Her mother heard her come in, and stood in her slippers and robe in the kitchen doorway. “Is it true, sweetheart?”
“Is what true?” Judit asked.
“That they’re going to deport them all?” Leonora looked so fragile that Judit felt she ought to offer her a chair, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to bother you. I try not to wait up for you anymore. But I just wanted to know. Is it true that there are trucks waiting at the border to take them to Siberia?”
“Where did you hear that?” Judit asked.
“Where I work,” her mother said. “They’re in a panic. Oh, it’s terrible to see, the way they’re overreacting and spreading rumors. The old ones in the home, they’ve all stopped eating. I had to force-feed one woman who actually struck me, Judi, right across the face, and they had to put her in restraints.”
Leonora tended to keep to herself these days; she and Judit seldom crossed paths. She looked older than Judit had remembered, diminished, and the robe was too big for her. Her hazel eyes searched Judit’s.
“That’s crazy, Mom,” Judit said. “They arrest one nut, and the black-hats get a persecution complex. He should be treated like everybody else.”
“I know, I know,” Leonora said. “But they don’t see it that way. As far as they’re concerned, they’ll never be like everybody else.”
“Go to bed, Mom,” Judit said.
“Don’t you agree? That they think they can’t be like everybody else?”
“They’re right,” Judit said. “We can’t be.”
Leonora looked perplexed, and Judit herself wasn’t sure what she just said and what she had confessed. She knew she owed her mother an explanation, but that would mean a longer night, and sharing a document she would prefer to keep to herself for a while. She suspected that her mother often went into her room, and thus, she’d placed it inside her old sewing machine, just below a panel where she kept spools of thread. Of course, it was Stephen Weiss’s manifesto.
4
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of genocide. The great powers struggle to exorcise this specter through solemn dedications, bad art, and rhetoric that is designed to drain the term of any specificity. Where is the nation that has not been decried as genocidal by its opponents? Where are the opponents who have not hurled the reproach of genocide against their adversaries?
Two things result from this state of affairs:
1. Genocide has become a term for mass murder of a group on ideological grounds.
2. It is high time that we who were the objects of genocide should publish our views and meet these fairy tales with a manifesto that defines the meaning of the term and once and for all lays out a program of action for Churban survivors.
In earlier epochs, we find almost everywhere famine and bloodshed. As time went on, the opportunities for slaughter multiplied as death became the province not of random natural phenomena or personal vendettas, but of machinery and whole industrial armies. Today, conventional warfare no longer suffices. Given the first half of the twentieth century, the evidence is indisputable. The modern state is but a committee for managing murder.
Paradoxically, the modern state is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment, an ideology that privileges progress and abstraction. Beginning with the premise of man’s goodness, Enlightenment philosophy assures that human action must be grounded in human reason. Forging ahead, vulgar ideologues insist all men are brothers. What they cannot acknowledge is that all men are, in equal measure, butchers, and that irrationality, along with reason, is our common currency.
Therefore, modern states fight in the name of reason, and battle the irrational. If they wipe out their enemies, surely all men will be brothers. Soldiers, indeed, are burnt sacrifices to this God of Reason. Yet these relations do not constitute genocide. Rather, the term will be defined as follows:
1. Genocide is the attempted destruction of the Jews.
2. As survivors of genocide, we constitute a special class. The penumbra of our experience transforms not only us, but our relationships to other nations, in ways we shall delineate below.
We leave religious and ethnographic definitions to professionals in those disciplines, but insist that three elements distinguish Jews from what tradition might establish as Nations or Goyim.
In fact, Jews are the antithesis of Nations for the following reasons:
1. We do not bow down.
2. We cross borders.
3. We remember.
The first point can be confirmed both theologically and historically. Our ancient prohibition against idol-worship has had lasting power; we do not honor crowns or flags. The second point is central to our narrative; we thrive in no fixed place. Finally, if we are border-crossers, what we carry is our memories, both individual and collective.
Contrast this set of characteristics to the Nations. They are defined by their allegiances and by their borders. These loyalties can only be sustained by a compulsory amnesia. Otherwise, they would be so tangled in contradictory memories that they would not be able to bow down at all. It is fair to say that forgetting is a passport to the wider world. The Jews can only join the rank of nations if they learn to forget.
Yet we cannot forget. Our memories extend beyond the Churban. Because we do not bow down, we have no loyalty to a particular ideological idol of the age. We are the repository for the history of every border we have crossed. Therefore, how can we help but laugh at flags? We know they are just bits of colored cloth. We carry our contradictions and represent, in the deepest sense, what Nations fear.
In what relation does genocide stand to the Jews as a whole? Not all of us lived in countries under fascist domination, but if the fascists sought complete extermination of the Jews, perforce, all living Jews are survivors.
Yet here we come across a paradox: our continued survival is dependent on other Nations and on the implications of the Churban. When Nations see us, they see ghosts; thus, they have no choice but to respond with terror and revulsion, and the power of that response ensures a symbiotic, necessary partnership which will be explained below, and in more detail, in section IV.
Throughout the ages, Jews have inspired in Nations that same terror and revulsion. Whole libraries have been compiled by way of explanation: their ignorance of our customs, their belief in black magic, their association of Jews with an angry, unforgiving God-the-Father who castrates and kills His son. Yet in the end, it is our indelible identity as demons that ensures our lasting power.