A Pfefferkorn rant

Reflections on a book by an attention-seeking academic The question of ‘Who is a Jew’ has been frequently and inconclusively debated. The question of ‘who doesn’t want to be a Jew’ almost answers itself since lapsed Jews have a habit of turning on their former coreligionists. Half a millennium ago the apostate Johannes Pfefferkorn helped the Dominican friars to generate a wave of Judeophobia in the Rhineland with allegations that the Talmud was full of anti-Christian blasphemy. Several centuries later another Rhenish Jew, Karl Marx, excoriated Jews as germ carriers of the “spirit of capitalism”. Marx’s Jewish self-hate was far exceeded by that of Otto Weininger, who regarded Jews (and women) as the lowest form of human life; feeling incapable of transcending his own Jewishness – as Jesus had done – Weininger committed suicide. Around 1920 the satirists Kurt Tucholsky and Karl Kraus created Herr Wendriner and ‘der alte Biach’ as risible Jewish hate figures. Simultaneously, activists of the yevsektsia persecuted rabbis and closed down chedarim all over Russia. Then came the Holocaust in whose aftermath any outright disavowal of Judaism would plainly have been untenable. However, a substitute soon arose. This was anti-Zionism – which appealed to Jews anxious to appear untouched by gut feelings of ‘my people right or wrong’, and above all to terribles simplificateurs of the Left who pilloried Israel as a catspaw of the U.S. in the Middle East. The latest of these simplificateurs is Professor Norman Finkelstein. He was unfortunate in that his The Holocaust Industry (Verso, 2000) came out in the UK at around the time Prime Minister Barak was offering unprecedented concessions to the Palestinians – unfortunate because the book repeats the well-worn litany of Israel’s ‘appalling’ human rights record. Where Finkelstein does break new ground is in his assertion that Holocaust awareness is an artificial construct manufactured by the US and Israeli Governments after the Six-Day War to underpin Israel’s victory (and with it American dominance in the Middle East). He argues that by equating anti-zionism with antisemitism, the two have created a situation in which the pressing of Arab claims can be ruled out of court as antisemitic. This is an allegation the falsehood of which almost approximates to that of Holocaust denial itself. The slow pace at which awareness of the Holocaust seeped into the world’s consciousness can be ascribed to a variety of causes: the pressing needs of post-war reconstruction; the reluctance of survivors to relive traumas by telling their tale (a reluctance compounded by the fear of being disbelieved); the unfathomable enormity of what had happened; the time lapse between the Nuremberg Trials, the publication of the Wannsee Protokoll and the Eichmann Trial; cold war pressures and so forth. Who, apart from the US and Israeli Governments, are the beneficiaries – in Finkelstein’s book – of this artificially created, exaggerated Holocaust awareness? They are, as it were, the tycoons of the ‘Holocaust industry’ whom the professorial author bespatters with remarkably unacademic ad hominem invective. His hit list includes Edgar Bronfman of the World Jewish Congress, Saul Kagan of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, Rabbi Israel Singer of the World Jewish Restitution Organisation, Simon Wiesenthal and Eli Wiesel. The aforementioned, and their lawyer accomplices, stand accused of using the Holocaust to blackmail diverse governments, German firms and Swiss banks in pursuit of nefarious political aims as well as of fat salaries. To make the charge stick, Finkelstein constructs a Marxist model of postwar Jewry, in which a ruling class of ‘Holocaust industrialists’ manipulate and exploit a proletariat of genuine camp survivors (who include his own mother) and ordinary Jews. To crown it all, this latterday Pfefferkorn claims that by integrating the Holocaust into the chain of disasters that befell the native Americans, the Armenians, the Rwandans etc, and by querying hugely inflated compensation claims, he mitigates the damage the Holocaust lobby has inflicted on the good name of Jews.