Netanjahu, the German Right and Christian Europe

Flashback, 6.5.2020: The far-right AfD (“Alternative for Germany”) in Germany now advertises with the portrait of Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli prime minister who repeatedly stands up for his father.
Yair Netanyahu had tweeted on April 28: “Schengen zone is dead and soon your evil globalist organization will be too, and Europe will return to be free, democratic and Christian!” And further: “The EU is the enemy of Israel and all Christian countries in Europe.” What was meant was the support of the EU representation for the large annual peace event of the Combattants for Peace, which commemorates the victims on both sides on the eve of Israel’s Heroes’ Day.

The new Posterboy of the AfD: Yair Netanjahu

Netanyahu promptly received applause from AfD Member of the European Parliament Joachim Kuhs on his Facebook page. Which Yair Netanyahu answered with an enthusiastic call to Kuhs and the AfD to finally end this “madness” with his “colleagues.” What was meant was EU support for NGOs in Israel and Palestine.
Kuhs, chairman of the “Christians in the AfD” and member of the AfD federal board, has only recently visited Israel together with representatives of the “Jews in the AfD” to meet representatives of Likud – and writes again and again in right-wing and radical right-wing German and Israeli media about the “hostility of the EU towards Israel”, apparently one of his favorite topics.
The AfD, whose members are repeatedly seen with Israeli flags at right-wing demonstrations, also make no secret of the kind of Israel they love: namely the one that finally ensures that the Jews no longer want to be part of Europe – and in this way they can finally be gotten rid of.

“Allah will help”. The Arabist Hedwig Klein

European Diary 19.2.2021: 110 years ago today, Hedwig Klein was born in Antwerp. Soon after, the family moved to Hamburg.
She loses her father, the merchant Abraham Wolf Klein, when she is not even five years old. He dies as a soldier on the Eastern Front for the German Reich. Hedwig Klein enrolled at the university to study in 1931. Her choices: Islamic Studies, Semitistisk and English Philology. In 1937, her doctoral thesis is written: the critical edition of an Arabic manuscript on early Islamic history. But Jews are no longer allowed to sit for the doctoral examination from the spring of 1937.
Hedwig Klein is persistent, she convinces the university administration to allow an exception. Her thesis is given the top grade of “Excellent,” and her supervisor Arthur Schaade attests to her “a degree of diligence and perspicacity that one would wish on many an older Arabist.”

Hedwig Klein

In 1938, the thesis is to be printed, and the doctoral certificate is also already drawn up, but then the imprimatur is withdrawn. The ban on Jews earning doctorates is now enforced with all thoroughness.
Now Hedwig Klein plans her emigration. But she does not succeed in obtaining a visa, neither in France nor in the USA. With the help of the Hamburg economic geographer Carl August Rathjens, she finally receives an invitation from an Arabic professor in Bombay. And on August 19, her steamer sets sail from Hamburg. Two days later, she writes Rathjen a hopeful postcard. “Allah will help already…”
But in Antwerp, the ship receives orders to return and call at a German port. By then the German invasion of Poland is already in preparation, and with it the next world war.

Once again, Arthur Schaade helps her. Klein is recommended to Hans Wehr, an Arabist who has just joined the NSDAP. The Reich government, Wehr demands, should make “the Arabs” its allies, against France and England, and against the Jews in Palestine. And the Foreign Office, in turn, sees in Hans Wehr the right man to compile a German-Arabic dictionary. For this is now urgently needed, not least for a successful translation of “Mein Kampf” into Arabic.
Her collaboration on the German-Arabic dictionary initially saves Hedwig Klein from deportation to Riga in December 1941, which Schaade is just able to prevent with an intervention. Klein was irreplaceable.
But on July 11, 1942, the time had come. The first deportation train leading from Hamburg directly to the Auschwitz extermination camp also takes Hedwig Klein to her murderers. Just as her sister, her mother and her grandmother are murdered.
In 1947, Carl August Rathjen succeeds in getting Hedwig Klein’s dissertation printed after all, and she is declared a doctor of philosophy in “absentia”.
After the war, Hans Wehr was classified as a mitläufer and used Klein’s collaboration to exonerate himself. The German-Arabic dictionary appears in 1952, and in the preface Wehr thanks a “Fräulein Dr. H. Klein” for her cooperation. Without a word about her fate.
“Der Wehr” is still the most widely used German-Arabic dictionary, with the 5th edition last published in 2011.

Thanks to Stefan Buchen, who vividly describes Hedwig Klein’s story in his essay on the Quantara.de website.

https://en.qantara.de/content/hedwig-klein-and-mein-kampf-the-unknown-arabist

Flashback, 19.2.2020: In Hanau, Hesse, a 43-year-old German shoots nine people of “foreign origin,” in two shisha bars and on the open street, and injures six others, some seriously. Finally, he shoots his mother and himself at home. Before the attack, the perpetrator had spread a right-wing extremist appeal on the Internet, characterized by anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, misogynistic and racist conspiracy theories: a “message to the entire German people.”

The perpetrator apparently also had psychological problems, which later prompted representatives of the right-wing AFD to deny that the crime was politically motivated. Josef Schuster, the representative of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, on the other hand, states that it can be “assumed that the perpetrator deliberately wanted to hit people with an immigrant background” and accuses the police and judiciary of having “poor eyesight” in the “right eye. Among the victims of the attack are Germans with Turkish, Kurdish, Bosnian and Afghan background, German and Romanian Roma. The perpetrator attacked them all deliberately, or shot them blindly through the door of a shisha bar.

“We are the new Jews”

European Diary, 4.12.2020: One of the leading figures and closest confidants with whom Viktor Orban has been bringing Hungarian cultural creators and institutions into line for years is Szilard Demeter, the director of the Petöfi Literature Museum in Budapest – and a member of numerous committees in which decisions are made on the allocation of grants to the literary and music industry. Szilard did not become known for his rather moderately successful literary and musical attempts, but rather for his marked right-wing slogans and threats of violence. Now he has also gone a little over the top, even for Orban’s best friends, the Israeli government.

George Soros, the Hungarian Holocaust survivor and former investment banker who has been the most popular target of anti-Semitic campaigns by the Hungarian government for years, made Europe his “gas chamber”, according to Szilard in a commentary on the Internet portal origo.hu last Saturday. “Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.” “The liberal Führer, and his liber-Aryan army” would try to erase the Christian and national identity of the European peoples. “We are the new Jews,” writes Demeter, referring to Poland and Hungary, and the intention of the European Union to punish violations of the rule of law in the future, which Poland and Hungary want to prevent by blocking the entire EU budget.
Demeter, who calls himself a “fanatical Orbanist”, has half-heartedly backed down after strong protests by the Jewish community in Hungary, numerous organizations and yes, even the Israeli embassy. Of course, there is no question of resignation or dismissal. After all, the fact that Soros allegedly wants to “flood” Europe with Muslims is the core of Orban’s daily propaganda, in which he is advised by close confidants of the Israeli head of government, Netanyahu. The fact that Szilard has made a few mistakes with the text modules here will not really hinder his career in Hungary.

“We are the new Jews,” wasn’t it with these words that the chairman of an Austrian right-wing party in 2012 complained about being insulted on the way to the ball of fraternity members. “It was like the Reichskristallnacht”. Only five years later the man was vice chancellor. Szilard Demeter must have a brilliant career ahead of him. Well, at least for a while.

“Communication Problems”?

European Diary, 4.11.2020: The Austrian Federal Chancellor’s approach to a statesmanlike attitude and “inclusive” level-headedness lasted only briefly. Only two days after the murderous attack by a jihadist in downtown Vienna, Sebastian Kurz has once again begun to serve the anti-EU right-wing populism. And shows himself unimpressed by any knowledge of constitutional principles. How does that work? In this way: Instead of becoming specific about who is currently posing a threat in Austria, the all-purpose weapon of the talk of “political Islam” must first be brought into position again. This phrase, which has been used again and again, has the advantage that, in case of doubt, it can mean anything and everything that can somehow be associated with Islam. Islamic politicians from states inhabited by a majority of Muslims can be labelled with it just as fanatical jihadists who carry out terrorist attacks. Women who wear headscarves because they want to emphasize their Muslim identity, as well as people who want to see some of the ethical principles of Islam (yes, there are such principles, such as donating money to the needy – here it is called Caritas…) implemented in the world of politics, as well as people who use a certain understanding of Islam to justify their male, political, ethnic or social claims to power, and who are prepared to commit all sorts of infamous acts in return. Is there actually no political Christianity? Is there no German CDU (Christian Democrats) and no Austrian Christian-social People’s Party (ÖVP), no human rights-active Caritas and no evangelical, violent Trump followers, ready for action? Just to hint at the broad, contradictory spectrum.

But whoever speaks of “political Islam”, like Sebastian Kurz and so many others, wants to level precisely this differentiation and instead cultivate a general suspicion. That “culture of suspicion” which is partly to blame exactly for encouraging people like the assassin of Vienna in his jihadist frenzy, which shares – and radicalizes – precisely this world view of “we” and “the others”.

But then Sebastian Kurz delighted the public with the surprising insight that the assassination attempt would not have taken place if the perpetrator, who was released after two-thirds of his prison time, was still in custody. Otherwise we would never have thought of this.
However, even the Chancellor could know that this is not only customary in principle, but also makes sense, because it is the only way the judiciary has a handle on imposing conditions on the convicted person, as long as there is no other evidemnce in sight, such as participation in the deradicalization program and regular support through probation services, even for a longer period of time than the actual imprisonment would last. But the Chancellor’s diffuse message was clear: the (green) Minister of Justice and the judicial system, indeed the constitutional procedures in general are somehow to blame for the disaster. The turquoise-blue Chancellor, however, felt that this assignment of blame seemed all the more “necessary” after it became clear that the Ministry of the Interior run by his fellow party member Nehammer and the Federal Department of Domestic Intelligence in particular had a real need for explanation. After it became known that the assassin had tried to obtain ammunition for a Kalashnikov rifle in Slovakia, the Slovakian secret service informed its Austrian colleagues. Only the judiciary and the probation office knew nothing about such things.
In his press conference, which began only an hour late (and with apparently some need for clarification behind the scenes), Karl Nehammer had to admit in a subdued manner that there had apparently been “communication problems”, “mistakes” that called for an independent investigation. Minister of Justice Zadic (of the Greens), on the other hand, politely refrained from now putting up retaliatory measures on her part.
Instead, Sebastian Kurz is now publicly blaming – well, of course, who is surprised – though incredible as it is, the European Union and its “false tolerance”. Against Austrian citizens born in Vienna, like the assassin of Monday? Nobody should ask about the logic of arguments here. The tendency is the usual one. The Kurz’s touch of reason lasted only a short day.

Schleich di, du Oaschloch (Piss off, you asshole)

European diary, 3.11.2020: At the moment, voting is taking place in the USA. And when this will be read, we might know, or perhaps only guess, where the journey might take us. And no matter how it ends, a part of American society will articulate its anger, in a country that has been divided for four years, from above, day by day.

Meanwhile, the city of Vienna is trying to recover from a shock, the effects of which are also not yet foreseeable. But there are some signs that this shock may not deepen the division that is also felt in Austria. The split into a society that knows only “we” and “the others”.
Yesterday, on monday evening, the city of Vienna was like being at war. An unknown number of assassins had, at least that is how it seemed, starting from the Vienna Synagogue, the city temple, spread the center of Vienna with terror. Attacks by armed terrorists were reported from all over the city. The Austrian television reported in a continuous loop, without being able to report anything more than that the situation was unclear, the perpetrators unknown, the situation unchanged, and police forces were deployed everywhere. And that one should stop posting any videos on the Internet and instead download them from a police website, which urgently needs clues as to whether more perpetrators are on the way. At that point, it was already known that one of the perpetrators had been shot. In every second sentence, however, the media reported primarily on the proximity of the crime scenes to the synagogue. And they puzzled over whether the attack was aimed primarily at Jews.
The president of the Vienna Kultusgemeinde, Ossi Deutsch, remained calm and explained that the synagogue was closed already and that no one from the Kultusgemeinde had been harmed. And some journalists noticed that the attack took place not only in the vicinity of the synagogue, but also in the middle of the city’s busiest pub district. The evening before the lockdown. All of Vienna was on the move. And yet it could be felt that many were just waiting to hear it: an anti-Semitic attack, possibly a refugee, the scenario par excellence. One could not get rid of the feeling that the synagogue was being served as if on a silver platter as an explanation for the horror, which after all had a simple form. The perpetrator(s) had apparently shot indiscriminately at all the people they encountered. They obviously meant: all of us!
This morning the sad outcome was known. Some as expected, some a little different, some quite different. The victims: four dead, 22 injured, many of them seriously, including a policeman. The perpetrator: one person, a selfdeclared Islamist, with rifle, pistol and machete. And an “explosive belt”, which was a dummy. A born Viennese, with North Macedonian roots, completely failed with his life, grown up in exactly the city, the society he hatefully declared “war” yesterday. For less than a deadly quarter of an hour. Nine minutes after the first emergency call was received by the police, he was shot by policemen, while the emergency forces, some in plain clothes, searched for hours for potential accomplices. And apparently even alarmed citizens in various parts of the city being mistaken for terrorists themselves and causing panic accordingly.
As early as 2018, the assassin, who had not been able to cope with school, having been in conflict with his family, sought his salvation in ever more radical Islamist ideologies, allowed himself to be recruited by the IS. Instead of reaching Syria as hoped, this brought him to court in Austria and into jail. Even an official deradicalization program, as we now know, did not have the desired effect. So far so bad.

But instead of defending “Europe” against its “external enemies” like France’s president in his solidarity address, the rhetoric of Austrian politics today remained unusually “inclusive”. Chancellor Kurz managed, to the surprise of many, to speak for the first time of “all people living in Austria”. And Minister of the Interior Nehammer specifically emphasized the “migrant background” of some courageous helpers. In fact, it was two martial artists of Turkish origin who first brought an old woman out of the fire at the risk of their own lives and then carried the seriously injured policeman to the ambulance. And it was a young Palestinian who first dragged the policeman from the assassin’s field of fire to cover and stopped his bleeding. Just like the assassin, the young man, Osama, and his family had already been in Austrian newspapers a year earlier. His parents had wanted to buy a house in Weikendorf, Lower Austria, and had been prevented from doing so for months by the mayor, who did not want to have any more of “these people” in “his” town.

But the declared hero of the people was the Viennese of unknown – one could also say: whatever – origin, who spontaneously called out his anger after the assassin. “Schleich di, du Oaschloch!” (Piss off you asshole) This was not exactly a heroic deed, but it was honest in a typical, sly Viennese way.

Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey: Border Crossing Between All Worlds

European Diary, 20.10.2020: Hardly anyone has crossed so many borders as he has, and this under many different names. 115 years ago today he was born in Baku or in Kiev: Lev Abramovich Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said alias Mohammed Essad-Bey. His father was a Georgian Jewish oil industrialist, his mother a Russian Jewish revolutionary in addition to my own. A German nanny took care of young Lev, who attended high school in Baku, until the family fled the Bolsheviks across the Caspian Sea in 1918.

His odyssey led the 15-year-old Lew to the German colony of Helenendorf in Georgia in 1920, and from there via Tbilisi, Istanbul, Paris, and Rome to Berlin. In 1922 Nussimbaum converted to Islam there, renamed himself Essad Bey and began to be active in the Berlin Islamic community. He studied Turkish, Arabic and Islamic history and became acquainted with the literary scene in Berlin, with Else Lasker-Schüler, Vladimir Nabokov and Boris Pasternak. As a journalist he wrote about the “Orient” and Islam for German newspapers, and in 1929 he made his debut as a literary author with an autobiographical novel, Oil and Blood.

Memorial Plaque at the Mansion Essad Bey lived in at Fasanenstraße 72 in Berlin, Fasanenstraße 72. Without any reference to his Jewish background…

This was followed in 1932 by a biography of Mohammed that is still considered a reference work today. His anti-Communist writings, on the other hand, and the fact that his Jewish origins were not an issue in Berlin at first, also gave him access to the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1934. But in 1936, Essad Bey, who was now living in Vienna, was banned from publishing in Nazi Germany. He published his next novel, Ali and Nino, under his new pseudonym, Kurban Said. And the book became a great success in Germany as well. (New editions followed till 2000 and 2002). In 1938, Essad Bey, who by then had come to admire Italian fascism, traveled via Switzerland to Italy, presumably to write a biography of Mussolini. Under growing physical pain he reached Positano in southern Italy, where he was diagnosed with Raynaud’s disease. His German nanny from Baku cared for him during the last months of his life, in which he completed his last, so far unpublished novel, The Man Who Understood Nothing about Love. In 1942 Lew Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said died in Positano.

The American journalist Tom Reiss wrote Nussimbaums weird biography: The Orientalist. Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.

The Orientalist

Lew Nussimbaum’s biography may be one of the most extreme examples of the borderline crossings that led many Jews to a keen interest in Islam and its history as early as the 19th century – starting with the representatives of the “scholarship of Judaism”, such as Abraham Geiger, who was to be one of the founders of modern Oriental and Islamic Studies.

“Abendland”

European Diary, 13.10.2020: Tomorrow evening Micha Brumlik (Berlin) will speak in our program about the new discourse on “Christian-Jewish Occident”. To get into the right mood André Heller will sing his unrhymed chanson about “Occident”.
André Heller’s Jewish father fled from the National Socialists and lived after 1945 mainly in Paris. Thus Heller also grew up with French citizenship before he became a chansonnier in Vienna.
In 1967 he was one of the founders of the pop channel Ö3 and presented the program Musicbox. His political commitment was always a balancing act. As a “Jew living in Vienna,” he criticized Kreisky for his compromising attitude toward old Nazis and anti-Semites, and Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, even though some critics accused him of “promoting” anti-Semitism. André Heller has not challenged such poisonous absurdities. He has remained as politically awake and critical as ever. When he spoke in the Austrian Parliament on 12 March 2018 on the occasion of 80 years of “Anschluss” in the Austrian Parliament, he ended his speech with a look at the new populism of the icy cold that had entered Austrian politics – and has not been overcome to this day.

“Allow me to tell you another strange thing about my life. For decades I thought I was something better than others. Wiser, more talented, more amusing, entitled to pride. I was arrogant, narcissistic, constantly judging others, and it didn’t do me any good until one day I was looking around me in a London Underground car. There were sitting and standing very different people with different skin colors and I heard different languages: In a kind of lightning bolt into my consciousness, I realized that each and every one of these women and men, old and young, hopeful and desperate, is also myself and that German, English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic or Swahili is not our real mother tongue, but the world mother tongue is and should be the compassion. It enables us to recognize ourselves in each other and to be intimately and lovingly connected with them and to take this realization into account in all our thoughts and actions.

Late time, twilight
hour that carries hope, sadness and ashes
Take a breath, be lonely
Autumn of thoughts and last refuge for me
Occident, Occident ‘I respect and despise you
Occident!

Occident
Not my tiredness
But the longing for dreams makes me look for sleep
The disturbing possibility of the transformations of my figure
Into other characters and locations
In the Von der Vogelweide
Cervantes, Appollinaire and James Joyce
Children’s crusades, funeral pyres, guillotines, colonies
The infamy, in fornicators on the Holy See
Expeditions to the edge of consciousness
Bankruptcy of good intentions
Congresses of the cynical laughing masters
Marc Aurel’s “Astronomy of contemplation”.
The storm baptisms Vasco da Gamas
Leonardo’s mirror writing
Gaudi’s anarchy of buildings
In Pablo Ruiz Picasso
Who grabbed the wishes by the tail
The Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto
The Great Progroms of Armenia and Spain
Percival, Hamlet, Woyzeck, Raskolnikov
The flowers of evil
De Sade, Hanswurst and the man without qualities (“Mann ohne Eigenschaften”)

The tale of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”

European Diary, 28.9.2020: Do you know this joke? Mayer, a Viennese Jew, wants to travel. At the train station in Vienna, already on the platform, he realizes that he still has to go to the toilet. He asks around: “Excuse me, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Me? Well, that’s an insinuation. I love the Jews.” “Okay, You obviously can’t help me.” And he turns to the next one: “Excuse me, are you anti-Semitic?” “Well, really, not at all. I love Israel, such a wonderful country, fighting against those…” “Let it go.” And again he turns to the next one. “Please, can you tell me, are you anti-Semitic?” “How not! Of course, Jews rule everywhere, even the weather…” “Thank you, you are at least honest. Can you watch my suitcase for a minute?”

Austria’s “Integration Minister” Susanne Raab loves it, Germany’s AfD loves it, Viktor Orbán loves it, Identitarians love it, Chancellor Sebastian Kurz loves it, the German CSU loves it, Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and Martin Engelberg love it: the “Christian-Jewish Occident”. HC Strache even loves the “Christian-Jewish-Aramaic heritage”. But hardly anyone is interested in that anymore.

I don’t remember exactly when the Jewish-Christian dialogue, that began in the 1950s under the impression of the Shoah – and the critical reflection among Christians – was taken up by the slogan of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”.

In Germany, this was already being talked about more and more often in the late 1990s. The Enlightenment and the Greek heritage were also frequently invoked. The only thing missing in this talking was Islam. As if it had not been Islamic philosophers in the Middle Ages who had a decisive contribution to Europe’s rediscovering of its Greek heritage in the Middle Ages. One could not avoid the impression that this void in public identity rhetoric was the only real thing about this discourse.

In 2010 the slogan of “Christian-Jewish Occident” also arrived in Vienna. Martin Engelberg, editor of a “Jewish” magazine and now a conservative (that is – in Austria – for the time being right wing populist) member of the Parliament and “Israel expert” of the Chancellor, invoked the “Judeo-Christian heritage” and the notion of a “common Jewish-Christian community of values” (after 1000 years of Christian persecution of Jews). And he warned against Muslim immigrants.

In the meantime, talk of “imported anti-Semitism” has become commonplace and serves not at least as justification for racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic asylum and migration policies.

And it serves as a distraction from everything that does not fit into this world view of essentialist identities. The greatest danger for Jews in Austria and Europe in fact still emanates from right-wing extremists, even if many Islamists make a successful effort to learn from them. Even in the everyday life of the middle classes and bourgeois circles, the so-called middle of society, Jews still have to listen to cultivated resentment about Jewish influence on this or that.

More than ever before, the most intimate friends of Israeli politics – from Victor Orbán and Matteo Salvini to Marie le Pen, to the right-wing populists of the Netherlands, Belgium, and most Eastern European countries – are always capable of rough-caliber anti-Semitic rides. That is in effect, when it is not about Israel, the Jews in the Middle East, who, as vanguard of the “Occident,” are expected do the dirty work for Europe and the United States, and are supposed to receive the blows for it.

Jews all over the world instead defend their right to live in open societies, in which it is not ethnicity or religion that decides whether one enjoys civil, political or social rights.

Thus, as a Jew, one has to deal with the fact that Israel, of all countries, as a “Jewish state” is now being misused by the nationalists of this world as a justification for their own racism, and is happy to be used.

And thus one now is faced with a strange constellation of ardent anti-Semites and fanatical “friends” of Israel: more and more often the same people.

The “fight against anti-Semitism”, which the current Austrian government has written in full in its program, and even more so the commitment to Israel as a “Jewish state”, is in reality not directed against anti-Semitism at all, but against everything that can be interpreted as “too far-reaching” criticism of Israel. Is it Austria actually that decide whether Israel defines itself in terms of ethnic-religious or secular pluralism?

In the name of the “Christian-Jewish Occident”, this naturally affects not only Muslims, who – like Christian fundamentalists – get stirred up to the “fight for Jerusalem”, but at least as often it is directed against Jews, i.e. the “right ones”. Cosmopolitan Jewish Intellectuals, or even critically minded Israelis. Orbán has demonstrated this most vividly. Advised by his friend Benjamin Netanyahu, he cemented his power with a campaign against the “Jewish world conspiracy” of George Soros, who would try to flood Europe with Muslim immigrants.

In Germany, one can observe the beneficial activity of a state sponsored “commissioner against anti-Semitism” for quite some time. In the meantime, he denounces so-called “left-wing liberal” critics of his politics (most of them Jewish and Israeli intellectuals) as latently violent “anti-Semites”. We will certainly get such specialists in Austria soon.

“Christian-Judeo Occident”

Installation “Christian-Judeo Occident”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

The Jewish communities in Europe are in part significantly older than the Christian communities; after all, Europe’s Christianization was completed only in the Middle Ages. Nonetheless, until recently, the term “Christian Occident” was applied to Europe; hereby, eleven million Jews who had lived here prior to the National Socialist period were erased from European culture via linguistic usage. The relationship between Catholicism and Judaism was put on a more positive footing only under the impact of the Holocaust and with the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This had been preceded by the establishment of Christian-Jewish associations—as a critical reaction to the anti-Semitism and complicity of the churches in the genocide of the European Jews. It would take until 1986 until the first pope, John Paul II, Karol Wojtyła (1920-2005), would enter a Jewish house of prayer, namely, the Great Synagogue of Rome together with Chief Rabbi Elio Toaff.

< Pope John Paul II and Chief Rabbi Toaff on their way to the Great Synagogue of Rome in 1986, © Str/EPA/picturedesk.com

> Anti-Islam protests in the Czech Republic with Miloš Zeman on the occasion of the 26^th anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution” in November 2015, © Matej Divizna, Getty Images

The catchword “Judeo-Christian West,” which has recently become popular, is a political battle cry. With its help, an old minority is meant to be coopted and mobilized against a new minority. It alludes to the cultural heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity as well as to the Bible. The fact that a significant part of this heritage is owed to Arabo-Islamic mediation is withheld as is the fact that Jews have always been forced into precarious life conditions and threatened by pogroms. Moreover, European protests against the construction of mosques recall prohibitions to build synagogues, which had been in force in large parts of Europe until well into the second half of the 19^th century. Thus, the protests are also directed at the houses of worship of Muslims who speak Slavic languages and are shaping the culture of Southeastern Europe since hundreds of years. The concept of a European “Judeo-Christian community of shared values” blatantly contravenes Article 10 (1) of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union that declares: “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right includes freedom to change religion or belief and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or in private, to manifest religion or belief, in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”

Doron Rabinovici (Wien) über die Rede vom “christlich-jüdischen Abendland”:

Europe’s “Other”

Installation Europe’s “Other”. Photo: Dietmar Walser

In the European search for the “other,” the attempt to find Europe’s “counterpart” in the Orient, the academic discipline of Oriental Studies came into being already in the 18^th century. Among those driving forward linguistic and historical research of the entire Orient in the 19^th century were also many representatives of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) , such as Lion Ullmann, Salomon Munk, Gustav Weil, Moritz Steinschneider, David Samuel Margoliouth, Felix Peiser, Josef Horovitz, and Eugen Mittwoch. Unlike the history- and philology-oriented Oriental Studies, Islamic Studies mainly dealt with Muslim religion and culture. The initial impulse to establish such field of study came from the pioneer of the Jewish reform movement in Germany, Abraham Geiger. However, the father of modern Islamic studies was—together with Theodor Nöldeke—Ignaz Goldzieher. Lew Nussimbaum (1905-1942) who converted to Islam and Hedwig Klein (1911-1942) also wanted to follow in the footsteps of these scholars. Klein studied Islamic and Semitic studies in Hamburg and completed her doctoral thesis in 1937 on a manuscript about the “History of the people of ‘Omān from their adoption of Islam until their dissensus”. Since she was Jewish, her PhD was not approved. After a failed attempt to escape Germany, she was still able to collaborate until mid-1942 on today’s most widely used Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr. Eventually she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz. In 1947, she was posthumously awarded her PhD degree. Was Hedwig Klein’s interest in the Orient and in Islam founded, like that of her male predecessors and colleagues, in the affinity between Hebrew and Arabic or else in the fact that both Judaism and Islam are considered to be law based monotheistic religions?

< Den Orient im Herzen: Lew Abramowitsch Nussimbaum alias Essad Bey alias Kurban Said, Berlin 1921

In any case, research carried out by European Jews on Islam was not motivated by the exoticism widespread in the 19^th and early 20^th century, by the superficial fascination with the “alien.” Nor was it prompted by the goal to use Orientalism as an ideology of difference and—as so often happens these days as well— to define the Orient as the negation of the Occident. On the contrary: Jews—themselves perceived as Europe’s “other”—were able to approach the Islamic world with much more insight and understanding than many Christians. Although the return to fundamentalism can be observed in all religions, these days, populist agitation expresses itself mainly in the promotion of the enemy stereotype of “Islam”: the image of the Orient as a counterdraft to the Occident, as Europe’s eternal adversary.

Brian Klug (London) about the inner and outer “other” of Europe and the heritage of Colonialism: