Pogroms Are Back

(AP Photo/Francisco Seco)

Did you know that Jews make up only 0.2% of the world’s population?

One-fifth of 1%. Statistically speaking the Jewish population is only a rounding error. And if many people get their way, Jews will be rounded up and then rounded down to 0%.

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Despite being so few in number, or perhaps because they are both few in number and easily identified, they have become the world’s whipping boy, blamed for all the troubles in the world. They are the object of the 2-minute hate, the subject of the conspiracy theory, and the convenient target for the rage of people unhappy with their lives.

During the Middle Ages, in dark times rumors would spread of Jews committing atrocities, and it was those secret atrocities that were the underlying cause of whatever ailed society. Where Jews weren’t available to hate, witches were invented as a convenient substitute.

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Out of this dark history came the pogrom, the sudden and violent outburst of rage directed at the Jews. Pogroms were localized, as such things were when communications were slow and social media immediacy nonexistent. Russia was famous for its pogroms–the word is Russian in origin–but it was hardly alone in its Jew hatred. It’s just that, as in so many things, Russia remained unsophisticated and brutal long after the Western Europeans became more sophisticated and subtle, expressing their hate and suspicion more in whispers and discrimination.

The Jews, for the most part, responded in one of two ways: emigrate or assimilate. The US has such a large population of Jews, relatively speaking, because of the first solution. In Germany, however, Jews went to extraordinary lengths to assimilate, and we all know how that worked out. In the most civilized and sophisticated country in Europe at the time the instinct for blaming the Jews led to one of the great mass slaughters in history.

Emigration looked in retrospect to be the better solution.

After the Holocaust, the world agreed, generally, that the formal creation of a Jewish homeland made sense, and the ancestral home of the Jews–where many still lived–was reborn as Israel. Contrary to current myth, there never really was a Palestine–the region was part of the Ottoman Empire which collapsed after World War I. The Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic and relatively sophisticated (it was considered a European power), and nobody in 1914 could have predicted that the Middle East would turn back into a medieval dystopia.

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Since its creation, Israel has assumed the role of international whipping boy, just as Jews as a people have occupied that role for millennia. No country has been as vilified by the United Nations as Israel. Atrocities can be committed against Israelis and fail to be condemned, while Israel’s mere existence is often treated as an affront.

Over the past 3 weeks, we have seen a remarkable–to us, if not to many Jews–explosion of Jew hatred around the world. Within hours of a vicious, barbaric attack on Israeli civilians the haters of the world jumped up to blame the Jews for existing. They deserved the horrors inflicted upon them, we were told.

Here in the Western world our best and brightest stood alongside the most barbaric people in the world and declared their fealty to Jew hatred. But for the Jews, all the problems in the world would evaporate. Jews are “settler colonialists” in their own homeland. They deserved to be raped, murdered, tortured, and kidnapped.

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It is resistance!

It’s the same impulse to pogrom as has existed since God taught Abraham that human sacrifice was wrong.

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