1948. “Vatican Under Fire for Tapping ‘Anti-Semitic’ Priest to Become Saint” is the headline of an item in today’s Daily Beast that reported “The Vatican is under fire from several Jewish groups for its move to recognize a Polish priest as a saint despite his record of anti-Semitic remarks.” Well, it turns out that “a Polish priest” is August Cardinal Hlond, primate of Poland 1926-1948.
Who are these ‘groups’?? I am weary of this sort of reporting. I want to know who they are, where they are coming from. There is such a thing as fraternal correction, there is also such a thing as slander, telling lies about another to diminish her prestige, and detraction, telling the truth about another with a view to diminishing his prestige. I need to know more about these ‘groups’ if I’m to decide whether this is an instance of fraternal correction or an essay in detraction/slander.
However this may be, I am very weary of the denunciation of admirable figures from the past simply because they did not share all our beliefs, or, rather, our highly selective, self-aggrandizing, and self-serving versions of these beliefs. Contemporaries have set themselves up as inquisitors, seeking in people of long ago traces of some prejudice that is offensive specifically to contemporary liberals, and if found, this prejudice serves as a warrant for the categorial and complete rejection of the past. The glamorous “hermeneutic of suspicion” must to applied, it seems, to all except contemporary illiberal liberals, who alone are sufficiently free of prejudice to sit in judgement on their betters.
Today’s Daily Beast also brought a report from Al-Jazeera of the siege of Khan al-Amar, a Bedouin village in occupied East Jerusalem. The invaders have decided to grab some more land by evacuating all the residents and demolishing the village so that the site can be seized by the occupiers. So the occupying troops showed up with the ubiquitous demolition equipment, and beat up and/or arrested those who stepped forward to protest. We’ve seen this pattern in 1940s Europe and now again and again in the contemporary Middle East. The project is the same, sc., to seize the territory, deport or enslave the inhabitants, colonize the newly desolate land, claim it as one’s own, and at last, when the results of the aggression are irreversible, to attempt to palliate the aggression by phony legal maneuvers and appeals to a higher power. And what is odd here is this: one group of semites has forcibly dispossessed another group of semites, seizing their and driving them out or installing them in concentration camps. And yet in the world’s eyes the term anti-semitic applies to a bias against only one of these groups. Isn’t this odd. How did it come about?