My hope is that you, as you read these materials, will critique and otherwise provide me with feedback and suggestions. Or, for that matter, refer me to sources I may not have discovered.
I thank you in advance,
David
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Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1
Preface
With this submission I begin an experiment: For some time I have been writing what, until recently, I would euphemistically refer to as a "book." In recent months I have found myself increasingly engaged in research and writing and now realize that my efforts are indeed coming together as that book which, for the time being takes the title of my blog, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival. Following this introductory offering I will begin to send out the present draft of the book in serial form, start to finish (a goal as yet not arrived at!).
Some form of anti-Jewish animus has plagued Jewish life in the Diaspora since at least the 4th century, with
Since Ben-Gurion declared statehood just three years after the ovens of
My project, should it achieve completion and emerge as a published book, will argue that the Holocaust, far from being just another of the countless tragedies to befall the Jewish people in our Diaspora, is but the most recent, the most nearly successful effort by one religious tradition to eradicate another. I will demonstrate by examples from 2,000 years of history a pattern of behavior based on a consistent development of a theology born in the most revered documents of Christianity, come to be embedded in the very sinews of western history and culture that followed. Theological anti-Judaism found easy passage from religious autocracy to secular democracy, integrated unquestioningly into the social revolution that swept the west with Voltaire and the Enlightenment.
The Holocaust is not just another tragedy in the long history of persecution meted out to the Jewish dispersion in Christendom. Neither is it an event "too mysterious to comprehend." The Holocaust is but the most recent if nearly successful effort by the West to resolve its self-invented Jewish Problem. Hitler, as the solution's most recent advocate and instrument, nearly achieved his stated goal of "exterminating each and every Jew the Reich could lay hands on" because, for the first time in history, the 20th century provided the technological means to achieve it.
As those technologies, particularly relating to computing and military hardware, have continued to develop exponentially so, I suggest, have the instruments available to a future project aimed at finally solving this millennial and as yet unsolved Western Jewish Problem.
Zionism, far from having achieved its goal in creating a state of the Jews has lost none of its immediacy and urgency as first expressed by those young Jews in late 19thcentury Russia, and defined by Herzl in early 20th Switzerland. Both felt impending disaster "in their bones" but could not possibly have imagined the form and magnitude it would take. We alive today are witness to that which for previous generations had been unimaginable.
Introduction (to the first chapter)
The Holocaust is usually understood as referring to the six million Jews murdered between 1940 and1945 in death camps created specifically for that purpose. But as horrendous and frightening as that is, Hitler's blueprint encompassed far more than the destruction of
It takes little imagination to appreciate that, had
But what is the "Jewish Problem," how would Hitler have come by the idea that the Jews were not just a threat, but a threat so severe as to demand its full and final eradication? The Jewish Problem and its solution are not a creation of the 20thcentury, nor even of the nineteenth. In fact "the problem" came into existence in the first century, in the earliest documents which were eventually collected by the Church as its "New Testament." From that seed would sprout 2000 years of theological development and expansion at the hands of some of west's most famous thinkers, from Augustine in the 4th century to Luther in the 15th; and absorbed seamlessly into secular scientific thought by the Enlightenment, by Voltaire and the Philosophes in the 18th; and political philosophy from the 19th century to the present.
It is not my purpose to critique all relevant historical documents since scriptural anti-Judaism is the common early thread and focus of the present chapter. Instead I will provide examples I consider typical and representative of what, for Christianity represents a barrier to that religion's self-representation as "loving" and "forgiving;" but for Jews was and remains a matter of life and death for person and people.
This, as with all previous submissions, was first sent to the Jerusalem Post and appears today on-line. My editor wisely limited what went up to my (earlier version)Introduction and (unchanged) Preface, where I had included also part of my first chapter. As the above title suggests, the story begins with a discussion of the father of Christianity, Paul, then on to the gospels and the early Church Fathers. From there through the Middle Ages, the Crusades and Inquisition and on to Luther; then on to the Enlightenment and the secular revolution, scientific and political antisemitism. Approximately half the volume, which I am now working on, involves the Jewish experience in die goldene medina, the
An earlier version of Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1 is just a click away. Previous writings on topic are accessible through my JPost presence at, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival.
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