel's actions, accusing Israelis of child killing, racially-motivated massacres and genocide.

An editorial in the German weekly Der Spiegel compares Ariel Sharon's attitude towards Palestinian Arabs with Hitler's attitude towards the Jews. A cartoon in a Spanish newspaper depicts a large building labeled "Museum of the Jewish Holocaust" and behind it a building under construction labeled "Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust." Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci described as "shameful" a recent event in her country in which "a procession of individuals dressed as suicide bombers [spewed] vile abuse at Israel, [and held] up photographs of Israeli leaders on whose foreheads they [had] drawn the swastika."

Such Holocaust analogies are now routine in the Arab media and in public discourse by Arab leaders. In a speech to the Arab summit in Amman, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad declared that Israel "is a society more racist than the Nazis." In moderate Jordan a recent article discusses "the Israeli Third Reich" and predicts that its end will be the same as that of the German Reich.

In moderate Egypt, one newspaper article equates the Nazi theory of the superiority of the Aryan race with the 'racist Zionist' theory of the 'Chosen People.' Other articles describe the Holocaust as "a myth," "a fabricated story" and "a fairy tale." A children's supplement to an Egyptian government newspaper features an illustration of a Jew in traditional garb, with a long nose, a Jewish hat and a swastika on his arm, choking a small boy on the back of a dead Palestinian.

The Arab media repeatedly resurrect Nazi propaganda devices. A 30-part series, produced by Arab Radio and Television and aired during Ramadan last year, dramatized the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the notorious tract describing a vast, nefarious conspiracy of Jews to dominate the world. Kuwaiti television recently featured a political satire showing Ariel Sharon drinking the blood of Palestinian children. The blood libel, first raised in the Arab world in 1840, has been published repeatedly in Syrian, Egyptian and Saudi newspapers. And let's not forget the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union handed out booklets depicting caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood.

But is all this really anti-Semitism? A piece in the British "Independent" by one of the paper's regular columnists, Deborah Orr, entitled "I'm fed up being called an anti-Semite," cut to the heart of the matter. "Anti-Semitism is disliking all Jews, anywhere, and anti-Zionism is just disliking the existence of Israel and opposing those who support it," explains Orr. Orr's sentiments are shared by many others. I frequently hear the argument that the Jews can't tolerate any criticism of Israel, but immediately cry "anti-Semitism!"

They're wrong. We Jews can and do tolerate criticism of Israel's policies. Criticism of any government's policies is legitimate in a democratic society. Within Israel itself a continual and intense debate rages about the morality of the occupation and settlements on the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli press is at least as critical of its government as the American press is of ours.

How then do we distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and anti-Semitic views?

Dr. Martin Luther King, in a "Letter to an Anti-Zionist Friend," wrote: "You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews -- this is God's own truth...Anti-Zionism is inherently Anti-Semitic, and ever will be so."

Let us examine this assertion with some care. Arabs often argue that they are anti-Zionist but cannot logically be anti-Semitic because they themselves are a Semitic people. They are wrong. Look up "anti-Semitism" in the dictionary and you will see that its definition is "hostility towards Jews." A second definition of anti-Semitism, given in my Webster's Third New World Dictionary, is "anti-Zionism; sympathy with opponents of the state of Israel."

But why should that be? Why is opposition to the state of Israel, a political entity, synonymous with hatred of Jews, a religious and cultural group? Here is why. Some Jews, and some Israelis, challenge individual policies of the Israeli government because they believe those policies are wrong or dangerous to the safety of the state of Israel. Such criticism may be extremely forceful, but it is offered out of love and commitment to Israel's survival. Those who participated in the American anti-Vietnam war movement know that patriotism -- love of one's country -- sometimes requires one to be in opposition to certain governmental policies.

Anti-Zionists have a very different purpose and agenda. Anti-Zionists do not challenge particular policies of the Israeli government. They oppose Zionism itself; they deny the legitimacy of the Jewish state, the right of Israel to exist as a homeland for the Jews. That is, they deny the right of the Jewish people to exist collectively, in a position to defend itself, protect itself and maintain its life. To insist that Jews may live only as a minority people at the mercy of a non-Jewish ruling power, to condemn the Jews to a position of perpetual vulnerability at risk of being destroyed -- a risk that history has amply demonstrated -- is to show hostility towards the Jews. That is why Anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic.

Hillel Halkin writes: "To defame Israel is to defame the Jews. To wish it never existed, or would cease to exist, is to wish to destroy the Jews....Only an anti-Semite can think the world would be better off without Israel, just as only a Francophobe can think the world would be better off without France...'Jewish' and 'Israel' are not synonymous? No, they are not -- but 40 percent of the world's Jews live in Israel. There are Jews who are anti-Zionists? Yes, there are -- and there are Englishmen who revile England."

How else may we distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism? Critics who habitually single out Israel for condemnation while ignoring far worse actions committed by other nations demonstrate an anti-Jewish bias. Critics who justify the intentional murder of Israeli civilians by Palestinians but condemn Israel when it attempts to defend itself demonstrate an anti-Jewish bias.

Critics who liken Israel to Nazi Germany are guilty of trivializing the Holocaust and grossly misrepresenting the true character of the Jewish state; they demonstrate a truly repugnant insensitivity to those who survived the Nazi effort to exterminate them. It may be that the deliberate use of Holocaust metaphors is an act of revenge by those who resent how Jews have made the rest of the world feel guilty by focusing on the moral depravity of the so-called "civilized" world during World War II.

A front-page editorial in the Manchester Guardian recently declared that the establishment of the state of Israel has exacted such a high moral price that "the international community cannot support this cost indefinitely." In reflecting on the meaning of these words, Jonathan Rosen writes, "I understood that this editorial, speaking of the cost of the establishment of Israel -- not of any particular policies -- implied that Israel's very right to exist is somehow still at issue. (One cannot imagine something similar being formulated about, say, Russia, in response to its battle with Chechen rebels, however much the Guardian might have disagreed with that country's policies.) And this reminded me inevitably of the situation of the Jews in 1940's Europe, where simply to be was an unpardonable crime....More and more I feel Jews being turned into a question mark once again. How is it, the world still asks -- about Israel, about Jews, about me -- [how is it] that you are still here?"

And it is a similar question that continues to torment us. How is it that anti-Semitism is still with us? Why does it persistently live on when we have been promised so many times that it would be eradicated - by enlightenment, by emancipation, by socialism, by democracy, by scientific advancement? Many books have been written to try to answer this question, and we will not do so tonight. It may, in fact, be at bottom an incomprehensible phenomenon.

That is an intensely disturbing idea. The fact that Jews were hated when they were weak and vulnerable victims in Europe and now are hated for being strong and autonomous in their own land; the idea that there exists an irrational, implacable hatred of Jews - a hatred we did nothing to deserve, and can do nothing to eradicate - is a painful one to accept. But painful as it is, I'm convinced that it's reality.

"We in the West," writes Andrew Sullivan, "simply do not want to believe that this kind of hatred still exists; and when it emerges, we feel uncomfortable. We do everything we can to change the subject. Why the denial, I ask myself? What is it about this sickness that we do not understand by now? And what possible excuse do we have not to expose and confront it with all the might we have?"

It would be wrong and destructive to exaggerate the danger we face and to believe that "it's us against the world." Certainly we ought to give thanks for the many decent people in this country and abroad who abhor anti-Semitism, and should work to build stronger alliances that unite us. And we are blessed that the United States has never been a place where anti-Semitism was deeply entrenched or institutionalized in law. We must not lose the ability to be morally sensitive and self-critical, believing that "everyone is against us" and dismissing all criticism as illegitimate. But it would be equally wrong, and equally destructive, to pretend that the hostility we face isn't real.

We have no choice but to live in the face of this hostility. All the good will in the world, all the liberal faith we can muster - faith in reason, progress and the brotherhood of man - can't wish it away. But there is one choice we can make. We can choose not to be defined by those who hate us, not to internalize that hatred, nor to be consumed by it. We can create together a Judaism of joy and strength and goodness. We can love our children, and teach them to love being Jews. So will we endure. So will we stand forever against hate.