Semitic Controversies

Jacques Maritain, anti-Semitism and the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sat, 18 May 2013 19:44:00 +0000

As I have already covered in my previous article on the personal interest of the famous and influential Catholic philosopher; Jacques Maritain, in the jewish question is rather strong in spite of the fact that he wrote comparatively little on the subject. (1) I have there pointed out that Maritain had a jewish wife Raïssa Oumansoff; who was a convert to Catholicism, plus many jewish friends who he seems to have; at least in part, idolized. Further Maritain as I implied was originally an anti-Semite and a follower of the ideas of the anti-Semitic nationalist philosopher Charles Maurras. (2)

Indeed Maritain had written; in regards to the situation in Poland, as late as 1919 that: 'One of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and most evil, is that of the Jews.' (3)

Clearly then Maritain still clung to Catholic; and indeed Christian, orthodoxy at the time on the subject of the jews in 1919 (i.e. anti-Judaism not; as Wasserstein would have it, anti-Semitism), but yet by 1939 he could write that all Christians are spiritually Semites. (4) However; as I outlined in my previous article, I would date Maritain's own Judeophilia to some years earlier in 1904 when he met his jewish wife and then converted to Catholicism with her in 1906.

I cannot agree with either Kertzer or Wasserstein in relation to their dating of Maritain's tout face on the subject of the jews to the advent of the Third Reich in 1933. I would argue that the roots of so superficially radical a change are much deeper. In particular I would point out the need for clarity of terminology to understanding what made Maritain so violently oppose the rise of anti-Semitism but yet so accepting of anti-jewish Christian orthodoxy before this.

The point is simple enough: if we are to understand Maritain's seeming double standards then we need to comprehend that Christianity as a whole; although there have been historical aberrations which defined jewishness biologically or wanted Christians to become jews, has long had a streak of anti-Judaism within it.

Now what do I mean by that?

Well very simply anti-Judaism is the opposition to Judaism not jews per se. Christian anti-Judaism has tended to focus less on the conduct of individual jews and much more on criticizing and commenting on both Judaism itself as well as Judaism's own criticisms of Christianity. The key thing to understand with traditional Christian anti-Judaism is that it allowed the possibility that individual jews could come good and convert to Christianity, which would then in turn mean that they lost the stigma of jewishness in the eyes of most of the Christian church.

However anti-Semitism was a whole other intellectual world: to the anti-Semite by contrast whether a jew confessed to a belief in Judaism or whether they had converted to Christianity didn't matter, because jews were a biological group and thus the problem was not their rejection of Jesus, but rather their actions as a biologically-based minority in competition with a biologically-based majority represented by their host countries.

In essence in Christian anti-Judaism: Maritain's jewish wife was acceptable, because she had; figuratively, seen the light and converted to Christianity from Judaism. To anti-Semitism however this was irrelevant because jewishness was not a religious label, but in fact a biological one.

Once we understand this we can very quickly see why Mauritain seemed to switch overnight from tacitly accepting anti-Judaism to becoming a vocal critic of anti-Semitism. This is very simply because anti-Judaism was the orthodoxy of Christianity; especially that of the Catholic Church at this time, and to oppose it as a Papal Nuncio: Maritain would have probably caused his own recall and as well damaged his own future influence given that senior Catholics at this time were strident in their anti-jewish views. (5)

Further anti-Judaism was no threat to Maritain's personal situation precisely because according to Christian norms: his wife was now a Christian like any other and the stigma of her jewishness did not; for many, come into the matter.

However with the rise of anti-Semitism in the late 1920s and then the advent of the Third Reich in 1933: this changed. While some Catholic clerics; like Cardinal Hlond of Poland, continued to attack the jews while broadly distancing themselves from anti-Semitism and the Third Reich more specifically: others went the opposite way; like the English Catholic writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and endorsed a kind of Judeophilia (an irrational love of the jews) in spite of having made many previous comments which; even then, were borderline anti-Semitic.

Maritian; of course, decided on the second approach to the problem and what seems to have in large part decided this was his jewish wife as well as his already; and increasingly, liberal reading of Christianity, which had been taking shape since 1904. That it was Maritain's jewish wife that was the key factor in his increasing Judeophilia is easily evidenced by looking at his work on the jewish question.

Now; to briefly explain, I have utilized one of the few times that Maritain addressed the issue of the jews and anti-Semitism to elucidate his views (i.e. his short book 'Anti-Semitism' from 1939) largely because it is his major statement on the issue and contains an excellent distillation of all that had to say about the jews in a chapter of another of his books ('Questions de Conscience' from 1938 although originally written in 1937) and his other short book on the jewish question ('A Christian Look at the Jewish Question' also from 1938). Thus I felt it unnecessary to cite everything that Maritain wrote on the issue of the jews as 'Anti-Semitism' is simply a repeat of his earlier arguments with additional qualification and new information on his part.

With this necessary side issue out of the way we can proceed to Maritain's actual text and the stress; or rather lack of it, that Maritan places on racial doctrines in regards to the jews.

Maritain tells us that:

'The truth is that the Jews are not a race in the biological sense of the word.' (6)

He then proceeds to add that:

'Eminent scientists have concluded that, in man's present historic stage, the idea of race corresponds to no anatomical-physiological reality, to no unity of “blood,” but merely to types of “mentalities” produced by historic and social conditions. Its significance rests on extremely complex historical factors (of a psycho-ethico-sociological character) formed by the course of time, rather than on hereditary characteristics transmitted by blood.' (7)

Before briefly analysing this; to put it politely, nonsense we should take note of the qualifier that Maritain introduces in his argument:

'We know that in man's present stage of development there is no group of any importance, even that most favoured in this respect, which is pure in race.' (8)

Now what is interesting about this qualifier is that we can very clearly see that Maritain is trying to degrade the very idea of relative racial purity; which is central to both nationalism and to most forms of anti-Semitism, so that every individual of every suggested racial group becomes de facto racially impure thus rendering any reason for not sleeping with other racial groups moot.

This then clearly plays into Maritain's personal situation given his love for and union with a jewess as if racial classification holds true then it means; very simply, that he is betraying his race and that Oumansoff is still jewish regardless of her formal profession of Christianity.

To justify this rationalizing need to attack the concept of race: Maritain engages in what I can only refer to as a lie by omission. He cites the fact that 'eminent scientists'; which is incidentally a use of the fallacy that has come to be known as 'weasel words', have 'concluded' that there is no such thing as race. He wasn't technically wrong in saying this as some scientists did argue precisely this, but yet they were not all; or even a majority, of the major figures in biological science at the time such as Wesley George and Carleton Coon to name but two: who agreed that race was a valid taxonomic category and also that pure races did exist.

In essence Maritain is being thoroughly dishonest here as he would have; and indeed should have, known better: that he did is shown by his airy-sounding remark about 'extremely complex historical factors', which is basically telling us that he doesn't know why he is right (with the implication he knew a lot of 'eminent scholars' disagreed with him) but that he believes he is regardless (i.e. it is an appeal to mysticism as opposed to a piece of evidence or an argument).

What is perhaps more interesting is that Maritain does not remark on the substantial debate on the subject of the categorization of the jews as a racial group which was then going on between largely German, Swedish and French scientists (For) and British and American scientists (Against). It is odd that Maritain didn't plump for the British and American interpretation in part because it would have resolved his immediate issue with Oumansoff's jewishness, but as Maritain was a philosopher and a Christian one at that: he took the logic to its ultimate conclusion.

Mankind had to be one and the same people to be equal in the sight of God, which would necessarily render race an invalid classification (in humans anyway). This then makes sense of Maritain's adoption of the extreme position of the denial of race and belief in the infinite plasticity of humanity; vis-a-vis the use of environmental factors, which was the hallmark of the fashionable left-wing counter to racialism: Boasian anthropology. (9)

The irony is; of course, the fact that Boas was not even a trained biologist (much like the German author on race: Hans Guenther) and was directly involved in distorting biological science and American anthropology into supporting Marxism's assumptions about nature. (10) Maritain did not not realise it, but his 'eminent scientists' were actually communists of the very kind that most Christians were decrying and the Pope was forcibly and volubly condemning at that particular moment in time. It also confirms the charges that were leveled at him by French nationalists at the time of being a 'mongrelizer of the races', (11) which works on two levels in that he was married to a jewess and advocated the abandonment of racial classification.

Maritain himself however adopted the position that in a choice between two evils: the Nazis were worse than the Communists. His rationale for this was that while Communism was secularism: it was 'against God universally', while the Nazis are secular while being specifically anti-Christian and anti-Semitic (and thus worse). (12)

This is obviously rather strained reasoning, which only makes sense when we recognise that; according Maritain, Christians are the new Jews (13) and that this is why both Christians and Jews were persecuted in equal numbers in the Third Reich. (14) That is simply wrong is neither here nor there, but we should note that it is regardless. (15)

Indeed Maritain actually goes further in developing his idea of the 'mystical body of Israel' (16) in that he styles the Christians as being merely the followers of the jews, (17) which suggests that Maritain's thought had developed to the point of implicitly placing the jews a superior group of people to gentiles. (18) This is particularly brought out when Maritain speaks of the 'special mission' of the jews to essentially be an indivisible remnant making the jewish question unsolvable outside of the Second Coming of Christ. (19)

The jews then; according to Maritain, are to; in effect, hold witness to the truth of Christianity in their 'heroic tribute to the sanctity of a personal and transcendent God.' (20) In other words the jews are a kind of spiritual and literal sacrifice to the God of Israel, because they sacrifice in the 'unjust persecution' to which they are subjected and also in the literal persecution which Maritain claims; on more than one occasion, will see them 'exterminated' by the Third Reich (i.e. a blood sacrifice as in the Old Testament). (21)

This is obviously prescient given that Maritain believed in 1939 that the jews were going to be subject to a 'Holocaust' type scenario and in 1945 it was Maritain who spent a good deal of time trying to persuade the Vatican to support the official 'Holocaust' narrative. Either Maritain was remarkably good at divining the future or Maritain was predisposed to belief in an extermination program.

The latter is the more likely given Maritain's strident belief; in spite of the large amount of evidence from the mass migration of jews from the Russian Empire from the 1880s up till the early 1920s, that mass emigration was quite impossible (22) and that the German attitude to the jews so bad (23) that the Germans would necessarily have to attempt to exterminate the jews in order to be rid of them.

Indeed we can see on this point that Maritain's belief; that emigration was impossible and that extermination the likely alternative in countries where anti-Semitism was state policy, informs his theological positions on the jews which emphasizes the idea of a jewish 'remnant' as witness to Christian truth and also assumes that all that the jews have been accused of; as a group, is necessarily false or unjust.

It also notably allows Maritain and the Church to escape complicity in; what Maritain viewed as, the inevitable attempt by the Third Reich to exterminate the jews by arguing that the Church had historically been a pro-jewish institution and needed the jews in order to fulfil her purpose on earth (thus its opposition to the jews was purely theological and completely different from anti-Semitism). (24)

Maritain develops this view by attacking what he considers as common anti-Semitic charges such as the jews were behind the Russian Revolution, that the jews own all the large banks and so on. Maritain's arguments on this score; such as they are, amount to emphasizing a distinction between the individual and the group. In so far as he argues that the actions of several jews cannot be used to condemn the whole of jewry (25) and further that no critic of jews has ever known enough jews to make a sound judgement about as them as a group. (26)

This is fairly standard intellectual fare for those arguing against anti-Semitism to this day, but as with such intellectually liberal propositions: it doesn't stand up to even basic scrutiny.

The reason for this is very simple in so far as Maritain and others; in regards to the second point, are not arguing from an agnostic position on the judgement of the jews. In fact they are arguing from the position of believing the jews to be a universal (or a net) force for good as a group; or as 'the agent of higher culture formation' as Maritain might phrase it, (27) which means that Maritain; and those who tend to use this argument, are trying to have their cake and eat it.

In order to suggest that no group judgements can be made without knowing or sampling a sufficient amount of the given group: one has to abstain from making judgements about them whatsoever oneself because if we introduce our own subjective value into the equation (be it positive or negative) then it necessarily means that you are asserting that a group judgement cannot be made when the it is (in this instance) for the assignation of blame, but yet a group judgement can be made when it is for the assignation of praise.

This is; simply put, a contradiction in terms.

This then nicely brings us back to the first point in that Maritain is; as I have above outlined, trying to assign the jews praise as a group, but then refuses to assign them blame as a group. This is necessarily an invalidation of his own argument, but it doesn't stop there; because Maritain actually suggests that the jews have been 'adopted by God' as a people and thus 'godly' group judgements can be made. (28)

This is obviously another appeal to mysticism (i.e. saying 'it is a mystery' as your rationale for making a contradictory or incomplete affirmative case) on Maritain's part and as such deserves little attention other than pointing out that it necessarily demonstrates how weak Maritain's arguments; regardless of his bombastic theological rhetoric and pleasing written style, actually are, because he cannot show material evidence for them, but rather tells us that he knows it to be true because he was informed by a higher power (in effect).

That said Maritain does make one quite interesting argument; aside from trotting out the claims that the Protocols of Zion were the result of an anti-Semitic conspiracy headed by the Tsarist secret police (29) and the jews were only disproportionately over-represented among the leading Bolshevisk because of unjustified anti-Semitic persecution before the event, (30) when he argues that; as the jews are individualists by nature (31) and are natural capitalists not communists (32) [he actually labels modern economics to be of jewish inspiration] (33) that the solution to the jewish question in society; as it was then, would be to get gentiles to compete better against nature's capitalists: the jews. (34)

Maritain believed that free competition between jews and gentiles could allow for the creation of better economies and also liberalize society creating tolerance. However Maritain failed to understand that free competition is not simply limited to a set playing field of business with firms and entrepreneurs competing on price, quality, brand and so on. It is much wider than that because the freer the competition the more firms and entrepreneurs will take to using extra-market methods to influence the competitive struggle: so for example bribing a politician to introduce legislation that would be more favourable to them than all or some of their competitors leading; potentially, to an increase in market share for them.

This means; in effect, that Maritain's solution was completely unrealistic and part of the reason that the legislation was preferable to this so-called 'free competition'. Was precisely because the jews had abused the hospitality of North American and European countries by not competing fair and square, but rather being so ruthless as to begin to employ extra-market methods to get their own way and turn these same countries into miniature versions of Eden for jews and miniature versions of hell for non-jews (although the jews believed; and still believe, this was the divinely-ordained order of things). Anti-jewish legislation simply represented an extra-market method by the majority of non-jews to combat the extra-market methods that the jews had been using to better their situation at the expression of that of the gentiles.

The irony is; of course, that it was these same extra-market methods which were being used by jews in Germany to bring in policies which was contrary to the interests of Christianity at that time such as the attempt to normalize homosexuality (lead by Magnus Hirschfeld), the attempt to bring about a Communist state in Germany (Rosa Luxembourg and Kurt Eisner among others) and the destruction of the home by feminists (such as the non-jewish Klara Zetkin but whose ideas were often taken in actuality from Rosa Luxembourg).

However we are told by Maritain that the Germany of the 1920s was a paradise for the jews: (35) but yet he doesn't seem to realise that in defending the jews he is actually voting against everything he himself is against as a Christian in addition to working for the abolition of Christianity in Germany.

In essence Maritain was a brilliant philosopher; reading his interpretation of Saint Thomas Aquinas is a very pleasurable experience, but he was also an intellectually weak and naive man divided by the love of his jewish wife on the one hand and Catholic orthodoxy on the other. He chose to fight against his own faith for his wife's sake as his objections to anti-Semitism; as I have above outlined, are based on the supposition that he knows Christianity better than anyone else and that God has chosen the jews to be his agents as much as he has the Christians.

In other words Maritain advocated 'mongrelizing the races', because that was what he himself was doing every day.

References

(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/05/jacques-maritains-jewish-problem.html

(2) Bernard Wasserstein, 2012, 'On the Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War', 1^st Edition, Simon and Schuster: New York, p. 32

(3) Quoted in David Kertzer, 2001, 'The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism', 1^st Editon, Knopf: New York, p. 251

(4) Jacques Maritain, 1939, 'Anti-Semitism', 1^st Edition, Geoffrey Bless: London, p. 27

(5) Wasserstein, Op. Cit., pp. 31-32

(6) Maritain, Op. Cit., p. 13

(7) Ibid, pp. 13-14

(8) Ibid, p. 13

(9) On the absurdity of this position see Frank Miele, Vincent Sarich, 2004, 'Race: The Reality of Human Differences', 1^st Edition, Westview: Boulder

(10) On this see Gary Bullert, 2009, 'Franz Boas as Citizen-Scientist: Gramscian-Marxist Influence on American Anthropology', Journal for Social, Political and Economic Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 208-243

(11) Leon Poliakov, 2003, [1979], 'The History of Anti-Semitism', Vol. IV, 1^st Edition, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, p. 304

(12) Maritain, Op. Cit., p. 21

(13) Ibid, p. 16

(14) Ibid, pp. 12-13

(15) See Susannah Heschel, 2008, 'The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany', 1^st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton

(16) Maritain, Op. Cit., p. 18

(17) Ibid, p. 16

(18) Ibid, pp. 11; 16

(19) Ibid, p. 17

(20) Ibid, p. 23

(21) Ibid, pp. 3-4; 6; 24

(22) Ibid, p. 3

(23) Ibid, pp. 6-7; 36-37

(24) Wasserstein, Op. Cit., pp. 30-32 neatly summarizes this.

(25) Maritain, Op. Cit., pp. 5-6

(26) Ibid, pp. 8; 19

(27) Ibid, pp. 5; 20; 22

(28) Ibid, p. 12

(29) Ibid, p. 7

(30) Ibid, pp. 7-8

(31) Ibid, p. 7

(32) Ibid, pp. 4-5; 9-11

(33) Ibid, p. 9

(34) Ibid, p. 5

(35) Ibid, pp. 9-10

Joseph Jacobs, the NSDAP and the Famous 'Jewish Noses' Diagram

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:19:00 +0000

As I might not have a chance to write anything later today I thought it an idea to quickly publish an observation that my readers may find interesting. Now when I was in high school I was subjected to three long years of fairly intensive 'Holocaust' education; the reason being that the history tutors at our school had all specialized in the 'Holocaust' during their undergraduate history degrees, and of the many examples of 'Nazi propaganda about the jews' that I was told about and shown during that time: one in particular has always stuck with me.

It is a diagram of jewish noses that was allegedly; according to my old history textbook anyway, a Nazi diagram meant to confirm their pseudo-scientific beliefs about; as well as encourage hatred of, the jews. That particular diagram I found online yesterday when I happened to recall it and what I had (accidentally) discovered about it in the interim years.

The diagram concerned is thus:

Now I am sure that my fellow long-standing sufferers of indoctrination will remember that one of the claims about this diagram is that it was a crude bit of Nazi propaganda and was meant to get people to believe that a 'jewish nose' sometimes looked like the figure six and thus; as six is the number of the devil, the jews were evil.

As I've already intimated: some time ago I happened to come across this diagram again, but yet there were no mentions of Nazis or anti-Semitism in sight. (1) Indeed the scientist discussing it regards its use by the NSDAP as irrelevant in part because it was actually drawn by one of the most important jewish anthropologists and writers of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century called Joseph Jacobs. (2)

Specifically the article it comes from is Joseph Jacobs, 1885, 'On the racial characteristics of modern Jews', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 15, pp. 23-62.

This is interesting precisely because it points out the fact that what 'Holocaust' historians are teaching as 'crude Nazi propaganda' designed to make make people hate jews was actually a diagram taken from a major jewish author on the subject of the racial anthropology of the jews and was meant to (correctly) illustrate the agreement between 'Nazi racial science' and 'Jewish racial science' on the distinctive physical characteristics of the jews.

It is also neatly points out that 'crude Nazi propaganda' against the jews is quite frequently not crude, not factually inarguable even today and was good science in its day (which also means that looking doing on it today; because science is a continuous empirical process not a state, is essentially a tautology).

Scratch one myth.

References

(1) John Baker, 1974, 'Race', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 241
(2) On the importance of Jacobs see Maurice Fishberg, William Helmreich, 2006, [1911], 'Jews, Race & Environment', 1st Edition, Transaction: New Brunswick, p. 3; Fishberg also reproduces exactly the same diagram on p. 85.

Jacques Maritain's Jewish Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:51:00 +0000

Jacques Maritain isn't exactly a household name, but it is the name of one of the most important Christian philosophers of the twentieth century. He was a man who was the guiding light of liberal Catholicism for most of his mid to later life, counted among his pupils Pope Paul VI and is rightly regarded; by both conservative and liberal Catholics alike, as being one of the spiritual fathers of Vatican II.

The interesting thing about Jacques Maritain for us is really that he wrote two books on anti-Semitism and the jews: one in 1938 ('A Christian Look at the Jewish Question') (1) and the other in 1939 ('Anti-Semitism'). (2) It is also more importantly that Maritain was a fairly central figure in attempting to impose the 'Holocaust' theory onto the Vatican as well as removing anti-jewish doctrines from Catholic Orthodoxy.

Now before we look at what Maritain thought (which will be covered in the next article) in relation to the jews it is important to bring up and understand three separate issues. To wit:

In the first instance Maritain was not exactly a neutral party on the issue of the jewish question as his wife; who Maritain by all accounts was genuinely in love for all his life, was a Russian jewess named Raïssa Oumansoff. (3) Both Maritain and Oumansoff converted to Catholicism in 1906 two years after they met in 1904 and both were fairly well-known during their lives Maritain as a philosopher and Oumansoff as a writer and poet. (4)

This means for all practical purposes that Maritain's philo-Semitism is unlikely to ever have been disinterested and certainly had a direct relation to his marriage to a jewess who had converted to Christianity under his influence.

In the second instance Maritain seems to have seen socialisti-cum-anarchist jews as 'role models' for his revolutionary brand of liberalizing Catholicism; regardless of their religious sentiments, such as the left-wing French jew named Saul Alinsky with whom he became good friends. (5)

This obviously; to reinforce my earlier point, means that Maritain's views on the jews are not those of a neutral observer, but rather a partisan with a specific stake in the cause that he espouses.

In the third instance one of Maritain's major intellectual influences was a French Catholic philosopher named Charles Maurras. You might ask why that is odd given that all thinkers have an intellectual ancestry so-to-speak, but add into the equation that Charles Maurras was the intellectual figurehead behind the 'Action Française' (6) and almost all of his writing espoused extreme nationalism (to the point where even the SS had to move to silence him because he was so nationalistic that he believed the NSDAP simply weren't radical enough [and were German to boot]) as well as one of the most extreme forms of intellectual anti-Semitism that has ever graced French literature (Maurras was fairly homicidal towards jews). (7)

Or to put it another way Maurras placed anti-Semitism at the core of French patriotism and nationalism as well as being a public nationalist intellectual par excellance (as Maritain was himself to become). (8)

That presents us with something of a contradiction: doesn't it?

The most philo-Semitic of French Catholic philosophers was heavily-influenced by the most anti-Semitic of French Catholic philosophers. It is certainly a strange thing to happen, but not unprecedented at the time as one of the most philo-Semitic German experts on Judaism; Hermann Strack, was actually the intellectual mentor of one of the most anti-Semitic German experts on Judaism (Erich Bischoff). (9)

Some jewish academics would have it that anti-Semitic (although; we note, not philo-Semitic) tout faces of this kind are the result of political circumstance, (10) but I would disagree on the grounds that this assumes that anti-jewish thought is ipso facto irrational. This; in spite of the many attempts to claim it is so, is patently absurd any more than it is to argue that anti-Islamic sentiment is ipso facto irrational because anybody could construct and detonate a suicide bomb not just Islamists.

Indeed I would argue that what circumstance there is tends to be a mixture of intellectual conviction, intellectual fashion (which incorporates economic and cultural motivations) and personal circumstances. The interesting thing is that Maurras violently opposed secularism (11) and was also deeply interested in reconciling the differences between Plato and Aristotle, (12) which mirrors Maritain's own intellectual later interests in anti-secularism and a revolutionary form of Christian philosophy based on a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle using the medium of Saint Thomas Aquinas. (13)

It is also important to note that Maurras had begun writing only shortly before Maritain entered higher education and with Maritain having a voracious mind deeply interested in the problems of philosophy: it is not surprising that he found an intellectual kindred spirit in Maurras.

Indeed if we take into account that Maritain was in higher education and university in France between 1898 and 1906: then it is not difficult to find the event that likely pushed him towards an interest in the jewish question outside of his attraction for Oumansoff. That event was very simply the Dreyfus Affair, which went on between 1894 and 1906. (14)

Maurras naturally was an anti-Dreyfusard and wrote anti-jewish polemics against the perfidy of Dreyfus and I find it difficult to imagine that Maritain would not have taken the side of Maurras during this early period especially as it was not until later that Dreyfus would be found innocent.

However by the time of his meeting with Oumansoff in 1904: Maritain's anti-jewish ideas; probably inherited from Maurras, were likely beginning to wane (with the fortunes of the anti-Dreyfusards) with his reading Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic classics which emphasized conversion and the goodness that man can do as opposed to fighting the forces and influence of hell (which was more in tune with Maurras and his intellectual confrères).

We can reasonably suggest that it is the introduction and then continued presence of Oumansoff in Maritain's life that was the formative agent in his views on the jews combined with his increasingly differing reading of the purpose of and the challenges facing the Catholic Church in comparison to Maurras. In essence Oumansoff was Maritain's Esther; as in the principle figure in the book of Esther, where she by dint of her jewishness controls the Platonic philosopher-king (Maritian) by said king's love for her so that said king will use his power to destroy the enemies of the jews (in Maritain's case ranging himself against the French anti-jewish Catholic intellectuals such as Monsignor Jouin). (15)

This then means; in effect, that Maritain was not the neutral partisan on the jewish question that he is so often made out to be, (16) because he had a jewish wife; who was like him a convert to Catholicism, and also because he had close jewish friends who he wished to protect and nurture into 'accepting Christ'.

The reason Maritain's views on the jews have tended to be regarded as relatively neutral is precisely because he wrote in an unapologetically liberal tone; seeming reasonable while using actually using rather strange logic (even for a Thomist), and that he wrote very little on the subject of the jews. Outside of the two books (and they are small ones even then) I can find only four articles in his papers explicitly to do with the jews, (17) he seems to have generally written little on the subject, but this doesn't mean; as is usually assumed, that because he wrote little that he was in anyway unbiased on the issue.

In reality it is probably because he wrote so little on the subject of the jews that his extremely philo-Semitic views on the jews (which I would without much equivocation style the irrational love of the jews or Judeophilia) were as well-regarded as they were, because he wasn't seen to obsess over the issue and instead focused on his philosophy and using his 'true humanism' to change the Catholic Church in order to suit both his liberal intellectual tastes and also make it a place that would unequivocally accept his jewish wife and jewish friends as Catholics like any other (as otherwise that wouldn't be 'his kind' of Church).

Was this not what the contemporary anti-jewish Catholic author; Leon de Poncins, foresaw happening? (18)

Indeed: it was.

References

(1) Jacques Maritain, 1938, 'A Christian Look at the Jewish Question', 1^st Edition, Longmans and Green: New York

(2) Jacques Maritain, 1939, 'Anti-Semitism', 1^st Edition, Geoffrey Bles: London

(3) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/ [Last Accessed: 14/05/2013]

(4) Ibid.

(5) Bernard Doering, 1986, 'Jacques Maritain and His Two “Authentic Revolutionaries”', pp. 93-96 (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/modernism/Maritain%20and%20His%20Two%20Authentic%20Revolutionaries%20(Thomistic%20Papers%20III.).pdf )

(6) Thomas Molnar, 'Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age', Modern Age, Fall 1999, pp. 339-341

(7) Paula Hyman, 1998, 'The Jews of Modern France', 1^st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley, p. 146

(8) See Zeev Sternhall, David Maisel (Trans.), 1986, 'Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France', 1^st Edition, University of California Press: Berkeley

(9) See the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/06/erich-bischoff-contra-hermann-strack.html

(10) For example this is implied by Moshe Zimmerman, 1986, 'Wilhelm Marr: Patriarch of Antisemitism', 1^st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, pp. 96-111

(11) Pierre Birnbaum, Jane Marie Todd (Trans.), 1996, 'The Jews of the Republic: A Political History of State Jews in France from Gambetta to Vichy', 1^st Edition, Stanford University Press: Stanford, p. 131

(12) Molner, Op. Cit., pp. 337-338

(13) Doering, Op. Cit, pp. 91-92

(14) For a good overview see Albert Lindemann, 1991, 'The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs: Dreyfus, Beilis, Frank, 1894-1915', 1^st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 94-128

(15) On Jouin's fanatical hatred of and rather detailed research about the jews see Leon Poliakov, 2003, [1979], 'The History of Anti-Semitism', Vol. 4, 1^st Edition, University of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia, pp. 282-283

(16) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/

(17) For details of the Maritain collected papers see: http://maritain.nd.edu/jmc/jm.htm

(18) Vicomte Leon de Poncins, Timothy Tindal-Robertson, 1967, 'Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion', 1^st Edition, Britons: London, pp. 167-174

Palladius of Galatia on the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sun, 12 May 2013 18:11:00 +0000

Palladius of Galatia isn't exactly a household name even among those who consider themselves fairly well-versed in early Christian history. This is in partially because we know very little about Palladius himself and all that we do know with some certainty is that he was a fifth century bishop of Helenopolis and was a devoted follower of Saint John Chrysostom.

Indeed one of Palladius' two surviving works is a book about the life of Saint John Chrysostom: the other is his 'Lausiac History'. What we do know about Palladius is that he was well-regarded in his day and that he had a considerable amount of correspondence and relations with many senior Christians of his day.

That then gives us a basis for the authority and life of Palladius' teachings and in particular we find a significant amount of material in his two works on the subject of the jews.

To begin with in the 'Lausiac History' he writes that:

'But Pythagoras, Diogenes and Plato drank water; so did the Manichaeans and the rest of the band of soi-disant philosophers, and yet they reached such a pitch of vain-glory in their intemperance that they failed to know God and worshipped idols. The apostle Peter and his companions used wine to some extent, so that their Master, our Saviour, was himself reproached on account of their participation, by the Jews' saying: "Why do not thy disciples fast as do the disciples of John?" Again insulting the disciples with reproaches they said: "Your Master eats and drinks with the publicans and sinners."' (1)

Here we see Palladius casting the jews in the role as the fanatical opposition to Jesus and as being devoted agents of the Devil in casting aspersions on this character (i.e. his association with drunks and prostitutes or put another way on his association with the lowest of the low as opposed to hobnobbing with the great and the good of his day) and also trying to draw him into imitating others (why don't you abstain from sustenance like the disciples of John the Baptist did/do) [thus proving him not to be original or wholly truthful and thus not the Messiah].

Palladius continues thus:

'So before their eyes he took scissors and cut off his left ear to the base, saying to them: "Well, be convinced now that it is impossible for me to be ordained, since the law forbids a man with ear cut off to be raised to the priesthood." So then they left him and departed and went and told the bishop. And he said to them: "Let the Jews observe this law. For my part, if you bring a man with his nose cut off worthy in character, I'll ordain him." So they went off again and implored Ammonius. And he swore to them: "If you use force to me, I'll cut off my tongue." So then they left him and went their way.' (2)

Here Palladius is casting the jews once again in the role of the fanatical opposition to Jesus and Christianity, but the emphasis he is using has changed. This change is that rather than the jews trying to actively lead the Christians; by contradiction and error, into the arms of the Devil: they are instead passively observing the old laws and if if; as the jews say, 'it is written' then the they must do it because it is written so.

Palladius' point is simply that the old laws of the Torah (the 613 Mitzvoth in historic and modern Judaism) are absurd and the jews observe them rigidly without understanding them or seeing an obvious motive in them: so; as he says, if the Torah forbade a man to be a priest who had had an ear cut off then the jews would adhere to this without critical appraisal regardless of how pointless or unjustified it may actually be.

Essentially he is making the point that the jews observe the letter; rather than the spirit, of the law of God and also observe those laws without understanding them, which is; in Palladius' view, in direct contradiction to Christian observance of the spirit of the law; as opposed to the letter of the law, as well as using the tools of logical analysis and philosophy to comprehend and make sense of those laws in quasi-scholastic fashion.

Palladius illustrates this adversarial nature later when he relates a personal anecdote to make a separate point. To wit:

'I knew an old Palestinian named Gaddanas, who lived in the open air in the region round the Jordan. Some Jews once set about him in a fanatic outburst, in the region round the Dead Sea, and came against him with swords drawn. And this incident occurred. When a man lifted up his sword and wished to use it against Gaddanas, the hand of him who had drawn it was withered up, and the sword fell from the hand of its wielder.' (3)

In the above we can see that the jews are cast as having attacking a pious Christian named Gaddanas and he was attacked due to this strong Christian belief by jews 'with swords drawn'. However God protected his devout follower and struck down his jewish attackers and thus miraculously saved Gaddanas from harm (i.e. proving the jews wrong and the Christians right).

We can see from this that Palladius means to suggest that the jews are the eternal persecutors of Christians and they have been filling this role ever since the crucifixion of Christ due to their persecution and hand in killing of him (i.e. the charge of Deicide). Indeed Palladius casts the jews very much in the role of the devil's own mortal army who will stop at nothing to stop the spread of Christian truth to the peoples of the world.

This is brought out in particular in Palladius' 'Dialogue concerning the Life of Saint John Chrysostom' when he states that:

'So they held a gathering, and took steps to bring a suit against John. One of them suggested that they should present petitions to the king, and insist upon his appearing before the synod, however unwilling. This was the course adopted; as with the Jews, so with them, money made everything easy.' (4)

Palladius' point is not hard to discern here in that the Christian synod was aping the stratagem of the jews in dealing with Christian influence: simply bribe officials to get your way as every individual has their price regardless of ideological scruples and claims to the contrary. The sub-text to the remark is; of course, that the jews have long used bribery and the offer of money in exchange for political influence as a practical political tool to fight against Christians in the public and private spheres of life.

To Palladius' mind it seems that while the jews attacked Gaddanas with 'swords drawn' ready to stab: they tend to attack Christians less in this direct way, but rather with their cheque books drawn from their pockets and ready to bribe.

This is confirmed when Palladius tells us:

'The feast of Pentecost passed, and five days afterwards Acacius, Antiochus, Severianus, and Cyrinus came to the king, and said: "Your majesty, as by God's appointment you are not under our authority, but have authority over all, you can do whatever you will. Be not more mild than a priest, and more holy than a bishop; we said to you publicly, Upon our heads be the deposition of John. Do not then be unmerciful to all of us, in being merciful to one man." They employed the same language, I might say the same actions, as the Jews, to persuade the king.' (5)

Palladius here is clearly telling us that the jews use underhand and dishonourable tricks such as bribery to get their way, but it is also implied in what he says that the jews also use the additional trickery of slanders, lies and calumny. In order to achieve their ends as a bribe is accepted that much more easily when it is given a justification and can be portrayed by the bribed party to be; shall we say, 'in response to information received'.

In other words the jewish assault on Christianity is two-fold according to Palladius: the jews spread lies, slanders and calumnies against the Christians and these are backed up by a campaign of bribery in order to grease the acceptance of these claims.

The object of this twin campaign against Christians is elucidated by what Palladius says happened as a result of it in the case of Saint John Chrysostom. To wit:

'With him went forth the angel, unable to bear the desolation of the Church, brought about by wicked principalities and powers, who had produced a sort of theatrical exhibition. Yes, there was a roar, like that one hears in a theatre; the ungodly hissed and booed, Jews and Greeks yelled at the top of their voices. And there were blows and body wounds, inflicted by the soldiers, as if they were dealing with criminals in a prison; while every faculty of the soul was tortured by the withdrawal of the teacher, and by the blasphemy against God.' (6)

The above presents us with the simple object of this campaign by the jews in that it was to see the Christians persecuted by the authorities and ultimately for Christian blood to stain the sands of the arena with that of the common criminals, which would then slake the jewish thirst for blood for at least a time.

Palladius also tells us quite clearly where the jews got the money for their bribes from when he states as follows:

'So the synod ordered, that they should recover from the heirs of Antoninus, and should communicate within the sanctuary, but not be reckoned as priests, for fear that if their doings were condoned, a custom might arise worthy of Jews or Egyptians, of selling and buying the priesthood. They say that the pestilential patriarch of the Jews, whose acts belied his title, used to change the rulers of the synagogues every year, or every other year, as a means of raising money; and that the Patriarch of Egypt emulated him by doing the same, that the word of prophecy might be fulfilled, "Her priests made answer for gifts, and her prophets divined for money." (7)

Now in the above; quite side from the delightfully pejorative comments Palladius makes about the 'pestilential patriarch', we can see that he had identified that the jews have corrupted their own institutions into being ones that can be bought and sold for profit by those in authority. This then gives the purchaser a huge boost in socio-cultural; in addition to political, status which they then invariably use to enrich themselves in order to recoup their losses (in much the same way as jews often brought tax-farming rights from medieval monarchs in Eastern Europe [i.e. paying the monarch a fixed sum for the right to collect taxes in a given area thus meaning that you use every law possible to wring more money from the population]).

However it also gives the jewish leadership caste a considerable flow of liquid capital/ready cash, which they can then use to bribe officials and influential individuals/groups into following their agenda rather than their own.

This also links nicely back to Palladius' comments in the 'Lausiac History' about the jews obeying the letter of the law as opposed to being in-tune with the spirit of the law. As to him the jews have debased their covenant with God so far that they are willing to sell even the highest of spiritual offices, because it is no specifically prohibited by the Torah but yet is clearly prohibited in the spirit of the Torah in relation to the formation of the priesthood of uncompromising Yahweh purists only beholden to God (i.e. the Levites).

This buying and selling of the priesthood; or simony in Christian theological vocabulary, for profit is then implicitly drawn on by Palladius when he remarks about jews seeking to become Christian priests and then deliberately causing the lowering of attendance at Churches so as to remove; what Marxists would call, the 'mass base' of the Church and thus remove a large segment of its political power in its ability to gather mobs together and fights its religious enemies.

To wit:

'So these companions of actors and Jews are entrusted by our clever friends with the secrets of the priesthood, as if they were friends of the Saviour, and in consequence the orthodox laity avoid the houses of prayer.' (8)

In essence Palladius is telling us that jewish converts to Christianity are 'wolves in sheep's clothing' who are interested only in promoting the agenda of the jews among the Christians by forcing the people away from the Churches and thus making war upon Jesus. This is clearly demonstrated by Palladius' reference to the jews as being the enemies of Jesus and the inference of his remark that the jews were; as a people, not the friends of Jesus and that jewish converts must; accordingly, be 'wolves in sheep's clothing' as opposed to genuine converts to Christianity.

We can then sum up Palladius' strident opposition to the jews and place him as one of the strongest critics of the jews among early Christian intellectuals by quoting his own last words on the subject of the jews, which find few parallels in Christian writing for their sheer strength of feeling and their obvious erudition.

He ends thus:

'Perhaps people who are always on the look-out for honours call this insolence; but John says to those who came to put themselves under his instruction, "O generation of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" And Paul, in the Acts, says to the chief priest, "God shall smite thee, thou wailing wall;" and the Saviour in one place says to the Jews, "A wicked and adulterous generation seeks after a sign," and in another, to all the apostles, "O fools and slow of heart." In yet another He calls Peter, Satan" Get thee behind me, Satan; for thou art an offence unto me." Yet there was no grave offence, which called for these severe expressions.' (9)

References

(1) Pall. Lau. Hist. Pro. 9

(2) Pall. Lau. Hist. 11

(3) Ibid. 50

(4) Pall. Dia. Vit. John Chrys. 8

(5) Ibid. 10

(6) Ibid.

(7) Ibid. 15

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid. 19

Update on the famous Goldwin Smith Misquotation

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sat, 11 May 2013 18:43:00 +0000

About this time last year I published an article; 'The Origin of the Goldwin Smith Quotation', (1) about the often used quotation that alleges that Goldwin Smith said the following in 1981:

'We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them.'

Now; just to briefly recap, I pointed out that in the first instance Goldwin Smith wasn't jewish, in the second he was a prolific opponent of the jews (being branded as the 'founder' of intellectual anti-Semitism in Canada for example) and that he wrote during the nineteenth century not the twentieth century (ergo he wasn't alive in 1981 or even 1921).

Further I pointed out that the quotation was completely wrong as he actually wrote:

''The Jew alone regards his race as superior to humanity, and looks forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them all and to its final ascendancy under the leadership of a tribal Messiah.' (2)

I also pointed out that the earliest variant of this misquotation that I was aware of was made by Gordon 'Jack' Mohr when he quoted it (without giving an originating source) in his 'The Satanic Counterfeit':

'Listen to the Jew, Goldwin Smith, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, October 1881, “We regard our race as superior to humanity, and look forward not to its ultimate union with other races, but its triumph over them.”' (3)

Now it seems fairly clear that between 1982 and present there has been a mistype of 1881 for 1981, which would explain the rather silly error on the part of those who use this quotation: made worse by the fact that Goldwin Smith actually has a Wikipedia article explaining that he wasn't jewish and an opponent of them. Even putting his name into Google quickly reveals this to be the case.

I've been reading Goldwin Smith's rather considerable corpus of written material on and off over the last year with a view to doing some academic work on him (in part because we share a personal connection), but I did come across an mention of Goldwin Smith's 1881 article 'The Jewish Question' (from which this misquotation stems) in William Guy Carr's 'Pawns in the Game'.

To wit Carr says the following (which I have double-checked against the original text of Smith's article):

'In the Nineteenth Century, October issue, 1881, Goldwyn Smith, professor of modern history at Oxford University wrote: “When I was last in England we were on the brink of war with Russia, which would have involved the whole Empire – the Jewish interests throughout Europe, with the Jewish Press of Vienna as its chief organ, was doing its utmost to push us in.”' (4)

Carr also makes it explicitly clear that Smith was an anti-Semite and not jewish when he spends a paragraph in his notes criticising Smith for 'mistaking' the jews as the principle conspiratorial agent against the British Empire (Carr prefers a Satanic plot headed by the Illuminati in which the jews are just hapless pawns). (5)

It thus seems that between the last edition of Carr's book (the sixth in 1966 although there was a reprint in 1967) and Mohr's 'The Satanic Counterfeit': there has been a substantive change in the interpretation of Smith's article. It does however pointedly inform us that Smith's 1881 article 'The Jewish Question' was well-known in anti-jewish circle, but Smith himself was probably not (hence both why it was misquoted as well as also how the editor heard of the obscure article and Smith).

It also suggests (but does not prove) that between 1967 and 1982 was when the quotation was altered to make it seem like Smith was a jew and had asserted something he did not. I am yet to find an originating source, but I doubt that Mohr was actually the origin of the misquote given his tendency to simply take quotes from elsewhere and use them with attribution.

It seems likely however that this quote was probably modified and then published by one of the anti-jewish groups in the United States that were operating at this time (as the British anti-jewish groups would be more likely to know who Smith was given his high prominence in nineteenth century British intellectual life and Mohr isn't likely have got the quotation from a non-Anglophone publication) and unfortunately; as I have pointed out in relation to several other misquotes and supposed 'jewish documents', there are at least two significant candidates (with access to the pages of anti-jewish publications) who were operating at this time who were prone to do this kind of thing (i.e. Eustace Mullins and Walter White Jr.).

I shall publish an update when and if I find anything else to do with this particular quote whereby we can find an originating source or further narrow down the time period it seems to have come into existence.

References

(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/05/origin-of-goldwin-smith-quotation.html

(2) Goldwin Smith, 'The Jewish Question', The Nineteenth Century, October 1881, Vol. 140, p. 1114

(3) Gordon Mohr, 1982, 'The Satanic Counterfeit', 1^st Edition, CPA: Boring, p. 63

(4) William Guy Carr, 1967, 'Pawns in the Game', 6^th Edition, St. George: Glendale, p. 72

(5) Ibid, p. 83

Antiochus of Palestine on the Jews and the Fall of Jerusalem in 614 AD

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sat, 11 May 2013 17:19:00 +0000

In 614 AD the Byzantine Empire lost its spiritual centre when the Persian Empire under Chosroes II and one of those who chronicled this event in his 'Exomologesis' was a monk named Antiochus (usually called Antiochus of Palestine or Antiochus Strategos) who was an eyewitness to many the events that he describes. The interesting thing about this chronicle; which tells of the woes suffered by the Christians at the hands of the Persians and their allies, is that it includes a fairly substantive mention of the treatment of the Christians of Jerusalem by the jews.

I quote:

'Thereupon the vile Jews, enemies of the truth and haters of Christ, when they perceived that the Christians were given over into the hands of the enemy, rejoiced exceedingly, because they detested the Christians; and they conceived an evil plan in keeping with their vileness about the people. For in the eyes of the Persians their importance was great, because they were the betrayers of the Christians. And in this season then the Jews approached the edge of the reservoir and called out to the children of God, while they were shut up therein, and said to them: 'If ye would escape from death, become Jews and deny Christ; and then ye shall step up from your place and join us. We will ransom you with our money, and ye shall be benefited by us.' But their plot and desire were not fulfilled, their labours proved to be in vain; because the children of Holy Church chose death for Christ's sake rather than to live in godlessness: and they reckoned it better for their flesh to be punished, rather than their souls ruined, so that their portion were not with the Jews. And when the unclean Jews saw the steadfast uprightness of the Christians and their immovable faith, then they were agitated with lively ire, like evil beasts, and thereupon imagined another plot. As of old they bought the Lord from the Jews with silver, so they purchased Christians out of the reservoir; for they gave the Persians silver, and they bought a Christian and slew him like a sheep. The Christians however rejoiced because they were being slain for Christ's sake and shed their blood for His blood, and took on themselves death in return for His death...

When the people were carried into Persia, and the Jews were left in Jerusalem, they began with their own hands to demolish and burn such of the holy churches as were left standing...

How many souls were slain in the reservoir of Mamel! How many perished of hunger and thirst! How many priests and monks were massacred by the sword! How many infants were crushed under foot, or perished by hunger and thirst, or languished through fear and horror of the foe! How many maidens, refusing their abominable outrages, were given over to death by the enemy! How many parents perished on top of their own children! How many of the people were bought up by the Jews and butchered, and became confessors of Christ! How many persons, fathers, mothers, and tender infants, having concealed themselves in fosses and cisterns, perished of darkness and hunger! How many fled into the Church of the Anastasis, into that of Zion and other churches, and were therein massacred and consumed with fire! Who can count the multitude of the corpses of those who were massacred in Jerusalem!' (1)

Now it is not difficult to see that the above is a fairly vicious attack on the jews by a Christian monastic (I am not elaborating on it largely because the text is self-explanatory), but what is important to emphasize is that regardless of the fact that Antiochus' text is invective per se: it is also a chronicle of what happened by someone who may or may not have been there and if he was not there then he would have known eyewitness who had been.

The historicity of the account is also hard to dispute given the fact that the Roman Empire; which then became the Byzantine Empire, had long had an acrimonious relationship with its jewish subjects and Emperors; both Christian and Pagan, had long regarded the jews with suspicion and even outright hostility.

This suggests that one of two possible explanations to us in so far as the jews could have been driven into the arms of the Persians by Imperial persecution or the jews could have been against the Romans and Byzantines throughout the centuries they had been part of the successive empires with the events in Jerusalem just giving voice to that sentiment after having had it passively or actively suppressed due to their material circumstances for quite some time.

The latter seems the more likely of the two explanations; although scholars traditionally plump for the former as it neatly removes any need to investigate whether the jews had any non-material motivations for what they did, as it fits with jewish behaviour in the mid-late Roman Empire (2) as well as jewish behaviour in Spain before, during and after the Islamic conquests (where the jews were active traitors to the Visigothic kingdoms and acted as a pro-Islamic fifth column inside Spain's cities). (3) It is also worth noting; as I have argued elsewhere, (4) that the jews had long had a friendly association with the Parthian/Persian Empires in part because they contained large numbers of jews who we know with some certainly held positions of responsibility and influence. (5)

Indeed jewish assistance for anti-Roman/Byzantine powers has quite some history: predating even the formation of the Roman Empire and stretching back to the last years of the Roman Republic! (6)

This situational context is important precisely because without it the explanation that the jews were just persecuted into having nothing to lose, but to help the Persians seems quite appealing. When you factor in this situational context however: it becomes quite clear that the jews are not interested in anything but either general vengeance against Rome/Byzantium and/or using anti-Roman/Byzantine powers to sweep away their imperial masters so that they can in time forge a new jewish state.

In essence the jews weren't being oppressed by anyone in particular; to be sure they had statutory laws of long-standing against them but they were also afforded significant protection under these same laws, and their betrayal and then murder of Christians at Jerusalem (conducted as if it were a sport no less) then the defiling of its churches goes well beyond the pale of simple 'resentment against persecution' and more into vengeance and the nationalistic thirst for power and dominion.

This ironic especially as jewish historians; such as Samuel Glassman, when recounting the seventh century anti-jewish riots and jewish support for the later Muslim invaders in both Asia Minor and Spain, do not mention the catalyst event (jews killing Christians for vengeance/sport in Jerusalem in 614 AD and also working with the Persian Empire against the Byzantines). (7) Instead they mention the effect (anti-jewish riots in Constantinople/Byzantium as well as the wave of Byzantine legal repression of the jews that followed this) and what they see as the concomitant jewish sympathy for Islam and hatred of Christians due to this 'unjust irrational persecution'.

Glassman and others are misrepresenting the situation quite considerably, because they are citing everything but the founding event and then representing the Byzantine dislike of jews as being ex nihilo so as to fit into their broad narrative that the jews were unjustifiably and irrationally persecuted for things they didn't do as opposed to being rational prosecuted for things they most certainly did (i.e. the anti-jewish riots and legislation were irrational because they had no rational trigger [which we can clearly see that they did]).

We can thus see that Antiochus of Palestine's chronicle of the behaviour of the jews towards the Christians is actually likely to be very accurate; with the odd rhetorical flush perhaps, and that this murderous and spiteful jewish behaviour was then the cause of a wave of anti-jewish riots and legislation in the Byzantine Empire, which then escalated over centuries with the jews actively helping the armies of Islam leading to the slaughter of jewish communities across Europe at the time of the First Crusade (which occurred; we should remember, at the behest of the Byzantine Emperor).

So who ultimately caused jewish suffering in these later centuries?

The jews themselves.

References

(1) Frederick Conybeare, 1910, 'Antiochus Srategos: The Capture of Jerusalem in 614 AD', English Historical Review, Vol. 10, pp. 508-509

(2) For example: Eusb. Pamp. Ecc. Hist. 4:2.1-5; Cassius Dio, 68:32.1-3

(3) Eliyahu Ashtor, 1973, 'The Jews of Moslem Spain', Vol. I, 1^st Edition, Jewish Publishing Society of America: Philadelphia, pp. 10-16; also see the following two articles: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-28-jew-laws-of-erwig-part-i.html and http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-28-jew-laws-of-erwig-part-ii.html

(4) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/05/cassius-dio-on-jews-part-iii.html

(5) See Leon Poliakov, 2003, [1973], 'The History of Anti-Semitism', Vol. II, 1^st Edition, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, pp. 12-15

(6) Adrienne Mayor, 2010, 'The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy ', 1^st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 341

(7) Samuel Glassman, 1980, 'Epic of Survival: Twenty-Five Centuries of Anti-Semitism', 1^st Edition, Bloch: New York, p. 64

Debunking Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez's 'All European Life Died in Auschwitz'

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:05:00 +0000

In my previous article on the subject of Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez's article-cum-chain letter 'All European Life Died in Auschwitz' I simply re-wrote the text of the article to make it fit the actual situation more appropriately than Rodriguez's original. (1) Now more than that I think it is necessary to actually analyze what Rodriguez has to say or rather; perhaps more appositely, what he claims.

The reason for this is simple: in that this article has been widely disseminated and includes basic assumptions that underlie a large amount of counter-Jihadi material that need to be challenged: as they are more fundamentally erroneous as well as; ironically, hypocritical. Indeed I would go so far as to argue that Rodriguez's article is actually representative of an intellectual disease that has afflicted some well-meaning people today.

That disease is very simply: the irrational love of the jews.

Otherwise known as: Judeophilia.

What do I mean by that?

Well if we understand that the sine qua non of most right-wing and patriotic ideas today is the supposition that the downfall of European civilization was ultimately caused by the advent of the Third Reich and the destruction that was World War Two; which Germany supposedly started out of ambitions for world conquest, caused the expansion of Communist rule. As well as greatly enhanced the attractiveness of Marxist ideas to Westerners and non-Westerners alike while simultaneously tainting right-wing and patriotic ideas; as well as racialism and hereditarianism in science, with the reflected tint of the supposed evils; inspired by so-called 'crank science', that were visited on the world by National Socialism.

This then informs us that World War Two and National Socialism have become the twin evils about which right-wing and patriotic ideas today seek to explain and answer, because they believe them to be a good part of the reason why their ideas and visions of society have failed.

However this is simply an excuse for their failure to; as Sun Tzu aptly put it, 'shape to fit the times': the right-wing and patriotic groups failed to learn from their experiences, they failed to recognize that the political battlefield had changed and perhaps more fundamentally they failed to evolve to meet that changing situation.

Right-wing and patriotic ideas have so long been on the back foot not because the ideas were lacking in appeal or because there weren't people willing to listen to them, but rather because the people who styled themselves right-wingers and/or patriots failed to understand the evolution of technology, failed to adapt their message to fit the changing society which encompassed new generations and even more fundamentally did not have the courage of their convictions.

How can a right-winger complain about the corruption of society or the influence of the jews: when they are not prepared to become; as Christians would describe it, 'living stones' of their political faith. Beacons of light in the growing darkness if you will, because only such beacons of light can inspire others to both make their way to that light and also try to reproduce that light in themselves.

Anarchists in the nineteenth century frequently talked of the difference between the 'propaganda of the word' and the 'propaganda of the deed' often arguing that a deed was worth thousands of words. I would naturally agree with that but with the qualification that individuals carrying out bombings don't cause intellectual and political revolutions, but rather those living their lives in agreement with their ideas and showing others what it means to be a right-winger and/or a patriot do make such revolutions.

The point is simple enough in that people; as exemplified by Rodriguez, believe their own excuses about why they have failed without understanding what businessmen call the 'root cause' of their problem. Instead they seek to blame their failure on some group and/or event that they feel aggrieved at in the belief that it 'queered their pitch' to their target audience.

Now the interesting thing about that is that it is that it is precisely what orthodox history tells counter-Jihadis like Rodriguez the Nazis claimed about the jews and the leftists in relation to Germany's loss of World War One. This is otherwise known to anyone who went through secondary or high school as the 'Stab-in-the-back' myth (i.e. the Dolchstoßlegende) and while this characterisation has some truth to it: the 'myth' is not without some evidential foundation in the first instance and in the second it was not an unreasonable belief for the soldiers on the ground or the German civilian population. (2)

Now if; as the counter-Jihadis like Rodriguez believe, we wish to suppose that the advent of the Third Reich and World War Two has caused them and their predecessors to fail to successfully propagate right-wing and/or patriotic ideas: then surely are they not creating their own version of 'Stab-in-the-back' myth in order to explain why they have; and keep, failing?

Instead of locating the 'root cause' of the problem: they have instead created legend to explain why a particular group and historical event have 'queered their pitch' to their would-be audience. However unlike the German nationalists; and then later the NSDAP, after World War One: the counter-Jihadis unjustly (and bizarrely) blame those they believe unjustly blamed the jews for their own failings.

It is certainly ironic that counter-Jihadis, right-wingers and patriots so frequently try to blame their erstwhile confrères for their own failures, but the belief that the advent of the Third Reich and that the necessary consequence of that was World War Two has also spawned an almost Hegelian anti-thesis to traditional right-wing and/or patriotic views on the subject of the jews. These; as I am sure the reader well knows, have historically hovered between passive dislike and outright hatred with every hue in-between represented.

However the centrality of the 'Holocaust' of six million jews; allegedly committed by the Third Reich between 1941 and 1945, to post-war interpretations of World War Two; as well as acting as a significant dose of rhetorical ex post facto justification, has meant that even passive dislike of the jews has come to be associated with adhere to the principles of National Socialism with one thus being an apologist for the Third Reich and accordingly trying to justify the 'Holocaust' in short rhetorical order.

This leaves counter-Jihadis; like Rodriguez, in something of a conundrum in so far as they cannot; or rather do not wish to seem to, support National Socialism, because they believe that it was National Socialism rather than their own poorly-chosen actions (and in many cases simple inaction) that caused their failure to propagate their beliefs. However traditional right-wing and patriotic beliefs are derogatory towards the jews in differing degrees, which means that they risk alienating their natural allies.

To solve it they needed to introduce a new understanding of right-wing beliefs into the equation and the jewish right (i.e. the Zionists) provided the perfect answer to the conundrum. That answer was simple: you could style the jews as being a 'super-people' who invented everything from the wheel to the computer and who Europe had blamed for their own failures as opposed to looking for the 'root cause' of the failure in themselves.

This meant in practice that the counter-Jihadis could emphasize their distance from National Socialism on the basis of the latter's vehement dislike for the jews and also gain a ready-made number of allies among the jews: who; as Israeli society is rather more right-wing as a rule than European or American society, could provide a steady stream of educated material to back up their other arguments.

However in forming this alliance the counter-Jihadis; like Rodriguez, ended up going a lot further than they originally intended. They ended up not just viewing the jews as a 'super-people', but rather ended up belittling their own people for not being like the jews and failing to even consider that the jews could have provoked a reprisal or performed a negative act.

In essence; to follow the expression of the common logical fallacy, the counter-Jihadis not only slipped down the slope, but they veritably tumbled down it.

The end position that they have come to is what I have above termed: Judeophilia.

In other words the irrational love of the jews.

The reason that is apt is simple: counter-Jihadis; like Rodriguez, see criticism of the jews as ipso facto irrational and a sign of a diseased and/or jealous mind. They do not consider for a moment that anti-jewish opinions and theses are as potentially justifiable as any other, but rather they simply believe they cannot be so because they are anti-jewish.

Instead they believe that the jews have been disproportionately responsible for arbitrarily assigned positives with which the world has been gifted. They believe that the jews are the best of Europe and that accordingly any criticism of them has to be irrational and based on jealousy.

In other words: Judeophobia.

Judeophobia; or the irrational hatred of jews, (which is incidentally a real term increasingly used by scholars and writers on anti-Semitism) is believed by the counter-Jihadis to be one of the touchstones of a backward mind, but yet they do not consider that in considering the jews as above other peoples they in the first instance uncritically accept as gospel what the jews say about themselves and in the second they engage in an essentially reactionary behaviour.

What do I mean by this second point?

Well very simply the counter-Jihadis; like Rodriguez, are simply reacting to the traditional right-wing many-shaded dislike and suspicion of jews by simply rejecting that and taking the polar opposite viewpoint. They haven't considered the merits of the Judeophilic argument; let alone those of the Judeophobic one, and have decided to take a position in an emotive reaction to the normalisation of the latter.

Hence they have reacted without thought as opposed to having made a critical and informed decision ergo they can be aptly described as 'reactionary'.

This is clearly evidenced by Rodriguez's claim that the jews are a 'chosen people'; which is the jewish description of themselves and should not as well as cannot be applied to the jews by non-jews unless said non-jews have either converted to Judaism or have become Noahides, (3) and that they produced a 'great and wonderful people who changed the world'.

Now I obviously disagree with Rodriguez's characterisation of the jews as a 'great and wonderful people'; and I have probably read and researched a great deal more into jews and their culture than Rodriguez has, but I cannot disagree with his assertion that the jews 'changed the world'. Indeed I know of few people on either the pro-jewish or anti-jewish sides of the debate who would disagree with it.

However our differences come when we assign a valuation to that change: Rodriguez would argue it was wholly positive. Where-as I would take a far more nuanced view that while the jews have naturally contributed things of positive value to mankind: they have also contributed disproportionately far more things of negative value to mankind compared to any other group. I would also argue that the jewish 'contribution to civilization'; as Cecil Roth styled it, has on been balance rather negative as opposed to overwhelming positive.

That Rodriguez's view is quite irrational is easily shown by pointing to his use of a Nobel Prize winners comparison between jews and Muslims as the centre-piece of his argument; and indeed the only thing remotely factual in it, however his list is not only ludicrously wrong (as it leaves out some jews and Muslims, leaves out the Chemistry Nobel and includes others who were not jews or Muslims as if they) (4) but it is an apples versus oranges comparison.

What do I mean by that?

Very simply the list isn't even comparing the same thing as it defines jewishness biologically (hence the numerous jewish atheists, second/third generation converts to Christianity with a jew mother/grandmother or father/grandfather included in it) while it defines Muslims as someone who born into or is an active adherent of Islam.

Clearly then you can't compare a biological group to a religious group now can you?

This is especially awful given that Rodriguez is essentially using the opinion of a committee to be his barometer of contribution, which is clearly erroneous as he is arguing for the total contribution of the jews as opposed to the contribution of the jews over the last few decades. Indeed; as Jan Biro has noted, (5) most of the jewish Nobel Prize winners have had their prizes awarded since 1945: when according to Rodriguez (and those like him) European culture and civilization has been in a headlong rout under the avalanche of leftist and 'Islamofascist' attacks on it.

Rather incompatible: isn't it?

To explain briefly: if European civilization has been in a headlong rout since 1945 under the assault of leftists and 'Islamofascists', but it is during this time that the jews have been winning large numbers of Nobel Prizes which obviously have a political element and rely on the socio-cultural compatibility of their ideas with the culture concerned (after all a chemistry paper that threw doubt on the 'Holocaust' story could never win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry: could it?). (6)

Then does this not suggest that the jews are likely winning Nobels at an increased rate, because their arguments and theses are highly compatible with the political ideas of said headlong rout of European culture and civilization?

Why yes it does.

So does that not suggest to Rodriguez: who might be playing a disproportionately significant role in the headlong rout of European culture and civilization?

After all the Third Reich fell in 1945: who does Rodriguez think might have benefited most from that in terms of their short and medium term prospects given the amount of empathy that was showered on them for 'surviving' the 'Holocaust'?

That's right: the jews.

In essence from this we can quickly see that Rodriguez's logic actually bounces back against him as he is forced into a position where the jews are linked to the headlong rout of European culture and civilization as being disproportionately responsible for it, because it is in said period of headlong rout that they have been at their most dominant as opposed to being passively and/or actively suppressed by the state and society in general (when European culture and civilization was in the ascendant).

I also note with not a little humour that in seeking to push jews to the fore Rodriguez is actively downplaying European achievement. By suggesting that the jews have disproportionately contributed to the advancement of humanity: Rodriguez forgets that the European people; who are not jewish, have contributed a vast amount more and significantly more disproportionately than the jews.

What about them then?

Europe has been the birthplace of most technology (past and present), most political ideas (past and present), the only civilization to create and us the empirical method, produced the greatest warriors and the greatest art that humanity has ever known.

Yet Rodriguez fails to mention that: he only signs the hymns of jewish not European achievement.

The jews are not part of that great history and indeed many of Europe's greatest minds have turned their attention to the jews in the spirit of empirical investigation only to be disgusted, appalled and repelled at what they saw starring back at them. They saw only fanatical hatred, jealously and greed starring back at them: not the peace-loving super-people that Rodriguez believes the jews to be.

Were these men and women irrational haters of the jews as Rodriguez would likely suppose?

Could Goebbels have found a spiritual ancestor in Cicero?

Could Himmler have found a spiritual ancestor in Voltaire?

Could Hitler have found a spiritual ancestor in Luther?

No: I don't think so.

Indeed the simplest possible solution that all these men undertook to study the jews and found them not only wanting, but a clear and present danger to all that they held dear.

There is no conspiracy, no jealously and no psychological abnormality here: only empirical investigation leading to one disturbing conclusion about the jews, which required action sooner rather than later on the part of the investigators.

In seeking to paint the jews as being a 'super-people' Rodriguez essentially blackens the name of his own people and in doing so his writing become less a counter-Jihadi call-to-arms to a sleeping Europe, but rather a counter-Jihadi attempt to emasculate a sleeping Europe by demanding they fight on the side of the school bully so that they can feel less guilty about punching him in the face once.

From this then we can see that Rodriguez is not only not a European nationalist or a European patriot, but rather one of those guilt-induced European liberals who has decided that has to sleep with the enemy in order to pay of the debt of his ancestors.

The only difference is: he is in bed with the jews as opposed to the Muslims.

References

(1) This is available at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/04/all-european-life-died-in-auschwitz.html

(2) On this see: Udo Walendy, 1981, 'Truth for Germany: The Guilt Question of the Second World War', 1^st Edition, Institute for Historical Review: Torrance

(3) The reason for this is that Rodriguez is effectively calling himself and his people sub-human and this is clearly incompatible with nationalistic, right-wing or patriotic thought.

(4) See the following articles which have independently treated this subject: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/jewish-versus-muslim-nobel-prize.html and http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-jewish-internet-defense-force-cant.html

(5) http://www.davidduke.com/mp3/The%20Jewish%20Bias%20of%20the%20Nobel%20Prize.pdf

(6) On this see the following articles: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/jews-and-nobel-prize-fantasy-versus.html; http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-nobel-prize-fantasy-versus.html; http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-nobel-prize-fantasy-versus_5.html and http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-jewish-achievement-lists-are.html

Salvian on the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sat, 04 May 2013 17:55:00 +0000

The German-born Christian who we know as Salvian is not a well-known fifth century author of the classical world, but he is an interesting one given that he is one of the earliest examples of militant Christian ideas of the equality and justice. Essentially Salvian was what we would now call a socialist; if not a communist, and he refused to back down from his beliefs. In the last sense regardless of your personal views on socialist and communist ideas we can admire Salvian's steadfast sense of purpose precisely because he never compromised on what he believed was fundamentally right.

In many senses Salvian is the anti-thesis of many modern political thinkers as well as Christians in that he showed a great deal of spine in his reasoned intractability. While in comparison many of those who profess to have strong political and religious beliefs today have almost no spine whatsoever and are less intractable and more undefinable in the sense that an opponent of theirs has a great deal of difficulty in pinning them down to any specific position per se.

Salvian in his lifetime was not close to major political figures, but he was a significant figure in Christian intellectual circles and worked closely with several French bishops such as Hilary of Arles and Eucherius of Lyons. That said Salvian's influence and ideas are often seen; although usually by proxy, in the interpretation of the works and ideas of Saint Augustine by Christian authors up to the present time which tends; as he did, to stress Augustine's focus on asceticism and belief that no government was above the law of God.

We know Salvian was a fairly prolific author, but only two of his works and several letters have come down to us. It is in his treatise 'De gubernatione Dei' (lit. 'The Government of God') that we find Salvian commenting on the jews thus:

'Surely then, since our most indulgent Lord shows himself always more prone to mercy than to punishment, even though in punishing a part of the Jewish host by his divine censure he gave some scope to judgement and severity, yet his love claimed the greater portion of the people - a special and peculiar act of mercy to countless men that the punishment might not destroy all who were implicated in the guilt.' (1)

This is then needs to be understood in the context of his later comment in relation to Saint Paul and the jews:

'Since he so followed Christ, let us consider which of us seems to be a true follower of the apostle. He writes of himself first of all that he never gave offence to any, but in all things showed himself the minister of God, in much patience, in affliction, in necessities, in blows, in imprisonments, in stripes. Elsewhere, comparing himself with others, he says: "How is it, wherein so ever any is bold (I speak foolishly) I am bold also: I speak as a fool, I am more; in labours more abundant, in prisons more frequent, in stripes above measure, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck."' (2)

This is then clarified further by Salvian's comments on the nature of the jewish people and their relationship with God:

'The twelve tribes of the Hebrews, when they were of old chosen by God, received two holy names, for they were called the people of God, and Israel. We read: "Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify against thee." Once the Jews bore both these titles, now they have neither. They who long since left off the worship of God cannot be called God's people, nor can they who denied his Son be given a name that means "Seeing God." So it is written: "But Israel does not know, my people doth not consider." For this reason on another occasion our God spoke of the people of the Hebrews to the prophet, saying: "Call his name, Not Beloved." And speaking to the Jews themselves: "You are not my people and I am not your God." Moreover, he himself showed clearly why he spoke thus about them, for he said: "They have forsaken the Lord, the fountain of living waters." And again: "They have rejected the word of the Lord and there is no wisdom in them."' (3)

In addition to:

'For the whole human race is rushing headlong into eternal punishment by the very course that the Scriptures describe. First we kindle the fire, then add fuel to the flames, and lastly enter the flames that we have prepared. When does man first kindle eternal fire for himself? Surely when he first begins to sin. But when does he add fuel to the flames? When he heaps up sins upon sins. When shall he enter the everlasting fire? When he has already completed the irrevocable account of wickedness by the increase of his sins, as our Saviour said to the leaders of the Jews: "Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers, ye serpents, ye generation of vipers," The men whom the Lord himself told to fill up the measure were not far from completing the full number of their sins. Because they were no longer worthy of salvation, they filled up the number of iniquities by which they were to perish.' (4)

Now in the above I have quoted four extracts from Salvian's writing which deal with the jews one after the other. The reason for this is very simple: in that each individual bit of text qualifies Salvian's attitude to the jews appreciably.

Salvian starts out in the first piece of quoted text pointing out that the jews were divinely censured by God who decided to kill a goodly number of them for transgressing his instructions/commandments to them, but proceeded to forgive most of them for doing so (i.e. the mass of the jews as opposed to the leaders/ringleaders) and thus spares most of the jews his chastisement. However in doing so he; to Salvian's mind, is clearly reminding the jews that they need not always be the chosen people and should they suitably anger God then they will suffer terribly and possibly even be wiped out altogether.

In the second piece of quoted text Salvian is introducing the conduct of the jews in relation to Saint Paul into the equation. Here we can see Salvian recounting the persecution, suffering and torment of Saint Paul at the hands of the jews and thus begins; in effect, to illustrate the fall of jews from divine favour as they have once again rejected God's instructions/commandments in favour of their own instructions/commandments.

This then leads to Salvian's qualification in the third piece of quoted text where the jews are said to have been finally deprived of their status as the 'chosen nation' of God and that God has abandoned them to their fate as being unrighteous and undeserving of his forbearance and grace. Salvian clearly tells us that in his view: a people who name themselves as the ones who can 'see God' cannot retain that name when they reject that God's ultimate messenger because they were willfully blind to that status.

Essentially Salvian is telling us that the jews are outcast and cannot be admitted into God's good books until such time as they accept Jesus as their Messiah and then beg forgiveness for their past errors.

Salvian then; in the fourth piece of quoted text, makes it abundantly clear that jews are destined for hell-fire and brimstone unless they do just this. Indeed he even suggests that many jews; although necessarily not all, are now incapable of receiving God's forgiveness, because they are the; oft-quoted, 'generations of vipers'. This means in effect that Salvian is arguing that the jews are the active servants of the devil and are thus the principle opponents of all Christians in spiritual warfare and are to be hunted down and treated as active enemy combatants where-ever they are found by the Christian faithful.

To confirm this we should note that Salvian argues that the Vandals; then ravaging the Western Roman Empire, were acting the part of the chastiser of the Christians, because they had; like jews of old, turned their face from God and thus he had also turned his face from them. (5) However unlike the jews this could be rectified, but like the jews Christians should beware because of the potential that God's wrath could be awakened as it had been by the jewish rejection and crucifixion of Jesus. (6)

Indeed Salvian also refers to the perpetual jewish hatred of Jesus as well as their responsibility for the crime of deicide (the murder of a God). (7) Salvian also vehemently makes the point that the pagans have not murdered the Saints, but rather the jews have done so. (8)

This indicates Salvian's deep-seated hostility towards the jews as being a group defined by national origin as well as faith, who; in his view, actively do the work of the devil and are accordingly to be expunged at every opportunity unless they truly convert to Christianity and ask forgiveness for their many sins. It also fundamentally shows that Salvian was; like Martin Luther after him, unable to show much compassion for the jews as a people and regarded them very much as his active enemies who wouldn't by en-large see the light of Christian reason and so thus needed to be put to the sword.

References

(1) Salv. De gub. 1:11

(2) Ibid. 3:4

(3) Ibid. 4:1

(4) Ibid. 4:8

(5) Ibid. 7:7

(6) Ibid. 7:8-11

(7) Ibid. 7:4

(8) Ibid.

Nestorius on the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:25:00 +0000

Nestorius is a fairly famous character in Christian history given that it is to his name that we attach one of the major Christian sects of the late Roman era: the Nestorians. This description is however problematic in part because so-called Nestorian Christianity was not really that different from orthodox Christianity: the difference was rather meekly that the orthodox Christians rejected Nestorius' teachings (which anticipated a significant number of Protestant arguments especially in around the so-called 'Marian Cult') en toto while the Nestorian Christians accepted him as one of their many teachers but did not elevate him to a position of intellectual primary within their sect. (1)

Nestorius himself was the fifth century archbishop of Byzantium/Constantinople, but only held the position for five years before being deposed by the Emperor Theodosius II in 431 AD. Perhaps predictably we have very little of Nestorious' voluminous writings have come down to us with one only of his works; 'The Bazaar of Heracleides', has come down to us more or less complete in addition to a few of his short missives to Pope Celestine.

The concern of most writers on the subject of Nestorius is usually in and around his rivalry with Saint Cyril (the famous Bishop of Alexandria); who was also responsible for the murder (quite possibly conducted by a converted jew) (2) of the pagan neo-Platonic philosopher and mathematician Hypathia, as well as what of his theological ideas we can discern from his few extant works and what his ecclesiastical enemies claimed about his arguments and intellectual positions.

However what has been almost universally ignored is Nestorius' several comments on the jews in his work, which I shall highlight and analyze in this article. For ease of reference for the reader I have used the commonly available edition of Nestorius' 'The Bazaar of Heracleides' by Driver and Hodgson. (3)

Nestorius in fact mentions the jews in the first few lines of 'The Bazaar of Heracleides' when he is outlining what he believes enemies of orthodox Christianity argue. To wit:

'Wherefore the Jews do not admit that he is Christ.

But the Jews do not confess that he is Christ because of the Cross and the death, in that they look for the advent of Christ in all great glory and dominion.' (4)

This is then clarified by what Nestorius says a few pages later:

'The Sabellians. Among them indeed are also those who deny that God the Word exists in ousia and who say only that the name 'God the Word' is that command: He spoke and it became. But thus also they predicate the Father and the Holy Spirit in name alone; so in short they agree rather with the Jews than with Christians.' (5)

Now what does Nestorius seem to be saying here?

Well very simply Nestorius is trying to add a qualification to the orthodox view of the fact that jews rejected Christ and then crucified him: thus making them responsible en bloc for the crimes of deicide (the murder of a God). What he is pointing out is that the jews killed Jesus because they simply did not believe that he was their long awaited Messiah and that when Christ comes again in the last days then; Nestorius believed, the jews would correct their error.

That is perhaps the obvious interpretation of what Nestorius is saying, but I would correct Driver and Hodgson's translation here because they have unintentionally altered the meaning of what Nestorius is saying by using the Greek rather the Hebrew term (i.e. 'Christ' rather than 'Messiah'). The term 'Christ' effectively chastens what Nestorius is saying, because of its generally positive connotation in Western thought compared to the generally neutral one for the term 'Messiah'.

This is because when we use the correct term 'Messiah' then the simple interpretation changes from Nestorius saying that the jews will realise their error when Christ comes again (which is a relatively benign message) to the far more Orthodox Christian message that the jews rejected Jesus because he did not fit in their notion of what the Messiah should be (which is a somewhat anti-jewish message).

To prove that all we need do is but look at the rather unusual wording that:

'Jews do not confess that he is Christ because of the Cross and the death, in that they look for the advent of Christ in all great glory and dominion.'

Which then changes (per my correction) to:

'Jews do not confess that he was the Messiah because of the Cross and the death, in that they look for the advent of the Messiah in all great glory and dominion.'

We should note that the precise wording that the jews 'look for the advent of the Messiah in all great glory and domination' is actually a fairly accurate rendering of jewish; not Christian, conceptions of the Messiah.

In other words to a Christian: Jesus was the Messiah who died on the cross to save the world, but to the jews the Messiah is judged not by his death and the saving of souls. Rather the Messiah is judged by the fact that when he comes as Elijah reborn: he was lead the jews to great military glory and thus dominion over the world (hence 'great glory' [i.e. conquering the non-jews] and [great] 'dominion' [i.e. conquering the world]). If a person claiming to be the Messiah didn't do that then according to the jews then he simply wasn't the Messiah in the first place.

This is reinforced by the fact that Nestorius is trying to place the fundamental beliefs of Christian sects and opponents of Christianity in their proper context so that they can be objectively examined. This would mean that interpreting the passage in the sense of the jews realizing their error when the Second Coming of Christ occurred would be necessarily be out of place, but interpreting the passage as to why the jews refused to credit the fact that Jesus was the Messiah fits the rest of Nestorius' text perfectly.

Thus we can already see that Nestorius; in spite of appearances, was not exactly complimentary towards the jews. While in the second of the two passages we can also see that Nestorius is effectively; if concisely, berating a Christian sect called the Sabellians for believing as jews do and not as Christians do.

Nestorius' general hostility to the jews is further confirmed by another comment he makes about their responsibility for the trial and crucifiction of Jesus. To wit:

'But by those who pass for orthodox these things are said, that he is of the very nature of the Father, impassible and without needs and unchangeable and immutable, and then, as the Jews mocked, calling him Christ, and surely crucified him'. (6)

It should be noted that this particular comment is buried in a lengthy discussion of the 'divine nature' of the Father and the Son by Nestorius and in which he signally fails; while attacking just about everything else the orthodox Christians of the time argued (i.e. those who agreed with Saint Cyril), to dispute or even criticise the comment that the jews mocked and crucified Jesus.

This isn't a positive statement of Nestorius' opinions on the jews of course (in spite of believing Jesus to have been a jew), (7) but the notable absence of criticism of that particular orthodox proposition directly suggests that Nestorius found nothing to criticise in it, because that is what he himself believed and argued was the case.

That said Nestorius; like Martin Luther in his 'On the Jews and their Lies', did allow the possibility; which was required by the basic tenants of Christianity, that jews could turn against their nature per se, because they were first men and that if a prophet of old were to rise up among them (in which role he envisions the Christian clergy) then some of them could be saved. (8)

But once again Nestorius clearly regards the jews as the bitter enemies of Christianity as he tells us that:

'For not even Paul, when he was stoning Stephen with the stoning Jews, was then an Apostle but when he removed himself afar from stoning.' (9)

We can see clearly in the above that jews; in Nestorius' view, were the great persecutors and enemies of Christians and hardly their friends as some have wished to read Nestorius' thinking. Add to that the fact that we have a reference to a homily that Nestorius explicitly composed against jews (although not the actual text) (10) then it is clear that Nestorius was actually a strident enemy of the jews albeit something of a moderate in the fifth century world of fervently anti-jewish Christianity.

References

(1) Charles Freeman, 2009, 'A New History of Early Christianity', 1^st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven, p. 306

(2) On this see the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/03/hypathia-of-alexandria-victim-of-jews.html

(3) G. Driver, Leonard Hodgson (Eds. and Trans.), 1925, 'The Bazaar of Heracleides', 1^st Edition, Clarendon Press: Oxford

(4) Ibid, p. 8

(5) Ibid, pp. 43-44

(6) Ibid, p. 94

(7) Ibid, pp. 99; 202

(8) Ibid, pp. 376-377

(9) Friedrich Loofs, 1905, 'Nestoriana: Die Fragmente des Nestorius', 1^st Edition, Max Niemeyer: Halle, Frg. 253 (cf. Friedrich Loofs, 1904, 'Die Überlieferung und Anordnung der Fragmente des Nestorius', 1^st Edition, Max Niemeyer: Halle and Friedrich Loofs, 1914, 'Nestorius and His Place in the History of Christian Doctrine', 1^st Edition, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge for good general background on the fragments and Nestorius respectively)

(10) Loofs, 'Nestoriana', Op. Cit., Frg. 254

Eutropius on the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 19:08:00 +0000

Eutropius is not a name well-know to many outside the scholarly realms of the Classics and as such his comments on the jews; or rather in those instances where Roman history crossed with jewish history, are often forgotten. This is in part because Eutropius' only know work; his Compendium of Roman History, is largely just a summary of what was known or believed about history to that point in time.

This isn't helped by Eutropius' distance; in terms of time elapsed, from most of the events that he describes, but never-the-less his comments about the jews should be brought to the fore once more so that we may be complete in our investigation of ancient and classical authors who commented on the jews.

However before we look at what he has to say about them we should explain that Eutropius was not a man of small station in the Roman Empire in his lifetime as he served the Emperor Julian faithfully as his secretary and then served in a significant administrative capacity up to at least the Emperor Valens. This gives additional weight to what Eutropius has to say in part because he; as a member of the Imperial household, would have had access to a wide range of sources that he could condense and would have been able to very easily check the sources of claims before deciding whether to credit them or not.

This makes Eutropius a very useful 'fact check' if you like, but it also makes him a difficult author to use if he was our only source for a particular claim. Hence historians tend to use Eutropius more as a 'fact check' and a guide to Roman historical thinking than a source in his own right.

Having described Eutropius as an individual and also commented on the use of his work by historians: we can then move on to what Eutropius has to say about the jews. The answer to that is that he; because of his purpose to write a summary of Roman history, only touches on the jews twice in the course of the Compendium.

The first mention that Eutropius makes of the jews is as follows:

'Shortly after he subdued the Itureans and Arabians; and, on entering Syria, rewarded Seleucia, a city near Antioch, with independence, because it had not admitted King Tigranes. To the inhabitants of Antioch he restored their hostages. On those of Daphne, being charmed with the beauty of the spot and the abundance of water, he bestowed a portion of land, in order that their grove might be enlarged. Marching from thence to Judea, he took Jerusalem, the capital, in the third month; twelve thousand of the Jews being slain, and the rest allowed to surrender on terms. After these achievements, he returned into Asia, and put an end to this most tedious war. ' (1)

This is then followed and clarified by the following comment:

'In the six hundred and ninetieth year from the building of the city, in the consulate of Decimus Junius Silanus and Lucius Muraena, Metellus triumphed on account of Crete, Pompey for the Piratic and Mithridatic wars. No triumphal procession was ever equal to this; the sons of Mithridates, the son of Tigranes, and Aristobulus, king of the Jews, were led before his car; a vast sum of money, an immense mass of gold and silver, was carried in front. At this time there was no war of any importance throughout the world.' (2)

What Eutropius is referring to here is the conquest of the near east by the famous General Pompey as part of the end-game of the prolonged Roman campaign against King Mithridates of Pontus and King Tigranes of Armenia, which were then and are now more commonly called the Mithridatic Wars. One of the countries which aligned with Mithridates and Tigranes was Judea; under King Aristobulus II, and which was brought under Roman control by Pompey's destruction of the Mithridatic armies (although it was not ruled by a Roman governor till the time of the Emperor Vespasian). (3)

Eutropius' comments however do have a slight anti-jewish tinge to them in that Pompey showed great favour to most other cities and countries that had aligned with Mithridates and Tigranes, but then in the case of the jews: he slaughters twelve thousand of them, forces them to beg for their lives and then promptly marches their king off to be humiliated in his Triumph in Rome.

This suggests that the jews were somewhat different to cities like Antioch that had sided with Mithridates and Tigranes precisely because Pompey shows mercy to them, but shows very little towards the jews.

We also should note the interesting addition of Aristobulus to the sons of Mithridates and Tigranes as part of the central element of 'defeated enemies of Rome' in Pompey's triumphal procession. This strongly suggests that either Aristobulus had dared to defy Rome after his side had been beaten or that Pompey wanted to teach the jews; who we know were close allies of Mithridates (as many of them were in Pontus), a particularly harsh lesson as part of Mithridates' inner circle of confederates with Tigranes.

Either solution works with the former being the more likely as it includes less assumptions about Pompey's mindset than the latter. That said the latter is strongly supported by the fact Pompey had Aristobulus poisoned on his way home to Judea (4) and then had his son beheaded at Antioch (5) in order to make sure the jews got the message (which; as history informs us, they did not).

Regardless of which solution is; in fact, the truth: we should note that Eutropius very clearly depicts the jews as the particular enemies of Rome. A fact that cannot have been lost on his readers given that at the time of the writing of the Compendium: the jews were numerous and played a powerful role in Rome, while the bodies of Mithridates and Tigranes were dust.

This slight anti-jewish tinge to Eutropius' compendium is also indicated by the fact that he does not credit anything done by the jews to be worthy of the label 'civilized', but rather states that only when outsiders have built cities in Palestine: have they been worthy of note and become great hubs of intellectual and commercial activity. (6)

All-in-all Eutropius' mentions of the jews are few, but considering what he says and also the environment in which he said it: it is very clear that Eutropius had no particular love for the jews and regarded them very simply as the enemies of Rome with little to no capacity for building creditable civilizations.

References

(1) Eutro. 6:14

(2) Ibid. 6:16

(3) Ibid. 7:19

(4) Jospeh. Bell. Jud. 1:9.1

(5) Ibid. 1:9.2

(6) Eutro. 7:10

All European Life Died in Auschwitz: A Reinterpretation

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:07:00 +0000

Recently a friend of mine emailed the rhetorical chain letter-cum-article 'All European Life Died in Auschwitz' by Sebastian Vilar Rodriguez that was written in 2008. I thought that; as I've seen the article re-posted and bandied about a lot on conservative and anti-Islamic forums, I would issue a rhetorical reinterpretation of Rodriguez's nonsensical article correcting its many historical blunders and focusing on the true culprits as opposed to just assuming their re-imagination of their own past and present is accurate.

I should note that I have removed Rodriguez's list of Nobel claimants given that it is firstly incorrect in whom it lists as both jewish and Muslim and secondly it is completely wrong even as a simple comparison as I have been at pains to point out elsewhere. (1) Also it is difficult to replicate in part because unlike the list of jewish Nobel Prize winners: the list of European prize winners is far longer and more illustrious. (2)

I hope that you; my reader, find the below reinterpretation interesting and dare I say it: fun.

All European Life Died in Auschwitz

Karl Radl

I walked down the street in Berlin and suddenly discovered a terrible truth: Europe died in Auschwitz. We didn't kill six million Jews, but got saddled with the blame for doing it anyway. Instead of burning them in the fires of Auschwitz we allowed them to take control of our culture, thought, creativity and talent. We didn't destroy the chosen people, but we did allow them to destroy us.

The destructive contribution of these people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, in the moral compass of the world. These are the people who didn't burn.

And these people lead us; through the pretense of tolerance and because they had gulled us into trying to prove that we were cured of the disease of Nazism, to open our gates to millions of non-Europeans who brought us stupidity, ignorance, religious extremism, poverty and crime due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride.

They have blown up trains and turned our beautiful European cities into third world slums: drowning in filth, crime and vice of every kind.

Shut up in the houses that they receive free from the government they ape the chosen people who brought them here: they plan the murder and destruction of their native hosts.

And thus; in our misery, we have exchanged our ancestral culture for gay pride marches and anti-racist witch hunts, economic self-determination for financial slavery to Israel, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition.

We have exchanged the pursuit of knowledge of our European ancestors and their talent for building a better future for their children in addition to their pioneering determination to what was right regardless of the cost. For the modus operandi of the chosen people who pursue self-enrichment and personal gratification purely at the expense of others, which includes both us and our children.

What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.

The Jews are promoting brain-washing children in Holocaust Museums, teaching their children the virtue of killing ours and simply not to care if the victim is not Jewish.

The Jews blow up ships, assassinate people in other countries and bomb publishing houses. There is not a single living European who has destroyed a synagogue, but yet there is not a single Jew who protests the killing of Europeans.

The Jews routinely traffic slaves and their leaders call our epoch the time of their eternal victory, while proclaiming that in the near future every Jew will rule over every non-Jew.

Jews must ask 'what can they do for mankind' before they can ask that mankind forgive them for the Holocaust Industry.

Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel, the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours: even if you believe there is more culpability on the side of the Palestinians and the Arabs, then the following four lines says it all:

'The Jews were only forced to desist from their nastiness and clean up the mess by the threat of the butt ends of rifles. Of course, I know the expression 'lost tribes of Israel' applied to the tribes which disappeared -- not to the tribe of Judah from which the current sons of bitches are descended. However, it is my personal opinion that this too is a lost tribe -- lost to all decency.'

- General George Patton

It is a matter of history that General Patton warned us that the chosen people were preparing to use a Big Lie to assure their own self-enrichment, self-gratification and cultural domination for years to come. While to paraphrase what General Dwight Eisenhower told us: we should get everything on record now, because down the road of history someone will get up and say that the Holocaust Industry never happened.

It is now more than seventy years after the Second World War in Europe ended. Why is Europe still paying for atrocities it never committed? Why is the United States alone; with crime and poverty rampant domestically, still giving Israel at least 2.8 billion dollars a year? Why is Israel not paying for its well-documented atrocities?

Does not all of this violent injustice come from the fantasy that millions of Jews were burned in the fires of Auschwitz?

Yes: it does.

References

(1) Dealt with in the following articles: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/jewish-versus-muslim-nobel-prize.html; http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-jewish-internet-defense-force-cant.html; http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-jewish-achievement-lists-are.html

(2) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-nobel-prize-fantasy-versus_5.html

The Crimes of Gilles de Rais and the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 00:23:00 +0000

The horrific crimes of the 15^th century French aristocrat; Gilles de Rais, are well known to the general reader, but aside from this image of Gilles de Rais; or 'Bluebeard' as he came to be known in French literature, (1) they have several aspects to them which are not so widely known.

In the first instance there are some grounds for doubting Gilles' actual crimes in that the ecclesiastical court that tried him (and recommend his case to the secular court for sentencing [i.e. for his execution]) was not exactly disinterested and the actual reason for bringing him to court (his violation of a Church's sanctity by seizing a priest during mass with that priest having cheated him out of a piece of property) (2) was obviously nothing more than a pretext. The case itself seems to have a sub-text of political motives; hence the pride of place of the charge of heresy and not child murder/witchcraft in the original indictment, (3) relating to the Duke of Brittany and the Bishop of Nantes' attempts to extract land from the increasing bankrupt Gilles. Hence Gilles' offer of large bequests to the church and request to join the Carmelite monks (4) can be interpreted as an attempt to buy his way out a political trial and preserve an inheritance for his daughter.

In the second Gilles only confessed; such as his confession may be termed one, when he was told he would be tortured if he did not do so. (5)

In the third Gilles' victims were universally young and male: those female victims we have allegations of his killing are from dubious testimony, because the testimony is non specific while that related to some of the boys that went missing is. (6)

This lends itself to seeing Gilles as a homosexual paederast (also pointed to by the fact that he only ever had one daughter with his wife [who had at least one child we know of with her second husband)]and seems to have been away from her whenever possible) with strong religious convictions. Gilles; for want of a better term, was really a bit dim and easily lead by others as is shown by the fact that nobody at the French court thought Gilles a political or social threat when he was appointed as a Marshall of France. (7)

This stands in stark contrast to the usual portrayal of Gilles as a genius whose mind was unable to find its niche, (8) but on closer inspection we find that this is a supposition based on the fact that we know that Gilles; in an age before books were common, a copy of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses', Suetonius' history of the Caesars and two copies of St. Augustine's 'City of God'. (9)

However a simple fact is overlooked in that supposition: Gilles was a very ostentatious individual (10) and books; especially rare ones, were an expensive luxury. (11) It does not necessarily follow that because Gilles owned copies of some rare books that he was a rootless intellectual.

Indeed the odds are that it was an ostentatious display because in the first instance Gilles never pursued any higher education what-so-ever (he hated his two ecclesiastical tutors for a start and so bad was their relationship that he hunted one of them down twenty years after the fact). (12) While in the second had Gilles been a genius; or even highly intelligent, then; if he did what was alleged and he confessed to doing, he would have realised that he didn't need all the sorcerers and alchemists he acquired and could have pursued his own alchemical researches using just occasional advice and his own reading.

That he felt he needed large doses of outside help from a whole range of charlatans and snake oil salesmen; (13) and furthermore that he strongly believed in their rather obvious deceptions (such as a sorcerer entering a haunted wood at night of the new moon only to make lots of loud noises to indicate he had summoned something), (14) suggests quite strongly that Gilles was less a medieval Einstein and more the village idiot given control of the village.

It is important to understand this lack of intelligence because it in part potentially exonerates Gilles from some of the blame for the crimes; which he probably committed at least some of, (15) in that; as Bataille has pointed out, (16) Gilles likely fell under the spell of his longest alchemist companion named Francois Prelati.

Prelati; as Bataille argues, is likely the key agent in Gilles' downfall as he appears to have seduced Gilles and introduced him to paederasty as well as the various types of sadistic sexuality with which Gilles is now closely associated. The thing about Prelati is that he escaped the trial of Gilles; in spite of being directly responsible for the alleged murder and sexual molestation of hundreds of male children, with only a life sentence which he then absconded from only then to seduce another lord who wished to dabble in alchemy and the occult, becoming arrogant once again, being captured and then put to death. (17)

Now in coming to Prelati we come to the convergence of our description of the crimes of Gilles and the jews in two separate issues. The first is in what Gilles was specifically trying to do (create a new source of revenue for himself by cracking the secrets of the art of alchemy) and the second is why he was specifically trying to do it in the first place.

Lets return to Prelati now for a moment to observe that we know precious little about him other than he had allegedly been a cleric at one time (18) (although I doubt this and would suggest it more likely that Prelati was assuming the air of clerical honours after being well-schooled) and that he was an Italian. (19)

Now for all that Prelati was obviously something of a con-artist: I don't doubt that he did genuinely believe; at least partly anyway, in the possibility and plausibility of what he was trying to do (i.e. transform base metals into 'prima materia' and then transform them back into valuable metals such as gold and silver). However to do such experiments and test his theories he needed rich sponsors with a slightly gullible streak willing to part with large sums of cash in order to obtain the rare ingredients needed for such experimentation.

The ideas however that formed much of what Prelati was doing are heavily derived from elements of jewish magic; specifically the Kabbalah, which had begun to significantly penetrate the thinking of Western occultic masters and adepts at around this time. (20) Specifically one of the most significant borrowings from jewish magic was the direct invocation of demons as deliberate agents who could be bound by the will of a sufficiently skilled conjurer to do their persona bidding (21) as opposed to the value-neutral 'spirit invocations' that were common in traditional European magic. (22)

Christian and traditional European ideas about magic of course fused with these jewish borrowings to create the demons as significant entities of themselves as opposed to the evil entities who could be controlled of jewish magic (usually for use in divination) (23) and the spirits of the ancestors and the Gods who were invoked in traditional European magic.

The merger comes from the jewish habit; as shown most tangibly by the use of 'Ba'al' (lit. 'Master') in the Old Testament to describe a whole range of different gods and deities, of assuming that any god or metaphysical entity other than Yahweh was actually just an evil spirit who was worshipped by deluded individuals and nations fusing with the Christian belief in a literal 'evil one' (i.e. the devil) making an 'evil spirit' rather more than a wandering enemy of God's creation, but rather a member of the devil's highly organized legion of the damned.

In essence we can see that the demons that Prelati and others alleged they had raised (including the devil himself on several occasions) were essentially taken almost directly from jewish concepts of magic and had been given a Christian veneer by apportioning them a place within the Christian intellectual cosmogony.

However Christian the devil might at first appear to be: in large measure the devil Gilles knew; and indeed that we still hear of today, wore a kippah, a tallith and conversed in Hebrew.

The demonology of the jews and Kabbalistic ideas about the mystical importance of individual characters and names (although these did have precedent in European magic their use was substantially different and their power understood differently when compared to the jewish versions) is visible to us through the importance attached to such things by occultists and alchemists in the medieval era.

When we add that we know that this specific kind of 'agent magic' (i.e. jewish demonology which developed from jewish angelology) sprung from the jews in southern Italy our interest must be tweaked. (24) This is even more interesting because southern Italy was one of the greatest jewish centres of Gilles' day (25) (the jews having been officially expelled from France in 1306) and Prelati; of course, just happened to come from Italy.

We also know that jews were; shortly before Gilles' time, coming north into the regions previously cleansed of their jewish inhabitants (26) and that this means that Gilles' agents; who were scouring southern Europe (specifically Italy) for skilled occultists and alchemists, (27) would have run into a large number of jewish occultists and alchemists or at the very least many of those who had been trained and inspired by them.

Prelati; of course, is an obvious candidate for at least being inspired by jewish magic or magicians in his quest for the 'prima materia'. We cannot say whether Prelati was himself of jewish origin or not with no evidence to do so, but it is clear that if he wasn't jewish: he was probably deeply inspired by the magical ideas of the jews.

One particular idea that seems to have dominated Gilles' thought is the concept of spiritual transgression in that we are told that Gilles would do anything Prelati told him to in order to effect the desired result except for one thing: sell his soul to the devil. (28) This wasn't through a lack of Prelati's encouragement to do so, (29) but because Gilles was deeply religious in a way that I would opine is very difficult for the modern secular man to comprehend.

In Prelati's suggesting, encouragement and management of Gilles' alleged crimes we should see a man who wanted to get to the 'prima materia' no matter what and Gilles was; in many ways, the ideal candidate to help him do that as he was deeply in debt to moneylenders and was willing to do practically anything to get his fortune back so he could pursue his expensive habits again. In essence Gilles was Prelati's experiment to see if human sacrifice, sodomy, torture and fornication could actually summon the devil and please him sufficiently to give Prelati the secret to alchemy (which the devil was presumed to know). (30)

In Prelati we can see the evil mastermind behind Gilles' crimes and also a man who deserved a far more painful death than he; in fact, received. The question of his jewishness may be impossible to prove either way, but it is no accident that a plethora of writers on Gilles have mentioned that jewish magic; and specifically the Kabbalah, was key to the intellectual system that underlay Gilles' alleged crimes. (31)

Having illuminated the jewish influence on the crimes themselves it remains for us to look into the second half of the equation as to what drove Gilles to do what he allegedly did.

That is really very simple: Gilles was a spendthrift par extraordinaire and in spite of being one of the richest subjects of the French crown. He managed to bankrupt himself in a few short years by his habit of giving large sums of money to almost random individuals, settling parts of his estates on other individuals and spending outrageous sums on making war on the English crown (specifically in service to the French crown through the agency of Jean d'Arc) as well as on theatre productions and religious services/paraphernalia.

By the beginning of his crimes (when he resigned as a Marshall of France) in 1432 Gilles was all but broke and had begun borrowing from moneylenders as well as selling off estates to other lords queuing up to buy them at bargain prices (Gilles was desperate for ready cash after all and as soon as he acquired it he had usually squandered it). (32)

The interesting question in that is: who were the moneylenders?

Since the moneylenders at this time were usually Christian monastic institutions and we have no record; that I have seen or heard of, of Gilles borrowing from such institutions (I suspect he would have found it immoral to do so due to his excessive religiosity): it is reasonable to assume he had found some other stream of credit. Gilles' known contact and predilection for Italy suggests a very obvious candidate in the jewish moneylenders who were famously operating throughout Italy in spite of the attempts by the Papacy to outlaw them. (33)

If Gilles did borrow (at least in part) from jewish moneylenders; as we may speculatively but reasonably suggest, then it also gives us the vector for how he and his agents located occultists and alchemists in such numbers as to be able to judge those thought most skilled and employ them. The reason for this is rather simple in that many jews in the medieval period; as well before and after, often had a formal occupation; such as money lending, and also had a separate religious life, which could; for the more mystical, easily include engaging in jewish magic and teaching non-jews bits of said magic for a price.

This completes the riddle of Gilles then as it gives us both the key origin of the magical ideas he thought he was experimenting with and also the medium through which those ideas were introduced to him as well as locating the partial agent of Gilles' financial desperation in one group of people: the jews.

This then turns the famous scholar of jewish magic Joshua Tractenberg's argument that the activities of Gilles de Rais informed Christian charges of witchcraft, sorcery and devil worship against the jews (34) on its head. Instead it places the crimes of Gilles de Rais in a background of increasing financial desperation; partially caused by the jews, and the concomitant desperation to find the magical secrets; garnered ultimately from the jews, of transmutation of base metal into gold.

It is then clear that the jews bear at least some of the responsibility for the murder of the several hundred male children allegedly tortured, sodomized and butchered by Gilles de Rais in the name of magical experimentation and his own flagging fortunes.

References

(1) Georges Bataille, Richard Robinson (Trans.), 2004, 'The Trial of Gilles de Rais', 1^st Edition, Amok: Los Angeles, p. 17

(2) Ibid, pp. 62-63

(3) A. Vincent, Claire Binns, 1926, 'Gilles de Rais: The Original Bluebeard', 1^st Edition, A. Philpot: London, p. 164; vis-a-vis Robert Moore, 2012, 'The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe', 1^st Edition, Profile: London

(4) Candice Black (Ed.), 2012, 'Satanic Alchemy: Atrocities of Gilles de Rais', 1^st Edition, Sun Vision Press: Washington D.C., pp. 63-65

(5) Bataille, Op. Cit., p. 22; Vincent, Binns, Op. Cit, pp. 174-175

(6) Implied by Ibid., pp. 34-37; also Black, Op. Cit., pp. 43-44; 60-61

(7) Ibid, p. 31

(8) Tennille Dix, 1931, 'The Black Baron: The Strange Life of Gilles de Rais', 1^st Edition, Eveleigh Nash: London, pp. 34-35

(9) Black, Op. Cit., p. 82

(10) Bataille, Op. Cit., pp. 47-52

(11) Black, Op. Cit., p. 155

(12) Bataille, Op. Cit., pp. 25; 98-99

(13) Black, Op. Cit., pp. 15-16; 108

(14) Ibid, p. 16

(15) Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1974, 'Witchcraft in the Middle Ages', 1^st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, p. 263

(16) Bataille, Op. Cit., pp. 23; 32

(17) Ibid, p. 23

(18) Black, Op. Cit., pp. 14-17

(19) Ibid, pp. 17; 36

(20) Russell, Op. Cit., p. 262

(21) Joshua Tractenberg, 1939, 'Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion', 1^st Edition, Behrman's Jewish Book House: New York, p. 26

(22) On this see Bengt Ankarloo, Stuart Clark (Eds.), 2002, 'Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Middle Ages', 1^st Edition, University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia

(23) Tractenberg, Op. Cit., p. 26

(24) Ibid, pp. 72-73

(25) Robert Chazan, 2006, 'The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom 1000-1500', 1^st Edition , Cambridge University Press: New York, pp. 119-120

(26) Ibid, pp. 121-122

(27) Black, Op. Cit., pp. 15-17

(28) Black, Op. Cit, pp. 37-38

(29) Vincent, Binns, Op. Cit, pp. 136-137

(30) Bataille, Op. Cit., pp. 59-62

(31) Vincent, Binns, Op. Cit, p. 128; Dix, Op. Cit., p. 56; Black, Op. Cit., p.15

(32) Ibid, pp. 97; 111; 121; Bataille, Op. Cit., pp. 14; 44; 47-52

(33) Chazan, Op. Cit., pp. 121-124

(34) Tractenberg, Op. Cit., p. 9

Anti-Semitic Aphorisms

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:13:00 +0000

Some anti-Jewish Aphorisms that I came up with today during my lunchtime walk. I thought I'd share them with my readers. To wit:

---------------------------

If anti-Semitism is the longest hatred then how is it that that hatred isn't caused by Jews?

When a Jew calls you an anti-Semite: he means to tell you that he is anti-White.

Anti-Zionist is the politically correct way to say that one opposes Jewish behaviour: anti-Semite is the politically incorrect way of saying it.

If there is no Jewish conspiracy then why do so many conspiracies involve Jews?

If Palestine was meant for the Jews by God then why did God kick them out again?

If the Germans killed six million Jews then why aren't we told that the Jews killed eight million Germans?

If the Palestinians are terrorists and Israelis victims now: then doesn't that make the Jews terrorists and the Palestinians victims before?

If the Holocaust happened then why are there so many survivors?

If the Holocaust is the best documented event in history then why do historians cite so little of the documentation?

An anti-Semite is someone a Jew wants to silence.

If Communism wasn't Jewish then why were so many Communists born to Jewish parents?

If the Jews are White then why do they describe themselves as Jewish?

If Aristotle said a bad word about Jews would that mean he was therefore a bigoted and paranoid pseudo-intellectual?

If all Israel wants is to live in peace with its Arab neighbours then why does it always invade them?

If the rise of radical Islam was unrelated to Israel's treatment of the Arab world then why would the plight of the Palestinians be at the top of radical Islam's tally of grievances?

If radical Islam hates Jews then why were the creators of radical Islam themselves Jewish?

Being skeptical about Jewish claims is the first step on the highway to Hitler.

Harold Russell Rosenthal, Walter White Jr. and 'The Hidden Tyranny'

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 21:07:00 +0000

The pamphlet and the alleged interview that make up Walter White Jr's pamphlet 'The Hidden Tyranny' have recently come to my attention once again as I happened to be researching the inter-war anti-Communist Edwin Marshall Hadley and my copy of one of Hadley's works; 'Kehilla Unmasked', was republished by Walter White Jr. in 1980. (1) In that work I was reminded of a particular interview that White claimed to have performed in 1976 with Harold Russell Rosenthal; a senior jewish aide to Senator Jacob K. Javits, which he published in his periodical 'Western Destiny' and in pamphlet form. (2)

In this article I'd like to focus on the question of the authenticity of this claimed interview in part because it is used to back up claims of a Protocols of Zion type of jewish conspiracy and also due to the fact that I find White's story rather incredible. What I will not do in this article is seek to interpret the Rosenthal interview text per se, because I would argue to do that we would have to have some evidence that the interview text is actually genuine (which we do not).

I should begin by correcting an issue I noticed while checking what people had written about 'The Hidden Tyranny' on the internet: it seems an author; Charles A. Weisman, associated with Christian Identity has been confused as being the interviewer (3) although; as Henry Makow has correctly alluded, the interviewer and author was Walter White Jr. (4) It is possible that Weisman did claim to be the interviewer and author as he does list it on his site and doesn't mention White in his description of 'The Hidden Tyranny'. (5)

It also possible that Weisman could have been a later pseudonym of White's (I have been unable to establish when White died although he would have been of near retirement age by 1980 and Weisman was still active in 2005), (6) but this seems very unlikely given the significant differences in written styles as well as differences in their intellectual interests. I am unwilling to rule the possibility out completely in part because White's publication 'Western Front' was head-quartered in Hollywood, which also happens to be where Dr. Wesley Swift (more or less the founder of Christian Identity) had his base and White; throughout his works and 'Western Front', shows that his racialism and Conservatism is based on a deeply-held sense of Protestant Christian faith with some similarities to Christian Identity.

This; of course, is a side point, but never-the-less one that I felt needed some comment. Getting back to the thrust of this article I shall begin my commentary on the authenticity of White's transcript by pointing to a peculiar omission on White's part in that he doesn't once mention the date of the interview.

Given that White claims that the interview was 'highly confidential', (7) hints (although does not explicitly claim) that Rosenthal was murdered in a false flag attack by the Israeli state (pretending to be the Palestine Liberation Organization) on an Israeli civilian aircraft in Istanbul on the 12^th of August 1976, (8) that White was kidnapped on the morning of the 21^st of March 1977 for more than five days during which time he was repeatedly beaten up, (9) that he was further badly beaten up on the 13^th of March 1978 (10) and that on the 26^th September 1979 two men; pretending to be delivering a parcel, forced their way into his home while holding him and his wife hostage so they could steal the tapes of Rosenthal interview (only to knock White and his wife out when they had obtained them). (11)

Then it is extremely odd that White never once gives us a date that this alleged interview with Rosenthal took place. We are given dates by White for everything but the very thing that we need the date for in order to verify it: now conversely if the interview never took place then a date could be used to disprove White's story as we could discover where Rosenthal was and where White was.

The argument that the interview was so 'highly confidential' that White wouldn't have disclosed that information is absurd precisely because Rosenthal was dead and White was a well known critic of jews (being the publisher and chief luminary of 'Western Front' since at least 1967) who in fact styled himself a fearless critic of the jews. (12) That should have been all too happy to disclose when and where he met Rosenthal for his interview (he did after all pay Rosenthal for his time in his version of events) (13) so that this could be verified by his supporters as; simply put, he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing so.

After all why give us the dates for all the assaults on his person as well as that of his wife (and I don't have any reason to doubt White's truthfulness here although I do doubt the motives he necessarily suggested were behind these attacks) and not give us the one piece of information that would allow us to easily confirm the authenticity of what he himself referred to as the Protocols of Zion of 1979? (14)

This obviously then gives us cause to doubt White's version of events; as well as his transcript, as they are unverifiable given that according to White the tapes were stolen in 1979 and the only other person who attended that interview; Rosenthal, was dead. This effectively means that we only have White's word that the interview ever took place.

It doesn't help that the interview must; if White's story is to be believed, have taken place some time (presumably at least several weeks given White's allegations about the Israeli state's role in Rosenthal's early demise) before the 12^th of August 1976, but yet 'The Hidden Tyranny' was only published in mid-late 1977. That is odd precisely because White tells us that he knew he had 'political dynamite' in his hands, (14) but then claims that he waited a year to publish the material out of 'respect' for Rosenthal. (15)

The problem with that is simply that it is completely inconsistent with White's own professed goals in that if he 'knew he had a political weapon' in his hands; a new Protocols of Zion in his estimation, (16) then why would he wait a year out 'respect' for a man who had been deeply offensive throughout the interview, (17) who White believed to have been a high-ranking member of the jewish conspiracy (18) and who White also believed to have been silenced by that same conspiracy because of said interview? (19)

White claims that he did 'not want to hurt' the Rosenthal family; who had set up a fellowship in his honour (which still operates to this day), (20) but one has to ask why White would essentially retard his own cause to honour a jewish family that he did not really know and politically was radically opposed to?

Surely if White wanted to honour the legacy of Rosenthal then he would have published what Rosenthal said and made copies of the tapes so that Rosenthal's legacy would help the many at the expense of the few. That he waited a year; which again is a very long time to wait, while believing that distributing this manuscript was a 'God-given mission' (21) is telling I think that the transcription isn't exactly kosher.

Another issue which plays into this is that the first version of 'The Hidden Tyranny'; which was published in 1977, is not actually a transcription as White describes it (22) but rather a series of quotes which we are given little context for. We are given relatively little material from the interview itself and we have to wait till the second batch of material was published in 1979 (or alternatively 1983) for anything resembling a transcription of the interview.

Even then we are told that this conversation came from after the official interview had ended (23) and that there is no transcription of the official material as 'only the first portion' was transcribed (in reality it is a series of excerpts without their context) (24) and the after-interview conversation is supposed to be 'the balance' (i.e. the rest). (25)

This is then contradicted by White's claim that the interview was 'very lengthy' (26) when in fact the first part published in 1977 is considerably shorter than the after-interview conversation that is 'the balance' published in 1979 or 1983. I say this because anyone who has transcribed an interview knows that even a standard interview lasting an hour or two can easily take up ten to fifteen pages of text let alone one that took several hours.

The simple fact is that there is not enough material for the interview transcript to have been published and what was published in transcript form was published later and even then it is not considerable. This then puts the authenticity of the Rosenthal interview in serious doubt because White is effectively telling us he has published the entirety of the transcript, but yet it isn't very long (i.e. he is contradicting himself) and the main interview was never published except for a series of excerpts.

The authenticity of the interview is put in even more jeopardy when we note that White claims that he believed it was a 'divine commandment' that he spread the knowledge about the interview (27) and considering the excerpts he published (which are fairly explosive if true) it would have been a simple thing to prepare and publish the full unedited transcript in the three or four years after the interview, but yet White never did this.

Why did he only publish the after-interview conversation and not the interview itself?

Given of course that the former is rather tame when compared to the latter with only the occasional brash statement then it becomes even more odd precisely because had the original interview contained what he claimed it did then he had a great opportunity to publicly expose the perfidy of the jews and gain attention and readership for his periodical 'Western Front'.

This is amplified greatly when we note that White himself estimates that between 1977 and 1979 'The Hidden Tyranny' had been read by some seven million people! (28)

Why didn't he capitalize on this if it was his divine mission?

The answer is difficult to see other than that White had no interview transcript and was taken aback by the scale of interest and readership of his pamphlet both domestically and internationally.

It is not unreasonable to suggest the following scenario: White began to receive letters asking for the whole transcript or a copy of the tapes, which of course he could not provide. The weight of requests however forced his hand and he wrote an after-interview conversation in 1979 and then either made-up or used a real burglary at his house in 1979 to claim that the interview tapes had been stolen by the jews (which is then conveniently backed up by the after-interview text with Rosenthal; playing the part of the jewish conspiracy, threatening White not to make copies or 'they would get him'). (29)

This White hoped would stop the requests for the full transcript and the audio recording as well as covering up the original invention of the transcript, which also makes sense of the year that White supposedly waited before publishing. In so far as White probably came up with the idea some time in 1977 and picked Rosenthal as a politically powerful jew who had recently been killed in a high profile terrorist attack to be the 'talking head' of the jewish conspiracy given he could then claim that Rosenthal had been 'silenced' (hence eliminating the possibility of being exposed like recent invented quotes like that infamously attributed to an Israel Cohen by Eustace Mullins) as well as giving the transcript the appropriate aura of persecution (i.e. it must be true because it is being allegedly suppressed). (30)

This limelight also nicely explains the difference between the excerpts of the original interview published in 1977 and the after-interview conversation published in 1979 or 1983.

The former quotes are at best largely comical and representative of anti-jewish opinion as opposed to jewish opinion when they make such faux pas as claiming that 'jews control the Kremlin' (31) and the Russian Communist Party (CPSU) was '50 percent jewish' (32) [in 1976 don't forget!] when; at the time of the interview, Zionists were declaring the Kremlin to be anti-Semitic and were engaged in a not inconsiderable public relations battle against it in the United States and the Middle East. (33)

We are also told; in excerpts that are clearly all but summaries from the common English translation of the Protocols of Zion, that the jews have deliberately taken control the printed and publication of textbooks for schools in order to rewrite history, (34) that jews created Israel to disprove the words of Jesus, (35) that Jesus wasn't jewish, (36) the jews aren't the 'chosen people' of Yahweh (37) and so on.

Compare that to the after-interview conversation and we note the dramatic change in that while being belligerent Rosenthal merely claims the jews control the news media in America, (38) Jesus wasn't a jew (again), (39) the jews control the churches and schools (40) and that gentiles are stupid. (41)

In the short the series of excerpts from the original interview are incredibly crude and outlandish in their claims. While the transcript of the after-interview conversation is much more measured in tone with the claims that are made being less broad and stereotyped than those of the excerpts of the original interview.

This change in tone as well as content is difficult to explain by anything other than the two texts being composed in different circumstances with the former being written to get attention by providing source material for common anti-jewish arguments and beliefs, while the latter was composed to satisfy the resultant attention and the desire for the original transcripts.

This in short means that the Rosenthal interview as published by White is likely a fake, because; in summary, the two texts are not long enough to be the whole interview as described by White, the two texts are markedly different in tone and content, we do not have a text or a recording of the original interview only excerpts in spite of the considerable interest in the text, the content of the texts is often stereotypical and contrary to common jewish tropes and positions at the time of its alleged occurrence, White does not provide us with any evidence the interview ever took place and we do not know the date of the interview in spite of being told the date of every other event related to 'The Hidden Tyranny'.

In essence there is absolutely no proof the interview ever happened and quite a lot which counts against it having occurred.

References

(1) Anon. (probably Walter White Jr.), 1980, 'The Lurking Shadow', 1^st Edition, Western Front: Hollywood

(2) See Ibid, 'Conclusion', pp. vii-viii; also Walter White Jr., 2003, [1983], 'The Hidden Tyranny', 1^st Edition, Patriot Press: Henderson

(3) http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=11222

(4) http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_zion23.htm

(5) http://www.seek-info.com/israel.htm

(6) http://www.amazon.com/Maxims-Law-Charles-Weisman/dp/B00BHYXP32/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1366047699&sr=1-2

(7) White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', Op. Cit., p. 1

(8) Ibid, p. 3

(9) White, 'The Lurking Shadow', 'Conclusion', p. vii

(10) Ibid; White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', Op. Cit., p. 27

(11) White, 'The Lurking Shadow', 'Conclusion', p. vii

(12) Ibid.

(13) Ibid.; White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', Op. Cit., p. 29

(14) Ibid, p. 26

(15) Ibid, p. 4

(16) Ibid, p. 26

(17) Ibid, pp. 2-5; 29-30

(18) Ibid, pp. 29-30

(19) Ibid, p. 3

(20) http://www.rosenthalfellowship.org/fprogdes.htm

(21) White, 'The Lurking Shadow', 'Conclusion', p. viii

(22) White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', pp. 2-4

(23) Ibid, p. 30

(24) Ibid, p. 29

(25) Ibid, pp. 29-30

(26) Ibid, pp. 4-5; 29

(27) White, 'The Lurking Shadow', 'Conclusion', p. viii

(28) White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', pp. 29-30

(29) Ibid, p. 33

(30) On this see the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/04/israel-cohens-racial-program-for.html

(31) White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', p. 8

(32) Ibid, pp. 8-9

(33) For example see Elie Wiesel, 1987, 'The Jews of Silence: A Personal Report on Soviet Jewry', 3^rd Edition, Schocken: New York; Martin Gilbert, 1987, 'Shcharansky: Hero of our Time', 2^nd Edition, Penguin: New York and Zev Katz, 1970, 'After the Six-Day War', pp. 321-336 in Lionel Kochan (Ed.), 1970, 'The Jews in Soviet Russia since 1917', 1^st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York

(34) White, 'The Hidden Tyranny', pp. 18-23

(35) Ibid, p. 7

(36) Ibid, p. 12

(37) Ibid, p. 18

(38) Ibid, p. 32

(39) Ibid, pp. 33-34

(40) Ibid, p. 38

(41) Ibid, p. 39

Was Adolf Hitler of Jewish or Rothschild Origin?

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 19:16:00 +0000

By Karl Radl with Hans Blackthorne

I have long encountered claims made by a wide variety of individuals that Adolf Hitler; the leader of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945, was of jewish; and more specifically of Rothschild, origin. These claims; usually to do with Hitler's life before he joined the DAP, are almost entirely based on hearsay and gossip combined with the need to invent reasons why Hitler was so good an orator (he 'must' have been a black magician: hence the 'Occult Reich' literature), why Hitler was keen to clamp down on some sexual and reproductive activity (he 'must' have been a homosexual or sexually aroused by scat: hence the psychoanalytic interpretations of Hitler), why Hitler invaded Poland (he 'must' have been bent on world conquest: hence the 'Hitler as a warmonger' literature) and why Hitler hated the jews and supposedly killed six million of them in the 'holocaust' (he 'must' have been of jewish origin: hence the 'Hitler as a jew' literature).

All of the above claims are quite false, but yet people often believe at least one of them; if not several at once, in part because they feel the intellectual need to 'explain' Hitler as some sort of deviant who they couldn't possibly be like, because they are 'normal' and he wasn't. The sensible position that Hitler was a normal human being; although in fairness that is underselling Hitler quite substantially given that he was obviously rather intelligent, a gifted artist and one of the best orators the world has ever known, is in sense revolutionary because it asks the question of many people; in terms of their own perceptions, as to whether they could commit acts regarded by current social norms as the very summit of evil.

This is much the same reason that other highly-talented National Socialists; like Goebbels, have been frequently been subject to the same process: although in Goebbels' case it is alleged that he was a cynic, didn't believe in a word he said, a closet communist, an accomplished liar and generally manipulated all and sundry persons to his advantage. To believe that Hitler and Goebbels were normal people; like you or I, is heresy in a very real sense for a lot of people in much the same way that communists were not often viewed as people; during the 'Red Scare' epochs of the 1920s and 1950s, but rather as a subversive 'other'.

Let us move beyond the claims of those who wish to simply vilify Hitler or proclaim that he was an agent of the Rothschilds in a gigantic Zionist conspiracy to look at whether this thesis is in any way justifiable.

There are two elements to the claim that Hitler was of jewish or Rothschild origin.

The first is the historic claim that his paternal grandmother (Maria Anne Schicklgruber) was actually impregnated while in service (i.e. employed as a live-in maid) to a jewish man of Rothschild descent surnamed Frankenberger in Graz. There are non-specific claims in relation to Hitler having a jewish father that were made during and after Hitler's ascent to power in 1933: however as these have no names or detail behind them we can safely dismiss them as being smears by opponents. (1)

The second is of far more recent vintage and originates from a Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and a customs official Marc Vermeeren (2) (the latter has incorrectly been labelled a 'historian' by a later article in an apparent attempt to give him some semblance of authority) (3) claim to have 'genetic proof' that Hitler was of partial jewish/North African origin.

The first of these positions that Hitler's father; Alois Schicklgruber, (4) was the product of a sexual indiscretion between a maid and her jewish master; Frankenberger, while the former was in his employ in Graz, derives almost singly from the memoirs of Hans Frank. (5)

In his memoirs Frank firstly claims that Hitler had no jewish ancestors, (6) but then changes his mind later reciting the Frankenberger story. (7) Further Frank claims; and we are not usually told this by proponents of the Frankenberger hypothesis, that Hitler told him that he knew about this story and that his grandfather and grandmother were actually conning the jew involved out of money. (8) Frank however; as Kershaw informs us, was in a psychologically troubled state when he wrote these lines (as he was facing execution) and his memoirs are filled with made-up information and inaccuracies. (9)

That Frank was simply inventing the Frankenberger claim can be shown easily enough by pointing out there is no confirmatory evidence for it and some significant problems with it.

In the first instance of course there is the fact that Frank contradicts himself on the subject of Hitler's alleged jewish ancestry, in the second because Patrick Hitler in his 1938-1939 'revelations' about alleged jewish ancestry did not locate that ancestry in Graz let alone the supposed fact that the ancestry was specifically of Rothschild origin, (10) in the third there is no evidence that Maria ever went to Graz, (11) and fourthly there is no record in the Graz archives of any family named Frankenberger being resident there in the 1830s when Alois was born. (12)

The possibility of it being a mistaken spelling has also been investigated; as Kershaw relates, there is only one family (the Frankreiters) and one individual (Leopold Frankreiter) in that family that Maria could have had a relationship with. However there are two qualifiers on that Leopold Frankreiter was an ordinary butcher (as opposed to the wealthy jewish financier depicted by the Frankenberger legend), employed no maid we know of and the Frankreiter family wasn't of jewish origin. (13)

The coup de grace to the whole charade of the 'jewish Hitler' claims is delivered when we understand the Gestapo themselves undertook a series of different secret investigations into Hitler's ancestry and found nothing to contradict the official NSDAP position (that Hitler's paternal grandfather was Johann Georg Hiedler) on the matter. (14)

Clearly Frank isn't the best source of information in relation to Hitler's origins then is he?

The reason the story has gained so much currency is in part that one of the major sources for biographical information about Hitler; a jewish anti-Nazi journalist named Konrad Heiden, mentioned the claims in his 1944 biography of Hitler 'Der Fuehrer', but didn't supply any actual information to back them up. (15)

We need to remember that one of the major angles for propagandistic attack on the racial doctrines of National Socialism was accusing National Socialist race theory of being the product of intellectual cranks and that Nationalist Socialist leaders weren't themselves of pure Aryan ancestry even under their own standards.

Good examples of just this kind of vicious attack can be found in wartime propaganda works such as the wartime best-seller; 'People under Hitler', where it is claimed that Japanese and Sioux Indians were officially proclaimed to be members of the Aryan race (16).

If we understand that the 'jewish Hitler' claim is born from anti-Nazi gossip in the 1920s (the reader should ask themselves which of the major leaders of the NSDAP wasn't called a jew in an attempt to discredit them) (17) and then picked up to be used as wartime 'black propaganda' by the Allies and Soviets (then being carried over into the peacetime conceptions of the subject); much as the rumours about Franklin Delano Roosevelt's alleged jewish origins were picked by Goebbels and his propagandists (most notably Johann von Leers), then it is not hard to see that the 'jewish Hitler' claims are an unfortunate historical by-product of political invective which have been picked up by pro-jewish authors in an attempt both to discredit Hitler on the far right and also provide a Freudian type explanation of his dislike of jews (i.e. it wasn't due to jewish behaviour but was ipso facto irrational).

The second argument; as advanced by Mulders and Vermeeren, is also dubious in the extreme. Our intrepid duo; who remind me more of Thompson and Thompson than Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, claim that they tracked down 39 of Hitler's living relatives using genetics. (18) The only actual relative they actually name is Alexander Stuart-Houston; Hitler's grand-nephew, who they admit to having taken DNA from for testing without knowledge or consent. (19) That we don't know who the rest of the 'Hitler relatives'; they have allegedly taken genetic material from, are throws a problematic light on their conclusions such as they are.

We simply don't have any idea who these people are or what; or even if, they have any indirect familial relationship to Hitler. Ironically we also only have Mulders' word for it is Stuart-Houston's DNA that he took from a discarded serviette. After all one wonders how Mulders specifically acquired said serviette and how on earth we can be sure that the genetic material is actually Stuart-Houston's? Since we don't know who the other donors are either it makes the whole 'study' a somewhat hilarious farce from the get-go because the genetic material has not been kept free of potential; and even probable, contamination (thus is completely inadmissible). (20)

This is in spite of all the usual weasel words from our two budding forensics boffins that they had 'taken all possible care' to keep the samples 'free of contamination'. This is; of course, clearly nonsense given what we are told about the only identified contributor (and an unknowing one at that) of genetic material to their 'study'.

What does this mean?

In effect the likely contamination of the sample means that anything Mulders and Vermeeren claim is de facto unreliable because they have no actual proof (i.e. anything linking it to Stuart-Houston) of who the genetic material comes from.

This is before we even note that their methodology is clearly faulty given that they could and should; had been they been reputable historians as opposed to a publicity-seeking hack and a customs official, have requested genetic material be extracted from one of Hitler's teeth that are still in his skull (which has been identified primarily through its fairly unique dentistry) as opposed to trying to claim an ancestor's genetic origins based on the genetics of his descendants.

You might ask why this is such a stupid thing to do and this is really because in order to establish Hitler's genetic make-up we need his own genetic material if it is available (which it is) and if not then we would need reliable genetic material from all of Hitler's direct descendants and relatives up to him. The reason we would need this is really very simple: we simply do not know if the claimed father of a person is actually the father historically speaking.

Hitler himself is a good case in point in that the two most probable candidates for being his biological grandfather are either his official grandfather (Johann Georg Hiedler) or his grandfather's brother (Johann von Nepomuk Huetler). There is simply no other serious candidate in the field and of the two Nepomuk seems the most likely given Hiedler's general rejection of Alois and Nepomuk's general acceptance of him. (21)

We cannot absolutely prove this either way of course, but we can narrow the field by using the historical documentation and thought experiment to eliminate all the other candidates.

Simply put: you cannot claim that an ancestor is proven to be something because their descendants are something because you do not know what has happened; in terms of sexual activity, in-between unless you can establish the genetic line up to the individual concerned (i.e. you need direct not indirect descent), which Mulders and Vermeeren cannot do without Hitler's actual genetic material because Hitler fathered no children.

This means in effect that Mulders and Vermeeren have no genetic case whatsoever to make the claims they do about Hitler's genetic origins: although they don't let genetics stand in the way of their broad claims.

Thus having rendered both the historical and the genetic argument invalid we can categorically state that there is no actual evidence that Hitler was jewish or Rothschild origin: indeed everything points to him being of Austrian peasant stock much as he himself asserted.

References

(1) Cf. Ron Rosenbaum, 1998, 'Explaining Hitler: A Search for the Origins of His Evil', 1^st Edition, Random House: New York, pp. 167-178

(2) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213589/Hitlers-secret-family-How-researchers-tracked-39-living-descendants-dictator.html

(3) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305414/Hitler-descended-Jews-Africans-DNA-tests-reveal.html

(4) For a particularly useful genealogical chart of Hitler's ancestors see Alan Bullock, 1954, 'Hitler: A Study in Tyranny', 1^st Edition, Companion Book Club: London, pp. 22-23

(5) Ian Kershaw, 1998, 'Hitler', Vol. 1, 1^st Edition, Penguin: New York, p. 9; Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 27; 31

(6) Kershaw, Op. Cit, p. 8

(7) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 11-15

(8) Kershaw, Op. Cit., p. 8

(9) Ibid, p. 9

(10) Ibid, pp. 8-9

(11) Ibid, p. 8

(12) Ibid.

(13) Ibid, pp. 8-9

(14) Ibid, p. 9

(15) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 130-134

(16) Wallace Deuel, 1942, 'People under Hitler', 1^st Edition, Lindsay Drummond: London, pp. 129-130

(17) The most notable examples aside from Hitler were Joseph Goebbels, Alfred Rosenberg and Reinhard Heydrich. All of which; I might add, have been categorically declared false by modern historians.

(18) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305414/Hitler-descended-Jews-Africans-DNA-tests-reveal.html

(19) Ibid.

(20) Reading between the lines of the article (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1213589/Hitlers-secret-family-How-researchers-tracked-39-living-descendants-dictator.html ) we should not that Stuart-Houston 'disposed' of the napkin in a bin and we haven't even got a clue as to whether it was his or not let alone what other genetic material would have been added to the mix in said bin.

(21) Kershaw, Op. Cit., pp. 6-7; also Charles Bracelen Flood, 1989, 'Hitler: The Path to Power', 1^st Edition, Houghton Mifflin: Boston, p. 6

An English Translation of Agobard of Lyon's 'De Insolentia Judaeorum'

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 20:42:00 +0000

Agobard of Lyon is a ninth century Christian bishop well-known to students of early medieval jewish history in part because he was involved in encouraging the active prosecution of the jews in Frankish kingdom under Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious. He wrote several treatises against the jews; none of which are more than a few pages long, which are filled with information about them and scholars agree (often grudgingly) that Agobard was well acquainted with jewish culture and Judaism (although as far as we know he himself wasn't of jewish origin) in spite of being a fanatical opponent of both. 'On the Insolence of the Jews' is the third of Agobard's writings against the jews appearing in 827 AD.

As no English translation I know of has appeared of these texts I have decided to translate the Latin original into modern English as these texts are not well-known but are of inherent value to anti-jewish thought precisely because they are rich in contextual information as well as highlighting a period of time when Christianity was a major force against Judaism as opposed to trying to placate it as is common now.

To do this I have taken the text of Agobard's work from the 'Patrologia Latina' (Vol. 104, Col. 69-74) and translated it in relation to the meaning of text as to translate much of what Agobard says literally would be largely meaningless to most readers. I have also taken the liberty here and there of inserting qualifying words and phrases as to make the meaning clear without resorting to footnotes and thus hopefully making Agobard's text less stilted than it originally was.

On the Insolence of the Jews

To the most Christian and pious conqueror Emperor Louis from the humblest of your abject servants Agobard.

God Almighty, who has made you a righteous and just ruler and pre-ordained the difficult tasks that you have undertaken, has designated that you have a sublime wisdom and a religious knowledge above other mortals of our time. There is then no doubt that you have been prepared by God for these dangerous times as the apostle says: In the last days men shall be lovers of themselves, covetous, boasters, and so on, while having an appearance of godliness. Of these we do not have to wait as they can seen at this time with the exception of the advent of Satan's kingdom and the public captivity of the holy city for forty-two months when the anti-Christ will rule at the head of the wicked.

Therefore; since these things are so: I beseech your sufferance so that I may speak to you of such things as it necessary to bring to your attention; from the perspective of the lowest of the servants of the Most Holy, so that they may be corrected. I would entreat those in your government to carry out these tasks but as you are the foundation of all authority and your ministers fear to speak of this then I entrust myself to your patience and goodness; even if it imperils me, so that you may be aware of the dangers you face.

Imperial agents; lead by Frederick and Evrard, came and showed themselves to be agents of the Jews who persecuted the meek Christians; especially at Lyon, where they desecrated the paintings of the Church and the Christian populace were goaded into angry demonstrations by this outrage. Nevertheless; in so far as it is harmful to the Church of Christ, let me begin and trust in your meekness and clemency. When they came for the first time the Jews gave me documents in your name which charged the count who rules Lyon to aid the Jews in their persecution of myself and my flock.

These documents; although they used your sacred name and were sealed using your ring, I do not believe came from you. The Jews then began to carry out the activities listed in this document with a hateful arrogance and threatened injury against Christians in order to sate their need for vengeance. After the Jews came Evrard telling everyone that you; your majesty, were very angry with me because of what I had said about the Jews. The Jews then used the documents; which I cannot believe to have come from your hand, to sanction nefarious activities and unjust legal proceedings.

This has given the Jews joy beyond measure and has aggrieved the Christians causing some to flee and others to hide while others inform on their fellow Christians to the Jews in order to gain leniency from them. The Jews then dare to preach irreverently against the Christians, speaking evil of the Lord God and our Saviour Jesus Christ before the multitude.

III

We are strengthened in our faith; against the perversity of these things, by the words of the Bible and many whisper that the behaviour of the Jews is an abomination and that they are not beloved by you and are not above other men as they would like to believe. As I am an unworthy servant of yours I may have gone to far in imposing on monasteries in letters the task of promulgating my teachings. However forgiveness should not be required for some of my priests; who I do not name, as they did not dare promulgate my teachings in the presence of the Jews as I had instructed.

The reason they did not dare to promulgate my teachings is the abuse they had suffered from the supporters of the Jews for no other reason than preaching that if a person sells slaves to Jews then that person is not a Christian. This is so that the Jews are unable to acquire Christian slaves to sell in Spain, are unable to acquire slaves for themselves and to make sure that baptised Christian women do not serve them on the Sabbath, dine with them and not eat flesh or drink their wine during the days of lent. This is especially so as the Jews; when slaughtering a cow for consumption, have three conditions for that slaughter that makes the animal unclean: the discovery of a lesion on the intestine or the liver, if the lung has split open in error or the animal was imperfectly sacrificed. This means; which can cause the meat to be poisonous, that the meat is regarded as unclean by the Jews and it is sold to the Christians who the Jews also insult by calling them cattle.

With wine that which the Jews regard as foetid and unclean they do not make use of except for selling it to the Christians so that a Jew will place whatever wine that has split on the ground into a new vessel in order to accomplish this. These things; which are the preserve of the wicked, are not only attested to by Christian witnesses but by Jewish ones as well.

I do but that which our Lord Jesus Christ has commanded me and the prayers of all Christians enjoin me to do in dealing with the Jews. Not only that but the Blessed Jerome writes that he knows the Jews inside and out as a witness to them and that all Christians should bear witness to the Jews and share the Gospel with them. In this manner I told the Christians that: Whether you are an ordinary man or a master you are faithful and you love your brother, but if a man comes into existence that you feel is the enemy of all men, a backbiter, a criminal and a deceiver: then you will not feel you have to be a friend to him or his companion in partaking of food at table. If this is so then this person will find it impossible to be friendly with with that man whether he be his father or his lord and would not think himself unfaithful for not wishing to serve him.

Therefore; like we know the Jews to be without doubt blasphemers, the faithful of Christ should not be required to participate in the consummation of meat and drink with the Jewish enemies of the Lord God and in doing so we only follow the instructions and example of the Fathers of the Church. In any case because they live among us we should not pander to them and instead show them a life whether there is no need for riches as a contrast to their own by observing the rules of the Church and we should not be cautious in seeking to spread the truth of the Gospel among them.

Thus; most kindly lord, I have described to you the treachery of the Jews and of the damage to Christianity that the supporters of the Jews have caused due to the ignorance of the Christian doctrine of our local lord. His Christian faith has been injured and corrupted by the lies of the Jews and I pray that yours; my lord, has not. For the Jews glory in telling lies to the simpler Christians that they are beloved by and represent you, whilst boasting that your counsellors have influenced you towards their cause and against ours so that you would author a law which they use against us, because we have forbidden Christians from drinking their wine. Which they have strived long and hard to maintain because they have received many pounds of silver for the purchase of this wine and also try to lure Christians from religious observance so that they may sell them more food and drink.

They do this using the documents; which cannot be genuine, that are graced by your name and golden seal, which look to show a woman's dress like those worn by your relatives or the mother of your wife. In doing this they explain that to the glory of their ancestors: your law has allowed them to build a new synagogue.

This has lead them to try to misinform Christians by proclaiming that they [the Jews] are superior to the Christians as they are authorized by the aforementioned documents to decide when market days are to be held. To do this the Jews; who come from both near and far away to sell their wares, choose days that benefit them such as Christian holidays so that they may tempt Christians away from both the morning and evening mass so that they may purchase the necessities of life from them and also entertain themselves in the festivities.

So now; if it please your generous nature, let us that state that the Gallic Church and its officials as well as the kings has to the power to prevent these abuses by the Jews. The Jewish clergy have argued that they are doing what has been handed down to them by their ancestors and draw their arguments from the Old Testament, but these we have proved to be wrong because of the authority of the Acts of the Apostles and that therefore the Jews are the enemies of truth and are in many ways worse than the pagans.

A man has testified; which I have sent to you separately, that a certain man; not yet twenty-four, recently fled from Cordoba in Spain to Lyon having been kidnapped by a certain Jew from Lyons when he was a young boy. Another boy had been kidnapped by a Jew of Arles six years ago. When he heard of this: he and some acquaintances went to find other children stolen like this and they found that Christian children were being bought and sold. One Jew had recently kidnapped and sold another boy. It is unspeakable that Christians continue to be kidnapped and solid by the Jews as these acts are base and are difficult even to write.

Umberto Eco and his Fictional Case against the Protocols of Zion

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000

It is a common adage among those who pour scorn on the Protocols of Zion that the Protocols just won't stay dead or as one fairly recent writer; in the long tradition of self-styled Protocols debunkers, Hadassah Ben-Itto put it: it was 'The Lie that wouldn't Die'. In fact it is largely not the proponents of the Protocols who haven't 'let it die', but rather the self-styled debunkers.

There has been a recent surge of books about the Protocols not the least of which is Umberto Eco's novel 'The Prague Cemetery', (1) which recalls the famous chapter of the novel 'Biarritz' penned by Hermann Goedsche (writing under the pseudonym Sir John Retcliffe).

Now despite initial appearances I don't mean to treat this novel here in part because I am yet to get through all of it as it is execrable to read if you have any kind of knowledge of the scholarly debates around the Protocols of Zion and a conception of what anti-jewish thinkers actually believe and argue. The reason I say that is; much as Robert Moore recently commented on Eco's most famous novel 'The Name of the Rose', (2) the mistakes in the presentation are voluminous and desperately awful to read if you know something of what Eco is writing about.

I must confess I have never been a particular fan of Eco's novels (although he is very readable and interesting literary theorist); even before I began looking into the Protocols of Zion, but 'The Prague Cemetery' is turgid to say the least and the peons of praise it has garnered seem to be more because it reinforces basic liberal and left-wing prejudices about supposed 'bigots' than due its innovative written style or story line.

However the intellectual origins of 'The Prague Cemetery' can be traced to a work Eco published nearly two decades earlier called 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods'. The work itself isn't commonly cited outside of those who have engaged with the literature on the Protocols of Zion as it really serves as an appendix to one of Eco's main contributions to literary theory: 'The Open Work'. (4)

This;as the title suggests, focuses on the idea of the 'open tradition' of literature in that a piece of literature; like the folklore of old, is modified by different writers and editors of a period of time to suit their particular ideas and intellectual biases. The book largely focuses on novelists, but then in the last chapter 'The Fictional Protocols' Eco suddenly changes course and spends some time discussing the Protocols of Zion as an example of a fictional open work which was taken to be fact.

It is Eco's ideas on this point that are worth discussing in more detail because they are so often cited when the subject of the authenticity of the Protocols is raised.

Despite its name; or perhaps even in spite of it, Eco's chapter 'The Fictional Protocols' spends less than a third of its pages on the Protocols and the bulk of the chapter is actually spent discussing the issue of the contrast between natural (= true) and artificial (= false) narrative and the indicators of them. (5)

Eco's argument on this score I largely agree with as he asserts that we cannot actually tell what is supposed to be fiction and what is supposed to be fact unless we notice various different indicators and cues that tell us how we are intended to view a particular written, viewed or spoken narrative which we are consuming. Eco rightly shows how lacking these indicators or cues we have a tendency to take artificial (= fictional) narrative as being natural (= truthful) narrative.

Eco also rightly points out that when we believe an artificial narrative to be a natural narrative then we are quite capable of rationalizing it every which way because that is what we 'know' to be true as opposed to what is reasonably arguable to be true.

Eco even remarks; and quite rightly so, that our concept of 'history' is largely a case of trusting and cross-checking narrative sources (be they documents, photos, testimony, chronicles and so forth) in order to decide whether each individual source or even parts of sources are to be considered natural (= truthful), artificial (= fictional) or a combination of the two (i.e. an artificial narrative which seems to reflect or compliment the natural narrative). This of course means that history should be viewed; and in my opinion rightly so, as a completely subjective discipline that is based purely on interpretation with no boundary between 'fact' and 'fiction' that is easy to qualify.

Indeed such a view of history fits nicely in with Eco's views on the interchangeability of fictional worlds expressed in novels and the real world as expressed by tactile experiment. In essence Eco's view; as suggested by his ideas on 'truth' versus 'falsehood', is one where there is no 'truth' only perceived reality which then defines the subject's ideas about the object.

This Eco brings out by using the example of linguistic scholarship which was dominated by the Creation Story told by Genesis, (6) which lead to the arguments (and belief) that Adam had created a number of definitive linguistic categories that then formed the basis of human languages.

These biblical theories are obviously wrong, but we should also point out that Eco could very easily have used another (less obviously anti-religious) example in Marr's theory that language has a class character which became the official intellectual orthodoxy of Soviet linguistics for some thirty years or so until Stalin officially censored it in the early 1950s.

This; similarly to Biblical theories about the origin of language, took an particular document or ideological system to be the unvarnished truth (i.e. the Bible in biblical origin linguistic theories and Engels' 'Anti-Duehring' in Marr's) but neither are these 'artificial narratives' per se, because they are believed to be truthful by their exponents based on the assumption that their foundation's are provable absolutes as opposed to documents or ideas like any other.

In essence Eco is forgetting an intellectual frame in his work, because while he talks about the indicators and cues of normal versus artificial narrative: he does not once consider that such indicators and cues can be derived externally about; and independently of, a work (reputation for example) or social/cultural/political norms associated with the subject or external indicators of the work in question.

For example if I were to write a book about the Protocols of Zion entitled 'The Truth about the International Jewish Conspiracy' then the indicators and cues as to whether it is a natural or artificial narrative can be assumed from the title in that it is either a natural narrative arguing for the reality of an international jewish conspiracy or it is an artificial narrative arguing against it.

There are however other factors operating for a potential consumer of said work in so far as said individuals are conditional by social/cultural/political norms to automatically regard the indicator that this work; because of the title, is likely to really be an untruthful (i.e. artificial) narrative trying to pretend it is a truthful (i.e. natural) narrative irrespective of the amount of evidence presented or how minutely detailed and tightly reasoned the argument in the book actually is due to its conclusions being contrary to those social/cultural/political norms.

If I were to title the same book 'The Protocols of Zion: A Critical Reappraisal' then we can immediately see that the social/cultural/political norms that created the indicators and cues; which informed potential consumers of the work that it was an untruthful (i.e. artificial) narrative trying to pretend it is a truthful (i.e. natural) narrative, now do precisely the opposite because the title has been reworded to take advantage of these same indicators and cues rather than work against them.

If we understand this then we can see that Eco's subjectivism in regards to narrative and history has not actually been taken far enough as he hasn't considered whether or not his own treasured beliefs are actually the result of his taking an artificial narrative as being a natural narrative then applying that artificial narrative to the real world (much like the readers of the Harry Potter novels who try and enrol themselves at Hogwarts).

In essence Eco's thought contradicts itself because he doesn't carry that train of thought far enough in relation to questioning his own assumptions and in doing so he commits precisely the same mistake as those scholars who theorized a biblical origin of language. In so far as Eco talks of the subjectivity of belief and the lack of border of viewpoints derived from fantasies with scholarly theories.

This is beautifully demonstrated when Eco suddenly discards everything he has spent the last dozen or so pages discussing and challenging his readers with by introducing something called 'true history' into the equation. (7) Eco doesn't define this 'true history' but he does imply that he has some kind of special knowledge that allows him to discern historical fantasies from historical realities, but unfortunately he doesn't tell us just what that is.

This is a shame really as through the next pages; where he focuses on the idea of a jewish conspiracy, Eco shows an almost laughable amount of reading and knowledge about the history of anti-jewish ideas where he implies that the idea of the 'plot against the state' by an international jewish conspiracy dates from Abbe Barruel's acceptance of the suggestion that Freemasonry and the Illuminati had jewish origins. (8)

Eco doesn't seem to realise that the literary idea of the world jewish conspiracy can be reasonably dated back to at least the Romans who had first had experience of just such conspiracy in the first, second and third jewish revolts while the idea of a jewish conspiracy was also a relatively common one in medieval Europe with ritual murder trials and accusations of poisoning wells having these ideas as an intellectual backdrop. Indeed we can see just such an ideas tacitly espoused by authors as intellectually distant as Chaucer and Shakespeare if we but care to think about they are necessarily suggesting with their jewish characters for a moment.

Eco focuses on Goedsche's 'Biarritz' and particularly on his chapter relating to the Prague cemetery in pointing out that this the scene is allegedly inspired by one from Alexandre Dumas' 'Joseph Balsamo'. (9) This is while claiming that Norman Cohn's conspiracy theory about the alleged anti-Semitic origins of the Protocols of Zion in the Paris office of the Okhrana (the Russian Secret Police) is the absolute truth even though with even a little research Eco would have known that Cohn's idea (while commonly accepted by popular writers) had been significantly criticized by other scholars specializing in the study of the Protocols of Zion such as Henri Rollin. (10)

Indeed we should note that Cohn's theory has been dealt a decisive blow by the most recent study of the Protocols by Cesare de Michelis where he rightly points out that Cohn's theory about Rachkovsky's and Golovinsky's involvement in a conspiracy to 'write' the Protocols and blame the jews is completely unfounded as it studiously ignores the element of Russian interdepartmental struggles among many other things. (11)

These stinging scholarly debunks haven't dampened Eco's almost religious belief in Cohn's theory though as he all but restates the theory in 'The Prague Cemetery' (12) seemingly without having noticed that the natural narrative completely disagrees with his perceived natural (i.e. artificial claiming to be natural without indicators) narrative. After all if a natural (= truthful) narrative contradicts an individual's artificial (= untruthful/fantasy) narrative then what does Eco himself suggest happens?

That's right: the artificial narrative simply recasts itself as the natural narrative.

So what does Eco do?

Well just that as he claims that 'scholars have shown' that the Protocols deal with end of the nineteenth century French conservative preoccupations (13) however this is categorically wrong as it in the first place there is no plural: Eco is only citing one scholar's controversial theory (i.e. Cohn's). Also; for example, Cohn's claim about French fears about Paris Metro being represented in the 'subterranean tunnels' comments in the Protocols text actually results; as de Michelis has shown, (14) from a garbled translation of an original Russian verb and not from 'end of the nineteenth century French preoccupations'.

The latter is of course a rationalization to fit a particular theory, which in a delicious irony is simply an artificial (fictional) narrative trying to make out that it is actually a natural (truthful) narrative, which effectively means that Eco has spent the best part of a chapter talking about indicators and cues about interpretation and how they can be difficult to spot for the non-expert: only then to fall into just such a trap trying to prove his argument by using a subject he hasn't done very much reading on.

If this wasn't enough Eco makes some obvious misstatements of fact in that he repeatedly quotes claims that only appear in the later editions of the Protocols (particularly that of Sergei Nilus) (15) that; if he had read Cohn, he should know are almost certainly interpolations of later editors onto an original text that have nothing to do with the Protocols of Zion per se. This in spite having drawn a rather innovative (if limited) diagram of the evolution and influence of Goedsche's 'Biarritz' text in relation to the Protocols to illustrate just this on the next page! (16)

Eco simply forgets that he is dealing with an 'open text'/'open tradition' here as it suits his argument to do so and instead uses a text he has to know he is wrong to try and prove the truth of his contention as if it were the actual text of the Protocols of Zion.

It doesn't help his case that Eco evidently hasn't checked the slightly reworked republication of Goedsche's Prague cemetery chapter in the French magazine 'Le Contemporain' in 1881, which was intended to be fictional (as Bronner has implied) (17) but yet instructive. Yet Eco claims it was misinterpretation by the editors of 'Le Contemporain' as being a real transcript when in fact Goedsche reworked said chapter (as Eco doesn't seem to have noticed) because it had sold well independently as a fictional work in Russia (18) and would also fit nicely into the anti-jewish feeling gripping France at the time (thus ensuring good sales).

Essentially Eco is alleging that there were a series of misunderstandings of Goedsche's 'Biarritz' chapter based on shared assumptions about the existence of an international jewish plot and also because different European anti-jewish individuals thought that said chapter was actually a natural (= truthful) narrative as opposed to being an artificial (= fictional) narrative. This lead; in Eco's view, to the creation of the Protocols of Zion and then to the alleged 'holocaust' of the jews during the Second World War. (19)

In fact it is only Eco getting confused as he has continuously made erroneous statements in relation to the Protocols text; in spite of the fact that he should know better, misrepresented the now-debunked opinion of one scholar as being the academic consensus, not studied the sources he is citing and most fundamentally made the same mistake he alleges others do in mistaking an artificial narrative as being a natural narrative and then constructing an intellectual position on the resultant mental Disneyland.

In short Eco exposes himself in 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods' to be not only flat out wrong about the Protocols, but also quite the hypocrite as well.

References

(1) Umberto Eco, 2011, 'The Prague Cemetery', 1^st Edition, Vintage: London

(2) Robert Moore, 2012, 'The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe', 1^st Edition, Profile: London, p. 345

(3) Umberto Eco, 1994, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge

(4) Umberto Eco, 1989, 'The Open Work', 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge

(5) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., pp. 117-131

(6) Ibid, p. 129

(7) Ibid, p. 131

(8) Ibid, pp. 133-135

(9) Ibid, p. 135

(10) Cf. Henri Rollin, 1991, 'L'Apocalypse de Notre Temps: Les Dessous de la Propagande Allemande d'apres les Documents Inedits', 2^nd Edition, 2 Vols., Editions Allia: Paris

(11) Cesare de Michelis, 2004, 'The Non-Existent Manuscript: A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion', 1^st Edition, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, pp. 65-69; 122

(12) Eco, 'The Prague Cemetery', Op. Cit., pp. 529-54

(13) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137

(14) de Michelis, Op. Cit., pp. 92-93

(15) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137

(16) Ibid, p. 138

(17) Stephen Eric Bronner, 2003, 'A Rumor about the Jews: Antisemitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion', 1st Edition, Oxford University Press: New York, p. 82

(18) de Michelis, Op. Cit., pp. 49-50

(19) Eco, 'Six Walks in the Fictional Woods', Op. Cit., p. 137

The Case of Sarah Cohen

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:46:00 +0000

As I have remarked on several occasions before: I have a long standing interest in what may be called 'jewish conversion' literature. Or put in simpler terms: accounts written by jews or about jews who have converted to non-jewish faiths from Judaism. This interest stems largely from the fact that conversion literature is a central piece of evidence for the importance of viewing the jews in anti-Semitic rather than simply anti-Zionist or anti-Judaic terms.

The point is simple enough in that if a jew still retains loyalty to the jewish people in spite of having actively chosen to follow a different religious system. Then it tells us that jewishness has to go beyond confessing a belief in the tenets of Judaism and also beyond jewish nationalism (i.e. the various forms of Zionism) as if an individual remains in his or her mind a jew after disregarding the tenets of Judaism and rejecting jewish nationalism then they cannot be taken to be the definitive border of jewishness.

The contrast with non-jews is simple enough to make in that if you or me as a gentiles dear reader wished to convert to say Buddhism then we would describe ourselves as Buddhists would we not? We wouldn't say that we were Buddhist Christians or Christian Buddhists now would we? Similarly a person born into and brought up in the Islamic faith who decides that they believe there is no god (atheism) does not become an Islamic Atheist or a Muslim Atheist: now do they?

However when a jew converts to another religion they become a Jewish Muslim, a Jewish Christian or a Buddhist jew which suggests to us in terms of self-description 'Jew' or 'Jewish' does not signify the belief in a particular religious creed or necessarily an affinity with jewish nationalism, but rather is a description of national origin. In other words 'Jew' or 'Jewish' is actually equivalent not to a religious confession like Christianity or Buddhism, but rather a nation like being of German, Russian, Brazilian or Japanese origin.

After all we can have a German Christian, a Japanese Buddhist or a Brazilian Muslim, but we can't have a Christian Muslim or a Buddhist Hindu can we?

Now if we come back to 'jewish conversion' literature we can easily see how intellectually powerful it can be for us as the jews concerned have; in affirming their jewishness over and above their new religious confession, given us tangible evidence that loyalty to their jewishness and their self-description as thus transcends their religious or even their political beliefs. This makes their jewishness their defining aspect not their religious creed, which means in effect that a jewish convert to say Christianity or a jewish atheist who believes in the tenets of Marxism-Leninism still fundamentally identifies themselves as being jewish.

This is important precisely because in doing so it necessarily creates a system of dual loyalty among the jews as on the one hand they profess to be loyal to their religious and/or political creed, but at the same time they show loyalty to their jewish origins by suggesting that they are a nation in and of themselves. What this means is that the long-standing anti-jewish argument of dual loyalty; most famously brought out in the Dreyfus Affair in France, and the more current variant of jewish dual loyalty to both their host country and Israel plus a separate argument as to whether or not the jews can meaningfully integrate into a host country at all outside of actually mating with its inhabitants.

One such case which nicely demonstrates the permanence of the jewish question as well as their separation from the rest of the population is that of Sarah Cohen. (1) Sarah Cohen; an otherwise unremarkable jewess from London, started out as a post-World War II baby being born in May 1946 to a father who she claims was a 'holocaust survivor'. (2)

Her father; Thomas Cohen, was supposedly captured in North Africa in 1942 and in spite of being named Cohen it seems the Germans were so dim as to have taken some time to work out that he was jewish. When they did he was allegedly shipped off to Auschwitz by the Germans and we are told while there he himself witnessed the alleged homicidal gassings of the jews. Apparently Private Cohen only survived because another inmate 'knew' about the gassings and told him to claim he was cobbler, which façade he managed to keep up till the Soviet army turned up.

This is of course highly suspect as if Cohen had in fact 'witnessed' the gassings then he would have been of signal importance to the orthodox holocaustians given that while they are not short on alleged eyewitnesses: they are very short on credible ones who don't contradict each other on just about every point of fact.

However it does nicely indicate; as it is given a small chapter with the pejorative name 'The Nazi Menace', that Cohen feels her jewish identity very strongly in spite of having been a Christian for some fifty odd years at the time she came to write her autobiography such as it is. Indeed she recounts a story of when a local Baptist minister; a Mr. McNicol, realised that she was jewish and told her that she was especially 'fortunate' to come from such 'distinguished' stock. (3)

There is no reason for Cohen to include that particular anecdote at that point in time other than to reinforce the point that her jewish origins make her special or 'chosen' among Christians or put another way jewish Christians are somehow superior to non-jewish Christians.

We can further see this in Cohen's rather off-hand comment that her spiritual life; as a jew converted to Christianity, was based on fullness of Christianity rather than those of the gentile Christians around who she attacks for not doing things because they believed them to be immoral, but because other Christians would not approve. (4) She tells us in effect that jews are taught to live the fullness of their religion while Christians are not so therefore as a jew she is helping 'teach' the Christians how to practice Christianity properly.

This is also demonstrated rather nicely when Cohen attacks Roman Catholics; as well as other gentile Christians, for not taking sin seriously enough and suggests that the jewish attitude to sin is actually the correct one that once again she; as a jewess, has to teach the gentiles. (5) This belief that gentile Christians don't really know what Christianity is, but Cohen; as a jewish Christian, does is also evident when she somewhat carelessly implies that Christians who contradict her particular doctrinal beliefs have a tendency to have psychotic episodes or need mental help in some form. (6)

This isn't particularly helped by the belief that Cohen espouses; and presumably still does, that all her footsteps are guided directly by God (7) and this concomitantly means she is a kind of pseudo-prophet of God's will or at the very least her footsteps and actions are predestined to some mysterious purpose by God (a-la Calvin's theological ideas). It doesn't also help that Cohen allegedly was the subject of a minor medical miracle apparently caused by prayer, (8) but then jews have always been in the miracle business haven't they?

The irony is of course that Cohen puts her biological jewishness in the words of others. She has a Mr. Harper; owner of a Christian bookshop in Rotherham, say that she is a member of 'God's Chosen Race' and that she doesn't stop being jewish by converting to Christianity. (9) Cohen naturally narrates herself denying this but this is obviously a bit of fictional narrative that has been inserted by Cohen to put forth the uncomfortable idea; for gentile Christians anyway, that jewishness is biological and independent of religious confession.

Had this been a real conversion we might have expected some rather different wording on Mr. Harper's part in relation to Cohen having 'fortunate' heritage (like Mr. McNicol) or some such as opposed to couching it in very specifically jewish terminology (i.e. a descendant of the ancient Israelites would be a more orthodox and common way of putting it for a Christian as opposed to implying; as Cohen's text does, that jews are still the masters of the universe as opposed to being part of the multitude chosen by God now).

It is clear from Cohen's narrative that she ardently associates herself with being jewish in terms of national origin (she not once describes herself as British or English only as jewish for example) and Christianity to her is merely an extension of her jewishness into her confession of faith. Cohen approaches her Christianity first and foremost as a jewess and as the recipient of a special personal revelation based on that heritage, (10) because to her Christianity is simply her ancestral Judaism where the long-awaited Messiah has come and told the jews to become Christians so as to repair the world in the name of Yahweh (i.e. the concept of Tikkun Olam in Judaism).

Cohen is then an ideal example of what I have argued exists in my article 'Why I am an anti-Semite' (11) in that jews will naturally look at any religious or political ideology through a uniquely jewish perception and consciously or unconsciously seek to modify that religious or political ideology into reflecting their own egoistic ethnic priorities as jews.

This then means that the epistemological break in early Christianity between its early jewish followers and its early gentile followers is replicated when a jew converts to Christianity not only because a jew understands Christianity differently than a gentile, but also because a jew will seek to turn Christianity into Judaism because that is what a jew naturally understands Christianity to be.

The crux of the issue is that jews are loyal only to themselves and should be viewed as the eternal outsider: the kind of individual you may let join in with a group activity, but won't tolerate any nuisance from because of the potential disruptive influence.

If you let the town drunkard run the town then one wonders why we can be surprised that purchasing alcohol becomes cheap and easy in the town's shops?

References

(1) She tells her story in Sarah Cohen, 2008, 'Costly Roots', 1^st Edition, Crossbridge: Martley

(2) Ibid, pp. 20-21

(3) Ibid, p. 9

(4) Ibid, p. 41

(5) Ibid, p. 30

(6) Ibid, p. 51

(7) Ibid, p. 62

(8) Ibid, pp. 73-74

(9) Ibid, p. 67

(10) Related by another jew on Ibid, pp. 123-124

(11) This can be found at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2010/06/why-i-am-anti-semite.html

An English Translation of Agobard of Lyons' 'De Baptismo Judaicorum Mancipiorum'

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 11:11:00 +0000

Agobard of Lyons is a ninth century Christian bishop well-known to students of early medieval jewish history in part because he was involved in encouraging the active prosecution of the jews in Frankish kingdom under Charlemagne's son Louis the Pious. He wrote several treatises against the jews; none of which are more than a few pages long, which are filled with information about them and scholars agree (often grudgingly) that Agobard was well acquainted with jewish culture and Judaism (although as far as we know he himself wasn't of jewish origin) in spite of being a fanatical opponent of both. 'On the Baptism of Jewish Slaves' is the first of Agobard's writings against the jews appearing in 823 AD and was followed by four others in the next five years, which charts his struggle against the power of the jews in the Frankish court.

To do this I have taken the text of Agobard's work from the 'Patrologia Latina' (Vol. 104, Col. 173-178) and translated it in relation to the meaning of text as to translate much of what Agobard says literally would be largely meaningless to most readers. I have also taken the liberty here and there of inserting qualifying words and phrases as to make the meaning clear without resorting to footnotes and thus hopefully making Agobard's text less stilted than it originally was.

To wit:

'On the Baptism of Jewish Slaves

To the most holy and blessed of men, Bishop Hilduin and the Abbot Wala from Agobard their most humble servant.

In your prudent gentleness I have presumed to write the following to you both, because without you I would know little and as you are known to be helpers of our most Christian emperor: therefore you will always be well regarded at court and will always be vigilant in searching out doctrinal error and heresy.

If this influence and search for the enemies of the faith is to be maintained: you have to be prudent in your suggestions and encouragement to those who would aid us in this struggle. I write to each of you to relate the conversion of a Jewish woman to Christianity; who is now blessedly transferred to the grace of Christ, and suffering of severe persecution for the faith she has received in Christ and in this case there is little better example of womanhood.

And so now the cause of this persecution of Christians; which is a common error of the wicked, which I hope you will be pleased to read signifying your continuing regard for my work.

The Jews use a law; as given to them by the Emperor, to boast that without the consent of the owner no one can baptise Jewish slave. That is not believed by us; as Christians, at all, as that is to claim that from the court of the most Christian of Christians came forth a decree which is un-Christian in nature.

For the Emperor knows very well that your eminences; beloved of God, have instructed him in the same way that the holy apostles did from the beginning of the Church. From his teaching we see that Christianity is in reality a precept of the truth, by which; without any discrimination between the nations or any exceptional conditions, it is instructed of us as Christians that we shall: 'Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and Holy Spirit.'

And again: 'You shall go into the world, and preach the gospel of the Almighty. He that believes and is baptised shall be saved.' That and all the rulers of the faith and who are consistent in that faith, all the successors of the early Church, all of the servants, and not only the men, but also the women and children of the Emperors and Consuls, and by preaching to convert them to the faith, with no mention of having scrupled to ask for permission to baptise the servants from the masters. This is easy to recognize historically, especially in light of the apostolic letter that clearly demonstrates this. For at the end of the Epistle to the Philippians (4:22) we read: 'All the saints salute you, chiefly they that are of Caesar's household.'

This refers; as it was written in the time of Nero who was one of the most impious men who has ever lived, to those of Caesar's household who ministered to his court and as no one doubts that the preaching of the apostles converted these servants: they would never have been able to be sanctified by the grace of baptism if Caesar's permission had been sought. For in this matter those who live in the greatest fear of persecution are not only the unbelievers; lest they should come to the faith, but also those who have already embraced the faith. Hence the generals of Christianity; the masters and teachers of the faith, saw in Christian doctrine a science that was to be propounded among the nations in order to furiously slay the atrocity of unbelief.

In the Epistle of Timothy; after he had commanded that all men should pray to God, the Apostle states: 'For this is good and they took in the sight of God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For we are one again, and there is but one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all.' And to Titus; in relation to old men and women, children, young men and all slaves, he explained the proper law: 'For the grace of God our Saviour has appeared to all men, instructing us,' and so on.

If therefore; in order to clearly proves these examples, it is the will of God our Saviour that all men are to be saved and should be brought to a knowledge of the truth and are to be reconciled through one mediator between God and man (the man who gave himself as a ransom for all). Then if by the grace of reconciliation and salvation to all without shedding light on distinctions or putting limitations on the goodness of God: it is wrong to make such laws if one is a Christian and in addition to this it appoints the wicked as a court of appeal over those who would be righteous. This then would put the wicked Jews in a position where their stubborn disbelief in the faith of Christ allowed them the ability to blaspheme in public and private without legal recourse, which would therefore only strengthen their disbelief.

In short it is easy to see that if we piously consider the one omnipotent God; the just creator of all, who formed the first man out of the clay of the earth and the first woman out of man's rib: then the whole human race is from a single source and has grown from a single root, which means that all men and women are but one large family.

And although the equal and just judgement of sin and of all secret things past and present occurs: some are born to a variety of honours (i.e. are wealthy and influential – KR) while others are born cowering in the yoke of bondage (i.e. to be low-born or more precisely to be born into slavery – KR). There can be a way shown to all these men and women; from the ministry of Christ, an equality of spirit as we need but inwardly imagine man to be his own foundation beholden to no other man, to no angels and to no one at all other than the only creature he wants himself to be subject to: God.

Hence; in divine law, every man is a slave of the mind beholden only to God expressed when we are admonished: 'Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.'

And the Apostle; in regard to the diversity of the nations and the freedom of all to worship his Creator, teaches in just such a way: 'Regard the old man within you by his own deeds, and look to your neighbours, who are being renewed in the divine knowledge, and see the image of him that created them: where there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, Barbarian or Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all and in all.'

When, therefore, those who are to be baptised; by doing so acknowledge the Creator in their inner life so that they may be free of spiritual slavery, are held by back by the wishes of their wicked masters who can hinder or help them in achieving the renewal of their souls: should this be legal?

In his letter to Timothy the Apostle gave the following instruction: 'Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honour, that the name of the Lord and his doctrine be not blasphemed. They that have believing masters, let them not despise them, by which they are brethren, but do them service, because they are faithful,' and so on. (1 Tim. 6:1)

In these words evidently directed towards the servants, some of whom were Christians and of whom some were unbelievers, he is speaking to both believers and unbelievers. In these words the apostle is evidently speaking to the servants; who he assumes to be Christian believers, but also he is also talking to unbelievers who serve their master. This is because the unbelieving servant can be lead into the true faith by the example of the believers or of a believing master.

We learn that Onesimus a slave of Philemon's; whom the Apostle Paul had converted to and baptised in the faith of Christ in prison, complains that he has been rejected by Philemon and Philemon is instructed by Paul to take him back.

Those who wish to follow the commands which stem, as it were, from the imperial authority and fear to transgress these are caught between two dangers. If we observe this imperial command, ignoring the rules of the Church, we offend God and if we follow God's command: we face the wrath of the Emperor. The Jews cannot be trusted not to use their influence in the palace to attack our efforts on behalf of Christ. Do not count on their meekness as doing so will bring problems and persecution for ourselves and also those who we have been able to convert to the faith as it will throw an impediment in the way of the spread of Christianity among the Jews.

Hence, representatives of the most high and loving God, as it were, as your special strength is your pious minds and learning, intercede with the most Christian Emperor and see if this obstacle can be removed from the path of the holy work of the Church.

To great men, and the greatest of which is the most just, have been given the reigns of government. We should trust that the love of the merciful goodness of Christ himself should come to our aid, lest the souls, from which he was able to be increase the flock of the faithful and for the salvation of which the universal Church; by the Passion of the Lord God, has been entrusted should become imperiled by removal of legal sanction against public opposition to the commandments of God which are the snares of the devil intended to deceived man.

In all events we have established from the sacred canons that if any of the Jews wish to be baptised, the bishop, if he wishes, to redeem them or any other of the faithful should have jurisdiction and not the Emperor.

What we do willingly admit is that this only requires them to come to faith. This shouldn't be taken as removing their material status as slaves, but rather that sons of Christ are no longer slaves in spirit so that they might come to the faith as unbelievers should.'

The Tale of Gamelyn and the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:52:00 +0000

The Tale of Gamelyn is the name given to an English ballad that came down to us through the agency of Geoffrey Chaucer and more specifically through his famous 'Canterbury Tales'. The Tale of Gamelyn is agreed to have not actually been written by Chaucer himself; based on stylistic differences and the socio-legal system described, (1) but was to be used as the basis for some of the unfinished Canterbury Tales such as the Cook's Tale. (2)

The Tale of Gamelyn; unlike other ballads of its type and era, is inordinately focused on legal procedures (3) and the original author of the work is likely to have been a law clerk or a legal advocate considering the depth of legal knowledge that is exhibited by the author. (4) We can also use the precise nature of this legal knowledge and terminology to date the composition of the Tale of Gamelyn to around 1350. (5)

Unlike the other ballads it is often compared to; such as those of Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk and Robin Hood, the Tale of Gamelyn does not appear to have been based on a historical individual or at least a historical individual we can reasonably speculate was the primary source. Part of the problem of course is because we do not know the real author of the Tale of Gamelyn and we do not even know from which part of England the tale originally derives: so it is rather difficult to locate a starting point in such a search.

It is likely that if the author was a practitioner of the law then he based the ballad on a particular court case or created it out of a composite of different court cases in which he was involved. In spite of the author's anonymity the Tale of Gamelyn had a major impact on English literature as it was the basis for Shakespeare's play 'As You Like It' as well as Anthony Munday's version of Robin Hood, which served as the basis for the a large portion of the modern version of the Robin Hood legend. (6)

The Tale of Gamelyn as a transitional piece of English literature is absolutely key in the evolution of modern legends away from their early to high medieval roots and into the early modern era. (7) One of the aspects of these legends that evolved through the Tale of Gamelyn was the changing character of the opponents of these eponymous heroes in that the original opponents of Robin Hood were almost certainly jews (8) as they would have been for both the historical (9) and mythical (10) Eustace the Monk.

In the Robin Hood ballads in particular there was a substantial shift away from the jews being the avaricious money-lenders and the Catholic religious institutions of the day (particularly monasteries and the sees of Bishops) moving in to the ballads to replace them between the probable origin of the ballads in the mid-late 1200s and the first printed versions of the ballads we have from the early-mid 1400s.

The reason for this shift is rather simple in that the jews; as the butt of complaints from the common people and the elite, had largely ceased to a problem with their expulsion from the kingdom of England in 1290 by Edward I. This meant that another group would inevitably have to step into the money-lender vacuum formerly occupied by the jews: that group was the institutions of the Catholic Church. The Church had by this time acquired substantial amounts of land; often deriving from grants from nobles as socially encouraged 'good works' designed to lessen the amount of time the individual concerned had to send in purgatory, and with land ownership came wealth.

Wealth; in its liquid or in kind form [i.e. money or goods/services], could be lent to the less wealthy or those in need of it for profit, but the charging of interest (usury) was forbidden under canon law: the Church instead encouraged the traditional system of encouraging gifts of wealth to the lenders in lieu of interest for having had the generosity to grant a loan.

This meant that with the jews largely gone: they ceased to play an active part in the lives of most of the population of England and thus no longer were credible enemies or figures of fun on which ballad writers could draw. They naturally found their new target in the successors to the jews as money-lenders, which is given expression in the Tale of Gamelyn and the revisions of the older ballads of Robin Hood by the hero's disdain for the clergy in general, while reserving particular venom for the high clergy who to them were the new jews in their lives.

This means that when we read in the ballad that Gamelyn would show no mercy to monks, canons and abbots; (11) as well as the point that the common people did not wish him to, (12) then we should actually read it as Gamelyn and the common people's declaration of war on the money-lenders represented by the Church, but who had formerly been the jews.

We are also told that Gamelyn forcibly took wealth only from these same people (i.e. the lords of the Church) and not from the common people (13) again suggesting that the story of Gamelyn is an attack on the position of the usurious money-lenders who were still plaguing England in place of the jews who had originally created that position and; after their expulsion for being too usurious, the vacuum.

In essence then we should read the Tale of Gamelyn as a transitional piece of English literature linking the early-high medieval world that was under siege from the jews to the supposedly jew free world where the institutions of the Catholic Church had moved in to take over the money-lending businesses of the jews.

This means of course that Gamelyn is actually recommending the expropriation of the Church and if necessary the murder of its agents as a symbolic struggle against usurious money-lenders. So had the Tale of Gamelyn been written 50 years earlier we would not find Gamelyn attacking the Church and seeking to expropriate wealth her, but rather seeking to expropriate and murder the jews.

Interesting what a difference a few years can make: isn't it?

References

(1) John Bellamy, 1985, 'Robin Hood: An Historical Enquiry', 1^st Edition, Croom Helm: Sydney, pp. 63-66

(2) James Holt, 1989, 'Robin Hood', 2^nd Edition, Thames and Hudson: London, pp. 72-73

(3) Bellamy, Op. Cit., pp. 63-64

(4) Ibid, p. 66

(5) Holt, p. 72

(6) Stephen Knight, 2003, 'Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography', 1^st Edition, Cornell University Press: Ithaca, p. 62

(7) David Baldwin, 2011, 'Robin Hood: The English Outlaw Unmasked', 1^st Edition, Amberley: Stroud, p. 177

(8) See the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/02/robin-hood-and-jews.html

(9) See the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/02/eustace-monk-philip-ii-of-france-and.html

(10) See the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/03/eustace-monk-black-magic-and-jews.html

(11) Tale of Gamelyn, Fytte 4

(12) Ibid.

(13) Ibid, Fytte 6

Valerius Maximus on the Expulsion of the Jews in 139 BC

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:15:00 +0000

Valerius Maximus is one of the least known of classical Roman writers in part because his only extant work 'Memorable Deeds and Sayings' is merely a collection of excerpts culled from the work of other writers. That said in his day Maximus was a significant literary figure (although we know of no other work by him extant or otherwise) as he was part of the literary circle that included such famous writers as Ovid (1) and he appears to have had some connection; via patronage, to the Julio-Claudian Imperial dynasty: specifically the Emperor Tiberius.

Even though Maximus isn't well known: his work is invaluable to historians and this is particularly so in relation to the issue of the jews in the city of Rome. The reason for this is quite simple as Maximus tells us that the jews were expelled from Rome in 139 BC (our only mention of this event). (2) The passage concerned (which are Maximus' only mention of the jews) is as follows:

'Story as recorded by Julius Paris: During the consulship of Marcus Popillius Laenas and Gnaeus Calpurnius, the praetor for foreigners, Gnaeus Cornelius Hispanus, issued an edict ordering the Chaldaeans to leave the city and Italy within ten days. The praetor felt that they deceived frivolous and silly people with their dishonest interpretation of the stars and cultivated a money-making air of obscurity with their lies. The Jews had tried to corrupt Roman values with their cult of Jupiter Sabazius, so the praetor forced them go to back to their home.

Story as recorded by Nepotianus: Cornelius Hispanus expelled the Chaldaeans from the city and ordered them to leave Italy within ten days to prevent them making money out of their foreign science. The Jews had tried to pass their religion on to Romans, so Hispanus expelled them from the city and demolished their private altars in all public places.' (3)

The interpretation of this is fairly straight forward in that we can see that Cornelius Hispanus sought to purge the city of Rome of non-Romans who were causing harm to Roman citizens by alternatively cheating them out of their money or trying to corrupt them by luring them into anti-Roman religious cults.

The Chaldaeans [= Mesopotamians] are held to be proverbial soothsayers with a particular focus on the divining of the future with the use of the Zodiac ('the stars') and to be also using the idea that their predictions have a prophetic quality in order to make money from the Roman people.

The jews on the other hand are held to be trying to; in Maximus' words, 'pass their religion onto Romans' in the form of the cult of Jupiter Sabazius.

The reader at this point may very well be scratching their head wondering how this should be understood, but we can quickly shed light on the meaning by pointing out that the likeliest explanation is that Maximus confused Yahweh (who is primarily worshiped on the Sabbath) with the eastern variant of the cult of Dionysus (i.e. the cult of Sabazius) (4) which was often done by early Roman writers. (5)

So the passage from Maximus should actually read as follows:

'The Jews had tried to corrupt Roman values with their cult of Yahweh, so the praetor forced them go to back to their home.'

This makes a lot more sense now: doesn't it?

In essence: the jews were in Rome proselytizing among the Roman people in the name of Yahweh and probably on the basis that the worship of Yahweh was but another mystery religion. What is interesting about this is very simply that Simon Maccabee's envoys had arrived in Rome some three years before this in 142 BC. (6)

This is unlikely to be a coincidence given that the emissaries of a jewish zealot arrive in Rome and three years later Rome promptly throws out the Chaldaeans and the jews for duping the locals on the one hand and proselytizing on the other. Regardless of whether this was a Roman public relations move to blame foreigners (as Gruen argues) (7) what is difficult to cogently explain away is the historical coincidence.

The solution to this conundrum is actually fairly simple in so far as Gruen and Feldman both assume that the Chaldaeans and the jews are two different groups of people, because Maximus suggests they were. However; as Gruen tells us, (8) the Seleucid monarch Antiochus III had resettled a large community of jews from Mesopotamia and Babylonia (i.e. some of the descendants of the jews of the Babylonian captivity) between 188 and 191 BC in Phyrgia in what is now western central Turkey. (9)

This is likely to be the origin of the community of jews in Rome as those that Antiochus III had settled were intended to be troops in his army and some would have inevitably been taken prisoner and been transported back to Rome as slaves in the myriad of small scale wars between local client kings, Rome and the Seleucid empire.

On the other hand one has to ask the question; which Gruen notably does not, of how the Mesopotamians and Babylonians also came to be in Rome at this time as well as why those two groups? Why not other groups such as Syrians which were more numerous in the Seleucid armies and had their own religious traditions?

In short: why the Mesopotamians/Babylonians and the jews?

Well we know that the likeliest group origin for the jews concerned would from Mesopotamia and Babylon [i.e. before they were transplanted into Phrygia by Antiochus III a relatively short time before] so then why do we separate the groups? Maximus; as well as the Roman authorities at the time, wouldn't have been able to distinguish between the jews who took their ancestral religion very seriously identifying as jews and those jews who preferred more secular assimilated lives identifying as Babylonians/Mesopotamians.

Is it not more likely than instead of two groups (one jewish and one not) from Mesopotamia and Babylon that we in fact have one and those labelled the jews by Maximus were the highly religious element, while those labelled as Chaldaeans were the secular assimilated element?

This is further suggested by the fact that the Chaldaeans were not expelled for trying to convert Romans to their religious ways, while the jews were (suggesting that the Chaldaeans concerned were either not very religious or held to similar religious beliefs as the jews). This would be odd precisely because Babylonia and Mesopotamia had a very strong and well known religious heritage and identity as well as the fact that their belief system; from what we know of it, was based (like most) on confession of faith as opposed to ancestral caste (like Judaism) so would have been an ideal candidate for a spreading foreign faith among the Roman people.

In essence we have to ask ourselves why the Chaldaeans were expelled for secular crimes and the jews expelled for religious crimes?

The simplest answer is that they were two groups of jews: one more secular and assimilated which self-described as being Babylonian/Mesopotamian (hence the Roman description of them) while the other was more religious and self-described as jewish based on the mythos of their new religious tradition (hence their being ascribed correctly as jews).

This is further pointed to by the entry into the city of the ambassadors of Simon Maccabee in 142 BC as the presence of these envoys of revived and fanatical jewishness may have acted as a catalyst for a substantial split in the jewish community between those who embraced this new identity (i.e. the jews of Maximus) and those who embraced the traditional identity of their captivity (i.e. the Chaldaeans of Maximus).

This would then have caused an increasingly vicious split between the two groups of jews leading to the increased visibility of what both groups were up to in the streets of Rome: one conning the Romans with false divination and the other trying to con the Romans into becoming initiates into the cult of Yahweh (as 'god-fearers' rather than jews bearing in mind that jewishness in Judaism; then as now, is equated with being descended from the Israelites).

The Roman praetor responsible for overseeing this increasingly problematic group; Hispanus, then simply decided to be rid of the problem the community presented and expelled them all from the city. That the jews found their way back in and had a flourishing community some 80 years later does not detract from this, but should rather be seen as part of the typical cycle of expulsion and the; after some years have elapsed, re-admittance of the jews that is found in both the ancient and the medieval/early modern world.

However there is another angle to this expulsion that does need to be briefly brought out in relation to the subversion of Roman religion by the jews. In that we know that Hellenized jews had a big hand in writing the Sibylline Oracles (particularly the third book) [composed circa 140 to 160 BC] which declared that Rome would be enslaved by an Asian power which ruled all the Asian peoples (in the jewish view this power would have been Judea and accorded with Yahweh's gift to the jews of their 'chosen' status and their role as the 'light unto the nations'). (10)

Further; as Feldman notes, (11) Hellenized jews (which the Maximus' 'Chaldaeans' could also refer to in whole or in part) had long been trying to convert Romans to the worship of Yahweh of which the famous 'Letter of Aristeas' is but the best known example. (12)

We need to recognise that both of these independent facts suggest to us that the jewish religious activity in Rome was not nearly as benign or harmless as is commonly believed, because we know of jewish communities across the Mediterranean taking part in conspiracies to kill Romans (in 88 BC), we also know that the jews were faking religious prophecy to cause panic among the Romans (part of the Sibylline Oracles) and that the less religious jews (the 'Hellenizers' as opposed to the 'Zealots') were also engaging in anti-Roman activity in addition to their fundamentalist kin.

This; combined with the neat coincidence of jews faking religious prophecy explicitly for Roman consumption in the years before the expulsion and the so-called Chaldaeans doing more or less the same thing but for profit, suggests that the expulsion of the jews from Rome in 139 BC was a preventative measure taken by Hispanus in order to remove the threat of the jews; divided into two squabbling factions, from the city.

It also provides suggestive evidence for why the jews were able to conspire and revolt across the eastern Mediterranean at least three times in the course of the three centuries that followed in so far as the key issue was control. The jewish community needed to be closely controlled by religious leaders which was the case in the later jewish revolts, but was likely not the case in Rome in 139 BC as the two factions (the secular jews and the religious jews) were openly squabbling leading to the unearthing of their activities before they were in a powerful enough position to attack the city of Rome from the inside as they later did to other Roman cities in the third jewish revolt.

References

(1) For Ovid's comments on the jews please see the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/04/ovid-on-jews.html

(2) Erich Gruen, 2002, 'Diaspora: Jews against Greeks and Romans', 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, p. 15

(3) Val. Max. 1:3.3 (cf. Henry John Walker, 2004, 'Valerius Maximus: Memorable Deeds and Sayings', 1^st Edition, Hackett: Indianapolis, p. 14)

(4) Gruen, Op. Cit., p. 16

(5) Louis Feldman, 1993, 'Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian', 1^st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, p. 151

(6) Gruen, Op. Cit., p. 17; Menahem Stern, 1980, 'Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism', 1^st Edition, Vol. II, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities: Jerusalem, pp. 359-360

(7) Ibid, pp. 17-19

(8) Ibid, p. 17

(9) The descendants of these same jews were also involved in the mass murder of Romans across the eastern Mediterranean in 88 BC (cf. Adrienne Mayor, 2010, 'The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome's Deadliest Enemy', 1^st Edition, Princeton University Press: Princeton, pp. 19; 153)

(10) Ibid, p. 35

(11) Feldman, Op. Cit., pp. 150-151

(12) For the text of this see: http://www.ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig/aristeas.htm

Lucius Apuleius of Madaurus on the Jews

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:11:00 +0000

Lucius Apuleius of Madaurus; better known as either Lucius or Apuleius, was a second century Roman polymath and the author of numerous books on topics as disparate as philosophical commentaries on Plato, practical magic, the mechanics of universe and agriculture. Apuleius is also the only Latin novelist whose work; 'Metamorphoses' (usually called after Saint Augustine 'The Golden Ass'), has come down to us complete.

Indeed we know quite a lot of biographical detail about Apuleius in that he was Berber origin; as was Saint Augustine, and spent the sizable fortune that his father left him in a constant search for knowledge as well as initiation into numerous Roman mystery cults. When money began to run dry Apuleius married his friend Pontianus' mother Pudentilla (with said friend's blessing); who happened to also be a rather rich widow, but Pontianus' wife's father persuaded him to indite Apuleius in court with having seduced Pudentilla with magic in order to get her fortune. This directly lead to Apuleius' successful defense speech (we also know he practiced law for an unspecified amount of time hence his ability to easily defend himself against the charges rather than hiring an advocate to do it on his behalf); which was later published by him, known as the 'Apologia' or alternatively 'A Discourse on Magic', that contains a substantive mention of the jews.

To wit:

'Consider what confidence in my innocence and what contempt of you is implied by my conduct. If you can discover one trivial reason that might have led me to woo Pudentilla for the sake of some personal advantage, if you can prove that I have made the very slightest profit out of my marriage, I am ready to be any magician you please—the great Carmendas himself or Damigeron or Moses of whom you have heard, or Jannes or Apollobex or Dardanus himself or any sorcerer of note from the time of Zoroaster and Ostanes till now.' (1)

Now in the above it is clear that Apuleius is suggesting that Moses; the 'law-giver' of the jews from the Greek and Roman perspective, was a sorcerer/magician par extraordinaire. Williams even goes as far as to declare that the Romans and Greeks saw Moses as the 'supreme sorcerer' and concomitantly jews as master practitioners of magic and sorcery. (2) This is true to an extent but Williams is guilty of slightly overstating the case in that while it is true the jews were seen as highly competent sorcerers: they were not the only ones.

The Egyptians; in addition to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia [the Assyrian and Babylonian empires respectively], (3) were also renowned for their magical abilities (4) as is easily demonstrated in the passage by pointing out that of all the non-divine names mentioned we do know who the magician Jannes supposedly was: one of the Egyptian magicians bested by Moses. (5) This means that while Williams is right to emphasize the jews as being regarded as eminent sorcerers: she is wrong not to qualify her remarks by pointing out that the jews were but one of several Eastern peoples that had such a reputation in the Greek and Roman world.

Coming back to the point in hand in relation to Apuleius: we should understand; as this necessary diversion has shown, that when he is talking about Moses as being a master magician it is not actually a compliment per se. Rather it would be regarded as an insult inside the Imperial Roman ideological system of Romano-Greek civilization being non-decadent and manly (thus willing to deal with problems fairly and in the open), while Eastern barbarians like the jews were held to be examples of decadent emasculation in that they didn't deal with others openly and honestly, but rather sought to gain mastery and revenge by nefarious means in their barbarous religious systems such as casting spells. (6)

This is confirmed when we read Apuleius' other mention of the jews in his work 'Florida':

'The Indians are a populous nation of vast extent of territory, situated far from us to the East, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians, and the superstitious Jews, and the mercantile Nabataeans, and the flowing robed Arsacidae, and the Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians rich in perfumes.' (7)

In this passage we can see that Apuleius is highlighting the material and religious decadence of the Eastern peoples in so far as in referring to the Indians: he talks about the Egyptians as being 'learned' (as the Egyptians were regarded as 'origin of religion' by the Greeks and then the Romans), the (southern) Arabs as being decadent perfume merchants, the (northern) Arabs (Nabataeans) as being obsessed with mercantile activities and the jews as being superstitious religious loons par excellence.

This is obviously negative stereotyping on Apuleius' part, but it does tell us that Apuleius had a strong distaste for the jews (who he would have had plenty of contact with in his well-traveled life and profound interest in all things to do with the pursuit of knowledge) and that distaste is likely to have been based; in whole or in part, on his experiences in dealing with them.

References

(1) Apul. Apol. 90

(2) Margaret Williams, 1998, 'The Jews among the Greeks and Romans: A Diasporan Sourcebook', 1^st Edition, Duckworth: London, p. 58

(3) For a useful summary of the focus on the practice of magic in Mespotamian religion see Benjamin Foster, 2007, 'Mesopotamia', pp. 205-206 in John Hinnells (Ed.), 2007, 'A Handbook of Ancient Religions', 1^st Edition, Cambridge University Press: New York

(4) Cf. Derek Collins, 2008, 'Magic in the Ancient Greek World', 1^st Edition, Blackwell: Oxford

(5) Tim. 2:3.8

(6) Cf. Erich Gruen, 2002, 'Diaspora: Jews against Greeks and Romans', 1^st Edition, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, pp. 20-21

(7) Apul. Flor. 6

Charles Krafft and the Art of 'Holocaust Denial'

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 13:12:00 +0000

Over the recent weeks we have witnessed a typical hand-wringing episode from the habitual hysterical blubberers: the liberal-left art world and the jews. The object of their alternate bleary-eyed declarations of 'say it ain't so' and militant screeching about there being 'no place for hate' (whatever that is) is the Seattle-based ceramic artist Charles Krafft. Krafft has long produced risqué pieces of artwork which have for some time now been centred around the idea of 'disaster ware', which are pieces of art which provoke and challenge those who look upon them into thinking deeply about human disasters and mass death in history.

What is in many ways both hilarious and sad at the same time is that many of Krafft's artistic works were loved and treasured by the very people who are now vilifying him and his artwork. Articles such as the 'contribution' from 'The Stranger' ask rhetorically whether Krafft's artwork was really meant to convey a 'trivialization' of 'jewish suffering' and whether it seeks to normalize the Third Reich more generally. (1)

One wonders how the much vaunted 'art critics' don't seem to realize that the value of art should; if art is not to be anything more than realism, be completely independent of the views of the artist. To be sure some art is loaded with a political message or is conceived for an explicitly political purpose (such as carved wall scenes at the Assyrian palace of Nineveh), but it is important to realise that the message conceived of by the artist has no sure fire way of being received by the audience. (2)

Menachem Wecker's story about putting some of Adolf Hitler's paintings on display while concealing the information about who the artist was and the positive reaction and praise of them is pointed in its message that artists do tend to have a habitual case of double-think. (3) They; as Greg Johnson has rightly pointed out, want to view art by itself as having a value independent of the artist, but also cannot believe that somebody they would consider evil would produce art worthy of praise. (4)

It comes down to the conundrum surrounding figures like Ezra Pound in that he was arguably the greatest poet of the twentieth century, but yet he was openly anti-Semitic and produced pro-Axis propaganda during the Second World War.

How do the arty-farty community reconcile this?

Well they look to Pound's proverbial death bed repudiation of his earlier views and suggest that he was a good guy after all despite being fundamentally flawed for his support of Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain and the Third Reich.

That of course is a rather asinine and insipid interpretation in much the same way as claiming that Voltaire was a Catholic, because he confessed his sins and was given absolution as well as the last rites on his deathbed by a Catholic priest. In summation: it takes a retrospective view of belief so that everything Voltaire or Pound did before their literal and proverbial 'death bed confessions' is seen in the light of that new confession of faith as opposed to the original intellectual context in which it was created.

The same applies with Krafft in that the artistic community cannot seem to understand; for what reasons I know not, that Krafft can still be an avant-garde artist while being skeptical about the holocaust or that he produced art that was innocently but darkly satirical about the Third Reich and 'jewish suffering' before he came to doubt the official version of the holocaust.

The simple fact is that Krafft has only expressed skepticism about the holocaust and has even explicitly told people concerned that he doesn't 'deny' anything, but rather on the basis of research he has come to endorse the alternate hypothesis suggested by holocaust revisionism. That school of thought is much vilified and has even been outlawed in numerous countries not because it is a 'crank theory' (after all 'denial' of the well-documented Soviet atrocities isn't illegal and is practiced in European countries by some Marxist intellectuals and historians) but rather because it has a tendency to catch 'holocaust historians' with their metaphorical trousers down.

If those decrying how 'well evidenced' the holocaust is actually stopped looking at newspaper articles about 'the latest study' and used that time instead to read through a couple of orthodox academic books on it and then did a few thought experiments: they would quickly see that the 'holocaust' is actually the worst kind of conspiracy theory. It assumes; for example, that an order was given or that it 'was a series of coincidences' (the famous 'orders from the top'/'initiatives from below' position) but no 'holocaust historian' has to date found any such order only the occasional inference which can be only be interpreted to mean industrial mass murder when one already believes it happened.

It doesn't help that; as of this writing, no 'holocaust historian' has been able to provide documentary or physical evidence that a single jew was gassed as part of a mass gassing program aimed at them as jews. It is true that lists of victims get put forward, but the missing component to those lists is very simply the question: on what basis do we know they were gassed?

The response is very simple: we don't.

The lists have largely been created by simply taking manifests of jews transported to the camps and when they died according to extant concentration camp records then adding the unjustifiable assumption that anyone who died soon after arrival or disappeared from the camp was 'gassed'. That completely ignores every possible other cause of death or loss of a record, such as disease (the camps famously had problems with disease not helped by the ghettoization of the jews for several years previously) and also the fact that we know jews were shuttled around different camps in large numbers.

Suffice to say if you couple that with the absolute howlers of supposed purpose-built gas chambers at Auschwitz being built underground with only a single door in and out and with a small number of crematory ovens serving two gas chambers supposedly killing thousands a day then the absurdity of the holocaust theory is there for all to see.

Next time you go to a funeral that involves a cremation: think about how long it takes to cremate a body in a modern crematory oven and then compare the number of victims per day at say Auschwitz to the number of crematory ovens for single bodies that were available. If you do you'll quickly see why revisionist critique of the 'holocaust' theory has been so devastating as well as quietly forcing 'holocaust historians' away from the gas chambers and into the new idea of the 'holocaust by bullets' on the Eastern front.

That hasn't stopped the loud claims about 'gas chambers' and almost weekly bevy of new 'survivor' stories however, but it has severely clogged the wheels of official 'holocaust historians' so much so that they now almost completely ignore revisionist work in part because to even cite it in a non-pejorative context is taken by jewish organizations and their amen corner to be ipso facto proof of 'holocaust denial' and/or 'anti-Semitic sentiments' on the part of the individual citing it.

Now what I have expressed above is what we could call 'holocaust skepticism' which is a fairly healthy intellectual beast, but what then would 'holocaust denial' be?

Well if we are talking in terms of the killing of jews being a 'holocaust' (i.e. 'burnt offering') then the problem comes in the terminology precisely because the 'holocaust' theory (and its concomitant claims of 'uniqueness') is predicated on the gas chambers and what Applebaum has called the 'industrial nature' of the killing. (5) If we take away the gas chambers then the killing of jews in the Second World War becomes simply one of many atrocities committed by all sides involved: indeed if we understand it contextually the number of jews killed in the alleged 'holocaust' is actually not the worst or even the largest atrocity of the period by a long shot.

Stalin's purges and the Holodomor in the Ukraine killed far more, while the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Germans after the Second World War (sometimes claimed to have been 'justified' by 'holocaust historians') by the Soviet Union and the Allies killed almost double the amount of Germans than the number of jews who were supposedly killed in the 'holocaust'. (6)

One wonders what Krafft's hand-wringing liberal-lefty critics have to say about those atrocities or perhaps even more appallingly: have they even heard of them?

We can thus perceive that 'holocaust denial' can be seen as the removal of the gas chambers from the story (something quite a few recent 'holocaust historians' are somewhat guilty of) or alternatively it can be seen simply as the intentional mass killing of the jews. Now no revisionist I am aware of disputes that jews were intentionally killed by the Third Reich, but the basic problem persists as even if we accept that the Third Reich shot millions of jews on the Eastern Front (highly unlikely but at least somewhat technically plausible) then that makes the 'holocaust' but one atrocity of many.

It then loses its place as a 'unique event' in the pantheon of modern belief as it isn't distinguishable from Stalin's mass shootings or the Allies own mass killings in the prisoner of war camps: let alone the atrocities committed by former resistance members against their own country people who supported the Third Reich.

What then is 'holocaust denial'?

Well if anything it is the simple objection to the supposed 'uniqueness' of 'jewish suffering' before and during the Second World War and substituting the placement of real and imagined atrocities against the jews in their correct historical context as opposed to downplaying the context and then pushing one type of atrocity to the fore as 'holocaust historians' invariably do.

That to me; as a historian, is utterly repugnant especially given that the 'holocaust' is used like a money-making racket for jewish organizations as Norman Finkelstein has famously pointed out. (7)

Essentially 'holocaust denial' is a pejorative term invented to rhetorically smear those who question the basis of 'uniqueness' of the killing of jews before and during the Second World War. That the 'holocaust' has become a political tool; and hence the lack of ability for it to be conceded as a false intellectual position much like Turkish historians 'denying' the Armenian genocide, (8) is indisputable and as such it is beholden on the honest observer to at least ask the fundamental question of just what evidence supports this ever-changing theory?

That is precisely what Krafft did as if one reads his account of the alleged 'Abattoir Murder' of jews by members of the Romanian 'Legion of the Archangel Michael' in 1941: (9) then one can clearly see that Krafft was himself very surprised by the fact that so widely credited an atrocity has almost literally nothing behind it in terms of documentary evidence. He notes that the two Romanian authorities working in the area; whose work other 'holocaust historians' view as 'authoritative', can't even produce a copy of the original document which is the cornerstone of their argument on this point.

Indeed in Krafft's narrative it is clear that it is both a case of 'can't' as well as 'won't', which is an unfortunately all too common occurrence with scholars being unable to back up a claim they have made but because that claim has entered common scholarly parlance: it is ironically just accepted without question.

Reading between the lines of Krafft's article; which is part travelogue, part autobiography and part historical commentary, it becomes very clear that Krafft was himself shocked at the intellectual carelessness of the 'holocaust historians' he encountered and that his initial interest in the 'Legion of the Archangel Michael' was the kind of intellectual whim that is popularly associated with artists. What precisely Krafft's thoughts were at this time I do not know, but at the same time it is fairly clear that Krafft came to holocaust revisionism awkwardly and hesitantly, because it went against most of what he then believed about the world.

It might be very difficult for his fellow artists to believe, but Krafft came to his doubt about the official holocaust narrative through study and; like most of those associated with holocaust revisionism, a troubling period of self-doubt as to whether the official historians could have got it so badly wrong. Krafft; as he himself relates, engaged with the literature on both sides of the debate and made an informed decision.

This is the inverse to his detractors who have simply believed the standard 'holocaust' narrative without investigation or even a little dose of lateral thinking or as one person remarked to Krafft (I paraphrase): 'look at this latest newspaper article about the documentation of the killing sites'. (10)

Indeed when we look at the original article that sparked off the witch hunt against Krafft; written by a barely literate hysteric known as Jen Graves, (11) we note that she hasn't actually engaged with the scholarly (or even the popular) literature on the 'holocaust' at all, as she gives us such historical howlers as:

'I followed up: "The number I've always read is 6 million Jews killed. I just want to clarify that it's your belief that 700,000 to 1.2 million Jews died total."

Krafft did not answer the question. He only sent a link to a story about exaggerations in the original numbers of Jews reported killed at Auschwitz. That story, called "New 'Official' Changes in the Auschwitz Story," appears on a website called Institute for Historical Review.' (12)

The idea that '6 million jews' were killed is of course the sine qua non of popular 'holocaust' discourse, but as any 'holocaust historian' will tell you: it isn't an accurate number in the slightest and official estimates range between 4 and 5.5 million jews being killed. However Graves treats it as gospel and doesn't even bother to comment about the issue of why the 'number of dead' keeps being revised down.

Graves also clearly doesn't realise that the '6 million jews' number in relation to what in 'Jewish Studies' we call a 'Shoah' (lit. 'Catastrophe') event dates to at least 1840 (in relation the Damascus Affair) (13) and came into popular usage in relation to the so-called 'pogroms' (which as is now widely agreed weren't 'state-sponsored' contrary to the myth perpetrated by the jewish historian Simon Dubnow) from the 1880s to 1923. (14) Further the '6 million' number itself is; as is widely conceded, merely symbolic now and as I have pointed out elsewhere: it probably started out as a simple literal misunderstanding of the rabbinical concept of the guzma, (15) which snowballed over the course of the decades into a literal casualty figure to be taken as gospel (hence the incorrect rationalization that it supposedly comes from population statistics).

Now it is clear; even in Graves' hit piece, that it is Krafft who has done the research on the 'holocaust' and not Graves, but yet it is Graves who judges Krafft while Krafft doesn't judge Graves. It is ironic indeed that one of lefty-liberal art critic brigade is the one who is intolerant and hateful, while Krafft's role in this drama has been that of the individual simply seeking to be understood.

This brings us nicely onto the question of what precisely Graves is up to given that her article; as Johnson has rightly observed, (16) is extremely prejudiced and in all essentials is dressed-up personal invective against Krafft. Graves; looking at her previously published 'content', (17) is a typical example of what we may term; with Johnson, 'cultural bolshevism'. In other words: Graves believes that everyone has the right to an opinion as long as that opinion doesn't contradict hers and if it does woe betide them.

This is the symptomatic behaviour of what Jonah Goldberg has appositely termed 'liberal fascism' or the viewpoint; held in practice but not often in theory by those on the liberal-left, which seeks to suppress all points of view which do not fit into their neat political paradigms of 'acceptability'. One such example of intellectual traditions that they seek to suppress is that associated with the radical right as well as the racialistic right (which they don't tend to differentiate themselves) with which school of thought they broadly and rather incorrectly associate 'holocaust denial'. (18)

Graves in her article; as do Phil Campbell and Priscilla Frank in theirs, (19) sounds a militant call to all art galleries to stop showing Krafft's work because of his 'political views' and supposed 'rehabilitation' of the Third Reich. Indeed it seems that Graves in particular has been actively messaging galleries; as well as encouraging her readers too, that have shown or are currently showing Krafft's work in order to have it withdrawn.

What are we to make of that other than that Graves, Campbell and Frank don't actually believe in the separation of art from the artist and that they are all more interested in what an artist thinks about such and such a historical event or the current political status quo as opposed to the art said artist produces. Clearly Graves, Campbell and Frank adhere; by their actions if not their explicit beliefs, to the position that art is at the service of political and intellectual orthodoxy as opposed to the idea; current in their own writing as it happens, that one of the functions of art is to challenge cherished beliefs and breakdown barriers to understanding.

Is that not what Krafft has been doing irrespective of his historical and political beliefs?

As an aside we should also probably say that if Krafft had become involved with Stalinism and supported Stalin's murderous purges against the kulaks, 'saboteurs' and foreign communists accused of actual or imaginary political deviancy: then Graves wouldn't have written her article and nothing more would have be said.

Such an attitude is symptomatic of what Krafft himself talks about in his article on the Abattoir killings in reference to the 'post-socialist' artistic trends he was involved with, (20) which had for years been lionizing every possible variant of socialism even the ones that killed millions like Trotsky's, Castro's and Mao's. Essentially Graves' problem with Krafft is that he went the wrong political direction and in her view is apologising for the wrong side: the far right rather than the far left.

When Campbell talks about the fact that Graves 'bothered' to google Krafft while others didn't: (21) I can understand what he is trying to say in that Krafft has not made his views on the 'holocaust' a particular secret. (22) However what is interesting is that nobody seems to have noticed or cared that Krafft held such views as we hear repeatedly from those interviewed by Graves and others. (23)

Now all of a sudden Krafft's friends are left holding the proverbial ticking time bomb of trying to apologise and explain why they 'didn't say anything' by the accusative spotlight that Graves has shone on them. It is classic yellow journalism; a term I suspect Graves would not appreciate being applied to her work, in so far as Graves contacts Krafft's friends and artistic associates who are then grilled about why they haven't reported Krafft to the liberal thought police and endorsed the subsequent attempt to hold an artistic auto-de-fe.

Essentially what has happened here is that Krafft held heretical beliefs about the 'holocaust' in private and then began to express those beliefs relatively quietly on the internet on alternative media outlets generally associated with the radical and racialist right. A liberal-lefty mud-raker (Graves) is having a hard time scratching around for her next 'big piece' (her content generally looks to be light on innovation in addition to what we may term 'artistic revelation' in a brief survey of her last few dozen articles) and she happens onto Krafft and thinks to write another short and somewhat dull peon to risqué 'visual art'.

Graves; like most hacks do these days, immediately jumps on google and taps in 'Charles Krafft' cycling through the pages about his work until she notices something odd: Krafft keeps coming up on sites associated with the radical and racialistic right. Graves' excitement deepens and she listens to a podcast with him from Carolyn Yeager's 'The White Network' to discover that he holds unorthodox and nigh on heretical views about the 'holocaust'.

A little more searching reveals Krafft's views have been held for some time and this; to Graves' continued excitement, means that she had a journalistic 'big score' here as she can 'out' Krafft and thus gain a reputation, kudos as well as potential income from a much wider circle than merely a Seattle-based arts rag. Graves' presentation itself is rather pedestrian and lacking in literary ability, but it creates enough of a stir to be picked up by Phil Campbell and Priscilla Frank at the widely-read liberal rag: the Huffington Post.

Their amusing and overdone 'outrage' about Krafft's 'warped ideology' (as Campbell terms it) then causes a ripple effect as liberals and leftists are by now scrambling to avoid any sort of association with Krafft and are acting the part that students played in Mao's cultural revolution in lining up to denounce the man they had loved and respected till a few days before as the devil incarnate.

This is made even worse when the Southern Poverty Law Center picks up the story and promptly begins scrambling to construct a 'profile' on Krafft (having missed his participation in the podcasts and radio interviews for years in spite of having a multi-million dollar endowment to 'track hate') and then strut around the room like they knew all the time. (24) This is then further picked up by the Jewish Daily Forward's arts blog; 'The Arty Semite', and I suspect this story has yet to run its full course in terms of officious liberal and jewish outrage.

We'll have to see.

What Graves has started off against Krafft is simply a witch hunt against a man based on the contravention of her own artistic tropes that the artist and the art they produce are separate entities. More than that Graves will certainly benefit by the publication of this hit piece as for years she has been confined to writing about the Seattle arts scene and now she has opportunity to move into 'exposing' artists with heterodox views (i.e. things she doesn't agree with and can easily be sensationalized) as well as gain national syndication for her own work.

Perhaps our struggling arts writer has finally had her Michelangelo moment?

I doubt it as Graves will find out: the 'Hatewatch' scene is all about what new exposes you can perform and tends to forget successes very quickly, but does have a tendency to remember a writer's failures for a much longer period of time.

Perhaps the last part of this saga that needs to be talked about is what impact it is having on Krafft. This hasn't been touched on by any other writer on this subject to my knowledge, but in an email exchange I recently had with him: he seems remarkably chipper for a man who is being publicly vilified by people he believed to be his friends left, right and centre. Financially Krafft has never had it so good (in contradiction to the SPLC's claim his artistic work is 'devalued'), (25) but he confessed that the hardest thing to bear is the social ostracism he is suffering as a result of this ongoing farrago of liberal character assassination and self-flagellation. (26)

I'd say that Krafft is a very brave man in standing by his views as being factually correct despite what it is costing him personally and emotionally as opposed to the usual kowtowing and mealy-mouthed apologies which characterise so many people who are 'exposed' as having heterodox views. I can only wish him the best of luck in his future endeavours and can assure him; as somebody who has been personally attacked for his intellectual beliefs in the past, that it does show you who your real friends are and that you get used to it soon enough.

Don't back down Charles.

References

(1) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/charles-krafft-is-a-white-nationalist-who-believes-the-holocaust-is-a-deliberately-exaggerated-myth/Content?oid=15995245

(2) Nicholas Jackson O'Shaughnessy, 2004, 'Politics and Propaganda: Weapons of Mass Seduction', 1^st Edition, Manchester University Press: Manchester, pp. 24-29

(3) http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/172267/can-charles-krafft-be-defended/

(4) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/freude-durch-krafft/

(5) Anne Applebaum, 2003, 'Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps', 1^st Edition, Random House: New York, pp. 22-24

(6) This is a very uncomfortable area for modern historians and relatively few English studies have appeared (although there are a profusion of them in the German language), the most recent attempt at breaking this historical taboo is: R. Douglas, 2012, 'Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War', 1^st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven

(7) In Norman Finkelstein, 2001, 'The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering', 2^nd Edition, Verso: New York

(8) This isn't strictly true in the sense of 'denying it happened' but rather (incorrectly in my view) disagreeing with the Armenian interpretation of malice aforethought as well as on the number of deaths (the Turks also tend to stress the atrocities committed by Armenian nationalists as well).

(9) Charles Krafft, 2012, 'To the Abattoir: Investigating the Legionary Rebellion of January 21-23, 1941', Smith's Report, Vol. 190 (March), pp. 7-11

(10) Charles Krafft in personal communication to the author.

(11) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/charles-krafft-is-a-white-nationalist-who-believes-the-holocaust-is-a-deliberately-exaggerated-myth/Content?oid=15995245

(12) Ibid.

(13) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2012/07/origin-of-6-million-jews-figure.html

(14) For a good summary see Don Heddesheimer, 2003, 'The First Holocaust: Jewish Fund Raising Campaigns with Holocaust Claims During and After World War One', 1^st Edition, Theses and Dissertations Press: Chicago

(15) Lit. 'Exaggeration' and used to express a sense of scale in relation to a 'Shoah' event by multiplying the number of jews involved in the Exodus from Egypt according to the Mishnah (600,000).

(16) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/freude-durch-krafft/

(17) See http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/jen-graves/Author?oid=26622

(18) Holocaust 'deniers' actually come from across the political spectrum from Libertarians to Marxists to Nationalists to Liberals. It is a myth constructed from almost nothing that 'holocaust denial' is synonymous with nationalism.

(19) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-campbell/when-a-good-artist-turns-_b_2694938.html and http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/charles-krafft-nazi-holocaust_n_2695418.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

(20) Krafft, Op. Cit., pp. 7-8

(21) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-campbell/when-a-good-artist-turns-_b_2694938.html

(22) http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/02/freude-durch-krafft/

(23) http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/charles-krafft-is-a-white-nationalist-who-believes-the-holocaust-is-a-deliberately-exaggerated-myth/Content?oid=15995245; http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/172267/can-charles-krafft-be-defended/; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/15/charles-krafft-nazi-holocaust_n_2695418.html?utm_hp_ref=arts

(24) http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/03/06/famous-seattle-ceramicist-exposed-as-holocaust-denier/

(25) Ibid.

(26) Charles Krafft in personal communication to the author.

Jews and the Adams Prize

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 19:30:00 +0000

The Adams Prize is an annual award made to a young mathematician currently resident in Britain by the prestigious University of Cambridge in England. (1) This prize; unlike some others, has been awarded since 1848 and thus has large number of recipients over the years making it an ideal prize to look at in relation to claims made about disproportionate 'jewish achievement'. (2) What is interesting is that is another prize where the jews and their apologists have not compiled a list of the 'jewish winners' and even the otherwise predictable JINFO has not provided such a list. (3)

Now before we begin we should note that the selection procedure in relation to deserving young mathematicians is decided only be mathematicians associated with the University of Cambridge which means that British mathematicians would naturally have an advantage, but this advantage is offset by the issue of what I have the termed the lingua franca of mathematics or the fact that equations communicate a specific logical point that can be followed even without understanding the language an article is in. (4)

Once again I should point out that in compiling the list of jews versus non-jews: I have used the widest possible criteria for what a jew is. Since; as I have pointed out elsewhere, jews who compile these lists almost invariably use a biological definition of jewishness as opposed to a religious or a cultural one: we also need to compare like-for-like. Given that to compare the number of Irish who have won a given prize to the number of jews from any country who have won it is necessarily disingenuous: since the Irish are but from one country while a Jew can come from any country by the common jewish list compiler's definition. (5) Thus I have adopted the widest possible biological definition of jewishness (i.e. any jewish ancestry makes someone jewish) and used those of European origin as a major point for comparison in order to be more than equitable.

I should also mention that there is not a complete list of winners of Adams Prize winners that I have been able to find: so I have put together two different partial lists to come up with 85 recipients. (6) These breakdown as follows:

Jewish Winners: 4

European Winners: 75

Indian Winners: 5

Chinese Winners: 1

Percentage of Jewish Winners: 4.7 percent

Percentage of European Winners: 88.2 percent

Percentage of Indian Winners: 5.9 percent

Percentage of Chinese Winners: 1.2 percent

In the above we can clearly see that European domination is near enough total (requiring little comment or analysis) and the jews are actually significantly under-represented given that they had been resident in significant numbers in Britain and played a significant role in British intellectual life since the 17^th century. The Indians by contrast only began to attend British universities or play a significant part in British intellectual life from the mid-late 19^th century, which immediately begs the question of why the jews have been unable to contribute more than they have in fact done as opposed to why they have contributed so much to the study of mathematics.

The only point in the above list that would perhaps be contested by the pro-jewish side of the debate is the jewishness of the 1972 recipient of the Adams Prize: Alan Baker. (7) JINFO lists him as being jewish on two separate occasions, (8) but no other source I can find on him mentions anything related to this alleged jewishness. (9)

This seems once again to be jewish nationalists claiming someone is jewish for no apparent reason other than they wish it to be true!

References

(1) There is no official page for the Adams Prize but the closest is: http://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/news/3.html

(2) I have discussed the issues in relation to common arguments and statistical claims of this school of thought in the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/02/why-jewish-achievement-lists-are.html

(3) http://www.jinfo.org/

(4) This has been discussed in the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-fields-medal.html

(5) I have discussed this is in more detail in the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-nobel-prize-fantasy-versus.html

(6) These two separate lists are located at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_Prize and http://planetmath.org/?op=getobj&id=9271&from=objects

(7) Previously discussed in the following article: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2013/01/jews-and-fields-medal.html

(8) http://www.jinfo.org/Mathematics_Comp.html and http://www.jinfo.org/Fields_Mathematics.html

(9) For example: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Baker_Alan.html and https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/people/a.baker/

Throwing another Jew down the same Well

noreply@blogger.com (Karl Radl) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 19:12:00 +0000

Two years ago I commented in my article 'Throwing the Jew down the Well' (1) about the much touted 'discovery' of a medieval well shaft in the English city of Norwich, which was stuffed full of human remains. (2) These remains were plausibly dated to the 12^th and 13^th centuries, which caused proverbial heart palpitations among medievalists and the jewish community. This was because Norwich at that time was embroiled in one of the major events in the history of anti-Semitism: the first medieval ritual murder case or 'blood libel' as the jews and their apologists prefer to refer to it.

This gained even more credence when forensic anthropologist Sue Black and geneticist Ian Barnes carried out testing, which suggested that the human remains were firstly jewish and secondly were related implying that they were in fact a family. This seeming avalanche of evidence was only worsened when a (quite well-known) jewish medievalist named Miri Rubin got involved by telling people (correctly in my view but incorrectly according to the orthodox view) (3) that this was a time of jewish persecution in Norwich. (4)

At the time I threw quite a lot of doubt onto the 'discovery' on the grounds that the 'jewishness' of the skeletons had not been conclusively established and nor could they actually be linked to 'jewish persecution' in Norwich. I also pointed out that a key point of evidence; that the well was a 'few hundred yards' from Norwich's jewish quarter, was nonsensical given that; as any history of medieval Norwich will tell you, it was a small place and a 'few hundred yards' would have actually been a considerable distance rather the small distance it is today.

As it turns out this early trumpeting of a jewish identification by Black and Barnes as well as the concomitant media hype over the 'massacred jews' was quite unjustified as scholars have echoed my own initial skepticism of the identification of these human remains as being those of jews. (5)

Indeed what it is interesting is that further genetic testing has yielded inconclusive results about the 'jewishness' of these skeletons, but this skepticism from the academic community has unsurprisingly not stopped the jews effectively claiming special knowledge that these individuals were jewish.

Barnes has tried to defend his identification of the skeletons as jewish on the grounds that the geographical mapping of the origins of the genetic material gives us a location of South-East Europe to Central Asia. He claims that this has be plausibly explained and that he has not yet been given a reasonable answer.

Answering that little tit bit is fairly easy given that Barnes is forgetting that a Franco-Norse dynasty (the Normans) conquered England in 1066 and included many members who were militarily active in south-eastern Europe and whose ancestors had; to an extent, intermarried with families from that region as well as probably had numerous children out of wedlock with local women. Further Barnes is also forgetting that many of the ancestors of the Normans would have served in the Varangian guard of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople and could have easily produced sons and daughters of more varied origins than would have been immediately apparent. (6)

Incidentally we also know of major violent events in Norwich in the late 11^th century (which could easily given a 12^th century genetic locational cusp reading) in which Normans of this type were killed! (7)

Barnes really hasn't thought through his defensive claims of jewishness now has he?

This means; as I have above intimated, that the likelihood is that these bodies were of Christians as West asserts. (8) What has also been completely ignored by those arguing; like Barnes, that these bodies are those of jews and that their deaths were likely the result of Christian persecution. Is that if they are indeed of jewish origin: then why couldn't they be say a family of jewish converts to Christianity and killed for a reason unrelated to this ancestry? We know of plenty of such individuals in Europe at the time: so why should we automatically being of jewish origin as meaning that the individual concerned believes in Judaism?

This doesn't seem to trouble Norwich's current jewish population however who are demanding (no doubt believing themselves 'inspired' by Yahweh) that the human remains be buried as jews because they believe them to be jewish. This is rather nonsensical at best considered that fresh tests are being conducted by the university of Mainz in Germany to help determine whether the jewish identification by Barnes is valid or not.

I mean who cares about science and the academic process?

The jews believe it to be true so according to them it must be so.

References

(1) http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot.com/2011/06/throwing-jew-down-well.html

(2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13855238

(3) The accepted view is well represented by one of its major proponents; Gavin Langmuir, who argues the ritual murder, the trial and concomitantly the massacre of the jews never happened and was a creation of Thomas of Monmouth. See Gavin Langmuir, 1984, 'Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder', Speculum, Vol. 59, pp. 820-846

(4) http://www.medievalists.net/2011/06/23/bodies-of-17-jews-from-medieval-norwich-may-have-been-mass-murder-victims-scholars-believe/

(5) http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/103175/norwich-bury-bones-%E2%80%94-jewish-or-not

(6) On this see Brian Crouch, 2002, 'The Normans: The History of a Dynasty', 1^st Edition, Continuum: New York

(7) David Bates, 2001, 'William the Conqueror', 2^nd Edition, Tempus: Stoud, pp. 181-186

(8) http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/103175/norwich-bury-bones-%E2%80%94-jewish-or-not

Hat-tip to Bev at VNN for posting the story as I hadn't noticed there had been developments till she highlighted them.