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Lately, I've been seeing a lot of Zionists claim that online rhetoric surrounding Israel, and specifically accusations of it intentionally killing Palestinians, is blood libel. I think this warrants a discussion of what blood libel actually is, how it's legitimately applied today, and how Zionists claiming "charges of genocide against Israel are blood libel" damages conversations about antisemitic tropes. I'll probably cover other antisemitic canards (such as well-poisoning) another time, since they're also frequently weaponized by Zionists to shield Israel from legitimate accusations of wrongdoing.
History and Background Blood libel is an antisemitic canard that accuses Jewish people of ritual murder and blood sacrifice, specifically that we kill Christians to use their blood for various rituals. Many of the historic accusations of blood libel suggest that Jews use the blood of Christians to bake Passover matzah. Primarily, though, the accusations of blood libel sprang up when a Christian child (often a young boy) went missing or was killed in a town. The local Jewish community would be blamed, often by the actual perpetrators (if a crime had taken place at all), and Jews would be brutally tortured until a confession was given. Sometimes, the specifics of these accusations tied into deicide, another antisemitic trope blaming all Jews throughout all of time for the crucifixion of Jesus. Jews are frequently used as scapegoats for countless disasters throughout history, and the death of young children is no exception. Though the first documented occurrence of blood libel dates back to 40 BCE, the examples we usually see originate from Europe in the Middle Ages, where it was an incredibly dangerous time and place to be Jewish. Blood libel was used alongside various other antisemitic canards to justify the mass-murder and expulsion of Jewish people, especially from Central and Western Europe, like modern-day England, France, and Germany (who is always at the scene of the crime). In 1144, Jews in Norwich, England were accused of blood libel after a young boy named William was found to have been stabbed to death on Good Friday. A monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich about the murder of the boy and the alleged miracles occurring near his burial site. It's his fabrication that solidified the rumors of blood libel stirring in Norwich. William was treated as a Christian martyr (someone killed for being Christian/professing love for Jesus) and even canonized as a saint. A cult began to form around him not long after that. After several more instances of blood libel popped up in England in the following decades, the pogroms started. Jewish communities across the country were raided and their people massacred. A few decades after the death of Hugh of Lincoln, another young boy who was killed in 1255, England expelled its entire Jewish population in 1290 and they were not allowed to return until 1657, four hundred years later. Another notable case of blood libel - perhaps the most famous - occurred after the death of a two-year-old boy in modern-day Italy, Simon of Trent. Simon was killed in 1475 and like a majority of other children used in blood libel accusations, was venerated as a saint. His cult spread throughout Europe and to this day, I've still seen him referenced by antisemitic Christians. Blood libels have persisted throughout time since then, including being published in Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Though their more modern iterations haven't really resulted in the mass-murder or expulsion of Jews, like all antisemitic tropes, they're still extremely dangerous and we absolutely should take great lengths to avoid them. Modern applications Now with the background on blood libel accusations of the past, we can see what they look like today. The most common example I can think of is the adrenochrome conspiracy theory, a popular one amongst the QAnon crowd. The adrenochrome conspiracy posits that "Hollywood elites" participate in child-trafficking rings to harvest their blood for adrenochrome, which would allegedly make them immortal somehow. Of course, the usage of "elites" makes it easier for the promoters of these antisemitic conspiracy theories to deny that they're talking about Jews, but dogwhistles are very common with contemporary antisemitism (which we'll discuss more in depth another time). The trope has also "accidentally" been regurgitated by modern media plenty of times. I think this may sometimes be unintended, because of how antisemitic tropes have worked their way into acceptable public consciousness, but it's still negligence on the part of the creators. A good example would be Inside Job on Netflix (see this article about why). Or perhaps Roald Dahl's The Witches (but this one's not really hard to put together considering Dahl was a raging antisemite). Disney's Tangled suffers enormously from the Jewish-coding of Mother Gothel, in appearance and behavior and using her blonde-haired, stolen child's powers to keep herself young. It can also sometimes be applied to vampire media in particular, and it's definitely not uncommon for there to be a connection between vampire imagery and antisemitism, but that's something I'll cover another time. What blood libel is not Blood libel absolutely is a trope that still exists today in the media we consume, but that doesn't mean the label of "blood libel" can be ascribed to something that doesn't fit in with the libel itself. Today, Israel has leveled the accusation of blood libel against South Africa for describing the attacks on Gaza as "genocide" as South Africa attempts to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice. The same accusations are regularly directed towards anyone else being vocally pro-Palestine. Accusing supporters of Palestine of blood libel for pointing out that Israel is committing genocide is a blatant attempt to take legitimacy away from these statements. None of these discussions bring up ritual murder or consumption of blood, which are very key parts of categorizing a claim as blood libel. Zionists also pretend any "blood libel accusation" against Israel is the same as one being made against Jews in general; it's not. Israel is a militaristic, apartheid state that commits atrocities in the name of the Jewish people, but it is not "us". Most importantly, the genocide of Palestinians is actually happening. There is an overwhelming amount of photo and video evidence documenting the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, along with testimonies from the people involved, including admissions from the perpetrators themselves. Another consequence of unjustly accusing people of antisemitism is that antisemitism is taken less seriously, or legitimate accusations of antisemitism are met with denial or indifference. I would argue that this is intentional, because Israel relies heavily on the lack of safety of Jews in diaspora to legitimize itself. By combatting antisemitism in all its forms worldwide, we make sure that Israel can no longer claim to be the only safe place in the world for us. We will thrive where we are, and education about antisemitism is imperative to that goal. Sources Passover and Blood Libels | My Jewish Learning The Adrenochrome Conspiracy Theory—Pushed By ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Star—Explained (forbes.com) Does Netflix’s ‘Inside Job’ encourage antisemitic conspiracy theorists? – The Forward Israel-Hamas war: List of key events, day 85 | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera
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To understand the effects Zionism has had on Jewish linguistics, one must first have some background on Jewish linguistics itself.
Hebrew has been considered a dead language since around 200-400 CE, after Mishnaic Hebrew (or Early Rabbinic Hebrew, the language of the ancient sages and scholars) became an exclusively written language instead of a spoken one. Hebrew was still used by Jews around the world as a lingua franca. A lingua franca a language that is adopted as a common language between speakers whose native languages are different. Hebrew was also used for both secular and religious literature, including spoken prayers, but it was no longer the primary means of communication within Jewish communities. Obviously, the importance of Hebrew shouldn't be understated, but it must be understood that historically, Hebrew as we know it did not exist until the late 19th century. After the "death" of Hebrew, Aramaic became another lingua franca for Jews in and out of Palestine, as well as a primary means of communication with their non-Jewish neighbors. The Talmud and the Zohar (the primary text of Jewish mysticism) are both written in Aramaic, as well as a multitude of important prayers. In addition to the widespread usage of Aramaic, diaspora languages had begun to pop up. The oldest is Yevanic (also called Judeo-Greek or Romaniyot), which is first documented to have been used in the Second Temple period (between 516 BCE and 70 CE). There are dozens of Jewish diaspora languages, unique to the region they come from and the Jews living there. Many are, unfortunately, now extinct and it's a race against time to preserve as many as possible. If you or a family member or person in your community speaks a Jewish language, even more "common" ones, I recommend reaching out to the Jewish Language Project. There are two that I'll put links to at the end of this post, one operated by Wikitongues and another by HUC-JIR. Both have opportunities to get involved, including interviewing and filming speakers of these heavily endangered languages, as well as documentation efforts. The extinction of these languages has multiple causes, but I'll start with the main focus of this post, the invention of modern Hebrew and Zionism. Early and modern Zionists alike have pushed for modern Hebrew to be treated as the language of Jews, rather than one of many. This initiative was started by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, a secular, proto-Zionist linguist, who attempted to attract Old Yishuv Jews in Palestine to his movement for Jewish nationalism by dressing up as an Orthodox Jew. Ben-Yehuda was initially rejected by Old Yishuvim, who used Hebrew only for religious purposes and infrequently as a lingua franca with Jews outside of Palestine, and spoke Arabic, French, and Yiddish with their communities. They even declared cherem on Ben-Yehuda (a concept relatively close to excommunication). This did not stop him, though, and Ben-Yehuda raised his children in a household exclusively speaking Hebrew. He attempted to prevent his son from interacting with other children or hearing other languages spoken, even chastising his wife for singing a lullaby in Russian. Ben-Yehuda's Hebrew lexicon was comprised of the medieval Hebrew used as a lingua franca, with Arabic, Yiddish, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Egyptian linguistic analogies. By the time of his death in 1922, Ben-Yehuda's project to revive Hebrew was successful enough for British authorities to recognize Hebrew as an official language of Jews in Palestine. This revival of Hebrew, born of Jewish nationalism, created strong resentment for diaspora Jews amongst early settlers in Palestine, sentiments that still exist in Israel today. Language was a big part of this internal culture war and Yiddish was a primary target, most likely because it was the most widely spoken diaspora language at the time. In 1923, an organization called the Language Defenders Battalion was formed to enforce modern Hebrew as the only language of Jews in Palestine. In 1927, after the Hebrew University of Jerusalem sought to install a Chair of Yiddish Literature, the Language Defenders Battalion launched a riot in the streets and attacked multiple staff members, badly wounding multiple people. Their often-violent protests shut down Yiddish theatre performances, lectures, and publications, including the firebombing of a publishing house in the 1930s for reproducing Yiddish literature. The Language Defenders Battalion was not the only organization that targeted Yiddish, either. The Union for the Imposition of Hebrew sent threatening letters to printing presses in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, one of which reads: “We have just been informed that you are preparing to publish or print a newspaper in Yiddish… We warn you not to do this thing and not to assist those who dishonor the Hebrew language, which would lead to conflict and unrest and bring about the involvement of the police. The responsibility for the consequences will be yours. Stop the typesetting of the newspaper immediately.” From a Forward article from 1938: "There’s a second battle brewing in the Land of Israel, and it’s not between the Arabs and the British, nor is it between the Arabs and the Jews. It’s between the Jews and the Jews. There are those in the Yishuv who would like to do away with Yiddish completely, and then there are those who would like to use the language with which they grew up. And these groups are at war. The former, which appears to be in control of the situation, refuses to allow newsstands to display Yiddish papers. It also refuses to permit public meetings at which Yiddish is spoken, nor does it allow Yiddish theater to be performed legally. The latter group would simply like for this ban on Yiddish to be rescinded, and for the works of Mendele, Peretz and Sholem Aleichem, and the literature of 15 million Yiddish-speaking Jews throughout the world, to be acceptable as culture in the Land of Israel." Central figures in the Zionist movement also had quite a lot to say about Yiddish, including David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. Ben-Gurion referred to Yiddish, of which he was a native speaker, as "a grating, foreign language" in 1945. Theodor Herzl, the father of contemporary Zionism, said this about diaspora languages in general: "We will rid ourselves of the ugly and stunted jargons, those ghetto languages of which we now make use. They were the furtive languages of prisoners." These statements outline the primary reason why Zionists despised Yiddish. To them, it represented the mere concept of diasporic identity, something that would not give Zionism power, and it had to be diminished. It was because of this need to dominate the narrative on Jewish cultural identity that legislative bans on Yiddish theatre and publications persisted until 1951. It is for the same reason that Yiddish speakers are still looked down on in Israel. Rokhl Kafrissen for Tablet Magazine writes, "My own experience with (non-Yiddishist) Israelis has found that even among those who are the most critical of the state and/or Zionism, the topic of Yiddish (and Eastern Europe) is almost invariably met with benign disgust, if not outright contempt." The other, blatantly obvious reason for the decline of Yiddish and other Jewish languages is the Holocaust, which decimated both the Yiddish and Ladino-speaking populations of the world. About 75% of the global Yiddish-speaking population were killed in the Holocaust, and Yiddish speakers accounted for over 85% of Jewish Holocaust victims. It is, however, an undeniable fact that Jewish diaspora languages as a whole have diminished significantly because of the Israeli regime. Judeo-Arabic, for instance, was widely used until the middle of the 20th century and speakers of Judeo-Arabic vastly outnumbered Yiddish speakers in the Middle Ages. Today, after the majority of Middle Eastern and North African Jews immigrated to Israel or France, Judeo-Arabic and all of its dialects are either endangered or extinct. Hebrew is taught to Jewish children around the world regardless of what language their family would have spoken in the past because of its ties to Israel, with the exception of Hasidic communities that still use Yiddish as a primary language. For diaspora to be associated with weakness and cowardice instead of strength and resilience is ludicrous considering our people's history of perseverance predates the Zionist project more than 30 times over. The celebration of diaspora cultures threatens the Zionist myths that Israel as a nation is inextricable from Jewish identity, or that we can never hope for a better world where our diverse global communities thrive. It is because of this threat that Israel has attempted to fully snuff out Yiddish in the past and jeers at it in the present, as well as erase and target the cultural and linguistic identities of Jews from all parts of the world. I wanted also to include some links to videos of Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and some other diaspora languages being spoken. They are so beautiful and deserve to be heard. Again, there are links to both Jewish language projects below and I urge anyone with the ability to do so to offer support with donations or linguistic contributions or even simply spreading the word that these initiatives exist. Yiddish: Speaking Yiddish On The Street - Yiddish Book Center Nitsokhn Lid - Victory Song (Yiddish Anti-Fascist Song) Oy Ir Narishe Tsienistn - Daniel Kahn Ladino: The Ladino Language, Casually Spoken - Wikitongues Kuando el Ray Nimrod - Sephardi Ladino Song El Sueño de la Hija del Rey - Sephardic Ladino Song Haketia: Bellida - Moroccan Jews Song in Haquetia - by LALA Tamar Alicia Sisso Raz - Haketia What is Haketia (Western Judeo-Spanish)? Egyptian Judeo-Arabic: The Judeo-Arabic Language of Egyptian Jews - Wikitongues Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic: Joseph Speaking Baghdadi Jewish Arabic - Wikitongues Jewish Neo-Aramaic: Jewish Neo-Aramaic - Jewish Languages Project Juhuri: The Juhuri Language, Casually Spoken - Wikitongues Judeo-Malayalam: Listen to the Language of Cochin Jews - Wikitongues Resources for Jewish languages: - Wikitongues | ... - Jewish Languages Sources: - Jewish Languages: From Aramaic to Yiddish | My Jewish Learning - How Yiddish became a ‘foreign language’ in Israel despite being spoken there since the 1400s – The Forward - Palestinian Yiddish | YIVO Institute for Jewish Research - Yiddish in Israel | The Strange Side of Jewish History - The History of Yiddish | My Jewish Learning - Yiddish in Israel - Tablet Magazine - Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Making of Modern Hebrew | My Jewish Learning - Recovering Judeo-Arabic | The Jewish Standard (timesofisrael.com) |
AuthorAn anti-Zionist, socialist, Ashkenazi Jew who writes essays on social and humanitarian issues, especially Jewish subjects. ArchivesCategories
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