Albert Camus on antisemitism

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Albert Camus. He understood what anti-Semitism and the denial of anti-Semitism (in the meantime packaged as anti-Zionism) are :

"In your every day life, you can be sure you will invariably come across a Frenchman who, incidentally, is likely to be intelligent and who will tell you that Jews exaggerate. Naturally, he has a Jewish friend, who at least … He does not, in the least, approve of the torture and burning of millions of Jews. Nevertheless, he thinks that Jews exaggerate and that they are wrong to stick together, even though their solidarity is the result of their concentration camp experience."

A. Camus (1913-1960), French writer and philosopher
"La Contagion", Combat, 10.5.1947. Quoted in La France et les Juifs : De 1789 à nos jours, by Michel Winock, Seuil, 2004

Translated by P.

Ancient Mayas and the Jews

"Being unaware of the existence of Jews, the ancient Maya ascribed all their misfortunes to the dark forces of nature."



Source: from a lecture on history of religion (lecturer unknown)
Via: Simply Jews

This is what came later:
The Manual of Inquisitors by Nicholas Eymerich

Modern antijudaism, Jean-Claude Milner

“Modern antijudaism has become the natural form of indifference; persecution, the natural form of idleness; antijudaism and persecution denial, the natural form of reasonable opinion.” Les Penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique [The Criminal inclinations of democratic Europe] by Jean-Claude Milner, Verdier, 2003, p. 130 Translated by Philo

We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the smoke of crematoriums..., François Mauriac

"We who live beneath a sky still streaked with the smoke of crematoriums have paid a high price to find out that evil is really evil."




François Mauriac (1885-1970), French novelist, essayist, literary critic and journalist

“Our own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels”, John F. Kennedy

“Before he became president, John F. Kennedy visited Palestine and Israel twice -- once in 1939 and again in 1951. He wrote about the trips in his 1960 collection of speeches entitled The Strategy of Peace.

“In 1939 I first saw Palestine, then an unhappy land under alien rule, and to a large extent then a barren land... In 1951, I travelled again to the land by the River Jordan, to see firsthand the new State of Israel. The transformation that had taken place was hard to believe.

For in those twelve years, a nation had been born, a desert had been reclaimed, and the most tragic victims of World War II... had found a home.”

Kennedy used that recollection to introduce his February 9, 1959 speech to the Golden Jubilee Banquet of B’nai Zion in New York City.

“[O]ur own history as a nation and Israel’s have many parallels - in the diversity of their origins, in their capacity to reach the unattainable, in the receptivity to new ideas and social experimentation...

History records several… breakthroughs - great efforts to which spiritual conviction and human endurance have combined to make realities out of prophecies. The Puritans in Massachusetts, the Mormons in Salt Lake City, the Scotch-Irish in the Western territories were all imbued with the truth of the old Jewish thought that a people can have only as much sky over its head as it has land under its feet...

I would like to... dispel a prevalent myth... the assertion that it is Zionism which has been the unsettling and fevered infection in the Middle East, the belief that without Israel there would somehow be a natural harmony throughout the Middle East and Arab world. Quite apart from the values and hopes which the State of Israel enshrines... it twists reality to suggest that it is the democratic tendency of Israel which has injected discord and dissension into the Near East. Even by the coldest calculations, the removal of Israel would not alter the basic crisis in the area... The basic rivalries within the Arab world, the quarrels over boundaries, the tensions involved in lifting their economies from stagnation, the cross pressures of nationalism - all of these factors would still be there, even if there were no Israel...

Israel, on the other hand, embodying all the characteristics of a Western democracy and having long passed the threshold of economic development, shares with the West a tradition of civil liberties, of cultural freedom, of parliamentary democracy, of social mobility...

The choice today is not between either the Arab states or Israel. Ways must be found of supporting the legitimate aspirations of each. The United States, whose President was first to recognize the new State of Israel, need have no apologies – indeed should pride itself – for the action it took...

The Jewish state found its fulfilment during a time when it bore witness, to use the words of Markham, to humanity betrayed, “plundered, profaned, and disinherited.”But it is yet possible that history will record this event as only the prelude to the betterment and therapy, not merely of a strip of land, but of a broad expanse of almost continental dimensions... [A]s we observe the inspiring experience of Israel, we know that we must make the effort...””
Rick Richman in Jewish Current Affairs
http://jpundit.typepad.com/jci/2006/04/response_to_ton.html

Albert Camus on anti-Semitism (1947)

"In your daily life, you can be sure you will invariably come across a Frenchman who, incidentally, is likely to be intelligent and who will tell you that Jews exaggerate. Naturally, he has a Jewish friend, who at least … He does not, in the least, approve of the torture and burning of millions of Jews. Nevertheless, he thinks that Jews exaggerate and that they are wrong to stick together, even though their solidarity is the result of their concentration camp experience."

A. Camus (1913-1960), French writer and philosopher

"La Contagion", Combat, 10.5.1947. Quoted in La France et les Juifs : De 1789 à nos jours, by Michel Winock, Seuil, 2004

Translated by Philosemite

“They supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx”, Peter Ustinov

“I believe that the Jews have made a contribution to the human condition out of all proportion to their numbers: I believe them to be an immense people. Not only have they supplied the world with two leaders of the stature of Jesus Christ and Karl Marx, but they have even indulged in the luxury of following neither one nor the other.”

Peter Ustinov (1921-2004), British actor, playwright, film star
Dear Me, autobiography (1977)

“The very best that is in the Jewish blood...”, D. H. Lawrence

“The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow.”

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), British novelist
Kangaroo, Ch. 6 (1923)

I am thrice homeless, Gustav Mahler

“I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), Austrian composer and conductor