Why the Jew?

WHY THE JEW?

The other day I wrote in a thread that I would write about this.

It sounded as if it were something I just needed to get sorted over a weekend. But the Truth is that it has been lying there working in me for years.

I am writing and sharing it because I myself have needed to understand where it comes from, this strange, seemingly unstoppable and implacable hatred that keeps turning up in new clothes every time you think it has been laid in the grave. And because I believe others besides me wonder about the same thing, but perhaps never get round to sitting down and pondering it. The Man on the Television, at any rate, doesn't look like he is going to do the work for us and take the trouble to explain it.

The hatred.

Because the more I read, the less sense it made. It has had so many faces, so many justifications and so many fantasies pinned on it that there was no pattern to be seen. Every age has had its own explanation - and the explanations have nothing to do with one another.

And when something goes on for two thousand years without having the same reason twice, then the reason probably doesn't lie where you are looking. Then it must come from somewhere else.

From Man himself.

I now believe I have found the contours of it.

The question was simple. Why the Jews? Why for two thousand years? Why precisely them and not any other minority that has lived among strangers and held on to its own?

My first thought was that there must be something special about them. About their faith, about their way of standing in the world. That they WILL not bow their necks to anything other than what they understand as the Truth - and that this sort of thing inevitably creates conflict wherever you settle.

There is something in that thought. But it breaks if you are not careful, because there is only a small step from "there is something about them" to "they brought it on themselves". And that is neither what I mean nor what I experience - and still the thought must not break, because it is too important.

So I tested it.

An explanation of Jew-hatred only holds if it can carry four things at once.

1. That it has lasted for two thousand years.

2. That the accusations contradict each other - the Jews have been hated for being poor and for being rich, for being capitalists and for being communists, for being without a land and for having one.

3. That the hatred is metaphysical - the Jew has never just been called an irritating neighbour, he has been called Antichrist, well-poisoner and world conspirator.

4. And that the hatred thrives where there are almost no Jews.

In 1968 Poland had around thirty thousand Jews left of the more than three million who lived there before the war. The regime drove half of them out. And in Japan, where most people have never once met a single Jew, books about something as foolish as "Jewish world control" sold in the hundreds of thousands in the eighties.

It is the last one that settles it.

A hatred that doesn't need Jews in order to exist is not about what Jews do.

I cannot know whether what follows is true, but follow along - then you can judge for yourself.

…

Let us begin before Christianity.

Around the year 100 a Roman senator sits writing the history of his people. His name is Tacitus, and he has reached the Jewish war and the fall of Jerusalem, and before he lets the legions advance he stops to explain to his readers what kind of people this is.

He writes - "All that we hold sacred, they hold profane." And he accuses them of harbouring hatred towards all other human beings.

Notice what the accusation is not about. Tacitus could have settled for the revolt, Rome had just spent four years putting it down. But that is not what occupies him. What occupies him is something that was there long before the revolt, and that existed in every single city in the empire where Jews lived.

Because out in the diaspora the Jews paid taxes, served the king and kept the laws of the land. Their Talmud later got a rule for it - "the law of the land is the law".

What they refused was the altar.

They would not sacrifice to the city's gods - and in antiquity the city's gods and the city were the same thing. Whoever did not sacrifice had, at bottom, said that the city was not The Highest.

And here comes the test.

Some years later the same Tacitus writes about another group, whom Nero had burned as torches in his gardens. The Christians. And he uses almost the same words. "Hatred of the human race". As long as we - those of us who are Christians - were the minority that refused to sacrifice to the emperor, we got exactly the same verdict.

So my thought was not to be thrown out.
On the contrary, it was to be sharpened.

They bow to the King's Law.
They NEVER bow to the King's God.

The image is Daniel in the Bible. Perhaps you know it. He was carried off as a boy, trained at court, and then a loyal official in Babylon under three kings, and so able that his enemies cannot find one single error in his accounts. So instead they get the king to issue a law - for thirty days no one may pray to anyone but the king. And Daniel does not rebel. He makes no speech. He just goes home, up to his room, where the windows stand open towards Jerusalem, and kneels three times a day, as he always has.

That is his entire crime. An open window.

Now look across the whole of our history through those glasses.

The emperor. The king. The Church, when it became power. The race. The class. The revolution.

Every single order that has laid claim to the last word over Man has run into a people whose mere existence says -

You are not God.

….

Then there is the layer people rarely talk about.

Several times in history a movement has arisen that declared itself the fulfilment of Israel's promise. And each time it needed Israel to say yes.

In 1523 Luther wrote warmly about Jesus having been born a Jew. He believed it was the papal church's fault that the Jews had not come, and that they would come now that the gospel stood pure. He waited twenty years. They did not come. So in 1543 the same man wrote that their synagogues should be burned.

And one more figure you know.

In Medina, Muhammad first prayed towards Jerusalem - and expected that the city's Jewish tribes would recognise him as the prophet their own scriptures pointed towards. They did not. The direction of prayer was then turned towards Mecca.

There were three Jewish tribes living in the city. The first two were driven out a year apart. The third, the Banu Qurayza, was accused in 627 of having negotiated with the army besieging Medina. They surrendered after twenty-five days, and the verdict was that the men were to die and the women and children were to be sold as slaves. Islam's own oldest biography of the prophet puts the number at between six and nine hundred men - beheaded in the city's marketplace.

Five years after the prophet came to Medina, there were no Jewish tribes left in the city.

And just one more - a little further on in time.

Marx, himself a descendant of rabbis on both sides, wrote a piece on the Jewish question in 1843. "Zur Judenfrage".

In the years that followed he built the doctrine that was to replace all the religions - a salvation without God, where property was the Fall, the working class the chosen people, the revolution Judgement Day and the classless society paradise…

And already in 1843 the Jew had been given his place in it. The worldly god of the Jew is money, he wrote, and society only becomes free when it has emancipated itself from Judaism.

Feel that for a moment.

He did not wait for a yes. He demanded - that they stop being Jews.

And so we arrive at a central point.

NO doctrine of salvation - neither the Church's, nor Islam's, nor Marxism's - can bear the firstborn saying no. As long as the heir lives and refuses, the successor's whole claim is an open question.

And let me interject, so there is no doubt.

I am a Christian, and that is why it has to be said here. The greater part of those two thousand years belongs to Christendom. The Church could not bear the no from the promise's own people. That shame is ours.

And I know very well what the attentive reader is thinking now. That my own faith stands in the same row. That we too say the promise has been fulfilled, and that we too got a no.

That is right. And that is why it is worth seeing what actually stands in our own book, the Bible, as I read it. Because the answer was given long before the Church forgot it.

Paul, himself a Jew, writes to the first Christians in Rome that they are wild branches, grafted onto an old tree, and that they must beware of being arrogant towards the branches that were there first. It is not you who bear the root, he writes. It is the root that bears you. And a few lines later - the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

That is to say, a Christian has no need of the Jew's yes.

The promise to them stands firm, no matter what they answer us, and that is precisely why we can trust the promise to us. A God who regretted his first people could also regret the next.

The Church read past those lines for fifteen hundred years. And every single time it did, it was sawing at the branch it was sitting on.

….

But why the metaphysical, then?
Why THAT hatred and not just contempt?

In 1939, old and ill and just fled from Vienna, Freud wrote that the Christian peoples are "badly christened". That under the varnish they are pagans who never forgave the law that was laid on them, and who hate the Jews because they do not dare to hate Christ.

George Steiner put it more sharply.

Three times the Jews have confronted the West with a demand that man cannot live up to.

The one God from Sinai. The Sermon on the Mount. And Marx's dream of the just world, which is the prophets' dream, only without God. He called it "the blackmail of transcendence".

And notice the third one. It is Marx again. The same Marx who, a little further up, wanted Judaism to disappear.

He took the prophets' demand for justice for the widow, the fatherless and the stranger, and then he took God out of it. And a demand that no longer has anyone above it becomes a god itself.

So Marx stands on both sides of the line. He is the heir who carries the demand on out into the world, and he is the successor who cannot bear that the original heir is still alive. That is why the Revolution is on the list of those who wanted to be God, even though it spoke with the voice of the prophets.

And then Nazism.

Luther wanted baptism. Muhammad wanted recognition. Marx wanted the Jews to be absorbed into mankind and stop being something of their own. They were narrow doors and humiliating doors, but they were doors.

Nazism had none. It did not want the Jew's yes, and it did not want the inheritance. It simply wanted the will burned.

And it knew perfectly well what it was doing. In 1939 German theologians opened an institute in Eisenach whose declared task was to remove Jewish influence from the life of the church. The Old Testament was to go. The Hebrew words were to go out of the hymns. What was to be left standing was a Jesus who had never been a Jew.

A chosen people. A thousand-year reich. A leader who would save. The whole vocabulary was taken from the book they wanted to be rid of. But the Race could not become God as long as one single human being walked around carrying the commandment that there is only One.

So here it was not enough to burn the books. The commandment did not stand only on paper. It walked around on two legs, in every single human being who bore the name, and that is why it was the human beings who had to go.

And now you can see what Freud and Steiner, each in his own way, were pointing at.

Conscience is the voice that says "you must not", precisely when you want to most of all. You cannot cut it out of yourself. But you can remember who brought it.

You do not forgive the one who gave you your Conscience.

Against a troublesome neighbour you build a fence, or you move. That is not the kind of hatred we are talking about. This is the hatred of the one who has seen what you have done, and who keeps standing there.

You don't hate a neighbour like that.
You hate an accuser like that.

….

And so we are at the bottom.

I have previously called the Jew "the developer".

And here it becomes clear, to myself as well, why the word is right.

Those of us who have stood in a darkroom remember it. The paper lies white in the tray, and then the face slowly appears as if out of nothing. But it did not come out of nothing. The image was already in the film, the light put it there. The developer creates nothing. Without it, the image just never appears.

So yes, back to the start.

There IS something about the Jews. One people with one book where the words do not move, and one God over all kings. It will not dissolve, and it will not worship. That is the developer.

But the image was there already.

It is Man's oldest drive - to want to be God. It is already there in the third chapter of the Bible, where the serpent promises - "You will be like God." And where Man cannot become it himself, he makes his state, his race, his class or his revolution God instead.

Right in the way of that drive stands The First Commandment.

"I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me."

Notice how it begins. The God who forbids all other gods presents himself as the one who led slaves out into freedom. And that hangs together, because every time something earthly is made into a god, someone becomes its thrall or slave.

And now the second test can get its answer, the one with the accusations that contradict each other. Because the developer is the same every time. It is the film that changes.

The one who has made the nation his god sees a rootless cosmopolitan who belongs nowhere.

The one who has made the class his god sees a capitalist.

The one who has made the market his god sees a Bolshevik.

And the one who today has made the borderless world his god sees a people stubbornly holding on to a land.

And the one who has divided the world into victims and oppressors and made that scheme his god sees a white colonist. The people who for two thousand years were too foreign for Europe have now become too European for the rest of the world.

And notice what happens to the words here.

The word "genocide" was created in 1944 by a Polish Jew, Raphael Lemkin, while his own family was being exterminated. Today it is turned against the people it was created around. That is how it goes when you believe that words do not describe reality but create it. Then they can be moved to wherever they are needed.

And then perhaps it is not so strange that precisely that way of thinking runs into the people of the book, where the words do not move.

Regardless.

It is the same Jew. He has not moved. It is the altar that has been swapped out, and every time he stands precisely where the new god cannot get past.

So the accusations only contradict each other if you believe they are about the Jew. Read them as what they are, and they hang together completely.

They are a list of what human beings through the ages have put in God's place.

So tell me what you accuse the Jew of, and I will tell you what you worship.

The Jew is the first commandment with a face.

The occasion. Never the cause.

And that is why one thing has to be said quite clearly. This is not about the piety of the Jews. The most assimilated Jews in Europe were the German ones in 1933. Secular, many baptised, a hundred thousand had worn the Kaiser's uniform, and twelve thousand of them never came home. When the SA men took up position in front of the Jewish shops on the first of April, there were veterans standing behind the windows with the Iron Cross on their chests.

It did not exempt a single one of them. What the Nazis hated was not what the Jews believed. It was what the word Jew meant.

….

That is also why I - or anyone - cannot put Judaism and Islam on the same shelf, even though both refuse to bow.

And here I want to be quite precise - because a Muslim will rightly say that Islam confesses the same thing. There is no god but God. No king, no state, no human being. On paper it is the same boundary.

But the difference lies in who holds that boundary.

The Jews carried the commandment for almost two thousand years without an army, without a state and without a sword to put behind it. They could not force a single king to do anything. They could only keep on being there, and that was enough.

Islam, on the other hand, was an empire before the prophet was dead, and ten years later his successors stood in Jerusalem, Damascus and Alexandria. There the boundary was never carried by anyone standing outside power. It was carried by power itself.

And that changes everything.

Judaism says - no earthly order is God. Not even our own.

There is a story in the Old Testament that says it better than any explanation. King David, the greatest king Israel has had, stands one evening on the roof of his palace and sees a woman bathing. Her name is Bathsheba, and she is married to Uriah, one of his own soldiers, who is away in the field. David has her brought to him. When she becomes pregnant, he sends a letter to his commander - put Uriah in the front, where the fighting is hardest, and then pull back from him. Uriah falls. David marries the widow.

And no one says anything. He is the king.

Then the prophet Nathan comes in to him and tells a little story. There were two men in a city, one rich and one poor. The rich man had sheep and cattle in plenty. The poor man had one little lamb, which grew up with him together with his children, ate of his bread, drank from his cup and slept in his arms. One day the rich man had a guest, and instead of taking from his own animals he took the poor man's lamb and slaughtered it.

David is furious. That man shall die, he says.

And Nathan looks at him and answers - "You are the man."

That is the whole scene. A man without an army and without office stands before the mightiest man in the kingdom and tells him the truth straight to his face. And the king does not have him executed. He bows his head and says - I have sinned.

It stands in their own book. Their greatest king, caught red-handed, written down by themselves and carried along for three thousand years.

Islam as an order says the opposite - this order IS God's. Bow down!

The one is the limit on power.
The other is power laying claim to the limit.

And a boundary that power itself administers does not awaken the hatred we are talking about here. It awakens fear, and it awakens resistance, but that is something else. The hatred that calls a Human Being a well-poisoner and world conspirator is reserved for the one who says no without having anything but his no.

THAT is why every project that wants to be God sooner or later goes after the Jews. And that is why the hatred that begins with Jews, as Jonathan Sacks said, never ends with Jews.

Swallow that.

It is worth standing still by that sentence for a moment, because it is not a figure of speech. It is a description of how this hangs together.

Nathan could only point at the king because something stood above the king. Take that away, and there is no prophet, just a subject who has spoken out of turn. Everything we in the West count as our own, take for granted, rests on the same one thing - that power is NOT the highest.

Conscience, which no state can own. The Law, which also binds the one who gives it. The individual human being, who is something before being a citizen, a voter or labour. The king stands under the Law, the Law stands under the Truth, and the Truth has a Source that lies higher than the king.

The Jew is not the only one protected by that boundary.

He is just the one standing furthest out.

The one who has carried it longest and most visibly, and who is therefore hit first when someone wants it gone.

So the one who goes after the Jew is not only going after the Jew. He is going after the roof over all of us, and he begins with the beam that has been in place the longest.

So when Jew-hatred rises, don't ask what the Jews have done.

Ask who is in the process of making himself God.

❤️‍🔥🪽

Happy Sunday, friends.
Enjoy the sun while it's here ☀️