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June 18, 2010
A parricidal war waged on Jews
In viewing history, there is always a tendency to introduce a psychological aspect.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Parricide (par’e-sid) n. the killing of a parent
As the reader must be aware, the history of the Jews after the fourth century, when Constantine had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, has been one of harsh and often violent circumstances that eventually culminated in the Holocaust, and has led to much of the hostility that Israel and its defenders experience today.
Historically, this antipathy originated with the anti-Judaism of early Christianity and, later, with that as a substrate, took on other ideological manifestations, even among startlingly different movements (Enlightenment, socialism, Nazism, etc.), becoming increasingly racialized and racist along the way.
There have been major transgressions waged between notably different religious groups (for example, the murderous violence between Hindus and Muslims after the partition of British India), but the prolonged economic, political, homicidal and genocidal war against the Jews waged by Christians and Muslims has many of the characteristics of “civil war,” precisely because of the shared early history, traditions and doctrines among these three groups, all “religions of the Book.”
Consider the long and deadly wars of religion in Europe during the Protestant Reformation. Consider the sectarian violence in Ulster and, among contemporary Muslim groups, the Shia and Sunni. As history has shown, in both religious and secular civil wars – more broadly, factional wars of any kind – the intensity and duration of violence is often greater than in international wars. This is because a factional war is not over disputed territory that can be apportioned; it usually involves deeply held ideological or religious convictions difficult to moderate or compromise. Moreover, following a civil or factional war, the victor and the vanquished must usually go on sharing one another’s, often detested, presence in the same, invariably war-devastated, country.
After the death of Jesus, his small group of followers faced a problem. Jesus, in sending out his 12 disciples, had specifically admonished them: “Go nowhere among the gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 10:5) And, in John 4:22, Jesus says, “... for salvation is from the Jews.”
Yet, the disciples had little success in convincing Jews that Jesus had indeed been the Messiah, let alone the son of God. The Roman-Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, born shortly after Jesus’ death, contrary to descriptions in the Christian Testament of raptly attentive “multitudes,” doubted that many contemporaneous Jews had ever heard about Jesus.
The disciples were not about to abandon the Jewish Testament. Jesus had been a practising Jew, as were all of them. One faction, led by James, adhering to his brother Jesus’ command, wanted to concentrate exclusively on the Jews. Paul differed. It is likely that he, a former rabbinical student, had participated in the Jerusalem stoning of Stephen, Christianity’s first martyr. Perhaps his guilty feelings led him to his famous conversion on the road to Damascus.
In any case, the dynamic and wilful Paul set out to preach to the gentiles of the eastern Mediterranean, ending up in Rome, where he was executed. Rome, in spite of its having put down Jewish revolts in its usual brutal manner, had been reasonably tolerant of Jews because it saw Judaism as a national religion, therefore no threat to its own polytheism. But Christianity claimed to be catholic (all embracing), and the precepts of Christianity could undermine an empire built on violence and exploitation. What Constantine did was brilliant in its simplicity and in its practical outcome: appropriate Christianity by making it the official religion of Rome.
Paul knew of the strenuous proselytizing efforts of Jews at the time, rarely successful because, while gentiles respected the concepts and ethics of Judaism, the men would not agree to undergo Judaism’s most primitive rite, circumcision, and they had trouble enough getting food without imposing the restrictions of kashrut. Paul’s solution was quite simple: forget the injunctions; it is only your faith that counts. Moreover, Paul could invoke, through the vicarious sacrifice by Jesus, the offer of God’s total forgiveness for all transgressions, an offer hard to rival or resist.
There was a time, in the early history of Christianity of a slight possibility that the new religion would diverge significantly from its Judaic roots and might not develop the parricidal tendencies that it was early and protractedly to manifest. The outstanding figure in this regard was Marcion, presumably a Gnostic Christian, who insisted that the God of the “Old Testament” was brutal, jealous, demanding and un-loving, whereas the God of Jesus was just the opposite. Let’s just forget about the “Old Testament” and all that Mosaic claptrap, Marcion argued, and get on with a new religion, worshipping a new and more attractive God. Evidently, he failed. But much of his characterizations of the “two” deities lived on: the God of Jesus being portrayed as a kind, forgiving, supportive father, while the God of the Jews is forever threatening, railing and, worse, carrying out some of His many menaces.
The relationship between Mohammed and the significant and influential Jewish community of the Arabian peninsula also had a decisive bearing on Islam. Mohammed discoursed, perhaps “argued” would be more precise, with local Jews, and apparently was offended by what he saw as their patronizing attitude. So, his revelation, the Koran, has some specific invocations against Jews, which did not prevent him from creating a divergent history, centred on the Book of Genesis, for Muslims. It is they who stem from Abraham, Mohammed argued, but not from Sarah. Indeed, his claim was that Hagar, identified in the Torah as Abraham’s Egyptian concubine, who, with Abraham, conceived and gave birth to Ishmael, and it was Sarah and Isaac, not Hagar and Ishmael, who were sent away into the desert. In the Dome of the Rock mosque on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, there is the stone on which Abraham had allegedly prepared to sacrifice Ishmael and whose hand had been stayed by God – the same stone from which Mohammed is said to have ascended to Heaven.
The consequence of these divergent religions, both having Judaism as their taproot, is that, early on, they acquired a marked anti-Judaic tendency, which frequently manifested itself in atrocious deeds. This process could be called “parricide” of a religious nature. It was, after all, their parent religion they wished to eliminate.
How different would the history of the Jews have been if James’ faction had convinced Paul to follow Jesus’ orders and go only among the Jews? What would have happened in the Middle East if Mohammed had had a more congenial relationship with the local Jews?
In viewing history, there is always a tendency to introduce a psychological aspect. Part of that appeal is that it may mirror the familial and personal experience of people writing and studying history. What, for example, would have happened if Hitler had developed enough skill and imagination to become a successful artist? Would he have abandoned the politics of hatred and aggression in favor of art? Did the influence of Napoleon’s family, especially his mother’s, reflecting more their Italian than French heritage, shape his intention to become emperor and then parcel out portions of his domains to his brothers? What was the influence on Stalin of his earlier life as Dzhugashvili, a Georgian seminarian who would have learned the statement uttered by Jesus, “He who is not with us is against us” (Matthew 12:30)? Was that a factor in Stalin’s many blood purges?
Impossible, of course, to say.
Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.
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