February 25, 2008

Also in the new Atlantic is a piece by Christopher Hitchens about Jews and “the 2,000-year-old panic.” Pegged to the re-release of an old novel, Hitchens writes that Jews are discriminated against for the opposite reasons other minorities are.

Almost every tribe or ethnicity has a rival tribe or ethnicity that it views as inferior or dirtier or more primitive: the Hutu with the Tutsi, the Sinhalese with the Tamil, the Ulster Protestant with the Irish Catholic, and so forth. The “other” group will invariably be found to have a different smell, a higher birthrate, and a lazier temperament. These poor qualities are sometimes attributed even by Jews to Jews: elevated German and Austrian Jews once wrinkled their nostrils at the matted sidelocks and large families of the poor Ostjuden who had come from the backwoods of Galicia and Silesia; and Ashkenazi-Se­phardic rivalry in Israel sometimes recalls and resembles this hostility. But garden-variety racists do not usually suspect the objects of their dislike of secretly manipulating the banks and the stock markets and of harboring a demonic plan for world domination. Gregor von Rezzori, in his newly reissued novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, meshes the micro and macro versions of interwar anti-Semitism very skillfully indeed:

  They spent their childhood skipping among mounds of horse dung and flocks of gay sparrows, warbling Hebraic words of wisdom in Jewish schools … disappearing then to the next town. They returned gangling, cheeky, precocious, and self-confident a couple of years later, unfurled little red flags, and chanted socialistic marching songs; then they went off again. The next time they came back they were unrecognizable—polished, poised, coiffed, and manicured, lugging doctorates on their proud shoulders; they dug themselves in and became dentists, high-school teachers, professors of music, and God only knows what other intellectuals, married similar solid burghers and produced streams of progeny, teaching them to speak refinedly through their noses, packing them off to the Sorbonne to get equipped the better to meddle with the course of the history of civilization.

“Jealousy born of envy” is the way that Rezzori (1914–1998) elsewhere summarizes this combination of anti-intellectualism fused with the hatred of material success and the suspicion of social and international mobility. If the Jew isn’t a mutinous prole, he is a stinking bourgeois!

(Hitchens began the piece with a joke about Der Stürmer, the Nazi rag depicted above: “A sour old joke from prewar Germany has two elderly Jews sitting in a Berlin park, with one of them reading a Yiddish paper and the other one scanning the pages of Der Stürmer. The latter Jew is laughing. This proves too much for the former Jew, who says: ‘It’s not enough you read that Nazi rag, but you find it funny?’ ‘Look,’ replies the other. ‘If I read your paper, what do I see? Jews deported, Jews assaulted, Jews insulted, Jewish property confiscated. But I read Der Stürmer, and there’s finally some good news. It seems that we Jews own and control the whole world!’”)

No surprise here regarding the new language for the Tridentine Mass, which will be uttered in four Fridays. The traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X issued a statement over the weekend that it was none too happy that language regarding the conversion of Jews was watered down in the Good Friday prayer.

“Following foreign pressures on the Catholic Church, the pope has felt obliged to change the very venerable Prayer for the Jews, which is an integral part of the Good Friday liturgy. This prayer is one of the oldest and goes back to about the third century. It has thus been recited throughout the whole history of the Church as the full expression of Catholic faith.

The SPPX said the change, which it called an “amputation,” had “the allure of a real transformation, expressing the new theology of relations with the Jewish people. It is part of the liturgical upheaval that is the characteristic mark of the council and the reforms that followed it. While the necessity to accept the Messiah to be saved has been retained, one can only profoundly deplore this change.”

Speaking of the Pew Forum, the religious research center’s home page features a lengthy Q&A with a leader of UCLA’s “Spirituality in Higher Education,” which I wrote about for the fall cover of UCLA Magazine.

The study found that nearly three-of-four students who are now juniors agreed that “most people can grow spiritually without being religious.” That’s up 12 percent from when these students were freshmen.

I think you have to realize that we have, on the one hand, the students’ individual faiths and practices, and on the other hand, their viewpoints about students who might follow a different faith or no faith. To us, this is a positive finding in the sense that students display a good deal of tolerance for differing approaches to religion and spirituality on the part of their peers. In other words, they’re not imposing their own standards upon their fellow beings.

Does that mean that they’re seeing the world in more relative terms and in less absolute terms?

Yes, I would say so, and this is consistent with the finding that their tendency to embrace an ecumenical worldview also increases during college.

This would seem to be bad news for many organized religions, especially the ones making truth claims.

Not necessarily. We have organizations like the National Council of Churches and other worldwide religious organizations that try to think about how to enhance understanding across different religions and faiths. Looking ahead to the condition of the world down the road, one would hope that this kind of understanding and tolerance would increase with time. That, of course, may not fit certain belief systems, but I think, on balance, that it’s reassuring to see that the college experience is associated with an increase in this kind of tolerance and understanding of the other.

A new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life found that “constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace”: more than a quarter of Americans leave the faith they grew up with, that about 16 percent aren’t affiliated with any religion and that Protestants are approaching minority status. Some explaining from The New York Times:

While the unaffiliated have been growing, Protestantism has been declining, the survey found. In the 1970s, Protestants accounted for about two-thirds of the population. The Pew survey found they now make up about 51 percent. Evangelical Christians account for a slim majority of Protestants, and those who leave one evangelical denomination usually move to another, rather than to mainline churches.

To Prof. Stephen Prothero, large numbers of Americans leaving organized religion and large numbers still embracing the fervor of evangelical Christianity point to the same desires.

“The trend is toward more personal religion, and evangelicals offer that,” said Mr. Prothero, chairman of the religion department at Boston University, who explained that evangelical churches tailor many of their activities for youth. “Those losing out are offering impersonal religion and those winning are offering a smaller scale: mega-churches succeed not because they are mega but because they have smaller ministries inside.”

It’s not often a reader offers you a hat tip on a story you wrote, but thanks Gershon, who sent me an e-mail that said, “Good Muslims are hard to find these days, but it is good to profile them when you do.”

He was referring to a story I had in this week’s paper about a Muslim scholar teaching at Hebrew Union College. (He was not referring to the other story I had about anti-Israel rhetoric at UC Irvine.) Here’s a bit about Ismail Bardhi, who was brought to the attention of HUC’s Scholar Rescue Fund by Reuven Firestone, a professor of Islam and Medieval Jewish studies.

Firestone first met Bardhi in Macedonia six years ago, when the latter was helping organize an international conference on religion and peace, the first to bring together the country’s Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Christian Slavs.

The conference coincided with a violent build-up between the two ethnic groups—including shootings, retaliation shootings and torchings of churches and mosques—that put the young nation on the brink of civil war. But the dialogue that began with Bardhi and his Orthodox Christian counterpart helped dissolve the tension, and the conflict fizzled.

“In Skopje, Mr. Bardhi was the voice of Muslim moderates who greatly promoted in a nonpolitical manner the process of reconciliation between Albanian Muslims and Macedonian Orthodox,” Paul Mojzes, organizer of the conference and co-editor of The Journal of Ecumenical Studies, wrote in a letter of recommendation. (Last March, in an essay titled, “Orthodoxy and Islam in the Balkans,” Mojzes identified Bardhi as “the best Muslim proponent of inter-religious dialogue in the Balkans.”)

The Macedonian peace, however, was short-lived, and two years ago, when Bardhi was nominated to become president of the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, he discovered that the problems had bled into his own religious community. After a former student who had become affiliated with the Muslim nationalists smashed Bardhi’s face with the butt of a gun, Bardhi spent weeks secluded in his home, withdrew from the political race and eventually lost his job for political reasons, he said.

“During the latest elections within the Islamic Religious Union of Macedonia, professor Bardhi has been the most prominent and trusted candidate,” Ahmet Sherif, a professor at Macedonia’s Institute of National History, wrote in a letter to the Scholar Rescue Fund. “But unfortunately, due to the threatening and sinister actions toward him and his collaborators he chose to withdraw his candidacy as an act of protest.”

Bardhi’s problem was an unwillingness to politicize his faith. He is, as Firestone described him, an “Islamic humanist,” a religious progressive willing to see Islam as “the perfect expression of the divine will,” but not alone and superior on the world stage.

“My topic is quranic exegesis and how we have to be more open between the Quran and Torah, to see how they could speak together,” said Bardhi, 50. “We have spent too long using religion against each other. This is not good for religion or for human beings.”