The Pandemic, Antisemitism, and the Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History

Abstract

Brian Schrauger, in The Jerusalem Post, discussed Jews being "slaughtered," "murdered," "bludgeoned to death, herded into houses to be burned alive en masse, stripped naked and marched to a collective massacre," before asking "Could COVID-19 ignite an outbreak of antisemitism?"6 Dan Freedman, in Moment Magazine, sought to explain "why Jews were blamed for the Black Death";doing so, he too repeated the language of persecution by highlighting "episodes of violence," "slaughter," "burning," "torture," and more 7 Although Freedman did not answer the question asked, the answer seems implicit in the vocabulary he employed [ ]it may do the opposite;it may encourage hatred and violence as evidenced by the fact that some of the perpetrators of anti-Jewish attacks today have been known to have Googled questions like, for example, "Why Did Hitler Hate Jews?"10 The current popular writing about American Jews in the era of the pandemic (and Trump) feels eerily like Leidensgeschichte (the history of suffering), but without the Gelehrtengeschichte (the history of learning) that was equally a hallmark of much nineteenth-century Jewish historiography In his piece, Roth challenged the idea that all violence from which Jews suffered was automatically antisemitic 17 Episodes of "Jewish martyrdom," Roth argued, were very often episodes of "general history," with Jews caught in bigger events 18 A few years later, Roth published his popular A Short History of the Jewish People, in which he declared his desire "to break with" earlier Jewish historiography that tended to overstress "the traditional tale of woe [ ]both authors explicitly or implicitly used their scholarship to combat antisemitism, in part by expanding the existing understanding of what Jewish life and experience had been like in the past 21 Both Baron and Roth, in different ways, strove