Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
This NEW RELEASE is for anyone and everyone concerned with the rising threat of bigotry and hatred in our country. It’s a harsh but necessary wake up call… not only for Jews, but for all Americans. Surprisingly, the most virulent form of anti-Semitism today is the result of toxic identity politics and anti-Israeli sentiment coming from today’s political Left. Perhaps the most persecuted people in all of history, Jews have stood tall in the face of unprecedented persecution in all places, at all times. Their culture’s rigorous emphasis on education and achievement catapults them to the upper echelons of the societies in which they live. But their success too often breeds resentment and jealousy, leading to an ugly anti-Semitism that has led, historically, to unspeakable violence. In this urgent new work, Dr. Benjamin Ginsberg—political scientist, professor, and bestselling author—exposes the ugly face of this new, progressive anti-Semitism (which is also thriving in Europe). To combat it, he urges American Jews to form new political alliances, particularly with evangelical Christians. The stakes of not doing so, says Ginsberg, are horrifically high—not only for the survival of the Jewish people, but for America’s survival. Jews have been good for America; and America has been good to the Jews. But things can change ... and Jews can never afford to forget their history.
Conheça um pouco sobre a história do conflito entre israelenses e palestinos, cujo novo capítulo de confronto já deixou mortos de ambos os lados
JERUSALÉM - Em dezembro, em meio a um catastrófico derramamento de sangue em Gaza, a Câmara dos Deputados dos Estados Unidos decidiu que “antissionismo é antissemitismo”. A votação foi de 311 a 14, com 92 membros presentes, refletindo um consenso entre as elites políticas americanas de que a oposição ao sionismo é equivalente ao ódio conspiratório contra os judeus. Se a resolução em si não teve consequências práticas imediatas, o consenso por trás dela teve.
A votação desigual refletiu o apoio diplomático, militar e ideológico absoluto do governo dos EUA a Israel, uma vez que esse Estado, sob a liderança do governo mais conservador de sua história, estava realizando uma campanha em resposta ao ataque terrorista de 7 de outubro que resultou na morte de dezenas de milhares de palestinos, incluindo crianças. Ao saber dessa votação, muitas pessoas familiarizadas com a história judaica podem ter reprimido um riso sardônico. O antissionismo, afinal, foi uma criação dos judeus, não de seus inimigos.
Antes da 2ª Guerra Mundial, o sionismo era a questão mais divisiva e debatida com mais intensidade no mundo judaico. O antissionismo tinha variantes de esquerda e variantes de direita, variantes religiosas e variantes seculares, bem como variantes em todos os países onde os judeus residiam. Para qualquer conhecedor dessa história, é surpreendente que, como a resolução quer que seja, a oposição ao sionismo tenha sido equiparada à oposição ao judaísmo - e não apenas ao judaísmo, mas ao ódio aos próprios judeus. Mas essa confusão não tem nada a ver com a história. Em vez disso, ela é política e seu objetivo tem sido desacreditar os oponentes de Israel como racistas.
A raça sempre esteve no centro do debate. Muitos antissionistas acreditavam que os judeus eram, em sua linguagem, “uma igreja”. Isso significava que, embora compartilhassem certas crenças, tradições e afinidades com correligionários de outras nações, eles ainda assim pertenciam tão plenamente às suas próprias comunidades nacionais quanto qualquer outra pessoa. Para eles, um judeu americano era um judeu americano, assim como um americano episcopaliano ou um americano católico era, antes de tudo, um americano.
Eles não estavam dispostos a aderir a qualquer ideia que sugerisse que os judeus eram uma raça, separada e, como os antissemitas diriam, inassimilável. Essas pessoas não se consideravam exiladas, como os sionistas gostariam que fossem. Elas consideravam que estavam em casa. Eles temiam que a insistência na etnia ou na raça pudesse expô-los às velhas acusações de dupla lealdade, minando as tentativas de alcançar a igualdade. Na verdade, o pensamento antissionista é anterior ao sionismo.
Ele surge da possibilidade que apareceu pela primeira vez no final do século XVIII. Em 1790, em sua famosa carta aos judeus de Newport, R.I., George Washington declarou que “todos possuem igualmente liberdade de consciência e imunidades de cidadania. Agora não se fala mais em tolerância como se fosse a indulgência de uma classe de pessoas para que outra desfrute do exercício de seus direitos naturais inerentes, pois, felizmente, o governo dos Estados Unidos, que não sanciona o fanatismo nem ajuda a perseguição, exige apenas que aqueles que vivem sob sua proteção se comportem como bons cidadãos”. Apenas alguns anos depois, Napoleão ofereceu aos judeus da França a possibilidade de cidadania plena em um estado secular - e depois levou esse princípio para os vastos territórios que conquistou.
A abertura dos guetos desencadeou uma explosão de criatividade. Os pensadores judeus começaram a contestar uma ideia preservada nas orações tradicionais: que os judeus retornariam à Palestina, onde, em sua terra ancestral, seriam governados por um descendente da Casa de Davi, restaurariam os sacrifícios sob o sacerdócio dos descendentes de Aarão e adorariam em um templo reconstruído. Muitos pensadores modernizadores rejeitaram essa e muitas outras fórmulas rituais, considerando-as antiquadas e fantasiosas. Em vez de esperar um messias vivo - alguém que traria a ressurreição corporal dos mortos - eles esperavam, em vez disso, uma era messiânica de paz e fraternidade. Isso não estava condicionado à esperança mística de um retorno a Sião.
Em vez disso, os judeus deveriam trabalhar no aqui e agora do mundo real. Junto com essa ideia, veio o preceito de que os judeus são, nas palavras de um rabino, “cidadãos e filhos fiéis das terras em que nasceram ou foram adotados”. Eles são uma comunidade religiosa, não uma nação”. Embora considerado radical no início, esse preceito acabaria sendo adotado pela maioria dos judeus ocidentais. Continua após a publicidade Essa visão acabaria encontrando sua adesão mais entusiástica nos Estados Unidos. “Este país é nossa Palestina, esta cidade é nossa Jerusalém, esta casa de Deus é nosso Templo”, disse o rabino Gustavus Poznanski de Charleston, Carolina do Sul, em 1841. Um século depois, durante o Holocausto e a 2ª Guerra Mundial, o rabino Samuel Schulman, do Templo Emanu-El, em Nova York, declarou que “A essência do judaísmo reformista para mim é a rejeição do nacionalismo judaico, não necessariamente o consumo de presunto”.
Muitos judeus notaram que falar de uma “diáspora”, até mesmo de um “povo judeu”, assemelhava-se às calúnias dos antissemitas, que sustentavam que os judeus eram um “imperium in imperio”, estrangeiros inassimiláveis. Eles notaram, como dificilmente poderiam deixar de notar, que muitos antissemitas eram fervorosamente pró-sionistas: o melhor era se livrar dos judeus. Após a Declaração Balfour de 1917, que prometia uma pátria judaica à pequena minoria de judeus que vivia na Palestina, Lord Montagu, o único judeu no gabinete britânico, observou “A política do governo de Sua Majestade é antissemita em seu resultado e será um ponto de encontro para os antissemitas em todos os países do mundo.” Somente uma catástrofe tão avassaladora como o Holocausto nazista poderia ter encoberto essas divisões. Não importava o que os judeus pensassem de si mesmos, argumentavam os sionistas, os gentios nunca os aceitariam.
Por mais que se sentissem em casa, por mais lealdade que expressassem, por mais que muitos deles morressem defendendo seu país, eles sempre seriam perseguidos. Não importava se eles se autodenominavam um povo, uma raça ou uma igreja; não importava se eles se consideravam alemães, romenos ou canadenses. O mundo exterior só via judeus. Essa realidade calamitosa provou que os judeus só podiam confiar em si mesmos, que precisavam de sua própria terra, seu próprio exército, seu próprio Estado, que precisava existir na Palestina.
O Holocausto parecia provar o argumento sionista. Para quase todos os judeus, o surgimento do Estado de Israel, apenas três anos após a derrota de Hitler, parecia ser uma ressurreição milagrosa. As espetaculares vitórias militares de Israel sobre seus inimigos aparentemente muito mais poderosos eram uma garantia de que os judeus nunca mais sofreriam o que haviam sofrido. Para muitos judeus em todo o mundo - até mesmo judeus que nunca haviam pisado em Israel - o orgulho por Israel substituiu a fé que muitos deles haviam perdido. Após a longa noite de exílio - galut - finalmente havia chegado o amanhecer brilhante.
No entanto, por trás dessa aparente unanimidade, o sionismo permaneceu controvertido.
Era controvertido entre certas comunidades religiosas rigorosas, que acreditavam que somente o Messias poderia levar os judeus de volta à Terra Santa e que rejeitavam o que consideravam o materialismo e a impiedade dos colonos sionistas. Foi polêmico entre os socialistas e comunistas, que rejeitavam todas as formas de nacionalismo. Porém, após a fundação do Estado de Israel, o debate tomou um rumo diferente. O cerne da objeção estava entre aqueles horrorizados com o que Israel significava para a população nativa da Palestina. Para essas pessoas, a lição do antissemitismo foi a rejeição de todas as formas de racismo e, especialmente, dos tipos de atrocidades cometidas contra os judeus. Eles ficaram consternados com o fato de outro povo, que não tinha responsabilidade pelos crimes nazistas, ser forçado a pagar por eles.
E seu compromisso com o universalismo os colocou em conflito com o Estado judeu. Durante décadas, e especialmente devido ao perigo que Israel continuava enfrentando de seus vizinhos, seus argumentos raramente eram ouvidos e muitas vezes ignorados, e eles próprios eram descritos como “odiadores de si mesmos” ou até mesmo como “doentes mentais”. Mesmo os pensadores que continuavam a ver o estabelecimento de Israel como um erro, esperavam que a questão pudesse ser resolvida com uma divisão pacífica. Os acordos de Oslo apontavam para essa possibilidade. Mas o assassinato de Yitzhak Rabin, consequência direta desses acordos, acabou com essa suposição e levou ao poder uma série de governos cada vez mais de direita. Suas políticas tornaram impossível um futuro Estado palestino. Como resultado, o antissionismo, em vez de diminuir, aumentou.
Nenhum outro Estado no mundo viu seu “direito de existir” ser questionado com tanta frequência. Essa falta de reconhecimento tem sido uma das principais, talvez a principal, preocupação da diplomacia israelense. Às vezes pode ser o resultado da rejeição de pessoas que odeiam os judeus, mas entre os judeus é a rejeição da ideia do sionismo. É uma rejeição da ideia de nacionalismo étnico. É uma rejeição da ideia de cidadania ligada à raça. Israel, muito mais do que qualquer outro país que se define como “ocidental” ou “democrático”, ainda se baseia nessas ideias. E pelo fato de ter se definido cada vez mais, e agora oficialmente, como um Estado judeu, seus defensores frequentemente descrevem seus oponentes como antissemitas. O problema com essa descrição? Muitos dos que compartilham essas convicções são, e sempre foram, judeus. “Não há debate”, disse Jonathan Greenblatt, executivo-chefe da Anti-Defamation League, em dezembro.
“O antissionismo é baseado em um conceito, a negação de direitos a um povo.” Para as pessoas que não sabem nada sobre um dos debates mais antigos e persistentes da história judaica, isso pode parecer plausível. Qualquer pessoa que saiba só pode admirar a elegância necessária para apresentar como unânime uma questão tão profundamente divisiva - uma questão que, por dois séculos, atingiu o cerne da identidade dos judeus. O debate nunca foi tão intenso como agora. * Benjamin Moser é judeu, e autor de ‘Sontag: Her Life and Work’, pelo qual ganhou o Prêmio Pulitzer de Biografia. Também escreveu ‘Clarice’, premiada biografia da escritora Clarice Lispector. Seu último livro, ‘The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters’, foi publicado em outubro nos EUA.
O negacionismo do Holocausto judaico, do genocídio armênio, do racismo estrutural que permeia a sociedade brasileira não é opinião, é uma iniquidade.
Celso Lafer, O Estado de S.Paulo
20 de fevereiro de 2022 | 03h00
“Promover o bem de todos, sem preconceitos de origem, raça, sexo, cor, idade e quaisquer outras formas de discriminação” é um dos objetivos do nosso país, contemplado na Constituição cidadã (artigo 3, IV).
É uma ideia a realizar que indica o caminho para dar plena efetividade ao Brasil como sociedade pluralista, diversificada e democrática, retificando múltiplas inadequações de nossa arquitetura imperfeita.
A intolerância de práticas discriminatórias é um obstáculo a esta ideia a realizar. Ela veio à tona com estridência em eventos recentes, como o brutal assassinato de Moïse Kabagambe, o refugiado do Congo que encontrou abrigo em nosso país para morrer a pauladas ao lado do quiosque onde trabalhava na orla carioca; a prepotência da prisão sem provas de Yago Corrêa de Souza no Jacarezinho, depois de comprar pão perto de sua casa; e o empenho discriminatório da apologia do racismo nazista veiculado pelo podcaster Monark (Bruno Aiub).
Os três eventos interligam-se. São constitutivos da abrangência de condutas impelidas pelas múltiplas práticas de racismo existentes na sociedade brasileira.
Afrontam e contestam a dignidade da pessoa humana, princípio fundamental que inspira a Constituição.
A preservação da dignidade humana permeia a tutela dos direitos humanos, cuja positivação é a expressão do aprimoramento da convivência coletiva num regime democrático. O ponto de partida dos direitos humanos é o princípio da igualdade, e o seu corolário lógico, a não discriminação, que se aprofundaram com a especificação da tutela dos seres humanos em situação de vulnerabilidade (crianças, idosos, mulheres, etc.).
Nesta linha, a Constituição qualifica como crime a prática do racismo e a legislação infraconstitucional correspondente tipifica as modalidades com as quais se expressam. Estas modalidades são abrangentes e não circunscritas, como a interligação dos três eventos acima mencionados evidencia.
A Convenção Interamericana contra o Racismo, a Discriminação Racial e Formas Recorrentes de Intolerância de 2013, recém-promulgada no Brasil, esclarece que, explícita ou implicitamente, “a discriminação racial pode basear-se em raça, cor, ascendência ou origem nacional ou étnica”.
Foi por conta da abrangência que o Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF), em 2003, no caso Ellwanger, subsumiu o antissemitismo e a sua apologia discriminatória como uma das modalidades de crime da prática do racismo.
A ilicitude da prática do racismo abarca a contenção da difusão e a propaganda de teorias e ideias que justificam ou incitam a discriminação, com destaque para as provenientes de explícitos discursos de ódio. Daí provêm parâmetros que esclarecem por que em nosso país e em muitos outros, com respaldo nas normas do Direito Internacional, a garantia constitucional da liberdade de expressão não se tem como absoluta. Não abriga na sua abrangência manifestações de ilicitude penal. É o caso da calúnia, da injúria e da difamação, e também do crime da prática do racismo e a sua incitação.
Explica Stuart Mill, ao tratar do exercício da liberdade, que ela contempla a distinção entre condutas “self-regarding” e “other-regarding”. Em relação às primeiras, não cabem limitações, pois “o indivíduo não responde perante a sociedade pelas ações que não digam respeito aos interesses de ninguém a não ser ele”. Em relação às segundas, o indivíduo é responsável por qualquer ação prejudicial aos interesses alheios. Daí a possibilidade de limites, se a sociedade julgar que a sua defesa a requer.
A punição legal do crime da prática do racismo e a sua apologia é o que prevê o direito brasileiro. O seu fundamento, como observa Mill, provém do fato de que “viver em sociedade torna indispensável que cada um seja obrigado a observar certa linha de conduta para com o resto”.
Machado de Assis observou: “Haverá coisa pior que mesclar o ódio às opiniões?”. Inspirado por Machado, concluo pontuando os vínculos entre negacionismo, discurso de ódio e a prática de condutas racistas. O negacionismo nega fatos apurados motivados pelo ímpeto discriminatório e pelo ódio “que não respeita coisa nenhuma”, como dizia Monteiro Lobato pela voz do Visconde de Sabugosa. Contrapõe-se, assim, ao bem público consagrado no artigo 3, IV. Por isso, a denegação do Holocausto é prática de conduta racista. A Convenção Interamericana reitera que não cabe tolerar a defesa e a justificação do genocídio. Trata-se, assim, da contenção do dano moral para a sociedade que provém do desrespeito à tutela de consagrados direitos humanos.
O negacionismo do Holocausto judaico, do genocídio armênio, do racismo estrutural que permeia a sociedade brasileira e que provém do passivo da escravidão tem um objetivo: impedir o reconhecimento do respeito que merecem ao direito à verdade e à memória das vítimas da prática do racismo que padecem uma pena sem culpa porque integram uma cor, uma religião, uma ascendência, uma origem nacional ou étnica. Por isso o negacionismo não é uma opinião. É uma iniquidade.
PROFESSOR EMÉRITO DA FACULDADE DE DIREITO DA USP, FOI MINISTRO DE RELAÇÕES EXTERIORES (1992 E 2001-2002)
Um artigo importante, sobre um dos episódios mais vergonhosos de nossa diplomacia, mas não apenas da diplomacia, do governo do Estado Novo, ao recusar vistos para judeus no período da ascensão do nazismo na Europa, apenas por puro e simples preconceito racial. O autor, diplomata, recomenda a leitura da obra de Fabio Koifman, Quixote nas Trevas, sobre o embaixador Souza Dantas, assim como o filme de Luiz Fernando Goulart, Querido embaixador. Meus cumprimentos ao autor, cujo artigo precede de pouco uma outra época de obscuras posturas políticas e sociais. Paulo Roberto de Almeida
O embaixador Luiz Martins de Sousa Dantas (ao centro), com Oswaldo Aranha (esq.) e Getúlio Vargas (dir.) - Divulgação
Em junho de 1937, todas as embaixadas e consulados brasileiros receberam uma circular de caráter reservado, cujo assunto era “entrada de estrangeiros no território nacional”. Na verdade, a circular tratava da chegada de refugiados judeus ao Brasil. O documento mencionava a “quantidade surpreendente de elementos dessa espécie” que vinham desembarcando nos portos brasileiros, muitas vezes com vistos temporários, e afirmava que a intenção dessas pessoas era “burlar a vigilância das nossas autoridades e radicarem-se clandestina e definitivamente nos centros urbanos e populosos do país, para, numa inadmissível concorrência ao comércio local e ao trabalhador nacional, absorverem, parasitariamente, como intermediários apenas, uma parte apreciável da nossa riqueza, quando, além disso, não se entregam, também, à propaganda de ideias dissolventes e subversivas”. Por fim, a circular proibia a concessão de vistos a toda pessoa de “origem étnica semita”, ordenando ainda que a recusa ao visto fosse justificada “sem qualquer referência à questão étnica”.
O que você faria se recebesse uma ordem dessas? Você não tem bola de cristal para saber com certeza o que vai acontecer nos próximos anos. Só pode contar com a informação disponível no momento e com suas próprias convicções. Como você se comportaria quando alguém batesse à sua porta pedindo um visto que, naquelas circunstâncias, representava praticamente uma garantia de vida?
A circular 1.127/1937 não era um ponto fora da curva, e não foi o único documento oficial que tentava restringir a imigração judaica. Muita gente poderosa, dentro e fora do governo brasileiro, se incomodava com o número crescente de judeus que chegavam ao Brasil buscando refúgio do antissemitismo que se espalhava por toda a Europa. Mas nem todos os funcionários do Serviço Exterior Brasileiro obedeceram à ordem clara e direta de não dar vistos a judeus. Um dos que se recusaram a cumprir as instruções foi Luiz Martins de Sousa Dantas, que desde 1922 comandava a embaixada em Paris.
Quando a circular foi publicada, Sousa Dantas já tinha mais de quarenta anos de carreira diplomática, mas seu profundo respeito pelas tradições do Itamaraty não o impediram de se posicionar contra as políticas racistas de Hitler e mesmo contra a posição de dúbia neutralidade assumida pelo governo brasileiro; em abril de 1940, ele chegou a enviar um ofício reservado ao chanceler Oswaldo Aranha dizendo que não acreditava em “neutralidade perante os crimes cometidos pela Alemanha”.
Após a invasão alemã da França, Sousa Dantas, arriscando sua posição e a própria vida, concedeu vistos a mais de 400 judeus de várias partes da Europa. O governo logo percebeu o que estava acontecendo e, além de repreendê-lo e proibi-lo formalmente de emitir qualquer tipo de visto, abriu um inquérito administrativo contra ele.
Enquanto isso, dezenas de outros funcionários do Serviço Exterior Brasileiro seguiam à risca as instruções da circular 1.127/1937. Nem todos, certamente, eram antissemitas convictos; apenas cumpriam ordens. Mas, mesmo entre os que cumpriam ordens, as atitudes variavam muito.
Em 18 de setembro de 1937, por exemplo, o cônsul-geral em Budapeste, Ildefonso Falcão, enviou um ofício reservado ao Itamaraty, no qual informava que estava obedecendo às ordens da circular: “dando razões outras que não as exatas, ou seja, mentindo oficialmente, tenho recusado o visto em passaportes de um número regular de húngaros de origem semítica”. Mas, numa linguagem tão respeitosa quanto confusa, não deixava de apresentar suas ressalvas: “É que me parece, Senhor Ministro, atenta contra o sentimento de nossa terra fecharmos as portas aos elementos pobres de uma raça, a que tanto devem a humanidade e a civilização, em todas as épocas, e a cujos irmãos banqueiros, em Londres e Nova York, rendemos homenagens, por isso que a eles estamos presos por dívidas vultuosas”. Por fim, observa que a circular estava “criando situações desagradáveis para todas as nossas chancelarias consulares”.
Meses depois, Ildefonso Falcão foi substituído por Mário Moreira da Silva. O tom dos ofícios agora era outro, sem hesitações. Em 1º de abril de 1938, ele encaminhou ao Itamaraty a lista dos nomes dos judeus húngaros cujos pedidos de visto havia negado no mês anterior, tal como determinava a circular: cinquenta e cinco pessoas. Três dias depois, enviou ofício secreto defendendo que a circular não fosse revogada, ao contrário. E justificava sua posição: “Está provado que os judeus, – embora possuam, isoladamente, elementos bons – são, em comunidade, assaz perniciosos e, por tal forma agem, que são tratados, nas suas próprias pátrias de nascimento, como indivíduos nocivos, indesejáveis mesmo, contra os quais se decretam toda a sorte de restrições, com um único objetivo: vê-los partir”.
Luiz Martins de Sousa Dantas é hoje lembrado em todo o mundo como exemplo de dignidade e coragem frente à adversidade. Quem quiser saber mais sobre sua vida, pode ler o livro Quixote nas trevas, de Fábio Koifman, e ver o filme Querido embaixador, dirigido por Luiz Fernando Goulart. Em 2003, Sousa Dantas foi declarado “justo entre as nações”, título atribuído pelo Memorial do Holocausto de Israel (Yad Vashem) a pessoas que arriscaram suas vidas para ajudar os judeus perseguidos pelo nazismo e pelo fascismo.
Quanto a Mário Moreira da Silva, ninguém mais se lembra dele.
a documentary film directed by Marcel
Ophuls, restored by the Academy Film Archive in association with
Paramount Pictures and the Film Foundation
available on HBO
AFP/Getty ImagesNazi
leaders accused of war crimes during World War II standing to hear the
verdict in their trial, Nuremburg, October 2, 1946. Albert Speer is
third from right in the back row of defendants; Karl Dönitz is at the
far left of the same row.
1.
The
main Nuremberg war crimes trials began in November 1945 and continued
until October 1946. Rebecca West, who reported on the painfully slow
proceedings for The New Yorker, described the courtroom as a
“citadel of boredom.” But there were moments of drama: Hermann Göring
under cross-examination running rings around the chief US prosecutor
Robert H. Jackson, for example. Jackson’s opening statement, however,
provided the trial’s most famous words:
We must never
forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the
record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants
a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon
such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial
will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity’s aspirations to
do justice.
How well humanity lived up to
these words, after a good number of bloody conflicts involving some of
the same powers that sat in judgment on the Nazi leaders, is the subject
of The Memory of Justice, the four-and-a-half-hour documentary
that has rarely been seen since 1976 but is considered by its director,
Marcel Ophuls, to be his best—even better, perhaps, than his more famous
The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), about the Nazi occupation of France, the Vichy government, and the French Resistance.
Near the beginning of The Memory of Justice,
the violinist Yehudi Menuhin declares that the barbarism of Nazi
Germany can only be seen as a universal moral catastrophe: “I proceed
from the assumption that every human being is guilty.” The fact that it
happened in Germany, he says, doesn’t mean that it cannot happen
elsewhere. This statement comes just after we have seen the Nazi
leaders, one after the other, declare their innocence in the Nuremberg
courtroom.
We
also hear a former French paratrooper recall how the French in Algeria
systematically tortured and murdered men, women, and children. There are
gruesome images of the Vietnam War. And Telford Taylor, US counsel for
the prosecution at Nuremberg, wonders how any of us would cope with the
“degeneration of standards under pressures.” Later in the film, Taylor
says that his views on Americans and American history have changed more
than his views on the Germans whom he once judged.
Such
juxtapositions are enough to send some people into a fury. The art
critic Harold Rosenberg accused Ophuls in these pages of being
“lured…into a near-nihilistic bog in which no one is guilty, because all
are guilty and there is no one who is morally qualified to judge.”1 Ophuls, according to Rosenberg, “trivialized” the Nazi crimes and “diluted” the moral awfulness of the death camps.
This
is to misunderstand what Ophuls was up to. The film never suggests that
Auschwitz and the My Lai massacre, or French torture prisons in
Algiers, are equivalent, let alone that the Vietnam War was a criminal
enterprise on the same level as the Holocaust. Nor does Ophuls doubt
that the judgment on Göring and his gang at Nuremberg was justified.
Ophuls himself was a refugee from the Nazis, forced to leave Germany in
1933, and to flee again when France was invaded in 1940. Instead he
tries, dispassionately and sometimes with touches of sardonic humor, to
complicate the problem of moral judgment. What makes human beings who
are normally unexceptional commit atrocities under abnormal
circumstances? What if such crimes are committed by our fellow citizens
in the name of our own country? How does our commitment to justice
appear today in the light of the judgments at Nuremberg? Will the memory
of justice, as Plato assumed, make us strive to do better?
Ophuls
does not dilute the monstrosity of Nazi crimes at all. But he refuses
to simply regard the perpetrators as monsters. “Belief in the Nazis as
monsters,” he once said, “is a form of complacency.” This reminds me of
something the controversial German novelist Martin Walser once said
about the Auschwitz trials held in Frankfurt in the 1960s. He wasn’t
against them. But he argued that the daily horror stories in the popular
German press about the grotesque tortures inflicted by Nazi butchers
made it easier for ordinary Germans to distance themselves from these
crimes and the regime that made them happen. Who could possibly identify
with such brutes? If only monsters were responsible for the Holocaust
and other mass murders, there would never be any need for the rest of us
to look in the mirror.
It is true that Ophuls does not
interview former Nazis, such as Albert Speer and Admiral Karl Dönitz, as
a prosecutor. His role is not to indict, but to understand better what
motivates such men, especially men (and women) who seem otherwise quite
civilized. For this, too, Rosenberg condemned him, arguing that he
should have balanced the views voiced by these criminals with those of
their victims, for otherwise viewers might give the old rogues the
benefit of the doubt.
There
seems to be little danger of that. Consider Dönitz, for example, who
makes the bizarre statement that he could not have been anti-Semitic,
since he never discriminated against Jews in the German navy, forgetting
for a moment that there were no known Jews in Hitler’s Kriegsmarine.
When Ophuls asks him whether he really believes that there was no
connection between his ferociously anti-Semitic speeches and the fate of
the Jews under the government he served, the admiral’s tight little
mouth twitches alarmingly before denying everything in the harsh yelp of
a cornered dog. This speaks for itself, and needs no “balancing” by
another voice.
Ophuls is a superb interviewer, polite,
cool, and relentless. His tone is often skeptical, but never moralistic
or aggressive. This allows him to get people to say things they may not
have divulged to a more confrontational interlocutor. Albert Speer was
responsible for, among other things, the ghastly fate of countless slave
laborers pulled from concentration camps to work in German armaments
factories. Responding to Ophuls’s quiet probing, this most slippery of
customers speaks at length about the moral blindness and criminal
opportunism that came from his ruthless ambition. Unlike most Germans of
his generation, Speer believed that the Nuremberg trials were
justified. But then, he could be said to have got off rather lightly
with a prison sentence rather than being hanged.
Where
Dönitz is shrill and defensive, Speer is smooth, even charming. This
almost certainly saved his life. Telford Taylor believed that Speer
should have been hanged, according to the evidence and criteria of
Nuremberg. Julius Streicher was executed for being a vile anti-Semitic
propagandist, even though he never had anything like the power of Speer.
But he was an uncouth, bullet-headed ruffian, described by Rebecca West
as “a dirty old man of the sort that gives trouble in parks,” a man one
could easily regard as a monster. The judges warmed to Speer as a kind
of relief. Compared to Streicher, the vulgar, strutting Göring, the
pompous martinet General Alfred Jodl, or the hulking SS
chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Speer was a gentleman. What saved him, Taylor
recalls in the film, was his superior class. When Ophuls puts this to
him, a ghostly smile flits across Speer’s face: “If that’s the
explanation…, then I am only too pleased I made such a good impression.”
In the event, Speer got twenty years; Dönitz only got ten.
Ophuls
said in an interview that it was easy to like Speer. But there is no
suggestion that this mitigated his guilt. The historian Hugh
Trevor-Roper, who also interviewed Speer at length, called him “the true
criminal of Nazi Germany,” precisely because he was clearly not a
sadistic brute but a highly educated, well-mannered, “normal” human
being who should have known better than to be part of a murderous
regime. This is perhaps the main point of Ophuls’s film as well: there
was nothing special about the Germans that predisposed them to become
killers or, more often, to look away when the killings were done. There
is no such thing as a criminal people. A quiet-spoken young architect
can end up with more blood on his hands than a Jew-baiting thug. This, I
think, is what Yehudi Menuhin meant by his warning that it could happen
anywhere.
2.
Far from being a moral nihilist
who trivialized the Nazi crimes, Ophuls was so committed to his
examination of guilt and justice that The Memory of Justice had a narrow escape from oblivion. The companies that commissioned it, including the BBC, did not like the rough cut. They thought it was far too long. Since the film was to be based on Telford Taylor’s book Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy
(1970), they wanted more on the Vietnam War and less on Nuremberg.
Rejection only made Ophuls, who never took kindly to being told what to
do by the men in suits, stick more stubbornly to his own vision. He was
less interested in a specifically American tragedy, or indeed a German
tragedy, than in man’s descent into barbarousness, wherever or whenever
it happens.
Ophuls was locked out of the cutting room in
London. The producers put together a shorter version of the film, with a
different spin, which was sold to ZDF television in Germany. Ophuls then traveled all over Europe to save his own version. A German court stopped ZDF
from showing the shorter one. The original edit was smuggled to the US,
where a private screening reduced Mike Nichols to tears. Hamilton Fish,
later a well-known publisher, managed to persuade a group of investors
to buy the original movie back and Paramount to distribute it. It was
shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, and then in New York and on
college campuses, as well as on television in many countries. But for
the cussed perseverance of Ophuls and the help of his American backers, The Memory of Justice
would never have been seen. In Fish’s words, “You needed his type of
personality to make such a film. He took history on personally.”
After
its initial run, however, the movie disappeared. Contracts on archival
rights ran out. The film stock was in danger of deteriorating. And so a
documentary masterpiece could easily have been lost if Martin Scorsese’s
Film Foundation had not stepped in with Paramount to put it all back
together again, a labor that took ten years and was completed in 2015.
Much
has changed, of course, since 1976. Germany is a different country now,
geographically, politically, and culturally. When Ophuls talked to
Dönitz, the West German establishment was still riddled with former
Nazis. Most of the wartime generation masked their dirty secrets with
evasions or shabby justifications. The history of the Third Reich, in
the words of Eugen Kogon, a Holocaust survivor and the first German
historian to write about the camps, was still “the corpse in the
cellar.”
Quite ordinary people, like the smiling man
encountered by Ophuls in a small town in Schleswig-Holstein, still
remembered the Third Reich with great fondness as an orderly time when
people knew how to behave and there was “no problem of crime.” Ophuls
happened to meet this friendly burgher while he was trying to track down
a female doctor who had been convicted at Nuremberg for murdering
children in concentration camps by injecting oil into their veins, to
name just one of her grisly experiments. After she was released from
prison in 1952, she continued for a time to practice as a family doctor.
She was, it appears, well respected, even friendly.
When
Ophuls finally managed to find her, she very politely declined to be
interviewed, since she was in poor health. Another former concentration
camp doctor, Gerhard Rose, did agree to talk, however, but only to deny
any guilt, claiming that his medical experiments (infecting victims with
malaria, for example) served a humanitarian purpose, and that the US
Army performed experiments too. Ophuls observes, quite rightly, that
American experiments were hardly conducted under the kind of
circumstances prevailing in Dachau and Buchenwald. But the hypocrisy of
the Western Allies in this matter might have been better illustrated by
pointing out that German and Japanese doctors who committed even worse
crimes than Dr. Rose were protected by the US government because their
knowledge might come in handy during the cold war.2
Perhaps
the most disturbing interview in the movie is not with an unrepentant
Nazi or a war criminal, but with the gentlemanly and highly esteemed
lawyer Otto Kranzbühler. A navy judge during the war, Kranzbühler was
defense counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, where he cut a dashing
figure in his navy uniform. He later had a successful career as a
corporate lawyer, after defending the likes of Alfried Krupp against
accusations of having exploited slave labor. Kranzbühler never justified
Nazism. But when asked by Ophuls whether he had discussed his own part
in the Third Reich with his children, he replied that he had come up
with a formula to make them understand: if you were ignorant of what
went on, you were a fool; if you knew, but looked the other way, you
were a coward; if you knew, and took part, you were a criminal. Were his
children reassured? Kranzbühler: “My children didn’t recognize their
father in any of the above.”
Dominique Nabokov: Marcel Ophuls, Neuilly, circa 1988It
was a brilliant evasion. But Kranzbühler was no more evasive than the
French prosecutor at Nuremberg, the equally urbane Edgar Faure, who had
been a member of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France.
Ophuls asked him about French war crimes during the Algerian War of
Independence, when torture was systematically applied, civilians were
massacred, and prisoners were thrown out of helicopters, a practice that
later became widespread under South American military regimes. “Well,”
said Faure, “events do get out of hand. But you can’t really criticize
politicians who have the difficult task of running the government.”
Edgar Faure was prime minister of France during part of that war.
The 1970s were a critical time in Germany. There were still people, like the son of the former Waffen SS
officer interviewed by Ophuls, who believed that the Nazi death camps
were a lie, and it was the Americans who built the gas chambers in
concentration camps. But the postwar generation had begun to question
their parents amid the student revolts of the 1960s. Just a year after The Memory of Justice
was completed, radicalism in Germany turned toxic, when members of the
Red Army Faction murdered bankers, kidnapped industrialists, and
hijacked planes, all in the name of antifascism, as though to make up
for their parents’ complicity with the Nazis.
German
families were torn apart by memories of the war. Ophuls includes his own
not uncomplicated family in the film. His German wife, Regine, the
daughter of a Wehrmacht veteran, speaks openly to American students
about her own childhood under the Nazis. One of their teenaged daughters
talks about the need to come to terms with the past, even though their
mother finds seventeen a little too young to be confronted with images
of concentration camps. Then Regine says something personal that cuts to
the core of her husband’s life and work. She wishes sometimes that
Ophuls would make films that were not about such dark matters. What kind
of films? he asks. Lubitsch films, she replies, or My Fair Lady all over again. We then hear Cyd Charisse singing “New Sun in the Sky” from The Band Wagon (1953), while watching Ophuls in a car on his way to find the doctor who murdered children in concentration camps.
This
is typical of the Ophuls touch, show tunes evoking happier times
overlapping with memories of horror. The motive is not to pile on cheap
irony, but to bring in a note of autobiography. His father was Max
Ophuls, the great director of Liebelei (1933), La Ronde (1950), and Lola Montès
(1955). Max was one of the geniuses of the exile cinema. Memories of a
sweeter life in imperial Vienna or nineteenth-century France are
darkened in his films by a sense of betrayal and perverse sexuality.
Nostalgia
for better days haunted his son, who spent his youth on the run from
terror with a father whose genius he always felt he couldn’t live up to.
He would have loved to direct movies like La Ronde. Instead he
made great documentary films about the past that won’t let him go, about
Vichy France, or Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo butcher of Lyon, or
Nuremberg. The true horror stories are mixed in all his work, as in a
collage, with songs from pre-war Berlin music halls and Hollywood
movies.
One of the most unforgettable examples of the
Ophuls touch is a scene in a film that has almost never been viewed
(another bitter fight with producers). November Days (1991) is
about the fall of the Berlin wall. One of the people he interviews is
Markus Wolf, the former East German spy chief, whose father, the
Communist writer Friedrich Wolf, had known Max Ophuls in pre-war Berlin.
While Markus dodges every question about his past with blatant lies, we
hear music from one of Max’s movies slowly swell on the soundtrack as
Marcel thinks out loud to himself how lucky he was that his father
decided to move west instead of east.
3.
In the second half of The Memory of Justice,
the focus shifts from east to west, as it were, from Germany to France
and the US. Daniel Ellsberg, speaking of Vietnam, says that “this war
will cause us to be monstrous.” We hear stories from men who were there
of American soldiers murdering civilians in cold blood. We hear a
Vietnam veteran talk about being told to shut up by his superiors when
he reports a massacre of civilians ordered by his commanding officer. We
hear Ellsberg say that no one higher than a lieutenant was ever
convicted for the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians by US soldiers in
My Lai.
On the French side, stories about summary
executions and the use of torture during the Algerian War (1954–1962)
are followed by a crucial question put by Ophuls to Edgar Faure, the
former Nuremberg prosecutor and later prime minister of France: Did he,
Edgar Faure, think the French would have accepted an international
commission that would judge, on the basis of Nuremberg, what the French
did in Algeria? No, said Faure, after a pensive suck on his pipe, since
one cannot compare the invasion of another country to the actions taken
by a sovereign state in its own colony.
Sir Hartley
Shawcross, the British prosecutor at Nuremberg, speaking to Ophuls in
his elegant country house in Sussex, remembers how much his American
colleagues had believed in justice and the rule of law. Like other
British officials at the time, he took a more cynical view: “All law is
created by the victors for the vanquished.” What mattered in his
opinion, however, was not who made the laws, but whether the principles
were right. About this he had little doubt.
Looking back,
Otto Kranzbühler shared Shawcross’s memory of American idealism. But he
believed that as a model for the future, Nuremberg had been a failure.
The trial, as he saw it, presupposed a united world community in which
wars would be a thing of the past. This illusion did not last long.
In
fact, the trial was tainted from the beginning, not only because among
the men who judged the Nazi leaders were Soviet veterans of Stalin’s
bloody show trials, but also because Allied war crimes could not even be
mentioned. A former British officer involved in the wartime bomber
command had no doubt that the destruction of Dresden was a war crime.
If The Memory of Justice
has a weakness, it is that this second half of the film, concentrating
on French and American war crimes, is not quite as gripping as the first
half about the German legacy of Nuremberg. Perhaps Ophuls’s heart was
not in it to the same extent. Or perhaps no matter what one thinks of My
Lai or Algiers, they are overshadowed by the sheer scale and savagery
of the Nazi crimes.
Then again, pace Rosenberg,
Ophuls doesn’t suggest that they are equivalent. What is comparable is
the way people look away from, or justify, or deny what is done in their
name, or under their watch. The wife of a US marine who died in
Vietnam, living in a house stuffed with flags and military memorabilia,
simply refuses to entertain the idea that her country could ever do
anything wrong. More interesting, and perhaps more damning, is the
statement by John Kenneth Galbraith, an impeccably liberal former
diplomat and economist. His view of the Vietnam War, he tells Ophuls,
had been entirely practical, without any consideration of moral
implications.
Vietnam was not the Eastern Front in 1943.
My Lai was not Auschwitz. And Galbraith was certainly no Albert Speer.
Nevertheless, this technocratic view of violent conflict is precisely
what leads many people so far astray under a criminal regime. In the
film, Ellsberg describes the tunnel vision of Speer as “controlled
stupidity,” the refusal to see the consequences of what one does and
stands for.
This brings to mind another brilliant documentary about controlled stupidity, Errol Morris’s The Fog of War
(2003), featuring Robert McNamara, the technocrat behind the
annihilation of Japanese cities in World War II and the escalation of
the Vietnam War in the 1960s. To him, the deliberate killing of hundreds
of thousands of civilians was a mathematical problem. Only many years
later did he admit that if the US had lost World War II, he could
certainly have been indicted as a war criminal.
Even more chilling is another documentary by Morris, which received less attention than The Fog of War. In The Unknown Known
(2013), we see Donald Rumsfeld, another gentlemanly technocrat, shrug
his shoulders about Vietnam, commenting that “sometimes things just
don’t work out.” When, as the result of another war in which he was even
more intimately involved, Baghdad was convulsed in anarchic violence,
he notoriously remarked that “stuff happens.” This is what Hannah Arendt
called a “criminal lack of imagination.”
Perhaps the US
in 1945 set its ideals too high. But it is a tragedy that the same
country that believed in international law, and did so much to establish
the norms of justice, has done so little to live up to them. The US is
not even a signatory to the International Criminal Court, a flawed
institution like the Nuremberg tribunal, but a necessary step in the
right direction. No one can hold the greatest military power on earth
accountable for what it does, not for torture rooms in Abu Ghraib, not
for locking people up indefinitely without trial, not for murdering
civilians with drones.
For Germans living under the Third
Reich it was risky to imagine too well what their rulers were doing. To
protest was positively dangerous. This is not yet true for those of us
living in the age of Trump, when the president of the US openly condones
torture and applauds thugs for beating up people at his rallies. We
need films like this masterpiece by Ophuls more than ever to remind us
of what happens when even the memories of justice fade away.
“The Shadow of the Furies,” The New York Review, January 20, 1977; see also the exchange between Rosenberg and Ophuls, The New York Review, March 17, 1977. ↩
The most notorious case was that of Surgeon General Ishii
Shiro of Unit 731, the biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese
Army, who tortured countless people to death in Manchuria in the course
of his experiments. He was shielded by US authorities from prosecution
as a war criminal in exchange for data from the experiments. ↩
Thirty years after the dust had settled on the fields of Waterloo, a poisonous anti-Semitic pamphlet circulated in Europe, claiming the Rothschild family had accrued its vast wealth on the back of Wellington's triumph. The 'facts' were entirely made up
In the summer of 1846, a political pamphlet bearing the ominous signature "Satan" swept across Europe, telling a story which, though lurid and improbable, left a mark that can be seen to this day.
The pamphlet claimed to recount the history of the richest and most famous banking family of the time – the Rothschilds – and its most enduring passage told how their vast fortune was built upon the bloodshed of the battle of Waterloo, whose bicentenary falls this year.
Here is the story that "Satan" told. Nathan Rothschild, the founder of the London branch of the bank, was a spectator on the battlefield that day in June 1815 and, as night fell, he observed the total defeat of the French army. This was what he was waiting for. A relay of fast horses rushed him to the Belgian coast, but there he found to his fury that a storm had confined all ships to port. Undaunted – "Does greed admit anything is impossible?" asked Satan – he paid a king's ransom to a fisherman to ferry him through wind and waves to England.
Reaching London 24 hours before official word of Wellington's victory, Rothschild exploited his knowledge to make a killing on the Stock Exchange. "In a single coup," announced the pamphlet, "he gained 20 million francs."
Beyond all doubt this tale was anti-Semitic in intent. Satan was in reality a left-wing controversialist called Georges Dairnvaell, who made no attempt to hide his loathing for Jews –and the Rothschilds in particular. Though they had been little known in 1815, by 1846 the Rothschilds had become the Rockefellers or the Gateses of their age, their name a byword for fabulous wealth. Nathan himself had died in 1836 and so could not rebut the claims.
Every aspect of Dairnvaell's tale – the ruthlessness, the guile, the greed – represents a derogatory racial stereotype, and he was writing at a moment when such attitudes were having one of their periodic surges of popularity in Europe.
The story was also false: Nathan Rothschild was not at Waterloo or even in Belgium at the time. There was no Channel storm. And he made no great killing on the stock market.
Yet the Satan pamphlet, translated into many languages and reprinted many times, gave this legend such a grip on history that, albeit often in modified or diluted forms, references to it can still be found today both in popular culture and in scholarly works.
Versions appear in a Hollywood film of 1934 and the 2009 Sebastian Faulks novel A Week in December; in past editions of the Dictionary of National Biography and Encyclopaedia Britannica; in Elizabeth Longford's acclaimed 1970s biography of the Duke of Wellington; and (with a very different analysis) in Niall Ferguson's authorised history of the Rothschilds. Perhaps more predictably, the story provided the plot for a Nazi film of 1940 entitled The Rothschilds: Shares in Waterloo, and the tale can be read on many anti-Semitic websites.
How does a crude racist smear endure for so long? More importantly, how has it survived as a supposed sub-plot of history – towards which even the most respected writers have felt obliged to nod – when it is one of those myths that, on being challenged with inconvenient facts, simply adjusts its form? For example, when it was finally accepted that Nathan Rothschild was definitely not at Waterloo, the story changed: the banker was in London, but had made elaborate preparations to get the news first, either by special messenger or pigeon post. An additional twist was added. Once he knew Wellington had won, Rothschild was said to have deliberately provoked a collapse of the stock market by spreading false rumours of a defeat, so allowing him to pick up shares at rock-bottom prices and double his profits later, after official news of the victory had sent the markets soaring.
Nathan Rothschild was a German banker, businessman and financierNathan Rothschild was a German banker, businessman and financier
Was there any truth to this revised version, or to any of the other variants that have surfaced over the years? We will come to that.
The legend has had innocent uses – for example, the former CIA chief Allen Dulles repeated it in a 1963 book on espionage as he wanted to illustrate the value of early information. Other writers have adopted the tale simply as a good yarn, without any anti-Semitic intent.
Even the Rothschild family, always deeply uncomfortable with the story, has tried to domesticate it. Their preferred version glosses over any alleged profits and stresses that Nathan's first action on hearing of the victory had been that of any good citizen of the time: he informed the government. (This was the version Elizabeth Longford embraced.)
All the while, error and trickery were hampering attempts to separate the myth from the facts. What apparent evidence was there? For many years, historians cited a line from the London Courier newspaper dated 20 June 1815, two days after the battle and a day before official news of the victory arrived. It stated simply: "Rothschild has made great purchases of stock."
On the face of it, this supported the legend, but there is a problem: those words do not appear in surviving copies of that day's Courier. Instead, it now appears that the purported quotation originated in the writings of a Scottish historian, Archibald Alison, in 1848 – two years after the Satan pamphlet was published.
Further backing for the legend came in the form of an entry in the 1815 diary of a young American visitor to London, James Gallatin. On the day of Waterloo, he writes of great public anxiety over events in Belgium, adding: "They say Monsieur Rothschild has mounted couriers from Brussels to Ostend and a fast clipper ready to sail the moment something is decisive [on the battlefield] one way or the other."
Once again, this is not what it seems. The Gallatin diary was exposed in 1957 as a fake cooked up late in the 19th century – long after the Satan story had gained currency.
The 1846 Rothschild pamphlet written by Satan
The first modern attempt to challenge the myth was made in the 1980s by a Rothschild – Baron
Victor, a retired scientist and public servant who wrote a book about his ancestor Nathan. It was Victor who identified the powerful role played by the Satan pamphlet, and he debunked many of the dafter allegations.
But he also discovered in the Rothschild archives a document that muddied the water.This was a letter written to Nathan Rothschild by a bank employee in Paris about a month after Waterloo, and it included the statement: "I am informed by Commissary White you have done well by the early information which you had of the victory gained at Waterloo." Proof, it seemed, that the legend had some foundation in fact. There matters have stood since the 1980s, and in those years the old legend has enjoyed a new lease of life online, while historians and writers have continued to pay it lip service.
But fresh evidence has now surfaced which allows us finally to put this story in its proper context. Newspapers published in the week of Waterloo make it clear that the first person to bring authentic news of the victory at Waterloo to London was not Nathan Rothschild; rather, it was a man who had learnt of it in the Belgian city of Ghent and made a dash to England.
This shadowy figure, identified only as "Mr C of Dover", was telling his story freely in the City from the morning of Wednesday 21 June – at least 12 hours before the official news arrived. It was published in at least three newspapers that afternoon. We also know that a news report written that Wednesday evening referred to Nathan Rothschild receiving a letter from Ghent reporting a victory and passing his news to the government – though this was noted alongside reports of two other, similar letters.
So, while it is confirmed that Rothschild had early news, he was not the only one.
Did Rothschild have time to buy shares? Apparently, but in the thin market of the period, it could not have been enough to accumulate holdings sufficient to earn him the millions that Dairnvaell wrote of. Nor did he manipulate the market to double his gains, for, contrary to legend, there was no slump in prices that Wednesday.
Nathan Rothschild may have "done well" from his purchases when stocks rose sharply following the confirmation of the victory, but his gains were dwarfed by those of numerous rival investors who, without any advantage of early information, had bought key government securities earlier, more cheaply and in quantity.
Two hundred years on from Waterloo, then, not much is left of Satan's tale. It's just possible to see the factual elements upon which a vivid myth was built: Nathan Rothschild did have early information and it seems he did buy shares. But it was only by taking these facts out of their relatively humdrum context and adding a heap of falsehoods on top – relays of horses, storms in the channel, pigeon post, market manipulation – that a narrative of any interest was fashioned.
There is no doubt why that was done: to smear the Rothschilds and Jews generally. Perhaps this bicentenary year of Waterloo would be a good time to recognise that smear for what it is. Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University London and the author of 'The News from Waterloo' (£16.99, Faber)
In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay “On the Jewish Question.” This wasn’t an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with the sociology of German Jews. Its occasion was the contemporary debate about Jewish emancipation, but its real purpose was to call for the overthrow of the capitalist order. The call was expressed in a language that is probably not surprising to readers today and that was entirely familiar to readers in the nineteenth century. Still, it is a very strange language. Capitalism is identified by Marx with Judaism, and so the overthrow of capitalism will be, he writes, “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” The argument is worth quoting, at least briefly:
Hermitage, St. Petersburg/Bridgeman Art Library
Rembrandt: Portrait of an Old Jew, 1654
The Jew has already emancipated himself in a Jewish way…not only insofar as he has acquired financial power, but also insofar as, through him and without him, moneyhas risen to world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian peoples. The Jews have emancipated themselves to the extent that the Christians have become Jews.
“Through [the Jew] and without [the Jew]”—mostly without him: as Marx certainly knew, Jews made up a very small part of the moneyed elite of England, the most advanced capitalist country, and an even smaller part of the “rising” German bourgeoisie. His own father had converted to Protestantism in order to facilitate his entry into bourgeois society, where Jews were not welcome in the early nineteenth century.
What Marx is doing here, David Nirenberg argues in his brilliant, fascinating, and deeply depressing book Anti-Judaism, is exactly what many other writers have done in the long history of Western civilization. His essay is a “strategic appropriation of the most powerful language of opprobrium available to any critic of the powers and institutions of this world.” That sentence comes from Nirenberg’s discussion of Martin Luther, but it applies equally well to Marx. Still, we should be more surprised by Marx’s use of this language than by Luther’s, not only because of Marx’s Jewish origins but also because of his claim to be a radical critic of the ideology of his own time. He might, Nirenberg says, have questioned the association of Judaism and capitalism and written a critical history aimed at making his readers more reflective about that association. Instead, he chose to exploit “old ideas and fears about Jewishness.”
Consider another famous use of this language of opprobrium, this time not in support of but in fierce opposition to revolutionary politics. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke compared what was going on in France to previous revolutions (like England’s in 1688) that were led by noblemen “of great civil, and great military talents.” By contrast, he wrote, the revolutionary government in Paris is led by “Jew brokers contending with each other who could best remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their degenerate councils.”
In Burke’s case, the choice of this language was probably not “strategic.” The choice was structural—anti-Judaism was a feature of the worldview with which Burke was able to recognize what Marxists later described as a “bourgeois” revolution. “Given the complete absence of Jews from the actual leadership, whether political, pecuniary, or philosophical, of the French Revolution,” Nirenberg writes, the line about “Jew brokers” (and also Burke’s proposal to help the revolutionaries by sending English Jews to France “to please your new Hebrew brethren”) may, again, seem very strange. In fact, it is utterly common; only Burke’s ferocious eloquence is uncommon.
Friendly writers have worked hard to exonerate Burke of anti-Semitism. Nirenberg says only that they miss the point. Burke certainly knew that Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, and their friends and enemies among the revolutionaries were, all of them, Catholics and lapsed Catholics (plus a few Protestants). They were only figurative Jews, imaginary Jews, who came to Burke’s mind, and to many other minds,
because the revolution forced him…to confront basic questions about the ways in which humans relate to one another in society. These were questions that two millennia of pedagogy had taught Europe to ask in terms of “Judaism,” and Burke had learnt the lesson well.
2.
Nirenberg’s book is about those two millennia and their pedagogy. It isn’t a book about anti-Semitism; it isn’t a history of the Jewish experience of discrimination, persecution, and genocide; it isn’t an example of what the historian Salo Baron called the “lachrymose” account of Jewish life in exile; nor is it an indictment of contemporary anti-Zionism or a defense of the state of Israel. The book is not about Jews at all or, at least, not about real Jews; it deals extensively and almost exclusively with imaginary Jews.
What Nirenberg has written is an intellectual history of Western civilization, seen from a peculiar but frighteningly revealing perspective. It is focused on the role of anti-Judaism as a constitutive idea and an explanatory force in Christian and post-Christian thought—though it starts with Egyptian arguments against the Jews and includes a discussion of early Islam, whose writers echo, and apparently learned from, Christian polemics. Nirenberg comments intermittently about the effects of anti-Judaism on the life chances of actual Jews, but dealing with those effects in any sufficient way would require another, and a very different, book.
Anti-Judaism is an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Nirenberg tells us that he has left a lot out (I will come at the end to a few things that are missing), but he seems to know everything. He deals only with literature that he can read in the original language, but this isn’t much of a limitation. Fortunately, the chapter on Egypt doesn’t require knowledge of hieroglyphics; Greek, Hebrew, and Latin are enough. Perhaps it makes things easier that the arguments in all the different languages are remarkably similar and endlessly reiterated.
A certain view of Judaism—mainly negative—gets established early on, chiefly in Christian polemics, and then becomes a common tool in many different intellectual efforts to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings. Marx may have thought himself insightful and his announcement original: the “worldly God” of the Jews was “money”! But the identification of Judaism with materialism, with the things of this world, predates the appearance of capitalism in Europe by at least 1,500 years.
Since I want mostly to describe Nirenberg’s argument (and, though without the authority of his erudition, to endorse it), let me note quickly one bit of oddness in it. One could also write—it would be much shorter—a history of philo-Judaism. It might begin with those near-Jews, the “God-fearers” of ancient Rome, whom Nirenberg doesn’t mention. But the prime example would be the work of the Christian, mostly Protestant, Hebraists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who searched in biblical and rabbinic texts for God’s constitution and produced books with titles like The Hebrew Commonwealth. Many of these writers studied with Jewish scholars, chiefly from the Netherlands, but (with some notable exceptions) remained in most of their references to contemporary Jews conventionally anti-Semitic.
Nirenberg writes about these Christian Hebraists with his usual learning, but they don’t fit neatly into his book. They were looking for an ancient, biblical Judaism (with the rabbis of the talmudic age as helpful interpreters) that they could learn from, even imitate. Nirenberg’s proper subject is a hostile understanding of Judaism, early and late, reiterated by writers of very different sorts, with which the social-political-theological-philosophical world is constructed, enemies are identified, and positions fortified. Philo-Judaism is aspirational; anti-Judaism claims to be explanatory.
What is being explained is the social world; the explanatory tools are certain supposed features of Judaism; and the enemies are mostly not Jews but “Judaizing” non-Jews who take on these features and are denounced for doing so. I will deal with only a few of Judaism’s negative characteristics: its hyperintellectualism; its predilection for tyranny; its equal and opposite predilection for subversive radicalism; and its this-worldly materialism, invoked, as we’ve seen, by both Burke and Marx. None of this is actually descriptive; there certainly are examples of hyper-intellectual, tyrannical, subversive, and materialist Jews (and of dumb, powerless, conformist, and idealistic Jews), but Nirenberg insists, rightly, that real Jews have remarkably little to do with anti-Judaism.
3.
Speaking to German students in May 1933, a few months after the Nazis took power, Joseph Goebbels proclaimed that “the age of rampant Jewish intellectualism is now at an end.” Goebbels was a third-rate German intellectual (the word is unavoidable: he had a Ph.D.; he wrote articles; Nirenberg suggests that we think of him as an apostate intellectual). But he was making an argument that had been made by many less infamous, indeed, more worthy, figures. It begins in the Gospels, with the earliest attacks on the Judaism of the Pharisees. Christian supersessionist arguments—i.e., arguments about what aspects of Judaism had been superseded by Christianity—were based on a set of oppositions: law superseded by love, the letter by the spirit, the flesh (the material world, the commandments of the Torah, the literal text) by the soul. “I bless you father…,” writes Luke, “for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to little children.”
The Pharisees were indeed learned and clever, as were their rabbinic successors; the discussions and disputations of the Talmud are a particularly revealing display of learning and cleverness. By comparison (it’s a self-description), the early Christians were naive and innocent children to whom God spoke directly, evoking the faith that brought salvation (which law and learning couldn’t do).
The difficulty here is that the Christians very quickly produced immensely learned, clever, and disputatious theologians of their own, who were then accused, and who accused each other, of Judaizing—thinking or acting like Jews. The earliest Christian writers, Paul most importantly, were engaged with actual Jews, in some mix of coexistence and competition that scholars are still trying to figure out. Nirenberg writes about Paul with subtlety and some sympathy, though he is the writer who sets the terms for much that comes later.
By the time of writers like Eusebius, Ambrose, and Augustine, the Jews had been, as Nirenberg says, “a twice-defeated people”—first militarily by the Romans and then religiously by the imperial establishment of Christianity. And yet the threat of Judaism grew greater and greater as the actual Jews grew weaker and weaker. According to their triumphant opponents, the Jews never gave up their hostility to Jesus and his followers (indeed, they didn’t convert). They were endlessly clever, ever-active hypocrites and tricksters, who mixed truth with falsehood to entice innocent Christians—in the same way that those who prepare lethal drugs “smear the lip of the cup with honey to make the harmful potion easy to drink.”
That last charge is from Saint John Chrysostom, who was such a violent opponent of “the Jews” that earnest scholars have assumed that Judaism must have posed a clear and present danger to Christianity in his time. In fact, Nirenberg tells us, there was no such danger; the people mixing the poison were Christian heretics. If Saint John feared the Jews, “it was because his theology had taught him to view other dangers in Jewish terms.”
Bridgeman Art Library
The cover of a French edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, circa 1940
The critique of Jewish cleverness is fairly continuous over time, but it appears with special force among German idealist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, who repeat many of the supersessionist arguments of the early Christians. Kant understood the heteronomy he sought to overcome—action according to moral law externally imposed rather than freely accepted by the agent—in Jewish terms, but he was himself considered too Jewish by the philosophers who came next, most importantly by Hegel. Kantianism, Hegel claimed, was simply a new version of “the Jewish principle of opposing thought to reality, reason to sense; this principle involves the rending of life and a lifeless connection between God and the world.” According to Hegel, Abraham had made a fateful choice: his rejection of the world in favor of a sublime God had alienated the Jews forever from the beauty of nature and made them the prisoners of law, incapable of love. (Needless to say, Schopenhauer, in the next generation, thought that the academic Hegelians of his time were “Jews” and followers of “the Jewish God,” but I shall stop with Hegel himself.)
It isn’t Nirenberg’s claim that any of these philosophers were anti-Semites. Indeed, Hegel defended the rights of Jews in German universities and thought that anti-Semitic German nationalism was not “German-ness” but “German-stupid-ness.” Nor is Nirenberg arguing for any kind of intellectual determinism. He doesn’t believe that Goebbels’s attack on Jewish intellectualism was the necessary outcome of the German philosophical identification of Judaism with lifeless reason—any more than German idealism was the necessary outcome of Christian claims to supersede Pharasaic Judaism or of Lutheran claims to supersede the Judaizing Catholics. In all these cases, there were other possible outcomes. But philosophers like Hegel used the language of anti-Judaism to resolve “the ancient tension between the ideal and the real,” and their resolutions were enormously influential. The idea of Judaism as the enemy of “life” had a future.
4.
Judaism’s associations with worldly power and subversive rebellion are closely linked, for what is rebellion but an effort to seize power? So Jewish bankers can rule the world and Jewish Bolsheviks can aspire to overthrow and replace the bankers. In some alcoves of the Western imagination, the two groups can almost appear as co-conspirators. The populist anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (what August Bebel called “the socialism of fools”) has a long history. One very early example is Saint Ambrose’s response to the emperor Maximus, who punished the leaders of a Christian mob that burned a synagogue in the Mesopotamian city of Callinicum: “That king,” Ambrose said, “has become a Jew.” What made Maximus a “Jew” was not that he defended the Callinicum Jews but that he ranked enforcement of the law over the demands of the spirit (and the religious enthusiasm of the mob).
Often in the Middle Ages, Christian rulers were accused of Judaizing by populist rebels; the accusations had a curious doubleness. Tyranny was, first of all, imagined as a feature of Judaism, both when there were Jews at court (as physicians, advisers, tax collectors, and money-lenders) and when there were no Jews at court. The Jewish “seduction” of princes was one common way of understanding tyranny. Of course, Jewish seduction was often princely exploitation: the Jews were allowed to collect interest on loans to the king’s Christian subjects so that he could then “expropriate a considerable share of the proceeds.” It was a kind of indirect taxation, at a time when the royal power to tax was radically constrained. The indirectly taxed subjects resented the Jewish money-lenders, but, Nirenberg stresses, the resentment was politically acted out, again and again, in many times and places, though Jews rarely predominated in royal financial affairs “and then only for short periods of time.”
Anti-Judaism also had a second and rather different political usefulness. Jews were imagined not only as tyrants or the allies of tyrants but at the same time, and more realistically, as oppressed and powerless. Given their rejection of Jesus Christ and their complicity in his death, the oppression of the Jews was justified; but when a tyrannical ruler oppressed his Christian subjects, he could be accused of trying “to make a Jewry” out of them, which obviously wasn’t justified. “We would rather die than be made similar to Jews.” That last line is from a petition of the city council of Valencia to King Peter in 1378. So tyranny was twice understood in Jewish terms: a Judaizing prince treated his subjects like Jews.
Populist rebels obviously did not think of themselves as Jews; the construction of subversion and rebellion as “Jewish” was, and is, the work of conservative and reactionary writers. Among modern revolutionaries, the Puritans actually were Judaizers (focused far more on the Old than the New Testament), though with their own supersessionist theology. The use of the tropes of philo- and anti-Judaism during the English civil war made some sense, even though there were no Jews in England in the 1640s. The French revolutionaries were neither Jews nor Judaizers, though Burke and others understood them by invoking the “old ideas and fears.” But it was the Bolsheviks who, more than any other group of rebels, were widely understood as “Jewish.” It is true that many of them were Jews, though of the sort that Isaac Deutscher called “non-Jewish Jews.” Judaism had nothing at all to do with Bolshevism and yet, if Nirenberg is right, the Bolsheviks would have been explained in the language of anti-Judaism even if there had never been a Trotsky, a Kamenev, or a Radek among them.
5.
The identification of Jews with merchants, money-lenders, royal financiers, and predatory capitalists is constant in Nirenberg’s history. I will focus on one moment in that history, Shakespeare’s England and TheMerchant of Venice, which will give me a chance to illustrate the difference between his anti-Judaism and the anti-Semitism that is the subject of more conventional, but equally depressing, histories. Anthony Julius’s Trials ofthe Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in Englandincludes a long and very intelligent discussion of Shakespeare’s play.1 Julius callsThe Merchantof Venice an anti-Semitic drama that is also a dramatization of anti-Semitism and the beginning of its literary investigation. Shakespeare, as always, writes from opposing perspectives, but he clearly leans toward Shylock’s enemies.
Shylock himself is the classic Jew: he hates Christians and desires to tyrannize over them; he loves money, more than his own daughter; he is a creature of law rather than of love. He isn’t, indeed, a clever Jew; in his attempt to use the law against his Christian enemy, he is unintelligent and inept. (A modern commentator, Kenneth Gross, asks: “What could [he] have been thinking?”) But in every other way, he is stereotypical, and so he merits the defeat and humiliation he receives—which are meant to delight the Elizabethan audience.
Julius doesn’t ask Nirenberg’s question: What put so many Jews (like Shylock or Marlowe’s Jew of Malta) on the new London stage, in “a city that had sheltered fewer ‘real Jews’ than perhaps any other major one in Europe”? His answer—I can’t reproduce his long and nuanced discussion—is that London was becoming a city of merchants, hence a “Jewish” city, and Shakespeare’s play is a creative response to that development, an effort to address the allegedly Judaizing features of all commercial relationships, and then to save the Christian merchants by distinguishing them from an extreme version of the Jew. But the distinction is open to question, and so the point of the play is best summed up when Portia asks, “Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?” The play is about law and property, contracts, oaths, pledges, and promises. Shylock is the Jew of the gospels: “I stand here for law.” But he is defeated by a better lawyer and a more literal reading of the law: Portia out-Jews the Jew—which is surely an ironical version of Christian supersession.
So Shakespeare understands the arrival of modern commerce with the help of Judaism, though he knew no Jews and had never read a page of the Talmud. He knew the Bible, though, as Shylock’s speech about Jacob multiplying Laban’s sheep (Act 1, scene 3; Genesis 30) makes clear. And Paul and the gospels were a central part of his intellectual inheritance. Shylock emerges from those latter texts, much like, though the lineage is more complicated, Burke’s “Jew brokers” and Marx’s “emancipated Jews.” The line is continuous.
6.
Nirenberg’s epilogue addresses one major theorist’s denial of that continuity. In the preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt mocks what she calls the doctrine of “eternal antisemitism” (this could serve, Nirenberg writes, “as an ironic title for my own book”) and insists that the “specifically Jewish functions” (banking and finance) in the capitalist economy made the Jews partly “responsible” (her word) for the hatred they evoked.2 This is much like Marx’s claim that “the Jews have eagerly contributed” to the triumph of their “worldly cult,” “Haggling,” and their “worldly God,” “Money.”
Arendt actually draws on the statistical work of Walter Frank, a Nazi economist, who headed an Institute for the History of the New Germany, to support her account of the role of the Jews in the German bourgeoisie. It can’t be the case, she argues, that the Nazis, who had “to persuade and mobilize people,” could have chosen their victims arbitrarily. There has to be a concrete answer, a local socioeconomic answer, to the question: Why the Jews?
Nirenberg agrees that the choice of the Jews was not arbitrary; nor does he find Arendt’s argument surprising—though he rejects all the usual hostile explanations: her assimilationist childhood, her long relationship with Heidegger, and so on. He does think it remarkable that Arendt “clung” to her argument about Jewish responsibility “even after the full extent and fantastic projective power of Nazi anti-Semitism (including its vast exaggeration of the Jews’ economic importance) became clear.” But his whole book is a kind of explanation for why she found it so easy to connect Jews and finance: the connection was one of “the a priori ideological commitments that structured her selection and interpretation of ‘facts’ about the Jews.”
The disagreement with Arendt nicely sums up Nirenberg’s book. His argument is that a certain view of Judaism lies deep in the structure of Western civilization and has helped its intellectuals and polemicists explain Christian heresies, political tyrannies, medieval plagues, capitalist crises, and revolutionary movements. Anti-Judaism is and has long been one of the most powerful theoretical systems “for making sense of the world.” No doubt, Jews sometimes act out the roles that anti-Judaism assigns them—but so do the members of all the other national and religious groups, and in much greater numbers. The theory does not depend on the behavior of “real” Jews.
Nirenberg’s history of anti-Judaism is powerful and persuasive, but it is also unfinished. It never gets to the United States, for example, where anti-Judaism seems to have been less prevalent and less useful (less used in making sense of society and economy) than it was and is in the Old World—and where philo-Judaism seems to have a much larger presence. The modern state of Israel also makes no appearance in Nirenberg’s book, except for one sentence on the next-to-last page:
We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of “Israel.”
So we have a partial discontinuity (the US) and an unexplored continuity (contemporary Israel) with Nirenberg’s history. There is still work to be done. But here, in this book, anti-Judaism has at last found its radical critic.
