The Jewish communities in Germany only have a total of around 90,000 members, and the average age is 70 years. They may be joined by the same number of Jews who, for various reasons, do not belong to a community.
In public perception, however, ten times as many Jews seem to live in Germany. Of course the Jew himself is to blame for this. Firstly anyway. Secondly, because there must be something in the centuries-old stories that “the Jews” are behind everything and everywhere, thirdly because those who speak out publicly can cause quite a ruckus.
Outsiders do not know that it is almost exclusively those who do not lead a religious Jewish life. However, the fact that rioting - or, better said: contradiction, discussion, putting yourself in the position of the other - is a kind of traditional Jewish intellectual exercise has been getting on the nerves of Christians and Muslims for ages. believers and secular people.
Anti-Semitism has now become the word of the hour. As a political instrument. It's almost comical how every upstanding Democrat now advocates for "Jewish life." Very few people in this country will have ever met a Jew in person. This is not technically possible at all. But NABU is also serious about saving rare species that no one else has ever seen. Of course, for most people it's not about Jews. It is not the Juchten beetle that led to opposition to the famous “Stuttgart 21” project, for example.
Political opponents are now also being fought against non-Jewish people using the instrument of terror through the Holocaust. It is relatively transparent that the good, dead Jews are meant, perhaps their direct descendants. You don't want to let your cultivated culture of remembrance be destroyed after you've just learned how to say "Jude" without stumbling.
Until the shock wave of October 7th, there were enough professional Jews, usually politically left-leaning, who gave a Jewish voice to those interested on this and that on public television, preferably of course as critics of Israel, which is a full-time job for many people.
The small number of Jews who practice Judaism laughed at them, shook their heads or ignored them altogether. Brought the children to the police-guarded kindergarten and struggled out of the house on Saturday morning so that a minyan, the required quorum of ten men to read the Torah, could be held in the synagogue and, with a sigh, paid double the price for kosher food, which is hardly produced in this country due to a lack of customers and is expensively imported.
Then came October 7th
Presumably it was also difficult for the alibi Jewish experts to balance their journalistic existences. They didn't play a big role in the community, they didn't know them either. But for the German public they had to be a Jewish voice without being able to make it clear what was Jewish about them other than their grandfather's name on the deportation list. Then came the anti-Jewish wave after October 7th and the business model collapsed. Being Jewish, even self-described, was no longer chic. On the contrary. Her political family provided her.
An experience of collective guilt in reverse. The high-security life under which the very manageable Jewish life in this country supposedly thrives, under police protection since the 1970s, is no home for them. The awakening that anyone who was even remotely Jewish was to be made to publicly disappear caught her strangely unprepared.
Hannah Arendt, the unearthed intellectual icon of the hour, abused and appropriated by the spirit of the times, could have shown them where the road led. Just as those quoting her are no match for her intellectually, just as they have little in common with her striving for free-spirited thinking, one thing is always ignored: her resignation at always being labeled as a “Jewish” thinker. Arendt's sharp words, which decidedly did not want to associate herself with any camp, are quoted like fig leaves. Her decisive life balance, that it was not the declared enemies who were endangering her life, but rather the supposed friends who watched silently, remains unheard of.
Incidentally, this is the experience that all the survivors who went into hiding had: help came from people who were least expected. “At least we must remember that the victory of evil in the world is not primarily due to its blind enforcers, but rather to the spiritually seeing servants of good,” Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich quotes Fedor Stepun in “Secondhand Times”.
The left-wing extremist Tuperamos of the 1970s are back. Only now they are not trained in guerrilla warfare weapons in Palestinian training camps in the Far Middle East. The ground troops can be recruited right here, and the propaganda is also served. Instead of terrorist attacks that shock the majority of society, the mass of Palestine activists manage to finally solve the “Jewish question” in Europe through the pinpricks of a continuing threat situation. There isn't much work left.
Training no longer takes place with weapons, it takes place through words and pictures. Political “discussions” of the monologue post type. The still undisciplined are left to partially maraud. Show understanding and forbearance. A “But Israel” – also for the firebomb in front of a synagogue.
Since it is currently fashionable to draw parallels with the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps one should also remember the naivety of the majority of German Jews at that time. Completely assimilated, proud of its Iron Cross from the First World War, with its organs in the synagogue and a cemetery design based on the Christian model. They initially felt unintentional when the Nazis' persecution of Jews began. The poor, embarrassing relatives with their medieval habitus, rites, way of life and strict faith, their complete anti-modernity ultimately disturbed them on their way to virtually dissolving themselves in the majority society.
The shock that in the truly persecuted history of the Jews in Europe, those who had just achieved civil equality just one or two generations earlier were to be exterminated in the same way as the strict believers who were strangers to them, did not seem to have been particularly lasting. Despite the unprecedented factory-like mass destruction, Jews of all stripes believed they had a place in Europe. The “chosen people” are chosen and condemned to believe in goodness and reason. And to ask God until the last second of your life whether he has gone crazy, whether the whole thing is just a bad joke - and the only answer you get is to find out for yourself. The profound difference to all monotheistic religions: I've already given you a brain, some operating instructions and principles (the ten commandments), you should be able to work with them.
Judaism not only gave Europe its greatest talents, but also constitutional principles that found their way into modern criminal law. It wasn't far from Christianity being denigrated as an "Old Testament" book of the "avenging God" to Goebbels' "subtle Jewish intellectualism" of the "Talmud Jews". It has never been a popular thought that every event must also be viewed from the other side, that ambivalence and infinite shades of gray make up our lives. After all, finding someone to blame is more convenient than taking responsibility yourself.
How naive
In my community after October 7th, I asked older members of the post-war German community how they could be so surprised by the anti-Zionist wave that took over the streets even in liberal Frankfurt. “How could you be so naive?”
The fact that the pro-Palestinian cause had picked up steam again in this country since the Israeli army withdrew from Gaza in 2005 was obvious. That it would develop uninhibitedly into a political power, too. That both the Hamas-Hezbollah terror campaign and the inevitable Israeli military counterattack would develop into a PR disaster for Israel, Kol Israel, the Jewish people in clan custody. The fact that even in so-called feminist circles in the West, Iran's Islamist terror regime and the global fires it ignites are not addressed is evidence of intellectual and economic capitulation.
However, amid all the “Yallah, yallah Intifada” noise of the present, I did not expect that the old, classic anti-Semitism would also celebrate a renaissance. The one I only met after the third glass of wine from self-described left-liberal intellectuals in the 1990s.
Nobody wants to hear about the corona virus anymore, now that autumn is the classic flu season again - the “Jewish world conspiracy” is lurking in the background. In streets, bars, politics, schools, sports clubs and universities, in private encounters, anti-Zionism conquers with its violent attacks, the original virus of Jew-hatred thrives almost unnoticed. Contrary to stated political declarations, the vaccination rate, as with measles and smallpox, has fallen to such an extent that herd immunity no longer exists.
In at least my circle of international artists of diverse origins and different dispositions, no one wants anything to do with “Free Palestine”. Many of their parents' roots lie in Asia. Her parents emigrated to the USA and Canada at a time when only the societies of the democratic West promised individual development and even prosperity. They fled decades ago from collectivism, both intellectual and economic.
It may be because of their profession that freedom is the greatest good for my artist friends and they don't think in terms of national borders. You hear “F*ing Jew” from them just as often as I hear my children in the schoolyard or at Maccabi games. It just has a different sound in Europe.
Where Jews are a natural part of a diverse society and cannot only be looked for with a magnifying glass, jokes can be made about a “f*ing Jew” just as much as about the “bloody Indian”. Old Jewish jokes, Yiddish words are linguistic common property in the USA and Canada.
“Rothschild” as a cipher and lightning rod
And yet even here something has shifted. Not least in the election of the new mayor in New York, a movement against the “East Coast establishment” is manifested. Ten or fifteen years ago, celebrities in California increasingly complained about the “Judaization” of Hollywood, the music industry and the press. Who had become big through the flight of Europe's greatest talents. “Rothschild” as a cipher and lightning rod has long since become socially acceptable “over there”. On the left. Not like here, where so far only conspiracy-minded right-wingers have used it.
Of course, one can joke about the fact that there can't be much going on with the alleged "world Jewish conspiracy" if Jewish students are being hunted down in the supposedly elite-controlled US universities. When Jewish businesses and synagogues are attacked, even in “Jewified” New York. But of course the staging of the enemy image “Israel/Jewishness” is only part of the Jewish plan to determine thought and action worldwide.
The fact that, unlike in Europe, where Jews were largely exterminated, a self-confident Jewish life is lived in the USA is thanks to their numbers. Which in turn results from European history of expulsion and the search for a safe haven that the founding fathers of the United States promised.
The idea of Zionism was to find a home for the Jewish people where they could live freely and equally. It emerged at the beginning of the last century under the influence of the pogroms in Russia and Poland, which were part of a long chain of expulsions and pogroms in Europe since the emergence of Christianity. The secular founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, initially didn't care where this state would be located; only Jews have been praying for thousands of years to return to Zion, Jerusalem, the land promised to Abraham. (By the way, Jews continued to live before the founding of the state of Israel).
The bad conscience of the world public as it watched the Holocaust, largely closing its gates to the persecuted, and the unwillingness of the derelict colonial power Great Britain to continue to deal with the literal hotspot of Palestine (whose territory stretched from the sea to the river to Jordan to present-day Iraq) made the founding of a Jewish state possible. A beautiful gift from the colonial power to Abraham's people! Let the Jew be torn between the archaic-Arab-Muslim tribal feuds. Let's see if he'll be happy between malaria swamps and desert. The admiration in Israel's first decades was for the self-assertion and modern cultivation and urbanization of the volatile region. The gibberish Jew with the plow and rifle – who would have thought that.
By the way, “Am Israel Chai” does not mean, as many well-meaning people translate it, “Long live Israel”, the state. “Am” means people. The Jewish people survived the anti-Jewish persecution of Christianity, its racist mutation into anti-Semitism, by defiantly clinging to its traditions and beliefs. Expelled several times through Europe, and in the last century also from the native Arab world in their millions.
Jewish solidarity with the State of Israel does not follow Israeli politics. It follows the logic of life insurance. The saving island. Which didn't exist on November 9, 1938.
