Because the Jewish people have never been truly safe in any nation for the long term, I reluctantly accept and support the need for a Jewish homeland. I would have much preferred to have seen the creation of a Jewish state following World War II carved out from lands in eastern Germany through western Poland. However, that boat has since sailed on an ocean of fallen tears.
The fact is that both Palestinians and Jews are indigenous to what we call the Middle East, and Jews existed there when the area was known as “the land of Canaan.” Palestinians and Jews are distant cousins. Yes, it is also true that most Jews who reside in what today is called “Israel” arrived during the late 19th and 20th centuries.
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Today, 23 countries have declared Islam the state religion; there are three Hindu majority countries; in four countries Buddhism is the official religion; 15 nations have declared a form of Christianity as their official religion; and 157 countries and territories are majority Christian.
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How Christian History has contributed to Middle Eastern conflicts
I recently led a discussion with a group of progressive Christians on the history and current conflicts between Palestinians and Jews in the Middle East, the very issue that has sparked massive demonstrations on campuses and communities worldwide.
Following introductions and the workshop agenda, I opened with a critical question, which I asked them first to consider alone, and then to pair with a partner to discuss. When I completed the question, I heard audible gasps and looks of disbelief and even of shock.
The two-part question was:
Has any part of the overall history of Christianity affected current events in the Middle East?
If so, how? If not, why not?
While it took a few minutes for some of the participants to absorb the question, they eventually connected with one another.
After approximately 10 minutes, we had a larger group discussion about what came up for them. After some reluctance, some acknowledged with a sense of surprise rather than of objection: “I’m still in utter shock. I never thought about this question,” one said. Another added, “This is not the direction I thought we would be going in this workshop.”
A third remembered a slide from a PowerPoint presentation I sent to the participants two days prior to the workshop of a condensed history of the Middle East: “I think I understand. It began the first time early Christians accused Jews of killing Jesus.”
I followed with additional questions: “Would Jews require a state if Christian countries had welcomed them as trusted neighbors and as contributing participants to the cultural tapestry of the countries in which they inhabited, especially if they had unrestricted access to travel to and in ‘the Holy Lands’?”
And then I asked, “If Christians had welcomed Jews, would the Christian Cross have ultimately been chiseled into the Nazi Swastika? In other words, without two millennia of Christian persecution, could we have avoided the Holocaust and the desperate need for a Jewish homeland?”
The final question I asked them to discuss was, “How have Christian countries impacted the development of the state of Israel, the displacement of Palestinians, and the continuing tensions between the peoples of the area?”
Antisemitism: A condensed (and unfortunately long) historical timeline
Former President Donald Trump gave a campaign speech Thursday, September 19, purportedly on the topic of antisemitism.
During his speech, Trump lectured Jews that they must vote for him in the upcoming November presidential sweepstakes, and if they do not, that “the Jewish people” would be partially to blame for his defeat. Trump repeated his perennial warning that the Democrats hold a “curse” over Jewish voters.
Trump said if he loses the race: “Blame the Jews.”
Throughout millennia, strong leaders have blamed Jews for causing the problems of humanity. They have stereotyped and accused Jews of many crimes, including:
Killers of God
In service of / fathered by the Devil
Catholic host desecrators
Poisoners of drinking wells
Transmitters of diseases
Usurers (people who make loans at unreasonably high rates)
Ritual murderers & abusers of Christian children
People of immature / inadequate religious consciousness
Forced circumcisers onto non-Jews
Proselytizers of Judaism
Clannish
Alien “race”
Wanderers / “stateless”
Freedom-killing Communists
Super Capitalists
Sexually perverse
Oversexed or sexually frigid females
Lecherous males preying on Christian women
Feminized and non-athletic males
Controllers of world economic systems
Exaggerators of the extent of anti-Jewish oppression
Controllers of the media
Financially cheap cheaters
Exploiters of the oppressed
Holders of dual / multiple loyalties
Greedy for wealth
So, let us go back millennia through a condensed timeline to find out where these tropes developed and extended to current eras. I could go back further, but I will begin in ancient Egypt:
Several plagues fell upon ancient Egypt, so “Blame the Jews.”
Under ancient Greek rule, since they will not assimilate to our ways, they must die and for their own death, “Blame the Jews.”
Greco-Roman writers accused Jews who adhered to their religious beliefs as “bigots fighting in defense of circumcision and a pigless diet,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Under ancient Roman rule and the murder of Jesus of Nazareth, early Christian writers declared for Jesus’s death, “Blame the Jews.”
During the split between Judaism and Christianity during the first century of the common era, Jews who would not convert were depicted as evil, rebels, and heretics against God, and eventually murdered … so, “Blame the Jews.”
Money lending (forbidden to Christians) fell to Jews, who were seen as cunning, cheap, and miserly thieves and in the service of the landed classes so, “Blame the Jews.”
Pope Urban II who called and funded the First Crusade in 1095 argued, “Let us first avenge ourselves on them [the Jews] and exterminate them from among the nations so that the name of Israel will no longer be remembered, or let them adopt our faith.” In other words, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
In 1144, the beginning of the so-called “Blood Libel” in England, when Christians accused Jews of sleighing William of Norwich, a Christian male child, to use his blood in the making of their sacred Jewish matzos, resulting in Christians murdering Jews. So, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Powerful leaders evicted Jews from several European nations during the Middle Ages, and in Germany, they were forced to wear a pointed hat to distinguish them from Christians so that others could “Blame the Jews.”
The Fourth Lateran Council of the Church ordered Jews to wear distinctive yellow badges in 1215 choosing yellow because it symbolized “racial disgrace” to help “Blame the Jews.”
Pope Gregory IX ordered all copies of the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, confiscated in 1239, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
King Edward I, in 1290, issued an edict expelling all Jews from England, which remained in force until 1657, and Jews were expelled from France in 1182 & 1400, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
From 1348 to 1354, masses connected with the myth that Jews were baby killers, Jews were unjustly blamed for bringing on the Bubonic Plague by poisoning drinking wells, killing nearly one-third of the entire European population into Asia. Even though ticks had spread the disease through rats, nonetheless, masses decided, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Spanish Christian theologians in 1391 devised the doctrine of Limpieza de Sangre (“purity of the blood”) whereby Baptized Jews remained Jewish in the view of the Church, and therefore, a danger to society. Baptized Jews were forbidden to practice medicine, surgery, or pharmacy because it was thought that Jews were always ready to murder Christians, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella during the Spanish Inquisition drove the last Jews from Spain and Portugal who had not already been murdered since Jews were no longer needed for the economic roles they once filled, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century resulted in a schism in Christianity. Catholic and Protestant leaders, however, agreed on one issue: the evilness of the Jews. So let’s “Blame the Jews.”
In 1526, Protestant reformer Martin Luther published a book called, On the Jews and Their Lies. Some have referred to this as “the first work of modern anti-Semitism,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
For example: Luther wrote, “First, their synagogues should be set on fire.” He said Jewish prayer books should be destroyed and rabbis forbidden to preach. The homes of Jews should likewise be “smashed and destroyed” and their residents “put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land.” He effectively said, “Blame the Jews.”
The 18th-century French philosopher Voltaire asserted, “The Jews are nothing more than an ignorant, barbarian people, who combine the foulest greed with a terrible superstition and an uncompromising hatred of all the peoples who tolerate them and at whose cost they even enrich themselves….[T]he Jews are cowardly and lecherous, greedy, and miserly,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
In many European countries, Christian leaders often forced Jews to reside in designated, often overcrowded areas. Bishops often prohibited Jews from living among Christians. These areas would come to be called “Ghettos,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
The largest European ghetto was in Imperial Russia where the majority of Russian Jews were forced to live between 1835 and 1917. Called “The Pale of Settlement,” it extended from the Crimea to the Baltic Sea, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
During the United States Civil War in 1862, Major General Ulysses S. Grant unfairly accused Jews of plotting to illegally engage in the cotton trade, and ordered all Jews expelled from the states of Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, then under the control of the Union Army forces — an action reminiscent of European forced expulsions of Jews. So again, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Wilhelm Marr, a Hamburg, Germany anarchist and writer, coined the term “anti-Semitism” in his 1879 pamphlet, “The Victory of Judaism over Germanism.” He hated Jews, and he warned of the imminent final Jewish victory to conquer and enslave the Western world… so basically, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term “eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek, “well born” or “good origins or breeding.” Galton championed the science of improving the qualities of a “race” by controlling human breeding, claiming that “The Jews are specialized for a parasitical existence upon other nations,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Phrenology — the study of the shape & size of the human skull, based on the belief that they indicate human mental facilities and moral character — becomes a stream within the eugenics movement. Some phrenology advocates assert that a section of the “Jewish skull and brain” are “abnormally developed,” indicating that Jews are highly concerned with money and finances. This, they assert, has developed as an evolutionary process over time. As late as 2014, Nicholas Wade — in his book, A Troublesome Inheritance — argued that Jews possess an evolutionary genetic “adaptation to capitalism” the same way that Tibetans who live at high altitudes possess an evolutionary genetic “adaptation to extreme environments,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Frederick Nietzsche, a leading European philosopher, in 1887 published his The Genealogy of Morals, in which he wrote: “It was the Jew who, with frightening consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equations good/noble / powerful / beautiful / happy / favored-of-the-gods and maintained that only the poor, the powerless, are good; only the suffering, sick, and ugly, truly blessed. Jews, to Nietzsche, were a disease corrupting the nations, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Originally appearing under the reign of Czar Nicholas II in Russia around 1895, an anonymous author who worked for the Russian secret police in Paris wrote a booklet, Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, to influence the policies of the Czar regarding Jews. It contained the alleged minutes of a supposed conference organized by rabbis to plot how Jews would overtake and dominate the world. So let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Though Jews were allowed very little control over the conditions surrounding their lives in many European countries, by the end of the 19th century c.e., the stereotype of Jews as powerful with an interest in world domination persisted into the current era, led purportedly by the super-industrialist Rothchild family, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Adolph Hitler said about Germany’s loss in WWI: “Blame the Jews.”
Hitler asserted that he had been influenced by the theology of Paul in the Christian Bible, and by the works of Martin Luther, as well as many Christian theologians of his time regarding the evilness and inferiority of the Jews. In his 1925 Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler wrote, “Today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord,” so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Henry Ford, the U.S. automotive pioneer argued that Jews controlled world finance. He had the Protocols translated into English in 1927 and published it in his newspaper, The Dearborn (Michigan) Independent, thereby introducing it to a large U.S. audience. Adolph Hitler bestowed on Henry Ford the highest award given to a non-German. Following WWII at the Nuremberg Trials, Baldur von Shirach, Hitler’s leader of Hitler Youth, stated that Hitler had become “Jew-wise” by reading Henry Ford’s own writings about the Jews, so let’s all “Blame the Jews.”
Father Charles E. Coughlin — an Irish-Catholic priest, anti-Jewish, and anti-Communist — used his radio broadcasts in the U.S. during the 1930s to warn that the Jews were out to destroy the U.S. economy. He defended Hitler’s treatment of the Jews as warranted in the fight against Communism, so let’s “Blame the Jews.”
Following the McCarthy era, xenophobes alleged that an underground Communist cabal had infiltrated the U.S. government, and since “Communist” was viewed as a “Jewish” influence, let’s “Blame the Jews.”
According to the fraudulent “Great Replacement Theory,” white people are being replaced by a globalist conspiracy bringing in immigrants of color in primarily European-heritage nations like the United States and Great Britain. So we must “Blame the Jews” because we won’t allow “Jews to replace us.”
Well, as Spanish philosopher George Santayana, has warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are destined to repeat it.” Unfortunately, we keep forgetting, or more correctly, we fail to learn our past, and, therefore, we keep repeating it.
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