“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: