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"Holocaust is Jews own religious fault"

Oliver

Penultimate Amazing
Oliver
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Aug 12, 2006
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Yesterday I had a conversation about the whole Middle East mess with a colleague and we also talked about Israel as a part of it. When the Holocaust came up as an "accelerator" for immigration into Palestine, he argued that "the Holocaust probably never had happened if the Jews wouldn't have sticked to their religion and instead, integrated themselves into European societies so they wouldn't have been the scapegoat for centuries".

Now that striked me as a loaded argument against Religion, Judaism in particular, but I have no Idea how much of that POV is accurate. Sure, from History we know that Jewish People in strong Christian Societies [and other religious communities] were seen as "different" and probably in many cases in a negative meaning, but would integration have avoided the Shoah, I don't know.

Your thoughts?

[And I might add that my collegue isn't an Anti-Semite from what he argued besides that particular POV]
 
Well, technically speaking, the Third Reich's excuse and criterion was racial not religious. If a good argument could be made that at least one of your grandparents are Jewish, then you're a Jew, and it's off to Buchenwald with you.

Even if I were to take your coleague's view (and I don't), it's impossible for me to place the blame on the people who rounded up by the SS. Even if they wanted to change their religion and integrate -- in fact, a large percentage of them had given up Judaism and most were as integrated as it gets -- it was way too late for them. They'd still get rounded up because one of their granparents was Jewish. I just can't see how it can be right to kill someone for some perceived fault of his grandfather.

As an illustration, and a pretty perverse one at that, take Reinhard Heydrich. The "Blond Beast". The "Butcher Of Prague". Or "Himmler's evil genius." I think you'll agree that he was as integrated as it gets in the NSDAP, if Hitler even considered him as a successor. I mean, come on, you can't get more integrated than _that_.

But the mere suggestion that his grandmother's second husband had a jewish-sounding name, almost got him dismissed. And it was used as a threat against him to keep him in line.

IIRC he eventually used his influence and had it as a reward that an "investigation" destroyed and falsified documents to prove that that guy not only wasn't a jew, but wasn't his grandfather either. You can't get more thorough than that.

Because the "taint" of Jewish blood was that important to them, above all else. Even the guy who was Hitler's and Himmler's faithful dog, even the guy who was instrumental in the policy of exterminating the Jews, etc... well, he still wouldn't be integrated enough if he had any jewish ancestry.
 
Prior to the time of the holocaust, Jewish villages were often attacked when Illness occurred in gentile circles and not in the Jewish community because they were accused of poisioning wells. The lack of disease can be traced to their religious rituals of strict hygiene, abstention from certain foods and their lack of integration into general society.

So it looks like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Edit: Ah, I misread the intent of you friend, since his grammar was so poor, "Wouldn't have sticked"?
But the point still stands, that they were villified for being separate as described above, and villified for being integrated and, according to the nazis, poisoning aryan blood by inter-marrying and destroying the economy by running the banks. They were attacked for being too separate and for being too integrated. In fact the original Nazi premise, before the death camps were announced, maybe their actual plan before the death camps were constructed, was to re-segregate the Jews OUT of mainstream society.

And even if you could arrive at the position that Jews wouldn't have been persecuted if they had given up their religion and integrated into Christian society, that doesn't translate to blame in any way.

Harvey Milk would probably not have been killed if he had remained in the closet. Martin Luther King would not have been murdered if he never fought for civil rights. Many women could have avoided being raped if they simply gave up secular life and joined a nunnery.

The fact remains that any individual or group having the power (in hindsight) to have avoided being victimized by giving up something important to them, in no way is the same as them being at fault. The Nazis are at fault, the rapists are at fault, the murderers are at fault.

Fault lies with those who take purposeful action to victimize others.
 
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The lack of integration also wasn't entirely the fault of the Jews, members of "polite society" looked down on Jews & wouldn't tolerate them trying to integrate - they didn't want any "uppity Jews" in their country club.

This wasn't just happening in Germany either, there are still some "Gentlemans clubs" in the UK & golf clubs in the U.S.A that only fairly recently opened their doors to Jews.
 
Cavemonster said:
according to the nazis, poisoning aryan blood by inter-marrying and destroying the economy by running the banks.
Click to expand...

Not disagreeing with you, but just to illustrate the point further: it wasn't just the banks. According to Nazi propaganda, just about _anything_ a Jew did at all was somehow evil.

If you look at some of the propaganda books for children from back then, it's often stupefying because it's stuff we'd just call the normal run of any free market economy. E.g., the jewish butcher was presented as evil because he bought the german peasant's animals (presumably at a better price than anyone else offered, since nobody forced the peasant to sell to a particular butcher anyway) and then he's presented as evil for driving the german butchers out of business with his lower prices.

I mean, wtf?

It's especially stupefying because the NSDAP for all the "socialist" in its name and initial promises, was also promising to be throughly right wing to the industrialists. And after it got the power, it did side with the industrialists all the way. You'd think a right-wing ideology wouldn't be bothered by some guys who (in the NSDAP's own propaganda, if not necessarily all in Real Life) practiced free market economics.

So, yes, as you correctly point out, it wasn't about integration in the rest of the society at all, it was plain old about being "racially" a Jew. Anything a Jew did, other than maybe keel over and die, was presented as inherently evil.
 
If everyone always sucked up to those in power, no matter how unreasonable their demands or how barbaric their behaviour, yes it is likely that there would be somewhat less persecution.

But I think it is also 100% certain that the world would be a horrible place.
 
By the same token, if everyone in the US converted to militant Islam, the 911 attack wouldn't have happened, so really it's our own fault.

This argument, it is toilet paper. If your friend is not actually anti-semitic, then he is simply an idiot.
 
Yup, if Jews became Xian then there would not have been the Holocaust. Sure whatever.

If they had let the jews emigrate to the US...but they couldn't ... because of prejudice.
 
It just occured to me that if the various canonized martyrs of Christianity itself had shut the f*** up and stopped trying to troll for Jesus, they wouldn't have been martyred. So I guess it's their own damn fault.
 
Fault, and the ability to have avoided a situation (when seen in hindsight) are not synonymous.
 
FWIW, many years ago now in this forum I made a similar point to the one that Oliver's colleague did.

My point wasn't that the holocaust or the mistreatment of Jews in general was the fault of the Jews, it was just the notion that if people of Jewish faith or culture had assimilated more thoroughly into the mainstream culture then the mistreatment of people based on their religious or cultural differences wouldn't be possible.

I had two questions in mind when I made that point:
1. Is antisemitism a unique kind of discrimination against a minority population or is it just the routine kind of discrimination against minority populations that seems to be a fairly common aspect of human culture?
2. Was there something unique about Judaism or the relationship between Christianity and Judaism that led to a longer than normal assimilation time for people in the Jewish culture?

Today I have much more complicated thoughts about those questions than when I was considering earlier.

I think several things are going on here that make it such that the Jewish/Christian cultural enmity is out of the norm for the interaction of a minority population with a majority population.

1. Christianity was founded at a time of great hostility towards the Jewish population by the Romans and an almost essential aspect of it to catch on in its early years was some inherent antisemitism. The antisemitism that was inherent in the formation of Christianity ended up surviving after the Roman empire was long gone.
2. There is a racial element to Judaism that tends to isolate Jews more from the majority population than if the Judaism/Christian enmity was just based on religious differences.
3. There is an exclusionary element to at least some of Judaism that worked to isolate Jewish communities from the majority population.

But despite all this, I think the occurence of the holocaust was an unlikely event that might not have happened except for the existence of Hitler. Jews in Germany had substantially assimilated into the German mainstream. They served in the military and I believe about a third of all Jews were marrying gentiles prior to the rise of Hitler. Despite significant isolation from the majority European population the fact seems to be that Jews and Gentiles had been marrying in Europe for a very long time and a lot of Christians were at least partially Jewish by ancestry and all European Jews were substantially Christian by ancestry.
 
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I understand that the issues of 'assimilation' vs 'integration' are understood differently in Europe and in the US. The European understanding of 'assimilation', I believe, is that a group would give up any distinctive features and just blend completely with the rest of the population. On the other hand, 'integration' means that a group may still be distinct, but it has countless ties with the majority and is not excluded from positions of power.

In this sense, American Jews are currently 'integrated', but they are not 'assimilated'.

Now, the thing is that for German Jews, they were quite integrated too. Perhaps not so in Eastern Europe, which is where most of the killing took place, but the genocide was planned in Germany and pushed by an Austrian, so this doesn't really support the idea that if the Jews had just been better integrated, the genocide would not have happened.

Now if someone is really arguing for 'assimilation' in the sense given above, I don't think it's worth considering. We are human beings, we are not some sort of Borg.
 
davefoc said:
1. Christianity was founded at a time of great hostility towards the Jewish population by the Romans and an almost essential aspect of it to catch on in its early years was some inherent antisemitism. The antisemitism that was inherent in the formation of Christianity ended up surviving after the Roman empire was long gone.
Click to expand...

Well, before Constantine, Christianity was seen by most Romans as just a sub-cult of Judaism. So it's a bit hard to distinguish when they were persecuting Jews thinking they're Christians, and when did they persecute Christians thinking they're Jews.

A good case can be made that more Jews suffered because of the Christian trolls (err... "martyrs") trying to get their automatic immortality by getting killed by the Romans before promised imminent doomsday, than the other way around. To the Romans both were worshippers of the same jewish god, both had the annoying (and illegal!) habit of denying the gods of the state, and both were fairly hostile to Rome. Few took the time to distinguish between the obnoxious followers of Christ and the slightly less obnoxious worshippers of the same god.

At any rate, given that a lot of the hostility to Jews was really just misplaced hostility to Christians... it would be kinda sad if later antisemitism were just because of the trolling of very early Christians.

But I don't think really that it's because of that. I don't think that any of the later religious persecutions of any kind (including catholics-vs-cathars, catholics-vs-protestants, both-vs-muslims, etc) had much to do with whatever the Romans thought 1000 years earlier. E.g., when the call to the first crusade caused some people to go murder jews at home instead, it was simply a case of, basically, "if god wants the heathens killed, wouldn't he want those right here killed too?"

davefoc said:
2. There is a racial element to Judaism that tends to isolate Jews more from the majority population than if the Judaism/Christian enmity was just based on religious differences.
Click to expand...

That's a bit of a vicious circle. Once the Jews were forced to be penned in their own isolated quarters and whatnot, of course they'd eventually get their own genetic differences.

There is nothing racial about Judaism itself. Even if you count it as needing a jewish mother, just about the only things that would stay constant after a few generations would be the mitochondrial DNA. Even the X chromosome that a daughter gives in turn to her son, can actually be the one from her father.

The only racial differences are, pretty much, because of isolating them in the first place.

davefoc said:
3. There is an exclusionary element to at least some of Judaism that worked to isolate Jewish communities from the majority population.
Click to expand...

Maybe, but historically they did not as much voluntarily isolate themselves from the rest of the world, but the other way around. They were forced to live in separate quarters, were given funny names, and a bunch of other stuff.

So I would think the blame is a bit misplaced in this point.
 
Even if there were no ethnic differences people would still find some excuse to abuse others.
 
AkuManiMani said:
Even if there were no ethnic differences people would still find some excuse to abuse others.
Click to expand...

Yes God forbid the SS, Hitler and the rest of the Nazi glee club were forced into this course of action. Those dispicable Jews, daring to breath, raise kids, live life, how dare they. What an afront such actions are :eek:
 
Someone would have been made the scapegoat, no matter what, they would come up with something they didn't like about someone, like the color of their eyes…………… wait......... they did that.

Paul

:) :) :)
 
Oliver said:
Yesterday I had a conversation about the whole Middle East mess with a colleague and we also talked about Israel as a part of it. When the Holocaust came up as an "accelerator" for immigration into Palestine, he argued that "the Holocaust probably never had happened if the Jews wouldn't have sticked to their religion and instead, integrated themselves into European societies so they wouldn't have been the scapegoat for centuries".

[And I might add that my collegue isn't an Anti-Semite from what he argued besides that particular POV]
Click to expand...

I would argue that your friend is one of those self proclaimed non racists who sometimes starts statements with "I'm not a racist but". He may not think hes got a racist bone in his body but his argument clearly shows otherwise

the jews had always been used as scapegoats because they were a racial minority. thats always been a good enough reason for racist depots wether that person was Nebuchadrezzar II, one of several popes or Hitler makes no difference, their creed has always been "pick on someone different who can't fight back", its never been about how genuinely inferior a person or a group is, its always been about how superior you can make yourself feel and look by annihilating them.
:mad:
 
If you find the series Christianity: a History, it puts the Holocaust into the context of 2000 years of Christian anti-Semitism.
 
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