The New Homeland

The New Homeland

 Zionism's "anti-prophetic" tribalization of nationalism also shows how Zionism is fundamentally anti-historical.     The history of the human race has been one of progressive assimilation as smaller units of differentiation give way to more encompassing concepts of commonality.  The progression has not always been uniform but it has been consistent.   Zionism, explicitly seeks to wind back.   Not only to "pick up" where 70 A.D. left off, but to go back from there.

The Roman Empire represented a culminating unification and assimilation of the tribes and kingdoms of the ancient Mediterranean world.  St. Augustine (450 A.D.) put it this way:

"Men’s common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more easily hold intercourse with his dog than with a foreigner. But the Imperial City has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace, ... " (City of God XIX, ch. 7.)

It is typically said that with the collapse of the Empire in the West, the world re-fragmented and reverted to localism and tribalism.  That is only partially correct. The overall point of Augustine’s City of God, was that Christianity was providing a newer, higher sense of unity on a “spiritual” level.

A Higher Form of City

In other words, although infrastructurally, economically, and politically society was re-fragmenting, a more overarching sense of community — Christendom — was arising.  This is why converting the Germans was regarded as essential to preventing consciousness from slipping back into the tribal God of the Forest mode. 

Christianity was not a tool of empire but rather an extension of the cultural unity the Empire had achieved.  The Augustan Peace (9 B.C.) had let loose a tremendous cultural cross-assimilation.  Throughout the Empire, including Judea, people began “sharing their gods”.  The Centurion mentioned in the Gospels, was a “God-fearing” gentile; a person who “shared” in synagogue meetings and sabbath meals. Jews traditionally recognized that such Gentiles had a place in their idea of the Family of God, (See Ps 115:9-13, Ps 118:2-4, and Ps 135:19-20)

Purists objected to this cross-pollution.  Tacitus complained that Rome had become the “sink and sewer of the world.”  Doubtless similar expressions were heard on the Temple Mount.  But the ecumenical impulse was unstoppable. One way or another — with or without the form of Christianity — it was destined to prevail.

The Middle Ages, particularly in the beginning, was a time of chaos and violence — hardly the image of universal brotherhood. But, unlike to classical attitudes which held that justice consisted in doing harm to your enemies, the warring Christians understood that, fall short as they might, justice consisted in befriending the enemy.  That may seem like weak beer; but it seems to me that it is better to have a conscience, and fail, than not to have one at all, and triumph.

Both Christianity and Talmudic Judaism were offshoots of an antecedent theological/liturgical tradition.  Neither was a continuation of Temple Judaism.  Both decoupled themselves from a practice at a location. Both removed religion into the “ideological” sphere.

15th Cent., Pentateuch (Rome)

Christianity reflected the assimilationist and outward looking trends in Judean life; and, in assimilating outward, Christians ceased to Jewish, and left that label to those who continued adhering to an adjusted Torah-based religion. 

Although it actually arose later than Christianity Talmudic Judaism only made a half-way adjustment. While it decoupled itself from the Temple Mount and a political framework, it remained “purist” in the sense of self-differentiation from “gentiles.”  One could say that Christianity proclaimed the present possibility of the Kingdom of God, at hand; Jews affirmed the future eventuality of a Messianic age, next year...

With the conversion of Constantine (312), Christianity gained entrée into the Forum, although the Empire remained officially non-sectarian.  With the accession of of Theodosius (379) the  Roman Empire became  “Holy” and pagan cults were outlawed.  But it was a brief moment.  In 410 Alaric (a Christian) sacked Rome and the Empire began its descent into “Barbarism”.

From that point to the present, there has been no such thing as a Christian homeland. Christianity remained a set of aspirations and beliefs over-arching usually warring tribes and political entities. In terms of culture, Christendom became a vast exercise in cross-assimilation and miscegenation.

Graphic Conceptualization of Fragmentation under Over-Arching Unity

The emergence of “nationalism” in the 15th century moved in two directions. Nationalism was progressive in so far as it represented an expansion of tribal and localized “us-ness”. It was regressive in so far as it stagnated  true evolution of our sense of human being.

The original sin of nationalism is that, by definition, it differentiates and exalts. It represented a retreat from the concept of Christendom into a regenerated concept of distinct “peoples” — often called “races”.  In fact, the word “nation” derives from  natio,  to be born of a root or place.

Of course, all the newly emergent nations were “Christian” states, but this unity was facile and merely semantic. In actuality secular and commercial values became defining factors.  Except for episodes like the Kulturkampf,  flavors of Christianity remained an increasingly optional ideology, much like taste in music.

The progressive nature of the nation state predominated until about the Franco Prussian War (1871).  Despite the consolidation of national entities which began in 1237 and 1492, actual popular life was migratory and assimilative. After 1792, the assimilative option became official; that is, a person could choose his social-contract and declare allegiance to his choice of State. 

However, as previously sketched, Pan-Germanism, which had begun in 1808 as a movement for political unification, became by the end of the century a movement for racial unity -- einheit.  Whereas the trend before had been to nationalize the tribes, Pan Germanism now sought to tribalize the nation.  It anachronistically transposed the 18th century concept of “state” onto a first century reality of German tribalism.

It worked this magic by creating a fictionalized racialism which no longer existed.  It wound back the world into a fantasy of runes, sundials, forest elves and thunder gods. Glorifying an impersonal concept of pan-Germanism, and brightly idolatrizing the Volk Gemeinschaft, Germany committed the darkest crimes.

Germanic Decorative Motif

Pan Judaism is no different and it involves the same  equivocation: the in-gathering all Jews in a Greater Israel as an emanation of blood and as an epiphany of nationhood.

Zionism  is a regressive winding the world back to idolizations of Arcs, foreskins and a jealous thunder god.  Its paradigm is that of the Maccabees who (150 BC) raised a revolt against Seleucid assimilation, waging guerrilla war, rampaging through the land destroying pagan temples, forcibly circumcising boys and outlawing all signs of Hellenization.

History is what it is and the Maccabeans eventually established the Hasmonean Dynasty and rededicated the Second Temple (500 & 140 BC). But by all accounts the Maccabeans were rather like the Taliban or I.S.I.S. — politico-religious fundamentalists hacking against the tide of history.

The official propaganda of Israel (which adopts the Maccabean menorah as its state seal) casts those second century events into the mold of an independence revolt against oppression and cultural genocide.  But the issue was far more nuanced.  Modern scholarship is agreed that the revolt was actually a Jewish civil war between assimilationists and fundamentalists.   The same war of attitudes persists today.

Zionism, as we have sought to explain, draws its waters from the spring of tribal self-differentiation. The Pan Judaism of Zionism is not the revelation of the Torah as read and understood through the teaching experience of history, as a moral metaphor.  It is not the personal and mystical zionism of Halevi (11th cent.).    Zionists invoke “Judaism” as a religious factor only when it is convenient to do so; but it does not deserve religious currency. It conceals a confusion of concepts.

At the end of the day, one has to ask the assimilationist question: what the hell is so important about being Jewish?   Zionist react to this question with a kind of passive aggressive apoplexy which more than insinuates that to ask the question is “to reach for the gas.”  But the question is historically and logically legitimate.   Apart from whatever religious ideology & practice one wished to adopt, what is so important about preserving any “national” or “cultural” identity? These things have always been temporary abodes and malleable expediencies.

All these “nativist” movements, whether it is American (Anglo-Protestant) nativism or Nazi Germanism, or Slavic or Jewish are regressive and unnatural.  The only real  blut is the  blood of the human race, which flows whither it will.

There is no point in try to fix a recipe.   People and places evolve in their own manner and at their own rate.   The United States, Ibero-America and Spain itself have been highly permeable and cross-assimilative.  Nordic countries and Japan little.  Everywhere else falls anywhere in between.

Sephardic  Synagogue (El Transito) in Spain

Jews had in fact assimilated greatly.  The food, deity, language, clothes, architecture of Jews in Russia was Russian and bore no resemblance to the food, deity, language, clothes of the Jews in Spain or North Africa. It is a vain chase to hunt after a “Jewish Culture” apart from a common unifying religious element which infuses otherwise distinct cultural phenomena.

Ashkenzi Synagogue, Wolpa, Poland.

The Jewish assimiliationists of the 19th century saw that this was the case, and felt it natural.  Where they going to “loose” their Jewishness?  The answer was: what was there to loose in the first place?

Maccabean Gifilte Fisch?

I envied Israelis during my stay in the country.  It was a remarkably egalitarian and comradely society.  They were infused with a spirit of gemeinschaft in a land that exhaled history from every wall.  They were building something and had a sense of participation that was totally lacking in the West.

Polish Felafski?

I understood that this Joy in Nationhood was bought at the expense of an Other, but I admired it because Zionism seemed to present a solution. In the intervening years, I have watched Israel’s devious, bullying and increasingly brutal progress.  I have become convinced that what I once saw as incidental danger was, in fact, an inherent flaw.

go to PART VII

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