Toronto, Ontario
--- Upon resuming on Monday, May 11, 1998
at 10:10 a.m.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Good morning. Mr. Freiman, are you still leading?
MR. FREIMAN: I am, sir.
MR. CHRISTIE: I would like to place something on the record, if I may.
I just want to place on record my client's position that we are proceeding under protest. We are of the view that this Tribunal, like the Tribunal in the Bell Canada case is tainted with a reasonable apprehension of bias for the same reasons as given by Madam Justice McGillis in the Bell case. We are only appearing under protest to protect my client's position in the event that her decision does not stand on appeal.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you, Mr. Christie. Mr. Freiman, please.
MR. FREIMAN: Since we are putting things on the record, the record may wish to show that the Panel may take notice of the fact that the Federal Court last week handed down a decision dismissing Mr. Christie's motion to stay this Tribunal pending the resolution of the Bell matter or in light of the Bell matter.
Just to make things easier, I have a set of documents which, as with previous Commission witnesses, will assist the Tribunal in following the evidence of the witness. I intend to introduce the documents through the next witness. Prior to calling him and so as to minimize disruption, I propose to distribute the documents.
MR. CHRISTIE: Just for the record, I don't recall receiving any notice of any of these documents, with the exception of the curriculum vitae of Dr. Schweitzer.
MR. FREIMAN: We might as well talk about it now. All that we have here is Professor Schweitzer's curriculum vitae and a summary of the proposed evidence that he will be giving today by way of an aide-memoir. Attached to it is a number of documents that he will be referring to, including a table that he prepared, and a number of excerpts from HR-2, the book of Zundelsite documents to which Professor Schweitzer will be making reference. It is simply easier to have them all in one place.
The documents that Mr. Christie is worried about are the curriculum vitae of Professor Schweitzer which he has had for some four months, the aide-memoir, which is merely an expanded version of the lengthy disclosure that was provided to Mr. Christie in December, and attached to it are simply documents to which Professor Schweitzer will be referring.
THE CHAIRPERSON: I assume you will justify these documents as the evidence proceeds.
MR. FREIMAN: Yes.
MR. CHRISTIE: When my friend refers to a lengthy aide-memoir, I think he is referring to a précis of Memorandum on Lethal Antisemitism, Old and New, which is four pages long, and the curriculum vitae. Is that what my friend is referring to as lengthy disclosure?
MR. FREIMAN: Yes. We have now triple-spaced and expanded. That was a précis, and this is the memorandum. We have now expanded it and triple-spaced the 17 pages from its original form, which means we have probably added a page and a half of text.
With that introduction, I would call Professor Frederick Schweitzer.
THE REGISTRAR: Mr. Freiman, would you like this book of documents filed now or individually?
THE CHAIRPERSON: I suggest we hold it for now.
SWORN: FREDERICK M. SCHWEITZER
5500 Fieldston Road, Apt. 9GG
Bronx, New York, 10471
EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF RE QUALIFICATIONS
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, the documents that I have given to the Tribunal correspond to a book that is entitled "The Commission's Brief of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer" which we prepared last night. I wonder if you could open it at tab 1.
Professor Schweitzer, is this your curriculum vitae?
A. It is.
MR. FREIMAN: In anticipation of the Tribunal's ruling, I won't ask for the material to be marked until I ask for the entire document to be put in, or we can refer to tab 1 and simply have it marked as Exhibit 1, at the Chair's discretion.
THE CHAIRPERSON: I will take it that each document goes in, or does not go in, depending on whether there is any objection.
MR. FREIMAN: Shall we give it a number now?
THE CHAIRPERSON: Yes.
MR. FREIMAN: May that be the next exhibit for the Commission? It is the curriculum vitae of Frederick M. Schweitzer, appearing as tab 1 of the document entitled "Commission's Brief of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer."
THE REGISTRAR: The document as described by Mr. Freiman will be filed as Commission Exhibit HR-15.
EXHIBIT NO. HR-15: Curriculum vitae of Frederick M. Schweitzer, found at tab 1 of Commission's Brief of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. With reference to Exhibit HR-15, tab 1, Professor Schweitzer, can you tell me what is your present occupation?
A. I am a Professor of History at Manhattan College.
Q. Where is Manhattan College?
A. It is in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Q. How long have you been a professor at Manhattan College?
A. I have been a member of the History Department since 1960. I began in 1958 part-time.
Q. What position do you now hold?
A. I am Professor of History.
Q. In the past, have you held other positions at Manhattan College and in the History Department?
A. Yes, I had the various ranks: lecturer/instructor; assistant professor; associate professor; and since 1983 I have been a full professor. I was the Chair of the Department for 10 years, from the mid-1970s to mid-1980s.
Q. What are the areas of your current research interest, sir?
A. Christian Catholic-Jewish relations; antisemitism; Jewish history.
Q. Have you had any training in those fields?
A. Yes. At Lehigh I was a history major. Several of the courses had a segment on Jewish history, particularly one on ancient history where I read, perhaps not in its entirety, much of Josephus' "The Jewish War," a history of the Revolt against Rome.
I also had the great boon of taking a course in Comparative Religion with Professor Roy Eckardt who just died; I was sad to read his obituary two days ago. He was the author of 18 books. He was a Methodist minister and a pioneer in Christian-Jewish relations when it was not particularly the mode. I think his teaching, his knowledge, his moral courage and his books all had a tremendous impact on me.
Q. Have you published in the areas of Jewish history, antisemitism and Jewish-Christian relations?
A. Yes, I have. You will notice in my CV that I published "A History of the Jews since the First Century A.D."
Q. How did that publication come about?
A. This was in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council's Proclamation Nostra Aetate, the first document in the whole history of the church to speak positively, affirmatively of Jews and Judaism. It resulted from a joint effort by the Archdiocesan Education Office and Monsignor Rigney and the Anti-Defamation League to publish a history which would help to implement Nostra Aetate which called for Catholic-Jewish dialogue and for setting the historical record straight, for filling in the long blank page that sufficed for Christian Catholic understanding of Jewish history. It was from the crucifixion until World War II and Israel reborn.
Q. What has been the history of that publication? Was it well received or badly received?
A. It was very well received and reviewed. It was widely used. It was addressed to high school and college students, essentially Catholic Christian students. It went through a couple of reprintings. It is now out of print and out of stock, and one of the projects I have in the future is a second edition, updating it and so forth, which comes to me, I might say, at the invitation of the publisher.
Q. Have you published anything else in the areas of Jewish history, antisemitism or Jewish-Christian relationship?
A. Yes, the work that I co-edited with Marvin Perry, "Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue." That grew out of a conference that he and I arranged, which was jointly sponsored by my college, Manhattan, and his, Baruch of the City University System. We had 20-some authorities, theologians, historians and so forth. It covered the whole span of Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations from the biblical period, the Dead Sea scrolls, to the last one which was my protegé's presentation, Eugene Fisher, on the attempt to remedy and rectify Catholic-Jewish relations since 1965. I am the author of one of the essays in that collection on Mediaeval Perceptions of Jews and Judaism. The essay itself is cited.
Q. I note that you are currently engaged in a work in progress. What is that?
A. It is myths about Jews. My friend and frequent collaborator, Marvin Perry, and I will be co-authors. Some of the myths we are dealing with are the Satanization, the Shylock image myth of the Jews, Holocaust denial, and so on.
Q. I note under "Articles" a large number of articles. I don't propose to go through them. Could you tell me whether any of those articles deal with the subjects of Jewish history, antisemitism, and Jewish-Christian relations.
A. Yes, the bulk of them. The one enumerated at the bottom of the first page is an essay in historiography. Mainly, what struck me was that the Jews were referred to not at all or in such an abbreviated, telegraphic way that you could not make sense of Jewish life of a particular age, the Renaissance and so forth. So it was silence, as it were. The message was that these people did not have a history and, if they didn't have a history, they didn't exist and they were of no importance.
That is what I am getting at by "Distortion by Omission and Simplification" which is the abbreviated tag that refers to Jews as little Jews or as nothing more than usurers, as though there was nothing else to tell about the Jews in that period of 1,000 years.
A similar essay, "Christian Antisemitism and Interpretation of the Holocaust," is an argument with Professor Rosen who wanted to teach the Holocaust simply by pitching in with the question of racism of the last couple of generations before. My argument is that you cannot make sense of the Holocaust unless you understand the religious antisemitism that goes back to the Middle Ages. It is a plain historiographical fact that the Holocaust could not have happened without two millennia of Christian preaching and precedent in word and deed denigrating the Jews, the teaching of contempt, and so forth -- not that Christian authorities, the church or anyone else initiated the Holocaust, but the moral justification and rationalization and the dehumanization of the Jews, the ushering them out of the human race so that one would shrug their shoulders on hearing of their fate. That is the subject of that essay.
It is a theme that runs in antisemitism as Hydra. Hydra, of course, is the Greek mythical monster; if you cut off one head, seven appear. Sometimes I get discouraged in combatting antisemitism, and that is the metaphor that comes to mind. Then I remember my great hero, Father James Parkes who said sometime in the 1930s, "How long will it take to remove the antisemitaires from Christian teaching and ritual? Three hundred years, and we are only a good stretch of the way."
The piece on Julius Streicher, who was one of the principal Nazis in Hitler's circle, is germane to our proceedings today because it makes the connection with mediaeval antisemitism. He is, in my judgment, much more a mediaeval anti-Semite than a modern racial kind.
The book reviews, as you can see by the title, deal with the theme of the Holocaust. They are published in the AHR, the American Historical Review, which is the premier journal of history, certainly in the United States.
Q. Are the books and the articles and the reviews self-published, or are they what we call reviewed?
A. They are refereed. They are published by reputable publishers -- Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, et cetera -- and they have been reviewed by my professional peers.
Q. Have you had any function at all or any role in setting of curricula on the teaching of Jewish history or antisemitism?
A. Yes. If you turn over two pages, I have done that in a number of categories.
Once Nostra Aetate was published in 1965, a year later there came out directives for its implementation, one by the Vatican itself and the other by the Archdiocese of New York. For 10 years or more I was travelling all over the place in the United States, going, at the invitation of the Archdiocesan education authorities, to speak on the significance of Nostra Aetate and to suggest ways that it should be implemented in the curricula already operative in these institutions. Sometimes it would be along the lines of what would be called lesson plans, not only how to do it but "here is how I do it."
Most of that was at the high school level, but I did go to five or six Catholic colleges. I went to Carlow College, memorably, in Pittsburgh; to Iona, which is just up the pike in Westchester County; New Rochelle College. I worked at that level as well.
Q. Has that work been recognized at all by any individuals or organizations?
A. Yes. I have received letters of thanks and acknowledgement and copies of curricula changes, additions, revisions and so forth. Yes, I have a stack of that.
That chapter is closed. In a sense, the initiation of grafting onto actual practice pedagogical and curriculum the Nostra Aetate imperatives to set the historical record straight and cleanse the theological tablets has been launched. It has momentum. It doesn't need me any more. There are others. It just carries on like the proverbial pebble in the lake, in wider and wider circles.
Where I have most satisfaction in this category is the work I did with Eugene Fisher. We drew up a revised curriculum; in fact, it was a model curriculum for the Catholic seminaries in the United States. The seminary is a strategic place. It is the training place for the priests. The priests and clergy are, in some measure, the church, with their teaching function and their capacity to give sermons and instruct the faithful and flock in the appreciation, the gratitude, that the Pope and the hierarchy in the church wish us to feel and express for our Jewish brethren and to be knowledgeable, not just to have good intentions but to be knowledgeable about their history, their triumphs, their great achievements as well as their suffering.
At each diocese or each archdiocese which has a seminary -- not all of them do -- it is a local option to adopt curriculum. As I understand from Eugene, it is widely adopted all over the United States.
Q. Turning to Europe, Professor Schweitzer, what is the Heppenheim conference?
A. The Heppenheim conference is an annual meeting of scholars, historians, professors of literature, theologians, educators, with a good sprinkling of high school teachers. It meets annually. It is under the auspices of a number of organizations and institutions. The principal one is the Conference of -- I forget the exact title -- Christians and Jews. The Martin Buber House often hosts it and sponsors it.
Martin Niemoeller, who was a fascinating person, a U-boat captain in World War I and who spent 10 years of the Nazi period in jail, afterward made it his business to teach and preach what he thought the lesson of the Holocaust should be.
It is dedicated to furthering Christian-Catholic, but not exclusively Catholic -- Christian-Jewish understanding through dialogue, through knowledge and so forth.
That was for me a great honour in that the persons who are invited don't come because they want to, but at invitation. They are outstanding scholars in their fields. I was asked to give the keynote address, setting the tone for the proceedings which go on for four or five days on why Jewish history should be incorporated into the junior curriculum, in the history of western civilization, in the history of Europe, in the history of England, Belgium, or whatever it may be, and how that might be done and what the proportions are and what its links are to the more general history in that particular course or sphere and then some of the standard works that they might go on.
Q. As a result of your keynote address in 1985 and following it, were any of your recommendations accepted as part of the curriculum in Europe?
A. Yes. Somewhat as with Eugene Fisher, several curriculum models were prepared and carried home by those who participated, but conveyed to a much wider public by the CCJ. I have not followed that closely, but I understand that they are adopted and implemented more and more widely as the process goes on.
Q. Do you have any role with the Holocaust Resource Center at Manhattan College?
A. Yes. I am its Director. That was launched a year ago in April. Manhattan is a Catholic college, and we want to convey to our own student body some of the things that I referred to earlier.
We have one grand day each semester, so twice a year, and we began with Franklin Littell who spoke as a Christian minister on the Holocaust as a watershed in Christian history and explained to our audience -- students, faculty and many people from the Riverdale community -- why it should be remembered, why the story has to be told and transmitted to the young so that they may know and learn its lessons as much as possible.
Beyond that, a theme that I have been concerned with consistently -- he emphasizes preaching and I emphasize teaching, both the teaching and preaching of the New Testament, the Christian gospels, and so forth.
Q. As a result of your work in these various fields, have you received any honours, recognitions or awards?
A. Yes. As I mentioned, when my book was published, Cardinal Cook honoured me with a reception. When I went hopping around the country, from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine, the bishop would receive me and often would embarrass me with praise.
What tickled me most of all was that recently the Mayor of New York City, who is a former student of mine, when one of the temples in Riverdale honoured me -- I think the occasion was the Holocaust Resource Center's inaugural, to honour me for that and more for my many years devoted to Christian-Jewish understanding and combatting antisemitism. To my surprise and pleasure, the one who presided and the one who delivered a eulogy on me, remembering our days in the Vatican together in the 1960s, was none other than Rudi Guiliani.
MR. FREIMAN: Members of the Panel, I propose that you accept Professor Schweitzer as an expert in Jewish history, antisemitism and Christian-Jewish relations.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Do any counsel in the same interest wish to ask questions? Mr. Christie, please.
CROSS-EXAMINATION RE QUALIFICATIONS
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. Your reference to the Manhattan College Holocaust Resource Center -- is it located in a room in Manhattan College?
A. Yes, it has an office about one-third the size of this space.
Q. Is it open to the public?
A. Oh, yes.
Q. Is it locked?
A. It is locked as other offices are, yes, at the end of the day and so forth.
Q. During the day?
A. No.
Q. It is open to the public during the day?
A. Yes. It is just a plain office with files, with some posters. That's about it.
Q. Is there someone in attendance there all the time?
A. No. It is run on a shoe string. I get no stipend for that. I get no reduced teaching level, nor do my two colleagues, Brother Peter Drake and Rose Santos-Cunningham. We do it out of devotion to the cause of Christian-Catholic-Jewish understanding.
Q. So this is Room 437, is it?
A. 434. There is a conference room which is about the size of this which we share with the Peace and Justice Program and with the Institute for Ethics.
Q. What does the Manhattan College Holocaust Resource Center consist of?
A. Could you clarify that? Do you mean what do we do?
Q. What does it consist of? If I go to this room, what is there?
A. You will find a desk, a computer, a printer, files. You will find a number of books that have been given to us, some standard works on the Holocaust, and that sort of thing.
Q. How many books?
A. As of now, I would say 30 or 40. We have a collection on the Holocaust in the library to which, of course, we have access.
Q. You said files.
A. Yes, files, letters --
Q. How many files? What kinds of files are there?
A. They are ordinary office files, business files. One of the things we have is what is called the Holocaust Survivors Speakers Bureau, who are survivors who are able and willing to speak on their experiences to students in schools in the Bronx, Yonkers, Riverdale area and northern Manhattan. These requests for a Holocaust speaker come to us, and we make an arrangement for a Holocaust speaker or sometimes two Holocaust speakers to go to that school and speak for an hour to their students.
Q. Do you have a set of Nuremberg trial documents?
A. Yes, I do. I have them on one little disk this size, all 42 volumes.
Q. That is in the Holocaust Resource Center?
A. Yes.
Q. And you allow that to be seen by the public?
A. Nobody has requested it. If someone did, I would not have any objection to it.
Q. Do you have any books on the Holocaust there?
A. Yes, a number.
Q. Any revisionist books on the Holocaust?
A. No.
Q. Have you read any revisionist books?
A. Yes.
Q. What have you read?
A. I have read the Butz book.
Q. What book is that?
A. "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century."
Q. You have read that.
A. Yes.
Q. Anything else?
A. No, I haven't read so-called revisionists. I don't accept that term. I don't accept that as an accurate designation of what you are referring to.
Q. Whatever you might use to describe it, have you read any books that are of a different persuasion than your own on the subject of the Holocaust?
A. I have a persuasion, but other historians of the Holocaust, whom I accept on the subject, have somewhat different persuasions. There is not a rigid, strict, orthodox interpretation of the Holocaust.
I might mention that I reviewed the Goldhagen book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which I panned as a historiographical disaster.
Q. Are you a student of the Holocaust?
A. Yes.
Q. How much have you studied in that region?
A. How much have I studied? In what sense are you asking the question? How many books I have read?
Q. What have you done in the study of the Holocaust?
A. It is a segment of my 1971 book. I teach it. I teach a course on genocide, and the Holocaust is 50 to 60 per cent of the course.
Q. What do you rely on for your source material in your teaching?
A. Hilberg.
Q. Raul Hilberg?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware of changes in his position over his three-volume work and his latest work?
A. Not in specific detail. The three-volume work I find to be consistent with the original one-volume work. It is expanded, of course.
Q. But is it consistent with regard to the existence of a Hitler order for the extermination of European Jews?
A. That question is left open. There is no Hitler order --
Q. In the first book there is.
A. That is a question of Holocaust study, interpretation and so forth. I must tell you that I am not here for that.
Q. Do you consider yourself a Holocaust scholar?
A. Yes.
Q. You are?
A. Yes.
Q. What, then, do you know about the existence or non-existence of a Hitler order?
A. Such an order has not been found. There was a report in January, sometime earlier this year, in the archives that have become opened in the former Soviet Union, of a record, a diary jotting or something of that sort, on Himmler's part that is within a few days of Pearl Harbour, December 7, 1941, in which he indicates that he has come from a Führer conference and the order, the decision, to annihilate the Jews has been given. The interpretation of that is not absolutely clear and precise, but it is plausible. It depends on further research to confirm and to clarify.
Q. Does your reliance on Hilberg indicate a knowledge of a Hitler order in the first book or not?
A. No. He says that the murder of the Jews, the decision to annihilate, simply emerged in the course of a process that began step by step, almost innocuously, and built up momentum, and in the crisis of the war went to the last stage of annihilation. He argues that you get to a stage where you don't need orders. He talks about the railway men for example. You interview a railway man and you ask him, "Why did you do this?" "Orders." "May I see the orders?" "Well, there were no orders. It was understood. It was expected of me." That is the system of expectation and understanding that certainly prevailed in the railways, and I would hazard the generalization of that across the regime.
Q. I suggest to you that Hilberg in his first book indicated the date of the Hitler order. Do you deny that or do you affirm that?
A. I don't recall that precisely. However, these works are not dogmatic and doctrinaire. That book came out in 1961 or 1963. A lot of work has been done since; a lot of documents have turned up. Inevitably, in the historical process -- we are still studying the French Revolution, understanding it better, and revising our interpretation and conclusions about it. That is going on with the Holocaust and undoubtedly will continue to go on.
Q. Is there such a thing as a Catholic theologian?
A. Yes, I would say Father John Pawlikowski is a Catholic theologian.
Q. Are you?
A. No, I am a historian.
Q. Are you a Christian?
A. Yes, I am of Christian heritage. I am not particularly religious. I believe in God, that there is a force outside of ourselves and the world that makes for goodness, but that is about as far as I go.
Q. Have you been paid by the B'nai Brith to write any books?
A. Yes, that first one I was paid $1,000 or something like that.
Q. Do you get any percentage from the copyright?
A. No.
Q. You wrote a book for the B'nai Brith in which they hold copyright?
A. No, no, no. I wrote a book commissioned jointly by the Archdiocesan Education Office -- the one I worked most closely with was Monsignor Rigney who, I am sorry to say, died a few years ago. It was a collaborative effort. B'nai Brith made available to me materials and books. Our library at that time was pretty naked when it came to Jewish history.
Q. Did you write a book called "A History of the Jews since the First Century A.D.?"
A. That is it.
Q. That is it?
A. Yes.
Q. Does the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith hold the copyright?
A. It does.
Q. If you are the author, how did they get the copyright?
A. Because they paid me a stipend and they underwrote the costs of production, the typing and all of that. It was through their good offices -- and I don't know if that entailed expense -- there was an agent that went around to publishers and signed an agreement with Macmillan.
Q. So they actually secured the publisher for the book?
A. Yes. I was very young and green in that day and age. I didn't know my way around in those channels.
Q. So they prepared the book by virtue of typing it and --
A. No, no, no. The secretaries at Manhattan College typed the book. They were paid extra.
Q. Did you pay them?
A. Yes, I paid them with money that came to me from the Anti-Defamation League, from that stipend.
Q. Surely they didn't type a book for $1,000. There must have been more to it than that.
A. No, it was less than that.
Q. What was less than that?
A. The fees that I paid the secretaries.
Q. But you didn't pay their fees out of your $1,000. B'nai Brith paid you extra for that, did they?
A. No. I had a $1,000 fee. This was the late 1960s. This project began in 1968.
Q. Have you published any other book?
A. Yes, I have published a book co-edited with an essay of mine that was referred to earlier, "Jewish-Christian Encounters over the Centuries: Symbiosis, Prejudice, Holocaust, Dialogue."
Q. That is a book of essays of other people, is it?
A. I have one there.
Q. You have one. It is basically put together from Donald Gray, Lawrence Schiffman, Lawrence Frizzell, Asher Finkel, Norman Beck, Robert Michael, yourself, Scarlett Freund and Teofilo Ruiz, Eric Gritsch, Susannah Heschel, Marvin Perry, Celia Heller, John Pawlikowski, Henry Feingold, Ruth Zerner, Alan Davies, Edward Flannery, Michael McGarry and Eugene Fisher. Is that right?
A. Correct.
Q. Basically, you edited this book with Marvin Perry. Is that correct?
A. Correct. It grew out of a conference which we organized together.
Q. You edited the conference papers and published them in a book.
A. Yes.
Q. Have you published any other book?
A. No. I have published essays that have been published in books, like the essay on Toynbee, "Toynbee and Jewish History."
Q. Just to understand your present position, intellectually or morally or spiritually, is it your position that Christianity is preposterous?
A. Heavens, no!
Q. Did you write this:
"The Jews' present-day importance, celebrity, and discomfort all derive from the historic fact that they have involuntarily begotten two Judaic world religions whose millions of adherents make the preposterous but redoubtable claim to have superseded the Jews, by the Jewish god Yahweh's dispensation, in the role of being this One True God's `Chosen People'?"
A. No, that is Arnold Toynbee.
Q. You are quoting him, are you?
A. I am quoting him to deal with him, to knock him one in the eye.
Q. Oh, I see. Looking at your book, it doesn't indicate any quotes at all. In looking at the context, it doesn't seem to indicate that you are implying that is his view.
A. What book is that?
Q. "Toynbee: Reappraisals." It's your essay.
MR. FREIMAN: Perhaps Mr. Christie would do --
MR. CHRISTIE: I can do exactly what I was intending to do, if you wish, and that is to give him a copy.
MR. FREIMAN: That would be a very good thing.
THE WITNESS: My view is that Christianity can purge itself of its anti-Semitaires and be a great world religion with a true mission of humanity.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. So, at the present time it is not. Is that your position?
A. It's working on it. A revolution has occurred since 1965. Nostra Aetate, the 1985 Notes for the correct interpretation and preaching about Jews and Judaism in Christian and Catholic scripture
-- I am paraphrasing. You will notice Footnote 102. It is a citation to the text of Toynbee. I am not agreeing with that. I am showing how extreme and aberrant he is.
Q. So your position is that Toynbee was anti-Christian and anti-Muslim?
A. No. Toynbee --
Q. That is certainly --
MR. FREIMAN: Let him explain.
THE WITNESS: What do I care what Toynbee's personal religiosity was? He called himself an ex-Christian. One of my points in this essay is that he never escaped from the intellectual trammels of his Christianity which reprobated the Jews; that Judaism has served its great historic purpose and mission by giving birth to the Saviour and providing the base on which Christianity was born and took shape and that, having done that, Judaism has no further purpose and is replaced. This is the theology of replacement.
That is what Toynbee remained a prisoner of even in secular guise.
Q. Surely you can't say that Toynbee suggests that the assertion that Christianity supersedes Judaism is preposterous. He doesn't say that.
A. It is the assumption. It is implied. You have to read him with great care and to be fair to him, or try to be fair to him.
Q. I suggest that it is you who referred to it as a preposterous position.
A. Don't put words in my mouth, please.
Q. They are your words; they are right there. You tell me what they mean if it doesn't mean exactly what it says.
A. I am paraphrasing Toynbee to deal with a position that Christians tend often, unconsciously, to carry with them and to speak from and to act from, and that is what this revolution in Catholic-Jewish relations is trying to dispose of once and for all.
Q. So you are saying those are Toynbee's words or are they your words?
A. These are Toynbee's thoughts. I am paraphrasing Arnold Joseph Toynbee.
Q. When were you first asked to prepare your opinion in regard to aspects of the Zundelsite?
A. I think last November. I am not absolutely sure, but sometime in the late fall or early winter.
Q. Were you told what it was that the Commission was looking for?
A. I was told that my purpose would be to establish the continuity, the replication, of antisemitism as it appears on the Zundelsite with previous antisemitism, classic antisemitism, going back to the antisemitism in the Middle Ages, the early modern period, the reformation, the 19th century with its hypernationalism and its racial consciousness of a people's identity, through into the 20th century and the Hitlerite Nazi version of antisemitism.
Q. How was this communicated to you?
A. On the telephone.
Q. Was there any correspondence?
A. No.
Q. There was never any correspondence between you and anyone indicating --
A. The only correspondence was when I sent this CV.
Q. Who did you talk to on the telephone?
A. I spoke to Mr. Mark Freiman and I spoke to Danielle Miller, his assistant.
MR. FREIMAN: I rise now because I am beginning to get uncomfortable as to the propriety of any more questions that might tend to violate the litigation privilege. I don't think it is proper to now proceed to probe what was discussed between myself and members of my office and Professor Schweitzer.
THE CHAIRPERSON: It is appropriate for counsel to ask about the instructions he was given.
MR. FREIMAN: Absolutely.
THE WITNESS: I was told what I have indicated --
THE CHAIRPERSON: Dr. Schweitzer, just wait for your next question and we will see how far Mr. Christie wants to go.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. What else were you told?
A. That this was not a question of the Holocaust, whether it was or was not; that I was not to come and fortify myself with the historical facts and arguments on that issue.
Q. To try and understand the extent of your expertise, you have already given us your views about Julius Streicher. Have you done any study of his life?
A. Julius Streicher?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
Q. What have you studied?
A. The essay does have a biographical segment.
Q. A biographical segment?
A. Yes. Of Julius Streicher?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes. He was born in 1885 in a Bavarian family, very Catholic, very traditional.
Q. Rather than give me your opinion, maybe you could answer my question.
MR. FREIMAN: He did.
MR. CHRISTIE: He did not.
Q. My question was: What did you study in regard to Julius Streicher, not what you believe with regard to Julius Streicher.
A. The sources I used?
Q. Yes, that's right.
A. The IMT, principally, and there are a great many studies --
Q. The IMT?
A. The International Military Tribunal.
Q. Yes.
A. And there are a great many -- if I had my collected works, I could indicate to you the other works that I consulted on Julius Streicher, including Der Stürmer. I didn't go through -- I get sick doing that. Der Stürmer was his prurient, weekly, antisemitic rag with horrible cartoons and all of that. I went through quite a number of those.
I used standard scholarly works. I used the book of Edward M. Peterson, "The Limits of Hitler's Power," Princeton University Press. William L. Shirer's "Berlin Diary." He was a journalist in Berlin and reported until the outbreak of war with the United States in 1941. Ludecke's "I Knew Hitler." They were close friends for quite some time, until Ludecke fled. "Das politische Testament on Julius Streicher" edited by Jay W. Baird in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 1978. Ian Kershaw's "Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, the Catholic Church and Nazi Germany. Stephen Roberts' "The House that Hitler Built," a book that was published in 1938. He was an Australian specialist in German history and made annual trips to Germany and reports year by year his impression of the house that Hitler built; the last edition was in 1938.
Then a book by Dennis Showalter, "Little Man, What now?" It's a study of Der Stürmer in the Weimar Republic. A book by Bytwerk who is a contemporary scholar. William P. Varga's "Julius Streicher." This was a dissertation done at Ohio State University in the 1970s. Robert E. Conot's "Justice at Nuremberg." It's a study of the trials. "Hitler's Secret Conversations" where he refers a few times favourably to "Herman Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction". He was a contemporary and an eye witness to not so much events but conversations with Hitler. Robin Lenman, an essay on Julius Streicher and the press in "German Democracy and the Triumph of Hitler." Joseph E. Persico's "Nuremberg," a study of the trials. Telford Taylor's "The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials", and so on.
So I used the IMT, but I used in equal volume a number of secondary sources, biographies and studies of him.
Q. Of those, which would you consider primary sources?
A. The IMT and, of course, Der Stürmer which was his deterministic work. He was the editor and the owner of Der Stürmer all those years.
Q. What segments were you provided from the Zundelsite?
A. What is here.
Q. Did you get those over the telephone, too?
A. No, they were sent to me --
Q. When?
A. This is not a letter. You asked me about correspondence. This doesn't fit that category.
Q. Whatever you might call it, when was it sent to you and how?
A. It was sent to me overnight by what we call Federal Express in the States or something comparable. It was sent in a hurry because I was given to understand that I would be called -- I expected to be testifying in December.
Q. When was it sent to you?
A. I don't know the precise date, but I would say around Thanksgiving.
Q. Was there a letter accompanying it?
A. There was a letter from Danielle Miller that said, "Per our telephone conversation, this is the material."
Q. Is that all it said?
A. Yes.
Q. Could you show that to the Tribunal?
A. The letter?
Q. Yes.
A. The letter is in my office. I can bring it in tomorrow. It is in my hotel room. It's a brief thing.
Q. Were you given the selection that is in this bound volume?
A. Yes.
MR. FREIMAN: It might assist the Tribunal to know that Professor Schweitzer is referring to
HR-2.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. Was this bound volume a selection made by someone else for you, or have you ever seen the Zundelsite?
A. I have seen it browsing around on the Internet in my office.
Q. How much of the site do the documents that you have been given comprise, in percentage terms?
A. I have no idea. I am not an Internet person. I am just getting my legs in that, so I have no idea. I can't answer that.
Q. In terms of Christian-Jewish relations, not being a theologian, do you feel competent to assess the moral value of the Christian position prior to 1965?
A. The moral value? Yes. By their fruits shall we know them.
Q. Do you speak in that regard for yourself or as an expert in theology, or how do you speak?
A. No, I am not an expert in theology, but I am familiar enough with the duty for the Christian-Catholic theology of Judaism down to 1965 and the Second Vatican Council and to see what I take to be its results: the ghettos, the badge, the degradation that Jews have suffered under papal Christian auspices in the Middle Ages, the judgment papally and economically sanctioned that the Talmud is a heretical body of work -- that sort of thing. I follow the historical track in events, in deeds, in suffering, in expulsions, in mediaeval preaching which I understand stems from the Catholic Christian theology of Judaism.
Q. So you have read the papal pronouncements declaring the Talmud to be a heretical work?
A. Mediaeval, yes.
Q. And subsequently? What is the most recent one?
A. Of papal pronouncements on the Talmud? I couldn't tell you offhand. For example, in the Notes of 1985 it is strongly suggested there that the person who is going to teach Sunday School and so on should steep himself or herself in a great body of sources: the Christian sources obviously -- the New Testament, the Gospels; the Roman sources; the Greek sources; and the Jewish sources. There is mention of the Mishneh which happened to be the authoritative work of biblical commentary that prevailed in Jesus' lifetime, a couple of centuries B.C. and a couple of centuries A.D., and the Talmud. "Take a plunge in the Talmud and get acquainted with this body of commentary and interpretation of the Bible."
I can assume from that the Talmud is not terra incognita, it is not terra prohibitiva, and in fact that Christian students and teachers are encouraged strongly to know something about it.
Q. Do you remember my question?
A. I answered your question, that I cannot tell you the last papal pronouncement on the Talmud and what the Catholic or church position on it would be.
Q. Your position is that the church was wrong before 1965.
A. Yes, the church was wrong. The church is attempting now to correct that. After all, the most recent document we remember calls upon Christians, Catholics, for repentance.
Q. So you feel that the church should repent for its attitude about the Talmud?
A. No, the Talmud among other things. The Talmud was burned. The Talmud was declared a heretical book. It was sentenced, the way you sentence a heretic, and burned at the stake. St. Louis IX, 13th century. Carloads of the Talmud were burned at the stake, the way you would burn a criminal at the stake.
Q. You are a Talmud scholar, are you?
A. No. I wish I were.
Q. Are you familiar with the Talmud?
A. Somewhat. I have dipped around into it. There are 20 volumes. There are two Talmuds, the Babylonian and the Palestinian.
Q. From what you know, would you agree with the value of it?
A. I find some things inspiring. Some things mystify me. It is not a book. It is like the Bible. It is an enormous work. It's a library.
Q. And there is nothing anti-Christian in it?
A. There might be. I wouldn't be surprised if there were. The Talmud was censored by Christian censors, and there was self-censorship out of fear. After all, the Talmud dates from as early as 500 B.C. and perhaps earlier and carries down to 1000. It is an enormously complex body of material and documents and reflects different attitudes and values. As I say, at one point, the Bible once sanctioned, and in some places it is still thought to sanction, polygamy, but that is in abeyance, and so are portions of the Talmud.
I know that Christians have read through the Talmud to dredge up passages which they say, like Eisenmenger around 1700 in his two-volume work, "Judaism Revealed," where he finds that Jews, as a religious obligation are to commit crimes, to cheat, to malign, to poison -- doctors poisoned their patients, and so forth. That is all manufactured.
Q. It is all manufactured?
A. Yes.
Q. You are prepared to say that. You are an expert to say that, are you?
A. I don't believe it. I don't believe it because of the censorship that I referred to, both by Christian authorities and by the self-censorship by Jews out of fear. Don't forget that very, very few mediaeval copies of the Talmud survived because the Inquisition was successful in rounding them up and burning them at the stake.
Q. What I am interested in finding out is the boundaries of your expertise in relation to your personal beliefs. You seem inclined to take the view that, if you believe it, you can say it, which of course you can in any other context. I would like to know if you think you are an expert in the Talmud to make those opinions.
A. I am expert enough in the denigrations of the Talmud and the use that was made of it by Christian authorities, religious and secular, to convict Jews and find Jews guilty and to punish them by expulsion or what have you and, of course, to deprive them of the Talmud.
Q. You say you are expert enough to do what, to determine if there was condemnations from the Talmud? I don't quite understand what you are saying.
A. The Christian interpretation of the Talmud was used as justification for ill-treating Jews and for burning the Talmud.
Q. In order to know whether or not that itself was justified, wouldn't you have to know something about the Talmud, be an expert in some sense?
A. No, I can't know everything. No historian knows everything about everything. No matter how narrowly he defines the subject, he can't know everything about it.
Pope Gregory IX said that, if what is said about the Jews -- and he is speaking about the Talmud -- is true, no punishment is too severe or too extreme to be meted out to them.
Q. Is it true, what was said about the Talmud?
A. What is believed to be true by popes and authorities is real in the sense that it directs action. It may be a complete myth, but what is believed to be real is real in its effects.
Q. When we speak of the Talmud, don't we speak of something that is real?
A. I am not speaking of that. I am speaking of the interpretation, the judgment made by Pope Gregory IX.
Q. In order to know whether there is justification for that judgment, don't you need to be an expert in the Talmud, to know what it says and know what it means?
A. No, I wouldn't think so. I am, again, tracking what happened to Jews and to Talmuds because of the Christian interpretation of what the Talmud was. It was thought to be, in another category, a great arsenal of weapons that the Jews used secretly and publicly against us, of magic weapons, heaven knows what. It was supposedly full of formulas and incantations.
Q. Is it?
A. It isn't, no.
Q. How do you know?
A. I know because this is what Franciscan inquisitors in the 13th and 14th centuries said of it.
Q. So it must be false?
A. That is not the point. The point is that they said this. This was their position, and they acted on it.
Q. What is the truth, though, if we are concerned about truth?
A. Truth in history?
Q. Truth about the Talmud. We are not going to find that from you, are we?
A. That is not the point. That is not at issue.
Q. It is not at issue. So you are prepared to tell us what the Christians were doing wrong in condemning the Talmud without knowing yourself, as any kind of expert, or being able to tell us what the Talmud actually says.
A. I can only repeat, Mr. Christie, what I have already said. The Christians only began to study the Talmud in the 12th century, in the age of the universities and so on. They looked upon the Jews with suspicion --
Q. Did you hear my question?
A. -- as the agents of Satan, and they understood the Talmud to be a source of danger to Christian souls and to Christianity.
Q. I just want to understand the extent of your expertise. You are prepared to tell the Tribunal what the Christians did wrong in respect of the Talmud without knowing what the Talmud actually says.
A. Yes. I respectfully submit that one does not have to know the Talmud, from Volume 1 to Volume 20.
Q. That is not what I suggested. I was suggesting that you might have to know something about it to know whether what was said about it was true.
A. I know something about the Talmud. I have a sense of its flavour and character.
Q. Anything beyond that?
A. No. The study of the Talmud is a lifetime affair.
Q. Who told you that?
A. Talmudists at the Jewish Theological Seminar, saying to a biblical scholar, "You have it easy." It is a 20-volume work.
Q. So you are not even sure whether it has any anti-Christian remarks in it at all. You are not sure about that.
A. I am sure it did. I do know that prior to the age of the universities, in the 12th century --the persecution of Jews was in the later centuries, from the Crusades onward. Earlier there was a very lively polemical literature by Jews about Christians and Christianity and by Christians about Jews and Judaism. It is polemical. It is crude. It is mutual misunderstanding and mutual condemnation.
Q. And you are familiar with that body of literature, then?
A. Yes, I have read around it just to get the sense and flavour of a collection of rabbinical sermons that date from the 10th, 11th and into the 12th century. There are precious few from the 10th that have survived.
Q. And you have read the early church fathers?
A. Some. St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine.
Q. Anything else?
A. "City of God."
Q. You have read the "City of God?"
A. Yes, as an undergraduate. We all read it. St. John Chrysostom says in "Ten Orations Against the Jews" that the Jews are like an old plough horse ready for slaughter and that Judaism is obsolete or replaced by the resurrection, ready for slaughter like an old plough horse.
Q. You have those quotes, do you?
A. Yes.
Q. You can tell us that you have read their context and you know their meaning and you are familiar with them.
A. I am. It was a situation when the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity were not clear. In his congregation, his members would go to synagogue on Friday or Saturday and come to church on Sunday, and he resented that. He called that "Judaizing" or whatever. He talked about drawing the line, the equator: "You are you, and we are we, and ne'er the twain shall meet."
In the course of that, the polemic gets out of hand and he has no mercy. St. John Chrysostom was not the saint for all seasons. He was the complete anti-Semite, if there is such a thing.
THE CHAIRPERSON: He is a mystic, isn't he?
THE WITNESS: Yes, a mystic. A mystic will make anything out of anything.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. Do you claim to have read any other church fathers?
A. St. Augustine. I have read some of Ambrose on questions of commerce, usury, trade and so forth, and Pope St. Gregory the Great.
Q. And they are all anti-Semites, are they?
A. No. Pope St. Gregory the Great, for example, upbraided a bishop who had permitted a synagogue to be appropriated by the local zealous Christian community and turned into their church. He restored it to the Jewish community.
Another example of Gregory's evenhandedness, even though he said some crude polemical things -- I suppose that was the language of the era. A number of Jews were forcibly baptized, and he invoked Roman law which still prevailed in his time to some degree, at least in the city of Rome, and permitted them to be restored to the Jewish community and the Jewish religion.
Q. Are you familiar with the writings of St. Pius X?
A. No.
Q. Did he write anything about Jews and Judaism?
A. I am not clear. When did he write?
Q. In the 19th century.
A. No.
Q. You are not familiar with it?
A. No.
Q. So you are a selective reader of what you find useful to the theories you have about Jews and Judaism. Isn't that right?
A. That is the way all historians proceed. They do their research as well as they can, as broadly as they can. They cannot do everything. They have to be selective in their sources and then in what they say in their book. They select and include this and they exclude that. It can't be helped. That is a human limitation.
Q. And your limitation is that you are preoccupied with the subject of the guilt of the Christian church --
A. I am not preoccupied. I am not a psychological case. I am interested, profoundly interested, intellectually interested. I would love to see amity and understanding and regard between these two great faiths and peoples.
Q. You don't see any inconsistency in their fundamental theology, do you?
A. I can't guess what you mean.
Q. You can't guess what I mean?
A. What are you getting at? Inconsistency?
Q. Yes. Incompatibility between Judaism and Christianity? You can't see any incompatibility?
A. No. I see Jesus as the Christian, the Gentile's path to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Jews don't need that path.
Q. When it says in the Bible, "No one comes to the Father but through me," it doesn't apply to Jews. Right? Is that the position of the Catholic church?
A. Mr. Christie, we have to have a prolonged -- if you give me two days or two hours, we can go into the biblical scholarship that begins with Reimarus in the 18th century and is carried forward by many more scholars, with Pope Pius XII's encyclical Divino Afflante in 1943 which gave scholars intellectual freedom to approach the gospels as historical texts dealing with historical figures and historical events and to shed at least temporarily their theological presuppositions.
What does that reveal? As in Rudolph Bultman, for example, you cannot establish any statement of Jesus as authentically his beyond all doubt. Words built into Jesus' mouth reflect the fact that the redaction of the gospels is after the event. The oldest is probably the Gospel of Mark which dates from 65-70. The Crucifixion was 30-33. The fourth. the Gospel of St. John, dates from, at the earliest, 120 and down to 150, a full century after the event.
What do they say? That the gospels are not based on eye witness accounts; that it is an oral tradition which changes with the telling and the retelling and the situation, whether it is in Rome, Italy or in Syria. It is like studying World War II. The first document you have after the event in 1945 would be something around 1980. That is the difficulty in reconstructing the events of Jesus' life and the words, the teaching.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Could we pause there for the next question.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. What you are saying now is your opinion and has absolutely --
A. It is not my opinion.
Q. It is not the position of the Catholic Church, is it?
A. It is. Look at the Notes for the correct teaching and interpretation of 1985.
Q. So your position that Jews don't need Jesus Christ for salvation, that is the position of the Catholic Church. Is that right?
A. I can't say with theological hair-splitting that is the case. I hope it is not.
Q. You call that hair-splitting?
A. That kind of precision, that either you are saved or you are not. That seems to me to be hair-splitting.
Q. And whether Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation is also hair-splitting?
A. No. The teaching of the church is that -- Nostra Aetate has several sections. One, the most extensive, the 15 lines of Latin view of the Jews; there is another one on Buddhism, and a couple of others. They are all legitimate religious teachings and offer legitimate ways of knowing the will of God and earning salvation.
Q. Is this your position as an expert, a Catholic theologian, or what is it?
A. This is my position as a private individual.
Q. So it is a basis of your other opinions, isn't it?
A. Undoubtedly; I would assume so. I am not a hypocrite who says one thing in one category and another in another.
Q. So you approach your opinion from the point of view of your personal prejudices, which are--
A. No, I close my mind after I have read, thought and reflected and come to a conclusion. You can call it prejudice; that is an opprobrious word.
Q. Your position, your belief and your opinions are based on the understanding that all religions are equal. Isn't that right?
A. No. That statement seems to me to be absolutely beside the point in establishing my attitudes and views.
Q. Your attitudes and views expressed earlier were that Jesus Christ is not necessary for Jews, and that is the Christian position.
A. No, he isn't.
Q. Is that position taken by the Catholic Church about Jews and Judaism?
A. Ask the Pope. I don't pronounce that.
Q. I just need to know whether your views on Jewish-Christian relations bear any comparison to traditional Christianity or not. I take it that you will agree that they do not.
A. Traditional Christianity, the antisemitic Christianity, no.
Q. Do you consider traditional Christianity, with its view that salvation cannot be found outside of the Christian church, is antisemitic?
A. No, I think that is narrow.
Q. It is not your view, though. For Jews at least, they have salvation through their own faith.
A. I would take the view of St. Bernard Clairveau in the 12th century when he was trying to hold off the Crusaders from murdering Jews and forcibly baptizing them, and that sort of thing. "Leave them to God," he cried, and I am willing to do that.
Q. You are telling us what Bernard of Clairveau is supposed to have said in the 12th century --
A. Not supposed to have said; it is reported in two of the chronicles.
Q. Two of the chronicles. What chronicles are they?
A. Of the second Crusade.
Q. Where are they written? Where have you read of them? Have you seen original documents, or what are we doing here?
A. There is an anthology -- I taught mediaeval history for 10 years, Mr. Christie, and I taught it with a textbook, a synthesis, and I always used a body of documents which I changed every couple of years. One of those collections of documents had the sermon -- that is the form it took -- of St. Bernard Clairveau on this subject.
Q. And you are telling us that you quoted from this sermon?
A. Yes.
Q. Which you read in a textbook.
A. I read it in a collection of documents.
Q. What were they?
A. They were documents appropriate for the study of mediaeval history.
Q. What document are you talking about?
A. St. Bernard's sermon of the time. He was one of the preachers of the second Crusade.
Q. What I am asking you is: What document are you talking about? It is certainly not the original, and it must be some text that you are referring to. I would just like you to identify it, if you could.
A. When I quoted "Leave them to God?" That is in the sermon.
Q. Where would we find this in this material that you have told us about?
A. You would find it in almost any fairly ample volume of primary sources for the study of mediaeval history.
Q. Can you name one?
A. One that I used for a number of years was one by Professor White, "Sources of Mediaeval History", and the old war horse, Ashley Thorndyke.
Q. That is where we find this quote, is it?
A. Yes, and --
Q. Do you have something else you want to say?
THE CHAIRPERSON: Wait for the next question so that we can get on with this.
Are you going to be a while yet, Mr. Christie? If so, we will take our morning break.
MR. CHRISTIE: Yes. Thank you.
=== Short Recess at 11:38 a.m.
--- Upon resuming at 12:02 p.m.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. You published a paper for the symposium held by Robert Maxwell at Oxford called "Remembering for the Future." Is that correct?
A. Yes.
Q. Was this Robert Maxwell of newspaper fame whose name was also Jan Hoch, who was found floating in the ocean and who was a fraud?
A. Yes, that is he.
Q. He organized this symposium --
A. No --
Q. He paid for it.
A. He paid for it, yes.
Q. And he is referred to as being on the Editorial Advisory Board with Elizabeth Maxwell, his wife. Right?
A. She is the organizer and continues to be. There is another conference scheduled to which I have been invited at Oxford 2000. She is the leading person there.
Q. Again, basically promoting the Holocaust. Right?
A. Promoting the study and understanding of the Holocaust, plus, in proportion, our understanding of the history of World War II and Europe of the 20th century and western civilization.
Q. And this symposium, are you paid to go to that?
A. No. I am paid by my college to go to any kind of scholarly conference, to help out with travel expenses and so on.
Q. And it becomes part of your curriculum vitae as it has become known.
A. Yes.
Q. And you presented your paper there on the "Tap-Root of Anti-Semitism: The Demonization of the Jews." Right?
A. Right.
Q. And you identified the origin of it as in the Christian Gospels. Right?
A. Correct. St. John.
Q. St. John attributes the words to Jesus, and you say, "Well, it must be a mistake or it's after the fact and not to be relied upon."
A. No, that is really beside the historical point. That statement is understood to have been said by Jesus and was implemented and acted upon accordingly.
Q. But you don't think it was the words of Jesus. You think it is some human fabrication. Right?
A. No. I don't actually know. No one can actually know whether these words were or were not those of Jesus.
Q. No, but people who claim to be Christians have these on faith. Right? They believe them.
A. True.
Q. You don't. Right?
A. It is not a question of whether I believe it or not. My concern is that this idea of the Jews as agents, instruments, disciples of Satan has a terrible history. That is the source of much punishment and persecution of Jews.
Q. If you believed it was true, then it would be right, wouldn't it? At least, the belief would be right.
A. Yes, but I don't address that question.
Q. Isn't it a fundamental question? You don't address it personally, and you don't address it in your article.
A. No.
Q. Because truth doesn't matter, as far as whether it was said by Jesus or whether it is true or not. You are concerned about its historicity. Right?
A. It is real in that it was accepted as true by Christian authorities, the Christian faithful, and it was followed through by action.
Q. If it was true, at least the statement would be justified, wouldn't it, morally?
A. If it were true?
Q. Yes.
A. It's hypothetical.
Q. It is not hypothetical to those people who believe it, is it?
A. But I am not a theologian. I am not the priest or the curé of a congregation and hearing confessions. That is not my responsibility.
Q. And you are definitely not a believer either, or it would be a responsibility, wouldn't it?
A. In this capacity, I am here as a historian. My concern is to establish that was a Christian belief, axiomatic and acted upon. Whether it was true or not is really beside the historical point.
Q. You make moral judgments in this article, don't you?
A. Yes, to lament.
Q. To lament the fact that Christians regarded Jews as Satanic.
A. Yes.
Q. You wouldn't be lamenting that if you believed that Jesus had actually said it, would you? You wouldn't be making that moral judgment?
A. I cannot believe that Jesus actually said it.
Q. Thank you.
A. The clue to that is in the Notes of 1985 which say that much of the animus for Jews in the gospels, especially the more removed in time, reflect not Jesus' time but the later period, the end of the first century and early second century when the Jews were the great troublemakers of the Roman Empire. They revolted in 66. That is the great story of Josephus from 66 to 74. The Roman Empire went to great lengths to suppress the revolt, to destroy the temple, to turn the Holy City into a garrison town, to establish a cult of Jupiter there, and carry off tens of thousands of Jews as slaves and forbade Jews to even enter the city of Jerusalem.
What has happened in this oral tradition of the telling and the retelling of the story of Jesus is that the Christian church begins to take upon itself the evangelization of the pagans. How can they blame the Crucifixion on the Romans? It must be those terrible Jews.
As you come down decade by decade, almost measurably, almost by predictable increment, the animus for the Jews as the enemies of Jesus and so forth intensifies. It is the judgment of biblical scholars of every denomination -- there is a consensus among denominations -- that this animosity did not prevail in Jesus' time and could not have prevailed, but that it dates from a later period.
Q. So it is your judgment that those words attributed in John 8:43-47 are later fabrications. Right?
A. Why do you put that construction on it?
Q. It is just what you said.
A. That is the way oral tradition works.
Q. That is exactly what you are saying as a justification for what you believe.
A. It just as well elaborates as fabricates.
Q. But they were not actually, according to you and all these biblical scholars -- the universal judgment of biblical scholars is that these words were not --
A. I didn't say "universal;" I said "consensus."
Q. The majority consensus of modern biblical scholars is that those words were never said by Jesus Christ. Is that your position?
A. Yes, that is the view of this biblical scholarship that prevails.
Q. And that is what you accept as the basis for your moral judgment on this teaching. Right?
A. If you say so.
Q. I am trying to find the logical basis for your opinion, that's all, to find out what is the basis for your expertise.
A. My opinion is nothing. My judgment is that this text has a critical role in justifying persecution of the Jews over the centuries. I am not there to judge. Historians don't judge.
Q. You certainly do judge, and you make moral judgments in your article. You make moral judgments that say that this demonization of Jews was unjustified.
A. Yes. Demonization of any people is unjustified.
Q. Demonization of a religious group is unjustified.
A. Yes.
Q. There is no such thing as an evil religious group or an evil religion. Right?
A. That is in the abstract. I am not talking about 23 civilizations.
Q. You are talking about the tap-root of antisemitism. It is a premise upon which you write, isn't it?
A. I am saying that it was a misfortune that the Jews were branded as agents of Satan, armed with superhuman powers, bent on the ruination of souls, et cetera, et cetera. That is one instance.
Q. It's a misfortune?
A. Yes.
Q. It wouldn't be a misfortune if it was true, would it?
A. I never addressed that question.
Q. Your premise is that it is false, or it wouldn't be a misfortune.
A. It is beside the historical point.
Q. But it is a judgment that is a premise of your historical thesis.
A. As I said earlier, it was believed to be real. Whether it is true or not really does not matter. What is believed to be real is real in its consequences.
Q. You don't resile, do you, from your premise that the statements attributed to Jesus Christ are -- not fabrications; what was your word?
A. Elaborations.
Q. Elaborations.
A. Embroidery.
I. Q. Embroidery. Changes?
A. Elaborations, embroidery.
Q. Are you saying that he said something like that, but that it wasn't that? That would be embroidery.
A. He could. Jesus was a Pharisee. He is probably addressing Pharisees there. Pharisees excoriated each other. There were Pharisees and Pharisees and Pharisees, variations of Pharisees. Some of the things they said about each other are polemical, and it is just verbiage, in one ear and out the other. However, later on when you have the Inquisition and the Christian powers that be to implement and act upon these things, that is another issue.
Q. I am just trying to get at the basis of your opinions and how you are an expert in these subjects. I hope you will admit that you have certain biblical and religious assumptions as part of your fundamental value system that you have used to make these judgments.
A. True. It is a truth I have come to by reflection and study and reading the works of biblical scholars who have the credentials as to the languages, et cetera.
Q. Do you claim to be a biblical scholar?
A. No, Mr. Christie, I do not.
Q. But you accept the opinions of certain biblical scholars and you incorporate them in your own. Right?
A. Yes, I do. That is what historians have to do.
Q. I see. So you are basically basing your thesis and your beliefs upon the opinions of certain biblical scholars that you have accepted.
A. Correct, but they are numerous.
Q. Oh, I am sure, very numerous.
A. It is not just one or two or three.
Q. They are the majority, are they?
A. Yes, I would think so. They represent a consensus.
Q. To which dissent would be foolish, would it?
A. Hardly. They meet and they have rousing discussions among themselves.
II. Q. Who are "they?"
A. The biblical scholars.
Q. Who are "they" who are the basis of these beliefs? Can you name their names?
A. The one that leads off that book of essays, Donald Gray, is one of them.
Q. Can you name any others?
A. They just don't come to mind at the moment, but I have several of their books on my shelves. I haven't worked in that sphere recently.
Q. This biblical belief founded on the consensus of many biblical scholars, one of whom is Mr. Gray or Dr. Gray, I assume, is this a Catholic belief?
A. He is a Catholic, yes.
Q. Is he a Catholic theologian?
A. Yes. He is a member of the Religious Studies Department at Manhattan College.
Q. So he is recognized by the church as a Catholic theologian.
A. He is recognized by the Religious Studies Department at Manhattan College as a Catholic theologian.
Q. Does he share your belief that the words of Jesus are simply elaborations?
A. Essentially, yes, that they cannot be relied upon to be verbatim quotations, transcripts such as we will have of these proceedings. Nothing of that sort remotely exists.
Q. So you say that to believe that those words are true would be unfounded in Catholic theology.
A. I would hope so.
Q. "Those words" meaning the words of John, Chapter 8, verses 43 to 47.
A. Yes.
Q. To believe that those are true would be inconsistent with Catholic theology.
A. I can't say. Not being a theologian, I can't say.
Q. But you would hope so, you said.
A. I would hope that they would deal with it in the way that the 1985 Notes deal with it, seeing it in its historical context and setting and, therefore, able to handle it and discount it or to
de-emphasize it.
Q. De-emphasize it, disbelieve it. That is basically what you mean. Right?
A. De-emphasize.
Q. What is the difference between
de-emphasize and disbelieve?
A. With a sacred book, you can't censor it; you can't redline it. You put in abeyance, just as in the Hebrew scripture the question of polygamy has never been repealed. It has never been censored. It has never been cut out. By definition, with a sacred text you can't do that, but you put it in abeyance. When you instruct the young, you pass over that text or, if there is a necessity to deal with it, you explain it as reflecting a specific historical set of circumstances, and you go on from there.
Q. But you, yourself, don't say that is what it means in your writing. You say that it does refer to the Jews. That is the way you say it in the article you wrote.
"The beginnings of the most literal-minded, simplistic species of dehumanization is a passage in the Gospel according to St. John 8:43-47. There Jesus is reported as arguing with the Jews and tells them that neither God nor Abraham, but the Devil, was their father."
Is that what you wrote?
A. Yes, I wrote that.
Q. But it doesn't actually say "the Jews" at all, does it?
A. It was interpreted that way. It is always "the Jews," all the Jews. That is the trouble with antisemitism.
Q. You are saying it is a misinterpretation of that section, are you?
A. No, I am not saying it is a misinterpretation of that section. That is the text as it stands in every redaction of the New Testament. It is taken at its face value.
Q. But it doesn't refer to Jews at all. It refers to Pharisees.
A. Pharisees are Jews; they are synonymous.
Q. Are they all Jews?
A. All Pharisees, I assume, are Jews.
Q. Not all Jews are Pharisees.
A. No. That is the historical development of the New Testament. In Jesus' time there were Pharisees, there were Sadducees; there were Essenes, and every one had its variation. There were zealots and there were this and there were that. By the time the gospels are redacted, all these other groups had been killed off by the Romans in suppressing the revolt from 66 to 74. The only Jews to identify as a target or as the enemy of Jesus or whatever are Pharisees. All the rest have dropped through the historical cracks.
Q. You are sure of that, are you?
A. I am sure of that.
Q. There were no Sadducees alive in Jesus' time.
A. That is not what I said.
Q. I just heard you say that everyone else had fallen through the historical cracks.
A. Those groups were suppressed by the Romans in suppressing the revolt a generation later. It is a generation later that is reflected in the gospels.
Q. So you are saying they weren't written at the time, so it couldn't refer to the Sadducees.
A. Exactly. They were not written at the time.
Q. Again, that is your interpretation.
A. No. That is the modern biblical scholarship's interpretation.
Q. And you are qualified to tell us that?
A. No contemporary texts, no eye witness accounts.
Q. No eye witness accounts?
A. No.
III. Q. Was John an eye witness?
A. Which John?
Q. The John who wrote the Gospel according to John.
A. No.
Q. John the Divine was not an eye witness?
A. You mean John the Baptist?
Q. No, not John the Baptist.
A. The gospel author?
Q. Yes.
A. No, he is not.
Q. You mean none of the disciples wrote the gospels; somebody else did?
A. None of the evangelists are contemporary with the events.
Q. Who wrote the Gospel according to St. John, then?
A. John.
Q. And he wasn't the John who was one of Jesus' disciples?
A. No.
Q. Who was he?
A. I don't know what the answer to that would be. I don't know what the position of this school of biblical scholarship would be. I am sure they have some judgments and conclusions, but I don't know what they are.
Q. Aren't you really being a little bit unorthodox, to put it mildly, to say that the gospels are not written by the disciples who claimed to be there and to speak as eye witnesses?
A. I am speaking with two and a half centuries of biblical scholars.
Q. You are?
A. Yes.
Q. When did you do that?
A. Are you mocking me, Mr. Christie?
Q. I am trying to understand you. I don't know what you mean when you say "I am speaking with 200 years of biblical scholars."
A. I have read some of the works of biblical scholars. from Reimarus in the 18th century down to the present.
Q. And those you choose to believe. Is that right?
A. Yes, because they are cogent and compelling, as far as I can judge, and their views as they are evaluated by other scholars are found to be such.
Q. Therefore, we can assume from what you say that nothing that was written in the gospels was written by eye witnesses.
A. True.
Q. That is your position.
A. That is my position.
Q. And that is the premise on which you write these articles about Christianity, at least the article I am referring to.
A. It doesn't depend on that. That would follow whether it was the case or not.
Q. It would, I suggest, follow whether it was the case or not. Let me suggest that, if you were actually a person who believed that the eye witness, John, spoke accurately about what Jesus said, you could not say that it would be false or that it would be unjustified to have those views, would you?
A. If I was convinced that John is the disciple John?
Q. Yes, that the author of the Gospel of St. John was John the disciple. If you believed that and really believed that Jesus said those words, which you don't --
A. Then it would follow.
Q. That those words were justified and that the faith of the people who followed them would be justified. Whether all their actions would be or not would be another matter. Right?
A. Yes, but I don't take that view.
Q. I agree. The premise of your view, which I am trying to identify, is that these are ex post facto alterations as you call them by people who really weren't there.
A. That is correct.
Q. So the gospels are fabricated by others than eye witnesses --
A. Those are your words, not my words.
Q. But, really, if someone writes something claiming to be an eye witness, saying they were there, saying they heard someone say something, but they really were not there, it is not just an alteration; it is what we call in English a fabrication, isn't it?
A. That is the way oral tradition works. At some point it comes to be redacted in print. That is the problem. Some of these one-liners of Jesus may be authentic; we can't establish that. They may have been preserved in oral tradition and transmitted. They may have been preserved intact. They may have been modified drastically or slightly. We have no way of knowing that.
The way oral tradition works is as I have indicated. When you come to the redaction, that carves it in glass. Then it becomes fixed and set, but not before that.
Q. You have told us that in your view those words were not written by an eye witness, but they claim to have been written by an eye witness, don't they? You are a person who claims familiarity with Christian tradition, aren't you?
A. Yes, that is the way the gospels come across.
Q. They are written that way.
A. Yes.
Q. No one could write that down and put those words in print of one form or another if they were not true, unless they were fabricating them. Either they were eye witnesses or they weren't. They say they are.
A. It is not either/or. They are based on oral tradition.
Q. You may be satisfying some people, but I wonder how you can argue or maintain in all honesty that the gospels are not written by anyone who was an eye witness when they claim to have been written by the disciples of Jesus. They would have to be fabrications, wouldn't they? Why don't you use that honest, open word?
A. On y soit qui mal y pense.
Q. Brilliant. I am familiar with it. Just answer the question.
How can you avoid calling them fabrications? You choose not to.
A. Because I understand the way that oral tradition works.
THE CHAIRPERSON: It is the mode of expression in oral tradition is what you are saying.
THE WITNESS: Yes, exactly. And names change. The gospels refer to a high priest; in two of them they refer to caliphs; in one of them they refer to Aman; in one of them they don't name the high priest. What is one to do about that? That's the problem with oral tradition, folk memory, and so on.
MR. CHRISTIE:
Q. What does the Book of John begin with?
A. It begins with the genealogy of Jesus, the light, "I am the light." I say it doesn't have a genealogy; the other three do, a descendant of David and so forth.
Q. Surely it is clear in the gospels that they are written by or claim to be written by people who were present at the time, don't they?
A. Yes. I don't know if you are familiar with the Apocrypha --
Q. I am dealing with the gospels for the moment.
A. -- which are works -- there are some of them in the Bible, like the Book of Daniel -- in the Old Testament and New Testament, which were written centuries after but purport to be written back there at the time of the events.
Q. I am not talking about those. I want to speak about just the gospels. I want to establish that they indicate on their face, in their context, that they are written by persons who speak in the first person as if they were there.
A. I am saying that the composition of the Bible, the New Testament, and the history of these materials is an enormously complicated one and cannot be reduced to the simplicities which you are trying to impose on them.
Q. Is that a position that you say is consistent with the Christian tradition?
A. The Christian tradition -- traditions.
Q. Let's say the Catholic tradition.
A. It is consistent with the school of biblical scholars to which I have referred.
Q. Is this Catholic theologians or just a school of --
A. Some of them are theologians, yes.
Q. Are they Catholic theologians recognized by the Catholic Church?
A. Yes, some of them are.
Q. Then who would you say would agree with you on this point, who is a Catholic theologian?
A. Father John Pawlikowski.
Q. Where does he teach?
A. He is in Chicago. It's a Catholic institution, but I can't remember its precise name. He was one of the essayists in the collection of Jewish-Christian Encounters Over the Centuries.
MR. CHRISTIE: Those are my questions on the issue of qualification.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Fromm, do you have any questions?
MR. FROMM: Mr. Chairman, as the language of these proceedings, from my understanding, is English, I was wondering if the professor could translate for us the French term he used.
MR. CHRISTIE: On y soit qui mal y pense. Evil is he who evil thinks. That is what he was trying to say.
MR. FROMM: I just have a few questions dealing with Professor Schweitzer's expertise.
EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF ON BEHALF OF CANADIAN ASSOCIATION
FOR FREE EXPRESSION INC. RE QUALIFICATIONS
MR. FROMM:
Q. Could you just review for me the area in which you are an expert and for which you are testifying.
A. On the history and nature of antisemitism, Jewish-Christian relations, and in a broader way Jewish history, most of it in the more recent period, since emancipation, let's say the beginning of Enlightenment.
Q. Would you characterize your writings in this area as being scholarly?
A. Yes.
Q. Published in scholarly sources?
A. Yes. Refereed and published by reputable journals, reputable publishing houses.
Q. In commenting, if I understand correctly, on some of the debate that went on during the Middle Ages between Catholic spokesmen and Jewish spokesmen, I understood you to say something like this: There is a very lively polemical literature by Jews about Christians. It was crude. It was full of mutual misunderstandings.
A. Recriminations and accusations and bias.
Q. In reference to writings of St. John Chrysostom, I copied your comment roughly to the effect that the polemic gets out of hand?
A. He is one of the first authors, yes. He was incensed by that particular situation and the memorialization of it.
Q. In the declining days of the Roman Empire.
A. Exactly. He was Greek-Byzantine, so there wasn't that decline.
Q. And then in a comment made to you by Mr. Christie, he suggested to you that a certain remark indicated prejudice. Did I understand you to say that that term is an opprobrious opinion?
A. It is an opprobrious term to apply to whatever it was being applied to.
Q. In your 17-page summary of your argument we were given this morning -- and I don't want to go all the way through it. I note on page 17, for instance -- this is at tab 2.
MR. FREIMAN: It is in the Commission's Brief of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer, tab 2, page 17.
MR. FROMM:
Q. I picked these at random just to save time. At the end of the first paragraph we read the statement:
"Such malignant fantasizing places Jews in a category distinctly different from normal humanity, a loathsome category of demonic conspiratorial supermen."
Is that what you wrote?
A. Yes.
Q. Then the following paragraph states:
"Since the crusades, and into the twentieth century, even before the Holocaust, the Jews have suffered simply because they were Jews, placed upon the bull's eye of fear and hatred by ideological stereotypes. Such was the harvest of hate."
Those are your opinions?
A. They are.
Q. Do you write that as a historian?
A. Yes. I reach that conclusion based on the previous expositions.
Q. And you see this as factual, do you?
A. Yes.
Q. You don't see it as, in your own words, polemical?
A. No.
Q. I hope I am quoting you correctly. You are referring to the events of the first century A.D. in the Roman Empire. The Jews were the great troublemakers of the Roman Empire, and you went on to talk about a rebellion of Josephus.
A. Josephus participated in and defected to the Romans, and later told the history of it.
Q. In fact, do we not have here a long and varied series of historical disagreements, animosities and antagonisms and you, in fact, are writing a polemic, taking one side?
A. No, I deny that.
MR. FROMM: Those are my questions.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Thank you. Any
re-examination?
MR. FREIMAN: No. In my submission, Members of the Panel, Professor Schweitzer's credentials speak for themselves. His summary of credentials alone would justify receiving him as an expert in the sense of someone who, by virtue of his skill and training, is in a position to present the Tribunal with facts and opinions that will assist them in reaching their conclusions.
More so, in Mr. Christie's voir dire, Professor Schweitzer has demonstrated his mastery of that expertise, the knowledge of texts, the ability to cite texts, to easily refer to a wide variety of historical matters.
I was somewhat bemused by the attempt to turn Professor Schweitzer into a theologian which, of course, is not the purpose for which he is being proffered. He is being proffered for precisely what he exhibited today, the ability to set out historical events, to back them with factual citations and sources, and the ability to draw conclusions that are of assistance to this Tribunal in the very questions that are before it.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Do any other counsel wish to argue? Mr. Armstrong, please.
MR. ARMSTRONG: I support counsel for the Commission, Mr. Freiman. He has tendered this person as an expert in Jewish history, antisemitism and Christian-Jewish relations. His CV speaks strongly to that issue, and the cross-examination, in my respectful submission, has done nothing other than to elicit the fact that this person is a distinguished scholar and has studied these subjects for most of the last 40 years. I would urge that the Tribunal receive his evidence.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Earle, please.
MR. EARLE: The Mayor's Committee supports Mr. Freiman's submissions.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Kurz, please
MR. KURZ: The same here. It is very clear that there is a wide breadth of knowledge in areas for which his expertise is being tendered.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Woods, please.
MR. WOODS: We support Mr. Freiman's application as well.
MS HAYWARD: The Simon Wiesenthal Center supports Mr. Freiman as well.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Christie, please.
MR. CHRISTIE: The witness is an expert in polemics; that is obvious. An expert in history is supposed to testify to matters of fact. There is no analysis of fact in his opinion. His opinion is bearing upon what he purports to say and the psychological effects of the writing.
There is no qualification to express opinions on the psychological effects of Mr. Zundel's writings. This witness is neither a psychologist nor is he qualified to speak in any way on matters of sociology or matters of fact relating to the effects of any opinion.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Is that why he is giving evidence? I understood that he was to give evidence to establish the continuity of antisemitism in the Zundelsite with a historical perspective on antisemitism.
MR. CHRISTIE: You could say that that is what he is supposed to say, and that is what the prosecution wants. That is exactly what they are asking you to allow him to do.
THE CHAIRPERSON: As a historian.
MR. CHRISTIE: As a historian, how can he say what writing has any bearing upon a matter of history, if we are dealing with fact, other than philosophical or moral analysis to which he claims not to be qualified?
He will be giving opinions on the text of some writing in the 20th century in relation to events in the 10th century, as we hear his views on those matters, premised upon his views of the nature of the Christian religion. Although he claims not to have any expertise in that, it is certainly a basis for his opinion.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Are you arguing that he is disqualified because he does not have the appropriate professional qualifications or is the situation a question of weight which you are free to attack in his evidence, if we qualify him?
MR. CHRISTIE: He has no qualifications in the area that is relevant to the inquiry. He has expertise in the realm of history. History doesn't establish facts in a given case.
The Finta case was a case in which historians were allowed to give background facts, but not to prove the facts of a case through a historian. We would not need witnesses if all we needed was someone to say that historically it has been held as an opinion that so and so did such and such.
This witness is trying, through the back door, to introduce opinion evidence about the effect of writing in the 20th century from his views about writings long previous to it, alleging that there is a connection. That is not really historical; that is psychological. That is an analysis on certain moral and philosophical premises, none of which he has overtly admitted to, none of which he is really qualified for, but all of which he must rely on to express his obviously clearcut opinion.
He is going to tell you that certain passages in Mr. Zundel's writing which he has identified in highlighting, which we just got today, will be comparable to or grow out of the biblical or historical premises of traditional antisemitism or some form of antisemitism in the past. This mediaeval antisemitism has nothing to do with the facts of this case. Whether or not someone holds views of a mediaeval nature is perhaps relevant, but a psychologist, a psychiatrist, sociologist or someone with a qualification in the realm of social sciences would be best qualified to deal with that.
Historians don't tell us what modern people think or why they think it or the effects of their thoughts. How are they qualified to do that? Just because they have opinions? Of course, he has opinions, very strong opinions. Heaven help me if I disagree with them.
Does it mean that, because he is a historian, he can tell us what either Ernst Zundel thinks or the effect of what he thinks or what he writes, if he writes it?
THE CHAIRPERSON: I am not sure that he has been tendered to tell us what the effect of what he thinks is.
MR. CHRISTIE: We heard what we were told. We were told that he was an expert in Christian-Jewish relations and historical antisemitism.
THE CHAIRPERSON: And antisemitism, right.
MR. CHRISTIE: Does that mean that, because he is familiar with historical antisemitism, he is qualified to identify it in modern writing and to say, "That is antisemitism. That promotes hatred?"
THE CHAIRPERSON: He may be; I don't know.
MR. CHRISTIE: That is the only relevant function he could have. We are not here to discuss a treatise on historical antisemitism or whether St. John Chrysostom was right, wrong or a terrible man, a good or bad person, or a mystic. This is surely an exercise in futility if we are allowing an expert in history to tell us his views about St. John Chrysostom, Jesus Christ, the authenticity of the gospels and, thereby, derive an opinion that Ernst Zundel's writing produces thus and so effect.
THE CHAIRPERSON: You have demonstrated an interest in St. John Chrysostom. I don't think he raised the issue.
MR. CHRISTIE: I went to some of his writings; that's all. That is some of this witness' writings.
I am suggesting that nothing that this witness knows or is qualified to say beyond his own personal opinions -- and they are his own personal opinions -- is really an area of expertise in which a historian is qualified to express opinions. He is not qualified any more than I am to take the stand and tell you what Mr. Zundel's writing says or means or what effect it has. Yet, this is the way the prosecution works here. They bring in a witness in history to tell us the meaning and effect of what they say are the writings of Ernst Zundel, which is totally unreasonable, unfair, unjustified.
No doubt, it is all prepared. He has done all his highlighting and he has done all his book reading. He has seen certain passages which he will comment on, and he will tell us they are all -- he has already given us the opinion in writing that they are all part of a historical, antisemitic predisposition which Christians have.
How is that relevant? Is Mr. Zundel a Christian? Does he therefore have it? Is this a disease that this is an expert witness in? Of course, there are many who would like to say so and many who would like to put people in mental hospitals who don't agree with them. It happens in the Soviet Union, and they would like to see it happen here. With certain orders of certain tribunals and courts, maybe it will happen. But will it be justified to set up these purported experts who come from countries that have free speech to tell us that we have crossed the boundaries of their mystical pale, their mystical justified beliefs, their mystical historic antisemitism, that we have ventured beyond anti-Judaism, that we have ventured beyond legitimate criticism? They will tell us all this? That is what he can say?
That is what he is going to say. That is what he writes in his treatise. That has been his life's work, to blacken the name of Christianity and exonerate Jews from any guilt of anything in history. That is exactly what he has written in all the materials he has written, and it is exactly what he is going to do here, with your permission. If he is allowed to give these opinions, this becomes an exercise in condemnation from personal opinion, and that is all it amounts to.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Fromm, please.
MR. FROMM: Mr. Chairman, I would like to point out that what this Hearing is basically all about is the liberty of an individual to express opinions. Whether or not Mr. Zundel is the author of the Zundelsite is another matter but, if he were, this Tribunal exists to determine whether or not he can continue to have that right.
It is because that liberty is at stake here that we would certainly oppose the witness being qualified as an expert, for a couple of reasons.
First of all, under examination by the lawyer for the Respondent, I understood him to say, "I am not an Internet person. I don't know what is on the Zundelsite." His knowledge of what is on the Zundelsite, which is thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documents, is contained in what he says he studied, a very small portion. That would not pass the test of any historical scholarly study of an area.
If a person wished to be qualified as a historian and an expert, let us say, on the life of Mackenzie King and he said that he read 20-some pages of Mackenzie King's speeches, he would be laughed out of any historical conference in North America.
Whether or not the gentleman from New York City is an expert in Christian antisemitism I don't know. From what I have read, he seems to be an extremely partisan individual. He has an axe to grind. Writings or argumentation throughout history critical of Jewish people is labelled as antisemitism.
I tried in my questions to point out some of the rather unscholarly, overblown language in the submission to us. Whether or not he is an expert in that I cannot say, but he is certainly not an expert on what appears on the Zundelsite, and that is the area that is under question here. Whether one Patristic father said this or that or what is meant might be of great theological interest to some of us, but I think it is irrelevant. He has no expertise in the Zundelsite, and I can't see him being qualified as an expert witness.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Reply...?
MR. FREIMAN: No.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We will adjourn now for lunch. We will resume at 2:15.
--- Luncheon Recess at 12:51 p.m.
--- Upon resuming at 2:20 p.m.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We are satisfied that this witness bears professional qualifications as a historian to give opinion evidence on issues before us. The focus of his evidence, as we understand it, has to do with the continuity of the alleged antisemitic statements emanating from the Zundelsite in relation to historical antisemitism, the efficacy of which remains to be seen. We will hear the witness.
MR. FREIMAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
EXAMINATION-IN-CHIEF
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, in dealing with your qualifications, I neglected to deal with some of the human side.
I understand, sir, that you were born in the United States.
A. Correct.
Q. I also understand, sir, that you are originally of German extraction.
A. Yes.
Q. Do you have any firsthand knowledge of life and events in Germany in the 1930s?
A. Yes, a very limited span of a year.
My parents came to this country just in time for the depression.
Q. By "this country" you mean the United States?
A. The United States, I beg your pardon. I don't want to annex Canada.
My parents decided after some years that the going was too tough. They were alone; they had no relatives and friends. My father was a tool and die maker, and there was no work for such machinists.
The new Germany beckoned, and letter after letter, as I understand, from home, from grandparents and lots of aunts and uncles and so forth, said, "Come back home to the new Germany and be a part of it," et cetera, et cetera. So back they went. That was in 1935.
The family lives in Kemnat. Now it is a big town, but then it was a village. My ancestors can be traced back to the early 17th century.
Q. Was there ever any occasion where it was required that your ancestry be traced back to the 17th century?
A. Yes. My aunt, my mother's youngest sister, was a school girl. She was in the BDM, and one thing she did, as all students did at one stage, was to trace the family tree back. The records of baptisms, marriages, deaths and so on and so forth are all there in the local church archives. She found that we were Judenbein all the way back on one side to, I think, 1607 or 1609 and on the other to sometime around 1620.
Q. For purposes of the record, what is meant by the expression Judenbein?
A. Pure, clean, not besmirched by Jewish blood.
Q. For how long was your family in Germany in the 1930s?
A. For about a year. I went to school. I had a uniform --
Q. When you say you had a uniform, what does that mean?
A. A brown shirt with a black neckerchief and black trousers, shorts and so forth.
I went to school. I wanted to be a Hitler Jugend, which normally was age 10. I was far short of that. I went on hikes frequently led by the Hitler Jugend whom I greatly admired.
I should say that the return to Germany occurred really because my father was killed in an accident in a plant, so my mother was alone. From what she said later, they had decided to go, so she went back with me. I went to school and I loved it.
My grandparents were peasant farmers and had a barn, and I loved to play in the mow. I can remember practising for the test, the mutprobe, the test of courage which featured something like jumping 10 feet downward, jumping out of the hay mow and things of that sort.
Q. Just to interrupt you, this is the Jugend for what?
A. For the Hitler Youth. I was saving to buy the shirt which was a tradition or a custom. When you were formally initiated into the Hitler Youth, your shirt would be handed to you by a member of the family or a Hitler Youth member.
Q. Do you have any recollections of any ideas that were inculcated to you during that period of time?
A. Yes. I remember very vividly going on a hike -- you always went on Saturday afternoons; you went to school on Saturday mornings -- and coming to another village. It started to rain, so we took cover in what was apparently a religious school. It had a crucifix on the wall, and the Hitler Jugend who was our leader saw it and was so incensed by it that he tore it off the wall, threw it down and said something to the effect, "Dirty little Jew, that's where you belong." I can remember that I was just astounded, and having discussions with my mother and with my Aunt Ottie, my favourite aunt. They explained it away; I don't quite remember how.
I remember years after, when we returned, my mother could not take care of me and farmed me out to a couple who were also of German extraction. I remember talking with her and my foster father -- I was not legally adopted or anything of that sort, but I thought of them as Papa and Mama and that I had two mothers. I can remember years after returning to that episode.
Q. You say that you returned with your mother. Was the rest of the members of your family also immigrants to the United States or did they live in Germany?
A. No, only my mother and my father. Of course, my mother is now dead as well.
Q. Is there still family in Germany?
A. Lots. My mother came from a large family, and they all married and they all had children. I have aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins scattered all over Germany, in the north in Bochum and Wilhemshafen. My favourite cousin lives down on Lake Constance.
Q. Has the fact that your family remained in Germany allowed you to keep up with German events, and does it help you with your understanding of the German reality and German history?
A. Yes. I suppose my sense of Nazi Germany is somewhat owed to the fact that my uncle was a member of the Nazi Party. A great-uncle was a Nazi Party member and was the Mayor of one of the towns. Another uncle was a member of the Labour Corps and wore a uniform and carried his spade like a rifle, very proudly.
There was a picture of Hitler on the wall in a place of honour in the dining room. I loved that. I wanted to prepare for my Youth Program. I wanted to earn an insignia which was something like a miniature bayonet to carry which would have been recognition of my enthusiasm, physical prowess and so on.
Q. Turning now to the reason that you are here today, Professor Schweitzer, could you turn to tab 2 of the materials that you have before you. Is that a memorandum that you prepared?
A. It is.
Q. Did you prepare it yourself?
A. Yes. The only thing that I did not do -- I selected the documents that are enumerated in the text, but they are not in the initial order and sequence that I had suggested. It was done in collaboration with you for reasons of editing and sequence that I found compelling.
Q. Does this memorandum constitute a statement of the findings, opinions and conclusions to which you intend to testify today?
A. It does.
Q. Would it assist you to have reference to this memorandum in order to allow you to make specific references to texts and quotations?
A. Yes. How do you intend to proceed?
Q. I simply wanted to ask you whether having this before you would make it easier for you to find specific quotations and specific references that you might want to testify about.
A. Here in the memorandum?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes.
MR. FREIMAN: I would ask that the Tribunal accept this memorandum as a summary of the testimony intended to be given, along the same lines as the aides-memoir for Professor Prideaux and for Mr. Angus.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Is there any objection? Mr. Christie, do you have any objection?
MR. CHRISTIE: What this accomplishes is making the opinion virtually meaningless because he has already prepared it and delivered it in writing. I object to it because, for one thing, it has really nothing to do with the evidence in the case. If he has an opinion on anything, it should be those things that are subsequent to tab 5, starting at tab 6, and none of that is dealt with in this introduction. It has broad, sweeping generalizations which should not properly be within the scope of his expertise in any event.
THE CHAIRPERSON: The Tribunal has not examined what is in the memorandum. Mr. Freiman, is the issue to the extent that this is simply an aid to the witness in delivering his evidence in a more expeditious or coherent way?
MR. FREIMAN: Yes, and it is also of assistance, I think, to the Tribunal in following the evidence. Clearly, it is not a substitute for the evidence.
In administrative proceedings and in some cases even in courts of law, the trend has recently been to admit memoranda not as a substitute for the testimony but as an aide-memoir for the panel as well and to allow the panel to follow.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We followed a similar pattern in Mr. Prideaux' evidence?
MR. FREIMAN: Exactly the same.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Anything further, Mr. Christie?
MR. CHRISTIE: No.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We will allow it in on the basis that you have presented it.
MR. FREIMAN: Thank you.
THE REGISTRAR: The document found at tab 2, entitled "Memorandum on Lethal Antisemitism, Old and New" will be Commission Exhibit HR-16.
EXHIBIT NO. HR-16: Document entitled "Memorandum on Lethal Antisemitism, Old and New" found at tab 2 of Commissions's Book of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, in the voir dire, which was the questioning that Mr. Christie subjected you to this morning, it was established that you had before you at some point HR-2, the exhibit of materials that appear on the Zundelsite.
Did you, in fact, refer to those documents? Did you use those documents in the preparation of the opinion that is found at tab 2 of this latest exhibit?
A. Yes, that is the basis of this.
Q. As a preliminary matter, Professor Schweitzer, can you tell me how you define "antisemitism?" What is antisemitism?
A. I define it simply as hatred, fear, hostility for Jews and often "the Jews", all Jews present in the world at that moment, that is also likely to result in harm being done to the Jews.
Q. We will go over this in some detail in a moment, but I would like to ask you: As a general conclusion, did you arrive at an opinion as to whether there is any continuity between the historical themes of antisemitism and the materials in HR-2 that you reviewed?
A. Yes, I have.
Q. Is there or is there not a continuity?
A. There is a clear, compelling continuity.
Q. Dealing with antisemitism, again as a general matter and before we proceed through a historical analysis, can you tell me whether it is your view that there is a central theme or archetypal motif in antisemitism historically?
A. Yes. It hinges upon ushering the Jews out of the human race in two directions. They are demonized as agents of Satan, armed with his powers, and they are equated with animals -- pigs, dogs, what have you. That means that they forfeit all status as human beings, and apparently anything and everything can be done to them without violation of the ordinary code and moral restraints that one feels under.
Q. From a historical point of view, has antisemitism as a theory or ideology been associated with any results or with any consequences for Jewish people?
A. Yes. Massacres, expulsions, pillage, the whole gamut of tribulations.
Q. In your analysis of antisemitism as a historical phenomenon, do you find any progressions as to the themes or the stereotypes?
A. Yes.
Q. What is that?
A. The first prototype of them all is the Jewish deicide, as a murderer of God. This makes the Jew a criminal person, criminal people, for all time inescapable.
The variation on that theme -- and it doesn't mean that the archetype or the stereotype ceases to be the deicidal Jew -- is the criminal Jew. Superimposed upon it is the Talmudic Jew.
Q. What is meant by that phrase?
A. That is a Jew whose faith and behaviour and attitudes and dealings with other people are governed by the Talmud. The notion is that this requires of the Jew, as a religious obligation, to do harm, cheat, play all kinds of tricks on Gentiles, on Christians. He is not guided by any kind of moral law and so forth.
Q. Is there progression from the Talmudic Jew?
A. Yes. By the end of the 18th century and the 19th century, when Jews come to be defined as a race with a certain set of characteristics that make them dangerous predators and the danger of racial pollution of our pure race, a superior race, by contact and intermarriage with them is another manifestation which, I must say, simply reinforces the previous stereotype.
Q. Has there been any development or evolution in the late 20th century?
A. Yes. I think the closest parallel to the Talmudic Jew is the Holocaust Jew who supposedly has manufactured this great myth the way Jews have manufactured the Talmud out of earth, as one Pope complained. This becomes a substitute religion, a secular religion, and the Jew is identified by it, lives by it. This means that he bestows upon himself a moral shield of superiority or a victimhood and it gives him claim to reparation, restitution, et cetera, et cetera.
Q. Just before we look a little more closely at historical developments, I note that the name of your memorandum is "Lethal Antisemitism." What is the significance of the term "lethal antisemitism?"
A. Fatal, namely that the neighbours of Jews, the host society in which they dwell, are imbued with this ideology and these stereotypes. The logical conclusion to draw is that they are a danger, an enemy of God, this, that and the other, and they must be destroyed, they must be expelled, they must be gotten out of our midst so they can no longer do hurt and injury to us.
Q. I note the use of the word "chimera" or "chimerical" in association with lethal antisemitism. What is the connection between lethal antisemitism and that term?
A. The image of the Jew, the notion of the Jew, the belief of what the Jew is and does is unreal. It is a fantasy, a monster from the Greek illusions and so forth. This fantasy is by a process of reification translated into reality and acted upon.
The notion that Jews kidnapped young children and immolated them as a sort of second running of the crucifixion, that kind of thing, of which there is no testimony, no eye witness accounts and so forth -- the capacity to believe such things about Jews is what I call and Professor Gavin Langmuir calls chimerian.
MR. FREIMAN: I intend to go through a number of historical issues with Professor Schweitzer. Some of them have already been covered in the lengthy voir dire. It is my understanding that the voir dire is evidence in this Hearing as well as a separate proceeding. If I am mistaken in that, I will change the tone of the examination to ensure that some of the matters already dealt with in the voir dire are dealt with again in-chief.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Do you have any objection to that, Mr. Christie?
MR. CHRISTIE: Certainly there are two different issues. The voir dire on the issue of qualification is different from what is relevant now. I don't agree that it is automatically appropriate to take one piece of evidence and use it for another purpose. The questions should be different, from my point of view.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Perhaps we should proceed.
MR. FREIMAN: I will assume then that the Panel will excuse any repetition and understand it in terms of Mr. Christie's objection.
MR. CHRISTIE: It's Mr. Christie's fault.
THE CHAIRPERSON: That wasn't a word he used.
MR. CHRISTIE: No, I used it.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Go ahead, Mr. Freiman.
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, could we go back to the earliest origins of antisemitism in the common era. Can you identify where that comes from?
A. It comes fundamentally from the Patristic authors, St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom and so on, who are interpreting the New Testament. They are to Christianity in this former period in many respects parallel to the Talmud in the formative stage in the development of Judaism. Fundamentally, it is interpreting scripture.
Q. Can you tell the Panel, in terms of the interpretation of scripture, are there any central themes that emerge in the Patristic era in antisemitism?
A. Yes. The fundamentalist one that I alluded to previously, that owing to the Crucifixion the Jews are a criminal people, archcriminals, and their criminality is hereditary by whatever mechanism it was transmitted generation by generation. The Jews for all time will be archcriminals and will be prone to and dedicated to criminal activity. A clue to that is that, for example, the Crusaders shout out "Revenge, revenge on the criminal Jews, the murderers of our Saviour."
Q. That is one theme. Is there a second theme?
A. Yes. The second one follows from the Gospel of St. John, that Jews are not the children of Abraham, the children of God, but the children of Satan, so he is their master. They are his disciples and they are armed with his superhuman powers for evil and they are devoted to the ruination of souls, thwarting the divine will, and so on and so forth.
As in that passage, since Satan's nature -- when he speaks, he speaks a lie because such is his nature; he can't do differently. So, too, the Jews become the great liars, congenital liars or, as I say there, have lying and deception as weapons, and there is no truth in him or in them.
Q. Is the archetype of Jews as liars part of the second theme of Jews as descendants of Satan, or is that a separate theme?
A. There are two themes there. One is instruments of Satan and armed with his power and dedicated to evil, and the other is the lying. There are two distinct attributes, although they have the same origin in the same text.
Q. Are there any further themes?
A. Yes. In the Gospel of St. Matthew, the passage that is most quoted down the centuries by anti-Semites, where it has reference to the crucifixion and the trial. The Jews are made to acknowledge in that reporting that they know he is God, heaven-sent; they want his death; and they confess this in their arrogance, or whatever it might be; accept the curse that befalls them, or in the Patristic terminology, the malediction, and say, "His blood be upon us and upon our children to the end of time."
That has lots of ramifications. One of the most striking, which is brought up again and again in the sources, is the blood accusation, the ritual of murder accusation, and so forth.
Q. What is the blood accusation or ritual murder accusation?
A. I referred to that earlier. There are two forms. One is around the Passover or Easter season, in the spring, Jews come together from far and wide; it has a conspiratorial organization formed about it. They contrive to kidnap an innocent Christian child and they crucify him and torture him. This is done as a sacrifice or the ritual required by Satan, their lord and master.
Another is simply to kidnap Christians, innocent children or not, and to drain away their blood to be used for magical purposes, to put it in matzah and in the wine of Passover for medicinal purposes, magical purposes, ritual purposes and so forth. As distinct from the immolation based on the crucifixion, it is a kind of cannibalism.
Q. Are you able to discern any further themes, in addition to the four you have already discussed?
A. Yes. The notion of Antichrist is a central one to Christian explanation of why things didn't go as expected. It was hoped and expected that Jesus would return soon, very soon. He doesn't return. So what is the explanation? What is thwarting? What is getting in the way of divine providence?
First, it is a kind of abstraction, as though there were some kind of force out there that prevents this. Increasingly, this is personified as the Jew, or various definitions. It is equated with the Messiah that the Jews are praying for and hoping to come.
In an odd kind of inversion of the Christian story, the Antichrist is depicted as the offspring of Satan and a Jewish prostitute rather than a Jewish virgin. He is the "wandering Jew" and so on. He will rally all the Jews of the world, and they will re-establish. There is a whole library of these dramas in the Middle Ages. They will restore Judaism and sink Christianity beneath the waves of the earth, and they will reign despotically with exploitation, tribulation and so on, until after a given term, usually three and a half years which corresponds to the public ministry of Jesus, when he will be defeated. Jesus will return, the Second Coming, and it will be the end of time, the end of history, the inaugural of the reign of God, heavenly bliss, and so forth.
To explain why that doesn't come, it must be the fault of the Jews.
Q. Are these five Patristic antisemitic themes a fair and necessary interpretation of the gospels?
A. Absolutely not. I stand with Father Bruce Vawter, S.J., Society of Jesus, who says -- and he reflects the biblical scholarship and study that I invoked earlier, over the last two centuries, particularly since the Divino Afflante and most especially since Nostra Aetate, "If properly understood, the New Testament is not antisemitic." There is no necessity to draw the kinds of conclusions that the Patristic authors unfortunately drew.
Q. I would like to pass along with you from the Patristic period into the mediaeval period. Can you tell the Panel how the mediaeval imagination--
MR. CHRISTIE: Excuse me. Is that not a theological opinion we just heard, as to whether the early church fathers were right or the later biblical text is right? I understood that we were going to deal with history and somehow the history of ideas, but that last statement, I thought, was a very clear judgment or opinion.
THE CHAIRPERSON: I understood that, in part, he was referring to the opinion of Father Bruce Vawter and the opinion of current scholars and the papal encyclical Divino Afflante. I think that was the context in which he made the statement.
THE CHAIRPERSON: He said, "I stand with them." That is what he said. "I stand with Father Bruce Vawter, S.J., Society of Jesus."
This is clearly going to the realm of theological opinion, and this witness has never been qualified to express theological opinion and where he stands on theological matters. Unless this is an inquisition -- and it is beginning to look very much like one -- it is very clearly improper to have his opinion on matters of theology expressed at all.
THE CHAIRPERSON: He has not offered, nor are we taking, his opinion as a theologian. He is not a theologian, so I take your remarks as having some merit in the context of what we are talking about here.
I will ask Mr. Freiman to proceed on that basis.
MR. FREIMAN: I shall proceed on that basis but, of course, I then expect in final argument that I won't hear from Mr. Christie that Professor Schweitzer is a rabid, anti-Christian theoretician who turns his back upon the gospels and upon Christianity.
MR. CHRISTIE: Why shouldn't he? He has just expressed that opinion, and he has been allowed to express that opinion. You had no objection. He can say anything, it seems, as long as he relies on some non-existent witness by the name of Bruce Vawter, S.J. No one objects to that; no one has a problem with that. He is talking about the history of ideas.
Whether Bruce Vawter is a historical figure in the discussion of the Christian religion or not, we don't know. He could be a personal friend of the witness. This is why it is totally ridiculous.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Mr. Christie, you have the right to object, and you have. I have made a ruling. Please proceed.
MR. FREIMAN: Thank you.
Q. Let us turn now, Professor Schweitzer, to the mediaeval era. How were Jews conceptualized in the mediaeval imagination in Europe?
A. This is the chimeria that I referred to earlier -- the ritual crucifixion, the ritual murder, cannibalism, host desecration which is the Holy Host of Communion, the body of the Lord, which was believed and understood to have special potency and was stolen. Jews were accused of stealing what to them was no more than an unleavened piece of bread. They stole it because it had special powers for magical purposes, or they crucified it, they tortured it, they stabbed it, they tore it up, they stamped on it, and so forth -- host desecration. Poisoning of wells, poisoning of everything, and much else at that time.
Q. In your earlier testimony you talked about a double demonization. Is that concept of any relevance in understanding the mediaeval conception of Jews?
A. Double dehumanization.
Q. Double dehumanization or double demonization, I think, was the word you used.
A. If I did, I slipped. I meant "dehumanization."
Yes. We have the Jews assailed as supernatural entities, demons, and we have them assailed as animals, dogs and so forth.
Q. You spoke of a conspiratorial theory. Is that of any relevance to the mediaeval conception of Jews?
A. Yes. The Jews can do all kinds of strange, bizarre things. Like witches, they can fly through the air because of powers bestowed upon them by Satan. They are regarded, as I indicated, as a fifth column. We see some instances -- when the Muslims conquered Spain and Portugal, they did so with the aid of Jews as spies and so on.
The deprivations of the Vikings -- the most striking case of that is the 13th century when the Mongols were a formidable threat to Europe. Had the Mongols taken it into their heads to conquer Europe, they clearly could have done so without much resistance, but they were distracted by other things. For 60-or-so years, for the better part of the 13th century, they were standing on Christendom's doorstep. They had conquered almost the entire Eurasian land mass, so they would round it out by conquering Christendom.
The Christian world was terribly fearful, and they equated this menace, the khan, with the Antichrist, the hell-hound, which is a paraphrase out of Matthew Paris' rendering of this story.
Q. What role was attributed to the Jews in all of this?
A. The Jews were supplying the Mongols with weapons, with secret information, intelligence, and so on, and they were supposedly hailing the khan as the heaven-sent Messiah.
Q. I just want to clarify something. In your description of the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and again in your description of the Mongol invasions, you said things like Jews were supplying aid and comfort to the enemy. Are you making that statement as a historian about facts, or are you paraphrasing the mediaeval ideas?
A. This is the accusation that you find in chronicles, such as Matthew Paris.
Q. Were there any other natural phenomena or events about which the mediaeval imagination drew links with Jews and Jewish involvement?
A. Yes. Jews tended to be prominent as physicians, and medicine was not regarded as a science at all. It was magic hocus-pocus and so forth. The whole business of pharmacy -- there was good magic and black magic and white magic, and so forth. The success of a physician was assumed to be his capacity as a magician with superpowers, which tends to dovetail some of the observations I was making earlier.
The quotation from Martin Luther, who in this and in some other respects is quintessentially mediaeval, is: "They --"
The Jews at large.
"-- could kill us all, they would gladly do so, aye, and often do they do it, especially those who profess to be physicians. They know all that is known about medicine in Germany; they can give poison to a man of which he will die in an hour, or in ten or twenty years."
That kind of fear and phobia is the product of this chimeria.
Q. Was the mediaeval event of the Black Plague at all significant in the development of antisemitism?
A. Yes. The Black Plague wasn't really understood. The germ theory of disease was 500 years in the future. This was attributed to poisoning.
The Plague swept from the Mediterranean regions of Europe northward relentlessly like a moving front. The explanation was that the Jews were poisoning, that this was their revenge, part of their scheming. Even though it was noted by one of the Popes that the Jews suffered a high rate of mortality and had to buy additional land for cemeteries, and he interceded -- he tried to say, "They suffer at least as much as the Christians do" -- it was blamed on the Jews. It fit the chimerical pattern. They were massacred; they were expelled, and it went on.
1348 was just the first act. It goes on, and it returns. The intervals get longer and longer that Europe is suffering from the Plague. The last outbreak, I think, was in the early 17th century in eastern Europe, in Prussia and so forth.
While the casualty rate goes down as you come to the scientific revolution and a more rational explanation of these things, the casualties among Jews blamed for this remained very high.
Q. Earlier you referred to the concept of the Talmudic Jew. Does the Talmud figure as a theme in mediaeval antisemitism?
A. Yes. As I indicate there -- let me say that Jews were tolerated in Christian civilization because their religion was a biblical revelation.
The Talmud, once it was discovered, was understood not to be biblical revelation; that the Jews in some papal accusations had abandoned, renounced the Hebrew scripture, the Old Testament, and they had adopted this new religion which is of earth, not of heaven, as was said. The church concluded that the Jews had forfeited the right of being tolerated in Christian society, that the Talmudic religion is a heresy and, by definition, to the mediaeval minds, the kinds of lawyers and theologians, heresy originates with Satan.
As you see in the exposition, what was attributed to the Talmud was this series of injunctions to do harm to the Christians -- ritual crucifixion, cannibalism, et cetera. There was supposedly a special injunction to doctors to poison their patients; a doctor cannot be in good standing unless he poisons a certain percentage of them, and so on.
What you have in the Talmud is a kind of computation of these earlier antipathies, fears and phobias, giving another layer of justification and explanation.
Q. You referred earlier -- and we have to repeat some of the matters that you dealt with in the voir dire. What was the consequence for the Talmud of these beliefs?
A. The Talmud having been declared heretical was outlawed. Jews were required to surrender it. They were forbidden to retain copies of it. It was confiscated and carried, and in the ceremony of burning at the stake which was done with heretics, you had the Talmuds piled up and burned at the stake in a public square, in the Great Square of Paris on one occasion, and throughout. So efficient were they that very, very few mediaeval copies of the Talmud survived.
Q. Did churches and universities in Europe have any part to play in the dissemination of antisemitism?
A. Yes, the churches were imbued with these ideas, and the universities were church institutions. The Chancellor of the University of Paris was quite often also the Archbishop of Paris. The universities became centres where the Talmud was studied and where there were extracted from it all the texts and injunctions which require harm and evil to be done to Christians.
Q. Extending the definition of "mediaeval" somewhat later to the beginning of the Reformation, is there any connection between the Reformation and the developments in antisemitic thought?
A. Yes. There is not really a development. What you have is that some of the new denominations take over mediaeval antisemitism and make it a part of their heritage and tradition, give it a new lease on life and project it into the modern world.
The most striking instance of this is Martin Luther who is not only the creator of Lutheranism, evangelicalism, but launched the whole movement of the Reformation. Calvin takes a cue from Luther and others. Luther is central to a profound transformation of European religious life, both negatively in the challenge to traditional ways and positively in new modes of religious life. He is a remarkable person, a person of great courage and the courage of his convictions. He almost singlehandedly defied the powers that be of church and state. "Here I stand. God help me," he said on occasion.
He excoriated the Pope as Antichrist, denied papal authority. The canon law -- I don't quite remember the term, but he dismissed it as barbaric rubbish, or something of that sort, and mystic theology with it and scholasticism. He wanted to return to Patristic authors, St. John Chrysostom and so forth.
He took over the antisemitism and sets it down. He was a marvellous writer of German prose, one of the great stylists, with passion in his letters, and so forth. The letter in which this is expressed makes it that much more compelling. The fact that it is Luther who says this makes it undeniable, irresistible to the faithful, not just the Lutherans.
I would note that his treatise of 1543, toward the end of his life -- he died three years later -- centres on one of these archetypes, one of these motifs, "The Jews and their Lies." He defines Jews in terms of lying, genius, and all their other evil propensities would seem to stem from that.
Q. Is antisemitism endemic to the Protestant Reformation at its beginning?
A. No. In Calvin, not at all. Really, it is a mystery. Why did Luther go to the extreme in one way and Calvin in the other? Calvin is philosemitic.
The Calvinist communities in Holland and so on returned to the Old Testament, the Hebrew scripture, and tried to model their lives on it in a literal way. They named their children for its heroes and heroines, such as Abraham Lincoln and so forth. There was always a sense of gratitude for the scripture, for the ethics, for the Saviour, and so on in Calvinism.
Q. Do modern scholars and historians of the Protestant Reformation, in Protestantism and in Lutheranism in particular, consider antisemitism to be key to that movement?
A. They do historically, and they regret it and lament it. They have gone very far -- not as far, I think, as the Catholic church has gone, but they are not far behind -- in rectifying, in acknowledging. There is some apology, and perhaps it is appropriate, but the essential thing is that in their Sunday Schools and in their seminaries they teach the origins of Christianity and of the Protestant denomination in keeping with our historical understanding and theological understanding.
One Lutheran minister, also a historian, said to me very succinctly, "Luther was not God. We are not bound by his words. That treatise of 1543 has just been put behind the books on the shelf." I can't speak with any authority, but as he conveyed to me, Lutherans, to be Lutherans, are bound by a statement of faith written by Melanchthon after Luther's death, based on Luther in large measure, called "Confession of Faith."
They are not tethered by Luther's work. They can go to Luther's works; they are invited, as it were, to do so because he had profound insights on the nature of prayer, on mystical communion with God, reflection and so forth. So there is great merit, and they can have the benefit of that without being -- there is absolutely no necessity to be burdened by his condemnation of the Jews and Judaism.
Q. What role, if any, did the use of Jewish texts themselves have in the mediaeval development of antisemitism?
A. As I mentioned, once the Talmud was discovered and understood and seen to be the essence of Jewish religious life and practice, they therefore forfeit halloration. This opened the door to conversion. The Franciscans and the Dominicans particularly try to carry out an epic, grand-scale effort to convert the Jews to Christianity. One of the devices they used was to go through the Talmud and Hebrew scripture which uses several Hebrew words for "God." One of these, which I have mentioned here just as an instance, is "Elohim" which is plural.
What did that mean to Raymond Martini? It meant that the Jews, the liars, know the truth, but they are such inveterate liars that they won't admit it, even to themselves; that Jews really believe in the Christian Trinity.
The use of Jewish texts -- as I quote at the end of that section, St. Vincent Ferrer, who was one of these golden-mouthed preachers with a mission to convert the Jews. with the greatest goodwill in the world, said: "We should not kill the Jews with knives, but with their own words. We will quote their teachings, and they will see the light and accept our proffer of baptism."
Q. Let's turn from the mediaeval period to the modern period. What is the Enlightenment, and what changes, if any, occurred with the Enlightenment to antisemitism in Europe?
A. The key to Enlightenment thought is secular, anti-clerical, anti-religious, almost a superstition, so I refer to secular antisemitism. I might perhaps say that that is ominous in the sense that the mediaeval Christian sense of the Jew was ambivalent. All of what we have seen -- the fear, the hatred, the detestation of Jews, the criminality and the ill-treatment. There was a check on that because the Jews remained theologically indispensable to Christianity.
This is what is called, from St. Augustine, the "witness theory," the witness theology that the Jews, by their presence, by their degradation, by their suffering, by their scripture, testified to the truth of Christianity and we need to have them around until the Second Coming, until the end of time -- I think this is in St. Paul and also in St. Augustine -- when all will be gathered into the fold and there will be an end of Jew/Christian, male/female, slave/free, and so on. It will be the reign of God.
There was a restraint. I earlier referred to St. Bernard of Clairveau, "Leave them to God." He doesn't want them destroyed, even though he says many nasty things about them that we have seen in earlier connections. They must be preserved. They are part of the providential scheme of things.
When you come to antisecular antisemitism, that restraint is gone.
Q. Are there any leading figures in the development of secular antisemitism?
A. Yes. At the forefront of them stands Voltaire who carried out a kind of negative crusade against Christianity, the bodyguard of reaction, of spiritism, anti-science, anti-anything. He saw with absolute truth that Christianity derives from Judaism; it is its parent.
In trying to "écrasez l'infâme", which was his motto --
Q. For the purposes of the record, could you translate that, please.
A. Destroy, crush the infamous thing, meaning Christianity. In order to do that thoroughly, you had to rip up its roots and destroy Judaism as well.
Q. Were there images in Voltaire's writing or any themes in Voltaire's writing with regard to the Jews?
A. He is nasty and condescending. He disliked Jews. He refers to them as dirty and so on. They are money-grubbers.
If you read a fuller account, what makes them money-grubbers? Their religion. He cites them for that. They are worldly; they are material -- money and begetting children. He also refers to them as eternally alien. They are vagabonds, wanderers. They come and they fleece us, siphon off the wealth, and then they move on to pickings somewhere else.
His solution is the Enlightenment solution. He couldn't leave them alone or leave them to God, as St. Bernard would. He wanted them to cease to be Jews, which is comparable to conversion in the Middle Ages -- that they would simply cease to be practitioners of their religion, cease to live apart. Their mores would disappear by assimilation, which I say is a cultural form of annihilation.
He had a Jesuit education, so he knew the Bible and all the theology. He knew the Patristic authors. He quotes them like a computer and uses them for his polemical ends. He is good at quoting all kinds of texts, Jewish texts among others, to ridiculize them and so forth.
Q. What was the Jewish emancipation? When did it occur? Let's start with that.
A. The case for Jewish emancipation -- that is to say, civil rights, civil and political equality, the right to vote, to hold office, to pay an equal rate of taxes, et cetera -- is propounded by the Enlightenment and its secular key. It is translated into legislation by the French Revolutionists, first in 1790 and again in 1791, which means that the Jews are free and equal citizens like the rest, like the Hugenots who suffered from the same kind of disabilities in France and the majority of the Catholic population. They are all equal at the starting gate, with an equal right to education, entry into professions, economic callings, and so on.
Emancipation was initiated in France. Over the next three-quarters of a century or so it was progressively enacted in one country after another: in Britain in 1858; in the new Germany of Bismarck in 1868; in Switzerland in 1871-73. Then it was held off in Russia in 1917, not by the communists but by the previous government of Kerenski.
The development is emancipation, liberation, freedom, breaking people's bonds.
Q. Did this emancipation of the Jews have any effect on antisemitism and on themes in antisemitism in Europe?
A. Yes, because the Jews no longer had the ball and chain on their ankles holding them back, and off they went to the races, and they won in every sphere of human endeavour -- in the arts, scholarship, the professions, business, industry, you name it.
I attribute that to two causes. One is the emancipation which was long anticipated, and also because the Jews -- this is in Josephus: We value education. Our ideal is not the king, not the man of power, not the wealthy merchant. We don't love merchandise. Our ideal is the scholar. For centuries, of course, it would be the religious scholar and the nice phrase, "He who studies through prayer," or "He who prays through study."
This belief in education as the jewel without price and the growing access, as the decades of the 19th century roll on, of Jews to education seems to me to explain this. One scholar has compared the Jews in 19th century Europe to 5th century B.C. Athens, with Thucydides, Aristotle or what have you, as a tremendous cultural flower.
Q. How did this increasing success in various areas for Jews affect antisemitic themes?
A. The idea seemed to be, "We can't compete with them; they have such an advantage." Why do they have an advantage? Some of these motifs that we have seen earlier, in the 18th century, have been languishing, namely, they have superhuman powers, this conspiratorial thing, they work together to gain all the prizes, and so forth. As things went on, they became wealthy, influential, prestigious, and so forth. They begin to get elected to public office, and they begin to be prominent in political parties -- and I don't know specifically, but I am sure in a disproportionate way to their members in the population-at-large.
So the fear, the phobia -- they are taking over; they are going to eclipse us, and so forth -- becomes one of the dominant themes of the 19th century, from the 1880s onward.
The reference I have to Richard Wagner is another manifestation of this. He minted the term, as far as anyone can tell, "Verjudung," Judaization, and it took various forms: that the Jews, so prominent and so successful and riding higher and higher, are a source of danger and infection. The metaphor of disease and infection goes back to the Black Plague and those sorts of thing. That a Jewish composer is vitiating German music and German culture and institutions, you get this vague but powerful notion of a Jewish spirit that is seeping in upon us, into our institutions and our culture.
Religion was another one, with the German soul and so on. They are taking over in that sense as well, and it takes drastic action to deal with that.
Q. Did this find any residence in historical work?
A. Yes. Not one of the greatest historians but one of the most widely-read in Germany and central Europe was Heinrich Treitschke. He was a professor at the University of Berlin which was the greatest university in the world, a professor of political science. As I indicate, he is the one who minted the term much used by the Nazis and emblazoned their party rallies and so forth, "The Jews are our misfortune."
He took up the Jewish question, which was almost inevitable, inescapable, in this time, given the concern that the Jews are more and more successful and prominent, so he had to address that question. He does so in dual terms, national and racial, rather than religious. He detested particularly the east Jews, so many mediaeval apparitions with their caftans and sidecurls and so forth, very unGerman and so forth.
He found the Jews a distinct nationality. He does not make the case, though, which is perhaps implicit, that the Zionist solution would be the right one for the Jews: Let them have a national state of their own and normal arrangements for people. In Germany they are alien.
One of the racial doctors had it that the mixture of Jew and Christian, the offspring is always Jewish, the eternal Jew. As Bismarck is supposed to have proposed, you could never breed the Jews out of existence by German stallions and Jewish mares because the offspring would always be Jewish and we would always have this alien, this outsider, this foreigner, and that is what Treitschke is getting at. They can't be German; they are unassimilable -- and their Shylockism.
Q. Did observations such as those of Treitschke and Richard Wagner have any consequences in terms of political programs?
A. Yes.
MR. CHRISTIE: Is this witness now going to tell us the origin of certain political programs? I suppose the history of the world should not be limited in any way, but I wasn't sure that he was a qualified political philosopher, although I suppose it is consistent with everything else he has done.
MR. FREIMAN: I am baffled by the objection.
MR. CHRISTIE: Maybe I should stop my friend from being baffled.
It seems to me that this person has opinions on everything, and nobody seems to object if he expresses opinions on the origin of political ideas and the origin of political movements. There is such a thing as political philosophy; there is such a thing as political science. They are separate disciplines from history. It is very seldom that I have run into a historian who claims to know everything about the history of the world, but this one does.
I object because I think, frankly, we are getting the sermon according to Dr. Schweitzer, the history of the world by Schweitzer, and it is of absolutely no value.
MR. FREIMAN: The value, of course, will be judged by the Panel, fortunately for the Commission, not by others. The evidence is absolutely unassailable. Professor Schweitzer is a historian of Jewish history, including antisemitism. If antisemitism or if some of the antisemitic themes, such as those that Dr. Schweitzer has been testifying about, crystallized into political movements, they of course become part of the history of antisemitism, in fact perhaps a central part of the history of antisemitism.
I still am baffled as to how a historian would not be qualified to speak about political movements.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Do any other counsel have comments?
MR. KURZ: I don't know how you could precisely cut out the political -- when you look at historical events, how you could simply and surgically cut out the political aspects that lead to movements. For example, how could you talk about the history of the German Nazi regime without talking about some of the ideas that it formed? I don't believe that goes outside of the bounds of what a historian does.
He does not claim to be a political philosopher or a political scientist, but there is always an overlap between various disciplines. Sometimes what one says may overlap on what another member of a different discipline may have to say. The point is that, as a historian, he cannot divorce himself from some of the more basic political aspects, and that is basically within the bounds of his expertise.
MR. ARMSTRONG: It seems to me that what the witness has said is that this phenomenon of antisemitism, which he has traced historically, has religious roots, social roots, economic roots, political roots, and that is all he has done. He is describing the historical development of this phenomenon.
We can clearly link what we heard him say in the voir dire to the situation that faces us today and the very issues that this Tribunal has to determine.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Is there any reply?
MR. CHRISTIE: We are basically in a sort of intellectual madhouse, where this expert can say anything he likes about the origin of political ideas. The other gentlemen seem to think that is just fine. These people seem to think that it is permissible for a witness to testify about the origin of ideas when he is not a participant in the formation of those ideas, he is not a political scientist or a philosopher of ideas. It is, in effect, a licence to give his version of the history of the world.
I object to it because I think frankly, although we could all have people with opinions about the history of ideas and the origin of political movements, it is, in effect, allowing him to be an expert beyond the scope of any legitimate expertise.
THE CHAIRPERSON: It seems to me that this line is following the theme of his evidence and within the realm of the description from a historical point of view of the history of antisemitism as this witness sees it, and I will allow him to continue.
MR. FREIMAN: Since I have asked a question that is hanging, if we intend to take an afternoon break, this might be an opportune time.
THE CHAIRPERSON: You are starting a new area?
MR. FREIMAN: I will pick up the question of political implications. If you would like me to continue with that and stop at the 20th century, we can do that as well.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We will take 10 minutes now.
--- Short Recess at 3:38 p.m.
--- Upon resuming at 3:53 p.m.
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, before the break I asked you whether the reaction to Jewish emancipation, the response to which by Richard Wagner and Heinrich Treitschke you discussed, was associated with any political ideas or programs.
A. Yes. The demand, essentially, was to reverse emancipation, to disemancipate the Jews, to restrict them by quotas in professional schools and things of that sort, to limit Jews from entering the country, from gaining residence and citizenship, in the 1880s the fear of eastern Jews being the pogroms of the czar and blocking them from entering Germany to make their way to ports to enter elsewhere. They had become the prisoner of a fear of the Jews, and they tried to throttle them or limit them or checkmate them.
They were very opposed to or fearful of Jews controlling the press and permeating it with the Jewish spirit. One of the things you find is that Jews came to be schoolmasters as a product of emancipation, university professors and so forth. There was a fear or a concern, and they wanted to limit that or to prevent it altogether.
As the decades go by, these fears become more extreme. The demands become more extreme. They proposed various solutions of expulsion. They used various words which it is not precisely clear what they may literally have meant. They may have meant several things. When Wagner says, for example, "Go under," that could mean any number of things. The sense of those designations is: Some desperate action must be taken; otherwise, we will be overwhelmed.
In fact, as you can read in the Wilhelm Marr book: We are already overwhelmed. The Jews are publicly proclaiming the world historical triumph of Jewry. In every area of life they have taken over, and so on. For 1,800 years this has been going on.
Q. Before we proceed to talk about Wilhelm Marr and his significance, I just want to clarify with you, Dr. Schweitzer: During this secular period, what you have called the secularization of antimsemitism, does that mean that mediaeval themes were abandoned and forgotten?
A. No. Antisemitism is a chameleon. It takes its colouring from the background and transposes itself, like a musical composition, from a religious to a secular to a racial key, but the archetypal pattern, the conception, is very much the same.
Q. You mentioned the modulation into a racial key. What is the significance of the concept of race in the development of antisemitism in the 19th century?
A. With religion, conversion solves the problem. With race, there is no solution to the problem because a race is a race and you cannot change it. Especially, you can't breed them out of existence because the offspring is going to be a Jew, the eternal Jew, and so forth.
With the Jews defined as a race, the ante goes up and the solution becomes necessarily more extreme.
Q. You mentioned Wilhelm Marr. What is the connection between Wilhelm Marr and the concept of antisemitism?
A. He is the inventor of the term which, up to then, was the Judaophobia, Jew-hatred, Jew-baiting, et cetera. This is the secular note. He wanted to divorce it from religion. He was atheistic -- I don't know quite what he was, but he was not a religious believer or practitioner. He wanted this problem to be dealt with scientifically, so he agreed to the term "antisemitism" which has a nice kind of latinizing, scientific impartiality or a scientific objectivity, if you will.
Q. What were the themes of Wilhelm Marr's antisemitism?
A. For all the science of it, he defined the demonized Jew as powerful as ever. The "slyness and fraud "-- that is the lie. "A state within a state," the notorious empire within an empire, and so forth. The "stubbornness and endurance of the Semites" -- as he is a racist and the idea that the offspring of a Jew and an Aryan was a Jew is this so-called scientific principle, so the problem will never be resolved in that way.
The Germans, Deutschdom, are being subverted, swallowed up by this monster, Jewry. "Deceive all his oppressors" -- representing himself as Mr. Victim and having a tactical advantage, as it were. "Continuously waged a war of cunning against everything non-Jewish." Germany is now the pivot of all of this. What is developing in Germany and near its culmination is going to radiate out elsewhere. "Autocratic hegemony" -- these are the terms of geo-politics and politics, and he sees it scientifically and in political terms.
"They rule us. We are bound hand and foot, head and heart, from the palace to the lowly hut."
As I note there, this is the first draft of "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."
Q. Earlier you talked about the double dehumanization in terms of a portrait of Jews alternatively as supermen and as subhuman. You have discussed in Marr's work the portrait of superhuman Jews. Is there also a corresponding portrait of subhumanity?
A. Yes, we see that in Hermann Ahlwardt who was a schoolmaster. He was an agitator and a pamphleteer. He sat in the Reichstag, and he is a kind of catch-basin of all the stuff that is floating around in the air. He finds the Jews are a race and, therefore, have to be assimilated; there are no remedies for that kind. They are predators, parasites, bacilli, cheats, exploiters, scoundrels, and so forth. They do not stand in the cultural soil of labour, meaning that what they produce is not real goods, true wealth. That is agriculture. What the Jews do is manipulate the stock market and so forth, which one school of economic theory defines as sterile. Wealth was gained, for example, by taking interest. Usury was sterile, not true wealth. The Germans produced true wealth. The Jews, with this dissembling and profiting in the stock market and bankers calling the shots so that the interest rate goes up and down as they would wish it and the stock market likewise -- that is the sort of thing he is getting at there.
We are in their grip, so we perish. It's a life and death battle. That is what he said in a speech to the Reichstag, the German parliament.
Q. You mentioned, Professor Schweitzer, the preoccupation by this individual with the idea of Jewish modes of creating wealth as opposed to Germanic modes of creating wealth, and you talked about the sterility of stock market and usury. Is that a new theme, or is that a theme with some history to it?
A. It has a long, long history, mediaeval like so much else. Jews in the mediaeval world were merchants, bankers. They began as merchants, as peddlers with a pack on their back. That was in the Dark Ages, so the record is not very clear.
What is clear is that Europe was economically a simple, agrarian society, with the manor or estate of the nobleman or the monastic community with its village of 60 or 70 peasant farmers that worked the land, and was as economically self-sufficient as they could possibly be. Travel was difficult and uncertain. There were marauders on the roads, and so on.
There were some things that they depended upon. For example, there was a trade in fish in inland areas, required by the church's liturgical calendar. Salt was in demand for preserving food, and items like ploughshares. The share element of the plough would wear out and have to be replaced, and so on, which was minute in the life of Europe. That need was met by these merchants with a pack on their back who came, some of them from Spain, some of them from Islamic countries, who came from countries where economic activity was normal and was not frowned upon; whereas, in Europe, as the expression is often quoted, "The merchant will come to heaven only after the camel has come through the needle's eye."
Mediaeval Christian Europe was economically simple, backward, agrarian. There were very few urban communities with trade and industry that one associates with them.
This theological view prevailed -- in fact, it goes back to a waiting for the return of Jesus which would be soon. In the meantime, concern yourself with heavenly treasure and be like the birds and flowers in the field, and you would risk your life by trafficking in worldly things, merchandising and so forth. Suffice to say that there was a profound antipathy, a condemnation on economic activity and the accumulation of wealth, profit-making. Charging usury was a sin of the most heinous kind. The church declared war against usury and usurers for several centuries.
With the revival of Europe in the 11th century, to some degree a by-product of the Crusades, and in the 12th century you get urban communities in the Low countries, and the merchant function becomes more and more important. The scale gets larger. Inevitably, I suppose, in a familiar human way, what is necessary becomes respectable and acceptable, and Christians become merchants. The scriptures diminish, and the Jewish merchants are displaced, partly because they could not compete with organized Christian guilds of merchants and they could not enter those because they could not take the oath of a Christian. Also they were forced out just by sheer force.
They needed to find a living, so they landed on their economic feet in the sense that they went from commerce, merchants, into finance, into banking. Over and over again we have this pattern in Jewish economic history. They function as a catalyst, as pioneers, and we have the same pattern. This rose in scale and importance. The royal monarchies and the governments that emerged required complicated financial transactions, and for a while Jews performed that indispensable function.
Again, the pattern is that necessity causes a release or a relenting on the scriptures, and Jews are displaced, and the pattern repeats itself, by force sometimes and by an inability to compete, and then they go off to some other economic realm. Literally, they go off to eastern European countries, Bohemia, which is the Czech Republic and so forth now, and they go through the same pattern, and then a century later to Poland and so forth.
Usury was condemned by the church in canon law. It was put in the same category with murder, with arson, with heresy which is the worst of all crimes. The author of heresy is Satan. Jews come under this kind of condemnation and pressure.
There is an interesting, complicated story, but suffice it to say that this goal as pioneers, being displaced, entering another economic following or creating one or going to a new area is the pattern of Jewish economic history over and over again.
What happens is that at some stage the country, England where the record is clearest, begins to have merchants and financiers who can take over these functions. They are there; whereas they had not been earlier. It reflects the economic history of the various kingdoms of Europe, that you see this pattern.
In the 19th century they are regarded as tremendous competitors and supposedly they could compete with them. They proposed all kinds of resolutions -- by barring them, by taxing them at a double rate, and so on.
Q. As we move into the 20th century, is there any particular relevance to a document known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or the Rabbi's Speech?
A. The Protocols incorporate the Rabbi's Speech, which was from a novel in the 1860s. It is plagiarized by the concocters of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and, in turn, a new version of the Antichrist thesis -- conspiratorial, taking over in order to dominate, exploit, destroy, and what have you.
Q. Just before we proceed, you have included at tab 3 the text of the Rabbi's Speech and excerpts from a book called "Antisemitism in the Modern World" from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
I wonder whether this might be made the next exhibit on Dr. Schweitzer's testimony.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Is there any objection?
MR. CHRISTIE: I objected before to this, so I won't repeat myself.
THE REGISTRAR: The document found at tab 3 will be filed as Commission Exhibit HR-17.
EXHIBIT NO. HR-17: Excerpts from "Rabbi's Speech" and from "Antisemitism in the Modern World," found at tab 3 of Commission's Brief of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Briefly, Professor Schweitzer, can you tell us what the text of the Rabbi's Speech and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion purport to say?
A. The Chief Rabbi is giving a speech, and he is setting forth the aim which is to create a great world power state under Jewish auspices and everyone else will be compelled to submit, will have to knuckle under. The various means that are used for making wars -- the longer, the better so that the opposing sides will use up their resources and fall into debt with us and come into our power.
One of the things that the Rabbi's Speech encourages is speculation, and you get trapped into debt from that as well.
As I suggest, I might confine myself to The Protocols which is simply the Rabbi's Speech magnified.
Q. Before we proceed, can you set the scene for us? What, in fact, is said to be depicted in The Protocols? What do The Protocols put forth to record?
A. The Protocols are a meeting of the Elders of Zion, of the leading rabbis, the leaders of the Jewish people. There are many, many editions of The Protocols. Some have the title "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." In many it is the Chief Rabbi or the Rabbi who is speaking. In others it is Satan, with his minions. This is as mediaeval as you can get. In others it is Theodor Herzl, which is a clue to the date; it is probably the last years of the 19th century. This may be the centennial, 1898. The first Zionist Congress met in Basle in 1897 and was presided over by Theodor Herzl, so he is made in some versions the speaker, the one who presides and holds forth about the Jewish plan for the conquest of the world.
Q. You have already told us some of the means by which the Jewish conquest of the world is purported to be encouraged in The Protocols. You have mentioned control of the press; you mentioned speculation. Are there other themes that emerge in The Protocols as being attributed to the world Jewish conspiracy?
A. Yes. One of the weapons is freedom generally, free thought which leads to doubt and skepticism. It undermines and weakens precious traditions and institutions. The power of gold -- gold is our god, the golden calf, and Rothschild is its prophet. The power of gold is such by which we will supplant and destroy the power of faith in God. The power of money, one of which is speculation, and money which we alone dispose by controlling the stock markets, et cetera, et cetera.
In that connection it is urged: Our power is invincible. Why is it invincible? Because it is invisible. Also, we want to promote all the vices: debilitation -- drug addiction is not there, but I suppose today it would be -- alcoholism, white slavery, and things of that sort, which will demoralize the youth and give us an increasing hold over the masses, a grip on the masses.
Then we promote all the "isms". One would infer from the text of The Protocols that we Jews have no convictions about anything except power and wealth, wealth and power. We use all these "isms" from left to right -- socialism, Marxism, communism, democracy, liberalism. Restoration of the monarchy seems to reflect the situation in France. These were all banners that we wave to rally this segment and that segment of the population --
Q. Dr. Schweitzer, let me interrupt you for a moment. When you use the plural "we, " are you referring to yourself there?
A. No, I am using the voice of The Protocols.
Another is bribery, fraud, terrorism. "Terrorism" is used about half a dozen times in the edition of Protocols that I am familiar with. I mentioned the long wars which would be inconclusive and dragged out. Then universal economic crises -- runaway inflation; the inflation of 1923 was said to conform to this exactly; depressions; panics. I reference the 1890s edition to the 1873 panic which was a terrible one.
By that means, we will generate antagonism. Resentment will become increased. We will generate revolt. We will lead the masses. We will overturn the classes and the powers that be, and they will fall into our hands. This universal economic crisis will pave the way for our fight, as we did it in the French Revolution which was "of our hands."
Control of the press has been mentioned.
An interesting thing is the reference to the metaphor of the great god, Vishnu, from Indian mythology -- I retract that; from Indian religion. Vishnu had 100 hands, and here the Jews are like Vishnu, with 100 hands, conspiring relentlessly, and so forth.
Q. Professor Schweitzer, does this image of Vishnu have any other metaphorical manifestations?
A. Not to my knowledge.
Q. I was referring to a multitude of hands or appendages.
A. In cartoons Jews are depicted as monsters with these extremities that encircle the globe.
Q. What is the historical status of The Protocols? Is there anything known about their origin?
A. They are an outright forgery of the most obvious kind.
Q. Why do you say "the most obvious kind?"
A. Vishnu, for example, comes from a satire on Napoleon III, which dates from before 1870 when he was overthrown. If you compare text to text, you will find that 40 per cent of The Protocols is derived from this book by Maurice Joly, which went by the title, "A Dialogue of Machiavelli and Montesquiou."
The criminal, cruel, brutal devices that are set forth in The Protocols as those of the Jew come out of the pages of Machiavelli, plagiarism.
Another large portion of it comes from the Rabbi's Speech, and that is an interesting story in itself. The Rabbi's Speech appears in a novel in 1868 or 1867. In the middle 1870s the Speech was detached and appeared as an essay, and it was said, "This is fiction. However, it is true to life."
As you go on to a couple of other editions, it is avowed that the Speech of the Rabbi is an authentic Jewish document, that it depicts an event that occurred and a speech that was given.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Are you speaking here of a historical consensus as to the origin of The Protocols and Rabbi's Speech?
THE WITNESS: Yes. This will be found in a book by Norman Cohn called "Warrant for Genocide." The Protocols were proven to be a forgery by Philip Braise who was a reporter for The Times of London in the Ottoman Empire. Britain and the Ottoman Empire were enemies, belligerents. He was in Istanbul as a reporter for The Times of London, and he found a book with the cover gone and proceeded to read it and recognized that this was The Protocols, a work that he already knew. That is the starting point for the truth beyond all possible doubt that they are a forgery.
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. In fact, Professor Schweitzer, was this the subject matter of a trial?
A. Yes. In Switzerland it was a genuine trial. The persons called to testify were qualified, and they were not grinding any axes. Their conclusion was that this was a forgery. The judge in his decision found that this was such an oddball concoction of the most obvious kind that he dismissed it with contempt.
Q. Did The Protocols have any importance in 20th century history?
A. It explains disasters. It is of Russian provenance. It was manufactured by the Russian Secret Police. It was used, for example, to explain the Russian defeat in the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905. It was used also to explain the revolution, which that failure in war triggered, and the attempt to create a constitutional government with a parliament, the Duma.
It was used to explain the onset of World War I. That is the great Armageddon that the Jews have contrived in order to weaken the powers and sap their strength, and we will sit on the sidelines and take over at the opportune moment.
It was used, par excellence, to explain the Russian defeat, although it was not used to explain the German victory. It is sort of a re-run of the 1904-1905 and the revolution; that is all explained in terms of The Protocols.
In Germany, which was one of the first countries to receive The Protocols, it was used to explain the defeat in the war, the stab in the back, the November criminals as they came to be called, the revolution of November 1918 that overthrew the monarchy of the kaiser and established a democratic, socialist, Marxist republic in Bavaria and then in the country-at-large.
The reparations that were inflicted on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles -- the same explanation of the treaty itself. The Weimar Republic and its constitution was drawn up by a constitutional convention, but its principal author was a Jew. There is the strategic Jew in the strategic place.
One of the points that is made in The Protocols is that Jews are democrats, that they use it as a kind of pulverizing, softening-up mechanism to break down hierarchies of ordered authority, to generate chaos, and to fragment political life of parties, with fractionalism and so forth. This was built into the Weimar Republic presumably by the author of its constitution.
Also, as I mentioned, the 1923 inflation, which was horrendous -- there are still in my family's possession marks; I think there is one that is 10 trillion marks. The ratio at the worst stage was seven trillion marks to one dollar. That was the nefarious, cosmic conspiracy of the Jews.
Then 1929 is the same explanation.
One of our weapons is antisemitism. One would gather from that provision of The Protocols that antisemitism has no real existence, that there ain't no such thing, that we masquerade as victims; that is part of how we --
Q. Again, Professor Schweitzer, who are the "we?"
A. The conspiratorial Jews, the authors of The Protocols.
This has a double purpose. It makes us morally -- it commends us in some way to the public opinion, the world-at-large. We capitalize on that in material ways. Also it is the way that we maintain our own cohesion and solidarity. The humble Jews were perhaps not so given to our supreme ambitions, but are coerced and compelled by the bogey of antisemitism that is held out to them. That is still another weapon. There is no end to it.
Q. I want to get to the connections between The Protocols and Nazi ideology, especially the writings of Adolf Hitler, in a moment. To get to that, I wonder if you could tell us: Is Hitlerian ideology entirely of modern provenance or are there older features in it?
A. No, it is old, definitely. My judgment is that it represents a remarkable continuity with forms and manifestations of antisemitism that we have seen here today, going back to the 12th and 13th centuries.
Q. In what way?
A. For example, the Jew as the personification of a lie; the Jew as Mammon; the Jew as economic despoiler.
Q. Can you synthesize, to the extent that it is possible, the nature of Hitler's antisemitism and the themes that run through it?
A. As I say at one point, Hitler often spoke with mediaeval accents. He says. "There cannot be two chosen people; this is God's honest truth. We Germans are God's people, and the Jews are Satan's people."
Also the question of capitalism, exploitation, usury and so forth is one of the Jewish weapons. It is also Satanic; it is also the Devil's creation.
Q. You have included in this collection of documents an excerpt from "Mein Kampf" at tab 4. You have highlighted a number of sections.
I first ask that tab 4, which is excerpts from "Mein Kampf" be made the next exhibit.
THE REGISTRAR: The document found at tab 4 will be filed as Commission Exhibit HR-18.
EXHIBIT NO. HR-18: Excerpts from "Mein Kampf" found at tab 4 of Commission's Book of Materials for Dr. Frederick Schweitzer
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. With reference to tab 4, can you comment on some of the features of the ideology that arise from "Mein Kampf", especially in terms of its portrayal of the Jew and its perspective on Jews?
A. The portion I have highlighted on page 83 is an echo of The Protocols plan:
"-- the anxious question suddenly occurred to me whether perhaps inscrutable Destiny, for reasons unknown to us poor mortals, had not unalterably decreed the final victory of this little race?"
Hitler says elsewhere, "The fewer the Jews are, the more dangerous they are, and the most dangerous Jew is an intellectual Jew." Perhaps we see the intellectual Jew in the passage at the bottom, using Marxism.
This is, in miniature, Hitler's theory of history:
"The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle in nature;"
That is hierarchy, authority, from the top down through several levels, the chain of command.
"-- instead of the eternal privilege of force and strength, it places the mass of numbers and its dead weight."
That is the Jew as democratic intriguer and, now with the communist ideology compounding it, disrupts. That is the means by which the Jews disrupt the hierarchical ordering of authority and inaugurate chaos. This is how he explains the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Aryan Jesus, with his pure Aryan message and mission, was destroyed by the Jew, St. Paul, who created Christianity, another variation of Judaism, as a way to have this effect --
MR. CHRISTIE: Is the witness reading something?
MR. FREIMAN: No, he is not.
THE WITNESS: I am explaining an interpretation of history that this text reflects.
MR. CHRISTIE: At this point, I take it we are allowing the witness to express his view of the interpretation of pages 83 and 84, involving something to do with St. Paul. Is there any limit on this witness' --
THE CHAIRPERSON: Are you referring to any particular page in tab 3?
THE WITNESS: No, I am giving an example of this generation of chaos and disorder by which a great empire collapses. Hitler gives any number of examples.
MR. FREIMAN: Perhaps I can elucidate.
Q. Professor Schweitzer, is the material that you are talking about simply your interpretation or are you citing something that was actually written by Hitler?
A. Yes.
MR. CHRISTIE: Where is it?
THE WITNESS: It is elaborated by Hitler in his Table Talk, in his speeches.
MR. CHRISTIE: So this is the way this operates. I am trying to understand.
The witness looks at pages 83 and 84 and then he gives us something to do with St. Paul, but he goes to something to do with Hitler's Table Talk that we don't have. Is that the way this works? I am trying to understand this.
THE CHAIRPERSON: We were speaking about tab 3, so you are leaving us slightly confused as to where you have gone.
THE WITNESS: Mr. President, I was trying to give one example, of which there are many, that Hitler provides us with of how this process works to destroy a state system, hierarchical order, and how that is vitiated and turned into chaos by Jewish activity -- democracy, Marxism and so forth -- as the preparation for implementing the plan of Jews to take over.
MR. FREIMAN: In my submission, the witness, as a historian familiar with the writings of Adolf Hitler, is entitled to draw on that familiarity, to draw parallels with other works that that person authored, and to draw linkages to Hitler's philosophy. He is not limited to these very words.
If Mr. Christie wants chapter and verse from "Mein Kampf", I guess we can spend the evening finding the citations.
THE CHAIRPERSON: I think where the confusion arises is that we didn't know whether the witness was leaving the text of "Mein Kampf" and going to another source.
MR. CHRISTIE: We didn't know what the source was either, for that matter. I had no idea.
THE CHAIRPERSON: Perhaps you can proceed from there.
MR. FREIMAN:
Q. Professor Schweitzer, what are you relying on in terms of your description of other matters with which Hitler dealt that you say are similar to this theme and that elucidate this theme?
A. Elsewhere in recent sources, in "Mein Kampf" and in Table Talk --
Q. Just so those who have not had the experience of perusing this work, who might not know what Table Talk is, what is that?
A. It is the conversations of Hitler with his inmates, his intimates, his cronies, usually late into the night, from the late 1930s and continue until early 1941. There are a couple of entries from 1942 and even in 1944; there were perhaps seven or eight after 1942. The bulk of the Table Talk is from the early years of the war well into 1941. Much of it talks about the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
He talks about any subject on the face of the earth -- Rome, and the greatest tragedy of human history, the fall of Rome. The explanation is the one I tried to give.
The passage that is highlighted farther on is the last instance that is drawn from this process:
"If, with the help of the Marxian creed, the Jews conquer the nations of this world --"
And I take that to be all the nations of this world.
"-- his crown will become the funeral wreath of humanity, and once again this planet, empty of mankind, will move through the ether --"
This is not Nature's way. It is transgressing the law, this democratization and generation of chaos.
"Therefore, I believe today that I am acting in the service of the Almighty Creator: By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord's work."
Of course, the Jews are doing the Devil's work.
Q. Could we turn over to page 420. Can you tell us what see there in the highlighted passages that is of note?
A. Yes. This we have seen before several times:
"He is --"
The Jew is.
"-- and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who, like a harmful bacillus, spreads out more and more if only a favorable medium invites him to do so. But the effect of his existence resembles also that of parasites; where he appears the host people die out sooner or later."
He sucks out all the vital life.
Q. And down at the bottom of the page...?
A. More of the same.
"In the Jew's life as a parasite in the body of other nations and States, his characteristic is established which once caused Schopenhauer to pronounce the sentence, already mentioned, that the Jew is the 'great master of lying.' Life urges the Jew towards the lie, that is, to a perpetual lie, just as it forces the inhabitants of northern countries to wear warm clothes."
Q. What do you see there in terms of the residence with your earlier testimony?
A. These are the conceptions, the very terms that we have seen over and over before. As with Luther and others, he makes lying an essential characteristic and a source of power, opportunism. When you see their conduct and behaviour, it is to be understood in terms of the lie.
Q. What about the passage on page 421?
A. This is where he is arguing that the Jews are not a religious entity, but a racial one. They deck themselves out as a religious community, and it is a masquerade, as a lie. As a religious community, they can come and filter themselves among us as Frenchman or Americans or Germans, and so forth, and we welcome them. After all, there is a denomination of this and a denomination of that, and this is another denomination.
Then the disguise is thrown off.
"In order to lead an existence as a peoples' parasite, he is forced to deny his inner nature. Now the more intelligent the individual Jew is, the more will he succeed in this delusion. It can even go so far that great parts of the host nation finally believe in all sincerity that the Jew is really a Frenchman or an Englishman, a German or an Italian --"
But he remains a Jew; he remains alien.
The argument here is the eternal lie.
Q. At page 422...?
A. This is the carnal Jew of the Patristic authors' material, worshipping the golden calf. He says in the top paragraph:
"Indeed, the Talmud is then not a book for the preparation for the life to come, but rather for a practical and bearable life in this world."
Then in the highlighted passage:
"His life is really only of this world, and his spirit is as alien to true Christianity, for instance, as his nature was two thousand years ago to the Sublime Founder --"
Who, of course, is Jesus Christ.
"-- of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of His disposition towards the Jewish people, and when necessary --"
He whipped them out of the Lord's temple, and so forth.
The notion there is that this is not religion of the spirit of the future life and reward for moral goodness; it is a religion of greed, only a means for his business existence.
"But for this, of course, Christ was crucified, while our present party Christianity --"
go and badger for votes.
This first and greatest lie, a religious community rather than a race, gives rise to all the others. Everything follows from that.
Q. What about at the bottom?
A. Here we come to Hitler's immersement in The Protocols. As you read "Mein Kampf," you will find echoes, resonances, paraphrases, quotations over and over. Here we have the central idea again:
"How far the entire existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown in an incomparable manner and certainty in the 'Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion,' so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are supposed to be a 'forgery' the Frankfurter Zeitung --"
Which, I am sure means a Jewish newspaper -- moans and groans once a week that they are a forgery. That is for him, as for others, the truth that they are really genuine.
Then, to nail it down:
"-- they demonstrate, with a truly horrifying certainty, the nature and the activity of the Jewish people and expose them in their inner connection as well as in their ultimate final aims."
Now it is out and we are on to them just in time, and we can avoid the calamity.
Q. Returning to your text at page 13, you cite a prophecy that was made by Adolf Hitler. What is that prophecy, and what is its connection to The Protocols?
A. This was a speech in January 1939. The war did not break out until September of that year. The quotation is from Hitler, of course. It could be from the literal adaptation from The Protocols:
"If international finance Jewry --"
International finance Jewry is the bankers and also the Marxist-Communists. They are international, and equally conspiratorial.
"If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples into another war, then the end result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth --"
Which, presumably, is what the Jews are aiming at.
"-- and the consequent victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,"
Q. I won't ask you to comment on that, but only inquire as to whether there is some importance to the constant connection of Jewry and Bolshevism or Marxism in these texts.
A. Hitler said on one occasion, "Communism is nothing but Judaism with a little philosophical tinsel thrown over it."
As I work in this area, I am brought up short every once in a while when I am compelled to recall that Hitler had three final solutions: one for the Jews; one for communism; and one for Christianity. The trouble with these latter two was that they were both Jewish. As he explained on one occasion, "You can't be German and Christian, one or the other."
Q. Was The Protocol world view influential in other figures within the Nazi circle?
A. Yes, many of them. I mention in passing Goebbel's propaganda ministry.
Q. What is the significance of the Goebbel quotation?
A. The 300 secret Jewish kings. This is The Protocols of the Elders. All you have to do is checkmate them, and then everything will fall into its proper, benign place. The people of this world would at last find their peace.
Q. I understand, Professor Schweitzer, that you have made a special study of the life and writings of Julius Streicher. Can you tell us who he was, what his significance is, and what his views were about?
THE CHAIRPERSON: Excuse me. Before we deal with Julius Streicher, we will break and resume tomorrow at 10 o'clock.
MR. FREIMAN: Thank you.
--- Whereupon the Hearing adjourned at 4:50 p.m.
to resume on Tuesday, May 12, 1998 at 10:00 a.m.