Anti-Semitism

Irrational evil marks history of Jew hatred

GREG SHERIDAN

It’s the oldest hate of all, and the most terrible.

A few weeks ago, long before the Hamas atrocities and the inevitable Israeli response in Gaza, I attended a modest suburban function. I couldn’t believe the security, the twostage vehicular entry, the multiple guards. Even in peaceful, cheerful, law-abiding Australia, a Jewish community centre needs perpetual guarding.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of Jews, is deranged, but widespread.

It’s the most difficult hatred of all to understand, partly because it’s irrational, evil and nourished from wildly divergent sources.

Today, several main strands of anti-Semitism disfigure our world. It’s to be found in the conspiratorial swamp fevers of the far left and far right, casually among cowardly universities (what’s the collective noun for vice-chancellors? a “lack” of principles), inferentially and unconsciously in countless media reports. It has a strong identity in the Arab world and in Islamist movements.

But let me say straight away the biggest source of anti-Semitism throughout history is Christianity.

These are hard words to say. I’m someone who believes Christianity is true, and that it’s been overwhelmingly a force for good. But the inheritance of anti- Semitism is a blight on Christian history.

It comes from faulty theology surrounding the idea that the Jews killed Christ. Of course, Christ was executed under Roman authority. The New Testament has remarks critical of “the Jews”. Properly understood, these refer exclusively to the temple authorities in Jerusalem at the time. Today we might say the Russians decided to invade Ukraine. Moral culpability resides only with the Moscow government, not the whole Russian people, or Russians in perpetuity.

John Barton in his absorbing treatment of Bible translation, The Word, recounts a proposal to substitute “Judaeans” to make clear the New Testament references are to a specific group of individuals at a specific time. Most modern bibles refer to “the Jewish authorities” rather than to the Jews.

In any event, it’s all 2000 years too late. The overwhelming majority of anti-Semitism today is not Christian. But it draws on centuries of images, stereotypes and lies perpetrated against Jews by some Christians.

Many of these images were propaganda inventions and fevered fantasies. In medieval times there grew up the idea that Jews killed Christian children to mix their blood in ritual bread. This was an imagined mimicry of Christ’s suffering and death. It was obscene, completely untrue.

This “blood libel” was condemned as a lie by popes, but it held an evil grip on popular imagination.

Much anti-Semitism was Catholic, though many Catholics understood the Jewishness of their own religion and admired the Jewish tradition. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, drew on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed.

The Reformation didn’t help Jews, and Protestants did their share of Jew hating. Martin Luther was a formidable theologian, but at a certain point he turned against Jews and authored some of the most savage anti-Semitic abuse. Over centuries, Jews were expelled from one European nation after another.

This, then, is religious anti- Semitism. It’s been denounced now by every Christian denomination.

Pope John Paul II apologised for Christian sins against Jews, saying: “We are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood.”

There’s religious anti-Semitism in Islam as well. The Koran, like the Christian New Testament, contains disparaging passages about Jews. Islamist extremists conflate this with political disputes involving Israel.

Much popular Arab media discourse is now frankly anti-Semitic; so is a portion of school curriculums.

Each new iteration of anti- Semitism has drawn on earlier iterations, especially the negative imagery and stereotypes. This is how evil lives on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Russian secret police concocted an epic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This purported to recount the proceedings of a group of Jewish elders plotting world domination, not least through finance power. Though everything about the Protocols was a lie, they are one of the most successful acts of black propaganda in history.

The Nazis combined the global domination lie of the Protocols with a racialised version of religious anti-Semitism. Because Jews had rejected Christ, they were seen as alien to Western culture.

The Nazis detested Christianity, as they detested all religion. But they knew they needed some kind of ersatz Nazi Christianity as part of their ideology.

Like some arms of Palestinian propaganda today, the Nazis thus decided Christ wasn’t really Jewish. They reserved special hatred for Paul, who with his universalism – “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” – had severed the link between blood and nationality, between ethnicity and citizenship.

The far right today continues with all the tropes of traditional anti-Semitism – Jewish global dominance, Jewish cultural otherness, and so on. If the Jews dominate the world, how did the Holocaust happen, you might ask. Just shows how fiendishly clever they are, is the demented right-wing conspiracy response.

Arab anti-Semitism always had its virulent side. The mufti of Jerusalem met Hitler in 1943 and the two were as one in their hatred of Jews. During the war, the mufti lent his support to Nazi SS recruitment campaigns.

The communist left always had a strong element of anti- Semitism. But popular left anti- Semitism really took off in the Cold War, during the alliance of Israel with the US. Leftist ideology grants no rights of indigenous identity to the Jews of the Middle East, casting them as a colonial, racist power acting on behalf of, or manipulating, the West.

Thus Jews are hated on the right because they are allegedly alien to Western culture, and they are hated on the left because they are allegedly exemplars of Western culture. The left’s antipathy to Israel, and its ignorant idealising of Islamist hatreds as “resistance”, have led to an irrational, hysterical hostility to Israel which is antiSemitism by another name.

All the different strands of anti-Semitism seem weirdly happy to link up and crossfertilise, to draw on the images and insults of their contradictory conspiracy theories and serially monstrous misunderstandings of the world.

In truth, the Jewish tradition is one of the most sublime, profound and beautiful the world has produced. Spend some time in the Old Testament if you don’t believe me. Read as your commentary the works of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

It’s also the case that the Jewish contribution to the arts, to science and to all branches of culture is magnificent. The world owes the sure knowledge of one God, the essence of monotheism, to Jewish experience and tradition.

The Old Testament in many ways is a continuous song of protest against the barbarities of ancient paganism.

Perhaps that’s the real cause of anti-Semitism. The Jews brought the Ten Commandments to the world. And the spirit of evil has never forgiven them.

The Voice Real Truth

 REAL TRUTHS THAT SHOULD BE TOLD GEOFFREY BLAINEY 

It must be hard for a prime minister to admit that he has been crushingly defeated in an electoral contest that he originally expected to win with ease. In one segment of his speech last Saturday night, Anthony Albanese praised himself as a bold man of conviction – as if he had actually won the referendum. 

Many viewers who at first sympathised with the Prime Minister on television regretted that he did not directly congratulate the two Aboriginal leaders who especially defeated him. Only one sentence was needed. He failed to speak that sentence. Yet in our long political history this probably was the most significant public victory yet achieved by Aboriginal campaigners. Moreover, they had fully digested and then condemned the controversial Uluru Statement from the Heart, but Albanese had not even digested it. 

As a political leader he has his merits, but command of crucial detail is not yet one of them. Alongside him on election night was Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. She offered no congratulations to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the talented senator by whom she had been overshadowed and outgunned this year. In the past 60 years there were notable victories in achieving Aboriginal goals but they owed more to mainstream or white Australian political leaders The victories also owed as much to High Court judges. 

Here was a unique event – a national triumph for two true-blue Aboriginal leaders, Nyunggai Warren Mundine and Price. Crucial to the national debate is the health of Indigenous people. It is often proclaimed to be a matter of urgency, almost of shame, that they have a “life expectancy eight years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians”. But that fact, standing on its own, is misleading. The life expectancy of us all, Aboriginal people included, has improved dramatically since 1788. Nearly every country in Africa has a much lower life expectation than Indigenous Australia. Even the EU displays more than an eight-year gap between member nations. There is even a wide gap between north and south England. Today Aboriginal Australians have a life expectancy equal to that of Bulgaria and rural Romania. Their life expectancy is higher than that in Russia and Ukraine. It is about the same as the average citizen of the world. Indeed, it soon would be improved if those Aboriginal men aged 40 and older were not heavy smokers. 

Of course we in the Western world – my generation included – taught them to smoke. Ownership of land remains another divisive topic. Federal departments some years ago should have investigated what proved to be right or wrong, sensible or misguided, in the way vast areas of land were transferred to Indigenous people. Should these new possessors of the land be exempted from paying taxes on this new but erratic source of income? Moreover, should the families who lived on native title lands be able to build a house and own the land? Instead, most of such land is held collectively, almost in Soviet fashion. 

Here is one of the most remarkable ventures in Australia’s modern history, indeed in world history, but some of the key effects are blanketed in silence or dispute. In all, an area of land twice as large as Indonesia and eight times as large as France has been transferred to Aboriginal Australians since 1975. The supporters of this transfer tend to excuse it or apologise for it by asserting that it is largely desert or semi-desert, but in fact it embraces or borders one of the main mining regions in the world. It also contains mini-regions with high rainfall and a potential for tropical agriculture as well as large expanses that are reserved for environmental reasons. 

Gary Johns, a minister in the Keating government, later became an alert investigator into Aboriginal affairs. In The Burden of Culture he is brave enough to conclude that the introduction of native title has proved to be a dubious reform: “The benefits are few and fitful; the costs are high; the disputes are many; the system will need to be propped up forever on the pretence that native title holders can contribute to the ‘north’ of Australia, or indeed, the remainder of Australia.” In Johns’ opinion, these unique kinds of land tenure that now occupy a little more than half of the nation are based on the faith that all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a spiritual affinity with their tribal lands, to which their spirit or soul, on death, must return. But most Indigenous people even in the Outback no longer cling to the religious faith that underpins the concept of native title. 

The censuses of 2016 and 2021 make this clear. I believe most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far, far better off today than if they were living in 1788. Price, after recently expressing a similar belief, was flayed by critics who had faint idea what daily life ashore was like before the coming of the First Fleet. Unfortunately, a minority of Aboriginal people still have to struggle with two different values and ways of life. This land is infinitely more fruitful than it was in 1788, and most Aboriginal people are now the gainers. The whole globe gains too. In some years Australia produces enough food to sustain probably 100 million people in the world as a whole. In the past decade it has produced for at least one billion people the minerals with which to build aircraft, railways, motorways, ships, cars, power stations, schools, stadiums and city apartments. 

Likewise, here in this continent arose a democratic society that, for all its imperfections, offers liberty in a world where liberty is not normal. The idea that Aboriginal people could have remained, even today, the only occupiers of this huge expanse of land is fanciful. How can the 1000 or more Aboriginal towns be helped? Have such tiny and remote towns a future? The question has to be asked again and again. It is an experiment rarely conducted in modern history – the creation of isolated towns that grow little of their own food, rely heavily on subsidies and social welfare, are mostly too small to attract a capable nurse, police officer or teacher, and provide few jobs for their poorly educated children. Most of these Aboriginal towns are too far apart to share amenities. They are also marred by family violence. The Uluru statement laments the high numbers of Aboriginal men in jail but does not mention that so many are there because they bash the women of their own race. This message Price has emphasised. Without saying so too loudly, she knows the so-called Stolen Generations were often Aboriginal children who had to be rescued for the sake of their own safety and welfare. 

Such remote and tiny towns can exist only in a nation that is wealthy enough to subsidise them on a generous scale. Yet many are eyesores, viewed by their few visitors as blots on the nation that allows them to exist. One argument in their favour is that the older people wish to retain their own culture and to oppose assimilation by an alien culture. On the other hand, the recent censuses reveal that Christian pastors – mostly Aboriginal – are more influential here than in most suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. A simple, short and accurate statement of the rival Yes and No cases is required for every referendum. This year, small but rival groups of federal parliamentarians had each summarised the arguments to be printed, side-by-side, in Your Official Referendum Booklet. The Australian government then printed millions of copies. Translated into many Indigenous and foreign languages, it reached more households than any bestselling novel in our history. At the front of the booklet, readers are assured they will find valuable information on where and how to vote if they turn to page 21. But the editors had forgotten to number the final pages. 

Even enthusiastic citizens must have been bored or even bamboozled, except for the occasional short quotations from lawyers speaking with some authority. Alas, the booklet did not even print the one-page Uluru Statement from the Heart. As this referendum involved more factors than any other in the past 100 years, a lucid source of information was vital. The booklet failed. In contrast, at the 1999 referendum on the proposed republic, a committee of four lawyers and historians – presided over by Ninian Stephen, the former High Court judge and governor-general – had issued a readable and careful assessment of the rival arguments. The present government seemed unwise to ignore such a precedent. Australia is one of the oldest continuous democracies in the world. Democracy is government by debate. The federation and the commonwealth were born only after long and extensive democratic debate extending from 1889 to 1900. In contrast, the present government has shunned or tried to minimise debate. 

We can now see that the debate conducted during the past year was indirectly a clash about two conflicting views of this nation’s history. Albanese’s view is of an Aboriginal Australia that was – for 60,000 or more years – a form of utopia. His vision owed much to historian Bruce Pascoe, an engaging speaker who by pretending to be Aboriginal tended to convince young people, and their teachers too, that he possessed an insider’s knowledge. Pascoe claimed the Aboriginal people invented democracy and that they lived in peace and prosperity until the Europeans invaded. The present government and its leader can hardly be attacked when the heads of the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and other universities actually promote a similar black-armband version of Australia’s history. Albanese was captivated by a heroic version of history even before he won the federal election last year. Persuaded that such a version had been deliberately hidden from us all, he announced that since 1788 our nation had provided largely a history of brutality – until the era of multiculturalism arrived. 

One day his project – though defeated in last Saturday’s referendum – may provoke or inspire a total rewriting of Australia’s history. Its official names will be Truth-telling and Makarrata, for they are embodied in the short Uluru statement: a document containing highly vulnerable accusations against mainstream Australia as well as several sobering statements about Aboriginal distress today. There are two different Australias. Admittedly, many Aboriginal Australians live in unsatisfactory and even appalling conditions. Also true is that a larger number in urban Australia have become important ingredients of our success as a modern nation. They are often overlooked. On election night we often gathered from commentators the idea that most Aboriginal Australians lived in the Northern Territory or in remote tropical outposts to the east and west. 

In fact, NSW, especially Sydney and its far western hinterland, is the nation’s stronghold of Aboriginal people. More live there than in any other state and territory; and an update from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the surprising advances they have made in the 10 years from 2011 to 2021. Their life expectations are higher than the referendum booklet dismally reported. Of their houses, the overwhelming numbers are not overcrowded. More than 40 per cent of these houses are owned outright or with a mortgage. The proportion of their students who pass year 12 or attend university and other tertiary institutions has soared. Successful Aboriginal leader Mundine, originally a tradie, was reared in one of these towns far west of Sydney. The Uluru statement, compiled by the leading large group of Indigenous activists, concludes that a revolutionary new era is beginning: “We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country.” But hosts of Aboriginal people have little need to leave their base camp in the big towns and cities and go trekking. They belong to the 21st century and share in its opportunities. 

Historian Geoffrey Blainey is the author of more than 40 books. His recent memoir is called Before I Forget (Penguin)