Hate Mail - We Need Several More Words With Distinct Meanings To Replace That One Word Of Bastard Origin From A Real SOB

As an outside observer I've found it painful to listen to Jewish people reassure gentiles and each other that they're "not religious," a declaration that I can't help but hear as a mildly nervous way of saying, "we're not like them, we're OK."   

That has long bugged me as has the assertion that the "enlightenment" was what liberated Europe's Jews, a half-truth, at best.  I will acknowledge that for all his dictatorial and imperial evil - it killed millions -  Napoleon's march across Europe did a lot to break down the medieval evil of the ghettos, you'd have to be an ahistorical liar in the way I generally condemn to deny that.  But the "enlightenment"* acceptance of Jews seems to me to be conditioned on the same kind of abandonment of the Jewish religion, the very thing that maintained Jews as a distinct people even as other peoples, including many Jews of centuries past,  in diaspora have melted into the general population.  I would guess that every single person of European ancestry has had "jewish blood" in their lineage even as we are also mathematically held to have had Charlemagne in our lineage.  There were a lot more Jews in Europe than there were Charlemagnes.  As I once heard a Black woman tell a female Klansman,  "Being from where you are, having your coloring,  you might not be the White woman you like to think you are."

There is nothing I'm aware of in the Gospels or Epistles that hold that Jews are to give up The Law, the Prophets or anything else about being Jewish.  The Covenant with Abraham was declared to be eternal.   I read Paul, the champion of the right of gentiles to the Gospel without following The Law, and it couldn't be clearer that he regarded himself as a Jew who declared himself as not only a Jew but a Pharisee.  It's a scandal and a shame that gentile Christians ever forgot that, it led to so much anti-Christianity among the nominal Christians and the Christian churches and among so many so-called Most Christian monarchs and princes.  And there has never been a period in Christianity like the present for rejecting the late-classical, medieval and post-medieval divide that should never have happened.  I think more progress has been made on that than fixing the internal divides among various groups of Christians, at least in the West.  And I think it is within religion that the greatest change has actually been made, not in secular culture.  As with Napoleon's horrific imperial campaign, it is in the reaction to a terrible evil that moves people past the long-standing habits of thought and law and custom that produced that evil. 

I think the enlightenment, ironically, in this regard adopted in a far more radical form what is called "antisemitism" when it is Christians the accusation is made against.  I mentioned last week that a number of those who the Nazis murdered for being Jews were Catholics, such as St. Edith Stein.   I mentioned that the Conversos in 15th and 16th century Spain could not only become fully recognized Catholics, they could rise to positions of power in the Church, Cardinals who get to choose the Pope, and who could be hired by the Spanish Inquisition - which was an institution of Ferdinand and Isabella, not the Vatican - and become infamous as the face of the Spanish Inquisition.  

The word "antiseitism" was invented in the late 19th century by Wilhelm Marr, a rather bizarre and infamous Jew hater (who, nonetheless was married to three women with Jewish ancestry - haters are seldom people of rational integrity) who invented himself an -ism to lend his ideology a sciency cachet in late 19th century intellectual culture where sciency cachet was the thing.  It was a word that rejected Jews as biologically separate from Germans, a different "race" who, as Baur, Fischer, Lenz would declare, along with Karl Pearson and other Darwinists of a geneticist bent**, could never really become a German or a Brit, if it were tried, they would destroy the alleged racial purity of the nation.  Something which that beacon of the PR bullshit that most talk of the "enlightenment" is Voltaire anticipated in his writings on the Jews and others he held as other and, generally, either dangerous or to be used.   

Both Voltaire and Marr hated Christianity, Marr called Christianity the "new Judaism" which had, he held, corrupted the pure Germanic population with Jewishness.  Interestingly, they also had their predecessor in a strain of Spanish claims of ancestral taint in those politicians and clergy members who, jealous of the number of Conversos who held power and favor but whose anti-Conversos stands were opposed by the majority of those in the Church of the time. 

Marr's style of it and the Nazi antisemitism is a biological claim, in the period in question a claim of "hard Darwinism" in even Marr's articulation of it.  It is the exact opposite of what is called the same thing when it's the Christian desire to convert Jews to Christianity.   The practice of allowing Jewish converts to Christianity to have full rights as not only members of denominations but as clergy and even, in the case of many in the history of the Catholic Church, as "princes of the Church" with the potential power to become Pope, is the exact opposite of what the Nazis held as a hard scientific fact in line with late 19th century and early 20th century Darwinism.  

And, I will remind you,  Marr invented the word and gave it its meaning. 

The habit of English speaking people to use one word for complex and often entirely different entities and to pretend that those entities are all the same is unfortunate.  A lot of the dishonesty of current discourse depends on that sloppiness and slackery.   Some of its most skilled users are academics and members of the scribbling profession.  Its use is not unknown in those who practice science polemically. 

I think the current effort to come up with a definition of "antisemitism" is a rather blatantly dodgy way of shielding the Israeli government from criticism of its abominable acts and policies.  I started out thinking it was a somewhat bad idea and now I think it's a dishonest one.  What's needed are several more words with distinct meanings, not mashing everything into that one word, to be used the sloppy, slacker, dishonest way you use it. 

* Consider how remarkable it is that the military dictator whose actions killed millions is considered a figure of the "enlightenment,"  and that those who held him as such at the time considered him as just that.  I've come to have a rather dim view of that "enlightenment" we were all ordered to revere.  Not that I'd want to go back to what came before it, you have to be really stupid to not understand that we're supposed to move forward, learning from the horrors of the past history, not returning to the ones that led to the later ones.   But, then, the Jewish view of history that was accepted by the later monotheistic religions, has a progressive character that is in opposition to the materialist-pagan static view of it. 

** Part of the problem was the naive belief in "genes" at the time and what was held to be their all-powerful potency as fixed entities.  We now know that that was a delusional belief on the part of early genetics, a delusion which is still potent in the general population and still claimed by even those who have a career in science and academia.  The Selfish Gene, a delusion, has enormous potency in popular culture and in the popular understanding of science even as it is known to be a grotesque distortion of current scientific knowledge.  As the Sociobiology Study Group said in 1976, it is a dangerous recapitulation of what led to the eugenics-genocide of several decades earlier. 


Update: Rereading this - I always find typos and editing artifacts that need changing -  I think that the post-WWII revolution in Western Christianity in regard to relations with the Jewish religion as opposed to what I'd assert is a far lesser effect in secularism comes because religion and religious thinking concerns itself with morality in ways that secularism doesn't.  I think the fact that evolutionary psychology easily accommodated the blatant assertion of antisemitism of Kevin MacDonald, allowing him to hold editorship at professional journals, a tenured faculty position in a science department at a reputable university, that led to that Mr. Science of the last quarter of the 20th century, Richard Dawkins, citing the blatant antisemtic science of John Hartung is directly related to the exemption science is given by secular culture from dealing with questions of morality in exactly the way that religion is required to. 

Just to be provocative.  I am a political blogger.