In a pattern that will repeat itself for centuries inside the Catholic Church, when courageous churchmen sought to repel rabbinic infiltration and the recondite ecumenical tradition it spawned, they were often overruled by forces at the top of the “obelisk.” In the case at hand, the warnings of the faithful Prof. De Castro were rejected by Spain’s Grand Inquisitor, as well as Pope Gregory XIII (under the malignant influence of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana). It is an irony of ecclesiastical history that the Antwerp Royal Polyglot Bible came to be renowned as the Counter-Reformation’s answer to Protestant Bible studies, when it actually served to infuse rabbinic and Neoplatonic Kabbalistic ideas into Protestant England, where it became a reference work for Anglican Old Testament exegetes in the reigns of the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth I and James I, and was an influence on the translation of the King James Bible of 1611.
The relentless stereotype of “Judaizing Protestants” that was seeded into the Catholic grassroots, particularly in the Right-wing, functions as a means of obscuring the Judaizing Catholic precursor of Protestantism. The Renaissance-Catholic responsibility for transmitting rabbinic ideas into Protestantism is seldom acknowledged by Catholics who often resort to monotonously parroting the “Judaizing Protestant” cliché.
In certain respects, Anglicanism was a project of the Corpus Hermeticum of the Catholic Neoplatonists of Florence and Rome. Protestant Hebrew translators such as Leo Jud (1482-1542) and Immanuel Tremellius (1510-1580) both of whom transmitted rabbinic glosses to Reformation linguists, were acting under the inspiration of their occult Catholic predecessors and contemporaries. The Cryptocracy has arranged it so Protestants alone are made to bear the stigma of “Judaizing,” while few allude to “Judaizing Renaissance Catholicism.”
Judaizing: Distinctions and Definitions
Konrad Pellican of Zurich was a Christian Hebrew scholar who picked the brains of rabbis and riffled through their books of Hebrew grammar, but eschewed their traditions and interpretations. His star pupil, Sebastian Münster, Professor of Hebrew at the University of Basle, turned his back on Pellican and succumbed to the pull of Talmudic lore, as did many non-Judaic Renaissance Hebraists. Richard Simon wrote that Münster “would have done better to have followed the method of Konrad Pellican, his Hebrew master, who was in the right in thinking we ought only to borrow the grammar from the rabbis, not the sense (of the text).”
This too was Martin Luther’s position, that it was permissible to take the grammar from Judaics but not their interpretation of the meaning of the Hebrew scriptures. It was Luther’s objective to publish Bibles in the vernacular based on the most accurate translation of the Hebrew. By 1519, Luther was seriously studying Hebrew and beginning to revive the Hebrew scholarship of medieval Catholic exegetes, largely free of rabbinic falsification. By 1530, he was fluent in Hebrew despite a modest disclaimer in his Table Talk concerning his struggles with Hebrew grammar and his reliance on Christian Hebraists for assistance.
During the twelve years he translated the Bible into German (1522-1534) Luther received assistance from a circle of linguists who were Christians and not Judaizers: the Leipzigbased Hebraist Bernard Ziegler; Matthew Aurogallus, professor of Hebrew at the University of Wittenberg and a compiler of Hebrew dictionaries and grammars; Caspar Cruciger the Elder; the Hebrew prodigy Andreas Osiander, also of Wittenberg, and Johann Förster. In the case of Förster, Osiander and Aurogallus, they surpassed the most learned rabbis of their time. They laid the groundwork for what would become an early modern Lutheran heritage of Christian scholarship in Hebrew and Aramaic defiantly independent of rabbinic tradition.
Johann Förster’s 1543 Hebrew dictionary carried a disclaimer on its title page explicitly denying any dependence on rabbinic commentaries: “Dictionarium Hebraicum Novum, non ex Rabbinorum commentis.” In his preface, Förster warned that “Among Christians the rabbinic commentaries are controlling the work of translation and explanation.” He decried the “feeblemindedness of those Christians who have embraced without discernment the commentaries of the Jews, in which there is no light, no knowledge of God and not even a proper understanding of Hebrew.” According to Förster, rabbinic commentaries were riddled with deception, bringing into Christ’s church “more obscurity and error than light and truth.”
Luther’s estimation of rabbinic Hebraism was more severe than even Förster’s. Luther rejected and ridiculed the rabbinic exegesis of the Hebrew Scriptures. In Lectures on the Book of Genesis, he denounced the rabbinic traditions about the first book of the Bible. Luther said that the rabbis erred miserably in their exposition of the Old Testament because of their obsession with showing off their supposed grammatical and intellectual prowess. In their eagerness to defame Christ they unscrupulously twisted the text of the Bible and distorted its meaning. Luther’s views on Judaism were nearly a verbatim transmission of the medieval Roman Catholic view. In his 1543 Treatise on the Last Words of David, Luther advised Christians to pay no attention to the grandiose claims of the rabbis to scholarship: “…the words in many a (Scripture) passage are incomprehensible to them. They are far from having one harmonious, perfect and flawless Hebrew Bible, even from the point of view of grammar, to say nothing of theology, where they are so very incompetent…We Christians have the meaning and import of the Bible because we have the New Testament, that is Jesus Christ.”
Given a choice between the rabbi’s interpretation of Scripture and that of St. Augustine, Luther thundered, “I would let the Jews with their interpretation and their letters go to the devil, and I would ascend into heaven with St. Augustine’s interpretation, without their letters.” For Luther, parsing the Old Testament was only possible when undertaken “in the direction of the New Testament, in opposition to the interpretation of the rabbis.” Christians must be aware, said Luther, of the “usual habit of perverting the Scriptures to which the Jews everywhere adhere.”
We are not endorsing Lutheran theology, its statist political theory, or its persecution of Anabaptists. Luther was culpable for sinful error, large and small, beginning with the fact that he disobeyed Christ’s command to love one’s enemies, as evinced by the disgusting imprecations he hurled at Catholics, Muslims, Judaics and Anabaptists. There was also his gullible and somewhat egotistical belief that his brand of Christianity would convert the “Jews” of his time in droves, when Catholicism was failing to do so. He admitted at the end of his life that this had been a chimera and that his mission to convert Judaics had been a nearly complete failure.
Compared with St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419), Luther is not in the same league. Since the days of the early Church, no Christian in the Latin West can compare with Vincent when it comes to converting Judaics. Almost none of St. Vincent’s writings and sermons have been published and translated in modern editions. The two significant biographical studies in English have been allowed to go out of print for more than 55 years.
The true record of his life is neglected and obscured by the Catholic establishment, for a reason: Pope John Paul II repudiated St. Vincent Ferrer when he issued a blanket condemnation, echoing the Second Vatican Council. Addressing the whole sweep of Catholic history, the pope defiantly attacked exposure of Judaism by anyone. By this enormity he could only mean that not even Church Fathers and canonized saints are exempted from his unprecedented papal condemnation, in the course of which he named the religion of Judaism which is the Jesus-denying religion of the Talmud, “intrinsic” to Catholicism:
“Once again, through myself, the Church, in the words of the well-known declaration Nostra Aetate, deplores the hatred, persecutions and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews at any time and by anyone. I repeat, by anyone…
“The Jewish religion is not ‘extrinsic’ to us, but in a certain way is ‘intrinsic’ to our own religion. With Judaism therefore we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers and, in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers…
“Notwithstanding the Church’s awareness of her own identity, it is not lawful to say that the Jews are ‘repudiated or cursed,’ as if this were taught or could be deduced from the Sacred Scriptures of the Old or the New Testament.” (Rome: Synagogue Discourse, April 13, 1986).
As we study the work of Pico, Reuchlin and the fifteenth and sixteenth century pontiffs in the following pages, we will be equipped to grasp the fact that John Paul’s bold elocution in the Roman Synagogue was the triumphant public endorsement of the theology of the occult Renaissance Church.
St. Vincent Ferrer’s heroic, twenty year mission to the Judaics of Europe, wherein he reminded them of their religion’s black evil, of their desperate need to convert, that their elder brother was Satan, and that all who are spiritual heirs of the Pharisees are cursed, is now denounced by the Church of Rome. This denunciation is Hermetic-Kabbalistic to its core, but it took five hundred years for it to be publicly asserted by a pope.
In Luther’s case it should be observed that he had no intention early in his career to split from the Catholic Church. There are no signs of any such desire other than internal reform, especially of simony and usury. The powers that ruled Rome at the time goaded Luther into breaking away. This was the mission of the conspirators who ran the pontificate of Pope Leo X. These operatives deliberately instigated Protestantism in Europe, as we will observe when we track the tangled web of perfidy surrounding the protection which the Church of Rome accorded to the celebrated Catholic-Kabbalist Reuchlin. 68
The Church was surfeited with undercover Judaizers; this was the belief of the peasantry as expressed by William Langland in his classic medieval work, Piers the Plowman. St. Vincent Ferrer was born just after Langland died. Ferrer began to clean up the inquity that the common folk had decried. If Luther had been another Ferrer, the world would be a very different place today, because Luther’s anti-rabbinic, Gutenberg-era printed tracts would have indelibly marked the Church. Instead, he was driven out, as many Catholics are driven out today. Luther then succumbed to the temptation to create a new church, in the course of which he published radical truths about rabbinic Judaism’s demonic incarnation of deception and verbal subterfuge, which he hammered home with a fearless candor. Until the ascendance of the religion of Holocaustianity in the 1970s, Luther’s defiant legacy of adherence to Jesus Christ’s side in His clash with the Pharisee schools of Shammai and Hillel in first century Palestine, ensured a vital tradition of centuries of conservative Lutheran skepticism toward Judaism in German-speaking nations and Scandinavia,69 and in America as well, wherever conservative Lutherans settled. Luther revived the Christian truth that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is the rightful inheritance only of the followers of Jesus Christ.
“Luther’s German Bible cannot be regarded as a primary channel of Jewish exegesis in the way that the versions of his three contemporaries, Pagninus, Münster and Leo Jud were. Although, as a vernacular Bible it ranks above these Latin translations, those using it would not often find rabbinic explanations of difficult words being preferred to the renderings of the Septuagint…Furthermore, his Biblical commentaries, as we have seen, were not calculated to encourage his fellow Christians to look for the elucidation of problematic passages in the works of the rabbis or to turn to the local Jewish community for help with the text of the Old Testament. Yet throughout his career his attitude toward the Hebrew language was positive. He was obviously convinced that a thorough knowledge of it was an essential part of the training of (a Christian)… In 1523 he told the Bohemian Brethren, ‘…learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew well…St. Augustine was obliged to confess, as he does in Christian Instruction, that a Christian teacher who is to expound the Scriptures must know Greek and Hebrew in addition to Latin.’ Luther was uncompromising in his insistence on the importance of Hebrew.” 70
Catholic priests are free to refer to Martin Luther as “accursed,” and we have heard them do so with vehemence, but these same priests are forbidden to accost a rabbi by name, or pronounce any jeremiad against servile papal pilgrimages to synagogues. St. Vincent Ferrer entered many synagogues—in order to tell the assembled congregation in no uncertain terms that they were slaves to sin, delusion and the devil.
John Calvin and Judaizing
With regard to Jean Cauvin, the French lawyer known to history as “John Calvin,” some of his followers are numbered among the foremost witnesses against rabbinic perfidy in history. Among these the most illustrious is the 17th century English Puritan scholar William Prynne, a man of immense learning and the author of more than 200 books:
“Even in a century of intellectual omnivores he was acknowledged a prodigy…The journalist Marchamont Needham described him as ‘one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept into a library…” (Hugh Trevor-Roper).
Despite the ceaseless recitation of the myth that “Oliver Cromwell readmitted the Jews into England,” the fact is that Parliament rebuffed Cromwell’s attempt at readmitting them, largely due to the widespread circulation of a book by the Puritan Prynne, which he compiled expressly to support the ancient Catholic laws which forbade their presence in England:
“During the Protectorate, an address was presented on behalf of the Jews, soliciting the free exercise of their religion; a measure which Prynne opposed in his laborious tract, Short Demurrer to the Jews Long Discontinued Remitter into England…the Jews failed to obtain a legal establishment under Cromwell…their return occurred in the reign of Charles II.” 71
“The indefatigable and resolute Mr. Prynne published a very zealous remonstrance against it (the readmission of the Judaics to England), the aim of which was to show that permitting the Jews to reside in England, according to the foregoing proposals (by Cromwell), was highly criminal, being the greatest affront offered to the Son of God that any Christian government could be guilty of.” 72
Calvin’s An Answer to a Certain Jew’s Questions and Objections affirms medieval teaching on Judaism and carnal Israel, although with none of Luther’s energy and sustained deconstruction. Calvin was theoretically and philosophically critical of rabbinic tradition in general. Calvin criticized Rabbi Isaac Abravanel for departing from the clear meaning of passages in Scripture. At one point Calvin terms Abravanel, a “twister,” and a “trifler” brazenly “babbling about matters utterly beyond his knowledge.” Calvin frequently condemned rabbis for seeking “new and subtle interpretations” and being “actuated by pure malice.” Yet, a significant portion of Calvinists today, like contemporary Catholics, can be said to be in the camp of the rabbis or, at the very least, indifferent to the evil of the religion of Orthodox Judaism.
The Kabbalists inside the Catholic Church emphasized learning the Hebrew language, not for the better understanding of the Bible, but rather to pervert it for occult rites involving a specially reserved pronunciation of the word Yahweh, the Hebrew name for God, as part of the Hermetic belief that Hebrew is a “wonder-working” magical language. Use of the sacred name Yahweh was forbidden by the Mishnah, except by the high priest. (Pope Benedict XVI also ordered it suppressed during his reign.) Early English-vernacular Protestant and Catholic Bible translations adhere to this superstition.
There were two schools of Hebraism in Christendom: the original one, which mastered Hebrew as the patrimony of Christian Israel, and the Neoplatonic-Hermetic-Kabbalistic variety which learned it for use in magical ceremonies and for raising the prestige of the rabbis and their books. To the glee of the occultists, certain Christian opponents of Judaism equated Hebrew study with Judaizing. This foolish equation allowed the Neoplatonic-Hermeticists to mock their conservative opponents as illiterates and ignoramuses, and led to activists who campaigned against Judaizing within the Church, to be proud of their ignorance of Hebrew, thereby conceding to the rabbis exactly what the rabbis’ claimed to be their exclusive property, the language of the Old Testament.
Certain individual Roman Catholic scholars put up a noble fight against Rome’s Renaissance Kabbalism, but
their obedience to Rome was used to silence and obstruct them. “In a Lenten sermon, Jean Catilinet, provincial superior of the Franciscans in Burgundy, accused him (Cornelius Agrippa, Johann Reuchlin’s disciple), of being a Judaizing heretic who had introduced into Christian schools the criminal, condemned and prohibited art of Kabbalah. Despising the Fathers and Catholic doctors he had made it clear that he preferred the Jewish rabbis, and had bent sacred (Hebrew) letters to heretical arts and to the Talmud. Although Agrippa freely admitted that he did not disparage the Hebraic tradition and that he had frequent recourse to Talmudic works, he strenuously denied the charge of heresy; it was the ignorance of the Kabbalah among his opponents that led to such a monstrous accusation.” 73
Agrippa’s deceitful suggestion that the contents of the Kabbalah would not be offensive to Hebrew-literate Catholics is testimony to the crying need for Christians to have greater knowledge of the rabbinic texts, and not just a few lines of pornographic insults against Jesus and Mary contained in the Talmud of Babylon. The objective of our book Judaism Discovered was to provide an advanced study of the religion of the Talmud and Kabbalah. Imagine a future in which, in our Christian colleges and seminaries, the dark corners of the Mishnah, Gemara, Midrash and Zohar are as fully exposed as much as the errors of Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky.
The danger of rabbinic texts like the Kabbalah is more than just a generalized trend toward “Judaization.” Occult Hermeticists have viewed the old Catholic Mass as a magical rite and the priest as a type of magician. This was Agrippa’s thesis in De occulta philosophia— enthusiasm for what he claimed were the magical dimensions of highly ritualistic religion, where the emphasis is on objects and form. The New Age theosophist C.W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) honored the Catholic rites in his classic 1920 occult text, The Science of the Sacraments.
The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome Page 14
