The Holy Hook
Yahweh’s Trojan Horse into the Gentile City
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Is the Church the whore of Yahweh?
I concluded an earlier article by what I regard as the most important “revelation” of modern biblical scholarship, one that has the potential to free the Western world from a two-thousand-year-old psychopathic bond: the jealous Yahweh was originally just the national god of Israel, repackaged into “the God of Heaven and Earth” during the Babylonian Exile, as part of a public relations campaign aimed at Persians, then Greeks and ultimately Romans. The resulting biblical notion that the universal Creator became Israel’s national god at the time of Moses, is thus exposed as a fictitious inversion of the historical process: in reality, it is the national god of Israel who, so to speak, impersonated the universal Creator at the time of Ezra—while remaining intensely ethnocentric.
The Book of Joshua is a good eye-opener to the biblical hoax, because its pre-exilic author never refers to Yahweh simply as “God,” and never implies that he is anything but “the god of Israel,” that is, “our god” for the Israelites, and “your god” for their enemies (25 times). Yahweh shows no interest in converting Canaanite peoples, whom he regards as worth less than their livestock. He doesn’t instruct Joshua to even try to convert them, but simply to exterminate them, in keeping with the war code he gave Moses in Deuteronomy 20.
However, we find in the Book of Joshua one isolated statement by a Canaanite woman that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11). Rahab, a prostitute in Jericho, makes that statement to two Israeli spies who spend the night with her, and whom she hides in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city and slaughter everyone, “men and women, young and old” (6:21). Rahab’s “profession of faith” is probably a post-exilic insertion, because it doesn’t fit well with her other claim that she is motivated by fear, not by faith: “we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized with terror at your approach” (2:9). Nevertheless, the combination of fear and faith is consistent with Yahweh’s ways.
The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem—a scholarly translation by the Dominicans of the École Biblique, which served as guideline for the English Jerusalem Bible—adds a following footnote to Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel”, saying it “made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.”
I find this footnote emblematic of the role of Christianity in propagating among Gentiles the Israelites’ outrageous metaphysical claim, that great deception that has remained, to this day, a source of tremendous symbolic power. By recognizing her own image in the prostitute of Jericho, the Church claims for herself the role that is exactly hers in history, while radically misleading Christians about the historical significance of that role. It is indeed the Church who, having acknowledged the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power over Christendom.
This thesis, which I am going to develop here, may seem fanciful, because we have been taught that Christianity was strongly Judeophobic from the start. And that’s true. For example, John Chrysostom, perhaps the most influential Greek theologian of the crucial 4th century, wrote several homilies “Against the Jews”. But what he is concerned about, precisely, is the nefarious influence of the Jews over Christians. Many Christians, he complains, “join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts” and even believe that “they think as we do” (First homily, I,5).
“Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness? […] For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?” (First Homily, V,1-7).
To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. “Do not tell me,” he warns them, “that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law” (Second Homily, II,4). And so, with all its Judeophobia (anachronistically renamed “anti-Semitism” today), John Chrysostom’s homilies are a testimony to the strong influence that Jews have exerted on Gentile Christians in the early days of the triumphant, imperial Church. And no matter how much the Greek and Latin Fathers have tried to protect their flock from the influence of Jews, it has persisted as the Church expanded. It can even be argued that the history of Christianity is the history of its Judaization, from Constantinople to Rome, then from Rome to Amsterdam and to the New World.
We commonly admit that the Church has always oppressed the Jews and prevented their integration unless they convert. Were they not expelled from one Christian kingdom after another in the Middle Ages? Again, this is true, but we must distinguish between the cause and the effect. Each of these expulsions has been a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish communities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders, and were particularly indispensable in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king into taking measures.
Let us consider for example the influence of the Jews in Western Europe under the Carolingians. It reaches a climax under Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. The bishop of Lyon Agobard (c. 769-840) left us five letters or treatises written to protest against the power granted to the Jews at the detriment of Christians. In On the insolence of the Jews, addressed to Louis the Pious in 826, Agobard complains that the Jews produce “signed ordinances of your name with golden seals” guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are “terrible towards Christians and gentle towards Jews.” Agobard even complains of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day, in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complains of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters.[1]
Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife, Queen Judith—a name that simply means “Jewess”. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther. Graetz describes the reign of Louis and Judith (and “the treasurer Bernhard, the real ruler of the kingdom” according to him) as a golden age for the Jews, and points out that in the emperor’s court, many regarded Judaism as the true religion. This is illustrated by the resounding conversion of Louis’ confessor, Bishop Bodo, who took the name of Eleazar, had himself circumcised, and married a Jewess. “Cultured Christians,” writes Graetz, “refreshed themselves with the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and the Jewish philosopher Philo, and read their works in preference to those of the apostles.”[2] The Judaization of the Roman Church at this time is appropriately symbolized by the adoption of unleavened bread for communion, with no justification in the Gospel. I say “the Roman Church”, but perhaps it should be called the Frankish Church because, from the time of Charlemagne, it was taken over by ethnic Franks with geopolitical designs on Byzantium, as Orthodox theologian John Romanides has convincingly argued.[3]
The Old Testament was especially influential in the Frankish spheres of power. Popular piety focused on the Gospel narratives (canonical gospels, but also apocryphal ones like the immensely popular Gospel of Nicodemus), the worship of Mary, and the ubiquitous cults of the saints, but kings and popes relied on a political theology drawn from the Tanakh. The Hebrew Bible had been a major part of Frankish propaganda from the late sixth century. Gregory of Tours’ History of the Franks, the primary—and mostly legendary—source for Merovingian history, is framed on the providential ideology of the Books of Kings: the good kings are those who support the Catholic Church, and the bad kings those who resist the growth of its power. Under Louis the Pious, the rite of anointment of the Frankish kings was designed after the model of the prophet Samuel’s anointment of King David in 1Samuel 16.
The Old Testament as Israel’s Trojan Horse
In pre-Christian times, pagan scholars had shown little interest in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish writers (Aristobulus of Paneas, Artapan of Alexandria) had tried to bluff the Greeks on the antiquity of the Torah, claiming that Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato had been inspired by Moses, but no one before the Church Fathers seems to have taken them seriously. Jews had even produced fake Greek prophecies of their success under the title Sibylline Oracles, and written under a Greek pseudonym a Letter of Aristea to Philocrates praising Judaism, but again, it was not until the triumph of Christianity that these texts were met with Gentile gullibility.
Thanks to Christianity, the Jewish Tanakh was elevated to the status of authoritative history, and Jewish authors writing for pagans, such as Josephus and Philo, gained undeserved reputation—while being ignored by rabbinic Judaism. Christian academia uncritically tuned to the rigged history of the Jews. While Herodotus had crossed Syria-Palestine around 450 BCE without hearing about Judeans or Israelites, Christian historians decided that Jerusalem had been at that time the center of the world, and accepted as fact the totally fictitious empire of Solomon. Until the 19th century, world history was calibrated on a largely fanciful biblical chronology (Egyptology is now trying to recover from it).[4]
It can be argued, of course, that the Old Testament has served Christendom well: it was certainly not in the nonviolence of Christ that the Catholic Church found the energy and ideological means to impose its world order for nearly a thousand years on Western Europe. Yet for this glorious past, there was obviously a price to pay, a debt to the Jews that has to be paid one way or another. It is as if Christianity has sold its soul to the god of Israel, in exchange for its great accomplishment.
The Church has always advertised itself to the Jews as the gateway out of the prison of the Law, into the freedom of Christ. But it has never requested Jewish converts to leave their Torah on the doorstep. The Jews who entered the Church entered with their Bible, that is to say, with a big part of their Jewishness, while freeing themselves from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren.
When Jews were judged too slow to convert willingly, they were sometimes forced into baptism under threats of expulsion or death. The first documented case goes back to Clovis’ grandson, according to Bishop Gregory of Tours:
“King Chilperic commanded that a large number of Jews be baptized, and he himself held several on the fonts. But many were baptized only in body and not in heart; they soon returned to their deceitful habits, for they really kept the Sabbath, and pretended to honor the Sunday” (History of the Franks, chapter V).
Such collective forced conversions, producing only insincere and resentful Christians, were conducted throughout the Middle Ages. Hundreds of thousands of Spanish and Portuguese Jews were forced to convert at the end of the 15th century, before emigrating throughout Europe. Many of these “New Christians” not only continued to “Judaize” among themselves, but could now have greater influence on the “Old Christians”. The penetration of the Jewish spirit into the Roman Church, under the influence of these reluctantly converted Jews and their descendants, is a much more massive phenomenon than is generally admitted.
One case in point is the Jesuit Order, whose foundation coincided with the peak of the Spanish repression against Marranos, with the 1547 “purity-of-blood” legislation issued by the Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General of Spain. Of the seven founding members, four at least were of Jewish ancestry. The case of Loyola himself is unclear, but he was noted for his strong philo-Semitism. Robert Markys has demonstrated, in a groundbreaking study (free download here, review here), how crypto-Jews infiltrated key positions in the Jesuit Order from its very beginning, resorting to nepotism in order to eventually establish a monopoly on top positions that extended to the Vatican. King Phillip II of Spain called the Order a “Synagogue of Hebrews.”[5]
Marranos established in the Spanish Netherlands played an important role in the Calvinist movement. According to Jewish historian Lucien Wolf,
“the Marranos in Antwerp had taken an active part in the Reformation movement, and had given up their mask of Catholicism for a not less hollow pretense of Calvinism. […] The simulation of Calvinism brought them new friends, who, like them, were enemies of Rome, Spain and the Inquisition. […] Moreover, it was a form of Christianity which came nearer to their own simple Judaism.”[6]
Calvin himself had learned Hebrew from rabbis and heaped praise on the Jewish people. He wrote in his commentary on Psalm 119: “Where did Our Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles draw their doctrine, if not Moses? And when we peel off all the layers, we find that the Gospel is simply an exhibition of what Moses had already said.” The Covenant of God with the Jewish people is irrevocable because “no promise of God can be undone.” That Covenant, “in its substance and truth, is so similar to ours, that we can call them one. The only difference is the order in which they were given.”[7]
Within one century, Calvinism, or Puritanism, became a dominant cultural and political force in England. Jewish historian Cecil Roth explains:
“The religious developments of the seventeenth century brought to its climax an unmistakable philo-semitic tendency in certain English circles. Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.”[8]
Some British Puritans went so far as to consider the Leviticus as still in force; they circumcised their children and scrupulously respected the Sabbath. Under Charles I (1625–1649), wrote Isaac d’Israeli (father of Benjamin Disraeli), “it seemed that religion chiefly consisted of Sabbatarian rigours; and that a British senate had been transformed into a company of Hebrew Rabbis.”[9] Wealthy Jews started to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy, to the extent that, according to Hilaire Belloc’s estimate, “with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception.”[10]
The influence of Puritanism on many aspects of British society naturally extended to the United States. The national mythology of the “Pilgrim Fathers” fleeing Egypt (Anglican England) and settling into the Promised Land as the new chosen people, sets the tone. However, the Judaization of American Christianity has not been a spontaneous process from within, but rather one controlled by skillful manipulations from outside. For the 19th century, a good example is the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by Oxford University Press, under the sponsorship of Samuel Untermeyer, a Wall Street lawyer, Federal Reserve co-founder, and devoted Zionist, who would become the herald of the “holy war” against Germany in 1933. The Scofield Bible is loaded with highly tendentious footnotes. For example, Yahweh’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:1-3 gets a two-thirds-page footnote explaining that “God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever” (although Jacob, who first received the name Israel, was not yet born”. The same note explains that “Both O.T. and N.T. are full of post-Sinaitic promises concerning Israel and the land which is to be Israel’s everlasting possession,” accompanied by “a curse laid upon those who persecute the Jews,” or “commit the sin of anti-Semitism.”[11]
As a result of this kind of gross propaganda, most American Evangelicals regard the creation of Israel in 1948 and its military victory in 1967 as miracles fulfilling biblical prophecies and heralding the second coming of Christ. Jerry Falwell declared, “Right at the very top of our priorities must be an unswerving commitment and devotion to the state of Israel,” while Pat Robertson said “The future of this Nation [America] may be at stake, because God will bless those that bless Israel.” As for John Hagee, chairman of Christians United for Israel, he once declared: “The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.”[12]
Gullible Christians not only see God’s hand whenever Israel advances in its self-prophesized destiny of world domination, but are ready to see Israeli leaders themselves as prophets when they announce their own false-flag crimes: Michael Evans, author of American Prophecies, believes that Isser Harel, founder of Israeli secret services, had a prophetic inspiration when, in 1980, he predicted that Islamic terrorists would hit the Twin Towers.[13] Benjamin Netanyahu also boasted on CNN in 2006 to have prophesized 9/11 in 1995. To the less gullible, this tells a lot about the Jewish gift of prophecy.
Christians’ learned helplessness
It is beyond question that Christianity played a major role in the creation of Israel, and continues to play a major role in securing American and European support for its criminal enterprises. This has nothing to do with Jesus’ teaching or the example he set with his life and death, of course. Rather, this was due to the Od Testament, Israel’s Trojan Horse inside Christianity. By recognizing the Jews’ special status as the people of the Old Testament, Christians have granted them an extraordinary symbolic power that no other ethnic community can compete with.
For two thousand years, Christianity has taught Gentiles to consent to the delusional claim of the Jews to divine election: are they not the first and only ethnic group whom the God of the universe has addressed personally, the people whom He has loved to the point of exterminating its enemies? It matters not that Christians tell the Jews that they have lost the election because they rejected Christ: the main price is theirs. To accept the biblical notion of “chosen people”, whatever the reservations, is to accept the metaphysical superiority of the Jews. If Christ is Israel’s Messiah, then truly, “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).
We are experiencing today the final consequences of this submission, which the peoples of Antiquity could never have imagined in their worst nightmares. The exalted status of the Jews and of their “holy history” is the deeper reason for their influence on the affairs of the world. By accepting the triple biblical paradigm—Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land—, Christian Churches, Catholic and Protestant in particular, have become complicit with the imperialistic project of the Hebrew Bible. Therefore, there will be no definitive emancipation from Zion without mental and moral emancipation from the biblical matrix.
When reading the Book of Joshua, a Christian is supposed to approve, as a matter of principle, the extermination of the inhabitants of the cities of Canaan and the stealing of their land, since it was ordained by God. The editors of my Bible de Jérusalemexplain in a footnote to chapter 3:
“Joshua was considered by the Fathers as a figure of his namesake Jesus [their names are identical in Hebrew], and the Jordanian passage as a figure of Christian baptism.”
How can Joshua be a figure of Jesus? What has Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount to do with Joshua’s bloodthirsty fanatism? How can the god of Joshua be the Father of Christ? A crippling cognitive dissonance has seized Christian peoples, causing a chronic inability to think intelligently about the divine, and to see and resist the violence of Israel. We can also compare the Christian world to a son who has been lied to all his life about his real father, and, on top of that, told that his father was a war criminal, when in fact he is the son of a loving father. The neurotic ailments that genealogical lies and secrets may cause over several generations, though largely mysterious, have been well documented in the last fifty years (particularly by French psychogenealogists), and I believe such considerations, applied to the usurpation of our Heavenly Parent’s identity by the psychopathic Yahweh, are relevant to the psychology of nations.
As a matter of principle, the Christian is supposed to approve Yahweh’s sentence on those who ate with the Moabites and took wives among them: “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Take all the leaders of the people. Impale them facing the sun, for Yahweh, to deflect his burning anger from Israel’” (Numbers 25:4). But then, why blame the Jerusalem priestly cast for sending Jesus to the torture? Explain to me in which way they were unfaithful to the Torah! Not to mention, of course, the inherent contradiction in blaming them for the Cross since, according to the Gospel, “the Son of man was destined to suffer grievously, and to be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and to be put to death, and after three days to rise again” (Mark 8:31).
The sanctification of Yahweh’s bloody leadership during the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan has made Gentiles incapable of understanding the historical foundation of Jewishness, and helpless in the face of its intrinsic violence today. It has created a blind spot in Christians’ mind: they may see the effects of Zion’s evil power, but not its cause, falsely assuming that the moral corruption they see in Jews comes from the Talmud and the Kabbalah.
Christians cannot even see the Jewish plan for world domination that is written in plain language, right under their nose. If the Jewish Tanakh had not become the Christians’ Holy Book, it would have been exposed as the proof for Israel’s racist and supremacist ambitions long ago. But when it comes to the Old Testament, Christians are seized by a severe reading disorder: when the book says “Israel will conquer the world”, they read “the Church will convert the world”.
If the “Jewish question” is about the inordinate power of Israeli elite networks within nations, then the Jewish question is also a Christian question: it is about the built-in vulnerability of Christian societies to this power. Deep down, anyone who grew up a Christian knows that the chosen people will have the last word, because if Yahweh is God, his promise is eternal, as he himself declares, in his inimitable style: “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word” (Isaiah 45:23). One can even speak of Christians’ “learned helplessness” in front of Jewish power, since they are taught in their Scriptures that God has always guided Israel’s merciless slaughter of his enemies—no need for Scofield’s footnotes to know that. There is also learned helplessness in having as ultimate model a man crucified by the Jews: how can the “imitation of Christ” save us from the high priests’ power to lobby and corrupt Pilatus?
The Judeo-Babylonian metaphysical hoax makes God not just ridiculously anthropomorphic, but Judeomorphic. To be fooled by it is to mistake the Creator of the Universe for a topical demon rumbling and spitting fire from a Midianite volcano (Exodus 19), adopted as tutelary deity by a confederation of Semitic nomadic tribes craving for a piece of the Fertile Crescent. It is to internalize an extremely primitive and unspiritual image of the divine that is obstructive of sound metaphysical thinking: the divorce between philosophy (the love of Wisdom) and theology (the science of God) is one manifestation of this cognitive dissonance in Western thought. In the final analysis, the jealous Yahweh, destroyer of all pantheons, is so unconvincing in the garb of the Great universal God that he is fated to be discarded in his turn. Atheism is the end result of biblical monotheism: it is the rejection of the biblical God, mistaken for the true God. “If Yahweh is God, no thanks” has been the simple rationale for atheism in Christendom since the Enlightenment: Voltaire, for example, scorned Christianity by quoting the Old Testament. Yahweh has ruined faith in a divine Creator.
How Christianity reinforced Jewish alienation
Also to consider is the effect that the Christian sanctification of the Jewish Tanakh has had on Jews themselves. It has discouraged Jews from questioning their scriptures and freeing themselves from their psychopathic god. Any Jew who questioned the divine inspiration of the Torah was not only banned from his community, but found no shelter among Christians: this happened to Baruch Spinoza and many others. For two thousand years, Christians have prayed that the Jews would open their heart to Christ, but they have done nothing to free them from Yahweh.
Critics of Jews in pagan Antiquity had a simple logic: although Jews were considered an ethnos, it was commonly admitted that their misanthropy was due to their religion. It was the fault of Moses, who had taught them to scorn the gods and the traditions of others. Hecataeus of Abdera gives in his Aegyptiaca (around 300 BCE) an alternative version of the Exodus: to appease their gods during a plague, the Egyptians expelled from their lands the many tribes of migrants (those known in Acadian as habirus), and some of them settled in Judea under the conduct of their leader Moses who, “because of their expulsion, […] introduced a kind of misanthropic and inhospitable way of life”.[14] The Roman historian Tacitus tells a similar story and also attributes to Moses the introduction of “new religious practices, quite opposed to those of all other religions. The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they permit all that we abhor” (Tacitus, Histories V,3-5). Plutarch reports in his treatise on Isis and Osiris that some Egyptians believed the god of the Jews to be Seth, the murderer of Osiris, exiled by the council of the gods in the desert from where he periodically returns to bring famine and discord. This opinion was so widespread in the Greco-Roman world that many people believed that the Jews worshiped in their Temple the golden head of a donkey, symbol of Seth in the divine bestiary of Egypt. The Roman general Pompey is reported to have been surprised not to find this famous donkey head when he entered the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE.
Everything was simple, then: the Jews were not racially, but religiously degenerate. But the Christian Fathers, who held that only the Jews had worshiped the true God before the coming of Jesus Christ, had to elaborate a sophisticated explanation for the Jews’ asocial behavior, one which is so self-contradicting that its message to the Jews amounts to a “double bind”: on the one hand, the Jews are told that their Yahweh is the true God and that their Bible is holy, but on the other hand, they are criticized for behaviors they have learned precisely from Yahweh in their Bible. They are accused of plotting to rule the world, although it is the very promise that Yahweh made to them: “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1). They are blamed for their materialism and their greed, but that also they learned from Yahweh, who dreams only of plunder: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in” (Haggai 2:7).
Above all, they are rebuked for their separatism, although this is the very essence of Yahweh’s message to them: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26). Jews who want to break away from Jewish separatism deserve death, according to the lesson of the Bible. The Church Fathers have repeated Yahweh’s endless complaint against his people’s irrepressible tendency to compromise themselves with the gods of the nations by oaths, shared meals or—abomination of the abomination—marriages. But are not these “stiff-necked Jews” who rebelled against the tyrannical yoke of the Levites, precisely those who sought to extricate themselves from the Jewish alienation by assimilating into the surrounding civilization? Were they not doing exactly what we would like them to do today? The contradiction is in many Christian writings. John Chrysostom, for example, writes in his First Homily Against the Jews (II,3):
“Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation. When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable that those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it?”
This amounts to telling the Jews: “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Christians accuse them of having rebelled against Yahweh yesterday, and they accuse them of obeying Yahweh today, under the pretext that Yahweh’s orders no longer stand. How unconvincing to the Jews!
Anti-Yahwism is the only effective criticism of Israel because it is the only fair criticism. It cuts short the accusation of anti-Semitism, since it aims at liberating the Jews from the sociopathic god who has taken control of their destiny—and who is, of course, only the puppet of the Levites. A manifesto of anti-yahwism might begin with this statement by Samuel Roth from his book Jews Must Live:
“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.”[15]
Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker wrote in his booklet Auto-Emancipation (1882), that the Jews are “the people chosen for universal hatred.” They are indeed, but not because Gentiles are universally affected by a “psychic aberration,” a “variety of demonopathy” known as Judeophobia, as Pinsker believes, but rather because their covenant with Yahweh has programmed them to be hated wherever they go.[16]
It’s time to tell the Jews what Christians have been unable to tell them: You were never chosen by God. You have just been misled by your Levites to take your vindictive tribal god for the universal Father in Heaven. This cognitive short-circuit has caused in your collective psyche a grave narcissistic personality disorder. For our own misfortune, we Gentiles have been fooled by your self-delusion and have fallen, too, under the psychopathic bond of your leaders. But we are now waking up, and as soon as we recover our senses and our dignity, we’ll help you out of it too.
Christianity as controlled opposition
“Inside every Christian is a Jew,” stated Pope Francis. That is the simplest and the deepest truth about Christianity. Most Christians are not aware of this Jew inside them, yet he commands a large part of their worldview. Meditating on this truth can be a mind-opening experience, radiating in a multiplicity of questions. Should we use Sigmund Freud’s concept of “projection” and say that most Christians who hate Jews hate the Jew inside them? Or is this Jew a self-hating Jew, like every Jew according to Theodor Lessing (Jewish Self-Hatred, Berlin, 1930)? Perhaps inside every Christian are two Jews, one hating the other, Moses and Jesus. From whichever side we want to look at it, the fact is that Christians are, by New Testament definition, the spiritual heirs of Yahweh’s promise to Israel. They are new branches grafted onto the trunk of Israel, according to Paul’s metaphor (Romans 11:16-24).
What still needs to be explained is how Paul and his followers succeeded in convincing tens of thousands of Gentiles to become a new synthetic Israel, at a time when the very name of Israel was hated all around the Mediterranean Sea? How is it that the Christian religion, which would convert the Roman Empire to the worship of a Jewish Messiah, was born at the time when the biggest wave of Judeophobia was sweeping across the Empire? To answer that question, let’s examine the context. At the turn of the millennium, during the prosperous reign of Augustus, Jews had gained advantageous situations in many parts of the Empire. They enjoyed freedom of cult and judicial autonomy, and were exempted from the civil formality of emperor worship, from all obligations on the Sabbath, and from military service. Moreover, they were allowed to collect funds and send them to the Jerusalem Temple bureaucracy.[17]
As Jews abused of their privileges and conspired to increase them, Gentile resentment grew and anti-Jewish riots followed. In the year 38 CE, the Greeks of Alexandria sent a delegation to Rome, whose leader Isidoros complained that the Jews are “trying to stir up the entire world.”[18] The emperor issued an edict declaring that, if the Jews continued to sow dissent and “to agitate for more privileges than they formerly possessed, […] I will by all means take vengeance on them as fomenters of what is a general plague infecting the whole world.” This edict was followed by another addressed to all the Jewish communities of the empire, asking them not to “behave with contempt towards the gods of other peoples.”[19]
Tensions were high in Jerusalem, where the pro-Roman Herodian dynasty faltered. It was at this time that a conspiracy of Pharisees and Sadducees denounced Jesus to the Romans as a seditious would-be king of the Jews, calculating, according to the Fourth Gospel, that “it is to [the Jews’] advantage that one man should die for the people, rather than that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:50). Flavius Josephus mentions several Jewish revolts in the same period, including one during the Passover of 48 or 49 CE, after a Roman soldier assigned to the entrance of the Temple committed the irreparable: “raising his robe, he stooped in an indecent attitude, so as to turn his backside to the Jews, and made a noise in keeping with this posture.”[20] In 66 the Jewish War broke out, when the Sadducees defied Roman power by banning from the Temple the daily sacrifices offered in the name and at the expense of the Emperor. After the destruction of the Temple by the general and future emperor Titus in 70, the embers of Jewish messianism continued to hatch for 70 more years, and ignited Palestine for the last time with the revolt of Simon Bar Kochba, which provoked in retaliation the complete destruction of Jerusalem, its conversion into a Roman city renamed Aelia Capitolina, and the banning of Jews from it. By then, enmity against the Jews had reached a climax throughout the Empire.
This is precisely the time when Christian missionaries spread the cult of Christ in all the major urban centers of the Empire, starting with those inhabited by large Jewish communities, such as Antioch, Ephesus and Alexandria. A reasonable explanation for that synchronicity is that Christianity, in its Pauline version, is a fundamentally Judeophobic religion that surfed on the greatest wave of Judeophobia. As the cult of a demi-god victim of the Jews, it satisfied the general perception of Jews as a “race hated by the gods” (Tacitus, Histories V.3). But that explanation fails to account for the fact that the triumphant Judeophobic religion is not a pagan religion, but the fundamentally Jewish cult of a Jewish Messiah allegedly fulfilling Jewish prophecies. What we have here is a bizarre case of Hegelian dialectic, one in which the “antithesis” is controlled by the “thesis” and absorbed into it.
Through Christianity, Roman Judeophobia became Judaized. The Gospel narrative makes the Jews the plotters against the Son of God, but this Son of God is a Jew, and soon the “Mother of God”—as Isis, Ishtar or Artemis were called—would be turned into a Jewess too. Most importantly, Judeophobic Christians will adopt the Tanakh and the bizarre Jewish paradigm of the “jealous god” with his “chosen people”. From that point of view, it is as if Christ nailed on the Cross had been used as a bait to pull anti-Jewish Gentiles, by the line of the Old Testament, into worshipping Jewishness.
This process fits the concept of Jewish controlled opposition conceptualized by Gilad Atzmon in his book Being in Time and in a recent video. Whenever Jewish power becomes threatened by the Gentiles’ resentment against it, it produces “a satellite Jewish dissent” designed to control and stir Gentile opposition. This Jewish dissent monopolizes the protest and keeps non-Jewish dissenters in line. According to a parable proposed by Atzmon, the purpose is to make sure that any Jewish problem suffered by the Gentiles is treated by Jewish doctors, whose fundamental interest is that the problem is not solved. By claiming to have the solution to the problem, dissident Jews deceive Gentiles on the nature of the problem, and ultimately aggravate the problem.
As Atzmon sees it, the process does not necessarily result from a secret agreement between Jewish power and Jewish dissent. The Jewish opposition intellectuals
“are not necessarily consciously deceiving us; indeed, they may well be doing their best, within the context of a limited tribal mindset. The truth is, they cannot think out of the box, they cannot climb over the ghetto walls that enclose their own tribal beings.”[21]
We can see this tribal mindset as a collective instinct of conservation that is part of the essence of Jewishness. Ideological quarrels between Jews are sincere, but they remain quarrels between Jews, who tacitly agree to speak louder than Gentiles and exclude from the discussion any radical criticism of Jewishness.
In the light of Atzmon’s analysis, it is conceivable that Christianity’s primary function was to absorb Greco-Roman Judeophobia into a movement that would ultimately reinforce the symbolic status of the Jews, by spreading the “chosen people” propaganda myth fabricated five centuries earlier. Ezra had convinced the Persians that the Jews worshipped the God of Heaven like them; the Church went on convincing the Romans that, before Jesus, the Jews had been the only people worshipping the true God and loved by Him. Such creed from the Gentiles is worth a thousand Balfour declarations, in the march toward world domination by way of deception. In the Christian narrative that says, “God chose the Jewish people, but then rejected them,” the benefit from the first part is much higher than the cost of the second, which hardly makes sense anyway.
If the Italian rabbi Elijah Benamozegh is right in saying that “The constitution of a universal religion is the ultimate goal of Judaism,” then Christianity is a great step toward that glorious future: “In Heaven, one God of all men, and on earth a single family of peoples, among whom Israel is the eldest, responsible for the priestly function of teaching and the administration of the true religion of humanity.”[22]Christianity has prepared the way for the next stage: the cult of the crucified Jew is now being superseded by the cult of the exterminated Jews.
Christianity without the Old Testament?
In the second century of our era, Marcion of Sinope had asserted the incompatibility of the Hebrew Bible and the Gospel: Yahweh cannot be the Father of Christ, he said, because everything opposes them. The covenants of Moses and Christ are so contrary in their terms that they must have been sealed with deities totally alien to each other. According to the German specialist Adolf von Harnack, it was Marcion who founded the first structured church, established the first Christian canon, to which he first gave the name of evangelion. In the early 3rd century, his doctrine “has invaded the whole earth,” complained Tertullian, who was from the Semitic city of Carthage, as was Augustine and other Latin Fathers who emphasized the Jewish roots of Christianity.[23] Had Marcionism prevailed, Christianity would have broken with Judaism, which might have withered in a few centuries.[24] Islam would never have happened. On the other hand, perhaps Christianity itself would not have prevailed, and would be remembered today as just another transient otherworldly oriental religion, along with its Manichean cousin.
Can we really separate the New Testament from the Old anyway? We are told that Marcion’s canon consisted of Paul’s letters and a short version of Luke, but it is hard to imagine how he could have completely sanitized the later from its 68 references and allusions to the Old Testament. Admittedly, the original Gospels contained less Old Testament items than it does today: for example, Mark’s only apocalyptic passage (in chapter 13), a condensation of apocalyptic imagery from the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, was a secondary addition. Many scholars even consider all of Jesus’s apocalyptic prophecies in Matthew and Luke as foreign to Jesus’s original message, and some regard the bulk of the Book of Revelation (from 4:1 to 22:15), which refers neither to Jesus nor to any identifiable Christian theme, as a Jewish book framed between a Christian prologue and epilogue.[25]
Alternate history is fun, but quite pointless. Christianity came to us with the Old Testament and a heavily Judaized New Testament. The fruit came with the worm, whose name is Yahweh. The question is: what can we expect from Christianity today? From the viewpoint I have adopted here, it seems that Christianity cannot be the solution to the problem it has created. Yet, like many unz.com readers, I rejoice at the rebirth of the Russian Church, and its role in fostering a healthy public morality and reviving national dignity. In fact, I can even imagine that the Catholic Church could resurrect from its ashes if only it humbly came back to its Orthodox mother whom it has conspired to destroy throughout the Middle Ages. Orthodox Christianity is the closest to the original, and by far the least Judaized. Persecuted during seventy years of communism, it is certainly not much infiltrated by crypto-Jews, at the moment. But can it overcome the inherent problem that I have highlighted here? Can it ever challenge the Jews’ megalomaniac and narcissistic claim of their metaphysical exceptionality? A radically critical approach of the Old Testament is, I believe, an indispensable component of Gentiles’ mental emancipation and recovery of their natural defense mechanism against the Yahweh-Zion matrix. Theologians should, at the very least, be allowed to say that Yahweh is a grossly distorted Judeomorphic image of God. Islam has an advantage here, since Muslims have always admitted that the Jewish Tanakh is fraudulent. Not that I see Islam as a solution, far from it, but a consensus between Muslims and Orthodox Christians on the problematic nature of the Hebrew Scriptures could be a first step toward emancipation.
It is important also not to overrate the influence of these questions on popular piety. The average Christian’s faith would not be much disturbed if the Old Testament would cease to be read in Church, or even if it would be openly criticized. It is also important not to confuse Christendom with Christianity: Notre-Dame was not built by bishops, priests or saints, but by the people of Paris. The same can be said of every cathedral or village church. Johan Sebastian Bach was not a priest (and certainly never composed under the inspiration of the Old Testament), and neither were any of the great geniuses who built our civilization.
Finally, I have zoomed here on a problematic aspect of Christianity, but other viewpoints are possible. I have developed the antithesis to the common thesis that Christianity is anti-Jewish, but there is truth also in the thesis. Christianity is certainly not entirely Jewish: it is also profoundly pagan. Jesus’ legend is a Greek heroic myth. The cults of the Virgin Mary and of the saints are pagan traditions superficially Christianized, with no roots in the Old or New Testament. To acknowledge, accept and celebrate those pagan roots, could be a welcome development within Christianity, as a counterweight to the Old Testament burden.
But I know what you’re thinking: “Who cares what a Marcionite has to say?”
Laurent Guyénot, PhD in Medieval Studies, is the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014.
Notes
[1] Adrien Bressolles, “La question juive au temps de Louis le Pieux,” in Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, tome 28, n°113, 1942. pp. 51-64, on https://www.persee.fr
[2] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162.
[3] John Romanides, Franks, Romans, Feudalism, and Doctrine: An Interplay Between Theology and Society, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1981, on www.romanity.org/htm/rom.03.en.franks_romans_feudalism_and_doctrine.01.htm
[4] Read Gunnar Heinsohn, “The Restauration of Ancient History,” on www.mikamar.biz/symposium/heinsohn.txt et John Crowe, “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective,” on www.sis-group.org.uk/ancient.htm
[5] Robert A. Markys, The Jesuit Order as a Synagogue of Jews: Jesuits of Jewish Ancestry and Purity-of-Blood Laws in the Early Society of Jesus, Brill, 2009, free download on http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=627427
[6] Lucien Wolf, Report on the “Marranos” or Crypto-Jews of Portugal, Anglo-Jewish Association, 1926.
[7] Vincent Schmid, “Calvin et les Juifs : Prémices du dialogue judéo-chrétien chez Jean Calvin,” 2008, on www.racinesetsources.ch.
[8] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.
[9] Isaac Disraeli, Commentaries on the Life and Reign of Charles the First, King of England, 2 vols., 1851, quoted in Archibald Maule Ramsay, The Nameless War, 1952 (archive.org).
[10] Hilaire Belloc, The Jews, Constable & Co., 1922 (archive.org), p. 223.
[11] Joseph Canfield, The Incredible Scofield and His Book, Ross House Books, 2004, pp. 219–220.
[12] Jill Duchess of Hamilton, God, Guns and Israel: Britain, The First World War And The Jews in the Holy City, The History Press, 2009 , kindle, e. 414-417.
[13] Michael Evans, The American Prophecies, Terrorism and Mid-East Conflict Reveal a Nation’s Destiny, Hodder & Stoughton, 2005, quoted in Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9-11: The Deception That Changed the World, C. Bollyn, 2012, p. 71.
[14] Peter Schäfer, Judéophobie: Attitudes à l’égard des Juifs dans le monde antique, Cerf, 2003, pp. 13-15.
[15] Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934, (archive.org).
[16] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882), on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
[17] Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011, pp. 58–61.
[18] Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 178.
[19] Quoted in Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., pp. 134–135.
[20] Flavius Josephus, Jewish War, II,224, quoted in Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., p. 148.
[21] Gilad Atzmon, Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto, Skyscraper, 2017, p. 208.
[22] Élie Benamozegh, Israël et l’humanité (1914), Albin Michel, 1980, pp. 28–29.
[23] Adolf von Harnack, Marcion, l’évangile du Dieu étranger. Contribution à l’histoire de la fondation de l’Église catholique, Cerf, 2005 (translation from the German second edition of 1924).
[24] If we follow the logic of Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other, Princeton UP, 2012.
[25] See for example James Charlesworth, Jesus within Judaism, SPCK, 1989.
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