Book chapter
Judaism and Stealth Altruism
Stealth Altruism, pp 17-28
2017
Abstract
This chapter explores a second motivator of significance in the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, namely, altruistic religious tenets. Altruism-supporting tenets in Judaism teach "the love of God is unreal, unless it is crowned with love for one's fellow men". Throughout the Holocaust these tenets connected twentieth-century European Jews with a three-thousand-year-old Jewish history that relates "suffering, and resilience, endurance, and creativity". Every camp had its own mix of ultraorthodox, orthodox, conservative, reform, agnostic, and atheistic Jews. Many Jewish prisoners were helped by rabbinical relaxation of religious strictures that might have otherwise fatally weakened them. Zionism was held to blame, as its proponents had forgotten there could be no Jewish State until the Messiah had returned. Secular Jewish prisoners and even some progressive religious ones were outraged by the notion that their suffering and the cold-blooded murder of their loved ones was a deserved punishment, one somehow mitigated by a tenuous link to the eventual arrival of the Messiah.
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Details
- Title
- Judaism and Stealth Altruism
- Creators
- Arthur B. Shostak
- Publication Details
- Stealth Altruism, pp 17-28
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Edition
- 1
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Sociology; Culture and Communication [Historical]
- Other Identifier
- 991020705437604721