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The atrocities Hamas committed on October 7, 2023, and subsequent worldwide support for the genocidal “judenrein-from-the-river-to-the-sea” ideology revealed the prevalence of widespread anti-Semitism. Terrorism has a worldwide reach. The Israel-Hamas war affects international markets and geopolitics. Anyone on the planet, Jewish or not, might suffer from anti-Semitism. It is important, therefore, to understand anti-Semitism.
This essay rejects supernatural or genetic explanations for anti-Semitism. Jews are not a different species of human being. Humans are more alike than different. Children born black or white, Muslim or Jewish, offer the same potential.
Both anti-Semites and philo-Semites repeat the same formulaic phrases: “Jews are the most persecuted minority,” and “Anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest hatred.” Anti-Semites like these phrases. There must be something wrong with Jews, they insist, since Jews are hated everywhere. My friend Alex, a philo-Semite, repeats these phrases as well. He sees them as proof of a unique and romantic quality to Jewishness. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the seventeenth-century Ukrainian leader Bogdan Chmielnicki, and Hamas are all identical because they all killed Jews. I disagree. The pharaohs, seventeenth-century Ukrainians, and Hamas are not magical reincarnations of each other. They had different motivations, methods, and goals. No supernatural thread connects them. To understand them, one must understand their particular historical context, not presumed supernatural curses.
Anti-Semitism isn’t the world’s oldest hatred, nor is it the hatred with the highest body count. Misogyny has a longer history and has claimed more victims. The caste system in India “has existed in some form for at least 3000 years.” Recent estimates are that there are 200 million Dalits, aka untouchables. The suffering Dalits have endured is unspeakable.
Westerners, living in a world strongly affected by Christendom, associate anti-Semitism with Christianity. The standard approach is to blame Christianity, the religion, and to ignore historical context. If discussing anti-Semitism among Muslims, the standard position is to argue that historical context, rather than religion, caused the anti-Semitism. This essay argues for a reverse of these approaches.
These approaches distort reality. When Christianity is understood as inherently anti-Semitic, Christians, even those who support Israel, are assessed as inescapably anti-Semitic. Anthony Weiner is a former congressman who currently broadcasts via WABC. In October, 2023, he made a comment that shocked me. I requested clarification. Did he really say that “Christians support Israel because they want all the Jews to be in one spot so that God can kill them all more easily”? Weiner did not respond with a yes or a no, but with a link to a Washington Post article.
In the “Christianity is anti-Semitic” worldview, Christians who are not anti-Semitic are understood to be “modernized.” In this view, the more Christian you are, the more anti-Semitic you are, and the more “modern” or “secular” you are, the less anti-Semitic you are. Data does not support this assumption. In Russell Middleton’s peer-reviewed publication, “Do Christian Beliefs Cause anti-Semitism?” Middleton concluded that “Religious orthodoxy was uncorrelated with anti-Semitism” and that “the well-springs of anti-Semitism today” may be “largely secular.” A 2019 Gallup poll suggested that those who attend church regularly are more likely to be sympathetic to Israel. “Highly religious Americans continue to be much more sympathetic toward Israel than those who are less religious.” Worldwide anti-Semitic protests in autumn, 2023, are not populated by visibly Christian protestors. Rather, these protesters appear to be more Woke than Christian.
This distortion of Christians and Christianity matters. Some start from this false assumption and go on to apply a distorted lens to Islam. That distorted conclusion goes like this, “Christians were anti-Semitic when they were devout, but as they modernized they became less anti-Semitic.” We can’t assume that anything like this process will change the hearts and minds of Muslims. “Modern” Muslims might turn out to be just as anti-Semitic as “old-fashioned” Muslims.
This essay will argue that to understand anti-Semitism among Christians, one must factor in historical context. To understand anti-Semitism among Muslims, more attention must be paid to religion.
Anti-Semitism is one of many tribal prejudices found around the world and throughout history. Humans form tribes in order to increase our ability to gain resources, both material and immaterial. Membership in a successful human tribe means not just that individual members will be better fed, but also that they will benefit from immaterial goods like peace and security, and a sense of meaning and purpose. Successful tribal membership may offer the balm to cope with life’s greatest challenge: the inevitability of death. One’s group identity, if not an individual identity, can be understood to be immortal. Even a shiftless or lazy American can live better than a hard working striver in a poor African country. The shiftless American benefits not because of his own effort. He rides on the accomplishments of the Founding Fathers, capitalism, a cultural matrix, and American servicemen and women. Immaterial, as well as material resources can be shared. Even a low-achieving Jewish person can feel pride given his connection to Einstein.
In forming tribes, we are like our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Chimpanzee troops have been observed, for example in the Gombe Chimpanzee War, massacring another troop. To increase access to resources, chimpanzees may beat to death every member of an opposing tribe.
Tribe members emphasize their tribal loyalty and adherence to tribal values. Politicians wear navy blue suits, white shirts, red ties, and an American flag lapel pin. Young people struggling to find a place to fit in, generation after generation, invent uniforms and rituals signaling tribe membership. Poodle skirts, bell bottom jeans, grunge, neologisms like “cis” and “trans” etc, have signaled successive generations’ membership in their tribe of choice.
Tribal membership is fluid. Individuals decide that membership in group Y offers more benefits than membership in group X and move over to group X. A black man enslaved in the American South could not suddenly change to a white identity, but those who could pass for white often chose to do so. Today there are benefits to be gained for a white person passing for black, and numerous whites, especially in academia, have been exposed as white people passing as non-white in order to gain benefits.
Tribal membership can be ephemeral. Few adults cling to any idea of themselves as girl scouts or members of a given little league team, even though that membership meant a great deal at one point in their lives. History is littered with abandoned identities. I identify as “Polish” but my ancestors might have identified as “tutejszy,” that is, “from here.” The Paleo-Eskimo people vanished so thoroughly that they didn’t even leave a name for themselves. Rather they are called “Paleo-Eskimo,” after the group that completely replaced them. There are no thriving communities of the Hittite, Harappan, Anasazi, or Moriori tribes.
Jews are not unusual in that they are members of a distinct group. We all are. Jews are also not unusual in that they have been subjected to atrocities from members of competing groups. There are features, though, that set Jews apart.
Jews are unusual in that an idea of Jewish identity has existed since ancient times. The patriarch Abraham is dated to 1800 BC. Abraham’s historicity is debated. If one accepts Abraham’s actual existence and traditional dates, one can argue that Jews can trace their identity back almost 4,000 years. Abraham aside, there is concrete evidence of the ancientness of Jewish identity. The 3,200 year old Merneptah Stele mentions Jews. The ancient book of Leviticus outlines behaviors we associate with Jews today. In 1997, Karl Skorecki argued for Y-chromosomal Aaron, a genetic marker going back to the brother of Moses, over 3,000 years ago.
Leviticus 19:27 says “you shall not round the corners of your head,” and the Hasidic men I pass regularly at the Paterson Falls, over 2,000 years after this rule was written down, have distinctive haircuts that mark them. Numbers 15:37-39 says, “You are to make tassels on the corners of your garments … You will see these tassels and you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes.” A fragment from the book of Numbers goes back 2,600 years. Hasidic men I see in present day Paterson display these fringes described in the book of Numbers.
When I pass Hasidic Jews in Paterson, I feel their vulnerability. Why do Hasids publicly identify as an often hated minority even in a high-crime environment? Their choices strengthen their connection to God and to their fellow Jews. Their choices are visible advertisements for Judaism, a belief system that blesses all, Jews and non-Jews alike. See Psalm 67; Genesis 12: 2-3; Isaiah 42:6; Zechariah 8:23; Isaiah 2:2-3. These Jews defy the Holocaust. Nazism attempted to erase Jews; these Jews are not just alive, they keep alive Yiddish, a language the Holocaust attempted to silence. In short, Hasids, in their choice of dress, a choice of dress that all too often results in anti-Semitic assaults, exhibit exceptional courage and dedication to their peaceful spiritual goals.
On Thursday, November 5, I was walking on a garbage-strewn Paterson street. I was near a makeshift memorial, consisting of empty liquor bottles and prayer candles, commemorating a young man who was recently shot to death. I have walked this street hundreds of times. I had never before seen another white person on this street. On Thursday, I did.
Imagine the fault lines. Residents’ cars, if residents had cars, might cost a few thousand dollars. This brand-new SUV cost ten times that. I was in New Jersey; the license plate read “New York.” The two Hasids standing beside the expensive car were white. Other than me, every passer-by was non-white.
I was so curious, I approached and asked, “What are you doing in Paterson?” The men explained to me that they were here on business. One man said that he likes Paterson because he can make money here.
There are multiple fault lines in this encounter. Blacks in Paterson are poor. When they see Jewish businessmen, they may feel their exclusion from resources Hasids share with other Jews. One might conclude that these blacks would best respond to that sense of exclusion by improving their own affiliations with others and their own access to resources. There are, though, cultural barriers militating against their success. Black men in this neighborhood do not emerge till past noon. They spend nights hanging out, smoking marijuana, playing loud rap from car stereos, and dealing drugs. In this, they are “keeping it real.” Ambitious young blacks who follow the law, avoid drugs, excel at school, and are go-getters at the workplace are condemned by their peers for “acting white.” “The ghetto mentality is … like quicksand, once you are in it; it’s hard to get out,” observes black journalist James E. Causey. Keeping it real, Causey explains, is the opposite of acting white.
In addition to these fault lines, there is another immaterial one. Many blacks feel a sense of competition with Jews over commodified suffering. They resent attention the Holocaust receives, and they insist that slavery was worse. This resentment over an alleged “stolen” suffering championship reinforces a conspiracy theory. Jews, this conspiracy theory insists, stole Jewish identity from Blacks, who are the real main characters of the Bible. In 2019, a black man who believed in this conspiracy theory murdered Jews in a terror attack in Jersey City.
Jews, observant or not, will always be distinct because their ancestors were the authors of one of the most influential books ever written, the Bible. Both the Old and New Testaments were written by Jews, with the possible, but not certain, exception of Luke, who may or may not have been Jewish. (Scientists have genetically analyzed the DNA of a corpse thought to be Luke’s. The Bible says that Luke was born in Syria; available DNA evidence supports that origin for the purported Luke skeleton.)
The Bible’s unique status is immediately apparent to anyone reading any other ancient culture’s scripture. The Ancient Greeks produced peerless plays and tales. Ancient India produced probing explorations of life’s big questions. Neither of these exceptionally articulate civilizations even begins to approach the Bible for depth, breadth, and worldwide influence. Had I never received any religious training at all, the comparison between the Bible and any other culture’s spiritual literature would be enough for me to consider the existence of God and God’s choice of the Jews as his people. A tiny group of scrappy and beleaguered desert herders produced the Psalms; the commandments; archetypal characters and struggles; minimalist sketches – like that of the contest between Cain and Abel – that confound and inspire for thousands of years; the soaring rhetoric of the disquisition between Job and God himself, as they debate the nature of suffering; and a salvation narrative powerful enough to reach international hearts, hurts, and hopes. When you compare these to what other cultures at the same level were producing, you cannot help but notice a vast gulf in quality, coherence, and meaning. The mere existence of the Bible is something close to a miracle.
Exactly because the Bible is so influential, people have been warring against it for thousands of years. There’s a reason that people in communist and Muslim countries have been imprisoned, tortured, and even killed for mere ownership of a Bible. Ideas can be as powerful as military hardware. The ideas in the Bible threaten the tyrant, the bully, and the egotist and changed the world.
Pagan gods like Mars, Dionysus, and Venus sanctified human appetites for war, domination, drunkenness, and lust. Pagan values championed the rich, powerful, young, healthy, and beautiful, and okayed sacrifice of the weak, poor, and the foreign. Roman Pagans could invoke their deities at the orgy or at grisly gladiatorial spectacles. Spartans habitually murdered helots and their own children; Spartan gods approved. The Jewish God, in contrast, was the advocate of the outcast, of the poor, of widows and orphans. The Jewish God reminded believers to discipline their appetites. To many, the Jewish God was a buzz kill. Humanity was happy until the Jews came along and ruined everything with all that talk about one God, sin, and guilt, according to the neo-Pagan worldview.
Tribes depend on numbers for strength. Other tribes have devoted energy to recruiting. Ancient Rome arrived, conquered, and assimilated foreign peoples. The Roman army came to be only about 20% from the Italian peninsula. Other soldiers were from previously conquered territory. Islam is even more ruthless than ancient Rome in its voracious quest for flesh, territory, and power. Previously conquered peoples became slaves, and then invaders. Muslim Arabs conquered the Berbers of North Africa. Tariq ibn Ziyad was a Berber and possibly a slave. He lead the Muslim Conquest into Spain. Islam relied heavily on slave armies, gobbling up conquered peoples and turning their sons into shock troops to claim more territory, and more bodies, for Islam.
Jews are about 0.2 of world population. Jewish identity is traditionally understood as descendent from Abraham, and being born of a Jewish mother. This understanding of Jewish identity is reflected in Jewish genes. Jews today remain related. Ashkenazi Jews, according to one study, are thirtieth cousins or closer. Not just Ashkenazi Jews are related. “Jews worldwide share genetic ties,” Alla Katsnelson reported in a 2010 Nature publication.
We can see factors that make Jewish identity perilous: Jews are identifiable, Jews are associated with a powerful but contested book, the Bible, and Jews are small in number. There are more factors that contribute to the perilous nature of Jewish identity.
Sacrifice at the temple in Jerusalem used to be an essential part of Jewish identity. That changed in 70 AD when Rome destroyed the temple and Jerusalem. Romans killed, enslaved, dispossessed and exiled Jews. In 2012, Zvi Eckstein and Maristella Botticini published The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492. Previously, the authors argue, Jews had been like most people throughout most of history. They made their living from the land in agriculture and animal husbandry. After 70 AD, Jews could no longer sacrifice at the temple. Jews had to find a new way to keep Judaism alive.
In this new paradigm, Jews would remain Jews by funding the writing of Torah scrolls, and by teaching sons to read, write, and study Torah. Most people through most of history have not been able to read and write. Jews, therefore, came to have an almost magical skill. Jews were employed for their newly cultivated skills in literacy and numeracy. Only a small number of literate men were needed in any given location in the ancient world, and usually only better-off people could afford to hire a literate and numerate employee. For these reasons, Jews began to disperse and Jews began to be associated with their wealthier, more powerful employers. Given that Jews in various locales shared their own languages – from Aramaic to Yiddish – Jews could keep in touch with other Jews throughout their diaspora. Botticini and Eckstein write, “Almost all Jews entered urban occupations despite no restrictions prohibiting them from remaining in agriculture. This occupational selection remained their distinctive mark thereafter.”
Jews’ new role was a mixed blessing. Jews were, again, a distinct identity, and a relatively small group, now associated with the powerful, but not themselves as powerful as their patrons, and they were also associated with professions that most people did not practice. Most people in the ancient and medieval world were farmers and herders. Jews were urban, educated, working in markets, banking, medicine, management, and minting money. There are fault lines between farmers and merchants, between the formally educated and those lacking formal education, between the rulers and the ruled, between rural areas and urban ones, and between people practicing agriculture and a barter economy and people using money. All those tensions arose between non-Jews and Jews.
In 1973, Edna Bonacich, the daughter of a rabbi, offered an outline of middleman minority theory. Middleman minority theory isn’t the complete explanation for anti-Semitism, but it is helpful in many settings. Middleman minority populations are concentrated in urban, skilled, and mercantile professions. They are not constrained by the surrounding culture’s taboos that impede business progress for those rooted in their communities. Rooted peasants, like my black neighbors who “keep it real,” often do not strive to excel; rather, they aim for equal status with others in their community. Think of the “tall poppy syndrome.” Working hard would not advance the status of many such people; they were trapped by serfdom, slavery, sharecropping, or other conditions that relegated them to dying at the same status they were born into. Middleman minorities have at least a ritual tie to another territory, and, if only in a mythic sense, experience themselves as “sojourners.” The sojourner mindset impedes the forming of intimate bonds with members of what Bonacich calls the “host” society. Bonds are formed with other members of the middleman group, even those geographically distant.
Groups other than Jews have performed middleman minority functions. Chinese have been middleman minorities in Asia; Koreans have been middleman minorities in American inner cities – think of the “Rooftop Koreans” meme. Armenians were middleman minorities in the Ottoman Empire; Indians and Lebanese in Africa; Japanese in Peru; Tamils in Sri Lanka. As Thomas Sowell, Amy Chua, and others have pointed out, where a distinct ethnic group has played the role of the middleman minority, tensions have arisen, and atrocities often follow. Muslim Turks committed a genocide against Christian Armenians. Muslim Indonesians committed hideous rapes of Chinese women in 1998. Indians were expelled from Uganda in Africa. In 1983, during “Black July,” Sinhalese pogromists tortured, raped, and murdered thousands of Tamils, and triggered a civil war.
Humans kill and commit atrocities against their neighbors. Jews, for the reasons mentioned above, have a long history, and have lived in diaspora since the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. Jews, over millennia, have had many neighbors, and therefore, there was a chance for tension between Jews and members of other groups. Jews have faced prejudice in many different countries because Jews’ unique job skills, after the literacy revolution, sent them to many different countries, and located them in the middle – that is, in fault lines between demographics. Jews are not uniquely evil; Jews are not supernaturally destined to be persecuted.
Instead of citing historical contexts that can help elucidate otherwise incomprehensible violence and hate, the knee-jerk position has been to blame Christianity. On November 3, 2023, influential journalist Fareed Zakaria appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. Zakaria attended Yale and Harvard. He has worked for CNN, TIME, Newsweek, and Foreign Affairs. Zakaria is an influential man.
Maher asked, “What do you make of this gut-wrenching level of anti-Semitism? It was like a volcano that blew. I don’t know where this comes from … among young people who hated Trump because he [allegedly] wouldn’t condemn the people with the tiki torches. You are the ones with the tiki torches now!”
Zakaria responded, “It comes out of Christian ideas about Jews.”
Zakaria is the son of an Islamic theologian. He knows that he is lying.
In 2019, Bari Weiss published How to Fight Anti-Semitism. Weiss hits Christianity hard, and inaccurately. And she is very careful not to be too hard on Islam. See my review of this book here. A Facebook friend, a prize-winning poet, was asked how to understand Hamas atrocities. He blamed priests and nuns.
Nazism is a separate topic. Nazism was its own ideology, hostile to Christianity, and springing from very different roots. I make that argument here. But what about the Rhineland massacres, the Spanish Inquisition, Bogdan Chmielnicki, pogroms? These atrocities were committed by Christians.
Christians who committed atrocities against Jews acted directly against their founder, their scripture, and their most authoritative teachers. Jesus was a Jew, living in Israel, citing Jewish scripture, speaking a Jewish language, participating in Jewish ritual life, tracing his lineage back to King David. Jesus’ apostles were Jews. New Testament authors, possibly, but not certainly excluding Luke, were Jews. Jesus never tortured or killed anyone. He endured torture and death without resistance, out of love for humanity. Jesus taught love. Jesus identified Jews as God’s chosen and the people who would produce the Messiah. Jesus said, “Salvation is from the Jews.” Paul taught that God’s promises to the Jews are irrevocable. Christians of all denominations accept the full authority of the Old Testament; rejection of the Old Testament is heretical.
The New Testament contains a minority of lines that are harshly critical of Jews. These hair-raising words were written by Jews writing as part of a Jewish tradition. Matthew and John, both certainly Jewish authors, contain the most problematic verses. Luke, whose identity is in debate, is not a source of anti-Jewish material. The Old Testament contains similar verses of equal ferocity criticizing Jews. Conversely, as mentioned above, the New Testament contains verses extolling Jews. In any case, there is no command for Christians to commit violence against Jews. It’s undeniable, though, that anti-Semitic Christians have exploited New Testament verses to foment hatred of Jews.
On the other hand, popes and other officials repeatedly condemned mistreatment of Jews. See Sicut Judaeis and other similar preceding and subsequent papal decrees. See also “Bishops and Jews in the Middle Ages” by Norman Roth. Roth describes philo- and anti-Semitic clergy and disproves an image of uniformly negative interactions. The mid-sixteenth century Council of Trent denounced the popular concept of deicide, that is, the idea that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. We, the council insisted, are responsible. “We” includes all Christians, and all people. Pope Pius XI said that, spiritually, Christians are all Semites. Pope John Paul II said “The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us, but in a certain way is intrinsic to our own religion. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion … you are our elder brothers.”
Exactly because there is no command or precedent in the New Testament for Christians to persecute Jews, understanding the position of Jews living among Christians requires reference to historical context. In some places, at some times, persecution was intense. In other places, at other times, relations were non-violent, conducive to Jewish flourishing, or even mutually affectionate.
By some estimates 80% of American Jews have ancestry in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which, at its largest, extended from Estonia to Romania, and into today’s Russia. Author Paul Berman depicted life for Jews in “darkest Poland” as comparable to life for blacks in the American South. Berman’s image, of Polish Jews as comparable to black slaves, is both widespread and false. Salo Baron, “the greatest Jewish historian of the 20th century,” criticized such views as the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history.”
Rafael Scharf was born and grew up in interwar Poland. He asked, “If it was so bad, then why was it so good?” What Scharf meant by “so good” is encapsulated in a quote from historian Joseph Adler. In interwar Poland, “Jews who formed ten percent of the population constituted thirty percent of the country’s university students, forty-nine percent of all lawyers, forty-six percent of the physicians, as well as fifty-nine percent of the nation’s population engaged in commerce, and twenty-one percent in industry … Judaic studies would flourish … in 1937 alone the Jewish community of Poland published some two hundred fifty periodicals and over seven hundred books.”
In contrast, in the early twentieth century, the majority of Poles were poor farmers whose ancestors, in the previous century, had been serfs. In eastern Poland, literacy rates were as low as forty percent. When Booker T. Washington visited Poland, he observed, “Wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange.” One can see numerous fault lines between Polish Jews and Polish Catholics.
Christians and Jews have interacted for 2,000 years. One can’t, in a brief article, fully describe 2,000 years of interaction in several different cultures, countries, and political systems. One theory – the middleman minority theory – no matter how useful that theory may be, can’t explain every fault line between Jews and Christians. This much is clear. Some, not all Christians, including church officials and lay Christians, have, at times and in places, disseminated anti-Semitic hatred, and falsely insisted that that hatred was Christian. Christians have oppressed, persecuted and murdered Jews. At other times and in other places, other Christians, clergy and lay, have had mutually beneficial interactions with Jews. Throughout history there have been Christians who, at the risk of their own lives, have championed and protected Jews against deadly violence. They cited genuine Christian beliefs in that work. Every member of the Ulma family was murdered by Nazis for the help they offered Jews. The Ulmas offered that help because of the authentic Christian teaching found in the parable of the Good Samaritan (see here). In spite of the worst conditions in Nazi-occupied Europe, Catholic Poland produced more “righteous” saviors of Jews than any other country. Those righteous included priests and nuns.
When the world conflates Christianity with anti-Semitism, it doesn’t do so out of love for Jews. It does so out of hatred for Christianity. Anti-Semitism and Christophobia walk hand in hand along the same demonic path. Reference to historical context would not excuse atrocities committed by Christians against Jews; there is no excuse. But reference to historical context would deepen understanding of anti-Semitism, and all hatred, and clarify understandings of Christianity per se. This essay strongly recommends reference to historical context when discussing Christian anti-Semitism.
When we discuss events like October 7, and the wider phenomenon of Muslim anti-Semitism, it is conventional to reverse the approach taken in reference to Christian anti-Semitism. Christianity itself is made to be responsible for hate. Historical context is ignored. Regarding Islam, historical context is to blame for anti-Semitism. Islam itself is white-washed as a “tolerant” “religion of peace.”
The white-washing of Islam has a history. In Islam in History, Bernard Lewis wrote that even when Islam was at its most tolerant “the golden age of equal rights was a myth … invented by Jews in 19th-century Europe as a reproach to Christians – and taken up by Muslims in our own time as a reproach to Jews … if tolerance means the absence of discrimination, then Islam never was or claimed to be tolerant, but on the contrary insisted on the privileged superiority of the true believer in this world as well as the next.”
People familiar with the Rhineland Massacres are not generally familiar with the 1033 Fez Massacre, when Muslims massacred an estimated 6,000 Jews, took Jewish women as sex slaves, and stole Jewish property. Jews were again massacred in Fez in 1438 and 1465. In 1066, Muslims crucified a Jew in Granada, and massacred the city’s Jewish population. In 1941, Muslims in Baghdad massacred Jews. In 1817 in Morocco, Sol Hachuel, a 17-year-old Jewish girl and a renowned beauty, was beheaded for refusing to convert to Islam. In nineteenth century Morocco, Jews were required to walk barefoot when outside the ghetto. In the ninth century, Muslims forced Jews and Christians to wear identifying badges – donkeys for Jews, pigs for Christians. Periodic decrees, stretching across centuries, in Muslim North Africa and the Middle East ordered the destruction of synagogues. Also periodically Jews were ordered to convert to Islam or be killed. In 1909, a British observer wrote, “The attitude of the Muslims toward the Christians and the Jews is that of a master towards slaves, whom he treats with a certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of pretension to equality is promptly repressed.” These facts are not adduced to prove that it was all bad all the time for Jews under Islam. I mention them because they complicate powerful propaganda whitewashing Islam as “tolerant” and “peaceful.”
This essay cannot provide, and is not trying to provide, an exhaustive history of life for Jews in the Muslim world. Rather, this essay is meant to address those who have succumbed to popular romanticization of Islam as “tolerant” and “peaceful,” and who emphasize historical context of Muslim anti-Semitism, and ignore the Islamic substrate of that anti-Semitism.
Many factors thoroughly differentiate Islam from Christianity. The Quran is not comparable to the Bible. The Bible has roughly 800,000 words, written by perhaps forty authors over the course of over a thousand years. The genre of Biblical books changes from allegory to poetry to erotica to reportage. The Quran is about 80,000 words. The Quran is a tenth of the size of the Bible. It is replete with repeated material; if all those repetitions were removed, it would be 40% of its current size. The Quran’s brevity offers many fewer opportunities for varying interpretations of previous statements. The Quran states in its first chapter that Jews earn God’s anger and Christians have gone astray from God. Nothing elsewhere in the Quran softens or disagrees with that pronouncement, one that pious Muslims are required to repeat seventeen times daily.
Jews and Christians have been debating the Bible for thousands of years. These debates are a necessary part of community and are ongoing. Debate is modeled by Biblical characters like Abraham, Jacob, and Mary. The Bible is regularly translated anew, as language changes. The Quran, in contrast, is perfect and eternal. Translations are not allowed. To say that anyone created the Quran is punishable by death. Muslims insist that no changes have ever been made to the Quran, though this claim is patently false. The Muslim’s job is not to question the Quran. The Muslim’s job is to submit, unquestioningly, to the Quran.
The Quran forbids Muslims from taking Jews and Christians as friends (5:51). Jews and Christians are the worst of creatures (98:6). Jews are the worst enemies of Muslims (5:82). Allah turned Jews into apes and pigs (5:60). Allah cursed the Jews with humiliation and poverty (2:61). The Quran orders that those non-Muslims who are allowed to live – so that they can enrich Muslims with their tax dollars – must be ritualistically and perpetually “humiliated.” This humiliation applies to Christians and Jews. And of course the Quran quite clearly recommends eternal warfare, torture and death for non-Muslims (5:33).
Muhammad, whose historicity is disputed, is the putative founder of Islam. Muslims understand Muhammad to be al-Insan al-Kamil, the perfect human, worthy of emulation. Muhammad declared himself a prophet of the same line as Jewish and Christian figures. He declared this though he was an Arab Pagan, and not Jewish, he lived in the Arabian peninsula, not in Israel, he did not know the Bible, and he did not descend from David. Muhammad, according to his legendary biography, craved affirmation from Jews, but Jews saw through him. Whereas Christians accept the Jewish Bible as authoritative and from God, Muslims reject and indeed calumniate the Bible. Ownership of a Bible in a Muslim country can lead to imprisonment, torture, and death.
Muhammad committed a genocide of a Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah. Muhammad ordered the torture with fire of a captured Jew, Kenana al-Rabi. Muhammad took as his sex slave this tortured and murdered Jew’s wife. Muhammad had also killed the father and brother of Safiyah bint Huyayy. Muhammad ordered the expulsion of Christians and Jews from the Arabian peninsula. Zaynab bint al-Harith, a Jewish woman, poisoned Muhammad. When asked why, she replied, “You killed my father, my uncle and my husband. There is nothing left you have not done to my people.” In some versions, Muhammad eventually died of this poisoning.
Hadiths are the collected sayings of Muhammad. Hadiths reaffirm Islam’s eternal warfare against non-Muslims. Muhammad declares, “I have been ordered (by Allah) to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah.” Hadiths also report that Allah will take sins from Muslims and use them to torture Christians and Jews in order to relieve Muslims. Muslims will be saved from Hell when Allah places a Jew or Christian in the place of the Muslim. According to another hadith, “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.” Muslims take this hadith so literally that they think that Israelis are planting gharqad trees for self-protection. In another hadith (Muslim 2997a 7496) Muhammad said that some mice or rats are actually human Jews in mouse form. One can differentiate between real mice and Jewish mice by inviting them to drink camel’s milk. The Jewish mice will decline. Next, the Muslim must invite the Jewish mice to drink sheep’s or goat’s milk. That, they will drink.
Hamas describes itself, not as a political entity, but as a religious one. Hamas speaks of Israel in Islamic terms, as a “waqf,” that is territory once inhabited by Muslims and that, therefore, according to Islam, must never again be allowed to be anything but part of Dar al-Islam. “Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day” reads the Hamas covenant.
Islam, not historic context, creates and perpetuates violent hostility between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially Jews. Focus on any increase or decrease in settlements or any other political question will not end conflict. Applying distorted paradigms and wrong assumptions about Christians or Christianity to Muslims and Islam is a deadly mistake.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.
Thank you, Danusha, for this, your companion volumn to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. I’m always pleasd when your contributions are posted on Thursdays, giving me extra time to afford them the attention they require (and deserve).
Volume , not volumn. Sorry. An aural / visual disconnect. Voices in my head? I don’t know.
“You talk of spelling? I have no use for spelling – what I really crave is slaughter and blood and the choking groans of men!”
Achilles to Agamemnon. Book 19, Lines 254-56. Robert Fagles (trans).
Thanks again for this article.
Another informative, scholarly essay from this author.
Excluding the supernatural from the basis of Jew hatred is sorta like tossing out the engine and pretending you still have a car;Judaism’s understanding that ‘the hatred comes from Sinai is in the Talmud.I wanted to slug Alan Dershowitz when he mentioned 2000 years of antisemitism(I refuse to spell it with a dash) at Trump’s Chanukah party which I thought was innacurate and ungrateful….While not a different species-Jews announced their arrival on the scene with the ultimate fuckyou.. The University of Chicago in 1947 published a book of essays ‘The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man-An essay on speculative thought in the Ancient Near East. Professor William A. Irwin wrote on the Hebrews: ‘Israel’s great achievement, so apparent that mention of it is almost trite was monotheism. It was an achievement that transformed subsequent human history..One may raise the question whether any other single contribution from whatever source since human culture emerged from stone ages has had the far reaching effect on history that Israel in this regard has exerted through both the mediums of Christianity and Islam and directly through the world of Jewish thinkers themselves…The nations are condemned by the prophets for the depravity of their morals..And here is the point.They are so condemned by the God of Israel! It is his righteousness,,be it observed..not his might or his glory or any of the divine qualities prized at the time which provides the ground of his supremacy..Here we see the meaning of that phrase so commonly employed in the study of Hebrew history: Israel’s monotheism was an ethical monotheism.
A righteous monotheism did not stop the Jews in the New Testament from demanding of the Romans that they execute Jesus of Nazareth for heresy and blasphemy against their righteous God. Indeed, it was their mystical belief that their righteous God demanded death for heresy and blasphemy against him.
A righteous monotheism did not stop the Maccabees from killing their fellow Jews who wanted and preferred Hellenization.
A righteous monotheism did not stop the Christians from slaughtering the pagans once they had enough numbers and Christianity became the dominant religion of the West. A righteous monotheism did not stop the Christians from slaughtering each other over exegesis, interpretation, or figuring out what the nature of this righteous God was. How many Christians were slaughtered by other Christians over the Arian heresy, Donatist heresy, Catharist heresy?
“A heretic is a member of a religion who challenges some tenet of its orthodoxy. After Christianity came to power in the 4th century AD, the number of heretics it suppressed—in many cases murdered—is incalculable, as are the intellectual advances not reached by relatively rational heretics due to such repression and murder. Men of reason, as taught by their first teacher, Aristotle, demand observable facts in support of the ideas they accept. But religion is not based on facts; it is based on faith—and it cannot withstand rational inquiry. Therefore, when fervently religious men hold cultural and political authority, they conduct relentless war against the thinkers who challenge their dogmas.” – Andrew Bernstein
And a righteous atheism did not stop atheists from slaughtering over 100 million in the 20th C. What’s your effing point since you aren’t out to change minds.
Correlation is NOT causation. Although Marxism is atheistic the two are NOT the same thing. Marxism and atheism are separate issues. Not all atheists are Marxists. Atheism does NOT necessarily lead to Marxism.
And there do exist Christian Socialists. MLK was a Christian Socialist. Christian Socialism is a real religious ideology.
In fact, the core teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are not about individual freedom and liberty, are not about the personal pursuit of happiness on earth, they are all about sacrificing yourself for God and neighbor. They are all about the renunciation of life on earth in order to be rewarded in death with some infinitely superior fantasy utopia.
The roots of America’s welfare state and of socialism, and Islam, lie in Judeo-Christianity, that’s a historical and philosophical fact.
Objectivism is atheistic but it champions the sanctity of the sovereign individual. Objectivism is atheistic but it champions freedom, liberty, individual rights, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, and the personal pursuit of happiness.
I have no idea what “Correlation is NOT causation” means and I don’t care. Sounds like philosophic psycho babble, much like the rest of the crap you post on a daily basis. you couldn’t change minds even if you wanted to. And since you claim you aren’t out to change minds I don’t know what grift you are trying to pull. You basically spout doubletalk.
Objectivists are atheists. You have no guarantee that if Objectivism ever got any measure of real power beyond the theoretical nonsense you spout, some bozo in charge wouldn’t start killing Christians and Jews.
And since you are an avowed atheist you basically know nothing about Christianity, except what you think you know from Piekoff and the rest of the lying frauds, all of whom hate Jews and Christians.
All you ever do is lie, lie, lie.
My exact words were that changing minds was not my primary or only motivation for posting my comments. If someone changes their mind because of the content of one of my comments that would be welcomed. But if not, then not.
“Mattathias, who was very old, soon died, leaving his son, Judas, known as the Maccabee, or Hammer, as head of his troops. In the years 166–164 BC, the Maccabees drove the Greeks from the area around Jerusalem and, in time, from Judea. THE PRO-GREEK JEWS WERE SLAUGHTERED OR EXILED [emphasis added] ….
To understand this complex conflict, bear in mind that the king, Antiochus Epiphanes, although undoubtedly a tyrant, was significantly less tyrannical than were his zealous foes. One is reminded of the 20th-century struggle between the Shah of Iran—a foreign-backed brutal secular dictator—and the indigenous, fanatical supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, a dictator vastly more brutal and totalitarian. Perhaps more to the point, the Maccabees were the Taliban of their day—slaughtering their more secular coreligionists as apostates and tolerating nothing but a strict adherence to fundamentalist religion….
Dimont analyzes the conflict like this: “Antiochus Epiphanes has been so entrenched in Jewish history as a villain that few Jews can see the war that ensued for what it really was—not an uprising against tyrannical Seleucids, but a revolt by Jewish anti-Hellenizers against Jewish Hellenizers.” – Andrew Bernstein
Monotheism was the original state of mankind in the garden. It did not originate with the Jews. It originated with God, who then chose the descendants of Abraham to be His people to preserve the Truth.
Technically, the Jews did not write Scripture, but God wrote the Scriptures using His prophets (all Jews) as amanuenses over a period of about 1600 years. God is their King, but he is rejected now just as he was in 1 Samuel 8:7. God is still their God, but they have had no prophet, priest or king since He was again rejected by them in the person of Jesus Christ. All of this was foretold in their own Scriptures.
If you look at the sons of Noah (who were not Jews), you will see that monotheism was again preserved in that tiny remnant. The sons of Noah were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. If you follow the nations coming from those three sons, you will see loss of the knowledge of God causes degradation of mankind. The longer a nation persists in that loss the greater the depravity, explaining the savagery of sub-saharan Africa and native American Indians. How important it is for families to convey the knowledge of God to their children!
The Lord is not finished with the Jews whose rejection has been the reconciliation of the world, and whose reconciliation will be life from the dead (Romans 11:15).
The Messiah is Prophet, Priest and King Eternal. He is in the line and lineage of David. He is the sacrifice provided by God (Genesis 22:8) takes away the sins of the world. Who would have conceived that God Himself is prefigured in the Passover Lamb?
I fear for Israel without God. All her attempts to save herself will fail without Him. I fear for all of us, Christians and Jews for the same reason. We must not neglect so great a salvation as the only one God has provided.
Acts 4:12 “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”
You write, “I fear for Israel without God. All her attempts to save herself will fail without Him.” While we can agree to disagree about the status of Jesus, this Jew absolutely agrees with you in this area. Israel has only one Ally, and He is all they need. If they continue to look to the U.S., a very treacherous ally (think of Saigon, 1975 or Afghanistan a few years ago), they will be destroyed. Our politicians are quite willing to sacrifice Israel and replace them on their millennia-old holy land with a people who did not exist until the 1960’s.
There are many historical reasons coexisting alongside religion for antisemitism but to claim that historical context absolves religion itself as the MAJOR reason for religious conflict and violence is false.
Jews persecuted, ostracized, and killed other Jews over heresy and blasphemy. Indeed, the major reason the Jews were appalled and enraged by Jesus of Nazareth was because he was a heretic and a blasphemer. That’s Jew hating Jew over heresy and blasphemy.
Philosophy (and religion is an early form of philosophy, the first attempts at explaining the nature of existence, man’s nature, and man’s relation to existence, before men knew enough to graduate to rational, scientific, and secular philosophy) is the chief motivating factor in every individual and every society of individuals.
Jews have persecuted and waged war against other Jews over heresy and blasphemy, Christians have done the same to other Christians, Muslims have done the same with other Muslims.
If the whole world were Jewish, if every individual on earth were a Jew, and Judaism existed in its pure, original, undiluted, and ancient form, the form it had among the Maccabees and the Zealots, Jews would be persecuting and killing other Jews over heresy and blasphemy.
“I have said that faith and force are corollaries, and that mysticism will always lead to the rule of brutality. The cause of it is contained in the very nature of mysticism. Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding are possible. Why do we kill wild animals in the jungle? Because no other way of dealing with them is open to us. And that is the state to which mysticism reduces mankind—a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence. And more: no man or mystical elite can hold a whole society subjugated to their arbitrary assertions, edicts and whims, without the use of force. Anyone who resorts to the formula: “It’s so, because I say so,” will have to reach for a gun, sooner or later. Communists, like all materialists, are neo-mystics: it does not matter whether one rejects the mind in favor of revelations or in favor of conditioned reflexes. The basic premise and the results are the same.” – Ayn Rand
How many minds have you changed here?
Correct, nil.
If anything he has hardened minds against him with this endless lectures and insults.
Yes. I used to like reading Ayn Rand more than I do now, but then I met our friend THX. Now reading her rather good essays has become a chore.
Perhaps it’s time to put them aside entirely. Rand always reminded me of stuff that idiot college students leave on a coffee table or read, used basically to impress girls in order to “seal the deal”.
You’re assuming that changing minds is my primary or only motivation for posting my comments, it isn’t.
Why do you keep reading my comments and keep replying to them?
If changing minds is not your primary motivation what is it then. Do you simply like to see your crap in print?
It is an assumption, but it could also be that you are carrying out some pointless research into how people respond to academic junk.
If you consider my comments junk then you’re an IDIOT to waste your time reading my junk and replying to it.
You’re responding like an idiot, I’ll jot that down in my research notes.
It is “fallen” mankind that is at the core of our delusional perfections.
The current claims of higher knowledge in every academic institution, has those who hold contradictory “scientific” positions.
Is it not the arrogant man, who assumes he is GOD. back then and now that forces reactions .? Mechanical engineers must be the closest discipline that can “prove” or disprove ones claims or be willing to risk or suffer catastrophic failures to prove a right or wrong claim.
Civil society requires organized structures to maintain order, as anyone maverick can be detrimental to its safety. Personal and collective self discipline is required to ensure steady progress. That requires the undisciplined ones to be checked in proportion to the potential harm that is presumed for the common good.and so the circle continues. Man suffering himself. ,
THX: “Philosophy (and religion is an early form of philosophy, the first attempts at explaining the nature of existence, man’s nature, and man’s relation to existence, before men knew enough to graduate to rational, scientific, and secular philosophy) is the chief motivating factor in every individual and every society of individuals.”
Your thinking is illogical and absurd. You say all religions are mystical and based in “faith without evidence,” but your own words condemn you. Observe:
1. You believe WITHOUT EVIDENCE that man PRODUCES truth, rather than observing / discovering truth.
2. You believe WITHOUT EVIDENCE that “reason” is man’s mind (which produces truth). Absurd.
3. You believe in “Objectivism,” yet simultaneously hold man’s mind / reason to judge all existence by itself. This is the very definition of “subjective.”
4. Your Genesis 1:1 is “Existence exists by the grace of existence.” So “grace” must precede existence.
The above, although not exhaustive, is sufficient to show you are deeply religious by your own definition: irrational faith without evidence.
You are willfully misrepresenting and misconstruing the fundamentals of Objectivism.
I’ve been through this several times with you, to no avail, there’s no point in engaging with your continual willful sophistry.
Nothing reveals your weakness more than when you fall back to the tactic of claiming I misrepresent you. How consistent you are! When backed into a corner, you feign my arguments are false and beneath your dignity.
Rather than clutching your pearls, deal with the irrationality of your own thinking or correct the alleged misrepresentation. If you can do neither, then REALITY DEMANDS you abandon your Precious and step into the light of freedom. I am using your own words and premises.
Ok, let’s start all over again. Once again battling your sophistry.
When I used the word “grace” as in “by the grace of existence” I was using the word in the sense of “by the FACT of existence”. By the fact that existence does exist we and the universe exist. I did not mean to imply that grace is some power or force separate from and antecedent to existence.
“Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.” – Leonard Peikoff, “Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand”
This guy is beyond full of it. Pure psycho babble.
He tried to pull the “Correlation is NOT causation” argument when I said Objectivism and he are atheists…..something about Marx and atheism being two separate issues. I have a feeling he got that from his boyfriend Piekoff. He also claims he is not trying to change minds.
He is so backed into a corner on everything he writes it is no wonder he can’t think clearly.
(If the whole world were Jewish, if every individual on earth were a Jew, and Judaism existed in its pure, original, undiluted, and ancient form, the form it had among the Maccabees and the Zealots, Jews would be persecuting and killing other Jews over heresy and blasphemy.)
But Judaism today is not the same as it was during the time of the Maccabees which undermines your entire thesis
No, it does not undermine my argument at all. It undermines Dr. Goska’s argument.
Here is her argument: “This essay will argue that to understand anti-Semitism among Christians, one must factor in historical context. To understand anti-Semitism among Muslims, more attention must be paid to religion.”
The historical context that Dr. Goska leaves out is that Christianity and Judaism have both been leashed, tamed, diluted, put through the wringer, by the Aristotelian Renaissance (the rebirth of reason) and the Aristotelian Age of Enlightenment.
In their pure, undiluted, unleashed form, both Christianity and Judaism result in intolerance and theocracy just like Islam does. But Islam never went through the Renaissance or the Age of Enlightenment.
Neither the New Testament nor the Old Testament have changed at all. The Bible remains the same as it was 1,500 years ago. But both religions have been so leashed and diluted by Aristotelian reason and logic that they are no longer taken seriously in their pure, undiluted, form.
The vast majority of today’s Christians and Jews are Cafeteria Christians and Cafeteria Jews. Picking and choosing the parts of the Bible they wish to believe in and interpreting those parts as rationally and reasonably as they can to be able to dedicate their lives as much as possible to pursuing their happiness and pleasure in this life, here on earth.
Of course it doesn’t undermine your argument at all. Because you never put your arguments up against professionally credentialed philosophers for scrutiny. In your world you are always right. You hate Jews and Christians, you have your own interpretation of world and bible history, so how can you possibly be wrong.
Other than the non-philosophers here at FPM when was the last time you went up against a pro, and advertised it to us that you going to have a debate….where and when?
Mr. tough guy. Mr. Intellectual. Mr. Coward
“Contrary to the prevalent views of today’s alleged scholars, history is not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance and whim—historical trends can be predicted, and changed—men are not helpless, blind, doomed creatures carried to destruction by incomprehensible forces beyond their control.
There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty—the power of ideas. If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.
There is no fatalistic, predetermined historical necessity. Atlas Shrugged is not a prophecy of our unavoidable destruction, but a manifesto of our power to avoid it, if we choose to change our course.
It is the philosophy of the mysticism-altruism-collectivism axis that has brought us to our present state and is carrying us toward a finale such as that of the society presented in Atlas Shrugged. It is only the philosophy of the reason-individualism-capitalism axis that can save us and carry us, instead, toward the Atlantis projected in the last two pages of my novel…. CONTINUED
Just as a man’s actions are preceded and determined by some form of idea in his mind, so a society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy among those whose job is to deal with ideas. The events of any given period of history are the result of the thinking of the preceding period. The nineteenth century—with its political freedom, science, industry, business, trade, all the necessary conditions of material progress—was the result and the last achievement of the intellectual power released by the Renaissance. The men engaged in those activities were still riding on the remnants of an Aristotelian [pagan] influence in philosophy, particularly on an Aristotelian epistemology (more implicitly than explicitly)….
The power that determines the establishment, the changes, the evolution, and the destruction of social systems is philosophy. The role of chance, accident, or tradition, in this context, is the same as their role in the life of an individual: their power stands in inverse ratio to the power of a culture’s (or an individual’s) philosophical equipment, and grows as philosophy collapses. It is, therefore, by reference to philosophy that the character of a social system has to be defined and evaluated….
The present state of the world is not the proof of philosophy’s impotence, but the proof of philosophy’s power. It is philosophy that has brought men to this state—it is only philosophy that can lead them out.” – Ayn Rand
So what you are really saying is that failed philosophies Like Objectivism and Randism are the cure for a world sliding into global war at the hands of the Muslims and the Communists.
Uh, good luck. I’m sure they will just sit down at a table with you and listen to your cranky balderdash.
How’s next week looking?
This excellent article is must reading on this subject and one fact should be noted .Yes there were terrible outbreaks of Semitism and pogroms in the medieval era that were rooted In Christianity but the Holocaust was perpetrated by Nazism which was decidedly secular and industrialized in nature and Jews in Soviet Russia were persecuted by Communists The ideology of Hamas is rooted in Nazism and has roots in the support of the Mufti of Jerusalem snd his support of and documented relationship with Hitler
If by “secular” we mean that which is based on reason and logic, and if by reason and logic we mean those ideas that are based on reality; a coherent, non-contradictory identification of reality, of existence, of that which exists and that which is real, then Nazism was NOT secular, rational, or logical.
The Aryan Race is as much a mystical, supernatural, mythological, fantasy as Charlton Heston talking to a burning bush and parting the Red Sea,
Nazism is rabidly, fervently, and EXPLICITLY anti-reason and anti-reality.
So is Marxism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
“Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the fact that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers….
There was also Martin Luther, regarded by the Nazis as a major hero, who was the greatest single power in the development of German religion and, through this means, an influence on the philosophies of both Kant and Hegel. Luther is anti-reason (“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”), intensely pro-German, and crudely anti-semitic (“Fie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly”). He formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue. “In like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
Wow it wouldn’t be a Friday without your prepackaged pile of Lenny Peikoff lies about Martin Luther Lutheranism and Judaism preparing the ground for all of the evils in the world. I’m not sure who is the bigger bigot,,,,you or your magotty buddy Peikoff.
But you did the impossible…… 7 long boring comments without comments. Only downvotes.
Another downvote derby victory for you. What do you think that says about you and your worthless comments?
Ooops, a correction. 8 long boring comments without responses. Only downvotes. It would seem that no one wants to waste their time.
Incorrect. The “ideology” (which is theologically based) of Hamas derives entirely from Islam itself. Read – or reread – its charter; its references to Islam as its sole raison d’être are screamingly obvious. Islam’s intrinsic and ineradicable anti-Jewish component was the basis for the Mufti’s alliance with and admiration for Hitler. Goska mentions just a few of the many pogroms waged against Jews in Muslim lands dating from the eleventh century onward, hundreds of years before this Mufti was born. I will mildly criticize Goska, by the way, for her failure to mention the numerus clausus in place in Poland during the interwar years, restricting Jewish admission to universities, and the edict of Pope Innocent III, which forced Jews throughout Christendom to wear a yellow badge identifying them as Jews, increasing their vulnerability. This act was actually inspired by Islamic law, which required Jews and Christians to wear identifying clothing and similar badges, as Goska does point out. Hitler eventually adopted this practice as well, to make Jews easier to identify.
A big thank you for a very informative narrative about anti-semitism. It seems like nothing will change.
Yes, it can change for the supremely better. Men have free will. They can choose better. They can choose the good if they discover and understand that the good lies not in the self-immolation of altruism, selflessness, and self-sacrifice but in self-fulfillment, self-confidence, self-esteem, the selfish pursuit of personal happiness here on earth.
They can discover, understand, and choose Ayn Rand’s revolutionary, paradigm shift, historical, philosophy of Objectivism and its moral code of rational selfishness. It is only 60 years old, not even a blink of an eye in historical terms, and her philosophy is fighting 5,000 years of entrenched, primordial, altruism, mysticism, and unreason. It took Christianity 500 years to become the dominant religion of the West. And it took another 500 years from the Renaissance to 1776 for Christianity to become diluted enough, for Christianity’s stranglehold on America to loosen enough, for America to be born.
Philosophically speaking it is still early in the history of mankind. It is only mysticism, myopia, and vanity that makes so many think we are living in end times or the end of history.
The Industrial Revolution was a mere 100 hundred years ago.
“In the history of mankind, it is EARLIER than we think…
In spite of all their irrationalities, inconsistencies, hypocrisies and evasions, the majority of men will not act, in major issues, without a sense of being morally right and will not oppose the morality they have accepted. They will break it, they will cheat on it, but they will not oppose it; and when they break it, they take the blame on themselves. The power of morality is the greatest of all intellectual powers—and mankind’s tragedy lies in the fact that the vicious moral code men have accepted destroys them by means of the best within them.” – Ayn Rand
I hate to disappoint you but Christianity has never had a stranglehold on America. If you had your way Objectivism would have a stranglehold on America. Fortunately it only has a stranglehold on you.
I have heard in a few places for the past month, “Where are the anti-Hamas” demonstrations?” When posters of Israeli hostages are ripped from their places in NY, Jewish students fear for their safety, and an elderly Jewish man is murdered in LA at a protest, but virtually no anti-Hamas protests, only counter protests at pro Palestinian rallies, I have to wonder. There are a lot of those, the pro-Palestinian rallies. The contrast is so stark that you would have to be in a coma not to suffer from the immense cognitive dissonance resulting from it.
I am not Jewish, but if I were, I would wonder why ‘open season’ on Jews seems to have been declared, and why my friends are silent. Why do people equivocate on the lyrics, “From the river to the sea?” They are not unambiguous. They are not like Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” or Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville.” Even The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” or Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name” did not advocate removing a particular group of human beings from a strip of land, preferable dead, in just six words.
Middleman theory or man in the middle? I understand the theory you present, but it reminded me of the classic “Man in the Middle” plot of movies such as “The Glass Key,” “ Yojimbo,” “ A Fist Full of Dollars” or “Last Man Standing.” The man in the middle always gets the crap kicked out of him, but he persists, with dignity.
I have heard it said that Islam means ‘submission.’ In my own limited experience in the Middle East and Asia, I have seen this to be true, and it went further than that. Islam was always understood to be the people, the ‘believers,’ and that they were God’s people, as good as God, and therefore the unbelievers should submit to the people of Islam as well. There was no misunderstanding this. You were never going to be one of them in any sense of equality.
Danusha, thank you for sharing this informative essay with us. I felt the same way as after reading your book, Bieganski, more informed and more curious. You have a knack for doing that.
It is so good to read a piece on a controversial, sensitive topic that is so well-researched. Dr. Goska has done all the work for us. As she explains and backs up with lots of data, historical context isn’t everything, but it helps us wrap our heads around the horrors that have occurred in many eras and continue today. And what a religion actually teaches in it’s foundational scriptures and ongoing official statements is also a key for anyone who wants to be honest about assigning blame–or praise–to the role that religion plays in encouraging or discouraging atrocities.
What are the first foundational doctrines of Christianity? The doctrine of Original Sin and the Fall of Man. Original Sin is hatred of man for being man. The Fall of Man to earth is hatred of life for being life.
“Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code…. CONTINUED
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a “tendency” to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.
What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil—he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.
Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.
They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man.” – Ayn Rand
“You’re assuming that changing minds is my primary or only motivation for posting my comments, it isn’t.”
Finally the truth comes out. You are simply a very confused and insane individual. As I have said before…see a psychiatrist. You are more in need of one than ever.
Thank God you aren’t trying to change minds. So far you have failed anyway. I must assume you have nothing else going on in your pathetic life exceot for your copy/paste addiction.
10 insane posts, nothing but downvotes and almost no responses. Maybe just maybe Rand’s failures and your own failures are starting to dawn on you.
Making excuses for Objectivism’s 60 year failure in the face of 2000 years of Christianity just isn’t going to cut it.
“And it took another 500 years from the Renaissance to 1776 for Christianity to become diluted enough, for Christianity’s stranglehold on America to loosen enough, for America to be born.”
How desperate you are becoming. This last sentence of yours makes no sense. How could Christianity have a stranglehold on something that hadn’t been created yet. Well it rally doesn’t matter. Christianity is America’s predominant religion and will be for another millennia, assuming we get there. Objectivism will probably not make it to the 2100s. And more importantly, Godless atheistic societies generally produce mass murder, death, misery, and very unhappy people, especially since God was pulled out of the schools by the idiot leftists running the schools 60 some years ago. I suppose love all the crime in the streets in the blue Godless cities. Right your ally, huh?
Of course you will always fall back on your “Christian Dark Ages”, but that really doesn’t work either , does it. That’s just your revised version of the Middle Ages.
So what is the point of all your useless blather, if not to change minds?
The more seriously a man believes in an eternal afterlife that is infinitely superior to this life on earth and the more seriously he believes that all sins can be forgiven by accepting Jesus as his savior, the more he will discount this life on earth as insignificant compared to the afterlife and the less seriously he will take the evil he does to himself and others.
Would the Muslim jihadist or the Christian martyr renounce this life and the pursuit of happiness on earth except for their delusion that they will have eternal life, forgiveness, and redemption by sacrificing themselves to their God and seeking death? No, they would not.
“John Emil List (September 17, 1925 – March 21, 2008) was an American mass murderer[1] and long-time fugitive. On November 9, 1971, he killed his wife, mother, and three children at their home in Westfield, New Jersey, and then disappeared…. List gave critical financial problems, as well as his perception that his family members were straying from their religious faith, as his motivations for the murders. He believed that killing them would assure their souls a place in Heaven, where he hoped to eventually join them.” – Wikipedia
Those that reject the fall of man into sin, with a sin nature inherited from Adam, will be faced with the continuing disappointment of finding their utopian schemes dashed on the rocks of history. Mans attempts at establishing a Godless utopia have always fallen prey to man’s own innate sinfulness. This would also include attempts at establishing religious based utopias.
The living God, who knows the end from the beginning, is working out his plane of redemption in the history of the world. The present age will end with the intervention of God Himself. The salvation and deliverance of the remnant of Israel in the last days will come about when the risen Christ comes in power and glory to establish the promised millennial kingdom of God. Mankind will be made to taste the bitter results of their rejection of Christ. Armageddon and the great tribulation, predicted by Christ, will take place first. Then He will come in judgement on the world system and deliver the believing remanent of Israel from destruction by their enemies.
It is time for the people of the world to take the bible seriously. Both the Old and New Testaments have much to say about the history and end of the present age. The true and Godly utopian system that the heart of man longs for will come when Christ returns and not before. It is time for as many as will to come into reconciliation with God through Jesus Christ.
Your religion is STUPID and EVIL just like Islam!
THX sez, “If you don’t get on board with what I say, I’ll throw a temper tantrum!!!”
Getting testy, aren’t you.
I would say you and your fake religion are stupid and evil and the proof is on this page. 10+ overly long posts, an average of 15+ downvotes, few if any upvotes, and the admission that you aren’t out to change minds. That is a sideways admission you have failed.
I notice you never talk about yourself. What are you afraid of? What are you hiding? All you ever do is spout theory about basically nothing. Maybe you should write “The Vapid Objectivist” because that is what you are.
You have tried this before. No one knows , remember, or cares about John List.
Christ did not seek death. He did not run away from it either.
But the verdict on secularism and happiness is already in.
Never has there been a more secular generation as what the West is now producing, and never has there been a more miserable generation either, starting in childhood even. That is unprecedented.
Secular people demonstrably disdain life to the extent that there are negative birth rates wherever secular thought predominates.
It is a pointless, purposeless generation with no love for the past that bestowed the benefits of that secularism upon them, and no hope for a future that regards themselves and their children as a cancer on the earth, as per secular green teaching.
Suffice it to say that murdering your family breaks several of the Ten Commandments. It is a breach with the religious traditions that it purports to defend.
And there is such a thing as bad religion too. And bad ideologies. Communism, Nazism, and now Gaia green;
Here the religious impulse evolves into shit.
WE can no more escape the religious impulse than we can escape the trajectory of our genes upon which the religious impulse is written.
There can be good religion or bad religion, but no such thing as no religion.” You gotta serve somebody”.
. Choose well.
Thank you, Professor Goska, for this learned and valuable analysis.
Not to spoil the party, but how do you explain the antisemitism of figures like Martin Luther, St. John Chrysostom and other Christian “saints? Also how do you explain how Jews have lived amongst Buddhists and Hindus without any problems?
Take away the labels, (Jew, Christian, Muslim), and it’s just people killing other people. We are all sinners.
Jews are the most persecuted group in history because they are part of a culture that is capable of surviving genocides. Virtually any other ancient group has either become the dominant culture, or has succumbed and has been assimilated into the dominant culture.
But Jews, even as they fully assimilate to the dominant culture to the extent where they write the most popular American Christmas carols, such as Whte Christmas, nevertheless remain just as Jewish as those Jews who remain separate from dominant cultural norms.
Any of the ancient Biblical peoples, from Hittites to Moabites and from Ammonites to Philistines have been wiped out through either bloody genocide, or cultural genocide. Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, are in effect no more. They have all since assimilated into a dominant culture completely foreign to their ancient Biblical roots.
Being targets of genocide is not unique to Jews. What i unique is the Jewish ability to survive genocides
” addition to these fault lines, there is another immaterial one. Many blacks feel a sense of competition with Jews over commodified suffering. They resent attention the Holocaust receives, and they insist that slavery was worse. This resentment over an alleged “stolen” suffering championship reinforces a conspiracy theory. ”
This actually explains a lot about even conservative DW podcast host Candace Owens, in her episode “Am I an anti-Semite”.
It is not so much what she does say or does not say during that interview, but her emotional flatness in the face of babies being put in ovens that was striking. She ticked the right box condemning it for sure, but with all the emotion of a blink.
Nobody rises above their culture. It is in us as much as we are in it.
Of course Jews and the Holocaust are the granddaddies of Identity victim groups, with blacks and feminists following that trajectory in their civil rights battles and women’s rights struggles after that successful establishment of the State of Israel, as an an of empathy and compassion for the scapegoats of the Shoah
Suffering itself has currency ever since. The competition for who suffers most, for status in effect of the biggest loser rising to the top of the interesectional hierarchy as a result, is is a perversion of the impulses toward justice and compassion..
But it is there make no doubt, this resentment against the Jew is omnipresent throughout Black American culture.
The victory of the Cross was never meant to be a power play, I don’t think, but a refutation of power as the Way.
Then Muslims, and gays and trans, all displacing the Jewish vindication for their exist4ence through the injustice of their suffering
Mohammed also had his Jewish sex slave’s husband beheaded. The first islamic beheading in the United States that I am aware of was in Oklahoma in 2014. Jihadist Alton Nolan beheaded a Christian, Colleen Hufford, as an act of terror and despite being sentenced to death he is still alive in prison.
Ms. Goska: “Jews are not a different species of human being. Humans are more alike than different. Children born black or white, Muslim or Jewish, offer the same potential.”
Conflating equality and sameness is one of the most successful tactics of Leftists. Our sameness begins and ends with our shared Imago Dei. The truth is people groups and individuals vary widely in physical and intellectual abilities, as well as in appearance. Our differences create our cultures, languages, foods, music, diseases, abilities and achievements (or lack thereof) unique to our societies.
Your false assertion that we “offer the same potential” drives affirmative action and is the antithesis of a merit-based society. This society, if Christian, would honor all necessary work from brain surgery to the solid waste disposal. It would have a strong rule of law to enforce equality before the law, the earthly manifestation of shared Imago Dei.
When speaking of blacks watching Hasadim take over their neighborhood, you claim “cultural barriers” cause black men to sleep past noon spend their nights being obnoxious and dealing drugs. These barriers are created and maintained by blacks despite trillions of dollars spent to remove those barriers without success. People are NOT the same. This is terrible only when Christianity is lost.
Blacks are to praise or blame for whatever they create. Do not engage in soft racism by denying them agency. They tend to re-create their “ghetto” existence wherever they live be it Africa or western civilization. Those blacks who have desire and potential escape as quickly and decisively as possible and are considered traitors to their ghetto clans. I find that attitude a difference unique to blacks and in large part responsible for their custodial status.
“Anti-Semitism isn’t the world’s oldest hatred, nor is it the hatred with the highest body count. Misogyny has a longer history and has claimed more victims. The caste system in India “has existed in some form for at least 3000 years.” Recent estimates are that there are 200 million Dalits, aka untouchables. The suffering Dalits have endured is unspeakable.”
Maybe, maybe not.
Until you define what you mean by “hate,” I cannot agree with this.
Arguably, both examples relate to a form of “caste” system. I submit that this may be different from discrimination based on “hate.”
Further, these examples can be considered intra-tribal/peoples. Jew hatred is extra-tribal/peoples.
Other distinctions can be drawn.
Kindly define your terms.
Thank you.
I thought this long and detailed historical accounting of Judaism enlightening. But the multitudinous explanations for Anti-Semitism while interesting are unnecessarily confusing. Using Ockham’s Razor we can more easily put our finger on the present phenomenon of hatred in American for Jews and on the support for Palestine and Hamas found in academe. Israel today is the most concentrated location of Jews on the globe. Thus do totalitarians in their political parties and in academe in the U.S. find them an easy focal point.
Totalitarians take power when they weaken their opposition by force of arms on the one hand and on the other by creating turmoil and social chaos which becomes so severe a populace welcomes the peace totalitarians promise. That is what they are doing in the U.S. and worldwide.
There used to be 3;000;0000 million Jews in Poland now there are 7000 (last time I heard). Also a lot of Christians hate Israel because they believe we are condemned to exile because we don’t accept Jesus. Some Christians are oro-Israel but Israel is almost as much of a pariah in the Christian world as the Moslem world. The Buddhists and Hindus as a whole seem to be capable of leaving us the hell alone.