“Why Did He Lose Six Million Jews?”

Back in my prog days, one of my favourite groups was Emerson Lake and Palmer. For my Anglican/Episcopal readers, this was the group that, while Episcopal churches fought over the prayer book and the organ committee was in gridlock over the blasphemous suggestion that the church buy an Allen, introduced a new generation to the hymn “Jerusalem” in this way:

But there were unfavourite moments from this group, especially this one from their album Tarkus, where the following made it into the lyrics:

Can you believe God makes you breathe,
why did he lose six million Jews?

At the time and now my answer was simple: where were we when the Holocaust was in preparation? And by “we” I was thinking about the soon to be Allies, who piddled in the 1930’s while Hitler, whose intentions for the Jews was clear from Mein Kampf, was making preparation for another world war. (Some of that I discuss in my Book Review: Jean-Baptiste Duroselle’s France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939.) Beyond that I couldn’t and can’t see blaming God for something that humans could have done something about, especially when “humanism” was being taunted as the replacement for theism. I’m not the only one: I quote Giles Fraser in my post Wonder Where Evil Comes From? Try the Mirror:

But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

I’ll come back to the “why” shortly but today the sentiment “lose six (and more) million Jews!” has become fashionable. The genocide of worldwide Jewry is written into Hamas’ DNA and is now shouted in the streets by people, many of whom are not Muslims or even close to it. What we have now is genocide with purported divine sanction. I really don’t think that such people have the right to complain about “war crimes;” what we are back to is personal, Middle Eastern brutality which was around long before international law, Islam or Christianity.

To put it mildly this is a game changer, one which has taken many by surprise while others don’t even recognise it’s happened. While international law certainly antedates the Nuremberg trials, those trials did more to advance the idea of war crimes and crimes against humanity than any other single event. And the chief crime (certainly not the only one) they were prosecuting was the Holocaust, the extermination of those six million Jews that ELP lamented but is now celebrated in the streets.

The question on many peoples’ minds is simply “where did all of this new found antisemitism come from?” I think the basic problem is that it never really went away, it just went into hiding until it could be made fashionable again. The basic problem is that, on the whole, Jews are overachievers, and the rest of humanity, while reaping the benefits of their genius (represented in the outsized number of Nobel prizes they have won) have resented their success. (Or, as one Algerian friend told me, “Jews are smart.”) Hitler constructed the “final solution” because the existence of the Jews put the lie to his idea of the Aryan Germans as the “master race,” and that existence has shown that many other pretentious groups don’t deserve that moniker either.

It’s true that, outside of the State of Israel, the United States has been the most welcoming place for Jews on the planet, but that silver lining hasn’t been without a cloud. Things really began to sour around World War I, when the old WASP alumni of the Ivy Leagues took fright at the number of Jews passing through these storied institutions and redesigned the admissions process to de-emphasise sheer academic achievement and look for the “well-rounded person.” It was also the time when Jew and Gentile really separated (especially at the top,) which led to some of the conditions I grew up with. There was always an antisemitic undertow, one shoved to the back by the horrors of the Holocaust, but it was there, waiting to re-emerge.

On my first trip to the then Soviet Union, my brother and I were sitting in the eating hall of our Intourist hotel. On the other side of the hall was a wedding reception. Two of the attendees were fuelled by vodka, and one of them shouted to the other, “I thought you were my friend!” Fisticuffs ensued. Today the Jews find themselves in the same position. People who they had benefited have suddenly turned on them. Many Jews thought they had a good handle on their enemies and their friends, but they’re waking up to the fact that they were wrong.

Really, though, it’s time for all of us to decide who are our real friends are and stick with them. This whole fiasco has upended many of our liberal (and some conservative) platitudes about each other. We need to prioritise opposing people who are trying to kill us because, as Martin Niemoller observed, when they come for us, there may be no one else left.