Jews against Themselves

Abstract

Edward Alexander, Jews Against Themselves, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2015, 178pp.Reviewed by ABIGAIL L. ROSENTHALThese remarkable essays by Edward Alexander bring intellectual precision, moral clarity and literary elegance to bear on a syndrome that could be called "Jewish suicidalism." That is almost the right name for it, except that its advocates, who are described eloquently by Alexander, exempt themselves from the condemnations they rain down on their fellows. The motivational patterns that Alexander exposes cannot, as is sometimes claimed, reduce to self-hatred. Rather, shown in vivid detail are the workings of opportunistic self-love.Edward Alexander, Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Washington, is the author of books that span literary, cultural and Jewish worlds. In his latest book (Transaction Publishers, 2015), Alexander's contemporary survey is far-ranging, albeit, not exhaustive.In "Michael Lerner: Hillary Clintons Jewish Rasputin," we meet the founder of the magazine Tikkun, "the omnipresent, gentile-appointed voice of the Jewish community," at an earlier stage of his career, when he incited mob violence and threatened lawsuits to intimidate his opponents.And in "Antisemitism Denial: The Berkeley School," we meet Judith Butler who urges progressive people to fight antisemitism but maintains that it is "wildly improbable that somebody examining the divestment petitions signed by herself and her co-conspirators might take them (as hundreds on her own campus already had) as condoning antisemitism." Alexander compares Butlers puzzlement to that of Charles Dickens, who did not know what to make of Fagin, the villainous Jew he had created in Oliver Twist. "The reason for Dickens' puzzlement was that, in an important sense, he did indeed not make' Fagin, and therefore didn't know what to make q/Tiim. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the collective folklore of Christendom, which had for centuries fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, surrogate of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young-to which list of attributes Butler and her friends would now add 'Zionist imperialist and occupier.'"The type described in Jews Against Themselves is not new. Drawing on recent scholarship by Sander Gilman, Ruth Wisse and others, Alexander traces the genre to its historical medieval prototypes. Throughout the era of triumphalist Christianity, there were Jewish informers-my term not his- who converted to the dominant religion. Innocent themselves, they deflected attacks onto other, also innocent Jews, thereby becoming guilty accomplices in acts of betrayal. Indeed, Pope Gregory IX, who ordered the public burning of the Talmud in Paris and Rome, acted on the advice presented by a Jewish convert to Christianity, the Dominican Nicholas Donin, in 1239. In 1263, the Jewish convert Pablo Christiani played a leading role in the famous Barcelona Disputations. The latter actually was a show trial in which the eminent Jewish scholar, Nachmanides, was forced to defend Judaism against Christiani's accusations under intellectually disabling rules of engagement. Likewise, possibly another convert, Johannes (Josef) Pffefferkorn, may have inspired Martin Luther's destructive campaigns against the Jews of Germany. Luther justified his calls for humiliating, looting and burning in Concerning the Jews and Their Lies (1543), became one of Hitler's favorite books. In "Disraeli and Marx: StammgenosseV' (Members of the Tribe), Alexander describes these tormented and influential figures within the political context of the Nineteenth Century, who persisted in publically repudiating their Jewish forebears (in the case of Marx, more damaging and venomous). …