Viorica S Constantinescu

The Jew Inside Us

Outline of Cultural History

Translated from the Romanian by

Ligia Doina Constantinescu

L A P Publishing House 2010

Contents
Introduction: Aimez-vous.les Juifs? I. Stereotypes of Thinking 1.The Jew Question in The Old Testament 2.The Question of Judaism 3. Anti-Semitism II. Stereotypes of Art 1. The Image of the Word in Medieval Art 2. The Melodrama of the Passions 3. The Jew in Rumors, Legends, Fallacies a) b) c) d) e) The Jew in Rumors The Judas Case The Merchant of Venice The Eternal Jew The Jew the Master of the World

4. The Judie-phobic Language 5. Dear Judas, or about the European Philo-Semitism Concluding Addendum: The Compromise the Unique Solution Brief Lexicon of the Contacts between Judaism and Christianity Bibliography

Frischli: I am also writing a play. Durli: What about? Frischl: About the Jews. Durli: But, are you a Jew by any means? Frischli: Well, what came to your mind? Durli: You, you are in a more critical situation than I am. There are only a few chemists who could answer me back, while on the other hand, the world is full of Jews. Frischli: It doesnt matter, because in my play there is no Jew. Durli: I beg your pardon? A play about Jews in which there is no Jew? Oh, that bespeaks a genius! You, you must retell me at once.

(Max Frisch)

Introduction

Aimez-vous.les juifs?

I keep on looking at me, the Jew, and I am glad. Never mind Im despised Im glad That I am a Jew!

(Albert Einstein)

Who could say that he likes the Jews without at least an adversative but to curtail his generosity? Do the Jews like the others indeed? What is the source of this incompatibility (an absolute one, sometimes, in some periods of the common European history?) between Jews and non-Jews? How was homo antiSemiticus born? I havent met any German who would love the Jew, Nietzsche was noting with sadness in his Aurora. But could he really have met any Russian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish? It is certain that the split between we and they with deeper causes, beyond and behind consciousness is not similar to a common enmity among

neighboring peoples or co-existing minorities; rather, it gets ranked in the field of socio and psycho pathologies. And if the last representative of this ancient race that has been both megalomaniac and humble, calling itself chosen but depicting itself as miserable and culpable, were to disappear, its rejection would remain as long as inside us - inscribed in fact through the Christian morals, manners and faith the Judie did not cease to torment our guilty consciousness. The tolerance that the Jews enjoyed in the non-European, non-Europenized and non-Christiani civilization spaces makes us believe that we shall not cease to perversely strike a blow through them at the very Christian inside us, that keeps on tormenting us underground even if we have consciously accepted him. The Judies guilt is also that of having given and taken Jesus away.

Nobody, even the droll Sancho Panza, could remain indifferent to the Jewish question. His very interesting confession has its rationale, a more than pardonable one, purely sentimental. Sancho, always pulling at his masters sleeve, and bringing him back to reality through rationalisations as straightforward as they were common sensical, lost all his presence of mind when the Jews were under discussion: he does not say that he hates them because he loves the holy Roman Catholic very much and the good God, but even if . Sanchos Jew and that of our anti-Semitism is not an individual, a man, but a universal principle of the negative that seems to foster our instinct of hate, and as such we have to reject it from the very beginning or anyway to beware, to be on our guard in its presence, but.also in its absence. Because the play of our existence, like that by Max Frisch entitled Andorra, does not need Jews in order to deal with the peril represented by the notion of the Jew. Anti-Semitism without Jews, which is topical nowadays, is very old, ever since the time when, driven away from England (1240), and from most France (1394), from Spain (1492), they continued to remain a danger of such a real nature that Shakespeare created Shylock, not as a homo economicus as he had been and

still was in reality, but as a revengeful man of his race, a disguised practitioner of human sacrifice. It is known that some of the Jews came to Europe even before the Romans (we refer to the Spanish Jews who seem to have emigrated together with the Phoenicians to North Africa and to Southern Spain) before the AngloSaxons, the Francs or the Visigoths. They had been appreciated ever since the early middle ages, especially as merchants who were traveling from one corner of the world to another, as scholars, artisans, medical men and even as good farmers; this lasted for almost a millennium. They were not born usurers and bankers, but, as we shall see, the non-Jewish Europeans forced them to become the privileged pariah in the first millennium, and a cursed race in the second. Since then when, why, and how have some citizens, with a collectivist spirit more emphatic than others (a spirit that was not an inconvenience at the time when the pre-national Europe was but a cluster of communities, more or less related, more or less willing to mix between themselves) come to get hated to death, to become the concern of in a ridiculously disproportionate way in relation to their number theologians, thinkers, politicians, biologists, psychologists or psychoanalysts? After the Holocaust, there was an attempt to account for this phenomenon of neurosis, of collective pathology, which could be called anti-Semitic nausea (If there is physiological, metaphysical nausea, why shouldnt there be a racial one?), and which is typically Europeanii. More or less detached, they, the researchers. of the anti-Semitic nausea seem almost always stamped by the guilty-victim complex, while the justice to be done and the punishment of the evil are passing, as in the ancient tragedy, from a camp of guilty ones to the other, and the truth, the explanation has always remained an aspiration. But certain is the fact that without an elucidation of its position on the Jewish matter, Europe can hardly write its history, as faithfully as it wants to; especially it cannot pre-write the history of its future. The same thing also holds good for the victims of the others, for the people of Zion, who, since it acquired state identity, has not got accustomed to doing penance any longer in sackcloth

and ashes, although this practice originated with them. The continuous selfvictimization and blaming of others cannot function ad infinitum, especially under the circumstances in which the Judaic evil flagging, the Christian evil also got gradually enfeebled. In this respect, it has also been said that to the extent to which the Jews were leaving, or were no longer the priority concerns of the democratic or totalitarian societies, Christianity in fact began to crumble from within: : the Judeo-Christian antinomy getting thus replaced by a normal conciliation resulted in the deterioration of both faiths. Instead of the Christian evil, there surfaced the atheist evil, or worse, the scientological evil, the Satanic evil, and so on. The guilty Jew, has himself has given currency to his representation ever since the Bible by always lamenting that he was wrong, the suffering Jew (Precious is suffering, is written in Talmud; the Judaism that brought about only misfortunes to mankind, - noted the romantic Heine, who on getting elderly regretted not having been more Judie-) this image has genetically got transmitted from generation to generation. More real than the real one is the inherited guilty one that we are carrying in our unconsciousness; and whom when the language speaks (to) us, we call Jidan, even if it escaped our lips. Willingly or not, despite the reconciliation resoundingly proclaimed by the Church and the Synagogue, or by ideologists and politicians, we belong, for the time being, to the species homo anti-Semiticus; and unless we think in anti-Semitic terms, we are thought anti-Semitically, while the alien mouth gives us away: Did you know that he was a Jew?, He, the Jew is clever!, Thief, this Jew!, The Jews, the Jews, it is they who are guilty, they are pulling strings!, etc etc. What harm did nevertheless do to us the heterogeneous, half-nomadic horde of four millennia ago that took over from those on whose lands they had been tolerated the idea of monotheism, and perfected it so as to render it subservient to the creation of a people, a people as poor, simple as presumptuous the choseniii of Divinity, which in His turn was chosen, unique, the most powerful, the only true one, the only one that did not show Itself, but only got revealed to some chosen ones of the chosen people.

The abyssal drama of hatred seems to have been founded initially on a psycho-ethnic ground. The Mosaicism of the Jews, the Judaism of the Judies, the Christianity of the Europeans imposed a spiritualist belief over some naturist peoples: our whole spirituality, from Moses till today, has been grounded in the aggression against nature (Emil Gillabert)iv. An eternal wandering at the gates of reality, this seems to have come of experience(Being) after the Judeo-Christian model. Our civilization, like our religion from which it originated, has been edified by repression and the mutilation of our instinctsv. An accepted but not less vindictive frustration turned the spiritualists into doctrinarians, and the Jews into the eternal enemies of those who accepted and amplified their ideology. Are they, the Jews, to be blamed eternally for everything that they are charged with? Couldnt Sydney Tarochov rather be right when, like Walter Jens, in fact, he speaks to us about die beide Sundbocke (both scapegoats)vi of humanity? Provocateurs, aggressive, masters in psychology manipulation but also sublime through the idea of moral order, they have made the world revolve round their problem, almost ever since the moment they emerged, as an organized group, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan. Regarded as event-sequentiality, without psychoanalytic, biological, racial, genetic or other implications, the history of anti-Judaism and of anti-Semitism (as a superior phase of the former) looks to us like the history of some theological and economic animosities, which from time to time have become state policy. Under certain circumstances of economic crisis, the class struggle became the race struggle, the race struggle being supported by a halo of paranoidhysterical fallacies, the more shocking, the more efficient. Homo anti-Semiticus was the creation of economic crises, of the cultivated and popular theology, of the Medieval Christian art, and, in the long run, of anthropology and racial biologyvii. Let us imagine a poll or survey, beyond history, so as to be able to get a faint idea about the way homo anti-Judaicus and anti-Semiticus conceived their

co-existence with.the Jews, be they the handsome Sephardi, the Ethiopian Blacks or the Ashkenaz Arianics. Therefore: Aimez-vous les Juifs? (Do you like the Jews?) A Roman citizen: No, because instead of offering sacrifice to our gods and emperors, they worship Jupiter Sabasios of theirs, a god nobody has seen. They are always discontented, always grumbling, do not love life, even worse, some contend that they experienced the arrival of a Savior of the poor (sic!), they hate all those who do not belong to their nation, they are profligates and destabilizers. Emperor Nero was right in throwing their Messiah along with them into the circus ring to be torn to pieces by beasts. And yet we cannot punish them as they deserve either those who call themselves Jews or those who calls themselves Christians, as we do not have laws against them. A Christian from the early middle ages: Not quite, unless they were less stubborn, and if they recognized that our Christian law is the true one, that this is why God had sacrificed His only son so that we could be saved and not only we who are not Jews, but they too! So much for them, their job, they will be punished and will not experience redemption. Sometimes I am seized with pity when thinking: Why are they to blame for having been born Jews? It is good for us to have our own churches and no longer have to use their synagogues as our ancestors did. Many true Christians also listened to the rabbis sermons, and even believed what those erudite liars were saying. It is true some of theirs are coming to our Church. They might as well hope to also get redeemed. A Christian from the Late middle ages (after crusades): No, because they are a betraying tribe; Judas sold Jesus to the Sadducees and the Pharisees. It is they who are responsible for Christs death. It is the devil that prompts all their ideas, not the Holy Spirit as with us. Their synagogue is a whore, and they are liars, killers, fish-spears defilers; it is they who brought in the plague by infesting the fountains. They are greedy and dirty swine. They stink because they cook with oil, not with fat, and they eat garlic. They should be driven away from all the places, even burned maybe. Because they are the embodiment of the horned one. They must wear special clothes so that we could

differentiate them in the street, should not get mixed up with us, should reside in special quarters from which they should not get out at night. A Christian from Renaissance: No, because they are unfaithful, thirsty for money, scrupleless usurers, they hate us to death, their medical men kill the Christians under the pretext of treating them, while princes and Popes spoil and pamper them so that they could use their money. Many wear tails, men have periods like women, and they deal with witchcraft. An Enlightened Christian: No, but they should not get killed, but only enclosed and avoided. Another Enlightened Christian: Why should they not be to my liking? They are very cultivated, some are helpful to the poor to whom they lend money. And then, they have remade Europes connection with the Greek rationalism. A Romantic Christian: But wasnt Jesus a Judie? Their poetry is very beautiful. And the Holy Scripture was also written by them. They turned the poor into people with dignity. And it was also they who have given us the sublimity of morals! Another Romantic Christian: No, they are the fatal people of mankind. Their moral rendered man weak. Jesus was not a Jew, He was an Arian. This is why they killed Him, because He was not one of them, of their community. They are to blame for the French revolution that brought so many misfortunes to mankind. They raise shameless claims and demands, to be regarded as equal to other people. That would beat any measure, to be regarded men. They want equal rights with the Christians! They brought about Capitalism. They proclaimed themselves the chosen people. Chosen for what? Only to suffer and to also make others suffer. They should be chased away from all places. A Christian from post-communist Eastern Europe: Well, they hardly exist, what could they possibly look for in our poverty? But they are not stupid, at their place they did not make communism. They tried it on us and then they put it on display in museums in the kibbutz. And what if there are only a few of them left? It is they who still rule the world.

The Jew will still remain Jidan for a long time, depending on contextualizations. The Europeans are not easily going to get rid of those ides recues that have masterminded their thinking for two millennia, even if they play on with paradoxes of the type Liebesmord (to kill out of love). Judaism and Christianity have been confronting each other for 2000 years to the stupefaction of some philosophers, such as Th. W. Adorno, who wondered how such a paradox, in which the sons religion should become the deadly enemy of the fathers religion was possible. Those who believe in the fathers religion to become the death enemies to those who believe in the sons religionviii. Behind Europes history, there are always Cain and Abel, Ormuz and Ahriman, Judas and Jesus, Evil and Good, Devil and God, Judies and Christians. The question What is a Jew? should not even be answered, because just to pose it means already to answer it: a Jew remains a Jew, even if converted, assimilated, atheist. And this not because it is only he who wants it, but because we also want it. The Jew is a consecrated otherness, or alterity. The real Jew. But what about the imaginary one? The intention of the subsequent pages is to pursue how the settling of accounts between non-Jews and Jews is represented in literature and art, in parallel or at the intersection with history; these pages do not make a point of rendering comprehensible what is not comprehensible yet, but only to update this eternally incomprehensible , especially from the perspective of art.

Notes
i

A research of the Jew question in other non-Europeanized civilizations, such as the Far East, India, Japan, even South America shows that the Jews have been co-living under normal circumstances, even after some of these regions got Islamized. In Hannan, at Kai-fong-flu, there is even today an odd Chinese minority that does not eat pork and red meat and which is nothing else but the descendants of the Jews who emigrated there after Jerusalems destruction and Babylon exile or much later. No Chinese chronicle registers disgracing words about these inhabitants that were dealing in commerce, were practising diverse crafts or were farming. Most information about them has become available from the Jesuits who massively penetrated into China in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The funerary stars, Marco Polos accounts, their appearance in some Arab tales, all bespeak their spreading into the immense yellow empire. In Japan, the Tamako district, two villages are called Goshen (recalling the territory from Egypt which the pharaoh gave to Josephs tribe) and Manash (Manase), and an abandoned temple bears Davids name. On a fountain in a nearby little town is engraved the word Israel. Some etymologists contend that the name of Samurai derives from Samaritans. Speculations go as far as the notion that diverse ethnographers uphold, namely that the Japanese would be the descendants of one of the ten lost tribes (Dr S. Oyabe, Origin of Japan and of the Japanese, Yale Univ Press, 1926). In India, the Jews have co-existed with other peoples, and also naturally have lived especially in the region of the city of Bombay. Without history, they must have been happy because happy peoples do not have a history, writes Leon Poliakov, from whose exceptional study Histoire de lanti-Semitisme (19551977), we have taken over the above information. We can also add the fact that the Jews were not persecuted in the Arabized circles either, or in the pre-Reconquista Spain. In the Arab folklore, there are biblical or extra-biblical narratives under the name of Israylliat. In the 11th century, the Fatimiz Calyphs from Egypt contributed with impressive sums of money to managing the rabbinic Academy from Jerusalem. The Calyphs surrounded themselves with Jewish ministers and scholars. It is true that the first who in 1012 required the Jews to wear a distinctive mark or badge was the calyph Hakim, but the restriction lasted but a month. Yet the idea has remained and it turned into the yellow star for more than a millennium. For the occupying Muslims from 11th century, Yahudi (the Jews) and the Nasrans(the Christians) were equally less dangerous. The proliferation of Judeo-Muslim sects did not generally inconvenience the Arabs, who were not fundamentalists then. To explain the inexplicable through psychoanalysis was an attempt at getting out of the impass of consciousness resulting from the Holocaust. The beginning was made by S Freud in Der Mann Moses und die monoteistiche Religion (19341938/9). In 1946, there appears in Boston a volume of studies signed by prestigious names, without the omission of Th W Adorno, entitled Anti-Semitism. A Social Disease, re-edited in 1993 in Germany by Ernst Simmel. Often quoted is J P Sartres essay Psichanalyse dAntisemitisme, published in several editions after 1940. One of the authors of the volume published in Boston, Arnold Zweig, opines for instance that in Europe the hatred against the Jews would go back to the time of the peasant wars; in supporting his thesis, he relies on a story by the Grimm brothers Der Jude im Dorn (The Jew in the Brambles); an almost innocent story, in fact it refers to the eternal tricks that Jews and Christians have played on one another, without letting these farces make them hate each other. They remain in the topos of the biter bit. Douglas W. Orr takes Freuds study Sur Psychologie des Altaglebens (1901-1904) as a starting point, a study arguing the
ii

idea (already demonstrated by Xenology) that in the less extended communities, whatever is foreign is regarded as an enemy and as dangerous. In his study Antisemitismus und faschistiche Propaganda , Th W Adorno writes that the Fascist agitator is generally a skilful seller of his own defects; Vater-imagerie ( paternal imagism) is replaced by an imagism of hatred against the father, whie father (Vater) by the collective ego (Ich). Propaganda has functioned as fulfillment of a collective desire: to get out of the Judeo-Christian idealism and reenter into the ancestrally pagan rationalism. Juden blut muss fliessen ( The Jew blood must be shed and run), one of the national-socialist slogans, uses in a perfidiously propagandistic way a Christian sacramental formula that runs 'Vergiesse des Blutes Christi (Christs blood should be shed). Adorno recalls how a fascist priest, a Jirinovschi in soutane, was shouting through the radio:Blood-shedding cannot be helped. The analysis of the anti-Jew hatred as neurotic phenomenon deeply rooted in a troubled and murky unconsciousness, is noteworthy for broadening the study of anti-Semitism, but is also vulnerable by somehow relativizing the gravity of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of some ideologies. Along the same line of psycho-analytical explanations is also ranked Emile Gillaberts study Moise et le phenomene judeo-chretien, (Metanoia, Marsanne 1976), especilly the chapters La rupture avec le reel (pp 40-46) and Lagression contre la nature (pp 204-208). As for the concept of the chosen people, there have surfaced of late some theories that are conducive to a certain relativization of the guilt of the immeasurable vanity of the Jews who self-entitle chosen. There is an apocryhal Abrahams Apocalypsis, in which there is described a cosmic journey which the first missionary of the Jew monotheism, Abraham, would have made in the interstar space after having been kidnapped from the earth. He would have arrived somewhere high, and in a very intense light circle, he would have seen some beings that were talking with one another. During his upward journey, he would have seen stars above him, and down the earth. Astral journeys also exist in other Biblical apocryphs, which made the most known advocate of the belief in the existence of other civilizations and unidentifiable flying objects we referred to Erich van Daniken suggest the fact that the Jews were indeed chosen by a superior stance (or entity) (Auf den Spuren der Allmachtigen, 1993). This presupposition is born out by facts related to the famous Ark of the Covenant which the Jews were carrying about them everywhere. The ark of the Covenant or the ark of alliance was a locust tree wood box, in which there was.. something secret. In fifty pages, the Zohar describes that something; by using the description in the Zohar, some nuclear physics researchers built a car of a strange shape; its bright eye would have owed its brightness to some phosphorescent algae. But the car which is presupposed to have been hidden in the respective box had another quality: it continuously produced a nourishment (which for todays astronauts is a normal thing) and this nourishment produced by the small generator of atomic energy would have been mana that the Jews
iii

that had followed Moses would have eaten in the desert for 50 years. It is more than certain that the car was radio-active, or anyway, an energy producing generator, reason why it was very dangerous, and the uninitiated who were coming close to it died, calcinated. The priests who were servicing it were wearing special linen clothes. This box whose construction was prompted to Moses by God himself and in which Moses law tablets and walking stick were thought for a long time to have been stored was found empty by the Roman conquerors who entered the Jerusalem temple in 63 B C (opportunity for the Christians to jibe at the Jews when they were contesting Jesus as Messiah, while for Pompei, who had penetrated to the Holy of the Holiest where there was the box, to believe that the Judies were....an atheist people). The box under discussion was also sought by the Knight Templars so as to justify their crusade to Jerusalem. In three places, diggings were made at the place where people thought that the Templars, who claim to have discovered it, would have hidden it. In one of these places, there were found material traces of an object; as carbon date identification were contradictory, the conclusion was reached that these material traces would have been radio-active, as they were perturbing the reactions of the carbon. Beyond all those scientific discoveries, or new legends of the era of cosmic flights and nuclear energy, one idea can be noteworthy the Jews could indeed have been a ... chosen people -.
iv v vi vii

Emile Gillabert, op. cit., p 208 Ibidem, p 265 Judas, der Lieblingsjude, p 246, or Walter Jeres, in Der Fall Judas

See Elemente des Antisemitismus, in Dialektik der Aufklarung, p 188 It is known that the replacement of the old theologic motives of anti-semitism by the racist biological ones (All is race, the converted Jew Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1844, Disraeli whose circle of intellectuals was frequented by Byron) resulted in the most disastrous consequencies for Germany and generally Europe. The III-rd Reich regarded the chosen people as inferior and harmful primarily because of their blood. But modern genetic researchers have settled that, with the Germans, the frequency of some sanguine groups is the same as that of ...a great percentage of Jews. A genetic contamination subsequent to a prolonged ethnic co-existence? Common stock of the Aschenads, - the Germans and the Ariens? As for the old anti-semitic ferment, that is, theology whose role has ceased to be powerful any longer ever since 18th century, the author of a book recently published with Franz A. Taubut Verlag and entitled, Das Elend der Theologie. Eine Kritische Auseinender sezung mit Hans Kung, supports with scientific evidence how theology has many times compromised the faith. The idea is that

when the miracle got to the hands of the theologians, it vanished. It is not incidental that the contested Catholic theologian Eugen Drewermann became the case D; author of over 50 volumes in the field of theology, of which the most known is entitled The Structures of the Evil and was about to get him excommunicated, proposes a critical survey of traditional theology. In 1989, he published Der Klericker Psychogramme eines Ideals, book that occasioned the interdiction of the right of exercising his profession of clergyman any longer.
viii

What is a Jew? Leon Poliakov also wonders (op cit., vol III, pp 476-477); The religion or confession categories and those of nation or nationalist he writes were worked out by the thinking of a Christian civilization; Judaism that got shaped out during a pre-Christian period as a particular community with a universalist, ethic al vocation which enjoys its special rank -, will not probably get integrated in either category. In 19th century, it was regarded and selfregarded as a confession in Western Europe, and as nationality in the Eastern one; but already when we talk of Russian-Polish Jewish community, we fill in this definition by means of the particularly powerful notion of Idish (Yiddichkeit), which refers to a distinctively Jewish sensibility. The idea of a Jewish race was gradually ruled out thanks to some anthropologic discoveries that, from imperative extra-scientific reasons, sometimes propose to us today a substitution with the concept of specifically Jewish, or Judaity. From the Occidentally analytic vewpoint, this risks to become a tautology, because a Jew self-defines through Judaity, which in its turn self-defines through being a Jew, or through a certain Jewish sensibility which is residing in something that is not known exactly, anyway not in the fact of simply being a Jew. Yet this definition has the advantage of emphasizing the uniqueness of the phenomenon in the midst of the Occidental civilization (it reminds us that thanks to the very nature of things, the destiny of the Jews the Jew phenomenon could exist but by analogy). In the long run, there remains the notion of a Jew community, notion that is often rejected by the non-practicing Jews and always by the atheists of all affiliations, because of its religious colouring, which, for this very reason, they emphasize not without satisfaction, we think on the humanitarian preoccupations and ethical aspirations; in fact they lightly get ahead with claims and charges about the surrounding world which characterizes the Jewish sensibility and even the Jewish soul. But anyway all these difficulties and contradictions seem to be leading in the last analysis to an ideology, a terminology inscribed in a society in which Christianity was the rule and the Jew, the exception; peripheral also in relation to society and language, he gets placed with difficulty among the ordinary categories

THE STEREOTYPES OF THINKING

And he will rule from one border to the other and from a river to the corners of the world. In front of him the Ethiopians will kneel down and his enemies will lick the dust. The kingdom of Tarsus and the islands will come with gifts, the Arabs kingdom and Saabs kingdom will come with offerings. And he will be bowed to by all the emperors, all the tribes will serve him.

(Psalm 7, 8-11)

1. The Jew Question in The Old Testament

[They] have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it come into my mind; therefore, behold, days are coming, says the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter ( Jeremiah, 19,6)

Racism has been born Jew has often been said ever since the inception of the theories of racism. They, the Jews, the chosen people, who were required even by The Law , which is in fact their true God, that should not get mixed up with other nations (in a geographical and ethnographic region where the inhabiting peoples were hardly able to differentiate even their own gods, coming to generously borrow and lend them to one another, their gods and their altars), were sure that they would become masters of the world. But what did the world

of the Biblical times mean? Egypt, the empire of queen Saba (maybe todays Oman), Ethiopia, the eastwards and westwards of Jordan territories till Euphrates. When Abraham makes the covenant with God, God promises to him: To your descendants I give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river; the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaims, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites (Genesis 15, 18-21). The pan Hebrew dream was no longer comparable by far to that of the Greek, subsequent Macedonian who got to India. They really wanted to see how the fortified towns that had humiliated them several times would now kneel down, while their megalomaniac sovereigns would bring gifts to Israel. This is why the Jews also began another type of war than by weapons. They might have known from somewhere that in the long run their Elohim-Yahweh-Shavuot would conquer the world even beyond the borders known then to them. Their sacred war, their Jihad was to be waged with the word as revealed and written in The Sacred Book. The historiography of the Jews is one in continuous process, as new archeological and philological discoveries, new hypotheses change the image of the true history for a while. But neither their history, nor their legend is eloquent enough to sort out for us why they have always been a problem for the peoples they came into contact with, why they carried on a feud with all the neighbors, while they have always remained foreigners, the eternal alterity. Even when they managed to get on well with some neighbors who were offering them hospitality after they reconciled with Abimelec, the Egyptian king who was ruling over Canaan: And Abraham planted a tamarisk tree in Beer-Sheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the Everlasting God. And Abraham sojourned many days in the land of the Philistines, as a foreigner (Genesis, 21, 33-34) they still remained as foreigners, nevertheless. The latest comers inferiority complex (eroded as they were by a keen crisis of identity), a complex specific to those always tolerated and never

regarded as equal, gradually changed into a superiority complex, connected to racism in the long run, and surfacing in numerous pages from The Bible. Eager to settle down on a territory of their own, the shepherds who did not reject agriculture either (this is why Abraham bought from Hets sons the master of Hebron from the Canaan country the Macpela cave so as to bury Sarah, and the tilled land at whose end there was the cave, and which he wanted to make certain it would belong to him and to the people following him, he did not want to receive as gift, so he paid 400 silver sicli, according to the merchant standards), did not seem to be suffering from some neuropathy of the eternal wandering, as has always been said in the Jews-pathy studies about their descendants of over three millennia. They were usually maneuvered depending on the adversities or the necessities of the Egyptian pharaohs and of the local monarchs from Canaan (subject to Egypt): either invited as guests as during Josephs protectorate, or exterminated as at the time of the descendants of the benevolent pharaoh, submitted to labors, treated as slaves, forcefully driven away or held back. Thus, what gradually sets in is the obsession of the others hatred against the Jews, hatred that is retorted with the Jews hatred against the others. From a historical astro-perspective, we are shown an awful notion: the Jews themselves have in reality created homo anti-Semiticus, first by describing him in The Holy Book, and then by conveying him to the non-Jews along with this Book. The mechanism of the animosity transfer from the Jews to the surrounding peoples, and from the surrounding peoples towards Jews, then from Judies (as all the Jews, after the Babylonian exile, irrespective of the branch they came from, will be called) towards the non-Judies and further on, from the Europeans to Judies, as well as the mechanism of transforming the Jewish feeling of self-culpability into a non-Jewish one of culpability, of self-victimization in victimization (that partially aroused the contemporary antipathy against them) ran continuously inside the psycho-social and artistic interiority of the Mediterranean peoples. Mention can be made of a history of the Jews, that from the Pentateuch obsessively taken over in broad lines in The Old and The New Testament,

according to the structural law about the analogical works: Praise the Lord and call His name, speak about His things among the nations.Remember His wonders, which He made, His wonders and the judgments of His mouth. Abrahams nation, His slaves (our italics), Jacobs sons, His chosen ones (our italics). And He did put eternal bond to Jacob, to His order and to Israel, by saying: It is to you Ill give the Canaan land, your part of inheritance. Then when they got few in number, and foreign on their land, and they were passing from one tribe to another, from one empire to another, He did not let any man to do wrong to them and scolded them, the emperors, by telling them: Dont touch My annonointed ones (our italics) and do not be sly against My prophets. And He summoned hunger over the world and broke the grain blade. He sent man before them, and bondsman was Joseph commissioned. They humbled him by placing his feet in the stocks; through iron passed his soul until His word (our italics) came. Gods word inflamed him, the emperor sent order and set him free. He set him master to his house and head over all his army, so that he could teach his chieftains as he was teaching himself and his elderly to get wise.(our italics). And Israel entered Egypt and Jacob lived as a foreigner (our italics) on Hams land. And He multiplied His people very and strengthened them, more than their enemies. He turned their hearts so as to hate his people, to be sly against His bondsmen. He sent Moses, His bondsman, Aaron whom He chose. He was putting in them the words of His signs and of His wonders on Hams land. He sent darkness and darkened them, as they embittered His words; He turned their waters into blood and killed their fish; He had their land draw out the frogs into the rooms of their emperors. He uttered and the dog fly came, and a multitude of flies over all their borders. In their rains He put hail, and burning fire in their land; and He blew their vineyards and fig trees and broke the trees of their borders and thrashed all the new born on their land, ripe crop of all their pains. And He drew them out with silver and with gold and there was no sick man in their tribes. Joyful was Egypt on their exodus, as fear of them had seized them. He stretched a cloud to cover them, and fire to light them at night. He summoned and there

came quails, and with manna He filled their mouths. He chopped stone and there flowed waters and there ran rivers into the waterless earth. As He recalled the word sacred to Him, as said to Abraham, His bondsman. And He drew His people into joy and the chosen ones (our italics) into gladness. And He gave them the countries of the tribes and the exertions of the peoples did they inherit so as to guard His justice and His law to obey. Psalm 105 continues the history unfolding the afflictions that befell on the chosen people because they did not understand Gods wonders, and soon forgot His things and did not bear His counsel. And they made calves in Horeb and they knelt down to pray to the idol Then they despised the desired land and did not believe His word, but in their tents they were caviling and wouldnt listen to the Lords voice They made sacrifices for Baal-Pear and ate the sacrifices to the dead, and they were angering Him with their deeds and died many of them. They did not exterminate the tribes the Lord mentioned to them, but got mixed up with the tribes and learned their acts and served the things of their idols, and went off their head, and sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the idols, and shed innocent blood, the blood of their sons and daughters who they sacrificed to the idols from Canaan and the country thus got defiled through murders (our italics). This ballad of history before becoming Psalm 105, which is attributed to King David - which covers the whole Genesis (without the creation and annihilation by the Flood) and the Exodus, probably retold to musical accompaniment in the evening round the fire, where the nomad shepherds stopped to make a halt - , comprises by itself the fundamental principles of the Jews theo-sociology, structured according to a pastoral pattern. The Bible shows to us how Abrahams, Isaacs and Jacobs tribes, Gods bondsmen, already His chosen ones, did not always listen to the divine order and got mixed up with the nations from Canaan instead of destroying them, which brought about them a destiny of theo-prompted suffering. The legend is wavering and conceals some incidents that sometimes are not convenient; on the contrary, history is, with or without its consent, more

honest about the past. It retells to us how, by the time they became the chosen people through Jacob-Israel, that is Jacob who wrestled with God (or with the angel ?), Semite tribes migrated from the Persian golf about 4th millennium B C towards the fertile fields of Mesopotamia, where part of the shepherds became farmers , another part, well-to-do townspeople. This is supposed to have been the case with the family of he who experienced for the first time the revelation of the unique God, Abraham. According to some philologists, the name of these relatively heterogeneous tribes, Habiru (or Apiru) from which perhaps the word Jew derived, would have meant thief or trampviii; according to others, Eber meant the preposition or the adverb across, or beyond (across Jordan), or it was the name of one of Abrahams ancestorsviii , thus the Abrahamites being the same as the Habirites. From still obscure reasons (perhaps religious), about 1800 B C., some tribes left Haran fortress, where Terah, Abrahams father was a very well off man, and went to the fertile country of Canaan. From Canaan, where Abraham bought a tilled land, his descendants crossed to Egypt at the time of the domination of the Hicsoshs. The privileged position at court of a Jew Joseph, son of Jacob and of Rahall, might be explained through the special situation of Egypt as occupied country between 1700-1500 B C. Likened to former conquerors, after their chasing, the Jews (who in the meantime had also got multiplied in a disquieting way for the Egyptians) begin to get antagonized, regarded as suspect, persecuted, submitted to the hard work of constructing a new capital. This antipathy led, as several millennia later, to hatred and then to genocide, even if in Egypt there was no taking up of the question of the total extermination of the Jews as in the Medieval age or during the III-rd Reich. Already in Egypt, a new communitarian consciousness is substantiated, for one thing because of the pressure of the environment, for another thing because of the exceptional status (of tolerance) of the sons of Israel (for natives foreigners, bondsmen, also thieves, maybe); this new consciousness is based primarily on maintaining the memory of the patriarch alive and intact, and secondarily on self-isolation. The history of the patriarchs became cult, and

came to structure representations about cosmos, people, family, the whole fabulation potential, including the religion of the Jews, and later on, of the Christians. It was not the Jews who invented the monotheism, but they granted it the paternalist meaning: there is a God, whose name YAH WEH (I am what I am) is not connected, like others, to concrete phenomena, whose face is unseen, but who nevertheless behaves like a heedful caring father, demanding about his sons upbringing, violent sometimes, more often than not justly so, with great ambitions for his favorite sons to become masters of the world -. Many Jews must have come out of Egypt before following Moses: the Egyptian racial segregation on the one hand, their refusal to mix up among other peoples on the other hand, the feeling that they are humiliated and unwanted, must have determined the rich ones to run to Greece, Asia Minor, perhaps even to Europe, or to other more distant regions, up to the Extreme Orient or to America. On the other hand, the foul mouths of history even say that in the illustrious exodus, Moses would have headed only the poor Jews, because the rich ones had fled from the empire of the pharaohs long ago. The Jews did not turn Moses, their first rescuer, into a divinity; Moses was and remained a law-maker, a hero, a magician, a creator of religion, and for many specialists, primarily an initiate into esotericism. He may not have been a pure Jew, or one at all, but surely he was an initiate in the Egyptian mysteries, where from he must also have assimilated the monotheism, in fact, a traitor of the Egyptian priests who were severely guarding their knowledge. Neither Plato nor Pythagoras is said to have succeeded in taking the tests of the sacerdotal secret, so that neither the one nor the other managed to finalize the initiation. To turn an esoteric principle into a religion and then into a pattern of social organization was already a sacrilege. The Egyptian sacred monotheism had never left the sanctuary. In Egypt, authority was based on knowledge not on force as in Babylon. To impose the principle of order, of law within a universal chaos so as to persuade some common people about the power of order was a colossal enterprise, but a

priestly infringement. His precursors, Abraham, probably a Caldeean initiate, Isaac and Jacob had prepared the Jew people for accepting monotheism. Yet both the representation of the spiritual superiority and the cult of the physical paternity had been acted on for a long time by the old priests. The legendary genealogy from the Genesis : Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph more likely an invented than a real one rather than ensuring the narrative coherence of the book, is meant to assert the idea of a monotheist tradition, based on the patriarchs filiations of the inmates of the dessert. They experienced the revelation of the unique, of the evolution, which from the viewpoint of esotericism, develops certain meanings: descendancy (embodiment in matter) and ascendancy (transubstantiation), Jacobs ladder being only a metaphor for an initiatrix principle. The bread and the wine (later Jesus, more likely than not He Himself an initiate and not an ordinary Jew scholar) replace the sacrifice of flesh and blood; it is with bread and wine that Melchisedek, the king of Salem, welcomes Abraham, the gesture probably being a token of recognizing the initiates from various places among themselvesviii. Chosarsiph (Moses presupposed Egyptian name) took refuge with a Moabite priest, his would-be father-in-law, also a practitioner of a monotheist cult. He receives the laws on the Sinai mountain, a mystic centre for several centuries, rising with its peak wrapped in clouds in the middle of the barren dessert natural image for the idea of a unique revealing entity -. Moses was initiated in the mystery of the eternal life, eternal life being for numerous Indo-European peoples symbolized by the cross sign or by the swastika (the Egyptians often imagined Isis, the swastika in one hand and the lotus flower in the other both as tokens of initiation), as well as in some secrets related to the science of physics, such as the engendering of electricity (the covenant Ark being, according to many researchers, nothing else but electricity generator). Yet Moses did not lose his power as the Nazirite Samson was to, later on, by disclosures. It is common knowledge that no religion can get founded

without an initiator, a master, and without mystery, no state without a law-maker, no people without a symbol, an emblem; and, especially, it is known that religion catalyzes the political and ethic identity of a community. The alliance between the Habiru (Eberes, Apirus) and other tribes into a nation was symbolized by the very covenant Ark (only Moses and Aaron being allowed to access it, and even they were to be dressed only in flax tissue, known for not being a good electricity conductor). According to some views (not only legend-based), the spiritual son of Hermes the Trismegistus (Toth god with the Egyptians), Moses founded a state order that lasted several centuries after him (until Saul was elected as king); in this order, the executive power was submitted to the juridical one, while the latter was to the religious one of the priests (See The Exodus, 18, 19-21). He enforced the law in terms of a mixture of mystery and terror. His god resembled him: all-knowing, all powerful, generous, whimsical, tyrannical, wise, but above all, unique, no longer sharing the power as Moses had done with Aaron. The Mosaic religion as political strategy became the founding layer of the Israelian state. The polytheist instinct related to the Naturist one of the surrounding peoples, but even of the Jews contaminated by their neighbors, often burst out jeopardizing Moses spiritualist monotheism. This is why, he had to resort to violence against the Jews, so as to suppress (in the Jews) first and foremost their attempt at individual thinking and to direct them back to the collective one, as the instinctual tendency of tribal separation was still powerful with the former nomads. Moses believers did not deify him as the Egyptians did with Toth, or the Christians with Jesus. He remained the Patriarch, the Prophet, the leader and not more. He died, was killed, nobody knows, but was buried like an ordinary mortal some place.

From whatever is known besides The Bible, at the time of starting to conquer the many state territory of the Canaan, Moses Jews were a poor people

and psychically traumatized. Along religious channel, they had been inoculated the notion of chosen people in exchange of a contract arrangement that stipulated The Torah, the law; the idea that Israel is a chosen people represents rather a cluster of obligations than of privileges (wrote Josy Eisenberg in his history about the Jews). The Law is a long apprenticeship, a theory difficult to implement, a neuro-pathogen agent especially for the nomad peoples. The instinctive human element is prepared any moment to get reactivated, like the tribal instinct that results in a peoples breaking up. Do the totalitarian Unitarianism and racism become acceptable requirements under such circumstances ? The Jews had to wage wars with many Semite peoples such as the Moabites, the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Amorites, the Madianites., with other tribes not mentioned in The Bible, with a developed civilization that the Bible does not mention and which the Greeks called Phoenicians. It is known that part of the Phoenicians emigrated to the West, founded Carthagine in the North Africa and got as far as Spain, being also followed on their exodus by many Jews, to be later called Sephards or Sapharads, who, according to some views, are the handsome Spanish Jews already turned into Arabs and Europeans by other tribes. Ugarit, the Paris of the Canaan Europe, centre of an exceptionally commercial and cultural life is not mentioned in The Bible either, although even in 4th millennium B C, it was the meeting point between great civilizations such as the Cretan and the Mesopotamian ones. The decline periods of Egypt, under whose ruling it often was, favors the development of its own economy and cult in Ugarit. The Age of Bronze was also the Age of Gold of the fortress: merchants and artists, scholars and poets, coming from Syria, Cyprus, Greece built here palaces and temples to worship god Dagon and other gods, such as Baal, and especially the mother goddess, Asher. The Ugaritic Texts published by Cyrus Herzel Gordon in Analecta Orientalia, Rome 1855 demonstrates a half disclosed truth: how much the Biblical poetry is indebted to the Ugaritic one. But

the influence of the Cretan religion, where the other goddess was regarded as primordial goddess (Minos being, according to the latest researchers, a womanking, minos meaning in fact king), was very powerful in Canaan. Some statues of Asher (Astarte) represents her as richly clothed, adorned with bracelets and earrings, sometimes with a snake (phallic but also initiatrix symbol), resembling the famous goddess from Knossos, the one with her hands raised above her head, holding two serpents. Thus the Jews arrive at the Canaan of a flourishing cosmopolitan civilization, of welfare as a mode of existence, and they start their wars for conquering the region, according to the prophet Jeremiah (47, 4) about the same time as another people, of non-Semite origin, representing the remnants of the population from Caftor island, a toponymic which, according to some linguists, would refer to Crete island. One of the most known archeologists of the Biblical space, the American scientist W F Albright argues in favor of the Pelage (Iranian) origin of these sea men, as the inhabitants from South of Troy are called in some ancient inscriptions or in other documents; therefore not islanders, as names such as Goliath or Achish are also met in South Anatolia. According to other scholars, the Philistines, by which is meant the non-Semite enemies of the Jews, would have been Venetian navigators, pirates that used to control the coasts of Egypt, Syria, the Canaan. Irrespective of where they came from Crete, Anatolia, Venice or Troy - they got easily integrated in the Canaan civilization (Egyptian- Mesopotamiano-Cretan), and built their own powerful fortresses, such as Askalon, Gaza, Ekron, Gath, fortresses that became buffers between the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian empires, always in dispute. To the military superiority of the seamen is added the skill of iron processing, which secured them a privileged position in the region, because, as we learn from I Kings 13,20, even the Jews, their enemies had to turn to them so as to sharpen the iron of their plough. Always allied with the adversaries of the Jews (in fact, with all the peoples around the territories conquered by them), they were continually at war with Israels people, until king Davids time, king who defeated

them definitively, obliging them to pay tribute; and they gradually disappeared from the real history, and finally from the Biblical one. On good terms with the Canaan peoples, from whom they also took over the gods Dagon, Baal, Astarte, the Philistines became fierce enemies of the other newcomers, whom in fact they involuntarily determined to learn superior fighting strategies, while under the impact of the continuous threat constraining them to get united under a name, a law, a religion, a state and a king. In the Bible, the Philistines are constantly present as enemies to the Jews: Samson kills 600 Philistines with an ox chap, and then he dies in Dagons temple, which he breaks down by smashing its columns; Saul and his son Jonathan die in the fight against them; David kills Goliath the Philistine with a sling, then he allies with them against Sauls armies who wanted to kill him; finally, he regains the covenant Ark and decisively defeats them. When the Philistine peril disappeared, after king Solomons death, the Israel state divided into two kingdoms, Israel and Judea; and there resurfaced the tribal enmity between diverse Israelite tribes. This enmity was exploited by the Egyptians and the Asiro-Babylonians so as to simplify the conquest of the region; the Law which they endeavor to obey save the Jews from total disappearance through integration. And the Diaspora. Were the Jews those Habiru or Hapiriu who are often mentioned in the letters from Tell-al-Amarna (written in the then Franca language, Acadian), the former capital of the 18th Pharaoh dynasty, between 16 -14 B C? The letters were discovered together with the famous bust of Nephritis, the wife of the pharaoh Amenofis IV, in 1890. In some letters, the pharaohs complain about the Habiru tribes which they call thieves. A king from Jerusalem also signaled an invasion of these Habiru, mercenaries and thieves alike. Their fighting strategy was a special one, as shown by the mentioned letters: they took action in small groups in numerous places, thus giving the impression of being very many, and provoking an awful chaos in the fortress under attack. As for fidelity, they were always on the side of the winners. They did not have any place in the Canaan or

the Egyptian society, and sold their confidence to those who paid better. In The Bible as well, there appear some loafers who joined Iefta the Galaadite, in the Tob region (The Judges, 11,13). According to the American bibliologist scholar G E Mendenhallviii as well, these Habiru were not a tribe, but an association of tribes, while their name did not designate the people that tried to get infiltrated into the 14th century Canaan, but a word of contempt about any kind of enemies, prates, thieves, mercenaries. According to some bibliologists, the letters from Tell-al-Amarna refer to events taking place at least 100 years before the Exodus and before the wars from Joshuas time, wars by which the Israelites conquered the Eastern part of Jordan. Are the Jews therefore the descendants of those Habiru, loafers, mercenaries, the beyond enemies (Ever), or are they the enemies of the Egyptians and of all the Canaan fortresses in general ? Or were they only Gods bondsmen, His chosen ones ever since Abrahams time, the nomads who were allowed to enter the rich fortresses only by day, remaining outside the walls at night, the emigrants welcomed spitefully, used for some mean tasks, despised like some sheep shepherds whom the Egyptians could not eat together with, because these are vile, as Joseph himself says (Genesis 43, 32), while advising his brothers not to disclose their true trade in front of the pharaoh, but to tell him: Your bondsmen were cattle raisers ever since our youth till now, like us and like our parents, so that they could be allowed to settle down in the Goshen county as farmers: Because for the Egyptians, vile is every sheep shepherd, Joseph warns his brothers. The disdain against the Habiru might have been caused by their trade as sheep shepherds and not necessarily because they would all have been thieves. Anyway, even before Jacobs arrival in Egypt and Canaan, the Israelites did not enjoy good reputation in that land. That even the Jews guarded against their older name the Acadian Habiru is proved by the fact that already in The Genesis, they become Jacobs Israels peoples, Israelites, Judies in Diaspora.

Yet their age-old appellative did not disappear from the international language; on the contrary, it enjoyed a better destiny than that of Judie which has acquired negative connotations; the Jew does not bear the burden of those negative connotations, it even enjoyed also words of praise. Maria de Medici said about a Jew physician, a scholar of high rank at her court, that he was a good Judie and a true Jew. Along with the acknowledged hostility against the Jews from Egypt, there emerges the Jew question. This antipathy is Biblically motivated, not only by the shortcomings of the Habiru tribes, as mentioned in the letters between he pharaohs and the monarchs of the Canaan fortresses. It is in fact one motivated by belligerent strategy. Because the Jews were on the increase, because they were unfaithful even to those who had given them the fertile land from the Nile valley in the Goshen county to settle on, and because they were ready to ally with the enemies of the Egyptians, not only for the sake of payment, but also out of revenge on those who were mixing their generosity with arrogance and disdain, they seem to the pharaoh Ramesses II (1290-1224) as a real danger, in case they had waged wars with the Hittites, whose empire was becoming all the more powerful and threatening to Egypt. But both Joseph and his brothers died is written in Exodus, 6-11 and all those from their time. And Israels sons were born in great number and multiplied, grew up and got strong very much and the country was filled with them. But another king rose over Egypt, who had not known Joseph. This one told his people: Look, the tribe of Israels sons is in great multitude and is more powerful than us. Come then to oppress them, so that they should not multiply any longer and lest at war time they should unite with our enemies, and by defeating us, to go away from our country. The Jews were submitted to the hardest construction works. Eliopoulos and other grand fortresses required an immense working force; and the Egyptians, although not bearing them and fearing their disloyalty at war time, did not let them go out of Goshen, and used them as working force in construction. Let heavier work be laid upon the men that they may labor at it and pay no regard to lying words

(Exodus 5,9). The lying words are an allusion to the Abrahamist monotheism of the Jews who had also shared Amenofis IVs reformist attempt; Amenofis IV had wanted to introduce Atons cult, instead of the traditional Naturist polytheism. The persecution of the Israelite minority became more and more unbearable. You shall no longer give the people straw to make bricks, as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. But the number of bricks which they made heretofore you shall lay upon them, you shall by no means lessen it; for they are idle; therefore they cry, Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God (Exodus 5, 7-8). The first pogrom took place before Moses emergence in the history of the Jews: Then pharaoh commanded all his people, Every son that s born to the Hebrews, you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live (Exodus 1, 22). Strangely, on leaving Egypt, the Jews take with them not only sheep and oxen, the unleavened dough in troughs, but also the gold and silver vases of the Egyptians. Thus they despoiled the Egyptians (Exodus, 12,36). (Could they have recalled. the old trade of the Habiru tribe?) Along with the anti-Jew persecutions, there emerge the first signs of the cultic extremism that led to the foundation of the Jew racismviii. The celebration of their Easter also implies hatred against the foreigners. And after their coming out of Egypt (our italics), the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the Pass-over: no foreigner shall eat of it (our italics); but every slave that is bought for money may eat of it after you have circumcised himAnd when a stranger shall sojourn with you and would keep the Passover to the Lord, let all his males be circumcised, then he may come near and keep it; he shall be as a native to the land. But no uncircumcised person shall eat of it (Exodus, 12, 4349). The xenophobe passages (motivated in The Exodus by the condition of the Jews) are not the only ones from The Pentateuch: You shall make no covenant with them (the other nations the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites), and

show no mercy to them. You shall not make marriages with them, giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters from your sons.But thus shall you deal with them: you shall break down their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn (o u) their graven images with fire. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession, out of all the peoples that are on the face of the earth (Deuteronomy 7, 2-6). When after Cyruss edict in 538, some Jews returned from exile, and Ezra decided to reintroduce Torah, he also intended to restore ethnic purity along with faith, as required by Moses centuries ago. And Ezra the priest stood up and said to them, You have trespassed and married foreign women, and so increased the guilt of Israel. Now then make confession to the Lord the God of your fathers, and do his will; separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign wives (Ezra 10, 10-11). Nehemiah also severely scolds the Judies, who during their exile combined with other tribes through their mixed up marriages. In those days also I saw the Jews who had married women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab,And I contended with them and cursed them and beat some of them and pulled out their hair; and I made them take oath in the name of God, saying You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves (Nehemiah 12, 23-30). The Jew racism is motivated religiously almost without exception. In His decision about the chosen people, the Lord did not accept the neighboring tribes to become part of or to enjoy this grace. The molding of an ethic identity requires its totalitarian-racist sacrifices; this seems to be the philosophy of the Biblical history. Moses himself, although married to an Ethiopian woman (which did not spare him Mariams grumblings, Aarons sister, as well as of other characters from the clerical elite) had been xenophobe at least, if not altogether racist. According to some views, he would have led the Jews who had followed him across the dessert for 50 years, instead of having taken them along the shortcut to Sinai; so that there should get erased the generation of those inclined to make

ethnic and religious concessions to Egyptian pagans; as they were used to in the dream land of Goshen, where welfare and the lavish nature had surely rendered the Jews tolerant, preoccupied by their wellbeing rather than by their ethnic purity, bent to concrete thought, rather than to the abstractions of the law. In The Bible, this detour which took the toll of dozens of human lives and was like a purgatory for Moses proselytes is motivated by Moses fear, lest, discouraged and daunted by the wars they had to wage, some Jews should have returned (back) to Goshen; because the Jews followed Moses willingly, but also out of constraint. They often cursed the day when galvanized by their Saviors word, narcotized by mass psychology decided to leave Egypt; and in the leaders absence, and with Aarons consent (the great Levite priest), they made a gold idol, in the hope of getting their redemption from, rather than getting redeemed from the new God, wrapped as He was in the fog of the Sinai mountain, and whose voice could be heard only by Moses, and whose face could not be seen by anybody, as nobody was allowed to. Moses monotheism required a xenophobe God, a jealous, revengeful and exclusivist one. In this respect, how could a people molded by a religion based on intolerance against the other denominations have become internationalist in the meaning of tolerance and compromise? (And God spoke all these words, saying I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before meYou shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me(our italics) (Exodus 20, 1-3,5) Yet the Jews who had followed Moses did not turn out to be worth the sacrifices that they had been required to make when they had been promised an uncertain future. While expecting a better life on the promised land, the men began to play harlot with the daughters of Moab. These invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods and the people ate and bowed down to their gods. So Israel yoked himself to Baal of Peor. And the anger of the Lord was kindled

against Israel; and the Lord said to Moses: Take all the chiefs of the people, and hang them in the sun before the Lord, that the fierce anger of the Lord may turn away from Israel (Numbers 25, 1-5). There follows a terribly cruel episode: And behold, one of the people of Israel came and brought a Middianite woman to his family in the sight of Moses, and in the sight of the whole congregation of the people of Israel while they were weeping at the door of the tent of meeting. When Phinehas the son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, saw it, he rose and left the congregation, and took a spear in his hand and went after the man of Israel into the inner room, and pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, through their body. Thus the plague was stayed from the people of Israel. Nevertheless those that died by the plague were twenty four thousand(our italics)(Numbers 25, 6-9) For the Jews, any combination with other tribes is a sacrilege, a harlot playing (But the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab). The crisis of ethnic identity was bringing about extremist xenophobia. The Jew ancient racism was founded on rounds of ethnic religious purity, as well as on the notion of racial superiority (chosen people). But what distinguishes it from the Medieval, modern one and from the contemporary European one is regard for alterity, for the others as Gods creatures, as well as the absence of the notion of the destruction of the non-Jews: one does not mix up with them, one does not take meals with them, one does not accept their faiths; but Moses tells them You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt (Exodus 22, 21). Their xenophobia based as it was on some tribal instincts, more active with the former sheep and cattle raisers, with farmers than with the townspeople of the Canaan fortresses was the prerequisite of shaping out an ethic identity, to subsequently become a state foundation, rather than a mere hatred against the others. When self-calling chosen people, they really give vent to the mood of a complexed unconsciousness: while everybody regarded them as harlot playing, as not cultivated, as thieves, they begin to think high of themselves, in an attempt at

defending against the arrogance of those around by prioritizing the soul life, the morals, of something that seems mysterious, strange, unattainable to the others. In fact, they bring to life and to the world the wonderful idea that Immanuel Kant was also to worship: the sublime nature of morals. This is how there begins the Bovary drama of the people that settled eastward and westward of Jordan; an eternal drama that has always consisted of a striking contradiction between what they were like and what they conceived of themselves to be, between the way they thought about themselves and the way the others were treating them. The former nomads, to whom their God had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance (Acts 13, 19), who had been priested by king shepherds, such as Saul and David, who had been gradually converted to agriculture and with difficulty to fortress life (it was not for nothing they were forbidden cut-stone by law, and according to some legends, only in Solomons time were they able to build a temple, whose stones would have been cut by a worm that had been gnawing at the rocks inside); who had been bearing the rigors of their own laws with difficulty, those former nomads are all the more convinced that they have to fulfill a universal mission. The geographic universalism was far from being new in the Orient, where several monarchs aspired for becoming world kings (this would also have been Alexander the Macedons dream). As we were remarking, this universalism contaminated the tyrants from all times; only that the Jews did not self-assign the target of conquering the world by weapons, but through the power of spirit, through the written word, thus replacing the geographic universalism by that of the logos. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you.(our italics).(Genesis 12, 2-3), God tells the first patriarch of the Jews, Abraham. Indoctrinated in this way, the Jews gradually lose their contact with reality, always regard themselves as missionaries, get always at odds with their neighbors, whose territories they had partially occupied, out of the notion that it was only natural to be treated as missionaries, as a super race, as

chosen people by the other inhabitants of Canaan as well. They begin to behave all the more like a neurosis-suffering collectivity (at some moments, overestimating themselves, while humbling themselves at other times), an anxious, aggressive, desperate, catastrophic collectivity. The Biblical weeping is perhaps the most conspicuous mood that distinguishes the Jews from those around them. It is true that they had been enslaved, that their fortress had been destroyed; but equally true is that they were not an exception. The wars in the Orient meant mass destruction and deportation. But on the other hand, their Zion-return was desired in the Biblical chant, rather than in reality. After only 50 years exile, many Jews came to not wanting to follow Nehemiahs and Ezekiels call of returning to rebuild their country. They preferred to lament and to live prosperously in Babylon and in other Oriental metropolises. As any people that arrives later and claims territories on the strength of some laws obeyed only by themselves, the Jews were being antagonized by those around; in this way, the Jews rendered themselves guilty and subject to enmity, while the Bible worked to a great extent to support this representation. If we re-read the Psalms, we can easily notice that the greatest frequency is taken by words such as enemy, enmity, disgrace or shame, or hatred. In the Biblical song, the Jew who weeps is always wronged against, always feels despised for his poverty, threatened by enemies, haunted by terrors, tormented by remorse; he is left only with the obsessive halleluiah, a praise to God that makes him suffer, but Who surely will redeem him some time by forgiving his guilt; it is a guilt that he is not very conscious about, although he knows he incurs it. And it will especially help him to take revenge on his neighbors. While the neighboring peoples poetry was eulogizing nature, beauty, the richness of gods and of people, power and Eros, long before the emergence of Christianity, they bewail all the time. Their favorite character is the amawin, the poor man, who is usually needy because of the other Jews, but especially the non-Jews, and who wants revenge: I am not afraid of ten thousands of people/

who have set themselves against me round about(Psalm 3,6); Who eat up my people as they eat bread (Psalm 13,4); You would confound the plans of the poor, but the Lord is his refuge/O that deliverance for Israel would come out of Zion!(Psalm 13, 6); He delivered me from my strong enemy,/ and from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me (Psalm 17,7); I pursued my enemies and overtook them;/and did not turn back till they were consumed (Psalm 17, 37); You will make them as a blazing oven when you appear/The Lord will swallow them up in his wrath;/ and fire will consume them./You will destroy their offspring from the earth,/and their children from among the sons of men (Psalm 20, 9-10); But I am a warm, and no man; scorned by men, and despised by the people. (our italics) (Psalm 21, 6); My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?( Psalm 21,1); Yes, dogs are round about me;/ a company of evil doers encircle me;/they have pierced my hands and feet -/I can count all my bones -/they stare and gloat over me; they divide my garments among them,/ and for my raiment they cast lots(Psalm 20, 17-20)viii ; Nay, for thy sake we are slain all day long,/and accounted as sheep for slaughter./Rouse thy self! Why sleepiest thou, O Lord? Awake ! Do not cast us off for ever! (Psalm 43, 22-23); Awake to punish all the nations;/spare none of those who treacherously plot evilconsume them in wrath,/consume them till they are no more (our italics)(Psalm 59, 5-6). As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;/as wax melts before fire,/let the wicked perish before God! (Psalm 67, 1-2); For it is for thy sake that I have borne reproach,/that shame has covered my face(our italics)thou knowest my reproach,/and my shame and my dishonor ;/my foes are all known to thee./Insults have broken my heart,/so that I am in despair/But I am afflicted and in pain;/let thy salvation, O God, set me on high!(Psalm 68, 9, 22, 23); In Thee, O Lord, do I take refuge; let me never be put to shame!(Psalm 70,1) and so on. The Bibliologists have noticed the following about the Biblical texts: there is a scarcity of details about describing wealth, luxury, and the life led in the well off fortresses round Israel. Only when depicting the palace and the temple built

by king Solomon does the anonymous author give vent to his words of praise and admiration for the wealth of Gods house and the richness of the Kings house (Psalm 13, 11-16). Anti-Jewishness as collective expression or manifestation of rejecting the Jews in the Biblical ancient times anti-Jewishness that generated a continuous lamentation, an anxious weeping, as well as a fierce thirst for revenge - must also have had other causes, much more profound ones, than the mere antipathy against an invader, ridiculous in his simplicity and megalomania. The Jews monotheist cult got shaped out in various Afro-Asian regions that they had migrated across. It surely had more than one Egyptian sources of ascendancy: not only Egyptian (if we take into account Moses grounding at the Egyptian sacerdotal school) but also Iranian (their ancestors came from the Persian Golf, while to Moses, divinity was revealed as a burning shrub, as with the Zoroastrishts), Medianite (Ietro, Moses father-in-law, as a priest, practiced monotheism, and it was not incidental that Moses took refuge with him, fearing the Egyptians). Yahweh of the Jews can be neither seen nor imagined; he is the live God, who works as a manifestation of cosmic energy invisible yet perceivable through His work (influence or manifestation) over matter. And what is most important, nothing turns up to be hap hazardous in the operation of this force which is the Jew God; everything is law, divine design. Once the Jews decisively settled down in Canaan, there begins a real god war: on one side, the local gods, personifications of nature forces or of human instincts as typical of all the peoples inhabiting geographical spaces, rich in vegetation and fertile - ; on the other side, Yahweh (also called Shavuot), a faceless and nameless god (I am who I am), an action, not an object; outcome of a revelation experienced by an imagination fostered in the barren space of the dessert covered only by the immense tent of the ruthless sky by day through the heat it issues; by night, full of stars, it is the agent of the metaphysical thrill or furor: the notion of transcendence. Baal, Astarte (Ashero), Dagon, Isis, Osiris,

Hator, Tamuz were living in proximity with mortals, with whom as also the Greeks they were almost on familiar terms. The Abrahamsen cult was still a naturist one, not as intellectualist as the Yahwism. The Abrahamites were worshipping mountains, animals, were dendrolatry. But even in the ancient phase of the Hebrew cult, probably under the Zoroaster influence, among other sacrifice types, there was also performed the burning up, in other words, the holocaust. The burning up became the supreme sacrifice in Yahwism, being dedicated only to Yahweh. (Far be it for us to uphold that the Jews did self-assign the holocaust, although some archeological findings prove that in pre-Biblical history, the Judies rite of burning up was not confined to animals only, but extended to human sacrifice). Nevertheless, Yahweh borrows some of His qualities (reason why He is also called Elohim in the first Book of Genesis, interpreted as the plural of majesty or as a polytheist residuum), some qualities from Baal (He can travel through clouds: Sing praise to the Lord,/to Him who rides through clouds is written in Psalm 69) and some qualities from some Canaan gods of war (then He is called Shavuot, emerges as head of armies and helps the Israelites to conquer the promised lands in the Jordan valley . Yet He Yahweh maintains His absolute paternal power, which flagrantly distinguishes his cult from that of the neighbors gods. With the Jews, there surfaced the utter elimination of the mother goddess: Yahwehs children are motherless, as some psychoanalysts remarked; they only obey their divine father who is androgynous, in other words perfect. The exclusivist paternalism of Yahwism fully insulated the Jews from the other peoples around them, isolation that led to self-isolation and to the isolation complex that has haunted them like a congenital tare in the course of their whole history. With farming peoples, the mother goddess was worshipped as fecundity goddess; with urban peoples, as Eros goddess of pleasure. It is interesting what happened to Lilith, Adams other wife, the one who, according to Zohar legends, would also have dated after their being chased away from Paradise. Not only did the subsequent editors of Genesis not mention her at all letting Adam in the

company of a nave and household wife, who in fact also leads him to catastrophe -, but also the beautiful Lilith was turned, by an imagination tyrannized by the patriarchal pastoral Puritanism, into a demon who kills children; reason why numerous talismans with her face were found, talismans that children used to wear so as to get protected against the prostitute child-murderer, because Lilith was the woman of the adolescents erotic dreams and the erotic nightmare of the man dissatisfied inside the gynaeceum relation, and however faithful he may have remained when self-aware to the mother-wife (otherwise without importance), his nights were according to legends and to numerous plastic representations disturbed by the emergence of she who, without antinaturist self-mutilation, was worshipped by the Canaans and by the Babylonians, as a goddess or priestess of the fecundity mysteries, of the cosmic orgasm, and therefore, called sacred prostituteviii. Might the anonymous authors of the Bible have been determined by their nostalgia for the fatal Lilith (often represented with a serpent body) to also include Solomons Chant among the texts of somber lamentations, of history, of wisdom? Could the chant of a natural love affair be a naturist accident, subsequently rescued through the priests allegorization, and interpreted, in the Yahwist sense, as hymn to a mystic conjugality that referred to wedding, the union between God and the chosen people? Many lucid exegetes wonder even today about Sulamithas place beside Sarah, Rahila, Rebecca, Judith and Esther, taking into account that she was an erotically provoking Venus from Sharon, loaded with jewelry, perfumed, aggressive in approaching men, insistent to the point of indecency ? Sulamitha was not a priestess of lewd love, nor was she a mother to be devoted to her husband and children! And nevertheless, between Sulamitha, Judith, Esthera and Lilith, there is a common, very important element: their awareness of the womans seductive power that she can employ not only to attain a personal goal the fulfillment of her own erotic desire - but also to serve collectivity. Liliths daughters Juditha and Esther ,rather than the wise men with their armies, managed to rescue the Jews from their

enemies. Therefore the Jews turned the mother goddess of the Canaanites into a dangerous demon. Why? It is important to ask. This attitude of dealing with nature and womanviii, of asserting an empty scenery populated with psychopaths as an existential and artistic ideal led to their utter isolation, to the radicalization of the rejection phenomenon and to the transformation of a whole people into an agent generating suspicion and even anxiety for those around. On the other hand, the Jews relation to their god was one of almost total paternal determination. This predestinated homme determine (Gillabert) was deprived of any initiative; he does not manage to become a mature individual, but always remains the child, the son, the member of a collectivity that thinks (of) him. Thus, ever since the Yahwist phase of the Hebrew denomination, the Jew is shaped up in the mentality of a collectivity affiliation. All along his future existence, the Jew-self was to easily renounce his individual thinking, in favor of the communitarian one. This renunciation of personal thinking primarily accounts for their success in obeying laws and in the ensuing correlatives of social and political power. The Judiezed and Judiezing Christianity partially failed at this very point: the impact between the people the law. As religion of the Mediterranean peoples, it failed only at certain periods (and even then, at the risk of bringing about a schizoid individual, with a continuous double life) to turn the individual into a man of collectivity and the Christian into a law-abiding man. The Christian man (and in stating this, we do not mean the sects, whatever they might be), although regarding himself as absolved from the guilt of having committed the crime of all crimes, the murder of the Redeemer, nevertheless does not await the Last Judgment too lightly. The trauma of the Judie people, their devastating guilt has extended over the whole Christian world. The Europeans did not inherit the guilt and fear-complex from the Greeks, but from the Jews. Through the rediscovery of the pagan culture, Europe retrieved the happiness of living in communion with nature. Then, in a naturist region, there once emerged a people that embraced a profoundly spiritualist doctrine as unique, ineffable (and not only did they endorse

it theoretically, but they also employed it with an expansionist purpose). Their morals and moral-ism are ranked with this pan-spiritualism that had nothing to do with the spirit of the place and of the time. What can be seen from the description of their mistakes, punishments, penitence is that the Jews did not find it easy to dodge the instinctual naturist temptations either. And it was a matter not only of the error of attending the ashers (prostitution houses) of the pagans, but also a matter of imitating nature. According to Aristotle, this type of imitation is also correlated to an instinct specific to man, not only the Greek one naturally. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth (Exodus 20,4) is Yahwehs command. Even if the barren space of the dessert which their ancestors had wandered across had molded them in the spirit of abstract thinking, awakening their longing for transcendence, yet their prolonged mode of living in the fertile delta of the Nile or in the flourishing valley of Jordan, neighboring the people who cheerfully worshipped and represented animals, flowers, gods, and kings in stone had surely re-molded them. Even Moses, who had spent his childhood in the flourishing Egypt, at a given moment orders the manufacturing of a copper serpent for those who, bitten by it, were to get healed by looking at it. Could this therapy have been the cause of Moses giving up on a divine command? Or maybe, the awakening of an initiatrix principle on the strength of which the serpent is symbol of at once the cosmic spiral and of knowledge? Or simply, as in his childhood, he had seen it in representations of all sorts in stone or bronze, as a decorative and simultaneously magic element, could there have re-awakened in him the wish for reviving the cult of that animal that The Genesis turned into a devil, but which other peoples were worshipping? The aesthetic infirmity resulting from repressing the instinct of representing and of the beautiful embodied in matter contributed all the more to the programmatic isolation and unhappiness of the Jew, who was thus deprived of the joy of representing the natural beauty, of fully living in dream; as art or

creation is an eternal answer to the question that man asks about his eternity, Andre Malraux was noting. Instead of a life led in joy, the Jews were assigned the part of defenders, propagators of the notion of world spiritual domination. Progressively connected to the notion of salvation, this notion will subsequently take on a megalomaniac amplitude, while a nations salvation was to become the salvation of the nations. Doubling Christianity, its ideology was animating the spirit of missionary conquest and will become a world phenomenon (Gillabert). A climate of suspicion and terror must always have reigned amongst the Jewish people, tempted to violate the law; this (the law) deeply stamped the unconsciousness of the eternal Jew, who himself offered to the others the representation of a guilty individual, anxious, whimpering, traitor, neuropathic, unbearable, repellent, a source of unhappiness for mankind.

Notes See Manusu Duala-Mbedys study, which lays the foundation of a new science Xenology science of the foreigner, from an anthropological perspective. The study of the African researcher, entitled Die Wiessenschaft von Frem den und die Verdragurg der Humanitat in der Antropologie appeared in 1977, with Karl Verlag Freiburg, Munchen. The focus in this study is on two fundamental questons of xenology: the attempt at the economic integration of the new comer and the attempt at consciousness integration of the same new comer. There is also discussed the psychological mechanism of refusing the foreigner; See also Die Bil und ihre Welt, vol 1, p 77-80, 391; the name of Habiru (Apiru, Chabiru) is used in the non-Biblical texts, and designates nomad groups who emerged in Mesopotamia, Capodochia and Syria and were plundering at the end of the third millennium B C, when the first chapters of the Genesis were created. According to some bibliologists, these nomad groups did not have any ethnic identity. viii In his work A History of the Jews , Josy Eisenberg writes: The etymology of this word is not certain. It derives from the proper noun Eber , one of Abrahams forefathers, or from the preposition ever, beyond; the Jews came from beyond the river, and are therefore trans-Euphratusiens(p 12).The same view is also shared by E. Schure, in Les Grands inities (p 162), who quotes Renan with his Histoire du peuple dIsrael: The Egyptians were generally calling them Jews, seemingly giving this name a pejorative sense, related either to their condition of foreigners, or their condition of bondage (J.E. Schure, p 15); viii After his return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom went out to meet him at the valley of Shaveh (that is, the kings valley). And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine; he
viii

was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, Blessed be Abraham by God Most High, maker of heaven and earth (Genesis, 14, 1719).The notion that the bread and wine were already sacramental to some initiates as well as their acknowledgment emblem is also found in the chapter on Moses and Jesus in the above mentioned book by Eduard Schure. viii Apud Die Bibel und ihre Welt, vol I, p 80 5. The word race first emerges in the French vocabulary in 19th century, with the meaning of descendancy, and from the beginning, it entails a value judgment: nobleness of the race, good race, refined (phrases that Romanian has taken over and employs today without any anti-Semitic or xenophobe connotations). Racism did not have to be a creation of the Jews; it partakes of a strong tribal mentality that they also had. Although initially grounded in racismerasure as the only feasible way for universal Judiezing, Christianity came finally to practice racism in its anti-Semitic version. Through its concept of limpieza de sangre, the Iberian racism precedes the German one. In overestimating the superiority and purity of their blood, the 18th century Germanphils were prompted by Tacitus words in Germania, Ch XIV: As for myself, I join the view of the others that the Germans have not ever alterated themselves by crossing with other nations. The fear of alteration got updated when the consequences of the holocaust lapsed into forgetfulness; and in their daily anti-foreignist (Fremdenhass) zeal, some outstanding politicians overtly allege their phobia about what they call the race mixture (Durchrassen). So much for the 1990s united Europe (sic!) The French people manifested their racism by looking up for pedigree ancestors: in Ronsards Franciada, they appear as successors to...Enneas. The Romanians have located the Tracs. 6. And about ninth hour, Jesus cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani ?, that is, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? (Matthew 27, 46). And when they had crucified Him, they divided His garments among them by casting lots;...And over His head, they put the charge against Him, which read, This is Jesus, the king of the Jews (Matthew 27, 35) 7. As Emile Gillabert upholds in the above-mentioned book, the tribal Yahwism had not been anti-naturist, and absolutely intellectualist, as that which figures in the Bible; Abrahams Jews adored the mountains, the animals, and they also used to imagine Lilith, Adams first wife, driven out of Paradise before Eve. Lilith was the woman, and the Adamic legends say that after the perfect couple got expelled from heaven, Adam was secretly dating Lilith. And what else is being said refers to the notion that had he not been married to the innocent and stupid Eve, but to the intelligent and demoniac Lilith, Adam would not have lapsed into sin (See the book we quote at Bibliography Das Geheimnis Lilith, oder die verteufelte Gottin, by Barbara Black-Koltuv). 8. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Moses, the founder of religion, morals and of the paternalist state, would have acted in this respect, out of one of his complexes:as an abandoned child, therefore without a father, he was looking for one. Paternalism had a positive impact on the nomadic Jew tribes, who

according to the rules of the nomadic life, already as such, were organized in structures of shepherd-herd, father-son type.

2.

The Question of Judaism

I bargained along the whole history and dug hollows inside time in the raw flesh of mankind Messiah I have sowed Of blood was the hour, And burned have I been a hundred times, and strangled, And hanged have I been and put to the wall. And under Gods nose

have I moved when still without clothes I was walking through the world

(B. Fundoianu)

The Hebrew question emerges along with the discontinuation of their own State, that is in the 6th century BC. In 586 BC, Judea is also conquered (Israel and the ten tribes, which are said to have disappeared, had been conquered in 721 BC by Nebuchadnezzars armies. For the peoples who had afforded them exile, Beni Israel (the sons of Israel) become yehudens (Jews), irrespective of whether they belonged to Judea or not; while for the Jews, others, foreigners, irrespective of their tribe, become goyimi (a word without the negative connotations subsequently acquired, which simply meant people (gentes). These yehudens (in Aramaic), iudaios (in Greek), iudaei (in Latin), juden (later in German), juifs (in French), jid (in Russian), jidani (in Romanian), judios (in Spanish), jidki (in Polish), butebreo (in Italianviii ) will, by force of circumstance, fall into two categories: the inhabitants of Palestine, and those scattered, exiled or self-exiled, from the diaspora. In Judea, in Jerusalem, but especially in Babylon, Suza and other fortresses, from the Yahwist tradition, is brought to life Judaism, a religion that primarily self-assigns to keep the law. The Talmud , a text worked out for ten centuries, contains prophetic theology that, contrary to the Greeks or the Romans, locates the golden age in the future, this epoch being regarded as one of collective salvation through the agency of one anointed by God, a Messiah, Masiah. He becomes the spiritual nucleus that preserves the Jews spirituality, but also their ethnic purity.

Obviously, there was a pagan anti-Judaism, but an acute manifestation of the Hebrew question surfaced along with Christianity. The civilized countries did not attach special importance to Judea before the first millennium BC. The Greek authors mention the Jews only on Alexander Macedons entrance to Jerusalem. In Palestine (the name given by Romans to the whole former Canaan region), travellers found nothing special about this people until the Macabei wars in the second century BC. Palestine had first devolved upon the diadoh Ptolemaios and had been annexed to Egypt, the authority being given over to a counsel of the old priests, gerusia. Hellenism exercised a special attraction over the Judaic aristocracy from Jerusalem through art, sports, games and theatre; this is why the conservative priest caste begins to perceive Hellenism as a threat for the occupied peoples spiritually religious integrity. In 198 BC, Antioh III vanquished Ptolemei, and Palestine enters the protectorate of the Seleucid Greeks. The Antiohs are no longer tolerant of the Jews, just as the conservative Jews did not approve of Palestines Hellenization either, so that in 161, under the leadership of Judah the Macabe, the Hassidims (believers loving God) levied a war on these monarchs, some of whom, such as Ptolemeu Filoator, meant the utter destruction of the chosen peopleviii. The Jews were forbidden their religion and were obliged to convert to the cult of Zeus, whose statue was taken into Yahwehs temple by the Seleucids in 165 BC, while the Jews are constrained to sacrifice pigs in the templeviii. Those scattered among other peoples (the Judaic Diaspora) somehow followed a different course than the Jews from Jerusalem (the city that nevertheless continues to be the Mecca of Judaism), being distinguished from them by a more obvious opening to universalism. Without getting assimilated, they integrate with the peoples they have coexisted with. Nor were they able to arouse the interest of foreigners, except when they rebelled, or when they were used as by some kings against other kings. The letter which, consequent to Hamans designs, Artaxerxes (486-465) sends to the Persian empire, in reality proposed a pogrom

on a grandiose scale, meant to wipe out for ever the tribe found guilty of disobedience and restlessness in the empire. The great king Artaxerxes it was specified in that letter addressing those who rule over Judea up to Ethiopia, over more than one hundred and twenty seven countries with their leaders and servants under their rule writes this: ruling over many peoples and mastering the whole world, I, without being conceited about power but always ruling with kindness and calm, meant to render my subjects life undisturbed for ever, guarding my kingdom in peace and ease to cover to its borders, by having secured the peace desired by everybody. But when I asked the councillors about how we could carry this out, then Haman, who is famous over here for wisdom, and who firmly enjoys our benevolence, and who had proved loyalty to the utmost degree, which is the reason for his gaining the honour of sitting in the second place behind the king, showed us that among the tribes of the world there intruded and got mixed an inimical people, hostile to the laws of all the peoples, who continuously defy the kings orders, so that our ruling could not be carried out without trouble. Therefore learning that only this single people always opposes everyone, that they lead a kind of life alien to laws and always contest our undertakings by committing the greatest mischief so that our kingdom should not come to be well run, I decreedto destroy, to slay and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children, .. by ruthless sword, without pity and clemency, and to plunder their goods (our italics) in one day, the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month of Adar, so that these people enemies in the past as well as today come to be one day forcefully flung into hell, so should in the future no longer prevent us from leading peaceful, undisturbed lives to the very end. (Esther 3, 13) In Babylon, as well as in Susa, the Jews were not treated as slaves; some of them such as Mardoheu or Daniel managed to become high dignitaries at emperors courts. But the threat of being destroyed as destabilizers and traitors (an effect really of envy resulting from their becoming, through work and skill, rich and highly ranked) had haunted the Jews from the first periods of their diaspora.

Their Galut (exile) was also a positive experience to the extent to which, for defence necessities, it has secured their community, their Golah (exiled group). Thanks to the relative openness they were practising, the diaspora enabled the Jews to contact the civilization of the pagans and to develop the early Judaic proselytism. You could hardly find on the inhabited land a place which had not sheltered this people and which had not been mastered by them, wrote the Greek geographer Strabon (63 BC-24 A.D). All over the known world, not only in Europe but also in the Far East, India and Africa, there were Jewish communities, sometimes real little states within states. But Judas sons, Jacobs descendants, were hardly eager to make many concessions even to those who held them in high esteem. For instance, Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (Daniel 1, 5-6) do not feel obliged to eat from the kings dishes, they do not want to defile themselves, and refuse lest they should get defiled (Daniel 1, 8). It is interesting to note that all four want to be vegetarians. One could say that they refuse meat as it was not killed according to their ritual. Yet after ten days, the four looked better in health than the kings servants who ate meat. Did the IndoArian vegetarianism which in fact Jesus proposed by replacing the sacrificial meat and blood by bread and wine become a principle for some exiled Jews several centuries before Jesus came? It is true that the royal priest of Salem, Melchisedec also receives Abraham with bread and wine (Genesis 14, 18), and it is not incidental that he is quoted by the Christian apostles. We again turn back to the idea that some initiates might have used some emblems so as to recognize each other (and one another): Abraham, Melchisedec, Moses, Daniel, Jesus and so on. Otherwise, it would seem strange that in Genesis, Abel, the very character who puts forth Jewish sacrifices related to the work of a shepherd, is the one preferred by Yahweh and not Cain. In fact, in Daniels prophecies, the arrival of Mans Son is heralded (the Jews never admitted the existence of a Son of God): I saw in the night visions and behold, with the clouds of heaven, there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him, and to him was given dominion

and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed (Daniel 7, 13-14). This is the way Daniel announces the Redeemers arrival and the empire of Christianity. The relation between Daniel and Jesus would appear as one of doctrinarian community, not only as a visionary event. The Jews did not fare poorly in the diaspora, as proved by consequences of or sequels to the Edict from Cyrus of 538 B. C., which allowed them to return to Israel; some idealists such as Ezra and Manasseh returned to Jerusalem (as has happened in the 20th century), and so did the poor who had not managed to find their bearings in the rich Asian fortresses whence they had got scattered. In their exile, in advanced cultural centres far from the pressure of the simplistic conservative Yahwism, the Jews also had the opportunity to found academies of Hebrew studies, from which there emerged the Talmud , the translation of the Bible into Greek and the books that have deepened, interpreted and construed or misconstrued, deciphered and enciphered the simple narratives from the Holy Book: Kabbalah and the Zohar. In Babylon, where the history of Judaism truly begins, by means of the separation from the Yahwist tradition, the new religion takes on a universal aspect, and more importantly, some idolatry vestiges are given up, by definitely separating transcendence from immanence. The influence of Zoroastrism over the Talmudist scholars had constituted and constitutes a subject of study for historians of religion. The Babylonian Yahwism begins to get distanced from that of Zion; even if Jerusalem remains the Mecca of the Jews, the Babylonian academics were forbidden to travel to Palestine any longer, lest they should get contaminated by the bad habits of those who had remained there (probably more prone to mixings with and concessions to the peoples they lived with) and were deprived of a protecting state and of an authoritarian, organized church. Babylon regarded itself as also being Abrahams city. Why had the Jews been exiled to Babylon twelve years before the destruction of Jerusalem? From the same

reasons that a woman is sent backto her parents, when she does not behave well as a wife, wrote with graceful irony Leon Poliakov, the greatest historian of anti-Semitism. Ethiopian Judaism was also powerful; this accounts for the appearance of a sacred book, an African version of the Bible, entitled Enochs Book (20-50 BC). Enoch is also mentioned by the Apostle Paul: By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death; and he was not found, because God had taken him (Hebrew 11, 5). (Paleastronautics would find a further argument in the apostles contention that the patriarchs would not have been purely terrestrial). The communities from Mauritania, Namibia and Libya made the fathers of the Church, St Augustine and Tertulian contend that the Phoenicians had disappeared through Judaization. But what happened to the Jews and to Judaism in Rome? Any isolated collectivity tends to overestimate itself and to despise any other collectivity; like the isolated individual, the collectivity always seems suspicious of the majority: In the Roman empire from the very beginning, people found themselves in such a position as to wonder: who are these people? Where do they come from? How do they differentiate themselves from other peoples, and why? Why are they spread all over (the world)? (Josy Eisenberg)viii. Even for a pluralist and cosmopolitan society like the Roman one, the Jews were a case, a problem. The antipathy against the Jews from Rome does not seem to have had economic causes (as it did later on, in post-12th century Europe), nor a racist or religious basis. Rather, it was caused by this peoples unwillingness to integrate into Roman society. For instance, the Jews refused to eat with non-Jews, to practise the same games, to join the same celebrations or to make sacrifices to gods and to deified emperors. Their fanatic monotheism in particular was hurting the religious feelings of the world masters (formalist, as they were). On the other hand, the pagans did not bear the doctrinaire radicalism of the Jews religion, while the latters separatist tendency was perceived as defiance. More than one hundred Greek and Roman authors

refer to them, without any word of praise. It was not before long slanderous legends about their origin surfaced: Hecateu from Abdera, a Greek 3rd century historian, wrote that the Jews had been driven from Egypt because they used to consume infected meat, left-overs from sacrificial rituals, resulting in epidemics; with but few positive remarks (on Moses, leading the people through the desert, distinguished himself by his courage and wisdom). According to other legends and rumours, the Jews had been driven away by the pharaohs, because they were leprous, and because in the temple they worshipped the head of an ass, or even the pig (sic!) Before long, ancient Roman writers also came to blame the Jews: the Jews were an atheist (!) and asocial people, they adored heaven (Celsus wrote); they worshipped an indistinct god (Lucan wrote); they were known for their contempt of all other religions (see Plinius the Old). The eating interdictions, as well as the interdiction of working on a particular day, the Sabbath, are targets of irony for Tacitus, Seneca and Quintilion. The Jews are misanthrope, misoxene and embittered. Moses urged them not to be affable to anybody, wrote Lisimach from Alexandria; they swore never to wish well to other people (notes Apion); the Jews are against everybody, they refuse the gods, they refuse the people (remarks Philostrat); they really are rascals (Seneca writes). The first Jew historian, Josephus Flavius (the author of two famous books, Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish Wars) answers Apion, who had written a fierce pamphlet criticizing the Jews, in Apions Book; from it we learn that in Alexandria, also one of the most powerful centres of Judaism, Greek scholars were debating with Jews on diverse themes, especially religious ones, however without using vituperations as arguments. Horace and Juvenal also satirized these insolent people who were attempting to make proselytes from among the Romans, corrupting them from their belief in.. Jupiter Sabasios, a faceless god. On entering the Holy of Holies of the Jerusalem Temple B.C, without finding anything in the Covenant Ark , either the Law Tablets, or Moses staff, or books

of wisdom and of esotericism of the Jews, or the statue of any god, Pompey declared them to be .atheist. The emperor Hadrianus forbids the practice of the circumcision ritual for a while. But as ensued from the exchange of letters (about the Christians) between Plinius the Young and the emperor Trajan, then away on his campaigns to conquer Europe, nothing much could be done against them or against the Christians, as there were no laws to punish them. On the other hand, the antiJudaism of the cultured layers of Roman society, especially the literati, had almost no impact on the masses. For the ordinary Roman, the Jews were but one among the numerous barbaric peoples, tolerated in the empire and in cosmopolitan Rome. This is also the explanation for the circulation of a legend that did not necessarily have to be the creation of the Jews: the symbol of Rome, the she-wolf, brought back to the Romans the notion that their ancestors were from the tribe of Veiamin (a predatory wolf, as Jakob calls him in the blessing before his death Genesis 49, 27), and not the successors to Enneas who had left Troja in blazes. The confrontation between Judaism and paganism seemed almost negligible in the empires strategy, and so did the wars which the Jews waged against the Romans, the first between 66 and 73, followed by the famous uprising, led by Bar-Kochba (131-134), one that gave a great deal of trouble to the Romans, especially on account of the rebellious Jews guerrilla strategies. The Hebrew peril begins to be perceived as such by the Romans only with the emergence of a sect of Judaism Christianity. Having to mark the limits from both Judaism and paganism, having been persecuted both in Jerusalem and in Rome, the Christians manifested themselves aggressively and vigorously; as the Romans generally did not manage to distinguish between the traditional Jews and the Christians, with the general antipathy and aversion to some of them having repercussions on the others. Suetoniu, in his book The Lives of the Caesars, mistakes the Jews for the Christians, saying that the emperor Claudius banished. the Jews, because they were agitators, causing restlessness in Rome (in reality this referred to the

Christians), while Tacitus, in Histories, calls them all hostes publici, practitioners of a loathsome religion that could have resulted in serious public disturbances. In the 2nd century BC, the general antipathy against the Jews had become relatively apparent. Bar-Kochbas uprisings in Palestine had given trouble to the Romans, but gradually their deeds were forgotten, especially as they were well and truly defeated. After all, unlike the Christians, the Jews had a religion, a pedigree. The Romans a practically-minded people, rather than (being) believing and superstitious were interested not in prophecies and in the miracles taking place, especially in some peripheral provinces of the empire, but in their own wealth, and first and foremost in pax romana. The Christians, on the other hand, became all the more antagonized, because of their exclusivist attitude, their obscure and uncertain origins, their aggressive eulogy of poverty and their propagation of the notion of equality (the master equal to the slave, in Rome!). The Christians come to be regarded as destabilizers, while their religion was regarded as unlawful (in contrast to that of the Jews, which was lawful). They are acknowledged as genus tertium. Gradually, the Christians come to be the victims of a general transfer of animosity, the scapegoat of the calamities that befell Rome (as there used to be and will always be the Jews in post-12th century Europe: arsonists, enemies of mankind). The Christians should be fed to the lions, the crowd seated above the arena shouted (and so they were, more than once). Sometimes, the Jews style themselves as defenders of the Christians and offer them shelter in their synagogues (just as in the Middle Ages, the Christians were to offer Church protection to the Jews who were pursued and hunted by the gangs of the little shepherds or of Emicho); but at other times, they accused and denounced them for real or imaginary guilt or faults. What made ill-blood between the Jews and the Christians in Rome was not in fact the difference in religion, nor was it a matter of settling accounts with them for having killed Jesus as we might be tempted to suspect today (the Judeo-Christians regarded the killing as an accomplishment, Judas being given a minor part in the whole drama), or the rivalry in their proselytizing practices. The divergence between the

Jews and the Judeo-Christians non-theological at that time, as neither group had specified any dogma often took violent forms, especially as proselytes were easily converted to the other side, from Judaism to Judaic Christianity. Christianityviii had surfaced in the Palestine occupied by the Romans, in other words, a country oppressed by foreigners, against a background of prolonged collective expectancy for the Rescuer or the Saviour, for political redemption rather than the eschatological one. According to the prophets and even to Jesus, who more than once contends that He has come to first rescue Israels sons (I am not sent but for the lost sheep of Israel, or But youd rather go to the lost sheep of Israel), eschatology did not equally refer to all the peoples of the world or of the area, but only to those who had embraced Yahwism, and then Judaism. In essence, what separated the primitive Judeo-Christians of Judea or of the Roman empire from the traditionalist Jews was the notion that, for some, the Redeemer had come as embodied in Jesus of Nazareth; while for others, especially for the scholarly elite from Jerusalem (formed over several hundred years), He was still awaited. He who has come did not answer to their main aspiration, the political one: to set Judea free, to remake Israel as a State, to retrieve the power and brilliance of Solomons time. And there was something else: Never in Judaism has the idea been expressed that the attachment to a man could become one of the prerequisites of redemption. Jesus new religion turned ones love for ones neighbor into a sacred principle, similar to ones love for God. Similarly, the conservative Jews did not find it acceptable that Jesus, according to the view of the Sadducee and of the Pharisees, equated faith with belief in Him and nothing elseviii. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple (Luke 14, 26), He said. Was Jesus responsible for this equation, or were the Jews who believed in Him, and who called themselves Christians on the grounds of the Greek name for the word Mesia Mashiah Christ? The Saviour, anticipated by Biblical prophets, did not meet the terms for being awaited in Jerusalem, nor did He in the Diaspora

centres. When He was speaking to them about the heavenly empire, the Jews thought of Davids and Solomons kingdom, as forgiveness was entirely alien to them; their obsession was with revenge for the humiliations experienced from the time of their emergence on the stage of history in Asia Minor. And then the idea of a demi-god, Mans son and Gods, seemed to them in equal measure to resemble some pagan mythologies, in which gods had wives, brothers and even children begotten with earthly beings, and at once detrimental to the absolute monotheism they had practised ever since Abrahams revelation. Their capacity for fabulating was of a patriarchal-pastoral nature: the unique God, all-powerful, the absolute master had spoken to believers through the prophets, had given signs to them through the miracles performed or through the revelations of some chosen ones, and was living withdrawn beyond, in a transcendence that did not promise anything to human beings. The paradise of the Jews was the new Jerusalem here on earth, close to the sacred Mountain of Zion, and not in heavenviii: Jesus is part of the question of Judaism, just as Christianity is, in fact. He appears as a case for the Jews, and will become one for Christianity. The Jews were concerned with Jesus only as an individual, a creator of heresy and disorder, a political and religious destabilizer, while the Christians were concerned with Jesus as a mystery. But who was the destabilizer, the Jew (?) Jesus, and who were those who followed Him and founded the faith that finally turned out to fulfill the universal dream of Judaism? Mountains of books have been written on Him, and the greater their number, the deeper the Christic enigma has becomeviii. What is certain is that (beyond some phenomena that belong, just like UFOs, to an as yet uncontrollable field some believers contend that He showed Himself to them, moreover that they took a picture of Him) the Jesus enigma is alive in the modern consciousness, all the more so as Jesus apocalyptic doctrine is more familiar than ever to our current spirit. Who was He in reality? On her Sunday word of wisdom on a West German television channel, a woman priest once asked: Could the true Jesus never have laughed, or at least smiled? Could He have

been as appears from the Gospels, from legends - always stern, like Yahwehs or Moses face, and like the anxious, mournful Jews? In body He was a Jew, maybe from one of those ten lost tribes, and not necessarily a Jew, as the Jew from Tars upholds (St. Paul, Romans 9,5). Ones reverting to the Judeo-Arian notion, according to which Jesus would have been Arian, is dangerous, as this notion was not exploited in order to elucidate Jesus mystery, but to found an anti-Semitic Christianity. On the other hand, the notion as such can hardly be neglected (self-detachment, the eulogy of inactivity cannot help but bring back to our mind the Indian philosophy, eulogizing nothingness and non-being). It goes without saying that what most affected true faith in Jesus has been the continuous attempt at explaining Him, and at involving Him in history, at rationalizing Him. This proves the intellectuals incapacity to acknowledge mystery, to think other than in terms of cause and effect. Instead of feeling Him as a positive energy on the strength of which we could perform in our private and collective life, we think of Him and explain Him, and want, like the poet seemingly unable of transcendence, to cry: I want to touch you and to shout He is!. Theology, like history, religion, philosophy etc from time to time reshuffles or reforms Christology, but at the level of the theological elite. Like yesterdays and todays mystics, the Church youth and the rebel have been on a private quest, to experience the beatitude of that mystic conjugality (that remains alien to the ordinary practitioner) of a ritual that does not commit Him more than superficially, if at all. The suspicion that all of Jesus lives have more or less been forged results from the contradictions between the Synoptic Gospels, between these and the apocryphal ones (all the more openly displayed in todays bookshops), between all the Gospels and The Dead Sea Manuscripts and other documents, the hidden books of The New Testament , available to a number of initiates. The most outrageous forgery would, according to the views of some theology dissidents, have been made by Apostle Paul and the first missionaries, while the Christian Church founded by them has emphasized the Hebrew nature of Jesus

teaching, its kinship to The Old Testament, so much so that a statement by Shelling, according to whom Jesus biography had been written before he was born, almost falls into place here for those who know the whole Bible well. The first Judeo-Christian missionaries either did not comprehend His word too well and construed it according to their upbringing as Jews, or they deliberately preached it to the Jews in the beginning, in such a way as to attract them to the new faith without shocking them; their role was first to persuade the Jews that the Messiah-Christ had come, and thus the prophets written word, through which the Holy Ghost spoke, had been fulfilled. And obviously this was not simple at all. Several times, Iehoshua (the Hellenization of the name Jesus) made statements that remain somehow suspended within the rationale of the Gospel narratives. Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am (John 8, 58). Could this mean that Jesus regarded Himself as an archaeus, an eon, (as in the Alexandrine Neo-Platonism which could have influenced John the Gospel writer, the most cultured and the most esoteric of the Synoptics), that He was anticipating the doctrine of the souls pre-existence or that of the same being as Father was eternal? The main principle of His teaching is love. For the initiates in esotericism, love is attraction between bodies, a universal cosmic principle (Amor qui move sole e alter strele, as the mystical Dante was to say). To love your neighbor as you love yourself was the way Jesus construed it for the poor who followed Him, as did the disciples, who subsequently became Apostles, and as did the Jew authors of Gospels and propagators of Gospels, all unable to comprehend too much of what cannot be seen and cannot pertain to the immediately perceivable. In a purely Judaic spirit, the last-named emphasized the moral that could result from His word, that is, something that could be useful; in fact, killing by this for the sake of the letter the spirit of Jesus teaching. What could the fisherman Peter comprehend when Jesus was telling him, as if he had been sharing the key truth of the Smaragdine Tabula with him (as in Heaven so on the Earth) that this meant the micro-macro-cosmos unity. I will

give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven (Matthew 16, 19). What could the disciples have comprehended from the fact that the master was singling out the importance of the live verb, that is, of the uttered word, loaded with energy, in contrast to the written one, which was turned into a fetish by the Sadducees, the official masters? So be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10, 6). Innocent as doves was selfevident, but since when has the serpent become a symbol of wisdom? As it was well known that it was through the action of this schemer that man had fallen, Adam had been driven from heaven. Had fallen? But did not Adams expulsion from paradise also mean the acquisition of the dying condition? In fact, the right to immortality, which is, or rather can be ascension, spiral, serpent? To him who strikes you, turn also your other cheek, the new Master says further. According to the Neo-Platonist Plotin, the authentic magic of love is love for the hatred which is its opposite, as love and hate are unique, like good and evil. To love hatred meant, from the initiatrix perspective, to create a spring of infinite energy. The problematics of Christological philosophy remain the main concern for those who seek Jesus. The doubts about the characters real existence derive not so much from a lack of concordance between the Gospels or from the rational mans incapacity to accept what is and cannot be factually proved (the shroud being for most but a false relic); rather, they derive from that conspiracy of silence that neither the Jews nor the Roman scholars were surely alien to, and resulted in the Roman historians lack of concern with his person. Joseph Flavius does not mention Him in his Antiquities of the Jews (the pages that are thought to be accounts about Jesus and which subsequently turned out to be interpolations by a zealous Christian transcriber); and this can be explainable. For the elite of the Jew priests, Jesus was a dangerous heretic. He was speaking about an empire beyond, but who could believe that He did not in fact want to take Irods place? Yet by sentencing Him without evidence or proofs, the Jews would not have cut a

good figure for the Romans. In Rome, nothing of the kind could have happened, which is the reason why the Apostle Paul subsequently requires to be judged by the Caesar himself in Rome. Tacitus and Suetoniu did not mention Him in their writings either, for two reasons: primarily, they did not believe in the prophets miracles that had surfaced only in the provinces most despised by the Romans; secondly, they (the Romans) did not think much of the Christians who might have been arson agents for Rome. They did not distinguish at all between the soothsaying or divination spirit (Acts 16,16) and pure charlatanry, especially when the Judies/Jews were under discussion, an entirely uncertain and collectively suspect people for the Romans. Both Jews and the Romans made use of this silence so as to discourage the phenomenon of proselytism, which was beginning to threaten the religious equilibrium of the empire. As is evident from Acts of the Apostles, Caesareas very king seemed to be close to conversion, and later on, one of the Roman emperors was converted and became St Constantine, and his mother, St Helena. Christianity began to be enticing, not only for the poor in the cities. But who were the Christians in Judea and in Rome? When referring to Paleo-Christians, we should perhaps be closer to the spirit of truth to speak of Judeo-Christians for two reasons: firstly, they were not clearly delimited from the other main Judaic sects: the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Esseniens; secondly, they were Jews in body (Paul), and it was with difficulty that they accepted proselytes from among the barbarians. As a matter of fact, as results from Acts (11,26), it was in Antioch in 43 that the Christians were named: And in Antioch the disciples were for the first time called Christians. In Judea, the Paleo-Christians seem to have been Esseniensviii. Forming a sect spread across Palestine and Egypt, they lived in small communities, organized in the manner of todays monasteries. Aside from the bachelor monks, peasant Essenien families lived in the vicinity of the monasteries, all leading an austere life in which there was no place for worldly joys and pleasures. Their morality was exemplary, as they endeavored to repress any instinctive drive,

continually having a sympathetic smile on their serene faces. Their word was as powerful as an oath of allegiance, the reason why they did not accept to swear on oath. They practised ablution, those from monasteries ate lunch together and were indifferent to the Sadducees scientific knowledge. The scholars were grounded in esotericism, the knowledge that Christianity as a religion has secured in the form of sacraments. In their doctrine, ones body is a product of the soul that acts on the soul by means of the similar astral body; the visible universe is but the outcome of the infinite spirits dynamism, so much so that physical healing has to begin with psychic healing. In fact, in Aramaic, asaya meant physician, therapist, healer, just as Josephus Flavius wrote in Antiquities of the Jews (XIII,5,9). Jesus Himself was also a healer, his acts of healing being the source of many of his wonders. Yet Jesus did not confine Himself to healing the body, but assigned himself to the redemption of souls. John the Baptist (who, according to some Bible scholars had not been grounded with the Esseniens, having borrowed from them only the notion of cleansing or purification, which is why the Jordan River, sacred to the Jews, had become a site for the collective performance of the ritual, with a spectacularly profound impact on the collective abyssal psychology) says: I baptize you with water, He will baptize you with fire; in terms of the Egyptian, Zoroasterist and Indian esotericism, this meant that there were two stages in purification: an intellectual one, pertaining to the conscious stage, and another, superior to the first, of the soul, pertaining to transubstantiation. Disgusted with the Pharisees hypocrisy, the Esseniens abhorred the pageantry of the cult, as practised in synagogues. Sacerdotal imposture, the striking difference between a certain initiatrix tradition, of diverse sources but essentially the same, and the Jerusalem Judaism rendered them unbearable to the Jews themselves. From the historical vantage point of two millennia, Essenien JudeoChristianity seems to have been a failed hypostasis of Judaism, a pseudo-sect. According to some well documented views, Jesus, when very young, would have joined one of the Essenien monasteries so as to get apprenticed. Why did they

reside in hypogeum, as the primitive Christians from Rome resided in the famous catacombs Diocletian, Priscilla, Calixtus etc, subterranean lodgings, serving also as tombs? Only to hide? Except for the persecutions by authorities such as Nero or some of the other emperors, one can hardly contend that in Rome Christians led their lives as depicted in novels like Quo Vadis, or other films on the same theme. There were also happy Christians (to paraphrase the title of a film on gypsies); or else they would not have taken the liberty to carry out proselytism so intensely as to come to rival the Jew conservatives. Those who visited these catacombs and looked, directly or through films, at the Dead Sea grottos where the famous scrolls were found realize that there are similarities between the Esseniens lodgings and those of the Roman PaleoChristians. Numerous famous frescoes that decorate the walls of the catacombs are used as documents enabling one to retrieve the history of early Christianity. Thus, for instance, an agape from the Chapel of the Sacrament lying in the Calixtus catacombs of third century Rome; or that from the Priscilla catacombs. Quintus Tertullian, a lawyer who lived between 160 and 225, one of the first scholars and fathers of the Christian Church, of Carthaginian origin, insists in his Apologetica on the importance of the brotherly repast for the early Christians, which almost immediately brings back to our mind the Esseniens from Judea. The walls of these labyrinthine constructions, otherwise built after well designed plans, were also used as tombs; the line between life and death did not have to be very well traced, life being death of the spirit, death its resurrection. Yet underground cities on several levels, very similar to the ghettos of the catacombs, were also discovered in Anatolia going back several millennia B C. Could there be any connection between Shambala in the Tibetan faith, the Essenien lodgings the Christian catacombs and Jobs lamentations? They (a foreign people) open shafts in a valley away from where men live; they are forgotten by travellers, they hang afar from men; they swing to and fro. As for the earth, out of it comes bread; but underneath it is turned up as by fire (Job 28, 35). A paleo-astronaut might wonder: what terrestrial experiences the Essenien

initiates ancestors might have had, to convey the notion of underground cities up to the Christians of Rome? For the Judeo-Christians from Jerusalem, Jesus was the Messiah, but they do not acknowledge His divine nature. The Christian representation of Jesus has got moulded in the course of the confrontation but also of the intersection impact of two powerful currents in Jerusalem: on the one hand, the Saducees Judaism (the aristocratic rabbis who did not accept the idea of the immortality of the soul, of life to come, nor the live word) and that (Judaism) of the Pharisees, who acknowledged the oral tradition, along with the written one, of the immortality of the soul, used to display a sort of ritualistic populism; on the other hand, the philosophic and esoteric Hellenism that brought in some elements typical of Oriental mythology about birth, death and the gods resurrection, sun worshipping that derived from Mithraism, a very widely spread religion in the Roman empire. In some communities (as resulting from some apocryphal texts), Jesus seems closer to Orient (an initiate, a healer, loving animals); in others, closer to the Iranian gods (Saoshyant, the universal redeemer from Iranian mythology, Zarathrustas son born from the maiden Endafredi), in others, closer to Osiris, the Egyptian god that symbolizes the death and resurrection of Nature, but also the passage to another empire in which Osiris reigned. On earth, the Egyptian god had been betrayed, killed and brought back to life by his sister Isis (whose cult was also widespread in Rome); just as the Egyptians and Greeks used to worship him as sun-god. Like many ancient gods, Jesus enters the Euhemerist thought patterns imposed by some classic Greek historians, representing gods as heroes, therefore sons of men. Taking over the Euhemerist method so as to rule out the pagan divinities, the Christian patristics introduced their Trojan horse into the fortress: in writings and preachings, Jesus himself began to be treated like a hero, a hero who is betrayed, beaten, mocked and suffers on the cross and implores His Father, My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?, although in reality He knew that then, through His suffering

and death, the divine plan for peoples redemption was to be fulfilled ! And less as god. Leaving aside the fact that The Synoptic Gospels have simplified Jesus teachingviii, by turning His life into a rather melodramatic account of His passions, thus truncating the very profoundness of His teaching, that these Gospels were obviously Judiezied and cleansed of the mysteries of other teachings about initiates, the texts that produced puzzlement and gave a lot of trouble to Christian dogma are the apocryphasviii, especially The Gospel of Peter, The Gospel of Tomas, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It is puzzling that the Christian Church detached itself from The Gospel of Peter, its author being Jesus closest disciple, he who is entrusted with the key of the religion to be. After one has read it, the cause is easy to guess: the Redeemers divine nature does not seem clear at all. He is not judged by Pontius Pilate, but by Irod, on the cross, He behaves as if He had not experienced any pain, and He had cried with relative detachment not My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?, but My power, why have you forsaken me? It was no wonder that He would have kept silent all the time He was judged, as, whether it was true He was affiliated to the Esseniens sects, these, like the Buddhists, practicing the interdiction of speaking, the fast of speaking. But there is something else that seems odd. No Gospel describes His resurrection as such; in all, He simply disappears from the well-guarded tomb. In the Gospel of Peter, we read how two men seemingly descended from heaven, entered the crypt, and took Jesus, and then ascended to heaven with Him. And early in the morning, on waking from the Sabbath, the crowd came from Jerusalem and from the area around, to see the sealed tomb. Or, on the night previous to Sunday, when two by two the soldiers were going the rounds, a great noise was heard from the heavens. And two men came, shining in light while descending, and they approached the tomb. The stone before the entrance rolled away by itself, and the two entered the tomb. On seeing this, the soldiers awakened the centurion and told him what they had seen. While they were telling this, three men came

out from the tomb, two youths propping up the third, while the heads of the two touched the heavens, and he who was leading reached above the heavens (The Gospel of Peter 9, 34-37, 19, 38-40). The disappearance as well the appearance (some apocryphal textsviii describe one of Jesus descents, while on a 16th century Slavic Bible, He is represented in a sort of capsule, like the astronauts) have remained mysteries of history. Could Jesus not have died on the cross, as some Christian heretics uphold? The Gospel of Toma (published by Philippe de Suarez in the Metanoia collection (Drome, Marsanne, 1975) was discovered by Mg Hamadi in Egypt in 1946. Supposedly, it was written by the unbeliever who placed his finger on Jesus wound, the most lucid of all the apostles, who according to the views of some reformers of Christianity, being very simple, without learning, would have rendered Jesus utterances faithfully, probably omitting what he could not comprehend. In this Gospel (the source for the others, as the American Bible school from Jerusalem contends), the emphasis is placed on knowledge and not on belief. Jesus told His disciples Compare me, tell me whom I resemble. Simon Peter said to Him You resemble a wise scholar. What seems stranger is the fact that Jesus was also perceived as a heretic by the Judeo-Christians from Jerusalem, already at a distance more or less from the Essenien Cenobites from their original communities: And He took Thomas by His side, and He withdrew and spoke three words to him. And when Thomas turned back to his companions, they asked him, What did Jesus tell you?, and Thomas answered, If I told you one single word from what He told me, youd take stones and throw them at me, and then a fire would come out of the stones to burn us. According to the same Gospel, Jesus also told the disciples, Ill give you what the eye hasnt seen and what the ear hasnt heard, and what the hand hasnt touched and what hasnt reached mans hand. And then I am the light that is above everybody, I am everything. Everything has sprung from me, and to me everything will return, and in addition, And you, from the masculine and the feminine make up one, so that the masculine shouldnt be

masculine any longer and the feminine, feminine, then will you enter the empire of sky or Heaven. If He was a heretic Pharisee, Jesus also was an Essenien hereticviii , as we have already said, and also an initiate who in fact transgressed the law of the initiates, that of not making their knowledge public. The contemporary quarrel between the Christian and the esotericviii Church was brought about by the publication of some of the 600 manuscripts discovered in Qumran in 1947, and of some other texts, such as The Gospel of Peace printed between the two wars by Bordeaux Szekely, who found it in an archive from Rome. In this Essenien Gospel, it is written: And Jesus stood in the midst and said: Truly I tell you, nobody can be happy if outside the law. And the others answered: We all keep Moses old law, Moses who brought us the law, as written in The Holy Scriptures .And Jesus said, Look for the law not in what is written, because the law is life (our italics), while the written word is death. Truly I tell you, Moses took the law from God not in written form, but through the living word (our italics). The law is the Live Gods living word, God who gave it to the living prophets for the living people. In whatever there is life, there is law. You find it in grass, in trees, in rivers, in mountains, in the birds of heaven, in the fish of the sea; but you had better look for it in yourselves. As indeed truly I tell you, all living things are closer to God than the Scripture which is lifeless. God has thus made up life and all living beings so that through them, the eternal word (our italics) of the true law should be clear to man. God writes the laws not in books but in your hearts and in your spirit. They are in your breath, in your blood, in your bones, in your room, in your bowels, in your eyes, in your ears, in the smallest parts of your body. They are in the air, in water, in the earth, in plants, in the suns brilliance, in the depths of heaven. All speak to you so that through them, you should discover God. But you close your eyes lest you should see, plug your ears lest you should hear. Truly I tell you, writings are mans deeds, while life and its legion are Gods deeds. Why dont you hear Gods words, that in his creation are written? Why do you study dead writings that were written by mans hands? This pantheism, this

manner of viewing Nature as encoded logos (the book Nature will be a topos in medieval and romantic literature), and especially the attack on the written laws aroused the Sadducees hostility. The Sadducees stance was already precarious as it was, because the Pharisees were more populist and enjoyed a greater impact over the masses of confused believers. In Jerusalem, Jesus was seen as a dangerous heretic, not only for the conservative Jews, but also for the Esseniens and Paleo-Christians, who in fact are no longer spoken about after the year 70. In the disputes between the Jews and the Christians, when the Christians were accusing Judas of betrayal, and were accusing the Jews of not having comprehended their own book, The Old Testament, the latter were justly retorting: Why couldnt anybody defend that Jesus of yours, because sufficient Christians (read Judeo-Christians) were in Jerusalem? In the same Essenien Gospel, an episode from Jesus life is related which puts Him in the stance of a Buddhist wise man, echoing St Francis of Assisi, or a good Essenian (these were known to have adored animals). Reaching a village, He saw a stray cat, which was hungry and ill. The Redeemer took it in His hands, held it against His chest, and in the next village He sought food for it. The cat ate, drank and looked gratefully at Him. One of His followers said, This man tends the animals. Are they His brothers and sisters, as He loves them so much? and Jesus said, Truly, these are your brothers and sisters, who breathe the same air of eternity. And when you tend these little ones, taking care to give them food and something to drink, you will do this for Me, and if you leave them in pain, you will suffer as if I were the one you are doing this to. As what you do in this life, the same will be done to you in the next life (34, 7-10). So Jesus believed in karma, in reincarnation, and moreover He was proposing a dervishs life to the disciples, Take no gold, nor silver, nor copper in your belts, no bag for your journey, nor two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for the labourer deserves his food (Matthew 10, 8-10). When He came to Jerusalem to face up to the conservatives of a religion without a canon at that time, therefore full of

contradictions, He was met with a suspicion that changed into hatred. And there was nobody to defend Him. After the discoveries made in the course of time, the Church heretics of yesterday and of today are always still wonder why Christianity was founded on simplest and the most Judiezing-moralistic version of His teaching, without turning to good account other components related to the initiatrix space Jesus was sure to belong to. Jew-/Judi-ezed to a lesser extent, Christianity might have been perhaps.less anti-Judaist. There are multiple causes, some already mentioned so far. First and foremost, the disciples who became apostles were ordinary men, and did not comprehend the spirit of Jesus teaching, though He himself took pains to render His own behaviour comprehensible by means of parables, preaching and miraculous healings. Next, in order to make proselytes, especially in Palestine, one had to remain largely a Jew in thought, and to demonstrate at all costs that the new teaching, so much slandered by some, was already contained in the old teaching - so that afterwards one could uphold the idea, outrageous to the Jews, that the Messiah had come embodied as Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews could accept only a Saviour of Zion and not a saviour of the soul (which meant nothing to them). On the other hand, in Rome, the Redeemers teaching was to get adjusted in such a way as not to encroach conspicuously either on the Judaic spirit, already having seeped in there for a long time, or on the Roman-pagan one. The Arian she-wolf that was towering over the Capitol, and which for the Jews was the emblem of their past history in those places (as a symbol of the Veniaminits) did not need to get vexed or provoked. This is why the apostle Paul no longer slanders the rich, not only because he himself came from a family of rich Jews from Tarsus, but also because in the eternal city, to praise the poor and slander the rich would most likely have sounded like an invitation to the poor to rebel. Moreover, the ideal was to make proselytes among the rich, not only among the poor, an undertaking which turned out to be a success, one of its triumphs being the conversion of Emperor Constantine. This momentous event came to seal the victory of the

Christianity of the Gospels over the Talmudic Judaism, as well as the transformation of Christianity from a belief into a religion, and subsequently into a State policy. The Apostle Paul gave up on Peters collectivist idea, equally undesirable in a rich fortress. Only too conspicuous, the Judeo-Christian doctrinaire rivalry in a phase in which neither one part nor the other had a church (synagogue or ecclesia) or catechism would have been harmful to both religions. And yet in Rome, people began talking more and more earnestly about the wicked Christian, this new situation not being alien to the Jews. The persecution of Christianity acquired legal grounds even in Trajans time (who wrote to Plinius the Young as we have already noted that he could not punish them because they had laws) in 122; in 260, the emperor Gallienus grants them the freedom of cult, but the reprisals against them intensify along with the Edict of 303 given by Diocletian, who orders that churches should be demolished, holy books should be burned and the Christian cult should be banned. The first Christian martyrs appear, as reported in Acts of the Apostles: Stephen, Jacob and then others; in 304, St George is burned alive, Peter had been crucified head downwards in Rome, Paul also probably died as a martyr. The race to exterminate Christians extends across the whole empire. Here is what was written in the protocol concluded, and occasioned, by the murder in Carthagina in 180 of a Christian community from Sicily, Numidia; this protocol describes the confrontation between the Roman procurator Claudius Saturnius and the Christians Speratus, Narzalus, Ciltinus, Donata, and others. The procurator Saturnius said We only fear our Lord who is in Heaven, Donata said, Glorify the emperor as emperor, but fear God, Vestia said I am a Christian, Secunda said, What I am, this is what I want to be. The proconsul Saturnius asked Speratus, Will you remain a Christian? Speratus answered I am a Christian and everybody approved him. Saturnius asked, Do you need time for reflection?, Speratus answered In such just matters, there is nothing to reflect about .The proconsul Saturnius said, What do you have in your trunks? ,

Speratus answered, Books, especially Pauls letters, those of a just man. The proconsul Saturnius said, You have 30 days to further reflect, Speratus answered again, I am a Christian, and everybody approved himviii The number of the martyrs increases. St Andrew is killed in Scitia, crucified on a distorted cross; in Nicomedia, 20,000 Christians are burned alive. The martyrs lives and deaths would become the favorite literature of the literati, the intelligentsia and the Middle Ages oral story-tellers, as they catered for the thirst for Christian pedagogy, their taste for suffering, for cruelty, and the heroic as experienced by the ordinary man. In parallel with the process of anti-Christian persecutions in the Roman empire, there emerge their defenders, who, without getting converted to the Messianic belief, endeavor to demonstrate that they are not State destabilizers, on the contrary. This is the case of Justus (Justin), who in the 2nd century makes the first apology of the Christians, regarding them as helpful in keeping order, and he does not consent to their condemnation because of their belief in Jesus rather than in the Pantheon gods. He writes to Antonius Pius, emperor between 138 and 161 and to the Roman Senate, quoting Jesus,Give to Caesar what is Caesars, and to God what is Godsviii Then being killed in turn, Justus is also ranked among the martyrs of Christianity. In Rome (and not in Jerusalem), the Christians led a communitarian life similar to that of the Jews from Medieval Europe; isolated, suspected, always in danger of being accused of imaginary crimes and lawlessness, sometimes manipulated for political purposes, poor, fanatical, insolent in the eyes of others, licit rather than illicit, the Christians were incomparably less tolerated than the Jews, who were flexible and who perceived themselves as being a privileged minority, sometimes demonstrating generosity even to this genus tertium. The demarcation line between ecclesia and synagogue became all the more perceptable, especially against a background of theological confusion, but unmistakably one of rivalry. While apostle Peter had given up on the Judaic law with difficulty (being on a mission in Caesarea and getting hungry, he refused to

eat defiled and unclean dishes, Acts 10, 11-15; yet apostle Paul begins to make some concessions to the non-Christians: To the Jews, I became as a Jew in order to win Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law though not being myself under the law that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ that I might win those outside the law (I Corinthians 9, 20-21). The strategy of missionary enterprise resided in flexibility. The risk of contaminating the Christians with or by paganism was not ruled out either. Apostle Paul writes in the first Letter to the Corinthians: But I torture my flesh and subdue it , lest after preaching to others, I myself should be disqualified (I Corinthians 9, 27). Both Peter and Paul, in discordance with the superior, radical authority from Jerusalem, accept and endorse the baptism of the non-Jews, of the un-circumcised. And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles. For they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God (Acts 10, 45-46). The explanatory discussions were carried out in synagogues or in public squares; not having cult places, the Christians often borrowed those of the Jews. Thus, some Jews happen to take part in the Christians sermons, or some Christians, in those of the Jews. Apostle Paul had special tact in pursuing his universal strategy. A good psychologist and exceptional diplomat, he endeavored to spare the belief of others (the mistake made by the Yahwists in Canaan), especially the belief that the pagans were easier to convert than the Jews, as they had not been attached to their gods too much; on the other hand, this new strange belief of the poor could look attractive to them, God and religion usually appealing to the poor (in large numbers), and not to the rich. Apostle Pauls diplomacy was sufficient even in the case when he had to face up to Sophist or Epicurean philosophers, he himself being a scholar and knowing how to speak to each according to his rank. A passage among many others from Acts, So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I

passed along, and I observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, To an unknown god, what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you (Acts 17, 22-23) The new belief was gradually making its way into the souls of those who listened to Apostle Paul. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there. Some of the Epicurean and stoic philosophers also met him. And some said, What would this babbler say? Others said, He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities, because He preached Jesus and the resurrection(Acts 17, 17-18). But as the foreign God, still a Jew, was without a sculptured face, this new belief was detrimental to the craft of the Greek and Roman artists specialized in sculpting temples and the faces of the various gods. Apostle Paul was in Ephesus when a revolt of the silversmiths took place against him. About that time, there arose no little stir concerning the Way. For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only at Ephesus but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away a considerable company of people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may count for nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship. When they heard this, they were enraged and cried out Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! So the city was filled with the confusion; and they rushed together into the theatre, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Pauls companions in travel(Acts 19, 23-29). Apostle Paul takes advantage of the misunderstanding between the Jews (as the Sadducees say, there is no resurrection, or angel, or spirit, while the Pharisees acknowledge both one and the other (Acts 2, 38) - misunderstandings that had extended from

Jerusalem and Rome to all the provinces where fights were taking place, so as to gain proselytes, Do you not know that in a race all the runners compete, but only one receives the prize? So, run that you may obtain it(I Corinthians 9, 24), and goes on successfully to announce Gods gospel, Gods deputation. From Acts and Letters, there is nothing about the existence in Rome or in the provinces of a belligerent situation between the Jews and the Christians, but only a doctrinaire-conflictful one. Not even the emergence of Church elders (some of them converted Jews, others, non-Jews), who begin to shift the focus from the mystery of the resurrection and redemption on to the guilt of the Jews to have killed Jesus , was able to bring about a phenomenon of ethnic rejection. They rather created a condition of intense confusion for the then thinkers; on the one hand, Jesus had to die, God himself having sent Him, so that through His sacrifice, He could redeem Israels people; on the other hand, the Jews, descendants of a murderer, were guilty. The missionaries success was accounted for by the fact that the new religion, often simplified to vulgarization, was perceived as a religion of the poor, and the latter were embracing it without problematizing it. The Christians from Jerusalem awaited the salvation of Israel: Lord, in this time, could you possibly restore Israels empire?, his disciples asked Jesus when he revealed Himself to them after the resurrection; or, But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel, a group of proselytes answered Cleopa, a group on the way to announce the Redeemers resurrection in Jerusalem (Luke 24, 21), those from diaspora salvation from death, individual redemption. On the other hand, the Jews were accusing the Christians of propagating the belief in a false Messiah, which is the reason why, as a divine punishment, Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The Christians were blaming the Jews for not believing in the Messiahs coming, anticipated in their writings, and for killing Him, for which reason the temples wall broke down and Jerusalem was destroyed; and the Jews were slandering Jesus, giving currency to the rumour that he was the illegitimate child of a Roman soldier with a Jewish woman, far

from being a descendant from Davids family - so much so that they introduced even into the daily sermon an imprecation against the false miracles maintained by the heretics (that is Christians). The Christians called the Jews deicide peopleviii. After the early enthusiasm, the conversion of the Jews, as well as that of the pagans, became all the more difficult. The Jews were to become convinced that their nation was a sly tribe, but that they could get redeemed by baptism, and by accepting that new law, which resides in the Gospels, while the pagans were to get warned about being gullible in front of the sly and murderous people, that is the Jews. But both beliefs, Jew and Christian, proposed to the pagans an anti-naturist cult, as well as the paradoxical acknowledgment and experience of suffering as joy. The Jews in particular were loath to be talked into taking over the guilt of their ancestors. Apostle Paul, for instance, addresses the Jews gathered in the temple to listen to him, after first making up a necessary and strategic captatio benevolentiae by enlisting the patriarchs of Judaism and of Christianity, The God of Abraham and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our ancestors, honored his son Jesus who you have given over and denied in front of Pilate and now brothers, I know that out of ignorance you did harm just like your higher ranks (Acts 3, 17). At the end of the sermon, he repeats the Redeemers words, Forgive them, Lord, as they know not what they do. As long as the Jews felt more powerful, both in Jerusalem and in Rome, not only did they allow the Christians to preach in the temple and in their synagogues, but they were reserved about condemning them. Gamaliel, a refined Pharisee scholar, advises the Sanhedrin that they should not kill believers in Jesus, for if Gods will is that they should perish, they will perish anyway, and they will not perish if so God wills it. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, preached against Judaism in the synagogues from Alexandria, Cirene and Cilicia, but there is some nostalgia about him, a nostalgia for the Levite cult, for those priests who had opposed the construction of the temple: But the Most High does not dwell in houses made with hands; as the prophet says. Heaven is my throne, and the earth, my footstool. What house will you build for Me, says the Lord or what is

the place of my rest? Did not My hand make all these things? (Acts 7, 48-9). Some converted to Christianity inherited the Jews xenophobia and did not approve of the metanoia of the uncircumcised, or they conditioned it by those who did not practice the Jew ritual on deciding to join Christianity. Even Peter was reproached for accepting the Christianization of the pagan Cornelius and of other pagans, Now those who were scattered because of the persecution that arose over Stephen travelled as far as Phoenicia and Cyprus and to Antioch, speaking the word to none except Jews (our italics)(Acts 11,19-20). And the Apostle Paul refrained from blaming the Jews too harshly for having killed Jesus (in terms those that the Church elders were to do, from the second century onwards), regarding His death a fulfillment of the divine will, For those who live in Jerusalem and their rulers. because they did not recognize Him nor understand the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled this by condemning Him (Acts 13, 27-28). The Jews from Tarsus knew the effects of the slow transition, and used them for the purpose of universalizing Christianity, Let it be known to you therefore, brethren, that through this man forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you, and by him everyone that believes is freed from everything from which you could not be freed by the law of Moses (Acts 13, 38-39). Although the Jews became all the more envious of the success of the Christians evangelism, they endeavoured to carry on the dialogue both with heretics and with pagans. At the same time, the Christians gradually withdrew from the dispute, with the text of the Gospels remaining within an indistinct framework, but the Church elders started to express accusations and insults with anti-Judaic overtones. Justin (+165), Irineus from Lyon (140-190), Origene (182252), Esebius of Cezareea (260-339), Grigore from Nissa (328-389) and John the Chrisostom (354-407) all open the door to anti-Semitism in medieval Christian theology. Origene wrote: We can therefore uphold in all confidence that the Jews wont be able to retrieve their former condition any longer, because it is they who committed the most abhorrent crime (our italics), by plotting this

crime against the Redeemer of the human race. Consequently, the town in which Jesus thus suffered was razed to the ground, the Jewish people driven from it, while others were called by God to join the lines of the blessed (Counter Celsus 4, 223)viii ; Grigore of Nissa is extremely violent about the deicides, Murderers of God, assassins of the prophets, rebels and enemies of God, they trespass against the laws, oppose the divine grace, repudiate the faith of their parents. Like the devil, a race of vipers, informers and thoughtless slanderers, Pharisaic dregs, Sanhedrin of demons, cursed, hateful killers, enemies of whatever is beautiful, etc.viii. John the Chrisostom similarly says, At once brothel and theatre, the synagogue is simultaneously a den of thieves and a directing place for beasts. Living for the sake of the belly, their mouths always full, the Jews can hardly manage better than pigs or he-goats in their lewd coarseness and in their intense greediness (our italics). They know how to do only one thing: eating their fill and drinking until they are drunk.viii The accusation of deicide is more and more frequently expressed in direct and violent terms. In an Easter sermon, Meliton of Sardes, who was archbishop between 161 and 180, for the first time totally deprives the murder of Jesus of its theological dimension. It sounds like a pure crime, This Jesus was killed. In the heart of Jerusalem; why? as it was the paralytic He was healing, the very poor he was cleansing, the blind to whom He was giving sight and the dead He was bringing back to life. This is what He suffered for. It is written in the words of the prophets, They requite me evil for good; my soul is forlorn (Psalm 35, 12). Against you, they thought and slandered and said, Lets enchain the Righteous and the Just one, because He stands in our way. Why have you Israel committed this new crime? You have disgraced He who has honored you. You have disdained He who has valued you. You have belied He who has acknowledged you. You have driven away He who called you. You killed Him who kindled you. What have you done, Israel? You have not forgotten the place where is written, If you do not oppress the alien, the fatherless or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your

own heart, then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers for ever (Jeremiah 7, 6). I really killed the Lord, Israel says. Why? Because He had to suffer. You are wrong, Israel. Because you thought of killing our Lord, He had to suffer; yet not through you, did He have to be mocked at, yet not through you, did He have to be judged, but not by you (our italics) He had to get hanged, why did you make this new injustice by killing our Lord, your Master, in unimaginable tortures, the Lord who made you, and conceived you, and who honored you, He who called you Israel? On the contrary, you rose against your Lord before whom people kneel, He who is worshipped by the Just and the uncircumcised, and because of whom Pilate himself washed his hands. It was He who you killed, on the great celebration day, you killed your Lord in the heart of Jerusalemviii St Pionius of Smirna, killed in 250, had drawn the Christians attention to the peril for their faith of using synagogues as places of asylum during persecutions. He who enters the synagogue will sin against the Holy Spirit. As a matter of fact, Jesus had said, Every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven (Matthew 12, 31) The Jews and the Christians accused one another of lies. In their sermons, the Jews were saying that Jesus was but a man murdered violently, because He unlawfully implored the spirit of the dead. The Christians were also claiming that the Jews were telling lies when writing that Saul would have talked with Samuels spirit; he who deceives himself by this aberration is lost, so that he has to choose between two options: to believe that Saul talked with Samuels spirit awakened by the witch from Endor, or to refuse this heresy so as to cling to the faith inspired by the Holy Spirit.viii In the imaginary dialogue entitled Dialogue with the Jew Tryphon (155161), which Justus or Justin was carrying on with a contemporary rabbi, rabbi Tarphon, the Jews blame the Christians for having falsified the text of the Bible while translating it. The rabbi Tryphon defends the Talmudic truth, while Justus, that of the Gospels. Both employ a reserved and decent language. Justus asks

the rabbi to advise the Jews in their sermons to give up mocking He who the Pharisees crucifiedviii. The rabbinic literature of the time rarely mentions Jesus. In general, it does not rule out His existence, but questions His condition as Messiah and accuses Him of having practised witchery and magic, which flagrantly transgressed the Judaic laws - laws that punished such practices as lapidating (See Deuteronomy 13, 2-12). Ever since the romantic period, the Christians had lapsed into the error that the Jews had made in their Canaanite period: to involve God in their controversy with the Jews. Some passages from the Gospels (always altered and updated) render Jesus in violent terms, as Yahweh was at one time, which seems to be in total opposition to the preaching about meekness and kindness, as sources of positive energy, as formulated in some passages from the same Synoptic Gospels, but especially in the apocryphal ones. Instead of the universal reconciliation that Jesus was announcing, the Christians sermons began to disseminate hatred, revenge and to create an art that was fostering anti-Judaic propaganda on the black market. Christian theology is grounded on some passages of high sophistry from Apostle Pauls Letters (such as the following from Galatians 4, 23-26): But the son of the slave was born according to the flesh, the son of the free woman (Sarra) through promise These women are two covenants. One is from Mount Sinai in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free and she is our Mother; or from Romans 9, 6-8, For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his descendants, but through Isaac shall your descendants be named. This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are reckoned as descendants. Gradually and progressively, Christian theology gets structured in relation to the betraying and murdering tribe, in other words, Jesus descendants (whose Judieity cannot be denied). In the view of Christian

theologians, the true Chosen Israel becomes the younger brother of Judaism, Christianity. After the Nazi Holocaust, an unbiased (as far as possible) psychoanalysis of the two faiths or religions, whose archetypal rivalry has become topical (Cain and Abel, the inimical brothers are frequently-invoked metaphors). From the new perspective of ethno-abyssal research, by dislodging the divine couple, dislodging typical peoples of agriculturers, both religions would have relied on the principle of phalocracy, a principle whose practical consequences begin with womans slavery and end up with the destruction of nature (ecologically). Torn away from terra, from the divine woman, from the mother goddess, man becomes the engineer of the paranoid systems that can jeopardize the very principle of creation. Christianity pushed Judaic spiritualism to its extreme limits: the very birth of our Redeemer is one that has nothing to do with the conjugal couple, with the fecundity principle. What used to be a divine blessing for the pagan peoples, fecundity=cosmic eroticism, cosmic orgasm, for the Jews but especially for the Christians, becomes a moral infringement. Jesus attitude to the adulterous woman seems paradoxical, and this attitude has been construed as an act of magnanimity, of forgiveness. In reality, as some scholars opine, the adulterous woman, she who is forgiven for having loved too much, was the symbol of cosmic love, which Jesus knew. In the sinful woman, the metaphysics of sex survives, symbolized through Aphrodite, Ishtar, Amaitis, Mylita, as well as through the temples of sacred prostitutionviii. Some Hellenistic mysteries are known to rely on the magic of sex; the erotic couple symbolized the sacred couple, and this united sky and earth. At Samothrace, the High Priestess with a serpent in her hand simulated scenes of violent eroticism. Millennia before, the goddess from Knossos, represented by a famous statue discovered in the mythical labyrinth, held two serpents in her raised hands or arms. While Lilith, Adams wife, appears in various medieval representations as half woman, half serpent. As a matter of fact, from the phallic symbol in the Old and the New Testaments, the serpent turns into a satanic

symbol of universal evil, in other words, whatever pertains to sex enters the register of negative connotations. And not only whatever partakes of sex, but of pleasure, of beauty; Where are the flowers in the biblical Paradise? Christel Kraus wonders in a relatively recent essay published in Tubingen. Indeed, could the sinful, inciting flowers have been sex symbols for the priestly writers of Genesis? In the Middle Ages, Christian spiritualism goes as far as to refuse nature, and implicitly Eros, such that the Catharses sect prohibited sexual relations even in marriage, proclaiming sexual abstinence as a supreme principle of the Christian faith. As results from the Upanishads and from the whole esotericism, before creation, heaven and the earth were one, enwrapped as in Brincushis Kiss. In Judaic and Christian monotheism, returning to one means returning only to Father, to half One in fact. Until the emergence of Yahwism, of Judaism and of Christianity, nature had been perceived as an immense theophany; the new faith chased gods away from it placing them in a zone totally inaccessible to man, in the intellectual spiritualized palaces of heaven, while the new race of people later on moulded by the Paulinian spirit endeavors to rehabilitate Eve through Mary and through the Mariologic cult. The fact that Jesus manifests detachment to his Mother is not motivated only by Jesus Essenien upbringing (with the Esseniens, as is known, the womans part used to be performed only within the gynoecia), not only by the exacerbated communitarian spirit, but also by the Gospel writers attempt (before the emergence of the Mariology cult that elevated Mary to the rank of the immaculate saint, innocent in 431, at the Ephesus Concilium) at belittling the womans part, out of the same obsessive refusal of the feminine principle. Estrangement from Mother means estrangement from the mother goddess, that is, from the Earth, from Nature. Todays suicidal mankind might have owed its paranoid existence to this rupture, brought about by the paternalist monotheism of the Jews 3500 years ago. Christian theology had to be on its guard in the Medieval Age lest the Virgin Cult should be mistaken for the cult of the Mother

Goddess, and lest the Virgin cult should get overrated at the expense of the Jesus cult, the only one which possesses the Holy Spirit (filioque). The cult of Virgin Mary has softened up the rigours of the law, and has introduced the lily, the rose, violets, lilies of the valley into the churches, cemeteries, iconography, religious poetry and so forth, but it has proved unable to assume sexuality, fecundity and death. Secularized, the Marial cult has created the Medieval poetic ideal of an asexual woman, like angels, la donna angelicata, that the troubadours used to chant to, Dante, Petrarch, the romantics, Eminescu, and who has been betrayed by all with real women, sinful Magdalenes. From the psycho-analytical perspective, anti-Judaism was born in the instinctively frustrated subconsciousness of some peoples, deeply connected to nature, but in the long run, incapable of a real metanoia.

From the 5th century onwards, Christians wondered: Are the Jews worth living? Are they, as well as their women, people? And as they did not have then the courage to specify that the Jew is first and foremost Jew and then man (E Cioran)viii, the good Christians found a justification for tolerating the deicide tribe, The Jews wrote St Augustine (354-430) have the mission of testifying, through their degradation, to the miseries befalling those who do not believe in Christ. Like Cain, they bear a stamp, but they do not have to be killed. They are a necessity to the faithful peoples (our italics), needed to show them what befalls those who do not believe, who cannot believe, who will not believe in the Christians catechism.

Notes
viii

See Josy Eisenberg, A History of the Jews, p 92;

Ptolemeu Filopator mentions the perishing of the whole breath of Judas. After a pogrom of the Jews from Alexandria, Ptolemeu Filopator wrote note-book to his subjects from Syria and Phoenicia, asking them to exterminate those who never cease with their madness (III Macabei 3, 11). He calmly describes their smooth coexistence with all the other tribes subjected to him, and then motivating his plan regarding those with wickedness inborn in them, shedding the good and ever astray to the river and who by word and silence ever confess their hatred , unbelievers, secret sellers, and barbars, we ordered he writes, that as soon as this letter reaches you, those singled out in it, together with women and infants, you should admonish and rob, and on the same day you should send them from all over the place to us, enchained in iron bonds, as befits the wicked ones to perish with disgracing death. And anybody who hides any Judie, be he old or young, or an infant at his mothers bosom, in terrible tortures will he get tormented along with his whole house. And whoeverl informs on him who is hiding, that one will follow the fortunes of he who falls under the blame, and from the princely silver, 2000 drahmas and freedom will he get wreathed. And the whole place where a Judie will be found hidden will get burned and wasted... (III, Macabei, 3, 18-22). The letter sounds as if it is written by Hitler and Goebbels. And shortly the king sent an old Athenian to compel the Judies to drop their age-old laws and not act on Gods laws any longer. And to defile the Jerusalem temple and to call it that of the Olympian Zeus, while that of Gorizine, Zeus the guest lover, as the inhabitants of the place used to be. It was with difficulty that this malevolent act was imposed on the people, while pagans defiled the temple with debauchery and drunkenness, taking delight in the whores in the sacred courts. And the altar got filled with unlawful things specifically forbidden in the law, and people were not allowed to keep Gods day either, or to keep the traditional feast-days, or even to say they were Judies. They were taken forcibly to the sacrifices people brought each month on the kings birthday; and when there was the celebration of Dyonisos, the Judies, were compelled with ivy wreaths to take part in the pageantry to honor Dyonisos. And from Ptolemeus edict an order was issued in the Hellenist fortresses: those neighbours, like the Judies, had to make a sacrifice,while those who would not adopt the Hellenistic custom would be killed; so little is revealed about that period other than the burdens that oppressed them. Two women were brought who had been told not to have their infants circumcized. For this reason they hung the infants from their bosoms, and taking them through the roads of the city, they threw them down from the wall and they died. Others would run to caves in the vicinity, to hide so as to be able to celebrate the day of rest. When Filip was told of this, he burned them without any opposition from them to that much honored day (our italics) I therefore ask those who will do justice to this book not to be terrified by these sufferings, but to deem that these toils served our nation, not to piety but to teaching (II Macabei, 6, 1-12)
viii viii

viii

Josy Eisenberg, op cit., p 99;

viii

See 2000 Yahre Christentum, p 87;

viii

Josy Eisenberg, op cit, p 106;

viii

Ibid, p 107;

viii

Who was Jesus? The Marxists uphold that he was a Marxist, Judies that he was a Judie, Christians that he was a Christian, the feminist movement that he was its initiator by emancipating women, vegetarians that he was a vegetarian, the Nazi Arian Christianity that he was an Arian, the initiated that he was an initiate in ancient esotericism, the mystics that he was a mystic, the deists that he was Gods son, the sacrificelogists that he was a sacrifice to honor a god, the psychiatrists that he was a typical case of paranoia, the paleo-astronautics an alien. Was Jesus really a Judie from the Iesei tribe as presented by the Gospels, or a Jew from a province far from Jerusalem? Was he a scholar, a Pharisee rabbi, as some Jewish historians contend, or an initiate as construed on a reading of the Gospels, other than a aliterary reading? If he was an initiate, was he like Abraham, Melchisedec, Moses, Aaron, Krishna, Rama, Hermes the Trimegist, Buddha, Orpheus or Pythagora? Why was he deified like Hermes the Trimegist who became Toth the god? Or was he a messenger from another world, an alien, as the paleoaatronautics analysts of proofs would contend? Was he a healer or a magician? Why has he obsessed mankind for 2000 years, to such an extent that the deluded characters that believing that they are Jesus frequently emerge in the permanent war of the end of the world? Was he a typical case of psychopathology in which an Alyosha Karamzov can become, under certain circumstances, the great Inquisitor? (according to some biblical accounts, he had moments of great violence, and his very driving away the merchants from the temple, as reported in the Synoptic Gospels, seems to support this diagnosis,). Did he really rise again, or did he only speak of the parable of resurrection so that ordinary people should comprehend it, while in reality, Jesus was speaking about a rebirth into a superior matter, in a superior world? After His resurrection, did he continue to preach far away in India, as some recently published books uphold? Is it true what Rudolf Steiner, one of the great mystics of our century, maintains that to render the resurrection mystery believable, that is life transformation, the raising of Lazarus was in fact stagemanaged? With Lazarus, in the spirit of the very old customs, Jesus fulfilled the great miracle of life transformation. Through this, Christianity became attached to mysteries. Through Christ, Lazarus had become an initiate. He thus had become capable of rising to the superior words pronounced, Lazarus, come out!, words in which we can

recognize the cry by which the initators Egyptian priests called back to everyday life those who, to be able to abandon earthly things and to acquire belief in the existence of eternal ones, were undergoing the initiation processes. But, behold, Jesus disclosed the secret of the mystery through Lazarus initiation, Jesus had brought to the world a process that, in the sense of the old sacerdotal wisdom, could only be fulfilled in the hidden corners of the mystery. This initiation was to prepare for understanding of the mystery of Golgotha (Christianity as Mystic Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity, pp 129-130). Crucified on the cross, did he cry for Elijah (who had ascended to heaven beforehand in a fire chariot), or God. Or maybe the legend of his return to India is true, to somewhere in todays Kashmir, the place of a civilization that was seemingy destroyed by an atomic blast, as described in Mahabharata, a blast whose smoke would have risen to the sky in the shape of a mushroom, and left behind a mountain of stones that formed a town in times gone by. Could it be true that in the strange church of the little town of Srinagar, under an Indian inscription Here is buried Jesus- , there is the tomb of he who wanted to preach Indian teaching to the Judies, but they drove him away? If the metal sarcopagus placed in the middle of the church were opened, could one find there the bones of a man who still shows the traces of the nails that pierced his feet and hands? Christians do not show any interest in the Srinagar church, it is a place of pilgrimage for Muslims, who regard Isha (Jesus) as a prophet sent by Allah... As for the shroud with which he would have been covered on His burial, it has been proved to be ..a forgery. Even if the thousand questions about His identity disturb the dogma, those who truly love Him and believe in Him cannot help wondering, Who was Jesus? According to Eduard Schure in Les Grands Initis, ch Jesus the Orders of the Esseniens derived from the remnants of a brotherhood of prophets founded by Samuel (p 470). These asaya (therapists) knew the occult virtues of plants and minerals, and treated the physical body through the psyche. They practised the essential dogma of the Orphic and Pythagoreic doctrines of the pre-existence of the soul and the consequence and explanation of its immortality. The Soul, they said, comes down from the subtlest ether, and is attracted into the body like a natural charm, and remains there as in a prison; set free of the bonds of the body, as from bondage, it rises joyfully to the sky(Eduard Schure, p 472). The common points between the Esseien doctrine and that of the Pythagoreics were: the pre-sunrise prayer, the linen clothes, the common supper, the one-year apprenticeship, the three-fold initiation, the organization of the order and the common property of the curators over their belongings, the law of silence, the oath to keep the mystery, the division of their science into three parts: (a) the science of universal principles, or theogony, which Phylon calls logics; (b) physics or cosmogony; (c) morals, that is whatever deals with man, a science to which especially therapists were consecrated (Eduard Schure, p 471) Jesus came to Galilee not as a popular Judaic prophet, as the editors of the Gospels depicted Him, but as an esotericism initiate, initiate into the great
viii

mysteries, and He wanted to present ordinary people with the new science of The Gospel of the Heavenly Kingdom. Such courage had not been seen from the times when Cakia Muni, the last Buddha, animated by immense pity, preached on the banks of the Ganges. The same sublime pity for humanity animated Jesus. He united an inner light, a power of love, a grandeur of belief and an intense energy of taking action that were his only (Eduard Schure, p 486). As for Essenien esotericism, and implicitly that of Jesus, see also Iesus der Esoteriker, Esotera 8, August, 1990; The quarrel between esotericists and the Church is the subject of Ulrich Holsts article from the above- mentioned review. Like Eugen Drewermann, Ulrich Holst from Hamburg, a theologian and psychotherapist, upholds in Der Kleriker Psychogramme eines Ideals (1989) that Jesus was an Essenien, that the Esseniens were initiated in esotericism, and that Jesus would have survived on the cross, that the Church has a vested interest in keeping hidden some texts that rebuff dogma, that after the Nicea Concilium of 325, certain correctors designated by the clerical authorities did correct the Gospel texts, ruling out the very elements that pertained to the Essenien mysteries.
viii

See also Ulrich Holst, Esotera 8,August 1990, Jesus der Esoteriker, p 63; 11 See Kembach, Dictionary of General Mythology, Scientific and Enciclopedic Publishing House, Buch., 1983, p 260; See Kernbach, Dictionary of General Mythology/ Dictionar de mitologie generala, Scientific and Enciclopedic Publishing House, Buch, 1983, p 260;
viii viii viii

See Kernbach, op cit., p 261 and Pierre Crepon, Les Evangiles apocryphes;

Das Friedensevangelium der Essener, Bd I, S 11 f, Frankfurt 1974, apud Iesus der Esoteriker, p 63;

viii viii viii

Ibidem p 65; Die Scilitanischen Martyrer, in 2 000 Jahre Christentum, p 97;

See Die Christen Feinde oder Stutzen des Staates, Justin, Erste Apologie: Die Christen halten sich an Recht und Ordnung, in 2000 Jahre Christentum, p 90;
viii

The dispute between Judies and Christian heretics begins over Jesus ministry. They confuted the laws that even the bishops did their best to impose, so as to create a dogmatic and coherent religion capable of opposing the evermore numerous sects, equally dangerous and threatening to the unity of the

people, that unity attained by Moses and Ezra, by means of the very law. Jesus thought that they hated Him unjustly (they hated me without a cause John 15, 25), but they hated Him justly, as an ethical, political, religious destabilizer; Jesus also blamed them for not knowing how to read the signs of the times; <You hyocrites, you know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.>, Jesus cried to the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 16, 3). He always admonishes the official priests for their hypocrisy and lack of belief. They in their turn, even if (in the case of the former) they accepted the dogma of the souls immortality through resurrection, they regarded Jesus as a strange, turbulent character, and above all did not believe in the wonders worked by Him.
viii

In De Migne, Pathrologe greque 11, 1060, apud Poliakov, op cit., I, p 41; Ibidem, pp 46, 685; Ibidem, pp 25, 230; 2000 Yahre Christentum, p 153; Ibidem, pp 152-153;

viii viii viii viii viii viii

Ibidem p 154; See J Evolo, Metaphysique du Sexe, Petite Bibliotheque, Payot, 1976; viii Romanias Face-Changing, Buch., 1937, p 130.

3.

Anti-Semitism

In everything, the Jews are unique, beyond compare in the world, hunchbacked under a curse that is Gods responsibility alone. If I were a Jew, I would commit suicide (Emil Cioran)

Anti-Semitism - collective hatred of Jewsviii - begins, according to the views of some historians who have written about the phenomenon, at the time of the first Christian crusade, 1096; while according to others it arose with their being ejected in 1492 from the country where they had felt most at home, Spain. Historically, it is not clear how Jewish communities developed across the whole area between Atlantic and Siberia. One could suppose that many were remnants of those ten tribes expelled after the conquest of Israel; naturally only the Samaritans remained in Palestine. Most of the Jews scattered across the East, as far as China, Japan and Judea; while other tribes went to Europe, Siberia, Africa, some to South America. What is known for sure is that these communities had coexisted for many centuries in a conglomerate of peoples and minorities, without having any particular ethno-economic problems, because theological disputes did not go beyond the level of the elite. What else is known refers to the tribes of Judiezied Berbers from North Africa, that vehemently opposed the Arab conquerors in the 8th century, and during the reign of the Jewish Queen Kahena, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco flourished. The Jews had

gone to Spain before the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths and the Arabs. According to legend, Adoniram, a subject of King Solomon, reached the peninsula and discovered its beauty; then he brought in Jews who colonized it. Other Jews reached Spain with the Phoenicians. Many Spanish towns have Biblical names: Toledo (Toledoth), Escaluna (Escalon) and Maquedo (Megido). In 589, the Visigoth king Reccarede was converted to Catholicism and began to chase the Arian heretics (the Monophyzites), but also the Jews. From these Jews (who having left Palestine a long time before no longer had a close connection with Judaism), we get the term Marranism (from Marran, which originarily meant pig, the accursd), that is in most cases conversion to a crypto-Judaism, which is something that did not remain unnoticed by the Inquisition, and generally, by Christians. The Marrans, the conversos, were to get surrounded by a real psychosis of suspicion, but they were able to maintain a certain privileged economic and social status until 1492, when, along with all the Judies, they were expelled from Spain. In 711, some Marrani had helped the Arabs to conquer the peninsula, others had fought against them. Islam had proved to be tolerant, as everywhere, to the regions conquered by the Arabs. Between the Bible and Koran, there were not too many contradictions, the 9th century Arab historian, Al Tabari, writes in the book entitled The Book of Religion and of the Empire. The tragedy of the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 was the cruellest one which the Jews had experienced until then, according to some Jewish historians. While in Europe, from the 12th century onwards, the Jews in some regions were being persecuted and massacred or driven away, those in Spain, the Sephards, had enjoyed a real golden age till then. They were merchants, land owners, high ranking dignitaries, elite intellectuals, free to deepen theological studies (the result of which was the publication in the 13th century of the mystical Cabala and of Zohar), Hispanized without getting de-Judiezied, Judies without getting deHispanized. The Spanish Christians, busy with re-conquering Spain from Arab rule, did not attach great importance to them; on the contrary, they used the power of their communities the famous al-jamas (which enjoyed as much

autonomy as they wanted) in their fight against the common enemy the Saracens. The year 1492, just like other years, had nevertheless been prepared in the underground of consciousness, and in Spain. Moreover, during the Civil War between 1360 and 1364, the Jews had been on the side of Pedro the Cruel, the lawful king of Castile, and of Leon, and not on the side of his bastard brother, Enrique of Trastamara. The victorious Enrique took revenge on the Jews, whom he constrained to wear a distinctive badge, similar to those beyond the Pyrenees. As early as 1391, the first Medieval pogrom had taken place, in which 50,000 Jews who had refused baptism died. Some conversos, once affiliated to the Christian Church, had advanced given their high intellectual grounding to the Christian theological elite; and thus came to demonstrate extreme nervousness. Because of the crisis induced by their lack of identity, they carefully monitored anti-Semitism, with sickening perfidy, in its two forms: both the high, Popish one, and the low, popular one. Solomon Halevi, by conversion becoming Pablo de Santa Maria of Burgos, was one of the most fierce and cruel adversaries of the Spanish Jews. After having enjoyed all the ecclesiastic honours, he died as a saint. In Spain the ultra-racist concept, later taken over by the Nazis, of limpieza de sangre (blood purity) appeared. Although at least ten ethnic groups then lived there, limpieza de sangre did not refer to the Greeks, the Goths, the Berbers, the Arabs, the Romans, the Gypsies or to any other peoples of the former Roman and Byzantine empires that had migrated there, but only to the Jews. The massacre of the Jews, as described in their numerous chronicles Memorbuch surfaces after the failure of the crusades, and becomes the popular form of expression of hatred against the murderers of Jesus; in reality, one could say that it was the safety valve of a general and indiscriminate hatred that breaks out at times of affliction. The interdiction of knee-bending (pro Judaeis non flectant) during the religious service when the Jews were under discussion, the expulsions, the obligation for the Jews to live in special quarters

ghettosviii , the obligation to wear a distinctive badge (after the Lateran Concilium, 1215) a flier of yellow cloth, round in France, rouelle (as a reminder of the money with which Judas was bought), square in the Netherlands (as a reminder of Moses law tablets), a horned hat, Judenhut in Germany (as a reminder of the devils horn)viii, grey or black clothes and so on; yet all these identifying signs did not mean great miseries for the Jews, compared to the mass killings, robberies and the ravaging of their communities. The Jews were moreover no longer as necessary and efficient as before, as the post-crusades Europeans, no longer needed as crusade soldiers, themselves became merchants. Therefore, the Jews had to disappear. It was high time to carry on theological disputes, to employ allegories or to show Carolingian tolerance, when Louis de Debonnairs confessor got converted to Judaism, when Agobard, the famous bishop of Lyon (728-840), the most enlightened man of his century (and a visionary of sorts in his way) had been refused by the king Ludovic the Pious (who had previously been counseled by a magister judaeorum) in his attempt to baptise all the Jews; overdue was the time of Concilia (like that from Lateran 1215) with the participation of the rabbi. The time had come for the Jews to fight for their survival, especially in the 14th century, called, because of hunger and the plague, the century of the devil. After the great crusades, the former crusaders (many of them disabled, just like todays fighters who returned badly injured from Vietnam or Afghanistan) got allied to the poor of the towns and starving people of the villages as a result of natural disasters, and set out on small crusades, some local ones, others of some scope, like that of the little shepherds, spiritually supported by visions, previsions, sermons la croisade de pastoreaux. In 1320 according to some chronicles, a peasant from Northern France had had a vision: a bird had alighted on his shoulder and told him that he had to destroy the unfaithful, this being the only way to rescue mankind from perishing. The little shepherds, led by a baron (!), went everywhere, to Spain, France, Italy and Germany, and massacred more than one hundred and forty Jewish communities. They set fire to synagogues,

while the high clergy and great feudal lords, princes and popes seem helpless in the face of the peasant wrath. Similarly, while the physicians were diligently concerned with discovering and annihilating the causes of the 1347 plague, for ordinary people it seemed clear that Satan had been taking action through his agents, the Jews, making them poison and infect the wells. Numerous gangs of killers appeared, like that of Baron Emicho von Leisingen, gangs that acted in the main towns of Germany and France. After robbing the Jews, they forced them to get baptized. The Jewish but also the Christian chronicles of the time record the fact that sometimes the town churches attacked by Emicho gave shelter to the Jews. Thus, on hearing that Emichos gangs were approaching Worms, the Jews took refuge in the Bishops palace of the prelate Adalbert, but all those present in the church, including the bishop, were killed. On 25 May, terror descended on those who were in the bishops palace. The enemies had killed them by the sword, as they had the first. The victims, knowing what had happened to their brothers, gave in to killings and let themselves be massacred, thus sanctifying their names and fulfilling the prophets words: mothers lying over their children, fathers falling onto their sons. Some had killed their brothers; others their parents; wife, children, their betrothed, all accepting the divine sentence with an open heart; giving up their souls to eternity, crying, Hear O Israel, eternal is our God, eternal and unique. Their enemies undressed them and dragged them off without any concession for anybody, except for those who accepted baptism (From bar Simeons Solomons Chronicle)viii. Two days later, it was the turn of those from Mayence. At first, as the chronicler Albert dAix writes, the Jews attempted to oppose their attackers, to defend themselves, cross in hand, Then they resorted to killing one another, lest they should fall alive in the enemys hands.Then followed the pogrom in Kln and in other German towns. The bishops Adalbert of Worms, Ruthard of Mayence, Herman III of Kln and Cosmas of Prague risked their lives in their attempt to save the Jews, but those gangs made up of the dregs of society and led by fanatical and dissolute princes, such as Emicho, Guillaume of Charpentier, Thomas of Ferria were unstoppable.

The theological and lay elite tried to take advantage of all these misfortunes in both material and ideological terms, while the population viewed them with mixed feelings of both pity and satisfaction - to which was added the ordinary mans thirst for cruelty. Some Christians covered the Jews, others denounced them; yet, all had a clear conscience. The anti-Semitic mood was thoroughly prepared by the obsessive indictment of the synagogue, the burning of the Talmud in public squares, the disgracing of rabbis in the so-called public debates, accusations of witchcraft and ritual death. A Judeo-Christian public dispute that took place in Paris in 1320 had proceeded in the following terms: 1. Is it true that after the fall of Jerusalem, the rabbi Simon ben Yohai proclaimed that any foreigner was the worst goyim, shouting kill him? 2. What is a goyim? 3. Is it true that a goyim who takes a rest on Saturday and obeys the law deserves death? 4. That Jesus was condemned suffer in Hell? 5. That Jesus was an illegitimate child? 6. That in Paradise, the Leviathan will be attended by the Just at tableviii? The rabbis behaved in a reserved way, stoically. The quotes from Haggada and others of their books, by which they counteracted the accusations of their opponents in the debates, were not too persuasive, especially as they did not feel altogether innocent of some of the blasphemies attributed to them. Moreover, the converted, fanatical, hysterical Jews became weapons for reprisals in the Christian Inquisition, disseminators, informers or profiteers, at the expense of their fellow-believers. Despite the precarious religious situation in a Europe that was building cathedrals, waging holy wars, setting up its information apparatus for the Inquisition, so as to be able to control the whole Christian empire, economically, it was the Jews who create the foundation of a new era in Europe an era based on the circulation of money. In the big cities a Jewish aristocracy arose, one of money; and the rich Jew began to be respected and even accepted at princely

courts, and even at that of the Pope, while the poor Jew, who could not get out of the ghetto, was still viewed as the devil, the leper, the dirty one, the killer. And nobody defended him, not even his rich co-religionaires, who were becoming more and more indifferent to Talmudic principles. Like Christianity, Judaism remained the consolation of the poor. As we mentioned before, Spanish racism became radical in 1492, when Tomas of Torquemada (1420-1498), the great Inquisitor, got permission to expel the Jews and the new Christians, conversos, Marrani. The result of this first racist war and the diaspora of Spanish Jews was Spains economic decline, with the country now deprived of the most active people commercially, who had been excellent artisans of the new economy, the bankers needed for those times. Beyond the Perrine, whence many Sephardi Jews from Spain emigrated, the Ashkenazi did not enjoy a better fate. It was not incidental that the most known Judaic chronicle of the Middle Age is entitled The Valley of Tears. All Jews came to be expelled from England in 1290, and from France in 1394. Although they had contributed financially to the first crusade, yet Godefroy of Bouillon, called the Saviour of the Sacred Tomb in 1099, had sworn to avenge Christs death with the blood of the Jews from home. Reaching the Holy Tomb to set it free from the hands of the Muslims (who were not very fond of it), the crusaders had a real revelation: murderers could be found in their own house. They returned from the crusades fanaticized, determined to punish the traitors and the deicides. The economic crisis experienced in post-crusade Europe, and especially the devastating plague of 1347, exacerbated discontent and feelings of enmity. In the climate of hatred, the scapegoats were the Jews. While for the common man, the Jews were wicked usurers, untrustworthy and even killers, yet for princes, for the nobles in distress, they were the dung pit with money, the clog that could fix a particular economic mechanism, through the money they were levying by practicing usury, and by supplementing the fiscal evasion of the kings subjects, through the numerous taxes they were paying. The financial efficiency of the usurers and of the

merchants accounts for a certain tolerance of the aristocratic classes towards the Jews, whom they were sometimes disputing with the Pope. Expelled by some princes, they were invited by some others, until they came to be driven away by those as well. Eternally wandering, they could not afford to possess goods other than furniture, money, gold and jewelry. The money commerce, prohibited for Christians but permitted to Jews, was on the one hand the trap set by the aristocracy and the clergy, so as to fan ordinary peoples hatred and envy towards them; on the other hand, for the Jews it was the only form of existence and even of prosperity, despite all those dozens of taxation demands (one was even called the duty of the cloven foot, in other words, duty of. the devil). Often, the poor people were sorry about the Jews when they had been driven away, especially the small money-lended who had helped them to survive. Drugged by the melodramatic-popularizing sermons of the minor clergy or of the professional preachers, by propaganda made especially through the melodrama of the passions at Easter, but also by mural art, legends and rumours produced by an almost occult mechanism of propaganda, always in search of an enemy, of a scapegoat, the lower orders were manipulated, rhinocerosized by elitist authorities that were working out by means of a sophistry that seems pure paranoia today the thought model and the feeling pattern of the time. As a matter of fact, in this given thought pattern, whose transgression equalled unlawfulness first to the Church, but also to the lay authorities, hatred of the Jews was turning into an existentialist axiom. A Christian without hating the Jews? The Godot of the poor had to be hated by all means. The preachers of the small towns and villages carried on their campaign against the Jews of the ghettos. This was the case with Vincent Ferrier, a Spanish preacher (also called Flau des Juifs in the Jewish chronicles), who roamed all over Europe accompanied by self-flagellating monks, proclaiming the synagogue of Toledo (the greatest in the Europe of that time) the church Santa Maria Blancaviii . In Russia, the successors to Genghis-Khans empire always regarded the Jews (who had been there so long that nobody knew how long) as an evil that

had to get extirpated. Ivan the Horrible explained in a letter to the king of Poland why they were undesirable: they had introduced the poison of distrust about Jesus, causing much harm to the peace of the empire. In fact, the Czar was referring to a heretic reformer, the converted Jew, the Lithuanian Skaria, who had criticized the luxury of the Orthodox clergy, the cult of the relics and of icons, and denied Jesus divinity. In fact, in the whole of Europe the Christian church had to fight against Judaism and the heretics, the heretics sometimes happening to be converted Jews. Unlike Europe, where there was also a Jewish aristocracy that was beyond discussion (but, according to a witticism, each country has the Jews it deserves), the Jewish question was limited in Russiaviii to jidani, the plucked birds, the carriers of illnesses, ridiculous in whatever they were doing, doctors of distrust, sorry wise men; iankii were not American Yankees, people with money, but were considered dregs of society. Like the Germans, who came to be masters in creating a mass psychosis, the Russians surrounded them with greater and greater suspicion, like conspirators disguised as beggars. There is no general European consensus about the attitude to Judaism, as well as to the Jewish nation: some countries took advantage of the intolerance of the others, to bring in Jewish capital. Paris tolerated the guilds of peddlers, as well as the big bankers; at Maria of Medicis court, the adventurer Concino Concini, also called Montalto, almost managed Frances politics from the shadows. For a while, the Reformation managed to push Judaism out of the stage of hate-generating theological disputes. Luther, himself an anti-Semiticviii in his early career as a reformer of the Catholic Church, was more dangerous for the Pope than the Talmudists and the Cabalists. In 1542, Luther published a pamphlet of hysterical violence against the Jews: Gegen die Juden und ihre Lugen (Against the Jews and their Lies). The declarations of love for Jesus alternate with sarcastic pages against the traitors. He recommends to Christians not to engage in conversations with these foreigners (sic!), coming from who knows where (sic!), whose material assets lawfully belong to the German people. We do not

regard their women as harlots, as they do with Maria, Christs Mother; we do not regard them as harlots sons, as they do with our Lord, Jesus Christetc; they did not live so well either under David or under Solomon. His speech excels by updating all those Medieval ides reues, which Christian Europe, busy with its emergent capitalism, had begun to forget. The measures to be taken against these murderers of Christian children, against these poisoners of water sources, against these lazy carriers of disease, had to be radical: burning their synagogues, confiscating their books, expelling them, while the ministers duty was to see to this plan of cleansing Germany was applied following his own example. Ich habe das Meine getan: ich bin entschuldigt (I have done my part: I am excused). In another anti-Semitic pamphlet (Schem Hamephoras), Luthers tone becomes violent and trivial; he accuses the Jews of always looking ironically at goyim, that is, those who as he writes would not be able to understand the Gospels, where it is written how, after Judas had hanged himself, his bowels burst open and spilled out, while the Jews gathered dirt on their gold and silver plates and ate it. In brief, the Jews are worse than devils. Yet, we have to bear in mind that Luther did not always remain anti-Semitic; when the fury that animated him turned onto the Pope, when Protestants began themselves to be treated as a dangerous minority, sharing the Jews fate to whose Book they had returned, Luther defended the Jews, saying that they were after all Jesus ancestors (!) Luther is the landmark from which anti-Semitism shifts from the level of theological confrontation with more or less visible socio-political consequences, usually local (except for the radical expulsions from England and Spain) to the philosophic, anthropological and, in the long run, political level. He tried to justify the holocaust as a measure required to avert the danger of Talmudism over and against Christianity. From another perspective, what is attempted is a revival of anti-Semitism.

There is no longer a confrontation between two forms of fundamentalism by maintaining a polite anti-Jew attitude, but a shift to direct attacks, scientifically grounded. From among the enlightened philosophers, the most violently anti-Jew was Voltaireviii. His Philosophic Dictionary, 1768, covers 130 articles, of which one third refer to Jews, our masters and enemies, who we believe and abhor (Voltaire wrote in his article on Abraham), or the most abominable people on earth (article Antropophague) or, whose laws do not say a word about spirituality and about the souls immortality (article Ame) . The article on the Jews itself, Juif, is of 30 pages, and it ends thus: You are not likely to find in them but an ignorant and barbaric people, who for a long time have united sordid avarice and the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred against the peoples that have tolerated and enriched them. But Voltaire does not think about the final solution: Yet they do not have to get burned, he writes, and thus, by denying the negation, gives a clue to posterity. Why was Voltaire an anti-Semitic? Because, generally, he was anticlerical, anti-Christian, and therefore, anti-Judaic, ironic, violent, and seemingly, his consciousness was burdened with an unhappy legacy: his ancestors conversion, in other words, the hysteria of an identity crisis. As a matter of fact, as we know, the most violent anti-Semites often come from the ranks of the converted. Kant, Fichte and Schopenhauer had harshly criticized Judaism, in terms of their metaphysics (the former two, with views anchored in Lutheran theology, the latters anchored in Buddhism). Schopenhauer makes Moses out to be a barbarian legislator, and affiliates Christianity to Buddhism, separating it from Judaism and from the Bible, a tissue of infamies, meanness and cowardice, as the poet Roux Bordier was to write in 1821. The philosopher of the will to live and of absolute pessimism criticized the Judaic God, a creator who passes judgment on his own creation as good, And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. In reality, hardly good at all was the creation of a world whose law is suffering! On the contrary Christianity places

the creator beyond good and evil, life and death, uninvolved in His creation. Schopenhauer does not miss the racist side of anti-Semitism either, The country of the Jews is the other Jews, remarks the German philosopher vis--vis the Jews self-isolation. Nietzsche (one of the Jews defenders) said about Richard Wagnerviii that he was a neuropath. In the case of his pathological anti-Semitism, his neurosis may have originated in the complex of the genius from Bayreuth: the illegitimate son of a Jew, the pathetic artist Ludwig Gayer. Perfidious, revengeful, treacherous, avid for gain, with a keen sense of psychological insights, the antiSemitic Wagner embodied all the qualities of the diabolical Jew that Christians detested. Much was written about the fact that the famous king of Bavaria, Ludwig II was the psychopath creation of the musical genius, ironically called in his time the great rabbi of Bayreuth! He enjoyed the vocation of prophesying, of the Messianic call, and had a racial superiority complex. Just as for the Jews, for Wagner, the Book was truer than reality, or the only true one, the legend was truer than history, while the Nibelungens was the racial document about German superiority over all the empires peoples. According to Wagner, it is Wooten and not a Jew from Nazareth who is the true Christ. According to Wagner, what is asserted in European thought is the theory of non-Judaic Christianity, which the history of religions from the epoch of doctrinaire Nazism was to endeavor to demonstrate archeologically and anthropologically. In his 1849 article Judaism in music, he indirectly, but transparently enough, attacks the great Mayerbeer, the musician who had introduced Wagner when he was still unknown to the elite of Parisian artists. The musical sterility of his time was attributed by Wagner to the Judaisation of music, and, especially, he regarded it as a baneful consequence of the general Judaisation of the European arts. He even wrote to Liszt that he feels like practising terrorism of sorts a little in music, and asked for his help so as to make a great slaughter of rabbits. On Mayerbeers death, Wagner upheld that if the human race perished, it would be no great misery. But to perish because of the Jews would be a foolish thing. In other words, let the world perish,

but through a superior race, such as the Indo-Arian Germans. In European thought, Wagners antumity and posterity enjoyed an extremely powerful impact - obviously in the spiritual confusion following the post-Lutheran crisis of Christianity, and along with the more and more aggressive manifestations of atheism. According to a famous witticism, When religion loses its prestige, mankinds expectation is that the artist should take the place of the priest. The Wagnerian anthropodiceea, as also expressed by his art, began in a Tibetan paradise, where according to some anthropologists a vegetarian population (originating from Northern Siberia and the Arctic Circle) migrated there after powerful glaciations we refer to the Arians gradually overflowing into Europe and Asia Minor. Wagner himself was not able to get rid of the Biblical mental structure: mankinds spring was not in Eden on the banks of Tiger and Euphrates, but in Tibet. The Last Supper would thus be but the allegory of a return to vegetarianism, the replacement of meat by bread, and of blood by wine. After the Tibet exodus, the nomadic races, especially the Semites, would have become carnivorous, because of life circumstances. (Not incidentally, in the Biblical translation and anthropodiceea, Jehovah favors Abels sacrifice, meat, and not Cains, vegetal). As a matter of fact, meat is harmful (we recall the Daniel episode, when, having consumed only vegetal food for several days, Daniel and his companions, all dignitaries at Nebuchadnezzars court, looked much better than all the other young men, who had eaten meat). Ever since antiquity, through their sacrifices, and later on in the modern world, the Jews are responsible for having brought to Europe the disgusting meat marketing houses. Nothing more horrible than the famous Parisian house, Wagner said. He ostentatiously loves animals, especially the swan, that becomes symbol of absolute beauty. The death of the animal is the real original sin, contends the rabbi from Bayreuth. In the history of European anti-Semitism, Marxs caseviii is not less serious than Wagners. It is symbolic on the self-hatred of the Jews (like that, Deutscher Selbsthass, of the post-Holocaust German generation), the one most debated by psychoanalysts being judaischer Selbsthassviii. For Marx the Jew, any capitalist

is an inner circumcised, in other words, a Yankee, a Jankel, an Iani, a Ianke. In his study, The Judaic Problem (1843-1844), Marx transferred his anti-Semitism from theology, anthropology and arts into political economy. In his materialist dialectic outlook, through capitalism the whole of mankind becomes Judaic, materialist, idolising a new god, money. The Jews became emancipated not only by becoming the masters of the financial market, but much more and with a vengeance, to the extent that in their worship of money, the Christians became Jews. Their supremacy in America makes a point about the way in which, having been ostracized in Europe, they moulded the society of the future somewhere else. Money is the zealous god of Israel, before which no god can keep his holding, wrote the atheist Marx. Whatever is abstraction, theory, art, is despised by the Jews. While man cannot be regarded as having a purpose for himself, in the religion that shaped out the Judaist world of Capitalism neither was man acknowledged as an individual, but as the member of a collectivity.

Affiliated recently to the collectivity of European nations, Romania has tended to get synchronized to Europe, especially on the thought level, the economic level being almost unattainable Die Gedanken sind frei thoughts are free meaning that they, thoughts and ideas can be taken over, without paying for them. The jacket wearers thus bring into the young Romanian consciousness not only the European revolutions ideas, but also those of the post revolution. As a matter of fact, as is well-known, a post revolution, in its wing of restoring the pre-revolutionary forces, is concerned to single out the bad points of a revolution. And who has made revolutions without participating in them? The eternal destabilizers, the eternal discontent, the bad luck generators, the eternal Jews. And whereas in France after 1789 the accusations were not too violent, in Germany, the anti-revolutionary feeling has always been connected to the anti-Jewish one, especially as the Germans as manifest in Tiecks Orwelian comedies - were particularly responsive to the disaster brought about by any revolution, in the short term, but also the remote future one.

Incidentally, Eminescu was an adversary of these social illnesses (the revolutions), as he called them in his political articles, thus also getting affiliated to the philosophy of politics, in German thought. This accounts for his antiSemitism outbursts that cannot and should not be concealed. They pertained not to an unworthy enmity against the Jews (whom he eulogizes more than once), but to an acutely national feeling, and especially, to a system of thought of German inspiration. It was the time when we were seeking our identity in the West. For one of the main actors or architects of the Romanian revolution of 1848 (we refer to Vasile Alecsandri), those who represented but a minority, disadvantaged in relation to others, the Jews of the village, the connection bond with the town, become the blood- suckers of the village. I. Heliade-Radulescu, Cezar Bolliac, Ion Ghica and Simion Barnutiu take action as adversaries of the movement to acknowledge that Jews have rights. Gradually, like the Greek, the Jew comes to represent the noxious foreigner, lying within the Romanian nation, inside the State. If the post-revolution and post-union country did not make much progress, as desired and expected by the pro-Western-minded intellectuals, this was caused by the brakes put in by malevolent obscure forces. The fundamentalist Orthodoxism although not as vehemently anti-Judaic as Catholicism had been in the West, as it was made up in a theological climate of Byzantine tolerance - now increasingly assumes conspicuously xenophobic and anti-Jewish notes. The spiritualization that the Romanian and the European post-revolutionary economic and ethnic anti-Semitism needed and required takes place through Orthodoxism, engaged as it was in maintaining a rural patriarchal status that seemed the only ideal solution for Romanians and the national consolidation of the Romanian State. The bourgeois, the intellectual and the Jew were suspect, as through them the century-old stability of an eminently agrarian country was being jeopardized, a country eminently absent from history, eminently Christian Orthodox, and eminent with its dual-identity, Occidental and Oriental. With Romanians, the economic problem, the crisis, had not surfaced in

terms of a rejection of Jews or of the Western hatred of them (as evidenced by the mural frescos, where the Jew is not caricatured; or else, the dearth of antiSemitic idioms, and so on); but it had to get conjured up as a necessary danger; because danger is the catalyzer for forces to unite. The nation was becoming all the more powerful as it was in greater danger. The philosopher Vasile Conta, in The Jewish Question (a speech delivered in Parliament in 1879) had proposed the scientific grounding of antiSemitism, by applying the principles of modern science. Its criteria are no longer of a socio-economic nature, but are derived from the principle of nationalities understood as unity of race and religionviii. Vasile Conta was saying clearly: The Jidanii make up a nation distinct from all the other nations and their enemies. More than this: we can say that the Jidanii are the most well bred nation and the most distinct from all the nations in the world. They come down from a single race that has always kept its purity. Their religion is in fact a social and political organization clad in religious formviii. For Romanians as well, the danger would also be all the greater, because the Jews want to set up a state of their own, a clearly Jewish country, in other words, to found that Palestine much awaited and announced by the Talmud We, unless we fight against the Jewish element, will perish as a nationviii. Therefore, his arguments were not a matter of outdated theological grounds of the type traitor, deicide, diabolic, but were purely nationalist and racist ones, in keeping with the European spirit of the time. Thus, in the second half of the 19th century, the national myth, with its xenophobic and anti-Jewish component, becomes self-conscious and is given its cultural expression (getting consolidated as an element of Romanian spiritual life). As in Germany, anti-Semitism is part of the intellectual history of Romaniaviii. After the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, European anti-Semitism withdraws from the fields of philosophic theology and of arts, and gets installed in that of State ideology and politics. The climax of some preparations that lasted a thousand years is made by the Third Reich.

The cult of the German race, which emerges beginning with the romantic century, is a phenomenon without any analogue in Europe; the analogue to such a tribal cult resides only in the Canaan of the Bible. The Germans (a powerful people, admired by the Romans for their belligerent sense), like the Jews (of former times, of the Canaanites) failing either to get Latinized or to get integrated within the other peoples, begin to build for themselves, on an inferiority complex, a megalomaniac image of the new, chosen people, a pan-Germanist dream, first and foremost anti-Latin and anti-Judaic. The apostles of the German racism were Ernst Moritz Arndt and Ludwig Friedrich Jahn. All his life, the Swede E M Arndt (1768-1860) endeavored to demonstrate that the Germans had fertilized the Latins (whom Hitler hated as fiercely as the Jews), and are the only people able to rule the world. In order to carry out this mission, they have to maintain their blood purity (just like Moses Jews) and to avoid mixing with Latins, especially with the French, who are a narcotic poison for the noble nation. Sometimes, Arndts fury recalls Moses against Gods sons, who from time to time see that the Canaanites daughters are beautiful. Teuschkeit opposes Welscheit, in other words, the Germans oppose the whole world. The world is made up of Germans (like the Jews of yore) and non-Germans. Nor was the aversion of Ludwig Friedrich Jahn (1778-1852) directed only against the Jews, but against all the Latins; in both cases, they are not peoples, nations, but races, while the Germans are the superior race, the chosen one. German romanticism had pushed the universalistic vision very far, along a pan-Germanic Biblical tonality; in fact, the theologian Joseph von Gores (17761852) wrote: As of yore Judea, nowadays Germany is the holy land (our italics), where religion founds its temple It is up to the Germans to carry out the

duty of being the priests of the modern epoch, the Brahmanist caste, or We, the others, the Germans, are a chosen people (our italics), a representative people for mankind. Never has this people, who we are, been purely national (our italics)viii , or, The great federalism of European peoples, which is sure to come

one day, will wear German colours, for whatever is majestic, profound and eternal about the European institutions is Germanviii Along with the dream of dominating the world, there was an increase in the Germans hate of those who were imagined to be pursuing the same goal in a subversive way, that is, the Jews. Therefore the adversary had to get eliminated from the stage of universal history. For the former general in the First World War, Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), the strategist of anti-Semitism as State policy (Hitler himself regarded himself, more or less hypocritically, as being only the harbinger of the Redeemer Ludendorff - in reality he was undoubtedly paranoid), the Latin Christians were but artificial Jews, constrained to carry out the Judaist imperatives. As the Lutheran Erich Ludendorff wrote, The Bible was written by Jews for the Jews, Christianity had its roots in the Bible, and Jews and Rome dispute their domination over the world, the domination that should have devolved upon Germanyviii. The Holocaust had been prepared for more than one thousand years. This accounts for the world indifference to the way fascism did its duty (to quote Luther). The liquidation of the enemy to mankind was within Europes horizon of expectations, endorsed by art in the undercurrents of the collective unconsciousness. For yet awhile, the actors remain, until everything gets forgotten, trailing at the back of the Covenant Ark, as if they were the bondsmen of the Jews, as one of the most fanatical anti-Semites, Huston Steward Chamberlain, forecast about them. But will forgetfulness and neglect spare them the humiliation forecast by Chamberlain?

Notes viii A term introduced into journalistic language first in 1879 by the journalist Wilhelm Marr; it means hatred of Jews exclusively;

The ghetto appeared in Frankfurst in 1349 and was institutionalized in the 16th century. Its name derives from the Jewish quarter Getto near Venice, placed next to a foundry. In Germany it is called Judengasse (the street of the Jews). Here, there seems to have been the first Jew residence; it was surrounded by walls and designed with guarded gates that closed at nightfall. Given the ever increasing birth rate of the Jews, the ghettos were becoming insufficient and dirty (Josy Eisenberg, op cit, p 235)
viii

viii

Judenhut (the hat of the Jew/Jidan) might as well be an identifying sign that European art took over from the Persan-Arab miniatures. One can notice how the aristocrats rendered in these miniatures were wearing, under diverse circumstances (wars, hunting, races, ceremonies) a sort of helmet with a hornet. Judenhut could simply be the fruit of an artistic contamination, a taking over of the Semitic from the Oriental miniatures with its distinctive sign the hornet, which, in an anti-Semitic context, has acquired the negative connotations that range from irony to the accusation of devil-dealing. For Europeans, there was an point of intersection between the Saracen and the Jew both were not Christians. Illustratiaons of the clothes worn by the Semitic nobility can be found in the volume Lart de la miniatre et la litterature de lOrient by E A Poliakov and Z I Rakimova, published in Tashkent, 1987, Editions de la littrature et des beaux arts, Gafour-Gouliame. See Leon Poliakov, op cit, vol I, p 141, a o;

viii viii viii

Ibidem, vol IV, p 182; Ibidem, vol III, p 87; viii Ibidem vol II, pp 90-97; See Henri Labroues study: Voltaire antijuif, Paris 1942, and Poliakov, op cit, vol III;
viii viii viii

See Poliakov, op cit, vol III, and M Schneiders study,Wagner, Paris, 1960;

See Poliakov, op cit., vol III and Arnold Kunzli: Marx. Eine Psychopatie, Zurich, 1966; viii The term belongs to Arnold Kunzli, study already mentioned; viii See Leon Volovichis study Nationalist Ideology,translated in the Dialogue/Dialog review, May-September 1995, edted in Germany by dr I. Solacolu, p 7;
viii viii viii

Ibidem, p 8; Ibidem, p 8; Ibidem, p 8;

See Fall der Religion und ihre Wiedergeburt, 1820, apud Rene Gerard, LOrient et la pense romantique allemande, p 171 and Lettres Gorres, quoted by M Boucher in Le sentiment national en Allemagne, Paris, 1947;
viii

viii

See Adam Muller, Elemente des Staatskunst, 1809, quoted by S Keiser i Pietismus und Patriotismus im literarischen Deutschland, Wiesbaden, 1961, p 220; Quoted from La grande pouvante. La Bible nest pas la parole de Dieu, 1933;

viii viii

Houston Steward Chamberlain (1855-1927), Germanophil, a fanatical antiSemitic. His most known work Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 2 vol, Mnchen, 1829; ch 5 intitled Eintritt der Juden in die abendlandische Geschichte, vol I, p 373;

II

The Stereotypes in Arts

Art is a Circe. It can turn people into beasts

(Morse Peckham)

1.

The Image of the Word in Medieval Art

Never as in the Medieval Age have words become images (Bernhard Blumenkranz)

The anti-Judaic virus, prepared in the vial of the medieval theological and intellectual elite, infected the arts, which had a more powerful anti-Semitic impact over collective mentalities than the disputes on religious matters. Unlike the word which, in the reception process, enables a greater space for relativizing the message, the image does not convey a notion, it is the notion; it is not satisfied to represent it, it performs (our italics) like it, so that it gets positioned in an immediate presence (Ernest Cassirer)viii.

In the 18th century, along with the Enlightenment, there took place the first break between the image of the Jew and the real Jew. The Jew with a turban or an ordinary hat replaces the one with the pileus cornutus (the horn-shaped hat). Reality no longer endeavours to imitate canonical art. Many thinkers come to the conclusion that the Jews are.human beings. Many artists think that they also are able to institute realistic images of man, not only caricatures. But until the 18th century. The theological image in representation appeared not out of the pleasure of recognizing reality, as Aristotle wrote when setting out to explain the origin of art, but out of the necessity of translating the Bible. On the aesthetic level, it means the triumph of the Greek-Roman sympathetic spirit over the abstract symbolic-Semitic one; while on the religious level, it means the discovery of an adequate way of according to the Christianized God the universalism promised to the Jews. The anti-representative commandments You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth (Exodus 20,4, The Holy Bible, 1971, 65), or We ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, a representation by the art and imagination of man(The Acts of the Apostles, p 130) were infringed in the Aristotelic cultural space, in other words, Mediterranean. The infringement of the Fourth Commandment by Moses and of the Apostle Pauls word occurred in the context in which the Hellenistic artviii was flourishing. The tradition of representing Biblical themes and the attempt at introducing the immediate reality along with the Bible-inspired image dates from about 200 A D. The artisans who had been living on representing gods and goddesses, got readjusted to the new theme, as commissioned by the new patrons. They learnt how to grant them a meaning , other than the one associated with the image proper, in other words, to allegorize the vine, the lamb, the peacock, the fish, the pigeon, which are not , but mean something, and this something had to be suggested by the sculptor-artisan in stone, by the engraver

in copper, gold and silver, and by the painter, in frescoes. Working for pagans and for Christians alike, the artisans were resorting to the same gestures, clothes and postures of the characters, be they Adonis, Endymion, Venera, or Jonah, Maria Magdalena, and so on. From the oral version of The Bible, they chose scenes which should not require too much innovation: the prophet Elijah rising to heaven accompanied by chariots of fire was similar to Apollo riding his Pegasus in heaven, or to the sun god Helios, who descended into the sea in the evening. Elijahs coat, left in Elishas hand, looks pictorially like a river (symbolically, the Jordan). The pattern will also be used for the theme of Jesus ascension to heaven. A wood engraving on the Santa Sabina church door of Rome, approx. 430 AD, as well as a fresco from the Priscilla catacombs from third century Rome, show the nude Jonah, in a prone position (lying with one hand under his head, the other stretched forward, in the shade of a palma Christi or vine tree), like Titir or Melibeus in Arcadia. The topos of Elijah-Hellios-Apollo-Jesus ascension, as well as the Jona-Endymion topos, can often be seen on sarcophagi, as both situations connote eternal life, as subsequent to deathsleep. The topos of Jonah-Endymion can be found in a miniature in the Bibliae de la Moutier Grandval-Tours (834-843) (but Jonah is replaced by Adam, in the same Hellenistic attitude), as well as in a sketch decorating a Jesuit church in Anvers, sketched by P.Paul-Rubens, dating from 1620. Or in paintings by Marc Chagall (the mosaic from the Message Biblique museum, Nisa, a stained glasswindow in Metz cathedral, or the Pocantico Hills chapel in New York). For David, the psalm singer topos visible for the first time in a fresco in the Dura Europos synagogue of third century Syria - they use the Orpheus type who also turns into a pattern for Jesus in Byzantine painting. In the Dura Europos fresco, the king wears Persian clothes and Phrygian cape. In another image, David Orpheus is dressed like a Byzantine emperor, on the throne, a diadem on his head, while the animals around him are symbolical: an ox, a giraffe, a snake (the synagogue of Goza, sixth century). In the Psalm Book from Paris, tenth century, David no longer wears royal clothes and diadem, but a short

tunic like a shepherd; among the surrounding animals, one can see sheep, goats, a dog, even a monkey, probably for the sake of an exotic atmosphere. This clich enjoys popularity and gains ground, and through Byzantine iconography, it reaches the Russian one. Jesus-Orpheus-David is represented on the faade of the Cathedral St Demetrius of Vladimir and on the faade of the Pokrov (the confessional chapel) of the Nerl church (twelfth century). Taking inspiration from the image, given currency on sarcophagi, in frescos and mosaics, some church fathers in their writings compare Jesus to Orpheus, so that the stereotype compels all the more striking recognition in the structures of Christian imaginary, generally without the initiatrix-esoteric connotations, which this association could have entailed. In early Christian iconography dedicated to Adam, there are elements from the stereotypical representation of Prometheus as creator. The miniature which translates Adams creation, Cotton Genesis, fifth century, Neapolis Museum, as well as The Bible from Moutier Grandval take over a Hellenisticiconic topos: Prometheus gives shape to man from clay. Thus, surprised by the miniaturist in the Biblical scenes of sleeping, Adam looks like a recumbent statue, his arms lying by each side of his body, suggesting the immobility of the clay object. Similarly, he is also represented in a sarcophagus relief dating from the third century. In thirteenth century Venice, the San Marco mosaic on the same theme ensures the longevity of the Hellenistic stereotype. As for Eve, her gesture of covering her sex with one hand was very common in representations of the Hellenistic fine arts: Venus from the Capitol Museum in Rome, Venus Medici from the Uffizi Museum Florence , Boticellis Venus, all representing for some creators versions of Venus the Chaste Eve, or.of Venus the indecent Eve. The coquetry of her gesture, as rendered for the first time in the Via Latina catacomb, appealed especially to the Renaissance painters (without any mythological prejudices, passing easily from Biblical characters to those of Greek Roman mythology, and the other way round). The allegorical treatment, the encoding of a pluri-signifying message are, if not

expressions of an over-intellectualized Hellenism, then at least an artistic rule. The manner of representing the visible so as to convey the invisible informs the cryptic style of the whole of Christian art: the tree is not only a tree, the river is not only a river, the peacock, the lamb, the pigeon, the vine leaf, and, last but not least, the human faces and their attitudes, all have to get decoded, because all are encoded. Instead of the Greek pantheism, step by step, Hellenism introduces the Gnostic spiritualism, thus paving the way for the allegorically transcendentalist style of Christian art, in its crypto-propagandistic version as well. The paleo-Christian representation flourished in an empire which hardly experienced anti-Judaism; socially and religiously, it was a tolerant empire, fostering an intellectual environment that was focusing its attention on the resurrection mystery, on the mystery of renewal and redemption, and not on history, morals and the dramas entailed by its manipulation, under various guises, ranging from ideology to politics. In Byzantine Christian art, the Judaic question confines itself to identifying the Jew which had not been the case in the Hellenistic Judeo-Christianity we referred to above; yet this identifying act does not imply discreditable connotations. The concerns with identification echo some theological disputes between priests and rabbis, even some lampoons dating from the second century. The attempt of the theological elite to discredit the Jews did not coincide with their social economic status in Byzantium, which is the reason why no unfavorable connotations enfolded the gesture of outlining and identifying them. In Byzantium, there was no obligation about the cornered hat, or of the badge, and neither can one find the ghetto, book burnings or synagogue ransackings, expulsions or pogroms. The Jews identification by his garb had been decreed ever since the Bible (Numbers, 15, 37-41, Deuteronomy (21,11; Exodus 13, 1,3,16; Deuteronomy 6, 4-9). These markers of dressing referred to tallithviii (cloth), tefillin and ziziot (tassels or fringes) and they bespoke the Jews godliness before God, being at once the result of his will, as expressed through Moses:

The Lord said to Moses, Speak to the people of Israel, and bid them to make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and to put upon the tassel of each corner a cord of blue; and it shall be to you a tassel to look upon and remember all the commandments of the Lord, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to go after wantonly (Numbers, 15, 37-9) Already in the fresco from the Dura Europos synagogue, Moses who receives the Law Tablets is dressed in pallium-shaped tallit, with ziziot at the four corners, not in the shape of tassels, but as an outfit of black stripes on white. The longer Roman tunic, worn also by Biblical characters such as Cain, Abel and David, was soon to get trimmed with the Greek gamadia, which was widespread in all sorts of decorations, even in those of garden buxus. In the Judaic tombs, the tallit was found, decorated with gamadia. In the Dura Europos synagogue at St Appolinare Nuova (fifth century), as well as on some sarcophagi, David is shown dressed with tunic, pallium trimmed with gamadia (decorative element which uses letter gama as motif). About tefillin, one can also learn from Exodus (3, 16) and Deuteronomy (6, 4-9), that it was a cubic box fastened by a leather strip. It used to be worn on ones forehead and on the left arm daily during the morning service: And you shall make a plate of pure gold, and engrave on it, like the engraving of a signet, Holy to the Lord. And you shall fasten it on the turban by a lace of blue; it shall be on the front of the turban. It shall be upon Aarons forehead, and Aaron shall take upon himself any guilt incurred in the holy offering which the people of Israel hallow as their holy gifts; it shall always be upon his forehead, that they may be accepted before the Lord( Exodus, 28, 36-8, p 73) In the whole Byzantine iconography, the tefillin is visible, as eloquent marker of religious identification. The Jews themselves give up on wearing the tefillin on other occasions than the service, as well as on representing it in the synagogue frescoes or in the miniatures from their holy books. Therefore, the Byzantine art uses the Judaic identifying marker, with religious connotations, while the West European Medieval art, with discreditably caricaturing connotations. This differentiates Byzantium from Europe, as far as the Judaic question is concerned.

In the miniatures to Cosmass Christian Topography (deposited at Vatican), in Codex Amiatinus (3-rd century), in the mosaic from Kalenderham Djami (7-th century), or in the frescos of Santa Maria from Castelseprio (8-th century), Aaron, Moses, and Ezra wear pallium, tunic and tefillin on forehead. Martyrs and prophets, Peter, John and even Jesus were often to be dressed in tallit or with ziziot tunic. This is how they look in Codex Rossaniensis, (the trial of Jesus), or in the mosaics from S. Appolinare Nuova. Another marker of the Hebrew identifying garb was the hood, possibly an ancestor of the tri-corn hatviii , Judenhut as well. Already from 12th century, the hood had begun to acquire negative connotations; thus, the centurion who thrusts the spear in Jesus rib in the crucifixion episode wears a hood in many representations, ranging from Reiche Kapele, Munchen, to the Byzantine and Romanian icons. Judas and Caiafa are not assigned a special position in the Byzantine iconography, while in the Western iconography, they enjoy top positions. The mosaic from S. Appolinare Nuova from Ravenna shows Judas kiss: he is dressed in the same clothes as the other apostles (tradition that will also be shared by the Romanian iconography, including the Church frescos from Northern Moldavia). In the whole Byzantine art, Judas is a prototypical guy, undifferentiated from the typically Semitic pattern: swarthy, short cut curly hair, large black eyes; he is distinguished only through his action. Caiafa often wears hood, but the hood had not become discrediting yet, just as the turban was not negatively connotated either. Cain also appears with the murdering weapon, but does not wear the distinctive markers of the imminent wrong-doing. Andre Grabarviii remarks about the Byzantine iconography that the Jews face is a markedly Semitic-Syrian physiognomy. This remark also applies to the Romanian, Serbian and Russian iconography: Maria, Jesus, the angels, the apostles, the martyrs, the holy fathers, all represent the Semitic- Arab typology, and not the Ariano-Aschenazi from the Medieval European iconography. In various regions, the stereotypical character of the canonized creation gave currency to types, without physiognomic characteristics. This evinces once again

that the Christian Orthodox art generally operated with other clichs, some taken over from the Oriental Christian art, until the Renaissance at least. Its antiSemitic innocence is also largely attributable to this aesthetics of identity , according to which, acknowledged, canonized motifs with a clear message to convey were consistently taken over; so these Byzantine motifs or patterns were not discreditably caricaturing. Ever since the beginning of the representation praxis through words, in the spirit of the Paulian tradition, the Church fathers had adopted a contesting attitude. They particularly turned down the image of Christ on the Cross. To represent what strictly pertains to the Christian sacrament was a dangerous concession made to the pagan idolatry. Nevertheless, some theologians admitted that Moses also infringed the divine order, when he envisaged the copper snake wound around the pole. Yet for the Christians, the snake was equivalent to the devil; and then the cross (at the beginning of Christianity), represented as upper case T was as Isaiah had prophesied, the place for killing the devil. The traces of a popularized esoterics were ingrained in the consciousness of the Church priests. Just like the swastika, which it is iconically related to, the cross is in fact a century-old symbol, whose meaning is life, eternity. It had long been shown on flags, ship sails, sarcophagi and even in the place of Knossos. Tertulian (160-265) in a sermon entitled On serving Idols, opined that the representation of Jesus was as deplorable as the acquisition of other pagan customs. Theophilos bishop in Antiohia between 166 and186, in his sermon The Spiritual Experience of God, wrote about the blindness (not physical but spiritual) which urges man to represent God in stone or wood or to paint Him: If you say: Show me God!, Ill answer you, Show me what kind of man you are inside and I in my turn will show you God. The eyes of the spirit, the ears of the heart it is only they that can make the true believer see God, Theophilos maintained; He is to be perceived like a helmsman of the world ship, what cannot be seen with the bodys eyes, and so on.

Similar to the priest Irineus, bishop of Lion between 180 and 190, Origene in his lampoon Contra Celsus is also against the representation of Jesus, and generally of the happenings in the Bible. To imagine Jesus crowned like Plato, Aristotle or Pythagora (as had already taken place in some catacombs or on sarcophagi) or handsome like an Apollo ( a fourth century statue of 70 cm exhibited at the Thermae Museum in Rome endorses an underlying tendency) was regarded as a real blasphemyviii by all the priests of early Christianity. In the territory of the former west Roman Empire, the art of Christian representation took shape gradually, in semantic terms, as guided reading of the Gospels, the theological debates and the legends, thus taking for granted the detachment from Judaism, the justification of the sacred wars, the fight against heresies, the enforcement of an inquisitorial totalitarinism and the universalization of Christianity. The artisans of the frescos, icons, mosaics, basreliefs, sculptures, paintings and miniatures also worked here, on the one hand, according to the aesthetics of identity by practising stereotyping, and on the other hand, according to that of parallelisms, in as much as the image was at once representation (figure) and a symbol. Once tested and accepted, the image was taken over, processed, stored for centuries on end, essentially the same, yet with some details that shifted the emphasis in the message, according to one work or another, one geographical area or another, one theological strategy or another, a Concilium, a Synod or other occasion. The symbol, the fable and the allegory were working in consensus with the official theology, for the purpose of this guided reading of the Bible, but also in consensus with Medieval artistic thinking. The role of art was primarily to set up the culture of the poor (Richard Hoghard), a folk culture based on the confusion between a consistently localized, if eternal, tradition, and the acquisitions from elitist culture. The art of this type had to express the religious, but also the ethnic identity of a community. The dynamics of tradition vital in mapping out an ethnic artistic identity operated similarly in the Christian and Judaic communities. Halakha, Thora and Haggada for some, the Gospels for others, had to be conveyed, especially to

ordinary people, in the most direct, most sensitive, and clearest way possible, with a certain meaning, without too much room left for the receivers own relativized thinking, be the receiver Christian or Jew. The relations between cult and culture, cult and art are different in the early Romanic Christianity from those of the flourishing Medieval age; art was not expected to support the cult, it only made it known, by means of representing the Gospels, as well as popular literature of Gospel extraction. As in Byzantine Christian art, in decorating the sarcophagi, practised zoomorphic motifs were practised: the peacock representing eternal life, the dove the Holy Ghost, the lamb Jesus, the palm tree, the vine tree the Church. The spiritual wine was redemption; the twigs and the branches are the saints who believe in it. The grapes are the martyrs; the trees on which the vine gets intertwined bespeak Jesus passion; the reapers are the angels; the baskets full of grapes are the apostles, while the winepress is the Church; and the wine is the power of the Holy Ghost, wrote Hippolit, one of the first priests of the Church. In the decorative bands, instead of representing Jesus, the cross or His monogram was implemented, with alpha and omega on each side, framed by a plant wreath (which echoed the Hellenistic practice of garlands and wreaths) and by peacocks or doves. Some 6th 10th century stone crosses (two of which were discovered in Ireland, where Christian missionary activity was strong) were richly embellished with bas-reliefs, designed in bands ranged in tiers; similar to obelisks or victory arches, they retell the legendary history of Christianizing the Normands. On some sarcophagi, but also on altars and ivory crosses, from the fifth century onwards, Jesus face had begun to appear (instead of the above mentioned monogram), for instance the ivory work placed in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London), then a dogmatic Jesus on the throne, his right hand giving blessings, his left hand holding the Book; this is a stereotype that has been given recognition in all Christian iconography (although it is known that Jesus set store on the live logos, not on the written one, which according to Him meant the death

of Spirit); such a sculpture dating from the seventh century is found in the Schnutgen-Muzeum in Cologne. The policy of icons from the Byzantine empire (where Jesus, Mary and the angels were often part of the emperors courtiers) also emerges in Romanic Christianity. In a fresco from a chapel in 9th century Aix-la-Chapelle, Charles the Great is represented beside Jesus. Plastics theology is purported to serve the Popes dogma (and to a lesser extent the lay power), engaged as it was until the tenth century in its fight against Christian heresies, and after the 10th century against Judaism. The Hellenistic spirit triumphs, even if Jesus is no longer represented as Pithagora, Plato, Aristotle, or as a handsome Roman youth like Apollo as in the second century, the priests of the Church were grumbling, priests who advocated the interdiction of representation, as required by the Apostle Paul, but hieratic, schematic, austere, unidentifiable in face and position; always in the centre, on the throne, with a halo, a book in one of His hands, the other blessing. Evolving throughout the Middle Ages, figurative Christian art gains ever more ground without renouncing the symbolic component; its dimension combines the figurative with the symbolic, reality with allegory. The victory of pagan Greek Roman naturalism over Hebrew spiritualism and abstractionism cannot be underrated. Reading the Gospels through images constrained the Christian Church to give up on the Paulian interdiction and to start representing the word. On altars, iconostases, sarcophagi, tabernacles, niches, columns of Church galleries, portals, doors, fountains, canopies, crucifixes, cult vessels and medieval funerary monuments, the main scenes of the Gospels come to be represented ever more realistically (even when schematism and ByzantineGothic immobility are maintained): in the Annunciation, the birth, the adoration of the shepherds, the baptism, the Sermon on the Mount, the miracles. Then when after the 12th century the tensions between the synagogue and the Church were intensifying, especially the Last Supper, Judas kiss, the betrayal, the peoples sentence to death, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the ascension, the acts of

the martyrs, and so on. The fish, the lamb, the stag, the dove, the vine tree, the palm tree and the monogram remain only as supplementary decorative elements, on the side sections of the scene or episode. The central place is occupied by Jesus, with a halo, a scepter in His hand, all the more conspicuously related to the notion of light, of sun (as an echo of the Roman Mithraism, which contributed to consolidating the cult of Jesus). Melito from Sardes, the bishop inimical to the Jews already mentioned, called Him The emperor of heaven, the sun of the sunrise that becomes visible to the living and the dead; while Clemens from Alexandria called Him the sun that sets and rises, the sun of justice; and Athanasios from Alexandria the sun that rises from the depths of Hell towards heaven. Generally, in the Christian iconography until the 10th century, the spirit of love for our Redeemer prevails. The eastern influence of the powerful iconographic centres of Asia such as Antioch is unmistakably manifest. The Zoroastrian spirit of the Christian Orient required positive thinking, Christianity meaning first and foremost a mystery of universal love and of resurrection. Iconographic theology does not get involved in the theological disputes of the time.viii The literary spring of the spiritual brightness in the East and West European Christian iconography from the first millennium can largely be found in Ephraim the Syrians work (+376); his floral paradise from Hymns on Paradise, love overflowing from his logos, through which Sanctus spiritus and odor paradisi are the same, dominated European and Oriental Christianity, before falling prey to hatred after the failure of the crusades. In such a beneficent framework, disturbed only by the obsession with the Last Judgment, Jesus is not shown like Moses, book in hand, but as a serene Arcadian shepherd, kindly watching over his faithful sheep. A mixture of allegory and realism, the mosaic from the Church of St Cosmo and Damian in Rome is beyond compare, in regard to visual beauty and message: the dark blue sky is the background against which, on a white cloud, sits Jesus with outstretched arms, like a live cross, as if saying come to me; on either side stand Peter and Paul and other apostles;

under them is a flock of sheep. This Jesus, who believes in love, not in revenge, in the live word, not in books, gradually disappears from Christian imaginary, in favour of the one in agony, because of his peoples betrayal, while the figurative message of universal love and light loses ground, in favour of the one about hate and darkness. Jesus eternally beautiful face comes to get rivallfed by Judas eternally ugly one, the allegory of the Church, rivalled by that of the synagogue, Ephraim the Syrians paradise by Hieronymus Boschs hell. The discrediting identification of the synagogue, of Judas and of the Jews is set up in image, as a result of the Judeo-Christian theological polemics, of legends and of disparaging rumours that come to circulate at the expense of the Jews; it is not taken over from Byzantine art at all an art, which, in fact, gave shape to European Christian iconography. The plastic personification of the two communities, ecclesia and the synagogue (subsequently turned into Churches) is a translation, in terms of iconography, of some theological concepts, which powerfully operated in Medieval theology. Their stylistic source is the Bible: one can read there about Gods union with the Jewish people, the mystic conjugality between Yahweh and Israel the latter not turning out to be a faithful wife, but rather a prostitute, like Gamer, whom the prophet Osseo marries, so as to demonstrate to the nation how low they had fallen. Jerusalem and Zion are often blamed or praised like women the unfaithful wife (synagogue) and the eternal, faithful betrothed (Mary). Christianity obviously opposed the widow to the prostitute Gamer: Oh, how lonely sits the city / that was full of people! Jeremiah lamented. How like a widow has she become / she that was great among the nations! / She that was a princess among the cities / has become a vassal. / She weeps bitterly in the night, / tears on her cheeks; / among all her lovers / she has none to comfort her (Jeremiah 1, 2-5), or also from Jeremiah: How the Lord in his anger / has set the daughter of Zion under a cloud ! (2,1), that is the immaculate Virgin Mary. Moreover, in The Letter to the Galatians, Apostle Paul makes a point about distinguishing the two Churches, otherwise sisters: For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by a slave

(our italics), and one by a free woman (our italics).that is Hagar is the Sinai Mountain in Arabia; she corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother (Galatians 4, 22-26). In the 5th century, there already appears on one wall of Church Santa Sabina (in Rome) an apses mosaic, entitled Ecclesia ex circumcisione and Ecclesia gentibus; the two women are identical, draped in thin clothes, with covered heads, both being in fact allegories of the Christian community, at the time made up equally of Christianized Jews and Christianized pagans. In Byzantine art, the couple synagogue-church is visible in the 10th century, on a cross dating from 957; two women on either side of the crucified Jesus personify the two Churches. The one on the right looks at the blood dropping from Jesus wound into a cup, while the one on the left is looking away. The different reactions of the two women to the crucifixion, which already connotes the opposition Christianity Judaism, can also be seen in Carolingian iconography, where in some representations the synagogue-woman gets away from the crucifixion scene. In a Russian icon, the appearance of an angel, who accompanies one of the women the Church makes a point about the two eras, of the law and of grace. In Grigore of Nisas Homilies, the two Churches are personified as women, the synagogue being negatively treated, while in some miniatures to the tenth century liturgies, the angel rejects the synagogue from beside the cross. Ironic and caricatural elements have not yet come to be characteristic of the representation style. The discrediting markers appear in Western Christian art as late as the fourteenth century, after the start of expulsions, the mandatory distinctive garb, the pogroms; and they were stimulated by those Altercatio Aecclesiae contra Synagogamviii that gave birth to a type of medieval literature called adversus judaeos. In this literature profanereligious as it was two women, the synagogue and the church, are shown face to face while contending their priority. The synagogue upholds that the prophets have been on her side, while the church reproaches the others disdain and incomprehension of its prophets. As a rule, the dispute came to an end, by

having the synagogue acknowledge its own defeat. The first and better-known plastic representations are those found in the Cathedrals of Bamberg (around 1200) and Strasbourg (1230). On the south arch gate of the famous Strasbourg Cathedral one can see the two statues in a design reminiscent of Michelangelo, beautiful women, like Uta of Naumburg, covered in their thin apparel. One of them is crowned with a proud, vainglorious expression looking outwards, while the other is modest, with her head down, as if ashamed. In other representations beginning to become stereotypical, the Synagogue is given the form of a woman with her eyes covered, holding in one hand a broken spear, the commandment table in the other; she is clothed in a yellow dress (which was the colour imposed on the Jews in Spain), wearing even the rosette, while by her side there is a diabolical-looking animal. This was also the way she looked on an altar painted by Konrad Witz around 1430 (exhibited today in the Kunstmuseum of Basel). A new theme, meant to discredit the synagogue is the one entitled by an author The Synagogue and the Pigviii. Designated as food for Christians, this animal acquired extremely negative connotations in the middle ages. These connotations were to be reactivated during the Third Reich. Refused as food by the Jews, the devil-pig is sent to the Jews courtyard as a symbol of dirt, debauchery, greediness and vice. The synagogue, represented in various paintings or sculptures as a woman accompanied by a wild boar, is shown with similar representations in miniatures (which oriented the parallel reading of the Gospels or other theological texts), as well as in the stained-glass windows of cathedrals (to mention in this respect the stained-glass windows at Chalons-surMarne), on some cult objects, on enamel objects, and so forth. On the enamelled wing of the altar in the Stavelot Church (around 1540), the woman Church is positioned in the upper part of a rectangle, while in the central part is the synagogue-woman. In her right hand, the latter holds the spear and a stick, with a sponge as a scepter (emblem of royalty), while in her left hand, she holds the crown of thorns. All around scenes from The Old and the New Testament are drawn.

Jesus is symbolically introduced in Christian iconography only timidly, in the guise of a lamb, on either side of the cross shaped as th letter T (this analogy can be found in Ezekiel 9,4: And the Lord said to him, Go through the city, through Jerusalem, and put a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it).In a 12th century Parisian pontifical, the veiled synagogue, with a broken flag, spears the lamb, engraved on a medallion in the upper part of a T; the Church on the other side of the T-cross holds in one hand a cup, into which the lambs blood drops, and in the other, a miniature church. More often than not, the synagogue-harlot (as it was called in controversies) is shown as a lascivious woman, recalling Gamer. Thus, on the curtain of a canopy from a church in Norway (second half of the 13th century), the synagogue is represented as a harlot, surprised in an obscene position. In fact, in Spain, judio publico, that is unconverted Jew, involved a play of words that also referred to the communal woman. In the circular part of the richly-ornamented letter R of a 14th century miniature, an eye-covered synagogue-harlot is riding a lewd Billy goat; on her right, one can see Eve and the diabolical snake; the Church-chaste woman riding a lion holds in her hand a cross-shaped flag; above, the choir of angels surround God, beneath, Jesus and the Last Judgment. There are few miniatures representing the synagogue as rescued: God takes the veil off her eyes (see the embellishing elements of the initial V from the Sacrament of Tours, twelfth century). According to the iconic suggestions, the synagogues blindness is caused by the devil, who either folds her eyes, or, as in a semi-medallion from the Cathedral of Chartres, blinds her with an arrow. In the 14th century Bible historisee, God the Father is shown with the Church woman on the left, while on the right, instead of the synagogue, there is a Jew, with a devil round his neck covering his eyes with its paws. What this image means is that the Jews were not able to understand their own book, because the devil prevented them from reading it in its true sense. Through images, the controversial themes between the Jews and the Christians were thus sorted out

at the level of intentions. In their turn, the rabbis were accusing the Christians of having translated the Bible poorly. St Augustine answers the rabbis that, according to what the Apostles maintained, the Christians enjoy the light, as the One who was Awaited has come. As St. Augustine wrote later on, The Old Testament was not to get repudiated, nor were the Jews to get repudiated by the nations, as they testify to the suffering of those who believe in the Redeemer. In his polemics with St Hieronymus, the author of the Vulgate, St Augustine noted that the laws and the prophecies of the Old Testament had been useful until the New Testament was made publicviii. In a miniature of a famous Medieval manuscript, Le Livre dheures (The Book of Hours) from Rohan (1418), a woman, her hands joined in prayer, looks towards a book in which there is as in a sarcophagus a child; according to some interpretations, this should be the synagogue that bewails the fact that Jesus betrays the deep and hidden truth of the sacred Book. In another miniature from the same Livre dheures, Matthew the Evangelist does not write (with an inspiring angel on his shoulder, as with Rembrandts), but copies from a book that is held by an angel. At the Evangelists feet, there are other two books: a closed one and an open one. On the right, at the top of a column, there is woman with her eyes covered who is pointing to the books; as B. Blumenkranz notices, she personifies not the synagogue, but Judaism in general. In the latter case, as the same St Augustine noted, the believers are like the carpenters of Noahs ark; they built up the ark for others, then they perished in the flood; they are like the milestones that mark the road they cannot cover; they are like the blind who carry a torchlight to direct others along the road they are not able to seeviii In other iconographic representations, the Jews are shown in confrontation with the Christians: in the Bible moralise, their identifying marker is the horned skullcap, their hands holding an unwritten papyrus, while the Christians hold a written one (obviously The New Testament). A well-known miniature of a manuscript from Monte Casino (1023) shows Jews covering their

ears when Christians are speaking to them; another, from Brviaire de Paris , 14th century, shows the Jews sleeping when the Prophet Isaiah announces Jesus coming. But, gradually, while evolving from allegory to symbolism, Christian art comes to attack anti-Judaism directly. The main character is no longer the vanquished, disgraced synagogue, but the devil himself, whose embodiment is the Jew all round the world, as epitomized by Judas Iscariot. The psycho-terrorist strategy against the Jews employs from the beginning the required garb not as an identifying marker, but as a discrediting one, to be followed next by caricatures of the Semitic features and hyper delineation, as a method of isolating and of blaming the Jew, who is thus drawn out of the real into the imaginary. Frescoes, sculptures and miniatures shed light on the Gospels, on the level of intention, by choosing, processing and distorting certain incidents, so as to put the Jews in a most unfavourable light; this was taking place in the spirit of the real terror that had set in as we have already remarked along with the process of identification by clothes, an identification required by the Fourth Concilium of Lateran (1215): Lest we should get mistaken in the future Canon 65 specifies we take the decision that Jews and Saracens of both sexes, in each Christian county and each day, should get publicly differentiated by their clothes from the rest of the population. Ever since the thirteenth century, horn skullcapped Jews had cropped up all over the place, especially in miniatures and stained glass windows. A miniature accompanying Hortus deliciarum shows them in a cauldron in hell no doubt with their horn-skullcaps on, the devils prodding them with pitchforks. Not always is the horn-skullcap a discrediting marker; it also appears as an identifying marker, similar to the tefillin in Byzantine iconography. In a miniature accompanying S Louis Psalm Book (1265),in the episode of the conquest of Jericho, the priests who blew horns and destroyed the citys stone walls were wearing red robes, rosella and Jude hut(the Jews hat). The faade of the town is identical to that of the medieval cities. This updating was not haphazard though; it implied the peril of Judaism for Christianity at any time. The

hyper-Judeazing through clothes comes to also be manifest in the writings of the Jews; in a manuscript of the Aggadah (1300) from the Museum of Jerusalem, Abraham and Isaac wear theJude hut in the sacrificial scene. More interesting is a miniature accompanying Ludovic the Saint s Book of Psalms, 13th century, stored in the Library of Leida; at the Emmaus supper, Jesus and the two young men who had invited Him to dine with them are wearing the Jude hut, thus implying the Redeemers identity as a Jew. The distinguishing marker does not here connote anything unfavorable, but it is simply read as a stereotypical accident, in the context of the movement of updating the events of that time. Jude hut, the horn skullcap was also being manipulated as a hyperJudeazing marker, meant to absolve the Romans the ancestors of the Catholics from their guilt of having sentenced Jesus to death. The illustrator of the 13th century the Book of Psalms from Liege makes Pilate wear a horn skullcap so as to imply the Romans Judaism, and thus to justify his deed. Sometimes, the centurion who hands to Jesus the sponge dipped in vinegar also wearsthe Jude hut. Gradually, attempts are made to push Jesus out of Judaism. Although the evangelist Luke mentions the circumcision (2,21), artists try to suggest the refusal of little Jesus to submit to the ritual, or in the same sense, they figuratively conceive how to replace the Jew priests clothes with those of the Catholic bishops. At other times, the anti-Judaic intention is perceived in the way the ritual is represented, as an act with a certain degree of cruelty: the priest is shown sharpening a knife which is a disproportionately large one. On a plate of an abbey altar from 12th century Klostenburg, the priest is dressed like a bishop, while in a miniature of the 15th century French Bible, the circumcision is done by a woman. Mary gesticulates as if wanting to protect her son, but she does not manage to hinder the ritual from taking place. In a German Gospel, the young Jesus beseeches His Mother to help, while a horn skullcapped Jew sharpens his knife. The circumcision may be taken as a premonitory sign about the subsequent sacrifice (?)

Numerous are the events of the Gospels illuminated by miniatures, in which Hyper-Judeazation is practised by means of garb markers. In the 15th century Bible from Alsacia, while Jesus is preaching and the Christians are listening to Him, a Jew with a particular hat makes an unmistakably distrustful grimace. Above his wry face is written the word Jew. One dating from the 13th century and exhibited in Cologne, shows the scene described in St. Johns Gospel, Chapter 8, 59 - 10, 31 (in which the Jews wanted to stone Jesus because He claimed to be Gods Son), the Jews naturally singled out by means of the horn skullcap hold stones in their hands, ready to throw them at Him. In a 15th century French Bible, in the scene where Jesus enters Jerusalem, the disciples who surround the Redeemer already have haloes, while the Jews, who are prepare to stone Him, are wearing hats with disproportionate horns. In representations on German stained-glass windows and miniatures, the merchants banished by Jesus from the Temple (see the Gospel of St.Matthew), wear either horn-skullcaps or curly side-burns and beard. But the merchants from the temple are not only Jews; what is coming to the fore is a new connotation, about the fight against the practice of simony in the Catholic Church: be he Pope, monk or priest, the simoniac is a traitor or sold individual, satanic, a Jew. Once Judas surfaced in the Christian imagist of fine arts, features of the discrediting identification got mixed with features of the practice of caricaturing and of hyper-delineating the Jew. The first caricature resulting from the anamorphosis of the semitic features of the Jew can be seen in a 14th century manuscript, in which the operating regulations of Arles as a town were laid down. and especially there was established more Judaico; on a border of a Jew the manuscript, there is the drawing of a Jews profile: hooked nose, pointed beard, the slightly oblique eye with an exophthalmac tendency, the ziziotted hood, and a apparent rouelle. The theological disputes had for long degenerated into racial aversion. The distortion writes Elisabeth Revel-Neher characterizes a dazed world, twisted through its own excesses and inner

contradictions, which projected into the image of the rage-contorted Jew the trauma of a real confrontation the expression of the most hideous iconographic distortionviii. Concomitantly, in a 13th century bas-relief from the Naumburg Dome the sculptor, who had created the beautiful Uta, emphasized the brutality of the Judas character: he wears the Jude hut, is broad-faced, thick-lipped, with a hooked nose; meanwhile the great priest counts his dinars. Each time Christians borrowed money from the Jews, they must have recalled the scene each time they went to a Church service. How could they not have hated he who, even if he was momentarily helping them, was humbling them by indebting them to his deicide satanic race? In the same Dome, Christians could contemplate the scene of the betraying kiss: in contrast to Jesus serene, calm face, there is Judas: contorted, ugly, brutal. For the sake of effective caricaturization, more often than not Judas is rendered in profile, while Jesus, full face. In a copy of the abovementioned Livre dheures (1280), Judas face is manifestly grimacing, with its aquiline nose and thick bulging lower lip. Judas, with his name that is closer to the word Jew gradually becomes the kernel of European anti-Semitism. The stereotypical features - a criminal, traitor, Satans tool - had gradually settled. The facial ugliness was taken for granted, like the stodgy or pointed wrinkled face. There were other attributes about Judas discrediting identification as well, such as the usually red beard (the red-haired man was strange for peoples for whom the customary type was considered an evil endowment), blue, yellow, and especially, red coloured coat, the (conspicuously) red or yellow purse, sometimes a devil either round his neck, or beside him, or if not a devil, then an animal related to the zoomorphism of hell. The red hair (anathematized ever since the Bible, Isaiah 1,18), the red, as well as yellow colours arouse negative moods ( the sly vixen isred coloured). Abraham a Santa Clara even upholds that Iscariot (Judas family name) means the red colour. Thus, Judas is integrated into a physiognomic and chromatic stereo-typism, with a sure propagandistically anti-Semitic effect. The aesthetic manipulation of the individual gets assimilated to the strategy of medieval Christianity; it sets up prejudices that get passed from

generation to generation, and turn out to be, as Albert Einstein noted, more difficult to dispel than. the atom. Another clich is also used as a hyper-delineating element: Judas is always represented as of shorter stature than Jesus, or in a sitting position, so as to look lower, or on his knees, looking for something under the table (at The Last Supper), hypocritically bowing in front of Jesus. But more effective is the manner of isolating him in the genre painting. Already in the 6th century Codex Rossanensis, Judas does not join the other apostles at table in The Last Supper; the same can also be seen in a mosaic from San Marco in Venice (around 1200), as well as in numerous other Gothic representations, frescos or basreliefs. Sometimes he is depicted with a black aura on the other side of the table, as in Casino Rosellinis fresco, the Sixtine Chapel or in the Romanian iconography; anyway, isolated from the others. The hyper-delineation also becomes inflationary: Judas steals a fish from the table (he is a thief like any Jew; moreover, ICHTIOS the Greek for fish was Jesus sign for Christians). He carries money-laden bags, wears sandals, and stands up, while the fly-shaped devil is flying around his mouth (as in Jorg Ratgebs painting Herrenberger Altar , 1519, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart). In the same guise, as a fish-thief, Judas is also painted by Konrad von Soest (Hochaltar der Stadtkirche von Nieder Wildungen, 1404) and by Nikolaus von Verdun Klosterneuburg, in 15th century Vienna and in some Romanian frescos. Once artists give up on hyper-delineation and caricature, Judas nevertheless remains isolated (as with Pietro Lorenzettis Supper, with Leonardo, or Raphael, with Andrea del Castagna, Ghirlandajo or Tintoretto) and ugly. Leonardo da Vinci is said to have scoured a district of the poor to locate a sufficiently ugly face to become a model in representing Judas. Not only was he ugly, but he was also accompanied by repulsive animals vipers and scorpions. The grotesque element was expected to dispel some stray feelings of pity, even in the suicide scene: he is often depicted hanging from a tree, his belly ripped open, through which a devil takes his soul (that could not get out through his

mouth, because it was the mouth that had kissed Jesus). Other times, around the tree from which he hung, the demons are dancing a reel, And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, you shall bury him the same day for a hanged man is accursed by God(Deuteronomy 21, 23). He is drawn the same way, with devils reeling round him, in an engraving that illustrates Araham A Santa Claras book Judas Ertzschelm (1686). There were also exceptions to this tendency of making Judas hideous. In a church fresco from Lohja (1510), Jesus and Judas are both rendered full face, Judas without a halo, like Peter, in fact. In a famous fresco pertaining to the Viennese school (dating from the 14th century and exhibited in Subiaco), Judas is rendered in profile, and unlike Jesus, is deprived of a halo, but his face is not distorted; on the contrary; moreover, Jesus hair and beard are slightly chestnut, while Judas embodies the Sephardi-Semitic type. In the Baroque period, the other hanged man (who in a piece of 4th century ivory work is hanging on a tree beside Jesus which recalls to us Walter Jens words: Lets bear in mind that in Jerusalem there were two hanged men - ) is represented as a man intensely affected by inner torment, remorse and hesitations. Rembrandt singles out the scene in which Judas throws the coins the payment for his treason at the priests in the temple. The identification of the Jew now begins to occur by being orientalized; now he wears a turban instead of the Jude hut, has a swarthy face, black beard and almond-shaped eyes. In Livre dheures from Rohan (1418), in the 15th century Liber de vita Christi, in an illustration to Giovanni Boccaccio a French version of The Decameron - as well as in other paintings, the Jews get represented in an Oriental way (are orientalized). We should bear in mind that iconic theology drew on the literary one. The turbaned Jew epitomizes an epoch of relative alleviation of anti-Semitic anger; it was caused, on the one hand, by the emergence of another enemy to Christianity, in the very heart of the Church: the Reformation, and on the other hand, by the scientific discoveries in history

and geography; these resulted in the Europeans change of perspective on the world. At last, nevertheless, the notion emerges that the 16th and the 12th century Jew is not the same as the first century one; therefore, that one cannot have worn the same costume, while this one cannot possibly kill as happened then. As for Romanian iconography, which is significantly represented in the Church frescos and in the Byzantine-styled icons, the identification of Judas (and of the Jews) is not discrediting; it is action, and not another sort of markers that distinguishes him from the others. The Byzantine tradition of un-discrediting identification is manifest; but for all these, some clichs which are specific to the West European mannerist iconography are manifest though; for instance, at St Nicholas Church, Parpauti, in the Supper scene, Judas is isolated, with a negative connotation, inasmuch as it is only he who does not have a halo, while in the scene of Jesus mockery, a Jew wears a sort of pointed hat, recalling the horn skullcap. In another fresco at Voronet monastery, the Jew who arrests Jesus wears a pointed hat, and five small round discs (sic !) on one of his sleeves. This seems to be a Polish influence, as in Poland the Jews were obliged to wear this distinctive mark on their sleeve, and not on their chest. The Jews are . the Turks, the true enemies of the Moldavian Christians; this is why sometimes they wear yataghans as in a martyrdom scene in a Humor church and display all the features of the Turcomanviii Semitic type. This image echoes a confusion that is also manifest in Western art, when the pagan whoever he could have been was wearing the Jude hut. Thus, in an illustration to Heldenbuch (1477), the King Alb Erich pulls at the pagans beard, the pagan who had stolen his daughter for his son, Ornit: the pagan king wears a horn skullcap (red hat), sideburns and beard, bearing a great resemblance to the stereotypical Jew in the frescoes of the time. In the Middle Ages, the image turned out to be an eager servant of the word in misconstruing the Gospel. Nevertheless a global condemnation of Medieval Christian art regarding its attitude to the Jews writes B. Blumenkranz

would be unfair, as, along with numberless hostile works, there are some objectively fair, even friendly ones. But undoubtedly, hostility prevails.viii Plastic art, like the mystery theatre, contributed to turning theological disputes into human adversities. Officially legitimate in the middle ages, the notion of manipulating collectivities through images was also successfully taken over by the nationalist propaganda of the Third Reich, and tacitly approved by the whole of Europe. HaBfilme and Hezfilme (provocative films of hatred) manipulated the Europeans imagination, by means of documentaries on rats, swine, vipers, worms, spiders and so forth - metaphors about the Jews - or by means of feature films with devilish Jews, such as the famous Der Jude Sus, so as to work up hatred of them to a paroxysm. Fritz Hipplers cinematography, as oriented by the Nazi ideologist Joseph Goebbels, prepared Europeans to respond politely to the early anti-Jewish horrors committed by the Nazis. Thus, art turned out to be a Circe that has managed to turn people into beasts. What is incomprehensible is the fact that this imagistic tradition (and not only that) has proved to be so powerful that, seemingly, even today the dead generations who created it press down with heavy feet on the brains of the living, as the very anti-Semitic Marx remarked.

Notes La philosophie des formes symboliques de la pense, apud Poliakov, op cit., vol II, p 60; See Mira Friedmann, Bilder zur Bibel. Altes Testament, Gondrom Verlag, Bayreuth, 1985, chapter Hellenistiche Quellen biblischer Ikonographie;
viii viii viii

Signs of Identity on Signs of Infamy, in Elizabeth Revel-Nehers study, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art; See LIconoclasme Byzantine, p 287; See 2000 Yahre Cristentum, pp 140-145;

viii viii

In his study,The Origin of the Christian Church, (Art Haccken Art Books, New York, 1973), Stzygowski discusses in the chapter on painting elements of the Mazdaist cult, elements that are easy to trace back to Oriental and Byzantine Christianity, but also to the mosaics from Ravenn: Christs entry to Jerusalem on the back of an ass: the Arians are known to have vanquished the Indo-Persians thanks to using the horse as a draft animal;the prayer on the mountain;the Last Judgment; allegories of the herd and the shepherd; good and evil; Jesus king influence of the Achemenids over the Mitraist cult, then over the Oriental Christian one from the 3rd century. The literary root Ephraim the Syrian, a Christian poet and exegetist;Jesus pantocrator - the influence of the Achemenids; the Ariano-Mazdeist art was not figurative, but it became so through contact with Hellenism; viii A novel text from these Squabblings (10th century) appeared in Strassbourg in Revue du Moyen-Age latine, 1854, p 160, under the supervision of Bernhard Blumenkranz.
viii viii

viii

Michel Pastoureau: Couleurs, Images, Symboles, - Le Lopard dor, Paris; Apud B Blumenkranz, Le Juif dans,,,,, p 55;

viii viii

Ibidem, p 58; Ibidem p 112; viii One can find an analysis of the monastery frescoes in Northern Bucovina in Andre Grabars studies Les Croisades de lEurope orientale dans lart (1935) and Lorigine de la faade peinte des glises Moldaves (1936);
viii

B Blumenranz, op cit., p 135.

The Melodrama of the Passions

Once manifest, its mechanism starts working in the service of skilful propaganda

(Julia Prezbos)

On the artistic level, Jesus and Judas have played the same metonymical part, one on the side of good and the victim, the other on the side of evil and the executioner. In any society, the outbreak of violence (uprisings, rebellions, crusades and revolutions) was and has been accompanied by the appearance of a sacrificial victim, the emissary victim, the scapegoat, as well as of an executioner, who redirects this violence, polarizes hatred on it, giving full reign to evil forces. In primitive communities, the ritual victims were children, young girls, etc. As for the executioner, he is to be positioned as being alien to the community, to come from the outside, so that the very siphoning off of the hatred should get channelled outwardly from the community in question.viii In fact, Jesus was the emissary victim of the Jews, while Judas, that of the Christians. Legendary tradition positions them both above the community, in an attempt to get them isolated (to such an extent that Jesus was written about as having been either non-Judaean, Indo-Arian, or pagan).

In Christian Europe, any victim bears an engrained Jesus, while in the Judaic community, any Jewish-victim bears an engrained Judas. The first phase in the moulding process of collective enmity triggers the hatred that is targeted towards the victim-to-be. It is the case of the Pharisees vis--vis Jesus. Then in the second phase, hatred is directed against he who represented justice in the first phase (Judas in the context of the Evangelical drama). Was Judas a traitor? How would the Redeemers destiny have run its full course but for Judas? In a fictitious trial in the 60s (last century), a Franciscan prelate proposed two things: Judas rehabilitation, so as to rank him with the martyrs (See Walter Jens Der Fall Judas, 1976), and Jesus acquittal trial, which took place in 1931, and whose decision 4 votes in favor, 1 against spelled out that Jesus was not a political destabilizer, a rebel against order in Jerusalem, a threat to pax romana. The melodrama of the Gospel, based as it is on the anti-Semitic capital of the middle ages and on the violence of the Christians, as occasionally expressed in their daily life, but especially from time to time, on the emergence of a professional warrior preacher or eternal crusader, who on the one hand becomes that channel of siphoning off hatred, a form of expressing our need of hating to death like Sanchez; but also, on the other hand, a tool to shape, intensify or perpetuate some stereotypes of hatred, as produced over time. Intensely emotional for the experience of collective feelings is extremely powerful drawing on precise psycho-aesthetic formulas, in which the executioner is always severely punished, while the victim gets beatified, the melodramatized mysteries (the games or the passions) were and have remained an extremely efficient type of propagandistic art. The mathematics of equity (Roland Barthes)viii directly touches the common man, who thinks of even his relationship to God in terms of an eternal capitalism of sorts: payment and reward. The show of the Passion, as pertaining to the theological space, integrated as it was in folk culture, implied rigourous stage-management, according to certain patterns, so as to foster paroxysmal moods. The catharsis of these shows should, naturally, have consisted in Christian emancipation from

hate, and engrossment in love. But it did not happen this way. Emancipated from liturgical drama, and generally from the church, the Passion, like mural paintings, could take liberties with the Gospel texts, making concessions to legends and local customs, to socio-economic and theological imperatives of the time. The incitement to sadism overlapped the eternal need for cruelty of the scarcely educated man. The scenes of Jesus adoration alternated with almost indescribable ones of rape, crime and torture, scenes played up the horror instinct, and could easily be associated with hatred of the enemy. The Redeemers very tortures evinced an unbearable naturalism: the blood dripping from his wounds and the noisy blows of the hammer nailing Him on the Cross usually aroused a collective hysteria in the onlookers. In order to support the notion of the eternally criminal Jew, the latter were anachronistically rendered with their Jude hut and rosella, in red or yellow clothes etc. Parasitical scenes, tableaux interspersed between the acts of the main dramatic action took over leitmotifs from The Old Testament, thus prolonging the show which could take as long as 30 days. In other words, 30 days of anti-Jewish provocation, usually on the eve of Easter, the period in which the Jews were not allowed to leave the ghetto, lest they should be exposed to hysterical attacks by Christians. Popular rage usually increased to such intensity that frequently the actor playing the part of Judas got stoned at the end of the show, unless he was careful enough to hide just in time. As for arguments in support of the crime, among the characters in the paintings there were legendary emperors, such as Nero who had demanded to have his mothers belly opened, so that he could see where he had been lying before his birth, or Titus as a crusader taking part in the liberation of Jerusalem, resulting in a bloodbath, etc. The onlookers hatred and cruelty usually became demential. The games called Mysteries and Passions were complex shows that the city authorities organized at great expense; they acquired a privileged social status in the devils century, as the century of the 1347 plague was called. The economic, moral and religious disaster caused by the crusades was followed by

a century of droughts, floods, diseases (some brought by the crusaders who had been contaminated in the East), rebellions, confrontations between principles, progroms, uprisings, disorders initiated by uncontrollable bands of crusaders deproved of crusades, and so forth. The Passions, whose ritual origins were no longer known, but whose soteriological effect was counted on, took place in terms of diverse aesthetic patterns: Greek Roman tragedy, circus shows from the first centuries of Christianity, liturgical drama, ritualized elements, medieval legends that processed the Old and the New Testaments, rumours about ritual death and about the Satanism of the Jews; all of these got combined in a moving ensemble, an opera aperta, whose binding element was the notion of a universal theophany. As our intention is not to chronicle a history of the theatre of the Mysteries and Passions and to analyze it , but only to shed light on the contribution of this art genre to consolidating European anti-Semitism, we are simply going to single out the Oberammergau phenomenonviii a phenomenon that makes us ponder on Eugen Ionescus witticism pass present, present pass. Oberammergau, a village of actors in Bavaria, placed in a landscape of heavenly beauty near Ettal monastery the Huns were said to have called out To Bavaria! To Bavaria! - seems timeless. The Passion play that is performed here every ten years, as it has been for two centuries, is prepared several years in advance by the whole village, and is attended by people from all over the world. Just as for some places in Spain and France, the Holocaust was for Oberammergau but a historical episode among others, or else it did not even happen. This is why the author of a 1984 book on the phenomenon even called it a spear against civilizationviii. For many Christians, the play set in the little town has remained the world of the greatest drama (Audience/Spectator, 1934), the village that keeps its oath, the place where theophany is feasible, and so on.

The pious feeling that prompts tourists (only in the years of the play) to come to Oberammergau, situated 65 kilometres from Munich, is a psychophenomenon. With its painted and sculptured houses this idyllic village, whose name means amber, is itself a phenomenon. For instance in 1980, asked about her reason for coming, an Australian woman who had been married to a Jew from Romania (Mr MoscovIci, rescued from Transnistria extermination camp) replied: I am a Christian. A nun from Australia regarded the 1980 version of the show as a reconciliation formula between Judaism and Christianity. The play is methodically prepared, at least three years before it takes place. The cast of the leading parts is decided on by a jury, according to certain criteria such as the familys ancestry in the village, its social rank or good reputation. According to an anecdote, only one man of the village ever refused to perform in this play, which was the reason why he was obliged to take the role of Judas. In performing Judas part, there is an enormous risk; it can ostracize several families for generations. Sometimes, the Oberammergau inhabitant who plays the part of Jesus undergoes an obvious transformation himself (like Manolios, Kazanzakis character). According to the famous story teller Hans Christian Andersen, a woodcutter called Schauer who had played Jesus part in about 1860 came to be unable to speak any longer (he assigned a silence fast to himself), and spent most of his time in loneliness and meditation on a hill. Other villagers who had accepted the honour of the part used to fall ill after the play, fainting because of the real tortures during the eight-hour play. After the 1900 play, Joseph Mayr died of a heart attack. Before the play begins, the actor-villagers and the guest-onlookers go to Church together. At the end of the play, to the accompaniment of a symphony (Beethovens being favored), they shake hands above their head, as a token of Christian solidarity; some shout with excitement. During the performance, some members of the audience cannot help reacting and shouting Pah, devil!, Extraordinary!, Well, that beats it all!, Scoundrels! and so on.

Even todays villagers tell the following story: in the old days, a scholar, sick and tired of the world and depressed at the thought of his own limitations, was planning to commit suicide. After he had attended the play, the scholar cheerfully returned to his old habits, giving up on the plan of getting rescued by suicide. Even today, the audiences hatred against the guilty, and their love for the emissary victim, when played to hysteria pitch, energize people. The energy of hate, like the energy of love, is boundless. Between play and reality, the border gets blurred. Andreas Lang, who had played Judas in 1910, was said how he was nsot allowed to sign in at an English hotel when he was recognized by the hosts. Villagers refused to greet Gregor Leener or to invite him into their houses; he had played Judas as well. The neo-Nazi youth of today (and not only they) find this play outstanding. The foreigners be they Jews or non-Jews are traitors. Some students in theology still believe in the cathartic effect of the Passions theatre as a token of reconciliation, and not as a revenge battle cry against the deicide traitors of 2000 years ago, or against former communists or against todays destabilizers. (In its current form, pruned of its anti-Semitic repartees from before 1945), the text has undergone several alterations in the course of time. Priests or monks from Ettal successively laid down versions which were in keeping with a certain script, while attempting to adjust to the horizon of expectations of the time when the drama was being performed. The Gregorian songs that were initially the accompaniment to the play were replaced by music by Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. The latest version (for it has kept going until now) is that by Alois Daisenberger (1799-1883), a deacon at the Oberammergau church. The text in verses is made up of 18 acts, 60 scenes, and 24 living tableaux. Between acts, the choir of 49 men and women perform, dressed in grey robes, their forehead encircled by a strip (which recalls the Judaic tefillin), marching behind the stage. The play opens with a prologue (to the accompaniment of the choir singing softly

and the sotto marching behind the stage), which is meant to introduce like an overture the audience to the plays world. The Prologue shows Adam and Eve in paradise, dressed in sheepskins. They are chased away by an angel who carries a flaming sword. A band of children surround a cross that is placed centre stage, at the place of the Tree of Knowledge. Act 1: Jesus drives the money lenders out of the temple and leaves for Bethany; Act 2: The great Sanhedrins conspiracy; Jesus is condemned for having broken the law; Act 3: The young Tobias (character in The Old Testament), in the company of the young Raphael, sets out for his parents home; Jesus is followed by Mary Magdalena. Judas is angry, because of the great sum of money spent on the balsams from the alabaster vase, with which Mary from Bethany anoints the Redeemers feet; Act 4: There is a new turn to The Old Testament; Jerusalems last days are shown; then, empress Vashti steps in but is turned away by the Persian king, Achasverus, and Esthera, who was .a Christian, in reality. Jesus steps in again, and judges Jerusalem, Judas receives money for his treason; Act 5: The Last Supper, the model being Leonardo da Vincis fresco Jesus washes the disciples feet; next, he breaks bread and shares it with the disciples; afterwards, he offers them wine from a chalice. In the tableaux accompanying the respective ritual, Moses is shown (with rays or horns on his forehead), feeding the people with manna, and then with grapes); Act 6: The Treason; in the adjacent tableau, Joseph is sold by his brothers to the Midianites for 20 silver coins, in a way which foreshadows the selling of Jesus for 30 silver coins; Judas is shown in front of the Sanhedrin, and promises to help the Jews to arrest Jesus; the Pharisees are plotting to condemn and to kill Jesus;

Act 7: Jesus on the Mount of Olives; the scene of the Redeemers soliloquy is preceded by two tableaux, before others from The Old Testament. Dressed in a sheepskin, Adam witnesses his sons work, sons who are ploughing a stony and thorny land. Yet Jesus says that man has to earn his livelihood by the sweat of his forehead. Act 8: Jesus at Annaa; in parallel, a new episode from The Old Testament unfolds: the prophet Micaiah is slapped in the face by Baals priest for having foreseen king Ahabs death. Annas is irritated by Jesus courage in facing up to him. The soldiers (Jews) mock him, dragging him tried with ropes along the streets of Jerusalem. Act 9: The Sanhedrin specifies that they condemn Him who proclaims Himself the king of the Jews. Again, there follow tableaux from The Old Testament: Nabot (scoffed at by Isabellas men) and Job. Agonizing with remorse, Judas comes in front of the Sanhedrin, and asks the high priests to forgive Jesus. He is turned down, and he flings down the coins. Act 10; Judas despair; in the tableau that rounds off this act, Cain, as in many paintings, wears a leopard skin and holds a cudgel in one hand; with the other, he tries to cover the mark on his forehead, the divine branding of wandering incessantly throughout the world, an errant Jew of The Creation; Judas delivers a speech, and then hangs himself. Act 11: Jesus in front of Pilate; in parallel, the vetero-testamentary tableau shows an immense hall, with columns, in which Daniel the prophet is received by the Persian emperor, Darius. Pilate seems frightened by his wifes foreboding. After interrogating him, he comes to the conclusion that the Nazarenes guilt is that of lze Majesty to Herod, the lawful king of the Jews. Act 12: Christ comes before Herod. The tableau brings Samson, mocked at by the Philistines, before the audience. Hardly comprehending what Jesus means by not of this world, Herod sends Him back to Pilate, the Roman governor, putting on Him a red robe and a crown of thorns, as the Romans used to entertain themselves at the Saturnalia time.

Act 13: The Jews sentence Jesus to death by crucifixion; in a tableau we see old Jacob, to whom Josephs brothers show the bloodstained coat of their fathers favorite son, telling him that he had probably been torn to pieces by wild beasts. Then onto the stage come Abraham and Isaac, and the well-known scene of the preparations for the sacrifice follows, and the angels thwarting of the deed. Jesus is condemned, to the joyous shouts of the Jews. Act 14: The way of the Cross: the vetero-testamentary tableau shows young Isaac carrying the wood destined for the fire to cremate his own body. Then comes Moses and the copper snake on the cross. The choir steps up onto the stage and sings. On the way, Jesus meets His Mother, Simon from Syirene, and Veronica. The women from Jerusalem follow Him. He is placed on the Cross. The Roman soldier pierces His Body with a spear. Then He will be taken down from the Cross, and Mary will take His body in Her arms. His burial follows, in a new burial place. Act 15: Jesus Resurrection and apotheosis. The Roman guard sees an utterly unnatural light above the burial place. Mary the Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene meet an angel, who tells them about Jesus resurrection. The final tableau focuses on Jesus, who is enwrapped in a bright aura. Act 16: The choir is accompanied by music. The audience stands up moved to tears, aware of their own passions, jointly defending their faith, full of love for Jesus, despising (if not even hating) the Jews, who understood nothing about the Redeemers courage. A few blas individuals regret the high price of the entry ticket, accommodation and meals, and possibly on some futile shopping from the dozens of nearby stands. There were numerous other Passionspiel (Passion Plays): Haller Passionspiel (1430), Sterzinger Passionspiel (1480), Passion de Paris by Amoul Greban (1450), Passion dAngers by Jean Michel (1486), and thousands of other local plays on scripts by unknown authors, in little towns or villages of Spain, France, Austria and other countries. But none of them could rival the acknowledged effectiveness of the Bavarian one.

Labelled by some as an aesthetic insult, by others as a masterpiece, by some as an initiatrix play, by others as a lance against civilization, the endurance of the Oberammergau play (dating from around 1430) has nevertheless remained a mystery to sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists. The Munich Nazism used it, so as to set Christians against the Jews even more fiercely; contemporary ecumenism attempts to regard it as a moment of reconciliation. Its power consists in the manipulation of the emotional capital of the crowd, and, naturally, in its tradition. In other words, as one of Tiecks characters, Herr Murner, says: A powerful feeling is much more precious in science (read theology, politics, economy), than a hundred controversies (Herr von Fuchs).

Notes See Hubert et Mausss study Essais sur la nature et la function de la sacrifice, in lAnne Sociologique III, 1989, p 11; Quelques paroles de M Pouyarde, in Mythologies, aris, Seuil, Collection Points, 1970, p 85; The bibliography of this phenomenon is extremely rich. Many studies are subtitled by the interrogation Is the Passion Play Anti-Semitic? Saul S Freedmann: Oberammergau Passion Play, A Lance against Civilisation, Southern Illiois Press, 1984.
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3.

The Jew in Rumours, Legends and Fallacies

Modern man is at liberty to despise mythologies and theologies; but this is not going to prevent him from continuing to nourish himself on the myths in decline and on degraded images (Mircea Eliade)

a) The Jew in Rumours

We have not read a poetics or a sociology or a psychology of rumours yet, but they must exist. Because the rumour is a creation like any other, with its specific rules: first its birth, then it spreads, goes into circulation, is received, is effective in moulding opinions and in maneuvering the individual and the collective psyche; it has style, a period of flourishing and of withering, and a special relationship to reality, which it conveys or forges, and so on. In the work of the rumour, the unknown and the known complement each other, and maintain suspense, which no other creation-type will be able to generate. Structuralism would have enjoyed success with a poetics of rumours, but it underrated it.

The genre flourishes in periods of crisis; the receiver who awaits it does not doubt its truth, as he doubts the truth of what he sees and hears. He sends it further on on, not saying It cant be so, but I tell it you for sure, irrespective of the veracity of the rumour or what it refers to: witchcraft, magic, or deeds that verge on meta-reality. The rumour can be brief, striking, either as a sentence or, in more extended terms, a little narrative. About the Jews, as in fact about Christians, living isolated in strange communities, with the connotation foreign, rumours soon went round, even in ancient Rome. In this regard, it was said that Moses would have been none other but Osarsip, an Egyptian priest from Eliopoulos, who headed isolated lepers in a quarry, took them out of Egypt, and brought them to Canaan. On the other hand, ever since the third century B C, parodies to The Exodus had appeared, seemingly composed by the Egyptian priest Manetho. Posidonios from Apama made use of them in a story. According to rumours given currency in Rome, it was not Nero but the Christians who set fire to the city, or the spouses of Roman dignitaries embraced the faith of these poor paranoids, self-styled future masters of the world. In the Mddle Ages, the rumour processing machine worked only at the expense of the Jews. According to rumours, they were physicians who had taken an oath to kill at least one Christian per year, they poisoned the wells, they killed children so as to carry on ritually the murder of Jesus; they seduced Christians daughters, they menstruated like women, they had tails, they worked with the devil, they defiled fish spears, and they drank Christian blood on the occasion of their Easter. Their Matza was prepared with Christian blood; the Jews were plotting against the whole world, and so on and so on. Obviously, a rumour can be a pure invention, without any real basis, but it can also be something that is true, a real fact, given shape by transmission and circulation, so as to resonate with a certain horizon of expectations of the those hearing it. In an informational context such as the medieval one, where there never was a clear-cut distinction between the sacred and the profane, the rumour,

charged as it was with the mysterious I dont know exactly who, when and where, and loaded with the certainty of I saw it with my own eyes, I heard it with my own ears, in place x, at date y, the rumour then was most effective in moulding peoples consciousness and unconsciousness - people who were becoming excessively fervent in their feelings both in their love for Christ and in their enmity towards His killers. A topos in the literature of rumours was the alliance Jew-devil (opposed to the Christian-angel one). Like the Jew, his partner the devil had a stereotyped appearance: horns, the goatee beard, chestnut hair (like Judas), a tail, cloven hoofs, a pestilential smell (foetidus diabolicus, as a correspondent to foetidus Judaicus), a lewd appearance, of repellent sexuality; either very small, like an insect, or as large as a man, or by the side of a Jew or round his neck, sometimes metamorphosed into an animal a dog, a snake - from darkness, he was monitoring greed, envy, violence, power thirst, debauchery, the Christians daily sins. Many Christians swore to have seen him in the evening, by the sevenbranched candle-stick beside the Jew, who was reading from his devilish Talmud. Gradually, recreated by rumours, the Medieval Jew comes to lose his medieval identity. Is the Jew a man? his compatriots wondered more and more often, and in fact they were wondering just as seriously whether woman was a human being (Paracelsus opined that Eves descendants were not human beings). The Inquisition was watching witchcraft and black magic, and punishing by death whatever was related to the deal with the devil. Now, Satans intermediaries, his earthly personnel were Jews, and were practising them all. Aware of the danger caused by the Churchs hesitant attitude to condemning the Jews as direct agents of the Satanic Mossad, citizens from some towns, consequent to some repellant rumours, decided to punish the Jews themselves. Denounced for supposed very close connections with the devil, and accused of Satanic activities, 100 000 Jews were butchered in Rottingen in 1289 by Judenschlachter (butchers of Jews), a commando led by the citizen Rindfleisch

(in translation beef), a professional butcher. In Aquitania in 1381, there was rumoured to be a conspiracy of lepers; its members being suspected of processing, by means of a Satan-inspired pharmacopoeia, a powder made up of Christian blood, urine, and three secret weeds, to which was added some powder made from fish-bones. The powder, put into pouches, was placed into wells. Under torture, a leper confessed that he himself had dropped such a pouch that he had received from a Jew. The Christians took revenge, and slaughtered the children of the Jews as well, lest they themselves should later take revenge on the murderers of their parents (a practice and justification also embraced by the Nazis, when they slaughtered Jewish children in the camps). When plague broke out in 1347, there was no possible doubt about the authors of the apocalyptic epidemic. A mysterious character, named Iacov Pascal (sic !), was thought to have come from Toledo to Chambery, where he had distributed pouches with the epidemic-generating drug. In vain did Pope Clement VI publish a Papal bull, in which he urged the population to reason, on the ground that the Jews were also dying from the plague. The Christians anger overflowed, like a torrent of fire, over communities: robberies, fires, expulsions and death sentences were also extended to some Christians suspected of having defended them. Moreover, some people went as far as to claim that, given their dirtiness, the Jews were microbe-proof. (Today it is rumoured that the Jews might have engendered the HIV virus). The proliferation of rumours during the Mddle Ages is a sort of natura naturans; a news-item with a relatively real basis was enough to ignite the creative imagination that was subsequently given expression in thousands of rumours about the enemy to Christianity. This was the way things happened with the rumour species on the theme of ritual death. In 12 th and 13th century Europe, during the crusades therefore, the accusation of ritual death was oriented in three directions: the Jew killed, to repeat the murder of Jesus, then to cure his sick blood with clean blood, and finally to prepare the Matzos of the Easter celebration, which recalled the incident

from the Exodus, when God spares the Jews children, and kills those of the Egyptians who would not let the Jews leave. In order to put an end to the misfortunes of their people, they could be saved only by Christs blood, just as in former times, the blood of a lamb was used to single out the houses with Jewish children. This is why they yearly enacted the ritual of killing a child at Easter. The first juridical episode of ritual death is registered in England in 1144: the body of the young apprentice William is found in a wood near Norwich on Good Friday. The rumour that the young man was killed by the Jews, who thus meant to mock at Jesus Passion, alerted all the neighbouring villages. According to rumours, a rabbinical council, gathered in a secret place, had planned the ritual for a long time, Norwich having been chosen as a yearly place of sacrifice. The authorities did not give credit to the rumour, but it proved to be extremely powerful: the Jews were beaten, killed or driven away. This was the way in which St William of Norwich became the subject of cult; in this case, the main accuser was a converted Jew, the monk Theobalde from Cambridge. According to rumours, at Wurzburg in 1147, the corpse of a young man killed by Jews, is found. All the Jews living in the neighborhood are killed. In 1171 at Blois, 30 Jews, accused of ritual death, are sentenced in a trial and beheaded. Slander is spreading, the cases multiply, each place registers its own examples. Frightened, Frederic the second sets up a committee in 1236, which decrees that there is not any truth in this hysteria. A 1236 Papal Bull attempts the same thing, that is, to put an end to bloodshed, but in vain; nor is another Papal Bull of 1247 more effective over the population convinced of the truth of the rumours. Ritual killing becomes the leitmotif thematized in stories, poems, popular and cultured dramas. In this respect, a telling case is the ballad Sir Hugh or the Jews Daughter. In Geoffrey Chaucers narrative, the plot, set indefinitely in Asia, focuses on a child who, incidentally passing by a Jewish community, was stolen and sacrificed. Oh, cursed nation! Oh, the New Irod!, the narrator exclaims. Shylock, the character of Shakespeares play, will similarly try to kill, but in a

perfidious way, by demanding a pound of flesh from the heart of the indebted Christian. Rumours foster the animosity fanned as it was by preachers, by the low-ranked clergy, by legends, by the anti-Judaic iconography, by the jokes that made fun of the faithful Jews. For instance, a 14th century satire relates how one day a Jew from Paris falls into a public lavatory. The other Jews want to take him out, but he refuses, observing the commandment to rest, because it was a Saturday, to do it on the Sabbath would have violated the law. The following day, when the Jews went to take him out, the king forbids it, as it is Sunday, the Christian celebration. If he observed the Sabbath, he might as well observe our celebration, he said. On Monday, the Jew in the lavatory was dead. In the 19th century, ritual death was still occurring in Poland and Russia. Derjavin remarks that some sects of Hasidic extremists practise ritual death, although the Mosaic law forbids it. The rumour activated Russians imagination, as evidenced, for instance, by a passage from The Brothers Karamazov: fascinated by suffering and blood, the adolescent Lisa, after having read a novel on the topic of ritual death, asks Aliosha what he thinks about this, and whether he could kill Christian children. Aliosha answers her: I dont know!(sic!) In 1889, the theologian Auguste Rohling, a professor at Prague University, took up this theme in Talmudjude. Between 1867-1914, because of some antiSemitic agitators, twelve trials of ritual death took place; these trials were authenticated by Civilta Catolicaviii. In 1913, a trial took place that was followed around the world: the Catholic priest Pranaitis ( a Lithuanian brought up among the Jews from Central Asia) charged the Jews with being carriers of disease (such as conjunctivitis, eczemas and furunculosis), and with treating them with Christian blood; moreover, three reasons were advanced why they would enjoy killing a Christian: revenge, reiteration of the murder of the Redeemer, and their own salvation. The priest Pranaitis spoke for eleven hours, and a Russian secret agent highly appreciated the way he managed to persuade especially the Mujiks gathered to hear him. For Russian anti-Semites, it was clear that, because of his

haemophilia, the little Czarevich Alexei was a Christian martyr, a victim of Jewish demonism. Other rumours dealt with the defiling of fish spears. Here and there, more and more often, there were signals in the Middle Ages about the defiling of fish spears. Some corrupt Christian women were selling to the Jews fish-spears, the symbol of the Redeemers body, which they were profaning. A Liege chronicler wrote in 1150 about the following incident that took place near Cologne: the fish spear changed into a child. The story of Jean DOutremeuse, the Liege chronicler, began on Easter Friday: the son of a converted Jew went to church, took the fish spear and went home. But at the very moment he was leaving the church, he was seized with fright. A pit opened in front of him, and he dropped the fish spear from between his teeth. The pit then closed. A priest who had noticed what happened opened the pit, and found there a childs body, instead of the fish-spear. When he attempted to bring it into the church, a light descended from heaven, and the child vanished. Around 1106, ten Christians alleged that they saw a Jew placing a fish spear in a cauldron to boil, but from the fish spear, a child appeared. When the Jew attempted to murder him, the child eluded his grasp, but he got caught by those who were attending the ritual, who began to torture him. In Brussels in 1370, as a consequence of a similar accusation, twenty Jews who had been denounced for defiling fish spears were beheaded. Accused of a presupposed use of fish spears in their poisoning pharmacopoeia, Jews were tortured so that they would confess where they were getting them from. Many admitted .guilt. This is similar to what happened in the Third Reich period, when with his well known cynicism a Nazi said that while he was interrogating Jews, what mostly set his teeth on edge was the fact that they admitted all the accusations Noteworthy are rumours (not only the sufferings, as is written in The Talmud). Generating panic, they fill the peoples need for cruelty. By means of rumours, hatred reigns - in a civilized way. The rumour is never going to get

burned in public squares, as is literature, while their authors, be they anonymous or genius-like are never going to get punished for misdemeanours against consciences.

b)

The Case of Judas

Did Judas have enemies? How far did this hatred of Jesus enemies go? As far as sentencing him to death. Who was he who promised to hand Him over ? Judas the Iscariot. Why was Jerusalem fated as such ? Because it murdered Jesus. What will the Jews become ? They will become slaves, despised all over the world.

(M. Fleury)

The medieval anti-Judas and anti-Judaic pedagogy began in the family and in the first years of school, when, through Catechetics, the child was taught to distinguish between good and evil, between right and wrong; he had to be talked into admitting the existence of only one source of evil the people whose very name evokes the betrayer of Jesus.

Numerous editions of The Life of Jesus, or of Lives of the Martyrs contained passages of undisguised propaganda against the enemy of Jesus, and of all Christians. Nor could the troubadours dismiss the emotional strategy that had acted on them since childhood. In 1268, Konrad Wurzburg, under the influence of a play on the burning through of the Talmud, sang: Cursed be the cowardly, uncouth / and evil Jews, who did not take care / to evade the sufferings of Hell. / The Talmud has fooled them / and made them lose their honour. Along the course of the Christian Churchs process of doctrinarian selfassessment and self-elucidation, The Old Testament came to be pushed out of theological disputes, The Talmud coming to be ranked as a dangerous book, the Jews Mein Kampf. At the same time, some clerics and poets manifested an almost unbelievable degree of violence (if we bear in mind especially that they were nevertheless professing the religion of love and of reconciliation that Jesus would have liked to establish).The Christian selfblaming (echoing Judaism) was in fact a battle cry of hatred against the Jews: You also are guilty, you who bear with killers (Bossuet), or It is I who is guilty / Jesus is blameless / Oh, how miserable I am / I keep saying to myself (a refrain from a song that was well known in the Mddle Ages), and Oh, abominable sinners / It is true, Jesus is dead, / We are all guilty / What will come of us ?/ For us sinners, did He die in pains/ (the Allhappy Grignon of Montfort, 1673-1716), or More savage than the beasts / Are all the Jews, beyond any doubt (Gautier of Coincy, 13th century). Hatred against Judas was necessary, so that the love for Jesus should be intensified in its persuasiveness. The child or the ordinary man can hardly discern the good unless he compares it to the evil. Jesus needed Judas. Like Jesus, Judas had been heralded by The Old Testament. Therefore, he had to exist, because it was so written: Be not silent, O God of my praise! / For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, / Speaking against me with lying tongues. / They beset me with words of hate, / and attack me

without cause. / In return for my love, they accuse me, / even as I pray for them. / Appoint a wicked man against him, and let an accuser bring him to trialviii(our italics)(Psalm 109). And not only Judas destiny had been scripted beforehand, but also that of the Jews: May his children wander about and beg/ Let there be none to extend kindness to him, / nor any to pity his fatherless children! (Psalm 109). According to the new testamentary file on Judas, made up with some objectivity, on the basis of the Synoptic Gospels (!), the eternal accused is far from being that guilty, as represented by theological disputes, sermons, legends, ballads, iconography and mystery theatre. Judas was the treasurer of the community formed around Jesus; therefore, his concern with money, as well as the attraction it exercised over him, were psychologically motivated, without any other implications about a particular character-type, that of the miser. According to The Gospels of Matthew and Mark, in the episode of the anointment in Bethany, it was not Judas who cavils about the sum of money overspent on the balsam from the alabaster flask, but all the disciples express their discontent: But when the disciples saw it, they were indignant, saying: Why this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for a large sum, and given to the poor (Matthew, 26, 8-9); and, But there were some who said to themselves indignantly, Why was the ointment thus wasted? For this ointment might have been sold for more than 300 denarii, and given to the poor(Mark 14, 4). (As ensues from The Scripted Gospels, as well as from The Acts of the Apostles, and from The Letters of the Apostles), Jesus knew that one of the disciples would betray Him for money, and that that was as it had to be. When, at The Last Supper, He says: The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.(Matthew, 26, 24), Judas has already dipped his hand in the dish, and after John, Jesus himself gives him the dipped morsel: The disciples looked at one another, uncertain of

whom he spoke. One of his disciples, whom Jesus loved, was lying close to the breast of Jesus; so Simon Peter beckoned to him and said, Tell us who it is of whom he speaks. So lying thus, close to the breast of Jesus, he said to him, Lord, Who is it?, Jesus answered It is he to whom I shall give this morsel when I have dipped it. So when he had dipped the morsel, he gave it to Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot (our italics). Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him What you are going to do, do quickly. (our italics). Now no one at the table knew why He said this to him (our italics). Some thought that because Judas had the money box, Jesus was telling him, Buy what we need for the feast, or that he should give something to the poor (our italics )(John, 13, 21-29). Without comprehending it (this utterance by Jesus, or in fact most of His teachings), the disciples-turned-into-apostles interpreted and spread it, according to their comprehension level, thus impoverishing it of all its deep senses, and unwillingly Judeazing it; as did the Evangelists, in fact. The eternally incriminating passage on Judas is the following: Then one of the twelve, who was called Judas the Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, What will you give me if I deliver Him to you? And they paid him 30 pieces of silver(Matthew 26, 14-15) . The devil that had succeeded in tempting neither Job nor Jesus, found fertile ground in the disciples treasurer: And during Supper, [when] the devil had already put it into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him (John, 13, 1), and the same John writes: Then after the morsel, Satan entered into him ( 13,27). In Acts, the selling is also commented on as a fulfillment of the Scripture; in other words, Judas was but the unfortunate toy of a set destiny, like Oedipus (to whom he was to get assimilated in the Middle Ages), like some Shakespearean characters, or like Camus Meursault. Brethren, the scripture had to (our italics) be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit spoke beforehand by the mouth of David (sic !), concerning Judas, who was the guide to those who arrested Jesus. For he was numbered among us, and was allotted his share

in this ministry (our italics)(Acts, 1, 16-17); When Judas, His betrayer, saw that He was condemned, he repented and brought back the 30 pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders, saying I have sinned! (our italics) in betraying innocent blood. They said, What is that to us? See to it yourself. And throwing down the pieces of silver in the temple, he departed; and he went and hanged himself (Matthew 27, 3-5). Therefore, Judas betrayed, but he repented; he brought the money back and committed suicide. But in Acts, it is written that he bought a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong, he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out (Acts, 1, 18). Along with the beginnings of anti-Judaism and of anti-Semitism, Judas becomes the exponent of the Jews, the deicide people. Isonomy favored this substitution, Judas - Jews, and moreover, the Jews also began to be called Iscariots. Pope Gelasius from 5th century did not doubt the isonomy Jews/Jew-Judas-Scaraotchi/Old Gooseberry (the devils name deriving from. Iscariot). It is interesting to note that, in the Christians consciousness, only Judas is a Jew; neither Jesus nor the apostles. In a book published in New York in 1968, The War against Jesus, the author, Dagobert D Runes, pointed out the results of a poll: 50% of the American Catholics knew that Judas was a Jew, and only 10% that the other disciples were Jews as well. The name Iscariot was disputed. St Hieronymus upholds that Judas was born in Issachar, a toponymic that means payment, ut significatur pretium proditoris. Therefore the place of his birth also predestinated him for a certain role. By its origin, Scariot means death by asphyxiation ; in vulgate Latin, Iscariot was the designation for asino (donkey) or for stultus(fool). Judas has entered folk customs being used in magic versions (of rituals) of many peoples against the evil eye and fever : Fire of God / May your warmth fade / Just as Judas lost his colour with fright / in the garden of Gethsemane when / he saw Jesus. In Bayern, at Easter, they usually burn a straw guy, and

their joy is as great as if Judas were being burned even then (and with him, the Jews naturally). In a Castillian place, they used first to play the betrayal scene, and then they burnt the puppet that represented Judas. The man playing the part of Judas ran over the field, but was caught and beaten, and the puppet was burned in his stead. On Good Friday, the sailors from the Mediterranean Sea usually burn a piece of wood topped with a red hat. Giving chase to Judas is a custom that Catholics in certain regions of France and Germany perform on the vigils. A great deal of noise is made with all sorts of percussion instruments, to the accompaniment of shouting; the noise symbolizes both the earthquake that took place on Jesus death, but also an attempt to chase the devils away. Folk tradition depicts Judas as a drunkard, who had sat and eaten at a pub without having the money to pay, so he cadged from the chief priests. In some regions of France, Wednesday is bad luck, because it was on a Wednesday that Judas is thought to have been born. In other regions, the red-headed (as Judas is supposed to have been) are forbidden to practise priesthood, etc. Judas legend begins to be structured at the end of the 19th century. Until then, he had been a marginal character in iconography and legends; the central place was taken by Jesus. Even in Bericht uber die abenteuerliche Seefahrt des HL Brandon von Clonfort (Account of the Adventurous (Sea)Voyage of St Brandan), very widespread all over Western Europe in the 11th century, the episodes about Judas are but a number amongst others. In the new testamentary Apocrypha, such as Acta Pilati, anecdotes on Judas are interspersed in which, for instance, the latter makes fun of Jesus, by saying that He will bring the dead back to life, when the cock that he is frying in his pan cocka-doodle-dos. The ancient manuscripts from Vita Judae date from the 12th century. It is related there how, when she was pregnant, Judass mother Ciboreea dreamt that out of her body gushed a fire shaft that got spread around and burnt Jerusalem. Together with her husband, Rubin (and not Simon the Iscariot, as written in the Gospels) they want to kill the infant, but took pity on it. They placed it in a basket (as with Sargon II or Moses) and let it go out to sea.

The waves took the basket towards the coast of an unknown country, and it was found by a kings daughter, who already had a son. As he grew up, Judas mocked at his brother (as with Moses at the Pharaoahs daughters son, or Ismail at Isaac), for which he was turned out of the Court. He first came to Olympia, where he took part in the Olympic Games, but he was not accepted, because of his unclear origins. This is why he left for Jerusalem, to find out who he really was. There, he became a high dignitary to Pilate, who one day felt like eating apples from a certain orchard. Judas volunteered to fetch them. The owner of the orchard, who was none other than Rubin, Judas father, refused to give him the apples, and the Gospelic Oedipus killed his father, only to subsequently marry Ciboreea, his mother. By chance, he learnt from her that he was her husband and son. In despair, and very penitent, Judas followed Jesus, and became one of his disciples. Then there followed the betrayal, suicide and the surrender of Jerusalemviii. Jacobus de Voragine (1228-1298) introduced the legend of this Judas (Moses-Oedipus) in Legenda aurea. It has circulated in the MauroChristian literature of Spain, called Alhemiade to this day. In the plays called Mysteries or Passions Passionspiele -, Judas the traitor plays a very important part; in Haller Passionspiel (1430), Lucifer wants to show that Jesus is a man, and not God; this is why he has Judas betray Jesus; in Donaueshinger Passionspiel (15th century), the reason of the betrayal is the disciples treasurers thirst for money. From the moment the Judas myth enters serious literature, it comes to change: in T. Naogeorgs Judas the Iscariot.Tragoedia nova, the emphasis is placed on the Jews lust for money, while with Abraham a Santa Clara (1686), it is the Oedipus complex that turned Judas into a horrible character. Baroque art psychologically deepens Judas character and destiny, by attempting to put forward not an excuse, but human understanding of his deed. In fact, even before the 18th century, the Jew had begun to turn from imaginary into real. This metanoia about the Europeans way of regarding their fellow-citizens has an

eloquent impact on art. Anti-Judaic theological propaganda had also become defensive for a long time, the cause of religious wars being, in fact, located within Christianity. But the positive light thrown on the character in Klopstocks saga, Messias (1748) is followed by a new discrediting version, in Wagners work. In Jesus von Nazareth (1848) of the rabbi from Bayreuth, Judas is rendered as an individual obsessed almost to the point of paranoia with a thirst for power. The motivation of his betrayal is his desire to dominate the world; as one can see, he had become the contemporary of the romantic German anti-Semitism. In Leonid Andreevs novel Judas the Iscariot and others (1907), the traditional motive is absent: Judas loves Jesus, and would like him to be able to prove to his distrustful Jews that it is He who is the Messiah, who announces the Resurrection. Judas, Giny Madersprachs character (Judas, eine Charakteristik), betrays Jesus out of jealousy: he was in love with Mary Magdalena, but her devotion to the Master prompts him to take revenge. In his novel, Judasz Kariothu (1913), the Polish novelist H. Rostworowski turns Judas into an opportunist, a hypocritical petty bourgeois, who, distressed that his wife had been sentenced to death, is seized with madness, and commits the betrayal. Some writers, such as Jakob Lorber and Spiros Milas, regarded Judas as an exponent of extremist nationalism: disappointed that, through His own immortality, Jesus was not able to demonstrate that He was Gods son, he commits suicide (it is the case with Jakob Lorber, 1800-1869). Dear Judas, the American writer Robinson Jeffers drama published in Philadelphia in 1958, exchanges the terms in the good-evil equation. Jesus is portrayed as an unscrupulous, vain, violent, power-thirsty individual, while Judas, as a modest and peace-loving individual, is constrained to commit betrayal, so that Jesus could prove His divine powers. Judas is looked upon as a martyr, a hero in the Judaic legendary tradition, as well as in the denomination of Cains worshippers (the Kenites), who

are in possession of an Apocryphal Gospel that reveres the deicide, as the first Gnostic. The medieval theological quarrel between Judaism and Christianity gradually lost force. After the Holocaust, hardly anybody wanted to admit its real harmfulness any longer. This lasted until the political, economic ideology entered the stage of European thought; it came to use other concepts for the same binomial. Nevertheless, it is over the betrayal charge that the trial is carried on. Was what Judas committed a betrayal or not? Or else, was it a salutary betrayal, and as such, the injustice done to the Iscariot is even more serious. In 1976, a book was published in Stuttgart which contained a dialogue between the theologians Hermann Levin Goldschmidt and Meinard Limbeck, a dialogue occasioned by a scientific session at the Episcopal Academy of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1976. So Christians and Jews were again in a dialogue: Heil-voller Verrat? Judas im Neuen Testament (Salutary Betrayal? Judas in The New Testament). Hermann Levi Goldschmidts Judaic perspective and its basic notions can be summed up as follows: a) what causes rage?, b) what is betrayal?, c) what was related?, d) what is quoted?, e) who betrays whom? f) what causes joy? and g) the presupposed Judas. Meinard Limbecks notions are: a) necessary differentiations, b) Judas, the so-called Iscariot, c) Judas, one of the twelve, d) Judas as represented in the Gospels, e) did he have to betray Him?, f) a salutary betrayal?. There was a trial imagined in 1975 by the well-known Tubingen writer and rhetorician, Walter Jens: Der Fall Judas (The Case of Judas); it pursued Judas rehabilitation, and his being ranked with martyrs. It begins as such: On 28 August 1960, the Franciscan priest Berthold B proposes to the Latin patriarchs from Jerusalem to mediate the opening of a trial, meant to finally sort out whether Judas, the man from Kerioth, could be taken in the cart of the Blessed. In the course of Jens essay, the defence and prosecuting barristers face up to each other, using arguments to prove Judas innocence, and respectively, guilt. The minutes of the imaginary trial end thus: Lets bear this in mind: in Jerusalem,

there are two men lying hanging on wood. The field of blood and Golgotha are side by side. Not only was Judas trial revised, but also that of Jesus, the other who was hanged. A text was discovered in Italy in 1509 which refers to the protocols of Jesus indictment; it was published by the patriarch Jeremiah in 1848, and translated into Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian, being published in Romanian in 1875. In 1931, a news item published by The Telegraph specified that on 25 July 1931 in Jerusalem, the trial of reconsidering Jesus Christs sentence to death took place. According to the conclusion of this trial, He who was accused of destabilization, conspiracy, magic, and violation of the Judaic faith was found innocent with four votes in favor, and four against. Therefore, was there Heil voller Verrat ? (salutary betrayal) in both cases of martyrs, Judas and Jesus? Were they victim and executioner, or did they have to fulfill a destiny together ? In the literture of the Middle Ages, Judas friends were Cain, Esau, Goliath, Adam, Caiafa and Simon the Magus. But even before the Holocaust, Judas was also befriended by some Christian theologians, writers and philosophers. There was a generalized European anti-Judaism, but also a special Philo-Judaism, that gained ground during the Enlightenment and has been maintained until today, when the question with the predictable answer was raised in the past, Who needs the Jews? Nobody, is the answer many gave: A pity the Jews went away. On entering the European church, the initially hostile brothers Cain and Abel got reconciled to the really ecumenical ideals. They should also get reconciled in our consciousness (especially now, on our approaching a new economic policy).

c)

The Merchant of Venice

Every poor man bemoans That more lenient were the Jews When with them he was doing business Than the Christians nowadays. Warrants and pledges Mortgages, they ask him. They squeeze him to pieces, They rob and fleece the poor man. (Geffroi de Paris)

In the fictions about and against Jewish merchants and usurers, Shakespeares play has become almost legendary. It represents the phenomenon that is talked about today ever more insistently: anti-Semitism without Jews. When Shakespeare brought Shylock onto the stage of the European history of artistic anti-Semitism, the Jews had been expelled from England for three centuries. Shylock himself was not a Shakespearian invention, but part of the structures of medieval and Renaissance imaginary, as embodied in legends, farces and plays by unknown authors. The Jew stepped down from the theological stage and from that of the absolute

imaginary, thus becoming a reality on the stage of economy, which was already getting capitalized. Some Evangelical connotations linger though; in the popular consciousness, the Jews employment as merchant and usurer were predestinated (not, as we remarked above, determined by his condition as a perpetual fugitive from one place to another), on the grounds of the 30 pieces of silver that Judas received from the high priests to sell Jesus. In the early Middle Ages, until the crusades began to enable Christians to move to places further afield, and reach more areas even, Jews, travelled from Portugal across to Siberia and even to India, and secured commercial connections between West and East. When the Jews were driven from the countries that had opted for some cleaning up, be it general or partial, the commerce of the respective countries was the first to be affected, the first to suffer, and then it was the crafts. More often than not, it was said that Spains decline after 1492 was caused by the expulsion of the Jews. Along with the increase in expulsions, the Jews no longer invested in real estate (in the past, for example in Spain, they had bought land, houses and so on), but in personal chattels especially, in gold and money. They became big and small usurers, getting into the service of princely courts, of Popes and of simony-practising priests, or even of poor people from towns and villages. As in 1230, the Ordinance of Melun cancelled all the debts of the Christians to the Jews, the latter having to adopt the procedure of mortgages. Christians were not allowed to lend by usury; he who was found to have secretly practised usury was refused burial. Subsequent to the expulsions of the Jews, it was not the princes (or the crowned heads) who were affected, as these either confiscated all their assets, or they levied immense taxes for any activity, or they called them back at will, or to take revenge on one another (one prince would be turning them away, and another would be inviting them to return on the strength of their usefulness). But more affected were the poor people, who got on well with the poor Jews, and they helped one another. In

the case of their conversion, their goods were confiscated to turn them into good Christians. In the case of non-conversion, they were either expelled and obliged to pay immense sums, or submitted to all sorts of taxes. But despite all this, the Jews - some of them at least - were thriving, and were increasingly conquering economic power over Europe. This is why in England, where they were all to be expelled in 1290, they had become special vassals of the king prior to this date. Recollections about the moneyed Jew have been stored in the collective memory, and bring to life characters such as Marlows Barabas, Shakespeares Shylock or Fagin from Dickens Oliver Twist. The Jewish merchants and bankers were accepted as a necessary evil, but were more and more antagonized. Caricatures render them with claw-like fingers, like those of a bird of prey, with eyes bulging out of their sockets while contemplating their money hoard. On the other hand, the Jewish daughter or wife, seen as rich and beautiful, untarnished by the sin of deicide as she had not attended the betrayal episode, could become a Christians wife or sweetheart, without running the risk of being criticized in the perception of the public. Around 1830, one of the famous characters in Paris whom Chateaubriand, in Memoires doutre tombe, accused of having ruined his political career was a banker from the famous banking family Rothschild from Meinz (a family who in 1871 had a MP in the House of Lords, Sir Lionel von Rothschild and founded a famous bank). The cynical Parisian banker is rumoured to have said: Jehovah did not abandon his chosen people. He supplied me with an empire of intelligence and wealth, which is the scepter of the world. Balzac and Vigny abhorred him, and turned him into an exponent of Jewish rapaciousness. A Jew reigns over the Pope and Christianity at this moment, he pays the sovereigns and buys the nations (Vigny wrote in Daphne ). The Parisian newspapers, such as Le commerce, Le journal de debats, waged a real campaign against Jewish bankers, the rich great-

nephews of the Shylock-type usurers. A Dictionary of the French Academy from the period defines the Jew as a man who lends money by usury; and Pierre Joseph Proudhon one of the leaders of French socialism wrote in 1883, summing up several centuries of anti-Jewism: By temperament, the Jew is anti-productive: neither a farmer, nor a manufacturer, nor a real merchant. He is an intermediary (our italics), always a thief (our italics), and a parasite, who performs in business, as in philosophy, by means of prefabrications, counter-fabrications and trickery he is the principle of the evil; Satan, Ahriman got embodied in Sems race (Cesarisme et Aristianisme). In Italy, the Jews have always fared better than in Spain, England, Germany, France and Poland. But for the 16th century Englishmen, Italy itself was the debauched Judeae from the beginning of the first millennium, while the Venetians, the Neapolitans and the Sicilian were regarded as Jews, that is, individuals belonging to a degraded world; it was in the same Italy that under the eyes of a corrupt Papacy a nest of Judaism, as the Reformation used to view it - an eternal carnival of an upside down world was being acted out. For the serious Englishman, a journey to Italy was as suspect as a visit to a brothel by a healthily moral Christian bourgeois from another part of Europe. Generally, the journeyman was a dangerous person, concealing something of the Jews depravation and adventurous spirit, an eternal voyager, an eternal intruder. The Englishmen could hardly forget that once, thanks to their money, the Jews had been able to become special vassals of the king; it would have been utterly outrageous for them to learn that three centuries later some would also thanks to money become Sir Lionel von Rotschild, and Sir David Solomon, or Sir Benjamin Disraeli. One of the 21st centurys received ideas was: the Jew can buy anything with money. This accounts for the fact that, in the mystery The Croxton Play of the Sacrament (14th century), Jonathas, a usurer from Sicily (sic!) boasts about his riches (precious stones, pearls and silver), which he enumerates

with the great delight of an Oriental merchant in front of Aristorius, a pious and honest Christian merchant. In the 15th century, the Shakespearean couple Shylock-Antonio had already featured in the mystery The Croxton Play of the Sacrament. The Jew Jonathan does not believe in fish spears, he is a materialist and practical individual; transubstantiation, the after life, Resurrection all seem to him to be Christian nonsense. But he has a shortcoming: he is very inquisitive (like any Jew). This is why he asks his guild mate, the Christian Aristorius, to steal a fish spear and to give it to him, because he apparently wants to test the sacraments mystery, and to get converted to Christianity. Bribed with a great sum of money, Aristorius gives him a fish spear, which Jonathas, together with other Jews, attempts to defile on the Sabbath day: they break the fish spear into pieces in front of a crucifix, and stupefaction! The fish spear begins to bleed, then its pieces stick to Jonathas hand , when he wants to put it in a boiling oil cauldron, and when he drops it in a recipient with water, the water changes into blood, while from the recipient Jesus bust emerges; Jonathas is converted. The notion of maiming, outstanding in The Merchant of Venice, had been familiar in Italian popular culture for a long time; it originated from the very time of the Roman law tablets. Ever since the 12th century, the motif of the pound of flesh comes to circulate in some tales, in which he who claims it is either a revengeful slave, an affranchised Roman slave, or a devil, hypothesized as a merchant; as a matter of fact, for most Christians the medieval Jew was both a devil, and a slave, and a revengful agent. The maiming of the Christian might have been the ultimate, secret desire of the people that had had to suffer for more than a millennium. In the subconscious background of the revengeful Jew from the 15th century there might have lain the notion of the ritual death, the human sacrifice that was being practised in the prehistory of the Jews whose Biblical victims were Isaac or his daughter Iaela, and whose simulacrum was circumcision.

In an adventure novel The Unfortunate Traveller, a masterpiece of satirically grotesque English fiction published by an English author Thomas Nashe, one of Shakespeares contemporaries, Jack, a dyed-in-the-wool negativist (anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, anti-Puritanical, anti-feminist), wandering all over the world like Cain, also reaches Rome, the citadel of absolute corruption, ruled by Satan, according to the islanders views, as he noted in his diary. At a certain moment, while purposelessly travelling all over and along the meandering streets of the diabolic town, Jack meets the Jew Zadoch, who takes him to be a thief, and sends him to the physician of the Pope, the Jew Zachariah, who is enormously pleased at the thought of getting a fresh corpse to vivisect to broaden his anatomy studies. Zadoch and Zachariah are not only miserly, perfidious, diabolical, corrupted and corrupting, but like Shylock, they claim Christian flesh to revenge their people. On his way to the physician, Jack attracts the attention of the Popes concubine, who asks Zachariah for his body. This tends to make the Pope believe that Jack might be affiliated to a sect of heretics that had designed a plot to poison him. In the end, Jack manages to hide in the concubines boudoir, and then to flee from the eternal city, corrupted as it was by Jews. In the Renaissant Sodom (we mean Rome), Shakespeare sets the scene of the play that processes the Italian popular legend, and on the other hand, also draws on the play of his predecessor, Christopher Marlow, The Jew from Malta. On the pretext of being willing to respect the contract, Shylock in fact wants to take revenge on the Christians, because of the humiliations he and all his people have experienced in the course of time; and these humiliations were far from being few in number. When he laments, Shylock arouses the audiences pity (the same may also have happened to Shakespeare): Yes, I am a Jew ! Hath not a Jew eyes ? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?

The Jew in other words is not a man like others, simply because he has his own laws, his own celebrations; while, like Sancho, he has learned the perfidy he is charged with from those who hate him to the point of death. And lest he should become a victim of the perfidy of his masters, he has to outdo them in their art. This is why he asks for a pound of flesh to be taken from the area of the debtors heart, unless the latter pays his debt when it is due. Wanting to be more perfidious than the perfidious Christians, Shylock finally comes to be the biter bit, the victim of a judiciary procedure, which referred essentially to one of his laws: bloodless flesh. The judge of the trial, Portia, tells him that he can cut out his pound of flesh from Antonios heart (the real merchant of Venice), but without taking any drop of blood. While Barabas, the Malta Jew, Marlowes character, a usurer and professional poisoning agent, arouses repugnance and revengeful thoughts, Shylock is less culpable, his revenge having one justification: the humiliations that the Christians have heaped onto him. His Christo-phobia is understandable. The Jew does not forget; and then this time it is he who is the bit one. The philo-Semitic romantics attempt a rehabilitation of the usurer for the poor. August Kotzebue (1761-1819), author of melodramatic plays (translated into Romanian to a great extent) writes a play Der Opfertod, in which a desperate Christian talks with the Jewish usurer (the setting is London): The Jew: Good afternoon, Sir! Maxwell: So may God have it ! The Jew: You owe me 50 pounds Maxwell: Of course. The Jew: Can you pay it? Maxwell: No The Jew: Thats bad. Maxwell: (shrugging his shoulders) The Jew: I have the contract. Maxwell: I know. The Jew: And you also know what I could do. Maxwell: Throw me into prison. The Jew: I wouldnt do it gladly, though.

A defense of the Jewish usurer very subtle at the time when hatred of the Jewish bankers, combined with a dislike of the capitalism that favoured some people (Christians and Jews alike) and, on the other hand, created a substantial layer of poor was an act of courage, as well as an attempt at returning to reality. Gradually, the economic anti-Semitism becomes all the more manifest, especially in the countries caught totally unawares in regard to befoming capitalist, such as Russia and Romania. The deplorable character of the squalid outskirts of towns, the one who has helped the poor Christian when in need turns into an enemy that threatens the national entity of the people. This panic is created and fanned by intellectuals, while the masses answer by commitment, indifference or refusal. The enemy, that is the Jew, had he not existed, had to be invented; he becomes the coagulant of the political ideas round the notions of nation and State at a time when, for us, they just started to assert themselves in political thought. Romania comes to awaken from its patriarchal history, to change its countenance (Emil Cioran), to be delirious (the same). Its incapacity to enter Europe and to adjust faster to capitalism gets excused through an apology of the paradisiacal-rural civilization, through the theory about the refusal of Europe and of capitalism that were nothing else than one of the Jews manoeuvers, Jews who wanted to set up again their Zion at Mihailesti and Dorohoi (!). Anti-Semitism has to fight both against the kikes and against the Jidovit and corrupt spirit of some people, who comprehend poorly, or even prostitute the words of tolerance and civilization (wrote Mina Savel, ex-manager of the anti-Semitic newspaper The Alarm of Moldavia/Alarma Moldovei, in The Judaism in Romania, Iasi, 1896viii.Therefore?

d)

The Eternal Jew Empty the loaded sky of your rage And make it knee again, and again empty it Vesuvius, Etna tearem from the earth, buildem Above me, Yehova, throwem over us And drain their embers a sea for me to swim Vain will thy endeavor be to break me Once you will punish me to be like you, eternal (Samson Bodnarescu)

To be eternal why would it be such a curse, an awful punishment ? That is, to enjoy everlasting youth and life without death, as in fairy tales, or to be like Duncan MacLeod and his friends, the immortals, from a popular serial, Highlander ? And to incessantly travel all over the world? And throughout all history ? Neither the pagans, who are not supposed to cherish the notion of life beyond, of paradise, nor those without any notions about reincarnation, transmigration, or metempsychosis, could understand why it would be bad not to be able to die. The true Christians, the Buddhists, the esotericism initiates, they all know: not to die means not to be able to live. Because as was written with

beautiful Gothic letters on many crosses of young German soldiers whom the Fhrer had sent to war, and who died - Death is the gateway to life. Without being as repulsive as Judas, the Chronogeoid devised in the Mddle Ages shook the Christians, so that more than once they still thought that his punishment had been disproportionately severe in relation to the mistake he had supposedly made. Judas commits suicide and has the chance of being forgiven some time, and of being resurrected. Ahasverus (as the eternally travelling man was called, all the time and all over the place) is condemned to witness the whole unfolding of history, as long as it is meant to last; during a more or less hellish existence, he has to await the end of the world, before he can be redeemed. In the Mddle Ages and in the Renaissance, to be a traveller meant to be a crusader, a conquistador, a merchant, to experience armed encounters and piracy, to lead a wandering, uncertain existence, and to have an insecure social status, to be ranked in a suspect category, like yesterdays and todays alien or foreigner. The role of Juif errant or der ewige Jude befitted the Jew. The cowardly shoemaker, who according to the post-Gospel legends would not have allowed Jesus, exhausted with the heavy cross He was carrying along to Golgotha, to take a rest at the gate of his house for fear of the Pharisees, seems to be more guilty than the betraying disciple. Ahasverus is guilty twice; of cowardliness and indifference to the suffering of his fellow man. We, all the Christians, seem to claim Ahasverus as an ancestor; otherwise, how could we possibly account, in the long run, for the pogroms, the expulsions, the false incriminations, the constant mockery, the Holocaust, the impudence of those who openly uphold that the extermination camps are a matter of makebelieve - a Jewish hoax at the expense of the Christians ? How could one condemn the alien, the foreigner indiscriminately?

With Judas at the back of anti-Jewish anger, his persuasive force gradually diminished, and people got used to him. In 1602, about 15 years after Dr Fausts

story, also in Germany, a narrative of only four pages came out, with a lengthy title: Short Description and Account of a Jew Named Ahasverus, who Witnessed in Person Jesus Crucifixion. The success that this story enjoyed was tremendous; one edition after another followed and legends about the strange Jew multiplied. Ahasverus is sometimes a magus, at other times he is a physician, or a wizard, or a merchant, he even undergoes some Faustian contamination. In the 17th century, about 60 editions were in existence. A mental epidemic seized Germany and France, two countries that were leading a pathetically commonplace existence, stirred by social, and religious conflicts, by discoveries that were more sensational and threatening than todays flying saucers and the aliens visits. The appearance of the official legend was preceded by rumours about a strange character - a Jew, it goes without saying - who became visible, either in one place or another, and astonished people with his erudition, only to vanish suddenly. In the autumn of 1542, theologian Dr Paul von Eitzen relates that he went to a certain place to visit his parents, and there, at the Sunday Mass, opposite the pulpit where the priest was preaching, he saw a strange barefoot man, with long hair touching his shoulders, wearing a thin mantle, who was listening to the sermon with piety, until the priest uttered the name of Jesus Christ; then the strange character crossed and bowed and sighed in distress. Paul von Eitzen did not doubt that this was Ahasverus who had been more and more gossiped about, the cowardly Jew who had not been mentioned in the Gospels, but who figures in Arabic stories and inThe Acts of the Aposles. Attracted by the foreigner in front of the pulpit, Paul von Eitzen exchanged a few words with him, and the latter told him that he was a Jew, that he had remained in Jerusalem while Jesus was trudging up Via Dolorosa, that he took his child in his arms, telling him ,Here is our Lord!, then he offered Him a resting place, but the Redeemer refused saying, Ill get there and will have a rest, but youll always rove about. The Jew put the child down, and went on to witness the Crucifixion. Afterwards, he could not return home, so he went on roving throughout the world.

Back in Jerusalem 100 years later, he found the city in ruins, and did not recognize any of the houses. He did not know why God keeps him a prisoner in this existence (an idea shared by the Renaissance mystics and the NeoPlatonists), to use him as an eternal witness to the unfolding history of an unfortunate world, whose horrible ending is imminent. The old Jew, seemingly coming down from St Augustines philosophy, and stating that the Jews have to be left alive to set an example to unbelievers through their suffering) was sad and unsmiling; he was living withdrawn from society, and the money he received from those who came to Hamburg to see him was given to the poor. In his continuous lamentation, he spoke about the despicable human creature, for whose sake the Lord had suffered in vain, His name was turned into blasphemy. In 1575, Christofle Ehni(n)gen claimed that he met the same Jew at Malduit, and that he spoke Spanish perfectly. In Strasbourg, he spoke to people in French, telling them what had been happening in their town over the previous two hundred years, through which he had been living (one cannot miss the allusion to the knack of Europes Jews for foreign languages). Published in various languages and versions, the folk story gets enriched with new episodes; the eternally wandering Jew always wears the markers of garb identity, as well as a stereotypical visage: he is undersized, his face bespeaks suffering, he wears a beard and long hair, is mournful, looking hermitlike, rather than a caricature, like Judas. He is so skeptical that he no longer even believes in the Last Judgment, while his suffering about not dying, about having to look at the show of the world, seems eternal to him. Ahasverus is a Jew by origin, and a Christian by behaviour; this paradox is orchestrated all through the story. From his emergence, the eternal Jew has been a multi-faceted character. Yet he who refused Christ, he who got exiled from society for his crime and for subsequent punishment, knows as a Jew how to inspire compassion through his own way of suffering, through his repentance and his Christian virtues. Always a victim and never an executioner, he witnesses all the events in history, without

participating. He knows the whole story, without getting (from it) anything to belong to him. This past, which, after the beginning of the Christian era, is not his, but belongs to the whole world, came out only in VolksbuchThis will become one of the most important aspects of mythviii. We could add, a myth turned into literature, intellectualized and processed, in an epoch of postrevolutionary French romanticism, when Christianity got divided into two camps: those who were enemy to the Jews, and those who were their friends. The latter take over the Enlightenment concept of the good Jew, wise, the creator of The Bible and of the most exquisite poetry - that made Coleridge exclaim exaltedly: The sublime was born Jew (referring to the Hebrew poetry, but also to Jesus death, about which an American researcher wrote in plain terms that through this death, human sacrifice got sublimized). But as the greatest historian of anti-Semitism, Leon Poliakov, remrked, through Ahasverus, the transition was made from Judas theological anti-Semitism to the racial one. The poor shoe makers curse is incidentally not out of all proportion to his deed; it does not refer to what he did, but to what Ahasverus is. As a matter of fact, he is the symbol of a whole people, accursed to wander throughout the world, isolated, slandered, forced in his turn to answer back, to take revenge, or to get resignedviii. There appeared in 1602, first in Silesia according to some researchers, but according to others in Danzig, The Short Description its character named after the Persian emperor, Artaxerxes, or Ahasverus - that appears in The Book of Esther that the Jews read from in Spring, at the celebration of Purim. During the Purim celebration Ahasverus mystery was performed in synagogues. It was hostile to Christians, just as the latters mysteries were hostile to Jewsviii. But if the name of Judas from the Passions at once recalls the whole Jewish people, as enemies to the Christians, nothing of the kind can be upheld about Ahasverus; he does not have anything to do with Christians. Similar characters (ancestors of a roving category, also living in the great cities even today, some constrained by poverty, others unable to settle in one

place) have also existed in other mythologies. For instance, one of Buddhas disciples, Pindola, whose sin was boundless vanity, was condemned by gods to not be able to die. Thus, he was refused the right of entering the cycle of metempsychosis. Al-Sameri, the character of an Arabian story, is accursed to walk incessantly after Allahs messengers, so as to gather the dust of their steps. Naturally, some allusions also refer to Cain, who after killing Abel was punished to stray eternally on earth; Nimrod is the eternal hunter; Irod, Irodiada, Pilate and Nero appear as immortal in some legends; Sisyphus is condemned to always push the rock upwards to the mountain peak, and so onviii. Because of their deeds on earth, all these characters become exceptions to the laws of cosmic normality, a normality which supposes a rhythmic pattern, movement, death and life. Eminescus notion of sunsetting of gods condition is but punishment for a lack of movement, or the stasis of a universe from which gods withdraw, a punishment equally serious as in other myths and legends, with other characters guilty to have brought transcendent wrath down on themselves. Ahasverus is doubly condemned: to eternal movement and (through immortality) to eternal stagnation. He embodies the most tragic cosmic destiny. One can add to this context of legendary medieval characters that are condemned, a number of episodes supplied by the mysteries, which, as is well known, compounded the liturgical drama (closer to the Gospels), either by processing some facts from The Old Testament , or by ad-hoc inventions, la commedia del arte. This is how Malhus Cartaphile and Boutedieu appear in the mysteries from Spain and Italy, then in those from France. Malhus begins to identify with Ahasverus. He exists in The Gospel according to John - the Roman soldier Malhus (or perhaps a Jew with a Latinized name), whose ear Simon Peter cuts off with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the high priests come to arrest Jesus (18,10). When he had said this, one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand saying Is that how you answer the high priest? (John, 18, 22). In The Gospel according to Luke, Malhus name does not appear. Jesus forgives him, and heals his ear: And one of them struck the slave of the

high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, No more of this! And he touched his ear and healed him(22, 50-51); and in The Gospel according to Matthew, And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest, and cut off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword(26, 51-52). The Italian legends about Malhus speak of the life this outlaw was leading in a cave or in prison, in despair, necessarily going round the walls of the grotto or of the prison cell. In order to make their memoirs more interesting, some travellers to Palestine related that they saw Malhus in an underground cave under Pilates palace, incessantly going round a column. This is what accounts for the enormous success of a Franciscan monks voyage memoir; Dominique Auberton claimed to have seen Malhusviii. According to another story of an Armenian archbishop, a man called Cartaphile, who was gate-keeper to Pilates praetorium in Jesus time, would still have been living in an Armenian monastery. Already in 1223, a monk is thought to have met him in a monastery in Ferrari. In 13th century rhymed chronicles, Cartaphile is depicted as being punished with immortality for having struck Jesus, by pushing him from behind while the exhausted Jesus was carrying his cross along the Via Dolorosa. Cartaphile however seemingly repented of his deed; and baptized, but has been awaiting his redemption for centuries. In the 13th century, also in the rhymed chronicles, there appears another character, Boutedieu. As Gaston Paris upholdsviii, the character was born among the Christians from Asia Minor, as part of the local legends created about the Passions. Boutedieu is mentioned in a 14th century pilgrimage guide, Liber terrae sanctae Jerusalem; he has vast knowledge in all fields, is a healer, discovers treasures, but cannot remain in one and the same place for more than three days. It is strange that neither the characters origin (obviously Judaic), nor his shoe-making job is specified in the legends that prepare

Ahasverus emergence on the stage of the imaginary. Once articulated, the legend of the shoe-maker Ahasverus, who, out of cowardice and indifference to the suffering of his fellow man, did not allow Jesus to have a rest at the gate of his house, and consequently is condemned never to die, but to wander throughout the world without having any country of his own, enjoyed an extraordinary popularity and dissemination all over Europe, from Spain to Russia, from Lyon to Dorohoi. Like Mignon, eternally unknown, as Goethe wrote on referring to the eternal Jew and to the eternal female, Ahasverus is relevant as a symbol and a character, in a post medieval intellectual context, stamped by violent confrontations between Judaism and Christianity. Both denominations gave signs of vulnerability. Love for Jesus was getting weaker, as was the hatred for Judas. The Reformation had disturbed the power equilibrium. To Jesus passions, there were added the passions of Ahasverus, who was not a killer, but only a coward like all the Jews (even Jesus proselytes Simon Peters abjuration being more outrageous than the cowardice of the shoe-maker, who was not one of the Redeemers proselytes). Jesus forgave Peter, who before the cock crew three times, out of fear, had told the servant who had recognized him as the disciple of the condemned that he did not know Him, he who had sworn eternal faith in Him; but the Christians do not forgive Ahasverus. The neurosis of vagrancy (also topical today, as we have already noticed) had set in after the Crusades; and it was what the Christians were also suffering from. But as peoples, only two were predestinated to roam about: the gypsies and the Jews. Had he not lived in Jerusalem, Ahasverus might perhaps have been a gypsy. The Brief History as we specified above, had an exceptional dbut in its reception; it fell in place within the expectation horizon of the European reception. In 1620 at Anvers appeared the Histoire admirable du juif errant/The Admirable History of the Wandering Jew, that places the emphasis on the characters longevity: a real treatise of gerontology, for some envious readers, who really wonder why they should not live longer. Could not death possibly be postponed

by means of some transmutation, similar to those in alchemy? The Renaissance Christians come to be skeptical about the happiness beyond, about the gate to life (obviously eternity), so they come to prefer the earthly prison. People always talk about the eternal Jew (especially the Germans), and about the wandering Jew (especially the French people), and not about Ahasverus, because the Semitic ferment had to be maintained, nevertheless. Histoire admirable , in its hesitantly Christian way, as we have seen, leads to the emergence of a species of lamentations, to the accompaniment of music, on the topos of tragic immortality; they attempt to muffle the Christians manifest indifference to afterlife, and their desire to live as long as possible. The delineation of the wandering Jew (because such a portrait also emerges) becomes one of the most efficient enterprises in and with stereotypical art: engravings and paintings rendered him according to fashion: cape, beard and plaited hair, hat, tunic or trousers. But he aroused other feelings than Judas: curiosity, skepticism, hope. Punishment of the treacherous people seemed almost a reward. The lamentations vainly commiserate his fate; Ahasverus is rather envied. This is why he becomes subject of some satirical stories; for instance, people said that on entering a convent, Ahasverus-Don Juan becomes the bone of contention for his hostesses, whom he enchants either with his stories from all over the world, or with his personal adventures (Claude dEsternod, Satire 15). The success of The Brief Account was due to the fact that it could be rendered in different genres, epochs and tastes. The central element, the plot, was almost taken for granted, if not even neglected; the encounter between Ahasverus and Jesus on Via Dolorosa was not even mentioned sometimes; what was important referred to the adventures recounted by the deathless man, the eternal voyager, true or invented, as they were. Ahasverus becomes a puppet in the authors hands; in a ballet performed at the Court of Blois in 1638, the Jew comes onto the stage, accompanied by a buffoon, a physician and a mule driver. He delivers a speech made up of words from

diverse languages, which an interpreter translates into French. Ahasverus is no longer caricatured, like Judas, or like the Jew in the Medieval iconography, with crooked nose, side burns, bulging lower lip, exophthalmiac; one reason is that he comes after the waning of the epoch of caricatured identification of the Jew. And then he belongs to lay iconography, not to Christian propaganda. After he has featured in folk stories, lithographies and memoirs, Ahasverus gets elevated to cultured literature, losing his theological connotations altogether: a traveler, whom Scarron compares to Enneas. The focus of the narrative shifts from the first degree narrator, Ahasverus, to the second degree one; the latter, as an interlocutor to the wandering Jew, recounts what he has been told by the strange character: who was born at the beginning of history, had travelled to Japan, America and Mexico, had witnessed episodes of mass human sacrifice and cannibalism, in other words, he had witnessed all the clichs of the European imagination, from the early European universalism era. Edgar Quinets annals, Les Tablettes du Juif errant, written in 1821 and published later, are meant to make a point: human destiny is a sequence of irrational and disconnected absurdities, while sufferings have entirely distorted people. Proud of belonging to a creature species that has given birth to Hesiod, Euripides, Temistocle, Virgil, Horatio, St Hieronymus, St Augustine and Isaac Laquedem, the character of Les Tablettes is disappointed by the Middle Ages, and puts forth a sort of negative theology: religion is not conceived as a faith that unites people in a community; on the contrary, it invents and re-invents itself, to make people miserable and at variance. Isaac Laquedem is a Byronic, melancholy, pre-romantic individual, stamped by Weltschmerz (an apathetic or vaguely yearning outlook on life, a feeling of pessimism, a universal sadness and suffering) of a history that grinds individuals down at random. Ahasverus begins to lead a double life: a popular one, in which he remains the coward and the ruthless fellow from post-Gospel literature, and another, cultured, according to which his guise is that of a skeptical intellectual,

who, in contact with history, the science of the past, no longer cherishes any illusions about the future. The present, as a time of despair, the time of the wandering Jew, as S Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote in his diary in 1836, was as discouraging as the past. The English and the Germans take the myth conceived by the Renaissance imagination all the more seriously. Sturm und Drang (the German pre-Romanticism, in other words) hypostatizes Ahasverus as a solitary, introverted, cursed, unsettling rebel. This is the way he is shown in D F Schubards poem The Rhapsody of the Wandering Jew (1785), translated into French by Nerval, and taken over in English by Shelley (1809) in two poems: The Wandering Jew and The Monologue of the Wandering Jew. Schillers hero from the novel The Visionary (1786) is a Protestant German prince, who witnesses a necromancy episode in Venice. The prince is confused, not knowing whether he is facing some real phenomenon or some illusionist hoax. The author of these sleights of hand with the paranormal is introduced either as an Armenian, or as a Russian officer, or as a Capuchin monk; nobody knows where he came from, where he sleeps or where he eats. After the play, his face visibly disintegrated, and he vanished. Although, like Dr Faustus, a creation of the German imagination, The Short Descriptiondid not generate good quality literature in Germany, as in the case of the other legend. It did not have an author like Goethe. Yet, the myth as such is appreciated; Kierkegaard ranks it among the three fundamental myths: Don Juan, Faust, the eternal Jew. German anti-Judaism is more powerful than the European Enlightenment. In German literature, Ahasverus is presented either as a grotesque character, or as a quack. Yet A W Schlegels poem is an exception: here the eternal Jew is a taciturn character, who sits at a tavern table with some satanic young people, who relate all sorts of sacrileges: how they hung a dead cat on the cross, how they had laid a crown of thorns at the statue of the Virgin, and so forth. In the end, the Jew admonishes his satanic companions, and relates his own story to them, as a sign of divine wrath; on his forehead, a sign appears, like Cains: a red cross.

In Eugene Sues instalment novel Le Suif errant (1844) - 169 instalments the wandering Jew (who in fact plays a secondary role) pulls the strings in an incessant series of adventures, resulting from the confrontation between Jesuits and Protestants. From the shadows, he stage-manages the war of the two. Christian roses. Disliked by critics, but read breathlesly by the audience, Le Suif errant (The Wandering Suet as, ironically and anti-Semitically connoted by alluding to the pig-Jew, Balzac calls it in a letter to Mme Hanska) causes Christian anti-clerical disputes, and paves the way for the emergence of the good Jew. After the 1848 revolution, and the disaster that any revolution brings about in society, the Jew being guilty both for the revolution and for its consequences, general sympathy for the authors of the wandering Jew decreases, but not the sympathy for their character. In 1852, Scribe and Halevy stage-manage the opera The Wandering Jew. Its success was avenging, making amends for eight centuries of Catholic anti-Judaism; because this opera, like Sues novel, condemned not the Jew, butthe Jesuits. The last attempt at a come-back by Ahasverus on the literary stage is Alexandre Dumas novel Isaac Laquedem (left unfinished). But Ahasverus is not only a character; philosophically, he becomes a symbol of eternal reincarnation; he is, as we have noticed above, not punished, but rewarded. What we find interesting is the treatment of this myth by some romantic poets, who attempt an overthrow of the known elements, in an initiatrix-esoteric direction. Ahasverus is happy, because he is eternal, like God (see Samson Bodnarescus poem); he is the symbol of the eternity that faces up to change, to history. Ahasverus problem, writes Perpessicius in vol 7 of his edition, had been a matter of concern for Eminescu, ever since his university studies, as well as since his Jassy period. A novel such as Eugene Sues could not appeal to the romantic, who believed neither in Jehova, nor in Buddha SakiaMuni, but was concerned with the esotericism of the time and with Indian philosophy. In the manuscript no. 2,287, he writes about Ahasverus, Thus the beings by themselves are like a running river on whose surface are suspended

shadows. These shadows stand still like a warp (our italics) under the waves of the eternal river, and make a sure weft, that lends substance to the shadows, and nevertheless, it is in an eternal transition itself; in a pilgrimage from being to being, an Ahasverus of the forms of the world (our italics). Ahasverus is an embodied Archaeus, we could say in an attempt to place our arguments within the framework of the Eminescian thought, an original mytho-poetico-philosophical synthesis, fascinating even without systema.

e) The Jew the Master of the World

In your turn, poor proletarian, In your turn, dethroned kings Obscure cadgers or personalities Set out on the tour of the world ! The Jew, the outlaw of the past, Are the gods of the modern world. King of the Jews, surrender to the kings of the Jew The human ideal that governs today Is their minted ideal. Diogenes, put out thy lamp The wandering Jew is having his rest

(Abbot Constant)

To the extent to which the eternal Jew has known the world from its beginning, and the world from one corner to another, he has in fact been its owner; an owner whose power resided in pragmatic sense, knowledge, initiative, money and communitarian solidarity. The post-revolutionary romantic Europe was in a state of moral disorder, disappointment and economic crisis, as characteristic of post-revolutions. The need to find a guilty one was pressing, and they turn to some older props from the puppet box, with which dramas, melodramas, comedies, mysteries, miracles and farces had been performed. The integrated (but not also the assimilated) Jew comes back onto the stage, but not with a caricatured face now, with the devil by his side, with horned-skullcap and little disc on his chest, with hooked fingers like claws, but as the great banker, the manager of world finances, the unseen puppeteer, who pulls the strings during the showThe wandering Jew was having a rest, but was not idle. Because his thoughts had always been about Zion, whence he did not want to return, but where he would have revived the glory of Solomons state, so that the real redemption of the cursed Jew would come true. The new Messiah was faceless, and was called Capital. The healing power of the new god, a golden calf, with the shape and colour of the little rose they had worn on their chest, no longer had anything to do with the Judaism of The Talmud or with Law; it had to do with the intelligence of the paradisiacal snake. In the Christian world, more than ever Judieiized, as Karl Marx maintained, because of money-worshipping, the time of heresies and fallacies had remained behind, and there had begun another period, one of counterfeit and of forged documents. These were keeping alive the need for danger, which is the energizing force of any negative ideology.

By means of this stereotypical formulation, the Jew, master of the world, the concept of the chosen people gets sorted out in capitalist terms, and not in geopolitical ones; the master of the world did not want all of Europe as territory, the whole land, but mankinds consciousness. And he also wanted Zion back from the Europeans. Loan, Ian, Iancu, Iankle, Ianke, the Yanke, at last the Kike were claiming the rights that forfeited 2000 years ago, over a territory, where the descendants of the crusaders, French, English and native Arabians were in confrontation. But the Jerusalem of the rabbis, who were dreaming about rebuilding Zion, stood in the way of the great powers, with their benefits in Asia Minor. The universal enemy did not have to be a legendary character, but one with official documents. He was pointed at with the finger; in France Eduard Drumont, a renowned anti-Semitic journalist, who founded the publication Libre parole (1892), published in 1886 in his book La France juivre, a pamphlet entitled The Jew, Heres the Enemy, supported by evidence. Such circumstances facilitate the printing of The Protocols of the Wise Men from Zion, the greatest acknowledged and controversial sham of all times. It was not incidentally in France; here, the Zionist movement was powerful, while the State (interested in sharing the Syro-Palestinian territory with the English and the Arabs ) more committed, than anywhere else in Europe, to expose the Jewish threat. Obsession with the universal Zionist conspiracy surfaced in Europe immediately after the 1789 revolution, when Scaramouche had become king for the first time. Until then, the changes had been made within the framework of the reshuffled tradition; now, there were proposed radical transformations. The poor were raising inconceivable claims for an elitist country, at the head of which was an emperor-adventurer ( and not French). Nothing seemed to be able to function logically. An empty space without form, a tohu bohu in the country of rationalism, stage managed ? By whom? By the Francmasons, or by the Jews, or by some of each and the others? Anyway, one of the centres of disorder emanation could only be LAlliance Isralite universelle from Paris; but the real

centers were situated in many places, known only by the agents of Zionism. About the Vatican, there were sinister suspicions: the Vatican, a great Semite fortress, a state within a state, wrote Eugene Sellon. In defense against the accusation of collaborationism, the Catholic Church came out, in 1869, with an anti-Semitic reply, Le juif, le judaisme et la judaisation des peuples chrtiens, written by Gougenot de Mouseaux, and edited with Pope Pius IXs blessings. The Dreyfus Affair (1894) is salutary in testing the percentage of European anti-Semitism; what is brought up now is the notion of the traitorous Jew. Jaccuse, cries Zola, Down with the Jews!, the greater part of the population becomes the victim of ruthless capitalism. Anti-Semitic organizations proliferate, for example Ligue de la patrie francaise, Jeunesse nationale et antiSemite. Clemenceau himself, although looking up to the Jews, in Au pied de Sinai (1898), cannot help caricaturing them, because anti-Semitism (like Zionism) was floating in the air. In Russia, Ohrana was obsessed with the Jewish threat, that was taking shape in capitalism and in revolutions The year 1905 of the Russians had come. A version of what was to be The Protocols of the Wise People from Zion is given to Czar Nicholas II to look into, and he notes in the book margin: What profoundness of thought! What prophecies! What precision in implementing the programme! This year 1905 of ours (our italics) was masterminded by these wise people! One cannot help noticing the guiding and destructive hand of Judaism. On the Czars order, the secret police initiates an investigation: stupefaction, The Protocols document ...was a forgery! But the conclusion of the investigation did not count any longer; sham as it was, The Protocols was.. true. It also entirely corresponded to the expectation horizon of the general climate of opinion. Ever since 1895, the Department of the Russian Secret Police had handed in to the Tsar a document of about 30 pages entitled The Secret of Judaism, in which were written the following: (a) the sublime mystery of monotheism had been known for a long time, ever since antiquity, by the Egyptian and the Kaldeen priests, who refrained from divulging it, although an exalted Jew, Moses, did; (b)

Moses violated the Sacerdotal oath, so as to render his people masters of the world (our italics); (c) the hour of conspiracy has come. Measures are taken in two apparently opposite directions: dissemination of Christianity all over the world (the target generally being the Jesuits and the Vatican), and its annihilation, through atheism; (d) the peril of Russian intellectual restlessness for Orthodox Christianity, the true one, without Judaism. Nobody knew who had written the document; but the Czar, who thought that there also were innocent Jews, that moreover the Jews were human beings, did not heed it. The disturbances that were occasioned by the 1905 revolution frightened him, so he consented, especially after reading The Protocols.., to set up an international crusade against the Jew, that would have required pogroms, expulsions, synagogue burnings, the banishing of Jewish culture and press, and so on. The idea gaining all the more ground was that Russian bolshevism was created and monitored by the Germans, through the agency of the Jews. In the end, as the Russian anti-Semitic press was opining, a pax iudaica was to set in, so that the Germans with their pax germanica were to lose face, and to be put to shame. Revue internationale des socits secrtes had specialized in exposing occult Jew activities whose final goal was to master the whole worldviii. In that period, there were also other shams that acted as warnings about the peril of a single herd and a single shepherd: Peter the Greats Willviii, General Tanakas Memorandumviii, and The Secret Monitaviii; but they had been forgotten by public opinion earlier. The ideas of The Protocols of the Wise Men from Zion went round and got spread on the black market, long before they came to be drafted in different versions, never in a final shape. They referred to a plan to destroy the current order - a plan that aimed at replacing the European monarchies by democracies, which having been proved inefficient would be succeeded by totalitarian regimes, susceptible of causing wars. Those who would surely have taken advantage of this condition of overall destabilization were the mysterious heads, the

universalistic Zionists, who would have taken over the financial, political and economic power of the entire world. Through them, and thanks to them, the Zionists dream of mastering the world would have been realised. Pax iudaica would have brought in an economic, political Judaism, and in the long run, a religious, universal one. The plan for Europes and Russias breakdown and collapse into chaos would primarily have been the following: (a) discrediting any religion, through atheism; (b) disseminating subversive, anti-State ideas among the young people; (c) stirring and fanning hatred between social classes; (d) encouraging consumerism luxury and the vices of the elitist classes; (e) fanning immorality and corruption; (f) stirring the hatred of the poor classes for the elite; (g) developing industry to the disadvantage of agriculture, which would result in the creation of an immense pauper class; (h) encouraging great monopolies to the disadvantage of small industry; (i) destroying financial stability; (j) instigating and maintaining a permanent economic crisis; (k) at the right moment, instigating a final cataclysm leading to the total breakdown of the European-type civilization; (l) enforcing the Judeo-Masonic dictatorship. In 1921, a Russian owner (with constitutionally monarchist convictions and Orthodox Christian faith), who emigrated to Constantinople after the revolution, was concerned with the Jewish question (that had not ceased to stir Russia; even if the Jews had helped the Bolsheviks to take power, the latter were planning to discredit them; so as to get rid of them). In his concern, this migr buys a stack of books from an old officer of Ohran, also a refugee in Constantinople. Among these books there was one entitled Dialogue aux Enfers entre Machiavelli et Montesquieu , authorless and dating from 1865. Stupefaction! Here, in this book, there was the content of The Protocols (made up of about 25,000 words) that had been going round Russia ever since the end of the 19th century. In fact, the paper was but a plagiarized work, a sham after the parody-pamphlet, by the lawyer Maurice Jolly, who in the book Dialogue , published anonymously, had satirized Natpoeon the Thirds Second Empire. The pamphleteer lawyer, once discovered, was arrested by the empires police.

In Jollys imaginary dialogue, Machiavelli and Montesquieu were talking about ways of having a democratic state ruined from within, and then having it collapse. The pamphlet parody did not have anything to do with the Jewish peril, but it seems to be a cryptic book, in which its ideas represent the plan of the wise men of Zion to destroy and master the world. The Russian owner remembers The Protocols, which had been circulating clandestinely in Russia from the time of Tsar Nicholas I I; and he sends the book to a friend, a journalist with The Times, Philip Graves; he publishes a series of articles in which he makes the point, with quotes from Dialogue, that what the anonymous Protocols had maintained until then had now been discovered as a written document. The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, as this book, the most sold and translated book after the Bible would now be called world-wide, was preceded in its latest version by an article published inThe Times, The Jewish Peril. The book was eagerly awaited. Europe was about to commit suicide (Poliakov), and for those who want to be lied to, the truth stands no chance. Nor did the publication of the documents on Maurice Jolly take any effect. Nobody wanted to make any connection between the French parodist and the serious documents going round in Russia, to which the Tsar himself fell victim, even if he doubted their authenticity. As early as 1897, a version of Jollys pamphlet, known to the Russian immigrants to France, had been published with the title Old and Modern Protocols of the Wise Mens Reunions from Zion, then again in 1903, at Chisinau, under another title: The Program of the Worlds Conquest by the Jews, in the magazine Znamia from Petersbourg run by a then famous anti-Semitic Russian. The Russian writer and mystic Serghei Nilus (who in some encyclopedias is taken to be the author of the final version of The Protocols) includes The Protocols in one of his books, The Great Thing in the Small Thing/Velikoe v Malom, a book that was dealing with the next outbreak of the Anti-Christ (in other words, the Communist revolution) in the political economic context, as prepared beforehand, and as envisaged by the Jews. On 16 October 1905, the Metropolitan of Moscow, Vladimir, admirer and spiritual protector of

Nilus, orders that the fragment of The Protocols and other passages from The Great Thing in the Small Thing be included in an Encyclical, and read in 368 Orthodox churches. In 1906, in Petersburg, Niluss book,The Enemies to the Human Race was published , a final edition of the Russian version of The Protocols. In the second edition of The Great Thing in the Small Thing , they are included again, while in 1917 they are published with the motto: Here comes Anti-Christ and the Empire of Devils on Earth. After the Tsars family had been executed at Ekaterinburg, among the unfortunate Tsarinas books there was The Protocols, which she had received with a dedication from Tolstoys wife (sic!). Then, there follows the discovery of The Dialogue ..., the publication in The Times of its English version, that gets spread all over the world, as we mentioned above. The English who managed Palestine were most concerned to deal a mortal blow to Zionism, to turn all those who were returning to the former Israel and wanted to lay the foundation of their own state into enemies of mankind. The poison of the presupposed Protocols took effect; and many were concerned that they should prove to be true, which is the reason why refutations and exposures of the sham did not take any effect, either in that period or afterwards. In Germany, where at the end of 19th century one of their summaries had already been published in the anti-Semitic Berlin newspaper Auf Vorposten, 33 editions of the forgery had been registered by 1933. The Protocols became Hitlers bedside reading as well as that of the national-socialists. In America as well, the famous magnate Henry Ford between 22 May and 2 October 1920 published a series of articles about the Protocols, in his magazine The Deaborn Independent, then an edition of The Protocols of the Wise Men from Zion in Boston, which he entitled The Protocols of World Revolution. Yet in 1927, the same Henry Ford declared he had been tricked, and refused to acknowledge the authenticity of the Protocols, which he regarded as a sham, and vehemently indicted as the lie of the century. But in England,

France and Germany, the Protocols were called the Bible of the Bolsheviks; and despite some attempts at debunking them, books have nevertheless been written that analyze them from various perspectives, calling them the great revelation of the Christian world. The Book spread all over Europe, including Romania, fuelling the increasing hatred of the Jews, generating a real psychosis that plunged Europe into a nationalist and anti-Semitic frenzy. Hitler was more and more convinced that it was high time for him to embark on the great crusade. On the national socialist flag fluttered the swastika, the cross of pagan, Aryan Christianity, the badge of a revived humanity, enervated with Judaism and Judaized Christianity. The Myth of the 20th Century, Alfred Rosenbergs book, also nicknamed Hitlers Prompter, takes over the ideas of The Protocols, as well as those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who in The Foundations of the 19th Century (Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts published in 1899, wrote that pestilential Judaism and Roman universalism have got stronger and stronger, attacking Germanism more and more, so as to break it down from within and to paralyze it without. After the Holocaust, and despite innumerable attempts to demonstrate its falseness, The Protocols of the Wise Men from Zion became an ideologically dangerous weapon for Islams anti-Semitic system of propaganda. The first translation into Arabic of The Protocols dates from the year 1921, and was published in Damask, the centre of Islamic anti-Zionist opposition. In Beirut in 1968, there were already 200,000 copies of the anti-Semitic document in French, and 180,000 in other languages - copies that Islamic missionaries were spreading from Asia to Argentina. The President of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, pronounced them to be authentic; the Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadaffi and King Feisal of Saudia Arabia regularly gave to guests a copy of the book that incriminated the Jews. General Idi Amin of Uganda demanded that all Africans should read it, to judge the Jewish peril for themselves. Maurice Jollys dialoguepamphlet, which did not make any remark about the danger of world domination

by Zionism but satirized the post-revolutionary state of affairs in France, turned out to be one of the most productive books in generating false notions, which no demonstration has subsequently been able to remove categorically from political culture and from the Islamic and European anti-Semitic propaganda stock-intrade. The Jew - master of the world puts forward a further argument about nationalisms from the periphery of the civilized world. This is the argument that fundamentalisms resort to - be they Islamic or Christian - because of hatred and fear of an enemy, however hypothetical that enemy might be; it was and has remained a coagulant, more efficient than the love of God or than tolerance towards others, whoever they might be. Moreover, when properly distributed in well written terms, hatred can even satisfy ones hunger. The renewed editing of The Protocolsalso gets enlisted in the market economy of the post-December Rromanians.

Notes

See Charlotte Klein: Damascus to kier: Civilt Cattolica on Ritual Murder, in The Wiener Library Bulletin, XXVII, 1974, (apud Poliakov); See Charlotte Klein: Damascus to Kiev: Civilt Cattolica on Ritual Murder, in The Wiener Library Bulletin, XXVII, 1974, (apud Poliakov);
viii viii viii

viii

Leon Volovich, op cit, p 9;

Kurze Beschreibung und Erzahlung von einem Jude mit Namen Ahasverus. Welcher bei der Kreuzigung Christi selber persnlich gewesen auch der Crucifige ber Christum habe helfen schreyere
viii

Edgar Knecht, Le mythe de juif errant, pp 25-26; Ibidem p 28; See Gaston Paris, Lgendes du Moyen Age, Hachette,1908;

viii viii

The Franciscan monks played a special role in spreading the legend on Malhus. Cf P B Bagatti: The Legend of the Wandering Jew, apud Knecht, op cit, p 33; Journal, vol I, p 74; apud Knecht, op cit; See the study LApocalypse de notre temps. Les dessous de la propaganda allemande daprs des documents indits. The study appeared in 1933; Henry Rollin (1885-1955), a devoted and passionate researcher of the enigmas of history, head of the secret information service at Constantinople,1917, head of the secret information service of Le Havre during the Second World War. During the time of the Laval government, he succeeded in fleeing to London, where he continued his activity as a secret agent. LApocalypse.deconstructs the mechanism of disinformation, a mechanism the nefarious consequences of which are known. In 1942, his book was banned in France. After Napoleons fall, whenever the Western powers were in conflict they invoked the Russian peril, as testified in Peter the Greats Testament, so as to expose pan-Slavism. On 4 September 1896, in La libre parole, the article Le Prince Lobanof et le Testament de Pierre le Grand, signed by Eduard Drumont, was published. It was an exposure of the French-Russian deal of Crimeea: in a perfidious way, the Russians were putting into practice their expansionist plan. Drumont reproduced paragraphs from the testament: The great God, whom our existence and ascendance depend on allows us to look at the Russian people as to people called (chosen?) to generally dominate Europe. In order to fulfill the call, it was necessary to have Poland divided, to buy the governments of the European countries at high cost, to influence them so as to get rid of the adversaries of the plan, to have the army enter certain states and stay there, maintaining confusing relations with powerful neighbours and at the crucial moment, placing them in front of a fait accompli. Therefore a new chosen people was threatening Europe. The magazine La France juive was wondering panic-stricken: how could a money-thirsty, divided people like the French oppose the Slav threat? On the occasion of the visit of Tsar Nicolas II to France, Eduard Drumont does not omit to mention the German origin of the Tsarina and the Russians deals with the Germans. The Tsar also had the sin of not being anti-Jew. The fashion of the famous Testament is fading away, yet it reappears around 1936. The visionary Tsar was comparing his invasion with the Niles waters that fertilize the Egyptian earth; the Northern peoples had the duty of invading the South so as to fertilize it (a common idea with that of the national-socialist pan-Germanism). He hoped that the river that he had created the Russian people from his time would become a sea whose waves would overflow any dam in its way.
viii viii viii

viii

In fact, The Testament was the work of the general Mihail Sokolnicki, a former pupil of the Warsaw Cadets School, a refugee to France in 1812, where, after

Napoleons campaign against Russia in which he had participated, he published a book The Progress of Russian Power in which he also includes the Testament.
viii

General Tanakas Memorandum, published in 1927 in a New York magazine, China Critic, had echoes in America and in England. He warned mankind about a hidden plan of universal domination by the Japanese. It was a rewarding affair for the magazine that published the forgery. The refutations of the Japanese government that General Tanaka did not exist were neglected. He had to be invented.

Monita Secreta, another famous forgery, appeared in Cracow in 1612, with an excommunicated Jesuit monk as its author. In 1939, it reverted to Europes attention under the title Monita Secreta or the Jesuits secret Instructions, but nobody gave a thought to it this time.

viii

4. The Jew-phobic Language

Jew: 3. Among the unpleasant features, one can notice primarily dirt, as well as profit; thirst and their usury: dirty as an old Jew; he stinks like a Jew; he tastes like a Jew; he tastes like a dead Jew; he must first soothe his throat, or else this dish tastes like a dead Jew; 4. to lend ones money at usurious rates of interest, to lie; to claim like a Jew; to lend like a Jew; this fellow does not demand anything: neither the Jew nor the priest demands anything straightforwardly. 5. He looks like a Jew, that is, his beard is not shaven; a lunch without meat. 6.judeln: to speak like a Jew, to heal, to stink, to feel like a Jew.

(Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm)

By about 1432, in Spain, Judio begins to acquire connotations of very serious public offence. Spain was the country where Jews had been not only integrated, but also largely assimilated, because of their prolonged settlement there (for some Fundamentalist Jews, the Jews from Spain were neither Jews, nor were they deemed to be, just as the Sephardis do not regard themselves as close relatives of the Ashkenazi from the other side of the Pyrenees). The range of epithets that were applied to the Jews in folk theatre Passions or Mysteries clearly suggests the standing of the Jews in Europe, during and after the crusades: hypocritical Jew (faux juif), hypocritical thief (faux larron), hypocritical disbeliever (faux mcrant), mendacious scoundrel (faux chenaille), traitors (tratres juifs), cursed false monks (faux moines maudites). All these, and many others, are registered only in Marcel Bulards list, made up after Arnoul Grebans Mystre de la Passionviii The more the word Jew gets loaded with negative connotations in dictionaries and the popular theatre, the more far-reaching it gets in phrases or words naming plants, states, phenomena; the record in this respect is held by the Germans. In vernacular Latin, for a tree species, the term arbol Jew was already in circulation. Two main species come into play: (a) Cercis siliquastrum, Cercis Canadensis, Cercis occidentalis, Cercis reniformis, and (b) Sambucus nigra. In various languages, both are called Judas tree, in the folk register. A first linguistic phenomenon that suggests the Jew-phobic attitude is the ever clearer distinction between Jew and Jew (Juif, Jid, Jidan, Judio, Jude, etc). The Jew was the author of The Bible, the Jew, the author of The Talmud. Yet, it

was not The Old Testament that the Church had had to struggle, but The Talmud. And then, harmful to contemporaneity were not Abrahams and Isaacs Jews -, but the Jew, the descendant of the treacherous and murderous nation. In this respect, it is telling that the adventurer Montalto, subsequently a counselor to Mary de Medici, was commented on in a letter as such: Great Jew and true Jew. The word Jew had the shortcoming of making direct reference to Judas (the main character of the anti-Semitic stage, until the 15th century). At a moment of anti-Semitic respite, or else, in the elitar register, the adjective Jewish was used to designate whatever was related to Holy Scripture, or to cultural and scientific phenomena; therefore, there were Hebrew tunes, Jewish prophets, Hebrew Studies, and .treacherous Jews. In 1842, the adjective juif was so negatively connoted that, when three Jews were enlisted to the House, the French magazine Archives Isralites, wrote in an exalted mode: Hatred has vanished, fanaticism is in ruins, while the literary marshals order the great army of the press to drop the term Juif for ever, thus to give up on this word, which is continually a weapon against us; this word has come to be used ever more seldom in connection with the Jew, whose soul is at once in Jerusalem and in France. Reverting to anti-Semitic botany, we can notice that Cercis siliquastrum refers to various plants related to beans, with fruit resembling pods; Sambucus refers to plants that have in common berry fruit, usually black, but also red: common elder (also called Judass gallows), bilberry, black currants. Arbol Judae might have been folk etymology surfacing in Spain, from arbol Judia, beans, but also from a tree with beans, that is, with pods, such as carob beans, also called in German Judas bread tree (Judasbrotbaum), but alsoSt Johns bread (Johannesbrotbaum), case in which the anti-Judaic connotation is missing, as Judas-John are part of the term for the same plant: carob tree. Cercis siliquastrum, a leguminous plant with rich flowers, which grows in Southern Europe, is described in a book entitled Plant Lore, Legends and Lyrics as follows: grows up to 20 feet, with pale green leaves, purple, butterfly-shaped

flowers, which in spring come out in clusters, the fruit being flat pods, transparent like lenses, with small seeds inside. Some writers describe it as a tree with very beautiful flowers, in clusters of red or lavender colour, which grows in Spain, Italy and Egypt. This is thought to have been the tree Judas hanged himself from, as was written in a Herbal of 1597. Therefore, in vernacular Latin, arbol Judia (beans) gave the name arbol Judae to a tree that had pods for fruit (probably carob beans), which in Spanish became arbol de Judas, in English Judas tree, in French, arbre de juif, in German, Judasbaum, in Dutch, Judas boon, in Swedish, Judastrad, in Danish, Judastrae, in Bohemian Jidasni, in Hungarian, Judasfaja, in Polish, Judaszowe. In Romanian, the tree is called roscov, roscov salbatic, scorus, bob, sorb, without any echo about Judas. Cercis caadensis, a Judas American tree with red buds, is called in German americanisher Judas-baum, or Juden-dorn (Judas thorn), or Kanadisches-Griffel-baum, or Frher Salatbaum (the spring lettuce tree), or Rotherknof baum (the tree with red buttons), and in Dutch, Kanadische Judasboon. Cercis occidentalis, Judas Californian tree, is also called love tree, arbre damour, Liebesbaum, but also Judas lime tree (Judaslinde in German, Judaslind in Swedish) . But did Judas hang from a Cercis, a nice tree, with purple flowers and edible fruit, or from an elder tree, that is, from Sambucus nigra, the elder which is a bad smelling fungus, or on which is a toadstool is a parasite or guest? More than once, the Jews replied to the Christians, who accused them of stinking, that it was natural for them to stink, as it was they, the Christians who had constrained Judas to get hanged from a tree that did not smell nice, because of a parasite mushroom, Judas ear (Judenohr). Legend and language get associated on the Jew question. Peziza coccinea, or Peziza auricula, shaped as a small cup, was used to prepare some healing mixtures for diseases of the ear, but also for treating those rescued from hanging. Auricularia sambucina, or auricula Iudae is manifest in various languages: Judasohr, Judaisinohr, Judasohrechen, Judasohrlein, oreille de Juif, orecchio di

Giuda. In Hamshire (England), Licopercum esculentum, that is, the red tomato, is also called Judas ear. Voluta auris Iadae is a snail-like moss in Eastern India. In Bohemia, on Good Friday, it is customary to prepare and serve jidas, a snail-like cake. In Romania as well, there are small snails made from dough, without any Judaic connotation though. Lunaria annua, a flower with round flowers, is called in Romanian pana zburatorului/the flyers feather, while in German, Judasgeld (Judas gold), or Judasgroschen, while in Swedish, Judas silverpemring (Judas silver coins), and in French, mdaille de Juda, but also mdaille de Pape. Physalis Alkekengi (the winter cherry tree) is called in German Judaskirschen (Judas cherry tree), the same in French, cerise de juif, and in Swedish, Judeskorsbor. The plant called in Romania Christs thorn is a thorny bush, or gledicie, and its scientific name is Paleurus australis and it is called in German Judas dorn (Judas thorn), but alsoChristdorn (Christs thorn). A tropical plant, a sort of fichus with purse-like flowers is called Judas purse in English and in German. As already mentioned so far, Judas becomes part of various phrases, used to denote features, emotions and situations; for instance, for shrewdness, betrayal, insincerity, perfidy: Judastreu (Judas faith), Judas Tcke (Judas perfidy, a phrase given currency by Luther), Judas Zunge (German), Judas tunga(Swedish), la langue de Judas (French) mean Judas tongue or language: Judas Kss (German), Judas kyss(Swedish), Judaskus (Dutch), pokolowana Judasza (Polish), Judas csok (Hungarian), sarutul lui Judas (Romanian) mean Judas kiss. An ugly face is called Judas face: Cara de Judas (Spanish), Judas Gesicht(German), and Judas tronie (Dutch). German is very rich in compound words with Judas: Judas mantel (Judas mantle), Judas hut (Judas hat), Judas kunst (Judas art) an ironic phrase used by Luther about the Catholic Church - , Judas Lach (Judas laughter), Judenfresser (Jew eater, fierce antiSemite), Judas Knecht (Judas slave, he who betrays), Judas Kommunion

(reference to a thorny theological discussion about whether Judas attended The Last Supper, the communion, whether he received the eucharist), Judas Lohn (Judas wages), Judas lust (compulsive desire), Judas Angst (intense fear), Judas Market (outstanding man), Judasmut (false courage), Judasrat (false advice), Judassalbe(bribe). Also to be mentioned are: Judas Saturday (the Sabbath), Scaratchi (from the Iscariotviii ), denoting the chief of the devils (in Moldavia), oeuvre dIudas (the devils matter, in Romanian a compounded situation); and this enumeration can continue according to the depth of the research. Thus, in Holland, a severe winter is called a Judas winter; in England, the pane through which the prisoner looks is called Judas hole, while in France, the peep- hole is Judas. In Germany, freckles are called Judas excrement, Judas Dreck; in France, somebody who speaks incomprehensibly is referred to as It sounds Spanish to me (allusion to the Spanish Jews who fled to France in 1492); in England, the Jews are said to talk gibberish, while in France, about German, cest de lhbreu pour moi, that is, a difficult language which I cannot understand, as I do not understand Hebrew. In German, there is no shortage of verbs whose root is made up with Judas: Judassen (to squander money), judeln (to feel like a Jew, to heal illnesses, to be dirty), or abjudassen (to attempt to gain money by dishonest means). Yankeu, a word designating the American banker, or generally the North American, might derive from Ianke, the Dutch form of Ioan, Ian, Jean, Juan. The Dutch are known to have been called Yankei in North America, that is, those who in great number are called Janke. In Russia, the Jew was a Ianke, just as in Poland. After 1492, most Marranos took refuge in Holland, which became the country in Europe with the greatest number of Ianke. In America, Dutch people were known as Ianke, and they also were top bankers and great manufacturers. Each country has the Jews that it deserves, wrote Pierre de Boisdeffre. No wonder that the American people had Yankei, and others. Iankl; some had

the bankers, and some others had the poor Jew short-sighted, dirty, fearful, despised, blamed and self-blaming, hated by everybody, isolated. Moreover, we can also remark that the languages in which there are compound words made up with negatively loaded Judas are generally spoken by peoples for whom the anti-Judaist tradition has been powerful and prolonged. The linguistic Judeophobia is a phenomenon that does not primarily relate to linguistics, but to its sociology and its psychology.

Notes
viii

Marcel Bulard, in Le Scorpion, symbole du people juif dans lart religieux de 14th , 15th siecle, Paris, 1935, p 42;

See Wayland D Hand, A Dictionary of Words and Idioms Associated with Iuda Iscariot, Berkeley, 1942

viii

5.

DEAR JUDAS, or about the European Philo-Semitism

No argument in the world can possibly rule out this truth: the Jews are human beings (The Dutch Member of Parliament Hahn)

Unlike the other stereotypes, the good Jew is not a spontaneous, collective, popular creation, but an elitist concoction; it derives not from a legendary stock even if there were at least Judaic legends, which bemoaned Judas fate of being unjustly accused but from the new way of thinking, that of the enlightenment, branching off as it did from Christian theology (if not altogether adverse to it). The good Jew came to life in a family of intellectuals, possibly Protestants, possibly atheists, possibly good Christians. Before the good Jew, there was the poor Jew; the poor people were getting on well with each other even in the anti-Semitic Middle Ages. The poor Christian used to buy old clothes or other things from the haberdasher, from the small usurer he used to borrow money. A poor haberdasher died last night/Nobody wanted to give planks for his coffin./Nor did the smith agree to nail it/He is a Jew, he said, coming from who knows where/an enemy of the God whom we love/And who, when He comes, will punish him again./And the Jews wife had beseeched the indifferent passers-by in vain. Out of such compassion, poems emerged, such as Jocelyn by Lamartine (from which we quoted above), or the older ones such as the poem by Antonio Montoro (about 1492), with its direct allusion to the miserable fate of the converted from Spain: I said the Creed/I adored the bones with grease/I spread tables and I prayed/and nevertheless I was not able to kill my face of a converted one./I prayed with devotion/And counted on the rose wreath/with the belief that it will erase my mistake;/But I havent ever cancelled my reputation of old, abject Jew (Canciones). Protestantism played an extremely important part in the process of reducing and removing anti-Semitic prejudice in the Christian Church; and not only in the century of Enlightenment, but also much later, in the period of Fascist

terror. The Catholic Church had for a long time, in fact for centuries, ceased to be anti-Judaic to any great extent; and so had the anti-Christian synagogue. But what the Catholic Church was reproached for in relation to its attitude to the Holocaust referred to its lack of a firmer tone in criticizing the Fascist horrors. The Protestants took a position of radical opposition to the human sacrifice which Europe was preparing. As for Orthodoxy, it evinced neither violent opposition, nor an alleged attachment to the homicidal anti-Semitismviii. Enlightenment therefore aims at tearing the net of fallacies in which the European Christian community had got entangled for several centuries, and it does so by taking advantage of the vulnerability of the Church, of the acquisitions of history, of an individualist aspiration of man, who did not want to remain masterminded by a collectivity any longer, but to think for himself. Biblical poetry is regarded as the matrix of world poetry; Biblical characters become heroes in plays and in novels. In 1710, the Calvinist pastor Jacques Bosnage published in Holland a country where many Jews lived, as in an enclave of tolerance in the middle of Europe seized with the spasms of antiSemitism The History of the Jews, in which for the first time in the West, he applied the criteria of a scientific history. The book was received with enthusiasm by enlightened intellectual Europe, and Louis Dupin, a renowned Catholic theologian, decided to translate it into French; yet in order to be able to publish it, he had to make alterations to it a hundred times. Thus, the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain had to be reformulated as one of the praiseworthy deeds of Isabelle and Ferdinand. The same Dutch Calvinist pastor wondered in another of his books, Treatise of World Tolerance: Those who cried Crucify Him !, Crucify Him ! were punished, their temple destroyed, likewise their town; why then should all their subsequent generations be regarded as guilty? But not even Jacques Bosnage could elude the concessions of acquired training; he upheld that Jesus Christ could not have been influenced by Judaism, He could not have been a copyist of the doctrine of the Pharisees.

The Jew is finally regarded by some as a man, and not as a distinctive species. In the arts, creators often renounce the tendency to hyper-characterize the then Jew, to caricature and update him. If a good savage had already emerged, why should there not have also been a good Jew? While Voltaire was calling out that it was high time for this people of mystifiers from Canaan to get punished, and Pascal was lamenting Jesus Christ, They robbed you, they ran away, they let you get crucified, they abjured you, Montesquieu was upholding that it was high time for this unjustly oppressed people to have justice done to them. Yet it was difficult for reason to set to rights what the heart had destroyed. An example of the Christians incapacity to extricate himself from received ideas is a 1689 letter by Madame de Svign to Madame de Grignon. The letter referred to the queen of Frances visit to Avignon for the purpose of converting all the Jews in that area to Christianity. This hatred against them she notes is out of the common. But where does this stench, which annihilates all the fragrances, come from? Undoubtedly, faithlessness and ungratefulness are bad, just as virtue is good I feel pity and repugnance for them, and together with the Church, I pray to God to let the scales that prevent them from seeing that Jesus Christ has come, fall from their eyes.viii (our italics) A more lucid explanation came from Berlin, where lived an elitish settlement of rich Jews learned, cosmopolitan and integrated into Berlin society. The leader of their emancipation was Moses Mendelsson (1729-1788), a friend to Lessing. The German poet introduced him to the Berlin literary circles, while Mendelsson moulded the German playwright, by turning him into a Nathan the wise(man). In Berlin, the Jew was welcome, both as a businessman and as an intellectual; the Jew, who knew how to write in German, enjoyed royal protection, was a Schutzjude. And in a philosophical controversy in 1763, Mendelssohn wins over Kant. He is called the Plato of Germany, and around him cluster the school of enlightened minds (Haskilim) of the humanist Jews. Similarly in France, people were talking more and more about the rights of the Jews, about their emancipation, about the way in which they could be

efficiently employed. Almost all over the land, terms such as rouelle and Judenhut were given up. The good intentions of people, such as Abbot Grgoire, a defender of the rights of the Jews, came to clash with those of a high proportion of the bourgeoisie, priests, intellectuals and of the ordinary people; especially after the French revolution. They all, still intensely affected by antiSemitism, were convinced that it was the Jews who, in the shadows, were the authors of the post-revolutionary catastrophe. No argument in the world can possibly cancel this truth: The Jews are human beings, the MP Hahn was calling out in 1796, in front of the Dutch assembly. But more often than not, politics and language ran parallel to reality. Napoleon manifested a certain liking for the Jews, as part of his attraction to the East. The Jews looked on him as a sort of Alexander Macedon, or even more than that, a Messiah, because the emperor had allowed them to sit in a Sanhedrin in Paris, after the gates of the ghettos in Rome, Venice and other towns had been demolished. The lampoons directed against the revolutionary Phil-Semitism were not too long to emerge; one of them was significantly entitled Parallelism between the Jews who Crucified Jesus, their Messiah, and the French, who guillotined Louis XVI, their King (1784)viii. From the Judaic perspective, the negative side of this clemency and of this emancipation of the Jews consisted in their moving away from the communitarian spirit, in their getting integrated, in their losing their Jewishness; in other words, in the decline of the chosen nation. And that was taking place at the beginning of the Zionist dream, to boot! Just as in the 6th century B C, in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the prospective rebuilders of Jerusalem were mental mongrels, deficient of that religious incentive that leads to performing great deeds. Skepticism was also inwardly gnawing at Christianity. Diderot is one of the first great skeptics. In Paris, a rich and cultured German financier, Rene Hubert dHolbach, was weekly throwing a philosophical feast, which he called la synagogue de la Rue Royal, during which various religious and philosophical

questions were debated; an anticlerical and atheist spirit was the corollary of such meetings, which were also attended by Diderot. He wrote La promenade sceptique, in 1747viii. The Calvinist Rousseau felt profoundly affected by the century-old crime of his anti-Semitic ancestors. In his Profession de foi du Vicaire Savoyard, by comparing in the fashion of the old medieval controversies the Church and the Synagogue, he came to the conclusion that the latter was superior to the former! How can we possibly understand the Jews unless we grant them the opportunity of expressing themselves, unless they have universities and schools, as in Amsterdam? It is true that they smile at the ineptitudes of the Christians, but they do not sentence them to death. The sensitive Rousseau did not accept the cruel, jealous, angry Jewish God, but admired Moses, who had tried to turn a throng of shepherds into a free, powerful people, by giving them high-minded moral laws. He taught the whole of mankind the meaning of abiding by laws, and its consequences. The name of Licurg Solon Rousseau wrote in Considrations sur le gouvernement de Pologne, 1772 had long since been forgotten, while that of Moses was alive; Athens, Sparta, Rome did not perish, but their children are not theirs. Zion that was destroyed has never lost them. For Rousseau, Jesus is the sublime Jew, who wanted to elevate his people back to dignity; his cowardly fellow-countrymen did not understand Him, and killed Him. Gradually, in anti-Semitic Europe a state of confusion set in - of religious unbelief on the one hand, and on the other hand, a romantic enthusiasm for equality and fraternity, even if this was also with Jews. But this was not to last for for long, nor espoused by the intellectual elite. The good, poor Jew was soon to be taken away from the heart of the weak and the poor, who had been ready to regard him as their equal.

Au pied des Carpatesviii, the poor Jew has long been a creature acknowledged as something strange in the existence of the little towns or villages. The ghetto from Suceava, the Jewish slums are depicted by Mihai Eminescu in Iconostas and Fragmentarium in the following terms: Quaint, like a letter in hieroglyphs, lies the Jewish lane in the moonlight. Rows of poor, dwarfed houses, either uniform, like the laws of the Pentateuch, or motley and sundry, like the torn clothes and the old things in a Jews pouch.. In the middle of the sleeping slums the cracked temple the ruined Zion propped up all round with oak girders, while in front of the Cahal, an ox stabbed as for sacrifice. It was dreary, like one of Isaiahs visions, like one of Ezekiels lamentations. But the wicked, demoniac Jew was affiliated to intellectual circles, and had begun to lay claims. This is why a wave of anti-Semitism began to pour forth, enfolding especially the scholarly and clerical Romanian elite. In anecdotes and in the popular outlook, the Jew was usually made out to be a fearful, sick, humble, sometimes sly fellow, far however from being the enemy to the nation who would have liked to build up the new Zion by the side of the Mihaileni, or close to Dorohoi. Small craftsmen, small merchants, functioning like a driving belt between the rural village and the town, they lived on rather good terms with their Christian neighbors. The Synagogue did not disturb the Church. But this was not always so. Leibe Zibal is a tragic instance: fearful and sick, a derided convert, threatened by Gheorghe who had been his servant, and whom he had driven away for being lazy, a thief and uncouth towards his balabusta, Leiba Zibal from Podeni near Iassy turned to the prefect to have justice done to him: Leiba went to the Mayors, then to the sub-prefect, to denounce the threatener, and asking to be protected.But after accepting his peskes, the sub-prefect advised him to behave himself, and not even to speak of anything of the kind, lest in a village where people are evil, and poor he should truly whet the appetite for infringing And you see, people in Podeni are really wicked and faultfinding. Insults, mockery., oaths...accusations of vitriol poisoning. But what about the threats ?

The approach of the eve of Resurrection brings him into a fit of insanity. The Jew takes revenge on the robber Gheorghe, then he goes to the rabbi in Iassy, to confess to him that he is a Goy, he is not a Jew, because Leiba Zibal lit a torch to Christ, under the hanged body of Gheorghe. The misalliances brought about scandals on both sides, and were avoided. Otherwise, they laughed without malice at each other, Judas at Jesus, Itic at John. Sometimes Rifca and Rashela the balabusta cuckolded Itic and Strul, with John or George, while the rabbi pardoned them, just as the father does, with some Mariuca who had sinned with a Jew. Beyond the anti-Semitic fever, by which we get integrated into Europe, more vocal among the people have been the words of the wise peddler Cilibi Moses: He who differentiates man from man is not a man. This is why A Torch on Resurrection was written by Caragiale, then later on Haiasanis by Sadoveanu, the novel Itic Strul the Runaway by Rebreanu, and the novels on Jewish questions from Northern Moldavia. It is a peasant Jewish community, made up of carters, porters, water carriers, vagrant children, tailors, butchers and cab drivers, as also in The Childhood of a Knave by Ion Calugaru. The poor Jew is also a hero in the literature written by Jews. In his novel Messiah Can Wait, the less renowned I. Lado turns out to be a soothsayer of a subsequent reality, the Jew, the foreigner to Zion. D Samy from Gaiesti goes to Palestine; the life of the pioneer colonizers arouses in the Romanian Jew the hope about the revival of the people, constrained to inhabit the wretched European ghettos. But Samy feels but a stranger there and hardly enjoys the feeling of having regained his country; this had remained far away, at Gaiesti. He notices the confrontations between the Jews from diverse countries, cultures and homelands. This is why Samy returns home, to Gaiesti. The good, poor Jewish man may have been a Utopian notion, but one which, by a hairs breadth, accused the civilized world; he was playing second fiddle in a psychodrama that has remained incomprehensible. About him, as about woman, it has been deemed, too late perhaps, that he is a man.

Notes The role of the Christian church in propagating and maintaining anti-Judaic hatred becomes a minor one by the 18th century. Yet the Church and theology prepared some forces that turned out to be more harmful than they were meant to be, and which got out of their control, like the famous wizard-apprentice. The Churchs incapacity to oppose anti-Semitism as State policy surfaced at the time of the national-socialist ascension. Obsessed with guilt, the Church attempted to disrobe, to justify and to try to forget its contribution to the Holocaust. It preached tolerance, ecumenism, relativizing the truths of yesteryear. The two Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, (with some exceptions) manifested cautiousness in condemning the Fascist horrors at the time they were being perpetrated. When Edith Stein, a Carmelite nun from a family of converted Jews (one of the few philosopher-women of the century, a specialist in Thomas dAquino, who came to be killed at Auschwitz in 1942) went to Rome to talk to the Pope, to warn him about the disaster Hitler was preparing for mankind, the Pope listened to her quietly, then he carried on with his the preparations for an event occasioned by a Jubilee of the Church. Many clergymen helped the Jews illegally on their own initiative. In a volume published in1981, at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, there is ample discussion on the real attitude of the Protestant and Catholic Churches throughout the Third Reich. One of the better-known cases is that of Cardinal Lienard, a former bishop of Lille, who debated widely in the volume La France et la Question Juive 1840-1944. La Politique de Vichy, lattitude des Eglises et de mouvements de Rsistence, as a stereotype. The cardinal had had Talmudist theologians among the Jews and rabbis that he knew, and between 1940 and1944 he showed understanding of the Jews sufferings. I am happy that through my attitude and intercessions, I have been able to improve the condition of some Jews, he alleged on the occasion of the unveiling of a commemorative plaque at the Lille synagogue in 1950. Many Jews thanked the cardinal, who unfortunately did not have a firm commitment to combating anti-Semitism, nor did he perceive the seriousness of the facts then committed, as in a pastoral letter of 1960 entitled The Judaic Question and Christian Consciousness, he attempted to justify the Holocaust, which was in his view an attempt at damming the peril of Talmudism over Christianity (sic!)
viii viii

Lettres de Mme de Svgn, Paris, 1957, tome III, p 466 (apud Poliakov, op cit vol III); See Ren Hubert, DHolbach et ses amis, Paris, 1928; Lettres Mme de Franqures 1759, in Profession

viii viii viii

Paraphrases of the title of one of Clemenceaus studies, Au pied de Sinai, 1898.

Conclusion Prsent pass, pass prsentviii

Without Via Dolorosa,

Gehena would have lasted for eternity

(Hyam Maccoby)

Looking in puzzlement at the havoc that the younger brother of Judaism and of Christianity, Islam, has been creating, we can hardly believe that all these events are contemporary for us: from the famous Ice Cube, for instance, the coloured Muslim, who hysterically shouts at everybody and especially at the Jews, to the paranoid Jirinovski, the defender of the white race and enemy of the Jews, from wherever they might be. The relativization of past crimes, a sort of prolonged leukemia, a malady of Judaism and of Christianity that were once at war, has made them tolerant of each other, if not even glad to be related. In the meantime (especially after the publication of the Apocryphal Gospels, which deal with both Christs childhood and adolescence, not only with His birth and His activity as a propagator, as in the Synoptic Gospels ), Jesus has been found to have some shortcomings too, while Judas has been well documented to have been but the toy of a history written beforehand, an unhappy character through whom a plot is played out in the Theatrum Mundi; the number of victims, we are told, was really not that high, they exaggerate; nay, even that nor did the concentration camps really exist, they were invented by the Jews. On reading Heine, who writes with intense sadness that Judaism has brought about only miseries, we have before our eyes a film about the monsters that reason, and not its sleeping stance, gives birth to; scenes in which Jews are taken forcibly to work camps, ghettos with streets full of corpses thrown down through windows at night, the waggoner helpless at the sight of the overlarge number of corpses, children lying half dead of starvation in the sordid galleries; others, glad to see

carriages arriving laden with clothes of those who had already been exterminated, theatres, restaurants, escape attempts, rebellions in ghettos, Potemchin-sprees organized on the occasion of official visits, movies, clinics, laboratories, in which the human being was scrutinized while alive, walls with paper hangings showing systematically-arranged eyes, Polish women brought in for forced labour, pregnant women operated on alive, foetuses buried (over 600 unborn children) in an non-existent cemetery, because by 1950 on that very spot trees and grass had been planted there, vacation chalets built where people could quietly enjoy their week-ends over a glass of beer or wine, little knowing that beneath them there is.. a cemetery of ghettos; former officers, medical men, lawyers, who serenely declare they did their duty, former clandestine visitors, who are crying, while recounting what they saw, former prelates who kept silent but opposed with caution, forging false emigration documents for war criminals in the name of forgiveness, Jews who collaborated with the executioners of their fellows, philosophers who gave a spiritual, rational justification of the phenomenon, thus contributing to what we have called in these pages the terrible illness of relativizing the crime; archive movies, diaries, reminiscences, interviews, museums, monuments to the memory of .. the photocopy of reality, which has won over the imaginary. But what about the relativization of the Holocaust? That Auschwitzluge (the Auschwitz Lie), the anti-Semitic ghost that set out to scour Europe? Are they the past or the present? As many scholars opine today, in fact for two thousand years a psychodrama has been performed, that still partakes of the uncontrollable, of psycho-phenomena. In the long run, all the pains taken to explain what happened are pointless. Over us lingers an immense question mark: How was it possible? Could the heroic deed of former times, blameable from todays vantage point, not have been, like Via Dolorosa, part of a plan, the rationale of which still evades us?

Given a birds eye view of history, we can find traces of the Holocaust in The Bible too. From the point of view of sacrificelogy, the study of sacrificial rituals, the Holocaust could be a sacrifice of 6,000,000,000, Jews, buried in various common tombs, some of them greater, others smaller. It is therefore not a matter of crime and punishment, but of ritual, a ritual that returns, in which the sublime sacrifice also got inscribed - Jesus crucifixion, which took place even in illo tempore, and then in history, and will reach its supreme moment in the expected apocalypse. Who is to blame? Instead of a victim emissary, as Jesus was, there are 6,000, 000,000 victims, necessary scapegoat Jews. In his book, Zu Ehren der Gotter. Menschenpfer in der Anden (1989), Patrick Tierney demonstrates that ancient Jews, like the surrounding peoples, practised human sacrifice, that Moloch meant children executioner, and Topheth, a place of burning. The Phoenicians and the Jews who had migrated to North Africa had a Topheth in Carthage, in one of Didones gardens. Just by the side of the Jerusalem wall, archeologists discovered an immense necropolis, Gehenna, in the Ben Hinnom valley. Because the people have forsaken me, and have profaned this placeand because they have filled this place with the blood of innocents, and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire, as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree (sic!), nor did it come into my mind; therefore, behold, days are coming, says the Lord, when this place shall no more be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of slaughter (sic!) (Jeremiah 19, 5-6), or, Behold, the name of the Lord comes from afar, burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke; his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue is like a devouring fire; his breath is like an overflowing stream that reaches up to the neck; to sift the nations with the sieve of destruction you shall have a song, as in the night when a holy feast is kept; and gladness of heart, as when one sets out to the sound of the flute to go to the mountain of the Lord, to the Rock of Israel. And the Lord will cause His majestic voice to be heard, and the descending blow of his arm to be seen, in furious anger and a flame of devouring fire, with a cloudburst

and tempest and hailstones,For a burning place has long been prepared for Moloch; yea, for the king it is made ready, its pyre made deep and wide, with fire and wood in abundance; the breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone, kindles it (Isaiah 30, 27-33). This passage would stimulate many discussions. Yet we only retain the fact that human sacrifice this time was no longer for Baal, but for the God of the Jews, thick rising smoke. Strange how the editors of the Bible, usually rabbis grounded in Judaism, who refused human sacrifice, overlooked this passage and others that an American Bible scholar, Hyam Maccoby, traced back like another Sherlock Holmes, to the whole Bible, and commented on in his study, The Sacred Executioner. Human Sacrifice in the Legacy of Guilt (New York, 1982). Let us imagine that another specialist in history, religion, anthropology, psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis of human sacrifice wrote on this matter, after one or two thousand years (it does not matter; when the past is under discussion, mankind will always play with the centuries). He will surely write that necropoli have been discovered at the wall of Jerusalem, in the towns of the Incas and Aztecs, in the Carpathian region, and on the territory between the Atlantic and the Urals, called Europe, a multi-cultural, multi-state, multiempire region, with a northern part different from the southern one, with a flourishing civilization, and with an acute semitic phobia. What differentiates these necropoli from one another our imaginary scholar would note is the fact that, while in some the corpses are burned, in others they are not, in some they are placed all in a heap, in others, they are arranged in an orderly way, to take up little room, and a white powder is dusted between the layers. All of them were sacrifices brought to the gods. As to whose god such sacrifices were brought to, from the necropoli with many corpses, arranged neatly and covered in white dust, is not known. Anyway, all of them, the Europeans, thought that death was the gateway to life, and went to the place of sacrifice singing in chorus. All of them were wearing on their chests a yellow star, a sign of the starry sky awaiting them.

And probably other researchers will continue to seek an answer to the question: What was the gods name? The translation of the name is sure to be: A very greedy god. When we hear that whatever has been called until now an abominable crime, horror, disgrace, and so on was not like that, that again down the Jidanii! is shouted, that synagogues are being burned without the Churchs involvement now, that anti-Semitism without Jews is being discussed in the Eastern Europe itself, from whence they had left en masse, we can hardly help wondering: Shouldnt those, who for a thousand years, on feasting in their Sunday service on the Lords body and blood - the sublime Jew from Nazareth, by taking anaphora, fish spear or the sacrament, have wondered (like the Dominican priest Marcel Duboi, the founder of the ecumenical Association Isaiahs House in Jerusalem)?, shouldnt we who daily eat of His body also wear the yellow star on our chests perhaps? Hyam Maccobi contends that Jesus sublime sacrifice put an end to the ritual of human sacrifice in Christianity. But was it the case? In essence, what prevented us, and also the Jews, from experiencing an inner mood of affinity, so that we, both they and us, should not, more often than not, have to imitate or pretend that we could put up with one another? There remains only resignation: like the anti-Christianity of the Jewish fundamentalists, anti-Semitism is a psycho-phenomenon, or perhaps an explainable phenomenon. What we have written so far is but a factual chronicling, the explanation of which is assumed to be pointless. How was it possible for the miracle of redemption through love to result in the miracle of redemption through hate? The Jews, some of them returned to Zion, and proving their strength and endurance by building on barren stone a prosperous and powerful country, full of green, a State that the great powers use to carry on a game without check-mate on the chessboard of the Easts policy and politics. They retrieved their eastern roots, and hoard their western experience. They still suffer from an identity crisis from the past, of other peoples conational ancestors, foreigners among their own fellows.

Other stereotypes new in appearance, old in reality - have surfaced in literature, journalism, family policy, major policies. The time of the Jewish martyr of post-Holocaust art is somehow overdue (even if a film like Schindlers List shocked our amnesiac humanity again, reminding us how powerful is an atom of love for humanity and for our neighbour, be he a Jew). The Jew of former days is known to everyone: forcefully deported, willingly exiled, isolated in the hell of the ghettos, ordered to sing on the way to being gassed. But who knows the Christian, be he a German, who risked his life to be and remain a man? As we mentioned, the Jew from I. Ludos novel, Messiah Can Wait (1937), realizes that in Zion he is a foreigner, and that his country is at Gaesti. The character suggests a very old and very topical clich. He lives the drama of he who was living 2400 years ago, who returned to rebuild Jerusalem after Cyrus Edict. That one had also experienced a process of becoming integrated in the Babylonian States, while those left in the destroyed fortresses had collaborated with their neighbours, or even with the occupiers or conquerors, so that they could peacefully take their herds to pasture, could peacefully till the land, could be engaged in commerce and could practise the crafts of the conquerors; on the other hand, on the arrival of the exiles, they did not look too pleased. Not all the Jews had been deported, but especially those from Jerusalem; and by living fifty years without any religious authority, they had come to forget the law. It was a situation very similar to that of the Palestinian Jews and of the European ones going back after centuries of exile to the new State of Israel. The reproaches and charges were and are mutual, suspicion hovers over all; the then fundamentalists (Ezra and Nehemiah), like those of today, a few hysterical anachronists, behave similarly. Back then, along with the construction of the wall of Jerusalem, the reconstruction of the religious basis of the state was attempted (the sacrifice of the burning up, the celebration of the tent, the laying of the temple foundations, imposing the Torah, and naturally, the attempt at reviving the national and racial feeling). But at the same time, it was decreed: Foreign women are separated from Israel (Ezra 10), or The Ammonite and the Moabite

cannot ever be received into Gods assembly, or When the people heard the law, they separated from Israel all those of foreign descent (Nehemiah 13, 1, 3). Today, Jerusalem as well as all the towns of Israel are cosmopolitan fortresses, like all the towns in the world, but as Spinoza the convert, who gave Catholicism a lot of trouble, wrote, the hatred of the nations was propitious to securing the Jews preservation, as proved by experienceI also ascribe a value to this affair (to drive the Jews from Spain and Portugal) (our italics) of circumcision, able to ensure their immortality (Trait thologico-politique. De la vocation des Hbreux). The Islamic hatred of the surrounding enemies, the threat of the Jihad, also even today represent the circumcision, capable of bolstering their surviving force. Israel is a cosmopolitan State, without however becoming deprived of its pregnant identity. Circumstances force it to consolidate its walls and gates, as in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, to secure buffer zones, thus turning from the former occupied State into todays occupier, from victim into executioner. Today, the Jew back in Zion also feels he is a foreigner in the country of his remote ancestors. He cannot understand the Judaic democracy; he knows that there is totalitarianism and democracy. As a matter of fact, the former world citizen does not find it easy to put up with the original democracy of Israel, a religious and a lay one, according to which you are free to be a Jew. His country has remained somewhere far away, where they have all suffered, so as to preserve their identity, an identity that is of no use to them now. Something alien is the soul on this earth - G. Trakls famous line also suits them.

The survivors of the Holocaust continue to remain in the bloody shadow of the Third Reichs Europe; their nephews listen to them, the grandfathers who recount what it was like to be on the front. Their concerns are different now. They

have to find a purpose, and this is not easy in a democratic, capitalist society, albeit a Judaic one. One also has to witness the quarrels between the Orthodox Jews and the tolerant ones. The Orthodox, they who were the first to come, and were fighting - as Nehemiah and Ezra of former times were doing in the 6th century BC, to create a democratic but Judaic State - think ill of the Jewish latecomer from the consumer society, whether it be capitalist or socialist, democratic or totalitarian. The separation from Yahwism was not easy in the 6th century, but it gave birth to Judaism, a force that has preserved the identity of an ancient people, that has survived. Nor is it easy either to try to attune the Judaism left in Jerusalem to that of Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Petersburg, Warsow, and so on. Going back to Zion once more, the Jew does not find it easy to comprehend that he lives in a democratic village, whose tolerance is a religious, not a lay, one. The occupier Jew, the fanatical one, the atheist Jew, the non-adjusted Jew, always ready to return to whence he came, are other stereotypes, other clichs. And even the Jew who is missed. While, in the pre-Holocaust period, the question hovering in the air was: Who needs the Jews?, today, with all the antiSemitic manifestations in the countries left without Jews, especially those from Eastern Europe, some more often than not may wonder, Where could we possibly find some Jews? This is similar to the medieval age when, driven away by a prince, they were invited in by another, who was able to find them efficiently helpful, for whatever they were like circumcised, murderous, diabolical, sly, but skilful in making money. New concepts go round European thought: anti-Semitism with Judaism, anti-Judaism without Christianity, anti-Semitism without Jews. (If in India, China, Japan, or the Byzantine empire, the Jews could exist without anti-Semitism, why shouldnt an anti-Semitism without Jews also be possible?) But the world has not got rid of anti-Semitism yet. In todays Europe, it equates to anti-foreignness, and decently but overtly, it uses the old rituals of hatred: rumours, false notions,

burning, political panic. Europe is already under occupation!, The war began along with the massive migrations from the East to the West, and from the South to the North (as if movement in anything, like a cosmic law, ever since the beginning of the world, had not been active from East to West). The European peoples will perish, swallowed by the yellow race!, and so on. In a poem dedicated to Spinoza, Nietzsche wrote in 1884, .Doch unter dieser Liebe frass unheimlich glimmender Rachenband/am Judengott frass Judenhass (Yet under this frightening, devouring, smothering love, the fire of war/ the hatred of the Jews is devouring the God of the Jews). Christianity has got enfeebled to the degree that it destroyed Judaism; the Churchs fight against Judaism was the Trojan horse of the Christian fortress. The Catechism published in 1993, in German translation (Katechismus der Katolichen Kirche, Libreria Edetrice Vatican), specifies in its Prologue, Above all, love! Despite some traditional charges (that have been maintained), the Catechism recognizes: Israel is the Chosen People; God chose Israels sons so as to reveal His existence; it was they to whom He entrusted the law; Jacob is the father of the twelve tribes; Israel announces Jesus. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all three paternalistic religions - were, in certain periods of their post-Biblical history, generators of totalitarianviii, communitarian or State systems. And also of stereotypes and clichs. It would be interesting to compare the stereotyped Jews of the Christians with the stereotyped Christian of the Jews; the stereotyped Muslim of the Christian with the stereotyped Christian of the Muslims, etc. The confrontation between these images and reality could perhaps result in a necessary metanoia, able to awaken us from heresies. But would the eternal Jew, the eternal Christian, the eternal Muslim disappear from the obscure background that he lives in? Would Apostle Pauls word carry the day indeed? And he made from one every nation of men to live on all the face of the earth (Acts 17, 26) Then Ahasverus might as well die, and the question What else is new in Europe? could be answered to, Anti-anti-Foreigness, man!

Augsburg, 1993

Notes
viii

Prsent pass, pass prsent, Eugen Ionesco, Paris, 1968.

The idea that the mythic structure of totalitarianism would reside in Biblical monotheism is often suggested or brought into discussion in diverse studies. Naturally, a distinction is to be made between religious totalitarianism and the lay one, and between totalitarian religion and totalitarian politics. There are numerous elements common to religion and politics, elements that derive from a common eastern monotheist legacy as first concretized in the firm lawfulness of the Mosaic Yahwism and taken over by Judaism and by Christianity. Some of them are: 1. a single God a single leader; 2. the invocation of love for God for the leader; 3. the paternalism of the relation God-people-leader-people; 4. the infantilism of the individual who remains a determined entity dependent on God or on the leader, from whom he expects the very resolution of his existence; 5. the perfect organization of a rational system which manifests itslf as an occult power; 6. the practice of culpabilizing and self-culpabilizing; 7. collectivization, the communizing of the individual, the attempt at annihilating his personality; 8. the appearance of conscience violation and its punishment; the attempt at suppressing thes individual personal or private life and its replacement by a masterminded interiority, etc.

viii

Addendum

The Compromise

the unique solution.

Brief Lexicon of the Contacts between Judaism and Christianity

Absolutism

Both Judaism and Christianity (as also Islam) practise absolutism, first and foremost, with the meaning of a quest for the absolute; then, each of the three religions upholds that, to their chosen ones, the true, unique and all-powerful God has been revealed. God also requires His subjects to believe exclusively and absolutely; You shall have no other gods before me (Exodus 20, 3). Yahweh tells Israel, while Jesus tells his disciples In My Fathers house are many rooms;I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by Me (John 14, 2-6). Nevertheless, between the three religions originating from the Bible, there is no conciliation, as would be quite natural; on the contrary. The rabbi Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), in the spirit of Mose Ben Maimon, one of the most erudite medieval rabbis, proposed a way of compromise: through Christianity, the non-Jews got to the knowledge of the Judaic God, and they could partake of the celestial happiness; in their turn, the Christians recommended conversion, as the redemptive mode for non-Christians.

Akeda (blindfolded)

It is the name of the chapter from The Bible, which speaks of Abrahams attempt at sacrificing his only son, Isaac, blindfolded, to prove his absolute faith in Yahweh. God the Father also sacrifices His only son whom He sends to mankind, but with another purpose: to show the way of redemption. According to Genesis, Isaac the child carries the faggot for the fire himself, the fire that was to burn the body brought as a sacrifice on Yahwehs altar.

According to some para-Biblical legends, Isaac was not a child, but a young man of 33 (precisely the age Jesus was when He died) and would have willingly gone to the sacrificial altar. Anyway, the Jews are known to have practised human sacrifice, and the Topheth (the Valley of Murdering) from Ben-Hirom testifies to the ritual, refused by the successive editors of the books of The Bible. Had Abraham not been prevented by the ministering angel, he would have done what Moloch seems to have done: sacrifice His son. According to more recent Biblical interpretations, Akede would be a protest against the sacrifices that prophet Jeremiah also mentions (Jeremiah 19, 11). Jesus carries the cross along Via Dolorosa by himself, just as Isaac carried the faggot for the fire that was to consume him. The theologian Hans-Joachim Schoeps, in his book Paulus (Tubingen, 1959), argues in favour of the notion of the Holocaust as a modern Akeda. The theological relativization of the Holocaust seems to us to be extremely dangerous, because, by spiritualizing the genocide, it justifies it.

Apocalypse

In Greek, the word means disclosure, showing forth. Christianity called apocalypse the book by which John from Patmos made his disclosures known. Any apocalypse presents a situation in which creation is on the threshold of a change, of a metanoia, to be followed by the better. Emerging in about the 4th century, the Judaic apocalypses share with the Christian ones the idea of a judgment that precedes the change, a transition to another condition. Other religions also had their apocalypses. In the 4th and 3rd centuries B C, the Egyptian and Iranian ones were better known.

The vetero-testamentary apocalypses, the visions of some prophets, feature in the books of the prophets Daniel, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Zachariah. Their metanoia has the meaning of revival of the State of Israel. The obsession with re-editing the creation is the main theme of all the apocalypses. The fundamentalist Judaic movement Gush Emunim relies in its internal and external politics on ideas of apocalyptic origin. Every apocalypse proposes painful ruptures, as phenomena by which change is brought about, thus refusing the notion of evolution.

Abraham

He is a character common to the three religions that originate in the Bible: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. According to some opinions, the first missionary of Judeo-Christian monotheism to whom the unique God revealed himself before the Sinai episode, was an initiate in Brahmanism. According to other views, he was an initiate in the Egyptian mysteries, like Melchisedec, the King of Salem, who meets him with bread and wine. Apostle Paul regards Christ as a descendant of Abraham. The promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring, which isChrist (Galatians 3, 16). The Gospels attempted to diminish the importance attached to the Jew Abraham: it will not suffice to be Abrahams son to believe. Thus, John the Baptist tells the Sadducees and the Pharisees who were coming to him to be baptized: And do not presume to say to yourselves, We have Abraham as our Father; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham (Matthew 3, 9). According to the Gospels, Abraham is known to be taking supper in heaven together with Jacob and Isaac, but not with Jesus. Yet, the attempts at relativizing Abrahams importance in the structuring process of Judeo-Christian monotheism, and then of the Christian one, could

hardly eclipse the image of this patriarch, who has remained an ideal of morality, faith, wisdom and generosity. Who would not like to feel as if they were in Abrahams bosom? (that is, in his nature, or temper).

The Last Supper (Seder)

The evening supper, in a narrow circle of family and close friends, has remained an old Hebrew custom; this custom was also practised by the Essenien proto-Christians. After the synagogue prayer on the evening that precedes the Sabbath, the Jews take a supper that begins with bread, blessed wine and prayers. The Christians have taken over the Judaic or Essenien supper and turned it into a sacramental manifestation, which recalls the Last Supper that Jesus took with His disciples, when He proposed bread and wine as a sacrament, thus ruling out meat and blood from the Christian ritual for ever. The post-Easter moment of supper allows lamb to be eaten, this lamb symbolizing Jesus. Yet, on the other hand, on their Easter celebration, the Jews also eat lamb. Both suppers, the secret one, as well as Seder are preceded by fasting, and have sacramental implications. The Lateran Concilium of 1215 sanctions transubstantiation: bread and wine, instead of meat and blood,according to the Gospels. And He took a cup and when He had given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26, 27).

Resurrection and The Life Beyond

As we know, the ancient Jews believed in a life beyond, but in the Bible, only seldom is there a reference to the connection with the dead, and by no means the idea of reincarnation (except in Ezekiels vision). The Endor witchcraft episode, a sort of Shamanic exercise, is relevant about the Jews notion of the beyond: But the woman answered Saul, You know what Saul had done, how he drove those who call the dead and the soothsayers away from the country. Why are you therefore setting a trap to my soul, so that I should perish?, and Saul swore on the Lord saying, Alive is God, youll not suffer any misery for these deeds (I Kings 28, 9-14). The two, the witch and Saul, are clearly carrying on with a ghost (Samuels), and not with a reincarnated being. What happened to Jesus? Was also His resurrection a bodily one? Or only one into Spirit? The episode with doubting Thomas makes a point of persuading us about a material reappearance of the Master. With Ezekiel, there is already a resurrection that is attuned to popular Christianity; Again He said to me, Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, you dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and I will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord (Ezekiel 37, 3-6). Therefore, the idea of Jesus bodily resurrection that Thomas-the-Unbeliever is testing also

exists in the Old Testament. Both express a heresy of faith in metempsychosis, and refute the very idea of an ascending change, a fundamental one for our comprehending the meaning of reincarnation. Anastasis in Greek, techiat ham metim in Hebrew, had a common origin: the classical Biblical texts, the Midrashic texts and the esoteric ones. The Pharisees believed in resurrection, while the Sadducees did not. Jesus resurrection is the kernel of Christianity. Although mountains of commentaries have been written on this event, everything has still remained a mystery. This is why even today, suppositions can come to the fore, such as the one according to which it was not Jesus who got crucified on the cross, but one of his brothers, while it is thought that He, with a group of proselytes, left for Japan through Siberia. In Japan, there are places whose names recall the Israelite fortresses, just as in America and Canada, there are towns and streets that remind one of Europe. This can also account for the enigma of the Srinagar Church, where Jesus tomb is thought be some to exist, according to the inscription at the church entrance. The Gnostic-originating notion of resurrection as transubstantiation has more and more become the concern for cultured theology. But it will remain at this elitist level. Nor is the life beyond a concept with the same meaning for the Christians either. Yet anyway there is not only a Seol, a realm of the dead; rather, the other realm is seen as one in heaven, neither under the earth, nor on it.

Covenant (berit), The Old and the New Testament

In the Hebrew-Judaic paternalistic tradition, the covenant (berit) consists of the duties that the children (Israels people) have to carry out for Yahweh, their supreme Father. By means of this covenant, both the duties but also the reward are stipulated for those who will obey them. On the other hand, God, even if faceless and nameless, becomes a presence in the believers daily life. This relationship is complicated, entailing fear, adoration, dependency, respect, reward and punishment - with duty first and foremost. The Jewish God strikes the first covenant with Noah after the Flood, promising to his descendants not to punish them any longer through a flood. Then, He renews the covenant with Abraham, to whom first and foremost He promises the multiplication of his tribe. As a consequence of the covenant, the Jews practise the sacrament of circumcision (berit mala). The new covenant is related to The Secret Supper, or the Last Supper. Jesus tells his disciples: This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood (our italics) (Luke 22, 20). Christianity distances itself from the Old Covenant, first of all by giving up on the circumcision sacrament, and by replacing it by baptism. A greater part of the Paulian polemics, as well as of those of medieval theology, revolves on the relationship between the Old and the New Testament. Bible scholars have scrutinized minutely the texts in the Old Testament, and how it corresponds with the New Testament. As a matter of fact, many of the incidents in the Gospels were either experienced, or foreseen by the prophets.

Law (Torah, Halakha)

As a religion, Judaism was founded on Law (Torah), teaching and commands. It was even called the religion of the Law. Disobeying the law is the cause of all the sufferings that have stamped the history of the most miserable people, as the Jews have been called more than once. The Jews have viewed Halakha not as a burden, but as a sign of divine generosity. The Talmud has interpreted the Law, and endeavored to maintain it in the Judaic communitarian circumference. The Christians did not refuse the Torah; on the contrary, they drew their inspiration from it, so much so that between Moses commands and Jesus ten commandments there are but minor differences. Additionally, Nova Lex Christi sets forth the love of your neighbour as the fundamental law. Luther used the ten commandments in The Great Catechism. Yet, Christianity viewed Torah, the old covenant, as holding good until the Messiahs arrival, that is Jesus. In reality, the foundation of Christianity is in the Torah.

Pity (chen, chinam)

Christians have permanently charged the Jews with the inability to comprehend the divine meaning of pity, grace and forbearance. Nevertheless, the Psalms always praise this very divine forbearance. The theme of a rabbinic Eucharistic service is pity. As Judaism upholds, the Law itself is the highest manifestation of Divine grace. What Christianity brings anew is compassion for ones neighbour. Divine compassion is taken for granted.

Easter (Pesha)

Like the Jews Easter, the Christians Easter is a spring holiday that recalls the shepherds customs of celebrating the birth of the lamb (psch means in fact a small bound, jumping). And you shall present with the bread seven lambs a year old without blemish (Leviticus 23,18). In Exodus, the blood of the lamb sacrificed in spring acquires rescuing connotations: the Jews smear their doors with it, so that God will know the location of their houses, and rescue them from the killing of infants that was prepared for the Egyptians. The lambs sacrifice no longer means the gift that shepherds brought to gods in Spring, but the memory of the first lamb the Jews sacrificed in Egypt, as Moses ordered them to do: They shall eat the flesh that night, roasted; with unleavened bread and bitter herbsand you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lords Passover. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will smite all the first born in the land of Egypt, both man and beast..The blood shall be a sign for you, upon the houses where you are (Exodus 12, 8-15). With Christians, in the Romance languages the term Pashti, Paque, Pasqua, Pashte has been kept; yet in German it is Ostern, and in English Easter, from the name of the northern goddess of spring, Eostre. Like that of the Jews, the Christians holiday is preceded by fasting and a religious service, concluding with eating roast lamb and leavened bread, in contrast to the Jews, who eat unleavened bread, that is the bread of affliction. Jesus himself celebrated the sacrifice of the lamb, on the first day of unleavened bread: And on the first day of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, His disciples asked Him, Where will You have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover? (Mark 14, 12) Apostle Paul calls Jesus Our Passover, that is our lamb, For Christ, our Paschal Lamb, has been sacrificed for us (I Corinthians 5, 7). The Passover, the sacrificial lamb, entails the notion of getting rescued for Jews and Christians alike. Jesus also adds the hope of resurrection: and he looked at Jesus as He walked, and said, Behold, the Lamb of God! (John 1, 36).

Although Pashte and Pesha share origins and meanings, their celebration has favoured an escalation of the hatred between Jews and Christians, and an outbreak of conflict conditions, with serious consequences on the social level.

Our Father Quaddisch

Numerous stanzas in the Christians prayer Our Father can be identified either in the prayers of the Jews, or they single out moments in their religious service. Any Jewish religious service ends with Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time forth and for evermore! (Psalm 112, 2); Our Father is in Matthew 6, 9-13). In Quaddisch, it is said, Hallowed be Thy all-powerful Name, Thy Will be done in the world and in your kingdom. Let Redemption go over all our life, our days, over the life of Israels house. Our Father is a Christian prayer drawing on the thesaurus of Judaic prayers; in its current form, it emerged in the 2nd century A D; in contrast to Quaddisch, Our Father adopts a restrained formulation, without redundant epithets.

The Holy Trinity

It is the most disputed Christian dogma, as it transgresses ordinary logic. The Christian theologians took pains to explain the concept of hypostasis, the Trinity being a triple hypostasis of God. But for the believer, questioning is not the best solution if he wants to have a clear conscience. Yet the Trinity is not the invention of Sinodal Christianity.

In Christianity, through the Holy Spirit, God the Father was embodied in His Son. Father-Son and The Holy Spirit are One. In contrast to Rabbinic unitary monotheism, the Trinitarian monotheism has been preached since the first centuries after Christ. The Trinity has been the apple of discord between Christianity and Judaism. Judaism has permanently accused the Christians of forging, under the influence of Hellenism, the laws as revealed to the patriarchs and to the prophets. On the other hand, the prophets acquired their independence from the Judaic empire, through the very assertion of the concept of the Trinity in the 4th century. Trinitarian monotheism emerged from the Bible. Under the Mamvri oak tree, Abraham receives three angels, who were a Holy Trinity of Yahweh; the shape under which God revealed Himself to Abraham was a trinitarian one. On the other hand, forestalling the accusations of the Jews, Christians have always emphasized the unity of the Trinity: In Deo omnia sunt unum, is said in the Concilium from Florence of 1330.

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