Inventing the Enemy: Essays Read Free Page A

Our ears are particularly offended by the shrill, sibilant, strident sounds of this idiom. The Jew uses words and constructs his phrases in a way quite contrary to the spirit of our national language . . . When we listen to him, our attention dwells involuntarily on how he speaks rather than on what he says. This point is of the greatest importance in explaining the expression produced by the musical works of the Jews. Listening to a Jew talking, we are inevitably offended by the fact of finding his discourse devoid of all truly human expression . . . It is natural that the inherent aridness of the Jewish character which we find so distasteful finds its greatest expression in song, which is the liveliest, most authentic manifestation of individual feeling. We might recognize the Jew’s artistic aptitude for any other art except that of song, which nature herself seems to have denied him. (
Judaism in Music,
1850)
     
    Hitler proceeds with a greater delicacy, bordering almost on envy: “In regard to young people, clothes should take their place in the service of education . . . If the beauty of the body were not completely forced into the background to-day through our stupid manner of dressing, it would not be possible for thousands of our girls to be led astray by Jewish mongrels, with their repulsive crooked waddle” (
Mein Kampf,
1925, translated by James Murphy).
    From facial appearance to customs: this brings us to the Jewish enemy who kills young children and drinks their blood. He appears very early, for example, in Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales,
where there is a story, much like that of Saint Simonino of Trento, of a young boy seized while passing through the Jewish quarter while singing “O alma redemptoris mater.” His throat is slashed and his body thrown into a pit.
    The Jew who kills young children and drinks their blood has a very complex genealogy: the same model existed earlier in Christianity, in the creation of the enemy within—the heretic. A single example is enough:
     
In the evening, when we light the lamps and commemorate the passion, they take young girls initiated into their secret rites to a particular house, they snuff out their lamps as they wish no one to witness the indecencies about to take place, and give vent to their licentious practices on whomever it might be, even upon sister or daughter. Indeed they believe they are pleasing the demons by violating the divine laws that forbid union with those of the same blood. Once the ritual is over, they return home and wait for nine months to pass: when the time comes for the godless children to be born of a godless seed, they assemble once again in the same place. Three days after the birth, they seize the wretched children from their mothers, cut their tender limbs with a sharp blade, fill cups with the blood that spurts forth, burn the newborns while they are still breathing by throwing them on a pyre. Then they mix blood and ash in cups to obtain a horrible concoction with which they contaminate food and drink, secretly, like someone poisoning mead. Such is their communion. (Michele Psello,
De operatione daemonum,
eleventh century)
    The enemy is sometimes seen as different and ugly because he belongs to a lower class. In
The Iliad,
Thersites (“crooked, lame in one foot; his shoulders rounded and bent over his chest; his head pointed and sprouting tufts of hair,” book 2, line 212) is socially inferior to Agamemnon and Achilles, and is therefore jealous of them. There is little difference between Thersites and Edmondo de Amicis’s character Franti in his novel
Cuore
(
Heart,
1886): whereas Odysseus attacks Thersites, drawing blood, society punishes Franti with imprisonment.
     
(25 October): And beside him there’s a tough, cheeky-looking fellow called Franti who has already been expelled from another school . . . (21 January): Only one boy could laugh while Derossi was talking about the king’s funeral, and that was Franti. I