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fice," the doctor says, "and there's not one of them who one way or
another isn't persecuted. Yes.
Ellerybody's
persecuted. The poor by the
rich, the rich by the poor, the black by the white, the white by the
black, the men by the women, the women by the men, the Catholics by
the Protestants, the Protestants by the Catholics." If the doctor were
theorizing in 1994, he would add Croats, Serbs, Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds ,
Tibetans, Zulus, Qhosas, Tutsis, and a hundred others. "And of course,"
he concludes in an ironic turn, "all of them [are persecuted] by the
Jews." What the doctor hopes
to
urge on us is that anti-Semitism is
simply an instance of the prevalence of scapegoats, perhaps a little more
resilient, but surely not different in kind.
Let us return to the body. Over the whole stretch of the globe, only
a Jew has been elevated to become the Body of God, and only Jews
have been charged with hanging and piercing the Body of God. Yet the
Jew as reviler of divinity, and the blood libel itself, are older than
Christianity. Damocritus , a Greek chronicler, claimed that once every
seven years Jews kidnapped a foreigner and cut up his body into little
pieces. Apion, in a later version, said that the Jews ate the entrails of the
murdered man while swearing an oath of hatred. Manetho, an Egyptian
priest, explained that the Hebrews were lepers whose aim was to destroy
the temples of Egypt. Lysimachus ascribed to Moses the injunction to
desecrate the gods of Greece. For the Greeks, the Jews were atheists:
they did not bow to the Pantheon. For Christianity, the Jews were anti–
Christ: they did not acknowledge the divine nature of Jesus. The re–
formers Luther and Mohammed, having rooted out local idolatries,
summoned the Jews to join in the new revelation. When the Jews
would not yield, Luther compared the Talmud to turds and the Koran
declared that in the circumstance of their unbelief the Jews were as apes.
It
is true that the stranger and the alien are everywhere scorned.
Tribe battles tribe. Ancient antipathies erupt, social patterns alter and
squeeze, land and borders embitter, economic tribulations press hard. The
persecutors find their reasons; terror alibis ax and bomb. Imperialism,
colonialism, capitalism, Marxism, fundamentalism, the gulag, the slave
trade, the Trail of Tears, the Armenian genocide, and on and on: the
roster of villainies engenders its roster of victims. Every scapegoat is the
spawn of one
ism
or another. Every
ism
lusts to spew out a foreign body.
For every Crusade, a Jewish community bloodied. For every Stalin, a
Doctors' Plot. Yes, it is
also
the Jews, but it is not
only
the Jews. Jews
become victims for the same reasons many other groups have been vic–
timized, in one place or another, because of this folly or that: the insan–
ity over the presence ofJews has a thousand parallels.
Here is a hypothesis that explains everything. Its sociological plausi-
