Guilt and Colony

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“The figure of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, has been explored and exploited many times over 2,000 years, seldom emerging with any credit. Medieval Christianity, for example, turned him into the archetypal Jew and used his example to justify its own murderous antisemitism.”*

The most famous Jew in literature, Shylock, was a demonic depiction of greed and malice, demanding a pound of flesh when Antonio defaulted on his loan. Portia’s plea for mercy in the court fell on deaf ears, and she then bested him with forensic logic. Were Shylock to collect his penalty, she argued, Antonio would bleed to death; this, the court agreed, was a conspiracy against a Venetian citizen. Half of Shylock’s estate was seized. The other half, in a victory for Christendom, he could keep only if he converted to Christianity. His daughter, meanwhile, ran away with a Christian and abandoned her Jewish heritage. Shakespeare was not subtle in proclaiming the victory of Christian civilisation over the greedy Jew, and as the celebrated literary critic Harold Bloom wrote**,

"One would have to be blind, deaf and dumb not to recognise that Shakespeare's grand, equivocal comedy The Merchant of Venice is nevertheless a profoundly anti-semitic work.”

Shakespeare’s work is always multi-layered, amenable to many degrees of interpretation, and a wonderful essay*** by Brandon Ambrosino asks whether the intent of Merchant of Venice was perhaps to “open the door for the questioning of the entrenched anti-Semitism of the day.” 

Perhaps. Nevertheless, two hundred and fifty years later, another iconic character in another great literary work reflected how the day of anti-Semitism ran into centuries. Like Judas, Fagin, in Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, “has red hair, and like Satan, he is compared to a serpent”, Irving Howe wrote in the introduction to the 1982 edition of the novel. This depiction did not impute an anti-Semitism to Dickens, Howe clarified, but came from “the collective folklore, the sentiments and biases habitual to Western culture, as these have fixed the Jew in the role of villain: thief, fence, corrupter of the young, surrogate of Satan, legatee of Judas.”

Apparently, a Jewish woman wrote to Dickens protesting against his depiction of Fagin. His reply, “It unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that the class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew".

All forms of phobia lean heavily on such cliches of depiction; uncontested, then stoked by political forces, they coalesce into wide acceptance. By 1930, Israeli author Amos Oz wrote, “Every wall in Europe said, Jews, go home to Palestine.”  Living in Vilnius, then in Poland, his grandfather knew they would have to move. For two years, the family “attempted to obtain immigration papers for France, Switzerland, America, a Scandinavian country and England. None of these countries wanted them: they all had enough Jews already. (‘None is too many’, ministers in Canada and Switzerland said at the time, and other countries did the same without advertising the fact.)”

And so in 1933, his father’s family,  “those disappointed lovers of Europe… emigrated half-heartedly, almost against their will, to Asiatic Asia…”. In Jerusalem, his grandmother fought the malevolent germs of the Levant for the remainder of her determined life.

It hardly bears retelling how and where the tide of anti-Semitism peaked. The Holocaust resulted in a vast catharsis of collective guilt, and the move towards a homeland for Jews took centerstage in global discussions, centred in the ascendant US.  Conveniently, though, the rehabilitation of Jews took place, not in Europe, or in the USA, but in Palestine, their lost land. Mahatma Gandhi examined the notion with spiritual clarity - “…if they must look to the Palestine of geography as their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British gun. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of the bayonet or the bomb. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs."

This was not to be, and in the endless cycle of violence that followed, there is enough blame to be shared around the world, not just by the actors located within the Land of Israel. The carnage that erupted last weekend, when Hamas warriors exploded into Israel, was brutal, and barbaric. The Israeli reaction, in turn, has brutally ignored the Rules of War, incumbent on nation states, especially to the widely accepted injunction against collective punishment.

The polarisation of the last week has been fuelled into an X-fuelled orgy of condemnation on both sides, thankfully leavened with a sprinkling of those who advocate a path towards reconciliation and understanding, remote as those may seem at this time. One of the charges levelled at those who plead the cause of the people of Palestine is that they are motivated by their inherent anti-Semitism.

Like violence and blame, there is enough anti-Semitism and Islamophobia coursing through the synapses of billions of humans, feeding the gazillions of nodes and data centers of the interwebs, to rival the energy of a thousand suns. 

But above all, it is the guilt over anti-Semitism that we need to be rid of. It is this guilt, weaponised by the west, that enabled the last colonial project, the creation of the State of Israel. It is this guilt, centred in Europe, that prevents Ursula von Leyen, President of the European Commission, from calling the Israel blockade of Gaza what it is. “An act of terror”, her words for the Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

*Review of Amos Oz’ book, Judas, in The Observer, by Peter Stanford

** wrote literary critic Harold Bloom in his 1998 book Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human.

***https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-scholars-still-debate-whether-or-not-shakespeares-merchant-venice-anti-semitic-180958867/