By Shlomo Wagner | 03/09/2009
On the face of it, the Harry Potter stories take place in a fictional "Wizarding World" that has nothing to do with our universe. On the face of it, these tales deal with the struggle of one boy with extraordinary abilities against the forces of evil that threaten to take over the world. Shlomo Wagner The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,
offers an unexpected reading an ostensibly safe place
of Harry Potter
The Harry Potter series opens on the day of the defeat of the Dark Lord, Voldemort, the most gifted and evil wizard ever to exist. Voldemort is the leader of a racist group that seeks to "cleanse" the Wizarding World of the Muggles - ordinary humans like ourselves - who have entered it. Voldemort and his followers have labeled the wizards born to Muggle parents "Mudbloods," and they seek to exterminate them. Voldemort is defeated and disappears at the height of his power and success, but not before managing to kill two of his greatest enemies from the Order of the Phoenix, the parents of the one-year-old Harry. It is not clear what force brings Voldemort down, but he is overcome by his own "killing curse" during his attempt to kill the helpless infant Harry as well. It has been prophesied that a rival worthy of Voldemort will be born with powers greater than those of the Dark Lord. Believing that Harry is that rival, and that he is the only one who can destroy Voldemort, the evil wizard tries to kill him. In fact, without Voldemort's being aware of it, his very attempt to eliminate Harry seals both their fates. Harry indeed becomes Voldemort's greatest foe and sworn enemy.
"You know," said Yolanda, a Lithuanian technician at the Harvard University lab where I was working (she had come back that week from a trip to find her family roots in Vilna - Vilnius, she called it - the city of her birth), "a lot of museums and sites memorializing the Jews of Lithuania have opened up in my hometown these past few years. I was at a few of them on my last visit. It's really surprising to discover what a rich Jewish life and culture there was in Vilnius before the war. But tell me," she said, with that same innocent look with which she had once asked me how it was possible that the Jews didn't believe in something so self-evident as Jesus' being the Holy Savior of the world, "Where did they disappear to, all those Jews?"
Like Moses in the House of Pharaoh, Harry grows up totally oblivious to his true destiny, in the home of his Muggle aunt and uncle who tell him nothing of the Wizarding World. He is also not even aware of the painful memory that Voldemort and his horrific deeds have become in the ten years that have passed, albeit one that has begun to fade. The most fervent of Voldemort's followers, the Death Eaters, were imprisoned following the murder of Harry's parents, but most of them "repented" and were pardoned. Over the years, some of them even took up senior positions in the Ministry of Magic. The Wizarding World preferred to buy silence and forgetfulness rather than expose the extent of the betrayal and the depth of Voldemort's racist ideology.
"The Jews," said Gilles, the gay liberal French post-doctorate student who had pursued me charmingly from the moment I arrived at the lab, "the Jews are okay, except for this business about the chosen people and their endless lust for money."
All of this ends at age 11, when Harry is accepted to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where most of the series takes place. One of the things that makes the Wizarding World so frightening is the constant, unexpected danger: At any moment, the enemy is liable to appear ("apparate") beside you without warning, and any innocent object can transform into a "Portkey" that will sweep you away in the blink of an eye to a different place entirely, where death lies in wait. Worst of all, even those you think of as your best friends can turn out to be your enemies, disguising themselves as your allies with the help of a "Polyjuice Potion," so that you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe. Nonetheless, there is one place that is seemingly safe - the School of Wizardry. The powerful spells of the school's headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, protect those within its walls, and do not allow the enemy to make its way inside. Precisely for this reason, it is such a harsh blow to Harry and his friends in the sixth book when the betrayal of one of the students allows the Death Eaters to make their way into the School, leading to the murder of the beloved headmaster and leader by the person he trusted completely, faculty member Professor Snape.
Overt anti-Semitic content
In April 1938, an article by the German physicist Johannes Stark, winner of the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics, appeared in Nature, to this day the most prestigious of the scientific journals. Stark was already known as a devoted Nazi, and was sentenced following World War II to four years in a labor camp for aiding the Nazi regime. In his article, Stark differentiates between "pragmatic" physics, which he praises, and "dogmatic" physics, which he condemns. Stark explicitly links scientists who are "Aryan, primarily of the Nordic race" with pragmatic physics, and Jewish scientists led by Einstein with dogmatic physics. At the end of the article, Stark declares that in recent years he has been devoting the bulk of his efforts to thwarting the harmful influence of Jewish scientists on German science as carriers and disseminators of the "dogmatic spirit," while the Aryan scientists promote the "pragmatic spirit." Relating to the content of the article, the British editor of the journal, Sir Richard Gregory, in the "News and views" section of the same issue, notes that he is happy to grant Professor Stark the opportunity to air his views, though he would be surprised if Stark's distinctions were found to be appropriate contributions to the advancement of science.
When shown the article, I was dumbstruck. I did not understand how a scientific journal like Nature could publish an article with such explicit anti-Semitic content - and in the guise of a scholarly article, no less. I later learned that the article had been commissioned by the editor, who had written to Stark that the readership would be interested in learning his views on the "ties between a 'certain' group of people and scientific endeavor." Since then, the article I myself published in that same journal seems much less significant.
The most touching passage in the description of Harry's school years, in my opinion, are when various events from his past and that of his parents are revealed to him. In difficult times, the final moments of his parents come back to him in nightmares - his mother's screams as she tries to shield him, Voldemort's evil laughter as he casts a Killing Curse upon her. But beyond all this, Harry discovers the past history of Voldemort himself. Wizards possess a wonderful device known as a "pensieve" that allows them to penetrate the memories of others; using it, Harry and Professor Dumbledore pursue Voldemort through the memories of various people in an effort to puzzle out his psyche and his plans.
The Harry Potter series opens on the day of the defeat of the Dark Lord, Voldemort, the most gifted and evil wizard ever to exist. Voldemort is the leader of a racist group that seeks to "cleanse" the Wizarding World of the Muggles - ordinary humans like ourselves - who have entered it. Voldemort and his followers have labeled the wizards born to Muggle parents "Mudbloods," and they seek to exterminate them. Voldemort is defeated and disappears at the height of his power and success, but not before managing to kill two of his greatest enemies from the Order of the Phoenix, the parents of the one-year-old Harry. It is not clear what force brings Voldemort down, but he is overcome by his own "killing curse" during his attempt to kill the helpless infant Harry as well. It has been prophesied that a rival worthy of Voldemort will be born with powers greater than those of the Dark Lord. Believing that Harry is that rival, and that he is the only one who can destroy Voldemort, the evil wizard tries to kill him. In fact, without Voldemort's being aware of it, his very attempt to eliminate Harry seals both their fates. Harry indeed becomes Voldemort's greatest foe and sworn enemy.
"You know," said Yolanda, a Lithuanian technician at the Harvard University lab where I was working (she had come back that week from a trip to find her family roots in Vilna - Vilnius, she called it - the city of her birth), "a lot of museums and sites memorializing the Jews of Lithuania have opened up in my hometown these past few years. I was at a few of them on my last visit. It's really surprising to discover what a rich Jewish life and culture there was in Vilnius before the war. But tell me," she said, with that same innocent look with which she had once asked me how it was possible that the Jews didn't believe in something so self-evident as Jesus' being the Holy Savior of the world, "Where did they disappear to, all those Jews?"
Like Moses in the House of Pharaoh, Harry grows up totally oblivious to his true destiny, in the home of his Muggle aunt and uncle who tell him nothing of the Wizarding World. He is also not even aware of the painful memory that Voldemort and his horrific deeds have become in the ten years that have passed, albeit one that has begun to fade. The most fervent of Voldemort's followers, the Death Eaters, were imprisoned following the murder of Harry's parents, but most of them "repented" and were pardoned. Over the years, some of them even took up senior positions in the Ministry of Magic. The Wizarding World preferred to buy silence and forgetfulness rather than expose the extent of the betrayal and the depth of Voldemort's racist ideology.
"The Jews," said Gilles, the gay liberal French post-doctorate student who had pursued me charmingly from the moment I arrived at the lab, "the Jews are okay, except for this business about the chosen people and their endless lust for money."
All of this ends at age 11, when Harry is accepted to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, where most of the series takes place. One of the things that makes the Wizarding World so frightening is the constant, unexpected danger: At any moment, the enemy is liable to appear ("apparate") beside you without warning, and any innocent object can transform into a "Portkey" that will sweep you away in the blink of an eye to a different place entirely, where death lies in wait. Worst of all, even those you think of as your best friends can turn out to be your enemies, disguising themselves as your allies with the help of a "Polyjuice Potion," so that you cannot tell the difference between friend and foe. Nonetheless, there is one place that is seemingly safe - the School of Wizardry. The powerful spells of the school's headmaster, Professor Dumbledore, protect those within its walls, and do not allow the enemy to make its way inside. Precisely for this reason, it is such a harsh blow to Harry and his friends in the sixth book when the betrayal of one of the students allows the Death Eaters to make their way into the School, leading to the murder of the beloved headmaster and leader by the person he trusted completely, faculty member Professor Snape.
Overt anti-Semitic content
In April 1938, an article by the German physicist Johannes Stark, winner of the 1919 Nobel Prize in Physics, appeared in Nature, to this day the most prestigious of the scientific journals. Stark was already known as a devoted Nazi, and was sentenced following World War II to four years in a labor camp for aiding the Nazi regime. In his article, Stark differentiates between "pragmatic" physics, which he praises, and "dogmatic" physics, which he condemns. Stark explicitly links scientists who are "Aryan, primarily of the Nordic race" with pragmatic physics, and Jewish scientists led by Einstein with dogmatic physics. At the end of the article, Stark declares that in recent years he has been devoting the bulk of his efforts to thwarting the harmful influence of Jewish scientists on German science as carriers and disseminators of the "dogmatic spirit," while the Aryan scientists promote the "pragmatic spirit." Relating to the content of the article, the British editor of the journal, Sir Richard Gregory, in the "News and views" section of the same issue, notes that he is happy to grant Professor Stark the opportunity to air his views, though he would be surprised if Stark's distinctions were found to be appropriate contributions to the advancement of science.
When shown the article, I was dumbstruck. I did not understand how a scientific journal like Nature could publish an article with such explicit anti-Semitic content - and in the guise of a scholarly article, no less. I later learned that the article had been commissioned by the editor, who had written to Stark that the readership would be interested in learning his views on the "ties between a 'certain' group of people and scientific endeavor." Since then, the article I myself published in that same journal seems much less significant.
The most touching passage in the description of Harry's school years, in my opinion, are when various events from his past and that of his parents are revealed to him. In difficult times, the final moments of his parents come back to him in nightmares - his mother's screams as she tries to shield him, Voldemort's evil laughter as he casts a Killing Curse upon her. But beyond all this, Harry discovers the past history of Voldemort himself. Wizards possess a wonderful device known as a "pensieve" that allows them to penetrate the memories of others; using it, Harry and Professor Dumbledore pursue Voldemort through the memories of various people in an effort to puzzle out his psyche and his plans.
| At first glance, it would seem that Harry himself is largely responsible for the return of the Dark Lord, due to an error in judgment: He took pity on Wormtail (the traitor who handed over Harry's parents to Voldemort), and prevented the members of the Order of the Phoenix from killing him. As a result, Wormtail was able to escape and help Voldemort return. But it is obvious that, at most, this mistake only hastened the process somewhat; since Voldemort, soul survived, sooner or later the opportunity would have arisen for him to return to the world | |
In March 1944, the Nazis began a stepped-up campaign to exterminate the Jews of Hungary. My grandmother's family was split: The oldest daughter, she was already married and living with her two daughters, my mother and her sister, in Budapest. The two older brothers, Jancsi and Dedi, were studying in yeshivas away from home; from there, they were drafted into the notorious work brigades of the Hungarian Army. Both fled the forced labor details and hid in Budapest, but just one day before the liberation, Dedi was shot to death and his body thrown into the Danube River. My grandmother's parents lived with their five younger children in a small town named Galanta, from where they were sent to Auschwitz. The two eldest daughters, Nani and Susa, were found fit for forced labor and were taken to a women's work camp, where they survived the war. The parents and the three youngest children, Simi, Igo (Yitzhak) and 11-year-old Yehudis, were killed in the gas chambers. To this day, I keep going back to the only family photograph that remains from that year, trying in vain to imagine their final moments. But in my worst nightmares, which come to me often or rarely, depending on "the situation," we and our three children are led to the slaughter, just as they were.
With the help of the "pensieve," Harry discovers that Voldemort is actually a Mudblood, the son of a mixed marriage between a mother from a long line of wizards and a Muggle father who abandoned his mother and did not acknowledge him as his son. He lost his mother at a young age and grew up in an orphanage until entering Hogwarts, where he discovered his roots and steadily acquired his evil powers. One of his first acts as an underage wizard of 16 was to murder his father and his Muggle family.
Harry also learns that Voldemort did not die. Indeed, he cannot die since, in the course of the many horrific killings and tortures he committed, Voldemort used the darkest of spells to split his soul into seven parts, which he implanted in various symbolic objects (known as "Horcruxes"), only some of which Harry has identified. Moreover, Voldemort's soul constantly tries to come back to life and regain its lost powers. In his first two years at Hogwarts, Harry manages to block two such attempts, and even destroys one Horcrux, but his success is fleeting. In one of the highlights of the series, at a dark ceremony in a graveyard using the bones of his father and the blood of Harry himself, Voldemort's soul is able to reincarnate itself in a flesh-and-blood body and return to life. Apart from Voldemort's sworn followers, the Death Eaters, Harry is the only one who knows of Voldemort's return.
At first glance, it would seem that Harry himself is largely responsible for the return of the Dark Lord, due to an error in judgment: He took pity on Wormtail (the traitor who handed over Harry's parents to Voldemort), and prevented the members of the Order of the Phoenix from killing him. As a result, Wormtail was able to escape and help Voldemort return. But it is obvious that, at most, this mistake only hastened the process somewhat; since Voldemort's soul survived, sooner or later the opportunity would have arisen for him to return to the world.
The root of all evil
I myself came to realize the error of my ways thanks to Mikis Theodorakis, the well-known Greek composer, campaigner for human rights, and creator of "The Ballad of Mauthausen," which I used to listen to every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day. At a press conference in November 2003, Theodorakis declared with regard to the Jews: "...this small nation is the root of all evil" in the world. When I read this for the first time, I could not believe my eyes. There is a direct line between this statement and the extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz. This was followed by similar comments made by other European intellectuals like José Saramago and Jostein Gaarder. But I didn't need to read them. I already knew: Voldemort had returned.
It may be that we, too, as Jews and as Israelis, bear responsibility for this process. Certainly, many mistakes have been made, both in the management of the Arab-Israeli conflict and in the handling of the compensation claims following the Holocaust, which fanned the flames. But in my opinion, it was inevitable. Sooner or later, with the advent of these mistakes or others, anti-Semitism would have reemerged in all its vilest forms.
It is no accident that Voldemort makes use of Harry's blood. Because of his mother, who gave her life to save her son, Harry was endowed with a form of protection against Voldemort, who could no longer touch or harm him. Indeed, this protective force put him in good stead during his first year at Hogwarts, when he foiled Voldemort's initial attempt to come back to life with the help of the Sorcerer's Stone. But Voldemort's use of Harry's blood to regain his body and return to the real world nullified the protection, rendering Harry once more vulnerable. In fact, the first thing Voldemort does with his newly acquired body is to touch Harry, glorying in his new ability and rejoicing at the removal of the protection.
Exploitation of the Jews themselves
A recently published report tracking global anti-Semitism for the year 2006 displays a sharp upswing in the number of anti-Semitic incidents. In certain locales such as Britain, the tally has doubled. But the most worrisome trend is the change in the nature of the incidents: There has been a significant rise in the use of physical violence against Jews for anti-Semitic reasons. For half a century, the Holocaust and the horror of the Nazis' actions created a kind of immunity against overt anti-Semitism, offering a protective cloak that stifled displays of Jew-hatred. But now this immunity has worn off, and the protective covering has fallen away. What enables violence against the Jews today, and statements of the kind uttered by Theodorakis, is the new anti-Semitism's exploitation of the Jews themselves, and Israel in particular. Assorted anti-Semites are hitching a ride on the Arab-Israeli conflict to make the claim that it is the Jews who are the new Nazis, and Israel's actions in the territories the true genocide.
When Harry returns to Hogwarts, having managed to escape from another attempt by Voldemort to kill him immediately after the Dark Lord's return to life, he discovers that his troubles have just begun. The inconceivable horror of Voldemort's actions before his defeat casts the Wizarding World into a state of deep denial and unwillingness to acknowledge even the possibility of Voldemort's return. At first, Harry is simply met with disbelief. Apart from Professor Dumbledore and his closest friends, no one believes his tale. But just as the threatening signs and unexplained murders secretly carried out by Voldemort and his followers are increasing, the Ministry of Magic sets in motion a campaign of incitement aimed at totally undermining Harry's credibility and presenting him as an unstable, pathological seeker of fame. At the height of the crusade, Dumbledore is removed from his post as headmaster of Hogwarts, and his replacement, the repulsive Professor Umbridge, tries to crush Harry and his friends. Only when Voldemort appears at the head of the Death Eaters in the heart of the Ministry of Magic does the denial give way, and the severity of the crisis facing the Wizarding World - which has been caught unprepared - becomes apparent.
A crack in the wall
The interview of Mikis Theodorakis by journalist Ari Shavit (Ha'aretz, August 27, 2004,) nine months after his dramatic statement, is a work of art. More than presenting the mercurial personality and confused opinions of Theodorakis himself, in my view the article exposes the nature of anti-Semitism as a neurotic phenomenon, not an ideology. Theodorakis opens with a vehement denial: There is, he asserts, no anti-Semitism in Europe. It's all an invention of the Jews. This sort of denial is typical of anti-Semitic intellectuals. Even Jostein Gaarder was not ashamed to make the claim, immediately after publishing his portentous, toxic anti-Semitic manifesto, that he is a friend of the Jews and of Israel. Later in the interview, Theodorakis brings up memories from his childhood, recalling how his grandmother warned him not to go near Jewish homes before Passover since, she said, that was the time when they caught Christian children, rolled them into barrels with knives stuck in them, and drank their blood. Here, the wall of denial starts to crack. At a later point, Theodorakis offers a thorough analysis of the racial makeup of the Jews, which leaves no room for doubt: The Jews, in his eyes, are fanatic, aggressive, arrogant, devious, and marked by a feeling of superiority. Towards the end of the interview, he relates to politics: The Jews control international finance, the governments of various countries, President Bush, and the world music industry. This last item offers a glimpse of a surprising fusion between the personal frustration of Theodorakis the composer and his political perceptions and prejudices. He believes that the Jews, who dominate the world's great orchestras, are causing him to be discriminated against professionally as a result of his political views.
In effect, this interview exemplifies the three aspects of the new anti-Semitism: the religious, the intellectual, and the neurotic. The religious aspect is beyond the purview of this article. The intellectual aspect is related to the tendency (and the weakness) of intellectuals when it comes to using a single principle to explain a complex, multi-faceted reality. There is no other entity in the world like the Jewish people that has the power to "explain" so many different things: One can speak - as anti-Semites in fact do - of Jewish music (Mahler), Jewish physics (Einstein), Jewish psychology (Freud), Jewish literature (Kafka), Jewish art (Soutine), Jewish finance (Friedman), and so on. This principle is taking a new form today, as embodied in the view that the State of Israel is the one and only source of all wars in the world. In modern anti-Semitism, the "utopian" ideal of a world without Israel has replaced the Nazi ideal of a world without Jews as an apocalyptic solution to the world's problems.
But to my mind, the most important aspect of any form of anti-Semitism is the neurotic element, which, paradoxically enough, is reinforced precisely in those situations where it is hard to hold the Jews responsible. Here, the principle that I call the one-way mirror comes into play, which can be understood as follows: When things are going well, Western culture sees its own reflection in the mirror. But when things are not going well, it sees the demonic reflection of the Jew, who is to blame for the problem at hand. Recent American regimes have demonstrated this principle. Because of the traditional ties of American Jews with the Democratic Party, the Clinton administration was filled with Jews and half-Jews at the highest levels of power. In fact, apart from the President and Vice-President, all the others were either Jewish or part-Jewish, including the Secretary of Defense (Cohen), Secretary of State (Albright), National Security Advisor (Berger), Director of the CIA (Deutsch), Secretary of the Treasury (Summers), and others. The administration's ideologues were the top-tier essayists of The New York Times, most of them Jewish, such as Thomas Friedman and Susan Sontag. Despite this, the Europeans, who delighted in the Clinton administration's liberal leanings, always claimed that it did things "the European way"; in other words, they saw in it their own reflection.
The Bush administration, by contrast, has a lot fewer Jews, and most of them are found at the lower echelons. It would be hard to find a more determined, more ideological, more religious bunch than the quintet that led the Bush administration into war in Iraq: President Bush himself, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and Powell, none of whom, of course, is Jewish. This created a problem for the liberals, especially in Europe, since the one-way mirror principle states that Jews are involved in everything that goes wrong. But where are they here? Ironically, the absence of Jews from the front ranks of the Bush administration unleashed the neurotic anti-Semitic element, since there is nothing more dangerous than Jews hiding behind the scenes. Under these circumstances, they turn into a band of "secret conspirators." English even has a special term for this: cabal (from the Hebrew word "Kabbalah"). Indeed, the longest-serving member of the British Parliament, Tam Dalyell, accused Tony Blair of being surrounded by a "Jewish cabal." Ultimately, there were several Jews in the Pentagon - Wolfowitz, Perle, and others - who were blamed for the war; but the anti-Semitic knee-jerk reaction didn't subside, and thus was born the myth of the "neo-cons," the gang of Jewish neoconservatives who had secretly "cooked up" the war in Iraq on behalf of Israel. A mythological "rebbe" was found for them as well - Leo Strauss - who had once taught political science to Wolfowitz at the University of Chicago.
| In addition to his tremendous courage and the powers he acquired from Voldemort, Harry has another, hidden power that Voldemort himself lacks entirely and cannot even conceive of - a force that may grant Harry an advantage in the future conflict between himself and the Dark Lord. The nature of this force is unclear, but it is implied in several places that it is the power of love | |
A similar process took place in the century prior to the expulsion from Spain, as masterfully described in the book Vidui (Confession) by Yonatan Ben-Nahum (Zmora-Bitan, 1991). In 1391, in the wake of a series of anti-Jewish decrees and pogroms, some 100,000 Jews in Spain converted to Christianity. In a process not unlike what happened in Western Europe 400 years later, they were quickly assimilated into Spanish society; it took only two generations for some of these conversos (crypto-Jews) and their descendants to reach key positions in all spheres of life in Christian Spain, including the leadership of major monastic orders. As a result of the threatening, neurotic feeling that the Jews were clandestinely running Spanish society, a process was begun to uncover these hidden Jews and cleanse society of their presence. Precisely for this purpose, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella launched the Spanish Inquisition, which involved the torture and murder of thousands of "unfaithful" conversos and culminated in the expulsion of all the remaining Jews from Spain. In the first half of the 20th century, German society underwent a similar, though more brutal, neurotic process as a result of Nazi ideology. Am I implying that a similar process is liable to recur in the near future? The word "implying" is not strong enough.
In the tragic and dramatic conclusion of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry embarks on his ultimate mission: to kill Voldemort. To do so, he must destroy Voldemort and all the remaining Horcruxes. Dumbledore and Harry manage to identify all the Horcruxes except for one, concerning which they have different theories, none of them substantiated.
One of the nagging, unsolved mysteries in the series relates to Harry himself. Early on, Harry discovers that some of the special powers he was endowed with are also shared by Voldemort, among them the ability to speak Parseltongue, or snake language. Moreover, he is tied to Voldemort in a mysterious way: He is able to "feel" the Dark Lord and even to observe, in his dreams, some of the horrific acts committed by Voldemort - not to mention the fact that he and Voldemort have virtually identical wands. At a certain point, Dumbledore explains to Harry that Voldemort's Killing Curse (which struck Harry, left a lightning bolt-shaped scar on his forehead, and rebounded to destroy its instigator) granted him some of Voldemort's powers - but the question of the connection between the two is left unanswered.
Hidden power
Now I'm going to make a wild guess, since, as of this writing, the final book has not yet been published. I think that Harry himself is the last Horcrux. Voldemort wished to turn Harry's murder into an opportunity to split his soul one last time and create the ultimate Horcrux that would make him immortal. He may even have uttered the dark incantation as he was casting the Killing Curse on the helpless infant. But something went wrong and the spell rebounded on him, causing a fragment of Voldemort's soul to be implanted in Harry himself, making him a Horcrux. If this guess is correct, the hardest part of Harry's mission will be to separate Voldemort from himself. Will he succeed, or will it only be possible to eliminate Voldemort at the cost of Harry's death?
The neurosis of anti-Semitism also has a Jewish aspect. During the four years that I lived in the United States, I felt how this neurosis, this fear, was gradually taking me over: What do they really think of me? Did that fellow insult me because I'm a Jew and he's an anti-Semite, or simply for no reason? Do the people in the street hate me because of my kippah? Maybe I should take off the kippah and wear a hat instead. At a certain point, I became so nervous that I unjustly accused a certain person of anti-Semitism. When I returned to Israel, I was wrapped in a tremendous, euphoric feeling of relief. But it is clear to me that Jewish life in the Diaspora almost inevitably arouses such feelings. One could say that Jews and anti-Semitism can't be separated. As long as the Jews are involved in Western culture, the neurotic phenomenon of anti-Semitism will continue to exist on both sides.
Western culture is Judeo-Christian. The Bible is a Jewish work whose profound impact on Western culture cannot be quantified or obliterated. Jewish life alongside European society contributed a great deal to this culture. In effect, one can see it as an alliance between the European nations and the Jewish people. But the marriage failed, and all of us who belong to this culture are the product of this miserable union. If you've read Married Life by David Fogel, or the stories of Bruno Schulz, or even more so, the entire oeuvre of Aharon Appelfeld, you'll understand what I'm talking about. It seems that you can't take the Jew out of Western culture or take Western culture out of the Jew - which is why there's also no way to get rid of anti-Semitism.
In addition to his tremendous courage and the powers he acquired from Voldemort, Harry has another, hidden power that Voldemort himself lacks entirely and cannot even conceive of - a force that may grant Harry an advantage in the future conflict between himself and the Dark Lord. The nature of this force is unclear, but it is implied in several places that it is the power of love. From a thematic standpoint, it is actually Harry - growing up an orphan in the home of a loathsome aunt and uncle who never show him love - who represents, in his power of love, both the inverse of Voldemort and an antidote to him. Himself an orphan, Voldemort grew up without love, never receiving or bestowing it. It is not clear exactly which type of love is being referred to - love of self, of fellow man, of family - or how it can be used against Voldemort; but paradoxically it may be precisely through the power of love that Harry will be capable of knowing himself, separating from Voldemort's soul, and redeeming the world from the scourge of the Dark Lord.
It may well be that such a separation is unattainable, but there are several strategies than can be tried. Ostensibly, it is possible - and there are those who are actually doing it - to raise a new generation on Jewish culture and Jewish texts alone, on Bible stories and heroes of the Mishna instead of Robin Hood and Sleeping Beauty. In my view, this is dangerous and infantile self-delusion. Is the Mishna itself not the product of an interaction between the different worlds of the Pharisees, Hellenist Jews, Greeks, Romans, Christians, and others? And where should we hide Maimonides, master of the synthesis between Jewish thought and Greek philosophy? Or the Zohar? Or Rav Kook? (Not to mention the Bible, some of which is written in Aramaic; or the "Hebrew calendar" that we borrowed from the Babylonians; or the Assyrian script that we adopted after the Babylonian exile.) If we try to peel away, one by one, those layers that are not purely Jewish, we will be left in the end like an onion, without anything. At the same time, the more we get excited by the number of Jews who receive the Nobel Prize, or a Jew who is a candidate for the presidency of another country or a position in a major international institution, or an Israeli writer who receives a prestigious prize overseas, or an Israeli director who is up for an Oscar, the deeper we sink mentally. Perhaps we need to engage in an opposite, mystical strategy - of love for our fellow Jews. Perhaps, as
"The Ari" (Rabbi Isaac Luria) and his successors in the Hasidic movement showed us, the right thing is to seek out and gather up the sparks of holiness that have been scattered. This can be likened to a scientist who, in trying to find the common denominator in a set of phenomena that are ostensibly unrelated, combines their data into one axis system until the boundaries of that common denominator are revealed through statistical significance. We, too, must search for traces of those Jews, hidden and revealed, who have become immersed and assimilated in Western culture. We must uncover, gather, receive and contain them as they were, as they are, until from this - from the gathering, the burgeoning, the coming-together - we suddenly discover the true outlines of ourselves, of our souls, of the Divine Presence that was exiled. Perhaps then, we will not need to analyze, and we will be able to continue with our lives without the torment of separation, without internal rivalry, without ostracism and exclusion. We will simply arise, go on our way, and be ourselves.
Dr. Shlomo Wagner is a faculty member of the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Haifa
