From Yahweh to Zion
Page 52
Not all elites deserve to be put in the same bag. Many Zionist leaders have had the courage to confront the monster they created, and to try to undo the damage. Moshe Sharett, foreign minister from 1948 to 1956 and prime minister from 1954 to 1955, advocated a moderate Zionism respectful of international rules, in contrast to the methods of Ben-Gurion, Pinhas Levon, Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres, the clan bent on “setting the Middle East on fire.” Yet men like Sharett have always remained isolated and never had a chance to overcome the psychopathic ideological power machine of Zionism. Israel seems destined to be directed by the most extremist, openly racist, paranoid, and Machiavellian elements—the most lacking in all inhibitions normally imposed by empathy and respect for other peoples.
In the final analysis, was not this destiny blueprinted in the Bible? If Israel seems bewitched by a sociopathic destiny, is it not the fault of its evil genius Yahweh? Does not the Zionist manipulation go back to the creation by the ancient Levites of this particularly xenophobic tribal egregore that has usurped the title of “Creator of the Universe” and “Father of Humanity”?
As a collective entity, the Jewish people has always behaved like a sociopath among other peoples. Many Jews, of course, have resisted that collective mind frame. But most have been bred into it for generations—not just by their parents, but by their tribal god, the fake Yahweh. Today’s Jews cannot be blamed for having inherited as sacred text the most extraordinary hoax in all human history. As children of a psychopathic god, they are his first victims. But although no one is responsible for the faith he has grown up with, everyone, at some stage, should take responsibility for it.
We must hope that Jewish revolt against the divine sociopath will one day take on a collective character. The Jewish community has always been torn between an assimilationist tendency and a separatist tendency, between genuine thirst for universality and tribal particularism. All the tragedies it has experienced stem from the maneuvers of its elites opposing majoritarian aspirations to integration. These elites endlessly revive the tribal spirit from which they derive their power. It is under the double banner of the Holocaust and Israel that Jews are today called upon to strengthen their communal solidarity.
Only when the biblical Yahweh is correctly diagnosed and publicly exposed as a sociopathic myth will the Jews have a chance to collectively break away from his psychopathic bond, renounce the curse of being the chosen people, and learn to empathize with the rest of humankind. Until then, courageous Jews, from Jesus and Paul to Shlomo Sand and Gilad Atzmon, will continue to pave the way in solitude, vilified as self-hating Jews by those they wish to liberate.
ENDNOTES
1Alexandre Roudinesco, Le Malheur d’Israël, Éditions de Cluny, 1956, p. 7.
2Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew, 1882, on www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/pinsker.html.
3Avigail Abarbanel, “Why I Left the Cult,” October 8, 2016, on mondoweiss.net.
4Dan Kurzman, Ben-Gurion, Prophet of Fire, Touchstone, 1983, pp. 17–18, 22, 26–28.
5Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oneworld Publications, 2007, p. 144.
6Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994, p. 10.
7David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116.
8“The Complete Transcript of Netanyahu’s Address to Congress,” on www.washingtonpost.com.
9This term, here borrowed from Gilad Atzmon, was first introduced by Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, 1994.
10Jean Daniel, La Prison juive. Humeurs et méditations d’un témoin, Odile Jacob, 2003, p. 53.
11Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934, (archive.org).
12Information juive no. 297, January 2010, p. 4, on www.informationjuive.fr.
13Raphael Patai, The Jewish Mind, Wayne State University Press, 1977 (books.google.com), p. 24.
14e.g., Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods II, 6.
15Ancient dates given in this book are those commonly admitted. They should be regarded as of relative value, since the chronological scale on which they are based has been seriously challenged and reduced by the so-called “revisionists of ancient history”; read Gunnar Heinsohn’s paper on “The Restoration of Ancient History,” on www.mikamar.biz/symposium/heinsohn.txt, and John Crowe’s “The Revision of Ancient History – A Perspective,” on www.sis-group.org.uk/ancient.htm.
16Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 44.
17Israel Finkelstein and Neil Adher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.
18Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. 1, p. 343.
19Philip Davies, In Search of “Ancient Israel”: A Study in Biblical Origins, Journal of the Study of the Old Testament, 1992, pp. 41, 94.
20Mario Liverani, La Bible et l’invention de l’histoire, Gallimard, 2012, pp. 354–355.
21André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, pp. 67–95.
22Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: The History of the Jews, Harper Perennial, 1995, pp. 55–61.
23Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 56, 17–18.
24Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, John Knox Press, 1998, p. 122.
25Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 66.
26Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, Thames & Hudson, 1982, pp. 13–51.
27Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 22-23.
28Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, Lowrie Press, 2008.
29Colin Humphreys, The Miracles of Exodus: A Scientist’s Discovery of the Extraordinary Natural Causes of the Biblical Stories, HarperOne, 2003.
30Larry Williams, The Mount Sinai Myth, Wynwood Press, 1990; Howard Blum The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, Simon & Schuster, 1998.
31Gordon D. Newby, A History of the Jews of Arabia, University of South Carolina Press, 2009.
32David Samuel Margoliouth, Relations Between Arabs and Israelites Prior to the Rise of Islam: The Schweich Lectures 1921, Oxford UP, 1924 (archive.org).
33Karl Budde, Religion of Israel to the Exile, Putnam’s Sons, 1899 (archive.org), pp. 5-11.
34Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, op. cit., pp. 58-60.
35As recently propounded by Swiss scholar Thomas Römer in his lectures in the Collège de France, 2011-2012, on www.college-de-france.fr/
36For a good overview, read Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005.
37Papyrus Sallier 1, quoted in Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods, op. cit., p. 48.
38Laurent Guyénot, La Mort féerique. Anthropologie du merveilleux, Gallimard, 2011, p. 318.
39Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods, op. cit., p. 47.
40Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Harvard University Press, 1998, pp. 15–16.
41Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary
Readings, ed. and introduced by Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, Augsburg Fortress, 1996, pp. 356, 385.
42Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, op. cit., p. 183.
43Jan Assmann, “Seth the Iconoclast,” in Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, pp. 28–52, 46.
44Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, Stanford University Press, 2009, kindle, k. 255, 322–324.
45Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.
46See also Psalms 89:7.
47Jean Soler, Qui est Dieu?, Éditions de Fallois, 2012, pp. 12–17, 33–37.
48Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.
49Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 48–49.
50Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.
51Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 144–150.
52Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, op. cit., k. 698.
53Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 18.
54www.gilad.co.uk/writings/on-idfs-failure-and-jewish-ethics.html.
55Quoted in Robert Edward Edmondson, The Jewish System Indicted by the Documentary Record, 1937 (archive.org), p. 15.
56Bernard Lazare, L’Antisémitisme, son histoire et ses causes (1894), Kontre Kulture, 2011, p. 12.
57Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 3rd ed., Wayne State University Press, 1990, p. 34.
58Gérard Chaliand, Les Voix du Sacré, Robert Laffont, 1992, p. 32.
59Jean-Pierre Chevillot, D’Isis au Christ: Aux sources hellénistiques du christianisme, L’Harmattan, 2010, kindle, k. 27–33.
60Françoise Dunand, Isis, mère des dieux, Actes Sud, 2008, p. 232.
61Stehanie Lynn Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
62Laurent Guyénot, La Mort féerique. Anthropologie du merveilleux (XIIe-XVe siècle), Gallimard, 2011.
63Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse: Tales of the Soul’s Conquest of Evil, 1948.
64Jean Soler, Qui est Dieu?, op. cit., p. 23.
65Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122–125, 4.
66Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté, quoted in Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes, Éditions Baskerville, 2005, p. 308.
67Hervé Ryssen, Les Espérances planétariennes, op. cit., p. 301.
68Also Exodus 22:24 and Leviticus 25:35–37.
69Lawrence Wills, Jew in the Court of the Foreign King: Ancient Jewish Court Legends, Cornell University Press, 1995, p. 189.
70Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol.1, p. 331.
71Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, John Knox Press, 1998, p. 110.
72Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy, Praeger, 1994, kindle 2013, k. 3122–3231.
73Genesis 37:35; 42:38; 44:29; 44:31.
74Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, Hogarth Press, 1939 (archive.org), pp. 33-34.
75Jan Assmann, Mort et Au-delà dans l’Égypte ancienne, Rocher, 2003, p. 87, 186.
76Bojana Mojsov, Osiris: Death and Afterlife of a God, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, p. 46.
77Jean Bottéro, L’Épopée de Gilgamesh, le grand homme qui ne voulait pas mourir, Gallimard, 1992, p. 34.
78Snorri Sturluson, Histoire des rois de Norvège, première partie, Gallimard, 2000, pp. 61–63.
79Bruce Lincoln, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, University of Chicago Press, 1991.
80George Foucart, Les mystères d’Éleusis, Picard, 1914 (archive.org), pp. 46, 253.
81e.g., Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Law, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (1864), Dover, 2012.
82Jan Assmann, Mort et Au-delà dans l’Égypte ancienne, Rocher, 2003, p. 17.
83Laurent Guyénot, La Mort féerique. Anthropologie du merveilleux (XIIe-XVe siècle), Gallimard, 2011, p. 155.
84Klass Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1986, pp. 344–345.
85Deuteronomy 26:14 is also generally interpreted as a condemnation of offerings to the dead. Read Susan Niditch, Ancient Israelite Religion, Oxford University Press, 1997.
86According to a more accurate translation than the Jerusalem Bible, too ambiguous here.
87André Gaillard, Les Racines judaïques de l’antisémtisme, AMG Éditions, 2012, p. 69.
88Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891 (archive.org), vol. 4, p. 240.
89Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality (1921) Adamant Media Co., 2005, p. 343.
90Christopher Jones, New Heroes in Antiquity: From Achilles to Antinoos, Harvard University Press, 2010.
91Carla Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995, p. 1.
92Mario Liverani, Israel’s History and the History of Israel, Routledge, 2007, p. 410.
93Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, 1843, on www.marxists.org/archive
94Jacques Attali, Les Juifs, le monde et l’argent, Fayard, 2002, p. 36.
95Isaac Kadmi-Cohen, Nomades: Essai sur l’âme juive, Felix Alcan, 1929 (archive.org), pp. 115, 98, 143, 27–28.
96Harry Waton, A Program for The Jews, An Answer To All Anti-Semites: A Program for Humanity, 1939 (archive.org), pp. 52, 125, 132.
97Niels Peter Lemche, The Israelites in History and Tradition, John Knox Press, 1998, p. 111.
98Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.
99Harry Waton, A Program for The Jews, op. cit., p. 148.
100Ludwig Feurbach, L’Essence du christianisme (1841), François Maspéro, 1973, p. 129.
101Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 1918 (archive.org), pp. 48, 64–65.
102Henri Guillemin, L’arrière-pensée de Jaurès, Gallimard, 1966.
103John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Penguin Classics, 2000, p. 26.
104Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011, pp. 58–61.
105Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., p. 121.
106Quoted in Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian, Princeton University Press, 1995, p. 178.
107Quoted in Michael Grant, Jews in the Roman World, op. cit., pp. 134–135.
108John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 3 vols, Doubleday, 1993–2001.
109Gerald Caron, Qui sont les Juifs de l’Évangile de Jean ?, Bellarmin, 1997, pp. 30–33.
110John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus, Harper San Francisco, 1995.
111Keith Elliott and Ian Moir, Manuscripts and the Text of the New Testament, T&T Clark,
1995, p. 65.
112Marie-Émile Boismard, L’Évangile de Marc, sa préhistoire, Gabalda, 1994.
113Martin Peltier, L’Antichristianisme juif. L’enseignement de la haine, Diffusion Internationale Édition, 2014, pp. 38–49.
114Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski, The Jews of Egypt, op. cit., p. 169.
115Sam Williams, Jesus’ Death as Saving Event: Background of a Concept, Scholars Press for Harvard Theological Review, 1975.
116I Apologies V.3, quoted in Martin Hengel, La Crucifixion dans l’Antiquité et la folie du message de la croix, Cerf, 1981, p. 13.