When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS: A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
George L. Mosse notes the way particularist Judaism was contorted to be
somehow universalized in turn-of-the-century Germany:
“In 1910, Rabbi Cossman Werner of Munich castigated Jews who had
been baptized into Christianity for committing a crime not merely
against Judaism but above all against humanity itself. Such Jews opposed
equal rights and hindered others in fighting for justice, for ‘to be
a Jew means to be human,’ a statement which was greeted with thunderous
applause. The argument against baptism was based not on Judaism
as a revealed religion but on the religion of humanity.” [MOSSE, G.,
1985, p. 19]
This curious universalistic message, heralded today in some form by so
many modern Jews, is rendered transparently hollow and fundamentally
incongruous in a Jewish context. As Eric Kahler phrases it, in Orwellian doublethink:
“The substance of [Judaism’s] particularism is universality.” [KAHLER,
E., 1967, p. 11] “True universalism, according to [one Jewish] school of
thought,” wrote Lothar Kahn, “can’t occur without each human family contributing
its individuality to the whole race of men. The Jew can best become a
Frenchman or German – a citizen of the world – by perfecting the Jewishness
in him.” [KAHN, L., 1961, p. 30] Or take Will Herberg’s typical Jewish view of
it all:
“Jewish particularism, because it transcends every national and cultural
boundary, becomes, strangely enough a vehicle and witness to universalism.
[HERBERG, p. 276]
In other words, at root here, Herberg simply asserts that because Jews
extend their allegiance to each other wherever they are in the world, this is “universalism.”
E. L. Goldstein notes the Jewish reluctance to relinquish the racial
foundation of Jewish identity, even in the invention of a “universalistic” Reform
Judaism in the 19th century:
“It was not uncommon for a rabbi to make bold pronouncements
about his desire for a universalistic society and then, in moments of
frustration or doubt, revert to a racial understanding of the Jews …
While willing to stretch the definition of Judaism to its limits, it was clear
that most Reformers were not willing to break the historical continuity
of the Jewish ‘race.’ Even Solomon Schindler … one of the most radical
of Reform rabbis, felt compelled to acknowledge the racial aspect of
Jewish identity. Despite the high universal task of Judaism, wrote Schindler,
‘it remains a fact that we spring from a different branch of humanity,
that different blood flows in our veins, that our temperament, our
tastes, our humor is different from yours; that, in a word, we differ in
our views and in our modes of thinking in many cases as much as we differ
in our features.’” [MACDONALD, 1998, p. 157]
“The tension between the universal and particular in Jewish life,” observes
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen about much Jewish commentary today, “is
a favorite theme of Jewish commentators, both scholarly and popular … They
in effect lead their audiences in cheering the uniqueness of American Jewry,
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