I first heard about jews from my Grandfather. Among my clearest early memories is of him sitting beside the fire in the wooden armchair we still have in the kitchen here, me at his feet playing armies with the ashes & cinders on the hearth. To amuse himself he'd sometimes dribble scalding tea into my ear. I'd be eight or ten years old.
I didn't pay much attention to the television in those days, in the 1950s there was nothing on it but posh people talking, or women dancing & singing in screechy voices. Now & then though my Grandfather, who could barely walk, would suddenly struggle to his feet & hobble towards it, trying to whack the little wooden box with his walking stick. It was 'bloody jews'that caused this.I must have asked questions about jews, because I learned all about them from him. The gaffers were jews, they were all rich & cared about nothing but making more money. They were mean & cheated people. A lot of them had shops. Our local butcher was a jew, & my Grandfather wouldn't set foot there. The rag & bone man who came round once a week with his handcart, who would give you a goldfish in a plastic bag for piles of old clothes, was a jew. Even though he looked like a tramp in his loppy old overcoat & greasy flat cap he was really a millionaire, & lived in a fancy house in Totley. Sheeny Ike, my Grandfather called him.
My Grandfather had been a Sergeant Major in the First World War. The only thing I can recall him saying about it was that at the Battle of the Somme the officers had ordered him to get his men to polish the brass on the artillery pieces in the teeming rain & knee deep mud. After he'd died I heard from my Mother that he was a Red, & an admirer of the Soviet Union - which was why my Mother, born in 1923, had an outlandish Russian christian name. He was a skilled man, an engineer, & could earn good money as a foreman or chargehand. But he was a union stirrer, & was always getting the sack for sticking up for the men. My Mother said he cared more about the union & his men than he did his own family. She recalled standing with my Grandmother at the front room window, watching for him coming up the street from work. If he way carrying his bag of tools over his shoulder it meant he'd been sacked again.
One day on my way to school I found a lump of yellow chalk & decided to write 'Juden Raus' in big letters on a few walls. I don't know where I got this phrase from, probably the television, but I knew it was German & meant 'jews go home'. I wrote it on the wall of the local church, & in the biggest letters on both sides of the school gates. I got into serious trouble over this. My Father was sent for. I was given a bucket of water & a scrubbing brush & had to wash it off all the walls. Then I had to go & apologise to the headmaster of the school, Mr Abrahamson.
Just after leaving school at fifteen I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, which at that time was run by Trotskists. My antisemitism gradually evaporated as I read the books & pamphlets the older comrades gave me. Many of the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution were jews, including Leon Trotsky, Lenin's true sucessor & architecht of the Glorious Red Army. I read about the Holocaust, & was shocked & angry that the Nazi bastards could do these things to people.
My Grandfather must have known about all this. I never saw him with a book in his hands, but he must have seen the cinema newsreels after the war showing the liberation of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau. I remember as a very young child being taken out of the room when scenes of skeletal corpses being bulldozed into pits were shown on television.
I know that between the wars antisemitism was a common currency, & explains why German jews escaping Nazi persecution got short shrift from the rest of Europe,including Britain, who for the most part refused them sancuary. A proud exception was the Dutch Communist Party, whose members, under Nazi occupation, risked their lives organising strikes to protect Dutch jews from deportation. But it seems my Grandfather, admirer of the Worker's State & fighter for his class, had swallowed a version of Hitler's poison about a conspiracy of war-mongering jewish capitalists bent on world domination. And he passed it on to me.
So for most of my life I've had sensitive anntenae for antisemitism in all its forms. (Incidentally, I have black hair & dark skin, & have been taken for a jew in both Europe & the Middle East, a few times experiencing racist abuse.) Of course it persists, though in different forms & in different places than in the 1930s.
When I was learning Arabic, my Yemeni teacher couldn't mention jews without making a sly remark. When I tried to make the distinctions between jewish people, the religion, & the ideology of Zionism, he'd grin at me as though I'd just told him a funny story. Most of the young Muslim men who came to the classes could be heard parotting the same toxic lies as I had done as a ten year old.
Over at the apalling rense.com, where you can get your barmy rightwing conspiracy theories while picking up your miracle health supplements & magnetic resonance penis rings, I came across what was to me a new version of the old antisemitic shite. It seems now that it's all down to the Khazars.
This much of it has some factual basis; the Khazar Empire flourished sometime between the tenth & the twelfth centuries, in the area beween the Caspian & the Black Sea, the Caucasus. Not much is known about them, but the Khazars seem to have been a Turkic people from Central Asia, who had migrated to the Caucasus & at some point converted to Judaism. (for more see http://www.khazaria.com). A Jewish empire in the Caucasus! How amazing, & how topical! Just the kind of thing for conspiracy headbangers to latch onto. According to them, the decendants of the Khazars are still around, & they want their empire back. They've wormed their way into the corporate, military & political establishments of the US & Europe, & as we speak are plotting wars to bring them World domination. (Sound familiar?). As the Khazar watchers point out, this is in no way antisemitic. They've nothing against Ashkenazi or Sephardic jews. It's the Khazars, they're 'fake' jews, who pretend to be jews to advance their evil designs. How far this bollocks will spread is anyones guess, but I'm sure the Nazis at the BNP will just love this fable.
|
