Jews Against Rome, Forever
In a recent short video, we see Benjamin Netanyahu being asked what book he is reading now, and answering with a satisfied look that he is reading Jews vs. Rome by Barry Strauss. Asked why he picked it up, he says: “Well, we lost that one, I think we have to win the next one.”
This video has circulated widely (as it was meant to), because it is telling of the way Israel relates to ancient history. This is not the first time Netanyahu shows that he views the history of modern Israel through the lens of ancient history. He does this for the benefit of Israelis (for example when referring to the Palestinians of Gaza as Amalek in October 2023) as well as Gentiles (for example when comparing Trump to Cyrus for recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in March 2018). This is not just rhetoric. Zionists like Netanyahu are genuinely obsessed by what they think happened to ancient Israel two or three thousand years ago in their struggles with various empires. This obsession is shared by all Zionists since David Ben-Gurion, who had changed his name Grün to that of a Jewish general fighting the Romans. Dan Kurzman writes in his biography Prophet of Fire: “Ben-Gurion was, in a modern sense, Moses, Joshua, Isaiah.” In his view, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 “paralleled the Exodus from Egypt, the conquest of the land by Joshua, the Maccabean revolt.” Ben-Gurion was not religious at all, yet he was thoroughly biblical.
The wars between Jews and Rome that Barry Strauss covers in his book (the Jewish War from 66 to 74 CE, the Diaspora Revolt from 116 to 117, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt from 132 to 136), happened after biblical times, but they carry the same weight in Zionists’ mind. Early Zionists were awakened to their national identity by Heinrich Graetz’s multi-volume History of the Jews published in German between 1853 and 1891, with the fourth volume, on the period following the destruction of Jerusalem, published first. Zionism is rooted in history, or, more properly, in memory, which fluctuates somewhere between history and mythology (the wailing wall, for example, belongs to memory but not to history, being part of the Antonia Fortress and not of Herod’s Temple). “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people,” wrote Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982). By “Israel”, he meant not only Israelis, but Jews worldwide.
Jewish Memory is the essence of Jewishness, and the ultimate source of Jewish Power. We are mistaken when we think that the main divide within the Jewish world is between religious Jews and secular Jews. That is not the most important criterion. The span of their national memory is the more important difference between Jews. For peripheral Jews (people who do not consider their Jewishness as the most essential part of their identity), the Holocaust is the main point of reference. To the question “What’s essential to being Jewish?” 73 percent of Jewish Americans gave as first choice “Remembering the Holocaust” in a 2013 Pew Research poll. But deeper Jews have deeper roots, reaching back more than two thousand years. They feel the trauma of 70 CE as if they had been there. These are the leading Jews, who occupy the center and pull the community together by their memory field. It makes little difference whether they present themselves as secular or religious Jews, whether they think of God or the Jewish mind as the driving force behind world history—many probably think that God and the Jewish mind are one and the same. Netanyahu is supposedly a secular Jew, but his thinking is not very different from Ben-Gvir’s: it is a matter of nuance. Whether religious or secular, Jews in general are rooted in the memory of their nation. The longer their memory, the more intense their Jewishness.
All peoples are rooted in their collective memory, you may say. True, but Israel operates with a totally different time scale from other nations. Israel defines itself by a panoramic vision that scans millennia into the past. It holds on to a vivid memory of its beginnings 3000 years ago, and it looks with anticipation to the fulfillment of its prophetic destiny at the end of times. Jewish Memory is incommensurable with any other national memory, in terms of both focus and depth. Only the Chinese can perhaps compete. The key difference, though, is that no one cares for Chinese history but the Chinese, whereas the Jews have made their self-crafted miraculous history the world best-seller.
Contractual theology
In the ancient world, when two nations were at war, they thought their national gods were at war. Therefore, the victor’s god was believed to be the more powerful—a concept known as the “theology of victory”. Christian historians of the first six centuries still thought like this. According to Eusebius of Caesarea, Constantine adopted Christianity because Christ gave him victory over Maxentius. According to Gregory of Tour, Clovis converted because Christ put the Alamanni to flight. At first, when his wife Clotilde had urged him to believe in the Son of God, Clovis “merely replied that his gods were more powerful.” But in the middle of a decisive battle, he prayed in desperation to Jesus Christ: “If you deign to grant me victory over these enemies, … I will believe in you.” And so it happened (History of the Frankish Kings II,1).
Jews are different. They have been defeated again and again, but they emerged each time more convinced that their god is the strongest and will soon give them total victory. After the Israelites were crushed and scattered to the winds by the Assyrians, Yahweh was still bragging that his victory was only postponed:
Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, “Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assur in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains.” … This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it? (Isaiah 14:24-27).
That stubbornness—that madness—is the strength of the Jewish people: no matter how many times they lose, they get more determined to “win the next one.” Listen to Yahweh throwing a tantrum after his defeat by Marduk: “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23). There is something childish there, but let’s admit it: there also something heroic. Leo Strauss, the neocons’ mentor, said that Judaism is a “heroic delusion”.[1]
The essence of that delusion is, of course, the Jews’ belief that the “god of Israel” is none other than God Himself, who by definition, is stronger than all the gods. He is also the jealous God, which means that other gods don’t matter or don’t exist. In the Jews’ holy book, God did two important things: He created the Universe, and he made a deal with the Jews.
Jews think they have a covenant theology, which means they have a contract with God. Their history is a contractual claim. The point is well made by substacker Brado. The Torah, he writes, must be understood primarily “as a means to fabricate a claim to inheritance, to primacy and precedence, assembled to leverage position under Macedonian and Roman arbitration.” This is according to the hypothesis that the final redaction of the Torah is from the Hellenistic period, “when the Macedonians and Romans began arbitrating property disputes in Egypt, Syria and Palestine, and the Torah was quite intentionally designed to secure advantages for this purpose.” But even if we attribute the main body of the Torah to the Babylonian school of Ezra, the aim was the same: “It is not concerned with communicating insight, truth or understanding. It is about staking claims to precedence or primacy. It is evidence to be presented in a courtroom. It is history as a grievance or inheritance to be arbitrated before God. This is not God the Almighty, but God the Assessor, the Arbitrator, the Justiciar. The settler of accounts.”
For Jews like Netanyahu, settling accounts means taking revenge, as it had been for the great Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508), whose biblical exegeses are filled with the expectation of God’s vengeance against Esau/Edom (code names for Rome): “at the precise moment the Lord takes vengeance on the nations, Israel will then go from darkness to light and out of bondage,” and “nothing will survive of the house of Esau.” “Indeed, any deliverance promised Israel is associated with the fall of Edom.”[2] The reason I quote Abravanel is that Netanyahu’s father was a great admirer of him and the author of his laudatory biography.
Biblical history is either heavily biased or completely fabricated. After two centuries of digging, archaeologists have come to the conclusion that Solomon’s kingdom, the basis for the Greater Israel claim, has less reality than Arthur’s Camelot.[3] At the supposed time of Solomon, Jerusalem was a big village. The Exodus—so central to Zionist mythology that a film on the founding of Israel was named Exodus—is just as fake. There is no archeological trace of a massive exodus from Egypt through Sinai to Canaan, and the evidence is that the twelve tribes were indigenous (only their religion was not). The best that Richard Friedman can come up with in The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters (HarperOne, 2017) is the theory that a few thousand aggressive Habiru (nomadic raiders), escaped from forced labor in Egypt, invaded the land of Canaan and imposed on some local tribes the cult of their jealous god and the obligation to pay tribute to them (read my review here).
Biblical history is not only self-aggrandizing mythology, it is framed into a fraudulent contract penned under the name of God. It is the most daring forgery imaginable. In comparison, the false Donation of Constantine, by which the popes claimed to have been given the empire by Constantine, is an innocent prank.
Western man has been fooled by that forgery. For two thousand years we have swallowed the Jews’ fake history hook, line and sinker. This is why Christianity is an integral part of the Jewish Problem. Jewish Memory is the ultimate source of Jewish Power, and Christianity has converted Roman civilization to Jewish Memory. In our Holy Book, Israel is the hero and the innocent victim of one evil empire after another, no matter how much they steal, destroy, rape, slaughter, and commit genocide.
The winner gets to write history, but the reverse is also true: the one who writes history and imposes his narrative will be the winner in the end. The Jews are the people of the Book, and with the Book, they conquered our minds. Ancient history from Noah to Cyrus the Great has been written for us by the Jews. That’s why the baddies are the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians—not to mention the Amalekites or the Midianites, who obviously deserved to be eradicated.
Netanyahu has some good reasons to be confident that the Jews will “win the next one.” Jews don’t win on the battlefield, but they are the undisputed masters of information war, and they can ruin an empire from within, with good coordination and enough time. We are Rome, now. So if Netanyahu studies the history of “Jews vs. Rome” with the premise that the war is not over, then we should study it too. That story has two parts: “Israel against Rome”, and “Israel inside Rome”.
Israel against Rome
The Romans were notoriously welcoming to foreign gods. Evocatio deorum is an ancient Roman ritual that involved calling the enemy’s gods out of cities besieged by Roman forces with the promise of a new temple and better worship in Rome.[4] But the Romans understood that the god of Israel is unlike any other national god. His hatred of other gods made him unassimilable. That’s why his sacred objects were treated as mere booty in 70 CE. “The treatment of the Jewish god,” wrote Emily Schmidt, “can be seen as an inversion of the typical Roman treatment of or attitude towards foreign gods, perhaps as an anti-evocatio.”[5] Since Jews throughout the world used to pay two drachmas (silver coins) a year for their temple, Vespasian now compelled them to pay that tax to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (the fiscus Iudaicus). That was appropriate since the Jews hypocritically pretended that they were worshipping the supreme god, whom the Romans called Jupiter.
Later on, Trajan, whose father had commanded the Tenth Legion during the Jewish War under Vespasian, had to put down Jewish insurrections throughout the Diaspora, and especially in Egypt (115-117). The insurrection coincided with Trajan’s war against Parthia, in which many Mesopotamian Jews were fighting on the Parthians’ side, so there was certainly some coordination there. According to Arrian, a soldier-politician-historian who wrote about Trajan’s wars, “Trajan was determined above all, if it were possible, to destroy the [Jewish] nation utterly, but if not, at least to crush it and stop its presumptuous wickedness.”[6]
His successor Hadrian faced a new messianic uprising in Jerusalem, led by self-proclaimed messiah Shimon Bar Kochba, who managed to establish an independent state for three years (132-135). The Roman military campaign left 580,000 dead according to Cassius Dio, who adds: “At Jerusalem, Hadrian founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised a new temple to Jupiter.” Jews were banned from the city. The name of Israel was erased and the new province was renamed Syria Palæstina (in remembrance of the long gone Philistines, of Greek descent). Circumcision was again declared illegal. As Martin Goodman comments in Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations: “In the eyes of Rome and at the behest of Hadrian, the Jews had ceased to exist as a nation in their own land.”[7]
These wars are the subject of Barry Strauss’s book Jews vs. Rome. It is a pretty good book for basic information, but it is purely narrative, and Strauss writes the story as he finds it in his sources, without much critical perspective. The almost unique source for the Jewish War of 66-74 is Flavius Josephus, who was a Jew writing for the glorification of his nation. Here are a couple of paragraphs from Strauss’s introduction:
For Jewish history, the rebellions against Rome mark a major turning point. They cost hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives and sent many of the survivors into slavery and exile. They reduced the Jewish people to secondary status in their own homeland. Indeed, the revolts put the future of Jewish survival there in question, although they did not end it. It’s a common misconception to think that the Romans finished the Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. They did not, but they did do an enormous amount of damage. Rome destroyed the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, and its crowning glory, the Temple. Rome ended the daily sacrifices that marked the heart of Judaism and ruined the priesthood who carried them out. Rome decimated the largest and most prestigious Jewish Diaspora community in the Roman Empire, the Jews of Egypt. As if to add insult to injury, the Romans changed the name of the country from Judea (“land of the Jews”) to Syria Palaestina, or simply Palestine (“land of the Philistines”). In no other case did the Romans punish a rebellious province by changing its name. Then again, no people had rebelled as often as the Jews.
There is a holy fire, burning in the hearts of warriors, that leads to glory or oblivion. For two centuries it burned in the hearts of the nation that is the subject of this book, the Jewish people. Messiahs added to the conflagration. Even priests, resistant at first, grew dazzled by the white-hot light. Sober men saw the fire’s destructiveness and tried to douse the flames. None succeeded. It was left to the Romans to drown the blaze in rivers of blood. Only then did a new generation of rabbis emerge from the ruins and turn the fire into light. At the same time, another offshoot from the Jewish experience of this turbulent era also began to grow: Christianity. The Jewish people survived, learning how to become a religion without a state. Then, twenty centuries later, they created a sovereign state in their ancestral homeland, Israel. The survival of the Jews is one of history’s great cases of resilience.
“It is my hope,” Strauss writes, “that the history of this period, these people and these struggles, will offer context for the clash of civilizations we are witnessing today and forge a deeper understanding of the forces that propel them.”[8] The book does that, at least for readers like Netanyahu. Strauss’s underlying premise is that the story is all about Israel’s struggle for its national independence from an oppressive imperial power.
The Romans certainly made mistakes in their dealing with the Jews. They thought they could solve their Judean problem as they had solved their Carthaginian problem three centuries earlier, but they failed to understand that, precisely, their Carthaginian problem had only morphed into a more complex Judean problem (read Ron Unz’s take on the Punic hypothesis). On the other hand, from the Romans’ perspective, their rule over Judea was generous. It was not incorporated into the empire, but became a semi-autonomous kingdom, while enjoying all the benefits of Roman civilization. What the Romans did for the Jews is as notorious as the Jews’ ungratefulness for it (and the subject of a good Monty Python sketch). Herod the Great, the choice of both Octavian and Anthony, was the son of an Idumean father and a Nabatean mother, therefore not an ethnic Jew, but he tried to be as Jewish as Roman, and he built for the Jews the most magnificent temple they could dream of. He was a great king by the standards of his time.
But Jewish Memory is not objective history, it is an eternal present of Jewish victimhood. From the Jewish point of view, all empires that ruled over Judea at one point or another are just more of the same: either obstacles or instruments on the way to the ultimate rule of Israel over all nations, as promised by God to his people, when the kings of the world “will fall prostrate before you [the Israelites], faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet” (Isaiah 49:23). In the Book of Daniel, written in the 2nd century BCE but set four centuries earlier, the four evil kingdoms that Daniel foresees in his interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream were the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Greeks. But later the traditional interpretation was that Rome was the fourth beast with ten horns, “devouring and crushing with its iron teeth and bronze claws, and trampling with its feet what was left” (7:19-20).
Israel inside Rome
What about us, non-Jews, whose side are we on in this fight? Are we on the side of the Jews, or on the side of Rome? That should be an easy choice: we are Rome. We are the heirs of Roman civilization, the Western version of Hellenistic civilization. We are also the heirs of the Roman Church, who has breastfed us from our medieval infancy. Thomas Hobbes famously said that the papacy was “the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof” (Leviathan, chapter 47). In the High Middle Ages, the pope was the verus imperator (in the words of Gervase of Tilbury); he could make and unmake kings, and treated them as vassals. For the Netanyahus of this world, Christian Rome is still Rome, and so is Western civilization today.
But here is where it gets complicated: the Church is also the new Israel. And the holy story of Israel is the biggest part of the Christian Bible. The Book of Revelation that closes it is an apocalyptic text in the filiation of the Book of Daniel. Rome is designated there as “Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes,” “riding a scarlet beast which had seven heads and ten horns and had blasphemous titles written all over it” (17:3-5); “within a single day, the plagues will fall on her: disease and mourning and famine. She will be burnt right up” (18:2-8). This is followed by a vision of the rebirth of “Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down from God out of heaven” (21:10).
The end of Rome and the new beginning of Jerusalem are key prophetic themes in early Christianity. Justin Martyr, who died in Rome in 165, believed that after the imminent end of the world and the resurrection, “Christians whose doctrine is pure on all points … will spend a thousand years in Jerusalem rebuilt, embellished, enlarged, as Isaiah, Ezekiel, and other prophets acknowledge” (Dialog with Trypho lxx,4).
Rome didn’t like people like Justin, which is how he got his posthumous nickname. The problem was not that Christians were casting spells on the eternal city, for they did this cryptically. The problem was that they ostentatiously refused to participate in the basic formality of the imperial cult. According to Candida Moss, Christians were not persecuted, but prosecuted; “the traditional history of Christian martyrdom is mistaken. Christians were not constantly persecuted, hounded, or targeted by the Romans. Very few Christians died, and when they did, they were often executed for what we in the modern world would call political reasons.”[9] The sources, concurs Bart D. Ehrman, show that “magistrates were not out for blood. They wanted to keep the peace and much preferred for Christians to come to their senses and perform simple cultic acts.”[10] Refusal to pay homage to the genius of the emperor was a political act, comparable to burning the national flag today.[11]
How can we explain, then, that under Constantine and his successors, Rome converted to Christianity, a religion hostile to the gods of Rome, whose programmatic prophecy was the revenge of Jerusalem over Rome, in the spirit of Jewish apocalypses? This is a great paradox and a great mystery. Some Romans did smell a Jewish conspiracy there, and warned that Christianity was leading Rome to its downfall. One of them was Ammianus Marcellinus, the last non-Christian Roman historian. In the 380s, he traced the decline in civic virtues back to the court of the first Christian emperors, and he blamed the senatorial landowners who had converted to Christianity out of opportunism, such as Petronius Probus, whom he portrays as a vain and rapacious man, a pernicious schemer, servile to those more powerful than him and pitiless to those weaker, who craved office and exercised enormous influence through his wealth (xxvii,11). After the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, Augustine wrote the first book of The City of God in response to similar accusations that Christians had brought a curse on Rome by ruining the patriotic spirit. He didn’t deny that Christians couldn’t care less for the earthly city of Rome, being devoted exclusively to their eternal city in heaven. But he wanted the Romans to know that whatever they suffered during the bloody sack of their city—loss of property or loved ones—was for their good, since it brought them closer to God.
How Christianity paved the way for the Jewish takeover
Italo-Romans couldn’t fail to notice that, as Christianity was becoming the official religion of the Empire, and as all traditional cults were being outlawed, with temples expropriated or destroyed, one single non-Christian religion remained legal: Judaism. Augustine justified it by his “witness theory”:
The Jews who killed him and who refused to believe in him … were dispersed all over the world … and thus by the evidence of their own Scriptures they bear witness for us that we have not fabricated the prophecies about Christ… It follows that when the Jews do not believe in our Scriptures, their own Scriptures are fulfilled in them, while they read them with blind eyes. . . . It is in order to give this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they supply for our benefit by their possession and preservation of those books, that they themselves are dispersed among all nations, wherever the Christian Church spreads. (City of God xviii,46)
A logical connection is made here between preserving the Jewish scriptures and preserving the Jewish people. Like Cain who murdered his brother Abel, says Augustine, the Jews are under the protection of God, who vows seven-fold vengeance on their murderers. Thus until the end of time, Augustine writes, “the continued preservation of the Jews will be a proof to believing Christians of the subjection merited by those who, in the pride of their kingdom, put the Lord to death” (xii,12). There are various interpretations of Augustine’s writings on Jews, but in her book Augustine And the Jews, Paula Fredriksen (a convert to orthodox Judaism) presents Augustine as a defender of the Jews. Unlike pagans and non-Catholic Christians, “Jews, Augustine argued, had a continuing positive role to play in the story of redemption. … Precisely because of the integrity of their religious identity, argued Augustine, contemporary Jews performed a unique, and uniquely important, service of witness for the Church.”[12]
The Jews therefore lived on as a nation dispersed throughout the Roman world, amid Christian hostility but under government protection, in relative isolation from Gentile society, in city districts that would later be known as ghettos. Laws forbidding Christians to marry Jews or even to eat at their table (Council of Elvira in the early 4th century) actually reinforced Jewish identity and cohesion, because endogamy and ritual purity are the most important commandments in the Torah. In return, hostility to Christ and Christianity was a fundamental tenet of Rabbinic Judaism from the 3rd century CE, and this antagonism between the only two lawful religions within Christendom became a structural part of both. The great Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner goes so far as to claim that “Judaism as we know it was born in the encounter with triumphant Christianity” (“encounter” is a euphemism) and suggests that Jewish identity would likely have disappeared without its Christian nemesis.[13] Christendom, therefore, fully deserves to be called Judeo-Christian in the sense that Judaism and Christianity were the only two legal religions, and existed in a kind of dialectical opposition necessary for both: Jews were the “witness people” for Christians, and Christians were the new face of Haman for Jews.
Forced baptism of Jews was theoretically forbidden, although it happened in times of crisis. Gratian of Bologna, in his collection of “canon” law compiled in the 1140s (the Decretum), cites a letter of Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) and a decree of the Fourth Council of Toledo (633), confirming that Jews were not to be forcibly converted but only persuaded “by gentle means rather than by harsh means lest adversity alienate the mind of those whom a reasonable argument would have been able to attract.”[14] Voluntary conversion of Jews to Christianity happened on an individual basis, but remained rare.
Unlike Christian heretics, Jews were never chased by the Inquisition and never tortured or burned on the stake—unless they were suspected of “Judaizing” after receiving baptism. This happened inevitably, since Jews who converted (generally to avoid forced exile), were asked to stop being Jews but not to stop reading their Bible. They moved in with the biggest part of their Jewishness, while being freed from all the civil restrictions imposed on their non-converted brethren. Quite logically, some, like the bishop of Burgos Alonso Cartagena (1384-1456), son of the great rabbi of the same city, held that a converted Jew was a better Christian because he did not really convert but rather deepened his Jewish faith.[15]
In fact, the Christian sanctification of the Jewish Tanakh has discouraged Jews from questioning their scriptures and breaking free from its mental conditioning. Any Jew who rejected the divine inspiration of the Torah was not only banned from his Jewish community, but found no shelter among Christians: this happened to Baruch Spinoza and many others. Christians have prayed that the Jews would open their heart to Christ, but they have done nothing to free them from Yahweh.
John Chrysostom (c. 346-407), the most influential Greek theologian of his time, came up with an explanation for Jewish sociopathic behavior that is laughably absurd: the Jews are the way they are because they didn’t follow their Torah when they should have, and because they follow it when they shouldn’t:
Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation. When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable that those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it? (First Homily Against the Jews ii,3)
How confusing! On the one hand, the Jews are told that their Yahweh is the true God and that their Bible is holy, but on the other hand, they are criticized for behaviors they have learned precisely from Yahweh and the Bible. They are accused of plotting to rule the world, although it is the very promise that Yahweh made to them: “Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world” (Deuteronomy 28:1). They are seen as having only contempt for others’ nationalities, but they have learned it from their god: “All the nations are as nothing before Him, for Him they count as nothingness and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17). They are blamed for their materialism and their greed, but in that also they imitate Yahweh, who dreams only of plunder: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in” (Haggai 2:7). Above all, they are rebuked for their separatism, although this is the very essence of Yahweh’s message to them: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
Because of the sanctification of the Old Testament, Christians looked up to Jews as a metaphysically superior race, and to Judaism as God’s original religion. The same John Chrysostom complained that many Christians “join the Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts” (First Homily i,5).
Is it not strange that those who worship the Crucified keep common festival with those who crucified him? Is it not a sign of folly and the worst madness? … For when they see that you, who worship the Christ whom they crucified, are reverently following their rituals, how can they fail to think that the rites they have performed are the best and that our ceremonies are worthless?” (First Homily v,1-7).
To John’s horror, some Christians even get circumcised. “Do not tell me,” he warns them, “that circumcision is just a single command; it is that very command which imposes on you the entire yoke of the Law” (Second Homily ii,4).
Christianity has not only tolerated, but empowered the Jews. By recognizing their special status as the people of the Old Testament, once chosen by God among all nations, Christians have granted them an extraordinary symbolic power that no other ethnic community can compete with. While Romans before Constantine had been laughing at the Jews’ delusional claim to divine election, Christianity has taught Gentiles to consent to that claim. Are they not the first and only ethnic group whom the God of the universe has addressed personally, the people whom He has loved to the point of exterminating their enemies?
There were periods when the Jewish lobby had great cultural, economic and even political influence. In the mid-9th century, the bishop of Lyon Agobard complained to the emperor Louis the Pious, Charlemagne’s son, that the Jews produce “signed ordinances of your name with golden seals” guaranteeing them outrageous advantages, and that the envoys of the Emperor are “terrible toward Christians and gentle towards Jews” (On the insolence of the Jews). Agobard even complains of an imperial edict imposing Sunday rather than Saturday as market day in order to please the Jews. In another letter, he complains of an edict forbidding anyone to baptize the slaves of the Jews without the permission of their masters. Louis the Pious was said to be under the influence of his wife Judith—a name that translates as “Jewess”. She was so friendly to Jews that the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz hypothesizes that she was a secret Jewess, in the manner of the biblical Esther. Jews were so highly regarded that Bodo, a Frankish deacon at the court of Louis the Pious, converted to Judaism.[16]
Certainly, in the following centuries, Jews were expelled from one Christian kingdom after another. But Jewish expulsions do not contradict Jewish influence. On the contrary, they were related as an effect is to its cause. Each of these expulsions was a reaction to a situation unknown in pre-Christian Antiquity: Jewish communities gaining inordinate economic power, under the protection of a royal administration (Jews served as the kings’ tax collectors and moneylenders in times of war), until this economic power, yielding political and social power, reaches a point of saturation, causes pogroms and forces the king to take measures. The Jews in England, for example, first brought as administrators and usurers by William of Normandy, had become very wealthy and influential by the 12th century, with one of them in particular, Aaron of Lincoln, being “perhaps the richest man in England”, until king Edward I, failing to force them to give up usury, expelled them in 1290.[17] The Jews would come back in force in the 17th century, first as Marranos, when, according to Jewish historian Cecil Roth, “Puritanism represented above all a return to the Bible, and this automatically fostered a more favourable frame of mind towards the people of the Old Testament.”[18]
Because it is written right under their nose in their Holy Book, Christians have never come to the realization that the Mosaic contract is nothing but a program for world domination by the Jewish nation, fraudulently presented as a license from God to steal and murder. The vulnerability of Christian societies to Jewish Power is directly related to this blindness inflicted on them by the Church. In 1236, Pope Gregory IX publicly condemned the Talmud as “the first cause that keeps the Jews stubborn in their perfidy,” as E. Michael Jones reminds us.[19] And so the Talmud was burnt. But the Talmud is nothing but a series of commentaries on the Tanakh. Many Christians still blame the Talmud for Jewish misanthropy, when in fact the Talmud now has very little influence beyond Jewish orthodox circles. In fact, Zionism was founded on the rejection of the Talmud and a return to the Biblical project. Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, explicitly justify their contempt for International Law by the Bible, never the Talmud. I believe it is a fatal and unforgivable mistake not to recognize that the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Old Testament, is the textbook of Israel’s demonic behavior on the international scene. As H. G. Wells once wrote, the Bible spells out “a conspiracy against the rest of the world.” In the Bible, “you have the conspiracy plain and clear, … an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. … It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.”[20]
Why Christian Zionists have a point
Today, it is a delusion to think that the Christian responsibility in the Jewish stranglehold on the West is restricted to Christian Zionism, and that Christian Zionists can be defeated by anti-Zionist Christians. Looking at this debate from outside (I am not a Christian), I don’t see that Christian Zionists are less rational than anti-Zionist Christians. Christianity is irrational in any version of it. But when anti-Zionist Christians claim that the term “Judeo-Christianity” is a misnomer, I beg to differ. In “The myth of a ‘Judeo-Christian’ West: Why the label doesn’t hold up”, Lorenzo Maria Pacini complains that the term “is a contradiction in theological terms.” Christianity, she says, “is based on the belief that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the savior of humanity. Judaism explicitly rejects Jesus as the Messiah, considers him a false prophet, and, in many rabbinical texts, denigrates him harshly.” She misses the point: the very notion of Messiah is Jewish, and presupposes that Israel is God’s chosen nation. From the Jewish point of view, Christianity is a Jewish heresy. Christians agree with Jews that God had revealed Himself uniquely to Abraham, Jacob and Moses—while all other civilizations, Romans included, were devil-worshippers—, and that God planned to send the Messiah to Israel. The only disagreement is about the Messiah. If Jesus Christ, besides being the Son of God, is Israel’s Messiah, then truly, “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22).
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t support the idea that Western civilization is Judeo-Christian, let alone that “it all began at Mount Sinai,” as Josh Hammer writes in his grotesque Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West. On the contrary, I have argued (here and here) that the real genius of our civilization in art, science and philosophy is Helleno-Roman, and flourished despite Christianity rather than because of it. I’m not even willing to credit the cathedrals to Christianity, for they were built by guilds of “free masons” whose Christian faith is irrelevant to their craft. What I say is that, to the extent we are Christians, we are Judeo-Christians. The only Christians who were not Judeo- were those who rejected the Old Testament, such as the Manichean Faustus who called Augustine a half-Christian for worshipping the Jewish god (Augustine , Contra Faustus i,2).
To say, as I hear often, that the problem is that Christianity has been infiltrated by Jews (through Calvinism, the Jesuits, Scofield’s Bible, Vatican II or whatever else) is a tautology: Christianity is Jewish infiltration of Roman civilization from the start. Anti-Zionist Christians claim that Christian Zionism is based on the false doctrine of dispensationalism, which claims that God’s promise to Israel is still valid. That’s partially true (only partially, because not every Zionist Christian is a dispensationalist). But let’s see if that is un-Christian.
In his Epistle to the Romans, certainly one the most influential texts in the New Testament, Paul asserts that God’s promise to Israel is eternal and that the Jews “are still well loved for the sake of their ancestors. There is no change of mind on God’s part about the gifts he has made or of his choice” (11:28-29). What Paul is saying to the Gentiles, essentially, is that the Israelites are still God’s chosen people. The contract still holds. The Jews have not been unchosen. God had to work through the Gentiles because of the Jews’ rejection of Christ, Paul explains, but in the end, “all will be restored to them [the Jews]” (11:12). “Part of Israel had its mind hardened, but only until the gentiles have wholly come in; and this is how all Israel will be saved” (11:25-26). In Paul’s famous metaphor of the grafting, Israel is like a good olive tree planted by God, and gentile Christians are like branches cut off from wild (bad) olive trees and grafted into Israel (11:17). Paul then warns those converted Gentiles not to feel superior: “if you start feeling proud, think: it is not you that sustain the root, but the root that sustains you” (11:18). The grafted branches can be cut off if they fail, while it will be easy for “the branches that naturally belong there, to be grafted on to the olive tree which is their own” (11:24).
Before being a Christian (a term that didn’t appear before the 2nd century), Paul is a cosmopolitan Jew trying to find a way for his nation to progress toward its ultimate destiny through the Roman Empire rather than against it. His mindset is very similar to that of Flavius Josephus who, in The Jewish War (vi,5), reinterpreted the Jewish messianic prophecies as referring to Vespasian. What moved the Judeans to revolt against Rome, he writes, “was an ambiguous prophecy from their Scripture that ‘one from their country should rule the entire world.’” But they were wrong in their interpretation of this prophecy, because it applied in reality to Vespasian, “who was appointed emperor in Judea.” By turning Jewish prophecy on its head, Josephus was not giving up on the destiny of the Jews to rule the world; he was elaborating a Plan B, one that relied on using the strength of the Roman Empire rather than opposing it. Like Philo of Alexandria before him, but in a different way, he was trying to convert Rome to the Jewish worldview. By recognizing Vespasian as the Messiah, he was considering Rome as the instrument of the Jewish conquest of the world, just as the Second Isaiah had been considering Persia when he called Cyrus the Great the “Messiah” (Isaiah 45:1). Josephus’ reinterpretation of Jewish prophecies didn’t start a religion, but Paul’s did, and ultimately conquered Rome.
Of course, anti-Zionist Christians also have a point with their supersessionism doctrine: the new covenant supercedes the old—although Jesus denies it in Matthew 5:17, and “new” doesn’t appear in his programmatic sentence, “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, poured out for many,” echoing Moses in Exodus 24:8: “This is the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you”. Everyone has points. Ultimately, whether the old covenant is obsolete or still valid is a matter of dispute between Christians, and I’m not taking part in it. Every Christian believes his brand of Christianity is the true Christianity, the one that Jesus wanted. But for the outside observer, there is no true, eternal Christianity: Christianity is whatever Christianity is at any given time. And at the present time, Christianity is an instrument of Jewish Power. With all due respect for E. Michael Jones, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and like-minded Catholics, they can never turn Christianity into something un-Jewish, unless they convert to Marcionism.
The Irresistible Zionization of Christianity
I predict that Christian Zionism will continue to grow, as more and more Jews will finance and promote it, while non-Zionist Christianity will continue to dwindle in developed countries, as less and less non-Jews will find it useful for their personal salvation or for the salvation of their civilization. A recent significant phenomenon is the appearance of a Catholic version of Christian Zionism (for which Vatican II had already laid the ground). From Sinai to Rome: Jewish Identity in the Catholic Church is a book addressed to Catholics, “concerned with recovering the Jewish dimensions of the Gospel and the Church so that Catholicism may recover its full ecclesial dimensions as consisting of Jews and gentiles under the Messiah of Israel.” The authors, including Catholic priests with names like Elias Friedman and Antoine Levy, “argue that it is only in taking seriously the Jewish context of Jesus and his disciples and teachings that we come to see the Church for what it is: a Jewish covenantal community established in Abraham and welcoming the gentiles, the nations, to share this great promise and gift from God.” Echoing Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Catholic Hebrew scholar Angela Costley claims that “we should see the gentile church as an insertion into Israel,” and that “Israel is not rejected for not accepting Jesus as the Messiah as previously thought, but that gentiles are instead incorporated into Israel.”
I am not saying that Christian Zionism is a good thing, I’m saying that it is inevitable. Christianity was designed with a backdoor, an embedded device meant for Judaism to take control of it. The Old Testament is a Jewish Trojan Horse into the Roman city. Although there will always remain some anti-Zionist Christians, mainstream Christianity is being taken over by Jews. Popes are as Jew-friendly as they can get. In France, the most publicized defender of the Catholic faith is Eric Zemmour, a Jew who privately hangs out with the most despicable anti-Christian Zionists after debating them on TV. Are French Catholics being fooled by this charade? Yes, completely.
The best metaphor for what is happening is in the Book of Joshua. While the Israelites are besieging Jericho, two Israeli spies enter the city and spend the night with a prostitute named Rahab, who hides them in exchange for being spared, together with her family, when the Israelites will take over the city. Then she provides the means for the Israelite warriors to enter the city and slaughter everyone, “men and women, young and old” (6:21). As justification for betraying her own people, she tells the Israelites that “Yahweh your god is God both in Heaven above and on Earth beneath” (2:11), something that neither the narrator, nor Yahweh, nor any Israelite in the Book of Joshua ever claims (Yahweh is systematically designated as “the god of Israel” in that book). My French Catholic Bible (La Bible de Jérusalem published by the Dominican École Biblique) adds a footnote to Rahab’s “profession of faith to the God of Israel”, saying it “made Rahab, in the eyes of more than one Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find this footnote, likening the Church to the whore of Jericho, emblematic of the true role of Christianity. For it is indeed the Church that, by acknowledging the god of Israel as the universal God, introduced the Jews into the heart of the Gentile city and, over the centuries, allowed them to seize power.
Notes
[1] Leo Strauss, “Why We Remain Jews: Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?” in Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth Hart Green, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 311-356, online here. An audio recording is accessible here.
[2] Jean-Christophe Attias, Isaac Abravanel, la mémoire et l’espérance, Cerf, 1992, pp. 140, 111, 269, 276.
[3] Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible’s Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition, S&S International, 2007.
[4] Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.
[5] Emily A. Schmidt, “The Flavian Triumph and the Arch of Titus: The Jewish God in Flavian Rome,” on escholarship.org; also Jodi Magness, “The Arch of Titus and the Fate of the God of Israel,” Journal of Jewish Studies, 2008, vol. 59, n°2, pp. 201-217.
[6] Barry Strauss, Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World Mightiest Empire, Simon & Schuster, 2025, p. 234. Arrian’s book is lost, and there is no certainty that the “nation” mentioned in this preserved line is the Jewish nation, but that is the opinion of Menahem Stern in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, vol. 2, 1976, pp. 152-155.
[7] Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations, Penguin, 2007, p. 494.
[8] Strauss, Jews vs. Rome, op. cit., pp. 1, 3.
[9] Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, HarperOne, 2013, pp. 14-15.
[10] Bart D. Ehrman concurs in The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 130, 161.
[11] The targeting of Christians in Rome under Nero in 64, as told by Tacitus 50 years later, probably never happened, as Christians were then indistinguishable from Jews, but if some people were burned alive then, that was because the penalty for arson was to be burnt alive.
[12] Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism, Yale UP, 2010. I quote from her article, “Excaecati Occulta Justitia Dei: Augustine on Jews and Judaism” Journal in Early Christian Studies,vol. 3, n° 3, Fall 1995, pp. 299-324.
[13] Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine, University of Chicago Press, 1987 , p. ix.
[14] Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution, The History Press, 2006, p. 29.
[15] Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity, Princeton UP, 2018, pp. 76, 122.
[16] Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1891, vol. III, ch. VI, p. 162.
[17] Richard Huscroft, Expulsion: England’s Jewish Solution, The History Press, 2006, pp. 41-45
[18] Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews in England (1941), Clarendon Press, 1964, p. 148.
[19] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Fidelity Press, 2008, pp. 118–123.
[20] Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, 1939 (archive.org), p. 128.
Source: https://www.unz.com/article/jews-against-rome-forever/