From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  Fundamentally, as its very name indicates, Zionism is a biblically inspired project: Zion is a name used for Jerusalem by biblical prophets. Although officially a secular ideology, Zionism was, from the start, biblical to the core. Avigail Abarbanel makes the point in a text meant to explain to Israelis why she has given up her Israeli citizenship: “Let’s say you did ‘return home’ as your myths say, that Palestine really was your ancestral home. But Palestine was fully populated when you started to covet it. In order to take it for yourself you have been following quite closely the biblical dictate to Joshua to just walk in and take everything. You killed, you expelled, you raped, you stole, you burned and destroyed and you replaced the population with your own people. I was always taught that the Zionist movement was largely non-religious (how you can be Jewish without Jewish religion is perplexing in itself). For a supposedly non-religious movement it’s extraordinary how closely Zionism—your creator and your blueprint—has followed the Bible. Of course you never dare to critique the stories of the Bible. Not even the secular amongst you do that. None of my otherwise good teachers at my secular schools ever suggested that we question the morality of what Joshua did. If we were able to question it, the logical next step would have been to question Zionism, its crimes, and the rightness of the existence of our very own state. No, we couldn’t be allowed to go that far. It was too dangerous. That would risk the precarious structure that held us in place.”3

  The founders of the Yishuv (Jewish communities settled in Palestine before 1947) and later the founders of the new State of Israel were steeped in the Bible. From their point of view, Zionism was the logical and necessary end of Yahwism. In Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire (1983), the biography of the man described as “the personification of the Zionist dream,” Dan Kurzman entitles each chapter with a Bible quote. The preface begins like this: “The life of David Ben-Gurion is more than the story of an extraordinary man. It is the story of a biblical prophecy, an eternal dream. […] Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah, a messiah who felt he was destined to create an exemplary Jewish state, a ‘light unto the nations’ that would help to redeem all mankind.” For Ben-Gurion, Kurzman writes, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Yet Ben-Gurion had no religious inclination; he had never been to the synagogue, and ate pork for breakfast. He liked to say that “God did not choose Israel; Israel chose God,” and he quoted Joshua 24:22 to back it. According to the rabbi leading the Bible study group that he attended, Ben-Gurion “unconsciously believed he was blessed with a spark from Joshua’s soul.” He had been captivated by ancient history since his childhood, and changed his name David Grün to that of a Jewish general fighting the Romans. “There can be no worthwhile political or military education about Israel without profound knowledge of the Bible,” he used to say.4 He wrote in his diary in 1948, ten days after declaring independence, “We will break Transjordan [Jordan], bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight—we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo,” then he adds: “This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during biblical times.”5 Three days after the Israeli invasion of the Sinai in 1956, he declared before the Knesset that what was at stake was “the restoration of the kingdom of David and Solomon.”6

  Prophecy is part of the biblical mindset. In a statement published in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, Ben-Gurion predicted that in the next twenty-five years: “All armies will be abolished, and there will be no more wars. In Jerusalem, the United Nations (a truly United Nations) will build a Shrine of the Prophets to serve the federated union of all continents; this will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”7 That program is running late, but it has not changed. How could it? It is printed in Isaiah! Christians find hope in the prophecy that, one day, people “will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into sickles. Nations will not lift sword against nation, no longer will they learn how to make war” (Isaiah 2:4). But more important to Zionists are the previous verses, which describe these messianic times as a Pax Judaica, when “all the nations” will pay tribute “to the mountain of Yahweh, to the house of the god of Jacob,” when “the Law will issue from Zion and the word of Yahweh from Jerusalem,” so that Yahweh will “judge between the nations and arbitrate between many peoples.”

  Ben-Gurion’s attachment to the Bible was shared by almost every Zionist leader of his generation and the next. Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the 1967 Six-Day War, wrote a book entitled Living with the Bible (1978) in which he biblically justified the annexation of new territory. Even the nuclear policy of Israel has a biblical name: the Samson Option. On March 3, 2015, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dramatized in front of the American Congress his deep phobia of Iran by referring to the biblical book of Esther (the only Bible story that makes no mention of God). It is worth quoting the heart of his rhetorical appeal for a US strike against Iran: “We’re an ancient people. In our nearly 4,000 years of history, many have tried repeatedly to destroy the Jewish people. Tomorrow night, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, we’ll read the book of Esther. We’ll read of a powerful Persian viceroy named Haman, who plotted to destroy the Jewish people some 2,500 years ago. But a courageous Jewish woman, Queen Esther, exposed the plot and gave the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved. Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us.”8 Netanyahu managed to schedule his address to the Congress on the eve of Purim, which celebrates the happy end of the book of Esther—the slaughter of 75,000 Persians, women and children included. This recent and typical speech by the head of the State of Israel is clear indication that the behavior of that nation on the international scene cannot be understood without a deep inquiry into the Bible’s underlying ideology. Such is the main objective of this book.

  The first three chapters probe the heart of the Hebrew Bible. They set out to extract its ideological substratum, unveiling the process by which Yahweh, through the voices of his priests, prophets, and scribes (the “cognitive elite”)9 shaped the vision and collective psychology of his chosen people. Christians have their own reading and particular conception of the Old Testament—a “religious,” second-degree reading—that differs from the Jewish reading, and that impedes their understanding of Jewish identity. We must consider the biblical tradition in its original context in order to grasp its revolutionary and corrosive character.

  Chapter 4 then examines the genesis of Christianity and its medieval evolution, while chapter 5 analyzes the evolution of the Jewish people in its relation to Christendom. The major turning point of this story is the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, and their forced mass conversions to Christianity, followed by the pitiless hunt for the “false Christians” thus generated. These traumatic events radicalized Jewish anti-Christianity, and played a critical role in the upheaval of the old world, as Jewish historians alone have correctly apprehended. Chapters 6 through 9 shed light on world events from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries by focusing on the influence of Ashkenazi Jews in Central and Western Europe and then in North America. The “deep history” of networks, secret diplomacy, clandestine operations, psychological warfare, and propaganda reveals the decisive steps in this process, which launched a struggle for the soul and destiny of humanity. This book will highlight a “project” that has been ongoing for over a hundred years, marked by four world wars and culminating in the programmed destruction of the Arab-Muslim Middle East, the final installment. The two concluding chapters (10 and 11) provide a summary and synthesis, proposing theoretical models capable of handling the empirical data, and presenting a conception of history that recognizes
the crucial role played by the Jewish people. These chapters, like the preceding ones, will rely mainly on Jewish authors, whose views on these questions are often much more relevant than those of conventional non-Jewish historians.

  This book is a critical approach to “Jewishness” as a system of thought—a representation of the world and the self—essentially an idea. I am critiquing this idea by exposing its dangerous irrationality, nothing more. Even if it were as old as the world, any idea would deserve critique. Since the first victims of a toxic idea are the men and women who believe it, they are the first I wish to help liberate. Trying to understand Jewishness entails dealing with the nature of the Election, the Holocaust, and Israel, for they are the three “invisible walls” of the “Jewish prison,” according to French journalist Jean Daniel’s personal testimony.10 If there is a moral judgment in the following pages, it is directed at the elite who have built this prison throughout the ages, and kept its key.

  For today, just like yesterday, Jewishness is an identity shaped by the elite, as it has always been. The dominant ideology among world Jewry is, by definition, the ideology imposed by the dominant Jews, the cultural and religious elite intimately associated with the political and financial elite. “The evils of Israel are the evils of leadership,” wrote Jewish publisher Samuel Roth in Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization (1934). He blames all the suffering of the Jews on “the stupendous hypocrisy and cruelty imposed upon us by our fatal leadership.” “Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews—tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. […] despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.”11 This book will show that the submission of the Jewish people to the self-proclaimed representatives of Yahweh—and to their ideology— is the essence of biblical ethics. Even though the biblical narrative itself presents the Hebrew people as often rebellious and reverting to their “abominable” natural leaning toward fraternization with their neighbors, Yahwist ideology, which forbids intermarriage with the goyim, always seems to have the final say.

  Today, under the influence of a new elite, composed mostly of sons and grandsons of rabbis, Jewishness tends to merge with Zionism. Being Jewish had always been synonymous with being part of “Israel,” but now “Israel” has taken on a new meaning. Jewish identity is no longer defined as belonging to a people or a religion, but as loyalty to a particular Middle Eastern state. The efforts of Jewish authorities to condemn anti-Zionism as a disguise for anti-Semitism (Israel has become “the Jew of nations,” claims Paul Giniewski in Antisionisme: le nouvel antisémitisme, 1973) are only the counterpart of their efforts to convince all Jews that Zionism is a nonnegotiable part of their Jewishness. When Rabbi Josy Eisenberg writes in an editorial for the French magazine L’Information juive, “Except for a few Jews—alas sometimes negationists—love for the State of Israel is today the only common point of all Jews,” he means it less as an observation than as an injunction: each Jew is required to love Israel or he will be deemed traitor to his own Jewish identity, that is, a “self-hating Jew.” At minimum, adds Eisenberg, “there is today a moral imperative not to add our voice to the detractors of Israel, and to always temper our critiques.”12

  I do not ignore the fact that, like the ghettos of bygone days, the “Jewish prison” has also been a refuge. As an even greater paradox, it can be argued that the prison has incited great creativity among the prisoners most determined to free themselves; true freedom is, perhaps, only available through escape. If so many Jews have left their mark on worldwide cultural history, it is obviously not in spite of their Jewishness. Instead it is often in an antagonistic relationship to it, or at least in a determined effort to move beyond it. These Jewish geniuses are very different from the communitarian elites, even though the latter try to appropriate and profit from the posthumous fame of the former. The archetypal example is Baruch Spinoza, excommunicated by the rabbis during his lifetime, now lionized as the greatest Jewish thinker. Almost without exception, the Jewish geniuses have been anticommunitarian, critical of Judaism, and, in the twentieth century, anti-Zionist. Today the Jewish mental prison consisting of victimization (Holocaust worship and fear of anti-Semitism) and guilt (blackmail-driven loyalty to Israel) has become so oppressive that those who wish to escape must first exhaust themselves breaking down the walls.

  This book is, above all, the result of a sincere effort at cognitive empathy. I have read from a wide range of schools of thought, but among them I have given the greatest importance to Jewish writings. These have greatly influenced my vision of Jewish culture and its worldwide impact, leaving me today with the dispassionate conviction that Judaism and the Jewish people have been, throughout history, in their very antagonism to Gentile cultures, and sometimes in a brutal and tragic way, a dynamic factor of evolution. No Christian, indeed, could deny that fact without ignoring Jesus’s background.

  This book will deal with Judaism, the Jewish people, Jewish history, Jewishness, and Jewry (the Jewish community). I adopt for all these terms nominalist definitions, the only ones that suffer no objection: “A Jew is a person who considers him/herself a Jew and is so considered by others,” to quote Raphael Patai.13 Likewise, Jewishness is nothing but what Jews think of it. I am dealing with these notions exclusively from a cognitive viewpoint; my research is about beliefs, ideology, mental frameworks, and representations. For example, the fact that the majority of modern Jews define their Jewishness as ethnic rather than religious is, from the standpoint adopted here, a cognitive fact, nothing more. Whether genetic studies prove them right or wrong is not the point, for ideology is independent from biology.

  The thesis of this book is also independent from the question of the Bible’s dating. That the majority of Jews and non-Jews think it is three thousand years old is just another cognitive fact. The nature of the Bible is in its content, not its age. Yet the historical context of its birth and growth, as informed by scholarly research, can be enlightening. Such is the subject of the first chapter.

  Finally, the argument of this book is independent from the question of the existence of God—a question that presupposes a consensual definition of “God,” an impossible task. Let it be said, however, that the author holds as self-evident that the Universe is endowed with Intelligence; for how could man, otherwise, be intelligent? Philosophers figured that out more than two thousand years ago.14 The unfathomable mystery of that Cosmic Power of Truth and Love, without which human brotherhood is a vain idea, cannot be contained in a book or a set of dogmas. As for Yahweh, I consider him nothing more than the main character of a saga written by several generations of priests and scribes for their own advantage. Yet, as an idea cultivated in the collective psyche of millions of people for tens of centuries, it is certainly endowed with great spiritual power.

  All Bible quotes are taken from the Catholic New Jerusalem Bible, which has not altered the divine name YHWH into “the Lord,” as most other English translations have done for unscholarly reasons. I make only one alteration to this authoritative translation, for reasons that will be apparent later: I write “god” rather than “God” when the word is used as a noun rather than a name, as in “the god of Israel.” For example, where the NJB arbitrarily differentiates “Chemosh, your god” from “Yahweh, our God” in Judges 11:24, I do not.

  Chapter 1

  THE PEOPLE OF SETH

  “If you faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments, which I am laying down for you today, Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world.”

  Deuteronomy 28:1

  The Birth of Israel

  The history of Israel, as recounted by mainstream historians, begins at the
end of the tenth century BCE, when the Middle East was dominated by Assyria, whose capital was Assur. That is when the Omrides dynasty founded in northern Palestine a kingdom that took as its name Israel, and as its administrative capital Samaria. It was known in the Assyrian chronicles as the “House of Omri.” Judea, in the south, was a backwards hinterland consisting of mountainous arid land inhabited by pastoral tribes that had only recently settled down. Religious life in Israel was certainly as diverse as in other parts of Syria. It was merely a local version of polytheism, which, across the known world, admitted the plurality of gods—some local, some national, others international or cosmic, all proceeding from or contained within the supreme god, referred to simply as El (God), or by majestic plural Elohim.