“Like Spengler, Heidegger saw metropolitan urbanity as marked by rootlessness. That by adhering to the cosmopolitan values of modernity, the Westerners lost their roots, their vivid power of thought, and became deracinated beings. It is ‘The spread of asphalt intellectualism’ that characterize those who abandoned the permanence of the soil for the fluidity of a capital and so they are doomed!”

The roots of the West are precisely in “metropolitan urbanity.” Was Socrates not a man of the city, was Plato not a man of the city? Is the philosopher not a paragon of rootlessness as much or more than the Jew?

The choice is not the permanence of the soil OR the fluidity of capital, but the permanence of the soil or the fluidity of the text. Jews are not the people of the market but the people of the book.

“Just by adding the prefix Jewish to their title (a Jewish philosopher, a Jewish writer, a Jewish sociologist) these thinkers announce their belonging to a tribal racial blood community while simultaneously they keep propagating the ideas of cosmopolitanism, universalism and internationalism.”

“Internationalism” requires a plurality of nations. By stating I am a Jewish writer I am not denying other people’s rights to be a German writer or a Christian writer. The universal is only accessible from the particular. Plato was both a Hellene and a cosmopolitan. The solution to the author’s dilemma was already tried; its vestiges are found in the kibbutzim. That she rejects such autochtony is obvious in her use of the text, the hallmark of the eternal Wanderer, the Jew of the Republic of Letters.

Also, the voice of Athens may not get much public expression in Europe, but an unspoken “rootedness “ is at the very heart of European civilisation, even to this day, Europe is what you might call a “territorial monoculture”. In Europe, you “are” where you come from and trouble always starts when two “ares” are in the same “come from”. Think Kosovo. Think Ireland. Think Sudetenland. Think Estonia. That is radically different from the Middle East. (Look at the mosaic of Lebanon, for example!) The problem for the Jews in Europe is that they sought to remain a separate “are” in someone else’s “come from”!

That’s why the Jews were restricted as to where they could live and what professions they could exercise and, indeed, why they were often victims of persecution. 19th century liberalism lifted all of those restrictions and, for the first time, the Jews emerged from the shadows. From that point on, they have made miscalculation after miscalculation, with disastrous consequences for themselves.

First of all, as Dr Atzmon points out, the skills they possessed served them well in the context of 19th century Europe and many prospered. Suddenly, they were no longer the reviled minority, they were rich and behaving like part of elite. But they couldn’t be part of the elite because they weren’t part of the “people”! They were “foreigners”, which meant they were “usurpers”, “stealing” Europe’s wealth, “hogging” the good jobs through mutual back scratching. Worse than that, at the very moment that Europeans were becoming nationalistic, denying the right of one people to lord over another, they found themselves being “lorded over” by the Jews. To put it in American terms, imagine an America where most Blacks were rich and many rich people were Black, but most whites remained poor. In a Germany bitter at an unfairly harsh peace, in a Europe which generally believed that it had manoeuvred into WWI by wealthy Jews in pursuit of private profit, and in a technological age when the means of mass murder were available as never before, all that came to a frightful head.

Second miscalculation: assimilation. Dr Atzmon wrongly describes conversion to Christianity as assimilation. That is integration, as is marriage with non-Jews, with the children of the marriage not brought up as Jews. And integration is what the European territorial monoculture requires. Thus those Jews who integrated were not panicking, they were merely being lucid about their own future in an age when Israel did not exist and seemed unlikely ever to exist. Those Jews who merely assimilated turned themselves into wolves in sheep’s clothing: foreigners disguised as natives. A sort of fifth column before the expression was invented, thereby, making themselves appear threatening: the Jew lurking in the shadows, so to speak.

Indeed, the odd thing in all this is that having brought the wrath of Europeans down on their heads by behaving in Europe in the Middle Eastern manner, they then fled to the Middle East and there behaved like Europeans, seeking to set up a European-style territorial monoculture in their ancestral homeland, thereby bring down on their heads the wrath of their fellow Middle Easterners!

The reason why there has been so little discussion of all this is indeed political correctness. People are afraid that a discussion of why the Holocaust happened will be misinterpreted as a justification of it. But the answers to the questions “why the Jews”, “why Germany” and “why then” tell us an immense amount about the differences between European and Middle Eastern civilisation which, in today’s world would, as Robert Burns put it, “from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion”.