Jan Assmann An archetypal joke of the second half of the twentieth century is that Germans (or Europeans) will never forgive the Jews—for the Holocaust. When I think about the historiography of modern anti-Semitism, I think of two odd bookends: the historian Martin Jay—whose claim to fame is a book on the Horkheimer-Adorno Frankfurt School, but whose more recent jag is the claim that Jews themselves (because of Zionism, etc.) are the primary cause of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism and Albert Lindemann whose “Esau’s Tears” (1997) argues that Jews (because of their “pushy” entry into the professions, etc.) were the primary cause of pre-Holocaust anti-Semitism. It was probably inevitable that the empty space between these bookmarks would be filled—or the capstone of the intellectual arch completed—and now this has been done by a formidable intellectual and cultural historian: Jan Assmann. In “The Price of Monotheism” (2010) (followed by his “Cultural Memory and Early Civilization” [2011])—Assmann, an Egyptologist who’s branched out into European history, argues in broad strokes that “the gift of the Jews”—monotheism—is the root cause of modern intolerance including the Nazi genocide. (See Richard Wolin’s “Biblical Blame Shift” in the “Chronicle of Higher Education.”) Since the Enlightenment, when John Toland argued that the Spanish Conquest—not Aztec mass ritual murder—was the signature horror of Mexican history, monotheism has often gotten a (in my view, unjustified) bad name. Two recent examples: Regina M. Schwartz’s “The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism” (1998) and Barrington Moore, Jr.’s “Moral Purity and Persecution in History” (2000). Of course, at the level of Mideast propaganda, the argument that Jews and genocide are synonymous is pervasive, beginning with the charge that the Palestinian Naqba is worse than the Holocaust and ending with the charge—advanced, among others, by Palestinian President Mohammad Abbas in his younger days—that Zionists orchestrated the Holocaust to provide an excuse for the creation of Israel. (This Palestinian victimology has found an echo in Louis Farrakhan’s claims that Jews are also responsible for “the Black Holocaust” of the slave trade and slavery.) Assman’s recent work can be read against the backdrop of the current revival of interest in pagan religion and pantheist naturalism that parallels the efflorescence of atheism. (In the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius, pantheism and atheism were mixed.) Without being too judgmental about these modern revival movements, it is disconcerting that their acolytes don’t first acknowledge Nazism’s affinities with certain noxious brands of paganism and atheism before blaming the Holocaust on “Jewish” monotheism. But what’s particularly troubling about Assmann’s argument is the combination of his scholarly reputation with its German provenance. He admits that his own intellectual evolution is rooted in a struggle to define his modern German identity. From Germany in recent decades, we’ve got the argument from Ernst Nolte that Hitler was merely a willing pupil of Stalin’s crimes. Nolte goes almost as far as the notion that the Holocaust was a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy. And now we have that reliable weathervane of fashionable opinion, Gunther Grass, pulling Teutonic heartstrings by novelizing and poeticizing the notion that the sufferings of millions of Germans displaced after World War II was equal to or worse than the Holocaust. I must admit that I’ve enjoyed Assmann’s earlier work including “The Mind of Egypt” (1996) and “Moses the Egyptian” (1997) rediscovering the strand of Enlightenment history that pictured Moses as a naturalist, pantheist, sort-of ancient Spinoza whose (Egyptian) religion was hijacked by Israelite monotheists. Unfortunately, Assmann has now become possessed by this rediscovered tradition—rather like a horror movie-version Egyptologist who falls under the spell of the revivified Mummy—which he now carries to the extreme of blaming Judaism, if not the Jewish victims, for the Holocaust. What could be more ominous coming from Germany—the land of Beethoven and Goethe but also Göring and Himmler? But is Assmann correct, if not about the Holocaust, than about ancient Israelite religion? Though no expert, of course, I suspect he’s as wrong as the ancient historians hailing from Hellenistic Egypt like Manetho who invented the libel that the Israelites were a tribe of lepers kicked out of Egypt for their odiousness. Regarding the propensity to religious-inspired violence, pagans as well as Jews were numbered among its practitioners in the ancient world. Why the double standard depicting first-century and second-century Jews in rebellion against Rome as religious fanatics while depicting the Romans who slaughtered a million Judaeans as benign pagans? Perhaps most important, Robert Goldenberg in “Nations That Know Thee Not: Ancient Jewish Attitudes Toward Other Religions” (1998) shows (at least in my reading) that the Israelites were too self-preoccupied with the Holy Land to imagine—by their own agency—imposing some universalist, uniform religion on the non-Jewish world. The Talmudic rabbis eventually ventured the idea that all mankind should adopt the “Noahide Commandments”—an ethical code modeled on the Ten Commandments. And earlier some Prophets even dreamed of the end times when Yahweh by His own agency would transform the world. Any linkage between these dreams and Hitler’s—neo-pagan—Final Solution is preposterous.