Religious Responsibility at a Time of Ethnic Conflict

The conflict in Bosnia sent shockwaves through many Jewish minds. Here in the heart of Europe, less than half a century after the second World War, bitter civil war was once again raising the spectre of violence in the name of race and killing in the cause of ethnic purity. Despite the political and strategic difficulties of military intervention, this was not a cause about which I felt religious leaders could be silent. I wrote and spoke about it in the national press and on television and radio, and the following was a speech I gave on the subject (26 January 1993) at a dinner in honour of the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Selly Oak Colleges, Birmingham.

There are times when good relations between religions are no more than a matter of decency, politeness and good citizenship. We learn each other’s customs. We share each other’s celebrations. These are no small things.

In Golders Green, where we used to live, our next door neighbour was a Christian. One day she knocked on our door carrying a cardboard model that her son had made at school. It was a model of a sukkah, the hut that Jews live in on the festival of Tabernacles. She said: “I tried the Muslims next door and it wasn’t theirs, and I knew it wasn’t ours. So I came to the conclusion that if it wasn’t a Muslim hut or a Christian hut it must be a Jewish hut.” It was. And a few weeks later we were able to take them into our garden to see the real thing. That is the easy but vitally important part of interfaith relations. We learn about each other and begin to banish the myths, the prejudices and the stereotypes.

There are other times when interfaith relations become part of our own self-knowledge. Jews, Christians and Muslims meet and face the humbling fact that ours is not the only faith, the only gate through which men and women have come to God. But there are rare times when our ability to speak across the boundaries of faith is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Now is such a time.

Think back to our mood barely three-and-a-half years ago, to the glorious false dawn of 1989. The Berlin Wall came down. Communism was being dismantled in Eastern Europe. The cold war was at an end. Francis Fukuyama, an American historian, announced the “End of History.” His thesis was that people were now more interested in living standards than ideals. Ideology was dead, and all the wars and conflicts once driven by ideology would be a thing of the past. Life would be dull but peaceful. We were in for a quiet time.

I knew then that he was wrong, and I said so in my Reith Lectures. Hatred, rivalry and animosity were no more likely to be buried by the collapse of the Soviet Union than they were two hundred years earlier by the French Revolution. I argued then that the greatest danger facing humanity after the collapse of secular ideologies was religiously-fuelled nationalism: the cloak of sanctity over the politics of hate.

Since then we have seen the Gulf War and its still unfinished aftermath. We have seen the rise of racism, xenophobia and right-wing nationalism throughout Europe. We have seen neo-Nazism resurgent in a united Germany. And we have seen bloody ethnic war ravaging what was once Yugoslavia. The mood in world politics is dark, darker than I have known it in my lifetime. What makes it worse is that in many cases what has risen to the surface are not new grievances but old, and we had thought long-buried, animosities: ethnic rivalries that had been dormant for decades. Ogden Nash once said: “No man ever forgets where he buried the hatchet.” He was right. Prejudice is like a virus that can be frozen into suspended animation, but once unfrozen it remains as virulent as ever.

So today we are faced with a question that only rarely surfaces in human affairs, but once it does, it demands an answer for the sake of humanity itself. Does nothing change? Are we destined to repeat history as if all the tragedies of this terrible century had taught us nothing? Have the millions of pages written on racism and prejudice since the Second World War proved powerless to prevent their recurrence? Can we stand a bare half-century after the Holocaust in a Europe that today witnesses neo-Nazi rallies, immigrants burned to death in Germany, a Europe which once again houses concentration camps, and which has replaced the word Judenrein with the equally repellent phrase “ethnic cleansing,” and not ask the most fearful question of all? Were we wrong to say: never again?

In the 1870s antisemitism entered the vocabulary of German politics. In the 1880s there were pogroms in Russia, turning millions of people into refugees. In the 1890s there was the Dreyfus affair in France, which convinced even the assimilated Theodor Herzl that the writing was on the wall for the Jews of Europe. We are not today plunged back into the 1940s. The concentration camps of Bosnia are not Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, nor are the neo-Nazi rallies in Hungary what they were in Nuremberg. But we are unmistakably at the beginning of a process that is all too familiar, in which instability turns to anxiety which becomes hostility to the outsider, and thus is born xenophobia, ethnic conflict and the politics of race.

And we, the onlookers, find ourselves paralysed by a sense of déjà vu. Events unfold before our television screens like a horror film we have seen somewhere before, many years ago. We know that something dreadful is going to happen in the next scene, and we long to be able to warn the hero to look out and save himself. And we can’t.

But we can. Because if we believe anything on the basis of the Bible we believe this: that history is not a film endlessly replaying itself. It has not been pre-scripted. The ending has not been written. “Behold I set before you today the blessing and the curse, life and death. Therefore choose life.” History is made by our choices. Nothing that has happened in the past forces us to let it happen again.

Far from being called into question by recent events, the importance of interfaith and inter-racial understanding can hardly be overstated. To put it bluntly, if religion is part of the problem then religion must be part of the solution. If conflicts between Jews, Christians and Muslims have been fuelled by the clash of faiths, then it must be the leaders of those faiths who rise above the conflict and say: in the name of God, stop. Let me, in the name of religion, say how.

First, the Bible – the common core of the three great monotheisms – issues a remarkable command. It is contained in one word: zakhor, “remember.” The verb “to remember” occurs no less than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. The great historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi writes that “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”

Why? The Bible tells us with absolute clarity. “You shall not oppress the stranger because you know the heart of the stranger, because you were once strangers in the land of Egypt.” We are commanded to remember so as not to let history repeat itself. If we were once oppressed, we cannot become oppressors. And if we once cried for help and no one came, we cannot stand idly by when others cry for help. Memory is the driving force of morality.

Today we are faced with an almost monstrous desire to forget. There are countries which even today have not yet come to terms with what happened during the Holocaust. There are revisionist historians who try to deny Holocaust history itself. We have recently had a revisionist reading of Churchill which suggests that if only Churchill had made peace with Hitler, Britain might have saved its empire. Almost at the same time we discovered in the case of Guernsey what might have been the price of that peace. Britain might have saved its empire, but it would have lost its soul.

Someone once said that the only lesson that history has taught us is that we have not yet learned anything from history. If so, we must go back and learn again. Memory is a religious imperative, and we now know why. There are people who will try to make us forget in order that the same crimes can be committed again in temporary blindness to their consequences. There are too many parallels between the mood of Europe now and that of a hundred years ago, and we have too much knowledge to ignore the line that leads from hatred to holocaust. The first thing we must do is to remember.

The second thing is to be prepared if necessary to intervene. We have heard, and surely we respect, the case against military intervention in Bosnia. There is the pragmatic danger of being caught up in a long, bloody and indecisive conflict. There is the political case which rightly urges caution before an outside party involves itself in the affairs of another country, even, or perhaps especially, in the case of civil war.

But my thoughts go back to a passage we read in synagogue a few weeks ago. I refer to the passage describing Moses before he became leader of the children of Israel. The Bible tells us little about the character of the young Moses. It does not say that he was righteous or pious or exceptionally spiritual. It merely relates three episodes in his life before the revelation in the burning bush. He saw an Egyptian attacking an Israelite, and he intervened. He saw an Israelite attacking an Israelite, and he intervened. He saw Midianite shepherds preventing Jethro’s daughters from watering their flocks, and he intervened. Here were three conflicts: non-Jew against Jew, Jew against Jew, and non-Jew against non-Jew. In each case, Moses intervened. We need no further commentary. After reading these passages, we understand why it was Moses whom God chose to lead His people from slavery to freedom.

The Bible commands us not to stand idly by the blood of our neighbour. It was Cain who uttered the terrible words, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” There are some evils which, because they are crimes against humanity, implicate us all. We are sometimes morally responsible for what we fail to prevent, as well as for what we do. I am persuaded by the statement in The Times which said that “The moral case for intervention in Bosnia has been clear for many months. Mass rape, medieval siege warfare, starvation and disease disfigure Europe’s claims to civilisation.” The international community must act if it is to stop the slide towards catastrophe, and religious leaders must say so.

Finally there is a dimension in the politics of Europe and the Middle East for which a special responsibility lies specifically with religious leadership. Here I want to point out one salient fact. The Hebrew Bible tells the story of one people, the people of Israel. However, for the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis there is no mention of the people of Israel. There is only humanity. There are the archetypal figures of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the builders of the tower of Babel. And at the beginning of the beginning there is the declaration that in the entire created universe there is only one thing of absolute value, only one thing in which God has chosen to set His image: the human individual. Any human individual.

For too long the great monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have sanctioned suspicion and hostility to the outsider, the one who is not of our people or our faith. That hostility costs lives even today between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, between Christians and Muslims in Bosnia, and between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East. Even today, theology drives antisemitism in Poland and fuels the politics of fundamentalism.

But the Bible teaches today, as it has always taught, that our common humanity precedes our particular faiths, and that the ethnic outsider is in God’s image even if he or she is not in our image. To put it simply: crimes against humanity are not crimes against humanity alone. They are crimes against God, even when – especially when – they are committed in the name of God.

The time has come for religious leaders of all faiths and denominations to alert the world to what is at stake in the ethnic war in Bosnia and the rise of racism throughout Europe. Who in future generations could forgive us if we, who have lived through the century of the Holocaust, did not rise up and prevent the beginnings of a second Holocaust, whoever are its victims and whoever its perpetrators? Let us invoke the moral imperative of memory. Let us support international intervention. Let us teach that there is no religious justification for xenophobia or ethnic cleansing or holy war. And let our “Never again” mean “Never again.”