The Holy Hook, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

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.

_____________

[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).