Finding a mistake in Part I, I made the mistake of starting Part II on the same day I wrote the last part, and like any sort of exercise, it's not a good idea to do two regimens in one day. 24 hours later, my brain feels like such that I can't even finish that day's post. So here it is, what I wrote last night, which itself was a way of apologizing for how this series of posts got more fluid...
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It was foreordained ("bashert") that this post would be more than two parts no matter what I said, I just didn't think it would happen so quickly.
But then I decided to put Benny Morris and his many villages of gloom down so I could pick up something the promised to be a bit more readable: the 'famous' history of Zionism by Conor Cruise O'Brien, endowed with the promisingly cheerful title: 'The Siege.' O'Brien is a guy had the concentration to write a 1000 page history of Zionism while still being a UN diplomat, Irish politician, British newspaper editor, and write history books about most of the major English speaking nations: meanwhile I can't finish a fucking history book without picking another up.
And within the first fifty pages, O'Brien documents the first use of the word 'antisemitism.' So far as we know, it comes from the scintillatingly titled "Der Sieg Des Judenthums Über Das Germanenthum" by Wilhelm Marr - a book that sold twelve editions by 1879. The book title literally means 'The victory of Judaism over Germanism,' and after its publishing, Marr literally started an organization called 'The League of Antisemites" - which is not the most appropriate title for an org accusing Jews of participating in a conspiracy. It was just one of a number of German bestsellers in that period whose thesis is that Jews are a terrible racial threat, and at least two of them suggested the elimination of the Jewish people as early as sixty years before the Holocaust. These books were written in 19th century Germany, which was, believe it or not, thought Europe's acme of progressive tolerance, and the absolute zenith of Europe's philosemitism.
Now, I should have remembered about the origin of the word antisemitism because THIS IS IN THE BOOK I TALKED ABOUT READING IN PART 1.
I'm sure I've read it elsewhere too. This is not an uncommon point, but the important point to make is that antisemitism was not coined by the unprejudiced to describe a type of bigotry, it was coined by the bigots themselves as a mark of pride.
Until late 1800s Germany, antisemitism was not about race, or at least, not officially about race. Supposedly, if a Jew converted to Christianity or Islam, the persecution would cease: though that's never how it worked out in reality... This is the era of Nietzsche's Germany, and unless you're a libertarian objectivist, you will find the worldview of this epoch completely antithetical to our own. A lot of thinkers wanted to dispense with Christianity outright: not because of Christ or persecution or fanaticism, but particularly with the Christian notions which we think of as the religion's greatest virtues. Nietzsche's greatest hope was that humanity would dispense with notions that he believed to be human disadvantages, Christian notions like compassion and tolerance (I'm perfectly serious... read Nietzsche...).
To Nietzsche, Judaism is not the enemy, Christianity is the enemy, but to Nietzsche's followers, it was obvious that Jewish influence started the world down the path to its rejection of progress, and by worrying about helping others or achieving salvation through our virtue, we reject most of the ways we can make the world better. So therefore, it's the Jews particularly who hold the world back from its true potential. To thinkers like Wilhelm Marr and Eugen Durching, Jews should be hated not because we killed Christ but because we birthed him. Judaism, to them, created the whole monotheistic horror that killed the classical ethos of Greece and Rome - an ethos of strength and reason and pride and wisdom, which created a better world which it took Christians, hidebound from progress by their need for tolerance and inclusion, a full 1900 years to equal.
So all these Christian societies: from Byzantium to the Holy Roman Empire to the Bulgars to the Crusaders to the Renaissance city-states to the Polish Lithuanians to the Hanseatic League to the kingdoms and empires we know from history class and nation states we know from current events...
What do they all have in common?
What they all have in common is the presence of us, the Jews, and yet they all eventually fall. Even Rome herself fell from the sway of Christianity, and before Rome adapted Christ, Christianity was barely more than a little sect of apostate Jews. When did Greece fall? Shortly after Alexander the Great's death, the Syrian (Sellucid) Greeks tried to conquer Judea, and Jews celebrate how that went every Hanukkah.
Who, so far as we know, did not have the presence of us?
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....This is the tragedy of Zionism: it was enacted just late enough that it could not prevent the event it was created to stop.
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