Jews Among the Nations by Erich Kahler

Author:Erich Kahler [Kahler, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781351317221
Google: 7qp-DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-12-12T03:40:30+00:00

The Jews and the Germans

IT IS NOT, after the experiences of our age, so easy to view the relations between Germans and Jews with calm and equanimity, not as easy for us as for governments which, for reasons of expediency, “let bygones be bygones.”

We cannot and we must not forget what happened. But we can and indeed we should try to probe the roots of the events, honestly and soberly, in order to gain distance from them and to alleviate our haunting memories. Not only the Germans, but the Jews as well must make such attempts to purify and clarify their minds; for what happens to somebody is just as much part of his being as what he does. How could we in a world like ours, a world of mounting confusion and recklessness, of continually impending mass extermination, keep our senses intact without keeping events at bay by efforts to cool our minds and hold on to our reason.

From the outset it should be stated that what happened in Germany is not entirely a matter of German-Jewish relations. A wider perspective of recent developments has made us aware of the fact that those monstrosities form part of an overall trend in our unfortunate epoch, a trend toward progressive overcivilized dehumanization. It is, however, no accident that this trend has found its most radical, its first completely and deliberately ruthless expression in the German treatment of the Jews. Such an extraordinary way of dealing with human beings cannot simply be attributed to that general rise of mechanical mass destruction which started in the First World War and is a consequence of technological progress and the indifference toward human life and suffering that goes with it. Nor can it be explained by the various pandemic motivations of anti-Judaism as they have been propounded in so many psychological and sociological studies of the phenomenon.

To be sure, anti-Judaism arose far back in antiquity and has persisted ever since all over the Western world, with more or less open virulence. Its overt causes are manifold, but they can, all of them, be traced back, directly or indirectly, to the peculiar, transnational existence and persistence of the Jewish people. We should not, as it is too often done, represent ourselves as mere victims, and it is unworthy of our tradition and unjustified by our history to interpret Judaism in terms of Passion and passivity only. There has been at the core of the Jewish people an unshakeable will to affirm their special, quasi-constitutional idea of humanity, to affirm it in all circumstances, in religious as well as in secular terms. The concept of man as created in the image of God, of a metaphysical, ideological God, purified of any anthropomorphic relations, and impeccable at the expense of man who forever strives and fails to live up to His demands–this concept carried from the beginning the seeds of all the mundane devotions of the Jews and of the resentment which these were bound to arouse. The

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