Winston Churchill, it turns out, wrote an article in 1937, three years before he started leading Great Britain in which he addressed the wave of anti-Semitism sweeping across Europe and the United States at the time, and which would culminate in the Holocaust. It was withheld from publication — too hot, even for then — even for England. What did the Great Man think was the problem?

The central fact which dominates the relations of Jew and non-Jew is that the Jew is “different.”

He looks different. He thinks differently. He has a different tradition and background. He refuses to be absorbed.

Churchill was right. I agree with everything he says, and so does the Jewish tradition. We may quibble over whether “the Jew” truly “refuses” to be absorbed in a conscious way, or whether instead he cannot be absorbed because he looks, thinks and springs from difference.

In fact Jews have absorbed, millions of them, and to a large extent by choice. In Western Europe alone large portions of the population have Jewish blood coursing through their veins. In America assimilation is a fact. You might also say that the ones who do get absorbed aren’t really Jews any more so they are no longer a “problem.” But the Jews always manage to spring up a stubborn branch of different that indeed will not be absorbed.

That doesn’t justify oppression or prejudice, and Churchill did not, from the excerpt available, attempt to justify it. He just laid it on the line: They’re not like everyone else. To the extent that that gets under peoples’ skin, people are going to lash out. Not because of the difference, though. Because the difference, rather, is a statement that causes resentment. The statement is: We Jews have a special relationship with God.

That riles certain people up. Now, why it does is a good question, since almost every religious group in history, and many national and ethnic groups, have made the same exact claim without getting everybody so angry. William Norman Ewer (not Hillaire Belloc!) wrote:

How odd of God

To choose the Jews

Lots of people understand why it’s not odd. Churchill may not have, but this article doesn’t seem to suggest anything but sympathy, limited by his own class’s attitudes — the suggestion implict, for example, that assimilation would be a good thing. This is an attitude that is as old as the Jews, and certainly beats the alternative. There’s no question that Churchill’s attitude toward the Jews, and Jewish-related questions, was complex (though complexity should not be confused with incoherence) and he was a complex man with a complex set of responsibilities, influences and goals.

But this attitude, and Churchill’s comment, do miss the point: The Jews’ job in this world is to be the Jews.

UPDATE:  David Kelsey agrees, down to the choice of picture.  Great minds?…

I wrote last month about the opening of the definitive archive of the Holocaust in Germany, called the International Tracing Service, which was featured in this extraordinary report on 60 Minutes. That segment said that the archive was finally, after years of being — for no particularly good reason — closed to the public, going to be opened. But Anne Applebaum, writing in Slate, says that “although commission members are meeting in Holland this week, supposedly to make final arrangements, it’s still far from clear that they will finish the process soon.” She’s naturally upset about that, and rightly so.

There is sense in this world, even when the Hand of God is not so evident, as Jews were reminded last Sunday in celebrating the holiday of Purim. The Book of Esther commemorates that Hidden Hand, describing how a seemingly unconnected series of events and “coincidences” in ancient Persia resulted in salvation of the Jews from yet another plot to destroy them all. To the Jews it is elementary that, through all the Purims of history, Providence directs the events. Sometimes we need the perspective of many years to understand why awful things are perpetrated in this world.

So once again, in Persia — not ancient Persia, but one which resists modernity with a vengeance — awful events, such as the threat by the national leadership to annihilate the Jews of the region, the staging of a neo-Nazi “Holocaust Conference,” and a bizarre obsession with The Jews — may perhaps act as something of an historical spur to the urgent need to unlock the archives. The purpose is not to bask in Holocaustism (one of the worst religion-replacements Western Jews have yet invented) but to take the cap off the memory hole so truth and horror may be seen, and learned from. If learning is still at all possible.

UPDATE: Turnabout! And then some.