1
|
2 november 2019
When I wrote my book “Liberal Quicksand” an important decision I made was not to include the story of anti-Semitism and its disastrous consequence, the Holocaust, into my book. I had two reasons. First, the story of the near destruction of the Jewish population in Europe was sufficiently known. Second, this horrible story was, as I saw it, a matter of racism and as such an aberration of the processes I described in my book : formation of the different nations and democratisation in one movement.
Just recently I finalized reading “Europa gegen die Juden 1880-1945” by Götz Aly. In this excellent book Aly makes the point that to understand anti-semitism and the Holocaust, the ideas that these events are driven by Racist theories or Christian revenge theories (Christians eliminating the Jews because they killed Jesus) are no good starting points. Aly demonstrates rather convincingly that the events are, certainly in Eastern Europe rather related to (1) the modernizing transition of societies, (2) the fact that Jews seemed to make better use of the opportunities offered by the new circumstances, (3) the intention to create nation-states in which the people belonging to the nation should make sufficient social progress, if needed by holding down the Jews who prospered too well. Anti-semitism was futher (4) formalised politically by the introduction of universal voting rights. In pre-democratic structures anti-semitism did not find a political outlet.
Understood like this, the story of the near elimination of the Jewish people in Europe certainly fits the story I described in “Liberal Quicksand” better. The way Aly tells the story anti-semitism is a formative power of the European nation-states working together with democratisation, and this certainly in Eastern Europe and Central-Europe.
But of course Aly cannot deny that the whole story presupposes that the Jews were clearly identifiable and were indeed identified as Jews and that therefore, even if the history is told as he does, the racist basis is a necessary element of the explanation of what happened. Aly makes even the assumption that the jealousy against the success of the Jews was based on the fact that Jews dealed better with the ermanent flux in modernising societies.
And then of course, the conclusion must be that these forms of anti-semitic nationalist processes are not inclusive, while I, in my book, focus on linguistic nationalism which is capable of inclusion.