Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

Jew-Hate/ W oman-Hate
tism is a way of keeping Jews separate: they are different and need special
treatment. ”32The special treatment would have been to cultivate stronger
feet in Jews. The great German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, paraphrased,
considered anti-Semitism “a misdirected hatred of the rich”; 33 historian
Eric Hobsbawn notes that “Jews were almost universally present, and
could readily symbolize all that was most hateful about an unfair world,
not least its commitment to the ideas of the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution which had emancipated them. . . They could serve as
symbols of the hated capitalist financier; of the revolutionary agitator; of
the corroding influence of ‘rootless intellectuals’ and the new mass media;
... ”34 This is, as U. S. writer Stanley Crouch says, “a protean xenophobia”
that has the deepest implications for both individual and cultural identity—
“ [b]ecause the Jew is both Moses and Jesus, we might be talking
about a remarkable tale of the Oedipus impulse. ”35
That anti-Semitism provides a canvas for an ominous rendering of a
faux world without personal responsibility, empathy, or generosity seems
obvious; so does the social utility of anti-Semitism. But why? Julia Kristeva
asks, “Is anti-Semitism a fear of circumcision transformed into a fear
of castration? ”36 Martin Luther provided at least a provisional answer long
before she asked the question: “I hope I shall never be so stupid as to be
circumcized. I would rather cut off the left breast of my Catherine and of
all women. ”37 And yet both Moses and Jesus were circumcized. Their
God— the God of the Jews—wanted a piece of penile flesh to mark his
covenant with them, not a left breast. Is the hatred of Jews a form of living
terror, an internal deicide of both the father and the son, an aggression
coded to protect an uncut penis? In the anti-Semitic imagination, are Jewish
men always slashed and bleeding, the menstruating male? Does the
eminence of Moses and Jesus cause a self-protective, hysterical shielding
of the penis to protect it from mutilation? Does the hygienic spread of circumcision
to non-Jewish populations subdue the panic, or reinforce it—
the dread cutting accomplished, and who is the Jew now?
The transmutation of the Jewish penis into a weapon of cutting and
predatory death shows itself in the conviction, in London’s East End in
the 1880s, that Jack the Ripper was a Jew. There had been an influx of
Eastern European Jews into the East End; “there were occasional riots
against them, and anti-Semitism generated fears that Jack the Ripper was
himself a Jew. ”38 A local newspaper dated October 15, 1888, described
crowds threatening “the Hebrew population of the District. It was repeatedly
asserted that no Englishman could have perpetrated such a horrible