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May 18, 2011

David Turner: Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1

 

Dear freinds, I today decidede to try something different, and I hope you will participate in the adventure. For an indefinite period, possibly as long as a year, I will be sending out in serial form a book I am in the process of writing. As of today I am writing on antisemitism in the United States during the years of the Holocaust. But the story begins much earlier, in the first century actually. What appears below is a revised introduction to what began today as its on-line serialization on the Jerusalem Post. I have provided a link for anyone interested in accessing it there. 

My hope is that you, as you read these materials, will critique and otherwise provide me with feedback and suggestions. Or, for that matter, refer me to sources I may not have discovered.

I thank you in advance,
David

Text Box:

Antisemitism and Jewish Survival

 

 


Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1

 

Preface

 

With this submission I begin an experiment: For some time I have been writing what, until recently, I would euphemistically refer to as a "book." In recent months I have found myself increasingly engaged in research and writing and now realize that my efforts are indeed coming together as that book which, for the time being takes the title of my blog, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival. Following this introductory offering I will begin to send out the present draft of the book in serial form, start to finish (a goal as yet not arrived at!).

 

Some form of anti-Jewish animus has plagued Jewish life in the Diaspora since at least the 4th century, with Constantine's adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. The Holocaust should have represented for us a wake-up call, a loud and clear statement that Jew-hatred is more virile in secular society than ever it had been even in the centuries of religion-inspired persecution. Instead we Jews, in our Diaspora and in Israel, have grown complacent. We seem to be aware of a continuing threat because as I write these lines today headlines remind us that antisemitism on the European sub-continent is at a level not seen since the Holocaust. Antisemitism and Jewish Survival is first and last a call for a renewed focus and return to the original purpose and intent of Zionism.

 

Since Ben-Gurion declared statehood just three years after the ovens of Auschwitzcooled, the meaning and purpose of Zionism has focused on developing the state of the Jews. And this was inevitable: one-third of all Jews had been murdered for the crime of having been born Jews, and Israel was the symbol of our defiance, our rise from the ashes. Then followed decades of threat, provocation and war against the fledgling state, and a people only recently emerged from the death camps seemed on the verge of yet another Holocaust. Decades of threat against the state of the Jews shifted attention away from the now quiescent but continuing threat to our Diaspora; and Zionism, long focused on the creation of a refuge for the Diaspora was now fixed instead on the survival of Israel. And our Diaspora communities, of the United States, of Jews who somehow chose to return to and make their homes in Germany andEurope, continued our lives as if the Holocaust was but a momentary blip in a fast receding history.

 

My project, should it achieve completion and emerge as a published book, will argue that the Holocaust, far from being just another of the countless tragedies to befall the Jewish people in our Diaspora, is but the most recent, the most nearly successful effort by one religious tradition to eradicate another. I will demonstrate by examples from 2,000 years of history a pattern of behavior based on a consistent development of a theology born in the most revered documents of Christianity, come to be embedded in the very sinews of western history and culture that followed. Theological anti-Judaism found easy passage from religious autocracy to secular democracy, integrated unquestioningly into the social revolution that swept the west with Voltaire and the Enlightenment.

 

The Holocaust is not just another tragedy in the long history of persecution meted out to the Jewish dispersion in Christendom. Neither is it an event "too mysterious to comprehend." The Holocaust is but the most recent if nearly successful effort by the West to resolve its self-invented Jewish Problem. Hitler, as the solution's  most recent advocate and instrument, nearly achieved his stated goal of "exterminating each and every Jew the Reich could lay hands on" because, for the first time in history, the 20th century provided the technological means to achieve it.

 

As those technologies, particularly relating to computing and military hardware, have continued to develop exponentially so, I suggest, have the instruments available to a future project aimed at finally solving this millennial and as yet unsolved Western Jewish Problem.

 

Zionism, far from having achieved its goal in creating a state of the Jews has lost none of its immediacy and urgency as first expressed by those young Jews in late 19thcentury Russia, and defined by Herzl in early 20th Switzerland. Both felt impending disaster "in their bones" but could not possibly have imagined the form and magnitude it would take. We alive today are witness to that which for previous generations had been unimaginable.

 

 

Introduction (to the first chapter)

 

The Holocaust is usually understood as referring to the six million Jews murdered between 1940 and1945 in death camps created specifically for that purpose. But as horrendous and frightening as that is, Hitler's blueprint encompassed far more than the destruction of Europe's Jews. In Mein Kampf, begun in 1923, he clearly stated that his goal was not just the extermination of Europe's Jews, but of all Jews, wherever the Reich could get its hands on them. Hitler intended a full and finalsolution to the West's Jewish Problem. It was only by chance, Germany's defeat in a war that Roosevelt and Churchill still doubted success in the war's final year that Hitler's ambition was only partly realized.

 

It takes little imagination to appreciate that, had Germany emerged victorious that your parents and mine, in the United States or elsewhere in the Christian world; that few Jews would have survived.

 

But what is the "Jewish Problem," how would Hitler have come by the idea that the Jews were not just a threat, but a threat so severe as to demand its full and final eradication? The Jewish Problem and its solution are not a creation of the 20thcentury, nor even of the nineteenth. In fact "the problem" came into existence in the first century, in the earliest documents which were eventually collected by the Church as its "New Testament." From that seed would sprout 2000 years of theological development and expansion at the hands of some of west's most famous thinkers, from Augustine in the 4th century to Luther in the 15th; and absorbed seamlessly into secular scientific thought by the Enlightenment, by Voltaire and the Philosophes in the 18th; and political philosophy from the 19th century to the present.

 

It is not my purpose to critique all relevant historical documents since scriptural anti-Judaism is the common early thread and focus of the present chapter. Instead I will provide examples I consider typical and representative of what, for Christianity represents a barrier to that religion's self-representation as "loving" and "forgiving;" but for Jews was and remains a matter of life and death for person and people.

 

This, as with all previous submissions, was first sent to the Jerusalem Post and appears today on-line. My editor wisely limited what went up to my (earlier version)Introduction and (unchanged) Preface, where I had included also part of my first chapter. As the above title suggests, the story begins with a discussion of the father of Christianity, Paul, then on to the gospels and the early Church Fathers. From there through the Middle Ages, the Crusades and Inquisition and on to Luther; then on to the Enlightenment and the secular revolution, scientific and political antisemitism. Approximately half the volume, which I am now working on, involves the Jewish experience in die goldene medina, the United States and the State of Israel. Both are illustrative of the achievements, and the failures of Zionism. The final chapter will bring us back to the Hoveivei Zion and Herzl, and the continuing Zionist imperative.

 

An earlier version of Anti-Judaism and the origins of Christianity: Part 1 is just a click away. Previous writings on topic are accessible through my JPost presence at, Antisemitism and Jewish Survival.

 





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Fun stuff to read, tell and watch:

Now FREE to watch all 91 minutes: "Defamation," from Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir. LINK: http://tinyurl.com/3rvhdvc

Some of His Best Friends Are Jewish: The Saga of a Holocaust Revisionist By Nathaniel Popper. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3v6m88c

...an Israeli lawyer has filed a class-action lawsuit against former President Jimmy Carter, seeking $5 million in damages because his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" allegedly defamed Israel. Link: http://tinyurl.com/3pltqg2

"...when you have laws against questioning the Holocaust narrative, you are screaming at the other person to stop thinking!!!" ---Mike Santomauro. *Anthony Lawson's Holocaust Video "were the Germans so stupid"... Link: http://tinyurl.com/44nsrco

An anti-Semite condemns people for being Jews, I am not an anti-Semite.--Mike Santomauro. Link: http://tinyurl.com/42z9p8o

Peace.

Mike Santomauro
253 West 72nd St
New York, NY 10023
Call anytime: 917-974-6367




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