In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The Holocaust Was Not Christian

Jill

Thank you.

When I read Pope Benedict XVI’s words about the Holocaust, I was stunned at his attempt to turn the Holocaust into a Christian tragedy. Not that it wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before from a handful of deeply narcissistic Christians with persecution complexes, but to hear the leader of the Catholic church say it? Unbelievable. As the writer of this op/ed says:

Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a “ring of criminals” who “used and abused” the duped and dragooned German people as an “instrument” of destruction. In truth, Germans by and large supported the Jews’ persecution, and many of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were ordinary Germans who acted willingly. It is false to attribute culpability for the Holocaust wholly or even primarily to a “criminal ring.” No German scholar or mainstream politician would today dare put forth Benedict’s mythologized account of the past.

Benedict did say correctly that the “rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people.” But he then turned the Holocaust into an assault most fundamentally not on Jews but on Christianity itself, by falsely asserting that the ultimate reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews was “to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith” — meaning that their motivation to kill Jews was because Judaism was the parent religion of Christianity.


You see, the Holocaust was just a precursor to the “War on Christmas.”

As every historian, and even the casual student, knows — and as the church’s historians ordinarily take pains to emphasize — the German perpetrators saw the Jews as a malevolent and powerful “race,” not a religious group. Their desire to annihilate Jews had nothing to do with anti-Christianity.

Right. Which is also why, today, when I hear people claim that Jews are strictly a religious group and not a racial/ethnic one (which I believe someone claimed on this blog a while back), I get a wee bit testy.

Benedict’s historical fabrication to Christianize the Holocaust is also a moral scandal because it obscures the troubling truth about the Catholic Church: Its churches across Europe tacitly and actively participated in the Jews’ persecution. Pope Pius XII, the German bishops, French bishops, Polish church leaders and many others, animated by anti-Semitism, supported or called for the persecution of the Jews (though not their slaughter). Some, such as Slovakian church leaders and Croatian priests, actively endorsed or participated in the mass murder.

But let’s just glaze over that and act like the Holocaust was just “a few bad apples.” It’s easier to do that than to imagine that ordinary people were swept up in a culture of hatred and intolerance, and did some unthinkable things. Telling ourselves that it was a handful of evil-doers effectively negates responsibility in our own lives — it allows us to think that horrible things only happen because of horrible other people. And that’s a lot more comforting than recognizing that each of us in capable of doing evil.

Stunningly, Benedict walked through the gates of Auschwitz and did not once mention the prime mover of the Holocaust: anti-Semitism (let alone the anti-Semitism of Christianity that was for centuries ubiquitous in Europe and that culminated in Nazism and the Holocaust). Whatever differences existed between Nazi anti-Semitism and its Christian anti-Semitic seedbed, anti-Semitism is the unavoidable causal, historical and moral link connecting the church, the Nazis and Auschwitz.

Since Vatican II, the church has forcefully condemned anti-Semitism, even declaring it a sin. Yet Benedict stood in Auschwitz negligently silent.

I suspect that part of his silence has to do with the fact that he’s German, and the tragedy of the Holocaust is lergely on the collective shoulders of his countrymen. Easier to blame a few people than delve into the underlying causes — and to recognize that the very ideas that sparked the Holocaust continue to exist today.

At length Benedict wondered about where God was. A churchman’s question. But he conspicuously failed to ask where the church was. Benedict’s appeal to the mysteries of God’s ways thus obscured even the most discussed aspects of the church’s and Pius XII’s conduct during the Holocaust: Why they didn’t speak out. Why they didn’t do more to help Jews.

It would be nice to hear the church ask these questions. But I won’t hold my breath.

50 thoughts on The Holocaust Was Not Christian

  1. Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a “ring of criminals” who “used and abused” the duped and dragooned German people as an “instrument” of destruction. In truth, Germans by and large supported the Jews’ persecution, and many of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were ordinary Germans who acted willingly. It is false to attribute culpability for the Holocaust wholly or even primarily to a “criminal ring.” No German scholar or mainstream politician would today dare put forth Benedict’s mythologized account of the past.

    If he blames a “ring of criminals,” he doesn’t have to take responsibility for his own role, and that of his family, friends and neighbors. He’s been a bit cagey about what he was doing in the Hitler Youth at a time when it was not compulsory (he claims it was just for the scholarship money), but a lot of his story doesn’t add up.

  2. Goldhagen (author of the op-ed) wrote “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” which won him some acclaim. I think his thesis regarding the German people as a whole has been challenged since the book was published. The thesis that Ratzinger is a wanker, however, is unassailable.

  3. Yeah, I wish that article had been written by someone a little more credible than Goldhagen.

    He’s been a bit cagey about what he was doing in the Hitler Youth at a time when it was not compulsory (he claims it was just for the scholarship money), but a lot of his story doesn’t add up.

    I think his argument is that although it was officially optional, it wasn’t really optional. And it may be that there was more pressure on him to join because his family was known to be anti-Nazi. I’m actually pretty loathe to judge his wartime choices, since I have no idea what I’d do in a comperable situation. But I do find it a bit baffling that a guy who joined the Hitler Youth to save his hide opposes abortion to save the life of the woman.

    He’s apparently made another speech clarifying his original speech, and in this one he does say that the worst kinds of anti-semitism were based on racism. It’s difficult to tell from this story whether the second speech is an improvement.

  5. Indeed, it would be nice to have this come from someone other than Goldhagen, whose work has been challenged by many across the political spectrum. “Hitler’s Willing Executioners”, the book that made his reputation, is thoroughly discredited by most Shoah scholars these days.

  6. “Which is also why, today, when I hear people claim that Jews are strictly a religious group and not a racial/ethnic one (which I believe someone claimed on this blog a while back), I get a wee bit testy.”

    I’ve had this discussion with a few Jews I work with. The older ones (50 and older) generally consider Jews to be a race, while the younger ones do not. Dunno what that means. Just sayin’.

    Also, my girlfriend converted to Judaism while she was married to her Jewish husband. Her parents were born and raised in Germany. When she changed religion (Christianity to Judaism) did she also change race (caucasian to Jew)?

  7. Right. Which is also why, today, when I hear people claim that Jews are strictly a religious group and not a racial/ethnic one (which I believe someone claimed on this blog a while back), I get a wee bit testy.

    You and me both. Except for the “wee bit” part.

  8. The German society, which was most christian, was responible for the failure of the society.

    Yes, but not solely responsible. Many factors led to the Holocaust, some of them not related to German society then or now. If Heny Ford had not had “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” translated and had not donated money to the Nazis in the 1920s they might very well have sunk into obscurity, another minor party mumbling their conspiracy theories. If the winners of WWI hadn’t been so punitive, Germany wouldn’t have been in such bad shape that they were willing to vote for obvious crazies. If the occupied territories had all resisted the way Denmark did many fewer Jews and other “undesirables” would have been killed. And so on. My point? It wasn’t “a few bad apples” or just “a ring of criminals” than caused the Holocaust. And it wasn’t just an evil or failed society either. There’s nothing about American (or British or French or Afghani or whatever) society that makes a similar event here impossible.

  9. Everyone needs to read John Cornwall’s Hitler’s Pope, which is by far the fairest (but still harsh) treatment of Pius XII’s involvement in the Holocaust.

    Does it surprise anyone else that Pope is less a less a spiritual leader and more a PR rep? Fuck, Catholicism is such a sham.

  10. My experience is that my Jewish friends get very testy at any suggestion that Jewishness IS a race or ethnicity. They insist that it is a religion. It was the Nazis, they say, who insisted on the concept of Jewishness as a racial category.

    Personally, I view Jewishness as an ethnicity, a cultural identity, and a religion. Different types of Jewishness apply at different times. Thus, you might be a secular Jew, meaning that you are culturally but not religiously Jewish. Or you might be a religious Jew who converted to Judaism from some other religion, and thus you are not ethnically Jewish but you are religiously Jewish.

    While I understand why Jews may get nervous about being categorized as an ethnic group, my understanding is that the genes of Ashkenazi Jews (which I share in through my Jewish grandmother) can be traced to the middle east. Thus there does seem to be a genetic link, at least among Jews with Eastern European ancestry. However, that fact should never obscure the fact that it is really the culture and the religion that make a person Jewish.

  11. Heliologue:

    Hitler’s Pope is not in the slightest fair. It is a hatchet job of the first order. There are things Pius could have done better and more quickly. Be he did much more than he is give credit for; including hiding 500 Jews in his own apartments.

    Consider:

    Pope Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church did much throughout the war to bring the world’s attention to the plight of the Jews of Europe, to reverse the genocidal policies and practices of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the regimes operating in the conquered countries of Europe, and to assist tens of thousands of Jews to survive and escape these regimes and their death camps. This is proved simply by looking at the New York Times of the period. The Times reported that the pope was not silent concerning the Jews, and applauded him for what he did do and say–often. Whatever the editorial policy of the Times or the background of the reporters and their work, the newspaper itself proved that the pope was not silent, and that the Church was quite active during the war.

    Following the war, numerous tributes were made to the Pope by members of the Jewish Community world-wide. On December 1, 1944 the Times reported that the World Jewish Congress publicly thanked the Holy See’s protection of Jews, especially in Hungary; in October, 1945, the World Jewish Congress made a financial gift to the Vatican in recognition of the Vatican’s work to save the Jews; in May, 1955, the Israel Philharmonic played at the Vatican as a gesture of thanks to the pope for his services to Jews during the war. At the pope’s death, numerous tributes were made, so many that the Times could list only the names of their authors in the October 9, 10, and 11 issues. For example, in the October 9, 1958 issue: Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, President of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (p. 24, 2); the Synagogue Council of America (p. 21, 12); in the October 9, 1958 issue: Bernard Baruch; Rabbi Theodore L. Adams, president of the Synagogue Council of America; Irving M. Engel, president of he American Jewish Committee, and Jacob Blaustein and Joseph M. Proshauer, honorary presidents, (p. 12, 1); Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress; Dr. Israel Goldstein, chairman of the Western Hemisphere Executive of the World Jewish Congress; Rabbi Alan Steinech, president of the New York Board of Rabbis; Mrs. Moise S. Cahn, president of the National Council of Jewish Women; Rabbi Jacob P. Rudin, president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, (p.12, 1); in the October 10, 1958 issue: Rabbi Emanual Rockman, president of the Rabbinical Council of America; Isaac H. Herzog.

    On the October 12, 1958 number, the Times reported the numerous memorial services for the late pope in the synagogues of New York City. (p. 5, 1-2) On October 10, 1958, the Times reported that Leonard Bernstein began the performance of the New York Philharmonic the previous evening with a tribute by Harold C. Schonberg, and by Mr. Bernstein asking the audience to stand in silence for one minute, in tribute to Pius XII. (p. 35, 4)

    From a CCC document, but I doubt in can be refuted.

  12. I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Jewish race/religion thing. On the one hand the notion of a Jewish race is preposterous. On the other hand, my father’s family was persecuted for the fact tthat they were ethnically Jewish. My great-grandmother and my great-great grandmother both died in the Shoah — and both were Catholics! My great-great grandmother had converted, and her daughter had been raised in the church — but that didn’t matter to the Nazis. So when we say “being Jewish is only about one’s faith”, then I have a difficult time with the story of my ancestors’ murder.

  13. “Ethnic Judaism” seems to be used for persecution, historically, and I think it’s absurd to say that what Hitler defined as Judaism is what counts on any level.

    If you grew up in a Jewish household but have since stopped doing anything religious, and you say you’re not Jewish, then fine: you’re not Jewish. Sure, you have a genetic background that goes to the Middle East, but lots of people do. (I admit I’ve not read into the studies about the genetics, but I think they’re sort of a red herring — if you have this Jewish DNA, the DNA is not Jewish, it’s just shared by people who have some ancestors who were.)

    Most people would agree with a cultural and a religious split, though they’re hard to differentiate sometimes.

  14. I don’t think it’s genetics, but culture; I have a “genetic background” that goes back to the British Isles, but that’s not what makes me Irish as opposed to English.

    Although I agree that Hitler shouldn’t have the final word.

  15. The ethnic/racial Jewish thing has a deep history. After the Holocaust, Jews insisted that they were *not* a arce, that Jewishness was not something inborn — explicitly referencing the Holocaust as the consequences of the “Jews are a race” breed of thinking. Jewish scientists were instrumental in re-shaping (and eventually wholly sicrediting) the scientific notion of “race”; there’s very few biologists, anthropologists, or otehr sceitnists studying human populations who will use the word “race” to describe groups of people. The flagship of this effort, the UNESCO STatement on Race, was drafted by a team chaired by the Jewish anthropologists Ashley Montagu, and essentially eliminates “race” from the scientific vocabulary (instead suggesting “ethnic group” and, better, “population” for scientists who study diversity among and between groups).

    Jewish groups also pressured the US government to get them to remove “Jewish” as a racial category on the Census, which went into effect on either the 1960 or 1970 Census (I forget, so sue me!). The ’50s/’60s modernist Jewish position is that being Jewish was *just* a matter of religion and tradition, that is, of behavior, not of genes; Jews were just like their neighbors, just they went to church on Saturday instead of Sunday.

    Then the 1967 war happened and the assimilationism of the mid-century began to be replaced with the Zionism of today, and the notion of Jewishness as something inborn and essential began to return, backed by the new sorts of identity politics that have shaped and have been shaped by the postmodern era. But I think most Jews, even those deeply committed to the inborn-ness of Jewishness, would still feel very uncomfortable with the idea that they represent a “race” — we remember too well where that road leads…

  16. The Jewish ethnic/religious conundrum has been around, it seems, as long as Jews. But it isn’t a matter of opinion.

    According to Jewish law, if you are born of a Jewish mother, you are a Jew. You can never lose the fact of your birthright, even if you convert. In fact, if you convert, spend most of your life as a Christian, and then decide you want to be religiously Jewish again, you don’t have to convert back into Judaism. You never left it.

    Once you have converted to Judaism, the same applies.

    The thing that disturbs me the most about our Jewish ethnicity is that people are quick to deny it for things like, oh, the nationhood and relationship of Jews to Israel. But as was pointed out above, they’re very quick to agree with it for the purposes of persecution.

    I am a Jew, by birth, by religion, by culture, by ethnicity, and by choice. None of these statements is contradictory to me.

  17. What do you mean by “agree with ethnic Judaism for the purposes of persecution”? I agree that people have claimed there is an ethnic Judaism (which seems to be you had ancestors who were Jewish), and that many of those people have used this definition to persecute. I don’t think it’s a useful definition in any other way, or that it says anything relevant. If I became a dictator and killed off people who’d ever had Christian ancestors, whether they had converted to another faith or left their own or not, I wouldn’t create a new useful category of “ethnic Christian”.

    I know what Jewish law says about who is a Jew (which is not an “ethnic” Jew). I don’t think, as a general rule, it’s a useful description either. (It’s also problematic in other ways: my sisters are Jewish, but not in Israel, because their conversions were not done in an Orthodox synagogue.) I also think it’s problematic to say that someone is an X, against their own self-definition.

  18. By definition, the Jews are a tribe. If you convert for religious purposes, you become a part of the tribe. That’s why one of the slang terms Jews use for Jews (themselves or others) is MOT–Member Of the Tribe.

    You cannot leave Judaism, although you can practice a different religion. I have been Wiccan for 25 years (definitely past the “phase” range). Yet I am also a Jew, because I am a member of that tribe. Among Wiccans, this is so common it is called being a “Jewitch,” but an analoguous condition for former Christians doesn’t seem to exist.

    This, I think, is because Christianity is not a tribal religion but a universalist one. Christians profess that anyone can be a Christian, they must simply believe. But not anyone can be a Jew. You must be a MOT. The process of conversion doesn’t simply involve a profession of faith, but an enrollment into the Tribe. Thus, even if you aren’t ethnically Jewish (and the DNA testing among Jews is remarkable), you are tribally Jewish.

  19. By ethnicity, I meant the same as the ones above who use the word “race.” Hitler codified the use of race against Jews with the Nuremberg laws, which stated that if you had one Jewish grandparent, you were Jewish, and off to the camps you went.

    Wolfa, self-definition is meaningless when it comes to Judaism. Jewish law is defined by the Torah, and the interpretations of the Torah. (Let’s not get into the Haredi control over “who is a Jew” in Israel; I suspect you and I are on the same page on that one anyway.)

    But beyond that, your Christian comparison won’t work. Christianity is solely a religion, not an ethnicity. Use “Armenian” instead, and you get what I’m trying to say. An Armenian is born an Armenian, and can’t shed that birthright, even by choice. She can move to America, but she’s still an Armenian by birthright. Of course, her children would be Americans, and that’s where my comparison stops. Because Judaism and Jewishness aren’t like anything else. There is no other religion that is also a culture and an ethnic grouping.

    Whether or not you think it’s a useful definition is irrelevant. Facts are facts. Let me expand on my statement above.

    I am a Jew by birth. Self-explanatory.
    I am a Jew by religion. I practice Judaism.
    I am a Jew by culture. I grew up Jewish, in a state with a large Jewish population.
    I am a Jew by ethnicity. My ancestors are Jewish.
    I am a Jew by choice. I choose to practice Judaism, the religion.

    Substitute any other religion for the word “Jew” in the above, and you lose a couple of them. There’s no such thing as an ethnic Christian. And I don’t think you’re born a Christian, either. Isn’t that what Baptism is all about?

    It is one of the biggest sticking points when discussing Judaism, Jewishness, and Israel. And since even Jews disagree about it, well…. I don’t think the concept will ever fully settle in.

  20. Unless the law has changed (and it may since believe it is a controversial law), I understand that anyone with one Jewish grandparent qualifies for Israeli citizenship, along with anyone married to a person who has one Jewish grandparent.

    Not that I plan on becoming an Israeli citizen, but this law has always made me feel happy for some reason. I guess it makes me feel happy to have some official acknowledgement of my connection to the Jewish people, even if I don’t really qualify as a Jew in terms of culture or religion. But I have never understood how one would go about PROVING that one’s grandmother was Jewish.

  22. My experience is that my Jewish friends get very testy at any suggestion that Jewishness IS a race or ethnicity.

    And my experience with my Jewish friends is completely the opposite; see Meryl, above.

    You know what we can extrapolate about all Jews from your experience and mine? Not a damn thing–except that some Jews identify as ethnic Jews, and some don’t.

    But by gum, that’s not going to stop all we non-Jews from trying our hardest to determine what it is to be Jewish, is it? Oh yeah, we Gentiles can surely pat ourselves on the back for being so keen to answer the question of whether Jewishness is a matter of race/ethnicity, or a matter of culture, or a matter of religion, or a mix of some or all of them; and we can cheerfully do this for Jews, yet know that we are not being condescending, patronizing, or anti-Semitic in the least for it, because guess what? We have Jewish friends! YAY US for being inclusive.

  23. and we can cheerfully do this for Jews, yet know that we are not being condescending, patronizing, or anti-Semitic in the least for it, because guess what? We have Jewish friends! YAY US for being inclusive.

    Congrats Happy Feminist! It apperars you just won the “first to be labeled anti-Semetic” award.

    Why do you hate your Grandmother?

  24. ilyka, I think you’re way off-base there — I haven’t seen anything I’d brand “anti-semitic” in this thread. I disagree with the implication of Jill’s original statement, but I find nothing particularly offensive about it. Several of us on this thread *are* Jewish, and *we* can’t even agree on it — I wouldn’t expect non-Jews to understand this easily, and I certainly am not offended when they try! For instance, I am Jewish in a very, very different way than Meryl is — non-religious (atheist, even), anti-Zionist, the son of a convert. Yet circumcised, Bar Mitzvahed, well-informed about Jewish history and theology, fairly strongly linked culturally and socially with a larger Jewish community.

    The question Jill’s comment raises is not so much “what is a Jew?” but “what is a race?” Jews are not a race, for the same reason nobody else is: it’s an empty, useless category. Jewishness is an ethnic category, and like all the other ethnic categories, being Jewish means a lot of things, most of them contradictory and even mutually exclusive. However, what’s important here is how the category “ethnicity” works in contemporary language: as Merlyl’s comments suggest, a lot of people have simply replaced “race” with “ethnicity”, which I reject, and which I think most feminist-minded people, at least those who reject essentialism, would reject. But this kind of identitification, this belief that we as a people are united by something more fundamental than behavior and/or belief, that we are connected by “blood” and by deep roots stretching back into the mists of history — this is a powerful force in ethnic identity formation. Thus, a category originally intended to counter the notion of “race” has besically become it.

    The bottom line, though, is that being Jewish is a claim, and the “truth” of the claim is dependent not on genetics or birthright or theology or legality but on the willingness of others to recognize that claim (which involves all the factors I just listed, and then some). The community of people who recognize each others’ claims are Jews, just like any other ethnic community.

  25. HappyFem:
    Israeli citizenship: a Jew (=biological mother is Jewish or converted-with-caveats and has not changed religion) or a child/grandchild/spouse of a Jew. It specifically excludes anyone who was Jewish and converted, so in some sense, it is possible to convert.

    Meryl:

    You can shed citizenship of a country, though. My grandparents were born German and Austrian, but now do not have citizenship. (Admittedly they could probably get it fairly easily. But they’re not citizens.)

    I disagree with the ethnicity one, as you’ll be unsurprised to note. I know it’s in common use, and in a way it’s not for other religions, but I don’t think it’s a good descriptor. (Obviously it’s useful for certain genetic tests — my parents got tested for Tay-Sachs (neither are carriers).) Bear in mind that I have been brought up in Reform/Reconstructionist Judaism, which does not have the same rules about who-is-a-Jew as Orthodox Judaism, including in regards to born-Jewish-then-converted.

    And I bet we are on the same page about Haredi control in Israel.

    Deborah:

    Not all rabbis — especially progressive ones — would call you a Jew if you converted to another religion. And in general, as I said, I think it’s bs to go against someone else’s self-definition. Sure, I can think of examples, and I do think that you need to convert to Judaism, and if I claim to be a pacifist but think hitting people is a good thing you can ignore my self-definition[1], but as a general rule, I’m not into forcibly calling people part of a religion they’re not.

    [1] See, for example, Jews-for-Jesus.

  26. Okay, RM, ya got me. I overlooked that Happy Feminist is Jewish. I tend to hear “All my Jewish friends” the same way I suspect most people here would hear “All my African-American friends”–really, how many sentences that begin that way ever end well?–but that doesn’t excuse my essentially knee-jerk reaction. My bad. HF, I’m sorry.

    I’d still like to know where Hugo gets off asserting that the notion of a racial Jewish identity is “preposterous,” or where piny gets off determining Jewishness to be a matter of culture, not genetics. But in that case, those are the remarks I should have responded to, and not Happy Feminist’s.

    Myself, I have mixed feelings about the whole Coptic Christian race/religion thing. I just don’t know about those people.

  27. I’m pretty sure HF is not Jewish, actually.

    But Judaism as race or ethnicity-as-cover-term-for-race seems to be really well disputed in the community, so I don’t find it particularly offensive for non-Jews to fall on one side of the divide or the other. (I find it offensive when, say, I am told that Christmas trees are pretty much secular, or that Merry Christmas also includes Happy Chanukah or that Chanukah is an important holiday and Passover isn’t or any of a million other things.)

    But no one here has been particularly off-base. (Though I think Hugo being confused that his great-grandparents were killed because Hitler had a weird definition of Judaism is somewhat bizarre.)

  28. Wolfa:
    It specifically excludes anyone who was Jewish and converted, so in some sense, it is possible to convert.

    A rule which was added, in the last decade or so, specifically to exclude “Jews for Jesus” (which is a WHOLE other conversation).

    Not all rabbis — especially progressive ones — would call you a Jew if you converted to another religion. And in general, as I said, I think it’s bs to go against someone else’s self-definition.

    But I am a Jew. Like I said, the whole “Jewitch” thing is much discussed in Paganism. I recently reviewed a book about it. There are websites, blah blah. Because my identity as a Jew, my cultural, familial, and personal identity, is Jewish, but my spiritual and religious identity is not. So that’s me. It’s part of the complex nature of my personhood. And for almost all the Jews I know who have converted to other religions (and being who I am, I know quite a few), they are both Jews and not-Jews in similar ways.

    or where piny gets off determining Jewishness to be a matter of culture, not genetics.

    The genetics thing is pretty well-established. You can even find genetic markers for Cohanim, as I understand it.

  29. “I’d still like to know where Hugo gets off asserting that the notion of a racial Jewish identity is “preposterous,” or where piny gets off determining Jewishness to be a matter of culture, not genetics.”

    Is there a racial Christian identity? Is Muslimness cultural or genetic?

    I don’t see how a black, a white, and an asian can be considered to be the same race just because they choose to follow the same religion.

    You can join or quit a religion; you can’t join or quit a race.

  30. Just jumping in to agree that Goldhagen is not the guy you want making this argument. Hitler’s Willing Executioners was lousy scholarship, and time and investigation have not been kind to it. The entire thesis of the book, that Germany was just somehow evil, is a disservice to our understanding of nthe Shoah – as others above have pointed out, it could happen here, or anywhere, given the correct circumstances. Goldhagen’s book is one of the few that actually make you dumber by reading it.

    One other thing – Jewishness as a religion alone is the product of Napolean’s code. Under the Republic, Jews were considered national citizens, which could not be done (under Napolean’s Frenchification program) without separating religion from ethnicity. Ultimately, Jewishness is both ethnicity and religion (although not simultaneously for many people).

  31. or where piny gets off determining Jewishness to be a matter of culture, not genetics.

    Excuse me? I didn’t say that. My point was that the argument I’d heard advanced about Jewishness-apart-from-religious-belief was that it was about cultural rather than genetic inheritance. I was responding to wolfa’s point about how “middle eastern” genes aren’t very relevant to affiliation.

    I didn’t say anything about what I believe Jewishness to consist of, or anything about what “true” Jewishness might be. I have no opinion on the former, and have seen no consensus on the latter. I resent the implication that I’m stomping all over a complexus with my big gentile feet, or that I’m too ignorant to know one when I see one.

  33. I know it was recently added (converts don’t get the right of return). That said, it was added.

    And inasmuch as I am not forcing Jewishness on people who repudiate it, I am not refusing it from those who claim it. Especially since “Jewishness” is a cover term for at least the religious and cultural/familial aspects, and changing the first does not necessarily imply changing the second. My point is simply that people’s claims about their identities are what I will use, generally speaking — and that this does not necessarily go against Judaism, and not all rabbis disagree with me.

    Re: genetics. DNA is DNA. That they can find that your ancestors were part of a small, self-contained community is interesting and informative, but the DNA itself is not Jewish, it’s just a bunch of nucleic acids in some specific order.

    (Incidentally, I found out I was wrong, and my sisters were converted using Orthodox rabbis, just in case.)

  34. And inasmuch as I am not forcing Jewishness on people who repudiate it, I am not refusing it from those who claim it. Especially since “Jewishness” is a cover term for at least the religious and cultural/familial aspects, and changing the first does not necessarily imply changing the second. My point is simply that people’s claims about their identities are what I will use, generally speaking — and that this does not necessarily go against Judaism, and not all rabbis disagree with me.

    I didn’t mean to imply that you were.

    Re: genetics. DNA is DNA. That they can find that your ancestors were part of a small, self-contained community is interesting and informative, but the DNA itself is not Jewish, it’s just a bunch of nucleic acids in some specific order.

    Exactly. I was suggesting an alternate kind of connection that isn’t strictly voluntary, is all.

  35. Piny, I was responding to Deborah, not you. I think we mostly agree. (You have a non-voluntary connection if you were brought up Jewish, I think, but if you just happen to have those genes but were brought up Sikh and continue to practice it, I don’t think you have any real connection to Judaism.)

  36. If you look at race as an extended family that inbreeds to some degree, then ethnicity could be defined as a race that allows for adoption and relation through marriage.

  37. Somebody’s going to have to explain what the benefit of using the term “race” to describe an ethnic group is. There is no gene or group of gene, including the Kahane haplotype, that is universally present in Jews or universally non-present in non-Jews. Race is a particularly un-useful category in scientific research. We know the negative consequences, ranging from exclusion from hotels and restaurants to lynchings (Leo Frank) to porgoms to the Holocaust; what are the positive outcomes of using the concept of “race” to describe Jews?

  38. I don’t think it’s useful to describe Jews as a race. But I do think it’s useful to describe some kinds of anti-semitism as racism. And I also think it’s important to acknowledge that Judaism isn’t just Christianity without Jesus and that Jews have a long history of defining membership based in part on heredity. That’s obviously not set in stone and is subject to debate, like everything else in Judaism, but it is a long tradition.

  39. Dustin, I think that’s what all of us were talking about. It doesn’t seem that there are any positives to discusing “race” to describe Jews. And yet, we are constantly described as “the Jewish race.”

    I have tried many times to explain the difference between Judaism the religion, and Judaism the culture, which is yet another word to use instead of ethnicity or race. It’s confusing, but I can’t think of any other people who have the same problem. No other people have tied religion to their personhood/nationhood/race/ethnicity.

    Ah, the benefits of being unique. It always makes me recall the SatireWire spoof:

    “GOD NAMES NEXT “CHOSEN PEOPLE”; IT’S JEWS AGAIN
    “Oh Shit,” Say Jews

    Yeah, it’s confusing. I don’t expect it to ever become any less so.

  40. I don’t want to speak for someone else but if my interpretation of Ilkya is right then I agree.

    It is pretty darn weird to watch people who don’t identify as Jewish by any reckoning sitting around discussing what it means to be Jewish.

    I think there is some feeling that because Judaism is kind of a pro/co-genitor with Christianity and Islam, and thus “western” tradition, it belongs to everybody and everybody feels free weighing in on it in a way that they wouldn’t about most other heritages. People talk and talk about cultural (mis)appropriation when it comes to other peoples, but for some reason it never applies to Jews.

    And no, I don’t want to police the boundaries about who is ‘allowed’ to have an opinion, I would like feminists who ought to know better to apply their own beautifully developed principles even to a people who has the mis/fortune to be completely immersed within the same cultural milieu.

  41. “It is pretty darn weird to watch people who don’t identify as Jewish by any reckoning sitting around discussing what it means to be Jewish.”

    And why is that? Should only black people read Alice Walker or Ralph Ellison, or maybe non-blacks should just refrain from talking about them, because their books describe with it means to be a black person? Should feminists just give up the long-standing tradition of telling men what it means to be a woman in a sexist society? True enough, it isn’t seemly for people who don’t identify as Jewish, or black, or female to dictate the terms on which others can or should identify as such, but I think it’s not only acceptible for people to discuss how identity is constructed and try to understand the factors that shape the lives of people that are different from them.

    There’s a whole weird thing about Jewishness — while you might find a class on African-Americans in any number of departments in virtually any university, you’ll hardly ever find a class about Jews outside of a Jewish Studies dept. While you’ll find books about Native Americans or Indonesians or Southerners scattered throughout the Barnes & Noble, you’ll find almost all the books about Jewish people clustered in the Judaica department. Multicultural fairs almost always have pad thai and tacos, but almost never latkes and gefilte fish. I don’t think this is just caused by anti-Semitism; actually, I think Jews have withdrawn somewhat behind a protective barrier of Jewish exceptionalism. But be that as it may, I don’t think we ought to consider Jewishness as an ethnic identity in any different terms than we would consider any other ethnic identity — we generally think it’s a Good Thing to understand and discuss and even incorporate into our own lives the histories and traditions and life stories of people different from us.

  42. People talk and talk about cultural (mis)appropriation when it comes to other peoples, but for some reason it never applies to Jews.

    Tara, you have just discovered The Exception Clause. Take any concept you like, and add the words, “Except for Jews,” and you’ve got the motif of my weblog for the past four years.

    But I won’t go into details with that here. I think my hosts don’t deserve the crapstorm it would bring up.

  43. Just to quickly clarify what I meant in the original post when I said that I get testy when I hear people insist that Jews are not a race:

    I wasn’t trying to say that Jews necessarily are a race; I wasn’t trying to define Jewishness at all. I was just saying that for someone to insist that Jews are not a racial group strikes me as offensive because I feel like it ignores history and seeks to define an entire people from the outside. So to all the commenters who have argued that Jewishness is a lot of things to a lot of different people and that we can’t draw definitive lines, I’m with you. And Jewishness, obviously, should be defined by the people who identify as part of it.

  44. Oh man, i have had this discussion with so many people and there does not seem to be a consensus among Jews as to what Jewishness means. So, there’s no consensus. Non-Jews (like me) are certainly in no position to dictate.

    It’s interesting that Jews are the people who had Jewish removed from the census. I remember when I live d in the states in teh 90s my husband was wondering whether he was considered “white” (he is Egyptian) because there was no category for Middle Easterners on the Affirmative Action form. A Jewish professor who I worked for used to say he would put “none of the above” (though I would have called him white). A few years later I read a lot of info about the Human Genome Project and stuff like that and decided that there was no real genetic thing called race and it is too bad humanity still acts like there is.

  45. Yikes. Just checking back in. Glad that little dust up resolved itself. (comments 20-26)

    Yeah, I would not presume to call myself Jewish because I know I don’t qualify either religiously or culturally, but I would consider myself to be of Jewish heritage and that fact is very important to me. I am probably a bit of a wanna-be, actually.

    I can see how my original comment could rub people the wrong way. I didn’t mean to generalize that all Jews feel the same way about this issue– just to say that I have known people who have taken the opposite position to that raised by other commenters. And certainly, I don’t think it’s my place to define Jewishness for others. My view was simply based on my observation of how the term seems to actually be used.

  46. I think judaism is a religion, several different cultures and several different ethnicities. Judaism is not a particularly open religion, yes of course people can and do convert to Judaism, but it isn’t easy to do so, nor is it encouraged. Given genetic testing and prevalence of certain genetic diseases among (especially ashkenazi Jews), I think it’s ridiculous to not consider that jews are an ethnic group (or rather several ethnic groups, including the ashkenazim). I find it useful to consider the concept of a tribe or nation (although normally I only hear orthodox people talk about the nation concept), which is that people are born into that nation, the nation has a (or more than one in this case) culture and ethnicities, but people from the outside can become members of this nation.

  47. HF: how is it important to you? I mean it seriously. Did you light candles with your grandmother on Friday nights, or do something, or is it the knowledge that your grandmother was Jewish that means . . . well, what?

    Meryl, are you distinguishing between culture and ethnicity/race? I agree there is a distinction, which I cannot exactly describe, between the culture and the religion. I don’t really bother describing it, I figure anyone who knows me knows where I stand, and other people can continue to believe what they want to.

    Dustin, I’d claim it’s a good thing we don’t see gefilte fish around at fairs and stuff. But you can buy bagels and challah at most bakeries, blintzes and knishes are all over, and I see hamentashen around pre-Purim, and those weird not-kosher-for-Passover matzahs in the supermarkets.

    Penina, if Jews are lots of non-overlapping ethnic groups (unlike the overlapping cultures and religions — it’s not a single religion in many ways), it’s really uninformative. Jews are, um, the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic and oh those Ethiopian Jews and hey what about the Chinese Jews . . .

  48. I think Rattzinger really let himself down, he showed that he was ill prepared , had poor judgement and no insight. Pretty incredible for a major spiritual leader, who happened to be german and visiting one of the sites of his birth nations gravest shames.

    I really think catholics and non-catholics have to monitor this man, not because he is a closet nazi as some would like to suggest, but more importantly becuase he is the product of the nazi education system and nazi era socialisation.

  49. In tardy response to number 47: Thanks for asking Wolfa. I have asked myself the same question all my life. My sense of connection to Jewish history and culture is not at all rational. We didn’t do a lot of culturally or religiously Jewish things when I was growing up but my Dad insisted that I learn Jewish history, from ancient times through the present, and we talked about Jewish religious belief and Jewish history constantly. My father’s efforts to make sure I knew “my heritage” definitely took. I have always felt that my family’s emphasis on the written word and our liberal/progressive political orientation were a result of our Jewish roots. Although those values aren’t unique to Judaism or universal within Judaism, I still think those values came into my life through my grandmother’s religion and her family’s experience as an outsider/minority group.

    In my real life, I never ever mention this amorphous “sense of connection” because I can’t really justify it rationally, and it seems sort of silly and sentimental and presumptuous. But it’s a strong feeling I have nonetheless.

  50. I agree with Meryl and the Happy Feminist on this one.

    Like a lot of you, I’m a secular Jew. I am a Jew by birth (my mother is a Jew and her mother was a Jew and on and on). I am a Jew by culture (I grew up in a Jewish neighborhood and city, we identified ourselves ethnically as “Jewish” and others as goyim, gentiles). I was brought up as a religious Jew, bat mitzvahed in a Reform temple although in practice my family tended to run the gamut from modern Orthodoxy to Reform (my father was not Jewish so my mother, who was raised “Conservadox” was forced to join a Reform shul. She later grew to prefer the Reform movement, because she liked that my sister and I were able to receive religious education something that she, as a girl, hadn’t been allowed to have. However, we were definitely more frum, religious, than a typical Reform family.)

    However, nowadays my Judaism only comes into play around various holidays or when I slip out a few Yiddish phrases, which my mother speaks fluently though I only have a shaky grasp on the language. Or sometimes people will call on me to defend circumcision or something.

    Being raised Jewish, however, is something you can’t shake. It’s like being raised American. You can move, become an expat, but you’re still an American. I think “the Jewish race” is a problematic concept, but it’s even more offensive to me when people — who are usually not Jewish — insist that being Jewish is just about religion, not about ethnicity. What is an ethnicity, then? We have our own language, style, customs, and rituals that often have little to do with anything the Torah or the Talmud says. Through the magic of inbreeding, a lot of us have similar features, though that’s harder to pinpoint. I don’t know, sometimes I think it’s just something non-Jews can’t get. I just don’t know why everyone loves to debate this issue so much, especially liberals for some reason. I don’t know why people don’t see that questioning someones ethnic identity as being legit or not is pretty offensive.

Comments are currently closed.