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Category: Judea v. Rome

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Alexandria Ancient Rome Claudius Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • XIII

by Evropa Soberana

Caligula
In 38, Caligula, the successor of Tiberius, sends his friend Herod Agrippa to the troubled city of Alexandria, to watch over Aulus Avilius Flaccus, the prefect of Egypt, who did not enjoy precisely the confidence of the emperor and who—according to the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (Contra Flaccus)—was an authentic villain.
The arrival of Agrippa to Alexandria was greeted with great protests by the Greek community, as they thought he was coming to proclaim himself king of the Jews. Agrippa was insulted by a crowd, and Flaccus did nothing to punish the offenders, despite the fact that the victim was an envoy of the emperor. This encouraged the Greeks to demand that statues of Caligula be placed in the synagogues, as a provocation to Jewry.

Caligula, Roman Emperor reviled
by Judaeo-Christians.

This simple act seemed to be the sign of an uprising: the Greeks and Egyptians attacked the synagogues and set them on fire. The Jews were expelled from their homes, which were looted, and thereafter segregated in a ghetto from which they could not leave: since they were stoned, beaten or burned alive, while others ended up in the sand to serve as food to the beasts in those macabre circus shows so common in the Roman world. According to Philo, Flaccus did nothing to prevent these riots and murders, and even supported them, as did the Egyptian Apion, whom we have seen criticising the Jewish quarter in the section devoted to Hellenistic anti-Semitism.
To celebrate the emperor’s birthday (August 31, a Shabbat), members of the Jewish council were arrested and flogged in the theatre; others were crucified. When the Jewish community reacted, the Roman soldiers retaliated by looting and burning down thousands of Jewish houses, desecrating the synagogues and killing 50,000 Jews.
When they were ordered to cease the killing, the local Greek population, inflamed by Apion (not surprisingly, Flavius Josephus has a work called Contra Apion) continued the riots. Desperate, the Jews sent Philo of Alexandria to reason with the Roman authorities. The Jewish philosopher wrote a text entitled Contra Flaccus and, along with the surely negative report that Agrippa had given to Caligula, the governor was executed.
After these events, things calmed down and the Jews did not suffer violence as long as they stayed within the confines of their ghetto. However, although Flaccus’ successor allowed the Alexandrian Jewry to give their version of the events, in the year 40 there were again riots among the Jews (who were outraged by the construction of an altar) and among the Greeks, who accused the Jews of refusing to worship the emperor.
The religious Jews ordered to destroy the altar and, in retaliation, Caligula made a decision that really showed how little he knew the Jewish quarter: he ordered to place a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem. According to Philo, Caligula ‘considered the majority of Jews suspects, as if they were the only people who wished to oppose him’ (On the Embassy to Gaius and Flaccus). Publius Petronius, governor of Syria, who knew the Jews well and feared the possibility of a civil war, tried to delay as long as possible the placement of the statue, until Agrippa convinced Caligula that it was a bad decision.
In 41, Caligula, who already promised to be an anti-Jewish emperor, was assassinated in Rome, which unleashed the violence of his German bodyguards, who had not been able to prevent his death and who, because of their peculiar sense of fidelity, tried to avenge him by killing many conspirators, senators and even innocent bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Claudius, the uncle of Caligula, would become the master of the situation and, after being appointed emperor by the Praetorian Guard, ordered the execution of the assassins of his nephew, many of whom were political magistrates who wanted to reinstate the Republic.
Here is the probable cause of the unprecedented historical defamation of this emperor: The texts of Roman history would eventually fall into the hands of the Christians, who were mostly of Jewish origin and viscerally detested the emperors. Since, according to Orwell, ‘he who controls the past controls the present’, Christians adulterated Roman historiography, turning the emperors who had opposed them and their Jewish ancestors into disturbed monsters.
In this way, we do not have a single Roman emperor who has participated in harsh Jewish reprisals who has not been defamed by accusations of homosexuality, cruelty or perversion. The historian José Manuel Roldán Hervás has dismantled many of the false accusations against the historical figure of Caligula.

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Christendom Eduardo Velasco Jerusalem Jesus Judaism Judea v. Rome Nero New Testament St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XII

by Evropa Soberana [1]

 

‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for out of you will come a ruler who will shepherd my people Israel’.

—Matthew, 2:6

‘…which you have prepared in the sight of all nations: a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and the glory of your people Israel’.

—Luke 2: 31

‘You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews’.

— John 4:22

‘Christus, from whom the name [Christians] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular’.

—Tacitus, Annals, 15: 44, about the persecution decreed by Nero.

 
Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm
Yosef (a.k.a. Joseph), Jesus’ father, was a Jew from the House of David. But since Yosef supposedly did not intervene in the Virgin’s pregnancy, we will go on to examine the lineage of Miriam (a.k.a. Mary).
Luke the Evangelist was an individual from Antioch, in present-day Turkey. According to him, this woman was from the family of David and the tribe of Judah, and the angel who appeared to her predicted that a son would be born to whom Jehovah ‘will give him the throne of David, his father, and he will reign in the house of Jacob’.
According to the gospel story, Jesus was born in Bethlehem. In the Gospel of Matthew (1: 1) he is associated with Abraham and David, and in that same gospel (21: 9) it is described how the Jewish crowds in Jerusalem acclaim Jesus by shouting ‘Hosanna to the Son of David!’ without mentioning, of course, the ‘wizards of the East’ who visited the Messiah by following a star and asking ‘Where is the king of the Jews who was born?’ (Matthew, 2: 1-2).
Jesus, who never intended to found a new religion but to preserve pure the Orthodox Judaism made it clear, ‘I have not come to repeal the Law [of Moses, the Torah] but to fulfil it’ and, enraged to see that the Jerusalem temple was being desecrated by merchants, he threw them with blows. This Jewish agitator, like an Ayatollah, did not hesitate to face—with the authority given to him by being called rabbi—the other Jewish factions of his time, especially the Sadducees.[2]
Jesus surrounded himself with a circle of disciples among whom we could highlight the mentioned Simon the Zealot, Bartholomew (of whom Jesus himself says in the Gospel of John, where he is called Nathanael, ‘here is a true Israelite’); Judas Iscariot (who betrayed him to the Sadducees for money), Peter, John and Matthew.[3] Although there is not much information about the rest of the Apostles, it is necessary to remember that, until the trip of Paul (also Jewish) to Damascus after the death of Jesus, in order to be a Christian it was essential to be a circumcised, orthodox and observant Jew.
That the doctrine of Jesus was addressed to the Jews is evident in Matt. 10:6, when he says to the twelve apostles: ‘Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel’. The phrase implies to rescue those Jews who have strayed from the Law of Moses. This was because ‘if you believed in Moses you would believe me’ (John, 5:46).
In the year 26, Tiberius, who had expelled the Jews from Rome seven years before in times when the zeitgeist was fully anti-Semitic, appointed Pontius Pilate as a procurator of Judea, a Spaniard born in Tarragona or Astorga: the only decent character of the New Testament according to Nietzsche.
After the incident with the banners of Pompey, the Jews had obtained from previous emperors the promise not to enter Jerusalem with the displayed banners, but Pilate enters parading in the city, showing high the standards with the image of the emperor. This, the golden shields placed in the residence of the governor, and the use of the money of the temple to construct an aqueduct for Jerusalem (that transported water from a distance of 40 km), provoked an angry Jewish reaction. To suppress the insurrection, Pilate infiltrated the soldiers among the crowds and, when he visited the city, gave a signal for the infiltrated legionaries to take out the swords and start a carnage.
In the year 33, after various skirmishes of the Jesus gang with rival factions—particularly with the Sadducees, who at that time held religious power and saw with discomfort how a new vigorous faction arose—, Pontius Pilate orders the punishment of Jesus, at the request of the Sadducees. Jesus is scourged and the Roman legionaries, who must have had a somewhat macabre sense of humour and who knew that Yeshua proclaimed himself Messiah, put a crown of thorns and a reed in his right hand, and shout at him with sarcasm ‘Hail, king of the Jews!’ (Matthew 27: 26-31 and Mark 15: 15-20). When they crucified him they placed the inscription I.N.R.I. at the top of the cross: IESVS NAZARENVS REX IVDAEORVM (Jesus Nazarene King of the Jews).
Yeshua of Nazareth, known to posterity as Jesus, was one of many Jewish agitators who were in Judea during the turbulent Roman occupation. Executed around the year 33 during the reign of Tiberius, his figure would be taken by Saul of Tarsus (a.k.a. Paul): a Jewish Pharisee marvelled at the power of subversion that enclosed the sect founded by Jesus.
Jesus was, then, one of many Jewish preachers who, before him and after him, proclaimed themselves Messiah. Only that, in his case, Saul of Tarsus (now Turkey) would soon call him, instead of masiah, Christus: the Greek equivalent of ‘Messiah’. After changing his name to Paul he preached the figure of ‘Christ’, indissolubly linked to the rebellion against Rome, throughout the empire, deciding that Christianity should be spread out of its narrow Jewish circle and introduced in Rome.
 
________________
[1] Slightly modified by the Editor of this site.
[2] Note of the Ed.: The split of early Christianity and Judaism took place during the first century CE. Traditional Christian doctrine aside, it is more likely that the point of conflict between Jesus and the religious authorities was political rather than religious. It had its roots right after the driving of the traders from the Temple of Jerusalem. Jesus thus came into direct conflict with the High Priest, a Sadducee: the one who officiated the Temple.
The texts known as the ‘New Testament’, written not in Jesus’ Aramaic but in Greek, are Christian propaganda when, later, the early church entered in conflict with the Pharisees. (At the time that the gospels were edited the Sadducees had lost their leadership and the Pharisees were the sole repository of religious authority.) Although the evangelists specifically mention the Pharisees as those who Jesus scolds—even the author of this essay (which is why I modified his text)—, modern scholars postulate that the fight of the historical Jesus was with the Sadducee faction of Judaism: the bourgoise priesthood that represented the Temple, the collaborators with Rome.
On the other hand Talmudic Judaism, as known today, is the offshoot of Pharisee theology with Jews already in the Diaspora.
No Sadducee documents survived Titus’ conquest of Jerusalem. It is likely that, by editorial intervention, the name ‘Pharisees’ was substituted for the original ‘Sadducees’ in several gospel verses, in times that early Christians clashed with the Pharisees. In future instalments of the Kriminalgeschichte series (Volume III) we will see the extent of the tampering of gospel verses by the early Church.
[3] Note of the Ed.: Not to be confused with Matthew the Evangelist, a Greek-speaking author who never met Jesus in the flesh.

Categories
Augustus Eduardo Velasco Josephus Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • XI

by Evropa Soberana

 
Herod the Great
Augustus (born Gaius Octavius), successor of Julius Caesar at the head of the Roman Empire, appointed Herod, son of Antipater, as king of Judea, and financed his army with Roman money. Herod was a capable, brutal, competent and unscrupulous leader (he practically dispatched his entire family), as well as an excellent warrior, hunter and archer. He expelled the Judean Parthians; protected Jerusalem from pillage, persecuted the bandits and highwaymen and executed the Jews who had supported the Parthian marionette regime, consolidating himself in 37 BCE as king of Judea.
Although Herod is portrayed by history as a ruthless, cruel and selfish king, the reality is that, as hard as it may seem to believe, as a sovereign he was one of the best that this land ever had. Even in 25 BCE he sacrificed important personal wealth to import large quantities of grain from Egypt, with the aim of fighting a famine that was spreading misery in his country.
Despite this and everything he did for Israel, Herod is viewed with antipathy by the Jews, for having been a pro-Roman, pro-Greek sovereign and, above all, because his Jewishness was questioned: Herod descended from his father’s side of Antipater (the one who supported Cassius), who in turn descended from those Idumeans (or Edomites) forced to convert to Judaism when John Hyrcanus, a Hasmonean king, conquered Idumea (or Edom) around 135 BCE.
On the maternal side Herod descended from the Arabs, and the transmission of the Jewish condition is matrilineal. Therefore, although Herod identified himself as a Jew and was considered a Jew by most authorities, the masses of the Jewish people, especially the most orthodox, systematically distrusted the king: especially in view of the opulent and luxurious life he imposed on his court, and held for him a contempt perhaps comparable to the one that the Spaniards of the 16th century felt by the Marranos or Jews converted to Christianity.
For his education and Greco-Roman inclinations, it is more likely that this king felt less Jewish, although he certainly wanted to please Jewry and be an effective sovereign by the prosperity that he brought to them. More rational than his fundamentalist subjects, Herod understood that enraging Rome was not good business.
Herod gave Israel a splendour that it had never known, not even under David or Solomon. He embellished Jerusalem with Hellenistic architecture and sculpture; carried out an ambitious program of public works, and in 19 BCE demolished and rebuilt the very Temple in Jerusalem, considering it too small and mediocre.
This angered the Jews, who hated Herod for being a protégée of the Romans, whom cordially they hated even more. Undoubtedly, the most orthodox sectors of the Jewish quarter were happy with the Temple as it was, and they must have seen as bad its conversion in a more Roman-looking building, especially when the king ordered to decorate the entrance with a golden imperial eagle. (Paradoxically, the Jews would later mourn the destruction of this same Temple at the hands of the Romans.)
Herod was continually involved in conspiracies by his family, much of which, including his own wife and two of his children, was executed at his request. As he was getting old, he developed ulcers and convulsions. He died in 4 BCE, at the age of 69. Eventually it was said that he had ‘ascended to the throne like a fox; ruled like a tiger, and died like a dog’.

The first temple in Jerusalem was a very shabby building, as we have seen in a previous chapter. The second, similar to the first, was built under the protection of the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in 515 BCE. In the year 19 BCE Herod proposed to renovate and enlarge it, for which he demolished the old temple; erecting, under Roman protection, a much grander one, although it continued to be called ‘Second Temple’ (or Temple of Herod). Although Jewry would abhor Herod, the truth is that he gave the temple a size and splendour that neither Solomon nor Zerubbabel could have imagined.

In that same year of 4 BCE, two Jewish Pharisees called Zadok (or Tsadoq) and Judas the Galilee (also called John of Gamala) called for not paying tribute to Rome. There was a Pharisee uprising, and the rabbis ordered to destroy the ‘idolatrous’ image of the imperial eagle that Herod had placed at the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem. Herod Archelaus, the son of Herod, and Varus, a Roman commander, stifled the revolt harshly, and had nearly 3,000 Jews crucified.
It is thought that perhaps this first revolt is the origin of the Zealot movement, about which we will talk in the next section. Archelaus, despite having been proclaimed king by his army, did not assume the title until he had presented his respects, in Rome, to Augustus. He was made the Roman client king of Judea, Samaria and Idumea, despite of the sentiments of the Roman Jews, who feared him for the cruelty with which he had repressed the Pharisee uprising.
Archelaus is mentioned in the gospel of Matthew, since Yosef, Miriam and Yeshua—known as Joseph, Mary and Jesus—had escaped to Egypt to avoid the massacre of the innocents. (Supposedly, that year Herod Archelaus ordered the execution of all the firstborn of Bethlehem.) [1]
 
The Zealots
In the year 6 CE, after the complaints of the Jews, Augustus dismisses Archelaus, sending him to Gaul. Samaria, Judea and Idumea are formally annexed as a province of the Roman Empire, with the name of Judea. The Jews become governed by Roman ‘procurators’: a kind of governors who had to maintain peace, Romanize the area and exercise the fiscal policy of Rome by collecting taxes. They also arrogated to themselves the right to appoint the high priest of their choice.
The Jews hated the puppet kings despite the fact that they imposed order, developed the area and, in short, civilised the country. Paradoxically, from the beginning the Jewish quarter was also highly hostile to the Romans, whose intervention they had practically begged! Now, in addition to the Temple tribute, they also had to pay tribute to Caesar—and, by tradition, money was not something the Jews happily lavished.
That same year, the consul Publius Sulpicius Quirinius arrived in Syria to make a census in the name of Rome with the objective of establishing taxes. Since Judea had been annexed to Syria, Quirinius included the Jews in the census. As a result of this and of the new irruption of European culture in the area, the fundamentalist terrorist movement of the Zealots flourished.
Flavius Josephus considers the Zealots as the fourth Jewish sect together with—from least to greatest religious extremism—the Essenes, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Zealots were the most fundamentalists of all: they refused to pay taxes to the Roman Empire. For them, all other Jewish factions were heretical; any Jew who collaborated minimally with the Roman authorities was guilty of treason and should be executed. The armed struggle, the militarization of the Jewish people and the expulsion of the Romans, were the only way to achieve the redemption of Zion. According to the New Testament, the apostle Simon, one of the disciples of Jesus, belonged to this faction (Luke, 6:15).
Among the Zealots the Sicarii stood out, a faction even more fanatized, sectarian and radicalised, so called by the sica: a dagger that could be easily hidden and used to kill their enemies. The Zealots and Sicarii would form the hard core of the Great Jewish Revolt which we will see in another section. They were also the most active element of Judaism of the time, since at that time it is probable that most Jews, although they detested both Greeks and Romans cordially, would simply like to live and enrich themselves in peace, agreeing with whom it was necessary for it.
As it could not be otherwise, the Sicarii and zealots also fought among themselves. There were a total of twenty-four Jewish factions that generally fought against each other, in a very representative frame of what the rabbis called Sinat chinam, that is, ‘groundless hatred’ from Jew to Jew (maybe because hating non-Jews does make sense): an attitude that perhaps has been better caricatured in the movie Life of Brian.
In year 19, with Jewry in process of climbing to acquire influence at Rome itself, Tiberius expelled the Jews from the city, instigated by the Senate. Concerned about the popularity of Judaism among freed slaves, he forbids Jewish rites in the capital of the Empire, considering Jewry ‘a danger to Rome’ and ‘unworthy to remain within the walls of the City of the Legions’ according to Suetonius. That year, on the occasion of a famine in the province of Egypt, Tiberius denies to the Alexandrian Jews grain reserves, since he does not consider them his citizens.

Tiberius set in motion anti-Jewish measures during his reign, during which Jesus was executed.
___________________
[1] Note of the Ed.: An obviously fictional gospel tale, as no Roman historian mentions it, not even the Jew Flavius Josephus.

Categories
Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Josephus Judea v. Rome Julius Caesar Library of Alexandria

Apocalypse for whites • X

by Evropa Soberana

 

The Jews in the Roman Empire
Around 55 BCE the Republic, too large and militarized, was calling for a new form of government. And it was de facto governed by the so-called Triumvirate: an alliance of three great military commanders: Marcus Licinius Crassus—bust above: the one who crushed the Spartacus revolt in the year 74 BCE—, Pompey, the conqueror of Syria, and Julius Caesar, the conqueror of Gaul.
In 54 BCE, Crassus, then Roman governor of the province of Syria, while spending the winter in Judea decreed on the population a ‘war tax’ to finance his army, and also plundered the temple of Jerusalem, stealing its treasures (for value of ten thousand talents), causing a huge stir in the Jewish quarter. Crassus and the vast majority of his army would be massacred by the Parthians in the unfortunate Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE. [1]
Lucius Cassius Longinus, one of Crassus’ commanders who had managed to escape the Carrhae massacre with his 500 horsemen, returned to Syria to prepare for a counter-attack and re-establish the devalued Roman prestige in the province. After expelling the Parthians, Cassius had to face a rebellion of the Jewry, which had risen as soon as Jews learnt that the hated Crassus had been killed.
Cassius became an ally of Antipater and Hyrcanus II. After taking Tariquea, a Judean stronghold and execute one of the leaders of the rebellion who had ties with Aristobulus, Cassius captured 30,000 Jews. In the year 52 BCE he sold them as slaves in Rome.
This was the beginning of subversion within Rome itself, since these 30,000 Jews (later freed by Mark Antony and his descendants), dispersed throughout the Empire, would not cease henceforth to promote agitation against of the hated Roman authority. They would have an important role in the construction of the underground catacombs and synagogues, which were later the first preaching field of Christianity. Cassius would later be appointed governor of Syria.
In 49 BCE Crassus was killed and the Triumvirate broken. Civil war broke out between Pompey and Caesar: one of whom, inevitably, was to become the autocratic dictator of the entire empire. Hyrcanus II and Antipater decided to take sides with Caesar, who had Antipater as regent. Julius Caesar would soon take control of the situation, and Pompey was assassinated in Egypt by conspirators.
In 48 BCE, while the Roman and Ptolemaic fleets were engaged in a naval battle, an event was held to further tense the relations between Jews, Greeks and Egyptians: the burning of the library of Alexandria.
Of all the ethnic groups that were in the city, none could have anything against the library. The Greeks had founded it; the Egyptians had contributed much to it, and the Romans sincerely admired this Hellenistic legacy. The Jews, however, saw in the library an accumulation of ‘profane’ and ‘pagan’ wisdom, so that if there was a group suspected of the first burning of the library, logically it was the Jewish quarter, or the most orthodox and fundamentalists sectors. At least that’s what the inhabitants of Alexandria should have thought.
In 31 BCE, the year of a strong earthquake in Israel that killed thousands of people, Cleopatra and Mark Antony committed suicide after their fall from grace.
Flavius Josephus mentions, during the reign of Augustus, a judicial complaint in which 8,000 Jews supported one of the parties. These Jews were to be all adult males, and since a nuclear family used to be of four or five people, we may conclude that at the time of Augustus there were about 35,000 Jews in Rome.
__________________
 
[1] Crassus, who committed a crass (hence the expression) blunder during the battle, was responsible for the massacre of 20,000 soldiers at the hands of the Parthians. Another 10,000 Roman soldiers were taken prisoners and sent to forced labour to what is now Afghanistan. Many ended up fighting, under Parthian control, against the Huns. We lose their trail onwards. Genetic analyses seem to indicate that this detachment, the famous ‘lost legion of Crassus’, ended in the current Chinese province of Liqian, where they are responsible for a greater frequency of ethnic European features in the native population.

Categories
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • IX

by Evropa Soberana

 
Cicero and the Jewish lobby
In 62-61 BCE, the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem.
When this happened, the Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 BCE, which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold. And this, forsooth, is the reason why this cause is pleaded near the steps of Aurelius. It is on account of this charge, O Laelius, that this place and that mob has been selected by you. You know how numerous that crowd is, how great is its unanimity, and of what weight it is in the popular assemblies. I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite that people against me and against every eminent man; and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…

From these phrases we can deduce that already in the 1st century BCE, the Jews had great political power in Rome itself, and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Categories
Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Jerusalem Josephus Judaism Judea v. Rome

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.
 
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[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
Alexandria Celsus Eduardo Velasco Judaism Judea v. Rome

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
Alexander the Great Antiochus IV Epiphanes Eduardo Velasco Judaism Judea v. Rome 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
Ancient Rome Cicero Eduardo Velasco Horace Judaism Judea v. Rome Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • V

by Evropa Soberana

 
Roman anti-Semitism: a spiritual conflict
What happened after the arrival of Roman troops in Judea was a spiritual confrontation unprecedented in the history of mankind. Four million Jews were now going to share borders with the other 65 million subjects of the Roman Empire.
It is impossible to write an article on this subject without mentioning the profoundly anti-Jewish quotes written by great Roman authors of the time. In them a true conflict is perceived between two systems of values exactly opposite each other. The clash between Roman rigidity and the dogmatism of the desert caused in Rome a genuine movement of rejection of Judaism. Although anti-Semitism goes back to the very origins of Jewry, the Romans, heirs of the Greeks and of a superior military discipline, were undoubtedly, until then, the ones who showed the greatest hostility towards the Jews.
Cicero (106-43 BCE), as we shall see later, condemns hostile Jewry considering that their mentality of skulduggery and cowardice is incompatible with the altruistic mentality of the best in Rome.

Horace (65-8 BCE), in Book I of his Satires mocks the Sabbath or Sabbatic rest, while Petronius (dies in 66 CE) in his Satyricon ridicules the circumcision.
Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE) in his Natural History speaks about ‘Jewish impiety’, and refers to ‘the Jews, well known for their contempt for the gods’.
Seneca (4-65 CE) called Jewry ‘the most evil nation, whose waste of a seventh of life [he refers to Shabbat] goes against the utility of it… These most perverse people have come to extend their customs into the whole world; the defeated have given laws to the victors’.
Quintilian (30-100 CE) says in his Institutio Oratoria that the Jews are a derision for the rest of men, and that their religion is the embodiment of superstition.
Martial (40-105), in his Epigrams, sees the Jews as followers of a cult whose true nature is secret to hide it from the rest of the world, and he attacks circumcision, the Shabbat (or Saturday: that is, doing nothing on the seventh day of the week, which gave them lazy press), and their abstinence from pork.
Tacitus (56-120), the famous historian who praised the Germans, also spoke about the Jews but in very different terms. He says that they descend from lepers expelled from Egypt, and that under the Assyrians, the Medes and Persians, they were the most despised and humiliated people. Among the terms with which Tacitus qualifies Jewry we have ‘perverse, abominable, cruel, superstitious, alien to any law of religion, evil and filthy’ among many others:

The Jewish customs are sad, dirty, vile and abominable, and if they have survived it is thanks to their perversity. Of all enslaved peoples, Jews are the most despicable and disgusting.
For the Jews, everything that is sacred to us is despicable, and what is repugnant to us is lawful.
The Jews reveal a stubborn bond with one another, which contrasts with their hatred for the rest of humanity… Among them, nothing is lawful. Those who embrace their religion practice the same thing, and the first thing they are taught is to despise the gods [History, chapters 4 and 5].

Juvenal (55-130), in his Satires, criticizes the Jews for the Sabbath, for not worshiping images, for circumcising themselves, for not eating pork, for being scrupulous with their laws while despising those of Rome, and that they only reveal the ‘initiates’ the true nature of Judaism. In addition, he blames Orientals in general and Jewry in particular for the degeneration of the environment in Rome itself.
Marcus Aurelius (121-180) passed through Judea on his trip to Egypt, being surprised by the ways of the local Jewish population. He will say, ‘I find this people worse than the Marcomanni, the Quadics and the Sarmatians (Rerum Gestarum Libri by Ammianus Marcellinus).
These quotes summarise how the Romans, an Indo-European martial, virile and disciplined people, saw the Jewish quarter. It can be said that, until the triumph of the Romans, no people had been so aware of the challenge posed by Judaism.
All these quotes point to a stubborn ideological as well as military confrontation, in which both Rome and Judea were going to think a lot for a final solution: a conflict that would influence History in a huge way and, therefore, cannot be ignored under any pretext. This article tries to give an idea of what the old clash of the East against the West meant.

Categories
Eduardo Velasco Human sacrifice Judaism Judea v. Rome

Apocalypse for whites • IV

by Evropa Soberana

 
Judea
The Jews, in many ways, were the exact antithesis of the Romans, but they had something in common with them: ritual rigidity and loyalty to customs. In the Jewish case, the character was tinged with certain fanaticism, dogmatism and intransigence. The Romans considered such religiosity sinister: the Biblical religious background, which is the matrix of Judaism—also of Christianity and Islam—, comes from an ancient Syrian-Phoenician-Canaanite-Semitic tradition, which among other things sanctioned human sacrifice, including the one of first-born children.
Jewry, which had a long record of nomadism, slavery, persecutions and expulsions from Egypt and the Mesopotamian civilisations, had maintained, despite its great swings through a thousand deserts and a thousand foreign cities, its essentially undisturbed idiosyncrasy.
From the remotest antiquity, the Jews proved to be an unassimilable and highly conflictive people, endowed with an unprecedented ability to climb the social positions of other civilisations, undermine their institutions and destroy their traditions and customs from a parasitic and advantaged position; enrich themselves in the process, take whatever was useful, become increasingly sophisticated and, finally, survive the fall of the civilisation they devoured, taking a baggage of experience and symbols stolen to the next civilisation destined to suffer the repetition of the cycle.
In all the countries that welcomed them, the Jews were accused of appropriating the riches of others without working (usury), of exercising vampirism over the economy, of being sycophants with the nobility and openly hostile to the people, of indebting the States and to mortally hate, in secret, all the non-Jewish humanity.
Those who held power among the Jews were the rabbis: priests who had spent their lives learning the Torah and exercised firm psychological control over their people by threatening the wrath of Yahweh and manipulating the individual’s fears and feelings such as guilt or sin. The Greek historian Strabo would end up describing the Jewish priests as ‘superstitious and with the temperament of tyrants’.

This is the first temple in Jerusalem, also called the temple of Solomon or Zion, built on the esplanade of Mount Moriah, around the year 960 BCE. It was razed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and rebuilt seventy years later by those Jews who, led by Zerubbabel, Ezra and Nehemiah, returned from the deportation of the so-called ‘Babylonian captivity’. It is a rather modest structure and, of course, following the fundamentalist Semitic tradition, lacked images or representations of the human figure: literally, Judaism was a religion without idols. The Carthaginians, associated with the presence of haplogroups J and who had been crushed by Rome in the course of the Punic wars, had also been heirs of the Phoenician tradition of child sacrifice.
But to be a ‘barbarian’ and ‘third-world’ people, despised and considered destined for slavery, the Jews had a very high literacy rate and, because of their experience, they handled themselves extremely well in urban environments, since from all over the world they were the people that had lived the longest in civilised conditions.
There were also among them, without any doubt, extremely smart and astute men, good doctors, accountants, fortune tellers, merchants and scribes; and their radical monotheism, almost sophisticated in its total rupture with everything else, differentiated them well from any another people.