Storytellers in the Talmudic Tradition

Take a bit of Talmud, add a spice of social psychology and a generous helping of a mass communications medium more powerful than anything hitherto imaginable, and what do you have? A New Religion." Prof. Arthur Butz

An interesting objection is the claim that nobody would dare invent such a tale as the six million legend; nobody has the extraordinary imagination required and, even if he did, the obvious risk in telling such gigantic lies should dissuade him. The argument amounts to the claim that the mere existence of the legend implies the truth of its essentials, so I suppose that we can classify it as the hoaxers' ontological argument.

What is interesting about this objection is its superficially logical quality. Indeed I imagine that this calculation accounts in good measure for the widespread acceptance of the legend; people assume that nobody would be so brazen as to invent such lies. Nevertheless the logic is not sound, for history affords us numerous examples of popular acceptance of gigantic lies, and in this connection we can again cite witchcraft hysteria as precedent for the psychological essential of the six million hoax.

It is ironic that Hitler anticipated the psychology of the "big lie" in his remarks on the subject in Chapter X of Mein Kampf. It is also ironic that the most mind-boggling accounts of exterminations appear in the Jewish Talmudic literature in connection with the last two of the three great Jewish revolts against Rome, the Diaspora revolt of 115-117 AD and the Palestine revolt of 132-135 AD. In connection with the Palestine revolt of 66-70 AD the Talmudic writings do nothing more than bewail the loss of the temple in Jerusalem and discuss implications of the loss for Jewish law. A good discussion of the three reports is given in Michael Grant's The Jews in the Roman World.

According to the ancient accounts (mainly Cassius Dio, who wrote around 200 AD, and Eusebius, the early fourth century Bishop of Caesarea) the Diaspora revolt started in Cyrenaica (northeast Libya) at a time when the Emperor Trajan had, for the purposes of annexing Parthia and its valuable Mesopotamian territory, constituted a huge eastern army at the price of withdrawing many small contingents which had served to keep order in various parts of the Empire. The Jews attacked the Greek and Roman civilian population and it is said that they killed 220,000 in Cyrenaica, amusing themselves in various gruesome ways. The revolt then spread to Egypt where the Jews killed an unknown number, and to Cyprus, where they are said to have killed 240,000. In Alexandria, however, the predominantly Greek population gained control of events and are said to have massacred that city. Recent archeological evidence indicates that the ancient accounts are not exaggerated.

The Talmud says almost nothing about this revolt, except to give the number of Jews killed in Alexandria as "sixty myriads on sixty myriads, twice as many as went forth from Egypt", i.e. 1,200,000 on the assumption that addition and not multiplication is intended. The killings are blamed on "the Emperor Hadrian," which may be due to the fact that the Hadrian was at the time the commander of Trajan's eastern army and succeeded Trajan as Emperor when Trajan died in 117, possibly before the final suppression of the revolt.

The figure given for the number of Jewish victims is obviously exaggerated for, while it is usually difficult to be more than approximately correct in estimating the population of ancient cities, Alexandria of the period had a population of 500,000 or more, with an upper bound of one million a reasonable one to assume because that was the approximate population of the city of Rome, a figure concerning which there is also some uncertainty, but if Rome ever attained a population significantly greater than one million, it never got near two million. The 1,200,000 martyred Jews may seem a brazen invention but you haven't seen anything yet.

The next great revolt was in Palestine in 132-135 and was a serious attempt by its leader, Bar-Kokhba, to set up a Jewish state with himself as king, although he eventually claimed to be the Messiah. During the revolt he made laws, issued money, and performed the other regular functions of government.

Bar-Kokhba's end came in 135. Jerusalem not being suitable to withstand a siege, he led the remnants of his army to Bathar (the present Bittir), which is located on high ground about ten miles southwest of Jerusalem, 25 miles from the Dead Sea and 35 miles from the Mediterranean. The dimensions of the ancient town were roughly rectangular, with a north-south length of about 600 meters and an east-west width of about 200 metres. The south half of the town was fortified. These dimensions plus the fact of the estimates for the Jewish population of Palestine of the time ranged from a low of 500,000 to a high of 2.5 million make it unlikely that Bar-Kokhba's Bethar army numbered as many as 50,000 men.

The Romans laid siege to Bethar in the summer of 135 and Bar-Kokhba's resistance collapsed in August. The Romans broke into the fortress and Bar-Kokhba was killed in that final battle.

For general reasons it seems unlikely that the Romans carried out a massacre of the Jewish population of Bethar. The only "evidence" for a general massacre occurs in the Talmudic literature (including in this context the Midrash Rabbah) which for reasons unknown comments extensively on the siege of Bethar and its supposed aftermath. Except where noted, the Talmudic passages are reproduced in the Appendix to the book Bar-Kokhba by the archaeologist Yigael Yadin. The size of Bar-Kokhba's Bethar army is given as 200,000 men. Bar-Kakhba is said to have been so tough that, when the Romans catapulted missiles into his fort, he would intercept the missiles with his knee with such force that he would knock them back into the faces of the astonished Romans, killing many. The Talmud goes on to claim that the number of Jews killed by the Romans after the fortress fell was 4 billion "or as some say" 40 million, while the Midrash Rabbah reports 800 million martyred Jews. In order to reassure us that these figures are given in earnest, the necessarily accompanying events are set forth. The blood of the slain Jews reached to the nostrils of the Romans' horses and then, like a tidal wave, plunged a distance of one mile or four miles to the sea, carrying large boulders along with it, and staining the sea a distance of four miles out.

The Jewish school children of Bethar, according to the Talmudic literature, were of course not spared by the Romans, who are said to have wrapped each of them in his scroll, and then burned all of them, the number of these school children having been 64 million or at least 150,000 (the approximate present public school population of Washington, D.C.).

The Romans matched the Germans in efficiency, for the bodies of the slain Jews were used to build a fence around Hadrian's vineyard, which is said to have been eighteen miles square, and blood saved over from the tidal wave was used to fertilize Roman vineyards for seven years. Shades of soap, glue and fertilizer factories!

It is also claimed that Bar-Kokhba (usually referred to in the Talmudic literature as Bar-Koziba - it is still not clear what his real name was) was killed by rabbis for falsely claiming to be the Messiah.

From Arthur R. Butz: The Hoax of the Twentieth Century , Historical Review Press, 1976, pp. 245-247

A Holocaust museum is built in Washington. Sixty-five million people watch 'Schindler's List.' The German president apologizes to Israel. Then what can you say about these guys who say the Holocaust never happened? They're a fringe movement of charlatans." Michael Berenbaum

Wilkomirski and What it Means by Prof. Arthur Butz

The story of the impostor "Binjamin Wilkomirski" has been generally well known for almost two years, but new revelations were coming out as late as last fall. I think there are some aspects of it that deserve added stress and contemplation. There is more here than the tale of a con man being nabbed.

In 1996 a book appeared, authored by Binjamin Wilkomirski, entitled Fragments: Memories of a Childhood 1939-1948. It had been published the previous year, in its original German. In this book the author related that he was born a Jew in Latvia and was separated from his parents at age three, was sent to German concentration camps, to Majdanek, then Auschwitz, where he endured a living hell. Liberated at the end of the war, he was adopted by a Swiss family named Dössekker, from which he took the name Bruno Dössekker. His memoirs, which immediately won wide acclaim, were promoted by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and won the National Jewish Book Award for 1996. In France his book won the Prix Mémoirs de la Shoah, and in Britain the Jewish Quarterly literary prize.

Eventually his tale was supported by a woman named Laura Grabowski, who said she was also a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz and remembered Wilkomirski: "He's my Binji, that's all I know" she said.³³ She had her own tale of suffering at Auschwitz at the hands of Josef Mengele and other Germans, and the scars to prove it. Wilkomirski and Grabowski went on lecture and concert tours individually and together.

Raul Hilberg appears to have been an early skeptic. Swiss Jewish journalist Daniel Ganzfried heard rumors that Wilkomirski's story was not true. He investigated and determined that the Latvian Jew "Binjamin Wilkomirski" was actually a Swiss gentile, born on February 12, 1941, to an unwed Swiss mother named Yvonne Berthe Grosjean, and later adopted by the Dössekker family. He was never incarcerated at Auschwitz. Ganzfried's expose was published in the Swiss weekly Weltwoche during August and September 1998. Wilkomirski subsequently refused to submit to a DNA comparison with Max Grosjean, Yvonne's brother.³⁴

Laura Grabowski was exposed as a fraud in October 1999 by the Christian magazine Cornerstone. Her real name was Laurel Rose Willson, born to Christian parents on August 14, 1941, in Washington state, and of course she was never incarcerated at Auschwitz. She had earlier written books under the name Lauren Stratford, claiming she had suffered ritual satanic abuse, citing the same scars which she later claimed were inflicted by Mengele. (The scars were apparently self-inflicted.) As such she appeared on talk shows such as Oprah to relate her ordeals. When she decided that she would also be Laura Grabowski, she transposed the stories of ritual satanic abuse to the new setting Auschwitz.³⁵

An important observation is that the downfalls of Dössekker and Willson did not come about because their claimed experiences were determined to be phony. Though Ganzfried and others thought there was something fishy about Wilkomirski's story in itself, for example, his claim that as a lone Jewish child, four years old, he was able to survive the "Holocaust," they were nailed on the issue of identity. They are gentiles who were not in a German concentration camp during World War II; they only visited them years later.

They are contrasted for example to Elie Wiesel, who cannot be discredited on the basis of identity, since he is a Jew who was actually interned at Auschwitz. Against Wiesel's concoctions society has yet to develop an effective defense, by listening to revisionists instead of its current leaders. Wilkomirski's Fragments is no more or less plausible, in itself, than Wiesel's Night. For example, Wiesel admitted in Chapter 5 that, when the Germans evacuated Auschwitz, he had the option of staying at the hospital, with his father registered as a patient, to await the Soviets. He chose rather to join the evacuation, taking his father with him, on a predictably difficult journey to another German concentration camp. That is as implausible as anything in Wilkomirski's book if one is to believe Wiesel's tale of the horrors inflicted by the Germans at Auschwitz. His story also has the claim, common among the "eye witnesses," that the crematories at Auschwitz belched fumes from the chimneys (Ch. 3). Crematories do not operate that way, and such flames are not seen on any of the aerial photos of the camp. His claim to have seen piles of children being burned by the Germans at Auschwitz is lifted from the Talmud, with the Romans replaced by the Germans.³⁶ I could go on and on about Wiesel's absurdities, but I won't. I recommend reading Faurisson's 1993 leaflet about him.³⁷ My point right now is that Wilkomirski was discredited only on the basis of identity. We can also observe that the Wilkomirski book shows that the filthy imagination that was required to create Elie Wiesel's Night is not unique to Jews.

What I now want to focus on is the amazing obstinacy of many people in supporting these two, especially Wilkomirski, long after they had been exposed. After Ganzfried published his expose "he received several complaints from Jews who said that, even if Mr. Wilkomirski turns out not to be a survivor, Mr. Ganzfried is feeding the fires of those who deny the Holocaust." Deborah Lipstadt, who used Wilkomirski's book in her course at Emory University, said that if Wilkomirski is a phony it "might complicate matters somewhat. But [the book] is still powerful" as a novel.³⁸

There was no attempt to rescind his National Jewish Book Award. Norman Finkelstein has discussed this phenomenon recently, recalling Elie Wiesel's earlier obstinate loyalty to Jerzy Kosinsky long after his 1965 "basic Holocaust text," The Painted Bird, was exposed as a fraud. (Kosinsky committed suicide in 1991, perhaps because his fraud had been exposed a few years before by Polish journalist Johanna Siedlecka.) Finkelstein noted that Yisrael Gutman, a director of the Yad Vashem center in Jerusalem, has said it isn't important that the Wilkomirski yarn is a fraud: "Wilkomirski has written a story which he has experienced deeply; that's for sure... he is not a fake. He is someone who lives this story very deeply in his soul. The pain is authentic.³⁹ Another Yad Vashem official who defended the Wilkomirski book when the controversy erupted was Lea Balint.⁴⁰ Bear in mind that Yad Vashem holds itself to be the central and official repository of "survivor" accounts.

Willson had her devoted friend and supporter in Jennifer Rosenberg, who ran the Holocaust web site www.holocaust.about.corn as a counterweight to revisionist web sites. Grabowski-Willson befriended Rosenberg and helped her run the site. On her site Rosenberg related that, before she visited Auschwitz, Laura Grabowski gave her a pair of pink sandals to leave at the crematorium in memory of her childhood friend, Anna, who Laura said died there.

Rosenberg maintained her friendship with Laura for at least five months after Laura was exposed as a fraud, claiming that the imposture was unimportant and not being sure what to do about the posted story of the pink shoes.⁴¹

"Whether I can say this is true or not true, I would have to do my own research" Ms. Rosenberg says, and adds that she is too busy to do so. Of Laura, whom she still considers a friend, she says, "She's a very sincere and sweet person."

"If it isn't real, and if Anna isn't real, there are so many young children and babies who went through that... It really was a metaphor for the children. For Laura, it was for Anna. I did it for the children. When I did it I was obviously doing it for Anna, but seeing it there, it was also for all the children, the loss of life, what they should have had, could have had."

"I don't want to be involved in this... My main goal is to educate people on the Holocaust." Ms. Rosenberg says she expends significant energy deleting messages with links to the sites of Holocaust deniers such as Mr. Irving and otherwise blocking correspondents who undermine the historical record. Postings to the bulletin board are not pre-screened, so sometimes a denier's comments show up before she can remove them. To keep them away entirely, Ms. Rosenberg says, "I would have to have a 24-hour shift."

Laura Grabowski knew that censoring the discussion would amount to more than a full time job (so) she said she volunteered to help Ms. Rosenberg monitor the discussion late at night, since she had insomnia. Ms. Rosenberg taught her how.

I think Rosenberg's position is that "to educate people on the Holocaust" consists in suppressing revisionist views, and not being concerned about those views and stories that sound more or less like the usual yarns. Impostors and con-artists such as Wilkomirski and Grabowski are thus not seen as people "who undermine the historical record," even after exposure. As for the web site, its URL has been changed to http://history1900s.about.com. On 21 April I took the "Holocaust" link there and used the site's search function to try to find mention of the pink shoes or Laura Grabowski but I couldn't. I assume that mention of them has been deleted, and Rosenberg has finally lost her friend.

The most significant of all these obstinate friends is, I believe, the American Orthopsychiatric Association (the "Ortho"), an organization of psychiatrists who specialize in various forms of abuse and persecution, especially of children. In March 1999, about six months after Ganzfried's expose, the Ortho announced that at its April 10 meeting it would honor Binjamin Wilkomirski with its Max A. Hayman award "to celebrate work done to increase our understanding of genocide and the Holocaust." Naturally there was great controversy on the appropriateness of this award, both inside and outside the Ortho. Wilkomirski had the support of psychiatry professor Dori Laub, a scholar long associated with Yale's Holocaust-testimony video archive. Laub argued that the award "re-establishes the priority of human experience and memory" over the written documentation preferred by historians, though the award leaves open the question of the authenticity of Wilkomirski's account. There is no doubt that Wilkomirski's work was "being taken seriously among therapists who treat Holocaust survivors," and in fact Wilkomirski has worked "with Israeli psychiatrist Elitsur Bernstein in developing 'an interdisciplinary therapy' to treat such child survivors"; a paper by Wilkomirski and Bernstein was well received at a 1998 Holocaust conference at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Ortho member Harvey Peskin, identified as "a Holocaust scholar and psychotherapist," argued that Wilkomirski's account can be accepted as true because it is "consistent with the memories of other child survivors and with the historical record." Though Peskin conceded that Wilkomirski could be a phony he argued, and I think I am summarizing him right on this, that denunciation or rejection of Wilkomirski could discourage real Holocaust survivors from coming forward, and would be hurtful to them in any case. He wrote "such disparagement of witness gives comfort to a new revisionism that no longer attacks the truth of the Holocaust itself but only individual claims of survival" and Wilkomirski [is] then not only disbelieved, but [his] cause cannot be left standing:... to