When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
4. In a city that has Jews and gentiles living together and half are Jews
and half are gentiles, if one found a lost object he should take the lost object
and announce it. If a Jew comes and gives a sign, that the object is
his, he is obligated to return it to him.
5. If the majority of the city are gentiles, and one finds it in a place
where most people there are Jews, he must make an announcement. But
if it is in a place that is mostly gentile, the lost article belongs to the finder
and even if a Jews gives a sign we do not give it to him. We say he gave
up since there are mostly gentiles and they would take it for themselves.
Still the right way is to return it even then to the Jew who gave the sign.”
[KATZ, D., 1980, p. 211-212]
In traditional law, Jewish physicians may break the Sabbath (i.e., the rest
day) and work in order to help seriously sick Jewish patients. But there are conflicting
opinions in religious texts about helping non-Jews, and the allowance
to aid ill Gentiles on the Sabbath is not as clear. Apologetic Rabbi Immanuel
Jacobovitz notes that
“the special sanction to disregard religious laws in the face of danger
to life originally operated only in regard to Jewish lives, an attitude still
upheld, in theory at least, by the Shulkan ’Arukh … Evidently the problem
[of what to do about helping non-Jews] was not very acute until the
17th century, when many responsa [opinions] began to be devoted to it.
In principle the more rigorous view of the Talmud and the codes was
generally maintained, but in practice it was admitted that Jewish doctors
and midwives – even the most religious among them – often violated the
Sabbath in their attendance of non-Jews, however legally indefensible
their action might be.” [JACOBOVITS, p. 63]
An Israeli commentator, Uri Hupperet, is more blunt about the traditional
reasons why Orthodox Jewish doctors might help Gentiles on the Sabbath:
“Saving a Gentile’s life is also subject to pragmatic reasoning. A Gentile
who is in immediate danger of losing his or her life can be saved even
on the Sabbath; not based on the philosophy of ‘loving thy neighbor,’ but
motivated by netivey shalom (preserving peace with neighboring Gentiles),
or by darkey eivah (avoiding atrocities of Gentiles against Jews). It
is not the human dimension that motivates the command to save a life
in this respect, but a dimension beneficial to the ethnocentric community
that will remove ammunition from antagonists of Orthodox Judaism.”
[HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 95]
Peter Novick notes the “psychological and rhetorical” tensions, as he calls
them, which traditional Jewish law provided for Jewish American soldiers in
World War II:
“Jewish American GIs were expected – always in principle and sometimes
in practice – to crawl out under enemy fire to bring in wounded
Irish Americans or Italian Americans, as the later were expected to do
for them. Members of the older [Jewish] immigrant generation surely
tested much higher for feelings of international Jewish peoplehood. At
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