Just after Kristallnacht, Gandhi said Jews should die with joy. What would he say now?
Numerous comments on the Holocaust by the renowned Indian leader who favored nonviolence have been misunderstood, say experts — but what about his aversion to Zionism?
A few days after the Kristallnacht pogroms in November 1938, Mahatma Gandhi called for Europe’s Jews to embrace their impending extermination, “for to the godfearing, death has no terror.”
In an article entitled “The Jews,” published in his magazine Harijan on November 26, 1938, the nonviolent anticolonialist activist leading the struggle for Indian independence opined: “If I were a Jew and were born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment.”
Though the death camps were not yet operational, Gandhi, like many others, seems to have foreseen the distinct possibility of the mass murder of Jews in Europe, and suggested that European Jewry do nothing but accept and even embrace it.
“The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews,” he wrote in the article. “But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”
Two years later, Gandhi wrote to Hitler that he didn’t believe him to be the “monster described by your opponents.” While he did criticize some of the tyrant’s acts as “monstrous and unbecoming of human dignity,” the examples Gandhi gives of Nazi atrocities are the “humiliation of Czechoslovakia, the rape of Poland and the swallowing of Denmark.”
Jews are not mentioned even once.
After the Holocaust, not long before Gandhi himself was murdered, the iconic Indian leader maintained that while the Holocaust was “the greatest crime of our time… the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs… It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany… As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.”
In a vacuum, these statements may make Gandhi out to be something between a blindly naive buffoon and a blatant Nazi sympathizer. Yet they were not written in a vacuum and despite the ideas they seem to convey, Gandhi was neither a buffoon nor a Nazi sympathizer.
Some eight decades after he expressed these thoughts, with war raging and global antisemitism and anti-Zionism on the rise, it’s hard to not see parallels in the current geopolitical climate. Do these words, from one of modern history’s most respected figures, have any practical relevance today?
The Times of Israel contacted leading Gandhi scholars, including one of his grandsons, to learn more about his thoughts on the Holocaust, antisemitism, Zionism, and what his advice regarding the Israeli response to the October 7, 2023, massacre might have been.
The right to choose the manner of their murders
Faisal Devji is a professor of Indian History at the University of Oxford and the author of “The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence.” According to Devji, in the broader context, Gandhi’s advice to Europe’s Jews was not simply to offer themselves like lambs to the slaughter, but rather to first try to either fight or flee; only once those options were exhausted or unavailable, should they “go to their deaths as moral agents rather than victims.” Devji explains that in Gandhi’s view “to ‘offer themselves to the butcher’s knife’ meant not to accept their fate but rather defy it by nonviolently resisting the Nazis even if it meant dying in the process.”
“He was not a pacifist but thought that fighting should only happen when defending others,” Devji tells The Times of Israel. “Perhaps he would have recognized events like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as an instantiation of all that he recommended.”
Once fight or flight became futile, Devji believes that in Gandhi’s eyes, choosing the time and manner of their murders would be a final act of public defiance, “offering both the Nazi soldiers and ordinary German spectators the opportunity to see what real courage looked like and therefore a chance to convert.”
In this way, “Jews would also be offering their own descendants an example of bravery rather than humiliation to remember. This was difficult and perhaps grotesque advice to give, but Gandhi did so to all those who came to him,” he says.
“Gandhi recommended the same thing to the Jews that he did to everyone else,” adds Devji. “When he heard about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, Gandhi said that he wished the Japanese residents of these cities had offered their non-violent resistance to the American pilots by living normally in the open despite air raids — for in doing so, they would have presented a moral challenge to their killers and taken on the role of actors in history rather than its victims.
“If they were to die anyway, he thought, they should do so valiantly… For victims enjoyed no moral status and even served to perpetuate violence by calls for vengeance that would allow their descendants to claim the agency they had themselves forsaken,” he says.
Historian Rajmohan Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson and the author of “Gandhi: The Man, his People and the Empire,” agrees, pointing out that the melodramatic reference to offering one’s self to the butcher’s knife “was also used by Gandhi when he challenged Indians resisting British rule or Hindus facing attacks from Muslims to do so with nonviolence.”
Still, according to Dr. Gangeya Mukherji, author of “Gandhi and Tagore: Politics, Truth and Conscience,” Gandhi was “careful of using metaphors,” and in this case, his use of the knife and the butcher is a direct reference to Abraham’s aborted sacrifice of Isaac.
Even if, in this one case, Gandhi may have utilized Jewish symbolism, his familiarity with Judaism and its history, practice, and culture seems to have been passing at best. In fact, his understanding of Judaism seems to have largely been through the lens of Christianity. This is apparent in a number of his writings, including “The Jews,” where in the very first few sentences he calls the Jews “the untouchables of Christianity,” and later describes the Jews’ god as “more personal than the God of the Christians.”
This may seem odd, given the fact that — as Gandhi not infrequently liked to point out — a number of his closest friends, colleagues, and acquaintances were Jews. Among others, these included his personal secretary, Sonja Schlesin, as well as Hermann Kallenbach, a wealthy architect who bankrolled much of Gandhi’s activity in South Africa and whom Gandhi called his “soulmate.” Yet most of his Jewish friends themselves had quite limited knowledge of Jewish tradition, practice, and theology, and therefore would not have been able to provide particularly comprehensive information on these topics to their Indian friend.
Zionism and the struggle to defend the Jewish State
Kallenbach, however, did try to convert Gandhi — to Zionism.
After witnessing with horror the Nazi rise to power, Kallenbach had become a devout Zionist and was even enlisted by the leaders of the Zionist movement in an unsuccessful attempt to convince Gandhi to follow suit. In fact, Gandhi’s opposition to Zionism had a longstanding impact, with India not adopting a warm stance toward Israel until as late as the 1990s.
The precise reasons for his opposition to Zionism remain a subject of debate. Some have pointed to the practical reasons why Gandhi — a champion of Indian inter-religious unity and independence — would certainly not have helped his cause by championing one so maligned by many of the world’s Muslims, including, of course, those in his homeland.
“Gandhi recognized that as long as India remained unified and the Muslim League was part of its political landscape, it would be impossible for the country to take any position opposed to the Palestinians,” says Devji. “Yet, the Muslim League had itself advised Palestinians to accept the partition of the country that was proposed by the UN, which was after all what they wanted for India as well. In this sense, India’s Muslims, as a minority population like Jews, identified with the latter in many ways even as they supported the Palestinians.”
Mukherji, however, dismisses any connection outright. “Hindu-Muslim unity had no bearing on the question of Zionism,” he says. “This linkage of Gandhi’s position on the Zionist question to that of Hindu-Muslim unity is a more recent phenomenon, emerging from the notion of Gandhi’s ‘appeasement’ of Muslims. It is similar to the Arab denial of the terrible vastness of the Holocaust by describing it as an act of anti-German sentiment.”
Rajmohan Gandhi, himself deeply involved in decades-long reconciliation efforts, thinks that his grandfather’s “lifelong desire and effort for friendship and partnership between India’s Hindus and Muslims would surely have influenced his views on the Jewish-Arab question,” yet does not think that “his opposition to Zionism was strongly influenced by the desire for Hindu-Muslim friendship” but rather “intimately linked to his problem with colonialism.”
“He said that as long as the Zionists relied on British power to stake a claim on Palestine he could not sympathize with them, for he saw the same thing happening in India with the Muslim League in place of the Zionists,” says Devji. “He thought that only by appealing to and convincing the Palestinians to share the land would Zionism become a legitimate movement. India and Palestine thus mirrored each other in his eyes.”
Even if Gandhi was never converted to Zionism, it seems clear that he would have abhorred the terror onslaught of October 7, 2023, which saw thousands of Hamas-led terrorists invade southern Israel, killing 1,200 men, women, and children and kidnapping 251 to the Gaza Strip.
Yet what would he have suggested Israel’s response be?
“He would certainly not have approved a military response, but he would have equally condemned the [Hamas] attacks,” says Mukherji, elaborating that “he would not have supported the policy of Israel to expand, fortify, and settle areas in quest of safeguarding its sovereignty.”
While agreeing that Gandhi would certainly have deplored the violence from all sides, Devji thinks that the Indian leader would indeed have supported Israel forcefully driving out the terrorists, after which he “might have seen the October 7 attacks as an opportunity for Israel to take the moral high ground… declaring a unilateral peace process to resolve the conflict.”
“He was a great believer in the spectacle of moral action, and the attack offered Israel just such an opportunity to completely change the tenor of political debate globally and to its eternal credit,” Devji says. “But of course, elected politicians don’t always have the luxury to make such statements, depending as they do not only on their constituents but partners as well. In this case, the very weakness of a coalition government seems to have pushed it into a very predictable response.”
Citing his grandfather’s support of dispatching armed soldiers to counter Pakistani-aided militants in Kashmir in 1947, Rajhmohan Gandhi emphatically agrees that the father of modern India “would surely have mobilized and mounted resistance to the attacks.”
“At times a practitioner of nonviolence, at some other times he was a professor or teacher of nonviolence but a supporter of violent resistance. This is what actual history says,” Rajhmohan Gandhi says. “No matter what form Gandhi’s resistance to October 7 would have taken, it would have definitely involved Israel’s Arabs as well. A starting premise with Gandhi would be that Jews and Arabs share the land as siblings, have to live next to one another together no matter the past, no matter who ‘started’ which conflict, or who merely ‘reacted.’”
