Description
Develops a psychoanalytic theory of sacrifice and guilt to explain the unique nature of antisemitism. Suggests that sacrifice began in the ancient world as a means of coping with the anxiety caused by natural cataclysms; since the victims stood for the gods themselves, the act aroused guilt. Post-exilic Judaism's renunciation of sacrifice was viewed as alien and threatening by ancient peoples. This feeling intensified in Christianity, whose central tenet was the sacrifice of Christ, repeated daily in the Eucharist - a sacrifice that necessarily aroused guilt feelings in those it came to redeem. It was most convenient to project this guilt onto the Jews, as though they had themselves sacrificed God. In turn, it was thought that the world's ills could be solved by the sacrifice of Jews - from medieval pogroms to the Holocaust. Modern racism is an outgrowth of this psychological-religious mechanism, which is again at work in Germany, often in the guise of anti-Zionism.
