The Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany) pushed this week to limit the number of refugees allowed into Germany. “Many of the refugees are fleeing from the terror of the ‘Islamic State’ and want to live in peace and freedom,” declared Zentralrat President Josef Schuster, “but at the same time they come from cultures in which hatred of Jews and intolerance are a central part. Think not just of the Jews, think of the equal rights of men and women or how we deal with homosexuality.*” His subtle rhetorical callback to Martin Niemöller’s “first they came for the socialists… then they came for the Jews… then they came for me” at the end of that quote is a brilliant move, reminding Germany of their failure to stand up against hatred, while at the same time himself promoting hatred. This is an appalling development after Schuster’s September op-ed applauding Germany for taking in the refugees in the first place.
Appalling, because of any group of people anywhere, we Jews should be the first to open our homes, our doors, our borders, to those fleeing for their lives. Were it not for my family being permitted into the United States as refugees from any of the many parts of Europe trying to murder us at the beginning of last century, I would not exist, and the same is true for an uncountable number of Jews throughout the world today. Those branches of my family tree who did not flee, or who were refused refuge when they finally did so, those branches are cut short, with a bullet or a puff of gas. I know no Jews in the US or the UK for whom the same story is not true, and those Jews I know in Germany tend to have ancestors who returned after time as refugees elsewhere, or who emigrated here from wherever it was that their families took refuge. Those refugees all learned the languages, learned the customs of the lands that saved them and became integrated at every level of society, just like the Zentralrat suggests that the refugees in Germany won’t do. If anyone should be waving the Refugees Welcome banner, it’s the Jews.
And of course this is not just recent history. As President Schuster himself pointed out in the aforementioned September op-ed, “In the past, the Ottoman Empire let in Jews expelled from Spain. During the Nazi era, many Jews also found refuge in Turkey. This country is thus continuing a great humane tradition and deserves not just praise for that, but also support.” And he himself, in the same op-ed, recalled the tragedy of “Roosevelt’s refusal in 1939 to let the more than 900 mostly Jewish refugees aboard the MS St. Louis land in America” as “a haunting memory. So it is a shocking contradiction of his own convictions when, two months later, he calls on Germany to do the same and block the Syrians fleeing here.
Based on history, the German state and the overwhelming majority of the German people will not speak out when Jews, in Germany or elsewhere, go too far. Thus it is the responsibility of Jews in Germany themselves to do so when those who claim to speak for us instead speak for fear and hatred. It is in our nature to think ourselves better than others: that’s the entire point of a “chosen people”. But this exceptionalism needs calling out when it turns into hypocrisy. So when President Schuster talks about equal rights for men and women being threatened by Muslim refugees, I have to ask why my wife has to sit separate from me and hidden from view by a Mechitza in Germany’s synagogues. And when he talks about hatred as a cultural cornerstone of Muslims, I have to ask why I’ve seen so many Israeli flags at PEGIDA’s hate-filled islamophobic demonstrations. I’ve seen at least as much islamophobia from Jews as I’ve experienced antisemitism from Muslims. Hate is hate, regardless of its targets.
And perhaps an equally great irony in anti-refugee sentiment among Jews in Germany is the modern angle: Germany’s Jewish population has quadrupled in the last 20 years, most of them as refugees from the East. Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Judaism in Germany has seen a rapid shift to the right and to the Orthodox extreme, with liberal, reform, or reconstructionist Jewish voices being silenced by the influx of Jewish refugees from former-Soviet territories who feared for their safety in the emerging regimes of the East Bloc. That Jews in Germany, with not just a Holocaust-refugee history but having sought asylum in Germany themselves, would attempt to limit entry for refugees is unconscionable.
The saying goes “Six Jews, seven opinions,” and naturally I do not speak for all Jews in Germany. However, the point is, neither does the Zentralrat. There are countless ways in which the Jews of Germany have failed to learn from history. For example, as anyone who has read Hanna Arendt’s Eichmann In Jerusalem would know, a mechanism such as a Zentralrat was a necessary precondition for the ease with which the Holocaust was carried out. But the idea that the modern incarnation of the Zentralrat would propose something as ghastly as a limit on accepting refugees is the peak of hypocrisy.
The author is a former board member of the American Jewish Congress (MD chapter) now living in Germany, and is a lecturer on Jewish Concepts of a Peaceful Coexistence in Berlin.
*Author’s own translation from German.
The Central Council of Jews in Germany has forgotten history by Zachary Gallant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
