Gotz Aly. Europe against the Jews.

Usually, the books are being commended because of their visionary ideas. But, sometimes, there is a need to commend a book not for its prescience but for the courage of the author to enunciate the obvious. Gotz Aly succeeded in clearly representing two ideas: first, that the Shoah was not an aberration but an end to a relatively long tradition of Eastern European anti-Semitism and that the instant push to Shoah was the degeneration of Wilsonian idea of "self-determination" into an ethnocratic state--in most of the Eastern Europe, and, second that the dynamics of the Shoah was much less related to the race and religion, and that in many countries it was rather looting, rape, confiscation of the Jewish assets and real estate, which were the main drivers. 

For that, his book was chastised by Steven Zipperstein in the New York Times. He wanted the book to be faithful to Snyder's vicious assertion that the Russians are guilty of everything--and to relate the murderous streak in the European anti-Semitism exclusively to Russian pogroms, which were, in his opinion, whitewashed by Gotz Aly. But there is no lack of information, including statistical data, concerning pogroms beginning from 1882 to the Russian Civil War. Some of this information is garbled, surely, for instance peasant leader Makhno was no anti-Semite--he was surrounded by the Jews, including the head of his secret police Leva Zadov--so feared that long thereafter mothers scared unruly children by him. This was the inner dynamics of peasant guerilla armies that led to mass murder of the Jews in Ukraine by the anarchists. But his general narrative--for instance, that the Tsarist Government, surely no friend of the Jews, did not have any coherent policy of dealing with them--was ridiculed, rather than refuted by Zipperstein. Similarly, Aly mistakenly says that the Kishinev 1903 pogrom went without consequences. It shocked the whole world and resulted in overwhelming turning of the US public opinion in favor of Japan in the Russo-Japanese War. (see the contemporary gravure by E. M. Lilien, a Jewish-German painter). Not that the pogroms were unique for the Russian Empire--neighboring Romania was also engulfed by anti-Jewish violence before the Second World War. 

However, the strongest examples in the service of Aly's own theses were omitted in the book--namely, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and Holland. In all these nations, only a minuscule fraction of Jews survived, near-zero in the case of Estonia--it was attested by Heidrich at Wannsee Conference in 1942 as judenfrei as an example to other, more "backward" nations--and in none of these states history of the racial or religious persecution played any role. 

Two main ideas of Gotz Aly were earlier enunciated by this author--may be, not in such clear and well-documented form. But I am not upset, for it requires his stature and popularity to move the connection of the emergence of the ethnocratic government--newly reborn state of Estonia in 1990 proclaimed its goal to achieve "monoethnic Parliament" well before the term "ethnic cleansing" became popular in the Balkans--to genocidal policies against minorities.  

Muraresku, Brian. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of Religion with no Name.

     

Muraresku wrote a remarkable book, where decent exercise in amateur archeology and anthropology is mixed with a complete madness, to a strange result. It is quite probable that the antique cults of Demeter and Bacchus, especially in Early Antiquity, were accompanied by orgies, drug taking and human/animal sacrifices. It would be quite strange if it were otherwise. 

However, to suggest that there was a direct inheritance line between Late Bronze Age cults and esoteric teachings of the Early Modern Europe suppressed by the Inquisition  is madness. First, many tribal groups--predominantly Germanic, which dominated Europe after the Fall of the Roman Empire had neither genetic, nor cultural relationship to the civilizations of European Antiquity. It would be again strange, if these Germanic invaders were not taking "magic mushrooms" or some other form of hallucinogenic drug and did not participate in sacrificial rites, but this is not the same as the existence of a cultural continuity.