From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  From the 1930s, Freudianism gained considerable influence in the United States, thanks to the immigration of a large number of members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, almost all Jews. This current swarmed into a multitude of schools, and the 1960s produced the so-called Freudo-Marxists, equally inclined to diagnose the ills of society and the traditional family.

  According to the psychoanalytic diagnosis, Christian societies suffer from sexual repression. The cure, therefore, is sexual liberation. Jewish intellectuals were the spearheads of the attack on moral and Christian values and the fight against the censorship of pornography. Norman Podhoretz pointed this out in an August 1995 Commentary article,684 and professor Nathan Abrams of the University of Aberdeen goes further in an article in The Jewish Quarterly (reprinted in the collection Jews and Sex): “Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading.”685 The sexual revolution, like the drug culture, arrived just in time to depoliticize youth during the Lyndon Johnson era, when Israel’s parasitism of America was gaining critical mass.

  Hijacking Christianity

  “The Jews are not merely out of step with Christian civilization, they hold it in utter contempt,” explains Michael Wex in his essay on Yiddish culture, Born to Kvetch.686 But the Haskalah strategy requires paying obsequious respect to Christianity. It consists not only in imitating Christianity in order to enjoy the same rights and dignity as a universal religion, but also in asserting paternity in order to absorb it. “What gave birth to the Christian gospel,” Rabbi Benamozegh claims, “is this faith in the universal religion that the Jews believed was born by their ancient doctrine and whose reign they were to establish one day.” But Christianity, like Islam, is an imperfect expression of this ideal, the true form of which should be Noachism, the universal law “which Judaism has preciously preserved and which was the starting point and impetus of Christian preaching in the world.”687 Benamozegh therefore exhorts Christianity to acknowledge its errors and return to its sources. The source is Jesus the Jew, while responsibility for Christian anti-Semitism is blamed on St. Paul, the first self-hating Jew, who wrote that the Jews “do not please God, they are enemies of all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15–16).688 Heinrich Graetz writes in his History of the Jews: “Jesus made no attack upon Judaism itself, he had no idea of becoming the reformer of Jewish doctrine or the propounder of a new law; he sought merely to redeem the sinner, to call him to a good and holy life, to teach him that he is a child of God, and to prepare him for the approaching Messianic time.” And so, he “fell a victim to a misunderstanding. How great was the woe caused by that one execution! How many deaths and sufferings of every description has it not caused among the children of Israel!”689

  This process can be described as a superficial “Christianization of Judaism”: Judaism not only mimics the universalist message of Christianity, but also claims Jesus as one of its honorable representatives. Better yet, the crucifixion of Christ becomes the symbol of the martyrdom of the Jews. In 1918, Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, a leading figure of American Reform Judaism, wrote in his Jewish Theology: “Israel is the champion of the Lord, chosen to battle and suffer for the supreme values of mankind, for freedom and justice, truth and humanity; the man of woe and grief, whose blood is to fertilize the soil with the seeds of righteousness and love for mankind. […] Accordingly, modern Judaism proclaims more insistently than ever that the Jewish people is the Servant of the Lord, the suffering Messiah of the nations, who offered his life as an atoning sacrifice for humanity and furnished his blood as the cement with which to build the divine kingdom of truth and justice.”690

  This aping of Christian soteriology (doctrine of salvation) culminates in the religion of the Holocaust, with Auschwitz replacing Calvary. And because absolute good needs its enemy absolute evil, one understands the importance of transforming Hitler into a quasi-metaphysical principle, with titles like Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil by Ron Rosenbaum (1998), which became in the French translation: Pourquoi Hitler? Enquête sur l’origine du mal (“Why Hitler? An Inquiry into the Origin of Evil”). The forelock and mustache of the Führer have replaced the horns of the devil in folk iconography.

  While mimicking Christianity, Judaism also seeks to transform it. And so the counterpart of the Christianization of Judaism is the Judaization of Christianity. According to the historian of Judaism Daniel Lindenberg, “the Jewish Reformation does not only want to ‘assimilate’ unilaterally into the modern Christian world. In a way, it aims to ‘reform’ it, too. […] It is really about awakening the Hebrew ‘root’ of a Christianity reconciled with Human Rights.”691

  In fact, it is really about eradicating all traces of anti-Judaism from Christianity—from the Gospel if it were possible—in order to turn Christianity into a Judeophilic religion, that is, a branch of Judaism. Jules Isaac, founder of the Jewish-Christian Friendship group in 1948, began this task in the years preceding Vatican II. He called on Catholics to renounce their anti-Judaism and to recognize Jews as their “elder brothers” on the basis of a vision of Jesus identical to that of Graetz: “The originality of Jesus did not consist of innovating in matters of faith and breaking with the religion of his fathers, but simply of extracting from Scripture and the whole Jewish oral tradition the elements of a truly pure faith and universal morality.” On December 15, 1959, Isaac delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne entitled “The Necessary Redress of Christian Teaching about Israel,” later published as L’Ensegnement du mépris (“Teaching Contempt”). To satisfy him, John XXIII appointed Cardinal Bea to head the Secretariat for the Unity of Christian Religions, which also deals with relations with Judaism. Bea’s two immediate assistants, Bishop Baum and Monsignor Oesterreicher, were converted Jews, and Bea was considered to be of Marrano origin (his real name would have been Behar). These assertions were supported in a Look magazine article of January 25, 1966, referring to secret meetings between Bea and the American Jewish Committee.692

  The protagonists in this drama include the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion, founded in 1843 by two Jewish brothers in Strasbourg, Théodore and Alphonse Rastisbonne, “to testify in the Church and in the world of the faithfulness of God to his love for the Jewish people, and to work at fulfilling the biblical promises revealed to the patriarchs and prophets of Israel for all mankind.” Although initially devoted to the conversion of the Jews, it contributed to the Church’s renunciation of that mission under Vatican II.

  The result of all these combined actions was the birth of a new ostensibly Judeophilic Christianity, promoted by personalities such as the Archbishop of Paris Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger. In his book The Promise, whose cover shows Pope John Paul II praying at the Wailing Wall, Lustiger explains why “though Christian by faith and baptism, [he is] as Jewish as the apostles were,” and why Jesus’s message is the continuation of the law of Moses and a confirmation of the election of the Jewish people: “One can only receive the Spirit of Jesus on the strict condition of sharing the hope of Israel,” since “the figure of the Messiah is at the same time the figure of Israel.”693

  Today’s Judeophiles and crypto-Jews in the Roman Curia are, of course, ardent Zionists. The casual admission of the prelate David-Maria Jaeger, the principal architect of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican, speaks volumes about the extent of this phenomenon. Born in Tel Aviv of Jewish parents and converted to Catholicism, but defining himself primarily as an “Israeli Jew,” Jaeger told a journalist from the Israeli daily Haaretz in 2011: “I’m just like any Israeli citizen who works for an international organization situated outside the country—just like there are Israelis at the International Mon
etary Fund in Washington, the United Nations in New York or UNESCO in Paris.”694

  The Judaization of Christianity culminates in American Evangelical Christianity, the direct descendant of Calvinist Puritanism. A few decades of skillful manipulation has succeeded in transforming Evangelicals into powerful allies of Zionism. The initial impulse can be traced back to Methodist pastor William Eugene Blackstone. His book Jesus Is Coming (1878) sold millions of copies and was translated into forty-eight languages. It became the key reference of what is called “dispensationalism,” the doctrine that the gathering of Jews in Palestine is the precondition for the Return of Christ on Earth (after which, of course, the Jews will finally recognize Christ). In 1890 Blackstone organized a conference of Christian and Jewish leaders. The following year he launched a petition signed by 413 Christian leaders and a handful of Jewish ones. This petition, known as the Blackstone Memorial, proposes “Why shall not the powers which under the Treaty of Berlin, in 1878, gave Bulgaria to the Bulgarians and Servia to the Servians now give Palestine back to the Jews?”695

  The Judaization of American Christianity, and English Christianity to a lesser extent, has not been a spontaneous process, but rather one controlled by skillful manipulation. An example is the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 and revised in 1917. It is characterized by dubious and highly tendentious footnotes. For example, the promise of Yahweh to Abraham in Genesis 12:1–3 merits a two-thirds-page footnote explaining that “God made an unconditional promise of blessings through Abram’s seed to the nation of Israel to inherit a specific territory forever,” accompanied by “a curse laid upon those who persecute the Jews,” or “commit the sin of anti-Semitism.” In reality, at this point Jacob, who would receive the name of Israel and beget the Jewish people, was not even born yet, nor was his father. The same note explains that “Both O.T. and N.T. are full of post-Sinaitic promises concerning Israel and the land which is to be Israel’s everlasting possession.”

  How was Cyrus Scofield, a lawyer without theological training, capable of publishing such a work with the prestigious Oxford University Press? The mystery has been solved: Scofield was only a front man for a project whose real sponsor was Samuel Untermeyer, a Wall Street lawyer, Federal Reserve co-founder, devoted Zionist, and close associate of Woodrow Wilson. As noted in chapter 7, Untermeyer called for a “holy war” against Germany in 1933.696

  Israel’s technique for manipulating history can be interpreted in Hegelian terms. Since he formulated the dialectical law of history in the early 19th century, Hegel has had two kinds of disciples: those who examine the past to verify the law, and those who apply the law to shape the future. Marx belonged to the second category: Although he claimed to merely predict an inevitable revolution, he contributed to hastening it. Marx may have understood this better than Hegel, because such laws were long known in his Jewish social environment. Manipulating history, rather than saving souls, has been from the start the great concern of Judaism. And it has never been so successfully done than during the “Jewish century,” as Yuri Slezkine names the 20th century.

  It is through dialectical oppositions that the great Jewish movements of the 19th and 20th centuries have been able to bend history. The three major Jewish movements were hatched around the same time: Reform Judaism, the fruit of 18th century Haskalah; Bolshevism, based on Marxism, which fed on earlier socialist ideas before smothering them; and Zionism. Reform Judaism and Zionism appeared in Western Europe almost simultaneously, in the same intellectual milieu which produced Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. Both used the victimization of the Jews as a springboard for their ascent to positions of power. While Reform Judaism was crafting a new image of the Jews as the collective suffering Messiah, Zionism was capitalizing on the Russian pogroms to advance its claim for the Jews to have “a nation of their own, a nation like others.” While originally affirming their mutual incompatibility and competing for the heart of Jews—wealthy and destitute alike—these two movements finally joined hand and congratulated each other on their marvelous common achievement: a nation like no other, with both a national territory and an international citizenry. Except for a few unreformed orthodox Jews, most Jews today see no contradiction between Reform Judaism and Zionism. The question of whether such dialectical machinery is engineered by Yahweh or by B’nai B’rith is open to debate. But most Jews involved in such movements are certainly not aware of the full picture. The process rests on an ambiguity which is the very essence of Jewishness: the impossibility of deciding whether it is a religion or a nationality.

  The dialectical opposition between Zionism and communism is another case in point. Both originated, again, in the same milieu, and the very nature of their opposition is perhaps best represented by the friendship between Karl Marx and Moses Hess. Theodor Herzl, we remember, used the threat of communism in his Zionist diplomatic overtures to Russian and the German leaders: “Support my movement, and I will rid your cities of their revolutionaries.” Churchill, also on the Zionist side, dramatized the opposition between the “good Jews” (Zionists) and the “bad Jews” (communists) in his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism.”

  Similar dialectical machinery can be found in all levels of Jewish movements. Consider, for example, the opposition between pro-Nazi Zionists and anti-Nazi Zionists in the 1930s. The Hegelian synthesis between the two is best embodied by Joachim Prinz, who in 1934 expressed sympathy for the Nazi racial laws, and in 1958 was elected president of the American Jewish Congress, the very organization which in 1933 had called for total economic war on Germany.

  Reshaping the Cultural Environment

  The manipulation of the Christian mind to make it favorable to the Jews and to Israel is one aspect among others of a general strategy of modifying the cultural environments of host nations to make them more conducive to the Jewish community. This strategy differs from the Darwinian crypsis by which the community blends into the environment to make its ethnic character less visible. Here, on the contrary, it is a question of modifying the environment to make it more tolerant of ethnic communities, or to diffuse the ethnic problem and thus divert Gentile hostility toward other ethnic communities. The Jews are then able, using the strategy of “triangulation,” to pose as mediators of conflicts

  This, for Kevin MacDonald, explains why “transforming the United States into a multicultural society has been a major Jewish goal since the 19th century.”697 The project entails both increasing national tolerance toward ethnic communities, but also increasing the numerical importance and diversity of ethnic communities through massive immigration, celebrating multiculturalism, and fostering ethnic pluralism. One of the emblematic figures of this cultural movement was Israel Zangwill, the successful author of the play The Melting Pot (1908), whose title has become a metaphor for American society. The hero is a Jew who emigrated to the United States to flee the pogroms that decimated his family in Russia. He falls in love with a Christian Russian immigrant, who turns out to be the daughter of the Russian officer responsible for the death of his family. The father of the bride repents, and the couple lives happily ever after. The hero makes himself the bard of assimilation by mixed marriages, through which God gives birth to a new man: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming.” The paradox is that when he was writing this play, Zangwill was a committed Zionist leader, that is, the leader of a movement affirming the impossibility of Jews living among Gentiles, and demanding that they be ethnically separated. Zangwill is the author of another famous formula: “Palestine is a land without people for a people without land.” There is no better illustration of the Jewish community’s double language and double game, which advocates cross-breeding among the Gentiles and ethnic purity among the Jews. The neoconservative Douglas Feith said it bluntly in a speech delivered in Jerusalem in 1997: “There is a place in the world for non-ethnic nations and there is a place for ethnic nations.”698

>   In the United States, the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act severely restricted immigration, especially from Asia and Eastern Europe. The lifting of this restrictive legislation was a high-priority political struggle for practically all Jewish organizations. They won in 1965, with a new immigration law that forced the doors of immigration wide open. To weaken the ethnic homogeneity of the host nation is to weaken what Ludwig Gumplowicz called its “syngeneic feeling,” of which anti-Semitism seems to be an almost inevitable by-product. A satisfying situation was achieved around 1993, according to Jewish activist Earl Raab, associated with the Anti-Defamation League, writing in the Jewish Bulletin: “The Census Bureau has just reported that about half of the American population will soon be non-white or non-European. And they will all be American citizens. We have tipped beyond the point where a Nazi-Aryan party will be able to prevail in this country. We [Jews] have been nourishing the American climate of opposition to bigotry for about half a century. That climate has not yet been perfected, but the heterogeneous nature of our population tends to make it irreversible—and makes our constitutional constraints against bigotry more practical than ever.”699

  In addition, Jews played a prominent role in the organization of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. From the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909, all of its presidents were Jews until 1975. After the Second World War, the majority of Jewish organizations were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Jews provided its financial, legal, strategic, and even ideological support. (By contrast, no African-American has been admitted to the major Jewish organizations, much less been allowed to run them).