Why the Jews?

Why have Jews been the object of the most enduring and universal hatred in history? Why is the Jewish state the most hated country in the world today? Drawing on extensive historical research, Prager and Telushkin reveal how Judaism's distinctive conceptions of God, Law, and Peoplehood, have rendered the Jews, and now the Jewish state as well, to other people's God, laws, or national allegiances. Anti-Semitism is not just another ethnic or racial prejudice, and it is not caused, as so many people falsely believe, by Jewish economic success or the need for scapegoats. Rather, anti-Semitism today, as in the past, is a reaction to Judaism and its distinctive values. Separate chapters document how anti-Semitism is a unique hatred (no other prejudice has been as universal, deep, or permanent), and how the Chosen People idea has spawned hatred. The role of non-Jewish Jews such as Marx and the M.I.T. professor, Noam Chomsky, in provoking anti-Jewish animosity as well is examined and explained. WHY THE JEWS? also provides an authoritative overview of the seven major forms of anti-Semitism the Jewish people have suffered: pagan, Christian, Muslim, Enlightenment, Leftist, Nazi and anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. Prager and Telushkin explain why anti-Semitism poses a mortal danger to moral non-Jews, and what kind of changes would have to happen to produce a world without hatred of the Jews.

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The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies. Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as “racists.” Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a “fifth column,” while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate. Hundreds of millions of people have believed (and in the Arab world many still do) that Jews drink the blood of non-Jews, that they cause plagues and poison wells, that they secretly plot to conquer the world, and that they murdered God.

The universality of antisemitism is attested to by innumerable facts, the most dramatic being that Jews have been expelled from so many of the European and Arab societies in which they have resided. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Hungary between 1349 and 1360, Austria in 1421, numerous localities in Germany between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lithuania in 1445 and 1495, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497, and Bohemia and Moravia in 1744-45. Between the fifteenth century and 1772, Jews were not allowed into Russia; when finally admitted there, they were restricted to one area, the Pale of Settlement. Between 1948 and 1967, nearly all the Jews of Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen fled these countries, fearing for their lives.

The depth of antisemitism is evidenced by the frequency with which hostility against Jews has gone far beyond discrimination and erupted into sustained violence. In most societies in which Jews have lived, they have at some time been subjected to beatings, torture, and murder solely because they were Jews. In the Russian Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mass beatings and murders of Jews were so common that a word, pogrom, was coined to describe such incidents.