Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

blending in. Dietary laws, eventual descent through the mother, the ethical
framework of the Ten Commandments, devotion to a written word,
materially differentiated Jews from others; even in the martial world of
the Hebrews, scholarship and fidelity to written law were distinguishing
marks. This separateness—with its claims to both dominance and superiority—was
turned on its head by pagan and animistic cultures into a
stigma, a reason for conquest or persecution. As the militarist Hebrews
disappear from legendary history, the scholarly, then the effete, then the
effeminate Jew becomes visible. The practices of Jewish devotion become
the reason for Jewish identity, the raison d’etre for Jewish survival, and an
unbending form of resistance to the profane, lawless society of non-Jews.
The Nazis destroyed European and East European communities of orthodox
practice through genocide; and assimilationist strategies of Jews, developed
after and as a result of the French Enlightenment, were proved
useless against planned murder and organized hate. “What are your endless
sacrifices to me? /says Yahweh. /I am sick of holocausts of rams and the
fat of calves. . . /who asked you to trample over my courts? ”5 Post-Nazi,
these lines from Isaiah (1: 11-12) are hard to read.
Christian hatred of Jews is implicit in the origins of the religion; as the
Chief Rabbi of Vienna said in 1907: “The Christian kneels before the image
of the Jew, wrings his hands before the image of a Jewess; his Apostles,
Festivals, and Psalms are Jewish. Only a few are able to come to terms
with this contradiction— most free themselves by antisemitism. ”6 In the
beginning, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah who came to fulfill a Jewish
prophecy of redemption and salvation. “Always and everywhere that
proposition led swiftly to a division of the worshiping community, ” writes
Roland Oliver about the development of Christianity in Africa, “the new
way of attracting a minority of ethnic Jews, but a majority of the gentile
fellow travelers, who thereafter tended to be strongly anti-Semitic in their
outlook. ”7 Jews were taken to be the agents of Christ’s crucifixion, a sadistic
drama against a resurrected, living deity, all hope being in the acceptance
of his divinity. In rejecting Christ as the Jewish Messiah, Jews were
responsible for Jesus’ failure to fulfill a scriptural promise that was Jewish
and prophetic. Jews became the long past against which Christians defined
their present and an apocalyptic future. The burden of worshiping a
Jew but despising Jews forced the reification of Jew-hate. In time it became
not only religion but blood that separated Jews from what became
the Christian majority— and not a populous Christian majority but an
institutionalized one, part of the apparatus of the state. When the cultural