Christianity Can’t Save the Jews. Can Historical Criticism Cure Them?
RSS
In “God, the Jews, and us: a deceitful civilizational contract”, I retold how the Romans, having failed to incorporate Israel within Hellenistic civilization, decided to erase it from history. In 70 AD, after four years of war, Vespasian and his son Titus conquered Jerusalem, looted and burned its temple, and compelled all Jews of the Empire to pay two drachmas a year to Jupiter’s temple on Capitoline Hill, instead of to Yahweh’s temple as they used to do. Half a century later, Emperor Hadrian tried to erase Jewish identity by forbidding circumcision under penalty of death. This triggered the Bar Kokhba revolt in the years 132-135 CE (“The Jews began war, because they were forbidden to mutilate their genitals,” according the Historia Augusta).[1]Hadrian crushed the revolt, razed what was left of Jerusalem to the ground and built a Greek city on its place, with a temple to Jupiter where once stood the Jewish temple. The new city was named Aelia Capitolina and the new province Syria Palæstina. As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”[2]
This, however, failed to solve the Romans’ Jewish problem. Arguably, it aggravated it. Israel was not dead, but now “dispersed” in every city of the Empire. It was no longer a state, but still a nation, with a stronger ethnic bond than ever. In fact, Jewish power had been felt in Rome since the first century BC: “You know what a big crowd they are, how they stick together, how influential they are in informal assemblies,” Cicero complained in his defense of the governor of Asia Minor who had prevented Jews from sending money to Jerusalem (Pro Flacco xxviii). But Jewish presence in Rome increased dramatically when Vespasian and Titus brought some 97,000 captives from Jerusalem, including members of the priestly and royal nobility rewarded for their support (Flavius Josephus, Jewish War vi, 9). Some of them happily assimilated into Roman society, while others only pretended to. In addition to their unfailing love for Israel, many Jews now felt an inextinguishable hatred for Rome. In the so-called intertestamental literature, which includes the mostly Jewish Book of Revelation, Rome was equated to Babylon, while in rabbinic literature she became Edom (Esau), Jacob’s archetypal enemy.
I bring this story up again as a cautionary tale against believing that the destruction of modern Israel, which will no doubt happen within a few decades, will solve the Jewish Question. The “Jewish State” is a sick country, no questions about that. It was born sick and will surely die of (or because of) its sickness. But what will happen after that?
Israel existed before 1947, and it will continue to exist even if the State of Israel disappears. Israel is in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, as well as in every European capital, and would still thrive without Tel Aviv.
Some people think that Netanyahu and his present government are the problem; they say Netanyahu is a psychopath, when in fact he is just the leader of the psychopathic nation. But those who think that the modern state of Israel is the only problem are also misjudging the situation. Israel is the problem, but Israel is not a nation founded in 1947, it is very, very old, one the oldest nations still in existence, along with China. And it’s here to last.
Theodor Herzl had thought that the creation of a Jewish State was the “final solution” to the Jewish Question. He was wrong, but so are we if we think that the destruction of the Jewish State will free the world from Jewish conspiracies.
Can Christianity save the Jews?
In order to solve the new Jewish problem that they had created by destroying the kingdom of Israel, the Roman emperors adopted the syncretic religion called Christianity. Its explicit purpose was to convert the Jews to the cult of a harmless, unpolitical Messiah, and dissolve Jewish nationality into a monotheistic version of Roman universalism. Christians have ceaselessly tried to convert the Jews, with the understanding that a converted Jew is no longer a Jew. The conversion of the Jews is a fundamental tenet of Christian eschatology.
Unfortunately, it will not happen. Not a chance. Not even if Jesus came back on the clouds. Christians ask the Jews to shift from “God chose the Jews” to “God chose the Jews but then unchose them because they rejected Jesus — although it was necessary that the Jews crucify Jesus so that he can resurrect in order to save humankind.” Why would any intelligent Jew make such a move? I am suspicious of Jews who do. Far from being un-Jewed, they generally consider themselves as super-Jews. And some of them are obvious cryptos who “pander to the Jews by throwing fellow Catholics under the bus in defense of Jewish fables like the Holocaust narrative”, writes Wyatt Peterson, citing Trent Horn as a typical “modern day converso”.
Even Martin Luther had to come to terms with Jewish inconvertibility. In 1523, he blamed Catholics for being unable to convert the Jews, who are of Jesus’s blood (That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew), but twenty years later, he deemed the Jews so corrupted by deadly sins as to be unredeemable: “They are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury” (On the Jews and Their Lies).
Instead of defusing Jewish identity, Christianity has strengthened it. First, it made Judaism the only legal non-Christian religion. From the time of Theodosius the Great (379-375 AD), who outlawed pagan cults, “among all the non-official religions, the Jewish religion was the best treated and, in short, the best tolerated.”[3] Jews had to be preserved in order to be converted — and they were not to be forced. Jews were immune from the Inquisition (in fact, they risked being hounded by the Inquisition only if they converted). Second, Christianity strengthened Jewish identity because, instead of challenging the Jews’ confidence in their divine chosenness, Christianity emboldened them in their narcissistic delusion. Christians tell the Jews “God chose you”; by adding, “and then He unchose you,” they just make fools of themselves. You cannot give the Jews the birthright and then ask it back. Third, Christianity provided the ideal antagonism to Judaism. According to Jacob Neusner “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity.”[4] It would be more exact to say that Jewish identity was fueled by Jewish hatred of Christians, who were Edom, Haman and Amalek in Jewish eyes. In 408, Theodosius II had to instruct the governors of all provinces of the Empire to “prohibit the Jews from setting fire to Haman in memory of his past punishment, in a certain ceremony of their festival, and from burning with sacrilegious intent a form made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith.”[5]
So instead of converting the Jews, Christianity made them more Jewish. In practical ways too, Christendom was a favorable environment for the growth of Jewish power. For example, it is said that the Jews went into usury because they were banned from other lucrative occupations, but by another perspective, the Jews secured a near monopoly on usury because Christians were banned from it.
Even if Christians could convert the Jews, what would be the point, anyway? Jews are the way they are, not because their rejected Jesus, but because they followed Yahweh. Jews don’t need to be converted to a narrative that attests to their chosenness. Jews need to be converted to the truth. The truth is not that “God chose the Jews”, nor that “God chose the Jews then unchose them”. The truth is that the Jews wrote a book that says God chose the Jews — and, sadly, Christians believe God wrote that book.
Israel’s sickness is of Biblical proportion
Jews don’t need to be told by Christians how to read their Torah. They need to be told that their Torah, with its jealous god and xenophobic covenant, is the cognitive virus that have driven them insane for a hundred generations. They need to be told that they suffer from biblical psychopathy. I have been searching for books that make this diagnostic, but couldn’t—apart from my own, From Yahweh to Zion and Our God is Your God Too. I had great expectation when I recently started reading Thomas Suárez’s book State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, an eye-opener to a sickening reality that even myself had underestimated before reading it. He writes in the introduction:
From Weizmann and Ben-Gurion to the fanatical terror gang Lehi, the ideological pronouncements of the settler project were couched in the language of messianism. Zionism was building the Third Temple, the final kingdom, a resurrection rising from the ashes of the Second Temple and apocryphal Solomon’s Temple. Its battles, its enemies, its conquests were Biblical; the state created by UN Resolution 181 was the rebirth of that created by God. Ben-Gurion all but placed himself among the Prophets, claiming that his 1948 conquest marked the third monumental event in all of Jewish history, following the Exodus from Egypt and Moses’ receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai.[6]
Since Suárez mentions that Zionists considered their struggle as Biblical, he could have made the Biblical inspiration for Israeli terrorism clearer. He could have quoted at least once Deuteronomy 2:25, in which “Yahweh, the god of Israel” presents himself as the god of “fear and terror”: “Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe in anguish because of you.”
When Suárez mentions that, “To encourage what it called ‘right-thinking Jews’ in the murder of Arabs, the Irgun exploited Biblical passages, such as the Old Testament’s account of Moses,” the verb “exploit” would need clarification: did the Irgun twist the Biblical narrative, or did Moses actually order the extermination of the Amalekites and the Midianites (Arab peoples)? When Suárez writes that “The Stern Gang, as it was commonly called, or more formally Lehi, was the most fanatical of the three major organizations, claiming to be (as the Chief Secretary in Jerusalem put it), ‘the inheritors of the purest traditions of ancient Israel’,” it would have been appropriate to discuss whether or not that claim was grounded. The conclusion would be unequivocal: Israeli terrorism is Biblical through and through. The Irgun is Biblical, the Lehi is Biblical, the Nakba is Biblical, Deir Yassin is Biblical, Baruch Goldstein is Biblical, and Itamar Ben-Gvir is Biblical. As I wrote in “The Biblical Lens”:
Netanyahu is mad, but he is mad with a Biblical kind of madness, like many other members of his government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, his Minister of National Security, had on his wall a photo of Baruch Goldstein, author in 1994 of the massacre of 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron. His tomb, on which is written “He gave his life for the people of Israel, their Torah and their land,” is a site of pilgrimage. Yigal Amir said he made the decision to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin during Goldstein’s funeral.
And of course, the massacre of civilian men, women and children in Gaza is Biblical, as Netanyahu assured his troops: “You must remember Amalek.” Israel is Biblical to the core, and claims to be.
To be fair, I assume Suárez understands the Biblical foundation of Israeli terrorism, but chose not to press the point. Perhaps it was the wiser choice: by limiting his inquiry to the bare facts, he made his case for the criminal nature of Israel — and the complicity of the West — unassailable. But the case for the toxicity of the Hebrew Bible needs to be made, and it is about time.
What is most absurd is that Jews and Israelis themselves are telling us to our face that they are possessed by the Biblical demon, and we just don’t want to hear it. We tell them that their book is holy but that they misinterpret it. We are doing them a great disservice.
How the Levites brainwashed the Israelites
The Torah is not holy, it is the Matrix, the prison for their mind. The red pill out of this Matrix is historical criticism, the rational, scientific exegesis of the scriptures. By chance, Jewish scholars are quite good at it.
One of today’s most talented and respected biblical scholar is Richard Elliott Friedman. In his most recent book, The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters (HarperOne, 2017), he solves the following contradiction: on the one hand, we have no archaeological evidence for a massive migration from Egypt to Canaan, and we have instead archaeological evidence that the Israelites were indigenous to the land of Canaan; on the other hand, we have scriptural evidence of an Egyptian origin for much of the priestly traditions in the Torah. The solution, Friedman argues, is simple: the tribes of Israel had “largely indigenous origins” in the land of Canaan, except for the one tribe without a territory, the Levites. The Levites migrated from Egypt in relatively small number, and superimposed their exclusivist Yahwist cult on the Israelites’ worship of the supreme god El. Israel probably existed as a kingdom in today’s Palestine before a conquering band of Levites moved there and progressively imposed their religious and military rule.
Here are the key arguments:
First, many Levites have Egyptian names (Hophni, Hur, two men named Phinehas, Merari, Mushi, Pashhur, and of course Moses), while “not one person from any of the rest of Israel has an Egyptian name.”
Second, “in all of our earlier sources, only the Levites have any connection with the exodus.”
Third, priestly sources (E, P, and D) show familiarity with Egyptian culture, tradition and literature.
A strong argument is drawn from two of the most archaic sources in the Bible: the Song of Miriam (or Song of the Sea, Exodus 15), and the Song of Deborah (Judges 5). “The Song of Deborah, set in Israel, does not mention the Levites; and the Song of Miriam, set in Egypt, does not mention Israel.” In the Song of Miriam, the people rescued from the pursuing Egyptians are simply “the people of Yahweh.” The Song of Deborah “celebrates the battle … that first established Israelite hegemony as a country,” and names all the tribes but the Levites.
Moreover, in the Blessing of Moses (Deuteronomy 33), another archaic source that combines oracles about many of the tribes of Israel, the oracle for Levi is the only one mentioning the wilderness wanderings.
The Levites were not a tribe, but a priestly group, with no territory allotment. They were dispersed among the tribes, took direct control of ten cities, and lived off a tenth (a tithe) of the Israelite tribes’ produce (Joshua 13-19). It was only by a late fiction that the Levites came to be counted as one of the tribes of Israel and given an ancestor among Jacob’s sons (Genesis 49).
What this means is that the Yahweh-worshipping Levites colonized the Israeli tribes, and merged their Yahwist death-cult with the indigenous religion, convincing the Israelites that their great universal god El was actually the tribal god Yahweh, as the Levite Moses had been told by the god himself while herding his father-in-law’s goats after he had run away from Egypt where he was wanted for murder (Exodus 3:6). It was the same trick that Ezra would later play on the Persians (read here). Although they migrated from Egypt, the Levites were probably not of Egyptian stock, and may have been Judean “Habiru” (nomadic raiders, later Hebrews) unhappy with their treatment by the Egyptians, or possibly descendants of the Hyksos driven out of Egypt. That would explains why, “[w]hat we know of ancient Israel’s religion does not look like it came out of an Egyptian source” (contrary to what Freud speculated, Yahweh has nothing in common with Akhenaton’s Sun God).
The Levites could convert, submit and tax the indigenous Israelites because they were not just a priestly caste, but a particularly violent and cruel band of conquerors. They massacred around three thousand Israelites in the golden calf episode (Exodus 32:26-28):
And Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is for Yahweh: to me!” And all the children of Levi were gathered to him. And he said to them, “Yahweh, God of Israel, said this: ‘Set, each man, his sword on his thigh; cross over and come back from gate to gate in the camp; and kill, each man, his brother and, each man, his neighbor and, each man, his relative.’” And the children of Levi did according to Moses’ word, and about three thousand men fell from the people in that day.
In this passage, the Levites appear as some sort of military guard of Moses, terrorizing the people into submission to their exclusivist, ethnocentric religion, the cult of the Jealous God.
Polish scholar Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò underlines this military function of the Levites. In Deuteronomy and Exodus, “the Levites are referred to as those military fighters executing Moses’ orders.” They are “soldiers par excellence”, and their primary function is to be “the guards of the Ark.” Numbers 1:53: “But the Levites shall camp around the tabernacle of the covenant, that there may be no wrath on the congregation of the Israelites; and the Levites shall perform the guard duty of the tabernacle of the covenant.” Their military nature is also emphasized in “Jacob’s Blessing”, which in their case is more a curse than a blessing:
Simeon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are their swords. May I never come into their council; may I not be joined to their company — for in their anger they killed men … Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel! (Genesis 49:5-7)
The fact, often repeated in the Torah, that the Levites possessed no special territory but are stationed in the towns, is generally explained by their cultic activity. But “it may be much more straightforwardly explained if one accepts the military role of the Levites, who may have been stationed in cities early in their history.”
Moreover, several passages, including Deutoronomy 33:8-11 (“They will teach Jacob your ordinances, and Israel your law”), “might suggest a foreign origin for the Levites,” also notes Niesiołowski-Spanò.[7]
Ultimately, many things point to the theory that the Levites came to dominate the Israelites religiously by military force. Which, of course, is consistent with the violence of their god Yahweh Sabaoth (“of the armies”), whose kill-count amounts to 2,821,324 according to Steve Wells, author of Drunk with Blood: God’s Killins in the Bible (the book title is a borrowed from Deuteronomy 32:42, in which Yahweh says: “I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword devour flesh”).
The Levites came to be divided into two rival priestly houses, the Aaronids (descendants of Aaron) and the Mushites (descendants of Moses), who engaged in struggles for leadership. The Book of Numbers recalls how the Aaronids secured for themselves the priesthood when Phinehas, Aaron’s grandson, received from Yahweh, “to him and his descendants after him, … the priesthood for ever,” that is, “the right to perform the ritual of expiation for the Israelites.” For what holy deed was Phinehas thus rewarded? For the murder of an Israelite and his Midianite wife, who had transgressed the Law of strict endogamy! Phinehas “seized a lance, followed the Israelite into the alcove, and there ran them both through, the Israelite and the woman, through the stomach.” By this act, says Yahweh, Phinehas showed that he had “the same zeal as I have” (Numbers 25:11-13). To call Yahweh a “jealous god” is a euphemism: he is really a hateful, murderous xenophobe.
Let us ponder the fact that, according to the Bible, the hereditary priesthood of the Jealous God was secured as a reward for the double murder of a Jew and his non-Jewish wife. Here you have the very essence of the Jewish faith.
Free the God-fearing Jews
“Fear and terror” is the essence of the Jews’ control over the Goyim, but it is also the essence of the Jews’ control over the Jews themselves. The Tanakh was written by generations of Levites as a means of controlling the Israelites by the fear of a bogeyman god. Which is why, in Biblical terms, a good Jew is a God-fearing Jew.
The Covenant is based on the permanent threat of destruction. Jews who challenge their God-appointed elites and who socialize with their non-Jewish neighbors, who eat with them, who intermarry with them, and who, while doing all this, show respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, traitors to Yahweh and to their race. They deserve to be eliminated without mercy, especially since they endanger the whole community by attracting Yahweh’s wrath. The fact that the Levites’ authority is founded on violence and terror is plain enough in Leviticus:
And if, in spite of this, you will not listen to me but go against me, I shall go against you in fury and punish you seven times over for your sins. You will eat the flesh of your own sons, you will eat the flesh of your own daughters. I shall destroy your high places and smash your incense-altars; I shall pile your corpses on the corpses of your foul idols and shall reject you. I shall reduce your cities to ruins, etc. (26:27-31).
Such threats are repeated over and over. Joshua, Moses’ successor among the Levites, said to the Israelites who had just taken possession of Canaan:
if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, … if you go and serve other gods and bow down to them, then Yahweh’s anger will be roused against you and you will quickly vanish from the fine country which he has given you. (Joshua 23:6-16)
When, in the second century BC, some Israelites thought, “let us ally ourselves with the gentiles surrounding us, for since we separated ourselves from them many misfortunes have overtaken us,” the Maccabees stirred a civil war against them, “striking down the sinners in their anger, and the renegades in their fury” (1Maccabees 1-2).[8]
In Numbers 16-17, a group of two hundred and fifty Levites led by Korah are themselves exterminated for having rebelled against Moses and Aaron. “I am going to destroy them here and now,” said Yahweh, and “Fire then shot out from Yahweh and consumed the two hundred and fifty men offering incense” (16:20-35). “On the following day, the whole community of Israelites were muttering against Moses and Aaron and saying, ‘You are responsible for killing Yahweh’s people!’” Then Yahweh said “I am going to destroy them here and now,” and a plague decimated fourteen thousand seven hundreds of them (17:6-14).
Today’s Jewish elites might not be Levites in the strict sense, but Jewishness is still a system of mind control by terror. Jewishness is a form of Stockholm syndrome. As Smilesburger says in Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock: “To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!”[9]Jews feel hated by all of humankind (the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred,” wrote proto-Zionist Leon Pinsker[10]), but this may be, in part, a case of Freudian projection: deep inside, they know that the god who chose them is the god of hate, not of love. This fake god conjured up by the Levites only loves them as long as they obey his crazy laws without discussion, but hates them as soon as they try to be think and act as free human beings.
That is why the only way to ultimately save the Jews is to expose the evilness of their leadership. “The evils of Israel are the evils of leadership,” wrote Jewish publisher Samuel Roth in Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization (1934). He blames all the suffering of the Jews on “the stupendous hypocrisy and cruelty imposed upon us by our fatal leadership.”
Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews — tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. … despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.[11]
The good news: Jews can and will be saved, when they break the spell of Yahweh. We need to help them by stating unequivocally that their biblical god is not God, but a grotesque puppet fashioned by their priestly leadership to terrorize, brainwash and deprave them. Unless they are willing to convert to Marcionism, Christians should keep away from this dialogue; Jews need not convert to Christianity, they need to convert to historical criticism.
Historical criticism has shown that Jewish monotheism was established, not when God chose the Jews, but when the Jews declared their prehistoric, holocaust-loving national god to be the only god, therefore God. We need to acknowledge and to tell the Jews that their god is not God, but the god of genocide — as Athena is both the goddess of the Athenians and the goddess of wisdom. The Jewish god (by Yahweh, Hashem or any other name) is a nasty, greedy, vengeful devil that has enslaved the Jews spiritually. Judaism is a case of collective demonic possession.
Notes
[1] Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard UP, 1997, pp. 103-104.
[2] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 494.
[3] Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’Empire romain. Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale, I, 1914, p. 229.
[4] Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation, University of Chicago Press, 1987 , pp. ix-xi.
[5] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton UP, 2006, p. 17.
[6] Thomas Suárez, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel, Skyscraper, 2016, pp. 26-27.
[7] Łukasz Niesiołowski-Spanò, “The Levites, *ra-wo, λᾶός / λαοί – A new proposal for lexical and historical relationship”, Biblica 101,3 (2020), 444–452. Based on an etymological speculation, the author suggests that “the Levites should be considered as a group of Greek-speaking mercenaries who managed to settle down in Canaan,” but the characteristically Egyptian names of the Levites, pointed out by Friedman undermines that theory.
[8] Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1995 , pp. 55-61.
[9] Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession, Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 110.
[10] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
[11] Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934 (on archive.org).
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten