The Occidental Amnesiac

It astounds me how little anti-Semites know about Judaism. Not "Judeo-liberalism" or "Judeo-Bolshevism," but the religion itself. This point was brought home to me by the following remark from an article on Julius Evola, an otherwise interesting thinker whose anti-Semitism is his most vulgar aspect:

The dualistic conception of body and soul born of the Jewish spirit, whose abstract and fatalistic contemplativeness is “devoid of any interest in the heroic and supranatural affirmation of the personality,” cannot, as a result, but level the higher values associated with the Aryan’s Olympian spirituality.

Surely a writer for a magazine called The Occidental Quarterly should know that the dualistic conception of body and soul originates with Plato. In fact, "the dualistic conception of body and soul" is entirely foreign to biblical Judaism and absent from the Torah. Anti-Semites apparently assume that everything they dislike about Christianity emerged from Judaism, not knowing or wilfully ignoring Christianity's strong Platonic influence. A cursory web search brought up the following article, Body and Soul: Comparative Studies in Biblical Judaism, Greek Philosophy and Medieval Christianity, which summarizes the matter:

In the Scriptural verse that “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7), nephesh is used to stand for “a living being”. It stresses the wholeness of human body and soul: the living being is a body with spirit or a soul with body. When interpreting Genesis 2: 7, Walter Brueggemann, an eminent scholar of the Old Testament, asserts that “ The articulation of ‘breathed on dust’ in order to become a ‘living being’ precludes any dualism. It is unfortunate that ‘living being’ (nephesh) is commonly rendered ‘soul’, which in classical thought has made a contrast to the ‘body’, a distinction precluded in Israel’s way of speaking. Thus the human person is a dependent, vitality-given unity, for which the term psychosomatic entity might be appropriate, if that phrasing did not itself reflect a legacy of dualism. . . .”

In contrast with the monism of man in Judaism is the dualism in some Greek philosophers. One of the characteristics of the dualism of man is to consider human soul is in essence different from body, the former is entirely spiritual or intellectual substance and the latter is the temporary house or grave. As found in Plato, the human soul is from the world of Ideas. Before it entered human body, the soul lived in the world of Ideas, an absolute spiritual world. On entering human body, the soul became the master of the man, as a steersman the master of a ship. As a well-known Platonic remark goes, "man is the soul which utilizes the body. . . ."

As a daughter religion of Judaism, Christianity inherited the Jewish monotheism. However, regarding the relation between body and soul, it mainly accepted the dualistic outlook from Plato and Aristotle. As we all know, Christianity originated at the end of Biblical Judaism. As a great contributor to the formation and development of Christianity, the Apostle Paul based his doctrine of salvation on the dualism of human body and soul. For him, human body is sinful. But the soul is holy. The salvation of man is to free himself from the sinful body through refining his soul with the help of the Holy Spirit. . . .

In short, the gravity of Judaism is "action". Action is to follow the law in life and to follow the law is to emulate God. God is holy and just. Therefore, to act on the Torah is to emulate God, to be a holy and just man, i.e. a righteous man. To act on the Torah is a process of action to link with body and soul rather than mere thinking in the mind. What I am trying to make clear here is that, since the end of Judaism is to teach how to act, not how to obtain knowledge, the soul does not have to be a rational soul, the heart does not have to be a mind, the relation between soul and body should not be a separable or unmixed union. On the contrary, it should be a full union, an internal and harmonious unity, “a living man.”

Finding the above article took me approximately ten seconds. As I said in a comment that website chose not to publish (must be Zionist censorship!), the real reason for the Occident's decline is not the omnipresent Jewish specter, but that Occidentals like Michael O'Meara don't spend the time to learn about the actual Occident. As a Jew and a member of Western civilization, I consider it my duty to learn about both my ancestral religion and my Occidental heritage. If only the Aryan kshatriyas would imbibe a little of that Jewish brahmin spirit and study their own texts. Thus spake Nietzsche:

Unpleasant, even dangerous, qualities can be found in every nation and every individual: it is cruel to demand that the Jew be an exception. In him, these qualities may even be dangerous and revolting to an unusual degree; and perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is altogether the most disgusting invention of mankind. In spite of that I should like to know how much one must forgive a people in a total accounting when they have had the most painful history of all peoples, not without the fault of all of us, and when one owes to them the noblest man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book, and the most effective moral law in the world. Moreover, in the darkest times of the Middle Ages, when the Asiatic cloud masses had gathered heavily over Europe, it was Jewish free-thinkers, scholars, and physicians who clung to the banner of enlightenment and spiritual independence in the face of the harshest personal pressures and defended Europe against Asia. We owe it to their exertions, not least of all, that a more natural, more rational, and certainly unmythical explanation of the world was eventually able to triumph again, and that the bond of culture which now links us with the enlightenment of Greco-Roman antiquity remained unbroken. If Christianity has done everything to orientalize the Occident, Judaism has helped significantly to occidentalize it again and again: in a certain sense this means as much as making Europe’s task and history a continuation of the Greek.