“It is the Jew who most fervently propagates the idea of democratic equality.” Taken out of context, this sentence could be attributed to a radical advocate of democracy and equality amongst all human beings and peoples. In fact, it was written by A. Hitler in Chapter 3 of his book Mein Kampf. This perpetrator of genocide hated the Jewish people just as much as he hated democracy, equality and human rights.
A well-researched but little-known argument is that Jewish culture has, since ancient times, been a source of liberation for the oppressed, of democracy and of the assertion of rights throughout society, and that this Jewish and democratic culture lies at the root of the rejection of Jews by totalitarian regimes on both the right and the left.
Two renowned intellectuals who supported Nazism linked Judaism with democracy, rejecting both. The philosopher M. Heidegger, in his Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1975, identified Judaism as the bearer of the ideas of liberalism and equality, which, in his view, entailed the ‘standardisation’ of the world and, with it, the destruction of ‘Being’. The jurist K. Schmitt, in his work on Hobbes’s Leviathan (1938) and his lecture ‘Judaism as a Legal Science’ (1936), associated Jewish culture with liberalism and parliamentarism, which, from his totalitarian perspective, undermined the sovereignty of the state and the unity of the people.
Other totalitarian authors of lesser intellectual standing who linked the rejection of democracy with hatred of Jews were: A. Rosenberg (1930), J. Evola (1934), Ch. Mauras (1932), H.S. Chamberlain (1989) and T. Kychko (1963). For these figures, Jewish culture spread the ‘virus’ of democracy and egalitarianism, as well as individualism and cosmopolitanism.
Of course, we also find a very long list of renowned authors who link Judaism with freedom and democracy but who are themselves democrats and advocates of social justice and, consequently, acknowledge how much they owe to the historical contribution of Jewish culture to emancipation. This is the case with P. Waltzer, E. Voegelin, J. Taubes, J.B. Metz, J. Habermas, B. Franklin and W. Benjamin, among many others.
On another occasion, I shall summarise the main arguments common to both groups of authors, who, despite their very different political outlooks, use similar lines of reasoning to show how Jewish culture has contributed to democracy, freedom, the rule of law and the emancipation of the oppressed.
In this article, I shall confine myself to noting the clear betrayal by the Netanyahu government of Judaism’s millennia-long contribution to the defence of history’s victims.
PhD in Sociology and PhD in History. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Ramon Llull University.
Director of Estrategies de Qualitat Urbana, S.L. President of the Foundation Ciudadanía y Buen Gobierno, and a founding member and coordinator of AERYC.