Copy of Scapegoat - Andrea Dworkin - pdf

tivity under the czarist government); he can feel “total revulsion for the
Jewish past”33: but still, the devastation will destroy the Jew, even though
he has already disappeared. How does a Jew by birth if not by conviction,
not a messiah, get off the cross?
As Andrei Sinyavsky, a Soviet dissident, writes in The Russian Intelligentsia,
“From my point of view, Russian anti-Semitism represents a kind
of alienation of evil. It is a popular, mythic, almost fairy-tale notion that
the people cannot be bad. Our people are good. They are our people. But
some outsiders have wormed their way into the government, and they are
to blame for everything. ”34 Cold-war antagonism allows the western
democracies to infer that the Soviets, regardless of their form of government,
are primitive, savage, mentally and morally simple; whereas in November
1969, enraged over growing public hostility to the U. S. massacre
at My Lai, Richard Nixon said over and over again to an aide, “Its those
dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it. ”33 He meant the outrage,
not the massacre. One concerned him; the other did not.
In the U. S. some fifty years earlier, the exclusion of Jews from colleges
was, said a spokesman from Yale University, because Jews were “a foreign
body in the class organism. ”36 So, foreign or nativist, in government or in
media or in the academy, Soviet or U. S., there are ideas of good people
and bad people— and the Jews are among the bad people, sometimes so
bad that they are likened to parasites and crawling things. In England in
1190 Jews, “besieged by a fanatical Christian mob, ”37 committed mass
suicide, and a century later were expelled from the country. In Seville in
1391 four thousand Jews were murdered in a riot; within a few months
another fifty thousand were killed throughout Spain. In 1941-1942,
185, 000 Jews were deported to a wilderness in Romania, and “in this obscure
and remote theater of the war, the [Romanian] army murdered
every one of these people, stripping them naked, and shooting them in
subzero temperatures. On a few occasions, when soldiers were low on bullets,
they shot only the adults and buried the children live. ”38 Seville in
1391, a remote patch of Romania 1941-1942: why? Really: why?
Even after the genocide of World War II, Jews were still pogrommed,
the best-known event being in Kielce, Poland, where, after the war, there
were two hundred living Jews out of what had been a population of
thirty thousand: “Violence erupted when a nine-year-old shoemakers