Share

Tweet

Share

Share

Email

Comments

 

 

Gatestone Institute

 

PART ONE: THE ROOTS OF DEMOCRACY: THE HEBREW BIBLE

Many academics and intellectuals seem attracted to totalitarian ideologies: fascism, Communism, Che Guevara, “Cuba si, Yanqui no.” There seems to be an admiration today for the “Palestinian” cause, and tireless apologetics for Islam in the face of spreading jihad. The awe and solicitude shown Iranian President Ahmadinejad when he spoke at Columbia University should cause one to wonder why the leader of a regime in which death penalties are a daily occurrence — a regime that massacres its own people and threatens another state with genocide — should be accorded such solicitude at a major American university.

Academics and other intellectuals are steeped in the roots of Western Civilization, whose roots originate in Greece and Rome. In the Greek republic, glorified as the wellspring of democracy, maybe two percent of the inhabitants participated and enjoyed its benefits. All the other inhabitants of the realm were beggars, slaves or nearly slaves, peasants who were one crop-failure from losing their lands to creditors and becoming debt slaves whose debts would never be paid off and would be inherited by their children. They had no say in public matters. It is much like calling Saudi Arabia a democracy because the emirs all vote. One emir, one vote. Democracy in the Greek model.

There is really not much practical difference between Roman rule and Stalinist or Nazi rule except that the Stalinists and the Nazis had better technology. There is no practical difference between Communist rule and fascist rule. Only the rhetoric and other trappings differ. Likewise, there is not much practical difference between Islamic rule and Stalinist or Nazi rule. Hence, Western intellectuals seem to be quite comfortable with jihad denial. The Catholic Church legitimated and sanctified tyranny since the Fourth Century. Over the course of the last three hundred years, however, as a result of the Enlightenment (as discussed below), it lost the ability to do that. So the forces of tyranny have lost that support. Islam is just the totalitarian religion they needed. The ceremonies and other trappings seem bizarre but it is otherwise perfect for sanctifying tyranny. In fact, it is even better than the Church ever was, for reasons that will also be discussed.

At the same time, there is a certain academic antipathy for Jewish sources, Jewish perspectives, the role and impact of Israel in history and for Judaism itself. The significance of anything the Jews ever did is to be minimized, covered up entirely, if possible, or simply ignored. Look how much was done in the ancient world, according to the academics, by the Phoenicians. In fact, there was never a people who called themselves “Phoenicians.” That is what the Greeks called the people who lived along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. The “Phoenicians” were the Sidonians, the Tyrians, the Beirutis, etc, and the Israelites. In fact, King Solomon of Israel and King Hiram of Tyre merged their navies. Where the Tyrians went, they went together with the Israelites. Where the Israelites went, the Tyrians went with them.

There are two responses to that from the academics: the Bible, they will say, is unreliable as history. Their response, however, seems to be “accepted truth” that survives any number of corroborations of the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible, and any number of disproofs that have been offered attempting to show that the Hebrew Bible is not reliable history. For one example, the great pioneer of archeology, Heinrich Schliemann successfully used it as his guide for major excavations.

So their second response is to ignore it. Do not address it at all. People who sometimes come out on the side of the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible often find their careers sidelined.

Historians raised serious objections to Hitler’s War Against the Jews 1933-1945 by Lucy Dawidowicz, because the name implies that the destruction of the Jews was Hitler’s primary goal and not an incidental secondary aspect of the war. Academicians cannot accord the Jews that much importance. They have to point out that others died in the gas chambers, not only Jews but also Gypsies, genetically defective persons, homosexuals, trade unionists, Communists and others, designated as degenerates. Indeed they did, but the Jews were truly a special case, targeted with special attention. The Holocaust was the highly extraordinary case of an entire nation mobilized to the systematic, meticulously planned, industrialized mass murder of an entire people, down to the last baby. It entailed the commitment of massive resources to locate every Jew in every neighborhood of every city and every town and village under German occupation, round them up, and either kill them on the spot or transport them from all over Europe and North Africa to Poland to be murdered en masse, and finally to dispose of the corpses. The resources devoted to the annihilation of the Jews were the equivalent of a third front.

Dawidowicz was right. The task of annihilating the Jews took preference over the navy, even as Germany was going down to defeat. The German general staff met every week and allocated all the resources at the Reich’s disposal, including every piece of rolling stock in the railway system, to specific tasks according to priorities set by the generals. The navy ran out of petroleum long before the death camps did.

The two sides of the same coin are the attraction to tyrannical government and the insistence on marginal attention, if any at all, to the Jews.

Democracy grew out of the Jewish Bible (also known as the Hebrew Bible or the Torah, which Christians call the “Old Testament.”) It is a profoundly seditious document. It teaches equality, and that the natural, ideal condition of mankind is freedom. It also teaches that it is the duty of everyone in the society, especially the rulers, to protect and care for the weakest members of the society. Widows and orphans are emblematic.

Equality in Judaism derives from the common origin of humanity. Sometimes the message is delivered subtly but it comes across very clearly, for example, in the following comparison. With reference to Egyptian society, the Torah says:

It came to pass at midnight, and the Lord smote every firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who is in the dungeon, and every firstborn animal. (Ex. 12:29)

The order is hierarchical, from top to bottom.

With reference to Israelite society, the Torah says:

You are standing this day all of you before the Lord your God: your heads, your tribes, your elders, and your officers, even all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and the stranger that is in the midst of your camp, from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water; (Deut. 29: 9-10)

The order, “from the hewer of your wood to the drawer of your water” is not from top to bottom. Rather, they stand before God as a social circle, from one person all the way around the circle to the one standing next to him.

Slave owners in America made much of the fact that slavery exists in the Bible. It is true, something called ‘eved exists and has the essential meaning of “slave,” as does its derivative, “‘avdut,” meaning “slavery.” It is the word used to refer to slavery in Egypt, which was classic, real chattel slavery.

In the Torah system, however, the laws concerning ‘avdut are vastly different from chattel slavery as it was practiced in America and still is elsewhere. “Slaves” in the Torah system are not chattel. Slaves have rights. The most striking single difference on the face of the actual text of the Hebrew Bible is the provision concerning a runaway slave. In America, the Constitution, no less, required that the slave be returned to his master in the master’s home state. In Torah, the law is diametrically the opposite, right on the face of the text:

You shall not deliver a slave to his master if he seeks refuge with you from his master. [Rather,] he shall [be allowed to] reside among you, wherever he chooses within any of your cities, where it is good for him. You shall not oppress him. (Deut. 23:16-17)

There are other differences in the specific laws. In the Torah system, if a master strikes his slave and wounds him, the slave goes free. If a master has enough food for only one, he is obligated to give it to the slave. If he has only one blanket, the slave sleeps under it, not the master.

There are two general categories of slave in Torah: Hebrew slaves and Canaanite slaves.

Hebrew slaves went free at the beginning of every shmitta (Sabbatical) year. The shmitta year is every seventh year from the entry of the Israelites into the Land, not the seventh year of the slave’s slavery. Furthermore, the master must give him what today is called “severance pay” to start his independent life. The Hebrew slave has the right to decide he doesn’t want to be free, in which case, he remains a slave until the next shmitta year. At the beginning of the Jubilee Year (every 50^th year from the entry of the Israelites into the Land), however, he cannot decide to remain a slave. He goes free by operation of law, with “severance pay.”

The Canaanite slave is nearer to a chattel slave, but nevertheless possessing rights such as those above. In addition, the master is obligated to influence the Canaanite slave to convert to Judaism. If he does, his status changes to Hebrew slave and he goes free at the beginning of the next shmitta year, with “severance pay.” If the master is unable to influence him to accept Judaism, then he should sell the slave. In either category, to be a slave to an Israelite master is to be on track toward freedom.

In fact, the very goal of “slavery” in Torah is freedom. This sounds absurd, oxymoronic or even Orwellian, but it is not.

People in the Torah system became slaves in several ways. Most commonly, they incurred debts that they could not pay. People who fall into those straits lived as “slaves” to families of freemen where they could observe and learn the discipline and mindset of freemen and how they manage their lives.

The goal is freedom. Slaves do not know how to be free. The Israelites had God Himself to teach them, through Moses as His spokesman. Even so, in forty years in the desert, the lesson was learned only imperfectly. Since the entry of Israel into its land, the master and his family became the teachers of the ways of freedom.

Even in the matter of “slavery,” the Torah works toward the natural and ideal condition of each and every individual person, which is freedom.

PART TWO: THE HEBREW BIBLE AND REVOLT IN EUROPE

The first translation of the Bible into a European vernacular, the “Wycliffe Bible,” was done in England in the late 14th Century from the Catholic Bible. That was before printing was invented. Every copy had to be written by hand and it was vigorously suppressed everywhere in Europe.

Despite that, once people could read the Bible, or have it read to them, it began the ferment of a real revolution, especially in England. Out of the Wycliffe Bible, around 1382, came the “Lollards,” a political and religious movement that grew and spread despite extremely determined efforts to suppress it. It was the main influence on Jan Hus and his proto-Reformation in Bohemia. According to historian Francisco Gil-White,

“Why is there antisemitism?

“…. [T]here has been and still is so much antisemitism in the West because Judaism is the original mass movement of the political left. It is the original movement of progressive politics, preaching freedom, justice, equality, ethics, and compassion. This is precisely why the Western ruling classes have always persecuted the Jews and taught ordinary gentiles to hate them, lest ordinary people learn from the Jews that they have a right to live in freedom and equality. Once this is understood, the history of the West, with its endless sequence of anti-Jewish massacres, will, for the first time, make sense. [1]

Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic and the Hussite movement was vigorously suppressed, but its influence spread, including the imperative of making the Bible available in the vernacular to everyone.

The Wycliffe translation was followed, about 150 years later, by the Tyndale Bible, translated from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek sources. Tyndale was executed in Belgium as a heretic. About two years later, Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome and set up his own church, the Church of England. He needed an official Bible for his new Church and seized upon the Tyndale translation, which he then had printed in large numbers. That publication and dissemination fully legitimated Bible study in England. The revolution accelerated and the ranks of the Protestant fundamentalist Puritans swelled year by year, despite Puritan worship being banned on pain of death.

Within less than 100 years, there were radical, fundamentalist Protestant groups, such as the Diggers and the Levelers, who rejected the legitimacy of nobility and, of course, of divine right of kings, all based on the common origin of humanity, (“When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”), and the Puritans, who refused to distinguish in speech between noblemen and commoners. That is why the familiar form, thee and thou and thine and ye and hast and thinkest, disappeared from the English language before the close of the 17^th Century. Everyone came to be addressed as “you” in the manner of a nobleman, including husbands and wives, the children, the slaves and the dogs and cats and horses and mules.

Around the same time as the Tyndale translation, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. Out of this came what might be the only peasant revolt in German history. The peasants mistakenly believed that Luther wanted social change.[2] Luther did not want social change but, as the peasants correctly perceived, God wanted social change.

The American Revolution is replete with rhetoric and doctrine which come from Hebrew Scripture; the image of America as a replay of the Israelites free in their land, which was an island of freedom surrounded by a sea of brutal tyranny. The Atlantic Ocean was openly compared with the Jordan River that separated Israel from the benighted world of tyranny. The Geneva Bible, with commentaries of Knox and Calvin and other Protestant luminaries, was to be seen everywhere, and the colonies were awash with pamphlets and tracts about “Hebrew governance” and how it should be applied to the colonies. People were conversant on the subject of Hebrew governance. Universities established in that period have, to this day, Hebrew slogans on their seals because they taught the Hebrew Bible in the original Hebrew and Aramaic. (Some of it, including part of the Book of Daniel, is in Aramaic.) The “classical languages” in those times were Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin and Greek.

The notion of man being “endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights” comes from Jewish Scripture, certainly not from Greek or Roman political philosophy. The Liberty Bell is inscribed with a quote from Jewish Scripture (Lev. 25:10). “Proclaim liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof.” One would be at pains to find a quote from Plato’s Republic.

Professor Gil-White goes further and states categorically that, going back to the first clash of Greek and Jewish civilizations some 2,500 years ago, all notions of humanism, all doctrines of the sanctity of human life, of equality, of freedom as an ideal state of society and the duty of the king to nurture and protect the rights and welfare of the masses, all have their origin in Jewish sources and in Jewish thinkers.[3]

Tyrants have overwhelmingly been aware of that and, with some exceptions such as Henry VIII, have sought to denigrate and demonize the Jews, Jewish sources and Jewish thought, and to uproot Jewish influence from their culture. The way to accomplish this was difficult for the tyrants to learn. There was some trial and error.

Titus destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, massacred half the Jews in the land and exiled many others into slavery in all parts of the Roman Empire. It did not work. The Jewish communities in Europe responded by raising money to redeem as many as possible out of slavery, thereby establishing Jewish communities in places such as the Rhineland, Pannonia (Hungary) and Dacia (Romania), among others. The problem of Jewish rebellion only spread, changing into the destabilizing influence of the Jews.

Conversion to Judaism was rampant among all social classes all over the empire. Slaves were thrilled by the notion that slaves have rights, that God cares about slaves and wants them to be free. The poor and miserable were moved by God’s commandments of caring for the weakest members of society. The patrician classes were hungry for deeper and more substantive notions of the spiritual dimension of man than the old mythology provided. Titus’ own nephew, Onkelos, converted and became a great Torah scholar, to whom we are indebted for the authoritative translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible into Aramaic, which was the spoken language of the Jewish people at that time. It is unusual, to this day, to find a Hebrew printing of the Five Books of Moses without Onkelos’ translation.

Sixty-two years after Titus destroyed Jerusalem and slaughtered or exiled most of the Jews, the Jews in Judea revolted again, led by a man known as Bar Kokhba. The war was a desperate and bitter four-year struggle, and after the Romans won, they perpetrated another genocide. In addition, the Emperor Hadrian also ordered forests burned, orchards uprooted and salt plowed into the land, Jerusalem renamed Aelia Capitolina and the country renamed Syria Palaestina, “so that the name of Judea the Rebellious should be remembered no more.” The same treatment had utterly finished Carthage, but it did not finish the Jews.

Within two hundred years, Rome had a problem again with the Jews, even though the genocide had been ongoing. No matter how many rabbis and Torah scholars the Romans killed, or how many Jews they crucified or sent to the lions in the Coliseum, conversion to Judaism was again so rampant in all social classes of Roman society that the Emperor Constantine feared that through conversion, the Empire would be lost to the Jews.

PART THREE: CONSTANTINE’S SOLUTION TO SAVE ROMAN TYRANNY FROM THE JEWS AND THEIR SEDITIOUS BIBLE

Constantine decided that he needed an official religion for the Empire, one that looked sufficiently like Judaism to hold the Romans, especially the “patricians” [ruling classes], but sufficiently foreign to Judaism that Jews would not accept it. He also needed a doctrine that required demonizing the Jews. Constantine and his mother, Helena, created it.

Christianity may still have been a sect within Judaism, but two centuries earlier, contrary to the direct instructions of Peter and James, Paul had opened the “inner court” to the non-Jews. During all that time, the roads to Jerusalem were lined with crucifixions, but the Christians who were crucified or sent to the Coliseum to be killed by gladiators or lions were sent to die because they were Jews, not because they were Christians. Non-Jewish Christians were mainly unaffected by those depredations. By the time of Constantine, the Romans had murdered so many Jewish scholars that the leadership of the Church had passed from Jews, who were learned in Torah, to non-Jews, who were not. By insisting on the divinity of Jesus, Constantine ensured that the Jews would reject the doctrine and be alienated from the Church, but Romans, including the non-Jewish leaders of the Church, would have no trouble accepting it.

Constantine convened a conference of all Christian groups at Nicaea, to canonize the tenets of the faith. There was a group of Jews, known as Ebionites (in Hebrew, ‘Evyonim), who learned the Torah, kept the commandments and believed Jesus was Messiah. Being Jews, however, they honored the First Commandment, “Thou shat have no other gods before me,” refused to believe that Jesus was God, and rejected any notion of a Trinity. So Constantine was able to insist that they be excommunicated.

That was pretty much the end of Christianity among the Jews, and Constantine got exactly what he wanted: (1) an official religion which he could present as the real, valid Judaism which (2) the Jews would not accept, (3) a Church doctrine which would condemn the Jews for heresy and Deicide, and (4) a Church leadership that would willingly assume its place in the power structure of the Empire and enthusiastically take on the task of persecuting the Jews.

This solution became the pattern for Western Civilization. It set the Jews apart, depicting them as utterly depraved creatures of abysmal and absolute evil, the enemy of all that is good and holy; diabolically insidious and dangerous to the realm and to decent folks; who will take over the land and enslave the people (projecting Caesar’s own motivation and the whole of Roman governance onto the Jews). It made the people fear and loath the Jews and clamor for the king and the Church to protect them, and to keep the Jews and their influence suppressed.

Suppressing the Jews and their influence brought everyone under suspicion, of course; and that persisted for fifteen centuries. It served the Inquisitors in extending their reign of terror to everyone, both Jews and non-Jews. No one could speak for fear of his words being misinterpreted to appear to reflect Jewish influence and cause him to be summoned before the Inquisitors. The Inquisition did not wind down in Spain until the 1830’s, more than three hundred years after there were no longer even any Jews in Spain. The last auto de fé in Mexico occurred in the 1880’s, four hundred years after the Inquisition was instituted to make sure that recent Jewish converts were not practicing Judaism in secret.

Meanwhile, the Enlightenment had taken hold. It had been introduced by Benedict Spinoza, a Jew in Amsterdam writing tracts about reason and freedom. Out of the Enlightenment came the French Revolution. What with the destruction of the nobility, ghetto walls being thrown open and Jews being allowed to actually mingle with Christian folk, the Enlightenment threw the tyrants and the Churches into a panic. The tyrants of Europe tried to fight the Enlightenment by denouncing it as the nefarious work of the Jews to undermine Christian civilization.

Then came the uprisings that swept Europe in 1848, all demanding what the French Revolution had demanded; “liberty, equality and fraternity.” Even though they were successfully suppressed, the Church and the ruling elite of Europe were shaken to the core.[4] Denouncing the Enlightenment as a Jewish plot was not gaining traction. Popular pressure for universal citizenship and universal suffrage (which is to say, equality), constitutions, parliaments, human rights and freedom for all, separation of Church and State, etc., (meaning liberty) continued and increased. To maintain public order, the autocratic governments of Europe found it necessary to speak in the language of the French Revolution, and over the course of the 19^th Century, democratization increased.

Eventually, early in the Twentieth Century, the elite rulers found the tool they needed to turn back the demands for democratization that arose from the Enlightenment. The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was a forgery, a plagiarism of a play produced in Paris several decades earlier, which depicted a conspiracy to take over the world and enslave it through use of money to corrupt governments into tyrannizing the people, mass media to mislead the people, and banking to break countries with usury. The conspirators in that play, however, were not the Jews, but the Masonic Orders.

No matter. It was reworked by a servant of the Czar who, after Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, needed something to distract the restive masses, who were demanding rights, a constitution, and a parliament with real power with which to confront his reign.

The Protocols are full of infantile scenarios, such as oaths signed in blood in a cemetery at midnight. The Czar, saying that even the most ignorant peasants would never believe something so obviously infantile and that disseminating it would make the Czar himself a laughing stock, threw the servant out with his Protocols.

Little did the Czar imagine how many people would believe it, or how smart many of those people would be. It is the second best-selling book in the history of the world — second only to the Bible. It was the bedrock of virulent strains of anti-Semitism, including Nazism. Henry Ford reworked it and published it as The International Jew. It is a best-seller in the Islamic world and is easily found on the internet. Its tropes continue to surface in the media, in political arguments and even in academic publications by university dons at institutions as august as Harvard and the University of Chicago.[5] Despite being proven in the early 1920’s to be counterfeit, plagiarized from an identified source,[6] the Protocols continues over the internet, and especially in Muslim countries. The world simply cannot believe it is not true. After all, it comports perfectly with all the calumnies that the Church has been drilling into the heads of Christians since Constantine.

The use of the Protocols succeeded in containing and reversing democratization by convincing the European masses that they need authoritarian government to protect their civilization from corruption and destruction by the Jews, and to protect them from Jewish enslavement and degradation. The Protocols took root especially among Germans after the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles. Seeing how Jews rose to prominence in the Weimar Republic, the ground was fertile for incitement of hysteria about democracy being a Jewish plot to seize power, and for a strong government and Church to protect society from them.

PART FOUR: USING THE ENLIGHTENMENT AGAINST THE “SEDITIOUS” BIBLE

Other elements of the ruling elites had found a more subtle way of uprooting Jewish influence, not in conjunction with the Churches but in a secular way. The tool was science and pseudo-science, actually using the Enlightenment to pull up the Jewish roots of Western Civilization. The official narrative is that science (reason) debunks the Torah. Whatever corroborates that narrative gets prominent treatment by the universities, publishing houses and the rest of the “enlightened” intellectual establishment.

There are, for example, crates of evidence supporting the validity of the Theory of Evolution, which seems quite clearly to contradict the Bible’s account of the creation of the world in six “days.” Christian fundamentalists played right into their hands by insisting that the Bible — which is both literal and mystical, a text written in layer upon layer of “code” — can be read and understood the way we read and understand the morning paper. The Scopes trial, derisively called the “Monkey trial,” was made to order for propagation of the view that only dolts are religious. William Jennings Bryan, who defended Creationism in the Scopes trial, was a brilliant man and a dedicated humanitarian, twice the Democratic Party candidate for president, and who served as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State. He is remembered, however, only for this anti-scientific defense and also for advocating that both gold and silver be used as legal tender, a proposal that was not adopted. Those defeats, which are easily marginalized, made it easy to bury and forget his principled warning during the Spanish-American War, that the methods of political control to support an authoritarian government in the Philippines would undermine American democracy. That is exactly what happened and is still happening.[7] The people in power do not want people noticing this and thinking about it.

Much the same has occurred in the school of “Higher Biblical Criticism.” Again, there is an official narrative: the Bible is not “true,” not “historical,” was written and compounded over centuries by different authors, and eventually edited (badly) and canonized. No matter how many of their proofs have turned out not to be correct, the narrative that the Bible has little, if anything, accurate in it acquired the status of received truth, or at least agreed upon dogma. Those who contradicted it would see their careers evaporate.

The Hebrew Bible has also been attacked on moral grounds, because it is aggressive and militaristic, denigrates current “cause of the day” matters such as homosexuality, and seems to be in favor of separate nations, all of which, according to current politically correct code, is immoral. The Hebrew Bible also seems, at a superficial reading, to approve of slavery, as did other cultures at the time, including Periclean Athens. Besides that, it seems as if at the moment many think that that religion — all religion, any and every religion — is the cause of so much war and oppression that it should all be shunned, not even to be looked into. To do so would be anathema — but as that word has no place in science, we do not call religion anathema, but it is anathema all the same.

These schools of thought, dubbed by their followers “progressive,” by ostensibly embracing the Enlightenment, seem to have succeeded in uprooting Western Civilization from the Biblical source of equality and freedom. The result is increasing efforts to suppress free speech on campus, in the media and, especially in Europe, by legal prosecution. The Enlightenment, meant to free people from tyranny, now seems to become, perversely, the new enforcer of it.

By sometime in the 19th Century, the forces of tyranny, both the progressives and those aligned with the Churches, had managed to put the Hebrew Bible back into the bottle and to confine the category of the “classical languages” to Latin and Greek, shunting aside the languages of the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew and Aramaic. This de-emphasis of the Hebrew Bible meant that, once again, it was to be read, not on its own, but only through the gloss of Emperor Constantine’s Bible, the “New Testament.” This ensures that the connection of Western Civilization to the root of democracy, namely, the Hebrew Bible, would wither and that Western Civilization would once again be rooted solely in the authoritarian societies of Greece and Rome.

Admittedly, it was from the Christian Bible that Europeans learned that God intends that people should live in freedom and equality, which caused all the revolutionary ferment since the 14^th Century, described above. Nevertheless, if the authorities of the churches can prevent the people from reading the Hebrew Bible themselves, they will have the ability to interpret the Hebrew Bible for everyone solely through the filter of the Christian Bible. It makes a difference.

For example, in Constantine’s Bible, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” (Matthew 22:21). What does the Hebrew Bible say? “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” (Psalm 21:1). Then what is Caesar’s? Absolutely nothing. He too belongs to God. Tyrants hate that. There is a clear reason why the Catholic Church, the extension of the Roman Empire, forbade anyone but the priests to learn the Hebrew Bible.

By now, the Bible has acquired a bad name, regarded as primitive, morally inferior, benighted superstition. The Bible has been effectively driven from public discourse. The marginalization of the Bible has made the Western world safe once again for the resurgence of tyranny, the default position of all civilizations, including Western Civilization.

I once heard the director, Orson Wells, in a radio interview, say that without the contributions of the Greeks and the Romans, we would have a much poorer civilization; without the contributions of the Jews, we would not have a civilization at all. He was right, but that is the direction in which Western Civilization is going. It seems to be divesting itself of its Jewish roots and reverting to its default position, rooted in autocracy of ancient Greek and Rome.

PART FIVE: CONSTANTINE’S SOLUTION RIGHT DOWN TO OUR TIMES

By now, Europe may have abandoned Christianity but its hatred of Jews and of Judaism has been deeply internalized. In our multicultural age, Westerners, especially Europeans, can no longer see total evil in people. Islam cannot really be as evil as it appears. Nazism could not have been as evil as we have been told. Surely the Holocaust has been exaggerated. No one can be totally evil, apart from maybe a few deranged individual psychopaths.

All that changes, however, when the Jews are being accused. Suddenly, any accusation is automatically believed, no matter how depraved or lurid. Deliberately massacring Palestinian children, racism, “apartheid,” systematic oppression, waging of genocidal wars and harvesting organs from the victims are all believed, just as Christians in another time believed — and might still believe, as many Muslims today do believe — that Jews murder non-Jewish children and collect their blood to make matzah for Passover. These ghoulish and horrifying fabrications are believed with no need of proof, no matter how many times the accuser has been proven in the past to have lied. The assertion that the Zionists are “worse than the Nazis” should have the world rolling on the floor holding their sides in derisive laughter, Europeans especially, as the Nazi horrors were perpetrated in their “front yard,” on their streets, in their town squares and railway platforms, with cattle cars stuffed full of screaming Jews rolling through their towns. But no, it is considered by many a respectable proposition with which one may reasonably agree or disagree.

An Arab member of the Knesset [Israeli parliament] spoke in Finland, where he denounced Israeli rule as worse than apartheid. “Give us apartheid,” he said, as if that would be better than what they actually endure. He was cheered with outrage and gusto. No one seems even to have thought how many black members of the South African parliament came to speak to them during apartheid days. There were, of course, no black members of South Africa’s Parliament in the days of apartheid. Did anyone feel any fear and anguish over what terrible retributions would happen to the speaker, that poor, oppressed man, when he returned home to fascistic, racist, genocidal, worse-than-apartheid Israel? Not likely. At some level, they know full well that nothing would happen to him. It is all lurid fiction, and deep down they know that; but believing it gives Europeans the freedom to give full-throated expression to the Jew-hatred that has been indoctrinated into them by the churches for the last seventeen centuries.

In the search for a way to protect tyranny from the “seditious” influence of the Jews, there is a progression — from Titus’s solution through Hadrian’s and Constantine’s solutions — to Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question;” and we can already begin to see what is developing as the next phase.

Titus massacred half the Jews in the land and exiled many more as slaves. That was the beginning of Jewish presence in the Rhineland, Pannonia (Hungary), Dacia (Romania) and other places. Sixty-two years after Titus’s genocide, the Jews in Judea responded with another revolt.

The Emperor Hadrian not only perpetrated another genocide but also destroyed the land itself and attempted to detach it from all reference to the Jewish people. Few Jews remained and nearly all of those that did, remained as slaves. Unlike Carthage, however, which had only its land to unify its people, the Jewish people had another source of national coherence: the Torah and its underlying learning. The Torah was given in the wilderness, and with it, the Jewish people and Jewish civilization were able continue even without land. From ancient Rome’s point of view, the “disease” of freedom, equality and sanctity of human life merely metastasized and spread by conversion.

Constantine therefore, sought to defeat the “pernicious” influence of the Hebrew Bible by superimposing a sequel, presented as its fulfillment, therefore subjecting the Hebrew Bible to interpretation through the filter of the “New Testament,” and supplanting the Jewish people, who would be reviled and dehumanized in the eyes of Christian believers.

That worked for a thousand years (a period called the “Dark Ages”), during which no one but the Christian priests were permitted to learn the Bible. There was, however, a problem. Because Constantine had needed to hold Romans, who were attracted in massive numbers to Judaism,[8] his new religion had to look like the “Improved Judaism,” the fulfilled Judaism. It therefore needed to include the Hebrew Bible to show what it was fulfilling. Eventually, Wycliffe let the genie out of the bottle with his translation of the Bible into English. People were able to gain direct, unfiltered access to the text of the Hebrew Bible. What resulted was the revolutionary ferment described above.

If even Jews like Benedict Spinoza, who was excommunicated by the rabbis, and even assimilated Jews in our time militate passionately for the ideals of freedom, equality and sanctity of human life, then it seems to be in the very bones of the Jews. As long as Jews are around, tyrants will never be safe. In their view, both the Jews and their seditious Bible have to be done away with utterly. For the tyrants, all else had failed.

PART SIX: THE NEXT PHASE – ISLAMIC TYRANNY

The Nazi “Final Solution” inexorably followed but it also failed. Germany could not conquer the entire world and wipe out every last Jew down to the last baby. Furthermore, it could not have succeeded absolutely if the Churches remained, because the Churches carry the Hebrew Bible around as part of their own Bible, and they have to deal with its terms and doctrines. Ultimately, in order to rid the world of the seditious Hebrew Bible, the Nazis would have had to destroy Christianity as well.

For tyrants, Islam is the perfect solution. Whereas Christianity claims to be the fulfillment of what is set forth in the Hebrew Bible, and therefore must proclaim its validity, Islam claims to be the true text of what Allah gave to Moses. Islam claims that what the Israelites would have given the world, if the rabbis had not corrupted the manuscript, would have been the Quran. To Islam, the Hebrew Bible is made by man and not by Allah; it has no validity and therefore there is nothing to confront. It is just garbage, together with its message of freedom, equality, the sanctity of human life and the obligation and commitment of everyone, especially the rulers, to help the weakest members of society and protect the general safety and welfare.

Islam is the perfect religion for making the world safe for tyranny. Furthermore, Islam makes no secret of its intention to murder every last Jew in the world.[9] In addition, Islam also fully intends to destroy Christianity, as is clear from its doctrines. In the Qur’an alone, disbelievers are to be beheaded (47:4), terrorized (8:12), annihilated (6:45), killed (4:91) and crucified (5:33). It is also clear from the consistent actions of those waging jihad. Could tyrants possibly ask for more?

This is the nexus of the “Red-Green Alliance.” How can the Marxist “progressive” left and the Islamic jihadis join forces, when the jihadis only want to return to pure seventh-century tribal Islam, and Marxism is all about progressive ideals like equality, social justice and peace? Look at their positions and what they stand for. What do they have in common?

That is actually easy. Marxism is not about equality or social justice or reason or freedom or peace. Marxism is about power. The positions that Marxists advocate and the causes they support are no more what Marxism is about than the excessive uniforms of the 1920’s, ’30’s and ’40’s are the essence of fascism. They are only the mask that is presented in order to enlist the support of people at a particular time and place. Just as there is no practical difference between Communist rule and fascist rule, so there is not much practical difference between Islamic rule and Nazi rule. Only the rhetoric and ceremonies and other trappings differ. Both Marxism and Islam, however, are about brutal tyrannical rule.

Ask a “progressive” what it is that they would have us “progress” toward. The response will usually be a blank stare. The answer, in the history of “Progressivism,” is, at its base, a notion that arises out of Marx and Darwin: that mankind is still evolving and can be perfected, and that the appropriate instrument to direct that evolution is government. In the Soviet Union, homo sapiens were self-consciously evolving into a morally and socially superior homo sovieticus. Seriously. Google it and see for yourself. You could not make that up. Furthermore, the belief seems to be that man can be directed to this perfect state by the ruthless, unrestrained use of force and brutality — exactly what the world is witnessing at the hands of the Islamic zealots every day. On their side, the Communists in the last century murdered more than a hundred million people.

Is it any wonder that “progressive” Western leaders and establishment journalists consistently cave in to Islamic demands to curtail freedom and have given Islam a special status among religions? They protect it against criticism, vilify its detractors and continually serve as public relations flacks for Islam: they keep explaining that the burgeoning global jihad and its expanding horrors “have nothing to do with Islam.” One could contend, with far greater justification, that the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity. One could claim that the Inquisition was actually anti-Christian, perpetrated by people who twisted the doctrines of Christianity. No one says such an inane and ridiculous thing, except in defense of Islam.

CONCLUSION

When tyrants target the Jews and incite the people against them, the real target is everyone’s freedom. It is a mistake to point out that the same fate befell others, that non-Jews were also gassed and cremated, that the Inquisition persecuted “everyone,” so why are the Jews feeling sorry for themselves. The whole purpose of taking down the Jews is precisely to enslave everyone. If Jew-bashing is being stoked once again, it is because the enemies of liberty are ready to make a move on everyone’s liberty.

The Jews are like the canary in the coal mine, not because the Jews, like the canary, succumb to the poison before everyone else. It is because the enemies of liberty know that all humanism, all doctrines of liberty and sanctity of human life in Western Civilization come from the Jews; from Jewish sources and from Jewish thinkers. In order to put those ideas to rest, they have to eliminate the Jewish roots, the Jewish frames of reference and the Jews, whose very presence is a reminder that people have the God-given right to live in freedom and equality. The goal of Jew-bashing is the destruction of everyone’s freedom, and that is why everyone should take warning.

In historical terms, democracy has not lasted long: fewer than three hundred years in America; two hundred fitful years in France, punctuated by the occasional resurgence of tyrannical rule; one hundred and fifty years in Britain, and barely a hundred troubled years on various parts of the European Continent, where it was interrupted by fascism and its Nazi variant for as long as twenty of those years, and by Communism for more than seventy years. This record means that most of those countries – except Czechoslovakia, briefly, and the Scandinavian countries — never really experienced democracy. The rest of Europe had fascist regimes with only some of the trappings of democracy at most.

In the Islamic world, only Iran experienced democracy, and only briefly. The CIA and British intelligence destroyed it because they feared the socialist government that the Iranians elected. The people liked democracy and they remember it, as was clearly evidenced by the failed 2009 “Green Revolution.”

Democracy in Europe appears to be nearly finished by now, falling rapidly to Islamic tyranny on one side and autocratic rule by unelected, unaccountable, faceless European Union bureaucrats on the other, with a resurgent Imperial Russia in the wings. I fear America may not be far behind. And I fear that if liberty fails in America, it will fail everywhere.

Prof. J.P. Golbert has practiced law in New York, California and Israel for a multi-national clientele, including Israeli NGO’s, and was also a law professor in Los Angeles. He has practiced law in Jerusalem since 1986 and has contributed numerous opinion pieces to various media outlets.

---

[1] I am indebted for this information to the historian, Prof. Francisco Gil-White. His book, The Crux of World History, which used to be online, is undergoing revision. It will be online again.

[2] Again, I am indebted to Professor Gil-White for this information.

[3] See, for example, the discussion of Spinoza in the next section.

[4] Gil-White, “Psychological warfare and political grammar”, Part 9, “Why do enemies of democracy attack the Jews?”

[5] John Meersheimer and Steven Walt, “The Israel Lobby.”

[6] Gil-White, “Psychological warfare and political grammar,” footnote 13.

[7] Gil-White, in “Psychological warfare and political grammar”, Part 1, “Psychological warfare, communication research, and the media” and the rest of the sequence, treats in depth the ultimate development of these techniques.

[8] Francisco Gil-White, The Crux of World History, citing Shaye Cohen.

[9] See for example the Hamas Charter.