The connection between racism and sex has always intrigued researchers. White racists in the US spread the rumor that "niggers" have bigger penises. Among German Nazi newspapers, the most sensationalist was Der Stà ¼rmer, a pornographic sheet filled with stories about innocent blond girls seduced by the money of crooked-nosed ugly Jews. Its editor, Julius Streicher, was condemned and hanged in Nuremberg.
Some believe that one of the roots of racism is a feeling of sexual inadequacy, the lack of self-confidence of men afraid of sexual impotence and/or competition -- the very opposite of the picture of the macho racist he-man. It is enough to look at the racist protesters to draw conclusions.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE famously said that every person is a racist -- the difference being between those who admit it to themselves and try to combat it and those who do not.
That is undoubtedly true. I have a simple test for the power of racism: you are driving and somebody cuts your path. If it is a black driver, you say: "Damn n-word!" If it is a woman, you shout: "Go home to your kitchen!" If he wears a kippah, you cry: "Bloody Dos!" ("Dos" is a derogatory Hebrew term for a religious Jew.) If it is a driver without special features, you just shout: "Idiot! Who gave you a driving license?"
The hatred of strangers, the aversion to everyone who is unlike you, are -- so it seems -- biological traits, remnants from the time of ancient man, when every stranger was a threat to the limited resources the tribe had to depend on. It exists in many other animal species, too. Nothing to be proud of.
The civilized human being, and even more so the civilized human society, has a duty to fight these traits -- not only because they are ugly in themselves, but also because they hinder the modernization of the globalized world, In which cooperation between peoples and between people is imperative. It takes us back to the stone age.
The situation here is now moving in the opposite direction: the country is embracing the racist demon. After millennia as the victims of racism, it seems as if Jews here are happy to be able to do unto others what has been done to them.
IT IS impossible to ignore the central role played by rabbis in this filthy mess. They ride the wave and assert that this is the spirit of Judaism. They quote the holy texts at length.
The truth is that Judaism, like almost every religion, includes racist and anti-racist, humanist and barbarian elements. The Crusaders, who massacred the Jews on their way to the Holy Land and who slaughtered the inhabitants of Jerusalem --" Muslims and Jews alike -- when they conquered the city, shouted: "God Wills It!" One can find in the New Testament magnificent passages preaching love, side by side with quite different sections. So, too, in the Koran there are Surahs full of love for humankind and calls for justice and equality, as well as others full of intolerance and hatred.
So, too, the Hebrew Bible. The racists quote Rabbi Maimonides, who interpreted two biblical words as a commandment not to let non-Jews reside in the country. The whole Book of Joshua is a call to genocide. The Bible commands the Israelites to murder the entire tribe of Amalek ("both man and woman, infant and suckling") and the Prophet Samuel dethroned King Saul because he spared the lives of Amalekite prisoners (1 Samuel 15).
But the Hebrew Bible is also a book of unequalled humanity. It starts with the description of the creation of man and woman, stressing that all human beings are created in the image of God -- and therefore equal. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he him." The Bible repeatedly demands the treatment of "Gerim" (foreigners living among the Israelites) as Israelites, "because you were foreigners in the land of Egypt."
As Gershom Schocken, the owner and long-time editor in chief of Haaretz, pointed out in an article republished this week on the 20th anniversary of his death: Ezra did indeed expel the non-Jewish wives from the community, but before that, foreign women played a central role in the Biblical story. Bathsheba was the wife of a Hittite, before she married King David and became the mother of the house from which the Messiah will come in due course (or from which, as Christians believe, Jesus -- who was born 2010 years ago today -- already came.) David himself was the descendant of Ruth, a Moabite woman. King Ahab, the greatest of Israelite kings, married a Phoenician woman.
When our racists present the ugliest face of Judaism, ignoring its universalist message, they do great damage to the religion of millions of Jews around the world. The most important Jewish rabbis were silent this week in face of the racist fire that was ignited by rabbis, or murmured something about "ways of peace" -- referring to the rule forbidding the provocation of Goyim, because they might treat the Jews in their countries as the Jews treat the minorities in their own state. Up to now, no Christian priest has yet called upon his flock not to let apartments to Jews -- but it could happen.
The silence of the "Torah sages" is thunderous. Even more so the silence of the country's political leaders: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres did not roar his outrage, and Binyamin Netanyahu has contented himself with calling upon the racists "not to take the law into their own hands." Not a single word against racism, not a single word about morality and justice.
WHEN I listened to the ex-soldiers at the "Breaking the Silence" meeting, I was filled with hope. This generation understands its duty to heal the state in which they will spend their lives.
In the words of the Hanukkah song, which is rapidly becoming the anthem of the anti-racist demonstrations: "We come the darkness to expel!"
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