Not in God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence

by Jonathan Sacks

Dualism entered Judaism and Christianity when it became easier to attribute the sufferings of the world to an evil force rather than to the work of God.

They chose the single most emphatic rejection of dualism in the Bible, Isaiah’s statement, ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil’ (Isa. 45:7).

The essence of Christianity as articulated by Paul and the Gospels is that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New are the same God. His love is the same love. His justice is the same justice. His forgiveness is the same forgiveness. That is why the Old Testament is part of the Christian canon.

line of thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein have highlighted the processes of splitting and projection.

The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism.

Pathological dualism does three things. It makes you dehumanise and demonise your enemies. It leads you to see yourself as a victim. And it allows you to commit altruistic evil,

Konrad Lorenz, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for his work on animals, wrote in an article for the Nazi Office for Racial Politics that a nation with ‘defective members’ was like an individual who had a malignant tumour.

The second stage is establishing victimhood. Just as it is necessary to rob your enemies of their humanity, so you have to find a way of relinquishing responsibility for the evil you are about to commit. You must define yourself as a victim. It follows that you, in committing murder, even genocide, are merely acting in self-defence.

Defining yourself as a victim is a denial of what makes us human. We see ourselves as objects, not subjects. We become done-to, not doers; passive, not active. Blame bars the path to responsibility. The victim, ascribing his condition to others, locates the cause of his situation outside himself, thus rendering himself incapable of breaking free from his self-created trap. Because he attributes a real phenomenon (pain, poverty, illiteracy, disease, defeat, humiliation) to a fictitious cause, he discovers that eliminating the cause does not remove the symptom. Hence efforts must be redoubled.

Blame cultures perpetuate every condition against which they are a protest.

But compassion can be exploited. When self-defined victims lay claim to compassion in a less-than-noble cause, they turn people of goodwill into co-dependents. Seeking to assist, they reinforce the pattern of behaviour they wish to cure.

In Mein Kampf he wrote that ‘the highest purpose of an ethnic state is concern for the preservation of those original racial elements that bestow culture and create the beauty and dignity of a higher human nature’.38

E.H. Gombrich, the great art historian, worked at the BBC during the war, analysing German wartime propaganda. In a lecture after the war he explained that what made it effective was ‘less the lie than the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events’. Pathological dualism creates a self-contained world which becomes self-confirming. ‘Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe it will become reality for you,

In the light of this we begin to understand the moral force of monotheism. The belief in one God meant that all the conflicting forces operative in the universe were encompassed by a single personality, the God of righteousness, who was sometimes just, sometimes forgiving, who spoke at times of law and at others of love. It was the refusal to split these things apart that made monotheism the humanising, civilising influence that, in the good times, it has been.

Discovering God, singular and alone, the first monotheists discovered the human person singular and alone. Monotheism internalises what dualism externalises.

‘Who is a hero?’ asked the rabbis, and replied, ‘One who conquers himself.’

But divide humanity into absolute categories of good and evil, in which all the good is on one side and all the evil on the other, and you will see your own side as good, the other as evil. Evil seeks to destroy the good. Therefore your enemies are trying to destroy you. If there is no obvious evidence that they are, this is a sign that they are working in secret.

It is antisemitism, not anti-Zionism. This, as we will see, is something new in Islam.

It found that 74 per cent of those surveyed in the Middle East and North Africa held antisemitic attitudes.

The corresponding figure was 24 per cent in Western Europe, 34 per cent in Eastern Europe and 19 per cent in the Americas.

there that, eight centuries later, great rabbinical academies were founded, and there that the masterpiece of rabbinic Judaism, the Babylonian Talmud, was composed.

In the Middle Ages Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth century they began to be hated for their race. That is what was new.

B.S. Lewis, has argued that historically Islam had contempt for Jews but not hate.

But xenophobia, though it may cause wars, does not in and of itself give rise to the demonisation of opponents, a sense of victimhood and the resultant altruistic evil.

The scholar who did more than most to provide an answer was the French literary theorist and cultural anthropologist René Girard, in his book Violence and the Sacred (1972).

It is not religion that gives rise to violence. It is violence that gives rise to religion.

Girard had a less fanciful explanation. Early societies, he argued, did not yet have a legal system – laws, courts, prisons and punishments – to enforce order. Instead they practised reciprocity, the rule of Tit-for-Tat that, as we saw, was the first principle to emerge from computer simulations of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. They acted generously to others until they encountered a hostile response.

Hence Girard’s contentions that, first, the primal religious act is human sacrifice; second, the primal sacrifice is the scapegoat; and third, the function of religion is to deflect away internal violence that would otherwise destroy the group.

To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatising moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come. From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others.

Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492.

Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statute appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century.

The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favourably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate.

The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty.

Voltaire called Jews ‘an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched’.

Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the ‘falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticising Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for giving birth to it in the first place.

Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Devised by members of the Russian Secret Police based in Paris, it was a document that purported to be the minutes of a secret Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination by controlling the press and economies of the world.

What makes these two myths fascinating is the way they exemplify the splitting-and-projection that gives dualism its unique psychological hold. The Blood Libel is a Christian projection (that is not to say that Christianity embraced it or was responsible for it: recall the papal rejection of it). It makes no sense within the framework of Judaism. But it made sense to some believers in transubstantiation, the idea that the bread and the wine used in the Eucharist are not symbolically but actually the body and blood of the Son of God.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was introduced, along with Mein Kampf in Arabic translation, into the Middle East in the 1930s by, among others, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Muhammed Amin al-Husayni, who had spent the Second World War in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen SS. It continues to be reprinted and widely sold and read. In 2002 a forty-one-part television dramatisation of the Protocols, entitled Horseman without a Horse, was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organisation Hezbollah during Ramadan.

If you seek to understand what a group truly intends, look at the accusations it levels against its enemies.

Our most primal instincts of bonding within the group occur when it confronts an external enemy.

The trouble with the use of scapegoats is that it is a solution that compounds the problem. It makes internal tension bearable by turning the question ‘Why has this happened?’ into the question ‘Who did this to me?’ If it is someone else’s fault, not mine, I can preserve my self-respect intact.

Mimetic desire is wanting what someone else has because they have it. This is behaviour we often see in children. When one child is given a new toy, the others suddenly discover that they want it.

Mimetic desire is not just wanting to have what someone else has. Ultimately it is wanting to be what someone else is.

Girard then suggested that one of the prime sources of strife is not between father and son but between brothers: sibling rivalry.

In a lecture on ‘Femininity’ he said, ‘But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother…

This is the first point. The primal act of violence is fratricide not parricide. Sibling rivalry plays a central role in human conflict, and it begins with mimetic desire, the desire to have what your brother has, or even be what your brother is.

The second stage of the journey takes us to the post-Holocaust years when a French historian, Jules Isaac, who survived the war but lost his wife and daughter at Auschwitz, began to assemble the evidence of the long history of Christian anti-Jewish teachings that he called ‘the teachings of contempt’. His work came to the attention of Pope John XXIII, and the two met in 1961. This may have been one of the factors that led the pope and his successor Paul VI to institute the process that culminated in Vatican II in 1965, and the document Nostra Aetate that transformed the relationship between the Catholic Church and other faiths,

The Holocaust was not the result of Christianity; it is important to state this categorically at the outset. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi pointed out, Christianity had an interest in the preservation of Jews, not their destruction.9 The history of Christian–Jewish relations is not one of unrelieved darkness.10 There were bishops who defended Jews at times of persecution, and popes who rejected anti-Jewish myths like the Blood

There were the more than twenty-five thousand individual heroes, memorialised in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, who saved lives.