This is another essay that first appeared on my Yahoo360 page on March 21, 2006. I repost it here in response to a question I answered today in Yahoo Answers, once again seeing people who don't appear to believe they're harboring any antisemitism, USING some canards of the antisemite to try to explain why Jews are hated.
One of them was that Jews keep to themselves with our strange customs...well that only describes a very small percentage of Jews if you're talking about a somewhat cloistered environment, and the worst antisemitism the world has known happened to the MOST assimilated group of Jews in the world first..in Germany. Now here is the essay as it appeared there, addressing other forms of stereotype and bigotry that some don't recognize as such and perhaps why:
Every time I think I’ve heard all the excuses or stories to justify Jew hate, I’m amazed all over again. Despite years of study of trying to figure out why there is bigotry in the world particularly Jew hate and hate against blacks, the two forms I’ve seen first hand the closest, I’m coming across new versions of propaganda daily. These two types of stories may not be new to you, but they were to me. They also show me how our human nature is so easily led to believe tales that can seen quite plausible at first glance and help bigotry to grow when the tales are passed along from people who aren’t intentionally promoting prejudice.
First, the story that inspired me to pen this today: It came from someone that I view as intelligent and not one prone to promotion of bigotry or hate, yet his telling of this helps to clearly show how bias can grow from mistaken notions and even become accepted by people who do not like bigotry! He made mention that the Germans hated the Jews of Germany not so much because of religious differences but because during the Depression the Jews were much better off than the gentile Germans and would not “ share” their wealth as Germans. They were indifferent to the poor gentiles and only took care of their own.. Now, in his assuming that this was true to begin with, that the gentiles of Germany were all poor and the vast majority of Jews were all very wealthy and that the hate was from jealousy and from the greed of the wealthy Jew, he fell prey to many false stereotypes; so many that I was even hesitant in the conversation to start listing all the problems wrong with that assumption. Instead, I made mention rather feebly of the fact that the vast majority of the Jews of Germany suffered equally in the failing economy of Europe. I was rather dumbfounded at seeing these words from someone I thought educated and someone who did not believe he harbored an antisemitic bone in his body.
Here I shall try to address a few other misconceptions, just in case there are other people out there who think similarly. While there WERE wealthy Jews in Germany, there were statistically still far greater number of wealthy Gentiles, who were far less philanthropic toward their fellow Germans. Don’t take my word on this. I’m not going to provide various historic resources in this essay because it’s primarily based on my memory of things I’ve read over many years, in books, magazines, and on the internet. I’m sure it would not be difficult to ascertain the statistics from a reputable site on the percentages of various groups and their economic status. Then as now, the greatest wealth in the world is not in the hands of the Jews despite the propaganda. The Jews of Germany were in fact, quite philanthropic to their nation in the years before Hitler took power, this despite the fact that Germany’s wealthy Jews had already been supporting attempts to save hundreds of thousands of very poor Eastern European Jews from the many pogroms that had been raging for already 40 years. Yes, many of the wealthy Jewish Germans did only concentrate on helping Jews and saving Jews and purchasing land in Eretz Yisrael starting in the 1880s, because NO ONE ELSE WOULD LIFT A FINGER to stop the hatred and very real persecution that led to the Holocaust.
Because of the dire straits of the Jewish populace in Europe in the 19th century and early 20th century, German Jewish business owners were often chastised at the time in Jewish newspapers both in Europe and the U.S. for donating more to non-Jewish charities than Jewish charities. Those were the German Jews and the American Jews who had assimilated the most and who were accused of identifying themselves much more with their German nationalism or their American nationalism than with their Jewishness. In the years before the Holocaust it was not uncommon for the more assimilated German Jew to place some of the blame the hatred their Jewish brethren were experiencing on their unwillingness to become more “ modern". It was also hard for the non-Jew to realize that one could be both for one’s own smaller group AND for the larger group as a whole. Even their charity toward non-Jew was often seen as an attempt to “ Judaize” the populace. They were stuck between a rock and a hard place, and could not appease either group. Often when Jewish groups would seek donations for charity and aid for Jews, the wealthy assimilated Jew responded to say that they felt that it was more important to care for the community as a whole rather than just the Jews. They wanted to show the rest of the Germans that they were true Germans like everyone else. After all many of them had roots going back centuries there, too. And Tikkun Olam or Repair of the World doesn’t mean just the Jewish community, and this is what they claimed to be honoring.
Judaism stresses deed over creed and that was a time when no one else would aid Jewish poor other than Jews. Therefore, I cannot fault the wealthy German Jew for first aiding their own. Nor can I see that their so doing even if it were true that most would only aid their own would have implied they were being cruel to the poor gentile or taking away from them unscrupulously. There were many more gentile wealthy and elite who took from both Jew and gentile than greedy Jew, by sheer numbers alone. I don’t justify greed here at all; I’m trying to show that the accusation is yet another way to justify hate. Many Jews were trying unsuccessfully to help their own in a time of growing hate and persecution. The Nazis didn’t create Jew hate and the Depression didn’t either. It had been growing for centuries. Jews were fleeing Europe in the 1800s in massive numbers. This is why all ship's manifests coming from Europe had special quotas to limit Jews specifically, and they kept track by designating them as “ Hebrew”. Go check for yourself at Ellis Island.org on any ships manifest from those days with immigrants from Eastern Europe. Non-Jews did not have their religious status designated.
The Depression allowed for the wealthy Jew to be put in a position where no matter what he did, he could not justify his existence in the mind of the antisemite. In trying to lend a hand to give to non-Jewish poor, he was accused of Judaizing and propagandizing to undermine Germany. If he chose to only help his fellow Jew, he was accused of being against gentiles! Another thing not taken into consideration in accepting the notion that wealthy German Jewish behavior was provoking a backlash to greed ignores that in the Depression, many poor German Jewish families and poor Jews from all over Eastern Europe were sometimes kept alive through harsh factory work and Jewish mother wet-nurses to gentile babies from wealthy Christian European families.
This leads to another episode of my running into a seemingly intelligent person who presented me with an absurd notion of Jewish culture and history. History has become so perverse as of late, that upon hearing a woman here in Arkansas try to claim that Jewish women all over Europe and particularly in Germany wouldn’t nurse their own babies and so they farmed them out to poor gentiles rather than be bothered and they didn’t care about their own babies, the other women present didn't even raise an eyebrow. She gave me this bit of “information” when I was discussing breast-feeding with some mutual acquaintances and she overheard me to say I’d nursed my child until he was 2 years old. She expressed shock and said to me that I couldn’t possibly really be Jewish or must have learned that from the non-Jews I lived with here as she never knew Jewish mothers breastfed, and exclaimed, “ None that I’ve EVER heard of did so, especially in my mother’s generation, they think it’s beneath them!” I asked her how many Jewish mothers she knew and she fell silent. I was astounded at this absurd and false tale, an almost opposite portrayal from what I knew to have really happened. I once spoke with a non-Jewish woman of Jewish ancestry at a breastfeeding support group years ago and she told of her grandparents escape from Nazi Europe. She said her mother as a baby shared her grandmother’s breast with the child of a German gentile who grew up to serve in Hitler’s army. She bitterly said that she wished Jewish mothers had not nursed those babies to grow healthy and strong to later persecute and try to kill her grandmother and her children. How ironic that a number of the anti- semites who placed Jews in camps were once suckling at the breast of a Jew! Perhaps this thought enraged them so much that now the story is twisted to make the European Jewish mother image into a cold and uncaring woman. How this contrasts with the other stereotype of the Jewish mother who is overly concerned with every aspect of the life of her children. They can’t seem to make up their mind about what kind of bad mothers Jewish women are, can they? My Jewish grandmother breastfed my father and all his 8 siblings until they were toddler age. That was the common thing to do at that time. My maternal Jewish grandmother did not breastfeed but not because she didn’t desire to do so. My Jewish mother breastfed me and my brother In fact, with my own extended family, it is the Jewish babies who were almost exclusively the one’s who were breastfed rather than the babies born to the mothers who either converted to Christianity or who were Christians who married the Jewish men in the family. I never even bothered to think about such differences until I was presented with such an absurd bigoted statement. I’ve never polled or done studies to see if breast feeding had any corelation to religion, but I knew that such a claim that Jewish women did not breastfeed was utterly absurd.
Observant Jewish mothers would never have allowed their babies to be nursed by women who did not eat a kosher diet. In communities where Jew and gentile lived side by side, I am sure it was not an uncommon thing for a Christian woman to wet-nurse a Jewish child. However, this incensed the Church; Pope Gregory XIII in 1581 in his list of conditions that he commanded a Jew must be submitted to the Inquisition included the act of having a wet-nurse empty their milk after having taken the Eucharist. (Like it should be a surprise that a Jewish mom wouldn’t want her baby eating the body and blood of Jesus, even if only symbolically?)
All over Europe with Jew and gentile alike, the wealthier, cosmopolitan European woman did not breast feed their own child. Royalty for centuries did not breastfeed their own. This was not a Jewish invention. I do not doubt that many of the wealthier secular Jewish German women who were trying to assimilate to fit in with the upper classes adopted the practices of their social peers and had someone else breast feed their child rather than ruin their figure, but even in that instance I cannot imagine that the job would be preferentially given to a gentile woman (I wonder if this too will be made into discrimination against the gentile to justify their hate, eh?) The kosher diet, which was seen as “ cleaner” than the diets of many very poor gentiles was also why the poor Jewish wet-nurse was so highly sought out over the poor gentile wet nurse among the wealthy cosmopolitan European woman who at that time was being taught that such a thing was left to what they sometimes called the “ vulgar masses”. And the poor wet nurse was more often than not from a religious or Orthodox family. . My very own grandmother was one such Jewish wet nurse but not in Germany, in Slonim, Poland for a time. This had been an established practice long before the Great Depression. My grandmother luckily was able to leave in 1920. I have a brief story about that in another essay.
I don't tell this narrative to point out that Jewish wet nurses were somehow superior or more caring. I have no reason to assume they were much different than any other poor mother who had to supplement her family’s meager means by giving nourishment of her own body and sometimes taking away from literally the mouth of her own flesh and blood. The poor wet nurse if she was not getting adequate nutrition and fluids risked not having enough milk for her own offspring as the child she was being paid to nurse had to come first. And not every woman, Jew or gentile, who wet nursed another's child was poor and did it for money but fed the child of another who could not do so, simply because they were doing what had to be done to ensure the life of a fellow human.
I bring up these stories to illustrate that in trying to justify hatred, often quite absurd notions are used and with enough time and telling, start to become viewed by intelligent people as plausible. This is human nature. I’m sure there are things I’ve been told about aspects of other cultures that have been quite mistaken, in fact, since I’ve met some traditional Native American Indians, I know it for a fact. But I do try to educate myself and try to use a bit of reasoning to see if what is being said to me is congruent with the larger picture.
In the instance of both these stories, the wealthy German Jewish greed as the justification for Jew hate there, and the Jewish woman who was cold and farmed out her babies for the gentile poor to nurse at horrible wages and nearly starving their own child does not fit at all with the known customs or accepted cultural norms, let alone the many personal histories of the Jews who survived that time. They’re simply excuses to be used to deflect accountability and obfuscate the more deep-seated reasons that have been passed down for generations.
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