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Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews
Esau's Tears explores the rise of modern racial-political anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. Previous histories have been more concerned with description than analysis and most have lacked balance. The evidence presented in this volume suggests that anti-Semitism in these years was more ambiguous than usually presented, less pervasive and central to the lives of both Jews and non-Jews, and by no means clearly pointed to a rising hatred of Jews everywhere, even less to the likelihood of mass murder. Hatred of Jews was not as mysterious or incomprehensible as often presented, but may be related to the differing perceptions of the rise of the Jews in modern times.
600 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 31, 2016
This is a very well-researched and argued counterpoint to the dominant narrative of Jews as helpless and blameless victims throughout history. Lindemann shows how "anti-Semitism" was the result of competition with Gentile host communities that frequently led to conflict rather than the mobs of ignorant peasants motivated by simple religious hatred or xenophobia. Far from being hapless, Jews played an active (and oversized) role in intellectual and political life, which forced them to grapple with the questions of assimilation, Zionism, and utopian ideologies of democracy and socialism. My only complaint (and reason for giving it only 3 stars) is that the book can be very dry and unengaging at times, it's definitely not for the dilettante.
June 30, 2019
DISINGENUOUS, DISHONEST, EXECRABLE PIECE OF “SCHOLARSHIP”
Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Lindemann comes to bury anti-Semitism, not to praise it. Yet he finds it necessary to devote more than 500 pages to documenting the hackneyed proposition that mundane as well as ideational causes played a role in the ebb and flow of anti-Semitism. Why bother, especially since Lindemann himself acknowledges the general currency of this view and the “overall and recently much enhanced sophistication of the field of Holocaust studies”? Instead of fastening onto the shortcomings of earlier, inferior scholarship, wouldn’t it be more productive to engage with the best and raise its standards yet higher? Not to Lindemann, for obvious reasons. Lindemann needs the pretext of documentation to engage in what is clearly, for him, the pleasurable exercise of repeating any scurrilous anti-Semitic claims, musings and rants that suit him, while himself remaining camouflaged as a disinterested scholar. He purports to arrive at a nuanced understanding of anti-Semitism, but his “analysis” rarely rises beyond the “Jews-can-be-annoying” variety. With breathtaking naivete, he demonstrates how “reasonable” anti-Semitism could be by asserting that many anti-Semites were of “first rate abilities and worldly success.” But do Wagner’s musical gifts, success, or even intelligence, make him any less crude or susceptible to petty envies and paranoia?
Lindemann acknowledges but fails to analyze the SELECTIVITY of all sorts of “isms”, particularly “isms” directed against other groups. Misogynists, xenophobes, racists, anti-Americans—all can give you perfectly rational (and not always ill-informed) reasons for their distrust, fear or loathing. What they cannot do successfully is empathize with their subjects or allow discordant facts to interfere with their emotional antipathy. The question that must STILL be answered is this: when faced with the same stimuli, why do some people respond chiefly with envy, resentment, fear and loathing; and others with admiration, curiosity or indifference? Consider, too, that antipathies can be just as easily produced by “positive” as “negative” traits and actions. Many among the less literate and harder-drinking Romanians had reason to take umbrage at Jews who spurned their company, but why did some Germans lash out at the disproportionate role of Jewish women in launching volunteer welfare organizations for veterans, etc? If any conspicuous behaviors provide stimuli for anti-Semitism, then how much explanatory power do such “causes” of anti-Semitism really have? At the very least, such stimuli deserve far more analysis than Lindemann gives them.
Worse than the author’s superficiality is his serpentine use of innuendo to cast aspersions on Jews where the evidence is too weak to merit an outright statement of fact. Thus Lindemann raises the possibility that German- Jews were draft dodgers in World War I: “[T]hey undoubtedly had greater resources, material and intellectual, if they wanted to avoid frontline service”. True, Mr. Lindemann, the opportunities were there, but why flatly assert that the evidence is “elusive” when numerous reputable studies by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars have documented Jewish overrepresentation among German draftees and among those earning purple hearts? If you have credible evidence to the contrary, let’s see it, but let’s not cast unwarranted aspersions. Lindemann also asks but does not answer the question “The Red Terror: A Jewish Terror?” He notes, on the one hand, that Kiev’s Cheka was preponderantly Jewish and leading Bolsheviks were disproportionately Jewish. On the other, the Soviet-wide Cheka was disproportionately and quite intentionally drawn from many other ethnic minorities as well; Soviet Jews were overwhelmingly hostile to Bolshevism, the largest numbers being social democrats; countless Jews were persecuted by Bolsheviks; and the Jewish Bolsheviks tended to come from backgrounds atypical of most Jews. So what? Lindemann should have had the integrity either to answer the question he posed or, better yet, the decency to recognize the question for the inflammatory nonsense that it is.
When it suits him, however, Lindemann can be overcautious. He finds that “determining Stalin’s real attitude toward Jews is difficult”, citing only Vaksberg as making the most “insistent” (read: unpersuasive) case, when in fact dozens of reputable authors have backed up similar assertions with ample evidence. (Incidentally, in another work Lindemann had no trouble ascertaining that a certain Southern judge “was free of the taint of anti-Semitic feeling”).
At times, Lindemann rises from the safety of innuendo and omission to outright defamation, fueled by his own peculiar selectivity. He baldly declares that “Jews did not have deep and genuine roots in German culture.” Is Heine thus less German than Thomas Mann with his part-Portuguese mother and Rudolf Virchow with his Slavic antecedents? And what if we discovered that these two luminaries had Jewish ancestors? Would their deep German roots suddenly wither away? Lindemann callously and unconvincingly blames certain Jews for Gentile indifference to Jewish suffering: “After WWI, the temptation of some Jews to exaggerate, or even make up atrocity stories… had inured a number of observers to the charges of “wailing Jews.” His facile assertion that Christian intolerance derives from intolerant Jewish monotheism effaces the differences between Christian orthoDOXy and Jewish orthoPRAXy, a distinction that explains why “Talmudic” and Karaite Jews did not crusade against each other’s “heresies”.
Lindemann also chides certain Jewish authors for churning out “morality tales” rather than mature scholarship. But in the end Lindemann can’t resist a bit of unseemly moralizing himself. Jewish separatism rankles him, notwithstanding the fact that most American Jews today “marry out”. He seems galled that Jews are not, say, Swedes, who as Ake Dauw tells us, perceive Swedish tradition as a “meaningless” jumble of “pleasant but superficial folklore”. Can Lindemann forgive Jews for finding greater meaning in their traditions, just as Americans find greater meaning in their nationality than most of the world’s people? Perhaps not. Much of his book betrays a petty nose-thumbing desire to take Jews down a notch. Finally, still professing his purity of heart, Lindemann concludes that Jews bear some of the blame for past –and future (!)-- anti-Semitism. Think of the sleepless nights he must have endured agonizing over this conclusion!
Like Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Lindemann comes to bury anti-Semitism, not to praise it. Yet he finds it necessary to devote more than 500 pages to documenting the hackneyed proposition that mundane as well as ideational causes played a role in the ebb and flow of anti-Semitism. Why bother, especially since Lindemann himself acknowledges the general currency of this view and the “overall and recently much enhanced sophistication of the field of Holocaust studies”? Instead of fastening onto the shortcomings of earlier, inferior scholarship, wouldn’t it be more productive to engage with the best and raise its standards yet higher? Not to Lindemann, for obvious reasons. Lindemann needs the pretext of documentation to engage in what is clearly, for him, the pleasurable exercise of repeating any scurrilous anti-Semitic claims, musings and rants that suit him, while himself remaining camouflaged as a disinterested scholar. He purports to arrive at a nuanced understanding of anti-Semitism, but his “analysis” rarely rises beyond the “Jews-can-be-annoying” variety. With breathtaking naivete, he demonstrates how “reasonable” anti-Semitism could be by asserting that many anti-Semites were of “first rate abilities and worldly success.” But do Wagner’s musical gifts, success, or even intelligence, make him any less crude or susceptible to petty envies and paranoia?
Lindemann acknowledges but fails to analyze the SELECTIVITY of all sorts of “isms”, particularly “isms” directed against other groups. Misogynists, xenophobes, racists, anti-Americans—all can give you perfectly rational (and not always ill-informed) reasons for their distrust, fear or loathing. What they cannot do successfully is empathize with their subjects or allow discordant facts to interfere with their emotional antipathy. The question that must STILL be answered is this: when faced with the same stimuli, why do some people respond chiefly with envy, resentment, fear and loathing; and others with admiration, curiosity or indifference? Consider, too, that antipathies can be just as easily produced by “positive” as “negative” traits and actions. Many among the less literate and harder-drinking Romanians had reason to take umbrage at Jews who spurned their company, but why did some Germans lash out at the disproportionate role of Jewish women in launching volunteer welfare organizations for veterans, etc? If any conspicuous behaviors provide stimuli for anti-Semitism, then how much explanatory power do such “causes” of anti-Semitism really have? At the very least, such stimuli deserve far more analysis than Lindemann gives them.
Worse than the author’s superficiality is his serpentine use of innuendo to cast aspersions on Jews where the evidence is too weak to merit an outright statement of fact. Thus Lindemann raises the possibility that German- Jews were draft dodgers in World War I: “[T]hey undoubtedly had greater resources, material and intellectual, if they wanted to avoid frontline service”. True, Mr. Lindemann, the opportunities were there, but why flatly assert that the evidence is “elusive” when numerous reputable studies by Jewish and non-Jewish scholars have documented Jewish overrepresentation among German draftees and among those earning purple hearts? If you have credible evidence to the contrary, let’s see it, but let’s not cast unwarranted aspersions. Lindemann also asks but does not answer the question “The Red Terror: A Jewish Terror?” He notes, on the one hand, that Kiev’s Cheka was preponderantly Jewish and leading Bolsheviks were disproportionately Jewish. On the other, the Soviet-wide Cheka was disproportionately and quite intentionally drawn from many other ethnic minorities as well; Soviet Jews were overwhelmingly hostile to Bolshevism, the largest numbers being social democrats; countless Jews were persecuted by Bolsheviks; and the Jewish Bolsheviks tended to come from backgrounds atypical of most Jews. So what? Lindemann should have had the integrity either to answer the question he posed or, better yet, the decency to recognize the question for the inflammatory nonsense that it is.
When it suits him, however, Lindemann can be overcautious. He finds that “determining Stalin’s real attitude toward Jews is difficult”, citing only Vaksberg as making the most “insistent” (read: unpersuasive) case, when in fact dozens of reputable authors have backed up similar assertions with ample evidence. (Incidentally, in another work Lindemann had no trouble ascertaining that a certain Southern judge “was free of the taint of anti-Semitic feeling”).
At times, Lindemann rises from the safety of innuendo and omission to outright defamation, fueled by his own peculiar selectivity. He baldly declares that “Jews did not have deep and genuine roots in German culture.” Is Heine thus less German than Thomas Mann with his part-Portuguese mother and Rudolf Virchow with his Slavic antecedents? And what if we discovered that these two luminaries had Jewish ancestors? Would their deep German roots suddenly wither away? Lindemann callously and unconvincingly blames certain Jews for Gentile indifference to Jewish suffering: “After WWI, the temptation of some Jews to exaggerate, or even make up atrocity stories… had inured a number of observers to the charges of “wailing Jews.” His facile assertion that Christian intolerance derives from intolerant Jewish monotheism effaces the differences between Christian orthoDOXy and Jewish orthoPRAXy, a distinction that explains why “Talmudic” and Karaite Jews did not crusade against each other’s “heresies”.
Lindemann also chides certain Jewish authors for churning out “morality tales” rather than mature scholarship. But in the end Lindemann can’t resist a bit of unseemly moralizing himself. Jewish separatism rankles him, notwithstanding the fact that most American Jews today “marry out”. He seems galled that Jews are not, say, Swedes, who as Ake Dauw tells us, perceive Swedish tradition as a “meaningless” jumble of “pleasant but superficial folklore”. Can Lindemann forgive Jews for finding greater meaning in their traditions, just as Americans find greater meaning in their nationality than most of the world’s people? Perhaps not. Much of his book betrays a petty nose-thumbing desire to take Jews down a notch. Finally, still professing his purity of heart, Lindemann concludes that Jews bear some of the blame for past –and future (!)-- anti-Semitism. Think of the sleepless nights he must have endured agonizing over this conclusion!
May 6, 2019
I was looking forward to reading this after having been told about some of the book's revelations by an eager reader -- e.g. "J'Accuse" contained as many lies as truths, Dreyfus was not targeted for anti-Semitic reasons, and so on. In fact this book is a bit of a snooze. The author characterizes the situations in various countries through sweeping generalizations, then refuses to admit whether those generalizations are really true or not. For example, I think it would have been more interesting if the author went into detail about why he concludes that prominent figures such as Disraeli, von Treitschke, and Dreyfus were "strange" and "eccentric". I'm the sort of person who is intrigued by claims of weirdness, but the author doesn't justify his claims strongly enough to hold my interest. The titular story of Esau and Jacob, which would make for fascinating historiography, is treated in a similarly sweeping and vague way.
I do appreciate the bold approach of trying to integrate Jewish and anti-Semitic perspectives together in a single book, but the result is not bold at all. Three stars because the depth of research is decent and noteworthy.
I do appreciate the bold approach of trying to integrate Jewish and anti-Semitic perspectives together in a single book, but the result is not bold at all. Three stars because the depth of research is decent and noteworthy.
March 22, 2017
An attempt to explain the persistence of antisemitism as a reaction to Jewish behavior. The author was not convincing.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews