Jewish Mythology

 I remember the incident well, even after all these years. I grew up surrounded by survivors of the Shoah. I went to school, including elementary school, with many kids whose parents came here as refugees (as survivors were then called) and I knew many of those parents well. Our next door neighbors were an older couple that fled Vienna at the very last minute and ended up here after brief stops in Sweden and the U.K. They were everywhere, those people. It was commonplace to see men with numbers tattooed on their forearms in the grocery or at shul. But things were different back then. Eager to move forward into their new lives as Americans, my friends’ European parents specifically did not talk about their wartime experiences and certainly didn’t dwell on them. They may have spoken Polish, German, French, or Yiddish at home, but they certainly did not speak in anything but English in public. I can even remember my mother cautioning me when I was ten or eleven about asking our neighbors about their backstory in too much detail, explaining that those stories were too personal “just” to inquire about. As a result “So what was Auschwitz like?” was a question more unaskable than unanswerable in those days. And no one did ask. Just to the contrary, actually: it was considered in poor taste even to suggest obliquely that our survivor-neighbors weren’t Americans in the fullest sense of the word, something that asking about former lives might somehow suggest.

But the moment I’m talking about came years later. As many of my readers know, I lived and worked in Germany from 1984 to 1986, teaching ancient Jewish history and Bible at the Institute for Higher Jewish Learning attached to the University of Heidelberg for four semesters. It was an exceptional experience, and in a dozen different ways. I could make a list! But at the top of that list, I think, would have to be the fact that the taboo inculcated in me from childhood about asking survivors’ about their stories in too much (or any) detail, that did not at all seem to be part of survivor culture in Germany itself. Our synagogue in Heidelberg had no actual German Jews among its members (or at least not in the way we in New York used the term to denote Jewish people whose families had been in place Germany for centuries before the war), but there were a fair number of survivors, mostly Eastern Europeans who simply had no place to go after they closed the D.P. camps and so stayed in place and made a life for themselves in, of all places, Germany. This was in the mid-eighties. The war was only forty years in the past. The people I’m describing were at the time younger than I am now. Some had been hidden children, but most came through the camps and somehow survived. And, unlike my friends’ parents back in Forest Hills, these people couldn’t stop talking about their experiences.

The specific incident I want to write about today features a guest who came to the community, an actual German Jew. She was a woman then in her sixties who lived in Paris, but she had once been a little girl in a wealthy Jewish family in Cologne where her parents had owned a huge department store. She spoke about her childhood, about Kristallnacht, about the deportations. And then she turned to the topic of anti-Semitism itself. She had been vaguely aware, she said, of anti-Semitism as a concept, as a malign part of the history of Western culture, as something dark and scary…but as something from the distant past, something connected with 15^th century Inquisitors and 17^th century Cossacks, and certainly not as something to fear or worry much about in modern-day Germany. She spoke about how no one in her parents’ circles took Nazism—at least not in the early days—as a serious threat. I specifically recall her saying that no one in our world worries seriously that the world might well be flat and it was that same lack of serious attention her parents and their friends brought to the vulgar prejudice promoted by the Nazis in the years before Hitler came to power.

They changed their minds quickly after that, she said almost wryly. Those who could escape got out. The rest waited to see what was going to happen. And what happened was that about 180,000 of the quarter-million Jews present on German soil the eve of the Second World War were murdered.

The rest of her talk was also interesting and very moving. But the detail that’s stayed with me over all these years is the way she described her parents and their friends as thinking of anti-Semitism as some medieval scourge, as something antique to regret and from which to recoil, but not something you would expect actually to encounter.

Up until recently, I felt the same way. I lost count years ago of the books about the Shoah I’ve read. And I am more than aware of the fact that there are people in our country who harbor prejudicial feelings about Jewish people: if any of us doubted that before Pittsburgh or Poway, then surely no one thinks that now. But even after the rank anti-Semitism on display, say, in Charlottesville, where the marchers chanted anti-Semitic slogans out loud without the slightly reticence, let alone shame, I still felt safe, certain that these were “just” white-supremacist types wholly unrepresentative of the nation as a whole. I still do think that! And yet there was something new and particularly unnerving about the incident in Colleyville, something that only came to light in the days following the release of the hostages.

At first, no one—myself certainly included—understood the significance of the phone calls to Rabbi Angela Buchdahl of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan. What she could possibly have had to do with this was unclear—and not solely to me personally. Had she ever had any contact with Malik Faisal Akram, the hostage taker? Did they somehow know each other? Did he take a rabbi in Texas hostage as a way of getting himself in contact with her? Surely, he could have just phoned her himself if that were the case! But as days passed after the incident, it became clear that Akram had swallowed his own poison and truly believed—not theoretically or hypothetically, but really and truly—that a rabbi of Rabbi Buchdahl’s stature could simply order the President of the United States to release a federal prisoner and he would have no choice but to comply. The Jews run the world, don't they? Hadn’t Aafia Siddiqui, the woman he was trying to spring from prison, herself noted that her guilty verdict had not been determined by the American jury before whom her case was tried, but by Israeli Jews who apparently had the power to instruct an American jury how to find in any case at all in which they care to intervene?

This notion that the Jews somehow run the universe is not new, of course. There was a very interesting essay by Professor Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University posted on “The Conversation” website last week, one in which the author writes that the myth of Jewish power over the world’s leaders was already present in these United States before the outbreak of the Civil War. (To read Professor Sarna’s article, click here.) And he writes specifically about two books. The first is a book by one Telemachus Thomas Timayenis called The American Jew: An Exposé of His Career that was first published in 1888 and which is currently available to all interested parties for download on any number of internet sites. Can you judge people by the company they keep? Sometimes you can! And so it seems more than relevant that a recent reprint of Timayenis’s book, which details the specific ways in which the United States government is a puppet of world Jewry, contained a preface by the man convicted of the 1958 bombing of Bethel Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and author of The Gospel of Jesus Christ Versus the Jews and other similar works.

And the second, almost of course, is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in the nineteenth century as a kind of expose detailing the plans of world Jewry to dominate the world’s nations and make them into slave states. Nor are the plans themselves left unexplicit: the book purports to present the minutes of a meeting of world Jewish leaders at which their specific plans to take over the world were drawn up. The book is silly and unconvincing, but many people bought and still do buy into its basic theory. Henry Ford promoted it shamelessly in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. (Ford eventually apologized for promoting anti-Semitic theories. But his book, The International Jew, is available for purchase around the world and for download from any number of internet sites. If you find that unlikely, just google The International Jew and see what pops up. (And even more bizarrely, click here to see the reviews on the Goodreads site and—my personal favorite part—the box on the side of the screen noting that readers who enjoyed this book also enjoyed Mein Kampf.)

It's easy to laugh this stuff away. (Goodreads also suggests The Myth of German Villainy by Benton Bradberry and The Zionist Seizure of World Power by Deanna Spingola as books that Henry Ford fans might also enjoy.) But Colleyville only ended well because it did—because the moment for escape presented itself, because the rabbi had the courage to act decisively, because he had a chair nearby to throw at the Malik Akram’s head—and could just as easily have ended with a living hostage-taker and four dead hostages. So we can be grateful that that didn’t happen. But we can’t look away from the hostage taker’s worldview and we certainly should all be beyond laughing it off as craziness. Nazism was craziness too, but it led to the deaths of millions. The notion that Rabbi Buchdahl could have sprung a federal prisoner by making a phone call or two is easy to wave away as even crazier than the notion that the rabbi of a Reform temple in a Texas suburb could have. But we ignore this kind of craziness at our own risk. Crazy people do crazy things, yes. But in sufficient numbers such people can alter the course of human history…and not in a way that any decent American should be able to imagine calmly.