Judaism
Sir: Mr Christopher Booker (9 September) says,'. . . one is a Jew first and an individual or a member of the human race second.' I wonder what study of Judaism Mr Booker has undertaken in order to arrive at this judgment. Has he read the Mishnah, the Talmud, the works of Maimonides, Mendelssohn or Buber? Or is he picking up stale scraps of anti-Semitic pseudointellectualism? At least let him reflect that anti-Semites have just as often made exactly the opposite charge — that the Jews are the arch-individualists who, in Charles Maurras' phrase, have invented the 'damned concepts of liberty, democracy and individualism'.
Mr Booker says that he found Holocaust 'profoundly offensive'. I found Mr Booker's article profoundly offensive. How can he have the insolence to equate the Jewish conflict with the Palestinians with the Nazi persecution of the Jews? Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs have been fighting a war over disputed territory; Jews accepted partition, Arabs refused. The Nazis, on the other hand, carried out the calculated cold-blooded massacre of unarmed helpless civilians (including 2,000,000 children) for no reason other than that they were Jews. Mr Booker's view is that the Jews were the originators of racial intolerance and genocide, and therefore only got what was coming to them from the Nazis. The alleged proof of this is Moses' attitude towards the Canaanites 3,500 years ago. What were Mr Booker's ancestors doing 3,500 years ago? How would he like to be judged by their actions? Massacres of defeated enemies were carried out by every nation of the ancient world; but even this was infinitely better than the actions of the Nazis. The victims of Assyrians, Romans, Huns or Hebrews at least had arms and fortifications, and their attackers had to use some military courage to defeat them. But Judaism has long outgrown the more primitive parts of the Old Testament. It is probably news to Mr Booker, for example, that the literal interpretation of 'an eye for an eye' was abandoned in Judaism long before the time of Jesus. Mr Booker is entirely unaware of the fact that Judaism, like other religions, has a history of development and progress. Mr Booker's picture of Jesus as rebelling against the racialist tradition of Judaism is entirely wrong. Jesus was asserting the ideal of the Jewish prophets Isaiah, Joel and Zechariah, which was part of the Judaism of his day. As it happens, Jesus was less internationalist than previous Jewish prophets. He was most reluctant to heal a non-Jew (Mark 7: 27), unlike Elisha who did so without hesitation, He told his disciples to go to Jews only, not to Gentiles (Matthew 10: 5), unlike Jonah who was sent to preach repentance to Gentile Nineveh.
Mr Booker's crude idea of internationalism is that it precludes love of one's own particular group. He should beware of espousing the kind of 'internationalism' that persecutes minorities in the name of global or regional conformity. The present struggle of the Jews to assert their national identity has been carried out in the face of a refusal by the Arabs to acknowledge any national identities other than their own in the Middle East (compare the similar national struggle of the Kurds). Yet despite his sanctimonious internationalism, Mr Booker finds no difficulty in accepting the nationalist claims of the Palestinian Arabs. It is only Jews who are not allowed to be nationalists.
By repeating old canards against the Jews, Mr Booker is helping to prepare another Auschwitz, I suspect that Mr Booker's real reason for denouncing Holocaust was that the programme courageously made clear that the groundwork for the Nazi massacres was laid by the ceaseless Christian propaganda over a period of 1,500 years misrepresenting Judaism and stigmatising the Jews as Christkillers and children of the Devil. The Holocaust was only the latest of many bloody persecutions of Jews that have occurred in Christendom. Mr Booker shows just the complacency and unawareness of responsibility that Holocaust was meant to expose. As long as ignorant and malevolent people like Mr Booker still exist, such programmes are not superfluous. Hyam Maccoby Leo Baeck College, 33 Seymour Place, London W1
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