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by Charles
Rammelkamp
We often think of urban legends as essentially harmless tales that have
captured the popular imagination. However, some urban legends veer into
superstition and prejudice when various attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors
are attributed to a particular group of people. One group that has been
subject to this sort of urban legend is the Jews, who have been vilified
over the centuries for many imaginary crimes.
The Jewish
Kosher Tax
Where do urban legends end and malicious lies begin? Take, for instance,
the claim that there is a secret tax on food either labeled with a “K,”
a lowercase “u” inside a circle, or by the word “pareve.”
How this tax works is unclear since taxes are collected by the government,
but such details seem irrelevant to those who believe that Jews are inherently
greedy.
Rather, these symbols indicate that the contents of the package
were prepared in accordance with Jewish dietary laws. The “K”
means “kosher” while the lowercase “u” in a circle
refers to the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, under whose auspices
the food has been inspected and certified.
Similarly, the Yiddish word pareve means that the food is
free from any animal by-products and thus, can be eaten with meat or dairy
(in Jewish law, meat and milk must not be mixed). The organizations which
provide the certification do, indeed, charge a modest fee for their services,
but the cost of kosher certification that is passed onto the consumer
is negligible.
The Protocols
of the Elders of Zion
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, purportedly the text of discussions
among Jewish leaders that describe how Jews plan to take over the world
by enslaving non-Jews, constitutes another insidious urban legend about
Jews. Yet according to historian Benjamin Segel, the Protocols were fabricated
in Paris at the end of the 19th century under the supervision of the Russian
Okhrana (the Czar’s secret police) as a propaganda tool to stir up
anti-Semitic sentiment.
The first known publication of the Protocols was in the Russian
newspaper Znamia in 1903. In 1917, they were published again, this time
attributed to Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, the Jewish
nationalist movement. This was a time of political turmoil in Russia,
and a Jewish scapegoat was welcomed under such circumstances, to direct
popular hostility away from those in power.
Two years later, the Protocols were distributed to members
of the US cabinet and in 1920, Henry Ford printed them in his newspaper
The Dearborn Independent as “proof” that Jews and Communists
were trying to take over the world.
However, in 1921, Philip Graves, a reporter for the London
Times, discovered that the Protocols had been plagiarized from two sources—an
1864 satire of the French ruler Napoleon III by Parisian lawyer Maurice
Joly (entitled Dialogue between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell) and
Biarritz, an 1868 novel by German anti-Semite Hermann Goedsche. Graves
debunked the Protocols in a long series of point-by-point refutations,
after which a South African court ruled them a forgery and a Swiss court
declared them a fraud. Subsequently, in 1927, Henry Ford publicly retracted
his statement about the Protocols, and apologized for his diatribes, claiming
his assistants had fed him false information.
But by then the damage had been done. In 1933, excerpts
from the Protocols were used by Fascists in the Romanian parliament as
a reason to expel Jews from the country. Adolf Hitler cited the Protocols
in Mein Kampf, the influential anti-Semitic autobiography he wrote in
prison in the 1920s. General Francisco Franco, the Fascist dictator of
Spain, also referred to the Protocols when denouncing the Jews in the
1930s and ‘40s.
The Protocols are also believed to be used today as proof
that Israel’s designs on the Middle East go beyond the Palestinian
territories. In fact, they have been published in Arabic, distributed
to local populations by Islamic groups with government sponsorship, and
even promoted as true on Egyptian television, as recently as the spring
of 2003.
The Holocaust
Was a Lie
Similarly, denial of the Holocaust is used to both demonize and trivialize
Jews, essentially calling them liars who are only trying to gain sympathy
for themselves as victims by spreading falsehoods about WWII’s Nazi
death camps. Holocaust deniers claim that the systematic slaughter of
six million European Jews did not really happen, or certainly not on the
scale that was reported.
These denials began in 1947 when Maurice Bardéche,
a French fascist, suggested that much of the evidence about the extermination
camps were fabricated and that any deaths in the camps was attributable
to disease and starvation. Later, scores of books, such as David Hoggan’s
The Myth of the Six Million (1969), claimed that the Holocaust was invented
by Zionists in order to discredit Germany’s attempts to maintain
national identity and racial purity.
The issue naturally arouses strong emotions on all sides,
and several famous court cases have been ajudicated on this very matter.
The most famous occurred in the 1990s, when British historian David Irving,
author of various books on Hitler, sued Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt,
professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Georgia’s Emory
University for libel, when she “outed” him as a Holocaust denier.
Lipstadt won the trial when Irving was found to have used pseudoscientific
evidence to misrepresent historical evidence in his books.
Jesus Killed by Jews
The New Testament Gospels have been a source of much misunderstanding,
with the medieval Church portraying Jesus a a Christian who was killed
by Jews. Rather, Jesus was a Jew whom the Romans killed in response to
the political intrigues of the Sanhedrin. In fact, miracle plays of the
Middle Ages incited pogroms against Jews by showing, onstage, the drama
of Christ’s final days and his gleeful murder by Jews, who were usually
portrayed with devil horns and tails. After the performance of such plays,
European peasants would go on violent rampages against Jews, destroying
property, raping, and killing, all in an act of “revenge.”
Though they can be benign and amusing, some urban legends
have been used to reinforce stereotypes, which has often led to violence.
We should always try to separate verifiable truth from unsubstantiated
rumor when it comes to leveling serious accusations at groups or individuals.
From
issue #4
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