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Month: December 2017

Categories
Ancient Rome Evropa Soberana (webzine) Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site)

Apocalypse for whites • VIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
The conquest of Pompey
This section will deal with the first direct intervention of the Roman authority on Jewish soil.
In Israel, on the death of Alexander Jannaeus (king of the Hasmonean dynasty, descendant of the Maccabees) in 76 BCE, his wife Salome Alexandra reigned as his successor. Unlike her husband—who, as a good pro-Sadducee, had severely repressed the Pharisees—Salome got on well with the Pharisee faction. When she died, her two sons, Hyrcanus II (associated with the Pharisees and supported by the Arab sheikh Aretas of Petra) and Aristobulus II (supported by the Sadducees) fought for power.
In 63 BCE, both Hasmoneans sought support from the Roman leader Pompey, whose victorious legions were already in Damascus after having deposed the last Macedonian king of Syria (the Seleucid Antigonus III) and now proposed to conquer Phoenicia and Judea, perhaps to incorporate them into the new Roman province of Syria. Pompey, who received money from both factions, finally decided in favour of Hyrcanus II, perhaps because the Pharisees represented the majority of the popular mass of Judea. Aristobulus II, refusing to accept the general’s decision, entrenched himself in Jerusalem with his men.
The Romans, therefore, besieged the capital. Aristobulus II and his followers held out for three months, while the Sadducee priests, in the temple, prayed and offered sacrifices to Yahweh. Taking advantage of the fact that on the Shabbat the Jews did not fight, the Romans undermined the walls of Jerusalem, after which they quickly penetrated the city, capturing Aristobulus and killing 12,000 Jews.[1]
Pompey himself entered the Temple of Jerusalem, curious to see the god of the Jews. Accustomed to seeing numerous temples of many different peoples, and educated in the European mentality according to which a god was to be represented in human form to receive the cult of mortals, he blinked in perplexity when he saw no statue, no relief, no idol, no image… only a candelabrum, vessels, a table of gold, two thousand talents of ‘sacred money’, spices and mountains of Torah scrolls.[2]

Pompey the Great

Did they not have god? Were the Jews atheists? Did they worship nothing? Money? Gold? A simple book, as if the soul, the feelings and the will of a people depended on an inert roll of paper? The confusion of the general, according to Flavius Josephus, must have been capitalised. The Roman had come across an abstract god.
For the Jewish mentality, Pompey committed a sacrilege, for he penetrated the most sacred precinct of the Temple, which only the High Priest could see. In addition, the legionaries made a sacrifice to their banners, ‘polluting’ the area again.
After the fall of Jerusalem, all the territory conquered by the Hasmonean or Maccabean dynasty was annexed by the Roman Empire. Hyrcanus II remained like governor of a district of Rome under the title of ethnarch, dominating everything that Rome was not annexed: that is to say, the territories of Galilee and Judea, that in future would pay taxes to Rome but would retain their independence. Hyrcanus was also made a High Priest, but in practice the power of Judea went to Antipater of Idumea, as a reward for having helped the Romans. Pompey annexed to Rome the most Hellenised areas of the Jewish territory, while Hyrcanus remained as a governor of a district of Rome until his death.
From the ethnic and cultural point of view, the Roman conquest foreshadowed new and profound changes in that area of conflict that is Near East. First of all, to the Jewish, Syrian, Arab and Greek ethnic strata a Roman aristocracy occupying a military character was going to be added.
For the Greeks, this was a source of joy: the decline of the Seleucid Empire had left them aside, and they also had Rome literally in their pocket since the Romans felt a deep and sincere admiration for the Hellenistic culture, not to mention that many of their rulers had a Greek education that predisposed them to be especially lenient with the Macedonian colonies.
Moreover, in Alexandria, it was to be expected that, in view of the disturbances with Jewry, the Romans would seize from the Jews the rights that Alexander the Great had granted them, thereby ceasing to be citizens on an equal footing with the Greeks, and the influence they exerted through trade and the accumulation of money would be uprooted.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that the Decapolis (set of Hellenised cities in the desert borders that also retained much autonomy, among which was Philadelphia, the current capital of Jordan, Amman), surrounded by Syrian tribes, Jews and Arabs—considered barbarians—received the Romans with open arms and began to count the years since the conquest of Pompey.
 
_____________________
[1] The figures of the dead given throughout the text come from the writings of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews, as well as of Cassius Dio’s History of Rome. Most likely they are inflated to magnify the importance of events, something common in history.
[2] According to the Alexandrian authors (rabid anti-Semites who believed that the Jews performed human sacrifices), Pompey freed in the temple a Greek prisoner who was about to be sacrificed to Jehovah.

Categories
2nd World War Hellstorm Holocaust

The Holocaust of German people

On what used to be the Addenda of this blog, in 2014 I posted this:

The best-kept secret in modern history! Listen to Kyle Hunt’s interview of Tom Goodrich about an unheard of Holocaust concealed from the public view by those who wrote recent history.

But YouTube nuked that account since then (click on the bold-typed word above). Fortunately, there’s still the video ‘Red Ice Radio – Hellstorm: The Documentary’ about what I consider the most important subject of all: the debunking of the System’s narrative on the Second World War, as it was the Allies who committed the real Holocaust.

Categories
Nordicism

Greggy’s standards of whiteness

I’d never attack Tara McCarthy, which seems to be a decent woman. But scrolling down a long thread in Greg Johnson’s recent article about women in the movement, I spotted some little gems starting with this comment by him:
 

Jews and most Indians are non-European Caucasians. With those sorts of admixtures, I told Tara that she’s basically as white as she wants to be. Meaning that it is a question of what part of her heritage she identifies with. She identifies with White people and expresses that in her work. Richard Spencer married a woman who is part Georgian. Does that make him a race-mixer?
Non-European Caucasians are closer to us than, say, Asians, Amerindians, and Blacks. There are many people who identify as white with marginal admixtures from other races, including races more foreign than non-European Caucasians. This is why I have a pragmatic attitude about past miscegenation. From the point of view of a political movement, the best policy to cut off whiter-than-thou sperging is simply to have an amnesty for past race mixing and a moratorium on future race mixing.
Racial purism should be left to individuals and families in the ethnostate. If you don’t want Tara’s DNA in your bloodline, then don’t marry her. She’s taken anyway.
 
Sven Longshanks said…
So if Obama said he identified with his White portion, it would be fine for him to interbreed with Whites? Whether someone is White or not is a biological fact, race is not a social construct, you cannot say ‘I was brought up White so I am White’. Tara is a 5th non-White. Any adulteration is adulteration and it will always be there in her descendants, or DNA testing would be obsolete and it would not be able to tell who someone’s ancestors were.
Georgia cannot be compared to India, they came up with the idea of sanitation for themselves in Georgia and as far as I am aware, they also have White people there, not various mixtures of Dravidian. If Spencer married someone with Non-White ancestry the same applies to him, but being of Georgian ancestry is not sufficient to prove that.
Past miscegenation will always be there and marginal admixture is even worse than obvious adulteration, as it makes it far easier for the adulteration to pass into the White portion that is left of the nation. The only policy to have if you want to preserve the White race is to insist that White means White and non-Whites breed only with non-Whites. Otherwise we will just go the same way as India, Egypt, Persia etc who all will have thought they could somehow breed the purity back in.
This is not something that can be left to individuals if you want to put a stop to the gradual darkening of the entire race. I have yet to meet someone with slight adulteration who was not selfishly looking for a White partner, or looking to marry their children off to Whites in the hope that the next generation would be that little bit lighter only also that little bit more dangerous to the rest of us who do not have any adulteration.
If Tara wants to advocate for Whites, then destroying the purity of her future White partner’s children is a funny way to go about it, especially when every single ancestor of his preserved it for him.
This is not meant to be an attack on anyone, just pointing something very important out that cannot be ignored. Our culture comes from our biology, not the other way around. This isn’t purity spiralling or sperging, this is the biology that makes us White, if that goes, then there is no chance of bringing us back.
 
Greg Johnson said…
You are welcome to try to build a racially pure movement if you want.
Think through what that would require and get back to me.
I think that it will always remain marginal and fractious, splitting over endless quibbles about subracial types.
In the meantime, our race’s programmed march to extinction will continue.
I suppress all forms of purer-than-thou and whiter-than-thou spiralling [Editor’s note: What does he mean, suppressing the whole nordicist debate?], and I also reject the idea that people have to have always been White Nationalists, because you can’t build a movement with mass appeal that will have a chance of saving our race if you allow Jews and Leftists to go around and say to every sympathizer, “You know, these people will be calling for your extermination if they find some sort of surprise in your genetic profile, or evidence on your Facebook page that you took an Asian chick to the prom.”
Enjoy your smug sense of superiority and “purity.” I am sure it will console you while the world burns.
If anyone needs to be culled from the movement, it is people like you. [Editor’s note: Wow! Would Greggy also cull Madison Grant and all nordicists back to Gobineau if they were alive?]
 
Sven Longshanks said…
You have just avoided every point that I have made with your reply Greg.
A racially pure movement is already what I am in, I am a White Nationalist and I seek to preserve what is left of the White race. That means having no tolerance at all for miscegenation. An ethno-state means a state composed of one ethnicity, not civic nationalism, which is nationalism based on ‘sharing ideology but not biology’, which is what you appear to be supporting. White is synonymous with purity, this is not ‘spiralling’ these are facts that everyone used to be well aware of when getting involved.
I don’t believe there is any need for extermination, and I do not care what people did before they realised the truth. We are not talking about White people race-mixing in the past, but mixed-people looking for Whites in our movement to partner with right now. I am just making the point that someone who is the product of miscegenation is not White and therefore not a candidate for White Nationalism or a White ethno-state. They could be guests maybe, but certainly not citizens or partners with Whites.
This isn’t about superiority either, that is a leftist response. This is about preserving what we have left and I am certainly not smug about the many damaged people out there who are like that through no fault of their own. That does not mean we should give them a free pass to destroy what’s left of it though to assuage ours and their feelings.
Integrity is a valued trait, if people make exceptions for non-Whites for short-term gains such as numbers, they sacrifice their integrity and lose the morality of what they are doing.
 
Greg Johnson said…
Or you have missed every point in my reply.
If I thought that your approach would amount to anything, I would already have accepted it.
Good luck though.
 
Sven Longshanks said…
Thank you Greg, I look forward to your next podcasts and I will say I do enjoy them, but I do feel you are trying to defend the indefensible here.
 
Steffen Krauter said…
Interesting conversation to read. It I’m interested Sven if you don’t mind about what you mean when you say race mixing. Do you mean indo-Europeans should not intermingle with uralics? Or that Europeans should not intermingle with other indo Europeans? Or Europeans should not mix between themselves? Like Italians to Swedes or any combination. This may sound like autism but I’m sincerely interested. Love your podcasts btw.
 
Sven Longshanks said…
Steffen, by race-mixing, I mean anyone White breeding with someone who is not White. That could be anyone from a full dark black negro with an elephant butt, to 1/16 non-White ancestry and beyond. That would mean no Indians, no Persians, no Japanese, no Koreans and no quadroons, octaroons, etc.
Europeans will still damage the integrity of their ethnic nation if they breed with someone from another European nation, as one nation will lose that branch depending on where the couple settle. This is not a problem in the New World and America would have been well on the way to forming a new White ethnicity if it wasn’t for the recent immigration of the last 70 years and unfortunate small fraternisation with the natives in some isolated areas.
You use Swedes and Italians as an example and that raises a good point. There are areas of Italy that still have a population of Whites with similar features to those seen in Sweden, usually referred to as Nordic, but there are also areas where everyone has a portion of mixed blood and are commonly referred to as having a ‘Mediterranean’ look. Like should breed with like, if they wish to produce offspring with harmonious qualities. To mix the Mediterranean type with either the Swedish or the non-mixed Italian would not be good.
Genetic Similarity Theory predicts that racial types will try to breed with similar racial types, so even in America with many different White ethnicities having emigrated there, most will have picked partners with the same biology as themselves, even if originally from a different language speaking area.
I don’t think it sounds like autism, we have to have ideals even if we have problems keeping to them, this is why I think it is wrong to say mixing is fine because there are a minority already mixed. If there is known non-White ancestry in any percentage then having a White partner should be frowned upon. Most seem to agree that this should be based on knowledge of family history, obvious mixture, or coming from an area known to be mixed beyond all shadow of doubt, such as Persia, Lebanon, Syria etc and not discredited tiny percentages in commercial DNA tests.
 
Franklin Ryckaert said…
Tara McCarthy has herself said that she is 1/8 Indian and 1/17 Jewish. Together that is 18,75% non-European. See her video on You Tube, “Deleted by Tara McCarthy: ‘What’s it like being a mixed race ethno-nationalist?’ – mirror”. I will pass no judgment on her racial make-up. She is handsome and intelligent. Her videos are of high quality. She should continue.
Lauren Southern’s real name is Simonsen and that is definitely a Jewish name. She has also tweeted about her grandparents who had to flee from the Nazis. See YouTube “Exposed: Lauren Southern is (((Lauren Simonsen)))”. I have not seen her videos, so I can’t judge them. If she serves as a stepping stone then she is acceptable. If she serves as a gate keeper, she is not.

Categories
Deranged altruism

Sandman quote

‘Whites seem to have this knee jerk response in giving approval to other races but the empathy is rarely reciprocated. It’s like living in a fantasy. I guess the desire to avoid being called “racist” is so strong in some people they’d rather see their entire race collapse than be called the R word. But the other races don’t seem to have this handicap’.

 —Sandman

Categories
Feminism Feminized western males Miscegenation Real men Women

Unsweetened pill

Recently, in one of his typical videos, Millennial Woes reacted to the subject of admitting women in the movement. He has a point: the presence of female vloggers sweetens the redpill, there’s no question about that. But he goes farther and chastises those who want a boys-only club. Right after the hour Woes said: ‘We have to mature and develop beyond the male insecurity and paranoia that clearly is in abundance in our movement, in our community…’
Like many in the Alt-Right movement Woes is an ahistorical simpleton. He completely ignores that, say, women occupied prominent positions at the beginning of the Church. Hitler called Christianity the Bolshevism of the Ancient World, and we can imagine the female SJWs of the Early Church fighting for the inclusion of those nonwhites marginalised in the provinces of the Roman Empire.
I have not ended my translations of the series Apocalypse for whites, let alone the huge Kriminalgeschichte. For the moment a picture is worth a thousand words:
These are the type of mudbloods and sandniggers that composed the first Christians. The image is taken from funerary portraits of faithful resemblance to Greek-speaking people residing in Egypt. (The portraits survived thanks to the dryness of the Egyptian climate.) Although it is impossible to say who these men or women were, all were early Christians according to the book where I scanned the image.
Female vloggers sweeten the redpill, yes. But ultimately, and pace feminised western males like Woes, what we will need are natural-born killers. Women have their place in the movement lecturing other women. But only men ought to lecture men. If Alt-Right women are lecturing men that only means that the latter are avoiding a real fight in the real world. Moreover, women usually lack the IQ to see why the info provided by the authors of Apocalypse for whites and Kriminalgeschichte (think of the above pic) is so relevant for the survival of the race.
Yes: the women that Woes defends score much higher in YouTube hits than Woes himself. And Woes scores much higher than this humble WordPress blog of yours truly. But sooner of later men will have to make a choice: remain feminised like Woes or, awakened with the unsweetened redpill, fight to the death.

Categories
Quotable quotes

Walsh quote

‘The White ethno-state will have to be at war perpetually against practically the whole earth in order to achieve the 14 Words’.

—Joseph Walsh

Categories
Alexandria Celsus Evropa Soberana (webzine) Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Plutarch

Apocalypse for whites • VII

by Evropa Soberana

 
Greek anti-Semitism
The Alexandrian school has special relevance, as here lived the most important Jewish population (almost half of the total), and also the most important ‘anti-Semitic’ tradition (I use quotation marks because the Syrians, the Babylonians and the Arabs were Semites and the Alexandrians had nothing against them).
As an important part of Jewish history had taken place in Egypt, these Hellenised Egyptian writers attacked Jewry harshly. In addition, the Greeks of the Near East had long been badly living with the Jews, and during that time a real animosity had developed between the two peoples.
Hecataeus of Abdera (around 320 BCE), not an Alexandrian himself, was probably the first pagan who wrote about Jewish history, and he did not do it on good terms:

Due to a plague, the Egyptians expelled them… The majority fled to uninhabited Judea, and their leader Moses established a cult different from all the others. The Jews adopted a misanthropic and inhospitable life.

Manetho (3rd century BCE), an Egyptian priest and historian, in his History of Egypt—the first time someone wrote the history of Egypt in Greek—said that at the time of King Amenhotep, the Jews left Heliopolis with a colony of lepers under the command of a renegade Osiris priest named Osarseph, whom he identifies with Moses. Osarseph would have taught them habits contrary to those of the Egyptians, and ordered them not to relate to the rest of the villages, and also made them burn and loot numerous Egyptian villages of the Nile valley before leaving Egypt in the direction of Asia Minor.
Mnaseas of Patrae (3rd century BCE), a disciple of Eratosthenes, was the first to say something that would later be recurrent in Greek and also in Roman anti-Semitism: that the Jews, in the temple of Jerusalem, worshiped a golden donkey’s head.
Agatharchides of Cnidus (181-146 BCE) in Affairs in Asia mocks the Mosaic law and its practices, especially Sabbath rest.
Posidonius of Apameia (philosopher and historian, 135-51 BCE—bust left), called ‘the Athlete’, said that Jews are ‘an ungodly people, hated by the gods’.
Lysimachus of Alexandria (1st century BCE) said that Moses was a kind of black magician and an impostor; that his laws, equivalent to those recorded in the Talmud, were immoral and that the Jews were sick:

The Jews, sick with leprosy and scurvy, took refuge in the temples, until the king drowned the lepers, and sent other hundred thousand to perish in the desert. A certain Moses guided and instructed them so that they would not show good will towards any person and destroyed all the temples they found. They arrived in Judea and built a city of temple robbers.

Apollonius Molon (around 70 BCE) of Crete, grammarian, rhetorician, orator and teacher of Caesar and Cicero in an academy of Rhodes, dedicated an entire work to the Jewish quarter, calling them misanthropes and atheists disguised as monotheists:

They are the worst among the barbarians. They lack any creative talent; they have not done anything for the good of humanity, and do not believe in any god… Moses was an impostor.

Diodorus Siculus (around 50 BCE), a Greek historian of Sicily, wrote in his Bibliotheca Historica (below, a medieval illuminated manuscript of Diodorus’ book):

The Jews treated other people as enemies and inferiors. The ‘usury’ is their practice of lending money with excessive interest rates. This has caused for centuries the misery and poverty of the Gentiles, and has been a strong condemnation for Jewry.
Already King Antiochus’ advisors were telling him to exterminate the Jewish nation completely, because the Jews were the only people in the world that resisted mixing with other nations. They judged all other nations as their enemies and passed on that enmity as an inheritance to future generations. Their holy books contain aberrant rules and inscriptions hostile to all mankind.

Strabo (64 BCE-25 CE), Greek geographer, in his Geographica admires the figure of Moses, but thinks that the later priests distorted his history and imposed on the Jews an unnatural lifestyle. In the following quote it is clear that the Jews, already in those times, constituted a powerful international mafia:

Jews have penetrated all countries, so it is difficult to find anywhere in the world where their tribe has not entered and where they are not powerfully established.

Apion, Egyptian writer and main promoter of the pogrom of Alexandria of the year 38 CE that culminated in a massacre of 50,000 Jews at the hands of the Roman military, said that the Jews were bound by a mutual pact to never help any foreigner, especially if he was Greek:

The principles of Judaism oblige to hate the rest of humanity. Once a year they take a non-Jew, they kill him and taste his insides, swearing during the meal that they will hate the nation from which the victim came. In the Holy of Holies of the sacred temple of Jerusalem there is a golden ass head that the Jews idolize. The Shabbat originated because of a pelvic ailment that the Jews contracted when fleeing from Egypt, forced them to rest on the seventh day.

Plutarch (50-120) was initiated into the mysteries of Apollo in Chaeronea, and served as a priest in the sanctuary of Delphi. His work is one of the favourite sources of information about the lifestyles of Sparta. In his Table Talks Plutarch wrote that the Jews neither kill nor eat the pig or the donkey because they worship them religiously, and that in the Shabbat, they get drunk.
Philo of Byblos (64-141), a Hellenized Phoenician who wrote about Phoenician history, the Phoenician religion and the Jews, speaks of human sacrifices of the firstborn among Hebrews (remember the passage of Abraham and his son Isaac).
Celsus, a Greek philosopher of the 2nd century, especially known for The True Word, in which he attacked Christianity and also Judaism, wrote:

The Jews are fugitives from Egypt who have never done anything of value and were never held in esteem or had a good reputation.

Philostratus, a sophist of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, wrote:

The Jews are a people that have risen up against humanity itself… They have made their life apart and irreconcilable, and cannot share with the rest of humanity the pleasures of the table, nor join their libations or prayers or sacrifices…
They are separated from us by a gulf greater than that which separates us from the farthest Indies.

Categories
Quotable quotes

Walsh quote

‘‪Even the pro-white “movement” seem beholden to this irresistible death-wish. No matter what we do, maybe all we can do is commit racial suicide’.‬

—‪Joseph Walsh

Categories
Alexander the Great Antiochus IV Epiphanes Evropa Soberana (webzine) Judaism Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • VI

by Evropa Soberana

‘When the Macedonians seized power [in Judea], King Antiochus sought to extirpate their superstitions and introduce Greek habits to transform that inferior race’.

—Tacitus, History

 
The Hellenistic legacy
To understand the virulent ethnic conflicts that occurred during the Roman domination, it is necessary to go back a few years and place ourselves in the era of the Macedonian domination, since the Greek social strata bequeathed from the conquest of Alexander the Great had a lot to do with the uprisings of Jewry and the long history of hatred, tensions, reprisals and counter-reprisals that followed one another thereafter.
When Alexander the Great was on his way to conquer Egypt he passed through Judea, and the Jewish community, fearful that they would destroy Jerusalem, did with the Macedonians what they used to do whenever there was a new triumphant invader: betray their former lords and welcome the invader with open arms. Thus, just as they had betrayed the Babylonians with the Persians, they betrayed the Persians with the Macedonians. Grateful, Alexander granted them extensive privileges; for example, in Alexandria they were legally equated with the Greek population.
This point is important, because the legal status of the Alexandrian Jews—who would constitute almost half of the city’s population—later led to bitter misgivings on the part of the Greek community, leading to riots, which we will see later.
When Alexander the Great died in the year 323 BCE, he left a vast legacy. The whole area he had dominated, from Egypt to Afghanistan, received a strong Hellenisation which produced the period called Hellenistic, to differentiate it from the classical Hellenic. The Macedonian generals, the so-called Diadochi, foolishly fought among themselves to establish their own empires, and in this case we will be interested in the empire of the Ptolemies (centered in Egypt) and that of the Seleucids (centered in Syria) because Israel, between both, would become part of the first and finally, in 198 BCE, annexed by the Seleucids.
Under the umbrella of Alexandrian protection, the Jews were spread not only in Palestine and the Near East, but throughout Rome, Greece and North Africa. In these areas already existed well-organized, rich and powerful Jewish Qahals, all of them connected to Judea, the nucleus of Judaism. In Jewish society, some social sectors would absorb the Hellenisation which, with the fermentation of the centuries, produced a cosmopolitan breeding ground that would lead to the birth of Christianity. Other Jewish sectors, the most multitudinous, clung to their traditional xenophobia and began to react against those who, in the lead of Alexander the Great, had received them as saviours.
Although the Near East was a hotbed of Egyptians, Syrians (also called Chaldeans or Arameans, whose language was lingua franca in the area, being spoken regularly by the Jews), Arabs and others, the traditionalist Jews saw with great displeasure that Asia Minor and Alexandria were filling up with Greeks who, naturally, were pagans and, therefore, in Jewish thought, infidels: ungodly and idolatrous, as had been the hated Egyptians, Babylonians and Persians before them.
With time, to the discomfort of these sectors of the Jewish quarter adverse to assimilate into the Greek culture, a series of measures decreed by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid king, were added. In December of the year 168 BCE, Antiochus literally forbade Judaism, attempting to extirpate the cult of Yahweh, suppressing any Jewish religious manifestation, placing circumcision outside the law and even forcing Jews to eat foods considered religiously ‘unclean’.
The Greeks imposed an edict by which an altar to the Greek gods should be built in every city in the area, and Macedonian officials would be distributed to ensure that in every Jewish family the Greek gods were worshiped. Here, the Macedonians demonstrated elemental clumsiness as they did not know the Jewish people. According to the Old Testament (2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees), those who remained faithful to the Mosaic Law, Antiochus had them burned alive and the Orthodox Jews who escaped to the desert were persecuted and massacred. These statements should be taken with caution, but what is clear is that there was anti-Jewish repression in general.
What were these measures? We must bear in mind that the pagan world was a world of religious tolerance, in which religions were not persecuted just like that. However, in Judaism, the Greek sovereigns saw a political doctrine that potentially could turn the subversive Jews against the pagan states that dominated them. They were hostile towards the other peoples of the planet, and therefore, a threat. In this context, it is possible that the first manifestations of religious intransigence came from the Jewish side among other things because, as I said, the ancient pagan Greeks were never religiously intransigent or intolerant. Such intransigence was not funny for the Macedonians, who considered their gods symbols of their own people.
The fact is that in that year, 168 BCE, Antiochus sacrificed nothing more and nothing less than a pig on the altar of the temple of Jerusalem, in homage to Zeus. This act was considered a double desecration: On the one hand because it was a pig (a profane animal of Semitic creeds like Judaism and Islam), and on the other because that was the first step of consecrating the entire temple to the Olympian Zeus and to convert Jerusalem into a Greek city.

Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Seleucid king and descendant of Seleucus I Nicator, perhaps the most brilliant of the generals of Alexander the Great. According to Jewish tradition, this Macedonian king, by desecrating the altar of the temple in Jerusalem and sprinkling it with pig’s blood, was possessed by a demon: the same who will possess the anti-Messiah or the ‘coming prince’ spoken of in the Old Testament (Daniel, 9:26).

This sacrilegious act brought a strong reaction from the fundamentalist sectors of the Jewish quarter. The most zealous rabbis began to preach a kind of holy war against the Greek occupation, urging the Jews to rebel, and when the first Jew timidly decided to make an offering to the Greek Zeus, a rabbi, Mattathias Maccabeus, murdered him.
The ethnic turmoil that followed led to the period known as the Maccabean wars (years 167-141 BCE), of which there is much talk in the Old Testament (Maccabees). Carrying out, with the Hassidim (the ‘pious Jews’, also called Chassidim or Chassidic) a guerrilla war against the Macedonian troops surrounded on all sides, the ‘Maccabees’ were finally spared from being overwhelmed when an anti-Greek rebellion broke out in Antioch, and crushed the influence of the Hellenizing Jews.
Judas Maccabeus, who succeeded Mattathias renewing the cycle of treason, would even negotiate with the Romans to secure their support. In fact, the Roman Senate would formally recognize the Hasmonean dynasty in 139 BCE, without suspecting the headaches that this remote land would give them in the near future.
During this time, in addition to the Hellenised Jews, two other important Jewish factions would be formed, also in bitter dispute: on the one hand, the Pharisees, a fundamentalist sector that had the support of the multitudes; and on the other, the Sadducees, a group of priests more ‘progressive’, more ‘bourgeois’, in better dealings with the Greeks and who in the future would be victims of the ‘cultural revolution’ that the Pharisees carried out after the fall of Jewry in the hands of Rome.
Their writings would be destroyed by the Romans, so the vision we have today of the panorama is the point of view of the Pharisees, from whom would come the lineages of orthodox rabbis who would complete the Talmud. The Hasmonean dynasty, in spite of numerous swings and changes, would be essentially pro-Sadduceean.

Categories
Julian (novel) Libanius Literature

Julian, 21

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

 
I remained the rest of that year at Constantinople. I had a sufficient income, left me by my grandmother who had died that summer. I was allowed to see her just before her death, but she did not recognize me. She spoke disjointedly. She shook with palsy and at times the shaking became so violent that she had to be strapped to her bed. When I left, she kissed me, murmuring, “Sweet, sweet.”
By order of the Grand Chamberlain I was not allowed to associate with boys my own age or, for that matter, with anyone other than my instructors, Ecebolius and Nicocles, and the Armenian eunuch. Ecebolius is a man of much charm. But Nicocles I detested. He was a short, sparse grasshopper of a man. Many regard him as our age’s first grammarian. But I always thought of him as the enemy. He did not like me either. I remember in particular one conversation with him. It is amusing in retrospect. “The most noble Julian is at an impressionable period in his life. He must be careful of those he listens to. The world is now full of false teachers. In religion we have the party of Athanasius, a most divisive group. In philosophy we have all sorts of mountebanks, like Libanius.”
That was the first time I heard the name of the man who was to mean so much to me as thinker and teacher. Not very interested, I asked who Libanius was.
“An Antiochene—and we know what they are like. He studied at Athens. Then he came here to teach. That was about twelve years ago. He was young. He was bad-mannered to his colleagues, to those of us who were, if not wiser, at least more experienced than he.”
Nicocles made a sound like an insect’s wings rustling on a summer day—laughter? “He was also tactless about religion. All the great teachers here are Christian. He was not. Like so many who go to Athens (and I deplore, if I may say so, your desire to study there), Libanius prefers the empty ways of our ancestors. He calls himself a Hellenist, preferring Plato to the gospels, Homer to the old testament. In his four years here he completely disrupted the academic community. He was always making trouble. Such a vain man! Why, he even prepared a paper for the Emperor on the teaching of Greek, suggesting changes in our curriculum! I’m glad to say he left us eight years ago, under a cloud.”
“What sort of cloud?” I was oddly intrigued by this recital. Oddly, because academics everywhere are for ever attacking one another, and I had long since learned that one must never believe what any teacher says of another. “He was involved with a girl, the daughter of a senator. He was to give her private instruction in the classics. Instead, he made her pregnant. Her family complained. So the Emperor, to save the reputation of the girl and her family, a very important family (you would know who they are if I told you, which I must not)… the Augustus exiled Libanius from the capital.”
“Where is Libanius now?”
“At Nicomedia, where as usual he is making himself difficult. He has a passion to be noticed.” The more Nicocles denounced Libanius, the more interested I became in him. I decided I must meet him. But how? Libanius could not come to Constantinople and I could not go to Nicomedia. Fortunately, I had an ally.
I liked the Armenian eunuch Eutherius as much as I disliked Nicocles. Eutherius taught me court ceremonial three times a week. He was a grave man of natural dignity who did not look or sound like a eunuch. His beard was normal. His voice was low. He had been cut at the age of twenty, so he had known what it was to be a man. He once told me in grisly detail how he had almost died during the operation, “from loss of blood, because the older you are, the more dangerous the operation is. But I have been happy. I have had an interesting life. And there is something to be said for not wasting one’s time in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.”
But though this was true of Eutherius, it was not true of all eunuchs, especially those at the palace. Despite their incapacity, eunuchs are capable of sexual activity, as I one day witnessed, in a scene I shall describe in its proper place.
When I told Eutherius that I wanted to go to Nicomedia, he agreed to conduct the intricate negotiations with the Chamberlain’s office. Letters were exchanged daily between my household and the palace. Eutherius was often in the absurd position of writing, first, my letter of request, and then Eusebius’s elaborate letter of rejection. “It is good practice for me,” said Eutherius wearily, as the months dragged on.
Shortly after New Year 349 Eusebius agreed to let me go to Nicomedia on condition that I do not attend the lectures of Libanius. As Nicocles put it, “Just as we protect our young from those who suffer from the fever, so we must protect them from dangerous ideas, not to mention poor rhetoric. As stylist, Libanius has a tendency to facetiousness which you would find most boring. As philosopher, he is dangerously committed to the foolish past.” To make sure that I would not cheat, Ecebolius was ordered to accompany me to Nicomedia.
Ecebolius and I arrived at Nicomedia in February 349. I enjoyed myself hugely that winter. I attended lectures. I listened to skilled Sophists debate. I met students of my own age. This was not always an easy matter, for they were terrified of me, while I hardly knew how to behave with them.
Libanius was much spoken of in the city. But I saw him only once. He was surrounded by students in one of the porticoes near the gymnasium of Trajan. He was a dark, rather handsome man. Ecebolius pointed him out, saying grimly, “Who else would imitate Socrates in everything but wisdom?”
“Is he so bad?”
“He is a troublemaker. Worse than that, he is a bad rhetorician. He never learned to speak properly. He simply chatters.”
“But his writings are superb.”
“How do you know?” Ecebolius looked at me sharply.
“I… from the others here. They talk about him.” To this day Ecebolius does not know that I used to pay to have Libanius’ lectures taken down in shorthand. Though Libanius had been warned not to approach me, he secretly sent me copies of his lectures, for which I paid him well.
“He can only corrupt,” said Ecebolius. “Not only is he a poor model for style, he despises our religion. He is impious.”