Here are transcripts of the speeches at this 2013 conference at Ben Gurion University in Israel.
Dr. Sharon Pardo, Director Centre for the Study of European Politics and Society, gave welcoming remarks:
Last year when we discussed Europe Day, we at
CSEPS, decided to celebrate this year’s Europe Day in a
unique and original way. We decided to embark on a
new project that will examine and discuss the Jewish
contribution to the European integration project.
I admit that when we thought of the theme of this
workshop, which from now on will be an annual event,
we had in mind Milan Kundera’s famous 1998 essay on
“The Tragedy of Central Europe” in which Kundera
suggests that no other part of the world was as
illuminated by Jewish energies as was the centre of
Europe. In Kundera’s own words:
“Aliens everywhere and everywhere at home, lifted
above national quarrels, the Jews in the twentieth
century were the principal cosmopolitan, integrating
element in central Europe: They were its intellectual
cement, a condensed version of its spirit, creators of its
spiritual unity.”
Such iconic Jews were viewed by some as representing
Europe’s first supra-national and multicultural entity
and, from the nineteenth century onwards, were
depicted as the essence of “Europeaness”, consisting of
cosmopolitanism, anti-nationalism and the principles of
the liberal order.
Hannah Arendt, the controversial German-American
political theorist even went further in her 1968 book
“Men in Dark Times” and depicted the Jews as
“Europe’s Chosen people” – in her words:
“The position and functions of the Jewish people in
Europe predestined them to become the “good
European” par excellence. The Jewish middle classes of
Paris and London, Berlin and Vienna, Warsaw and
Moscow were in fact neither cosmopolitan nor
international, though the intellectuals among them
thought of themselves in these terms. They were
European, something that could be said of no other
group.”
Yet were such Jews really cosmopolitan, international
and European? Were they Europe’s Chosen people, the
heroes of the European integration project, and if so
what does it tell us about the founding fathers of the
European integration project and their imagined
community today? It appears that Jews have, or at
least had, a lot to live up to in Europe. What happened
to the Jewish contribution to the European integration
project? What happened to such Jewish Europeans? Did
they all go in a puff of crematorium smoke?
The Jew has always been deemed to have competing
loyalties and affiliations, being a member of a religion,
an ethnic group, and even at one point a ‘race’. To the
extent, therefore, that the European integration project
is creating a similar crisis at the heart of European
citizenry, today all Europeans are, in some
metaphorical sense, Jews.
Interestingly enough, this metaphorical sense is not
lost on EU leadership, who often speak of the need to
learn from the history of European Jews and draw on
European Jewry as a model for emulation within the
EU. As Romano Prodi, former President of the European
Commission and former Italian Prime Minister has put
it:
“I believe we can learn a lot from the history of the
Jews of Europe. In many ways they are the first, the
oldest Europeans… We, the new Europeans, are just
starting to learn the complex art of living with multiple
allegiances – allegiance to our home town, to our own
region, to our home country, and now to the European
Union. The Jews have been forced to master this art
since antiquity. They were both Jewish and Italian, or
Jewish and French, Jewish and Spanish, Jewish and
Polish, Jewish and German. Proud of their ties with
Jewish communities throughout the continent and
equally proud of their bonds with their own country.”
In fact, the EU leadership views European Jewry as
somehow the constitutive minority of the Union,
despite or rather precisely because the most patently
historical link between the European project and
European Jewry is the Second World War. After all, the
EU was born out of the atrocities of the past as an
effort to reconcile the religious, cultural and linguistic
differences of Europe.
Moreover, to the extent that religious tensions continue
to affect the European space, the EU leaders expect the
Jewish communities to take a central role in improving
and promoting inter
-religious and inter
-community
relations in the EU. In practical terms, this means an
expectation that European Jewish communities work to
improve their relations with the Muslim communities in
all EU Member States, and that Jews living in the EU
Member States broaden their struggle against anti
–
Semitism to include other categories of racial and
religious discrimination, including of course
Islamophobia.Another expectation that the EU has from its Jewish
communities regards Israel. The EU views the Jewish
communities as a broker that brings it closer to Israel,
or in another words, as a bridge between the EU and
Israel. EU leadership expects the Jewish communities
to assist the EU institutions in cementing the ties with
Israel.
An author uses the moniker The End of Zion critiques:
Imagine holding an international conference in which European speakers claimed that Whites are “Israel’s Chosen People” and the “essence of Hebrewness” due to their leading role in the destruction of Jewish identity and the forced integration of millions of Blacks and Moslems into Israel, and you’ll have an idea of just how absurd and offensive this all is.
German goy Michael Mertes says: “Nationalism (at any rate its ethnocentric version) had identified the Jews as an alien minority, excluded them from the Volksgemeinschaft – the national community – and finally treated them as enemies who had no right to life. In that sense, the fight against nationalism and the fight against anti-Semitism have always been two sides of the same coin.”
“Should the Euro crisis considerably strengthen right-wing extremist parties that openly advocate anti-foreigner policies and an anti-Semitic worldview, Article 7 could become a serious option.”
Article 7 is cited as follows:
“[The] Council, acting by a majority of four fifths of its members after obtaining the consent of the European Parliament, may determine that there is a clear risk of a serious breach by a Member State of the values referred to in Article 2. … [The Council] may decide to suspend certain of the rights deriving from the application of the Treaties to the Member State in question, including the voting rights of the representative of the government of that Member State in the Council.”
