Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism [Paperback]

Dennis Prager (Author), Joseph Telushkin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 29, 2003

From the bestselling authors of The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism comes a completely revised and updated edition of a modern classic that reflects the dangerous rise in antisemitism during the twenty-first century.

The very word Jew continues to arouse passions as does no other religious, national, or political name. Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why did Hitler consider murdering Jews more important than winning World War II? Why has the United Nations devoted more time to tiny Israel than to any other nation on earth?

In this seminal study, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin attempt to uncover and understand the roots of antisemitism -- from the ancient world to the Holocaust to the current crisis in the Middle East. This postmillennial edition of Why the Jews? offers new insights and unparalleled perspectives on some of the most recent, pressing developments in the contemporary world, including:

• The replicating of Nazi antisemitism in the Arab world

• The pervasive anti-Zionism/antisemitism on university campuses

• The rise of antisemitism in Europe

• Why the United States and Israel are linked in the minds of antisemites

Clear, persuasive, and thought provoking, Why the Jews? is must reading for anyone who seeks to understand the unique role of the Jews in human history.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dennis Prager, one of America's most respected thinkers, is a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and syndicated columnist. He has written four books, including the #1 bestseller Happiness Is a Serious Problem. He has lectured on all seven continents and may be contacted through his website, www.dennisprager.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One: Why Jew-Hatred Is Unique

Hatred of the Jew has been humanity's greatest hatred. While hatred of other groups has always existed, no hatred has been as universal, as deep, or as permanent as antisemitism.

The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies. Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as "racists." Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a "fifth column," while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate. Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.

The universality of antisemitism is attested to by innumerable facts, the most dramatic being that Jews have been expelled from so many of the European and Arab societies in which they have resided. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Hungary between 1349 and 1360, Austria in 1421, numerous localities in Germany between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, and Bohemia and Moravia in 1744-45. Between the fifteenth century and 1772, Jews were not allowed into Russia; when finally admitted there, they were restricted to one area, the Pale of Settlement. Between 1948 and 1967, nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen fled these countries, fearing for their lives.

The depth of antisemitism is evidenced by the frequency with which hostility against Jews has gone far beyond discrimination and erupted into sustained violence. In most societies in which Jews have lived, they have at some time been subjected to beatings, torture, and murder solely because they were Jews. In the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass beatings and murders of Jews were so common that a word, pogrom, was coined to describe such incidents. And these pogroms were viewed by their antisemitic perpetrators as being of such significance that they were equated with the saving of Russia.

On a number of occasions even beating and murdering Jewish communities was not deemed sufficient. Antisemitic passions have run so deep that only the actual annihilation of the Jewish people could solve what came to be called by antisemites the "Jewish Problem." The basic source of ancient Jewish history, the Bible, depicts two attempts to destroy the Jewish people, that by Pharaoh and the Egyptians (Exodus 1:15-22) and that of Haman and the Persians (book of Esther). While it is true that the historicity of these biblical accounts has not been proven or disproven by nonbiblical sources, few would dispute the supposition that in ancient times attempts were made to destroy the Jews. Indeed, the first recorded reference to Jews in non-Jewish sources, the Mernephta stele, written by an Egyptian king about 1220 B.C.E., states, "Israel is no more."

Jewish writings from the earliest times until the present are replete with references to attempts by non-Jews to destroy the Jewish people. Psalm 83:5 describes the enemies of the Jews as proponents of genocide: "Come, and let us cut them off from being a nation, that the Name of Israel may no more be remembered." Just how precarious Jews have viewed their survival is reflected in a statement from the ancient, and annually recited, Passover Haggadah; "In every generation they rise against us in order to annihilate us."

On three occasions during the last 350 years, annihilation campaigns have been waged against the Jews: the Chmelnitzky massacres in eastern Europe in 1648-49, the Nazi German destruction of Jews throughout Europe between 1939 and 1945, and the attempt to eradicate the Jewish state by its enemies.

For various reasons, the Chmelnitzky massacres are today not well known among Jews and are virtually unknown among non-Jews; perhaps the Holocaust tends to overshadow all previous Jewish suffering. Yet without denying the unique aspects of the Nazi Holocaust, there are a number of significant similarities between it and the Chmelnitzky massacres. In both instances, all Jews, including infants, were targeted for murder; the general populaces nearly always joined in the attacks; and the torture and degradation of Jews were an integral part of the murderers' procedures. These characteristics are evidenced by the following contemporaneous description of a typical Chmelnitzky massacre:

Some of [the Jews] had their skins flayed off them and their flesh was flung to the dogs. The hands and feet of others were cut off and they were flung onto the roadway where carts ran over them and they were trodden underfoot by horse....And many were buried alive. Children were slaughtered in their mothers' bosoms and many children were torn apart like fish. They ripped up the bellies of pregnant women, took out the unborn children, and flung them in their faces. They tore open the bellies of some of them and placed a living cat within the belly and left them alive thus, first cutting off their hands so that they should not be able to take the living cat out of the belly...and there was never an unnatural death in the world that they did not inflict upon them.

The permanence (as well as depth) of antisemitism is attested to by the obsessive attention given to the "Jewish Problem" by antisemites throughout history. At one time or another nearly every major country that has had a large Jewish population has regarded this group, which never constituted more than a small percentage of its population, as an enemy. To the Roman Empire in the first century, the European Christian world for over fifteen centuries, the Nazi Reich, the Soviet Union, and to the Arabs and much of the Muslim world, the Jews have been or are regarded as an insufferable threat.

Jews have been perceived as so dangerous that even after their expulsion or destruction, hatred and fear of them remain. The depiction of Jews as ritual murderers of young Christian children in Chaucer's "Prioress's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales one hundred years after all Jews had been expelled from England attests to the durability of antisemitism. So does the characterization of Jews as usurers who wish to collect their interest in flesh in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, three hundred years after the Jews' expulsion. A more recent example was Poland in 1968, when for months the greatest issue for Polish radio, television, and newspapers was the "Unmasking of Zionists in Poland." Of the thirty-three million citizens of Poland in 1968, the Jews numbered about twenty thousand or less than one-fifteenth of 1 percent.

How are the universality, depth, and permanence of antisemitism to be explained? Why such hatred and fear of a people who never constituted more than a small minority among those who most hated and feared them? Why, nearly always and nearly everywhere, the Jews?

Many answers have been offered by scholars. These include, most commonly, economic factors, the need for scapegoats, ethnic hatred, xenophobia, resentment of Jewish affluence and professional success, and religious bigotry. But ultimately these answers do not explain antisemitism; they only explain what factors have exacerbated it and caused it to erupt in a given circumstance. None accounts for the universality, depth, and persistence of antisemitism. In fact, we have encountered virtually no study of this phenomenon that even attempts to offer a universal explanation of Jew-hatred. Nearly every study of antisemitism consists almost solely of historical narrative, thus seeming to indicate that no universal reason for antisemitism exists.

We reject this approach. To ignore or deny that there is an ultimate cause for antisemitism contradicts both common sense and history. Antisemitism has existed too long, and in too many disparate cultures, to ignore the problem of ultimate cause and/or to claim that new or indigenous factors are responsible every time it erupts. Factors specific to a given society help account for the manner or time in which antisemitism erupts. But they do not explain its genesis -- why antisemitism at all? To cite but one example: the depressed economy in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s helps to explain why and when the Nazis came to power, but it does not explain why Nazis hated Jews, let alone why they wanted to murder every Jew. Economic depressions do not explain gas chambers.

The very consistency of the passions Jews have aroused demands a consistent explanation. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, medieval and many modern Christians and Muslims, and Nazis and Communists have perhaps only one thing in common: they have all, at some point, counted the Jews as their enemy, often their greatest enemy. Why?

Among Jews, this question has been posed only in the modern era. Until the modern age, Jews never asked, "Why the Jews?" They knew why. Throughout their history, Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as an inevitable consequence of their Jewishness. Contrary to modern understandings of antisemitism, the age-old Jewish understanding of antisemitism does posit a universal explanation for Jew-hatred: Judaism, meaning the Jews' God, laws, peoplehood, and claim to being chosen. The historical record, as we shall show, confirms the traditional Jewish view that the Jews were hated because of Jewish factors. Modern attempts to dejudaize Jew-hatred, to attribute it to economic, social, and political factors, and universalize it into merely another instance of bigotry, are as opposed to the facts of Jewish history as they are to the historical Jewish understanding of antisemitism.

Antisemites have not hated Jews beca...

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (July 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743246209
• ISBN-13: 978-0743246200
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #52,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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54 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The roots and reality of Jew-hatred/Israel-hatred, February 2, 2007

By 

Gary Selikow (Great Kush) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (Paperback)

In the last six years in particular, since Arafat launched a war of terror against Israel's people, I have often wondered what the reasons are for the intense hatred and violent rage, especially by Moslems and the Left, of Israel and her people.
The country where I live, is periodically rocked by nationwide paroxysms of vicious rage and murderous hate of the tiny nation of Israel,encouraged by the ruling party and it's allies, civil society, universities and the media.
This is the world's latest incantation of Jew-hatred, the world's longest and most intense hatred, as Dennis Prager explains in this fascinating and illuminating work.
Prager begins by outlining some of the violent attacks on Jews and Israel in Europe and elsewhere, which has become the disease permeating the world as we begin the 21st century.
Prager mentions the United Nations-sponsored World Conference on Racism, in Durban, South Africa in August 2001, which, while failing to mention human rights abuses and genocide in China, Rwanda or anyplace in the Arab world, turned into a violent fest of hate and rage against Israel.

While anti-Semitism was traditionally associated with rightwing populists, vicious anti-Israelism is becoming the culture and raison d etre of 'progressive' intellectual communities.

Prager illustrates that:

* Thousands of academics around the world, have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though not an end to support for researchers from any other nation.

* Israeli scholars in Spring 2003 were forced off the board of an international literary journal.

* And many at universities across the world, including North America, have called for their universities to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university's endowment to be invested.

Prager marvels how in a world filled with enormous evils-such as totalitarian states that make their countries into large prison camps (Iran and North Korea); that massacre and enslave millions of citizens (Sudan) , that wage deadly war against their own populations (Zimbabwe and Myanmar) that destroy entire cultures (As China is doing in Tibet), it would seem a puzzle as to why the Jewish State and America are the two most villified countries in the world.
Prager points this out as being a violent rejection of the American and Jewish values of Judeo-Christian civilization, justice, freedom, democracy and humanity as a source of light to the world. He explains the reason why the USA supports Israel as being because of the USA's Judeo-Christian values and her realization that Israel is a tiny island of democracy and human rights in a sea of totalitarianism.

It is against this background that Prager delves into the roots of Jew-hatred to attempt an explanation of this phenomenon.
The basic source of ancient Jewish history, the Bible, depicts two attempts at anihilation of the Jewish people: that of Pharaoh and the Egyptians (Exodus 1:15-22) and that of Haman and the Persians.
On three occasions in the last 350 years, anihilation campaigns have been waged against the Jews, the Chmelnitzky massacres in Eastern Europe in 1648-1649, the Nazi destruction of Europe's Jews between 1939 and 1945 , and the current decades long campaign to anihilate the Jewish State by it's enemies.

Prager holds out four basic reasons for Jew hatred (and it's latest incantaion, Israel-hatred)
* The hatred of Judaism and ethical monotheism
* The chosen people idea as a cause of Jew-hatred
* The moral challenge posed by the Jews for a better world.
* The higher quality of Jewish life as a cause of Jew-hatred

Chapter 5 deals with the topic of Non-Jewish Jews and anti-Semitism. This is particularly interesting to me, because leftwing diaspora Jews who hate Israel, are a major source of anger and disgust for me.
Prager is also vexed by the question of explaining Jews who devote their lives to hurting Jews. He points out that "Among no group in the world are there so many individuals who so single-mindedly attempt to damage the group into which they were born".
He gives as examples the loathsome Noam Chomsky who has dedicated much of his life tro defending those who wish to destroy Israel, and to demonize Israel and her people, frequently comparing Israelis to the Nazis; and Norman Finkelstein who lectures throughout the world , calling Israel a Nazi State and demanding it's destruction.
Indeed many Jewish ultra-Leftists lead the "burn Israel" movement, sponsoring pro-Palestinian hate rallies, leading campaigns for divestment from Israel, and demoinzing Israel and her people in the media and universities.

The author expalins this phenomenon as being that Jewish radicals, like other radicals, lack roots, and hate Jews (such as the Jews of Israel) who do have roots and a national identity.
"The Ubermensch, which is how they see themselves, rises above such parochial indentities."
Also they likely believe that if they side with those who hate Jews, they will not be hated by them.

Prager refutes the Marxist view of anti-Semitism that it is caused by Capitalism, pointing out that in Communist societies anti-Semitism has often been at it's worst.
He also easily refutes the myth that anti-Semitism is purely a rightwing phenomenon, pointing to Soviet persecution of Jewry , and the new anti-Semitism of today, which eminates mainly from the Left.
Prager go's on to examine the historical evidence of anti-Semitism with histories of ancient anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Semitism, Islamic anti-Semitism, Secular Enlightenment anti-Semitism, Leftist anti-Semitism, Nazi anti-Semitism and anti-Zionist anti-Semitism.
He continually draws parralels between historic anti-Semitism and today's new anti-Zionist version, for example discussing the mediaeval libel that Jews poisoned wells, and deliberately spread disease , to lies by the Palestinian Authority and Leftist NGO's that the Israelis have poisoned Palestinian water supplies and deliberately infected Palestinian children with the HIV virus.

In the section on Islamic anti-Semitism, he outlines bloody pogroms carried out against Jews in Arab countries, in the 20th century. He also explains the real reason behind Arab hatred of Israel. The idea of Jews as free people in their own state cannot be tolerated, they can only be tolerated as subordinate or degraded. The basis of Arab hatred of Israel is the hatred of Jews refusing to accept an unequal, inferior status, that they lived under for centuries of Arab rule.
He also deals with the Arab-Nazi connection of World War II, and beyond.
In the chapter on Leftist anti-Semitism he observes how the further left one goes the greater the Jew-hatred. The propaganda peddled by far-left ideologues, academics and journalists today is a reproduction of the propaganda manufactured in the old Soviet Union, during the Cold War, when the USSR was persecuting Jews and working for the destruction of Israel.

Letwing anti-Semitism revolves around the denial of Jewish nationhood, and therefore of Israel's right to exist, leading to a hatred of all Jews who affirm Jewish nationhood and particularly of all Jews who live in the Jewish homeland. It also involves a gross Orwellianism whereby Israel is accused of genocide, when the truth is that the Arabs and their allies are the ones pushing for the destruction of Israel and thereby a second holocaust against Jews.

Because anti-Zionism's goal would lead to a second holocaust against five million Jews, it cannot be distinguished from anti-Semitism.
Furthermore there is only one posible reason why people isolate Israel of all the countries of the world to deny it's right to existence. Because Israel is a Jewish State. Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.
Finally Prager deals with the 8 most common lies about Israel, and the truth behind them, examines what the solutions are to Jew-hatred, and his epilogue ends with a warning that anti-Semitism/anti-Israelism is the problem not only of Jews, but of all decent human beings because what begins with the Jews seldom ends with the Jews. Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred is the moral litmus test of nations, regimes and individuals.

40 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, if not entirely convincing, thesis, April 27, 2006

By 

Lucien the Librarian (Toronto) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (Paperback)

Prager and Telushkin offer a useful historical survey of anti-Semitism and skillfully refute the most common explanations for "the oldest hatred." Where I disagree with them is in their own theory of anti-Semitism's orgins. Simply put, the authors assume that, regardless of historical period, geographic location, or ideology, the typical anti-Semitic individual or organization follows the same essential syllogism:

1. Judaism originated the concept of ethical monotheism, that is, the belief in a supreme God who is just and good and demands the same from human beings.
2. I/We are opposed to (or are unable/too lazy to live according to) ethical monotheism.
3. Therefore, we must hate Jews, the original advocates of ethical monotheism.

Very neat. However, as reviewer Ben notes below, it's doubtful that the average "Joe Sixpack" anti-Semite goes through anything remotely resembling that thought process. Nearly all Jew-haters hate Jews simply because they were taught to do so, by people who were in turn taught to hate Jews, and so forth.

Furthermore, Judaism, with the minor exception of some Jews in the Hellenistic age, has never been a prosyletizing religion. True, there is the rabbinic concept of the universal "Noahide" moral laws binding upon all human beings. However, there is scant instance of Jews *actively* urging their non-Jewish neighbours to observe even these laws, let alone all of Judaism. So how would your average non-Jew even know what Judaism stood for?

Furthermore, the authors' prescription for ending anti-Semitism, promoting Judaism's ethical monotheism even more strongly, is a praiseworthy goal but contradicts their own thesis. If ethical monotheism is the cause of anti-Semitism, isn't it possible that advocating it more assertively and publicly would produce even more hatred of Jews?

I have come to the conclusion that anti-Semitism exists because it exists. It is a self-perpetuating meme which knows of no logical explanation. The fact that Jews are perhaps the oldest unified nationality still in existence may account for anti-Semitism's particular universality and persistence. Perhaps if the Sumerians were still around, we'd ask, "Why anti-Sumerianism?"

Nevertheless, I give _Why the Jews?_ four stars for the authors' keen historical research and for the stimulating debate that the book has, and will undoubtedly continue to, stimulate.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, July 27, 2006

By 

Michael S. Valle (Mesa, AZ) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism (Paperback)

Dennis Prager is emerging as one of the single most insightful and important conservative thinkers in the country. His analysis of Jew-hatred is by far and away the best organized, comprehensive, and compelling account I have ever seen. In an age in which religion-based radicalism seeks to kill the Jews all over again, Prager's book couldn't be more timely.