Sunday, April 27, 2014
RE PROFESSOR HOWARD 2008 DISCUSSION
http://www.oxfordchabad.org/templates/articlecco_cdo/aid/630648/jewish/Prof-Sir-Michael-Howard.htm
..."The first problem that I myself face is, why was it the Germans who did this ? Here again I must explain where I am coming from. My mother transmitted to me not only Jewish blood, but the German culture imbibed and loved by her own parents. I feel at home with the German language (though I can barely speak it), with German poetry and German music, as I do with no other. So for me, even after I have explained it, it remains something of a mystery. After all, the Jews were no more unpopular in 19th century Germany than they were anywhere else in Europe. If one had been told , say in 1900, that the Holocaust would occur forty years later and asked to guess where it would happen, Germany would certainly not have been the first choice. That would probably have been Russia, where the pogroms, admittedly on a small if brutal scale, gave some indication of the intensity of racial prejudice in at least some regions of the Tsarist Empire. But Russia, it was generally admitted, was still semi-barbaric.. When she had caught up with the West, as she seemed rapidly to be doing, incidents like these would surely sink back into her troubled history. But next on the list would probably have been France, where at the turn of the century violent and endemic anti-Semitism was finding expression, not only in such works as Edouard Drumont’s La France juive and the circulation of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but in the official victimisation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus with the consent of the entire French establishment and half the electorate....."
It contains a more well considered treatment than his brief remarks on this subject in "Structure and Process In History".
..."The first problem that I myself face is, why was it the Germans who did this ? Here again I must explain where I am coming from. My mother transmitted to me not only Jewish blood, but the German culture imbibed and loved by her own parents. I feel at home with the German language (though I can barely speak it), with German poetry and German music, as I do with no other. So for me, even after I have explained it, it remains something of a mystery. After all, the Jews were no more unpopular in 19th century Germany than they were anywhere else in Europe. If one had been told , say in 1900, that the Holocaust would occur forty years later and asked to guess where it would happen, Germany would certainly not have been the first choice. That would probably have been Russia, where the pogroms, admittedly on a small if brutal scale, gave some indication of the intensity of racial prejudice in at least some regions of the Tsarist Empire. But Russia, it was generally admitted, was still semi-barbaric.. When she had caught up with the West, as she seemed rapidly to be doing, incidents like these would surely sink back into her troubled history. But next on the list would probably have been France, where at the turn of the century violent and endemic anti-Semitism was finding expression, not only in such works as Edouard Drumont’s La France juive and the circulation of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but in the official victimisation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus with the consent of the entire French establishment and half the electorate....."
It contains a more well considered treatment than his brief remarks on this subject in "Structure and Process In History".
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