PART 2:THE CONTROVERSY OF ZION...THE FORGING OF THE CHAINS & THE FALL OF BABYLON & THE PEOPLE WEPT

THE CONTROVERSY
OF ZION
BY DOUGLAS REED

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, comprising 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.[Levites=Grandfather of Zionism DC] 

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 selfadministration. 

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 tribespeople 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 high priest'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 racioreligious 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. [They are hardly scholars,and having to invent a second Isaiah,just shows they are students of the Levites,not the Lord D.C]

"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 delivered 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", "anti semite" 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 servants . . . even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people". 

With this glimpse of a loving God of all mankind the protests ended. The Levites and their Law were left paramount, and therewith the true captivity of "the Jews" began, for their enslavement to the law of racial and religious hatred is the only genuine captivity they have suffered. 

Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah, like the earlier Israelite remonstrants, spoke for mankind, which was slowly groping its way towards the light when the Levites reverted to darkness. Before the Law was even  completed Prince Sidharta Gautama, the Buddha, had lived and died and founded the first religion of all mankind, founded on his First Law of Life: "From good must come good, and from evil must come evil". This was the answer to the Levites' Second Law, though they probably never heard of it. It was also time's and the human spirit's inevitable answer to Brahminism, Hindu racialism and the cult of the perpetual master caste (which strongly resembles literal Judaism). 

Five hundred years ahead lay a second universal religion, and five hundred years after that a third. The little nation of Judah was held back in the Law's chains from this movement of mankind; it was arrested in the fossil stage of spiritual development, and yet its primitive tribal creed retained life and vigour. The Levitical Law, still potent in the Twentieth Century, is in its nature a survival from sunken times. 

Such a Law was bound to cause curiosity, first, and alarm next among peoples with whom the Judahites dwelt, or to their neighbours, if they dwelt alone. When the Judahites returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, about 538 BC, this impact on other peoples began. At that moment in time it was felt only by little clans and tribes, the immediate neighbours of the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem. It has continued ever since in widening circles, being felt by ever greater numbers of peoples, and in our century has produced its greatest disturbances among them.

Chapter 5 

THE FALL OF BABYLON 

Before this first impact of "the Mosaic Law" could be felt by other peoples came the event of 536 BC which set the pattern of the Twentieth Century AD: the fall of Babylon. 

The resemblance between the pattern of events today (that is to say, the shape taken by the outcome of the two World Wars) and that of the fall of Babylon is too great to be accidental, and in fact can now be shown to have been deliberately produced. The peoples of the West in the present century, had they realized it, were governed under "the Judaic Law", not under any law of their own, by the forces that controlled governments. 

The grouping of characters and the final denouement are alike in all three cases. On one side of the stage is the foreign potentate who has oppressed and affronted the Judahites (or, today, the Jews). In Babylon this was "King Belshazzar"; in the first World War it was the Russian Czar; in the second war, it was Hitler. Confronting this "persecutor", is the other foreign potentate, the liberator. In Babylon, this was King Cyrus of Persia; in the second case, it was a Mr. Balfour; in the third, it was a President Truman. 

Between these adversaries stands the Jehovan prophet triumphant, the great man at the foreign ruler's court who foretells, and survives, the disaster which is about to befall the "persecutor". In Babylon, this was Daniel. In the first and second world wars of this century it was a Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist prophet at foreign courts. 

These are the characters. Then comes the denouement, a Jehovan vengeance on "the heathen" and a Jewish triumph in the form of a symbolic "restoration". "King Belshazzar", when Daniel has foretold his doom, is killed "in the same night" and his kingdom falls to the enemy. The Jewish captors who killed the Russian Czar and his family, at the end of the First Twentieth Century war, quoted this precedent in a couplet "written on the wall" of the room where the massacre occurred; the Nazi leaders, at the end of the Second Twentieth Century war, were hanged on the Jewish Day of Atonement. 

Thus the two World Wars of this century have conformed, in their outcomes, to the pattern of the Babylonian-Persian war of antiquity as depicted in the Old Testament. 

Presumably the peoples who fought that ancient war thought that something more than the cause of the Judahites was at stake, and that they strove for some purpose or interest of their own. But in the narrative that has come down through the centuries all else has been expunged. The only significant results, in the picture which has been imprinted on the minds of peoples, are the Jehovan vengeance and Judahite triumph, and the two world wars of this century followed that same pattern. 

King Belshazzar survives only as the symbolic foreign "persecutor" of the  Judahites (although Jehovah made them his captives, as a punishment, he is nevertheless their "persecutor" and hence must be barbarously destroyed). King Cyrus, similarly, is but the fulfilling instrument of Jehovah's promise to visit "all these curses" on "thine enemies" when they have served their turn as captors (and thus deserves no credit in his own right, either as conqueror or liberator; he is not truly any better than King Belshazzar, and his house will in turn be destroyed). 

King Cyrus, from what true history tells of him, seems to have been an enlightened man, as well as the founder of an empire which spread over all Western Asia. According to the encyclopaedias, "he left the nations he subjected free in the observance of their religions and the maintenance of their institutions". Thus the Judahites may have benefited by a policy which he impartially applied to all, and possibly King Cyrus, could he return to earth today, would be surprised to find that his portrait in history is that of a man whose only notable and enduring achievement was to restore a few thousand Judahites to Jerusalem. 

However, if by any chance he thought this particular question to be of paramount importance among his undertakings (as the Twentieth Century politicians demonstrably think), he would at his return to earth today be much gratified, for he would find that through this act he exerted a greater influence on human events in the 2,500 years to come, probably than any other temporal ruler of any age. No other deed of antiquity has had consequences in the present time so great or so plain to trace. 

In the Twentieth Century AD two generations of Western politicians, in the quest for Jewish favour, competed with each other to play the part of King Cyrus. The result was that the two World Wars produced only two enduring and significant results: the Jehovan vengeance on the symbolic "persecutor" and the Jewish triumph in the form of a new "restoration". Thus the symbolic legend of what happened at Babylon had by the Twentieth Century gained the force of the supreme "Law", overriding all other laws, and of truth and history. 

The legend itself seems to have been two-thirds untruth, or what today would be called propaganda. King Belshazzar himself was apparently invented by the Levites. The historical book which records the fall of Babylon was compiled several centuries later and was attributed to one "Daniel". It states that he was a Judahite captive in Babylon who rose to the highest place at court there and "sat in the gate of the king" (Nebuchadnezzar) through his skill in interpreting dreams. Upon him devolved the task of interpreting the "writing on the wall" (Daniel, 5). 

King "Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar", is then depicted as offering an insult to the Judahites by using "the golden and silver vessels" taken by his father from the temple in Jerusalem for a banquet with his princes, wives and concubines. Thereon the fingers of a man's hand write on the wall the words,  "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin". Daniel, being called to interpret, tells the king that they mean, "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians". Thereon King Belshazzar "in the same night" is slain, and the Persian conqueror enters, who is to "restore" the Judahites. 

Thus the end of a king and a kingdom is related directly to an affront offered to Judah and given the guise of a Jehovan retribution and Jewish vengeance. What matter if Daniel and King Belshazzar never existed: by its inclusion in the Levitical scriptures this anecdote gained the status of a legal precedent! When the murder of the Russian Czar, his wife, daughters and son in 1918, again, was related directly to this legend by words quoted from it and scrawled on a blood-bespattered wall this was at once an avowal of authorship of the deed, and a citation of the legal authority for it. 

When an ancient legend can produce such effects, twenty-five centuries afterwards, there is little gain in demonstrating its untruth, for politicians and the masses they manipulate alike love their legends more than truth. However, of the three protagonists in this version of the fall of Babylon, only King Cyrus certainly existed; King Belshazzar and Daniel seem to be figures of Levitical phantasy! 

The Jewish Encyclopaedia, which points out that King Nebuchadnezzar had no son called Belshazzar and that no king called Belshazzar reigned in Babylon when King Cyrus conquered it, says impartially that "the author of Daniel simply did not have correct data at hand", and thus does not believe that Daniel wrote Daniel. Obviously, if an important Judahite favourite at court, called Daniel, had written the book he would at least have known the name of the king whose end he foretold, and thus have had "correct data". 

Evidently the book of Daniel, like the books of the Law attributed to Moses, was the product of Levitical scribes who in it patiently continued to make history conform with their Law, already laid down. If a King Belshazzar could be invented for the purpose of illustration and precedent, so could a prophet Daniel. This, apparently mythical Daniel is the most popular prophet of all with the fervent Zionists of today, who rejoice in the anecdote of the Judahite vengeance and triumph foretold on the wall, and see in it the legal precedent for all later time. The story of our present century has done more than that of any earlier one to strengthen them in this belief and for them Daniel, with his "interpretation" fulfilled "in the same night", gives the conclusive, crushing answer to the earlier Israelite prophets who had envisioned a loving God of all men. The fall of Babylon (as depicted by the Levites) gave practical proof of the truth and force of the "Mosaic" Law.

However, it would all have come to nothing without King Cyrus, who alone of the three protagonists did exist and did either allow, or compel, a few thousand Judahites to return to Jerusalem. At that point in history the Levitical theory of  politics, which aimed at the exercise of power through the acquirement of mastery over foreign rulers, was put to its first practical test and was successful. 

The Persian king was the first of a long line of Gentile oracles worked by the ruling sect, which through him demonstrated that it had found the secret of infesting, first, and then directing the actions of foreign governments. 

By the present century this mastery of governments had been brought to such a degree of power that they were all, in large measure, under one supreme control, so that their actions, in the end, always served the ambition of this supreme party. Towards the end of this book the reader will see how the Gentile oracles were worked, so that the antagonisms of peoples might be incited and brought into collision for this super national purpose. 

However, the reader will need to look into his own soul to find, if he can, the reason why these oracles, his own leaders, submitted. 

King Cyrus was the first of them. Without his support the sect could not have set itself up again in Jerusalem and have convinced the incredulous Judahite masses, watching from all parts of the known world, that the racial Law was potent and would be literally fulfilled. The line of cause-and-effect runs straight and clear from the fall of Babylon to this century's great events; the West today owes its successive disappointments and its decline even more to King Cyrus, the first of the Gentile puppets, than to the ingenious, stealthy priesthood itself. 

"Judaism originated in the name of the Persian king and by the authority of his Empire, and thus the effect of the Empire of the Alchemenides extends with great power, as almost nothing else, directly into our present age", says Professor Eduard Meyer, and this authority's conclusion is demonstrably true. Five hundred years before the West even began, the Levites laid down the Law, and then through King Cyrus set the precedent and pattern for the downfall of the West itself. 

The five books of the Law were still not complete when King Cyrus came to Babylon and conquered. The sect in Babylon was still busy on them and on the supporting version of history which, by such examples as that of "King Belshazzar", was to give plausibility to the unbelievable and supply the precedent for barbaric deeds twenty-five centuries later. The mass of Judahites still knew nothing of the Law of racial intolerance which was being prepared for them, though religious intolerance was by this time familiar to them: 

The sect had yet to complete the Law and then to apply it to its own people. When that happened in 458 BC, under another Persian king, the controversy of Zion at last took the shape in which it still implacably confronts its own people and the rest of mankind. The umbilical cord between the Judahites and other men was then finally severed. [Now today,they would be rightfully called a CULT. D.C.] 

These segregated people, before whom the priesthood flaunted its version of the fall of Babylon like a banner, then were set on the road to a future which would find them a compact force among other peoples, to whose undoing they were by their Law dedicated.

Chapter 6 

THE PEOPLE WEPT 

The first people to feel the impact of this "Mosaic Law" which the Levites were developing in Babylon were the Samaritans, who in 538 BC warmly welcomed the Judahites returning to Jerusalem and in token of friendship offered to help rebuild the temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 596 BC. At the Levites' order the Samaritans were brusquely repulsed and at this affront became hostile, so that the restoration of the temple was delayed until 520 BC. (The feud against the Samaritans continued throughout the centuries to the present time, when they have been reduced to a few score or dozen souls). 

The friendly approach shows that the new "Law" of the Judeans was unknown to their neighbours, who were taken by surprise by this rebuff. It seems to have been just as little known to, or understood by the Judeans themselves, at that period. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon and, despite anything the priests may have told them, they clearly did not at that time realize that they were to be racially, as well as religiously, debarred from their fellow men. 

The repulse of the Samaritans gave the first hint of what was to follow. The Samaritans were Israelites, probably infused with other blood. They practised Jehovah-worship but did not recognize the supremacy of Jerusalem and on that account alone would have incurred the hatred of the Levites, who probably saw in them the danger of an Israelite revival and absorption of Judah. Thus the Samaritans were put under the major ban; even by taking a piece of bread from a Samaritan a Judahite broke all the statutes and judgments of the Levites and abominably defiled himself. 

After this first clash with their neighbours, the Judeans looked around them at ruined and depopulated Jerusalem. None of them, unless they were ancients, can have known it before. They were few in number: those who "returned" numbered about forty thousand, which was perhaps a tenth or twentieth of the total, for centuries self-dispersed in other lands. [This holds true today as far as how 'many' have returned,compared to how many are dispersed in other nations.We have long passed the time where those who have chosen to live among other peoples, condemn with force those who hold to the cult of the levites DC]

It was not a happy or triumphant return for these people, though it was a major political success for the priesthood. The Levites met the same difficulty as the Zionists in 1903, 1929 and 1953: the chosen people did not want to go to the promised land. Moreover, the leaders did not intend to head "the return"; they wished to stay in Babylon (as the Zionist leaders today wish to stay in New York).[Of course they do who wants to visit hell on Earth,ESPECIALLY,when you are the creator of it. DC] 

The solution found in 538 BC was similar to the one found in 1946: the zealots were ready to go, and a hapless few, who were too poor to choose, were rounded up to accompany them. Those who desired the privilege of remaining in Babylon (under their own prince, the Exilarch, in his own capital!) were mulcted in fines (just as the wealthy Jews of America are pressed today to provide funds for the Zionist state). 

The Jewish nation was already and finally dispersed; obviously it could never again be reassembled in Canaan. That was a fact, unalterable and permanent; "from the exile the nation did not return, but a religious sect only", says Professor Wellhausen. But this symbolic "return" was of the utmost importance to the priesthood in establishing its mystic power over the scattered mass. It could be held up as the proof that "the Law" was true and valid, and that the destiny of the "special people" was to destroy and dominate. 

The "return" meant quite different things to the few who returned and to the many who watched from the dispersion. To the few it meant the possibility to practise Jehovah-worship in the way and on the spot prescribed by "the Law". To the many it was a triumph of Judahite nationalism and the portent of the final triumph foreseen by the Law.

This watching mass had seen the means by which the success had been achieved, the conqueror undone and overthrown, and the "captivity" transformed into the "return". Segregation had proved effective, and the chief methods of enforcing this segregation were the ghetto and the synagogue. The ghetto (essentially a Levitical concept) had been tried out in Babylon, in the form of the closed-community in which the Judahites lived. 

The collective reading of the law had also proved to be an effective substitute for the ritual of worship which, under the Law, could be performed only at the temple in Jerusalem (this was the beginning of the synagogue). The institutions of the ghetto and the synagogue were adopted by the communities of the dispersion, and gave them a feeling of union with the exiled Judahites and the returned Judeans. 

Thus the "religious sect" which "returned" to an unknown Jerusalem was also the core of the nation within-nations, state-within-states. The priesthood had shown itself able to maintain its theocracy without a territory of its own and under a foreign king. It had ruled its followers under its own Law; and of this Law as it was first imposed in exile on the Judahites in Babylon Dr. Kastein says: "Instead of the constitution of the defunct state, communal autonomy was established, and, instead of the power of the state, there came into being another power, more reliable and more enduring: the stern and inexorable regime enforced by the obligation to render unquestioning obedience to the regulations of the ritual." 

The words deserve careful study; many of "the regulations of the ritual" have been quoted in this book. The Levites had succeeded, in "captivity" and on foreign soil, in "enforcing" a "stern and inexorable regime". The achievement is unique, and it has been a continuing one, from that time to our day. 

"Strangers" are usually puzzled to imagine any means by which the ruling sect could keep so firm a hold over a community scattered about the world. This power is based, ultimately, on terror and fear. Its mysteries are kept hidden from the stranger, but by diligent study he may gain some idea of them. 

The weapon of excommunication is a dreaded one, and the fear which it  inspires rests to some extent on the literal Judaist's belief in the physical efficacy of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy and other books; the Jewish Encyclopaedia testifies to this continuing belief. In this matter there is a strong resemblance to the African Native's belief that he will die if he is "tagati'd", and to the American Negro's fear of voodooist spells. Casting out of the fold is a much-feared penalty (and in the past was often a lethal one), of which examples may be found in the literature of our day. 

Also, for pious (or for that matter superstitious) Judaists the Torah-Talmud is the only Law, and if they submit formally to the laws of countries where they dwell, it is with this inner reservation. Under that only Law the priesthood wields all judicial and magisterial powers (and often has had these formally delegated to it by governments), and literally the Law includes capital punishment on numerous counts; in practice the priesthood in closed-communities of the dispersion has often exacted that penalty. 

The Jerusalem to which a few returned was far from Babylon, in those times, and after their first coup (the repulse of the Samaritans' offer of friendship) the Levites apparently found themselves unable, from a distance, to restrain the normal impulses of human kind. The Judahites, in their impoverished fragment of land, began to settle down and intermarry with their neighbours for all that. They broke no law comprehended by them. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon; they knew about Solomon's hundreds of wives and Moses's Midianite father-in-law, but did not yet know that Moses had been resurrected in order to exterminate all the Midianites save the virgins. Thus they married their neighbours' sons and daughters and this natural intermingling continued for about eighty years after the return. 

During that period the Levites in Babylon completed the Law, the impact of which all nations have felt ever since. Ezekiel of the High Priest's family was its chief architect and probably all five books of the Law, as they have come down, bear his mark. He was the founding-father of intolerance, of racialism and vengeance as a religion, and of murder in the name of God. 

The book of Ezekiel is the most significant of all the Old Testament books. It is more significant than even Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers because it seems to be the fountainhead from which the dark ideas of those books of the Law first sprang. For instance, the student of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy is bound to suspect that the deity in whose name they were uttered was of diabolic nature, not divine; the name, "God", in the sense which has been given to it, cannot be coupled with such menaces. In Ezekiel's book the student finds this suspicion expressly confirmed. Ezekiel puts into the very mouth of God the statement that he had made evil laws in order to inspire misery and fear! This appears in chapter 20 and gives the key to the whole mystery of "the Mosaic Law" . 

In this passage Ezekiel appears to be answering Jeremiah's attack on the  Levites in the matter of sacrificing the firstborn: "And they have built the high places to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart". Ezekiel is not much concerned about the lot of the sons and daughters but is clearly enraged by the charge that the Lord had not commanded the sacrifice of the firstborn, when the scribes had repeatedly ascribed this command to him. His retort is concerned only to show that God had so commanded and thus to justify the priesthood; the admission that the commandment was evil is casual and nonchalant, as if this were of no importance: 

"I am the Lord your God; walk in my statutes and keep my judgments, and do them….Notwithstanding the children rebelled against me; they walked not in my statutes, neither kept my judgments to do them…. then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them, to accomplish my anger against them in the wilderness….Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord." 

The ruling of Christian theologians,[They are the blind leading the blind DC] that the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New, presumably includes this passage! Ezekiel, in his day, forbade any protest by quickly adding, "And shall I be enquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, saith the Lord, I will not be enquired of by you". 

Ezekiel experienced the Fall of Judah and the removal of the sect to Babylon, so that his book is in parts an eye-witness account of events. Its other, "prophetic" parts show this founding-father of literal Judaism to have been a man of dark, even demoniac obsessions; indeed, parts of the book of Ezekiel probably could not be publicly printed as anything but Scripture. 

Early in it he portrays (in words which he also attributes to the Lord God) a siege of Jerusalem in which he, Ezekiel, to atone "for the iniquity of the people", is commanded to eat human excrement baked before his eyes. At his plea, that he has always scrupulously observed the dietary laws and never taken anything abominable in his mouth, this is mitigated to cow's dung. Then he threatens transgressors with cannibalism, a curse on which the Levites laid marked stress:[Hey Zeke demonstrate your strings,and eat shit,yeah really divine there DC] 

". . . the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee and the sons shall eat their fathers…. a third part shall fall by the sword…. and I will scatter a third part unto all the winds….famine and evil beasts…. pestilence and blood….." 

All this is to be the retribution for non-observance, not for evil deeds. Pages of cursings follow and Jehovah promises to use the Gentiles as the rod of chastisement: "Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen,.. and they shall possess your houses". 

Portraying what will happen to those who worship "other gods", Ezekiel in a characteristic vision sees "them that have charge over the city" (Jerusalem) "draw near, every man with his destroying weapon in his hand," One, with a  writer's inkhorn by his side, is commanded by the Lord, "go through the midst of Jerusalem and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof" (these are the zealots in "observance"). The foreheads having been marked, Ezekiel quotes the Lord, "in my hearing", as saying to the men, "Go ye through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark . . . and they went forth and slew in the city". 

After Ezekiel's time men may have thought it wise to be seen sighing and crying in Jerusalem; hence, perhaps, the Wailing Wall. Chapter on chapter of menaces follow, always with the alluring proviso that if the transgressors turn from their wickedness towards observance, even worse things will then be visited on the heathen:[It is now known that the Wailing Wall is no such thing and actually a wall from Herods fort,that the Romans built,NO STONE LEFT STANDING...DC] 

"I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land…. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God…. Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood. Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth…. And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be drunken…. and I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen shall see my judgment that I have executed, and my hand that I have laid upon them".

While the school of scribes founded by Ezekiel continued for eighty years, in Babylon, to compile their Law, the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem gradually developed normal relationships with their neighbours. They had never known the regime of bigotry and exclusion which was being prepared for them in Babylon. Many of the people still prayed to "other gods" for rain, crops, sun and herds, and to Jehovah in tribal feuds. 

Then, in 458 BC, the Levites struck. 

Their Law was ready, which was not by itself of much importance. The Persian King was ready to enforce it for them, and that was of the greatest importance, then and up to the present moment. For the first time the ruling sect accomplished the wonder which they have since repeatedly achieved: by some means they induced a foreign ruler, who was their ostensible master and to all outer appearances a mighty potentate in his own right, to put his soldiers and money at their disposal. 

On this day in 458 BC the Judahites in Jerusalem were finally cut off from mankind and enslaved in a way they never knew in Babylon. This was the true "start of the affair". The story is told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Levitical emissaries from Babylon who were sent to Jerusalem to enforce Ezekiel's law.[I will say this one time Zeke IS NOT a prophet DC]

Ezra of the high priesthood came from Babylon to Jerusalem with some 1500 followers. He came in the name of the Persian King Artaxerxes the Longhanded, with Persian soldiers and Persian gold. He arrived just as Dr. Chaim Weizmann arrived in Palestine in 1917, supported by British arms and British gold, and in 1947, supported by American money and power. Ezra was in legal form a Persian emissary (Dr. Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew, was in legal form a British emissary in 1917). 

What means the sect found to bend King Artaxerxes to its will, none can now discover; after King Cyrus, he was the second potentate to play a puppet's part and in our century this readiness has become a strict qualification for public life. 

Ezra brought the new racial Law with him. He enforced it first among his own travelling companions, allowing only those to accompany him who could prove that they were Judahites by descent, or Levites. When he reached Jerusalem he was "filled with horror and dismay" (Dr. Kastein) by the prevalence of mixed marriages. The Judahites were finding happiness in their fashion; "by tolerating miscegenation with neighbouring tribes they had established peaceful relations based on family ties". 

Dr. Kastein (who was equally horrified by this picture many centuries afterwards) has to admit that the Judahites by this intermingling "observed their tradition as it was understood at the time" and broke no law known to them. Ezra brought Ezekiel's new Law, which once more supplanted the old "tradition". In his status as emissary of the Persian king he had the Jerusalemites assembled and told them that all mixed marriages were to be dissolved; thenceforth "strangers" and everything foreign were to be rigorously excluded. A commission of elders was set up to undo all the wedlocks forged and thus to destroy the "peaceful relations based on family ties". 

Dr. Kastein says that "Ezra's measure was undoubtedly reactionary; it raised to the dignity of a law an enactment which at that time was not included in the Torah" (which the Levites, in Babylon, were still writing down). Dr. Kastein's use of the word "dignity" is of interest in this connection; his book was published, in Berlin, in the year, twenty-four centuries later, when Hitler enacted exactly the same kind of law; it was then called "infamous" by the Zionists, and the armies of the West, reversing the role of the Persian soldiers of 458 BC, were mobilized to destroy it! 

The effect of this deed was the natural one, in 458 BC as in 1917 AD: the neighbouring peoples were affronted and alarmed by the unheard-of innovation. They saw the threat to themselves and they attacked Jerusalem, tearing down the symbols of the inferiority imputed to them: its walls. By that time Ezra, like any Twentieth Century Zionist, had evidently returned to his home abroad, for once more the artificial structure began to crumble and natural tendencies were resumed: intermarriage began again and led anew to "peaceful relations based on family ties". Only force can prevent this from happening.

After thirteen years, in 445 BC, the elders in Babylon struck again. Nehemiah was another figure, as typical of our century as of that time in Babylon. He was of Judahite descent and stood high in the Persian king's favour (as Zionist "advisers" today habitually stand at the right hand of British Prime Ministers and American Presidents; the parallel could not be much closer). He was cupbearer to Artaxerxes himself. He arrived from Babylon in Jerusalem with dictatorial power and enough men and money to re-wall the city (at Persian expense; the parallel with today continues), and it thus became the first true ghetto. It was an empty one, and when the walls were ready Nehemiah ordered that one in ten of the Judahites be chosen by lot to reside in it. 

Race thus became the supreme, though still unwritten tenet of the Law. Jehovah-worshippers who could not satisfy Persian officials and the Levite elders of their descent from Judah, Benjamin or Levi were rejected "with horror" (Dr. Kastein). Every man had to establish "the undisputed purity of his stock" from the registers of births (Hitler's Twentieth Century edict about the Aryan grandmothers was less extreme). [You would think that people with remaining brain cells that work, would see the hypocrisy of  the hate directed at Hitler, by these very same people who INVENTED THE LAW, to control their own people,but sadly it is not the case by these folks who think they are believing in God DC]

Then, in 444 BC, Nehemiah had Ezra embody the ban on mixed marriages in the Torah, so that at last what had been done became part of the much-amended "Law" (and David and Solomon presumably were posthumously cast out of the fold). The heads of clans and families were assembled and required to sign a pledge that they and their peoples would keep all the statutes and judgments of the Torah, with special emphasis on this new one. 

In Leviticus the necessary insertion was made: "I have severed you from other people that ye should be mine".[No The Lord did not sever this people,the priests of the budding cult did DC] Thenceforth no Judahite might marry outside the clan, under penalty of death; every man who married a foreign woman committed a sin against God (Nehemiah, 13.27; this is the law in the Zionist state today). "Strangers" were forbidden to enter the city, so that the Judahites "might be purified from everything foreign". [So the distinction of being referred to as a apartheid State is SPOT ON,according to THEIR OWN LAW people! DC]

Nehemiah and Ezra were both eye-witnesses. Nehemiah is the ideal, unchallengeable narrator: he was there, he was the dictator, his was the deed. He says that when Ezra for the first time read this new Law to the Jerusalemites:

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law". 

These twelve words of contemporary journalism bring the scene as clearly before today's reader as if it had occurred twenty-four hours, not twenty-four centuries ago. He sees the weeping, ghettoized throng of 444 BC through the eyes of the man who, with Persian warriors at his side, forced them into their first true captivity, the spiritual one which thereafter was to enclose any man who called himself "Jew". 

Nehemiah remained twelve years in Jerusalem and then returned to the Babylonian court. At once the artificial structure he had set up in Jerusalem began to disintegrate, so that some years later he descended again on the city, where once more mixed marriages had occurred. He "forcibly dissolved" these,  also setting "the severest penalties" on further transgressions of the kind. Next, "with a view to applying rigorously the selective principle, he again carefully studied the register of births" and ejected all, including even Aaronite families, in whose descent the slightest flaw could be detected. Last, he "ruthlessly purged" the community of all who had failed in "unquestioning and unhesitating allegiance to the established order and the law" and made the entire people renew their pledge. 

This is known as "the New Covenant" (as Deuteronomy was the Second Law; these qualifying words are the milestones of the supplanting heresy). It had to be signed, at Levite order and under Persian duress, by every man in Jerusalem singly, as if it were a business contract. Then Nehemiah finally departed for Babylon, his home, having "completed the task of isolation" and "left behind him a community which, agreed as it now was on all fundamental questions, was able to fend for itself. He had organized their everyday life for them and built up their spiritual foundations". These words are Dr. Kastein's; the reader has seen, also in his words, by what means these Jerusalemites were brought to "agree on all fundamental questions". 

By this time about four hundred years had passed since the repudiation of Judah by Israel, and three hundred since the Assyrian conquest of Israel. This period of time the Levites had used to complete the perversion of the older tradition, to put their racio-religious Law in writing, and at last to clamp it, like shackles, on the Judahites in the little Persian province of Judea. They had succeeded in setting up their fantastic, tribal creed and in establishing their little theocracy. They had started the catalytic agent on its journey through the centuries. 

For more than a hundred generations, since that day when the New Covenant was enforced by Persian arms, and the people who had wept were compelled to sign it anew, a mass of human beings, changing in blood but closely or loosely held in the bonds of this Law, have carried its burden and inheritance, in spiritual isolation from the rest of mankind. The singular paradox remains: though their enchainment was devised by the Levites the chains were Persian. On that day as ever since, though the fanatical sect has dictated their continuing captivity, foreign arms and foreign money have kept them in it. 

Where does responsibility lie between those who incite to a deed and those who commit it? If the answer is that the greater and final responsibility lies with the perpetrator, then the verdict of history is incontestably, though strangely, that responsibility for the heresy of Judaism lies with the Gentiles, who from the time of the Persian kings to this century have done the bidding of the sect that devised it. 

It was a heresy: On the day when King Artaxerxes's soldiers forced the Jerusalemites to sign Ezekiel's New Covenant, the perversion of the earlier Israelite tradition was made complete and the affirmation of God was supplanted  by the denial of God. 

No resemblance remained between the God of the moral commandments and Ezekiel's malevolent deity who boasted that he commanded men to kill their firstborn in order to keep them in awe of himself! This was not revealed God, but a man-made deity, the incarnation of primitive tribalism. What those ancient people signed under duress, in the New Covenant, was either the formal denial of God or the formal claim that God was Judah, and this in fact is the claim expressly made in many Zionist utterances of our time, so that the heresy is openly avowed: 

"God is absorbed in the nationalism of Israel. He becomes the national ethos . . . He creates the world in the Hebrew language. He is the National God" (Rabbi Solomon Goldman). 

"We and God grew up together. . . We have a national God. . . We believe that God is a Jew, that there is no English or American God" (Mr. Maurice Samuel). 

"It was not God who willed these people and their meaning. It was this people who willed this God and this meaning" (Dr. Kastein). 

These statements are explicit, and such phrases are easy to pen in this century, in New York or Chicago, London or Berlin. But at the start of this affair, as Nehemiah recorded: 

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law" and since that day it has given very many cause to weep.


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THE TRANSLATION OF THE LAW