Yossi Schwartz, ISL the section of the RCIT in Israel/Occupied Palestine, 02.05.2022
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attacked Ukraine and its president Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday during an interview in Italy, claiming that “the fact that he is a Jew does not negate the Nazi elements in his country. I belive that Adolf Hitler also had Jewish blood.” [i]
FM of Israel Yair Lapid said in response that “The Jews did not kill themselves in the Holocaust. The Nazis killed my grand- father. This makes me angry not only as Foreign Minister but as the son of my father. To say that Hitler was a Jew is like saying: “The Jews killed themselves” [ii]
“The use of the Holocaust of the Jewish people as a political tool must cease immediately.” [iii] Said the PM of Israel
There is a speculationthat Adolf Hitler had partial Jewish ancestry. This speculation originated by the Nazi leader’s personal attorney Hans Frank — who served as governor-general of Poland during the Holocaust. However Historians have disproved this claim of Hans Frank — that Hitler’s paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, had been impregnated by a Jewish man while employed as a cook for the Frankenberger family in the city of Graz.
Richard Evans, author of “The Third Reich Trilogy” and former president of Cambridge University’s Wolfson College, stated that “even if there were Jews living in Graz in the 1830s, at the time when Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was born, this does not prove anything at all about the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather…There is no contemporary evidence that Hitler’s mother was ever in Graz, or that there was a Jewish family called Frankenberger living there. There was a family in Graz called Frankenreiter but it was not Jewish. No correspondence between Hitler’s father or paternal grandmother has ever been found. Nor is there any evidence for Frank’s claim Hitler’s half-nephew knew about it and was blackmailing Hitler, as Frank claimed” [iv]
Many of the same arguments were made by British historian Ian Kershaw in his 1998 book “Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris.” In it, he noted that the “son of Leopold Frankenreiter and alleged father of the baby…for whom Frankenreiter was seemingly prepared to pay child support for thirteen years was ten years old at the time of Alois’s birth” [v]
It is not only that historians deny that Hitler had partinal Jewish ancestry but the entire line that Jewishness is determined not by belief in Judaism and shared some common culture but by genetic should be rejected as a form of racism.
“The Nazis sought a legal definition that identified Jews not by religious affiliation but according to racial Anti-Semitism. Jews in Germany were not easy to identify by sight. Many had given up traditional practices and appearances and had integrated into the mainstream of society. Some no longer practiced Judaism and had even begun celebrating Christian holidays, especially Christmas, with their non-Jewish neighbors. Many more had married Christians or converted to Christianity. According to the Reich Citizenship Law and many ancillary decrees on its implementation, only people of “German or kindred blood” could be citizens of Germany. A supplementary decree published on November 14,1935 the day the law went into force, defined who was and was not a Jew. The Nazis rejected the traditional view of Jews as members of a religious or cultural community. They claimed instead that Jews were a race defined by birth and by blood. For the first time in history, Jews faced persecution not for what they believed, but for who they—or their parents—were by birth. In Nazi Germany, no profession of belief and no act or statement could convert a Jew into a German. Many Germans who had never practiced Judaism or who had not done so for years found themselves caught in the grip of Nazi terror. While the Nuremberg Laws specifically mentioned only Jews, the laws eventually extended to Black people and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) living in Germany. The definition of Jews, Black people, and Roma View This Term in the Glossary as racial aliens facilitated their persecution in Germany” [vi]
In Israel a Jew is defined in a similar way to Nuremberg Laws. A Jew is anyone who was born of a Jewish mother (or has undergone conversion to Judaism according to halachah Jewish law). You’ll never hear of an atheist Protestant or a Catholic Muslim, but a Jewish atheist, or even a Jew who converts to another religion, is still a Jew because he/she has a Jewish blood as he/she was born to a Jewish mother. A person who was not born Jewish and has not converted according to Jewish law may hold all the beliefs and keep all the laws and practices of Judaism and still not be a Jew.
David Barkey, the senior counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, told Ha’aretz that defining Jewish people as a distinct race, is a common claim of neo-Nazi groups and yet the definition who is a Jew as used in Israel is of a distinct race.
Harry Ostrer’s book, Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People and Raphael Falk, Zionism and the Biology of the Jews, does not use the term “race” explicitly in these books, in large part because the term is so loaded. Nevertheless, there is considerable discussion of the Jews as a race or, using a less charged word, as a “people”.
Raphael Falk who was professor emeritus of genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel, has argued that: “Zionists claimed that Jews maintained their ancient distinct ‘racial’ identity, and that their regrouping as a nation in their homeland would have profound eugenic consequences, primarily halting the degeneration they fell prey to because of the conditions imposed on them in the past”. [vii]
It is ironic that the PM of Israel, the state that make use of the Jewish Holocaust all the time for its political gains and to cover for its war crimes, will tell Putin not to use the Holocaust as political tool. It is like a camel telling another one: “I see you have an hump on your back”.
The fact that Lavrov has used the claim of Hans Frank that Hitler was a Jew to justify war crimes just shows how shallow and racist is the Russian propaganda, but the Zionists who are racists do not have the credentials to denounce this racism.
Down with Russian, American and European imperialists!
The main enemies of the workers and the oppressed are the imperialists!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.jpost.com/international/article-705627
[ii] https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/1.10774447 (In Hebrew)
[iii] https://www.timesofisrael.com/lapid-denounces-russian-fms-unforgivable-claim-that-hitler-had-jewish-blood/
[iv] https://www.timesofisrael.com/historians-cast-doubt-on-hitler-jewish-heritage-
[v] Ibid
[vi] https://encyclopedia.ush
[vii] Raphael Falk. “Zionism and the Biology of the Jews, page 58