THE CONTROVERSY
OF ZION
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 11
OF ZION
BY DOUGLAS REED
Chapter 11
THE PHARISAIC PHOENIX
Then comes the familiar, recurrent paradox; the catastrophe of Judea, which followed within a few
decades of the death of Jesus, was the triumph of the Pharisees, for it left them supreme in Jewry. By the
crucifixion of Jesus they rid themselves of a "prophet and dreamer" who would have cast down their Law.
The brief remaining years of Judea rid them of all other parties that contended with them for power under that
Law.
After the death of Jesus the Pharisees, according to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, found "a supporter and
friend" in the last Herodian king of Judea, Agrippa I. Agrippa helped dispose of the Sadducees, who
disappeared from the Judean scene, leaving all affairs there in the hands of the Pharisees (whose complaint
about the Idumean line, therefore, seems to have little ground). They were thus left all-powerful in Jerusalem,
like the Levites after the severance of Judah from Israel, and as on that earlier occasion disaster at once
followed. In rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of this, the Pharisees also repeated the history of the Levites.
During the few remaining years of the tiny and riven province the Pharisees once more revised "the
Law", those "commandments of men" which Jesus had most scathingly attacked. Dr. Kastein says, "Jewish life
was regulated by the teachings of the Pharisees; the whole history of Judaism was reconstructed from the Pharisaic point of view . .
Pharisaism shaped the character of Judaism and the life and the thought of the Jew for all the future . . It makes 'separatism' its
chief characteristic ".
Thus, in the immediate sequel to Jesus's life and arraignment of the "commandments of men", the
Pharisees, like the Levites earlier, intensified the racial and tribal nature and rigour of the Law; the creed of
destruction, enslavement and dominion was sharpened on the eve of the people's final dispersion.
Dr. Kastein's words are of especial interest. He had earlier stated (as quoted) that after the infliction of
the "New Covenant" on the Judahites by Nehemiah, the Torah received a "final" editing, and that "no word"
of it was thereafter to be changed. Moreover, at the time of this Pharisaic "reconstruction" the Old
Testament had already been translated into Greek, so that further changes made by the Pharisees could only
have been in the original.
It seems more probable that Dr. Kastein's statement refers to the Talmud, the immense continuation
of the Torah which was apparently begun during the last years of Judea, although it was not reduced to
writing until much later. Whatever happened, "the life and the thought of the Jew" were once again settled
"for all the future", and "separatism" was reaffirmed as the supreme tenet of the Law.
In AD 70, perhaps thirty-five years after the death of Jesus, all fell to pieces. The confusion and
disorder in Judea were incurable and Rome stepped in. The Pharisees, who had originally invited Roman intervention and were supreme in Judea under the Romans,
remained passive.
Other peoples of Palestine, and most especially the Galileans, would not submit to Rome and after
many risings and campaigns the Romans entered and razed Jerusalem. Judea was declared conquered territory
and the name vanished from the map. For long periods during the next nineteen hundred years no Jews at all
lived in Jerusalem (the Samaritans, a tiny remnant of whom have survived all the persecutions, are the only
people who have lived continuously in Palestine since Old Testamentary times).
Dr. Kastein calls the seventy years which ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem "The Heroic
Age", presumably because of the Pharisaic triumph over all others in the contest for the soul of Judaism. He can hardly intend to apply the adjective to the fighting against the Romans, as this was so largely done by the
alien Galileans, of whom he is no admirer.
Chapter 12
THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW
Before Jerusalem fell in 70 AD two bands of travellers passed through its gates. The disciples bore a
new message to mankind, for Christianity had been born. The Pharisees, foreseeing the fate which they had
brought on Jerusalem, removed to a new headquarters from which (as from Babylon of yore) the ruling sect
might exercise command over "the Jews", wherever in the world they lived.
These two small groups of travellers were the vanguard of parties of light and of darkness which, like a
man and his shadow, have gone ever since through the centuries, and ever westward.
The crisis of "the West" today traces directly back to that departure from doomed Jerusalem nineteen
centuries ago, for the two groups bore into the West ideas that could never be reconciled. One had to prevail
over the other, sooner or later, and the great bid for victory of the destructive idea is being witnessed in our
generation.
In the centuries between the story of the West was always, in essentials, that of the struggle between
the two ideas. When "the Law" according to the Levites and Pharisees was in the ascendant, the West made
slaves of men, brought heretics before an inquisition, put apostates to death, and yielded to primitive visions
of master-race hood; thus the Twentieth Century was the time of the worst backsliding in the West. When the
West made men and nations free, established justice between them, set up the right of fair and open trial,
repudiated master-race hood and acknowledged the universal fatherhood of God, it followed the teaching of
him who had come to "fulfil the Law".
The Romans, when they took Jerusalem, struck medals with the inscription, "Judaea devicta, Judaea
capta". This was a premature paean; Jerusalem might be ruined and Judea be empty of Jews, but the ruling
sect was free and victorious. Its opponents around the temple had been swept away by the conqueror and it
was already established in its new "centre", to which it had withdrawn before the fall of the city.
The Pharisees were as supreme in this new citadel as the Levites once in Babylon, but in the outer
world they espied a new enemy. The sect which believed that the Messiah had appeared, and called itself
Christian, did not acknowledge this enmity; on the contrary, its ruling tenet was "love your enemies". But as
the first tenet of the Pharisaic law was "hate your enemies", this was in itself a deliberate affront and
challenge to the elders in their retreat.
They saw from the start that the new religion would have to be destroyed if their "Law" were to
prevail, and they were not deterred by the warning voices which (at this juncture as on all earlier and later
occasions) were heard within their own ranks; for instance, Gamaliel's words when the high priest and
council were about to have Peter and John scourged for preaching in the temple: "Consider well what you are
about to do. If this be the work of men, it will soon fall to nothing; but if it be the work of God you cannot destroy it". The majority o the Pharisees felt
strong enough, in their own man made Law, to "destroy it", and if necessary to work for centuries at that task.
Thus the Pharisees, when they left the surviving Judeans to their fate and set up their new
headquarters at Jamnia (still in Palestine), took their dark secrets of power over men into a world different
from any before it.
Previously their tribal creed had been one among many tribal creeds. Blood vengeance had been the
rule among all men and clans. The neighbouring "heathen" might have been alarmed by the especial
fierceness and vindictiveness of the Judaic creed, but had not offered anything much more enlightened. From
this time on, however, the ruling sect was confronted by a creed which directly controverted every tenet of
their own "Law", as white controverts black. Moreover, this new idea in the world, by the manner and place
of its birth, was forever a rebuke to themselves.
The Pharisees in their stronghold prepared to vanquish this new force that had risen in the world.
Their task was larger than that of the Levites in Babylon. The temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was
depopulated. The tribe of Judah had long since been broken up; now the race of Judeans was dissolving.
There remained a "Jewish nation", composed of people of many admixtures of blood, who were spread all
over the known world, and had to be kept united by the power of the tribal idea and of the "return" to a land
"promised" to a "special people"; this dispersed nation had also to be kept convinced of its destructive
mission among the nations where it dwelt.
"The Law", in the form that was already becoming known to the outer world, could not again be
amended, or new historical chapters be added to it. Moreover, Jesus had addressed his rebukes specifically to
the falsification of these "commandments of men" by the scribes. He had been killed but not controverted or
even (as the growth of the Christian sect showed) given his quietus. Thus his arraignment of the Law stood
and was so conclusive that not even the Pharisees could expect to convince anybody simply by calling him a
transgressor of it.
Nevertheless, the Law needed constant reinterpretation and application to the events of changing times, so that the "special people" could always be shown that each and every event, however paradoxical at first sight, was in fact one of Jehovan fulfilment. The Pharisees at Jamnia invoked once more their claim to possess the oral secrets of God and began, under it, to reinterpret the "statutes and commandments" so that these could be shown to apply to Christianity. This was the origin of the Talmud, which in effect is the antiChristian extension of the Torah.
The Talmud became, in the course of centuries, "the fence around the Law"; the outer tribal stockade around the inner tribal stockade. The significance lies in the period at which it was begun: when Judea was gone, when "the people" were scattered among all nations, and when a new religion was taking shape which taught that God was the father of all men, not merely the patron of a selected tribe.
Looking back from this distance of time, the task which the Pharisees undertook looks hopeless, for the wish to become part of mankind must surely have had strong appeal to a scattered people.
The Pharisees, as the event has proved, were successful in their huge undertaking. The Talmud was effective in interposing a fence between the Jews and the forces of integration released by Christianity.
Two examples from our present time illustrate the effect of the Talmud, many centuries after its compilation. The brothers Thoreau in their books give the diligent student some rare glimpses behind the Talmudic walls; in one book they depict the little Jewish boy in Poland who had been taught to spit, quite mechanically, as he passed the wayside Calvary and to say, "Cursed be thou who created another religion". In 1953, in New York, a young missionary of the Moravian Church in Jerusalem described the seizure by the Zionists of the Moravian leper home there, called "The Jesus Mission"; their first act was to putty over the name "Jesus" which for more than a hundred years had been inscribed above its door.
Such incidents as these (and the ban on the mention of the name Jesus) derive directly from the teaching of the Talmud, which in effect was another "New Law" with a specifically anti-Christian application. For this reason the next period in the story of Zion is best described as that of the Talmudists, the former ones being those of the Pharisees and of the Levites.
While the Pharisaic Talmudists, in their new academy at Jamnia, worked on the new Law, the tidings of Jesus's life and lesson spread through the territories of Rome.
A Pharisee greatly helped to spread them; Saul of Tarsus set out from Jerusalem (before its fall) to exterminate heretics in Damascus and before he arrived there became a follower of Christ. He preached to Jew and Gentile alike, until he was prevented, and he told the Jews, "It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing that ye put it from you and judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, we turn to the Gentiles".
Dr. Kastein says of Saul, named Paul, that "he made all those whom he persuaded to believe in his prophecy renegades in the widest sense, whether they were Jew or Gentile".
However, what Paul (and others) said was in fact inevitable at that point in time, because men everywhere were groping towards the universal God and turned to the teaching of Jesus as growing things to the light. Possibly this impulse in men was also the reason why Jesus had to appear among the Judeans; the Judaic creed was tribalism in its most fanatical form, even at that time, and, as every action produces its reaction, the counter-idea was bound to appear where the pressure was greatest.
This was a fateful moment for that great area, then little known or populated, which today is called The West. Had not the disciples turned their faces westward, the term, "the West", and that which it denotes, might never have come about.
What is called "Western civilization" cannot be conceived without Christianity. During the nineteen hundred years which followed the death of Jesus the West improved so greatly that it left the rest of the world behind. In material things its advance was so great that at the time when this book was written it was on the brink of the conquest of space; it was about to open the universe to exploration by man. But that was much the lesser part of its achievement.
Its greatest improvement was in the field of the spirit and of man's behaviour towards man. The West established men's right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.
The shadow that followed the disciples out of the gates of Jerusalem, before the Romans entered, also followed Christianity into the West and the Talmudic sect dogged it during all those centuries. The West, in the Twentieth Century, became the scene of the struggle between the nations which had risen with Christianity and the sect dedicated to the destructive idea.
Not only the West is involved in its issue. About five hundred years after the life of Jesus the instinctive impulse of men to seek one God produced another challenge to Talmudic racialism, and this time it came from among the Semitic masses. The Arabs, too, attained to the concept of one God of all men.
Muhammad (dismissed by Dr. Kastein as "a half-educated Bedouin"), like Saul on the road to Damascus, had a vision of God. His teaching in many ways resembled that of Jesus. He held Jesus to have been, like Abraham and Moses, a prophet of God (not the Messiah). He regarded himself as the successor of Moses and Jesus and as the prophet of God, whom he called Allah. There was but one God, Allah, the creator of mankind, and Allah was not the tribal god of the Arabs, but the God of all men.
This religion, like Christianity, taught no hatred of other religions. Muhammad showed only reverence for Jesus and his mother (who are both the subjects of profane derision in Talmudic literature).
However, Muhammad held the Jews to be a destructive force, self-dedicated. The Koran says of them, "Oft as they kindle a beacon fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth; but God loveth not the abettors of disorder ". All down the centuries the wisest men spoke thus of the tribal creed and the sect, until the Twentieth Century of our era, when public discussion of this question was virtually suppressed.
Thus was Islam born, and it spread over the meridional parts of the known world as Christianity spread over the West and Buddhism, earlier, over the East. Great streams began to move, as if towards a confluence at some distant day, for these universal religions are in no major tenet as oil and water, and in the repudiation of master-racehood and the destructive idea they agree.
Christianity and Islam spread out and embraced great masses of mankind; the impulse that moved in men became clear. Far behind these universal religions lay Judaism, in its tribal enclosure, jealously guarded by the inner sect.
In the Twentieth Century this powerful sect was able to bring the masses of Christendom and Islam to the verge of destructive battle with each other. If the present generation sees that clash, the spectacle will be that of one great universal religion contending with another for the purpose of setting up the creed of the "master-race".
Towards this strange denouement, nineteen centuries ahead, the two parties of men set out from Jerusalem long ago.
The Levitical phase was that of isolated Judah, the Babylonian "captivity" and "return", and the production and enforcement of "the Mosaic Law". The Pharisaic phase, which followed and roughly coincided with the Roman overlordship of the province of Judea, ended with the second destruction of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the last Judeans, the Pharisaic supremacy and the withdrawal of the "government" to its new "centre" at Jamnia.
The third, Talmudic phase was much the longest for it lasted seventeen centuries, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. During this period the Jews entered the West and the "government", from a succession of "centres", worked tirelessly to keep the dispersed nation under its control, subject to "the Law", and separate from other peoples.
As this was also the period of Western civilization and of the rise of Christianity, it was inevitable that Christendom specifically (and not merely the generic "heathen", or "strangers", or "other gods") should become the chief target of the Law's destructive commands.
In the eyes of the dominant sect and its devotees, this period, which seems so long and important to Western minds, was essentially as insignificant as the Babylonian period. The fact that the one lasted seventeen centuries and the other fifty years made no real difference: both were merely periods of "exile" for the special people; and under the Law the long Western episode, like the short Babylonian one, was ordained to terminate in disaster for the "captors", a Jewish triumph and a new "return", all of which some new Daniel would interpret in those terms.
The seventeen centuries represented a new "captivity", under the Law, which laid down that wherever the chosen people dwelt outside Jerusalem they were in captivity, and that this captivity was in itself "persecution".
To a literal Zionist like Dr. Kastein, therefore, the seventeen centuries which saw the rise of Christendom form a page of history which is blank save for the record of "Jewish persecution" inscribed on it. The rest was all sound and fury, signifying nothing; it was a period of time during which Jehovah used the heathen to plague the Jews while he prepared the triumph of his special people; and for what they did the heathen have yet to pay (he cries). The one positive result of the seventeen Christian centuries, for him, is that the Jews emerged from them still segregated from mankind, thanks to their Talmudic governors.
Certainly this was an astounding feat; in the entire history of negative achievement, nothing can approach the results obtained by the elders of Zion. In the Talmud they built that "fence around the Law" which successfully withstood, during seventeen hundred years, all the centrifugal forces which attracted the Jews towards mankind.
While they reinforced their stockade, European men, having accepted Christianity, toiled through the centuries to apply its moral law to daily life, by abolishing serfdom and slavery, reducing privilege and inequality and generally raising the dignity of man. This process was known as "emancipation" and by the year 1800 it was about to prevail over the system of absolute rulers and privileged castes.
The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.
Nevertheless, in the case of the Jews there was an obvious paradox which repeatedly baffled and alarmed the peoples among whom they dwelt: The Jewish Law expressed the theory of the master-race in the most arrogant and vindictive form conceivable to the human imagination; how then could the Jews attack nationhood in others? Why did the Jews demand the levelling of barriers between men when they built an ever stronger barrier between the Jews and other men? How could people, who claimed that God had made the very world itself for them to rule, and forbade them to mix with lesser breeds, complain of discrimination?
Now that another hundred and fifty years have passed, the answer to such questions has been given by events.
It was true that the Jewish clamour for emancipation was not truly concerned with the great idea or principle at issue: human liberty. The judaic Law denied that idea and principle. The Talmudic governors of Jewry saw that the quickest way to remove the barriers between themselves and power over nations was to destroy legitimate government in these nations; and the quickest way to that end was to cry "emancipation!".
Thus the door opened by emancipation could be used to introduce the permanent revolutionary force into the life of nations; with the destruction of all legitimate government, the revolutionaries would succeed to power, and these revolutionaries would be Talmud-trained and Talmud-controlled. They would act always under the Mosaic Law, and in this way the end of Babylon could be reproduced in the West.
The evidence of events in the Twentieth Century now shows that this was the plan to which the Talmudic elders worked during the third phase of the story of Zion, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. Thus there was the widest possible difference in the understanding of "emancipation" by the Christianized European peoples among whom the Jews dwelt and among the Talmudic rulers of the Jews. For the great mass of peoples emancipation represented an end: the [78] end of servitude. For the powerful, secret sect it represented a means to the opposite end; the imposition of a new and harsher servitude.
One great danger attended this undertaking. It was, that the destruction of barriers between men might also destroy the barrier between the Jews and other men; this would have destroyed the plan itself, for that force would have been dispersed which was to be used, emancipation once gained, to "pull down and destroy" the nations.
This very nearly happened in the fourth phase of the story of Zion; the century of emancipation (say, from 1800 to 1900 AD) brought the peril of "assimilation". In the century of "freedom" a great number of Jews, in Western Europe and in the new "West" oversea, did evince the desire to cast off the chains of the Judaic Law and to mingle themselves with the life of peoples. For that reason our Zionist historian, Dr. Kastein, considers the Nineteenth Century to be the darkest age in all Jewish history, fraught with the deadly peril of involvement in mankind, which happily was averted. He cannot contemplate without horror the destruction, through assimilation, of the Judaic barriers of race and creed. Thus he calls the Nineteenth Century movement towards emancipation "retrograde" and thanks God that "the Zionist ideology" preserved the Jews from the fate of assimilation.
That led to the fifth phase, the one which began in about 1900 and in which we live. The Talmudic stockade held fast and at the end of the fourth phase the Jews, fully "emancipated" in the Western understanding, were still segregated under their own Law. Those who tended to escape, towards "assimilation", were then drawn back into the tribal enclosure by the mystic power of nationalism.
Using the power over governments which it had gained through emancipation, the ruling sect achieved a second "return" to the chosen land, and thus reestablished the Law of 458 BC, with its destructive and imperial mission. A chauvinist fever, which yet must run its course, was injected into the veins of world Jewry; the great power wielded over Western governments was used to a co-ordinated end; and the whole destructive ordeal of the West in the Twentieth Century was related to and dominated by the ancient ambition of Zion, revived from antiquity to become the dogma of Western politics.
This fifth phase is about fifty-five years old as the present book is written, and its first results are formidable. The "Mosaic Law" has been superimposed on the life of Western peoples, which in fact is governed by that law, not by any law of their own. The political and military operations of two world wars have been diverted to promote the Zionist ambition and the life and treasure of the West have been poured out in support of it.
Forty years of continuous bloodshed in Palestine have obviously been but the prelude to what is yet to come there. Any third world war may begin and spread outward from Palestine, and if one were to start elsewhere it would in its course foreseeably revolve around and turn on the ambition of Zion, which will not be fulfilled until a much greater area in the Middle East has been conquered, "other Gods" have been thrown down, and "all nations" have been enslaved.
Dr. Kastein sees in this fifth phase the golden age when "history may be resumed" (after the meaningless interregnum known as the Christian era) and Zionism, as "the possessor of a world mission", will re-enter into a destined inheritance, culminating in world dominion, of which it was criminally dispossessed in AD 70 (when "history" was interrupted).
This narrative has now reached the third of these five phases, the long one when the Talmudic scribes in the Academy at Jamnia began with infinite industry to spin The Law into a much greater web, of endless ramifications, from which a Jew could hardly escape without dire penalty. By means of it the seemingly impossible was achieved: a breed of people dispersed throughout the world was for seventeen hundred years kept apart from mankind and was trained for a destructive task in the Twentieth Century of the Christian era.
Some account of that remarkable period of preparation and organization, when a fence was built around the Judaic Law, so that "liberty" should not absorb the special people or weaken their destructive force, is here appropriate.66s
Before the last battles with Rome (says Dr. Kastein) "a group of teachers, scholars and educators repaired to Jamnia, taking the fate of their people on their shoulders so as to be responsible for it through the ages . . . At Jamnia the central body for the administration of the Jewish people was established . . . As a rule, when a nation has been utterly routed as the Jews were on this occasion, they perish altogether. But the Jewish people did not perish . . . They had already learnt how to change their attitude during the Babylonian captivity . . . And they followed a similar course now".
At Jamnia the Old Sanhedrin, the source of all legislative, administrative and judicial authority, was established under a new name. In addition, an academy was created for the further development of The Law. In it, the scribes continued the revelation of Jehovah's mind and the interpretation of The Law, so often said to have been put in its final form. In fact, as the dogma is that the Law governs every act of human life in circumstances which continually change, it never could or can be finally codified and must ever be expanded.
Apart from that permanent reason for revision, the new factor, Christianity, had arisen and the Law's application to it had to be defined. Thus the Torah (the Law) began to receive its huge supplement, the Talmud, which was of equal or greater authority.
From Jamnia the Law was administered which "raised an insuperable barrier against the outside world", enforced a discipline "rigid to the point of deadliness", and "kept proselytes at arm's length". The aim was to "make the life of the Jew utterly different from that of the Gentiles". Any law that received a majority of votes of the Sanhedrin became enforceable throughout the dispersed Judaist communities everywhere; "opponents were threatened with the ban, which meant being excluded from the community".
In this way, "the centre of the circle was finally fixed, and the circle itself fully described in the form of the law and the hedge that was set about the people". During this period (before Christianity became the religion of Rome) the secret edict went out from "the centre" at Jamnia, authorizing Jews to pretend denial of their creed and profess conversion to "pagan religions", if circumstances made this expedient.
The period of government from Jamnia lasted for about a century, and then it was transferred to Usha in Galilee, where the Sanhedrin was re-established. "Judaism set limitations about itself and grew ever more exclusive"; at this time the special curse on Jewish Christians was pronounced. In 320 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and enacted laws which forbade marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade Jews to keep Christian slaves. These were the natural response to the Law of exclusion and "stranger"-slavery administered by the Talmudic government at Usha, but they were held to be "persecution" and to escape their reach "the centre" was moved back to Babylonia,— where the Judean colony, which eight centuries earlier had preferred to stay there rather than "return" to Jerusalem, "was still intact". The Talmudic government was set up at Sura, and academies were established there at Pumbedita.
The Talmud, begun at Jamnia and Usha, was completed at Sura and Pumbedita. "A ring of vast proportions and colossal elasticity" was built around the Jews everywhere; the mystic circle of fear and superstition was drawn tighter. From Sura an Exilarch (prince of the captivity of the house of David), ruled, but in time he became a figurehead. Thereafter "the president of the academy" (in effect, the high priest and prime minister) "laid down the rules and regulations not only for the Babylonian Jews but for the whole of Judaism . . . The Jews throughout the world recognized the academies in Babylonia as the authoritative centre of Judaism, and regarded any laws they passed as binding".
Thus the nation-within-nations, the state-within-states, was enfettered and ruled by the Talmudic government in Babylonia.
The core of dogma remained as Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah had shaped and enforced it; but the Talmud, in effect, had taken the place of the Torah, as the Torah earlier had supplanted the "oral traditions". The heads of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita were called Gaonim and began to exercise autocratic power over the scattered Jews. The shadowy Exilarchs (later Nasim, or princes) were dependent on their approval and the Sanhedrin surrendered its functions to them, or was deprived of these. When doubt arose among Jews, anywhere in the world, about the interpretation or application of the Law in any matter of the day, the question was referred to the Gaonate. The verdicts and judgments returned (in the name of Jehovah) from the distant government were the Gaonic Reponses, or laws enacted from Babylonia, to which Jews everywhere submitted, or incurred danger of excommunication.
In this manner the Talmudic thrall spread round the dispersed Jews, wherever they dwelt, "like a closely woven net . . . over ordinary days and holidays, over their actions and over their prayers, over their whole lives and every step they took . . . Nothing in their external lives was any longer allowed to be the sport of arbitrary settlement or of chance". This is the picture of an absolute despotism, different from other despotisms only in the element of distance between the despots and their subjects. Given a benevolent mission, a community of people so closely controlled might immensely fructify the life of peoples; given a destructive one, their presence among others is like that of a blasting charge in rock, operated by a distant hand on a plunger.
For six hundred years the Talmudic government, at Jamnia, Usha, and Sura, remained in or near to its native, oriental climate, where its nature was comprehended by other peoples; they knew how to cope with and counter the savage tribal creed and, as long as they were not hampered or constrained by foreign powers in their dealings with it, they were always able to find a workaday compromise, which enabled all to live in practical amity side by side.
Then came the event which has produced such violent results in our time: the Talmudic government moved into Christianized Europe and established itself among peoples to whom the nature of its dogma and its methods were strange and even incomprehensible. This led, in the course of many centuries, to the recurrent clash of the alien ambition and creed against native interest, which our century is again experiencing.
The nature of Westerners (more especially in the northern latitudes) is to be candid, to declare purposes, and to use words to express intention, and Christianity developed these native traits. The force which appeared among them was of the opposite character, oriental, infinitely subtle, secretive, conspiratorial, and practised in the use of language to disguise real purposes. Therein lay its greatest strength in the encounter with the West.
The removal to Europe came about through the Islamic conquests. The Arabs, under the Prophet's banner, drove the Romans from Palestine. By this means the native inhabitants of Palestine, who had inhabited it some two thousand years before the first Hebrew tribes entered, became the rulers of their own country, and remained so for nine hundred years (until 1517, when the Turks conquered it). An instructive comparison may be made between the Islamic and the Judaic treatment of captives:
The Caliph's order to the Arab conquerors in 637 AD was, "You shall not act treacherously, dishonestly, commit any excess or mutilation, kill any child or old man; cut or burn down palms or fruit trees, kill any sheep, cow or camel, and shall leave alone those whom you find devoting themselves to worship in their cells". Jehovah's order, according to Deuteronomy 20.16, is, "Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth".
From Palestine, Islam then spread its frontiers right across North Africa, so that the great mass of Jews came within the boundaries of the same external authority. Next, Islam turned towards Europe and invaded Spain. Therewith the shadow of Talmudic Zionism fell across the West. The Moorish conquest was "supported with both men and money" by the Jews, who as camp-followers were treated with remarkable favour by the conquerors, city after city being handed to their control! The Koran itself said, "Their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth"; the Islamic armies certainly facilitated this aim.
Christianity thus became submerged in Spain. In these propitious circumstances the Talmudic government was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, and the process began, the results of which have become apparent in our generation. Dr. Kastein says:
"Judaism, dispersed as it was over the face of the globe, was always inclined to set up a fictitious state in the place of the one that had been lost, and always aimed, therefore, at looking to a common centre for guidance . . . This centre was now held to be situated in Spain, whither the national hegemony was transferred from the East. Just as Babylonia had providentially taken the place of Palestine, so now Spain opportunely replaced Babylonia, which, as a centre of Judaism, had ceased to be capable of functioning. All that could be done there had already been accomplished; it had forged the chains with which the individual could bind himself, to avoid being swallowed up by his environment: the Talmud".
The reader will observe the description of events: "individuals" do not commonly bind themselves, of choice, with chains forged for them. Anyway, the Jewish captivity was as close as ever, or perhaps had been made closer. That was for the Jews to ponder.
What was to become of vital importance to the West was that the Jewish government was now in Europe. The directing centre and the destructive idea had both entered the West.
The Talmudic government of the nation-within-nations was continued from Spanish soil. The Gaonate issued its directives; the Talmudic academy was established at Cordova; and sometimes, at least, a shadowy Exilarch reigned over Jewry.
This was done under the protection of Islam; the Moors, like Babylon and Persia before, showed remarkable benevolence towards this force in their midst. To the Spaniards the invader came to bear more and more a Jewish countenance and less and less a Moorish one; the Moors had conquered, but the conqueror's power passed into Jewish hands. The story which the world had earlier seen enacted in Babylon, repeated itself in Spain, and in later centuries was to be re-enacted in every great country of the West.
The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish reconquest, after this long ordeal, was completed in 1492 the Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled. They had become identified with the invaders' rule and were cast out when it ended, as they had followed it in.
The "centre" of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland.
At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt, Palestine, Italy, the [84] Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany, Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the Spanish Peninsula. There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.
Yet in the 1500's, when the "centre" was set up in Poland, "a Jewish population of millions came into being there ", according to Dr. Kastein. But populations of millions do not suddenly "come into being". Dr. Kastein shows himself to be aware that something needs explanation here, and to be reluctant to go into it, for he dismisses the strange thing with the casual remark that the size of this community, of which nothing has previously been heard, "was more due to immigration, apparently from France, Germany and Bohemia, than to any other cause". He does not explain what other cause he might have in mind and, for a diligent scholar, is on this one occasion strangely content with a random surmise.
But when a Zionist historian thus slurs over something the seeker after knowledge may be fairly sure that the root of the matter may by perseverance be found.
So it is in this case; behind Dr. Kastein's artless conjecture the most important fact in the later story of Zion is concealed. The "centre" of Jewish government was at this time planted among a large community of people who were unknown to the world as Jews and in fact were not Jews in any literal sense. They had no Judahite blood at all (for that matter; Judahite blood must by this time have been almost extinct even among the Jews of Western Europe) and their forefathers had never known Judea, or any soil but that of Tartary.
These people were the Khazars, a Turco-Mongolian race which had been converted to Judaism in about the 7th century of our era. This is the only case of the conversion of a large body of people of quite distinct blood to Judaism (the Idumeans were "brothers"). The reason why the Talmudic elders permitted or encouraged it can only be guessed; without it, however, the "Jewish question" would by now have joined the problems that time has solved.
This development (which will be further discussed in a later chapter) was of vital, and perhaps even mortal importance to the West. The natural instinct of Europe was always to expect the greatest danger to its survival from Asia. From the moment when "the centre" was transferred to Poland these Asiatics began to move towards, and later to enter the West in the guise of "Jews" and they brought Europe to its greatest crisis. Though their conversion had occurred so long before they were so remote that the world might never have known of them, had not the Talmudic centre been set up among them, so that they came to group themselves around it.
When they became known, as "Eastern Jews", they profited by the confusing effect of the contraction of the word Judahite, or Judean, to "Jew"; none would ever have believed that they were Judahites or Judeans. From the time when they took over the leadership of Jewry the dogma of "the return" to Palestine was preached in the name of people who had no Semitic blood or ancestral link with Palestine whatever!
From this period the Talmudic government operated with a masse de manoeuvre of a different Asiatic order.
Once again, a virtually independent state was formed within the Polish state, which like so many states before and after showed the greatest benevolence to the nation-within-nations that took shape within its gates. As in the earlier and later cases this in no wise mitigated the hostility of the Talmudic Jews towards it, which was proverbial.
Dr. Kastein gives the picture of this independent Jewish government during the Polish phase. The Talmudists were allowed to draw up "a constitution", and through the 1500's and 1600's the Jews in Poland lived under "an autonomous government". This administered "an iron system of autonomy and an iron religious discipline, which inevitably resulted in the formation of an oligarchic body of administrators and the development of an extreme form of mysticism" (this gives the picture of the training, under rigid discipline in close confinement, which produced the Communist and Zionist revolutionaries of our century).
This autonomous Talmudic government was called the Kahal. In its own territory the Kahal was a fully-empowered government, under Polish suzerainty. It had independent authority of taxation in the ghettos and communities, being responsible for payment of a global sum to the Polish government. It passed laws regulating every action and transaction between man and man and had power to try, judge, convict or acquit.
This power only nominally stopped short of capital punishment: Professor Salo Baron says, "In Poland, where the Jewish court had no right to inflict capital punishment, lynching, as an extra-legal preventive, was encouraged by rabbinical authorities such as Solomon Luria". (This quotation reveals the inner meaning of Dr. Kastein's frequent, but cautious, allusions to "iron discipline", "inexorable discipline", "discipline rigid to the point of deadliness", and the like).
In effect, a Jewish state, Talmud-ruled, was recreated on the soil of Poland.
As Dr. Kastein says, "Such was the constitution of the Jewish state, planted on foreign soil, hemmed in by a wall of foreign laws, with a structure partly self-chosen and partly forced upon it . . . It had its own Jewish law, its own priesthood, its own schools, and its own social institutions, and its own representatives in the Polish government . . . in fact, it possessed all the elements which go to form a state". The achievement of this status was due "in no small measure to the co-operation of the Polish Government".
Then, in 1772, Poland was partitioned and this great community of "Eastern Jews", organized as a state-within-the-state, was divided by national boundaries, most of it coming under Russian rule. At that point, for the first time in more than 2500 years and less than two hundred years before our own day, the "centre" of Jewish government disappears from sight. Up to 1772 there had always been one: in Poland, Spain, Babylonia, Galilee, Judea, Babylon and Judah.
Dr. Kastein says that "the centre ceased to exist". The suggestion is that the centralized control of Jewry at that moment ended, but the length and strength of its earlier survival, and the significant events of the ensuing century, confute that. In a later passage Dr. Kastein himself reveals the truth, when he jubilantly records that in the Nineteenth Century "a Jewish international took shape".
Clearly "the centre" continued, but from 1772 in secret. The reason for the withdrawal into concealment may be deduced from the shape of later events.
The century which followed was that of the revolutionary conspiracy, Communist and Zionist, culminating in the open appearance of these two movements, which have dominated the present century. The Talmudic "centre" was also the centre of this conspiracy. Had it remained in the open the source of conspiracy would have been visible, and the identification of the Talmudic, Eastern Jews with it obvious.
In the event this only became clear when the revolution of 1917 produced an almost all-Jewish government in Russia; and by that time power over governments in the West was so great that the nature of this new regime was little discussed, a virtual law of heresy having come into force there. Had the visible institution continued, the masses of the West would in time have become aware that the Talmudic government of Jewry, though it led the clamour for "emancipation", was also organizing a revolution to destroy all that the peoples might gain from this emancipation.
The Russians, among whom this largest single community of Jews at that time dwelt, knew what had happened. Dr. Kastein says, "The Russians wondered what could possibly be the reason why the Jews did not amalgamate with the rest of the population, and came to the conclusion that in their secret Kahals they possessed a strong reserve, and that a 'World Kahal' existed". Dr. Kastein later confirms what the Russians believed, by his own allusion to the "Jewish international" of the Nineteenth Century.
In other words, the "government" continued, but in concealment, and probably in the different form suggested by Dr. Kastein's word "international". The strong presumption is that the "centre" today is not located in any one country and that, although its main seat of power is evidently in the United States, it now takes the form of a directorate distributed among the nations and working in unison, over the heads of governments and peoples.
The Russians, who at the time of the disappearance of "the centre" from public view were better informed than any others about this matter, have been proved right.
The manner in which this international directorate gains and wields its power over Gentile governments is no longer quite mysterious; enough authentic, published information has come out of these last fifty years to explain that, as this book will later show.
The mystery of its agelong hold over "Jews" is more difficult to penetrate. How has a sect been able to keep people, distributed around the globe, in the clutch of a primitive tribalism during twenty-five centuries?
The next chapter seeks to give some insight into the methods used during the third and longest phase of the story of Zion, the Talmudic period which lasted from AD 70 to about 1800. These methods have so much of the Orient and of Asia in them that they are puzzling to Western minds and are best comprehended by those whose own experience took them much among the communities of "Eastern Jews" before the Second World War, and into secret-police states, where rule is also by fear and terror.
next
THE TALMUD AND THE GHETTOS
Nevertheless, the Law needed constant reinterpretation and application to the events of changing times, so that the "special people" could always be shown that each and every event, however paradoxical at first sight, was in fact one of Jehovan fulfilment. The Pharisees at Jamnia invoked once more their claim to possess the oral secrets of God and began, under it, to reinterpret the "statutes and commandments" so that these could be shown to apply to Christianity. This was the origin of the Talmud, which in effect is the antiChristian extension of the Torah.
The Talmud became, in the course of centuries, "the fence around the Law"; the outer tribal stockade around the inner tribal stockade. The significance lies in the period at which it was begun: when Judea was gone, when "the people" were scattered among all nations, and when a new religion was taking shape which taught that God was the father of all men, not merely the patron of a selected tribe.
Looking back from this distance of time, the task which the Pharisees undertook looks hopeless, for the wish to become part of mankind must surely have had strong appeal to a scattered people.
The Pharisees, as the event has proved, were successful in their huge undertaking. The Talmud was effective in interposing a fence between the Jews and the forces of integration released by Christianity.
Two examples from our present time illustrate the effect of the Talmud, many centuries after its compilation. The brothers Thoreau in their books give the diligent student some rare glimpses behind the Talmudic walls; in one book they depict the little Jewish boy in Poland who had been taught to spit, quite mechanically, as he passed the wayside Calvary and to say, "Cursed be thou who created another religion". In 1953, in New York, a young missionary of the Moravian Church in Jerusalem described the seizure by the Zionists of the Moravian leper home there, called "The Jesus Mission"; their first act was to putty over the name "Jesus" which for more than a hundred years had been inscribed above its door.
Such incidents as these (and the ban on the mention of the name Jesus) derive directly from the teaching of the Talmud, which in effect was another "New Law" with a specifically anti-Christian application. For this reason the next period in the story of Zion is best described as that of the Talmudists, the former ones being those of the Pharisees and of the Levites.
While the Pharisaic Talmudists, in their new academy at Jamnia, worked on the new Law, the tidings of Jesus's life and lesson spread through the territories of Rome.
A Pharisee greatly helped to spread them; Saul of Tarsus set out from Jerusalem (before its fall) to exterminate heretics in Damascus and before he arrived there became a follower of Christ. He preached to Jew and Gentile alike, until he was prevented, and he told the Jews, "It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing that ye put it from you and judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, we turn to the Gentiles".
Dr. Kastein says of Saul, named Paul, that "he made all those whom he persuaded to believe in his prophecy renegades in the widest sense, whether they were Jew or Gentile".
However, what Paul (and others) said was in fact inevitable at that point in time, because men everywhere were groping towards the universal God and turned to the teaching of Jesus as growing things to the light. Possibly this impulse in men was also the reason why Jesus had to appear among the Judeans; the Judaic creed was tribalism in its most fanatical form, even at that time, and, as every action produces its reaction, the counter-idea was bound to appear where the pressure was greatest.
This was a fateful moment for that great area, then little known or populated, which today is called The West. Had not the disciples turned their faces westward, the term, "the West", and that which it denotes, might never have come about.
What is called "Western civilization" cannot be conceived without Christianity. During the nineteen hundred years which followed the death of Jesus the West improved so greatly that it left the rest of the world behind. In material things its advance was so great that at the time when this book was written it was on the brink of the conquest of space; it was about to open the universe to exploration by man. But that was much the lesser part of its achievement.
Its greatest improvement was in the field of the spirit and of man's behaviour towards man. The West established men's right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.
The shadow that followed the disciples out of the gates of Jerusalem, before the Romans entered, also followed Christianity into the West and the Talmudic sect dogged it during all those centuries. The West, in the Twentieth Century, became the scene of the struggle between the nations which had risen with Christianity and the sect dedicated to the destructive idea.
Not only the West is involved in its issue. About five hundred years after the life of Jesus the instinctive impulse of men to seek one God produced another challenge to Talmudic racialism, and this time it came from among the Semitic masses. The Arabs, too, attained to the concept of one God of all men.
Muhammad (dismissed by Dr. Kastein as "a half-educated Bedouin"), like Saul on the road to Damascus, had a vision of God. His teaching in many ways resembled that of Jesus. He held Jesus to have been, like Abraham and Moses, a prophet of God (not the Messiah). He regarded himself as the successor of Moses and Jesus and as the prophet of God, whom he called Allah. There was but one God, Allah, the creator of mankind, and Allah was not the tribal god of the Arabs, but the God of all men.
This religion, like Christianity, taught no hatred of other religions. Muhammad showed only reverence for Jesus and his mother (who are both the subjects of profane derision in Talmudic literature).
However, Muhammad held the Jews to be a destructive force, self-dedicated. The Koran says of them, "Oft as they kindle a beacon fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth; but God loveth not the abettors of disorder ". All down the centuries the wisest men spoke thus of the tribal creed and the sect, until the Twentieth Century of our era, when public discussion of this question was virtually suppressed.
Thus was Islam born, and it spread over the meridional parts of the known world as Christianity spread over the West and Buddhism, earlier, over the East. Great streams began to move, as if towards a confluence at some distant day, for these universal religions are in no major tenet as oil and water, and in the repudiation of master-racehood and the destructive idea they agree.
Christianity and Islam spread out and embraced great masses of mankind; the impulse that moved in men became clear. Far behind these universal religions lay Judaism, in its tribal enclosure, jealously guarded by the inner sect.
In the Twentieth Century this powerful sect was able to bring the masses of Christendom and Islam to the verge of destructive battle with each other. If the present generation sees that clash, the spectacle will be that of one great universal religion contending with another for the purpose of setting up the creed of the "master-race".
Towards this strange denouement, nineteen centuries ahead, the two parties of men set out from Jerusalem long ago.
Chapter 13
THE FENCE AROUND THE LAW
The story of Zion, from its start, falls into five distinct phases: those of the Levites, the Pharisees, the
Talmudists, the "emancipation" interlude and the Zionists. This narrative has now reached the third phase. The Levitical phase was that of isolated Judah, the Babylonian "captivity" and "return", and the production and enforcement of "the Mosaic Law". The Pharisaic phase, which followed and roughly coincided with the Roman overlordship of the province of Judea, ended with the second destruction of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the last Judeans, the Pharisaic supremacy and the withdrawal of the "government" to its new "centre" at Jamnia.
The third, Talmudic phase was much the longest for it lasted seventeen centuries, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. During this period the Jews entered the West and the "government", from a succession of "centres", worked tirelessly to keep the dispersed nation under its control, subject to "the Law", and separate from other peoples.
As this was also the period of Western civilization and of the rise of Christianity, it was inevitable that Christendom specifically (and not merely the generic "heathen", or "strangers", or "other gods") should become the chief target of the Law's destructive commands.
In the eyes of the dominant sect and its devotees, this period, which seems so long and important to Western minds, was essentially as insignificant as the Babylonian period. The fact that the one lasted seventeen centuries and the other fifty years made no real difference: both were merely periods of "exile" for the special people; and under the Law the long Western episode, like the short Babylonian one, was ordained to terminate in disaster for the "captors", a Jewish triumph and a new "return", all of which some new Daniel would interpret in those terms.
The seventeen centuries represented a new "captivity", under the Law, which laid down that wherever the chosen people dwelt outside Jerusalem they were in captivity, and that this captivity was in itself "persecution".
To a literal Zionist like Dr. Kastein, therefore, the seventeen centuries which saw the rise of Christendom form a page of history which is blank save for the record of "Jewish persecution" inscribed on it. The rest was all sound and fury, signifying nothing; it was a period of time during which Jehovah used the heathen to plague the Jews while he prepared the triumph of his special people; and for what they did the heathen have yet to pay (he cries). The one positive result of the seventeen Christian centuries, for him, is that the Jews emerged from them still segregated from mankind, thanks to their Talmudic governors.
Certainly this was an astounding feat; in the entire history of negative achievement, nothing can approach the results obtained by the elders of Zion. In the Talmud they built that "fence around the Law" which successfully withstood, during seventeen hundred years, all the centrifugal forces which attracted the Jews towards mankind.
While they reinforced their stockade, European men, having accepted Christianity, toiled through the centuries to apply its moral law to daily life, by abolishing serfdom and slavery, reducing privilege and inequality and generally raising the dignity of man. This process was known as "emancipation" and by the year 1800 it was about to prevail over the system of absolute rulers and privileged castes.
The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.
Nevertheless, in the case of the Jews there was an obvious paradox which repeatedly baffled and alarmed the peoples among whom they dwelt: The Jewish Law expressed the theory of the master-race in the most arrogant and vindictive form conceivable to the human imagination; how then could the Jews attack nationhood in others? Why did the Jews demand the levelling of barriers between men when they built an ever stronger barrier between the Jews and other men? How could people, who claimed that God had made the very world itself for them to rule, and forbade them to mix with lesser breeds, complain of discrimination?
Now that another hundred and fifty years have passed, the answer to such questions has been given by events.
It was true that the Jewish clamour for emancipation was not truly concerned with the great idea or principle at issue: human liberty. The judaic Law denied that idea and principle. The Talmudic governors of Jewry saw that the quickest way to remove the barriers between themselves and power over nations was to destroy legitimate government in these nations; and the quickest way to that end was to cry "emancipation!".
Thus the door opened by emancipation could be used to introduce the permanent revolutionary force into the life of nations; with the destruction of all legitimate government, the revolutionaries would succeed to power, and these revolutionaries would be Talmud-trained and Talmud-controlled. They would act always under the Mosaic Law, and in this way the end of Babylon could be reproduced in the West.
The evidence of events in the Twentieth Century now shows that this was the plan to which the Talmudic elders worked during the third phase of the story of Zion, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. Thus there was the widest possible difference in the understanding of "emancipation" by the Christianized European peoples among whom the Jews dwelt and among the Talmudic rulers of the Jews. For the great mass of peoples emancipation represented an end: the [78] end of servitude. For the powerful, secret sect it represented a means to the opposite end; the imposition of a new and harsher servitude.
One great danger attended this undertaking. It was, that the destruction of barriers between men might also destroy the barrier between the Jews and other men; this would have destroyed the plan itself, for that force would have been dispersed which was to be used, emancipation once gained, to "pull down and destroy" the nations.
This very nearly happened in the fourth phase of the story of Zion; the century of emancipation (say, from 1800 to 1900 AD) brought the peril of "assimilation". In the century of "freedom" a great number of Jews, in Western Europe and in the new "West" oversea, did evince the desire to cast off the chains of the Judaic Law and to mingle themselves with the life of peoples. For that reason our Zionist historian, Dr. Kastein, considers the Nineteenth Century to be the darkest age in all Jewish history, fraught with the deadly peril of involvement in mankind, which happily was averted. He cannot contemplate without horror the destruction, through assimilation, of the Judaic barriers of race and creed. Thus he calls the Nineteenth Century movement towards emancipation "retrograde" and thanks God that "the Zionist ideology" preserved the Jews from the fate of assimilation.
That led to the fifth phase, the one which began in about 1900 and in which we live. The Talmudic stockade held fast and at the end of the fourth phase the Jews, fully "emancipated" in the Western understanding, were still segregated under their own Law. Those who tended to escape, towards "assimilation", were then drawn back into the tribal enclosure by the mystic power of nationalism.
Using the power over governments which it had gained through emancipation, the ruling sect achieved a second "return" to the chosen land, and thus reestablished the Law of 458 BC, with its destructive and imperial mission. A chauvinist fever, which yet must run its course, was injected into the veins of world Jewry; the great power wielded over Western governments was used to a co-ordinated end; and the whole destructive ordeal of the West in the Twentieth Century was related to and dominated by the ancient ambition of Zion, revived from antiquity to become the dogma of Western politics.
This fifth phase is about fifty-five years old as the present book is written, and its first results are formidable. The "Mosaic Law" has been superimposed on the life of Western peoples, which in fact is governed by that law, not by any law of their own. The political and military operations of two world wars have been diverted to promote the Zionist ambition and the life and treasure of the West have been poured out in support of it.
Forty years of continuous bloodshed in Palestine have obviously been but the prelude to what is yet to come there. Any third world war may begin and spread outward from Palestine, and if one were to start elsewhere it would in its course foreseeably revolve around and turn on the ambition of Zion, which will not be fulfilled until a much greater area in the Middle East has been conquered, "other Gods" have been thrown down, and "all nations" have been enslaved.
Dr. Kastein sees in this fifth phase the golden age when "history may be resumed" (after the meaningless interregnum known as the Christian era) and Zionism, as "the possessor of a world mission", will re-enter into a destined inheritance, culminating in world dominion, of which it was criminally dispossessed in AD 70 (when "history" was interrupted).
This narrative has now reached the third of these five phases, the long one when the Talmudic scribes in the Academy at Jamnia began with infinite industry to spin The Law into a much greater web, of endless ramifications, from which a Jew could hardly escape without dire penalty. By means of it the seemingly impossible was achieved: a breed of people dispersed throughout the world was for seventeen hundred years kept apart from mankind and was trained for a destructive task in the Twentieth Century of the Christian era.
Some account of that remarkable period of preparation and organization, when a fence was built around the Judaic Law, so that "liberty" should not absorb the special people or weaken their destructive force, is here appropriate.66s
Chapter 14
THE MOVABLE GOVERNMENT
The Pharisaic elders who moved to Jamnia from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 AD intended,
like the Levites in Babylon earlier, to set up a centre of power and remote-control, from which they might
keep in subjection a tribal organization, by that time distributed over the earth. They took with them to
Jamnia the accumulated experience of Jerusalem and Babylon and the stored secrets of ages and they
succeeded in establishing a mobile government which has continued to exercise authority over the Jews until
the present day. Before the last battles with Rome (says Dr. Kastein) "a group of teachers, scholars and educators repaired to Jamnia, taking the fate of their people on their shoulders so as to be responsible for it through the ages . . . At Jamnia the central body for the administration of the Jewish people was established . . . As a rule, when a nation has been utterly routed as the Jews were on this occasion, they perish altogether. But the Jewish people did not perish . . . They had already learnt how to change their attitude during the Babylonian captivity . . . And they followed a similar course now".
At Jamnia the Old Sanhedrin, the source of all legislative, administrative and judicial authority, was established under a new name. In addition, an academy was created for the further development of The Law. In it, the scribes continued the revelation of Jehovah's mind and the interpretation of The Law, so often said to have been put in its final form. In fact, as the dogma is that the Law governs every act of human life in circumstances which continually change, it never could or can be finally codified and must ever be expanded.
Apart from that permanent reason for revision, the new factor, Christianity, had arisen and the Law's application to it had to be defined. Thus the Torah (the Law) began to receive its huge supplement, the Talmud, which was of equal or greater authority.
From Jamnia the Law was administered which "raised an insuperable barrier against the outside world", enforced a discipline "rigid to the point of deadliness", and "kept proselytes at arm's length". The aim was to "make the life of the Jew utterly different from that of the Gentiles". Any law that received a majority of votes of the Sanhedrin became enforceable throughout the dispersed Judaist communities everywhere; "opponents were threatened with the ban, which meant being excluded from the community".
In this way, "the centre of the circle was finally fixed, and the circle itself fully described in the form of the law and the hedge that was set about the people". During this period (before Christianity became the religion of Rome) the secret edict went out from "the centre" at Jamnia, authorizing Jews to pretend denial of their creed and profess conversion to "pagan religions", if circumstances made this expedient.
The period of government from Jamnia lasted for about a century, and then it was transferred to Usha in Galilee, where the Sanhedrin was re-established. "Judaism set limitations about itself and grew ever more exclusive"; at this time the special curse on Jewish Christians was pronounced. In 320 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and enacted laws which forbade marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade Jews to keep Christian slaves. These were the natural response to the Law of exclusion and "stranger"-slavery administered by the Talmudic government at Usha, but they were held to be "persecution" and to escape their reach "the centre" was moved back to Babylonia,— where the Judean colony, which eight centuries earlier had preferred to stay there rather than "return" to Jerusalem, "was still intact". The Talmudic government was set up at Sura, and academies were established there at Pumbedita.
The Talmud, begun at Jamnia and Usha, was completed at Sura and Pumbedita. "A ring of vast proportions and colossal elasticity" was built around the Jews everywhere; the mystic circle of fear and superstition was drawn tighter. From Sura an Exilarch (prince of the captivity of the house of David), ruled, but in time he became a figurehead. Thereafter "the president of the academy" (in effect, the high priest and prime minister) "laid down the rules and regulations not only for the Babylonian Jews but for the whole of Judaism . . . The Jews throughout the world recognized the academies in Babylonia as the authoritative centre of Judaism, and regarded any laws they passed as binding".
Thus the nation-within-nations, the state-within-states, was enfettered and ruled by the Talmudic government in Babylonia.
The core of dogma remained as Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah had shaped and enforced it; but the Talmud, in effect, had taken the place of the Torah, as the Torah earlier had supplanted the "oral traditions". The heads of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita were called Gaonim and began to exercise autocratic power over the scattered Jews. The shadowy Exilarchs (later Nasim, or princes) were dependent on their approval and the Sanhedrin surrendered its functions to them, or was deprived of these. When doubt arose among Jews, anywhere in the world, about the interpretation or application of the Law in any matter of the day, the question was referred to the Gaonate. The verdicts and judgments returned (in the name of Jehovah) from the distant government were the Gaonic Reponses, or laws enacted from Babylonia, to which Jews everywhere submitted, or incurred danger of excommunication.
In this manner the Talmudic thrall spread round the dispersed Jews, wherever they dwelt, "like a closely woven net . . . over ordinary days and holidays, over their actions and over their prayers, over their whole lives and every step they took . . . Nothing in their external lives was any longer allowed to be the sport of arbitrary settlement or of chance". This is the picture of an absolute despotism, different from other despotisms only in the element of distance between the despots and their subjects. Given a benevolent mission, a community of people so closely controlled might immensely fructify the life of peoples; given a destructive one, their presence among others is like that of a blasting charge in rock, operated by a distant hand on a plunger.
For six hundred years the Talmudic government, at Jamnia, Usha, and Sura, remained in or near to its native, oriental climate, where its nature was comprehended by other peoples; they knew how to cope with and counter the savage tribal creed and, as long as they were not hampered or constrained by foreign powers in their dealings with it, they were always able to find a workaday compromise, which enabled all to live in practical amity side by side.
Then came the event which has produced such violent results in our time: the Talmudic government moved into Christianized Europe and established itself among peoples to whom the nature of its dogma and its methods were strange and even incomprehensible. This led, in the course of many centuries, to the recurrent clash of the alien ambition and creed against native interest, which our century is again experiencing.
The nature of Westerners (more especially in the northern latitudes) is to be candid, to declare purposes, and to use words to express intention, and Christianity developed these native traits. The force which appeared among them was of the opposite character, oriental, infinitely subtle, secretive, conspiratorial, and practised in the use of language to disguise real purposes. Therein lay its greatest strength in the encounter with the West.
The removal to Europe came about through the Islamic conquests. The Arabs, under the Prophet's banner, drove the Romans from Palestine. By this means the native inhabitants of Palestine, who had inhabited it some two thousand years before the first Hebrew tribes entered, became the rulers of their own country, and remained so for nine hundred years (until 1517, when the Turks conquered it). An instructive comparison may be made between the Islamic and the Judaic treatment of captives:
The Caliph's order to the Arab conquerors in 637 AD was, "You shall not act treacherously, dishonestly, commit any excess or mutilation, kill any child or old man; cut or burn down palms or fruit trees, kill any sheep, cow or camel, and shall leave alone those whom you find devoting themselves to worship in their cells". Jehovah's order, according to Deuteronomy 20.16, is, "Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth".
From Palestine, Islam then spread its frontiers right across North Africa, so that the great mass of Jews came within the boundaries of the same external authority. Next, Islam turned towards Europe and invaded Spain. Therewith the shadow of Talmudic Zionism fell across the West. The Moorish conquest was "supported with both men and money" by the Jews, who as camp-followers were treated with remarkable favour by the conquerors, city after city being handed to their control! The Koran itself said, "Their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth"; the Islamic armies certainly facilitated this aim.
Christianity thus became submerged in Spain. In these propitious circumstances the Talmudic government was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, and the process began, the results of which have become apparent in our generation. Dr. Kastein says:
"Judaism, dispersed as it was over the face of the globe, was always inclined to set up a fictitious state in the place of the one that had been lost, and always aimed, therefore, at looking to a common centre for guidance . . . This centre was now held to be situated in Spain, whither the national hegemony was transferred from the East. Just as Babylonia had providentially taken the place of Palestine, so now Spain opportunely replaced Babylonia, which, as a centre of Judaism, had ceased to be capable of functioning. All that could be done there had already been accomplished; it had forged the chains with which the individual could bind himself, to avoid being swallowed up by his environment: the Talmud".
The reader will observe the description of events: "individuals" do not commonly bind themselves, of choice, with chains forged for them. Anyway, the Jewish captivity was as close as ever, or perhaps had been made closer. That was for the Jews to ponder.
What was to become of vital importance to the West was that the Jewish government was now in Europe. The directing centre and the destructive idea had both entered the West.
The Talmudic government of the nation-within-nations was continued from Spanish soil. The Gaonate issued its directives; the Talmudic academy was established at Cordova; and sometimes, at least, a shadowy Exilarch reigned over Jewry.
This was done under the protection of Islam; the Moors, like Babylon and Persia before, showed remarkable benevolence towards this force in their midst. To the Spaniards the invader came to bear more and more a Jewish countenance and less and less a Moorish one; the Moors had conquered, but the conqueror's power passed into Jewish hands. The story which the world had earlier seen enacted in Babylon, repeated itself in Spain, and in later centuries was to be re-enacted in every great country of the West.
The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish reconquest, after this long ordeal, was completed in 1492 the Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled. They had become identified with the invaders' rule and were cast out when it ended, as they had followed it in.
The "centre" of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland.
At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt, Palestine, Italy, the [84] Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany, Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the Spanish Peninsula. There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.
Yet in the 1500's, when the "centre" was set up in Poland, "a Jewish population of millions came into being there ", according to Dr. Kastein. But populations of millions do not suddenly "come into being". Dr. Kastein shows himself to be aware that something needs explanation here, and to be reluctant to go into it, for he dismisses the strange thing with the casual remark that the size of this community, of which nothing has previously been heard, "was more due to immigration, apparently from France, Germany and Bohemia, than to any other cause". He does not explain what other cause he might have in mind and, for a diligent scholar, is on this one occasion strangely content with a random surmise.
But when a Zionist historian thus slurs over something the seeker after knowledge may be fairly sure that the root of the matter may by perseverance be found.
So it is in this case; behind Dr. Kastein's artless conjecture the most important fact in the later story of Zion is concealed. The "centre" of Jewish government was at this time planted among a large community of people who were unknown to the world as Jews and in fact were not Jews in any literal sense. They had no Judahite blood at all (for that matter; Judahite blood must by this time have been almost extinct even among the Jews of Western Europe) and their forefathers had never known Judea, or any soil but that of Tartary.
These people were the Khazars, a Turco-Mongolian race which had been converted to Judaism in about the 7th century of our era. This is the only case of the conversion of a large body of people of quite distinct blood to Judaism (the Idumeans were "brothers"). The reason why the Talmudic elders permitted or encouraged it can only be guessed; without it, however, the "Jewish question" would by now have joined the problems that time has solved.
This development (which will be further discussed in a later chapter) was of vital, and perhaps even mortal importance to the West. The natural instinct of Europe was always to expect the greatest danger to its survival from Asia. From the moment when "the centre" was transferred to Poland these Asiatics began to move towards, and later to enter the West in the guise of "Jews" and they brought Europe to its greatest crisis. Though their conversion had occurred so long before they were so remote that the world might never have known of them, had not the Talmudic centre been set up among them, so that they came to group themselves around it.
When they became known, as "Eastern Jews", they profited by the confusing effect of the contraction of the word Judahite, or Judean, to "Jew"; none would ever have believed that they were Judahites or Judeans. From the time when they took over the leadership of Jewry the dogma of "the return" to Palestine was preached in the name of people who had no Semitic blood or ancestral link with Palestine whatever!
From this period the Talmudic government operated with a masse de manoeuvre of a different Asiatic order.
Once again, a virtually independent state was formed within the Polish state, which like so many states before and after showed the greatest benevolence to the nation-within-nations that took shape within its gates. As in the earlier and later cases this in no wise mitigated the hostility of the Talmudic Jews towards it, which was proverbial.
Dr. Kastein gives the picture of this independent Jewish government during the Polish phase. The Talmudists were allowed to draw up "a constitution", and through the 1500's and 1600's the Jews in Poland lived under "an autonomous government". This administered "an iron system of autonomy and an iron religious discipline, which inevitably resulted in the formation of an oligarchic body of administrators and the development of an extreme form of mysticism" (this gives the picture of the training, under rigid discipline in close confinement, which produced the Communist and Zionist revolutionaries of our century).
This autonomous Talmudic government was called the Kahal. In its own territory the Kahal was a fully-empowered government, under Polish suzerainty. It had independent authority of taxation in the ghettos and communities, being responsible for payment of a global sum to the Polish government. It passed laws regulating every action and transaction between man and man and had power to try, judge, convict or acquit.
This power only nominally stopped short of capital punishment: Professor Salo Baron says, "In Poland, where the Jewish court had no right to inflict capital punishment, lynching, as an extra-legal preventive, was encouraged by rabbinical authorities such as Solomon Luria". (This quotation reveals the inner meaning of Dr. Kastein's frequent, but cautious, allusions to "iron discipline", "inexorable discipline", "discipline rigid to the point of deadliness", and the like).
In effect, a Jewish state, Talmud-ruled, was recreated on the soil of Poland.
As Dr. Kastein says, "Such was the constitution of the Jewish state, planted on foreign soil, hemmed in by a wall of foreign laws, with a structure partly self-chosen and partly forced upon it . . . It had its own Jewish law, its own priesthood, its own schools, and its own social institutions, and its own representatives in the Polish government . . . in fact, it possessed all the elements which go to form a state". The achievement of this status was due "in no small measure to the co-operation of the Polish Government".
Then, in 1772, Poland was partitioned and this great community of "Eastern Jews", organized as a state-within-the-state, was divided by national boundaries, most of it coming under Russian rule. At that point, for the first time in more than 2500 years and less than two hundred years before our own day, the "centre" of Jewish government disappears from sight. Up to 1772 there had always been one: in Poland, Spain, Babylonia, Galilee, Judea, Babylon and Judah.
Dr. Kastein says that "the centre ceased to exist". The suggestion is that the centralized control of Jewry at that moment ended, but the length and strength of its earlier survival, and the significant events of the ensuing century, confute that. In a later passage Dr. Kastein himself reveals the truth, when he jubilantly records that in the Nineteenth Century "a Jewish international took shape".
Clearly "the centre" continued, but from 1772 in secret. The reason for the withdrawal into concealment may be deduced from the shape of later events.
The century which followed was that of the revolutionary conspiracy, Communist and Zionist, culminating in the open appearance of these two movements, which have dominated the present century. The Talmudic "centre" was also the centre of this conspiracy. Had it remained in the open the source of conspiracy would have been visible, and the identification of the Talmudic, Eastern Jews with it obvious.
In the event this only became clear when the revolution of 1917 produced an almost all-Jewish government in Russia; and by that time power over governments in the West was so great that the nature of this new regime was little discussed, a virtual law of heresy having come into force there. Had the visible institution continued, the masses of the West would in time have become aware that the Talmudic government of Jewry, though it led the clamour for "emancipation", was also organizing a revolution to destroy all that the peoples might gain from this emancipation.
The Russians, among whom this largest single community of Jews at that time dwelt, knew what had happened. Dr. Kastein says, "The Russians wondered what could possibly be the reason why the Jews did not amalgamate with the rest of the population, and came to the conclusion that in their secret Kahals they possessed a strong reserve, and that a 'World Kahal' existed". Dr. Kastein later confirms what the Russians believed, by his own allusion to the "Jewish international" of the Nineteenth Century.
In other words, the "government" continued, but in concealment, and probably in the different form suggested by Dr. Kastein's word "international". The strong presumption is that the "centre" today is not located in any one country and that, although its main seat of power is evidently in the United States, it now takes the form of a directorate distributed among the nations and working in unison, over the heads of governments and peoples.
The Russians, who at the time of the disappearance of "the centre" from public view were better informed than any others about this matter, have been proved right.
The manner in which this international directorate gains and wields its power over Gentile governments is no longer quite mysterious; enough authentic, published information has come out of these last fifty years to explain that, as this book will later show.
The mystery of its agelong hold over "Jews" is more difficult to penetrate. How has a sect been able to keep people, distributed around the globe, in the clutch of a primitive tribalism during twenty-five centuries?
The next chapter seeks to give some insight into the methods used during the third and longest phase of the story of Zion, the Talmudic period which lasted from AD 70 to about 1800. These methods have so much of the Orient and of Asia in them that they are puzzling to Western minds and are best comprehended by those whose own experience took them much among the communities of "Eastern Jews" before the Second World War, and into secret-police states, where rule is also by fear and terror.
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THE TALMUD AND THE GHETTOS
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