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Russell Jacoby Free Press, New York, 2011, 256 pp., $24.00, ISBN: 1439100241
Bloodlust argues that groups slaughtering other groups – massive, merciless killing – comes from similarities rather than differences. It is not the “Other” as demonized outsider that stokes our rage but our neighbor, the person who looks like us, who is us. Jacoby’s is an ambitious project that examines the origins of violence from the Bible to contemporary cases of mass murder. But he also takes issue with those interpretations of political violence that suggest it is the hated Other, and its often historically defined struggles (in the pursuit of territory or religion), that initiates mass murder and horrifying death. For Jacoby it is not difference that provokes these murderous outbreaks, but likeness or affinity. It is not the band of brothers coalescing into a united front against the Other invading at the religious or territorial borders; it is the brothers themselves who are intent on slaughtering each other.
Our primary form of killing, he argues, is fratricide: “It is not so much the unknown that threatens us but the known” (p. ix). We strike out at those we know, those we are familiar with. “The most common form of violence is violence between acquaintances or neighbors or kindred communities within nations”(p. x). Violence comes from “inside the fold rather than outside it”( p. x) – for example, civil wars in Russia, China, Spain and America, the genocides in Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and the current strife in Egypt. Even in Eastern Europe, where the Jewish populations’ relation to their host countries was quite different than inside Germany, many communities had previously lived peacefully amongst their neighbors, for example the Jews of Jebadw