States of Exile

To be so detested by the whole race of man one must carry within oneself something truly great. - Bernard Lazare, Notes on a Conversion As the hatred of Christ by the Pharisees was testament to his divinity, so the hatred of Jews by anti-Semites is testament to their worth. The scorn of the multitude is the crown Providence lays on the head of the exceptional.

You like us because, being Portuguese and Comtadins, we do not form part of the accursed race. And we do not. We had nothing to do with the judicial crime committed against Christ. . . . you Latins have good reason to like us Latin Jews, because we are as much part of the Latin race as the Greeks and Saracens were in Provence and Sicily. Nor are we half-breeds, any more than those heterogeneous individuals who were mixed with the Romans during the great invasions. Furthermore, we are the best propagators of Latinity. After all, is not Spanish, for the most part, the language spoken in the Jewish areas of Bulgaria and Tunisia? - Apollinaire, "The Latin Jew"

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 Jud...

An Arab who lost a brother was asked, "What was the cause of his death?" He replied, "Life." - Le-Yosef ben Meir ibn Zabarah, Sefer Shaashuim , 13c, 7.27

While you are sinking through the three hundred and sixty-five eons, worlds and generations on your way to the earth at a point in time, you will grow heavier and heavier; more and more litter from the cosmic spheres will attach itself to you, shrouds, clothes, execrescences, snails, dead weight, covering your awareness of the original Light, until you at last fall into the dark dungeon of spirit and flesh and are finally born as a human being. That is, as a being that remembers nothing, not even what it is, namely Light - like someone sleeping. That applies to you too. But at the same time you are different from the others. All the others are sleepers, who have yet to awake, through faith and knowledge. Only then is there a way back for them. But the heavy accretions have mostly reconciled them with life on earth; they have forgotten that they are aliens there and that they are what they think they are: that is the greatest threat to their return. - Harry Mulisch, The Discovery of Hea...

Exiled into the world you are aliens in it as Spirit is alien You are its embodiment and your travail here is an unending refutation For the Cosmos itself framed you to mock God's pretense to infinite Justice and Love - Irving Layton

Andre Glucksmann, wandering Jew : "Mr. Glucksmann, was the driving power behind your thinking fury?" "More my childhood and the lifelong sense that I was on the edge of an abyss." Glucksmann's father came from Bukovina, his mother from Prague. They had emigrated to Palestine long before Hitler seized power; there they met and married. Glucksmann's two sisters were born there. In 1930, the young couple gave up all security to go to Germany to help the anti-fascist opposition. Exposed in 1937, they were able to escape to France at the last moment. There, Jojo Glucksmann was born, a German-speaking Jewish child. To the outside world he was "Andre Riviere", French speaking, Christian. The family lived with false papers in constantly changing accommodations near Lyon. The father died in 1940. In 1941, French police uncovered the Glucksmann family and brought them to the Bourg-Lastic camp near Vichy, from where they were to be deported to Germany. Andre...