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IV. The Universal City

If the modern state of Israel were indeed established to provide a refuge for Jews stumbling among the God-forsaken ruins of the Holocaust, it has been a colossal and unmitigated failure. Today, Jews throughout the Diaspora – from Montgomery, Alabama to Berlin – are appreciably safer and less exposed to anti-Semitism than the residents of Haifa or Tel Aviv. European Christian anti-Semitism has either completely deliquesced or become so wholly discredited that those who continue to profess it subject themselves to universal opprobrium if not criminal prosecution or deportation by the state. In the post-War democratic West, an anti-Semite is the equivalent of the perpetrator of murder or sacrilege who, in Greek antiquity, was ritually ostracized lest his miasmal presence pollute the land and destroy the polis. And anyone who questions the precise historical details of the Holocaust is called a “denier”, a term to whose irony the mighty hunters of anti-Semitism are blithely oblivious, inasmuch as it was originally used by the Inquisitors against heretics, especially Jews, who “denied” the divinity of Christ.

But the creation of the state of Israel has managed to incubate a wholly new and more lethal strain of soi-disant “anti-Semitism” – one that straps itself into suicide vests. It has done so, moreover, within a Semitic Arab population that at the turn of the century lived peacefully and often amicably with its Jewish neighbours, and a larger Islamic culture that has historically offered sanctuary to Jews flying from Christians accusing them of having murdered their Lord. Surely the fact that Islam has, in such a short time, exploded into a psychotic frenzy of Jew-hatred demands to be recognized as historically remarkable. Not even the most fanatical Nazis were willing to martyr themselves for the cause of Aryan purity.

In reality, of course, Arab hatred of the Jews has little to do with “anti-Semitism” per se, and certainly nothing to do with the traditional European Christian kind. Arab hostility is perfectly comprehensible in the context of the unique historical circumstances of the founding, expansion, and ongoing policies of the modern state of Israel. It makes about as much sense to call the anger of Palestinian Arabs over their dispossession and colonial subjection – whether real or merely perceived, it matters not – “anti-Semitism” as it is to call the Soviet-era anger of occupied and Russified Hungarians “anti-Slavism”. Naturally, it serves the interests of the apologists for Israel and her policies to conscript her Arab opponents into the ancient and continuous ranks of anti-Semites, whereby their historical grievances seem as vicious and irrational as the racist calumnies of the Nazis, and, more generally, the looming threat of an outbreak of another episode of the Holocaust becomes more real and imminent than ever. Above all, it serves to portray Jews as hapless and passive victims of a cosmic malevolence for which they have had no responsibility and with which they have had nothing to do. Having been dropped by God like manna from heaven into a moral desert, Israeli Jews are, yet again, history’s innocent bystanders, God’s eternally suffering servant and sacrificial lamb.

The Prison of History

It is time, perhaps, for Jews to recognize that the history they simultaneously abhor and revere is, in the formulation of Jean Daniel, a prison, and that to seek redress in history for injuries suffered in history is only to forge new bars. Every genuine religion has regarded history as a prison, insofar as the vanities and resentments, the triumphs and humiliations, deposed in a people’s historical memory are the links in the chain that bind the soul to the ephemera of the temporal world. All the major religions and philosophical sects of antiquity with which I am familiar—the mysteries of Osiris in Egypt, of Marduk and Adonis in Babylon and Syria, of Attis in Asia Minor, of Mithras in Persia, the Orphic, Eleusinian, Pythagorean, Platonist, Stoic, and Gnostic cults in Greece, and, above all, Christianity—have preached a soteriological doctrine that enjoins upon its adherents at least a partial withdrawal from the historico-temporal world, a relativization of its overwhelming reality and value, a liberation from its brute necessity, a transcendence of the meaningless flux of time: an escape from or “abolition” of history, as Eliade has described it.

But Judaism is a religion of and for history, not in spite of it; indeed, when Jews affirm that Yahweh is the “God of history”, they confer upon the historical order the highest possible value. Their yearning is to be redeemed by and through history, rather than from it. And with neither a hope nor a desire for a hope of deliverance from this prison, historical injuries and resentments burrow deeply into the Jewish soul.

It is, of course, manifestly impossible that history, as the fallen arena of human action, could be redemptive, except in the sense that time, when of sufficient duration, can heal old wounds and confer upon the observer the wisdom of perspective. But with their counsel to “Never Forget”, Jews strenuously reject such wisdom. In any case, equanimity and perspective come from one’s transcendence of history, hardly one’s absorption into it.

Most of the other empirical human disciplines have at least a rational or metaphysical afflatus that informs the insensate materiality of the objects they study, and may well beckon their initiates along a highway that eventually leads to the Mind of God. But history is the most intractably opaque and unintelligible of all branches of human knowledge. Historical events are governed by no objective, constant, and universal laws that we yet know of. (The closest approach to the discovery of such a law was made by the ancients, who taught that history unfolds in response to the spastic lurches of Fortune’s Wheel, a “constant” defined by capricious and inscrutable inconstancy.) Modern historians don’t even pretend to inquire into the existence of such laws. And when we speak of history’s purposes or final ends, or history’s patterns or archetypes, we are speaking the language of poetry and myth—the language, that is, of the Gentiles.

I have already referred to Aristotle’s judgment that myth is “more philosophical” than history. For Aristotle, the novelty, uniqueness, and unrepeatability of historical events condemned them to that inferior ontological order of “appearance” or “non-being” which consisted in everything mutable, visible, transient, and particular. But Aristotle was also surely alluding to the ethnic and socio-political particularism to which historical events (and the separatist history of the Jews especially) so monotonously give witness.

By contrast to all of the theologies that germinated in the spiritually fecund soil of Greek and Near Eastern antiquity (Christianity amongst them), Judaism alone has dignified the historical sphere as man’s true and rightful home. Having looked there for justice and happiness, as they do now to the modern state of Israel, it is surely no wonder that the Jews have found, in the words of Augustine, only a “perverse and bitter sweetness”.

Augustine’s seminal distinction between the vice of cupiditas – the illicit love of the historical world for its own sake –, and the virtue of caritas – the use of the world for the sake of the apprehension and love of the invisibilia Dei –, seems to apply to, and was probably rendered in mind of, the Jews. As he explains in the De Doctrina Christiana:

To enjoy something is to cling to it with love for its own sake. To use something, however, is to employ it in obtaining that which you love, provided that it is worthy of love. For an illicit use should be called rather a waste or an abuse. Suppose we were wanderers who could not live in blessedness except at home, miserable in our wandering and desiring to end it and to return to our native country. We would need vehicles for land and sea which could be used to help us to reach our homeland, which is to be enjoyed. But if the amenities of the journey and the motion of the vehicles itself delight us, and we were led to enjoy those things which we should use, we should not wish to end our journey quickly, and, entangled in a perverse and bitter sweetness, we should be alienated from our country, whose sweetness would make us blessed. Thus in this mortal life, wandering from God, if we wish to return to our native country where we can be blessed we should use this world and not enjoy it, so that the “invisible things” of God “being understood by the things that are made” [Rom. 1:20; 11:36] may be seen, that is, so that by means of corporal and temporal things we may comprehend the eternal and spiritual. (I. iv)

I am aware that these are outmoded philosophical sentiments, wholly alien not only to Jews but to most modern Christians and atheists alike, for whom reality and truth mean empirical-historical reality and truth above all. But no intelligent discussion of Jewish historical suffering can proceed as if it has come out of an intellectual vacuum. That even well-educated Jews can refer reverently to that narrow strip of land that constitutes the territorial state of Israel as their “homeland”–without a twinge of irony or the faintest awareness of the ancient philosophical attitude that Augustine here re-presents–, demonstrates how contentedly ensconced they are in their historical prison.

I have no intention of attempting to reprise the long history of that philosophical attitude here, except in the briefest of terms and only insofar as it maneuvers into perspective ancient and modern Jewish velleities to sanctify the meager particularities of history, nation, and land. Clearly, the unbroken tradition of Greek philosophical and religious universalism (from Pythagoras, Xenophanes, Parmenides, and Heraclitus, through Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics, to Apuleius, Plutarch, Maximus of Tyre, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and Macrobius) was paganism’s most precious bequest to Christianity, as it functioned, on the level of the collective psyche, to compensate the narrow historicism and sectarianism of the ancient Hebrews. On this theme, I have already mentioned Jesus’ repudiation of the ethnic particularism of the Jews—their parochial law; their messianic expectation of a national and political kingdom of Israel–, and his proclamation, on the contrary, of a non-sectarian Law written on the heart of man; an unlocalized Kingdom Within; and a Universal Church inclusive of the faithful of all the nations.

The Cosmopolis

For Paul and the early Fathers, the universality of the Christian message was so radical and fundamental a datum that to speak of the Church, as we now speak of it, as a locus of worship or even an earthly institution, would have seemed a malicious insult to them. On the contrary, the Church (the New Israel) could be bounded by no finite limits of either historical time or geographical space. It consisted only in an everlasting, diffuse, and incorporeal community of souls, a more or less eternal spiritual Diaspora, whose relation to this or that particular people or earthly-historical city was regarded as merely contingent (having resulted from nothing more than an accident of birth), and whose principal allegiance was to the Celestial Jerusalem, the Universal City of God in which all human souls originally dwelled, and to which they by nature belong. Under the New Law, as Paul proclaimed it, every new Israelite was a fellow-citizen of the heavenly City, “Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free.” (Col. 3: 11)

As I have argued elsewhere, the Christian vision of the Civitas Dei derived more or less directly from the ancient Stoic vision of the Cosmopolis, which the god-like sage of antiquity recognized as his spiritual fatherland and true home. Seneca’s eloquent summary of the doctrine should serve to place Augustine’s dependence upon it beyond doubt:

…there are two commonwealths–the one, a vast and truly common state, which embraces alike gods and men, in which we look neither to this corner of earth nor to that, but measure the bounds of our citizenship by the path of the sun; the other, the one to which we have been assigned by the accident of birth. This will be the commonwealth of the Athenians or of the Carthaginians or of any other city that belongs, not to all, but to some particular race of men. Some yield service to both commonwealths at the same time–to the greater and to the lesser–some only to the lesser, some only to the greater…

…The laws [that Zeno and Chrysippus] framed were not for one state only, but for the whole human race…

…Our school [i.e., the Stoics] refuses to allow the wise man to attach himself to any sort of state…(Moral Essays: On Leisure)

Within this universal Cosmopolis, all men are free and equal citizens by natural right and by virtue of their common filiation from the eternal Logos, regardless of those accidental differences of social or economic stratum, or national or ethnic ancestry, that divide them from their brothers, and pit man against man, here below. As a son of the universal Logos and King, every man of reason and virtue is by rank a prince. In Boethius’ Christian-Stoic formulation, “The whole race of men on this earth springs from one stock. There is one Father of all things….Thus, all men come from noble origin. Why, then, boast of your ancestors? If you consider your beginning, no one is base unless he deserts his birthright…” (Consolatio III, meter 6)

This is so gloriously humanistic and egalitarian an ideal that one suspects that only the mention of God has prevented modern Marxists, pacifists, and Beatles’-era “imaginers” from appropriating it. Which they did, of course, except that they obtusely “imagined” that it could be translated to, and realized in, the fallen City of Man. But even in this bowdlerized and diminished form, the vision of the Universal City has now been utterly rejected by the primitive multicultural ethos and identity politics of post-modernism. If it has survived anywhere, albeit barely, it is only in Christian tradition, where it has served for two millennia as the world’s single credible moral and intellectual check on those tribalistic and jingoistic instincts that are equally native to the human animal, at least in its accidental habitat within the historical world.

Whether or not “Zionism is racism” (in the crude and unhelpful sloganeering of Israel’s Arab enemies), it should at least be obvious that Semitism and anti-Semitism—racial solidarity and racial hatred—are two sides of the same debased coin. Pride illustrates the point just as convincingly as prejudice. When Jews (or members of any other group) take “pride” in the history of accomplishments of their countrymen, they are proud of accomplishments of which they have no right to be, having had absolutely nothing to do with them. The collective has merely appropriated the achievements of one of its “members” and redistributed them to the membership at large. Such “pride” comes from the theft of an individual’s personality. Whether one identifies oneself with the group out of solidarity and pride, or one is so identified by others out of racial prejudice and contempt, the effect is the same: one’s human individuality is obliterated.

As Simone Weil has remarked, God is capable of incarnating in a man, a stone, or a loaf of bread, but not a people. Defining oneself as a member of the group drives out God just as surely as it drives under the individual personality. For Weil, even the social milieu in which the adherents of institutional religions ordinarily commune is inhospitable to the Divine. The group exerts such a powerful gravitational force that not even God’s love for the soul can wrest it free of its comforting embrace.

How is it, then, that the Jews have failed to see that ethnic nationalism and ancestral pride have confined them to the narrowest cell in the historical prison? How has the fundamental truth so escaped the attention of Jewish philosophers and theologians, that man in his essence is neither an Athenian nor a Roman nor an Israelite, but a subject of God and a citizen of the world; and that it is upon his detachment from those petty provincial allegiances that his peace, happiness, and salvation depend? Everything that binds a man to his particular nation or tribe fosters what is primitive, inessential, and unnatural within him, and diminishes the innate divinity that makes him most completely and individually a human person.

…Caeca Synagoga…Election…In the Image and Likeness of the Hebrews…

III. An Everlasting Possession (God’s Pun)

Rabbi Epstein’s formulation of current Jewish teaching on the Kingdom of God is nothing more than a breathtakingly fundamentalist reprisal of the Old Testament myth. And it is in this myth that lies the answer to my question of what, precisely, in their Jewishness so compelled the loyalty and cohesion of my friends in the Manor.

As I have noted many times throughout the course of this rambling memoir, the Old Testament myth is the only thing I can come up with that explains practically everything about the manorial mentality: the self-ghettoization, the enduring contempt for the Gentiles, the cultural hubris, the vigilance against intermarriage, the always vexing sense of persecution and victimhood, the obligatory Zionism, the constant re-living of the anguish of the Holocaust, the ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the oppressor. Possessed by, and in the possession of, these four-thousand-year-old archetypes, there is hardly any need for the sort of theology, soteriology, or liturgy in which other religious adherents invest their spiritual aspirations and energies.

 

Caeca Synagoga

The Jews’ unconsciousness of the archetypes that have them in their grip is ultimately, it seems to me, a function of a traditional aversion to the mythological valencies of the Old Testament narrative. Jewish biblical scholars are certainly aware that many Old Testament loci are mythological: the creation story in Genesis, the Eden myth, the primeval history, the legends of the Patriarchs, large tracts of the Moses and Exodus cycle, the Samson saga, the story of David’s youth and election, the folktales of Daniel, Jonah, and so on. But the guardians of Jewish orthodoxy regard these as interpolations, and insist, in spite of them, upon the essential historicity of the chronicle of Israel. Israel is the People of History, and it is the God of History who leads them.

Inevitably, this insistence called forth a decisive response in the form of Christianity. For the Old Testament prophets, priests, and kings, the arch-sin was syncretism: the contamination of a rigorously monotheistic cult by the seasonal rites and deities of the “nations” of the Ancient Near Eastern world. What happened in due course followed as if according to some immutable law of the cosmos. Christ, in whose person and story was deposited the universal mythology of ancient paganism, appeared in Palestine and laid claim to the Israelite throne. The mythological Christ was the religious psyche’s answer to Jewish historicism, and to a separatist Jewish ethos that regarded the culture and religion of the Gentiles as a demonic snare and miasmal swamp of pollution.

Though they are both peoples “of the Book”, the Jews’ and Christians’ respective attitudes towards myth and history are fundamentally antithetical. At the time of the Advent, the Jewish messianic hope was (and still is) for a new Mosaic liberator to lead Israel out of bondage to yet another of the nations, and to establish the Kingdom of God on earth on the historical model of the Davidic golden age. Rejecting this interpretation as grossly reductive and concretistic, Jesus was rejected in turn; He promised only liberation from sin, and a Kingdom of God that “cometh not with observation”. St. Paul rebuked the Jews for the cognate sins of legalism and historical literalism: for Paul, the Law and the history of Israel were above all visible sacraments of the invisibilia – self-transcending signs and symbols (myths, that is) pointing, in the first case, to an interior state of grace, and in the second, to what Origen would later call the “inner history of Israel”. Christianity thus represented a profound re-evaluation (and devaluation) of what (as Origen again would put it) was “mere history”

Over the course of the next fifteen centuries, Christian exegetes took up the Pauline burden of spiritual interpretation, treating the historical letter as a provisional conveyance for allegorical, that is, typological, moral, psychological, doctrinal, or mystical meanings. In Greek antiquity, allegoresis and mythopoesis were, as Jean Pepin has shown, closely related forms: the twin idioms in which the opposition between historical “truth” and mythic “falsehood” was transcended, both being relativized and subordinated to the hidden meanings occulted beneath the literal veil. Christian exegetes, in fact, regarded both the fictive veil of pagan mythology and the historical veil of Scripture as allegorical integuments concealing spiritual mysteries. The concomitant allegorization of biblical history and pagan fable suggests that the historical sense of Scripture and the false letter of pagan poetry were assimilated as “myths”: that is, symbolic fictions, or else equivalently figurative genres for the mediation of truths more profound and valuable than the mute facts of “mere history”.

Remarkably, the allegorical consciousness that gave birth to the Church–and continued to breathe meaning into the lives of Christians long after the Incarnation and Resurrection had receded into the historical shadows–had practically no effect upon the Jews. Indeed, the Jews have striven manfully to suppress it. In the very generation in which the Christian Messiah preached in Palestine, another reformer appeared on the scene in the Alexandrian Diaspora. Philo Judaeus (c. 20 B.C.-50 A.D.) was unquestionably the most brilliant Jewish philosopher and scriptural exegete of his age. More accurately, Philo was the most brilliant philosopher and scriptural exegete of his age, period. The author of more than forty moral essays, philosophical treatises, and biblical commentaries, Philo was not only the leading living exponent of Middle Platonism, but as the first theologian to apply to Scripture the allegorical method that had been employed by the ancients for the interpretation of Homer, he would be revered for centuries to come as the father of scriptural allegory.

Now, here is a Landsman to kvell about. Yet, ask a rabbi about Philo today and you are likely to be answered with bemused ignorance. Jewish teachers and scholars who are able to recite the names of the Talmudic commentators in chronological order from the early Middle Ages to the present have never heard of him. Why? Philo’s allegiance to some of the most solemn of Jewish principles is suspect. As a philosopher, his thought is fatally infected by the Middle Platonic and Stoic ideas that at the time furnished the essential elements of the universal theology of the “nations”; and as a proponent of scriptural allegory, Philo is guilty of having insulted the historical literalism upon which Jewish orthodoxy is apparently founded.

 

Though no expert, I have read a good deal of Talmudic commentary in the hopes of finding some trace of Philo’s sinister allegoristic influence. But figural interpretation, which plays a part in the exegesis of the sacred text of every other ancient religion, is another Golden Calf for Jewish orthodoxy. The bulk of the Talmud is, significantly, Halachah: elaborations of biblical precepts relating to the duties, dress, and deportment of priests and Levites; regulations governing the Temple and its appurtenances; governing the slaughtering of animals and their ritual fitness for use; laws of ritual cleanness and uncleanness in things and persons; of the Sabbath as well as of festivals and fasts; rules and regulations connected with agriculture (tillage, sowing and reaping, gardens and orchards); statutes governing marriage and divorce and other regulations concerning the relations between husband and wife and the sexes in general; Jewish civil and criminal ordinances, covering the conduct of judge and judged, teacher and student, governor and governed. In these pages the Pentateuch’s Byzantine legalism not only survives but stretches out its dead hand to embrace every aspect of human activity, including the pious angle at which to set one’s hat, and what to do if one has to use the bathroom on the Sabbath, but the nearest facilities are farther than the four cubit limit on travel (Eruvin 41b). One hesitates to make fun of such material, first out of respect for religious tradition, and second, because it is too easy; but the Talmud’s tens of thousands of similar hair-splitting trivialities benumb the mind and deaden the soul.

No more inspiring is the much smaller portion of the Talmud devoted to Haggadah (narrative), as well as the independent cycles of scriptural exposition (Midrashim), which are consecrated to the task of deciphering the precise literal meaning of the scriptural text. Here is the Midrash Rabbah on Exodus:

And the Children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground (14:22). How is this possible? If they went “into the sea”, then why does it say “upon the dry ground”? And if they went “upon the dry ground”, then why does it say “into the midst of the sea”? This is to teach that the sea was divided only after Israel had stepped into it and the waters had reached their noses; only then did it become dry land.

(So, it’s Moses over Pharaoh by a nose.)

In Christian commentary, any discussion of the watery abyss, Noah’s Flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, or Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan, will inevitably open up into the vast cosmos of mythic archetypes and symbols: into a discussion, that is, of the primeval ocean as universal mother and abode of the dead, of the sea as womb and tomb, of the paradoxical relationship between death and birth, the realms of darkness and light, and the contraries in general. These are the primordial images through which the rhythms of human life have been experienced and expressed since time immemorial, and in which we find the roots of the human psyche and the eternal spirit. But the Jewish exegetical eye is focused narrowly and superficially (though in excruciating detail) upon the historical surface of revelation. It’s as though the world’s most powerful electron microscope were calibrated to probe universal existence to the depth of a single atom.

 

I have written elsewhere and at some length about the defining opposition between Christian allegory and Jewish historical literalism, and do not wish to prolong the discussion here. The principal point is that a culture that is so outward-looking as to remain contentedly blind to the symbolic inner significations of its sacred narrative is inevitably blind to its own psychology. This is undoubtedly what the medieval sculptors and stained glass artists were suggesting when they depicted the Synagogue as a withered old crone with a blindfold over her eyes.

The “blind literalism” of the Jews was, of course, an early Christian trope, rehearsed in conjunction with the Pauline topos of the “oldness of the letter”. Indeed, there is something that can only be described as anthropologically primitive about Jewish literalism. Recommending the spiritual rewards of the allegorical interpretation of classical myth, the sixth-century Bishop Fulgentius of Ruspe wrote, “A child is content to play with the whole nut, whereas an adult breaks open the shell to better savour the taste within.” Literalism is a mark of the adolescent stage of human psychic evolution, when the primitive accepted his unconscious projections as objective, outward realities, there being, for him, as yet no subjective “inside”.

 

In the Image and Likeness of the Hebrews

The Old Testament narrative, comprising written materials and oral traditions that go back to the early second millenium B.C., is naturally replete with such unexamined projections; and the doctrine of divine election is a typical enough example of them. It is hard to ignore the reek of tribalism and political utility that emanates from the terms of God’s covenant with Israel. Abraham agrees to keep God’s statutes and ordinances, to worship Yahweh alone, and to proclaim Him as the One and Only. In return, Yahweh agrees to multiply Abraham’s descendants until they outnumber the stars in heaven and the grains of sand in the sea. He will make Abraham the father of nations; great kings shall come out of his loins; his seed shall possess the gates of their enemies; and Yahweh will give to them all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession. When famine strikes, Yahweh instructs Abraham’s son Isaac to go into the land of the Philistines, and promises to give to his seed in turn “all these countries”. When He changes the name of Jacob to Israel, He explains, “for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men”.

The mercenary nature of this contract is apparent. (It is scarcely less mercenary than the transactional economy of pagan animal sacrifice—propitiating divine ire and buying divine favour with burnt offerings–which the Old Testament prophets and kings constantly decry.) There is a significant difference, however: Yahweh does not promise riches, ease, fertile pasture, or bountiful herds; it is evidently political power that Israel aspires to–to be a great nation among “the nations”–, and Yahweh covenants with her to be her conquering warlord.

In the renewal of the covenant with Moses, political ambition is compounded with tribalistic xenophobia. The Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm promises to deliver the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, and once again to give them the land of Canaan for an inheritance, so long as “you shall not walk in the customs of the nations which I am casting out before you” (Lev. 20:23). The customs of the nations are abhorrent to the Hebrews’ Jealous God, priimarily in that they include the worship of others besides Him. Lest they adopt these promiscuous pagan ways, Yahweh has set the nation of Israel “apart from other people”.

 

To any but the most fundamentalist of adherents, these statements are literally swarming with projections. Unless you contend that the Pentateuch was dictated verbatim to Moses by God, you are bound to acknowledge that, like all other religious texts, the Old Testament is an attempt by a fallible and finite human understanding to represent an ultimately infinite and irrepresentable Deity; and in doing so it is necessarily condemned to describe Him in terms borrowed from its own immediate experience. As a God who is thus created in the image and likeness of his worshipers, Yahweh exhibits the as yet unconsolidated moral consciousness of a Bronze Age tribe.

What I have just said hardly represents a neoteric theory of religion, by the way. By the sixth century B.C., the ancient Greeks recognized that Homer’s depiction of Zeus as a moral reprobate whose crimes include indiscriminate murder, incontinent lust, incest, and serial adultery, was crudely anthropomorphic, and not coincidentally reflective of the dubious mores of the Achaean military adventurers whose exploits Homer sings. As the Pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes famously wrote:

The Ethiopians make their gods snub-nosed and black; the Thracians make them gray-eyed and red-haired.

And if oxen and horses and lions…could draw and do what men can do, horses would conceive their gods in the shapes of horses, and oxen in the shape of oxen….

The Yahwistic God-image similarly holds up the mirror to the character and aspirations of the Hebrews.

Yahweh’s conviction that He is the One True God can thus only reflect the belief of the Israelites that they are in possession of the One True Faith, by comparison to which all others are “unclean”. Yahweh thunders that He is a jealous God who will have no other gods before Him; Israel is then a jealous people, righteously convinced of the superiority of her religion, legal code, and customs. Yahweh’s bequest of Canaan is obviously enough the rationalization of Israel’s expansionist yearnings. As an itinerant tribe of desert herders, constantly in search of fresh pasture, the Hebrews could hardly have failed to covet a land flowing with milk and honey, and Yahweh duly provides the divine sanction for the Conquest. Indeed, the God of Israel not only condones but enjoins upon her the ruthless methods she employs in pursuit of this end, including dashing the heads of the babes of the infidel against the rocks until their brains pour out. Such brutal illusions are innocuous enough so long as one recognizes them as the product of a ruthless and depredatory age, and withdraws the projections that have solidified into dogmas exonerating and indeed ennobling the ancient Israelites as a nation called by God and providentially commanded to realize her military and political ambitions. But surely it is obvious that to continue to entertain such teachings as literal truths in the twentieth century can only spell spiritual and political disaster.

I note that even Jews themselves are aware of the mortal perils to which such pious fantasies give rise. Consider the analysis of the aforementioned Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg:

Obviously there can be no “chosen people” unless there is a God who does the choosing. History, especially modern history, knows too many examples of self-chosen peoples. No matter how high and humanitarian a “civilizing mission” such a people may assign to itself, self-chosenness has invariably degenerated into some form of the notion of a master race.

The blindfold of Caeca Synagoga is evidently still firmly in place. To a religious historian in the late-twentieth century, it should be apparent that, for a second millenium B.C. tribe of bedouins, “divine election” is none other than “self-election” projected into transcendence. Since time immemorial, in every military adventure and confrontation in history, nations have blustered that God was on their side, but even in proclaiming Him as their champion, they have been at least half-aware that they are engaged in jingoistic humbug, or an act akin to sympathetic magic, wherein the chief or medicine man mimes a desirable outcome so as to compel it to come to pass. The Nazis, too, betraying their own primitive unconsciousness, were convinced that they had been divinely summoned to establish the Aryan Regnum Dei on earth. Another odious comparison, I’m sure, but it is Hertzberg himself who can’t help but conjure it to mind.

The relationship between the Old Testament mythos and the tragedy of twentieth-century Jewry has become a modern taboo – a subject that Jews and non-Jews alike are officially forbidden to think or talk about. I say mythos, once again, because anyone who has contemplated the long and complicated history of the Israelites can’t help but be struck by its monotonous repetitiveness. The details change, but the pattern is essentially immutable. Israel goes whoring after foreign gods, and is justly abandoned by Yahweh to one of the world’s “unclean nations”, under whose heel she groans in bondage and captivity. Israel prays for a liberator, and in His infinite mercy Yahweh grants her prayers. She is restored to the Promised Land, and enjoys an interval of prosperity and power, which inevitably comes to an end after another episode of backsliding. Then the cycle repeats itself. This is the mythic archetype that underlies Israel’s “history” from the time of her bondage in Egypt, through the absorption of the Northern Kingdom into the Assyrian Empire, the Jews’ Dispersion and Captivity in Babylon, and finally, Judea’s impotent subjection to Persia, Hellenistic Greece, and Rome in turn. The only thing as constant as the Jews’ political ambition is its frustration.

Contentedly possessed by this myth, the Jews have been condemned to live it out. The world has always been their mastering enemy, and they its victim. Second Isaiah’s magnificent hymn to the Suffering Servant expresses Jewish victimhood in language so noble that it seems churlish to point out its megalo-maniacal implications. “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief…for the transgression of my people was he stricken.” This passage is best known in Christian circles as a typological adumbration of Christ’s magnanimous Sacrifice on the Cross. Sine macula, He died for the sins of mankind. For Isaiah, of course, the Suffering Servant is the covenant community of Israel, who suffered for the transgressions of “the nations”. Evidently Israel’s own backslidings have been forgiven by Yahweh, and she steps forward in the end-time as a guiltless victim and vicarious sacrifice to be placed upon the altar of the very nations who persecute her, and for whose redemption she willingly undergoes this persecution.

 

When allegorized as a prefiguration of the divine man, Isaiah’s poem spills over into mythic universality, and becomes a poignant and affecting vision of the tragic and redemptive suffering of Everyman; read as a literal record of the historical vicissitudes of a particular race and nation, it is rank and unendurable chauvinism.

Chauvinism inevitably begets chauvinism. The Old Testament legacy of racial superiority, separatism, and victimology is, thus, a geo-politically lethal one. How might the world be expected to respond after four thousand years of being reminded of Jewish “chosenness”, quarantined as a breeding-ground of infection, and, in paradoxical conjunction with the above, regularly petitioned for sympathy and demonstrations of contrition? Until the archetypes are depotentiated, Israel’s future history is likely to be as monotonously repetitive as her past.

…Jewish “Theology” …The Kindgom of God…

II. Judaism – Theology = Judaism

I had already begun to grow weary of the Holocaust fixation by my mid teens, if only from the urgency and zeal with which my peers, who had grown up like me in a hermetically sealed ethnic bubble and never inhaled so much as a whiff of prejudice, lived and breathed It, continued to abominate all things German, avidly raised money for the Zionist project, and insisted firmly on the need to preserve the racial integrity and traditions of the Jewish people. Frankly ignorant of the answer, I asked them, Why? What, exactly, was it that they burned so to preserve? It was the Sixties, after all, and not even the relative cultural isolation of the Manor immunized it against the revolutionary Zeitgeist of that decade. On the contrary, many of my high school classmates declared themselves Marxists, Trotskyites, Maoists, and unqualified admirers of Fidel and Che. As children of the Sixties, they regarded traditions, in solidarity with their political heroes, as things to be smashed. But their own Jewish traditions were somehow exempt from revolutionary scorn.

In what did this precious tradition consist? I certainly saw in my contemporaries no searing religious conviction. (Neither did I see it in their parents, by the way. It was the modernist scorn for the supernatural, the insouciant secularism, of my Jewish acquaintances that eventually persuaded me that Judaism had little to offer me or anyone else who was interested in the life of the spirit.) Whatever it was, it was surely not the religious content of their “Jewishness” that my friends were so zealously determined to preserve.

At the Saturday morning synagogue services I briefly attended in preparation for my Bar Mitzvah, I experienced nothing that I couldn’t have experienced at a country club cocktail party. The synagogue architecture itself–all pockmarked concrete, both inside and out, blond wood furnishings in the Danish modern style, and, of course, nothing that one could call ornament or imagery–seemed expressly designed at once to banish any sense of the sacred and amplify the sense of the workaday and mundane. The floor was covered in thick-pile broadloom, just like the nineteen-fifties ranch-style bungalows and “splits” in which most of us lived. The individual seats were over-stuffed buckets upholstered in burgundy velvet–exactly like the ones in the local cinema. Since the rows were steeply graded, the synagogue interior communicated to the “worshiper” the breezy feeling of being out for a movie or a concert. The only thing that distinguished it from the O’Keefe Centre was the fact that the spectators chatted with one another incessantly, religiously ignoring whatever happened to be transpiring on the “stage” below.

The most notable ritual of the Saturday morning service was the endless parade of comings and goings. At the risk of mixing metaphors, it was rather like being at a Blue Jays game, where every five minutes one has to pull in one’s knees to let another “fan” pass on his way to the beer counter, and then again as he departs for the bathroom to empty his bladder of what he had purchased on his last trip. At any given moment, there were more people in the synagogue lobby than in the pews. And since they passed their time in idle conversation in both venues, moving back and forth between them was accomplished with the utmost casualness. There was certainly no bracing awareness in doing so of transiting from a locus profanus to a locus sacer. Moreover, unlike a movie or baseball game, there seemed to be neither an official start nor end to the service. People arrived and left more or less at will.

 

Since the Exodus was the most momentous juncture in Jewish history, and Passover the most sacred season of the year, I fondly imagined that the religious gravitas so absent from the Saturday morning synagogue service would veritably overwhelm me at the Passover Seder. But the only thing overwhelming about it turned out to be the sheer quantity of food. At all the Seders I attended, the rite was merely a preamble to the meal, and one to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. It was conceded from the beginning that the hunger of the flesh must inevitably triumph over that of the spirit. The Passover Haggadah (the text of the rite commemorating the events of the Exodus, which is read aloud by those assembled at the dinner table) is already short, but no one objected to its further arbitrary abridgement, or its recitation at warp speed. An unusual number of Jews, it seems, were able to speed read long before any systematic technique had been developed for learning such a valuable skill; and the Seder is undoubtedly the reason why. But then the text of the modern Haggadah is so infantile that it could hardly be said to have suffered an indignity for having been paid supersonic lip-service. I say “infantile” advisedly, by the way. The Seder is the only religious ritual I have ever attended that has been expressly devised for the amusement of children.

As I’ve already mentioned, idolatry is the most grievous abomination in Old Testament consciousness; and perhaps this is why modern Jews (like radical Protestants) avert their eyes when in the presence of anything that strikes them as ritualistic. But what does that leave in the way of religious content? I am well aware that Judaism is pre-eminently a religion of laws. But in following the commandments (Thou shalt not bow down to graven images; Thou shalt not kill; not steal; not commit adultery; not bear false witness) contemporary Jews are only observing the practices of every monotheistic creed, and obeying the laws they are compelled to obey by the modern secular state. There is nothing uniquely “Jewish” in these desiderata, let alone religious; and most of the more esoteric laws and shibboleths (if an ox shall push a manservant or maidservant, its owner shall give unto their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned) have been retired long ago as anachronisms.

In the Manor, the dietary laws were the conspicuous exception. And precisely how they were observed bears noting. To reduce a very complex code to its essentials, Jews are bound by the laws of kosher, first, not to eat or touch what has been proscribed as “unclean”, and second, amongst the licit foods, not to combine meat with anything made from milk. To comply with the latter requires that every Jewish household possess two sets of dishes, cutlery, and cooking utensils, and that they be fastidiously segregated against mutual contamination. But in the kitchens of my friends and relatives in the Manor, as in most modern Jewish communities, one is struck by a clever improvisational novelty. Jews are as fond of lobster, spare ribs, bacon, and especially Chinese food as any other prosperous people. The solution? Eat them out, in a restaurant (the traditional occasion is Sunday night, when the uxorial chef gets her day off); or if you must bring them into the house, keep a third set of dishes. Apparently the stomachs of Jews can be insulted so long as the china remains undefiled. I know that trimming is a specialty of hypocrites of every religion on earth. But that Jews should have more regard for the purity of their kitchen cupboards than the temples of their souls strikes me as perfectly emblematic of the externality of the modern Jewish outlook, just as, two thousand years ago, the Pharisees’ outward piety of gesture struck St. Paul.

 

Laws, in any case, do not make a religion. A philosophy, perhaps; but no philosophy I know of has been capable of instilling in men the conviction that their eternal souls have been saved and their lives transformed through an experience of the transcendent. To be sure, modern-day Christian “searchers after the historical Jesus” are no less oblivious to this truism than Jews. If the “historical Jesus” had been deemed no more than an enlightened social critic or moral sage, and not also the living God in whose Passion, Resurrection, and apotheosis all men might participate, He would have had no greater claim upon the religious imagination than Hammurabi, Pythagoras, or Gandhi.

When I was growing up in the Manor, I had hoped to discover some evidence of a transformative encounter with the Divine amongst the friends and relatives who had so fiercely identified themselves as Jews. I was disappointed. Their lives seemed to me as banal, their preoccupations as neurotic, and their happiness as fragile as those of the most hedonistic pagans or rootless atheists. It was in university that I learned that any awareness of a dimension of being that transcends the world and time was simply unavailable to them, even if it was something to which they aspired, and for which they had the spiritual aptitude. Judaism has no interest in it. In fact, Judaism has always regarded such interest as arid speculation.

During my undergraduate studies of ancient religion, I grew to suspect increasingly that Judaism had no theology. I dismissed this suspicion as the product of scholarly immaturity. After all, a religion without a theology, I thought, is like champagne without the alcohol: it may quench the thirst of the flesh, but the spirit craves stronger stuff. Then, while taking a third-year course on the early literature of the Old Testament, I read the following passage in an authoritative book on Judaism by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg (of Columbia University and Temple Emanu-el, Englewood New Jersey):

The Jewish ideas of God, Torah, and the people of Israel, as well as the lesser but quite important doctrine of the Holy Land, do not represent a catechism or a theology, for there is none such in Judaism. They are the lasting values, areas of concern, foci, or problems (call them what you will) around which the mass of Jewish…thought through the ages has organized itself.

In place of a theology, in Rabbi Hertzberg’s view, Judaism has “values”; and I am inclined to agree with him. For once, that empty and over-used word seems appropriate.

 

Nothing better illustrates the theological poverty of Judaism (and its purposefulness) than its doctrine (lack of doctrine) of the afterlife. Here is the Torah’s teaching on the subject as summarized by another respected scholar, Rabbi Dr. Isidore Epstein:

Promises of reward, primarily temporal and national, are made for obedience, as part of the divine justice which is to distribute to each according to his deserts. No specific mention is made of reward and punishment after death.…Scripture…found it necessary to cast a veil over the whole question of survival beyond the grave, in order to wean people away from the idolatrous cult of the dead with which this belief was at that time associated.

Once again, the pagan temptation is dispositive. No doctrine of the soul’s survival, lest possessing one the Jews are befouled by the superstitions of the unclean and go whoring after foreign gods.

 

My own reading of the Old Testament is only slightly more consoling. Job’s nihilism, certainly, is complete: “man dieth, and wasteth away: yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he? As the waters fail from the sea, and the flood decayeth and drieth up; So man lieth down and riseth not….” Throughout Isaiah, Ezekiel, the sapiential literature, and especially Psalms, there are references to Sheol as the abode of departed spirits. But Sheol is exactly like Achilles’ Hades: a place of strengthless wraiths and shadows. “In death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol, who can give you praise?” “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol…”

Rather than in a metaphysical heaven or hell, Jewish eschatological hopes have been invested in the myth of the Kingdom of God, to be ushered in by the coming of the Messiah. But once again, the Kingdom is unambiguously terrestrial and political in conception. It is to be preceded by the General Resurrection (in the body, of course) and the Judgment wherein, depending on God’s sectarian temperature, either all of the nations or those of the nations who still deny the One God are to be eternally damned. For the people of Israel, the Kingdom is to be raised here on earth, by human hands, as a monument to Judaism’s faith in the ultimate perfectability of mankind. The Messiah, accordingly, will be neither a god nor demi-god, but a political leader (on the Mosaic-Davidic model) who will repatriate Israel to her ancient homeland, and through her ingathering and elevation to the former glory of the Davidic golden age, bring about the moral and spiritual reclamation of all of humankind. Thereafter, the One True God will be worshiped and the One True Religion observed by all the nations of the world. Then, the divine purpose of the God of History will be fulfilled.

Of the Heavenly Kingdom to which the Earthly is a prelude, there is nothing to say. As Rabbi Hiyya bar Abba, quoting Rabbi Johann, writes in the Talmud: “All of the prophecies of consolation and of good things to come delivered by the prophets apply only to the days of the Messiah, but as for the world to come, no eye has even seen, O God, only You have seen.” (Berakhot, 34b)

That the Heavenly Kingdom is but a nebulous afterthought to the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth demonstrates that even unto the end of time, Judaism is a “faith” whose focus remains determinedly socio-political and this-worldly. Such, as Rabbi Epstein writes, is nothing less than its defining nature:

The kingdom of God, in its terrestrial and social setting, provides the key to the understanding of Judaism in all its varied manifestations, and, indeed, the solution to the riddle of the existence of the Jewish people…No people has suffered more cruelly from ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ than have the Jews, but they have refused to despair…of the world…, and never gave up the belief in man’s ultimate regeneration and perfection. This belief…is a genuine historical tradition, based on the conviction that this is God’s world chosen by Him to become the scene of a divine order wherein goodness and truth are to reign supreme.

And how, again, will this regeneration take place, and what will be the Jews’ role in it?

At the highest the Messiah is but a mortal leader who will be instrumental in fully rehabilitating Israel in its ancient homeland, and through a restored Israel bring about the moral and spiritual regeneration of the whole of humanity.

Israel is thus not the subject but the agent of God’s redemptive activity. She is, as the Prophet calls her, the “light unto the nations”. It is the “nations”, pre-eminently, who are in need of redemption. And this miracle will occur once the Jews have been re-established in the land they had conquered and briefly occupied beginning in the eleventh century B.C.

Jews and Gentiles…

Blood…

The Sins of the Fathers…

The Holocaust Industry…

*****

For what follows, I make no claim of universal validity. What I have written is just as the title suggests: an irreducibly personal reflection. Since they live in every region of the world, the children of Abraham have grown up in widely varying milieux, undergone different experiences, and arrived at different conclusions. Still, I am persuaded that the modern Jewish pre-dispositions I describe below are normative if not absolutely universal. To the degree that they derive from the archetypes embedded in the Jews’ scriptural hieros logos, this should hardly be surprising.

*****

 

I. To the Manor Born

In our politically correct culture, so completely hobbled as it is by tribalism and racial hypersensitivity, it is only the pure of blood who enjoy the privilege of lively moral accusation. Since the Fifties, Black–if I were racially sensitive I would say “African-American” –comedians have been cracking ruthless jokes about the multiple socio-pathologies that have all but destroyed contemporary urban Black society. Not even liberals can restrain their laughter at Eddie Murphy’s uproarious impersonations of the stock characters of the urban Black underclass: silk-suited pimps, baggy-panted, Nike-shod gangsta-rappers, spaced-out Rastafarians, and primping Cassanovas who are proud of siring a brood of children they have never met. But if you are not a member of the ancestral group, beware. Mention these peculiar anthropological types in any but admiring tones and you will be accused of racial stereotyping, or hauled up before one of Canada’s human rights tribunals for the crime of “hate speech”.

And so, I offer my own endogenous bona fides. I was born to Jewish parents and spent my childhood and adolescence in a conventional subdivision in the northern suburbs of what was then called Metropolitan Toronto. My mother and father were also born in Toronto, but to Polish immigrants who had fled Europe before the First War. Many of my grandparents’ numerous siblings had remained in the Old Country, with the consequence that a good number of my parents’ relations remained unknown to them, having perished in the camps.

The place in which I grew up was, and still is, known as “Bathurst Manor”. I prefer to think that in giving it such an incongruous upper-class English designation, the humour of the Manor’s developers was intentional. A few years after the last driveway had been poured and before the sod had taken root, streets with names such as “Acton”, “Hotspur”, “Hove”, “Brighton”, and “Waterloo” were inhabited almost exclusively by Jews who had emigrated from towns or villages with names like Lodz, Minsk, and Pinsk, or had been born to immigrant parents of the same humble eastern European origins. At about ninety-five percent Jewish, Bathurst Manor was the least “English” and least manorial place you could imagine. In truth, it was a modern treeless ghetto, not unlike the ghettos many of its denizens had fled, except that it was richer, freer, cleaner, safer, and a ghetto entirely of the inmates’ own making.

It was the ethnic homogeneity and suburban blandness – not to mention the architectural and natural turpitude of the place – that made me flee the Manor for a new country of my own. The Jews had told themselves that they had no choice but to live together in separate and ethnically monolithic enclaves. Indeed, they had been forced to do so by the anti-Semitic majority that conspired to exclude them. In Toronto, that meant WASPs, whose ancestors had come from such towns as Hove, Brighton, and Waterloo. Given the standing hostility of my relatives to WASP culture and values, I’ve sometimes wondered whether the Jewish onslaught upon and occupation of the Manor was a subliminal stroke of revenge against the Anglo-Saxon Establishment. Usurping the “lords of the manor” is, after all, very much a part of the Jewish historical narrative, beginning with the expulsion of the indigenous Canaanites and, one might say, continuing more recently with the re-occupation of Palestine.

The sense of being a people excluded was in any case an almost palpable component of Jewish psychology in my neighbourhood. Family lore, as retailed by my uncles, consisted mostly of stories about having been singled out for humiliation at school, of this or that successful Jewish businessman who had been denied admission to this or that club or organization. What’s more, the Gentiles weren’t content with merely banishing Jews to the socio-economic fringes; they habitually pursued them even to the gates of their exile. It was for these reasons, according to my elders, that “we” needed to huddle together in places like the Manor, to protect ourselves from the ever-present threat of racial discrimination and violence from the anti-Semitic hordes.

When I finally passed beyond the battlements of our ethnic fortress and emerged into the big bad Gentile world, I experienced a somewhat different reality from the one I had been schooled to expect. I encountered neither prejudice nor discrimination; indeed, knowing how naturally abrasive my personality could be, even I was a little surprised at the world’s benignity. The worst insult I was able to elicit from a member of the old Ontario guard was that I reminded him of Woody Allen. No doubt Allen himself would have deconstructed this as anti-Semitic “code”. But then Allen’s on-screen persona perfectly epitomizes the sort of racial defensiveness that discomposed so many in the suburban ghetto in which I grew up.

I have never doubted, of course, that anti-Semitism has been a virulent poison throughout history; as I said, there were significant lacunae in my family’s genealogy because of it. But as an anthropologically curious youth in the late Sixties and early Seventies, I could find no empirical evidence of anti-Semitism in anything like the toxic doses against which I had been regularly inoculated by the community elders. On the contrary, all the “Goyim” I met were bending over backwards to demonstrate that they were “not prejudiced”, in the politically correct parlance of the day. The entire world, it seemed, including a generation that hadn’t been born until after the War, was engaged in a solemn dromenon of self-flagellation over what had happened to the Jews in Europe.

 

Lest you think the fears of racial persecution I describe beset only the older generations of Jews, haunted as they were by memories of their own direct encounters with it, let me assure you that they persist to this day amongst my contemporaries. In 1970, when I finished high school, most of my friends from the Manor chose to go either to York University or University of Toronto’s New College, both of which had been founded shortly before. Amongst themselves, they referred to New College as “Jew College”; but then, as I said, no Gentile would have dared utter such a calumny or even remarked in passing upon the disproportionate number of Jews at this institution. The reason for such choices was earnestly explained to me by those who made them: a brand new school would as yet have no WASP patrician class to harass or discriminate against Jews.

There was no arguing with them, of course. Since the early Sixties, Jews had been wildly over-represented amongst the graduating classes in the humanities, in the departments of sociology and psychology, and of course, in the faculties of business, medicine, and law. But such statistical vagaries did not assuage my friends’ strangely consoling dread that they were about to be discriminated against. It is ironic that, today, Jews have once again become the targets of racial discrimination in the academy. In lowering objective admissions standards or abandoning them altogether so as to accommodate “people of colour”, “Native” peoples, the handicapped, homosexuals, and anyone else upon whom society has recently conferred fully-accredited victim status, university admissions officers have inevitably excluded better qualified Jewish applicants. The further irony is that Jews, overwhelmingly liberal in their political proclivities, have always been in the forefront of movements calling for such racial (i.e., racist) “remedies” –the very policies and programs that are currently working against them. But this is only one of many Jewish paradoxes I must return to later.

 

When I married and left the parental nest, I went south, to the big city. Meanwhile, all of my high school friends migrated in the opposite direction, to a place called Thornhill. There, in another suburban wasteland with a bucolic English name, they proceeded to re-establish the self-ghettoized existence they had known in the Manor. It was more than clear to me at this point that the old arguments about racial persecution and violence were ritual mantras that had nothing any longer to do with actual empirical realities. The Jewish instinct to remain “together and apart” was something that ran much deeper than any prudent historical adaptation to external events or circumstances; it was evidently an inner, psychic compulsion, which is to say, a mythological imperative.

 

Blood

It may seem far-fetched to some to say that this instinct is rooted in the historical mythos of the Old Testament, but then modern rationalists invariably underestimate the degree to which they can be possessed by these hoary archetypes. For ancient Israel, remaining a people apart was the supreme religious obligation. Yahweh makes it a binding condition of the covenant: “I am the Lord your God, who have separated you from other people…; you shall not defile your souls by…anything…which I have set apart for you to hold unclean.” Uncleanness beckoned to the Hebrews pre-eminently in the form of the temptation to “go whoring after foreign gods”, and Hezekiah’s was only the first in a series of religious reformations whose centerpiece was the tearing down of the high places and their conversion to a latrine. Circumcision was a proud stigma of membership in the tribe, and Hebrew dietary laws were likewise shibboleths meant to keep the Jews free of the pollutions of the unclean Gentiles.

The ancient practices of circumcising new-borns and keeping kosher are both still widely observed today, notably, even amongst Jews who are otherwise unobservant. And, of course, the most solemn Jewish commandment next to the worship of the One True God is the prohibition against intermarriage. For a “good Jewish boy” to contemplate marriage to a “Shiksa” is always the occasion of parental dread and anguish, both in Borscht-Belt comedy and real life. Marrying outside the clan is an unforgivable apostasy. The argument is that Jewish numbers are so precarious that widespread intermarriage threatens the utter extinction of a four-thousand-year-old tradition. But once again, tradition is here defined in terms of blood. There is no impediment against a Gentile wife’s converting. (Indeed, in the “mixed marriages” with which I am familiar, this is the case more often than not.) In fact, the conversion of every “Shiksa” would only add another Jewish soul to the census rolls. But that is to understand Judaism as a religion, not a tribe. A converted Gentile is not a “real” Jew, in the eyes of the elders—not of the blood. It is for this reason, amongst others, that the Jewish clergy place no great emphasis on proselytism.

The Old Testament prohibition against miscegenation originated in a totemic stage of social history, when the tribesman’s first obligation was to maintain the purity of the ethnic group. Otherwise, the ancestral spirits might abandon him in his hour of need. Similarly, Jewish separatism is anthropologically articulated with the fear and suspicion of anyone outside the tribe’s ethnic temenos. We throw around charges of xenophobia loosely enough these days. Yet the Jews are apparently exempt. Perhaps because they have been conspicuous victims of racism, they are presumptively incapable of it. (But the subject of Jewish racism is also one I’ll have to come back to.) Let me simply close this part of the discussion by pointing out the eerie similarities between Jewish anxieties about racial purity and the “Aryan” fantasies of the Nazis. The respected leadership of the Jewish community (the Canadian Jewish Congress, the B’nai Brith, et al.) will immediately dismiss this as an “odious comparison”. But odious comparisons are usually things that people prefer not to think about.

Here’s another in the same vein, since I’m on a roll. I’ve said before, to the shock and horror of my auditors, that the confrontation between Judaism and Nazism was probably historically pre-ordained. Oh, I know: providence and pre-ordination are superstitions, no less atavistic than the Jewish beliefs and practices I am currently decrying. But I don’t mean pre-ordination in a theological sense. There are unknown currents, as Jung has argued, that clash and mingle beneath the surface of historical events: unconscious psychological affinities and repulsions that arrange things in ways we are unaware of. We all accept that they operate in the personal realm, of course. We say that so-and-so’s failure is the result of his negative attitude, or that so-and-so’s sunny disposition creates his own good luck. I see no reason why there should not be unconscious psychic forces that operate at the collective level of culture and history in the same way.

In the thirties, the Nazi movement notoriously saw itself as the long-awaited historical epiphany of mankind’s master race. Such inflations are common enough. The ancient Greeks sneered at the barbaroi (i.e., everyone who wasn’t a Hellene) as too intellectually and morally backward to appreciate the Greek gifts of reason and liberty. The Romans thought that only they knew how to govern, and so they magnanimously Romanized the world. Arguably, the illusion of racial superiority has at one time or other ensnared every nation throughout history, with the difference that the Nazis projected it with monstrous literalism. But who does not think his own people are “uniquely” special? Try to send back an order in any restaurant in France and you’ll find out, as I did, that the French are the world’s absolute masters of the culinary arts, so vastly superior to all of the other nations in this metier that the mere suggestion that a meal isn’t up to snuff will reasonably and justly expose one to the threat of physical violence.

 

The “Nations”

That the Jews are remarkably gifted, and have been the objects of envy and distrust on account of their gifts, goes without saying. In any number of fields—science, business, the law, medicine, academic scholarship, the media, literature, the arts—the Jews have achieved a degree of success and prominence out of all proportion to their numbers. And everybody knows it, especially the Jews.

All Jews of my acquaintance are understandably proud of their collective accomplishments; to their credit, in fact, they don’t speak of them overmuch. But the awareness is ever present, the more so for remaining unstated. It manifests itself in subtle ways. Whenever someone does something splendid in the news and it turns out that he or she is Jewish, there is a mute gesture of acknowledgment. If it’s someone in an occupation in which Jews are normally undistinguished–Sandy Koufax in baseball, or Steve Yzerman in hockey, for example–, there is an audible kvell of pride.

“Is he/she Jewish?” is the perennial question. “He/she is Jewish, you know”, is the perennial affirmation. Some may find this innocent enough; to me it was a mark of morbid self-absorption. I felt as though I were living in a Judeo-centric universe, from which there was no escape.

Indeed, for the Jews in my neighbourhood, just as for the ancient Greeks, the world consisted of only two groups of inhabitants: Jews and Gentiles. It never occurred to those who thought in such binary terms that the Jews represented a tiny minority of the global population, and to conceive of God’s creatures as consisting of “us” and “them” (as though the two were poised in some sort of balance of power) was profoundly self-aggrandizing. It also didn’t seem to matter that the “them” – the Gentiles – comprised a thousand different peoples. The term served to assimilate non-Jews in a homogenous lump, which is just how my friends and relatives thought of them.

Of course, “Gentiles” is a WASP prettification. The Yiddish word, the word used in the Manor, was Goyim. Goyim is, plain and simple, a racial calumny–if it’s possible to say so about a word as ethnologically diffuse as Goyim. On the lips of every Jew I have ever met, it has an unmistakably derogatory connotation. Goyim are morally and intellectually defective in every way that “we” are not. Jews are smart; Goyim have, well, a “goyishe kopf”. Jews are responsible family folks; Goyim are rakish and dissolute. Jews are sober and self-disciplined; Goyim drink too much.

 

Just in case you thought that, having been the victims of Shylockean stereotyping, Jews would never be guilty of the same, consider the widespread Jewish myth that Gentiles (i.e., the world’s entire non-Jewish population) have a congenital problem with alcohol. On this theme, I must recur to another personal anecdote – one, however, that is all too representative of my manorial experience.

When my parents’ estate was being settled a few years ago, my brother made an appointment with an accountant who had been a boyhood friend in the Manor. His office was – naturally – in Thornhill. Both of them, as it happens, had just returned from holidays in the Maritimes and were singing the praises of the Caeli’s they had attended. The consensus was that Maritimers really knew how to throw a party. Apparently, none of the locals left before he was falling-down, pickled-to-the-gills, two-sheets-to-the-wind, insensibly, roaring drunk. “Well”, said my brother’s accountant friend, “they’re Goyim”. Remember, I had just been introduced to this self-righteous prig. All he knew about me was that I was the brother of his friend, and therefore (at least biologically, which is all that counts) Jewish. So commonplace is his opinion within the tribe, that he naturally assumed that I wouldn’t be offended in the least by his arrogant moronism.

I’m aware that for the CJC, B’nai Brith, and so on, merely asking the question is proof that the questioner is an anti-Semite. But I’ll ask it anyway. Are Jews racists? Not in the conventional sense, of course; although some of the comments I heard about “Shvartzes” when I was growing up were world-class racial slurs. (But then Jesse Jackson, Louis Farakkhan, and other self-appointed leaders of the Black community have since returned the favour.) Most racists, however, look down upon particular groups (Blacks; Pakistanis; the Irish; Catholics; Jews). The Jews are equal opportunity condescenders; they look down upon everyone.

Preserving, into the twenty-first century, the sort of parochial hubris that regards “the nations” of the world as barbaroi is, in the least, a spectacular feat of anachronism. The great idol before which we all currently genuflect is cultural relativism: the creed according to which all creeds are equal. But, amongst the Jews, I see no realization that the Old Testament mythologem of the “chosen people” is an atavistic enormity that needs to be forcefully and unambiguously renounced. On the contrary, Jewish history and psychology, from the beginning to the present, seem to me to represent the steady, unreflective reification of the Old Testament myth.

 

The Sins of the Fathers

The Old Testament mythos, as I will argue more fully below, has much to do with many of the poisonous and geo-politically suicidal attitudes of contemporary Jews. The most poisonous of all concerns the “German question”, which seems the appropriate designation for a corrosive obsession that has been gnawing at the heart of Jewry for over sixty years.

A couple of years ago my oldest friend from high school abruptly terminated the relationship. My sins had been to question the original justice of the founding of the state of Israel, and to cast doubt upon the moral sanity of continuing to abominate all things German. Edmund (as I’ll call him) liked fast cars, and had just taken delivery of his latest when I asked if he’d ever test-driven a BMW. The reply was delivered in a familiar tone of disdain: “I don’t buy things made by German bastards”.

I’d heard the same anti-German vitriol throughout my childhood and adolescence in the Manor, and I always found it repugnant. To indict an entire nation – a nation with a two-thousand-year history – for the crimes of the Nazis struck me as outrageous. The Jews above all should be loath to condemn others on the basis of the group to which they belong by accident of birth. Surely my friends and relatives knew that in the thirties not all the German people happily subscribed to the Nazi program. Surely they knew that if a substantial segment of the German population were complicit, it was in the way that the inmates of totalitarian prisons have always been complicit. It’s easy enough for those of us who have never had to worry about a nocturnal knock at the door from the KGB or the Gestapo to be very brave and wonder why the German people did so little to oppose Hitler.

As I said to Edmund, the current shareholders of BMW must inevitably include investors from all around the world, and of the Germans amongst them, few were old enough to have lived during the Holocaust. To condemn the sons for the sins of the fathers is the most primitive sort of racism – the Neolithic sort that assumes that guilt is passed down through the blood. Come to think of it, that is just what the Old Testament God Yahweh apparently thought, when He fulminated that, in punishment for the sins of the fathers, He would pursue the sons to the nth generation.

I am aware, of course, that the same atavistic mentality is behind the current ubiquitous political sacrament of affirmative action and “reparations”. But such morally preposterous “remedies” compensate those who have suffered no injuries by punishing those who have committed no sins. Guilt has merely trickled down through the centuries and generations until it settles upon some convenient scapegoat lurking in the thicket.

It is for the same reasons that the conventional moral raison d’etre for the creation of the modern state of Israel has always struck me as questionable. Suffering from their own bad consciences over the historical treatment of the Jews, the Allied victors assumed the burden of guilt for the atrocities committed by the Nazis during the War. But the ancient Arab inhabitants of Palestine were not responsible for the Holocaust. One can hardly atone for the dispossession of a people by dispossessing a mutually agreed upon third party. As Arthur Koestler, a self-described Zionist, described it, the Balfour Doctrine amounted to “one nation solemnly promising a second nation the country of a third.” This, it seems to me, is the irreducible cause of the bitterness that has persisted through the decades in the Middle East.

 

The corrosive anti-Germanism that has survived through a second and third post-war generation of Jews has by now taken on the quality of a blood-feud. One can be forgiven (pun intended) for noting that Judaism has never repudiated the lex talionis that is the core of the Old Law. There is in Jewish tradition no glorious myth of the supersession of the Erinyes by the Eumenides, and the Christian proclamation of an epochal transition from the aera sub lege to the aera sub gratia has, of course, been emphatically rejected.

The yearning for vengeance for such monstrous crimes as the Jews suffered during the War is understandable and human; but sixty years on, it has become psychologically destabilizing. For many of my friends and relatives, it seems, it is still 1946. More than six decades later, the Holocaust Industry (as it’s been aptly called) has never been in fuller swing. Every year or so there is a new Holocaust movie or television documentary; there are Holocaust museums, travelling Holocaust exhibitions, Holocaust symposia, Centres for the Study of the Holocaust on practically every campus, and tour companies that specialize in “holiday” packages to Auschwitz and Belsen. In response to its more or less constant coverage, an American journalist once quipped that the New York Times should have changed its name to Holocaust Update. (Predictably, he was accused of anti-Semitism.)

It is for the Jews to judge the toxic psychological and spiritual consequences of continuing to rehearse and re-live the pain and anger conjured up with these memories. But the injunction to “Never Forget” is not merely directed by Jews to their own descendants; it is a standing accusation aimed at the Gentile world. Whether intended or not, the effect of nurturing a permanent Holocaust consciousness is to place the Germans in a perennial state of supplication for forgiveness. But since, as I have said, the majority of living Germans have nothing for which to apologize, they can hardly be expected to respond with anything but indignation and resentment. If Germans are as congenitally anti-Semitic as many Jews claim, then it is only a matter of time before that resentment metastasizes into something far more ominous.