Around the year 400 CE, about a hundred years after Jews settled in German lands, church founder Augustine of Hippo came up with the concept of ‘Eternal Witness” whereby Judaism would be superseded by a Christian world view and where Jews would be marked eternally for condemnation for the trauma of Jesus’ crucifixion. Jews were cast to submission in a role defined by Christian triumph and hegemony. Jewish existence therefore became a function of Christian teleology, where the end justified the means.
This dictum facilitated and set the wheels into motion of increasing marginalization and segregation of both religious and secular Jews including Jewish communities. Jews were forced to wear special garments or badges of identification, live in designated areas, and banned from most occupations including farming.
Christians were forbidden to socialise or dine with Jews. Jews now identified as the ‘other’ became isolated and unloved. Despite most Christians having never met a Jew, contempt for Jews became part of European culture. Segregation, dehumanization, and expulsion went hand in hand with conspiracy theories and rumours. This culture of hatred permeated socio-political discourse, literature and the arts. Jews were seen as being deservedly unloved and homeless and destined to wander the earth .The degradation of Jews went way beyond religious differences.
Sound familiar?
The Middle Ages were thus an era of violence and destruction of Jewish life across Europe. The Crusader massacres of Jewish communities in the Rhineland 1096, the Blood Libel in England 1144, the Black Death 1346, expulsion from England 1290, France 1306, Switzerland 1348, Germany 1394 and Spain 1492 all systematically contributed to the ostracization of Jews. As the Jews were marginalised and disappeared, European Jew-despising folklore became integrated into every facet of European culture.
A tailwind to these events was an emerging mercantile class and the invention of the printing press in 1440. Later in 1605 the first newspaper appeared in Germany, the forerunner to social media.
Despite the European Enlightenment that would include Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Symphony with the text by the poet Schiller who wrote that ‘all mankind would become brothers’, the Jew-despising European culture never disappeared. Indeed in 1819 the Hep Hep anti-Jewish riots started in Germany as protests against Jewish emancipation laws. While Jews enjoyed far more rights in 19th century Europe than before, it was also the era of Wilhelm Marr’s newly formed League of Antisemitism in 1879, the Dreyfus Trial in 1894, pogroms and later the Shoah. The Jew was always the ostracized other no matter how enlightened Europe became.
Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Symphony became the official anthem of the European Union headed by Ursula von der Leyen.
The EU under Ursula von der Leyen, has announced sanctions against the modern representative of the Jew among the nations, Israel. Israel has always been marginalized and ostracized but since 10/7 the wish fulfilment fantasies of Israel’s demise has reached hysterical levels. Blood libels assaults, conspiracy theories and murder are regular occurrences across Europe and elsewhere. Universities and city centres are some favourite battle grounds. The media is filled with hateful, mendacious articles and relentless vilification of Israel. The ‘polite’ distinction between Jews and Israel has been eroded.
But this has not stopped Europe to pause and examine itself. After a terror attack near Jerusalem in which 6 people were murdered, Israel attacked the Hamas perpetrators in Qatar. The “international community” was outraged and slammed Israel for violating Qatar’s sovereignty.
That Qatar harbours terrorists aimed at Israel’s destruction was not an issue for von der Leyen. Nor was she and her colleagues fazed by her hypocrisy, aware that America violated Pakistan’s sovereignty by killing Osama bin Laden hiding there.
Instead, von der Leyen sanctimoniously invoked her Eternal Witness moment and announced an intention to isolate Israel with trade restrictions, sanctions ,measures against ‘violent settlers’ and ‘extremist ministers .’ (Extremist -Jew hating ministers in Europe apparently do not exist!)
But wait! There’s more!
She announced an exception for Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem is not only a Holocaust museum but is a monument to the memory of dead Jews. That is, dead Jews as a result of centuries of Eternal Witness that formed the basis of European culture and that ended in the barbaric mass murder by intent a k a genocide-the real genocide, not cheap baseless and populist declarations.
It seems that von der Leyen thinks German and European history kind of starts with V-E Day, 8 May 1945 and Jewish history with 1948.
Does she not understand that by making a sanctions exception for Yad Vashem, she insults Jews by implying that dead Jews are more acceptable than live Jews trying to defend themselves?
Does von der Leyen not know that she does not know?
Ron J.Hutter is the author of the satirical novel on antisemitism, “The Trombone Man :Tales of a Misogynist, and the Kristallnacht Cantata: A Voice of Courage.”