The Persecution of the Jews
Reason for Being in the World, Chapter 6
See now that I, I am He,
And there is no god besides Me;
I deal death and I give life.
I wound and I heal,
And there is no one who can deliver from My hand.
~ Deuteronomy 32, “The Song of Moses”
Only God or a confluence of contingent circumstances could have created this universe, this world, this earth with its history, its core creation and soupy, hypothermal genesis of microorganistic life, its geologic epochs, eruptions, compressions, and involutions, its prehistoric metallic ages, evolutionary expansion of species to the hominid, the spread of Homo to sapiens, distributions into anti-entropic geographical zones of community, accumulations of culture into accretions of power and influence, the rise of civilizations, and, with them, soon, the Israelites, hence the Jew.
They came by the early Iron Age, c. 1200 BCE, from amongst the Canaanites or the nomads of the Sanai south into the hill country of Judea, to contend with the Egyptians and Hittites, Mitanni, Assyrians, Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites. Rose the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, their centers in Samaria and Jerusalem, a great nation never to be forgotten, in a Testament of one true God and a people’s covenant with Him, stories of great floods in punishment for sin, babel of human discord, incest and devotion, slavery, plague, piety, and exodus, the slaying of giants and the building of temples, foolish jealousy, and wisdom. They left a history to civilization of faith, persistence, and peoplehood, a great pillar in the eschatological edifice of the imagination.
They became, too, in their singularity, victims of this history of persecution, in synoptic presentation.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE JEWISH KINGDOMS OF ISRAEL AND JUDAH.
The emergence in the world of the first monotheistic believers amid polytheistic pagans.
740 BCE: The Kingdom of Israel is conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire, thousands of Jews are exiled.
586 BCE: The Kingdom of Judah is conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, which destroys Solomon’s (the “first”) Temple in Jerusalem and exiles thousands of Jews to Babylon. Thus begins the Babylonian captivity.
167 BCE–165 BCE: The first religious persecution of Jews as a distinctive religious group, by Antiochus of the occupying Seleucid Empire, produces the Maccabean revolt.
139 BCE: Roman praetor Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio Hispanus expels Jews from the city.
63 BCE: During the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, an estimated 12,000 Jews are killed defending the Second Temple.
19 CE: Roman Emperor Tiberius again expels the Jews from Rome.
38 CE: In the Alexandrian riots (a first “pogrom”), mobs provoked by the Roman prefect Aulus Avilius Flaccus murder thousands of Jews. According to eyewitness Philo of Alexandria, the populace "slew them … with all kinds of agony and tortures, and newly invented cruelties, for wherever they met with or caught sight of a Jew, they stoned him, or beat him with sticks." They “burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents, in the middle of the city, sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants." Some men are dragged to their death, other Jews crucified.
66 CE: Roman soldiers kill an estimated 50,000 Jews in another, official Alexandrian pogrom, coincident with the First Jewish-Roman war against Roman rule in Judea.
66–73 CE: Over the course of the First and Second Jewish-Roman wars, as much as a third of the Jewish population is killed, enslaved, and driven into exile, the Second Temple destroyed. Judea is devastated and in further “ethnic cleansing,” non-Jewish populations are settled. The Hebrew language fades from use.
94 CE: Apion of Alexandria, in his five-volume History of Egypt, writes “Against the Jews,” offering many slanders, including a first recorded case of the blood libel, that each year a non-Jew is kidnapped, murdered and his entrails eaten, with a simultaneous oath to hate the people from whom he sprang.
115–117 CE: The Diaspora Revolt extends almost simultaneously across wide-ranging Jewish communities of the Roman East. The Jews suffer another devastating loss and their presence in regions from Alexandria to Cypress almost completely disappears for centuries.
132–135 CE: The Bar Kokhba revolt, the final Jewish effort to reclaim Judea, is crushed. According to Cassius Dio, with support from modern archaeologic and demographic research methods, nearly 600 thousand Jews are killed. Hadrian builds Aelia Capitolina among the ruins of Jerusalem and orders the expulsion of Jews from Judea, renamed the province of Syria Palaestina.
BEGINS THE TWO MILLENNIA JEWISH DIASPORA AND THE RELIGIOUS, SCAPEGOATING VILLAINIZATION AND OSTRACISM OF JEWS.
306: Intermarriage and sexual intercourse between Christians and Jews is banned by the Synod of Elvira. Jews and Christians are forbidden from eating together.
315: Roman Emperor Constantine I calls Judaism an "abominable sect."
325: Jews expelled and banned from Jerusalem.
Over the first two centuries CE, Jewish rejection of Jesus’s Messianic claim becomes settled, and the Nazarene faith of Jesus’s followers finalizes as a gentile religion rather than a faith of Jewish converts. Christian reaction decisively splits the new religion from its origin, vilifying Jews for the rejection.
325: In the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, the Christian Church separates the calculation of the date of Easter from the Jewish Passover, declaring it “improper to follow the custom of the Jews in the celebration of this holy festival, because, their hands having been stained with crime, the minds of these wretched men are necessarily blinded.... Let us, then, have nothing in common with the Jews, who are our adversaries. ... avoiding all contact with that evil way. ... who, after having compassed the death of the Lord, being out of their minds, are guided not by sound reason, but by an unrestrained passion, wherever their innate madness carries them. ... a people so utterly depraved. ... Therefore, this irregularity must be corrected, in order that we may no more have any thing in common with those parricides and the murderers of our Lord. ... no single point in common with the perjury of the Jews."
339: Intermarriage between Christians and Jews banned in the Roman Empire and punishable by death.
380: Roman Emperor Theodosius I decrees Christianity the official state religion. St. Gregory of Nyssa declares of Jews "Murderers of the Lord, assassins of the prophets, rebels and detesters of God, they outrage the Law, resist grace, repudiate the faith of their fathers. Companions of the devil, race of vipers, informers, calumniators, darkeners of the mind, pharisaic leaven, Sanhedrin of demons….”
386: John Chrysostom of Antioch, Archbishop of Constantinople, writes eight homilies called Adversus Judaeos (Against the Judaizers), centuries later to be invoked by the Nazi Third Reich.
418: First recorded instance of Jewish forced conversion or expulsion. Bishop Severus of Menorca forces 540 Jews to accept Christianity, burns the synagogue in Magona.
439: The Codex Theodosianus, a first compilation of Roman law, prohibits Jews are from holding important financial, judicial, and executive offices. Ban against building new synagogues reinstated.
451: Sassanid ruler Yazdegerd II of Persia abolishes the Sabbath and orders executions of Jewish leaders, including the Exilarch Mar Nuna, considered by Jews the heir of the House of David.
469: According to Isfahanian historian Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, half the Jewish population of Isfahan is put to death over alleged killing of two Magi Priests.
534: The Justinian Code strips Judaism of legal protection, bans the Mishnah (part of the Talmud, a written exegesis of Jewish oral law), closes synagogues in North Africa, establishes the principle of Servitus Judaeorum (Servitude of the Jews), forbids use of the Hebrew language in worship, threatens to execute those not expressing faith in the Resurrection or the Last Judgment. Some Jewish communities are converted by force, their synagogues turned into churches. The status of the Empire’s Jews thus determined for hundreds of years.
Over the next thousand years, expulsion of Jews from Christian European communities and nations becomes common. Full participation in society is restricted. Persecution arises from variant local circumstance, but common themes recur, of guilt for Jesus’s crucifixion and Jewish blindness and stubbornness in maintaining a resistant, singular identity.
615: Italy. The earliest referral to the Juramentum Judaeorum (the Jewish Oath): the concept that no heretic could be believed in court against a Christian, a form of oath Jews in the Middle Ages are compelled to take in lawsuits with non-Jews. Both oath and symbolic ritual intended to invoke a self-imposed curse, with detailed punishment if falsely taken, the purpose to stress distrust of Jews and to humiliate them. Such an oath remains the rule in Europe from the early Middle Ages until the 18th century, in some places persisting even beyond.
628-29: The failed Jewish revolt against Heraclius, the last serious Jewish attempt to regain autonomy in Palaestina Prima prior to modern times. Jews are persecuted and massacred in the Byzantine empire throughout the Seventh Century.
629: Encouraged by Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, Frankish King Dagobert I, expels all Jews from the kingdom.
640: Caliph Umar expels Jews from Arabia.
653: The Jews of Toledo face forced conversion or expulsion.
682: Visigothic King Erwig begins his reign by enacting 28 anti-Jewish laws and presses for the "utter extirpation of the pest of the Jews."
694: At 17th Council of Toledo. King Ergica declares that all Jewish children over the age of seven be taken from their homes and raised as Christians.
720: Caliph Omar II bans Jewish worship on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount (the Second Temple remnant).
820: Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, writes that Jews are accursed and demands complete segregation of Christians and Jews.
931–942: Byzantine Emperor Romanos I Lekapenos decrees that all Jews should be forced to convert and subjugated if they refuse. Hundreds of Jews die.
985: Nikon the Metanoeite of Sparta expels the Jewish population saying it will rid the city of a plague.
1012: In one of the earliest persecutions of Jews in Germany: Henry II, Holy Roman Emperor expels Jews from Mainz.
1016: The Jewish community of Kairouan, Tunisia is forced to choose between conversion or expulsion.
1032: Abul Kamal Tumin conquers Fez, Morocco, massacres 6,000 Jews.
1033: The forces of Tamim, chief of the Zenata Berber Banu Ifran tribe, perpetrate the Fez Massacre of Jews: 6000 are killed.
1066: Muslim mob storms the royal palace in the Granada Massacre, crucifies Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacres most of the Jewish population of the city. More than 4,000 are killed in one day.
1096: The Rhineland massacres of the First Crusade, mass murders of Jews perpetrated by French and German Christians mobs of the People's Crusade, understood by many as first in a sequence of antisemitic events in Europe culminating in the Holocaust. Estimates range from 5000-10000 Jews killed or suicides rather than forcibly convert. Jews continue to be targeted throughout the Crusades.
1106: Son of Yusuf ibn Tashfin decrees the death penalty for any Jews living in Marrakesh.
1107: Yusuf ibn Tashfin, the Almoravid caliph, orders all Moroccan Jews to become Muslim or leave.
1113: After the death of Sviatopolk II of Kiev, leader of the Kievan Rus', widespread riots and plundering of Jewish homes.
1124: Jewish quarter of Kyiv destroyed by arson.
1145: Jewish population of Sijilmasa, Morocco ordered by Almohad leader Abd al-Mu'min to convert to Islam or face death. 150 Jews refuse and are massacred.
1146: 100,000 Jews massacred by the Almohad Caliphate in Fez, Morocco and 120,000 in Marrakesh.
1147: Jews expelled from al-Andalus (Muslim-ruled Iberia).
1148–1212: Under the Almohad Caliphate in al-Andalus, only Jews converted to Christianity or Islam are allowed to live in Granada.
1165: New Almohad ruler decrees all Jews in Fez convert to Islam or face death.
1171: In the first instance of the Blood Libel in Europe, the Jews of Blois, France, are accused of crucifying a Christian child during the Passover ritual and throwing the corpse into the Loire. On order of Count Theobald. Jacob b. Meir, thirty-three Jews are burned at the stake on May 26,
1189: Jews attending the coronation of Richard the Lionheart are attacked by the crowd. Pogroms follow in London and throughout England.
The persecution of the Jews continues this way for centuries, with every few years some historic instance more or less notable than others — because of the thousands dead, the breadth of the devastation, the historic or repetitive nature of the event, the notable personages decreeing, expounding, or leading — in which Jews are attacked, tortured, and killed, expelled from cities, towns, or whole nations, libels levied against them as God slayers and ritual devourers of Christian blood and flesh, conversion and Baptism of children forced upon them, with suicides committed to avoid it, laws passed restricting Jewish movement and life, Jews ordered to wear identifying clothing and markers, confined to special urban quarters, then destruction of those quarters, mass imprisonments ordered until ransoms are paid, debts to Jews canceled, Jewish holy books burned, theological disputations and condemnations recorded against their faith – the general wrong of human evil itself (sinfulness, wickedness, bad character and conduct), year by year, century by century, regularly projected onto the Jew as scapegoat* for that evil, and through those crimes against the Jewish people, evil enacted, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
*Scapegoat: In the book of Leviticus in the Torah, the scapegoat (a term coined in translation in 1530 by Protestant Biblical scholar William Tyndale from the Hebrew word ‘ăzāzêl, meaning “absolute removal,”) is an actual goat upon which the collective sins of the entire people are conferred, then pushed off of a cliff as a symbol of the casting aside of wrongdoing.
13th Century
In Germany, appearance of Judensau: obscene and dehumanizing folk art images, ranging from etchings to Cathedral ceilings, of Jews in obscene contact with a large female pig (in Judaism, an unclean animal). Such art continues to appear for over 600 years.
1203: Its Jewish quarter burned down by crusaders during the Siege of Constantinople.
1215: Pope Innocent III’s Fourth Lateran Council declares: "Jews and Saracens of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress."
1243: The first ever accusation of eucharist “Host Desecration.” The entire Jewish population of Beelitz, Germany burned at the stake.
1254: Louis IX expels the Jews from France.
1290: Edward I expels the Jews from England.
1298: Rindfleisch Massacres: during civil war between Adolph of Nassau and Albrecht of Austria, German knight Rindfleisch determines to exterminate "the accursed race of the Jews." Roaming mobs destroy 146 Jewish communities and massacre about 100,000 Jews, often by mass burning at the stake.
14th Century
1320: Shepherds' Crusade attacks the Jews of 120 towns in southwest France.
1321: Jews in central France accused of ordering lepers to poison wells. An estimated 5,000 Jews are massacred.
1328: 5,000 Jews are massacred near Pamplona, Spain following anti-Jewish preaching by a mendicant Franciscan friar.
1346-53: The Great (Bubonic) Plague, or Black Death,
Among the greatest calamities in human history, up to half the population of Europe, perhaps 50 million people die. By 1348, accusations that Jews are poisoning the wells to cause the plague lead across Europe to three years of pogroms, in which hundreds of Jewish settlements and populations are attacked and as many as 15000 Jews killed, usually by burning.
1391: Inflammatory speeches and sermons by Archdeacon Ferrand Martinez lead on June 6 to mob attacks in Seville, Spain that kill 4,000 Jews. Soon, in Cordoba, 200 are slain. On July 9, 200 die in Valencia. On August 2, 300 Jews are killed in Majorca. Between August 5 and 10, over 400 are murdered in Barcelona. Many more cities are attacked.
15th Century
1421: After accusations of host desecration, persecutions of Jews in Vienna, known as the Wiener Gesera (Vienna Edict), results in confiscation of their possessions, and forced conversion of Jewish children. 270 Jews burned at the stake. The Jewish community of approximately 1500 ceases to exist.
1421-1492: Jewish expulsion, pogroms, and forced conversions in more than 35 mostly European and North African cities.
1453: Approximately 40 Jews burned at the stake in Breslau on charges of host desecration. The head Rabbi hangs himself. Children forcibly baptized. Remaining Jews banished.
1463: Pope Nicholas V authorizes establishment of the Inquisition to investigate heresy among the Marranos (Jewish converts by compulsion, also known as Conversos, many of whom remain secret or “Crypto-Jews”).
1465: May 14, in Morocco. Amidst civil war, rebels kill almost all the Jews of Fez.
1474: Sicily. 360 Jews are killed in Modica. In Noto, as many as 500 Jews are killed.
1481: The Spanish Inquisition is instituted.
1492: King Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella issue General Edict on the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain: approximately 200,000 people. Some return to the Land of Israel; others scatter around the Mediterranean. The legend of the “Wandering Jew,” a condemned harbinger of calamity, gains popularity.
May 31, 1492, a decree orders the expulsion of the Jews from Sicily, similar to Spain. An estimated 37,000 Jews leave Sicily.
1496: December 5, King Manuel I of Portugal decrees all Jews must convert to Catholicism or face expulsion.
16th Century
1506: Lisbon massacre, April 19-21, kills up to 4000 Cristãos-Novos (New Christians) suspected of being crypto-Jews.
1516, the Ghetto Nuovo, the first Jewish ghetto is established on a swampy Venetian island. By law, Jews are relegated to live within its gated walls, to segregate them from the surrounding Christian population in Venice.
1526: Following the Battle of Mohács Jews expelled from Hungary, Croatia, and Slovakia.
1543: In the pamphlet “On the Jews and Their Lies,” Martin Luther advocates an eight-point plan to eradicate Jews as a distinct group either by religious conversion or by expulsion, including:
"...set fire to their synagogues or schools..."
"...their houses also be razed and destroyed..."
"...their prayer books and Talmudic writings... be taken from them..."
"...their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb..."
"If we wish to wash our hands of the Jews' blasphemy and not share in their guilt, we have to part company with them. They must be driven from our country" and "we must drive them out like mad dogs."
1546: Martin Luther's sermon “Admonition against the Jews” makes accusations of ritual murder, black magic, and well poisoning.
1547: Ivan the Terrible becomes ruler of Russia, refuses to allow Jews to live in or even enter his kingdom because they "bring about great evil"
1555: In papal bull “Cum nimis absurdum,” Pope Paul IV writes: "It appears utterly absurd and impermissible that the Jews, whom God has condemned to eternal slavery for their guilt, should enjoy our Christian love." He creates a Jewish ghetto in Rome that is locked nightly.
1593: Pope Clement VIII confirms the papal bull of Paul III that expels Jews from papal states except ghettos in Rome and Ancona and issues “Caeca et obdurate” ("Blind Obstinacy"): "All the world suffers from the usury of the Jews, their monopolies and deceit. ... Jews have to be reminded intermittently anew that they were enjoying rights in any country since they left Palestine and the Arabian desert, and subsequently their ethical and moral doctrines as well as their deeds rightly deserve to be exposed to criticism in whatever country they happen to live."
17th Century
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
1648–1655: during the Khmelnytsky Uprising against the Poles, Ukrainian Cossacks, led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and Tatar allies massacre 20-30,000 Jews: destroy 300 Jewish communities.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
18th Century
1711: Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s notorious Entdecktes Judenthum ("Judaism Unmasked"), denounces Judaism as a religion of secret practices designed to deceive the world: a formative and influential work of modern antisemitic polemics.
1790s: Catherine II of Russia establishes the Pale of Settlement which stretches from the Baltic to the Black Sea in the western part of the Empire; Jews are forbidden to live outside this area.
19th Century
1805: June 29, Two to five hundred Algerian Jews massacred by the Sultan’s Turkish infantry guards.
1815: Pope Pius VII reestablishes the ghetto in Rome after the defeat of Napoleon.
Transformation of the bigotry over the 19th century and into the 20th from anti-Judaism to what is later called ant-Semitism – from religious bigotry to racial discrimination. Arises the intellectually legitimated but inherently objectifying and prejudicial topic of “the Jewish question,” i.e. what to do with the Jews, who may assimilate but will not disappear – a distinct and different people who have no place of their own.
1844: Karl Marx publishes On the Jewish Question in response to Bruno Bauer. Marx concludes: "What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money . . .. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering and therefore the possibility of huckstering would make the Jew impossible. . .. In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
1850: German composer Richard Wagner publishes under a pseudonym Das Judenthum in der Musik ("Jewishness in Music"), which makes a general attack on Jews and on Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular.
1878: Adolf Stoecker, German antisemitic preacher and politician, founds the Christian Social Party, which marks the beginning of the political antisemitic movement in Germany, particularly focused on “the Jewish question.”
1879: Wilhelm Marr coins the term Anti-Semitism to distinguish it from religious Anti-Judaism.
1881-1882: in Russia, after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, pogroms sweep southern Russia, propelling mass Jewish emigration from the Pale of Settlement: between 1880–1924 about 2 million Russian Jews emigrate, many to the United States.
1882: The International Anti-Jewish Congress for the Protection of the Interests of Non-Jewish. Society, held on September 11-12, 1882, in Dresden, Germany.
1880s-1890s: Jews are expelled from the Russia’s major cities.
1894: Infamous Dreyfus affair, as accusations of espionage against Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus split the French public and intellectual world and reveal depth of French antisemitc prejudice. In 1898, Dreyfus supporter Émile Zola publishes the open letter “J'accuse!”
1903: Anti-Jewish violence erupts again in the Russian Pale. One of the most violent pogroms occurs in Kishniev, Moldova, April 6-7; more than 49 Jews are killed, hundreds of others are savaged and raped.
1903: First publication in Russia of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion hoax, prepared with the help of the Russian secret service and still referenced today, claiming to prove Jewish conspiracy to dominate the globe.
1905: Pogroms erupt simultaneous to the 1905 Revolution against the government of Tsar Nicholas II.
1918-1920: Amid Russian revolution and civil war in Ukraine, accused as revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries, unpatriotic pacifists or warmongers, religious zealots or godless atheists, capitalist exploiters or bourgeois profiteers, at least 100,000 Jews are killed by forces on all sides in the greatest mass murders of Jews before the Holocaust.
1920: in the U.S. Henry Ford’s The Dearborn Independent begins to chronicle, for 91 weeks, the "Jewish menace." The stories are then chosen reprinted in four volumes called The International Jew.
1924: The National Origins Quota and Immigration Acts of 1924 in the United States end meaningful Jewish immigration from troubled regions. As conditions worsen in Europe leading to the Second World War, Western democracies effectively close their doors to emigrating Jews.
1925: Adolf Hitler publishes Mein Kampf and warns of "the Jewish peril," a Jewish conspiracy to gain world leadership.
1929: in the Hebron Massacre, the Jewish community of Hebron is devastated and 67-69 Jews murdered by local Muslims over rumors that Jews plan to seize control of the Temple Mount.
1941: November 28 meeting at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin between Adolf Hitler and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. According to the official German record of the meeting, al-Husseini wished
to convey to the Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich, admired by the entire Arab world, his thanks of the sympathy which he had always shown for the Arab and especially the Palestinian cause, and to which he had given clear expression in his public speeches.
The Arab countries were firmly convinced that Germany would win the war and that the Arab cause would then prosper. The Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists.
. . . .
The Fuhrer replied that Germany’s fundamental attitude on these questions, as the Mufti himself had already stated, was clear. Germany stood for uncompromising war against the Jews.
1933-45: full-range history of Nazi and allied fascist regime pre-war persecution and Holocaust genocide. Of 6 million killed:
2.5 million murdered in concentration camps,
2 million massacred in mass shooting operations
800,000 die or murdered in ghettos
Including over 88% of Poland’s 3.4 million Jews
33% of Jews in the Soviet Union
60.7% of Hungary’s Jews
42% of Norway’s Jews
87.6% of Yugoslavia’s Jews
a third of the Jews of Germany and 25% of France
75% of Latvian Jews
96.7% of Lithuanian Jews
One third of the world’s Jewish population was killed.
Nearly 80 years later, the world Jewish population of 15.7 million out of 8.2 billion people in the world has only now returned to pre-WWII levels.
1947: November 29 United Nations vote to Partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab sovereign states is rejected by Palestine’s Arabs and the surrounding Arab states. War ensues.
1948: 1.5 million of 11 million displaced persons from WWII remain in allied administered German refugee camps and refuse to return to their home countries. By the end of the year, all but 250,000 have been offered refuge, the remainder all Jews. At least 150,000 are rescued from statelessness and smuggled into Palestine through the clandestine Brihah movement run by officers of the British Army’s Jewish Brigade.
1948-72: Expulsion and flight from Arab countries – Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen – of 851,000, Mizrahi, Jews.
1948-1952: The Soviet government launches a campaign against "cosmopolitanism" generally directed against Jewish intellectuals and professionals.
1952: Twenty-four leading Soviet Jewish writers, intellectuals and artists are executed.
1953: Pravda announces that doctors have been killing top Soviet officials by deliberately providing poor medical treatment, in what becomes known as the "doctor's plot." Scores of Soviet Jews dismissed from their jobs, arrested, some executed.
1957: Khrushchev launches new Soviet campaign against religion in general and Judaism in particular; a propaganda campaign claims that the Jewish faith encourages a love of money, promulgates the hatred of other peoples, and promotes allegiance to another, reactionary state, that is, Israel.
1964: The Palestine Liberation Organization founding National Charter declares that “the Jews are not one people with an independent personality because they are citizens of the countries to which they belong.”
1967: June 5-11; after Israeli victory in the Six Day War, the Soviet Union severs diplomatic ties and launches an anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli media campaign in which Jews and Israelis are compared to Nazis.
1975: By a vote of 72 in favor, 35 against, and 32 abstentions the United Nations General Assembly adopts Resolution 3379, which "Determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination." Sixteen years later, the Resolution is revoked by Resolution 46/86, adopted on 16 December 1991, with 111 votes in favor, 25 votes against, and 13 abstentions.
1979-80: After the Iranian Revolution and establishment of an Islamic theocracy under the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 70,000 Jews flee Iran.
1983: The Soviet state-sponsored Anti-Zionist Committee is established to denounce “international Zionism,” the United States and Israel, the Committee working to defuse Western accusations that the Soviet Union's attacks on Israel are anti-Semitic.
1988: The Hamas Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement states, “The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: ‘The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.'".... There is no solution for the Palestine question except through Jihad.”
Through the remainder of the 20th Century and first quarter of the 21st Century
It continues.
* * *
The mind should achieve a kind of blankness in the face of this history, a blue screen of death, as a computer will crash.
Huh? What? Nothing. Blue.
The route through the human state of barbaric nature to goodness, however one conceives it – peace, amity, the fruits of the earth and the rewards of heaven – already challenges a soul. But in that general condition, we find the universe as God or No-Thing will have made it for all. To the challenge of good versus evil it presents, your answer may be enfolded in theology or the pecking of eagles at your Promethean liver or what pleasures you can grasp while you may.
But that the road of the world stretched out so long in such a way as this for some people, and one in particular, only?
It quickly emerged in the realms of literate and ethical intellection and meaning making, and in the arts, that properly regarded the Holocaust, the Shoah, be understood and set off in its unprecedented horrific malevolence as sui generis. In its concentrated, targeted, and systematic density of evil and volume of death, it lay beyond commensurate representation – as YHWH’s vowels unsuppressed bespeak a profane presumption. But fitting as this understanding may be, grasped too facilely, without full recognition of its preceding history of Jewish persecution, the Holocaust becomes, also too easily, and already, only 80 years after, just one more event in that seemingly limitless and greater timeline of inhumane occurrences that contribute to the human narrative, that may be diminished in the tide of ever more instances of worldly wrong with which we all must come to terms to live: challenged and questioned and denied, unconsidered without too much burdensome care as the past normally is for most of the people of the present looking, as they prefer, to the future.
Properly regarded, however, as not less but rather more than a thing unto itself and set off from all around it, the Holocaust becomes instead in the understanding what it more completely came to be in the world, an expansive concentration and unification into a single epochal eruption of evil – a node at the vertex of all these converging lines of scapegoating conspiratorial malice, lies, and demonized difference in a long history of cruelty and hate extending over the stream of generations and that, in truth continue to bend and course through time even now, just as before.
In that light, we consider that among the Jewish days of observance and holiday not so famous to non-Jews as are Chanukah and Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is Tishah Be’av. Tishah Be’av, observed on the Ninth of Av of the Jewish calendar, during summer, is the saddest day of the year for observant Jews, intended in its origins to commemorate the destruction, purportedly on that date, of Solomon’s Temple, and then, too, of the Second Temple. Over long time, Jewish communities, with such a history as we see of death and destruction and long lamentation, began to add other events to their Tishah Be’av commemorations. It came, finally, by necessity, to be understood in modern times, especially after the Holocaust, that Tishah Be’av was no longer meaningfully about any one, or some small set of particular calamities of Jewish history but rather serves to commemorate them all, as a fundamental truth of Jewish existence as the fortunes of the world shaped it.
Such is the history of Jewish persecution, and when we scan from our current, always temporary but not often quickly altering height of time back along the line of human passage over the earth and attempt to read the text of its long, lumbering, clamorous, and so frequently calamitous narrative, we may think we spy deep readings of the text. Themes and structures. Sex, patriarchy, the unconscious. Ideas embedded and then embodied in the unfolding of historical time. Determinants of material culture and sociobiology. A will to power. Grand scale processes, almost too soon, after what seems to mere humans so much time, to be perceived. And among these patterns, boldly arising from the typographic stems and strokes of the text as repetitions – iterative and reiterative incidences of incidents and instances, of human behavior, activity, policy, program, and prejudice that form our maladaptation to being in the world among others – the vast twenty-five-hundred-year history of demonization and persecution of the Jewish people, justified and rationalized, still, in ever mutating variants of conspiratorial theology, sociology, and political ideology, might appear a branded stamp upon the Histomap of the world. A threatening mark of cancelation.
AJA
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
This is breathtaking work, Jay. It's also the kind of work that must have been so difficult, on an emotional and psychological level, to compile. To go through generation after generation after generation of suffering in one's lineage is no easy task, and I can see now why you'd mentioned the weight of this task on you in recent weeks.
Nevertheless, it is important work, and powerful work, and I'm grateful to you for having done it. May the rest of these days of awe find you able to lean on that word in both senses: not just in horror, but also in wonder. You are *here*. You are here because some light, through so much suffering over the millennia, survived.
Much warmth from afar.
Jay, this is an important contribution to our understanding of the history of persecution. Christianity has a long and violent record of refusing to accept any doctrinal differences. Against both Jews and other Christians. Each Jew alive today is in some ways a miracle.
While your post is mainly a record of horror, I left it also with gratitude for my ancestors who persisted and who were lucky enough to come to this country. Now the torch of survival has been passed to us, a sacred duty.