Where They Burn Books

The Spiritual Destruction of the Jewish People

Of all the terrible images that I’ve seen come out of the war on Gaza, the one that affected me the most was an image of an Israeli soldier sitting in front of a burning library. I’m not particularly proud of this: I don’t wish to parade it as a sign of my own cultivation or moral sensitivity. It is, on some level, a morally defective reaction. After all, tens of thousands of Palestinians—children—have been burned. The images emerging from Rafah are far, far worse, so why should some books bother me so much? I’m aware that this reaction must be partly the product of my own sentimental humanism that values signs and symbols of supposed civilization over actual humanity. But I can’t deny either that it touched something central, if perhaps childish, in me.

For me, being Jewish alway meant loving books. Books cannot not be thrown away. Books cannot be defaced. They are to be collected and kept, even at the expense of one’s own space and comfort. This is not to create a monument to one’s own erudition, although there is certainly some pride in it. There is something spiritual in books: As if they each contain the impressions of a unique, irreducible soul. Their collectivity was the world. Each is a prism that refracts the light of God’s creation. The most anti-Jewish thing one could do was to destroy books. This is the supreme act of barbarism. The first thing I learned about the Nazis as a child, before being told about the murders of the Holocaust is that they burned books. “They are the burners of books. We are the keepers of the books.” This formed the simplest, most childlike statement of my own self-understanding.

The German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, exercising the prophetic gifts of his people, wrote in the 1820s, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen"— "Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” Now, where they burn people, they will also ultimately burn books. There is no way to remain a “civilized people” and also commit barbaric acts: it will result in spiritual devastation.

My first reaction to seeing Israeli soldiers burning books was to say “these are not Jews.” But such a disavowal is too easy. This is what the founders of Israel wanted: for the Jews to “be a nation like any other.” To be normal. And therefore to be able to commit crimes like any other nation. The defenders of Israel cry, “Why pay so much attention to us? We are not the worst or biggest criminals? Do we not just do the same as the others?” But when the labels applied to others are also applied to them, they also reject them: “We could not possibly do colonialism, or apartheid, or genocide — how dare you apply those terms to us!” Every act of evil requires both a universal and particular moment — evil exists in that contradiction and false reconciliation. To do evil, one must say to oneself “everybody does it” at the same time as “I’m uniquely permitted to do it.” Does my own conception of Jews as the book-shepherds, the guardians of civilization, “a light unto the nations,” contribute to this permission as well? In my mind, the book — the Word — was always opposed to idols, which we are forbidden to worship. Perhaps the love of books too, raised above that of people created in the image of God, is its own form of idolatry.

Still, I can’t fully give up the sacredness of the book. To do so would be to abandon my faith and give into despair and a world without spiritual values. This is what nationalists would like us to do and to worship blood instead, both its “preservation” and its spilling.

Recently, I’ve been reading about the Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz — a self-proclaimed Zionist — who warned that Israel’s occupations and wars risked turning its citizens into “Judeo-Nazis.” While researching Leibowitz, I found an interview with an ultranationalist identified only as “C.” done by the writer Amos Oz around the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon War 1982. Here’s what he said:

Yes. Judeo-Nazis. Leibowitz is right. And why not? Listen to me: a people that gave itself to be slaughtered and destroyed, a people that let soap be made of its children and lamp shades from the skin of its women is a worse criminal than its murderers. Worse than the Nazis. To live in a world of wolves without a fist, without teeth and without nails is a worse crime than to murder. The fact is that the grandchildren of Himmler, Heidrich and Eichmann live very well and are getting fat. They are even using this occasion to moralize to us. The grandchildren of the great Rabbis of East Europe and of all the humane and pacifist Jews who philosophized so well in Prague and Berlin will not moralize to anyone. They are no longer here. And they shall never be here.

For this nationalist, what he wants in a sense is for Jews to stop being Jews:

The zhids [he uses the Polish word for Jews, it has the tone of a slur] are all twisted. In order to attempt to straighten them up you must first bend them strongly in the opposite direction. And that, in short, is my whole ideology …

… No more nonsense about the unique Jewish morality, the moral lessons of the Holocaust, the Jews who were supposed to have emerged out of the gas chambers pure and good. No more of that. The detruction of Ain el-Hilweh (it's a pity we didn't wipe that wasps' nest off the face of the earth), the healthy bombardments of Beirut and the tiny massare-can you call 500 Arabs a massacre? It's a pity that the Phalangists did it, we should have done it with our own delicate hands-all those good deeds killed once and for all this talk about being a unique people and a Light for the Gentiles. That was all bullshit! That's it: no more uniqueness, no light and good riddance.

Any growth in antisemitism from Israel’s war in Lebanon was a good thing for “C.”, because it would drive the diaspora back into Israel and forge a single people:

The sweetest fruit of this war in Lebanon is that now they don't hate only Israel. Thanks to us, they now also hate all these Feinschmecker-Jews in Paris, London, New York, Frankfurt and Montreal, in all their holes. At last they hate all these nice zhids, those who say that they are something different, they are not the Israeli hooligans, but different Jews, clean and decent. Just like the assimilating Jew in Vienna and Berlin begged the anti- Semite not to mix him up with the stinking Ostjude, who had been smuggled into the cultural environment straight from the dirty ghetto in Ukraine or Poland. It won't help them, those clean zhids, just as it didn't do them any good in Vienna and Berlin. Let them shout that they condemn Israel, that they are okay, that they didn't want and don't want to hurt a fly, that they always prefer being slaughtered to fighting, that they have taken it upon themselves to teach the Gentiles how to be good Christians and always offer the second cheek. It won't do them any good. Now they are getting it there because of us, and I am telling you-it's a pleasure to watch… They are identified with us. And that is excellent! Their cemeteries are disgraced, their synagogues are burnt, all the old nicknames are brought back, they are expelled from all the decent clubs, people shoot into their ethnic restaurants, murdering some of the small children, forcing them to remove any sign that will identify them as Jews, forcing them to move, to change their profession. Soon their mansions will be smeared with the slogan: Zhid, go to Palestine! And you know what? They shall go to Palestine because they shall have no other choice!

If you think this is the just ravings of a lone madman, you are wrong. This is the Zionism of Israel’s leaders today: of Netanyahu, of Ben-Gvir, of Smotrich. It is also the same one propounded by the editors of American magazines. As the Nazis worked for the physical destruction of the Jewish people, they work towards the spiritual destruction of the Jewish people: to go from the people of the book, to a people of blood. It is a form of virulent self-hatred. The non-Jews who encourage us down this path are spiritual antisemites, whether they realize it or not.

Oz pauses to ask his interlocutor: “Is it possible that Hitler did not only strike the Jews but also infected them with poison? Did that poison reach some of the hearts and is it still active?” I think that what Hitler did was stab the heart of the world and it is still writhing from that wound. I don’t know if it can be healed.

Genocide is called a crime against humanity because it attacks the very being of mankind as a plural entity. As Hannah Arendt wrote, the destruction of one people is “an attack upon human diversity as such, that is upon a characteristic of the ‘human status’ without which the very words ‘mankind’ or ‘humanity’ would be devoid of meaning.” This is why the burning of books is the supreme symbol of genocide: it is an attempt to annihilate the multifarious human soul.