The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and its Impact on World History (Selections), Judaism
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The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
and Its Impact on World History
(Selections)
by E. Michael Jones
Edited by Darrell Sean, culture warrior and part-time E. Michael
Martyr
is the Editor of
Culture Wars
magazine, as well
as author of 11 books, including
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
and Its Impact on World History
Hardcover: 1,200 pages
Cost: $48.00 plus $8.00 S&H
ISBN: 0-929891-07-4
Publisher: Fidelity Press
Order #: 574-289-9786
CONTENTS
1. The Revolutionary Jew and His Impact on World History
2. Rabbi Dresner's Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos [On Jews and Pornography]
3. The Apology In Context: Fifty Years of Catholic-Jewish Kulturkampf
4. Guilt by Association
5. The Conversion of the Revolutionary Jew
6. “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History”:
A Review By Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D.
7. An Interview with Dr. E. Michael Jones on
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
1. The Revolutionary Jew and His Impact on World History
This article was published in the September, 2003 issue of Culture
Wars magazine.
1648 Annus Mirabilis
According to the Zohar, the year 1648 was to be the mystical year of
resurrection, when the Jews could expect deliverance from their more
than millennium long exile. Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew, a devotee
of the Enlightenment and author of one of the most frequently cited
histories of the Jewish people, calls the Zohar that "lying book" and
by extension impugns the entire Kabbalistic tradition. Since the
Enlightenment was in many ways a direct result of the disappointment
which followed from the failure of the Messianic expectations which
reached their fever pitch and denouement in the second half of the
17th century, his skepticism is understandable, as is his scorn for
the Kaballah, the mish-mash what he considered Gnostic and Talmudic
mumbo-jumbo that had led to the rise and fall of Messianic hope in the
first place. Graetz espoused a worldview which was the complete
antithesis of the Messianic fever of the mid-17th century. He was so
convinced in his opposition to the Kaballah because he had the benefit
of historical hindsight and could see where its vaporous illusions
were leading the Jewish people. Expectation of redemption fostered by
widespread dissemination of Kabbalistic doctrine made the Jews, in
Graetz’s words, "more reckless and careless than was their custom at
other times."
Just what Graetz meant by reckless can be derived from his analysis of
Polish Jewry, which had become by the time of the period in question a
hotbed of Kabbalistic thought. Beginning with the Statute of Kalisz in
1251, the Jews of Poland were granted rights like nowhere else in
Europe. They were even granted their own autonomous legal system,
known as the kahal, which allowed them to adjudicate intra-Jewish
disputes without recourse to the Polish Christian legal system. This
autonomy, in turn, necessitated the intensive study of the Talmud,
which, according Graetz, led to the peculiar corruption of Polish
Jews. The reliance on the Talmud as the basis of Jewish legal autonomy
created a culture of "hair-splitting judgment" among the rabbis,
according Graetz, as well as "a love of twisting, distorting,
ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie
within their field of vision," which in turn trickled down to find
expression in the behavior of vulgar, who "found pleasure and a sort
of triumphant delight in deception and cheating." Since by the end of
the 18th century, the overwhelming majority of Jews lived in Poland,
Jews in general earned, as a result, the reputation of being "a nation
of deceivers," to give Immanuel Kant’s formulation. "It does indeed
seems strange," Kant, the quintessential Enlightenment philosopher,
continued, "to conceive of a nation of deceivers, but it is also very
strange to conceive of a nation of merchants, the majority of whom,
bound by an ancient superstition accepted by the state they live in,
do not seek any civil dignity, but prefer to make good this
disadvantage with the benefits of trickery at the expense of the
people who shelter them and at the expense of each other. In a nation
of merchants, unproductive members of society . .. . it cannot be
otherwise"( Kant, Werke Bd. vii, p. 205-6). From his vantage point in
Koenigsberg, the capital of what was then East Prussia, a country
which the Teutonic Knights wrested by force from the Slavic natives,
all Jews were Polish Jews.
Graetz, the Enlightenment Jew and apostle of German culture and Jewish
assimilation to it, echoes Kant but confines his censure to the Jews
of Poland, who, according to his judgment, "acquired the quibbling
method of the schools and employed it to outwit the less cunning."
Piety and knowledge of the hair-splitting distinctions of the Talmud
became one and the same thing for the Polish Jew, a combination which,
when added to the dogmatism of the rabbis, "undermined their moral
sense" and made them prone to "sophistry and boastfulness."
Largely as a result of the concessions of the Polish crown which began
with the Statute of Kalisz, Poland became known throughout Europe as
the "paradisus Judeorum," the paradise of the Jews. When persecutions
would flare up in the traditionally Jewish sections of Europe, in the
German principalities, particularly in the urban centers of the Rhein
valley, as they frequently did throughout the middle ages, the Jews
who wished to escape persecution inevitably headed east toward Poland,
taking their language, "juedische Deutsch," or Yiddish with them. When
Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize toward the end of the 20th
century, he was designated a Pole by the selection committee, and yet
in spite of that fact had to admit in a moment of candor that he
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