ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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chatological drive is always directed against the Jews. This is a murky
apocalyptic fantasy-world, imbued with sadistic visions and colored at
times by occult sectarianism, permeated with notions of retributive pun–
ishment on a cosmic scale if the implacable enemy is not eradicated in
time. Yet this negative millenarianism, with its vision of the satanic,
ubiquitous, immoral and all-powerful Jews or scheming Zionists, is often
harnessed to a cold, calculating political agenda, turning anti-Semitism
into a crucial lever of mass mobilization and totalitarian control. Did
not Hitler tell Hermann Rauschning that it was from the
Protocols
that
he had learned the methods of "political intrigue, the technique of
conspiracy, revolutionary subversion as well as prevarication, deception
and organization"
?
Any attempt to analyze the resurgence of anti-Semitism in so many
parts of the globe, less than fifty years after the Holocaust, must come to
grips with this miasma of nightmarish paranoia, millennial fantasy,
homicidal hatred and sheer political cynicism. It must always take into
account the special and peculiar Christian hatred of the Jew that
ultimately derives from the ambiguous origins of Christianity and it
obsession with the non-recognition of the Jewish people of Christ as the
true Messiah. It has to take cognizance of the seething hatreds unleashed
in a radicalized Islam, not only against Israel and Zionism, but also
against Judaism and the Jews, whose history is now being vilified by some
Muslims in a fashion previously unknown. It has to deal with the
unraveling of the Messianic vision of Communism in Central and Eastern
Europe which has generated a revival of "national" and "Christian"
values against the intangible cabal of "cosmopolitan" and "godless"
conspirators, still allegedly striving for world domination. This free–
floating anti-Semitism, for which the actual presence of Jews is almost
immaterial, thrives on archetypal fears, anxieties and reflexes that seem to
defy any rational analysis.
More alarming still is the advanced state of decay within the Com–
munist heartland of the Soviet Union, where the ground appears to be
burning under the feet of the still substantial Jewish minority. Trapped in
a crossfire of nationalist hysteria, ethnic conflicts, mass deprivation, and
the possibility of civil war as internal centrifugal forces undermine the
arthritic colossus of Communist power, Soviet Jewry is fleeing
en masse
to
the Jewish homeland of Israel. Not even the Scud missiles of the Iraqi
dictator can stay the exodus from the bleak despair of the "socialist" fa–
therland, to which Soviet Jews had once given their life-blood and
intellectual energies.
In the light of these momentous transformations and the continuing
threat of anti-Semitism, the historian might well be tempted to question
the value of rational analysis and the applicability of the normal tools of
