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WHAT HE SAID AND WHAT HE WROTE
religious reasons for this situation. The power relationship between
the two sides also contributed to the majority’s ability to mistreat
them at will. But in periods of particular stress such as Crusades,
Hundred Year Wars, Reconquista in the Iberian peninsula,
German nation-building process, Second republic in France and
interwar period in this century, west European peoples have
regressed deeper, projections onto Jews intensified proportionately
and the content of these projections become more dehumanizing.
But Jews were not alone as target for projections. Cathars,
Lepers, Witches, Africans, indigenous peoples of North and Latin
Americans, Muslims and Turks have also been used as receptacle
for projections. The question is why these projections have
concentrated incomparably more on Jews and led to their
expulsion in 1492 from Spain or to the Holocaust between 1933-
45.
The short answer to this question is that each time the Jews
opted for assimilation in order to save themselves, they had to face
not only persecution, but, unexpectedly, expulsion and
annihilation. Let me try to explain why this paradox has come
about.
The purpose of the projection mechanism is to dump all the
unwanted parts of the character on the victim. The underlying
assumption is that this material will never return to the projecting
side. If the target is black, the skin colour constitutes such an
unalterable and immutable barrier that whatever projected is
contained by the black, even if he lives amids the society.
Therefore, racism in the United States is relatively stable. But,
Jews or migrant Turks, being white, cannot contain projected
material. Therefore, their religion, language, culture and traditions
are overemphasised by the racist as structurally distinctive marks
which distinguish them from the majority in place of skin color.
When the Jews in Spain started converting to Christianity in
order to escape persecution, in psychoanalytic terms, the projected
material has boomeranged. The return of his unwanted and denied
aspects deeply destabilized the Christian who felt it as a
psychological annihilation of his character. Christians have been
accusing Jews of the deicide, ritual murder and poisoning wells.
These were silly accusations. But Christians who have identified
themselves with Christ or regressed to the level of children must
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