Innumerable volumes have been written on anti-Semitism—meaning hatred of Jews and Judaism. After all, it started after Sinai, more than 3,000 years ago. Although we Jews had yet to possess a land or state of our own, Amalek sought to destroy us. Thus it has always been.
Today, anti-Semitism is more virulent and widespread than every before. The extermination of the Six Million was not enough to quench the hatred of Jews and Judaism. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmanidehad, animated by Hitler’s “Final Solution,” vows to destroy Israel, and he is being armed by European technology.
To distract the West from its nuclear weapons program, Iran employs Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel. Iran has Hezbollah cells in dozens of countries, including the United States. Iran’s agents preach and train for Jihad. Yet no American politician has the courage to tell the truth about Iran—mankind’s most dangerous and imperialistic enemy.
American politicians are intimidated by the cultural left—even by Hollywood idiots. US presidential candidates as well as president George W. Bush bury the truth about Islam’s multi-faceted threat to the United States. They are fearful of being called racists even while Arab-Islamic racism inundates England and Europe. The same fate awaits America, whose economy will collapse because of its dependence on Europe as well as on Saudi oil. Mark my words, civil war in the United States is on the horizon.
Jews everywhere will pay with blood (God forbid) for America’s intellectual cowardice and moral apathy. Some of America’s highest government officials, upon leaving office, enter the Saudi payroll, where they serve as lobbyists for Saudi billionaires. Treason pays.
Meanwhile, many American professors teaching Middle East studies have become the beneficiaries of Saudi largesse. The fires of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are burning on many university campuses. An average of ten-to-one faculties are pro-Arab leftists inflamed by Saudi propaganda, or feted by Saudi endowments. America is on the slippery slope to oblivion, and Jews will be the first victims.
But still, why this hatred of Jews? My text is Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh’s Israel and Humanity, published posthumously at the outbreak of the First World War.
Benamozegh (1823 and died in 1990) was an extraordinary scholar, learned in European philosophy and culture, as well as in eastern religions. Here was a rabbi and philosopher whose wisdom had few equals.
Benamozegh witnessed the ascendancy of German bible criticism—an attempt to disparage the Torah and deny the Jews of the laurels of monotheism. The bible critics were nonetheless sore put to explain the incontestable appearance in history of these strange Jews, a specially endowed people who rose so far above the level of their contemporaries that they in fact outstripped the slower pace of general human progress.
“We are speaking,” of course, says Benamozegh “of what is for the most part a relative superiority, yet it has actually seemed almost absolute. Here was an exceptionally talented people that attained, in a certain domain, “a degree of perfection, which mankind in the aggregate reaches only much later if at all. It would therefore seem to be presumption to maintain that as regards religious ideas, the law of progress, which calls for gradual evolution, has never been able to allow a startling exception.”
And yet, long before the Greek philosophers, Israel “had probed the supernal problems of metaphysics, Israel had already spoken of the unity of God. Long before the early Christians, she chose martyrdom rather than worship idols. We must wonder how it could have been that in times of ignorance, barbarism, and hatred among people, men without any philosophical culture could have risen to conceptions higher than those of Socrates and Plato. Here is a phenomenon which eludes analysis and the laws of historical evolution, a fact which evades the chain of causes and effects, a unique intuition—in a word, what religious thought calls Revelation.” (Emphasis added.)
Jewish monotheism was a threat to all the “immortal” gods and all their mortal spokesmen who ruled the pagan world. Moreover, Judaism aroused envy of Israel, even among pagan philosophers of the pre-Christian and Roman eras, who obscured the influence of the Jews that dwelled in the Hellenic world after the destruction of the First Temple. This envy eats at the hearts of Gentile nations today, nations that would feel so much at ease if Israel were to disappear.
Perhaps the nations are dimly aware that a renaissance of Hebraic civilization is on the horizon, and that this renaissance will put an end to all the myths and lies which have long been the driving force of the Gentile world. Is this the underlying cause of anti-Semitism?
