Jewish Quarterly 244 The Return of History: New Populism, Old Hatreds

By Jonathan Pearlman

“For a long time now, the authority of knowledge has been under siege from those who march under the banner of pure belief.” —Simon Schama

Welcome to the new JQ.

The Return of History investigates rising global populism, and the forces propelling modern nativism and xenophobia. In wide-ranging, lively essays, Simon Schama explores the age-old tropes of Jews as both purveyors of disease and mono-polists of medical wisdom, in the wake of a global pandemic; Holly Case takes us by train to Hungary; Mikołaj Grynberg reflects on Poland’s commitment to forgetting its atrocities; and Deborah Lipstadt puts white supremacy under the microscope, examining its antisemitic DNA.

Recently discovered letters about Israel from Isaiah Berlin to Robert Silvers are published here for the first time. In new sections on History and Community, Ian Black revisits a turning point in the Arab–Israeli conflict, and Elliot Perlman traces the roots of the Jewish farmers in Uganda. And in three insightful, erudite book reviews, Hadley Freeman, Benjamin Balint and Robert Manne cast light on second-generation Holocaust memoirs and the work of Paul Celan and Götz Aly.

The Return of History is a truly global issue, bringing together esteemed, well-known voices and those you’ll be exhilarated to read for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Inc. Books
• Release date: May 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781743821893

Book preview

Viral prejudice and the Jews

Simon Schama

In the dog days of summer 2020, much of the northern hemisphere fondly imagined that the plague had receded; enough, at any rate, to allow for the resumption of time-honoured habits: holidays in the sun and routine exercises in military confrontation. On 12 August, the two activities came within hailing distance of each other off the coast of south-west Anatolia. Tourists on a venturesome Sunfish could have spotted what one party called a mini collision, when the bow of a Greek frigate struck the stern of a Turkish frigate, opening a two-metre gash in its hull above the waterline. The two NATO allies exchanged complaints and threats. For a few weeks there was the possibility of actual hostilities.

Oil was the problem, along with natural gas. Over the past decade, exploratory probes have revealed substantial deposits of both fossil fuels in the seabed of the eastern Mediterranean. Undeterred by a dim economic future for those energy resources, the littoral states – Libya, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Turkey and Greece – have all carved out shares in Exclusive Economic Zones stretching from their respective coasts. But Greece and Turkey have differed furiously over their boundaries. Arguing that islands can establish maritime rights as legitimately as a mainland coastline, Greece has used Kastellorizo (population 492 in 2011) to claim a gas-rich field that is within swimming range of Kas, Kalkan and Antalya on the Turkish shore.

But the Greco-Turkish conflict over drilling rights is not just a competition in maritime mercantilism. Inevitably, it draws poisoned nourishment from ancient hostilities, dating back through Ottoman history and much earlier. For at least two centuries, Greek and Turkish histories have been perennially locked together in antagonistic mutual self-definition. Jubilantly reporting on the collision at sea, the drum-beating wing of the Greek press made sure to mention that their newly minted hero, the commander of the Greek frigate Limnos, Lieutenant Ioannis Saliaris, hailed from Salamis – where, two and a half millennia earlier, an outnumbered Greek fleet had defeated an oriental (Persian, not Turkish) fleet, thus, at least in romantic memory, preserving Christian Europe from the barbarism of Asiatic despotism. Conversely, the Turkish frigate, which had been escorting a survey vessel, was named Kamal Reis, after an Ottoman privateer and admiral whose exploits in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had sunk European shipping from the western Mediterranean to the Levant.

Retro politics, sharpened by retro energy extraction, persists, obstinately and angrily facing backwards even as the oncoming fury of the future – waves of viral pandemics, catastrophic degradation of sustainable ecosystems – slams into conventional norms of growth-driven power. But while Greece and Turkey were embroiled in their zero-sum battle for maritime spoils, a Greco-American was busy saving the world through his partnership with two German Turks. In late July 2020, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer, in collaboration with the German company BioNTech, founded by the husband-and-wife scientific team Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, began the phase 3 clinical trials which would result, four months later, in the announcement of the first Covid-19 vaccine ready for manufacture and distribution. Pfizer’s CEO is Albert Bourla, born and educated in the Thracian metropolis of Thessaloniki (erstwhile Salonica), while his two Turkish collaborators both come from families who immigrated to Germany. Uğur Şahin was born in the western Anatolian town of Iskenderun (Byzantine Alexandretta), moving to Cologne in 1969 at the age of four when his father became a Gastarbeiter at the Ford factory in that city. Özlem Türeci was born in Lastrup in industrial Lower Saxony, where her father was a surgeon in a local hospital. Both their family histories, not to mention their research partnership, run spectacularly counter to the populist anti-immigrant rhetoric that has driven hard-right nationalism in Germany for the last decade. While not making a great show of the fact, Bourla and his two Turkish partners have been content to allow their transnational collaboration to establish its own exemplary significance for an inescapably interconnected world. Şahin has observed that the three of them bonded over their shared background as scientists and immigrants.

Bourla’s scientific education took place literally over the remains of his people

You would assume, then, that a partnership across historically adversarial national frontiers, a collaboration based on the universal imperatives of science, would deal a blow to nationalist intransigence and ancient demons. But modern times being what they are, you would of course be mistaken. There is another fact about some of the leading scientist-entrepreneurs responsible for developing and delivering RNA messenger vaccines with a speed and urgency hitherto thought inconceivable, a fact that has not escaped the attention of the preternaturally suspicious: many of the most prominent among them are Jewish. The chief medical officer of Moderna is Tal Zaks, an Israeli living in the United States; the chief scientific officer of Pfizer, Mikael Dolsten, is a Swedish Jew – his father a two-generation resident of Halmstad, his mother an Austrian Jew who escaped the Shoah. Dolsten spent a year at the Weizmann Institute while working on his Lund University doctoral research. Albert Bourla, who, like Dolsten, lives in New York state, is by origin a Greek Sephardi Jew from one of the few Jewish families to survive the Salonica Holocaust that, as Leon Saltiel writes, took the lives of 95 per cent of the 56,000 Jews living in that ancient city of Jewish settlement. Bourla’s scientific education took place literally over the remains of his people, for Aristotle University, where he studied, was constructed on the site of a centuries-old Jewish cemetery, the largest in Europe, which, before its desecration and destruction, held the graves of some 350,000 Salonica Jews. The final demolition of the cemetery occurred in December 1942 during the Nazi occupation, but the campaign to expropriate it for the benefit of the university had begun in earnest in 1936, five years after a pogrom in the Campbell district of the city. A leading newspaper, Makedonia, and a philosophy professor at the university, Avrotelis Eleftheropoulos, dismissed any criticisms as obscurantist pseudo-religious objections to the necessary expansion of Hellenic civilisation. A committee to defend the cemetery did what it could but in 1938 a portion containing 562 tombs and the remains of an estimated thousand, including some dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were disinterred and removed to a new distant site, while a special Kaddish was recited on a day of mourning. Further bites out of the cemetery were taken in 1939, so that although the German occupiers licensed the final destruction, its work had been long prepared by a Greek nationalist campaign. Marble was freely looted and, as Devin Naar’s Jewish Salonica notes, used, inter alia, for road construction, sea-walls, lining of latrines, repair of a Greek Orthodox church, and construction of a yacht club and a Wehrmacht swimming pool.

The extermination of the vast majority of Salonica’s Jews was followed after the war by the expedient disappearance of historical memory. Though there had been some evasion and resistance on the part of some Athenians, what took place in Salonica was notable for the absence of opposition and, as in so much of Nazi-occupied Europe, the collaboration of the local community. For some seventy years, there was no visible acknowledgement of what had taken place, until, in 2014, mayor Yiannis Boutaris pushed for a modest memorial on the university campus. Even so, reading the inscription would lead one to believe that the annihilation had been the work of the Germans alone. Most recently there has been discussion of a Holocaust memorial and education centre at Thessaloniki, though its future is uncertain. And in the meantime, the little memorial site has been the target of repeated anti-Semitic desecration: painted vandalism in 2017; smashed headstones in 2018 and in late January 2019, just a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The 2018 assault was only tangentially a response to Jewish history (though a direct response to the demonology of anti-Semitism). It was part of the protests against the Tsipras government’s agreement to allow its neighbour to preserve the contentious word in the new name of the Republic of North Macedonia. Such an ignominious appropriation of the memory of Alexander the Great, it was said by extreme opponents, was the result of Balkans and Jews sitting in the Athens parliament (where there are, in fact, currently no Jewish members).

None of this, however, prevented Greek media and politicians celebrating Albert Bourla as a modern Greek hero when, in November 2020, Pfizer announced the astonishing success rate of its vaccine. This chimed perfectly with Bourla’s own embrace of his Thessaloniki birth and upbringing and his willingness to advertise his identification with contemporary Greece. An instant love fest broke out from New York to Athens to Mainz, the headquarters of BioNTech. Except, however, for one newspaper, Makeleio, which broke ranks during the week of Pfizer’s announcement. Bourla, its front page screamed, was no hero but a Jewish veterinarian about to stick a needle in us! Forced admission into concentration camps like herds! Just in case readers failed to grasp the point, a photo of Dr Mengele was printed alongside that of Bourla as comparable fiends of demonic experimentation. A few days later a second article accused Bourla, the Greek Jew, of trousering millions for the ‘Israeli Council’. Makeleio is a publication of far-right fascist and neo-Nazi nationalists of the likes of Golden Dawn, with 8 per cent of Greek newspaper readership. Which is not to say it is without influence. In the Anti-Defamation League’s most recent survey of attitudes towards Jews in European countries, Greece was reported as having one of the highest percentages of population endorsing the perennial items of the anti-Semitic repertoire: Jews wielding too much influence in the media, possessing too much money, dominating the globalised world and so on.

The paradoxical exploitation of Holocaust tropes and signs to refresh anti-Semitism – turning the victims of the Shoah into its new perpetrators – has been standard polemic in the more venomous zones of anti-Zionist diatribes. Drawing on hoary tropes of the medieval blood libel, hated figures like Sharon and Netanyahu have been represented as shedding or even drinking the blood of murdered children. The Covid-19 twist on these horrific lunacies is to equate the imposition of vaccines and even masks with a new Holocaust. Anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers have taken to wearing yellow stars sewn on their coats; cartoons and signs have been published showing victims of compulsory social distancing and mask wearing being herded onto cattle trucks. The jaw-dropping stupidity of equating the means of saving life with the historic insignia of mass