II. Prejudice And Discrimination

This Chapter and You...

1. Why are we prejudiced?
2. Why do people hate?
3. Why is prejudice so destructive?

The Holocaust is the ultimate result of prejudice. When prejudice is allowed to fester and grow, it leads to hate campaigns, acts of discrimination, loss of rights, illegal jailings, pogroms and mass murder. There is a direct link, a natural progression between this chapter and your journey through Poland, on the March. You will bear witness to the destructive force of prejudice and group hate carried out to its "final solution."

Group prejudice, hatred and discrimination have permeated human society since the beginning of recorded time. If we are to build a better world, it is imperative that we fully understand the components of group prejudice, discrimination and anti-Semitism, what it is, how it functions and what it can lead to.

In this unit, you will explore how anti-Semitism, left unabated, led to the Shoah. Prejudice, scapegoating, anti-Semitism, Holocaust - a natural progression. Why was there so much anti-Semitism in Europe? Why was it allowed to flourish and grow? What is its status in Poland today? What are the chances that you will experience it in your home town? On the March?

Everyone has prejudices... You have prejudices. We all have prejudices. As you read through this study guide, you will be challenged to understand the roots of your own prejudices.

As you walk the two mile March from Auschwitz to Birkenau, think about your own personal prejudices and commit yourself to trying to purge them forever.

Objectives

1. You should be able to define the word prejudice.
2. You should begin to understand what is the nature of prejudice and discrimination in general and begin to question how it impacts your daily life.
3. You should be able to trace how a single simple ethnic slur or prejudicial statement can lead to more dangerous occurrences.
4. You will begin to understand anti-Semitism in its historical context.
5. You will begin to see how anti-Semitism led to the Shoah.

"Hatred begins in the heart and not in the head. In so many instances we do not hate people because of a particular deed, but rather do we find that deed ugly because we hate them."

The Jew and the Cross by Dagobert Runes

Activity A:

Write your own definition of prejudice. Compare your definition to the dictionary definition on the front cover of this chapter.

Reading #1

Before we even go on the March, you will understand that a fundamental lesson of the March is that we need to root out prejudice and hatred. (Notice, we even used the concept of "rooting" it out. Remember Chapter #1, Reading #1?) This means understanding it, its history, its nuance and its nature. As the title says, prejudice is bad, any way you read it.

"ECIDUJERP, PREJUDICE" (excerpts) - by Irene Gersten and Betsy Bliss. Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, Franklin Watts, Inc., 1974

Prejudice is an attitude, a rigid emotional response toward all members of a particular group or social category. It is generally an unfavorable opinion formed before the facts are known, which results in hatred or intolerance.

In this section, authors Irene Gersten and Betsy Bliss explain the meaning of prejudice. As indicated by the authors, prejudice can be motivated by, among other reasons, economic interest, conforming to group expectations, and/or the difficulty people have in accepting their own weaknesses.

Prejudice can be expressed in a variety of ways such as anti locution (bad-mouthing), avoidance, discrimination, physical attack and genocide. As the worst expression of hate, genocide represents the systematic murder of an entire people because they belong to a specific nation, race or religion.

PREJUDICE AND IGNORANCE

Suppose that you had never met an old person. Suppose that your friends told you that "All old people are crazy." Would you believe them? You might - if you had never known an old person. That is what happens when we insist on knowing only people just like ourselves.

This kind of prejudice is really ignorant - prejudice due to not knowing better. It is expressed by many people who keep themselves separate and do not mix with other groups.

Ignorant prejudice was what those white residents felt when the black families began to move into their neighborhood. But when they were actually living next door to one another, they started to look at their black neighbors as individuals and to see that they were not noisy or troublemakers, but were honest, warm hardworking people, very much like themselves.

REAL PREJUDICE

It is important to remember that there is a difference between ignorance and prejudice. Ignorance means forming opinion without really knowing the facts. The prejudice that often results from ignorance does not necessarily mean hateful feelings.

Real prejudice, on the other hand, occurs when we choose to keep bad opinions even when we have a chance to know better. Prejudice occurs when a person refuses to change his mind - even when the facts show him that he is wrong.

Mark is an example of a person with real prejudice.

When Mark was young, all of his friends and classmates told him that all black people were "lazy" and "dirty." Mark took their word for it.

He believed them because he had never seen a person with dark skin. There were no black people in his school, his neighborhood, or his Boy Scout troop. When he went to the movies, he hardly ever saw black people in films. Those that he did see were shown as "lazy" and "dirty." The same was true on television. Mark was a very protected person who had little touch with the world outside of his own group.

As Mark grew older and left his neighborhood, he began to see some people with dark skin. But they seemed so different from him. They looked different. They dressed differently and they even talked differently. Mark stayed away from them because they were strange and he was afraid of them. Mark covered his fear by saying that "they" were "dirty" and "lazy."

When Mark entered high school, he met Jeff, who was black. Jeff was in most of his classes and Mark was forced to see that Jeff was neat, well-dressed and very hardworking. But Mark refused to change his bad opinions of all dark-skinned people. Even though he knew Jeff to be much like himself, his prejudice would not allow him to see Jeff as a complete individual. Mark could not see beyond Jeff's dark skin. He said to himself, "Jeff is different from other blacks. It is still true that all those people are "dirty" and "lazy." Mark simply could not see that "all those people" are individuals just like Jeff.

PREJUDICE AND PROFIT

Why do Mark and people like him refuse to give up their prejudices even when the facts show them to be wrong? Why do people prejudge others in the first place? Why has man, for as long as we can remember, been cruel to his fellow man? Why is prejudice as much a problem today as it was four hundred years ago?

To answer these questions isn't easy. Mostly, we act in a prejudiced manner because we expect to gain something.

Each individual is a complex being, with many different needs, desires and goals. And though people are guilty of prejudice because they believe they will gain something, what it is that they want to gain is different in almost every case.

CONFORMING PREJUDICE

A very common type of prejudice comes from our need to have the same values as the group to which we belong. We tend to feel safe within our own group. It makes us feel important. To know we will be accepted by that group, we adopt the group's thinking. When the group thinking is prejudiced, we often accept this thinking because we are afraid to go against the group.

A college student recently wrote about an example of this kind of prejudice. It occurred on his first day of high school. He had been talking with a boy of his own age when one of the older students came over to him and said, "Don't you know that Harry is a Jew?" He had never before met a Jew and really didn't care whether or not Harry, whom he started to like, was a Jew. But he admitted that the tone of the older boy's voice was enough to convince him that he had better not make Harry his friend.

When we act in this way, we are clearly in the wrong. There is nothing wrong in wanting to belong to a certain group because we want to feel a part of something. We all need friends and want to feel safe and needed. But there is something terribly wrong when we become a part of the group and are no longer an individual. By giving up what is special in each of us, we can no longer act or think on our own. We become a group body. We are afraid to make a step on our own two feet. We act in a prejudiced way not because we believe the others are not as good as we are, but because we are afraid of being "different" and of having opinions different from those of our friends, classmates and family.

SCAPEGOATING

There is one kind of prejudice that occurs when we want to go along with opinions of our friends. There is a more dangerous kind of prejudice that stems from feeling unsure about ourselves and from the questions we have about our own worth as individuals. It is called scapegoating.

It is part of human nature for people to compare themselves with one another. It is part of our society for individuals to compete with one another for money and personal rewards. Often our feeling of being not as good, as attractive, as wealthy, as skilled, or as successful as others makes us need to blame someone else for our own shortcomings.

It is difficult for people to accept their own weaknesses. It is much easier to blame our problems on others. When we look down on someone else, we seem so much taller.

The word "scapegoating" comes from Biblical times. Then a scapegoat was let loose in the wilderness after the high priest had placed the sins of the people on its head. All of the failures, the shortcomings, and the shameful things that the people were guilty of were put onto the goat. Sending the goat out into the woods was the people's way of separating themselves from their guilt. They were no longer responsible for their own actions.

Today we use the word scapegoat to describe a person or a group of people who are blamed unfairly.

Scapegoating is in many ways like labeling. Both are lazy ways of thinking. Both can prevent a person from seeing himself as he really is. When we put people into groups, we hide ourselves or other people behind name tags. We see only a part of what people really are, not the whole picture.

Our world is full of people like Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones is very upset about what is happening in this country. Mr. Jones says, "The reason we have riots is that there are outsiders in this country." He adds, "If we could only get rid of the outsiders, everything would be fine."

Riots, like most problems, have many causes. Solutions are hard to find and Mr. Jones doesn't want to bother to find out what all of the causes are. It is much easier to find someone to blame, to find a scapegoat. For Mr. Jones, outsiders are handy scapegoats.

It is usually easy to recognize the Mr. Joneses of the world. They are the people who can say, "If only we didn't have so-and-so, everything would be okay." These persons will find one enemy to explain everything that is wrong. "If only we didn't have Jews." or "If only we didn't have hippies."

But nothing is that simple.

Prejudiced people who scapegoat say the same things about all groups that are different from their own. No matter who is the prejudiced person, he warns everyone against "marrying those people" or "believing anything those people say." You can substitute almost any kind of human being for "those people," but the prejudiced person's remark and warnings will be the same.

That is because the scapegoater does not hate any one person in particular. He hates a group that is different, and his hatred covers all the members of that group.

DEFEATING PREJUDICE

When people say the kinds of things that Mark, for example, said about Jeff, they do not always know that they are guilty of prejudice. Most prejudiced people try to hide their true fears from themselves as well as from others. These people feel good only when they believe that there are others who are not quite as good as they are.

Practically nobody will admit to being prejudiced. Practically everybody agrees that prejudice is cruel and ugly. That is why people have been forced to defend their prejudice. And that is why their defenses have been pretty strange!

In the nineteenth century, for example, many people tried to use a religious excuse to cover their prejudice. They said that slavery was a way of introducing the Christian religion to the Africans, who had their own, different religion. It was obvious to a majority of people that this was not a very good excuse, and so many people tried to find a better one. These people turned to the idea that some people were better than others - smarter, nicer-looking, with better manners, and more honest.

Today we know that this is completely untrue. Today we know that, any way you look at it, there is no excuse good enough to defend prejudice.

Questions:

1. How does a person go through life learning prejudice?

2. Why is real prejudice harder to deal with than ignorant prejudice?

3. Some people feel that prejudice is an essential element of maintaining self esteem. What is your reaction?

4. Others argue that prejudice comes from people who are deprived and frustrated. What is your reaction to this idea?

5. What do you think causes prejudice?

Reading #2

Why the Jew? Where did it start? When will it end? Is that why we march? Or does prejudice march on endlessly? Reading #2 will help you understand the "why".

The Jew As Scapegoat - (excerpts from) The Holocaust Years: Society on Trial - by Gordon Allport

Anti-Semitism is thought to reach back at least to the fall of Judea in 586 B.C.E. When the Jews were dispersed, they took with them their relatively rigid and unbending customs. Dietary laws prohibited them from eating with others; intermarriage was forbidden. They were even by their own prophet Jeremiah considered "stiff-necked." Wherever they went their orthodoxy presented a problem.

In Greece and Rome - to mention only two of their new homelands - new ideas were welcomed. The Jews were received as interesting strangers. But the cosmopolitan cultures which they entered could not understand why Jews did not reciprocate the meals, games, and gaiety of their own pagan life. Jehovah could easily be fitted into the galaxy of gods who were worshiped. Why could not the Jews accept the pantheon? Judaism seemed too absolute in its theology, ethnic customs, and rites.

Yet in Ancient Rome it is fairly certain that Christians were persecuted more vigorously than Jews. Tertullian gives a terse record of the scapegoating of Christians. Until the fourth century when Christianity became the officially dominant religion under Constantine, it is probable that the Jews fared relatively better than the Christians. But after that time the Sabbaths were separated, and the Jews became a highly visible group marked off from the Christians.

Since the early Christians were themselves Jews, it took the first two or three centuries of the Christian era for this fact to be forgotten. Then only did the accusation arise that the Jews (as a group) were responsible for the Crucifixion. Subsequently, for centuries it seems that to a large number of people the epithet "Christ killer" was a sufficient cause for scapegoating the Jew on any and all occasions. Certain it is that by the time of St. John Chrysostom (fourth century) elaborate anti-Semitic homilies were preached, accusing Jews not only of the Crucifixion but of all other conceivable crimes as well.

Some support for anti-Semitism is drawn from straight Christian theological reasoning. Since the Bible explicitly asserts that the Jews are God's chosen people, they must be hounded until they acknowledge their Messiah. God will punish them until they do so. Thus their persecution by Christians is ordained. It is true that no modern theologian would interpret this situation to mean that an individual Christian is justified in acting unfairly or uncharitably toward any individual Jew. Yet the fact remains that God acts in mysterious ways, and apparently His concern is to bring recalcitrant Jews, His chosen people, to acknowledge the New Testament as well as the Old. While modern anti-Semites are certainly not aware that they are punishing the Jews for this particular reason, from the theological point of view their conduct is understandable in terms of God's long-range design.

It is necessary to stress these religious factors in anti-Semitism, for the Jews are above all else a religious group. It may be rightly objected that many (perhaps most) Jews today are not religious. While orthodoxy has declined, there has been no decrease in persecution. Further, it may be objected that in present day anti-Semitism, the sins of the Jews are said to be moral, financial, social; religious deviance is seldom mentioned. All this is true - and yet the vestiges of the religious issue certainly persist. The Jewish religious holidays make for visibility; so too the imposing synagogues in Jewish residential districts.

Still, many people today are indifferent to the specifically religious quarrel between Judaism and Christianity. Many more are able in their own minds to transcend it, realizing well the essential unity of the Judea-Christian tradition. But, according to a broader interpretation of the matter, each one of us is still affected by the epic quality of spiritual ferment in Jewish culture. Jacques Maritain, the Catholic scholar, expresses the matter thus:

Israel...is to be found at the very heart of the world's structure, stimulating it, exasperating it, moving it. Like an alien body, like an activating ferment injected into the mass, it gives the world no peace...it teaches the world to be discontent and restless as long as the world has not God, it stimulates the movement of history."

A Jewish scholar continues the argument: the Jews as a group are no larger than certain unheard-of tribes in Africa. Yet they have provided continuous spiritual ferment. They insist upon monotheism; upon ethics; upon moral responsibility. They insist upon high scholarship; upon closely knit home life. They themselves aspire to high ideals, are restless, and ridden by conscience. Throughout the ages they have made mankind aware of God, of ethics, of high standards of attainment. Thus - though imperfect in themselves - they have been the mentors of the world's conscience.

On the one hand people admire and revere these standards. On the other hand they rebel and protest. Anti-Semitism arises because people are irritated by their own consciences. Jews are symbolically their superego, and no one likes to be ridden so hard by his superego. Ethical conduct is insisted upon by Judaism, relentlessly, immediately, hauntingly. People who dislike this insistence, along with the self-discipline and acts of charity implied, are likely to justify their rejection by discrediting the whole race that produced such high ethical ideals.

Jews, partly at least because of their religious deviance, were excluded in many countries for long periods of time from owning land. Only transient and fringe occupations were open to them. When the Crusaders needed money, they could not borrow from Christians (whose code did not allow usury). Jews became the moneylenders. In so doing they invited customers but also contempt. Excluded not only from land-owning but also from handicraft guilds, Jewish families were forced to develop mercantile habits. Only money lending, trading, and other stigmatized occupations were open to them.

This pattern has to some extent persisted. Occupational traditions of the European Jews transferred to new lands when Jews emigrated. To some extent the same discrimination barred them from conservative occupations. They were again obliged to develop the fringe activities where risk, shrewdness, enterprise were required. We have seen how this factor led large numbers of Jewish people, especially in New York City, into retailing, theatrical ventures, and professions. This somewhat uneven distribution on the economic checkerboard of the nation made the Jewish group conspicuous; it also intensified the stereotype that they work too hard, make lots of money, and engage in shady dealings in the less stable occupations.

Looking backward once more over the historical course of events, we find another consideration of importance. Lacking a homeland, the Jews were regarded by some as parasites upon the body politic. They had certain attributes of a nation (ethnic coherence plus a tradition of nationhood). But they were, in fact, the only nation on earth without a home. People who distrusted "bi-loyalty" accused them of being less patriotic, less honorable within their adopted land than they should be.

A further factor to be noted is that the insistence upon scholarship and intellectual attainment is a long-standing mark of Jewish culture. Jewish intellectualism calls to mind one's own defects of ignorance and laziness. The Jews once more symbolize our conscience, against whose challenges we protest.

Surveying such a welter of historic-psychological factors, one naturally wonders whether there is a leading motif that would sum them all up. The nearest approach would seem to be the concept of "fringe of conservative values." The expression, however, must be understood to cover not only deviance in religion, occupation, nationhood, but likewise departure from conservative mediocrity: conscience pricking, intellectual aspiration, spiritual ferment. One might put the matter this way: the Jews are regarded as just far enough off center (slightly above, slightly below, slightly outside) to disturb non-Jews in many different ways. The "fringe" is perceived by conservative people to represent a threat. The differences are not great; indeed, the fact that they are relatively slight may make them all the more effectively disturbing. Again, we cite "the narcissism of slight differences."

This analysis of anti-Semitism, historically considered, is far from complete. It is intended only to demonstrate that, without historical perspective, we cannot tell why one group rather than another is the object of hostility. The Jews are a scapegoat of great antiquity, and only the long arm of history, aided by psychological insights, can reconstruct the story.

The problem is exceedingly complex, but it will never be solved unless there is at every stage scrupulous regard for factual evidence, concerning both the traits of the Jewish group and the psychodynamic processes of anti-Semites.

Questions:

1. What is a scapegoat?

2. What support for anti-Semitism came from early Christian theology?

3. Can you explain the circumstances surrounding the acceptance of the Jew as "Christ Killer"?

4. How did the concept of "a nation without a home" affect the way in which Jews were treated by various countries?

Reading #3

Did the Holocaust just happen? Was there no "history" before? The March teaches that nothing just happens. So does this reading.

The Holocaust: The Jewish Ordeal In Nazi Occupied Europe 1933-1945 (excerpts from): A Resource Unit for High School Students - by Beverly Sanders

Introduction

During the years of World War II, the Nazi German State under Hitler destroyed six million European Jews, among whom over a million were children. In carrying out their program of genocide, the Nazis achieved a unique synthesis of primitive barbarism and advanced technology. A racist ideology based on a pseudo-scientific mystique of blood and the cult of superiority provided the impetus for mass murder by means of modern machinery and elaborate bureaucratic procedures. Germany, a nation which prided herself on her culture, and whose culture commanded universal respect, conceived Auschwitz, the death camp where thousands of Jews were murdered daily in gas chambers and their corpses were burned in giant crematoria.

I. Origins of the Holocaust

A. European Anti-Semitism: A Long Tradition

1. Anti-Semitism was primarily a religious prejudice at first. From the very beginning, Christians held an ambivalent attitude towards Jews. On the one hand, Judaism was the parent of Christianity and Jesus was a Jew. On the other hand, the Jews refused to accept Jesus as a savior and messiah and were blamed for his death. Through the centuries there were attempts to convert the Jewish minority to Christianity. When these attempts failed, the Jews, regarded as a danger to Christians, were excluded from full participation in society and frequently subject to executions, massacres and expulsions. Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land stopped to murder Jews along the way. Between the 13th and 16th centuries, Jews were expelled from England, France, Italy, Bohemia, the German states and Spain.

2. In the 19th century anti-Semitism became primarily a secular form of prejudice. Religious feelings had declined in intensity. The French Revolution and Napoleon had paved the way to the eventual emancipation of the Jews in Western and Central Europe and their partial integration into society at large, but also brought new problems for them as a group. The consequent social and economic rise of the Jews caused antagonistic reactions in many sectors of society. The rapid expansion of capitalism in the 19th century provided many opportunities for a newly emancipated social group; the consequent presence of some Jews in newly formed capitalist enterprises aroused hostility towards them on the part of those traditional elements of society, such as the peasantry and the old aristocracy who resented the rise of capitalism altogether. Jews were also resented by radical political movements because of their high visibility in the emerging capitalist class. Yet because the Jews had been an oppressed people for so long, many of them were attracted to these same liberal and radical movements and this in turn aroused the resentment of the conservative elements in society. As nationalism grew stronger and more xenophobic through the course of the 19th century and the notion of an "organic" society (i.e. society as a single cohesive interconnected entity) arose, the Jews began to be looked upon by some as an alien element in whatever society they lived. The tradition of Jewish concern with other Jewish communities throughout the world, gave rise to the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world. The instrument for developing and spreading this myth was a notorious forgery known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which had been concocted by Russian emigres in France in 1895 and smuggled into the Czar's court. The Protocols, which were alleged to be the minutes of a meeting of Jewish leaders in which a plan for world domination is set forth, were widely disseminated in Western Europe and even the United States, despite evidence that they were a complete forgery. They fell on the most fertile soil in Germany after World War I.

The secular anti-Semitic movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries took on two overlapping forms:

a. Political anti-Semitism. Starting in the 1880's, first in Germany and Austria, then in France during the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), certain political parties and candidates campaigned on anti-Semitic platforms to win votes.

b. Racial anti-Semitism. According to a theory that arose in the late 19th century, the Jews were not merely a religious, social, or cultural group, but a kind of subhuman criminal race whose character was biologically determined, and who constantly sought to subvert, undermine, and exploit the superior (Nordic-Aryan) race amidst whom it lived. This was at first a purely literary movement, but political anti-Semitism gradually drew upon its ideas and, after the First World War, Nazism was to achieve success as a synthesis of the racial and political anti-Semitic movements.

Questions:

1. What was the basis of the Nazi racist ideology?

2. Trace with a highlighting pen the events in European anti-Semitism which allowed religious prejudice to development into government policy.