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Goldhagen v. Augustine



Two days ago (as you reckon time, oh real-time reader of these prepared-for-vacation notes) I said that I am thinking of writing something about the historiography of the Holocaust.

Somewhat related to that ambition: I see that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, a very high-profile social scientist, formerly an associate professor of political science at Harvard, has a new book out called  The Devil That Never Dies.

From what I've heard it is not so much as history as a work of personal meditation on the past, present, and future of anti-Semitism.

 It is also the object of a very sharply worded critique in the September 13th WALL STREET JOURNAL by Anthony Julius. Julius says that he is himself of Goldhagen's "party," that is, anti-anti-Semitism, but ... to do the good work of that party one has to be a "smart, truth-telling" participant in the "terrible struggle" against the enemies of the Jews. And this, Goldhagen is not.

I shouldn't comment on this review, since I haven't read the underlying book and don't know whether Julius' various particulars behind this charge are accurate. Still, the bit about Augustine draws my own antiquarian interests.

Julius says that Goldhagen cites as an example of St. Augustine's anti-Semitism this passage (an apostrophe to God) from Augustine's CONFESSIONS: "How hateful to me are the enemies of your Scripture! How I wish that you would slay them (the Jews)."

Those final two words in the parenthesis aren't Augustine's. That is easy enough to confirm in this era of GoogleBooks. Without working too hard at it I find what seems to be a somewhat different English-language translation, but what is clearly the same passage, to which I have just linked you, dear reader.

The passage, early in a chapter title "Of the depth of the Sacred Scripture, and its enemies" reads:
 "The enemies thereof I hate vehemently. Oh, if Thou wouldest Slay them with Thy Two-edged sword, that they not be its enemies!

So it does appear that Julius has a point, that Goldhagen inserted the phrase (the Jews) into the passage to help us along with its interpretation and with the inference that it fits his thesis, which seems to be that anti-semitism is ubiquitous in western culture.

I won't argue that you couldn't find good prooftexts for this thesis in Augustine. But I am not inclined to see this as one of them. Looking over the context I see that quite near to this statement Augustine refers favorably to God's "servant Moses" as the author of the book of Genesis, and that (not a New Testament text) is the only specific "scripture" he seems to be referencing here.

It seems that the enemies of scripture Augustine had in mind were the Manicheans, the dualists/gnostics of his time who thought that the material world was the creation of a demon, that the good God had created only the spiritual world.

Genesis tells us that at each step in the creation of the material world, God "saw that it was good." This is an idea the dualists., who identified matter with evil, had to discredit. Thus, they were the "enemies" in this passage.

Yes, the talk of dispatching theological enemies with a sword, or even hoping that God will do so with a metaphorical sword, is still a rather blood-thirsty habit of mind. but the passage doesn't seem to work for Goldhagen.

Unless, then, there is some qualification of this point in Goldhagen's book (again, I wouldn't know -- haven't read it -- take my bloviating no more seriously than it warrants): unless there is some qualification not presented by Julius, this would seem a sound objection.
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  1. HenrySeptember 22, 2013 at 7:15 AM

    Let me save those who follow through to Christopher's two links from the effort I expended. When I clicked on "Julius says that Goldenhagen," I got a WSJ article that is available to subscribers only. But, when I googled "The Devil That Never Dies by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen," the second hit was the article, readable in full. Then I discovered that it will not go into the print format, so I had to print as it appeared.

    When I clicked on the link to GoogleBooks, I got 12 results, none of which was, on its face, the one Christopher quoted. I discovered it to be the page 328 result, but, after opening it, I found that I had to scroll down to page 329 for the quotation.

    By the way, editorial additions to quotations, such as "the Jews," should be in brackets, not parentheses. Christopher correctly quoted Julius as using parentheses, and, if Julius correctly quoted Goldenhagen, then Julius could have added that (admittedly less significant) mistake, to Goldenhagen's others.

    Julius's criticisms of Goldenhagen do not surprise me, because I recall that Goldenhagen's 1996 book, "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which received much attention, was widely criticized as being tendentious.

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