Opinion Authors String Book Reviews - VII
Retired, Assistant Clinical Professor Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, USA
Correspondence: Dr. Samuel A Nigro M.D., Retired, Assistant Clinical Professor Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, 2517 Guilford Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118, USA, Tel 216 932-0575
Received: October 15, 2015 | Published: January 27, 2016
Citation: Nigro SA (2016) Male/Female Differences in Natural Law. J Psychol Clin Psychiatry 5(3): 00272. DOI: 10.15406/jpcpy.2016.05.00272
Evidently in response to my past articles on the Holocaust, another two unordered books arrived. Seemingly disparate, they amazingly converge to provide a more clear understanding of anti-goyism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and even theological insight into the Messiah.
The first book is Judeophobia: Attitudes Towards the Jews in the Ancient World, by Peter Schafer, (Professor of Jewish Studies at Princeton and the Free University of Berlin), Harvard University Press, London, 1997. The second book is The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not have Saved More Jews from the Nazis, by William D. Rubenstein, (Professor of History of University of Wales) Routledge, London and New York, 1997.
Judeophobia
Judeophobia's opening sentence is "Anti-semitism has a long and endless history" and interesting details are given back to ancient Greeks, Romans and pre-Hellenistic Egyptians. Professor Schafer states that the pagan perception of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt (circa 13th Century B.C.) was one of expulsion of unclean, diseased misanthropes (Pg. 27-29) rather then an emancipation story. Jewish historian Josephus describes the Egyptians as a "nation of slaves with a foolish religion who always hated the Jews." Professor Schafer makes a strong case for the existence of "Alexandrian anti-semitism". "The first recorded event in Jewish history which may be understood as an outbreak of anti-Jewish feeling took place in the Egyptian military colony at Elephantine" (Pg. 121) in 410 B.C.. This was almost 450 years before Egyptian anti-Jewish riots in Alexandria. Philo in Alexandria in 38 A.D. detailed the Egyptians as having the "Delta" quarter which was "the first known ghetto in the world" (Pg. 140).
The Roman, Tacitus, called Jews "base and abominable and owe their persistence to their depravity." (Pg. 31). Tacitus describes Christians as being inferior Jews, "only worse". Tacitus argues that Christians were the worst Jews because the Jews themselves even treated "Christian" Jews atrociously. To Tacitus, this was further proof of Jewish degradation. Professor Schafer states: "The Christians are the 'worst rascals' among the Jews to use Tacitus' words regarding the sympathizers/proselytes"... (pg. 191) meaning that Christianity appealed to all peoples and therefore were a danger to all others "as a disease" jeopardizing even Rome. So part of early anti-semitism appears to be based on the belief that getting rid of the Jews would also get rid of the Christians. Again, to the ancients, Christians were the worst Jews -- even Jews hated them.
"The Romans inherited and absorbed the blunt Egyptian hatred and Greek contempt for the outcasts of human kind" (Jews) (pg. 194).
One of our main findings is that it has been precisely the feeling of being threatened by the Jews which informs many, if not most, anti-Jewish statements in antiquity. The Jews were regarded as a threat although in different forms, to Egyptian, Greek, and, above all, Roman society alike. It is very doubtful whether the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans felt less threatened in their sense of identity than the Christians and the feeling of threat certainly cannot be used as a criterion to distinguish between two different categories of hostility against the Jews Greek and Roman xenophobia directed against Jews quite obviously is not based on some concrete actions of some Jews (in contrast to the proper behavior of others) but from the very beginning aims at all Jews as Jews, in spite of what they do and what they do not do... "Irrational" or "chimerical" fantasies that have never been empirically observed" are also an essential part of the pagan antiJewish arsenal...(Pg. 202).
Clearly, vicious anti-Semitism pre-dates Christianity. Most assuredly the Greeks were anti-Semites, however, not out of a position of power or preying on Jewish inferiority, but rather vice versa, i.e., responding to Jews' political threats. The author states:
The Jews as the "evil incarnate" denying and perverting in their xenophobic misanthropic hatred of all cherished values of humankind, conspiring against the civilized world -- this, I would like to argue, is the elevation which crosses a line from the "justifiable" to the "unjustifiable" from "anti-Judaism" to "anti-Semitism" . It is directed against "the" Jews, that is, not only some, but all Jews, and it has no regard for what Jews do and do not do in reality -- the Jews are identified as the outcasts of human civilization. To be sure, it has a "kernel of truth" in that the Jews do separate from others in certain circumstances, but it is precisely this conscious perversion of the "truth," the phobic mystification of the out group, which distinguishes the "anti-Semitic" from the "anti-Jewish" attitude. Since it is the peculiar result of the amalgamation of Egyptian and Greek prejudices, one might argue that only the idea of the world-wide Greco-Hellenistic civilization made it possible for the phenomena we call anti-Semitism to emerge. (Pg.206).
Professor Schafer details further the Roman attitude:
On the whole, however, the peculiarity of the Roman attitude toward the Jews seems better expressed by the term "Judeophobia" in its ambivalent combination of fear and hatred. One may argue, of course, that "anti-Semitism" also carries, and always carried with it, an element of fear. This is certainly the case, but the Roman fear is peculiar not only in that it projects onto the Jews an irrational feeling of being threatened by some mysterious conspiracy but also, and mainly, in that it responds to the very real success of Jews in the midst of Roman society, that is the distorted echo of sympathy. (Pg. 210).
This would seem understandable as Jews known as Christians were gaining peace, love and transcendentally oriented conversions galore.
What becomes clear is that Jews were identified and perceived by the ancients as being extremely hostile to and apart from non-Jews causing Jewish rejection. The author documents the basis for this as a perceived "Jews' fault" by Jewish xenophobia, Jewish misanthropy, Jewish impiety, Jewish subtle sedition in its various forms, notorious discord among Jews, and Jewish general unassimilatable lifestyle. These are all clearly present for hundreds of years before the Christian era. Then the author states that, "different people are rejected especially when their differences" engage a style of provocativeness that is undeniable in its repetitiveness. For Jews it can now be clearly dated back almost to 500 B.C. (or to 13th Century B.C. Egypt, but the author never elaborates on the evidence that the Exodus was an "expulsion" rather than escape).
However, the arrival of Christianity ("considered Jewish") with its appeal to the common man frightened political leaders everywhere. So a hidden dimension of early anti-Semitism is that Christianity added to the anti-Semitism not because Christians were anti-Jewish, but because they were considered a type of Jew whose ideas appealed to many gentiles thereby adding indiscriminate wrath onto all Jews! Regardless, recent events would seem to confirm that many of the same exasperating qualities of Jewishness which irked the ancients, still exist.
In fact, Schafer overlooks its presence today but himself provides a good contemporary example of subtle ethnic cleansing by Jews., i.e., his use of erroneous and anti-Christian " C . E. " and "B.C. E. " instead of A.D. and B.C.. Also, of the anti-goyism genre in Judeophobia is the lack of elaboration and concern about the mistreatment of non-Jews fleetingly mentioned and alluded to perfunctorily in his text but essentially ignored as if mistreatment of ancient gentiles was irrelevant. Jews, then as now, maintain their anti-goyistic core while they appeared to prowlingly demean and degrade any host society, which brings up the other book, The Myth of Rescue.
The myth of rescue
The Myth of Rescue is Professor Rubenstein's well-documented, erudite and informative book. For students of the Holocaust, this well referenced book is extremely important and very clarifying. Rubenstein makes clear how the Holocaust has been distorted, especially about possible rescue of Jews from the Nazis. He details the myth of immigration quotas, the myth of the plans for rescue, the myth of bombing Auschwitz, the myth of the War Refugee Board and the myth of negotiations with the Nazis. Interestingly, Professor Rubenstein's stern judgment spares the Vatican most likely because Pope Pius XII did not belong in a book on myths about rescuing Jews because no one rescued more than he. Rubenstein emphasized that Hitler was a monster out to kill Jews and nothing offered to date in retrospect could have diminished the massacres. He does not deny that American Jews, FDR, and Churchill did little. Instead, he claims that they could not have had any impact had they tried. Rubenstein does not contradict Rafael Medoff's book The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and The Holocaust (read my review article in Social Justice Review, January/February 2000). He does not debunk the events in Ben Hecht's book Perfidy (read my review article in Social Justice Review September/October 1999). But by claiming nothing could have helped, Rubenstein seems to excuse the inaction of others.
However, professor Rubenstein does not go far enough. Nothing is contained in his book which rebuts my article "Holocaust Propaganda as a Cover Up for Jewish Cowardice and Complicity with the Nazis" (Social Justice Review, in print). Actually, the real reason for the truth of his subtitle of "Why the Democracies Could Not have Saved More Jews from the Nazis", was not mentioned, i.e., Jewish leaders led their people to death by cooperating with the Nazis as described in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and elsewhere. Pinchas Freudiger, an orthodox Jew who did escape the Nazis, estimates that half of the massacred Jews (2.5 million?) would have survived had they tried to escape instead of listening to Jewish Councils collaborating with Nazis. Obviously, democracies could not have saved more Jews because of the Nazi supporting Jewish leadership!
Rubenstein debunks Raoul Wallenberg's, as a Swiss diplomat, supposed rescuing of nearly 100,000 Jews in Hungary from July 1944 to January 1945 (Pg. 191). And he overlooks completely my thesis that the owardice of Sweden was the main indirect cause of the Holocaust -- had Sweden early entered the war on the side of the Allies, the war would have easily been shortened by at least a year, doubtlessly preventing the deaths of most Jews who died after 1943.
There would be no Holocaust if Sweden had joined allies early and if European Jewish Council leaders had fought the Nazis instead of groveled for them. These two phenomenon are the events of cowardice of the 20th century.
To read The Myth of Rescue is to see more clearly the fabrications by the Jewish community about the Holocaust. First is the guilt creating fabrication that potential rescuers could have done more (or "anything" of significance). The second self-serving fabrication is the massive denial of Jewish collaboration and cooperation with the Nazis. The third provocative fabrication is the hate crime of some Jews condemning those who actually did help the most such as Pope Pius XII. And the fourth snobbish fabrication is the minimizing of other victims, especially Catholics and other Christians who died in greater numbers than the Jews.
Because of these four fabrications about the Holocaust, one must begin to contemplate a fifth fabrication: stories by the victims themselves. Given the appalling mental and physical debilitated conditions of the survivors and their highly likely frequent collaboration with the Nazis, (as documented especially by Arendt), it is obvious that many of the victims' stories are undocumented, exaggerated, self-serving rationalizations. In fact, it may not be fashionable, but is not doubt appropriate when one discovers the difficult technology of "mass gassing" as a means of extermination? The Myth of Rescue details the effort by the Jewish community to demean and degrade western democracies, all the while preserving the fabricated innocence of their own Jewish leadership and Jewish identity.
Coupled with Israel Shahak's book, Jewish History, Jewish Religion -- the Weight of Three Thousand Years, (Reviewed in SJR, January/February 1999), The Myth of Rescue along with many other Holocaust writings enable an understanding of what the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans were upset about as described in Judeophobia. Is it not possible that much of the Holocaust is propaganda comparable to the same Jewish xenophobia, Jewish misanthropy, Jewish impiety, Jewish instigation of sedition and Jewish unassimilatibility identified as present at least since 500 B.C. and perhaps even to the 13th Century B.C.?
Are we not witnessing and experiencing what has been going on for over 2,500 years because of an astonishingly persistent self aggrandizing anti-goyism by Jewry's leadership which repeatedly provokes anti-Semitic responses? Is Holocaust propaganda more of the same?
Permutations of hate
The hate permutations of 2500 years become more clear as the outlooks of three groups are analyzed.
The first group is composed of pagans who are non-Christian gentiles repeatedly seeing Jews as intransigent, anti-social and overly independent in ancient times. The pagans also perceived Christians as a particularly dangerous group of Jews because the people were attracted to a religion which offered a peaceful focus based on love and truth as gateways to a limitless future (This is comparable today to China's fear of Catholicism especially).
The second group is comprised of the Jews themselves who have been identified repeatedly as overly independent, always disrupting, sooner or later, social norms in one way or another by a talented dominating leadership always seeming to offer a slick, subtle form of what is known today as "ethnic cleansing". Historically, Jews always ended up in conflict blaming the host society as if there is nothing to be learned from repeated rejections from every culture imaginable almost. What is well documented is that Jews self sustain by an insular projection of fault onto all others, i.e., a functional impeccability which evokes negativism from all others further reinforcing Jewish togetherness and anti-goyism. By a carapace of ineradicable self-righteous, loud impeccability claims and remorseless public relations, they undermine their host society to a degree of some well earned mistreatment. Then, Jews must reject their own Christian sect because it, in finest form, even appeals to Jews too. Finally, the Jewish community is enraged because pagans see Christianity as an especially attractive and insidious form of Jewishness causing, therefore, more anti-Semitism (All this is comparable today to the anti-Catholicism of the Nazis and the like-minded Anti-Defamation League, the American Civil Liberties Union, Hollywood and most of the American press and media).
The third group is comprised of Christians, begun as a Jewish sect, but severed from Judaism especially in the first century by Bar Cochba, a Jewish leader, who used the mass murder techniques of Moses as modified by Rudolf Kastner (Jews killing Jews goes way back). Furthermore, because of anti-Semitism by the Romans and others, Christians realized that proclaiming their Jewish origins was just asking for trouble from pagans and Jews alike. So Christians, the first Loving Truth sect, had to cope with intense hostility from all sides bearing the brunt of pagan anti-Semitism and Jewish viciousness. Interestingly, in such regard, adopting an anti-semitic posture would surely be a protective stance for early Christians.
Thus explained, the permutations of hate seem understandable even without all the embellishments each group has added over the centuries.
Theological implications
The Chosen People seem chosen for sure being small enough to maintain close coherence with a singular mission for themselves and their One God. But their leaders have repeatedly failed to deal well with their host societies. Obviously, something is wrong in Jewish self-identification and self-implementation schemes. Perhaps disinformation, counterhistory, and impudent recussancy have something to do with it as well as the idea that any good gentiles have is Jewish misfortune. While some (Michael Fishbane) has emphasized that "Judaism is not one thing and Jews do not believe one thing," it seems very clear that there is a persistent singular collective consciousness for a mystical Messiah-providing role on the planet. This moral satisfaction, this factitious protection, this feeling of having been designated by God as provider of the Messiah, cannot be relinquished as long as they erroneously believe their identity depends on a future promise. Needless to write, that future promise is never to be filled because the promise has been fulfilled already. So, on this interminable mission from God, the spiritual role of Jews has become a repetitive paranoid and persecutory one, if politicized, always a catastrophe unless understood as such and challenged to seek transcendental goodness and confluence with their host societies rather than selfish ambitious obsessional Sisyphean ersatz messianism no longer necessary except as a provocative unifying self-identity "us vs. them" scheme.
To resolve this, the death of Jesus with Jews being the "chief culprits" needs to be addressed. The Crucifixion needs a different perspective than customary. Theologically, if there is to be Salvation, necessitated by Man's Fall, a great Sacrifice was needed. Jesus was the Sacrifice, and, therefore, Jews must be seen not as executioners but as High Priests doing what was necessary for the Salvation of mankind. Christians ought to be thankful for it. The Chosen People sent by God to challenge, promote and prepare mankind for the Savior are high priests performing the Divine Sacrifice needed for Redemption. Having done that, the Jewish mission is over and continued efforts in such vein are fruitless and probably counterproductive if history is any guide. Of course, non-believing Jews can plod onwards but they ought not be so pushy until they get a better idea than Jesus -- and that takes more than good public relations, high IQ's, or worshiping self references about the Holocaust. Clannish messianic ploys are no longer needed. What is being offered as the Messiah now? What is the alternative to Jesus? A more appealing belief in a "future" Messiah is needed than the moving of the New York Times, Disney, all cloning technology and all abortion mills to Jerusalem or a bunch of Bar Cochba wannabes at the Holocaust Museum. If not Jesus, who or what is being waited for? Is there a better idea than Christianity at its transcendental finest? In fact, it is difficult to think of anything other than the Resurrection which could overcome the independent, arrogant ignorance of mankind and restore him to sanity and a salvific mode. Where oh where is a deeper mystery of Israel today than ersatz-messianic anti-goyism?
The time is up for Jewish messianism. A cynical but realistic comment is that there was no intention by Jewish leaders ever to accept a Messiah on behalf of the people. This has dragged on long enough. Waiting for the messiah is a ruse to control like all the mad mullahs' shouting "Allah says " what is not even in the Koran. Both are political ploys insulting mankind and must cease. Talk about talk, the politics of pity and cleverly sabotage the gentiles are the rules of continued Jewish messianism, It is not idealism, but obstinance and libel. This is the vocation of Jewish humanism, i.e., dehumanize the gentiles as the situation allows.
Indeed, Jewry's leaders misleading the people for over 3000 years has been a self-made disaster antagonizing everybody everywhere. Jewry's leaders have milked their host societies to the detriment of their people long enough.
To continue singular unity as if still to deliver the Messiah has been not only counterproductive, but a disaster. And the Holocaust is part of it. Those who persist in so called messianic deliverance actions because of their Chosen People status, need to be much more articulate and convincing about just what they expect their Messiah to be, and they have to stop the homo Judeocus' anti-goyism. Those on the other side, especially Christians, need to be more forcefully articulate in questioning as well as in challenging the Jewish communities' latest subtle self aggrandizing self-unifying acts of undermining their host societies behind a facade of professional victimhood.
The role of the Jews will continue to repeat itself unless challenged. They will repeatedly remain at odds, exalt theirselves, live a double standard, special plead for themselves, and ethnically cleanse their host societies as they have for over 2500 years. We must support and help Jews and their Chosen People role but we must clarify to them with Loving Truth day in and day out because their leadership seems to always be a disaster. Cardinal O'Connor has spoken of the need to risk "being shaken to the roots of one's being" and that is what is needed for all parties. What Gurshon Greenberg has called an "inner synthesis of Judaism and Christianity in the wake of the Holocaust" is not only possible but achieved with this new understanding which emphasizes the redemptive value of suffering as we mutually share an effort to Oneness made most difficult when the one party is always too eager to take advantage and de-ethnicize their host. Indeed, too much cohesiveness based on lies, even about the Holocaust, defeats genuine community and unity. This is why the absolute total truth about the Holocaust must be known not only in terms of what everyone did, but also what the Jews did not do and have tried to flee from acknowledging. Who knows, some Jews may even want to apologize for millennia of anti-goyism as well as current Holocaust propaganda.
None.
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.
©2016 Nigro. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and build upon your work non-commercially.