Apr 3, 2024
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My Half Century With Islam, Part 3
by Doniphan Blair
Michelangelo’s muscular 'Moses'. photo: unknownContinued from My Half Century With Islam, Part 2
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ALTHOUGH ISLAM'S POLITICO-RELIGIOUS
hybrid made its achievements automatic gifts from God, by the same token, its defeats and decadence had to be blamed on sin. Monotheism became so popular so quickly because it solved so many polytheist problems, but not the central human concern of “Why bad things happen to good people?”, which pagans easily explain via polytheism’s central conceit: “You’re praying to the wrong god.” A similar theological crisis challenged Judaism in the 6th century BCE, after the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple and the city of Jerusalem, and kidnapped half its inhabitants to exile in Babylon. Although the temple was soon rebuilt, with Persian help, the rabbis still had to answer for abandonment by God. Blaming increasingly subtle sin, like “coveting thy neighbor’s wife in thy heart,” the Jewish intellectuals invented “guilt,” a more internal and sophisticated style of social control than the emotional peer pressure of tribal shame, shunning and excommunication.
Rejecting such hyperbolic self-criticism, however, an unknown rabbi wrote and many rabbis approved of “The Book of Job”, arguably “The Bible”’s most advanced theological postulate, which is unlike the other biblical books and thought to come a polytheist story. Probably written in the 5th century BCE, shortly after the Jews' liberation from Babylonian captivity, “The Book of Job” became central to the new ideas of the Pharisee sect (515 BCE-70 CE). Using big characters reminiscent of “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, God bets the Devil that his devout follower, Job, is so righteous, he won’t renounce God, even if his good fortune ends. After losing his health, possessions, flocks and family—everyone except his wife (who, unlike the supportive Khadija, recommends he admit error)—Job defies the three wise men and their insistence he sinned, and addresses God directly. In the heat of their argument, God asks him, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), which inspires his epiphany: The universe is too old, large and complex to be fully understood. Indeed, the path toward good—which can be defined as “greater benefit, for more people, over longer periods” (“Evil is short term benefit for the few”)—inevitably includes struggle, pain and, on occasion, grotesque tragedy.
I dealt with Job's conundrum once in a discussion with my mother (by phone in the 1990s). “If it wasn’t for the Holocaust, you probably would have stayed in Poland and not come to America,” I told her, “Then you wouldn't have met my father, which means I wouldn’t exist.” “That’s not true,” she said, after a long pause, "You would have been your father’s son.” “But how could that be without you as my mother?” “You would have been your father’s son with another woman,” she concluded, which surely would have pleased Khadija, given my mother was ceding the traditional female power of birth to a good man, a righteous patriarch.
Muhammad drew on Jewish and Christian stories but added some from his own experience, his tribe’s lore or Mecca’s many polytheisms. Hence, “The Quran” has the single-sentence revelation, “God speaks in parables to mankind” (Surah 24:37), which contradicts literalism, if taken literally. Of course, the Christians syncretized older polytheist themes, like gods mating with humans, and the Jews incorporated Egyptian theology and Babylonian myths, like "The Flood" or "Tower of Babel". Indeed, the Israelite authors exploited every known literary device, from poetic flights of fancy to omniscient instruction or proto-modern texts, like the agnostic, vanity-busting “Ecclesiastes” or “The Songs of Solomon”, eight romantic, matriarchal poems plopped in the middle of a patriarchal text. Nevertheless, it’s mostly a long novel starring the Jews. The origin of the universe and humanity and their first heroes are all in the first book, “Genesis”, while the next four, starting with “Exodus”, concern their physical and mental liberation from slavery and idolatry led by Moses. Traditionally considered the Hebrew’s greatest prophet and author of “The Torah” (the first five books of "The Bible"), Moses was probably Egyptian and a Pharaoh’s son. (This possibility is important to highlight, I feel, to offset the Pharaohs as the Biblical epitome of evil, given they did develop an incredible culture, replete with the unexplained pyramids, to share the legacy of Moses and monotheism with modern Egyptians.)
There’s no archeological proof that Moses existed but, if he didn’t, why did the Hebrew writers give him an Egyptian name, have him speak through his brother Aaron (suggesting he wasn't fluent in Hebrew) and marry a woman from the Kenite tribe, mythical descendants of Cain? Moreover, foundling stories, like the Pharaoh’s daughter “finding” the infant Moses floating in a basket on the Nile, were a common literary trope for tribe switching (Sargon uses it for his own history, probably because he wasn't from the city of Akkad, probably located under modern Baghdad). In fact, all societies are somewhat or largely multicultural (regardless of purity claims), which obliges storytellers to invent believable biographies of immigrant heroes that transform them into blood kin.
Indeed, Moses was undoubtedly Egyptian and an acolyte of the sun god, Aten, as Freud details in his last book, “Moses and Monotheism”, written in 1938, after he was allowed to flee to England from Vienna. (The Nazis reviled Freud's theories of guilt, conscience and sex but feared he was too famous to kill, at that time, although they soon sent many of his relatives to death camps). History’s first recorded monotheism, Atenism, was probably developed over a few generations by elite priests, but it was instituted by Pharaoh Akhenaton around 1350 BCE, with support from his beautiful wife, Nefertiti, and his military, who installed it by force. Alas, that enraged Egyptian aristocrats, who lost the status and incomes often derived from polytheist temples. After Akhenaton's death and 17-year reign, they destroyed all of his statues, shrines to Aten and the sacred capital city, Amarna.
Rome's Arch of Titus has a carving of soldiers bringing home Jewish booty, the Second Temple's massive menorah, circa 70 CE. photo: unknownRecognizing the moral conflict between normal friendships and religious compulsion, not to mention a top-heavy society like Akhenaton's Egypt, Moses (or someone like him) reinterpreted Atenism and rebuilt it from the ground up for the slaves and the poor. Indeed, Moses’ major theme, aside from monotheism, is that all humans have the God-given right to freedom and equality—just as friends treat each other—liberating humans from both bondage and idolatry, slavery of the mind as well as body. Slavery began as a primitive social welfare program, after the onset of labor-intensive agriculture, since it allowed starving families to trade excess children for food, solving the downside of reproductive success and helping both the family and children survive (the latter were eventually accepted by the new community). With the rise of civilizations, however, it became an abusive and perverse booty-of-war and labor pool system, especially the inherited, lifelong "chattel" slavery of the American colonies. Among the ancient civilizations and tribes, enslavement was usually temporary, more like the indentured servitude practiced in America until the Civil War.
Moses was probably an elite, upper class Atenist, if not pharaoh's son, until he witnessed a Jewish slave being abused by an overseer, killed him and fled into hiding. His epiphany, that monotheistic unity meant universal equality and justice for all humans, triggered the monotheist revolution. Indeed, Moses (or someone like him) organized the liberation of the builders of Egypt's pyramids, still one of civilization's greatest achievements, which personified the eventual triumph of liberalism and was honored by the Jews, as their first and foremost holiday. An egalitarian ritual, Passover is performed priest-less in the home, recounting the ancient story over a meal with a democratic and relaxed vibe (participants are encouraged to recline). All adults can read a portion of the text, "The Haggadah", children Socraticly answer “The Four Questions", and freedom for all humans is referenced. Indeed, the Christians turned Passover into the Last Supper, suggesting a respite before the storm of betrayal and crucifixion, but Easter also freed all humans from sin, if not physical slavery, if they accepted the metaphor of Christ.
Whether Moses saw “god” or made “him” up, or someone else did, is immaterial to a post-modern textual analysis. For example, after meeting God on Mount Sinai, why did the authors of "The Bible" have Moses carve “The Ten Commandments” on stone tablets, only to smash them shortly thereafter? Or, if that actually happened, why not edit out that embarrassing affront to Moses's authority? Narratively, it serves to reveal his sorrow at seeing his (adopted) people revert to praying to the polytheist Golden Calf, despite his struggle to liberate them, mentally and physically. Meta-narratively, however, it highlights “no compulsion,” a theme often reiterated by the Jews, like when Moses’s (supposed) first cousin, Korach, led another revolt against him. Ethical evolution has to be voluntary and personal, the Jews realized, so they proselytized only through poetic descriptions, strong narratives about incredible events and characters, and reasoned arguments, at multiple levels of symbolism.
Eliminating idol worship also signified an attempt to transcend the material world and turn society toward spiritual values, responsible relationships and improved mental health. Many polytheisms had incredible insights and metaphysics but their overall cosmology was chaotic. One God, meanwhile, alleviated stress by ordering the universe and ordaining one day respite a week (the Egyptians had a day off every ten, while polytheists had monthly full moon and other festivals), the time for relaxation we moderns depend on, from breaks and afterwork recreation to two days off for the Sabbath! This increased attention to the intellect and spirit greatly benefited Hebrew culture, which proceeded to produce dozens of monotheist prophets, many of whom got their own chapters in "The Bible", thousands of moral rabbis, poets and regular people, and the founders of two new monotheisms, Christ and Muhammad.
Although the Jewish states of Israel and Judah were tiny, compared to their imperial neighbors, Jerusalem became literary center by 750 BCE. illo: courtesy MapPornReligion Inevitably Involves Politics
"No coercion" made sense religiously, but for a people to flourish on the Israeli isthmus—the continental crossroads Homo sapiens had been hiking across for millennia to get out of Africa—the Jews fashioned two tiny states. The first was the Kingdom of Israel, situated to Jerusalem’s north and lasting from 900 to 720 BCE, and then a smaller, poorer nation, including a lot of barren land, around the city itself. That was the Kingdom of Judah, which reigned from 850 to 586 BCE but then even longer, from 530 BCE to 70 CE, 864 years total. Judah gives us the words “Jew” and “Judaism” (as opposed to the older assignation, Hebrew, still their language name) after half the residents of Jerusalem were kidnapped to Babylon, in 586 BCE, where they were asked about their identity and faith. The larger Israel had more farmers, traders and soldiers, and started first, hence, provided their political name, until today. Abraham's grandson Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with God, suggesting they were the tougher tribe of the Hebrew speakers, while the Judeans were significantly more intellectual.
Although extremely early Jewish history has little archeological evidence and remains disputed, it was probably King Josiah who instituted major theological reforms and produced "The Bible". (I started researching this when my mother began asking, repeatedly, "Who wrote 'The Bible'?" around when she turned 90, an interesting question for a secular humanist Jew approaching death.) Josiah was installed as a child regent in 648 BCE but ruled rather maturely for 39 years, gradually eliminating, with the occasional use of military force, the shrines and stories of the other gods, while talking up new ideas and enlisting rabbis and scribes to compile, edit and publish “The Torah", "The Bible"'s first five books. Those texts established the origin of the universe created by the one Lord and the adventures of the first mythical beings and Jews: from the first family of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel to the first Jews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In addition, the writers chronicled Josiah’s doings in “Chronicles” and “Kings”, which became two of the 39 "books" (chapters) of "The Old Testament", the earth's second bestselling book after "The New Testament". King Josiah on, Jerusalem has been a religious, scholarly and publishing powerhouse known worldwide and the Earth's only Jewish metropolis, even as other groups arrived and sometimes became the majority, until Tel Aviv was founded in 1909.
So respected was Jerusalem, in fact, even though it was conquered three dozen times over three millennia, it never served as the capital of a single other nation or imperial district, and polytheists pilgrimaged there to petition its powerful god. That was why the liberal Persian king, Cyrus the Great, helped rebuild the Temple in the sixth century BCE, and there were moneychangers, which Christ reviled (not moneylenders, as often assumed due to later stereotypes). Foreigners simply needed local currency to buy oil for prayers. Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, to connect him to that tradition, making it Islam’s third holy city (after Mecca and Medina), but he only visited a couple of times and obviously didn’t compose that story. Jerusalem maintains a similarly elevated status today, replete with psychiatric institutions full of people of all faiths afflicted with “Jerusalem Syndrome” (AKA messianic psychosis), algebraically more mental cases than at any other sacred site.
Atenism, Judaism and the Late Bronze Age Collapse inspired another unified worldview, originally called "Babylonian science.” Although five millennia ago the Sumerians invented the math of time, based on Sun and Moon cycles and the corresponding numbers of 12, 60 and 360, and the Babylonians had a working understanding of the Solar System's first five planets by 1500 BCE, their oracles were still divining the future through the color of a sheep's liver. "Why look to an animal's viscera," an entrepreneurial prognosticator must have asked a king of that day at one point, “When your destiny is in the stars?” Shortly thereafter, a new tribe of seers was furnishing Babylon's royal family with a fecund farrago of soothsaying and stories infused with cutting-edge astronomy and an almost-agnostic, non-denominational monotheism eventually known as "astrology."
Of the Zodiac's many stories, one of the most insightful is about the sign of Scorpio, which starts around the universal day of the dead (late October) and chronicles the soul's journey through death to redemption and resurrection, foreshadowing Christ. illo: D. Blair, 2013Babylonian Science was seen as a rational complement to other beliefs and came to be revered by the Egyptians, Greeks and then Europeans, where it eclipsed the similar pseudo-scientific investigations of alchemy. Although India, China, Mesoamerica and Africa have their own elaborate versions, Babylonian astrology's "horoscopes" (from the Greek, meaning life forecasts from planetary positions) have filled many books and newspaper columns and are now plentiful online. In fact, astrology became one of humanity's most popular unified field theories, along with Judaism, Christianity, Islam and science. A majority of our fellows may favor science, as we can see by their cell phone, vaccination and vehicle use, but the number of them referencing one or more of the astrologies probably approaches three billion, plus about a billion religious Muslims, an equal quantity of devout Christians, and one one-thousandth of humanity practicing Jews.
Forty-eight years after Nebuchadnezzar ransacked Judah in 586 BCE, the Jews resurrected and ran ‘til 70 CE, not a bad reign for such a small state. Alas, Judaism was ripe for reinterpretation by then, in keeping with monotheism’s half-millennium update cycles as well as accelerated by the brutal Roman conquest in 63 BCE, which aggravated animosity between the Jews' two biggest sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees. The former were mystical populists, who integrated fate and free will and followed the great prophets who reformed Judaism post-Babylonian captivity. They opposed both the rational Hellenizers, enthusiastic fans of Greek culture (after Alexander the Great’s more benevolent conquest in 332 BCE), and the priestly, scholarly, establishment Sadducees. The latter rejected predestination as well as the new prophets, abiding only the five books of "The Torah". By the first century CE, however, there was a plethora of prophets with radical new notions and fanatical followers, notably Jesus and his ilk, like John the Baptist and the Essenes, but also the Zealots, who terrorized Jerusalem, killing and looting (often disguised as women), and the assassins of the cult of Sicariis, which prefigured the Hashashin (though they fled after attacks) and still means “hit man” in Spanish.
Although Jesus was a peaceful hippie type and rabbi, embodying Judaism’s highest ideals, he was also a maverick mystic in the prophetic Hebrew mode, aggressively critiquing the religion and society of his day. His pacifism contradicted David, in fact, the Jews' most exalted prophet after Moses, who came up a romantic shepherd and musician but transformed himself into a giant killer and righteous king, mimicking the story of monotheism. Given David supposedly co-authored “The Psalms”, still an apex of Western wisdom literature—"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23)—he exemplified the marriage of sword, spirit and word, the blending of matriarchal and patriarchal powers that came to be considered mandatory for messiahs. David was probably just a local chieftain—not the second king of the mythical unified Israel-Judah state—but his existence was verified by a stone inscribed with “The House of David" unearthed in the 1990s by archeologists at Tel Dan, Israel. As with Moses, if David didn't exist, it is perplexing why Jewish storytellers made up so much dirt on him, like when he ordered into battle the husband of the beauty Bathsheba to seduce her. Either way, someone fairly smart and skillful must have established Jerusalem, around the ninth century BCE, and someone's son or grandson, perhaps named Solomon, did build a substantial temple there, regardless of embellishments two centuries later by King Josiah’s writers.
Christ, seen here with correct skin tone in an Eastern Orthodox icon, is well-known worldwide to be Jewish. illo: unknownSimilarly, we can assume Christ existed, given “The New Testament”'s authors admitted he was from Galilee, not Jerusalem, but devised a sophisticated narrative workaround. Mary and Joseph had to go to the sacred capital to register for the Roman census around the winter solstice, which connected him to the pagans, emerging astrology, David's royal heritage, and civilization simultaneously. Christ’s rejection of political power precluded messiahdom, according to most Jews, but others were happy to separate church and state, theology and tribe, mind and body, which contributed to Christianity’s rapid success. Through its simplified, universalized and more etherial Judaism, a Christian could commune with converts from other tribes, transcend physicality, and enjoy romantic devotion to a more personal God, a spiritual hero who solved the secret of death, heavenly justice and earthly selflessness. Gilgamesh rejected Goddess Ishtar and her sensual polytheism, and hiked to the end of the earth to study with a male mystic, while Jews focused on terrestrial actions and ethics without mentioning heaven much. Christ celebrated celestial life, which could be made eternal through abstract language's ability to conceptualize infinity, the natural syncretism of an all-knowing Lord with Eastern concepts of karma and transactional reward for eschewing sin.
“The Gospels” are four different biographies of a powerful hero-martyr, written by Jesus's disciples Mark, Matthew, Luke and John (or their disciples), between 70 and 100 CE—the mere fact of four precluding divine dictation. “The New Testament” has 26 books in all, over half (14) attributed to Paul, although he never met Jesus and probably penned only half (7). Originally known as Saul of Tarsus (5-65 CE), Paul was a Turkish tentmaker and Pharisee Jew, who opposed Christianity until his mystical epiphany on the road to Damascus. Deciding that Christ's martyrdom obviated Jewish laws, including many practiced by Christ himself, he abolished circumcision, the strict "kosher" dietary codes and other rituals, invented much of Christianity, and sought a more intellectual redemption through forgiveness, faith and grace.
Christ is highly esteemed by Muslims, albeit not as a deity, with over a hundred by-name mentions in "The Quran", exceeded only by the founder of monotheism, Moses, with 136. Muhammad's syncretizing and synopsizing connected those two heroes, in fact, by turning Moses’s sister, Miriam, into Jesus’s mother, Mary (related names). Muhammad often closely abided the ancient Jewish narratives, including having Abraham's first son, Ismail (eventual father of the Arabs and Muslims), be born from Hagar, an Egyptian princess, according to "The Hadith", or the servant of Abraham's wife, Sarah, according to "Genesis". Both traditions agree that Sarah was initially infertile, but God said Abraham would father a large nation, a claim she had to take on faith, given God appeared only to Abraham, so she supported his polygamy. While that's an interesting imbroglio to plant at the root of two tribal trees, Sarah did eventually bear him a son, Isaac, who becomes the Jewish patriarch. Islam, for its part, has Abraham and Ismail as well as Hagar (who is unnamed in "The Quran") travel to Mecca and build and carve their holiest of holies, the Ka’aba Building and Stone (later defaced by polytheists with a yoni). While Abraham briefly abandons the family (another odd plot twist), Hagar saves it by finding a well with good water (with help from Angel Gabriel), an event highlighting matriarchal power which was incorporated into the Hajj pilgrimage's rituals. Judaism long preceded Christianity and Islam, as everyone in seventh century Arabia as well as first century Jerusalem knew, making it entirely logical that the new monotheists drew on it deeply but also claimed it was antique, that the Jews disobeyed God, had to be eliminated, etc.
Muhammad and Muslim warriors at the Battle of Uhud, fighting the Meccans led by HInd's husband, Abu Sufyan, painted in 1595. illo: courtesy Wikipedia“The Quran” was also a biography recorded by disciples, since Muhammad didn’t write—although he emphasized the importance of literacy to monotheism—but his personality suffuses the text, essentially making it an autobiography. As we read its Surahs, arranged from longest to shortest (suggesting a post-modern disregard for chronology, perhaps to bury controversial Surahs at the end), we can hear Muhammad's distinctive voice: dictating to a scribe, preaching in front of the Ka’aba, explaining to his neighbors, especially the Jews and Christians, and sometimes pleading, to get them to join monotheist civilization as well as his new monotheism and enjoy a more functional society.
The Romans became massively multicultural after conquering the Greeks, whose culture they appropriated wholesale, while also borrowing from other tribes and civilizations. Such assimilation was impossible with the Jews, since Roman emperors liked to be worshipped as gods, an abomination for monotheists. The Hellenizing Jews respected Greek and Roman amenities, from the roads and aqueducts to theater, science and Olympics (in which Jews competed naked, tying up their penis skin to look uncircumcised), but the two communities argued polytheism-monotheist dialectics and libeled each other. Around 168 BCE, the Syrian-Greek King Antiochus IV fought with rebellious Jews and outlawed Judaism, while the Jewish Maccabees won some battles and kept a sacred lamp burning for eight days, a modest miracle which generated the Hanukkah holiday. Differences escalated even further after the Romans crucified Christ, Caligula installed his statue inside the Jerusalem Temple, and subsequent emperors destroyed Judah outright. Using their standard tactic of extreme violence, the Romans repressed with extreme prejudice three Jewish rebellions, between 66 and 136 CE, an inevitability given Jewish monotheism compelled them to stand for freedom of religion, speech and ritual—proto-liberal democrats, in other words.
After Rome killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, a lot of survivors fled (the Diaspora), while a majority remained in or around Jerusalem. Those wandering Jews (mostly young men) were often respected, since monotheism solved so many polytheist problems, and they frequently married into ruling families and/or built philo-Judaic communities as far afield as Nigeria, Samarkand and Bangladesh, traces of which remain today. Mostly, they spread out across the Roman Empire, which allowed Judaism, in keeping with their openminded polytheism, and joined their more persecuted cousins, the Christians. While the latter preached aggressively, often in secret, the Jews discussed theology, and both scribed thousands of copies of their respective books and built dozens of synagogues and churches. Turning from prophecy to commentary, the Jews produced “The Talmud” (200-500 CE), which analyzed “The Torah”, and “The Zohar”, which dissected “The Kabbalah”. Moses de Leon of Spain liked to insist he copied "The Zohar” from an ancient, Israeli text, but he did so to boost book sales, and it was written about 1275 CE (as his wife later admitted).
In this way, the Christians and, to a lesser degree, the Jews converted much of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe, as far as Spain, using the spirit not the sword, greatly assisted by the fact those populations were accustomed to classical civilization and monotheism was the next logical step. Despite the Romans' bellicosity and militarism, they themselves gradually converted to Christianity until Emperor Theodosius I (of Spain) made it the state religion, in 380 CE. Three hundred years later, however, when warrior preachers accompanied Islamic armies into Central Asia and North Africa, or their Christian counterparts entered northern Europe, tribal people like the Berbers, Turks, Celts, Goths and Scandinavians were traumatized by religious compulsion. As one Goth complained after converting, “I hear my father crying out from the grave.”
Medicine was both a science and easily portable profession studied by Jews since antiquity: here a 15th century German Jewish physician, with distinctive headgear, examines a patient. illo: unknown Why Christians and Muslims Began Abusing Jews
As civilization developed, Jews used their book learning and intellectual training to evolve from their traditional labor as shepherds, farmers, merchants and rabbis into doctors, diplomats, moneylenders and international traders. These professions were central to civilization but also easy to blame if health, politics or finances went bad. Despite the scriptural mandate to be righteous, assist strangers and respect fathers, authorities decided to demote the Jews to third class status, even though many Christians and Muslims maintained friendships, partnerships and marriages (as indicated by how Jews look similar to non-Jews from the same region, as well as DNA tests). There was much cooperation among elites, which is well documented from Morocco to India and exemplified in Baghdad, where the Jews were taken by Nebuchadnezzar but many eventually settled. Indeed, they built both the city and an alternative Jewish center, replete with its own "Babylonian Talmud", famous for recommending men marrying around 15 to channel their sexuality. Through Baghdad's Muslim conquest, Mongol annihilation and Ottoman resurrection, Jews lived peacefully beside their neighbors, working in the diamond, spice or other commodity trades, until the 19th century when they started newspapers, railroads and other modern businesses. In fact, Baghdad had the world’s largest urban Jewish population (90,000), outside of Europe or New York City, until they were expelled in 1948.
The front stage rationale for repressing Jews was simple: If they can be pressured into accepting Christianity or Islam that would prove the superiority of those religions, the compulsion not withstanding. Just as the Jews were “chosen” as the first monotheists (aside from the Atenists), subsequent monotheists wanted to believe themselves chosen and ecumenically entitled. Backstage and subconsciously, however, many Christians and Muslims were angry, confused and desperate for psychological and political relief. Both afflictions could be cured, it so happens, by fashioning a blameworthy villain and applying the standard psychology of scapegoating, which is better defined in the modern era as "conspiracism." Given that the Jews were the oldest people to travel and settle the world (in the second century CE, while the Roma arrived 900 years later) as well as the original practitioners of the monotheism now followed by just over half the globe, Jews were known to many peoples for a long time, making them ideal scapegoats.
Although most Muslims, Christians and Jews agree they share one God, that thesis has only been fully practiced once before the modern era, during Granada Spain's 'La Convivencia,' meaning coexistence, from late 700 to 1492. illo: unknownFreud dissected the mechanics of scapegoating in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1928): “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, as long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness… In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews of the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows… Once the Apostle Paul had posited universal love between men as the foundation of his Christian community, extreme intolerance on the part of Christendom towards those who remained outside it became the inevitable consequence.” Similarly, once the Goths converted to Christianity, their tribal law essentially made all Christians fellow tribalists, leaving only the Jews, Gypsies (or Roma) and witches blameworthy. In fact, “the dream of a Germanic world-dominion called for antisemitism as its compliment,” Freud wrote before Nazism was a decade old, adding presciently about the other major totalitarianism, “[T]he attempt to establish a new, communist civilization [finds] its psychological support [scapegoat] in the persecution of the bourgeois. One only wonders, with concern, what the Soviets will do after they have wiped out their bourgeois.”
In fact, Freud couldn't even begin to imagine how "the Jewish people... rendered most useful services to the civilizations," given that both Muslim and Christian kingdoms would invite the Jews in, when they needed to increase trade, banking, medicine or learning, and then do an about face, when times turned tough, and sacrifice them to the mobs.
Freud did nail scapegoat psychology, based on his renown “narcissism of minor differences,” which drives neighbors to fight over small issues to release natural aggression, but there are bigger problems, in my opinion. The failures of families, tribes, cities, nations and civilizations, although compounded by the vagaries of war, weather, pestilence and economics, are almost always due to the stupid, corrupt or repressive behavior of leaders, mostly men. Since those corrupt and failed leaders are peoples’ fathers (or mothers, albeit rarely,), public review of their faults is hard in patriarchies, which require fatherly respect and where criticism can offend community members as well as authorities. This primordial tension between respecting ancestors and studying and correcting their errors can be alleviated through honesty, courage and bold action, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and helpful discussion, or its opposite: cowardice, denial and anti-intellectualism. People who revere dysfunctional forbears are traumatized doubly. Not only do they suffer personal abuse and societal collapse, in multicultural societies, where tribes mix based mutual advantage, they witness their neighbors and others of similar social strata enjoying patriarchal affection and support, a psychological poison exacerbated by travel and media, especially social media. To expatiate such severe sorrow, they must transfer their anger to a fictional or symbolic threat, what Freud called scapegoating but is better defined in the modern era as conspiracism, or manipulating conspiracy theories, the obsessive following or Machiavellian managing of strategic rumor mongering, largely driven by a mental disorder I'm calling "repressed father hatred syndrome."
Mediaeval Jewish moneylenders, often caricatured grotesquely, provided civilization two essential services, small loan banking and perfect scapegoats. illo: unknown, circa 16th century Although this ancient proclivity to transfer blame has long been exploited by the greedy, tyrannical or psychopathic, it was exacerbated to an extreme by flaws in the Christian and Muslim civilizations. In addition to the problem Freud points out—Paul’s universal love inevitably needing an “other” to hate —another ethical error emerged when Christian and Muslim authorities prohibited lending at interest, a fiscal policy they “borrowed” from “The Old Testament”, where it is forbidden 18 times. The thing was: the ancient Hebrews could maintain an economy without interest because they operated as a tribe, where "interest" was repaid through labor, marriage and other gifts, but outlawing lending at interest would severely limit a multi-nation civilization. Think about it: who would lend a non-tribal member a hundred sheep, say, on the promise of reimbursement five years later with the exact same-sized herd? Lending is the central fiduciary instrument of civilization, in fact, after money itself, and dates back to Sumer. Reason being: it encourages people to do business outside their tribe; it redistributes accumulated resources through fair recompense instead of violent seizure; it accelerates economic recovery after an environmental or social disaster; and it finances startups and inventions. The common complaint against it— that excessive or “usurious” interest is enslaving, "debt slavery"—is often true and tragic, but there were mitigating traditions of basic humanism and generosity, like leaving some food unharvested for gleaners, debt forgiveness during “jubilee" years, or competition between lenders offering lower interest rates, which is improved by decreased restriction, not more regulation.
To replace the indispensable growth mechanism of financing, many Muslims turned loans into investments, with recompense dependent on outcome. The Christians, for their part, invented a “tax loophole with God” after the turn of the first millennium. Theologians began to worry that Christ cancelled his “second coming” due to the Church's extensive lending at interest, which condemned them to eternal damnation. Since the Jews were going to hell anyway, they reasoned, they could provide poor Christians retail moneylending, while the princes and bishops would be the wholesale bankers, lending to and extracting "their pound of flesh" from the Jews (see my article on about it ).
The cover drawing of Reverend James Parkes's groundbreaking 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' (1938) shows Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. illo: courtesy J. ParkesMuslims, Christians and Jews debated publicly during the Middle Ages, the latter sometimes under pain of death, but the main topic was usury. Due to Christian and Muslim hypocrisy about interest, religious compulsion and other issues, despite holding a similar theology, many Christians and Muslims were challenged by their encounter with Judaism, which their faiths claimed to have surpassed. This generated a death wish, much as spoiled children hope their parents would disappear. Despite believing in the same Lord and universal justice, Christian and Muslim authorities attempted to relieve their social problems and inferiority complexes by blaming and punishing Jews. They instituted restrictions and humiliations, from the obligation to wear identifying insignias, hats or clothing to exclusion from professions, commerce, certain activities or the community outright, which almost inevitably leads, eventually, to mass murder. When times turn tough, to prove the validity of what had started as a psychological trick, a symbolic scapegoating, the aggressor is obliged to produce a real victim. You don’t need to be a scholar on monotheism to realize that murdering Jews because their version of monotheism is older abrogates the ethics of Christ and Muhammad. That, in turn, increased Christian and Muslim guilt, the need to repress it, and anger with their fathers, hence, the proliferation of repressed father hatred syndrome (RFHS).
While the Muslims did enact the occasional Jewish massacre, or “farhuds” as they are called, over their first millennia and a half, until the end of World War Two in 1945, Christians committed almost 99% of all antisemitic atrocities. They started in 1096 with the First Crusade, intended to “bring the light of Christ to the world,” which massacred the large Jewish communities along the Rhine River, and culminated with the grotesque capture of Jerusalem, three years later. Unlike the city’s fair surrender to the Muslim Caliph Umar 450 years earlier, the Crusaders butchered Jewish and Muslim residents, until the streets ran ankle deep with blood. Until the First Crusade, however, the Dark Ages had been a time of light for Jews, living peacefully across southern and middle Europe, doing the same work as their neighbors and often respected members of multi-faith communities. Fourth century Cologne, Germany, for example, had a central square surrounded by temples for Roman and Gothic deities as well as a church and a synagogue. As the Church accrued a spiritual monopoly as well as financial as well as "spiritual" power, they felt it advantageous to force the Jews into moneylending, ghettos and the wearing of insignias, which soon led to horror.
The mass psychosis of mob-driven antisemitism first appeared as a “blood libel” in Norwich, England, in 1144 CE, after a 12-year-old boy was discovered dead. Although there was nothing linking his death to Jews, a monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who investigated it four years later, insisted there was. English nobility was following the standard method of inviting Jews in to encourage trade, lending and theological thinking but, if need be, throwing them to the dogs, often with the connivance of the clergy. After killing and expelling their Jews, England was officially Jew-free from 1290 to 1656, although both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about them in that period. Accusations of blood libels spread like wildfire across Europe, as is possible with intensely stimulating, verbally-transferred fantasies. According to the Christian rumormongers, rabbis used Christian children’s blood to make Passover matzo, the sacred unleavened bread they use on Passover to honor liberation from slavery, even though matzo is obviously white, and blood red. Fifty years later, in 1190, about 150 Jews were murdered in York, England, after seeking refuge in a royal tower, to which they fled because they were supposed to be under the auspices of the king. That first mass murder of Jews in England did shock the society of the day. Nevertheless, despite their immense achievements, from maintaining the earth’s oldest democracy to helping defeat the Nazis, a malevolent strain of antisemitism remains in the national psyche, periodically emerging among Britain’s hard right and left and new-age conspiracy theorists and now Muslim immigrants.
King Edward I (on left) expelling English Jews in 1290, due to a conspiracy theory claiming they used children's blood to make Passover matzo. illo: unknownAntisemitic murder expanded during Black Plague (1346-53), which was blamed on the Jews, because they had lower death rates from kosher cleanliness and medical practices (not witchcraft, as claimed). Then came the Inquisition, which started in 12th century Italy and France but reached an apogee in 16th century Spain, when perhaps 300,000 Jews were killed, some burnt at the stake. Although the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 17th century Ukraine killed tens of thousands of Jews, and was long considered the root of the Holocaust, it was more a political uprising against the Polish aristocracy, for whom the Jews often worked as tavern owners, who are always also money lenders. A religious-based slaughter came two centuries later to Ukraine and Russia, where we get the word “pogrom,” although it involved few victims until 1920, when 100,000 Jews were murdered and 1,000 communities annihilated. Unfortunately, that was two years after the unprecedented death orgy of World War One, when some 20 million died, and during the chaos of the Russian Civil War, when the Red, White, Black and Green Armies (communist, tsarist, anarchist and peasant, respectively) fought brutally and killed nine million.
As if that were not enough of Freud's death drive, or “thanatos,” 21 years after the First World War, the Nazis launched yet another, condemning over 60 million souls to the grave, including the industrial slaughter of almost six million Jews. It came to be called the Holocaust, from “holokaustos,” Greek for “burnt offering,” due to its train-gas chamber-crematorium assembly line but more importantly its symbolic nature. Even though Jews were part of German society for a millennium and many Germans were happy to have them—indeed, “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck recommended them as wives, diplomats and business partners—they served as the Nazis as perfect scapegoats, symbols of wrongdoing, much as Freud predicted. Already blamed by various sectors of society, they became the perfect protagonists in the Nazis’ favorite conspiracy theories, “The Stab in the Back” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (the Jews supposedly secretly orchestrated Germany’s WWI surrender and control the banks, respectively). There was second, even more important reason: the Jews represented both freedom of religion and liberal democracy—the same reasoning as Rome’s war with the Jews—as well elevated ethics and patriarchal affection—not only did their fathers love them but also the symbolic great father of monotheism. The Nazis knew they had to obliterate such a moral structure to build their survival-of-the-fittest and totalitarian society.
Antisemitic annihilationism tainted not just the Nazis but the Germans who acquiesced, the Europeans who collaborated, and the societies which denied Jews the refuge that was practiced almost almost universally, throughout history. Given only the city-state of Shanghai accepted visa-less Jews (and only about 20,000 made the long, expensive journey), the nations of world can be said to have joined to form the last ring of barbed-wire and guard towers in the Nazi universe of concentration and death camps and killing fields.
The German matriarch and intellectual, Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), was born in a ghetto but became the first host of the many European literary salons in the 19th century run by Jewesses and beloved by gentiles. illo: unknownAs if mass murdering Jews was not enough sin for European Christians, from the 12th century to the Enlightenment, Jews were often confined to ghettos, which were closed to varying degrees, from locked after curfew to 24/7 imprisonment, sometimes for centuries. Although Jews could convert to Christianity, making mediaeval Christianity enlightened compared to Nazism, forcing the Jews into ghettos generated generations who had never seen a tree, save those painted on synagogues walls. In fact, often only two types of people were allowed to leave the ghetto: rag collectors and moneylenders. The latter were essentially fiduciary serfs, who could be loaned, rented, sold or “harvested” (for hidden gold), while the “Right of First Night” entitled the lords to rape Jewesses on their wedding night.
Jews finally rejoined monotheist civilization in the West around 1800, and in the Middle East, about a half a century later, after the Enlightenment was brought to much of Europe, at the point of a sword. Emancipation began with the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man”, which included the Jews, but was instituted by Napoleon, through his conquests (1798-1814), although those laws were often rescinded. Not surprisingly, Europe's religious antisemitism transformed almost immediately into its political cousin, where Jews were accused of being communists or capitalists, ill-mannered or overeducated, foreign immigrants or too assimilated. France itself dissolved into paroxysms of antisemitic psychosis 80 years later, when mobs chanting “Death to the Jews” marched the streets of Paris during the Dreyfus Affair, which involved a Jewish army officer by that name accused of spying for Germany (he was later acquitted).
The standard antisemitic trope was that Jews were crafty, controlling or outright evil, even though many Europeans found they were suitable spouses, writers, musicians, chemists, political theorists, entrepreneurs and professionals. Indeed, the respect of so many gentiles helped Jews join society with surprising speed, although their enthusiasm was largely due to abuse and their abilities honed over millennia of monotheism. The latter fostered literacy, education and even scientific investigation (mostly medical, until the 19th century) as well as optimism, love (familial, romantic and humanist) and devotion to justice. Inspired by the archetype of Moses bringing the law down from Mount Sinai, many Jews became lawyers. While some were shysters, many fought bravely for human rights. Indeed, the ancient Jewish project of relief from bondage, suffering and poverty continued, applied to themselves but also all humans, as suggested by monotheism. In fact, many Jews becoming involved in progressive politics, from liberal democrat to communist, and philanthropies, especially building hospitals and schools, where the Jewish ones often equalled gentile institutions, despite being a tiny percent of society. One of Martin Luther King's closest confidants and allies was Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and became a professor of mysticism in the rabbinical school next door to Columbia University. Others devoted themselves to writing, music, other arts and or the general promotion of culture and civilization through publishing, museums and theaters.
The Jews were released from European ghettos in time for the 19th century’s explosion of democracy, capitalism and science. They had the energy, intelligence and desperation for freedom but also cash, due to the moneylending, which nurtured a few rich families, notably the Rothschilds. While their forbears served as smalltime lenders or “tax farmers” (who paid a region’s tax bill up front and were provided soldiers to collect it, an antisemitism manufacturing machine), over the centuries they could study the profession and market. Hence, they became adept bankers, international merchants and industrial magnates including suppliers of war materiel, which was critical to Europeans for prosecuting their many wars. It was only through complex lending, international connections and detailed planning, they could get the weapons, ammunition, horses and food needed.
The vast majority of Jews, however, were impoverished. My grandfather, Mendel Rotkopf, was a loom operator working in the new, industrialized and multicultural (Polish, German and Russian) city of Lodz, Poland, but he lived in one room with his family of five, without running water or electricity. Indeed, Jews had to study, work and hustle extremely hard to reenter the civilization they helped invent and finance, regardless of the Holocaust.
Although Karl Marx (lft) was raised Christian, Freud (center) was an atheist, and Einstein (rt) a mystical Jew, they are considered the three Jews who made the modern West. illo: D. BlairNevertheless, within a century, Jews just out of the ghetto developed dozens of new enterprises and fields, from lumber yards and department stores to medical professions and film making, which enriched a few but benefited millions, both in Europe and the Americas as well as the Middle East and Islam. Indeed, their inventions and achievements were historically unprecedented, notably in political, psychological and scientific fields, especially the communism of Marx (who was of Jewish descent but became antisemitic), Freud’s psychoanalysis (he was an atheist tribal Jew) and the physics of Einstein (a mystical modernist of Jewish descent), as well as the work of writers, artists and philanthropists.
In fact, Jews were instrumental in establishing of the modern, liberal and democratic societies, despite representing as little as ten percent of a nation’s population, as in Poland, or less than one percent, as in Germany, which was saved during World War One by two Jews. The Allies were going to try Fritz Haber, inventor of nitrogen fabrication, as a war criminal, because his process allowed Germany to keep making explosives, but he received the 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry instead, because nitrogen is needed for fertilizers and he helped feed billions. Walter Rathenau was so revered for reengineering Germany’s wartime military supply chain, he was elected prime minister, although he served only five months in 1922 until his assassination (one assassin apologized to his mother).
All civilizations are like monotheisms, insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize this obvious fact. They were mistaken. Many Muslims and Christians rejected the inherent equality and tolerance of monotheism, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, a pattern of prejudice continued among communists and fascists. Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who roleplay Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in my “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
A founder of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-'97), was probably a Persian Shi'a but preferred to be known as a Sunni Afghan, hence his name. illo: unknownSalafists Try to Make Islam Great Again
The Wahhabis were resisted from their mid-18th century beginning by liberal Muslims, first the preachers in Wahhab’s own family, then those in Mecca. Indeed, Islam’s most sacred city was famous for tolerance and creativity pre-Islam and that tradition continued, especially when it welcomes millions of visitors during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it), and Muslims from all over the world came to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled, or be entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During Wahhab's Hajj, with his devotees, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on ‘Hadith’, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural, scholarly center and port of Alexandria. The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and later full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the army (important for men to prove their capacity and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI).
Meanwhile, “The Nahda,” meaning Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. One of the best-known was the activist and scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), who travelled throughout Europe as well as the Middle East, Persia and India teaching, publishing and sometimes plotting, including assassinations. His most famous disciple, Muḥammad Abduh (1849-1905), became Egypt’s Grand Mufti (religious head) and famously liberal. Indeed, he allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “The Quran”’s “No compulsion” line, amplified women’s rights, and inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. In fact, many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Hence, the poor and disenfranchised were forced toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist innovations from India and elsewhere.
Unlike the Protestants, who evolved from Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats in three centuries, the Salafists believed modernity could be stopped by increased fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even though they reinterpreted “The Quran” and added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood was started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, to restore a caliphate after the Ottoman one was abolished in 1924. Although it adopted a few theories from Abduh, it borrowed mostly from European Fascists, already in control of Italy, and the Nazis, using brown uniforms, mass rallies and extreme antisemitism to became Salafism’s preeminent sect. Indeed, Hamas is an offshoot; Qatar is a Brotherhood state; Erdogan’s Turkey is Brotherhood-inspired; and the original Egyptian group tried to co-opt the Arab Spring in 2011 but then destroyed it. As the Brotherhood was beginning, the Wahhabis finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, even though that, too, is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 04:30 PM
by Doniphan Blair
Michelangelo’s muscular 'Moses'. photo: unknownGo to My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
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ALTHOUGH ISLAM'S POLITICO-RELIGIOUS
hybrid made its achievements automatic gifts from God, by the same token, its defeats and decadence had to be blamed on sin. Monotheism became so popular so quickly because it solved so many polytheist problems, but not the central human concern of “Why bad things happen to good people?”, which pagans easily explain via polytheism’s central conceit: “You’re praying to the wrong god.” A similar theological crisis challenged Judaism in the 6th century BCE, after the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple and the city of Jerusalem, and kidnapped half its inhabitants to exile in Babylon. Although the temple was soon rebuilt, with Persian help, the rabbis still had to answer for abandonment by God. Blaming increasingly subtle sin, like “coveting thy neighbor’s wife in thy heart,” the Jewish intellectuals invented “guilt,” a more internal and sophisticated style of social control than the emotional peer pressure of tribal shame, shunning and excommunication.
Rejecting such hyperbolic self-criticism, however, an unknown rabbi wrote and many rabbis approved of “The Book of Job”, arguably “The Bible”’s most advanced theological postulate, which is unlike the other biblical books and thought to come a polytheist story. Probably written in the 5th century BCE, shortly after the Jews' liberation from Babylonian captivity, “The Book of Job” became central to the new ideas of the Pharisee sect (515 BCE-70 CE). Using big characters reminiscent of “The Parable of Adam and Eve”, God bets the Devil that his devout follower, Job, is so righteous, he won’t renounce God, even if his good fortune ends. After losing his health, possessions, flocks and family—everyone except his wife (who, unlike the supportive Khadija, recommends he admit error)—Job defies the three wise men and their insistence he sinned, and addresses God directly. In the heat of their argument, God asks him, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4), which inspires his epiphany: The universe is too old, large and complex to be fully understood. Indeed, the path toward good—which can be defined as “greater benefit, for more people, over longer periods” (“Evil is short term benefit for the few”)—inevitably includes struggle, pain and, on occasion, grotesque tragedy.
I dealt with Job's conundrum once in a discussion with my mother (by phone in the 1990s). “If it wasn’t for the Holocaust, you probably would have stayed in Poland and not come to America,” I told her, “Then you wouldn't have met my father, which means I wouldn’t exist.” “That’s not true,” she said, after a long pause, "You would have been your father’s son.” “But how could that be without you as my mother?” “You would have been your father’s son with another woman,” she concluded, which surely would have pleased Khadija, given my mother was ceding the traditional female power of birth to a good man, a righteous patriarch.
Muhammad drew on Jewish and Christian stories but added some from his own experience, his tribe’s lore or Mecca’s many polytheisms. Hence, “The Quran” has the single-sentence revelation, “God speaks in parables to mankind” (Surah 24:37), which contradicts literalism, if taken literally. Of course, the Christians syncretized older polytheist themes, like gods mating with humans, and the Jews incorporated Egyptian theology and Babylonian myths, like "The Flood" or "Tower of Babel". Indeed, the Israelite authors exploited every known literary device, from poetic flights of fancy to omniscient instruction or proto-modern texts, like the agnostic, vanity-busting “Ecclesiastes” or “The Songs of Solomon”, eight romantic, matriarchal poems plopped in the middle of a patriarchal text. Nevertheless, it’s mostly a long novel starring the Jews. The origin of the universe and humanity and their first heroes are all in the first book, “Genesis”, while the next four, starting with “Exodus”, concern their physical and mental liberation from slavery and idolatry led by Moses. Traditionally considered the Hebrew’s greatest prophet and author of “The Torah” (the first five books of "The Bible"), Moses was probably Egyptian and a Pharaoh’s son. (This possibility is important to highlight, I feel, to offset the Pharaohs as the Biblical epitome of evil, given they did develop an incredible culture, replete with the unexplained pyramids, to share the legacy of Moses and monotheism with modern Egyptians.)
There’s no archeological proof that Moses existed but, if he didn’t, why did the Hebrew writers give him an Egyptian name, have him speak through his brother Aaron (suggesting he wasn't fluent in Hebrew) and marry a woman from the Kenite tribe, mythical descendants of Cain? Moreover, foundling stories, like the Pharaoh’s daughter “finding” the infant Moses floating in a basket on the Nile, were a common literary trope for tribe switching (Sargon uses it for his own history, probably because he wasn't from the city of Akkad, probably located under modern Baghdad). In fact, all societies are somewhat or largely multicultural (regardless of purity claims), which obliges storytellers to invent believable biographies of immigrant heroes that transform them into blood kin.
Indeed, Moses was undoubtedly Egyptian and an acolyte of the sun god, Aten, as Freud details in his last book, “Moses and Monotheism”, written in 1938, after he was allowed to flee to England from Vienna. (The Nazis reviled Freud's theories of guilt, conscience and sex but feared he was too famous to kill, at that time, although they soon sent many of his relatives to death camps). History’s first recorded monotheism, Atenism, was probably developed over a few generations by elite priests, but it was instituted by Pharaoh Akhenaton around 1350 BCE, with support from his beautiful wife, Nefertiti, and his military, who installed it by force. Alas, that enraged Egyptian aristocrats, who lost the status and incomes often derived from polytheist temples. After Akhenaton's death and 17-year reign, they destroyed all of his statues, shrines to Aten and the sacred capital city, Amarna.
Rome's Arch of Titus has a carving of soldiers bringing home Jewish booty, the Second Temple's massive menorah, circa 70 CE. photo: unknownMoses was probably an elite, upper class Atenist, if not pharaoh's son, until he witnessed a Jewish slave being abused by an overseer, killed him and fled into hiding. His epiphany, that monotheistic unity meant universal equality and justice for all humans, triggered the monotheist revolution. Indeed, Moses (or someone like him) organized the liberation of the builders of Egypt's pyramids, still one of civilization's greatest achievements, which personified the eventual triumph of liberalism and was honored by the Jews, as their first and foremost holiday. An egalitarian ritual, Passover is performed priest-less in the home, recounting the ancient story over a meal with a democratic and relaxed vibe (participants are encouraged to recline). All adults can read a portion of the text, "The Haggadah", children Socraticly answer “The Four Questions", and freedom for all humans is referenced. Indeed, the Christians turned Passover into the Last Supper, suggesting a respite before the storm of betrayal and crucifixion, but Easter also freed all humans from sin, if not physical slavery, if they accepted the metaphor of Christ.
Whether Moses saw “god” or made “him” up, or someone else did, is immaterial to a post-modern textual analysis. For example, after meeting God on Mount Sinai, why did the authors of "The Bible" have Moses carve “The Ten Commandments” on stone tablets, only to smash them shortly thereafter? Or, if that actually happened, why not edit out that embarrassing affront to Moses's authority? Narratively, it serves to reveal his sorrow at seeing his (adopted) people revert to praying to the polytheist Golden Calf, despite his struggle to liberate them, mentally and physically. Meta-narratively, however, it highlights “no compulsion,” a theme often reiterated by the Jews, like when Moses’s (supposed) first cousin, Korach, led another revolt against him. Ethical evolution has to be voluntary and personal, the Jews realized, so they proselytized only through poetic descriptions, strong narratives about incredible events and characters, and reasoned arguments, at multiple levels of symbolism.
Eliminating idol worship also signified an attempt to transcend the material world and turn society toward spiritual values, responsible relationships and improved mental health. Many polytheisms had incredible insights and metaphysics but their overall cosmology was chaotic. One God, meanwhile, alleviated stress by ordering the universe and ordaining one day respite a week (the Egyptians had a day off every ten, while polytheists had monthly full moon and other festivals), the time for relaxation we moderns depend on, from breaks and afterwork recreation to two days off for the Sabbath! This increased attention to the intellect and spirit greatly benefited Hebrew culture, which proceeded to produce dozens of monotheist prophets, many of whom got their own chapters in "The Bible", thousands of moral rabbis, poets and regular people, and the founders of two new monotheisms, Christ and Muhammad.
Although the Jewish states of Israel and Judah were tiny, compared to their imperial neighbors, Jerusalem became literary center by 750 BCE. illo: courtesy MapPorn"No coercion" made sense religiously, but for a people to flourish on the Israeli isthmus—the continental crossroads Homo sapiens had been hiking across for millennia to get out of Africa—the Jews fashioned two tiny states. The first was the Kingdom of Israel, situated to Jerusalem’s north and lasting from 900 to 720 BCE, and then a smaller, poorer nation, including a lot of barren land, around the city itself. That was the Kingdom of Judah, which reigned from 850 to 586 BCE but then even longer, from 530 BCE to 70 CE, 864 years total. Judah gives us the words “Jew” and “Judaism” (as opposed to the older assignation, Hebrew, still their language name) after half the residents of Jerusalem were kidnapped to Babylon, in 586 BCE, where they were asked about their identity and faith. The larger Israel had more farmers, traders and soldiers, and started first, hence, provided their political name, until today. Abraham's grandson Jacob was renamed Israel after wrestling with God, suggesting they were the tougher tribe of the Hebrew speakers, while the Judeans were significantly more intellectual.
Although extremely early Jewish history has little archeological evidence and remains disputed, it was probably King Josiah who instituted major theological reforms and produced "The Bible". (I started researching this when my mother began asking, repeatedly, "Who wrote 'The Bible'?" around when she turned 90, an interesting question for a secular humanist Jew approaching death.) Josiah was installed as a child regent in 648 BCE but ruled rather maturely for 39 years, gradually eliminating, with the occasional use of military force, the shrines and stories of the other gods, while talking up new ideas and enlisting rabbis and scribes to compile, edit and publish “The Torah", "The Bible"'s first five books. Those texts established the origin of the universe created by the one Lord and the adventures of the first mythical beings and Jews: from the first family of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel to the first Jews, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In addition, the writers chronicled Josiah’s doings in “Chronicles” and “Kings”, which became two of the 39 "books" (chapters) of "The Old Testament", the earth's second bestselling book after "The New Testament". King Josiah on, Jerusalem has been a religious, scholarly and publishing powerhouse known worldwide and the Earth's only Jewish metropolis, even as other groups arrived and sometimes became the majority, until Tel Aviv was founded in 1909.
So respected was Jerusalem, in fact, even though it was conquered three dozen times over three millennia, it never served as the capital of a single other nation or imperial district, and polytheists pilgrimaged there to petition its powerful god. That was why the liberal Persian king, Cyrus the Great, helped rebuild the Temple in the sixth century BCE, and there were moneychangers, which Christ reviled (not moneylenders, as often assumed due to later stereotypes). Foreigners simply needed local currency to buy oil for prayers. Muhammad ascended to heaven from Jerusalem, to connect him to that tradition, making it Islam’s third holy city (after Mecca and Medina), but he only visited a couple of times and obviously didn’t compose that story. Jerusalem maintains a similarly elevated status today, replete with psychiatric institutions full of people of all faiths afflicted with “Jerusalem Syndrome” (AKA messianic psychosis), algebraically more mental cases than at any other sacred site.
Atenism, Judaism and the Late Bronze Age Collapse inspired another unified worldview, originally called "Babylonian science.” Although five millennia ago the Sumerians invented the math of time, based on Sun and Moon cycles and the corresponding numbers of 12, 60 and 360, and the Babylonians had a working understanding of the Solar System's first five planets by 1500 BCE, their oracles were still divining the future through the color of a sheep's liver. "Why look to an animal's viscera," an entrepreneurial prognosticator must have asked a king of that day at one point, “When your destiny is in the stars?” Shortly thereafter, a new tribe of seers was furnishing Babylon's royal family with a fecund farrago of soothsaying and stories infused with cutting-edge astronomy and an almost-agnostic, non-denominational monotheism eventually known as "astrology."
Of the Zodiac's many stories, one of the most insightful is about the sign of Scorpio, which starts around the universal day of the dead (late October) and chronicles the soul's journey through death to redemption and resurrection, foreshadowing Christ. illo: D. Blair, 2013Forty-eight years after Nebuchadnezzar ransacked Judah in 586 BCE, the Jews resurrected and ran ‘til 70 CE, not a bad reign for such a small state. Alas, Judaism was ripe for reinterpretation by then, in keeping with monotheism’s half-millennium update cycles as well as accelerated by the brutal Roman conquest in 63 BCE, which aggravated animosity between the Jews' two biggest sects, the Pharisees and Sadducees. The former were mystical populists, who integrated fate and free will and followed the great prophets who reformed Judaism post-Babylonian captivity. They opposed both the rational Hellenizers, enthusiastic fans of Greek culture (after Alexander the Great’s more benevolent conquest in 332 BCE), and the priestly, scholarly, establishment Sadducees. The latter rejected predestination as well as the new prophets, abiding only the five books of "The Torah". By the first century CE, however, there was a plethora of prophets with radical new notions and fanatical followers, notably Jesus and his ilk, like John the Baptist and the Essenes, but also the Zealots, who terrorized Jerusalem, killing and looting (often disguised as women), and the assassins of the cult of Sicariis, which prefigured the Hashashin (though they fled after attacks) and still means “hit man” in Spanish.
Although Jesus was a peaceful hippie type and rabbi, embodying Judaism’s highest ideals, he was also a maverick mystic in the prophetic Hebrew mode, aggressively critiquing the religion and society of his day. His pacifism contradicted David, in fact, the Jews' most exalted prophet after Moses, who came up a romantic shepherd and musician but transformed himself into a giant killer and righteous king, mimicking the story of monotheism. Given David supposedly co-authored “The Psalms”, still an apex of Western wisdom literature—"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23)—he exemplified the marriage of sword, spirit and word, the blending of matriarchal and patriarchal powers that came to be considered mandatory for messiahs. David was probably just a local chieftain—not the second king of the mythical unified Israel-Judah state—but his existence was verified by a stone inscribed with “The House of David" unearthed in the 1990s by archeologists at Tel Dan, Israel. As with Moses, if David didn't exist, it is perplexing why Jewish storytellers made up so much dirt on him, like when he ordered into battle the husband of the beauty Bathsheba to seduce her. Either way, someone fairly smart and skillful must have established Jerusalem, around the ninth century BCE, and someone's son or grandson, perhaps named Solomon, did build a substantial temple there, regardless of embellishments two centuries later by King Josiah’s writers.
Christ, seen here with correct skin tone in an Eastern Orthodox icon, is well-known worldwide to be Jewish. illo: unknown“The Gospels” are four different biographies of a powerful hero-martyr, written by Jesus's disciples Mark, Matthew, Luke and John (or their disciples), between 70 and 100 CE—the mere fact of four precluding divine dictation. “The New Testament” has 26 books in all, over half (14) attributed to Paul, although he never met Jesus and probably penned only half (7). Originally known as Saul of Tarsus (5-65 CE), Paul was a Turkish tentmaker and Pharisee Jew, who opposed Christianity until his mystical epiphany on the road to Damascus. Deciding that Christ's martyrdom obviated Jewish laws, including many practiced by Christ himself, he abolished circumcision, the strict "kosher" dietary codes and other rituals, invented much of Christianity, and sought a more intellectual redemption through forgiveness, faith and grace.
Christ is highly esteemed by Muslims, albeit not as a deity, with over a hundred by-name mentions in "The Quran", exceeded only by the founder of monotheism, Moses, with 136. Muhammad's syncretizing and synopsizing connected those two heroes, in fact, by turning Moses’s sister, Miriam, into Jesus’s mother, Mary (related names). Muhammad often closely abided the ancient Jewish narratives, including having Abraham's first son, Ismail (eventual father of the Arabs and Muslims), be born from Hagar, an Egyptian princess, according to "The Hadith", or the servant of Abraham's wife, Sarah, according to "Genesis". Both traditions agree that Sarah was initially infertile, but God said Abraham would father a large nation, a claim she had to take on faith, given God appeared only to Abraham, so she supported his polygamy. While that's an interesting imbroglio to plant at the root of two tribal trees, Sarah did eventually bear him a son, Isaac, who becomes the Jewish patriarch. Islam, for its part, has Abraham and Ismail as well as Hagar (who is unnamed in "The Quran") travel to Mecca and build and carve their holiest of holies, the Ka’aba Building and Stone (later defaced by polytheists with a yoni). While Abraham briefly abandons the family (another odd plot twist), Hagar saves it by finding a well with good water (with help from Angel Gabriel), an event highlighting matriarchal power which was incorporated into the Hajj pilgrimage's rituals. Judaism long preceded Christianity and Islam, as everyone in seventh century Arabia as well as first century Jerusalem knew, making it entirely logical that the new monotheists drew on it deeply but also claimed it was antique, that the Jews disobeyed God, had to be eliminated, etc.
Muhammad and Muslim warriors at the Battle of Uhud, fighting the Meccans led by HInd's husband, Abu Sufyan, painted in 1595. illo: courtesy WikipediaThe Romans became massively multicultural after conquering the Greeks, whose culture they appropriated wholesale, while also borrowing from other tribes and civilizations. Such assimilation was impossible with the Jews, since Roman emperors liked to be worshipped as gods, an abomination for monotheists. The Hellenizing Jews respected Greek and Roman amenities, from the roads and aqueducts to theater, science and Olympics (in which Jews competed naked, tying up their penis skin to look uncircumcised), but the two communities argued polytheism-monotheist dialectics and libeled each other. Around 168 BCE, the Syrian-Greek King Antiochus IV fought with rebellious Jews and outlawed Judaism, while the Jewish Maccabees won some battles and kept a sacred lamp burning for eight days, a modest miracle which generated the Hanukkah holiday. Differences escalated even further after the Romans crucified Christ, Caligula installed his statue inside the Jerusalem Temple, and subsequent emperors destroyed Judah outright. Using their standard tactic of extreme violence, the Romans repressed with extreme prejudice three Jewish rebellions, between 66 and 136 CE, an inevitability given Jewish monotheism compelled them to stand for freedom of religion, speech and ritual—proto-liberal democrats, in other words.
After Rome killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, a lot of survivors fled (the Diaspora), while a majority remained in or around Jerusalem. Those wandering Jews (mostly young men) were often respected, since monotheism solved so many polytheist problems, and they frequently married into ruling families and/or built philo-Judaic communities as far afield as Nigeria, Samarkand and Bangladesh, traces of which remain today. Mostly, they spread out across the Roman Empire, which allowed Judaism, in keeping with their openminded polytheism, and joined their more persecuted cousins, the Christians. While the latter preached aggressively, often in secret, the Jews discussed theology, and both scribed thousands of copies of their respective books and built dozens of synagogues and churches. Turning from prophecy to commentary, the Jews produced “The Talmud” (200-500 CE), which analyzed “The Torah”, and “The Zohar”, which dissected “The Kabbalah”. Moses de Leon of Spain liked to insist he copied "The Zohar” from an ancient, Israeli text, but he did so to boost book sales, and it was written about 1275 CE (as his wife later admitted).
In this way, the Christians and, to a lesser degree, the Jews converted much of the Middle East, North Africa and southern Europe, as far as Spain, using the spirit not the sword, greatly assisted by the fact those populations were accustomed to classical civilization and monotheism was the next logical step. Despite the Romans' bellicosity and militarism, they themselves gradually converted to Christianity until Emperor Theodosius I (of Spain) made it the state religion, in 380 CE. Three hundred years later, however, when warrior preachers accompanied Islamic armies into Central Asia and North Africa, or their Christian counterparts entered northern Europe, tribal people like the Berbers, Turks, Celts, Goths and Scandinavians were traumatized by religious compulsion. As one Goth complained after converting, “I hear my father crying out from the grave.”
Medicine was both a science and easily portable profession studied by Jews since antiquity: here a 15th century German Jewish physician, with distinctive headgear, examines a patient. illo: unknownAs civilization developed, Jews used their book learning and intellectual training to evolve from their traditional labor as shepherds, farmers, merchants and rabbis into doctors, diplomats, moneylenders and international traders. These professions were central to civilization but also easy to blame if health, politics or finances went bad. Despite the scriptural mandate to be righteous, assist strangers and respect fathers, authorities decided to demote the Jews to third class status, even though many Christians and Muslims maintained friendships, partnerships and marriages (as indicated by how Jews look similar to non-Jews from the same region, as well as DNA tests). There was much cooperation among elites, which is well documented from Morocco to India and exemplified in Baghdad, where the Jews were taken by Nebuchadnezzar but many eventually settled. Indeed, they built both the city and an alternative Jewish center, replete with its own "Babylonian Talmud", famous for recommending men marrying around 15 to channel their sexuality. Through Baghdad's Muslim conquest, Mongol annihilation and Ottoman resurrection, Jews lived peacefully beside their neighbors, working in the diamond, spice or other commodity trades, until the 19th century when they started newspapers, railroads and other modern businesses. In fact, Baghdad had the world’s largest urban Jewish population (90,000), outside of Europe or New York City, until they were expelled in 1948.
The front stage rationale for repressing Jews was simple: If they can be pressured into accepting Christianity or Islam that would prove the superiority of those religions, the compulsion not withstanding. Just as the Jews were “chosen” as the first monotheists (aside from the Atenists), subsequent monotheists wanted to believe themselves chosen and ecumenically entitled. Backstage and subconsciously, however, many Christians and Muslims were angry, confused and desperate for psychological and political relief. Both afflictions could be cured, it so happens, by fashioning a blameworthy villain and applying the standard psychology of scapegoating, which is better defined in the modern era as "conspiracism." Given that the Jews were the oldest people to travel and settle the world (in the second century CE, while the Roma arrived 900 years later) as well as the original practitioners of the monotheism now followed by just over half the globe, Jews were known to many peoples for a long time, making them ideal scapegoats.
Although most Muslims, Christians and Jews agree they share one God, that thesis has only been fully practiced once before the modern era, during Granada Spain's 'La Convivencia,' meaning coexistence, from late 700 to 1492. illo: unknownIn fact, Freud couldn't even begin to imagine how "the Jewish people... rendered most useful services to the civilizations," given that both Muslim and Christian kingdoms would invite the Jews in, when they needed to increase trade, banking, medicine or learning, and then do an about face, when times turned tough, and sacrifice them to the mobs.
Freud did nail scapegoat psychology, based on his renown “narcissism of minor differences,” which drives neighbors to fight over small issues to release natural aggression, but there are bigger problems, in my opinion. The failures of families, tribes, cities, nations and civilizations, although compounded by the vagaries of war, weather, pestilence and economics, are almost always due to the stupid, corrupt or repressive behavior of leaders, mostly men. Since those corrupt and failed leaders are peoples’ fathers (or mothers, albeit rarely,), public review of their faults is hard in patriarchies, which require fatherly respect and where criticism can offend community members as well as authorities. This primordial tension between respecting ancestors and studying and correcting their errors can be alleviated through honesty, courage and bold action, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and helpful discussion, or its opposite: cowardice, denial and anti-intellectualism. People who revere dysfunctional forbears are traumatized doubly. Not only do they suffer personal abuse and societal collapse, in multicultural societies, where tribes mix based mutual advantage, they witness their neighbors and others of similar social strata enjoying patriarchal affection and support, a psychological poison exacerbated by travel and media, especially social media. To expatiate such severe sorrow, they must transfer their anger to a fictional or symbolic threat, what Freud called scapegoating but is better defined in the modern era as conspiracism, or manipulating conspiracy theories, the obsessive following or Machiavellian managing of strategic rumor mongering, largely driven by a mental disorder I'm calling "repressed father hatred syndrome."
Mediaeval Jewish moneylenders, often caricatured grotesquely, provided civilization two essential services, small loan banking and perfect scapegoats. illo: unknown, circa 16th century To replace the indispensable growth mechanism of financing, many Muslims turned loans into investments, with recompense dependent on outcome. The Christians, for their part, invented a “tax loophole with God” after the turn of the first millennium. Theologians began to worry that Christ cancelled his “second coming” due to the Church's extensive lending at interest, which condemned them to eternal damnation. Since the Jews were going to hell anyway, they reasoned, they could provide poor Christians retail moneylending, while the princes and bishops would be the wholesale bankers, lending to and extracting "their pound of flesh" from the Jews (see my article on about it ).
The cover drawing of Reverend James Parkes's groundbreaking 'The Jew in the Medieval Community' (1938) shows Christians and Jews arguing, books in hand. illo: courtesy J. ParkesWhile the Muslims did enact the occasional Jewish massacre, or “farhuds” as they are called, over their first millennia and a half, until the end of World War Two in 1945, Christians committed almost 99% of all antisemitic atrocities. They started in 1096 with the First Crusade, intended to “bring the light of Christ to the world,” which massacred the large Jewish communities along the Rhine River, and culminated with the grotesque capture of Jerusalem, three years later. Unlike the city’s fair surrender to the Muslim Caliph Umar 450 years earlier, the Crusaders butchered Jewish and Muslim residents, until the streets ran ankle deep with blood. Until the First Crusade, however, the Dark Ages had been a time of light for Jews, living peacefully across southern and middle Europe, doing the same work as their neighbors and often respected members of multi-faith communities. Fourth century Cologne, Germany, for example, had a central square surrounded by temples for Roman and Gothic deities as well as a church and a synagogue. As the Church accrued a spiritual monopoly as well as financial as well as "spiritual" power, they felt it advantageous to force the Jews into moneylending, ghettos and the wearing of insignias, which soon led to horror.
The mass psychosis of mob-driven antisemitism first appeared as a “blood libel” in Norwich, England, in 1144 CE, after a 12-year-old boy was discovered dead. Although there was nothing linking his death to Jews, a monk, Thomas of Monmouth, who investigated it four years later, insisted there was. English nobility was following the standard method of inviting Jews in to encourage trade, lending and theological thinking but, if need be, throwing them to the dogs, often with the connivance of the clergy. After killing and expelling their Jews, England was officially Jew-free from 1290 to 1656, although both Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about them in that period. Accusations of blood libels spread like wildfire across Europe, as is possible with intensely stimulating, verbally-transferred fantasies. According to the Christian rumormongers, rabbis used Christian children’s blood to make Passover matzo, the sacred unleavened bread they use on Passover to honor liberation from slavery, even though matzo is obviously white, and blood red. Fifty years later, in 1190, about 150 Jews were murdered in York, England, after seeking refuge in a royal tower, to which they fled because they were supposed to be under the auspices of the king. That first mass murder of Jews in England did shock the society of the day. Nevertheless, despite their immense achievements, from maintaining the earth’s oldest democracy to helping defeat the Nazis, a malevolent strain of antisemitism remains in the national psyche, periodically emerging among Britain’s hard right and left and new-age conspiracy theorists and now Muslim immigrants.
King Edward I (on left) expelling English Jews in 1290, due to a conspiracy theory claiming they used children's blood to make Passover matzo. illo: unknownAs if that were not enough of Freud's death drive, or “thanatos,” 21 years after the First World War, the Nazis launched yet another, condemning over 60 million souls to the grave, including the industrial slaughter of almost six million Jews. It came to be called the Holocaust, from “holokaustos,” Greek for “burnt offering,” due to its train-gas chamber-crematorium assembly line but more importantly its symbolic nature. Even though Jews were part of German society for a millennium and many Germans were happy to have them—indeed, “Iron Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck recommended them as wives, diplomats and business partners—they served as the Nazis as perfect scapegoats, symbols of wrongdoing, much as Freud predicted. Already blamed by various sectors of society, they became the perfect protagonists in the Nazis’ favorite conspiracy theories, “The Stab in the Back” and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (the Jews supposedly secretly orchestrated Germany’s WWI surrender and control the banks, respectively). There was second, even more important reason: the Jews represented both freedom of religion and liberal democracy—the same reasoning as Rome’s war with the Jews—as well elevated ethics and patriarchal affection—not only did their fathers love them but also the symbolic great father of monotheism. The Nazis knew they had to obliterate such a moral structure to build their survival-of-the-fittest and totalitarian society.
Antisemitic annihilationism tainted not just the Nazis but the Germans who acquiesced, the Europeans who collaborated, and the societies which denied Jews the refuge that was practiced almost almost universally, throughout history. Given only the city-state of Shanghai accepted visa-less Jews (and only about 20,000 made the long, expensive journey), the nations of world can be said to have joined to form the last ring of barbed-wire and guard towers in the Nazi universe of concentration and death camps and killing fields.
The German matriarch and intellectual, Rahel Varnhagen (1771-1833), was born in a ghetto but became the first host of the many European literary salons in the 19th century run by Jewesses and beloved by gentiles. illo: unknownJews finally rejoined monotheist civilization in the West around 1800, and in the Middle East, about a half a century later, after the Enlightenment was brought to much of Europe, at the point of a sword. Emancipation began with the French Revolution’s “Rights of Man”, which included the Jews, but was instituted by Napoleon, through his conquests (1798-1814), although those laws were often rescinded. Not surprisingly, Europe's religious antisemitism transformed almost immediately into its political cousin, where Jews were accused of being communists or capitalists, ill-mannered or overeducated, foreign immigrants or too assimilated. France itself dissolved into paroxysms of antisemitic psychosis 80 years later, when mobs chanting “Death to the Jews” marched the streets of Paris during the Dreyfus Affair, which involved a Jewish army officer by that name accused of spying for Germany (he was later acquitted).
The standard antisemitic trope was that Jews were crafty, controlling or outright evil, even though many Europeans found they were suitable spouses, writers, musicians, chemists, political theorists, entrepreneurs and professionals. Indeed, the respect of so many gentiles helped Jews join society with surprising speed, although their enthusiasm was largely due to abuse and their abilities honed over millennia of monotheism. The latter fostered literacy, education and even scientific investigation (mostly medical, until the 19th century) as well as optimism, love (familial, romantic and humanist) and devotion to justice. Inspired by the archetype of Moses bringing the law down from Mount Sinai, many Jews became lawyers. While some were shysters, many fought bravely for human rights. Indeed, the ancient Jewish project of relief from bondage, suffering and poverty continued, applied to themselves but also all humans, as suggested by monotheism. In fact, many Jews becoming involved in progressive politics, from liberal democrat to communist, and philanthropies, especially building hospitals and schools, where the Jewish ones often equalled gentile institutions, despite being a tiny percent of society. One of Martin Luther King's closest confidants and allies was Rabbi Abraham Heschel, who was born in Warsaw, Poland, and became a professor of mysticism in the rabbinical school next door to Columbia University. Others devoted themselves to writing, music, other arts and or the general promotion of culture and civilization through publishing, museums and theaters.
The Jews were released from European ghettos in time for the 19th century’s explosion of democracy, capitalism and science. They had the energy, intelligence and desperation for freedom but also cash, due to the moneylending, which nurtured a few rich families, notably the Rothschilds. While their forbears served as smalltime lenders or “tax farmers” (who paid a region’s tax bill up front and were provided soldiers to collect it, an antisemitism manufacturing machine), over the centuries they could study the profession and market. Hence, they became adept bankers, international merchants and industrial magnates including suppliers of war materiel, which was critical to Europeans for prosecuting their many wars. It was only through complex lending, international connections and detailed planning, they could get the weapons, ammunition, horses and food needed.
The vast majority of Jews, however, were impoverished. My grandfather, Mendel Rotkopf, was a loom operator working in the new, industrialized and multicultural (Polish, German and Russian) city of Lodz, Poland, but he lived in one room with his family of five, without running water or electricity. Indeed, Jews had to study, work and hustle extremely hard to reenter the civilization they helped invent and finance, regardless of the Holocaust.
Although Karl Marx (lft) was raised Christian, Freud (center) was an atheist, and Einstein (rt) a mystical Jew, they are considered the three Jews who made the modern West. illo: D. BlairIn fact, Jews were instrumental in establishing of the modern, liberal and democratic societies, despite representing as little as ten percent of a nation’s population, as in Poland, or less than one percent, as in Germany, which was saved during World War One by two Jews. The Allies were going to try Fritz Haber, inventor of nitrogen fabrication, as a war criminal, because his process allowed Germany to keep making explosives, but he received the 1918 Nobel Prize in chemistry instead, because nitrogen is needed for fertilizers and he helped feed billions. Walter Rathenau was so revered for reengineering Germany’s wartime military supply chain, he was elected prime minister, although he served only five months in 1922 until his assassination (one assassin apologized to his mother).
All civilizations are like monotheisms, insomuch they’re rules-based, share the social construct of increased ethics and cooperation, and are universalist. Despite their stupendous suffering and occasional cynicism, often expressed in humor, most Jews assumed the other monotheists would eventually recognize this obvious fact. They were mistaken. Many Muslims and Christians rejected the inherent equality and tolerance of monotheism, even after it helped inspire the American Constitution and the elimination of slavery, a pattern of prejudice continued among communists and fascists. Sadly, monotheism has long been gamed by charlatans, cult leaders and false messiahs as well as authoritarians, who roleplay Islamic, Christian or Jewish values but lust for the idolatry of personal or tribal benefits, despite the fact that “[a] civilization that builds on the basis of blood is a tribe, a tribe that builds on the basis of ideas is a civilization,” as I noted in my “The Tribe Versus Civilization Manifesto”.
A founder of Islamic modernism, Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-'97), was probably a Persian Shi'a but preferred to be known as a Sunni Afghan, hence his name. illo: unknownThe Wahhabis were resisted from their mid-18th century beginning by liberal Muslims, first the preachers in Wahhab’s own family, then those in Mecca. Indeed, Islam’s most sacred city was famous for tolerance and creativity pre-Islam and that tradition continued, especially when it welcomes millions of visitors during the Hajj. Making the pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the “Five Pillars of Islam” (but only if a devotee can afford it), and Muslims from all over the world came to pray, talk, trade and sometimes marry, since women often attended unveiled, or be entertained and enlightened by Sufi storytellers and theologians. During Wahhab's Hajj, with his devotees, “the qadi [head judge] of Mecca pronounced them to be unbelievers, in view of the well-known principle, based on ‘Hadith’, that whoever without good reason denounces a fellow Muslim as an unbeliever himself enters that category,” (Hamid Algars, “Wahhabism”, 2002).
The Wahhabis were so unpopular, in fact, they were driven from Mecca in 1811, eight years after conquering it, by Egypt’s new ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, a military genius backed by hardened Albanian troops. Ali Pasha was also a liberal Muslim, probably a Bektashi Sufi (a tariqa which allows alcohol), who opened Egypt to the West, by reviving the multicultural, scholarly center and port of Alexandria. The Ottomans followed suit in 1839 with top-down reforms, called “Tanzimat,” which introduced elections and later full citizenship for Greeks, Armenians and even Jews, including the right to serve in the army (important for men to prove their capacity and status, unfortunately, just in time for WWI).
Meanwhile, “The Nahda,” meaning Arab Enlightenment, bubbled up from Arab street, driven by writers and diplomats, ranging from progressive modernists to conservatives or clandestine Wahhabis. One of the best-known was the activist and scholar Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), who travelled throughout Europe as well as the Middle East, Persia and India teaching, publishing and sometimes plotting, including assassinations. His most famous disciple, Muḥammad Abduh (1849-1905), became Egypt’s Grand Mufti (religious head) and famously liberal. Indeed, he allowed figurative art (after visiting European museums), often quoted “The Quran”’s “No compulsion” line, amplified women’s rights, and inspired Egypt’s 1919 Revolution. In fact, many Middle Easterners adopted western ideas, tools and goods, which radically altered lives and life spans, but their democracy was in its infancy, their institutions were archaic, and their leaders were often corrupt. Hence, the poor and disenfranchised were forced toward Salafism, as Wahhabism came to be known, after incorporating Islamist innovations from India and elsewhere.
Unlike the Protestants, who evolved from Puritans to mostly tolerant democrats in three centuries, the Salafists believed modernity could be stopped by increased fidelity to Shari’ah Law, even though they reinterpreted “The Quran” and added sections. The Muslim Brotherhood was started by an Egyptian schoolteacher in 1928, to restore a caliphate after the Ottoman one was abolished in 1924. Although it adopted a few theories from Abduh, it borrowed mostly from European Fascists, already in control of Italy, and the Nazis, using brown uniforms, mass rallies and extreme antisemitism to became Salafism’s preeminent sect. Indeed, Hamas is an offshoot; Qatar is a Brotherhood state; Erdogan’s Turkey is Brotherhood-inspired; and the original Egyptian group tried to co-opt the Arab Spring in 2011 but then destroyed it. As the Brotherhood was beginning, the Wahhabis finished their conquest of most of the Arabian peninsula, established Saudi Arabia (1932), and began building immense wealth in partnership with infidels, the Americans who discovered oil there in 1938, even though that, too, is forbidden by Shari’ah Law.
Article continues at My Half Century With Islam, Part 4
Doniphan Blair is a writer, film magazine publisher, designer and filmmaker who can be reached .
Posted on Oct 26, 2024 - 04:30 PM
