AMERICAN ANTISEMITISM IS NOT NEW
The year was 1977. Jimmy Carter was president. A white supremacist, who later told police he intended to “kill Jews,” detonated explosives and blew up Beth Shalom Synagogue on Pisgah Avenue in Chattanooga — a synagogue I would join some 30 years later. Almost nothing was left of the building except rubble and some miraculously preserved Torah scrolls.
The men of that synagogue, so the story goes, were supposed to have been in prayer during the time of the explosion, but they didn’t “make a minyan,” i.e., achieve the minimum number of 10 men required for an Orthodox service, so they went home early.
If the congregants that Friday night had made a minyan, at least 10 Jews would have been killed, one short of the number killed last weekend in Pittsburgh. It was only luck, or the will of God, that saved them.
Antisemitism in America is not new. Violence against Jews in America is not new.
Jews have long been the number one religious target of hate crimes in the United States.
In 2014, according to the FBI, under the Obama administration, “56.8 percent [of anti-religious hate crimes] were victims of crimes motivated by their offenders’ anti-Jewish bias.” That’s almost three times the percentage of such crimes against Muslims (16.1 percent), the next largest target of religious bias.
Irrational hatred has plagued the Jews in Western culture for more than a thousand years. It waxes and wanes, but it never goes away.
For those who want to know more about the long, long history of antisemitism, I recommend “Europe and the Jews” by Walter Kaufman. Kaufman traces the history of violence against Jews in Europe from 1096 when about 10,000 Jews were killed in the Crusades. He writes about how it used to be the annual custom at Easter time in Toulouse “to drag a Jew into the Church of St. Stephen and slap him on the face before the alter,” a form of persecution that is frankly comical compared to some of the brutalities visited upon Jews over the millennium preceding World War II. Over the centuries Jews were blamed for, among other things, earthquakes, storms and the black plague, and were the victims of ritual torture, inquisitions and pogroms.
America has been kinder to Jews, but antisemitism here also has a long, if not quite as brutal, history. Besides the 1977 attack in Chattanooga, there was another against a synagogue the same year in St. Louis, Missouri. There were also attacks on American synagogues in 1958 and 1960.
Antisemitism didn’t start in Hitler’s Germany, and it certainly didn’t start in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.
But you wouldn’t know that to hear what some people in the media have to say. Despite the murderer’s explicit attack against Trump for, among other things, allowing a “kike infestation” of his administration, despite Trump’s Jewish daughter and grandchildren, they say it’s our president’s rhetoric and winking at white supremacists that have caused this tragedy.
People blaming what happened this weekend on the current administration are either ignorant or are putting party politics ahead of concern for the Jewish people.
I don’t know what the answer is. I’m not sure there is an answer. For myself, I see antisemitism as a kind of social hysteria, a mass mental-disease that is never dormant, though not always deadly, but which, nonetheless, periodically, even inevitably, expresses itself in violence.
The U.S. is not, and never has been, immune to this disease.
The time now, at least for the Jewish community and its friends, is not for assigning blame but for expressions of grief and comfort, a time for reflection and remembrance, a time for acknowledging that antisemitism is nothing new.
Thomas P. Balázs, a fiction writer and essayist, is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.