November 3, 2003
THE NATION WITH THE SOUL OF A CHURCH:
What the Jews won't tell you (Spengler, 11/4/03, Asia Times)
Apart from China and India, of how many cultures can we say that they are not at risk? Despite its high rate of population growth, the Muslim world feels fragile. Few Muslim countries have adapted well to globalization, and the Muslim world feels besieged by the encroaching culture of the West. Jewish theology states that God elected the Jews as his people, and that the covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham never would perish as long as the Jews remained true to it. Most modern Jews are profoundly uncomfortable with this notion ("God of Mercy, choose a different people!" goes the joke).Yet the Jews have existed for well over 3,000 years, and Hebrew is the only language West of the Indus that is spoken today more or less as it was spoken 3,000 years ago. How improbable is it that a nation of former slaves, a race of shepherds rather than city builders who had to hire outside contractors to build a temple to their God, is the sole survivor of the civilizations of the time?
Every people wishes to be eternal, to be, as it were, God's chosen. Adolf Hitler's notion of the Master Race, some commentators aver, is an adaptation of the Jewish notion of election. Hitler's determination to destroy the Jews stemmed from his belief that Germany could not really be the Chosen People as long as the Jews remained in existence. The more vulnerable become the fading peoples of Western Europe, the hotter burns their wrath against the Eternal People. Americans, of course, are not a people but a concept. America is where individuals go to abandon their culture, language, customs and history, to be recast in the melting-pot and emerge as Americans.
As I have argued previously in this space, America comes closer than has any other political entity towards fulfilling the Christian idea of an ecclesia, of an assembly of souls called out of the nations. That is why Americans have no fundamental issue with the Jews. Americans enjoy the newborn's sense of immortality, because they have exchanged cultural memory for the promise of a new beginning.
Spengler is right there, but hardly goes far enough--India and China are both threatened too. When Francis Fukuyama said that we had reached the End of History, what he was saying--whether consciously or not--was that such places had lost the clash of civilizations, at the intellectual level, and would have to become like us or perish, at our hand (as Ba'athism in Iraq) or their own (as secularized Europe).
MORE:
-Mahathir is right: Jews do rule the world (Spengler, 10/28/03, Asia Times)
The hatred of the Jews is impossible to understand from a secular perspective, but from a religious perspective it is no surprise. Whether they like it or not, Jews are the Chosen People of God, and Judaism and the Christianity that came out of it the vehicles by which God is bringing freedom and justice to the world. There is no greater rebellion against God than to embrace murder and tyranny; and those who have embraced murder and tyranny, necessarily hate not only God, but God's people and God's ideas as expressed in the Judeo-Christian faiths.
The Nazis, the Communists, and the Islamofascists hate the Jews because they hate God, and the Jews are God's party on earth. Consciously they probably do not know why they hate the Jews so much; but spiritually, their own embrace of evil forces them to hate the Jews.
Jew-hatred will end only when freedom has triumphed, and it is no longer a select few who fight and argue for it, but the whole world.
Posted by: pj at November 3, 2003 12:35 PMJews may have survived, as a culture, because they were both oppressed, and denied assimilation. Under those conditions, people would cling tightly to their language, customs, and identity as a people.
As this blog pointed out recently, in America, where neither condition currently exists, Jews are melting away, becoming simply part of America.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at November 4, 2003 6:05 AMPeter:
I don't quite understand your point. Is it that there are fewer Christians in America ?
That may be true, but there is certainly no less spirituality in the US. It's merely being expressed in different ways, than in the past.