Can the Jews be saved?

(And can Jesus do it?)

In “God, the Jews, and us: a deceitful civilizational contract”, I retold how the Romans, having failed to incorporate Israel within Hellenistic civilization, decided to erase it from history. In 70 AD, after four years of war, Vespasian and his son Titus conquered Jerusalem, looted and burned its temple, and compelled all Jews of the Empire to pay two drachmas a year to Jupiter’s temple on Capitoline Hill, instead of to Yahweh’s temple as they used to do.

Half a century later, Emperor Hadrian tried to erase Jewish identity by forbidding circumcision under penalty of death. This triggered the Bar Kokhba revolt in the years 132-135 CE (“The Jews began war, because they were forbidden to mutilate their genitals,” according the Historia Augusta).[i] Hadrian crushed the revolt, razed Jerusalem to the ground and built a Greek city on its place, with a temple to Jupiter where once stood the Jewish temple. The new city was named Aelia Capitolina and the new province Syria Palæstina. As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”[ii]

This failed to solve the Romans’ Jewish problem. Arguably, it made it worse. Israel was not dead, but now “dispersed” in every city of the Empire. It was no longer a state, but still a nation, with a stronger spiritual bond than ever. In fact, Jewish power had been felt in Rome since the first century BC: “You know what a big crowd they are, how they stick together, how influential they are in informal assemblies,” Cicero complained in his defense of the governor of Asia Minor who had prevented Jews from sending money to Jerusalem (Pro Flacco xxviii).

But Jewish presence in Rome increased dramatically when Vespasian and Titus brought some 97,000 captives from Jerusalem, including members of the priestly and royal nobility rewarded for their support (Flavius Josephus, Jewish War vi, 9). Some of them happily assimilated into Roman society, while others only pretended to. In addition to their unfailing love for Israel, many Jews now felt an inextinguishable hatred for Rome. In the so-called intertestamental literature, which includes the mostly Jewish Book of Revelation, Rome was equated to Babylon, while in Talmudic literature she became Edom (Esau), Jacob’s archetypal enemy.

I bring this story up again as a cautionary tale against believing that the destruction of modern Israel would solve the Jewish Question. The “Jewish State” is a sick country, no questions about that. It was born sick and will surely die of (or because of) its sickness, probably within a few decades. But what will happen after that?

Israel existed before 1947, and it will continue to exist even if the State of Israel disappears. Israel is in Washington, New York and Los Angeles, as well as in every European capital, and would still thrive without Tel Aviv.

Some people think that Netanyahu and his present government are the problem; they say Netanyahu is a psychopath, when in fact he is just the leader of the psychopathic nation. But those who think that the modern state of Israel is the only problem are also misjudging the situation. Israel is the problem, but Israel is not a nation founded in 1947, it is very, very old, one the oldest nations still in existence, along with China. And it’s here to last.

Theodor Herzl had thought that the creation of a Jewish State was the “final solution” to the Jewish Question. He was wrong, but so are we if we think that the destruction of the Jewish State will free the world from Jewish conspiracies.

Israel is a psychopathic state because Israel is a psychopathic people; and Israel is a psychopathic people because Yahweh, “the god of Israel”, is a psychopathic god. It would be bad enough if this god Yahweh was just the god of the Jews, but the real disaster is that Jews believe he is God. Not a god, not their god, but God. Even worse, Christians believe it too.

Israel is irremediably evil because its evilness is, literally, of Biblical proportions. Whether Israel has a state or is just “a nation dispersed among nations” does make a difference, but it does not alter the fundamental nature of Israel’s evilness.

I have been trying to find a book that makes  this point clear, but couldn’t—apart from my own books From Yahweh to Zion, and Our God is Your God Too. I had great expectations when I started reading Thomas Suárez’s State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel (Skyscraper, 2016). He writes in the introduction:

From Weizmann and Ben-Gurion to the fanatical terror gang Lehi, the ideological pronouncements of the settler project were couched in the language of messianism. Zionism was building the Third Temple, the final kingdom, a resurrection rising from the ashes of the Second Temple and apocryphal Solomon’s Temple. Its battles, its enemies, its conquests were Biblical; the state created by UN Resolution 181 was the rebirth of that created by God. Ben-Gurion all but placed himself among the Prophets, claiming that his 1948 conquest marked the third monumental event in all of Jewish history, following the Exodus from Egypt and Moses’ receiving the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. In the United States, Christian fundamentalists were seduced by this opportunity to believe that they were living the prophecies themselves, the beginning of the end of time.

Since Suárez’s thesis is that Israel was a terrorist state from the start, I was hoping he would notice that, not only “[Zionism’s] battles, its enemies, its conquests were Biblical”, but its terrorist and genocidal war codes were Biblical too. Suárez writes that : “To encourage what it called ‘right-thinking Jews’ in the murder of Arabs, the Irgun exploited Biblical passages, such as the Old Testament’s account of Moses.” What does he mean by “exploited”? Does he mean that the Irgun twisted the Biblical narrative, diverted it from its true meaning? Did not Moses order the extermination of the Amalekites and the Midianites (in the latter case with the exception of 32,000 virgin girls, of whom 32 are reserved for Yahweh, presumably as holocausts)? The Zionists’ Biblical references are perfectly appropriate.

Suárez very usefully documents Israel’s inborn character as a terrorist state, but never tries to explain it. He never acknowledges that Israeli terrorism is Biblical. So let me state it: the Irgun is Biblical, the Nakba is Biblical, Deir Yassin is Biblical, Baruch Goldstein is Biblical, and Itamar Ben-Gvir is Biblical, as I wrote in “The Biblical Lens”:

Netanyahu is mad, but he is mad with a Biblical kind of madness, like many other members of his government. Itamar Ben-Gvir, his Minister of National Security, had on his wall a photo of Baruch Goldstein, author in 1994 of the massacre of 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron. His tomb, on which is written “He gave his life for the people of Israel, their Torah and their land, ” is a site of pilgrimage. Yigal Amir said he made the decision to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin during Goldstein’s funeral.

And of course, the massacre of Palestinians, of men, women and children in Gaza is Biblical, as Netanyahu made clear to his troops: “You must remember Amalek.”  Israel is Biblical to the core, and claims to be. Why do anti-Zionists turn a deaf ear to their claim?

And it’s not just about terrorism. When mentioning how in the 1920s and 30s “the Zionists’ vast infusion of European capital and rampant land speculation caused such inflation that many small Palestinian farmers fell into debt, and could only extricate themselves from it by selling their plot of land to the settlers,” Suárez fails to notice that this is exactly how Jacob’s tribe almost took over Egypt when Joseph indebted, expropriated, and ultimately enslaved the peasants (according to Genesis 37-50). Edmond de Rothschild, who helped Yishuv Zionists to buy land through their Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, was a Biblical Joseph.

Can Christianity save the Jews?

In order to solve the Jewish problem that they had worsened by destroying the kingdom of Israel, the Romans invented the syncretic religion called Christianity. Its explicit purpose was to convert the Jews to a harmless Messiah, and dissolve Jewish nationality into a compatible, monotheistic version of Roman universalism. Christians have never ceased trying to convert the Jews, with the understanding that a converted Jew is no more a Jew. The reason fundamentalist Christians still uphold this hope is because it is a fundamental tenet of Christian eschatology.

Unfortunately, it will not happen. Not a chance. Not even if Jesus came back on the clouds. Christians ask the Jews to shift from “God chose the Jews” to “God chose the Jews but then unchose them because they rejected Jesus—although it was necessary that the Jews crucify Jesus so that he can resurrect in order to save humankind.” I am suspicious of Jews who make this move. Far from being un-Jewed, they generally consider themselves as super-Jews. Some of them are obvious cryptos who “pander to the Jews by throwing fellow Catholics under the bus in defense of Jewish fables like the Holocaust narrative”, writes Wyatt Peterson, citing Trent Horn as a typical “modern day converso”.

Even Martin Luther had to come to terms with Jewish inconvertibility. In 1523, he blamed Catholics for being unable to convert the Jews, who are of Jesus’s blood (That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew). But twenty years later, he deemed the Jews so corrupted by deadly sins as to be unredeemable: “They are nothing but thieves and robbers who daily eat no morsel and wear no thread of clothing which they have not stolen and pilfered from us by means of their accursed usury” (On the Jews and Their Lies).

Instead of defusing Jewish identity, Christianity has strengthened it. First, it made Judaism the only legal non-Christian religion. From the time of Theodosius the Great (379-375 AD), who outlawed pagan cults, “among all the non-official religions, the Jewish religion was the best treated and, in short, the best tolerated.”[iii] Jews had to be preserved in order to be converted—and they were not to be forced. Jews were immune from the Inquisition (in fact, they risked being hounded by the Inquisition only if they converted). Second, Christianity strengthened Jewish identity because, instead of challenging the Jews’ confidence in their divine chosenness, Christianity emboldened them in their narcissistic delusion. Christians tell the Jews “God chose you”; by adding, “and then He unchose you,” they just make fools of themselves. You cannot give the Jews the birthright and then want it back. Third, Christianity provided the ideal antagonism to Judaism. According to Jacob Neusner “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity,”[iv] but it would be more exact to say that Jewish identity was fueled by Jewish hatred of Christians as much as it was preserved by Christian protection. An edict issued in 408, early in the reign of Theodosius II, instructed the governors of all provinces of the Empire to “prohibit the Jews from setting fire to Haman in memory of his past punishment, in a certain ceremony of their festival, and from burning with sacrilegious intent a form made to resemble the saint cross in contempt of the Christian faith.”[v] The Haman of the book of Esther, by the way, is a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, so that hanging Haman with his sons and exterminating the Amalekites are one and the same thing in Jewish tradition.

So instead of converting the Jews, Christianity made them more Jewish. In practical ways too, Christendom was a favorable environment for the growth of Jewish power. For example, it is said that the Jews went into usury because they were banned from other lucrative occupations, but by another perspective, the Jews secured a near monopoly on usury because Christians were banned from it.

Jews are the way they are, not because their rejected Jesus, but because they followed Yahweh. Even if Christians could convert the Jews, what would be the point, anyway? Jews need not be be converted to a narrative that attests to their chosenness. The Jews need to be converted to the truth. The truth is not that “God chose the Jews”, nor that “God chose the Jews then unchose them”. The truth is that the Jews wrote a book that says God chose the Jews—and Christians believe God wrote the book. 

Historical criticism of the Bible has shown that Jewish monotheism was established, not when God chose the Jews, but when the Jews declared their national god to be God, probably in Babylon around the time of Ezra. We need to acknowledge and to tell the Jews that their god is not God, but the god of genocide—as Athena is both the goddess of the Athenians and the goddess of wisdom. The Jewish god (by Yahweh, Hashem or any other name) is a nasty, greedy, vengeful, prehistoric god who recommends deception and demands the extermination of enemy tribes. How can anyone pretend this god is the supreme God, the Heavenly Father of humankind?

Jews don’t need to be told by Christians how to read their Torah. They need to be told that their Torah, with its jealous god and xenophobic covenant, is the cognitive virus that makes them paranoid. The Torah is not holy; it is the Matrix, a prison for their mind—and for ours.

In the excellent film “You are Amalek”, part 2, Alexander Life says: “A little hint: if you know Jewish psychology, then you will know that the only satisfaction the Jew gets is not by working with reality … and taking advantage of reality, but actually making you believe in a reality that doesn’t exist.” Yahweh, Yahweh’s special love for the Jews, and Yahweh’s hatred for the enemies of the Jews, is a reality that doesn’t exist. It is a fantasy, and the Jews’ success in making us believe it is their greatest satisfaction (read Marcus Eli Ravage’s “A real case against the Jews”).

---

[i] Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 103-104.

[ii] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 494.

[iii] Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l'Empire romain. Leur condition juridique, économique et sociale, I, 1914, p. 229.

[iv] Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation, University of Chicago Press, 1987 , pp. ix-xi.

[v] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton UP, 2006, p. 17.