Product Description

Esau’s Tears explores the remarkable and revealing variety of modern anti-Semitism, from its emergence in the 1870s in a racial-political form to the eve of the Nazi takeover, in the major countries of Europe and in the United States. Previous histories have generally been more concerned with description than analysis, and most of the interpretations in those histories have been lacking in balance. The evidence presented in this volume suggests that anti-Semitism in these years was more ambiguous than usually presented, less pervasive and central to the lives of both Jews and non-Jews, and by no means clearly pointed to a rising hatred of Jews everywhere, even less to the likelihood of mass murder. Similarly, Jew-hatred was not as mysterious or incomprehensible as often presented; its strength in some countries and weakness in others may be related to the fluctuating, and sometimes quite different, perceptions in those countries of the meaning of the rise of the Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #443481 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 568 pages

Review
‘… an original and perceptive observation on virtually every page, a consistent challenge to the orthodox interpretation of modern antisemitism which may be seen as a landmark in its study … Esau's Tears merits an important place in any historical assessment of modern antisemitism, while the author deserves a medal for bravery in writing the book’. History

Customer Reviews

A nuanced examination of antisemitism
Teaching, as a Jew, the History of the Jews, I have often come across discomfort in my largely Jewish audience when I explain that hostility to Jews has understandable causes - which of course is not to say that tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. Some of these causes - religious intolerance, envy, scapegoating - are wholly unworthy. Others relate to variety of dislikeable or threatening characteristics displayed by enough Jews to give rise to indefensible stereotyping.

So a frank discussion of the variety of causes of antisemitism is commendable, and the Preface of this book made me expect a fair-minded and dispassionate treatment of the subject. And yet within a very few pages I found assertions that struck me as distinctly skewed. Jews are said (p.14) to have found Marxism alluring because it emphasized the `tainted and sick qualities of modern Gentile existence' - ignoring Marx's hatred for Jews as particular exemplars of capitalism. On page 17 we are told that Jews were poor in Eastern Europe `primarily because the overwhelming majority of the population in that region was poor'. While this is true, there is no mention of the surely significant `secondary' reason - that obstacles, specifically directed at them, were placed in their way to raising themselves out of poverty. On page 20 we have the odd statement that Jewish religious rituals `threatened' other religions - how, is not explained. A substantial part of his long account of the Kishinev massacre of 1903, in which 45 Jews were killed, is devoted to showing how Jews exaggerated the scale of the disaster. And when Jews inside and outside Russia used what influence they had to fight back, it is `understandable' that Tsarist governments felt that the Jews set out to be subversive - a point Lindemann also makes about foreign attempts to relieve pressure on the Jews of Romania.

It is salutary to be reminded that doctrines of race and purity of blood - and of racial superiority - were held in the 19th century by Jews as well as by Gentiles, though again Lindemann seems to be to go over the top when he writes that Disraeli may (note the weasel word) have been the most influential propagator of the concept of race in the 19th century: simply because Disraeli was quoted by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, he is said to have `exercised a major influence' on him. And the way Lindemann downplays the Jewish aspect in his account of the Dreyfus case strikes me as excessive, even if it is true that the Dreyfus case was about much more than antisemitism.

Lindemann consistently emphasises that, whilst on the one hand the opponents of modernism had good reasons for seeing Jews disproportionately represented among its exponents and practitioners, on the other hand violently antisemitic organizations in 19th century Germany, Austria and France had a very small following, that most conservatives distanced themselves from vulgar extremism, that antisemitism had no impact in terms of legislation, that Jewish prosperity continued to grow apace, and that Jews had objective reason for not taking antisemitism too seriously. On the other hand, when they came across antisemitism, many Jews at the time tended to display a sensitivity that they did not always practice when commenting about matters that other people were sensitive about; and of course post-Holocaust Jews tend to read history backwards and see every cloud in the past, even if it was perhaps no bigger than a man's hand, as a hugely sinister portent of things to come.

Lindemann frequently stresses the `moderation' of even the most famous antisemites of the 19th century when compared with the Nazis. True: none of them suggested a `Final Solution' - but does that really need to be repeatedly stressed and qualified by the word `moderate'? His facts are usually undeniable, but his unfortunate choice of word here is symptomatic of the questionable tone that from time to time mars this work.

He devotes his last chapter to the Third Reich. A relatively small part of it explains, quite rightly, that antisemitism was not the reason why the Nazi vote leapt from 2.6% in May 1928 to 38% in July 1932: most of those who voted for the Nazis supported them for quite different reasons; and Lindemann rightly takes issue with the Goldhagen thesis that most Germans were Hitler's willing executioners. But most of that chapter is provocatively (and quite unnecessarily) devoted to showing how uncertain Hitler was in the early years of the Third Reich about what to do about the Jews. `Almost certainly' impressed by how Henry Ford in America had had to climb down when the Jews fought back, Hitler was afraid of their power. The three days' boycott (Lindemann says `it lasted a day or two') of Jewish shops at the beginning of April was merely a gesture, which fizzled out. The wholesale dismissal of Jews from state employment later that month is not mentioned. He implies that the abandonment of the boycott aggravated Hitler's problems with the Brownshirts and was one of the reasons for the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The Nuremberg Laws in 1935 are described as drafted in a hurry and as a last minute idea: some Jewish leaders were relieved that they were not worse, and that the loss of the right to vote `no longer meant much to anyone in Germany in 1935'. In one sentence he says that Goebbels planned the Kristallnach, but, lower down on the same page, that `to describe the pogrom as planned may (that weasel word again) overstate things.'

The flaws in this book are a great pity, because there is much interesting information in it, much which is insightful - the 14 page conclusion is wise and magisterial - and much which is a corrective to the view that criticism of the Jewish role in history is never anything except pathological and that it does not have understandable historical roots.