Peter Hayes > Quotes

“In short, the 1870s illustrated the force of the remark that antisemitism rises and falls in inverse relationship to the stock market. In that decade, when the market crashed, bigotry rose.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Martin Luther gave the most extreme voice to these prejudices when he discovered that Jews were no more willing to convert to his version of Christianity than the one he claimed to have reformed. He urged Christians to burn Jews’ synagogues, schools, and homes and subject Jews who would not convert to forced labor.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Why the Jews? Because an ancient tradition of blaming them for disasters, both present and prospective, a tradition deeply rooted in religious rivalry and superstition, persisted into the modern world and even assumed new forms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Antisemitism became institutionalized in elite and conservative society rather than in laws.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive traits. In other words, antisemitism is the belief that Jews have common repellent and/or ruinous qualities that set them apart from non-Jews. Descent is determinative; individuality is illusory.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The Holocaust was the product of a particular 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, deeply rooted in religious rivalry but updated with the trappings of modern science, turned into a fixation on removing Jews from civil society as a magical solution to all social problems.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Christians both took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“catastrophically bloody and ultimately stalemated Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught Catholics and Protestants the necessity of coexistence.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“By the time of the Reformation in the sixteenth century, hatred of Jews was widespread, and it had crystallized around two central generalizations: (1) that Jews were parasitic profiteers, intent on extracting wealth from Christians, and (2) that Jews were incorrigible instruments of Satan, intent on serving his purposes and afflicting the pious.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Although some ancient Egyptian and Greek texts express animosity toward Jews, the rise of intense hostility to and fear of them largely coincides with the rise of Christianity. The relationship between adherents of the two religions always has reflected a paradox: The two faiths were both very similar and very different, which created intense competition.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“dissatisfaction with the nation’s political and economic condition, along with fear of communism, the votes for which also were rising, clearly had more to do with Hitler’s ascent than hatred of Jews.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Thus the emergence in February 1879 of Wilhelm Marr and the new word “antisemitism” came as the culmination of a decade of rising reaction against emancipation.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Christianity declared that Jesus heralded a new Covenant that replaced Moses’s, that the old laws were now obsolete, and that election to the status of Chosen People was now open to anyone who accepted Christ and the teachings of the Bible and the new scriptures.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“the Panama Scandal of 1888–92, centered on widespread bribery of French officials and parliamentarians in order to obtain loans to finance a French company seeking to build a canal through Panama.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Opportunities to get out of Nazi hands were widest in 1933–34 and again in 1938–39, but very narrow in the years in between or afterward.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The survivors who came off best were Jewish Germans who managed to flee the country before the Holocaust or who survived it somehow on German soil.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The veneer of civilization is thin, the rule of law is fragile, and the precondition of both is economic and political calm.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“by expelling them”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The xenophobic form sees Jews as different from others in some observable respects, and its adherents exhibit varying degrees of discomfort with this difference. The chimerical form sees Jews as dangerous to others in some imagined ways, and its exponents advocate doing something in response.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“But he also refused to issue a special order to let the refugee ship St. Louis land in the United States or even in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as offered by that territory’s governor and legislative assembly and advocated by two members of FDR’s cabinet.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“but rather inner identification with evil.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“For non-Jews in Europe, the top priority in the Middle East is not the survival of a Jewish state; the top priorities are political calm, access to oil, and sufficient economic development of the region so that its burgeoning and overwhelmingly young population does not swamp Europe’s declining and aging one.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Antisemitism is a categorical impugning of Jews as collectively embodying distasteful and/or destructive”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“invention of the new word antisemitism. The invention marked an ominous qualitative change, in that the new form of hostility focused not on what Jews believed or how they behaved but on what they intrinsically and unchangeably supposedly are.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“The SS experimented briefly in 1944 with using Hollerith cards and tabulators to steer the deployment of camp inmates to work sites but soon gave up on the idea.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“This written instruction, unlike any document ever discovered about the Holocaust, connects Hitler directly and in writing to a murder operation, the so-called Euthanasia Action. Known bureaucratically as T4, an abbreviation of the street address of its main office after April 1940, at Tiergartenstrasse Nr. 4, in the center of Berlin,”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“These deals allowed Switzerland to seize the heirless Swiss assets of dead Polish and Hungarian citizens, most of whom were Jews, as compensation for the nationalization of Swiss property in these newly communist states.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“Psychologists call this sort of mental mechanism, in which beliefs conform to behavior rather than the other way around, a response to “cognitive dissonance,”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust

“the average cost of murder per head ultimately came out to about two German pfennig (pennies) a person, which is to say less than one U.S. cent in 1942.”
― Peter Hayes, Why?: Explaining the Holocaust