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CAUSES OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS JEWS:A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW - PART 1 |
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When Victims Rule. A Critique of Jewish Pre-eminence in America
In order to understand the present and prospects for the future, something must be understood about the past. Jews claim their origins to a seminal patriarch, Abraham, in the land of Ur (today part of Iraq) 4,000 years ago. Abraham was not a farmer or village member of a settled community. He was likely one of the "wandering" tribes of his time, a citizenship less, "outsider" social class known as the "Apiru," or "Habiru" (Hebrews) who were scattered across a wide area of the Middle East, from Syria to Egypt. [ANDERSON, p. 33] According to traditional Jewish religious belief, God is reputed to have singled out 75-year old Abraham among all people on earth and struck an arrangement with him, providing his progeny the consummate family inheritance: "If Abraham will follow the commandments of God, then He, in His turn, will make the descendants of Abraham His Chosen People and place them under His protection ... God at this time stipulates only one commandment, and makes only one promise." [DIMONT, p. 29] The initial agreement, by modern standards, seems extraordinarily peculiar. God's commandment was that all males by the eighth day of birth must have the foreskin of their penises cut off, a painfully literal branding of Jewish distinction around the male procreative organ:
With this physical marking, notes Barnet Litvinoff, "no male child born of Jewish parentage is ever allowed to forget he is a Jew ... it reminds him of the doctrine of the chosen people." [LITVINOFF, p. 5] "As a sign of this sacred bond, of being special seed, Chosen," note Herbert Russcol and Margarlit Banai, "The Lord of the Universe commands Abraham" to circumcize "every man child among you." And as the Torah states it: "I will establish my covenant between Me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant." [RUSSCOL/BANAI, 1970, p. 173] Is this alleged commandment by God to the Abrahamic "seed" in Jewish tradition not racial? "Circumcision," says Lawrence Hoffman, "has thus remained the sine qua non of Jewish identity throughout time. Jews came to believe that it warded off danger, and even saved Jews from damnation, that the sign of circumcision was tantamount to carrying God's ineffable name carved in the flesh, that it was a means of attaining mystical unity with the creator, and that it brought about visionary experience." [HOFFMAN, p. 11] It also symbolized, on the male genitals, special attention to the genetic continuance of the progeny of Abraham, that -- if they obeyed the laws and demands of God -- they would someday be as "numerous as the stars." "By the very sexual act itself," says Philip Sigal, in explaining traditional thinking, "the circumcised mystically transmits the covenant to the foetus." [SIGAL, p. 20] Until the 20th century, it was normal that during the mezizah phase of the circumcision ritual, the mohel (the expert who performed the circumcision) took the infant's "circumcised member into his mouth and with two or three draughts sucks the blood out of the wounded part. He then takes a mouthful of wine from a goblet and spurts it, in two or three intervals, on the wound." [ROMBERG, p. 45] Today, notes Rabbi Immanuel Jacobovits, "the original method of sucking by mouth tends to be increasingly confined to the most orthodox circles only." [JACOBOVITS, p. 196] In exchange for circumcision and following God's orders, the Jews were promised the land of Canaan (the land mass of today's Israel, more or less), a place that was already inhabited. [DIMONT, p. 29] This land for circumcision exchange is the root of Jewish tradition, from which centuries of rules, regulations, dictates, interpretations and other additions have followed. God's spiritual link to Jews is understood to have originated, of all things, around a piece of real estate commonly understood to be part of the "Covenant," which, says Alfred Jospe, "is the agreement between God and Israel by which Israel accepts the Torah [Old Testament] .... The concept of covenant signifies the consciousness of what the truth is." [JOSPE, p. 15] "The covenant," adds Will Herberg, "is an objective supernatural fact; it is God's act of creating and maintaining Israel for his purposes in history." [EISENSTEIN, p. 274] "The covenant made for all time means that all future generations are included in the covenant," notes Monford Harris,
Edward Greenstein notes,
Whatever else they believed, Jews have traditionally understood themselves to be -- by hereditary line -- special, intrinsically better than other people: they were divinely esteemed. The Old Testament stated it plainly:
The notion that Jews -- originally defined racially as the Israelite progeny of Abraham (and a special lineage through his son Isaac, then Jacob, and so on) -- are the "Chosen People" of God is the bedrock of Jewish self-conception and it resonates deeply in some form to Jewish self-identity to this day. What exactly such a mantle of greatness confers has, for most, changed drastically over (particularly recent) centuries, and is still a delicate source for self-reflection and debate, ranging from traditional racist theories against non-Jews (still entertained by many Orthodox Jews, and most of Zionism) to more modern, liberalizing, and even secular notions that Jews are destined to lead humankind to some kind of redemptive glory. The extraordinary self-perpetuating ethnocentric premises of traditional Judaism have been remarked upon by many modern scholars. Likewise, they have often addressed the drastically different ethical and spiritual views of Judaism and Oriental religious faiths (such as Hinduism and Buddhism). Such a gap is poignantly illustrated in this story by the great popular folklorist, Joseph Campbell:
"If you will obey my voice," God tells Jews in their seminal religious text, the Torah, "and keep my Covenant, you shall become my own possession among all people, for all the earth is mine." [EXODUS 19:5] This anthropomorphized model of the Israelite God is someone profoundly concerned with ownership, allegiance, and control -- key values in the self-promotive tenets of classical Judaism and their practical application in history. After all, the seminal Jewish religious text -- the Torah (in Christian tradition the first five books of the Old Testament) -- was created as a kind of Jewish family album, an ancient listing of Israelite genealogies and pedigrees that codifies sacred recipes for group solidarity, self-aggrandizement (land conquest, et al), and self-preservation for those with direct ancestral linkage to Abraham. "The biblical faith [of the Old Testament]," writes scholar Bernhard Anderson, "to the bewilderment of many philosophers, is fundamentally historical in character. It is concerned with events and historical relationships, not abstract values and ideas existing in a timeless realm." [ANDERSON, p. 12] "The halakah [Jewish religious law] does not aspire to a heavenly transcendence," notes influential modern rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, "nor does it aspire to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze on the concrete, empirical reality and does not let its attention be diverted from it." [SOLOVEITCHIK, p. 92] "There is no Valhalla [afterlife Paradise] in Judaism," notes Chaim Bermant,
Beyond Israelite genealogies, the Torah (the Old Testament) includes an ancient compilation of rules and regulations, elaborated upon in meta-commentaries by later Judaic religious texts, especially the Talmud, which codifies correct behavior for all the minutia of daily living. In Jewish tradition, "the whole keynote of being," says sociologist Talcott Parsons, "starting with the creation, was action, the accomplishment of things." [PARSONS, p. 103] (And one of the "keys to Jewish success," says Jewish business author Steven Silbiger, is to "be psychologically driven to prove something.") [SILBIGER, S., 2000, p. 9] "Judaism is not a revealed religion," wrote the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, "but revealed legislation. Its first precept is not 'thou shalt believe' or not believe, but thou shalt do or abstain from doing." [GOLDSTEIN, D., p. 43, in Jerusalem] "A constant motif of post-Enlightenment ethics," says rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "is the rejection of religious authority as an external command to which one submits. For this reason [philosopher] Hegel is sharply critical of the Jewish structure of law. 'Of spirit,' he writes of Judaism, 'nothing remained save pride in slavish obedience.' Much of Nietzsche's work is a deepening set of variations on this theme. Judaism, he says, introduced 'a God who demands.' The autonomous self, central to modern ethics, is radically incompatible with the structures of Jewish spirituality, built as they are on the concept of mitzvah, command." [SACKS, J., p. 100-101] The all-encompassing and dictatorial manner of Jewish Orthodoxy in the Talmudic (and other) interpretations of the Old Testament is reflected in this observation by Gerson Cohen:
The obsessive nature of even modern Jewish Orthodoxy within a tight web of restrictive daily dictates, and the surrender to what Israeli scholar Israel Shahak calls its innate "totalitarianism," [SHAHAK, p. 15] is reflected in this comment by Egon Mayer:
Michael Govrin notes that
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note that the "halakaha [Jewish religious law] commands that before eating bread a Jew must recite a blessing, and before this blessing the hands must be washed and a blessing recited over the hand washing. Even the manner in which the hands are washed is prescribed: the kind of utensil used, the order in which the hands are washed, the number of times each hand is washed." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 125] "It is a commonplace," adds Eunice Lipton, "that an abiding and secularized aspect of Jewish tradition is its valuing of sensual satisfaction. Jewish law acknowledges appetite; one is even is told how often one should make love ... One might say that Jewish validation of the senses results from the emphasis on human life in the present as opposed to any interest in any afterlife." [LIPTON, p. 289] Evelyn Kaye, who grew up in an Orthodox community, notes that "Orthodox Judaism plans to regulate every minute, every action and every thought of life ... [KAYE, p. 126] ... The code of Jewish law dictates a range of regulations for sexual intercourse, including when and where it may be experienced, as well as what to think about during the act." [KAYE, p. 125] "It is forbidden," says the Code of Jewish Law, "to discharge semen in vain. This is a graver sin than any other mentioned in the Torah ... It is equivalent to killing a person ... A man should be extremely careful to avoid an erection. Therefore, he should not sleep on his back with his face upward, or on his belly with his face downward, but sleep on his side, in order to avoid it." [GANZFRIED, p.17] "There are even rules," says Kaye, "about what you may think about while you sit on the toilet." [KAYE, p. 17] Israel Shahak underscores Orthodox Judaism's complex honing of regulations to the point of hairsplitting for even purely theoretical concerns that appear to be extraordinarily esoteric in a modern context:
One of the most profoundly important dimensions of traditional Judaism (one that has had enormous repercussions for Jewish relations throughout history with their non-Jewish neighbors) is its injunction to fellow members that Jews must -- conceptually, and through most of history, physically -- live "apart," "separate," distinct from other human beings. Jewish self-conception, from its early days, was antithetical and antagonistic to other peoples. "Separation of Israel from the nations [non-Jews]," says Moshe Greenberg, "in order to be consecrated by God took the extreme form of condemning to death any who worshipped or tempted others to worship alien gods." [GREENBERG, p. 28] In later years, throughout the Jewish Diaspora, this developed into the Jewish self-conception as a "nation apart" -- physically as well as conceptually distanced from all other peoples. "In their determined efforts to prevent assimilation and loss of identity as a small minority in the midst of a hostile majority," notes the Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, "the rabbis deliberately set up barriers for the explicit purpose of preventing social interaction with gentiles [non-Jews], and decrees were enacted to erect barriers against this danger. The partaking of meals with gentiles was forbidden ... food cooked by gentiles was banned." [WERBLOWSKY, p. 269] "The underside to this sense of chosenness [per the Chosen People idea]," says Rabbi Isar Schorsch, "is an inclination to dichotomize the world between 'them' and 'us. Categories of people are set apart by the fact that God has assigned them far fewer mitzvot [commandments] to keep. Three of those 100 blessings [Orthodox Jews must recite each day] praise God for 'not having made me a gentile,' 'for not having made me a woman,' and 'for not having made me a slave.'" [SCHORSCH, I., 4-30-99] Even in a 1988 survey, "more than a third of Reform rabbis -- traditionally the most 'integrated' and 'outreaching' of the major Jewish denominations -- endorsed the proposition that 'ideally, one ought not to have any contact with non-Jews.'" [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 181] Such a "nation apart" admonition is part of classical Jewish religious (and related to secular Zionist) belief to the present day. Jewish author Alfred Jospe notes that
"Unlike many religions," notes Steven Silbiger,
In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds people were polytheists, and relatively tolerant of each other's theology. Judaism, however, was expressed throughout their diaspora as an elitist, confrontational faith, engendering ill will everywhere. "It was not sensible," says Jasper Griffin, "nor was it good manners [in the ancient world] to allege that other peoples' gods did not exist. Only a madman makes fun of other peoples' religious practices, says the historian Herodutus in the fifth century BCE ... The response of the Jews [to other religions] was felt to be shocking and uncouth, as well as dangerous for everybody." Jewish rejection of the religions and communities in which they lived "placed an inseparable barrier between them and full acceptance into the classical world; as later on, even more acutely, it did with Christians." [GRIFFIN, p. 58] ***************** The seminal source of Jewish history and sacred law is recorded in the Torah (the Old Testament of the Bible in Christian tradition, consisting of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy). Biblical scholars tend to believe that the Old Testament (which sometimes cites conflicting facts in various places) was essentially four different written narratives eventually combined together, each section originally written between 800 to 1600 years after the events described allegedly occurred. Within these texts we read that Abraham and the early Israelites settled tentatively in the land of the Canaanites, but that famine eventually drove them towards Egypt. The ancient Hebrews were reportedly enslaved in Egypt, (a period of momentous impact even in current Jewish collective memory), but were ultimately led back to Canaan -- the Promised Land -- by Moses in a 40-year trek across the desert in the thirteenth century BCE. Moses became instrumental in mediating God's demands to the Hebrew people and instituting laws of behavior and belief for them, known today as the Mosaic code. Eventually the Israelites forcibly reestablished themselves in the land of Canaan and over the following centuries divided into sub-clans, fighting and warring among themselves, and against others. The most drastic intra-Jewish schism was the establishment of two conflicting monarchies -- Israel, in the northern areas, and Judah, in the south. When ancient Israel joined a coalition of non-Jewish states in threatening the southern Jewish kingdom, Judah joined the powerful Assyrian kingdom which destroyed Israel in about 723 BCE. Judah was destroyed, in turn, in 586 BCE, by Babylonian invasion, concluding the first Jewish expulsion from their proclaimed homeland. Jews were allowed to return in 538 BCE under the sovereignty of the Persian monarch, Cyrus; the Romans were masters of the Palestine area by about 100 BCE. The Jews were ultimately expelled en masse again, this time by the Romans, when Israelites repeatedly revolted against Roman rule. By the third century CE most Jews were scattered all across the Roman Empire, from India to Spain. In Jewish lore, this is the solidification of the Jewish "galut" (a term meaning exile, with derogatory connotations) in non-Jewish lands, i.e., the Diaspora (dispersion). It is necessary to again underscore, against the grain of modern popular (and largely secular) Jewish opinion, that the Old Testament is a compilation of stories, genealogies, and Godly dictates that were intended by its Jewish authors to be purely intra-Jewish in scope. The ten commandments of Moses -- "Love your neighbor, "Thou shalt not kill," and all the rest of it -- did not represent in origin for Jews a universalistic creed. "Love your neighbor" meant love your fellow Israelite. "Thou shalt not kill" meant don't kill those of your own people. "[Jewish] tradition," says Charles Liebman, "argued that the essence of Torah is the obligation to love one's neighbor as oneself, with the term 'neighbor' implying only 'Jew.'" [LIEBMAN, Rel Tre, p. 313] John Hartung notes that careful inspection of the Torah/Old Testament "Love Thy Neighbor" commandment make this clear, for example, in Leviticus 19:18:
As Louis Jacobs observes:
As Menachem Gerlitz explains the "neighbor" passage:
Judeocentrism, not human universalism, is the core of traditional Jewish understanding of the Old Testament. The influential medieval Jewish theologian, Maimonides, advised that "It is incumbent on everyone to love each individual Israelite as himself as it is said, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.'" [MANKIN, p. 37] Although there were some Jewish apologetics with this notion as early as Philo, it was Christian and Enlightenment influences that universalized the Ten Commandments, and liberalizing Jews, mainly since the eighteenth century, began to follow suit, bending and broadening the tenets of Judaism (carefully selecting from contradictory religious references) to encompass a humanistic concern for non-Jews in step with modern universalist-oriented values. Mosaic law or not, the only time-- till the modern state of Israel -- that Jews have had the opportunity to practice Moses' commandments and the rest of their beliefs (towards themselves or anybody) from a position of complete empowerment was, even by their own ancient religious standards, a disaster. The pinnacle of ancient Jewish history was a series of monarchial regimes that represented a turbulent time of failures in living up to Covenantal laws, incessant quarreling, fratricide, genocide, wars of conquest with non-Jewish neighbors, repeated intra-Jewish civil wars, and other struggles for power and control, rife with continuous bloodletting, as violent as any in human history. Most of this is codified as part of the Jewish religious faith/history in the Torah. The well-known historian, Will Durant, describes the Israelites' seizure (after the Mosaic moral code was accepted) of the Holy Land from the Canaanites who lived there, like this:
Even in the Book of Exodus, when Moses (deliverer of the admonition "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and all the rest of it) discovered his own people weakening, "out of control" with idolatrous dancing, naked, before a "Golden Calf," he directed the Levites, the priest caste, to slay three thousand of them. [EXODUS 33:27-28] Considerable portions of the Bible revolve around violent struggles amongst Israelites for power. Both King David and Solomon -- among the most beloved of the Israelite ancients in the myths of modern Jewry -- had half-brothers with rival claims to the Israelite monarchy murdered. Solomon, for example, arranged for Adonijah to be slain as well as another threat to the throne, Joab, who was even murdered in the Holy Tabernacle. (Both David and Solomon even had forced labor gangs of their own Israelite people). Likewise, Abimelich, the son of Gideon, (who like most powerful Israelite rulers had a harem of wives and concubines) murdered 70 of his brothers to guarantee the throne for himself. Jeru, too, in a fit of ruthlessness, killed the King of Israel, Joram, and then murdered Ahaziah, of the Israelite kingdom of Judah, as well as his two brothers. Then he had all 70 sons of King Ahab decapitated, clearing the way for his own leadership. In King David's family, notes Joel Rosenberg,
There is too the story of Gibeah (Judges 19:21). An Israelite, enraged by the rape-murder of his concubine by Jews of another tribe, hacked the corpse into pieces and sent a section to each of the twelve Israelite tribes to make an embittered point about solidarity. A confederation of tribes joined together to exact revenge on the perpetrators of the crime. The ensuing Israelite battle against each other took over 60,000 lives (Judges 20:21). The victorious confederation then marched on Jabesh-gilead, a group who had declined to join the coalition against the destroyed Benjaminites. 12,000 soldiers were sent to "smite the inhabitants of Jabed-gilead with the edge of the sword, with the women and children." (Judges 21) Only female virgins were spared. Going further along in Jewish religious history, there is the murder of Simon by his son-in-law, Hyrcanus, in another bid for the monarchy, and his son, Aristobulus I, who killed his mother and brother, and imprisoned the rest of his family. After him came his brother, Alexander Jannaeus, to the throne, a "despotic, violent ruler" who reigned during the civil war between warring pro-Greek Israelites (Sadducees) and anti-Greek Israelites (Pharisees). Jannaeus' bloody revenge upon the Pharisees was "as bloody as any in history." [DIMONT, p.89, 90] There was Antipater, "one of history's most unsavory characters," whose family had been "forcibly converted to Judaism" [GOLDBERG, M., 1976, p. 32] and his son, Herod, who murdered a few sons, one of his wives, and range of others including 45 Israelite religious leaders. [DIMONT, p. 95-96] The Torah tells us that the Israelite prophet Elijah slew 450 prophets of the rival deity Baal (I Kings 18) and military commander Jeru killed "all the prophets of Baal, all his worshippers and priests." (I Kings 10:18-27) [LANG, B., 1989, p. 120] Under the ruler Mannasseh there was the reintroduction of pagan cults, child sacrifices and "systematic murders" in the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah; this kingdom itself had a rivalry with the northern Israelite kingdom, Israel, and -- as noted -- it eventually aligned with Assyrian invaders against its Israelite brethren, ultimately to ancient Israel's complete destruction. The chaos, internecine warring and corruption, the straying from the "Covenant," the worship of idols and the fraying of the moral codes of Israelite solidarity resulted in a central Jewish belief that took form in later centuries, that Jews had been scattered in a Diaspora (dispersion) throughout the earth in galut (exile) from the land God gave them, Israel. But 2,000 years of exile experience, notes Alfred Jospe, "could not shatter the image Jews had of themselves. Destruction and exile were a national disaster but not completely unforeseen. They were part of the divine plan ... The Jew was persecuted not because God had abandoned or rejected him; [The Jew] suffered because he was not equal to his moral task. In the words of the prayer book, 'because of our sins, we were exiled from our land' ... Suffering was defined as punishment and punishment in turn was a call to duty. Exile was God's call to return to the faithfulness inherent in Israel's role as the 'chosen people.' The acceptance of punishment opened the gate to redemption and return to the land." [JOSPE, p. 17] Such a view of human suffering by Judaism, argues Richard Rubenstein, was "a colossal, megalomaniacal and grandiose misreading of a pathetic and defeated community's historical predicament. To this day Jews can be found who delude themselves with the notion that somehow Jewish suffering and powerlessness have redemptive significance for mankind." [KREFETZ, p. 182]
The key to the Israelite future of divine favoritism, and its special
covenantal "mission," was eventually linked to a Messiah who would
triumphantly come to lead His people into a glorious future. Originally
the Messiah was understood to be merely a nationalist savior, a great and
literal king of the Israelite people; later He was reconfigured as an
expression of the one God of the Universe who would lord -- physically and
spiritually -- over the earth, not in an after-life, but in the
here-and-now. [JOSPE, p. 22-23] "Judaism," notes Stephen Whitfield, "in
all its forms and manifestations, has always maintained a concept of
redemption as an event which takes place on the stage of history and
within the community. It is an occurrence which takes place in the visible
world, unlike Christianity, which conceives of redemption as an event in
the spiritual and unseen realm, an event which is reflected in the soul."
[WHITFIELD, American, p. 33] Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 1 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 2 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 3 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 4 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 5 || Causes of Hostility Towards Jews - Part 6
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