Summary of Peter Hayes's Why?

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

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#1 The author has made a career out of attempting to make the Holocaust accessible and memorable. He brings to this book his unusual training as an economic historian, which helps him see the importance of numbers and their significance.

#2 This is not a book about the Holocaust, but rather a book debunking the myths surrounding it.

#3 The term antisemitism is a misnomer, since it implies that the hatred of Jews is a recent phenomenon. It is actually a very old hatred, and it has always been collective in nature.

#4 Antisemitism is a misnomer. It is actually a very old hatred, and it has always been collective in nature. It has varied in strength over time, from xenophobic to chimerical forms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350032215

IRB Media

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Insights on Peter Hayes's Why

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 8

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The Holocaust is a difficult subject to understand, and it is often explained away as being unfathomable and inexplicable. However, these words attest to a distancing reflex, an almost instinctive recoiling in self-defense.

#2

The Holocaust was the result of a specific time and place: Europe in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution and the upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. These were the contexts in which ancient hostilities toward Jews and Judaism, updated with the trappings of modern science, turned into a fixation on removing Jews from civil society.

#3

Antisemitism is the hatred of Jews as a collective. It is the belief that Jews have common repellent and/or ruinous qualities that set them apart from non-Jews.

#4

The history of antisemitism has been complicated, and can be traced back to the differences in the strength of its xenophobic and chimerical forms. The origins of the words highlight the distinction: Xenos is Greek for stranger, guest; chimera is Greek for a mythical fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.

#5

Christianity took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism. It proclaimed monotheism, but declared Jesus the son of God and thus divine. It added the Gospels and other books as new revelations of God’s will.

#6

The time frames specified on the chart indicate that distinct frameworks for criticizing Jews developed in those periods, but that does not mean that the new ones erased the old ones entirely. Some people remained antisemitic in the 1940s for reasons developed during the first period.

#7

The first horizontal block in figure 1 is about the long period of European history in which the dominant framework of thought was religious and the central question that determined or legitimized ideas and policies was What does God want or demand. The Church had to do a balancing act between two contradictory obligations toward the Jews, as stipulated in the doctrine of Jewish witness.

#8

As the Church began to separate itself from Jews, it could not completely get away with hostility towards them. People periodically lost sight of the theological reasons why Christians should treat the Jewish religion differently from all other religions, and they would lash out at Jews, especially in times of adversity.

#9

The sixteenth century was when hatred of Jews became widespread, and it was crystallized around two central generalizations: that Jews were parasitic profiteers, and that they were incorrigible instruments of Satan.

#10

The Age of Enlightenment, which was the precursor to the Age of Revolution, was a time of liberation and freedom for people to improve the world. It was a time when people stopped concentrating on theological matters and instead focused on the human and natural world.

#11

Antisemitism, the third horizontal bar in figure 1, is the hatred of Jews because of their inherited and common qualities. This was the result of a shift in intellectual and public life from What does God want. to What material or physical laws govern us.