The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit: And Its Impact on World History

1194 Pages·2008·20.46 MB·English

by  E. Michael Jones

The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
and its Impact on World History
E. Michael Jones
Fidelity Press
South Bend, Indiana
2008
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Yet what kind of men were they who set their hands to the task [of rebuilding the
temple]? They were men who constantly resisted the Holy Spirit, revolutionists
bent on stirring up sedition. After the destruction which occurred under Vespa
sian and Titus, these Jews rebelled during the reign of Hadrian and tried to go
back to the old commonwealth and way of life. What they failed to realize was
that they were fighting against the decree of God, who had ordered that Jerusalem
remain forever in ruins.
St. John Chrysostom, Adversos Judaeos
Christianity did not bring a message of social revolutiQn like that of the ill-fated
Spartacus, whose struggle led to so much bloodshed. Jesus was not Spartacus, he
was not engaged in a fight for political liberation like Barabbas or Bar-Kochba.
Jesus, who himself died on the Cross, brought something totally different: an
encounter with the Lord of all lords, an encounter with the living God and thus
an encounter with a hope stronger than the sufferings of slavery, a hope which
therefore transformed life and the world from within.
Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi
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Contents
Introduction 13
Chapter One
The Synagogue of Satan 27
Chapter Two
Julian the Apostate and the Doomed Temple 57
Chapter Three
Rome Discovers the Talmud 93
Chapter Four
False Conversion and the Inquisition 133
Chapter Five
The Revolution Arrives in Europe 149
Chapter Six
The Converso Problem 203
Chapter Seven
Reuchlin vs. Pfefferkorn 225
Chapter Eight
Thomas Muentzer and the Peasant Revolt 257
Chapter Nine
The Anabaptist Rebellion 293
Chapter Ten
John Dee and Magic 327
Chapter Eleven
Menassah and the Apostate Messiah 409
Chapter Twelve
The Rise of Freemasonry 473
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Chapter Thirteen
The Revolution of 1848 563
Chapter Fourteen
Ottilie Assing and the American Civil War 601
Chapter Fifteen
From Emancipation to Assassination 645
Chapter Sixteen
The Redemption of the South and the NAACP 691
Chapter Seventeen
The Trial of Leo Frank 707
Chapter Eighteen
The Spread of Bolshevism 731
Chapter Nineteen
Marcus Garvey 761
Chapter Twenty
The Scottsboro Boys 785
Chapter Twenty-One
Revolutionary Music in the 1930S 817
Chapter Twenty-Two
Lorraine Hansberry 849
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Birth of Conservatism 863
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Second Vatican Council Begins 883
Chapter Twenty-Five
Folk Music meets the Civil Rights Movement 899
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Chapter Twenty-Six
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window 905
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Third Session of the Council 917
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jews and Abortion 941
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Black Panthers 949
Chapter Thirty
The Messiah Arrives Again 971
Chapter Thirty-One
The Jewish Takeover of American Culture
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Neoconservative Era 1019
Epilogue:
The Conversion of the Revolutionary Jew
Notes 1079
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12
Introduction
In trod uction
On September 12, 2006, Joseph Ratzinger made a triumphal return to his na
tive Bavaria. Having chosen the name of Benedict XVI when he was elected pope,
His Holiness returned not only to Germany but to the German university of Re
gensburg to express his gratitude for the time he spent there as a professor and to
renew the Church's commitment to the university.
But more than that, Pope Benedict wanted to re-affirm the Church's position
on the relationship between faith and reason. In order to do that he had to refer
to a tradition where that relationship has not been so complementary, a tradition
which stands outside of Europe, namely, Islam.
That's where the trouble began, specifically when Benedict quoted the Byzan
tine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, who felt that the Islamic world and the Chris
tian world shared two fundamentally different views of the relationship between
God and reason. The issue was religiously inspired violence: "Show me just what
Mohammed brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and
inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'"
After an initially favorable response, the world press, including the Arab
press, appeared to use the quote to inflame Islamic opinion against the Church.
The inflammation was a replay, at least in some ways, of the Danish cartoon crisis
of a few months before. In that incident, a Danish magazine editor, with ties to
American neoconservatives like Daniel Pipes, ran a series of cartoons that were
calculated to outrage Muslims and provoke them to attack Denmark and, by ex
tension, Europe. The purpose of the provocation was to drive Europe, by way of
reaction to the Muslim outrage, into the arms of the Americans, who were desper
ately in need of support for their failing war in Iraq.'
In the instance of the Regensburg speech, the outrage surrounding the Man
uel II Paleologos quote achieved two ends: first, it strengthened the neoconser
vative hold over the Catholic mind by giving the impression that Muslims were
fanatics determined to wage jihad against both the pope and the Church (the
Muslim/Catholic alliance against abortion, which I personally witnessed at the
World Population Conference in Cairo in 1994, gave the opposite impression), and
secondly, it obscured the real topic of the talk, which was Logos and the central
role it plays in both Europe and the Church.
Unlike Christianity, Islam is not docile to Logos, nor for that matter is Islam's
God; God's will is arbitrary, inscrutable. According to Benedict's reading of Man
uel II Paleologos, "the decisive statement in this argument against violent conver
sion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature." This
idea is not intrinsic to Islam. The "noted French Islamicist R. Arnaldez," Pope
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The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
Benedict continues, "points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is
not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the
truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry."
Christianity is different from Islam in this regard: The Christian God acts
with Logos. In using the term Logos, the Pope situates Christianity and, byexten
sion, the European culture which grew up under its influence, in the tradition of
Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy is part of God's plan for humanity, some
thing that became clear when St Paul had to change his plans and travel to Mace
donia. Greek philosophy is, in other words, not just Greek; it is universal:
Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a
Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the
profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the
biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of
Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel
with the words: "In the beginning was the logos." This is the very word used by
the Emperor: God acts with logos.
"In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God," says the Evangelist.
The marriage of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy that begat Christi
anity and subsequently Europe is not mere coincidence, nor is Greek philosophy
some adulteration of an otherwise pure Gospel. Europe means Biblical faith plus
Greek thought: Europe is based on Logos. "The encounter between the Biblical
message and Greek thought," the pope continues,
did not happen by chance. ... Biblical faith ... encountered the best of Greek thought
at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident in the later wisdom
literature. ... A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place there [in
the Septuagint], an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion.
From the very heart of Christian faith, and, at the same time, the heart of Greek
thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: "Not to act 'with logos' is
contrary to God's nature.
This means that Logos, far from being some cultural accretion, is part of the
nature of God and, therefore, part of creation. The European, and by that term I
include both North and South America and Australia, is traditionally born into a
world that is radically reasonable, radically logical, because that world mirrors the
mind of God, who behaves in ways that sometimes go beyond what human reason
can comprehend but never in ways that contradict that reason.
So far so good. We agree wholeheartedly with what the Pope said about
Logos, and we can see without too much effort that Islam has a radically different
attitude toward the relationship between faith and reason. Europe has dealt with
the threat for centuries, but from an historical perspective, the Islamic threat to
Europe is only half the story.
At this point we come to the attack on Logos which is not mentioned in the
Pope's speech, the Jewish attack on Logos, which manifests itself not by the threat
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Introduction
of invasion from without, as is the case with Islam, which has sought to spread its
faith by military conquest, but by the threat of subversion from within, otherwise
known as revolution. If Muslims are alogos, because of Mohammed's imperfect
understanding of the monotheistic traditions he absorbed from his position be
yond the borders of a collapsing Greco-Roman civilization, then Jews are anti
Logos, in the sense that they reject Christ altogether. Islam did not reject Christ;
Islam failed to understand Christ, as manifested in its rejection of both the Trin
ity and the Incarnation, and ended up trying to mask that misunderstanding by
honoring Jesus as a prophet.
The situation with Jews is completely different. The Jews were God's chosen
people. When Jesus arrived on earth as their long-awaited Messiah, the Jews, who,
like all men, were given free will by their God, had to make a decision. They had
to either accept or reject the Christ, who was, so Christians believe, the physical
embodiment of Logos.
As we will see, the Jews began by wanting to have the Messiah save them
on their terms, which were suffused with racial pride. When the Jews tell Jesus
in John 8 that they are the "seed of Abraham," in Greek "sperma Abraam," He
changes the term of the argument by replying "If you were Abraham's children,
you would do as Abraham did," which is to say follow God's will and accept Jesus
as the son of God and Messiah. Since the Jews, or those to whom Jesus is speaking,
reject Jesus, they reject their father Abraham as well, and show that "the devil is
[their] father."
Once Jesus arrives in Jerusalem, the term Jew in the Gospel of St. John is no
longer a purely racial term. Jew has come to mean a rejecter of Christ. Race is no
longer the focus. The Jews who accept Jesus will henceforth be known as Chris
tians. The Jews who reject him are known henceforth as "Jews." As St. John reports
in the Apocalypse, "those who call themselves Jews" are really liars and members
of the "synagogue of Satan" (Rev 2.9, 3.9).
By the middle of John's Gospel, the term Jew no longer has the clear racial
meaning it had at the beginning when the Samaritan woman was told that "salva
tion is from the Jews." The other, more negative redefinition of the word Jew is also
not essentially racial and becomes apparent in the story of the man born blind in
John 9. That man's parents, we are told, refused to answer any questions about
Jesus healing their son because they feared the "Jews." They "said this because
they feared the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that if anyone should confess
him to be Christ, he was to be put out of the synagogue." Clearly the split between
"Jews" and followers of Christ had already begun.
The Jews rejected Christ because he was crucified. They wanted a powerful
leader, not a suffering servant. Annas and Caiaphas mockingly told Christ that if
he came down from the cross, they would accept him as the Messiah. When the
Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos, and when they rejected Logos, which
includes within itself the principles of social order, they became revolutionaries.
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The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
Jews may have become revolutionaries at the foot of the cross, but the full im
plications of their decision didn't become apparent until 30 years later, when the
Jews rebelled against Rome, and Rome retaliated by destroying the Temple. At this
point, the Jews had no temple, no priesthood, and no sacrifice, and as a result they
had no way of fulfilling their covenant. Seeing which way the battle for Jerusalem
was going, a rabbi, and deputy head of the Sanhedrin, by the name of Jochanan
ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a shroud, and, after being
recognized by Roman authorities as a friend of Rome, was granted the privilege of
founding a rabbinical school at Jabneh.
It is at this moment, some 30 years after the founding of the Church, that
modern Judaism, Judaism as we know it, was born as essentially a debating soci
ety, because in the absence of a Temple, that was all that Jews could do. The results
of these interminable debates became known as the Talmud, which got written
down over the next six centuries. The debating did nothing to eradicate the spirit
of revolution from the Jewish mind, but in many ways intensified it by teaching
the Jews to look for a military Messiah.
The Jews got their military Messiah roughly 60 years after the destruction of
the Temple, when Simon bar Kokhba rose up against Rome in 131. The rabbis in
Jerusalem, with a few exceptions, recognized bar Kokhba as the Messiah, and so
as if to prove that racial Judaism had become incoherent, the Christian Jews were
expelled for not recognizing him as the Messiah. It didn't matter whether your
mother was Jewish; the ultimate determinant of Jewishness had become rejection
of Christ, and that rejection led inexorably to revolution.
II
Debate over who the Jews are never ceases. Such debate comes up against a
basic philosophical issue, something akin to the nominalism of William of Ock
ham. The issue revolves around the use of the word "Jew." Just what does the word
refer to? Does it refer to anything at all, or is it like the word "tree," a word which,
according to the nominalists, has no clear meaning, since in the real world the
only thing which exists are individual birches, maples, etc? According to this un
written rule of discourse, the term "Jew" refers to no category of beings in reality.
Use of the term "Jew" as a category is, as a result, ipso facto evidence of anti
Semitism.
This reasoning is not a new phenomenon. Hilaire Belloc noticed it in England
in the 1920S, when he wrote that if anyone "exposed a financial swindler who hap
pened to be a Jew, he was an anti-Semite. Ifhe exposed a group of Parliamentar
ians taking money from the Jews, he was an anti-Semite. If he did no more than
call a Jew a Jew, he was an anti-Semite.''3
Things have gotten worse since Belloc's time. Now it is impossible to write
about Jews without opening oneself to the charge of anti-Semitism, as Belloc's
current place in the literary firmament now shows. It is impossible to refer to Bel-
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