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A PREFACE
By Ivor Benson
The Author: In Europe during the years immediately before and after World War II
the name of Douglas Reed was on everyone's lips; his books were being sold by
scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the
English-speaking world by a vast army of readers and admirers. Former London
Times correspondent in Central Europe, he had won great fame with books like
Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding, Lest We Regret, Somewhere South of Suez, Far
and Wide and several others, each amplifying a hundredfold the scope available
to him as one of the world's leading foreign correspondents.
The disappearance into almost total oblivion of Douglas Reed and all his works
was a change that could not have been wrought by time alone; indeed, the
correctness of his interpretation of the unfolding history of the times found
some confirmation in what happened to him when at the height of his powers.
After 1951, with the publication of Far and Wide, in which he set the history of
the United States of America into the context of all he had learned in Europe of
the politics of the world, Reed found himself banished from the bookstands, all
publishers' doors closed to him, and those books already published liable to be
withdrawn from library shelves and "lost", never to be replaced.
His public career as a writer now apparently at an end, Reed was at last free to
undertake a great task for which all that had gone before was but a kind of
preparation and education that no university could provide and which only the
fortunate and gifted few could fully use - his years as a foreign correspondent,
his travels in Europe and America, his conversations and contacts with the great
political leaders of his day, plus his eager absorption through reading and
observation of all that was best in European culture.
Experiences which other men might have accepted as defeat, served only to focus
Douglas Reed's powers on what was to be his most important undertaking - that of
researching and retelling the story of the last 2000 years and more in such a
way as to render intelligible much of modern history which for the masses
remains in our time steeped in darkness and closely guarded by the terrors of an
invisible system of censorship.
The Book: Commencing in 1951, Douglas Reed spent more than three years - much of
this time separated from his wife and young family - working in the New York
Central Library, or tapping away at his typewriter in Spartan lodgings in New
York or Montreal. With workmanlike zeal, the book was rewritten, all 300,000
words of it, and the Epilogue only added in 1956.
The story of the book itself - the unusual circumstances in which it was
written, and how the manuscript, after having remained hidden for more than 20
years, came to light and was at last made available for publication - is part of
the history of our century, throwing some light on a struggle of which the
multitudes know nothing: that conducted relentlessly and unceasingly on the
battleground of the human mind.
It needed some unusual source of spiritual power and motivation to bring
to completion so big a book involving so much laborious research and
cross-checking, a book, moreover, which seemed to have little or no chance of
being published in the author's lifetime.
Although there is correspondence to show that the title was briefly discussed
with one publisher, the manuscript was never submitted but remained for 22 years
stowed away in three zippered files on top of a wardrobe in Reed's home in
Durban, South Africa.
Relaxed and at peace with himself in the knowledge that he had carried his great
enterprise as far as was possible in the circumstances of the times, Douglas
Reed patiently accepted his forced retirement as journalist and writer, put
behind him all that belonged to the past and adjusted himself cheerfully to a
different mode of existence, in which most of his new-found friends and
acquaintances, charmed by his lively mind and rich sense of humour, remained for
years wholly unaware that this was indeed the Douglas Reed of literary fame.
Of this he was sure, whether or not it would happen in his lifetime, there would
come a time when circumstances would permit, and the means be found, to
communicate to the world his message of history rewritten, and the central
message of Christianity restated. Interpretation: For the rest, The Controversy
of Zion, can be left to speak for itself; indeed, it is a work of revisionist
history and religious exposition the central message of which is revealed in
almost every page, understanding and compassionate of people but severely
critical of the inordinate and dangerous ambitions of their leaders.
In the final chapter, under the heading the Climacteric, Douglas Reed remarks
that if he could have planned it all when he began writing his book in 1949, he
could not have chosen a better moment than the last months of 1956 to review the
long history of Talmudic Zionism and re-examine it against the background of
what was still happening on the stage of world politics.
For 1956 was the year of another American presidential election in which, once
again, the Zionists demonstrated their decisive power to influence Western
politics; it was the year in which the nations of the West stood by as helpless
spectators as Soviet forces were used to crush a spontaneous revolt and
re-install a Jewish-Communist regime in Hungary; and it was the year in which
Britain and France, under Zionist pressure, were drawn into the disastrous
fiasco of an attempt to capture the Suez Canal, an adventure from which, once
again, Israel alone gained any advantage.
Everything that has happened since Reed wrote those last sentences in 1956 has
continued to endorse the correctness of his interpretation of more than 2000
years of troubled history.
The Middle East has remained an area of intense political activity and of the
maximum falsification of news and suppression of genuine debate, and it was only
the few with some knowledge of the role of Talmudic Zionism and Communism who
could have had any chance of solving the problem of successive events of major
importance, like the so-called Six Day War in 1967
and the massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Those who have read The Controversy of Zion will not be surprised to learn that
there were clear signs of collusion between the Soviet Union and Israel in
precipitating the Israeli attack on Egypt, for it was only because Colonel
Nasser had been warned by the Kremlin bosses that Israel was about to attack
Egypt's ally Syria that he moved nearly all his armed forces to his country' s
northern border, where they fell an easy prey to Israel's vastly superior army.
It seemed as if nothing had changed when in 1982 Israel launched a massive and
most ruthless attack on Southern Lebanon, ostensibly for the purpose of rooting
out the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but actually in furtherance of an
expansionist policy about which Jewish leaders have always been remarkably
frank.
By this time, however, the pro-Zionist mythology generated by Western
politicians and media in which Israel was always represented as a tiny and
virtuous nation in constant need of help and protection, was obviously beginning
to lose much of its plausibility, so that few were surprised when the British
Institute of Strategic Studies announced that Israel could now be regarded as
fourth in the world as a military power, after the USA, the Soviet Union and the
People's Republic of China - well ahead of nations like Britain and France.
More deeply significant was the reaction of the Jewish people, both in Israel
and abroad, to an apparent triumph of Zionist arms in Lebanon. While Western
politicians and media remained timorously restrained in their comment, even
after news of the massacre of an estimated 1500 men, women and children in two
Beirut refugee camps, 350,000 of the residents of Tel Aviv staged a public
demonstration against their government and there were reports in the Jewish
press that controversy over the Lebanese war had rocked the Israel army and
affected all ranks.
Of this, too, Douglas Reed seems to have had some presentiment, for among the
last words in his book are these: "I believe the Jews of the world are equally
beginning to see the error of revolutionary Zionism, the twin of the other
destructive movement, and, as this century ends, will at last decide to seek
involvement in common mankind" .
IVOR BENSON.
Page 1
Chapter 1
THE START OF THE AFFAIR
The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative
will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of
Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the
disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of
explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race
was set up as "the Law".
At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian
king, and what today is known as "the West" could not even be imagined. Now the
Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and "Western civilization", which
grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.
The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author's opinion, has chiefly
brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be
fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable
history.
The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over
the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive
achievement. Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something
that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless
the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in
the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set
many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea
of an exclusive, vengeful deity.
Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were
beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a
God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had
already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the
neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious
man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its
errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first universal religion, so
that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is
taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before
the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of
that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the
tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist "Law" was
completed) contains the passage: "Thou art the one, the God from the very
beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou
didst create the earth and make man". Conversely, the Scripture produced in
Judah of the Levites asked, "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the Gods?"
(Exodus).
The sect which attached itself to and mastered the tribe of Judah took this
rising concept of one-God of all-peoples and embodied it in its Scripture only
to
destroy it, and to set up the creed based on its denial. It is denied subtly,
but with scorn, and as the creed is based on the theory of the master-race this
denial is necessary and inevitable. A master-race, if there be one, must itself
be God.
The creed which was given force of daily law in Judah in 458 BC was then and
still is unique in the world. It rested on the assertion, attributed to the
tribal deity (Jehovah), that "the Israelites" (in fact, the Judahites) were his
"chosen people" who, if they did all his "statutes and judgments", would be set
over all other peoples and be established in a "promised land". Out of this
theory, whether by forethought or unforeseen necessity, grew the pendent
theories of "captivity" and "destruction". If Jehovah were to be worshipped, as
he demanded, at a certain place in a specified land, all his worshippers had to
live there.
Obviously all of them could not live there, but if they lived elsewhere, whether
by constraint or their own choice, they automatically became "captives" of "the
stranger", whom they had to "root out", "pull down" and "destroy". Given this
basic tenet of the creed, it made no difference whether the "captors" were
conquerors or friendly hosts; their ordained lot was to be destruction or
enslavement.
Before they were destroyed or enslaved, they were, for a time, to be "captors"
of the Judahites, not in their own right, but because the Judahites, having
failed in "observance", deserved punishment. In this way, Jehovah revealed
himself as the one-God of all-peoples: though he "knew" only the "chosen
people", he would employ the heathen to punish them for their "transgressions",
before meting out the foreordained destruction to these heathen.
The Judahites had this inheritance thrust on them. It was not even theirs, for
the "covenant", according to these Scriptures, had been made between Jehovah and
"the children of Israel", and by 458 BC the Israelites, spurning the non-Israelitish
Judahites, had long since been absorbed by other mankind, taking with them the
vision of a universal, loving God of all men. The Israelites, from all the
evidence, never knew this racial creed which was to come down through the
centuries as the Jewish religion, or Judaism. It stands, for all time, as the
product of Judah of the Levites.
What happened before 458 BC is largely lore, legend and mythology, as distinct
from the period following, the main events of which are known. Before 458 BC,
for instance, there were in the main only "oral traditions"; the documentary
period begins in the two centuries leading up to 458 BC, when Judah had been
disavowed by the Israelites. At this stage, when the word-of-mouth tradition
became written Scripture, the perversion occurred. The surviving words of the
earlier Israelites show that their tradition was a widening one of
neighbourliness under a universal God. This was changed into its opposite by the
itinerant priests who segregated the Judahites and established the worship of
Jehovah as the god of racialism, hatred and revenge.
In the earlier tradition Moses was a great tribal leader who heard the voice of
one-God speak from a burning bush and came down from a mountain bearing this
one-God's moral commandments to the people. The time when this tradition took
shape was one when the idea of religion was first moving in the minds of men and
when all the peoples were borrowing from each other's traditions and thought.
Whence the idea of one-God may have come has already been shown, although the
earlier Egyptians themselves may have received it from others. The figure of
Moses himself, and his Law, both were taken from material already existing. The
story of Moses's discovery in the bulrushes was plainly borrowed from the much
earlier legend (with which it is identical) of a king of Babylonia, Sargon the
Elder, who lived between one and two thousand years before him; the Commandments
much resemble earlier law codes of the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The
ancient Israelites built on current ideas, and by this means apparently were
well on the way to a universal religion when they were swallowed up by mankind.
Then Judah put the process into reverse, so that the effect is that of a film
run backward. The masters of Judah, the Levites, as they drew up their Law also
took what they could use from the inheritance of other peoples and worked it
into the stuff they were moulding. They began with the one just God of all men,
whose voice had been briefly heard from the burning bush (in the oral tradition)
and in the course of five books of their written Law turned him into the racial,
bargaining Jehovah who promised territory, treasure, blood and power over others
in return for a ritual of sacrifice, to be performed at a precise place in a
specified land.
Thus they founded the permanent counter-movement to all universal religions and
identified the name Judah with the doctrine of self-segregation from mankind,
racial hatred, murder in the name of religion, and revenge.
The perversion thus accomplished may be traced in the Old Testament, where Moses
first appears as the bearer of the moral commandments and good neighbour, and
ends as a racial mass-murderer, the moral commandments having been converted
into their opposites between Exodus and Numbers. In the course of this same
transmutation the God who begins by commanding the people not to kill or to
covet their neighbours' goods or wives, finishes by ordering a tribal massacre
of a neighbouring people, only the virgins to be saved alive!
Thus the achievement of the itinerant priests who mastered the tribe of Judah,
so long ago, was to turn one small, captive people away from the rising idea of
a God of all men, to reinstate a bloodthirsty tribal deity and racial law, and
to send the followers of this creed on their way through the centuries with a
destructive mission.
The creed, or revelation of God as thus presented, was based on a version of
history, every event of which had to conform with, and to confirm the teaching.
This version of history went back to the Creation, the exact moment of which was
known; as the priests also claimed to possess the future, this was a complete
story and theory of the universe from start to finish. The end was to be the
triumphant consummation in Jerusalem, when world dominion was to be established
on the ruins of the heathen and their kingdoms.
The theme of mass-captivity, ending in a Jehovan vengeance ("all the firstborn
of Egypt"), appears when this version of history reaches the Egyptian phase,
leading up to the mass-exodus and mass-conquest of the promised land. This
episode was necessary if the Judahites were to be organized as a permanent
disruptive force among nations and for that reason, evidently, was invented; the
Judaist scholars agree that nothing resembling the narrative in Exodus actually
occurred.
Whether Moses even lived is in dispute. "They tell you", said the late Rabbi
Emil Hirsch, "that Moses never lived. I acquiesce. If they tell me that the
story that came from Egypt is mythology, I shall not protest; it is mythology.
They tell me that the book of Isaiah, as we have it today, is composed of
writings of at least three and perhaps four different periods; I knew it before
they ever told me; before they knew it, it was my conviction".
Whether Moses lived or not, he cannot have led any mass-exodus from Egypt into
Canaan (Palestine). No sharply-defined Israelitish tribes existed (says Rabbi
Elmer Berger) at any time when anyone called Moses may have led some small
groups out of Egyptian slavery. The Habiru (Hebrews) then were already
established in Canaan, having reached it long before from Babylonia on the far
side: Their name, Habiru, denoted no racial or tribal identity; it meant
"nomads". Long before any small band led by Moses can have arrived they had
overrun large Canaanite areas, and the governor of Jerusalem reported to Pharaoh
in Egypt, "The King no longer has any territory, the Habiru have devastated all
the King's territory".
A most zealous Zionist historian, Dr. Josef Kastein, is equally specific about
this. He will often be quoted during this narrative because his book, like this
one, covers the entire span of the controversy of Zion (save for the last
twenty-two years; it was published in 1933). He says, "Countless other Semitic
and Hebrew tribes were already settled in the promised land which, Moses told
his followers, was theirs by ancient right of inheritance; what matter that
actual conditions in Canaan had long since effaced this right and rendered it
illusory".
Dr. Kastein, a fervent Zionist, holds that the Law laid down in the Old
Testament must be fulfilled to the letter, but does not pretend to take the
version of history seriously, on which this Law is based. In this he differs
from Christian polemicists of the "every word is true" school. He holds that the
Old Testament was in fact a political programme, drafted to meet the conditions
of a time, and frequently revised to meet changing conditions.
Historically, therefore, the Egyptian captivity, the slaying of "all the
firstborn
of Egypt", the exodus toward and conquest of the promised land are myths. The
story was invented, but the lesson, of vengeance on the heathen, was implanted
in men's minds and the deep effect continues into our time.
It was evidently invented to turn the Judahites away from the earlier tradition
of the God who, from the burning bush, laid down a simple law of moral behaviour
and neighbourliness; by the insertion of imaginary, allegorical incident,
presented as historical truth, this tradition was converted into its opposite
and the "Law" of exclusion, hatred and vengeance established. With this as their
religion and inheritance, attested by the historical narrative appended to it, a
little band of human beings were sent on their way into the future.
By the time of that achievement of 458 BC, many centuries after any possible
period when Moses may have lived, much had happened in Canaan. The nomadic
Habiru, supplanting the native Canaanites by penetration, intermarriage,
settlement or conquest, had thrown off a tribe called the Ben Yisrael, or
Children of Israel, which had split into a number of tribes, very loosely
confederated and often at war with each other. The main body of these tribes,
the Israelites, held the north of Canaan. In the south, isolated and surrounded
by native Canaanitish peoples, a tribe called Judah took shape. This was the
tribe from which the racial creed and such words as "Judaism", "Jewish" and
"Jew" in the course of centuries emerged.
From the moment when it first appears as an entity this tribe of Judah has a
strange look. It was always cut off, and never got on well with its neighbours.
Its origins are mysterious. It seems from the beginning, with its ominous name,
somehow to have been set apart, rather than to have been "chosen". The Levitical
Scriptures include it among the tribes of Israel, and as the others mingled
themselves with mankind this would leave it the last claimant to the rewards
promised by Jehovah to "the chosen people". However, even this claim seems to be
false, for the Jewish Encyclopaedia impartially says that Judah was "in all
likelihood a non-Israelitish tribe".
This tribe with the curious air was the one which set out into the future
saddled with the doctrine drawn up by the Levites, namely, that it was Jehovah's
"chosen people" and, when it had done "all my statutes and judgments", would
inherit a promised land and dominion over all peoples.
Among these "statutes and judgments" as the Levites finally edited them
appeared, repeatedly, the commands, "utterly destroy", "pull down", "root out".
Judah was destined to produce a nation dedicated to destruction.
Page 6
Chapter 2
THE END OF ISRAEL
About five hundred years before the event of 458 BC, or nearly three thousand
years ago today, the brief and troubled association between Judah and the
Israelites ("the children of Israel") came to an end. Israel rejected the chosen
people creed which was beginning to take shape in Judah and went its own way.
(The adoption of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was set up in
Palestine in 1948 was transparent false pretence).
The events which led to the short-lived, unhappy union covered earlier
centuries. The mythological or legendary period of Moses was followed by one in
Canaan during which "Israel" was the strong, cohesive and recognizable entity,
the northern confederation of the ten tribes. Judah (to which the very small
tribe of Benjamin attached itself) was a petty chiefdom in the south.
Judah, from which today's Zionism comes down, was a tribe of ill repute. Judah
sold his brother Joseph, the most beloved son of Jacob-called-Israel, to the
Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver (as Judas, the only Judean among the
disciples, much later betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver), and then
founded the tribe in incest, (Genesis 37-38). The priestly scribes who wrote
this Scriptural account centuries afterwards had made themselves the masters of
Judah and as they altered the oral tradition, whenever it suited them, the
question prompts itself: why were they at pains to preserve, or possibly even to
insert, this attribution of incestuous beginnings and a treacherous nature to
the very people who, they said, were the chosen of God? The thing is mysterious,
like much else in the Levitical Scriptures, and only the inner sect could supply
an answer.
Anyway, those Scriptures and today's authorities agree about the separateness of
"Israel" and "Judah". In the Old Testament Israel is often called "the house of
Joseph", in pointed distinction from "the house of Judah". The Jewish
Encyclopaedia says, ''Joseph and Judah typify two distinct lines of descent" and
adds (as already cited) that Judah was "in all likelihood a non-Israelitish
tribe". The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that Judaism developed long after the
Israelites had merged themselves with mankind, and that the true relationship of
the two peoples is best expressed in the phrase, "The Israelites were not Jews".
Historically, Judah was to survive for a little while and to bring forth
Judaism, which begat Zionism. Israel was to disappear as an entity, and it all
came about in this way:
The little tribe in the south, Judah, became identified with the landless tribe,
that of the Levites. These hereditary priests, who claimed that their office had
been bestowed on them by Jehovah on Mount Sinai, were the true fathers of
Judaism. They wandered among the tribes, preaching that the war of one was the
war of all, and Jehovah's war. Their aim was power and they strove for a
theocracy, a state in which God is the sovereign and religion the law. During
the period of the Judges they achieved their aim to some extent, for they
naturally
were the Judges. What they, and isolated Judah, most needed was union with
Israel. Israel, which distrusted this lawgiving priesthood, would not hear of
unification unless it were under a king; all the surrounding peoples had kings.
The Levites grasped this opportunity. They saw that if a king were appointed the
ruling class would supply the nominee, and they were the ruling class. Samuel,
at their head, set up a puppet monarchy, behind which the priesthood wielded
true power; this was achieved through the stipulation that the king should reign
only for life, which meant that he would not be able to found a dynasty. Samuel
chose a young Benjaminite peasant, Saul, who had made some name in tribal
warfare and, presumably, was thought likely to be tractable (the choice of a
Benjaminite suggests that Israel would not consider any man of Judah for the
kingship). The unified kingdom of Israel then began; in truth it survived but
this one reign, Saul's.
In Saul's fate (or in the account given of it in the later Scriptures) the
ominous nature of Judaism, as it was to be given shape, may be discerned. He was
commanded to begin the holy war by attacking the Amalekites "and utterly destroy
all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and
suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass". He destroyed "man and woman, infant and
suckling", but spared King-Agag and the best of the sheep, oxen, yearlings and
lambs. For this he was excommunicated by Samuel, who secretly chose one David,
of Judah, to be Saul's successor. Thereafter Saul vainly strove by zeal in
"utter destruction" to appease the Levites, and then by attempting David's life
to save his throne. At last he killed himself.
Possibly none of this happened; it is the account given in the Book of Samuel,
which the Levites produced centuries later. Whether it is true or allegorical,
the importance lies in the plain implication: Jehovah demanded literal obedience
when he commanded "utter destruction", and mercy or pity were capital offences.
This lesson is driven home in many other depictments of events which were
possibly historical and possibly imaginary.
This was really the end, three thousand years ago, of the united kingdom, for
Israel would not accept the man of Judah, David, as king. Dr. Kastein says that
"the rest of Israel ignored him" and proclaimed Saul's son, Ishbosheth, king,
whereon the re-division into Israel and Judah "really took place". According to
Samuel, Ishbosheth was killed and his head was sent to David, who thereon
restored a nominal union and made Jerusalem his capital. He never again truly
united the kingdom or the tribes; he founded a dynasty which survived one more
reign.
Formal Judaism holds to this day that the Messianic consummation will come about
under a worldly king of "the house of David"; and racial exclusion is the first
tenet of formal Judaism (and the law of the land in the Zionist state). The
origins of the dynasty founded by David are thus of direct relevance to this
narrative.
Racial discrimination and segregation were clearly unknown to the tribes-people
in those days of the association between Israel and Judah, for the Old Testament
says that David, the Judahite, from his roof, saw "a very beautiful woman"
bathing, commanded her to him and made her with child, and then had her husband,
a Hittite, sent into the front battle-line with orders that he be killed. When
he was dead David added the woman, Bathsheba, to his wives, and her second son
by him became the next king, Solomon (this story of David and Bathsheba, as
related in the Old Testament, was bowdlerized in a Hollywood-made moving picture
of our day).
Such was the racial descent of Solomon, the last king of the riven confederacy,
according to the Levitical scribes. He began his reign with three murders,
including that of his brother, and vainly sought to save his dynasty by the
Habsburg method, marriage, though on grander scale. He married princesses from
Egypt and many neighbouring tribes and had hundreds of lesser wives, so that in
his day, too, racial segregation must have been unknown. He built the temple and
established a hereditary high priesthood.
That was the story, concluded in 937 BC, of the short association between Israel
and Judah. When Solomon died the incompatible associates finally split, and in
the north Israel resumed its independent life. Dr Kastein says:
"The two states had no more in common, for good or evil, than any other two
countries with a common frontier. From time to time they waged war against each
other or made treaties, but they were entirely separate. The Israelites ceased
to believe that they had a destiny apart from their neighbours and King Jeroboam
made separation from Judah as complete in the religious as in the political
sense". Then, of the Judahites, Dr. Kastein adds, "they decided that they were
destined to develop as a race apart. . . they demanded an order of existence
fundamentally different from that of the people about them. These were
differences which allowed of no process of assimilation to others. They demanded
separation, absolute differentiation. "
Thus the cause of the breach and separation is made c1ear. Israel believed that
its destiny lay with involvement in mankind, and rejected Judah on the very
grounds which recurrently, in the ensuing three thousand years, caused other
peoples to turn in alarm, resentment and repudiation from Judaism. Judah
"demanded separation, absolute differentiation". (However, Dr. Kastein, though
he says "Judah", means "the Levites". How could even the tribes-people of Judah,
at that stage, have demanded "separation, absolute differentiation", when
Solomon had had a thousand wives?)
It was the Levites, with their racial creed, that Israel rejected. The next two
hundred years, during which Israel and Judah existed separately, and often in
enmity, but side by side, are filled with the voices of the Hebrew "prophets",
arraigning the Levites and the creed which they were constructing. These voices
still call to mankind out of the tribal darkness which bec1ouds much of the Old
Testament, for they scarified the creed which was in the making just as Jesus
scarified it seven or eight hundred years later, when it was long established,
at the Temple in Jerusalem.
These men were nearly all Israelites; most of them were Josephites. They were on
the road to the one-God of all-peoples and to participation in mankind. They
were not unique among men in this: soon the Buddha, in India, was to oppose his
Sermon at Benares and his Five Commands of Uprightness to the creed of Brahma,
the creator of caste-segregation, and to the worship of idols. They were in
truth Israelite remonstrants against the Levitical teaching which was to become
identified with the name of Judah. The name "Hebrew prophets" is inapt because
they made no pretence to power of divination and were angered by the description
("I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son", Amos). They were protestants
in their time and gave simple warning of the calculable consequences of the
racial creed; their warning remains valid today.
The claims of the Levite priesthood moved them to these protests, particularly
the priestly c1aim to the firstborn ("That which openeth the womb is mine,"
Exodus), and the priestly insistence on sacrificial rites. The Israelite
expostulants (to whom this "so-called law of Moses" was unknown, according to
Mr. Montefiore) saw no virtue in the bloodying of priests, the endless sacrifice
of animals and the "burnt offerings", the "sweet savour" of which was supposed
to please Jehovah. They rebuked the priestly doctrine of slaying and enslaving
"the heathen". God, they cried, desired moral behaviour, neighbourly conduct and
justice towards the poor, the fatherless, the widow and the oppressed, not blood
sacrifices and hatred of the heathen.
These protests provide the first forelight of the dawn which came some eight
hundred years later. They find themse1ves in strange company among the
injunctions to massacre in which the Old Testament abounds. The strange thing is
that these remonstrances survived the compilation, when Israel was gone and the
Levites, supreme in Judah, wrote down the Scriptures.
Today's student cannot explain, for instance, why King David suffers Nathan
publicly to rebuke him for taking Uriah's wife and having Uriah murdered.
Possibly among the later scribes who compiled the historical narrative, long
after Israel and the Israelite expostulants were gone, were some of their mind,
who contrived in this way to continue their protest.
Conversely, these benevolent and enlightened passages are often followed by
fanatical ones, attributed to the same man, which cancel them, or put the
opposite in their place. The only reasonable explanation is that these are
interpolations later made, to bring the heretics into line with Levitical dogma.
Whatever the explanation, these Israelite protests against the heresy of Judah
have an ageless appeal and form the monument to vanished Israel. They force
their way, like little blades of truth, between the dark stones of tribal saga.
They pointed the way to the rising and widening road of common involvement in
mankind and away from the tribal abyss.
Elijah and Elisha both worked in Israel, and Amos spoke solely to the Josephites.
He in particular attacked the blood sacrifices and priestly rites: "I hate, I
despise your feasts and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though
ye offer me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not accept them.
Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away
from me the noise of thy songs" (the Levites' chanted liturgies) "and let me not
hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run as water and righteousness as
a mighty stream". And then the immortal rebuke to the "peculiar people"
doctrine: "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of
Israel, saith the Lord".
Hosea, another Israelite, says, "I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the
knowledge of God more than burnt offerings". Hosea exhorts to the practice of
"justice and righteousness", "loving kindness and compassion and faithfulness",
not discrimination and contempt.
In Micah's time the Levites apparently still demanded the sacrifice of all the
firstborn to Jehovah:
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall
I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord
be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall
I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of
my soul? It hath been told to thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord doth
require of thee: only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy
God" .
These men contended for the soul of the tribes-people during the two centuries
when Israel and Judah existed side by side, and sometimes at daggers drawn.
During this period the Levites, earlier distributed among the twelve tribes,
were driven more and more to congregate in tiny Judah and in Jerusalem, and to
concentrate their energies on the Judahites.
Then, in 721 BC, Israel was attacked and conquered by Assyria and the Israelites
were carried into captivity. Judah was spared for that moment and for another
century remained an insignificant vassal, first of Assyria and then of Egypt,
and the stronghold of the Levitical sect.
At that point "the children of Israel" disappear from history and if promises
made to them are to be redeemed, this redemption must evidently be from among
the ranks of mankind, in which they became involved and merged. Given the
prevalent westward trend among the movements of peoples during the last
twenty-seven hundred years, it is probable that much of their blood has gone
into the European and American peoples.
The Judaist claim, on the other hand, is that Israel was totally and deservedly
"lost", because it rejected the Levitical creed and chose "rapprochement with
neighbouring peoples". Dr. Kastein, whose words these are, nearly twenty-seven
centuries later ardently rejoiced, on that very account, in their downfall: "The
ten northern tribes, with their separate development, had drifted so far from
their kindred in the south that the chronicle of their fall takes the form of a
brief bald statement of fact unrelieved by any expression of grief. No epic
poem, no dirge, no sympathy marked the hour of their downfall".
The student of the controversy of Zion has to plod far before he begins to
unveil its mysteries, but very soon discovers that in all things it speaks with
two tongues, one for "the heathen" and one for the initiates.
The Levites of that ancient time did not, and today's Zionists do not believe
that the Israelites "vanished without leaving a trace" (as Dr. Kastein says).
They were pronounced "dead", in the way that a Jew marrying out of the fold
today is pronounced dead (for instance, Dr. John Goldstein); they were
excommunicated and only in that sense "vanished".
Peoples do not become extinct; the North American Indians, the Australian
Blackfellows, the New Zealand Maoris, the South African Bantu and others are the
proofs of that. For that matter, the Israelites could not have been "taken away
captive", had they been physically exterminated. Their blood and thought survive
in mankind, somewhere, today.
Israel remained separate from Judah of its own will, and for the very reasons
which ever since have aroused the mistrust and misgiving of other peoples. The
Israelites "were not Jews"; the Judahites were "in all likelihood
non-Israelitish".
The true meaning of the assertion that Israel "disappeared" is to be found in
the later Talmud, which says: "The ten tribes have no share in the world to
come". Thus, "the children of Israel" are banned from heaven by the ruling sect
of Judah because they refused to exclude themselves from mankind on earth.
The Chief Rabbi of the British Empire in 1918, the Very Rev. J.H. Hertz, in
answer to an enquiry on this point said explicitly, "The people known at present
as Jews are descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin with a certain
number of descendants of the tribe of Levi". This statement makes perfectly
clear that "Israel" had no part in what has become Judaism (no authority,
Judaist or other, would support the claim made to blood-descent from Judah, for
the Jews of today, but this is of little account).
Therefore the use of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was created in
Palestine in this century is in the nature of a forgery. Some strong reason must
have dictated the use of the name of a people who were not Jews and would have
none of the creed which has become Judaism. One tenable theory suggests itself.
The Zionist state was set up with the connivance of the great nations of the
West, which is also the area of Christendom. The calculation may have been that
these peoples would be comforted in their consciences if they could be led to
believe that they were fulfilling Biblical prophecy and God's promise to
"Israel", at whatever cost in the "destruction" of innocent peoples.
If that was the motive for the misuse of the name "Israel", the expedient may
for the time being have been successful; the multitude was ever easily
"persuaded". However, truth will out in the long run, as the surviving
remonstrances of the Israelite prophets show.
If the Zionist state of 1948 could 1ay claim to any name whatever taken from far
antiquity, this could only be "Judah", as this chapter has shown.
Page 13
Chapter 3
THE LEVITES AND THE LAW
During the hundred years that followed the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the
Levites in Judah began to compile the written Law. In 621 BC they produced
Deuteronomy and read it to the people in the temple at Jerusalem.
This was the birth of "the Mosaic law", which Moses, if he ever lived, never
knew. It is called the Mosaic law because it is attributed to him, but the
authorities agree that it was the product of the Levites, who then and later
repeatedly made Moses (and for that matter, Jehovah) say what suited them. Its
correct description would be "the Levitical law" or "the Judaic law".
Deuteronomy is to formal Judaism and Zionism what the Communist Manifesto was to
the destructive revolution of our century. It is the basis of the Torah ("the
Law") contained in the Pentateuch, which itself forms the raw material of the
Talmud, which again gave birth to those "commentaries" and
commentaries-on-commentaries which together constitute the Judaic "law".
Therefore Deuteronomy is also the basis of the political programme, of worldly
dominion over nations despoiled and enslaved, which has been largely realized in
the West during this Twentieth Century. Deuteronomy is of direct relevancy to
the events of our day, and much of the confusion surrounding them disperses if
they are studied in its light.
It was read, in 621 BC, to so small an audience in so small a place that its
great effects for the whole world, through the following centuries into our
time, are by contrast the more striking.
Before Deuteronomy was compiled only the "oral tradition" of what God said to
Moses existed. The Levites claimed to be the consecrated guardians of this
tradition and the tribes-people had to take their word for it (their pretensions
in this respect chiefly caused the anger of the Israelite "prophets"). If
anything had been written down before Deuteronomy was read, such manuscripts
were fragmentary and in priestly keeping, and as little known to the primitive
tribesmen as the Greek poets to Kentucky hills-folk today.
That Deuteronomy was different from anything that had been known or understood
before is implicit in its name, which means "Second Law". Deuteronomy, in fact,
was Levitical Judaism, first revealed; the Israelites (as already shown) "were
not Jews" and had never known this "Law".
Significantly, Deuteronomy which appears as the fifth book of today's Bible,
with an air of growing naturally out of the previous ones, was the first book to
be completed as a whole. Though Genesis and Exodus provide the historical
background and mount for it, they were later produced by the Levites, and
Leviticus and Numbers, the other books of the Torah, were compiled even later.
Deuteronomy stood the earlier tradition on its head, if it was in harmony with
the moral commandments. However, the Levites were within their self-granted
right in making any changes they chose, for they held that they were divinely
authorized to amend the Law, as orally revealed by God to Moses, in order to
meet "the constantly changing conditions of existence in the spirit of
traditional teaching" (Dr. Kastein).
For that matter, they also claimed that Moses had received at Sinai a secret
oral Torah, which must never be committed to writing. In view of the later
inclusion of the Old Testament in one volume with the Christian New Testament,
and the average Gentile's assumption that he thus has before his eyes the whole
of "the Mosaic Law", this qualification is of permanent interest.
The Talmud, as quoted by Dr. Funk, says, "God foresaw that one day a time would
come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to
Israel, 'We, too, are sons of God'. Then will the Lord say: 'Only he who knows
my secrets is my son'. And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings" .
The few people who heard Deuteronomy read in 621 BC, and then first learned what
"the Mosaic Law" was to be, were told that the manuscripts had been
"discovered". Today's Judaist authorities dismiss this and agree that
Deuteronomy was the independent work of the Levites in isolated Judah after
Judah's rejection by the Israelites and the conquest of Israel. Dr. Kastein puts
the matter like this:
"In 621 BC, a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages was discovered among the
archives. It contained a curious version of the laws which had been codified up
to that time, a sort of repetition and variation of them, giving a host of
instructions regarding man's duty to God and to his neighbour. It was couched in
the form of speeches supposed to have been delivered by Moses just before his
death on the farther side of Jordan. Who the author was it is impossible to
say".
Thus Dr. Kastein, a zealot who awaits the literal fulfilment of "the Mosaic Law"
in every detail, does not believe that its author was either Jehovah or Moses.
It is enough for him that it was produced by the lawgiving priesthood, which for
him is divine authority.
None can now tell how closely Deuteronomy, as we know it, resembles Deuteronomy
as it was read in 621 BC, for the books of the Old Testament were repeatedly
revised up to the time of the first translation, when various other
modifications were made, presumably to avoid excessive perturbation among the
Gentiles. No doubt something was then excised, so that Deuteronomy in its
original form may have been ferocious indeed, for what remains is savage enough.
Religious intolerance is the basis of this "Second Law" (racial intolerance was
to follow later, in another "New Law") and murder in the name of religion is its
distinctive tenet. This necessitates the destruction of the moral Commandments,
which in fact are set up to be knocked down. Only those of them which relate to
the exc1usive worship of the "jealous" Jehovah are left intact. The others are
buried beneath a great mound of "statutes and judgments" (regulations issued
under a governing Law, as it were) which in effect cancel them.
Thus the moral commandments against murder, stealing, adultery, coveting, bad
neighbourliness, and the like are vitiated by a mass of "statutes" expressly
enjoining the massacre of other peoples, the murder of apostates individually or
in communities, the taking of concubines from among women captives, "utter
destruction" that leaves "nothing alive", the exclusion of "the stranger" from
debt-remission and the like.
By the time the end of Deuteronomy is reached the moral commandments have been
nullified in this way, for the purpose of setting up, in the guise of a
religion, the grandiose political idea of a people especially sent into the
world to destroy and "possess" other peoples and to rule the earth. The idea of
destruction is essential to Deuteronomy. If it be taken away no Deuteronomy, or
Mosaic Law, remains.
This concept of destruction as an article of faith is unique, and where it
occurs in political thought (for instance, in the Communist philosophy) may also
derive originally from the teaching of Deuteronomy, for there is no other
discoverable source.
Deuteronomy is above all a complete political programme: the story of the
planet, created by Jehovah for this "special people", is to be completed by
their triumph and the ruination of all others. The rewards offered to the
faithful are exclusively material: slaughter, slaves, women, booty, territory,
empire. The only condition laid down for these rewards is observance of "the
statutes and judgments", which primarily command the destruction of others. The
only guilt defined lies is non-observance of these laws. Intolerance is
specified as observance; tolerance as non-observance, and therefore as guilt.
The punishments prescribed are of this world and of the flesh, not of the
spirit. Moral behaviour, if ever demanded, is required only towards
co-religionists and "strangers" are excluded from it.
This unique form of nationalism was first presented to the Judahites in
Deuteronomy as "the Law" of Jehovah and as his literal word, spoken to Moses.
The notion of world domination through destruction is introduced at the start
(chapter 2) of these "speeches supposed to have been delivered" by the dying
Moses:
"The Lord spake unto me, saying. . . This day will I begin to put the dread of
thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who
shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of
thee". In token of this, the fate of two nations is at once shown. The King of
Sihon and the King of Bashan "came out against us, he and all his people",
whereon they were "utterly destroyed, the men, and the women, and the little
ones", only the cattle being spared and "the spoil" being taken "for a prey unto
ourselves". (The insistence on utter destruction is a recurrent and significant
feature of these illustrative anecdotes).
These first examples of the power of Jehovah to destroy the heathen are followed
by the first of many warnings that unless "the statutes and judgments" are
observed Jehovah will punish his special people by dispersing them among these
heathen. The enumeration of these "statutes and judgments" follows the
Commandments, the moral validity of which is at once destroyed by a promise of
tribal massacre:
"Seven nations greater and mightier than thou" are to be delivered into the
Judahites' hands, and: "Thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no
covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them. . . ye shall destroy their alters
. . . for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath
chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are on
the face of the earth . . . Thou shalt be blessed above all people . . . And
thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee;
thine eye shall have no pity upon them. . . the Lord thy God will send the
hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be
destroyed. . . And the Lord thy God will put out these nations before thee by
little and little. . . But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and
shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed. And he
shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name
from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou
have destroyed them. . ."
By the Twentieth Century AD the peoples of the West, as a whole, had ceased to
attach any present meaning to these incitements, but the peoples directly
concerned thought differently. For instance, the Arab population of Palestine
fled en masse from its native land after the massacre at Deir Yasin in 1948
because this event meant for them (as its perpetrators intended it to mean) that
if they stayed they would be "utterly destroyed".
They knew that the Zionist leaders, in the palavers with British and American
politicians of the distant West, repeatedly had stated that "the Bible is our
Mandate" (Dr. Chaim Weizmann), and they knew (if the Western peoples did not
realize) that the allusion was to such passages as that commanding the "utter
destruction" of the Arab peoples. They knew that the leaders of the West had
supported and would continue to support the invaders and thus they had no hope
of even bare survival, save by flight. This massacre of 1948 AD relates directly
to the "statute and judgment" laid down in chapter 7 of the book of The Law
which the Levites completed and read in 621 BC.
The incitements and allurements of Deuteronomy continue: ". . . Go in to possess
nations greater and mightier than thyself . . . the Lord thy God is he which
goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall
bring them down before thy face; so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them
quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee. . . For if ye shall diligently keep
all these commandments which I command you . . . then will the Lord drive out
all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and
mightier
than yourselves . . . even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There
shall no man be able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the
fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon . .
."
Then Moses, in this account, enumerates the "statutes and judgments" which must
be "observed" if all these rewards are to be gained, and again "the Law" is to
destroy:
"These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do . . . Ye
shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess
served their gods. . . When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from
before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and
dwellest in their land: Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by
following them. . . and that thou inquire not after their gods."
This tenet of "the Law" requires the faithful to destroy other religions. It was
impartial when enacted but gained a specific application in later centuries from
the fact that the Christian faith grew up in, and the mass of Jews then moved
into, the same geographical area: the West. (This made Christianity the primary
object of the command to "utterly destroy the places. . .", and the dynamiting
of Russian cathedrals, the opening of "anti-God museums", the canonization of
Judas and other acts of early Bolshevist governments, which were to nine-tenths
comprized of Eastern Jews, were evidently deeds of "observance" under this
"statute" of Deuteronomy).
The ideas of the inquisition of heretics and of the informer, which the West has
used in its retrogressive periods and repudiated in its enlightened ones, also
find their original source (unless any can locate an earlier one) in
Deuteronomy. Lest any such heretic should call in question the Law of
destruction, summarized in the preceding paragraphs, Deuteronomy next provides
that "if there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams . . . (he) shall
be put to death"; the crucifixion of Jesus (and the deaths of numerous
expostulants against literal Judaism) fall under this "statute".
The denunciation of kinsfolk who incur suspicion of heresy is required. This is
the terrorist device introduced in Russia by the Bolshevists in 1917 and copied
in Germany by the National Socialists in 1933. The Christian world at the time
professed horror at these barbarbous innovations, but the method is plainly laid
down in Deuteronomy, which requires that any who say, "Let us go and serve other
gods", be denounced by their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, wives and so
on, and be stoned to death.
Characteristically, Deuteronomy prescribes that the hand of the blood-kinsman or
spouse shall be "first upon" the victim of denunciation at the killing, and only
afterwards "the hand of all the people". This "statute of the Law" is still
observed today, in a measure dictated by local conditions and other
circumstances. Apostates cannot be publicly stoned to death in the environment
of foreign communities, where the law of "the stranger" might hold this to be
murder, so that a formal pronunciation of "death" and ceremony of mourning
symbolically takes the place of the legal penalty; see Dr. John Goldstein's
account both of the symbolic rite and of a recent attempt to exact the literal
penalty, which during the centuries was often inflicted in closed Jewish
communities where the law of "the stranger" could not reach.
The Law also demands that entire communities shall be massacred on the charge of
apostasy: "Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of
the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein".
In this matter of destroying cities, Deuteronomy distinguishes between near
(that is, Palestinian) and far cities. When a "far off city" has been captured,
"thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword, but the women,
and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the
spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself. . ." This incitement in respect of
captured women is a recurrent theme and Deuteronomy lays down the law that a
Judahite captor who sees among captives "a beautiful woman" may take her home,
but if he had "no delight in her" may turn her out again.
The case of a near city is different; the law of utter destruction (against
which Saul transgressed) then rules. "But of the cities of these people which
the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive
nothing that breatheth; But thou shalt utterly destroy them. . . as the Lord thy
God hath commanded thee". (This verse 16 of chapter 20, again, explains the mass
flight of the Palestinian Arabs after Deir Yasin, where nothing that breathed
was saved alive. They saw that literal fulfilment of the Law of 62l BC was the
order of the day in 1948 AD, and that the might of the West was behind this
fulfilment of the Law of "utter destruction".)
The Second Law continues: "Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and
the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the
nations that are upon the earth". Further "statutes and judgments" then provide
that "anything that dieth of itself", being unclean, may not be eaten, but "thou
shalt give it to the stranger . . . or thou mayest sell it to the alien; for
thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God".
Every seven years a creditor shall remit his "neighbour's" debt, but "of a
foreigner thou mayest exact it again". Chapter 10 (surprisingly in this context)
says, "Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of
Egypt", but chapter 23 brings the familiar cancellation: "Thou shalt not lend
upon usury to thy brother . . . unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury"
(and graver examples of this legal discrimination between the "neighbour" and
"the "stranger" appear in later books, as will be seen).
Deuteronomy ends with the long-drawn-out, rolling, thunderous curse-or-blessing
theme. Moses, about to die, once more exhorts "the people" to choose between
blessings and cursings, and these are enumerated.
The blessings are exclusively material: prosperity through the increase of kith,
crop and kine; the defeat of enemies; and world dominion. "The Lord thy God will
set thee on high above all nations of the earth . . . The Lord shall establish
thee an holy people unto himself . . . And all people of the earth shall see
that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee.
. . thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the Lord
shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and
thou shalt not be beneath . . ."
These blessings occupy thirteen verses; the cursings some fifty or sixty. The
deity in whose name the curses are uttered clearly was held capable of doing
evil (indeed, this is explicitly stated in a later book, Ezekiel, as will be
shown).
Literal Judaism is ultimately based on terror and fear and the list of curses
set out in chapter 28 of The Second Law shows the importance which the
priesthood attached to this practice of cursing (which literal Judaists to this
day hold to be effective in use). These curses, be it remembered, are the
penalties for non-observance, not for moral transgressions! "If thou will not
hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his
commandments and statutes. . . all these curses shall come upon thee . . ."
The city and the dwelling, the children, crops and cattle, are to be cursed
"until thou be destroyed and until thou perish utterly". Plague, wasting,
inflammation, mildew, botch, emerods, scab, itch, madness, blindness, famine,
cannibalism and drought are specified. Men's wives are to lie with other men;
their children are to be lost into slavery; any that remain at home are to be
eaten by their parents, the father and mother contesting for the flesh and
denying any to the children still alive. (These curses were inc1uded in the
Great Ban when it was pronounced on apostates down to relatively recent times,
and in the fastnesses of Talmudic Jewry are probably in use today).
The diseases and disasters were to be visited on the people "if thou wilt not
observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou
mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord Thy God: . . I call heaven
and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and
death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed
may live for ever".
Such was the life and the blessing which the Judahites, gathered in the Temple
in 621 BC, were exhorted in the name of Jehovah and Moses to choose by their
tribal chieftain Josiah, the mouthpiece of the priesthood. The purpose and
meaning of existence, under this "Mosaic Law", was the destruction and
enslavement of others for the sake of plunder and power. Israel might from that
moment have counted itself happy to have been pronounced dead and to have been
exc1uded from such a world to come. The Israelites had mingled in the living
bloodstream of mankind; on its banks the Judahites were left stranded in the
power of a fanatical priesthood which commanded them, on pain of "all these
curses", to destroy.
To the terror inspired by "all these curses" the Levites added also an
allurement. If "the people" should "return and obey the voice of the Lord, and
do all his commandments. . .", then "all these curses" would be transferred to
their "enemies" (not because these had sinned, but simply to swell the measure
of the blessing conferred on the rehabilitated Judahites!)
In this tenet Deuteronomy most clearly revealed the status allotted to the
heathen by The Second Law. In the last analysis, "the heathen" have no legal
existence under this Law; how could they have, when Jehovah only "knows" his
"holy people"? Insofar as their actual existence is admitted, it is only for
such purposes as those stated in verse 65, chapter 28 and verse 7, chapter 30:
namely, to receive the Judahites when they are dispersed for their
transgressions and then, when their guests repent and are forgiven, to inherit
curses lifted from the regenerate Judahites. True, the second verse quoted gives
the pretext that "all these curses" will be transferred to the heathen because
they "hated" and "persecuted" the judahites, but how could they be held culpable
of this when the very presence of the Judahites among them was merely the result
of punitive "curses" inflicted by Jehovah? For Jehovah himself, according to
another verse (64, chapter 28) took credit for putting the curse of exile on the
Judahites:
"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth
even unto the other . . . and among these nations shalt thou find no ease,
neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest…"
Deuteronomy employs this Doublespeak (to use the modem idiom) throughout: the
Lord makes the special people homeless among the heathen for their
transgressions; the heathen, who have no blame either for their exile or for
those transgressions, are their "persecutors "; ergo, the heathen will be
destroyed.
The Judaist attitude towards other mankind, creation, and the universe in
general, is better understood when these and related passages have been
pondered, and especially the constant plaint that Jews are "persecuted"
everywhere, which in one tone or another runs through nearly all Jewish
literature. To any who accept this book as The Law, the mere existence of others
is in fact persecution; Deuteronomy plainly implies that.
The most nationalist Jew and the most enlightened Jew often agree in one thing:
they cannot truly consider the world and its affairs from any but a Jewish
angle, and from that angle "the stranger" seems insignificant. Thinking makes it
so, and this is the legacy of twenty-five centuries of Jewish thinking; even
those Jews who see the heresy or fallacy cannot always divest themselves
entirely of the incubus on their minds and spirits.
The passage from Deuteronomy last quoted shows that the ruling sect depicted
homelessness at one and the same time as the act of the special people's god and
as persecution by the special people's enemies, deserving of "all these curses".
To minds of such extreme egotism a political outrage in which 95 Gentiles and 5
Jews lose their lives or property is simply an anti-Jewish disaster, and they
are not
consciously hypocritical in this. In the Twentieth Century this standard of
judgment has been projected into the lives of other peoples and applied to all
major events in the ordeal of the West. Thus we live in the century of the
Levitical fallacy.
Having undertaken to put "all these curses" on innocent parties, if the
Judahites would return to observance of "all these statutes and judgments", the
resurrected Moses of Deuteronomy promised one more blessing ("The Lord thy God,
he will go over before thee, and he will destroy these nations from before thee,
and thou shalt possess them. . . ") and then was allowed to die in the land of
Moab.
In "the Mosaic Law" the destructive idea took shape, which was to threaten
Christian civilization and the West, both then undreamed of. During the
Christian era a council of theologians made the decision that the Old Testament
and the New should be bound in one book, without any differentiation, as if they
were stem and blossom, instead of immovable object and irresistible force. The
encyclopaedia before me as I write states laconically that the Christian
churches accept the Old Testament as being of "equal divine authority" with the
New.
This unqualified acceptance covers the entire content of the Old Testament and
may be the original source of much confusion in the Christian churches and much
distraction among the masses that seek Christianity, for the dogma requires
belief in opposite things at the same time. How can the same God, by commandment
to Moses, have enjoined men to love their neighbours and "utterly to destroy"
their neighbours? What relationship can there be between the universal, loving
God of the Christian revelation and the cursing deity of Deuteronomy?
But if in fact all the Old Testament, including these and other commands, is of
"equal divine authority" with the New, then the latterday Westerner is entitled
to invoke it in justification of those deeds by which Christendom most denied
itself: the British settlers' importation of African slaves to America, the
American and Canadian settlers' treatment of the North American Indian, and the
Afrikaners' harsh rule over the South African Bantu. He may justly put the
responsibility for all these things directly on his Christian priest or bishop,
if that man teaches that the Old Testament, with its repeated injunction to
slay, enslave, and despoil is of "equal divine authority". No Christian divine
can hold himself blameless if he so teaches. The theological decision which set
up this dogma cast over Christendom and the centuries to come the shadow of
Deuteronomy, just as it fell on the Judahites themselves when it was read to
them in 621 BC.
Only one other piece of writing has had any comparable effect on the minds of
men and on future generations; if any simplification is permissible, the most
tempting one is to see the whole story of the West, and particularly of this
decisive Twentieth Century, as a struggle between the Mosaic Law and the New
Testament and between the two bodies of mankind which rank themselves
behind one or other of those two messages of hatred and love respectively.
In Deuteronomy Judaism was born, yet this would have been a stillbirth, and
Deuteronomy might never again have been heard of, if that question had rested
only with the Levites and their captive Judahites. They were not numerous, and a
nation a hundred times as many could never have hoped to enforce this barbarous
creed on the world by force of its own muscle. There was only one way in which
"the Mosaic Law" could gain life and potency and become a disturbing influence
in the life of other peoples during the centuries to follow. This was if some
powerful "stranger" (among all those strangers yet to be accursed), some mighty
king of those "heathen" yet to be destroyed, should support it with arms and
treasure.
Precisely that was about to happen when Josiah read The Second Law to the people
in 621 BC, and it was to repeat itself continually down the centuries to our
day: the gigantic improbability of the thing confronts the equally large,
demonstrable fact that it is so! The rulers of those "other nations" which were
to be dispossessed and destroyed repeatedly espoused the destructive creed, did
the bidding of the dominant sect, and at the expense of their own peoples helped
to further its strange ambition.
Some twenty years after the reading of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem, Judah was
conquered by the Babylonian king, in about 596 BC. At the time, this looked like
the end of the affair, which was a petty one in itself, among the great events
of that period. Judah never again existed as an independent state, and but for
the Levites, their Second Law and the foreign helper the Judahites, like the
Israelites, would have become involved in mankind.
Instead, the Babylonian victory was the start of the affair, or of its great
consequences for the world. The Law, instead of dying, grew stronger in Babylon,
where for the first time a foreign king gave it his protection. The permanent
state-within-states, nation-within-nations was projected, a first time, into the
life of peoples; initial experience in usurping power over them was gained. Much
tribulation for other peoples was brewed then.
As for the Judahites, or the Judaists and Jews who sprang from them, they seem
to have acquired the unhappiest future of all. Anyway, it was not a happy man
(though it was a Jewish writer of our day, 2,500 years later, Mr. Maurice
Samuel) who wrote: ". . . we Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyer
forever. . . nothing that the Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".
At first sight this seems mocking, venomous, shameless. The diligent student of
the controversy of Zionism discovers that it is more in the nature of a cry of
hopelessness, such as the "Mosaic Law" must wring from any man who feels he
cannot escape its remorseless doctrine of destruction.
Page 23
Chapter 4
THE FORGING OF THE CHAINS
The Babylonian episode was decisive in its consequences, both for the petty
tribe of Judah at the time and for the Western world today.
During this period the Levites achieved things which were permanently to affect
the life of peoples. They added four Books to Deuteronomy and thus set up a Law
of racio-religious intolerance which, if it could be enforced, would for all
time cut off the Judahites from mankind. By experiment in Babylon, they found
ways of enforcing it, that is to say, of keeping their followers segregated from
those among whom they dwelt. They acquired authority among their captors, and at
last they "pulled down" and "utterly destroyed" their captors' house; or if this
did not truly happen, they handed on this version of history to a posterity
which accepted it and in time began to see in these people an irresistibly
destructive force.
The first "captivity" (the Egyptian) seems to have been completely legendary; at
any rate, what is known confutes it and as Exodus was completed after the
Babylonian incident the Levitical scribes may have devised the story of the
earlier "captivity", and of Jehovah's punishment of the Egyptians, to support
the version of the Babylonian period which they were then preparing.
In any case, what truly happened in Babylon seems to have been greatly different
from the picture of a mass-captivity, later followed by a mass-return, which has
been handed down by the Levitical scriptures.
No mass-exodus of captives from Jerusalem to Babylon can have occurred, because
the mass of the Judahite people, from which a Jewish nation later emerged, was
already self-distributed far and wide about the known world (that is, around the
Mediterranean, in lands west and east of Judah), having gone wherever conditions
for commerce were most favourable.
In that respect the picture was in its proportions very much like that of today.
In Jerusalem was only a nucleus, comprizing chiefly the most zealous devotees of
the Temple cult and folk whose pursuits bound them to the land. The authorities
agree that merely a few tens of thousands of people were taken to Babylon, and
that these represented a small fraction of the whole.
Nor were the Judahites unique in this dispersion, although the literature of
lamentation implies that. The Parsees of India offer a case nearly identical and
of the same period; they, too, survived the loss of state and country as a
religious community in dispersion. The later centuries offer many examples of
the survival of racial or religious groups far from their original clime. With
the passing of generations such racial groups come to think of their ancestors'
homeland simply as "the old country"; the religious ones turn their eyes towards
a holy city (say, Rome or Mecca) merely from a different spot on earth.
The difference in the case of the Judahites was that old country and holy city
were the same; that Jehovaism demanded a triumphant return and restoration of
temple-worship, over the bodies of the heathen destroyed; and that this religion
was also their law of daily life, so that a worldly political ambition, of the
ancient tribal or nationalist kind, was also a primary article of faith. Other
such creeds of primitive times became fossilized; this one survived to derange
the life of peoples throughout the ages to our day, when it achieved its most
disruptive effect.
This was the direct result of the experiments made and the experience gained by
the Levites in Babylon, where they were first able to test the creed in an alien
environment.
The benevolent behaviour of the Babylonian conquerors towards their Judahite
prisoners was the exact opposite of that enjoined on the Judahites, in the
reverse circumstances, by the Second Law which had been read to them just before
their defeat: "Save nothing alive that breatheth. . ." Dr. Kastein says the
captives "enjoyed complete freedom" of residence, worship, occupation and
self-administration.
This liberality allowed the Levites to make captives of people who thus were
largely free; under priestly insistence they were constrained to settle in
closed communities, and in this way the ghetto and Levite power were born. The
Talmudic ruling of the Christian era, which decreed the excommunication of Jews
if without permission they sold "neighbour-property" to "strangers", comes down
from that first experiment in self-segregation, in Babylon.
The support of the foreign ruler was necessary for this corralling of
expatriates by their own priests, and it was given on this first occasion, as on
innumerable other occasions ever since.
With their people firmly under their thumbs, the Levites then set about to
complete the compilation of "The Law". The four books which they added to
Deuteronomy make up the Torah, and this word, which originally meant doctrine,
is now recognized to mean "the Law". However, "completion" is a most misleading
word in this connection.
Only the Torah (in the sense of the five books) was completed. The Law was not
then and never can be completed, given the existence of the "secret Torah"
recorded by the Talmud (which itself was but the later continuation of the
Torah), and the priestly claim to divine right of interpretation. In fact, "the
Law" was constantly changed, often to close some loophole which might have
allowed "the stranger" to enjoy a right devolving only on "a neighbour". Some
examples of this continuing process of amendment have already been given, and
others follow in this chapter. The effect was usually to make hatred of or
contempt for "the stranger" an integral part of "the Law" through the provision
of discriminatory penalties or immunities.
When the Torah was complete a great stockade, unique in its nature but still
incomplete, had been built between any human beings who at any time accepted
this "Law" and the rest of mankind. The Torah allowed no distinction between
this Law of Jehovah and that of man, between religious and civil law. The law of
"the stranger", theologically and juridically, had no existence, and any
pretension to enforce one was "persecution", as Jehovah's was the only law.
The priesthood claimed that the Torah governed every act of daily life, down to
the most trivial. Any objection that Moses could not have received from Jehovah
on the mountain detailed instructions covering every conceivable action
performed by man, was met with the dogma that the priesthood, like relay
runners, handed on from generation to generation "the oral tradition" of
Jehovah's revelation to Moses, and infinite power of reinterpretation. However,
such objections were rare, as the Law prescribed the death penalty for doubters.
Mr. Montefiore remarks, accurately, that the Old Testament is "revealed
legislation, not revealed truth", and says the Israelite prophets cannot have
known anything of the Torah as the Levites completed it in Babylon. Jeremiah's
words, "the pen of the Scribes is in vain" evidently refer to this process of
Levitical revision and to the attribution of innumerable new "statutes and
judgments" to Jehovah and Moses.
"Sin" was not a concept in the Torah as it took shape. That is logical, for in
law there cannot be "sin", only crime or misdemeanour. The only offence known to
this Law was non-observance, which meant crime or misdemeanour. What is commonly
understood by "sin", namely, moral transgression, was sometimes expressly
enjoined by it or made absolvable by the sacrifice of an animal.
The idea of "the return" (together with the related ideas of destruction and
dominion) was basic to the dogma, which stood or fell by it. No strong impulse
to return from Babylon to Jerusalem existed among the people (any more than
today, when the instinct of the vast majority of Jews is completely against
"return", so that the Zionist state is much more easily able to find money
abroad than immigrants).
Literal fulfilment was the supreme tenet and that meant that possession of
Palestine, the "centre" of the dominant empire to come, was essential (as it
still is); its importance in the pattern was political, not residential.
Thus the Levites in Babylon added Exodus, Genesis, Leviticus and Numbers to
Deuteronomy. Genesis and Exodus provide a version of history moulded to fit the
"Law" which the Levites by then had already promulgated, in Deuteronomy. This
goes right back to the Creation, of which the Scribes knew the exact date
(however the first two chapters of Genesis give somewhat different accounts of
the Creation and the Levitical hand, as scholars believe, is more to be seen in
the second chapter than the first).
Whatever has survived of the former Israelite tradition is in Genesis and
Exodus, and in the enlightened passages of the Israelite prophets. These more
benevolent parts are invariably cancelled out by later, fanatical ones, which
are presumably Levitical interpolations.
The puzzle is to guess why the Levites allowed these glimpses of a loving God of
all men to remain; as they invalidated the New Law and could have been
removed. A tenable theory might be that the earlier tradition was too well known
to the tribes-people to be merely expunged, so that it had to be retained and
cancelled out by allegorical incident and amendment.
Although Genesis and Exodus were produced after Deuteronomy the theme of
fanatical tribalism is faint in them. The swell and crescendo come in
Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers, which bear the plain imprint of the Levite
in isolated Judah and Babylon.
Thus in Genesis the only fore-echo of the later sound and fury is, "And I will
make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and
thou shalt be a blessing; and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him
that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. . .
and the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land.
. ."
Exodus is not much different: for instance, "If thou shalt indeed, . . do all
that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies. . . and I will cut
them off"; and even these passages may be Levitical interpolations.
But in Exodus something of the first importance appears: this promise is sealed
in blood, and from this point on blood runs like a river through the books of
The Law. Moses is depicted as "taking the blood and sprinkling it on the people"
and saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you
concerning all these words". The hereditary and perpetual office of the Aaronite
priesthood is founded in this blood-ritual: Jehovah says unto Moses, "And take
unto thee Aaron thy brother and his sons with him that he may minister unto me
in the priest's office".
The manner of a priest's consecration is then laid down in detail by Jehovah
himself, according to the Levitical scribes:
He must take a bullock and two rams "without blemish", have them butchered
"before the Lord", and on the altar burn one ram and the innards of the bullock.
The blood of the second ram is to be put "upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron
and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons and upon the thumb of their right
hands and upon the great toe of their right foot" and sprinkled "upon the altar
round about. . . and upon Aaron, and upon his garments, and upon his sons and
the garments of his sons".
The picture of blood-bespattered priests, thus given, is worth contemplation.
Even at this distance of time the question prompts itself: why was this
insistent emphasis laid on blood-sacrifice in the books of the Law which the
Levites produced. The answer seems to lie in the sect's uncanny genius for
instilling fear by terror; for the very mention of "blood", in such contexts,
made the faithful or superstitious Judahite tremble for his own son!
It is all spelt out in Exodus, this claim of the fanatical priests to the
firstborn of their followers:
"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn,
whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of
beast: it is mine".
According to the passage earlier quoted from Micah, this practice of sacrificing
the human firstborn long continued, and the sight of the bloodied Levite must
have had a terrible significance for the humble tribesman, for in the words
attributed to God, quoted above, the firstborn "of man and of beast" are
coupled. This significance remained long after the priesthood (in a most
ingenious way which will later be described) contrived to discontinue human
sacrifice while retaining the prerogative. Even then the blood which was
sprinkled on the priest, though it was an animal's, was to the congregation
still symbolically that of their own offspring!
Moreover, in the Talmudic strongholds of Jewry this ritual bloodying of priests
has continued into our time; this is not a reminiscence from antiquity.
Twenty-four centuries after Exodus was compiled the Reform Rabbis of America (at
Pittsburgh in 1885) declared: "We expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a
sacrificial worship under the administration of the sons of Aaron; nor the
restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". The importance of
this statement lay in the need, thus felt in 1885, to make it publicly; it shows
that the opposite school of Jewry still practised literal observance, including
the ritual of "sacrificial worship". (By the 1950's the Reform Rabbis of America
had lost much ground and were in retreat before the force of Zionist
chauvinism).
The Levitical authorship of the Torah is indicated, again, by the fact that more
than half of the five books are given to minutely detailed instructions,
attributed directly to the Lord, about the construction and furnishings of
altars and tabernacles, the cloth and design of vestments, mitres, girdles, the
kind of golden chains and precious stones in which the blood-baptized priest is
to be arrayed, as well as the number and kind of beasts to be sacrificed for
various transgressions, the uses to be made of their blood, the payment of
tithes and shekels, and in general the privileges and perquisites of the
priesthood. Scores of chapters are devoted to blood sacrifice, in particular.
God probably does not so highly rate the blood of animals or the fine raiment of
priests. This was the very thing, against which the Israelite "prophets" had
protested. It was the mummifying of a primeval tribal religion; yet this is
still The Law of the ruling sect and it is of great potency in our present-day
world.
When they compiled these Books of the Law, the Levitical scribes included many
allegorical or illustrative incidents of the awful results of "non-observance".
These are the parables of the Old Testament, and their moral is always the same:
death to the "transgressor". Exodus includes the best known of these, the
parable of the golden calf. While Moses was in the mountain Aaron made a golden
calf; when Moses came down and saw it he commanded "the sons of Levi" to go
through the camp "and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion,
and every man his neighbour", which these dutiful Levites did, so that "there
fell of the people that day about three thousand men".
Christendom also has inherited this parable of the golden calf (having inherited
the Old Testament) and holds it to be a warning against the worship of idols.
However, a quite different motive may have produced whatever trend among the
people caused the Levites to invent it. Many Judahites, and possibly some
priests, at that time may have thought that God would be better pleased with the
symbolic offering of a golden calf than with the eternal bleating of butchered
animals, the "sprinkling" of their blood, and the "sweet savour" of their
burning carcasses. The Levites at all times fought fiercely against any such
weakening of their ritual, so that these parables are always directed against
any who seek to change it in any detail.
A similar case is the "rebellion of Korah" (Numbers), when "two and fifty
hundred princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown,
gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said unto them,
Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of
them, and the Lord is among them; wherefore then lift ye yourselves above the
congregation of the Lord".
The Israelite "prophets" had made this very complaint, that the Levites took
much on themselves, and the parable in Numbers is plainly intended to discourage
any other objectors: "So the earth opened and swallowed Korah and his two
hundred and fifty men of renown" (however, the congregation "continued to
murmur", whereon the Lord smote it with the plague, and by the time Aaron
interceded, "fourteen thousand and seven hundred" lay dead.)
The lesson of these parables, respect for the priesthood, is driven home
immediately after this anecdote by the enumeration, in words attributed to the
Lord, of the Levite's perquisites: "All the best of the oil, and all the best of
the wine, and of the wheat, the first fruits of them which they shall offer unto
the Lord, them have I given thee".
Presumably because the older tradition imposed some restraint in the writing of
history, Genesis and Exodus are relatively restrained. The fanatical note, first
loudly sounded in Deuteronomy, then becomes ever louder in Leviticus and
Numbers, until at the end a concluding parable depicts a racio-religious
massacre as an act of the highest piety in "observance", singled out for reward
by God! These last two books, like Deuteronomy, are supposed to have been left
by Moses and to relate his communions with Jehovah. In their cases, no claim was
made that "a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages" had been discovered; they
were just produced.
They show the growth of the sect's fanaticism at this period, and the increasing
heat of their exhortations to racial and religious hatred. Deuteronomy had first
decreed, "Love ye therefore the stranger", and then cancelled this "judgment"
(which probably came down from the earlier Israelite tradition) by the later one
which excluded the stranger from the ban on usury.
Leviticus went much further. It, too, began with the admonition to love: "The
stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and
thou shalt love him as thyself" (chapter 19). The reversal came in chapter 25:
"Of the children of the stranger that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye
buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land, and
they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your
children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen
for ever: but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule over
one another with rigour".
This made hereditary bondage and chattel-slavery of "strangers" a tenet of the
Law (which is still valid). If the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority"
with the New, professing Christians of the pioneer, frontiersman or Voortrekker
kind were entitled in their day to invoke such passages as these in respect of
slavery in America or South Africa.
Leviticus introduced (at all events by clear implication) what is perhaps the
most significant of all the discriminations made by the Law between "thy
neighbour" and "the stranger". Deuteronomy, earlier, had provided (chapter 22)
that "if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and
lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die; but unto the damsel
thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death; for as
when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this
matter". This is the kind of provision, in respect of rape, which probably would
have been found in any of the legal codes which were then taking shape, and for
that matter it would fit into almost any legal code today, save for the extreme
nature of the penalty. This passage, again, may very well represent the earlier
Israelite attitude towards this particular transgression; it was impartial and
did not vary according to the person of the victim.
Leviticus (chapter 19) then provided that a man who "lieth carnally" with a
betrothed woman slave might acquit himself of fault by bringing a ram to the
priest "as a trespass offering", when "the sin which he hath done shall be
forgiven him", but the woman "shall be scourged". Under this Law the word of a
woman slave clearly would not count against that of her owner, on a charge of
rape, so that this passage appears to be an amendment, of the discriminatory
kind, to the provision in Deuteronomy. Certain allusions in the Talmud support
this interpretation, as will be shown. .
Leviticus also contains its parable depicting the awful consequences of
non-observance, and this particular example shows the extreme lengths to which
the Levites went. The transgression committed by the two allegorical characters
in this case (who were themselves two Levites, Hadab and Abihu) was merely that
they burned the wrong kind of fire in their censers. This was a capital offence
under "the Law" and they were immediately devoured by the Lord!
Numbers, the last of the five Books to be produced, is the most extreme. In it
the Levites found a way to rid themselves of their chief prerogative (the claim
to
the firstborn) while perpetuating "the Law" in this, its supreme tenet. This was
a political move of genius. The claim to the firstborn evidently had become a
source of grave embarrassment to them, but they could not possibly surrender the
first article of a literal Law which knew no latitude whatever in "observance";
to do so would have been itself a capital transgression. By one more
reinterpretation of the Law they made themselves proxies for the firstborn, and
thus staked a permanent claim on the gratitude of the people without any risk to
themselves:
"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, And I, behold. I have taken the Levites
from among the children of Israel instead of all the firstborn that openeth the
matrix among the children of Israel: therefore the Levites shall be mine;
because all the firstborn are mine. . ." (As the firstborn to be so redeemed
outnumbered their Levite redeemers by 273, payment of five shekels each for
these 273 was required, the money to be given "to Aaron and his sons".)
Proceeding from this new status of redeemers, the Levites laid down many more
"statutes and judgments" in Numbers. They ruled by terror and were ingenious in
devising new ways of instilling it; an example is their "trial of jealousy". If
"the spirit of jealousy" came on a man, he was legally obliged (by "the Lord
speaking unto Moses, saying") to hale his wife before the Levite, who, at the
altar, presented her with a concoction of "bitter water" made by him, saying,
"If no man have lain with thee and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness
with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that
causeth the curse. But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy
husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine
husband. . . the Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the
Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell."
The woman then had to drink the bitter water and if her belly swelled the
priests "executed the law" of death on her. The power which such a rite put in
the hands of the priesthood is apparent; ascribed to the direct command of God,
it resembles the practices of witch doctors in Africa.
The final touch is given to "the Law" in the last chapters of this, the last
book to be compiled. It is provided by the parable of Moses and the Midianites.
The reader will have remarked that the life and deeds of Moses, as related in
Exodus, made him a capital transgressor, several times over, under the "Second
Law" of Deuteronomy and the numerous other amendments of Leviticus and Numbers.
By taking refuge with the Midianites, by marrying the Midianite highpriest's
daughter and by receiving instruction in priestly rites from him, and in other
ways, Moses had "gone a-whoring after other gods", had "taken of their
daughters", and so on. As the whole structure of the law rested on Moses, in
whose name the commands against these things were laid down in the later books,
something evidently had to be done about him before the Books of the Law were
completed, or the whole structure would fall to the ground.
The last small section of Numbers shows how the difficulty was overcome by the
scribes. In these final chapters of "the Law" Moses is made to conform with "all
the statutes and judgments" and to redeem his transgressions by massacring the
entire Midianite tribe, save for the virgins! By what in today's idiom would be
called a fantastic "twist", Moses was resurrected so that he might dishonour his
saviours, his wife, two sons and father-in-law. Posthumously he was made to
"turn from his wickedness", to validate the racio-religious dogma which the
Levites had invented, and by complete transfiguration from the benevolent
patriarch of earlier legend to become the founding father of their Law of hatred
and murder!
In Chapter 25 Moses is made to relate that "the anger of the Lord was kindled"
because the people were turning to other gods. He is commanded by the Lord,
"Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the
sun", whereon Moses instructs the judges, "Slay ye every one his men that were
joined unto Baalpeor" (Baal-worship was extensively practised throughout Canaan,
and the competition of this cult with Jehovah-worship was a particular grievance
of the Levites).
The theme of religious hatred is thus introduced into the narrative. That of
racial hatred is joined to it when, in the direct sequence, a man brings "a
Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses". Phinehas (the grandson of Moses's
brother Aaron) goes after them "and thrust both of them through, the man of
Israel, and the women through her belly". Because of this deed, "the plague was
stayed", and "the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Phinehas hath turned away my
wrath from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake. . .
Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace!"
Thus the covenant between Jehovah and the hereditary Aaronite priesthood was
again sealed (by the Levitical scribes) in blood, this time the blood of a
racioreligious murder, which "the Lord" then describes as "an atonement for the
children of Israel". Moses, the witness of the murder, is then ordered by the
Lord, "Vex the Midianites and smite them". The symbolism is plain. He is
required, in resurrection, to strike equally at "other gods" (the god of the
high priest Jethro, from whom he had received instruction) and at "strangers"
(his wife's and father-in-law's race).
The Levites even made the ensuing massacre Moses's last act on earth; he was
rehabilitated on the brink of eternity! "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites; afterwards thou shalt be
gathered to thy people". Thus ordered, Moses's men "warred against the
Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males. . . and
took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil
of their cities, and all their flocks, and all their gods, and burnt their
cities".
This was not enough. Moses, the husband of a loving Midianite wife and the
father of her two sons, was "wroth" with his officers because they had "saved
all
the Midianite women alive. Behold these caused the children of Israel. . . to
commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague
among the congregations of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the
little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all
the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for
yourselves". (The booty is then listed; after the enumeration of sheep, beeves
and asses follow "thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not
known man by lying with him". These were shared among the Levites, the soldiers
and the congregation; "the gold" was brought to the Levites "for the Lord".)
With that, Moses was allowed at last to rest and the Books of the Law were
concluded. Incitement could hardly be given a more demoniac shape. Chapters 25
and 31 of Numbers need to be compared with chapters 2, 3 and 18 of Exodus for
the full significance of the deed foisted on Jehovah and Moses by the Levites to
become apparent. It was a plain warning to the special people of what Jehovaism
was to mean to them; it remains today a warning to others.
On that note The Law ended. Its authors were a small sect in Babylon, with a few
thousand followers there. However, the power of their perverse idea was to prove
very great. By giving material ambition the largest shape it can have on earth,
they identified themselves forever with the baser of the two forces which
eternally contend for the soul of man: that downward pull of the fleshly
instincts which wars with the uplifting impulse of the spirit.
The theologians of Christendom claim more for this Law than the scholars of
Jewry. I have before me a Christian Bible, recently published, with an
explanatory note which says the five books of the Torah are "accepted as true",
and for that matter also the historical, prophetic and poetic books. This
logically flows from the dogma, earlier quoted, that the Old Testament is of
"equal divine authority" with the New.
The Judaist scholars say differently. Dr. Kastein, for instance, says that the
Torah was "the work of an anonymous compiler" who "produced a pragmatic
historical work". The description is exact; the scribe or scribes provided a
version of history, subjectively written to support the compendium of laws which
was built on it; and both history and laws were devised to serve a "political
purpose. "A unifying idea underlay it all", says Dr. Kastein, and this unifying
idea was tribal nationalism, in a more fanatical form than the world has
otherwise known. The Torah was not revealed religion but, as Mr. Montefiore
remarked, "revealed legislation", enacted to an end.
While the Law was being compiled (it was not completed until the Babylonian
"captivity" had ended) the last two remonstrants made their voices heard, Isaiah
and Jeremiah. The hand of the Levite may be traced in the interpolations which
were made in their books, to bring them into line with "the Law" and its
supporting "version of history". The falsification is clearest in the book of
Isaiah,
"which is the best known case because it is the most easily demonstrable.
Fifteen chapters of the book were written by someone who knew the Babylonian
captivity, whereas Isaiah lived some two hundred years earlier. The Christian
scholars circumvent this by calling the unknown man "Deutero-Isaiah", or the
second Isaiah.
"This man left the famous words (often quoted out of their context), "The Lord
hath said. . . I will also give thee for a light unto the Gentiles, that thou
mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth". This was heresy under the Law
which was in preparation and the Levite apparently added (as the same man
presumably would not have written) the passages foretelling that "the kings and
queens" of the Gentiles "shall bow down to thee with their face towards the
earth and lick up the dust of thy feet . . . I will feed them that oppress thee
with their own flesh and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with
sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I am the Lord thy Saviour and thy
Redeemer" (This sounds like the voice of Ezekiel, who was the true father of the
Levitical Law, as will be seen.)
Jeremiah's book seems to have received Levitical amendment at the start, because
the familiar opening passage sharply discords with other of Jeremiah's thoughts:
"See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root
out, and to pull down, and to destroy . . ."
That does not sound like the man who wrote, in the next chapter: "The word of
the Lord came to me saying, Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus
saith the Lord: I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine
espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not
sown . . . What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far
from me . . . my people have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters . . ."
Jeremiah then identified the culprit, Judah (and for this offence well may have
come by his death): "The backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than
treacherous Judah". Israel had fallen from grace, but Judah had betrayed; the
allusion is plainly to the Levites' new Law. Then comes the impassioned protest,
common to all the expostulants, against the priestly rites and sacrifices:
"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the
Lord, the Temple of the Lord. . ." (the formal, repetitious incantations) ". . .
but thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, oppress not the stranger, the
fatherless and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place" (the ritual
of blood-sacrifice and the ordained murder of apostates). . . "Will ye steal,
murder and commit adultery, and swear falsely. . . and come and stand before me
in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are de1ivered to do all
these abominations" (the ceremonial absolution after animal-sacrifice). "Is this
house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? . . I
spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them
out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices…."
In such words Jeremiah, like Jesus later, protested against the "destruction" of
the Law in the name of its fulfilment. It seems possible that even in Jeremiah's
time the Levites still exacted the sacrifice of firstborn children, because he
adds, "And they have built the high place. . . to burn their sons and daughters
in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart".
Because of these very "abominations", Jeremiah continued, the Lord would "cause
to cease from the cities of Judah, and from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice
of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice
of the bride; for the land shall be desolate".
This is the famous political forecast which was borne out; the Levites, with
their genius for perversion, later invoked it to support their claim that Judah
fell because their Law was not observed, whereas Jeremiah's warning was that
their Law would destroy "treacherous Judah". Were he to rise from the earth
today he might use the word without change in respect of Zionism, for the state
of affairs is similar and the ultimate consequence seems equally foreseeable.
When Judah fell Jeremiah gave his most famous message of all, the one to which
the Jewish masses today often instinctively turn, and the one which the ruling
sect ever and again forbids them to heed: "Seek the peace of the city whither I
have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for
in the peace thereof shall ye have peace". The Levites gave their angry answer
in the 137th Psalm:
"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept….. Our tormentors asked of us
mirth: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a
strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. . . O daughter of
Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou
hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones
against the stones".
In Jeremiah's admonition and the Levites' reply lies the whole story of the
controversy of Zion, and of its effects for others, down to our day.
Jeremiah, who was apparently put to death, would today be attacked as a
"crackpot", "paranoiac", "antisemite" and the like; the phrase then used was
"prophet and dreamer of dreams". He describes the methods of defamation, used
against such men, in words exactly applicable to our time and to many men whose
public lives and reputations have been destroyed by them (as this narrative will
show when it reaches the present century): "For I heard the defaming of many,
fear on every side. Report, they say, and we will report it. All my familiars
watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall
prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".
While Jeremiah was a refugee in Egypt, the second Isaiah, in Babylon, wrote
those benevolent words which glow like the last light of day against the dark
background of the teaching which was about to triumph: "Thus saith the Lord,
Keep ye judgment, and do justice…… let not the son of the stranger, that hath
joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying The Lord hath utterly separated me
from his people . . . The sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the
Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his |
