on the right side of history

on the right side of history

Most people want to be good, not because it’s a virtue but because it makes sense to behave in ways that keep the peace, so we can get on with life and loving the people we love. I believe most people are inherently good.

We become angry when children are harmed. We defend those without power.

If we’re functioning humans, we are emotional beings. Arguably what sets us apart from all other beings is the way our emotions create and respond to narrative – to the stories we tell each other and ourselves. And stories can be as powerful as bombs and guns.

I’ve spent a lot time over the past few years studying the way stories about Jews move through history. Now, I’m researching a PhD on the subject. My interest in this area began with an editorial query: why do almost all stories we read about Jews focus exclusively on the Holocaust?

I knew there was more to Jewish history than the Holocaust, because my own family history tells me so. I’m not Jewish, but my great grandmother was, and she died in Bondi in 1940, probably knowing very little about what was happening in Europe. How did her story fit into the fabric of Jewish history?

My next question was trickier. If Holocaust fiction is one of the most popular genres, selling millions and millions of copies for decades, from Schindler’s List to The Tattooist of Auschwitz, how come synagogues and Jewish schools in Sydney have to employ security guards to keep Jews safe from attack today, in the twenty-first century?  

The answer, I’m finding, entails at least two thousand years of history – much bigger than my little PhD will be able to tackle.

There are lots of different opinions on where and how stories about Jews being bad people began. But the seeds of these stories can be found during the Roman Empire and the refusal of the Jews to accept conquest. They are troublemakers, upsetting the proto-fascist order of Roman-controlled Judea. “Look at how these people stick together,” said the famous legal scholar Cicero. “Don’t they know they’re supposed to be slaves?” (Or words to that effect.) From the century before the Roman crucifixion of Jesus, until the Emperor Hadrian expelled the unruly Jews from their homeland a hundred years later, massacring a million, this group of people became labelled as the enemies of civilisation.

One writer at the time, Apion, said that Jews are a bloodthirsty people who sacrifice humans (specifically Greeks) in their temples. This is the origin of the “blood libel” against Jews, and it’s an outright lie, no doubt told to reflect public sentiment and to increase his author profile. While many ancient peoples all over the world, probably including early Israelites, did perform human sacrifice, Judaism explicitly forbids the practice. Jews do not kidnap enemies, strangers or children in order to murder them for ritual purposes.

I can’t believe I’m spelling that out in 2024, but the re-emergence of this blood libel means that I must. Today, placards showing Jews as baby killers with dripping fangs, and the drenching of coffee shops and politicians’ offices in red paint by anti-Israel protestors can all appear to be reasonable, albeit dramatic, statements against the Israeli government’s bombardment of Gaza. But whether the protesters intend it or not, this bloody imagery is an echo of ideas that have been used to justify the massacre of Jews time and time again in the past.

To be clear, I think the present Israeli military bombardments of Gaza are outrageous and unconscionable. I think that the instigators of this crime against humanity – both from Israel and Hamas – should go to prison. Palestinian people deserve peace, dignity and freedom from all forms of oppression. Israeli hostages deserve to go home.

In faraway Australia, I am in no position to make moral judgements upon the distress of Palestinians or Israelis, and how that distress might manifest in narrative. I do not have a solution for conflict in the Middle East, either. But I can say with confidence that Jews do not murder or maim others for ritual purposes.

It’s a very dangerous lie to suggest that they do.

Throughout those two thousand years of history, this lie has been used to justify countless massacres of innocent, ordinary Jewish people. Both Christians and Muslims have burned Jews at the stake simply for being Jews. Millions of Jews have been tortured, beheaded, stabbed to death, hung, shot and gassed for being “evil”. When you look at the long view of history, the Holocaust appears as the culmination of many, many acts of violence against Jews.

All based on lies that have been told so often and for so long that they seem like truth.

But surely the Jews must have done something to upset so many people across such a long span of time, mustn’t they? No. Women have been told they are stupid for a lot longer than Jews have been told they are evil.

Stories can seep into our thoughts like poison. All racism, all prejudice, operates this way: with stereotypes, tropes and slogans that reinforce simplistic binaries of “good” and “evil”. Short, sharp words that can make us feel right, and righteous in saying them.

At least one Australian writer that I know of has recently stated that Jews “ritually” harm children (no, I’m not going to name them). And this week, after weeks of vandalisation of other politicians’ offices, the office of Jewish MP Josh Burns was trashed in a way that has chilled my own blood. The windows were smashed and fires lit beneath them, reminiscent of Kristalnacht. Across the glass is written in red paint “ZIONISM IS FASCISM”. Zionism means different things to different people, but as I understand it, for most Jews, at its most basic it means the right to exist in a homeland in peace. On the picture of Josh Burns in the window, red devil horns have been drawn on his head. The oldest symbol accusing Jews of murderous evil is to draw them as the devil. Such depictions appear in both medieval imagery of Jews and in Nazi imagery of Jews, across a period of a thousand years.   

It is not a protest symbol. It looks like a call for violence against Jewish people in Australia. The protesters who did this might well be naïve, they might think concerns such as mine are pointless, obscure. But where are their calls for peace? Their blood-soaked images are frightening. And they have finally made me speak.  

Image: Engin Akyurt, Unsplash, cropped