In his preface, Professor Lindemann makes the point that in the 19th Century, “it was almost universally assumed, by both Jews and non-Jews, that Jewish behavior was the all-too-obvious cause of the appearance of modern anti-Semitism.” Today it is universally assumed in polite society that Jewish behavior has nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
My view is that different groups have different interests and that these interests frequently clash. What is called “anti-Semitism” is just one aspect of clashing group interests. There are times when it is in the Jewish interest to restrict the rise of Gentiles and there are times when it is in the Gentile interest to restrict the rise of Jews. Resources are scarce and sometimes there is conflict until one group decisively wins and every other group loses.
Esau’s tears were perfectly understandable. They were not the result of some “mysterious fantasy about a wholly innocent Jacob.” Then and now.
“The inclination to picture Jews as perennially helpless victims, in no sense responsible for the ills that have afflicted them, has often been part of an unsophisticated and transparently defensive reflex.”
* The average medieval Jew was better off than the average medieval Christian. (Salo Baron)
* “The belief of Jews in premodern times that they, God’s chosen people, had been condemned by their god, because of their own sins, to live in subjugation in the polluted lands of the uncircumcised, the brutal, the unclean, the eaters of filth — of the reviled Children of Esau — took on new forms in a modern context Jews in late ancient times and in the Middle Ages found it easy to harbor a sense of superiority… But that comfortable and sustaining assumption of superiority became ever more tenuous with the advances of European civilization in the modern period… Increasingly, informed, sensitive Jewish observers began to feel that Jews were being left behind…”
* “It is not surprising, then, that many Jews have been, since the early nineteenth century, powerfully attracted to those modern secular ideologies that managed to reaffirm indirectly, with a new language, an older sense of the tainted qualities of Gentle life. Indeed, these ideologies carried a potent double message: The Other Nations were responsible not only for Jewish suffering (by their unjust and unprovoked attacks on innocent Jews) but also for Jewish backwardness…
“To reason that Jews were themselves responsible primarily…to blame for their backwardness eventually became as unacceptable to many Jews as it is to reason that Jews were to blame for the hatred directed at them.”
“Such modern ideologies as socialism, Zionism, and various forms of the psychiatric worldview all emphasize the tainted or sick qualities of modern Gentile existence, be it in exploitative capitalism, decadent bourgeois society, aggressive nationalism, or repressive Victorian prudery. Jewish frustration, anxiety, and rage at being considered inferior…found an alluring outlet in these ideologies — and a hope for eventual redemption.”
* “In purely numerical terms, [Hitler] reduced [Europe’s] Jewish population to something like what it had been…before the 18th Century.”
* Baruch Spinoza saw “that Jewish separatism and sense of superiority, linked to Jewish religious rituals that insult, denigrate, and threaten other religions, have been the fundamental factors in evoking hatred for Jews throughout the ages.”
Arthur Koestler said: “The Jewish religion, unlike any other, is racially discriminatory, nationally segregative, and socially tension-creating.”
Koestler said that during a break from raping women.
