May 28, 2005
NEW ISRAEL (via Tom Morin):
ASK SPENGLER (Asia Times)
Dear Spengler:The Israel-centric Judeophilia that has come to dominate American religion and politics is a relatively recent phenomenon. It drove the US into the war against Iraq, Israel's biggest enemy in the region, at the expense of the real war against terror. It may yet drive it into war against Syria and Iran, also Israel's' enemies. Will it hurt America in the long run? Only time will tell. I think it will, simply because this obsession with Israel is so irrational and so asinine.
The Hebrew god is a god that plays favorites. He commands his "chosen race" to steal land from others, to slaughter them en masse as in: "Now go and smite Amalek, 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" (I Samuel 15:3).
The Hebrew Bible is chock full of such insanities. No one who uses common sense would believe in such an insanely vicious deity.
Bliss
Dear Bliss:
Let us examine your two issues, namely what you perceive to be America's sudden leap into Judeophilia, and your dislike for the Hebrew god.
On the first point you are poorly informed. Judeophilia characterized America from its founding; for extensive quotations and source references, I recommend Michael Novak's book On Two Wings, whose first chapter is titled "Hebrew Metaphysics at the Founding" (of the United States). Novak, a Catholic (ie, neither Jewish nor Evangelical) scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, quotes an 1809 letter from the United States of America's second president, John Adams:
I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men then any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist ... I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.
During the first half of the 20th century, to be sure, the universal popularity of racialist theories did not leave the United States unaffected, and reverberations of European Jew-hatred influenced Americans. These attenuated gradually after the destruction of National Socialism. Evangelical Protestantism always had an affinity for the Jews, and its growth during the past 20 years surely made the US more Judeophilic, but that only took the country closer to its own origins.On the other matter, you are not alone in your discomfort with the Hebrew god who wiped out the tribe of Amelek. Whether you acknowledge the existence of the Hebrew or Christian god, or Allah, or karma, or blind chance, one cannot help be struck by the unspeakable unfairness of life. Six thousand languages are spoken in the world today, of which two become extinct every week - which means not merely the lives of those who become extinct, but of all the members of the entire preceding culture, retroactively become meaningless. Most of them will not merit so much as a doctoral dissertation. If there is a god of any sort, he not merely wiped out Amelek, but thousands of cultures of which we know nothing, because nary a shard of pottery survives of them. At the present rate he will eradicate another 1,000 cultures in the next decade. If present trends continue, French and German will be spoken only in hell 200 years from now.
With all of this extinction going on, does it not seem woefully unfair to you that the descendants of a tribe of shepherds speaking a minor West Semitic dialect are the only people left whose ancestors walked the green earth 3,500 years ago, and the only people who still speak the same language their ancestors spoke? The Indians and Chinese, whose languages also are very ancient, do not make much of this.
Many Evangelicals consider this a miracle. When Friedrich II ("the Great") of Prussia asked his court chaplain for a proof of God's existence, the cleric replied, "Your Majesty, the Jews!" US televangelists routinely preach that if God so visibly fulfilled his promise to the Old Israel, adherents of the New Israel have some assurance that he will keep faith with them as well.
Others grind their teeth in resentment. Why should my people not be the chosen people? That is the source of Jew-hatred (What the Jews won't tell you, November 4, 2003).
Spengler
It's no coincidence that societies that are anti-Semitic are likewise anti-American. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 28, 2005 6:52 PM
No doubt many Arabs also believe that the U.S. crushed Iraq because Israel told us to...
To believe otherwise might require them to acknowledge the hideous nature of their dysfunctional societies.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at May 29, 2005 12:38 AMAs a Jewish coworker once pointed out, the "Chosen People" were chosen to be held to a higher standard than us goyim, and are more likely to be severly punished for even minor transgressions.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at May 29, 2005 3:19 AMHow likely is it that Hebrew will be spoken any longer than the French or German? Aren't Orthodox Jews despised in Israel even more than Evangelicals in the U.S.?
A covenant is only good so long as it is remembered.
Posted by: Randall Voth at May 29, 2005 7:24 AMI thought that line about the Jews being proof of God's existence was Pascal's, spoken to the French king.
Posted by: Peter B at May 29, 2005 8:20 AMOJ - that is a new take on New Zion, but I'll certainly sign up for Hebrew classes when necessary.
Posted by: Randall Voth at May 29, 2005 11:18 AMA college classmate, of a staunchly Catholic family from the South, related to me that his younger sister, frustrated with her Latin homework, once asked their father, "Daddy, what language do the angels speak in Heaven?"
Replied the father, in his best drawl, "Why, my dear, the language of Heaven is Hebrew."
Sensing triumph, the daughter inquired, "Then why do I have to waste all this time learning Latin?"
Her brother, overhearing this, retorted, "Because Latin is the language of Purgatory."
Posted by: Random Lawyer at May 29, 2005 2:37 PMActually, Hebrew was not spoken, although it was used in prayers and in Biblical study, between the destruction of the First Temple in the 6th century BCE and the 20th Century, when the early Zionists revived it as the language of their settlements.
The language of the Jews in Judea and the Persian empire during the Hellinistic/ Roman Eras, and the lingus franca of the Middle east was, Aramaic a/k/a syraic (there were dialectical differences). Aramaic was (and is ) close to Hebrew linguisticaly. Indeed, because the Talmud is written in Aramaic, yeshiva buchers must master written Aramaic, which they mannage to do without formal classes.
In Europe in the CE, Jews spoke european languages, albeit written with hebrew characters and with liberal sprinklings of hebrew vocabulary. The jews in Spain spoke ladino, a dialect of spanish, and Jews in eastern europe spoke yiddish, a dialect of German.
In the early 20th century, Hebrew was transformed from a litugical/literary language by the early Zionist settlers in Israel. There were some who thought that Yiddish should be the language of Israel, Fortunately, they lost out as the first large wave of post independence immigrants were non-yiddish speaking areas of the Muslim world.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at May 29, 2005 5:07 PMShalom chavarim!
Posted by: Dave W at May 30, 2005 8:28 AM