‘Lower your voice… he’s a Jew’
In Pakistan, I also haven’t come across any specific examples of anti-Jewish sentiments.
anwer.mooraj@tribune.com.pk
I heard these words for the very first time during my university days. A Czechoslovakian student had joined me for a bite in a restaurant in north London so we could compare notes on the Marxian Dialectic. It was a warm summer evening and we were both in our shirtsleeves. “Are you referring to the chap with the dark brown hair and the exposed biceps?” There was an excoriating primness and a repressed snobbery in the voice. “No. Not the Turk. The blue-eyed ginger-haired fellow with the nose.” He was hitting on my friend, a full-blooded Ashkenazi, a communist and a jolly decent fellow, a member of a rare, endangered species always on the edge of extinction. He was also a pacifist and decided to ignore the racial taunt. As a person with no prejudices, I was appalled at the ignorance there was in the world.
There has always been a certain amount of anti-Semitism in England, though it was not always apparent except among the fascists of Oswald Mosley. In Europe and the New World, it was more vocal. As a child in Berlin, I grew up in an atmosphere of fierce anti-Semitism. We were told that after the First World War, when many Germans were hungry and scrounging for food, the Jews were gobbling up property at prices considerably below the real value. At St Peters, my boarding school in India, where we had eight Jewish students from the United States and Iraq, I did not detect any anti-Jewish feelings whatsoever. In fact, Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish students ate at the same table, attended church on Sundays, were part of one big family and beat the hell out of the ethnic Hindu, Muslim and Parsi boarding schools in boxing, soccer and cricket. In Pakistan, I also haven’t come across any specific examples of anti-Jewish sentiments, though the Zionists in Israel have been regularly hauled over the coals in the press for their grossly unfair treatment of the Palestinians.
Anti-Semitism appears to have existed from the early days of recorded history. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in Greece and Rome were primarily ethnic in nature. Christian anti-Semitism, on the other hand, which extended to modern times, was essentially religious in character. In fact, the political, social and economic anti-Semitism of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period laid the firm groundwork for racial anti-Semitism, which culminated in the wave of anti-Jewish feeling in Nazi Germany. In Russia, the pogroms germinated after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1939, Fritz Julius Kuhn, a Bund leader and bitter critic of President F D Roosevelt and his New Deal, addressed 20,000 supporters in Madison Square Garden and pointed to a growing Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy in the United States.
France was not far behind in the condemnations. The Jews were blamed for the collapse of the Union General Bank and the French Suez Canal operation –– and the defeat in the 1870-1871 war –– when the army of the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck routed the soldiers of Emperor Napoleon III. Remember the notorious Captain Dreyfus case? In its classical form, traditional Muslim anti-Semitism was remarkably mild and portrayed the Jews as a protected class. This was brought out clearly in Professor Hitti’s excellent book The Arabs, where the followers of Abd-ur-Rahman I and Abd-ur-Rahman III built public baths and vast libraries in Cordoba and other cities in Andalusia at a time when Charlemagne was learning to read and the University of Oxford maintained that washing was a dangerous custom. What eventually happened to the Arabs is another story, one upon which I do not wish to dwell.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 16th, 2014.
There has always been a certain amount of anti-Semitism in England, though it was not always apparent except among the fascists of Oswald Mosley. In Europe and the New World, it was more vocal. As a child in Berlin, I grew up in an atmosphere of fierce anti-Semitism. We were told that after the First World War, when many Germans were hungry and scrounging for food, the Jews were gobbling up property at prices considerably below the real value. At St Peters, my boarding school in India, where we had eight Jewish students from the United States and Iraq, I did not detect any anti-Jewish feelings whatsoever. In fact, Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Jewish students ate at the same table, attended church on Sundays, were part of one big family and beat the hell out of the ethnic Hindu, Muslim and Parsi boarding schools in boxing, soccer and cricket. In Pakistan, I also haven’t come across any specific examples of anti-Jewish sentiments, though the Zionists in Israel have been regularly hauled over the coals in the press for their grossly unfair treatment of the Palestinians.
Anti-Semitism appears to have existed from the early days of recorded history. Pre-Christian anti-Judaism in Greece and Rome were primarily ethnic in nature. Christian anti-Semitism, on the other hand, which extended to modern times, was essentially religious in character. In fact, the political, social and economic anti-Semitism of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period laid the firm groundwork for racial anti-Semitism, which culminated in the wave of anti-Jewish feeling in Nazi Germany. In Russia, the pogroms germinated after the assassination of Czar Alexander II. In 1939, Fritz Julius Kuhn, a Bund leader and bitter critic of President F D Roosevelt and his New Deal, addressed 20,000 supporters in Madison Square Garden and pointed to a growing Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy in the United States.
France was not far behind in the condemnations. The Jews were blamed for the collapse of the Union General Bank and the French Suez Canal operation –– and the defeat in the 1870-1871 war –– when the army of the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck routed the soldiers of Emperor Napoleon III. Remember the notorious Captain Dreyfus case? In its classical form, traditional Muslim anti-Semitism was remarkably mild and portrayed the Jews as a protected class. This was brought out clearly in Professor Hitti’s excellent book The Arabs, where the followers of Abd-ur-Rahman I and Abd-ur-Rahman III built public baths and vast libraries in Cordoba and other cities in Andalusia at a time when Charlemagne was learning to read and the University of Oxford maintained that washing was a dangerous custom. What eventually happened to the Arabs is another story, one upon which I do not wish to dwell.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 16th, 2014.