The Eschatological Reconciliation of Carthage and Rome

Norman Bedchinskey writes in a fascinating article:
History is always written by the victors. Rome vanquished Greece, mostly peacefully, and absorbed much of the Greek legacy - mythology, philosophy, and laws. Two other rivals, however, were crushed in a series of violent wars - Israel and Carthage. These two shared much of a common Semitic heritage in language and did not accept Rome's claims to a superior civilization. The Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon had been close allies of the ancient Israelite kingdom and helped King Solomon build the First Temple. Migrants from these two Phoenician cities founded Carthage and preserved their language (originally called Phoenician and later Punic), which was very similar to Hebrew.

The noted Israeli writer Amos Kenan gave expression to this link between ancient Israel and Carthage - Rome's bitterest opponents. In a article entitled "Envy Tyre," he wrote:

"I always had an attraction to this wonderful phenomenon called Tyre and Sidon, and as one who was born on the sands of Tel Aviv on the coastal lowland, I feel a closeness to all that was, is and will be, on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean which I am a part of, and which is a part of me. The Hebrew language, which is my language today, was 4,000 and 3,000 and 2,500 years ago the language spoken in Jerusalem and Tyre, in Shechem and Sidon, in Jaffa and Ugarit... and in Carthage. Tyre and Sidon and Jerusalem were two axes of one culture... the spiritual one of Jerusalem and the material one of Carthage. In the days when the prophets of Israel tried to create a universal code of morality, the seamen of Tyre established their colonies... Why shouldnt we feel a sense of pride in our proximity to that ancient contemporary of ours who stamped his image on the area, gave to the world writing, and once sent his elephants across the Alps under Hannibals leadership and momentarily brought mighty Rome itself in danger of destruction?"

In addition to their "strange" religion, the Jews' Hebrew language recalled the ancient Punic-speaking Carthaginian foe. It is no wonder that the Romans, who willingly acknowledged their cultural debt to Greece, were loath to grant any credit to the vanquished Jews, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. In contrast to so many other subject peoples under Roman rule, these Semites put up stubborn resistance and even claimed the superiority of monotheism (first Judaism and then Christianity), and were proud of their alphabet which was borrowed first by the Greeks and later by the Romans. Our alphabet is a direct descendant and still bears the names of the first two letters of the early Phoenician-Hebrew alphabet (alef and bet).

My prophetic-messianic dream: the reunification of the Semitic world, followed by the eschatological reconciliation of the Semitic world ("Carthage") with the European world ("Rome") under the banner of the Occident.
The governing idea of Hellenism is spontaneity of consciousness; that of Hebraism, strictness of conscience.
- Matthew Arnold

The two will be as one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Manifesto

The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the galut which has occurred, but it is not the end of the galut : in the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is a part of the galut . Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free of contradictions. From every point of view it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people, at least in the sense that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem . . . - Leo Strauss I am a Jew living in the galut . I would remain a Jew living in the galut if I lived on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Zionism responds to the geopolitical dimension of Jewish exile, but exile is not simply or primarily a geopolitical problem. Exile is an infinite, absolute problem that crosses all borders. The state of exile encompasses displacement from God, di
Read more

The Anti-Semite as High School Girl

The Germans hate the Jewish religion less than their race, less their peculiar faith than their peculiar noses. - Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem The most assimilated and preeminent Westerners of Jewish lineage still preserved in their physical physiognomy, if in nothing else, the unmistakable and eternal stamp of Israel. And this inevitable fact has again and again infuriated the pagan peoples of the world. - Ludwig Lewisohn I found the reductio ad absurdum proof of the above sentiment in a blog comment posted by an Internet beauty queen: Plenty of people object to Jewish looks/appearance, not just WNs…Jews tend to be very physically ugly. Actually, the vast majority of Jews aren’t just ugly, many are FRIGHTENINGLY UGLY, so much so that most normal and healthy people of all racial/ethnic backgrounds are immediately repulsed or even instinctively scared (women and children, mostly) of them and as such avoid contact with them. Full-blooded Jews, especially unmixed Ashkenazim, are quite
Read more

Anti-Semites, The Nation of Priests

Anti-Semites cite the following passage from Genealogy of Morals to enlist Nietzsche into their cause: All the world’s efforts against the “aristocrats,” the “mighty,” the “masters,” the “holders of power” are negligible by comparison with what has been accomplished against those classes by the Jews—the Jews, that priestly nation which eventually realized that the one method of effecting satisfaction on its enemies and tyrants was by means of a radical transvaluation of values, which was at the same time an act of the cleverest revenge. Yet the method was only appropriate to a nation of priests, to a nation of the most jealously nursed priestly revengefulness. It was the Jews who, in opposition to the aristocratic equation (good = aristocratic = beautiful = happy = loved by the gods), dared with terrifying logic to suggest the contrary equation, and indeed to maintain with the teeth of the most profound hatred (the hatred of weakness) this contrary equation, namely, “the wretched are
Read more