The Righteous: Prologue
Rabbi Jeffrey Schesnol, MAJS, PMP
Arizona Jewish Historical Society Associate Director
To attempt to understand why Righteous people were so important for Survivors, we need to briefly view historical antisemitism, how Nazism combined traditional religious antisemitism with modern racism to create a new kind of hatred, and why antisemitism was and continues to be a threat to all minorities, faiths, and beliefs.
Anti-Semitism has been called the “longest lie” and remains a phenomenon that as I say knows no national boundaries. Through vigilance and wakefulness, we have tried to confront it in every corner and in every country and in every region of the world. And in Europe the enormity of the Holocaust compelled Europe's peoples to begin the critical task of self-examination, confronting hateful action stemming from poisonous attitudes and beliefs which permeated Europe for nearly 17 centuries, helping to demonize the people and preparing the way for the unthinkable. This painful realization of how homegrown hatred sowed the seeds for genocide remains a significant force in Europe today. Yet now, over 75 years after the Holocaust, the fact remains that across Europe, from East to West, anti-Semitism lives and is gaining momentum. The perpetrators of these acts across Europe and elsewhere largely are individuals or members of groups who are deeply hostile to democracy and pluralism. Some are neo-Nazis who express their admiration for Adolph Hitler. Others are racist skinhead groups active in many countries, and many are violent religious extremists who distort the religion of Islam to suit their own intolerant political aims.
From a historic perspective, prejudice against Jews both open and latent has long been present in Europe. But it is important to distinguish between deep-seated prejudice against Jews and the use of anti-Semitism for political manipulation.
Racial antisemitism is prejudice against Jews based on a belief or assertion that Jews constitute a distinct race or ethnic group that has inherent traits or characteristics that are in some way abhorrent or inherently inferior or otherwise different from that of the rest of society. The abhorrence may be expressed in the form of stereotypes or caricatures. Racial antisemitism may present Jews, as a group, as being a threat in some way to the values or safety of society compared to religious antisemitism, which is prejudice against Jews and Judaism based on their faith. "The dividing line was the possibility of effective conversion ... a Jew ceased to be a Jew upon baptism." However, with racial antisemitism, "Now the assimilated Jew was still a Jew, even after baptism ... . From the Enlightenment onward, it is no longer possible to draw clear lines of distinction between religious and racial forms of hostility towards Jews... Once Jews have been emancipated and secular thinking makes its appearance, without leaving behind the old Christian hostility towards Jews, the new term antisemitism becomes almost unavoidable, even before explicitly racist doctrines appear."
Scientific racism, the ideology that genetics played a role in group behavior and characteristics, was highly respected and accepted as fact between 1870 and 1940. It was not only antisemites who believed in race science but highly educated Jews, among others, as well. This acceptance of race science made it possible for antisemites to clothe their hatred of Jews in scientific theory.
The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg developed a variant of this theory in his writings, arguing that Jewish people were not a "real" race. According to Rosenberg, their evolution resulted from the mixing of pre-existing races (black, white, and yellow) rather than natural selection. The theory of semiticization was typically associated with other longstanding racist fears about the dilution of racial differences through miscegenation, which were manifested in negative images of mulattos and other mixed groups.
Racial antisemitism has existed alongside religious antisemitism since the Middle Ages, and maybe longer. In Spain even before the Edict of Expulsion of 1492, Spanish Jews who converted to Catholicism (Conversos in Spanish), and their descendants, were called New Christians. They were frequently accused of lapsing back to their former religious practices (being "Crypto-Jews"). To isolate Conversos, the Spanish nobility developed an ideology called "cleanliness of blood" limpieza de sangre. The conversos were called "New Christians" to indicate their inferior status within society. That ideology was a form of racism, because in the past, there were no grades of Christianity and converts to Christianity had equal standing with life-long Christians. Cleanliness of blood was an issue of ancestry, not an issue of personal religion.
The logic of racial antisemitism was extended in Nazi Germany, where racial antisemitic ideas were turned into laws, which looked at the "blood" or ethnicity of people, rather than their current religious affiliations, and their subsequent fate would be determined purely on that basis. When added to its views on the Jewish racial traits which Nazi pseudoscience devised, the logic of racial antisemitism led to the Holocaust as a way to eradicate conjured up "Jewish traits" from the world.
German Aryan beliefs were based on ethnic “purity.” To be an American is not to be part of any ethnic group but to be part of something that transcends ethnicity. To be an American is to buy in to an idea that pluralism is good and that a multiplicity of peoples and ideologies and races and religions can coexist. This is at the heart of the American experiment. And to be an American is to buy in to the idea that not only can they coexist, but that in coexisting civilly, they will add up to a sum far greater than their parts. It is to know that one is not part of an ethnic group but of a group that transcends and potentially includes all ethnic groups. So true Americans can never be tribalists or racists. If we ever put one group above another group, we are denying ourselves and the core beliefs that make us Americans. Antisemitism is antithetical to freedom and democracy.
Several people have written or said: “If one person is not free than no one is free.”
“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” - Emma Lazarus
Civil rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer noted that “Nobody's free until everybody's free.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
And it was the German theologian, Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller, who wrote his famous poem expressed:
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.”
Jordan Holiday/Pixabay
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