Socialism of Fools by Michele Battini

Author:Michele Battini [Battini, Michele]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS022000, HISTORY / Jewish, HIS016000, HISTORY / Historiography
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2010-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Shoah, Social Anti-Semitism, and Its Aftermath

What was Anti-Jewish Anticapitalism?

One of the most distinguished and anguished scholars of the last century, Delio Cantimori, dedicated his life to the whole of the Reformation and heretics. He taught us the dangers of anachronism and of slipping into “metahistory,” as happened to the Harvard historian Peter Viereck.1 I believe that the path I have followed through the pages of the varied literature of anti-Jewish propaganda, all sharing the same social stereotypes, is also a way of reconstructing on new bases the long history that led, without any teleological predestination, to Auschwitz: in this case, the link between the past and the future seems to resemble the slow processes of hereditary biology, in which a new type of life can be the unforeseeable result of the combination of the elements of the long preceding history.2 I do not believe, therefore, that it can be maintained that the Shoah was the consequence of “modernity” and that the notion of modernity cannot be used in such a generic and abstract way, alluding to “Enlightenment social engineering.”3 But it is also true that the emancipation legislation—the offspring of the Enlightenment—while demolishing the old dividing barriers between the circumcised and the baptized produced a new type of reaction to what was perceived as a new threat: a social, cultural reaction, namely.4

There are two ways of eliminating the Shoah from history: one is simply denying that it ever happened, as the reductionists and negationists do; the other is regarding it with reverence and terror as if it were something numinous beyond human reason. Therefore, there is a great deal at stake as regards historical truth: if we do not see the Shoah as something that belongs to our history and that has deep roots in the heart of Christian Europe, we condemn ourselves to forgoing historical knowledge. It is certainly not by chance if, in recent times, the notion of reality has encountered serious difficulties with the reduction of history to a subjective narration or a novel. Whence has arisen the putting aside of a historical perspective, with the result that the sense of the future has become blurred and the present is experienced as “postmodern”—an age of survivors, disoriented among the ruins of what was the modern world?

Hence every serious attempt to tackle the genesis of anti-Semitism has to go through the task of placing it once again in real history: this task has developed in two stages. In the first, there were the accounts of the survivors, that “need to tell others” that Primo Levi felt as an “immediate and violent impulse.” The testimony of the survivors and the research commitment of historians such as Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, and many others have erected such a mass of information as to render indefensible every form of negationism and every private attempt to escape from the burden that weighs on the conscience of humanity. The second stage is the investigation of the deep roots of the Shoah in European history and culture, a task that still lies ahead.

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