For too long, too many Jews have taken the course of appeasing anti-Semitism in the hope of making the situation better. In fact, you can see that from hearing what Kenneth Levin says in his book “The Oslo Syndrome” and in this article in the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, too many Jews embraced anti-Semitic libels. It included libels about Jewish engagement in trade and commence and also attacks on Yiddish. Many Jewish leaders and leading figures accepted them and encouraged appeasement measures. Even today, too many Jews try to appease anti-Semitism. In fact, even in Israel, elements within the Israeli left embraces anti-Semitic libels. At the forefront of those on the Israeli left who do embrace anti-Semitic libels is Israel Shahak. He is a notorious self-haitng Jew and wrote the anti-Semitic book “Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight Of Three Thousand Years”. In that book, Shahk blames the suffering of the Jews, not on anti-Semitic bigots and barbaric killers, but on the Jews. It’s a classic blame the victim scenario. As any historian can tell you, for all those centuries, Jews were 100% the victims of anti-Semitism and persecution. It culminated in the Holocaust, which was one of the most ruthless genocides that took the lives of 6 million Jews in Concentration camps.

Yet Shahak compares anti-Semitic bigots with those who fight for freedom:

All Jews who really want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past must face the question of their attitude towards the popular anti-Jewish manifestations of the past, particularly those connected with the rebellions of enserfed peasants. On the other side, all the apologists of the Jewish religion and of Jewish segregationism and chauvinism also take their stand—both ultimately and in current debates—on the same question. The undoubted fact that the peasant revolutionaries committed shocking atrocities against Jews (as well as against their other oppressors) is used as an “argument” by those apologists, in exactly the same way that the Palestinian terror is used to justify the denial of justice to the Palestinians. 

Our own answer must be a universal one, applicable in principle to all comparable cases. And, for a Jew who truly seeks liberation from Jewish particularism and racism and from the dead hand of the Jewish religion, such an answer is not very difficult. 

After all, revolts of oppressed peasants against their masters and their masters’ bailiffs are common in human history. A generation after the Chmielnicki uprising of the Ukrainian peasants, the Russian peasants rose under the leadership of Stenka Ryazin, and again, one hundred years later, in the Pugachev rebellion. In Germany there was the Peasant War of 1525, in France the Jacquerie of 1357-8 and many other popular revolts, not to mention the many slave uprisings in all parts of the world. All of them—and I have intentionally chosen to mention examples in which Jews were not targets—were attended by horrifying massacres, just as the Great French Revolution was accompanied by appalling acts of terror. What is the position of true progressives—and, by now, of most ordinary decent educated people be they Russian, German or French—on these rebellions? Do decent English historians, even when noting the massacres of Englishmen by rebellious Irish peasants rising against their enslavement, condemn the latter as “anti-English racists”? What is the attitude of progressive French historians towards the great slave revolution in Santo Domingo, where many French women and children were butchered? To ask the question is to answer it. But to ask a similar question of many “progressive” or even “socialist” Jewish circles is to receive a very different answer; here an enslaved peasant is transformed into a racist monster, if Jews profited from his state of slavery and exploitation

So, to Israel Shahak, anti-Semitic movements that killed Jews in cold-blood were not bigots who killed innocent people for being the “wrong” race. But, to Israel Shahak, it was movements fighting for “freedom” from the Jews. And the self-hating Jews who make that claim “want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past”. This is the kind of self-hating nonsense we hear from Israel Shahak. The fact that he even has Israel as his first name is a travesty.

The Haskalah was a movement in the 18th and 9th centuries that sought to appease anti-Semites through reforms. It was a movement of European Jews who sought to appease anti-Semites. When it came to Jews being attacked for being involved in trade and commerce, Haskalah sought to discourage Jews from being in those fields in order to appease anti-Semites. So in order to improve the conditions of Jews in society, Haskalah sought to do what it can to appease anti-Semitism.

The policy of appeasing anti-Semitism failed. It continued to be a problem. Whatever small sign of “success” from the appeasement policy, it’s clear that the “success” doesn’t help at all. All it is is some [occasional] praise of Jews for making that “concession”. It still gives legitimacy to the anti-Semitic libel. And, instead of anti-Semitism being eliminated, Jews even suffered through the Holocaust. After WWI, Adolf Hitler took power. He was elected because of his populist message, where Germany was the victim in WWI, and where Jews were among those to blame for the country’s problems. Hitler sought to kill every Jew. He did kill six million of them in concentration camps. The Haskalah movement was inspired by Moses Mondelsohn, who also sought to appease anti-Semitism. He even verbally attacked the Yiddish language. According to Kenneth Levin, Mendelsohn called Yiddish “a language of stammerers, corrupt and deformed, repulsive to those who are able to speak in a correct and orderly manner.”

He was concerned about the well-being of European Jewry and sought to achieve assimilation through appeasing anti-Semitism.

The Jews, who sought to appease anti-Semitism in order to assimilate and to get rid of it, were actually legitimizing anti-Semitism. Many Jews, who joined leftist groups including Socialist ones, also sought to appease anti-Semitism and embraced the accusations of the anti-Semites. These Jews embraced the anti-Semitic accusations, which had no basis in reality. Those slanderous accusations were used to deny the Jews citizenship rights. 

Appeasing anti-Semitism legitimizes anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a disease. Who tries to negotiate with or appeases diseases. You try to kill diseases, not appease them in the hope of getting better. Anti-Semitism is the same thing. You don’t try to appease people who call Jews Pirates, who claim that Jews control the media and who uses anti-Semitic terms like “so-called Holocaust”.

As Israel’s heroic Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said at the UN speech,” History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others”.

The only peace you can get with an anti-Semite is when that person is no longer an anti-Semite.