When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
servative Party, House of Lords, and member of the Upper House of Prussian
Parliament.” [GIDAL, p. 17] In Russia, in 1869, “the infamous Book of the
Kahal, … written by the Jewish apostate Jacob Brafman, made its appearance
and seemed to document the already well-known accusation that the Jews constituted
a ‘state within a state’ whose main aim was to subjugate and exploit the
non-Jewish population.” [ARONSON, p. 42] (Louis Rapoport even argues that
Jewish oppression of Jews was even pre-eminent in the Russian communist revolution:
“The Jewish Bolsheviks were the most fanatical advocates of suppressing
Jewish parties.”) [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 29] Even recently, in Croatia,
“in July 1997, Mladen Schwartz, an individual of Jewish origin and an
ultra-nationalist agitator, promoted his book ‘Protocols, Jews and Adolf
Hitler’ in Zagreb’s main square. In the book Schwartz poses such questions
as ‘Why should the Croatian state be in the service of Judeo-lobbyists?’”
[INSTITUTE OF JEWISH POLICY RESEARCH, 2001]
Over the centuries, inflammatory Talmudic passages were “exposed” to the
Christian public more and more by non-Jewish authors; in 1700, for example,
the German, Johann Eisenmenger, wrote Judaism Uncovered and August
Rohling, a professor of Semitic languages in Prague, penned Talmud Jew in
1871. These two works were among the most sensational charges against Jewish
tradition and belief; modern Jewish scholarship (and even more so, Jewish popular
opinion) generally portrays such texts as fabrication or misinterpretation
– in either case, “anti-Semitic.” “The Talmud,” says George Mosse, “was said to
be full of exhortations to cheat, lustfulness, usury, and hatred of Christians …
The Talmud had come to symbolize the secret of the ‘perverted’ religion of the
Jews.” Rohling decided that it was a “program for domination of the world by
the chosen people.” [MOSSE, p. 139]
In Eisenmenger’s case, his “anti-Jewish sallies,” writes Jacob Katz, “were on
the whole not his own inventions. He collected anti-Jewish ornaments from the
Christian tradition, systematized them, and attempted to prove their truth by
reading them into the Talmudic literature with which he was well acquainted.”
[KATZ, Jew Dig, p. 6] Nazis and others have, of course, recognized such materials’
value in enflaming anti-Jewish hostility and appropriated them for presentation
for their own purposes.
Eisenmenger’s anti-Jewish work, the argumentative basis for many books
critical of Jews that were written later, is particularly noteworthy and bears
greater scrutiny. As a dedicated Christian, Eisenmenger’s writings were framed
as a polemic that impugned Jewish belief and tradition. His opus, Judaism
Uncovered (Endecktes Judenthum), was a two-volume set of over 2,100 pages,
quoting from 200 mostly Jewish sources and was the result of twenty years of
research. The author was a respected scholar and well read in Hebrew, Aramaic,
and Arabic. “In short,” says Jacob Katz (a well-known Jewish scholar who Israeli
critic Israel Shahak singles out as being particularly apologetic when it comes
to Jewish religious texts), [SHAHAK, p. 114] “Eisenmenger was acquainted
with all the literature a Jewish scholar of standing would have known … [He]
surpassed his [non-Jewish] predecessors in his mastery of the sources and his
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