Why? Quotes

“In short, the 1870s illustrated the force of the remark that antisemitism rises and falls in inverse relationship to the stock market. In that decade, when the market crashed, bigotry rose.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Antisemitism became institutionalized in elite and conservative society rather than in laws.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Why the Jews? Because an ancient tradition of blaming them for disasters, both present and prospective, a tradition deeply rooted in religious rivalry and superstition, persisted into the modern world and even assumed new forms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Martin Luther gave the most extreme voice to these prejudices when he discovered that Jews were no more willing to convert to his version of Christianity than the one he claimed to have reformed. He urged Christians to burn Jews’ synagogues, schools, and homes and subject Jews who would not convert to forced labor.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive traits. In other words, antisemitism is the belief that Jews have common repellent and/or ruinous qualities that set them apart from non-Jews. Descent is determinative; individuality is illusory.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The Holocaust was the product of a particular time and place: Europe in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. These were the contexts in which ancient hostilities toward Jews and Judaism, deeply rooted in religious rivalry but updated with the trappings of modern science, turned into a fixation on removing Jews from civil society as a magical solution to all social problems.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“dissatisfaction with the nation’s political and economic condition, along with fear of communism, the votes for which also were rising, clearly had more to do with Hitler’s ascent than hatred of Jews.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Thus the emergence in February 1879 of Wilhelm Marr and the new word “antisemitism” came as the culmination of a decade of rising reaction against emancipation.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“the Panama Scandal of 1888–92, centered on widespread bribery of French officials and parliamentarians in order to obtain loans to finance a French company seeking to build a canal through Panama.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, hatred of Jews was widespread, and it had crystallized around two central generalizations: (1) that Jews were parasitic profiteers, intent on extracting wealth from Christians, and (2) that Jews were incorrigible instruments of Satan, intent on serving his purposes and afflicting the pious.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“catastrophically bloody and ultimately stalemated Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught Catholics and Protestants the necessity of coexistence.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Christianity declared that Jesus heralded a new Covenant that replaced Moses’s, that the old laws were now obsolete, and that election to the status of Chosen People was now open to anyone who accepted Christ and the teachings of the Bible and the new scriptures.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Christians both took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Although some ancient Egyptian and Greek texts express animosity toward Jews, the rise of intense hostility to and fear of them largely coincides with the rise of Christianity. The relationship between adherents of the two religions always has reflected a paradox: The two faiths were both very similar and very different, which created intense competition.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Pastor André Trocmé, “believed that if you choose to resist evil, and you choose this firmly, then ways of carrying out that resistance will open up around you. His kind of originality generated originality in others.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“rights are for the people whom we fear or dislike because they are the people who need them.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The veneer of civilization is thin, the rule of law is fragile, and the precondition of both is economic and political calm.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The general trend in America remains toward pluralism, freedom, and Jefferson’s right to “the pursuit of happiness” for each person in his or her own way. We all have a responsibility to see to it that the trend continues; its opposite is the oppression, the stasis, and the homogeneity that Nazism prized.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“For non-Jews in Europe, the top priority in the Middle East is not the survival of a Jewish state; the top priorities are political calm, access to oil, and sufficient economic development of the region so that its burgeoning and overwhelmingly young population does not swamp Europe’s declining and aging one.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“These deals allowed Switzerland to seize the heirless Swiss assets of dead Polish and Hungarian citizens, most of whom were Jews, as compensation for the nationalization of Swiss property in these newly communist states.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Union Bank of Switzerland in 1999 by which the bank agreed to pay $1.25 billion into a fund administered by a U.S. District Court: $800 million for restitution of dormant bank accounts; $100 million for compensation for looted assets; and $325 million for payments to former slave laborers at Swiss-owned companies in occupied Europe or at German firms that had put their revenue in Swiss banks and for refugees mistreated by the Swiss.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The survivors who came off best were Jewish Germans who managed to flee the country before the Holocaust or who survived it somehow on German soil.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen (Organization of Former Members of the SS), known by the acronym ODESSA, appears to have been largely mythical.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Norway’s collaborationist leader Vidkun Quisling was shot by a firing squad;”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“It is simply untrue that many major perpetrators of the Holocaust escaped punishment afterwards, just as it is untrue that Germans, especially those in the eastern half of their country, paid little or no price for what their nation had done. Both legends are the opposite of reality.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The further down the Catholic Church hierarchy one looks, the more brave and principled behavior one finds.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“But he also refused to issue a special order to let the refugee ship St. Louis land in the United States or even in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as offered by that territory’s governor and legislative assembly and advocated by two members of FDR’s cabinet.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“leaders of the Republican Party who declared that, thanks to FDR’s appointment of many Jews to office, he was offering the public, not the New Deal but the Jew Deal.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust