hep! hep! hep!

Savage, insane, murderous, raging, poisonous, breeding virulently on the tongues of liars—hatred of the Jews is back and bloodier than ever.

by Cynthia Ozick

We thought it was finished. The ovens are long cooled, the anti-vermin gas dissipated into purifying clouds, cleansed air, nightmarish fable. The cries of the naked, decades gone, are mute; the bullets splitting throats and breasts and skulls, the human waterfall of bodies tipping over into the wooded ravine at Babi Yar, are no more than tedious footnotes on aging paper. The deportation ledgers, with their scrupulous lists of names of the doomed, what are they now? Museum artifacts. The heaps of eyeglasses and children’s shoes, the hills of human hair, lie disintegrating in their display cases, while only a little distance away the visitors’ cafeteria bustles and buzzes: sandwiches, Cokes, the waiting tour buses.

We thought it was finished. In the middle of the twentieth century, and surely by the end of it, we thought it was finished, genuinely finished, the bloodlust finally slaked. We thought it was finished, that heads were hanging — the heads of the leaders and schemers on gallows, the heads of the bystanders and onlookers in shame. The Topf company, manufacturer of the ovens, went belatedly out of business, belatedly disgraced and shamed. Out of shame German publishers of Nazi materials concealed and falsified the past. Out of shame Paul de Man, lauded and eminent Yale intellectual, concealed his early Nazi lucubrations. Out of shame Mircea Eliade, lauded and eminent Chicago intellectual, concealed his membership in Romania’s Nazi-linked Iron Guard. Out of shame memorials to the murdered rose up. Out of shame synagogues were rebuilt in the ruins of November 9, 1938, the night of fire and pogrom and the smashing of windows. Out of shame those who were hounded like prey and fled for their lives were invited back to their native villages and towns and cities, to be celebrated as successful escapees from the murderous houndings of their native villages and towns and cities. Shame is salubrious: it acknowledges inhumanity, it admits to complicity, it induces remorse. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that shame and remorse-world-wide shame, world-wide remorse-would endure. Naïvely, foolishly, stupidly, hopefully, a-historically, we thought that the cannibal hatred, once quenched, would not soon wake again.

It has awakened.

In “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!” — an 1878 essay reflecting on the condition of the Jews — George Eliot noted that it would be “difficult to find a form of bad reasoning about [Jews] which had not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print.” She was writing in a period politically not unlike our own, Disraeli ascendant in England, Jews prominent in liberal parties both in Germany and France. Yet her title points to something far deadlier than mere “bad reasoning.” Hep! was the cry of the Crusaders as they swept through Europe, annihilating one Jewish community after another; it stood for Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed), and was taken up again by anti-Jewish rioters in Germany in 1819. In this single raging syllable, past and future met, and in her blunt bold enunciation of it, George Eliot was joining bad reasoning — i.e., canard and vilification — to its consequences: violence and murder. The Jews, she wrote, have been “regarded and treated very much as beasts hunted for their skins,” and the curse on them, the charge of deicide, was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar dress; for torturing them...spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking their baptism when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands from their homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of His teaching.

As an anti-Semitic yelp, Hep! is long out of fashion. In the eleventh century it was already a substitution and a metaphor: Jerusalem meant Jews, and “Jerusalem is destroyed” was, when knighthood was in flower, an incitement to pogrom. Today, the modern Hep! appears in the form of Zionism, Israel, Sharon. And the connection between vilification and the will to undermine and endanger Jewish lives is as vigorous as when the howl of Hep! was new. The French ambassador to Britain, his tongue unbuttoned in a London salon, hardly thinks to cry Hep!; instead, he speaks of “that shitty little country.” European and British scholars and academicians, their Latin gone dry, will never cry Hep!; instead they call for the boycott of Israeli scholars and academicians.

Nearly all of this had precedents in the Church Luther renounced; and even the medieval Church practiced mimicry. It was Pope Innocent III who implemented the yellow badge of ignominy (Hitler was no innovator, except as to gas chambers) — yet Innocent too was innocent of originality, since he took the idea from Prince Abu-Yusef Almansur, a Moroccan Muslim ruler of the thirteenth century. Post-Enlightenment France may be known for its merciless persecution of a guiltless Dreyfus, and for the anti-Jewish rioting it set off; and, more recently, for the gendarmes who arrested and deported the Jews of Paris with a zeal equal to that of the Germans. But Paris had seen anti-Jewish mobs before-for instance, in June of 1242, when twenty-four cartloads of Talmuds were set afire in a public square. And while elsewhere in France, and all through the Rhine-land, the Crusaders were busy at their massacres, across the Channel the Archbishop of Canterbury was issuing a decree designed to prevent the Jews of England from having access to food.

All this, let it be noted, preceded the barbarities of the Inquisition: the scourgings, the burnings, the confiscations, the expulsions. Any attempt to set down the record, early and late, of Christian violence against Jews can only be a kind of pointillism — an atrocity here, another there, and again another. The nineteenth-century historian Heinrich Graetz (as rationalist in temperament as Gibbon) summed up the predicament of Jews across the whole face of Europe: If Jewish history were to follow chronicles, memorial books and martyrologies, its pages would be filled with bloodshed, it would consist of horrible exhibitions of corpses, and it would stand forth to make accusation against a doctrine which taught princes and nations to become common executioners and hangmen. For, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the persecutions and massacres of the Jews increased with frightful rapidity and intensity, and only alternated with inhuman decrees issued by both Church and the state, the aim and purport of all of which were to humiliate the Jews, to brand them with calumny and to drive them to suicide...The nations of Europe emulated one another in exercising their cruelty upon the Jews...In Germany they were slain by thousands...Every year martyrs fell, now in Weissenburg, Magdeburg, Arnstadt, now in Coblenz, Sinzig, Erfurt, and other places. In Sinzig all the members of the congregation were burnt alive on a Sabbath in their synagogue. There were German Christian families who boasted that they had burnt Jews, and in their pride assumed the name of Judenbrater (Jew-roaster).

And all this, let it again be noted, before the Shoah; before the Czarist pogroms and the Czarist fabrication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; before the exclusions, arrests, and gulag brutalities of the Soviet Union; before the shooting of the Soviet Yiddish writers in the basement of Moscow’s Lubyanka prison; before the rise of contemporary Islamist demonization of Jews; before the eight-decades-long Arab assault on Jewish national aspiration and sovereignty; before the Palestinian cult of suicide bombing. Anti-Semitism feeds on itself from continent to continent, from Iceland to Japan: it scarcely requires living Jews. Its source is commonly taken to be the two supersessionist Scriptures that derive from Judaism — in Christianity, the Jews’ cry (in the Gospel of Matthew) of “His blood be on us and on our children,” the fount of the venomous deicide curse; in Islam, the unwillingness of Jews to follow Mohammed in the furtherance of a latter-day faith which accused the Hebrew Bible of distorting the biblical narratives that appear, Islam claims, more authoritatively and genuinely in the Koran.

But anti-Semitism originated in neither Christianity nor Islam. Its earliest appearance burst out in Egypt, in the fourth century B.C.E., during the reign of Ptolemy II, when Manetho, an Egyptian priest, in a polemic directed against the biblical account in Genesis and Exodus, described a people who “came from Jerusalem” as the descendants of a mob of lepers. Against the Hebrew text, which records Joseph as a wise and visionary governor, Manetho charged that Joseph defiled the shrines and statues of the gods and set fire to villages and towns. Nor did Moses liberate the Hebrews and bring them, under divine guidance, out of Egypt, from slavery to freedom. These offspring of lepers, Manetho declared, were ignominiously expelled, having savagely despoiled the country for thirteen years. Such calumnies soon infiltrated Hellenic literature. The Greeks, detecting no plastic representation of the divine order, were quick to name the Jews atheists — lazy atheists, since once in seven days they refrained from labor. The Greek scholar Mnaseas of Patara recycled an Egyptian myth (traces of it later turned up in Plutarch) which asserted that the Temple in Jerusalem harbored the golden head of an ass, the sole object of the Jews’ worship. Another version had the Jews praying before an image of Moses seated on an ass while displaying a book containing laws of hatred for all humanity.

Greek enmity was most acutely encapsulated in the canard spread by Apion, whose contribution to the history of anti-Semitism is the infamously enduring blood libel. In its earliest form a Greek, captured by Jews, is taken to the Temple, fattened, and then killed; his entrails are ritually eaten in conjunction with an oath of hatred toward Greeks. Christian mythology altered Greek to Christian, usually a child, whose blood was said to be drained at Passover for the purpose of being baked into matzah. From its Christian source, the blood libel leached into Muslim societies. It surfaced most recently in a Saudi newspaper, which fantasized Muslim blood in Purim cakes. Mustafa Tlas, the Syrian defense minister, is the author of The Matzah of Zion, which presents the 1841 Damascus blood libel as an established “Jewish ritual.” And in a writing contest sponsored by the Palestinian Education Ministry, the winning entry, by a tenth-grader, described a Mother’s Day gift an Israeli soldier brings to his mother: “a bottle of the blood of a Palestinian child he has murdered.”

Current anti-Semitism, accelerating throughout advanced and sophisticated Europe — albeit under the rubric of anti-Zionism, and masked by the deceptive lingo of human rights — purports to eschew such primitivism. After all, Nazism and Stalinism are universally condemned; anti-Judaism is seen as obscurantist medievalism; the Vatican’s theology of deicide was nullified four decades ago; Lutherans, at least in America, vigorously dissociate themselves from their founder’s execrations of the Jews; and whatever the vestiges of Europe’s unregenerate (and often Holocaust-denying) Right may think, its vociferous Left would no more depart from deploring the Holocaust than it would be willing to be deprived of its zeal in calumniating the Jewish state. It is easy enough to shed a tear or two for the shed and slandered blood of the Jews of the past; no one will praise Torquemada, or honor Goebbels.

But to stand up for truth-telling in the present, in a mythologizing atmosphere of pervasive defamation and fabrication, is not a job for cowards.

In the time of Goebbels, the Big Lie about the Jews was mainly confined to Germany alone; much of the rest of the world saw through it with honest clarity. In our time, the Big Lie (or Big Lies, there are so many) is disseminated everywhere, and not merely by the ignorant, but with malice aforethought by the intellectual classes, the governing elites, the most prestigious elements of the press in all the capitals of Europe, and by the university professors and the diplomats.

The contemporary Big Lie, of course, concerns the Jews of Israel: they are oppressors in the style of the Nazis; they ruthlessly pursue, and perpetuate, “occupation” solely for the sake of domination and humiliation; they purposefully kill Palestinian children; their military have committed massacres; their government “violates international law”; their nationhood and their sovereignty have no legitimacy; they are intruders and usurpers inhabiting an illicit “entity,” and not a people entitled as other peoples are entitled; and so on and so on. Reviving both blood libel and deicide, respectable European journals publish political cartoons showing Prime Minister Sharon devouring Palestinian babies, and Israeli soldiers bayoneting the infant Jesus.

Yet the modern history of Jews in the Holy Land overwhelmingly refutes these scurrilities. It is the Arabs, not the Jews, who have been determined to dispose of a people’s right to live in peace. Is there any point now — after so many politically willed erasures of fact by Palestinian Arabs, Muslim populations in general, and a mean-spirited European intelligentsia — to recapitulate the long record of Arab hostility that has prevailed since the demise of the Ottoman Empire? The Muslim Arab claim of hegemony (through divine fiat, possessive greed, contempt for pluralism, or all three) over an entire region of the globe accounts for the hundreds of Christian Arabs who have fled Bethlehem, Nablus, Ramallah, and all other places where Muslims dominate — a flight rarely reported. Unsurprisingly, the Christians who have not yet departed blame the Israelis for this displacement, not the Muslim extremists under whose threats of reprisal they live. As for the fate of Jews in the orbit of this self-declared Muslim imperium, the current roar of “resistance to occupation” is notoriously belied by the bloody Arab pogroms of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936, and 1939, when there was no Jewish state at all, let alone any issue of “settlements.” The 1929 attacks left Hebron, the site of an ancient and uninterrupted Jewish community, effectively Judenrein.

What use is there, in the face of brute political and cultural intransigence, to rehearse the events of 1948? In that year Arab rejection of an independent Palestinian state under the UN partition plan led to the invasion by five Arab armies intent on crushing nascent Jewish sovereignty; whole sections of Jerusalem were destroyed or overrun. Nineteen-forty-eight marked the second, though not the first or the last, Arab refusal of Palestinian statehood. The first came in 1937, when under the British Mandate the Peel Commission proposed partition and statehood for the Arabs of Palestine; the last, and most recent, occurred in 2000, when Arafat dismissed statehood in favor of a well-prepared and programmatic violence. (The flouting of the Road Map by Palestinian unwillingness to dismantle terror gangs will have counted as the Palestinians’ fourth refusal of statehood; but the Road Map’s callously criminalizing equation of civilian inhabitants of Jewish towns — settlements — with Palestinian murder of Jewish civilians is itself egregious.) After 1948, the Arab war against the Jews of Israel continued through the terror incursions of 1956, the Six-Day War of 1967, the Yom Kip-pur attacks of 1973, and the fomented violence of 1987, the so-called first intifada.

In short, for two-thirds of a century the Arabs have warred against a Jewish presence in “their” part of the world. The 1967 war in defense of Jewish lives (when affected Jews everywhere went into mourning, fearing catastrophe) culminated in Golda Meir’s attempt to return, in exchange for peace, the territories which, in the spirit of partition, Israel had never sought to acquire, and had so unexpectedly conquered. The answer came at an Arab summit in Khartoum: no negotiations, no recognition, no peace. So much for the “crime” of occupation.

And though the Oslo accords of 1993 strove yet again for negotiations, most energetically under Ehud Barak, both the Palestinian leadership and the Palestinian public chose killing over compromise — this time with newly conceived atrocities through suicide bombings, always directed against civilians, in buses, cafés, restaurants, supermarkets, or wherever Israelis peacefully congregate.

This is the history that is ignored or denigrated or distorted or spitefully misrepresented. And because it is a history that has been assaulted and undermined by world-wide falsehoods in the mouths of pundits and journalists, in Europe and all over the Muslim world, the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has finally and utterly collapsed. It is only sophistry, disingenuousness, and corrupted conscience that continue to insist on such a distinction. To fail to trace the pernicious consistencies of Arab political aims from 1920 until today, despite temporary pretensions otherwise, is to elevate intellectual negligence to a principle. To transmogrify self-defense into aggression is to invite an Orwellian horse-laugh. To identify occupation as Israel’s primal sin — the most up-to-date Hep! of all — is to be blind to Arab actions and intentions before 1967, and to be equally blind to Israel’s repeated commitments to negotiated compromise. On the Palestinian side, the desire to eradicate Jewish nationhood increases daily: it is as if 1948 has returned, replicated in the guise of fanatical young “martyrs” systematically indoctrinated in kindergartens and schools and camps — concerning whom it is cant to say, as many do, that they strap detonators to their loins because they are without hope. It is hope that inflames them.

Perhaps the most bizarre display of international anti-Semitism was flaunted at Durban, during a UN conference ostensibly called to condemn “Racism, Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.” Plucked from the refuse heap, the old UN canard, “Zionism is racism,” together with a determined Arab hijacking of the agenda, brought about the bitterest irony of all: a virulent hatred under the auspices of anti-hatred. At Durban the Jewish state was declared to have been conceived in infamy, Jewish representatives were threatened, and language was violated more savagely than at any time since the Nazi era. “Political language,” said Orwell, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Yet the rant that emerged at Durban — those instantly recognizable snarls of anti-Semitism — hardly merited the term “political.” It had the venerable sound of the mob: Hep! Hep! Hep!

Anti-Semitism is a foolish word; we appear to be stuck with it. “Semitism” has virtually no meaning. The Semites are a linguistic group encompassing Hebrew, Akkadian, Amharic, and Arabic. Anti-Semitism (a term fabricated a century ago by a euphemistic German anti-Semite) signifies hatred of Jews, and hatred’s easy corollary: a steady drive to weaken, to hurt, and to extirpate Jews.

Still, one must ask: why the Jews? A sad old joke pluckily confronts the enigma:

— The Jews and the bicyclists are at the bottom of all the world’s ills.

— Why the bicyclists?

— Why the Jews?

...which implies that blaming one set of irrelevancies is just as irrational as blaming the other. Ah, but it is never the bicyclists, and it is always the Jews.

There are innumerable social, economic, and political speculations as to cause: scapegoatism; envy; exclusionary practices; the temptation of a demographic majority to subjugate a demographic minority; the attempt by corrupt rulers to deflect attention from the failings of their tyrannical regimes; and more.

But any of these can burst out in any society against any people — so why always the Jews? A metaphysical explanation is proffered: the forceful popular resistance to what Jewish civilization represents — the standard of ethical monotheism and its demands on personal and social conscience. Or else it is proposed, in Freudian terms, that Christianity and Islam, each in its turn, sought to undo the parent religion, which was seen as an authoritative rival it was needful to surpass and displace.

This last notion, however, has no standing in contemporary Christianity. In nearly all Christian communities, there is remorse for the old theologically instigated crimes, and serious internal moral restitution, much of it of a very high order. But a salient fact remains, perhaps impolitic to note: relief has come through Christianity’s having long been depleted of temporal power. Today’s Islamists, by contrast, are supported and succored by states: Iran, Syria (and Lebanon, its vassal), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Libya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt (which suppresses its domestic extremists, while its official press, film industry, and other institutions encourage anti-Zionist incitements). Iranian weapons flood into Gaza, whether by sea or through tunnels from Egypt. Saudi Arabia not long ago unashamedly broadcast a telethon to collect millions to be sent to Palestinian terror gangs; it continues today as Hamas’s chief funder. And though Saddam Hussein is finally gone, it will not be forgotten that he honored and enriched the families of suicide bombers. (I observe a telltale omission: those who deny any linkage between Iraq and terror universally discount Saddam’s lavish payments to Hamas and Islamic Jihad.)

But if one cannot account for the tenacity of anti-Semitism, one can readily identify it. It wears its chic disguises. It breeds on the tongues of liars. The lies may be noisy and primitive and preposterous, like the widespread Islamist charge (doggerelized by New Jersey’s poet laureate) that a Jewish conspiracy leveled the Twin Towers. Or the lies may take the form of skilled patter in a respectable timbre, while retailing sleight-of-hand trickeries — such as the hallucinatory notion that the defensive measures of a perennially beleaguered people constitute colonization and victimization; or that the Jewish state is to blame for the aggressions committed against it. Lies shoot up from the rioters in Gaza and Ramallah. Insinuations ripple out of the high tables of Oxbridge. And steadily, whether from the street or the salon, one hears the enduring old cry: Hep! Hep! Hep!

As I write, fresh news arrives — evidence of the fulfillment of one martyr’s hope. An Israeli doctor and his twenty-year-old daughter have this day been blown up together in a café, where they had gone for a father-daughter talk on the eve of the young woman’s marriage. She had been devoting her year of national service to the care of children with cancer; her ambition was to study medicine for the sake of such children. Her father was an eminent and remarkable physician, the tireless head of a hospital emergency room which tends the victims of terror attacks. He had just returned from the United States, where he was instructing American doctors in the life-saving emergency techniques he had pioneered. Father and daughter were buried on what was to have been the daughter’s wedding day.

Cynthia Ozick is the author of many books, among them the novels The Messiah of Stockholm and The Shawl. Her new novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, will be published this fall. She has written in this magazine of Christian courage in the Holocaust and of God’s love; that latter essay appears in God Is Love, a collection of the best spiritual essays from these pages, proceeds of which go to scholarships on The Bluff. “Hep!...” is drawn from a longer essay in a new book called Those Who Forget the Past: The Question of Anti-Semitism, edited by Ron Rosenbaum.