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**Sanremogirl** · 07-16-2008, 10:05 PM

Just two words in from the sidelines.

"centuries of antisemitism"

it makes a lot of sense to differentiate between old-fashioned jew-hate and modern antisemitism. I wrote two papers on that and read more original texts to this than I care to remember. A good source would be Hannah Arendts thick book on totalitarianism, if I am not mistaken.
so. there have NOT been centuries of antisemitism, if we say that modern antisemitism and medieval jew-hate were two different things. what happened in Germany was due to modern antisemitism (of course, jew-hate had its part there, too, but that is not the important thing.)
Russian antisemtism (and indeed, I have never been in an environment that I felt to be more antisemitic than when I was in Russia) is more like jew-hate, or it used to be. things change.

POint is that you can debate the point about how immoral each of these two monsters was (equally evil?), you can compare the killing off of jews (and you might find significant differences there as well, which I, personally, value differently, morally, but even smart people disagree with me here, so that would be going too far, no?), but once you enter the hate, it becomes sort of an apples and oranges situation.

To sum up (w/ ERic that is necessary): "as much an antisemite as..." is plainly wrong, unless one uses terms which are neither helpful nor reasonable.

To say that S is not "squeaky clean" in respect to antisemitism is marginalizing the issue. One book of his (I have it in German on the shelf and am too lazy to check the english title) is Zweihundert Jahre zusammen (Two hundred years together), about jews in Russia. Just read that, if you want insight to the extent to which S is antisemitic. Pretty heavy there, actually.

07-16-2008, 10:05 PM	#31
Sanremogirl Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 562 Senior Member	Just two words in from the sidelines. "centuries of antisemitism" it makes a lot of sense to differentiate between old-fashioned jew-hate and modern antisemitism. I wrote two papers on that and read more original texts to this than I care to remember. A good source would be Hannah Arendts thick book on totalitarianism, if I am not mistaken. so. there have NOT been centuries of antisemitism, if we say that modern antisemitism and medieval jew-hate were two different things. what happened in Germany was due to modern antisemitism (of course, jew-hate had its part there, too, but that is not the important thing.) Russian antisemtism (and indeed, I have never been in an environment that I felt to be more antisemitic than when I was in Russia) is more like jew-hate, or it used to be. things change. POint is that you can debate the point about how immoral each of these two monsters was (equally evil?), you can compare the killing off of jews (and you might find significant differences there as well, which I, personally, value differently, morally, but even smart people disagree with me here, so that would be going too far, no?), but once you enter the hate, it becomes sort of an apples and oranges situation. To sum up (w/ ERic that is necessary): "as much an antisemite as..." is plainly wrong, unless one uses terms which are neither helpful nor reasonable. To say that S is not "squeaky clean" in respect to antisemitism is marginalizing the issue. One book of his (I have it in German on the shelf and am too lazy to check the english title) is Zweihundert Jahre zusammen (Two hundred years together), about jews in Russia. Just read that, if you want insight to the extent to which S is antisemitic. Pretty heavy there, actually.
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