WHEN VICTIMS RULE A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America All Pictures Added by Gnostic Liberation Front     Page III   8. Jews and Slavery [83 Kilobytes] [about 16 paper pages] Jewish religious concepts of slavery; Jewish domination of the slave traffic of Slavs, beginning in the 5th century; Prominent Jews in the early Ku Klux Klan, as defenders of slavery and the southern Confederacy; The Nation of Islam's controversial book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews; the Jewish role in the slave trading of Africans; Jewish apologetics and mainstream academic rejection of The Secret Relationship. 9. Jewish Crime [121 Kilobytes] [about 15 paper pages] Jewish crime, focusing here in the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s; Jewish criminal networks in New York City and other major cities; the central Jewish influence in the birth of "organized" crime; prominent Jewish fraudsters and scam artists; Meyer Lansky and "the Syndicate"; Jewish pre-eminence in Las Vegas (and other international "Sin Cities") and its criminal underworld; Jewish criminal contributions to the founding of modern Israel; modern Jewish myth of categorical historical innocence and nonviolence versus the facts of history; noteworthy Jewish criminals in more modern times. 10. Jews and "White Slavery" (the International Prostitution Trade at the Turn of the 20th Century) [54 Kilobytes] [about 12 paper pages] Jewish domination of the early 20th century prostitution trade, including the United States, Argentina, Poland, Germany, South Africa, Russia, Austria, Brazil and other countries; Jewish control of three-quarters of the prostitution trade in New York City and Chicago; modern Jewish dismissal of such historical facts as Nazi-type hate propaganda; modern Israel's importance in the international prostitution trade today. 11. The Jewish Cosmology of Victimhood (Part 1) [101 Kilobytes] [about 21 paper pages] The Jewish self-conception and enforcement of collective categorical innocence through history; Jewish martyrology mythology; Jewish legend versus historical fact; Cecil Roth's pre-Holocaust assessment of the collective Jewish innocence tradition; the post-Holocaust age of Jewish apologetics; political use of the Jewish "cult of the persecuted" for modern Israel. 12. The Jewish Cosmology of Victimhood (Part 2) [130 Kilobytes] [about 25 paper pages] The Talmud as an ethnocentric, ahistorical compilation; traditional Jewish disinterest in non-Jewish history; Jewish celebration of its continuously proclaimed historical martyrdom; secular Jewish historical revisionism to fit religious "chosen sufferer" models; Jewry's categorical and militant insistence upon its historical innocence; Jewish conviction that all non-Jews hate Jews; effects of the "persecution tradition" upon the psychology of Jewish children; Jewish insistence upon the martyrological role, even while functioning as economic oppressors. 13. The Jewish Dictates of History [153 Kilobytes] [about 32 paper pages] Continued growth of "Jewish Studies" and the Jewish academic's role in maintaining the martyrological legend; Gentile disdain for Jews across history, culture, language, and class; singular Jewish focus upon anti-Semitism as a "mystifying disease"; the ban on criticizing anything Jewish in western society; influence upon Jewish Studies programs by wealthy philanthropic propagandists; Jewish Studies centers as outposts for ethnocentrism and pro-Israel polemics; examples of Jewish historical revisionism and militant resistance to face the more unpleasant facts of Jewish history; Jewish narcissism; Jewish censorship of dissenting views; the growing intra-Jewish debate about alleged Jewish powerlessness through history. 14.Who/What Is a Jew? [60 Kilobytes] [about 13 paper pages] Paradoxical lack of Jewish consensus about who exactly is a Jew; traditional racial definitions of Jewish identity; the enduring racial undercurrent definition today; popular Jewish identity as being "History's Greatest Victims"; Jewish need for anti-Semitism as an identity anchor; Jewish self-conception of superior intelligence; Jewish arrogance; lack of Jewish humility as an anti-Gentile hostility; Jewish preoccupation with "materialism and superiority."    8 THE JEWS AND SLAVERY         In our own time, as throughout history, Orthodox male Jews still must daily thank God for not being born Gentile, as well not being born a woman. Such ritual thanks branch out into other areas as well.        "One specific mitzvah [religious commandment] required of traditional Jews each day," says Arthur Kurzweil, "is [a reminder] that we were slaves in Egypt. This mitzvah is not performed with a ritual object, nor is it an act that would cause some to think you looked religious. Merely reflecting in your mind and hearing that we were slaves is, in itself, considered a spiritual act of great significance." [KURZWEIL, p. xxii]  Jewish victimhood tradition ritually underscores their roles as slaves thousands of years ago. In Orthodox households, says Evelyn Kaye, "bitter herbs [are dipped] in salt water at Passover to remind [Jews] of the tears of the slaves in Egypt." [KAYE, p. 45]         The traditional daily reminder of slavery and the supposed fact that thousands of years ago Jews were held in bondage is all the more peculiar when one tries to imagine what thoughts went through the minds of the many Jewish slave traders throughout history, merchants who were instrumental even in the slave trading of Europeans. These are the words of James Parkes, a respected philosemitic scholar, extremely sympathetic to Jews in his many volumes about their history:                     "In the period from the fifth to eight centuries [Jews] gradually                    took the place previously occupied by the Syrians as                    'international' traders; and they continued, and perhaps,                    developed, the trade in slaves." [PARKES, p. 17]                      "While the Jews were... never... the only traders, it is possible                    that the slave trade through north-eastern Europe to the Slav                    countries and the land trades to the East were for practical                    purposes Jewish monopolies. " [PARKES, p. 25]                     "It would appear that Jews had little difficulty in obtaining slaves                    in the eastern provinces of the empire and Poland, in spite of                    the protection which acceptance of Christianity in those regions                    should have given the inhabitants. References to this traffic in                    Christian slaves are not infrequent. [PARKES, p. 45]                       "The evidence is thus enough to show that the Church                     possessed a genuine grievance against the section of the Jewish                     population involved in the slave trade. But the misdeeds of                     slave traders did not cease at the purchase of Christians in                     eastern Europe. Agobard quotes cases -- and there is no reason                     to refute his evidence -- of the theft of children in France for                     sale to the Moors of Spain; and a chronicler of the middle of                     the tenth century brings an even more unpleasant story of the                     castration of boys in eastern France for their sale as eunuchs to                     the Moorish harems, a trade which was, apparently, extremely                     profitable." [PARKES, p. 46]        "In the tenth century," notes Jewish (and Zionist) author Julius Brutzkus, "the Jews possessed salt mines near Nuremberg. They also traded in arms, and exploited the treasuries of the churches. But their great specialty ... was their trade in slaves." [LEON, p. 124] "The first Jews that Poles encountered," states the Encyclopedia Judaica, "must certainly have been traders, probably slave traders, of the type called in the 12th-century Jewish sources holekhei rusyah (travelers to Russia). [EN JUD, v. 13, p. 710]  "In the tenth century," notes Israel Abrahams, "the Spanish Jews often owed their wealth to their trade in slaves." [ABRAHAMS, p. 98]         Jews, says Lewis Browne, "traveled everywhere from England to India, from Bohemia to Egypt. Their commonest merchandise in those days, beginning with the eighth century, was slaves. On every high road and on every great river and sea, these Jewish traders were to be found with their gangs of shackled prisoners in convoy." Such disturbing facts that impugn the Jewish myths of perpetual victimhood must of course be apologized away. "Slave trading," says Browne, a Jewish scholar, "seems irredeemably vile and hateful to us today, but we must remember here again the standards have changed ...And in light of the customs of those times, the slave-traffickers were actually doing almost a moral act. They alone were keeping the conquering armies from slaughtering every one of their defeated foes after each battle." [WILLIAMS, J., p. 230]         Jewish apologists of course further argue that Jews were involved in the trade of European slaves (the English word "slave" is reputed to come from "Slav") because "they were forced into it" by others, they were only "doing the dirty work for Christians," it was a norm of the era, or that extensive Jewish slave trading was a "Christian ecclesiastical myth."  Another Jewish apologist justifies the Jewish slave trade of Europeans during the era of Pope Gregory this way:               "Had the Jews been prevented from owning slaves it is likely that              they would have given up the slave trade and had they done this              the labor shortage that would have been created might have              caused an inestimable loss of life through sheer starvation."              [ABEL, p. 197]        "Slave traders were proverbially dishonest." [BARON, p. 193] And there were many legal hurdles that Jewish slave traders had to face, both from Christian authorities (who grew increasingly outraged by Jews owning Christian slaves), and their own rabbinical authorities when faced with the necessity of slaves' castration, for instance, to be eunuchs. Jewish religious texts forbade mutilation. This problem was easily resolved by resorting to a technicality; prospective Jewish slave owners merely hired non-Jews to do the operation before they formally bought them. [BARON, p. 191]  Jewish writers in Spain complained more frequently than other places about the ethics of having slave concubines in Jewish households. [BARON, p. 194]        Jewish mythology claims a long history of moral superiority over others, and innocence. The original Ku Klux Klan (1865-1876), however, was not hostile to Jews and even had Jewish members, including Simon Baruch, the father of the Quarter-Master General of the Confederate Army. (The father of Bernard Baruch, the Chairman of the War Industries Board under President Woodrow Wilson in World War I, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan). [COIT, M., 1957, p. 12-13] The Secretary of State of the Confederacy (initially its Secretary of War) was also of Jewish birth, Judah P. Benjamin. [RUBINSTEIN, p. 20] After the war Benjamin fled to England. David de Leon was the first Surgeon General of the Confederacy. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 172] Other prominent Confederate Jews included Edwin Moise, Speaker of the Louisiana House; Raphael Moses who "was influential in leading Georgia out of the Union;" Henry Hyans, the Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana leading up to the Civil War; and Edwin de Leon, "whom Benjamin sent to Paris to handle public relations and propaganda for the South." "The prominent role of Jews in the Confederacy," notes Nathaniel Weyl, "is generally either ignored or condensed into shamefaced footnotes by those historians of American Jewry whose opinions conform to the liberal-leftist stereotype." [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 54]        "Not a single Jew," notes Stephen Isaacs, "has been identified among the abolitionists in Charleston, South Carolina, which had been home to the largest Jewish community in the United States at one time." [ISAACS, p. 180] "[The Jew] somehow feels that in the Great Democracy he is 'the other' Negro -- a white-skinned one," wrote Isaac Deutcher in 1968, "And how very often he gets his own back on the black Negro: in the Southern States more often than not it is the Jew who is one of the most fanatical upholders of white supremacy." [DEUTCHER, ., 1968, p. 43]        Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, a champion of liberal Reform Judaism and "the most active and renowned rabbi in the United States" in the nineteenth century [SACHAR, p. 196], actively supported the enslavement of Blacks, called Abraham Lincoln an "imbecile," and argued that Blacks were "beasts of burden." [LINDEMANN, p. 210] Other of his words were later engraved on a memorial tablet in the Memorial Hall of Temple Emanu-El, the great Reform Judaism synagogue in New York City:         "American Judaism. A religion without mystics or miracles. Rational and        self-evident, eminently human, universal, liberal and progressive. In        perfect harmony with modern science, criticism, and philosophy and in        full sympathy with universal liberty, justice and charity. There are no        better American citizens than the Jews and no religion better befitting a        free people than Judaism." [GOLDSTEIN, D. p. 68]         Jonathan Kaufman notes the case of another very prominent New York Jewish rabbi in 1861:        "Rabbi Morris Jacob Raphall ... brought the full force of Jewish      learning to a defense of slavery, preaching a lengthy sermon that      defended its biblical roots and noting that 'Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,      Job -- the men with whom the Almighty conversed, with whose      names he emphatically connects to his own most holy name ...      all these men were slaveholders.' Raphall was no fringe figure. He      was one of the most prominent rabbis of his day; the year before      he had been chosen to be the first Jew to open a session of the      House of Representatives with a prayer." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,      p. 22]          Modern scholar Judah Rosenthal notes rabbi Raphall's effect on the slavery debate in America:         "Rabbi [Morris] Raphall delivered a sermon entitled 'The Bible View       of Slavery.' Raphall attempted to prove 'that according to the Talmud       there is no difference between a lost ox, donkey, or slave, and that       the Talmud recommends turning over a fugitive slave to its master.       The discourse of Rabbi Raphall which appeared in print caused a       public stir. It was reprinted many times in the pro-slavery press.       It produced a sensational effect coming from a popular rabbi who       had the reputation of being a biblical scholar ... Raphall was right       in his Biblical exegesis." [ROSENTHAL, J., 78]         In 1896 an editorial in the Jewish South of Richmond, Virginia, argued that "Negroes are intellectually, morally, and physically an inferior race -- a fact none can deny, " [LINDEMANN, p. 225] and with the death of a particularly racist Jewish senator from Maryland, Isador Rayner, a Black journalist wrote that Rayner "invoked upon his colored neighbors the terrors of (a pogrom)." [LINDEMANN, p. 233]        In 1991 a book was published by Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam, described by one Jewish author as "a masterful piece of propaganda." [MAGIDA, p. 171]  This work, and some of the issues surrounding it, merit some special attention here. Aside from a handful of obscure, rarely read volumes that challenged the commonly accepted facts of the Holocaust, the Nation of Islam's new volume was the most controversial book about Jews published in decades and helped in securing a deeper rift between American Black and Jewish communities.  Available from a 1-800 telephone number, the book received relatively wide circulation in the African-American community. The volume, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, seeks to document Jewish historical involvement in the African slave trade and severely taints, by association, Jewish luster in the later American civil rights record. In a word, the book -- which is a direct assault upon the myths of Jewry's self-perception of a higher moral ground than other people -- must somehow be dismissed by the Jewish community to avoid considerable embarrassment.         In fact, dismissal is quite easy. The Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan are in such serious disrepute in the Jewish, and other non-Black, communities that few people, other than those in the African-American world, have actually read the NOI book. Though most Jews have heard of it, it is automatically understood to be "hate literature," molded of entirely anti-Semitic nonsense and unworthy of anyone's serious attention. No Jew in his or her right mind would ever dare to purchase such a thing and add to anti-Semitic coffers.  (Reluctance to read the book, on principle, is deep. At the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, by late 1997 the 1994 edition on its library shelves -- the sole copy -- had never been checked out).  This situation has allowed Harold Brackman, of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (one of the various Jewish "defense" agencies), to write a few versions of his rebuttal to Secret Relationship charges, counterclaims that serve completely as the relevant truths for Jews -- and sympathizers -- interested in the matter. Brackman and the Jewish community rely upon the fact that most (non-Black) people will probably only read his book about the controversial subject, if any.        "Among [the arguments in support of the Secret Relationship]," says Ralph Austen (who read the book) in the Jewish journal Tikkun, "there is one which Jewish intellectuals need to take seriously: that few of the Jewish leaders who have attacked the book have actually read it." [AUSTEN, p. 66] And what is the essential impact one gets out of reading it? "There were not many Jews in America between 1492 and the 1860s," says Austen, "and quite a few had been involved in the slave trade." [AUSTEN, p. 68]         The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews seeks to tell the story of Jewish involvement in the African slave trade, largely throughout the Americas. The book's strategy is to use nearly 1,300 (mostly) scholarly citations to present its argument. Seeking maximum credibility, the overwhelming majority of the excerpts from historical sources are indeed  "authoritative," i.e., the quotes are not only from respected academic volumes, but most authors are Jewish scholars in various fields of expertise.  As many African-Americans bitterly complain, a very large number of Jews are preeminent in the academic world, even in African-American studies, a situation that has for decades found Jews (and other non-Blacks) dictating to African-Americans the facts and parameters of their own history. Some citations in The Secret Relationship are from less academically pedigreed commentators, but most of these are also Jewish which, as the Nation of Islam intended, confers a dimension of legitimacy to the quote, even if it is only opinion.          The quotes, facts, and figures by legitimate and well-respected Jewish academics (who usually address the subject of Jews and slaves peripherally in the course of  their own other interests) do not depict, in any way, a morally superior people. They underscore the Jewish role in the African slave trade and they are collected in the Nation of Islam volume by the hundreds. Take, for example, the following excerpts:          "The female slave was a sex tool beneath the level of moral        considerations. She was an economic good, useful, in addition to her        menial labor, for breeding more slaves. To attain that purpose, the        master mated her promiscuously according to his breeding plans.        The master himself and his sons and other members of his household        took turns with her for the increase of the family wealth, as well as for        satisfaction of their extra-marital sex desires. Guests and neighbors too        were invited to that luxury. [LOUIS EPSTEIN, Sex Laws and Customs        in Judaism, in SEC.LIFE, p. 196]            "They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves.        The traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often        appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale." [SEYMOUR        LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, SEC LIFE, p. 55]                                                                                               "They came with ships carrying African blacks to be sold as slaves. The         traffic in slaves was a royal monopoly, and the Jews were often         appointed as agents for the Crown in their sale ... [LIEBMAN, in SEC.         LIFE, p. 55] ... [The Jews] were the largest ship chandlers in the entire         Caribbean region, where the shipping business was mainly a Jewish         enterprise ... The ships were not only owned by Jews, but were manned         by Jewish crews and sailed under the command of Jewish captains."         [SEYMOUR LIEBMAN, New World Jewry, 1493-1825 , in MARTIN,         p. 113]          "The West India Company, which monopolized imports of slaves from         Africa, sold slaves at public auctions against cash payments. It happens         that cash was mostly in the hands of Jews. The buyers who appeared         at the auctions were almost always Jews, and because of this lack of         competitors, they could buy slaves at low prices. On the other hand,         there was also no competition in the selling of the slaves to the         plantation owners and other buyers ... Profits up to 300 per cent of         the purchase value were often realized with high interest rates ... If it         happened that the date of such an auction fell on a Jewish holiday the         auction had to be postponed." [Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial         Brazil, in SEC. LIFE, p. 29]          "Just as a disproportionately large number of Jews were slave        owners, a disproportionately large number of Jewish merchants sold        slaves as they would any other goods. Several of these merchants        were prominent in their communities: an acting rabbi, the president        of a congregation." [ROBERTA FEUERLICHT, in SEC LIFE, p. 179]           The Nation of Islam's own racist reputation, Jewish lobbying power (and the fear of it), and the obvious fact that few -- if any -- pedigreed historians have bothered to read the Secret Relationship can only explain the following  resolution by the American Historical Association about the controversial book:        "The AHA deplores any misuse of history that distorts the historical      record to demonize a particular racial, ethnic, or cultural group. The      Association therefore condemns as false any statement alleging that      Jews played a disproportionate role in the exploitation of slave labor      in the Atlantic slave trade." [RESPONSE, p. 9, SPRING, 1995]        But Jews did, it would seem irrefutably, have (at the very least) a "disproportionate role" in the slave trade even in the southern United States, where they were not -- as the NOI book shows -- as involved as in other places in the Americas. According to one survey noted by Jewish scholars Lee Soltow and Ira Rosenwaike, 75% of Jewish households surveyed in the American South owned slaves, more than double the average 36% for all southern households. [ROSENWAIKE, in SEC. LIFE, p. 180]  And Jews, as we will continue to witness, have always been "disproportionately" represented in virtually any field where there is serious money to be made. (In Port Royal, Jamaica, in 1680, about 16% of Jewish households had no slaves; in the non-Jewish community, this figure was over 47%. Likewise 73.7 % of Jewish households had between one and four slaves; in the non-Jewish community the figure was 41.8 %.) [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]         Ultimately, the much-maligned NOI volume does not assert that Jews ran the whole slave trade from a back street in Amsterdam, but rather that they held indeed a disproportionately significant role, a factor that should be considered in modern Jewish-Black relations, the way it is an important factor in Black-White relations. The book's fundamental charge is so stated: "The most prominent of Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history and participated in every aspect of the international slave trade." [SEC. LIFE, p. vii]  Behind Jewish resistance to take responsibility (whatever its dimensions) for the more distasteful parts of Jewish history is the fact that such concessions imperil the mythos of modern Jewish identity itself:  i.e., that Jews are morally superior to all others, for which they are humanity's consummate (and innocent) Victims.        Albert Lindemann notes the typical case of prominent Jewish historian Oscar Handlin's volume Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America:  "[Handlin] ignored the issue [of slavery in his volume] ... even while mentioning by name the 'great Jewish merchants' who made their fortunes in the slave trade." [LINDEMANN, p. xx]          It is clear that the issue of Jewish influence in the African-slave trade in many parts of the world was significant. And this is the value of the NOI book (along with, perhaps, the idea that Jews are not, as so often depicted in the popular media, necessarily the "best friend" of the Black man). How much significant the slave trade was Jewish-inspired can only be a matter of endless disputation. Considerably less than one percent of North America's population were Jews and it's hard to imagine that, by numbers alone, 18th and early 19th century Jewry could have possibly controlled the huge slave market in this area. (As late as 1817, there were only 3,000 Jews in all of America. [ROSENWAIKE, p. 13] ) Nonetheless, in considering the evidence -- Jewish and otherwise, it is clear that Jews were very much disproportionately involved in, and important to, the trade in human chattel.  In some colonial posts they were no doubt preeminent in the business. The largest Jewish exploitation of slaves seems to have been in Barbados, Brazil "In the first half of the seventeenth century," notes Abram Leon, "all the great sugar plantations in Brazil were in the hands of Jews." [LEON, p. 176], Curacao, Jamaica, and Surinam (Dutch Guinea). Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer adds that "Jews dominated the slave trade" in Dutch Brazil. [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]        Historian David Brion Davis notes that in the Jewish-founded town of Joden Savanne in Surinam, they "extracted labor from African slaves in one of the most deadly and oppressive environments in the New World." [MAGIDA, p. 184]       Jewish scholar Harold Bloom also noted that, in the early 1700s,       "Colonists [in Surinam] were troubled by attacks of 'Bush     Negroes,' former slaves who had escaped inland and refused     to return to their owners. They declared themselves independent     and set fire to many plantations ... [BLOOM, H., p. 121] ... Slave     trade was one of the most important Jewish activities here as     elsewhere in the colonies." [BLOOM, H., p. 123]        And as scholar Jacob Marcus, also Jewish, observes:        "Some writers of the eighteenth century, in attempting to account for      repeated flights by Negro slaves, accused Jewish owners of mistreating      their charges, and indictment the [Jewish] authors of the Historical      Essay [on the Colony of Surinam (1788] ascribed to anti-Jewish      prejudices and vigorously denied. It is a fact, however, that the wars      against the French and the Bush Negroes called into being among the      Jewish planter class a specific type of individual: the aggressive, brutal      fighter, politically ambitious and resentful of every limitation and      infringement of their personal liberty." [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]        Whatever its faults, the Secret Relationship is legitimate in laying out the  historical role between Blacks and Jews in the New World on the table for scrutiny. While this relationship has not really been "secret" in the literal sense (the information is freely available to anyone who cares to tediously find it) it certainly has never before been fore grounded nor popularly addressed; rather, it has been buried from public discourse in the obscure pages of esoteric academe. It has taken the growth of African-American scholarship (whether others like its accentuations or not) to frame discourse about the slave trade to their own -- not Jewish -- perspective. As one can see in this book, existing Jewish scholarship on Black history -- originally framed to Jewish interests and concerns -- is voluminous.        The Nation of Islam's intention in their volume was to quote from expressly Jewish sources as much as possible and overlooked those many non-Jewish sources that would instantly fall prey to discredit by the omnipresent charge of anti-Semitism. Citations from Jews would presumably render the NOI's arguments all more authoritative, resistant to the inevitable charge that the book was unfairly biased against Jews.         What the NOI apparently didn't recognize, of course, is that Jewish convention asserts that many Jews themselves are tainted by the dreaded virus of anti-Semitism. Thus, at the bottom line, it only slightly matters whether the NOI had quoted Adolf Hitler's view about the Jews (which they did not) or critical Jewish authors of Israel and Jewish life like Roberta Feuerlicht and Lenni Brenner (which they did). Jews or not, such people are not -- to the standards of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Harold Brackman, "respected authorities." "The truth of the matter," writes Brackman, "is that The Secret Relationship validates Feurlicht and Brenner as 'authoritative' for precisely the same reasons that the Nazis exploited the writings of selected Jews in that earlier era." [BRACKMAN, p. 57]        This, then, is the tone of debate -- not uncommon in the Jewish community -- over the book: the inevitable dragging of even Brenner's and Feuerlicht's criticism of Jewry into an association with Hitler and the very thought of an investigation into the facts of Jewish influence in the slave trade as opening doors to another Holocaust.          As The Secret Relationship was disseminated among segments of the African-American community, the Jewish community ignored it as much as possible, sometimes attacking it generally, categorically, as merely an anti-Semitic tome. "The book is a remarkable work of hate," says Jewish author Richard Bernstein in his own volume about the "multiculturalist" political wars of today's society .... I myself saw copies of it for sale at an Afro-centric conference I attended in Atlanta." [BERNSTEIN, p. 117] But silence by the Jewish community was perceived by many in the Black community as an admission of  guilt, and Brackman eventually came forward to "point-by-point" discard the allegations posed in the controversial volume.        Harold Brackman's credentials include the facts that he has taught -- like so many Jewish scholars -- African-American history at three major American universities. One of his book rebuttals to the Secret Relationship outshines even the NOI's reputed capacity for hyperbole, entitled:  Ministry of Lies, The Truth Behind the Nation of Islam's The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The Nation's 1300 citations cannot be reasonably addressed in a digestible volume, so Brackman goes for what he considers to be the "anti-Semitic" volume's weakest links.        Unfortunately, for the Jewish argument, upon close examination, the very foundation of Brackman's scholarship is shaky from the start, as evidenced in the very methodology of his attack to deconstruct the Secret Relationship as "lies." Brackman begins a chapter entitled "Methods ( ... of Deceit and Distortions to Falsify History)" by stating that         "the Secret Relationship is an anonymous production. 'The Historical       Research Department ' [the formal author of the NOI book] identifies       no individual members, nor does it indicate their academic credentials.       In other words, those responsible themselves remain secret -- choosing       to hide rather than stand behind their scholarship."       [BRACKMAN, p. 45]         Curiously, such impugning based on anonymity can likewise be made about the magazine Response, the journal of Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Los Angeles Holocaust-oriented "education center"  that sponsored Brackman's own work. While a Response "staff" is noted at the end of the magazine -- an Editor in Chief, and Editor/Supervisor, Senior Researcher, et al, the text of the magazine itself is never credited with an attributable author (except a brief editor's column). Even the Wiesenthal Center's educational resources kit for teachers, The Holocaust, 1933-1945, does not provide authorship for most of its pages of factual assertions.        Brackman continues:        "The reader is asked to proceed on blind faith supported only by the       assurance that: ‘The facts, we believe, speak for themselves.’"          The purported facts, of course, are excerpts from mostly Jewish authors, most of them credible scholars. Brackman pushes foreword, now on a rhetorical soapbox:        "No thoughtful person should accept this statement at face value.      Historical facts and historical truth are not identical. The indispensable      link between them is the historian's commitment to the honest evaluation      and presentation of evidence. Two thousand years ago, the Roman orator      Cicero enunciated what might be called 'The Historian's code of Ethics':                 "The first law for the historian is that he shall never utter an                untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is                true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality, or                malice."  [BRACKMAN, p. 45]        Brackman's championing of Cicero as a paragon of moral virtue and truth-finding is a bizarrely unsupportive selection for the foundation of his own arguments. Certainly Cicero was a virtuous figure, committed to telling the truth with no malice, et al.  But as Brackman should have known, in the common Jewish rush to condemn nearly every important thinker in history as somehow anti-Jewish, Cicero is often cited in books about anti-Semitism as a seminal "anti-Semite" himself; he is to be found in such titles as History and Hate, Twenty-Three Centuries of Antisemitism, A Short History of Antisemitism, and others.        Jewish professor Peter Schafer in his Judeophobia. Attitudes Towards the Jews in the Ancient World, even writes that, in Rome, "the first voice to be heard, and one regarded as the first evidence of Roman 'anti-Semitism' is that of the great orator of the late Republic, Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.) in his famous speech Pro Flacco ... It is the Jews as a pressure group, influential in public assemblies, who are attacked by Cicero." [SCHAFER, 1997, p. 180]         Taking careful account of Cicero's aforementioned reluctance to "utter and untruth," the ancient sage says this about Jews:           "How numerous they are, their clannishness, their influence in the          assemblies." [FLANNERY, p. 15]        These are charges that are among the foundations of "anti-Semitic" arguments to our own day.  And of course they remain, after all these centuries, "true," as we shall soon see. Cicero also called Judaism barbara superstisios  (a barbarous superstition) [MORAIS, p. 40] and his teacher, Apollonius Molon of Rhodes (presumably one of Cicero's seminal inspirations for the truthful approach to history) "was the first to compose an entire work against the Jews, thus launching the endless chain of adversus Judaeos [criticism of Jews] that reaches us to the present day." [FLANNERY, p. 12]        So begins Professor Brackman's defense of Jewry against the anti-Semitic "lies" of the Secret Relationship.         Obviously, anyone interested in the relationship between Jews and the slave trade should read both books, the NOI's and Brackman's. Rather than go through a tedious point by point refutation of a range of Brackman's own refutations of the Secret Relationship, suffice it to note that in his little 100 page book, Brackman often manages to stray considerably off the subject of Jews and the slave trade, rhapsodizing about Jewish altruism in the Civil Rights movement, chronicling the deteriorating Black-Jewish relations since 1991, arguing that calling the Black slavery experience a "Holocaust" (as the NOI book does) is inappropriate, and that African slavery deaths are often exaggerated. Most significantly, Brackman renders the Nation of Islam book to be merely "a hateful fantasy ... originally concocted by white anti-Semites ... who throughout history have demonstrated that they have no more true regard for Blacks than Jews." [BRACKMAN, p. 91]  This standard Jewish tact of shirking responsibility and passing it all along elsewhere upon someone else’s' head is a historically Jewish as the Talmud. And drawing a connection, as Brackman does, between automobile baron Henry Ford's belief in a world Jewish conspiracy and the NOI's examination of Jewish involvement in slavery is to find, in Jewish minds, the very equivalent obsession with "conspiracy" theories as those they condemn in "anti-Semites."        In 1993 a tenured Black professor, Tony Martin, of Wellesley College (the alma mater of Hilary Clinton) made national attention by committing the crime of using the Secret Relationship (as one of seven other course books) as a reading assignment in an African-American studies class. Martin found himself in a struggle for academic freedom against a massive -- and unified -- campaign by national Jewish agencies to censor and defame him, attempting to get him fired as an academically incompetent anti-Semite. The Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Community Relations Council and others joined to charge Martin with "clear-cut anti-Semitic prejudice in his classroom and on the Wellesley campus and demanded his firing." [MARTIN, p. 8-9] Martin and the book were soon attacked in four articles in the Boston Globe, on National Public Radio, the New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC's This Week With David Brinkley, the Today Show, and others. [MARTIN, p. 13-14]        In an attack on professor Martin, a Jewish fellow faculty member at Wellesley College, Jerold Auerbach, wrote that "Anti-Semitism ... is quietly diverted into the channel of academic freedom ... Professor Martin and his ilk are free to emulate [Nazi ideologue] Joseph Goebbels ... It is sufficient, perhaps, to note that anyone who teaches The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews as serious history has entered the realm of academic charlatanism." [AUERBAC H., p. 1]        One wonders how an ideologue like Auerbach musters the gall to smear Martin as a veritable Nazi when Auerbach's own ideological allegiance and attention to "serious history" is so morally questionable. In 1984 professor Auerbach sported an article in the Zionist journal, Midstream, in defense of twenty-two members of the messianic fascist Gush Emunim organization who faced court trials for a variety of crimes in Israel. "Accused of murdering Arabs at the Islamic College in Hebron, and of attempts to assassinate Arab mayors, bomb Arab buses, and destroy the Dome of the Rock," Auerbach sees such charges as "inflamed rhetoric [that] obscures principles of Jewish religious nationalism .... To describe these defendants as 'West Bank terrorists' prejudges their guilt and distorts their identity ... A lunatic fringe can easily be dismissed, but Gush Emunim draws too heavily upon Judaism and Zionism for such cavalier treatment. The credo of Gush Emunim ... may ... be enchantingly simple. But it can also be urgently compelling for in Judea and Samaria [these are the right-wing land expansion terms Auerbach chooses in reference to what is more commonly known as the "occupied territories"] Jews are struggling to explore and express intimate relationships -- between a people, its God, and its promised land -- that have defined Judaism since the 'Exodus.'" [AUERBACH, 10-84]        The group Auerbach fawns over -- Gush Emunim,  its messianic world view, and its hostility to all non-Jews, we have run across before and will visit again in this volume. Its credo is messianic land expansion and Nazi-like attitudes towards non-Jews based on the worst tradition of talmudic interpretation. "Gush Emunim leaders," says Israel Shahak, "have quoted religious precepts which enjoin Jews to oppress Gentiles." [SHAHAK, p. 96]  Israeli Uri Huppert notes that Miriam Levinger, wife of prominent Gush Emunim leader Rabbi Moshe Levinger, "expressed the extremist attitude now prevalent in the Orthodox, religious-nationalist camp in her well-known remark that 'democracy' is not a Jewish value." [HUPPERT, U., 1988, p. 18] Ideologues of Gush Emunim-style teachings who have risen to fame in recent years include Yigal Amir, the assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Baruch Goldstein, mass murderer of 29 Arabs in a Hebron mosque as they prayed. More about Gush Emunim later.        Among the most prominent (of the few) African-Americans attacking Martin's "anti-Semitism" was Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor, who was afforded space on the subject in the Op Ed section of the New York Times. (Gates, notes the African-American Los Angeles Sentinel, is seen by "many African-Americans ... as a pawn of Jewish leadership who never misses an opportunity to attack Black scholars and Afro-centrism, while ignoring rampant Jewish racism." [LEWIS, p. A7] Gates wrote that:         "The Bible of the new anti-Semitism is the Secret Relationship Between        Blacks and Jews, an official publication of the Nation of Islam that        boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages. Sober and scholarly        looking, it may well be one of the most influential books published in the        Black community in the last twelve months ... To be sure, the book        massively represents the historical record, largely through a process of        cunningly selected quotations from often reputable sources. [GATES,        p. 219] ... The authors of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and        Jews boast that they're hanging the Jews by their own words!" [GATES,        p. 225; original emphasis]        And what of Gates' authoritative reference to categorically refute the 1,275 "misrepresenting" citations in the Secret Relationship? Harold Brackman. Gates' rebuttal to the Secret Relationship, proudly proclaimed in the Simon Wiesenthal Center's magazine, Response, "drew of Brackman's scholarship." Hence, Gates' foundation as an African-American scholar attacking the NOI book is not largely -- if at all -- his own research, but that from a polemical Jewish scholar working for the Wiesenthal Center [See later chapter for a discussion about its role as a pro-Israel, Judeo-centric propaganda center].  In a thank you letter to Brackman (published in the Wiesenthal's journal), Gates wrote:        "I want to say how appreciative I am for the ground-clearing work you      performed in your paper on 'The Secret Relationship.' It's a subject I had      been addressing for a while, addressing the book's insidiousness in fairly      general terms but I think anyone interested in truly thrashing through the      issues has to be immediately grateful, as I am, for your splendidly detailed      and meticulous work of reason and analysis."      [RESPONSE, p. 11, FALL 1992, v. 12, no. 6]   9 JEWISH CRIME        "Of all the areas of Jewish enterprise," notes Gerald Krafetz, "none has been so overlooked as the field of crime. And it isn't because of a lack of Jewish criminality. For an introspective people, this oversight is significant. It is as if Jewish crime did not exist, an unsavory skeleton is best left in the family closet ... The sociopathology of Jews is not an acceptable notion since it runs counter to both religious precepts and preconceived ideas that Jews have of themselves." [KREFETZ, p. 112] "Jews were ... involved in many of the most visible and spectacular frauds of the post-Civil War period," notes Benjamin Ginsberg, "as well as in economic dislocations and financial manipulations that characterize the era." [GINSBERG, p. 75] In one much publicized scandal for instance, the Jewish governor of South Carolina, Franklin Moses, oversaw the issue and selling of $6 million in fraudulent state securities, as well as funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds into his own pocket. [GINSBERG, p. 75]        In a broader financial sphere, very visibly at the top of the socio-economic pyramid, Jewish businessman Joseph Seligman's nefarious activities in the late 1800s helped to create the infamous "Black Friday" stock market crash.  Benjamin Ginsberg notes that the crash        "ruined thousands of investors, implicated President Grant, and led to a      Congressional investigation of [Jay] Gould and Seligman ... Similarly, in      the early 1890s, Jacob Schiff collaborated with E. H. Harriman in the      latter's attempts to wrest control of the Northern Pacific Railroad from J.      P. Morgan and James Hill ... When the price of the Northern Pacific      Stock collapsed, the entire market crashed in the notorious 'Black      Thursday' panic that led to a nationwide economic depression."      [GINZBURG, p. 73]        In 1885 the French-based project to build the Panama Canal collapsed, resulting in financial scandal that led, in part, to Seligman again. "Both the United States Congress and the French Parliament had inquiries," says Ginsberg, "In both countries major Jewish financiers were implicated: Baron Jacques de Reinach in Paris and Joseph Seligman in the United States. Many shareholders lost everything, but Seligman lost nothing. In contemporary parlance, the Seligmans engaged in influence peddling, insider trading, and corporate asset stripping and looting -- all at the expense of credulous investors." [GINZBURG, p. 74] The French end of the Panama Canal scandals, notes Albert Lindemann, "involved large amounts of French capital and threatened national prestige -- and Jewish agents were deeply involved. The intermediaries between the Panama company and parliament were almost exclusively Jews with German names and backgrounds, some of whom tried to blackmail one another." [LINDEMANN, p. 87]        The Jewish component of (Gentile) Huey Long's corrupt political machine in early 20th century Louisiana included Leon Weiss, an architect, who "was implicated in the financial scandals surrounding the administration and served prison time." [KIRKUS, 10-1-97] Herbert Stempel was willing participant in the 1950s television quiz show scandals until a Gentile, Charles Van Doren, usurped him in deceit. Jewish TV producer Lew Cowan, denying guilt, was one of the most prominent executives who lost his job in the wake of the scandals. Even at the heart of the World Zionist Organization, after founder Theodore Herzl's death, his wife Julie ("an extravagant and unstable woman") "threatened the Zionist leaders with scandals and lawsuits if they didn't meet her extravagant financial needs." [STERNBERGER, I., 8-15, 1995]         At the other end of the socio-economic world, "the scant attention [popular author Irving Howe] paid to Jewish crime in World of Our Fathers, his magisterial study of the [Manhattan Jewish] Lower East side," notes Charles Silberman, "is a good example of the amnesia American Jews show about this part of their history." [SILBERMAN, p. 128] In researching the level of Jewish crime during the early decades of this century in the Lower East Side, Albert Fried notes that "I discovered that an enormously complex, richly endowed culture of vice and criminality, made up mainly of young people, thrived on the Lower East Side, that most outsiders regarded it as Tammany's bastion of power [Tammany Hall, the corrupt New York city government of the era] that the Jews themselves eventually came to look upon it as an insufferable burden of shame and embarrassment." [FRIED, p. xiv] Such embarrassment included Jewish "fagins" (bands of pickpockets), thieves, pimps, prostitutes, opium dealers, gamblers, brothel-owners, racketeers, murderers, robbers, and others of virtually any persuasion. Arson for building insurance and horse-poisoning in extortion rackets were "two offenses associated almost exclusively with Jews." [JOSELIT, p. 36] "In the area of only one square mile [in the Jewish Lower East Side]," notes Jenna Weissman Joselit, "authorities estimated there were approximately two hundred disorderly [prostitution] houses, three hundred and thirty-six gang 'hang-outs,' and over two hundred pool halls-cum-betting establishments; dance halls, a rendezvous of pimps and procurers, were found every two and one-half blocks." [JOSELIT, p. 24]          Abe "the General" Greenthal, "was one of America's premier pickpockets ... Abe's home and base of operation was in New York City, but his gang traveled all over the United States picking pockets." Michael Kurtz (born in 1850) "was one of America's most celebrated burglars." Joseph 'Yoski Nigger' Toblinsky "led a gang that specialized in stealing and poisoning horses."  Benjamin (Dopey) Fein "was the first gangster to make labor racketeering a full-time and profitable business. He institutionalized the practice of furnishing gangs of hoodlums to unions in their wars against employers." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 88, 91, 94, 95]        "In 1908," notes the Jerusalem Post, "Jews were 25 percent of the four million residents in New York City but 50% of the prison population." [HENRY, M., 10-4-01] That same year, the police commissioner of New York City, Theodore A. Bingham, publicly noted that half of all the criminals in his city were Jewish. "Jewish leaders," notes Robert Rockaway, "worried that Jewish gangsters provided ammunition for Jew-haters. Consequently, they steadfastly refused to acknowledge the problem in public." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 51] As stories of Jewish crime in New York City became increasingly publicized in the mainstream mass media, initially the "Yiddish press challenged the veracity of the evidence," [GOREN, p. 141] but "beginning in 1909 and reaching a climax in 1912," says Arthur Goren, "widely publicized disclosures of vice and crime among Jews created dismay and then alarm in Jewish circles. Protests of innocence were now impossible." [GOREN, p. 135]        The murder of a well-known Jewish gambler, Herman Rosenthal, was particularly horrifying for the Jewish community in that it opened up a Pandora's Box of trials and testimonies profoundly unflattering to local Jewry. Goren notes that           "The appalling fact was that the underworld segment which the trials         and the indefatigable press had so thoroughly laid bare consisted almost         entirely of Jewish gangsters and gamblers. No longer could Jewish         apologists find comfort in viewing the phenomena as a rare deviation         from the norm. In the accounts, the criminals appeared as         commonplace East Side figures. Sons of hard-working parents, most         had been exposed as children to religious training and had led average         family lives. Even considering the hired gangsters apart, one could point         to exceptional and touching instances of family loyalty, pride in one's         ethnic group, and knowledge of an affection for Jewish religious         tradition." [GOREN, p. 154]        "Jewish criminals," wrote Moses Rischin, "regularly made newspaper headlines. The appearance of an ungovernable youth after the turn of the century was undeniable and excited apprehension." [FRIED, p. xvi] In April 1911, for instance, 400 Jewish shopkeepers flooded a criminal court building to complain and testify before a grand jury about robberies and gangs in their neighborhoods. [FRIED, p. 26] In 1909 alone, 3,000 Jewish "youngsters" appeared before an area juvenile court. [FRIED, p. 41] Gangster Monk Eastman alone "bossed a Jewish street gang that could field as many as 1,200 men on short notice." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 97] While many criminals were rooted in poverty, some prominent Jewish gangsters -- like Arnold Rothstein and Big Jack Zelig -- came from comfortable backgrounds. [FRIED, p. 40] The king of Jewish crime in the era, Arthur Rothstein, "was a rich man's son." [COHEN, R., p. 46] Monk Eastman's father "was solidly middle class, a restaurant owner." [COHEN, R., p. 45] Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway discounts the usual apologetics for Jewish gangsters, saying:        "More likely, these men selected careers in crime because they wanted      money, power, recognition and status; and they wanted it fast. Crime      offered them a quick way to realize their dreams." [ROCKAWAY, R.,      1993, p. 52]         "It was the Jews, by and large," says Norman Cantor, "not the Italians, who created what was later called the Mafia. In the 1920s the Italians began to replace the Jews in the New York organized crime industry, but as late as 1940 if you wanted a spectacular hit you were looking for a representative of the Lepke Buchalter Gang, also known as Murder Inc. Jews were also prominent in the gambling trade and developed Las Vegas in the 1940s. It was a Jewish gambler who fixed the 1919 baseball World Series -- what became known as the Black Sox scandal." [CANTOR, p. 389] The perpetrator of the scandal was Arnold Rothstein, notes Charles Silberman, "the inventor of organized crime." [SILBERMAN, p. 128]        "It was with some astonishment," notes Jewish critic Marvin Kitman,           "that I discovered what an integral part of American Jewish life crime         was. Our forefathers made names for themselves, such as they are,         as gangsters, murderers, musclemen, hit men, acid throwers, arm         breakers, bombers and all the other professions open to nice Jewish         boys. Prostitution, vice, alcohol, gambling, racketeering, extortion,         and all the other things that fill the newspaper today and that I gladly         have been attributing as character flaws in other groups of founding         fathers: Those were our things ... I was shocked at how deep our         roots are in all the sinks of depravity and corruption ... The Jews         were the first ones to realize the link between organized crime and         organized politics. They led the way in corrupting the police and city         hall. They first realized the value of gang/syndicate cartels in business         to reduce the killing of each other. They were monopolists of the         highest order ... We wrote the book, so to speak, on crime, but it's all         forgotten." [KITMAN, p. 9]         "Some disgruntled Jewish immigrants," says Jonathan Sarna, "chose crime as their vehicle of upward mobility. Through robbery and fencing operations, they created a parasitic counter-industry that lived off the garment trade, skimming its profits for personal benefit. Others made their living by exploiting Jewish religious practices (the standard history of the kosher-meat industry in New York is aptly entitled Fraud, Corruption, and Holiness)." [SARNA, Jewish, p. 53]         Kosher meat is food that is prepared according to traditional Orthodox religious standards; it presumably entails extra time and energy to prepare which escalates prices to be higher than non-kosher food. An investigation in New York City sponsored by a Jewish community organization in 1915 discovered that 60% of the meat sold as kosher was fraudulent: most rabbis who supervised kosher sanctions were under slaughterhouse employ and abandoned strict religious adherence. [GOREN, p. 79] Among 6,000 New York area butchers who allegedly only sold kosher meat to fellow Jews, there were "few who did not, at some point, deal in unkosher meat."[GASTWIRT, p. 113] The Jewish slaughterhouse system was also involved in price-fixing, extortion, racketeering, fist fights in the synagogue, and even murder. "The intense rivalry and competition in the kosher poultry business," notes Harold Gastwirt, "made it prey to racketeering and violence." [GASTWIRT, p. 46]         Jewish gangsters were also violently active in support of Jewish unions or employers, depending upon who paid them. "Some of the so-called Jewish unions," remarked a veteran of Jewish labor activities, "... fell early in their careers upon evil days: underworld characters, gangsters, got a foothold in the organization ... Unfortunately, the element engaged to help would refuse to clear out when their services were no longer wanted." [GOREN, p. 304] Rita Simon notes another of the political dimensions of underworld [and New York City governmental] corruption:         "In exchange for police protection of his gang, [gang leader] Monk       [Easton] employed 'repeaters' (repeat voters) at the polls in favor of       Tammany Hall, the local Democratic machine." [SIMON, p. 139]          Jewish crime was widespread in a number of the largest urban areas of America, some of it eventually "syndicated" throughout the country, at times even in cooperation with the Italian mafia. In Chicago the Westside Jewish underworld ward was known as the "Bloody Twentieth." A 1906 description of the area claimed that "murderers, robbers, and thieves of the worst kind are born, reared, and grow to maturity in numbers that far exceed the record of any similar district on the face of the globe." [FRIED, p. 90]  (Even Al Capone's accountant, who later rose to further notoriety, was Jewish, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik.) [LACEY, p. 18] In Cleveland, the Jewish community had its "noisome and brutal Woodland section"; in Detroit it was the eastside, most prominently ruled by the Purple Gang; in Boston it was the Chelsea quarter; Newark had its "fierce third ward"; and in Philadelphia Jewish crime, featuring boss Harry Stromberg, was largely located in the southeast area. These cities, with New York, says Albert Fried, "held the worst, that is the most criminalized, of the Jewish neighborhoods in America." [FRIED, p. 90]  In London, England, notes Daniel Levy, "the Jews were involved in assorted criminal activities. They committed petty thievery, forgery, and illegal distilling of booze. Some sailed to eastern Europe and convinced young girls that jobs and bachelors awaited them in England, only to ship them off to Indian or Argentinean white slave markets." [LEVY, D, p. 20] Earlier forms of blackmail by non-Jewish British gangs were "developed by Jewish gangs (formed after the great immigration of the 1880s) into extortion from legitimate shopkeepers. Much as Jewish gangsters liked to portray themselves as honourable knights defending their co-religionists against anti-Semitic thugs, they were just as likely to live as predators upon their fellow Jews. A gang of extortionists known as the 'Bessarabians' were headed by a professional boxer who called himself Max Moses in private life and 'Kid McCoy' in the ring." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 17]       Poland? In the early twentieth century, future Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion was jailed in Warsaw, Poland, for suspected radical political activism. "That was the first time," he said later,        "that I ever came into contact with the dregs of society. I was shaken      to the core at the language and behavior. I never had the slightest notion      that such people ever existed ... The thing that shook me most was that      these criminals were Jews." [Daniel Kurzon suggests that these included      members of a rival Jewish political group which Ben-Gurion considered      "more dangerous criminals" than the "brothel keepers." [KURZMAN, D.,      1983, p. 67]        Prominent Jews in Chicago's criminal underworld included Louis 'Diamond Louie' Cowan, Hymie 'the Loud Mouth' Levine, Sam 'Sammy the Greener' Jacobson, Maxie Eisen, Murray 'the Camel' Humphreys, and (non-Jewish) Al Capone's money man, Jake Guzik. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 43]  In 1924, "Chicago Jewish leader" S. M. Melamed warned about the "great number of Jews in the underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 49]        "Bootlegging in Boston," notes Robert Rockaway,        "was controlled by Charles 'King' Solomon ... He headed one of the      largest liquor, vice, and narcotics smuggling syndicates in New      England ... In the 1920s, Solomon ran the Boston underworld."      [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 34]         But even smaller cities, like Minneapolis and adjacent St. Paul, had serious problems with Jewish crime. In November 1927 the Minneapolis Saturday Press ran an article that enflamed local public opinion, quoting the remarks of a non-Jewish gangster:         "90% of the crimes committed against society in this city are committed       by Jew gangsters ... It is Jew, Jew, Jew, as long as one cares to comb       over the records. I am launching no attack against the Jewish people as a       RACE. I am merely calling attention to a FACT." [FRIED, p. 113]        Originally from Sioux Falls, Iowa, prominent Jewish gangsters in Minneapolis included "Kid" Cann (Isador Blumenfeld), Yiddie Bloom, and the Berman brothers (Davie and Chickie). [LACEY, p. 66] Cann is believed to have been responsible for the murder of Walter Ligget, publisher of Midwest America, for a series of articles the paper printed about the Minneapolis criminal underworld. Ligget was gunned down in front of his family while Christmas shopping. "Much of [Minneapolis'] illicit business," notes Robert Rockaway,        "was managed by Isadore 'Kid Cann' ... Blumenfeld and his all-Jewish      syndicate ... In 1942, the FBI identified Kid Cann as 'the overlord      of the Minneapolis, Minnesota underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R.,      1993, p. 48]        Cleveland mob leaders included Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman, Sam Tucker, and Lou Rothkopf. After prohibition, "the Cleveland mob joined with Lansky and his confederates ... and formed the core of the most sophisticated national crime syndicate in America." [BLOCK, A., p. 165] Shondor Birns (Szandor Birnstein) was another prominent Cleveland mobster, lasting in the criminal underworld for decades til 1975, when he was assassinated by a car bomb. In early years, he was part of the Maxie Diamond (also Jewish) gang. Among Birns' crime partners was Mervin Gold who "was accused of defrauding banks and the Small Business Administration by using stolen Canadian bonds as collateral for loans. He fled to Israel," but eventually returned. Birns, noted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer for his reputation as a "charming killer," was suspected of Gold's eventual murder. [MCGUANGLE, F., 7-11-99, p. 5H]        Reading, Pennsylvania? As non-Jewish mobster Patsy Lepera recounted in his autobiography:        "Reading at that time, in the thirties and forties, was run by the Minkers --      Abe and his brother Izzy. They had a nephew named Alex Fudeman      who fronted for them ... Even though my father was connected right      to Sicily, he had to do what the Jews wanted done in Reading, because      that was their town. They eliminated the Italians. At one time it was      a two-mob town ... One thing I learn as I go through life is if you come      up against a Jew or an Italian, you check him out. You don't do nothing      against him -- you check him out careful. Jews don't belong to the [Italian]      mob, but they're connected strong. An awful lot of Jews are connected      strong." [LEPERA, P., 1974, p. 7-8]         Missouri? Charlie Birger (born Sachna Itzik Berger), prominent bootlegger, was hung in 1928 for the murder of the mayor of West City, Missouri. He is believed to have been "responsible directly or indirectly for the murders of at least a dozen people, many of whom had been his loyal followers." One of the killed who was not a follower was a local Ku Klux Klan leader. [DE NEAL, G., 1998, p. xviii]        To what lengths Jewish fraud and crime could go might be measured in the chutzpah of Bernie Barton (originally Blaustein) who even set up a fake church with a junkie as preacher as a "front for fencing stolen goods." [DEUTSCH, G., p. 7]         A number of modern respectable Jewish fortunes were founded on links to the underworld in the Prohibition era. Most noteworthy, the Seagram's alcohol fortune (the Canadian Bronfman family) grew to power by getting their alcohol into criminal hands who smuggled it into the United States. Bronfman, who bristled when anyone called him a bootlegger, had a distribution deal for his booze with Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky. [BIRMINGHAM, p. 159] Detroit's largely Jewish Purple Gang was also extremely active in running illegal booze from Windsor across the river border. The Purple Gang's activities also included "gambling, prostitution, extortion, loan sharking, and rackets of every kind." [FRIED, p. 102] So much smuggling was going on between Canada and the United States across Lake Erie that it was known as "the Jewish Lake." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 37]  During prohibition too, "[Federal] officials labeled sacramental wine [for religious purposes] one of the chief sources of illegal liquor in the nation," notes Jenna Weissman Joselit, "Furthermore, calling the record level of usage a 'national scandal,' they saw the problem as largely a Jewish one." [JOSELIT]     Here's what Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway says about Detroit's Purple Gang, and Jewish gangs generally:      "During Prohibition (1920-1933), Jewish gangsters became major operatives       in the American underworld and played prominent roles in the creation of       organized crime in the United States. At the time, Jewish gangs dominated illicit       activiites in a number of America's largest cities, including Cleveland, Detroit,              Minneapolis, Newark, New York, and Philadelphia. The gang dealt in bootlegging,              gambling, extortion, drugs, and murder, and developed a reputation for being       more ruthless than Al Capone's mob in Chicago. The Purple's decade-long reign       of terror ended when most of the gang's members either went to prison or were              murdered by rivals ... During the Prohibition era (1919-1933) 50 percent of the       country's leading bootleggers were Jews, and Jewish criminals financed and       directed much of the nation's narcotics traffic ... While Jews predominated in       their quarter [in Purple Gang-era Detroit], other immigrants and ethnic groups       lived there as well. One former resident of the old neighborhood joked that it was       of the old neighborhood joked that i was easy to distinguish the Jewish dwelling       from those occupied by non-Jews. 'The non-Jews grew flowers in front of their       houses,' he said. 'The Jews grew dirt.'" [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]          Elsewhere, "bootlegging in Prohibition-era Philadelphia was directed by Max 'Boo Boo' Huff ... Huff's successor as Philadelphia's dominant Jewish mobster was Harry Stromberg, alias Nig Rosen ... He also led what was called the '69th Street  Gang' that dealt in prostitution, extortion and labor racketeering. His influence extended as far as Washington, Baltimore, and Atlantic City ... When Stromberg left Philadelphia, he was superseded by his driver and bodyguard, Willie Weisberg, a long-time member of the city's Jewish underworld." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 32, 34]         Another modern Jewish fortune similarly constructed is that of the Annenbergs, which was founded upon Moses Annenberg's horse racing news monopoly that he arranged with the criminal underworld. "That Annenberg and the Prohibition and gambling mobs had interests in common is indisputable," says Albert Fried, "An information monopoly, nominally independent, gave the mobs the wherewithal to police the complex, sprawling kingdom of the Book [i.e., gambling and bookies]; it was an instrument of their sovereignty. In return Annenberg was allowed to reap inordinate profits and become one of the richest men in the land, the founder of one of its singular dynasties." [FRIED, p. 118]        Another of the most prominent Jewish American family fortunes, the "fabulously rich Pritzker family from Chicago," had links, however indirectly, to organized crime even in more recent history. They were involved, as "clients of the [Bruce] Kanter firm," who ran a variety of shady Caribbean companies. Kanter, who "had direct ties to organized crime," [BLOCK, A., p. 162] served on the Hyatt hotel company's Board of Directors (Hyatt is one of many companies owned by the Pritzkers). [BLOCK, A., p. 191] Also, notes Allen Block,          "A little digging into their background produced troubling questions.       It was discovered that the source of some Pritzker money comes from       the racket-ridden Teamsters Pension Fund ... Investigators probing the       Pritzker empire were intrigued by its connection to the Pension Fund.       This was especially so when it discovered that both [mob-linked] Jimmy       Hoffa and Allen Dorfman personally worked on Pritzker loans."       [BLOCK, A., p. 192]        In 1997, major publishers afforded two legendary Jewish conmen of international (dis)repute respective biographies. Adam Worth started out re-joining and re-deserting various Civil War regiments (both Union and Confederate) for enlistment bonuses and later expanded his exploits into forgery, larceny, robbery, burglary, and other criminal mainstays. In England, Sir Robert Anderson, head of Criminal Investigations at Scotland Yard, observed in 1907 that "Adam Worth was the Napoleon of crime. None other could hold a candle to him." The Pinkerton security agency noted that "in the death of Adam Worth there probably departed the most inventive and daring criminal in modern times ... Among all the men Pinkertons have known in a life time, this man was the most remarkable criminal of them all." [MCINTYRE, p. 287] Novelist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used Worth as his model for Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes' arch-nemesis. An important associate in Worth's earlier years was "Mother" Mandelbaum, described in her era as "the great crime promoter of modern times," the "most successful fence in the history of New York" and the woman who "first put crime in America on a syndicated basis." Starting in 1862, over the next two decades she was reputed to have "handled between $5,000,000 and $10,000,000 worth of stolen property." [MCINTYRE, B., 1997, p. 29, 30]       A few years later another real-life rogue (and Jewish) notable, Morris Cohen (the subject of the second biography), rose from a life as a western Canadian circus barker and pickpocket to an adventurous life as an arms dealer, bodyguard, and general to Chinese leader Sun Yat-Sen. [LEVY,  D.] Later he served under Chiang Kai-Shek. He also functioned as a liaison for Zionist influences to Chinese leadership. [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 99] A similar Jewish con-man was Elias Abraham Rosenberg, a "rascal" who arrived in Hawaii in 1887. There, he      "ingratiated himself with King David Kalakaua by his chanting and so-called      occult powers. He soon became the King's soothsayer and astrologer, acquiring      such power over the monarch that the Hawaiian press bitterly denounced him      as a 'Holy Moses.' Rosenberg taught the King some Hebrew and was persuaded      to appoint him appraiser of customs. He was given quarters in the Iolani Palace,      where he practiced magic, read the stars, and chanted Bible stories in Hebrew."      [KOPPMAN/POSTAL, 1978, p. 229-230]       In 1998, Jewish fraudster Trebitsch Lincoln was also afforded a biography. Lincoln, noted a reviewer, was "the king of dupers" and "a thwarted megalomaniac who was also a champion con man." Born in Hungary in 1879, he immigrated to England and converted to Christianity. He became a member of Parliament, and later tried to become a British, and then a German, spy. He turned up as a supporter of the right-wing Kapp Putsch in Berlin in 1920, became an abbot of a Buddhist temple in Shanghai, fleeced his devotees, welcomed invading Japanese, became a Nazi apologist/propagandist and on and on in the life of a human chameleon. [BERRY, N., 5-8-98, p. 28]         In 1999, the (London) Daily Mail highlighted the Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie, "of Jewish and Romany stock." Both were imprisoned in the 1960s. Only Reggie survives, "the best-known gangster in Britain ... By 1963, through their networks of thugs and thieves, Ronnie and Reggie were lording it over London's underworld and became figures in London society."        Decades after the likes of Worth and Cohen, famous Jewish underworld figures like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky made the American scene. Siegel was instrumental in creating the legalized crime-laden playground of Las Vegas, starting things off at the Flamingo Hotel. Joseph Sacher headed the nearby Sands Hotel; Sacher "was second only to Lansky in the [crime] Syndicate. Years ... [later] he fled the U.S. and went into exile in Israel." [KELLEY, K., p. 219]  Allen Friedman notes another early Jewish criminal influence in Sin City:  "The real potential of Las Vegas was not understood until Moe Sedway arrival in 1941." [FRIEDMAN, A., p. 82]         Meyer Lansky eventually "retired" from a successful life of crime with some $150-300 million after corrupt escapades that included Florida's "Gold Coast," the Bahamas, and a gambling resort in pre-Castro Cuba. "At the height of his notoriety," says Robert Lacey, "Meyer Lansky was reckoned to be, and was targeted by the U.S. Justice Department as, the biggest gangster in the United States -- a dangerous lawbreaker of extraordinary power. He was identified as the Mafia's banker, the boss of the National Crime Syndicate, the head of the Combination -- the Chairman of the Board." [LACEY, R., p. 10-11]         Las Vegas has long been a hotbed of underworld influence and a worldwide attraction for gambling and prostitution. The Italian Mafia has also, from the conception of Las Vegas as a leisure Mecca, held great sway in the city, but its most famous underworld personages have always been Jewish mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky.  The great scope of Jewish contribution to the creation, and dubious ethics, of Las Vegas may be measured by the words of professor Allen Balboni. Here he discusses the development of the desert city as a gambling resort area:        "Most of the [Las Vegas] hotel builders were Jewish Americans.      Jay Sarno and Nate Jacobson were associated with Caesar's Palace      [Sarno later created Circus Circus]; Moe Dalitz, Morris Kleinman,      and Sam Tucker with the Desert Inn (and, along with Jake Factor,      with the Stardust after [Italian-American Tony] Cornero's death);      Sidney Wyman, Al Gottesman, and Jake Gottleib with the early years      of the Dunes; Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway, and Charlie Resnick      with managing the Flamingo after Bugsy Siegel's death; Ben Goffstein,      Willie Alderman, and David Berman with the booking and running of the      Riviera; Milton Prell with the establishment of the Sahara and then with      the transformation of the Tally-Ho into the Aladdin; Hyman Abrams, Carl      Cohen, and Jack Entratter with the ownership and operation of the      Sands; and Ben Jaffe, Phil Kastel, and Jell Houssels (of Anglo-Saxon      background) with the construction and operation of the Tropicana ... A      few Italian-Amerians hold minor ownership shares in casinos."      [BALBONI, p. 27]      Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls a Las Vegas offer he had at the peak of his career that he now regrets turning down:      "When I was working at the Desert Inn I met with a man named Billy      Weinberger, who told me, 'We're building a new hotel and we want to      give you fifty percent of it.' In return I would perform there permanently      and would use my influence to attract other major stars. That sounded      interesting. 'What's it going to be called?' I asked. 'Caesar's Palace.'"      [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 292]           Bernie Rothkopf also owned the MGM Hotel. Allen Glick was, between 1974-79, "the mob's front man at the Stardust, Fremont, Hacienda, and Marina hotels." [MORRISON, J.A., p. 1A] "In July, 1979 Allen Glick was stripped of his Nevada gambling license and fined over $500,000 for a variety of improprieties." Glick sold his interests in casinos to Allan Sachs, who was, with a partner, "figureheads for the Chicago mob responsible for providing skim monies" from Las Vegas gambling operations. [MOLDEA, 1989, p. 336] Jerome Mack, past president of the Dunes and Riviera, was a former national chairman of the Israel Bonds Campaign. Jewish entrepreneur Hank Greenspon owned the Las Vegas Sun newspaper and a local TV station. [See his efforts for Israel in the mass media section]        In more recently years, Arthur Goldberg is the CEO of Park Place Entertainment, a conglomeration of 29 hotel-casinos [JENKINS, P., 5-30-99] worldwide (Caesar's Palace, Bally's, etc.) that is twice the size of its nearest competitor. Its Stardust division is the world's largest hotel company. Elsewhere, Sheldon Adelson, chairman of the Sands, is also the owner of Venetian, a new Las Vegas complex built in 1999 at a cost of $1.6 billion. Adelson is "one of richest men in America," in 1998 worth about $600 million. [STOLL, I., 1-7-00, p. 1] Adelson, noted the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "is one of the country's largest donors to Jewish groups and he has influence in the national Jewish community." [RALSTON]  Adelson, notes the (Jewish) Forward, "has paid for 75 congressmen to visit Israel with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee [the pro-Israel lobbying organization]." [STOLL, I., p. 1] As Joe Gelman noted in 1999, "A number of these sin-palace operators are Jewish and strong supporters of Israel." [GELMAN, p. 15B] [Author Gelman complains about the use of this citation here].        The chairman of the Mirage, Steve Wynn, is also Jewish. (The funds for Wynn's first casino, the Golden Nugget, was in large part raised by convicted Jewish financier Michael Milken). [JOHNSTON, D., p. 74] The Las Vegas mayor, Oscar Goodman, elected in 1999, is the former president of Temple Beth Sholom. He also has a reputation as a "mob lawyer," defending, among others, Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky and Frank Rosenthal. Rosenthal, notes the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "is credited by some with founding the modern day Las Vegas sports book but was repeatedly denied a gambling license because of association with organized crime members." [ZAPLER, p. 1A]        All of this, in more recent years, has its mirror image in Atlantic City and, increasingly, other American gambling Meccas. Kenny Shapiro, for instance, was "the Atlantic investment banker for [Italian American mafioso] Nicky Scarfo, the vicious killer who ruled the Philadelphia Mafia, the most murderous mob family in America." [JOHNSTON, D., 1992, p. 82]        Another influential Jewish gambling mogul today is Sol Kerzner, founder and principal owner of Sun City (also known as "Sin City"), a resort playground created in 1979 in a poverty-stricken area of apartheid South Africa. Kerzner's modern empire has expanded with extravagant casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the Bahamas, Mauritus, France, and a Native American site in Connecticut. An alleged bribery scheme involving the Jewish mayor of Capetown, David Bloomberg, in 1986 held up -- for a while -- his United States investments.        "Sun City," notes reporter Jay Clarke, "started out as a 'Sin City,' a place where South Africans could let their hair down because it was located then in the so-called 'independent homeland' of Bophuthatswana. Gambling, show-girl revenues, and prostitution were the lures." [CLARKE, p. TR1]  "If ever there was an appropriate setting for corruption it is Sun City," noted the (London) Guardian, "situated as it is in one of nine homelands which represent the cornerstones of that most corrupt of social systems, apartheid." [BERESFORD, p. 18]  One of the Israelis who made millions off the immoral socio-political system surrounding Sun City is Shabtai Kalmanovitch; he worked as an "economic advisor" to Bophuthatswana' s dictator. [BERESFORD, p. 18] )         In recent years Sun City has attempted to diversify by creating a family-oriented "Lost City" adventure park adjoining the casino. "The patent reason why the Lost City has been designed as a family playground and entertainment centre," says the (London) Guardian,           "is that it entices the public into gaming. The corridors leading to the         main casino even feature children's versions of slot machines -- game         machines -- which could with some justification be described as         nursery slopes inculcating the joys (or otherwise) of adult addiction         to the one-armed bandits packing the main 'treasure hall.'"         [BERESFORD, p. 18]        Many Jewish (and other) mob figures were also involved in the gambling industry in Cuba until the communist revolution destroyed their operations. "After the loss of Cuba and the clampdown on the Mafia by the Kennedy Justice Department," notes Dan Moldea, "Meyer Lansky and the organized crime syndicate had targeted the Bahamas as its new off-shore gambling and narcotics empire." [MOLDEA, 1989, p. 128]       In the casino/resort/hotel world of the Bahamas, and its criminal underworld, Jews have also been prominent. Among those who find a place in Alan Block's book about organized crime on these islands are       * Louis Arthur Chesler who "served as [mobster] Lansky's point man ...        Among Chesler's criminal specialties was the handling of stolen        securities." [p. 34-35]     * Morris Mac Schwabel, a Manhattan attorney, formerly convicted of        securities fraud. [p. 36]     * Joseph Jacob Frankel, who in the early 1960s "teamed up with Charles        'Ruby' Stein and [Italian mafioso] Nicholas 'Jiggs' Farlano who were        major organized crime figures." [p. 89]     * Arthur Millgram, president of Automated Ticket Systems (it had        contracts with the New York lottery system), who was murdered in        1977. [p. 91]     * Joel Mallin, a lawyer who had "ties to the mob." [p. 91]     * Irving Kahn, partner with "mob attorney Morris Shenker." [p. 95]     * C. Gerald Goldsmith, who "was the Board Chairman of the [Nassau]        Port Authority, DEVCO, and several related firms. This put him in        the middle of one of the largest political payoff scams in the Bahamas.        ... One of his duties was the illegal siphoning of company funds into        the hidden bank accounts for political payoffs." [p. 95, 98]     * Ben Novack, owner of Miami's Fountainbleau hotel, who was an        "associate of prominent gangsters Lansky, Coppola, and others        including Max Eder, a loanshark and suspected labor racketeer        with a history of gambling, robbery, narcotics, and homicide        arrests." [p. 115]      * "Cleveland racketeers Morris Kleinman and Moe Dalitz." [p. 116]      * Burt Kanter, a lawyer who had "direct ties to organized crime. [p. 162]        He was a senior member of the law firm Kanter, (Milton) Levenfeld,        (Charles) Lippitz and (Roger) Baskes.      * Allen Dorfman, who was "murdered in 1985 to prevent him from         talking about mob investments ... [He] was in the same league as         Glick, Shenker, and Malnik." [p. 164]         Even among many of the most vicious Jewish thugs, worldwide collectivist Jewish loyalty usually finds expression. "During Israel's war of independence," says Gerald Krefetz, "[Meyer Lansky] killed an arms exporter who was selling to Arab countries. Lansky has contributed substantial funds from his gambling fortunes to Jewish causes, particularly to the United Jewish Appeal." [KREFETZ, p. 116] "A Jew should lead a normal life and a proud life," Lansky once remarked, "... I've been ready at any time in my life to defend myself against insults to Jews or to me as a Jew." [SARNA, Jewish, p. 55]  In Russia, in warring leading to the Communist revolution, "real life gangster [Jewish] Misha Yaponchik ... helped to defend Odessa's Jews from the Whites [loyal to the Tsar] but was afterwards killed by the [Communist] Reds." [SICHER, p. 172] In England, Jewish criminal Jacob Comacho (aka Jack Spot) started "to establish the reputation for violence that would cause his rise. He called himself the "King of Aldgate." "When Oswald Mosley's Fascists started to infest the East End [of London] chanting, 'We gotta get rid of the Yids,' Spot became a local hero, taking a lead-weighted chair leg to inflict a savage beating on one of Mosely's roughnecks at the battle of Cable Street. Spot's exultant recollection of the incident from his placid law-abiding retirement in the '80s was still capable of startling a young journalist by the revelation of relished brutality ... He liked to think of himself as the strong man who could be sent for by any Jewish businessman in trouble anywhere, from Glasgow to London. He would then bash the businessmen's enemies, and in return help himself to clothing, food and drink, and spare cash as he needed it. Rabbis recommended him to their congregations, as Spot tells it." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 32-33]          "During Prohibition," notes Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway, "fifty per cent of the leading bootleggers were Jewish, and Jewish criminals financed and directed much of the nation's narcotics traffic ... At the same time, a number of these mobsters, quietly and without publicity, defended and assisted the Jewish community. Despite their aversion to 'these black sheep of Israel,' many ordinary Jews appreciated the gangster's protection, whereas communal leaders accepted and sometimes solicited their aid.'" [ROCKAWAY, p. 215] Jewish mobster Mickey Cohen, for instance, was particularly active in raising money for the Jewish terrorist group IRGUN in its attacks against the British (and Arabs) in Palestine. [BIRMINGHAM, p. 281] "Just how aware, in 1947," says Stephen Birmingham, "American Jews were aware of the role of organized crime in the fight for an independent Israel is unclear. Probably most were not aware. Those who were, numbed by reports of the Holocaust that were at last appearing in the American media, preferred to look the other way or to take the attitude that the end justifies the means." [BIRMINGHAM, p. 284]         The Jewish criminal underworld was also helpful to Israel in getting weapons to Israel in its early years. Yehuda Arazi, an arms purchaser for the Haganah organization, even made contacts with the Jewish-based Murder, Inc. gang, looking for help. "In my busines," said Arazis, "We can't be too fussy who we do business with. Sometimes they're not nice people."  [ROCKAWAY, p. 230] Other underworld contacts arranged for Israeli agents to conceal arms smuggling out of New York City. Jewish criminals even had links to the President of Panama who allowed illegal Israeli arms shipments to sail under the Panama flag. [ROCKAWAY, p. 231] In 1947 gangster Mickey Cohen helped fund-raising efforts for the terrorist Irgun gang fighting the British in Palestine.  Jewish criminals pooled about $120,000 for the Irgun cause." [ROCKAWAY, p. 232-233]   Jewish gangsters like Allie Tennebaum, says Rich Cohen, "did live to see the emergence of a strong Israel, and they must have seen it as something to rejoice over, proof that not everything the gangsters believed in was wrong." [KAUFMAN, G., p. 2]        Susan Berman, daughter of gangster David Berman, wrote that her father was, as Jonathan Sarna sardonically notes, "a Jewish role model."  He was "extremely proud of being Jewish," notes Ms. Berman, " ... He felt that for a Jewish child to be properly brought up, there must be a synagogue, a rabbi, and a cantor in evidence." [SARNA, JEWISH, p. 55]  Another Jewish author, Rich Cohen, romanticizes gangster murder as some kind of affirmative act of redemption, delighting in Jewish violence so strongly that he can write:          "When [Abe] Reles took a mark [murdered someone], he was not just        ending a life: he was expressing the essential freedom of the Jew in        America." [KAUFMAN, p. 2]          "America," wrote another Jewish author, Albert Fried, about Jewish gangsters,” is embracing Bugsy Siegel's vision; his martyrdom [he was murdered by other mobsters] was not in vain." [SARNA, JEWISH, p. 55]  "Bombast of this sort," complains Jonathan Sarna in a review of Fried's volume, "is obviously meant, in part, to pander to a potential Jewish audience, trying to fashion for it folk heroes of the same 'gentleman-bandit' type as non-Jews enjoy. Jewish criminals are thus portrayed as being proud of their heritage, big givers to charity, and strong supporters of the state of Israel." [SARNA, JEWISH, p. 55]         Is this an artificial portrayal that Jewish gangsters were integral to, and respected by, many in Jewish neighborhoods, and loyal to the burgeoning state of Israel? After the assassination of gangster Big Jack Zelig in 1912, during his New York City funeral procession "the streets of all around Broome Street were jammed," said Jewish detective Abe Schoenfeld, "A choir consisting of twelve singers conducted by Cantor Goldberg of Newark, New Jersey, sang their Jewish hymns as the procession proceeded down Delaney Street to the bridge. There was an unbroken line of people covering the sidewalk watching the funeral. Only the funeral of Rabbi Joseph (a revered spiritual leader) surpassed this --the funeral of Jack Zelig." [ROCKAWAY, p. 217]         In Chicago, the death of criminal Samuel "Nails" Morton attracted "five thousand Jewish mourners, including rabbis [who] accompanied Morton's hearse to the cemetery. Local reporters wanted to know why so many Jews would attend the funeral of a notorious gangster." [ROCKAWAY, p. 218] The reason, argues Robert Rockaway, is an old one: Jewish unity against non-Jewish enemies.        Between both the Jewish criminal underworld and respectable Jewry, there were especially strong feelings of solidarity against anti-Jewish right-wing political movements. In the 1930s, for example, prominent gangster Meyer Lansky was solicited by a New York City judge and former Congressman, Nathan Perlman, and New York's most famous rabbi, Stephen Wise, to arrange violent attacks against pro-German groups in America. [ROCKAWAY, p. 220, COHEN, R., p. 190] ] As late as 1992 the Synagogue of the Suburban Torah in Livingston, New Jersey, sponsored a tribute occasion in honor of a Jewish gangster, Max "Puddy" Hinkes, who had decades earlier organized violent Jewish mobster attacks upon pro-Nazi sympathizers in the area. [ROCKAWAY, p. 223] In Minneapolis, "gambling czar" David Berman led Jewish underworld assaults upon pro-Nazi conferences in the 1930s [ROCKAWAY, p. 224]; likewise, Mickey Cohen instigated similar violence in Los Angeles. [ROCKAWAY, p. 227] For some Jews, Cohen's claim that he single-handedly beat up two Nazi-types locked in a jail cell with him is welcome legend. [COHEN, R., 1999, p. 191] Even Jack Ruby, assassin of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald,         "with several friends, frequently attempted to disrupt rallies of the       German-American Bund. One acquaintance reported that Ruby       was responsible for 'cracking a few heads' of Bund members.       Apparently he joined in this activity for ethnic rather than political       reasons. The young men in the group were not organized adherents       of any particular political creed, but were pool hall and tavern       companions from Ruby's Jewish neighborhood who gathered on       the spur of the moment to present opposition when they learned that       pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic Bund movement was planning a meeting."       [WARREN COMMISSION, 1964, p. 696]        "From Arthur Rothstein and Meyer Lansky to their modern day successors in the Americas, Israel or the Soviet Union," says Joel Kotkin, "Jewish criminals have succeeded in everything from murder for hire to smuggling. Yet, even in crime, both emphasis and cultural preference lay with the successful use of sechel (smarts) rather than brute force." [KOTKIN]         It is curious that Kotkin concedes a Jewish criminal tradition but accepts another mythology about modern Jewry - that Jews were/are smart, but never violent. One of the many Jewish mobsters recruited to help Israel was Bugsy Siegel. "Siegel," says Robert Rockaway, "remained enthusiastic about violence. Even after he became a major crime boss, he wanted to do the killing himself rather than simply arrange matters. This may explain his willingness to help Israel once he learned that Jews were willing to kill to achieve their state." [ROCKAWAY, p. 231] Other exceptionally prominent Jewish murderers in America's criminal underworld included Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, head of Murder, Inc., and "one of the most vicious gangsters in the annals of American crime ... Between sixty and eighty men died on Lepke's orders. They were burned in gasoline, buried in quicklime, shot, stabbed with ice picks, or garroted." [ROCKAWAY, 1993, p. 17] Lewis "Pretty" Amberg "was one of New York's best known killers, having 'rubbed out' from eighteen to a hundred men, no one knew for sure." [ROCKAWAY, 1993, p. 22] Charley Workman "was said to have killed twenty men ... he was so expert at assassination." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 193] Harry "Pittsburg Phil" Strauss was "perhaps the most famous professional killer in American gangster history ... [He] killed over 100 (some say over 400) men from the late 1920s to 1940s, making him the most prolific killer in New York." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 149]   "Detroit police," adds Robert Rockaway, "credit the [the all-Jewish Detroit] Purple Gang with over 500 killings, more than the Capone mob. This caused Herbert Ausbury, a historian of American crime, to call the gang 'the most efficiently organized gang of killers in the United States.'" [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]        Rich Cohen, who wrote a book about Jewish crime, noted his own family's reaction to what he discovered in his research:         "They really had no idea just how bad [Jewish criminals] were. I didn't        really know how violent they were, or how many people they killed        or how many times they were arrested. You come to see them as        people. Even within that world, some of them were worse than others.        With some, it was just the situation. And some of them were just        killers." [KERNICKY, p. 1E]        Cohen also noted that some of New York's Jewish gangsters gathered at his grandmother's restaurant:           "When I told [my grandmother] of my interest in writing about the      restaurant and also about the gangsters and their table in back, her      face clouded over, 'They'll kill you,' she said, 'These men, they're      not like you. They'll kill a boy like you.'          When I pointed out that these men --Reles, Strauss, Goldstein,      Maione, Abbandando -- were long dead, she shook her head and      said, 'They'll kill you.'" [COHEN, R., 1999, p. 35]        Yet, adds Cohen, "When [Abe] Reles and the boys were hanging out at my grandparents' diner and the cops came by, my great-grandmother would hide their guns in the onions. She hated gangsters, but she hated people she thought hated Jews more." The endemic anti-Semites Cohen refers to here are generic policemen. [COHEN, R., p. 156]      A Jewish columnist, Brian Viner, at Great Britain's Jewish Chronicle notes Rich Cohen's look into Jeish criminal history, like this: "That I know all this is thanks largely to my estimable cousin Ben, a fount of information on Jewish gangster matters. I phoned him the other night and he told me, just as I might tell someone that Arensal are top the league by a point, that of 60,000 Jews living in Argentina by the 1920s, 9,000 were involved in prostitution rackets. You have to admit it's a conversation stopper. Ben -- a big fan of Rich Cohen's book 'Tough Jews,' not the least for its story of Red Levine, a hitman who wouldn't kill anyone on Shabbat -- is a Glaswegian, whose own father was threatened with imprisonment in 1916 for his involvement in a gambling den. And, according to Ben, some of the nastiest loan sharks in pre-war Glasgow were Jewish." [VINER, B., 11-29-02, p. 37]           Jewish author Gloria Deutsch also notes today's Jewish blinders to their inglorious turn-of-the-century American past:          "We were always conditioned to believe Jews didn't do these things, but         here is Sandy Sadowsky [author of My Life in the Jewish Mafia] with         her hair-raising stories of gangland murders, prostitution, rackets,         strong-arm men -- the shtarkers who exacted revenge and protected         their bosses -- and one wonders if believing in the myth of Jewish         crimelessness (other than a spot of fraud here and there) wasn't         anything more than a huge collective ostrich act." [DEUTSCH, p. 7]         Jewish violent criminality today also goes against the popular myths of an absolute non-violence in the Jewish community. "The concept of Jewish convicts serving serious jail time," noted the Los Angeles Times in 1995, "runs counter to a popular stereotype that Jewish felons tend to be nonviolent types who serve their sentences in minimum security cells ... Jews outside of prison often find this [fact of Jewish murderers] hard to deal with." "The people who know about it are kind of amazed," Howard Cohn, a part-time rabbi at the Pennsylvania State Corrections Institute told the Times. "They can't believe there are really Jews in a prison like this." [BEALE, p. A5]        In the most sensational genre, New York serial killer David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") was Jewish (he was adopted by a Jewish family as an infant), as was Joel Rifkind [EFTMIADES, p. 75] of Long Island, who into the early 1990s strangled to death at least 17 women, mostly New York prostitutes. "He went, picked up a prostitute, had sex with her, killed her, and dumped her." [EFTIMIADES, p. 90-91] In the 1920s, one of America's most sensational crimes, splashed all over the country's newspapers, was that of the Leopold and Loeb boys: "A pair of wealthy young members of Chicago's Jewish bourgeoisie in the early 20s, they kidnapped a young man, Bobby Franks, and murdered him as a kind of Nietzchean experiment; after their arrest, it was revealed that they had a sexual relationship too." [BARBOUR, D., 1998] At the time, it was popularized as "the crime of the century." [ABRAHAMSEN, D., 1983, p. 41] Amy Fisher, who received a great deal of press in New York tabloids as the "Long Island Lolita," was jailed in 1992 for shooting the wife of her lover. [PORTER, B., 5-11-99, p. A6]         Even in an Orthodox religious community, in 1990, the Jewish Week ran an article about today's New York Satmar Chasidic community, "notorious for its violent actions against other Jewish groups [which] has imploded into a war against itself. Pitting supporters of the deceased Satmar Rabbi against supporters of his successor ... In the Brooklyn area of Williamsburg, home to more than 30,000 Satmars, four cars belonging to one faction were set on fire last week, while as many as 500 Satmars watched and cheered. Three Satmars, in one of the burning cars, needed to be rescued by police, who were also trying to control the Satmar onlookers." [MARK, J, Satmar]          Satmar violence against others has increasingly spread against non-Jewish neighbors. "Recent years," wrote Jonathan Mark in 1990, "have seen an explosion of tension between all chasidim and their Black and Hispanic neighbors. Most recently, Hispanic groups have complained that the Satmars act like they have the right of eminent domain over Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, where many Satmars reside. They have charged that chasidic men have sexually harassed non-Jewish women, that chasidic security patrols are actually racially motivated vigilantes." [MARK, SATMAR, p. 4]          In the more overtly political context (and not Orthodox), in an entire book about assassinations (limited only to those deemed "political") carried out by Jews in Palestine/Israel from 1882 to 1988, Israeli scholar Nachum Ben David itemizes 91 cases of "assassination events" committed by Jews. (An assassination is defined by this author in his title as "a rhetorical device for justice"). Most murder victims were other Jews who were considered "traitors/collaborators/squealers/informers." [BEN DAVID, p. 418] "We are not dealing with a lone fanatic killer [in these cases]," stresses Ben David, "but with a premeditated planned act, committed by a group or by a representative of a group." [BEN YEHUDA, p. xxi]        Aside from a possible volume about Jewish gangster murders, no doubt a similar volume could be created about Jewish assassinations under the auspices of Russian communism. Just before, and after, the creation of the Soviet state, assassinations by Jews, in one form or another, sometimes as secret police agents, are many. Mark Zborowsky, for instance, (a later immigrant to America where he became a university professor), in league with fellow Jews Naum Eitingon and Grigory Rabinovich, was instrumental in the operation to murder Trotsky's son, Lev Sedov. [VAKSBERG, p. 96]  Arkady Vaksberg notes another case of Jews murdering Jews:        "The murder of two Jews whom Stalin hated [Efraim Sklyansky      and Isiah Khurgin] had been organized by two other Jews, Kanner      and Yagoda. Let us add that Kanner's assistant, Bombin, and      Mekhil's assistants, Makhovev and Yuzhak, were all Jewish."      [VAKSBERG, p. 28]        In 1904, the Russian Minister of Interior, Vlacheslav Plehve, also fell to a Jewish assassin. [LINDEMANN, A., 1997, p. 296]  In 1906, in the Russian town of Grodno, "Jewish partisans assassinated the Russian district commander of police." In 1908, the chief of police from another town, Bialystok, came to Grodno. This time, "the Jew who tried to shoot him died in prison." [LACEY, p. 18]  In September of 1911 another Jewish assassin, Dmitry Bogrov, shot and killed Pyotr Stolypin, a prominent Russian official, at the Kiev Opera Theatre.  [SINGER, N, p. 2] Another Jewish would-be killer, Fanya Kaplan, also shot V. I. Lenin through the neck in a failed assassination attempt in early communist Russia, saying that he had "betrayed the Revolution." [LEVYTSKY, p. 29] On the same day, "the Cheka leader Uritsky was shot to death in August 1918 by a distinguished Jewish poet and army officer named Kannegiesser who 'was revolted by the fact that so many of the Bolsheviks were Jewish.'" [WEYL, N., 1968, p. 198]         In 1926, another Jewish assassin, Shalom Schwartzbard, murdered Ukrainian nationalist Symon Petlura, in Paris. (Petlura was in exile from his homeland; he formerly led the Ukrainian army against Bolshevik attack). As noted earlier, a Jewish woman was also a member of the team that assassinated Tsar Alexander II. And, as noted before also, those who directed (and participated in) the murder of the royal family during the Russian Revolution were also largely Jewish. Even in Argentina, "on May Day 1909, during a workers' demonstration in Buenos Aires, a Jewish anarchist murdered a local police chief," thereby igniting anti-Jewish rioting. [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 281]        Elsewhere, during the rise of Nazi fascism in Germany, notes Franklin Ford, "paradoxically, during their movement's first years in power, Nazis were the victims, not the perpetrators of two sensational murders of German's residing in foreign parts." [FORD] In 1936 a Nazi official in Switzerland, Wilhelm Gustloff, was assassinated by a Jewish student, David Frankfurter. In 1938 Ernst von Rath, a German embassy official in Paris was killed by Herschel Grynszpan. The Nazis used this act as an excuse to respond with intensified savagery to the German Jewish population. Years earlier, in 1918, long before the Nazis came to power, a Russian Jew, Yakov Blumkin, assassinated the German ambassador to Moscow, Count Mirbach. [SUDOPLATOV, p. 189] Kurt Eisner, the Jewish prime minister of Bavaria, was also assassinated in 1918 by Count Arco Valley, "a young man who felt stigmatized by the fact that his mother was Jewish." [GRUNFELD, F., 1996, p. 123]'       As Leon Schapiro notes about late 19th century Russia and the formation of a communist base there:        "When Jews thronged into the party after 1881 the number of Jewish      terrorists was very high. There were important Jewish terrorists, like      Gershuni, for example, in the socialist revolutionary party which      evolved during the present century as the heir of the 'People's Will'      ... In more recent times one could cite the extensive Jewish      participation in the savageries of the Red Terror of the Cheka [the      secret police] -- or even events in Palestine." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961,      p. 152]        In America, in 1892 famous Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman and two comrades decided to assassinate millionaire Henry Clay Frick. "In desperation [Goldman] tried whoreing [sic] (unsuccessfully) on 14th Street [in New York] to raise the money for a gun, and [Alexander] Berkman went to Pittsburgh to pull the trigger." [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10] The assassination attempt by Berkman was carried out, but Frick survived his wound.        Also in America, in 1974 Samuel Byck, another Jewish would-be assassin, embarked on a sensationally bizarre suicidal scheme to kill President Richard Nixon. He murdered a security guard at the Baltimore/Washington airport, stormed into a jet and demanded to the pilots that it take off and follow his orders. His plan was to crash the plane into the White House. Technically unable to accommodate him, Byck murdered the two pilots before he was, in turn, shot and killed by authorities. [CLARKE, J., p. 128-142]        More famous, of course, in Texas, was Jack Ruby (born Jacob Rubinstein), the (Jewish) murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who is believed to have killed John F. Kennedy. Ruby had interests in six Dallas-area strip-tease clubs. As Gerald Posner notes:        "Ruby often resulted to violence with his employees, and lost the tip      of his left index fingers when one bit it off during a scuffle. He beat      one of his musicians with brass knuckles, cracked another's head      with a blackjack, knocked another's teeth out, and put the club's      handyman in the hospital with a severe beating. To avoid paying the      club's cigarette girl $50 in back wages, he threatened to throw he      down the stairs until she relented her claim ... He was not above      attacking people from behind, kicking men in the groin or face once      he had them to the floor, or even striking women ... He was often      malicious, forcing beaten victims to crawl out of the club on hands      and knees." [POSNER, p. 357]     Paul Krassner also notes this about Ruby: "Lenny [Bruce, the famous Jewish comic] told me, 'I know other comics who have worked for Jack Ruby. Dig this. They say he has a tattoo of a vagina on his upper arm, and whenever he flexes his muscle, the vagina dilates open." [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 60]        Ruby's killing of Oswald erased his looming testimony, as well as any other person's or organization's involvement in the most famous political assassination in American history. "In Dallas, Texas," noted Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff, "a man born with the name Rubinstein who subsequently eliminated its Jewish-sounding suffix took it upon himself to avenge the martyrdom of a President. He gave his Jewishness as one of the reasons for doing so." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 18]  At Ruby's trial, Patrick Dean (the police sergeant in charge of security where Oswald was killed) testified that shortly after the shooting he talked to Ruby about what he had just done. One of the reasons Ruby killed Oswald, the killer told him, was "because he wanted the world to know that Jews do have guts." [BELLI, p. 167] When Kennedy was shot, Ruby was in the advertising offices of the Dallas Morning News, troubled by a full page advertisement in that morning's newspaper. As Gerald Posner notes,        "The entire page was a black-bordered advertisement, headed in      large block letters, 'Welcome Mister Kennedy,' and the text accused      the President of being a Communist tool. It was signed by 'The      American Fact-Finding Committee, Bernard Weissman, Chairman.      Ruby was very disturbed that the News should have run such a      demeaning advertisement and was dismayed that it was signed by      someone with a Jewish name." [POSNER, 1993, p. 371]        Ruby mingled with a variety of underworld figures, and was involved in gun smuggling to Cuba, facts that has fueled in later years a variety of conspiracy theories about who really killed Kennedy. And for what reason. Jim Marris notes that        "The smuggling of arms to Cuba was overseen by Norman 'Roughhouse'      Rothman, a burly associate of Miami's mob boss Santos Trafficante who      managed Trafficante's Sans Souci in Havana. At the same time Rothman      reportedly was splitting Havana slot machines with [Cuban dictator]      Batista's brother-in-law." [MARRIS, p. 391]        In his 1989 investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Marris also devotes an entire chapter entitled, "Did Ruby and Oswald Know Each Other?," itemizing the testimony of those who claimed that the two were not strangers to each other. [MARRIS, p. 402-414]        "There were many signs that Ruby wasn't just a harmless scoundrel," noted Newsweek in 1993, "and the investigation into his background was remarkably  -- almost willfully -- shallow. FBI agents interviewed hundreds of his acquaintances, but they barely followed up on obvious leads about his underworld friends and his trips to Cuba." [BECK, p. 94]        While Ruby was locked in prison and sentenced to death for the murder of Oswald, the London Guardian notes that Ruby        "was raving by the end -- there was no bigger conspiracy theorist than       Jack Ruby. He became convinced America had begun a pogrom against       the Jews because of what he, or Oswald, or both of them, had done."       [BYGRAVE]   10 JEWS AND "WHITE SLAVERY" "[Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion] could hard imagine that Jewish women would stoop to crime or prostitution. When an associate, Meyer Weisgal, who resembled David Ben-Gurion, once told him humorously that a girl had walked up to him on a London street and offered her services, overwhelmed by the idea of sleeping with the 'Israeli prime minister.' Ben-Gurion, clearly troubled, was interested in only one thing: 'Was she Jewish?'"                                                                    -- Dan Kurzman, 1983, p.39                              "I also take a kind of perverse pleasure in the thought that the most important and influential book ever written is the product of Jewish thought ... I call it 'perverse' because it is an instance of national pride which I don't want to feel and which I fight against constantly ..."I remember once a fellow Jew remarking with satisfaction on the high percentage of Nobel Prize winners who were Jewish. I said, 'Does that make you feel superior?' 'Of course,' he said. 'What if I told you that sixty percent of the pornographers and eighty percent of the crooked Wall Street manipulators wre Jewish? He was startled. 'Is that true?' 'I don't know. I made up the figures. But what if it were true? Would it make you feel inferior?' He had to think about that. It's much easier to find reasons to consider oneself superior than inferior. But one is just the mirror image of the other.'" -- Isaac Asimov, 1994, p. 322 'But where do Jews enter the picture?' I asked him. 'Ah!' said Simon [Wiesenthal], slapping his knee. 'I haven't told you something else. A few years ago, I have a talk with a man who went to school with Hitler. I ask him what Hitler was like in school and he says, 'Normal. But maybe this hatred began after got this infection from a Jewish whore.' 'Are you saying that Hitler caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute?' I asked incredulously. Wiesenthal laughed and said: 'What's the matter? You think only Jews can catch diseases from prostitutes?' 'No, but were Jewish prostitutes common in Austria?' 'Why not? Is there a Gentile monopoly on prostitution?' 'I just don't see it as a vocation for a nice Jewish girl.' 'A nice Jewish girl,' Simon mimicked. 'You have those 'nice Jewish girls' in Israel, too, these days and they had them in Vienna years ago -- when there were more Jews.' -- Alan Levy, The Wiesenthal File. William B. Eardmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 1993 p. 18             At the end of the 19th and beginning of the twentieth century, Jews were deeply involved in what was popularly called "white slavery": international prostitution rings. "White slavery," notes scholar Albert Lindemann, "was a concern of Jewish leaders throughout the world, who recognized it as a special problem." [LINDEMANN, p. 33] [Jews have also dominated the pornography and commercial sexploitation business, a trend which continues to this day -- see Mass Media section]         "Between 1880 and 1939," notes scholar Edward Bristow, "the Jews played a conspicuous role in 'white slavery,' as the commercial prostitution of that era was dramatically called. Not only was this Jewish participation conspicuous, it was historically unprecedented, geographically widespread, and fraught with collective political dangers." [BRISTOW, p. 1] "Jewish trafficking," says Bristow, "was anchored in brothel keeping, women freelanced or kept houses while their husbands procured ... Jewish traffickers also supplied Gentile-run houses." [BRISTOW, p. 56-57]        Rooted largely in Eastern and Central Europe where they "dominated the international traffic out of the area," [BRISTOW, p. 2] Jews were involved in prostitution rings that networked, wrote Arthur Mora (of London's Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women) in 1903, to "almost all parts of North and South Africa, to India, China, Japan, Philippine Island, North and South America, and also to many of the countries of Europe." [BRISTOW, p. 1] Jewish criminals trafficked women under their control virtually anywhere, also including the major cities of Bulgaria, Bosnia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Ceylon, Manchuria, South Africa, Rhodesia, and Mozambique. [BRISTOW, p. 181]        "By 1900," says Bristow, "Jewish commercial vice was largely incorporated in underworld elements and many of it participants were predators of the poor." [BRISTOW, p. 89] Jewish pimps, procurers, and traffickers preyed mostly on non-Jewish women, but even large numbers of Jewish women were part of their stables.         In 1872, for example, Jewish prostitutes in Warsaw numbered 17% of the known prostitution population, in Krakow 27%, and in Vilna 47%. [BRISTOW, p. 23] Within the Jewish community itself, it was not uncommon for recruiters to marry innocent Jewish young women and "deposit them in foreign brothels." [BRISTOW, p. 25]  Many of the Jewish criminal underworld figures apparently saw no gap between their day-to-day activities and their religious lives, often maintaining their religious obligations. A Warsaw thug, Shilem Letzski, organized a small synagogue for Jewish "prostitutes, madams, pimps, and thieves." This criminal community even had a rabbinical court "to settle disputes between pimps." [BRISTOW, p. 60]  In Constantinople, prostitutes contributed money to "have their pimps called to Torah on holidays." [SCHNEIDER, p. 225]  In New York City, "a public school and a large synagogue were situated right next door to the house of prostitution." [RUBINOW, I., 1959, p. 114-115]        In Buenos Aires, Argentina, notes Donna Guy, the Jewish pimp organization called the Varsovia Society          "ostensibly functioned as a mutual aid society ... In fact, the Varsovia        consisted of pimps who wanted to maintain their business and still lead        a religious life ... Varsovia associates established their own synagogue        on Guemes Street in the midst of the traditional bordello district."        [GUY, p. 22]        Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes also, for example, that prominent Jewish American mobster Longy Zwillman "always remained sensitive to his Jewish upbringings." When a close friend died, and the funeral was conducted in a church, Zwillman refused to attend. As he explained it, he was an ancestral member of the Jewish priest caste (the Cohens) and it was religiously forbidden to him to be with a dead body in a room. [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 30]        Dr. Louis Maretsky, the head of the B'nai B'rith in Germany, forlornly noted in 1912 that at least 271 of 402 prostitution traffickers on a Hamburg police list were Jewish; in reviewing similar lists for Eastern Europe and South Africa at least 374 of 644 were from the Jewish community. [BRISTOW, p. 56]  (No mention here is made of even higher possible percentages: as explored later, it has long been a tradition for many Jews in their diaspora to formally change their identifiable Jewish names). Concerning Galicia, Maretsky wrote that "the prominence of Jewish traffickers and brothel operators there is no doubt. From the files of the Austrian and German police there were 111 Jewish traffickers active in Galicia and the neighboring province of Bukovina for 1904-08 alone." [BRISTOW, p. 56]          By 1889 Jewish women ran 203 of 289 (70%) of the licensed brothels in the "Pale of Settlement" (encompassing over 20 provinces in eastern Poland and western Russia -- an area where Jews were about 12% of the population). 1122 of 5127 (22%) licensed prostitutes in this area were Jewish. [BRISTOW, p. 63] The grievous political dangers for local Jewry in the context of enduring interethnic hostilities, when 78% of the rest of the women were Gentile, many indentured in Jewish houses, is obvious.        Further in the West, 16 of 19 licensed brothels in Warsaw were run by Jewish women, prostitutes in the low-class establishments were expected to service 40-50 customers a day, up to 60-70 on Holy Days. (In 1905 the respectable part of the Jewish Warsaw community rioted against the brothels; 40 whorehouses -- legal and illegal -- were reported destroyed, 8 persons killed, and 100 injured). [BRISTOW, p. 61]        In Minsk, Jews ran all four legitimate houses of ill repute. In the Russian province of Kherson (which includes the city of Odessa) 30 of 36 licensed brothels were Jewish-owned. The American Consul in Odessa wrote in 1908 that the "whole 'business' of prostitution is almost exclusively in the hands of the Jews." [BRISTOW, p. 56]      Martin Fido notes another genre of Jewish Eastern European profiteer in the prostitution world, in England:      "Latvian ponces accompanied [prostitutes] to help them cross borders and find            accommodation and working premises. These men were despised by police and      by some of the criminal fraternity for 'living off immoral earnings.' But they were      not pimps ... They were effectively travel agents, couriers and managers in      strange and unfriendly places. Their arrival in London ensured that a major      strand of prostitution would be controlled by organized crime. One of these      Latvians, Max Kassell, was still running a small stable of hookers in the 1930s,      when he was murdered in Soho ... Jewish dominance of the East End [of      London] and its crime was reflected in their Yiddish name, 'spielers' (places      for games). In the Brick Lane neighborhood, Isaac Bogard, a Jewish villain      whose swarthy complexion and tightly curled black hair earned him the      nickname 'Darky the Coon,' extended his interests. He began in the      early years of the 20th century by supplying muscle for street traders who      wanted to prevent newcomers from moving in, but he moved on to      managing prostitutes and drinking clubs." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 19-20]      Then in London there was Harry 'Little Hubby' Distleman, "a Jewish club manager, gambler and possibly part-sharer (with his brother) in a chain of brothels." [FIDO, M., 2000, p. 31] Jewish author Chaim Bermant noted in the Jewish Chronicle in 1993 that "In the same period (1903-1909), 151 aliens [in Great Britain], most of them Jewish, were convicted for keeping brothels, and 521 for soliciting ... Rabbi Avigdor Schonfeld ... protested that to draw attention to the existence of Jewish prostitutes harmed the good name of the Jewish people." [JEWISH CHRONICLE, 1-15-93]       More recently, Jewish singer Eddie Fisher recalls that "while performing in England in the late 1950s I had become friendly with a Jewish song plugger, a man who eventually left the music business to open a very exclusive whorehouse." [FISHER, E., 1999, p. 293] A little later, there was the infamous Colin Levy:      "In 1973, one of the better-known and more appreciated solo practitioners      of that [London prostitution] underworld was Norma Levy (nee Mary      Russell), an Irish-born prostitute in her mid-twenties whose career 'on the      game' was being managed by her husband Colin Levy, a petty crook ...      In 1973, Colin Levy found himself short of money. Aware that one of      Norma's patrons was the celebrated Lord Lambton, he decided to solve      his problem with a bit of blackmail. Camera in hand, he lay in wait outside      Norma's bedroom during Lambton's next visit to her flat. At the appropriate      time, at a signal from Norma, he burst into the room. With flashlights      popping in his face, the stunned Lambton was frozen on film, in      flagrante delicto, for posterity." [Levy's blackmail failed, but there was      a resultant scandal, including the ethics of newspaper (where Levy tried      to sell his photos] that published accounts of the story] [KIERNAN, T.,      1986, p. 162]              In Vienna, authorities knew of about 50 Jewish prostitution traffickers based in Czernowitz, "and they were a very inbred lot extending over two generations." [BRISTOW, p. 74] The most publicized 'white slavery' trial occurred in 1892, in Lemberg (once also called Lvov, then a Polish provincial capital, today called Lviv in Ukraine), where 27 traffickers -- all Jews -- were prosecuted for ensnaring women to go to Constantinople, Egypt, and India. Some of the women recruits understood their tasks, but others "were maids, others fieldworkers, one a butcher's helper, all apparently promised honest jobs." [BRISTOW, p. 74]  (Lemberg, "a cradle of Zionism from the 1880s onward," also had anti-Jewish riots in 1918. [KRAJEWSKI, S., p. 340] )      There was a tradition of Yiddish folk songs about Jewish criminal behavior, like this:      "I am Salve, the thief,      Four brothers are we;      One is hungry, the other well fed,      But thieves all four are we.      One is a pickpocket,      The second a pimp, a handsome fellow;      One is a hijacker on the lookout for      packages,      And I am a house thief.      A pimp is common,      As all agree:      From his own wife,      He gets the disease      To be a hijacker is bitter:      You can rupture your lung,      It's hard to earn something with some of      the packages,      The best thing is to be a house thief."      [RUBIN, R., 1979]         "In an age of pandemic anti-Semitism," says Bristow, "a Jewish pimp was a political as well as a social force," [BRISTOW, p. 4] very emotionally reinforcing anti-Jewish sentiments of the day. Jews were already blamed in central Europe for a financial crash in 1873 and economic competition between Jews and non-Jews was heightening.        A young and enraged Adolf Hitler paid particular attention to the highly visible phenomenon of Jewish street hustling and prostitution rings in Vienna, and was incensed that many non-Jewish women were coerced into the largely Jewish-run trade. "In no other city of Western Europe," he wrote in Mein Kampf, "could the relationship between Jewry and prostitution, and even now the white slave traffic, be studied better than in Vienna ... an icy shudder ran down my spine when seeing for the first time the Jew as an evil, shameless, and calculating manager of this shocking vice, the outcome of the scum of the big city." [BRISTOW, p. 84]        The Jewish prostitution business extended from Europe across the world, where it sometimes overlapped with French, Italian, Chinese, and other rings. In the Punjabi (Indian) capital of Lahore, "Jewish pimps were in the habit of leaving their women penniless only to reappear after workers had accumulated some money." [BRISTOW, p. 195] In Rio de Janeiro Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Romania were so much identified with prostitution in the late 1800's that "the kaftan, a Jew's traditional long gown, became synonymous with pimp." [BRISTOW, p. 113]         Thirty-nine Jews were expelled from Brazil in 1879 for soliciting women for prostitution and running illegal whorehouses. [BRISTOW, p. 114]  Of 199 licensed whorehouses in Buenos Aires in 1909, 102 were run by Jews and more than half the prostitutes were Jewish. [FRIED, p. 71]  4,248 Jewish women were registered for licensed brothels in Buenos Aires between 1880-1913, and those represented only the licensed ones. Edward Bristow estimates that 9,000 Jewish women immigrants came to Brazil in a 25-year span in that era as prostitutes (many were no doubt highly transient), when the total Jewish population of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay combined amounted to less than 60,000 people in 1910. [BRISTOW, p. 119] (Brian Viner, a columnist at England's Jewish Chronicle, underscores these figures from Argentina in this manner: "That I know all this is thanks largely to my estimable cousin Ben, a fount of information on Jewish gangster matters. I phoned him the other night and he told me, just as I might tell someone that Arsenal are top the league by a point, that of 60,000 Jews living in Argentina by the 1920s, 9,000 were involved in prostitution rackets. You have to admit it's a conversation stopper.") [VINER, B., 11-29-02, p. 37]           In 1889, the Buenos Aires Bulletin Continental reported that 200 German/Austrian women were held against their will by Jewish pimps from Poland. [GUY, p. 5] "Jewish procurers," says Donna Guy,           "... became an organized ring in major cities all over the world.         They were particularly powerful in the Argentine port cities of         Buenos Aires and Rosario ... [GUY, p. 10]   ... Turn-of-the-century         reports by the Hamburg B'nai B'rith [a Jewish fraternal organization]         concluded that most prostitutes in Buenos Aires were Jewish and that         traffickers 'dress with ostentatious elegance, wear large diamonds, go         to the theatre or opera daily; they have their own clubs and         organizations where wares are sorted, auctioned, and sold ... They         have their own secret wireless code, are well organized, and-- heavens!         -- in South America everything is possible." [GUY, p. 19]         "Pooling their financial resources in a kind of guild," notes another Jewish scholar, Howard Sachar,        "the [Polish Jewish] newcomers [to Argentina] in 1909 controlled      slightly more than half the nearly two hundred licensed brothels in      Buenos Aires. Jewish women served as their madams, and Jewish      immigrant girls often were recruited and lured into their hands as      prostitutes." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 283]        In Cuba, Jews "became engaged in the 'White Slave Trade,'" says Robert Levine, "importing prostitutes -- some Jewish -- from Poland ... Many women recruited to the business had been trapped in the Russian and Polish Pale and throughout the Hapsburg Empire by force or fraud, and the human dilemma was great." [LEVINE, p. 66]        Incredibly, even in Germany, where Jews have such a horrible history, such Jewish-related problems still bubble beneath the surface. In 1994 a US News and World Report reporter noted the observations of a Frankfort policeman patrolling Precinct 4:        "'It's all owned by Jews,' [Bernd] Gayk says of the train station's red light       district. 'Practically everything in this area is owned by German Jews.       There is a single cabaret here owned by a German, but the rest belongs       to the Jews.'" [MARKS, J., p. 42, 44]       Shockingly, even shortly after the Holocaust when there were only a few thousand Jews left in Germany, they remained prominent in the prostitution business there. In 1961 Rabbi Richard L. Rubenstein interviewed Dean Heinrich Gruber of the Evangelical Church of East and West Berlin. Rubenstein notes that Gruber nearly himself perished in a Nazi concentration camp, and he "had a long and heroic record of opposition to the Nazis on Christian grounds as well as friendship and succor for Nazism's chief victims [Jews]." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 5] "The problem in Germany is that the Jews haven't learned anything from what happened to them," the Dean told a startled Rubenstein, "I always tell my Jewish friends that they shouldn't put a hindrance in the way our fight against anti-Semitism." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 7] Gruber then complained that "many of the brothels and risqué night clubs, for example, were in Jewish hands, especially those in close proximity to army camps." [RUBENSTEIN, p. 7] And Rubenstein's response to the clergyman? "Look," the rabbi said,        "I don't understand why you are so troubled about a pitifully small      number of Jews in shady positions or interested in making money      rather than following more edifying pursuits. It seems to me that      every person pays a price for the kind of life he or she leads. Why      should Germany be upset about a few such Jews unless they are      overly involved in other peoples' lives? Must every Jew make himself      so pale, so inconspicuous, even invisible, that he will give no offense      to Germans? ... After what happened [the Holocaust], why should      any Jew remain and worry about German approval?" [RUBENSTEIN,      p. 7-8]      Marvin Wolf, a Jewish captain in the U.S. army serving in Germany, recalls that in 1971      "Rabbi David, the Jewish chaplain in Frankfort am Main -- and the husband of      my mother's second cousin -- told me that he knew several Jewish millionaires      at whose homes I would be welcome -- but, 'I'm not crazy about any of them,'      he said. 'What do you mean?' I asked. 'After the war, '45, '46, Germany was in      ruins,' he explained. 'Terrible times. Nobody had money except the Occupation      forces and a handful of Jews who had survived the camps and got a monthly      pension -- government reparations. In Frankfort, a few of these Jews recruited      starving, desperate German girls and opened brothels. Got their revenge, and      got rich, too. They're in other businesses now, but do you really want to spend      Pesach [Passover] with such people?" [WOLF, M. J., 1998]        In 1909 one Jewish observer, Marcus Braun, estimated there to be 50,000 Jewish immigrant prostitutes in America and 10,000 pimps. (Edward Bristow considers these figures grossly inflated, but notes that one of Braun's colleagues, echoing at least public feelings about the problem, thought there were up to 100,000 American Jewish women of ill repute.) In any case, the Jewish pimps of New York City (who owned many of the "so-called French" bordellos in the Tenderloin district and "sought to fill them with French prostitutes from abroad") [BRISTOL, p. 165] had their own official organization: "The New York Independent Benevolent Association."  Frances Kellar, a respected social worker, wrote in 1907 that "the two nationalities who may be said to be central to the disorderly house business in New York [are] French and Jewish ... French houses ... are not ... to be so much feared as the Jewish ... [which are] thoroughly vicious and bad." [BRISTOL, p. 165] By the turn of the century, "hundreds and hundreds" of Jewish women walked the Lower East Side of New York City as prostitutes. [FRIED, p. 8] Benjamin Altman described the whores he saw on Allen Street: "A hundred women on every ... corner. Tall women, short women. Fair women. Ugly women." [FRIED, p. 12]        Between November 15, 1908 and March 15, 1909, almost three-quarters of 2,093 prostitute cases before the New York City courts were "native-born" women, "a preponderance," noted Albert Fried, "who were presumably Jewish." (Ethnic categories included "Russian" and "Polish," but not Jewish). [FRIED, p. 8] Of "foreign-born" prostitutes in court, 225 were Jewish, 154 French, 64 German, 31 Italian, 29 Irish, and 10 Polish. [FRIED, p. 8]        "The Jewish pimp," says Albert Fried, "freely used marriage brokers and unemployment agencies to snare his victims -- the young, the lonely, the innocent, the weak, the alienated, the oppressed." [FRIED, p. 14] Starting out with one whore in 1890, for example, by 1912 Motche Greenberg had a "controlling interest in eight whorehouses and 114 women and was earning $4,000 a month, an incalculable amount by today's standards." [FRIED, p. 18]         In Chicago, by 1907 Rabbi Emil Hirsch declared that 75% of the "white slavery" in his city was controlled by Jews. [BRISTOW, p. 177] The Jewish periodical the Forward forlornly reported that "the facts that were uncovered at the trial [for corruption] of [police] inspector McCann are horrifying. 75% of the white slave trade in Chicago is in Jewish hands. The owners of most of the immoral resorts on the West Side are Jews. Even in Gentile neighborhoods Jews stand out prominently in the nefarious business." [FRIED, p. 70]      (Even in 2001, as a result of an undercover police investigation, Joel Gordon (a cantor, i.e., the man who sings liturgical songs and leads prayer in a synagogue) and his wife Alison Greenberg were tried in Chicago for running a brothel. Ginsberg was also charged with acts of prostitution. "We now realize," said Howard Peritz, a member of Gordon's synagogue, "that in starting a congregation around a man [Gordon], we were canonizing him." [JEWISH TELEGRAPHIC AGENCY, 1-5-01] The same year, a synagogue room (Finchley Synagogue's Kinloss Suite) in Great Britain made the news when it hosted a "stag party with three strippers performing 'sexually explicit acts.'" Some of the money raised was supposed to go to a Jewish charity.) [ZERDIN, J., 29-01]      In 1987, a Jewish ultra-Orthodox group bought a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, and began hiring illegal non-Jewish aliens from Eastern Europe to do the menial jobs at their company. Despite the fact that only Jews dominated the upper echelons of the firm, and Jewish author Stephen Bloom's underscores Jewish exploitation and condemnation of the entire non-Jewish community in his book called Postville, he frames the following in cautiously distancing, apologetic form:      "[A woman in her mid-twenties said:] 'The managers are incredibly rude. One      manager fired me because I wouldn't go to bed with him.' The translator used the      word 'manager,' but the woman was most likely speaking of one of her      supervisors, who would have been a Christian. 'If the manager wants to sleep      with you and you do, you get a raise. If you don't, he makes your life      miserable. Girls have no choice.' No one [of a group of fellow workers] disputed      what the woman said." [BLOOM, S., 2001, p. 138]      In 1932, a few Polish-American officials of the city of Hamtramck (within Detroit) were charged by a grand jury with the "familiar charge of collusion with vice interests for gratuities." The central player among those convicted was Jewish, Jacob Kaplan, "head of a vice syndicate" who collected $2,000 a month from disorderly houses in the Syndicate." [WOOD, 1955, p. 53-54] In 1941, the Detroit Free Press listed the names of those involved in another exposed vice ring in the area of Hamtramck, a ring that drew city officials and administrators into its web with bribes and payoffs. The racketeers included "Sam (the Jap) Gross, Hamtramck area brothel operator;" Charles Berman, "charged with operating a vice resort;" Irene Kaplan, "defendant in accusations as brothel keeper;" Ike (Forty Grand) Levy, "vice resort operator;" Kitty (Big Nose) Silverman, "reputed vice resort keeper;" and Jack (alias Jack Jesus) Silverman, "husband of Kitty." [WOOD, A., 1955, p. 84, 86]        Israeli scholar Robert Rockaway notes the dimensions of Detroit's all-Jewish Prohibition-era Purple Gang:      "Detroit's Canadian border and existence of Jewish-owned Canadian distilleries,       such as those of Sam and Harry Bronfman [Jewish founders of Seagram], offered       opportunities to Detroit's Jewish gangsters that rivaled bootlegging operations in       Chicago and New York. Instead of transporting the liquor themselves, the Purples              arranged for the Jewish-dominated 'Little Jewish Navy' to bring it across the river       for them ... The Gang's dealings also extended to the sale of stolen diamonds, narcotics              and prostitution in Canada." [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]        In New York City, among many other Jewish madams, was "Polly Adler, the Polish-born madam of New York's most famous bordello of the 1920s and 1930s." [MCDOUGAL, p. 92]            Jewish comic and eventual TV superstar Milton Berle recalls Adler's brothel: "When I had a night off from the Paradise, John Garfield [the actor, born Julius Garfinkle], who was a good friend, and I went over to Polly Adler's for dinner. Sure, the world knew Polly as a [brothel] madam, but her friends knew her as an intelligent woman, fun to be with, and a good cook. After dinner, Polly excused herself because she had to make some telephone calls to arrange for girls for her clients. John and I were talking when I said, 'I don't know about you, Julie (his real name was Jules), but I feel sort of horny.' John thought he might feel the same way, so we spoke to Polly about it, and she said she could get us two of her $100 girls -- Polly handled only the best -- and send them around to wherever we said. John and I went our separate ways to await our deliveries. When the doorbell rang at my place, there was Carole [a woman Berle had been dating and already having an affair with]." [BERLE, M., 1974, p 186]      A little earlier, "the most famous madam in turn-of-the century New York was Rosie Hertz. Saving enough from her own prostitution, she and her husband, Jacob, opened several brothels on the Lower East Side during the 1880s ... The epitome of the 'white slaver,' Hertz was called by one judge the 'godmother for prostitutes.' Another critic considered her 'as much a public feature of the lower East Side ... as the Brooklyn Bridge." [GILFOYLE, T., 1992, p. 295]         Dallas, Texas? When Jack Ruby (Rubenstein) murdered Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963, he owned the Carousel, a local strip tease joint. As Gerald Posner notes, "Ruby's main competition was from the Theatre and Colony Clubs, owned by two brothers, Abe and Barney Weinstein. In 1961, they had introduced amateur strip-tease dancing." [POSNER, p. 362] Atlanta, Georgia? By 1999, owner Steve Kaplan's Gold Club "nude dancing" business had been "indicted on federal racketeering charges that included prostitution, credit card fraud, money laundering, police corruption and ties to the Gambino organized crime family." His lawyer, Alan Begner, was also Jewish. "Since 1982," noted the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, "Begner has carved a lucrative niche as a lawyer of adult entertainment establishments," representing about half of the 45 in metropolitan Atlanta. "I knock out laws," he explained to the newspaper. Begner's interest in strip joints began when another Jewish owner (Emmanual Isaacs of the "She Club") asked him to represent him. [RANKIN, B., 12-5-99, p. 2D]            The Associated Press further noted in 2001 that Gold Club owner Steven Kaplan (club manager: Norbert Calder) was      "accused of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing prostitutes      for celebrities. Atlanta's Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs      in the country, popular among convention-goers and visiting celebrities.         Federal investigators say it is also a high-priced brothel that pumps cash into      the Gambino crime family ... [The Federal indictment against Kaplan] says      Kaplan ordered more than 20 beatings of people who did not repay loans      at high rates of interest." [COURT TV, 4-2001]      The most famous "sex club" in history (prospering in the 1970s and 1980s before the AIDS epidemic) is probably Plato's Retreat, based in New York City. Its owner was also Jewish: Larry Levenson. As Jewish scholar David Allyn describes it:      "First of all, you have to picture the Ansonia Hotel, which is a late 19th century      wedding-cake of a building in the heart of the upper west side in New York. In      the basement of the Ansonia was Plato's Retreat, then the world's most famous      sex club. Men and women would stroll about the Ansonia lobby in nothing but      towels. In the club, they would have sex with possibly a dozen or so people      in a single night. Plato's Retreat represented the commercial version of what was      happening in people's apartments and living rooms across the country."      [BOOKMARK, 2000]        Green Bay, Wisconsin? George Tane, also Jewish, "was a bootlegger who controlled Green Bay, Wisconsin. After Prohibition, he owned all the houses of prostitution in the city." [ROCKAWAY, R., 1993, p. 214] Atlanta, Georgia? In 2001, Steven Kaplan, owner of the nude "Gold Club," faced a Federal indictment on counts of "loan sharking, money laundering and bribing police officers." He was also accused "of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing prostitutes for celebrities ... Atlanta's Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs in the country." [COURT TV, 4-30-2001] [See also evidence in this volume -- Mass Media 2 Chapter -- about prostitution rackets controlled by today's "Russian" mafia, which is largely Jewish in organization; Heidi Fleiss (the much-publicized, high-priced Jewish prostitution "madam" to Hollywood stars), famed Jewish prostitute Xaviera Hollander ("The Happy Hooker"), and details of enormous Jewish influence in the worlds of "smut" and pornography]        With the American public beginning to note the high Jewish representation in the prostitution trade; some journalists implied wider corruption. In the June 1909 issue of McClure's magazine, for instance, George Kibbe Turner wrote:         "Out of the Bowery and Red Light districts have come the new       development in New York politics -- the great voting power of the       organized criminals. It was a notable development not only for New       York, but for the country at large. And no part of it was more       noteworthy than the appearance of the Jewish dealer in women, a       product of New York politics, who has vitiated more than any other       single agency the moral life of the great cities of America in the past ten       years." [BELL, p. 187]        "It is an absolute fact," wrote Ernest Bell in his 1911 book about white slavery, "that corrupt Jews are now the backbone of the loathsome traffic in New York and Chicago. The good Jews know this and feel keenly the unspeakable shame of it." [BELL, p. 188] "The criminal instincts that are so often found naturally in the Russian and Polish Jew," wrote Frank Moss in a popular volume called American Metropolis (1897), "come to the surface in such ways as to warrant the opinion that these people are the worst element in the entire make-up of New York City ... A large proportion of the people of New Israel are addicted to vice." [FRIED, p. 55-56]        "Vice and crime did pervade the Lower East Side," remarks Albert Fried, "and no one knew it more keenly than its residents. The better part of wisdom, so far as they were concerned, was to keep the disgrace quiet, to avoid publicizing it." [FRIED, p. 59] Meanwhile, in the early 1900's the National Council of Jewish Women even had Yiddish-speaking volunteers working to keep new female immigrants at Ellis Island "out of the clutches of men (often Jewish) who would try to entice them into prostitution." [SCHNEIDER, p. 224]         By the early years of the twentieth century, large urban department stores had reputations "as breeding grounds for prostitution." In New York City, for example, Macy's fell under suspicion to some, in part for its proximity to a former red light district. In 1913, Percy Strauss, the Vice President of Macy's, hosted a "vice vigilante" group to investigate his store. "Strauss," notes William Leach, "no dour Puritan, had a personal interest in leading a campaign against vice. For one thing, as a German Jew and spokesman for the Jewish community, he had to disprove the charge -- widely made -- that immigrant Jewish women (and many of his own employees, therefore) were more likely than other women to be prostitutes." [LEACH, p. 117] By 1915 the Committee Against Vice (of which Strauss had conveniently become chairman) published a report that affirmed that Macy's was "normal." "On the other hand," says William Leach, "testimony in the 'secret reports' told a different tale.  Saleswomen, it was revealed, passed around pornographic cards and poems about themselves, talked openly about 'sex' and 'sex desire,' and 'gossiped about fairies,' as one investigator put it. Private accounts by other investigative reformers echoed this view, that things at Macy's and in other department stores were hardly 'normal' or 'decent.' 'The strongest temptation of girls in department stores,' warned one reformer, 'is not poverty but luxury and money.'" [LEACH, p. 118]        Although Jewish poverty was -- and is -- often argued as a major reason for their high international representation in such a vice, a 1914 League of Nations survey of 25 Jewish prostitutes in Buenos Aires showed that only 4 of them claimed to be poor before their new trade. Nine, however, stated that their family lives had been "immoral or abusive in some way." [BRISTOW, p. 95] (As Robert Rockaway notes about the dozens of members in Detroit's all-Jewish criminal Purple Gang, which was involved in everything from murder to prostitution: "[Purple Gang members] were not products of crushing poverty, broken homes, or widespread economic despair. Most of them had been raised in lower middle class households where the father had a steady, if not well-paying, job.") [ROCKAWAY, R., 2001, p. 113-]         And what, in complete dismissal of the facts of history, is the common Jewish perspective about the unabashed prominence of Jews in the "white slave trade?" This, in 1998, from Jewish scholar Gary Tobin in a popular Jewish newspaper:          "For those with a knowledge of history of 19th century anti-Semitic        propaganda, the idea that Jews are running "the white slave trade" is        nothing new. Cartoon like stereotypes of loathsome Jewish villains        trading on the lost virtue of non-Jewish maidens was standard material        for the Nazis and their precursors ... It took a sick mind to imagine that        Jews were running the world's oldest profession." [TOBIN,        Distinguished, p. 51]        Tobin was responding to a very disturbing article in the New York Times (January 11, 1998) which described the horrible situation that Slavic Gentile prostitutes face today, trapped in Israel. As the Times notes, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a resulting economic chaos, literally hundreds of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian women have been dispersed throughout the world, most entrapped in an international prostitution trade run by the "Russian mafia." (Although it is certainly inferred, what the Times article does not overtly mention is that a significant part of the Russian mafia is Jewish. See later chapter). Glenn Frankel, however, a Washington Post correspondent in Jerusalem, took the perspective in 1994 that "there was much talk about the Russian mafia muscling in [to Israel], although the police and most crime experts agreed that the brothels were almost entirely under the control of the Israeli mafia and that the Russians worked mostly as low-level managers or hookers." [FRANKEL, p. 175]        "Israel has become a routine destination for the global trafficking of women," noted Leonard Fein in a 1998 Jewish Bulletin,         "women coerced into prostitution. The thousand such women       brought into Israel annually derive principally from the countries       of the former Soviet Union, and the way they get to Israel is that       they are 'purchased,' each one costing between $10,000 and $20,000.       And they are, of course, expected to repay the cost to their masters       through what amounts to indentured servitude -- or, if you prefer the       simpler and more straightforward, slavery ... Some [are] as young       as 15, and even 12 ... Each woman earns between $50,000 and       $100,000 for her pimp. The turnover of the prostitution trade in       Israel comes to some $450 million a year." [FEIN, 1998, p. 21]        In a country of six million people, this averages about $75 a year paid to a pimp for every man, woman, and child in Israel. There are today 150 brothels and sex shops in Tel Aviv alone. [SILVER, E., 8-25-2000, p. 32]         In an interview with Marina, a Russian prostitute, the (Jewish) Forward noted in 1995 that there were nine or ten "Russian" prostitution rings in Israel. "Girls are regularly beaten to keep them obedient," Marina told the Forward, "... [The Israeli police are] regularly paid off with free visits to our girls. A reporter like you thinks you're picking up a stone from the road, but you might find you're digging into a mountain." [SHILLING, p. 5]  As a report by Israel's Women's Network noted in 1997:        "Every year, hundreds of women from the former Soviet Union      are lured to Israel, gaining entry by posing as immigrants, on      the promise of finding lucrative jobs, and then are lured into      prostitution by abusive pimps." [GROSS, N., 1997, p. 16]        In 1998, Hungary's Consul in Tel Aviv, Andrea Horvath complained that four Hungarian women "had allegedly met their Israeli employer in a Budapest discotheque. They were hired as dancers but were later forced to provide sexual services as well." [MTI, 3-20-98] In 2000, Robert Friedman, in talking about his book about the "Russian Mafia," noted Seimon Mogilevich, head of a major Jewish mobster network, noting him as "one of the world's biggest traffickers in women, Eurasian women." [PENKLAVA, M., 5-3-2000]        "Women are sold into the sex business in Israel for between $5,000 and $15,000," reported the Jerusalem Post in 1998, "while the pimps who buy them can earn between $10,000 and $50,000 a year per woman ... 2,000 women are brought to Israel from the CIS and forced by pimps to work as prostitutes. Many are brought here on false pretenses and held against their will."  As Ira Omait, head of the Haifa Emergency Shelter for Women told the Post, "We are fast heading in the direction of trade in minors for prostitution and slavery." [COLLINS, L., 12-15-98, p. 5]  Incredibly, as noted in a Jerusalem Post editorial in 1998, "According to the Women's Lobby [a women's group in Israel], part of the [prostitution] problem is that there is no law against slavery in Israel." [JERUSALEM POST, 1-13-98, p. 10]       "Poor Women of Ex-Soviet Union Lured Into Sex Slavery" headlined a 1998 Associated Press story. Women forced into prostitution in Israel, noted the article, were locked in rooms and provided only food and condoms. And Israeli law on the subject? In 1996 150 men were arrested for pimping or running brothels. Merely 21 cases went to trial, and no one was ever convicted of a crime. [LINZER, D., 6-13-98]  In 1998 an Israeli judge even ordered an insurance company to pay for a client's prostitution addiction:         "An Israeli insurance company has been ordered to pay 300,000      shekels ($80,000) to fund the prostitution habit of a man injured      in a car accident." [DEUTSCHE PRESSE-AGENTUR, 4-22-98]       The man claimed that since a 1993 car crash he couldn't form relationships with women and relied on the prostitution world.        The 1998 New York Times article noted that more than 1,500 Slavic prostitutes -- mostly from the Ukraine -- have been deported from Israel for residence infractions in the past three years. (Israeli oppression knows no end: "Unlike many countries, Israel does not pay airfare for deportees." [LINZER, D., 6-13-98])  Prostitution is not illegal in Israel and clients include foreign workers, "Israeli soldiers with rifles on their shoulders," business executives, and tourists. The Times noted that         "The networks trafficking women run east to Japan and Thailand, where       thousands of young Slavic women now work against their will as       prostitutes, and west to the Adriatic Coast and beyond ... The routes       are controlled by Russian gangs based in Moscow ... In Ukraine alone ...       as many as 400,000 women under 30 have gone in the past decade ...       Israel is a fairly typical destination ... Police officials [in Israel] estimate       that there are 25,000 paid sexual transactions every day. [This in a       country with a population of 6 million]. Brothels are ubiquitous ... Once       they cross the border [into Israel] their passports will be confiscated       [by pimps], their freedoms curtailed and what little money they have       taken from them at once ... The Tropicana, in Tel Aviv's bustling       business district, is one of the busiest bordellos. The women who work       there, like nearly all prostitutes in Israel today, are Russian. Their bosses,       however, are not. 'Israelis love Russian girls,' said Jacob Golan, who       owns this and two other clubs, '.... They are blonde and good looking       and different than us ... And they are desperate. They are ready to do       anything for money." [SPECTER, p. 1]         "The situation," wrote Jewish author David Weinberg in an 1998 article about prostitution in Israel entitled Not So Holy Land, "is enough to make you cry in despair, or vomit from shame." [WEINBERG, D., 1-18-98, p. 8]   11 THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD (Part 1) "I have frequently had hotheaded romantics assume that our family fled Russia to escape persecution. They seem to think that the only way we got out was by jumping from ice flow to ice floe across the Dnieper River, with bloodhounds and the entire Red Army in hot pursuit. No such thing. We were not persecuted and we left in a quite legal manner with no more trouble than one would expect from any bureaucracy, including our own. If that's disappointing, so be it." Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir. 1994, p. 19          Ask any non-Jewish American what his or her personal link is to the Roman era, the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and other epics of human history and he will tell you: nothing. He knows nothing about it. And he doesn't care. For such a late twentieth century American to reflect on his own roots back to, say, medievalism, is to look with the naked eye for Mars: it is a vague dot, reputed by others to exist, in the remotest distance. Indistinct. Unfathomable. Something eternally elusive, lost forever.         Few Americans can trace their family history more than a few generations, if that. Throughout anyone's own ancestral lineage, however, going back deeply into time, there obviously exists their own share of participants -- as both perpetrators and victims -- in great and minor wars, massacres, invasions, famines, epidemics, and other disasters of every kind. Presuming five procreative generations per century, exponentially, any human being alive today can theoretically claim direct genetic lineage to over a thousand ancestors back to 1800, over 37,000 people to 1700, over a million back to the year 1600, and over a staggering billion human beings back to 1400 (thirty generations). Whatever the mathematically realistic number, (and Jewish history claims 4,000 years) the deeper we go back into history, the more we must consider the veritable Milky Way of humanity that preceded us in direct ancestral lineage; people of every imaginable sort, and they all knew well the melancholic chords of human suffering, sometimes subtly, sometimes brutally. Every single one of them.          Today's Americans of French, British, Italian or other European descent find themselves today lumped together in the generic "white" American community. Their respective ancestries are stirred together, gone. Their European origins mean little to them; they are homogenized in the New World, their identities now expressed -- for better or worse -- in the icons of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, Babe Ruth, the hallowed Constitution, even McDonald's hamburgers, or other superficial national icons that ancestrally have nothing directly to do with them.        The typical American's alienation, disinterest, and lack of connection to distant history is not characteristic of modern Jews. On the contrary. A stone thrown in spite through a Jewish window in Italy in the fourteenth century is a stone thrown into Jewish hearts today. The actions against Jews by desperate thugs in Poland in the eighteenth century are dumped on Gentile doorsteps in our time by Jews who are still grieving, still embittered, still seeking redress. And when we turn, in more recent history, to the bestial deeds of Adolf Hitler to conquer the world, we find that Jews have pulled tightly in a circle to proclaim that everything sinister in the whole world malevolently labors against them, and them only.            Ultimately, it is a central article of modern Jewish faith -- reflecting both secular and religious attitudes, formed and hardened over the ages -- that to be Jewish is to be always maltreated for innocence by others.  Or, perhaps more correctly to Jewish eyes, as part of this innocence, being Jewish is to be a victim for the crime of being superior to their persecutors. This claim to superiority was originally religiously based, as God's "Chosen People" of Old Testament tradition. And this Jewish preoccupation -- as being victims of their self-presumed superiority -- has been passed down, religiously, over the ages (traditionally epitomized in Jewish pilgrimage to Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to bemoan their communal fate, manifest also in the likes of the volume Sefer Yosifon, anonymously compiled in the tenth century as a litany of Jewish complaints and miseries). In the aftermath of Hitler's atrocities against Jews during World War II, this world-view has come to define, more tightly than any other aspect of Jewish tradition -- and now highly politicized -- modern Jewish self-identity.                But is this true? From the evidence we have already seen, are Jews correctly depicted as history's consummate, incomparable, and innocent victims? Have Jews pre-eminently and collectively suffered more than all other human beings, "victims of centuries of persecution and bigotry?" [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 378] And for no reason?       Here's a typical view of the Eastern European Jewish past, by Judith Arcana, who discusses the roots of Jewish American poet Grace Paley's family to the Jews of Russia:       "One of Isaac's brothers, Russya, was killed in a workers demonstration       in 1905 ... In the wake of that death, probably spurred by the retaliatory       wave of pogroms, the family decided to leave Russia. Knowing the              unpredictability of royal whim, Natasha Gutseit, Isaac's widowed       mother, sent the young couple to America before the czar could change       his mind and snatch them back again." [ARCANA, J., 1993, p. 10]      Here Arcana, who omits the relevance of Jewish socialist agitation in Russia as a factor in their "persecution" [Elsewhere she notes that even both Paley's parents were socialists, enemies of the Tsarist regime -- p. 9], speculates that the Russian czar would have interest in "snatching" Jews back to Russia.           In the American context, "one commonly finds a sentence like this in many [Jewish] books or articles," says Joshua Rothenberg, "... 'Jews came to the shores of this country from the ghettos of the shtetlekh [Eastern European Jewish villages] as a result of the pogroms.' Each phrase in this sentence is untrue or oversimplified to the point of untruth. There were no ghettos in 19th century Eastern Europe (except in the metaphysical sense) ... And the pogroms were not the principal reason for emigration: proportionately more Jews came to the United States from Austrian-ruled Galicia -- where there were no pogroms -- than from Tsarist Russia." [ROTHENBERG, p. 3]         "It has been discovered," says Henry Feingold, "that religious persecution, even its physical manifestations of pogroms, rarely furnishes sufficient impetus for Jews to uproot themselves. Moreover, it cannot account for the thousands of Jews who chose to leave areas relatively free of religious persecution ... [FEINGOLD, p. 60] ... Historians have taken a closer look at the early acculturation process and have discovered that the highly touted ability of the Jewish family to withstand the stresses of transplantation have been overstated. New studies on Jewish vice and crime and criminality and the discovery of a relatively high divorce and desertion rate among immigrant Jews present a picture of a community paying a dear price for establishing itself." [FEINGOLD, p. 61]        "The lachry-morose recollection of the shtetl, which are still with us," says Daniel Bell, "fail to recall its narrowness of mind, its cruelty, especially to schoolchildren (to whom a whole series of memoirs, such as Solomon Ben Maimon's, testify), and its invidious stratification." [BELL, Reflections, p. 318] Little remembered is this oppression of Jews by Jews. "Prior to World War I," adds Rothenburg, "the Kehilah  [Jewish governing bodies] were ruled, in most cases, by an oligarchy of the rich and the [Jewish] clergy. Their excesses, especially in the area of indirect taxation (kosher meat, etc.) and the silencing of the protesting voices of the poor, are well-known and documented. The Kehilahs remained a source of bitter complaint for the majority of the Jewish population, which had no say in the conduct of their own community affairs." [ROTHENBURG, p. 5]       American Jews today hold dear many nostalgic "Fiddler on the Roof"-type myths about their Eastern European ancestors. As, however, Jewish author Ivan Kalmar notes       "A stalwart Jewish peasant, with a native wit and a naive religiosity,     ever sturdy in the face of unending adversity, he is the epitome of     Jewish nostalgia ... The Fiddler is so much part of the way we     think of our Jewish background ... The Fiddler image has some     basis in reality, but it is also very much part of a nostalgic     reconstruction of our past, an example of what anthropologists     call 'invention of tradition' ... Jewish authors [like Sholem     Aleichem, creator of Fiddler on the Roof] tried to create     stereotypes of the Jews that would identity them with less     wealthy groups who were looked at more favourably by the     greater society. Sholom Aleichem's Tevye [hero of Fiddler     on the Roof] is very much a Ukrainian peasant. To counter     the idea of the Jew as a 'parasite,' Sholom Aleichem presents     Tevye as a dairy farmer, who sells not the Gentile peasant's     products but his own. North American Jews have     enthusiastically accepted the validity of Sholom Aleichem's     Tevye as a metaphor for the Eastern European Jew of old ...     Where finally Tevye finally shows unique character, he     turns out to be a modern Jew. Where he is being a 'typical,'     folksy, traditional East European Jew, he resembles the     romanticized Ukrainian peasant ... Of course, there were     in reality Jewish peasants like Tevye, but compared to the     Slavs, the percentage of Jews who farmed was miniscule."     [KALMER, I., quoted by PRYTULAK, L., UKRAINIAN     ARCHIVES]        "Having ... turned their backs on Poland," notes Jewish scholar Victor Seidler about modern Jewish perceptions of Eastern European heritage, "it can be difficult for the second generation [of Jews in America] to recognize just how Polish their parents were. Things we learned to think of as 'Jewish' turn out to be Polish." [SEIDLER, V.J., 2000, p. 74]  "Indeed," notes George Mosse, "when the first German-Jewish painter, Mortiz Oppenheim, painted scenes from the ghetto shortly after emancipation, it was transformed, as we have seen, into a community permeated with German middle-class values." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 80]        Jewish author Howard Jacobson notes Jewish historic myth-making at an exhibition of photographs of Eastern European Jews at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Particularly troubling to him was the depiction of the stereotypically "studious Jew":        "Something is wrong with this exhibition. Something is wrong with      the way we modern Jews idealize a past we wouldn't touch with a      barge-pole if it were offered us again ... Why is Jewish study always      made to look so soulful in these sorts of photographs, so unrelieved,      so unvarious, so fucking miserable and desolating? What is it about      Jewish books that make absorption in them such an invariably      heart-rendering business? What a sell! How have the Jews done it,      how have we persuaded ourselves, but gentiles as well, that anguish      and lamentation and self-abnegation and bodylessness and pathos      attach inalterably and exclusively to our studies? You don't see      [St. Thomas] Aquinas looking into a book like that." [JACOBSON, H.,      1995, p. 192-193]         The distinguished Jewish historian, Salo Baron, of Columbia University, whose twelve-volume Social and Religious History of the Jews is the most extensive Jewish history by a single author in existence, argued a view that, post-Holocaust, has been swept to the wayside by modern Jewish discourse. His view was that Jewish suffering in the European Middle Ages, and throughout history, has been exaggerated. That is, that the Jews of Europe, as a group, in comparison to their Christian neighbors, actually had a better life in the Middle Ages, to the 20th century.  For all the claims of massacres and pogroms, according to surviving documents, the Jewish population actually grew more rapidly than the Gentiles around them. [LIBERLES, p. 42]  This accelerated in later centuries.  "The two and a half centuries from 1660 to 1914," says Baron, "the Jewish population grew numerically some fifteen times ... while mankind at-large increased by only 250 per cent, Europe by 350 per cent ..." [BARON, H and J.H., p. 50] This thesis, addressing later years, is supported by a non-Jewish scholar of the Ukraine, Orest Subtleny:              "Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the            Jews experienced a tremendous population rise. Between 1820 and            1880, while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by            87%, the number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank,            this rise was even more dramatic:  between 1844 and 1913 the number            of its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased            by 844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to            famines, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of            communal self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted            for this extraordinary increase." [SUBTLENY, p. 276]          Salo Baron argued that his people, the Jews, were so privileged, relative to non-Jews throughout the European Middle Ages, that with the coming of the Enlightenment era "emancipation" and "equality" amounted to "a net loss [to Jews] in status and lifestyle." [SCHORSCH, p. 383]  Elsewhere, he wrote that "it is likely ... that even the average medieval Jew, compared to his average Christian contemporary ... was the less unhappy and destitute creature -- less unhappy and destitute not only by his own consciousness, but even if measured by such objective criteria as standards of living, cultural amenities, and protection against individual starvation and disease." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 11]         "Throughout the Middle Ages," notes David Biale, "the Jews enjoyed considerable influence in many of the lands in which they lived  ... In addition to their interest Court politics, these Jews participated in political life in defense of Jewish interests." [BIALE, POWER p. 69] "The situation of the Jews in the first half of the Middle Ages," says Abram Leon, "was ... extremely favorable. The Jews were considered as being a part of the upper classes in society and their juridical position was not perceptibly different from that of the nobility." [LEON, p. 128]  "At least some of the Jewish dress of the Middle Ages," adds Biale, "such as the Jewish hat, originated out of choice rather than compulsion ... The yellow patch [worn by Jews] ... was not originally intended as an instrument for segregating and humiliating the Jews ... but to proclaim publicly that its wearer enjoyed official protection." [BIALE, POWER, p. 67]         One of the privileges Jews enjoyed throughout Europe until relatively modern history was that they didn't have to serve in the local military organizations. "During the continuous wars of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries," wrote Baron, " ... the Jews were neutral and suffered few losses. If they had been combatants they might have lost more than in all the pogroms." [LIBERLES, p. 42] Yet Medieval Jews were allowed the extremely significant privilege of carrying weapons, a privilege equal to knights and one to which all commoners (the overwhelming majority of the population) were forbidden. [GOLDBERG, p. 123]  Baron also noted that, while there were certainly Jews who suffered poverty, the surrounding Christian population was worse off. And if the Jewish ghettos were, as widely claimed, abject holes of enforced degradation, "is it not remarkable that the most typical Ghetto in the world, the Frankfurt Judengasse, produced in the pre-Emancipation period the greatest banking house in history?" [LIBERLES p. 45]        "The Jews," says Israel Shahak,        "in spite of all the persecution to which they were subjected, formed      an integral part of the privileged classes ... Jewish historiography,      especially in English, is misleading on this point inasmuch as it tends      to focus on Jewish poverty and anti-Jewish discrimination ... The      poorest Jewish craftsman, peddlar, landlord's steward, or petty cleric      was immeasurably better off than a serf [most of the non-Jewish      population]. This was especially true in those European countries      where serfdom persisted until the nineteenth century, whether in a      partial or extreme form: Prussia, Austria (including Hungary), Poland,      and the Polan lands taken by Russia. And it is not without significance      that, prior to the beginning of the great Jewish migration of modern      times (around 1889), a large majority of all Jews were living in those      areas and that their most important social function there was to      mediate the oppression of peasants on behalf of the nobility and      the Crown." [SHAHAK, p. 52-53]        Jews in Eastern Europe understood the people around them as, categorically, persecutors. And "the Jews saw their persecutors as an inferior race," noted World Zionist Organization President Nahum Goldmann,  "Most of my [physician] grandfather's patients [in Lithuania] were peasants. Every Jew felt ten or a hundred times the superior of these lowly tillers of the soil; he was cultured, learned Hebrew, knew the Bible, studied the Talmud -- in other words he knew that he stood head and shoulders above these illiterates." [GOLDMANN, 1978, p. 13]         "It would never have occurred to us," said one Jewish immigrant to the United States, "that the Gentile world [in Eastern Europe] was happier ... On the contrary, we considered our world happier and finer." "We thought they were unfortunate," says another, "We were above them, this was the feeling [towards peasants]." [MORAWSKA, p. 17] In the face of the commonly cherished belief among modern Jews that their brethren of Eastern Europe were terribly and uniformly impoverished, it is a fact that Jews were doing so well (relative to the non-Jews around them) that non-Jewish servants in Jewish households were common.         Apart from racist folk tales, Zborowski and Herzog note that most Jewish children in Eastern Europe learned fragments of the surrounding non-Jewish culture via the Gentile servants in their homes. "These impressions [of non-Jewish life]," the scholars write, "[were] available not only to the children of the rich, for [Jewish] women of modest circumstances who worked in a store or at the market often had the help of a [non-Jewish] peasant girl in the house." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 155] "[Jewish life] was certainly better than the life of the Russian peasant," remarks Howard Sachar. [SACHAR, p. 215] "We were luckier than most of our fellow-Jews in being able to afford 'servants,' if that is the real name for them," declares Chaim Weizmann, an immigrant from the "Pale" of Russia, an agitator for how bad Jews had it in his place of birth, and the first president of modern Israel, "... [My second servant] who outlived the first and was with us for something like thirty-five years, was a lovable peasant by the name of Yakim ... He had learned to sing, after a fashion, the Jewish national anthem, Hatikvah; and in moments of enthusiasm would cry out: 'Come, little ones, let us sing Tikvah!'" [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 22]     Elsewhere, Weizman adds: "The teachers and governing authorities of the schools within the Pale [an area of Russia] were typical Russian officials, and as such, not free from corruption. So the rich Jew would use his gold to pave the way for his boy to enter the school ... There were occasions when a rich Jew would hire ten non-Jewish candidates (at times rather oddly selected) to sit for the entrance examination at the local school, and thus make room for one Jewish pupil -- needless to say his own son or a protégé." [WEIZMAN, C., 1949, p. 31]          "Even when the Jewish common people were known to be desperately poor," adds Albert Lindemann, "as in Austrian Galicia or parts of the Jewish Pale of Settlement in tsarist Russia, their overall per capita wealth still seems to have been greater than that of non-Jews, mostly peasants, among whom they lived." [LINDEMANN, Esau's, p. 21] "On the whole," says sociologist Stephen Steinberg, "Eastern European Jews [prior to immigration to America in the late nineteenth century] were unquestionably poor, though decidedly better off than the surrounding peasant population." [STEINBERG, p. 97]        What, one wonders, is to be read between this relativity of being "poor?"  How poor could Jews have really been if they were "decidedly better off" than the non-Jewish peasants (who were most of the Eastern European population), even hiring Polish servants for their homes?          Another part of Jewish popular mythology is that the Jews were forced against their will into ghettos in Europe. The widely-believed accusation that Jews were forcibly segregated, particularly into ghettos, is a distortion of historical fact. In the Middle Ages most Christian towns themselves had walls, gates, and locks for protection from outsiders. The enclosed Jewish ghetto was, in origin, a Jewish construction, conceived for both protection and self-segregation from the taint of non-Jewish ways.        "In the thirteenth century," writes Max Weinrich, "segregated living quarters for Jews were made compulsory. The fact of the matter is that separate Jewish streets had existed all along ... If the Jews lived together long before segregated living quarters were imposed upon them, then their segregation must have been voluntary. It was. Living apart, no matter how bizarre it may appear in the light of present day concepts and attitudes, was part of the 'privileges' accorded to the Jews in conforming with their own wishes." [WEINRICH, p. 105]       As president Nachum Goldmann of the World Zionist Organization notes:        "It is wrong to say that the goyim forced the Jews to separate themselves      themselves from other societies. When the Christians defined the      ghetto limits, Jews lived there already." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 66]         For centuries Jews isolated themselves from their surrounding non-Jewish neighbors except, of course, for the necessities of commerce. "Had the Jews not possessed a deep-rooted conviction of the truth of their religion," says Jacob Katz, "and had they not actively sought to maintain their separate identity, the tendencies inherent in medieval conditions would inevitably have ended by breaking down the social barrier erected by Jewish ritual." [KATZ, Ex, p. 40]  "In Orthodox Judaism," wrote anthropologist Maurice Fishberg in 1911, "a Jew must not eat at the same table with a Gentile, nor any food prepared by the latter; must not eat or drink from dishes, with spoons, forks, knives, etc. which have been used by a Gentile; must not drink wine with the container of which has been touched by a Christian, Mohammedan, or heathen ... I know Jews to feel nauseated and even vomit when told that the food they have consumed was not kosher. ... It was the intense tribal spirit engendered by his religion which kept the Jew from intimate contact with the Gentiles, more than the laws promulgated by Christian states for the purpose."  [FISHBERG, p. 536]        "We [Jews] formed the ghetto ourselves," wrote the Zionist leader Vladamir Zabotinsky, " ... voluntarily, for the same reason for which Europeans in Shanghai established their separate quarter, to be able to live their own way." [KORBANSKI, p. 8] "The Ghetto was rather a privilege than a disability," notes J. O. Hertzler, "and sometimes was claimed by the Jews as a right when its demolition was threatened." [HERTZLER, p. 73] Boas Evron cites the work of fellow Israeli scholar, Yehezkel Kaufmann, in noting that          "the popular assumption that external anti-Jewish pressures forced        group identify and exclusivity on the Jews is unconvincing, since        historical evidence shows that Jewish exclusivity and aloofness        preceded outside hostility and were thus its cause, not its result ...        Jewish communities were always borne by host societies ... They        never shared in political, military, administrative, or technological        responsibilities." [EVRON, p. 53]        In articles in 1928 and 1932, Cecil Roth, one of the foremost Jewish scholars of his day, set out to debunk the Jewish myths of incessant persecution by non-Jews through the ages. "In the first place," wrote Roth, ".... the Jew has always tended to regard as a martyr all persons who died at Gentile hands ... even if he died in a drunken brawl ... All those [Jews] who met a violent end, no matter under what circumstances, were included under the head of martyrs in the Jewish popular consciousness and recollection." [ROTH, Most, p. 136-137]        This martyr tradition and schema has even been outrageously used, quite the same, with the identical religious base, in Orthodox Jewish messianic political quarters in our own day. Baruch Goldberg, the American-born Orthodox Israeli doctor who murdered 29 Arabs with an automatic weapon this decade as they prayed in a Hebron mosque, and who was subsequently beaten to death, was proclaimed by some Jews to be kadosh. (This word is commonly translated as meaning "holy;" it also has connotations meaning "separate" or "apart.") "A Jew who is killed because he is a Jew," wrote Dov Leor (a rabbi for the messianic Gush Emunim organization) about Goldberg's violent death, "must certainly be called ... a holy martyr ... without investigating their previous conduct." [LEOR, p. 61] "Baruch Goldstein was the greatest Jew alive," declared a Jerusalem teacher, Samuel Hacohen, "not in one way, but in every way ... There are no innocent Arabs here, and thank God that one Jewish hero reminded us that it had become almost legal to kill Jews in the street. He is the only one who could do it, the only one who was 100 percent perfect. He was no crazy ... Killing isn't nice, but sometimes it is very necessary." Rabbi Yaacov Perin also announced at Goldberg's funeral that "One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail." [BROWNFELD, A., 3-99, p. 85]        A 1908 pamphlet, notes Cecil Roth, was widely circulated in the Jewish community under the title, Jews Hanged or Burned Alive in Rome.... Because They Refused to Change Their Faith. Of the hanged Jews listed, all but one were in fact executed for specific crimes, a harshness rendered no differently to any other people of past eras.  "This instance," says Roth, "... is symptomatic of the attitude which Jewish historiography has consistently adopted. Any popular attack or any governmental persecution in which Jews were victims is set down outright as an expression of anti-Semitic sentiment."         In another example, in 1278, on charges of money clipping [skimming gold or silver content from coinage], 267 Jews were hanged in London. This punishment was not merited out to Jews as Jews, but to those who were disproportionately "in possession of the greater amount of ready money." Those who accumulated money in the Jewish money-lending and usury era happened to be overwhelmingly Jews, but also included a lesser number of Christian goldsmiths and such who were similarly arrested and executed. "What seems at first blush," says Roth, "[to be] an act of sheer persecution appears in a closer examination one of primitively sharp justice." [ROTH, p. 137]        In the early years of Christianity, in Alexandria (of today's Egypt), attacks upon Jews rendered in Jewish historical consciousness as acts of anti-Semitism were really what Roth says today would be called "an interracial riot." [ROTH, p. 138]        Roth underscored the precarious existence of all peoples' lives in the Middle Ages:         "The modern reader frequently fails to realize that, generally speaking,        life in the Middle Ages was not secure. For every section of the        population the probabilities of meeting a violent death were high, even        in times of comparative peace. Country people were continually subject        to the onslaught of bandits or of lawless barons, as well as the        marchings and counter-marchings of armed forces. [Even] city dwellers        ... [ran] the risk of sack and wholesale murder. The whole of medieval,        and a great part of modern, history is studded with instance of the sort:        the devastation of Attila, the Scourge of God; the ravaging of the Vexin        by William the Conqueror; the sack of a score of German cities during        the Thirty Years War. There were frequently cases when only a minority        of the population survived, the vast majority being piteously massacred.        These events and their like should be borne in mind when one considers        the vicissitudes of any particular racial or religious minority. The scarlet        of Jewish persecution does not stand out on a ground of virginal white.        [ROTH, p. 138]        In medieval Poland, says Bernard Weinyrb, "In an epoch and a country where most of the time people were in danger of attacks by Tatars and Turks, of wars, soldiers, and robber gangs on the roads, insecurity became the normal way of life for people who had never known anything different." [WEINRYB, p. 159]        The miseries caused by the sack of Rome in 1527, Christian crusades against Muslim-controlled Jerusalem in 1096, Leon in 1197, Malaga in 1487, Naples in 1494, Padua in 1509, Tunis in 1535, or "a hundred other occasions" were at least equivalent tragedies to Jewish descriptions of "Jewish martyrdom." [ROTH, p. 138]          "It is probably the fact," says Roth, "that in the course of the medieval wars and disorders, the Jews normally suffered more than any other section of the population. This was not necessarily, however, because they were Jews, but simply because they belonged to the more opulent class ... on the capture of a town (by an army), the first objective of the assailants would naturally be the streets of the goldsmiths and the street of the Jews." [ROTH, p. 139]        Likewise, Jews  -- perceived as affluent and exploitive outsiders to native populaces --suffered the same way at the hands of mobs as did Italian traders in London in 1439 and 1455, and at the "Hansa Steelyard" in 1494. Jews were also subject to random "acts of rapine," like any Christian -- or other community -- of the Middle Ages, as happened in the Jewish part of Asolo, in northern Italy, in 1547. Perpetrators in that case were punished by the central government.        While Jews were sometimes required to wear special badges of identification in the European Middle Ages, it was a norm of discrimination for the era. Muslims also had to wear such marks of "outsider" distinction in Christian societies. Conversely, in the Muslim world, Christian communities were also faced with such laws and legislation of discrimination, sometimes even in clothing. And of course Jewish law itself has various nomenclature and attendant rules for treatment of various categories of non-Jews as second-class, or worse, people. (Even in modern Israel, Arabs are discriminatorily noted as such on national identity cards).        "Some current histories," said Roth in 1932, "appear to assume the Jews were sole victims of the Spanish Inquisition ...  Strictly, this is so far from the truth that a precisian might retort that [the Jews] never came under the [Inquisition's] scope, save in exceptional cases, since the activities were essentially confined to [Christian] apostates and renegades." [ROTH, p. 141] Those "Jews" who risked trouble were those among the Marranos/Conversos, who disingenuously represented themselves as Christians and were thereby subject to the same scrutinization for religious conformance as that directed upon any other Christian. Widely targeted were Christian heretics, not the Judaic faith. As M. Hirsh Goldberg notes,        "Contrary to popular belief, Jews who openly remained Jews were      not tortured or killed as part of the inquisition proceedings. The      Inquisition was specifically authorized by the Church to root out      heresy among Catholics, so only heretical Christians and Jewish      converts to Christianity accused of secretly reverting to Judaism      were prosecuted." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1979, p. 16]           "[T]he Holy Inquisition in Portugal," notes Arnold Wiznitzer, "did not persecute Jews who never had been Catholics. Only persons of Jewish origin who had been born Catholic, or those, born Jews and baptised later, who had deserted Catholicism openly or secretly were subject to the Inquisition since they were considered as being apostates." [WIZNITZER, A., 1957, p. 64]     "The Inquisition," notes Joachim Prinz,      "is considered one of the many traumatic experiences of Jewish history, and as      such, it is always spoken of with dread. But, of course, the Inquisition had no      power over Jews at all. It was established for the purpose of dealing with      Christians who had deviated from their faith. The Marranos who were called      into account for their secret practices appeared not as Jews but as allegedly      heretical Christians ... No unconverted Jews were ever called to the tribunals."      [PRINZ, J., 1973, p. 44]          "Living under the Inquisition," adds Goldberg in another volume,        "caused Jews to make some curious adjustments, as can be seen      in the family of Manoel Pereira Coutinho, who had five daughters --      all nuns in a convent in Lisbon -- while in Hamburg his sons were      living openly as Jews." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 109]        "All Jews know about the Inquisition," wrote David Goldstein, a Jewish apostate, "but of Jewish [-perpetrated] injustices they know hardly anything." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117]  "The name of Torquemada," wrote Jewish author John Cournos in 1937, "the loathsome Grand Inquisitor, was a byword among us children, as it was in other Jewish households." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 117] This view that the Inquisition somehow centered on Jews still remains widespread in the community today, as proclaimed in a 1990 issue of the American Jewish Congress magazine devoted to the subject of Jewish identity.  Ignoring the Christian target groups of the heresy trials, Zvi Bekarman remarked that "The Inquisition is brought to us as one more proof of the suffering of the Jews." [BEKERMAN, p. 14]        Despite all the Jewish lamenting of pogroms and massacres upon their ancestors, the Catholic-Protestant massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in the 1500's was as spectacularly horrible as any Jewish medieval misfortune to that time. Nor, adds Roth, "was persecution of the Jews in its acutest form [ever] systematic." (The later World War II Holocaust scenario, which of course was systematic, will be addressed later at length in its own chapter).        Jews were often blamed for the epidemic of the Plague and the Black Death that swept Europe in the Middle Ages (while Jewish communities were relatively free from the disease, [HERTZLER, p. 95] but such causal connection to medieval minds was not to the detriment of Jews only. Non-Jews were also accused of, and murdered for, causing the Plague in Palermo in 1526, in Germany in 1530, 1545, and 1574, at Casale Monferrat in 1536, and other places throughout Europe. In Breslau, in 1349 sixty Jews were executed for having caused a town fire, "but," says Roth, "when one recalls that 300 years afterwards the Great Fire of London was [blamed upon] the Papists, one realizes that the Jews had no monopoly on unjust accusations." [ROTH, p. 144]        Jewish communities themselves had irrational superstitions to scapegoat others and to explain disease and other misfortunes. Says Zborowski and Herzog:         "If an epidemic strikes the shtetl, prayers are, of course, offered up.        Other steps consist chiefly in marrying off two orphans or cripples,        so that God will be mollified by the good deeds of the worshippers...        Whenever there was an epidemic in the shtetl they used to blame it        on peoples' sins. They tried to find the guilty ones and expose them        to the public ... Another method for getting rid of an epidemic was        to get two orphans if possible and to marry them off on the cemetery         ..."  [ZBOROWSKI, p. 224]         Throughout Europe, "it was.... dangerous to be an old woman in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries"' when witch hunts put 100,000 unfortunates on trial for sorcery in Germany alone. [ROTH, p. 145] Some 30,000 such victims are reputed to have been burned alive or torn to pieces in England, and over a two hundred year period in Scotland, an average of two hundred "witches" were burned at the stake each year. Throughout Europe gypsies were sporadically singled out for persecution and blame, and various Christians and other non-Jews from time to time were executed for the charge of cannibalism.        Lest modern Jews feel too smug in the brutal superstitions of the ancient Gentiles, the Talmud itself notes an instance when eighty Jewish women were hung at one time at the instigation of a fellow Jew, "Simeon the Son of Shetach," in Ashkelon for the crime of being witches.  [HARRIS, p. 174] When coming across a witch, the Talmud recommends that the passerby "should mutter thus, 'May a potsherd of boiling dung be stuffed in your mouths, you ugly witches!'" [HARRIS, p.189] Some rabbis even opined that a witch may be either male or female, but "most women are witches." [HARRIS, p. 190] Even "the best among women," said Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, "is a witch." [HARRIS, p. 191]         The Talmud also details the various manners of stoning, strangling or beheading Jewish "blasphemers and idolaters." Such criminals were also buried up to their knees in manure, and their mouths forced open by strangling. Molten lead could then be poured "into his bowels." [HARRIS, p. 170]        The persistence of the Jewish mythology of unique persecution, says Roth, has much to do with their longevity and communal dispersal throughout Europe and the world. The persecution of the Albigensians of France, for instance, is known by hardly anyone today because their destruction was singularly localized, they were completely wiped out, and there is no one interested in heralding their suffering. Likewise the Waldenses of France, and various others. "The Jews," notes Roth, "are an inseparable element in the history of every country in Europe ... and thus have an advantage, as it were, of a superior publicity service; and no historian, even a Gentile, could fail to be impressed by this insistent, pathetic, unique record." [ROTH, p. 147]         Roth goes to the essence of the Jewish mythos of communal agony:        "In the classical period ... with its holocausts and heroes, the lot of      the Jewish people was much the same as that of the ancient Britons,      the Iberians, and the Gauls; and the leaders of those peoples' struggles      for freedom deserve to be remembered as much as the Jewish martyrs      who are commemorated each year on the ninth of Ab. But this is far      from the case. Generally, they are forgotten, save by a few industrious      antiquarians; and they have no place today in the proud memories of      any people. The reason is very plain. The races for which they fought      are long since dead. The Jews are still alive." [ROTH, p. 147]        These insightful observations were written by Roth in 1932. The rise of German fascism and its institutionalized inhumanity was still only rising. Yet we can see here in Roth's unusually honest overview of Jewish history the broader, foundational context for current Jewish thinking about themselves to this day. Of course the so-called Holocaust of World War II has completely solidified the traditional view of the persecution of Jewry and obliterated Roth's broadly realistic brand of Jewish historiography.        To a now militant Jewish polemic, their community's European experience in World War II merely confirms the Jewish mythos of unique and eternal victimization and martrydom. It is monolithic, irrefutable, immutable, and immoveable:  Jews argue they were uniquely "singled out." There will be a great deal more about the Holocaust and its part in Jewish identity in its own chapter. For immediate purposes, it is enough here to recognize the historical context for modern Jewry's fundamental self-conception: that of humankind's foremost -- and superlative -- victims, passed along as part of religious faith century after century, reified in Jewish cosmology at every turn.         Roth's early 1930's view, in the context of rising Nazi fascism and worry about anti-Semitism spreading in America, has been completely muted in our own day, and Jewish apologetics about Jewish identity and history began rising in direct proportion to the gravity of the growing German threat. By 1941, a Jewish author, Oscar Janowsky, reviewed -- in the same Jewish journal that earlier published Roth's critiques of the Jewish victimization cosmology -- two new books that championed Jewish history. Each book was authored by well-respected Jewish scholars. One of them was Cecil Roth. Janowsky's title for his article was "Apologetics for Our Time." In the context of German Nazism, even Roth was swallowed by the demands for Jewish positive image-making against all and any self-critical Jewish commentary. "Both authors," wrote Janowsky, "would readily concede that the purpose [of these books] was not to write 'history' of the accepted variety. Our age requires apologetics, and this sad need has been filled by the authors." [JANOWSKY, p. 225] This "sad need" was so great that a 1951 volume entitled The Hebrew Impact on Western Civilization even stated bluntly in its very first sentence: "This book is a book of propaganda." [RUNES, D., p. vii]         In 1947, Milton Steinberg wrote a volume, Basic Judaism, explaining the faith for both Jews and "those many non-Jews who happen to be curious about Judaism." [STEINBERG, p. viii] Here Steinberg's apologetic, in doing his part to engender a positive Jewish public image (like so many others to our own day), was grossly untrue: "Judaism is totally unaware of race. Though the Tradition loves to trace the House of Israel to the Patriarchs, blood descent is no factor in its calculations." [STEINBERG, M., p. 99]        With World War II and the disaster that befell humanity -- and the Jews within it -- looming soon over Europe, this apologetic methodology (as well as a resultant Jewish militancy) about Jewish history has continued in a rarely interrupted straight line to the present day. (Examine, for example, the gushingly laudatory content of the popular 1999 bestseller by a non-Jewish author: The Gifts of the Jews). In fact, the mythology of perpetual Jewish victimhood was well along as an exploitable tool by American Jews and Zionists as a political devise at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, where Jewish woe centered upon anti-Jewish riots and attacks in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia. "Some of the atrocities [against Jews] initially reported," writes Albert Lindemann, "were exaggerated or simply did not occur, and some Jews made false claims in the hope of getting relief money from Western Europe and America." [LINDEMANN, p. 154]           Many of the exaggerations were also created to enhance Zionist propaganda to garner sympathy and support for a Jewish state in Israel.  An important target of Zionist propaganda and historical exaggeration was American Jews. "You have to speak to American Jews in superlatives," remarked Nachum Goldmann, for many years the president of both the World Zionist Organization and World Jewish Congress, "Cool, balanced, analysis makes no impression on them, and exaggeration is almost indispensable." [GROSE, p. 162] Elsewhere, in 1978 he noted that his Zionist group alone had spent "millions of dollars on propaganda." [GOLDMANN, N., 1978, p. 63]        A pioneer strategist in the use of the accusation of anti-Semitism as a propaganda device was Theodore Herzl, a Viennese journalist and playwright, the man most credited for the successful promotion of the Jewish "return to Israel" Zionist ideology. Herzl "understood the true nature of propaganda," notes former Israeli diplomat, Moshe Leshem," of the emotional appeal." "In truth ... noise amounts to a great deal," Herzl noted in his diary, "A sustained noise is in itself a noteworthy fact, world history is nothing but noise." [LESHEM, p. 85]        Among the most reported Russian anti-Jewish pogrom sites at the turn of the century was Kishinev. (This incident led to the creation of the Jewish lobbying agency, the American Jewish Committee in 1903). [HALKIN, p. 54] Chaim Weitzmann, another Zionist activist and the first President of the state of Israel, wrote to a member of the wealthy Jewish Rothschild family (instrumental in funding early Jewish settlements in pre-Israel Palestine):           "Eleven years ago ... I happened to be in the cursed town of Kishinev          ... In a group of about 100 Jews we defended the Jewish quarter with         revolvers in our hand, defended women and girls ... We slept in the           cemetery -- the only safe place and we saw 80 corpses brought in,         mutilated dead...”          "Thus Weizmann," says Albert Lindemann, "reports that he personally saw eighty mutilated corpses in a single place, when the death toll for the entire city was later generally recognized to be forty-five. But there is another problem with the account he provides. It is pure fantasy. Weizmann was in Warsaw at the time." [LINDEMANN,  p. 164]        The long -- and continuing -- Jewish defamation of Poles and Poland, as part of a broad Zionist propaganda policy and secular Jewish victimization theology, has been going on for a long time. For all western Jewry's complaints about massive Polish violence against Polish Jewry, in 1919 Hugh Gibson, the United states minister to Warsaw, wrote that, "It is ridiculous as we are told about every incident where the Jew gets the worst of it and a great many incidents that never happened at all. These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes." Two prominent and powerful American Zionists -- Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (both United States Supreme Court justices) -- confronted Gibson to complain about his dispatches to Washington. "They complained that my reports on the Jewish question had gone round the world and undone their work [in proclaiming enormous violent Polish anti-Semitism]," said Gibson,          "... They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against        the Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were          and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it ... [They] seemed        to be interested in agitation for its own sake rather than in learning the        situation ... Their efforts were concentrated on an attempt to bully me        into accepting the mixture of information and misinformation which        they have adopted as the basis of their propaganda ... Felix handed        me a scarcely veiled threat that the Jews would try to prevent my        confirmation by the Senate [then pending] ... They made it clear to        me that they do not care to have any diagnosis made that is not based        entirely on Jewish statements as to conditions and events and doesn't        accept them at face value. If they are not ready to go into the question        honestly I don't see how they can hope to accomplish anything for their        people... [American Jews have embarked upon] a conscienceless and        cold-blooded plan to make the condition of the Jews in Poland so bad        they must turn to Zionism for relief." [GROSE, p. 94-95]         In 1923 the United States Vice Consul to Warsaw, Monroe Kline, added that "It is true that the Pole hates the Jew ... The Jew in business oppresses the Pole to a far greater extent than does the Pole oppress the Jew in a political way." [GROSE, p. 95]         More recently, Leonard Fein notes Jewish fears of assimilation that could erase them as a people, and the emotional cloud that informs Jewish perception of the facts of history:         "Deep down -- and sometimes not so very deep -- we [Jews] still       believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to       keep us a people, and that we have not the fibre to withstand       the lures of a genuine open society. It is seduction, not rape,       that we fear the most, and nowhere is the seducer more blatant,       less devious, than here in America." [in SILBERMAN, p. 165]         The Jewish limited historical memory (and corresponding embracement of legend) and its singular focus on its martyrological tradition has also been systematically exploited to buttress Zionist reasoning for the necessity of the modern state of Israel: a home for Jews from worldwide anti-Semitic persecution. The lengths some Jews will go to enforce -- and create -- the martyrological/persecution tradition for political purposes was noted by Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former CIA agent stationed in Iraq in the early years after the foundation (1948) of today's Israel. A few months before his arrival to that country in 1950, a bomb went off "outside a Passover gathering," underscoring Arab hostility to Jews and encouraging 10,000 to move to the new Israeli state. Eveland wrote that           "Just after I arrived in Baghdad, an Israeli citizen had been recognized         in the city's largest department store: his interrogation led to the         discovery of fifteen arms caches brought into Iraq by an underground         Zionist movement. In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American         and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the United         States Information Service Library and in synagogues. Soon         leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel ... Although         the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that         the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-         American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground         Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab         terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the         Zionists had 'rescued' really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish         population."  [FEURLICHT, p. 231]        Aware from personal experience about the facts in such matters, in 1998, an Iraqi-born Jew and former Zionist activist, Naeim Giladi, wrote that he wanted "to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews." [GILADI, p. 1]        In 1975 Jewish CBS reporter Mike Wallace journeyed to another Arab nation, Syria, to do a 60 Minutes program on the country. Years later, he noted his own biases (about alleged Syrian anti-Semitism) that were destroyed when he actually went to Damascus:        "[Before I went to Syria] I had a strong impression of what life was      like for [Jews] there. From Jewish friends in America, I had heard      the same stories over and over again: The Jews in Syria were confined      to ghettos and were constant victims of persecution. A tight curfew was      imposed on them and they were not allowed to have telephones or      drives automobiles. Nor were they permitted to worship in synagogues      of study in their traditional language, Hebrew. In short, the Syrian Jews      were forced to live as prisoners within their own country." [WALLACE/      GATES, 1984, p. 282]         All this, as Wallace soon learned upon visiting Syria, was complete nonsense. Jews owned cars; Jews had classes in Hebrew. Although the Jewish community was under close surveillance by the Assad regime, Wallace is careful to note that so was everyone in that police state. The CBS reporter interviewed a variety of Jews in the Arab country. Speaking to a Jewish teacher, Wallace notes his surprise to her response about the myths he had heard about Syrian anti-Semitism :        "Then I mentioned all the stories I had heard about how badly the      Jews were treated in Syria, and when I asked her where she thought      they came from, she replied in an almost malevolent tone: 'I think      that it's Zionist propaganda.'" [WALLACE, M., 1984, pl. 285]        Cecil Roth, in his overviews of Jewish history with its attendant polemics and apologetics (let alone some of the fraudulent escapades of modern Zionism), argued that the continued suppression of an honest evaluation of the Jewish past could come back to haunt them:          "By suppression we play into the hand of the anti-Semite, who may one         day make capital out of the innocent humanity we have chosen to         ignore. But, above all, by repression we are faithless to the most sacred         charge of history, which is the pursuit of truth." [ROTH, p. 423]   12 THE JEWISH COSMOLOGY OF VICTIMHOOD (Part 2) "I also tried to avoid becoming uncomfortably hooked on anti-Semitism as the main problem in the world. Many Jews I knew divided the world into Jews and anti-Semites, nothing else. Many Jews I knew recognized no problem anywhere, at any time, but that of anti-Semitism ... Such is the blindness of people that I have known Jews who, having deplored anti-Semitism in unmeasured tones, would, with scarcely a breath in between, get on the subject of African-Americans and promptly begin to sound like a group of petty Hitlers. And when I pointed this out and objected to it strenuously, they turned on me in anger. They simply could not see what they were doing. I once listened to a woman grow eloquent over the terrible way in which Gentiles did nothing to save the Jews of Europe. 'You can't trust Gentiles,' she said. I let some time elapse and then asked suddenly, 'What are you doing to help the blacks in their fight for civil rights?' 'Listen,' she said, 'I have my own troubles.' And I said, 'So did the Gentiles.' But she only stared at me blankly. She didn't get the point at all." Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov. A Memoir, 1994, p. 20, 21                                   For nearly fifteen centuries in their diaspora, after the Jewish/Roman historian Josephus, the Jewish community taught and re-taught only its religious dogma and martyrological mythos to define its past, present, and future. Until the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, the Jewish ghettos were filled with people cloistered away under rabbinical blinders. Jewish "history" was all history, and it was entirely framed in the religiously-based conventional framework for understanding the world: Jewish exceptionality, Jewish martyrology, and an apocalyptic vision entwined in Jewish suffering in search of atonement. [LOPATE, p. 306] As Jacob Neusner notes:        "What strikingly characterizes the imagination of the archaic Jew is the centrality      of Israel, the Jewish people in human history, the certainty that being Jewish is the      most important thing about oneself, and that Jewishness, meaning Judaism, was      the dominant aspect of one's consciousness." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 62]          Simon Dubnov, a prominent and well-respected Jewish historian, notes that Jews were so self-isolated from the non-Jews around them that for centuries their own history was merely the recycled meta-commentaries about their seminal myths of Chosen People victimhood:         "Talmudic literature (including the Midrashim) ... hardly contained any        material concerning social dynamics which is necessary for history in        the true sense. The leaders of the nation that was deprived of its        kingdom seemed to have lost interest in the events of the world        around them ... The historian is greatly distressed when, in the scores        of volumes of talmudical literature, he finds merely vague hints at events        of the first five centuries of the Christian era, and searches in vain for        chronological data. He has a sense of shame for the nation ... which...        lost its ability to perpetuate its experiences, even in simple chronicles...        The one-sidedness of the Jewish sources, which illuminated only the        spiritual side of life, created a false historical perspective." [DUBNOV,        p. 436-438]          Robert Goldenberg notes that, in Jewish tradition,         "great rabbinic leaders ... became both disembodied bearers of a       an elaborate legal tradition and also heroes of a marvelously rich       tradition of legend ... From the historian's point of view, the Talmud       thus becomes a terribly frustrating book. It is rich with stories that       may -- or may not -- reflect the way certain events happened, and it       is full of legal discussions that may -- or may not -- report the actual       content of early rabbinic scholarly activity. Everything is fascinating,       everything is potentially an open window on the past, but nothing       can be trusted." [GOLDENBERG, R., 1984, p. 157]         "Jews have suffered and Christians have suffered [throughout history]," wrote Rabbi Richard Singer, "Mankind has suffered. There is no group with a monopoly on suffering and no human beings which have experienced hate and hostility more than any other. I must say, however, that it is my impression that Jewish history has been taught with a whine and a whimper rather than a straightforward acknowledgement that man practices his inhumanity on his fellow human beings." [ZUKERMAN, p. 66]         "[A] disability for the Jews in modern times," says Barnet Litvinoff, "has been their own obscurantism. If all the questions of how to live were to be answered only in the wisdom of the Talmud, there could be no intellectual explorations, and therefore no progress." [LITVINOFF, p. 10]  "[Rabbis] had cut off [the Jewish community] from the community of nations," wrote Bernard Lazare in 1894 about the Jewish ghetto mentality, "They had made of it a sullen recluse, a rebel against all laws, foreign to all feeling fraternity [with others], closed to all beautiful, noble, and generous ideas; they had made of it a small and miserable nation, soured by isolation, brutalized by a narrower education, demoralized and corrupted by an unjustifiable pride." [LAZARE, p. 14] "The Eastern European Jews," notes Raphael Patai, "(with a few very notable exceptions) considered interest in all realms of non-Jewish intellectual endeavor as un-Jewish and therefore prohibited. Even the readings of books other than the Bible, the Talmud, the codes, and the Midrashim was strictly forbidden, and has remained so to this day in those circles in which the Eastern European Yeshiva tradition survives." [PATIA, R., 1971, p. 294]        "Jews lived with memory, so that redemption might be hastened," adds Stephen Whitfield, "but they did not live with history. The rabbis ... made little effort to record the history of their own post-Biblical era ... The first post-medieval attempt at a history of the Jews was written by a gentile, Jacques Basnage ... Only ... under the impact of modernization … could Jews ... wrest meaning from Jewish life and identity. [WHITFIELD, p. 29-30]        Basnage's 17-volume work, published between 1706 and 1711, has been called by one twentieth-century Jewish reviewer "the basis for the science of Jewish history; and though his work was far from perfect, it remained the best for a century to come." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 212]       Although Jewish history usually highlights Christian intolerance and the periodic burnings of the Talmud, the earliest printings of even this religious tract were accomplished with substantial Christian support. As M. Hersch Goldberg notes:        "Pope Leo X, who reigned from 1513 to 1521, encouraged the printing      of the first complete edition of the Talmud. Under his patronage, fifteen      volumes of the Babylonian Talmud were printed in Venice beginning in      1519 ... Another Christian played an important part in preparing that      historic edition of the Talmud. The printer Daniel Bomberg (whose name      may sound Jewish, but who was a Christian) had set up his press in      Venice in 1516. He devoted great care and attention in printing the      Talmud ... Seemingly fascinated with Jewish literature, Bomberg is      said to have done more to spread Jewish learning than any other      printer of his time ... Over the years, Bomberg printed approximately      two hundred books of Jewish interest." [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976,      p. 210-211]           The Talmud itself, of course, is not history, but religious polemic. "Memory of the past," says Yosef Yerushalmi, "was always a central component of Jewish experience; the historian was not its primary custodian." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 30] "The [Israelite] prophet," notes Old Testament scholar John Allegro, "saw Yahweh [the Israelite God] as a cosmic deity, lord of the heavenly hosts and forces of nature, but at the same time still the special god of Israel, a tribal deity whose main interest was the welfare of his Chosen People. Thus it followed that whatever the grand strategy in the Creator's mind, it involved the destiny of the Jews, and all history was directed to their glorification." [ALLEGRO, J., 1971, p. 58]      "Most Jews have a slight knowledge of Jewish history," says Chaim Bermant,      "This is true even of those in Yeshiva (college of higher learning), for the       Yeshiva is devoted largely to the study of the Talmud, and the Talmud,       though encyclopaedic in scope, was completed by the sixth century and       events beyond that date are largely terra incognita, except where they are       echoed by liturgy and lore." [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 18]         The above observations, and one of the theses of this volume, point to a Jewish identity that is at its conceptual roots -- even for the secular today -- religious in complexion and fundamentally ahistorical.         Firmly going against the grain of popular Jewish proclamation that they, and their old religion, Judaism, are the root of everything wise and wonderful on earth, a Jewish author and social activist, Maurice Hindus, wryly observed in 1927 that         "The force that first pried the Jewish mind open to radical doctrines of       a modern nature had its origin not in Jewish but in distinctly non-Jewish       intellectual associations ... [Political philosophers] Marx and Lassalle       were steeped in Western, that is, modern Gentile culture, Gentile       philosophy, Gentile science ... It is only after the Jew began to ram       down the gates of the ghetto and to make excursions into the intellectual       temples of his Christian neighbors, only after he had laid aside the       Talmud and the Shulcan Aruch for modern, western, that is Gentile,       history, biology, psychology, science, that he embarked on a       career of achievement in modern arts and science ... The old Jewish       civilization, with its rigid orthodoxy and its emphasis on Jewish       superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly intellectual intercourse       even as it compelled social isolation. It frowned on the perusal of       modern literature, philosophy, social theory, even on the study of       foreign, that is Gentile, languages." [HINDUS, p. 369-370]          "Guided by the dictum that 'all that is new is forbidden by the Torah,'" says Charles Silberman, "the rabbis spoke as though the slightest deviation from tradition was a lapse into heresy." [SILBERMAN, p. 171]       "The Jewish nature does not produce its rarest fruits in a Jewish environment," noted Israel Abrahams, "... It was ancient Alexandria that produced Philo, medieval Spain Maimonides, modern Amsterdam Spinoza." [FEUERLICHT, p. 38] "One can be ignorant of all the sayings of the wise old rabbis," notes Ann Roiphe, "and still acknowledge the Magna Carte, the Declaration of Independence, the words of Rousseau, Hobbes, Emerson, the art of Leonardo da Vinci, Michealangelo and Dante, the science of Darwin, Newton and Galileo. These were not Jewish, and the great Jewish thinkers, Freud, Marx and Einstein, Claude Levi-Strauss, studied at Christian universities and learned form Christian scholars ... The great universities of the West were founded without Jews ... The Christian world created Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Yale." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 209]        These perspectives do not reflect the mainstream current of modern Jewish history, however. For most, the self-repeating myths of the wonders of Jewish Talmudic scholarship and its attendant Jewish martyrology were -- and are -- central to Jewry's understanding of its past.  In the late nineteenth century, for example, Heinrich Graetz, the seminal "modern" Jewish historian, was only following a long line of self-portrayal when he introduced one of his volumes of Jewish history with what he felt to be the essence of their story:                    "The long era of the dispersion, lasting nearly seventeen centuries,             is characterized by unprecedented sufferings, an uninterrupted              martyrdom, and a constantly aggravated degradation and             humiliation unparalleled in history ... " [GRAETZ, v. 4 Intro,             in LIBERLES p. 104]        In 1911 a Jewish anthropologist, Maurice Fishberg, blamed common Jewish "nervous disposition" largely on historic persecutions:           "Considering that in medieval times massacres of Jews were quite         frequent ... it may be said that many of the survivors have remained         with unstable nerves, and that a fair proportion of neurotics and         psychopathics have inherited their nervous disposition from their         maltreated grandparents ... Any people, no matter what race, could         not remain with healthy nerves under the ban of abuse and persecutions         to which the Jews were subjected." [FISHBERG, p. 532]        In 1917, H. G. Enelow framed the same world view this way:        "There is no history as full of hardship and suffering as the history of      Israel. But there is none so heroic, either. That is just what has made it      the most heroic history in the world. That because the Jews were      chosen for a divine work, they have to suffer a great deal." [ENELOW,      p. 45]        Likewise, another nineteenth century Jewish scholar, Leopold Zunz, made the convergence of Jewish superiority and "aristocracy" through suffering explicit in a quote that eventually became "perhaps the best known in modern Jewish literature" [ROTH, Most, p. 136]:            "If there be an ascending scale of sufferings, Israel reached its highest           degree. If the duration of affliction, and the patience with which they           are borne, confer nobility upon man, the Jews vie with the aristocracy           of any country." [SCHULMAN, p. 34]      A 1954 "High Holy Days Prayer Book" for Jewish congregations even devoted two pages to quotes (including the one immediately above) by secular Jewish commentators, a legendary Jewish martyrological history framed here as the expression of religious faith. Other lamentations in the prayer book included:          * "Combine all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies           have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have           reached the full measure of suffering which this martyr people           was called upon to endure." [Leopold Zunz]          * "The thousand years' martyrdom of the Jewish people, its           unbroken pilgrimage, its tragic fate, its teachers of religion,           its martyrs, its philosophy, champions -- this whole epic will,           in days to come, sink into the memory of men." [Simon Dubnov]           [SILVERMAN, M., p. 386-387]         Fredda Herz and Elliot Rosen understand such self-definitions as "aristocratic" victims to be essential to modern Jewish temperament: "Jews anticipate attack from non-Jews, while privately reassuring themselves that they are 'God's chosen people.' The assumption is that suffering is a basic part of life. This suffering may even reinforce the notion that they are superior to others by virtue of their burden of oppression." [HERZ/ROSEN, p. 367]        In 1993, one of England's chief rabbis, Jonathan Sacks, framed Jewish resistance to assimilation in the land they lived as a noble sacrifice, the willingness to stand loyal with a relentlessly subjugated, oppressed people: "For the most part, Jews [through history] did not say, 'What advantage is it to remain part of the people of Israel, seeing that they are humiliated and persecuted? It is better for me to join my destiny to those who have power.' They declared their willingness liheyet miyisrael, to be counted among Israel." [SACKS, J., p. 131]        "[The] self-image of Judaism," says Philip Sigal, "as originating in bondage and redemption indelibly engraves itself upon the group memory and it became the permanent mythos of its origin. Beside that, documentable history is irrelevant. All that has transpired since antiquity is wedded to that theology." [SIGAL, p. 1] Israeli scholar Boas Evron notes that          "Long historical memory, delving into centuries-old, even millennia-old,        disasters, massacres and wrongs (accompanied by the convenient        forgetting of wrongs and atrocities perpetrated by ones' own people        against others), lachyrmorose self-righteousness, are all characteristics        of groups whose experience is basically passive, as the Jews have been        politically for thousands of years. In such groups, the consciousness of        being victims accumulates and poisons the very being of its members.        At times these characteristics become the primary content of their self-        awareness as a group, a perverted focus of their self-identity. Finally,        this suffering becomes a source of pride. ('I am persecuted and hated,        a sign that I am valuable and unique, for which I am envied and hated'),        rather than engendering a desire to be rid of it." [EVRON, p. 109]        The cloaking of Jewish martyrological legend over an authentic Jewish history in the real world is noted by another Israeli, Meron Benvenisti:        "It is an ahistoric philosophy of an ahistoric people. It sustained us      for two thousand years and is so imbued in our psyche that it was      not altered even when we made the profound leap from an ahistoric,      dispensed, and powerless people to an historic, independent, and      powerful nation [Israel]." [BENVENISTI, p. 73]        "The belief that the Jewish people had always been the passive sufferer of Christian persecution," says Hannah Arendt, "actually amounted to a prolongation and modernization of the old myth of chosenness." [FEUERLICHT, p. 35]   "The more desperate the oppression," writes Raphael Jospe, "the more oppressors reinforced the Jewish view that they, the victims, were the Chosen People, and that the oppressor religions were all the more morally spiritually bankrupt." [JOSPE, R. p. 130]        Michael Aronson notes the way that riots against Jews in Russia in the late nineteenth century were simply plugged into traditional interpretive Jewish martyrological frameworks focusing on categorical Jewish innocence:         "In Jewish consciousness, three biblical images are deeply ingrained       as archetypes of Jewish oppression. First is that of the Pharaohs,       who enslaved the Children of Israel in Europe. Next, are the       treacherous and murderous Amalekites, who attacked the Children       of Israel in Sinai after their exodus from Egypt and became the       symbol of causeless hatred. And third is the archetypical murderer       Haman (by tradition a descendant of Amalek), who tried to destroy       all the Jews in the Persian Empire. From the very beginning of       anti-Jewish outbreaks in 1881, the biblical images must have sprang       to people's minds and influenced their interpretation of events.       Indeed, these images were invoked repeatedly in both journalistic       and historical literature on the pogroms written by Russian Jews,       and others." [ARONSON, p. 9]         Like many Jewish or Gentile historians tainted by martyrological contagion, Bryan Moynahan's index to the Jews' role in his book about the last 100 years of Russian history reflects almost solely the Jewish victimology theme:        "Jews:         -accusations against         -anti-Semitism         -behavior toward         -emigration         -in Great War         -massacre         -pogroms against" [MOYNAHAN, p. 266]        Prominent Jewish psychoanalyst and child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim once wrote an article about the popular social psychology surrounding (famous Nazi victim) Ann Frank, noting the special state of "innocence" the Jewish people decree about themselves, a blanket character afforded no one else:        "Some time ago I questioned in print why there is such vast admiration      for The Diary of Ann Frank. I received many reactions, positive and      negative, but whether those who let me know their reactions agreed      or disagreed, they all shared one feature: a deep compassion for what      they called the 'innocent' victims of Nazi aggression ... I was further      startled to find that in the many communications I received, the      adjective 'innocent' was applied only by Jews to Jewish victims.      Nobody referred to the innocent Gypsies or the innocent Jehovah's      Witnesses, though they, like the Jews were internal minorities, one      of which, the Gypsies, was exterminated in toto. Maybe I overlooked      it, but despite search I can recall no popular reference to the innocent      Norwegians, for example, who the Nazis also killed in numbers."      [BETTELHEIM, 1991, p. 257]        "Jewish consciousness is cultivated consistently from the moment they are capable of understanding the spoken word," observed Maurice Feurlich in 1937,        "... I had the theme, Children of a Martyr Race, dinned into my      consciousness so deeply that it became the basic element of my      emotional life. Almost the first words I understood were "oppressed      people," "martyrs," "prejudice," "persecution." Like all other Jewish      children, I emerged with a 'Persecution Complex' which grew stronger      as I grew older ... [This] more than anything else constitutes the Jewish      consciousness we have today ... Our persecution complex makes us      abnormal in dealing with our neighbors ... For few of us have the courage      to admit that the fault might rest in our personal makeup. It is true of      human nature generally that men seek to blame for failure everywhere but      their own doorstep, but we Jews divulge from the normal when this      becomes a mental habit with which we constantly salve the wounds of      our failures." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 116]         "It became customary [in the Middle Ages] to record the names of the victims of persecutions," says Leon Poliakov, "many lists are preceded by the evocation of the 'cities of blood' ... Thus the memory of the first martyrs was perpetuated and a tradition was created and strengthened, inspiring succeeding generations to follow the lead and example of their ancestors." [POLIAKOV, p. 84] The ancestors have followed the lead well. In a 1984 survey, 94% of American Jews were found to believe that "Jews have a uniquely long and tragic history of persecution." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 31] "One critical element in this statement," note Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen, "is the word unique. The image of Jewish victimization has its political and psychological uses, and as a result Jews often have a deep emotional investment in preserving their image as a uniquely long-suffering minority. Leading Jewish spokesmen have resisted efforts to deny Jews their history of extraordinary persecution and to diminish the singularity, the distinctiveness, of Jewish victimization." [LIEBMAN, COHEN, p. 31] "All the Jews must internalize past events as if they happened to them only yesterday," explains Meron Benvenisti about traditional Jewish victim identity, "My father still feels the agony of the expulsion from Spain as if it happened to him personally and not five hundred years ago." [BENVENISTI, 1989, p. 73]          Jewish religious history -- and Jewish identity itself -- has always been founded upon the idea that non-Jews are out to destroy them.  "For Thy [God's] sake are we killed all the day long," proclaims the Torah/Old Testament. "We are counted as sheep for the slaughter." [PSALMS 44:22] "Eysor soyneh l'yaakov," wrote Joshau Halberstam in 1997, "[is] a phrase well known to Jews brought up in traditional homes. The literal translation of the phrase is 'Esau hates Jacob,' but the names are always understood as referring to the gentile hatred of Jews, an enmity that is presumed to be perpetual." [HALBERSTAM, p. 215]  Rabbi Moshe Zvi Neriyah, director of a network of religious Zionist high schools in Israel, and a former member of the Knesset, publicly declared that there were two kinds of Gentiles, "those that simply hate us and those who attempt with all their power to destroy us." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 59] "The Holocaust is not a national insanity that happened once and passed," remarked a former Israeli Minister of Education in 1984, "but an ideology that has not passed from the world and even today the world may condone crimes against us." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 61]        A number of Jewish religious fast days, including the traditional ninth of Av, the tenth of Tereth, the seventeenth of Tammuz, and the third of Tishri, commemorate "national and communal catastrophes." Most are linked to the destruction of the First Temple (physically memorialized today in Jerusalem at what is widely known as the "Wailing Wall") by non-Jewish enemies. At one time in Jewish history thirty-six such fast days of mourning were observed each year. [YOUNG, p. 263]   "Three times a day," notes Howard Sachar, "and oftener on special occasions, pious Jews prayed for the Restoration [of the destroyed Temple]." [SACHAR, p. 309] Even at Jewish marriages, wrote Alfred Siegel, "you know how it is to be a Jew. In the hour of pleasure he remembers his pains, and even in the ecstatic instant of a wedding he breaks a glass under his foot to remind himself of the crash of the Temple in Jerusalem. A Jew is never entirely happy." [GOLDSTEIN, p. 115]       Samuel Heilman notes the way the story of the biblical Samson is treated in an ultra-Orthodox religious school he visited:        "This Samson was not the Jewish Hercules as much as the weakened      and tormented Jew who begs God to allow him to avenge the      injustices he has suffered." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 247]        Heilman also notes that the traditional Queen Esther story (in which she saves the Jewish people in Persia from destruction from an arch-enemy), and the yearly Jewish celebration of the story at Purim, may be simply a borrowed tradition from another people, plugged into the Jewish martyrological base. As Heilman notes,        "Purim in Israel comes at the end of winter and commemorates the      deliverance of the Jews of ancient Persia from the genocidal decree      of Vizier Haman ... There are some scholars who argue that in fact      the [Purim] holiday precedes the scroll [about Esther] and simply      enshrines the principle of Jewish salvation from all those who have      tried to destroy the [Jewish] nation. And indeed, Jewish tradition is      filled with many local 'Purims,' each with its own 'megillah'      commemorating the deliverance of the Jews in question from      disaster. Some of those scholars who see Purim in such relative      terms argue that it arose in Persia as a Jewish counter holiday to many      of the pagan winter festivals. Others cite the absence of any evidence      of a king named Ahasueras in Persian records as well as the similarity      of the names Esther and Mordechai to the ancient Babylonian gods      Ishtar and Marduk as evidence of a linkage with precursor non-Jewish      traditions." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. 109]        A tradition of reciting the names of local "martyrs" to the faith was a widespread tradition among Jews in Europe for centuries; modern Israel has its own remembrance "Day of Holocaust and Heroism."  The mass suicide of 900 Jews at the fortress of Massada rather than surrender to Roman attackers is a major icon in modern Israeli mythology. In the Biblical Exodus tradition, the Egyptian Pharoah also chases Jews to annihilate them; in the Book of Esther, as noted above, Jews are saved from an evil Persian court minister, Haman, who sought their destruction. Still recited today as part of the yearly Jewish Passover rituals, Jews say, "In every generation they [non-Jews] rise against us to annihilate us: Bekhol dore omdm alaynu l'khalotaynu."  Other aspects of the Passover seder, notes Stephen Whitfield, include the identification "with the fate of [Jewish] ancestors so fully that the distinction between past and present has in effect been obliterated." One way to attain this collapsing of time is "to raise a piece of matzah and announce (in the present tense): 'This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.'" [WHITFIELD, American, p. 29]        Other forms of Jewish martyrology reportedly evidenced in the Middle Ages were occasions of mass suicide (including the slaying of fellow family members) if threatened with forced conversion to Christianity. "Medieval Christians ... tended to perceive it not as the extraordinary behavior of individual Jews but as behavioral practices sanctioned by the Jewish community and law. In the minds of some it encouraged and confirmed the perceptions of the Mosaic law as harsh and Jews as murderous." [REL.&THEO. 38, 863, 1995] The rabbinical tradition itself, notes Nahum Glatzer, is rooted in a martyrological world view: "Talmudic tradition preserves the memory of the chief scholars who suffered martyrdom rather than bow to the imperial [Roman] decree that forbade the study of the Torah ... The story of the Ten [rabbi] martyrs became one of the motifs of medieval Jewish liturgy." [GLATZER, p. 175-176] One talmudic tradition even notes 400 Jewish children who were reputedly "captured for shameful purposes. "They all leaped to their deaths into the sea." [GLATZER, p. 183]        The Jewish cosmology of eternal victimization is virtually celebrated in our own day. In a 1985 "fact-filled, fun-filled" book for children, for instance, The Jewish Kids' Catalogue, there is a section on the Jewish experience in World War II, including a full-page photograph of children walking towards Nazi box cars. The caption reads: "Orphan children from the ghetto of Lodz boarding a train that will take them to death camps." [BURSTEIN, p. 67]  In 1987 a Jewish psychologist, Ruth Bers Shapiro, took public exception to another children’s' book entirely about the Holocaust entitled The Children Remember; it was created for 4-8 year-olds. Such early socialization to the Jewish Cult of the Persecuted worried Shapiro; she suggested that the Jewish community "needs to anticipate how this information will be absorbed and shaped by the child's inner life." [GALLOB, B., p. 15]      (Emblazoning perceived martyrdom in communal memory is central to Jewish tradition. "The Hebrew Bible," notes Peter Novick, "contains the verb 'to remember,' in its various declensions, 169 times (along with numerous injunctions not to forget). Yet what Jews are enjoined to remember is almost always God's handiwork; secular history, insofar as such a category is even admitted by tradition, gets short shrift. Mourning and remembering the dead are, of course, traditional Jewish obligations.") [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 10]      Jewish author Paul Cowan notes the socialization of his half-Jewish son into Jewish tradition:      "One night in March 1973, we were invited to a puppet show dramatizing the      story of Purim. At the dramatic high point, when the evil Persian vizier Haman      threatened to murder all the Jews, Matt ran across the room and threw himself      into Rachel's arms, pleading for comfort. 'Mom, he won't get me, will he?      I'm only half-Jewish.'" [COWAN, P., 1987, p. 24]            In 1986, Ze'ev Chafets, a Jewish American immigrant to Israel, and eventual head of the Israeli Government Press Office, noted something wrong with his six-year old daughter Michal:        "I noticed a change coming over her. Suddenly she became afraid to go      to bed in the dark; often she had a hard time falling asleep. A few times      she cried out in the middle of the night and woke up with a headache.      Obviously, something was bothering her."         Eventually Chafets managed to get his daughter to tell him what was wrong. As he tells it:            "Abba [Father]," she sobbed, "Why does anyone want to kill us?"          "Michali, what do you mean? Who wants to kill us?"          "Us, the Jews. Everyone wants to kill the Jews. But why, Abba? What          have we done wrong?"          I was stunned by the question, and by Michali's fear. One of the                reasons I had decided to live in Israel was to bring up children free                of tics and neuroses of diaspora life. And now here was my sabra                [Israeli-born] daughter shaking with insecurity. "Who told you that                everyone wants to kill Jews?" I almost shouted.                "Our teacher. She told us about Haman and Pharaoh the King of                Egypt. And Hitler.  Abba, he puts Jews in the oven and burns them                up. And the Christians too." Michali burst into tears. "Abba, is                John one of those Christians?" John was a friend of mine who                worked for the international Red Cross.           "Yes, baby, John is a Christian, but he doesn't want to hurt you."           [CHAFETS, p. 89-90]         Similarly, in 1993 an Israeli scholar noted with concern the comments of a colleague's kindergarten-age daughter:         "Daddy, I know that on Passover we celebrate our freedom from the       horrid Egyptian Pharaoh who wanted to keep us as slaves. On Purim       we are happy because brave Queen Esther convinced the King to hang       the wicked Persian Haman who wanted to destroy all the Jews. On       Hanukah we celebrate our freedom from our Greek enemies. Daddy,       tell me -- who were our enemies on Tu Bi-Shevat [Israel's national tree-       planting day]?"         Myron Aronoff calls such a story a manifestation of Israel's "national paranoia." [ARONOFF, p. 57] This paranoia, of course, is not just Israeli; it is a foundation of Jewish identity. And for the little girl who wondered about the Jews' enemies against trees, they are there to be conjured.  In a 1987 appeal by the Jewish National Fund to Americans for money to plant trees in Israel, a recent forest fire was highlighted as a "suspected arson" by Arabs, and fund-raising for trees is often requested to honor children Holocaust victims. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 32]         Steven Cohen notes four main themes in the Jewish victimization mythology (Cohen frames them in the past tense, but they are, for most Jews, as viable as ever):          "1) pre-modern Jews viewed life among Gentiles as galut, exile.         2) Jews believed that Gentiles hate Jews.         3) They believed that Christian culture and civilization are inferior              to Jewish civilization.         4) They believed that individual Gentiles have personality characteristics              which are inferior to those of Jews." [COHEN, Uses, p. 26]           In our own time "Pulitzer prize-winning" Jewish historian and former president of the American Academy, Barbara Tuchman, is typical. (In 1967 Tuchman argued in the New York Times that the United States should intervene militarily for Israel in its war with Arabs. [FEUERLICHT, p. 196] Tuchman, daughter of wealthy financier Maurice Wertheim and niece of a former secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., obviously can't -- with a straight face -- claim victim status herself without some serious help from the Jewish martyrology tradition). [CHRISTOPHER, p. 219]  In her 650-page volume on "calamitous" European society in the fourteenth century, originating in her interest in the Bubonic plague, Jews are represented solely in relation to her own sense of their socio-political victimization. Of all the possibilities of a group of human beings over a century, (including the story of their own experience with the epidemic) Tuchman frames virtually the entirety of Jewish experience as merely a sponge for abuse from Gentiles.  This is the book's complete index for the heading "Jews":                           * money lenders --                         * resented by Pastoureux --                         * persecution of --                         * blamed for plague --                         * rights of --                         * accused of ritual murder --                         * Talmud tried for heresy --                         * badges worn by --                         * sexual relations with Christians forbidden --                         * ransom of Jean II --                         * attacked in working class revolts --                         * in Spain --                         * pogrom in Prague --           If fourteenth century Jews spent every moment of their lives fielding insults and running away from vigilante mobs, when did they have a moment of freedom to record the chain of misery that always wrapped so tightly around them, so that their progeny might still agitate with authority about their lack of relief, 600 years later? Jews did find time, however, in the Middle Ages to regularly memorialize lists of martyrs during synagogue services, emphasizing "Jewish suffering and its exaggeration." [MACDONALD, p. 219]           Tuchman's conviction of non-Jews' unrelieved hatred of Jews through the centuries as one of the foundations for her perspective of history is evidenced in her following quote about the Holocaust:         "What lurks in the shadows of ancient memory [was] a bitter recognition       that a Gentile world ... would fundamentally have felt relieved by the Final       Solution." [BAER, p. 64]        Jewish historian Arnold Wiznitzer reflects the Jewish martyrological base to understand history in his books about Brazil. As Jonathan Schorsch notes:        "Much of the American Jewish historiography from the 1960s continued       the monumentalist, nationalist orientation of its predecessors, and Arnold       Witznitzer's work could easily be included here. A historian of Brazilian       history whose work to this day practically constitutes the field in the       English language, Wiznitzer summed up his findings in his now classic       book, Jews in Colonial Brazil. There he takes great concern to       memorialize every 'Jewish' victim of the various Inquisitions."       [SCHORSCH, J., 2000]        In the Jewish cosmology, Jews can only be victims, even when they are pre-eminent in the society in which they live. In 1987, David Schers, for example, explored "the oppression of those [Jews] who are 'well off' in Latin America." "Is it possible," he asked, "to speak of those who eat well, have attractive lives, and live in relative prosperity? The case of the Jews of Latin America demonstrates that it is indeed possible. [They have] alienation, self-hate, and family conflict ... The very invisibility of Jewish suffering ... makes it more painful than might otherwise appear." [SCHERS, CULTURE, p. 285-286]  Jews, insists Sarah Horowitz, bizarrely, are also         "victimized by their own positive stereotypes, which mask the gender,        class, ideological and ethnic differences that distinguish them from one        another ... The invisibility of Jewish studies as an academic field [?!]        moreover, is hidden behind the presence of Jews as scholars in all        fields." [HOROWITZ, p. 123]        Jews, who are collectively the wealthiest, most comfortable ethnic/racial group of people in modern America, [see later chapter] nonetheless remain insistent in clinging to the identity core as themselves being victims and never oppressors, economic or otherwise. "If Jews are, by definition, victims," notes Edward Shapiro, explaining the common Jewish world view, "then those Jews who do not sympathize with this cult of victimization are inauthentic Jews who betray the essence of Jewishness." [SHAPIRO, E., 1998]  Even Jewish multi-millionaires like financier Harry Solomon, (whose 1989 estimated worth was $50 million) apparently fail to see the irony in claiming that "We [Jews] are all the victims of our backgrounds." [KOTKIN, p. 45] When Celia Heller wrote her book about the Jews of Poland, she completely ignored historic Jewish commercial dominance of Eastern Europe [see earlier chapters] and traditional Jewish self-segregation to preposterously link the Jewish situation there to that of oppressed African-Americans, evolving from the shackles of slavery: "The concept of caste is extremely useful in understanding the situation of Jews in interwar Poland just as it was in understanding the situation of the Negroes in the United States before the Civil Rights struggle." [HELLER, C., 1977, p. 59]         Robert Greene wrote an entire volume about professional "hustler and swindler" Mel Weinberg [GREENE, preface] and his role in "Abscam," an FBI sting operation to investigate white collar crime in America. Even as a six-year old, however, the future master scam artist was already primed to his identity as a Jewish victim:              "His mother answered his knock on the door.            'You're late. How did it go in school today?' she asked.            'Not so good,' answered the boy.            'What happened?'            'I got left back,' he replied.            His mother stared at him. The message short-circuited her ability         to comprehend, much less believe.            'You must be mistaken,' she said, clearly aware that something was         amiss. 'Nobody gets left back in the first grade. Besides, you         bring home all those gold stars every day. That means you are         doing wonderful work in school. Why would they leave you back?'             'Because I'm Jewish,' he sighed, fixing his mother with his most         earnest look.             'Because you're Jewish,' she replied in a voice that took on a slightly         hysterical edge. ' How can that be? This is the Bronx, in New York,         not Poland. Your teacher is Jewish. Why were you left back?'"        [GREENE, 1981, p. 17-18]       "When I was a little kid," says controversial talk show host Howard Stern,      "I was a victim. Many times I would turn the other cheek when I should have       stood tall. I was overly polite when I needed to be firm. There was something       in my personality that avoided confrontation because I always felt I would lose       in a two-way struggle. I never excelled at anything ... I had 'victim' written all       over my freakish face. I was a gawky lamb available for slaughter. I had lived       my entire young life as a sniveling coward. I was the half-Jew who bowed his       head and walked into the gas chamber without putting up a fight." [STERN, H.,       1995, p. 255]       The Cleveland Jewish News notes this about famous feminist Gloria Steinem:       "Steinem was born to a 'gentle, nurturing' Jewish father and a Protestant mother       who believed in theosophy, a set of beliefs based on mystical insight. Largely       home-schooled until the age 12 while her 'itinerant' father packed up the family       and traveled around the country, Steinem does not identify with any organized       religion, except when there's antisemitism. 'Then I identify with the Jewish person.'"       [KARFELD, M., 10-22-1999, p. 20-]      "As Jews," a "leader in the Jewish community" of Brooklyn, New York, told researcher Jonathan Reider, regarding the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979, "we know what it means to be hostages. We have been hostages since day one." [REIDER, J., 1985, p. 256]     A. M. Rosenthal (eventually Executive Editor of the New York Times) and Times reporter Arthur Gelb even titled their 1967 book about a Jewish Nazi "One More Victim." The subject of the volume is Daniel Burros, the King Kleagle of the New York Ku Klux Klan and former official in the American Nazi Party, who was a vehement hater of Jews. How, one wonders, is Burros a victim? Is he a victim of his own choices in life? Is he a victim of his own racism? Is he a victim of his own strange psychological dilemmas? Is he perhaps a victim of A. M. Rosenthal and the New York Times, who published an expose about Burros, noting that he was secretly Jewish? (Burros committed suicide immediately after publication of the article). No, insist the Jewish authors, Burros is a victim of anti-Semitism -- his hatred of Jews is something internalized from an ugly, exterior, non-Jewish world. The authors put it this way (and they are blaming Gentile society for the creation of the Burros Nazi identity):     "The fact that there is a Jewish condition disturbs many Jews and they rail against it,      but it is a fact nonetheless, because it cannot be otherwise. It is a condition not inborn      but created, created not so much by Jews but by Gentiles, and arising from the one      simple fact that, being apart, Jews have no privacy [i.e., if a Jewish mother calls out      in public to her son "Irving," everyone knows they are Jewish. Rosenthal and Gelb      go on to argue that Jewish "separateness" and "distinctiveness" is an attribute branded      upon Jews by the non-Jewish world, completely ignoring this as an absolute      pillar of historical, and current, Jewish identity] ... No number of laws, no strength of            others' traditions, and no faith in morals or even religion, can protect the Jew           -- German Jew, Russian Jew, Brazilian Jew, and American Jew -- from knowing      that he was born into a tribe of victims ... From the moment he is aware of his Jewishness            and of the history of Jews he is aware that this history is the biography of the scapegoat,            the martyr, the dispossessed, the wanderer, the outcast, the tortured, the despised or the            pitied, the beaten, the murdered -- the victim. What is a Jew? ' A misfortune!' There is      not a Jew who has not said that to himself, sometimes in a whisper he can hardly      hear ... Every Jew now alive has lived in the memory of the ghetto's stench, remembers            Torquemada [of the Spanish Inquisition], and every Jew now alive has an Auschwitz            number on his soul ... What is a Jew? A Jew, among other things, is a prisoner caged in the            ugliest of ages, the mind of his own enemy." [ROSENTHAL/GELB, 1967, p. 57-60]      Hence, we are lead to believe -- somehow in all this -- the Jewish Ku Klux Klan leader, is born, "victim" of an anti-Semitic society.      How weird does the Jewish persecution thing get? Jewish publisher Lyle Stuart even recalls an incident he had with William Gaines, also Jewish and the publisher of Mad magazine: "One day Bill and I were riding in his Cadillac and he said, 'You know, sometimes when I pass a bus stop I see those people standing there. I think they hate me. And I said, 'Bill, you have to get some self-esteem.' And I suggested he see a psychiatrist, which he promptly did.'" [TEBBEL, R., 1999]      Jewish author Ben Stein once noted the mood among the wealthy producer/writer elite of Jewish-dominated Hollywood [See later chapter about this subject]:           "There was a distinct feeling that, despite the high pay and the access      to powerful media that TV writers and producers enjoy, they are still      part of a despised underclass, oppressed psychologically, and      (potentially) physically by an Aryan ruling class of businessmen and      others. This feeling was by no means confined to Jews. [?]           The belief in a ruling class of white, East Coast Protestants meeting      occasionally in corporate board rooms to give its orders to whoever      happens to be elected to office is so strong that no amount of      argument to the contrary makes a dent. And hostility to that real      or imagined class is just as strong."      [in ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 107]         Despite the fact that the exploitation, oppression and sovereignty over non-Jews, as we have seen, is a very foundation of talmudic Judaism, Jews commonly portray themselves as victims even in their exploitation of others. In a relentless apologetic and Zionist-inspired volume (see the later chapter on Zionism), The Jews of Germany, Nachum Gidal asserts that "the Jews were forced into the role of pawnbrokers, money changers, and usurers, very public offices and therefore often hated ... Thus 'the Jew' became the tool and the scapegoat of the rising capitalist economic system." [GIDAL, p. 40]        Even if this apologetic myth -- often cited in the Jewish community -- was true, that they were somehow "forced into" their historic roles as oppressors of the non-Jewish populace, such self-preserving actions still represent a self-centered, self-protective amoralism where self-preservation ("self" being either the individual or ethnocentric community) is considered the paramount concern. If we may this way dismiss collective Jewish responsibility for negative actions against others over centuries, we may likewise conveniently excuse all Germans who were also "forced" to join the Nazi movement (or any other collective expression of evil) because there were no alternative options (short of personal trouble, hardship, and, of course, danger and self-impairment).        In modern America, even Jews responsible for a huge share of communist-instigated terror in post-war Poland, are reconceived as "victims" through a lens that can see nothing else. As Stefan Korbonski says,          "The ten years of Jewish rule in Poland [in the Stalinist era] could not      easily be forgotten. It was an era of the midnight knock on the door,      arbitrary arrests, torture, and sometimes secret execution. Most of      those responsible for that reign of terror left Poland and upon arrival      in the West represented themselves as victims of Communism and      anti-Semitism -- a claim which was readily believed in the West      and earned them the full support of their hosts." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 63]        "In other words," notes Tadeusz Piotrowski, "these [Jewish] executioners were transformed into victims." [PIOTROWSKI, p. 63] [More information about these people in the Holocaust chapter]         Jewish celebration of communal victimology is the cornerstone of Jewish identity. Simon Wiesenthal, the famed hunter of Nazi fugitives and namesake of Holocaust remembrance organizations, has even written the ultimate coffee table book for Jews (Every Day Remembrance Day: A Chronicle of Jewish Martyrdom) who wish more specific attachment to their self-perception of historic victimization; the book is a kind of calendar, listing selected atrocities against Jews throughout history, at least one for every day of the year.          "That collective Jewish consciousness (of suffering and martyrdom)," writes Lucy Dawidowicz, "has been and remains -- with justice, I think -- one of the central myths of Jewish history, being an essence distilled from real events and reinforced in nearly every Jewish generation until our own time by brute reality." [DAWIDOWICZ]  "Every Jew," declares Milton Steinberg, "at some time or other has reason to conclude that he has been penalized for his Jewishness." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 77] "The Jews," observed Sir Lewis Namier, both a Jew and Zionist, "do not have a history, they have a martyrology." [RAPHAEL, p. 30]  "Being a Jew and sufferer go together," a Jewish senior citizen told anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff, "When we stop suffering, we get rich and secure, we stop being Jews. We become like everyone else, living for enjoyment only. Without it we don't know what our purpose is." [MYERHOFF, p. 198]  "Moral decency, sympathy for the victim, sympathy for those who suffer," claims Ann Roiphe, reciting the myth she deeply believes, "these are the building blocks of the mystical connection Judaism. It seems not so much to be a matter of indulging in masochism as to be a matter of aligning oneself with innocence." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 187]        Molly Katz, in a book of humor, Jewish as a Second Language, highlights a number of Jewish cultural traits. Finding humor in the enduring truths of what the Jewish community recognizes in itself, she notes that a Jew must "always agonize, resent, be disappointed, gloat, get even, suffer, [and] be positive something terrible is going to happen." Conversely, Jews can "never be satisfied, think everything is fair, be a good sport, feel undeserving, let go of a grudge, ease up, [or] acknowledge the possibility of any light at the end of a tunnel." [KATZ, M., p. 72]        "I share ... an identification with the tribal suffering," wrote senior editor Jack Newfield in the Village Voice, "I don't know why, but if I read of Russian Jews waiting outside a visa office, if I read that a synagogue was blown up in Brussels, or I read [Jacobo] Timerman's book, it affects me more on a certain level than when I read about a massacre in El Salvador or if I read about some atrocity in South Africa. There is a sense that those are my brothers and sisters." [BRENNER, p. 55]  "Although American Jews seem rooted, comfortably integrated in Christian America," wrote Jewish art critic Donald Kuspit in 1997, "their long history has taught them, with paranoid precision, that one never knows what persecution and ostracization the future may bring." [KUSPIT]       "It isn't easy to find a Jew whose personality hasn't been warped by his feelings toward gentiles," wrote Jewish commentator James Yaffe in 1968, "Sometimes the damage is great, sometimes slight; many individuals succeed in overcoming it, or in learning to live with it, or even in making something valuable out of it. But the damage, in one form or another, is almost always there." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 57]         "How can a Jew not be bitter," wondered Ann Roiphe in 1995, "how can a Jew not be bent by the stories we know, stories that have come to us through the generations, so many stories of communal disaster, of individual pain, of lies and exclusions, of expulsions and blood libels, of Cossacks riding down on our villages, inquisitions and their instruments of torture, of cold shoulders and cold murders, of blame placed on our children's heads for plagues, for draught, for flood, despised for our enforced poverty and envied and loathed for our assumed wealth? ... [ROIPHE, p. 443] ... It is hard for a Jew not to feel that the plot of the world, its most central story, is about his or her destruction, exclusion, failed attempts to find a safe spot." [ROIPHE, p. 446] "According to the Hebrew Bible (and its Christian analogue, the Old Testament)," notes Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin, "Jews are God's chosen people. It is not easy to see the benefits, if any, of this divine chosenness, since the history of the Jews is one of persecution and oppression ... In the often-joined race for having suffered most, Jews are the group to beat." [DWORKIN, A., 2000, p. 109]        The Jewish novelist, Bernard Malamud, took chauvinist Jewish martyrology so far as to subsume all human suffering under the Jewish umbrella, claiming that "suffering makes all men Jews." [WHITFIELD, Mult, p. 10] Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida "says we are all Jews, insofar as people in the contemporary world are nomads and displaced." [STEYN, J., 1999, p. 11] The ridiculousness of such notions may be quickly dismissed in many ways, most poignantly with a comparison of Jewish consummate "suffering" to an almost unfathomable kind known by so many, even today, in the Third World. As Pascal Bruckner describes his experience with overwhelming poverty in a Third World train station:          "Here, the suffering are not just little groups scattered in a crowd; they      are laid out, row upon row, on the bare cement. There are far more of      them than there are travelers. Creatures are lined up in rags made of bags      and cloth, with arms that are eaten away by gangrene and repulsive      pustules sticking out.        You walk uneasily past these prostrate figures, as if you were walking      in a swamp, and make your way to the ticket window. Bodies are strewn      about like damaged goods, as if waiting along with their emaciation,      eczema, and lupus for street cleaners to sweep them up. It is impossible      to tell if they are living or dead. Nobody pays them any attention ... It is      an entire race of crushed, reviled, beaten down remnants, and this tide      of flotsam begs you, calls to you, pulls at you, but so weakly that you      push them aside with a simple movement of your foot." [BRUCKNER,      P., 1986, p. 53]        This is no episodic "holocaust" against a people who are declared by Evil Ones to have too much power and influence in surrounding society. Bruckner's description here is a norm of survival for entire defined castes in places like India for centuries. Do these people, an underclass that is an unchanging fixture in Indian history, merit status as honorary Jews, history's declared foremost sufferers?           Further along on the Jewish martyrological bandwagon, a Marxist and atheist, Isaac Deutscher, rejected all cultural, religious, and Zionist definitions of his Jewishness, but said               "I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the          persecuted and exterminated. I am a Jew because I feel the Jewish          tragedy as my own tragedy." [SHAPIRO, p. 8]         "Deutscher's Jewish identity," explains Edward Shapiro, "was dependent on Jews remaining among the persecuted." [SHAPIRO, p. 8] "With the invention of nuclear weapons the world has become Jewish," decides Eli Wiesel. [ROSENBERG, D. , p. xiv]        The emotions of the Jewish Persecution Complex are deep, powerful and often vengeful, as evinced by left-wing publisher Michael Lerner:            "There are moments when I become so overwhelmed by the feelings of           anger at what was done to my family and my people that I become           sympathetic to the most extreme fantasies of the Israeli right wingers."           [LERNER, Goyim, p. 430]        On another front, in an article in the feminist MS magazine, one of its founders and editors, Letty Pogrebin, solicits "Christian sisters ... to try to understand the immediacy of our [Jewish] mourning and the 5,000 years of terror that echo in our souls." [POGREBIN, Antisem, p. 46] Another "liberal feminist," and regular contributor to the Village Voice, Ellen Willis, echoed this view in her own public utterance:         "It is what all Jews, religious and secular, Zionist and non-Zionist, have in        common -- our status as outsiders, of being persecuted." [COHEN,        Uses, p. 26]        There are even intra-Jewish concentric circles of this ideology of incessant victimhood. In Israel, Orthodox Jews have taken the tool of self-perceived oppression to understand themselves systematically discriminated against and persecuted by secular Jewry around them. "This Orthodox self-perception as victims," says Meir Lockshin, "in its most extreme forms, involves seeing the discrimination against Orthodoxy as systemic. A number of Orthodox Jews are now saying that the basic structures of Israeli democracy -- the Knesset, the police, the army, and the courts -- all discriminate against observant Jews." [LOCKSHIN]        Meanwhile, not to be outflanked in the hierarchy of fellow Jews' feelings of persecution, Shlomo Cohen wields his own Jewish essence by counter-claiming that          "I am a secular Jew, a member of a group that is probably the most         oppressed in Jewish life today, certainly in Israel." [COHEN, S. p. 23]         Also in Israel, with the influx of Jews from Russia to the new Jewish state, "Russian mafia" head Grigori Lerner (who was imprisoned in Israel) "in Israel's Russian language press ... is being portrayed as a [victim] of ethnic persecution." [GROSS, N., 1997, p. 22] And what about the hyper-religious, far-right Messianic Gush Emunim movement in the Israeli-Occupied Territories? Israeli psychologist (and apologist) Tzvi Moses sees something familiar in their self-obsessions:         "The [Gush Emunim] settlers developed a feeling of persecution as        a defense mechanism, similar to what was essential in its time to        the Jewish nation in exile for its defense and adjustment in an inimical        environment. The existence of such a mechanism in the psyche of the        Jewish nation creates a problematic system in which change is difficult        ... Obstinacy and inflexible thinking typify the thinking of the Gush        today." [GROSSMAN, D., 1988, p. 42-43]           Even within the elemental unit of the household, Jewish women have traditionally cultivated complaint of personal suffering and victimhood abuse to practical ends. Zborowski and Herzog note that "vulnerability becomes a weapon, especially for the mother. Her suffering serves not only as a rebuke for the past but also as control of the future." [ZBOROWSKI, p. 297]           Oppression of Jews is commonly understood by Jews to have always existed, in varying but usually harsh degrees, everywhere they went in their exile from the Holy Land. Most of the world's Jewry, by the Middle Ages, ended up as a minority people in Christian Europe. Their experiences there, particularly in relation to the Christian faith throughout medieval times, are widely believed by Jews today to have lain a foundation for the Nazis' savage treatment of their people in the twentieth century.        Ann Roiphe goes out to do some calisthenics and lose some calories and, apparently, this is what runs through her mind:        "Even here in America stepping up and down in the aerobics classes of      our local Jewish community centers we remember the trains of the      Christians, those nation builders who called us 'Christ killers' as they      killed us."  [ROIPHE, p. 444]        Psycho-socially and religiously then, since ancient history, to be Jewish has always meant exilic misery -- exile from one's country (driven out of the Holy Land in ancient history by the Babylonians and Romans), from one's God (who has been traditionally understood to be angry with too much Jewish disregard for His dictates), and --increasingly for some, with the rise of rationalism a couple hundred years ago and estrangement from Jewish tradition in a sea of non-Jews  -- from ones' own people. But always, to be Jewish over the past millennium there has been an anchoring in the belief that Jews -- the Biblical "chosen people" -- are exceptional, and bound, at least, for some glorious leadership destiny.  Many Jews today -- secular or religious -- still quite literally believe that they are God's gift to mankind (often self-described as "the light unto the world.")  It is also a widely believed article of Jewish dogma, however, that, even in today's comfortable Western Diaspora, a Jew's non-Jewish neighbor might at any time turn on him -- the Jewish Other, the ultimate scapegoat -- with animosity. For essentially no reason. (Traditional Orthodoxy's reason for Gentile hostility, however, is  Gentile jealousy because God selected Jewry as His Chosen People). The successful creation of the modern state of Israel in recent times (as a direct consequence of Nazi Germany) -- and its overwhelming support by worldwide Jewry -- is a communal defense of such perspectives.       By the end of the 20th century "being Jewish" had reaffirmed its ultimate expression as both religious and supra-religious collective complaint, codified as a militantly arrogant politic against the rest of humanity.        There is, of course, considerable evidence across history -- over seventeen hundred years of it  -- of destructive acts by others against Jews in their Diaspora ("dispersion"): restrictive laws, harassment, and sometimes large scale violence.  We are not, however, talking about a weekend time span. Nor are we speaking of anti-Jewish actions that were systematically reasonless. We are talking about nearly two thousand years of exile and, quite literally, the life experiences of many millions of people. Lost to Jewish ideology is the fact that their mistreatment at times by others has always had a context and that perils, misery, and misfortunes have also been the common lot of all peoples everywhere -- of all faiths, politics, and social persuasions.  Whenever and wherever Jews suffered, non-Jews suffered too. Human history is a long and torturous catalogue of social, economic, and political upheavals; everywhere the struggle for power, everywhere the struggle for survival. Other peoples have always suffered too, sometimes catastrophically, in sequence across history, with their own dilemmas, strife and tragedies, and much of Jewish misfortune has resonated, inevitably, from others' painful struggles. Often enough -- and this is hotly and routinely denied, or reductively qualified, by common Jewish discourse these days -- Jews caused other people suffering too. Whatever the case, few peoples have had the good fortune to survive as an ideological unit as long as the Jews who culminate a trans-historical diary of troubles and grievances across thousands of years as a unified expression of their modern selves. Most other peoples quietly assimilated into surrounding communities, woefully perished, or began anew.          Many Jews see the presence of a divine hand to account for the fact of their longevity, that -- after 4,000 years and innumerable historical obstacles -- they are still here. Such commentators -- and they are legion -- always fail to recognize, however, that untold billions of other human beings are "still around" too who are NOT Jews, by divine hand or otherwise. And while not all non-Jews exactly mirror the same habits, ethnicity, and self-image of their own direct ancestors thousands of years ago, neither do Jews. Things have changed. Always and everywhere. The Talmud itself (a sacred compilation of Jewish religious opinions over centuries) is a map of such changes. No Western Jew today -- who represents the cumulative absorption of Hellenism, the Enlightenment, and a myriad of other extra-Jewish historical influences, as well as a long line of interbreeding with other racial types -- would be recognized as brethren by illiterate Jewish goat-herders living in tents 4,000 years ago. And meanwhile, untold billions are not descendants of Abraham. Who cares? Somewhere back up the ancestral line we all merge souls to our common human ancestors, of whom no greater covenant in this world has ever been made.  For Jews who take too much pride in (however drastically changed) a 4,000-year-old identity linked to a particular individual  (the early Abraham-Isaac-Jacob lineage), one need only scan the jungles of New Guinea, Africa, and the Amazon to find remote tribes whose modern religious and ethnic identity still very closely echoes their unfathomably ancient origins. So what? Does their longevity confirm -- as so many Jews would have it for themselves -- the Divine hand of favoritism? A hand that in some cases far outdistances the Jews?   "The rewriting of the past is usually undertaken to achieve specific political aims."                                                   -- Bernard Lewis, Jewish author, 1986, p. 48       "Pseudo-history [is] the rewriting of the past for personal or political purposes... If we want to be taken seriously, we must obey the rules of reason and apply the tools of science and scholarship."                                               -- Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, 2000, p. 2, 5, in their book about "Holocaust deniers" "It may be true that German romanticism furnishes the sources for much in Zionism, but to know only this is to know half of the story. The other half is what Jewish existence makes of facts, how Jewish stubbornness uses history for its own purposes."                                    -- Monford Harris, 1965, p. 97-98] "To write acceptable history of Jews in America, it is necessary to respect their performance, to know and to love the performers. He who writes history performs an act of faith. The historian selects a fact here, a person there -- seeking to recreate a vanished scene, to capture a mood, to clothe a skeleton in flesh and blood. He breathes upon dead bones of the past -- and, lo! -- they come to life! The history of the Jews is unlike that of any other people. It is distilled anguish. It is crystallized grief. It is the dirge of a displaced people. It is the story of an exiled band of pilgrims seeking sanctuary." -- Anita Libman Lebeson, 1950, p. 308 "After Christ, the history of the Jew is in large part the history of anti-Semitism."                                                -- A. M. Rosenthal/Arthur Gelb,                                                    1967, p. 69                       13 THE JEWISH DICTATES OF HISTORY          When digging back into written records, researchers always retrieve selected fragments of an immense historical continuum and carefully shape and edit them, intent upon lending credibility to their respective theses of the past. This is the nature of "history"-- it is always being reviewed, revised, changed, adjusted, and selectively reedited. Decades pass. Centuries. Emphases change: certain facts are accentuated, others are left out. Relevant historical information is overlooked, or discovered. Whoever has the luxury and/or determination to review and reconstruct history colors it entirely as they wish.  Christopher Columbus (his journeys funded in large part by Jewish investors and claimed by some to be himself of at least partial Jewish descent) is a good example. Revered in American folklore for two centuries, he has become, in the last decade or so, widely regarded by many as an exploitive, colonialist villain.         Modern popular belief and convention is validated by selected evidence from the past. While the time-rooted "facts" of events can sometimes be documented, the how's and why's of history have no such absolute mooring. What was written in the past is always biased, and that considered credible today in no lesser manner reflects the biases of writers and researchers today.            "Sometimes the past is remembered selectively," notes Alan Wald, "in accord with the needs of the ideological outlook one has at a given moment or had at some significant moment in the past." [WALD, p. 15]  "[Historical] data and interpretation of data often becomes inseparable through consensus," writes Alan Edelstein, one of the few Jewish scholars who have sought to reexamine the popular conventions of complete Jewish victimization. "This is particularly evident when many scholars share the same perspective, such as that of Jews as victims, and Christians as persecutors ...  The direction of inquiry is controlled by the questions that are posed. Because scholars are concerned with anti-Semitism, questions about Jewish-Christian relations are posed from this perspective." [EDELSTEIN, p. xviii]        In researching Jewish history, the investigator discovers a wide variance of written material. Work by authors expressly critical of Jews (and they include a surprisingly number of Jewish commentators, mostly "apostates" of one kind or another, from the Middle Ages, through the Enlightenment era and up to World War II and the Holocaust) is invariably labeled by today's political conventions to be "anti-Semitic" in nature. There is a large body of such material extending throughout history, written by critics wherever Jews were to be found, ranging from legitimate scholarship to Nazi fantasy material. Some of the criticism is ridiculous; the accusations of Hitler are absurdly exaggerated. But other observations about Jewish life by non-Jews is startlingly consistent over two thousand years.  Consistently credible Gentile themes in attacks against Jews include Jewish elitism, their insularity and clannishness, their disdain for non-Jews, their exploitive and deceptive behavior towards those not their own, the suspicion of Jewish national loyalties and allegiance to the lands they lived in, excessive Jewish proclivity to money and economic control, and an economic "parasitism" (the concentration of Jews in lucrative 'non-productive' fields of finance -- usury, money lending, etc. -- at the expense of non-Jewish communities).        "Anti-Semitism," remarks Oliver Cox, "is an ancient social attitude probably coeval with the rise of Jewish tribalism. It is thus an immemorial trait identified with Jewish culture ... Jewish communities, historical or current, must expect to incur such responses as ethnocentrism, nationalism, and group discrimination. Anti-Semitism has been identified with Jewish behavior in the sense that it is a reaction of other groups to the Jews' determination to assert and perpetuate their identity ... Unlike race prejudice ... anti-Semitism or intolerance is essentially an inherent social response -- a retaliation from a normal Jewish determination to resist merger of their civilization with that of a host peoples." [COX, p. 183-184]        "The Jews," said J. O. Hertzler, "... have been a super-nation rather than members of a nation. More than any other people, certainly up to the time of the emancipation, they were innocent and irresponsible toward the national traditions and aspirations of the people among whom they lived." [HERTZLER, p. 76]  "The vast majority of Jews [in Russia]," notes Michael Aronson, "... maintained a traditional way of life, tenaciously holding on to age-old Jewish practices ... Partly by choice and partly because of the circumstances created by anti-Jewish legislation, the Jews tended to keep aloof from the surrounding population." [ARONSON, p. 34]          In 1927 Jewish commentator Maurice Hindus noted the gigantic gulf traditionally set between Jews and Gentiles: "For the old Jewish civilization, with its rigid orthodoxy and its emphasis on Jewish superiority, compelled aloofness from worldly intellectual intercourse even as it compelled social isolation ... There are thousands of Jewish immigrants in [America] who remember only too vividly how horrified their parents were when they first discovered their children in possession of Gentile books and interested in Gentile studies." [HINDUS, p. 370] Meri-Jane Rochelson notes that even secular Jewish literature in Eastern Europe rarely addressed the Jews around them: "The absence of non-Jews in [Israel Zangwill's] Children of the Ghetto may be related to what Dan Miron has shown to be an even more severe omission of Christian neighbors in East European shtetl [Jewish village] fiction of the early twentieth century. According to Miron, the impression of insularity that results is part of a larger visionary shtetl myth." [ZANGWILL, I., 1998, p. 28]  Likewise, notes Ivan Kalmar, Sholem Asch's Fiddler on the Roof story [and its later Broadway and Hollywood adaptations] "largely ignores even the Gentile environment." [KALMER, I., in PRYTULAK]        As for non-Jewish perceptions of their Jewish neighbors, "hatred for the Jews," says Abram Leon, "does not date solely from the birth of Christianity. Seneca treated the Jews as a criminal race. Juvenal believed that the Jews only existed to cause evil for other peoples. Quintilian said that Jews were a curse for other people." [LEON, p. 71]        In 59 BCE the Roman statesman Cicero noted Jewish "clannishness" and "influence in the assemblies." In the second century AD Celsus, one of Rome's great medical writers, wrote that Jews "pride themselves in possessing superior wisdom and disdain for the company of other men."  Philostratus, an ancient Greek author, believed that Jews "have long since risen against humanity itself. They are men who have devised a misanthropic life, who share neither food nor drink with others." Tacitus (56-120 A.D.) a Roman public official, declared that "the Jews are extremely loyal toward one another, and are always ready to show compassion, but toward other people they feel only hate and enmity." [MORAIS, p. 46]          A brief sampling of the critical commentary and animosity towards Jews from a variety of sources through history includes the following:           "The Jewish nation dares to display an irreconcilable hatred toward all          nations, and revolts against all masters; always superstitious, always          greedy for the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous --          cringing in misfortune and insolent in prosperity."                                                                                                  -- Voltaire, (1694-1778), one of the greatest                                             French eighteenth century writers, from Essai                                             sur le Moeurs             Ironically, notes Jacob Katz, "Voltaire did more than any other single man to shape the rationalist trend that moved European society toward improving the status of the Jew." [KATZ, From, p. 34]  Still historically remembered (according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1994) "as a crusader against tyranny and bigotry," Voltaire turned repeatedly and angrily against Jews who he believed to epitomize such "tyranny and bigotry."  Jews, he complained, "are ... the greatest scoundrels who have ever sullied the face of the globe ... They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and Germans are born with blond hair. I would not in the least be surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race ... You [Jews] have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct, and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny." [GOULD, p. 91]  On another occasion Voltaire charged that "the Jew does not belong to any place except that place which he makes money; would he not just as easily betray the King on behalf of the Emperor as he would the Emperor for the King?" [KATZ, J, Fro, p. 44]        Thirty of 118 of Voltaire's essays in his Dictionary of Philosophy address Jews, usually disparagingly. Voltaire calls Jews "our masters and our enemies ... whom we detest ... the most abominable people in the world." [PRAGER, p. 128]        With the coming of the Enlightenment, notes David Sorkin, "Jews were roundly condemned for "their ritualistic religion, national character or economic situation which, separately or together, prevented them from being moral. Enlightenment thinkers almost without exception subscribed to this image of Jewish inferiority." [SORKIN, p. 85] "The [Jewish] ghetto, Enlighteners argued," says Steven Aschheim,      "had produced an essentially unacceptable culture. Jews were utter strangers to      Europe. Social isolation had created traits in need of drastic transformation: Jews      harbored within them hatred of the Christian nurtured by centuries of Talmudic      and rabbinic indoctrination, they were religious fanatics, parasitic in their      economics and dishonest in their dealings." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 6]     Even "enlightened" Jews disdained their Eastern European "ghetto" brethren: "The German Jews' attack upon his own and later upon the East European ghetto was made easier by the fact that the attack was in the mainstream of Enlightenment humanism. Jewish reformers agreed that integration required emphatic rejection of ghetto traits, traits which Goethe in his discussion of the traditional rabbi had summed up as 'fanatic zeal ... repulsive enthusiasm ... confused murmurings ... piercing outcries ... effeminate movements ... the queerness of an ancient nonsense." [ASCHHEIM, S., 1982, p. 6]        "Know that wherever there is money," said Montesquieu in his Persian Letters, "there is the Jew." [KREFETZ, p. 45]        "The Semites ... must declare all religious differences from their own      to be bad. In this sense, intolerance is really a factor of the Semitic      race, and a portion of the good and bad legacy it has left the world."           -- Ernest Renan, (1823-1892) [RENAN, E., p. 63] French           philosopher, historian and "one of the pioneers of Semitic philology"           [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 44]                                                 "Jews chose voluntarily and with a profound talent for self-preservation       the side of all those instincts that makes for decadence, not as if       mastered by them, but as if detecting in them a power by which the       world could be defied. The Jews are the very opposite of decadents ...       they have put themselves at the head of all decadent movements."                          -- Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900)  [AGUS, p. 295]      "The case against the Jews is long and damning; it would justify ten       thousand times as many pogroms as now go on in the world."                          -- H. L. Mencken, 1920, [in Rogow, A., 1961, p. 315]           "The Jews remain what they have been at all times: an elite people,        self-confident and domineering." -- Charles DeGaulle, former President                      of the Republic of France (1890-1970); (Facing heat,                      DeGaulle tried later to reframe this as compliment)  [GOULD,                      p. 494]         In apartheid South Africa, in a study of the representation of the Jews of that society in the fiction of Black writers, "coloreds," and Indians, Jews were perceived to be "exploitive and powerful." [SHAIN, p. 153] Another study, by Melville Edelstein, suggested that that the only English-speaking group further than Jews in "social distance" from Blacks were the dominant Afrikaners and that it was common parlance in Black culture to use the term "stingy like a Jew." [SHAIN, p. 153]         Even prominent and widely respected Jewish commentators echoed the same themes about their own people. Benjamin Disraeli, of Jewish heritage, and the most famous British prime minister of the nineteenth century wrote that         "The native tendency of the Jewish race is against the doctrine of the       equality of man. They have also another characteristic -- the faculty of       acquisition ... Their bias is to religion, property, and natural       aristocracy." [FELDMAN, p. 638]        Another Jew, the great philosopher Baruch Spinoza, was a  bridge between Jewish medievalism and the Enlightenment. Spinoza noted that:         "At the present time there is absolutely nothing which the Jews can        arrogate to themselves beyond other people ... As to their continuance        so long after dispersion, there is nothing marvelous in it, for they        separated themselves from every nation as to draw upon themselves        universal hate." [LEVY, p. 93]        Similar complaints reflecting consistently reoccurring charges against Jews have been echoed continuously throughout history, in many languages and in many lands, including -- even in the ancient past -- "Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Syrians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and many others." [HERTZLER, p. 62]  But this disdain for Jews by critics (some of the most learned men of their times, including Jews and Jewish apostates, across the spectrum of humanity) is not accepted as historical evidence for anything in our own day, except for the strange tenacity of irrational "anti-Semites” and "self-hating Jews" to badmouth Jews. Because this century's Nazi hate machine incorporated anything negative at all about Jews for their own evil aims, modern Jewry defensively, and manipulatively, equates any criticism about Jews in history (and there is a ton of it) to prejudicial lies or oversimplifications that led -- and can lead -- to Nazi fascism. So what was the real situation in bygone eras? What were Jews like, in relation to Gentiles? Popular Jewish dictate has one answer: look only to the Hebrew texts, ancient rabbis, and other Jewish chroniclers. They know what Jews were like. Their texts are reliable. The rest are all lies and exaggerations.        "How does one understand -- not even forgive, simply understand!" exhorts Harvard law professor and well-known Jewish polemicist Alan Dershowitz,         "the virulently anti-Jewish statements of intellectuals throughout       history? Their numbers included H. L. Mencken ('The Jews could       be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard       of'); George Bernard Shaw ('Stop being Jews and start being human       beings'); Henry Adams ('The whole rotten carcass is rotten with Jew       worms'); H.G. Wells ('A careful study of anti-Semitism, prejudice and       accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not       adequately realize the irritation they inflict'); Edgar Degas (characterized       as a 'wild anti-Semite'); Denis Diderot ('Brutish people, vile and vulgar       men'); Theodore Dreiser (New York is a 'kike’s dream of a ghetto,'       and Jews are not 'pure Americans' and 'lack integrity'); T. S. Eliot       (a social as well as literary anti-Semite, even after the Holocaust);       Immanuel Kant ('The Jews still cannot claim any true genius, any       truly great man. All their talents and skills revolve around stratagems       and low cunning ... They are a nation of swindlers.') Other famous       anti-Semites include Tacitus, Cicero, Aleksander Pushkin, Pierre Renoir,       Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and, of course, Richard Wagner. This       honor roll of anti-Jewish bigotry goes on, and included people of every       race, religion, and geographic area, political leaning, gender, and age.       The answer to the question why? probably lies more in the realm of       abnormal psychology than in any rational attempts to find understandable       cause in history, or economics. Anti-Semitism is a disease of the soul,       and diseases are best diagnosed by examining those infected with them."       [DERSHOWITZ, A., p. 113]            Nicholas de Lange, a Jewish scholar, joins Dershowitz in reflecting a virtually generic Jewish response about the constant complaint about their people throughout history and culture, saying:                "Much of the ancient literature on the Jews ... is devoted to               explaining why the Jews have incurred the justifiable anger or               hatred of ordinary peace-loving, law-abiding people ... But no               critical historian would consider taking their arguments at face               value, and in fact they are likely to tell us more about their               authors than their victims." [De Lange, p. 28]        A Jewish-Polish professor in Warsaw, Pawel Spiewak, adds this about the same theme:        "We find the representatives of almost every ideological orientation      [who were anti-Semites] ... Enlightenment thinkers (Voltaire), arch-      conservatives (de Masitre, de Bonald), socialists and communists      (Fourier, Proudhon, Marx, Sobel), and the great Romantics (Goethe).      These writers seem to differ in everything -- their relation to religion,      the idea of progress, authority, feudalism, and capitalism, the concept      of knowledge and human nature -- but they are united in a spirit of      dislike and hostility towards that strange tribe, the Jews." [SPIEWAK, P.,      p. 51]         While fascists on the political right like Hitler decried the Jews, polar political 18th and 19th century leftists like socialists Charles Fourier, Alphonse Tousenel, Pierre Le Roux, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Johann Gottlieb Fichte were, to today's Jewish analysis, also vehemently irrational anti-Semites. These men wrote tracts like this, by Proudhon:        "The Jew is by temperament an anti-producer, neither a farmer nor      an industrialist nor even a true merchant. He is an intermediary, always      fraudulent and parasitic, who operates, in trade as in philosophy, by      means of falsification, counterfeiting, and horse-trading." [LEWIS, B.,      1986, p. 111]       "I see no other means of protecting ourselves against them," wrote Fichte, "than by conquering their Promised Land and sending them all there." [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 111-112]  Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin declared that Jews were        "one exploiting sect, one people of leeches, one single devouring      parasite closely and intimately bound together not only across national      boundaries, but also across all divergences of political opinion ... [Jews      have] that mercantile passion which constitutes one of the principle traits      of their national character."  [LEWIS, B., 1986, p. 113]       "For one [reason] or another," notes Daniel Pipes, "virtually every major figure in the early history of socialism -- including Friedrich Engels, Charles Fourier, Ferdinand Lasalle, Marx, and Joseph Proudhon -- showed a marked antipathy to Jews." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 88]        Jewish author William Korey notes the same mystifying anti-Jewish omnipresence among disparate peoples in interviews (at a Harvard archive) with 329 refugees from the Soviet Union in the early 1950s: "A detailed examination of the background information of those who registered hostile attitudes to Jews reveals that they were of various age, national, educational, and status groups, and that they left the USSR at different periods." [KOREY, W., 1973, p. 11] The top six "anti-Semitic" assertions by this diverse group of people included assertions that        1) Jews occupy a privileged and favored position in Soviet society.      2) Jews are business- and money-minded.      3) Jews are clannish and help each other.      4) Jews are aggressive and 'pushy.'      5) Jews are sly, calculating, and manipulative, and know how to 'use a          situation.'      6) Jews are deceitful, dishonest, unprincipled, insolent, and impudent.