A Deceitful Civilizational Contract
Rabbis often say that antisemitism is the jealousy of those who have not been chosen by God — a kind of Cain complex.
French Jewish political advisor Jacques Attali proposes a subtler variation: antisemitism is resentment against those to whom we are indebted.[1] What do Christians owe to Jews? God, of course! Without the Jews, we would not know God, and we resent them for that.
I disagree. If the Goyim are ungrateful, that may be because, in the deepest recesses of their soul, they know they have been tricked. They have accepted from the Jews a phony God, a grotesque and malevolent forgery. Even worse, the Jews convinced them long ago to throw away the real thing that they had had all along.
We, Christians, have signed a civilizational contract that for two thousand years has prohibited us from accessing the idea of God through reason alone, as the Greeks and Romans had taught us, and which instead requires our adherence to the Jews’ “revelation” that God is the god of Israel. The Jews thus stripped us of the most essential freedom, and obtained from us the recognition of their original metaphysical superiority, an unmatchable and unstoppable symbolic power.
The civilization of cunningness
We should have known better. It is clear enough in the Jewish scriptures that cunningness is the essence of Jewishness. It is by deceiving his father, his brother, and his uncle that Jacob became the eponymous founder of Israel (Genesis 25-36). John E. Anderson has tried to justify this Hebrew “theology of deception” in a book titled Jacob and the Divine Trickster (2011). How can God be “complicit in Jacob’s deception”? Anderson’s answer is that God had to be, for the higher purpose of “the perpetuation of the ancestral promise.”[2] But of course, the question itself is stupid unless, like Anderson, you are victim of the core biblical deception and take the biblical God seriously. If Yahweh is just “the god of Israel who pretends to be God”, then everything is perfectly logical: like god, like people, and vice versa.
The origin of this metaphysical trick seems to go back to the fifth century BC, in Babylon under Persian domination, when Ezra published the first version of the Tanakh (later revised by the Hasmoneans). As I showed in From Yahweh to Zion, the subterfuge is almost transparent in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, in which the divinity called “Yahweh, the god of Israel” in the main body of the text, is called “Yahweh, the God of Heaven” in the fake edicts attributed to the Persian kings authorizing the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem: the implication is that the Zoroastrian Persians have been tricked into believing that the Jews worship the universal God.
Ezra was living around the time of the Persian king of kings Artaxerxes I, who had a notoriously tolerant religious policy. Interestingly, Herodotus, who lived in the same period, wrote this about the Persians: “They hold lying to be the most disgraceful thing of all.”
It is not clear to what extent the Persians were really duped by the Jews (then called Judaeans). But since that day, the relationship of the Judaean kingdom to the Empire (and more broadly to the Gentiles) has been based on this same doublespeak: Gentiles are told that the Temple of Jerusalem is dedicated to the Great universal God, but Jews know that it is the dwelling place of the god of Israel, where only Israelites are allowed. This doublespeak becomes a paradoxical dual meaning: Yahweh is simultaneously the universal God and the national god of Israel. And this paradoxical dual meaning is internalized by the Jews themselves, whose mind is twisted by this cognitive boloney from generation to generation.
Another facet of this ploy is the dual meaning of Jewishness, which for the Jews means ethnic separation, but which to the Gentiles is presented as a faith in the universal God. The first meaning is practical, the second theoretical; the practice is for the Jews, the theory is for the Gentiles. But the dual meaning is internalized, and Jews consider that what unites them is both a religion (Judaism) and a genetic community (Jewry).
Israel is therefore the civilization of trickery, cunningness, doublespeak, lies, and whatever other synonym you can find. Cunning was initially a way of collective survival for the Jews in times of Exile or Dispersion, but over the centuries it became a way of life and a way of domination.
Roman civilization was based on Greek culture, centered on wisdom, synonymous with truth. Although Rome also had a passion for empire-building, this was based on a passion for law, which was a practical application of Greek reason. This I explained in my previous article (“Israel vs. international law”), where I contrasted Rome’s law based on human reason and universalism, with Israel’s law based on divine revelation and ethnic chauvinism.
Here I will briefly recall the three major episodes of the struggle to the death between Roman and Jewish civilizations, beginning in the Hellenistic era and ending with Rome’s conversion to Christianity. But first, let’s settle the question of God: did the Romans believe in God? In other words: did we need to be introduced to God by the Jews?
The God of the Romans
We normally think of the conflict between Rome and Jerusalem as a conflict between polytheism and monotheism. That is not false. No people was more polytheistic than the Romans. They were so hospitable to gods that they even adopted the gods of vanquished people. Mithra is a case in point.
Let’s think of it this way: why would God be masculine rather than feminine, and singular rather than plural? The Greeks, like the Egyptians, found it natural to imagine the divine as both a diversity and a unity. Polytheism was an inclusive monotheism.
Most educated Romans were eclectic in their philosophical opinions, but the most influential school was Stoicism. It had the favor of Cicero at the end of the Republic, and of Marcus Aurelius at the zenith of the Empire. That Stoics professed a form of monotheism is beyond discussion. In a famous Hymn to Zeus, Stoic philosopher Cleanthes (third century BC) called God “Nature’s great Sovereign, ruling all by law,” to whom men must turn their minds in order to live “the noble life, the only true wealth.” Cleanthes prayed that people who do evil by ignorance can be enlightened: “Scatter, O Father, the darkness from their souls.”
It is said that Stoics confused God with the Cosmos or with Nature, and for that they have been labelled in modern times as “pantheists”. But we must be careful with Greek words and their translations: Kosmos means “order”, implying an “Intelligent Design”, and Nature (Phusis) has a dynamic meaning: it is the animating principle within Nature.
Greeks and Romans, however, did not pretend to know God, even less what God wants, what God says, or what God likes. Such anthropomorphism was acceptable for gods, not for God. God is, for the philosopher, the unknowable, or at least the unspeakable, since saying anything about God was putting a limitation on the infinite. This, we may call philosophical humility, which contrasts with theological arrogance.
But if God is unknowable, the laws by which He rules the Cosmos are partly accessible to human science. These laws constitute a sort of intermediate principle, the creative thought or wisdom of God, called Logos in Platonic tradition, sometimes identified as the feminine Sophia, the Wisdom of God. The fact that the universe is ruled by natural laws is proof of the existence of God, according to Cicero (Of the nature of gods II.12.34):
For when we gaze upward to the sky and contemplate the heavenly bodies, what can be so obvious and so manifest as that there must exist some power possessing transcendent intelligence by whom these things are ruled?
The God of the Jews
Unlike the Romans who thought of God as unknowable directly, the Jews considered that they, and they alone, knew God personally. They alone know God’s real name, which he told to Moses in a personal interview. They even know God’s address: He lives in Jerusalem and nowhere else (they brought him there from Sinai in an ark). Only the Jews are familiar enough with God to know what He likes and doesn’t like (He likes the “pleasant smell” of holocausts, for example, Genesis 8:21), or what He wants at any particular time, depending on His mood. The Jewish God is an individual, and a speaking one.
Most importantly, of course, Jews know that God chose them to rule the world. God told them in Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that after creating all nations, He delegated one small “son of God” (angel?) to every nation but kept Israel for Himself. And other nations are to serve Israel or perish: “Kings will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet,” while “I shall make your oppressors eat their own flesh” (Isaiah 49:23-26). Thus spoke Yahweh!
According to the Greco-Romans, God communicates with men through reason. Reason is the source of knowledge, and knowledge is the source of virtue, which is a life in harmony with the cosmos (and with your own nature or destiny), and the source of true happiness. This is stoicism in a nutshell.
Unlike the Greco-Roman God, the Jewish God does not connect with his people by reason, but by law. “Knowledge of good and evil,” the whole point of Greek philosophy, is the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3, a story which is an obvious polemical attack on Hellenism (which proves the late origin of this story). The pagan Roman Celsus (around 178 AD) commented that the Jewish God is the enemy of the human race “since he cursed the serpent, from whom the first men received the knowledge of good and evil.”[3] There is no other moral standard in the Hebrew tradition than following Yahweh’s arbitrary laws and commands (like killing everyone in this or that city).
The supreme God is for the Romans, and the Stoics in particular, a principle of unity, and therefore of harmony between men. The Jewish God, on the contrary, brings division: his Law (Torah) aims mainly to separate his chosen people from the rest of humanity. Even before Abraham was born, the Jewish God hated seeing men agree among themselves to accomplish great things, such as a great city with “a tower whose top reaches into the heavens.” He said to Himself, “Let us then go down and there confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says” (Genesis 11:6-7). Since Hellenistic civilization was founded on the universal use of Greek language, we can detect in this Tower of Babel story, just as in the Garden of Eden story, a declaration of war against Hellenism.
Before opposing Rome, Jerusalem opposed Hellenistic civilization, which encompassed the Seleucid and the Lagid (or Ptolemaic) kingdoms. And as we shall now see, there was an unmistakable religious dimension in this clash of civilization, since Jewish separatism was directly caused by the Jews’ incomprehensible claim that their ethnic god was the universal God, in other words, that the universal God loved only Jews and wanted to be worshipped only by Jews, in Jerusalem.
Rome vs. Jerusalem: the clash of civilizations
We find this story for example in Diodorus Siculus, who also tells that, when king Antiochus VII Euergetes besieged Jerusalem in 134 BC, his friends “earnestly advised him to root out the whole nation, or at least to abolish their laws, and compel them to change their former manner of living. But the king, being of a generous spirit and mild disposition, received hostages and pardoned the Jews: but he demolished the walls of Jerusalem, and took the tribute that was due” (34.1). Thus the Hasmonean kingdom survived, until the Roman general Pompey intervened to end a civil war and put an end to Jewish independence (62 BC).
In 66 AD, emperor Nero sent his general Vespasian and his son Titus to subdue a rebellious Jerusalem. The war lasted four years, and ended with the looting and destruction of the temple. The Romans would normally welcome the gods of vanquished people, but the god of the Jews, Yahweh, was considered unassimilable, even poisonous. And so his sacred objects were treated as war spoils, and, as Emily Schmidt explains, “the Jewish people were made into the ultimate anti-Romans: defeated godless rebels.”[iv Moreover, since Jews throughout the world used to pay two drachmas (silver coins) a year for their temple, Vespasian now compelled them to pay that tax to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol.v] The message couldn’t be clearer.
In the next dynasty, Emperor Trajan had to put down Jewish insurrections throughout the Diaspora, and especially in Northern Africa (115-117). His heir Hadrian tried to eradicate Jewish nationality by outlawing circumcision, under penalty of death. However, he had to face a serious messianic uprising in Jerusalem, led by self-proclaimed messiah Shimon Bar Kochba, who managed to establish an independent state for some years (132-135). The Roman military campaign left 580,000 dead according to Cassius Dio, who adds: “At Jerusalem, Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter.”[vi Jews were banned from the city. The name of Israel was erased and the new province was renamed Syria Palæstina (in remembrance of the long gone Philistines, of Greek descent). As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”vii]
We must therefore remember that the struggle between Rome and Jerusalem is a central dialectical force in ancient history. This reality has been largely underestimated in Western historiography, heir to a Christian civilization whose vocation was to reconcile Rome and Jerusalem.
How Jerusalem colonized Rome
Israel survived Hadrian’s attempt at eradication, thanks to the Talmudic culture of the Diaspora. Hatred of Rome (identified with Edom, that is, Esau) became an integral part of this landless Israel. This hatred was certainly brewing among the 97,000 Jewish captives brought back to Rome by Vespasian and Titus (according to Flavius Josephus), many of whom were later freed, some of them, like Josephus himself, even adopted into the imperial family. In the first two centuries of our era, this hatred of Rome was expressed cryptically in apocalyptic Jewish literature, often in terms borrowed from the Book of Daniel: Rome was the fourth beast in Daniel’s vision, with ten horns on its head, “devouring and crushing with its iron teeth and bronze claws, and trampling with its feet what was left” (7:19-20).
The Book of Revelation, which closes the Christian canon, belongs to this literary genre. Rome is designated as “Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes,” “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns and had blasphemous titles written all over it” (17:3-5). “Babylon has fallen, Babylon the Great has fallen,” shouts the angel; “within a single day, the plagues will fall on her: disease and mourning and famine. She will be burnt right up” (18:2-8). This is followed by a vision of the rebirth of “Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven” (21:10).
How can we explain this demonization of Rome in what would become the religion of Rome in the fourth century? Or let’s reverse the question: how can we explain that Rome converted to a religion whose programmatic prophecy was the fall of Rome and the rebirth of Jerusalem?
The conversion of Rome to Christianity is one of the greatest enigmas in human history. I have shared some thought on this question in “How Yahweh Conquered Rome,” and will add a few more here.
We must start from the fact, hardly contested by anyone, that Christianity first spread in Roman society from the bottom, not the top. According to Pagan author Celsus, writing under Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD), Christians preachers, “who in the market-places perform the most disgraceful tricks, and who gather crowds around them, would never approach an assembly of wise men, nor dare to exhibit their arts among them.” They target ignorant and gullible people, slaves and women particularly (Origen, Contra Celsum, III, 50). Christianity was denounced by the Roman aristocracy as being subversive of Roman values.
This may help to explain why it ended up being promoted then enforced by Roman emperors. By the third century, emperors were no longer Roman senators, but foreign military commanders: the Severan dynasty (193-235) was of Syrian and Punic origin, with a strong connection to the Syrian cult of Elagabal (from the Arab Ilah Al-Gabal, “god of the mountain”). After them came Philip the Arab (244-249). The Constantinian and the Valentinian dynasties were from the Balkans. Theodosius I (379-395) was born in Carthaginian Spain and may have been of Punic descent. All these emperors seem to have used the Christian popular superstition against the Roman senatorial class.
Obviously there was more here than just a struggle between Christian emperors and Pagan senators. Removing the goddess of Victory from the Roman Senate! Could there be a more ominous symbol? Was it a retaliation for burning the Jerusalem temple?
Did Jesus actually kill Rome? Pagan Romans thought so. After the sack of the city by Alaric in 410, Christians were blamed for ruining the love of the motherland and the courage to defend it (Machiavel would make the same point in his Discourses on Livy II.2). Augustine wrote The City of God in response to that accusation. He didn’t deny that Christians couldn’t care less for Rome, being only concerned with their heavenly city. But he wanted the Romans to know that whatever they suffered during the bloody sack of their city—loss of property or loved ones—was for their good, since it brought them closer to God. As for the young girls who had been raped, they shouldn’t worry, for their souls were not contaminated—unless they experienced some pleasure, of course (I.10)
Although Rome had crushed Jerusalem militarily again and again, the war ultimately ended by Rome’s spiritual surrender. As the city of Rome became a colony of Jerusalem, with a pope sitting in the imperial Lateran palace, a new Roman Empire emerged in Germany, and the struggle between those two Romes became the central issue of the European Middle Ages. Frederick II Hohenstaufen, the man who reportedly claimed that “the whole world was duped by three impostors: Jesus Christ, Moses and Muhammad” (according to Pope Gregory IX’s accusation), was a kind of Hadrian or Marcus Aurelius, and a forerunner of the Renaissance; the popes hated him biblically, excommunicated him three times, and made sure his descendance was exterminated to the last grand-child.
Eighteen centuries after Hadrian, the Christian West returned Jerusalem and Palestine to the Jews. To make a long story short: Pagan Rome abhorred Israel and destroyed it, Christian Rome venerated this same ancient Israel and recreated it.
Meanwhile, what has become of the Jewish God that we adopted with Christianity? He is dead. Europeans have rejected this blasphemous mockery of God, and now find themselves godless. Meanwhile, Jewish Power is alive and well.
Notes
[1] Jacques Attali, The Economic History of the Jewish People, ESKA Publishing, 2010,
[2] John E. Anderson, Jacob and the Divine Trickster: A Theology of Deception and Yhwh’s Fidelity to the Ancestral Promise in the Jacob Cycle, Eisenbrauns, 2011, p. 1. Thanks to this commenter for the source.
[3] Origen, Against Celsus, VI, 28.
[4] Emily A. Schmidt, “The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,” sur escholarship.org; also Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.
[5] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 454.
[6] Ibid., p. 484. Eusebius of Caesarea has a different chronology, but he is a much later source.
[7] Ibid., p. 494.
No comments:
Post a Comment