Anti-Jewish Writing

How to Criticize Israel without being Anti-Semitic: The Unofficial Guide

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The news media have once again been ablaze with reports of Israel’s military attack on Gaza. The historic Israeli-Palestinian conflict has, consequently, returned as a subject of discussion at cafés, salons, and dinner tables.

The discussion, however, is not an easy one to have—unless, of course, you are foursquare behind Israel. Criticism of Israel very quickly lands the critic into trouble; accusations of anti-Semitism are fired back as if from an Uzi. What is more, these accusations can sometimes come accompanied by raised voices, red faces, bared teeth, waved fists, and even rude expletives. Sometimes, not even Jews can avoid them. So it is understandable that non-Jews desiring to avoid drama think it best to keep mum.

Noticing the problem, and apparently in the interest of free and open debate, a concerned Jewish blogger has recently made waves posting a 19-point guide on how to criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic. The Tumblr blog post has, at the time of writing, attracted 8485 notes. And the BBC deemed it so useful that they even reported it on their news website.

As TOO was created for purposes of free and open debate, including Jews and Israel, it seems pertinent that we examine the 19 points. Perhaps we will find in them the Philosopher’s Stone in our efforts to discuss important matters involving Jews without being accused of ignorance and moral turpitude. The points are meant to be considered in no particular order.

1. Don’t use the terms “bloodthirsty,” “lust for Palestinian blood,” or similar. Historically, Jews have been massacred in the belief that we use the blood of non-Jews (particularly of children) in our religious rituals. This belief still persists in large portions of the Arab world (largely because White Europeans deliberately spread the belief among Arabs) and even in parts of the Western world. Murderous, inhumane, cruel, vicious—fine. But blood…just don’t go there. Depicting Israel/Israelis/Israeli leaders eating children is also a no-no, for the same reason.

While one can understand the desire to avoid rehashings of the ancient blood libel, this seems a little paranoid in the case of “bloodthirsty”. Read more

Sergei Semanov and the “Russianists”

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semanovRecently deceased Sergei Semanov (1934–2011), Russian writer and editor, was at times in his life a Stalinist, a critic of the post-Stalinist Soviet governments, an historian, and a public political commentator closely associated with the nationalist Russian political parties and the Russian Club, all of which peaked in popularity in the late 1960s under General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The Russian people generally approved of Brezhnev’s 18-year rule (1964–1982). Although known derisively in the West as a period of stagnation, it gave the people time finally to take stock of Russia’s postwar position in the world and plan for a future such as circumstances would permit.

However, even these early subdued expressions of the Russian people’s desire to influence the governance of their country ended abruptly when newly appointed Secretary General Yuri Andropov, an enemy of the nationalists whom he called “Russianists,” had Semanov arrested, interrogated in Lefortovo prison, removed from all his editorial and writing positions, and threatened with expulsion from the Party for the crime of propagating dangerous, possibly treasonous nationalist ideas.

Following the deaths of Stalin and Beria and the gradual disappearance of the military heroes of the Great Patriotic War, the USSR was obliged to choose new leaders to manage the affairs of the Russian State in the nuclear age. Unfortunately, because of the enormity of the wartime destruction and the dearth of energetic youthful Party leaders possessing even a fraction of the stature and authority of Stalin, the Soviet Union found itself lacking strong leadership. Although many native Russian intellectuals personally despised Communism, they nonetheless continued to support it as State doctrine for fear that many of the peripheral countries taken over hundreds of years by the Imperial Russian Empire would break away from Moscow if the combined centripetal forces of Moscow, the Party, and State security were not kept strongly in evidence. This façade of the all-powerful USSR was retained as a protective shield even though Russia was bereft of strong leadership, an effective economy, a reliable agricultural base, and a unified nation.

The enigmatic subtitle of Semanov’s posthumous The Russian Club: Why the Jews Will Not Win refers to a clandestine society of Russian intellectuals – members of the so-called Russian Club.[1] Semanov was one of the Club’s founding officers who met weekly from the 1960s to the early 1980s to discuss the existing state of native Russian cultural and political affairs, often critical of the official Marxist government positions. So influential had the Russian Club become by 1981 that it can take some credit for the collapse of Communism. Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part IV

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Go to Part II

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X: ISRAEL AND THE REVOLTS OF THE MIND[1] 

The Jewish antagonism has been manifested in a continuous—even if underhanded—manner in the two thousand year course of the Judeo-Christian clash. “The Jew—James Darmesteter tells us—was the champion of reason against the mythical mind; in the intellectual night of the Middle Ages, only in it did he think that he could find asylum. Provoked by the Church which wants to persuade him, after having tried in vain to convert him by force, he undermines with irony and perspicacity some of her controversies, and, like no one else, knows how to find the vulnerabilities of her doctrine. The understanding of the Sacred Books, and even more the terrible sagacity of the oppressed, are his means to discover those points. He is the doctor of the incredulous; all the revolts of the mind are presented to him in the shade or under an open sky. He worked in the immense forge of curses of the great Emperor Frederick and of the princes of Swabia or Aragon; he fashions together this deadly arsenal of reasoning and irony that he offered then to the skeptical of the Renaissance and the libertines of the Seventeenth Century. And the sarcasm of Voltaire is none other than the heavy echo of a word murmured six centuries earlier, in the shade of the ghetto, or, even earlier, (in the Counter-Gospel of the I and II Century) at the time of Celsus and Origen, and at the very origins of the religion of Christ.”[2]

For his part, Elie Faure (1873-1937), whose works were recently reprinted and highly publicized, talks about “this sarcastic snickering (Heine, Offenbach) towards all that is not Jewish […]. His ruthless analysis and his irresistible sarcasm acted as vitriol.” Following the course of our history, “it is easy to follow the trail, and although it is not possible to quantify the dissemination of Jewish thought, after its passage we can take note of its destructive power. Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Marcel Proust, Charlie Chaplin opened up to us, in all senses, the prodigious streets which demolish the narrow lanes of the Classic Greco-Latin and Catholic edifice in which for five or six centuries the burning doubt of the Jewish soul was waiting for opportunities to destroy it. For it is necessary to note that its [sc. that of the Jewish soul] own skeptical pole appears to emerge for the first time from the complete silence that surrounds the action of the Jewish mind in the Middle Ages, silence in the middle of which, from the Renaissance onwards, some voices burst forth, and which [sc. silence] today is annihilated by a great din.”

Yes, “is it possible to consider the Jew as anything other than a demolisher armed with corrosive doubts who, since the time of the Greeks, has always opposed Israel to the sentimental idealism of Europe? […] His historic mission is clearly defined, and perhaps forever. It will be the main factor of each apocalyptic period, as it was at the end of the ancient world, and as it will be at the end of the Christian world in which we live.”[3] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part III

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VII: JUDAISM’S STRUGGLE AGAINST THE CATHOLIC TRADITION

In fact, behind the appearance of an ecumenical search for a reconciliation between religions and other equally seductive words, it was a matter of demolishing the bulwark of Catholic Tradition, defined by Josué Jéhouda as “the ancient fortress of Christian obscurantism.” According to Jéhouda, there were three attempts at the “straightening out of Christianity,” which “sought to cleanse the Christian conscience of the miasmata of hatred”; three attempts at the straightening out of Christian theology which had become suffocating and paralyzing; “three open breaches in the old fortress of Christian obscurantism.” In fact, three important stages in the destruction of traditional Christianity:

– The Renaissance
– The Protestant Reformation
– The French Revolution

In these three major movements, Jéhouda perceives the wonderful work of dechristianization to which each of them, in various forms, has powerfully contributed. He does not tell us this so brutally, since he is very skillful at handling the artifices of language, but that bursts forth clearly from his writings, as we will show with some quotes extracted from his works:

“The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the French Revolution represent the three attempts at straightening out the Christian mentality to put it in tune with the progressive development of reason and science, and while dogmatic Christianity continued to make itself obscure, the Jews were gradually emancipating themselves.”

Speaking of the Renaissance, he maintains:

“We can affirm that if the Renaissance had not deviated from its original course in favor of the dualized Greek world, we would have had without a doubt a world unified by the creative thought and doctrine of the Kabbalah.”[1] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part II

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IV. Jules Isaac and the Church Fathers

In the second of these works—Genèse de l’antisémitisme—published in 1956, Jules Isaac strove to discredit the Fathers of the Church. It is impossible to summarize in a few words a volume of 350 pages. Let us limit ourselves to mentioning some of its most characteristic passages:

It is true that in the pagan world there was a strong current of anti-Semitism, much earlier than Christian anti-Semitism; it is equally true that this anti-Semitism has at times sparked bloody conflicts or ‘pogroms.’ Just as there was a pagan anti-Semitism, whose origin dates back to the divine commandment, in what would Christianity find its justification for having inherited it (after having been itself a victim of it for a long time), and even more, after having pushed to paroxysm its virulence, malignity, calumnies and mortal hatreds? Against Judaism and its followers, no weapon has been more fearful than the ‘teaching of contempt,’ especially inculcated by the Fathers of the Church of the fourth century; and in this teaching no thesis was more harmful than the ‘deicide people.’ The Christian mentality is still steeped in the depths of its subconscious. . . . To fail to recognize this and not to stress it is equivalent to ignoring or disguising the largest source of Christian anti-Semitism.”[1] . . .

The ‘teaching of contempt’ is a theological creation.[2]

The blind violence of the ignorant masses is intimately linked to the cold science of the theologians. A fundamental accusation to which is linked the theme of capital punishment, of the terrible curse that rests on the shoulders of Israel, explaining (and justifying in advance) its unfortunate fate, its most cruel trials, the worst violence committed against it, torrents of blood flowing continually from its open and living wounds. . . .

So that through a skilful manipulation, alternately, of doctrinal judgments and popular anger one makes fall back on God what, when viewed from the terrestrial sphere, is without doubt the result of human wickedness, this perversity, skillfully exploited in different ways from century to century, from generation to generation, and which culminated in Auschwitz, in the gas chambers and crematory ovens of Nazi Germany.[3] Read more

Léon de Poncins: The Problem with the Jews at the Council, Part I

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Editor’s note: The following are excerpts from George F. Held’s translation of a work by Léon de Poncins, a French traditional Catholic highlighting the role of Jules Isaac in bringing about Nostra Ætate. de Poncins focuses on the influence of Jules Isaac whose work emphasized the anti-Jewish themes in the Gospels and in the writing of many of the Church Fathers. Flagrantly anti-Jewish material was indeed central to the writing of the Church Fathers, leading me to propose that the Catholic Church beginning in the fourth century was at the center of an anti-Jewish movement aimed at lessening the economic power of Jews in the late Roman Empire (as seen, e.g., by its vehement opposition to Jews enslaving non-Jews). This material is in Chapter 3 of Separation and Its Discontents (see summary here). Jules Isaac simply gathered this material together and expressed his outrage, then leaped to the conclusion that this Christian tradition was responsible for the Holocaust, a dubious proposition at best. De Poncins, as a traditional Catholic, is angry that a centuries-old tradition has been jettisoned. The new doctrine “rests on nothing! Not a single passage of Holy Scripture, not a single saint, not a single Pope—at least until 1962—has ever supported a similar theory.” It should also be noted that recent research by Prof. John Connelly has also highlighted the role of  Jewish converts in altering Church doctrine on Judaism (see here). All footnotes except #1 are from de Poncins. Part II focuses mainly on Isaacs’ anti-Jewish quotations  gleaned from the writings of the Church Fathers.

Translated by George F. Held[1]

Contents

Introduction

I. Nostra Ætate

II. Origin of the Reforms Proposed to the Council

III. Jules Isaac and Christian Teaching

IV. Jules Isaac and the Fathers of the Church

V. What Jules Isaac Demanded from the Council

VI. The “Judeo-Christian Friendship”

VII. Judaism’s Struggle against the Catholic Tradition

VIII. Only the Monotheism of Israel Is of Divine Essence

IX. Supposing that Jesus Christ Historically Existed

X. Israel and the Revolts of the Mind

XI. Jewish Imperialism

XII. The Divinity of Jesus Christ: Obstacle for Jewish Messianism

Introduction

One of the most disruptive changes in Catholic doctrine introduced by Vatican II is certainly the Church’s teaching about the Jewish people. Up to forty years ago, in fact, all theologians, relying firmly on the Gospels, on the Fathers of the Church and on the ecclesiastical Magisterium of nearly 2,000 years believed that with the coming of Jesus Christ and the advent of the New Covenant sealed with His Blood, the New Israel of God is no longer the people of the Old Covenant, but all men called to be part of the Catholic Church through Baptism. It was also common opinion that the Jewish contemporaries of the Savior and those who lived subsequently (insofar as they “shared in” their forefathers’ “crucifixion”) were deicides, or that they were stained with the worst crime: the murder of the Son of God and the rejection of His messiahship and divinity.

That was what all Catholics believed at least until 1965, when with the approval of the council’s document Nostra Ætate a new doctrine was introduced according to which the Jews were in fact not responsible for the death of Jesus (unjustly attributed to the Romans, simple material executors of the crucifixion), and therefore had no longer to be considered as cursed by God for their enormous sin. Continuing along this line of thought and action one went even further and proclaimed that the Old Covenant between God and his people was still in force,[2] and thus maintained in fact that God had not rejected Israel because of its refusal of Christ and the salvation offered by Redemption which he accomplished on Calvary;[3] that anti-Semitism was a sentiment fed in the population from pre-council Christian teaching,[4] and that such a sentiment had led to the fierce persecution of Jews put into action by Nazism and in the Holocaust, for which, therefore, the Church would be responsible.

And thus it is that the highest representatives of the Bride of Christ, without blemish and without sin, prostrated themselves and asked forgiveness of Caiaphas’ successors for the crime committed by “Christian peoples” (!?), fomented in their hatred toward the Jews by a “distorted” reading of the Evangelists and by the excessive enthusiasm of some Christian orators of the first centuries. In fact, this council document—one must read it to believe it—is not equipped with any notes, and that is because this far-fetched thesis, imposed on the faithful of the whole Catholic world, rests on nothing! Not a single passage of Holy Scripture, not a single saint, not a single Pope—at least until 1962—has ever supported a similar theory…. Read more

Mr. Derbyshire, Get Right with the Lord

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It’s hard to believe it’s been four and a half years since I wrote a column about British polymath John Derbyshire. That was well before Lehman Brothers collapsed, before the world economy teetered on the brink, before the U.S. government gave untold bailout money to the largest banks and corporations.

In my column, I was critical of Derbyshire’s views on the writings of our editor, Kevin MacDonald. The column discussed Jewish power and the taboos surrounding that very power. (See a recent account of Jewish power here —”Elena Kagan’s “diversity problem” and Jewish privilege” by Patrick Slattery.)

Derbyshire began his ruminations on MacDonald’s writings in the March 10, 2003 issue of The American Conservative under the title “The Marx of the Anti-Semites.” There his take on the books was mixed, beginning with “The Culture of Critique includes many good things. . . . Kevin MacDonald is working in an important field.” Derbyshire even validated an important point in MacDonald’s work: “These Jewish-inspired pseudoscientific phenomena that The Culture of Critique is concerned with — Boasian anthropology, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, and so on — were they a net negative for America? Yes, I agree with MacDonald, they were.” Read more