By Savitri Devi (1976)
Jewish “racism” has been much discussed. And the doctrine of the “chosen
people” is often regarded as an expression of this “racism.” Yet in reality the
Jews of Antiquity (I mean, of course, orthodox Jews) believed that membership
in their race, that is, in the “family of Abraham,” had value only if it were
combined with exclusive service to the “jealous God” Jehovah, Israel’s
exclusive protector. According to the Bible, Moabites and Ammonites, though
enemies of Israel, were closely connected racially to the Jews. Did not the
former descend from Moab, son of Lot and his eldest daughter, and the latter
from Ben-Ammi, son of Lot and his youngest daughter? (Genesis 19.36-38) Now,
Lot, son of Haran, was the nephew of Abraham (Genesis 11.27). Evidently
genealogical kinship did not facilitate relations between these peoples and the
children of Israel. If blood joined them together, their respective cults
nevertheless separated them. Chemosh, god of Moabites, and Milcom, god of the
Ammonites, were in the eyes of the Jews “abominations” – as were all the gods
of the earth, save their own God – and their worshippers, enemies to be
exterminated.
Jewish racism, independent of religion – the attitude which consists in
accepting as a Jew and treating accordingly anyone born Jewish, whatever his
religious beliefs might be – is apparently a much more recent phenomenon,
dating at the earliest from the eighteenth or the seventeenth century, that is,
from the time when masonic lodges of Israelite inspiration began to play a role
in determining the politics of Western nations. It was perhaps a product of the
influence of Western rationalism on the Jews – in spite of themselves. It found
its most striking expression at the end of the nineteenth century and during
the twentieth in Zionism, which could be called an innovative, avant-garde
Jewish nationalism. The Zionist movement does respect, certainly, the religious
tradition of the Talmud and the Bible, but without in any way being identified
with it. Its political faith is “national,” but could not be compared with that
of modern Greece, since the latter is so inseparable from the official state
religion. But I shall call Zionism a nationalism rather than a “racism,”
because it implies the exaltation of the Jewish people as such, without any
enthusiastic consciousness of a blood solidarity uniting all the various desert
peoples customarily called “Semitic.”
Although modern in its expression, this Jewish nationalism is not in its
essence different from the solidarity which, after the introduction of the
Mosaic law, existed among all the children of Israel from the thirteenth
century before the Christian era. The religion of Jehovah played a paramount
role then. But its role consisted precisely in forming a feeling in all Jews,
from the most powerful to the most humble, that they were the chosen people,
the privileged people, different from other people, including those closest to
them in blood, and exalted above them all. The Jews have felt that more and
more in modern times, without the aid of a national religion; hence the
decreasing importance of this religion among them, except in a few permanent
centers of Jewish orthodoxy.
In other words, the Jews, who for centuries had been an unimportant Middle
Eastern tribe among so many others, a tribe quite close to others in language
and religion before Abraham and especially before the Mosaic reform, gradually
became, under the influence of Moses and his successors, Joshua and Caleb, and
then under the influence of the prophets, a people completely filled with the
self-image they had manufactured; having nothing but contempt for men of the
same race who surrounded them and, with greater reason, for people of other
races; seeing only “abominations” in all their gods; even repudiating, as the
prophet Ezra commanded after they returned from their long Babylonian
captivity, those of their kinsmen who, having remained in Palestine, had
married Canaanite women, under the pretext that the latter would loosen the
link that bound them and their families to Jehovah and thus weaken their
consciousness that they were a “chosen people,” a people unlike others.
They could have remained so indefinitely, isolated from the rest of the
world by a national pride as incommensurable as it was unjustified, for even in
Antiquity they were already rather mixed-race hybrids, if only because of their
prolonged sojourn in Egypt. Had the Jews remained in their self-imposed
isolation, the world would certainly have suffered no great loss – quite the
contrary. But they did not, because the idea of a “single, living God” – the
“true” God, in contrast to “false” gods, to local gods whose power was limited
to other peoples – could only imply, sooner or later, the idea of universal
truth and human community. A God who alone “lives,” while all others are merely
insensate matter, at most inhabited by impure forces, can only be, logically,
the true God of all possible worshippers, that is, of all men. To refuse to
admit it would have required that they ascribe life, truth and benevolence to
other peoples’ gods as well, in other words, that they cease seeing them only
as “abominations.” And that the Jews refused to accept, after the sermons and
threats of their prophets. The One God could indeed prefer a single people. But
it was necessary that he be, by necessity, the God of all peoples – the one
whom they, in their insane folly, were unaware of, whereas the “chosen people”
alone paid him homage.
The first attitude of the Jews, as conquerors of Palestine, toward peoples
who worshipped gods other than Jehovah was to hate and exterminate them. Their
second attitude – after Canaanite resistance in Palestine had long ended, and
especially after the Jews had lost most of what little international
significance they had ever possessed, being reduced to mere subjects of Greek
kings, Alexander’s successors, and later of Roman emperors – was to throw into
the spiritual pasture of a declining world not only the idea of the futile
emptiness of all gods (except their own), but also the false concept of “man,”
independent of and distinct from peoples; of “man,” a nationless citizen of the
world (and “created in the image of God”) whom Israel, the chosen people, the
people of Revelation, had the mission of instructing and guiding to true
“happiness.” This was the attitude of those Jews, more or less conspicuously
daubed with Hellenism, who from the fourth century AD until the Arab conquest
in the seventh century formed an increasingly influential proportion of the
population in Alexandria, as well as in all capitals of the Hellenistic world,
which would later become the Roman world. It is also the attitude of the Jews
of our own era – an attitude which, precisely, makes them a people unlike
others, a dangerous people: the “ferment of decomposition” of other peoples.
It is worth tracing the history of this attitude.
Its seeds, as I have suggested, already existed in the fanaticism of the
servants and prophets of the “sole” and “living God,” from Samuel to the
redactors of the Cabala. An important fact that should not be forgotten, if one
wants to try to understand it, is that the “sole God” of the Jews is a
transcendent god, but not immanent. He is outside of Nature, which he created
from nothingness by an act of will, and in his essence is different from it,
different not only from its sensible manifestations, but also from everything
that could, in a permanent way, underlie them. He is not that Soul of the
Universe in which the Greeks and all other Indo-European peoples believed, and
in which Brahmanism still sees the supreme Reality. He made the world as an
artisan manufactures a marvelous machine: from the outside. And he imposed upon
it whatever laws he wanted, laws that could have been different, if he had
wanted them different. He gave man dominion over all other creatures. And he
“chose” the Jewish people from among other men not for their intrinsic value –
that is clearly specified in the Bible – but arbitrarily, because of a promise
made once and for all to Abraham.
From this metaphysical perspective, it was impossible to consider the gods
of other peoples as “aspects” or “expressions” of the sole God, and all the
less so since these gods represented, for the most part, natural forces or
celestial bodies. It was also impossible to emphasize less the indeterminate
variety of men and the irrefutable inequality that has always existed among the
various human races and even among people more or less of the same race. “Man,”
whatever that might be, had to possess, alone of created beings, an immense
intrinsic value, since the Creator had formed him “in his own image” and had
placed him, for that very reason, above all other living creatures. The Cabala
states the matter clearly: “There exists the uncreated Being, who creates: God;
the created being, who creates: man; and … the remainder: the entirety of
created beings – animals, plants, minerals – which do not create.” This is the
most absolute anthropocentrism, and a false philosophy from the outset, since
it is obvious that “all men” are not creators (far from it!) and that some
animals can in fact be creators.
But that is not all. From this new humanist perspective, not only did Jewry
maintain its position as the “chosen people” – the “holy nation,” as the Bible
says – destined to bear unique Revelation to the world, but everything that
other peoples had produced or thought had value only insofar as it was
consistent with this Revelation, or insofar as it could be interpreted in that
sense. Unable to deny the enormous Greek contributions to science and
philosophy, the Jews of Alexandria, Greek in culture (and sometimes with Greek
names, like Aristobulus in the third century BC), did not hesitate to write
that all of the most substantial products of Greek thought – the works of
Pythagoras, of Plato, of Aristotle – were only due, in the final analysis, to
the influence of Jewish thought, having their source in Moses and the prophets!
Others, such as the famous Philo of Alexandria, whose influence on Christian
apologetics was considerable, did not dare deny the obvious originality of
Hellenic genius, but only retained, of the ideas they elaborated, those which
they could, by altering or even by deforming them completely, bring into
“concord” with the Mosaic conception of “God” and the world. Their work is that
hybrid product which in the history of ideas bears the name “Judeo-Alexandrian
philosophy” – an ingenious collection of interrelated concepts drawn more or
less directly from Plato, though not always in the spirit of Plato, mixed
together with old Jewish ideas like the transcendence of the sole God and the
creation of man “in his image.” All of this was undoubtedly a superfluous
scaffolding in the eyes of orthodox Jews, for whom the Mosaic Law was
sufficient, but it was a marvelous instrument for seizing spiritual control
over the Gentiles, in the service of Jews (orthodox or not) eager to wrest from
other peoples the direction of Western (and later, global) thought.
Judeo-Alexandrian philosophy and religion, increasingly permeated with the
symbolism of Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and so forth, and professed by the ever
more racially debased people of the Hellenistic world, constitute the backdrop
against which Christian orthodoxy gradually emerged in the writings of Paul of
Tarsus and the first Christian apologists, eventually taking shape during a
succession of Church Councils. As Gilbert Murray remarks of the latter: “it is
a strange experience … to study these obscure assemblies, whose members,
proletarians of the Levant, superstitious, dominated by charlatans and
desperately ignorant, still believed that God can procreate children in the
womb of mortal mothers, misunderstood ‘Word,’ ‘Spirit’ and ‘divine Wisdom’ as
persons bearing those names, and transformed the notion of the soul’s
immortality into the ‘resurrection of the dead,’ and then to think that it was
these men who followed the main road, leading to the greatest religion of the
Western world.”
In this Christianity of the first centuries, preached in Greek (the
international language of the Near East) by Jewish and later by Greek
missionaries to raceless urban masses – so inferior, from any point of view, to
the free men of the ancient Hellenic polis – there were undoubtedly more
non-Jewish elements than Jewish. What dominated was a common religious subject
I dare not call “Greek” but rather “Aegean” or “Mediterranean pre-Hellenic” –
or even Near Eastern pre-Hellenic, for the people of Asia Minor, Syria and
Mesopotamia all more or less exemplified it in their primeval cults. It was the
myth of the young god cruelly put to death – Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Attis,
Dionysus – whose flesh (wheat) and blood (grape juice) became food and drink
for men, and who came back to life in glory every year in Spring. This subject
had never ceased to be present in the mysteries of Greece, as much in the
classical era as before. Transfigured and “spiritualized” by the allegorical
meanings attached to the most primitive rites, it manifested itself in the
international “salvation” religions, namely in the cults of Mithra and of
Cybele and Attis, Christianity’s rivals in the Roman Empire. As Nietzsche saw
so clearly, the genius of Paul of Tarsus consisted in “giving a new meaning to
the ancient mysteries,” taking hold of the old prehistoric myth, revivifying
it, interpreting it in such way that, in perpetuity, all those who accepted his
interpretation would also accept Jewry’s prophetic role and its status as
“chosen people,” bearer of unique revelation.
Historically next to nothing is known about the person of Jesus of
Nazareth, so little about his origins and the first thirty years of his life
that some serious authors have even doubted his existence. According to the
canonical gospels, he was raised in the Jewish religion. But was he Jewish by
blood? Several scriptural passages tend to make one believe that he was not. It
has been said, moreover, that the Galileans formed a small island of
Indo-European population within Palestine. At any rate, what is important, as
the source of the historical turning point that Christianity represents, is
that, Jewish or not, Jesus was presented as such, and what is more, was
presented as the Jewish people’s expected Messiah, by Paul of Tarsus, the true founder
of Christianity, and by all the Christian apologists who followed over the
centuries. What is important is that he was, thanks to them, integrated into
the Jewish tradition, forming the link between it and the old Mediterranean
myth of the young vegetation god who died and rose again, a myth the Jews had
never accepted. He became the Messiah, acquiring the essential attributes of
Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Dionysus and all the other dead gods who triumphed over
Death, pushing them all into the shade for his own profit, and that of his
people, with an intransigence that none of them knew, the typically Jewish
intransigence of Paul of Tarsus, his teacher Gamaliel, and all the servants of
the “jealous God,” Jehovah. Not only was “new meaning” given to the ancient
mysteries, but this meaning was proclaimed the sole good and the sole truth,
the rites and the myths of pagan antiquity, from the most remote times, having
only “prepared” and “prefigured” it, just as ancient philosophy had only
sensitized souls to receive the supreme revelation. And this revelation was,
for Paul as for the Jews of the Judeo-Alexandrian school before him, and for
all the Christian apologists that followed – Justin, Clement of Alexandria,
Ireneus, Origen – given to the Jews by the God “of all mankind.”
Jewish intolerance, until then confined to a single people (and to a
despised people, whom no one dreamed of imitating) extended itself, with
Christianity and later with Islam – that reaction against the Hellenisation of
Christian theology – to half the globe. And, moreover, it is that very
intolerance that accounts for the success of the religions linked with the
tradition of Israel.
I have mentioned the salvation religions, in particular the cults of Mithra
and of Cybele and her lover Attis, which flourished in the Roman Empire when
Christianity was still young. At first sight, each of them had as much chance
of attracting to itself the restless masses for whom Roman order was not
sufficient, or was no longer sufficient, and who, increasingly bastardized,
felt alienated from any national cult, whatever it might be. Each of them
offered to the average individual all that the religion of crucified Jesus
promised, and with rites all the more able to assure his adhesion, since they were
more barbarous.
Mithra the Bull-Slayer
In the third century AD, the worship of Mithra – the old Indo-European
solar god, contemplated through the thousand deforming mirrors that the races
and traditions of his new worshippers represented – seemed destined to become
dominant … provided that no decisive factor should intervene in favor of one of
his rivals. The god was popular among Roman legionaries and their officers.
Emperors had believed it worthwhile to receive initiation into his mysteries,
under a shower of the Bull’s hot, redemptive blood. A growing number of common
people followed the movement. One can say with complete confidence that the
world dominated by Rome just barely failed to become Mithraic, instead of
Christian, for some twenty centuries. One can say with no less certainty that,
though it did not become Mithraic, this failure was due neither to any
“superiority” of the Christian doctrine of salvation over the teachings of the
priests of Mithra, nor to the absence of sanguinary rites among Christians, but
rather to the protection granted to the religion of the Crucified by the
emperor Constantine, and not to any other factor. Indeed it was Christianity’s
very intolerance – especially, perhaps even exclusively – that procured the
preference of the master of the Roman world.
What the emperor wanted above all was to give to this immense world,
populated by people of diverse traditions and ethnicities, the most solid unity
possible, without which it would be difficult to resist for long the external
pressures of the so-called barbarians. Unity of worship was certainly the only
kind of unity that he could hope to impose on his empire, on condition that it
could be achieved quickly. Among the popular religions of salvation, Mithraism
undoubtedly counted the greatest number of faithful. But it did not seem
capable of being spread rapidly enough, first and foremost because it did not
claim to be the only Way and the only Truth. It risked allowing its rivals to
survive, and the unity that Constantine so much desired would therefore not be
accomplished – or would take centuries – whereas the interest of the empire
demanded that it be done within a few decades.
One could say as much of the old cult of Cybele and Attis: its priests did
not proclaim, following the example of the Jews, that they alone possessed the
truth; on the contrary, they believed, as did all men of Antiquity (except the
Jews), that truth has innumerable facets, and that each cult helps its faithful
grasp an aspect of it. They, too, would have allowed rival religions to
flourish in complete liberty.
Fourth-century Christianity, although penetrated with ideas and symbols
borrowed from neo-Platonism, or from the old Aegean mystical substrate, or from
still more remote forms of the eternal Tradition, had itself inherited the
spirit of intolerance from Judaism. Even its most enlightened apologists, the
most richly nurtured in traditional Greek culture – such as a St. Clement of
Alexandria or an Origen who, far from rejecting ancient wisdom, regarded it as
a preparation for that of the gospels – did not put the two wisdoms on the same
plane. There was, they believed, “progress” from the former to the latter, and
the Jewish “revelation” retained its priority over the distant echo of the sole
God’s voice which one could detect in the pagan philosophers. As for the great
mass of Christians, they dismissed as “abominations” – or “demons” – all the
gods of the earth, except that One who had been revealed to men of all races
through the Old Testament prophets – Jewish prophets – and through Jesus and
his posthumous disciple, Paul of Tarsus, the latter entirely Jewish, the former
regarded by the Church as a Jew, a “son of David,” though in fact his true
origins are unknown and even his historicity could be questioned.
The profound link that attaches Christianity (and in particular the “Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass”) to the ancient mysteries ensured its survival down to
our own era. And it was, for Paul of Tarsus, a stroke of (political) genius to
have given to the oldest myths of the Mediterranean world an interpretation
that ensured to his own people an indefinite spiritual domination over that
world and over all the peoples it was destined to influence during the
centuries that followed. It was, for the emperor Constantine, a stroke of
genius (also political), to have chosen to encourage a religion which would, by
its rapid diffusion, give to the ethnic chaos that the Roman world then
represented the only unity to which it could still aspire. And it was, for the
German tribal chief Clodwig, known in French history as Clovis, again a stroke
of genius (political, in his case also) to have felt that nothing would better
ensure him permanent domination over his rivals, other German leaders, than his
own adhesion (and that of his warriors) to Christianity, in a world then
already three-quarters Christian, where bishops represented a power to be
sought out as allies. Political genius, not religious – and still less
philosophical – because in each case it aimed at power, personal or national,
at material stability, at success, but not at truth in the full sense of the
word, that is, accord with the Eternal. It involved mundane human ambitions,
not a thirst for knowledge of the Laws of Being, nor a thirst for union with
the Essence of all things – the Soul, at once transcendent and immanent, of the
Cosmos.
For if it had been different, there would have been no reason for the
religion of the Nazarene to have triumphed for so many centuries: its rivals
were its equals. Christianity had only one practical “advantage” over them: its
fanaticism, its infantile intolerance inherited from the Jews – a fanaticism,
an intolerance, which, during the early days of the Church, cultivated Romans
or Greeks could only find laughable, and which Germans, nurtured in their own
beautiful religion, simultaneously cosmic and warlike, could rightly find
absurd, but which would give to Christianity a militant character, which it
alone possessed, since orthodox Judaism remained – and would remain – the faith
of a single people.
Christianity could henceforth be combated only by another religion with
equally universal pretensions, just as intolerant as it.
The preceding text is from
Chapter III of Savitri Devi’s Souvenirs et réflexions d’une Aryenne (Calcutta:
Savitri Devi Mukherji, 1976).
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