The Great Debate
There
are good reasons why Europe’s Jews are so worried
By Harold James
February 11, 2016
The Weimar Republic,
Germany’s flawed experiment in democracy in the 1920s, has become
today’s paradigm for the failure of state and society. By the end
of Weimar, the government seemed to have lost control — vigilantes
from the political extremes claimed they were keeping the streets
safe while beating up vulnerable minorities, above all Jews. So it is
shocking when citizens in Germany and France — and elsewhere in
Europe — increasingly cite Weimar when discussing their society
today.
The European Union
now does sometimes resemble a replay of Weimar’s combination of
institutional perfection with violent and nationalist forces aimed at
tearing down the “system.” Though Germany’s 1919 constitution,
written in the city of Weimar, was widely viewed as a model document,
throughout the 1920s the constitutional dream seemed ever more
disconnected from public life.
Graves desecrated by
vandals with Nazi swastikas and anti-semitic slogans in the Jewish
cemetery of Brumath close to Strasbourg, October 31, 2004. It is the
third time in the last six months that Jewish cemeteries have been
desecrated in the Alsace regionREUTERS/Vincent Kessler VK/WS
Graves desecrated by
vandals with Nazi swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans in the Jewish
cemetery of Brumath close to Strasbourg, October 31, 2004.
REUTERS/Vincent Kessler
The political
leaders of France and Germany today deplore anti-Semitism and make
striking gestures of solidarity with their country’s Jewish
population, but the gestures seem helpless. The number of
anti-Semitic incidents, as tracked by such bodies as the European
Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, is on the rise. Many Jews in
many European countries, but above all in France, are contemplating
leaving because they believe their homelands have become so unsafe.
The political establishment tries to reassure them with the argument
that the parallels with 1933 are really too much of a stretch.
To a degree, the
reassuring voices are correct. Many of the most prominent recent
European incidents are not the outcome of an old-style anti-Semitism
in France or Germany. Indeed, the right-wing French National Front
under Marine Le Pen has distanced itself from its older positions —
as articulated by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, who was convicted of
Holocaust denial after calling the wartime Nazi occupation of France
“not particularly inhuman.” In fact, today’s National Front
sometimes refers to Israel as an ally against Islamism. In the new
grass-roots anti-immigration movement in eastern Germany, PEGIDA, the
explicit target is “Islamicization,” and Israeli as well as
Russian flags were prominently displayed in some of its early
rallies.
At the beginning,
Weimar’s political institutions were skillfully designed to be as
representative as possible. Most Germans viewed their society as
remarkably tolerant. German Jews in the 1920s often emphasized that
they lived in a more inclusive society than France’s, which was
still riven by the legacy of the Dreyfus case, when the army and the
church prosecuted an innocent Jewish officer for espionage, or than
the United States’, where prime real estate and universities were
often not open to Jews.
This misconception
about German stability lasted a long time, indeed extending for a
time after Adolf Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933. Right up
until April 1933, when the regime launched a “boycott” of Jews,
many German Jews refused to accept that anti-Semitism could be
politically serious.
Today, the most
obviously violent threats clearly come from Islamic terrorism, from
groups affiliated to or imitating Islamic State. That is the story of
the attack on the Jewish supermarket in Paris, where four were killed
last January, which came in the wake of the attack on the satirical
magazine Charlie Hebdo. It is also cited to explain the attack on the
Jewish Museum in Brussels, or of some of the many synagogue attacks.
The Agency for Fundamental Rights even tries to register incidents
separately and attributes some of them to “foreign ideology,”
meaning radical or jihadist Islamism.
French author Marek
Halter cleans the word 'quenelle' written on "The Wall For
Peace" at the Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower in Paris
January 6, 2014. The expression "la quenelle" literally
translates into English as meaning an elongated creamed fish dumpling
but is also a reference to the French comedian Dieudonne's trademark
straight-arm salute. France is considering banning performances by
Dieudonne M'bala M'bala whose shows have, according to Interior
Minister Manuel Valls last December, repeatedly insulted the memory
of Holocaust victims and could threaten public order.
REUTERS/Benoit Tessier (FRANCE - Tags: POLITICS)
French author Marek
Halter cleans the word ‘quenelle’ written on “The Wall For
Peace” at the Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower in Paris,
January 6, 2014. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Yet the jihadist
incidents are — in numerical terms — a minority. There is,
however, an intellectual contagion, in which native far-right
radicals often use anti-Israel and anti-American slogans that
proliferate in the Middle East as part of their anti-Semitic arsenal.
In France and Britain the “quenelle,” a version of the Hitler
salute, popularized by the French comedian Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala
has become popular with the racist right.
In addition,
arguments about anti-Semitism have spilled over into the discussion
of the refugee crisis confronting Europe. For some, the large-scale
inflow of more than a million refugees in one year, from the Middle
East and North Africa, is bound to lead to an inflow of actual
terrorists, who can easily conceal themselves in the crowds of
migrants. But it is also being blamed for a possible influx of
terrorist ideas. Anti-Semitic texts such as Mein Kampf or the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion are widely available in the countries
from which migrants are moving; and anti-Semitism, usually linked to
anti-Israelism, is a natural ingredient of the social and cultural
milieu that is moving into Europe.
Critics of
large-scale immigration use the supposed anti-Semitic culture of many
migrants as an argument against migration. They then make a case
about the superiority of their native or indigenous culture — which
can also, paradoxically, include hostility to aliens. So Jews feel
vulnerable on two fronts: vulnerable because of who is attacking
them, and vulnerable because of who is defending them.
The classic liberal
answer to the new threat is that the state has an absolute and
unconditional duty to protect all its citizens. That is the position
that Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and French Prime Minister
Manuel Valls insistently, and rightly, defend.
But many people will
also ask whether the state can really offer so much security. It is
increasingly obvious that the police are overstretched. That was true
even before the flood of refugees. A long trial currently under way
in Munich, Germany, has highlighted the way in which the intelligence
service that was dedicated to “protection of the constitution”
(Verfassungsschutz) against right-wing terrorists was for a long time
blind to the threat. Instead, it had undermined its efforts by
engaging members of far-right-wing groups as informers. Dealing with
the new kinds of threat demands a far greater security presence, as
well as new methods of surveillance.
As more and more
incidents demonstrate police ineffectiveness, new groups will
mobilize for self-protection. The incidents on New Year’s Eve in
Cologne and in other German cities, in which criminal groups,
composed largely of migrants from North Africa, stole from and
sexually harassed women, have led to the formation of citizens’
patrols. In many cases, the personnel of these patrols come from the
far right and its sympathizers.
That brings the
story back to Weimar. In the last years of the republic, German
streets were controlled not by the police but by paramilitary groups,
of the left (the communist Red Front Fighters’ League) as well as
the right (the Nazi Stormtroopers). Then, even the parties of the
center believed that they, too, needed their own defense
organizations, and built up their own leagues. When the government
tried to ban the Nazi Stormtroopers, the army objected on the grounds
that it believed it could not effectively fight all the different
leagues simultaneously.
One lesson of Weimar
is that it is very dangerous for the state to give up its legal
monopoly of violence. One key feature that makes modern life
civilized is precisely that we don’t take the law into our own
hands. But the existence of threats, real or imagined, creates a
great deal of pressure for “self-defense.”
There is a second,
related lesson. Violent and ostensibly antagonistic ideologies may be
quite capable of fusing. Sometimes in Weimar, the far right and far
left just fought each other; on other occasions, they joined together
in attacking the “system.” Today in Europe, there are the same
curious blends, sometimes of jihadism with traditional anti-Semitism,
or anti-jihadism and anti-immigrant populism with traditional
anti-Semitism.
The fusing of
dangerous ideologies makes members of small groups vulnerable. They
are additionally vulnerable when the state promises protection that
it cannot actually deliver. That is why Europe’s Jews are so
worried.
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