TheOldestHatred

What do the Roman Emperor Hadrian, Eric Newby the famed travel writer, Aldus Huxley, Roald Dahl, PG Woodhouse, all of these great writers, the French philosopher Voltaire, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler the Russian and German despots, Napoleon Bonaparte, the all conquering Frenchmen, have in common?

They all hated or despised Jews to a greater or lesser extent. They and many others like them, felt it was OK, even a good thing, to persecute, hate and malign an entire people just for being Jewish.

This was brought home to me this week in a series of jarring incidents. Two of these were insignificant and others that were far more profound.

Eric Newby was a famous travel writer and, in the documentary about him on television he came across as a very nice guy. That’s why the casual comment in his book, “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” was upsetting. He was describing the different groups of people to be found in the Afghanistan of a half-century ago. For all other groups and looks his attitude was romanticized until he came to the men who, he felt looked like Jews with their big hook noses and dark hair. I look around my Jewish family and friends and there is no one who fits this description, but this is clearly Newby’s casual, off hand, even unknown and self unaware anti Semitism.

Last night there was a comedy program on one of the British TV channels, I shall not dignify them by naming it, in which the comedians lampooned the dilemma of a woman given “Sophie’s Choice”, in which the idea of a woman having to choose which child of hers she has to send to the concentration camp to their deaths, is the subject of a joke. These bright boys and girls even thought it was funny to have a fake article condemning themselves in their program, as if from the British newspaper, The Jewish Chronicle.

Neither of these programs would have dared transmit the same, casual racism about Muslims or black people, and there would have been, correctly, mass outrage had they done so. Why is it acceptable to do this to Jewish people in a modern, politically correct society like Britain?

Currently there is a British Museum exhibition on the life of the Roman emperor, Hadrian. This led to TV programs and a few debates in the media, which in turn led to several in depth articles. Hadrian was, unquestionably one of the great emperors of Rome. He imposed Roman culture and methods of worship on the peoples under his control. In Judea this took the form of having statues of himself erected, expressly against the Jewish prohibition of a graven image, and banned the Jewish rites of circumcision.

This led to a Jewish rebellion both throughout the empire and in Judea, which Hadrian put down and then massacred over 500,000 Jews, dispersed those from Judea throughout the empire, sold the survivors into slavery, banned the religion and its teaching and destroyed the Second Temple and any Jewish social center in Jerusalem. Hadrian even banned the name of Israel and Judea, making the country known (in modern parlance) as Syria Palestine.

Throughout history it’s harder to find leading people in the world’s societies who were pro-Jewish than the other way around. Why is this, did the Jews, throughout history do something to bring this hate, vitriol and terrible acts of violent suppression down on the Jewish people?

Maybe the age-old calumny that the Jews killed the Son of God is the reason for all this hate? Yes, Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, was killed by the Romans with the connivance of some his fellow Jews. But if nations and religions are going to feel the vitriol of the descendants of victims throughout time, then surely the Jews could declare war on the entire world.

If you examine the facts the Jews were, almost without exception, a positive influence for the societies they inhabited.

The Jews, as a group but mainly as individuals, created such entities as monotheistic religions, such as Christianity, political creeds like Marxism, psycho analysis, the theory of relativity, from which flowed nuclear science, modern international banking, most of what makes the film and entertainment industry today, the list could go on endlessly.

Jews have, in addition, won an enormously disproportionate number of awards such as Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, Academy Awards, Emmys, Tony’s, in fact any competition for excellence. Perhaps the Jews very success is what brings them into sharper focus and makes them a group to be jealous of.

The strange thing is that this group of people currently number just over 13 million in a world of over 6 billion, far less than .1%. But the Jews do have a disproportionate influence on the world around them, and this is clearly by accident, not design.

There are as many Kurdish or Armenian people but these nationalities simply don’t resonate the same way.

Perhaps if the Jews had simply been left alone in their original Middle Eastern homeland no one might have heard of them. Perhaps there is an accelerated form of Darwinian theory at work here. As the world kept mass murdering the Jews who were not quick or lucky enough to escape the pogroms, inquisitions and pillage of the last two thousand years, the ones who survived were the faster, more cunning or clever, physically tougher, or just plain luckier folks who were destined to produce tougher, brighter and more articulate survivors. The world, including the Nazis, in their efforts to categorize the Jews as sub humans had, in one of the great ironies of history, created their own nemesis, Jews who would be great achievers.

Whatever the reason, it would be great if everyone just left the Jewish people alone and in peace. We all know that isn’t going to happen, the question is why? The answer, when you find it, will tell you much more about the world than it does about the Jewish people.