States of Exile

There is a subtle link between anti-Semitism and anti-Socratism. This thought struck me while reading the following passage from Allan Bloom's interpretive essay on Plato's Republic : Our friends are those around us, and the insistence that they must be good is a seconday consideration, one that has an abstract ring to it. This condition is admitted in speech but has little effect in deed. And this means that men who loyally serve their friends are constantly and thoughtlessly doing injustice. This consequence cannot be avoided simply by making more effort, for Polemarchus' view is not merely a result of his laziness but a product of his attachment to family and city. He makes the primitive identification of the good with his own. . . . Once the distinction between what is good and one's own is made, the principle of loyalty to family and city is undermined. In order to be just, one must seek good men wherever they may be, even in nations fighting one's own nation. ...

H.G. Wells writes in The Outline of History: The Jewish idea was and is a curious combination of theological breadth and an intense racial patriotism. The Jews looked for a special saviour, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but firm Jewish heel. As the political power of the Semitic peoples declined, as Carthage followed Tyre into the darkness and Spain became a Roman province, this dream grew and spread. There can be little doubt that the scattered Phoenicians in Spain and Africa and throughout the Mediterranean, speaking as they did a language closely akin to Hebrew and being deprived of their authentic political rights, became proselytes to Judaism. For phases of vigorous proselytism alternated with phases of exclusive jealousy in Jewish history. On one occasion the Idumeans, being conquered, were all forcibly made Jews. There were Arab tribes...

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 ...

Spengler writes in a blog post : When Christian theology declares that the New Testament fulfills the Old, they mean in effect that the history of Israel is a map to the inner life of every Christian. And this history is not simply a record interred in a book. The history of the Jewish people is manifest in the life of the Jewish people, for we are our history: Every one of us stood with Moses to receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, and all who clung to YHWH are alive today, as we pray before reading the Torah in public. We, the living people of Israel, are a flesh-and-blood map to the salvation of every Christian. Can't the history of Israel be a map to the inner life of a Jew? Take the following passage from an essay by Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Kabbalists go further still in recognizing in the prolonged stay in Egypt a ruse of Providence to incorporate in the Spirit of Israel all the "sparks" lost in the temples of impurity. What better way to interpret a bad relationship ...

Anti-Semitism: the conspiratorial plot to deprive the Romans credit for deicide, the Church Fathers credit for Christianity, rats credit for the black death, Adam Smith credit for capitalism, Engels credit for Marxism, the Allies credit for defeating the Kaiser, Lenin and Stalin credit for the Soviet Union, bin Laden credit for 9/11 and Cheney credit for the Iraq war.