TABOO TALK

The road to Jewish emancipation in America had to be less bumpy than in Europe, although not without a few snags, one of the most notorious being the refusal to accept 930 Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in 1939, as a result of which they had to return to Europe, and most of them would later perish in the Holocaust. Another unpleasantness was America’s anti-Israel stand in the 1956 Suez War, followed by JFK’s strong objections to Israel’s budding nuclear program. Added to these blots on America’s subsequent Pledge of Allegiance to Israel has been undoubtedly the most serious, yet the least publicized accusation initially made by Moscow and supported by a large majority of the Russian Jews and, I suspect, of the Israeli Jews as well, that an anti-Soviet Anglo-American conspiracy to delay the opening of the Second Front in Europe until 1944, during World War II, was largely responsible for the Holocaust of six million Jews, most of whom would have been spared, had the D-Day been carried out in 1942, or even in 1943, as expected by Moscow and incessantly demanded by Stalin.

The unpleasantness of this accusation is somewhat alleviated by a convenient combination of several facts, namely, that (1) the American Jews seem to be unaware of it; (2) that the Russian Jews coming to America are keeping mum about it; and (3) that Israel is being paid a sufficient compensation by Washington, not to bring it up. In fact, such historical sores have by now been safely covered by the thick blanket of Verboten, or, as I call it in this entry’s title, taboo talk.

…Who in his right mind would want to remind America these days of her own President Thomas Jefferson saying something as "degrading and injurious" about the Jews as the following: "Their system was deism; that is belief of only one God. But their ideas of Him and of His attributes were degrading and injurious." (From Jefferson’s An Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus Compared with Those of Others, 1803.)

Who in his right mind would want to repeat President Truman’s words, from his July 21, 1947 diary entry, that “the Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgment on world affairs.”

There is no desire on my part to rub all these things in. My point is to bring home the realization that in our time no American President would dare to conduct a policy which may be interpreted as insufficiently pro-Israel, and no aspiring politician, even of the minor leagues, would dare to say or write anything suspicious regarding the Jews, and expect to get away with it.

The curse of Verboten, as it spreads over the essential elements of history, politics, social life, etc., has cast a spell of fear, confusion, and ignorance, by its virtual ban on any meaningful discussion of the Jewish factor in modern times. It has contributed to the creation of a political fetishism, or a special kind of cult extended in this country toward Israel. No criticism is allowed, and each single mention of the Name smacks of cultic Doxology. This can be compared to the cult of Marx and Lenin in the old Soviet Doxology, and to some other cults too. Only those cults never extended to foreign objects, and when they did, like in the case of Karl Marx, their fetish had been dead for quite some time.

Turning an existing and functioning foreign object into a national fetish is perhaps unprecedented. Even the Pope does not rise to a similar status of infallibility and veneration, as Israel, and the Judenthum as a whole, have attained in the United States.

If anything could give comfort to the innermost confines of Jewish self-awareness it should be a well-justified sense of self-importance. Nothing in this world of ours can be properly understood without this essential component, the Jewish Factor. The chosenness of the Jews is much more than a tenet of religion, it is a fact of life.

Yet look around: the Jewish Factor is probably the most forbidden subject in our politically-correct society, in fact, more forbidden than “hate speech”! The most important piece of the global jigsaw puzzle, its very centerpiece is missing!!! Alas, we cannot understand the world around us without understanding the Jews, and we cannot understand the Jewish Factor at all without an assiduous study of the historical development of the Jewish thought and activity over the ages.

…I expect to be accused of every mortal sin for raising such controversial subjects throughout this section and in this entry. Ironically, the most controversial points of all have been made by unimpeachable Jewish writers and great Jewish patriots. It would be thoroughly anti-Semitic to see the Jews as a monolith, united right or wrong. An old Jewish joke says, for three Jews there are always four opinions. By the same token, any honest Jew will object to one opinion being imposed on all Jews, which is exactly what is being done by certain American Jewish ideologues today.

There are indeed dramatic differences of opinion, a great concern for many Jews regarding the recklessness of the allegedly “pro-Israel” agenda promoted by the neoconservative Jewish political activists in the United States, which in reality is conducive to a dangerous radicalization of the right wing of Jewish politics both in America and in Israel. In my opinion, such negative developments must not be swept under the Verboten rug, as the consequences of this kind of “political correctness” may turn out terribly harmful as much to the Jews themselves, as to the world at large.

Therefore I am drawing such attention to what I am calling the Jewish Manifest Destiny of Tikkun Olam, to the psychology and politics behind its most important interpretations, without the knowledge of which, and without an understanding of the true meaning and implications of which, one can never grasp the meaning of modern history, politics, and international relations, no matter how hard one tries. This Jewish legend, having taken mighty root in the United States, has indeed become the cornerstone of the American Foreign Policy, underlying the colossal misconception of Russia in America, the source of shock and a profound confusion in this country about the world as such, the tragic and inevitable source of perpetual retreat and failure. It is my honest opinion that unless the role of the Tikkun Olam philosophy and of its subconscious effect on the thinking of most Jewish foreign policy experts and lobbyists in the United States has been properly elucidated, all political science will amount to a bad joke. It is a daunting and uncomfortable truth, but sine qua non.

What is, then, the essence of the modern American ideology of Tikkun Olam, which, I have to repeat, has so much departed from Isaac Luria’s delightful mythological construct as to become its arrogant antithesis, and an inherent blasphemy?

There is no doubt that the ongoing Globalist attempt on the part of the United States to take political control of the world by economic and military means is bound to backfire with a vengeance, evidence of which we have seen plenty, 9/11 being one of such instances. Nationalism is the most powerful political force in the world, and nobody can bulldoze it with impunity. It is true that each society has its own fifth column, but not in this case, not in the final analysis. If history can teach us anything, it is the established fact that even a generous superpower support for the most obliging fifth column in a third-world country will go down to defeat, in the long run, when it faces the surging counterforce of indignant nationalism, as its nemesis.

There are certain very unpleasant implications here, so overly-sensitive and passionately controversial that their very inclusion in my book must instantly make this book untouchable for all eternity, yet it is the truth and only the knowledge of this truth can help America overcome its looming global political crisis and then its possible economic collapse. The shocking truth is that those American Jews who are exercising the most influence on this country’s foreign policy, disdainfully look down upon the Jews of other nations as their reliable fifth column. But that is exactly what they themselves have turned into, by virtue of their predictable and easily exploitable by America’s and Israel’s enemies, intransigence, within their own host: American society at large.

SAINT PAUL AND THE JEWS

Undoubtedly the most frequent accusation leveled against Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Apostle Paul, is that he was a hateful anti-Semite, who was the first to call the Jews “Christ-killers,” and thus formally opened the door to two thousand years of the Christian persecution of the Jews.

It is easy to disagree with this shallow assessment, as many have. But in this entry I am going much farther than his usual defenders. I see Saul/Paul as an exceptional Jewish nationalist visionary, who saw his mission not in putting down the Jews, but in elevating them to new heights, as befitted God’s “Chosen People.” His being used later for anti-Semitic propaganda directed against the Jews as a race, was one of the unintended consequences of his Jewish nationalist zeal.

But let us first follow the more usual argument contra Paul’s “anti-Semitism.”

Saint Paul was of course a Jew himself. It is therefore clear that, when he talks negatively about “the Jews,” what he has in mind are the unredeemed Jews, that is, all those Jews who have not believed in Jesus Christ, and therefore have not been cleansed of their collective sin of “killing the Lord Jesus.” Thus, for him, being “a Jew,” with the highly negative implications, is defined not along the ethnic lines, but wholly by religion. Here is his most famous rant against the Jews, which is obviously not “anti-Semitic” at all, because, I repeat, it is by no means directed against the “chosen race,” but against the deniers of the divinity of Jesus Christ:

“Who [the Jews] both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets and have persecuted us; and they please not God, and are contrary to all men.” (I Thessalonians 2:15.)

On the other hand, here is Paul’s clear statement on race: “Are they Hebrews? so am I. Are they Israelites? so am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? so am I.” (II Corinthians 11:22.)

Everything clear here? But now comes my next argument. Read the following part from Paul’s letter to the Galatian Christians, which very much reminds me of the Marx contra Bauer argument on the Judenfrage:

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28.)

Marx in his polemic suggested that the goal of the Jews was not the recognition of Judaism as a legitimate minority religion, but the abolition of Judaism and all other religions as the only way for the Jews to achieve full equality with the Gentiles, to become “all one” in Marx’s Third Testament. Exactly the same thinking, I believe, can be found behind Paul’s letter, and his new religion.

The letter addresses the rising disputes between Jewish and Gentile Christians. The Gentiles do not wish to be circumcised, nor to follow the other Mosaic laws. The way for the Jews to overcome these potentially self-defeating disputes is to abolish those divisive laws, becoming “all one in Christ Jesus.” Let us not forget in this context that Christianity was, for Paul, a distinctly Jewish religion, much of which he developed on his own. Clearly, Paul saw a Jewish triumph in the world’s adoption of the Jewish faith as the universal faith of the future. His attack against the Jews who resisted his teachings was therefore an aggressive defense of the Jewish Manifest Destiny, as he envisioned it at the time.

...Come to think of it, having compared Apostle Paul to Karl Marx, I am not going to stop there. St. Paul’s passionate combativeness against all those who stood in his way strongly reminds me of Lenin’s. May I be forgiven this irreverent comparison, but the two of them, Paul and Lenin, were truly birds of a feather…

HOLIER THAN THOU: AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL

There is no doubt, based on my personal experience and objective analysis, that American Jews have a sense of imperial superiority over all other Jews, including the Israelis. They call the Jews from the Soviet Union “Russians,” causing a lot of resentment, which fact is by now a matter of extensively published record. The consequent animosity of the “Russian” Jewish plebs toward the American Jewish patricians can no longer be disguised. In fact, the American Jews treat the “Russian” Jews exactly like the German Jews used to treat the shtetl Poilische Yidden before WWII. But of course the “Russians,” being very well educated, often much better educated than their counterparts in the United States, are far less tolerant of condescension than in the historical example from three quarters of a century ago, and their resentment has been real and bitter.

Characteristically, though, the general attitude of the English-speaking American Jews toward the Israelis is even more negative than toward the “Russians.” If there is anything worse than a Russian-speaking Jew, it is a Hebrew-speaking Jew. So much for the American love for Israel!

It is important to understand how the Jewish-American sense of superiority toward the rest of their race (the impatiently leaping parallel with America’s feeling of hegemonic superiority toward the rest of the world is very much in order) casts a spell on the Jewish-American attitude toward the State of Israel. Ironically, the Jews of Israel can boast of an official full-blown statehood, whereas their American brethren are officially just an ethnic minority of between two and three per cent within an overwhelmingly Gentile majority of America, and thus it appears that the real situation of who is actually superior and who is inferior should be reversed. But the incongruity of the situation is compensated by the humongously disproportionate role played by the American Jewish community today in American life and politics, caused by its disproportionate edge in the economic picture, as well as in domestic and foreign politics. No aspiring politician in the United States can survive without an explicit backing of the Jewish lobby, and, conversely, any politician who dares to act at odds with the American Jewish agenda is ipso facto marked for political annihilation.

Considering that American foreign policy is greatly influenced by the Jewish lobby, there is a strong sense of empowerment among the American Jews by the superpower might of the American State, which dwarfs the prestige of the Jewish formal sovereignty within the State of Israel and explains the superpower psychology of the American Jewish community, with its clear implication of a superiority complex.

How does this transfer to the American-Israeli relationship? The bottom line here is that the American Jews feel exceedingly qualified and entitled to represent the interests of Medinat Yisroel, as if they have acquired the power of attorney to run its affairs. The actual situation is in fact even more outrageous. American Jews are using their right under the Israeli law to come to Israel as Israeli citizens, and of all other constituents of the Jewish populace of Israel, they are the foremost troublemakers, the in-your-face settlers of the forbidden kibbutzim in the occupied Palestinian territories, the pushy ultranationalist fringe of the Israeli society.

The irony of this incongruous situation is that all of these American Jewish extremists in Israel have in their pocket a “Plan B” to fall back on, if the push comes to shove. Their American passports guarantee their secure return to the comfort of their American homes, away from the mess they have unleashed, while bona fide single-citizenship Israelis have no such luxury. Just imagine what would happen if 5+ million Israeli Jews all at once start knocking at the gates of the American superpower, asking for permanent residence, or even ‘simple’ mass admittance to the United States? Will the United States Government rush to grant them their wish? Will the American Jews second the motion? I sincerely doubt that! The last thing the American Jewish community wants are the domestic social complications caused by its overburdening of the national welfare system, particularly during a continuing economic crisis.

…It is therefore only reasonable to strenuously object to the recent push of these safely harbored American Jews to run the policies of the State of Israel from six thousand miles away, while taking unwarranted risks on behalf of the people whom they won’t be all too keen to harbor and share their homes with, in the event of trouble, the people whom they consider beneath themselves, and yet, whose interests they are so eager to represent aggressively and regardless of the cost to their unwilling clients!

ZIONISM WITHOUT AN ALTERNATIVE

A Jewish friend of mine once told me, rather angrily, that not all Jews are Zionists. I strongly disagree. The only difference here is in the intensity of the propensity for Zionism, which in its essence is present in every Jew. These words of Hatikva, the National Anthem of Israel, are describing not just an Israeli soul, but any Jewish soul, I would venture to say, without exception:

“As long as in the heart A Jewish soul still yearns, And onward, to the East, An eye still gazes toward Zion, Our hope is not yet lost, The hope of two thousand years, To be a free people in our land, The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

If these words are not an accurate description of Zionism, what else could Zionism be, by definition? Those who suggest otherwise are hypocrites.

There is no such thing as an anti-Zionist Jew. Among the closed circles of ultra-Orthodox awaiters of the Mashiach, a technical religious objection has long been raised to the existence of the modern State of Israel, but it has never amounted to anything close to a political delegitimization, and, moreover, even these objectors cannot be called anti-Zionists, but rather, Messianic Zionists. Besides, none of them would rather give Zion away than consent to such a preemption of the rightful Messiah’s historically designated mission. Just like the Torah, the Mashiach is a powerful irrational symbol, whereas Medinat Yisroel is the ultimate rational reality that no Jew today can live without.

In other words, there is no real alternative to Zionism among the Jews. The whole question boils down just to those who want to physically live in Israel, and those who don’t.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE JEW

...In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s historical drama King Richard III, the Duke of Clarence has been arrested and taken to the Tower for the sole reason, as he innocently and cluelessly explains to his nemesis Richard, “because my name is George!”

There is no point, except for deluding ourselves and thus doing ourselves a disservice, to explain anti-Semitism either by a pathological hatred of Moslems toward the Jews, or by the Christian religious prejudice against the Christ-killers. Hitler’s Germany was neither a Moslem, nor exactly a Christian nation. As I said before, the German animus toward the Jews after Germany’s humiliating defeat in the first World War was more of a Marxian class struggle attitude of the very poor towards the very rich, as well as a nationalist suspicion that these “fifth-column self-serving foreigners,” having ingratiated themselves into German society, had blown it apart from the inside, facilitating the enemy’s victory in a war that had been going decisively the German way just before it was suddenly lost, through sabotage and desertion, identified with the workings of Jewish agitators at the front and within, the latter being indeed a visible and substantial force, to reckon with.

By the same token, the bitter animosity of the Arab nations of the Middle East--- not toward the Jews, who had been living there for ages, but toward the geopolitical entity of the State of Israel that forced them out, as the Arabs saw it, from their rightful lands, was, in their eyes, a direct result of the militant Zionist movement, aided and abetted by the Europeans, who wanted to get rid of their Jews at the Arabs’ expense, and together made it happen. No matter what the implications, this was a territorial, rather than religious, or ethnic dispute.

While personally I have an understanding and even a sincere empathy for Zionism, I find it misleading and infinitely counterproductive to place the heart of the Middle East problem elsewhere, talking about a "war of civilizations," and other such nonsense. Yet, there is no question that this particular territorial grievance had indeed fueled the anti-Jewish sentiment in the Moslem world. I am sure that had the other side not raised the red flag of anti-Semitism, an equitable solution would have been much easier to come by. But, having thus provided a common umbrella to several essentially unrelated problems, we see an incredible empowerment of anti-Semitism as such, as a result.

Another powerful enabler of anti-Semitism are the excesses of modern financial capitalism, its international profiteering, manifestly responsible for the never-ending miseries of the current global financial crisis, with several unmistakably Jewish names achieving an unfortunate international notoriety in the process. Today I see a further exacerbation of the global anti-Jewish/anti-American revolt in the dogged persistence, despite the already heated emotions, of militant Globalism, a neo-Imperialist policy conducted by the United States under a heavy influence of a group of Jewish ideologues (and their Christian-Zionist comrades), known as the neocons. Their arrogance and belief in the eventual triumph of the internationalist capitalist ideology is combined with an irresponsibly cavalier dismissal of the legitimate and inevitable nationalist backlash. It is most unfortunate that Washington seems to have bought into the preposterous fairytale of Uncle Sam being able, and competent enough, to turn the world into a Pax Americana solely with the help of his soldiers and his wallet.

In fact, today’s Globalist Jew reinforces the image of the heartless Capitalist Jew, denounced by Marx and deplored by the whole Gentile world as the Usury Jew throughout the ages. Now, it is the Jewish-American nexus above everything else, including the territorial conflict in the Middle East, that feeds the anti-Semitic stereotype.

Coming back to the definition of anti-Semitism, if I may, in the simplest terms it means taking out the grudge against a “bad Jew” on a “good Jew.” But how do we qualify a good Jew, like Abraham Avinu, who acts revoltingly in the case of his wife and the Pharaoh, or like David Melech Yisroel, who acts revoltingly in the case of Uriah and Bathsheba?

These mercilessly unflattering, often shockingly nauseating stories of the greatest Jews of the Bible, whose complex characters seem to coalesce the heights of greatness with the depths of depravity, serve to buttress the idea of Jewish collectivity--- collective chosenness and collective condemnation, collective blessing and collective curse, collective pride and collective guilt. This is how I see those Biblical stories: allegorically! Abraham and David are each a collective portrait of the Jewish people as a whole… Perhaps, there exists a certain providential certainty both in the conception and in the inevitability of their collective fate?

In that case, the future of Judenthum holds very few surprises and a lot of continuity. The once Jew and the future Jew are essentially one and the same, and their name is both specific and generic too: Israel! But, to me, this fatalistic and even homiletic logic fails to make a persuasive case. Grigori Permyakov-German, my brilliant Moscow University mentor and a genius of structural paroemiology (see my entry From Proverb To Greatness), and my good family friend General Mikhail Milstein (see my entry Father Frost) cannot be merged into a "collective Israel" with a Richard Perle and a Paul Wolfowitz. A Sabbath Jew and a Renaissance Jew have nothing in common, in my mind, with a Stock Market or a Globalist Jew. And, whatever the truth of the matter is, the celebrated scar of Judas Maccabee (a Jewish national hero, and also a revered saint of the Russian Orthodox Church, together with several other Maccabee martyrs of the Russian Bible) is not a horcrux for Judas Iscariot (I am alluding of course to the denouement of the Harry Potter saga) on the face of my saga of the once and future Jew.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT...

Before the present journey through the Res Judaica section comes to its end, I need to further clarify my overall intent here.

The subject matter here, just as everywhere else, but perhaps even slightly more so, is not reduced to the academic interest of a detached scholar, but represents an intensely personal, and highly subjective preoccupation, which is the only way how I can write this book. Regardless of its shortcomings, in the conventional sense of solid methodology, organizational craftsmanship, exacting thoroughness, and broad comprehensiveness, the benefits of the opposite approach here epitomized, are no less commendable. In fact, the honorable job of copying the Encyclopedia Britannica, as performed by the proud Red-Headed League member in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous Sherlock Holmes mystery would never appeal to me as a substitute for this wildly undisciplined daydreaming fantasy. Le Roi S’Amuse, remember?

Res Judaica is perhaps the most intriguing object of study one can think of today, considering the colossal effect of the Jewish factor on the historical course of humanity, particularly since the end of World War II, the creation of the State of Israel, and the unprecedented activization of the American Jewry, in the wake of the 1967 war, waged and won by Israel against its Arab neighbors.

The extraordinary influence of Israel and of the international Jewish organizations on world affairs, as well as of the AIPAC on America’s foreign policy and on her domestic political process and public opinion has become a dominant feature in the life of our planet in the new millennium.

But to understand what is happening to the world today, one has to understand the past, and also the subtle intricacies of the present, and such knowledge is virtually inaccessible through regular academic channels. Only by going inside the Jewish phenomenon itself is it at all possible to gain the necessary insight, which is essential to the process of acquiring the knowledge in question.

Thus, much of the material in this section recounts my personal experiences and impressions from looking at the subject at a close personal range for the period of two years in the 1990’s as a virtual insider to the Jewish phenomenon. Prior to that experience I had been interested in res Judaica my whole life, with more or less success, but it was only in the course of my in-depth conversations with Rabbi Yisroel Rice, of the Marin County’s Chabad in California, with Rabbi Michael Barenbaum of the Reform Congregation Rodef Sholom, in San Rafael, and, of course, my unforgettable one-time meeting in San Francisco with the Beth Din of Northern California, headed by Rabbi Malcolm Sparer, with Jacob Traub and Eliezer Finkelman at his side, plus an uninterrupted stream of first-rate firsthand experiences as an eyewitness, which eventually forged that tiny key which can now unlock the secret door of Bluebeard’s castle, to the room, which makes all the difference, and without which the rest of the castle are mainly Pictures from an Exhibition. Indeed, no matter how delightful the pictures of Mr. Samuel Goldberg and Schmuyle are in Mussorgsky’s inspired rendering, they are still not the real thing.

ANTI-SEMITISM ON RUSSIAN SOIL

One does not have to push the limits of one’s intellectual capacity to realize that “anti-Semitism on Russian soil” is not identical to Russian anti-Semitism. While historically there used to be plenty of the former, this generalization ought not to be transferred to imply the latter. And yet, it is often deliberately transferred.

I must emphasize right away that I am not talking about some Russian Tsar playing ethnic politics and from time to time allowing Ukrainian-led pogroms as a sort of social safety valve at the Jewish expense, but only about the general historical attitude of the Great-Russians toward the Jews ,which simply cannot qualify under any reasonable definition of anti-Semitism as such. The same cannot be said of the citizens of the Western parts of the former Russian Empire, such as the Ukrainians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, etc. To accuse the ethnic Great-Russians of an attitude well known to be notoriously exhibited by somebody else, shows a defect of education and understanding on the part of Western students, and an ugly anti-Russian bias on the part of their bigoted professors, especially if Jewish, who should know better. Because every educated and every religious Jew, without exception, knows, for instance, that the classic Jewish tradition holds the names of two world-historically eminent Gentiles as righteous, on the basis of their enormous benefit to the Jews: Napoleon, who gave civil rights first to the Jews of France, then to the Jews of Europe that had been under his control; and Stalin, yes, that selfsame Stalin, who, at least according to the Jews of Russia, Europe, and Israel, saved close to two million Jews from the Holocaust--- first by annexing Eastern Poland in 1939, and then by relocating the Jews deep inside Russia prior to the German invasion of 1941, when, had they stayed behind in the vast areas of Western Russia occupied by the Nazis, most of them would have perished, but, as it turned out in actuality, these Jews, physically saved by Stalin, were to become a vital and abundant component of the post-war Jewish settlement in the newly established State of Israel.

Are Great-Russians capable of exhibiting anti-Jewish tendencies? You bet! Compare them to the Germans, who used to be very sympathetic to the Jews just two centuries ago. Could anybody have imagined, reading Lessing, that less than a century and a half after ‘Nathan der Weise,’ Germany would have a Jewish Foreign Minister (Rathenau), whose assassination in 1922 would be a harbinger of an impending Holocaust? I insist that those bizarre events were not indicative of either an excessive German fondness or an excessive hatred on their part toward the Jews, but rather of their benign tolerance, turning into an incredible ugliness due to a special set of circumstances, having nothing to do with racism. The circumstances included an explicitly prominent role of radical Jewish revolutionaries in Germany’s defeat in WWI (which, in my opinion, was a minor factor) and, far more seriously, the rapid enrichment of the German Jews after the war, set against the backdrop of great impoverishment and misery of the ethnic Germans during the same period of time.

Historically, the Great-Russians were anti-Semitism-free for the most part of their history. Prior to the reign of Tsar Alexander II, they had little contact with the Jews, who were mainly settled on the periphery of the Russian Empire, in Poland and Ukraine. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Alexander II allowed “socially useful” Jews, such as physicians, educators, scientists, and intellectuals, to settle in major Russian cities, and also to spread out into Great-Russian villages. In the course of this encounter, the Russians could only have a favorable impression of the cultured professional Jews in their midst. And then of course how can you hate your doctor or the teacher of your kids?

During the Soviet period, especially in the beginning, the mentality of the totalitarian state did not make an explicit distinction between different races, ethnicities, and cultures, as long as their representatives showed their unquestioning loyalty to their common Soviet State. It does not mean that all those differences became non-existent, but they drastically shrunk in importance, lurking somewhere in the background, very seldom coming to the fore. This goes of course for all constituent cultures of the Soviet Union, even those afflicted with the highest level of prejudice against others. (Such as the Azeris against the Armenians, for instance.)

And yet, it will be untrue to deny that a certain Great-Russian mistrust of the Jews had existed at all times. But it was never manifested as anti-Semitism per se. It was a product of Russia’s historical Xenophobia and her anti-Capitalist slant. There was never a prejudice on their part toward the assimilated Russian Jews, who had accepted conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity, the overwhelmingly essential litmus test for any foreigner’s acceptance as “one of us,” that is, as a Russian par excellence.

The first time a specific anti-Jewish bias showed itself among the Great-Russians was in the 1970’s, when Soviet Jews were allowed to emigrate to Israel, but started emigrating in large numbers to the United States of America. Many non-Jewish Russians then began looking upon the Jews as the fifth column of the Soviet society, ready to join Russia’s Main Adversary, ergo utterly untrustworthy. There was also a resentment on account of the special privileges given to the Jews by the Soviet Government: Why am I not allowed what they are allowed? Not that I want to go abroad, but as a matter of principle! To be honest, these particular aspects of the Jewish emigration had a very negative effect on the attitude toward the Jews in the USSR.

A slightly different, albeit connected, Xenophobic and anti-Jewish bias developed in post-Soviet Russia as a result of an aggressive effort on the part of foreigners led by the United States, to “capitalize” Russia, and turn her into a colony in the American Global Empire. Furthermore, the Russians perceived a conspiracy of sorts between the American imperialists and Russia’s Jewish billionaire capitalists, known as the oligarchs, such as Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky, and others, which perception nurtured an anti-capitalist and anti-Jewish bias.

Once we were talking about non-Russian anti-Semitism on Russian soil, Ukrainians were particularly noted for it. The Ukrainian rebellion against Poland in the mid-seventeenth century, led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky, targeted Jews who had served as tax collectors for the Poles, leading to the massacre of half a million Jews, referred to as the Khmelnitsky Holocaust. Nevertheless, Ukraine under the Russian Empire was settled by at least a million of shtetl Jews, and the Ukrainian propensity for anti-Jewish violence was barely contained by the Tsarist government to avoid a massive extermination of the Jews, led by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists. At the time of World War II, one of them, Stepan Bandera, personally participated in the slaughter of 110,000 Ukrainian Jews, which number is obviously part of the WWII Holocaust statistics. Ironically, Bandera was a foremost national hero, alongside Bogdan Khmelnitsky, in Victor Yushchenko’s Orange Ukraine, and the latter’s American sponsors and admirers never had objections to these two Holocaust perpetrators’ portraits being paraded across Kiev, Lvov, and all other major cities and villages of Orange Ukraine. Nor were there any official objections from Washington when Stepan Bandera was declared Ukraine’s national hero, and numerous monuments to him were erected around the country against the express wishes of the majority of the Ukrainian population.

In order to ascribe anti-Semitic hatreds to any nation or ethnic group, one has to study their behavior during WWII. It will then become explicitly clear who was exterminating the Jews with a vengeance, and who was actually saving them from the slaughter by others. It was Stalin’s Russia, not the Ukrainians, not the Poles, not the Balts, but the Great Russians, who saved nearly two million Jews from the Holocaust, which fact has been deliberately downplayed, ignored, swept under the rug by the American anti-Russian propaganda. The majority of Washington’s ‘agitpropers’ happen to be Jewish, which is already inexcusable, seeing how some American Jews are thus denying, falsifying and debasing the four-thousand year history of the Jewish people.

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!

(In Hebrew: L’Shanah HaBa’ah B’Yerushalayim, Next Year in Jerusalem, is the traditional phrase said at the end of the Pesach Seder, Yom Kippur services, and on numerous other occasions. This entry is about Jewish Zionism, but there are at least two distinctly different, even incompatible types of Zionism: religious and secular.)

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” (Psalm 137:5.)

“The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine, secured by public law, and, for the attainment of this end, it is necessary to promote the colonization of Palestine by Jewish agricultural and industrial workers; organize Jews, through local and general associations; strengthen Jewish national sentiment and consciousness; and take preparatory steps toward obtaining the government consent needed to achieve the aim of Zionism.” (From the so-called Basel Program, adopted by the First Zionist Congress, Basel, August 29, 1897, written by Max Nordau, and amended by Theodor Herzl.)

The beauty (figuratively and aesthetically speaking) of Haskala, and, at the same time, its congenital flaw, was its pipedream of a Jewish assimilation into Western society and secular culture (not necessarily giving up the Jewish religion, although the latter had to be impossible, in view of the strict dissimilationism of the Jewish religious identity--that was how Reform Judaism, an extremely watered-down version of “Judaism,” was born out of a Haskala compromise). The totally discredited by malpractice Messianic Zionism of yore was nowhere to be found among the Jews anymore, but a very different type of Zionism flourished among the so-called Christian Zionists. (Priorly referred to as restorationists, dispensationalists, or millenarians, their crazy breed had originated in Europe and was, naturally, brought to America, formerly an exception, but now virtually the rule among the American Evangelicals, plus several other Christian denominations. The most conspicuous latest example is the current [2012] Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, a Mormon Christian Zionist.)

The Haskala had been, of course, a West-European creation. The religious Jews of Eastern Europe had no desire to assimilate, but, in reaction to a wave of pogroms in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they developed a desire to move. Where else could they move, but to Palestine, and thus the organization called Lovers of Zion was born, which not only had nothing to do with Messianism, but, quite the contrary, was vehemently opposed to it, on religious grounds. Any new “Messiah” for them would have been an outright blasphemy, whereas a fulfillment of the Messianic dream without a Messiah would have been an insanity. They just wanted to move closer to the ultimate Jewish home, and there to be left alone.

Theirs was not the kind of move that could ever generate the Zionist movement, as history knows it today. The first spark had to be struck in the enlightened West, yet by someone who had to be well familiar with the experience of anti-Jewish prejudice. And so it was, courtesy of a Hungarian Jew in Paris at the time of L’Affaire Dreyfus.
Before we talk about the man, the Hungarian Jewish journalist and extraordinary political activist Theodor Herzl, a few words about the place, France.

France has played a very special role in Jewish history, and it occupies a special place in the Jewish psyche. I had the experience of attending Jewish ultra-Orthodox religious services, to discover that in every shul the singing of a Jewish prayer to the stirring tune of La Marseillaise is a mandatory part of the weekly ritual. It is an unusual tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, a hero to the Yiddishkeit.(One of the two most celebrated and world-renowned Righteous Gentiles: Napoleon, who gave the Jews their civil rights, and the other one was Stalin (sic!!!), who saved some two million Jews from Hitler’s Holocaust by having relocated them East in the wake of the temporary annexation of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union under the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939.)

Napoleon was an idol in the Jewish eyes. Even his impractical idea, expressed back in 1799, of establishing a national Jewish state within the confines of their historical home of ancient Israel (impractical in 1799 but visionary, as it turned out!), has naturally been endearing to them as a sensitive and commendable effort on his part to return their home to the Jews. Yet, even France, the land of the Great Revolution, the birthplace of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, would not hold her enlightened good will toward the Jews for very long. In fact, Napoleon himself as he was ending his turbulent life in the last exile to St. Helena, bitterly complained to his faithful servant Gaspard Gourgaud (who is already mentioned in several other sections as a multiple recipient of Napoleonic wisdom): “The Jews were a cowardly and cruel people!”
I wonder what the Jews could have done to him, to deserve such bitterness. Could it have had something to do with his ultimate defeat, being drawn into the Russian misadventure, and set up one against all?...

After Napoleon, France was sliding into an anti-Jewish bias anyway, whatever Napoleon’s bitter experience with the Jews had to do with it, culminating, of course, in the scandalous Dreyfus affair. There, in Paris, in the last years of the nineteenth century, was the rocket of modern-day Zionism launched through the nearly superhuman effort of one man, Theodor Herzl.

The incredible significance of Herzl, not only in Jewish history, but in the modern history of the world, has been definitely underappreciated, and I am strongly recommending to my reader to read more about him in the available sources of information. He died in 1904, of a heart failure, at the age of 44, but the spark that he had struck by the sheer force of his will and determination, grew into a conflagration, out of which arose the modern State of Israel. In the aftermath of that First Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, Herzl wrote in his diary: “If I had to sum up the Basel Congress in one word, which I shall not do openly, it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly, in fifty, everyone will see it.”

This new Zionism was a grandiose achievement of the Jewish people, and certainly one of the greatest, by a single man. However, the rise of Zionism, being the rise of a new militant Jewish nationalism, was destined to defeat the whole purpose of Haskala, to polarize the world opinion on the Judenfrage, and to destroy the amazing symbiosis between the Jews and the Islamic world. What it can still portend, though, if one listens with some attention to the rhetoric of the Christian Zionists, the most dangerous “friends” of Israel,  is a far greater Jewish Holocaust than Hitler’s, in numerical figures, and than Bogdan Khmelnitsky’s Holocaust, in percentages. In Christian parlance, this is called the Apocalypse, the necessary stepping stone to the second coming of Christ.

Judging from my conversations with a number of Ultra-Orthodox Jews, very few Haredim are happy with the phenomenon of Messiah-less Zionism. Many have grave forebodings of the unsettling things to come, and they blame the Zionists, who should have known better. I disagree. Whatever the costs, nothing can or could ever have been done about it. Like all hurricanes, earthquakes, and other “Acts of God,” Zionism was inevitable, and the modern Jewish State of Israel is an objective geopolitical reality, whether one likes it or not. There are many nations in the world today, besides the State of Israel, whose raison d’être has been far less legitimate, yet the world has to learn how to deal with its many problems. First and foremost, equitable solutions must be sought. Unlike some doom-and-gloomers, I believe that a practical solution is possible in Israel’s case too, without any infringement on Israel’s right to exist. But the otherwise doable task becomes impossible when the already fragile political balance in Israel is upset by her ideologically biased American sponsors, advisers, and arbiters.

ON HER MAJESTY'S CIVIL SERVICE

Looking at the American Jewish attitudes toward the domestic issues and at the foreign policy of this nation, it is impossible to miss a consistent pattern of adopting an unabashedly liberal stance in the former and an aggressively conservative, pro-Israel, stance in the latter. Some observers see this combination as a sort of anomaly when it is exhibited in a single politician such as the late Barry Goldwater, for instance, but there is no mystery here. What is often believed to be an exception, is in reality the rule, characteristic of the Jewish experience in Gentile politics. No wonder that there is a clear Jewish connection between the familiar terms “neoconservatism” and “neoliberalism.”

A hundred years before Goldwater in America, there was another senior Jewish politician, in Britain, no less ambitious and controversial, but far more successful, who exhibited the same disposition. He was Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s and Britain’s Prime Minister, first in 1868 and then again, from 1874 to 1880.
Born in 1804, his whole family converted to Christianity in 1817, after his father quarreled with the elders of his synagogue, and thus opened the door for his son to enter British politics.
A very unsympathetic character, an arrogant opportunist, who married a much older woman for her money and dabbed in less than mediocre penmanship, he was, nevertheless, an extraordinary man, and his rise to statesmanship in Britain symbolizes the high point of Jewish acceptance by the Gentile world. He was one of the savviest political operatives on the world stage, manipulating events, and the political process itself, in his favor. He won a special admiration from the Queen, which was perhaps justly attributed to unabashed “Oriental flattery” on his part. But his political opponents were not that charitable. Early on in his career, this is what his detractor Daniel O’Connell said about him, in an 1835 speech: “He is a liar in actions and words. His life is a living lie. He is a disgrace to his species. England is degraded in tolerating or having upon the face of her society a miscreant of his abominable, foul, and atrocious nature. If there be harsher terms in the English language, I should use them.” Pretty strong sparks are flying around here, but perhaps, this is exactly the kind of passion, which a capable politician ought to be arousing in his opponents.

Despite his family’s conversion to Christianity, Disraeli did not go the way of all those little Torquemadas, in whom such conversions would inspire a holier than thou zeal, as if they were overly anxious to validate their Christian bona fides by becoming vicious attackers of the heritage they had left behind. To his credit, Disraeli was never ashamed of his Jewish roots, but sought, with a lifetime consistency, to use his prominent position and rhetorical talent to act as a vociferous advocate for Res Judaica. Here is just one excerpt from his Speech in the House of Commons on May 25, 1854: “They are an ancient people, a famous people, an enduring people, and a people who, in the end, have generally attained their objects. I hope the Parliament may endure forever --- and sometimes I think it will;--- but I cannot help remembering that the Jews have outlived Assyrian kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman Caesars, and Arabian Caliphs…”

To sum it all up, I am never impressed by any person’s political genius alone. I have no liking for political salesmen, brainwashers, and manipulators, even if they are geniuses at doing it. But if there was one admirable quality in that “abominable miscreant,” as he was called, it had to be his unswerving and undisguised loyalty to his roots. A man who is capable of such kind of loyalty to his own race, cannot be altogether lost to the human race at large.

TRAGEDY AND GLORY

“Happy is the nation that has no heroes.” These words of Bertolt Brecht must be taken as a sad irony. Such a nation, then, has known no tragedy, but by the same token, such a nation has known no glory.

On 22^nd June, 1941, a terrible tragedy befell the Soviet nation. Hitler’s Germany attacked the USSR. It was not something totally unexpected. Having read Mein Kampf (see my entry Stalin Reads Mein Kampf, posted on February 13, 2011), Stalin had been preparing the nation for war for more than a decade, putting her life and development on the military track, and making rearmament of the armed forces with superior weapons the highest priority of the nation. In order to ensure that the goal be met, he had been playing for time, and, although when the hour had struck the weapons had not yet entered mass production, the country responded to Hitler’s attack with mass heroic self-sacrifice, which stopped Hitler’s push by the sheer national effort.

That terrible war, like the War of 1812 against Napoleon, became known as the Great Patriotic (Fatherland) War, and in that war every Soviet citizen with few exceptions was a hero of the Fatherland.

Like every Soviet family, my family had a great many dead and wounded, close relatives and dear friends. My father was a military soldier of that war fighting at the front. My mother was a civilian soldier of that war, sacrificing all for victory. I was named after St. Alexander Nevsky, Russia’s warrior patron saint, the greatest Russian of all time, according to recent national polls. I was born, baptized, and raised with that sacred memory of war, the memory of tragedy and glory that every true Russian proudly carries in his and her genes, whether born a century ago or today.

This day, 22^nd of June 1941, was not only the start of Russia’s war against Hitler. It was also the day when Russia started winning World War II for the whole world.

(Also see my entry June Of War, posted on June 22, 2011.)

ANTI-SEMITISM IN SHEPHERD'S CLOTHING

The essence of anti-Semitism is not in stating some negative facts concerning the state of Judenthum, but in making prejudiced conclusions. For some unfortunate reason, however, what is readily accepted as genuine social criticism, even in its most biting expressions, when it comes to the critique of most Gentile societies, is judged offensive and unacceptable when the same is applied to the Jews and to the State of Israel.

On the other hand, certain outrageous cases of public anti-Semitism are never confronted, but quietly swept under the rug in the hope that somehow against all commonsense logic, nobody will notice and nobody will raise hell about it, for this won’t be good for Jewish business. I am talking about modern America, and the case in point is the pathological buddy relationship between the Jews and the so-called Christian Zionists.

One example will suffice here. The Reverend Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, to Defend Israel in the Media, the Public Square, and on Campus, has been billed as perhaps the greatest supporter of Israel in America since Jerry Falwell. A great fundraiser and a great friend! So who would be so ungrateful and downright evil, to read anything negative into Pastor Hagee’s celebrated pro-Israel sermons, depicting Hitler as “God’s hunter,” apparently hunting the Jews during the Holocaust on God’s direct orders, to make the creation of the modern state of Israel possible!

…So, what is it with the properly Jewish defenders of the Jewish causes? They rush to condemn the sincere and legitimate critics of Israel, yet they are eager to shake the hand of Pastor Hagee, having taken his money and having praised his cheap pep talk? How long will they keep pretending that the anti-Semitic poison of John Hagee, and of the whole Christian Zionist movement with him, has been diluted into insignificance by his outstanding generosity toward Israel and his bigoted invective against the critics of Israel and the whole Muslim world?

But Pastor Hagee’s Jewish friends beware! His sugar pill is a poisoned pill. It has already poisoned millions of American Christian Evangelicals, and the deformed chimaera of Christian Zionism is its most dangerous miscreant today. As to whether or not I am exaggerating the lethal effect of Pastor Hagee’s anti-Semitism: look, so much pro-Israel sugar and just a few tiny drops of the other stuff,--- may the sugar win in the minds of those who think that way, but none of them must be allowed to sell this pill to others as harmless sugar.

CRITICAL MASS

From Haskala to the Holocaust… Once again, how could that happen? And we are not talking here about some backward Ukrainians or Poles, but about one the most civilized nations in human history: Germany!

…Something did happen, however, to which, as I pointed out in the last entry, Lessing and Mendelssohn, in an allegorical phrase, of course, opened the door. Not to keep the reader in unnecessary suspense about my intended surprise, it was the rich and powerful Jew, who was now stepping into the limelight of the world stage, assertively taking charge of the events on the wreckage of the old caste system, from which the Jews of yore had always been excluded.

They may always have enjoyed a disproportionate access to the riches of the nations, but they never enjoyed the other component of success: political power. The 1180 Law of Edward the Confessor in England says it all in one sentence: “The Jews themselves, and all that is theirs, belong to the king.” Just imagine how this royal property claim was, in fact, protecting the Jews and their fragile belongings from otherwise inevitable seizures by the perennially impoverished peers of the realm!

The powerful poor versus the powerless rich, a political balance of sorts, but beware when this balance has been broken! A new explosive balance of a powerful rich minority versus a powerless poor majority is now on the ascendance, and, with it, Marxism is also at hand.

It was only with the collapse of the caste system, a direct consequence of the Enlightenment with its motto of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, that the previously separated complementary components of a nuclear explosion, the money and the power, found each other in an unprecedentedly powerful, and just as deadly, when mishandled, fusion into a critical mass.

One of the greatest historical ironies of all time reveals itself when we realize that in the surging tide of an all-new type of class struggle of the poor against the rich, the Jews are sure to find their own in both camps, and whichever camp wins, they are destined to become both winners and losers in this conflict. Their task is therefore not just to win or to avoid losing, but to learn how to minimize the losses. Alas, too often they have been far more interested in maximizing their gains, following the formula of Larry “the Liquidator” Garfield (Danny DeVito’s character), in the movie Other People’s Money: “We just try to make as much as we can for as long as we can, and then… we adapt.” Such precisely must have been the general attitude of the enterprising Jews of Germany, making huge profits off the post-World War I German national misery, thus tragically foreshadowing Hitler’s Holocaust…

Returning to the question of the two distinctly different groups of German Jews: the conservative rich, and the revolutionary poor, there is a familiar historical argument blaming Germany’s “Marxist” Jews for her sudden and totally unexpected collapse at the end of the Great War. This is what the outraged generals were alleging, and the nation supposedly believed them.

My take on this does not buy such an explanation. Rank and file Germans during the war had been unhappy with it already, for which reason so many of them had actually bought the “Jewish communist agitprop.” It is ridiculous to even suggest that the Jewish radicals could on their own have brought about the collapse of Germany without a massive, disproportionately large Gentile support. The fact that, later on, most of those who had actually followed the Marxist cue reversed themselves (most of German Gentile Communists later joined the Nazi Party!) and struck against the Jews must be attributed, in my opinion, to their class struggle of the poor against the rich, where the Jews were identified as the rich, and the backlash against the other kind of non-wealthy Jews developed along the recognizable anti-Semitic lines, treating all Jews collectively guilty of the guilt of a few. (In order to understand what I am talking about, when I mention the wealth of German Jews sharply contrasted against the extreme impoverishment of ordinary Germans, prior to Hitler’s ascent to power, one can ask himself this simple question: how many priceless works of art and other such treasures have been claimed in the past decades by the heirs of the victims of the Holocaust, as the private property of their tragically perished relatives?! On the other hand, millions of the hapless Jewish poor, the object of derision and contempt on the part of their affluent brethren, would share their common tragic fate, on their account. For more on this, see my entry Yom Kippur.)

Thus, paradoxically, blaming the Jewish Marxists for Germany’s collapse in WWI, and for her subsequent deep humiliation, was an effect of a classic “Marxist” revolutionary rebellion of the poor against the rich…

In conclusion, I am asking the readers of this, especially those who vehemently disagree with me, to take my argument with all necessary philosophical seriousness. It is not too late still to learn from the history of which everybody knows the effects, but few are aware of the causes.

FRIENDSHIP THAT WOULD NOT LAST

The word Haskala, signifying the Jewish Enlightenment, invokes two powerful associations. One of them, with Nathan Der Weise-Moses Mendelssohn and Lessing: a friendship, or perhaps, an illusion of friendship that would not last. The other, pointing to an ugly split within the Ashkenazic community of Europe, between the “reformed” Citizen Jew who wanted to belong, and the diehard shtetl Jew who wanted to be left alone. The new Jew was deeply ashamed of his backward kin, and the old Jew despised his renegade brother who wished to become like the goyim ha-aratzot, and thus was a blight on the collective soul of Yiddishkeit.

Here was a split soul all right, and so are my own sympathies split between the authentic religious spirit of the aesthetically-challenged old Jew and the aesthetically-refined, but spiritually-confused persona of this pleasantly-Westernized new Jew, whose detractors call him a rootless cosmopolite, thus ridiculing him for his sincere desire to be not exactly “like everybody else,” but more like the “best and finest” of them.

Moses Mendelssohn was admittedly among those “best and finest.” He was also a friend of Lessing, and a friend of Germany. And then, he died… --And Joseph died, and all his brethren, and all that generation-- (Exodus 1:6.)

Between Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers… is there a parallel of some significance, I wonder?…

Between Lessing and Hitler, how did the Jews lose the friendship of Germany? Between Joseph and Moses, how had the Jews lost the friendship of Egypt? In the Biblical account, the children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly… and waxed exceedingly mighty; and the land was filled with them, then there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph. (Exodus 1:7-8.) Does this passage mean that the new generation of Egyptians did not know any Jews like Joseph? Had it been otherwise, surely we would have read about them in the Bible!

Can that Scriptural parallel now be cooked to death, to make even this toughest of all riddles chewable? Is it possible that men like Mendelssohn had unwittingly opened the door to others, the cleverest and smartest, who may perhaps have been too clever for their own good, but even more so, for the good of their people?

Who is better qualified to explain all this mess than one brilliant German Jew who was born after Nathan der Weise had already been dead… Had he lived during the zenith of the Haskala, had he been the friend of Lessing and of Germany, whatever we know today as Marxism might never have been associated with the name of Karl Marx.

BLACK SHEEP RISING

Entering the dark and stinky waters of historical blasphemy, I am presently turning my mind to the False-Messiah disease, which has had an ugly effect on Jewish history. It is understandable how the expectation of the Mashiach made so many Jews, living in misery and constant anticipation, become easily susceptible to outright fraud, so the blame for this unfortunate phenomenon rests by no means with the people, so eager to be duped, but with their unscrupulous manipulators, and them I am calling the black sheep of Israel.

Which brings me now to the seventeenth century of our era. History remembers several messianic Jewish leaders long before that time, such as the leaders of the last two great revolts against the Roman rule Simon Bar Kokhba (proclaimed as the Messiah by the great rabbi Akiva himself) and Lukuas Andreas. But in both these cases, as the Jews had been determined to fight to the death, not to believe in their leaders’ Messianic calling and status would have been tantamount to an outright acceptance of defeat.

The cases which I am talking about here, are totally different.

The abominable Shabbetai Tzvi was a self-serving scoundrel operating inside the Ottoman Empire, who, in 1648, proclaimed himself the Messiah, not on account of a worthy Jewish cause, but to make himself some clout from a few consenting scoundrels, like himself, but less inspirational, and therefore agreeing to play a supporting role to him, and naturally from the duped populace. In the course of his mounting fame, with all that generous and enthusiastic funding now assured him, he, however, had to face the cost of his Messianic, and therefore, martial, robes, becoming a security risk for Mehmed IV, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the latter finding an ingenious way to stem the surge of Jewish nationalism by discrediting its fetish. He demanded that this “Messiah” must now convert to Islam, showing them all whose religion had proved to be superior in that standoff. Shabbetai obliged, and that was the end of the threat to the Turkish power over the Jews. Dressed in outrageously resplendent robes, Shabbetai was paraded at the Sultan’s court as a jester for everybody to mock, and with him to mock the Jews as a humbled race and a fallen religion.

In the even uglier aftermath of Shabbetai’s apostasy, his sorely disappointed followers-- rather than cutting their losses-- chose to rationalize their Messiah’s betrayal, and started converting to Islam in large numbers.

Others, while refusing to convert, were seeking some mystical meaning in Shabbetai’s actions, creating a crooked perversion of the Lurianic Kabbalistic masterpiece, Tikkun Olam, now interpreting Shabbetai’s sin as a self-sacrifice of entering the evil qelippot in the quest for the scattered light. This abomination of post-Shabbetaianism would last for a whole century, as if waiting for another big-time scoundrel to make his splashy entrance, and of course the scoundrel obliged.

As if to prove that the ugliness of the Shabbetai Tzvi episode could be easily matched and raised, out of one of the eighteenth-century Poland’s shtetls came a certain Jacob Leibowitz, subsequently to be known as Jacob Frank, another scoundrel, claiming to be a reincarnation of the first one, Shabbetai. A shameless opportunist, he proclaimed himself the Mashiach, of course, and became the leader of a hideous Jewish sect which promoted freedom from morality, trashed the Talmud and the Jewish rabbinical tradition, and ended up as stooges for the Catholic Church, branding all other Jews with the blood libel, and next, converting to Catholicism, which of course was not a crime in itself, but became such on the strength of all other factors. Meantime Frank’s daughter Eva perpetuated the infamy declaring herself an incarnation of God’s Shehinah and a reincarnation of Virgin Mary, but despite such obvious blasphemy she was never persecuted for it, but, on the contrary, she would become the leader of an influential international sect that continued to worship her father and her, as she came to be known as the only female Messiah in Jewish (or anybody else’s) history. Curiously, both her father and she had become the darlings of Christian Europe, which probably gleefully misread their effect on the Jewish community as Judaism on its deathbed.

It is my belief that scoundrels, like Shabbetai and the Franks, the black sheep of the Jewish family, would become over time a big contributing factor in the accumulation and further aggravation of the already deep historical prejudice against the Jews in general. Rich, immoral, and shameless, they were a gift to the enemies of the Jews that just kept on giving.

DAYS OF WRATH

While the improbable symbiosis of the Arabs and the Jews persisted and flourished, despite a few relatively minor inconveniences, caused by overzealous foreigners, the Ashkenazic part of the Judenthum had no ties to the Christian communities among whom they resided, and looked down on them with a thinly disguised contempt. Completely segregated from the goyim, both in their culture and everyday life, they developed a whole different civilization, unlike that of their Sephardic and Middle Eastern brethren, but their vigorous bid at non-assimilation carried a sizable price tag, which was quietly accumulating interest until collection time would come and strike their midnight, again, and again, and again.

My title’s implicit reference to Dies Irae is intended to invite an immediate association with the Christian persecution of the European Jewry. Long before the Holocaust there were several lesser known Holocausts, and this entry intends to bring them back to mind, continuing my probe into the roots of anti-Semitism.

“…If all the seas were ink, and all the reeds pens, and all the people scribes,--- it would not be enough to record all the misfortunes of the Jews in a single year.” Thus wails a gloss to Megilat Taanit, written about the year 1400. By then, the Judenthum had experienced, among other miseries, the horrors of the Crusades, expulsions from England, France, parts of Germany, Switzerland and Italy,  and from several other places where they had resided, and more recently the massacres of 1391 in the wake of the widespread accusations blaming the Jews for the Great Plague. More tribulations came in the form of such Papal Decrees as this one of 1442 by Pope Eugenius IV: “We order that from now on, and for all time, Christians shall not eat or drink with Jews, nor admit them to feasts, nor cohabit with them nor bathe with them. Christians shall not allow Jews to hold civil honors over Christians or exercise public offices in the state.” And then, of course, followed more expulsions, in 1492 from Spain, in 1497 and in 1506 from Portugal, in 1569 from the Papal Territories, and so on and so forth. Some of these woes were clearly the consequences of the Christian bias, but others, manifested in the plunderings of the well-to-do Jewish communities of the Rhineland and other such areas, were motivated by a combination of factors, where the bias, even if present, played a secondary role. Had those plundered Jewish communities been destitute themselves, the hungry and destitute hordes of Christian crusaders would, in all likelihood, have left them alone, finding some prosperous communities to plunder, regardless of their religion or race. It just so happened that their quarry were Jewish, which gave the attackers a properly “Christian” pretext to plunder and kill “the enemies of Christ.”

The worst of all Jewish Holocausts, predating the Nazi Holocaust and in terms of the percentage of victims exceeding it, becoming the worst wholesale slaughter in history, was the Ukrainian Holocaust, perpetrated by the Ukrainian nationalist freedom-fighters under the leadership of Bogdan Khmelnitzky, hetman of the Zaporozhian Cossacks, in the course of a war of liberation from Poland, which started in 1648 and ended in 1654 with Ukraine’s reunification with Russia.

Approximately half-a-million Jews were cut to pieces, burned, impaled, and otherwise butchered, in a lurid display of popular fury against the foreign occupiers, the Poles, and their hated stooges, the Jews, who were employed by the Poles to collect taxes from the populace. Unlike the Poles, whose numbers in the occupied territories were small, there were some three-quarters of a million Jews living in Ukraine, doing their Polish masters’ dirty work for them, while naturally getting prosperous themselves in the process. And so they did end up paying a heavy price for their perks from the job, whose occupational hazard had been slow to show its full force, but when it did, reportedly consumed five hundred thousand of them (two-thirds of the total Jewish population!) in one large hellfire.

For more details on this darkest page of Jewish history one is invited to read Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba, a classic of Russian-Ukrainian literature. The events depicted in Taras Bulba, leading to the wholesale massacre of Ukrainian Jews (only partially shown in Gogol’s novel) have not that much to do with Ukrainian anti-Semitism (Bulba has no qualms receiving help-for-money from the double-dealing Jew Yankel), but everything to do with Ukrainian nationalism, its war of national liberation, and a genuine class struggle, à la Karl Marx, to boot. Still, Bogdan Khmelnitzky has entered Jewish history as a monster just as heinous as Hitler would later prove to be.

As a gloss to the tragic episode described above, this appalling case of a seventeenth-century Holocaust was conveniently and shamelessly disremembered during the George W. Bush Administration, when it came to the American war of independence on behalf of the post-Soviet Ukrainians, led by that great pro-American democrat Mr. Yushchenko, as thousands of colorful portraits of this Jewish enemy par excellence, Bogdan Khmelnitzky, were carried by the cheering crowds of orange demonstrators through the streets of Kiev, the awfully suspicious, and certainly auspicious, symbol of the new Ukrainian nationalism. As if that were not enough, the commanding 19^th-century equestrian monument to Khmelnitzky in the center of Kiev remains up to this day by far the most distinctive landmark of the Ukrainian capital. How many American Jews, I wonder, watching those demonstrations on TV ever realized whose portraits, and whose magnificent statue were staring at them from the screen; in other words, who was that celebrated national hero, along with the bunch of heroic Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators from World War II, of America’s newest freedom-loving friend?

DOWN WITH THE TEACHERS!

By the same token as Kalam Renaissance preceded European Renaissance by several centuries, the Karaite religious “Reformation” among the Jews preceded Luther’s Reformation in the Christian world by three quarters of a millennium. This quirky analogy gives our subject an extra flavor, but of course it stands well on its own merit.
It is important to emphasize up front that Karaism had nothing to do with a negative reaction to the Jewish fascination with Arabic Kalam, developing into a derivative, but hugely promising philosophical movement known as Jewish Kalam. Although among the most effective opponents of Karaism were Jewish Kalamists, especially the renowned Saadia ben Joseph (882?-942), the Karaite target was not Kalam, but the very heart of Jewish religious identity: Rabbinical Judaism and the Talmud.
The rebellion started even before the Kalam became popular among the Jewish rabbis in the eighth century AD. Its alleged spiritual founder was Anan ben David (715?-811?), for which reason Karaism was initially referred to as Ananism. The name Karaite comes from the Hebrew “Kara,” meaning “to read.” The reason for this name is that Karaism invests all religious authority in the written word of the Torah, as opposed to the “oral tradition,” such as the Talmud, which is denied any authority at all. To me, this revolt against the most endearing symbol of the Jewish faith looks like an overreaction to the authoritarian rule of the Jewish “Popes” of that time (the chief rabbis, “Geonim” of the two Babylonian rabbinical academies), and of their “cardinals,” issuing “infallible” decrees concerning all aspects of Jewish life, faith and religious practice, to be enforced throughout the whole Jewish world.
Thus, the initial thrust of the Karaite attack was not exactly against the rabbis, the teachers, but against the Gaon who would be Pope. But almost immediately and very predictably, the attack targeted all rabbinical authority (the “Church”), along the familiar Lutheran lines of the future.
The Karaite rebellion ended denouncing the Oral Tradition and all Rabbinical Judaism with it, asserting the Torah as the sole legitimate source of the Jewish law, Jewish faith, and practice. In this Karaite repudiation of the teachers, I repeat,  there was an unmistakable analogy with the Christian Reformation’s repudiation of the Roman Catholic Dogma, as well as with its categorical rejection of the role of the Church as the exclusive interpreter of the Bible and as the complementary source of Divine Truth to that of the Bible.
Unlike Christian Protestantism, Karaism would never amount to anything but a minor sect on the outer fringes of Judaism. While the Reformed Christians had their whole Bible to depend on, that is, both the Old Testament, and especially the Christian New Testament, virtually self-sufficient in itself, the Karaites were effectively dispossessed, as there was no Torah Judaism without the Temple, and there could be no Judaism without authoritative Rabbinical instruction as to what to do and how to do it.
The Karaite effort, however, was by no means a waste for Rabbinical Judaism, which had been itself in dire straits, to be sure. Kalam may have been a good thing in general terms, but it had its downside, just like its future descendant Reform Judaism  would have: the danger of losing its distinctive identity. Such outcome could not cause a calamity in the nineteenth century, when Orthodox Judaism was strong and indestructible, being sustained by a longstanding tradition. But in those early years, even after the Talmud, Judaism was weak, and Kalam could easily have overwhelmed it. The Karaite attack on the Talmud  gave Judaism what it needed the most: a rallying cry and a spirit of resistance. Remarkably, it was the great Kalamist Saadia ben Joseph, who led the counteroffensive, developing a distinctive Jewish philosophy in the process, and saving Judaism from both introverted decay and extroverted assimilationist tendencies. Indeed, challenging times give life and strength to extraordinary people, and the greater the challenge, the richer the reward. (Taking this to apply to our modern times, the reverse is also true: the smaller the opposition, the lower the morale of the warrior, and the paltrier his harvest.)

…Once again, three cheers for the Talmud! In this connection, see my earlier posted entry How The Talmud Saved The Jews.

COUSINAGE - VOISINAGE

Having seen the peculiar Christian religious bias creating the preconditions of future Jewish persecutions, we may still be reminded that in the modern times things have changed a lot, and today the Christians and the Jews seem to be getting along pretty well, especially in America, where this "getting-along" has flourished into a “beautiful friendship.”

On the other hand, ever since the end of World War I, Judenthum has been steadily sliding into what looks like an existential confrontation with the Islamic world, to the point that for several generations of humanity the situation may seem to have persisted if not since the Creation itself, then surely since the Biblical times. But nothing could be farther from the truth.

It is therefore all the more astonishing now to bring our attention to a case of a most improbable symbiosis, and also one of the greatest reversals of fortune in recorded history… Once upon a time there was Kalam!

…Kalam, and now this?!

But let us have first things first.

The title of this entry plays on the frivolous French proverb Cousinage est une dangereuse voisinage, warning of certain erotic complications which may arise between cousins. But in the case at hand, the danger is by no means a laughing matter, as I am talking now about the relationship of ‘cousins’ inside the Semitic family of nations, that is, between the Arabs and the Jews.

Euripides in The Phoenissæ puts his finger where it hurts: “Dreadful indeed are the feuds of relatives, and difficult the reconciliation.” Which, logically, does not have to be followed by a declaration of a necessary incompatibility between all relatives, as the latter inference would have been a classic non-sequitur, and an absurdity. As a matter of fact, Arab Moslems were living happily side by side with their Jewish cousins in a perfectly tolerant Islamic world, marred only by occasional invasions of foreign Islamic zealots, such as the Almohad neophyte Islamic sect of Berbers, who were themselves of Hamitic, and not of Semitic origin, and whose 1147-1148 invasion of Spain brought the Jews far less misery than the Christian Reconquista three-and-a-half centuries later.

There is a good reason for the early Islamic tolerance of the Jews, who were after all a people of the Book, and, as such, were entitled to certain privileges, in the wake of the blitz Islamic takeover of a huge chunk of the known world, in the course of just one century (600’s-700’s). But what occurred in the wake of that first wake, however, turned out even better.

Earlier in this entry, I happened to use the Arabic word Kalam, representing the enlightened philosophical disposition of the Islamic thinkers, since the eighth century AD, thus presaging the Christian Renaissance by half-a-millennium. The word Kalam comes from Kalam Allah, Word of God, which refers to the Koran (or Quran in modern transcription). The proponents of Kalam demonstrated that the ancient Greek culture, with its priceless philosophical and scientific tradition, had nothing to do with the alleged paganism of the Greek Civilization (the point I have been making all the time in my own philosophical criticism, pushing it even farther, to assert a solid monotheistic foundation to all Greek philosophy) and therefore could be very effectively incorporated into the new emerging Islamic culture with no prejudice or jeopardy to its Moslem religious foundation.

It goes without saying that the profound, pioneering genius of the Kalam principle was to inspire not only the best of the Islamic philosophers, but also the best Jewish philosophical and scientific minds of that time and place. Philosophy and science transcended the specific religious roots of a particular culture, therefore, a peaceful coexistence, as well as a healthy intellectual cross-pollination of cultures (such as in this case of the Moslem and Jewish cultures) was possible, and even desirable, using the wisdom of Ancient Greece as a guiding light.

To keep being fair to that marvelous Kalam civilization, not only did it precede the European Renaissance, but it actually made it possible, as it was only through the Kalam acting as their only intermediary that the priceless Greek cultural treasures would become available to the Christian world, still living in the shadow of the Dark Ages, which had been refusing to let the light in, on their own, so that it had to be smuggled in. Plato, Aristotle, and others all reached Europe in Arabic translations, not in the Greek originals, forbidden by the Church.

…Ach, that was such a lovely piece of sheer poetry. And what magnificent centers of world culture of yore: Damascus, Baghdad, Fustat/Cairo, etc., where the Arabs and the Jews used to live not like cousins, but like brothers. And here again comes my inescapable refrain: “Kalam, and now this?!”

The answer to what actually happened in the course of the last century that transformed the peace between cousins into an ugly and bloody permanent war can be sought in history in what I am calling the new kid on the block phenomenon. In order to understand the exact meaning of this expression, I shall refer the reader to its 1941 origin in Percy Crosby’s comic strip Skippy, where one of the characters delivers this message to the other: “The new kid on the block told me that the next time he saw you he was goin’ to twist your nose.”

Whether in the past this self-assertive role belonged to the early Christians, with their incredibly aggressive missionary zeal, or to the Turks, or to the Berbers; in the twentieth century, no offence to its perfect historical legitimacy, such a “new kid” was Zionism. (As the reader can see, I am not among those who would like to blame the Middle East problem on the British, or on Comrade Stalin, who was exceptionally instrumental in the 1948 creation of the State of Israel. Zionism was a great force of nature that was bound to succeed on its own anyway, but receiving a lot of political and practical help after World War II obviously did not hurt.)

Just as Christianity’s super-aggressive spirit had created a firestorm, even involving a two-way persecution street within itself, but was eventually expected to settle down with a considerably watered-down ‘civilized’ version; the militant spirit of Zionism, assisted by a series of downright awkward political decisions, on the part of the Great Powers, and backfiring in a predictably fierce cousins’ feud, might have been expected to quieten down eventually, with the watering-down of the Zionist Spartan zeal, a de facto recognition of the Jewish State of Israel by her Arab neighbors and by the rest of the Moslem world, and the enthronement of capitalism in the region, with its penchant for selling grudges for profit.

Tragically, nothing of the kind has occurred, with the laws of civilized society taking a back seat to vicious stone-age tactics of settling scores by muscle, rather than brain. Who is at fault?

It is easy for the strong to blame the weak, but nobody would believe them. It is even easier for the weak to blame the strong, but nobody would listen to them. For those who cannot come up with a reasonable plan to stop the violence, it is easy to call the conflict existential, and even apocalyptic. Incidentally, the latter view is prevalent among American Evangelical Christians. By its very definition, an apocalyptic conflict can’t be resolved, but, on the contrary, it is likely to be encouraged and exacerbated by the Armageddonists, ever so eager to bring on the end of the world, with its promise of the Second Coming.

Happily joining forces with the American Christian Armageddonists, and against the better judgment of the religious Mashiach-awaiting Jews, the immensely powerful American Jewish pro-Zionist community took it upon itself to promote alleged interests of Israel by throwing their unconditional support behind extremist Zionist elements, depriving the United States of the critically important role of an honest broker in the Arab Israeli conflict. As a result, extremist elements on both sides of the conflict have triumphed, and robbed the rest of any prospect of peace. Instead of a peaceful resolution of an intense regional conflict, what we have today is a global “War of Civilizations.”

The Armageddonists must be happy with this situation, but I fail to understand the Jews. Having endured a long and tragic history of recurring Holocausts, and having been armed with the glorious Jewish Manifest Destiny of Tikkun Olam, they appear insensitive to the noble mission of repairing the world, having chosen instead to ally themselves with Koran-burning arsonists and other such warmongers, as if the world which they have been called to repair has become for them a burnt offering waiting to happen…

But whose “god” is this offering meant for?