From: goldberg@techunix.technion.ac.il (Jacques Goldberg)
Subject: Re: Violent antisemitism?
Organization: Technion, Israel Institute of Technology
Date: Sun, 6 Sep 1992 09:12:01 GMT

hayim@locus.com (Hayim Hendeles) writes:

>One question though: Contrary to public opinion, a government is
>not a mindless entity (although it often acts as such), but rather
>consists of individuals. Most probably, it consisted of Polish
>individuals. So how was it, that the individual Poles were
>anti-semetic, but the collective government not (according to your
>theory) ?
   Dear Hayim,
    I would have expected from a learned person as I know you are to be
more careful in reading what I wrote.
    Your contradictor practises a well known propaganda intoxication technique
known as "amalgamating", that is, take a little bit of set A, a little bit of
set B that overlaps the samll subset of A, and use it to  "prove" that A n
and B are identical. To which the best and only possible response is to
build a wall between A and B, which I tried to do.
    Your contradictor, for example, replied to me that Spain was less
antisemitic than any other place because there were no Jews there: their
number though, today,is of the same order of magnitude as in Poland, and we 
have not heard reports that groups of tourists visiting Spain had been
insulted or subject to tomatoe or other projectile throwing. Also, your
contradictor probably does not know that the Franco regime, which I
unambiguously condem, did not do during WWII what neutral Switzerland did,
to return to the Nazis, groups of Jews that had crossed the border. Both of
you may want to know that with my parents we spent 6 months in a closed French
hotel on the France-Spain border, the owner was passing people (both ways,
Jews out, underground in, with weapons) almost every night, but my father 
could not reach enough walking condition: we had visas to go to Palestine,
others had visas to Cuba, you could get there from Spain. Again I have
always been deeply anti-Franco, but this is not a reason to lie on facts.
    So back to you Hayim: I had written that the Polish government had
not ALWAYS been so antisemtic as the non Jewish Poles, that's all. You
missed the NOT ALWAYS. Also I repeated and repeat that Poland was not
independent during long periods of times, but split among kingdoms (in
the USA, you of course can't imagine a King taking no account of his
subjects' feelings, you have elections  from time to time, don't you...)
who were more busy fighting each other than expelling Jews on their
frontiers, which I claim is why so many Jews lived in Poland. The  populace
was anyway doing the job for them. What your contradictor does not understand
is that the Jewish population could have been increasing in such proportions,
in spite of being constantly suject to violence. He must explain that
thru immigration. He just does not know that this had identically occurred
before in Jewish history, in Egypt.

    Questions to your contradictor:
    1-does he agree that there has been a pogrom in Kielce in 1946?
    2-was this organised or supported by the 1946 Polish government?
    3-how  many Jews were there in Kielce say in 1800, 1850, 1900, 1938,
        1946?
     4-was Poland an independent State in 1800,1850,1900,1938,1946?
    Warning: again, my Mother was  born and grew up in Kielce, and I have
all the necessary documentation to answer these questions.
>Hayim Hendeles
      Yaaqov (Jacques) Goldberg

Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish