READING: Isaac Asimov on Dominationist Ethnonationalism

It is for everyone, and everyone catches it...

It is for everyone, and everyone catches it...

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I broke out, under difficult conditions, once in May of 1977. On that occasion I shared a platform with others, among them Elie Wiesel, who survived the Holocaust (the slaying of six million European Jews) and now will talk of nothing else. Wiesel irritated me when he said that he did not trust scientists and engineers because scientists and engineers had been involved in conducting the Holocaust.

What a generalization! It was precisely the sort of thing an anti-Semite says. "I don't trust Jews because once certain Jews crucified my Saviour."

I brooded about that on the platform and finally, unable to keep quiet, I said,

Mr. Wiesel, it is a mistake to think that because a group has suffered extreme persecution that is a sign that they are virtuous and innocent. They might be, of course, but the persecution process is no proof of that. The persecution merely shows that the persecuted group is weak. Had they been strong, then, for all we know, they might have been the persecutors."

Whereupon Wiesel, very excited, said, "Give me one example of the Jews ever persecuting anyone."

Of course, I was ready for him. I said,

Under the Maccabean kingdom in the second century B.C, John Hyrcanus of Judea conquered Edom and gave the Edomites a choice conversion to Judaism or the sword. The Edomites, being sensible, converted, but, thereafter, they were in any case treated as an inferior group, for though they were Jews, they were also Edomites…

And Wiesel, even more excited, said, "That was the only time."

I said, "That was the only time the Jews had the power. One out of one isn't bad."

That ended the discussion, but I might add that the audience was heart and soul with Wiesel.

I might have gone further. I might have referred to the treatment of the Canaanites by the Israelites under David and Solomon. And if I could have foreseen the future, I would have mentioned what is going on in Israel today. American Jews might appreciate the situation more clearly if they imagined a reversal of roles, of Palestinians ruling the land and of Jews despairingly throwing rocks.

I once had a similar argument with Avram Davidson, a brilliant science fiction writer, who is (of course) Jewish and was, for a time at least, ostentatiously Orthodox. I had written an essay on the Book of Ruth, treating it as a plea for tolerance as against the cruelty of the scribe Ezra, who forced the Jews to "put away" their foreign wives. Ruth was a Moabite, a people hated by the Jews, yet she was pictured as a model woman, and she was the ancestress of David.

Avram Davidson took umbrage at my implication that the Jews were intolerant and he wrote me a letter in which he waxed sarcastic indeed. He too asked when the Jews had ever persecuted anyone. In my answer, I said,

Avram, you and I are Jews who live in a country that is ninety-five percent non-Jewish and we are doing very well. I wonder how we would make out, Avram, if we were Gentiles and lived in a country that was ninety-five percent Orthodox Jewish…

He never answered.

Right now there is an influx of Soviet Jews into Israel. They are fleeing because they expect religious persecution. Yet at the instant their feet touched Israeli soil, they became extreme Israeli nationalists with no pity for the Palestinians. From persecuted to persecutors in the blinking of an eye.

The Jews are not remarkable for this. It's just that because I'm a Jew I am sensitive to this particular situation-but it is a general phenomenon. When pagan Rome persecuted the early Christians, the Christians pleaded for tolerance. When Christianity took over, was there tolerance? Not on your life. The persecution began at once in the other direction.

The Bulgarians demanded freedom for themselves from an oppressive regime and made use of that freedom by attacking the ethnic Turks in their midst. The Azerbaijani demanded freedom from the centralized control of the Soviet Union, but they seemed to want to make use of that freedom to kill all the Armenians in their midst.

The Bible says that those who have experienced persecution should not in their turn persecute: "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21). Yet who follows that text? When I try to preach it, I merely make myself seem odd and become unpopular.…

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I miss Isaac Asimov, even though he did not handle the sexual liberation movement of the 1960s well…