The Jewish Cardinal Who Claimed the Enlightenment Caused Antisemitism - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#14881527
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... tiger.html

I went to church today and heard this guy's story about how in WW2, after his parents were killed in concentration camps, he had two Catholic friends who dared him to say confession in Notre Dame despite being Jewish. The guy as a boy went in, but the priest figured him out anyway and told him to look at a cross before saying out loud ten times that he knew Jesus died for his sins, but he didn't care. He said it several times, but couldn't complete the task and felt he saw God for who he was out of faith, so he converted and eventually became the archbishop of Paris.

The priest didn't mention this part of his story or his name, but whatever.

The really interesting point is how this is a French Jew turned Catholic (who even a father try to annul his conversion by appealing to the local rabbi) who came to a controversial point on the origins of anti-Semitism. His claim was it was the obsession with reason before faith which enabled this...

...but his complains on reason deal with people like Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. He leaves a lot to be desired in complaining about the Enlightenment. He complains about rationalism as well, but believes these other characters are extensions of rationalist philosophy. He even commends empiricism because he believes it's the foundation of good works as well as interactive communication.

It gets weirder. When he visited Israel, the chief rabbi condemned him in saying he was worse than Hitler.

In any case, he's just a really strange case that shows what happens when strange cases happen. He's drastically unappreciated, but then he made some unorthodox points that don't really fit in the conventional understanding of how beliefs come together.
#14881728
Hmmm...I guess it depends on how you define "antisemitism." The Jews have a long history of persecution under the various empires that have conquered them, from the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Romans, and so on. Then, with the split between Judaism and Christianity, there were a lot of polemics on both sides, and as Christianity became more powerful, a lot of those religious polemics were used to target the Jewish people themselves. The church had a rather mixed record on this: At some points, they were encouraging this anti-Jewish fervor, while at other times, they were condemning it, and protecting Jews from the popular outrage against them. Then there's the economic factor. Because they were barred from many traditional professions, Jews often became money lenders for their local lord. This made them a convenient source of income when times were good, but when people became outraged over usurious interest rates and the like, these feudal lords had a convenient scapegoat. With the onset of modernity, banking became a more acceptable profession, and that's when you see the rise of the Rothschild family, about whom countless volumes of conspiracy theories have been written. This, I think, is where this cardinal might have some credibility to his claims, because with modernity, Jews became the scapegoat for capitalism itself. Everything wrong with capitalism could be conveniently projected onto Jews. This occurs to some extent within the Left, but on the Right, it allows for a kind of double-think regarding capitalism. Capitalism then becomes something that is mostly good, except for the corrupting elements brought about by the Jews. So yeah, there is a connection between antisemitism and modernity in that Jews have become the scapegoats for everything wrong with modernity. But then, they've always been scapegoats for something.
#14882055
There is nothing new about this idea. It was a standard Jewish thinking before the war. As Arthur Ruppin (1934) noted earlier in the century, all modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses to the Enlightenment’s corrosive effects on Judaism—a set of defensive structures erected against “the destructive influence of European civilization.”

Zionist Maxim Nordau wrote in the late 19th century

Spoiler: show
French revolution anti semitism

The marginalization of antisemitism  in  Nordau’s earlier work  changed dramatically with the  Dreyfus Affair  and his involvement in the Zionist movement. Henceforth, the “Jewish question” was no longer separable from the crisis of Western civilization. The more that Nordau came  to define Jewish emancipation as a hollow reality, the more critical  his stance towards the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The emancipation of the Jews, he emphasized, had not taken place  organically, “from  an inner necessity” or as an act of genuine fraternity. It happened solely because  logic demanded it. “Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that  principles must be higher than sentiments. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the  sake  of principle.”63 A hundred years after the French Revolution, it was clear  to Max Nordau that, except for England (where emancipation had “already been completed in the heart before legislation expressly  confirmed it”), Jews were not at  all accepted in the  European  consciousness  as equal citizens.  Emancipation had proved to be nothing but a  thin façade following the rise of modern  racial antisemitism, which above all focused its attack against educated and assimilated Jews. They were  especially  vulnerable since they had too swiftly given up those elements of national  identity, solidarity,  and communal life which enabled Jewry to overcome medieval persecutions  and Christian bigotry in the past. 


Anti Zionist and "German Patriot" Jewish convert, Peter Drucker wrote in 1936

Spoiler: show
The Jewish Question

Since the collapse of the world of the Middle Ages, since faith is no longer the sole force that creates a community, there has been a Jewish question. If also not for the moment for the Jews, who, encouraged by having their main locus in the East, were ever more isolated, passing through their religious-mystical renaissance movement, Hasidism, in the 18th century, the century in which religious life underwent its steepest decline in Europe. However, for the outside world, it was increasingly incomprehensible that a community lived in its midst that was built on a basis disowned by Europe, isolated by it and isolating itself.

We cannot emphasize enough how important it seems to us that Jewish emancipation did not come from within Judaism, and that thus Judaism has not developed internal power that would have given it a place in the European order. Rather, the emancipation occurred from without, from ideas of bourgeois liberalism hostile to community and connectedness. The Jews were freed from the ghetto not as “Jews,” but as “humans” and “citizens,” in the name of equality. However, that cannot mean anything else than that the Jews were freed, by destroying the bonds of Judaism: for the concept of the chosen people with its claim to totality, on which the Jewish community rests, is in fact connected with the ghetto, but is totally unable to relate to bourgeois equality, although often the Jews did not become conscious of this.

Pious Jews in central or western Europe were anxious to observe everything prescribed by their faith, and therefore really felt themselves to be Jewish, If they promoted and assumed bourgeois equality, they would no longer be proper “Jews” in accordance with the concept of Judaism, any more that a Catholic who regularly went to confession, but no longer believed that the church alone could make one holy, would be a true Catholic.

Therefore, Judaism was not able to develop any counterforce that would have given emancipated Jews a “Jewish community” able to be coupled and incorporated in the bourgeois world. Thus it happened that the emancipation appeared not just as being freed from the outer limitations, but also to the same degree as being freed from the suppression of all worldly knowledge, all worldly intellect. It appeared as being freed from the limitation to the spiritual and spatial confinement of waiting for the Messiah and of mourning lost greatness, from the banning of all culture and everything of beauty, as being freed from Judaism itself.

Through emancipation, Jews lost their Jewish community and connectedness. Therefore, of necessity, the emancipated Jew makes his claim in society not on the basis of his “Jewishness,” but rather on the basis of his “no-longer-Jewishness,” on the basis of the bourgeois equality of all. Therefore, of necessity, released through the forces of liberalism, he is a representative of liberal ideas. Following the destruction of his own community, these ideas alone could give him a place in human society. What a paradox the result of this development in fact is, only becomes clear, when one considers that only the most devoted conservatism has held the Jews together through all those centuries. Two factors have provided support to emancipated Jews’ acceptance of bourgeois liberalism throughout Europe, and promoted maintenance of it. First, liberalism emancipated the Jews only in western and central Europe. But in terms of numbers, in the east, where Jews preponderantly lived, it failed to do so. There the ghetto continued to exist, and suppressions and persecutions persisted. Therefore, Jews constantly emigrated to the west- to freedom- and the problems of emancipation could not reach equilibrium. Owing to Jewish persecution in the east, the western, totally emancipated, totally “de-judified” Jews were constantly being shaken awake, and in them a common feeling of responsibility for the fate of eastern European Jews was aroused, which reminded them of their common origin with them. Although naturally given a predominantly religious emphasis, this feeling of community could not help but lead to strengthened accentuation of liberalism, to summoning the “liberal world conscience,” since the pogroms were religious persecutions. This was because the sole salvation for eastern Jews lay in victory of liberal ideas, religious tolerance and bourgeois equality.

The failure of liberalism to create a society based on the equality of all persons led to its becoming purely a negative force that only dissolved. For emancipated Jews, and for Jews “released” from their community, this produced a problem of assimilation, i.e., of fitting into the European community-forming connections: the connection of the church, and the counterforce that developed from liberalism, the Nation. This problem is different in its particulars in every country, depending on how much liberalism penetrated, and in what manner. For example, in England, where the basic concept of religion as a “private matter” triumphed totally, the problem of assimilation is purely a populace one: the Jew there is seen by the populace as other, to the point where proving the opposite as extraordinarily difficult. The reverse is true in France, where the populace’s conception became fully wedded with the French version of liberalism. There the Jewish question assumes a predominantly religious tone, and it is no accident that the Dreyfuss Affair has led to lay partisanship (“Laizismus”). The situation is much more complicated in Germany, which we will be addressing in greater detail. Before that, however, we must spend some time on the overall problems of assimilation. The tragedy of assimilation is that emancipated Jews, who are bereft of community and connections, must of necessity view the problems as solvable by the individual and through the good will of the individual – of which there has never been a lack on both sides. Meanwhile the community, due to its character as such, is seen as a community problem, and every effort of individuals to solve it as an individual, is perceived as contradictory to its basic principles, and as hostile. This is most salient in the problem of Jews and the Church. Jews, emancipated although they are heretical, could not acknowledge the demand of the Christian Church that they be members of it as a prerequisite to membership in European communities as well as individual national communities, because it directly contradicted the principles emancipating them. If they stayed religious Jews, naturally they had to defend this claim vis-à-vis the “Religion-is-a-private-matter” principle, and thus deny the communal nature of the Church, in other words the Church itself. Therefore, membership in the Jewish religion means being Other and Outside. Individual assimilation without an inner, and not merely superficial, assumption of the Christian faith, is just as impossible as is a full solution of the problem of community of Jews if a Jewish religious community worth the name is to continue, in our opinion. (We hope that from this determination no one in any manner will read a denial, enmity or intolerance against Jewish faith. We only believe that it is necessary clearly to express the either-or nature of the assimilation problem.)
#14882162
noir wrote:As Arthur Ruppin (1934) noted earlier in the century, all modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses to the Enlightenment’s corrosive effects on Judaism—a set of defensive structures erected against “the destructive influence of European civilization.”

This is a direct quote of the Neo-Nazi Kevin MacDonald. You ought to acknowledge where you take your ideas from.
#14882191
This is a direct quote of the Neo-Nazi Kevin MacDonald. You ought to acknowledge where you take your ideas from.

So noir reads anti-semitic texts. So what? This does not necessarily mean that she agrees with what they have written (and, being Jewish herself, she would be extremely unlikely to agree with them). After all, one must know one's enemy. What she was agreeing with was the statement by Arthur Ruppin, one of the leading Zionists of the early 20th century and one of the founders of the city of Tel Aviv, which the anti-semite happened to quote. It would have looked better if she had got the quote directly from the writings of Ruppin himself rather than from an anti-semitic text, but that's hardly sufficient reason to implicitly accuse noir herself of being an anti-semite or a neo-nazi.
#14882205
@noir , You are putting forward the words and ideas of a neo-Nazi (who quotes just a few words from Ruppin). It is important that everyone knows where your ideas come from.

@Potemkin , the interpretation of what Ruppin said is MacDonald's; noir has adopted that, while trying to make it look like her own words. Noir does blame Jews for causing antisemitic views, just like MacDonald does. I think it's important to know that noir thinks this way, and is happy using bigots liker MacDonald to speak for her.
#14882207
Paradigm wrote:Hmmm...I guess it depends on how you define "antisemitism." The Jews have a long history of persecution under the various empires that have conquered them, from the Babylonians to the Assyrians to the Romans, and so on. Then, with the split between Judaism and Christianity, there were a lot of polemics on both sides, and as Christianity became more powerful, a lot of those religious polemics were used to target the Jewish people themselves. The church had a rather mixed record on this: At some points, they were encouraging this anti-Jewish fervor, while at other times, they were condemning it, and protecting Jews from the popular outrage against them. Then there's the economic factor. Because they were barred from many traditional professions, Jews often became money lenders for their local lord. This made them a convenient source of income when times were good, but when people became outraged over usurious interest rates and the like, these feudal lords had a convenient scapegoat. With the onset of modernity, banking became a more acceptable profession, and that's when you see the rise of the Rothschild family, about whom countless volumes of conspiracy theories have been written. This, I think, is where this cardinal might have some credibility to his claims, because with modernity, Jews became the scapegoat for capitalism itself. Everything wrong with capitalism could be conveniently projected onto Jews. This occurs to some extent within the Left, but on the Right, it allows for a kind of double-think regarding capitalism. Capitalism then becomes something that is mostly good, except for the corrupting elements brought about by the Jews. So yeah, there is a connection between antisemitism and modernity in that Jews have become the scapegoats for everything wrong with modernity. But then, they've always been scapegoats for something.

What “Jews” are being referenced? Abrahamic Jews a barely discenible minority or the present Ashkanarzi of East European ethnicity who illegally, genocidally and parasitically occupy PALESTINE. The curse of these east European wannabe Jews and their me,! me, me! strategy has led to their domination of western economies, newspapers, film, publication, advertising, tv, social organisations and specifically their possession of the American gonads, not much of a possession I admit but you hopefully get the picture eh? GOYIM!!
#14882209
noir wrote:There is nothing new about this idea. It was a standard Jewish thinking before the war. As Arthur Ruppin (1934) noted earlier in the century, all modern manifestations of Judaism, from neo-Orthodoxy to Zionism, are responses to the Enlightenment’s corrosive effects on Judaism—a set of defensive structures erected against “the destructive influence of European civilization.”

Zionist Maxim Nordau wrote in the late 19th century

Spoiler: show
French revolution anti semitism

The marginalization of antisemitism  in  Nordau’s earlier work  changed dramatically with the  Dreyfus Affair  and his involvement in the Zionist movement. Henceforth, the “Jewish question” was no longer separable from the crisis of Western civilization. The more that Nordau came  to define Jewish emancipation as a hollow reality, the more critical  his stance towards the abstract rationalism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. The emancipation of the Jews, he emphasized, had not taken place  organically, “from  an inner necessity” or as an act of genuine fraternity. It happened solely because  logic demanded it. “Popular sentiment rebelled, but the philosophy of the Revolution decreed that  principles must be higher than sentiments. The men of 1792 emancipated us only for the  sake  of principle.”63 A hundred years after the French Revolution, it was clear  to Max Nordau that, except for England (where emancipation had “already been completed in the heart before legislation expressly  confirmed it”), Jews were not at  all accepted in the  European  consciousness  as equal citizens.  Emancipation had proved to be nothing but a  thin façade following the rise of modern  racial antisemitism, which above all focused its attack against educated and assimilated Jews. They were  especially  vulnerable since they had too swiftly given up those elements of national  identity, solidarity,  and communal life which enabled Jewry to overcome medieval persecutions  and Christian bigotry in the past. 


Anti Zionist and "German Patriot" Jewish convert, Peter Drucker wrote in 1936

Spoiler: show
The Jewish Question

Since the collapse of the world of the Middle Ages, since faith is no longer the sole force that creates a community, there has been a Jewish question. If also not for the moment for the Jews, who, encouraged by having their main locus in the East, were ever more isolated, passing through their religious-mystical renaissance movement, Hasidism, in the 18th century, the century in which religious life underwent its steepest decline in Europe. However, for the outside world, it was increasingly incomprehensible that a community lived in its midst that was built on a basis disowned by Europe, isolated by it and isolating itself.

We cannot emphasize enough how important it seems to us that Jewish emancipation did not come from within Judaism, and that thus Judaism has not developed internal power that would have given it a place in the European order. Rather, the emancipation occurred from without, from ideas of bourgeois liberalism hostile to community and connectedness. The Jews were freed from the ghetto not as “Jews,” but as “humans” and “citizens,” in the name of equality. However, that cannot mean anything else than that the Jews were freed, by destroying the bonds of Judaism: for the concept of the chosen people with its claim to totality, on which the Jewish community rests, is in fact connected with the ghetto, but is totally unable to relate to bourgeois equality, although often the Jews did not become conscious of this.

Pious Jews in central or western Europe were anxious to observe everything prescribed by their faith, and therefore really felt themselves to be Jewish, If they promoted and assumed bourgeois equality, they would no longer be proper “Jews” in accordance with the concept of Judaism, any more that a Catholic who regularly went to confession, but no longer believed that the church alone could make one holy, would be a true Catholic.

Therefore, Judaism was not able to develop any counterforce that would have given emancipated Jews a “Jewish community” able to be coupled and incorporated in the bourgeois world. Thus it happened that the emancipation appeared not just as being freed from the outer limitations, but also to the same degree as being freed from the suppression of all worldly knowledge, all worldly intellect. It appeared as being freed from the limitation to the spiritual and spatial confinement of waiting for the Messiah and of mourning lost greatness, from the banning of all culture and everything of beauty, as being freed from Judaism itself.

Through emancipation, Jews lost their Jewish community and connectedness. Therefore, of necessity, the emancipated Jew makes his claim in society not on the basis of his “Jewishness,” but rather on the basis of his “no-longer-Jewishness,” on the basis of the bourgeois equality of all. Therefore, of necessity, released through the forces of liberalism, he is a representative of liberal ideas. Following the destruction of his own community, these ideas alone could give him a place in human society. What a paradox the result of this development in fact is, only becomes clear, when one considers that only the most devoted conservatism has held the Jews together through all those centuries. Two factors have provided support to emancipated Jews’ acceptance of bourgeois liberalism throughout Europe, and promoted maintenance of it. First, liberalism emancipated the Jews only in western and central Europe. But in terms of numbers, in the east, where Jews preponderantly lived, it failed to do so. There the ghetto continued to exist, and suppressions and persecutions persisted. Therefore, Jews constantly emigrated to the west- to freedom- and the problems of emancipation could not reach equilibrium. Owing to Jewish persecution in the east, the western, totally emancipated, totally “de-judified” Jews were constantly being shaken awake, and in them a common feeling of responsibility for the fate of eastern European Jews was aroused, which reminded them of their common origin with them. Although naturally given a predominantly religious emphasis, this feeling of community could not help but lead to strengthened accentuation of liberalism, to summoning the “liberal world conscience,” since the pogroms were religious persecutions. This was because the sole salvation for eastern Jews lay in victory of liberal ideas, religious tolerance and bourgeois equality.

The failure of liberalism to create a society based on the equality of all persons led to its becoming purely a negative force that only dissolved. For emancipated Jews, and for Jews “released” from their community, this produced a problem of assimilation, i.e., of fitting into the European community-forming connections: the connection of the church, and the counterforce that developed from liberalism, the Nation. This problem is different in its particulars in every country, depending on how much liberalism penetrated, and in what manner. For example, in England, where the basic concept of religion as a “private matter” triumphed totally, the problem of assimilation is purely a populace one: the Jew there is seen by the populace as other, to the point where proving the opposite as extraordinarily difficult. The reverse is true in France, where the populace’s conception became fully wedded with the French version of liberalism. There the Jewish question assumes a predominantly religious tone, and it is no accident that the Dreyfuss Affair has led to lay partisanship (“Laizismus”). The situation is much more complicated in Germany, which we will be addressing in greater detail. Before that, however, we must spend some time on the overall problems of assimilation. The tragedy of assimilation is that emancipated Jews, who are bereft of community and connections, must of necessity view the problems as solvable by the individual and through the good will of the individual – of which there has never been a lack on both sides. Meanwhile the community, due to its character as such, is seen as a community problem, and every effort of individuals to solve it as an individual, is perceived as contradictory to its basic principles, and as hostile. This is most salient in the problem of Jews and the Church. Jews, emancipated although they are heretical, could not acknowledge the demand of the Christian Church that they be members of it as a prerequisite to membership in European communities as well as individual national communities, because it directly contradicted the principles emancipating them. If they stayed religious Jews, naturally they had to defend this claim vis-à-vis the “Religion-is-a-private-matter” principle, and thus deny the communal nature of the Church, in other words the Church itself. Therefore, membership in the Jewish religion means being Other and Outside. Individual assimilation without an inner, and not merely superficial, assumption of the Christian faith, is just as impossible as is a full solution of the problem of community of Jews if a Jewish religious community worth the name is to continue, in our opinion. (We hope that from this determination no one in any manner will read a denial, enmity or intolerance against Jewish faith. We only believe that it is necessary clearly to express the either-or nature of the assimilation problem.)

I am curious regarding the corrosive and destructive influences of Western enlightenment upon Judaism, what are the relevant specifics?
#14882215
William Bennett wrote:Abrahamic Jews a barely discenible minority or the present Ashkanarzi of East European ethnicity who illegally, genocidally and parasitically occupy PALESTINE. The curse of these east European wannabe Jews and their me,! me, me! strategy has led to their domination of western economies, newspapers, film, publication, advertising, tv, social organisations and specifically their possession of the American gonads, not much of a possession I admit but you hopefully get the picture eh? GOYIM!!

Thank you for showing your true colours so early in your membership on pofo.
You can now join the ranks of the antisemieuh, anti-Israel lobby.
#14882216
Dubayoo wrote:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1559620/Cardinal-Lustiger.html

I went to church today and heard this guy's story about how in WW2, after his parents were killed in concentration camps, he had two Catholic friends who dared him to say confession in Notre Dame despite being Jewish. The guy as a boy went in, but the priest figured him out anyway and told him to look at a cross before saying out loud ten times that he knew Jesus died for his sins, but he didn't care. He said it several times, but couldn't complete the task and felt he saw God for who he was out of faith, so he converted and eventually became the archbishop of Paris.

The priest didn't mention this part of his story or his name, but whatever.

The really interesting point is how this is a French Jew turned Catholic (who even a father try to annul his conversion by appealing to the local rabbi) who came to a controversial point on the origins of anti-Semitism. His claim was it was the obsession with reason before faith which enabled this...

...but his complains on reason deal with people like Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Voltaire. He leaves a lot to be desired in complaining about the Enlightenment. He complains about rationalism as well, but believes these other characters are extensions of rationalist philosophy. He even commends empiricism because he believes it's the foundation of good works as well as interactive communication.

It gets weirder. When he visited Israel, the chief rabbi condemned him in saying he was worse than Hitler.

In any case, he's just a really strange case that shows what happens when strange cases happen. He's drastically unappreciated, but then he made some unorthodox points that don't really fit in the conventional understanding of how beliefs come together.

There’s no one more dreastically unappreciated than those with no name
#14882222
Read the OP. At that time, it was believed antisemitism was the result of emancipation which was given by Napoleon decree. Before French revolution and emancipation order, the Jews didn't suffer so much by antisemitism nor there were much drifters the so called "self hating Jews". Of course, after WW2, this theme is no more popular because Europe tried to end institutional antisemitism.


I just gave few sources from that time to highlight the point the OP is telling. It sounds to him strange as if it's new for him. In fact it was the standard thinking.

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