The Destruction of Western Civilization [1]

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The Destruction of Western Civilization

By Dr Jeffrey T. D. Payne Vol. 1

THE DESTRUCTION OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION VOL. I

By Dr Jeffrey T. D. Payne

Copyright © 2022 Dr. Jeffrey T. D. Payne All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written

By Dr Jeffrey T. D. Payne

permission of the author, except in the case of very brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

For our children

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Preface You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. Vaclav Havel During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell And blessed are those who are persecuted in the quest for integrity, enduring defamation and disgrace for it – be glad and rejoice for you are the citizens of a divine realm. Jesus

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The shocking truth that will be revealed in this volume, and a truly adequate adjective to describe the simply unbelievable nature of what is revealed in this volume is difficult to find, is that we are ruled by an extremely secretive, unaccountable coterie of theologically motivated zealots who, while remaining hidden, shape the world according to their messianic vision of a dystopian future. It will be shown that these fanatics have realised a regime in the West where there is no equality before the law, there is no freedom of expression, there is no genuine respect for diversity of opinion, there is most certainly no meritocracy. In truth, oppression is practiced far more widely than permission despite the apparent permissiveness of today’s world. Indeed, oppression has become so widespread and ingrained into the organizational institutions of the West that there is no longer any opportunity for honest, open, rational debate. Perhaps, most dangerously, many people no longer even believe in the possibility of “the truth” as that towards which rational debate might aspire. Although there is an impenetrable wall, diligently maintained by those in power, separating the Christian Church from influencing government policy, this separation is only enforced so that another religious tradition can more easily realize its aims. This other religion is fundamentally opposed to everything that the Christian West has historically prized. Even

ii apparent expressions of “freedom”, contemporary feminism, the sexual revolution, liberalizing drug use, removing censorship, and the struggle for so-called “human rights”, are all, when properly understood, just expressions of a religious agenda that is being ruthlessly and uncompromisingly imposed upon Western societies by an extremely small but zealous elite who have used systematic deception to realise their perverse, heretical, and destructive, theo-political agenda. This volume has the ambitious task of revealing our true situation, explaining how we got here, who is behind it, why we do not know about it, and what it means for the future. The primary purpose of this volume, therefore, is to inform as it is only with the truth that we can even begin to consider how we might respond. In his influential 1951 book, The Impact of Science on Society, renowned British philosopher Bertrand Russell expressed the hope and belief that, “. . . in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.” In the years following World War II, Russell’s strategy for realizing mass deception was enthusiastically implemented by an extremely well-funded group of religious zealots who hoped to use their established power over key sectors of the United States to realize their theological agenda. After decades of concerted effort, slowly developing and implementing what has indeed proven to be an incredibly effective strategy, those who rule over us today have realized Russell’s vision. We are all indeed “educated”, beginning before we even start school, to believe what might be termed the “Western myth”. The Western myth is simply that countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia etc., are liberal democracies, that are secular and pluralistic. The most prized feature of Western societies is what has come to be understood as “openness” or the basic idea that any kind of “closure”, any kind of “limit”, any kind of constraint based on morality or demand to conform to historically authoritative norms is oppression. In parallel to the promotion of the belief that we live in a liberal, secular, “open” society, there has been advanced a destructive, divisive and, when properly understood, highly immoral, religio-social agenda aimed at reversing everything that the West, as the West, once held sacred. Traditional gender roles, historically accepted sexual practices, Christianity, the nuclear family, meaningful love, community, maturity, private property and, most importantly, the primacy of reason, have all today been demonized. That even scholars, tasked with the pursuit of truth, have come to embrace both the Western myth and the new theological agenda of those in power confirms that Russell’s vision of the future, a future when anyone could be made to believe whatever those in power wanted, has now been realised. The Western media arrogantly scoffs at the people of China for being compliant to an authoritarian, oppressive and intolerant regime when, in truth, the only difference between China and the West is that those who rule China, because people actually know who they are and what they aim to achieve, have been considerably

iii less successful at reshaping the beliefs and practices of their populations than those who rule in the West today. We live in an authoritarian, exclusive, steeply hierarchical, theologically informed, intolerant, and extremely homogenous society. It is a society where speaking the truth is not only difficult, because all avenues of “free” communication are controlled by those in power, but extremely dangerous. To speak the truth today is at least as dangerous as it was in pre-World War II Stalinist Russia and, because of the level of surveillance, considerably more difficult. The advent of the internet has realised the opposite of what it once promised in that it now facilitates the concentration of power enabling an intensification of surveillance thereby making it more difficult to not only freely communicate ideas that might challenge those in power and the ideas that they promote but to even research those ideas. To step outside the narrow confines of the permissible in contemporary Western societies is to at least run the risk of being marginalized, or what is colloquially called “cancelled”, like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, but more insightful thinkers, like the Romanian dissident Ioan Petru Culianu, who interestingly nobody has even heard of, quietly meet a much darker fate.1 The closer to the truth one moves, and Assange and Snowden are at best revealing some of the mechanisms of surveillance and control while remaining ignorant of who is controlling those mechanisms, the more dangerous it is for the truthteller. Today, Westerners live in societies where merit stands for almost nothing, but race and religious beliefs increasingly determine everything. Everyone’s social and economic standing in Western societies today is determined by the degree to which one is prepared to adhere to and promote a particular theological agenda. The more sympathetic and supportive of that agenda you are, the more obedient you are, the more intellectually enslaved you are, the more successful you will be, the more you try to question or resist that agenda, the more rebellious you are, the more you think freely, the less successful you will be. It is that simple. One might say that it has always been thus and there would be much to such a claim but what is different today is that there is a demand to conform to a set of beliefs and practices that are destructive not only to Western civilization but individual wellbeing. It is no coincidence that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg, the new elite of the West, all enthusiastically promote the same sociopolitical agenda. Like academics, they advance a theo-political agenda that would certainly not have been advanced by community leaders just 50 years ago. Indeed, the dominant ideas of today would have been advanced only by those on the most extreme margins of Western society just decades ago. Most of the

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loan Culianu seems to have moved too close to the truth with his insightful scholarship on gnosticism and was shot in the back of the head in a toilet block at the University of Chicago just prior to giving an important public presentation. He was just 41.

iv people reading this probably are totally unaware of the level of control people have over their lives and how constrained our society has become but that is because most people reading this have so completely internalized the dangerous and destructive theo-political agenda of those who do rule over us that they would never find themselves in a position where they would attract sanction. Of greatest concern is not just that hundreds of thousands of people are faithfully advancing a dangerously destructive religious agenda, but that most of those who do advance this agenda, those in the media, academia, government, and, quite likely, you the reader, are totally ignorant of the true motivation behind is being promoted. The vast majority of people, myself included for most of my life, undoubtedly believe that they are advancing their own individual “progressive” views for the benefit of society. Most people would probably argue that they advance certain ideas out of a sense of compassion, a desire to overcome historical evils. The ideas that are promoted today have been adopted, most believe, because of one’s own experience and out of a strong commitment for “social justice”. The truth that will be revealed in this volume is that all such beliefs, that “progressive” ideas are compassionate, that they overcome historical injustices and that they should be implemented out of compassion as a response to historical wrongs, are all expressions of an alien and destructive religious movement. A religious movement that controls our world today. These new beliefs, beliefs many of us today passionately promote, have actually been intentionally imposed upon everyone by an extremely small group of fanatical religious zealots who mediate our experience of reality in order to shape what we think with the explicit intention of destroying Western civilization. Very little today is produced culturally, - art, music, stage plays, movies, or educational material - that does not promote a particular and, with just a little critical reflection, peculiar and certainly unprecedented social agenda. Most Hollywood movies today, once they have been exposed for what they are, should be understood as nothing more than 2 hours of theological education and certainly not light-hearted, meaningless, entertainment. Our true leaders, hidden from view, unknown to the many hundreds of millions of people over whom they rule, scheme for nothing less than the total annihilation of Western civilization2.

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Which must be distinguished from Western economies. One of the innovations of the movement under consideration today is that they realized that they could detach the economy from society. By dividing between wealth creation and social norms, they have managed to maintain high levels of individual economic integration while destroying individual social integration. This separation explains why this movement is economically conservative but socially progressive. High levels of economic integration means that there continues to be high levels of production and low levels of social unrest, but people have become detached from the communities in which they were once embedded. That one is highly economically integrated but socially detached is actually the same condition as that of a slave. It is also how those who rule over us believe is the proper human condition.

v Before we can hope to save Western civilization, we must first relearn what it is. A recent European report considering the much discussed “crisis of the West” listed the recently crafted Western myth, that the West is tolerant, pluralistic, secular, etc., as the defining features of the West when, as anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of Western history will know, this account is far from true. When properly understood, it will be argued in this volume, the defining feature of Western civilization historically is the commitment, originally forged in ancient Greece, that the good and the true can be known by mortals and accessed through substantive reason. It is for this reason, that the ancients Greeks understood humanity itself as the “animal rationale” in contrast to “animals” which were “living things without reason”. Explicit knowledge of the good and the true, the very condition for substantive reason, has been thought, because it was not an expression of power, to be not only the highest form of knowledge, that which was most prized, but also the best, most peaceful, most inclusive, most tolerant way to order society. As this is the case, then making Western societies look away from the good and the true and reject the authority of substantive reason becomes the means of systematically destroying civilization itself. When technology becomes pervasive, because it is informed by an instrumental reason and not substantive reason, as it threatens to do today, then not only does Western civilization, as such, ceases to exist but all civilizations. That technology has become ubiquitous and other forms of evaluation, such as goodness and truth, have been marginalized by those who rule, means that society can no longer truly “progress”. With the loss of any meaningful metric, Western civilization has reached a level of crisis where the very concept of “social progress” has been co-opted by a very small group of religious zealots, in their blind fanaticism to realise their perverse vision of redemption. This alternate vision of “progress”, eroding “heteronormativity”, destroying the nuclear family, undermining traditional gender roles, rejecting private property, encouraging drug use, moving away from established positive religions, undermining morality, and encouraging sexual licence, are premised on the denial of the very possibility of a universal truth. For this reason, what is being promoted today has historically been thought of as markers of social decline and not social progress. When properly understood, to be a “progressive” today is to actually worship at the feet of the “Goddess of Chaos”, the “Queen of Darkness”, and to determinately look away from what has historically been seen as “the good” and “the true”. To look away from the good and the true has long been understood to be the way to become something evil. Our theologically motivated leaders, in devotion and service to their jealous and intolerant Goddess, intends

What is realized under such conditions is a world were one’s meaningfulness, as such, is constituted through their labor and no longer through their lives. Meaningfulness constituted through labor is not really meaningful at all and results in the kinds of broken society that most of us live in today.

vi to destroy our experience of God, which is a God of goodness, peace, justice, love and truth. The religious zealots who run our society are exclusively concerned with advancing their heretical religio-political project and whoever stands in their way, in resisting their agenda, is reviled by them as evil and, increasingly, our society is coming to agree with them. The greatest difficulty confronting somebody hoping to reveal our current situation is not that there is a lack of evidence about what is happening (after all, it is by necessity unfolding before our eyes and in plain sight, as our subjectivities are the primary site of transformation) but that most people are so utterly indoctrinated, so fundamentally brainwashed, so enmeshed in an alien theology, that most people have lost contact with reality itself. To have become detached from reality was once thought to be the defining criterion of madness. To look at what is decadent, deviant, greedy, and call it “good” landed people in an asylum well into the 20th century. Today, reflecting the theological vision of those who rule over us, it is increasingly those who disagree with their “progressive” agenda who are today branded “mad”. Under such conditions, it must be accepted, that most people, unthinking as they are, will not even consider the argument presented in this volume. They will dismiss what is argued here before they have even read what is actually being argued. This is, of course, the response that those who rule hope to achieve. As one part of their theological project, they hope that “truth” will be called “deception”, that “revelation” will be labelled “deceit”. People have been so intellectually incapacitated, so developmentally stunted, that it is difficult to slap them out of their juvenile obedience so that they can see the world in which they live today as free-thinking adults. If people did wake up and they could just see the world as it is, a world where woman are utterly undervalued so as to have become either readily available sex objects or productive slaves while their true worth is degraded, it is a world where our children are exposed to easily accessible pornography and taught about sex acts that were historically seen as deviant in primary school, a world filled with never-ending systemic corruption, excessive and socially sanctioned gambling, unprecedented levels of inequality and poverty, blatant greed, not so much just the use of but the social acceptance and increasing promotion of drugs (and the use of formally illicit drugs as “medication”3), terrible violence both sanctioned and unsanctioned by the state, the erosion of

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It has actually been part of a deliberate strategy to make us accept drugs since the 1960s to argue that certain historically illicit drugs have a medicinal benefit. The latest research on this claim is that there is absolutely no evidence that cannabis, for just one example, works for treating pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain published a position statement on medicinal cannabis concluded that cannabis is not an effective drug for treating chronic pain though it, amongst other drugs, are continuously being promoted for their medicinal benefits. Drug advocacy is part of a socio-political program to make society turn to mind altering drugs to access a sacred experience and are not truly part of a medical program.

vii traditional families, our children raised in institutions while their divorced parents pursue selfish dreams in a way not just condoned but encouraged by society. In short, we are witnessing the demise of everything that was once held sacred. If people could only see the world in which they live, if they could take off the blinders and see the world for what it is, a society where deviance is now praised as the highest good and the highest good now cast down as the lowest deviance, they would begin to wonder if hell itself has not been unleashed into this world. The challenge with us seeing our real situation today, seeing reality, is not that it is not “there”, or course it is, realty does not go away, but that we have become so accustomed, so accepting, so inculcated, so acclimatized to our degraded condition that, like the proverbial frog in boiling water, not only are we unable to see it anymore for what it is but, of most concern, we have become convinced that further degradation is progress. Despite the unquestionable importance of understanding our contemporary predicament, I have at times considered not publishing this research. This hesitancy is not because I fear what those I hope to expose might do to me personally, they have already done so much that I literally no longer have anything to lose, but I considered stopping out of fear of the terrible things that might be done in the name of this research. To mitigate this danger, there are two things I want to say from the outset. Firstly, I researched these books with great care, over many, many years, so that the guilty could be properly distinguished from the innocent. As even the most casual review of the published material broadly related to what is revealed in these pages will confirm, most of the errors that have historically been done in this kind of research is that it has been too brutish. Most of the research into this area is not adequately refined so that the research has continuously failed to properly distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. In failing to identify the true perpetrators, not only have the wrong people been victimised but there has never been an adequate understanding of why those who are guilty do what they do. I have taken a great deal of care to reveal as precisely as I can only those who have been primarily responsible for the terrible deeds disclosed in these books. I have gone so far as to name the particular individuals who are responsible for shaping our world and not just observing the ideas that they have promoted. Although I do name those with a public profile and those who have published material that reveals them for who they really are, there are, of course, many who will remain invisible, who are never exposed to public scrutiny and who have never published a single word but who are at least as responsible, if not more responsible, than those who have been prepared to reveal themselves. Acknowledging the many limitations both necessary and accidental, these books have been written to reveal the guilty and not those who just associate with the guilty or even those who may have been duped into doing their bidding. Secondly, so that my intentions and motivation for writing this volume simply cannot be misconstrued, my sincerest hope is

viii that love will conquer hate, that a gentle, cautious reflection will win over demands for hasty revenge, and that a humble experience of ‘the good’ will be victorious over the ignorance that is evil. If these outcomes are achieved, then I believe that the world can truly become one of peace and love as opposed to the hate and violence being manifested in our world today. In saying this, I fully appreciate that such consideration will not be returned and those that I hope to expose will be prepared and able to do the greatest violence, to whomever and however many as is required, to ensure that this content is never made public. They know that they are on the cusp of realizing an agenda that they believe has been thousands of years in the making. For this reason, they will stop at nothing to ensure their plans are not interrupted when it is about to be realised. My personal view, after learning everything contained in these books, is that we should leave the past in the past. Despite the terrible destruction and excessive violence perpetrated by those revealed in this volume, we should not even seek justice for past wrongs no matter revenge but, as the Russians managed to achieve after World War II when faced with the same situation, I hope we move forward with the knowledge of what has happened in the past and take peaceful actions to remedy the situation in the future.4 As Martin Luther King once said, “Far from being the injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. [It. . .] is the key to the solution of the problems of our world. Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is a practical realist.” (King 1969: 47f)5 The injunction to love our enemies is not just the morally right thing to do, it is the only strategy that will not further the agenda of those exposed in these pages. It is the only way forward that they most certainly do not want. The only real response to a theo-politics intent on destroying morality is not to embrace tribalism and, in seeking revenge, become more destructive, become more immoral, seeking an eye for an eye in retribution, a tribal mentality, but, as Jesus taught, by becoming more moral, by striving for love and seeking to forgive trespasses, this is the road to freedom. As Jesus said,

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Indeed, this is the greatest failure of the Russian approach, they tried to humanize a system that had been imposed on them by these very same people whereas they should have overturned it when they discovered the truth and, as I recommend, try to re-engage with what has been historically prized as the sacred thereby reinvigorating their culture. The Russians retained a social order created to destroy them and tried to make it serve their purposes, a project doomed to failure, when they should just have destroyed the system and turned to what had worked in the past. 5 Jesus Christ said, “You have heard that it has been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth . . . You have heard that it has been said, you shall love your neighbour, and hate your enemy. But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you . . .” (Mathew 5: 38-48)

ix You have also been told to love your friends and country, although you may hate your enemies and foreigners. But I say, if you cannot love your enemies, at least respect the humanity in them. For those who curse you, wish that good come to them; for those who hate you, do good to them. For those who lie about you to others, seeking to use them to make you miserable, intercede on their behalf. In this way you become true children of the father in heaven . . . Do not be under any delusions, those who I am asking you to forgive, those who I am asking you to express good wishes towards, they will never appreciate such actions. They will never express the same sentiments in return. They will see such attitudes as being nothing but an expression of something evil and therefore deserving of destruction. The truth is though that there is no alternative. To seek revenge, to commit violence, to surrender to hate, is to become them and then they truly have won. The sole purpose of this volume is to educate people so that they too know what is happening to their world and together we can learn how to respond in an understanding, forgiving, and loving way that is true expression of Western civilization. We must each as individuals practice the world we hope to realise and not become the world they hoped to impose. Without an adequate understanding of what is really happening, I fear that we will not be able to progress with love and forgiveness but that neo-Nazi groups, real ‘white supremists’6, and religious zealots7, will emerge into the public sphere with a louder voice and greater support in the very near future. Driven by fear and ignorance, these people might try to replicate the misguided actions of the German Nazis who vented their rage on those who were innocent while letting the guilty go free. As though materializing these fears, on the 27th of October 2018, Robert D. Bowers went into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed 11 people because he believed that ‘Jews’ were taking over the United States. These volumes show that Bowers claims are not only dangerously simplistic but, in important ways, wrong. Again, on the 15th of March 2019, a 28-year-old Australian man, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, entered two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and killed 50 people during their Friday Prayers. There is a lot of research that shows that many Westerners feel that something terrible is happening to their world, despite the almost criminal refusal of academia and the main stream media to acknowledge these concerns, and out of ignorance an extremely small group of disgruntled, scared people are taking action, usually against the wrong people, ignorant of the fact that they themselves are actually being manipulated

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Somebody who thinks white people are superior not because they believe that their moral stranding is superior to others, but because of the colour of their skin. This does not include somebody who thinks Western civilization is superior to other civilizations. 7 Which certainly does not include most Christians. As a result of this research, I now strongly identify as a Christian myself. I see in Christ’s message the best solution to our situation of crisis, the solution that He always symbolized.

x by the very forces that they should oppose. Nothing would benefit those who want to rule the world then the emergence of a white, “Christian”, terrorist organization8. The danger of all such movements, Nazism, anti-Islamism, and white supremacism, is that although they all rightfully identify that Western civilization itself is under threat, none have an adequate understanding of what is happening so they cannot take appropriate action. We are faced with the dangers of two equally unwanted outcomes, either letting the current situation continue unchecked and, therefore, participating in the end of Western civilization or be seduced into acts of violence by those whose culture is indeed being destroyed. Either outcome will be the result of ignorance. It is because of these dangers that I am determined, against all hardships, to not only complete this research, but to bring it to public attention. It is with the knowledge contained in these books that we can move forward with restrained, caring, confidence to realise a new and better society for everyone. One that is more prosperous, more cultured and, above all, more civilized. To ask the reader to read these volumes is to ask the reader not for perseverance or dedication but trust. Trust that I am not motivated by hatred, ignorance, racism, or fear, despite how it might initially appear. That appearance is the result of how we have all been conditioned to think and not a reflection of what has been written in these volumes. I am driven by one single passion. It is, strangely if we think about it, the one passion we can hold and advance and be guaranteed not to be led astray. That one passion is the truth. I was forcibly dragged out of my darkened cave of ignorance into the bright light of truth and now must, as a result of what was revealed to me, return into the darkness to those enslaved by delusions and try to reveal the truth. We must all desire truth, trust truth, be guided by truth. An author cannot release you from the shackles of delusions, it is truth that sets you free. It is the truth that shall set you free and nothing else. Follow truth as only then can one be assured of being on the side of what is right, the side of what is good. Truth and goodness, accessed through reason, is the Western God and we cannot, in our time of most desperate need, desert our God or we cease to exist. Do not ask if these texts are homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, white supremist, or whatever label might be tried. Ask only one question, are they presenting the truth or are they presenting untruth? As the character Morpheus asked in the film The Matrix, I too invite you to swallow the ‘red pill’ of truth and, in return, I will “. . .show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember; all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.” As with Morpheus, the truth that I am offering will shock you. What is revealed here will undoubtedly change the

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Not that I think such an organization has ever existed. Although there is an ongoing attempt to link Christianity with the Nazis such an association would be to ignore the truth that the Nazis were anti-Christian in associating it with Judaism. It is very difficult for a universalist religious movement built on love and forgiveness to adopt a violent strategy but, one should never say never.

xi very way that you see reality and understand history. What will be revealed will challenge some of your most cherished beliefs that you have fought to realize your entire life. I know this may be the case because this is exactly what happened to me. After all, I was educated in the same system as everyone else. I was exposed to the same children’s programs. I watched the same movies. I read the same account of history. I advanced the same project that I was told to progress like everyone else. Just as writing these volumes has challenged everything that I once believed, these books will challenge everything that you now believe. Despite how confronting the claims presented here are, I hope that you take note of economist Maynard Keynes who asked, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” (Keynes as seen in Heuer 2019: 13) I hope the facts presented in these pages will change your mind. One of the things that the reader will discover from reading these books, is that the best place to hide a rather old-fashioned grab for power is by making the very suggestion that it is happening “offensive” or, even better, criminal. Another thing that the reader will discover is that the best way to take power, is to have others fight to give it to you. Suspend judgement for a little while and this momentary openness just might change your life and, potentially, save Western civilization itself. Remain within the confines of what you currently believe and Western civilization itself will cease to exist. The observation that I would like the reader to take with them as they enter upon the journey that these books will take them on was said by Voltaire and is as true today as it was when it was said, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

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Introduction: Ethnocide Following is the Aleinu (which translates into English as ‘It is our duty’) which is recited at the end of each of the three daily Jewish services. It apparently outlines the duties of the Jewish people. We therefore put our hope in You, O Lord our God, that we may speedily behold the splendour of Your might, when You will remove the idols from the earth, and the false gods will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty, and all human beings will call on Your name, and when all the wicked of the earth will be turned towards You. Let all who dwell in the world recognise and know that to You every knee must bend, and every tongue must swear allegiance. Before You, O Lord our God, let them bend the knee and prostrate themselves, and to Your glorious name let them render honour. Let them all accept the yoke of Your Kingdom, so that You may reign over them speedily, and for ever and ever. For the kingdom is Yours, and You will reign in glory for all eternity. As it is written in Your Torah: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” And it is said: “And the Lord shall be King over all the earth: on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. (As translated by political theorist Leo Strauss (Strauss 1997 (1962): 327-328)) In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. . . And if, as is almost certain, the age which has thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. . . one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. (C. S. Lewis. The Abolition of Man) Only a god can save us. (Heidegger 1966/2004) . . .you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. (Jesus) * * *

Introduction An Australian journalist, Sean Jacobs, recently argued that David Hurley, Australia’s governorgeneral, the formal head of state as the Queen’s representative, was “too safe, too male and too white”.

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(Jacobs 2019) The implication was that a “person of colour” should have been chosen, preferably a

woman, because a female “person of colour”, would be unsafe and would rightly disrupt the calm certainties and promised continuities suggested by the nomination of the highly respected former soldier. Like Jacobs, there are many, many people today who seem to want disruption and aspire for discontinuity. Many people today in the West seem to want to be “emancipated” from what are perceived to be the restrictive mores that have guided Western civilization for generations. They want to break free from tradition in order to make room for something new, to realize an epochal shift in the way we think and act in the world. It now appears as though to be ‘safe’, to want to preserve and transmic cultural norms, especially if you are a “white”, Protestant, Christian, male, is intrinsically bad even, quite possibly, evil. Western culture, culture in general, advanced by “white males” like Hurley, has become something that is no longer worthy of respect and therefore should no longer be continued. Indeed, every culture today has become something odious. As Joshua Rothman (2014) observes, ““Culture” used to be a good thing. Now it’s not. . . the word “culture” has taken on a negative cast. . . today, “culture” has a furtive, shady, ridiculous aspect.” According to people like Rothman, culture today is no longer thought to be the highest good towards which one should aspire but has become, at least for some, something “ridiculous”. For this reason, the continuance of “culture”, attempts to sustain the historically dominant “culture” in places like Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, from one generation to the next, is something that now must be opposed, it must be disrupted so that those historical evils will no longer endure. The means for this disruption is the formulation of what some refer to as a “counterculture” or a way of living that is “opposed to” traditional cultural practices. In order to disrupt cultural continuity, to advance a counterculture, it is now believed that we should be led by those historically deemed “outsiders”. The West must find new leaders who are going to realize a fundamentally different kind of society to that kind which has been historically prized. A society thought to be fundamentally different in kind from that envisaged by the David Hurleys of this world. As former Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt observed in 2014, “Sweden belongs to the immigrants – not the Swedes.” Reinfeldt was not, as might be thought, lamenting the excessive influence of immigrants on Swedish society, he was not concerned that “Sweden now belongs to the immigrants when once it belonged to the Swedes”, despite the fact that today around 15% of people living in Sweden were born overseas and a much larger percentage identify as having a

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The author of this statement, and it is relevant, is himself a “person of colour”, whose family recently immigrated to Australia from Africa. Africa, sadly, is not a region renowned for good governance, social stability or prosperity. In fact, there have been 161 coup d’état’s in Africa since 1960. Many Africans leave Africa for Australia hoping for a better future. Given this fact, I cannot help but wonder if there are white journalists in Africa today writing that their political leaders are “too black” or even how such a statement would be met.

3 non-Swedish heritage, but, in some senses the exact opposite, he actually believed that “Swedishness was barbarism”.10 It was because of Swedish barbarity, Reinfeldt seemed to suggest, that Swedes were now unworthy to shape Sweden’s future. Sweden should now rightly belong to immigrants, that was Sweden’s best future, because Swedes require foreign influence. As Reinfeldt went on to say, “all development/progress (utvecklingen) comes from abroad”11. The Prime Minister of Sweden, the elected leader of one of the most respected Western democracies, believes that Sweden’s future should be determined by foreigners because indigenous Swedes were no longer deserving. Both Jacobs, with his concern about the “whiteness” of the Governor General, and Reinfeldt, with his concern about the intrinsic barbarity of the Swedish people, are actually expressing the same sentiment. It is a widely held sentiment. White, protestant, Christian, culture is to be no longer valued. White males and everything they represent are to be assigned to the dustbin of history. Listening to the mainstream media, reading school curricula, watching Hollywood movies, even reading contemporary history textbooks, it would appear that our understanding of the world and the West’s place in that world has been turned upside down, as though looking through a camera obscura. All that was once thought to be civility is now viewed as barbarity and vice versa. The widely supported Black Lives Matter protests, which hoped to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family”, “decriminalize . . . all drug-related offenses and prostitution” and “ensure a radical . . . redistribution of wealth”, seems to offer an alternative to Western barbarity by fighting to realise its opposite. (See Gonzalez and Olivastro 2020) The Black Lives Matter movement12, which received support from senior political leaders and was sympathetically covered by most of the mainstream media13, would seem to be in full agreement with

10

“Ursvenskt är bara barbariet.” Resten av utvecklingen har kommit utifrån 12 The Black Lives Matter movement has strange origins which point to problems for the entire movement. It was begun by three black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, in 2013 when an unarmed seventeenyear-old black man, Trayvon Martin, was shot dead by a self-proclaimed “neighborhood watchman” named George Zimmerman. Zimmerman was initially released without charges but was later charged with murder. He was acquitted of all charges on the grounds of self-defense. An ever-vigilant media jumped on the case initially claiming that a “white man” had shot an unarmed “black man” and it was because of the perpetrators race that he was not initially charged. In response to this news the Black Lives Matter movement began. It was only later, when photos of Zimmerman were circulated, and he was shown to actually be a dark-skinned man whose mother was Peruvian, who identified as “Hispanic”, that the true situation was clarified. This was not a case of a “black man” being killed by a “white person” at all but a “person of colour” killing a “black man”. He was not initially charged not because he was “white” but because there was no evidence that his claim of self-defense was untrue. 13 Despite not being found guilty of murder, a lot of race-based literature continues to refer to Zimmermann as a “murderer”. (See Kline 2020: 2) Although Zimmermann identifying as Hispanic, when trying to make the outrageous claim that Christianity is intrinsically racist, American-Jewish author Kline argued that this was a racially motivated attack with Zimmerman “acting as a weapon of the “white gaze”” in “defense of white life and property”. Zimmerman does not look white and does not identify of white and would, at least based on this, have 11

4 Jacobs and Reinfeldt that traditional Western civilization is something barbarous, even evil. It is clear that many people who live within the Anglosphere today, many who populate the most powerful institutions in the West, most especially in academia, but also in government and entertainment, would be extremely sympathetic with the argument that all that was once viewed as civility is now rightly understood as barbarity. In our age of “multiculturalism”, with its zealous advocacy for “tolerance”, “plurality” and belief in the unconditional benefits of “diversity”14 (Murray 2017: 10), expressions of any kind of concern with being ruled by “outsiders”, “foreigners” or “immigrants”, as Reinfeldt suggests, would most certainly be viewed as being highly questionable but would most likely be labelled racist. The ‘values’ that apparently define western countries today are not just liberal values but values of a particular kind of liberalism, a liberalism alien to the works of Locke or Mill, a liberalism that includes believing in, pluralism, multiculturalism, unconstrained openness (to ideas and immigration), embracing ‘Otherness’, rejection of “heteronormativity”, denouncing cultural bigotry, atheistic (“no-religion” is now the largest single religious identifier in Australia), and critical of traditional gender roles. As these “values” are now supposedly prized, it only logically follows, as these features are alien to the Western tradition, that the West needs to fundamentally changed and that this change is best achieved by being led by outsiders. The only way to implement a strategy diametrically opposed to the Western tradition is to have it implemented by those who oppose that tradition. It is as though the West is determined to rid itself of all things Western. “Australia”, as such, will continue to exist, it may even continue to be wealthy, but it will no longer be a “Western” country. It is this direction of thinking, now called “progressive” or “woke”, that is destroying Western civilization. The claim that the West is in decline is certainly not new. As Mezei observes, “The concept that the West is in decline has been commonplace for about a century.” This long decline manifests itself in terms of the West embracing the idea that it is barbaric and that it has historically never contributed anything positive to the world. A recent European report discussing the reasons for the “decline of the West” concluded that, The contemporary “spiritual disunity of the West” is due to the rise of an illiberal and nationalist camp within the Western world. For this increasingly vocal group, the West is not primarily a community bound by liberal-democratic values and open to everyone little interest in defending someone else’s “life and property”. Klin’s work really is outrageous yet despite this obvious falsehood it continues to get circulated. 14 This is so much the case that when it was reported that in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs “white Britons” were now a minority the spokesman for the Office for National Statistics praised the results as a demonstration of “diversity” in England. (Guy Goodwin from the ONS quoted in “Census shows rise in foreign-born”, BBC News, 11 December 2012)

5 sharing these values. Rather, it is a community held together by ethnic, cultural, or religious criteria. (MSR 2020: 8) Not only is the relationship between “spiritual disunity” and “nationalism”, an idea once thought essential for a good citizen, not explained but the ignorance of Western history being displayed in this paragraph is more an expression of the West’s decline than holding out any hope of a future “solution”. There is certainly no discussion of the massive waves of immigration, into Australia, Western Europe, and the United States despite some rightly observing that “with the torrent of immigrants and asylum seekers leaving their homes in Africa and the Near East and invading many European countries, we witness. . . the fulfilment, of the downfall of Europe . . .” (Mezei 2018: 12) This devastating mass immigration is not being discussed despite a July 2014 Gallup Poll finding that Immigration was the most pressing concern for Americans.15 (Saad 2014) In parallel to not even discussing immigration, is the enthusiastic implementation of “multi-culturalism” throughout the West without any sustained public debate. As Mezei questions, “the cultural impact of the sheer presence of untold numbers of people with a deeply different cultural background living in Western societies will be enormous”. (Mezei 2018: 13) To be critical of immigration and multiculturalism is to be labelled at best a “nativist”. Indigenous people can claim a region as “theirs” and then claim a special status within that space, but such claims cannot be made by Westerners. Instead of seriously considering concerns regarding multi-culturalism and/or mass immigration, perfectly legitimate political positions, such claims are simply ridiculed and quickly dismissed as “nativist” or “racist”. The European report on the crisis of the West actually identifies the nationalism of anti-immigration sentiments as one of the reasons for the West’s decline.16 Far from the true historical presentation of the beliefs and practices that have given shape to Western societies for millennia, which were broadly “nationalistic”, highly exclusive, religiously intolerant, and broadly aristocratic, these “values” are now associated with Europe’s decline and are cited for being responsible for the West’s current crisis. As Max Horkheimer critically observed of traditional Western values, “The whole political, religious, and philosophical literature . . . is filled with praise of authority, obedience, self-sacrifice, and the hard fulfillment of duty.” (Horkheimer 2002: 90) Although Horkheimer expressed loathing for these “Western values”, he is perfectly correct to observe that these were indeed the values that historically informed Western civilization and, to my mind, they are nothing about which to feel ashamed, yet they

15

Followed by Dissatisfaction with Government, the Economy in General and Unemployment. Interestingly, indigenous people when they claim a privileged status in a country are never criticized for “nativism”. This term is reserved exclusively from Westerners trying to claim privileged status. 16

6 are not considered in the European report on the crisis of the West while “diversity”, “tolerance” and “liberalism” all feature highly. Reading the report on the Western crisis, it would seem that the West finds itself in the paradoxical situation of demonizing everything Western in the hope of somehow saving “the West”. It was realism, hierarchy, obedience, self-sacrifice, moderation, hard work, and an especially strong commitment to a sense of duty, ideas with which those living in ancient Greece or Rome would easily have recognised and valued, that have historically informed Western civilization. As is the case in Horkheimer’s work that was cited earlier, such commitments today are generally vilified because it is believed that they crush the highly prized freedom required for individual self-expression. Now, it is claimed, that the West is “defined” by the historically very recent phenomenon of “liberal-democratic values”17 and a commitment to Europe being “open to everyone sharing these values”18. Commitment to “openness”, understood in these terms, would have been challenging to even my parent’s generation no matter my grandfather’s. What has come to be called “civic nationalism”, which is nationalism that is not associated with “ethnic, cultural, or religious criteria” but one built around liberal “values” of “openness” and “diversity”, is now apparently the single most important defining feature of Western civilization, despite its recent invention, that has apparently not only shaped the West historically but is the only possible future. There are simply no other options worthy of consideration. The West is “openness”.

17

It was not until after the First World War, confronted with a choice between communism or liberalism, that Europe began to adopt liberal democratic ideals and practices as a preference to communism. 18 Even millions who do share such values.

7

Map of European Monarchies (marked in red) in 1914. Looking at this map, the claim that the West has been historically defined by “liberal-democratic values” is shown to be false.

As Murray (2017: 10) rightly observes of the report’s conclusions, “Such shallow self-definitions may get us through a few more years, but they have no chance at all of being able to call on the deeper loyalties that societies must be able to reach if they are going to survive for long.” Indeed, it could be convincingly argued that it was in adopting “liberal-democratic values” about 100 years ago that marked the beginning of the decline of the West. What seems to be happening throughout the Western world today is a complete reversal of values. As part of this reversal, white, respectable, Christian men, as Jacob’s article attests, are now thought to be the least capable of leaders.19 It is now generally believed, “. . . that much of today’s political turmoil has been promulgated by white men . . .” (Jardina 2019: 93) As Preparata (2011: 2) also critically observes, “According to this sprouting creed, the culprit of all that was abominable was the middle-aged white males of European descent. . .”. “White men”, by this account, are now being explicitly held responsible for most of the world’s ills including the current crisis of the West. As Ruether (1998) argues,

19

Increasingly reflected in practice with woman and people from non-Anglo-Saxon background increasingly filling leadership roles in both the public and private sectors that once were have been the bastions of white male power.

8 it is because “patriarchy has structured classical and modern Western Christian cultures and social relations” that “Western Europe/North America” is in crisis today. The attack on white males has become so systematic that they are now cast as the lowest of humanity. As Preparata cynically observes, “No question: the white male is to date the most abominable, arrogant, obscene, murderous, mendacious, and savage creature that has tread upon this earth—his record of ignominies, which grows by the day, is simply indescribable and matched by no other.” (Preparata 2011: 121) Many Afrocentric scholars such as Na’im Akbar and Marimba Ani argue, apparently missing the irony, that it is racism that has contributed to Europe’s crisis and that racism is an exclusively “Euro-American pathology” that is not found in any other culture. (D’Souza 1996: 39) Even some people who might be identified as “white”, such as Michael Bradley, argue, Racism is a predisposition of but one race of mankind – the white race. Nuclear war, environmental pollution, resource rape . . . all are primary threats to our survival, and all are the result of peculiarly Caucasoid behaviour, Caucasoid values, Caucasoid psychology. There is no way to avoid the truth. The problem with the world is white men. (Bradley 1991) Such attitudes have become so pervasive that a recent survey found that 79% or people aged between 18-24 believe that “white people” are oppressors. (Harvard and Harris Poll 2023) Most of those who attack “white men” claim that “whiteness” is not just about the colour of a person’s skin20 but it is mostly about what people believe. As a recent article on these matters observed, “To be ‘white’ is a state of mind. It means belonging to the culture which perceives itself as ‘superior’. The culture which sees itself as ‘exceptional’, and somehow ‘chosen’ to judge and advise the entire humanity.”21 (Vltchek 2020) It is because of these very beliefs, apparently, that white men are no longer acceptable or capable as leaders but are now rightly being held responsible for most of the troubles affecting our world. In the highly respected Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, American psychologist Donald Moss recently claimed that “whiteness” is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to

20

Although, of course, it is. Why describe somebody as “white” if it is not about the colour of a person’s skin. Why not called them arrogant, or elitist, why call them “white”? It is because it is also about a person’s skin. 21 The strangeness of this sentiment cannot be fully developed here but it seems to me that every culture around the world should think itself “superior”. If a person looked upon another culture’s practices as being superior, then this experience would mean that that those practices are already a part of a person’s culture. If it is understood that a culture is a person’s experience of what is right and wrong, good and bad then it would be strange indeed for a person to view anther cultural practice as superior to their own and then carry on with their existing practices. A sense of cultural superiority is essential to an individual’s well-being. To appreciate one’s culture and think it superior to others has nothing what-so-ever to do with racism although this confusion happens all the time. Beyond this observation, I very much doubt whether many Anglo-Saxons think of themselves as “chosen”. “Chosenness” is a very un-British sentiment indeed.

9 which “white” people have a particular susceptibility.” (Moss 2021: 356) “Whiteness” is, apparently, a condition which is “foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world” that “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse”. (Moss 2021: 356) Whiteness is not about the colour of a person’s skin but it seems that the culture in which people of a certain colour have lived, the way they think, is the true debilitating condition. It is how white people think that is “perverse”. Many scholars have also linked “whiteness” to Christianity arguing that “white supremacy” is intrinsic to Christian theology. Norris (2020), for just one example, argues that “. . . all of white theology and white Christian practices are implicated in white supremacy.” Christian theology is acknowledged as the inspiration for “whiteness” and informs, apparently, the brutality instigated by white men against “people of colour”. Claims that “whiteness” is not about the colour of a person’s skin but is a way of thinking and acting in the world that implicates Christianity might seem to be simply a strategy for avoiding accusations of racism. In fact, reading the literature, it is actually quite true that attacks on “whiteness” are not primarily concerned with the colour of a person’s skin. What is discovered in the literature created by the activists who oppose “whiteness” is a rejection of the civilizing project that has historically defined the West. The real target of those opposed to “whiteness” is a way of thinking that prioritized, as feminist scholar Camille Paglia observes, a certain form of knowledge as being adequate for informing collective decision making. What anti-white activists oppose, in truth, as they did when they opposed “colonialism” and “patriarchy”, is not the colour of a person’s skin but a particular way of thinking. They oppose the way that Westerners are, as Westerners, in the world. Paglia (2001: 5), although critical22, rightly observes that what defines the “West” is that it, “. . . insists on the discrete identity of objects. To name is to know; to know is to control. I will demonstrate that the West’s greatness arises from this delusional certitude.” Surprisingly, but as will be confirmed in this volume, it is the West’s ontological commitments, a commitment to “the discrete identity of objects”, that is of greatest concern to the anti-white movement. Far from such beliefs being seen as the highest good, the highest ideal, in our contemporary setting, as Preparata observes (2011: 120), Western metaphysical commitments have become understood, as an expression of reversal, as “. . . the customary attributes of the Devil.” It is Western metaphysics, and the civilization project derived from these premises, that have literally been demonized. The new radical political movements cannot easily claim that it is Western civilization itself, informed by a particular

22

One is forced to draw on critical account of what some might think of as being positive attributes of Western civilization because nobody can navigate their way through tertiary education by expressing positivity towards traditional Western civilization. Such sentiments simply would not get published.

10 ontology, that is “evil”, as this would attract thoughtful debate, so they avoid such transparent claims and instead label Western metaphysics as “whiteness”. By relabelling “Western metaphysics” as “whiteness” they can then claim to be attacking whiteness, a racist, elitist, dangerous “movement”, something that has become acceptable to attack, when they really mean Western metaphysics and the civilization upon which that metaphysics was built. Most Westerners no longer recognise the Western project to be unique. Christopher F. Rufo observed in a recent interview, hosted on a program called “Black News Tonight”23, There are a lot of documents that are floating around public schools24 that say things like timeliness, showing up on time, is a white supremacist value or a white dominant value. Things like rationality, things like the Enlightenment, things like objectivity, and these are very strange things to be ascribed to a racial identity.25 (Rufo 2021) Yet the claims being made by these activists about Western civilization, disguised as “whiteness”, are quite correct. For reasons that will be explained, Western societies do particularly value things like duty, rationality, and objectivity. These are indeed Western values that most especially reflect a Protestant ethos that is not prized even throughout all of Europe no matter everywhere around the world.26 It is not strange to attribute such beliefs to “whiteness” because they truly are, almost by definition, expressions of Western Christian civilization which just happens to be advanced by “white people”. It is a moral imperative today to overcome certain expressions of racism and, therefore, “whiteness”, identified as a racist movement, becomes not only an acceptable target but a movement that everyone must oppose if one is to be truly moral. By contrast, explicitly attacking the values of Western civilization would be more difficult and attract a lot more resistance. That the West does indeed think in more objective terms has even been confirmed by recent research which found that Westerners find it easier to solve problems that require abstraction and isolation, objectification as such, while Easterners found it easier to resolve problems that were contextual and less reliant on abstraction. (Morris 2010) There is a school of thought,

23

As others have also observed, one could not imagine a show called “White News Tonight”. In the United States. 25 During the interview Rufo was asked to name one thing good about being white. He cleverly avoided the question by saying that this is the exact kind of discussion he thought that should not be happening. It should not be about the colour of a person’s skin. It is surprising when you read the recent literature on race that most of it is written by black Americans. It is surprising to the extent that it is so often claimed that only white people are concern with race. 26 Places like Spain and Italy do not particularly value timeliness. English people who move to Spain to retire continuously express frustration at how local workers run according to their own timetable. By contrast, in Western Protestant countries like Germany people believe that arriving at an appointed time is at least a sign of politeness if not a measure of a person’s character. 24

11 began by Robert Logan, which argues that the West embraced “abstraction, analysis, rationality, and classification” because they began to use the phonetic alphabet between 1500-500 BC. Whatever the cause, from a Western perspective, objectification is most certainly not simply a bad thing as “abstraction” is required if there is to be “knowledge” of any kind, but abstraction becomes most important when trying to secure scientific knowledge. Paglia, and not the report by MSR, is more correct in understanding the West. It is not “liberalism” with its commitment to “openness” and “diversity” that has defined Western civilization for millennia but, in many respects the opposite, it is metaphysical commitments that praise the abstraction of objectivity and the ontology upon which these beliefs are built that has defined Western civilization and it is these very beliefs, this way of thinking and being in the world, that is being opposed today manifesting the crisis of Western civilization. To be clear, this conclusion emphasises the fact that this volume is not about “race” or “whiteness” but is about a particular way of thinking. A way of thinking that would be accessible to anyone. That objects are discrete and knowable, and that this knowledge is acquired through observation and the use of reason is the defining feature of the West. It was because this knowledge was not an expression of power, but “true”, that it was considered, since the time of Ancient Greece, to be best for informing collective action. It is that the West has aspired to “close” things in the world in formal borders, not leaving the world “open”, that explains the West’s success, productivity, creativity and, ultimately, Western identity. As Marx himself rightfully observes, capitalism itself was primarily the result of “commodification” or the abstraction and reification of things as “goods”. The West emerged from the belief that humans could know what is good and true, as Paglia critically observed, and that this knowledge was secured and then rightly deployed using substantive reason with the aspiration of realizing a better world. Ideas of social progress are alien to most traditions around the world including those informed by Buddhism and Hinduism. The belief that the world can be improved is actually one of the defining features of Western civilization which goes a long way towards explaining why the West dominated the world. Traditional gender roles, it was believed, for just one example, was not the result of power, because gender was not political at all but was an expression of the good and the true. Gender was not thought political but was simply reality. It is only when the good and the true are no longer persuasive, when God has withdrawn, that gender can become politicised. As Foucault observed, But what does it mean to kill God if he does not exist, to kill God who has never existed? Perhaps it means to kill God both because he does not exist and to guarantee that he will not exist. Certainly a cause for laughter to kill God to liberate life from the existence that limits it [ . . . ]—as a sacrifice. [ . . . ] To kill God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because this wound must make him bleed until there springs forth

12 ‘an immense alleluia lost in the interminable silence’—and this is communication. The death of God restores us not to a limited and positivistic world but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it. (Foucault as cited in Preparata 2011: 88) The death of God, according to Foucault here, is not simply the end of limits but the beginning of their infinite contestability. It is under these conditions that reality becomes the result of a certain kind of power “politics”. The death of God actually demands for sacred limits to be transgressed. As Foucault observes, the death of God “frees us” from the original experience of limit thereby liberating humanity from a positivistic world. It is only after being “delimited” and therefore politicised that “reality” can become placed within inverted commas thereby being understood as an expression of power. That certain knowledge, such as gender, in the Western tradition, was indeed “truth” was confirmed through general consent. A practice Habermas (2002: 160) has described as the “legacy of Christianity”, “the concept of discursively directed agreement” but this practice might equally be called politics, properly understood, as such discourse is informed but reality, informed by what is good and true. Agreement becomes an impossibility in the aftermath of objective reality, with the death of God. It is for this reason why the West has expressed such a long history of belief in “progress” which is foreign to other traditions. So, what some contemporary political activists oppose, whether they are fully cognisant of this fact or not, is not the colour of a person’s skin, not that they are “white”, but “whiteness” as such, that “white people”, synonymous with the West, have developed and historically expressed a way of knowing the world, an epistemology based on an ontology, that was then thought to be best suited for universally informing collective action. This way of thinking was first practiced thousands of years ago in ancient Greece and has been deployed with a great deal of confidence and success in such a way that it has been beneficial for the entire world. Reason, knowledge, and truth have informed global progress for the last 2500 years. The reason the West was confident in this worldview was not arrogance, it was not an act of blind faith, it was not even some inbuilt feeling of superiority, but because it had proven itself to be both effective and, of more importance from within this worldview, moral.27 “Whiteness”, when properly understood, is most importantly ontological. Many people from non-Western backgrounds fail to prize this Theo-ontological foundation because it is alien to their traditions, and, therefore, they find it oppressive and even evil.

27

Just to substantiate this claim, in 1960, when Western thinking still dominated Western countries, the 9 of the 10 wealthiest countries in the world were Western, white, Protestant. United States, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Bahamas, Norway, Iceland, United Kingdom.

13 Ever since the Pre-Socratics, the dominant belief that has made the West distinct from everywhere else in the world has been that human actions, for both the individual and the collective, should be informed by the best argument. As American statesman and Founding Father of the United States, Thomas Jefferson,28 made clear in 1787, “Happy for us, that when we find our constitution defective & insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers & set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or restore their constitutions.” Jefferson is referring to the true principles that made the West unique, a political condition where decisions are made, “with the coolness of philosophers”, authorized through the reasonable exchange of ideas and legitimized through agreement. Not forced agreement, the agreement that informs society today, which is just an expression of power, but agreement freely reached and grounded on belief that certain claims are simply better than others. This account draws inspiration from the ancient Greek understanding of the philosopher where all erete, all excellence, was gathered or “uncovered”, as Heraclitus wrote, “. . . the greatest erete and wisdom is to say what is uncovered (ta aletheia29) and to do what is thus understood in its fundamental nature”. By this account, human action should not just be informed by tradition, it should not just be informed by blind obedience to religious dogma, although theology and tradition certain play a necessary role for allowing the experience of “truth”, it should not further the interests of a particular cohort, it should not be informed by what is thought to be “natural”, it should not even be informed by utility, and most certainly it should not be an expression of power, but it should be informed by the best argument because the best argument, “to say what is uncovered”, was by definition both good and true, therefore, it shared an intimacy with the Divine. So, there was already observed an intimacy, in the work the Greek philosophers, between truth, goodness and God. As none other than Parmenides, most probably the founder of the Western metaphysical tradition, makes clear, From this view, that ‘That Which Is Not’ exists, can never predominate. You must debar your thought from this way of search, nor let ordinary experience in its variety force you along this way, (allowing) the eye, the sightless as it is, and the ear, full of sound, and the 28

Thomas Jefferson has become the most demonized of the “Founding Fathers” and it is difficult today to find a positive account of his role in American history. As with so much, this is yet another reversal of history. Jefferson, who single handedly wrote a draft of the American constitution and whose writings were thought to have been critical for motivating the American Revolution, was historically seen as the most important and most impressive of the founders. Today, his opponent, Alexander Hamilton, has been raised into being thought one of great men of his time. Indeed, in a list ranking the importance of the Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton was ranked first while Jefferson only managed 5th. 29 Aletheia is often simply translated as “true”. It was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who popularized translating Aletheia as “uncovered”. The same is being communicated in both translations, truth is uncovering or revealing.

14 tongue, to rule; but (you must) judge by means of logos the much-contested proof which is expounded by me. (Fragment B 7.1 - 8.2) Parmenides is voicing what truly is the defining feature of Western civilization and that which has recently been characterised as “whiteness”. When reduced to its simple purity, Parmenides is saying that you cannot let the “unreal”, that which results from high emotions, have a claim over our lives. You cannot let what you simply see or hear, unreflectively, inform your life, individually or collectively, but it is only through logos, reason, that a kind of knowledge is secured that is adequate for informing our lives. Logos here is a kind of universally shared reason or reflective discussion that is not simply “within us”, in terms of something an agent controls, but is something, in which we each participate in or give voice too, as humans. The ancient philosophers of the West “. . . believed that logos (divine logic) was the power that created and governed the universe.” (Mangalwadi 2011) This understanding of logos, as something transcendent, has meant that it has historically been identified with the mind of God, intellectus divinus, in being that which is ultimately good and true. As it says in the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was logos and logos was God . . .”. To follow upon the path of truth, according to Parmenides, is to practice the art of “persuasion”. This is not just “persuasion” aimed at achieving an outcome, as practiced by the much-maligned sophists, which is merely a technical skill to persuade an audience through manipulating their emotions, therefore remaining an expression of power or remaining within the domain of individual self-interest. As Melcher and Morrow (2018: 95) observe, “If all you can get are opinions anyway, then you might as well try to make things appear to others in whatever way serves your self-interest.” In contrast to the sophists, the philosopher practiced persuasion informed by the good and the true, the telos of reason was the mind of God, that can only be secured through agreement and therefore does not serve power. This is the art of logos. (Thanassas 2008: 11) Martin Luther expresses this same understanding, two thousand years later, when he argued that Christians do not achieve their goals through violence or coercion but through the word, through logos. As Luther wrote, I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God’s word; otherwise, I did nothing. And while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philipp and Amsdorf, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany; indeed, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool’s play. I did nothing; I let the word do its work. (Luther 1968/1522: 37) Luther is observing the power of logos/God. Here, logos achieves everything, even that which cannot be achieved through military victory. That we have agreement between Parmenides, Martin Luther and

15 Thomas Jefferson is not, of course, some mere coincidence but marks a common thread running through their thinking that is Western civilization. It is through the word, logos, written and spoken, that uncovers truth, as something enduring, that everything in the Western tradition is to be achieved. Humanity is merely the vehicle of the word; the word itself is God. The word, logos, is Divine in the Graeco-Christian tradition. The word is God, but Jesus is the word/logos made flesh. As the theologian Petrarch wrote, Surely our God has come to us so that we might go to Him, and that same God of ours interacted with humanity when He lived among us, “showing himself like a man in appearance” . . . What an indescribably sacrament! To what higher end was humanity able to be raised than that a human being, consisting of a rational soul and human flesh, a human being, exposed to mortal accidents, dangers, and needs, in brief, a true and perfect man, inexplicably assumed into one person with the Word, the Son of God, consubstantial with the Father and co-eternal with Him. To what high end was humanity able to be raised than that this perfect man would join two natures in Himself by a wonderous union of totally disparate elements? Those disparate elements to which Petrarch referred were “Heaven” and “Earth”, “goodness” with “matter”, “spirit” with “flesh”. Jesus symbolizes the objectification of the world in terms of it being uncovered, in terms of it being truly present. Jesus is the bringing together of the left and right, the darkness and the light. Jesus’ incarnation symbolizes the World. Jesus is therefore truth. Parmenides does not only start the Western tradition, as such, in terms of metaphysics but is also the origin of a commitment to “a form of knowledge that is directed towards the world and that is now possible as ontological knowledge”. From this time onwards, tradition, religious dogma, utility or nature, were all thought to be inadequate for informing social order on their own because a new knowledge was believed to be foundational and primary, a knowledge accessed through logos. It is because this antiwhite movement is opposed to this particular way of knowing, thinking, and ordering society that, [w]hen they speak of “racism”, for example, they are not referring to prejudice on the grounds of race, but rather to, as they define it, a racialized system that permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper “critical” methods . . .” (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020) This is not some kind of obscurantist babble, but this quote grants insight into the true motivations of those who seek to undermine Western civilization and realize radical social change. To achieve this change, one must be “trained” in a particular “critical method”, a method actually voiced by a group of neo-Marxists following World War II called “critical theorists”. Again, as Moss also observes, “Parasitic Whiteness – an acquired condition: (1) a way of being, (2) a mode of identity, (3) a way of knowing and sorting the objects constituting one’s human surround.” (Moss 2021: 356) Moss is quite explicit that

16 whiteness is not only about a way of identifying but is equally about a way of knowing, a way of ordering the world. The more deeply you enter into the world of “anti-whiteness” protests the more the true identity of their target becomes apparent. The “system” for organizing society that they really oppose, whether many who protest against “whiteness” realise this or not, is against the ideas of reason, truth, agreement and, ultimately, justice, that has become recently racialized in terms of “whiteness”. This association, whiteness with knowledge acquired through reason, is having all kinds of consequences. Even within Christianity there are calls to desert the Western tradition. Luke Bretherton, for example, argues that Christianity needs to move away from its Western origins. Bretherton observes, “Black Liberation Theology heralded a seismic shift in Protestant social ethics and the use of Christian Realism as a dominant framework for thinking about political and social questions.” (Bretherton 2018) Again, it is the allimportant notion of “Christian realism”, the West’s ontology, the claim that the world is real and knowable, and that this knowledge is acquired through reason is what motivates “people of colour” to reject the “Western Christian” metaphysics. The danger is, of course, in doing this they also reject Jesus Christ and his embodiment in the world. Mills (1998) is quite explicit in arguing that what he believes underlies Western prejudice against “people of colour” are “the ways whiteness functioned as an ontological category” an ontology, according to Mills, that prized “property ownership, militarism and masculinity”. Again, there is more than a little truth to this. Metaphysics does inform property ownership, as Marx observes, which explains why the loss of property is always associated with the end of the nuclear family and emasculation of Western civilization. It is this opposition to everything that might be associated with Western metaphysics, “Christian realism”, the reasonable ordering of society through what the Greeks called logos, which reveals knowledge, that primarily informs the emergent “counterculture” that is increasingly dominating Western societies today. “Wisdom” in the Western tradition is, as Julius Evola argued, “. . . sapienza, is the progress of the individual human being, through initiation, towards the Absolute Being. It is therefore a matter of ontology, of states of being, rather than of epistemology.” (Furlong 2011: 8) Wisdom, sophia, is ontological; it is about Being not about knowledge. It is to undermine this project that, as Bretherton observes, “whiteness” now “. . .names a political and moral rationality through which a “common sense” is forged and reproduced; that is, it constitutes a way of discerning and deliberating about goods in common and a vision of the good life through which “we, the people” come to decide how we shall live.” (2018: 13) Political movements like “Black Power” are shaped by nonWestern thinking that hopes to “fundamentally recalibrate and resignify” (Bretherton 2018: 13-14) these “white” ontological and theological commitments in a way more harmonious with their historical traditions.

17 In the middle of the 1st millennium BC, many traditions began to teach that to live ethically is to renounce earthly desires, Buddha proposed meditation while Confucius advocated strict observance of particular rituals. The ancient Greeks, after the philosophical revolution, most importantly voiced by Plato but instigated by Parmenides, argued that the way of knowing what to do, knowing what is good and right, is through a particular way of knowing the world that involved reasonable persuasion constrained by truth or, better, logos. (Morris 2010) It is with this strategy, as Manoussakis (2012: 126) observes, that “Plato succeeded in overcoming the mythical, demonic, and orgiastic character of Greek cults”. That is, prior to Socrates and the philosophic turn, female goddesses were worshipped as the primary Gods through much of Ancient Greece and such Gods were not accessed through reason but encountered through achieving an ecstatic state via drugs, frenzied dancing and orgies. After the philosophical revolution, for which Socrates gave his life, sophia30 became the most important knowledge thereby laying the foundations for a completely unique way of thinking that was to inform, or indeed was, Western civilization. As Graves observes, “One of the most uncompromising rejections of early Greek mythology was made by Socrates. Myths frightened or offended him; he preferred to turn his back on them and discipline his mind to think scientifically: “to investigate the reason of the being of everything – of everything that is, not as it appears, and to reject all opinions of which no account can be given.”” (Graves 1971: 10) What is really being argued when protesters oppose whiteness, is that they oppose the role of reason, truth and goodness. This is why they criticize “whiteness” for perceiving itself superior, exceptional and that it is judgemental. It is because Christian Western civilization, at its best, has indeed prioritized these ordering principles, that are accessed through logos, that they wish to destroy the historically dominant order of society. As it is true that the counterculture movement opposes a certain method for ordering society that is rational and guided by individual conscience in terms of what is good then when “people of colour”, like Sean Jacobs, who actually unsuccessfully ran for an elected political position, demand to be the new leaders of a traditionally Christian Western societies, what they hope to undermine, as their political platform, is this method for ordering society. Before one leaps to adopt what those historically considered as “outsiders” have to offer, before the West surrenders to the accusation of being barbaric, one should be mindful of Paglia’s (2001: 3) warning, “Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first.” It is in the desire to do away with the dominance of knowledge

30

Sophia was unlike other Goddesses who were ruled by emotions as she was not born from the loins of Zeus, her father, but from his head. She was related to Zeus’ mind not his bodily drives.

18 acquired through reason and informed by conscience, the core of Western civilization, that people like Jacobs criticise certain leaders for being “too white” and “too male”. Substantive reason, goodness, truth, and belief in God, are all to be “opposed” according to those advancing the principles of the cultural wars, because it is these founding principles that have informed Western civilization and Western civilization is now understood to be evil. As will be revealed, the struggle between light and darkness, order and chaos, reason and power, the right and the left, has a very long history and is not truly native to our times. This struggle, the one in which we are currently engaged, has been identified by those who are the most enthusiastic participants, as an eternal war. We know that there was a struggle between those who identified with the forces of “light” against those who identified with the forces of “darkness” in the 5 th century BC when the ancient Greeks first raised the Apollonian, the rational, the objective, the known, the light, as preferred over the Dionysian, the erotic, chthonic alternative of “Mother Earth”, the darkness. Graves argues regarding this shift away from the Goddess, Law . . . grew out of religion: occasional pronouncements developed proverbial force and became legal principles. But as soon as religion in its primitive sense is interpreted as social obligation and defined by tabulated laws – as soon as Apollo the Organizer, God of Science, usurps the power of his Mother the Goddess of inspired truth, wisdom, and poetry, and tries to bind her devotees by laws – inspired magic goes, and what remains is theology, ecclesiastical ritual, and negatively ethical behaviour. (Graves 1971: 479) Graves is observing this shift from being guided by socially accepted norms to legally binding knowledge of what was good and evil marks the shift from the Dionysian to the Apollonian. This was Socrates rebellion. His works helped to establish a new epoch, the epoch of the Apollonian, which is only possible if we leave the subterranean haven of the maternal womb behind and venture into the bright light of the Sun/truth/goodness. It was argued at that time that “by naming and classification, by the cold light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated”. (Paglia 2001: 5) Recently, a person of colour who was supporting a “Resist Whiteness” conference being held in England claimed, “Resisting Whiteness is not about white individuals, it is about “whiteness” as a pervasive system of oppression . . . a system that needs resisting and dismantling.” Although it is probably true that this activist was ultimately ignorant regarding the full breadth and depth of what she was opposing and, indeed, what she was supporting, but, when properly understood, what has come forward in terms of “whiteness” is anything but oppressive. It is, as the very existence of the conference affirms, actually extremely tolerant and inclusive. What these activists find “oppressive” is the universal constraint of sophia/conscience as the highest form of knowledge that has been thought best for decision making at both an individual and collective level. After all, truth is indeed oppressive if you are wrong, motivated by emotions, desire power or advocating

19 on behalf of special interests. It is that the Western tradition, at its best, opposes, error, passion, power, and special interests, that it has historically been such an effective way of ordering societies. Truth is not the substantiation of power but what resists it. Is the discovery that the culture wars are aimed at a particular ontology, which finds expression in a particular epistemology and theology, the answer to the crisis of the West? Is it adequate for those who hope to save the West, as the West, those who believe that Western civilization is not barbarity but can and should positively contribute to the world as it has in the past, to simply fight to maintain a Christian realist ontology? Although with what has been discovered so far, progress has been made in not only understanding the crisis of the West but also in explaining what primarily informs the culture wars, the pressing question remains unanswered; why? Why have so many turned on Western civilization as something barbarous? It did not, after all, fall into crisis. It was never shown to be inadequate to the tasks asked of it. Quite the opposite. So why has there been a 180-degree reversal in what should be prized so that everything that the West once valued as the West is now thought evil while everything once thought evil has now been ennobled as the highest good? Now that there is a greater understanding of what is being undermined the most troubling question can now be considered, why?

Why are people opposed to Western Civilization? At the turn of the 20th century, Western Europe was “still the world’s richest, most culturally productive, and politically and militarily dominant continent”. (Wasserstein 2007: 1) It was believed that the Western European civilizing project, informed mainly by Protestant Christianity, would ultimately free all of humanity from its baser instincts and bring it to realize its full potential. (Jonsson 2013: 53) Europe, particularly Western Europe, truly dominated the entire world and aspired to realize its vision at a global level as a moral imperative with practical implications. As George Friedman observes, Imagine that you were alive in the summer of 1900, living in London, then the capital of the world. Europe ruled the Eastern Hemisphere. There was hardly a place that, if not ruled directly, was not indirectly controlled from a European capital. Europe was at peace and enjoying unprecedented prosperity. Indeed, European interdependence due to trade and investment was so great that serious people were claiming that war had become impossible – and if not impossible, would end within weeks of beginning – because global financial markets couldn’t withstand the strain. The future seemed fixed: a peaceful, prosperous Europe would rule the world. (Friedman 2009: 1) What Friedman is capturing is the pinnacle of what might rightfully be described as the Christian Protestant Era. Friedman was referring to a time that was the culmination of a long period of peace, prosperity and progress that some have called “The Long Peace” or “The Century of Peace”. This century

20 began with the Congress of Vienna in 1815, that marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and reached a pinnacle around 1870, the Belle Epoque, but was brought to a terrible and abrupt end with the destruction of the First World War in 1914. The First World War marked the beginning of what some call the “Short 20th Century” which spans from 1914 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992. The short 20 th century, 1914-1992, is by far the bloodiest, cruellest, most inhumane period of human history and the West has played a central role in these events. It was a period that saw the demise of Christianity as a global force and the emergence of humanism. The Christian Protestant Era began in 1517 when a 34-year-old German Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, supposedly nailed 95 “theses” on the door of a Wittenberg Church thus initiating the Reformation.31 By the turn of the 20th century, the Christian West was so dominant and its achievements so great, that its success, power and global dominance was unprecedented. It really was a glorious age. Albert Schweitzer rightly claimed that the greatest achievement of those times of peace and prosperity, what would be remembered when that era had concluded, would be the Protestant theology that was so central to that era. As he wrote, “When, at some future day, our period of civilization shall lie, closed and completed, before the eyes of later generations, German theology will stand out as a great, a unique phenomenon in the mental and spiritual life of our times.” It should be expected that what was to be remembered from the Protestant Christian Era was its Protestant theology. It was the Protestant ethos that informed the Golden Age of Western Europe that was thought, at that time, to be the greatest single achievement of the age. Just 30 years after Schweitzer observed what he thought was the greatest achievement of that era, the Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1932/2012) described that very same Protestant Christian theology as nothing more than a “second-rate conjuring trick which even a simpleton could see through”. So, what happened? What happened in just a few decades where ideas that had been understood as civilizations greatest achievement might be denigrated in terms of being nothing more than a “conjuring trick” for “simpletons”? As Mendieta rightfully observes, the Christian theology that was thought to be so central to the success of Western Europe and had enabled it to dominate the entire world had, within a generation, been demonized to such a degree that Zweig could publish his disparaging and dismissive remarks. The period between Schweitzer and Zweig were a period of unprecedented catastrophe. The First World War, the decadence of the Roaring 20s, the hardship of the Great Depression and the rise of the infantile Adolf Hitler were the markers of the end of the Christian Protestant Era. Interestingly, people today do not look back to Protestant theology as the greatest intellectual

31

Of course, many today claim that this was just a myth and Luther never actually nailed his criticisms of the Catholic Church on the Church door but that this event symbolizes the start of the Golden Age of Western civilization is the point being made not a claim of history.

21 achievement of the 19th century. Instead, contemporary scholars look to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the greatest intellectuals of that century. Today we look back on the Protestant Century through their critical eyes. Protestant theology is an opiate, an expression of a slave morality or the primary cause of neurosis, not the defining feature of an age. It was these very same thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, despite being held in the highest esteem today, who were primarily responsible for the extreme horrors of what the historian Hobsbawm described as, “the century of extremes”. (Mendieta 2002: 2) These very thinkers, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who are responsible for over one hundred million people being murdered in the 20th century (Mangalwadi 2011) and, if the full impact of Freud were included, then that number would actually be much higher. Indeed, as will be revealed, in 1900, those who would replace the Christian West with their new religion were already active, already scheming, already strategizing, to destroy the West. They were already busily working out exactly how to destroy Western civilization despite it being by far the most powerful socio-political force ever seen on the planet until those who would replace it came to power. Today, looking back over the 20th century, the success of their schemes is confirmed by the steep decline of the West and most particularly Christianity. As English historian Bernard Wasserstein observes, Europe has gone down in the world over the past century. Between 1914 and 2007 its share of world population declined from 27% to 11%. In 1913 the European economy produced more than half of global output; in 2004 around a third. In 1913 Europe’s share of world merchandise trade was 59%; in 2004 it was 48%. In 1913 around 90% of foreign capital investment was European (Britain’s share alone was 43%); in 2003 the European share of foreign direct investment was 60% (Britain’s share was 9%). In 1914 Europeanowned merchant shipping constituted more than four-fifths of the world’s fleet; by 2005 only about half. In 1914 European imperial powers bestrode the earth, ruling about half the land surface of the globe (in addition, Britannia ruled the waves). The only colonies of Europe remaining by 2005 were such tiny relics as the French island territory of Reunion, in the Indian Ocean, and the British mid-Atlantic island of St Helena. Two of the three British colonies in Europe in 1914, Cyprus and Malta, were now sovereign states and members of the EU . . . The third, Gibraltar, remained a British possession . . . In 1914 European universities and laboratories, particularly those of the German-speaking Kulturraum, led the world in science and technology. . . Of the fifteen Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine between 1910 and 1914, all but one was European. Of the forty-three recipients of these prizes between 2000 and 2004, only twelve were European . . . (Wasserstain 2009: 750-751) Things would have continued to deteriorate further since 2009, in no small part as a result of the rise of China. The West, as the West, is disappearing from this world. If the Sun has not yet fully set over the horizon of what might be understood as the Western Protestant project, it is deep dusk and only the last fading rays of its light might be glimpsed on the horizon. As Buchanan rightly observes,

22 . . .the West is passing away. In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birth-rate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of world population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth. (Emphasis added, Buchanan 2008: ix) The greatest crisis is not just that the West itself is in decline to such a degree that it is realistic to expect it to disappear in a generation but that what remains of the West is less Western. Even the ignorant Munich Security Conference recently acknowledged that the West is facing an existential crisis. It observed, Far-reaching power shifts in the world and rapid technological change contribute to a sense of anxiety and restlessness. The world is becoming less Western. But more importantly, the West itself may become less Western, too. This is what we call “Westlessness”. (Munich Security Report 2010) It is this “Westlessness”, as they dismissively call this fundamental crisis of Western civilization, which is most alarming, that the West itself is no longer Western, it no longer advances a distinct way of thinking, being and acting. As the former President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, recently observed, “The most serious crisis of modern times is the weakening, if not the breakdown, of faith in the durability and purpose of traditional values, which are the foundation of . . . the West in civilizational, not geographical, terms.” (Tusk 2016 as seen in Lehti et al. 2020: 1) This is a dramatic change of fortune over a relatively short period of time. At the turn of the 20th century, the entire world appeared to see the West as the light on the hill, the way the “future” should look. The West was envied and was that which should be emulated. The West presented as the very vision of civilization. The West was that against which every other region measured itself. Of course, today, nobody would dare claim that the West should be emulated. Indeed, quite the opposite, the West is presented as being that which is primarily responsible for the global catastrophes of our time and the sooner it has disappeared from the planet the better for everyone. Patriarchy, environmental destruction, and racism are all attributed primarily and uniquely to the Western way of thinking. The current unfolding global catastrophe, it is argued, is the result of imperialism, Protestant Christian morality and Western metaphysics. Western civilization is no longer thought to present a vision of the future but is the reason for most of the world’s ills and the preferred outcome in the future is that it will disappear. Western civilization is now thought to be barbarity itself. This new vision of the West, a vision most powerfully held by many Westerners themselves, is the direct result of the culture wars. The culture wars have realised a fractured society which has manifested

23 extremely high levels of distrust within society, between groups who now see themselves in competition, and nobody knows how to respond. There seems to be no “out strategy” for the West because the West itself is the problem. It is the West’s beliefs and practices that are thought to have caused the catastrophe of our age so where does the West, if it wishes to retain a distinct identity as “the West”, turn? The culture wars have challenged the historically dominant normative frames that have historically marked Western civilization as such, and so no culturally embedded solution can present itself. As William J. Bennet observes, The battle for the culture refers to the struggle over the principles, sentiments, ideas, and political attitudes that define the permissible and the impermissible, the acceptable and the unacceptable, the preferred and the disdained, in speech, expression, attitude, conduct, and politics. This battle is about music, art, poetry, literature, television programming, and movies; the modes of expression and conversation, official and unofficial, that express who and what we are, what we believe, and how we act. (Bennett 1994: 10) The West has jettisoned what it prized in the past and has come to embrace something new that can be seen to be expressed in contemporary music, art, poetry, literature, movies etc. Just look at the recent products coming out of Hollywood to see just how opposed to traditional Western values our society has become. In truth, the West is simply becoming less Western. What has emerged is a “situation that is foreign to all that has come before. It is foreign to Christian traditions; foreign to the Enlightenment project; and foreign even to the post-Christian and post-secular structures described by such authors as Giovanni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek, or Jurgen Habermas”. (Mezei 2018: 14) Everything that our grandparents would have believed in, indeed everything for which they would have been prepared to die for, has been revalued and now thought to be not simply wrong but immoral. What was once seen as honourable, patriotism, in-group loyalty, Christianity, strong gender norms, the nuclear family, objectivity and rationality, are all now seen as deeply problematic. What can be seen in contemporary society is a thoroughly consistent reversal of traditional Western values. Everything that was, until quite recently, held to be of the utmost value is today viewed as that which must be overcome. Our contemporary ideas of “progress” are no longer understood as the realization of traditional Western values, “what the good person’s conduct should be and how to develop it, generation after generation” but progress today is characterized by the systematic rejection of Western civilization. It is no longer viewed as progress, for example, if more people attend Church or if we are a more polite society or if we swear less or that there are lower rates of divorce or fewer people watching pornography or lower rates of extra-marital affairs or higher levels of respect for older people or less intergenerational conflict. Indeed, the reality seems to be the reverse, progress seems to be measured in the continuous and consistent undermining of every

24 traditional Western value with the aspiration to realise its exact opposite. This is not simply a re-evaluation of all existing values; it is their direct reversal. It is in this systematic and thorough-going determination to reverse historically prized values that explains why, unlike in the past, “elderly” people are no longer afforded respect in our society. As Roszak (1969: 1) rightly observes, “For better or worse, most of what is presently happening that is new, provocative, and engaging in politics, education, the arts, social relations (love, courtship, family, community), is the creation either of youth who are profoundly, even fanatically, alienated from the parental generation, or of those who address themselves primarily to the young.” The explanation for why youths are so influential while older people are disregarded is because it is the older people’s understanding of the world that is exactly what we are trying to reject. Again, as Wasserstein observes, “In 1914 the old were still revered . . . as repositories of wisdom and useful experience. In the youthoriented culture of the twentieth century, they were patronized as ‘senior citizens’, infantilized by social workers, and often felt that they had been thrown on the dust heap by society.” After all, why respect someone whose very existence is an indictment, a living fossil, of everything that contemporary society now denounces? Our elderly are a deposit of every “ism” that contemporary society hopes to destroy and, therefore, they should rightly be hidden away in their fenced off “villages” where their antiquated ideas can do no more harm. With as much certainty and equal fanaticism of the Chinese cultural revolution, so are we, in the West, marginalizing those who hold to a different vision, a “dated” vision, of who we are and what we should be doing. This is no minor point. It is evidence of the unprecedented and thorough way that society is changing in terms of reversal. Whereas throughout history, elderly people were valued for their insights and experience as guides to the future, today those insights and experiences are thought to be not merely worthless but offensive in terms of what is exactly wrong with the world. Today, progress is thought to occur when, traditional gender roles are undermined, traditional views on marriage are challenged, traditional views on sex are rejected, traditional ways of raising children are pathologized, traditional views on religion are ridiculed. . . Progress has manifested itself in term that all traditional values having been cast aside and apparently shown to be base or, more accurately, evil. Our elderly are now evil. This demonization of Western values and those who advance them is now thought to be progress. To believe that women should be allowed to stay at home in a heterosexual, monogamous marriage and raise good Christian children who have a strong sense of their gender identity and understand what that identity means for their role in society is now viewed as at best antiquated if not evil. To think that sex is something that should be exclusively practiced between a married couple with a view to raising many, well-adjusted children, is now thought to be prudish, at least, and yes, again, evil in

25 terms of not allowing people, especially women, to explore their sexuality and learn what they want from their ideal partner. To believe that children should be primarily raised and receive their moral education from within the family with limited institutional intervention in their moral development is now thought to be evil.32 The West, like all cultures, was built upon its past, but not determined by it, and it is the total loss or rejection of all traditional values, loss of trust in its institutions, loss of faith in its God, loss of legitimacy of its beliefs, that marks the decline of the West in civilizational terms. This transition has been observed for quite some time. Sociologist Emile Durkheim, who wrote at the turn of the 20 th century, observed even at that time that “. . .Western societies were in a process of transition – with the values, norms, and institutions needed for the new type of society still in the process of development.” (As seen in Lukes 1973) This “transitional period” has meant, as Strauss and Howe (1997) observe, that “Popular trust in virtually every American institution – from business and governments to churches and newspapers – keeps falling to new lows.” The question that seems to demand resolution is not just why did so many traditional values become understood as evil, but the much more pertinent and revealing question, why did all the traditional Western values become demonized? Why has Western civilization itself become thought of as something evil? The demonization of traditional Western values, marked most recently by the explicit marginalization of “whiteness”, has not been a selective process but consistent across the board. Everything the West once prized, those things that our grandparents, even our parents, valued most, is now thought to be barbarity. If these changes were arbitrary then one would expect that at least some traditional Western values would still be prized even if many were indeed overturned, but the dominant contemporary attitude is to reject all traditional Western values. It is Western civilization itself that is being shown as evil. What is this consistent and systematic reversal of tradition and how and why was it achieved? Finally, closely linked to the loss of faith generally and loss of faith in beliefs and traditions, is

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Some people may be questioning whether all these aspirations would truly be viewed as “evil” today or better just not “ideal”, and these claims will be substantiated, but to just look at childcare or early education. To argue against childcare in contemporary Western society is truly to have become something loathsome. After all, what are you arguing in its place, that women should stay at home and raise their children and not have a career? To argue against early institutional interventions in raising our children is to go against many sacred cows today including feminism but also many of the other liberation movements. Imagine if parents raised their child not to masturbate? Imagine if a parent did not teach moral relativism? To teach these things today is almost like a form of child abuse. As an experiment, try arguing against childcare at the next social gathering you attend and advocate instead that children receive their best moral education in the home. See the extremely passionate negative response, even aggression, mainly from women, that such a suggestion generates today. In the 1980s if you had made this claim, it would have been met with general agreement. That is how much things have changed in such a short period of time. What would trigger such a forceful response unless such a claim had indeed become something “evil”?

26 the loss of faith in Western legitimacy. Why do Westerners no longer feel legitimate to make reasonable judgements? Why do so many Westerners today, down to an individual level, no longer feel authorized to persuade others that their traditional culture is the best way to live? Indeed, as already observed, to claim that traditional Western practices, logos, truth, conscience, and sophia, should be prized is now thought to be a “colonialist” mindset that needs to be actively suppressed. Westerners no longer feel that they can legitimately try to help, advise or guide others because they understand themselves to be no longer worthy. This loss of legitimacy is nicely captured in Australia where it is constantly argued that Western civilization has much to learn from their Indigenous inhabitants. One of the first to insist that the West had no role to advise those once thought “primitive” was German anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote, I have always been of the opinion that we [the West] have no right to impose our ideals upon other nations, no matter how strange it may seem to us that they enjoy the kind of life they lead . . . or how much opposed their ideas may be to ours . . .the very standpoint that we are right, and they are wrong is opposed to the fundamental idea that nations have distinctive individualities, which are expressed in their modes of life, thought and feeling. (Boas 1916/1946: 171) At the time that this was written, this was a radical claim and Boas, and those from his school who advanced his ideas, gained infamy for suggesting that “primitive people” might be superior to Westerners. For making these radical claims, Boasians were dismissed from jobs, monitored by the FBI and criticised publicly by the press and academia alike. Up until Boas and his followers, ideas like that advanced by Sir Edward Tylor dominated Western academic thought. He claimed “that Europeans were simply culturally superior to everyone else”. (Morris 2010) Less “developed” societies, like those expressed by Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, were thought to be “savages” or “barbarians”. It was Boas and the school that he founded who were amongst the first to suggest that the West should not look at others as barbarians but, the more radical claim, that the reverse might be true. The West needed to learn how to be civilized from these other people. They had to learn from outsiders. As King recently observed in his book looking at the social impact of Boas and his school of anthropologists, they realized a “. . .root and branch reconsideration of what it means to be social animals and the surrender of an easy confidence in the superiority of our own civilization.” (King 2019) That these other culture’s ideas, especially indigenous people’s ideas, were actually superior to Western civilization was revolutionary. That these cultures were less constrained by morality, that they were purportedly more sexually liberated, practiced infidelity, and lacked personal discipline such as timeliness and sobriety, were not to be thought of being “uncivilized”, something that must be overcome, but were, for the first-time in history, thought to be expressions of the

27 exact kind of society that the West should become. Boas was the first to suggest that the West was not the epitome of civility but, in fact, barbarity itself. He argued that it should not be the case that these immoral, undisciplined, technologically underdeveloped countries should look enviously to the West, that they needed to become more Western, but, the reverse, it was actually the West who were the barbarians who needed to adopt indigenous beliefs and practices. Today, of course, claiming that indigenous people’s culture, their orientation to nature, their social relationships, their way of life, and their unique knowledge, is indeed superior to Western civilization has become academic orthodoxy across all disciplines and to suggest anything akin to Tylor’s position today would not only be denounced as the most extreme expression of racism but would result in dismissal. This is rather odd as contemporary Indians, Arabians, and Chinese, would all say that their cultures are superior to all others. Indeed, it would be odd to argue that one’s civilization is not the best and still adhere to its dictates. That we no longer prize Western civilization is just another sign of the loss of faith in the West that expresses itself in the loss of legitimacy that is fuelling the crisis of the West. As a reflection of the loss of legitimacy in the West, since the 1980s, Western civilization courses have steadily disappeared from university course lists. In the shadow of work by Lawrence Levine who brazenly argued, against all the evidence, that the idea of “Western civilization” was “invented” only after the First World War, political activists argued that Western civilization courses should no longer be taught because they were an “affront. . . to women and members of minority groups”. Basically, it was argued, Western civilization courses praised “white Christian males”, and this was not only offensive but was dangerously mistaken. In the West “. . . multiculturalists bewail the white’s conviction that the arts and sciences are for the most part an occidental affair.” Despite the truth that Levine’s claims were simply incorrect, his program was quickly embraced by tertiary institutions as orthodoxy, informing “a ‘multiculturalist’ movement that has swept away Western Civilization courses at most American colleges”. As they would chant at the Stanford University student protests in the 1960s, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” This movement, that began in the United States, has now been embraced by tertiary institutions around the world. In 2018, a passionate protest by 100 academics, certainly not a mass movement, successfully stopped the University of Sydney from introducing a Western civilization course because it was, “European supremacism writ large”. This hesitancy to allow Western civilization courses, interestingly, does not extend to learning about the positive legacy of Eastern civilizations. The same institution that fought against the establishment of a Western civilization course, the University of Sydney, was pleased to host the Confucius Institute that “celebrates the achievements of Chinese culture and the arts”. It seems that this “celebration” does not promote the same kind of “supremist” ideas advanced in

28 Western civilization courses that, because they praise white men, women and minority groups find so offensive. These Eastern “institutes” are widely acknowledged as being an obvious expression of the Chinese governments “soft power” and they promote a historical perspective harmonious with contemporary communist China’s expansionist aspirations including its penchant for demonizing the West. Not only are Eastern civilization courses that are known to be highly politicised allowed to operate in most leading Western universities today but, as a matter of explicit university policy, all courses must now teach content from a range of cultures with particular emphasis on the contributions made by Eastern cultures. As a university overview says of a philosophy program (and nothing could be more Western than philosophy), “Deakin Philosophy prides itself on applying philosophical concepts to our contemporary world and maintaining a pluralistic and cross-cultural outlook that embraces Eastern philosophy.”33 [emphasis added] That course coordinators are increasingly being ordered to include particular content, this is something that they must do to adhere to university policy, is not only questionable in regards to merit but undermines the long held Western tradition of academic freedom. What this increasing focus on Eastern thinking shows is that Western civilization has lost not only authority but legitimacy and to advance the ideas and beliefs of the West today, even in the West, is to promote something corrupt at its core, promoting something loathsome, something, if it expresses pride in its past, evil. Yet, is Western history any more brutal, any more imperial, any more murderous, any more patriarchal, any more racist, than China’s? After all, it was being argued in academic institutions in China as late as the 1950s that “self-rule” of minorities should not be allowed as this might inhibit those minorities from mixing with the Han Chinese thereby not allowing those minorities to acquire the Han’s “superior” cultural traits. (Xun 2016: 14) Perhaps the main difference between a place like the United Kingdom and China is that China not only still possesses its Empire, just ask the Uyghers and Tibetans, but they continue to expand their empire whereas the United Kingdom voluntarily ceded its Empire generations ago and has continued to decline ever since. It would be interesting to know if Chinese academics are being ordered to positively “embrace” Western philosophy in its course content. What we do know is that while the West has been promoting pluralism and a cross cultural outlook, since 1995 the

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A legitimate question would be does “Eastern philosophy” even exist? This is not a racist question but simply to observe that philosophy is the love of sophia, the love of an implicit knowledge, knowledge of the ‘Good”, that is then made explicit through logos. Eastern thinking, as expressed in Buddhism, does not even recognize that this knowledge exists. They argue that overcoming the world is the achievement of wisdom not moving closer to it. This questing of Eastern “philosophy”, I hope, will be better understood as the volume progresses but there is nothing wrong with observing that Eastern thinking does not advance what has come to be called metaphysics and without metaphysics there is no philosophy. That this Western knowledge has fallen in disrepute is evinced by the closure of so many philosophy departments around the world.

29 main goal of the Chinese education system has been to “boost the nation’s spirit, enhance cohesion, and foster national self-esteem and pride”. The West, unlike China, has lost faith, in every sense of this word, in itself. China still looks to “foster national self-esteem and pride” while Westerners are learning that the West was historically the most evil force in the world. The West, often reduced to white males, is presented as the most destructive force in history. This loss of faith in itself seems to be more the result of a loss of self-confidence rather than any kind of civilizational failure. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the truth. It seems that it was when the West was at the peak of its powers, dominating the world in the early 20th century, as Boas’ and Durkheim’s arguments confirm, that it began to lose faith in itself. The West has now lost all its confidence. It no longer has faith in its religious traditions, it has lost faith in its ontological commitments, indeed, it has lost faith in its experience of reality itself. Political scientist Fareed Zakaria argues that many in the West today are traumatized and feel that their civilization is under assault. (Fareed 1997) This sense of loss is a concrete expression and rational response to the reality of our contemporary condition. A civilization that has taken millennia to build and became for a time globally dominant in a way that has never been seen in history, seems to have crumbled into chaos in mere decades. The question that these volumes hope to answer is how did we arrive at this place? Why have all our traditional values been reversed? Why, in short, is the West in crisis?

The Problem That there is a crisis, that Western societies are extremely divided and that no-one knows how to respond, is widely acknowledged. As Adam Curtis narrates in his documentary Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, capturing the prevailing sentiment, We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America, societies have become split and polarized. Not just in politics but across the whole culture. There is anger . . . and a widespread distrust of the elites. Yet at the same time there is a paralysis. A sense that no one knows how to escape . . . People in the West know that there is something wrong, there is something deeply wrong, but people cannot act because they do not have an adequate understanding of what is happening or why. How do you escape when you are not even sure what is imprisoning you? The American author, George Friedman, claimed in his recent book, The Storm Before the Calm, (2020) that the reason the United States is going through “difficult times” is because of natural cycles of “periodic and predictable crises” which are beyond human control therefore Americans are just “passengers on the American roller coaster”. We should, by this analogy, sit back and enjoy the ride because these regular periods of crises cannot be avoided but just need to be passively endured. This particular moment of crisis that we are living through today, Friedman

30 claims, is the result of “deep structural changes” that are “creating profound stresses” in both the American economy and society. These economic “stresses” are caused by both “a periodic shift in which its operations and traditional relationships to society are changing”, or institutional change, and “an excess of money and limited opportunity for investment” resulting in a “falloff of innovation”.34 According to Freidman, it is this widely acknowledged but little understood phenomena, lack of innovation, that is resulting in dramatic socioeconomic change. These forces together are causing “the glue that was holding American society together” to “weaken and will continue to decline throughout the 2020s”. He even uses the phrase, loved by critical theorists, of this being a “cultural revolution” (Friedman 2020: 1) which is at the same time a political revolution. Friedman suggests that these crises are actually good for America as such crises are the engine room of “progress” because, . . . each period begins with a problem generated by the previous cycle, creates a new model from which to draw on American strength, and culminates in that solution playing out its hand and becoming the new problem that has to be solved. (Friedman 2020: 2) When the forces revealed in this volume, and the role they play in shaping society are understood, this claim by Friedman will be shown to be what it is, a distraction.35 Just another effort to portray deliberate interventions in shaping the world as being the result of natural forces. Friedman is arguing that nothing can be done, nothing should be done, just relax and the pain will soon be over. The West will be nothing but an embarrassing memory at most. What Friedman is actually presenting is a pseudoMarxist argument covered in a thin free market veneer consistent with neo-Conservatism. Marx would agree with most of what Freidman is arguing. That there are natural economic cycles that operate outside of human control which periodically manifests a crisis that precipitates a new era of prosperity that emerges from the ruins of the old order. What is true, which contrasts to Friedman’s myth, is that the United States, along with the West, is in a real crisis. An existential crisis. Indeed, Western civilization itself is in an existential crisis. Part of this crisis “. . . is a decline in legitimacy of hierarchical authority, patriotism,

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The flood of money without a productive place to go is the result of the American banking system which prints money to be “invested” in the stock exchange which then appears as government debt. It is because of this selfsustaining investment cycle that during the Covid 19 crisis, which saw the sharpest economic downturn since the Great Depression, the U.S. stock markets recorded record highs. The individuals who created this insane system which transfers wealth from hard working Americans into the pockets of investors will be revealed in volume III of this series. 35 Friedman actually promotes the same old line that his ideology has advanced for a century, move beyond the fractured society we live in, in this case caused by technocrats and their specific knowledge, and aspire towards the prior unity that this fracturing hides. As will be revealed, it is pure Jewish Gnosticism.

31 [and] religion . . .” (Inglehart 1977: 4) Murray affirms this conclusion, the crisis of Western civilization, he says, is the result of a loss of “. . . faith in its beliefs, traditions and legitimacy”. (Murray 2017: 2) The demise of the West, of course, indicates the dawn of something new, the advent of a new epoch. With the advent of this new epoch, the West risks being annihilated as a recognisable “way of life” and this danger is the direct result of the destruction of Western civilization. As Jordan and Weedon (1995: 4) observes, the question raised by cultural contestation is, Whose culture shall be the official one and whose shall be subordinated? What cultures shall be regarded as worthy of display, and which shall be hidden? Whose history shall be remembered and who’s forgotten? What images of social life shall be projected, and which shall be marginalized? What voices shall be heard, and which will be silenced? Who is representing whom and on what basis? THIS IS THE REALM OF CULTURAL POLITICS. This paragraph captures the extent and intensity of the cultural battle we face today. Culture “wars” are far more dangerous than those fought with bullets. Cultural destruction is the total annihilation of an ethnic identity. It is the fellow traveller of genocide in terms of reaching for the same destination. The destruction of an ethos, destruction of a way of life, is the crisis of the West and can be understood as a form of ethnic cleansing or ethnocide. This destruction of the ethnic identity of Westerners, most acutely experienced within the Anglosphere, has been so successful that American scholar Darren Kleinberg can boast that there now exists a “post-ethnic America” (Kleinberg 2016: xvi), an America not only free from the dominance of any particular ethnic identity, as sought by multi-culturalism, but an America free from any ethnic identity. To express concern about an ethnicity, an ethos, is not to be concerned with the dying out of a “race” but the extinction of a set of beliefs and practices, a way of thinking, that was once held to be sacred for informing a people. As Hirst (2011) recently wrote, “There is an absurdity in telling a people to drop their old values . . . for these are the things that have made them a people.” This is the crisis of Western civilization, the attempt to manifest this absurdity, this is the destruction of the Western ethos. This destruction is resulting in a lost generation. As grunge rocker Richard Hell wrote, “I belong to the Blank Generation. I have no beliefs. I belong to no community, tradition, or anything like that. I’m lost in this vast, vast world. I belong nowhere. I have absolutely no identity.” If this statement does not bring tears to your eyes appreciate that your children feel the same way. This is the price of ethnocide. The main question that informs this volume is not just what but the much more difficult question as to why? Why have shared Western values, held with such conviction for thousands of years, been turned upside down in such a way that everything that was once thought to be noble is now thought base and everything once thought base has now been ennobled? Why have we voluntarily rejected the

32 Western tradition if it was not informed by failure? Why have we collectively undergone a cultural revolution when, even as late as the 1950s, nothing seemed to be going wrong? It would be reasonable to assume that most people believe that the cultural revolution, that has had such an incredible impact in shaping the way people think and act in Western countries today, is a “natural” phenomenon. That, as Herbert Spenser observed, Western “[s]ociety changed by itself according to the laws of its own development.” This would be to believe that the aspiration so characteristic of our times, “to detach the present from the past” (Ferudi 2020a), as fought for by the activists in the culture wars, is a natural social phenomenon in terms of society changing according to its own internal motivations however complex and unfathomable those drives are. The “protesters” on the streets of the United States that are burning down buildings and looting shops, the “rioters” who broke into the Capitol building, the many activist academics forcefully promoting a particular view of the world no longer constrained by Weber’s insistence on “disinterested” education, and the intolerant social change advocates, are advancing a shared program, a thoroughly consistent program, simply because they agree, through their own volition, that such actions are the right thing to do. The culture wars, by this account, are just another disruptive social movement, like the Reformation, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and when everything has settled down in its aftermath, as George Friedman promises, the world will be better for having endured the birth pangs of the new, post-ethnic epoch. That in our current “periodic and predictable crisis”, there is nothing required of you in order to realise the predicted future benefits. The glaring problem with this argument is, if the new ideas being so passionately promoted by a relatively small but extremely vocal, well-funded, group of protesters is indeed reflective of changing values in the wider society then why do so many people, people who just quietly go about their day, the people Nixon referred to as the “silent majority”, raising their children and going about their work, believe that West is in crisis? A recent study found that around 2/3rds of British citizens, a significant majority, felt that Britain was worse-off today than it had been when they were young. The same study found that this feeling of decline was expressed by all generations suggesting that this is a long-term trend not just passing nostalgia. My sense is that if such a study were undertaken in the United States, Australia, or Canada, the same conclusions would be reached. Why, if the dramatic changes afflicting our society are “natural”, do so many people believe that the past was better than today, and that society is in steep decline? Revealing WHO is Destroying Western Civilization. It will be claimed in this volume that the “cultural revolution” that is destroying Western civilization is most definitely not a natural phenomenon. It is, most definitely, intentional. The question is, if this is indeed true, if the cultural changes that have unfolded in the West over the last 100 years are the

33 result of intentional human interventions, then who and not what is driving these dramatic social changes becomes the pertinent question. Perhaps even more urgent than the question of who is the question of why? Why is somebody determined to destroy Western civilization? What is their motivation? At the 1992 Republican Convention, that would confirm George Bush Snr as the Republican Presidential candidate in the upcoming elections, Pat Buchanan argued, . . . this election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America. (Emphasis added) Politics is about “who we are”, “what we believe” and “what people stand for”. Politics, by Buchanan’s account, is about meaning, not about distribution. Politics is more about spirt than matter. It is, as Buchanan observes, a contest for the “souls of America”. When what is valued is being contested, when our souls are what is at stake, then politics can no longer be just about wealth distribution, but must turn into something irreducibly theological in nature. Buchannan was rightly observing that the contest in politics over the last half of the 20th century, and in truth for quite some time before, is better understood as a theo-political struggle in that it is a political contest between different visions of what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is good and what is evil. The 20th century German intellectual, Martin Buber coined the term “theo-politics” meaning, “the public affairs arising from the striving for the actualization of God’s rule.” Theo-politics, according to Buber, was about efforts directed towards actualizing God’s rule on earth. What this means is that the term “theo-politics” captures efforts by humans to shape the world, shape what people believe and how they behave, in order to maintain or repair Man’s relationship with God. “God’s rule” might be understood as a contest between competing conceptions of what is good and what is evil, what is base or what is noble, what is right and what is wrong and, of course, what is true and what is false. As will be revealed, God is at the root of such problems, not man. According to Buber, the primary political question is not “will God rule in this world?” but more the question “which God will rule in this world?” Political theorist Alexandre Kojeve characterised this struggle as a dialectical struggle to both become the Master over others and, once in this position of power, to shape reality for everyone. (Kojeve 1980) This is the type of political struggle that Buchanan observed was taking place in the United States. It is this deeper contest, a deeply theological contest, that is being played out through politics, that Buchanan rightly describes as a “culture war”. The culture wars are a contest over which God will rule in the world. What will be understood as good and what will be understood as evil? What will be truth and what will be false? In his

34 speech, Buchanan failed to identify exactly who were the combatants in this theo-political contest. Who were the groups fighting to capture the “souls of America”? What competing conceptions of God were trying to be actualized in the world? Obviously, one side of this religious contest was the traditionally dominant, Protestant, Christian beliefs and practices that have historically shaped the United States, as championed by Buchanan himself. The question is who are those who are so passionately opposed to this Western, Christian vision of America? It was claimed that the crisis of the West was not the result of natural forces but the result of intentional activities to undermine Western civilization and that this should be understood as a theopolitical contest. The question therefore is to reveal who exactly is competing with Christianity for the “souls of America”? The answer to this question must resolve the outstanding questions, which, at least shallowly, appears unrelated; who is motivated to oversee the collapse of Western Christian civilization? Who wants to see the values of Western civilization reversed? Why are they particularly opposed to the Western project that relies on a particular set of ontological and epistemological commitments that have been most recently associated with “whiteness”? How are countercultural movements like feminism, Black Lives Matter, Gay Rights, liberalizing drug use, opposition to the nuclear family, rejection of property, all somehow related? Any solution to the question of who is trying to destroy Western civilization must answer all these different but, as it turns out, related aspects of our contemporary crisis. There is no easy or acceptable way to answer this question. There is, as they say in Australia, “no beating around the bush”. To state the matter in the most unambiguous terms will attract instant scorn and many will reject the claim without allowing further elaboration. Despite the possibility of this eventuality, the truth must be stated in the clearest terms if we are to ever overcome our crisis. It will be argued that there is a relatively small group of religious actors, who should rightly be identified as Gnostic Jews,36 that are responsible for the crisis of Western civilization. It will be shown, in this volume, that over the last 150 years, Gnostic Jews have done everything that they can to destroy Christian Western civilization in order to realise their vision of redemption. This conclusion certainly brings me no pleasure. It took me

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It is important to note from the introduction of this term, “Gnostic Jew”, that this term most certainly does not apply to all people who identify as Jewish. As will be explained, many Jews are fundamentally opposed to this movement and see it as an evil, heretical cult that should not even be called “Jewish”. The current practices of Gnostic Judaism are a relatively recent invention that involves the worships a female Goddess. As such, it is a movement that rejects the entire Orthodox Jewish religion including not revering the Talmud. Gnostic Jews, from this movement’s beginnings at the end of the 19th century, have done everything that they can to destroy Orthodox or Rabbinic Judaism with the intention of replacing it with their own heretical teachings. The distinction between Gnostic and other forms of Judaism is important to note as it is a distinction that has been missed by most commentators.

35 years of research, at great personal cost, to both understand and accept that this claim was, in fact, true. Despite how this claim may initially resonate with the reader, I am no “anti-Semite”. Indeed, as will be revealed, these people hope to destroy traditional Judaism as surely as they hope to destroy Christianity. As I know, from experience, to claim that “Jews”, of any kind, no matter how conditionally this claim is made, may be undermining the Christian West for religious reasons is highly confronting to the contemporary reader. I had considered tempering my claim to argue that “gnostics” were responsible for what is happening in our world today but so much would be missed in such a strategy, so much central for understanding history, that I have decided to retain the claim of “Jewish” despite how it may make the reader uncomfortable. All I do ask is, for the sake of Western civilization, and this is no exaggeration, that the reader will persevere with this volume to allow me the opportunity to substantiate this shocking and extremely confrontational claim. The basic strategy that has been used by Gnostic Jews to destroy Western civilizational is to fracture the West’s relationship with their God. This rupture with God, one that has been largely achieved, would be realised through the “revaluation”, or better a “reversal”, of all historically dominant Christian values. Everything Christianity historically understood as “good” was now to be cast as “evil” and visa versa. So, the West historically prized, heterosexuality, the family, private property, clearly defined gender norms, objectivity, truth, and reason, while it broadly demonized, homosexuality, single parent families, androgyny, bisexuality, subjectivity, deception, and emotional decision making. Gnostic Judaism, as a theo-political movement, for reasons that will be explained in detail, intentionally reversed all the values historically prized by the Christian West so that everything that was once thought to be “sinful”, is now to be praised as “noble” while everything that was once thought “noble” is now to be thought as “sinful”. Homosexuality, promiscuity, mind altering drugs (often disguised as innovative “medications”), matriarchy, mysticism, gender fluidity, single parent families, cultural diversity, tribalism, and subjectivity, are all now thought of as noble while, heterosexuality, chasteness, civility, humbleness, sobriety, rationality, masculinity, clearly defined genders, marriage, conformity, and objective truth, are all now characterised as “evil”. By destroying the historically dominant experience of “the good”, thereby destroying the West’s relationship with their God, Gnostic Jews hope to destroy Western civilization as such and, in-so-doing, destroy Westerners as an identifiable people. As American Jewish “racial activist” Noel Ignatiev said in unequivocal terms, “. . . we want to abolish the white race . . .”. This “abolition” will not be achieved simply through genocide, the intentional murder of a people based on their genetics, but through the destruction of Western civilization. Therefore, this destuctive project would more accurately be described as ethnocide or the destruction of an ethnicity. The destruction of an ethos. Ethnocide is the

36 complete annihilation of a people as such. A nation may lose many wars but continue to survive as a people. They can rebuild and once again walk the world stage as a people. There is no return from ethnocide. As a destructive act it is complete. Although a full understanding of what is being claimed here will require a great deal of elaboration and clarification, in the most basic terms, it is because the West was a Christian civilization that it has been historically globally dominant, and it is because of this historical dominance that, in the Jewish Gnostic vision of the future, it must now be destroyed. What is happening today is what Norman Cohn warned in his 1976 book Europe’s Inner Demons. It is "the urge to purify the world through the annihilation of some category of human beings imagined as agents of corruption and incarnations of evil." That category of humanity which some people seek to annihilate today for their evil deeds are white Christians. If Gnostic Jews are to realize their messianic mission to rule the world as Masters in the name of their God, the West, as the West, must be destroyed. This is understood by the Gnostic Jews as a struggle for dominance that has been taking place for over 100 years and, at least according to gnostic thinkers like Moses Hess, Ludwig Gumplowicz and Alexandre Kojeve, there can only be one “winner”. As Gnostic intellectual Kojeve himself wrote, “. . . it does the man of the fight no good to kill his adversary. He must overcome him dialectically. He must leave him life and consciousness and destroy only his autonomy. He must overcome the adversary only in so far as his adversary is opposed to him and acts against him. In other words, he must enslave him.” The aim of this struggle is not to kill your adversary but to take away is autonomy. To make him serve your purposes. To take away his very ability to think freely and act according to his own direction. The aim is to make your opponent a slave. True enslavement is achieved by making the “other” worship your god. When we balk at the claim that “Jews”, of any kind, may be responsible for the crisis of the West, that is an expression of our enslavement. We feel that we are speaking against our “betters”, we are getting out of line with our rulers, and we have an intense feeling of discomfort. This is not a rational response but an emotional response as an expression of power. For Gnostic Jews, the Western method of social ordering, one that is rational, conscientious, and above all moral, is an anathema that must be destroyed if their true God is ever to be liberated from her cavernous darkness and freed into the world thereby heralding a new era. It is only with her release, according to

37 these gnostics, that the Jewish people, and the entire world, will be redeemed in the eyes of their God, and they can take their rightful place as Masters of the world and the Messianic Age can begin.37 How has this revaluation of all existing values been realised? Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Gnostic Jews have managed to wrest the “production” of knowledge by becoming the intellectual elite of the Western world. There are few disciplines today whose leading historical figures did not identify as Jews. Even today, as Nisbitt (2009: 172) observes, “Jews comprise 33 percent of Ivy League students, and approximately equal percentage of the faculty at elite colleges . . . These are overrepresentations by a factor of 15 or more.” This massive overrepresentation, that began in the United States in the aftermath of World War II, has allowed Gnostic Jews to influence academia, shaping it to reflect their vision of reality, shaping the way we all think. As Gnostic Jew Stefan Zweig cautiously admitted, all his life he had “a secret longing to resolve the merely Jewish – through flight into the intellectual – into humanity at large”. (Heinze 2004: 74) Zweig is revealing his aspiration to make what had been “Jewish”, at least according to his gnostic faith, to become the universal by shaping everyone intellectually. This strategy requires inverting what were once thought to be the “deviant” practices of a culture, homosexuality, promiscuity, atheism, drug taking etc., and turning them into virtues and visa versa. (Assmann 1998: 31) This normative inversion has been primarily, although not exclusively, achieved by capturing our universities. This control has allowed Gnostic Jews to shape the way that we think, thereby changing the dominant ‘narratives’ that constitute reality and remake them so that they are harmonious with the theo-political ideals of Gnostic Judaism. As Kundera observes in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, when discussing how to destroy a people, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.” (Kundera as cited in Buchanan 2001) This is exactly what is taking place in the West today. Firstly, the West has forgotten its own heritage, its own history, it has grown ignorant of its own God. Into that emptiness, into that vacuum that was Western culture, the West’s history is being retold from a Gnostic Jewish perspective. Historically the West believed itself to be an important instrument for bringing civilization to the world whereas today people have come to believe that what was once called “Western civilization” is actually barbarity. Historical attempts to bring civilization to the world are today portrayed as “colonialism” which is just a form of “invasion”. What was once thought to be the successful transfer

37

Although Noel Ignatiev claims that he is a “race traitor”, Jews, of course, have never identified as being Western Europeans but have always rightly, and continue to today, identified as Eastern. This is just part of the deception of this movement that is repeated time and again for reasons that will be explained.

38 of the benefits of civility, after all indigenous people never return to their pre-Western lifestyles, are now falsely cast as “destruction”. This revaluation, this rewriting of history, encourages the majority of people to conform to the principles and beliefs of their new Gnostic Jewish overlords while remaining ignorant the true motivations of those who are controlling how and what they think. For this reason, as Preparata observes (2011: 4), in universities across the Western world, Ten times out of ten the pupils are trained to take aim and fire at the privileged pet-peeves of postmodernism. These are: patriarchy, phallocracy, paternalism, racism, sexism, machismo, racist industrial pollution (that is, only that pollution that is putatively caused by the white elites and discharged on “minorities”), Europe, Eurocentrism, the white European male, the male in general, Columbus and the Catholics, religion, God, transcendence, metaphysics, the spirit, colonization and early imperialism, and sometimes, ever more infrequently, “capitalism,” preferably singled out as a vague synonym for economic oppression. This religious project of attacking the West, presented in various guises, is being achieved today by nurturing a “culture of critique” which divides society along lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and capacity, to sustain conflict. Even within the family conflict has been created between husbands and wives and parents and children. All the essential bonds that hold a society together are being destroyed in order to enslave and, thereby, annihilate a people. As Jewish intellectual and one of the clearest voices for Gnostic Judaism, Eric Gutkind, wrote, The whole pattern of our [social] environment needs to be reformed . . . one possible approach to this end; namely, to make the social units of our living and working as small as possible, to concentrate the interests of those who live and work together on a common task, and to develop their sense of quality . . . On the other hand, the economic units, those for the supply of raw materials and for production, should be as large as possible. What we need is social associations on a small scale and economic integration on a large scale. (Gutkind 1946: 4) Gutkind is arguing, as has been achieved, for the separation of “the social” and “the economic” in order to achieve two different but strategically necessary outcomes. Society needs to be fractured as much as possible along lines of special ‘interests’, understood as narrowly as possible, to maximise social disunity, thereby destroying any sense of shared purpose and the shared experience of the good. This is disunity with no hope of future union. Again, as Preparata rightly observes, “This new philosophical “system” implied no resolution, no synthesis, no expectation of salvation, no promise of a struggle in the name of unity . . .” At the same time that this disunity was being nurtured, there was every effort to sustain high levels of economic integration. The trains, after all, must still run-on time. Economics uses instrumental logic to increase productivity and helps both generate wealth for those who do rule society to be able to further their plans while destroying the norms that may once have placed restrictions on laizzez faire

39 production. So, while there is an attack on the shared sacred boundaries and established morality of society the economic system remains perfectly intact if not strengthened. It is for this reason that, “. . . even though in the classroom “God” and patriarchy have come to be arraigned, tried, and sentenced a million times, our system, as a whole, as many critics (including various postmodernists) have understood, is never questioned.” (Preparata 2011: 4) It must be appreciated that both the “left” and the “right” of the current Western political spectrum is equally destructive. Normally, societies aspire to achieve high levels of both social and economic integration, bringing these two spheres together so that the economic is constrained by moral consideration, such as not allowing homelessness or slavery, while a certain morality is justified, sustained and spread, through economic success. For example, the success of Western Europe in dominating the world culturally and economically with a determination to stamp out slavery in the late 19th early 20th centuries is an example of this synthesis. The determination to separate the social and the economic, as part of Gnostic Jewry’s destructive project, hopes to rip the social fabric apart into the smallest sub-groups who are constantly in conflict with those “constructed” as their opponents. This fracturing today, one aspect of which is called “multi-culturalism”, is just part of what has become understood as the “progressive” agenda. It is in trying to segregate society while integrating the economy that the oft cited contemporary program of being socially progressive but economically conservative. This strategy ensures an Orwellian condition of perpetual war, or even an Hobbsian condition of a war of all against all, at a social level, as the conditions for permanent change or permanent cultural revolution. This is the first time in history when the educated elite have called for the systematic dismantling of the existing social order. Historically, as Thomas Piketty argues, to be more educated meant to be more conservative. In the 1960s, only 6% of educated voters voted Democrat in the United States. Literally “the higher the education, the lower the Democratic vote”. (Piketty 2020: 809) From 1990, everything changed, “from the 1990s on, the higher the level of education the more likely to vote Democrat, particularly among those with advanced degrees”. (Piketty 2020: 809-810) Piketty called this group of highly educated “progressive” voters, even progressive activists, the “Brahmin left” referring to the cultural function of imposing elitist “caste” interests. This new voting pattern was not because educated people as individuals suddenly had an epiphany that socially progressive causes were better for the country. It is not that the content taught at university was unchanged, but people were reaching new conclusions as a result of being taught educational material differently. This change in voting amongst the educated elite occurred because the education system was captured in the 1980s into the 1990s by a group of scholar activists promoting “progressive”, properly understood as Gnostic Jewish, causes. The American education system has realised “the paralysis of the critical faculty of students, the death of

40 dissent, and the political orientation of the American intelligentsia”. (Preparata 2011: 6) After only a 30to-40-year struggle, our education system had fallen to become a tool of social destruction at the service of Gnostic Jewry. Secondly, once established as the intellectual elite of the West, Gnostic Jews have used this power to promote a new conception of the individual. “Self-development”, in the Christian tradition, meant conforming to what was understood to be universal norms or for all individuals to ultimately participate in the same values as an expression of an intimacy with God. The Western conception of the individual was one necessarily embedded within a universal moral framework that demanded conformity to shared norms as the highest ideal. The highest praise under such conditions was to be identified as “well adjusted”. Being “well adjusted” was prized because it meant that the person was acting in ways consistent with the universal ideals. The West has always believed in, to draw on Kant’s account, the “freedom” to obey. As American psychologist G. Stanley Hall said expressing this idea in the 19th century, “the highest choice of free will is self-surrender to the service of God”. The highest expression of individuality was to obey the Christian vision of what it meant to be good in terms of serving God and manifesting His Kingdom as the world. (Kemp 1992) This Western concept of individuality found its most prominent expression when these universalized norms were breached by the individual who was then held responsible for breaking these norms and legitimately punished, as an individual, for their transgressions. There was no excuse that somebody was raised in poverty or that they were neglected by their parents because the definitive feature of being human was that they were “free to choose” and knowledgeable about what is right and wrong, good and evil, and, therefore, in being both free and knowledgeable about good and evil, morally responsible. Individual moral responsibility meant that each individual was able to improve themselves, able to become a better person and to make the world a better place. These beliefs find expression in many Western institutions but, perhaps most importantly, in the Western legal system. Such ideas underpinned the Western belief in social progress. The new gnostic meaning of individuality, by contrast, is one that is understood to be “free”, not in terms of being free to obey in order to be held morally responsible, in the sense that despite their circumstances they were responsible for their own actions, but free in terms of no longer rightly being constrained by ethical norms.38 Freedom today is understood in terms of “self-expression” or “selfrealization” which posits a “natural” self that has been the site of historical societal disciplining by

38

Most shallowly, this is why people have body piercings, tattoos and dye their hair blue, but, at the more serious end, it is why people primarily identify with their non-traditional sexuality or their newly minted gender identity.

41 “patriarchy”, “colonization”, “white men”, from which one must now seek liberation. This new conception of the individual has its origins in the post-World War II America where Max Lerner observes there was a change in the American ethos away from Christian conformity to seek “personal expressiveness”. (Lerner 1957: 688) The importance of this new conception of individuality cannot be overstated nor its impact exaggerated. Just this new understanding of individuality alone, and Gnostic Jews have achieved so much more, is an incredible achievement. The Gnostic Jewish account of “individuality”, as will be explained, is deeply indebted to Gnostic Jewish theology. For example, contemporary feminism posits a “natural self” that has been altered through a range of disciplining strategies by the “patriarchal society” to manifest “the feminine” from which “women” must now struggle to overcome in order to express their authentic or “natural” selves. The “Gay rights” movement posits a “natural sexuality”, itself supposedly immune from social or cultural influences, that has been historically marginalized by “heterosexual society” against which they must now struggle in order to express their authentic selves. The “Black power movement” argues that there is a “natural” black person who has been suppressed by “white society” from which black people must now struggle to free themselves so that they can both express their “natural” “black” selves and ultimately reveal how this way of being is superior to the oppressive white society that has historically dominated.39 The same basic argument could be repeated over and over again, with very little variation, and applied to every “liberation” struggle, all the “human rights” struggles, that are currently tearing Western civilization apart.40 If one looks at what people are trying to “free” themselves from, so that they can express their “true natural individuality”, you find patriarchy, heterosexuality, and whiteness, which have all become ways of characterising Western civilization. Western civilization is being demonized through the deployment of such labels. By contrast, that towards which individuals are to find “liberation”, matriarchy, homosexuality, and blackness41, have been historically marginalized in Western society. Stefan Zweig gave a succinct and generalized account of this argument which usually finds expression in each particular case. Zweig argued, Western civilization does “. . .irremediable damage to

39

And these ideas have seeped throughout Western society. I was speaking to an extremely marginalized, uneducated, impoverished Māori woman living in a Brisbane hostel who said that white people had had their turn as leaders and now it was the “black people’s” turn to rule. They would rule in the service of the Goddess of Mother Earth. 40 This is not to say that there is no legitimacy in any social struggle or that there have not been historical injustices, but it is how these injustices are understood and how to move forward. The Christian way is to seek out the truth, to enter into dialogue and find ways of moving forward together in peace. The gnostic way is to distort reality, say that there is no such thing as gender for example or that all people are bi-sexual, and cause everyone to return to a Hobbesian state of nature where there is a war of all against all. You can look to Martin Luther King or Malcolm X. 41 “Blackness” here, like “whiteness”, should not be misunderstood as a racial term but as a theo-ontological term. It is a different way of thinking and “knowing” the world that is becoming increasingly dominant.

42 the minds of children by incessantly reiterating the command to be “moral” and “self-controlled”” and it is therefore this “education”, one which is “moral” and demands one have “self-control”, that must be overcome. Again, the West prized morality, and the self-control morality demanded, while what should be prized, according to Zweig, is “immorality” and “self-indulgence”. Every “rights” struggles today is aimed at undermining some feature that has been historically prized as Western civilization and aspires to establish its reverse as the new “normal”. There is a line in the T.V. series Halt and Catch Fire, one of the many thousands of shows undermining Western civilization that pepper contemporary popular culture, that captures the way gnostics want us to see ourselves and interact with the world, “Progress depends on us changing the world to fit us, not the other way around.” This sums up their agenda, their account of individuality is one which wants people to demand the world change for them while historically the Western tradition required the individual to conform to the world. What this argument means is that for many people living in the West today, liberation, freedom, authenticity, self-expression, can only be achieved with the destruction of Western civilization. It has to be appreciated that Gnostic Jews do not particularly care about women, homosexuals, or black people, it is they who will rule with the destruction of the West, and they will rule over an extremely homogenised and controlled population. These “liberation” struggles are merely a strategy, deliberately devised and implemented, to fracture the West’s relationship with their God thereby destroying the West as such in order to open a space for Gnostic Jews to thrive. Freedom, by this new account, becomes this wilful imposition of an immature, “individual” self, a “will-to-power”, striving to mould the world to conform to each individual’s juvenile expectations. There is no longer any requirement to grow up, to become an adult, to take responsibility for who a person is so that they adjust to societal norms. Gnostic Jews have had to dominate academia in order to implement this program. Take the psychoanalysis of Gnostic Jew Sigmund Freud. Freud argued that there is a “natural” highly sexual self, particularly true of women, which has been historically oppressed by Christian morality using “guilt” and “shame”, and that it is this Christian oppression that results in neurosis. Freud’s “treatment” for this condition is for people to get in touch with their authentic, highly sexual self, thereby liberating themselves from the Western constraints of morality. Once freed from Western morality, one will be in touch with their “natural” sexuality, including masturbation, and they will no longer be mentally ill. Freud is arguing that by freeing our “animal drives” within us, by rejecting civilization and returning to a state of nature, we will return to a condition of “health”. As Jung observed, “It is well known that Freudian psychoanalysis is limited to the task of making conscious the shadow-side and the evil within us.” (Jung 1955: 239) Freud did not only want to make this “shadow-side” visible but raise it to primacy

43 and to then rule our subjectivities. From Freud’s perspective, the “bad” condition is to be chaste, which the West has historically prized, while the liberated condition is to be sexually “free”. This is a movement, a movement always required by Gnostic Jews, from light to darkness, from the conscious to the subconscious. Historically, in the West, to be captured by our instinctual drives was thought to have become the worst kind of “slave”. To be captured by our natural drives was to live the life, not of a human, but the life of an animal, enslaved to sensuous desires. The truly human aspiration to respond to the good, to manifest what is good, was what marked humans as distinct from animals. As it says in 1 Peter 2: 16, “Live in freedom, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as servants of God.” This statement has perhaps never had such poignancy as it has today. Today we do indeed commit evil and then hide that evil in terms of being free. Free to be our “natural” selves. True freedom, in the Christian Western tradition, is to serve God and not serve our basest desires. So many of us today are sexually promiscuous, irresponsible, selfish, greedy, materialistic, shallow, and insubstantial and we do indeed do all this under the cover of “individual freedom” or “self-expression”. We have forgone a meaningful life for the life of an animal and then affirmed that debasement, that enslavement, as “freedom”. We seem incapable of short-term sacrifice of material pleasures for the long term good of truth. We no longer aim to unite heaven and earth by trying to manifest the best of all possible worlds. The promotion of a particular conception of individuality is not only a strategy for destroying western civilization but, importantly, is intended at the same time as a redemptive project for the Jewish people. The founding condition of what Gnostic Jews think of as the Messianic Age. This “new age”, which some believe to have already begun, might correctly be called the Anthropocene. The Gnostic Jewish vision of the future, the vision of society that so many of us today have enthusiastically embraced and many now passionately advocate, is decadent, relativistic, materialistic, sensuous, instinctual, emotional, thoroughly instrumental, tribalistic, sexually licentious, and, of course, utterly immoral. This is because Gnostic Judaism advances a “new form of obscurantism, fundamentalism, anarchical mysticism, [and] religious irrationalism” that many of us now not only accept but promote. (Mendieta 2002: 1) Gnostic Jews argue that “. . . ethical systems [are] de nouveau, directly out of the creative faculty of the human mind” and are most certainly not the manifestation of God on earth. (Ochs 2000: 13) From a Christian perspective, to realize their Gnostic vision of society, is to manifest something truly evil. The need to destroy the Western experience of God, the experience of the good, the beautiful and the true, is because these guiding principles have been historically associated with the Western tradition generally and Christianity more specifically. In Plato’s famous dialogue, the Symposium, Plato argued that analysis of truth and beauty, when understood in their singularity, constituted “the good”. (Piętka 2015: 28)

44 According to Plato, the good was thought to be the ontological ground of all reality. For the Ancient Greeks generally, this unified experience of “the good” was synonymous with God. It was not the case that God had the attribute of being good, but God was Good. As Lovejoy rightly observes, “. . .the idea of God [for the Greeks] was taken to be also the definition of the highest good . . .” (emphasis added Lovejoy 1936: 316) So, truth, beauty and goodness, understood in their singularity, in their oneness, was God. These Greek ideas were thoroughly incorporated, via a Hellenised Rome, into the original formulation of Christianity. This early Hellenization of Christianity meant that Christians believed that “Our kinship to God is not by nature and necessity, but by the freedom of the gift – by grace . . . [this] gift . . . is closely bound up with the good, the beautiful and the true . . .” (Rolnick 2007: 170) As already observed, this experience of the good was thought to be revealed by logos and legitimized though general agreement. It is by breaking the Western commitment, deeply institutionalized in our legal and political systems even today, to having a relationship with God, of knowing God, that Gnostic Jews believe that they must destroy Western civilization, indeed all civilizations, as being something evil. As none other than Gnostic Jew Theodore Adorno42 wrote, “Anyone who would nail down transcendence can rightly be charged – as by Karl Kaus, for instance – with lack of imagination, anti-intellectualism, and thus a betrayal of transcendence.” (Adorno as see Mendieta 2020: 9) To claim to know God, to claim to know what is good, is, apparently, “anti-intellectualism” and is a betrayal of the true God. This is Gnostic Judaism. The intention of Gnostic Jews is to ensure that the good, the beautiful and the true, God, is no longer experienced. This means that living a “good life”, in a Christian sense, is explicitly rejected by Gnostic Jews as “the way” to live either individually or collectively because we remain ignorant of what is “good”. When the loss of the experience of God is complete, when the good can no longer inform our lives, then not only is Western civilization as historically constituted annihilated, and the Western God, finally mythologized in the form of Jesus Christ, dead43 but “Westerners” as a people with a shared

42

People with a passing familiarity with Theodore Adorno might question the claim that he is motivated by theological commitments, but a deep understanding of his work will show that he was theological throughout and that theology, as will be revealed in this text, is Gnostic Judaism. As Mendieta (2002: 5) observes, “A careful reading of the work produced by the members of the Institute for Social Research, as well as the people attached to it, reveal a sustained and in-depth concern with questions of religion, theology, the sociology of religion, theological metaphysics, and the history of religious ideas.” Many Jews who came to identify with Marxism were in fact Gnostic Jews who hid their theology behind the mask of communism. Of course, I certainly do not ask that this claim be accepted without question, evidence will be presented throughout this document to support this claim, but to note even at this early stage that such concerns are addressed, and such unconventional claims are not simply left unsupported. 43 This is not necessarily a religious claim but merely an observance that historically Western civilizations were informed by an experience of the good, the beautiful and the true whereas today we are increasingly informed by

45 tradition and values, also ceases to exist. It is only their God, implicitly or explicitly, that protects any people from existential extinction. Again, as Jung observed, The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering; it is as when a flourishing civilization is abandoned to invading hordes of barbarians, or when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent. . . Man has been aware of this danger since the earliest times, even in the most primitive stages of culture. It was to arm himself against this threat and to heal the damage done that he developed religious and magical practices. (Jung 1955: 240) According to Jung, “religion” was developed so that unconscious drives would remain “underground” and we would live in the eternal light of goodness. By contrast, God’s death is intentionally pursued by Gnostic Jews because then they remove the only barrier to the “invading hordes” of barbarity both within the subject, being ruled by the subconscious drives, and in the world, being ruled immorally. This sense of spiritual protection is captured in the word “religion” which, according to Robert Graves, “. . . can be formed only from the phrase rem legere, “to choose, or pick, the right thing”, and “religion” for the primitive Greeks and Romans was not obedience to laws but a means of protecting the tribe against evil by active counter-measures of good.” (Graves 1971: 478) Religion was always intimate to an experience, and therefore knowledge, of what is “good”. God is a protection both from within, holding back the dark subconscious, and literally without, stopping barbarian, “un-civilized” forces from taking control. It is in this sense that destroying an experience of the divine destroys a people as such. It is by robbing a people of their experience of the divine that they denude them of their very identity, all their vitality, and purpose as a people. 44 As Magid (2008: 23) writes from within the Gnostic Jewish tradition, “. . . the liberation of the divine sparks robs the demonic of any life force because the demonic or evil, in Luria’s imagination, is only sustained by proximity to some form of divinity”. Although the idea of releasing the divine “sparks” from their entrapment within evil seems to be indebted to the Manichean gnostic tradition, Manicheanism interpreted this release as demanding a severe asceticism, in opposition, the Gnostic Jews interpret the liberation of the divine sparks as demanding licentiousness, an immoral permissiveness, and it is through this license that the “evil” of moral restraint will be overcome. In the Gnostic Jewish tradition, the “liberation of divine sparks”, understood as liberating humanity’s natural, primitive drives from the stultifying effects of civilization, becomes the new standard for being “good” and everything once

an instrumental logic which not only turns us away from the good, the beautiful and the true but allows us to be dominated by a very small minority. 44 A recent survey found that 66% of those surveyed disagreed with the statement “Australia would be better off if people were more religious.” This is an indication of just how successful this movement has been at marginalizing all positive religions.

46 characterised as good is to be recast as evil. For this reason, Gnostic Jews often deny that they advance or adhere to a “religion” as such at all but prefer the idea of being “spiritual”. They want everyone to leave “religion”, reject picking the right thing to do, and instead become spiritual, embrace their animal selves. Gnostic Jews are perfectly correct when they identify “religions” with “required belief; worship of forms; dictates of regulated behaviour; [and] ideas of right and wrong” (Wolfe 2009: iv) because these are indeed the very features of religion that protected civilization, both within the subject and in the world, against barbarianism. It is to embrace the uncivilized, the Natural, the barbaric, that is the revaluation of all values or, as their 17th century Jewish messiah Sabbatai Tzevi argued, realizing “redemption through sin”. They argue that it is only through revealing what was once thought to be “evil” as “good” that they rob what they think of as the “demonic”, Christian Western civilization, of its power. It truly is through an experience of God that people collectively identify and are empowered as a people. In place of the old ethos, the “spirit” that constitutes a people, is a new understanding of reality, a new morality, and, ultimately, the domination of a different God. This new God is no longer the God of light, goodness, truth and peace, that has informed Western civilization at least since the time of Plato, but a chthonic god, a God of nature and chaos. A God of disorder. The “Prince of Darkness”. A God that they themselves explicitly identify as Lucifer. As political activist and educator of Hillary Clinton the Gnostic Jew Saul Alinsky wrote acknowledging his debt, Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins— or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer. It is this battle between the God of Christianity, Jesus, and the God of the Gnostic Jews, Lucifer, that we are all engaged in today. As Evola argued, there exists an eternal conflict between the ‘forces of the cosmos against the forces of chaos’, “. . . to the first, corresponds everything that is form, order, law, tradition in the higher sense of the word, spiritual hierarchy; to the second is tied every influence that disintegrates, subverts, degrades, and promotes the predominance of the inferior over the superior, matter over spirit, quantity over quality.” (Evola as seen in Furlong 2011: 46-47) The dominance of the God of chaos and disorder, the worship of a new God, marks the advent of a new epoch. It is the dominance of this new God, Lucifer, that marks, according to Gnostic Jews, the Messianic Age. It was for this reason that the period from the Second World War through until the mid-1990s was called by Gnostic Jew Steve Pinker, the era of “decivilizing”. It was “decivilizing” in terms that these years oversaw the destruction, not only of Western civilization, but civilizations around the world. The initial rebellion marked by the promotion of figures such Marlon Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Munroe and Elvis Presley, was the

47 initial tearing down of Western civilization, especially in the United States, followed by the 1960s “counterculture” with its increasingly drug induced, highly sexualized music, through the destruction and revaluation of the 70s and 80s including punk, the decade when “greed became good”, through to Nirvana’s generation of hyper-sexuality, drugs and conscious self-destruction as liberation. It is only in the aftermath of this decivilizing project, from the early 1950s through to the mid-1990s, that the Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt could describe Sweden as “barbaric”. The new era, by contrast, really only positively asserted itself in the dust clouds of September 11. Especially after September 11, there has been a systematic attempt to replace the dominance of Westerners, now characterised as “whiteness”, from positions of power and authority to build a new, functioning, post-Western, post-Christian, primarily matriarchal society. It is for this reason that a number of apologists for our time, Steve Pinker, Joshua Goldstein, and Peter Singer, all try to argue that, despite what many people feel, we are, they claim, today living in the “best of times”. It is not so much that we can actually say that we are living in the best of times but that the measure of “progress”, women in the workforce, population diversity, percentage of children raised in child-care, sexual freedom, etc., has come to reflect the vision of Gnostic Judaism. The new standards to inform society after the reversal of traditional values, as prized by Gnostic Jewry and one that, unlike they claim of Christianity, is primarily oriented by functionality and not morality. This is why Western civilization is in crisis today, because a new civilizational force has usurped traditional power relationships from within and yet the old Western institutions continue to haunt our functional landscape causing tensions between values and institutions that are yet to be properly resolved. As they continuously reassure us, the catastrophes of our times are merely the birth pangs of a new age. When order begins to totter, particularly during the caesura between two historical epochs, [peculiar] forces rise from their subterranean and angular lairs, or even from the zone of their private dissoluteness. Their end is despotism, more or less intelligent, but always shaped after the model of the animal kingdom. Therefore, even in their speeches and writings, they are wont to attribute beastly traits to the victims they strive to annihilate. (Junger as seen in Preparata 2005: 59) It is to nurture these subterranean forces, to manifest humanity in its more animal form, that Gnostic Jews strive to realise. It is the struggle between these two different visions of God, Christ or Lucifer, these two very different accounts of reality itself, Christian and Gnostic Jewish, that is the contest for our souls observed by Buchanan that is taking place in the West. It is a contest between those who believe that a living God that is knowable and experienced in the world should guide people’s lives against those who believe that God is absent from this world, that, from a human perspective at least, God is dead. It is therefore this

48 contest, between those who believe humanity should be humble and obedient to an experience of the good against those who believe that humanity should be proud of who they are naturally and become world destroyers/creators by asserting their basest drives in an ongoing struggle against God. As none other than Gnostic Jew Max Horkheimer observes, Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning. No matter how independent a given form of expression may be within its own sphere as in art or religion, and no matter how distinct and how necessary in itself, without the belief in God it will have to surrender all claims to being objectively something higher than a practical convenience. . . The death of God is also the death of eternal truth. (Horkheimer as seen in Mendieta 2002: 6) It is the death of truth, which is Jesus Christ, the reduction of everything to a “practical convenience” that gnostic Jews hope to realise. They fight to destroy our experience of God, not simply out of malice or cruelty, but because they believe that traditional Christian beliefs that God guides human action is an evil belief and that this evil belief has resulted in the West falsely believing in objective reality, true meaning and moral agency and it is this falsehood that must be destroyed for the good of all humanity. They embrace the dictum, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions” as an indubitable guiding truth. This is why the cultural revolution unfolding in the West today is so deeply ontological. People like Horkheimer, Adorno, and Kojeve, believe and argue that the “true situation”, now only stated ironically, is one where God is experienced as absent.45 In realty, they believe, this world is meaningless and there is no objective truth because God is no longer present in this world. The culture wars are a struggle between two very different conceptions of God, a present living God or an absent God. As James Dobson wrote, Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible worldviews are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society. . . It is a war over ideas. And someday soon, I believe, a winner will emerge, and the loser will fade from memory. For now, the outcome is very much in doubt. On one side of this Continental Divide are the traditionalists whose values begin with the basic assumption that “God is. . .” [The other holds] the basic assumption that “God isn’t . . . (Dobson 1995: 29) Those Dobson labels the “traditionalists” are those who value the Graeco-Christian tradition that has broadly informed Western civilization for millennia, sometimes more forcefully sometimes with less authority, but it is a tradition that has always been at play in the West since ancient Greece as that towards which we should aspire. Traditionalists are those who worship a living God that is, in some way and to

45

It is this presence in being absent that informs the irony of all truth claims. The claim that God is only present in being not there has the same onto-theological standing of truth claims that are made in the absence of truth.

49 some degree, knowable. The uniqueness of Christianity, which must be acknowledged especially in an age when all religions are thought to be the same, is believing in a living God that can be known. No other religious tradition in the world advances these basic beliefs. It is also these very beliefs, that God is living and can be known that people no longer accept. As Jung observed in 1933, People no longer feel themselves to have been redeemed by the death of Christ; they cannot believe – they cannot compel themselves to believe, however happy they may deem the man who has a belief. Sin has for them become something quite relative: what is evil for one, is good for the other. After all, why should not Buddha be in the right, also? (Jung 1955: 232) In truth, that Christians believe they know God, that He is a living God, as revealed in the New Testament, that is experienced in their lives and that this knowledge manifests an enduring reality that has an absolute claim over our lives as objective truth, is indeed unique to Christianity and has proven itself historically to be superior to other ways of believing.46 This distinction was what differentiated the word of Christ from other Jewish traditions. As an author wrote at the turn of the 20th century, “According to the fancy of the Pharisees47 in all ages . . . their great mistake . . . they did not know God.” (as cited in Heinze 2004: 16) Against Western Christianity, Gnostic Jews believe that God is utterly mysterious, unknowable, not a part of this world, irrelevant for informing human actions, and therefore should be treated as though He is dead. It truly is a contest between those who believe that “God is” against those who believe, living in this world at least, that “God is not”. It has to be appreciated, the more active God the more passive is humanity and visa versa. If you have an active living God guiding our lives, then our task is to obey Him whereas if God has withdrawn then it is left to humanity to value the world in terms of what works for him. The contest is this simple. Dobson, therefore, rightly observes that the so-called “culture war”, that is not only being waged in North America but throughout the Anglosphere and the West more generally,

46

This will be a confronting idea to most contemporary Western readers. Not that long ago I too would have found the idea that our lives should be guided by an experience of God confronting. I have certainly not believed in God for most of my life. What I have discovered is that there are two broad reasons why so many people today find such arguments difficult to appreciate, firstly we have lost the true meaning of what is being claimed by Christianity. Great Western minds have spoken of a living God for millennia which should be some evidence that it cannot be a claim that should be easily dismissed. Secondly, the reason why most people respond skeptically Christianity is because today, we are raised, from childhood, to dismiss claims that God should be a guiding light in our lives. Every Hollywood movie mocks Christianity. That so many people do accept the claim that God is dead is not an indication of independent critical thought but simply shows how successful those revealed in these pages have been at shaping the way we think. 47 The Pharisees was a term used to be equal to “Jew”. It was understood that the Pharisees, which are criticised by Jesus, were the founders of Judaism. As Travers Hereford, an English scholar of Judaism wrote, “. . . though the name [Pharisee] be now disused, the principles of PHarisaism have been maintained down to the present day; and it si these, more than anything else, which have kept Judaism as a living religion.”

50 is also theological. That there is a theological component to the culture wars has also been noted by Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) who observed that the culture wars show an incredible capacity to change “spiritual worldviews”, “each of which adopts its own interpretive frame through which it sees the entire world.” This new “interpretive frame” is opposed to everything that Christianity once held sacred. As Daniel Moynihan observed, No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf (culture struggle or culture war). The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near to silencing the representatives of traditional America. (Moynihan as seen in Furedi 2020a) Surprisingly, as D’Souza observes, despite this radical revaluation of everything that the West once most prized, . . . there has been no serious debate in America over the moral content of American popular culture. America has witnessed huge changes in its culture over the past few decades, changes that put contemporary American values sharply at odds not only with non-Western cultures but also with the values of America’s own past. . . there has been a coarsening, a debasement, a collapse of standards in American culture that makes much of it intolerable to older Americans. . . (D’Souza 2007) To be clear, this is not simply a struggle between those who believe in God and those who do not, as it may sometimes appear and is sometimes portrayed, a kind of “progress” towards secularization, but primarily a struggle between those who believe God is knowable, and therefore significant in human affairs, against those who believe that God is unknowable and plays no part on our lives. It is not a struggle between theists and atheists but, as already observed, a religious contest between competing theologies with different visions of reality and different conceptions of humanity’s place in the world in relation to different conceptions of God. It is a political contest that is at heart something deeply religious, as Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) observed, and certainly has ontological implications. As Nietzsche, a committed Gnostic (although not Jewish) predicted, there will come a time when “the notion of politics will completely dissolve into a spiritual war, and all configurations of power from the old society will be exploded”. (EC Why I am Destiny: 1) This “explosion” will not only mark the dissolution of former configuration of power but will mark, according to Nietzsche, the end of Western civilization. We are living towards the end of this explosion today. The old configurations of power are indeed being delegitimized and are being reconfigured to allow new expression of power. This new ordering of society marks the advent, the realization, of a New Age – the Messianic Age.

51 What is at stake in this spiritual war, therefore, is not only the existence of an ethos derived from a contested understanding of God but, as is always the case in theological disagreements, a contest about the nature of reality itself. As has already been observed, this is an ancient contest that has been fought ever since ancient Greece turned to the Apollonian and recognised it as being superior to the chthonic Dionysian. This contest has gone on for so long that those who know about it have characterised it as the “eternal war”. Evola, I think rightly, believed that all “History is the unfolding in time and space of the cyclical struggle between tradition and the forces of disorder, disintegration, contingency and lack of differentiation, which are inherent in the processes of becoming. Modernity is the culmination of the temporary success of the forces of disorder, the Age of Darkness. . .” (Furton 2011: 9) As self-confessed Gnostic Jew Harold Bloom wrote in his fictionalized Gnostic novel that predicted the end of Western civilization, the aptly named, The Flight to Lucifer, Between the cosmos, between all of the heavenly systems and spaces, and the true, alien God, our Abyss, there was eternal war. In that war, a person’s self or spark fought on the side of the alien God. But the sparks have fallen into the cosmos; they sleep in the prison of the cosmos, and do not know how to escape from that prison. The call from the Abyss calls to freedom. But the battle is endless, and even the spark that has answered the call cannot go home to freedom until all the systems and spaces are destroyed. (Bloom 1979: 240) As will be expanded upon shortly and then elaborated upon throughout this volume, this is a succinct account of how Gnostic Jews understand this contest. They believe that our “inner selves”, what the Gnostic Jews Sigmund Freud described as Id, is fighting on behalf of Lucifer, one name for their God, the “alien god”, while the conscious self, understood as the Super Ego, is fighting for cosmic order. Jesus Christ is the God of order, an Apollonian figure. As it says in John 3: 16, God sent his son “. . .that the world through Him might be saved.” Literally, the “world”, order or being, is saved through Jesus Christ. We now live in a time when the eternal war is being won by the dark forces of chaos that dwell in the shadowy Abyss. They are successfully conquering the once bright light of goodness but unlike the forces of goodness they will not hesitate for one minute to physically annihilate those that resist.48 These dark forces believe that there is an “eternal war” in the cosmos, that which was once understood simply in terms of the “world” or everything that is, against the Abyss, the undifferentiated oneness of Nature wherein nothing exists.49 As Leo Strauss observed, “What you call nihil the falasifa call physis.” (Strauss as

48

To resist is to remain free and the only option to survive, as Kojeve makes clear, is as a Slave. In some ways this is a play on words. It is in the Abyss that the “Nothing”, Nature, exists in terms of being nothing. 49

52 seen in Lazier 2009: 137) What you call nothingness the thinker calls nature. This is, therefore, a struggle between being and not being or, as individuals, the choice between to be or not to be, the ego or the Id, light and darkness, civilization or chaos. This explains why the struggle against “whiteness” is so ontological in nature. The philosopher and Gnostic Jew Franz Rosenzweig claimed in his extremely influential fin de siècle classic the Star of Redemption, that it is through engagement in this very conflict that there is an eternal enmity between Jew and Christian. (Kavka & Rashkover 2014: 184) Of course, Gnostic Jews are not alone in identifying this war in these terms. The important German Catholic writer, Franz Schronghamer-Heimdal, claimed that there was an apocalyptic “eternal” struggle taking place between, “Christ and antichrist” which he characterised as being between the “eternal German” and the “eternal Jew.” (Hastings 2009: 1) This is a war being fought between the forces of light and the forces of darkness and is, therefore, also a war being enacted within every individual subject, every single day, in everything that we do. Again, as it says in John 3: 19, “. . . men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” This is a war that can be characterised as one between a person’s inner self, their “natural drives”, what Gnostic Jews characterise as “the spark” or the “human spirit” that Bloom presents as fighting to “free” itself from cosmic order, the Abyss, and that cosmic order, the ideals of heaven, moral constraint. The sparks about which Gnostic Jews write are truly within each of us. They are the nagging natural drives that can never be permanently sated and therefore offer no promise of contentedness against the heavenly ideal within which one finds fulfillment and an enduring peace. The heavenly ideal has always been understood in the Western tradition as being outside of the subject, beckoning, “speaking”, welcoming us into a civilized world. The Gnostic tradition argues that the “sparks” of true heaven have fallen into Being, into a world, dwelling as unconscious drives, that have been imprisoned by a false experience of the “good”. These sparks, greed, homosexuality, jealousy, can only be freed, as again Bloom suggests, by destroying not only everything once understood to be “good” in the world but by destroying the historical experience of goodness itself. It has been believed in the Western tradition, as observed even by the ancient philosophers, that humanity must responds to the call of the good/God. Gnostic Jews believe, in polar opposition, that it is Nature that ultimately motivates humanity, and it is these natural drives that strive to enter into reality. By following Lucifer, also known in the gnostic Jewish tradition as the Shechinah, the “sparks” escape from the prison of Being, what Westerner’s characterise as “reality”, and seeks to return to true heaven. It is the task of Gnostic Jews, therefore, as the chosen of their God, Lucifer, to free these sparks by destroying the prison of Being. The fullest expression in history of Being was Western civilization. The Abyss is understood by most people today, in our contemporary age, as the space of “individual freedom” or “self-expression”. The Abyss moves into the world through

53 pride. It is after Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that Man believed Himself to be the arbiter of values. As Karl Barth writes of the fallen condition, Man has now become a tarnished mirror in which the glory of God can no longer be reflected. To be man means now to be an enemy of God and this means to be the destroyer of one’s own proper glory. To make use of the existence, dignity and freedom given to us means now that we go farther along the well-trodden by-path, in our life as a whole and in all its details, and thus become ever more deeply and completely involved in our corruption. To be in the world now means to be lost in the midst of powers, figures and events, which, after we became men without a lord, ceased likewise to have a lord, and so to have any significance for us. To exist as God’s creature means now to be subject to death and eternal death at that, to be subject to everlasting vanity which is the inevitable counterpart of the eternal efficaciousness of the ordinance which we have broken. . . Above all it is impossible for him to undo or to make amends for his sin itself. (Barth 1938: 50-51) According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, Man remains in this condition of living in the absence of God’s grace as they do not believe in the redemptive sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As we were not redeemed by Jesus then the task remains to redeem Man with God. This redemption is achieved through destroying this illusionary world that, in the West, is informed by Christianity. To do this, Gnostic Jews have entered enthusiastically into battle with the forces of goodness. The battle will only be finally won, according to the Jewish Gnostic tradition, when the cosmos, as such, order, is ultimately destroyed. Both sides fight for their conception of Pleroma, perfection, it is just that this vision is diametrically opposed. One is the vision of the Western tradition that finds its voice in post-Constantinian Christianity, as expressed in the Gospels, while the other is the vision of Lucifer who was portrayed tempting Jesus with earthly pleasures which He overcame. In the Western tradition, destruction of Being has been understood as the very definition of evil. As Eagleton nicely summarizes, . . .evil is not fundamentally mysterious, even though it transcends everyday social conditioning. Evil as I see it is indeed metaphysical, in the sense that it takes up an attitude towards being as such, not just towards this or that bit of it. Fundamentally, it wants to annihilate the lot of it. But this is not to suggest that it is necessarily supernatural, or that it lacks all human causality. (Eagleton 2010) Eagleton is perfectly correct, evil is the desire to annihilate Being, and this is most certainly not a “supernatural” act but is most certainly something dependent upon “human causality”. The cosmic fighters, Western civilization, strive towards the good, towards Being, and realizing an enduring world whereas the Abysmal fighters strive towards darkness, chaos, the Nothing, the emptiness of Lucifer.

54 This conflict, this “eternal war”, can today be understood as a “culture war”. German Jewish Marxist intellectual Herbert Marcuse, who, again, should rightly be identified as a Gnostic Jew50, observed that the American “cultural revolution not only precedes and prepares the soil for the political revolution. . . it has . . . absorbed the political revolution”. (Inglehart 1977: 17) In the United States, the political revolution is being waged first in terms of a cultural revolution. Unlike the Gnostic inspired Marxist revolution in the former Soviet Union, which ultimately failed to realize a gnostic vision because it used the flawed strategy, where there was first a political revolution that was then supposed to be followed by a cultural revolution as also occurred in China, in the United States, from the end of World War II, it was argued that there should first be a cultural revolution that would ultimately realize a political revolution. The Western strategy is in many ways the reverse of that tried in communist countries but has been very successful. In order to achieve revolutionary change in the United States, as will be explained at length, there was no need to first wrest political power, control the institutions of power, but political change was to be realised through cultural change. The cultural values would be changed first, by controlling the production of knowledge, to be followed, without resistance, indeed praised as “liberators”, by a political revolution. The political leaders that advance the Gnostic vision well may not even be Jewish but to be politically successful, to be successful in any sphere, one must promote the new cultural agenda. James Hunter called this “cultural revolution” the fundamental contest between competing worldviews, a “culture war” or “a protracted competition for cultural hegemony”. As American Jew Andrew Breitbart, of Breitbart News fame, nicely quipped expressing this priority, “politics is downstream from culture”. Culture is that which we now call that thing that determines the parameters in which political disputes can take place, determines the acceptable and the unacceptable, the good and the evil. Indeed, as has happened in the United States, once a cultural revolution has been carried through then certain topics transcend political debate and are just accepted without dispute. To question such newly consecrated ideas is then to become something evil. It cannot be discussed, it is not a topic of academic concern, it is beyond dispute. Examples today mark the victories in the culture wars, women working and accepted as social leaders, gender as a choice, homosexuality, opposing systemic racism, gender relationships

50

Gnostic Jews rarely identify publicly in terms of being a Gnostic Jew. Harold Bloom is one of the few exceptions. Many who advocate Gnosticism may not even know that they are themselves Gnostic, but they can be identified by what they argue. In many ways, this text will empower the reader how to rightly identify a Gnostic Jew or, indeed, any gnostic. (There is a Christian variant and Nietzsche voiced what might be called Teutonic Gnosticism) Not all Jews are gnostic and not all gnostics are Jews but they all advance a particular political agenda, and it is through this agenda that they reveal themselves as who they are. “You will know them by their fruit.” Matthew 7:16

55 understood as a power struggle, access to readily available and subsidised abortion51, belief in white privilege, no-blame divorce, sexual liberation . . . etc., etc. Primary school children today are taught to deny the very possibility of universal truth claims as an incontestable fact despite the troublesome nature of such a claim. This is what a cultural victory manifests. Although some of these issues remain contested, the aim of gnostic Jewry in achieving its cultural revolution is to lift these beliefs above political contest so that they truly are merely “culture” as such. This depoliticization allows certain beliefs to be imposed on all cultures around the world and any resistance is portrayed as barbarity. Cultural wars are about who will determine what is to be viewed as “good” and what will be viewed as “evil”, what will be experienced as “base” and what will be experienced as “noble”, what will be encountered as “beautiful” and what will be seen as “ugly”, if there will be “truth” and “falsehood” or if all such claims will be reduced to “power”. What is at stake in this contest, therefore, in this cultural war, is literally everything. As everything, the cosmos, is at stake in this culture war, ultimate victory can only be achieved through ethnocide or the total destruction of another’s ethnic identity. As is evident for anybody who cares to look, it is the Western ethnic identity today that is being destroyed. This destruction is why Westerners no longer feel authorized to pass judgement, their view no longer has any legitimacy. With the knowledge presented in this volume, with the truth, we can, with compassion and restraint proper to the Graeco-Christian tradition, resist this invasion from within,52 resist the moral wasteland of the coming eternal night and become vigilant for the rising of the new moral dawn. As Charles Weissmann said about this very same matter, “Before we can properly act, we need a proper, not just a superficial, understanding of the problem.” This volume is primarily intended to give this “deep understanding”. Every care will be taken to avoid superficiality and error which might result in injustice, so that not only the West can be informed in order to make substantial decisions about the future but so that those who practice any kind of cataphatic, or “positive” religion, can be empowered to move forward with confidence and finally effectively respond to the crisis of Western civilization. Gnostic Judaism

51

Although cast in a different light today, in the past, abortions were understood to be the actions of women who succumbed to the sin of lust. As it said in an ancient Christian account of Hell where women who procured an abortion would be cast into a deep pit of excrement while their aborted children would shoot flashes of lighting into their eyes because, “for fornication’s sake have caused their [the children’s] destruction”. (As seen in Ehrman 2020) 52 The invasion within ourselves and the invasion within our society.

56 As it is being claimed that Gnostic Jews are destroying Western civilization as part of a theopolitical project, the place to start to understand this movement and explain why it wants to destroy the West and why it is taking the strategy that is with a brief introduction of what exactly is Gnostic Judaism. The Need for Secrecy Even though Gnostic Judaism is the single most influential religious movement in the world today, commanding the strict obedience of millions, most people, even those who march on the street passionately fighting for its various causes53, would, most certainly, have never even heard of it. The invisibility of Gnostic Judaism is certainly not an expression of this movement’s incapacity but an indication of its potency. Clearly stated ideas can generate resistance and this movement is determined above everything to avoid resistance. It hopes to achieve its ends without anybody even knowing that they have been manipulated into embracing a heretical theo-political agenda. By working in the shadows, by keeping to the dark, by remaining elitist, this movement has managed to keep its identity and motivations secret from the world while making that world bend to its will. This secrecy has allowed this theo-political movement to thrive uncontested. This strategy of secrecy and deception has enabled Gnostic Judaism to make incredible strides in reversing the values of Western civilization without encountering resistance. As our world evinces, they have been extremely successful. Gnostic Jews self-identify in terms of being a small group of marginalized “outsiders” who must secretly struggle against an overwhelming power of evil forces. The instigators of these evil forces are primarily white, Christian, males. It must be appreciated, that when Gnostic Jew Stan Lee (born Stanley Lieber) helped create his comic superheroes, X-Men, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Panther and Doctor Strange, he had the struggle of Gnostic Jews against Western Christianity at the forefront of his thoughts. Gnostic Jews see themselves as being like these “superheroes”, misunderstood gifted outsiders, superior to those amongst whom they live, continuously fighting their secret struggle against evil forces disguised as just ordinary people. These “agents of change” must remain disguised as “normal” people, journalists, doctors etc., in order to achieve their world shaping goals.54 The importance of secrecy was emphasised by the

53

I met an Ethiopian Jew, a drug dealer, who was certainly fighting for the entire gnostic agenda and although he identified as a Jew, he was unfamiliar with the term “gnostic”. He would speak of their agenda, “fixing what is broken”, but had no idea that this was not just Judaism. Despite being totally ignorant of the Talmud and the rabbinic tradition he had never seemed to even ask why his practices were so different to so many other Jews. This is to observe that not only are many people fighting for the gnostic cause ignorant of gnosticism but many gnostic Jews themselves are unaware about that for which they fight. 54 All of these comics have clear Gnostic themes. They show people gifted with special abilities having to hide their true selves while fighting for their beliefs to be accepted in the world. Prior to movies, comics were used to

57 founder of modern Gnostic Judaism, Sabbatai Tzevi, in the 17th century. He argued that proponents of Gnostic Judaism needed to lie and remain hidden, even from Rabbinic Jews, if they were to achieve their destructive/creative agenda. Indeed, deception was especially important when promoting ideas that were not only noxious to the historically dominant Christian tradition within which most Jews have historically lived but was most especially required, when trying to progress ideas that would have been thought heretical in the broader Jewish tradition. For centuries, really until the late 19th century, Gnostic Jews feared Orthodox Jewry more than they feared Christianity. For this reason, they initially focused their attention on Western European Jewry to ensure that they nurtured a particular kind of enmity towards Jews before turning their attention on Western society.55 It was other Jews who were the greatest threat to Gnostic Judaism in the 18th and 19th centuries, not Christianity. It must be appreciated, as Jewish critic of Gnostic Judaism, Rabbi Marvin S. Antelman (2007) makes clear in his extremely important two volume set, To Eliminate the Opiate, Sabbatian inspired Jews are secretly trying to eliminate all positive religions and that includes Orthodox Judaism as much as Christianity. As the British Jewish author Peter Wilberg (2017) also rightly wrote, Gnosticism “. . . took the form of a spiritual critique of the ruling gods of the era - the gods of both Old and New Testament ‘orthodoxy’ . . . Along with this spiritual critique went political opposition to the priestly and political powers or archons which represented these gods and their theologies.” Old Testament Orthodoxy is just as threatened with extinction as is the new. Gnostic Jews have managed to achieve a great deal, fundamentally changing Western civilization, in less than 150 years. They have been so successful because they have managed to decouple their sociopolitical aspirations from their religious inspiration thereby making their theo-political agenda appear as secular “liberation struggles”. For example, if people knew that opposing “toxic masculinity” or promoting “transgender rights”, was all in truth just different expressions of the same religious agenda, then people might be more cautious in obediently supporting such movements. The reason why Gnostic Jews support transgender “rights” has little to do with transgender people but is primarily informed by the Gnostic belief that the God Most High is properly androgynous, without a specific gender allocation, and, as Man

communicate these ideas directly to children because children are more impressionable than adults and therefore, like DreamWorks today, it was important to shape the children’s thinking before they were captured by the evil ideas of Western Christian civilization. At the time, the subversive nature of comics was appreciated and written about in Fredric Wertham’s book, Seduction of the Innocent. This volume resulted in increased scrutiny of the comic industry by government which, in turn, led to the voluntary adoption of the Comics Code Authority in 1954 to regulate content. Although it did control the more extreme Gnostic expressions and overly sexualized images, everything returned to normal once the furore had died down. 55 Their argument was, as might be predicted from what has been written so far, that the way Jews naturally want to live their lives is being denied by Christian society therefore if they are to be liberated to express their authentic selves then they must destroy Christian society.

58 was made in God’s image, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he them,” therefore, humanity is also rightly androgynous. As this is the case, then that there are genders in the world must be simply an expression of human power. As an expression of human power, “gender” is part of the evil world of white, Christian men that must be overcome in order to realize the world as originally created by God. Realizing the world as created by God is to move towards redemption. As Gershom Scholem (1971) observed, “the union of opposites and their neutralization in the principle of unity” will herald a time of “harmony and eternal peace” or what Gnostic Jews understand to be the Messianic Age. That all binaries are properly understood as unities is Gnosticism or it is the knowledge that informs their spirituality. As influential author Arthur Drews wrote, Gnosticism also involves a completely dualistic philosophy in its opposition of God and world, of spirit and matter, of soul and body, etc., but all its efforts are directed to overcoming these contradictions by supernatural mediation and magical contrivances. It treats the “Gnosis”, the knowledge, the proper insight into the coherence of things, as the necessary condition of redemption. (Drews 1998: 18) One of the theological projects of gnostic Jewry, as part of this task of unification, is to ultimately manifest everyone as androgynous. Their hope is that the day will come when nobody identifies with a gender, “man” or “woman”, thereby overcoming the opposition of male and female. By moving beyond male and female, Gnostic Jews believe that they are moving closer to redemption. To “allow” everyone to be what Gnostic Jews believe to be their “true selves”, androgynous in this example, is conceived in their mind, and promoted as such in our universities, as a liberation project. This is liberating people from the stultifying effects of the artificially imposed gender allocations of civilization. They believe they are liberating people to their true natural selves as created by God. In the near future, they believed, people will no longer be mesmerized by human “constructs”, human “idols”, such as “gender”, that have been historically buttressed by false religious teachings such as Christianity and Orthodox Judaism. This is why we live, according to the gnostic Kojeve, at what he describes as the end of history. History is the changing understandings of objective constructions justified in terms of false gods. The past becomes the past with the construction of new objectivities supported by the creation of new gods. Once these changing “norms” are revealed as merely historically imbedded “constructions”, as an expression of human power, then history, as such, has come to an end. There will be no new construction of gender because gender will cease to exist. Opposing toxic masculinity, promoting trans-gender, creating “unisex” toilets, and demonizing traditional understandings of femininity, have all been strategies intended to achieve the same outcome, ensuring that gender no longer has a claim over our lives. As a core belief, Gnostic Jews argue that when opposites that exist in the world, man/women, good/evil, order/chaos, are no longer

59 meaningful, then God, in His/her unity, will once again dwell in the world. It is with God’s entry into the world that the long anticipated Messianic Age of the Jews will begin. The Messianic Age is a utopian time as it is a time without judgement. It is a time without distinction, without hierarchies, and therefore, supposedly, a time of peace. The danger is that if this argument was made explicit, that we must overcome traditional gender identity, which is at least thousands of years old, in order to acknowledge our supposed primordial androgyny as advanced by a heretical religious sect that originated in the 17th century by somebody who claimed to be God, then people would obviously be a lot less enthusiastic about supporting their theo-political program. Indeed, people might even begin to question why the religious beliefs of Gnostic Jews are superior to the religious beliefs of the Christian tradition that has informed Western civilization for millennia. Young people fighting for “universal human rights” is one thing, they can feel that they are doing “good” in the world by liberating people who have been historically oppressed but fighting on behalf of a heretical religious movement with its origins in the 17th century, is something completely different. In short, it is because nobody has heard of Jewish Gnosticism or understands their theo-political program that they have been so successful at implementing their agenda with little or no organized resistance. A former BBC journalist expressing bafflement at the inexplicable bias at the BBC for what he understood as “political correctness” observed that what these “progressives” argue cannot be easily labelled “leftist”, because they certainly did not promote a progressive economic agenda, indeed, quite the opposite, but they did indeed forcefully advance what has become understood as a “progressive” social agenda. At every opportunity they promote radical feminism, multiculturalism, pro-immigration, anti-nationalism, and pro-homosexuality. It is only when the theological aspirations of Gnostic Judaism are understood that this bias that has come to dominate the BBC, as in most public broadcasters throughout the West, becomes understandable. That is why this volume is so important and so dangerous. The Origins and History of Gnostic Judaism It is widely recognised today that Jewish Gnosticism was the original “Gnostic” movement. Although there continues to be debate from those who seek clearer evidence of gnostic origins within Judaism (Burns 2019), the dominant theory today of the origins of Gnosticism is that gnostic Judaism emerged from out of the Jewish tradition itself and was then spread to Christian and Greek communities later. As Bos observes, Now the older theory (1) that Gnosticism represents a corruption of Christianity has long been criticized. But the alternative theory (2) that it was a wild offshoot of Greek philosophy has also received considerable attack during the past few decades. The view which is most

60 generally supported at present, that of G. Quispel and R. M. Grant, is (3) that Gnosticism is a movement which was rooted in and inspired by the Jewish tradition. (Bos 1994: 2) Luminaries of Gnostic scholarship including Moritz Friedlander, Gershom Scholem, Gilles Quispel, Robert Wilson, Hans-Martin Schenke, Karl-Walfgang Troger, Birger Pearson, Kurt Rudolph and Christoph Markschies have all concluded that Gnosticism has Jewish origins. (Trompf 2019c) Although it is generally agreed that Gnostic Judaism is germane to the Jewish tradition, it is uncertain exactly how many years before it was adopted by the Greeks and Christians that Gnosticism existed amongst Jews. Within Gnostic Judaism, there can be seen influences from Ancient Egyptian mythology, Greek philosophy and the Chaldean religion. (Beer as seen in Kilcher 2010: 14) It has been widely accepted that Jewish Gnosticism was influenced by Greek philosophy in the centuries between the end of the reign of the Babylonians (332 BC), during which time Gnosticism was established, and the advent of Jesus (around 30 AD). Revered Israeli scholar of the Jewish mystic tradition, Gershom Scholem56, argued that Gnostic Judaism can certainly be detected in the ancient Jewish mystical Hekhalot and Merkabah literature that dates from the centuries preceding the birth of Christ.57 (Scholem 1941: 40-79) Scholem claimed that “Christian Gnosticism was in part preceded by a somewhat similar development in the midst of Judaism.” (emphasis added Scholem 1965: 2) Although it is generally agreed today that Jewish Gnosticism preceded the betterknown Christian and Pagan forms of Gnosticism by at least a few centuries, exactly when Gnostic Judaism emerged continues to be contested. Important scholar on ancient Judaism, Friedlander, argued that Jewish Gnosticism was the result of “. . .the cultural and religious situation in the Jewish Diaspora prior to the time of Jesus”. This is to suggest that Gnostic Judaism emerged originally outside of the Levant, most probably getting its final gloss in the Hellenised city of Alexandria, and was then introduced from there into “Israel”. Consistent with this belief, Pearson claimed that Jewish Gnosticism presents “. . . a situation

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Gershom Scholem is the pre-eminent scholar on every aspect of Jewish Gnosticism. Although not having a “classic” Gnostic background, he was neither an Eastern European Jew nor raised within Hasidism, he certainly became this movements most influential intellectual by the middle of the 20 th century. Scholem was probably introduced to Gnosticism by Zalman Shazar and, most importantly, Shai Agnon. Scholem was not only a scholar of the highest order but an enthusiastic political activist. His work directly influenced important Gnostic thinkers like Martin Buber, Leo Strauss and Walter Benjamin. He was extremely well respected amongst Jewish scholars for decades although, most recently, some are beginning to find fault with his conclusions. 57 The origins of Christianity in a Jewish context well may have arisen out of a contest between Gnostic and Hellenized Jews with the Hellenized Jews becoming “Christians”. The pre-Christian Jewish Book of Wisdom seems to present a Christian ethos without acknowledging a redeemer, while demonizing a Gnostic ethos. From these competing communities, the two traditions may have emerged. As it says in Chapter II, “He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord.” Eric Peterson has also argued that there existed a preChristian stratum in Judaism that was engaging with Gnostic ideas. Indeed, interestingly, the entire New Testament can be read as an attack on Jewish Gnosticism. This would mean that the Rabbinic tradition is a kind of Third Way between Christianity and Jewish Gnosticism.

61 in which the ‘new wine’ of Hellenistic culture and philosophy was being put into the ‘old wineskins’ of Jewish religion.” (2006: 12) Pearson is referring to a time when Hellenistic ideas dominated the entire Eastern Mediterranean and this dominance, he is arguing, as have others such as German historian von Harnack (Burns 2019), then shaped what came to be thought of as “Jewish thinking” in the centuries from Alexander the Great through to Jesus. This is to argue that a form of Judaism existed prior to Gnostic influences but this original form of Judaism was then corrupted by the influence of Greek philosophy that resulted in Gnostic Judaism. This conclusion would mean that those who fought against Gnostic influences in the third century AD, were fighting for the authentic Judaism against foreign influences. This idea was the one that has dominated intellectual thinking for centuries. Although the argument that gnosticism was introduced into existing Jewish communities in the centuries preceding the birth of Christ, not everyone agrees that Gnostic Judaism had its origins in this period of Greek cultural dominance. In the late 19th century, some Jews embraced the idea that Jewish Gnosticism preceded Judaism by centuries and therefore it should be understood as the “true” expression of Judaism. By this account, Gnosticism emerged so early in the development of Judaism that true Judaism has “Gnosticism at its core”. (Lazier 2009: 158) The Ancient Greeks, for example, possibly granting some insight into the origins of Judaism, believed that Judaism broadly was just a corrupted form of Egyptian theology, like their own religious traditions, that they unfavourably compared to its highly respected ancestor. (Boys-Stones 2001: 68-69) Because of such claims, some scholars argue that Gnostic Judaism became autonomous directly from primarily Egyptian sources and that this occurred as early as the middle of the 2nd millennium BC (1500 BC). This break with Egyptian spiritual beliefs is recounted metaphorically, they argue, in the Exodus myth which is actually an account of the separation of Jewish spiritual beliefs from Egyptian sources. As one of the core beliefs of Gnostic Judaism is to deny that humanity has knowledge of good and evil, it is argued that Gnostic Judaism is a continuation of the beliefs that preceded the Axial Age. If this is the case, then Gnostic Judaism might be understood as the authentic expression of Judaism that preceded the historically more popular and historically dominant nomian form of Judaism. This legalistic form, it is argued by such scholars, was introduced relatively late to the Jewish people by one of the “new Axial Age elite”, Ezra. It was Ezra, it is theorized, who, under the influence of the Babylonians, introduced the moralizing, patriarchal religion that has more recently become known as Orthodox Judaism. As Herford wrote, “Devotion to Torah, and the duty of regulating life, whether individual or national, according to its precepts, were of the essence of the Judaism which took its character from Ezra.” (Herford 1912) Ezra was a 5th century BC Jewish Priest who returned from the Babylonian Exile to “reintroduce” the teachings of Torah to the people of Jerusalem. People who argue

62 for the more ancient origin of Gnostic Judaism, preceding Ezrian Judaism, claim that it was Ezra who brought to the Jewish people the new ideas of the Axial Age from Babylon thereby corrupting the original, what we think of as “gnostic”, form of Judaism. It was Ezra who turned Judaism into a positive moralizing religion that has since dominated “Jews” for millennia. It is because Gnosticism was not derived from Babylonian sources that attempts to find the origins of Gnosticism in Persian sources have always failed. (Burns 2019) Gnostic Judaism was not, by this account, a “new wine poured into an old wineskin” but originally something entirely new, from extremely ancient sources, from which outside influences, especially Babylonian, managed to corrupt. If it is true that what we might label gnostic Judaism is the original form of Judaism or if it was a later corruption of the original Judaism is not what is really important here but how this particular historical account worked as a kind of “political myth” to shape 20th century Judaism is informative. As McCauly observed, “Those who disseminate these myths often do so because they want to believe they are true and because believing them is advantageous.” (McCauly 1993:77) That gnostic Judaism was the original form of Judaism gained some popularity in the late 19th century, just as the Gnostic Jewish revival gained momentum amongst Western European Jewish intellectuals who had become disenchanted with what they thought were the “Medieval” and “ignorant” practices of what had become known as “Orthodox Judaism”.58 They argued that the rabbinate advanced a “fossilized” religious tradition that encouraged quietism which enabled Christians to be dominant. The emergent gnostic tradition argued that by embracing this “new” activist expression of Judaism then this relationship of domination could be reversed. Promoting the argument that gnostic Judaism was the authentic expression of Judaism helped to advance this agenda amongst global Jewry in the early decades of the 20th century.59 This is a similar dynamic to what was taking place in the early centuries of Christianity when Christian gnostics “claimed

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The term “Orthodox Jew” is actually a relatively recent invention. It was first applied to certain Jews by Abraham Furtado in relation to the famous, or infamous, Sanhedrin (meeting) conferred by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century intended to solve the “Jewish Question”. The term “Orthodox Jew” was used to distinguish between who was thought of at that time as “traditional” Jews, who prioritized the interpretations of Jewish law presented in the Talmud, or what Antelman understand as “Judaism proper”, and Jews who appeared to have been more assimilated into Western culture. (Antelman 2007) 59 Although use of the term global Jewry is often criticized, the truth is that Jews always act and talk as though being part of a global community. If a Jew wins a Nobel Prize the Jewish newspaper write about Jewish talents not that they are American or British. If a Jew achieves sporting success, then Jewish newspapers write about the incredible success of Jews in sports around the world. If a Jews finds themselves in a difficult legal situation or even in jail, the Israeli government will often intervene and advocate on that individual’s behalf. In books one reads for example, if the influence of Jews in China who “come from all over the world”. In truth, Jews are allowed to think in global terms it is only non-Jews who are not allowed to think or write about “global Jewry”.

63 to be offering a superior and more authentic exposition of Holy Scripture. . .” while “orthodox” Christianity claimed the movement was heretical. (von Balthasar 1981) Whatever the truth to claims that Gnostic Judaism was actually the original form of “Judaism” as such, it most certainly cannot be denied that Gnostic Judaism was marginalized by those who practiced other forms of Judaism for the better part of the last two and a half thousand years beginning around the 3rd century AD. There were periods after the 3rd century BC when Gnosticism generally, including its Jewish form, rose into some prominence and received broad acceptance, both within and beyond Jewish communities, the 2nd century, the 11th century, and the 17th century, but every time Gnosticism rose into prominence, the positive religions, including Orthodox Judaism, found an adequate response to the gnostic challenge that forced Gnosticism back underground. Despite being forced to the margins of Jewish life time and again, Gnostic ideas continued to be sustained as an oral mystic tradition within some Jewish communities. This oral tradition was written down and formalized as kabbalah. As von Balthasar (1981) observed, “Of course, the Jewish kabbalah . . . were also of Gnostic origin.” Kabbalah was written down in the 13th century AD although it is generally accepted that these writings did not originate in the 13th century. These mystical writings, through the Jewish kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, informed the Jewish messianic movement of Sabbatai Tzevi in the 17th century. A period of Gnostic strength. It was Sabbatai Tzevi who would reinvigorate Gnostic Judaism in such a way that today it is probably the dominant form of Judaism around the world although this is difficult to assess. The 17th century was a time when Romantic ideas swept across Europe creating conditions for a general gnostic revival. Sabbatai Tzevi claimed that he, not Jesus, was the true Messiah. Sabbatai promoted a raft of heretical beliefs that were aimed at overturning the dominance of traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Sabbatai was said to claim that because Jewish laws, or halacha, so central to the rabbinic tradition, were written for a time before the coming of the true Messiah, now that “he” had arrived, and “he” had revealed the true purpose of the Law, then the old laws no longer applied.60 For this reason, Gnostics Jews who were influenced by Sabbatai are, unlike Orthodox Jews, antinomian. In the place of historically dominant Jewish practices and beliefs, Sabbatai developed new sacred practices while deliberately transgressing the old laws and encouraging others to do the same. Finding justification in the Midrash Tehillim, Mizmor 146:5 that in the Messianic Age, “God will permit what is now forbidden”, Sabbatai embraced and encouraged doing what was once forbidden and that which was now the permissible. He even minted a new blessing, Mattir Aurim or “praising God

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This is the argument made by Christians about their relationship to Jewish law.

64 for permitting what is forbidden”. Sabbatai’s central teaching was that Jews should embrace and practice that which is forbidden or, as he famously phrased these ideas, that redemption is achieved through sin. What is basically meant by this phrase is that by recontextualizing what is considered sinful in the dominant religious traditions to be embraced as “good”, then God will be redeemed, and the messianic age will be realized. To practice what he preached, Sabbatai performed numerous “Holy Sins” many of which were sexual in nature. It was believed that as part of a theurgical ritual, along with his third wife Sarah, who had been a prostitute, he would organize sexual orgies, eat forbidden foods, turn traditional days of fasts into days of feasts, have sex with the future brides of his followers on their wedding night and publicly speak the forbidden name of God. The basic idea that Sabbatai advanced is that the natural, the instinctual, the basest human drives, because they were created by God, needed to be released into the world, as an expression of the feminine aspect of God, the Shechinah, the Sabbath Queen, so that the dominant experiences of good and evil, as civilization, that in the Christian and Jewish traditions were believed to have been derived through reason and sacred revelation, needed to be reversed. Although Sabbatai’s movement initially attracted a great deal of support from the European Jewish community in the 17th century, when Sabbatai’s life was threatened by Muslim Turks, he proselytized to Islam. After becoming a Muslim, many Jews argued that his conversion revealed Sabbatai to be a false messiah and, therefore, his teachings were indeed heretical. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas of Amsterdam, one of the most critical voices opposed to Sabbateanism, quickly denounced Sabbatai’s Messianic claims. Sasportas argued, consistent with the Orthodox tradition, that the true Messiah would not deviate one inch from halacha or the explicit word of the Torah. As it says in the Talmud, “If God sends a prophet, if a prophet attempts to nullify a mitzva61, he is considered a false prophet.” What Sasportas is drawing attention to, is that one must accept an esoteric, mythological, allegorical reading of Torah, which is opposed to the historical reading of Orthodoxy, if Sabbatai’s interpretation of Jewish texts is to be convincing and such a reading simply should not be done. Sabbatai was outspoken about finding a new interpretation of Torah, but he always emphasized that he had not actually changed a single word. This interpretive approach to religious texts that was being used by Sabbatai and his supporters was harmonious with the kinds of hermeneutic strategies used on Christian sacred texts at the time throughout Europe. It was a time, as Kilcher (2010: 16-17) observes, when “philology had taken on the functions of restitution and recovery, even redemption” in the Christian tradition. It was also a time when European scholars believed that through philological study there could be a renewal in the

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Divine commandments as revealed by Moses at Mount Sinai or Jewish law.

65 “transcendental metaphysical and theological teachings of the Hebrews”. (Knorr as seen in Kilcher 2010: 17) Sabbatai and his supporters saw philology as crucial for interpreting the sacred Jewish texts allowing for new and creative readings. Sasportas was trying to reject such beliefs by arguing that the words of Torah are there and, with the help of the Talmud, easily read by everyone in a transparent way. The words of Torah do not require an imaginative new interpretation. According to Sasportas and his supporters, Jews should not deviate from the word of Torah and its 613 commandments and to do so was to face death at the hands of true Jews. Shortly after Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, most Jewish leaders at the time asserted that anyone associated with Sabbateanism was herem. Herem means something like being labelled “immoral”, “off-limits” or “exiled”. Such a person was “accursed” or, as Christians might say, “excommunicated”. They were no longer considered part of the “Jewish” people. For the next 200 years, Gnostic Judaism once again became an underground movement that continued to be practiced in secret by only a very small minority of Jews. To be caught practicing Sabbatian inspired gnostic Judaism during this period was to risk death. Despite Rabbinic Judaism being extremely active in trying to stamp out the heretical beliefs of Sabbatian Gnosticism throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, elements of Sabbateanism informed breakaway movements within Judaism across Europe and the Middle East. Most notably the Dönmeh in Turkey, believed to be highly influential in Turkish politics even today, the notorious Frankists in Poland, which was founded by Jacob Frank (Antelman 2007), which were identified by important scholars such as Jonas and Scholem as “Gnostics”, are the most famous. (Biale 1982: 66) Less obviously, but sill directly indebted to Sabbatai’s supposed revelations, is the Haskalah of Western Europe, early expressions of Hasidism in Eastern Europe, Marxism and even Zionism. When properly understood, all these movements can be directly traced back to the disruptive teachings of Sabbateanism. As Gnostic scholar Gershom Scholem attests, Sabbateanism is the matrix of every significant movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, from Hasidism to Reform Judaism, to the earliest Masonic circles and revolutionary idealism62. The Sabbatian believers felt that they were champions of a new world which was to be established by overthrowing the values of all positive religions. (Emphasis added) Scholem is perfectly correct and without exaggeration when he observes, “every significant movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century”. Scholem wrote in the middle years of the 20th century but although many of these movements have, since his time of writing, morphed into something

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Which might include all the “idealist” political trajectories including liberalism and Marxism.

66 new, they have all continued to find inspiration from the Sabbatian legacy. After his own extensive research, Rabbi Antelman agrees with Scholem, arguing that there were, . . . connection between the radical 17th century Sabbatian movement, and the 18th century Frankists connections with the Reform and Conservative movements, and the Jacobins . . . The thesis was that there exists a connection between the Reform and Conservative movements and Communism. The thesis was pursued and was found not only to be valid, but it appeared that there was a conspiracy in history to hide this relationship. (Emphasis added Antelman 2007) Antelman is perfectly correct, many Jewish scholars who may be aware of this debt owed to Sabbateanism do everything that they can to hide this relationship. Marxism, for example, when properly understood is “a secularization of the Gnostic salvation myth into the dialectical process of the loss and regain of man”. (Colpe 1981: 38) Sabbateanism itself can be traced back to a group of Jewish scholars who combined the traditions of Hermeticism and kabbalism in the 15th century. As the Jewish scholar Wieczynski observes, “Those who explored Hermeticism and kabbalism were fascinated by the idea that man can master creative power and become divine himself. Thus, was born a dream and a quest of which Marxism is the most forceful modern expression.” (Wieczynski 1975: 23) As Wieczynski observes, it is this new standing for Man, as creators of the world, as Hermetic God-like figures, that is a signature of this movement which finds expression in all these movements, from Marxism to reform Judaism. Perhaps the greatest challenge to established Jewish traditions stamping out all expressions of Sabbateanism, is that Sabbatai’s adherents are not only permitted to lie about their beliefs, practices and commitments, but they are encouraged to lie. Lying is an affirmation of their beliefs. In a world without an experience of reality, without moral constraints necessary to make “honesty” a virtue, then lies become nothing more than a practical convenience or even a strategic necessity that have been carried out by all throughout history. Sabbatians argue that just as the seed needs to be covered over with soil if it is to grow so must those who adhere to Sabbatai’s Messianic message hide their true beliefs if the movement is to ever flourish. That practitioners were not only allowed but encouraged to lie meant that suspicion and paranoia grew within European Jewry and the resultant accusations caused a great deal of conflict that ripped that Jewish community apart in the 18th and 19th centuries. During these years, many Jews who were not Sabbatian’s were accused of promoting Sabbatai’s teachings and were killed or had their lives destroyed while many who truly were Sabbatians managed to move into positions of power and influence within the Jewish establishment working their toxic schemes secretly from within. As a direct result of Sabbateanism, the once united Jewish religion of Rabbinic Judaism, which had existed since the 3rd century AD, became fractured into multiple often conflictual movements. The broad battle lines

67 were that on one side was traditional Rabbinic Judaism which prioritized the writings of the Talmud clarifying halacha, determined to wait for redemption, which stood opposed a plethora of emerging movements, Frankists, Dönmeh, Marxism, Zionism, and the Haskalah, to name just a few, all drawing inspiration in their own way from the Gnostic dictum of redemption through sin and who were actively determined to bring about the messianic age through human agency. Perhaps most importantly, through the activities of the founder of Hasidism, the Ba’al Shem Tov (or “the Besht”), Sabbatai’s ideas were incorporated into early Jewish “Hasidism” of Eastern Europe and, through this movement, were then successfully spread throughout eastern Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. During this time, Sabbatai’s teachings became accepted by a very large and receptive audience of uneducated and economically vulnerable Jews in Eastern Europe while remaining marginalized in the West. Through the writings of Dov Baer, the Great Magid of Mezerich, the Besht’s63 teachings became formalized and institutionalised into a series of “courts”. Around 1815, large numbers of Hasidim were reabsorbed into the historically dominant Rabbinic Orthodox tradition thus neutralizing them as a danger to the positive religions, but a few courts continued to be true to the original Gnostic message. The difficulty confronting the broader Jewish community was how to identify which were gnostic and which were orthodox. This general movement from authentic Beshtian Hasidism to Orthodoxy was motivated by fear of the emerging modernizing strategy of the centralized European states whose project to homogenize national identities appeared to threaten the unique and distinct Jewish identity which had always rejected “the values, cultures and civilizations into which they have been historically thrown”. (Braiterman 1998: 124) This “return” to Orthodoxy meant that many Hassidic courts advanced a form of Judaism that was again harmonious with the historically dominant Talmudic Judaism. That the Hasidic tradition adopted a strategy of continued isolation is important for understanding shifts that take place later amongst European Jewry. In the late 19th century, because of tensions between Jews and Russians, many of the most radical Gnostic Jews, those who continued the original Gnostic inspired Hasidism, amongst them Sigmund Freud’s father, moved into Western Europe where, unlike in Eastern Europe, Jews and Christians had lived in relative harmony for decades. This wave of immigration, bringing with them what many Western European Jews initially thought were heretical, Eastern beliefs and practices, initiated a wave of

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An acronym used to name the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Gnostic founder of Hasidism.

68 resentment across Europe directed mainly against the newly arrived Eastern European Jewish immigrants. As Ansel observes, When population pressures and pogroms propelled Russian Jews of the shtetl towards the West . . . Eastern European Jews . . . awakened a sense of resentment, if not open hostility, on the part of the established Jewish community in that country. By 1891, a pattern of intra-Jewish discord had emerged . . . [as a result of] mass migration of Russian Jews . . . (Ansel 1970: 151) Not only were many Western Jews angry with the incursion and criticisms being voiced by the newly arrived Eastern European Jews but Western Europeans themselves came to despise the newly arrived Eastern European Jews beginning a new wave of anti-Jewish sentiment. This resentment continued into the 20th century, as Albert Einstein said expressing concern about such resentment, Eastern European Jews are made the scapegoats for certain defects in present-day German economic life, things that in reality are painful aftereffects of the war. The confrontational attitude towards these unfortunate refugees, who have escaped the hell that Eastern Europe is today, has become an efficient and politically successful weapon used by demagogues. When the government contemplated measures against Eastern European Jews, I stood up for them in the Berliner Tageblatt, where I pointed out the inhumanity and irrationality of these measures. (Einstein as cited in Gimble 2013) Stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a none too subtle commentary on the fear and resentment that Eastern European Jews attracted when they moved into Western Europe, shows what Westerns thought of these newly arrived, sometimes extremely wealthy, Eastern European Jews. On the 13th of April 1881, a petition was submitted to the Prussian leader Bismarck requesting that there be both a prohibition against further Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe into Germany and for the exclusion of all Jews from any official government position.64 (Holub 1995: 106) Here is a concrete example of how resentment towards the newly arrived Eastern European Jews, some of whom were indeed enthusiastically promoting destructive Gnostic ideas, came to be applied to all European Jews without distinction. This period in history marks the end of decades of rapprochement between Western European Jews and European Christians because it was argued that, What the Jew lost in the process of the Emancipation and acculturation was what Gershom Scholem calls “Jewish totality” . . . The change in the civil status the Jews experienced in the late eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries brought about the dismantling of

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As will be revealed in Vol. III, 20th century history would be vastly different if Jews such as Arthur Zimmermann were not allowed to hold official government positions. Today, this petition is called “anti-Semitic”. The supposedly anti-Semitic Friedrich Nietzsche thought that this petition showed the weakness and uncertainty of the German people when faced with “a stronger race”.

69 the all-encompassing religious civilization of medieval Judaism. . . this dismantling occurred with the full complicity of the Jews themselves. (Mittleman 1990: 1-2) Scholem was observing that Eastern European Jews supposedly revealed to Western European Jews that they had compromised too much of their “Jewishness” to be accepted by Europeans as mere equals. Scholem’s own life attests65 that this intra-Jewish tension did not only rip communities apart but, as is the case in the West today being shaped by these same gnostic forces, also families. Sons turned on their fathers and fathers denounced their sons as a direct result of the growing influence of these Eastern European gnostic Jewish immigrants who were especially influential on young Western European Jews. Western European Jewry felt well liked and deeply embedded within Western society and had just experienced decades of improved relations and entitlements, but Eastern European Jewry were extremely critical of this harmonious arrangement and claimed that Western Jews had lost too much of their superior thoughts and special purpose for this acceptance. Although the older generation of Western European Jews rejected outright Gnostic arguments as at least ridiculous if not dangerous, young angry Jews, as young men so often are, were extremely open to such arguments. Many had, more than likely, experienced some expression of hatred towards Jews in Europe as they grew up despite being granted equal standing and instead of reflecting on how a Jewish dominated society might have treated a religious minority who had at times been antagonistic against the majority, such as the case in Israel today against the Muslim Arabs, they instead became angry and sought their moment of revenge. The increasing hated of Jews towards Christians only intensified the conflict between Jews and Christians which manifested more moments of conflict that would reach a moment of crisis in Nazi Germany. By the turn of the 20th century, in part motivated by this growing animosity against Eastern European Jews in central and Western Europe, from Western European Jews and Christians alike, a Jewish revivalist movement adapted some elements of Hasidism and the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) to form a new, reinvigorated, form of Gnostic Judaism that continued to draw inspiration from Sabbateanism. By the turn of the 20th century, young Jews, . . .brought a sense of a dawning new age but also a cultural pessimism about prevailing forms of social life. The general culture experienced a turn against established authority and norms. Young intellectuals, full of contempt for the petit bourgeois ideal of still und ruhig Leben, searched for new forms of communal life, free from alienation, rationality, and metaphysical impoverishment of the present. (Mittleman 1990: 8)

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Scholem developed a terrible relationship with his family, particularly his father, who was very critical of Gershom’s sympathies with the new Eastern teachings. He was thrown out of the family house which only ensured that he would move closer to the Gnostics.

70 This emergent movement that was determined to destroy the “prevailing social life” was specifically and explicitly opposed to “rationality and metaphysical impoverishment” that they identified with Christian Western civilization. The mature articulation of uniting elements of eastern and western Jewry finds its first expression in the work of Michael Levi Rodkinsohn (Frumkin) and Micha Berdishevsky. Other important intellectual contributions were made by Isaac Peretz, Peretz Smolenskin, and Georg Brandes. Most of these scholars understood 18th century Hasidism, which was more directly shaped by Gnosticism, as expressing the true essence of Judaism. This new movement went by the name of neo-Hasidism, and it marks the beginning of modern Gnostic Judaism. The movement that is primarily considered in these volumes. The tension that arose around the turn of the 20th century between Western Jewish populations and those who were coming to accepted Gnostic inspired neo-Hasidism is nicely capture in the work of assimilated Jew Max Nordau’s fin de siecle classic Degeneration. The very idea of “degeneration”, to become a “degenerate”, could only make sense from within a traditional Christian or Orthodox Jewish moral framework that recognized binary hierarchies and established morality shaped by rationality. Degeneration identifies all the aspirations of Sabbatian inspired Gnostic Judaism, sexual license, disregard for the visual arts, and, advocating for the basest sensuality, as expressing a “contempt for the traditional views of custom and morality” that would “carry humanity back to the condition of savages living in sexual promiscuousness without individual love, and without any family institutions whatever”. (Nordau 1898: 275) Nordau rightly observed that these “new Jews”, “do not at all hold themselves ‘beyond good and evil’ but plunge themselves up to the neck in evil, and as far as possible from good.” (Nordau 1898: 275) They were not, by Nordau’s account, beyond good and evil but simply evil. Nordau rightly identifies the central features of Gnostic Judaism and how this can only result in the ultimate loss of truth, goodness and substantial love. Advocates of this degeneracy is not one, Nordau argues, of the wilful assertion of “values” as ubermensch but the abnegation of values which is, in some traditions, he observes, the very definition of evil. No better criticism of Sabbatian influenced contemporary Gnostic Judaism can be found at around the turn of the 20th century than Nordau’s work and this was being voiced by a Western European Jew. Importantly, Nordau also critically questioned the personal qualities of anybody who sympathized with 19th century Gnostic convert and amoralist Friedrich Nietzsche, who also explicitly identified, as did Sabbatai Tzevi, as the anti-Christ. Nordau identified such sympathies as being nothing more than further evidence, if further evidence was needed, of “degeneracy” and most certainly not the expression of a “New Hebrew”. Nordau’s book nicely captures the contest within the Jewish community at the turn of the 20th century between those who remained true to the established Jewish tradition and

71 those who had come to accept the newly minted Judaism promoted by those living under the sway of Gnosticism. As an example of just how successful the gnostic movement has been over the preceding century at reshaping Judaism broadly, in 2004 Jewish author, Jacob Golomb, argued that Nordau’s Degeneration was nothing but an expression of Jewish self-hatred as “features of degeneration . . . could be attributed to Jews. Thus, his attack against the patterns of degeneration is simultaneously a critique of Jews, containing in no small measure the element of deeply rooted self-hatred.” (Golomb 2004: 50) What Golomb does not observe is that such arguments could not apply to Jews of old who practiced orthodox Judaism, but only contemporary Jews shaped by gnosticism. Golomb goes so far as to say that Degeneration is the work of the person trying to advance morality, therefore it is Nordau who is the real degenerate. Golomb justifies the claim that Nordau was a degenerate for arguing on behalf of morality with reference to none other than Nietzsche. According to Golomb, “It is noteworthy that Nietzsche sees in “self-contempt”, that is, in self-hatred, a clear symptom of degeneration. Thus, by his standards, Nordau, who suffered acutely from this, is a degenerate person.” (Golomb 2004: 53) As can be seen in Golomb’s arguments, by 2004 the once marginal and minority position of Gnostic Judaism had become Judaism as such. To question Sabbatai’s agenda is nothing more than to express Jewish self-hatred. In truth, when understood historically, Nordau was not self-hating at all but valued an alternative, and up until that time dominant, form of Judaism. One that, by the time of Golomb, had become so alien to many Jews that to express such traditional views is now seen as expressing a general hatred towards Judaism itself. The truth is that what is captured in the debate between Golomb and Nordau, though written over a century apart, is the difference between Sabbatian influenced Judaism, primarily from Eastern Europe, that many contemporary Jews now embrace and their increasing conversion and promotion of a relatively novel political agenda of gnostic Judaism and the traditionally dominant Orthodox Judaism with its strong sense of morality. Although it will be claimed that Sabbatian influenced neo-Hasidism has shaped 20th and 21st century Judaism in dangerous ways, it must be noted that many Jews continue to reject these relatively new teachings as Antelman’s own work evinces. Sadly, against these, there are many, many Jews who are simply either ignorant of how much Judaism has changed over the last 150 years and believe that the Judaism that they practice today is the same Judaism practiced by their great grandfathers or who have truly embraced this new Gnostic Judaism knowingly, accepting it as a new revitalized form of Judaism and enthusiastically advocating on behalf of its various causes. This distinction, between traditional Orthodox Jewish practices, that I am expressing sympathy with, against contemporary Gnosticism, is important

72 because it shows that any claim of anti-Semitism being directed against what is being argued here is necessarily wrong as it most certainly does not group all “Jews” together. Between the wars, neo-Hasidism developed a range of strategies that allowed the movement to grow and become an increasingly influential force within the wider Jewish community, particularly in Germany. This Gnostic influence was not felt only within Judaism but was spread by these Eastern European Jews throughout Europe and North America creating, . . .widespread interest in all sorts of psychic phenomena as manifested in the growth of spiritualism, astrology, theosophy, and so forth. The world has seen nothing like it since the end of the seventeenth century. We can compare it only to the flowering of Gnostic thought in the first and second centuries after Christ. The spiritual currents of the present have, in fact, a deep affinity with Gnosticism. (Jung 1955: 206) The rising influence of Gnostic Judaism also saw renewed enthusiasm, still attracting only a small fraction of European Jewry, for Zionism which, as Lazier acknowledges, was inspired by Nachman’s form of Hasidism (Breslov). It was neo-Hasidism that encouraged a new militant Jewish identity called “Semitism” that was thought to be in contest with German “Aryanism” for global dominance. A conflict first voiced in work of German Jew Moses Hess but sustained and developed by Jewish and German thinkers alike as the 20th century progressed. Despite Jews being treated relatively well in Germany for many years up until the First World War, certainly better than Arabs are treated in Israel today, it was the conflict between Aryan and Semite that promoted the emergence of fascism in the aftermath of World War I. The main ideological expression of anti-fascist sentiment, that was also heavily influenced by neo-Hasidism and Gnosticism, was the Frankfurt School of Marxism through their Institute of Social Research.66 As with all the militant political activists that created a highly contested cultural war in Germany between the wars, not dissimilar to what is taking place in the United States today, those of the Frankfurt School managed to flee Germany prior to Jewish persecution leaving behind only those Jews who refused to accept Gnostic Judaism either because, as with Nordau, they were highly assimilated or because they embraced Orthodoxy. The Gnostic inspired neo-Hasidim in their various guises, neo-Marxists, Zionists, anarchists, libertarians, Reformists and Conservative Jews, managed to flee Germany with the rise of Hitler and successfully secured positions in universities across the Anglosphere in places as far afield as New Zealand

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Which was founded by Felix Weil with a donation from his wealthy father Hermann Weil. They nominated Kurt Albert Gerlach as the first director, but he suddenly died at just 36 years of age. Gerlach’s death opened the way for Carl Grünberg, a German Jewish Marxist who quickly changed the shape of the Institute filling it almost exclusively with Gnostic Jews. How often are well funded research institutes which are not accountable to anybody for their research made available. I believe Gnostic Jews did not let this opportunity go by and killed Gerlach and took over the institute to carry our their Gnostic research.

73 and the United Kingdom but, most importantly, in the emergent global super-power of the United States. It was with this wave of German Jewish immigrant academics that began the Gnostic Jewish dominance of Western universities. Tragically, the victims of Nazi oppression, those to whom Antelman dedicates his books, were those very Jews who presented no challenge or threat to Germany or Europe but were, intentionally sacrificed by the Gnostic Jews to advance their aspiration to realize a Jewish state in the Levant. It was not until after WWII that the theology of Gnostic Judaism established itself in the United States through the work of people like, Theodor Adorno, Leo Strauss, Erich Fromm, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and Harold Bloom (1981: 60), who self-identified as a “true Gnostic”, Ernst Bloch, and Isaiah Berlin. More recently, people such as Jacques Derrida, Milton Friedman and Jacques Lacan, have progressed the gnostic agenda.67 Although the vanguard of this movement continued to be populated by people who identified as Jews, by the 1980s enough Westerners had become deeply indoctrinated into their theo-political agenda that others, such as Michel Foucault, became advocates for their program although apparently ignorant of the primary source. The final form of Jewish Gnosticism that came to shape the latter half of the 20 th century can be seen expressed as a turning away from the religious materialism that had inspired the Gnostic Judaism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that informed the theories of its founders, instead emphasising ideas in relation to “narrative”. What might be called the “psychological” or “cognitive” turn in Gnostic Jewish thinking that was championed by the “critical theorists” and the “Straussians”. Gnostic Judaism became primarily concerned with how people interpreted the world and how this interpretation needed to be harmonious with certain understandings of “Nature”. It became less materialistic and more cultural. So, the movement’s influence can be felt through the first half of the 20th century, but it is only in post WWII United States that they Gnostic Jews achieve the intellectual dominance over the entire Western world.68 They achieved this by coming to terms with the “production of culture” and taking control of the mechanism by which culture is produced and transmitted. It is for this reason that, The Frankfurt School will undoubtedly be identified with what we now call “cultural studies”. One of the main areas of investigation for the members of the Frankfurt School was what they called the “cultural industry” and mass or popular culture. The study of the mass production of a mass culture was pursued in terms of what are called media studies,

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Indeed, Boas and Friedman used in the first half of this introduction, both of whom argue against Western civilization, are Jews with Boas expressing many of the beliefs of Gnostic Judaism. 68 And if you doubt this dominance chose any academic discipline and see the massive overrepresentation of Jews as influential thinkers in that tradition. Once their presence is made explicit it truly is astounding how Jewish thinkers came to shape the intellectual landscape of post-World War II Western thinking. This phenomenon is elaborated upon in Chapter III of this volume.

74 the study of the way in which different media convey through their very form, i.e., technological and material mediation, different cultural norms and ideological messages. (Mendieta 2004: 2) This research was then used to re-shape the American mind to become harmonious with their agenda. With this phase of Gnostic Judaism, we have arrived at the contemporary “culture wars”. Their move to the United States entailed using new strategies, most especially not aspiring to achieve political revolution first followed by a cultural revolution but achieving the cultural revolution first. This new strategy meant using historically marginalized minorities to undermine the social cohesion of Western societies while maintaining high levels of economic integration or, to put the same thing differently, to advance a program that is socially “progressive”, read as harmonious with the Gnostic agenda, while being economically conservative. This was a reaction against their earlier support for radical redistribution as voiced by Marx because they discovered in the 1960s, as American Jew Milton Friedman expresses, that free markets are more disruptive to established social hierarchies than social democracy. This new approach for realizing social change included supporting social unrest, perhaps most successfully and importantly second wave feminism, the civil rights movement, the cultural revolution and the antiVietnam war peace movement, while maintaining its hatred of femininity and practicing the most extreme form of racial elitism and promoting violent conflicts around the world when it suits their agenda. Amongst the important ideas inherited from the Gnostic Jewish tradition includes the desire to realise a Jewish homeland in Palestine, hatred of Christian European culture because they believe that all cultural norms are the worshipping of false idols, and an onto-theology which has been called ‘Hassidic idealism’ whose foundational commitment is the destruction of all positive existents. The Russian Revolution, which was initiated and carried through by Russian Gnostic Jews, outlined its agenda, which is perfectly harmonious with that of Gnostic Judaism in the West today, • • • •

The old world must be destroyed, and a new one built in its place. To destroy the old world and build a new one, it is necessary to gain political power. Gaining political power requires using all measures, ranging from the most peaceful to the most violent, from the most open to the most secretive. The main struggle is not with political institutions but by shaping subjectivities to conform to our belief system. [author’s note: cultural change] The struggle for a new world must unfold not on a national scale, but on a global scale. The interests of the World Revolution are more important than the interests of individual countries. (Suvorov 2008: 6)

Gnostic Judaism, in its broadest definition, has had a range of different expressions but they are all informed by Jewish Gnosticism as their foundation beliefs and, therefore, can all be seen to aspire to

75 realise the same agenda. Redeeming God by redeeming the world which is achieved by redeeming man. Everything rests on successfully “shaping subjectivities”. The Beliefs of Gnostic Judaism With this brief mapping of the historical development of Gnostic Judaism, what exactly do Gnostic Jews believe? The defining feature of Gnostic Judaism is that there is a “knowledge of an esoteric character”, or gnosis, which reveals Man’s true relationship with God, the world and other men. For millennia, these ideas were passed on through Jewish communities by, . . . secret cells of initiates – spiritual teachers who taught that the key to salvation lay neither in political rebellion nor in redemption from “sin”, but rather in overcoming spiritual blindness and ignorance. In place of ignorance, they offered knowledge of gnosis – not in the form of dogmas but in the form of direct spiritual experiences undergone by individuals through initiation. (Wilberg 2017) It is believed that this knowledge, gnosis, is contained, although hidden, within certain sacred texts. Although these teachings can be found in various text written throughout history it is most primarily sourced from the Torah. As it says in the opening passage of Masserkhet Azilut, an anonymous kabbalistic text believed to have been written in 14th century69, “God’s glory is a hidden thing”. (Proverbs 25: 2) When will you make glory for God? When you are occupied with the hidden aspects of Torah . . . the Shechinah was adorned before them and protects them and reveals to them sublime secrets. . . Learning the secrets of Torah can never be accomplished through academic pursuits alone. Knowledge of God is a “hidden thing” that can only be revealed through understanding the hidden aspects of the Torah. This is the new reading of Torah introduced through the Sabbatians. Despite this hidden knowledge being found within Torah it is not revealed through study alone but is primarily revealed by the Shechinah and is therefore revealed through states of ecstasy such as unstructured emotive dancing and sexual arousal. This “hidden knowledge is understood to “liberate” humanity’s authentic inner self from the evil constraints that Man has come to understand as “morality”. As British Jew Peter Wilberg observes,

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Scholem emphasizes that it is wrong to assume that just because a text is written in a certain century that it originates from that century. He argues that many of the mystical text written between the 12 th and 14th centuries were part of a much older oral tradition that reaches back into history to the classical period. He argues that many of the texts that constitute the Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah date from at least the centuries preceding Christ if not long before.

76 At the heart of gnostic spirituality is the understanding that the inner human being has a trans-personal, trans-human, and trans-physical character – that it is a being fundamentally other than the personal, human and physical self we know. Man’s alienation from his inner being can lead him to interpret and experience it as a being of an entirely foreign or alien nature – a libinal unconscious, an unidentifiable presence . . . (Wilberg 2017) This “alien” god, this foreign presence, which is the type of language they themselves use, which inhabits the inner self, is often called the Shechinah but has also been known as Lucifer. The knowledge revealed by the Shechinah is kept secret because, for the rest of society, as Foucault observes, such knowledge generally, “. . . is forbidden knowledge, it anticipates at the same time: the reign of Satan, and the end of the world; the final bliss and the ultimate punishment; the almighty power on earth and the infernal downfall.” (Foucault as cited in Preparata 2011: 84) It is hidden because this “inner human being”, this libinal self, had been thought to be our “animal” selves, our “base” desires, that expresses everything that has historically been viewed as evil. Because these actions, greed, lust, vanity, revenge have been thought to be expression of “evil”, publicly promoting such knowledge as “good” has been criticised as seeking the “reign of Satan”. Because gnosticism was thought to advance something evil, it had to stay hidden if it was not to be passionately, often violently, resisted. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, this knowledge is also soteric in revealing how through the liberation of Man’s authentic or “natural” being humanity is “redeemed” before God. (Scholem 1965: 1) That Gnostic Jews adhere to all these beliefs means that the Jewish movement under consideration, although not all advocates of such beliefs would self-identify as “gnostic”70, the term is rightfully applied because, as Broek’s argues, Gnosticism or gnostic, “. . . are perfectly applicable to all ideas and currents, from Antiquity to the present day, that emphasize the idea of a revealed secret gnosis (spiritual knowledge) as a gift that illuminates and liberates man’s inner self”. (Broek 2008: 2) So this movement is most certainly gnostic by Broek’s definition. Most importantly, the acquisition of gnosis, the secret spiritual knowledge, is not through rational reflection, it is not through careful study, but is revealed by entering into our subjectivity, to reveal our inner drives. This inner self is revealed through powerful emotions like passion, ecstatic drugs, wild dancing, and sexual arousal. It is in these ecstatic states, not through calm reason, that the inner self is thought to be liberated from evil and can then cleave to God.

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Indeed, I have spoken to “Jews” who advanced this full agenda, anti-Christian, highly sexual, promoting drugs and committing acts of extreme violence, as a religious commitment that they simply identified as “The Truth”, who had never even heard the term “gnostic”. This has been an important achievement because gnostic Jews have always argued that what they practise is not gnostic Judaism, as such, but simply true Judaism. It is the orthodox tradition, they argue, that are presenting a false account of Judaism.

77 What is actually liberated in these ecstatic states, what is thought to be our true inner selves, as the Masserkhet Azilut makes clear, are primordial instincts that have been historically constrained by civility. The person who seeks to encounter the immanent aspect of God, the goddess, the Shechinah, must lose their human selves, must leave reason behind, in order to release their animal selves, their inner “madness”, as it is these irrational animal drives that true access to the “concealed aspect of God” – nature itself - is achieved. The starting point for accessing this secret knowledge is to accept, as Jewish scholar Magid observes, that “God is present and absent in creation, suggesting a kind of monotheistic pantheism where the presence of God as transcendent (eyn sof) is beyond human comprehension and the presence of God in the world is concealed but can be disclosed through mystical gnosis.” (Magid 2008: 22) This tradition presents a kind of dualism that has found expression in various Jewish traditions both ancient and contemporary. As Stroumsa observes, “The same dualistic structure of the Divinity was retained in a number of traditions from the rabbinic period, usually centred on the figure of Metatron (“he who sits near the Divine throne”) or of another archangel. Various rabbinic sources mention that there are “two Powers in Heaven”.” (2015) In some traditions that identify as Jewish, despite what it says time and again in their sacred texts, they claim that there are two “powers” in Heaven, one that cannot be encountered and is utterly unknowable in being transcendent, and one that is immanent, within us and the Earth, which can be potentially encountered and known. The transcendent or as yet unknown aspect of God is associated with the masculine expression of God, the God Most High, the “Father”, while the immanent aspect, that which is concealed but can be encountered and known through states of ecstasy, is associated with the feminine aspect, the “Mother” or “Sabbath Queen”. This goddess, as already observed, goes by various names including Astarte, Anat but is primarily known by the name the Shechinah (but also identified in Greek as Metatron71), as was presented in the Masserkhet Azilut. The Shechinah is associated with “Earth”, the darkness of the Abyss, and is rightly conceptualised, in the Gnostic tradition, as active matter. That the Shechinah is conceptualised as active matter is extremely important especially for understanding how this tradition is different from Christianity. In the Western Christian tradition, matter is conceptualised as passive, inert and therefore not an aspect of God. Matter is not divine.72 In the Gnostic

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As with a lot of the mystical Gnostic tradition, the name “Metatron” does not appear in the Torah but is mentioned in the later rabbinic literature. Metatron appears three times in the Babylonian Talmud. Although mentioned in the rabbinic literature, it is not until the kabbalistic tradition that Metatron become more commonly used. Metatron is a Greek word that is derived from the Semitic word Mitatrun which means the “angel of the veil” as in the one that is veiled. 72 It is for this reason that Jesus’ mother, Mary, is mortal and not a goddess. She is the feminine side in Christianity, but she is not a God. She is a virgin. She is characterized as being impregnated by God, but she herself is not a God. This difference in the role of the feminine is extremely important for understanding the difference between Gnosticism and Christianity.

78 Jewish tradition matter is thought active and, therefore, an aspect of God, something divine, the feminine aspect of God. As French philosopher, Georges Bataille, who converted to Gnostic Judaism and presented a “blueprint for chthonic religious awakening” (Preparata 2011: 81), wrote, In essence, it is possible to single out as the leitmotiv of Gnosis the conception of matter as an active principle, possessing its autonomous eternal existence, which is that of the tenebrous depths (which are not the absence of light, but the monstrous archons revealed by this absence), that of evil (which is not the absence of good, but a creative act).73 (Bataille as seen in Preparata 2011: 42) Bataille is drawing attention to the centrality of matter being active and that, at least in some traditions, active matter is considered something “evil”. The secret knowledge that Gnostics receive is that it is not knowledge that drives society and man but living matter. The primordial problem that motivates Gnostic Judaism is, if the world was created by a God that was all good, all-knowing and all powerful, then why is it so imperfect? Why is there so much suffering, pain and hardship, in a world created by God? As the Christian scholar Kindelberger asks, If the world we live in exists under a God with complete meticulous control, a God who knows the future in every detail and has ordained all that will be, we have no choice but to look around at the suffering and pain and question whether he really is the “God [of] love” that Scripture declares him to be? (Kindelberger 2017: 1-2) Surely, one would think, a perfect being without constraints that loves His creation would want to create a perfect world, a world full of joy, a world without sin, a world where everyone lived fulfilled lives free of labour. Yet the world that actually exists, the world in which everyone lives, appears to be far from perfect. We live, as the Tanakh74 confirms, in a world where people are continuously “sinning” and, therefore, are at best, forgetful of their relationship with God if not living without God in their lives. It is in this apparent

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This, of course, explains Marx’s entire philosophy. He argued that it was matter that drives humanity and social change and not reason. This basic reversal of Western values is why the means of production is so central to his thinking. 74 The Tanakh refers to the three division of the Hebrew Bible: Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim. There are many similarities between the Tanakh and what Christians call the Old Testament. The Old Testament, a Christian document, is drawn from the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Tanakh that was written in Alexandria. The most significant difference between the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament is that the Old Testament contains a number of books not included in the Tanakh. Despite their similarities, Jews find it offensive to call the Tanakh, the “Old Testament” because it is to accept the claim made by Christians that Jesus’ word marks a New Testament thereby making the Old Testament redundant. The claim that Jesus’ word makes the Tanakh obsolete is called supersessionism or the claim that the New Testament supersedes the old. Although I personally am a Christian and do indeed believe in supersessionism, I am here specifically referring to the Tanakh and not the Old Testament. Jews often complain when Christians refer to the Tanakh as the Old Testament, but this identification is more often done out of ignorance than as an expression of supersessionism.

79 absence of God, that we do sin, that we do hate our neighbours because we judge them for being who they are. People tend to be violent, greedy, lustful, and yet we judge them harshly simply for living as nature intended. According to the Jewish Gnostic tradition, that humanity acts in such a way reveals the truth of our condition. The condition in which most of us still live today, despite the efforts of Gnostic Judaism, is in a state of “. . .forgetfulness and heavy sleep; being like those who dream troubled dreams, to whom sleep comes while they – those who dream – are oppressed.” (Emphasis added Wink: 19) According to Gnostic Jews, we actually live in a false world, a dream world, an illusion, a simulacrum, and it is knowing this, the secret knowledge, gnosis, that we do not know what we think we know, that will begin to awaken humanity to the falsehood that is this World to the primordial unity of reality. By releasing humanity’s inner being, their instinctual selves, they overcome the delusion of objective “reality” that is oppressive thereby reuniting Man with the immanent aspect of God, the Shechinah. What has led to us accepting living in our dream state where everyone, often without knowing it, is oppressed is positive religions.75 Most Christian traditions attribute positive features to God and the world for which He is responsible thereby making it a “positive religion”. This knowledge, knowledge of what is right and wrong, good and evil, true and false, real and unreal, then informs the way people live their lives in the World. In the positive religions, this knowledge, knowledge of good and evil, is in part divine revelation and in part accessed through reason that ends in knowledge. There is something cataphatic about the Christian God that is supposed to inform one’s life. Judaism too, has historically been a positive religion. As Louth rightly observes, “the Hebrew scriptures contain records claiming to be God’s self-revelation” in the sense of God revealing something positive about Himself, in the Jewish tradition through text, to Man in order to guide Mankind to living a good life by knowing what is “evil”. This revelation, knowledge of good and evil, is then used in the Orthodox Jewish tradition to articulate laws that should be obeyed in living a good life. The binding laws of Orthodox Judaism are similar to those historically found in Christianity. In opposition to these positive religions, Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, Gnostic Judaism denies that we currently know anything positive about God whatsoever. The only knowledge we have is that we have no knowledge. This knowledge in itself is not positive knowledge, how to live a moral life or what is the “true” objective reality, but negative knowledge in terms that it is knowing that we do not

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A positive religion is a religion that believes positive things can be said about God and the world. Positive simply means affirmative claims about what God is and what “God” wants. In contrast to negative religions or religions that believe nothing is known about God or what He wants. Both commitments, as will be discovered, motivate religious actions (that is commitment to a negative religion does not mean that adherents are not influenced by their beliefs in the world). For example, to be committed to a negative religion might mean strict opposition to all positive religions as “evil”.

80 know. It is a knowledge acquired, according to the Gnostic Jew Theodore Adorno, through a negative dialectic – a dialectic that ends best in knowing nothing. As this is the case, then any positive account of God, including that expressed in Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, is actually evil. Positive religions are evil, according to this gnostic account, because it is sacrilegious to claim that humanity knows anything about the creator God or His creation. To claim that we actually know good and evil or know the world is to actually worship a false idol and idolatry is the greatest sin in the Jewish tradition. Because positive religions claim to know good and evil and claim to reveal the real world as it is then all positive religions must be destroyed. As Gnostic Jew Erich Fromm wrote, “. . .the question must be asked . . . out of concern for man’s soul: Can we trust religion to be the representative of religious needs, or must we not separate these needs from organized, traditional religion in order to prevent the collapse of our moral structure?” (Fromm 2013) Fromm is claiming that organized religions, the positive religions, present a false teaching and it is this false teaching that keeps us from living a truly moral, “life affirming”, existence. Historically in the West, it was Christianity, as voiced by the organized Churches, that was believed to be the bulwark against immorality. Gnostic Jews, as Fromm writes, reverses this valuing and argues that it is actually organized religions, including Orthodox Judaism, that results in moral collapse. Although Orthodox Judaism is implicated in Gnostic Judaism’s criticism of positive religions, it is the Christian Church, above all else, that must be destroyed. This simple argument, we cannot know the God Most High, therefore, anything positive claim about God, morality, or the world, is necessarily false and evil is the starting point of Jewish Gnosticism. Gnostic Jews hope to realise the destruction of all positive religions as a sincere attempt to save Man’s soul. In this project to destroy all organized religions, as statistics confirm, they have been extremely successful.

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Today many people will claim to be “spiritual but not religious” and this “spirituality”, often called the New Age Movement, is always by necessity outside of organized religions. It is because under such conditions, cut free from the sophistication and complexity of ancient religions that have been developed over millennia by the greatest minds in history, people can then be more easily manipulated into worshipping anything, even something that has been understood for millennia to be evil. Gnostic Jews are thoroughly apophatic when it comes to God and therefore deny any positive knowledge. It is for this reason, as influential Hasidic Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav would simply assert, “The ultimate knowledge is that we do not know.” True gnosis is that humans do not have any positive knowledge. As that thoroughly gnostic Jewish physicist Wolfgang Pauli observed, “. . .negative theology, that is what we need. As Schopenhauer said, he [God] cannot be personal, for then he could not bear the suffering of mankind. This is it, the Unknown God of Gnosis.” (Pauli as seen in Quispel 1981: 27) Pauli is expressing the belief that the suffering in this world confirms that God cannot be in this world, or He would have to do something to address all the suffering.76 Because the Gnostic God is not of this world

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The opposite is actually the truth and in this the entire argument of gnosticism is found wanting. It is that we can experience suffering as suffering, a distinctly human experience, that we know God is in the world. If Pauli was

82 He is exhaustively “unknown”. The explanation the Gnostic Jews give for this less than perfect world, as Pauli observes, a world in which man suffers terribly, is that this world was not created by the God Most High. This world, the one we live in that consists of all these objects that surround us, this world that appears so meaningful and permanent, was actually created by what the gnostic tradition calls the archon. Archons have at times been understood as lesser gods, Christian gnostic thought Yahweh was an archon, who created this evil world out of malice or ignorance. Archon are simply those who “keep humanity imprisoned in a world of suffering and delusion”. (Smoley 2005) Gnostic Jews understand the archon today to be mortal Men who create the world according to their religious beliefs. The reason why humanity made this world and not some other, is simply because it reflects the sectional interests of a particular cruel and ruthless minority. This world, according to gnostic Jewry, is primarily an expression of Christian, white, male power, who are today the archon, and man can create this world only because this world is autonomous of God. As Jewish scholar Lazier (2008: 164) observes, “. . . “Gnostic Judaism” was less concerned with establishing God’s radical transcendence than with the autonomy of the world as a scene for human endeavour.” One of the central teachings of Gnostic Judaism is that this world is not shaped by God. Drawing on the older mystical gnostic tradition of Lurianic kabbalah, which Scholem rightly observes is actually nothing but the “reappearance, in the heart of Judaism, of the gnostic tradition”, post-Sabbatian Gnostic Jews argued that God had voluntarily withdrawn, tzimtzum, in order to make a space for this imperfect world. A perfectly good God could not exist within the flawed world of existent things. As Scholem (emphasis added 1997: 84) observed, “The question as to why God did not create a perfect world, Himself being perfection, would have seemed absurd to the Kabbalists of the Lurianic school: a perfect world cannot be created, for it would then be identical to God Himself, who cannot duplicate Himself but only restrict Himself.” In the Lurianic tradition of kabbalah, it is emphasized that God must “withdraw” or “restrict himself’, set a self-imposed limitation, if there is to be an actual world of existent things at all. This withdrawal means that there is a gulf created between the creator Man and a now impotent creator God. Again, as Hans Jonas claimed, The sublime unity of God and cosmos is rent asunder, a monstrous chasm ensues; God and world are made foreign to one another, set in opposition . . . God is the world-alien77, the world-alienating, the anti-worldly. The gnostic concept of God is first and foremost a

really ignorant of God then he could not experience suffering as such. Pauli’s argument confirms Jesus’ redemptive message and shows that he has already been saved if he would only affirm Jesus as God. 77 This idea of God being “alien” or what they also refer to as an “alien God” or just “alien” is found in many Jewish Gnostic authors as already displayed in the earlier quote of Bloom.

83 nihilistic one. God – das Nichts der Welt [the nothing of the world] (Jonas as seen in Lazier 2009: 177) There is a space opened between God and everything that is, the cosmos, so that this world is actually devoid of God. The space opened is the result of the withdrawal of what they call the Ein Sof (the undifferentiated), one of the descriptions of the God Most High, which then opens a space, tehiru, where God is totally absent. It is in the tehiru, the space in which we inhabit, that is the source of dinim or human judgements (dinim is the plural of din “judgement”) and is, as a result, demonic. It is that God withdraws that opens a space for human creation through making judgements regarding what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false. As Scholem (1946/1991) wrote, “For in its classical form, religion signifies the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite creature.” As the judgements that constitute the world are made in the absence of God, without knowledge of God, they are only expression of human interests, expressions of human power, and are, therefore, actually demonic. The need to manifest a world as an expression of human power is also the moment that marks the beginning of religiosity as such. The more primordial condition of Man knew no experience that corresponds to “religion”, the right way to act, because of the intimacy between God, man and the cosmos was such that religion, as a kind of institutional arrangement that operates within society to constrain certain behaviours, was simply not conceptually possible. Religion itself signifies, perhaps ironically, Gnostic Jews argue, God’s withdrawal from this world. The advent of religion marks the absence of God in our lives and most certainly not, according to gnosticism, the means for reconciliation with God. Positive religions, by the Gnostic account, is evidence of the ignorance of God not knowledge of God. Positive religions are a kind of veil hiding God and, therefore, they must be destroyed. Man’s ignorance of the God Most High has left Him shivering, cold and alone in a world of darkness that is in reality devoid of meaning. It is as a result of the anxiety of meaninglessness that Man in His weakness flees into Being but now as an expression of power legitimized as an experience of God. Humans seek security thereby manufacture Gods, religions, in order to try to secure an enduring world. Religion is Mankind’s response to the anxiety of nihilism that results from losing his intimacy with God. Religion, understood as nothing but human judgment, is an expression of sectional interests, manifests a demonic world in the open space of tehiru simply as an expression of power. Historically it was white, male, Christians who have been the Masters, and they have enslaved everybody else, according to the Gnostic Jewish understanding, but that era is coming to an end. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, this account of the human condition can be seen to be portrayed in the Garden of Eden myth in Genesis. In that myth, the “original sin” of Man, eating from the

84 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, marks the time when humanity is removed from an intimacy with the Father and is exiled to live in an evil, distorted world. The Garden of Eden myth, according to the Gnostic tradition, captures a real time in human development, before morality, when Mankind lived intimately with God in nature. Prior to eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Mankind had been invited to eat from the Tree of Life. It is only after eating from the Tree of Knowledge that God then forbids Man from eating from the Tree of Life. So, Mankind has eaten deeply of knowledge of Good and Evil, but this has meant that he can no longer affirm life. He can no longer affirm “spirit”, the Shechinah. It is through eating from the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge that Mankind and the feminine aspect of God lives in a condition of knowing sin, a world of shame, guilt, and labour. According to the kabbalists, The two trees [the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil] are fundamentally one: they grow from a common root, in which masculine and feminine, the giving and the receiving, the creative and the reflective, are one. Life and knowledge are not to be torn asunder from one another: they must be seen and realized in their unity. So long as the two trees are connected, the Tree of Life retains control over the power of severity, the harsh critical power within the Godhead, which for this author, following Sefer ha-Bahir, is conceived in the image of Satan. (Scholem 1997: 70) In this quote, Scholem is observing that when knowledge of good and evil, the masculine, is separated from the Tree of Life, the feminine, then it becomes distorted, and that distortion distorts all of Creation. Humanity from this time onwards seeks justice but justice independent of life is nothing more than a hideous abstraction. It is evil. What is manifested from judgement devoid of life might be considered harsh or unreasonable judgement as it is judgement that occurs in the absence of a full understanding of the human condition. It is under these circumstances, harsh judgement, that humanity becomes the creator of the World. It is through harsh judgement that the world of white, male, Christians emerged as dominant. In such a world, Man marginalizes joy in preference for justice. In the absence of joy, knowledge of good and evil separated from the Tree of Life cannot truly be knowledge of good and evil at all. It is judgement that exists in the absence of affirming life and such judgements must be evil. By the Gnostic Jewish account, Adam, in eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, . . .kindled the fire of Judgment everywhere and corrupted all the worlds with it, so that even the air of the lands of the nations was corrupted by the host of the princes of impurity, who are literally objects of pagan worship; and each one took his portion and his land . . . and we have an absolute obligation to repair the external air . . . And particularly because we are learned in Torah, we are obligated to repair the air of the lands of the seventy nations with the breath of Torah which emerges from our mouths. And when that air is repaired to its limit, the Messiah will come to redeem us and will conquer the entire world under his dominion, and then good will overcome evil, as it was. (Emek ha-Melekh p121b as seen in Scholem 1997: 82)

85 This separation encourages humanity’s facility for critical judgement that from this time onwards is abstract because it no longer affirms life. Sex, for one important example, can be understood as being both an act for procreation and an act of a man trying to bring joy, even ecstasy, to a woman. To believe to know what sex, for example, is primarily about, for example “procreation”, means that those who pursue sex for pleasure are then judged harshly, as “evil sinners”, and it is this judgement that then constitutes a world, and institutions in that world, that are all distorted by evil. It was for this reason that in gnosticism “licentiousness was permitted or recommended”. (von Balthasar 1981) To judge people as sinners, according to the Gnostic tradition, is just an expression of authoritarianism from positive religions. Again, as Scholem observes, Hence, when Adam ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which is of the side of evil, and separated it [through his awareness or his contemplation] from the Tree of Life, the Evil Urge dominated him in his eating and in his soul, for his soul took part in the eating of the fruits of the Garden, as we said above. Thus, impurity and death and removal of the soul from the [supernal] soul took place [within Adam] . . . For after he separated the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, which is of the side of evil, from the Tree of Life, and increased the strength of Evil Urge and sated his soul with it, he separated the Tree of Knowledge from the Tree of Life, and also separated his soul from all the good qualities of the supernal soul and united himself with the Evil Urge. (Scholem 1997: 67-68) Knowledge is not evil but when separate from life, when the masculine disregards the feminine, knowledge is on the “side of evil” in terms of no longer affirming life. For example, Man makes clothing, according to this account, not out of necessity, not to keep himself warm, but out of a moral imperative, to hide his “nakedness”, as a result, clothing is an outcome of knowledge of good and evil. Nakedness is “evil”. The danger is that clothes designed only with knowledge of good and evil, that denies life, that we are also sexual beings, vibrant beings, active beings, then distorts all of creation. Clothing made out of a moral imperative alone, that is no longer informed by life, is overly restrictive, especially for women, in terms of being primarily designed to hide human sexuality and inhibit activity. Life affirming clothing, as people wear today, Gnostics would argue, are primarily for comfort as well as for displaying our sexuality. Think, for example, of the clothes imposed on Muslim women in some countries in contrast to the extremely revealing clothes of contemporary Western women. Clothes designed in response to knowledge of good and evil deny the sexuality of humanity, most especially female sexuality, and deny the need for comfort. Such clothing is “life denying”. Clothes instead should be designed, from the Gnostic perspective, primary for comfort and to secure high quality sexual partners that will enable highly orgasmic sex. Clothes informed by moral imperatives, which still exist today even in the West, is evil from a Gnostic perspective because such clothing is the result of decisions made by Adam, a man, which

86 resulted in harsh judgements of good and evil operating in isolation from divine love and the natural drives of life. As Scholem again observed, “Both man’s experience of reality and his moral nature are damaged by this misguided contemplation.” (Scholem 1970: 70) The separation of knowledge from life can only be corrected by the actions of the “righteous” in overcoming the distorting effect of this imbalance and reconnecting humanity with the Tree of Life, the feminine, the Shechinah. We must return to the Shechinah first before we can ever reach out to the Father. In the Zohar, the “Other Side”, the evil side, is the “fire” of severity from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, externalized, and independent of the Tree of Life. Under these conditions, it becomes a hierarchical system, good over evil, male over female, rational over emotional, and as a hierarchical system, one that does not find balance between these forces thereby acknowledging everything as the product of God. (Scholem 1997: 73) According to Gnostic Jews, the divine spark, the vibrancy of life, which can be understood as “natural drives” or “the instinctual”, continues to exist, even in Western Christian societies, though it is oppressed. This oppression is conceptualised by Gnostic Jewish intellectuals as authoritarianism and as something evil. Everything that is evil, the world in which we all live as moral agents, is in reality only an outer “shell” that contains within it an inner goodness. The “shell” is lifeless whereas what is within the shell abounds with life. This means that there is no absolute discrete realm, “good” or “evil” but in evil the good resides. (Scholem 1997: 76) Two consequences flow from this. Firstly, that good and evil do interlace explains why it is so difficult for humanity to differentiate between the two and, secondly, it offers the potential of bringing all deeds, many of which are now deemed “evil”, into the sphere of the good. (Scholem 1997: 76) As Scholem observes, “There is nothing so depraved that it cannot be returned to its source, to this spark of the divine within.” (Scholem 1997: 76) The task set Gnostic Jews, therefore, is to return this spark to God. To show how what is “the most depraved”, such as child sexual abuse, is actually good in freeing child sexuality. The returning of the sparks of life to God is to redeem both God and the world. This redemptive project requires reintegrating what has become understood as evil back into the unified whole that is true goodness/God. This task is thought to be captured in one of the more common Jewish names of God, Sa’el. When evil becomes independent of good then the divine name becomes transformed into Samael, the Hebrew name for Satan. But within “Samael” lies God’s name Sa’el. That Sa’el hides within Samael grants insight into the relationship between good and evil. Just as Sa’el dwells within Samael so does good dwell within the demonic shell. (Scholem 1997: 77) The demonic shell are those things that the Western Christian tradition has thought of as “good”. Everything that Western Christianity has thought to be good is actually, by the Gnostic’s account, evil. Importantly, the word “ma” in Hebrew, that are the letters removed from Samael to reveal Sa’el, is the pronoun

87 interrogative “what?” or “how?”. These are ways of asking for reasons or logos. Such questions are to be answered using judgements. “What is that?” or “How did that happen?” are asking for reasons and for these reasons to be accepted requires judgements. It is these human judgements, made necessarily in the absence of God, that are understood from a gnostic position as nothing but an expression of power and are therefore evil. They are Samael. By no longer judging, by removing logos, according to the Gnostic tradition, then one finds God. It is important to appreciate, Gnostic Jews do not want to find balance between good and evil, this is not simply the claim that knowledge of good and evil has become too dominant, and we need to find a more balanced account. What they are arguing is that we need to affirm evil, we need to destroy what has historically been seen as good and valorise its opposite, redemption through sin. When properly understood, Gnostic Judaism really aspires to be the polar opposite of the Christian tradition. What Christianity thinks is evil, lust, greed, material comfort, is actually what is good in terms that these features are thought to affirm human life while chastity, according to the Gnostic Jewish tradition. In contrast, everything that is seen as good in Christianity, abstinence, temperance, and austerity is what is actually evil because such attitudes deny life. One of the things that has been historically prized but which Gnostic Jewry hopes to demonize, as the account of God’s name attests, is reason. As will be elaborated upon in this volume, one of the early Christian conceptualizations of Jesus was, as he claims in the Gospel of John, logos. What is deemed evil in the Gnostic Jewish tradition is logos, one of the names of Jesus. The outer shell that is evil, is the world that is known, the world that is the result of “harsh” judgement, the world that results from reason. This kind of reasonable judgement has been rightly associated by Gnostic Judaism with masculinity, whiteness, and Christianity. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, we cannot know this aspect of God because the masculine aspect withdrew and is, therefore, no longer a part of this world. What can be sought, recovered, and encountered, according to Gnostic Jewish beliefs, is the feminine aspect of God, “life”, who Gnostic Jews call the Shechinah. The word Shechinah is from the Hebrew root shakhan or “to dwell”. It was claimed that the Shechinah inhabited the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. There she would “dwell” in the loving marital embrace of her husband, Yahweh, in the quite isolated darkness of the Holy of Holies. (Patai 1990: 32) In his best seller, The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown seems to draw inspiration from this myth when he rightly observed that the Star of David actually represents the two deities, the masculine and the feminine, because this, he wrote, “marks the Holy of Holies, where the male and female deities – Yahweh and Shechinah – were thought to dwell.” The Star of David does indeed represent the Holy of Holies in the Gnostic Jewish tradition and it was the Gnostic Jewish tradition that made the Star of David, previously it had been the

88 menorah, into the central symbol of Judaism. The Star of David represents the two aspects of God, the two triangles, the masculine and the feminine, which, when reunited, constitute all of reality. The creative father and the reflective Shechinah. That the Star of David adorns the Israeli flag says much about Israel, Zionism and the contemporary power of Gnostic Jews. Jews that want to remain true to the monotheism of rabbinic Judaism argue instead that the Shechinah did not represent the feminine aspect of God but that this interpretation arose from a basic misunderstanding of the text. What was actually being claimed was not that Yahweh was being united with the Shechinah, his consort, in the Holy of Holies but simply that God’s spirit “dwelt” in the Holy of Holies or “God’s Shechinah” in the sense that the Holy of Holies was “God’s dwelling” and not God’s wife. The Star of David, from this account, would be meaningless. Whatever the original meaning, by late antiquity, the Shechinah had become conceptualized as the “consort” of Yahweh by at least sections of the Jewish community. From this time onwards, at least some people who identified as Jews embraced what had become a true Hebrew “goddess”. (Stuckrad 2010: 286) As Patai observes, “she became the manifestation of God’s presence, the Shechinah – a feminine name just as God’s is masculine – the loving, rejoicing, motherly, suffering, mourning, and, in general, emotion-charged aspect of the deity”. (Patai 1990: 32) It was at this stage in Jewish history, in late antiquity, that the Shechinah also began to be associated with the eventual salvation of the Jewish people by becoming part of the redemption narrative of some sections of Jewish people that was just becoming a central theme in Judaism more generally. As Stuckrad (2010: 287-288) wrote, “. . .the Shechinah represents the female aspects of the godhead; she is the Sabbath on which God unites with his bride, exactly as he does with Israel on the Sabbath”. The narrative that developed in relation to the role of the Shechinah to human redemption was that when the Temple in Jerusalem burnt down in 70 AD, then the Shechinah, like the Jewish people whose spirit she personifies, became “exiled”.78 Like the Jewish people, she wandered the earth hoping to create a world which would again be a home for her spirit and the Jewish people. This new place of “dwelling”, this new Holy of Holies, that which the Star of David represents today, the place where God comes into the world as the uniting of Heaven and Earth, was from that time onwards understood to be the entire world. Gnostic Jews did not want a particular region or

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Although it should always be remembered that the Romans never “exiled” the Jewish people from the land of Israel. There was never a law ordering Jews to leave or forbidding them to live in Palestine. Jews seem to have simply chosen to leave after a series of natural disasters and military defeats. They were probably motivated to leave by the hardships being experienced in Palestine and the prospect of better opportunities in other regions of the Roman Empire. Despite this, the language of “exile” is highly emotive and suggest a future right to return to “their” land. If this period was simply called “leaving” then people might be less supportive of their supposed entitlement to “return”.

89 area in the world, they did not really care about “Israel” or rebuilding the Temple, but they were promised the entire world by God. It is to rule the entire world and everybody in that world that is the project of Gnostic Jews. They just needed the power and resources of an entire state, Israel, if they were to achieve their real project. It was in the dwelling place, the world as such, where the Shechinah would be reunited with her partner. By the Gnostic account, Jews were “exiled” throughout the world not as a punishment by God, but as the best opportunity for them to realize their God given project to redeem God, Humankind, and the World. In the Messianic Era, the Jewish God would reign over the entire world, and, as it says in their prayers, everyone would “bend the knee” to their God. In order for the Shechinah to be brought into this world, the world had to be made in such a way as to accommodate Her. The Shechinah is often represented as a Mother Earth goddess, who is also, as with most Mother Earth goddesses, a warrior Queen who fights, like a mother whose children are endangered, viciously on their behalf. As long as there is a world of things, she remains exiled or entombed, in the darkness of the Underworld. As long as Her underground crypt remains intact, as long as there is a World of judgement, a World of “morality”, then she remains apart from the light. The only way to destroy the World is to break the existing world’s creator’s relationship with their God or, to say the same thing, to overcome the idolatry that constitutes our world as a thing consisting of extent things. As Gutkind observed, “Idolatry is absolutely prohibited for Israel. This is the condition on which the people are founded. Thus, the saying, “He who refrains absolutely from idolatry is called a Jew.” (Gutkind 1952: 22) To ensure that the Goddess is worshipped and no longer the false Father of Christiantiy and his “son”, there is the need for the revaluation of all existing values or, to put the same thing in terms that might be expressed by Gnostic Jews, to find redemption through sin. The ultimate hope of Gnostic Jews is to realise a new matriarchal order that will replace the current supposed patriarchy so that female principles will again reign supreme. It will be a world which is emotional, non-judgemental, highly sexual and nurturing. It is only then that the Shechinah will once again rule in this world thus bringing about an age, it is believed, of prosperity, peace, and harmony with nature, the Age of Aquarius, the Messianic Age. This new matriarchal order is already finding many expressions throughout the West once one knows what such an order would look like. Anderlini-D’Onofrio (2010) recently wrote of the apparent need for a “new politics of love”, a new politics where “loving allows [the] emotional resources to multiply and become abundant on a planetary scale” this is a politics which “confirms that nonconventional styles of erotic expression [which] are playful enough for our Earthly mother to welcome . . . in her multifarious body.” For this new order to be realized they not only need women in positions of power, which is being forcefully realised, but they need a new way of leadership

90 that is reflective of these female virtues. This new situation is necessary for the Shechinah to return (Stuckrad 2010: 288) and is, in its most simple terms, the rule of the Jewish people, in terms of their God informing government practices, over the entire world. As none other than Max Weber observed, For the Jew . . . the social order of the world was conceived to have been turned into the opposite of the one promised for the future, but in the future, it was to be overturned so that Jewry could be once again dominant. The world was conceived as neither eternal nor unchangeable, but rather as being created. Its present structure was a product of man’s actions, above all those of the Jews, and of God’s reaction to them. Hence the world was a historical product designed to give way to the truly God-ordained order . . . (as seen in Bendix 1998: 216) Matriarchy is just one aspect of systemic reversal that is required for the Gnostic Jewish ethos to rule the world. Just as the reversal of the world was the result of the actions of the Jewish people so will be its return to the proper order, where Jews rule the world, which demands the destruction of the existing order.79 As Nietzsche, who was familiar with Gnostic Judaism through his friendship with the German Jewish scholar Paul Rèe, reveals in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “And whoever wants to be a creator in good and evil: verily, he must first be an annihilator and shatter values. Thus, does the highest evil belong to the highest good: but this latter is the creative.” The existing world must be “shattered” if that which is most evil, the most reviled, everything that the Shechinah symbolizes from a Western Christian perspective, can be affirmed as that which is to be most highly prized. It is only because the divine sparks remain within everything evil that revaluation remains a possibility at all through the destruction of the existing world. That what was once seen as evil must now be revealed anew as the highest good and what was once valued above all else, things that were worthy enough to die for, must now be revealed as evil. If there is to be a destruction of the experience of the divine through the revaluation of all values, thereby robbing the false God of all its powers, there must first be the destruction of all values or, to say the same thing, the destruction of everything. Because, according to Jewish Gnosticism, everything is only constituted through human judgement, undermining the authority of those who were once thought to make authoritative judgements, is to destroy the world those judgements have built. As Lazier (2003: 33) observed, “The gnostic impulse was not merely otherworldly but anti-worldly, characterized above all by an Entweltlichungstendenz, a tendency toward “de-worldification”.” Wink (1993: 3) also observed that,

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It should be appreciated that when it is claimed that Jews will rule world it does not mean that the world will be ruled by one ethnic or racial group, although this is how it is sometimes interpreted by Gnostic Jews themselves, but that people who reject idolatry, the core feature of “Jewishness”, will rule over a world that is no longer idolatrous. This is simply a world where reality is conceived as a “social construct” and nothing, literally, has endurance in terms of being “real”.

91 people “. . .have attempted to account for the Gnostic abhorrence of the world by pointing to the political disillusionment of Jews following their catastrophic defeats in the uprisings of 66-70, 115-117 and 132135.” According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, white, Christian men are qelippoh or “evil”. What will be realized once the Christian world has been destroyed, there will be, “. . .the utter disintegration, collapse, and death of the qelippoh once the completed tiqqun (healing) deprived it of the sources of its vitality. . . As the divine parsuf, or “countenance”, is restored in the world, that of the qelippah vanishes.” (Scholem 2016: 46) There is only one end point to this destructive project, “the human agents of evil will be either physically annihilated or otherwise disposed of”. (Cohn 2001) Gnostic scholar after gnostic scholar argues for this outcome, either white men will be killed or they will “disappear”. This destructive act is not just destructive but is, at the same time, creative. This destructive act is what they understand to be creative destruction. Of course, Karl Marx was the first to popularize the phrase “creative destruction” in Western literature, but it was the Hegelian scholar Alexandre Kojeve, in the shadow of the political intrigues of Parvus, who reinvigorated the term for modern Gnostic Judaism. Kojeve argued that all of history was an endless conflict between competing groups hoping to be recognised as superior. The most important aspect of this conflict is not armed conflict but about having your values affirmed in the world or to have your God recognised as the one true God by everyone. For example, there are two groups, one group wants to “consume” a particular cow for meat while another group wants to “consume” the same cow for dairy. These two groups enter into a struggle, what is really a life and death struggle, over how this cow will be consumed. If the cohort who want the cow to be meat “wins”, and they consume the cow for meat, then in the destruction of the cow they have at the same, constituted reality in a particular way. This “reality” is not only reality for the victorious cohort, the cow was consumed for meat, but it is also reality for the other group as well. The victorious group, the Masters, have created a universal truth. This act of destruction, consuming the cow for meat, is also creative in the sense of creating reality, creating a world. This is creative destruction. Imagine if what was at stake was not a cow but a young, white, Christian male. This man can be “appropriated” as a confident, Christian or society can be shaped in such a way that not only will he not grow up a Christian but the music he listens to is from another culture, the movies he watches denigrates everything that he was raised to believe, and then he goes through an education system that is designed to reject his heritage. In a way this person is “destroyed” as who he might have been, but he is also “created” as something else. This process of Gnostic Jewish creative redemption through destruction is nicely summarized by Mendieta who claims that what will be remembered of the 20th century is a certain trajectory of Jewish messianic thinking that has shaped contemporary society and most certainly not Protestant theology.

92 First, this Jewish messianism is profoundly characterised by a restorative element. This has to do with anamnesis as a fundamental aspect of rationality. In contrast to the idea of the restitution of an Arcadian past, or golden age, this messianism seeks to restore by way of an apocalyptic re-enactment. Second, this messianism is utopian in that it projects as new age that which is not brought about by the progressive accumulation of improvements, through a quantitative meliorism. This utopianism is unlike Enlightenment utopianism, which sees the future as the mere actualization of the present. Instead, the truly utopian is to be seen as an irruption into the historical continuum by a trans-historical agent. With Benjamin, we may say that progress is catastrophe, and utopia is ahistorical. The third element, already alluded to, is the apocalyptic dimension of this messianism. This restoration of wholeness, Tikkun, and the irruption of utopia, two aspects of one and the same process, are only conceivable as a radical discontinuity with the present. This past, as the past of injustice, is not to be superficially reconciled in the present, and the future is not imaginable from the present, lest it become a mere mirror image of what that present can alone think and project. . . Fourth, and finally, the restorative, utopian, and apocalyptic elements converge in the ambivalent image of messianism. This messianism, most importantly, is not personalizable. It is not the waiting or announcement of a messiah, but the call and discernment of the messianic forces and elements that, like fragments of utopia, break into the continuum of history. (Mendieta 2002: 4) This is an insightful account of the creative destruction of Gnostic Jewish messianism that was instrumental in shaping the 20th century but of course, only grows more influential in time as it “progresses” unchecked. The primary way that redemption will be brought to the world by overcoming the dominance of white, Christian, males, thereby liberating the Shechinah into the world was through female sexuality. Gnostic Jew, Wilhelm Reich, who believed that “sexuality was the centre around which revolved the whole of social life as well as the inner life of the individual” (Reich as seen in Tramontana 2021), argued that it was the female orgasm that would repair or heal the world. It was Reich who popularized this Gnostic idea of a “sexual revolution” in the United States in the years following World War II by proposing, what is described today as, an “anti-authoritarian orgasm theory, which stressed the importance of open relationships and sexual freedom with women’s economic and bodily autonomy. . .” (Tramontana 2021) The centrality of sex in Gnostic’s teaching was a development on the Gnostic teachings of Isaac Luria’s older version of kabbalah that was brought from Poland to the Near East by Nathan of Gaza, the man who shaped the messianic message of Sabbatia Tzevi. The basic idea was that the immanent aspect of God, the presence of God in the world, the female aspect that they call the Shechinah, was not accessed through the intellect, it could not be accessed through learning or reason, but through corporeality and extreme emotions. Consistent with the strategy of reversal, it was the heart, in a state of ecstasy, that should guide the mind in the Gnostic Jewish tradition and not the rational mind that should dominate the heart. Joy, especially sexual pleasure or the euphoria of drugs, which are both marginalized when eating

93 from the Tree of Knowledge, was how the female aspect of God was to be encountered. This might include frenzied dancing, like that engaged in nightclubs every night of every week, hallucinogenic drugs, as taken by those very same denizens, and, of course, extreme sexual activity especially as that experienced in group situations, as practiced at the end of many nights of “clubbing”. It was for this reason that Eastern Hasidic Jews, some of whom sustained Gnostic Judaism through the difficult 18th and 19th centuries, would practice a frenzied form of dancing themselves, not dissimilar to the more famous gnostic tradition of the Sufi dervishes, in an attempt to lose their individual selves and cleave to the immanent Goddess. Sex, particularly ritualized group sex, orgies, was another means to the same end. As Magid wrote of Lurianic beliefs, A healthy cosmos is a cosmos in the state of erotic desire leading to sexual union. An unhealthy cosmos is one where the masculine and feminine are uncoupled due to their proximity to the demonic. Erotic desire is aroused through the materialization of female desire which is reciprocated by male desire. . . That is, female desire initiates the erotic encounter. It is because of this current in Judaism that, in particular Jewish traditions today, “sex has now been exalted to the status of God”.80 (Chitkara 2004: 242) This thinking, the emphasis on sex but most especially female sexuality, is being forcefully promoted in the West. Sex education to primary school children, freely available extreme pornography, using payola and control over the music industry to ensure sexually explicit songs become popular, changing the purpose of sex from an act of procreation to an exclusively orgasmic pleasure where women today feel entitled to orgasms, the introducing of birth control and easily accessible abortions, are all aspects that allowed the “sexual revolution”. As will be revealed in detail, gnostic Jews were instrumental81 in realising this world and it was intended to aid in the destruction of Western civilization. Sabbatai Tzevi enthusiastically embraced Luria’s teaching and advocated that a “healthy” cosmos or a “healthy” society is achieved through sexual liberation with special attention paid to the female orgasm. As Jerry Rabow wrote of Sabbatai’s successor Jacob Frank, “He extended the paradoxical teachings of Tzevi that the coming of the messianic age had transformed sexual prohibitions of the bible into permissions and even obligations. According to Frank, engaging in sexual orgies became the means to purify the soul from its sins.” It was argued that humanity “naturally” enjoyed sex and it was

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Freud actually extended the meaning of the word “libido” which, traditionally, was the energy that drove people to want to have sex, so that it now, as Laing observes (2021), “refers to a positive life force, an instinctive animal energy that drives each individual from the moment they are born”. Libido is literally recast by the Gnostic Jew Sigmund Freud so that it is harmonious with their idea of the Shechinah. The sex drive literally becomes a Goddess. 81

94 only by being in the proximity of evil, adhering to the moral restraint or Rabbinic Judaism or Christianity, the power of the rational mind over bodily desires, that people would not continuously and enthusiastically participate in sex. The positive religions require one to embrace reason and morality, as knowledge, to inform one to restrain themselves from participating in casual sexual encounters so that love informs personal relationships and not lust. This is what is meant when people observe that gnosticism destroys love, it undermines substantial love, as has been argued since at least ancient Greece, in promoting sex. In opposition, gnostic Judaism aspires to overcome reason and morality so that people continuously participate in casual, pleasure seeking, sexual encounters. The Gnostic Jew Sigmund Freud would argue centuries after Sabbatai’s influence, contrary to the Western tradition, that the only unhealthy sexual activity was not promiscuity, not homosexuality, not even paedophilia, but abstinence. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, as expressed by Freud, sex needed to become a central aspect of the human condition, so important that it becomes the primary way by which we identify, because it moves us away from what they think of as “the demonic”. The point is that erotic desire, lust, historically portrayed in both the Western and Orthodox Jewish traditions as base and animalistic, a practice that blocks one’s access to God, is of central importance for the Gnostic kabbalistic tradition because it moves humanity towards the spirit of Nature, what they symbolically represent as the Tree of Life, or towards the goddess the Shechinah. This Gnostic belief was ritualized by Gnostic Alastair Crowley in the “Gnostic Mass” for what he named his “Gnostic Catholic Church”82. This ritual ended with the body of Christ, symbolized by the wafer of bread as in Christian Eucharist, being placed on the end of a lance, which was a phallic symbol, that was then plunged into a goblet of red wine, which symbolized a vagina. The lance is the masculine while the goblet is the feminine when these two aspects of God are brought together, the masculine and the feminine, then the wafer, the body of Christ, is stabbed and destroyed. Stabbing the Eucharist wafer is an established form to “desecrate the Host”. As the lance was plunged into the goblet, the High Priest and Priestess would both moan “hriliu” in unison which Crowley admitted was “the shrill scream of the orgasm”. What was being performed in this desecration of the Christian mass was the symbolic destruction of Jesus which was to be achieved through bringing together the masculine and feminine through orgasmic, pleasure oriented, sex. This is a ritualization of the Gnostic Jewish agenda. What must be appreciated is that historically the West prized reason, the intellect, order, in terms of the cosmos, over passion, sexual ecstasy and chaos. It is this hierarchical ordering, masculine/feminine,

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Which has nothing to do with Christian Catholicism but “catholic” is being used here in the sense of universal. Crowley oversaw the universal gnostic church.

95 intellectual/material, reason/emotion, order/chaos . . . that Gnostic Jews, perhaps most famously expressed in the “post-modern” philosophy of European Jewish intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, JeanFrancois Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida, that they not only consistently criticised but were quite explicit in claiming was evil and therefore must be reversed. This changing priority is extremely destructive as Christian intellectual Pageau rightly observes, “The sexual revolution has been just as devastating to the spiritual worldview as the Copernican revolution.” (Pageau 2018: 60) It is not only destructive to the “spiritual worldview”, which it truly is, but it is that the shared spiritual worldview unites the West as a people where the real devastation occurs. To conceptualize what is happening in Freudian terms, if the subconscious is understood as “Id” and the collective conscience as “superego” then what Gnostic Judaism hopes to realize is to destroy the superego, the experience of a transcendent God, and embrace the “pleasure principle” in order to “liberate” the Id or the subconscious thereby overcoming the supposed “schizophrenia” that forms the ego. The ego is formed through the schizophrenia of the human condition which is formed through a tension between the self oriented to God and what is good and a baser self oriented to satisfying human animal drives. Our animal drives means that we all want to have sex all the time, but morality demands that we get to know each other, become familiar, learn what kind of person the other is and thereby “loving” them emotionally in a way that transcends mere lust. In the Western tradition, sex is rightly an expression of love not the pre-condition for love. It is the tension created between the incessant drive for sex and moral restraint that is problematic according to the Gnostic view of the world. They suggest that we return to our animal existence and just have sex all the time for pleasure without the need for entering loving enduring relationships. As Jung observed of Gnosticism, “What is striking about Gnostic systems is that they are based exclusively upon the manifestations of the unconscious, and that their moral teachings do not baulk at the shadow-side of life.” (Jung 1005: 207) Jung is observing that Gnosticism seeks redemption in the unconscious drives, the “shadow-side”, and therefore they rely exclusively on guidance from this domain which, historically, has been associated with the feminine. According to Shaul Magid, this reconnection of the self with human natural drives is best achieved particularly by “liberating” women’s sexual desire. Women, in particular, were the site for sexual restraint but this disciplining act enabled women to be more disciplined in all areas of life, creatively, financially, and morally. In the 19th and much of the 20th century, women were thought to be more moral than men. Humanity became human, broke with animal existence, ate from the Tree of Knowledge, an act first performed by women, that led to enduring relationships, resulted in the family, encouraged selfimprovement and, eventually, informed civilization itself. As Kreeft observes, humanity can “discriminate

96 not only between truth and falsehood but also between good and evil. We can be bad or good. Nothing else in the universe has that choice. Our selves, unlike acorns or stars, are not wholly given to us but made by our choices.” (Kreeft 2007: 8) Therefore, to “liberate” women’s sexuality, to encourage them in particular to look away from good and evil, encourages them to be sexually aggressive, define sexuality in terms of the entitlement to female orgasmic pleasure, then all of humanity is quickly torn away from civilization, away from the ideal of self-improvement (beyond making ourselves more sexually attractive at the local gym), away from the family and, finally, away from any kind of enduring relationships that have been so prized by the West. We all become, in such a world, as can be clearly seen, utility maximising “individuals” cast adrift from the communities in which we once lived to live lives like isolated animals. It is believed by Gnostic Jews that it is through the female orgasm that humanity will become detached from the entire Western Christian edifice of family, morality, civility, and virtue. Sex, they believe, purifies the soul from sin in the sense that sexual pleasure affirms life, as they understand it, while working against established morality. If women are chasing men for sex, then men are also consumed in sexual activity and morality, self-discipline, self-improvement, the pursuit of excellence, are all neglected in the neverending pursuit of sexual pleasure. The ultimate aim of Gnostic Jewry is to destroy the historically dominant experience of the sacred by manifesting a matriarchy that will ultimately worship this goddess. Matriarchy is so prized by Gnostic Jewry because they believe that women’s Motherly love, unlike men’s, is unconditional. Women love their children no matter what they do or who they are. There is no judgement in a woman’s love. By creating a matriarchy, they move humanity away from judgement generally or away from the demonic forces, what was historically called morality in terms of being guided by an experience of “the good”, towards their God, the Gnostic God, the God of lust and depravity, the God that also goes by the name Lucifer. It is because Jews in particular believe that they have been set this onerous task, the salvation of all mankind and God through the destruction of this world, that Gnostic Jews believe themselves to be “God’s chosen people”. As Schoeman wrote, If there is one theological issue that both Jews and Christians should be able to agree on, it is that “salvation is from the Jews”. It has been a constant teaching of Judaism from the days of Abraham onwards that the salvation of all mankind is to come from the Jews. That is the primary sense in which the Jews are “the Chosen People”. (2004: 9) Jews believe that they are the chosen people of God because it is their responsibility alone to bring about redemption through their God for all of Mankind. In the Gnostic Jewish tradition, salvation, the reuniting of heaven and earth, Yahweh with the Shechinah, is the unique task of the Jewish people collectively and

97 it is for this task, to spread knowledge that the world is not redeemed and to thereby bring redemption to the world, that they are the “chosen” of God. As Borowitz wrote, “Instead of God sending an ideal king, they foresaw all humankind working together and by social reconstruction producing a perfected world. In place of people being relatively passive, performing their religious duties by relying on God to redeem history, they would become activists, applying their reason and conscience to effect their own salvation.” (Borowitz as seen in Weisman 2018) The task of the Jews is to bring “all humankind” to the task of “producing” a “perfect world”. This “perfect world” though, is very different from Christian conceptions of a “perfect world”. This mentality, that Jews are responsible for redemption, is what informs Gnostic Jewish political activism. Gerrits claims (2009: 106), “The question as to why Jews, “Jewish Jews” or “non-Jewish Jews”, were so disproportionately attracted to radical politics has been identified as “one of the most basic problems of research in Jewish history””. The explanation for this disproportionate political activism is because Jews believe they have been called to destructive/creative political activity by God. According to research undertaken by the Israel Democracy Institute, around 2/3rd of Israeli Jews today believe that Jews are the chosen people of God with a special mission to heal the world. Two out of three Jews in Israel today believe that they are held by God as uniquely obligated to change the world into their vision. From a Gnostic Jewish perspective, as the chosen of God, they are intermediaries that stand higher than gentile humans, who are thought to be little better than talking animals best suited to service, but lower than God. As Reb Leibel Egar claimed of this intermediary condition, “. . . man is a man and an angel is an angel; that if a man wants it enough, he can be higher than an angel; and that G-d created the Beginning, just the Beginning, thereafter man must create his world.” The point that the rabbi is making is to acknowledge the special standing of Jews in relation to God. Humanity is above the angels because they, unlike the Angels who are simply messengers of God, are free and, as such, are responsible for making the world in the absence of God. The Gnostic Jewish tradition places Man in a very powerful position in relation to God. As Gnostic Jew Eric Fromm observed, The mystics have been deeply imbued with the experience of man’s strength, his likeness to God, and with the idea that God needs man as much as man needs God; they have understood the sentence that man is created in the image of God to mean the fundamental identity of God and man. Not fear and submission but love and the assertion of one’s own powers are the basis of mystical experience. (Fromm 2013) Whereas Christians are taught about the superiority of God and, therefore, the need for Man to obey God, Gnostic Jews are taught that they must hold God to account. The Christian tradition teaches that “God actually doesn’t need people in any fundamental way”. (Kindelberger 2017: 2) In the Jewish Gnostic

98 tradition, by contrast, man is in some respect an equal to God, a peer, and, therefore, not only extremely powerful but necessary for God’s salvation. Man, when he recognises his full potential, is above all the other animals, is above those humans who do not have gnosis, and are even above “Angels”. The reason for this superiority is that Jews are “free”.83 Jews do not only stand beside God but also act as an active intermediary between God and everyone else. Jews are so powerful in Jewish Gnostic theology that they can even hold God to account in terms of judging Him. To be passive in the face of God, like Christianity teaches, to accept the demand to obey God and his teachings as communicated by Jesus, in Christianity that means listening to one’s conscience, is to Gnostic Jews to adopt a position that is overly passive. To simply obey God is to adopt a position where one does not realize humanity’s full creative potential and, most egregious, is life denying. God wants humanity to express his full freedom so that he can redeem the world. It is not only an insult to Man’s potential to adopt a passive orientation of obedience to God but dangerous in that, by granting God too much authority, it means that God Himself will never be redeemed. God does not even want Mankind to be obedient, according to Gnostic Judaism, but wants Man to go His own way so that He will eventually be redeemed. According to the Gnostic tradition, God wants Man to reach his full creative potential as world fabricators. Gnostic Jews believe most fundamentally, “. . . that the world is malleable, and that Jews were obliged to participate in the transformation . . .” (Gerrits 2009: 108) Gnostic Jews believe that God withdraw from the world in order to open a space for men, Jews, to realize their full potential. It is this understanding of the role of Man as world creators who hold God to account that differentiates a religious tradition, which defines how to act, like Christianity from Gnostic Judaism. As Erich Fromm wrote, “The question is not religion or not but which kind of religion, whether it is one furthering man’s development, the unfolding of his specifically human powers, or one paralysing them.” (Fromm 2013) Gnostic Judaism believes that it develops “man’s” full potential by arguing that God is not part of this world, that God needs Man, and that Mankind is world creating. If we accept God’s living presence, by contrast, as Christianity teaches, that Man’s full power is in obedience, then one reaches his highest powers by obeying his individual conscience. According to Fromm, this Christian position is “authoritarianism” in the sense that obedience to God, what every believer should do, is to deny the capacity of humanity to create the world as they want. Christianity

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It should be emphasized at this point that “Jews” here are not a racial group but anyone who reject idolatry. It might be argued that somebody like Friedrich Nietzsche or Michel Foucault are truer “Jews” by this account than an Orthodox Jew obeying Talmudic laws. It is such people as these who are “free”.

99 denies “humanism” in the fullest sense of this word, that humanity is understood as the creator of worlds.84 To gain an insight into Man’s relationship with God in Gnostic Judaism, the German Jewish scholar Erik Fromm differentiated between what he termed an “authoritarian religion”, like Christianity or Orthodox Judaism, and what he calls a “humanist religion”, the worship of Man, like Gnostic Judaism. According to Fromm, an authoritarian religion is simply a thin veneer laid over a much older, premonotheistic religion resulting in a kind of synthesis between pagan and monotheistic elements. Fromm is perfectly correct to suggest that Christianity was indeed heavily influenced by the Pagan Graeco-Roman tradition. Evidence for this influence is readily found. The people of the region in which Jesus lived probably spoke both Aramaic and koine Greek, Paul is shown quoting Greek poets and the entire ethic of the New Testament is Pagan Greek. Although Christianity, in trying to be “pure”, has usually tried to deny this Greek heritage, I would argue that this debt has greatly benefited Christianity. Against this, Fromm argues because Christianity is not exhaustively “Jewish”, it is really just a form of idolatry. As Fromm wrote, What is the religious situation in contemporary Western society? It resembles in curious fashion the picture which the anthropologist gets in studying the religion of the North American Indians. They have been converted to the Christian religion, but their old preChristian religions have by no means been uprooted. Christianity is a veneer laid over this old religion and blended with it in many ways. Christianity is just in reality paganism. According to Fromm, because of this, Christianity is an authoritarian religion. Christianity really consists of ancient pagan practices like, “ancestor worship, totemism, fetishism, ritualism, the cult of cleanliness, and so on.”85 It is authoritarian because it requires Man to obey, demands Mankind to be moral, insists on humanity denying their natural drives. A humanistic religion, by contrast, is one, unsurprisingly striking an accord with Gnostic Judaism, where God has reached a kind of agreement or covenant with Man that empowers Man. A humanistic religion is one that recognised Man as a near equal to God. That Jews invented a religious tradition that gives them a unique

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It should be appreciated that “humanism” informed Karl Marx, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao Tsi Tung, the most barbarous men of the 19th and 20th centuries, were all humanists. This is what humanism produces, despots who believe they can re-make the world according to their basest desires. 85 That Fromm pays so much critical attention to Christianity’s focus on “cleanliness” as exemplifying its fetishism shows just how much Judaism had changed by the middle of the 20 th century. Cleanliness is listed by both Menachem Mendel Lefin in his 18th century The Paths of Life and by the Italian kabbalist Moses Chaim Luzzatto in his 16th century Accounting of the Soul as a Jewish virtue. Indeed, both their lists, Lefin’s: Equanimity, Patience, Order, Resolution, Cleanliness, Humility, Justice, Frugality, Industry, Silence, Tranquility, Truth (Sincerity), and Separation (from lewd thoughts) and Luzzatto’s: Watchfulness, Zeal, Cleanliness, Abstinence, Purity, Saintliness, Humility and Holiness, (As seen in Heinze 2004: 41 & 44) are both thoroughly consistent with Christian virtues and yet a thousand miles away from contemporary Gnostic Judaism.

100 standing in relation to their God that has been observed by other scholars of Judaism not just Jews themselves. None other than Max Weber, who tragically died shortly after writing these words at the age of just 56 while researching his book on Judaism, claimed, His (God’s) relation to the people of Israel, who had accepted him under oath, together with the political confederation and the sacred order of their social relationships, too the form of a “covenant”, a contractual relationship imposed by Yahweh and accepted submissively by Israel. . . this contractual relationship also involved very definite promises by the divine partner; it was deemed appropriate for the human partner to remind him of their inviolability . . . This is the primary root of what is most distinctive in Israelite religion, the trait of mutual promise which despite various analogues is found nowhere else in such intensity. (emphasis added Weber 1965: 16) Weber is observing that Jews believe that they have been placed in a position where they become empowered, through their unique covenant with their God, to judge God, to fight with God, and, if necessary, to constrain His actions. The agreement between Man and God was a bilateral agreement, not one made by people to their God, as is usually the case, but one equally made by God to Israel. From their escape from Egypt, according to Weber, Yahweh was the “contractual partner to the ritualistic and social order of the confederacy” between the Jewish tribes. From that time onwards, all other people were now inferior to the people of Israel in the eyes of God, according to Judaism, because they were granted knowledge and power as expressed in their agreement. This new standing of Israel is what allows Moses to stop God from destroying all the people of Israel for worshipping false idols. Only Jews are part of this original covenant, only Jews were “the chosen”. Fromm appears to be suggesting that God may falter on His side of this agreement, and at such times it is the responsibility of the Jewish people to “stay the course” and keep Him to the covenant. This is humanism, claiming Man is equal to God. As Weber argued, A power conceived by analogy to living persons may be coerced into the service of man . . . Whoever possesses the requisite charisma for employing the proper means is stronger even than the god, whom he can compel to do his will. In these cases, religious behaviour is not worship of the god but rather coercion of the god, and invocation is not prayer but rather the exercise of magical formulae. (Weber 1965: 25) Because Judaism has personified God, it allows Him to be treated just as a person. God becomes a genii, ready to be ordered forth to do the bidding of the people who know the instruments of control. Weber is arguing that in the same way somebody gains a certain amount of power over a worker once a contract has been entered into, to ensure that he adheres to his side of the contract, so it is with the Jewish understanding of their relationship with their God. Under such conditions, Man is conceptualised as the active side of the relationship while God becomes the passive side of the agreement. Man, by this account, becomes equal to a God.

101 It now becomes Man’s task to create a world to please His God, now feminised as passive, not the task of an active God creating a world. The God that the Jewish people must please becomes conceptualised in terms of a Goddess, a feminine figure, who is to be lured or seduced into the world by mortal men. It becomes an erotic relationship where Man must create a home adequate to his demanding lover. Man becomes extremely powerful in this new role. As Kindelberger wrote, “Abraham now has a voice that impacts the direction of the nations and the world, a privilege no one before him had enjoyed.” (Kindelberger 2017: 23) Mankind now directs the nations of the world in order to realise an “ideal” future for God and not God creating conditions for man. This is why Gnostic Jews, informed by such beliefs, become so highly politically active. It is their task to realise a world for their God and anything, any brutality, any cruelty, can be justified in such a privileged task. In the aftermath of this type of thinking, it becomes the case that Judaism should “be expressed through social and political action”. (Heinze 2004: 77) Man creates while God receives. Man fulfills what has historically been seen as the masculine role, the creator, the doer, while their God becomes, literally becomes, something feminine. This idea has precedence in the Hasidic tradition of Eastern Europe when a worshipper was thought to bring “delight” to God, then God becomes the feminine in being the recipient of the “delight” brought by Man. This is obviously a sexual relationship, one that has erotic undertones. As the Hassidic scholar R. Nahman of Bratzlav, one of the most influential Gnostic theologians on contemporary gnosticism wrote, It is known that the recipient of delight from someone else is called a female . . . Therefore, when the Holy One, blessed be He, receives delight from the prayer of Israel it is as if He becomes female in relation to Israel . . . since by the smell that God receives from the prayers of Israel, He becomes the secret of the female. (as seen in Idel 2008: 122) It is almost as though the masculine spirit of God has withdrawn because of the active love of Israel for their God. Israel’s love has meant that all that remains of God is a feminine spirit that now waits passively for Her love to prepare their future home. God has been turned into something feminine because of the peculiar relationship with the people of Israel. This might explain why Gnostic Jews primarily worship the female spirit of God/Nature and why they are so pro-active, why they are so political, in creating a world for their God. It is like a Man building a house in which his lover will one day dwell. The people of Israel become like a Bowerbird building a nest and decorating it with beautiful blue things to lure their God into the world. This is also why Gnostic Judaism is a humanist religion, because humanity is, by their account, responsible for everything. As Barth wrote of the Adam and Eve, “They have refused God the gratitude which they owed Him. They have set themselves up as the lords of their life, as if they were Gods.” (Barth 1938: 50) God is no longer active. It is as though the story of the Tower of Babel, that seems to warn against such human hubris, was never written.

102 It is as a result of seeing humanity as the primary agents of redemption that Gnostic Jews understand themselves as destroying/creating a world for their God to enter as the promise of redemption was part of their contract. Weber claims that such an understanding of the relationship between God and Man is the “origin of the orgiastic and mimetic component of the religious cult”. (Weber 1965: 25) Weber is drawing attention to the fact that God needs to be seduced into the world and that Man is responsible for the seduction. Such an understanding of relationship between God and Man is why orgiastic rituals are so central to gnostic Jewish practice. Certain practices, such as orgiastic behaviour, are now understood as being required by God. This is the origins of the ritualistic sex that was intended to honour the Goddess through orgasmic pleasure thereby, through the act of sex, bringing “Her” into the world. In the same way that ecstatic dancing is thought to bring God into the world in the Gnostic Sufi tradition, so does sex function in the same role for Gnostic Jews. This is what is found in Hasidism which was, in its original form, an expression of Gnostic Jewry. In truth, “this erotic interpretation of the mysticalmagical model moved to centre stage in Hasidic literature”. (Idel 2008: 123) As Idel wrote of Hasidism, The members of the “royal” pair mentioned here are the sefirot Tiferet and Malkhut, that is to say, the male and the female divine manifestations respectively, and their erotic union is considered to be of paramount importance for the state of harmony in the higher and lower worlds. Their delight depends upon the human performance here below, and hence by adding delight below a person induces an addition of delight on high. (Idel 2008: 116) This passage captures a central idea in the gnostic tradition, “As above so below. That which has been, will return again. As in heaven, so on earth”. By participating in ritualized sex, to symbolically represent the union of the masculine and feminine aspects of God in sexual union, reflects the union between the Tiferet and Malkuth, between heaven and earth. Ritual is required in order to realize God/Man’s aims. This is in part why sexuality, particularly female sexuality, becomes so central to the project of global redemption. Weber observes that such ritualistic practices do “not yet involve any awareness of sin, and it initially takes place in the mood of cool and calculated trading”. (Weber 1965: 27) “Sinning” is not considered under such conditions but the sexual rituals, along with the frenzied dancing and hallucinogenic drugs, become a way of “trading” with God to bring her into the world. It is just part of a contractual agreement, part of “cool and calculating trading”. This contractual arrangement places humanity, or at least Jews as Jews, at the vanguard to realise redemption for all mankind and their God. This means, according to influential 20th century Jewish Gnostic theologian Rabbi Heschel, that God needs man as much as man needs God (Heschel 1955: 146; De Lange 2002: 182) “It is within man’s power to seek Him; it is not within his power to find Him. . . But the initiative, we believe, is with man. The great insight is not given unless we are ready to receive it.” (Heschel 1955:

103 147) Man is responsible for taking the initiative, just like any act of “courting”, because he is the active component and not God. Kabbalah, believed to be a received revelation of the Divine that is discoverable through an esoteric reading of the Torah, (Pinson 1999: 157) teaches these Gnostic ideas in terms of “uniting the name of God”. As it says in the Aleinu (which means “it is our obligation”), a prayer said by practicing Jews three times a day, :‫ְו ֶנאֱמַ ר‬ ‫וְהָ יָ ָ֧ה יְהוָ ָ֛ה לְ ֶ ֶ֖מלְֶך עַ ל־כָל־הָ ָ ָ֑א ֶרץ‬ ‫בַ יּ֣ ֹום הַ ֗הּוא י ְִהיֶ ָ֧ה‬ ‫יְהוָ ָ֛ה אֶ ָ ֶ֖חד‬ ‫ּוש ֥מֹו אֶ ָ ָֽחד׃‬ ְ

And it is said: “The Lord shall be King over all the earth; On that day the Lord shall be One And the Lord’s name Shall be One

Uniting the name of God requires the destruction of everything. It is only when everything, all that “is”, is destroyed, which is the bringing together of God’s fractured name, that we are again returned to the paradise and unity of primordial Nature, Eden, that humanity can again know the God Most High and be redeemed. As David Roskies wrote about the apocalypse, as a result of the Jewish people, “All past divisions would ultimately cease to have meaning, for all of the people were now holy . . . Liberated from their physical reality, from the vast contradictions of their life and their death. . .” (Roskies 1999: 224) All contradictions, all apparent tensions that result from this false world, are overcome by acknowledging, and realizing, the unity of everything by overcoming all that once had meaning. This is the exact nature of their Goddess. In Hebrew, God’s name consists of four letters which compose the tetragrammaton YHWH.86 The first two – the yod and the he, represent the Holy One, the transcendent aspect of God, the masculine and rational, and the second two – the vav and the he, represent the Divine Presence, the immanent aspect of God. This immanent aspect is the feminine side which is emotional. She is the Earth otherwise known as the Shekinah. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, these two aspects of God, the feminine and the masculine, become divided when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As Atwood (2011: 14) observes, One of the most important ideas, which has its roots in Jewish Kabbalah, is that God has both a masculine and a feminine nature that was part of the image of God in the original creation. . . Adam was originally androgynous and all seeing but his longing . . . caused his

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Ancient Hebrew has no vowels, so the entire word is written only in consonants. Although the origins of God’s name “Yahweh” is unknown, this is not a Semitic word, I believe that it consists of two names for Egyptian lunar Gods brought together, Yahw and Ah. Together, of course, this would be Yawah but, as Hebrew does not have vowels, it would be written in ancient Hebrew as YHWH. This matter is explored in some depth in the following volume.

104 fall into mortality and sexuality. No longer androgynous, Adam was now united to the woman, Eve, but their descendants long for their redemption and the redemption of the cosmos through reunification of the divided self. The task for Jews is to reunite this divided God. God is removed from the world, humanity is ignorant of God, and He remains unknown, as long as He remains divided. The project for Gnostic Jews is that all their actions should be oriented to bringing these two aspects of the one God together so that the Holy One is Present in the world. As Idel writes giving voice to these views, The Shekinah and the sparks are redeemed by their being returned to their original place in the divinity. You might say heaven and earth are united. This action is “nothing less than the process of redemption embracing God, world and man.” . . . the Jew redeems the sparks exiled in the world and returns them to their source; and by doing this he redeems God Himself. . . the Jew in his own unique way intends to redeem God, himself, and the world. (Idel 2010: 161-162) Once God’s name is united then the world will be redeemed, and He will be fully present in the world. This project of healing the world by uniting the name of God appears to be a kind of theurgy, where human actions or rituals brings God, after satisfying certain condition, into the world. This places Man, or more correctly Jews (who are the only true “men”), in an incredibly powerful position. One that is now unconstrained by any binding experience of sin. Man is no longer subjugated by God, but he becomes understood as His partner, God’s equal. It is a licence to do whatever is necessary, any barbarous act, to realise the redemption of God, Man, and the world. To show what this understanding means for gnostic Jews, Fromm draws on a story from the Hassidic tradition to affirm has claim that Judaism is indeed a “humanistic religion”, it posits humanity as the active aspect in the God/Man relationship. He wrote, A poor tailor came to a Hassidic rabbi the day after the Day of Atonement and said to him, “Yesterday I had an argument with God. I told him, “Oh God, you have committed sins and I have committed sins. But you have committed grave sins and I have committed sins of no great importance. What have you done? You have separated mothers from their children and permitted people to starve. What have I done? I have sometimes failed to return a piece of cloth to a customer or have not been strict in the observance of the law. But I will tell you, God. I will forgive you your sins and you forgive me mine. Thus, we are even” Whereupon the Rabbi answered, “You fool! Why did you let him get away that so easily? Yesterday you could have forced him to send the Messiah.” The story begins by observing that this world, if it was created by God, appears to be terribly unjust. Children die of cancer before they have even had an evil thought enter their minds while paedophiles live on into their 8th decade apparently without a care. The purest soul starves on the street, happily giving away their last morsal of food to another who they deem to be more needy, while the most corrupt villains

105 accumulate millions, give nothing away, and yet want for nothing while living long lives. If God created this world, the Hasidic tale begins, then God must truly be a sinner.87 The real point of the story is not simply that God may not have created this world but, the real point is that God allowed Jews to know what is good and evil and, as observed, to then judge God. In judging God, in holding Him to their agreement, it is Man that has the power to coerce God to do His bidding, at least within the constraints of the agreement. The rabbi is chastising the tailor because he missed the opportunity to shape the world as he wished, the tailor had failed in his responsibility to be active and, primarily, to be active in forcing God into the world to realize redemption as He had agreed. The tailor has committed the crime of being too passive and not fulfilling his role as a Jew in forcing God into the world. Fromm concludes that the tale, “. . .demonstrates even more drastically than that of Abraham’s argument with God the idea that God must live up to his promises just as man must live up to his. If God fails to put an end to the suffering of man as he has promised, man has the right to challenge him, in fact to force him to fulfill his promise.” (Fromm 2013) It is a contractual agreement that empowers humanity to do whatever it takes to not only fulfill his side of the agreement but to ensure that God fulfills His side of the agreement. The task set Man in their agreement with God, the outcome that the Gnostic Jews are wrestling with God to achieve, is to heal the world or unite the female and male aspects of God, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, and thereby make whole what has been rent asunder. The creation myth told by Gnostic Jews, indebted to kabbalah, is that the God Most High, the Ein Sof, withdraw by dividing into two aspects. There is a Heaven, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and an Earth, the Tree of Life. When these two halves come together again, then there will be a world. The masculine Heaven aspect is transcendent and unknown, but the female aspect is immanent, can be experienced, and it is this aspect that is called the Shechinah. The Shechinah, who those in the mystical tradition of kabbalah refer to as the Sabbath Queen (Shabbat Hamalka), (Sherwin 1997: 3) is often thought to be identical to the ancient Semitic goddesses Anat, Asherah, and Lilith. In the ancient Semitic tradition, the Shechinah was the goddess of the earth or the Goddess of Nature, sometimes characterised as Mother Earth, who is God’s remaining presence on Earth. Today it is widely believed that it is to the

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What the Christian tradition would claim is that the possibility of experiencing events how we do is the “best of all possible worlds”. So that we experience a corrupt man do well means that the “world”, that which is meaningful, is good in allowing the behavior of the rich man in terms of being evil. Without God’s Grace how could we even judge good and evil? The world, meaningfulness, is good, it is human actions in that world given to us by Jesus as Christ that may be evil but, the experience of evil, is evidence of God’s grace, not evidence of it lacking. That we experience evil or wrongness is the greatest evidence for God’s presence not evidence for His failure or “withdrawal”.

106 Shechinah Jews turn to on the Sabbath and not Yahweh. It is believed by many Jews today that “the candles, flickering on a Friday night [they are] to welcome the Sabbath Queen”. The female aspect of God is, like His people, alienated from the Godhead and so redemption demands that humanity first redeem the Shechinah. As Jewish scholar Byron Sherwin observes, “The physical exile is no longer considered, as it was in previous generations88, as an obstacle to the attainment of spiritual fulfillment; on the contrary, the individual in the state of physical galut (alienation) is able to commune with the presence of God in the world (Shechinah), which is also in a state of exile (Gulut ha-Shechinah).” (Sherwin 1997: 104) As Sherwin observes, this is a new feature of Judaism. Whereas historically it was believed that humanity was alienated from God because he was no longer present in the world, more recently, within a generation, it has become understood that humanity is not completely alienated from God but is in communion with the exiled aspect of God, understood as the Shechinah. Unlike the heavenly Father, Man can commune with the Shechinah. It was the 20th century poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik, an important figure for the Gnostic Jewish tradition, who invented the rituals of Oneg Shabbat or the “Sabbath Joy”, which requires textual study, a festive dinner, lectures, and mystical sexual rituals on the Sabbath to honour the Shechinah. Unlike the unified God Most High, the limitless, the Ein Sof, this Goddess is potentially imminent in the world and can be brought into the world through correct ritualistic practices which often involves orgiastic sex. The Shechinah is also released into the world by “freeing” the divine sparks or natural drives of humanity from the evil “shells”. The “shells” are just the objective presence of things and the conscious mind of humanity, which is understood to be the creation of white, Christian males. God is present, according to Gnostic Judaism, in the pre-ontological “earth” so is, in a way, absent. The goddess is not yet in the world because the world, as it exists, is her tomb. It is only with the destruction of the world that the true God can be brought into the world. Our world, the world supposedly created by the Father, is, by this account, merely the realm of the demonic. As they claim, “Material existence is thus composed of demonic materiality that contains hidden sparks of divinity”. The world of objective realty must be overcome, destroyed, for the divine sparks to be recovered. The Gnostic God therefore is often associated with both life and death because “nature” is both, as Paglia observes, “womb” and “tomb”, that from which we come and is that to which we return, “for dust you are and to dust you will return”. But for this goddess to be revealed and allowed into the world, the world as such, which forms her tomb as long as it is in existence, the world of objectively present things, must be annihilated. As it says in

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It is always important to remember that this is not part of the long tradition of Judaism but was introduced by Sabbatai Tzevi and was then nurtured within the Hasidic Jews of Eastern Europe before being transferred around the world. This is a relatively new practice and must be recognized as such.

107 Jeremiah 30:11 to the Jewish people; “For I am with you to save you, says God; I will bring annihilation upon all the nations among whom I scattered you, but upon you I will not bring annihilation.” According to Gnostic Judaism, as God is no longer active in the world, to be the agents of God’s wrath. It is they who will bring annihilation upon those amongst who Jews live. This burden of world destruction/creation, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, is tasked the messiahs.89 What is first recovered on the road to redemption, according to this Gnostic tradition, is the goddess of the earth. Because the masculine God in heaven permits judgment, therefore allowing a “world”, the things that are, the trees, the houses, the desk, the sky, the birds, the fleas, everything that is, is understood in the Gnostic tradition to be an expression of the masculine psyche. This belief finds expression in Christianity which claims that the objective world is the responsibility of the “Father”. As it says in Romans 1:19-20 “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.” God is known, in the Christian tradition, through His creations, the World, because in creation90, in the things that furniture this world, there is the experience of the good, the beautiful and the true. An experience of mind of God. As Heidegger wrote, in “Christian theological belief that, with respect to what it is and whether it is, a matter, as created (ens creatum), is only insofar as it corresponds to the idea preconceived in the intellectus divinus, i.e., in the mind of God . . . in this sense true.” (Heidegger 1993: 118) To know God, to know the Father, according to the Christian tradition, one just need come to know the objective world because through his “creations” He reveals Himself directly to Man. Christianity is not rightly understood as a religion of faith in the sense

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It is here that there are interesting resonances with Greek philosophy. In Plato’s Symposium, love is presented as being a spirit, like Hermes, between the gods and man, which loves explicit intellectual knowledge. So, Plato is subtly associating the spirit of love as that between the gods and man with the philosopher. The philosopher, in pursuing sophia, is above men who merely accept tradition and gods who truly have sophia. Just like Socrates, the task of the philosopher is to reveal how humanity is ignorant of sophia and needs to spend their lives pursuing it with single minded passion. I think these same ideas might motivate Gnostic Jews, reveal to other people what we do not know, thus making them question the authority of tradition. Socrates, of course, was killed by the Athenians for questioning tradition as it was believed to corrupt the youth. 90 Heidegger argues that the ancient Greeks did not think in these terms of “creation” or “cause” but instead thought in terms of “being responsible for” so he argues that the telos, that which bounds the thing, “is responsible for what as matter and what as aspect are together co-responsible” for things. (Heidegger 1993: 315) By this account, the mind of God, experienced by mortals as the good, the beautiful and the true, might be thought to be responsible for the limit of things, the telos, and, therefore, allows things to come forward as what they are. God is not the “creator” by this account but that which is “responsible” for things, Being as such. A subtle but extremely important reimagining of the role of God in manifesting a world but one essential if God is to again be thought plausible.

108 of belief without justification but a religion of faith in terms of a particular kind of knowledge. As Barth extrapolates, Faith knowledge in the sense used by Reformed teaching does not mean a knowledge which is based merely on feeling, which is peculiar to the individual and which therefore has no binding character for others. On the contrary, no more objective and strict form of knowledge can exist, and no type of knowledge can lay claim more definitively to universal validity than the knowledge of faith. (Barth 1938: 25) The knowledge gifted by God is initially implicit but is made explicit through reason or logos or is made “flesh” through the Son. Again as Barth observed, “Because God reveals Himself to man in Jesus Christ, it is established firstly that not only does God Himself exist but that from God, by Him and for Him there exists also a real world. . .” (Barth 1938: xii) It is that the Father is revealed through the Son that there is reality, there is a “real world”. As Peter Kreeft has rightly observed, “A world created by God is real, not a dream either of God or of man. And that world is rational. Finally, it is good. Christianity is a realistic, rational and world-affirming religion, rather than a mythical, mystical, or world-denying religion . . .” This capacity of bringing the world forward as already potentially made present by God through reason has long been associated with the masculine. As the feminist scholar Ruether (1998: 70) critically observes, “The self was defined as split between reason and passions, mind and body. The self is rightly ordered when the male powers of mind rule over the female elements of sensuality and bodyliness. The self falls into disorder and sin when the power or female part of the self gets out of hand and subverts the higher male rationality.” Ruether, though critical, is perfectly correct. It has been historically believed that when decisions are made on an emotional basis, when people are driven by desire, when action is taken only in terms of protecting those with whom one identifies, that is when bad decisions are made and when the world falls into chaos. The Father is revealed through His creation, through the world that He is responsible for because it exists only through knowing what is good, beautiful, and true. It was for this reason that consciousness of this World is thought to be an expression, Gnostics Jews argue, of the male psyche or the rational aspect of the soul. As contemporary feminists might say, and they are quite right, the world, as a world, is the result of the male gaze. It must be appreciated, of course, that the male gaze is not something exclusive to males, obviously women too experience a world through reason, but, as contemporary second wave feminists argue under the influence of Gnostic Jewry, everyone sees the world of objective things through the male gaze, biological males and females alike. All consciousness, in requiring a reason, in answering the questions “what?” or “how?”, is an expression of masculinity. What this means in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, which denies the presence of the Father, is that in fact it is male power that determines how the world is experienced, in terms of good and evil. By the gnostic

109 account, the objective world is an expression of male power. What white Christian males value, by the Gnostic Jewish account, is good while what they do not value is evil. Monogamous relationships, by this account, affirms male control and guarantees paternity and is, therefore, “good”, while female promiscuity, which allows women to seek pleasure but challenges male power and undermines paternity, is cast as “evil”. In traditional Western societies, women, in being Christian, also saw the world through this masculine lens. So, although monogamy, Gnostic Jews would argue, is actually oppressive to women, denying them one of their greatest pleasures in the world, historically women did not just advocate for monogamous relationships but were probably its greatest defenders of the institution of monogamous marriage. They first accepted and then promoted the male gaze. This is how masculine consciousness is thought to cover over the female “earth”, the primordial, the Natural, the emotional, the unified holistic experience that is prior to objectification. As Jung observed of psychoanalysis, The gods whom we are called to dethrone are the idolized values of our conscious world. . . People are laying bare the dubious foundations of our belauded virtues and incomparable ideals and are called out to us in triumph; “There are your man-made gods, mere snares and delusions tainted with human baseness – whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness”. (1955: 212) Jung is observing how it was, by 1955, being argued that what was historically prized in the Western tradition, “the idolized values”, were being revealed to have “dubious foundations” and were being revealed as “delusions”.91 By this account, there is no primordial limits manifested as the mind of God, nous, but there is simply the Natural continuum that becomes artificially constrained by human made, or more rightly man made, borders that are legitimized by claims of there being a God. It is this prior continuum, Earth, the feminine, in the fullest sense of that word, that is forced into the darkness of the Underworld and becomes understood as evil, chaos, ignorance. As Bloom wrote when giving an account of Gnostic Jew Hans Jonas’ work, Gnosis is, A knowledge that is at once “secret, revealed and saving” is indeed the language of a “transcendental genesis”. Like Milton’s Satan in his fall from the Godhead, a fall that opens up a new, Sublime, Negative creation in the abyss, so the Valentinian creation/fall brings about a Sublime and Negative cosmos, with the difference that the Gnostic fall is within the Godhead, and not just from it. (Bloom 1981: 61) What the Gnostic Jew Bloom is drawing attention to in a way that might be missed by the casual reader is that gnosis is oriented towards the abyss of Lucifer which can also be understood as Venus/Shechinah.

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Jung is unclear whether he believes this or if he is observing it about his times. In truth, if he did clearly write against this claim then he would not only not get published but he would have lost his entire career. Already by 1955, Gnostic Jewry controlled publishing and academia especially within the tradition of psychoanalysis.

110 This world become the domain of Satan. Gnostics also fall, as do Gentiles, but they do not fall away from the Godhead but within the Godhead in terms of towards the female aspect. It is here, in its movement down towards the feminine, the earthly, the instinctual, that gnosis is oriented as a “negative cosmos” in the sense that it is reversal of the positive cosmos. It is for this reason that many Jews, quite openly today, have come to embrace Satan. Rabbi Skobac, for just one example, argues that Satan is an agent of the God Most High sent to punish humans who interfere with His plans and oppose the Gnostic Jewish project. (Skobac 2013) Satan/Shechinah, by this account, rules on earth in the absence of the God Most High. This rule has been disrupted by evil men and the project now is to reverse this evil. This is why Gnostic beliefs informed “critical theory” which uses a “negative dialectic” which is a dialectic oriented away from the gentile92 fall into Being towards the negative cosmos, the abyss, of Satan/Lucifer/Shechinah. It is oriented towards the Earth or the feminine. As Flowers (2013) wrote when writing about gnosticism, “The base and the noble are, after all, parts of the same whole, or substance. Therefore, the transmutation of one thing to another is theoretically possible”. With the advent of the Christian male world, the Earth becomes not only an underworld, the domain of Lucifer/Shechinah but also, within the subject, the human “subconscious”. The conscious is literally the masculine while the feminine becomes the subconscious. The “world” is in the bright light of day, a masculine god like Zeus or Apollo, whereas the “earth” is in the darkness of the crypt, a chthonic goddess, away from the light, a Pandora like figure. According to the Gnostic view, the experience of reality, knowledge of good and evil, is the false separation of the unity of reality itself, idolized reality, as captured in the human gender division, which reflects the division of “World” and “Earth” into discrete spheres. As Gershom Scholem wrote, “The sin of Adam was that he isolated the Tree of Life from the Tree of Knowledge to which he directed his desire. Once the unity of the two trees in men’s lives was destroyed, there began the dominion of the Tree of Knowledge.” (Scholem 1995: 86) When humanity no longer lives in harmony with Nature, but tries to dominate Her, control Her, domesticate Her to do his bidding using knowledge, then He enters into a relationship of violence, a relationship of power/knowledge. With the manifestation of an enduring World, which is captured, just

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Unlike the Yiddish term “goy”, “gentile” is not a derogatory term but simply means foreigners from a Jewish perspective. It is from the Latin word “gens” meaning “family” or “race”. Gentilis means to be “of a family” or “of a nation”. Gentile is simply the English version of Gentilis. It might be considered to be the Latin form of the Greek ethnikos which is from ethnos, meaning “nation” and “-ikos” “from” so ethnikos might also be translated as “of a nation”. “Gentile” is used in English in the same way that people once referred to “foreigners” as being “ethnic” as in the sentence, “Those people who moved in next door are ethnic” to mean simply that they are foreigners. “Goy”, by contrast, although often claimed to be a translation of gentile is actually a pejorative term. The true plural of “goy” is “goyim”, but English-speaking Jews will use the insulting term “goys”.

111 for one example, in the dominance of clock time. Clock time means that the natural temporal flow of the Goddess of Nature is driven into the darkness of the abyss. This is why there is an intimacy between God and time, different Gods constitute different experiences of time. Time, like moral judgement, is a purely human

experience. This act

of reification/temporality, what becomes

the

“problem of

objectification/time”, through atomization, drove the holistic feminine aspect of the God Most High, the Shechinah, the receptacle, the primordial arche, the prior continua that can be divided, into the darkness of the “under-world”. From this time onwards the male gaze defines the world by breaking it up into discrete objects that exist in time. As a result, as the Lord says to Eve in Genesis 3, as punishment for living according to knowledge of good and evil, “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” This is not a prescriptive punishment but merely a description of what has been done as a result of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. By the Gnostic Jewish account, men rule in an absolute way, as second wave feminism later argued under the influence of Gnostic Judaism, not simply by instituting laws that benefit their continued dominance, not through formal inequality, but by making reality itself as the expression of male power. The more the world comes forward as a World, the more the Present endures through time, the more dynamic Nature withdraws into the darkness of the Underworld. “God’s lovely bride” (Green 2004: xxvii) is banished into the dark abyss.93 In 1972, Gloria Steinem gave a much more prosaic account of the myth of the lost matriarchy to which they hope to return writing, Once upon a time, the many cultures of this world were all part of the gynocritic age. Paternity had not yet been discovered and it was thought . . . that women bore fruit like trees – when they were ripe. Childbirth was mysterious. It was vital. And it was envied. Women were worshipped because of it, were considered superior because of it. . . Men were on the periphery – an interchangeable body of workers for, and worshippers of, the female centre, the principle of life. The discovery of paternity, of sexual cause and childbirth effects, was as cataclysmic for society as, say, the discovery of fire or the shattering of the atom. Gradually, the idea of male ownership of children took hold. . . Gynocracy also suffered from the periodic invasions of nomadic tribes. . . The conflict between the hunters and the growers was really the conflict between male dominated and female dominated cultures.

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Christianity, again drawing inspiration from Greek thought, acknowledges that “earth” precedes “world” or the intelligible precedes the intellect but that as the intellect is quite separate from “earth”, earth played no active role in creation. Earth, if you like, is not a God. Jewish Gnosticism claims that it was with the rejection of the primordial role in creation of “earth”, usually portrayed as a Goddess, this was the origin of Western patriarchy. For this reason, one of the agendas of Gnostic Judaism is to overcome patriarchy, this involves not only removing men from positions of power but destroying the nuclear family which they see as the true site of patriarchal power.

112 . . .women gradually lost their freedom, mystery, and superior position. For five thousand years or more, the gynocritic age had flowered in peace and productivity. Slowly, in varying stages and in different parts of the world, the social order was painfully reversed. Women became the underclass, marked by their visible differences. (Steinem as seen Eller 2001: 1) Eller would later observe that Gloria Steinem’s idealized account of a matriarchal past is just one example of “the myth of matriarchal prehistory”. This myth has no basis in historical truth. Despite it being simply untrue, that there weas indeed a matriarchal prehistory has come to be accepted by many Western scholars as fact when it actually originated out of Gnostic Jewish theology. Eller observes that the matriarchal prehistory myth claims that there was, . . . a time before written records, [when] society was centred around women. Women were revered for their mysterious life-giving powers, honoured as incarnations and priestesses of the great goddess. They reared their children to carry on their line, created both art and technology, and made important decisions for their communities. Then a great transformation occurred – whether through a sudden cataclysm or a long, drawn-out sea change – and society was thereafter dominated by men. This is the culture and the mindset that we know as “patriarchy”, and in which we live today. What the future holds is not determined, and indeed depends most heavily on the actions that we take now: particularly as we become aware of our true history. But the pervasive hope is that the future will bring a time of peace, ecological balance, and harmony between the sexes, with women either recovering their past ascendency, or at last establishing a truly egalitarian society under the aegis of the goddess. (Eller 2001: 2) Although the narrative of there once existing a matriarchal society to which, God willing, one day we will return is not historically true, many religions in the past did indeed have a goddess with many of the characteristics of the Shechinah. Indeed, there are several myths that speak of a situation in which women dominated society that is then overcome by a male heroic figure. For just one quick example, the Ancient Greek myth of Python. According to this myth, at the centre of world, where the omphalos or “navel” of the world was erected, there stood a great temple to Gaia, Mother Earth.94 This temple was protected by a great serpent, Python, who is portrayed as either being Gaia’s son or daughter depending on the account. There was a great deal of animosity between the Olympian God Apollo, who was a solar deity, a God of truth, healing95 and poetry, and Python who was a chthonic God associated with the earth. One day, Apollo fought and slew the Python. He then took over the temple to honour himself and established

94

Gaia, like Geo, is from the ancient Goddess Ge, which was a chthonic goddess much older than the Greek gods of Olympus. She was conceived as a very ancient, primordial power with the epithet “thousand-fold”. 95 Healing is often a feature of solar Gods because healing was once thought in terms of returning to a lost order.

113 the oracle at Delphi. From this time onwards the high priestess, the Pythia, named after the serpent, would function as an oracle or “prophet” under the divine possession of the God Apollo. Here appears a myth which shows the transition, which was thought to have occurred around 200 BC, from the dominion of an earth Goddess, Gaia, to the dominion of a male solar God, Apollo. Unlike the Gnostic Jewish tradition, in most religious traditions, it is the female aspect of God that was understood to be something evil, something that must be overcome, something that must be kept in Her dark crypt if civilization was to exist. In most societies, this expression of the Goddess is thought to be evil itself. Lucifer was originally derived from the feminine, the goddess Venus who was associated with the planet Venus, which went by the name Φωσφόρος (phosphoros) “light-bringer” or, in Latin, Lucifer. Venus was very much like the goddess Shechinah and like the Shechinah was symbolized by an eightpointed star. Opposed to this Goddess were masculine Gods, like Ares, whose planet was Mars or θοῦρος (thouros). For the Semitic Canaanites of the ancient near east, the Shechinah was the Goddess Astarte, for the Semitic Carthaginians who lived in modern-day Libya, she was the Goddess Tanit, in the ancient Egyptian tradition she the Goddess Hathor, which may be the oldest known expression, while in the Hindu tradition she/he was known as Shiva, the creator and destroyer of Worlds. In all these traditions there are common themes for these goddesses. They are all goddesses because woman have long been associated with the Natural, the wild, the untamed, the irrational, the sexual/fertile, “Mother Earth”, the emotional and the instinctual. Although she is often portrayed as a woman, she is always seen as being primarily androgynous in terms of expressing both male and female attributes prior to the division into genders. So alongside traditional female attributes she is also portrayed as being a ruthless, violent though loyal warrior. These goddesses are also often associated with uninhibited sexuality because they are supposed to live according to their instinctual drives, uninhibited by morality, they are literally uncivilized. As Lazier (2009: 16) observes, Embedded in both physis and nomos, after all, are claims about how to live. Those who prefer physis hold up nature as a standard by which to measure the rightfulness of human law or convention, and by extension our cities and states. Those who prefer nomos hold that nature, human or otherwise, has little to say about the matter, and if it did would lack the voice to say it. Because these Goddesses are of the earth they retain their mysteriousness. They are the mysterious beautiful woman who is seen but, despite the emotions she initiates, she retains her mysteriousness. She is from the earth, physis, who dwells in darkness. In some traditions, these goddesses simply cannot be brought into the light because to know such a goddess would require knowledge. They are unknowable, mysterious, because they are prior to division, they embody contradiction. They are both male and female,

114 good and evil, life and death, destruction and creation. Their actions can be viewed from a mortal perspective, when she flattens a city for example, but that is depending on a perspective. Her actions can be interpreted from a mortal position as creative or destructive, but her actions are always her own, she keeps to herself. Such Goddesses embody everything because they are prior to all categorizations. There is a religious tradition, the Mandaean (from Aramaic manda, “gnosis” or “knowledge)96, perhaps the only openly gnostic movement still operating in the world today, (Quisel 1981: 29) which believes in an evil spirit Ruha Matanita, who is personified in a female form. She is viewed negatively as the personification of the lower, emotional, instinctual, violent and feminine, elements. She shares many of the same features of the Jewish Gnostic Goddess, the Shechinah, in being an expression of pure contradiction. As is written as an epithet to Ruha Matanita, I am death, I am Life, I am darkness, I am light, I am error, I am truth, I am destruction, I am construction, I am the wound, I am the healing. (Right Ginza, 207) The contradictory nature of the Shechinah is captured in the Gnostic Jewish concept of tikkun olam or “repairing the world”. The ultimate purpose of World destruction, according to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, is to “heal” or “repair” the world or what they call tikkun olam. The commitment that it is humanity’s task to “heal the world” is just one idea that is adopted from, what Gershom Scholem, amongst many others, readily acknowledges is gnostic Kabbalah. (as seen in Biale 1982: 66) Tikkun olam is not a phrase used in the Tanakh but is used in passing in the Mishnah. It became an important idea to Jews through the Jewish mystical tradition as a result of Rabbi Isaac Luria only in the 16th century. Tikkun Olam came to mean the overcoming of all forms of idolatry and thereby separating what is evil from what is sacred.97 Luria’s account has come to be interpreted by the Gnostic Jewish tradition as God assigning humanity the task of destroying the objective world which is the creative act of healing. It is really only in the late 20th century that the phrase becomes firmly established in mainstream Jewish thinking. This is just

96

Just an interesting sidenote to tell your children but the name of the people in the Star Wars franchise, the Mandalorians, one of whom rescues the young Yoda, is most probably derived from the words Manda, meaning “gnostic”, and Loria, a Nordic goddess of beauty and wisdom akin to the Gnostic Jewish goddess Anat. So, Mandalorians could be translated to mean “knowers of the goddess Anat”. Gnostic Jews are so influential in American society that they do not only shape narratives in a Gnostic way but posit many characters who are archetypal of Gnostic Jews. This is especially true for children’s entertainment to shape their thinking early. 97 Luria’s greatest and most enduring contribution was to see this act of healing to be primarily a human task and not a task to be left to God. It was up to Jews to destroy the false idols of the world which he understood as the objective world. These ideas then influenced, Sabbatai Tzevi, who claimed in the 17th century that he was the true messiah. Sabbatai Tzevi is the founder of modern Gnostic Judaism.

115 one example, along with certain Sabbath rituals, that is evidence of the recent invention of the theology of Gnostic Judaism. Shlomo Bardin, the founder of the Gnostic educational program in California, the Brandeis Camp Institute, who was instrumental in institutionalizing the idea of tikkun olam into contemporary Jewish theology through his training programs, argued that the idea of tikkun olam actually captured the essence of Jewish values that ties various movements together. As Adler asks tying different strands of what is really one Gnostic movement together through the idea of tikkun olam or healing the world, Is there a strand in Jewish thought that reconciles religious belief and social commitment, a common thread which finds resonance both in the established Jewish community and among the Jewish activists . . . who claim that they acted not so much as Jews but as communists or liberals? I would suggest that this strand exists as the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, to the redemption of the world. (Adler 2000: 196) The healed world is a time when the goddess of the underworld is freed, a time constituted by the Shechinah, and she is then ready to be reunited with her husband. The world that is healed is the End of Days, . . . when presumption will increase, and respect disappear. The empire will turn to heresy and there will be no moral reproof. The house of assembly will become a brothel, Galilee will be laid waste, and the people of the frontiers will wander from city to city and none will pity them. The wisdom of the scribes will become odious and those who shun sin will be despised; truth will nowhere be found. Boys will shame old men and old men will show deference to boys. . . On whom shall we then rely? On our Father in heaven. (As told by Scholem based on the Mishnah tractate Sota 1971) A time without respect, a time without morality, a time when the governmental institutions will do everything for money, a time when the scholars’ arguments will be “odious” and those who are opposed to sin will be hated. A time when “truth will nowhere be found”. This seems to be a time very much like our own. It is then that the evil of this world, white, Christian males, will be destroyed and reality will be reunited into its primordial oneness without the disruptions of enduring objectivity. As a destructive force, the Shechinah is like a flood in the natural world or revolution in the human sphere. It is destructive but that destruction is also creative. The Shechinah is actually good, at least according to the PseudoDionysius’ account of the goddess, but good in a way that transcends human understanding. The Shechinah is so good, yet so mysterious, so unknown, that she also encompasses all that we mortals might understand as evil. She is life and death. Truth and falsehood. She can therefore be said to be beyond good and evil just as she is beyond destruction and creation and beyond male and female. The Shechinah is beyond all binary opposition and is therefore their union. That her goodness can be thought evil from a moral perspective turns out to be extremely important for the gnostic Jewish tradition whose sole aim is

116 to herald the new epoch of the Shekinah. The Greek tradition, by contrast, has the personification of heaven, Cronus, castrated by Uranus so that the lost unity of heaven and earth, the separation that allows a World in which mortals may live, can never be undone. In the Greek tradition, the separation of Heaven and Earth is good, at least from a human perspective, in that it is only through this separation that a world, as such, can exist “in-between” at all. It is the exact opposite, as is so often the case, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition. Gnostic Jews aspire to realize the destruction of the World in order to reunite Heaven and Earth in eternal sexual bliss. It is that Jewish Gnostics worship this manifestation of God that explains why they oppose all positive expressions of religion including Orthodox Judaism. As Rubenstein, a Gnostic Jew, wrote about his understanding of God and Messianism, Messianism’s real meaning is the proclamation of the end of history and the return to nature and nature’s cyclical repetitiveness. . . The deliberate turning of the people of the religion of history to the religion of nature is a moment of Kairos. . . earth’s fruitfulness, its vicissitudes, and its engendering power will once again become the central spiritual realities of Jewish life . . . Here Rubenstein is capturing the major fault line within Judaism itself, between those who read the Torah as a historical text, thereby understanding it primarily as a legal document, against those who read Torah as a mythological text, revealing secret knowledge. Gnostic Jews want to disregard the legalistic reading and read it has holding secret knowledge about returning to Nature’s rule and returning to the predictable cyclical repetitiveness that Nature promises. The eternal return of the same. Just by way of contrast, according to the Christian tradition, as a positive religion, that believes that positive things can be known about God, the world and other people, Jesus was the redeemer, who has already opened the way for uniting heaven and earth thereby manifesting a true World.

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The Star of David was not always synonymous with Judaism but was a widely used symbol that Christians also used. Jesus is being portrayed here as the figure who combines heaven and earth to realise a World

Jesus unites heaven and earth in such a way that is not world denying/destroying but World affirming. World becomes truly a World by linking earth with heaven. As Jesus prayed, “Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made You known to them, and will continue to make you known . . .” (emphasis added John 17: 25-26) This passage is important because it points to the pre-Messianic condition of ignorance, what Jesus then brings, “knowledge”, and, by the grace of the Holy Spirit, what God promises in the future, to live within Jesus/World. As Hegel presents Jesus as saying, “I cling to the untainted voice of my heart and conscience . . . This inner law is a law of freedom to which a person submits voluntarily, as though he had imposed it on himself.” Jesus has freed humanity from external Laws by granting humanity a conscience. Man’s conscience is now the Law and he responds to that voluntarily as though it was something he created himself but is really God’s. By this account, Jesus is the personification of the temple in Jerusalem. As it says in the gospel of John 2: 18-21 . . . [the Jews] said unto him (Jesus), What sign shewest though unto us, seeing that thou doest these things? Jesus answered and said unto them. Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days? But he spake of the temple of his body.

118 Jesus is the temple and he is “destroyed” only to be raised again three days later. In being the embodiment of the temple in Jerusalem, Jesus is identifying himself as the new way to God the Father in Heaven. According to Christianity, Jesus, not the Shechinah, is the embodiment of the Holy of Holies. Reason and not “nature” is to be the guiding light. One no longer sacrifices animals or relies on accounts given by the rabbinate, they had, after all, turned his house into a brothel, as it is Jesus, through his blood sacrifice, who opened the way to God. As it says in Hebrews 9: 12-14, He [Jesus] did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves; but he entered the Most Holy Place once and for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! Jesus’ untainted blood is the ultimate sacrifice that God could make so that Man’s consciences would be cleared of taint, no longer guiding them to animal like acts but would direct Man to the living God. Man, in the embodiment of Jesus, could give to God the Father. The Holy of Hollies is opened for everyone through the sacrifice of Jesus and forever because Jesus’ body, everything that is as united with logos, is now sacred. Because of Jesus’ revelation, Christians know the Father through the Son and live forever in the presence of the living God. Christians dwell forever in the Holy of Holies in terms of living in Jesus. As Klein observes, “The God of Christianity is neither unknowable, inaccessible, nor ineffable.” (Klein 1974: 170) As Miller elaborates, I would suggest that the central message of Christianity is that God has communicated God’s self to human beings so that human beings can share in God’s life. God has communicated God’s self to human beings without God ceasing to be infinite reality and without human beings ceasing to be finite existents. And the capacity of human beings to receive that selfcommunication is made possible by God. As Karl Rahner correctly maintains, “God’s selfcommunication is given not only as a gift, but also as the necessary condition which makes possible an acceptance of the gift which can allow the gift really to be God and can prevent the gift in its acceptance from being changed from God into a finite and created gift which only represents God but is not God himself.” We do have access to God. God has revealed God’s self and we do know God. (Miller 2011: 360) This knowledge is the greatest gift bestowed on Man in history. It is through Jesus, and his blood sacrifice, that we know God. Jesus is the way to God and there is, according to Christiantiy, no other way. You cannot embrace Buddhism and find God or read the latest Louise Hay’s book to find your own way. God’s gift of knowledge, experiencing the good, the beautiful and the true, is actually the very condition for being able to be good. One cannot find their own way to Heaven but must follow the way opened by Jesus the Messiah. There is a saying in the East regarding Buddhist monks, “He who wants to do good deeds

119 should not become a monk.” That is because actions intended to realize good things as an outcome cannot be performed by monks as all actions intended to change the world, including labour, is, according to Eastern thinking, really the product of sin. Because we are ignorant of God, we cannot do good as we do not know what is the good. The ultimate aim of Buddhism, like Hinduism, is to “overcome” ones beliefs and experiences in the world in order to united with the universal consciousness which is God in Eastern thinking. (Mangalwadi 2011) The knowledge that Jesus allows of God the Father is not something wholly new, according to the Christian tradition, but a return to our condition in Eden in terms of being intimate with the Father. As it says in the Gospels (John 17: 3-5), “Now this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” It is to renew the relationship with God, the Father, the God of creation, like that before the world, before separation from God, when humanity knew only implicitly, but, after Jesus, humanity knows explicitly. In the Christian tradition, the attitude towards the Shechinah, their goddess, Venus/Lucifer, is nicely captured in a poem written by Allan Ramsay the Goddess of the Slothful (from The Gentle Shepherd, 1725); O Goddess of the Slothful, blind, and vain, Who with foul hearts, Rites, foolish and profane, Altars and Temples hallowst to thy name! Temples! Or Sanctuaries vile, said I? To protect Lewdness and Impiety, Under the Robe of the Divinity? And thou, Base Goddess! That thy wickedness, When others do as bad, may seem the less, Givest themthe reins to all lasciviousness. Rotter of soul and body, enemy Of reason, plotter of sweet thievery, The little and great world’s calamity. Reputed worthily the Ocean’s daughter: That treacherous monster, which with even water First soothes, but ruffles into storms soon after. Such winds of sighs, such Cataracts of tears, Such breaking waves of hopes, such gulfs of fears, Thou makest of men, such rocks of cold despairs. Tides of desire so headstrong, as would move

120 The world to change thy name, when thou shalt prove Mother of Rage and Tempests, not of Love. Behold what sorrow now and discontent On a poor pair of Lovers thou hasat sent! Go thou, that vaunt’st thyself Omnipotent. Humanity explicitly comes to know the good, the beautiful and the true through Jesus. As Karl Barth wrote, “. . . knowledge is absolutely and alone God Himself, who reveals Himself to man by speaking to him as his Lord in Jesus Christ . . .” This is the core and most basic teaching of Christianity that informed the West for millennia. Humanity does know God/the good directly and that this knowledge affords a reality that then guides action. We know it is wrong to lie, we know that we should be faithful to our partners, we know that stealing is wrong, we know that we should not murder, we know that we should love our enemies, in short, we know The Good in part through divine revelation of Jesus, his life and his words, and in part as the result of reason. This knowledge is possible because it originates as a gift from God which is then secured through reason, secured through logos, the very reason or judgement demonized by the Gnostic Jewish tradition. In the New Testament, “. . .the entire creative process of the universe is regarded as one in which Mind (Nous) autocreates by “conceiving” and “throwing forward” (pro-jacere) onto the surface of the universe the visionary realities discovered by an inner process of spiritual discernment.” Not by accident, what is revealed as Christianity is the very thing demonized in the culture wars as “whiteness”, positive knowledge of the world, an encounter with the essential. Knowing God does not only have existential ramification, in terms of moral guidance, but, equally, ontological implications in that the world becomes something real, something enduring. As Wink writes when rejecting accusations that he himself may be Gnostic, “I love this created world, life in the body, sexuality, my wife, my children, and the God I encounter in them all. I look for redemption of the body, this planet and the whole of creation, not their dissolution.” (Wink 1993: 49) Wink is affirming the redemption of Christianity and the love that this Christianity allows. The love of world, the love for his wife, the love for his children, and the love of all of creation. Jesus is a God of love because love is possible because of human, uniquely human, knowledge. Wink is right in opposing this relationship of love to the Gnostic aspiration of “dissolution”. Love is the central idea in Christianity. Love of knowledge, love of God, love of the knowledge that God gifts, sophia or, equivalently, philosophia. Christians affirm the world as good, and the people and beings in them as God’s creations. Redemption is not of this world in terms of material well-being, quite the opposite, but it is love of what permits this World as something real.

121 Gnostic Jews, by contrast, loath this world. They hate this world with a single-minded passion. They want nothing more than to see this world annihilated. They do not believe in love beyond lust and understand sophia, the highest knowledge of the Graeco-Christian era, at best result in the creation of the abortive world. (Trompf 2019) It is for this reason that this theological contest, between Gnostic Judaism and Christianity, can also be explored in philosophical terms. The Father can be understood as the divine intellect, nous, for which we should get down on our knees and thank God every day for His presence in our lives. That Jesus was cast, as He himself self-identifies, as logos, by the ancient Christian Fathers like Ignatius of Antioch. Logos is not reason in the modern sense of that word but can variously mean, “word, speech, statement, discourse, refutation, ratio, proportion, account, explanation, reason and thought”. (Hillar 2012: 6) Logos is all disclosure of truth/God. It was thought to be, according to the ancient Greeks, “the creating and structuring force of the universe” (Couliano 1992: 9). In theological terms, logos means an “inward thought or reason, an intuitive conception; and as an outward expression of thought in speech” (Hillar 2012: 6). The inner intuited conception is the Father while the “outward expression of thought in speech” is the Son. Jesus, in terms of logos, is the only way to the Father. In the 2nd century AD, Christians began to think of Jesus as logos. The movement that supported this claim became known as “high” Christology to capture its philosophical sophistication. (Couliano 1992: 9) High Christology was particularly supported in Alexandria. By the 3rd century AD, most Christians had accepted that Jesus Christ was logos. Importantly, Christians understood Christ in trinitarian terms, as the logos incarnate. (Couliano 1992: 10) The Father is not identical to the Son but are both different expressions of the one Being. The Father was most certainly not higher than the Son, this would mean our world was being revealed by some kind of lesser God, but Father and Son, creation and revelation, are different aspects of the one reality. They are Being. It is for this reason that the World IS good. To observe that Christ is symbolic of logos means that the person of Christ is also allegorical of something beyond himself in terms of the ancient Greek word, symballein, (symbol) “to bring together”. Christ brings God, the Father, into this world, understood as Heaven, through what He said, by what he did and the Spirit he opened for the world. This does not mean that Christianity no longer has a claim over our lives because Jesus has only symbolic meaning, contrasting symbolic to real, but, quite the opposite, Jesus revealed how to access the Father through word, deed, and symbol because He is God. Gods are active, Gods are eternal. That Jesus Christ permits us to know the Father, that He shows us “the way”,98 that He is the way, is

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This is why Jesus must be rightly understood as antinomian or as overcoming Halakha (Jewish Law). Halakha can be literally translated from Hebrew into English as “the way” as in, these instructions, “laws”, are “the way”, to God. This is what He meant when He said, “I have not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it”, He did not come just to do away with the old laws but to fulfill their purpose as the way.

122 deserving of our most passionate expression of appreciation that humanity can give, and this appreciation should be given with the greatest sincerity every day. As already quoted, Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. . . From now on, you do know him and have seen him.” What powerful words in the context of what has been written here, we do know Him, we have seen Him through Jesus the Christ. The world becomes constituted through an experience of the good/God as reveal though Jesus as logos. It is both the ontological and moral implications of Jesus’ revelation that Gnostic Jews hope to destroy because they do not recognise him as the true messiah therefore, he does not grant moral guidance nor access to reality. Gnostic Jews, by contrast, believe that as Jesus was not the messiah the world is not redeemed. As Rabbi Sacks admits in his answer to the question as to why he remains a Jew, “I am proud that our ancestors refused to be satisfied with premature consolations, and in answer to the question, “Has the Messiah come”” always answers, “Not yet.”” (Sacks 2015) This is a rather transparent criticism of Christianity, which is typical of many Jews, who did, it would be assume, accepted the “premature consolation” that Jesus, the Messiah, had indeed come. As Jesus was not the Messiah, what Christians believe they “know” to be good is, because it is not informed by God, actually evil. What Christians believe is good is just an expression of white male power. Jews understand discursive intellectual reasoning only in instrumental terms so it can never uncover truth as God. As Quispel writes of French Jew Henri Bergson, “who warned us that reason is a useful instrument for making tools and machines and cars, but that discursive, intellectual reasoning is neither meant nor authorized to uncover the truth”. (Quispel 1981: 27) Although this would be missed by most readers, what Bergson is attacking here is the central teaching of Christianity. Reason is not revelatory, it is not poetic, according to Jews, Jesus is not poesis, and therefore reason can only be instrumental and never substantive. Logos, reason, can communicate instructions or help to build machinery, but it does not bring the World forward as what it truly is. Bergson would argue this because, as a Jew, he believes that reality, as such, is simply no longer available to Man. Gnostic Jews believe that it is because Christians hold a false belief in the reality of the world of “things”, portrayed by Gnostic Jews as idolatry, a crime in Judaism deserving death, that humanity is blocked access to the true God, the Shechinah. It is for this reason that this world must be destroyed, and Christianity overcome. As Wink observes, “In the Gnostic understanding, the coherence of heaven and earth tears apart. Hatred of this world casts it off from the life of God. Hence the Power are no longer seen as created, fallen, and needing redemption, but as misbegotten abortions requiring destruction.” (Wink 1883: 50) This destruction is not destruction like that realized in war, the destruction realized in war would be inadequately thorough for the total destruction required by the goddess, as wars leave beliefs and

123 principles behind, and a world destroyed through war can be rebuilt. The kind of World destruction achieved by Gnostic Jews is the most devastating and total destruction possible. It is absolute destruction. It really is the final solution. Nothing can be rebuilt after this kind of total destruction. It is the end of everything. As it says in the prayer Adon Olam (which means “Lord of the world”) ‫אַ חֲ ֵרי כִ כְ לֹות הַ כֹּל‬ ‫נֹורא‬ ָ ‫לְ בַ ּדֹו י ְִמלֹוְך‬

And after the end of everything, He alone will reign terribly.

The new epoch, the advent of the reign of the goddess, relies upon, is only possible under, conditions of the “end of everything”. It is only with the end of the cosmos as such that the God of the Underworld will indeed reign “terribly”. According to Gnostic Jews, this world exists because, as already observed, the once dominant Christian tradition believed it experienced the good, knew the good, through the redemptive revelation of Jesus. Existential destruction, the end of everything, is only realised by severing Man’s relationship with the creative God which is, equivalently, to deny Jesus’ message. This rupture is achieved by recontextualizing all that was once thought evil as good and all that was once thought good as evil. It is through the reversal of all existing values that Man’s relationship with the false God of Christianity is severed and a relationship with the Earth, the goddess of darkness, is opened as a possibility. With this reversal of all existing values, the “world”, experienced as such, no longer exists as such and is truly annihilated. The world, as a world, is laid waste through re-evaluation. The world of the Shekinah is redeemed by revealing what was once thought to be evil as the true good or, what the gnostic messiah Sabbatai Tzevi, described as, “redemption through sin”. This idea of “redemption through sin” is originally indebted to Lurianic kabbalah which teaches that there is the need of “descent for the sake of ascent”. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition broadly, holy Jews must descend into the space where the demonic has dominion, our World, and rectify the broken condition by redeeming God, Man, and the world, thereby returning to God. This redemption is achieved, according to Gnostic Jews, by reversing the values that dominate, indeed allow, the corrupted, putrid world that we all call home to exist. The need for the total destruction of this world is because demonic people rule as long as the demonic god, Jesus, is worshipped. In the same way, the sacred people will rule, the Jews, when the true God, the Shechinah, is freed into the world. As Nietzsche, who expressed a kind of Gnosticism that he learnt from his Jewish friend Paul Rèe, nicely characterizes, “I am by far the most terrifying human being there has ever been, this does not prevent me from being the most benevolent in the future”. Nietzsche is not saying here that now he is the “most terrifying” but one day in the future he will change into something different and become the most benevolent, as though these

124 ideas, “terrifying” and “benevolent” have some kind of transcendent, binary meaning that is essentially exclusive. What he is saying is that at one moment in history, as history, he can be seen as the most “terrifying human being” because of his “immorality”, but, in the future, these same thoughts will be understood as the “most benevolent human being” because it is God who grants thoughts and actions meaning. The same act can be experienced under the sway of one God to be terrifying while under the influence of another God the same act can be understood as benevolent. These are the changing times. Nietzsche’s immorality, as has happened, was seen by his peers as something loathsome, his friends ceased contacting him because his ideas were so offensive. Today, of course, he is seen as the foundational thinker of our age. A man who liberated the oppressed by questioning the moral dominance of Victorian society. By identifying as the anti-Christ, he is a man for today’s world. So, his observation has indeed come to pass. He was seen at the time as terrifying and dangerously immoral and yet today he is seen as benevolent in “liberating” people from the demands of moral conformity. This different experience of somebody’s thoughts marks the advent of a new God better than anything we may theorise. This exact situation is exemplified, for just one of a thousand of possible examples, in the work of German Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas who claimed in the 1930s that “primitive tribes” were more moral than Western societies. At the time these claims caused an outrage and Boas’ ideas were soundly criticized as he was proposing, for the times, something evil, something terrifying. Barbarism was civility and what weas thought civility was really barbarism. After all, to assert that Western civilization was barbarity and what was thought barbarity was the true civility was, according to the standards of the time, to advance something that was literally evil. As a teacher at university at the time, he was corrupting the youth and such corruption was worthy of the fate of Socrates. Today, of course, Boaz is seen as a genius and groundbreaking intellectual whose ideas were before their time. He was the first truly virtuous anthropologist to break free of the Western white, male prejudices to appreciate the superiority of “people of colour” and indigenous cultures. Such thinking has, of course, become orthodoxy. Boas has moved from being “terrifying” to becoming “benevolent”. From being “corrupting” to being “insightful”. Today, Boas is acknowledged as the “Father of American Anthropology” and is certainly amongst the most respected intellectuals of the early 20th century. This section has introduced the basic ideas of Gnostic Judaism. It is not an easy movement to uncover because it is, most importantly, a secret movement. One of the core teachings of its modern founder, Sabbatai Tzevi, is that its practitioners must lie, they are told to lie, if they are ever going to advance their project. Secrecy and deception have been core features of Gnostic Judaism, and this makes uncovering their beliefs extremely difficult. On one hand, they are highly critical of Christianity and its

125 supposed historical treatment of Judaism while, at the same time, intentionally and systematically trying to destroy Christianity with a determination that, frankly, if Christianity had adopted the same attitude would have seen the end of Judaism in Europe a thousand years ago.99 One of the most important features that distinguishes Gnostic Judaism from Christianity is the belief that humanity is ignorant of God. As Preparata observes (2011: 38) of Gnostics, like Bataille, who believed knowledge, gnosis, results in nonknowledge, that what you learn as knowledge is that you have no knowledge of God. Having no knowledge of God means you have no knowledge at all. Without God there is no truth. All you know is that you do not know. Because they deny the Messianic nature of Jesus, they believe that we still live in a fallen condition, far removed from God. God, by the Gnostic account, has withdrawn from this world and left it for humanity to find its own way back to God. This return is a task left to humanity to engineer on their own. He has tasked the Jews, as His chosen people, to enable His return. The belief that God has abandoned this world means that any claim of truth or goodness, a necessary condition for existent things, is currently necessarily false and everything that is, is merely the product of white, male, Christian power and is, therefore, evil. As Sherwin (1997: 114) characterizes this understanding, according to Eastern European Judaism, “The world is a disguise worn by God. Our task [Jews] is to unmask God, to find the divine beneath the disguise.” The mask is not neutral, it not just any disguise, but an evil mask that has been constructed by the idolaters to keep Man from the true God. This means that the only way to unmask God is to destroy the mask, destroy the evil veil, the World, and that destruction can only be achieved by overcoming white male power. As Jung wrote of this task of unveiling, No doubt this also sounds very simple. In reality, however, the acceptance of the shadowside of human nature verges on the impossible. Consider for a moment what it means to grant the right of existence to what is unreasonable, senseless and evil! Yet it is just this that the modern man insists upon. He wants to live with every side of himself – to know what he is. That is why he casts history aside. He wants to break with tradition so that he can experiment with his life and determine what value and meaning things have in themselves, apart from traditional presuppositions. Modern youth give us astonishing examples of this attitude. To show how far this tendency may go, I will instance a question addressed to me by a German society. I was asked if incest is to be reprobated, and what facts can be adduced against it! (Jung 1955: 238-239)

99

They do not give Christianity any credit for allowing Jews to not only survive but to thrive amongst them. Everything good that happens to Jews is the result of the intervention of their God while anything bad that happens to them is the result mainly of Christians. Christians cannot win. They either allow them to live peacefully and prosperously amongst them allowing them to do all kinds of diabolical deeds or they marginalize them and attract their wrath for Christian cruelty thereby justifying all kinds of diabolical deeds. There will be several accounts of how this conundrum manifests itself in the history of Jewish/Christian relations.

126 Jung is suggesting that this task is actually quite a difficult thing to achieve but that the young are most particularly vulnerable. It is simply impossible to rationally choose to embrace what is evil, once seen as evil, but we can be manipulated over time into accepting what is evil as good if the patient is caught young enough and those hoping to achieve this transition are both determined and well-funded. The aim is to ensure that our subconscious comes to dominate the world. As the civilized world is nothing but a deception and all truth is just an expression of power the only place to which Gnostic Jews can turn, in the absence of their God, is to the spirit of Nature. They conceive of the spirit of Nature as the feminine aspect of the God Most High, the Shechinah. The Shechinah is conceptualized, as many ancient Nature Goddesses were once conceptualised, in terms of “Mother Earth”. She is thought to be experienced as contradictions, good and evil, destructive and creative, peace and war, love and hate, the disease and the cure but these apparent contradiction point to the limitations of the human experience which she, as a God, transcends. From a certain perspective, what the Shechinah symbolizes can be seen as either good or evil, destructive or creative etc., but that is only from any one perspective. From the vantage point of the universal, which no human can grasp, she is all good. The Shechinah is thought to be the feminine aspect of the Devine, the consort or wife of the Godhead and “mother” or “spirit” of the Jewish tribe as a whole. Although these ideas have been historically marginalized, usually characterized as heretical within what has become known as the “Orthodox” Jewish tradition, in recent years, especially since World War II, these ideas have captured a large percentage of global Jewry to such a degree that today many Jews have now come to understand the Sabbath as a joyous celebration of the Shechinah. To mark the event, many Jews have reignited an ancient Jewish mystical tradition of ritualistic sex, that was historically done in groups and continues to be done this way by some, that are performed at the commencement of the Sabbath on Friday nights. This ritualized sexual activity, as with so much of contemporary Judaism, is largely inherited through Hasidism which oversaw a “process of the eroticization of Jewish mysticism”. (Idel 2008: 117) The Ba’al Shem Tov, the spiritual founder of Hasidism, interpreted the verse in Job 19:26 “From my flesh, I shall see God” to mean “From the greatest physical pleasure [i.e., the pleasure of the sexual organ], one causes pleasure Above [i.e., to God]. This pleasure comes about when man and woman unite, and this brings about unification above. Through the physical, we perceive the spiritual.” (Ba’al Shem Tov as seen in Sherwin 1997: 113)100 Sexuality helps bring the Shechinah into the world, it is a

100

This is the kind of strange interpretation required for Gnostic Jews to derive their agenda from the Tanakh. The line that the Ba’al Shem Tov is drawing inspiration from is obviously simply saying that the redeemer will one day appear on the earth and that “yet from my flesh I will see God: I myself will see him, with my own eyes”. This has nothing to do with sexuality, this has nothing to do with every day acts helping to redeem God, but it is simply saying that one day Job will see God with his own body, from his flesh. These strange, fabricated scriptural

127 theurgical act, because it is a release of humanities basest drives. As the Godhead has withdrawn and cannot be accessed, all that is left is for Gnostic Jews to release the Shechinah into the world from her underground dwelling, the immanent aspect of God, by destroying the world and manifesting what they believe is a lost matriarchy. The world is destroyed by “decivilizing” or by undermining those aspects historically thought good, or civilized through nurturing the base, the brutish. They do this because this is the only way the world can be. They believe that there is, “. . .no sense in sobbing, crying, cursing, and protesting against the screaming pain and iniquity of the deeds of men—no justification, for this was the (sovereign) way of life. Nothing could alter it, and thus, instead of demurring stubbornly and idiotically— like the obtuse maidens of the Marquis de Sade—one ought to give in to the flow, to the natural cycle of generation and mayhem.” (Preparata 2011: 38) By their account the world is only by being returned to how it must “naturally” be. This task is the burden of Jews as chosen. As Slezkine observed, “The Christian world began with the Jews, and it could not end without them.” (Slezkine 2004: 48) These destructive act are called tikkun or “healing”. As Christianity prizes order, experiences of the good, and morality then to release the Shechinah from her prison demands the reversal of all Western Christian values. Everything that constituted the world as real and enduring must be cast as evil while everything that undermines historically dominant Western values which were once thought evil must now be shown to be good. Males, especially white males, were once seen as good but are now thought to be evil, strong gender roles were once seen as good but are now evil, the nuclear family was once seen as good but is now evil, heterosexuality once seen as good but is now viewed as evil, property was once seen as good but is now viewed as evil. . . In short, every struggle of the “counterculture”, every struggle in the “culture wars”, is a front of Gnostic Jewry to reverse the values of Western Christian society. So that there can be no confusion, this movement was responsible for the Russian Revolution, both world wars, stopping the Vietnam War, the assassinations of the Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King, September 11 and the neverending wars in the Middle East. They are also responsible for the cultural revolution of the 60s, what some have called the era of “decivilizing”, which must now be understood, no matter how much we love the music, to be nothing but a stage in the destruction of Western Christian values.

What Gnosticism Means for The West

interpretations that have haunted Judaism since the Talmud has nothing to do with hermeneutics. Hermeneutics must be true. This is a violence against the intent of the text to make it say what some human wants it to say. Nobody should take such readings seriously. Read the text for yourself, most of it is rather transparent.

128 As Friedrich Nietzsche argued towards the end of the 19th century, the Christian God is dead. But what does it mean to say that ‘God is dead’? As was noted earlier in this introduction, to destroy a people, to realize ethnocide, Gnostic Judaism must destroy a people’s shared experience of the divine, their shared experience of the good. You must destroy a people’s experience of God as it is this experience that binds a people together in granting meaning and purpose as a people. The death of God, basically, is the end of being able to judge what is “the good, the beautiful and the true” or, equivalently, as Nietzsche termed it, to move beyond “good” and “evil”. Gnostic Jews hope that we will move beyond that experience of good and evil in order to value, what is by their account, “life”. Without a God it is not “. . .possible to determine what is right and what is wrong . . . to be effectively a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter. . . for a moral code to be effective, the code must be attributed to, and vested in, a non-human source.” (Hitchens 2010: 103-104) If God is dead, then all moral codes lose their authority, they appear as things that are fabricated and sustained only as an expression of human power. As expressions of human power, moral codes are no longer binding as formative of a people, and everything becomes contested, everything becomes political. Gnostic Jews believe that God is not a part of the world, God chose to withdraw. This withdrawal allowed for a world, at all, but it only allows for a world that is evil. It is a world that must ultimately be overcome if the Goddess Shechinah is to be reunited with Her consort. The death of God has resulted in humanity being thrown into a condition of meaninglessness, a meaningless gnostic scholars like Michel Foucault praised because the death of God permitted “an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of Being, and consequently . . . an experience that is interior and sovereign.” (Foucault as cited in Preparata 2011: 88) The death of God is not only the end of Being, the end of external reality but, as Foucault rightly observes, the end of interiority that is manifested as its opposite and the sovereignty, so prized by Christianity, that relied upon this experience. It is for this very reason that Jung described this condition of meaninglessness as a result of the death of God as “soul sickness”. Under such conditions, our “spirit yearns for an answer that will ally the turmoil of doubt and uncertainty”. (Jung 1955: 211) What is good and evil and why have we been encouraged to move beyond it? The first thing to observe is that good and evil is different in kind from good and bad. We would not say, for example, that somebody’s death is “evil”, it is bad, it is sad, but usually somebody’s death is not considered evil. It is “bad” that you were bitten by a spider but again it would be wrong to claim that a spider bite is “evil”. People who murder the innocent, cause devastating wars, carry out acts of terrorism, assassinate innocent people, sexually abuse children, these are the people who might most easily be described as

129 evil.101 It is significant that only humans can judge or, indeed, be judged as evil. Aristotle observed, “And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just/and unjust, and the like.” (Politics, 1253a8-1253a18) The reason why only humans have an experience of good and evil is because only humans live in the presence of God. Augustine argued that not only could humans be evil but that only humans could be responsible for evil. In answer to the question of evil that so troubles gnostic Jews, Augustine argued that God is not responsible for evil. As that insightful Lutheran philosopher Hans Blumenberg observed when commentating on “progress”, “According to the exemplary conception developed by Augustine, the physical defects of the created world are simply the just penalties for the evil that proceeded from human freedom.” (Emphasis added Blumenberg 1983: 53) Human “freedom”, that they are able to be good, is, in Christianity, the source of all evil. To the question of why if God is all good and all powerful is there evil in the world, Augustine answers that it is because evil is the necessary consequence of human freedom. God is responsible for creation, everything in creation is good, Being is good, but He as pure goodness cannot be responsible for evil. Evil is the product of Man’s knowledge of goodness. As God is not responsible for evil then Christians cannot abdicate personal responsibility for the evils that they do. This argument manifests an understanding of human freedom in terms of mankind Himself being responsible for His deeds. Interestingly, Augustine argued that evil is a privation of the good, a falling away from the good, “evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name “evil”.” Progress, from an Augustinian point of view, is to make the world less evil. To progress gives the individual life purpose. Without the idea of moral progress then life becomes purposeless. The world itself disappears. All that remains is a kind of “eternal recurrence of the same”. As Stanner wrote of traditional Aboriginal Australian beliefs, . . .they see life as a one-possibility thing with a once-and-for-all character. It is thus perfectly consistent that the myths should depict men as they do – always in a “human, all-too-human” fashion, good and bad, cowardly and brave, open and deceitful, filial and unfilial. As though to say, “this is how men are, this is reality”. It is also consistent that in actual life they should lack what we recognise as moral zeal or earnestness. And it is just as consistent that they should show a disinterest in “development” as we understand it, and thus be thoroughly at cross-purposes with much that we want them to do. (Stanner 1972: 57) Western myths generally are usually about making or, at least, trying to make the world better. A hero is heroic in overcoming their personal character flaws, overcoming their inner demons, and in so doing achieving their quest and making the world better. Kill the monster, protect the vulnerable, fight for

101

These are all acts carried out by Gnostic Jews.

130 justice. Without the Western ideal of progress, which was understood for millennia in terms of removing evil from the world, then there is no sense that people can not self-actualise but self-improve. It is as a result of this sense of improving the world towards a universal good why the West moved away from a circular understanding of time, still found in Eastern traditions, in favour of a linear, progressive understanding of time. The reason Aboriginal people think of human nature as fixed and unalterable, as Nietzsche also believed, is because they do not have the experience of good and evil that might enable people to become better. This was not because they had no sense of a distinction of some sort between the mundane and the sacred but according to “’pagan’ civilizations this “higher world” was symbolically structured according to principles very similar to those of the mundane or lower one [realm]”. (Eisenstadt 1982: 296) This is where the gnostic dictum “as above so below” first resonated. In these societies they “always recognised the moral frailty of man; the failure of people to live up to the prevalent social and moral ideals” but this failure was posited as being the human condition which was unalterable and what the way the world had always been and always will be. (Eisenstadt 1982: 296) Humanity, unlike the world, was immutable. By contrast in Christian societies, “the perception of a sharp disjunction between the mundane and transmundane worlds developed. There was a stress on the existence of a higher transcendental moral or metaphysical order which is beyond any given this-. . .” (Eisenstadt 1982: 296) The challenge of how to bridge this gap was addressed, in the Christian tradition, with the advent of Jesus who opened the way to know this transcendental realm and thereby open an ideal towards which Mankind must strive in everything that they do. As was said by an Indigenous American, observing this difference, “We don’t understand the whites; they are always wanting something – always restless – always looking for something. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy.” (as seen in Jung 1955: 213) What “whites” are endlessly seeking, what they are trying to tirelessly achieve, what this indigenous man does not know because he does not have Jesus in his life, as any reflective Westerner will be quick to reply, is to be better. To make things better. To build, to improve, to create, to change for the good. To bring order to this chaotic world. The task is to bring heaven into this world thereby living in Jesus. The idea of striving to be a better person, striving to be more moral, striving to increase respect for our fellow Man, are all premised on something like the Augustinian idea of progress being the removal of evil from this world. Gnostic Jews, of course, have gone the opposite way. By their account humans are naturally highly sexual, humans are naturally greedy, humans are naturally materialistic and any attempt to alter that natural condition, any attempt to alter man’s natural condition and make the world better, is understood as evil. As already observed, the reason they believe this is because they do not accept that

131 humanity experiences ‘the Good, the beautiful or the true” at all but that all claims, and this is very important, all claims of goodness, beauty and truth are only an expression of worldly power. In many societies around the world, including Christian ones, a person who murders a child is thought to be evil. What is unique to Christian societies is that, especially in Protestant societies, the person is not thought to be “intrinsically” evil, such a person does not commit evil because of the circumstances in which they grew up, as though the sinner’s evilness was fixed as an aspect of who they are, but that person can be rehabilitated can, through Jesus, be redeemed. People are truly and radically free. At any moment they can choose to do good. Any person can be encouraged to become good. This is an imperative of Western Christendom. Historically this process of improvement would have necessarily involved some kind of religious education, repeating relevant sections of the Bible or by undertaking some other kind of religious ritual with the aim of reuniting a lost soul with God. In the 20 th century, psychologists replaced Priests as those who we go to when life is not going well and are now the ones tasked by our society to enable self-improvement. As a Protestant minister rightly observed, “Nowadays people go to the psychotherapists rather than to the clergyman.” (as seen in Jung 1955: 228) According to the Augustinian account of Christianity, one can improve themselves by becoming more moral through reasonable self-reflection. This self-reflection is not aimed at discovering ones “natural self” but is aimed at seeing one’s “evil” and reorienting that evil back to God. That is because Man has knowledge of God. As Barth wrote, . . . there does exist a knowledge of God and His connection with the world and men, apart from any special and supernatural revelation. . . It is knowledge of which man, since as man he still stands in an original relation to God, indisputably possesses, and it is therefore a knowledge which he only requires to discover, as something which he himself possesses. . . (Barth 1938: 4) This knowledge is not retrieved through reason alone, whatever this would even mean, but reason informed by the primordial experience of God. Although such thinking was universalised in the West through Christianity there were pre-Christian thinkers in the West who held such a view. Seneca, for one example, argued that “. . . no mind is good without God”. That an experience of God was required if humanity was to know the good was extremely important because it is this that distinguishes Western Christianity from all Gnostic movements. (Blumenberg 1983: 53) According to the Christian tradition, What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says: “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart”. (Jung 1944: 236-237)

132 What was required, according to the Christian tradition, to which Jung himself belonged, was to nurture the rational side, in order to overcome the shadows, the evil. The desire to bring order to chaos. This is certainly not simply to embrace our juvenile, underdeveloped selves, but to adjust to an experience of the good which is God as revealed by Jesus Christ. By contrast, the Gnostic tradition hopes to liberate the darkness, disorder, irrationality, the shadows, as Freud himself argued, and this liberation of the darkness within would then return humanity to their unalterable “natural” condition. Gnostic Jews argue for people to be greedy, be materialistic, be highly sexual as that is humanities natural unalterable condition. Like the indigenous American, they know no different. For this reason, from a Christian perspective, Gnosticism is evil and visa versa. Christianity is evil from a Gnostic perspective because it tries to alter the natural human condition as an expression of merely human power. Not only is this imposition impossible but it is also evil. Late antiquity, when Augustine of Hippo wrote, there was a Gnostic revival. Augustine’s work should be read as the “first overcoming” of Gnosticism that, as with all historical over-comings of Gnosticism, sowed the seeds for Gnosticisms later return. (Lazier 2003: 620) According to Augustine, and the later Christian tradition, to create something, say through gene manipulation, that goes against nature or does a violence to nature, such as having an abortion, is considered evil. Because God is responsible for nature, it is essentially good therefore, to go against nature, to perform a violence against nature, is to be evil. This was also true of the Protestant tradition. Martin Luther believed that humanity had his dominion over the earth withdrawn with the Fall. Without divine guidance, all control exerted by humanity after the fall was just “technological mastery”, control of nature in order to satisfy human needs and therefore a kind of violence or, what the ancient Greeks called, bias. Humanity were rightly “earthkeepers”, not earth dominators, but the drive to exploit nature, make Her bend to his will, was a violence perpetrated by Man. That Christianity draw a distinction between living in harmony with nature and distorting God’s gift explains why the Christian Church historically supported science and alchemy but opposed magic and technology. Science and alchemy sought to understand nature and then help nature come forward as God intended, magic and technology, by contrast, assailed nature and forced Her to come forward according to the demands of human need. Science could be rightly used to speed up natural processes, but magic and technology was thought to do a violence to nature. To turn nature into something that it was not. It is for this reason that Gnostic Judaism embraced not only technology, which it did, but also magic. As already observed of Weber’s criticism of mystical Judaism, magical rituals are not constrained by morality because they are designed to satisfy human needs and are not intended to surrender to God. To practice technology is to become like a God in trying to shape the world to cater to

133 human needs like a magician.102 This also points to an important distinction between science and technology and Christianity and Gnostic Judaism. Science, as already observed, seeks truth about nature, it is therefore a movement towards God, whereas technology might use science, but it does so only to distort nature, to assault “Her”, to make Her come forward according to human desires in a way not dissimilar to the magician. Technology, like magic, is a movement away from God. It is only with the death of God, when humanity is no longer be able to discriminate between good and evil that technological society becomes a possibility at all. This means that the moral sentiment that has informed human action is no longer meaningful, and technology takes control of humanity. This conclusion, of course, ties back into Weber’s criticism of Judaism in the sense that Judaism orders God to do the bidding of Man. Undertaking orgiastic rituals to compel God into the world is to do a violence if God is already conceived of as Being in the world. A world exists for humanity, we can know the good and therefore can experience evil, only because of our encounter with the transcendent. As has been observed of Bataille’s account of religions, “Originally, humans were animals — living as immanent to nature, still lacking the dimension of transcendence. They became properly human, as distinct from the rest of animal life, by transcending that immanence, thereby constituting the human world.” (Direk 2015: 184) It is only by an encounter with transcendence, God, the Father, that humanity exists ecstatically in Being in a World. This is what the story of Genesis tries to communicate. Foucault claims that a world without God would be, “A world, finally, that would be the same as ours, except that, precisely, it is the same.” (Foucault 1998: 127) But this is not correct, this is where the error arises because without God, without an experience of transcendence, then we would not live in the same world as we would not have a world at all. We would be returned to the animal existence of “worldlessness”. Technology rises to prominence only with the death of God because reality, as such, no longer presents as a constraint. Without God there is no reality and without reality all that remains is to serve humanity. Under such conditions, humanity becomes reduced to the condition of an animal. This is what the Gnostic Eric Fromm meant when he differentiated the Christian religion from “humanistic religions”, humanistic religions seek to satisfy human needs and therefore, all of nature becomes understood as technology. We have quickly surrendered a world concerned with beauty, thoroughly informed by morality, and dedicated to truth, to the exclusive dominance of the technological. This single-minded pursuit has left Western civilization, if it may still be called that, devoid of substantial meaning. The main thing that grows in a technological society besides production is depression. Today we

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Not, of course, an entertainer

134 are directed by, “. . .one-eyed prophets who see only what new technologies can do and are incapable of imagining what they will undo. We might call such people Technophiles. They gaze on technology as a lover does on his beloved, seeing it as without blemish and entertaining no apprehension for the future.” (Postman 1993: 5) To be clear what is meant here by ‘technology’ is not any particular piece of technology, neither the atomic bomb nor the computer has a particularly privileged position as technology in determining our lives, this is not a materialist account along the lines of gnostic Marxism where changing technologies determine social relationships but, in many regards, the opposite claim. As the greatest philosopher of the last 200 years, the German Martin Heidegger observed, technology is best understood as a way of thinking or a way of appropriating and being appropriated by a World. Technology is not an item in the world but is a way of thinking that allows a World to come forward how it does. Technology is understood by Heidegger as that which takes us up as the agencies we are and, thereby, allows the world to come forward in a particular, and when properly understood, peculiar and destructive, way. Under the sway of technology, we now encounter things, think things, as measurable costs and benefits. How we work, how we interact with each other, what we say, what we learn, are all determined, or at least today rightfully determined, by a calculus of what works and what does not. Such a thinking has no regard for what is morally good and bad or what is morally right or wrong. As Hinde observes, “Morality and pragmatism have become indistinguishable in guiding the behaviour of many. Moral systems face special challenges today from the growth of technology.” (emphasis added Hinde 2011: 2) When technology becomes pervasive then God is driven from the world. Heidegger is giving an alternate account of the Marxist/Kojevean account of constituting objectivity in terms that they argued that things are constituted as what they are through human action, making matter active as materialists, Heidegger is returning the Western priority of thought, reason or logos. Thinking can either be constitutive of a World, in being directed towards God, or destructive of a World, in appropriating everything in terms of technology. In contrast to a society informed by technology, the ancient Greek world prioritized sophia. Sophia too, like technology, is a way of thinking. Sophia is most often translated into English as “wisdom”. Wisdom today, in so far as it is spoken about at all, has the sense of making “good choices”, of applying past experiences to novel situations and thereby making good decisions. Such an understanding of wisdom is more akin to the ancient Greek idea of phronesis or “practical wisdom” in that it captures the sense of good judgement. According to Aristotle, good judgement was thought to be evidence of a virtuous character. The most important difference, according to Aristotle, between phronesis and sophia is that phronesis requires that one be raised well, and it is only concerned with particulars derived from experience, what to do in this particular situation, while sophia is realised through logos, reason or

135 revealing conversation, and can be taught to anyone. One can acquire sophia no matter how they are raised. Unlike phronesis, sophia is not concerned with particulars, like a particular situation, but, like science, its subject matter is universals. It does not matter if you were raised a slave or an aristocrat, everyone can be brought to sophia. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle makes it quite clear that sophia, is the highest and most prized kind of knowledge. In that volume, he presents sophia as a combination of knowledge (episteme) and intellect (nous). Episteme is a fairly familiar Greek word even today amongst the educated that is derived from the Greek verb epistamai which means “knowing”. Episteme was translated into Latin as scientia from which we get the English word “science” in the sense of it being a kind of knowledge that is certain and universal. That the modern word science is derived from episteme does not mean that episteme is knowledge methodologically secured, as we might understand “scientific knowledge” today, but knowledge with the same status as we might think of as scientific knowledge. Sophia is truth. Just as when somebody claims that knowledge is scientific, in terms of it being objective and universal, knowledge that is independent of the perspective of the knower, so did the ancients think of sophia. If it is scientifically known that water boils under earth like conditions at 100° C then everywhere in the universe where these conditions are met water boils at 100° C, so it was with sophia. Sophia secured knowledge that was objective and universal through logos or reason. Contemporary notions of wisdom, just like phronesis, do not entail objective, universal knowledge but seems to indicate a display of making good decisions under particular conditions. Indeed, the contemporary sense of wisdom seems to necessarily entail the ability to adjust to the particular situation as a feature of being wise. Sophia does not easily fit under this understanding of “wisdom” but is best understood as nous, which in the Phaedrus (247c) Plato described as “the pilot of the soul”, that is made explicit through logos or reason. Nous was used by a number of ancient Greek thinkers as being equivalent to the divine mind, the thoughts of God or, simply, The Good. Anaxagoras, who was born around 500 BC, is credited with being the first person to have deployed the term nous in a pseudo-philosophical and not mythological context. Anaxagoras thought of nous as the thing that ordered all things in the cosmos. Anaxagoras claimed that “All things were in chaos; then came nous and introduced order.” Nous is the creative, ordering force, that is responsible for all things to be what they are. As Marmondoro (2017: 129) wrote, the “cosmic intelligence, nous, develops the world according to its conception of order, from what is primitively given in it.” It is claimed that nous in Anaxagoras’ thinking is the source of movement in the universe. Some Greeks thought of the cosmos as a swirling mass, a vortex, within which things, as such, become combined in particular ways and are thereby separated as discrete things distinct from the whole. Nous is thought to function, in Anaxagoras’ schema, as the source of this swirling movement. Importantly, nous is

136 understood by Anaxagoras as something separate from everything, nous was not thought to be the things, and, in its separateness, the purest of things. All things partake in a portion of everything, while nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself . . . the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have soul [psyche]. Nous seems to be an all-pervasive, ever-present force in the cosmos that remains distinct from things but is necessary for things to be at all. Importantly, Anaxagoras writes that “all things partake in a portion of everything” except for nous. Nous, therefore, it would seem, is not to be thought of as a thing because of its separateness and total purity but is responsible for everything. There certainly are resonances between Anaxagoras’ account of nous and the creation myth told in Genesis 1, the creative God, there named El (Lord). Indeed, there are a few reasons why Anaxagoras’ account of nous might be an account of the same being as that which creates the cosmos or what is called the “Spirit of God” in Genesis. In Genesis the “earth” begins as “formless and empty darkness” which is, by definition, a chaotic condition. Then it says that “darkness was over the surface of the deep”. There are also references to water, a vortex, over which the “Spirit of God” hovers. Nous and the spirit of God bring order to this chaos but are not reducible to what has been ordered. God here is not nature but is the condition for what humans come to know as natural. Perhaps the most important thinker in this tradition, quite possibly the person who founded the Western intellectual tradition as such, is Parmenides. Parmenides’ innovation was to clearly differentiate between two distinct paths, two different ways of thinking. One, the “Philosophy of Opinion”, which traces things back to the origin of “Light and Darkness”, represented by a Goddess who is seated upon a throne, a Queen, who is “steering the course of all”. This Goddess, who Parmenides associates with “Justice”, “Necessity” and the “Key-bearer”, is the mother of Eros, erotic love, which we know today was Aphrodite103, the goddess of love, lust, beauty, physical pleasure, high emotion, and procreation. Aphrodite was thought to be, according to Parmenides, the first amongst the Gods. Despite her authority, despite her majesty, the path offered by the Goddess is not the correct path for humanity to take. According to Parmenides, we must “restrain our thoughts from this way of inquiry”, but instead go down

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Importantly, Aphrodite was the equivalent to Venus in the Roman pantheon. Venus was also known as Lucifer, the light-bringer.

137 the path of Knowledge, the path of Truth. By praising this path, Parmenides thereby shapes not only the entire philosophical tradition but the entire Western tradition. As Graves observes of Socrates, “Socrates, in turning his back on poetic myths, was really turning his back on the Moon-goddess who inspired them and who demanded that man should pay woman spiritual and sexual homage: what is called Platonic love, the philosopher’s escape from the power of the Goddess . . ., was really Socratic love.” (Graves 1971: 11) Graves is observing that Parmenides/Socratic way of thinking, that founds the Western tradition, is one that rejects the poetic myths that sustain the goddess Aphrodite/Lucifer by instead advancing a rational kind of thinking, a thinking particularly associated with masculinity, that turns their back on the seductions and magical sexual cult practices of the Goddess. According to Parmenides, he argues that we should follow the path of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Here is the most important difference between the Western tradition and every other tradition in the world. The West, from the time of Parmenides, now truly the West, was confident that humanity could acquire knowledge of the world, truth was available to the human condition. It is because of this belief that Greek artists began portraying human figures, full of dynamic life, because humanity now had a very special status, they were the ones who were set the task of truth. The Western tradition agreed to follow Parmenides’ advice and worship the God of Knowledge, the God of Truth, the God that responds to the call of Good and Evil. This may well be a break with the pre-Parmenides tradition, expressed by a thinker like Anaxagoras, which represented a time when . . . mortals that know nothing wander to and fro, facing both ways at once; for utter helplessness directs the wandering thought in their breasts: deaf at once and blind, they are swept along in stupefied bewilderment, undiscriminating tribes who think that ‘to be’ and ‘not to be’ are the same and not the same, and that everything returns upon itself. This account of the pre-Parmenidean condition appears to be the condition embraced by Gnostic Jews. As with indigenous people, it is not so much that they think that such a situation is simply the “best of all possible worlds” but that it is the only world that can be realistically manifested. Any attempt to improve the world, to make mankind better, is just an assault or violence to the human condition, from their perspective, that at best will result in depravity for humanity and, most likely, will simply succumb to power which wraps itself up as truth and goodness. The best that can be achieved by the human condition is “knowing nothing”, “wandering to and fro”, being “deaf and blind”, “undiscriminating tribes” who cannot distinguish between “’to be’ or ‘not to be’”. This really is THE question. Not simply should we live or die, but the question is can we be in terms of aspiring towards what is good, or must we simply surrender to our baser selves and not “be” at all, not be masters of our own existence but simply enslaved by our baser drives? Can we live in God’s grace or is that road forever closed to us as mortals? It is when Parmenides penned his thoughts that the West, as the West, established a particular hierarchical ordering,

138 Good preferred to Evil, Order over Chaos, Reason over Emotions. That is the defining feature of Western civilization. That we have turned out backs on this hierarchy at the behest of Eastern thinkers like Adorno, Lyotard and Derrida is mysterious indeed. Parmenides main target here seems to be the notion of “nothing” as causal. He argues that “not-being” simply is not, such a thing cannot be thought or named, it cannot oversee generation or destruction, movement or change, such proposals become merely empty words. By Parmenides account, there is but Being. By contrast, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, nothing is indeed primordial and that from which everything emerges. That is why their God is Nothing, the Void. Matter, earth, in the gnostic tradition is a God or an aspect of God that is active. Parmenides preceded Anaxagoras and may be interpreted as switching Parmenides account of Being with his own account of nous. Just like Anaxagoras’ account of nous, Parmenides claims that Being is uncreated and imperishable whole, it is immovable and, therefore, as Anaxagoras suggests as a result through opposites, it is responsible for the generation of change. Being/nous is unchanging therefore, in being unchanging, brings change into being. It is for this reason that it might be said that both Anaxagoras and Parmenides argue that “there is no creation ex nihilo, no emergence of substances or qualities, and no qualitative alteration of the opposites over time.” (Marmodoro 2017: 27) Following Anaxagoras, it was understood that it was through nous that the Real could be secured, mediated by the imagination, and truth, divine nous, could indeed be secured. Nous, therefore, is the primordial intuited implicit knowledge that allows the experience of things in an originary way. It might be said that nous is equivalent to “truth”, “unclosedness”, or “unconcealedness”, in the Greek sense of aletheia.104 To draw on Heidegger’s metaphor, God might be thought of as a clearing in the forest where everything in that clearing, nature, is granted a limit so that things can come forward as what they are in the clear light of day. It was in this sense that God was understood as “the light”. This primordial experience is intuitively known and known with the utmost certainty. This knowledge is understood in the Christian tradition as the Father. As nous though, it may be certain, but it is not yet explicit knowledge. What is known when you see a particular rock is “rockiness”, but it is “matter”, the particularity of its colour arrangement, shape and weight, that grants individuation. The individual “rock” is experienced but cannot be known. “Brown”, “jagged”, “heavy”, “rock”, what can be potentially known, are all “forms” that

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The literal meaning of ἀ–λήθεια (aletheia) begins with the prefix ἀ which which expresses negation or absence as in a-typical meaning not typical. Lethe is one of the five rivers of the underworld of Hades. Anyone who drank from Lethe would experience forgetfulness. This river flowed around the cave of Hypnos. Hypnos was the personification of sleep so there is the association of sleep and forgetfulness along with the underworld where no light shone. So what is being expressed in a-lethe-ia is literally the negation of forgetting or remembering which is translated into English as “the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident”

139 are nous but “matter”, earth, in the Western tradition, withdraws in the face of knowledge. In the PreParmenides tradition, such as that of Anaxagoras (whose name interestingly means “Anax” – King or Lord, and “Agora” – central public space in the polis, so Anaxagoras might be read as Lord of the Public Sphere) it is in this moment that philosophy is truly born but it is Parmenides that gives it a full voice. It is this very knowledge, nous, which through the imagination sees the world sensuously, that is then secured as explicit knowledge via reason that is sophia. Parmenides argued that nous is secured through seeing but it becomes explicitly known through the intellect. This account of reality, what would come to be known as ontology, is a revolution in thinking that founds the Western tradition in its uniqueness. The ancient Chinese, Indians, Jews, Egyptians, as far as we know today, did not have this revelation. It might be said that it is only after Parmenides that the word becomes a God as it says at the beginning of the Gospel of John. Parmenides concluded that the subject of thought, Being (which seems to be a renaming of nous) must be immutable, eternal, one and homogenous. (Pięka 2015: 26) For this reason, many people, including Martin Heidegger, identify Parmenides as the originator of the metaphysical tradition that makes philosophy possible. According to the Pre-Parmenideans, Being is implicitly known by everyone, as confirmed every time a person experiences a mountain or a tree or a desk. After the metaphysical turn, initiated by Parmenides but carried through by Socrates and Plato, the primordial experience becomes thought inadequate to the form. Nous, although continuing to be initially secured intuitively, becomes definitional and that conceptual definition is made explicit through logos. When nous is made explicit, when a person explicitly knows what they already intuitively know, then they can be said to have sophia – explicit knowledge of what Plato equally thought of as “The Good”. So nous is the original implicit knowing encountered with the world. That tree, that man, that house, are all possible because of nous but one acquires sophia when one can say through logos what a “tree”, a “man”, a “house” actually is. Socrates walks around Athens showing that most people do not have this knowledge. They of course “know” what a tree or a shoe or an army is if asked to point to one, they have nous as all humans do, but they do not have sophia, the do not know what a tree is explicitly. To help clarify what is meant here by nous, all animals, according to the ancient Greeks, have sense perception. But no animal has nous. Animals have sense perception that is not intelligible. It is for this reason that they can navigate through a space, but they never truly speak. Humans uniquely have sense perception that is intelligible. They are species intelligibilis. This primordial perception is mediated by the imagination and perceived as nous or, to clearly differentiate this from particular experience, divine nous. Dianoia was the ability to experience nous and being able to interpret beings in light of this experience. (Brogan 2006: 172) The divine nous was brought to the light, made explicit, through logos.

140 When this occurred, and a person had acquired explicit knowledge of nous, and everyone was capable of this, then they had acquired sophia. What we think of as scientific knowledge is also universal and unchanging like nous but to secure scientific knowledge you must first begin with the subject of scientific knowledge already secured as explicit knowledge before scientific research can be undertaken at all. To do biology one must already know what life, bios, is or how else can you study it? Sophia cannot be secured using scientific methods because the knowledge that is being acquired by sophia is the very condition for acquiring scientific knowledge. It is this knowledge, sophia, that is pursued by philosophers and it is for this reason why philosophy was thought primordial. Philosophy can never become a science because philosophy is, by this account, the very condition for the scientific enterprise. The philosopher’s task is to make the shared intelligible world, mediated by the imagination as nous, explicit. Sophia is explicit intellectual knowledge. As suggested by Aristotle, such knowledge, like phronesis, has application in the world although it is not secured for the purpose of utility. As Brogan notes, “Phronesis is the revealing of human being whereas sophia is the kind of thinking and disclosing that arises out of the possibility of a kinship between thinking and being, a kinship that is open to human being as a possibility but does not arise out of human being itself.” (Brogan 2006: 171) But where does this disclosing arise, nous, which is secured beyond the limits of human logos, “reaching a divine saying of the truth itself”? (Brogan 2006: 171) Those who pursued this knowledge were lovers of sophia, Sophia-philes or philo-sophers. In Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium, Plato has Socrates claim that Diotima of Mantinea, a prophetess and philosopher, who as a woman could not attend a symposium, a gathering of men to drink and talk, and is yet given a voice, is said to have argued that between certain knowledge and absolute ignorance there is a kind of loving curiosity and this loving curiosity, this concerned seeking after, is the correct mindset of the philosopher. As Martin Heidegger105 wrote emphasising the distinction between ignorance, which might be characterised as “common sense”, and curiosity proper to thoughtful inquiry, Common sense has its own necessity; it asserts its rights with the weapons peculiarly suitable to it, namely, appeal to the “obviousness” of its claims and considerations. However, philosophy can never refute common sense, for the latter is deaf to the language

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Unlike many who carry the label, even is a career title, Heidegger truly is a philosopher. Heidegger truly hopes to make explicit what we know implicitly. As he wrote in his essay The Essence of Truth, “But in calling for the actual “truth” we must already know what truth as such means. Or do we know this only by “feeling” and “in a general way”? But is not such vague “knowing” and our indifference regarding it more desolate than sheer ignorance or the essence of truth?” Heidegger want to make what is implicit, nous, explicit through reason and, thereby, realize sophia.

141 of philosophy. Nor may it even wish to do so, since common sense is blind to what philosophy sets before its essential vision. (Heidegger 1949/1993: 117) Common sense cannot be “addressed’, in the fullest sense of this word, by philosophy because it has a different standard of verification, common sense appeals to what is obvious, it does not appeal to reason or to argument but simply that it is so obvious that it cannot be denied. That there is a tree in my back yard is not the concern of philosophy as it is just “common sense”. Philosophy, by contrast, relies on rational argument aspiring to reach common agreement and is not informed by common sense. Common sense cannot even encounter the domain, as Plato’ allegory of the cave observes, of the philosopher. Socrates claims that Diotima argued that the philosopher, like love itself and unlike the common man, can be thought to occupy a space somewhere between a god, who by definition possesses explicit intellectual knowledge, and therefore has no need to pursue it, and the ignorant person who, perhaps mistaking themselves for a god, like Gnostic Jews, believe that they already possess sophia. Socrates’ many forays into town to inquire into people’s knowledge proved that most people were indeed ignorant of sophia. They certainly had a common sense view of the world and claimed to be experts in their area of inquiry but Socrates showed that they lacked sophia not, as some argue today, because such knowledge was impossible but to show the need to pursue such knowledge. Socrates project, repeated over and over again, emphasises the distinction between knowledge secured through sensory perception and intellectual knowledge – the shadows cast by the fire and the true forms metaphorically presented in Plato’s allegory as being lit by the Sun or The Good. This might be understood as the difference between doxa (opinion/common sense) and orthodoxia (correct opinion/truth), where only orthodoxia is secured through the acceptable practices of philosophy. The philosopher, like Socrates, knows that they do not have explicit knowledge of the forms and therefore they rightly pursue sophia. By Diotima’s account, and she is not said to state this explicitly, but it is suggested in the way that she presents her argument, philosophers are like divine spirits, occupying a space between God and Man in the same way that the divine spirits, Mercury, Hermes and Thoth, carried god’s knowledge between God and Man. Philosophers are like these demi-gods, mediators between what endures and what is transient. The idea of certain people, Kings, leaders or messiah’s, being mediators between Man and God, or even lower God’s themselves, can be found in several ancient traditions around the Mediterranean and throughout the Middle East but was perhaps most famously expressed in Ancient Egypt (Morris 2010). Like Plato, the great Islamic scholar, Farabi, thought that nations and cities could realise complete happiness if they were ruled by philosophers because philosophers were just like prophets, in that they also mediated between God and Man. (Drury 1985: 319) At the dawn of the modern era, it was claimed by Sabbatai Tzevi, who claimed to be the true Messiah, that as a God-like figure on earth, he mediated between God and Man.

142 As Dan wrote, “. . . the Sabbatian movement of the 17th and 18th centuries, which believed that its messiah, Sabbatai Tzevi, was an intermediary between the people of Israel and the Godhead, an idea which was presented especially in the work of Nathan of Gaza, the prophet of Sabbatai Tzevi.”106 (Dan 1991: 178) This idea of the philosopher being an intermediary between God and Man like a prophet or a true messiah is consistent with Plato’s Socratic dialogues. As Diotima says, most people believe that they are like Gods in already possessing knowledge, thereby making them in fact ignorant because all they really possess is common sense. Diotima is arguing for a hierarchy that reflects the cosmic order, the gods have true knowledge, divine nous, while the common person has no knowledge beyond what is passed to them through the generations, doxa. The philosopher, the lover of sophia, occupies a middle space in not having absolute perfect explicit knowledge but, in knowing that they lack such perfect knowledge, they pursue it using logos and can acquire “true opinions” that are agreed to by a community. Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenised Jew, argued, in a way consistent with Plato, that the story of Jacob’s Ladder shows that human souls and angels are God’s logoi, pulling men up in great distress but then they voluntarily descend with compassion. Here logos has an autonomy of humanity. Logos is not something that humanity has, something under their control, something that they can use, logos is not a technology. Logos is understood as directing humans, like an external force. Logos is something that demands obedience, humbleness, and discipline if it is to guide human action properly. It is for this reason that logos is not simply an expression of power, people cannot make reason bend to their will as a way of expanding their power, such an approach is nothing but a kind of deception, but people must follow reason’s paths. We may wish the world to be however we might like but reason gives us to truth which is how things are. Logos lets us know the truth. As von Balthasar writes, The biblical way to God has been opened up by God himself – God’s Word is the way. And so, for the person willing to follow it in patience, it can lead to the divine destination, to the vision of God the Creator and Redeemer. By contrast, the Gnostic’s self-devised ascent is bout to end, like the flight of Icarus, in a crash both tragic and grotesque. The surge beyond faith into the abyss of God ends in a blinded fall into inhumanity. The Godhead that seemed to hold the promise of plenitude (pleroma), reveals itself to be anonymity, a silent void, the empty abyss of man himself, the projection of his won deficiency ontot eh wall of the absolute. (von Balthasar 1981)

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This belief is one the many ideas that link Sabbateanism with Hasidism. Hasidism believes that their “court” leaders, the Tzaddik, are intermediaries between the worshipper and God. Generally, this idea has been quite alien to the Jewish tradition. As Dan notes, “The system of values, which represent “perfect Judaism”, does not include the figure of the divinely inspired intermediary between Man and God. The creators of this image of the Hasidic movement regarded the concept and the role of the Zaddik as found in the authentic Hasidic theory and practice as an idolatrous one, impossible to accept within a Jewish religious system.” (1991: 179)

143 In the Christian tradition, Jesus, the word made flesh, lets us know the Father, the word, while, at least according to von Balthasar, gnosticism is simply a descent in the “abyss of man himself”, a descent into primal instincts. In Christianity, as Irenaeus wrote, “The Word ‘establishes’, that is, produces bodies and bestows permanence on what has come into existence . . . The Word is, therefore, rightly called the Son. . .” The Christian account of logos was perhaps first expressed in Plato’s allegory of the cave. In this account, the philosopher is physically forced, by the power of logos, up to the mouth of the cave, he does not ascend eagerly because, like all of us, he has become accustomed to his everyday beliefs, he has become accustomed to tradition, but he is physically forced to ascend. The philosopher, unlike the aesthete, then chooses to return to the prisoners locked in their cave of doxa out of a newly acquired compassion for their plight. He is prepared to suffer poverty, he is prepared to suffer ridicule, he is prepared to live life as an outsider, indeed, he is prepared to die because he has seen truth/God. The philosopher, as a lover of sophia, a lover of God/knowledge, suffers all of this and more because he cares for those amongst whom he lives, and this concern is itself the result his newly acquired knowledge. This is not dissimilar to the disciples of Jesus who, after the resurrection, having been filled by the spirit, acquired the truth, sophia, thereby also acquiring compassion and bravery that they certainly lacked prior to this revelation. Despite the dangers that they face, they choose to walk amongst the people telling them the truth. They suffer terribly but they almost must do what they are obligated to do as humans, if they are human, finding any other path false. All the disciples, in telling the truth, suffer terrible deaths. They are burnt and crucified but they never denounce the truth. The philosopher is dragged up by logos to the divine nous, the creative ordering force of Being, but then returns, as someone touched by God, to educate his fellow Man. This is where the idea of “participating in” the mind of God, nous, finds it original expression. By this account, the earth is a formless void, chaos, passive and neutral. It is certainly not divine in any way in the Western tradition as it has no activity. Opposed to this is the divine nous, conceptualised as the mind of a creator God, that brings original order to the darkened void. This intellectually ordered domain is important because it mediates between the unity of earth and what is present as World. Without the true experience of God, which is the Highest Good, there simply cannot be the sacred borders, no peras as the Greeks called such limits, (Tankha 2006: 18) that constrain things in order for them to be judged as the things that they are. These sacred borders, peras, were once thought to be the true domain of the solar deity Apollo,

144 [Pythagoras’ name] itself declares him to have been a servant or prophet of the Pythian [Apollo].107 [His] whole philosophy is based on the exaltation of peras and shows above all things a passionate devotion to form and law. The universe is a kosmos, and philosophy is a necessity because only by understanding the order of the macrocosm can man hope to imitate it and implant a similar order in the microcosm, becoming kosmios or orderly in his soul. (Guthrie 1954) It is the divine light of nous shining into the clearing in the forest that allows things to come forward potentially as what they are and is implicitly known with absolute certainty. Just because this domain is not explicitly known does not mean that it is chaos. This is not disorder but nor is it yet explicit knowledge. It is pure potential, what Aristotle called dunamis which was translated into Latin as potentia from which the English word “potential” is derived. By not only understanding but coming to know the divine order, in Plato ultimate informed by The Good, then each individual can themselves live an orderly life and, in an intermediate way, help bring order to the society in which he lives. The passage observes that Pythagoras’ name itself shows him to be a servant of Apollo, Pythian, and that his entire thinking can be understood to be about “form and law” or the peras, the divine borders and nomos, which might be understood as “norms”, that ultimately grant shape, form or meaning, to the cosmos as such that, he seems to believe, is accessed as sophia by those who prize such knowledge, philosophers. Indeed, “in antiquity, the nature of the Logos was represented in many ways, but its most central emblem was the Sun, symbolizing the source of Reality, the source of Light and Life.” (Fideler 1993: 2) Opposed to the chthonic Python, Apollo was a solar deity because he was seen as the origin, source, onset, of reality in manifesting the primordial peras. It was recognized in ancient Greece the heiros demarcated spaces and things in terms of their sacredness. As Burkert (1985) simply observes, “hieros draws boundaries”. Explicitly knowing these boundaries, knowing what things are, is explicit intellectual knowledge or sophia. The potential point of contact between Man and God, where God and Man meet, is logos which makes present the Divine intellect. To acquire this explicit knowledge is the true pursuit of the philosopher. When Socrates was dying, his main concern was not with his death but that his death would also be the death of logos, the death of dialogue oriented by truth. As Nagy (2015: 146-147) wrote, For Plato and for Plato’s Socrates, the word logos refers to the living ‘word’ of dialogue in the context of philosophical argumentation. When Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo (89b) tells his

107

Pythius is one of the names of Apollo and to follow him is to be a Pythian. Delphi was once guarded by a serpent-like monster called “Python” which Apollo killed. After killing Python, Apollo claimed Delphi as his place and founded an oracle of truth to speak his gifts. The priestesses at this temple were called “Pythia”. For the ancient Greeks, the python was a dragon like figure and lived in the center of the earth which was believed to be at Delphi. This oracle historically existed for the cult of Gaia, Mother Earth. The chthonic Python and the solar Apollo became entrenched enemies until Apollo managed to slew the Python and occupy the temple making it a dedication to himself. This myth, it is believed, originated in the early 6th century BC when the morality of the classical period was taking over the Nature cults of the Archaic period.

145 followers who are mourning his impending death that they should worry not about his death but about the death of the logos—if this logos cannot be resurrected or ‘brought back to life’ (ana-biōsasthai)—he is speaking of the dialogic argumentation supporting the idea that the psūkhē or ‘soul’ is immortal. In this context, the logos itself is the ‘argument’. Socrates is not concerned with his life but with logos, that logos is resurrected and with the resurrection of Jesus this is the resurrection of logos. Knowing these boundaries through logos, participating in the mind of God, how they are manifest and known, means that an individual’s own ‘soul’ becomes ordered in a way harmonious with God. At least according to that later interpreter of Plato, Plotinus. According to Plotinus it is the soul, the psyche, that unites with an experience of “The Good”, which allows a true world. Or, to put it differently, the Father, the divine nous, and the Son, logos, manifests the World. Explicit intellectual knowledge, sophia, is important because with it one can say if something is good or evil. That is, one obviously needs explicit knowledge of the good if they know that something is showing deficit and is, therefore, evil. This is important because you may experience an action through a legal lens or tradition, but both of these can lead you astray as a moral being, whereas explicit intellectual knowledge, knowledge of The Good, as the true, can, by definition, never be wrong. It is for this reason that Augustine, drawing upon the Neoplatonists, argued that nous, the Platonic Forms and the Good were all equivalent. As Wilder observed, “. . . Nous . . . [is] in affinity with το αγαθόν, [Agathon] one being the superior apprehending, the other the comprehending – one noetic and the other phrenic.” Wilder is claiming that Nous and Agathon (the Good) are synonymous though different, nous is the superior in being primordial perception while the good is understanding, nous is pure intellect while the good is thought. The good, the forms, nous were all interchangeable with and equivalent terms for the Christian Highest God. The incredible thing to appreciate, what just must be understood in today’s world if there is to be any hope of the West finding it own way forward as the West, is that Jesus is logos. This idea is ancient indeed. Ignatius observed that Jesus was logos in the 2nd century AD when he argued that Jesus breaks the ineffable silence of God thereby making God known to Man. (Musurillo 1961: 103) According to Kreeft, “Logos means the Word of God, the Revelation of God, the Speech of God, the Wisdom of God, the Mind of God, the Truth of God, the Reason of God, the Philosophy of God.” (Kreeft 2007: 9) Jesus is all this. Jesus is the personified force that drags us out of our traditional comforts to knowledge of the divine nous. Christianity teaches that you can only truly know the Father, nous, through the Son, who might be thought to symbolically represent logos or reason/word. As Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (John 14:6) Jesus is the way to the truth. This truth is also life or the correct, most life affirming, way to be. This might be contrasted to the Gnostic tradition where, as

146 Unamuno wrote, when considering those who prize “the Void” that under such conditions, “life cannot submit itself to reason, because the end of life is living and not understanding.” (Unamuno as seen in Preparata 2011: 37) One cannot submit to logos, to reason, because to not live in knowledge of God is to live purely for life, to live fulfilling merely earthly requirements like sex and greed. Goodness and truth are The World, living within Jesus is to live within a world of meaning. Such accounts are not unprecedented in the Jewish tradition, the erudite Philo of Alexandria, although remaining a Jew in prioritizing “matter”, said that “the creator [Demiurge] who created our entire universe is rightly called the Father of all Created Things, while we call Knowledge [Episteme, identical in Philo with Sophia] Mother . . . she received the divine seed and bore with Labor the one and beloved son . . . the ripe fruit that is the world.” (De ebrietate §30) Here Philo is identifying the “son”, the result of the combining of the creator and knowledge, as being the World. The Father in Heaven creates primordial being, the Mother is knowledge which are brought together and bear the son, the World within which we live.108 To associate Jesus with word and world is to claim that to know the Good, nous, you must secure it through the use of reason. This association should not be surprising as in John 1: 1 - 14 it famously says, “In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God . . . And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.” This was, of course in reference to the coming of Jesus. It is God as the archai, or “origins” or “that which is responsible for. . .”, that Schiller was claiming Christian society was losing. A loss Socrates feared more than death. Schiller had a vision of what he thought of as a “beautiful soul” which was when human emotions had been brought under the light of reason and were therefore in harmony, duty and inclination. The aim of life was to live in intimacy with God and therefore have an ordered psyche, or soul shaped or impregnated by God, reason. Such a person, in being in communion with God, cannot suffer “soul sickness” or have a soul detached from God and completely under the sway of irrational emotions or base passions such as greed and lust. The complete death of God, therefore, is not only the death of ends, the good, but the forgetfulness of means, reason. It is this loss of both the ends and the means that is the true death of God which would also mark the end of the West as the West. When God is dead, and our souls are sick, then reality becomes nothing more than a “social construction” that is a reflection of human power. Such a condition would be to surrender

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The Gnostic Jewish tradition seems to give a very different account to Philo. They claim that the father has withdrawn from the cosmos. It is only the Mother who can be made manifest in terms of being the spirit of Nature. As the spirit of Nature, she is opposed to all things that are, the World as such. Here the Shechinah is conceived, strangely, as both the mother and the lover of the Jewish people. It is through this strange account that a strong current of humanism runs through Gnostic Jewry. What we must appreciate, and the Jewish people, is that what is Judaism, as with Christianity, is highly contested and, as yet, unresolved.

147 to everything that is evil, to give into all of humanity’s basest drives. The death of God is soul sickness that finds expression in humanism and the contemporary crisis of Western civilization. The opposite of peras, divine borders, is chaos or disorder, “precepts without concepts”, a world of meaningless sensuousness and, therefore, unintelligible. Under such a condition the world is imagined as a continua upon which humanity imposes meaning as a reflection of interests, as an expression of power. The Greeks believed that the earth itself was a shapeless void, a meaningless continuum. This was the condition of the cosmos prior to being ordered by the mind of God. Without God there is no order. It is for this reason that many people denigrate the idea of an enduring reality and portray such claims as the greatest evil. Today retaining a commitment to an enduring realty is denigrated because it is, rightly, historically associated with the Christian God. Blumenberg wrote of Jonas’ opposition to an enduring reality which worked to “blend, confuse, disempower, bewitch and bind man, made him forget his self and the autonomy of his origins”. This is the core argument of Gnostic Jews that has come to dominate the entire academy since World War II. To claim that there is an enduring reality independent of humanity is to “blend” in the sense of distinguishing what should be acknowledged as differences, “confuse” in the sense of misguides and leads astray, “disempower” in the sense that the homogenising effects of the enduring robs the plurality of ways of “individual” being, “bewitches” in the sense that this is nothing more than idol worship, a kind of magic power that robs people of themselves, “make Man forget himself and his autonomy” is to impose a meaning onto people that robs them of their authentic selves and thereby makes them forget who they truly are and the independence of the plurality of ways to be. This last point is why so many of the movements that Gnostic Jews have supported are portrayed as “liberation” movements, in that they claim they are liberating women, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, the disabled, from white, male, Christian dominance.109 The Gnostic Jews Sigmund Freud also demonized what he called the ”reality principle” which he opposed to the life affirming “pleasure principle” which he sees, as the Gnostic Jew Marcuse observed (Marcuse 1974: 13), a movement from a human situation that was dominated by feminine drives of instinct to one which was informed by the masculine drive of reason.

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It is this last point that is most problematic. What is supposed to be being asserted as “freedom”. So what is the authentic women? Women were “happy” and affirmed for centuries a more Christian view of themselves and fought for over 100 years against the Gnostic vision of womanhood before succumbing to their efforts in the 1990s. But is the Gnostic vision authentic while the Christian vision robs them of their authenticity? Women are happy, in the short term, as highly sexualized beings, advertising themselves one dimensionally in sexual terms but are women more than this, does Christianity actually value the full woman more-so than the Gnostic vision? This discussion can only just be undertaken because until the publication of this volume, women did not know that they were being manipulated into becoming something that they others wanted them to be, with this knowledge everything changes.

148 From:

To:

Immediate Satisfaction

Delayed Satisfaction

Pleasure

Restraint of pleasure

Joy (play)

Toil (work)

Receptiveness

Productiveness

Absence of repression

Security

This chart, of course, is such a misrepresentation of what is really happening that it can substantively be ignored but it does reveal the voice of a religious zealot and his theological beliefs. To be Christian is not the “restraint of pleasure” but the pursuit of a “higher pleasure”, a pleasure unknown to animals. Christianity is not a movement from “joy” to “toil”, obviously a biblical reference to being exiled from the Garden of Eden, but one from being enslaved by base drives and finding transient pleasure in satisfying these drives to one motivated by an experience of God that gives complete and enduring fulfillment. A fuller account will be given later in this volume, but the distortions of this theological movement become transparent once it is revealed. It is for this reason that they have carried through their program secretly, without telling anyone, because once made explicit it can easily be cut to threads, so they choose not to expose their ideas to critical scrutiny but aspire for blind, unreflective acceptance. The ancient Greeks, as did other cultures, often presented thinking in terms of a journey from darkness (chaos) to light (order). As Pięka (2015: 27) wrote, “The motif of light as the object of cognition, represented in the form of the Sun, is also present in Plato and it will be closely related to noetic, intuitive cognition. The quality of light is that it allows eyes to see that which cannot be seen in darkness.” All solar deities are in fact representations, symbols, for the intellect. It is for this reason that the Western tradition has always used solar symbolism, at least until the Enlightenment, while Semitic traditions, Islam for example, use lunar symbols. The West has always understood itself as being guided by the intellect while other traditions suggest that humanity is rightly an earthly creature that must surrender to natural drives. From a Western perspective, it is to return to the primordial “earth”, symbolised in the Jewish tradition as the Garden of Eden, that is achieved with the “death of God”. As that convert to a kind of Gnosticism, Friedrich Nietzsche, observes, “There, that mountain! There, that cloud! What in them is ‘real’? Merely eliminate from them the phantasm of any human addition, you sober ones! If only you could!” Nietzsche appears to claim that when God is dead, when the “phantasms of human addition” are removed, then there is nothing left. The “nothing” here is not pure being, the divine nous, as some Western theorists have characterised the primordial encounter with Being, but nothing in terms of the void, nothing as in

149 terms of absence, nothing in terms of disorder or chaos. “Reality”, now presented conditionally, becomes conceived as nothing more than the fantastic creations of the human mind that is imposed on the world as a semblance of order. Remove these phantasms, according to thinkers like Nietzsche, and you would encounter true “reality”, pure chaos and disorder. Nietzsche concedes that the human condition is not one where we can simply strip away “knowing”, at least in its most primordial way, and have pure “experience”. When Man looks at a “mountain” they see a “mountain” and not pure “sense perceptions”. Humans simply cannot look away from beings in the abstract and see the mountain as the goddess Earth. That is why “Earth” is symbolized as darkness, it can never be brought into the light, it can never be truly “seen”, no matter how hard as we as mortals may try. We are doomed, as the story of eating the apple from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil suggests, to live amongst things. The very claim that mountains and clouds are only what they are because of an apparent imposition of the human mind is all the evidence that is required to confirm that by the time of Nietzsche, at least for those who had already succumbed to the Gnostic account, God was already truly dead. In 1873, Nietzsche met the French Jewish “moralist” (better described as Nietzsche described himself “immoralist”) Paul Rée. In what has come to be known as Nietzsche’s “middle period”, Nietzsche turned his attention to the same topic of interest that had attracted Rée’s attention in his most book, The Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). In this book, Rée was concerned with explaining apparent moral behaviour, against the Graeco-Western tradition, without recourse to God. Rée thought that what we call “immorality” are those actions which cause harm, “drunkenness, habitual gambling, and excessive pleasure-seeking”. According to Paul Rée, Man is a complete egoist, so much so that the members of a tribe of apes are not so hostile to one another as members of a human tribe. For the members of the same tribe of apes are certainly also rivals, but only until their drives for nourishment and mating are satisfied. A human being, in contrast, has not only the drives of hunger and sexuality, which are at least satisfied from time to time, but other insatiable drives as well. He does not only want to eat and drink as well as possible, to live as comfortably as possible, to mate with women as beautiful as possible, and in general to possess goods that are pleasant by themselves: he aspires just as much, and indeed much more, to the possession of goods that, without being pleasant by themselves, produce enjoyment only because one imagines oneself to possess more or to count for more than others. (Rée 2003: 95) It is interesting how Gnostics universalise their own desires, their own experiences, as that being experienced by everyone. It is like the psychopath claiming that everyone is really a psychopath if only they were honest with themselves and yet, as most of us know, that is simply not true. It was this rather vile, even depraved, view of the human condition, one where humanity is placed in a position more brutish and uncontrolled than animals, one which is very familiar to anyone who has completed tertiary education in recent years where this account of the human condition has become orthodoxy, that influenced

150 Nietzsche and encouraged him to herald the death of God. While under the influence of Rée, beginning with the publication of Human, All-too-Human, Nietzsche rejected any kind of “idealistic metaphysics” which had been a feature of his earlier work as presented in The Birth of Tragedy.110 (Donnellan 1982: 595-596) Indeed, Nietzsche’s debt to Rée is not only substantive but stylistic as Rée also employed the same aphoristic style as Nietzsche did in most of his later works which some claim was derived from the French moralist tradition but, interestingly, is also used in gnostic Hermetic texts. The point is that it was as a result of Gnostic influences that Nietzsche seems to have come to the realization, a realization that he thought the world had not yet come to terms with, the truth that God is dead. Unlike Rée, Nietzsche could write at length about what this death might mean because, unlike Rèe, he could explicitly and clearly voice his conclusions because he was not a Jew. The most significant consequence of the death of God that people had not accepted was that if you take the intimacy with God away from experience then things, as such, no longer exist. (Schurmann 2003: 5) So, when Jewish scholar Emile Durkheim argued that there was no transcendent realm underpinning social norms, or what he called the “collective conscience” but merely social norms, cultural deposits, simply reflecting the values of the existing social relations at any one time, he was actually implicitly observing the death of God. Further, which is the true motivation for detaching Man from God, without an experience of the divine, suggesting as Durkheim does that it is merely an expression of power, then a people, as such, can no longer exist. Without God, objective reality, truth, ceases to be persuasive so humanity cannot share in the experience of mountains and clouds, because mountains and clouds, as the erasure is trying to indicate, have become something altogether different. When the “constructed” nature of “reality” is claimed then, like Neo out of The Matrix, the true chaotic condition that is reality, the domain of the Queen of Death, is exposed for all to confront. We are thrown, by the death of God, into a pre-conceptual condition of chaos. Washed about on a stormy sea. We are kicked from the secure comforting boat of Jesus’ fishing boat to be cast adrift, drowning, into the turbulent sea of chaos. But an attentive reader might be quick to observe, but the mountains, as mountains, are there, I can see them, so how can God be dead? The answer that may be given is that these mountains are no longer the mountains that were once the gift of God, a blessing of His grace, something in which we should all rejoice receiving as an act of unconditional love whenever we are enlivened by their experience as a result of His presence, but they are now nothing more than a “human construct”, as Rée appears to conclude, and so many others besides such a Durkheim and Marx have agreed, just an expression of human power. As was observed in the introduction, according to Heidegger,

110

Which he later denounced as juvenile and unconvincing.

151 humanism results in what he thinks of as the fallen condition of humanity believing that they have control over Being itself. Man literally replaces God. Under these conditions, everything comes forward as a human creation that can, therefore, be created differently. By contrast, the Christian tradition claims a unique role for Jesus Christ as logos allowing an experience of reality in terms of granting knowledge of the world. This experience is not just a Christian phenomenon but, as already discussed, it goes back centuries before Jesus was born to the very origins of Western civilization itself in the writings of Parmenides. An experience of ‘the good’, implicitly knowing the good without being able to justify the judgement, was a central concern of the ancient philosophers such as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. So, what has been lost with the death of God, the loss of an experience of the good and the return of the chaos of a ‘soulless’ worldview, is something that was deeply ingrained into the Western tradition. Indeed, an experience of the good might be said to be the Western tradition, so its extinction might rightly be identified as the end of Western civilization as such. A New Era The Jewish English historian Bernard Wasserstein (2009: vii) rightly observed that we live “. . . in an era during which God has disappeared as a living presence . . .”111. This “death of God”, the loss of an experience of what is good, what is beautiful and what is true, the loss of divine nous, although expressed most famously in the work of the immoralist Nietzsche, really intensified in the Western world only after the Second World War. Indeed, I would go so far as to agree with those who advance the argument that with the end of the Second World War, a new era or epoch began that some have simply called the ‘postChristian era’. As that most significant of Christian Western thinkers, C. S. Lewis, observed in the middle of the 20th century, But roughly speaking we may say that whereas all history was for our ancestors divided into two periods, the pre-Christian and the Christian . . . for us it falls into three – the preChristian, the Christian and . . . the post-Christian. This surely must make a momentous difference . . . Christians and Pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not. (Lewis (1969)1980: 5)

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Note that he does not make the more general claim that God has disappeared, that for people today God no longer exists but the more specific claim, consistent with Gnosticism, that “God has disappeared as a living presence”. God is there in Her own sphere, in the underworld, but is not yet in this world, is not yet a living presence in our lives.

152 The apparently defeated Lewis is perfectly correct to observe the many continuities from the pre-Christian pagan world to the Christian world, which has been emphasized so far, and the unbridgeable gap from the Christian world to our own post-Christian condition. But has there been progress in naming our post-Christian epoch beyond naming it in terms of what it is not, post-modern, post-Christian, post-truth? (Berdyaev 1935/2009: 7) Some (see Picard, revel et.al. 2016) have proposed that our contemporary condition should be called ‘Jewish modernity’ in recognition of the incredible and undeniable influence that people who identify as Jews have had in shaping our contemporary condition. Yuri Slezkine (2006), again in a book clearly revealing the influence of Jews on our contemporary age, thought that the 20th century should be known as ‘The Jewish Century’ to acknowledge how Jews have successfully shaped the way our world is understood. Whitfield called his study of Jews in the United States, ‘American Space Jewish Time’, (Whitfield (1988)2015) to mark an era where the locality remains “America”, understood as such, but the action-constituted meaning of that space, the temporal as such, should now be understood as Jewish. These are very serious claims made by Jewish authors to the fact that Jews now possess such a great deal of power and are shaping the world. Such claims should, most certainly, be taken seriously. These are not idle boasts or exaggerations made out of ignorant self-aggrandisement but informed commentaries on our contemporary condition and the emergence of a new era that has been shaped by people who identify as Jews. These people are telling us, in absolutely unequivocal terms, about the influence that Jews in manifesting the world we live in today. This is a world where God is dead and all intellectual knowledge has, as a direct result of this death, lost legitimacy. Of course, these people cannot clearly identify what it means when there is Gnostic cultural dominance, when we live in a “Jewish Age”, but they are admitting that such dominance exists. This book is aimed at remedying that silence. This new era can be said to begin with the dropping of the atomic bomb at Trinity because the atomic bomb is perhaps the earliest expression of the kind of technological society in which we live in today. Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20 th century, definitely emphasised the mentality that informs the creation of the atomic bomb, one that sees everything in terms of how it can be utilized to serve human needs no matter how destructive, as a pivotal and epochal defining moment in human history. In his 1959 book, At the Time Wall, Ernst Junger argued that the new era we live in should be called the Anthropocene. The defining feature of the Anthropocene is that it is humanity who determines the shape of the world. As Junger wrote, The extent of human activity was however up to this point such that its geological examination appeared as a trick. That is changing. If bare patches of land appear in an

153 immeasurable forest region like that of the Amazon, on which stand some huts, it is meaningless for the larger balance. One individual kind of insect can intervene more deeply. If this mark however expands itself in such a manner that makes the forest disappear, then the axe, tools, determined the image of the area. Although here Junger is explicitly referring to the environmental impact, Junger is making a larger claim than merely the intensity and extent of human impact on the environment when naming our era the Anthropocene. Ultimately, he is trying to draw attention to how in today’s world what humanity values has become the only measure of value. If humanity does not “value” the forest, but requires a cleared space or “timber”, then this is how the space should be. This is how it will become what it is, something of value to humanity. As Gnostic Jew Eric Gutkind wrote, advocating for human valuing, “Man, values and things must be reintegrated, and man must reshape his environment in a spirit totally different from that of the past and present. He must do it himself: no one can relieve him of his task.” (Gutkind 1946: 6) Gutkind is asking that humanity needs to recognise themselves as the only valuer. God no longer has a role to play. It is because God is dead that Man must reshape the world in accordance with his values, his values not as a moral being, but his values as a utility maximising being. This way of thinking is harmonious with Eric Fromm’s claim that Judaism is a “humanist” religion in placing human valuing at the centre of meaning and creation. Gnostic Jews historically believed that the world should come forward according to human needs, as the only measure of value, and these authors, in the 1940s-1950s were unconcerned with environmentalism.112 From their perspective, everything loses its intrinsic value, as intuitively accessed and known implicitly, and becomes valued only in terms of human utility. This mindset is what marks the technological age, when everything comes to be seen in terms of utility and no longer as autonomously meaningful. Heidegger was extremely critical of such thinking and although acknowledged that it was a dominant way of thinking at the time, it was also extremely dangerous. Under such conditions, the world becomes meaningless, including humans themselves, except as a resource or what Heidegger called “standing reserve”. The loss of human value is verified with existing abortion laws and the tendency to introduce euthanasia laws. It is that the World and human beings become worthless and this is why Eric Voegelin suggested that our current age “would be better entitled the Gnostic Age” (Voegelin as seen in Blumenberg 1985: 126) or what DeConick (2016: 7) has called the “the Gnostic New Age”. Such titles acknowledge the centrality of gnostic thinking in shaping our contemporary encounter

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This, of course, was also Marx’s hope, that all values will no longer be exchange values, or market values, marked with a price, but things and people will be rightly seen in terms of their “use value”. There is no place in such a system for the sacred, the beautiful and the true. The opiate must be destroyed. Everything is reduced to a mere “value” and, as Heidegger observes, nobody is very concerned with “values”. What people care about, according to Heidegger, is truth.

154 with the world, a time when we understand reality and Man in thoroughly gnostic terms. To return to Junger’s suggestion, the Anthropocene, it draws attention to the reality that we have moved from a ‘Christ time’, (before Christ/anno Domini) where what was sacred to Christians determined reality, where God still spoke to us as we were prepared to listen, to the Anthropocene when God had, as the “prophet” of gnosticism (See Wilberg 2017), Martin Buber observed, fallen silent. As Postman wrote, for most of Western civilization, “. . .theology took as a first and last principle that all knowledge and goodness came from God, and that therefore all human enterprise must be directed towards the service of God. Theology, not technology, provided people with authorization for what to do or think.” (Postman 1993: 25-26) This is not just a post-Christian era, but a post-God era, a post-sacred era. A time when human valuing determines the nature of existence, again including human existence, exhaustively in terms of utility. This era is rightly identified in Junger’s terms as the Anthropocene. It will be shown in these volumes that the Anthropocene is the result of a political program where the aim of Gnostic Jewry is simply to increase their control over society so as to eventually achieve global dominion. If everybody thinks of themselves as instruments, think of themselves exhaustively as producers, most especially women, domesticate themselves without knowledge of virtues, then they can be more easily integrated into the economic system and manipulated to serve their master’s purposes. None other than C. S. Lewis observed that if there ever comes a generation that can determine how future generation think then that will realise a time when power is concentrated into the hands of those who control what people think. People do now, with the death of God, have the capacity to shape how we think and not only is power concentrated in the hands of a very few but, if nothing is done, they will be the last rulers we will ever have. Geologists announced that the earth entered the Anthropocene on July 16th, 1945, with the detonation of the first atomic bomb. Although other dates could be suggested, no better date could ultimately be found. That bomb, that dropped on [the] Trinity113, marked the start of a new epoch. As Jewish scientist who oversaw the project, J. Robert Oppenheimer famously wrote of this event, We knew the world would not be the same, A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

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To make this reference unambiguous, the Christian God is The Trinity. The dropping of the bomb, technology, on the trinity marks the end of era of Christ and the start of the Anthropocene. It is amazing how an atomic bomb was allowed to be dropped on a cite name “Trinity”. The whole exercise was overseen by Gnostic Jew Julius Robert Oppenheimer.

155 Although this passage is often quoted as being in some way substantial, few really seem to understand what Oppenheimer meant. The Bhagavad-Gita mainly consists of a dialogue between a warrior prince called Arjuna and his charioteer Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Lord Krishna is trying to persuade Arjuna to fight even though many who oppose him in the upcoming battle were once his friends. Krishna is arguing that Arjuna must fight because he has a holy duty, an unbreakable obligation to his god, to fight. What ultimately convinces Arjuna to engage in battle is when Krishna claims that Arjuna will not be personally responsible for the many deaths that result from the conflict, he will not be responsible for the death of his friends, as it will be Vishnu himself who ultimately decides who will live and who will die. By this account, it is not man who is responsible for deaths in a Holy War but the gods themselves. It is at this very stage in the exchange between Vishnu and Krishna that Vishnu changes form into Shiva, the sometime androgynous god of death and destruction, the Hindu version of Shechinah, who says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer is saying the lines of the God Shiva, the Shechinah, when he saw the mushroom cloud of the nuclear bomb that he was instrumental in realizing to make it clear that he had a holy duty to create the bomb, for his God(dess), but because it was a holy duty, he was not personally responsible for the many deaths that would result. Oppenheimer was making it clear that he was serving the god of death and destruction, like the Semitic goddess the Shechinah, and it was this God who would take responsibility for the deaths that would follow. Nietzsche argued that this was actually the true task of gods that come to earth, not just a God like the Shechinah but also properly Jesus, not to absolve humanity their responsibility by taking their punishment but to carry the guilt of Man, to bear responsibility themselves for humanity’s sins. As Nietzsche wrote, “the [ancient] gods served to justify man to a certain degree . . . they did not at that time take the punishment on themselves, but rather, as is nobler, the guilt.” Nietzsche is saying that the noblest act of a God is not, like Jesus, to take responsibility for Mankind’s sins, as it says in 2 Cor 5:21, “The one who knew no sin was made sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God”, but to bear responsibility. A noble God, Nietzsche suggests, should carry the guilt of Man, to live with the burden of Man’s guilt, not to take their punishment on their behalf. Vishnu is noble, by Nietzsche’s account, by taking responsibility for Oppenheimer’s actions. The Shechinah will bear the guilt for those who die and not Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer acknowledges that the is not responsible for what he has done because he was merely fulfilling his religious duty to serve the Shechinah. Once this obligation was fulfilled, he created the atomic bomb, it would now be used as his God saw fit. Only those God chose to die would now die. The goddess of death and destruction, the God/Goddess of war, should be more than satisfied with its destructive potential. The glee the Gnostic God would have felt, the joy in Lucifer’s heart as the mushroom cloud rose

156 over the desert on that day must have been immense. He must have laughed allowed at his new power. Jesus would have silently wept. He would have known that man had forgotten His message and were now ready to do evil. What is horrifying about Oppenheimer’s claim is what unimaginable evils could be committed by such a person who abdicated personal responsibility for his actions? One who left God all the guilt and took none on himself. What a terrible act of denial. It is a denial that is impossible for a Christian who is, as they know good and evil, rightfully individually responsible for everything that flows from their actions. For a Christian, there is nowhere to hide. It was the detonation of the atomic bomb which did indeed herald the New Era, the Anthropocene, but not just in geological terms but in theo-political terms. Gnostic Jews believe that they are entitled to the world because they believe, according to their interpretation of the Bible, that God promised it to them as the intermediaries between God and Man. Zion was never a country or region but was always, as it continues to be today, the entire world. China, who is currently working closely with the Gnostic Jews to realize Eastern dominance of the world, should be mindful that they are but a convenient tool to be done away with when the right time comes. As it says in the apocalyptic story told by Daniel as interpreted by Cohn, All that ever belonged to the great pagan empires will pass to the Jews whom Daniel has in mind. All, and more: for whereas each of those empires exercised its dominion only until it was replaced by another empire, no such fate is in store for the dominion exercised by these Jews: “Their kingly power is an everlasting power” – or, in the even more explicit words of chapter 2, “their kingdom shall never pass to another people; it shall shatter and make an end of all these kingdoms, while it shall itself endure forever.” (Cohn 2001: 173) The defining feature of the Anthropocene is the end of a binding truth. Humanity lacks the standing, the authority, the grandeur as the foundation of truth despite what the Gnostic Jews may claim, and so when we move to the Anthropocene what is lost first, and last, is truth. As Jung observed, “everything becomes relative and therefore doubtful.” (Jung 1955: 211) As the sage of Gnostic Judaism, Martin Buber, observed as recounted by Marvin Fox, Professor Buber seems to feel that the problem is especially acute in our own time, because now more than ever, “False absolutes rule over the soul, which is no longer able to put them to flight through the image of the true.” In other ages of human history men were also subject to the danger of confusing the one true voice with crude imitations. Yet they had, according to Buber, some more-or-less valid image of the Absolute to which they could appeal, and which could serve as a control. In our day we have lost this capacity to form even crudely valid images of the Absolute; “the image-making power of the human heart has been in decline so that the spiritual pupil can no longer catch a glimpse of the appearance of the Absolute.” (Fox 1991: 166)

157 Buber is claiming that humanity, in his time, no longer had the power to fabricate a God that will allow claims of truth, a clear vision of the Absolute, to stand so we have moved into a post-truth condition. We live in a time when humanity now appears as the measure of all things, the Anthropocene. The atomic bomb metaphorically ripped apart the Christian experience of God, sent the trinity into oblivion, and, therefore, ripped apart the fabric of reality itself. Socrates fear had at last been realised, logos was dead. That explosion launched a technological age where humanity appeared to be the measure of all things and truth was no longer persuasive. As Stenmark et al., wrote, Over the last decade or so, objectivity and truth have fallen on hard times in late-modern societies. Instead, we have entered a kind of post-truth condition where sceptical, relativistic and truth-indifferent attitudes increasingly dominate intellectual, public and social life, a condition where “nothing is true, and everything is possible”. (Stenmark, Fuller and Zackariasson 2018: 1) In truth, as Jung observed, “Whenever relativism is taken as a fundamental and final principle it has a destructive effect.” (1955: 215) Again, contrast this to Christian commitments, as a positive religion, to an enduring reality and objective truth. It is surprising how quickly the notion of “post-truth” or, its equivalent, “post-modernity” has been embraced by the intellectual elite and how casually we have walked away from the sacred borders, the peras, of ‘truth’ as though they never had a claim over our lives, “. . .things are in such a state of decay that people do not even care about truth anymore”. (Zackariasson 2018) It is as though truth was not something that was once cherish as the most valued thing of all. People, not that long ago, as Heidegger observed, would readily die for truth. As Jones observes, Prior to the 1960s there was a sense of universal truth. In fact, it was this very sense of moral imperative that inspired thousands to willingly sacrifice their lives in the defeat of Nazi Germany. . . Without a common moral principle to guide it, society has only seen more crime, despair, and conflict. (Jones 2019) Now we act as though the entire concept, the entire enterprise, that claims of truth informed, was an embarrassing mistake and no longer of consequence. As Nietzsche observed decades before this catastrophic event, God is dead simply because we killed Him. Humanity made the bomb that marked the death of God but no bomb, even one as devastating as an atomic bomb can kill God. Today we are evermore remote, not only from God, not only from meaning and purpose that were God’s gifts, but we are increasingly remote from each other and therefore eroding the living, vibrant communities that were constituted through our shared experience of the ‘good, the beautiful and the true’. Today we live in a Weberian disenchanted world like no other. It is therefore a shadow world populated by ghosts. Most importantly, it is space that is devoid of substantial meaning. The world of meaning, granted through the

158 grace of God, a gift for which nothing is asked in return, has been replaced by an utterly ‘mechanistic soulless worldview’. Our measures of ‘better’ is not informed by gods or even by culture but by technocrats, and I really do mean technocrats in the fullest meaning of this word. These technocrats tell us what to feel, what to think, what to believe, what to strive for, who to be, even what happened in the past. We live in a technocratic age, and because technology serves man it is best known as the Anthropocene. What has been presented in the previous sections has been the crisis of Western civilization, to attribute that crisis to a theo-political movement that can be called Gnostic Judaism, the historical development of Gnostic Judaism, the basic theology of Gnostic Judaism, and then the most important consequence of Gnostic Judaism, the erosion of Western ontology, the post-truth condition that might be called the Anthropocene. Beyond revealing a secret religious movement that opposes all positive religions including Orthodox Judaism, what is discovered is the foundational beliefs of Western civilization. Western civilization is not rightly understood as being a liberal tradition, committed to democracy, openness and diversity but is best understood as being founded upon a unique, onto-theology that claims that reality consists of a foundation “reality/truth”, as a domain of pure potential, that is accessed through reason/dialogue which is not an expression of power because it seeks consent. Although these commitments can be found expressed throughout the Western Christian tradition, it was first voiced by pre-Socratic Greek philosophers and then clarified by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Because this theo-ontology is the foundation of Western civilization, it is this which is the primary target of Gnostic Jewry. Gnostic Jews have managed to successfully convince a large section of the population that this onto-theology, rather than being a way to secure truth, is nothing but an expression of white, male, Christian power. It is “authoritarian” and any consensus secured through discourse, according to Gnostics like Lyotard, is itself “authoritarian”. (Preparata 2011: 117) Gnostic Jews have argued since the Second World War that it is this onto-theology, as an expression of white, male, Christian power, that is authoritarian at its core and therefore it is this onto-theology that must be dismantled if people are to live freely in the world. What these very same thinkers, people like Freud, Gross, Einstein, Trotsky, Gutkind, Fromm, Durkheim, Adorno, Derrida, Horkheimer, Lyotard, Friedman, Friedan, Marcuse, and Klein, to list just a few of the better-known exponents of these ideas, is that they are advancing their own theo-political agenda that worships a Goddess and is opposed to everything that the West has ever proposed. As Marcuse wrote of Freud but is true of all these thinkers and many more besides, “The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization . . .” (Marcuse 1974: 12) We are actually yet to discover if Freud’s real ideas are indeed as irrefutable as Marcuse is

159 proposing as they have never been clearly stated for refutation without the screen of deception. These people, in the most basic terms, believe that the Western onto-theology is just an expression of male power, “patriarchy” or “whiteness”, and that these ideas have imposed a particular account of realty upon the vast majority of society and then justified this imposition through the fabrication of a false God. . . Jesus. The strategy to overcome this oppressive system, according to Gnostic Judaism, is to realize the opposite of Western civilization. If the West worships a male God then they will worship a female God, if the West proposes a patriarchy then they advocate a matriarchy, if the West values reason then they will value emotions, if the West values chastity then they will advocate for promiscuity, if the West marginalizes the voice of children then they will amplify the voice of children, if the West believes in the primacy of the nuclear family then they will do everything in our power to destroy the institution of the nuclear family . . . It is this thorough going reversal of all existing values, redemption through sin, that is the crisis of Western civilization. What I hope is achieved with the publication of this volume above all else is that we can start to have a constructive, reasonable conversation, logos, about if our current direction is the best road to take. Gnostic Jews above all have done everything that they can to shut down opposition, to stop the necessary discussion, the destroy academia itself so that no intelligentsia can emerge that might question their understanding of reality that is being imposed on the world. This is exactly why, whenever these people have gained power, the Ukraine in the mid-17th century, the Soviet Union in the first half of the 20th century, contemporary United States, they have overseen a period of terrible surveillance, control, and violence, so only their voice is heard. The rule of Gnostic Jews necessarily results in oppression because it is necessarily an elitist, closed body of knowledge as such it is never introduced through persuasion but can only be achieved through violence. Gnostic Jewish domination always results in catastrophe for those over whom they have asserted control. With the publication of this volume, the hope is not that violence will be perpetrated against Gnostic Jews but that a discussion can commence that will be informed about what is being lost, why it is being lost and what is hoped to be achieved and why. If people choose to continue with the direction that we have been following for the last 70 years, then so-be-it, but if it is to be true to the Western tradition then that project should be made explicit, open to critical scrutiny and if those ideas are found wanting then we can perhaps choose another direction, one that is true, perhaps, to the prince of peace. Antisemitism or Anti-oppressor Before bringing this introduction to a conclusion, there is a need to consider the accusation, one which will most certainly be made if this book is ever released to the public, that this entire argument is just “antisemitism”. Accusations that “Jews” are trying to take over the world have been brought against

160 the Jewish people broadly since at least the 3rd century BC in the work of people like Manetho and Lysimachus. The oldest existing mention of Jews was an ancient Egyptian text which expressed the hope that the Jews would soon be annihilated. As Isaac Leeser, a Jewish community leader, wrote in an essay titled “The Jews and their Religion” in 1844, The Jews, and their predecessors the Israelites, have been always regarded with suspicion, and not rarely with aversion, by those who hold opinions different from them . . . One would suppose that the Judeophobia must be owing to some monstrous doctrines which the Jewish religion contains, which would render its professors dangerous to the state as unsafe citizens or rebellious subjects, by teaching them to imbrue their hands in blood, or to plunder the unwary of their possessions. Perhaps calumny has asserted these things; perhaps ignorance may have imagined that this could be so. But how stands the case? Despite Jews generally being marginalized at times by those amongst whom they have lived, it should already be clear by what has been written so far that “Jews” are not even the concern of this publication. The subject matter of this document is with the theology and political activity of a heretical religious sect that emerged, quite recently, from within the broader Jewish community. This distinction, of course, between what might be termed Orthodox Jews and Gnostic Jews, is of the utmost importance and one many Jews themselves have asked Gentiles to recognise for decades. It is claimed later in this volume that, although Gnostic Jews do indeed self-identify as “Jews” they actually do everything that they can to destroy rabbinic Judaism. As vocal Orthodox Jewish critic of this movement, Mavin Antelman, observes from an orthodox perspective, “Judaism has no branches. There is one Torah and one God . . .” (Antelman 2018) Indeed, I would go so far as to say that this book is almost as much a defence of Orthodox Judaism as it is a defence of Western civilization against the shared opponent of Gnosticism. This volume’s purpose is to reveal the activities of a theo-political movement whose exposure would benefit Orthodox Jews at least as much as Christians. Despite this important distinction, some may still claim that this text is, simply by observing the disproportionate power held by anyone identifying as “Jewish”, that this alone justifies the accusation of anti-Semitism. As the internationally accepted definition of antisemitism states, antisemitism today includes “. . .stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective – such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world conspiracy of Jews controlling the media, economy or other societal institutions”. As is so often the case for those who do indeed rule, it is informative to explore what you are not allowed to discuss because here, more often than not, lies the truth. For centuries in Europe there were laws in relation to lèse-majesté or “to do wrong to majesty”. Laws regarding lèse-majesté were intended to curtail criticisms of royalty. You were not allowed to claim that

161 the royalty had too much power or that they held too much wealth. Were such criticisms a crime because they were false or because such criticisms were, in fact, true? Why, one may ask, if there is no truth to accusations or criticisms is there a need to create laws to make such criticisms or accusations illegal? After all, as has been made clear, I could claim “White people” have too much power, that they are privileged from birth just because of the colour of their skin and demand that they renounce their power to “people of colour” and such arguments would not even be judged on their merit but simply accepted. There simply are no laws against making such claims. Indeed, quite the opposite. If you want an academic career in the West today in the arts or social sciences, then it is certainly beneficial to make such claims. A response to this kind of argument, at least in the case of “Jews”, might be to say that accusations against Jews are unique because such claims have led to such terrible consequences in the past, as Bloomfield suggests, “The term Jew has been used as a term of abuse, a curse and an accusation for centuries. It expresses the anti-Semite’s virulent and unreasoning hatred and contempt and has so often been the preliminary of attacks, pogroms, persecutions and death.” (Bloomfield 1996: 26) That is, accusations against Jews have led to violence in the past. But here we move to an interesting and unique point in considering accusations against Jews, what should be considered as evidence to support such claims? As Bloomfield observes, there have been claims that Jews have suffered uniquely in history, especially at the hands of Christians, but is there empirical evidence to support such claims? This question cannot be addressed here but is considered later in this volume. Now it is adequate to observe that a quick affirmation to this question, Jews have indeed uniquely suffered unjustified persecution, cannot be easily given. What can be said with confidence is that accusations of malice have long been levelled against Jews, uniquely, for thousands of years. Even before the birth of Jesus, Jews were accused by the Greeks of being misanthropes. That these accusations have continuously been levelled against Jews, time and again, is never thought to be evidence that such accusation might carry some merit but, as with Bloomfield, the opposite. It is claimed that because Jews have continuously been accused of malice against those amongst whom they live that this is evidence that such claims are ridiculous. It seems the argument is that the longer the historical accusations have been brought against Jews for being misanthropic, the more reasonable it is to label such accusation as “anti-Semitism”. As is often the case, evidence that might be used to substantiate claims of misanthropic activity are instead used to delegitimize such accusations. To understand the function of the accusation of antisemitism, it is interesting to first consider contemporary attitudes towards religion in general. The truth is that an author could develop a reasonably sophisticated criticism of Christianity, on moral or even theological grounds, express those views freely in the public sphere, write a book about it, get it published, and it would not only not attract any sanction

162 but, as such claims are so common, it would attract very little attention. Christians, even those embedded within its formal institutions, seem either to be no longer able, or at least so disenchanted, that they are no longer willing to even deny such accusations. Indeed, a female paster, from within institutionalized Christianity, asked in a recently published book, “We also ask if there are central parts of our tradition that are not moral or holy. How do we respond to a tradition that has justified slavery, the hatred of nonChristians, the slaughter of Jews, and the denial of women’s full humanity.114 (Miles 1999: 11) Here is a Christian paster questioning if her highly questionable list of things “justified” by Christianity are not immoral? Reading this I wonder who could be a member of this woman’s congregation? Pastor Miles, though, is not alone in expressing such sentiments. A Jewish American Hollywood director, Marshall Brickman, suggested recently, while defending his dark satirical comedy Sister Mary Explains It All, that

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Once again very dubious claims passed as though they are undeniable facts not requiring substantiation. Although full engagement with these issues would require at least an extended essay if not a full volume, some quick responses to these claims can be proposed. To the accusation of supporting slavery, every religious tradition has participated in slavery. As Sleeper observes (1994) Arab Muslims invented the sub-Saharan slave trade, European Christians institutionalized it in terms of a trans-Atlantic slave trade, indigenous Africans initially captured and supplied slaves from other tribes while funding for the slave trade was supplied by Sephardic Jews who owned Brazilian sugar plantations that operated using slaves. Why do Christians get picked out of this ensemble for special attention? Indeed, according to Harold Brackman (1977), Jews ran the global slave trade, justified by what is written in the Talmud as the curse on the descendants of Ham, for hundreds of years, from the 8th to the 12th centuries AD. There is certainly nothing in the Christian Testament that might be used to affirm slavery. Christian societies were the first to make slavery illegal. Indeed, as Green (2008) observes, one of the main moral justifications for expanding the British Empire was to abolish slavery. Some religious traditions continue to support slavery and it is believed to be practiced in the Muslim Middle East even today. Christianity has proven itself to be the least tolerant religion of slavery. To the accusation that Christianity taught hatred of non-believers, this again is a common feature of all religions. If properly understood, and a Pastor should know the differences, opposition to another religious tradition is, in some respects, only right. As is revealed in religious texts, religious beliefs are not arbitrary and, as should already be evident, certainly not irrelevant. Not all religions are the same or equal. It really does matter what religion you practice. The problem is that Christianity has forgotten that this is the case. Despite it being the case that all religions should promote their own beliefs, Christianity was less brutal than most faiths towards those of other faiths because of the central role of the intellect. As part of its core teachings, Christianity at least tried to convert through persuasion using the best argument, consistent with their theology, and therefore did not generally convert by the sword like Islam. I am not sure that Christianity as an institution has ever supported the “slaughter of Jews”, as part of Christianity’s relatively tolerant attitude towards those who practice other religions. Many non-Christians, most noticeably Jews, found sanctuary in Christian Europe and some Jewish communities absolutely thrived. Jews could have lived anywhere in the world but predominantly chose to live in Christian countries. Finally, Christianity gives women higher standing than any other religions that I am familiar with. It at least recognizes women as equals before God and, therefore, having equal morally responsible. Orthodox Judaism and Islam, by contrast, both believe that women are the moral responsibility of men, transferred from father to husband, because women simply cannot be moral. In these Semitic religions, women worship in a separate space to men acknowledging their different status. Again, by the distorted vision by which people see the world today, Christianity took a different strategy in seeing woman as morally equal and for this reason women have always worshipped besides men as morally equal. Relative to any other religious tradition, Christians should be proud of their past and not so quick to embrace shallow, largely incorrect, criticisms such as these.

163 unapologetically attacks the Catholic Church, was acceptable because, “. . . any institution that backed the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Roman position on the Holocaust deserves to be the butt of a couple of jokes.” (as seen in Jenkins 2003: 2) Again, Christianity is portrayed as having an extremely immoral past and this history of immorality permits contemporary attacks, whether they be in movies, books or, indeed, works of history. For just one example, when considering the supposed immorality of “Christian theology” and how this functioned alongside “whiteness” to nurture the Atlantic slave trade, the “historian” Kristopher Norris claimed, “. . . what led European Christianity to such depths of depravity? As the names of the slave ships sailing on that “wave of symbolism” suggest, the white supremacy that animated the institution of slavery was rooted in Christian theology and promoted by Christian churches.” (Norris 2020) The practice of slavery, according to Norris, was rooted in Christian theology which also informs “white supremacy”. Surprisingly, Norris does not substantial these brazen claims beyond observing the Christian names of the ships being used in the slave trade. Despite the total absence of evidence, Norris’ book attracted no particular critical attention questioning if his conclusions were, indeed, true. Contrast this silence to another book on slavery, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which claimed that Jews were actually deeply involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and were significant owners of slaves in the United States prior to the American Civil War. Just like Norris’s accusations against Christianity, this volume claims that there are links between Jewish theological beliefs, as presented in Torah, and slavery. Unlike Norris’ book, this book gives both quantitative and qualitative evidence to support the claims made, such as specifically detailing the actual involvement of Jews in the American slave trade and giving textual evidence from the Torah to support linking slavery to Judaism. Unlike Norris’ book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews was placed under intense critical scrutiny. Every quote used in the book was thoroughly checked. Every statistical claim analysed to find fault if not in substance, then in intent, so as to at least recast the “evidence” so that it did not appear to be so damning of Jews. The point is not that the claims in The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews is either true or false but that the level of critical scrutiny, the outrage, that met the publication of this volume was so much greater than when there are unsubstantiated criticism of Christianity. As Prof. Tony Martin discovered after revealing that Jews were more involved in the global slave trade then had previously been thought discovered. He observed, Here am I, a professor in a very small college, teaching a class of maybe 30 students, but they attached such great importance to this, that within a very short space of time the major Jewish organizations became involved, and it became a national event. For example, one Sunday morning on the ABC network television program “This Week With David Brinkley,” there was a whole segment dealing with this question -- about my telling my students that Jews were involved in the slave trade. (Martin 2002)

164 To be clear, this was not a response to published material but a response to lecture content. In contrast to claims made by people like Tony Martin who, as he observed, made his claims to a very small group of students at a very minor institution but, despite this, attracted National attention, the published claims made by Norris were simply accepted as statements of facts and attracted no criticism. How a claim is treated depends a lot on who is making the claim. A Jewish author can, as Steven Gimble does, identify links between Einstein’ theory of relativity, which he suggests, “is Jewish science after all” (Gimble 2013) and not attract any critical attention. A Jewish author can claim that Jewish ideas shaped the American psyche of the late 20th century, as Andrew Heinze does, and, again, such claim are met only with academic awards. As Heinze wrote, “Jewish interpreters of the psyche . . . hoped to move public values in a direction that would produce the kind of society they wanted to inhabit.” (Heinze 2004: 5) A Jewish author can claim that Jewish thinking has been extremely influential in shaping the world, as Yuri Slezkine does, and nothing critical is even raised. A Jewish author can identify resonances between the work of Freudian psychology and Judaism, as Joshua Liebman does, and it is heralded as insightful. An author can celebrate the fact that Jews not only founded Hollywood but ran Hollywood ensuring that there were positive portrayals of Jews on American screens, as Neal Gabler does, and the volume is praised. If a non-Jew criticises the fact that Einstein and Freud’s ideas were shaped by Judaism, that Jews were too influential in shaping the post-World War II intellectual landscape, that Jews intrigued to shape the way the world thinks or that Jews run Hollywood to reflect their own values and, if such claims even become public, one is instantly accused of anti-Semitism. The point is that it is not what is said but who says it. If a Jew proudly identified how Jews expressed their entrepreneurial spirt through the slave trade, then the volume would be praised. If, of course, one is critical of Jews involvement in the slave trade, even though the substantive claim is the exact same, then it is an expression of anti-Semitism. This means in practice that if you are a Jew then you can publish material and get praised for producing that material when a gentile would not only probably not get published but if he did he would be sharply, brutally criticised. This is just one example amongst many that could be given where theology, not merit, determines success. It is also true that Christianity has been historically more tolerant of non-believers than Islam or Judaism.115 No better example of this tolerance can be found than with the general treatment of Jews in Europe. In Muslim countries, by contrast, until Western imperialism in the 19th century, Jews “. . . were by law and by tradition ranked far below the Muslims; they had to wear distinctive clothing; they could not

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As evidenced by the fact that Jews chose to live in Christian Europe instead of anywhere else in the world and that it took a great deal of effort, from non-Christian sources, to manipulate European Jews to leave the comfort and security of their European homes and move to Palestine.

165 ride horses or carry swords; they had no standing in the courts when testifying against Muslims; and they were subject to additional taxes.” (Frankel 1997: 32) When it is appreciated that throughout history, although rarely mentioned, Christians, especially Christian monarchs, have formally and in practice opposed harm to Jews and have been extremely active in ensuring Jews are not only safe but, at the request of rabbinic leaders, helped ensure that Jews conformed to their traditions. That is why Jews chose to live in Europe and not Africa, the Middle East or Asia. As Russian-American Jew Harry Waton, certainly no friend of the West, wrote in 1938116, “Nowhere else on the face of the earth did the Jews preserve themselves, Judaism, and their culture, as well as, in the Christian countries, and among the Christians”. (Waton 1938” 5) Although Waton specifically states, “preserve themselves” in order to credit Jews with their own success and not merit Christians, in truth a lot of the credit should go to Christianity. Indeed, the narrative that Christianity was particularly oppressive against Judaism is, again, of recent minting. In truth, the oft made claims that Christianity uniquely endorsed slavery, is intrinsically anti-Semitic or suppresses women, are all unfounded. For another example, the Catholic Church is continuously portrayed as having been somehow sympathetic with Nazi anti-Semitism despite many Catholic Priests being sent, some dying, to the concentration camps for defending and protecting Jews. Pope Pius XI unequivocally denounced anti-Semitism in 1938, the high-water mark of Nazism, by stating that “it is not possible for Christians to take part in anti-Semitism”. It is simply impossible to be an anti-Semite and a Christian, especially a Catholic Christian. The truth is that Nazism was nearly as anti-Christian, which it thought was effeminate and destructive to the Teutonic masculine ideal, as it was “antisemitic”. Psudeofascist thinkers such as Julius Evola argued that Christianity undermined the active warrior mentality of pre-Christian Pagan West that was the primary cause for the West’s decline. Furlong (2011: 42) argued that, according to Evola, “The role of Christianity in undermining this [warrior ethic] and replacing it with an illusory contemplative ethic had been crucial in the decline of the tradition in the West. . . This was because he thought the kingly warrior ethic more appropriate for the West.” That Christianity, like Judaism, was thought to be so crucial in undermining the masculine, military ideal of the West meant that fascist governments around the world in the years prior to the war were strongly opposed to Christianity. As Berdyaev rightly observed, “. . .the fact that German anti-Semitism evolved into anti-Christianity must be considered highly significant. . .” (Berdyaev 1954: 2) Berdyaev is observing the historical fact that Nazi anti-Semitism did indeed morph into anti-Christian sentiments as evidence that Christianity was incompatible with anti-Semitism. Nazis idealized a pre-Christian West which they thought combined

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At the peak of Nazism in Germany, Waton’s country of origin.

166 militarism and the sacred in masculine action. For this reason, they generally preferred the currently popular neo-Paganism as more authentic to their vision of a Western ideal. (Preparata 2005: 133) As none other than German Jew Leo Strauss, who again personally expressed a great deal of animosity towards Christianity, observed, “The Nazis’ system was based on the notion of the Aryan. I mean, it was no longer a Christian Germany, it was to be an Aryan Germany.”117 The Nazis turned their backs on Christianity, after all the “anti-Christ” Nietzsche was the “philosopher of the Nazis”, yet, despite this, people continuously claim today that Christians supported or participated in Nazi anti-Semitism. As Catholicism explicitly opposed anti-Semitism and the Nazis loathed Christianity why does Brickman so unequivocally and unconditionally claim, as though stating an undeniable historical fact, that Christianity was responsible for the mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis during World War II? Of course, there have been many examples of strident attacks on Christianity. In 1989, one hundred and thirty homosexual protesters from the group “ACT UP”, founded and funded by American Jewish “Gay Rights” activist Larry Kramer, demonstrated during mass at New York’s St Patrick’s Cathedral. As part of the protest, a group of activists forced their way into the Church during mass yelling at the Cardinal hosting the service that he was a “bigot” and “murderer”. Among the slogans chanted by the protesters, during one of Catholicism’s most sacred ceremonies, was, “You say, don’t fuck; we say, fuck you!” Not very imaginative, after all it does not even rhyme, but extremely vulgar and vulgarity in the face of what some found sacred was obviously their intent. Like naughty boys lacking the maturity of selfconstraint and decency to respect other’s beliefs, they simply wanted to be vulgar. Most confronting to believers, one protester grabbed a communion wafer, threw it to the ground and stamped his foot on it. (Jenkins 2003: 3) Although it was not recorded who actually performed this sacrilegious act, this kind of behaviour has historically been known as a “desecration of the Host”. Desecration of the Host involves obtaining communion wafers, thought to be the transubstantiate body of Christ, and stabbing, burning, or stomping on it as a way of re-enacting the crucifixion of Christ. Were these “protesters” called out as “Christian haters” or even criticised for being intolerant of those who expressed an opposing view? Not at all. Today this event is praised as one of the defining moments in the “Gay Rights movement” when

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As will be explored later in this volume, this claim is NOT TRUE. Germany remained a Christian country and most people continued to support tolerant Christian principles. The Nazis never received more than 22% of the popular vote and that was falling at the time that they seized power. Despite the contradictory way that some like to present Germany in the mid to late 1930, as both consisting of Christian anti-Semites and as a people who had forsaken Christianity to embrace “Aryanism”, the truth is that the German majority remained Christian and were not passionate anti-Semites. What is true is that the Nazis had turned away from Christianity to Aryanism and this is significant.

167 brave protesters fought against oppression. It has not been remembered by history as an expression of hatred and intolerance, a victory for barbarity, but of liberation. History has actually marked this “protest”, ironically, as a victory for “tolerance” over “bigotry”.118 In contrast to the various forms of Christianity and their beliefs, one simply cannot criticise Judaism. One can observe that particular Jews have too much power or wealth, or that particular Jews are behaving in a morally abhorrent way, many documentaries explore the crimes, violence and theft by Jews, but one is most definitely not allowed to extrapolate from these particular observations, no matter how many Jews are involved, that such acts are being carried out by “Jews” as “Jews”. It is this association, above all, that accusations of anti-Semitism hope to silence. That individual behaviour might be part of an organized movement acting as Jews, but this is simply not allowed to be voiced. One can readily say, for example, that Hollywood promotes violence and encourages a sexually liberated lifestyle, as D’Souza observes, in Hollywood, Children are usually wiser than their parents and teachers, who are often portrayed as fools and bunglers. Homosexuals are typically presented as good-looking and charming, and unappealing features of the gay lifestyle are either ignored or presented in an amusing light. As countless movie plots confirm, the white businessman in the suit is usually the villain. Prostitutes are always portrayed more favorably and decently than anyone who criticizes them. Small towns are the preferred venue for evil and scary occurrences, and country pastors are usually portrayed as vicious, hypocritical, sexually repressed, and corrupt. Notwithstanding the occasional appearance of the stereotypical Elmer Gantry, nobody goes to church. Religion is simply not a feature of the lives of movie and television characters. Lots of film and T.V. characters have pre-marital sex, but very rarely does anyone contract a sexually transmitted disease. “Prudes” are always the subject of jokes and ridicule. One of the central themes of American movies and television is the glamorization of adultery. Adultery is almost always portrayed sympathetically, so that if a woman cheats on her husband, the husband is generally shown to be vicious, unscrupulous, abusive, impotent, or in some way deserving of the fate that befalls him. (D’Souza 2007) You are allowed to observe this of Hollywood, but you are not allowed to associate this behaviour with “Jews” as then it would become anti-Semitic. What the army of Jewish advocacy groups diligently police, and Christianity has a very small voice in comparison, is any attempt to move from observing certain behaviours, even if done by Jews, with Judaism. It is with this step, by definition, that one becomes an anti-Semite and to be accused of being an antisemite is, as Dr Stephanie Carp observed in a recent article, “the harshest judgment you can make . . . about someone”. One can observe that there are numerous

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After all, it was not the Christians storming a place where gay people gathered and telling them not to practice their beliefs.

168 European scholars who are passionately opposed to Western, Christian, civilization, but you are not allowed to associate these very same scholars, even if they self-identify in these terms, as being “Jews” because it is at this very point that one becomes an anti-Semite. The real definition of anti-Semitism is to be critical of Jews in any way including that they have a particular agenda or that they wield too much power. This is surprisingly close to the generally accepted definition of “antisemitism” which is, “a hostility to, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews . . . Antisemitism is generally considered to be a form of racism.” Of course, these arguments are having a significant impact on society at large. Recent research showed that people are much more sensitive to criticism of Judaism then criticism of any other religious traditions including their own. (Karpowitz et al. 2016) By contrast, generalized accusations are brought against “Christianity” in the mainstream media, on YouTube, and at universities, every single day. There is no demand when crude, simplistic or even erroneous claims are made against Christianity that such claims are motivated out of racial hatred. Even in the 1970s and 80s, Christianity was still generally respected, and one could criticise particular Christians, for not living up to the Christian ideal, but Christianity itself remained above criticism. Westerners thought that Christianity was a positive force in the world that had generally made a positive contribution to Mankind. How things have changed. Christianity today is all things evil. It does not need to be stated that this is for us all to have accepted the Gnostic Jewish narrative. No wonder nobody wants to be a Christian anymore. Christiantiy is portrayed as some kind of paedophilic cult aiming to corrupt the youth. As Jenkins observes, In 2002, the furore over child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy provoked a public outpouring of anti-Church and anti-Catholic vituperation on a scale not witnessed in this country since the 1920s. Reasonable and justified critiques of misconduct by particular Church authorities segued effortlessly into grotesque attacks on the Catholic Church as an institution, together with sweeping denunciations of Catholic faith and practice. (Jenkins 2003: 2) More recently Christianity is portrayed as a white supremist movement that was sympathetic with Nazism or that Christianity encouraged slavery. These claims are just untrue. Today you can criticise Christianity in a way that you simply cannot criticise any other religious tradition. Christianity has literally become the genesis of all evil. The truth is that today what should rightly be called anti-Judaism, which should be acceptable, is now wrongly identified as anti-Semitism. The move from anti-Judaism to anti-Semitism does not need to be justified or substantiated because, just like the world is round, the claim that Christianity is antisemitic is now just accepted as true. This does not even begin to touch upon the fact that almost all material published by Jews on religious matters and much, much more, psychoanalysis, economics, sociology,

169 political theory etc., are all either implicitly or explicitly critical of Christianity but nothing at all is ever said about Judaism being anti-Christian no matter racist against white people. Ester Freud, for example, a descendent of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, recently wrote a book highly critical of Christian attitudes to unwed mothers in the 1960s called, I Couldn’t Love You More. The book explores the way single mothers were treated by the Catholic Church in Ireland. The title itself, of course, is to draw attention to the Christian idea of “love” and how that claim of “love” has justified what we would think of as cruelties today. This is a transparent and explicit attack against Christianity by a Jewish author and yet nobody would dare suggest that her writing is motivated by her hatred of Christianity. She is thought to be just an historian documenting the cruelty of Catholic Ireland. Nor would anyone dare suggest that her advocacy for the kind of permissive society that we increasingly live-in today reflects her theology. One might respond and say that what Ester Freud published is acceptable because it is true, but this would be to affirm my point. You cannot publish critical true claim against Jews without being labelled an “antiSemite”. After all, there are plenty of cruelties perpetrated in Jewish societies against women who had children out of wedlock in the same decade, in the 1960s, and yet she does not write of those. Indeed, reading material produced by Jews, as Jewish authors like Shlomo Sands also observes, shows them to be blind when it comes to critical self-reflection but are only too eager to highlight mistakes or cruelties in Christianity’s past. Indeed, it is usually the case that when legitimate criticisms of Jews are made then it is quickly characterized as racism. As Rashid Khalidi (2016) recently stated in relation to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, “Whatever the Palestinians have done, is portrayed in terms of mindless violence against Jews out of some kind of primaeval anti-Semitism. No sense of how this started where the animus comes from, it’s completely inexplicable in the way it is generally presented . . .” Jewish violence is presented in terms of being a reasonable response to Palestinian violence while Palestinian violence portrayed as simply irrational barbarism. The same is true of Cossack’s treatment of Jews in the 16th century, or the Russian’s treatment of Jews in the 19th century or the German treatment of Jews in the 20th century. Jews are the innocent victims who did absolutely nothing to bring the wrath of others down upon them. Any anger towards Jews is explained in terms of mindless, racist bloodlust. The allimportant context, the reasons, for these actions against Jews are quickly forgotten to history. The truth is that any opposition to Judaism, no matter what form or for what reason, is quickly labelled as antiSemitism. In the 1980s, Paul McCloskey argued that the “Israel Lobby” was, . . . an obstacle for Mideast peace . . . If the U.S. is to work effectively toward peace in the Mideast, the power of the lobby must be recognized and countered in open and fair debate. I had hoped that the American Jewish community had matured to the point where

170 its lobbying efforts could be described and debated without raising the red flag of antiSemitism. (McCloskey as seen in Findley 1985: 53) These measured words were met with a barrage of invective. In the San Francisco Examiner, Paul Greenberg claimed that McCloskey’s rather measured words actively revealed him to be a notorious antisemite in the mould of outspoken “antisemite” Gerald Smith. Douglas Bloomfield, of the notorious American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), wrongly accused McCloskey of having “an intense sense of hostility” towards Jews. It is not even anger towards Jews that attracts the accusation of “antiSemitism” but, as the definition says, any kind of criticism. This contextualizing of everything critical of Judaism and Jews as anti-Semitism becomes particularly troubling when researching legitimate concerns about people who identify as Jews because legitimate research gets quickly cast as anti-Semitism. That every criticism of Jews, as Jews, is labelled as anti-Semitism, stops any kind of legitimate research because all material that might be used to inform legitimate research that is critical of Jews has already been labelled as anti-Semitism. To cite this material quickly attracts the criticism that the research has drawn on recognised anti-Semitic material. There is a dangerous circularity that stops legitimate research. There simply is no way out. As you cannot reference anti-Semitic research then anything critical of Jews, as Jews, cannot then be sourced no matter how legitimate that prior research. And this has been happening with increasing effectiveness for over a hundred years. The obvious question is why is nobody allowed to criticise Jews? I can be critical of Australia and people, including Australians, often express such criticisms. I can be critical of China, despite their best efforts to replicate Jewish exceptionalism by labelling all criticisms of China as “racism”, and many authors continue to be critical. I can criticise America, Russia, Catholics, Muslims . . . but nobody is allowed to criticise Jews. Even Christians are not allowed to criticise Judaism despite it being true that Jews are clearly, systematically and formally, antagonistic against Christianity.119

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Early in the process of researching material for this project, I experienced Jewish hatred of Christianity firsthand. I joined into an exchange with an American Jewish organization which claimed to inform people about the truth of Judaism. The person I was teamed with was a published, highly respected, Jewish academic. Despite his standing, this author expressed nothing but a deep hatred of Christ and Christianity. His hatred ran so deep that he refused to write Christ’ name, even in an email, but would instead replace His name with an X (which cast Xmas in a whole new light). His strong animosity towards Christianity absolutely surprised and shocked me. I’d not heard such attitudes expressed on religious matters at any other time in my life. I’ve literally spoken to hundreds of Christians, Catholic Priests, senior Protestant Pastors and I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything like the level of hatred towards Judaism that this Jewish academic expressed towards Christianity. He honestly loathed Christ and Christianity with a passion. This hatred infused everything that he wrote. By contrast, Jewish authors, like Martin Buber, are often positively referenced in Christian sermons and this use is perfectly acceptable today. I cannot speak of the past, but today, Christian’s believe that Jesus was a Jew, that it was the Romans who killed Christ, and, increasingly, it is argued that the entire Christian tradition is nothing but a terrible misunderstanding of its Jewish origins. In fact, Jews are often invited to speak to the congregations to help correct these misunderstandings. Despite this, somehow, it is Christianity today that is understood as intolerant.

171 The difference between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism is that it is acceptable to be anti-Judaic, as it is to oppose Christianity, but, rightly, nobody is allowed to be anti-Semitic. By moving from one claim to the next, from anti-Jewish to anti-Semitism, people like Maccoby besmirches all of Christianity with the outrageous claim of racism without needing to substantiate the accusation. One important difference between Christianity and Judaism is that there is not a barrage of well-funded, well-resourced institutions, like the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) or CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) trawling through everything that is written, said or published accusing anybody who transgresses extremely restrictive borders with anti-Semitism. Although criticism of Christianity is now accepted in just about any context, criticism of Christianity becomes more strident if there is suspicion that it has gained political influence. There has been a long struggle to ensure the strict separation between Church and state. The basic separation between the practical concerns of state and the moral concern of Christianity is consistent with Christianity theology. This distinction goes back to at least Augustine and is suggested in Biblical passages, but a secular society, one where Christianity has no role in public life, is different from the formal separation of responsibility and is thoroughly inconsistent with Christianity. A Christian society should have a Christian inspired government which it had, perhaps surprisingly today, up until quite recently. As was written of England in the late 1960s, For over a thousand years there has been an intimate relationship between the Christian Church in England and the English nation, so much so that much of the history of one necessarily involves the history of the other . . . Christianity was the basis of national unity . . . Membership in one presupposed membership in the other. (J. E. W. Jr 1967: 305) To be truly English meant that you were part of the Church of England and to be a member of the Church of England was the only way to be truly English. It has been observed by many that the most influential force that has insisted on the secularization of the state in the United States, and that has been exported throughout the West, has been the Jewish community. As Gregg Ivers wrote in his extended 1995 study into Jewish influences on the secularizing of the American state, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State, “Jewish civil rights organizations have had an historic role in the post-war development of American church-state law and policy.” Although there has been, again unlike Judaism or Islam, some recognition of a certain distance between what we would think of in terms of Church and State (take Jesus’ argument to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s), the demand to ensure there is an impenetrable barrier between Church and state has become a central tenant of recent forms of liberalism. That ensuring and maintaining the separation between Church and state and the further eradication of

172 any Christian display in the public sphere has been a key policy aspiration of several Jewish advocacy organization. Lisa Moses Leff, a Jewish scholar, has argued that the argument for Jewish rights helped inform the establishment of French state secularism that has now become a defining feature of France’s national identity. (Leff 2006) In the United States, demands to realise a secular society was led by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the American Jewish Congress (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). (Ivers 1995: 5) More recently George Soros’ Open Society Institute, the Miriam G. and Ira D. Wallach Foundation and the Bauman Family Foundation, all Jewish owned and funded organizations, have been extremely active ensuring Christianity plays not role in American public life. They have fought to ensure, as D’Souza observes, American public schools may not have organized prayers, not even at graduation ceremonies or sporting events. Courts have ordered the removal of monuments with religious themes, such as the Ten Commandments, from public facilities. Some courts have even declared the Pledge of Allegiance, with its reference to “one nation under God”, unconstitutional. The secular ethic favoured by the left has permeated the culture: “Merry Christmas” is now “Happy Holidays”, Christmas holidays are now winter break, and “friendship” trees have replaced Christmas trees. . . every year the ACLU and its allies seek to eradicate the remaining vestiges of religious influence from America’s public institutions. Each Christmas we witness the surreal spectacle of liberal organizations filing lawsuits to dismantle Nativity displays, compel department stores to remove statues of Jesus from their stores, and stop public-school children from singing Christmas carols like “Silent Night”. (D’Souza 2007) A childhood without The Little Drummer Boy or Silent Night is a childhood that is just a little bit sadder, a little bit emptier, than one that is familiar with these lovely carols. It is interesting that Israel is an enthusiastic theocracy, where religious symbols grace every public building, is emblazoned on their national flag and where religious texts are commonly used for educational purposes, and yet in places like the United States, Jews are the most vocal opponents of not only Church involvement in political decision making but ensuring Christianity has no public presence whatsoever. This insistence that Church and state remain discrete has meant that one may oppose the political agenda of “Christian fundamentalism” or, indeed, as was recently done, write a book explicitly critical of the supposed excessive political influence of a particular group of Christians simply because people identifying as Christians had developed relationships with people in political power. For one recent example, an American Jewish author, Jeff Sharlet, used deception to “infiltrate” a Christian political group operating in Washington DC. Sharlet wrote a “tell-all” book called The Family where he supposedly reveals the dark “truth” about the secret, well-funded, supposedly powerful, theo-political Christian organization trying to spread Christian values through the halls of power in the United States and around the world. Beyond there being some shock

173 expressed about what Sharlet had revealed, how dare Christians promote their agenda in a traditionally Christian country, and the accusations even if found to be true did not add up to much at all beyond a group explicitly and openly trying to spread Christian values through political associations. Indeed, Sharlet’s book was quickly turned into a much watched and well-reviewed Netflix series that included extended “re-enactments”, all based exclusively on one person’s account without any corroborating evidence, that was then viewed by millions. There was no suggestion, despite Sharlet being Jewish and admitting to using deception to infiltrate the organization and that everything was based on his account alone, that he was being “anti-Christian”, “Anglo-phobic”120 or motivated as a result of his own religious beliefs to undermine Christian influence. Indeed, anti-Christian sentiment is often claimed to be the result of the evil behaviour of Christians themselves which is one of the most fundamental taboos regarding claims against Judaism. There is never a suggestion that people like Sharlet could have ulterior motives beyond advancing the public good as an investigative journalist. Others might write against “militant” or “fundamentalist” forms of Catholicism, such as the anti-Gay activism being advanced by some Catholics today in Poland, or Islam, such as ISIS, and this is perfectly acceptable because these commentaries are attacking the politics of these religious groups not the religion itself. Such content is not even contentious in any way today and these kinds of projects would readily attract research funding from governments around the world and that research would then be published in reputable academic journals and taught as respectable content in our universities without concern. These types of claims are not even contentious. The reason why people are permitted to oppose particular religious groups or particular religious expressions is because they are religions that have been seen to transgress the barrier between Church and state. They are groups of people who adhere to a set of beliefs and practices and, as such, those beliefs and practices can be legitimately criticised if they are perceived to be influencing political decisions making. One can legitimately say, “Islamists misinterpret the Koran and are using a distorted interpretation of their religion to justify strategies for gaining political power that are cruel and unjustifiable”. This claim could be legitimately made simply because it is true. You could then go on to specify what acts of violence or terror they were undertaking to achieve their political goals in the name of religion to legitimize your claim. This is all legitimate research that is undertaken, taught, funded, and published, in academia around the world but particularly in western universities every day.

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This word, of course, does not even exist although it should. What is the Black Lives Matter movement except Anglophobia?

174 What is being claimed by the term “anti-Semitic”? The term “Semite” emerged in the mid-19th century to identify people who spoke a “Semitic” language. This language family was spoken by Phoenicians, Arabs, Hebrews, Ethiopians and Carthaginians. But almost from the first moment that it was coined, the word “Semite” was used not in the context of linguistics but, as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) observes, “The term has, however, since its inception referred to Jews alone.” That is, harmonious with the times, the term Semite came to be applied to a supposed ‘racial’ group. Although today Jews reject the use of the word “Semite” in a racial context, claiming that it expresses a false racial theory that “was spread through use by anti-Jewish political movements and the general public”, the truth is that many Jews embraced and promoted the term Semite throughout the late 19th century and into the 20th century. It can be seen used regularly by Jewish authors in a racial context until at least the Second World War. As Maccoby observes, it was used, “when theological explanations had come to seem out of date . . .” as a “racial reference” to be applied only to Jews and not to “other Semites”.121 (Maccoby 2009: 13) For just one example, Ignác Goldziher, in his extremely influential 1876 tome Mythology Among the Hebrews, despite being a philologist, continuously uses the term Semite to identify a distinct people with a shared history and cultural beliefs. Much of the literature at the time, that was being written by Jews, uses the term Semite to refer to Jews as a racially charged term. It was primarily used by a group of Jews who were usually European and no longer practiced the Orthodox form of their religion. As they did not obviously practice what many understood to be “Judaism” they could not, technically, be considered at that time to be ‘Jews’. This cohort were no longer considered to be ‘Jews’ as a religious practice, because at that time Judaism was thought to be exhaustively a kind of religious practice, but they continued to share an identity as Jews. If an Anglican Englishman no longer practiced Anglicanism, he remained an Englishman but Jews at that time, when Judaism was thought to be a religion, who no longer practiced in an Orthodox manner, were not easily identified as anything but in terms of the country in which they happened to live, and this did not seem a good fit. So, a Jewish Englishman who no longer practiced Judaism was thought to have become an Englishman. The problem with this conclusion is that it was not how Jews themselves felt. As Albert Einstein can be seen to be arguing even well into the 20th century to justify identifying as a Jew despite no longer practicing its Orthodox form. He rejected the claim that, “A Jew is a person professing the Jewish faith” by arguing,

121

Note that the term “other Semites” cannot rightly be said without it being deployed in a racial context. Maccoby should have said something like, “other speakers of the Semitic language”. A minor point but it does show just how readily the term continues to be deployed in a racial setting.

175 The superficial character of this answer is easily recognised by means of a simple parallel. Let us ask the question: What is a snail? An answer similar in kind to the one given above might be: A snail is an animal inhabiting a snail shell. This answer is not altogether incorrect; nor, to be sure, is it exhaustive, for the snail shell happens to be but one of the material products of the snail. Similarly, the Jewish faith is but one of the characteristic products of the Jewish community. It is, furthermore, known that a snail can shed its shell without thereby ceasing to be a snail. The Jew who abandons his faith (in the formal sense of the word) is in a similar position. He remains a Jew. (Einstein 1950: 24) Einstein is trying to argue that a Jew remains a Jew even if he no longer practices Orthodox Judaism. The important point is that this argument still had to be made in the years following World War II. Many Jews from the late 19th century rejected Orthodox Judaism but continued to associate with Jews, feel at home amongst Jews and continued some Jewish cultural practices despite no longer being orthodox. They were actively selecting what it meant to be Jewish. A former “Jew” may not practice an Orthodox form of Judaism, but he remained a “Jew” in some sense that the word Jew just did not carry in the late 19th century. To resolve this problem, how did a “Jew” who no longer practiced Orthodox Judaism continue to express their solidarity with people who felt the same, the word “Semite” was used. It is for this reason that the term Semite was so quickly employed in a racial context. “Semite” became the racial term for Jews without any religious connotation like “Englishman” or “Frenchman”. The word Semite was not primarily developed for simple “racist” reasons by those who hated Jews as is so often claimed but as a term embraced by Jews to address an identity “gap”. The term “Semite” was enthusiastically embraced, by the turn of the 20th century, by many Zionist Jews who shared an identity and political program, to realise a Jewish state in Palestine, but who, as Zionists, no longer practiced the Orthodox form of their religion. Although it is often claimed that Wilhelm Marr was the first person to use the term “anti-Semite”, as it says in the Encyclopedia Britannica, “The term anti-Semitism was coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr to designate the anti-Jewish campaigns under way in central Europe at that time”, the German Jew Moses Hess actually used the term ten years before Marr to identify people who disliked “Jews”. As with many terms of abuse, such as Protestant, anti-Semite was adopted positively by some people who, such as Marr, opposed Zionism. These people were no longer critical of Judaism as a religion but opposed a particular religio-cultural political program and so accepted the racially charged term Semite as they did not oppose Judaism as such but a political agenda being promoted by people who identified as “Semites”. To be opposed to or to question these non-religious, often highly assimilated ‘Semites’, in their nationalist aspirations for a Jewish state, as Moses Hess aspired to realise in the 1860s, was labelled ‘anti-Semitism’. That is why anti-Semitism became so strongly associated with racial vilification, it was not initially intended to identify an historical religious disagreements but was used from the start as a way of identifying a “race”. In its originally setting, when terms like Jew-hater and anti-Jewish

176 still existed to describe the religious contest, the term anti-Semite was indeed a uniquely racially charged term. The idea was that people who opposed the Zionist project, did so not on substantial grounds, for example that the number of Jews living in Israel at the time was very small or to claim possession of a piece of land that had previously been inhabited by others and had since been populated by others for centuries is nonsense, but exclusively on racial grounds. It was being claimed that opponents to the realization of a state for Jews, which, it should be remembered was not an aspiration for many Orthodox or assimilated Jews across Europe at the time and was a very small movement within the wider Jewish community, did not really disagree with the undeniable claims of Jews but argued against the establishment of a Jewish state just because they simply hated Jews or, as these non-Orthodox “Jews” had come to identify, Semites. They were anti-Semites. This strategy proved very successful at delegitimizing what might be thought in retrospect, as history has unfolded, legitimate concerns. Following the First World War, as attitudes towards Jews began to become more unfavourable than they had been prior to the War, especially in Germany, because of the increased political agitation of Gnostic Jews especially in communist struggles, the term Semite was quickly and enthusiastically adopted and deployed by all Jews who wanted to characterise any criticism made against them as being insubstantial and motivated exclusively by racial hatred. These years saw the emergence of many Jewish representative bodies in Germany whose existence was to ensure that there was an organized response to oppose the growing hatred of a particular expression of Judaism. It was in the inter-war years that the concept of “anti-Semitism” entered many legal codes for the first time but most especially in the former Soviet Union where Jews were massively overrepresented in leadership positions. By using the term “antiSemitism”, it was being said, that any criticism of Jews, of any kind or motivation, was necessarily without substance and was, therefore, just an expression of racial hatred. As criticism of Jews rose to a fever pitch in pre-World War II Nazi Germany, many Jews began to strongly identify as “Semites” as the Germans amongst whom they lived forcefully identified as “Aryan”. After World War II, in the aftermath of the popularization of the “Holocaust” narrative, any criticism of Jews, Judaism or Israel, became labelled as “anti-Semitism” and was characterise as a dangerous prelude to fascism.122 This had the sobering effect of associating any criticism of Jews with Nazism and having the potential to result in a Holocaust. If we just reflect on this for a minute to allow the implication of this new term to “sink-in”. Any criticism of Jews,

122

The oldest mention of a “holocaust” involving 6 million Jews was raised in an article in The American Hebrew on the 31st of October 1919 provocatively titled “The Crucifixion of Jews Must Stop!”. That article feared that 6 million Eastern European Jews were about to starve to death as a result of World War I if they did not get financial support from America. The idea of 6 million Jews dying in a holocaust is used numerous times between the first and second world wars.

177 Judaism or Israel was now characterized as anti-Semitism. Over the decades following the war, the Holocaust narrative was intensified, promoted in Hollywood movies, and forcefully introduced as a necessary component of school curricula from a very young age. To be an anti-Semite, to be a Nazi, became the worst thing a person could be. It became such a stigmatizing form of identification that even American presidents would hastily take steps in response to even the threat of being labelled an antiSemite. In many ways, the term as it exists today is an anachronism in the sense of really belonging to the years between 1880 to 1945 when the idea of being a Jew continued to be associated with a religious practice and was not a racial term. The reason why Jewish representative bodies today have uniformly rejected the positive identification of “Semite”, while continuing to embrace the term “anti-Semite”, is simply because it no longer serves any purpose. Non-Orthodox Jews readily self-identify as Jews, as a racial identification, and nobody even questions the claim. Today, Einstein would not have to justify identifying as a Jew even though he was not practicing the Orthodox religion because, despite the very idea of “races” falling into disrepute in certain contexts, “Jew” is now used every day as a racial marker. The irony to this situation is that today to claim that being Australian is a “race” or American or English, would all be extremely questionable claims whereas to be a Jew, to use this in a racial context, is simply an established, uncontentious statement of fact. The irony is that prior to World War II, the opposite was the case, Australians, Americans, and English unquestionably constituted “races” while being a Jew was thought primarily to be a religious term. It is because of this new way of conceptualizing “Jewishness” that, as Maccoby claims, any expression of “Jew hatred” is now understood as “racial hatred” in disguise. (Maccoby 2009: 13) This might be contrasted to Christianity where one can readily and enthusiastically criticise Catholicism as hypocritical or Protestantism for being overly judgemental and would certainly not be accused of being a racist even though Anglicanism or Lutheranism have strong racial associations. Today, it is simply impossible to substantively criticise Jews, Judaism or, increasingly, even Israel, without being labelled an “anti-Semite”. As the earlier cited definition of antisemitism makes perfectly clear, any “animosity” or, as the ADL website claims, any “belief or behaviour hostile toward Jews”, even hostile “beliefs”, is, by this account, a kind of racism. Use of the term anti-Semitism has become so politicized that it has obviously being used to suppress any criticism of Jews, Judaism or Israel.123 As Joseph Sobran wrote in the New York City Tribune, after being viciously attacked by American Jews for

123

Interestingly, Gnostic Jews claim loyalty to three core commitments, the Torah, the Jewish people and Israel. In stopping criticism of Jews, Judaism and Israel they are preserving the sanctity of these core commitments. Jew are the Jewish people; Judaism is Torah and Israel. Again, as will be made clear in what follows, we are being taught a religious lesson about what is above criticism, what is sacred, that we are not worthy, as “unclean”, to comment upon no matter criticize. As long as we remain silent, we are good goy, but we are not good people.

178 questioning actions of American Jews, “I will think twice before again addressing the topics that have brought on the pain. Let the taboos prevail. But please, let us not pretend we have the sort of freedom of discussion [which my critics] are always saying they want.” Sobran was observing how American Jews always demand the “right” to strongly criticise the established order but draw the line when such “freedoms” are directed against them. The more traditional term for being opposed to Judaism as a religious belief was “Jew hater”. This term is much more accurate for capturing the sentiment that might be being expressed by many, including many Christians, when criticising Judaism. Jew-hater, a perfectly legitimate position in the same way that Muslims and Jews openly express hatred of Christianity, but it is a term that is no longer ever used. To hate the religion of Judaism and the practices and beliefs that religion encourages, that anyone should be allowed to believe and argue in a public forum, is now characterised as being nothing more than “anti-Semitism” or racial hatred. To oppose Jewish actions in the former Palestine, antisemitism. To claim that Jews have too much power in the United States and that this power is used to further Jewish interests, antisemitism. To claim that Jews control Hollywood and use that control to drive a theo-political agenda, antisemitism. Even to observe dangerously noxious political activities from a heretical sect of people who questionably identify as Jews, antisemitism. The broad use of this term to delegitimize any criticism against people who identify as Jews is not, of course, accidental. It is not some kind of unintentional overreach. It is part of a deliberate strategy to silence accusation that some people who identify as Jews may be participating in nefarious schemes against the Christian West. Indeed, after the Israeli military intentionally attacked the USS Liberty off the coast of Egypt in 1967, which resulted in 37 dead US marines and 171 wounded, with the intention of sinking her with all her crew on board because they may have intercepted secret Israeli information, Jewish lobbyists in the United States quickly threatened the weak and cowardly President Lyndon B. Johnson that they would publicly accuse him of “antisemitism” if he took any action against Israel. Chief of Naval Operations at the time, Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, outraged by the extent of activities aimed at minimising the nature and intent of the attack concluded that, “Israel attempted to prevent the Liberty’s radio operators from sending a call for help by jamming American emergency radio channels. [And that] Israeli torpedo boats machine-gunned lifeboats at close range that had been lowered to rescue the most seriously wounded” and yet nothing was done. This threat to accuse Johnston of anti-Semitism covered telling the United States public the truth about what happened. Even in the 1960s, to be accused of being an anti-Semite was political death. What really happened to the Liberty did not enter the public domain for decades. In truth, the Israeli’s124

124

In truth, one should not use the term “Israeli” here because the term is not used in Israel. In Israel you are identified as a “Jew” or as a “Muslim” or “Christian” never as an “Israeli”. In truth, it was Jews who attacked the

179 hoped to kill everyone on board that vessel to maintain a secret and were only stopped from killing everyone on board by the ingenuity of a communications officer who managed to get a message out using unconventional means. The minute the message was sent and received, the attack was instantly called off and medical services were supplied by the Israeli military who initially pretended that it had all been some kind of terrible mistake. The truth was that once the message had been sent then Israel knew that they could not sink the vessel without the world knowing who was behind the sinking. Such an event makes one wonder how many things Israel may have done behind the scenes, when planes have disappeared from the sky without a trace or jet aircraft have been shot out of sky under suspicious circumstances, that have remained a mystery. Imagine if that communications officer on board the Liberty had not gotten his message out, would Syrian, Egyptian, or the Soviet Union been blamed for the disappearance of the vessel? The ship was there, it should be remembered, to aid Israel by spying on her enemies and yet it was attacked none the less. As a result of Jewish threats, and it would be just inaccurate to say “Israeli threats” as the political threats to the President Johnston were made by Jewish Americans, Johnston went to incredible lengths, and great expense, to hide the extent of the attack and the intentions of Israel in committing this unprovoked military attack on a largely defenceless surveillance vessel. An attack that included the war crime of machine-gunning lifeboats. As in the case of the USS Liberty, this strategy of labelling any criticism of Jews or Israel, no matter how deserved, as “antisemitism” to keep criticism quiet has proven to be extremely successful at suppressing legitimate criticism. As Pat Buchanan wrote, That the United States would sit still for anything was brought home to the Israelis, long ago, on the third day of the Six-Day War, when Lyndon Johnson ordered a coverup of an Israeli rocket-and-machine gun attack on the U.S. intelligence ship Liberty off the Sinai, an attack costing the lives of 37 brave American soldiers. That this military attack, intended to kill hundreds of America’s bravest and sink one of her vessels, was not properly investigated or reported and nobody was found responsible is just one of many time Israel has literally gotten away with murder. What it did prove to the Israelis and the wider American Jewish community was that anything could be achieved using the threat of accusing someone of “anti-Semitism”. As an example of just how extreme the “antisemitism” industry has grown in the West, a director of a prestigious arts event in Germany innocently invited Cameroonian philosopher Dr Achille Mbembe as a guest speaker. Dr Mbembe is a highly respected African scholar who has been described as “one of

USS Liberty. It was Jews who shot up lifeboats sent to help the seriously wounded. It was Jews who deliberately tried to sink an American vessel who was in the area trying to help the Israelis.

180 the most important thinkers on the African continent”. Mbembe has been recognised around the world for his “outstanding research achievements”. Straight after the invitation to Mbembe had been made public, Dr Mbembe was accused of being an anti-Semite because, in one of his many essays, he compared South Africa’s system of apartheid to the Holocaust. (Mashiach 2020) Dr Mbembe claimed in his essay The Society of Enmity (2016) that, “the apartheid system in South Africa and the destruction of Jews in Europe – the latter, though, in an extreme fashion and within a quite different setting – constituted two emblematic manifestations of this fantasy of separation”. This sentence might seem innocent enough. He is simply saying that the apartheid system and the Holocaust functioned on the same premise, by separating “black Africans”, in the case of South Africa, and “Jews”, in the Holocaust, from the rest of the population. This meant there was no “possibility of a single body”. By assigning “black South Africans” and “Jews” as distinct and discrete identities, Mbembe was arguing, those people who dominated society could justify their cruel and barbaric behaviour. As can be seen from the quote, Dr Mbembe even clarifies that the Holocaust was “in an extreme fashion” thereby not directly equating the situation in South Africa with the Holocaust. This qualification of the comparison was not enough, Dr Mbembe was guilty of comparing the Holocaust with another historical event and this is one of the things, one of many, that is not allowed. To compare the Holocaust with another historical event, thereby suggesting that others have suffered as badly as the Jews, is called “Holocaust relativization”. (Rothberg 2020) That the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other event in history has been voiced by many prominent Jews including Martin Buber in 1953 when he chastised the Germans “who killed millions of my people in a systematically prepared and executed procedure whose organized cruelty cannot be compared with any previous historical event.” The Holocaust was unique and beyond comparison. As the President’s Commission on the Holocaust said, as convened under President Jimmy Carter in 1978, the Holocaust was “a crime unique in the annals of human history, different not only in the quantity of violence – the sheer numbers killed – but in its manner and purpose as a mass criminal enterprise organized by the state against defenceless civilian populations.” The claim is that Jews suffered more than anyone in history and this unique suffering must be recognised and factored into contemporary political decision making and future treatment of Jews. As was recently claimed, “We have a duty to remember the victims of the Nazis, especially those murdered in the Final Solution.” Jews cannot be criticised because this is the first step towards genocide. Dr Mbembe broke the rule of “Holocaust exceptionalism” and, for this minute infringement, one line out of the thousands that the respected scholar had published, he was labelled an antisemite, one of the most

181 charged accusations that can be made, and therefore no longer allowed to speak in public. Mbembe was to be silenced.125 As is usually the case in this kind of situation, the media seemed particularly enthusiastic in pursuing Dr Mbembe on this matter. Articles in daily publications quickly followed the accusation questioning how an invitation to the arts event could have been made to this “anti-Semite”. All this interest in the media regarding Dr Mbembe’s invitation attracted the attention of Germany’s antisemitism commissioner, Dr Felix Klein. Despite Klein apparently being ignorant of the details of the case, he seems to have assumed that the accusations being made by the Jewish community were accurate, and that Dr Mbembe was indeed an anti-Semite. As a result, he insisted that Dr Carl withdraw Mbembe’s invitation to the arts event. Klein went so far as to threaten to withhold promised government financial support for the event if Dr Mbembe’s invitation was not revoked. Dr Carl continued to refuse to withdraw Mbembe’s invitation, personally believing that the accusations lacked substance and were vindictive in the extreme. As a result of this refusal, it was claimed by sections of the media that Dr Carl herself was a “modern antiSemite”. (Maschiach 2020) A “modern anti-Semite”, in contrast to a traditional antisemite, supports antiIsraeli measures, such as the boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) movement or is publicly critical of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians or Arab Israelis, without being explicitly critical of “Jews”. It has been argued since the 1980s (See Brownfeld 1987) that political attacks against Israel are just a disguised form of antisemitism which tries to hold Israel up to higher standards than that expected of other countries.126 As part of these claims, Josef Schuster, the president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, demanded Dr Carl be dismissed because she was obviously an anti-Semite. Dr Carl responded to Schuster’s charge, I was absolutely shocked. Does he know me? Does he know who I am? Because I invited to an art festival a speaker, an intellectual, whom he doesn’t like or even, I guess, doesn’t

125

I suspect that the real reason Mbembe was silenced is because he is actually being critical of the strategy being increasingly used in the United States and other Western countries against “whites”. After all, is it not the case that “whites” today are being singled out, separated as “other” and that this “othering” process is being used to justify acts of discrimination? Scholarship or career opportunities should not be distributed according to the colour of a person’s skin but because of their individual circumstances. This is not to deny systematic disadvantage but is to reject the argument that this should be understood in terms of “race”. It is Mbembe’s argument, I suspect, that is really being silenced, an act of censorship, not moral outrage at his supposed insensitivity which is only being used as an excuse. Of course, censorship is much worse than overzealous policing of history, yet this is exactly what is happening here. 126 Demanding all Israelis are treated equally under the law, insisting that Arab Israelis are not driven out of their homes to make way for Jews, ensuring that there are no exclusively Jewish suburbs where Arabs are not allowed to live, criticizing extra-Judicial killings, ensuring that Jews are held equally responsible for violent crimes no matter the racial profile of the victim, you know, those extraordinarily “high standards”.

182 know? How can you say that so fast about a person without any research and without any conversations? (Carl as seen in Maschiach 2020) “Luckily”, if that is the right way of characterizing it, the Corona virus struck the world, and the entire festival was cancelled thus defusing the situation before everything really came to a head. Despite this reprieve, Dr Carl’s career has been greatly harmed. Her role as the festival’s artistic directed ended and she has publicly expressed concern, as she should be if history is to be a guide, that nobody will ever employ her again because she has been labelled an anti-Semite and people might actually believe that she is indeed an antisemite. Dr Carl claims, Colleagues are scared to be seen with me, to be close to me. Some people have said that if I were on a podium, they wouldn’t want to be there with me – not because they really think I’m anti-Semitic, but because they fear for their own careers. Even colleagues I know very well. (Carl as seen in Maschiach 2020) Appreciate what is being claimed here, because somebody was labelled an anti-Semite because they invited a particular speaker to an arts event people are scared to be seen with her. This is where we are, and it is absolutely real. This situation is far too close to pre-World War II Soviet Union. The entire affair must be heartbreaking for the innocent Dr Carl who has probably worked very hard to become an arts festival director and to see everything lost for standing up for her principles is demonic. This kind of situation, as might be expected, is certainly not unprecedented. Even academics who have questioned the official narrative around September 11 in the most casual manner on the strongest of evidence have had their careers destroyed. There are many areas today that nobody is allowed to inquire, the historical accuracy of the Holocaust narrative, Jewish practices in Hollywood, international finance and government, even inviting someone who has performed the slightest of breaches against the silence in relation to Jews. Some have even reported after being accused of being an anti-Semite that they were suddenly refused bank loans that they would normally have received or were no longer offered research grants that they would have previously easily been granted. Although such claims are dismissed as paranoid or inaccurate, my investigations, and personal experience, would support these types of claims and much, much more. 127

127

I said three sentences regarding the contents of this volume that revealed too much to a person I later found out was an Ethiopian Jew. In response he tried to kill me out of what he believed was a religious obligation. He came to my unit was a gun and asked me to “go for a ride”. I managed to escape and fled the city leaving all my possessions behind. Ever since I’ve been followed everywhere I go and much more. The shocking aspect of this story is not just that somebody was prepared to commit murder over the contents of a book but that they were prepared to commit murder based on a few sentences without any other evidence. What if I had exaggerated or lied or the “book” was of an extremely low quality that would never find a publisher? I would have been killed for

183 Although this whole episode might be dismissed as a case of oversensitivity toward Dr Mbembe article followed by an almost gleeful vindictiveness against Dr Carl from sections of the Jewish community and a far too compliant German government fearful of not looking proactive, the actual situation is much more sinister. This is just the latest expression of a 100-year project to make any criticism of Jews, Judaism and, more recently, Israel impossible. In Australia, one of the most respected politicians, former Premier of New South Wales who became Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr Bob Carr, who wrote critically, with a great deal of restraint, on the power of what he respectfully, though inaccurately, identified as the “Israeli Lobby”. He claimed that as Minister for Foreign Affairs, “I found it very frustrating that we [the Australian government] couldn’t issue, for example, a routine expression of concern about the spread of Israeli settlements on the West Bank. . .” because of pressure brought to bear by the Israeli Lobby in Australia. Just to be clear, a former Foreign Minister is claiming that the Australian government could not bring even a basic “expression of concern” about an extremely serious matter because of the power of Jews in Australia. An incredible claim. But for his very tentative criticisms of what he clearly identifies as the “Israel Lobby”, despite unambiguously claiming that many Australian Jews, even those in his own party, were involved in restraining and controlling the Australian government, he was “disinvited” to the Brisbane Writer’s Festival and has been marginalized as a public speaker ever since. Since the publication of his book, he has disappeared from public view because he is now thought to be untouchable. Pressure similar to that brought against Carl was brought against the festival organizers but, as is true of most Australian’s today, unlike Carl, the organizers of the writer’s festival proved not to have the same moral fortitude and quickly agreed to disinvite Carr. The truth is, as Cook recently observed, Cultural associations, festivals, universities, Jewish research centres, political think-tanks, museums and libraries are being forced to scrutinise the past of those they wish to invite [to conferences and festivals] in case some minor transgression against Israel can be exploited by local Jewish organizations. That has created a toxic, politically paranoid atmosphere that inevitably kills trust and creativity. But the psychosis runs deeper still. Israel, and anything related to it, has become such a combustible subject – one that can ruin careers in an instant – that most political, academic and cultural figures . . . now choose to avoid it entirely. Israel, as its supporters intended, is rapidly becoming untouchable. (Cook 2020) Bob Carr is an extremely well-respected politician and senior statesman. He is the second longest serving N.S.W Premier in history and a former Minister of Foreign Affairs. This most highly respected Australian figure has been effectively banned from speaking publicly because now, after questioning the power of

absolutely no reason. To want to kill somebody over what was said so casually says everything about this movement really.

184 Jews in Australian, he is too “controversial”. The interesting fact is that nobody, Presidents, scientists, judges, business moguls, nobody is powerful enough to stand against Jews once you have been accused of antisemitism. Extremely powerful people have lost everything that they had, their careers, their wealth, their families, because of the most subtle and conditional of criticisms. Luckily, I have nothing to lose, except my life, so I am the perfect person to bring the truth to the world. The most important point is the one raised by Bob Carr, global Jewry will simply not allow any criticism, no matter how gentle, they will not accept any compromise, no matter how reasonable, and they will not even allow any comparisons, no matter how accurate. After all, as Preparata questions, why is the Holocaust granted a special status? “What about the millions of innocent others (including German civilians)? What perverse inclination could give form to a system of weight and tale applicable to the defenceless victims of violence? Are we not all worth the same? Isn’t justice one and the same for all?” (Preparata 2011: 124) The truth is that Jews are special, they are granted exception, they are treated with more respect. Jews are above criticism, above being challenged and beyond equal. The truth is that many Jews believe that they are on a mission from God, and they will see that mission through with a fanaticism Westerners just can not appreciate. These people might stand next to you in a lift, and they will look just like everyone else, sound like everyone else. They are our doctors, our teachers, our politicians, our lecturers, but they all carry a secret, a secret about which they are passionate, they have a single-minded determination to see their vision of the world realised and, as the chosen of God, are prepared to do anything, anything at all, to realize that vision. In Genesis 12: 3, it famously says, “And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curse you I will curse.” This has been read by Jews as saying that God will bless those who act favourably towards Jews while those who oppose Jews, no matter how irrationally destructive they behave, will be cursed. It would be perfectly fine if they left it to God to reward and punish, we could all accept that, but, of course, as God plays no part in this world, according to the Gnostic tradition, because He has “withdrawn”, Gnostic Jews see themselves as the agents of God’s justice. It becomes the task of Jews themselves to ensure that it is the case that those who support Jews in their project are “blessed” while those who oppose them are “cursed”. Gnostic Jews believe that this practice of reward and punishment is to be realised by themselves as with the entire theo-political project and not left to God. This claim might seem unbelievable, but one must appreciate that they are raised from birth to think like this and, Gnostic Jews, live without the moral restraint of guilt that informs the actions of Christians. Religious fanaticism without moral restraint is a dangerous mix indeed. The problem is that very different claims are being made when accusing someone of being “antiJewish” to someone being an “anti-Semite”. To be anti-Jewish is to oppose a set of beliefs and practices

185 of a religion, particularly if you differentiate between political and religious practices. So, as with any other religion, being critical of religious involvement in politics is more acceptable than criticism of the religious beliefs themselves. Criticism of Jews and Judaism should be acceptable if true problems are discovered whereas, to be an anti-Semite, is to unreasonably be opposed to Jews on racial grounds without reason. It is legitimate to oppose a set of ideas and practices, particularly if they are destructive, such actions should be encouraged, but racism, in all its forms, including being opposed to “whites”, is noxious. The real reason for strictly policing any criticism of Jews, Judaism, and Israel, is because they want us to eventually police ourselves. They want us to be more sensitive to criticisms of Judaism than to criticisms of our own religious beliefs. The starting point is with accusations of antisemitism which is understood today to be an “extreme accusation”, a “label that finishes you socially, economically and politically”, to be judged an anti-Semite “removes you from the realm of civil society” but this is only the start. This extreme punishment for not conforming to the expectations of the Jewish community is so that we will discipline ourselves, so that next time somebody is sought for an art event, for example, their entire history will be vetted for even the slightest possibility of “antisemitism”. The slightest possibility that the potential guest was critical of Jews, Judaism, or Israel, in any way. Anybody with any taint, no matter how slight, will no longer be invited because it can result in the end of your career. This diligence will then affect what people say through fear of possible transgression and the exclusion it will provoke. They know that they will no longer be invited to festivals or art events if they transgress in any way the line of antisemitism. The silence grows. This is the outcome that they hope to achieve, and they have been very successful. It is the same with publishing, books that may make false claims against Jews will not be challenged in the public sphere, they will not be shown to be false because they will simply not be published. We will simply know nothing about it. This has been happening since before World War II. As Cook observes in relation to Israel but it actually applies to Jews, Judaism, and Israel, Once, the “bad Jews” have been smeared into silence, as Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them largely have been already; when social media has de-platformed critics of Israel as Jew haters; when the media and political parties enforce this silence so absolutely they no longer need to smear anyone as an anti-Semite because these “antiSemites” have been disappeared; when the Jewish “community” speaks with one voice because its other voices have been eliminated; when the censorship is complete, you will not know it. There will be no record of what was lost. There will be simply an empty space, a blank slate, where discussions of Israel’s crimes against Palestinians once existed. What you will hear instead is only what Israel and its partisans want you to hear. Your ignorance will be blissfully complete. (Cook 2020) Of course, this silence has already been achieved in relation to the political activities of certain Jews and Judaism. As Dr. Bernd Scherer, director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of the World’s Cultures)

186 in Berlin recently said in relation to accusations of antisemitism, “The danger is developing that in the bureaucracy, in the government ministries and in the cultural institutions, there will be an atmosphere of suspicion, insecurity and self-censorship. This has to be stopped.” (Scherer as seen in Mashiach 2020) But this is exactly what Gnostic Jewry hopes to achieve. To claim that what is written in this volume is antisemitic would simply be an attempt to distract attention away from the substance of the argument being made by claiming that it is motivated by racism. Such a claim is an attempt to misdirect our attention away from the substance of the argument and the evidence being presented like a magician misdirecting the audience giving him the opportunity to do his trick. Nothing could be further from the truth than the claim that these texts are motivated by racism. Indeed, the exact opposite is at play. It is the Gnostic Jews who are the extreme racists and those who justify that racism on the grounds that it is the result of the wishes of God. The claims made in these documents are claimed to be true. Whether the arguments and evidence presented is persuasive is not for me to judge but I can say without any doubt that the claims are not driven by racism. This volume is not ant-Semitic. As has already been stated, these volumes are not even about “Judaism”, as such, but trying to differentiate a political movement that identifies as Jewish even though it was inspired by someone still called a heretic by Orthodox Jews today. Gnostic Judaism, as even some Orthodox Jews observe, is an enemy of Orthodox Judaism. (see Antelman 2002) When somebody writes that Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, people do not ask the author why they hate the Japanese so much. The simple reason for this is because it is true that Japan did attack Pearl Harbour. Further explanations for making this claim, such as being motivated by hatred or racial prejudice, are not required because what is being claimed is true. Gnostic Judaism, when properly understood, is no different from any other militant, fundamentalist, racist, theo-political movement, like the Taliban, that draws on religion as a justification for abhorrent acts. Indeed, as will be discussed, the very first victim of Gnostic Judaism, the very first people who were transformed into instruments to realise the project of political Hasidim, were those who practiced more orthodox forms of Judaism. As was recognised of Sabbatai Tzevi in the 17th century, it is this movement, not the truth presented in these pages, that is the greatest threat to Judaism as it threatens Orthodox Judaism with extinction. This can be confirmed when a list, identified by Lipset and Raab, of core contemporary features of being a Jew in the United States today can be seen as expressing the political ideology of Gnostic Judaism and not the beliefs and practices of orthodox Judaism. Lipset and Raab claim that Jews in the United States today, have waning observance of religious rites as expressed in the Talmud, are extraordinarily overrepresented in academia and in the professions, are committed to liberalism, and are strong supporters of Zionism. When properly understood, all of these features are

187 actually expressions of Gnostic Judaism but are not traditional expression of Orthodox Judaism. Rejection of the Talmud and its laws, shaping contemporary society through controlling academia, embracing the instrumental logic of liberalism and unconditional support of Israel, are all expressions of Gnostic Judaism. It is Gnostic Judaism that is increasingly winning the hearts and minds of young contemporary Jews, in the same way they are winning the hearts of minds of former Christians, thus creating a new Judaism that is opposed to Judaism as traditionally practiced. Of course, to oppose this destructive project is not racist, it is not anti-Semitic, but a legitimate political research project not motivated by hate but, by my God, the truth. Conclusion Why is the United States and the West more broadly in crisis today? Why have traditional moral concerns been demonized while what was once viewed as base is now seen as noble? Why have the governments of the United States become so degenerate? The basic reason is because the vision of progress, the vision of what it means to be a “good” society, has become more than simply corrupted, it has been reversed by a theo-political movement drawing inspiration from Jewish Gnostic beliefs as primarily voiced by 17th century “messiah” Sabbatian Tzevi. As Winston Churchill said when vaguely referring to the emergence of a political movement that was growing within European Jewry in the interwar years, It may well be that this same astounding race [Jews] may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent, which, if not arrested, would shatter irretrievably all that Christianity has rendered possible. It would almost seem as if the gospel of Christ and the gospel of the Antichrist were destined to originate among the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the divine and the diabolical. (Churchill as seen in Gilbert 2008: 89) It is the diabolical we must oppose, not “Jews”. Whereas merely one generation ago, an ethnically homogenous nation was most prized, today “multi-culturalism” is thought to be an incontestable good. One generation ago, clearly defined gender norms that were reinforced by different moral expectation of the sexes informed not only individual actions but government policy whereas today gender norms are seen as at best constituting a “construct” if not some kind of socially condoned abuse intended to oppress sections of society. Indeed, moral expectation of any kind no longer seems to have a legitimate claim over our lives unless it is a moral claim to undermine existing moral claims. These changing gender norms are particularly true of women who are becoming increasingly masculinised by being encouraged or maybe forced into not only traditional male roles but to also participate in male violent sports. They want to

188 manifest the Shechinah on earth, they want to turn women into sexual predators who are active in fulfilling the Gnostic Jewish vision of the future (not the woman’s). A generation ago drug use was an extremely marginal problem whereas today it is an epidemic destroying the lives of people who once would not have been in danger of even being exposed to drugs. Today, just about everyone experiments at some stage of their lives with hard drugs and some unfortunate people are unable to stop. Worse still, Western governments are decriminalizing the production of drugs such as cannabis and opioids, as these drugs are used, along with amphetamines, as legitimate forms of “medication”. As Mr Peter Hitchens observes, The unholy and undivided trinity of “Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll” is not merely a slogan. This trio of self-indulgences is the tripod on which modern morality rests. All three exalt the self. All three involve sensual pleasure sought for its own sake, separated from any effort or responsibility. Drug taking is the purest form of self-indulgence. It is permitted and promoted by the new morality, because it is the perfect, sublime version of the pursuit of present pleasure. (Hitchens 2013) Their basic agenda is to make us look away from the intellectual appeal of the good and embrace the shallow pleasure principle as an expression of the basest of human drives. As feminist Germaine Greer argues, “The chief means of liberating women is . . . by the pleasure principle. The essence of pleasure is spontaneity. Spontaneity means rejecting the norm, the standard that one must live up to. Liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts.” The sex, drugs, and the abandonment of civility that is expressed in rock and roll. It is an exact reversal from restraining sex to being driven by the pleasure principle and embrace the life of the “outcast, eccentric and perverted”. It was American Jewish disc jockey, Allan Freed, who first introduced large white audiences to what he termed “rock and roll” which was a black slang term for sex. Freed’s influence was that he appealed to white audiences who had, up until that time, listened to people like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra and were not particularly impressed by “black music”. After achieving initial success at promoting black music to white audiences, Jewish mobster Morris Levy paid Allan Freed a fortune to deejay at WINS in New York City. With Levy’s money and Freed’s appeal, Freed’s “rock’n’roll” radio program quickly rose to become the most popular radio program in New York thereby changing the face of music. Through his record label Roulette Records, Levy is credited for combining heroin and rock music that changed American culture. Morris Levy would pay Allan Freed money to play particularly sexually explicit music on his radio show. Freed was later found to be a central player in what became known as the “payola” scandal of 1959. Almost without any other assistance, Levy and Freed introduced a culture of drug, sex and rock’n’roll into America that would rampage through the 60s. Some help was supplied by the movie industry who made

189 rock’n’roll movies at the same time with rebels in the lead roles as teenage icons which is evidence of just how coordinated these efforts are at corrupting an entire society. What was being unlocked was more base and natural drives that society at that time was designed to suppress for the good of the individual and society at large. Levy’s ultimate aim was to ensure that black culture, as such, was dominant, black norms were embraced, at the expense of white culture. The danger of such reversals, as Paglia observes, “Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs and depression.” (Paglia 2001: 3) As the movie Trainspotting reveals, in the absence of true meaning, in the meaninglessness of modern life, drugs are as good as anything else for filling the void. To live free of social constraints and norms is to seek out drugs and sex or suffer depression because our lives have become meaningless. The list of changes that have been undertaken to realise this new world could go on and on because it is systematic reversal. Everything that a generation ago was prized is now considered base while everything that was then base in now valorised. Our vision of good has been reversed, just like it was in communist countries in the first half of the 20th century, so that people now see a sick society as being a desired ideal, degeneracy as liberation. The annihilation of knowledge of good and evil is not a social revolution but has been instigated by a very small group of religiously motivated actors’ intent on not only destroying Western civilization but replacing it with their own fanatical beliefs. They believe everything that is civilized, the good, the beautiful and the true, is actually barbarity and all that the West traditionally has thought to be barbarity is true civility. These beliefs have certainly not always been held by the majority of Jews and until very recently these ideas were not accepted by many Jews at all. What has led many people who identify as Jews astray today is not that they accept the teachings of Sabbatai but that they simply want to advance the interests of a group with whom they identify. It is those who are ignorant of the unorthodox nature of much of what goes by the name of “Judaism” today, and how it draws upon a range of polytheistic type symbolism about which they are ignorant, that are perhaps the most dangerous because they are easily manipulated into doing, as will be revealed, the most evil things in the name of a God that they well may not properly understand.128 What we are facing today is a

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Gnostic Jews actually do practice monotheism but, as with Assyrian polytheism and Hindu polytheism, it is really multiple aspects or powers of the one God hypostatized as different gods. As Simo Parpola (2000: 165) argues of the ancient Assyrian religion, “The religion of ancient Assyria is generally viewed as a classic example of a polytheistic religion with a pantheon, mythology and cult teeming with different gods. . . I shall make an effort to show that it is a mistake to regard Assyrian religion as exclusively, or even primarily, polytheistic. On the contrary, belief in the existence of a single omnipotent God dominated the Assyrian religion in its imperial elaboration, with all its polytheistic garb, must be regarded as essentially monotheistic.” The Assyrian religion may appear polytheistic but it right to see these “gods” as expression of different powers or attributes of the one god or the equation “God = all the gods”.

190 civilization contest, between East and West, individuality vs tribalism, morality vs immorality, chastity vs promiscuity, sobriety vs drunkenness, individual property vs collective ownership, and civility vs barbarity. If the West does not respond soon then there will be no hope because all experience of the good, the beautiful and the true will be gone from this world. We will inhabit Hell but will be ignorant of what we have lost. Be under no delusion, these people are prepared to do anything, murder, terrorism, biological warfare, environmental destruction, nuclear war, they are prepared to do anything to serve their God and change the world in way they believe it is their mission to realise. For just one example, the academic Ioan Culianu researched the influence of Gnosticism on the world, Culianu said, the Gnostics had “taken hold of the whole world, and we were not aware of it. It is a mixed feeling of anxiety and admiration, since I cannot refrain myself from thinking that these alien body-snatchers have done a remarkable job indeed.” (Culianu as seen in Lazier 2003: 619) Culianu was stabbed by an unknown assailant in the toilets at that hotbed of Jewish Gnosticism, Chicago University. He died of his injuries. Culianu’s murder was never solved, and no motivation could be found for this brutal crime. I truly believe that he, along with many others, have been killed because they have moved too close to the truth. Despite their verbosity, despite their preparedness to do anything, with love, compassion, understanding and determination, by acting virtuously, the West still has the opportunity to respond to this brutality and barbarity and save Western civilization. Of one thing I am most certain, as Mezei (2018: 12) observes, the West “can reclaim its cultural mission if and only if it understands, accepts, and develops its two thousand years of Christian heritage”. The West, as the West, cannot respond to this moment of crisis without embracing its own religious traditions which most recently found expression in Christianity.

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Chapter One September 11, 2001: The Tower of Babel We went after Iraq, they did not knock down the World Trade Centre. It wasn’t the Iraqis that knocked down the World Trade Centre, we went after Iraq, we decimated the country, Iran’s taking over, okay. But it wasn’t the Iraqis, you will find out who really knocked down the World Trade Centre. Because they have papers in there that are very secret, you may find it’s the Saudis, okay? But you will find out. But when I look at a guy like Lindsey Graham, you’ll end up being over in that war forever, you’ll start World War Three. Donald Trump while campaigning to become the President of the United States in Bluffton, South Carolina. Feb. 2016. “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell (Attributed) “Truth ultimately is all we have.” Julian Assange

Introduction The claim that there is a group of religiously motivated “Jews” trying to take over the world is a “conspiracy theory” cliché. To even appear to suggest that this may be the case is initially met with derision which quickly turns to angry accusations of “antisemitism”. I completely understand this response. That is the way we have all been conditioned to respond to such claims by our education system, the mass media, and the entertainment industry.129 The more educated a person is, the more likely that they have been completely indoctrinated into dismissing, without consideration, any claim that “Jews” might be malevolent. I am only too familiar with this mindset because, before undertaking this research, I too, as an educated Westerner, would have responded in exactly the same way. Because people are so

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The mandatory teaching of the holocaust began to be introduced into Western schools in the 1970s. The explicit purpose of this education, that is this is the justification made by those who advocate for this content being taught, is to show the supposed consequences of “antisemitism”. Increasingly, the content of many of these courses is actually being created in Israel to advance Israeli interests. White Protestants are undergoing an ethnocide, their ethnic identity is being destroyed, and nobody is allowed to even write about it. At the same time, it is mandatory across the West to run “holocaust information courses” to very young children. This prejudice is instilled in Westerners at a very young age so that claims against Jews will be dismissed without consideration. It certainly has proven to be a highly successful strategy.

192 predisposed to dismiss what people think of as “anti-Semitic” conspiracy theories, I will begin not with theology or a “grand historical narrative”, although both these will be given later in this volume, but with a concrete example of these theo-political agents in action. The purpose of this chapter is to quickly and persuasively answer the question as to why a reader should take the time to seriously consider the shocking claims being made in this volume. To be clear, in this volume there will be numerous concrete examples where people motivated by gnostic Judaism can be clearly identified as the manipulator of history. Gnostic Jews instigated the First and Second World Wars, assassinations of Presidents and numerous financial crises in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries including the Great Depression and the more recent Global Financial Crisis. It should always be remembered when reading the following pages, their central project is to redeem the world for their God through political activism aimed at destroying Western civilization. By the end of these volume, every reader will understand the last 150 years of history very differently to the way it has been taught to them. The place to begin this re-education is with an event many have identified as being the defining event of the 21st century, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Even 20 years after the terrorist attack on Washington and New York there continues to be many unanswered questions. The most obvious problem confronting the official account is how did these buildings, designed to withstand being struck by multiple Boeing 747s, collapse vertically, at a speed nearing free fall, into a pile of rubble no larger than the original building’s footprint after being struck by just one passenger jet aircraft? This type of collapse had never happened before and has not happened since. Perhaps the most troubling problem with the official account is why did Building 7 of the Twin Tower complex, untouched by plane debris and not drenched in aviation fuel, collapse in the same manner as Buildings 1 and 2 when officially the reason given for the larger buildings to collapse in the manner that they did was as a result of burning aviation fuel? Many people do not even know that three buildings, and not just two, collapsed on that memorable day. The official explanation for why Building 7 collapsed was because of extensive fires, caused by burning building materials and office supplies, paper, carpets etc., but, again, despite several significant high-rise building fires, some involving volatile accelerants, such a collapse is without precedence. Not only has the collapse of a high-rise building, like Building 7, from a low intensity fire caused by burning building materials never happened before but, for a building of this construction type to collapse vertically to the ground at roughly the speed of free-fall as a result of this type of fire is, as scientists have shown, not just unlikely or unprecedented but actually impossible. Although explaining how these buildings collapsed, especially building 7, is the most glaring problem with the official account, there are other questions that remain unanswered about the event on that day. For

193 example, how did completely inexperienced pilots, who had only previously flown propeller driven light aircraft, perform extremely complex manoeuvres in large jet aircraft that much more senior pilots with years of experience are on the public record as saying would be extremely difficult? Finally, the question that was raised by American Jewish U.S Marine and U.S Army War College Director, Dr Alan Sabrosky, who has personally investigated the causes of September 11, 2001, and found the official version questionable, “. . . why did the mainstream media pay more attention to Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than they did at dissecting blatant falsehoods, discrepancies and inconsistencies in the U.S. Government’s treatment of 9/11 and its aftermath?” Why was the media so compliant? It is not just that important questions were not raised, as Sabrosky rightly observes, but that nobody is allowed to criticise the official account without facing severe reprimand. What is being hidden and, actually of more interest if this is true, who is doing the hiding? This chapter is going to not only suggest who was behind September 11, but also propose a reasonable theory as to how it was achieved. The truth is, as others have observed, that the official story ignores important evidence and fails to adequately explain events. The account given here is therefore better than the official account although much more research is required. The real question is, after all the evidence is presented; why has there never been an official investigation on the links between American Jews, Israel, and the events of September 11, 2001? Answering this question will actually occupy the remainder of this volume. The Hypothesis Griffin observes that, There are two main theories as to who was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. According to the theory put forth by the Bush-Cheney administration (and it is merely a theory, because no proof has ever been provided), the attacks were planned and carried out solely by alQaeda terrorists under the authorization of Osama bin Laden. The alternative theory, espoused by members of what has come to the be known as “the 9/11 truth movement”, holds that the attacks were orchestrated by officials of the Bush-Cheney administration itself. (Griffin 2010: xi) This binary either/or choice as to who was behind September 11, terrorists or that it was an “inside job”, have been advanced by both those close to government and by those who claim to want to reveal the “truth” about September 11. The problem is, by reducing the options to that between either Osama Bin Laden or the Bush-Cheney administration, other possibilities are not even being considered. Either Muslim extremists did indeed carry out September 11, or the American government was secretly behind the attacks, no other options need be considered. Indeed, if, as Sabrosky has argued, they do not accept the official narrative then the, so called, 9/11 Truthers pursue the claimant aggressively to ensure that they

194 accept that it was the government. It appears to be the case that people are forced into one of the two acceptable choices for explaining September 11, Muslim terrorists or government. This chapter will advance an alternative theory. Although the alternative theory is rather obvious once it has been presented, and others have proposed the same theory, (See Hendrie 2010) unlike claims of Muslim terrorists or, perhaps more surprisingly, it being an inside job130, this theory is not allowed to be voiced in public. It is more acceptable and considerably less dangerous to claim that the U.S. government attacked their own people rather than to accuse those who are accused in this chapter. It will be argued that when all the publicly available evidence is scrutinized then it becomes rather obvious, it is not even that secret, that the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, was an orchestrated ‘false flag’ attack undertaken by people who identify as Jews. These people were most likely operating under the guidance and direction of people in the Israeli government. That this is the case has even been suggested by Israeli mainstream media. In The Jerusalem Post, it said, “This is a crazy country in a crazy world”, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his senior adviser Erez Halfon on September 10, 2001. “There is no day when our schedule goes as planned,” Halfon, who is now deputy chairman of Nefesh B’Nefesh131, promised his boss that the next day would be different, and by 3 p.m. Israel time on September 11, he told Sharon with pride that everything was going according to plan. Less than an hour later, Sharon received a note from his chief of staff Uri Shani informing him that a plane had hit the first tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. (emphasis added Hoffman 2016) This is either an example of very awkward expression from a journalist whose job it is to write clearly or a rather transparent “boast” that Erez Halfon and Ariel Sharon were behind September 11. Why else did Halfon, by this account, have to reassure Sharon on the 10th of September 2001 that, unlike most days which do not go according to plan, “the next day would be different” and “proudly” assured Sharon that everything was “going according to plan” when, “less than an hour later” the first plane struck the first tower of the World Trade Centre? Although it would be reasonable to suppose that such a public display of responsibility would be overly brazen, as will be revealed, this kind of bravado is a common feature of Gnostic Jewry around the world. Perhaps they are prepared to be so obvious about their involvement in such undertakings because they are so confident that they are indeed above the law. After all, others have

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Which you would think would attract the harshest sanction. Nefesh B’Nefesh is a program to help people to migrate from the United States and England to Israel. One of their organizations aims is to encourage people to settle in the contested Golan Heights and Jordan Valley regions which technical belong to Palestine. Both of these areas are officially “occupied” as result of Israeli military action during the war in 1967. 131

195 accused Israel of being responsible for the 2001 terrorist attacks, including senior military officials, and yet absolutely nothing has been done by police or the United States secret service to take any action in response to these accusations. Within days of the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, many people were already questioning the emerging “official story” that it was done by Islamic extremists and pointing the finger at “Israel”. In an interview with the United Press International’s editor at large, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Hamid Gul, former chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence service, stated unequivocally that it was, “Mossad (the Israeli secret intelligence agency) and its accomplices” who were behind Sept. 11, 2001. If there remained any questions about what Gul really thought, in 2008 he repeated the accusation in even less ambiguous terms by saying to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, “Well I have been on record and I said it is the Zionists and the Neocons. They have done it; it is an inside job and they wanted to go on to become world conquerors.” Not only have Muslims accused Israel of perpetrating Sept. 11, the former President of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, said, . . .all of the democratic circles of America and of Europe . . . now know well that the disastrous attack was planned and realized by the American CIA and Mossad with the help of the Zionist world to place the blame on Arabic countries and to persuade the Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Cossiga as quoted in Mir 2011: 241) In perfect agreement, Andreas Von Buelow, who served on the parliamentary commission which oversaw the German secret service, told the Agence France-Presse (AFP) that he believed the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, was behind the September 11 attacks. He believed that these attacks were carried out to “turn public opinion against the Arabs and boost military and security spending132 in the United States”.133 (Ahmed 2002: 366) Von Buelow believed that such sophisticated attacks, and despite their external appearance of simplicity it actually was an extremely sophisticate operation, simply could not have been successfully undertaken by those who were accused. There was no way that a rabble of unsupported amateurs without access to huge sums of money and advanced skills could have undertaken such an attack. This kind of operation could not have been undertaken, Von Buelow claims, without

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As none other than Noam Chomsky observes, military spending is a way of getting the American public to spend billions on technological development which they would, under any other circumstance, refuse to give consent. One of the big spending items on the militaries list was the development and early promotion of the internet. More recently, AI soldiers who will do whatever is asked of them without question has attracted big spending. In short, the people of the United States are quite possibly funding the development of the means of their own destruction. 133 If this was one of the motives, then it was extremely successful. Muslims are held with the lowest level of respect out of any religious group in the United States.

196 extensive state support. Von Buelow argued that the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst – the German secret service) was now being steered by the CIA which, in turn, was ultimately controlled by Mossad. As this is the case, Von Buelow believed, rightly it turned out, that it was going to be impossible for a thorough and independent investigation into the role of Israel in the attacks on the Twin Towers to be undertaken in the United States as the body primarily responsible for such an investigation was compromised. This is like asking a murderer to investigate one of his own murders. People from military intelligence, European political leaders and the members of the secret services, all agree that Mossad was primarily responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Further, this attack simply could not have been a success without insider help from a range of institutions in the United States including the CIA. Many people with authority and knowledge of global events have accused “Mossad”, “the Zionists”, or “Israel”, of being the principal instigator of the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. They have variously claimed that Israel was hoping to, “increase military spending”, “turn public opinion against Arabs”, “persuade Western powers to intervene in Iraq and Afghanistan” with the ultimate aim of becoming “world conquerors”. Although these outcomes did, in part, justify the terrorist attack on the Twins, these are all just small victories in what is the real struggle of these people which is to realize redemption. It will be shown in the following chapters that this terrorist attack was made possible because of a theo-political movement that has entrenched itself, especially since the late 1960s and early 1970s, into key positions of power within the United States. It was only because of these deeply entrenched politically motivated actors hoping to destroy Western civilization that an attack like September 11 could be successfully carried out and then covered up. As will be revealed, this political movement functions as a ‘state within a state’ or what some call a ‘deep state’. They are the real “leaders” in the United States that control every aspect of American life to serve their agenda. These “deep state” actors do not only control the United States government and CIA but also have total control over the media, financial services, the entire education system and the military. Presenting evidence that people from the United States and Israel perpetrated September 11 certainly does not substantiate the larger claim that there is a Jewish sect, Jewish Gnostics, trying to take over the world, but it does successfully raise questions as to who these actors are and how are they are so easily escaping justice for this perpetrating this horrendous terrorist act even though many important and influential people know who the real terrorists are. The Real Reason for the Attack The very date, September 11, 2001, communicates so much to so many. It speaks of an unforgettable event. It speaks of terrorism. It speaks of innocent deaths. It speaks of desperate ordinary people choosing to plummet hundreds of floors to their deaths to escape an even more horrendous death

197 of being burnt alive. It speaks of religiously motivated political actors prepared to do anything to achieve their goals. It speaks of heroism. It speaks of resilience. But, perhaps more than anything else, it speaks of a new age. As those who are old enough to know well remember, there was a before September 11, 2001, and an after September 11, 2001, and they were very different times. We live in a very different world today, a new world, to the one that we lived in through the 80s and 90s and this new world was largely shaped in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. It is a world where many people accept things as “necessary” that before they just would not have accepted. In the weeks following September 11, 2001, a focus group was organized by the United States Democrats to measure what this terrorist act meant for Americans, this focus group found that Americans believed that 9/11, “had created a new period which is, in many ways, radically different from what has gone before”. (As seen in York 2002: 20-21) This sense that the world has fundamentally changed, and things would not return to how they were before the attacks was not accidental but planned from the very beginning. Philip D. Zelikow, a Jewish/American academic whose interest is in how history is used to justify policymaking, drawing upon William McNeill’s notion of the “public myth”, argued that “narratives” that are thought to be true (but are not necessarily true) and shared by a community could be used to achieve political outcomes. Basically, he is arguing the very un-Christian position, but one argued by Plato, that lies can and should serve a political purpose. In 1989, Zelikow, along with Ashton B. Carter and John M. Deutch, wrote a report called “Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy”. In this report, the authors argued that, . . .the most serious constraint on current policy is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine American’s fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test. . . Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great “success” or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a “before” and “after”. (Zelikow, Carter, Deutch 1989: 5) Considering the authors and the accuracy of the “prediction” regarding the type of event and what would be realised in its shadow, this is an intriguing paragraph. If somebody came to me and said that they needed a building to be burnt to the ground, so that they could collect the insurance money and then proceeded to build a new business on the same site and those events then actually happened, I would be deeply suspicion of the person who initially told me what they hoped would happen. What makes this

198 paragraph of even more concern is that Philip D. Zelikow, one of the authors of this report, was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission generated a final report on the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack explaining how this event could happen and what it meant for the United States. In short, Zelikow was placed in a position to determine the form of the final ‘myth’ of September 11, 2001, that might be shaped in such a way as to achieve the political outcomes foretold in his earlier paper. One conclusion of this report was that, unbelievably if one has even the most basic understanding of Middle Eastern politics, there were close links between Iran and alQaeda. It is now a fact of history that constitutional liberties were challenged and historical “allowable limits” on surveillance, extending laws for the detention of suspects and the use of lethal force, where all eased in the aftermath of September 11. As Edward Snowden said in an interview with John Stossel on Youtube, When the government, writ large, identifies a moment of crisis, they use that crisis for an exceptional demand for exceptional powers to which they would not normally be entitled. This was the rise of the Patriot Act. This is how the Bush administration became involved in more or less wiretapping. This is how we got extra judicial killings through drone strikes off the ground. This is how we got involved in torture. But it is always justified as an exception to ordinary operations. Something that is done for a narrow purpose and in a narrow way and nobody objects to it. This all happens in secret remember. They keep the body of witnesses small by design to limit the amount of descent, that occur internally, organizationally and those that do complain are generally shuffled off the program. All these new powers, including new powers of surveillance, would obviously suit a group operating secretly within government. It is no coincidence at all the high-speed broadband first became available in 2000 and that 2001 marked the year that 50% of America’s population had internet access of some kind. These laws were passed directly to control the flow of information, to monitor who was making what claim, so that the truth could never be easily communicated. It is both not necessary nor an accident that it is basically impossible to access the internet without revealing where you are and who you are. Everything you search, write and do on the internet, even on your private computer, is being monitored by Gnostic Jews either directly through Israel, who boasts the best spy network in the world, or their proxies in the United States. As Snowden observed in the same interview as was cited above, it is domestic surveillance that these organizations really began to focus their attention on after September 11 and not foreign surveillance. It is this internal surveillance, against everyday people going about their everyday lives, that is unprecedented. Indeed, it is increasingly the case, continuously advanced by the media, that surveillance should focus on what it calls “white nationalists” which has become fudged with “domestic terrorists”, as though the two terms are synonymous, and this is such a broad term probably anybody

199 who identified as a patriot would fall foul of these laws. It is not a coincidence in any way that anti-white sentiments have blossomed since September 11 and any attempt to counter the anti-white agenda is called a “white nationalism” or, even, “white supremacism”. As Mohammadi (2011) wrote when commenting on the 9/11 Commission report, it reads, “less of a warning than a blueprint”. It was understood prior to the attacks on September 11 that such an event could function like a new “Pearl Harbour” that could then be used to undermine ‘constitutional liberties’, motivate state sanctioned violence and, most importantly, herald a new era. Today we all accept the loss of privacy as “necessary” for national security and have grown accustomed to the increased levels of surveillance. Indeed, we have largely accepted without complaint the apparently never-ending war on terror that is being waged at a global level where the enemy’s identity seems to continuously morph from group to group in a manner all too reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984. All these changes to surveillance and people’s acceptance of surveillance occurred in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Prior to September 11, as was observed in a critical Washington Post article by Nathan Perlmutter on the 5th of June 1983 “. . .the West’s strategic interests and profits in the Persian Gulf are given precedence over Israel’s security . . .” whereas after September 11 U.S. interests seemed to be best served by prioritising Israel’s security. Past interests and profits were no longer as important as the War of Terror which dove tailed nicely with Israel’s security. Today, September 11 is etched into our collective memory. The extraordinary media saturation, 24-hour exclusive coverage of the event and the theories around it for three days, has ensured that this horrible event is etched into our collective consciousness as a “era defining event”. It truly was a moment that shaped history and made us see the world in a particular way. It made us see anew who were “our friends” and who were “our enemies”. September 11 showed the world what “we” should do, what “we” must now do, in the face of this new reality. What we must learn to accept if we were to be safe. As the political movement behind Sept. 11 had learnt over many years of experience, fear is a stronger motivator to action than hope. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, there has been numerous wars, increased internal surveillance, and the establishment of vast new government institutions oriented towards domestic “security”. No September 11, no Syria crisis, no Libya crisis, no Yemen crisis, no Egypt crisis, no war in Afghanistan, no war in Iraq . . . The list of events triggered by this act of terror seems never ending. Over 4 trillion dollars have been spent on conflicts in the Middle East. An unimaginable sum to most. The simple truth is that the world today would be very different if not for September 11, 2001.

200 September 11, 2001, had their origin a few years earlier. In 1997, a number of prominent American political thinkers formed a new, extremely well-funded, think-tank called, The Project for the New American Century. The founding members of this think-tank were William Kristol and Robert Kagan, both from prominent Eastern European Jewish families and considered to be extremely influential political theorists in what became known as Neo-Conservativism. Although both these political theorists will be discussed later, both their theoretical contribution and political activities, it suffices for now to observe that they are both students of Leo Strauss who is one of the most influential theorists of Gnostic Judaism in the post-World War II era. One of the first acts of The Project for the New American Century was the publication of a special report called, Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. This report argued, consistent with Neo-Conservativism’s core beliefs, that it was good for the world if the United States, in the reality of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, remained the sole dominant global power. If it was to remain in this position, the United States needed to reverse the military spending cuts that had resulted from the end of the ‘cold war’ through the 90s and commit to massive increases in military spending in order to undertake a significant re-armament program. One aspect of this new military project was to argue that the United States needed to gain “control of space and cyberspace”134 as these were like the new “high seas” of the contemporary world. This “control” would be expressed in terms of the capacity to undertake surveillance on everything that everyone did in ‘cyberspace’ and increase control over what was published online and what was seen through internet searches. In short, according to this report, what was required was to have control over access to information, to know who was accessing what information, and control over everything that was made available on the internet. It was hoped that nobody could be anonymous when either searching information on the internet or when they posted material on the internet. Transparency was everything. The greatest threat to effective surveillance and control is anonymity and it was the publication of truly anonymous material being access by unknown people that had to be made impossible.135 The report identified two barriers to achieving control over global information systems, United States domestic politics in terms of freedom of information and the allocation of resources in a democratic political system. The single greatest challenge to realising the vision of the project for a new “American” century (read

134

Control of space is identified by influential Jewish intellectual Abraham Joshua Heschel to be one of the most important tasks for the Jewish people. As Heschel wrote, “To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective . . . To gain control of the world of space is certainly one of our tasks.” (Heschel (195101994: 3)) 135 The real secret that these Eastern European Jews hoped to maintain was that Gnostic Jews were taking over the world. They wanted to know if a book like this was uploaded onto the internet, when it was uploaded and by whom and then who might be reading it.

201 Gnostic Jewish Century) was ‘domestic politics’ which, with its quaint, “old fashioned” beliefs about “privacy” and the need for “personal control over personal information”. Such antiquated thinking would definitely slow the required transformative process of relatively decentralized information distribution and consumption to extremely restrictive and centralized information control. As with much military spending, the difficulty, one that had been traditionally addressed by the deception of the “cold war”, was persuading the public to allow governments to spend the tremendous amounts of money required to rearm when other services in the United States, most famously health care, were so desperately underfunded. People generally did not like large sums of money being spent on the military and certainly did not like large sums of money being spent on the military to increase domestic surveillance. The voting public generally preferred people’s taxes being spent on public services and infrastructure. Echoing the original research published by Zelikow & co., 8 years before, the one hope that the report explicitly identifies for overcoming these historical barriers and realising the kind of ‘revolutionary change’ that Kagan and Kristol hoped to achieve, to build what would come to be termed the surveillance state in a post-Cold War world, was if there was “some catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor”. This catalysing event would have to occur in such a way as to demand both increased military spending and increased domestic surveillance. The exact outcome Zelikow predicted would occur after a catastrophic terrorist attack. Interestingly, and chillingly, on the night of 9/11, as evidence of how the ground had been prepared on how such an attack should be conceptualised, President George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbour of the 21st century took place today”. (as seen in Griffin 2004) None other than Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also observed that 9/11 was a turning point in history just like the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (Hoffman 2011) September 11, 2001, was the required “Pearl Harbour” of the 21st century that would allow the allocation of huge sums of money on military expenditure and dramatically increase domestic surveillance with public support. The real purpose behind this agenda was to both ensure that those who currently run the world remain hidden and are never exposed through the internet and, secondly, that the United States military, already serving the interests of Gnostic Judaism, continue to be a formidable military force that will continue to realise the political project of the Gnostic Jews. Later in these volumes, the ‘state within the state’ that has taken control of the United States will be uncovered along with its historical development. Strauss, Zelikow, Kagan and Kristol, will all be shown to be central actors in this extended account. If September 11, 2001, was indeed the ‘new Pearl Harbor’ that presented as the exceptional condition that allowed for greatly increased restrictions and extended surveillance. What Sept. 11 justified is the kind of sacrifice and centralised control which would permit those who control the United States

202 today to take control of all ‘space and cyberspace’. This was actually the primary short-term goal of the September 11 attacks. There were other goals, taking out Israeli’s enemies, ensuring the U.S. budget was ruined, taking the U.S.’s attention away from the actions of China and ensuring that a lot of U.S. dollars were spent in Israel, but the main reason was to increase domestic surveillance so that nobody could reveal the truth that Gnostic Jews now run the world. Those who really control the United States needed to be able to monitor and control the internet to both stop resistance from building and to give an account of events harmonious with their worldview. As can be seen as an empirical fact about the world today, with its intense surveillance over everything that we do, and massive military spending, they have been extremely successful. The Attacks The official story of what happened on September 11, 2001, is familiar to everyone. At 7:59 AM American Airlines Flight 11 (AA 11) left Logan International Airport in Boston on a domestic flight bound for Los Angeles International Airport in Los Angeles. At 8:14 am, air traffic controller, Pete Zalewski, of the Boston Air Traffic Control Centre, had what he described as a “standard exchange” with Flight AA11 when suddenly, without explanation, the pilots failed to respond to the controller’s instructions. Initially, Zalewski claims, he thought that it was a technical glitch that had interrupted communications and there was nothing about which to be concerned. What caused people to pay attention, again according to the official account, was at around 8:16 AM when flight AA11’s transponder was suddenly turned off. This was a clear indication to the flight controller that the plane was not suffering technical issues that were affecting communications but that the aircraft was most probably being hijacked. Having attracted the attention of Federal Aviation Administration ground control due to the transponder being turned off, flight AA11 suddenly veered dramatically off course at around 8:20 AM thereby confirming that the aircraft had indeed been hijacked. Shortly after this change of direction, Zalewski heard a heavily accented voice say, “We have some planes. Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you’ll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.” According to a New York Press article, it is believed that the pilot of flight AA11 had secretly pushed a button that allowed the controller to hear what the hijackers were communicating to the crew. (Szamuely 2002) The timeline of events is extremely important for understanding what happened on that day. At around 8:16 AM, controllers strongly suspected that flight AA11 had been hijacked. By 8:20 AM, Zalewski and the air traffic controllers knew, without doubt, because they had heard the hijacker’s voice, that the plane had been hijacked. At 8:21 AM, flight attendants reported via a phone that American Airlines Flight 11 had indeed been hijacked and that two staff and one passenger had already been killed. (Carlisle 2007: 12) It has since been discovered that

203 Pete Zalewski, the air traffic controller on Sept. 11 who reported the initial exchange between the hijackers of flight AA11 and flight control, happens to be a particularly unlucky air traffic controller. As with so much in relation to the events of September 11, 2001, the story of Pete Zalewski, the flight controller on that particular day, overseeing that particular flight, is quite unexpected. Not only was Zalewski responsible for both AA11, that would later crash into the World Trade Centre, and United Airlines Flight 175 (UA175), which was also hijacked on Sept. 11, 2001, which was the second aircraft to crash into the World Trade Centre, but he was the flight traffic controller for the hijacked Egypt Airlines Flight 990 (EA99) (also a Boeing 767) which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on October 31, 1999. This is an unbelievable coincidence that would appear to be simply beyond probability. That the same flight controller, who is Jewish, was responsible for both Egypt Airlines Flight 990 and American Airlines 11 and United America 175 cannot be a coincidence. What it does at least suggest, is that, unlike what has been done, Pete Zalewski needs to be taken into custody and rigorously questioned regarding his likely involvement in both the hijacking of Egyptian Airlines Flight 990, which now must be understood as some kind of test run for September 11, and the hijackings on September 11, 2001. It has since been claimed that five hijackers, supposedly led by Mohamed Atta, had taken control of Flight AA11 with the prior intention of flying the plane into the World Trade Centre. Over the day, it has since been claimed, that a total of 19 Islamic extremists, all associated with al-Qaeda, hijacked four passenger jet aircraft with the intention of flying them into previously identified targets. The supposed perpetrators of this attack were identified, names, date of births, addresses and occupations, within two days of the attacks. This response was so quick that one former FBI official claimed in an interview with The New American, “Obviously this information was available in the files, and somebody was sitting on it” (Grigg 2002) otherwise this information could not have been gathered so quickly. The problem with this hasty identification of the supposed perpetrators of September 11 was, according to The Telegraph, four of the 19 named “terrorists” who apparently died in the attack were later confirmed to be actually alive. (Harrison 2001) To adjust to this inconvenient truth, the FBI later claimed that the four people who were obviously alive must have had their identities stolen by the terrorists for the purpose of the attack but, as Hendrie rightly observes, why would Islamic terrorists, who were supposedly motivated to undermine the relationship between Israel and the United States, take the identity of Arabs when they could just as easily adopted the identity of Israelis thereby making it appear that it was their enemy who was behind the attack and not Muslims? (Hendrie 2010: 1-2) For the terrorists to have taken the identity of Arabs to commit the crime means that they were either extremely stupid or totally incompetent but, as the successful attack would confirm, they were apparently neither. Whoever was actually onboard those

204 flights on that day, and nobody really knows, it is known that two planes were flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York city. The first plane to hit the North Tower of the World Trade Centre (WTC) at 8:46 AM made contact near the 80th floor of the 110-story building. Hundreds of people were instantly killed in the initial explosion including, it is assumed, all the passengers and hijackers on the aircraft. Hundreds more people were trapped on the floors above the incident and, therefore, unable to escape. The plane used in the attack was an American Airlines Boeing 767. The aircraft hit the building 32 minutes after suspicion had been raised that the plane may have been hijacked, when communication was lost, and 30 minutes after this suspicion had been confirmed, when the transponder was turned off. Everyone in New York, including the emergency services, who watched this catastrophe unfold initially believed that it was just a terrible accident. This means that despite the air traffic controllers knowing that it was a terrorist attack, this information was not being communicated to emergency services in New York. 17 minutes after the first plane had struck the Twin Towers at 9:03, 42 minutes after air traffic control knew that planes were being hijacked, a second Boeing 767, United Airlines Flight 175, hit the South Tower of the World Trade Centre complex. It was only from this moment, as a result of the second plane and not as a result of communication, that everyone realised what officials had known since the planes were hijacked, this was not just an unfortunate accident but a deliberate terrorist attack. Surprisingly, especially to many engineers, at 10:28, just one hour and 42 minutes after being struck, the North building collapsed into a pile of dust. The building fell vertically in on itself at roughly the speed of free-fall. It has since been claimed that burning jet fuel compromising the integrity of the steel infrastructure of the building, causing the building to fall vertically to the ground. 56 minutes after the North Tower fell, the South Tower, initially struck at 9:03 AM, collapsed in the exact same manner, apparently for the exact same reason. Later, at 5:20 PM that same afternoon, so quite some time after the two higher buildings had collapsed, Building 7 of the World Trade Centre complex also collapsed. Although Building 7 was an impressive 47-story skyscraper, a building that would dominate many city skylines around the world, it was dwarfed by its neighbours so appeared to be a significantly less imposing building making its collapse less conspicuous. After all, many people may have thought, it was only a “small building” and therefore, more fragile. Building 7 was not struck by any aircraft, because it was some distance away from the other buildings it was largely unharmed by aircraft debris and was not exposed in any way to aviation fuel, but it too collapsed in the same manner as the two taller buildings. It was later claimed that this building collapsed, unlike Buildings 1 and 2, because of the intense fires that had resulted from burning office material inside the building. This account was later rejected by hundreds of qualified engineers as implausible observing that a building collapsing due to being struck by planes and filled with

205 burning aviation fuel was extremely unlikely but a significant building, a 47-story high-rise building, collapsing because of a paper fire was simply impossible. It must be remembered that buildings had never collapsed like they did on that day before and have never collapsed like that since. A unique historical event happened not once, not twice but three times in one day to buildings designed to withstand the event supposedly being the cause of events with one of those building largely unharmed. With just a little reflection, the official story becomes ridiculous and utterly unconvincing, but most people do not reflect, even a little, but accept what they are told. While these events were unfolding in New York, another hijacked aircraft supposedly hit the Pentagon building just outside of Washington D.C. At around 9:35 A.M., air traffic controllers at Dulles International Airport identified an aircraft veering off-course and heading towards the White House. The pilot of the aircraft, Charles Burlingame, seemed to lose control of the flight, American Airlines Flight 77 a Boeing 757-223, when it suddenly turned towards the Pentagon from the west. The jet aircraft apparently came in so low over Washington that it clipped the top of light poles. At 9:43 A.M., the jet supposedly careered into the west side of the Pentagon. Tim Timmerman, a pilot who witnessed the events in Washington, claimed that it sounded as though the plane increased power as it made its final approach before colliding with the building. (Carlisle 2007: 146) 125 people died in the Pentagon and all 64 passengers and crew onboard American Airlines Flight 77. The final plane hijacked on that day was crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, killing all passengers onboard. United Airlines Flight 93 was supposed to take-off at 8:00 A.M. but was delayed for 42 minutes. It has been proposed that four Arab passengers who were affiliated with Al-Qaeda were aboard. The official story is that these four ‘terrorists’ took control of the plane by incapacitating the pilot and the co-pilot. Although the passengers were under constant supervision by one of the terrorists, he made no attempt to stop them contacting people by phone on the ground. More than 24 cell phone calls were made by the passengers onboard that flight to family and loved ones. One of these calls was made by Ed Felt just before 10 A.M. and he claimed that he had locked himself into the plane’s toilet and made a 9-1-1 call from his mobile phone informing them that the flight had been hijacked. It has been theorised that upon the passengers learning about the World Trade Centre crashes, they organized to try to attack the hijackers and take the plane back. When the terrorist pilot learned of these efforts, he decided to crash the plane into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing himself and everyone on board. The total fatalities from the hijacked planes and the buildings were almost 3,000 people. Amongst the many who went to work that day and would never see their loved ones again, were 343 firefighters. This is obviously a terrible event that is etched in everyone’s mind who is old enough to remember.

206 Thousands of people, going about their everyday lives, ruthlessly killed. It was shocking. These events cannot, should not, be left to the historians until properly understood. As a direct result of these attacks and their attribution to radical Islam there have been, by conservative estimates, well over 1 million people killed in the Middle East since 2001. The attacks on September 11, 2001, have truly proven themselves to be events soaked in blood . . . but also effective for realizing the agenda of The Project for the New American Century. The President of the United States of America As with those thousands who were about to die that day, President George W. Bush was going about his morning as usual. He had an appointment to visit E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida, hoping to publicise his policies on educational reform. (Carlisle 2007: 4) At 8:45 AM, as American Airlines Flight 11 was striking the first tower, George Bush was en route in his motorcade to the school apparently totally unaware that an unprecedented 4 American planes had been hijacked over American skies. It was later claimed that Captain Deborah Loewer was the first person to inform him of the unfolding events in the skies over America just as he arrived at E. Booker Elementary School at 8:55 (Approximately 10 minutes after the first flight had struck the Twin Towers but 35 minutes after people knew that a number of planes had been hijacked over America) but it does not seem to be the case that he was informed that the plane that struck the building was hijacked, which they knew, or that other hijacked planes remained in the air. This was an unprecedented terrorist attack on the United States involving 4 large passenger aircraft and the President of the United States was not properly informed. At that time, it seems that the information flowing to the President was not from those who knew what was actually unfolding but simply observers of the plane striking the building who believed that the plane strike on the World Trade Centre was just a terrible accident. That is, none of the many people who must have known what was happening had tried to inform those who might inform the President of the United States. Not knowing about the hijackings, and this as will be discussed is extremely important, the President continued with his planned visit to the school. Of course, it would not be expected that the President would instantly respond to every terrible accident that occurred in the United States but taking responsibility for most disasters was the responsibility best left to those trained for such events. The outstanding question is, if nobody knew that the plane was hijacked then everyone agrees the President should not be involved but should the President have both been told and involved in the decision making of four hijacked aircraft and the use of at least one of them, at that time, in an act of serious terrorism? I am certainly no expert on security protocols in the United States, but it seems to me that an unprecedented terrorist attack, especially involving passenger aircraft, should have involved the President

207 in the decision making process. At 9:06, Chief of Staff Andrew Card told George W. Bush that a second plane had struck the Twin Towers and that it was being undertaken by terrorist. The United States was under attack. To the surprise of many, President Bush, perhaps still not fully comprehending the extent of what was happening, nor his responsibilities in such a situation, continued with his visit to the classroom of children. He continued reading a book to the students for another 10 minutes. Although the President has been criticised for not responding more urgently to the news, it is actually understandable that he did not instantly appreciate what was the proper response to such news. He would not have been as familiar with emergency protocols as his aides. They should have communicated to him the seriousness of the situation and his role in such a crisis. Indeed, his response basically proves that, if the United States government is indeed implicated in this event, he personally did not know about it at the time. Anyone in that same situation may have failed to react “as they should” in exactly the same manner as the President. Although his response upon being told of the second plane hitting the Twin Towers has become part of the “hopeless President Bush” narrative, this is actually one of the few understandable events to have occurred on that day. At the further prompting of his increasingly agitated staff, Bush finally left the classroom at 9:16 to be properly briefed on what was known about events in a separate room at the school. At 9:30 PM, one hour and 10 minutes after people knew of the hijackings, the President of the United States of America gave a short-pre-prepared speech to the nation where he said, “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” Not the most inspiring words but George W. Bush was a particularly uninspiring President. What is interesting is that from the President’s very first words on the matter there was the narrative of “resolve”. Indeed, in the years and decades that followed, “resolve” would be a reoccurring theme, resolve to “stay the course”, resolve to “see things through” but what was the “course of action” requiring “resolve” at this stage when almost nothing was actually known about what was happening? George Bush’s speech writer at that time was David Frum, a Jewish Canadian/American who is on the board of directors of the Republican Jewish Coalition. On the day of the attacks Bush said, “We will make no distinction between those who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Incredibly insightful words considering what was understood to be the true situation in Afghanistan, where it was claimed Osama Bin Laden had taken refuge. It was that Afghanistan was “harbouring” Osama Bin Laden that justified the initial deployment of American troops into the Middle East. Did Frum know what the United States needed “resolve” to achieve? Did Frum already know that Osama Bin Laden was in Afghanistan and that American troops would need to be deployed to dislodge him? On September 20th, 2001, just 9 days after the event, the

208 President said, “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.” Again, shortly after the attacks and merely days after discovering who the perpetrators were, there was already a narrative that the “war on terror” would not stop with Al Qaeda but would continue until every “terrorist group” had been “defeated”. Were there people surrounding the President who already knew that this war on terror would take them to Iraq, Syria and Libya? Interestingly, the President was taken to his specially prepared Boeing 747 jet - Air Force One, in the aftermath of the attack. Air Force One departed from Sarasota at 9:55 AM without a destination. He was told by senior advisors, including Vice President Dick Cheney who had actually taken over as the head of the chain of command without requesting or receiving permission from the President and despite the President never being out of contact. At approximately 10:35, the decision was made to deliver the President to Barksdale Air Force Base. Air Force One reached Barksdale with the President onboard at 11:45 A.M. He would later depart Barksdale and be flown around to various destinations before being allowed to return to Washington D.C. at 6:42 P.M. that afternoon. Some have argued that because of the President’s isolation, there was another aircraft with advanced communications that was not used, that he was always moving and spent much of that time in the air, the only information he received about events was filtered by Dick Cheney and that they were making all decisions about how to respond to events and not the President. In practice, by all appearances, there had actually been a short coup in the United States where power was illegally transferred from the President to Dick Cheney outside of proper procedures. Dick Cheney was very close to the Neo-conservatives, and, unlike George W. Bush, he actually participated in The Project for the New American Century along with many other in the Bush administration including Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Some have claimed that Air Force One proved to be an excellent operations office for the President and that he remained informed, although everyone admits not in control, of events as they unfolded while others have claimed that the U.S President was kept out of decision making and was ignorant about much of what happened on that day in his name. Whichever of these accounts is closer to the truth really does not matter, if President Bush was isolated or informed, the important point is that Dick Cheney had taken control of the instruments of power even though the elected President remained able to function in the role. On September 11, 2001, not only was there a terrorist attack but there was also a coup. The question that continues to be raised is what was the responsibility of the President on that day under those circumstances? Stan Goff, 26-year military veteran, U.S. Army Special Forces Master Sergeant and tactics instructor, asks, and I quote at length,

209 I have no idea why people aren’t asking some very specific question about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks . . . Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time. Who is notified? This is an event that is already unprecedented. But the President is not notified and goes to a Florida elementary school to hear children read. By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong.136 The President is glad-handling teachers. By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Centre, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the world’s best-known twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief. No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Centre building. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush who ‘briefly turns sombre’ according to reporters. Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No. He resumes listening to second graders . . . and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington D.C. Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No. An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they already have figured out; that there’s been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Centre. There’s a hijacked plane beelining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No. At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon. The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at over 400 naughts. At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC. Now, the real kicker: A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessna, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in twoand-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 naughts. (Goff as seen in Ahmed 2002: 161-162) Although Goff’s statement raises some of the issues in relation to this attack that has yet to be raised, interestingly questioning the ability of a poorly trained yet to be formally qualified light air craft pilot to be able to complete the difficult manoeuvres supposedly performed by the pilot on that day, it does nicely

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8:15 was around the time, within a minute or two either way, that the transponder of Flight AA11 was indeed turned off and when the authorities did indeed know that the place was hijacked.

210 question the president’s behaviour and the actions of those around him and raises pertinent questions as to why there has not been more critical commentary on either those who are responsible for keeping the President informed or the President’s own actions. The most important feature of the President’s lack of concern about the unprecedented events unfolding over the United States is that only he, as Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to order the shooting down of a civilian aircraft to protect the security of the nation. That decision cannot be made by anyone else. With his apparent lack of knowledge regarding his responsibilities and non-participation as the events unfolded the option to shoot aircraft down to stop greater catastrophes on the ground was not available to the military. This is crucially important as ensuring that the President did not order the planes to be shot out of the sky meant that the terrorist missions were almost ensured of success. That is, even if the planes had been scrambled, which does not require the President’s permission, they could not have done anything to stop the planes anyway. That he was not informed of his responsibilities and does not seem to have been informed of the situation ensured that the attacks would be a success even if other measures had been more effective. As will be discovered, the truth is that even if the President did appreciate what was happening and acted as might be hoped, giving permission for the planes to be shot down to prevent worse harms, this would have been ineffective because the defence planes were not even scrambled to intercept the hijacked aircraft as they should have been. It has since been claimed that the President did not give the orders for the air force to be scrambled but this action does not require the President’s approval. Why was the United States air force, supposedly the most efficient and highly trained air force in the world, scrambled? The truth is, by the time something could be done, it was already too late as nothing could have prevented the attacks on the Twin Towers or the Pentagon.

Supposed Motivation for September 11 The supposed motivation for the terrorist attack on the United States has never been made clear. Indeed, as D’Souza observes, “What the 9/11 Commission Report does not tell us, however, is why it happened. On the subject of why the terrorists and their sponsors did what they did, the report is largely silent.” (D’Souza 2007L 32) It is actually surprising that the motivation for this attack has attracted so little attention from the media or commentators. The apparent reason for the attacks was in in retaliation against the United States for their unconditional support of Israel. Osama Bin Laden was apparently concerned that Zionism and the United States were imposing their values on the Muslim world and would be “like locusts, eating our fruits and wiping out our plantations”. America and their allies in Israel together presented as an existential threat to Islam. Israel, therefore, was always a central feature of the

211 September 11 narrative despite this fact attracting very little media attention. Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that is believed to be responsible for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, had its origins in the Arab militants who, with massive American support, fought a “Jihad” in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. In those days, these Islamic fighters were considered ‘freedom fighters’ against Soviet communist oppression. The founding members of Al Qaeda were Osama Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Dr Fadl. They were initially formed, it is claimed, to resist the United States military presence in the Middle East in the same way they had fought against the Soviet Union. Bin Laden had proposed that the best way to deal with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait was to form a Muslim army to destroy Hussain. Instead, the United States moved thousands of Christian troops into the heart of the Middle East bringing with them all the immorality and decadence that American society promotes. Although Al-Qaeda was opposed to various strategies used in the Middle East, his central motivation, apparently, was intended to sever the ties between America and Israel. Bin Laden says “the United States stops any efforts to condemn Israel” no matter the atrocities they perform against innocent Muslim women and children. Bin Laden cannot tolerate the presence of ‘infidels’ in places sacred to Islam as they spread “oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery”. (Carlisle 2007: 7) This narrative is harmonious with that being promoted by Israel itself which argues that extreme violence and marginalization of Arab populations both within Israel and in the surrounding region is necessary because these people aspire for nothing less than the total destruction of Israel. Al-Qaeda, as does the Israeli established Hamas, legitimizes this narrative. If the primary motivation for Al-Qaeda to attack the United States was to undermine Israel and one plank of that strategy was to undermine the U.S./Israel relationship, then September 11 was a terrible strategic error as one should have expected. If the attacks on the United States were understood as an attempt to destroy U.S/Israeli relations then the implications were, if the United States stopped supporting Israel, it would now appear that the United States was ‘giving in’ or ‘surrendering to’ terrorism. United States support for Israel, always extraordinarily high but attracting some critical attention prior to September 11, as happens from time to time, became an even more entrenched feature of U.S. foreign policy than it had been prior to the attacks. The main reason for this increased support was the simple fact that “. . .Israel’s apartheid civil war was vindicated. . .” by the terrorist attacks. (McMurtry as seen in Ahmed 2002: 279) September 11 happened at a time when there were growing voices, some with real authority, criticising America’s unconditional support for Israel. Supporting Israel did little to advance United States’ strategic interests in the Middle East and, actually, was known to do a great deal of harm.

212 The United States is seen as an apologist, at least, for Israel’s terrible behaviour in the Middle East and this undermines the United States’ moral standing. As Guyenot observed, In the years preceding September 11, Israel’s reputation had bottomed out; condemnation had been raining from around the world for its policy of apartheid and colonization, and its systematic war against Palestinian command structures. Increasing numbers of American voices questioned the merits of the special relationship between the United States and Israel. With the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers, the argument that U.S/Israeli relations were necessary for the future safety of the world was, apparently, proven to be true. As none other than Netanyahu was quick to state publicly, “It’s very good [Sept 11]. . .it will generate immediate sympathy . . ., strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror.” (Netanyahu as seen in Guyenot 2020) How many people around the world, no matter heads of state, were saying that Sept. 11 was “good”? Not even Arab nations long suffering at the hands of Israel and the United States were saying that the attacks were “good”. To be fair, Netanyahu was being honest for a change. It was no longer the case of Israel saying, ‘if you were in our shoes, you would do the same’. Now it appeared to be the case that America was in those vary same shoes. They too were victims of Muslim terrorism and, under those same conditions, were shown to be prepared to do the exact same, at least, or even worse than Israel. Again, as Guyenot (2020) observed, “From the day of the attack, it was all over. As Americans now intended to fight Arab terrorists to the death, they would stop demanding from Israel more reasonable, proportionate retaliation against Palestinian suicide bombers and rockets.” Israel now had a green light for anything because many Americans were now extremely supportive of any attacks against global terrorist organizations. As the headline in the New Republic asserted, “We are all Israelis now”. If the United States now stopped supporting Israel, then the United States would appear to be cowardly in the face of terrorist provocations. Why might this strong American support for Israel be so important as to motivated Israel to orchestrate such a terrible event. The full answer to this question, as with so much, is multi-layered. As already discussed, one element to ensure that information flow in cyberspace would be controlled. At the same time, Israel benefits greatly from American aide and this aide was being questioned. It should be remembered that Israel, a developed advanced economy that is ranked 22nd on the UN Human Development Index, has been the largest single recipient of United States foreign aid since WWII. It has received around $230 billion since 1948 with $130 billion of that money being paid since 2001. Israel was

213 the largest annual recipient of aid between 1976-2004. (McArthur 2013) Today, Israel officially receives over $3 billion dollars in grants annually.

This ‘aid’ sum does not include the hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid which included giving Israel billions of dollars’ worth of military weapons at the end of the Iraq War because it was considered too expensive to bring the latest most advanced military equipment in the world, paid for by working Americans, back to the United States. In 2014, for just one example, Israel received $3.1 billion in military aid and was guaranteed $3.8 billion in military aid between 2016-2026 by the Trump administration. In crude terms, Israel, an advanced economy by every measure, received over $7 billion dollars in direct aid in 2014. Further, Israel benefits from about $9 billion in loan guarantees annually, which allows Israel to access foreign loans on the same terms as the United States. (McArthur 2013) This aide is for a country of just 8.5 million people of which 1.7 million are a socially and economically marginalized Arab minority who would not benefit very much at all from this aide because Israel is an extremely segregated society. So less than 7 million people benefit from these massive aid packages. As Prof. John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Prof. Stephen Walt, of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard

214 University, wrote in their now renowned and extremely revealing book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, on the dangers of the ‘Israel Lobby’, Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War II. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $14 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of American’s foreign-aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year. This largesse is especially striking when one realizes that Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain. (Mersheimer and Walt 2006: 30-31) That the United States generously supports Israel is beyond question. Former Congressman James Traficant claimed that when all the trade compacts, economic assistance, military assistance and direct aid is considered, Israel receives around $15 billion a year. As the Congressman observed, this is at the same time that US citizens are “losing their pensions” and the welfare state is being increasingly restricted. Homelessness in the United States has reached levels that are more than a little reminiscent of a 3rd world country with plastic sheeted “tent cities” arising on the streets of its major cities and yet this much money can just be gifted to Israel. This level of support for Israel becomes unsurprising when it is discovered that when running for office in the United States, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the leading, so called, “Israeli lobby organization”, according to former Congresswomen Cynthia McKinney, approaches every candidate with a formal ‘pledge’, “stating that as a candidate I would commit my tenure, should I win, to the military superiority of Israel, to Jerusalem as the capital city, to continued aid at the level requested by Israel.” (McKinney as seen in Chehata 2011; emphasis added) All candidates for office are approached by these Israeli lobbyists and asked to sign this pledge. How many other countries would like to determine their level of aid being given by the United States? How many politicians from a supposedly independent country are approached by advocates of a foreign power asking them to sign an agreement of basically unconditional support or not get elected?137 With the Israeli lobby’s well documented control of the media and controlling billions of dollars in political funding it can only be imagined the chances of someone winning their election if they refused to sign this “pledge”. As Avnery observed of the power of this lobby,

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At the same time that this kind of pressure is brought against American politicians by Jews living in the United States on behalf of Israel, it is officially an act of anti-Semitism to claim that American Jews have divided loyalties. How did everyone come to accept all this?

215 It’s [Jewish Americans] electoral and financial power casts a long shadow over both houses of the Congress. Hundreds of Senators and Congressmen were elected with the help of Jewish contributions. Resistance to the directives of the Jewish lobby is political suicide. If the AIPAC were to table a resolution abolishing the Ten Commandments, 80 Senators and 300 Congressmen would sign it at once. This lobby frightens the media, too, and assures their adherence to Israel. (Avnery 2002) That they wield so much power and have so much money means that every politician is being extorted to either unconditionally supporting Israel or give up on having a political career. As Giraldi observed, [The Israeli Lobby] have bought or intimidated every politician that matters to include presidents, congressmen and even those in state and local governments. Anyone who criticises Israel or Jewish collective behaviour in support of the Israeli state is subject to character assassination and blacklisting a la Mel Gibson and Rick Sanchez. Those who persist are denounced as antisemites, a label that is used liberally by Zionist groups. At the same time that the United States gives less support to its own people, Israel has an extremely generous welfare program for Israeli Jews. Universal health care, universal child support payments, and generous pensions, are all features of Israeli welfare whereas in the United States none of this supplied. The most basic reason for Israel instigating September 11 was to at least maintain, but hopefully increase, this level of U.S. financial and military support to Israel. The next layer of concern was to implement the agenda of The Project for the New American Century. The final “layer” is to help realize the agenda of Gnostic Judaism. The more that is learnt the more the idea that people would believe that attacking the United States would ever stop the U.S. government from supporting Israel seems highly questionable. One would expect, as has actually been the case, that such an attack would only reinforce and extend U.S. support for Israel. As United States Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano observed in 2010, “The bond between the United States and Israel has never been stronger.” (Napolitano as seen in Blumentahl 2011) One day before the attacks on the Twin Towers, on 10th September 2001, the Washington Post reported, based on research from the U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), that Mossad, Israel’s military intelligence agency, was a “Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act.” (as seen in Ahmed 2002: 349) Not only might this be a public announcement of what was about to actually happen the very next day, but it shows that prior to Sept. 11, there were some very real questions from reputable sources beginning to question the unconditional support of the United States for Israel as Mearsheimer and Walt’s book confirms. After the attacks, all these concerns were silenced. Nobody today is questioning the “special relationship” status between Israel and the United States despite the relationship continuously facing many challenges. It actually became

216 almost treasonous to question the U.S.’s relationship with Israel after Sept. 11, as it suggested accommodation of the enemy. In light of the terrible terrorism being undertaken by radical Islamists, how could somebody question the role of Israel in the Middle East and United States unconditional support for those activities. To question U.S. support for Israel was now seen as surrendering to terrorism. The Israeli worldview had been vindicated. Muslims were terrorists, they were dangerous, they needed to be dealt with ruthlessly. Surly, the only “winner” out of these attacks was not radical Islam, who would know that as a consequence of the attacks that they would bring the wrath of the most advanced military machine in the world down upon them, but Israel who would equally know the consequences of such an attack. Just like any beneficiary from an event, whether it is a fortunate fire at the local factory, or a wife suddenly dies who is well insured by the husband, the beneficiary of an event should be investigated on suspicion of involvement because they, at least, have a motive. This investigation simply has not happened. Before moving on to more evidence to support the claim that Jewish actors were behind September 11, it is interesting to ask in light of the unprecedented support given by the U.S. to Israel, what does Israel do for the United States in return for this support? After all, the United States have literally fought wars on behalf of Israel for decades, spending billions upon billions of dollars, while the Israeli Army has not only preserved its military capacity but extended it greatly, while remaining safely at home. The United States can be seen to have spilt the blood of its finest youths in a foreign land for another country. As former US Congressman James Traficant138 observed, . . .Israel has a powerful stranglehold on the American government. They control both, members of the House, and the Senate. They have us involved in wars in which we have little or no interest. Our children are coming back in body bags. Our nation is bankrupt over these wars. And if you open your mouth, you get targeted. And if they don’t beat you at the poll, they’ll put you in prison. . . They’re controlling much of our foreign policy. They’re influencing much of our domestic policy. Wolfowitz as undersecretary of defence

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Traficant was a continuous annoyance to Israeli and Jewish interests in the United States. He served a time in prison on what he claimed were trumped up charges to silence him, but he continued to speak out. On the 23rd September 2014, Traficant was admitted to hospital. It was originally claimed that Traficant had been involved in a tractor accident on his farm. His wife initially made a public statement to say that he was “sedated and doing well”. Then, on the 27th September, five days after being admitted, Traficant surprisingly died. It was claimed that Traficant had died without ever regaining consciousness. Questions were instantly asked by his supporters, about the mixed messages regarding the state of his health. The forensic pathologist concluded, failing to quite concern, that Traficant had died of “positional asphyxiation” that he had suffered, supposedly, while under his tractor on the farm. So, he apparently both died of suffocation on his farm and lived several days doing well in hospital. Of course, as would be expected given who he was speaking against, many of his supporters have rightly suspected foul play. Although one can never know if foul play was really what caused Traficant’s death, what is known is that they are most certainly prepared to kill to further their project.

217 manipulated President Bush number two back into Iraq. They’ve pushed definitely, definitely to try to get Bush before he left to move into Iran. We’re conducting the expansionist policy of Israel and everybody’s afraid to say it. They control much of the media, they control much of the commerce of the country, and they control powerfully both bodies of the Congress. They own the Congress. What does Israel do for the United States in gratitude? Surely Israel must give every possible assistance, every possible aid, every possible support, that they can to the United States in return. They must be the United States’ staunchest ally in the Middle East guaranteeing military assistance whenever required. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Israel has never fought alongside U.S. troops in any conflict around the world at any time in history. This might be contrasted to a country like Australia, a true friend to the United States and her people, who receives no U.S. aid, (indeed the U.S. benefits to the tune of around $11 billion annually from a massive trade surplus which is the result of a very generous “free trade” agreement signed in the 1990s) who has militarily supported the United States in all their significant conflicts since WWII. Not only has Israel never fought alongside the United States in a conflict but Israel famously attacked the United States surveillance vessel, the USS Liberty, intending to sink the vessel with all her crew because the USS Liberty may have heard sensitive Israeli communications. As a result of the surprise attack from a military force the sailors believed they were there to protect, using both aircraft and naval vessels, 34 American crew were killed and 171 were wounded. This act of aggression was quickly hushed up by the then President of the United States, Lindon B Johnson, which up until that time was the most pro-Israeli President the United States had ever had.139 The official reason for this accommodation was to secure Jewish votes, and more importantly funding from Jewish Americans, in the up-coming U.S. election along with softening of the extremely negative media coverage being generated from Jewish controlled media sources on the ongoing Vietnam War. Nobody has ever been held responsible for this war crime in the United States or Israel. Israel is one of two nations to undertake a surprise militarily attack against the United States, the other being Japan. Two of the most respected academics on U.S. international relations, Mersheimer and Walt, observe that Israel “does not act like a loyal ally” nor has it ever. These highly respected scholars observe that just one expression of this disloyalty is that Israel flatly refuses to accent to United States directives. For just one example of their refusal, Israel continues to build illegal settlements in occupied territories of Palestine despite the United States continuously requesting that this building program be stopped. Indeed, millions of dollars from the US Jewish community ‘charities’, which are tax exempt, are given to

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Many have since surpassed Johnson in groveling to Israel. The most recent was Donald Trump who knows how to return a favor.

218 illegal Israeli settlements at the direct cost to the United States economy above and beyond the official aide given by the United States government. In an investigation Forward, “uncovered a tax-exempt Jewish communal apparatus that operates on the scale of a Fortune 500 company and focuses the largest share of its donor dollars on Israel.” (as seen in McArthur 2013) It is also known that Israel disregards international standards by undertaking extrajudicial ‘targeted assassinations’ at unprecedented levels. These accusations are only brought against Israel regarding the many murders about which the world knows about but, of course, does not even begin to count those many, who knows how many, murders carried out by the Israeli state and their many passionate supporters about which the world remains ignorant. In committing these murders, Israel has shown itself time and again to totally disregard international law. How many Americans, how many Australians, how many Europeans, are quietly killed for transgressing Israeli or Jewish interests around the world? This question becomes particularly pressing when the full agenda of Gnostic Jewry is appreciated. The truth is that we just do not know. What we do know is that in countries like Australia, Jews admit to forming militia type organizations, trained and equipped with military grade weapons by Mossad, that operate under such innocuous names such as the “Community Security Group” which are really paramilitary forces intended to protect and advance Jewish interests abroad. The Community Security Group’s explicit purpose is to “protect Jewish life and the Jewish Way of Life” in Australia. I cannot help but to wonder who is protecting my life and my way of life as a Christian Australian living in Australia against this militia? Most Australian’s do not even know that such organizations exist or that there are state funded organizations whose sole purpose is to ensure Jewish financial well-being. No other community seems to be allowed to maintain its own private militia, most probably funded by Israel using money secured originally from the United States. Their activities are surrounded in mystery, but we know, after the case of Ben Zygier, the prisoner X, that at least some of its members are indeed trained assassins. Will I myself get a knock on the door one day, or exposed to some unknown poison, or accidently swallow something slipped into my drink, for writing these books? If I died, even under unusual circumstances, no questions would be asked. The truth is that we just do not know how many people Israel or those organization sympathetic with Israel have killed. It could be 10s, it could be 100s, it could be 1000s, it could be tens of thousands every year and nobody would know. All we know is (1) they are more than prepared to do extra-judicial killings, (2) that they are trained and armed through their militias to undertake extrajudicial killings and (3) that they loath Western civilization and are determined to see it destroyed. These are not three facts that would fill one will confidence. How have we let these people get away with this?

219 Finally, beyond being deceptive and spying on behalf of potentially enemy states, Israel is certainly not the robust Western style democracy in the Middle East that it presents itself as being. Israel is not “. . .a flourishing democracy . . . A defender against irrationality and irreverence of life surrounded by infidels, a tower of strength and stability fuelling American industry” (Goldberg 2009: 116) that many Jews are eager to promote. Indeed, as this document will make clear, Israel was established to oppose rationality and advance the cause of “infidels” against the West. Beyond this theo-political agenda, according to a 1998 report by Israeli human rights organization, B’Tselem, Israel uses “routine torture”, these “Illegal practices included . . . isolation, sleep deprivation, psychological torment and direct physical force including beatings, kicking, violent shaking, painful shackling and use of objects designed or used to inflict extreme pain.” (as seen in Ahmed 2002: 267) Finally, it is well known in United States security circles that Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S” by anyone in the world which has meant that several senior officials, like Larry Franklin in 2004, have been caught passing on secret information to Israel. For this act of espionage, Franklin served just 10 months of home arrest and nobody else involved in the case, there were several Jewish Americans mentioned as being possibly involved in the case but were never arrested or charged, were brought to justice. As observed in the introduction, there is no equality under the law in the United States. This treatment of Larry Franklin, who was interested in serving no purpose other than his own, might be contrasted to the treatment of people like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who fight for truth and an accountable government but are punished most severely. Perhaps of greatest concern, as will be elaborated upon throughout these volumes, it is known that Israel has sold critical military technology that has been given to them by the U.S., to the second most powerful country in the world and future potential threat to American supremacy, China, Indeed, and this is very important, when one begins to investigate, “Jewish Americans” are doing everything that they can to advance China’s global interests at the expense of the United States to such a degree that it is treasonous. Sept. 11 was in part undertaken to help their Chinese comrades by drawing America’s attention away from the Pacific region, where it should be, onto the Middle East. After the Communist revolution in China, there was a period of time, from the mid-1950s through to the late 1970s, when relations between China and global Jewry was extremely poor. Probably for reasons of retaining power, Mao associated Jewish political activity and Zionism with American imperialism. Trying to cast itself as the nation of liberation from European colonialism, in places like Africa, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, Moa railed against Europeans. Mao characterised Israel as “the poisoned knife which the American imperialists pushed into the heart of Palestine.” It was not until the late 1980s, in post-Mao

220 China, that Sino-Jewish relations began to improve and improve quickly. The general perception of American Jews in China is much more insightful than most Americans. In no small part that is because the Chinese have not been exposed to the continuous propaganda intentionally aimed at distorting perceptions that occurs in the West. Unaffected by an education system and entertainment industry intended to shape the way people think in regards to Jews, many Chinese observe the reality of the situation in the United States. They recognise that Jews have incredible power, prestige and wealth in the United States and seem to be able to achieve anything they want. This is not to be critical of Jews, this is not the same narrative that has informed Western perception of the all-powerful Jew who must be stopped, but they actually greatly admire and are even envious of the power, influence, and wealth that American Jews have in the United States. As Chinese scholar Zhou Xun wrote capturing these feelings, . . . Chinese intellectuals’ attitudes towards Jews were often mixed with curiosity and envy. Why should the Jewish, not the Chinese, be the dominant culture in the world? Why should Judaism, not Confucianism, have been widely accepted as the guiding moral principle of human society? Why should a Jew, not a Chinese, be the richest man? (Xun 2016: 6-7) As this quote shows, the Chinese did not see the injustice of a small minority have such a disproportionate amount of power but, instead, asked why they themselves especially with their many millions of people, cannot achieve the kinds of success that Jews have achieved. In the 1980s, in an attempt to understand how Jews managed to wield such disproportionate power, China undertook to seriously research how such a small population managed to control the entire political and international program of the United States for their benefit. To undertake this research, a . . .space was opened for Chinese scholars to pursue independent research on issues and topics related to Judaism and, more significantly, to reach out to foreign groups abroad mostly as a way to procure funding, materials and networking opportunities. . . [with the aim] to foster ties with groups perceived to have an influence on U.S. politics. (Al-Sudairi 2015) That is, Chinese groups reached out to American Jewish organizations for financial support with the aim of networking with Jewish organization to realize shared aims. To this end, Chinese scholars began to undertake research into global Jewry and develop personal relationships with Jews around the world. This was not one or two academics working out of dimly lit rooms next to the janitor’s office. Large centres of research were created in Shanghai, Harbin, Nanjing, Tianjin, Jinan, and many other Chinese cities, specialising in Judaism and focusing on the Jewish diaspora. (Xun 2016: 15) This interest was enthusiastically reciprocated by global Jewry. Sensing a great opportunity

221 to advance their cause, a number of Jews from the West and Israel actually moved to China to help develop relationships and to better investigate what potential benefits might be available for Jews in China. From the start, the Chinese wanted to learn both how Jews had achieved their success and how might the Chinese and Jews form collaborations in order to achieve mutually beneficial goals. These early tentative explorations quickly flourished as both sides realised shared interests, shared cultural values and the massive potential gains that might be achieved through collaboration. It was at this time, most likely as a result of this very relationship, that China opened itself to global trade. Instantly, global Jewry began pouring huge sums of money into China giving them the capital to begin to industrialize. By the turn of the 21st century, China had learned the types of strategies used by Jews to hold such power and began to try to replicate the same strategies by both using the existing Chinese diaspora in the U.S and in other Western countries while insisting that Western countries, such as Australia, accept much higher numbers of Chinese immigration. As Ehrlich (2008) ambiguously suggests when elaborating what global Jewry was teaching the Chinese. When speaking to a . . . group of high-achieving Chinese expatriates returning to China to find out more about their former homeland and seek their “spiritual” roots. I spoke on the relationship between Jews and the Jewish homeland. At first the audience did not understand the connection between the Jewish Diaspora and themselves. Slowly the prospects of a spiritual relationship between overseas Chinese and the Chinese homeland were understood . . . Considering the estimated 200 million Chinese living abroad, being potential members of a Chinese Diaspora, the benefits. . . seem significant indeed. It is as a result of this realization that several significant scandals have emerged where Chinese businessmen and academics have been proven to be operating on behalf of the Chinese government. As Ehrlich’s quote suggests, the Chinese are not naïve. They understand only too well how the world works. They know exactly what it means to enter into a strategic partnership with global Jewry. In China, American Jews are considered ruthless, without normal moral restraints, and, therefore, people who one deals with only with the greatest care. There is a perception in China that Jews are “‘aggressors’ and ‘killers’ of the weak and innocent”. (Wald 2004: 62) Because of this, China has taken the strategy of ensuring that it is perceived as strong and prepared to act in an attempt to interact with global Jewry on equal terms. They have realized that if they are to stand alongside global Jewry, as they hope, then they must show themselves to be equally capable of the kind of immoral ruthlessness and unconditional brutality that they see is displayed by Jews. China believes that if you show weakness to Jews, and because it is under their control the United States, then their response will be ruthless. This has meant, because of the role Jews play in the United States, China has taken a “strong man” approach to international relations

222 as, they believe probably correctly, it is only by being feared that they will be respected. The best stance to take towards American Jews, from a Chinese perspective, is one of confidence and to leave Jews in no doubt that they are as equally prepared to use any measure if they are not getting a good deal out of their relationship. In this confrontation of giants, Westerners are viewed and treated like naïve children ignorantly playing with their toys while the adults of global Jewry and China sit at the adult table deciding the fate of the world. As Wald makes clear in his study of Chinese/Jewish relations, Chinese perceptions of Jews as aggressive, cruel, and brutal is not to be thought to be a criticism of Jews. The Chinese people are an Eastern people and, as such, they have a much more pragmatic view of human behaviour then that held by most in the Christian West. Even though the Chinese do believe that Jews are cruel, violent, and immoral, they genuinely respect these characteristics. They respect global Jewry in a way that they simply do not respect Westerners because they think of Westerners as naïve and easily manipulated. The Chinese believe that the West is being ruled by a handful of Jews and so the West is simply not worthy of respect. Why, they ask, respect slaves? Unlike in the West, the Chinese praise the intelligent use of violence and deception, as long as it serves a purpose, in a way that would be viewed as immoral in the Christian West. As Wald notes, “The Jews are admired, but perhaps also envied because they are seen to have what every Chinese wants to have for himself and his nation: money, success, and power.” (Wald 2004: 63) As Xun also observes, giving a Chinese perspective on this relationship, “According to Xue, if the Chinese were as rich as Jews, then China would be the most powerful nation in the world.” (Xun 2016: 7) It is all about wealth and power and not about, for just one possibility, being a good global citizen. The Chinese do not judge Jews morally for their aggression, deception, or greed, as was historically the case in the West, but they envy their wealth and power and want to know how they, a powerful country of millions, can achieve the same. China is not judging Jews for their perceived immorality but want to learn how to be the same. It is for this reason that when the Chinese claim, for example, that the Rothschild family controls the world economy, China is not turning this into a moral criticism, “isn’t it wrong that the Rothschild family controls the world’s economy” but are simply observing this as a truth about the world. They then ask, how did the Rothschild family become so powerful? How do they retain their power? Why do Western countries allow this obviously destructive control to continue? According to scholars like Xun and Wald, there will never be a pogrom in China against the Jews because pogroms are motivated by moral judgements and the Chinese will never judge Jews for being immoral. It is in no small in recognition of this Eastern thinking that both global Jewry and the Chinese leadership are determined that Christian morality will never find a voice in China. As things currently stand, traits such as skilful deception and manipulation are enviable

223 in China, when used correctly, and China today can be seen using these behaviours on the international stage. As the West has finally learnt, dealing with China is not like dealing with France or German. It is not even like dealing with Russian or even India. China will say one thing and do the exact opposite, they will fabricate research in order to achieve their ends. If France, Russia, or India say that they will withdraw troops then you can be fairly secure that the troops will be withdrawn. When French, Russian, or Indian academics sign a non-disclosure agreement you can rest assured that they will respect that agreement. The Chinese, by contrast, will be more likely to build up troop numbers after saying they are going to withdraw, and their academics will return to China and begin research centres built on the information that they had agree to keep secret. The West is finally learning this, but it has taken over two decades. The very reason why Chinese and American Jews have formed their special relationship is because they “use these relations for their own interests and policy goals.” (Wald 2004: 78) The “friendship”, or “alliance”, between Jews and Chinese is simply a relationship of temporary convenience with the West their mutual target. As Chinese academic Shan Shili observed in 1910, “. . .if they did not learn from the lesson of the “Jewish race” they would not be able to win the racial war against the “whites”.” (as seen in Xun 2016: 8) The Chinese approached the Jews in particular, not the American Hispanic or the black population, “Because the Chinese believe that the Jews have power and influence . . .” in the U.S. which these other groups simply do not wield. (Wald 2004: 78) Because of this expectation, Wald argues, Jews “. . . must be aware of what the Chinese expect from the Jews, whether these expectations are officially stated or not.” (Wald 2004: 78) The China/Jewish relationship began to show clear benefits for the Chinese in the 1990s as they opened their country to global trade. Whereas China was looking to expand its global power and ultimately defeat the West, a project harmonious with Gnostic Jewish aspirations, Jews have tried to present the Chinese as a culturally similar people to themselves. As Ehrlich (2010: 2) wrote, Comparisons between Jewish and Chinese festivals, calendars and rituals also have fascinating dimensions, especially as the Hebrew and Chinese calendars share many of the same intercalating techniques and milestones of the agricultural year marked by concurrent lunar and solar festivals. These suggest parallel development in aspects of the cultural and symbolic worlds of the two societies and point to the existence of similar sentiments, as they respond to events of the lunar and solar cycles. One area where they share many similarities is between the religious traditions of Buddhism and Gnostic Judaism. As it says in Wikipedia, a rather important access point for shaping popular perceptions, “Shared commonalities and similarities between the cultures and values of the two nations with ancient roots dating back thousands of years as well as convergence of interests have made the two countries (China

224 and Israel) natural partners”. Jews like to portray China as a fellow “Eastern” civilization that “celebrates riches, success, and well-being in this world” unlike, so the Gnostic Jews claim, the moralizing Western tradition that has always placed their foolish Christian beliefs above material interests. The West, at least traditionally, has praised a kind of meekness and humbleness that, at least Wald feels, is alien to Eastern beliefs and practices and is treated contemptuously by the Chinese.140 (Wald 2004: 63) Not only do Jews identify as an Oriental culture, and always have, but they claim to have also suffered persecution at the hands of Europeans like the Chinese and therefore share the same bitterness and desire for revenge. As Khlystov wrote in a cloying piece obviously aimed at winning the Chinese people over to the Gnostic cause, “It is quite interesting how the Jews and Chinese faced persecution by Europeans, making them share such a close bond.” This is to suggest that the Chinese and Gnostic Jews make natural partners who not only share a common origin and beliefs but have also suffered at the hands of the evil West. As proof of this shared experience, Jews, and the Chinese, when trying to affirm their relationship as an historical one, often point to an episode during World War II when China141 accepted 20,000 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany at a time when Europe, Australia and the United States had refused them entry. Of course, this ignores the truth of the situation that Jews were actually placing pressure on Western governments not to accept the refugees as they wanted them to be “forced” to go to Palestine. One of the largest barriers to the establishment of a Jewish state, a problem that they had tried to overcome since the late 19 th century, was the small population of Jews living in Palestine prior to World War II. That this is used as an example of Jewish/Chinese bonds is wrong in all kinds of ways and actually shows a level of ignorance by the Chinese regarding their understanding of Jews. The Chinese do not seem to appreciate, as far as I can

140

Although there are resonances between these Eastern cultures that have been observed by many and magnified by some Jews, there are also extremely important differences about which the Chinese remain ignorant. The idea of “gratitude” is extremely important for the Chinese and there have already been concerns expressed that Jews have not been adequately grateful for the help the Chinese have already offered the Jews. The truth is Jews do not believe in gratitude except to their God. According to the Jewish faith, God is behind all hardship and blessings of the Jews so, at best, the Chinese will only ever be seen as the vehicle of God’s blessings and, as with the United States or the United Kingdom or Australia, no matter what these countries do for the Jews, especially the United States, Jews will do what they believe they need to do for their God and if that means destroying their most generous benefactor then that destruction will be attempted. Jewish culture has no room for gratitude or obligation only pure self-interest. Indeed, many Chinese still believe in doing “good” which again, according to Gnostic Jews at least, is highly problematic. For their own interest, China would do much better having normal, respectful relationships with the West and having that reciprocated while staying well clear of Gnostic Jews but, sadly, I do not expect this to happen. 141 To be clear, and this is often neglected, Shanghai was not controlled by the Chinese government in 1939 when these refugees were accepted. In 1937, Japan invaded the Chinese section of Shanghai and established a government of collaboration. The rest of the city, in 1939, remained as it had historically, in the hands of an international body. The “Chinese government” had nothing to do what-so-ever with allowing Jew’s entry into Shanghai.

225 discern, the theological agenda underpinning the actions of global Jewry and that that theology has no historical precedence in China. They may share a seat at the adult table today, but the time must come when they will be pushed to the floor. Interestingly, in Ehrlich’s book, he notes that Jews have developed “modern hospitals”, tried to introduce the Sabbath day of rest, and are leaders in business, while the Chinese contribute, “manual labourers” to Israel. (Ehrlich 2010: 3) This is how the Gnostic Jews really see the Chinese. As an excellent example of Chinese naivete, in return for the Chinese welcoming Jewish refugees from Europe, the Jews who remained in China enthusiastically joined the Communist Party and helped the Communists to seize power. As Ehrlich (2008) observes, “Six of the ten foreign-born members of the Central Government’s People’s Consultative Conference were at one point Jewish.” As with many Westerners, the Chinese simply do not understand how Jews can be nationalists for Israel while being cosmopolitan everywhere else, racist at home and yet supporters of multi-culturalism abroad, atheists when in West and yet religious zealots in the Promised Land. This book will come almost as much of a surprise to the Chinese as it will to the West. No better example of the role of Jews in shaping Chinese history than the story of Jakob Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld was captured by the Nazis and held in Buchenwald concentration camp until he was released in 1939 on the condition that he left the country. He was amongst the 20,000 Jews who were offered asylum in Shanghai. In 1941, Rosenfeld joined the Chinese Communists fighting against the Republican Chinese government. His contribution to the Chinese revolution was later acknowledged with the erection of a statue at Rosenfeld Hospital in Junan County, Shandong. Gnostic Jews also played an important role in the bloody cultural revolution, as will be discussed later, that ripped China apart in the 1960s. I hope this volume will encourage China to deal with the West sincerely, as the West, as the West, does genuinely want global peace and prosperity and will deal with the Chinese honestly if given the chance. Never trust the West as long as they stay under the sway of the Gnostic Jews. What the Chinese hope will be realized from their alliance with American Jews is that they will help them, as they have, advance Chinese interests in the United States. As Wald states quite unequivocally, “China wants to have the support of the American Jewish community in managing and improving China’s crucial, but complex and oscillating relationship with the United States.” (Wald 2004” 79) As a concrete expression of the mutual benefits from the relationship between American Jews and China, a group of Wall Street executives from Goldman Sachs Group, Morgan Stanley and the Blackstone Group, pressured President Bill Clinton in the late 1990s to dramatically lower trade barriers to China and

226 support China’s aspiration, despite warnings about the way Chinese business functioned in China142, to become a full member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The main negotiator of the Chinese trade deal was Charlene Barshefsky, an American Jew, who attracted rave plaudits from Jewish controlled media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. She even received a standing ovation from “many [business] executives” because of her supposedly fantastic negotiations during trade deal discussions. Maurice Greenberg (Jewish American), chairman of the American International Group, complained to Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin (Jewish American), that the Clinton administration “had missed the boat” by not quickly taking the unbelievably generous trade deal that Barshefsky had negotiated with China. (Sanger 1999) By contrast, Gene Sperling, one of the main architects of the balanced American budgets of the 1990s and a person truly concerned with American interests, attracted a lot of public criticism, both personal and professional, from Jewish business leaders and the Jewish controlled media for arguing that the trade deal was simply nowhere near good enough and should most definitely be rejected. Sperling argued that the trade deal gave China a great deal, international standing and recognition along with excellent trade opportunities, while the United States seemed to benefit very little. Robert Kapp, President of the US-China Business Council, who is Jewish, actually had a well-documented heated argument with Sperling in public over their different positions on the trade deal. Kapp was on the public record claiming that Barshefsky had managed to get an “extraordinary range of achievements” through her exceptional negotiation skills and that “this dazzling laundry list” was an overly generous offer from the Chinese that simply could not be missed by the desperate United States. Zhu himself, with the perfect timing of a salesman, publicly agreed with Kapp. Zhu made it publicly known that he had, supposedly, been sharply criticised by Chinese authorities for giving away too much and asking for so little in return. When Congress continued to hesitate because many economists could plainly see that in fact, despite the incredible pressure being applied from the Jewish media and business interests, it was a bad trade deal, Kapp argued that the White House was missing out on a deal that would bring billions of dollars into American businesses. Sperling, by contrast, cautioned that there was no need to rush into a trade agreement with China, China was the one desperate for a deal while the United States could wait. With a little patience, Sperling argued, China would be extremely prepared to give the United States many more concessions. (Sanger 1999) Robert Hormats, Vice Chairman of Goldman Sachs (International), a Jewish American, argued forcefully to congress that it was a good trade deal and that, “Zhu basically went to the country. City by city, he said ‘Look what’s in this for you’” thereby putting increased pressure on the

142

As an extension of the Communist Party.

227 President. Hormats was arguing that Zhu had gone to great lengths to prove the benefits of the trade deal to middle America, which risked so much if American production shifted to China without getting anything in return. As a result of pressure from American Jews and the Chinese, despite concerns that it was a bad trade deal and China was not a democratic liberal society and that China would not adhere to international trade rules of business, Congress eventually accepted the deal. Not coincidently, this trade deal replicated the trade deficit between the United States and Israel but on a much grander scale. I can just imagine Chinese officials shaking their heads saying no idiot would sign such an agreement and the Gnostic Jews across the table assuring them that they can guarantee that the trade agreement would be signed.

The massive trade deficits that resulted from the Barshevky negotiated trade deal that today costs the United States around $350 billion a year. It looks like the promised “billions of dollars” from the “dazzling laundry list” was not intended for America but did materialize for the Chinese just as Sperling, a true patriot, had warned. The amazing thing is that nobody is ever held accountable for such terrible “blunders”. Barshevky should have put in prison. The “Chinese miracle” was paid for with Western wealth. Sourced from https://www.statista.com/chart/17982/us-trade-in-goods-with-china-since-1985/

Shortly after the signing of the trade deal and the inclusion of China in the WTO, the same “businesspeople” who had encouraged the Clinton administration to lower trade barriers to China were pouring huge sums of U.S. capital into building the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy grew at an astronomical rate, perhaps unequalled in history but this growth was achieved as a result of Western trade

228 deals. There is nothing miraculous, even impressive, about growing an economy with hundreds of billions of dollars pouring in for nothing. Ever since that time, Jewish Wall Street executives have done everything they can to ensure that nobody paid too much attention to what was happening in China but ensured that wealth and trade continued to flow from the United States into China. September 11 and the “War on Terror” ensured, if nothing else, that the United States spent billions of dollars fighting useless wars in the Middle East that had no strategic benefit for the U.S. while China quickly grew its industrial military complex in peace.

As can be seen from this graph, the economic lull after September 11 and the Global Financial Crisis have had significant negative impacts on the United States’ economy but these crises have had no negative impacts on the Chinese economy. These future projections do not, of course, consider the impact of Covid 19, which was the direct result of China not acting in accordance with international law by refusing to report the epidemic. China seems to have been well-prepared for this outbreak and it has not had a significant impact on China while devastating many Western economies most especially the United States. Image sourced https://mgmresearch.com/china-vs-united-states-a-gdp-comparison/

It was like the Jews and China were intentionally sucking the wealth and power out of the United States and the West more broadly like some kind of parasite while China grew wealthy and powerful from the proceeds. The overly intimate relationship between certain Jewish American business owners and China has progressed so far that White House National Trade Council and Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director, Peter Navarro, has called these businessmen “unregistered foreign agents” who, he felt, were actually doing the bidding of China and were certainly not serving the interests of the United States. Navarro said, “When these unpaid foreign agents engage in this kind of diplomacy, so-called diplomacy, all they do is weaken this president and his negotiating position.” He went on to observe the obvious, “No good can come of this”. To be clear, this massive transfer of wealth from America to China is being used to build the Chinese empire, most especially its military. While a great deal of wealth is being created in

229 China, Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai observe in their book, Dying for an iPhone, how Apple in China uses forms of labour abuse, which includes, extremely low wages and institutionalized wage theft, incredibly long, unsustainable hours of work, no sick leave, unsafe work conditions, substandard work environments and unrealistic quotas, that contribute to extraordinarily high rates of worker suicide, to build the wealth of China’s elites and the wealth of the owners of Apple. Workers often actually live onsite, in dormitories next to their work, and only know a life of moving between the dormitories and the factories. This is in order “to facilitate high-speed, round-the-clock production” at the expense of the Chinese workers quality of life and overall health. (Hedges 2021) Jewish American business leaders have managed to realise conditions in China where the vast majority of people are substantively slaves existing only to generate wealth for the Jewish business owners and those in the Chinese communist party. China has become the perfect expression of how Gnostic Jews see all non-Jews, productive animals with the ability to speak so that they can better serve Jews. As a New York businessman, former President Donald Trump has long been aware of the growing influence of China over American businesses. He reversed the Obama strategy of trying to nurture a “strategic partnership” with China to accept the reality that anybody who cared to look could see that China was intent on being America’s global competitor. As expressed in the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS), These competitions [China with the U.S.] require the United States to rethink the policies of the past two decades – policies based on the assumption that engagement with rivals and their inclusion in international institutions and global commerce would turn them into benign actors and trustworthy partners. For the most part, this premise turned out to be false. American Jews have since systematically helped the Chinese government in the United States. The United States has come out publicly against China and accused it of breaking its trade obligations with the WTO, whose membership the United States supported with the enthusiastic advocacy of American Jewry. The United States claimed that the Chinese government is strategically protecting the Chinese economy from fair foreign competition by manipulating its currency thereby making its exports more attractive and imports more expensive. Unlike in Western democracies like Australia, New Zealand and the United States, Chinese currency value is not market based. That they control their rate of exchange has allowed the Chinese government to manipulate the currency market and undervalue their currency in order to undermine the United States and, indeed, the global economy. President Trump, probably the most supportive U.S. President for Israeli causes in history, and that really is saying something, was removed through the direct efforts of Gnostic Jews probably because of his opposition to China.

230 That Gnostic Jews were prepared to remove such a supportive president of their causes is all the evidence required for the value that they place on their growing relationship with communist China. China may have supplied the pathogen for the global pandemic, but American Jews made sure nobody looked to China as a culprit. American Jew Ian Lipkin, who has worked in China for decades working on Covid-like viruses including at Wuhan, seems to have influenced Anthony Fauci into arguing that the Covid virus was “natural” and did not come from a Chinese laboratory. In an email exchange on the 5th of May 2020, that was heavily redacted before being made public, Lipkin expressed his appreciation to Fauci in his “efforts in steering and messaging” regarding the Covid narrative. As Fox News observes, it seems that Lipkin is working on behalf of the Chinese government and is thanking Fauci on their behalf. (Schoffstall 2020) In trade arrangements between China and the United States, as revealed in the documentary The China Hustle, there seems to be systematic fraud aimed at stealing money from the United States and securing it in China. Almost certainly with the assistance of the Chinese government and Jewish American business intermediaries, dishonest Chinese businessmen have managed to pull up to $50 billion out of the United States economy in order to feed it into the Chinese economy. When $50 billion of American money goes to China it does not matter if it produces nothing, it does not matter if it goes into a black hole, when it is U.S. money, that money enters into the Chinese economy and leaves the American economy. This is what these dishonest business deals wanted to achieve. When these activities were discovered, as is so often the case, nothing was done. Nobody went to prison. Nobody in China was even fined. The whole scandal just disappeared. It has also been discovered that China has been systematically stealing, at a state level, intellectual property, either directly through the products that are now produced in China or by stealing technology using methods of old-fashioned spying or cyber-attacks. Trump asserted that the United States would “no longer turn a blind eye to unfair economic practices” such as stealing intellectual property. To apply pressure on China to conform to international norms, Trump imposed new levies on tariffs that have certainly harmed the Chinese economy. Against Trump’s efforts, people like Stephen Schwarzman, called “Trump’s China whisperer”, a man who donated $100 million U.S. dollars to launch a scholarship program in China143, has been doing everything he possibly can behind the scenes to aid Chinese businesses and advance Chinese interests more broadly. Nobody sees the links between American Jewry and China and so these kinds of activities remain, to a high degree, unnoticed.

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That is $100 million leaving the United States and being spent in China. That goes to build Chinese buildings, pay Chinese workers, educate Chinese people, and leaves, forever, the United States economy. $100 million dollar scholarships are not created in Australia. Questions should be asked but Gnostic Jews control the media in the United States thereby ensuring that no questions are asked.

231 Many people, including Navarro, remain misguided about the real motivations of these Jewish business leaders that give unconditional support and advocate on behalf of China. He, along with others, wrongly believe that these businesspeople are simply responding to the Chinese government’s manipulations when they collectively try to influence U.S. government foreign policy to benefit China against the interests of the United States. Navarro believes that these business leaders do so in order to take advantage of business opportunities in China. That is, they are doing it out of the understandable motive of self-interest. This is not simply the case at all. The truth is that these Jewish businessmen are doing everything that they can to help China become a global leader with the ultimate aim of destroying the United States in order to advance their theo-political program. It is certainly no coincidence that the very same banks with the closest relationships with China today are also the very same banks that were implicated in the Global Financial Crisis that devastated the economies of the United States and the West. Indeed, Stephen Scharzman was one of the most influential advisors who encouraged Barack Obama to bail out the big banks in the aftermath of the GFC ensuring that those responsible for the crisis would not actually financially pay for their crisis. Up until now, Jewish wealth has relied on Western countries, first in Europe, then in North America, to store their accumulated wealth and exploit the local labour, but now they are creating an alternative site so that when they do finally destroy the United States and the West, which is not too far away, they do not lose their wealth. The importance for maintaining their wealth, is again, religious, because it has long been claimed that at the “end-of-days” all Jews will be so wealthy that they will no longer need to work. Wealth for Jews is not so much motivated by simple greed, although it is in part because greed is a natural aspect of being human according to their theology, but also one step in fulfilling the apocalyptic prophecy that has become so important to their gnostic religious vision. That they strive to make this a reality shows just how literal and fanatical these people are. China has long known that Jews control the United States, it is, after all, rather obvious to a people who understand scheming for power in the absence of God much better than the Christian West. It is for this reason that when Vice Premier Liu He, China’s chief trade negotiator, visited the United States in February 2018, to try to strike a trade deal with the White House in response to Trump’s actions, according to The Wall Street Journal (Dec 2nd), “Before meeting his U.S. counterparts, [Liu He] turned to a select group of American business executives – mostly from Wall Street.” This group included Larry Fink (Jewish), David Solomon (Jewish) and Jamie Dimon (Greek/Turkish). The Trump government wisely rejected He’s offer as “too narrow” and not giving enough concessions, but China continues to get strong support from Wall Street. These powerful men of Wall Street continued to publicly support China against the United States until the very last days of Trumps Presidency. A year after these failed trade talks, Covid 19 finds its way

232 around the world, originating in China, devastating most especially the United States while having only a limited impact in China itself. As already suggested, Jews influenced China long before the 1980s. Gnostic Jews were already active in China in the years building up to the communist revolution. As Wald notes in a recent report on Jewish/Chinese relations, “. . .a small number of foreign Jews joined the Communist’s fight against the Japanese occupants in the 1940’s, befriended the revolutionary leaders, became Chinese citizens, and are held in high esteem to this day.” (Wald 2004: 62) In fact, this small group of politically active Jews from the West did much more than simply “support” the Chinese communists “against” the Japanese. In the 1930s, Otto Braun, a German Jew who had moved to the Soviet Union, became the leader of the Chinese communist military in its struggle against the Government of the Republic of China. Unlike their token efforts against the Japanese, the Chinese communists fought eagerly, though largely unsuccessfully, against the Chinese government. This list of Jews in leadership roles in communist China is not huge but due to where they were positioned in the party apparatus, it was certainly significant. This list includes, Hank Sneevliet, Mikhail Borodin, Adolph Joffe, Otto Braun, Jakob Rosenfeld, Richard Frey, Sidney Rittenberg, Israel Epstein, Hans Shippe, Ruth Weiss, and Soloman Adler. As Otto Braun’s role suggests, these Jews were extremely active in facilitating the communist revolution. During World War II, American Jews helped ensure that the communists were given good quality American weapons which was the most important factor for allowing them to take China after the war. These Jews were not only supplying military advice and assistance but were extremely influential in shaping how the revolution itself unfolded. Jews were the extremely influential in Mao’s Cultural Revolution for the same reasons and in a similar manner that they are driving the Western cultural revolution today. It was no coincidence that Israel was one of the first states in the world to formally recognise the communists as the legitimate government of China when it did so in January 1950. That was decades before Western countries which did not begin to recognise the communists until the 1970s. American Jews were also active in instigating the protest movement against the Vietnam War, in which the Chinese were combatants supporting Vietnam against the United States, along with traitorous support in promoting the ideas of Chairman Mao through their underground “communist” networks. More recently, Israel has not only passed technology on to China, that was given them by the United States, but the Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard, who was born in Galveston, Texas, was, . . . found guilty of stealing thousands of classified documents from the Défense Department where he worked, gave these materials to his masters, the Israeli Mossad operating in the U.S.A. The Israelis, in turn, transferred these valuable military secrets straight to Red Chinese dictators in Beijing. (Marrs 2011: 201)

233 Not only did Pollard steal technology but he also stole information that greatly undermined the United States defence policy in the 1980s. As C.I.A. director at the time, William Casey, stated “The Israelis used Pollard to obtain our war plans against the USSR – all of it: the co-ordinates, the firing locations, the sequences, and Israel sold that information to Moscow. . .” The C.I.A concluded, “Pollard’s operation has few parallels among known U.S. espionage cases . . . his first and possibly largest delivery occurred on 23 January [1994] and consisted of five suitcases-full of classified material.” Of course, the state of Israel, recognising the historical support of the United States forcefully denounced the actions of Pollard in the sharpest terms and expressed public shame at one of “their people” being involved in the whole sordid affair. Not at all! Pollard is considered an absolute hero in Israel. He is a household name and there are huge wall murals painted in his honour. This honour is for stealing American military secrets and passing them onto fellow Eastern state China against not only the interests of the United States but against the interests of the West in general. On an official visit to the United States, Prime Minister Netanyahu personally visited Pollard in prison, in a public show of disdain to America, and assured Pollard that Israel and Jewish lobby groups in the United States were pressuring then President Barak Obama to pardon the convicted spy. Incredibly, for a man who probably should have been shot for the extent of his treachery, Pollard actually was released during Barack Obama’s presidency in 2015. Again, it is informative to note the contrast in the treatment of Australian Julian Assange who continues to rot in jail. Australia which does everything in its power to support the United States, fought in every significant war alongside United States soldiers, has never spied on the United States or done anything against their interests but quite the opposite and yet the Australian rots in jail without a proper trial and this human scum, Pollard, is not only free but assured of an extremely privileged future in Israel. One can be assured, that if somebody undermined Israeli interests to the degree Pollard undermined the United States they would be killed without question. It was actually Donald Trump, one of the most supportive U.S. Presidents of Israeli causes144, who ultimately realised Pollard’s complete freedom by lifting travel bans on Pollard allowing him to travel abroad. One-week after being granted permission to travel, Pollard flew to Israel aboard a luxury executive jet loaned to Pollard and his wife by gambling magnate and American Jew Sheldon Adelson. Adelson is actually a major donor to Donald Trump who famously admitted that he regretted having worn the U.S. Army uniform when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in the 1960s and that he would have been prouder to wear an Israeli Defence Force uniform. Upon arriving in Israel, which Pollard

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During his four years as President, Trump has withdrawn from the Iranian nuclear agreement, shut the Palestinian offices in the United States, stopped U.S humanitarian aid to Palestine, moved the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and given Israel a “green light” in the West Bank.

234 referred to as “home”, he was met by none other than his long-time supporter Benjamin Netanyahu on the tarmac as he disembarked the plane. At the airport, Pollard and his wife both knelt together and kissed the ground of Israel.145 This is just rubbing the citizens of the United States nose in the ground. Netanyahu then handed him an Israeli citizen I.D on the tarmac and welcomed them both as Israeli citizens. The person who was Pollard’s initial contact for his spying activities was a former Israeli Air Force officer by the name of Aviem Sella. In 1987, somehow learning of what was about to unfold, Sella fled the United States to Israel just days before Pollard was arrested trying to make his way into the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. The United States instantly issued extradition orders for Sella’s arrest but, as people should have come to expect from such a close ally which receives hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid, they flatly refused. The whole episode was brought to its final disgraceful end when, in the shadow of Pollard’s release, the outgoing President Donald Trump gave Aviem Sella a full pardon for his criminal activities against the United States. As Giraldi wrote, “Trump’s pardon for Sella as a favour to Netanyahu sends yet another signal that Israel can spy on the U.S. with impunity.” (Giraldi 2021) Is this really how to make America great again? Although the request for a pardon was endorsed by Netanyahu and the Israeli Ambassador to the United States, it was also supported by the American Jew and United States Ambassador to Israel, David Friedman along with Trump financial supporter and American Jew Miriam Adelson, wife of Sheldon Adelson the person who loaned Pollard his luxury jet. The truth is, as Pat Buchanan observes, “When it suits them, our Israeli allies launch air strikes on Tunis, Baghdad or Beirut; they invade Lebanon; they even enlist U.S. traitors, like the Pollards, to loot the secrets of a nation that has manifested toward them an extraordinary indulgence." As a result of Israel’s espionage, the United States counterintelligence operations, “strategically focused against [the] priority targets of China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and Israel”. (as seen in McArthur 2013) Israel is on the same counterintelligence list as China and Iran and yet the United States funds them to the tune of billions of dollars in aid and continues to give them the absolute latest military equipment, even before Australia, at bargain basement prices. Is this type of treatment fair repayment by Israel to the United States and her people for their support, protection and generosity? The claim that September 11 was ultimately about destroying the Israeli state by first fracturing the relationship between Israel and the United States is simply unpersuasive. History has shown that not only has it reinforced what was already an extraordinarily strong relationship

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Despite the kind of fervor for Israel expressed by people like Pollard and Adelson, it is considered antisemitism to even suggest that some American Jews favor Israel over the United States. This is the greatest danger that emerges from the ever-ready accusation of antisemitism, as with other such movements, like feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement, is that they first crush the truth and then make it somehow immoral to argue against the lie.

235 with the United States giving unconditional support to Israel, but it makes it almost impossible for the United States to place conditions on its future support for Israel, even if they wanted to, as now it would appear that they were “giving in” to terrorists. The claim that September 11 was intended to undermine U.S/Israeli relations is either the worst strategic blunder in history or, as is the case, stated as a distraction. It is because of the destructive behaviour of Israel against America that, as Andrew Sullivan notes, . . .the U.S. gets nothing in return for the extensive military and diplomatic support that it provides Israel, . . . the U.S. “suffers internationally” on account of its close relationship with Israel, and . . . its government under Netanyahu has behaved badly towards the U.S. (as seen on Larison 2019) What an understatement. The short lived Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, recently observed that Netanyahu was a “Machiavellian” politician who would deliberately create “misinformation” in order to persuade President Trump to do what Israel wanted. Tillerson claimed, They did that with the President on a couple of occasions, to persuade him that “We’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys.” We later exposed it to the president, so he understood, “You’ve been played.” It bothers me that an ally that’s that close and important to us would do that to us. (Tillerson as seen on RT 2019) Australia, by contrast, would never behave like that towards the United States. The United States provides no developmental assistance to Australia and does not even, despite being a faithful ally, subsidise Australia’s purchasing of United States’ military equipment. The U.S. Australian Free Trade Agreement, which came into force on January 1, 2005, allows the United States to receive a massive surplus of $28.9 billion dollars every year. Tillerson claimed that when he was Secretary of State, he was consistently marginalized on Middle Eastern issues in preference for the President’s Jewish son-in-law Jared Kushner who is extremely pro-Israel and a good personal friend of Netanyahu. Tillerson was quickly dismissed by Donald Trump after extensive pressure was exerted from within the State Department because he did tell the President the truth about what was happening, and this had to be stopped. Tillerson had tried to reduce State Department funding because the entire department is really just another pressure point for advancing Israeli interests. Although the US State Department did indeed lose funds, this reduction was carried out by Mike Pompeo and his targets were people who were insufficiently submissive to Israel’s demands and did absolutely nothing to reduce Israeli influence in the State Department. (Margolis 2021) For his patriotic service and commitment to truth, Tillerson became one of the shortest serving Secretary of States in history. In the broken condition that the United States is in today, Tillerson is actually shown to be a true patriot and American hero in being dismissed so quickly. Success is only achieved in the United States today, in universities, Hollywood, the media and government, if you are serving Gnostic Jewish

236 interests. An apparent plurality of voices came out denouncing Tillerson’s time as Secretary of State. Eliot Cohen said, “I think he really will go down as one of the worst secretaries of State we’ve had”. Ilan Goldenberg stated, “He will go down as the worst Secretary of State in history”. The truth is that Tillerson dared question, one or two policies that were designed to serve Israel and for this minimal interference he has been systematically and intentionally demonized. The “plurality” of voices when investigated are revealed to be just one . . . Gnostic Jewish. Goldenberg is an American Jew who served as the Israel Policy Form’s Policy Advisor and Cohen is an American Jew who was one of the most militant and forceful voices advocating and then supporting the war in Iraq. That such people even dare talk about a man of the stature of Tillerson is beyond reasonableness and is utterly despicable. In conclusion, the proposed motivation for undertaking the attacks on September 11, 2001, it is interesting to note, as Edward Hendrie does (2011: 28), that on the day before 9/11, on September the 10th, 2001, Secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to acknowledge that “according to some estimates we cannot track 2.3 trillion dollars in transactions”. Rumsfeld was admitting that the Pentagon had lost 2.3 trillion dollars and had no idea where it had gone. That sum would have paid a little under half of the United States’ total debt in 2001 which, of course, is much higher now. $2.3 trillion was approximately a quarter of the United States total GDP for 2001. This is to observe that $2.3 trillion is a massive sum of money by any measure, beyond most people’s comprehension, and for that to just go missing would rightly have attracted months of media attention. The top financial officer at the time, responsible for the lost money, was Dov Zakheim, a dual American/Israeli citizen. Zakheim was born in 1948 to Eastern European Jewish parents. His father had fled Lithuania because he was an active member of Betar, a militant Zionist movement. Dov Zakheim himself is a staunch supporter of Israel. As he said of his childhood, I was really brought up on God and country. I’m an orthodox Jew. I’m a sixteenthgeneration rabbi. My son is now the seventeenth generation, one of my sons. None of our family for the last hundred years has practiced as a rabbi. My father was a lawyer as I mentioned. But we believe in religious values. So, on the one had we have God, and on the other hand we have this wonderful country that had made a home for both of my parents who obviously would probably never have met if it hadn’t been for the United States. (Zakheim 2012) Out of everything that the United States has offered his family, all the safety and opportunity, all the wealth and power, all he can credit the United States for is that it allowed his parents to meet. One of the “favours” he managed to achieve for his beloved Israel was to arrange for the sale of squads of F-15s and F-16s at a much-reduced price by classifying them, for this sale alone, as “surplus” military equipment. (Hendrie 2011: 28) Zakheim began as the Under Secretary of Defence (Comptroller) in May 2001 and

237 served in the role until April 2004. By the time he left the role a total of around $2.3 trillion dollars had just gone missing. Dov Zakheim was also a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) whose paper, Rebuilding America’s Defence, concluded that for their plans to be realised quickly there needed to be a “catastrophic and catalysing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” In 2011, Zakheim published a book, A Vulcan’s Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan which was extremely critical of America’s attempt to rebuild Afghanistan after the worst of the Afghanistan war was over. The basic accusation was that the United States had spent a lot of money destroying the country but did not spend a lot of money rebuilding it. If the claims made in this volume are true, it is simply beyond outrageous that one of the people who may have instigated the whole series of events, stealing money to fund a secret mission, planning a terrible terrorist act as a false flag operation so as to realize a situation harmonious with their vision, would then be critical of the United States handling of the issue. To create a situation and then criticise the United States for being involved is a strategy that has been successfully used by Gnostic Jews for a hundred years. Why Were the Planes Not Intercepted? One of the many outstanding questions surrounding the events of September 11, 2001, is; why was there no response by the United States military to the hijacking of the planes? This question actually becomes more pressing in light of comments made by General Anatoly Kornukov, a Russian Air Force Commander, who said on the 12th of September 2001, Generally, it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on this scenario which was used in the USA yesterday. . . The notification and control system for the air transport in Russia does not allow uncontrolled flights and leads to immediate reaction of the anti-missile defence. As soon as something like that happens here, I am reporting about that right away and in a minute, we are all up. (Kornukov as seen in Mir 2011: 340) This was said at a time when the military capacity of Russia was greatly depleted following the collapse of the Soviet Union and yet, even in this incapacitated state, the opposite of the United States at the time, the Russian military could not imagine such a strategy ever being successful because strategies to respond to this type of attack are well established, prepared for in advanced, and, therefore, such attacks are easily neutralized. It has to be remembered, despite numerous claims to the contrary after the attacks, it was certainly not unexpected that commercial aircraft could be hijacked and used as weapons. Indeed, this exact scenario was used for practice scenarios multiple times prior to September 11, by the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD), including a scenario codenamed MASCAL, that took place between October 24-26, 2000, which considered how emergency teams would quickly and

238 effectively respond to a hijacked plane intended to crash into the Pentagon. The entire defensive system over the United States was actually designed around the possible need to intercept a hijacked aircraft before it could be used to cause any damage. This meant, developing a system that responded quickly to any perceived dangers. To contrast how air response is supposed to happen under normal conditions, an English academic Nafeez Ahmed, in his excellent book on September 11, “The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked on September 11, 2001”, contrasts the response of NORAD to the well documented events around golfer Payne Stewart’s Lear jet incident. On October 25th, 1999, a chartered Lear jet 35 rose above its assigned altitude and flew off course before crashing killing everyone onboard. The famous golfer, Payne Stewart was killed in the accident. The reason why this tragedy might be of interest is because it is an example of how the military is supposed to respond to an aircraft that is unresponsive or off course. The principle of interception is to respond quickly and to then use a “graduated response” to any threats. The approaching fighter jets may first rock its wingtips to attract the pilot’s attention or make a pass in front of the aircraft that could not be missed. If these strategies fail to get a response and the dangerous situation continues, the intercepting plane can fire tracer rounds into the airplane’s path, or, even, under certain circumstances, with the permission of the President, shoot the aircraft down. This graduated response can be seen in the case of Payne Stewart’s Lear jet as the official National Transportation Safety Board crash report of Payne Stewart’s aircraft attests, 9:19: The flight departs. 9:24: The Learjet’s pilot responds to an instruction from air traffic control. 9:33: The controller radios another instruction. No response from the pilot. For 4 ½ minutes the controller tries to establish contact. 9:38: Having failed, the controller called in the military. Note that he did not seek, nor did he require, the approval of the President of the United States, or indeed anyone to ask for military assistance. It’s standard procedure, followed routinely, to call in the Air Force when radio contact with a commercial passenger jet is lost, or the plane departs from its flight path, or anything along those lines occurs. 9:54: 16 minutes later – the F-16 reaches the Learjet at 46,000 feet and conducts a visual inspection. Total elapse time: 21 minutes. According to the chronology of events, at 8:20 A.M., Flight 11 made an unexpected left turn towards New York deviating markedly from its intended flight path towards its destination of Los Angeles. This followed closely behind the aircraft’s transponder being disconnected which had already alerted flight controllers that failed attempts to communicate with the pilot was not a technical error. A few minutes later, United Flight 175 also deviated from its flight path and also turned towards New York. The important thing to note is that unlike in the case of Stewart’s aircraft, the traffic controller, Pete Zalewski,

239 knew that this was a hijacking and, despite having this knowledge, Zalewski did not notify NORAD for 18 minutes. 18 minutes is the difference between success and failure. It took 4 minutes in the case of Steward when dealing with a small aircraft which weas not hijacked yet two large passenger aircraft with hundreds of passengers on board are known to have been hijacked and it takes 18 minutes for NORAD to be informed. As ABC’s John Miller observed, “There doesn’t seem to have been alarm bells going off, traffic controllers getting on with law enforcement or the military. There’s a gap there that will have to be investigated . . .” This gap between knowing that the planes were hijacked, and NORAD being informed is crucial and either must be explained or those responsible, especially Zalewski, must be thoroughly investigated. This is a passenger jet aircraft that is certainly being hijacked and heading towards New York, which might be contrasted to a small propellor craft with only one passenger, and yet it took only 21 minutes to scramble planes to intercept Stewart’s aircraft whereas it took, some have claimed, 26 minutes just to get two F-15s off the ground. (Ahmed 2002: 151) When everything is considered, from loss of contact to getting jets in the air, there was a break of around 35 minutes. This terrible delay meant that even if the pilots had been given permission by the President to shoot the planes down, and this permission was never given, thereby saving the lives of those in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, they would have arrived too late to intervene. “When the second tower was hit the fighters were still 70 miles from Manhattan.” Indeed, although there are several versions of events in the public domain, obscuring attempts to give an accurate account of what exactly happened, one common account of events claims that the planes were not scrambled until after the plane had struck the Pentagon. (Ahmed 2002: 156) This response might be contrasted to the response times in the Payne Stewart’s case when the FAA responded to a failure to communicate, not a confirmed hijacking, in just 4 ½ minutes with interception time in just 21 minutes. Using these times, with hasty permission from the President, the whole event could have been minimised with the jets shooting down the aircraft resulting in far fewer deaths. This is why, as General Anatoly Kornukov confirms, it is usually impossible for this type of attack to be effective. Indeed, the instructions are quite clear, “In the event of a hijacking, the NMCC (National Military Command Centre) will be notified by the most expeditious means by the FAA. The NMCC will . . . forward requests for DoD (Department of Defence) assistance to the Secretary of Defence for approval.” (as seen in Szamuely 2002) The important point that Ahmed is trying to make is that despite what was claimed in the days following September 11, it takes no special approval from the president to scramble jets to intercept aircraft, this is done routinely time and time again within the United States airspace. Presidential approval is only required to shoot aircraft down. Therefore, even if the President was out of communication, which should raise questions itself, the jets should have been scrambled. This did not happen. Why? Although

240 the ABC reporter rightfully observed that there was a gap that needs to be investigated, no investigation into the lack of military response has been undertaken. The greatest military power on earth was humbled on this day but this simply could not have been achieved without people trusted with the responsibility to respond in a certain manner failing to do so. The obvious question is why? Who Really Did September 11? Now that there has been raised a number of questions regarding this terrorist attack, why did the buildings collapse, the questionable role of the President and the Vice President Dick Cheney, and finally, why were the planes not intercepted? Further, it has been argued that the true motivation for the attacks were not to undermine U.S./Israeli relations, a ridiculous claim, but that it was actually in part undertaken to ensure that that valuable relationship, from an Israeli perspective, would continue without interruption. The task in this section is to find out who really perpetrated the terrible attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. Within 24 hours of the event, United States officials appeared certain that it was a fundamentalist Muslim attack perpetrated by Al-Qaeda. As CIA director George Tenet mused immediately after the Flight 11 hit the World Trade Centre, “You know, this has bin Laden’s fingerprints all over it.” According to the FBI, there was never any evidence linking Bin Laden to September 11. Bin Laden himself denied any involvement in clear terms while pointing to who he believed were the real perpetrators, I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government in the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself . . . That secret government must be asked as to who carried out the attacks. . . The American system is totally in control of the Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. (bin Laden as seen in Haitel 2014: 211) There are two serious problems with any claim that the Osama Bin Laden was behind the attacks: capacity and motive. As has already been suggested, the actions of several people and organization in relation to this event are highly questionable. The military should have been advised and the President should have retained command. It really does look as though, as Bin Laden himself claimed, that it required inside support, but Osama Bin Laden lacked the inside influence to affect the militaries response to matter remove President Bush from office for a period of time. Further, a terrorist organization like Al Qaeda would know that it would not benefit from such attacks. They would have known that such attacks would bring the wrath of the United States upon its head and that it would only strengthen U.S. and Israeli relations. If it is accepted that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaida were not the perpetrators of the terrorist attack, then who? One well established strategy for finding a perpetrator of any crime is to ask, as Ahmed

241 asked in 2002 in relation to September 11; ‘who benefits?’ Saudi Interior Minister Prince Nayef, who was put in charge of the Saudi investigation into September 11, answered Ahmed’s question, “Who benefited from September 11 attacks? I think the Jews were the protagonists of such attacks.” (Nayef as seen in Mir 2011: 342) The problem with the official account, as evidenced by how events have unfolded, is that the supposed terrorist organization, al Qaeda, has certainly not benefitted in the aftermath of the attack nor would there have been any expectation that it would benefit from such an attack against the United States. As has already been discussed, the real beneficiary so far from the September 11 attacks has clearly been Israel. They have obviously benefitted by having Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, both vocal Middle Eastern opponent of Israel, removed. In a 1996 policy paper A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, written by Jewish American Richard Pearl for Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu, it called for the creation of a ‘New Middle East’ which involved, “weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussain from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right”. If we look at events following September 11, two of these countries, Iraq and Syria, have been utterly destroyed and the third, Iran, appears to be firmly in the United States sights. The aggression towards Iran expressed by the United States has gone so far as to drive it to oppose the wishes and strategic interests of its ever-compliant European NATO allies of Germany and England. What has Iran ever done to the United States to attract this level of hatred? Has it militarily attacked the United States? Has it undertaken systematic espionage on behalf of the United States’ most powerful enemy? History would suggest that Iran has been a better ally to the United States then either Israel or Saudi Arabia. Not only has it done less to harm the United States than Israel or Saudi Arabia, but Iran’s values seem to be more harmonious with those of the United States then either Israel or Saudi Arabia if the real situation is properly understood. But, as elaborated upon later, the links between Gnostic Judaism and Muslim Brotherhood are extremely strong and all the disruptions in the Middle East has greatly aided their cause. The conclusion that Israel has been the greatest beneficiary of September 11146 begins to reveal the perpetrators but as will be revealed, there are simply too many American Jews involved in the events surrounding September 11, 2001, for it to be attributed just to Israel. Once all the evidence is considered, the short answer as to who did the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and why this truth has been hidden is because, as Bin Laden rightly observes, there is a government within the U.S.

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Another benefit beyond having potential opponents removed from the Middle East, it was argued at the End of the Second Iraq War that it would be too expensive to bring all the military equipment back to America so massive quantities of armaments and equipment were simply given to Israel. It would be interesting indeed, to discover who exactly was responsible for making the decision that returning all the military equipment to the United States would be too expensive.

242 government, a state within a state, a deep state, and this inner government consists of a relatively small group of religiously motivated Gnostic Jews who are sympathetic not just with the cause of Israel but with a theo-political ideology aimed at global domination and the destruction of Western civilization. Ritterband, also a Jewish author, agrees with Bin Laden by claiming that Jewish control over Presidents and Congress meant that Jews functioned in the United States like a ‘government within a government’ or, as he put it in Latin, an ‘imperium in imperio’. (Ritterband 1995: 378) It was as a result of this hidden government within a government that Jews act with such a high degree of confidence to advance their interests. This relatively small group of people control the United States with an ever-tightening grip that allows them to then use the massive resources of the United States as a vehicle for both realizing their religious project while advancing Israeli interests in the world against those of the United States. Millions of Americans are literally homeless and yet a massive proportion, far beyond what is directly gifted to Israel, is wasted on the theological agenda of Gnostic Judaism in the form of re-education programs, enabling talentless people with a particular agenda to rise into positions of authority and creating instruments of propaganda as entertainment that have very little true appeal to an audience. These people are directly responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon and hide the most damning evidence from public scrutiny. This relatively small group of people can do this, in our age of instant global communication, when so much information is literally at our fingertips, because they control, and have controlled for many years, the means of communication in the United States and, to a large degree, global communication especially after Sept., 11. They mediate, and politicise for their own purposes, everything in the U.S., and increasingly in the world, the way we come to understand events in the world and tell everyone how to respond with a singular, consistent voice that would be unbelievable if it could not be shown to happen. As highly respected veteran U.S. journalist Helen Thomas observed in her usual candid manner, when asked by Playboy journalist Glynnis Macnicol, “Do you actually think there’s a secret Jewish conspiracy at work in this country [the US]?” Thomson replied candidly, “Not a secret. It’s very open.” (Thomas as seen in Macnicol 2011) Once you know what to look for, as Thomas did know, then how open it is become obvious. As is all too often the case when this kind of thing happens, Thomas died two years after giving this interview. One of the most suspect aspects to the official narrative, and the one that made me initially suspect at least Israel’s involvement, is motive. Although the full motivation for September 11, 2001, is extremely complex and requires not only all the contents of this volume but several books besides, at a most basic level though, certain activists in the early 19th have argued that war was a necessary precondition for revolutionary change. So, while the United States’ military’s attention was being drawn

243 to the Middle East, an agenda revealed by Julian Assange through computer hacks of US military computers in the 1990s, these activists would do everything in their power, and that is a great deal indeed, to undermine “white nativism” in the United States and across the Anglosphere through what has become known as the “culture wars”. As will be fully disclosed in the final volume of this series, using the cover and disruption of a failed military interventions to carry through a revolutionary project was first theorised by Russian Marxist Jew Alexander Parvus (born Isreal Lazarevich Gelfand) around the turn of the 20 th century. The first time that this strategy can be seen to have been used was during the Sino-Russian war of 1904-1905 when a cohort of Russian Jews undertook revolutionary action against Tzarist Russia while the Russian militarily was engaged with Japan. This strategy was again used in Russia during World War I that created the conditions for the successful “communist” revolution of 1917. The same strategy, encourage war in order to realize a revolutionary agenda, was also used to support the cultural revolution in the United States in the late 1960s and, here we are again, another culture war coinciding with a real international war that is not going well. In realizing their basic agenda of getting the United States military bogged down in never ending conflicts in the Middle East while nurturing social unrest on the domestic front has obviously been incredibly successful. As part of this agenda of social unrest, the “deep state” has also used the danger of terrorism to greatly expand the United States government’s capacity to place all US citizens under intense surveillance. Increased surveillance, that has now spread across the Anglosphere and beyond, allows the political Hasidim to intervene in potentially disruptive acts prior to such actions actually taking place. For the first time in history, those in power can disrupt descent before it really gets under way. Not only was this false flag operation undertaken as a distraction and disruption to enable social unrest but, the attacks also changed people’s attitudes towards Israel’s behaviour towards Muslim states. As Mendes observed, Since the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on America, political conservatives in the USA, Australia, Canada and elsewhere have identified Islamic fundamentalism as the enemy, and the State of Israel as a key ally in the global struggle against terror. Many have forged an unconditional alliance with Israel as reflected in their supportive positions on the 2008 Lebanon War, Operations Cast Lead in Gaza, and the recent Gaza flotilla episode. That alliance involves endorsing all Israeli government policies and actions without question, irrespective of the implications (good or bad) for the prospects of peace, and Israel’s longterm interests. (Mendes 2010: 4) As already observed, prior to September 11, a number of questions were being raised not only about the massive levels of support that continue to be given to Israel despite Israel today being an advanced economy, but questions were also being raised about United States unconditional support for a country that people were describing as “rouge”. The terrorist attacks shifted people’s attitudes towards

244 Israel and Muslims firmly in Israel’s favour. As actually revealed by Israeli spies caught on September 11, 2001, in relation to the act of terror insinuates, changing American attitudes towards Muslims has meant increased support from the Anglosphere for Israel, who also hoped that the U.S. and her allies would at least remove Israel’s strategic enemies at the time, Syria, Iraq and Iran, in the Middle East.147 Finally, it might appear odd, but Israel is now an unofficial but generally acknowledged ally of Saudi Arabia. The motivation for this alliance between Jews and Arabs becomes apparent when the political movement behind the attacks is properly understood. Arabs, like Jews, are a Semitic people and, according to some interpretations, the Torah says that the Arabs will one day rule a vast empire in the service of Jews. The actual motivations for September 11 include.

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Initiating the Parvus Strategy of involving a nation in an overseas conflict that does not go well. Then use this conflict as both a distraction from what should really matter, the rise of China, and as a source to nurture dissatisfaction amongst the masses, who generally dislike wars, that then justifies a “cultural” revolution or a fundamental change in the failed culture that led to catastrophic war. September 11 really marks an important moment in an ongoing attempt to delegitimize claims by white, Protestant, Christians as the “true” Americans. Justifying Western countries developing pervasive systems of internal surveillance. The ‘cold war’ required external surveillance via secret police oriented primarily towards the Soviet Union, for reasons that will be explained, the so called ‘war on terror’, by contrast, has justified developing sophisticated and extensive surveillance of domestic populations in all western countries as outlined in the Project for a New American Century and enacted via The Patriots Act. The Patriots Act was basically originally drafted by the current President of the United States, Joe Biden, in the 1990s but initially rejected for being too invasive. September 11 changed the metric on privacy. This surveillance has been implemented as a response to the risk of what has been labelled “domestic terrorism” which is increasingly being applied to disgruntled white Americans who are concerned about what is happening in their country. The greatest danger to the aspirations of Gnostic Jewry is that people will discover their project and make that knowledge public thereby creating sites of resistance. Internal surveillance is primarily aimed at stopping the creation and dissemination of material, such as this, that might reveal the reality of our existing political situation. The most important aspect of this neutering of the possibility of resistance before it can even begin is to stop the formation of an intelligentsia. The single greatest danger to the total mind control of Gnostic Judaism over the American people is if people begin to think for themselves. It is for this reason that disseminating material linking Israel to September 11 or identifying the role of the ‘deep state’, American Jews must be avoided. Hiding this involvement is extremely important. Most recently, Jewish American and former CIA analyst turned House Representative, Elissa Slotkin, eagerly informed America that, The post 9/11 era is over. The single greatest national security threat right now is our internal division. The threat of domestic terrorism. The polarization that threatens

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On the Larry King show, former Democratic congressman (1997-2013) and Ohio gubernatorial candidate, Dennis Kucinich, claimed that there is a ‘deep state’ that has intervened in several attempts at brokering piece in Syria including apparently ordering a missile strike to intervene in a proposed peace deal being brokered between Putin and Obama.

245 our democracy. If we don’t reconnect our two Americas, the threats will not have to come from the outside. (Slotkin as seen in Jardula 2021)

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Whitney Webb, a journalist, also observed that the “war on terror” was over and now there was the “War on domestic terror”. This is using the same permissive laws drafted, supposedly, to combat those who burned people alive in cages and cut people’s heads off, against people who espouse traditional American values such as not teaching that homosexuality is healthy. As a concrete example of how these new laws are being employed, on the 29th of September 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSAB) wrote a letter to the Biden administration requestion that the thousands of parents going to school meetings to protest the teaching of critical race theory to their children should be labelled as “domestic terrorists”. They argued that the threatening behaviour of these concerned parents warranted them being labelled “domestic terrorists” and the appropriate policing of such matters, under terrorist laws, should be implemented. (Simon 2021) White Americans are being systematically demonized, especially white men, and this is the realization of a long project that has its origins in the aftermath of World War II, are increasingly demonized with labels such as “white nationalist”. The development of the surveillance state really is the realization of the project clearly outlined in Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century. That is, September 11 allowed the creation of state apparatus that can now be easily deployed against white Americans rightfully fearful of losing their country. Gnostic Judaism eventually hopes to depopulate areas in southern Syria that will later be taken to form ‘Greater Israel’ as the ‘Promised Land’. If Israel is to realise its God given borders, as outlined in the Torah, then it needs to occupy “all the territory between the Nile in the south and west and the Euphrates in the north and east” (Goldberg 2009: 116) which includes large swathes of areas currently claimed by Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Palestine.148 As Jewish/American Knesset member Meir Kahane defined this dream, The southern boundary goes up to El Arish, which takes in all of northern Sinai, including Yamit. To the east, the frontier runs along the western part of the East Bank of the Jordan River, hence part of what is now Jordan. Eretz Yisrael also includes part of Lebanon and certain parts of Syria, and part of Iraq, all the way to the Euphrates River. Quite a region. This is believed to have been the borders of Judea during the reign of King David (Friedman 1997: 62) The recreation of the Davidian Israel is one of the Messianic aspirations of Gnostic Judaism. The day will come, soon, when Israel will use some pretext to move its forces into southern Syria in the same manner that it has done in the past in other areas and then will simply never leave. This will be followed by housing settlements etc. etc. We have seen it all before. Syria is so destroyed it can do nothing about it and the United States, to its own destruction, has been under the sway of Gnostic Judaism for decades, at least, will also be unprepared to do anything.

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The realization of ‘Greater Israel’ has always been the plan. Herzl, perhaps the most important Zionist at the turn of the 20th century, said that “the time was not yet ripe [for realizing Greater Israel} it would be more appropriate for the time being to create a germ cell out of which a state could grow organically.” (Herzl cited in Polkehn 1975: 79-80)

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Spread adherents of Muslim Brotherhood around the world. In the Torah, God promises the land from the Nile to the Euphrates to the children of Isaac, but God tells Abraham that the children of Ishmael, the supposed progenitor of the Arabs, will rule a ‘great nation’ that will then serve the Jews. “As for Ishmael, I have heard you, I have blessed him and will make him fruitful and multiply him greatly. He shall father twelve princes, and I will make him into a great nation.” (Genesis 17:20) Like all religious fundamentalist movements, political Hasidim believes that Torah is the word of God therefore if the Torah says the children of Ishmael will rule a ‘great nation’ then a great nation, they shall rule. Further, Muslim Brotherhood is a form of Gnosticism, like Gnostic Judaism, so promoting the interests of this movement furthers the global Gnostic project of Gnostic Judaism. Force the United States to take an aggressive stance to the Islamic Republic of Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. (Mersheimer and Walt 2006: 32) In short, it has made Israel’s enemies, America’s enemies even though none of these countries, according to all the official reports, were involved in any way in September 11 or global terrorism. If anything, countries like Iraq fought against Islamists. Indeed, some have observed that in all, Israel would like to see five countries, Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Iran, “curtailed”. The political Hasidim hoped that people would turn on Muslims and be more sympathetic with Israel. Sept. 11 meant that Israel has been allowed a free hand in their dealings with Hezbollah and the Palestinians as well as ongoing support for Islamic terrorists in Syria. (Mersheimer and Walt 2006: 32)

This is not an exhaustive list, for just one further reason it has been argued that since Sept. 11, the sometimes-flagging security industrial complex in Israel has been greatly revived because of the increased demands in the U.S. for security products like surveillance devices for airports and tamper-proof biometric IDs, etc., (Goldberg 2009: 114) which Israel specializes in, but this list indicates the most important shortterm goals directly related to September 11. As others have observed, the influence of September 11 is waning, and we are increasingly living in a post-September 11 world, but we will perhaps never “move beyond” the laws and institutions to which it gave birth.

Dancing Israelis At a three-day conference in Ireland in 2017, International Law and the State of Israel: Legitimacy, Exceptionalism and Responsibility, the American Jewish scholar Joel Kovel claimed that there was a lot that happened on September 11, 2001, that Americans did not know about, Did you know that, as the towers were burning on 9/11 in lower Manhattan, about five painters were cheering on the process from across the river? . . . They were Mossad agents. And they were arrested and disappeared from the face of the Earth? (Kovel as seen in Friend 2017)

247 Kovel is telling something of the truth, but his account is actually not very accurate. The people that he is referring to as “painters”149 were actually Mossad agents and they have gone down in history as the “Dancing Israelis”. In my experience, very few people do indeed know anything at all about the Dancing Israelis even though they present as the most damning evidence linking Israel to September 11. The following account is mainly derived from a publicly released F.B.I. report initially acquired through a freedom of information request by an American citizen and then made publicly available on the internet. Early on the afternoon of Sept 11, 2001, a call was made by an eyewitness, codenamed ‘T-1’ in the F.B.I. report to keep her identity secret, to police saying that there was a group of men ‘dancing’ in the Doric Tower parking lot as they watched the Twin Towers burn. T-1 claimed that shortly after feeling her building shake from the impact of the first plane slamming into the World Trade Centre, she received a call for a neighbour telling her to look out her window at the southern Manhattan skyline. (Madsen 2014: 16) Although being directed to see the unfolding catastrophe of September 11, she noticed as she watched the events unfold, a white Chevy van parked in the parking lot of the apartment block with three of the five men present jumping on the roof of the van obviously celebrating while being filmed with the smouldering Twin Towers clearly visible in the background. (Madsen 2014: 16) The men were obviously exuberantly celebrating; smiling, hugging each other and giving each other high-fives, as the buildings burnt. They were celebrating like they were watching a success. This was just moments after the first plane had struck the World Trade Centre and quite some time before the second tower had been struck. The men were spotted, confirmed, at 8:50am, just 5 minutes after the first tower had been impacted. One eyewitness claimed that they actually saw the men in the parking lot as early as 8:00am, 45 minutes before the first tower was struck, but this citing has not been corroborated. T-1 was shocked by the behaviour of these men who were obviously celebrating the horrific tragedy unfolding across the bay. As the van pulled away from the parking lot, T-1 wrote down their number plate, JRJ-13Y. As the eyewitness was unsure of the relevance or importance of what she had seen, she did not instantly contact police but, after some reflection and in discussion with her husband on the unusual nature of what she had seen, in an undeniable act of bravery and conscientiousness, T-1 decided to report what she had seen to the New Jersey police. In response to the eyewitness report, New York police issued a BOLO (be on the lookout)

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Kovel seems to be confusing two separate events. One was the Dancing Israelis who seem to know more about September 11 then they are making public while there is another event when “Israeli painters” or Israeli citizens with links to the IDF were selling paintings that were mass produced in China to selected American officials. The motive for selling these paintings, why they were being sold, who they were being sold too, was never established beyond the whole episode being very suspicious. I myself was visited around 2004 by an Israeli claiming to be an artist selling his paintings.

248 for a white van with the reported number plate. Luckily, at 3:56 pm, the van that had been in the parking lot at the Doric Tower was indeed spotted traveling eastward on State Route 3 on the turnpike in New Jersey. Police officer Scott DeCarlo150 and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli, their names should go down in history, pulled the vehicle over based on their number plate despite one of the numbers given not matching but the description of the vehicle and the rest of the number plate matched perfectly so DeCarlo decided to pull the van over. The East Rutherford Police report said, Officer assigned to Special Detail on Route 3 was rerouting traffic on Highway 3 East to Hwy 120 and 3 West. Lincoln Tunnel was shut down and officer was diverting traffic. Officer notified by dispatch of a National Broadcast to be on the lookout for 2000 Chevy Van White, NJ tag JYJ 13Y. 3 to 4 occupants. Officer noticed van traveling at slow speed east towards Lincoln Tunnel on the Service Road with 2 occupants visible. Officer informed sergeant of possible match. No front license plate but JRJ 13Y tag may have one letter off from National Broadcast. Sergeant told officer to stop vehicle because van seen in Liberty State Park at time of first impact. Driver did not exit vehicle. He fumbled with a black “fanny pack”. Officer removed driver and van was searched. County bomb squad and FBI notified. FBI Newark ordered occupants to be held for prints because occupants were seen in Liberty State Park at time of first impact. 5 individuals were detained. Vehicle registration and insurance card were obtained. Officer spoke to FBI Special Agents Robert F. Taylor, Jr., Bill Lloyd, and Dave O’Brien. Prior to transportation to NJ State Police Barracks at Giants Stadium, driver said, “We are Israelis, we are not your problem. Your problems are our problem. Palestinians are the problem.” (as seen in Madsen 2014: 43 from East Rutherford Police information) As the report says, upon being stopped, the men initially refused to leave the vehicle but were then forced to do so at the point of the police officer’s gun. When the occupants were pulled from the

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In an interview with Dave Gahary, Scott DeCarlo appears to suggest that people continued to intervene in his life years after finding the wanted van. In the interview, a rather desperate sounding DeCarlo, who has since left the police force hoping to have a career in music, seems to ask if he could be left alone and allowed to go on with his life. When asked if he thought the actions of the Dancing Israeli’s was suspicion DeCarlo refused to be drawn on the question as though he feared giving a response that might upset those who continued to meddle in his life. DeCarlo seems to be seeking a way of communicating with his stalkers to tell them that he was not particularly interested in Middle Eastern politics and that his capture of the van was not against Jews or Israel but that he was simply doing his duty on the day and therefore wanted to be left alone. Gnostic Jews do intervene, and worse, in people’s lives if they have caused any kind of trouble for their movement. That Gnostic Jews do this is claimed by victim’s time and time again. I too have suffered from this kind of activity which resulted in me losing a lecturing position in a university just because my research was heading in the wrong direction. I had yet to link my research to any group whatsoever but even doing the wrong research attracts attention and punishment. I was later chased out of a city by a low level Gnostic Jewish drug dealer at the point of a gun. This kind of abusive behavior of those who cause trouble has to end and end now. The only way that this will be achieved is if victims of this kind of abuse are believed and action taken to protect them from persecution. Most people are so coward by Gnostic Judaism and their power that we are like children in an abusive family, happy if the abuse is directed at someone else. It is time for us to be brave, stand up for each other, and act against the oppressors. DeCarlo is a hero and needs to be treated accordingly. He should be famous and held in high esteem not fleeing persecution while trying to establish a career in music.

249 vehicle, they said that it was “ok” because they were “on our side” and, therefore, there was no need to be concerned. As an ABC 20/20 report confirms, upon being captured the men said, “We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.” It does not need to be pointed out that these were strange statements to be made by removalists being pulled over by police. I am sure that the police officers, who had probably gone through pulling suspicious cars over hundreds of times before, had never heard anyone say anything like this before. Interestingly, from the first contact with officials, they were advancing what would become the official narrative. The United States had now experienced terrorism like Israel and, therefore, Israel and the United States were now strong friends against a common enemy. The problem with these men advancing this particular argument at that time was that it was around 4 o’clock on the same day of the attack so most people remained ignorant about what was happening. These men seemed very well informed about the supposed nature of the attack, who was behind the attack and what was to be America’s response when the attack had just happened mere hours before. Upon inspection, the men were found to be carrying a camera and the developed photos clearly show the men celebrating as the second plane struck the Twin Towers. One of the men even held up a cigarette lighter to the remaining tower before it was hit by the second plane as though showing it burning. The five men found in the van were Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omar Marmari. All five men were later found to be Israeli citizens. Two of the men were confirmed to have links with Mossad while it was generally suspected that all the men were probably Mossad agents. Sivan Kurzberg was carrying over $1,000 in cash while Oded Ellner, supposedly a poor tourist doing removalist work to get by while staying in the United States, had $4,700 stuffed down one of his socks. It does not need to be stated that these were extremely suspicious men captured under extremely suspicious circumstances saying extremely suspicious things. What were Mossad agents pretending to be removalists doing photographing a terrorist attack while celebrating the fact that thousands of Americans, supposedly their allies, had been killed. Upon further questioning by Newark-based FBI agents Robert R. Taylor, Bill Lloyd and Dave O’Brien, although all their accounts differed significantly and were full of inconsistency, the most generous account has the five men hearing about the first plane strike on the Twin Towers through the media and they then decided to rush to a vantage point near where they worked in order to “record events”. The men claimed that they were Israeli tourists working for the removalists company, Urban Moving

250 Systems.151 This company was well known for employing illegal Israeli ‘tourists’ not on work visas who were, U.S. secret services knew, really doing Israeli secret service work. Beyond the inconsistency and known lies, the most obvious problem with the story told by the five Israeli Mossad agents is the timeline. These men were seen, by multiple witnesses, dancing and celebrating, already unpacked and established at the site, at just 8:50am. The first plane crashed into the Twin Towers at 8:45am. How did these men have time to hear about what was happening, even briefly discuss what they were going to do, decide to move to a better vantage point, pack up their gear (they were carrying cameras etc.), arrive, unpack their equipment at the site, all in less than 5 minutes? It has since been claimed by people who have tried to replicate their drive, from Urban Moving Systems to the Doric Towers, under similar road conditions as those on the day, that it takes at least 15 minutes just to drive from their warehouse to where the men were seen dancing. This does not include making decisions about what to do, packing up equipment, pulling out of parking spaces etc., etc., all of which takes time. To be generous, the fastest they could have achieved their journey after seeing television footage would be 20 minutes and that timeline, at least according to their story, is impossible. According to the real timeline, they must have left at least 15 minutes before the first plane stuck the North Tower. Their story just does not make sense. How did these men get to the Doric Towers so quickly? On the morning of 12th September 2001, the same three FBI agents, Taylor, Lloyd and O’Brien, all of whom have since been transferred away from the Newark Field Office, questioned people living in the Doric Temple at the corner of 9th Street and Palisades Avenue in Union City. They found that the men were established at the Doric Towers by 8:50 adds legitimacy to the eyewitness who claimed to have seen the van parked in the parking lot as early as 8am. If this is true, and it is an eyewitness statement, then the men obviously knew of the terrorist attack in advance. Even without this citing, they obviously had prior knowledge of the terrorist attacks. With just a little bit of critical reflection, there entire story simply unravels in being revealed as the fabrication that it is. Indeed, there are real questions about what was their true motivation? Why did they move to a better vantage point at all? Nobody else went to the parking lot although it was a very good vantage point to view the buildings. They claimed that they wanted to, ‘document the event’. The fact of the matter is, Oded Ellner claims, “we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the

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Even the name of this business is odd. Urban Moving Systems seems to suggest that they have systems for moving the “urban” which itself might be a vague reference to the Twin Towers terrorist attack. Not is the name unusual but on the 22 June 2001, the U.S. federal government granted a Small Business Loans award to Urban Moving Systems worth $498,750, along with 166,250 in “Non-Federal Funding”, despite this business being known to the federal government as a Mossad front organization. This grant was “To aid small businesses which are unable to obtain financing in the private credit marketplace”. (as revealed by Madsen 2014: 22)

251 event.” But at the stage that they were supposed to have moved to see the events unfold, everybody thought that it was just a terrible accident. What was there to “document” that the media was not already thoroughly documenting from 50 different angles? They claimed that they just wanted photos of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers just like everyone else. Why did these men assume, even at this early stage, that it was a terrorist attack that needed to be ‘documented’? Their testimony seems to raise more questions than it answers. After all, out of all the New Yorkers that lived in that area, these particular five men, some of whom had known associations with Mossad, were the only people, in the whole of New York, who gathered filming equipment to record the event. Not only were these particular men, caught filming the event but, of course, most damning of all, they were celebrating the disaster. Not only were the Israeli men’s stories highly suspect and riddled with questionable claims but shortly after the van had been secured, while still in situ, the police used K-9 explosive detection dogs, provided by the Bergen County Police, that alerted the handlers to the presence of explosives. In response, the nearby Homestead Studio Suites Hotel was evacuated for several hours. The van was later tested by scientists for a range of substances and the F.B.I. admitted that they had found traces of ‘explosive materials’ inside the van. The F.B.I report did not specify if that material was Nano-thermite, an explosive substance that was later confirmed by scientists to be on the debris from the destroyed buildings, but that a removalist van had any explosive material is troubling enough especially given the context under which the vehicle was being inspected. Further a map was found in the vehicle with a confidential source from Bergen County Records confirming, “There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted . . . It looked like they’re hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park.” (as seen in Lima 2001) Finally, it was also claimed, that Urban Moving Systems van had a picture of a plane actually flying into the Twin Towers painted on its side. That the removalist van had a mural of a plane flying into the Twin Towers was confirmed in a report authored by The Mineta Transportation Institute titled Saving City Lifelines: Lessons Learned in the 9-11 Terrorist Attacks. On page 20 of that report, it confirms that on 9/11, 2001, “A panel truck with a painting of a plane flying into the World Trade Centre was stopped near the temporary command post.” Many have questioned why, if they really were involved, would they advertise the fact on the side of their vans, but this is the exact kind of hubris that this theo-political movement displays because they are confident that they are really untouchable. They would find such a macabre display not only humorous but confirmation that they are above the law. The fact that they displayed a representation of the attacks on the side of the van actually supports the fact that they were involved in the attacks and certainly does nothing to negate the fact. As nothing has been done against either these agents, anybody else from Israel or their

252 American associates, their confidence in advertising their intentions appear to be well placed. Israelis, and if truth be told Jews in general, are literally shown, time and again, to be above the law. While in custody, the five Israeli agents were asked if they were prepared to take a polygraph test. Paul Kurzberg refused to take the polygraph test for 10 weeks and when he eventually did, he failed the test suggesting that he was lying. (Madsen 2014: 47) The transcripts of these tests have not been made publicly available. Shortly after failing this test, two and half months after being arrested, the men were released with the help of Judge Michael B. Mukasey and were hastily deported to Israel before any other action could be taken against them by people who were deeply concerned with what was unfolding. This release took place over the objections of the CIA. The incriminating photos found on the men were claimed to have been destroyed by court order on January 27th, 2014, but some extremely poor-quality photos, claiming to have be copies of those taken by the before the originals were destroyed, were later released on the internet. Acts by brave patriots continues to thwart the sinister practices of these people. Beyond these few photos, no material evidence surrounding these men has remained in the hands of the FBI as a result of court orders. This lack of material evidence means that no action could be taken concerning these five men even if there arose public demands to investigate this matter further in the future. Despite the seriousness of the situation and their obviously suspicious behaviour, (who celebrates such a devastating event that was obviously going to result in thousands, potentially tens of thousands of deaths) the five men were held in federal custody for just 71 days. This might be contrasted to the incredible suffering by people like Australian Julian Assange or patriotic Afghan soldiers who were held for years in terrible, brutal conditions without a trial simply for defending their country against an illegal invasion. No further action was taken against the men once they returned to Israel. The owner of Urban Moving, Dominik Otto Suter, was not arrested but was briefly questioned by the F.B.I. Upon his release from questioning, how this man was released at all is mystery in itself, Suter hastily closed his business and fled back to Israel before any further action could be taken against him. Again, as with the celebrating men, this does not seem like the actions of an innocent man. Suter’s name did get listed on a terrorist watchlist generated by the FBI, which was leaked by Italian financial surveillance authorities, but he remained at large. There has never been official confirmation that he is indeed on any FBI terrorist lists. Upon investigation, the F.B.I concluded that Urban Moving Systems was indeed a Mossad front organization, but, surprisingly, that the five men were not in any way involved in Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A Jewish weekly newspaper, The Forward, reported that U.S. government officials concluded, “The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it . . . the conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs.” (Perelman 2002) The F.B.I. believed that although the five men were spies and

253 were “documenting” the events of September 11 for a foreign agency, they were not spying on the United States or involved in the terrorist attack but were instead spying on Muslim’s living in the New York area suspected of funding Palestinian organizations. In 2015, Fox News reported that, A highly placed investigator said there were “tie ins” between the spy ring and 9/11. However, when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 was classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.” (Fox News cited in Mir 2011: 342) Although this is not a lot of information, merely to admit, “evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 was classified” actually tells everyone that there actually were indeed links. Interestingly, in the period following September 11, the Jersey City police computer system had been maintained by Larimore Associates which was a well-respected experienced company that specialised in archiving police emergency calls. The person ultimately responsible for allocating this contract, Jersey City Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham, suddenly died of a heart attack in 2004. The new mayor, upon taking office, abruptly cancelled Larimore’s contract and it was awarded instead to Information Spectrum. Information Spectrum oversaw the transition of the emergency call archive data, that had been planned for some time, from a Wang to a Windows environment. The Jersey City Police claim that during this transfer of data 8000 emergency 911 calls registered on September 11, 2001, were “accidently scrubbed”. Indeed, the lost data was so extensive that it also included the 911 calls relating to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. This meant that T-1s call was deleted and any other incriminating call from her apartment block or anywhere else on that day was also deleted. This would mean that the call could not be used in a court of law to convict suspects. The only call that remained that was relevant to the terrorist attack was a 911 call reporting a suspicious vagrant in a south Jersey City neighbourhood. When Larrimore heard about this loss, they offered their services to retrieve the lost data, which can usually be done under such circumstances, but their offer never even received a response. (Madsen 2014: 16-17) The data remains “lost” to this day ensuring that no action in relation to that call will ever take place in the future. If the dancing men were Iranian, caught under these exact circumstances on that day, the United States would have undoubtedly used this as a casus bellum. That no action has been taken regarding these men despite all that has been revealed in the public sphere is a disgrace. Indeed, why were there no serious and public questions asked of Israel more generally and their possible involvement in this devious act? On the 14th of September 2004, 3 days and 3 years after the event, the five “dancing Israelis” filed a suit against the United States in the US District Court in Brooklyn for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

254 Their suit made an interesting claim. They claimed that the men were held not because of any real grounds for suspicion, the eyewitness report, the celebration, the strange behaviour upon being arrested, but because they were Jewish Israelis and that the police “engaged in racial, religious, ethnic, and/or national origin profiling. Plaintiffs’ race, religion, ethnicity, and/or national origin played a determinative role in Defendants’ decision to detain them initially . . .” So, according to the suit, they were held not because they were seen celebrating the terrorist attack, not because they disobeyed police directives upon being confronted, but because they were Jews. They went on to claim, The plaintiffs are Jewish Israelis, not Moslems, but due to the similarity of language and the geographical location if Israel in the Middle East, and the ignorance or lack of understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the fact that Israel is an ally of the United States, the defendants mentally placed the plaintiffs in the same category as Moslems and discriminated against them the same way. It was, apparently, because of ignorance of geography and biases of the American people, confusing people who were really allies as enemies, that resulted in their arrest and detention of these men and not the fact that these men were; celebrating a terrible terrorist attack, having at least left their point of origin before the first strike, filmed the attack as it unfolded, acted suspicious upon arrest, could not explain their behaviour, lied to the police, had traces of explosives in their vehicle, were foreign agents and had a mural of the attack on the side of their van. How much more suspicious could people get? It is like the child with their face smeared with Nutella, holding the Nutella covered knife, standing beside the open jar, saying, “It wasn’t me”. It would be laughable if not so serious a matter. Just to try to obfuscate things in terms that are basically accusing the police and the FBI of anti-Semitism without quite being prepared to use the word. Perhaps the most incredible, and actually most damning, aspect of this whole affair is that the details of the “dancing Israelis” are not well known by the vast majority of Americans. In an age supposedly without secrets, when our individual lives are scrutinized and recorded at every turn, such an apparently important event in relation to September 11, that should be taught in high schools and open discussed on every talk show, has been largely kept secret. How did this happen?

The Buildings and Their Last Owners Although amongst the most famous buildings in the world, by 2001, the value of the World Trade Centre was greatly depleted. For many years prior to 2001, these buildings had very high vacancy rates and, because they were built in 1973, had extremely high maintenance costs. The high maintenance costs were not only the result of aging materials but also because the facilities in the buildings, such as the extensive air conditioning system and lifts, were old and in continuous need of repair. Another well-known

255 problem with the Twin Towers was that they offered extremely limited retail space on the lower levels which meant that an alternative source of valuable revenue in the heart of the city was impossible. The buildings themselves were actually filled with asbestos which government authorities were insisting had to be removed by whoever would agree to lease these obsolete buildings. The buildings themselves were designed to accommodate office spaces as conceptualised in the early 1970s and many businesses simply no longer wanted or could even use this type of space. So, although the buildings continued to be prestigious, many businesses who may have been interested in high rise central New York real estate were simply not interested in renting office space in the Twin Towers. For all of these reasons, aging buildings, aging facilities, high maintenance costs, poor design, and limited retail space, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who was in charge of allocating the lease of the World Trade Centre, had a great deal of difficulty in finding appropriate people interested in leasing these iconic New York buildings. Despite these troubles, a coalition of people, Larry Silverstein, GMAC Commercial Mortgage, Westfield America and Lloyd Goldman (BLDG Management) came together and decided to take out a 99year lease on the complex. All of these businesses and people have deep and abiding associations with Israel and the global Jewish community. Without easy access to the Twin Towers, it would have been impossible to organise the controlled demolition that many suspect was the real cause behind the collapse of the Twin Towers. The primary lease holders of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001 were two Jews, the American Jew Larry Silverstein and the Australian Jew Frank Lowy. Silverstein and Lowy were business partners who leased the World Trade Centre just months prior to the deadly terrorist attacks. For a very small investment, these men would make hundreds of millions of dollars out of the catastrophic attacks and Silverstein at least now has a 99-year lease on not only one of the most prestigious buildings in the world, but now that it is up to date, one with low maintenance costs. Exactly who are these extremely lucky men? Larry Silverstein is a Jewish American Businessman from New York. He is known as an extremely “hard” businessman even by New York standards. Silverstein managed to negotiate with Neil Levin, who was Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, for a 99-year lease of the Towers. Neil Levin was previously a vice president of Goldman Sachs152 and also worked as head of the Commission on the Recovery of Holocaust Victim’s Assets which arranged for restitution of property taken

152

As will be revealed in Vol. III of this series, one of the most important businesses for Gnostic Judaism. Goldman Sachs has also been identified as the most important conduit for enabling Chinese influence in the United States. As Hamilton and Ohlberg note in Hidden Hand, “No organization has been more important to the CCP’s campaign to penetrate US elites, or more willing”.

256 from Jewish families during World War II. Under pressure from his Jewish wife, Claudia Cohen, Senator D’Amato (a good friends of Donald Trump) placed Levin as Director of the Port Authority to oversee the leasing of valuable real estate in New York and New Jersey including the World Trade Centre. Because the World Trade Centre was old, expensive and poorly designed, with high vacancy rates, there was not a lot of interest in leasing the $3.2 billion towers. Then, suddenly, for some reason that has never been explained, Larry Silverstein, as he said, “felt a compelling urge to own them”. Silverstein and his business associates were quickly granted a 99-year lease over the buildings on the 24th of July 2001 for just $125 million. No justification has ever been given for deciding to lease these unprofitable buildings. It is true, usually business decisions do not really need to be justified, but, as events have unfolded, there are legitimate outstanding questions as to why this particular man leased these particular buildings at that particular time. There are coincidences then there is suspicious behaviour and Larry Silverstein leasing these buildings at that time is suspicious. It is just another of the many incredible circumstances that seem to surround September 11 that an American Jew with strong ties to Israel, a strong supporter and friend of Netanyahu and a person known to be highly supportive of the global Jewish community, happened to lease buildings that, at least on the face of it, do not appear to be good investments, had been available for quite some time, but in which he had not been interested. Just six weeks after taking control of the buildings, just enough time to wire the buildings up for detonation, three of the World Trade Towers lay in rubble. Again conveniently, Silverstein negotiated special insurance conditions on the Twin Towers in the incredibly unlikely event that the buildings were somehow destroyed. After all, no high-rise buildings in New York have ever been destroyed in the past. Part of these special conditions were that it was believed at the time that the World Trade Centre complex was significantly over-insured. Silverstein and Lowy had insured the complex for $3.55 billion even though replacement costs of the buildings were estimated to be a little over $1 billion.153 Importantly, this insurance policy stipulated prior permission that if the buildings were destroyed then not only would the lease holders be permitted to rebuild on the site but that they would be permitted to increase the retail space. This increase in retail space would, of course, address one of the most significant problems with the profitability of the original buildings potentially generating hundreds of millions of dollars in extra revenue for the owners. If this eventuated, which of

153

The One World Trade center which replaced these buildings did indeed eventually cost $3.9 billion which makes it the most expensive office tower in the world by a significant amount and it might be argued that, therefore, these buildings were actually underinsured. The problem is that Silverstein and Lowy only paid for a replacement insurance and not insurance that would cover the construction of a new improved building. For replacements costs, these buildings were indeed significantly over insured.

257 course it did, it would mean that the value of the site would increase in value significantly. The disaster happened so soon after Silverstein had taken control of the buildings that the insurance policies had not been finalized although they were honoured. Later, despite the insurance not even being settled, Silverstein made two unusual claims against the unlucky insurers. Firstly, he claimed that the insurers needed to pay for a new improved building and not simply pay for the replacement of the existing buildings which his insurance covered. As Judge Harold Baer said in the initial rejection of this claim, “Insurance against technological change and shifts in the political winds may very well exist in the marketplace, but no court has ever found that such coverage is included in a replacement-cost policy.” (emphasis added) The leasers had not paid for insurance that covered the rebuilding of a new premise using new technology but had only paid for the replacement costs of the existing buildings. The difference between the replacement costs and rebuilding a new building should have been carried by the owners. The second surprising feature of the insurance claim was that in 2004, Jewish American judge Michael Mukasey oversaw a decision which awarded Silverstein damages from some insurers for two separate terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre. It was argued that each plane represented a separate terrorist attack and therefore there had been two terrorist attacks on September 11 despite everyone knowing that both planes were part of the one scheme. As a result of this judgement, they were entitled to two full insurance payments. This is an extremely counter-intuitive verdict as there was only one asset insured. Each building was not insured separately but the entire complex was covered by one insurance policy. How could there be two separate attacks on one asset? Once the asset is destroyed and, therefore triggering an insurance claim, then the asset cannot be redestroyed by the “next” terrorist attack. An asset does not recreate itself thereby allowing for a second attack. Despite this, in the end, with the help of a sympathetic New York judiciary, Silverstein and Lowy received both money to build new improved buildings, even though they had only paid for replacement cost insurance, and were paid for two separate terrorist attacks on one asset. These decisions meant that Silverstein ultimately received $4.5 billion dollars in insurance payments. This was an astronomical figure that was by far the largest insurance payment ever paid and had repercussion for insurance around the world. The ultimate cost for building a high-tech new building on the now vacant site was estimated to be $3.9 billion. So, Silverstein, and his business associates – GMAC Commercial Mortgage, Westfield America and Lloyd Goldman, received $600 million, a vast sum of money by any measure, and a brand-new high-tech building in the very heart of New York city after owner the asset for just six weeks. Are these not the luckiest men alive? Because the money for rebuilding was initially held up due to ongoing legal squabbles, Silverstein initially did not have the up-front capital to fulfill his obligations to rebuild on the now vacant site. Because

258 of this delay, public pressure was growing on New York authorities that something had to be done to build on the ugly site that stood as a reminder of that terrible event, or the original owners would be forced to forfeit their right to rebuild. This really was a crisis that might have meant that this unbelievable opportunity to rebuild and own the most prestigious real estate in the world would be lost. In this moment of crisis, and this is a nice example of why Jews are overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States, for reasons beyond anyone’s understanding, George Pataki, then governor of New York and, some claim, potential future President of the United States, ordered the Port Authority to refund Silverstein’s initial $125 million equity on the site while allowing him to retain control. So, for some inexplicable reason, the people leasing a building returned the initially payment to the investors while allowing them to continue to lease the buildings. I wonder how good a businessman I could be if somebody just gifted me $125 million and a building lease for gratis. A sweet deal if you can get it. This was enough money to keep the rebuilding project afloat, continue with reconstruction planning, thereby silencing the growing discontent, until the outstanding legal matters relating to the insurance claims could be resolved. All these matters were resolved very much in Silverstein’s favour. In Larry Silverstein’s world it seems that you win some and . . . well . . . you win some more. For all intents and purposes, legally, the $125 million was a gift from the city of New York to Silverstein of more money than most of us could even imagine. In effect, this now meant, that Silverstein rebuilt the World Trade Centre, the interestingly named One World Trade Centre154, and received the $600 million for nothing. Not only did the conditions of the insurance benefit Silverstein, but his actions on the day are also extremely suspicious. Silverstein was well known to start every weekday with a business breakfast at the “Windows on the World” restaurant high in the North Tower. Silverstein was never known to have missed his breakfast at the ‘Windows’ except on Sept. 11, 2001. On that particular day, of all days, Silverstein did not have his usual business breakfast at the “Windows of the World” because he had a dermatologist appointment. Not only was he fortunately not present in the buildings on the morning of September 11, 2001, as was usual, but none of his family, many of whom worked in the buildings, were in the building on that fateful day. Unlike many thousands of families across America who lost people they loved dearly under terrible circumstances on that terrible day, despite being more exposed than most people to potential dangers, Silverstein luckily managed to avoid personal tragedy. It has to be appreciated that Silverstein is not just any businessman, he is not even just any Jewish American businessman, but he is

154

The idea of creating “one world” or overcoming nations and creating a world government has long been an aspiration of Gnostic Jewry. One of the most active political activists for Gnostic Jewry, Albert Einstein, said, “The only salvation for civilization and the human race lies in the creation of world government.”

259 well known to be a strong supporter of Israel and a good personal friend of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Silverstein and Netanyahu were so close that Silverstein would ring Netanyahu personally on the phone every Sunday. Why an American businessman would need to keep in such close contact with a foreign leader is at least curious but, probably more accurately, suspicious. Indeed, all the central actors identified around the events of September 11, 2001, had close associations with the President of Israel. At what point do the coincidences surrounding September 11, amount to the unavoidable conclusion that they are not coincidences at all but clues for answer the question as to who actually did the September 11 terrorist attacks? The Haaretz reporting service reported, “Their collapse [the Twin Towers] was also the collapse of the deal of his life, and since then, he has been trying to put the pieces back together in the face of fierce public criticism, some of it anti-Semitic”. (Leibovich-Dar 2001) With billions of dollars in insurance money, hundreds of millions of dollars from the city of New York, and a brand-new building, I think Silverstein has managed pretty well at putting the “pieces together” and, as there has been absolutely no investigation into Silverstein regarding the attacks or the strange collapse of the buildings, claims of “anti-Semitism” seem, as is often the case, somewhat exaggerated. Larry Silverstein is not the only ‘lucky’ investor on that all-important day. Frank Lowy, Silverstein’s business partner and owner of Westfields USA, is a Czechoslovakian Jew who moved to Australia as a poor immigrant shortly after the state of Israel was established. Despite his financial circumstances upon arriving in Australia, Lowy managed to establish a global retail empire that was worth billions of dollars when he decided to sell his remaining shares in October 2019. Luckily for Lowy, this was really selling at the peak of the market as it was just a few months before Covid 19 struck the world crippling global retailers which would have wiped millions off his assets. Luck really does follow Frank Lowy. Lowy is a thoroughly committed Zionist who passionately supports Israel and other Jewish causes. (Koutsoukis 2008) Lowy, while an “Australian” business owner, as with many Jews, used to spend at least three months of the year in Israel. As a young man, Frank Lowy fought within the infamous Jewish terrorist organization the Golani Brigade. The Golani Brigade fought primarily against the English in support of the establishment of a Jewish state after the Second World War. So, although Lowy was prepared to fight and die for Israel, just after his efforts had been awarded and Israel was established, he decided to leave. Perhaps he thought he could serve Israel better by working in another country rather than remain in Israel. Until recently, Lowy was the well-known and extremely influential owner of the Westfields Shopping Network. Lowy owns shopping complexes around the world with multiple centres in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom. He is well known for his absolutely ruthless business tactics, which some have suggested, verge on being more like an organised crime gang. He has incredible political influence and has

260 had the confidence of several Australian Prime Ministers. Despite doing so well in Australia and associating with the most powerful n the country, he has a reputation for his ability to avoid paying taxes in the countries in which he generates his wealth. As just one expression of his political power, Lowy established the extremely influential private Sydney think tank, The Lowy Institute for International Policy which has become one of the loudest voices on international affairs in Australia and is regularly featured as an authoritative commentator on the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC, as well as at academic institutions. He also established the Israeli international policy think tank ‘National Security Studies’ in Tel Aviv, Israel. Through these vehicles he is able to ‘interpret’ global events and shape public opinion that can then be used to leverage government to do his bidding. Lowy’s family has continued his interests, Peter Lowy is chairman of Tribe Media Corp, I could not make these names up if I tried, which publishes the Jewish Journal. Despite Frank Lowy is often being promoted by government officials as the exemplary immigrant who came to Australia with nothing, accumulated a great deal of wealth, and is now a loyal “Australian”, straight after Lowy sold Westfields, thereby no longer being required to live in Australia for business reasons, he quickly moved to Israel where he now permanently resides. Of course, he took hundreds of millions of dollars of wealth made in Australia with him. In 2001, Westfields leased the small shopping concourse area at the bottom of the Twin Towers on a 99-year lease in partnership with Silverstein. The problem with this space, as with the rest of the building, was that the facilities were outdated, and the available retail space was too small to be a valuable income steam to supplement income from office space. Like the rest of the Twin Towers complex, the retail space also suffered from the presence of asbestos that needed to be removed in the very near future. As already observed, as part of the purchase negotiations, it was agreed that on the chance that the Twin Towers were destroyed, there would be allowed a significant increase to the retail space. The new building, of course, has excellent, modern and extensive, retail space perfectly suited to making a profit. Like Silverstein, Frank Lowy made billions out of the tragic events of September 11 through the twin insurance claims that were accepted by a sympathetic legal system. Lowy’s business interests in the World Trade Centre complex were bought out by Silverstein in 2003 for $140 million. Again, a nice profit. This, of course, was above his share of insurance payments. Again, as with Silverstein, Lowy also has long been a close friend of Israeli political leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his historical tendency to want to kill the English on behalf of Israel in the years following the Second World War, Lowy was recently knighted by the Queen of England in 2017. Both Frank Lowy and Larry Silverstein are known and committed Zionists who are well connected to the powerful elite of global Jewry. They had only leased the Twin Towers a matter of weeks prior to the

261 terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. This would be just enough time to wire and charge the buildings. The reason for leasing these difficult, aging, unprofitable buildings has never been explained. They both made literally billions out the attacks through the doubling of the insurance claims, controlling the new building, and other forms of payment related to the Twin Towers such as government largess.

The Significance of the Date One aspect of the attacks on September 11, 2001, is the centrality of the date in narratives around these terrorist acts. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon are not known to history as ‘the attack on the Twin Towers’ or even ‘the attack on the World Trade Centre’ but it has become known to everyone as ‘9/11’. This framing, of course, is not something that has just happened, it is not just a popular expression, but was used from the very earliest reports in the media and by government. If this attack was planned, then why name an event after the date on which the event occurred? The most obvious answer to this question, why there was such an emphasis on the date of 9/11, was because 911 is the emergency number in the United States. These numbers, like the emergency services number from any country, are drilled into Americans from childhood. Dialling 911 is the correct response to an emergency. This, apparently, is the exact atmosphere the Islamic terrorists hoped to create. 911, this is an emergency, the people of the United States must act. Doing nothing is not an option. Act now! If this was what motivated the “terrorists” to select this date for this reason then, it might be wondered, why would Muslim terrorists promote the idea that this was an emergency requiring urgent action? Surly terrorists benefit most through U.S. apathy, complacency and inaction. You would think that the terrorists would want America to do nothing against them but allow them a free hand in the Middle East. The truth is that it was not the supposed terrorists or the organizations to which they were supposed to belong that emphasized the date but the United States media and government. Of course, that events unfolded on this date might just be a coincidence that the U.S. media took up and promoted because it was so meaningful for the and the emergency number simply could not be missed by the media, but this seems unlikely. The numbers are just too symbolic. The reason for emphasizing 9-11-01 might be explained by seeing it as a reference to Torah. In Hebrew, as is common for Eastern cultures, writing is read from right to left. So, 9.11.01 would be read from a Jewish perspective as 01.11.9. If this is read as a reference to the Torah, then it could be a reference to book 1, chapter 11, verse 9. Genesis 11: 9 is, incredibly, the story of the destruction of the tower of Babel. Genesis 11:9 literally reads, “That is why it is called Babel – because the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the earth.” When all the other

262 evidence is considered, this must be more than a coincidence. Indeed, it can actually be read as the key for unlocking the code that is September 11, 2001. Because of the traditional importance of numbers and letters in the mystical Jewish tradition, it would be consistent for Gnostic Jews to hide a biblical reference in an important number or date. So, what might be trying to be communicated if this is a reference to the myth of the Tower of Babel? There are various accounts of what the story of the Tower of Babel is about. In the Orthodox tradition, according to the School of Rabbi Shila, the story of the Tower of Babel is to teach humbleness. This tradition believes that humans built the tower with the intention of piercing the heavens with axes to release the water from the sky so that it would be impossible for God to bring about another Great Flood. This has been interpreted by Jewish scholars as saying that humanity tried to use science and technology to fight God in His domain, but God interrupted their efforts showing the power of God over human technology and the futility of human action in the face of God. This kind of account would necessarily rely on the Oral Torah, the Talmud, for instruction on what the story of the Tower of Babel actually meant. The story, remaining true to the original text, might be read as a warning to humanity about believing that they can find their own way to heaven or that human values are adequate for guiding human actions without the necessary guidance of God. Humanity tried to build a tower to heaven, but God can easily disrupt such undertakings as it is only by being guided by God can humanity be good and find their way into heaven. The Babel myth might be read as a warning that it takes more than human knowledge and technical skill to find your way to God. The story itself deploys an awkwardly phrased sentence, “Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves.”” This sentence, as with the entire story, is said to show Babylonian influences when a King might become famous around the world for building a spectacular building. What is interesting is that this wording really draws the reader’s attention to the line “so that we may make a name for ourselves” or so that humanity can enhance its own reputation, humanity can make itself great. In effect, it is like humanity aspiring to become a God. This account would explain why it is called the Tower of Babel because Babel, in Hebrew, sounds like the Hebrew word for “confusion” so it is a tower of confusion, or a tower built by the confused who believe that they can acquire greatness that could challenge God. But the story then takes what seems to be a change of direction and God says, “If as one people all sharing a common language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be beyond them. Come, let’s go down and confuse their language so they won’t be able to understand each other.” God expresses concern to . . . another God(?) asking them to “go down” to confuse humanity’s language otherwise humanity will be able to achieve anything. God seems to concede that humans can indeed become like God’s but by confusing their language their

263 aspirations are intentionally and actively thwarted. Once again, like the multiple creation stories in Torah, there is one sophisticated section, making what seems to be an important and poignant point about the necessity for humanity to be humble before God if they are to enter Heaven, followed by a section that seems to misunderstand or want to reinterpret the prior section to reach another, almost polar opposite conclusion. The apparently added section would give the Gnostic reader of the Tanach confidence because it seems to suggest that humanity can indeed become Gods after all. This tension in the narrative of the Tanach, almost like there are two distinct books being combined into one, happens time and time and time again in the Tanach.155 The brief story of the Tower of Babel ends with God punishing humanity, not, as one might expect, for hubris but seemingly out of fear of what humanity might actually be able to achieve if they ever realized their power. God’s punishment for their apparent aspiration to become like a God is not that he gives them all different languages, as the myth is so often explained, but that He “. . . confused the language of the whole world”. The story, so presented, is that if the language is not confused then humanity may achieve its aims and find their own path to heaven without God’s guidance. To suggest that there might even be the possibility of finding a way to heaven without God seems to go against the entire Jewish and Christian traditions. According to Braiterman (1998: 63), giving an account of the Story of Babel as interpreted by Buber, “After Babel, Buber taught, the nations must bind themselves together into a single humanity in order to realize God’s dominion upon the earth. Chaos and catastrophe occur when people fail to establish a just and loving common life.” So, at least according to Buber, humanity fails to realize God’s plan, which does not really seem to be an aspect of the story, if they are not united and living without borders. The truth is that there seems to be this continuous portrayal in the Torah of humanity struggling against God, as though humanity is always trying to outsmart God and God is in eternal fear of what humanity will achieve if they ever realise their true powers.156 Why would God and humanity be in conflict when, at least in the Western Christian tradition, a relationship with God is necessary for our true humanity? Interestingly, confusion is exactly what the destruction of the Twin Towers has achieved. At a time when people were really beginning to question U.S. relations with Israel there suddenly is a terrorist attack

155

It is argued by some that this is because there are competing narratives being harmonized or conflicts being resolved in the writing of the text, so some part of the story accommodates one group of people while another section accommodates another. Sadly, it seems as though the less educated, less sophisticated people from Southern Levant had the final word in the ultimate meaning of Torah. 156 It is surprising how so much of Judaism is about fighting God. The word “Israel” itself means to “fight or wrestle with God”. It is as though the Jewish people, or at least a section of those people, are indeed fighting against God. Such a notion would certainly go against the Western Christian tradition.

264 supposedly perpetrated by radical Muslims. The most basic conclusion drawn from this act, so understood, is that Israel has been right all along, and Muslims in the Middle East are dangerous. The only response to this kind of danger, as Israel has shown time and again, is violence. According to what has been presented in this text so far, this really does show that the language is confused. Who might once have been rightly thought of as allies against United States real foe, governments like Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Muammar al-Gaddafi are now all removed because now the United States is fighting as an ally of Israel and Saudi Arabia. We blame radical Muslims for being our enemy while on the side of the Jews when the attack was most probably undertaken by a certain sect of Jews. This is really the primary motivation for the attacks. To confuse. To misdirect. Just like a magician misdirecting attention away from where we should look, we are instead misdirected to look where the magician wants us to look. They are saying, “Look at the Middle East, destroy our common enemies. Don’t be concerned about what is happening at home. Leave that to us” Interestingly, the attacks by the United States in the Middle East have not been primarily directed at radical Islamism. The country that has done more than any other to nurture and fund radical Islam is Saudi Arabia.157 Saudi Arabia today is, for reasons that will be explained, increasingly and explicitly a strong ally of both the United States and Israel. Afghanistan was attacked, and it did adhere to a radical form of Islam, but that group came to power with the support of the United States. After Afghanistan, the U.S. attacked Israel’s Middle Eastern opponent Saddam Hussain. Saddam Hussain was again put into power by the United States to stop the countries earlier support for socialism. Saddam was well known to be fundamentally opposed to the radical Islamic elements in his country as he was a Shia when radical Islamists are most typically Sunni. Removing Saddam has not only further radicalized Sunni Muslims throughout the Middle East as evidenced by the rise of ISIS, but it potentially gave them a much stronger position. The United States removed the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to flourish in that country. After Gaddafi was removed, without the help of the United States this could not have been achieved, radical Muslim Brotherhood Libyans filled out the depleted troops of ISIS to continue their war in Syria to undermine the Presidency of Bashar Al Assad. The United States supported, along with media giant Facebook, the political drive of Muslim Brotherhood Islamists in Egypt.158 Indeed, Egyptian Lawyer Ahmed Nabeel Al-Ganzouri, lawyer and professor in criminal law at Cairo’s Ain Shams University, brought a formal legal case against Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, claiming that he “noticed that Facebook leans shamelessly towards members of the Muslim

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Another country that is continuously named as a supporter of fundamentalist Islam is Israel. In 2000, Pakistan and Afghanistan named Israel as a supporter of fundamentalist Islam in their countries. (See Ahmed 2002: 358) 158 This is at a time when Facebook and other Jewish controlled internet giants are explicitly marginalizing what they call “white supremacy groups” especially those associated with “antisemitism”.

265 Brotherhood” accusing Facebook of “allowing them to set up many pages that do nothing but disseminate lies about the Egyptian state.” Facebook has unashamedly supported the Muslim Brotherhood by showing a total “lack of neutrality and objectivity”. Al-Ganzouri warned that Facebook was “playing a dangerous role in misleading the youth and society and inciting strife, and intentionally hides away those writers that support the stability of the state and the preservation of its judicial and security institutions.” (Raseef22 2019) These Islamists were removed from power just in time by a vigilant Egyptian army although this heroic act that stopped madness from breaking out in Egypt was, as might be expected, demonized by the Western media. It is widely believed throughout the Middle East that the Arab Spring was instigated by the United States government in collusion with the Muslim Brotherhood to enhance the power of the Muslim Brotherhood. Just by way of introduction, the reason why Gnostic Judaism used the United States to support the Islamists of the Arab spring is because that too are a gnostic movement which seems to have its origins in Sabbateanism. As Miliopoulos rightly observes, “Political religions” are diametrically opposite to the spirit of the traditional religions such as Christianity, Judaism, or Islam itself and rather comparable with ideologies such as Marxism-Leninism, Fascism and National Socialism. It would be necessary to differentiate between specific revolutionary types of Islamism which could be described as totalitarian, gnostic and messianic “political (pseudo) religions”. (Miliopoulos 2013: 127) Muslim Brotherhood is rightly a Gnostic religious movement that is fighting for the opposite of “the traditional religions”. This is what the political Hasidim wanted to support. This was the real aim of September 11, 2001. It was the Tower of Babel. If this tower was not destroyed, then the United States might have navigated its own path to find its “heaven” but the destruction of the towers ensured that they would serve the other side. After September 11, Israel ensured that the soldiers of the United States army would not serve the interests of the United States but that Israel “. . . scattered them over the face of the earth”. Not only were the United States soldiers scattered over the earth but, more importantly, radical Islamists were successfully scattered over the face of the earth as refugees. Most recently, thousands of Afghan refugees poured into the West, when America finally admitted defeat.

Remote Controlled Planes The supposed terrorist pilots who flew the planes on 9/11 had extremely limited flying experience. The limited experience that the pilots did have was only in small, single engine, propeller planes. They had no experience flying any passenger jet aircraft at all no matter the large passenger jet aircraft used in the attacks. The pilot who it is claimed flew the plane that crashed into the Pentagon was named Hani Hanjour. Testimony from those flight trainers that tried to teach Honjour how to fly indicate

266 that he was a totally incompetent pilot. (Hendrie 2011: 6) Independent pilots have officially confirmed that the 360-degree descending turn into the Pentagon that Hanjour supposed performed was an extremely difficult manoeuvre that was beyond the skills of even recreational pilots no matter pilots with the limited experience of the supposed terrorists. As Captain Russ Wittemberg, former U.S. Air Force Pilot then Pan Am and United Airlines pilot for 30 years said, “The government story they handed us about 911 is total bullshit plain and simple. To expect this alleged airplane to run these manoeuvres with a total amateur at the controls is simply ridiculous.” The terrorists had only been learning to fly from July to December 2000 in a propeller driven Cessna 172. So how were the planes made to hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon with such precision? By an incredible coincidence, again, all the planes that were involved in the September 11 attack, including those that hit the Twin Towers, were Boeing 757/767. That is, they were all basically identical planes. This is surprising as it would be expected that terrorists would pick flights for convenience of access on the day and, therefore, there would be a random sample of planes used in the attacks. I cannot see how, with the plan that they had supposedly devised of hijacking a plane and crashing them into key buildings, that one type of plane should be preferred over another. Any domestic jet would have suited their purposes but, what is found, is that the same type of aircraft was used in every event. This might not, at first, appear to be particularly significant. So what? The same plane was randomly selected by the terrorists by chance. This might be the response until it is appreciated just how unlikely that this particular plane would be randomly selected for all flights. To explain, out of all the passenger jet aircraft that fly in the United States, only 45.78% of them are built by Boeing. Already, if chosen randomly, statistics would suggest that only half the planes used in the terrorist attacks would be Boeing planes at all no matter 757/767s. The fact that all the planes are from Boeing is already statistically unlikely. Around half of all the planes that were manufactured by Boeing are 737s. Out of the four planes used, statistically, only one of the planes should have been a Boeing 737. What is found though, is that all the planes are not only Boeing but actually none of them are 737s. Just over 5% of total planes flying in the United States are either a Boeing 757 or 767. For all four of the planes to be a 757/767, which is basically the same plane, has a 0.000006% chance of occurring as a random event. This is approximately a 1 in a 166,666 chance that all the planes used in the terrorist attacks on September 11 would be Boeing 757/767s. As can be seen, the statistical likelihood that these planes were selected at random is practically impossible. We must conclude, therefore, that these places were chosen because they were Boeing 757/767s. The question becomes, therefore, why were Boeing 757/767s in particular chosen for this terrorist attack?

267 It has been widely theorized that the pilots of these planes were so inexperienced that the planes that hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon had to be remote controlled from the ground. (Ahmed 2001: 359-360) There was simply no way that these inexperienced pilots could have successfully performed the flying manoeuvres done on that day. The interesting thing about 757/767s is that these particular planes, more so than others at the time, could be turned into remote controlled aircraft. These planes, unlike any other, have fully integrated flight management computer systems which allow for automatic guidance as a standard feature in both the Boeing 757 and 767. These systems could easily be adapted for remote controlled flight. Such systems have been used for remote controlled flight by the U.S. military since the early 1990s. The technology would be well known to state actors such as, for example, the military of Israel. For another coincidence, Dov Zakheim, the Jewish rabbi who was Comptroller of Under Secretary of Defence when trillions of dollars went missing, was deeply involved with System Planning Corporation (SPC) which oversaw the development of Flight Termination System (FTS). The FTS is a system which is used to destroy target drones or aircraft in the event that they malfunction. The FTS was a fully developed system that was capable of monitoring, remote controlling, interacting and terminating aircraft. These systems could also be used on commercial and military jetes in addition to the standard drone aircraft. Some have speculated, therefore, that it was actually Zakheim who supplied the technology to remote control the planes.159 The claim that the planes that were used in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks were remote controlled might sound a bit too much like a script for a science fiction movie, and indeed, this exact scenario, a plane hijacked remotely to carry out a false flag operation, was used in a television series pilot The Lone Gunman just six months prior to the actual event, but on September 19, 2016, the US Department of Homeland Security managed to successfully remotely hack a Boeing 757 while it sat on a runway using only WIFI access. This hack was achieved without any ‘insider’ support. (Cluley 2017) In the case of Sept. 11, there potentially was access to all the planes prior to the actual attacks. This would only make the ‘hacking’ of the planes so much easier. The reason why all the planes used on September 11, 2001, were Boeing 757-767 is because these planes could be easily remote controlled from the ground thereby removing the skill deficit as a confounding factor in explaining how this mission was successfully completed. If this was the case, then it becomes unnecessary to have actual terrorists onboard as, if the plane was remote controlled, then the pilots would have lost control and would be passengers on the plane like everyone else. It would also mean, as has been suggested for other reasons, that these were state actors. This level of sophistication is far beyond the kind of low-tech operations undertaken by Al-

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Dov Zakheim was also involved in securing the release of the 5 “dancing Israelis” along with Harvard chair and lawyer Alan Dershowitz.

268 Qaeda operatives in the past. Remote controlled planes explain how the mission was undertaken when the supposed terrorists lacked the adequate skills to perform the manoeuvres and why Boeing 757/767s were used in particular. Although positing remote-controlled planes answers some of the outstanding questions regarding September 11, 2001, it raises a raft of others that are simply inconsistent with the theorised method of the attack and the likely identity of the perpetrators.

Evidence of a Controlled Demolition In 2005, in the final report on the collapse of the World Trade Centre by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), it “found no corroborating evidence for alternative hypotheses suggesting that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition using explosives planted prior to Sept. 11, 2001”. It claimed that “. . .the WTC towers collapsed because: (1) the impact of the planes severed and damaged support columns, dislodged fireproofing insulation coating the steel floor trusses and steel columns. This led to the inward bowing of the perimeter columns and failure of . . . the towers.” Can this unambiguous conclusion stand up to critical scrutiny? The starting point when considering how the buildings collapsed as they did must begin with the simple truth that buildings generally do not collapse the way the Twin Towers and building 7 collapsed on September 11, 2001 as a result of fire even with jet fuel accelerants. The initial theory as to why the buildings collapsed was presented by the Jewish American director of Construction Engineering and Management Program at the University of Southern California, Henry Koffman. Koffman concluded, “The bottom line, in my opinion, is that intense heat from the jet fuel fires melted the steel infrastructure, which went past its yield strength and led to the collapse of the buildings . . .” (Koffman as seen in Hufschmid 2002: 16) This account of the collapse of the Twin Towers would make the collapse unprecedented. In the Final Report on the Collapse of the World Trade Centre Towers, written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, in full agreement with Henry Koffman, it was claimed that, “The collapse [had] been caused by the simultaneous effects of the impact of the airplanes and the fires.” This claim is particularly interesting when it is remembered that Building 7 of the Twin Tower’s complex collapsed about 7 hours after the North Tower supposedly as a result of fire alone at near free fall speed as it was not hit by any debris from the plane and no aviation fuel had leaked through the building. Unbelievably, NIST withheld its report on Building 7 and it was not released until 3 years after the initial report. That meant the report on Building 7 was not made available until 7 years after one of the defining events in American history. Even though Sept. 11 was a defining event, even such an event had lost a lot of interest in a world of 24-hour news cycles after 7 years. The truth is, as Dr. Frank Legge argued,

269 As no reports have come to light of any steel framed buildings collapsing due to fire, and as all steel framed buildings which had collapsed had done so due to explosive demolition, the logical way to have started the investigation of this surprising event would have been to question whether explosives had been used. This apparently did not occur. The organizations carrying out the investigations clearly selectively collected data and contrived arguments to support the fire theory and ignored contradictory evidence. This is in defiance of the scientific method and flouts the ethical standard of behaviour which the public is entitled to receive from their paid servants. (Legge as seen in Fenton 2010) For that reason, the investigators should have begun with the assumption that it was a controlled demolition because no building of this designed had ever collapsed without the use of explosives. To add weight to this conclusion, in February 2005, the Windsor Tower in Madrid caught fire during construction and burned for 20 hours, despite intense fires promoted by flammable building materials left on site the load bearing steel structure remained intact. Although the building was absolutely enveloped in flames, as the video images of the event clearly demonstrate, in a way the Twin Towers and Building 7 were not, the Windsor Tower did not collapse. Professor Thomas Eager of Materials Engineering and Engineering Systems concluded that it was simply impossible for the fires on Sept. 11 to get hot enough to melt steel. Steel melts are 1500֯C while jet fuel produces a maximum temperature of just 1000֯C under ideal conditions. These ideal conditions could not have been realised on Sept. 11, 2001 because the mix of fuel and oxygen was arbitrary and not maximized. The fires that were burning in the Twin Towers could not have even reached even 1000֯C which is certainly well short of the heat required to melt steel. (Hufschmid 2002: 16) It must be remembered, all the buildings in the Twin Tower complex were designed to withstand being struck by not just one large passenger jet aircraft but multiple strikes from such aircraft. As Frank De Martini, the WTC construction manager plainly observed, on January 25th, 2001, The building was designed to have a fully loaded 707 crash into it . . . I believe that the building probably could sustain multiple impacts of jetliners, because this structure is like the mosquito netting on your screen door, this intense grid, and the jet plane is just a pencil puncturing that screen netting. It really does nothing to the screen netting. Not only could the buildings resist the impact from large passenger jet aircraft, but they were designed knowing that such an impact would involve burning aviation fuel flowing through the building. As John Skilling, the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Centre said in 1993, “Our analysis indicates the biggest problem would be the fact that all the fuel (from the airplane) would dump into the building. There would be an horrendous fire. A lot of people would be killed [but] the building structure would still be there.” (Skilling as seen in Ikonen 2018) Here are people central to the design and construction of the Twin Towers acknowledging that the buildings were designed to withstand being struck by multiple jet

270 aircraft followed by a fire accelerated by spilled aviation fuel. That these statements were being made prior to September 11, 2001, makes it perfectly clear that everyone was aware of the possibility that planes might, either through an accident or through design, crash into the Twin Towers and that they were designed for just such a possibility. The truth is that the Twin Towers were built at a time when buildings were overdesigned in the sense that they were made so that they would be extremely durable. As Robert McNamara, president of the engineering firm McNamara and Salvia wrote, again prior to September 11, 2001. “. . .the World Trade Centre was probably one of the more resistant tall building structures . . . nowadays, they just don’t build them as tough as the World Trade Centre.” (McNamara as seen in Hafschmid 2002: 17) The official story that the Twin Towers collapsed due to the combined forces of the plane impact and burning aviation fuel has been discredited by numerous experts on various grounds including modelling. As Paul Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan rightly observes, “It is a non-controversial fact that the official explanation of the collapse of the WTC buildings is false.” This is not some university radical out to make a name for himself but a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury under Ronald Reagan saying that the official story is a blatant falsehood. In support of this statement, 1,700 engineers and architects put their names to a report that concluded that the planes crashing into the buildings could not cause the buildings to collapse in the fashion that they did. These were all experts in their fields. One reason for the established story being disproven is because, as can be confirmed by the footage, the fires in none of the buildings were that intense. Indeed, it was literally impossible for those fires to reach a temperature adequate to melt steel. Yes, eyewitness reports and telephone calls from those who were tragically stuck in the building report saying that the fires were indeed very intense and that they were letting off a lot of heat up the sides of the building, but they were not, as a matter of indisputable fact, hot enough to melt steel. If the Twin Towers and Building 7 did not collapse as a result of being struck by airliners and the resultant fire, then how did they collapse? The NIST report was released in 2008 on Building 7 and unsurprisingly concluded, The extensive three-year scientific and technical building and fire safety investigation found that the fires on multiple floors in WTC 7, which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings caused an extraordinary event. Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down. Although the previous report by NIST was unconvincing, they did not even seem to try to give an account of Building 7. Against this official account, hundreds of respected firefighters and independent eyewitnesses with nothing to gain report that they heard the ‘popping’ sound of explosions as the

271 buildings collapsed. As Ron DiFrancesco, a Canadian who was Manager of Eurobrokers and fled from the South Tower just prior to its collapse, said, We looked back at the Trade Centre, at the tower we had just come out of, and we started to see it, boom, boom, boom, boom, move. And we stared in disbelief, as this took about 8 or 10 seconds, for the whole tower just to go straight down and dissolve into its own ashes. . . My ears were hearing loud explosions at ground level. Very mysterious. Mike Pecoraro, who was in the sixth sub-basement of the North Tower, said that after he heard an explosion, he went to C Level of the basement to see what had happened and found, “There was nothing there but rubble”. (Pecoraro 2002) A police officer, Sue Keane, reported, “[there was] another explosion. That sent me and the two firefighters down the stairs . . . I can’t tell you how many times I got banged around. Each one of those explosions picked me up and threw me . . . There was another explosion, and I got thrown with two firefighters out onto the street.” (Keane as seen in Hagen and Carouba 2002: 65-66) A journalist from the Wall Street Journal which occupied a building near the World Trade Centre, wrote, “I . . . looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor . . . One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” (as seen in Bussey 2001) These are not vague reports but concrete accounts reporting being thrown around by explosives and seeing sections destroyed by explosions prior to the buildings collapsing. All reported by trusted sources with no known agenda. Seismic measures of the collapsing buildings from Columbia University Seismology Group show that the South Tower took 10 seconds to collapse while the North Tower took 8 seconds. (Hufshmid 2002: 73) Nano-thermite, a hightech explosive, has been confirmed by scientific experts to be found amongst recovered debris from Ground Zero. (Harrit, Farrer et. al. 2009) When the images of the collapsing buildings are reviewed, the dust and debris can be clearly seen being ‘blown’ away from the building as the building collapses. How could this outward force occur if the building was collapsing downward under its own weight? Jim Hoffman has calculated that even if the structure itself offered no resistance, freefall time from 400 metres, then it would take 9 seconds for the towers to fall. That the buildings collapsed in 8 to 10 seconds, supposedly with the massive resistance of the existent structure to overcome, means that it simply, scientifically, could not fall at this speed. As Philip Berg, the Lawyer of William Rodriguez and 9-11 victim’s family members observes, “There was no question in my mind that those buildings, based on the laws of physics, could not have collapsed without the assistance of a bomb.” The only way of explaining the speed of the collapse is to suggest that the resistance of the building did not exist because the building was ‘removed’ through a controlled demolition. As Hufschmid wrote, “One way to explain the rapid collapse of the towers (and other odd aspects of the collapse) is that explosives were placed in these buildings

272 before the airplanes hit them. Explosives easily explain the dust that flew out of the towers.” (2002: 74) To be clear, the buildings collapsing how they did is not just highly unlikely, the suspicion does not arise because this kind of event has never happened before or since, but that it is scientifically impossible. Other elements need to be brought into the analysis if the speed of the collapsing buildings is to be explained. The explanation given, as Nano-thermite was found at the scene, is that it was a controlled demolition. Although there is suspicion around the collapse of all the buildings in the Tower complex there is none as suspicious as the collapse of Building 7. The official reason for this building to collapse was because of fire, like the other buildings, but this building was not exposed to the accelerant of aviation fuel nor was it struck by a plane. It has to be appreciated that Building 7 is quite some distance away from buildings 1 and 2 which were supposedly destroyed by being struck by planes. Indeed, Building 6, which was hit by extensive amounts of debris and was well alight with fires did not collapse, despite it standing between the nearest North Tower and Building 7. The first question about the collapse of Building 7 is why was it burning at all? Other buildings around the Twin Towers had suffered at least as much damage, if not quite a lot more, yet they were not alight. Even if we accept that somehow debris had entered into this building and, somehow started a fire then how was this fire so intense as to lead to the collapse of the building in a similar, though importantly different, manner to the taller buildings? Building 7 collapsed differently to the two larger buildings in that it collapsed in a more conventional manner of a controlled demolition. From available video footage that captures the buildings collapse, it can clearly be seen to be destroyed from the base as the building collapsed and not, as with the larger buildings, from the top. Video footage of Building 7 collapsing also captures the centre of the roof arching downwards as a result of it falling more quickly than the edges which, again, is indicative of a controlled demolition. As already observed, one of the barriers to establishing beyond doubt that the cause behind the collapse of the building was that they were destroyed by a controlled demolition was because the debris of the buildings were hurriedly removed after the event therefore not allowing further detailed investigation of the cite or debris. It is usually the case that crime scenes are preserved intact until after the evidence has been gathered by investigators to find out the cause of events. This was most certainly not the case for the World Trade Centre. The truth is that on this cite, uniquely for such an event, the demolition crew had more authority than those who hoped to investigate what had occurred. As was claimed in the report by the Committee on Science on March 6th, 2002, “The building owners, designers and insurers, prevented independent researchers from gaining access and delayed the [investigators] in gaining access to pertinent building documents . . .” The owners have already been considered and their potential motive for limiting the investigation is clear. That the owners hampered access meant that

273 attempts to secure evidence had to be given by the clean-up crews. This line of authority is unprecedented. Usually authority, as one would expect, usually sat with the investigators and then moving down to the clean-up crews. The first problem was that the investigation was stalled until almost all the rubble had already been removed by the clean-up crews. Dr. Bement of NIST, one of the government agencies that investigated the collapse of the towers, said to the Committee on Science, “. . .[NIST] would possibly consider examining WTC Building 7, which collapsed later in the day.” So, as late as March 2002, 6 months after September 11 after most of the rubble had been removed, Bement from NIST was still only ‘considering’ beginning an investigation into the mysterious collapse of Building 7. Incredibly, as the statement shows, no investigation was already under way into this nation defining event. Other potential investigators complained of the delays to commence their investigations because they were forced to wait for all the rubble to be removed. Investigators were forced to wait before all the rubble was removed before the investigation. Surely that ‘rubble’ is the key evidence to be investigated. This is like waiting for aircraft wreckage to be removed before there is an aircraft accident investigation. It just does not make sense. This hesitancy to investigate may have been the result of Vice President Cheney suggesting the need to “limit” investigations. (Hufschmid 2002: 7) When investigations did commence into the most significant disaster the world had experienced since the assassination of Kennedy, unbelievably, funding was so limited that some scientists were forced to volunteer their free time on the weekends to undertake important research. By January 2002, the situation had deteriorated to such a degree that the editor-inchief of Fire Engineering magazine published an article claiming that the investigation into what happened at the World Trade Centre disaster was “a half-baked farce”. He went on to demand that, “The destruction and removal of evidence must stop immediately.” Very quickly after the event, it became the case that anybody demanding an investigation were labelled a “conspiracy nut” no matter their standing or expertise. (Hufschmid 2002: 5-6) When investigations were eventually undertaken, such as that by Charles Clifton for the Heavy Engineering Research Association in New Zealand, he said in frustration that, “I don’t have access to material/data from the wreckage of these buildings so I am not in a position to make detailed observations.” (Clifton as seen in Hufschmid 2002: 15) The deliberate strategy to stop access and to then remove evidence meant that there simply could not be a proper investigation into the collapse of the buildings. It was also as a result of these same limitations that the first report by FEMA into the collapse of the buildings, released in May 2002, concluded that, “With the information and time available, the sequence of events leading to the collapse of each tower could not be definitively determined.” All the material for generating the necessary information required for making a proper determination had simply been removed. This was not and is not good enough.

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Chesed Cemetery Not only were eyewitness accounts on the day ignored and investigators after the event inhibited but prior warnings that something serious was going to happen were also ignored or, at best, not taken with the seriousness that such reports deserved. 11 months prior to 9/11, in October 2000, a retired IDF (Israeli Defence Force) officer who fought in the Yom Kippur War, who remains anonymous even to this day out of fear of what Israeli operatives would do to him if his identity were to be revealed, was collecting English Ivy Cuttings from Gomel Chesed Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey (a Jewish cemetery), when he overheard people say in Hebrew, “The Americans will learn what it is to live with terrorists after the planes hit the twins in September.” (Madsen 2024: 46) When one of the men expressed concerns about the upcoming election results which was being contested between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the other replied, “Don’t worry, we have people in high places and no matter who gets elected, they will take care of everything.” The power of this evidence is that it was presented by a Jewish eyewitness who had served in the IDF and who had no motive to lie. Indeed, it is positive proof, if it was needed, that we should not look at these kinds of events as being performed by ‘Jews’ at all but by a theo-political movement called ‘Gnostic Judaism’ that promotes a heretical form of Judaism. Many Jews, perhaps the majority, would be horrified to discover that people who identified as Jews perpetrated September 11. It is because of these kinds of accounts and support for the general community that any kind of generalized attack or marginalization of ‘Jews’ in general must be avoided at all costs. Morality is the only response to a movement hoping to nurture immorality. Well intentioned Jews and law abiding Rabbis around the world should become allies with their Christian brethren in uncovering and dismantling this evil theo-political movement so that Judaism can return to its moral righteousness as a leading light to the world. The former IDF soldier who overheard the conversation at the cemetery at Newark did everything that he could to report the information to the F.B.I. Understandably, the man refused to officially give details of what he had overheard unless he was guaranteed protection by the F.B.I. As an IDF officer, the individual would have been only too aware that Mossad was both willing and able to kill individuals, Jewish or not, who interrupted their schemes. The preparedness of Mossad to do away with difficult people even when they are Jewish was evidenced most recently in the suspicious death of Australian IDF officer and supposed Mossad operative Ben Zygie, the so called “Prisoner X”, who appears to have tried to report something about Israel to Australia’s secret service, ASIO. For his efforts, Prisoner X was first imprisoned by Israel and then, apparently, killed. The official story is that Mr Zygie killed himself, but this story is questionable given that he was under 24-hour surveillance. This terrible murder was treated as an internal matter of Israel by the Australian government because Zygie was Jewish and in the IDF despite Ben Zygie

275 being an Australian citizen and that his interactions with ASIO seem to have been what initiated his arrest. If this is how events unfolded regarding Mr Zygie then it not only shows the ability of Mossad to infiltrate ASIO, and this is, as it is in the United States, because of unpatriotic Jews working within ASIO, but how far Mossad is prepared to go to retain secrets. Returning to the overheard conversation at Chesed Cemetery, surprisingly, despite the explosive claims of the former Israeli officer regarding the ‘Twins’, the F.B.I. refused to give the former soldier any official protection and, therefore, the information was never officially reported to the F.B.I. Despite the continued status of the information, not knowing the eyewitnesses name or that the information was never officially reported, that this information, given its source, was not take much more seriously raises real question regarding the integrity of the F.B.I along with the ongoing questions in relation to the C.I.A. To this day, nobody in the F.B.I has been held responsible for their inaction regarding this attempt to thwart Israel’s efforts. The anonymous informant who overheard a conversation at Chesed Cemetery is certainly not the only person who identifies as a Jew who has come forward to comment on the events of September 11, 2001. Most importantly, the American Jewish U.S Marine and U.S Army War College Director, Dr Alan Sabrosky, who has investigated the causes of September 11, concluded that, “It is 100% certain that 9/11 was a Mossad operation.” Sabrosky does not only unequivocally accuse Mossad and Israel of perpetrating September 11 but asked the all-important question that begs to be answered, “Finally, we need to take a hard look at why the mainstream media have paid more attention to Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than they have to dissecting blatant falsehoods, discrepancies and inconsistencies in the U.S Government’s treatment of 9/11 and its aftermath.” (Sabrosky: 2009) The unofficial reason given as to why nobody was prepared, in the media, security or military, to publicly state the rather obvious truth that Israel was involved in September 11 was simply, as Fox News reported, “Investigators within the DEA, INS, and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying . . . was considered career suicide.” (as cited in Mir 2011: 342) That is, nobody is allowed to suggest that Israel, no matter American Jews identified as such, might have perpetrated September 11 in public because it is at best the end of your career and, in reality, potentially threatening to your life. This is as true in academia as it is in the media and the defence and security forces. Israel, and Jews, are a no-go zone. Despite the dangers, some, like Sabrosky, have come out in public and accused Israel of being the perpetrators. Indeed, Sabrosky went on to warn, If these Americans and those like them ever fully understand just how much of their suffering – and the suffering we [Jews] have inflicted on others – is properly laid on the doorstep of Israel and its advocates in America, they will sweep aside those in politics, the press and pulpits alike whose lies and disloyalty brought this about and concealed it from

276 them. They may well leave Israel looking like Carthage after the Romans finished with it. It will be Israel’s own great fault. (Sabrosky: 2010) The reference to Carthage is acknowledging that Carthage, which was raised to the ground by the Romans, was a Semitic people, like the Jews, and the defeat of Carthage has often been cited as the moment when Indo-Europeans (Aryans) came to dominate the Semitic peoples. Many Gnostic Jews even today express the desire to revenge the slaughter of the Carthaginians by destroying the West. It is out of fear of what might happen if the people of the United States ever learn the truth about September 11 that some who came out with accusations against Israel have been silenced. Israel is known to carry out illegal international assassination. They are not secretive about these acts because it works to silence opposition with fear. One of Israel’s concerns, although because of their power it is one that they are not too concerned about, is that the United States’ citizens will finally discover who is the true perpetrator of September 11, 2001. When discussing the claim that Israel was behind September 11 to an officer from the U.S. Navy as he was being shipped to the Middle East to fight in Iraq, surprisingly to me at the time he expressed sympathy with the idea, but he advised me to keep the idea to myself and to be extremely careful with whom I discussed it with in the future. Being ignorant of how the world worked, I asked the officer what I should be concerned about, after all, I claimed, what could they do about it anyway as I lived in a democratic country which respected freedom of speech. He just reasserted his warning to be careful and left. Make no mistake, to know and communicate the truth of September 11 is to truly risk one’s life and there are quite a few people who know the truth about September 11 but are rightly too afraid to communicate this truth. This is not a game. This is the real world we live in today. It is a world where speaking the truth about the most significant event to have taken place this century must be communicated with the greatest of care as there is a real danger to one’s life. This is the true state of “freedom” that we have in the West today. So many people talk about Russian and China, but we are at least equally suppressed and, perhaps of more concern, by a foreign power. We are systematically lied to over more things and refused access to knowledge and information necessary for knowing the truth to a much higher degree than either Russia or China. The reason why our overlords have been so effective is because they are anonymous. They come to you as a friend, as a fellow countryman, but have nothing but sinister intent towards you if you resist their interests. amongst us and if you do breach their constraints the punishment will not even seem to come from their hand. To properly appreciate the situation that we live in today in Western countries is to begin to move towards some basic understanding of our political realities. We are utterly suppressed. We are totally controlled. We do not live in a democracy and there is no such things as freedom. The only freedom we have is the freedom to destroy ourselves, the freedom

277 to undermine our culture and to destroy traditional norms. We have no freedom beyond the freedom to the chaotic.

The Cover-Up Not only were people who identify as Jews implicated in carrying out the attacks on September 11, but they appear far too frequently in the subsequent cover-up. This is not the place to go into detail about individuals’ actions in the years following the attacks, this task still remains to be done, it is not the place of a document aiming to reveal the movement behind these events to spend too much time on each individual activity. To just give a flavour of the extent of their interventions post-September 11,

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Alvin K. Hellerstein: A judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He has been involved in several high profile 9/11 cases. He is a known Zionist and supporter of AMIT, an organization for educating young Zionist Jews in the United States.160 As will be revealed later in this document, Jews around the world are ‘educated’ into this radical political movement through Jewish youth groups like AMIT. Once initially indoctrinated, sometimes against their parents’ wishes, they are then encouraged to spend time in Israel and do their mandatory service with the IDF. The IDF is one of the main instruments of Gnostic Judaism. Increasingly, it is understood to be a real ‘Jew’ is not to be an Orthodox Jew but to accept the Gnostic agenda; militant, nationalistic, supremist, Zionist, opposed to positive religions, reformist, neo-Hasidic etc., etc. Sadly, many Jews have been corrupted by this process of indoctrination, just like many Christians, as they no longer know what it means to be a “good” person, a good Jew or a good citizen or, indeed, a good anything and this is exactly what they hope with be achieved.

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Michael B. Mukasey: Oversaw the litigation between Larry Silverstein and the insurance companies after 9/11. It was as a result of Mukasey’s judgement that Silverstein and Lowy were awarded insurance claims for each aircraft strike, as separate incidents, from some of their insurers. Mukasey also prevented a full inquiry into the ‘Dancing Israelis’ and played a significant role in their release. He strongly supported the introduction of the Patriots Act that greatly increases the power of the government to spy on its own population, increase government

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Such organizations have functioned for years as a conduit for teaching Jewish Gnosticism. Just like Christian children need to be removed from the education and moral guidance of their parents so it is the case for Jewish children. They get a different message, being the chosen by God, a moral mission to redeem the world, and that redemptive process made explicit, but the aim is the same, destroy traditional religiosity in all its forms.

278 powers of detention without adequate overview and is known to personally supports torture. He is known to be a strong supporter of Zionism.

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Kenneth Feinberg: set up the victim’s compensation fund ($7 billion) that was used to convince 97% of surviving victims to take the money on offer and drop demands for any further investigation. It was, in short, a fund at the expense of U.S. taxpayers to silence the demand for a more thorough investigation into what actually happened on September 11. Many families, who may have lost a large share of their family income and support, took the money and agreed to drop demands for a more thorough investigation. From the perspective of the families, this is certainly not a bad decision as it is extremely unlikely that there would ever be a truly independent and thorough investigation into events around September 11. As individuals, they are better off taking the money and remaining silent, moving on with their lives forever haunted by the death of somebody they loved and needed.

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Sheila Feinberg: Is a known Zionist who was appointed ‘special mediator’ of the legal suits filed by the 3% of victims who did not accept Kenneth Feinberg’s payment. As might be expect, nothing has come of these remaining cases.

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Stephen Cauffman: Was put in charge of investigation into the collapse of WTC 7. The unconvincing official position reached by Cauffman’s report was that standard office fires caused the collapse of building 7. As with his fellow conspirators, Cauffman is a well-known Zionist and extremely active in the American Jewish community. The investigation into the collapse of WTC 7, although researched for several years after the report on Buildings I and II were released, has found no surprising results. That somebody could investigate the unprecedented collapse of a high-rise building that collapsed at free fall speed into a pile of rubble no bigger than the buildings footprint without any other known cause except for fire is unbelievable.

From top to bottom, it seems that people who are active members of the Jewish community, are not Orthodox, and are known Zionists, seem to be positioned in the key places that would be required to silence questions, to reach safe conclusions, to encourage others to look anywhere else except at Israel and the American Jewish community. Just that these people would have known the names and addresses of any “troublemakers” is of concern could inform an interesting investigation. In the final analysis, Jews owned the buildings, they were the flight controllers, they were the investigators, they were the journalists, and they were the judges. The quick answer to Sabrosky question as to why the people of the United State do not know what really happened on September 11, 2001, is answered in a preliminary way that will be elaborated later this text, it is because everything that America hears is mediated by Jews.

279 Of course, with so many questions remaining outstanding in relation to September 11, 2001, people quickly demanded answers. In response, shortly after the attack, an organization emerged called the “9/11 Truth Movement” or “Truthers” for short. Their entire agenda can be seen as a strategy to ensure that people who rejected that Islamists were behind the attacks would look in just one direction: it was an “inside job”. Everything that the 9/11 Truth Movement has done since its formation is to ensure that people are not looking anywhere else except at either accepting the official story, Muslim terrorists, or it was the American government. This became just another front, like the Black Lives Matter movement, aimed at causing disruption within the United States, to encourage Americans to fight other Americans and to lose trust in their government. As publisher Kris Millegan wrote (2021), “I went to meetings [of the “9.11 Truth Movement”], only sadly to see them go up in flames of discord, driving interested people and real discussion away.” This was their task, to ensure that there would be no organized ongoing “movement” that wanted to properly investigate what actually happened.161 Three of the most prominent people in the 9/11 Truth Movement were Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas. It was Dylan Avery who was primarily responsible for creating the most influential and widely watched documentary on alternative theories to what actually happened on September 11 titled Loose Change: 9/11 an American Coup. Avery, Rowe and Bermas are all American Jews. Avery raised the funds for the documentary despite being only 18 at the time and having no experience. As with most causes, Gnostic Jews ensure that they control the entire “narrative”, both the fore and against if you like, ensuring that the truth can never get out. Another example is how there has emerged a right leaning movement, sometimes called the “new right”, against the excesses of globalization, political correctness and, initially at least, against the disproportionate power of Jews in the United States. Very quickly after this movement started a Jew, who proudly admits to being a Nietzschean162, named Paul Gottfried, used his money to quickly become the leader of the movement. All political movements need resources to survive so the people who control

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I’ve seen this same thing happen more than once in Australia. The movement to support Julian Assange is one recent example. Jewish backed organization initially support the movement, organizing printed material, ensure numbers and arrange rallies. Then, when they have become the sole “organizers” they defuse the movement. Organize useless rallies in the middle of summer, arrange rallies in places that are difficult to get to, or ensure that speakers unrelated to the core topic present long rambling speeches that drive people away. It is funny how easily our society can be manipulated. I’ve seen truly mass movements collapse in weeks using these kinds of simple strategies. 162 The importance of observing that he is a Nietzschean will be made clear in the following volume but just by way of introduction, Nietzsche was adopted by the early Political Hasidic movement because he voiced Gnostic beliefs and yet, fortunately, was not a Jew. So, Gnostic Jews could openly advance their agenda as “Nietzschean’s” without have to link it in any way with Judaism in any form. The particular writing of Nietzsche’s that is enthusiastically promoted by the Jewish community was actually shaped while in association with his good friend at the time, the Jewish immoralist Paul Rèe.

280 resource allocation control the entire movement. Gnostic Jews took control of global banking in the 19th century and have determined where a large percentage of investment goes. They now control hedge funds etc., which allows them to determine the destination of even more money and are today putting much of it into China. It was through controlling money the Gottfried simply took over an entire grassroots conservative movement. Indeed, it was Gottfried who first coined the term “alt-right” to characterise this emergent movement. Needless to say, any talk of excessive Jewish power quickly disappeared from their narrative. Instead, Gottfried, who had his doctoral thesis supervised by influential Marxist, the German Jew Herbert Marcuse, rages against American technocrats who, he claims, are driving an agenda of multiculturalism and political correctness. The reason for his opposition, and this is extremely counterintuitive, is because these movements, according to Gottfried, multiculturalism and political correctness, are being driven by, you might have guessed it, Christianity. As Gottfried brazenly argues, “A Christian civilization created the moral and eschatological framework that leftists anti-Christians have taken over and adapted . . .” Just about every social justice movement can be directly traced back to Jewish origins and yet, despite this, it was Christianity that created the “moral framework” for multiculturalism and political correctness. As will be explored throughout this series, this is an absolutely outrageous claim in the extreme. He also argues that for a kind of social Darwinism where some “races” are accepted as being superior to others based on their intelligence or what he terms “race science”. Now it is well known that in some literature on race it is claimed that Jews are the superior race because of their superior intelligence but Gottfried is not explicit on this point. He does speak out against Jewish neoConservatives but not because they are Jews but because they are “. . .Jews and their grovelling or adulatory Christian assistants . . .” so his concerns are not anything to do with their Jewishness but just an observance that they were, like him, Jews, the problem is that they have “adulterous Christian assistants”. Indeed, when you dig down just a little, Gottfried seems to not support very much at all of any substance. As he wrote in 2009, To the extent that anything resembling the historic right can flourish in our predominantly postmodernity, multicultural and feminist society . . . racial nationalism, for better or worse, may be one of the few extant examples of a recognizably rightist mind-set. So, the movement which he funds simply cannot flourish in our “post-modern, multicultural and feminist” world unless it is informed by “racial nationalism”. But who is this “race” that science has proven is superior to every other race and can respond to the excesses of our “post-modern, multicultural and feminist” world? He does not seem to clearly say who is this super race for running the world, but it is most certainly not “whites”. As Gottfried observes, “Where I would draw the line personally is white

281 nationalists. They are not people I would want to include in my alliance.” So, the only possible expression of resistance to the apparent reality of multiculturalism etc., is “racial nationalism”, built on “race science”, but he is personally fundamentally opposed to . . . “white nationalists”. It is funny that a movement that was began by white Christians as a response to contemporary shifts in power and excessive power of Jews now identifies “white nationalism” as the one thing that it most certainly will not support. Again, Gottfried seems to be arguing, “look at everyone else, particularly white Christians, for why the world is how it is but do not ever look at Jews”. As will be discussed, the alt-right is not the movement that was co-opted to serve a new master. Indeed, if any movement emerges that is even slightly critical of Jews and their disproportionate power in the United States, it is quickly taken over, using Jewish money, and redirected until it is exhausted of meaning and collapses. Where, after all, is the altright today? This is the exact role of 9/11 “Truth Movement” or 9/11 Truthers in relation to the 9/11 attacks. They are always organized, always manage to have the numbers when it matters, and they get funding from somewhere so as to be able to dictate the narrative through things like documentaries and publications. In practice, this means that they do not only control the “established” narrative, as told in the main-stream media, but they also control the alternative narrative thereby ensuring that Israel or American Jewry do not feature. As Victor Thorn (2011) wrote, In essence, the ‘9/11 truth movement’ was created prior to Sept. 11, 2001 as a means of suppressing news relating to Israeli complicity. By 2002-2003, ‘truthers’ began appearing at rallies holding placards that read ‘9-11 was an inside job’. Initially, these signs provided hope for those who didn’t believe the government and mainstream media’s absurd cover stories. But then an awful realization emerged: The slogan ‘9-11 was an inside job’ was quite possibly the greatest example of Israeli propaganda ever devised. . . The mantra, 911 was an inside job’ is only partially true and is inherently damaging to the ‘truth movement’ because it shifts all attention away from Israel’s traitorous assault against America. As with many events that have happened over the 20th century, they are initiated and realized by Gnostic Jews, no true Orthodox Jew would ever commit such heinous acts, but then responsibility, as told in the history books, is passed on to white Christians. There was enough truth to the claim that it was indeed, in a sense, an “inside job”, after all many Jews in government were involved and they did indeed play an important role, but it was also wrong enough, excluding their shared identity and the role of Israel, that it ensured that the real perpetrators would never be caught. What is achieved is that there is enough truth so as to raise questions about the role of the United States government, most of whom are loyal patriots who would think of a terrorist attack beyond comprehension, tainting the image of “white America”, but

282 never truly finding the perpetrators. When it is shown that September 11 was not simply an “inside job” then the entire “truth” movement is discredited. Conclusion There is a great deal of evidence that indicates that it was people who identify as Jews are those who orchestrated the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. They also covered up their involvement and made sure that no proper investigation took place. As Ahmed wrote, “A full-blown investigation into the facts surrounding the Israeli connection to 9/11 is of immense importance. For there can be little doubt that this brief document overview163 confirms an Israeli connection to 9/11.” (Ahmed 2001: 361) This claim seems shocking, particularly as we are continuously told not to accuse Jews of such things as they are, no matter the evidence, necessarily above suspicion, but, when everything is considered, as presented here, without any resources and just relying on material freely available in the public sphere, is quite persuasive. The ‘Dancing Israelis’, the fact that scientifically a building constructed like Building 7 simply cannot collapse as a result of a low intensity fire as theorised, the Nano-thermite proven to have been present amongst the buildings ruins, the traces of an unnamed explosive material, if it proved to be nano-thermite then that would be material evidence linking the van, the explosives, and the demolition, from inside the “Dancing Israelis” van, is all very strong evidence. This is all evidence that is not being proposed as a possibility but has been confirmed. The theory of remote-controlled planes and the overheard conversation at Chesed Cemetery are obviously weaker evidence, supposition and hear say, but still is interesting evidence supporting the basic thesis that Jews are implicated in the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Above this there are the reports produced before the event and the actions that followed this event and, to my mind, I have no doubt that Israel and Jewish Americans were behind the attack of the Twin Towers. That Bin Laden himself both claimed that September 11 was undertaken by Jewish agents who operate as a ‘government within a government’ might be dismissed as being motivated by malice or intended to misdirect the investigation, but, when coupled with knowledge of the historical activities of Gnostic Judaism, which will be revealed throughout the following volumes, there is an obvious pattern of false flag operations designed to manipulate public sentiment to achieve their outcomes. None other than former National Security advisor to Donald Trump, Mike Flynn, who was driven out of government by unnamed forces, claims that there is indeed a “unelected group within Washington effectively running the country without reference to voters”. Flynn said, “We have two separate governments. We have the one that actually gets elected and goes into office, and then you have a

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Heis here talking about his own volume which is convincing.

283 government inside Washington, D.C. that operates under no rules, no authorities other than their own or who’s ever in charge.” (Flynn as seen on Carlson 2021) Even if Flynn knew who was really in charge, he could not say as he would at best have his life destroyed but, most likely, he would be dead within two years. Many senior figures have made the claim that there is a ‘government within a government’ or a ‘state within the state’ which really runs the United States. Former Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich said on the Larry King Show that he believed that the ‘deep state’, an increasingly common way of referring to unknown forces with their own agenda operating from with the United States government, was responsible for maintaining the conflict in Syria. He claimed that President Obama had actually tried to reach a peace agreement with Putin on the catastrophic Syria crisis but as the negotiations were unfolding somebody, not on the orders of the Obama government, ordered a missile strike. (Kucinich 2018) OF course, this unprovoked missile strike brought an end to the negotiations. It also seems important that the date of the event aligns with a biblical reference appears, when coupled with the other evidence, to be quite persuasive. Some evidence has not even been considered here. For example, on September 18th, 2001, the Chicago Board Options Exchange claimed that somebody had actually profited from the Twin Towers terrorist attacks. They observed that there was an unusually high volume of activity in the three business days prior to September 11th which benefitted if the stock price of United Airlines and American Airlines fell. (Hufschmid 2002: 4) The $2.5 million in profits made from this activity has never been collected. The question, of course, is who were these investors? Obviously, it is evidence that somebody knew what was going to happen and when, but details of the transaction have never been made public. Surely if it turned out to be Muslim investors it would have made front page news as it would have supported the official narrative but, as it did not make the front page, it did not make any page, the identity of the investors remains mysterious, we must assume that it was not a Muslim investor. There is a limit to coincidence and that limit is well and truly exceeded in these cases. The question that emerges from what was revealed in this chapter is not just, why has action not been taken on this evidence that is in the possession of the CIA and the FBI but, more significantly, why has not the media been screaming about no action being taken? As Sabrosky rightly asked in 2010, “Finally, we need to take a hard look at why the mainstream media have paid more attention to Sarah Palin’s wardrobe than they have to dissecting blatant falsehoods, discrepancies and inconsistencies in the U.S. Government’s treatment of 9/11 and its aftermath?” It is answering this question that will occupy the remainder of this volume. Why has the media failed to investigate or demand official investigation of the role of Israel and American Jewry played in the events on September 11, 2001?

284 September 11, 2001 was undeniably a defining moment in Western history. The disaster changed so much of the way we live. After September 11, internal surveillance was greatly increased. In the future, if there was social unrest, measures are already in place to not only deal with any disruptions, but the surveillance is such that it will stop any social unrest prior to it taking place. We are all under constant surveillance today. We are regularly searched at public events. We are listened to when we are in private. None of this is paranoia but is based on material that has been leaked by insiders. The capacity to spy on every aspect of our lives has never been so great. We communicate our every thought through the searches we do and the things we write. Our TVs and phones can be easily turned into surveillance devices and have been, regularly, in the past. Not only our every action but our every thought is increasingly being brought under surveillance. We have lost our privacy to the surveillance state, and this was achieved in the aftermath of September 11. Most people have not objected to this steady loss of privacy because they believe that the state operates in their best interests. They are unaware that those who control this technology despise everything in which they believe. If people became aware that those who control this technology are not only malicious but actively determined to destroy their world then this increased surveillance might be of great concern. Sept. 11 changed many things, destructive and illegal military action in the middle east is only the most obvious, but it is this loss of privacy that will, I fear, present as the greatest danger. Those in power, Gnostic Jews, will do everything they can to ensure that their activities remain secret. This volume is intended to reveal the truth.

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Chapter Two: Jewish Overrepresentation in the United States A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through . . . all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor, he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague. Marcus Tullius Cicero “Israel has one secret weapon that not a lot of countries have. Israel is on the side of God, and we don’t underestimate that.” U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman on May 17th, 2019. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” George Orwell Introduction The question that was raised at the end of the previous chapter was why do we not know what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001? Why, in this so called “information age”164, when we have instant access to all kinds of information from around the world, is what is known about September 11 not broadly known by the vast majority of people? Most people have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of important facts relating to September 11, such as the “Dancing Israelis” or the conclusions of academic engineers in relation to the collapse of Building 7. Not only is much of the available evidence not widely known by the broader public but these aspects of September 11 have not even been “officially”

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Which should really be known as the “disinformation age” as the instruments of information are being utilized, indeed were created, in order to intensify their narrative, make it pervasive, and to further silence opposing voices.

286 investigated. This failure to fully investigate September 11, would include the general silence in relation to the possible role of Israel and American Jews. The truth is, as investigator of Sept. 11 Philip Giraldi observed in 2015, “. . .the Israeli role, insofar as can be determined, was never seriously investigated at all and any conclusions, if there were any, were never included in the final report.” (Giraldi 2015) The limited scope of the investigation only creates suspicion from those who know about the Dancing Israelis and the number of Jews implicated by the evidence about the role of global Jewry. Looking back on how things have unfolded since September 11, with almost every nation who opposed Israel in the Middle East now ruined, the Israeli economy booming while still receiving massive levels of American “aide”, and now, especially after America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S.’s reputation tarnished, one does not need to look too far to find motives for explaining why Israel and American Jews sympathetic with Israel’s cause might commit the terrorist attack on September 11. Despite these obvious motives, no United States official has ever formally identified Israel as even being under suspicion for being involved in September 11, despite some damning evidence, no matter being thoroughly investigated. It will be argued in this chapter that the reason why neither Israel nor global Jewry were investigated as the potential perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attack was because Jews are so overrepresented in positions of power, wealth, and influence in the United States that they were able to use this power and influence to not only hide their involvement in the attack on September 11 but to ensure that the investigation reached the desired conclusions. In short, people who identify as Jews have installed themselves in positions of wealth, power, and influence in the United States to such a degree that they now effectively control the United States. The majority of the population of the United States has become enslaved by their Jewish masters and it is because of this amount of power that no proper investigation was carried out regarding September 11. As Jews are so astonishingly overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and influence in the United States, and nobody denies that this is the case, the question is, how did people who identify as Jews gain such a disproportionate amount of power that they can successfully commit the most devastating terrorist attack that the United States has ever endured, an attack requiring power within the military, government, law enforcement and media, without even being investigated? This level of control is astonishing, especially in today’s world of high technology and supposed public scrutiny, and yet this is exactly what this regime has managed to achieve. It will be argued that there are, broadly speaking, two interrelated answers as to how Jews are so extraordinarily overrepresented in positions of power, wealth and prestige in the United States. Firstly, Jews are extremely tribal and, therefore, they simply help each other rise into position of power. One interesting thing about Gnostic Jews in particular, is that for them

287 helping the people of Israel, any person who identifies in terms of being a Jew, is a deeply religious obligation that is considered to be as equally as important as obeying Torah and serving God. The centrality of serving Israel in the Gnostic Jewish tradition is important because this conclusion ties in with the second, and most important, reason why Jews are so overrepresented in positions of power in the United States, the collective identity of Gnostic Jews is understood to be synonymous with the immanent aspect of their God, the Shechinah. As those who are assigned to be active on behalf of their God, it is their religious responsibility to create the world, reshape reality, so that it becomes an expression of their theology and, therefore, their reality. The way that this is to be achieved is by changing the “culture” of the United States so that it worships their God. Once American culture has been changed so that it is no longer a Christian culture, but one reflective of the theological beliefs of Gnostic Jewry, then Gnostic Jews165 will thrive. They will thrive because the social ecology, the social “environment”, has become one that is harmonious with their beliefs. For example, if a person is “greedy” in a society where greed is considered a “sin” then such a person would be at best marginalized if not demonized in terms of that person being viewed as immoral. It is not simply that a greedy person would not be successful in a society that thought that greed was sinful, but an immoral person could not be successful. Whereas if that same greedy person lived in a society where being greedy had become not only tolerated but valorised as the most authentic expression of the human condition, after all being greedy is “natural”, then that person would thrive. Today, in the United States, and to a degree across the entire West, it is easier to live and be successful if one is a Gnostic Jew or at least adheres to the values of Gnostic Judaism than to adhere to the traditional beliefs of Christianity. As Ritterband observes, the United States has become a “. . .culturally neutral society, one in which the public arena is secular, allowing a space for Jews . . .” (Ritterband 1995: 379) This chapter will argue that the cultural “neutrality” of America is not simply the result of secularization, but that secularization is an expression of the humanism of Gnostic Judaism. It is by making everyone think like a Gnostic Jew that has allowed them not only a “space” to live without attracting critical attention but has allowed them to dominate the entire society. This chapter will begin by showing to what degree Jews are indeed overrepresented in positions of power and influence in the United States. There will be evidence given for the claim that Jews are grossly overrepresentation in other leadership positions, including, high finance, the legal profession, academia

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Although Orthodox Jews also benefit from Gnostic Jewish control of the United States, they only benefit in the first sense, in being helped by the people of Israel, but not the in the second, more important sense, in that their values are affirmed by the changed culture of the United States. Orthodox Judaism and Christianity share many beliefs and therefore they, like Christians, are marginalized in a licentious society by at least as much, if not more, than Christians.

288 etc. (MacDonald 1998) If one controls the government, the media, and entertainment, then one can effectively not simply control the country but, more importantly, control what people think. It is controlling what people think that is the main strategy to enable Gnostic Jews to rule the world. Later in this volume, special attention will be given to how Gnostic Jews have managed to control academia and how through this control they have managed to shape the culture of the United States. As Lilienthal wrote when answering the question of how have Jews been able to realise their own political agenda in the United States? It is the Jewish connection, the tribal solidarity among themselves and the amazing pull on non-Jews, that has moulded this unprecedented power . . . The Jewish connection covers all areas and reaches every level. Most Americans may not even sense this gigantic effort, but there is scarcely a Jew who is not touched by its tentacles. . . The extent and depth to which organized Jewry reached – and reaches – in the U.S. is indeed awesome. . . Jews . . .have risen to places of prime importance in the business and financial world. . . Jewish wealth and acumen wield unprecedented power in the area of finance and investment banking, playing an important role in influencing U.S. policy toward the Middle East . . . In the larger metropolitan areas, the Jewish-Zionist connection thoroughly pervades affluent financial, commercial, social, entertainment, and art circles. (Lilienthal 1978: 206-228) These words were written in 1978, Gnostic Jewish power and control has been greatly extended since these words were written. Jewish overrepresentation is such that it would be more revealing to speak of “Jewish privilege” in the United States rather than the much more commonly discussed “white privilege”.166 Jewish Overrepresentation in United States Jews have achieved massive levels of overrepresentation in position of power, wealth, and influence in the United States. As Hollinger observes, “By almost any index, Jews are demographically overrepresented among the wealthiest, the most politically powerful, and the most intellectually accomplished of Americans”. (Hollinger 2004: 596) Nobody disagrees with this claim. This overrepresentation in business, government and academia, has allowed Jews to realize a great deal of power in the United States. As Whitman observes,

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The claim that American Jews did indeed experience “Jewish privilege” in the United States was raised but the Jewish lobby quickly reacted and shut the entire discussion down as an example of “anti-Semitism”. All references to “Jewish privilege” are now automatically removed from online sites. You can claim has loud and as often as you like that white Americans have “white privilege”, a dubious claim indeed, but you are not allowed to make the much more convincing claim that Jews are privileged in the United States. To my mind the truth of Jewish privilege is verified in their ability to shut the claim down in a way white people simply cannot.

289 The Constitutional prohibition against a religious test for public office167 has permitted Jews to participate in the nation’s service to so complete an extent that, if constituents have sometimes had trouble seeing their officials, it may be because on Friday the senator left early.168 Politicians of Jewish birth have held, on one recent legislative session, as many as eight seats in the United States’ Senate and four times that number in the House of Representatives. In the past two decades or so, Jews have chaired the Council of Economic Advisors, the Federal Reserve Board, and the National Security Council, and headed the Department of Defence as well as the American delegation to the United Nations. They have run the post office and the Department of Transportation and quarterbacked the negotiating team on arms control with the Soviet Union. Were it not for a scandal involving Abe Fortas, who had a knack for collecting checks the way other citizens collect stamps, a Jew would have become chief justice of the United States in 1968.169 (Whitman 1988/2015: 4) The political success of this particular minority group, which constitutes, as already observed, only about 2.5% of the United States’ population, was historically expressed by the fact that, “causes such as the defence of Israel and the emigration rights of Soviet Jews are by now almost as uncontroversial as farm subsidies and veteran’s benefits.” (Whitman (1988) 2015: 4) The causes for which American Jews fight for today may have changed but the power that this minority wields has only greatly increased. That Jews have this control over the United States is in no way a secret and when discussion are had freely many Americans express concern about this excessive power and control. As even President Netanyahu himself boasted on Israeli T.V. when talking to Israeli settlers, “I know what America is. America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction.” Quite a claim to be made by a leader of an extremely small country clinging onto the edges of the Near East. The contemporary power of Jews to control the political landscape of the United States was shown when long serving career politician in the U.S. House of Representatives for Alabama, Earl Hilliard, voted against a bill to increase U.S. funding of the Israeli military in 2001. Although Hillard had been a comfortable winner in the past, his task became very much harder as a result of his electoral district being suddenly significantly altered as an act of “redistricting”. The redrawing of electorates has been a strategy

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Article VI of the United States Constitution says, “The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” Perhaps affirming the United States as a Christian society might be one of the first steps to limit the powers of those who hope to destroy the United States. 168 The suggestion, of course, is that they have left to attend their synagogue. 169 That is, if Abraham Fortas had successfully become the chief justice of the United States, they would have had a totally corrupt chief justice and not just a corrupt judge on the Supreme Court. Fortas was found guilty of having taken a considerable sum of money so that he would advocate on the behalf of Louis Wolfson to President Johnson. Wolfson was convicted of violating federal securities laws and was sentenced to prison.

290 that has been across the Western world to ensure politicians Jews want to see win elections are successful. As though responding to a call to some collective call to action, Jews across the United States poured money into the campaign coffers of Hilliard’s opponent, Artur Davis, who became an outspoken and unconditional supporter of Israel. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a prominent Israeli newspaper, noted that amongst the names of campaign contributors to Davis’ campaign there were, . . .10 Cohens from New York and New Jersey, but before one gets to the Cohens, there were Abrams, Ackerman, Adler, Amir, Asher, Baruch, Basok, Berger, Berman, Bergman, Bernstein and Blumenthal. All from the East Coast, Chicago and Los Angeles. It’s highly unlikely any of them have ever visited Alabama . . . The point being made, of course, is that these people who were funding Davis to beat Hilliard were primarily Jews and that they were not funding Davis because they were interested in his political record in Alabama, they did not care one bit about Davis’ attitude on tax, employment, or health care, they were only interested in one issue and that one issue was helping Israel. When Jews identify a politician, like Hilliard, as having “a problem in his votes”, in not supporting Jewish concerns, as sometimes happens in Australia, then they simply ensure that they are removed one way or another. In the Presidential elections, in the 1990s, Jews were responsible for up to half the campaign funds of the Democratic party. (Goldberg 1996: xxii) Jews are able to pour so much money into influencing political outcomes because they are so overrepresented amongst the wealthiest of Americans. It is that they have wealth and that they are prepared to use that wealth strategically to influence power to serve their interests that partly explains the extraordinary, disproportionate power that Jews have over American politics. To briefly present just one example of what Jewish political power has realised in the United States one need look no further that the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. In 2004, during the Bush administration, the U.S. government, under pressure from the “Israel Lobby”, created the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (OTFI) within the Department of the Treasury. It was claimed that this institution was just one of a multi-tiered response to the attacks on the Twin Towers. Officially, the office was responsible for, “safeguarding the financial system against illicit use and combating rogue nations, terrorist facilitators, weapons of mass destruction proliferators, money launderers, drug kingpins, and other national security threats”. The true reason for the organization, according to Giraldi, is “safeguarding Israel’s perceived interests”. Although this organization has chased financial organizations and charities that support Palestine, it, . . .has a special blind spot for major terrorism generators, such as tax-exempt money laundering from the United States into illegal Israeli settlements and proliferation

291 financing and weapons technology smuggling into Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons complex. (Giraldi 2018) The reason for this “blindness” is because its members are predominantly Jewish. The first head of the office was Undersecretary of Treasury Stuart Levey, who operated within the Treasury while coordinating regularly both with the Israeli government and pro-Israel organizations like AIPAC. Levey is a passionate supporter of Jewish issues and an advocate for Zionism. Levey was replaced by David Cohen. Cohen, like Levey, was also a well-known advocate for Jewish issues and a passionate Zionist. In turn, Cohen was succeeded by Adam Szubin in 2015 who was replaced by Sigal Pearl Mandelker. Mandelker is actually an Israeli citizen.170 All the heads of OTFI have been committed Jewish Zionist. All have been seen to work closely with the Israeli government and all travel regularly to Israel, despite being paid by the U.S. government by money from the people of the United States, to have high level meetings with Israeli government officials. The OTFI generates a list of names of people who face sanctions and enforcement options. This list includes Islamic charities and people critical of the Jewish state but does not list one single Jew. The OTFI is not unique. There are other institutions embedded within the United States government that are populated and ran by Jews for Jews. These Jewish controlled organization are the government within government. They pop-up throughout the larger U.S. government to serve a number of purposes. OTFI is just one example of many where Jews have directly interfered with or controlled the United States to further the interests of Israeli’s and Jews. These institutions are funded and supported by Americans but advance the interests of Jews.171 This is the extent of Jewish infiltration of the United States government, it is no longer about lobbying but about directly controlling the instruments of government to serve their purposes. One function that these Jewish controlled American institutions can be seen to do is to further the economic and strategic interests of Israel whatever even if it harms the interests of the United States. Jewish support of Israel was shown with the creation of the “US Israel Free Trade Area”. In the mid-1980s, a decade before the Chinese trade deal, the Israeli state was in real economic trouble. It had an annualized inflation rate of about 400 percent, a budget deficit of about 17 percent of GDP and a massive current

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As in fact are all people who identify as Jews. All Jews are considered citizens of Israel. If a Jew is visiting Israel and war breaks out, then they are drafted into the army like any other Israeli citizen. This fact has political implications in places like Australia where you cannot be dual citizen of any other country and be a member of parliament. Although this is the case, many Jews have successfully been members of the Australian parliament. In fact, either this law must be changed allowing dual citizens or Jews should not be allowed to members of the Australian Parliament. 171 Once again, it would just be inaccurate to say “Israel” because they serve to benefit global Jewry.

292 account deficit which drove down Israel’s foreign reserves. (Bahar 2016) The greatest problem with Israel not economically performing was not simply what this meant for Israel and the people who lived in Israel but, more importantly, how this looked to the world. Jews were supposed to be the master race, the next evolutionary step in human development, the rightful leaders of the world, and yet their economy a joke. They were intentionally promoting themselves as being naturally more intelligent than other people and yet they were performing so poorly. How could Jews be expected to run the world when they struggled to run their own little country? Beyond the real crisis of the Israeli economy, the global optics did not look right. In response, Israel begged the Reagan administration for billions of dollars in emergency aid above and beyond the massive aid program that was already propping up the Israeli economy. The problems facing the allocation of even more funds to support Israel was that the public were beginning to ask why America was spending so much money propping up an advanced economy? The greatest barrier to further financial support for Israel was public antipathy. Not for the first time, some people in the United States had started to question the need for the massive levels of financial support being granted to this developed foreign state when states within the United States were in desperate need of housing and infrastructure. To overcome this barrier, the Israeli’s proposed to hide the aid by making a trade deal that greatly benefitted Israel. Such a trade deal would allow Israel to receive millions of dollars from the United States without it being labelled “aide”. Interestingly, the same strategy that would later be used to the benefit of China. Stanley Fischer wanted the US to unilaterally lower all of its tariffs on Israeli exports without the United States receiving anything in return. This would mean that it would be much cheaper for Israel to export their goods to the United States without having to lose anything in return to American businesses. Such a strategy would address the Israeli budget deficit, greatly improve the current accounts deficit and address inflationary pressure, without attracting too much public attention. US business groups, upon hearing of this “deal”, were horrified. It seemed that many American industries would face impossible competition from Israel without getting anything in return. American business interests began an organized effort to fight against the proposed free trade agreement with Israel. The fear was that Israel would get privileged access to US markets without American businesses getting the same access to Israeli markets. These were people from the Republican heartland who would suffer, and their concerns could not be easily dismissed by the Reagan administration. To persuade the US government not to go ahead with the FTA, US businesses made a formal submission identifying a number of key reasons why the U.S. should not sign the FTA. It is at this point where things go crazy. If Jewish lobby groups were going to address the concerns of the US business lobby, they needed to know exactly what was in the undisclosed submission. Somehow, it has never been revealed how, Dan Halpern, the Israeli Minister of Economics,

293 did manage to obtain a copy of the submission prior to its publication and quickly passed it onto the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). With this insider knowledge, AIPAC knew what they needed to respond too in order to allay the fears of politicians concerns about the negative effects on American businesses. When the FBI investigated the theft of government property, Dan Halpern was protected by diplomatic immunity from being investigated or being forced to reveal his sources. (Smith 2018) The FTA with Israel did proceed, and it has been amongst the worst trade deals that the United States has ever made. The only other catastrophic trade deal was the one made with China that effectively poured billions of U.S. dollars into the pockets of state ran Chinese businesses. The Israeli economy was turned around at the cost the people of America. They are so economically successful that in 2012, the science and technology advisor to the United States Secretary of State, Dr E. Williams Coglazier, claimed that the economic practices of Israel were now a “model for the world”. (Ordman 2012) The Israeli economy was doing so well that its practices were now understood to be those to direct the global economy. Now that is the optics that Israel wants. If Jews in the United States have been able to ensure the election of particular politicians to achieve their strategic and economic interests by establishing government organizations that appear to represent their interests and to shape American trade policy to benefit Israel and their allies like China, then how is this achieved? How do Jews have so much control that they can manipulate the American political system? The basic answer to this question is that Jews are massively overrepresented in positions of wealth, power, and influence in the United States. Perhaps the most informative, highly respected, recent research undertaken on Jewish overrepresentation in the United States was done by Richard Lynn in his 2011 research project, The Chosen People. Lynn found that Jews were indeed massively overrepresented in many sectors of American society. To present the results of his research in clear terms, Lynn used what he termed “achievement quotients” to quantify Jewish overrepresentation. An achievement quotient of 1 means that representation is proportionate to population. If men, for example, make up 50% of a population then an achievement quotient of 1 would be that they constitute 50% of a cohort. An achievement quotient of 2 would mean men constituted 100% of a cohort in being overrepresented by 2 x their population. For Jews, proportional representation would mean that they constitute approximately 2.5% of any cohort. If Jews were to have an achievement quotient of 3 then there is an overrepresentation of three times greater than their proportion of the population or 7.5% of a cohort. Just to give the following figures some context, an achievement quotient of 5 is massive and really would require an explanation. Anything higher than that would be indicative of a deliberate conspiracy. Lynn’s research found,

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Jews in the professions: There is a massive overrepresentation of Jews in the professions, with an achievement quotient of 5.8 for psychiatrists, 4.0 for dentists, 3.8 for mathematicians, 3.7 for doctors, 3.4 for writers, 3.3 for lawyers, and 1.7 for architects. Academia: Jewish overrepresentation becomes even more acute at elite universities. Jews in elite university faculties have an achievement quotient of 13.3 for law, 12.6 for sociology, 10.4 for economics, 9.6 for physics, 8.9 for political science, 8.1 for history, and 7.4 for philosophy. These statistics would suggest that although there is an overrepresentation of Jews in various professions, Jews seem to rise into academic positions disproportionally far higher than their representation in the professions. So, they constitute an achievement quotient of 3.3 as lawyers but have an achievement quotient of 13.3 in law departments at elite universities. This phenomenon was repeated across all professions researched. In short, the higher up the ladder of success one cares to look the greater the overrepresentation of Jews. These numbers might not look that significant but remember, if only white males filled every possible professional and academic post, that would require an achievement quotient of just 3.3. An achievement quotient of over 10 is absolutely extraordinary. Nobel Prize winners. Of the 200 American Nobel Prize winners, 62 (31%) were Jewish. Since Jews constitute about 2.5% of the American population, they have an achievement quotient as Nobel Prize winners over 10. Lynn was very conservative in his assessment and did not include Jews who resided in the United States but were not born in the United States such as Albert Einstein. Lynn noted that 33% of American Nobel Prize winners

in the second half of the twentieth century were Jewish. He said that many Jews only arrived in the U.S. between 1881 to 1924. Upon arriving, these immigrants earned their livings through skilled manual labour such as tailoring or Jewellery.172 Lynn believes that it took a generation for Jews to establish themselves and achieve a level of wealth where they could afford a good educations. What is extraordinary though, is that within a generation of arriving in the United States, Jews were dominant in many influential academic disciplines such as anthropology. It might also be the case that the traditional values of universities in the United States excluded Jews but as the culture of these institutions changed to be more harmonious with Jewish values then their perceived academic performance improved. •

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Mathematics. Jews have particularly excelled in quantitative pursuits. Lynn found Jews realized an achievement quotient of 7.4 in mathematics faculties at elite universities. Again, this overrepresentation increased the higher up the ladder of success one cares to look. The Jewish achievement quotient is 10 for recipients of the annual William Lowell Putnam Competition, an elite competition intended to show excellence in mathematics. This overrepresentation only increases again in the award of the prestigious Fields Medal or Wolf Prize, awarded for academic excellence in mathematics, where Jews had an achievement quotient of 16. That is nearly half of those academics awarded the Fields Medal have been Jewish. Music. In the field of orchestral music, the Jewish achievement quotient is 7.2 for musical instrumentalists, 10.0 for virtuosi, 12.8 for conductors. Again, the higher up in the field of orchestral music one cares to look the greater the overrepresentation of Jews. Jews are

They were also massively overrepresented amongst organized crime gangs most especially “Murder Inc.”.

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also massively overrepresented amongst composers, realizing an achievement quotient of 6.7. Pulitzer Prizes. Lynn reported that Jews have won 52% of the Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction, 15% of the awards for fiction, 20% for poetry, and 34% for drama. Working with the figure of 2.5%, that means that Jews have received an achievement quotient in Pulitzer Prize awards of 26, 7.5, 10, and 17 respectively. These are massive numbers. Media. The American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), and the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) were all founded and ostensibly ran by Jews. In 1990, Jews were CEO's of all the top-10 entertainment companies. Lynn wrote, “The newspapers, too, have become largely owned by Jews.” The New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and U. S. News and World Report are owned and ran by Jews. (Lynn 2011)

What did Lynn make of this massive overrepresentation of Jews in areas of wealth, power, and influence? Was he concerned that people who potentially held very different values to mainstream Christian America were deeply ensconced in positions of power in such a way that they could shape American culture? Not at all. Lynn argued, and this would be necessary if he was to be published, that as Jews make such a positive contribution to so many areas of human achievement that they should actually be considered a blessing for the United States. Lynn argued that Jews contributed so many positives to the communities in which they lived that they should be considered a quantifiable good. (Lynn 2011) Lynn is certainly not alone in believing that Jews are an unconditional good for those amongst whom they live. American academic Oystein claimed, Historically, there is empirical evidence that every nation that has protected the rights of Jews living within its borders has prospered. In the Middle Ages, Spain and Portugal treated Jews within its border fairly. The Jews supported the building of these nations. Spain and Portugal became the most developed nations on earth. (2012) Oystein concludes from these two supposed examples, Spain and Portugal, that all countries benefit if they treat Jews well and allow them to thrive within their communities. What Actually is Overrepresentation? As with most of the extremely limited literature that actually explores Jewish overrepresentation in the United States, Lynn does not consider the question if people should be concerned that Jews are so overrepresented in positions of power, wealth, and influence in the United States. After all, the contemporary general attack against “white males” is justified on the grounds that they are disproportionately represented in position of wealth, power and influence and there should be more proportional representation that reflects the diversity of the population. Women, it is argued, make up around 50% of the population and yet are extremely underrepresented in positions of wealth, power, and

296 influence. So, why are not similar arguments being made against Jews? They are a population with much greater overrepresentation in the United States than white males and yet nobody ever suggests that Jewish overrepresentation is a concern.173 Indeed, American Jews are counted as white males when looking at proportional representation although they themselves clearly identify as a distinct cohort. That nobody is concerned with Jewish overrepresentation might be because, despite claims being enthusiastically raised against white males, overrepresentation is never unambiguous. For example, it might be argued that if Jewish interests are in perfect alignment with the rest of the population, as was historically assumed regarding white males, then it does not matter if Jews are “overrepresented” in position of wealth and power because such overrepresentation would become meaningless. Indeed, claiming overrepresentation would not even make sense under such conditions because white males would not constitute a distinct population. That is, if white males, in pursuing their own vision of what is “good”, had a set of values that were perfectly aligned with everyone else in a population, then it would not matter if white males were indeed “overrepresented” because they would not represent a distinct cohort. Under these conditions, they would not constitute a discrete “interest group”. In a sense, “white males” simply could not be overrepresented in a society where everyone held the same values because white males would be indistinguishable from everyone else unless one were considering arbitrary distinguishing features. White males would actually be the cohort which they represented therefore could not be viewed as overrepresented. It would be like saying your right hand is overrepresented in relation to your left hand. It is only by arguing that women have a distinctly different and shared understanding of the kind of society that they hope to realise that “proportional representation” of genders becomes an issue of concern at all. Should Americans be concerned with Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power, wealth, and influence in the United States? It has to first be asked do Jews advance their own distinct political agenda that is not perfectly harmonious with those amongst whom they live? Perhaps people are unconcerned with Jewish overrepresentation, unlike white men, because it is believed that Jews simply hold the same values as everyone else. They do not constitute a distinct cohort. For example, nobody asks if Jews are overrepresented in positions of wealth, power, and influence, in Israel because Jews are Israel. They do not form, it seems to be accepted, a specific interest group within Israel and therefore rightfully

173

Indeed, in many areas where there appears to be white male overrepresentation it is actually because Jews constitute a large proportion of that overrepresentation. When Jews are excluded from being counted as “white males”, as they themselves do not identify in these terms, then often the evidence for white male overrepresentation disappears. There is no better example of the apparent overrepresentation of white males which does not really exist than Hollywood.

297 fill just about all the positions of wealth and power in Israel. All the judges on the Israeli supreme court are Jewish, despite Muslims constituting a significant percentage of the population, but this is not a political concern. It was perhaps with this belief in mind that the American Jew Silverman claimed when answering the question if Jewish overrepresentation in the United States was a concern, “Not in principle, no. All people are deserving of the rewards of the energy they invest in achievement.” Putting aside whether Jewish success is simply the result of “energy” for the moment, the interesting thing about Silverman’s response is that he does not actually address the question. It is like answering concerns if white male overrepresentation is a problem by replying that everyone deserves to reap the rewards of their efforts. The moral argument that a person is justified in reaping the benefits of their efforts and the moral question if overrepresentation is a concern are two different concerns. The former is a question of merit, which is worthy of consideration but not being raised here, the latter, by contrast, is a question of power. It is like questioning disparity of wealth and answering that the wealthy work hard for their money, working hard may suggest that they are morally deserving of their wealth, but it does not answer the moral question of inequality. The point is, overrepresentation is not simply about a certain cohort being disproportionately presented in positions of power, but it is a question about a cohort being identified as such. For example, there are never any arguments today that people over six feet tall are overrepresented in positions of power, although this is probably true, but we are not concerned with this fact because height is not thought to significantly for determining interests. Today, many would believe that an executive board that had 50% representation of both men and women had proportionate representation because today gender is understood to be a significant indicator of interests. As long as all “interest groups”, understood as such, are proportionately represented then there is no overrepresentation. There is proportional representation. Understood in these terms, it really becomes a question about “insiders” and “outsiders”. Men and women, until recently, were thought to be “insiders” in relation to each other. Like people over 6 feet tall, it was believed that men and women shared the same aspirations and desired to realize a collective benefit therefore anyone from within this group was considered as being just parts of the whole. Gender is an example where a fracture in society has occurred, or been created, and today it is perceived that men and women do indeed have different aspirations and men serve their own interest, so women need their own representation to address this bias. It is because of this perception that women need to represent their own interests that gender has become significant in relation to considerations of power. Not that long ago, whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant was considered important for determining what kind of society you wanted to realize in European and European influenced countries. In Western,

298 Northern and some Central European countries, Protestants were considered “insiders” while Catholics were “outsiders”. This was reversed in some Central and Southern Europe states. What we see today, is that contemporary society are increasingly riven with fractures that are perceived to be significant and therefore potentially significant regarding the distribution of power. Jews are certainly not strangers to the question of whether they should be considered insiders or outsiders. Famously, Jews have fought for millennia to retain their own distinct identity and values because it was believed, as Jewish scholar Andrew Heinze observes, that there is “an essential cultural difference between Jews and Christians” (Heinze 2004: 73). It was that Jews did indeed prize their own unique Eastern cultural values that, according to Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, “the diasporic genius of Jewishness, that genius that consists in the exercise and preservation of cultural power separate from the coercive power of the state.”174 (Boyarin & Boyarin 2002: vii) They viewed Christian “states” as being “coercive” because they were thought to try to influence Jews into becoming what Jews understood as being more “Christian”. Jews fought extremely hard, especially from the late 19th century, to retain their distinctness which they believed was superior. From first arriving in the United States, Jews felt divided loyalties between their obligations as Jews and their obligations to their newly adopted county, “Jews, like blacks, were especially prone to ponder the problem of a split ethnic American identity. Jews possessed a high degree of ethnic self-awareness . . . and they felt their marginality within Christian civilization.” (Heinze 2004: 30) For well over a century, Jews aspired “to create a moral space within European and American culture, from which to secure themselves as citizens and to purge the evils they associated with Christian civilization”. (Heinze 2004: 3) These different demands are nicely captured in a story told by Sigmund Frued, A Galatian Jew who was riding in a train had made himself very comfortable; he had unbuttoned his coat, and had put his feet on the seat, when a fashionably dressed gentleman came in. The Jew immediately put on his best behaviour and assumed a modest position. The stranger turned over the pages of a book, did some calculation, and pondered a moment and suddenly addressed the Jew, “I beg your pardon, how soon will we have Yom Kippur? “Aha!” said the Jew and put his feet back on the seat before he answered. (Freud as seen in Heinze 3004: 64)

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This is, as with so much, a thorough misrepresentation of the past. According to Boyarin & Boyarin, it was extremely difficult, an act of genius, to fight against the coercive forces of Christianity and maintain their own identity. Nothing could be further from the truth. For centuries the local Christian aristocracy did not try to undermine Jewish identity but did everything that they could to ensure Jews adhered to the Jewish tradition. It was the local Christian authorities, sometimes at the request of local Jewish leaders, who were responsible for punishing Jews for breaking with their laws. Yes, sometimes there were attempts to convert the Jews en masse but this was an exception to the rule of general support for the sometimes quite disliked Jewish leadership.

299 The point is, of course, that the moral expectations of Western culture, to be a “gentleman”, were experienced as a burden that Jews were forced to express in Christian societies. This story shows that both the entrant to the train and the Galatian Jew were both putting on a kind of performance of being “Western” but, when that constraint was not in place, such as in the company of other Jews, then they could behave freely.175 Historically, this “out sidedness” was nurtured by Jews in order to maintain their own ethnic identity but, later, some accommodations were made so as to better enable Jews to change Western civilization to reflect their own “moral” position.176 What Judaism is has most definitely changed significantly over the centuries but the desire to remain a “people apart” has been a constant. Despite wanting to retain their own distinct ethnic identity, any attempt by Christian cultures to marginalize Jews, as a result of them wanting to remain be a “people apart”, has been met with quick accusations of “antiSemitism”. If Westerners treat Jews as Jews, holding distinct values, then they are portrayed, as the earlier quote from Freud evinces, as coercive. Even historical attempts to acknowledge that Jews want to retain their own distinct identities and values and that they historically did not want to assimilate the rest of society, which is a common theme in their literature, is today portrayed as proof of Christian prejudice. The position of Jews was always to both retain their own distinct values and identity while having no restriction placed on them holding positions of power within the societies in which they lived. With a little reflection this is a strange position to demand. As already observed, legitimate leaders are thought to hold the same values as those over whom they lead. It is when it is perceived a cohort’s values are not harmonious with those over whom they lead that they loose legitimacy as, it might be argued, has happened with “white males”. Jews, by contrast, have insisted on retaining a distinct identity with distinct values that are outspokenly opposed to Christianity and yet have, at the same time, insisted that they should not be prohibited from holding positions in universities or government. For example, if I were to argue that homosexuality was immoral, I would not be able to build an academic career today based on that argument as it would be seen as being radically inconsistent with the values of the society in which I live. Gnostic Jews, no Orthodox Jews, have argued for over 100 years, as will be shown later in this volume, that homosexuality is acceptable, normal and natural in Christian societies that opposed these views and

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This also captures what has changed, to live as a Christian Westerner today is to be a foreigner in countries once considered your own. To dress neatly, to appreciate art, to find crassness repulsive, to embrace sexual restraint, would mean that you are now like the Jews on the train, an outsider. 176 The casualization in clothing, no longer adhering to the dictates of “good manners” and permitting swearing in places where such language would not have been permitted are all reflections of the influence of Jewish values on Western society. I knew a Jewish man who expressed almost no Jewish beliefs, but he liked to release loud expressions of flatulence in public, such as when having dinner, because he felt that it was a social norm that should no longer be maintained.

300 yet insisted that they were entitled to university posts and leadership roles. Indeed, any attempt to restrict Jewish access to roles of authority, as Jews, was called “anti-Semitism”. Gnostic Jews were not always allowed into leadership roles in the West. It was only with the French Revolution that some Jews really began to want to participate as equals in the political and social life of European countries. In response to this new relationship with Christendom, ever since the turn of the 19th century, “Slowly, often begrudgingly, states granted Jews civil and social equality . . .” This “equality”, understood in terms of not having any restrictions placed on them holding position of power, was initially granted on the condition that Jews accepted the values of European society. It was a kind of implicit social contract, assimilate into European society, learn European languages, dress as Europeans, publicly support European morality, and, in return, you can participate in the benefits of European civilization. This offer was enthusiastically embraced by Western European Jewry throughout the 19 th century until the 1880s. In the 1880s, Eastern European Jews moved into Western and Central Europe as a result of ethnic tension in the Russian Empire. These Eastern European Jews, many of whom had embraced Gnostic beliefs, and those who fell under their sway, insisted on maintaining the political and social equality that Western European Jews had achieved, full entitlement to positions of wealth, power, and influence within Western societies, but they were no longer prepared to assimilate. Assimilation was off the agenda. In short, Jews wanted a new contract and Europeans, despite quite some resistance, reluctantly agreed. The reason for this refusal to assimilate, as already briefly discussed and will be elaborated upon shortly, was because they believed that they were the real “insiders”, all along. They were the chosen of God, and therefore it was everyone else, no matter where Jews lived, no matter their relative numbers, no matter how recent their arrival, who were the real “insiders”. These Gnostic Jews believed that they should be on the Supreme Court, they should hold senior positions in government, and they should function as academics, because they were more than entitled to be leaders than anybody else. They were not only entitled but they were obliged, as Jews, to be leaders. They were rightfully leaders not because they held the same values as everyone else but the exact opposite, it was because they held opposing values, the values of Gnostic Jews, and those values were superior to everyone else’s and therefore they must be spread. As Simon observed, . . .a Jew as such has one great message and one only. . . Our message is a spiritual one and it concerns mankind. If we were to forgo the purpose for which alone, we exist as Jews, I for one could see no reason for maintaining the separateness. If the object of our distinctive existence is to be given up, the survival of the Jewish race would be hollow and useless. (Simon 1899: 393)

301 Jews had to assert their distinct identity because they had a special mission to “heal the world”. If not for this mission, Simon was observing in 1899, they would no longer need to retain their distinct identity. They would no longer have to remain a people apart. Many Jews across Europe, under the sway of these Eastern immigrants, embraced their theo-political mission as the chosen people of God to purge the evil from within Western civilization. The problem from a Western perspective was that Western civilization was what was being characterized as evil. According to Gnostic Jewry, Western civilization needed to be saved from itself. This was a breach of the agreement with Europeans and hatred of Jews began to rise across Europe after 1880s until the Second World War. Jews have long fought for their unique identity to be acknowledged while demanding that they get treated, at least initially, as equals. Ohana (2019) observes that thinkers like Brenner, Berdishevsky, Rosenzeig, Kurzweil, Scholem and Eldad, all exemplify a distinctly “Jewish way of thinking” that is not shared by gentiles.177 As the influential neo-Hasidic Jewish writer Abraham Heschel wrote in 1955, There is more than one way of thinking. Israel and Greece not only developed divergent doctrines; they operated within different categories. The Bible, like the philosophy of Aristotle, for example, contains more than a sum of doctrines; it represents a way of thinking, a specific context in which general concepts possess a particular significance, a standard of evaluation, a form of orientation; not only a mental fabric but also a certain disposition or manner of inter-weaving and interrelating intuitions and perceptions, a unique loom of thoughts. . . . Hebrew thinking operates within categories different from those of Plato and Aristotle, . . . [these] are not merely a matter of different ways of expression but of different ways of thinking. . . Geographically and historically, Jerusalem and Athens, the age of the prophets and the age of Pericles, are not too far removed from each other. Spiritually they are worlds apart. (Heschel 1955: 14-15) Because of the influence of Tanakh on Jewish culture, Jews simply think differently, according to Heschel, to Westerners. To be allowed to freely practice this different way of thinking has motivated Jews to initially demand respect for diversity and then to accept all diversity as beneficial. They found that it was very difficult to argue that Christians had to not only tolerate and respect the different way that Jews thought without arguing that respecting difference should be a general principle that applied to everyone and benefitted everyone. As will be elaborated upon later in this volume, Gnostic Jews argued that there was not just one universal value to which everyone should adhere, as Christianity taught, but, drawing on their own experience, there were numerous different ways of valuing, each with an equal standing. There was not just one “culture” towards which everyone tended as a common good but there were multiple

177

Which he contrasts with other Jewish thinkers who were influenced by Nietzsche but “did not deal with Jewish thought” such as Shaul Tchernichovsky and Jonathan Ratosh.

302 “cultures” and each one had at least an equal standing to Western culture if not, as with Judaism, were actually superior. For this reason, they fought for multiculturalism, fought for the “other” to be recognised and acknowledge to be at least equal to the West. As American Jew Mitchell Cohen expresses, “I want to live in an America of democratic citizenship, of social and economic democracy, of liberal tolerance, in a secular state that allows diverse cultures and religions to make of themselves what they will.” Although initially Jews fought for equality, this quickly actually turned into the argument that this Jewish way of thinking was intellectually and morally superior to the West. Ultimately, the Jewish project is not about diversity at all, diversity is just a means to the real end, the universal imposition of their values. As Dinnerstein observes, “It does not occur to him (Cohen) that Jewish values are not universal and that there are other valid perspectives . . .” Jews such as Cohen believe that their values are indeed universal as they are from God. Embracing this religious mission of conversion motivated Jews to leave the ghettos and enter into Western civilization. As Gutkind states of this realization, “This was “the leap from serfdom into freedom”. The genius of Israel had decided to be free. . .” (Gutkind 1952: 14) What Gutkind means is that it was only by appreciating the superiority of Jewish thought, and that that “genius” needed to be shared, that Jews decided to change the societies in which they lived so that they could be free. If Jews retained their own way of thinking, retained their own unique genius, then they would remain “. . . free from neurosis . . .” that affected Christian societies. (Gutkind 1952: 92) As Freud argued, Christian Western “thinking” retained their belief in morality and an experience of the “good” and therefore remained mired in neuroses of guilt and shame. None other than Albert Einstein, who was deliberately promoted as being the definition of a genius by a Jewish controlled media for well over half a century, insinuated that the German people, amongst whom he was raised, were “primitive and uneducated” in contrast, he infers, to the genius of the Jews. (Einstein 1918b: 156) Another Jewish luminary, of even more exaggerated importance, Sigmund Freud, genuinely believed, as expressed in private correspondence, “that Jews [were] intellectually and morally superior to others”. (Freud as seen in Yerushalmi 1991/2014: 339 emphasis added) Such sentiments were also promoted by one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Ahad Ha’am, the “teacher of the Jews” who claimed, “almost all admit that the Jewish people have a genius for morality, in this respect they are superior to all the other nations.” (Ha’am as seen in Golomb 2004: 143) Indeed, as Bergman observes, a Jew’s, “feelings of inner dignity were sustained by a belief in his own spiritual superiority which a . . . ‘goy’ can in no way touch.” (Bergmann 1976: 124) Even Benjamin Disraeli, the Jewish Prime Minister of Great Britain in the middle of the 19th centuy, argued that Jews should be granted new rights not because they were merely equal to gentiles but because Jews were the, “most striking evidence of the falsity of that pernicious doctrine of modern times – the natural

303 equality of man.” (Disraeli as seen in Baron 1949: 196) Jews were a concrete, living example that some peoples, the Jews, were simply naturally superior to all others therefore equality for Man should not only not be sought but was, because of their exceptional talents, impossible. Such immodest and highly questionable conclusions have not been left in the past. Even contemporary Jewish writers affirm not only a difference between Jews and others but Jewish superiority. As was recently voiced in a Jewish Sermon in the United States, “Embracing your Jewishness as counterculture means, I think, putting your values first – especially when these are values at odds with how mainstream society operates. It also means thinking of ourselves as more than individuals but as part of a covenantal community bigger than us, a Jewish people with a unique purpose among the nations of the world.”178 (R. Bair 2016) Again, as Jewish scholar Lamm wrote in 1999, . . .even if you [Jews] engaged in doing business with pagans, you cannot offer an excuse for yourself by saying that it is impossible to serve God because of the grossness and corporeality that befall you as a result of your continual business dealings with them. . . our sages long ago revealed to us that Godliness may be found in all material things . . . because without the presence of His Godliness, they would have no life or existence whatsoever . . . It is only that this vitality and Godliness are there in diluted form, after many contractions, just sufficient to keep them alive and no more.179 (Lamm 1999: 29) This paragraph was written in a serious academic text late in the 20th century. Lamm is arguing that just like every other material thing, Gentiles too have some extremely limited Godliness otherwise associating with them could be used as an excuse by some Jews to be unholy. It is as though Lamm grants gentiles a limited soul to take away a potential Jewish excuse for being immoral. It is undeniably true, looking at the literature, that throughout history, and still the case today, Jews have openly expressed their belief that they are not only a separate people, a ‘chosen’ people by God, but a superior people in every way. As Jewish psychologist Sander L. Gilman recently succinctly claimed again in a peer reviewed academic journal, “Jews are smarter and morally better than everyone else.” (Gilman 2008: 41) This sense of

178

Without any doubt whatsoever if a white person claimed publicly, “we must think of ourselves as more than individuals but as “white people” with a unique purpose” it would attract scorn and claims of being a “white supremist”. Such attitudes are certainly not rare amongst the Jewish literature and websites, even the literature published through American Universities. 179 I have read hundreds of Christian texts and cannot find corresponding statements in this literature. In Christian literature Jews are spoken about very favorably and, indeed, in my local church Jewish scholars are often referenced. The difference is that Jews strictly police negative sentiments against Jews. If similar sentiments were expressed by Christian scholars, they would be branded “anti-Semitic” and the academic so labeled would lose their academic post. Such sentiments are not even uncommon in the Jewish literature written in English. God only knows what is being written in the Hebrew literature. I mixed with an American Jewish online education group from the United States for gentiles when I was starting this research project to learn more about Judaism and they explicitly expressed absolute unmitigated hatred of Christianity and Christians. This hatred went so far that they refused to even write or say Christ’s name but would only use the symbol ‘X’ to stand for Christ as in ‘Xmas’.

304 intellectual and moral superiority has led some Jews, like Gilman, to contrast Jewish morality with “the hegemonic “white gaze” [which is] a fundamentally colonial, white supremist visual sensibility that dominates and consumes racial others.” (Samudzi 2020) Despite consistent contrary claims throughout history, including that made by Disraeli, some Jews, such as Ohana, try to claim that Judaism “gave birth to the universal principle of human equality”. So, a religion that teaches racial segregation, “chosenness”, and argues that Jews alone have both a divine and corporeal soul which others do not to explain why Jews are intellectually and morally superior,180 is apparently the inventor of “the universal principle of human equality”. The argument for the equality of Mankind was, as history shows, actually the product of Christianity that literally teaches the absolute equality of all humanity, without distinction. Jews claim moral superiority despite people of the stature of U.S. President Harry Truman, who found himself surrounded by Jewish advisors who had been moved into position of power by Roosevelt, observed in his private diaries, [The Jews] I find are very very selfish. They care not how many Latvians, Finns, Poles, Estonians, and Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DPs [displaced persons] as long as Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political, neither Hitler or Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment for the underdog. . . the Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. To support Truman’s conclusions, when a cabal of Jewish communists took power in Hungry for a short period of time, they formed the Soviet Republic in 1919 which lasted just 133 days, during this time they oversaw a period of terrible cruelty and oppression. (Gerrits 2009: 19-20) As Gerrits observed, On March 21, 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic was proclaimed. Under the uncompromising leadership of Bela Kun and his fellow-commissars, most of them of Jewish background, Hungary went through the first serious communist experiment outside of Russia. Although it lasted only 133 days, it made a tremendous impression, both within and outside of the country. It became the symbol of Bolshevik expansionism and of Jewish communist rule beyond the Soviet Union. (Gerrits 2009: 20)

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Reading this literature, mostly published in the United States and much of it written by academics employed in Western Universities, one can see how, unlike in formerly Christian communities, Judaism informs every aspect of their lives including their academic research. This has not occurred in the West for at least 100 or maybe even 200 years. Most Jews, like Einstein, Freud, Levinas and Derrida, remain passionately committed to Judaism. Many, most, Jews advance a radical theology at every opportunity but because we do not know what that theology looks like, what contemporary Judaism stands for, it is missed, and we think they are just like us. It is in this way that they have managed to redirect Western thinking and behavior in a way harmonious with their religion. We are all nomads now.

305 This short period of Jewish control was so brutal it soured Hungarian attitudes towards Jews to such a degree that it continues to shape Hungarian foreign policy even today. Despite such observation, Jews continue to claim moral superiority and a unique genius that, apparently, everyone acknowledges. Reading histories on this matter there are far more accounts that agree with Truman than with their own view of themselves. It is that apparent tension in Gnostic Judaism, the insistence on tolerance, openness, and respect for others coinciding with this utter intolerance, the realization of the terribly restrictive society in which we all live, that leaves many confused. For example, Gnostic Jews argue that women need to find their authentic being and express their inner selves but only in so far as it is perfectly harmonious with the Gnostic Jewish vision of womanhood. Women are not allowed to be anything that Gnostic Jews do not want them to be. Women cannot “freely” choose to be stay at home Christian mums who believe that their greatest contribution to society can be made by looking after their husbands and caring for their children. Such a person from a gnostic Jewish perspective is expressing white, patriarchal values and is literally evil. No, women must be sexually promiscuous, preferably bi-sexual, social leaders who want to dress like men and pursue traditional male roles in science, technology, and business. It is as a kingdom of priests that it is their mission to change to the world. This is one of the central claims of Gnostic Jewry that explains why Jews help other Jews to succeed. Jews have been assigned by God to shape the way people think. That Jews are renowned for helping each other is not just an act of solidarity as it is the Han Chinese or the Indians, helping those with the same background, but is literally a religious obligation. Whereas the Anglosphere has been involved in an intergenerational neo-liberal fight of all against all, Jews have been helping each other at every opportunity, funding each other, giving each other opportunities, based upon what should rightly be understood as racial criteria. Indeed, the particular focus on racism as morally abhorrent, that emerged only after the Second World War, began with a focus against anti-Semitism. That is, certain people did not want the disproportionate power of Jews to become an issue of concern that it had in pre-World War II Germany. Marginalizing the concept of race is ultimately a defence mechanism so that they could continue their schemes without people being allowed to observe what is happening in plain sight. Whereas Anglo-Saxons are not allowed to give preference to other Anglo-Saxons, and further usually choose not to out of a sense of moral justice, Jews, and indeed others such as the Chinese, have been helping each other to be success at every opportunity for generations. Jews help other Jews from the very start of life through to the end and these structures of assistance are often formal institutions that get a surprising amount of state funding. Because Jews are overrepresented to such a high degree in positions of power then this assistance occurs the higher the individual rises. So, at school, as they attend

306 government subsidised private schools, their schoolteacher is Jewish. These Jewish students are funnelled through their classes and are given special help the whole way. This is all organized by the Jewish headmaster, which is more common the more prestigious the school. Outside of school, after school care organization are all specialist Jewish institutions that are well funded and resourced so that only the best care is delivered. In the exclusive Jewish institutions, they are told the whole time how special they are, how intelligent, how moral, how they are the chosen of God and that, because of this, it their burden to be leaders. Nurtured through the best schools under the guidance and beneficence of any Jews around them they enter university where the privileges really begin. The massive overrepresentation of Jews in academia and university administrators ensures that any concern or grievance is addressed for Jewish students while gentiles are left to fend for themselves. Not only are universities in the United States dominated by Jews but the entire education system, as will be discussed shortly in relation to feminism, is shaped by Gnostic Judaism so they are in familiar surroundings in a way that a Christian Anglo-Saxon student might feel increasingly alienated. If the Jewish student chooses to leave after a degree, then they get opportunities unavailable to others. They get easier finance, easier promotions, easier access to entry level opportunities, often in prestigious situations like Hollywood, the federal government or international finance with less education and/or ability. Research the lives of some successful Jews and these surprising opportunities become extremely transparent. You start asking how did they get that million-dollar startup loan? How did they get that second movie contract after the first bombed? How did they manage to get a job in international finance with their degree in drama? In short, at every moment, at every stage in life, a Jew, as a Jew, is being given opportunities that others are not, and this is one of the reasons for Jewish overrepresentation. If one person manages to have a career as an actor, they have a record of excellence, a period of struggle despite their obvious superior talents that has been acknowledged by those around them, then they work their way up taking every opportunity and making it work until, finally, they are a success. Working and sacrificing the whole way through. A Jewish person who wants the same thing is often an underperformer. Then gets some incredible opportunity that shocks those around them. Failure is then ok because they will be given other opportunities until something appropriate is found. If a Jewish director does a bad movie, then Jewish critics in the media will complement the direction of the movie while criticising other elements so that it will not reflect badly on Jews. If Jews want to stay at university, then they get scholarship, promotions, research grants, employment opportunities, publication opportunities, that others, even if they perform at a higher standard, simply do not get. I have actually seen this happen more than once. One Jewish graduate student, in only her second year of her PhD program, shocked the department when she secured a very healthy research grant which other

307 scholars, who had higher qualifications with much more, would have failed to secure. Everyone was shocked and the halls were full of gossip about how she secured the grant, but nobody, absolutely nobody, mentioned the “Jewish factor”. At the time I certainly did not even think of it. Some others may have thought it, but nobody would ever dare say it. For most people success is hard, it takes special skills and talents and tremendous amounts of hard work along with good fortune. For a Jew, success comes easy, and if failure does occur then there are safety nets that enable them to find something more suitable next time. Not only is there assistance, but if somebody is “in the way” then they are conveniently removed to make way. This may just involve a surprise promotion or demotion, the discovery of a scandal or just life become hard, but, if the motivation is adequate, other more forceful steps are taken. Increasingly, it is not even just if you are Jewish or not but how supportive of Gnostic Judaism program a person is, is increasingly more important than that skills, talents, or hard work in determining success. Good luck being a patriotic American opposed to, say, Black Lives Matter or the transgender movement, having a career in Hollywood or the music industry. The same is true in finance, high tech, media, and academia. That Gnostic Jews have a different set of aspirations, a very different vision of the world, to other people, is shown in all kinds of political projects that they have fought to realize. There is not a single Jewish politician, no matter the party to which they belong, who does not push a consistent set of issues that includes, with varying degrees of emphasis, multiculturalism, black rights, undermining heteronormativity, overcoming gender norms, opposition to white nativism, undermining the traditional family and advocating unconditional support for Israel. Are these the same values historically held by Christian America? As American Jew John Simon was quoted as saying, it was the task of Jews, “To teach mankind about God, and to give a morality to the world, this is our calling.” (Simon 1899: 392) The problem is that the morality promoted by Gnostic Jews is very different to that historically cherished by Christians. Indeed, it is more than just different, it is the exact opposite. As will be discussed at length later in this volume, in his presentation, “Why we Remain Jews”, Strauss actually argues that the reason Jews should remain Jews, retain their distinct beliefs, is because they must teach the world that it is not yet redeemed, Jesus is not the Christ, and therefore redemption remains a future potential that must be realised by Jews. Much of this agenda was historically extremely unpopular with the majority of Americans. As already observed, their forceful advocacy for liberal immigration policy has always shown them to aspire towards a very different, cosmopolitan vision of America’s future that most Westerners have historically opposed. As Neuringer (1980: 83) rightly observes, there has been “a polarity between Jewish and general American opinion on immigration.” Jews have always been strong advocates for extremely liberal immigration laws and, further, they oppose integration strategies in preference for “multiculturalism”. As the Executive

308 Council of Australian Jewry (ECAU) argued when they passed a resolution to that effect on December 1, 1996. The ECAU hoped to express, . . .its support for the proposition that Australia’s long-term interests are best served by non-discriminatory immigration policy which adopts a benevolent attitude to refugees and family reunion and gives priority to humanitarian considerations. (MacDonald 1997) This was at a time when there was broad public debate between those who thought Europeans should be favoured over other immigrants because of their shared values against those who wanted a “nondiscriminatory” immigration policy, one that allowed people from Africa, Asia and the Middle East without consideration of their cultural fit. Australians of Western European descent generally wanted a more restrictive immigration policy while those from non-European countries, the Han Chinese, Indians, and Jews, wanted uninhibited immigration. This debate was not so much lost, but, as is so often the case, those who disagreed with a liberal immigration policy were simply ignored and a “non-discriminatory” immigration policy was adopted. Although the position of the ECAU sounds like it is addressing a moral concern, at the very least it is motivated by self-interest to limit the potential future dangers of anti-Jewish sentiment or what they term “anti-Semitism”. As Mirian Faine, from the publication, Australian Jewish Democrat, stated in 1994, The strengthening of multicultural or diverse Australia is also our most effective insurance policy against antisemitism. The day Australia has a Chinese Australian Governor General I would feel more confident of my freedom to live as a Jewish Australian.181 (as seen in McCormack 1994: 11) The reason why Jews prefer Chinese to Westerners is because they believe that Jews share an Eastern system of values that is consistent with Chinese, especially communist Chinese, beliefs. This is one that is not informed by moral consideration but is rather highly pragmatic. The Chinese will not judge Jews for being immoral because, like Jews, the Chinese do not particularly believe in morality. The primary concern of Jews is that they are allowed to continue to practice and indeed impose, their values on everyone. It is in order to advance this distinct agenda that Jews have fought for the empowerment of other minorities against white majorities. As Jonathan Sarna from Brandeis University points out, “. . .the fate

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That Faine specifically identifies the benefits of a “Chinese Australian” is of more than passing interest. There has been nurtured a close relationship between gnostic Judaism and the Chinese based on the belief that as both Judaism and China are Eastern cultures, they share a lot in common. As will be presented in the following volume, Jews helped the Chinese Communists into power and then were extremely active in the “Cultural Revolution”. Jews and Chinese, like Australia’s Beverley Wang, seem to be partners in a shared project. After all, as Donald Trump rightly observes, the economic policies of the West have been to the clear advantage of China for the last 50 years. Who is making these terrible trade and immigration decisions?

309 of Jews and the fate of other persecuted minority groups were, from the very beginning, entwined.” (as seen in Rosenblatt 2020) The hope has always been to manifest a society where anti-Semitism is an impossibility because there are no values that Jews promote which are not also held by the wider community. They fight for the “rights” of minorities not as a moral imperative but simply out of selfinterest which is, in their worldview, the only real moral imperative. As Jewish journalist Gary Rosenblatt recently wrote when various minorities expressed solidarity with Jews, “The Jewish community’s efforts in recent decades to align itself with other minorities in the face of racial, ethnic, and religious prejudice are now bearing fruit.” (Rosenblatt 2020) What will never be admitted to in public is that multiculturalism erodes the historical authority of a Western Christian worldview, with its universal morality, and therefore, in Christian countries, multiculturalism undermines Christian authority. What informs this fragmentation of society, this tribalization, that is so alien to the Western tradition is because it allows, as Murray (2017: 17) observes, people to live “parallel lives”. This fracturing weakens the bonds that holds society together making it more vulnerable and less able to present an organized resistance. A fractured tribal situation, where each tribe lives socially quite separate from other tribes, while collaborating in production, is more conducive to reversing how they see historical hierarchies. As Leo Strauss claims that in the West there was a ““racial hierarchy” coming down from the Anglo-Saxons, down to the Negroes; and we [Jews} are just above the Negroes.” They were determined to change this hierarchical system, which they have to a high degree realised, with Gnostic Jews as the new leaders, Chinese filling the role of henchmen, followed by blacks, all subordinating a white population left at the bottom as an unskilled labour force. Living in Australia many Chinese already look down upon whites ensuring that while they are the doctors and the pharmacists, the cleaners, and receptionists they employ, at best, are AngloSaxon. The Jewish liberation movement, that began towards the end of the 19th century, was actually the template for realizing multi-culturalism generally. Gnostic Jewish leaders nurtured a political identity amongst European Jews, what Mendieta (2002: 1) calls “manufacturing difference”, which was achieved by “raising the consciousness” of “Jews”. This “consciousness” raising involves persuading people, Jews, women, Asians, that they are oppressed and to adopt the established values of society is to surrender to suppression. Instead of assimilating, they demanded that people be recognised as different and, ultimately, for Jews, superior. This new “consciousness” was realised by magnifying supposed historical wrongs, nurturing a sense of shared identity, and creating a sense of shared purpose. As Jewish ‘feminist’ Zillah Einsenstein wrote of the strategy for encouraging “difference”,

310 In the process of consciousness-raising, actually life-sharing, we began to recognise the commonality of our experiences and, from the sharing and growing consciousness, to build a politics that will change our lives and inevitably end our oppression . . . We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation is us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work. This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics comes directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. (1978) Although this passage was directed at “feminism”, it is a true statement, as the author concedes, of every “identity politics” and shows the process of nurturing grievances, fabricate a sense of shared identity or “consciousness building” and then encouraging a binary narrative that constructs insider/outsider, us/them, with the ultimate aim of destroying both. Systematically carried through, this agenda has realized a highly fractured Western society which has split not only different members of the community, homosexuals and heterosexuals, people of colour against white, but has created contests within the family, husband against wife, children against parents. Creating these contests are intended to nurture inter-group contests. Leo Strauss admits in relation to “Negroes”, “we must see that there is a similarity between the Jewish question and the Negro question; there are quite a few Jewish organizations which are very well aware of this.” The aim is to reveal every relationship as being similar to that of the “Jewish question” and then promoting subgroups to adopt a distinct identity, it then becomes a motivation for them to fight on behalf of this identity’s interests against the historically dominant white culture. What is realised under such conditions is a “society” of competing interests, tribal passions, each claiming its own truth182, more like that historically expressed in the Middle East than in the West. As MacDonald observes, . . .the recent multicultural movement may be viewed as tending towards a profoundly non-Western form of social organization that has historically been much more typical of Middle Eastern segmentary societies centred around discrete homogenous groups. . .unlike the multicultural ideal, in these societies there are pronounced relations of dominance and subordination. (MacDonald 1998) This is the exact kind of society that they hope to eventually realise. One with racial hierarchies with them most certain entrenched a the top, followed by the Chinese, then blacks and indigenous, and at the bottom are the whites. Whites will fill the labour tasks and the unskilled work. The truth is that a truly

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I recently heard an indigenous woman use the term “my truth” about 50 times in a half hour interview. What she was trying to emphasize is that white people may have “their truth” but she had “her truth” and “her truth” had equal validity. All I could think that whole time is that there is only ever one truth and how asserting different “truths” means the need for dialogue is negated. People just assert their truth and society become not only fractured but the potential for conflict is ever increased.

311 multi-cultural society cannot survive over time because it has nothing that can binds it together unless there is concentrated power. As Buchanan rightly wrote, “Should America lose her ethnic-cultural core and become a nation of nations, America will not survive.” In Great Britain, the deliberate attempt to increase population diversity as a strategy to overcome the historically dominant white culture can be seen being advocated for by Tony Blair’s Minister for Asylum and Immigration, the Jewish/English politician Barbara Roche. Roche became the driving force behind changing the asylum seeker laws of Britain so that every asylum seeker, no matter the validity of their claim, was permitted to stay in Britain. The reason for reversing decades of established policy that required asylum seekers to have a legitimate claim of persecution if they were to be granted asylum, as demanded by international law, was because, as she said, “Asylum seekers should be allowed to stay in Britain. Removal takes too long, and it’s emotional.” Instead of asylum seekers having to establish the legitimacy of their asylum claim, Roche ensured that the entire process was reversed. Now asylum seekers would be granted asylum unless there was some reason why they should be refused. Roche argued that any restrictions on immigration, any restriction at all, was actually “racist” and that the atmosphere around the immigration debate had grown so “toxic” that all debate on the matter should cease immediately. Roche’s explicit objective, stated in unequivocal terms, was to transform British society through mass immigration from being predominantly white Anglo-Saxon to being one that is culturally/racially diverse. As one of her colleagues said, Roche did not see her job as controlling entry into Britain, but one of finding ways to enable and justify entry into Britain. She hoped that with increased immigration and approaching it “in a holistic way”, that by allowing millions of immigrants in from the Middle East into Britain, the British would eventually “see the benefit of a multicultural society.” (as seen in Murray 2017: 19) The phrase, “holistic way” actually reveals a lot about what is really motivating Roche, it is to overcome the divine borders, to seek out the prior unity, the “whole”, that is hidden under ethnic and national difference. As part of her determined drive to accommodate waves of asylum seekers, at that time mainly from the Middle East, she explicitly criticised her colleagues who opposed her open borders policy for being “too white”. Roche, as is often the subtext of the drive to make Western countries more culturally diverse, is actually using multiculturalism, in a fairly transparent way, to undermine what many would characterise as “whiteness” in England. She is hoping to destroy Western civilization in Britain. A multicultural society, a society of nomads, benefits Jewish people by enabling to live as Jews. Multiculturalism casts everyone as tribal nomads who are no longer expected to conform to established norms. Under conditions of diversity there is no need to dwell in the place in which they live. As Roche

312 was to later say, “I love the diversity of London. I just feel comfortable.” (Roche as seen in Muir 2011) They might claim that Jews advocate for multiculturalism and immigration on humanitarian grounds showing themselves, they argue, to be morally superior to Gentiles, but this argument is shown to be just a justification when it is recognised that Israel, the Jewish nation, has one of the most restrictive immigration policies in the world. Their immigration policy has been described as “racist, discriminatory, and undemocratic”. (Zreik 2008) As Silviu observes, unlike in Western countries “. . .Jews have had no interest in proposing that immigration to Israel should be similarly multiethnic or that Israel should have an immigration policy that would threaten the hegemony of Jews in Israel”. (Italics in original text as seen in Siviu 2011: 250) Whereas Jews have been forceful advocates for mass immigration and multiculturalism in countries such as the United States, Britain, and Australia, often with a subtext, as with Roche, of deliberately undermining “white” hegemony, Jews simply refuse to implement similar policies. Jews instead have always argued instead that, It is difficult for states with special populations, like the State of Israel, to be culturally neutral, and this fact might indicate that the achievement of the ideal of cultural equality is not a realistic goal in certain states, especially states such as Israel that wish to preserve and develop the unique culture of the dominant group in the population. Therefore, Jewish culture is and should be the dominant culture in Israel. (Kaplan 2015: 1096) Language referring to “special populations” might come as a shock to somebody in Canada, New Zealand, the United States and Australia who would be accustomed to the language of multiculturalism where all cultures have at least equal worth and, increasingly, indigenous and Eastern cultures are portrayed as superior. Again, the specific language here is interesting. Kaplan speaks rightly of “cultural neutrality” and this is exactly what is the aspiration, to make places like Australia etc., culturally neutral, not culturally diverse, but to realise a situation where there are no cultures at all. Here are a people who find it hard to be “culturally neutral” because they “wish to preserve and develop the unique culture of the dominant population”. There is no doubt that this would be called “white supremist” if said by a white person in Australia and would not be allowed to be said, no matter published. It has been observed by Israeli’s themselves that Jewish ethnocentrism has manifested in Israel, . . .one of the most racist societies in the western world. Racism is present to some degree everywhere, but in Israel it exists deep within the spirit of the laws. It is taught in schools and colleges, spread in the media, and above all the most dreadful, in Israel the racists do not know what they are doing and, because of this, feel in no way obliged to apologise. (Sand 2014) Around the world, Gnostic Jews have been at the very vanguard of realizing culturally neutral societies throughout the West while in Israel itself they have realized the most exclusive society on the planet.

313 Israel is a place where, as Sands observes, racism has been built into every element, education, industry, and the law, in such a pervasive way that it has been normalized. I guess white Australian culture is not “unique”, it is not an expression of a “special population”, and therefore not worthy of remaining “dominant” as the Jewish religion is in Israel. When I read things like this it is not that I am surprised or even angry that my county that I once loved has become a multicultural ghetto that I no longer recognise but I do wonder how Westerners have tolerated this double standard for so long. What this different attitude to immigration in Western countries evinces is that Jewish interests are simply not harmonious with those of the wider population. Indeed, their aims are often diametrically opposed to those of the wider, historically Christian, populations. As is intuitively true, if a population does have its own identity that keeps them apart from everyone else then overrepresentation is morally wrong because those that lead should have the best interest of those over whom they rule as their primary concern. Unsurprisingly, calls for the establishment of quotas to address overrepresentation made by women and other minorities to ensure proportional representation have been forcefully resisted by Jews. As Whitfield argued, “Such implementation seemed to violate standards of fairness in the assessment of individual promise and performance.” (Whitfield (1988)2015: 5) So, it seems right to think in aggregate terms to address white male overrepresentation, white people have suffered discrimination for years in universities and in the workforce to increase the representation of “minorities”, but to think individually in terms of ‘individual promise and performance’ when such decisions might negatively affect Jewish overrepresentation. The important question is why are Jews so overrepresented in positions of power, wealth and prestige in the United States? Is it, as people like Whitfield and Jacob suggest, the result of individual talent and superior intelligence or something else? Why are Jews Overrepresented in Positions of Power? Despite Jewish overrepresentation being broadly acknowledged, this phenomenon remains unexplained. As Hollinger acknowledges, Some people think it unwise to speak at all of the demographic overrepresentation of Jews among the wealthiest, most politically powerful, and most intellectually accomplished of Americans. I encounter this sentiment among some readers made uncomfortable by my references to Jewish overrepresentation . . . I believe the time has come for historians and social scientist to apply their skills to the question. (Hollinger 2006: 155) There have been a range of reasons given for why Jews are overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and influence. Joseph Jacobs, prominent Jewish historian, thought that although the Jewish religion was important for explaining Jewish success, the main reason for their overrepresentation was hereditary. He

314 argued, “There is a certain probability that a determinate number of Jews at the present time will produce a larger number of ‘geniuses’ than any equal number of men of other races.” (Jacobs as seen in Slezkine 2004: 60) Because of their natural tendency to be ‘geniuses’, Jacobs argues, it should be expected that Jews are massively overrepresented amongst the elite of American society. Jacobs goes on to argue that because Jews are so naturally superior to others, it is actually in the interests of all Mankind to further Jewish “propagation”. All Mankind, apparently, benefits so much from the presence of Jews, as Lynn also argued, that everyone should do everything that they can to ensure that there are more brilliant Jews in the world. Perhaps this is what motivated American Jew Jeffrey Epstein to try, as he said, to “seed” thousands of reluctant extremely young women with his DNA . . . to improve the human race. (See Stewart, Goldstein, and Silver-Greenberg 2019) It might come as surprise to many that in the 21st century someone is arguing that there is a race of superior people and that because of this superiority we should ensure that they continue to breed. The idea that Jewish success is a benefit for all Mankind is not simply some kind of strategy to explain overrepresentation, but it truly is what many Gnostic Jews simply believe is true. Genetically determined superior intelligence is like a Jewish superpower that explains why Jews are the leaders in the United States. Nathan Cofnas agrees with Jacobs, when responding to the evolutionary theories of Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argued that Jews fought to advance the interests of Jews as an expression of the evolutionary principle of survival of the fittest. MacDonald argued that Jews favour other Jews as an unconscious strategy to acquire resources. Against this argument, Cofnas claimed (2018) that the “evidence actually favours a simpler explanation of Jewish overrepresentation in intellectual movements involving Jewish high intelligence . . .” It is not a strategy of survival why Jews help other Jews into position of power, wealth and prestige in the United States, but they are overrepresented in positions of power because they are more intelligent. When Jewish overrepresentation was raised on a social media site, a Jewish respondent named Yoni Ariel wrote to explain why Jews are so overrepresented. It’s a combination of several things. One is a long tradition of education and skills. Under Queen Salome (141–67 BCE) Judea was the first country to implement compulsory universal education. This meant Jews had close to a 100% literacy rate centuries before other people. Compare two immigrant families from Europe arriving on Ellis Island in say 1890. One is Jewish, the other is say Italian or Irish. Both are poor, living in tenements, but the Jewish family will insist their kids study hard, graduate from high school with grades that would earn them a college scholarship. The other family would be just as happy if a kid got a job at 15 or 16 and started earning. Result, we educated ourselves out of poverty a generation quicker than other immigrants who came at the same time. Our religion also plays a part. For over a thousand years (the entire Dark Ages and Medieval period) the Church was the thought police. Christianity is a faith-based religion, its central

315 credo is faith in Jesus Christ the son of God. It regarded any non-Christian thought as a sin, and the Church feared non-conformism. Anyone thinking creatively was in danger of being declared a heretic or a witch, which meant a prolonged painful death. According to Catholicism (and some other Christian doctrines) merely thinking God might not exist, or Christ might not actually be his son is a mortal sin. Just thinking about sex before marriage, or outside marriage is sinful. This creates a culture of guilt, and fear of creative thinking. Jews never had that. Judaism is not a faith-based religion. To us what matters is what you do, not what you think. All that is required in the faith department is to believe in one all powerful, totally abstract God. To be an atheist is not a sin in Judaism. You only sin if you actually convert to a pagan religion or worship an idol. This means we do not find our intellectual pursuits inhibited by a culture of guilt and fear. This explains our abilities to innovate. The combination of universal literacy and respect for education with a mindset that does not inhibit questions and doubts and does not discourage innovative out of the box thinking has given us a huge intellectual advantage. This is an interesting quote because it really does capture the three most common arguments used to explain Jewish overrepresentation.183 Jews are of natural superior intelligence, which is also the explanation given by Lynn, geneticists, Harpending and Cochran, and many, many others besides, (See Cofnas 2018) including maverick Canadian psychologist Jacob Peterson, or that Jewish overrepresentation is the result of some feature or set of features of Jewish religious/cultural practice. As Senior writes when arguing that it is a feature of both superior intelligence and culture, They wouldn’t invoke their [Jews) extra dendrites. They’d invoke their mothers. To say that the Jews have a history of emphasizing scholarship is not just the fantasy of ethnic chauvinists and Woody Allen fans. To look at a single page of the Talmud is to understand this, with its main text at the centre, its generations of rabbis arguing around the rim. The dialectic and critical reasoning are at its core. (Senior 2005) Beyond those who argue for superior intelligence or religio-cultural factors to explain Jewish overrepresentation, there are those, like Senior, who propose a combination of both superior intelligence and religious practices. For example, Hill argued that, “Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ than any other group, the result of some kind of selection pressure in the Middle Ages, when European Jews

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According to the Rabbinic tradition that dominated Jewish life until the late 19 th and early 20th century, “faith” meant the exact same thing in Judaism as it did in Christianity. According to Martin Luther, faith basically means “trust in God”. As it also says of “faith” in the Jewish Encyclopedia, ““Faith” denotes not belief in a dogmatic sense . . . [but] confidence and trust in God, in His word, or in His messenger”. How could someone, after all, have “faith” in dogma? Even though this accusation is often directed against Christianity by Gnostic Jews it really makes no sense. Where Judaism and Christianity differ is that for Christians it is faith or trust in the experience of God, the knowledge that God has gifted humanity with grace. For Christians, this gift is experienced in terms of conscience whereas for Jews, faith captures trust in God as communicated textually. Faith is actual a central feature of Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. As none other than Leo Strauss insists, what is required of contemporary Jews according to Strauss is to “return to the faith, return to the faith of our ancestors”. (Strauss 1997/1962: 320)

316 weren’t allowed to own land and had to provide for their families through the professions.”184 So it was because Jews had to develop their superior intellectual skills, better suited to pursuits like finance, in contrast to others who were mindless farmers, that explains why Jews are so intellectually superior and so much more successful than everyone else. “Success at money-lending required a different set of skills than farming or any of the traditional trades. . . If you were Jewish . . . and you didn’t have a head for figures, you didn’t stand much of a chance.” (Senior 2005) Canadian Jewish film maker John Curtin, who made an entire documentary exploring the “unique genius” of Jews to explain why Jews are so successful relative to their gentile neighbours called, “Why the Jews?”, argued that “Jewish genius”, . . .remains a giant elephant in the room that everyone kind of notices, but no one really wants to talk about it. . . I think Jews talk between themselves, but they don’t really talk to other people about it . . . Almost everyone I spoke to mentioned the cultural aspects of Judaism but Jewish accomplishment is so ridiculously disproportionate it can’t be explained by culture alone. We have to talk about elevated IQ. You can’t have 11,000 per cent over-representation in Nobel prizes without some elevated IQ. The argument that Jews are naturally more intelligent, usually attributed to having to survive persecution at the hands of Christians, is the single most common explanation for Jewish overrepresentation. Even people critical of Jewish behaviour, such as MacDonald, agree that the superior intelligence of Jews is adequate for explaining why they are so disproportionately successful. The problem with these arguments for explaining Jewish overrepresentation, is that they are not just racist, and reading the comments given by Ariel on Italian and Irish parents being ‘happy if their kid got a job at 15” it clearly is racist, but that they are ultimately theo-political or, put more conventionally, they are not factual claims but religiously motivated. Ariel claims that Jews have historically prized education and that this explains why Jews are more successful than other immigrant groups, but, as already touched upon, this is just not true. Indeed, not only is it untrue that Jews historically prized education but that the very opposite is the truth, Jews intentionally rejected education. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish communities living in Europe were considered to be particularly uneducated, and most Jews were thought to be underperformers because of their lack of education. In Europe in the 19th century people simply did not think of Jews as being intelligent or educated but they were thought to be of inferior intelligence as reflected in their lack of interest in education. It was not until the turn of the 20th century, after, at least according to Gutkind (1952), a deliberate public program of deception by

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I personally have not found a time in Europe when Jews were not “allowed to own land” although this is a widely held belief.

317 sectors of the Jewish community aimed at changing perception of Jewish intelligence, that Jews became thought of as intelligent. As Strauss observed of this program, “There exists a kind of Jewish glorification of every clever or brilliant Jewish mediocrity, which is as pitiable as it is laughable. It reminds one of villagers who have produced their first physicist and hail him for this reason as the greatest physicist that ever was.” (Strauss 1997/1962: 326) Strauss is correct to observe how Jews do indeed promote mediocrity as “genius” but he seems genuinely ignorant of why Jews are so determined to portray themselves as intellectually superior. It is not simply, as Strauss suggests, an expression of insecurity. It was only as a result of a concerted effort to cast mediocrity as brilliance, that people stopped thinking of Jews as being “uneducated”, thoughtless slaves to religious dogma who were, to be blunt, “stupid”. As Ernest Jones, an early innovator in psychoanalysis and life-long friend of Sigmund Freud, observed, there is a “Jewish belief, which they often impose on other people too, concerning the superiority of their intellectual powers.” (emphasis added Jones as seen in MacDonald 1998) What he means is that Jews assert that others must recognise their intellectual superiority but this should be seen as just a part of a political project. Education has long been a problem for Jewish populations. In a report written on crime in early 20th century New York the author observes that “The percentage of Hebrew children in the truant school is also higher than that of any others”. (Bingham 1908: 384) The author suggests that this was not a choice of the children but that their parents were teaching them how to steal at such a young age that by the time they were ten they were experienced criminals. The truth is that if Jews were ever to become accepted as community leaders, they needed to overcome the common perception in the 19th century that Jews were unintelligent and uneducated and, therefore, people who certainly should not be amongst the most accomplished in society. Up until the middle of the 19th century, there was thought to be a distinct lack of education amongst Jews. As the Jewish writer Schechter evinces in the late 19th century, In a world with so many visible facts and invisible causes, as life and death, growth and decay, light and darkness; in a world where the sun rises and sets; where the stars appear regularly; where heavy rains pour down from the sky, often accompanied by such grand phenomena as thunder and lightning; in a world full of such marvels, but into which no notion has entered of all our modern true or false explanations – who but God is behind all these things? (Schechter 1888: 52) Not only was this statement known to be wrong at the time, there had been a great deal of progress made by science in explaining natural phenomena such as thunder, rain, and the motions of the sun, which shows the rabbi’s ignorance, but it was terribly unfashionable in the 1880s to claim that God was the cause of such phenomenon. Despite this, Schechter shows the level of scientific knowledge that many even “educated” Jews had in the late 19th century. Jews generally were so poorly educated in the 19th century

318 that it was not only a concern for some Jewish leaders, but it was increasingly thought to be a burden on the whole society, one which Christian leaders were no longer prepared to bear. By the middle of the 19th century, despite the advances of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, the majority of European Jews, most especially in Eastern Europe, remained restricted by community leaders to reading an extremely limited range of religious texts. To read beyond these prescribed texts brought at least a sharp rebuke from their community but more likely expulsion or even possible violence. In Germany, for example, the home at the time of the largest central European Jewish population, Judaism, . . .vigorously opposed not only the study of German, but also all secular studies. Although the fear of cultural assimilation played a large part in the Hasidim’s struggle against enlightenment, the principal factor was their Kabbalistic Weltanschauung (worldview) [where] . . .every secular area of inquiry is opposed to God, as it originates in hokhmah hizonit (external science) which comes from the sitra ahra (other side) and is thus essentially empty and false. (Mahler 2001: 15) As this passage confirms, what many Jews continued to believe in the 19th century was that science was opposed to God because it was, they rightly argued, the product of Christian thinking. As a product of Christianity, it was a form of idolatry, and, therefore, something evil. Science was derived from the side of those who believed in morality and objective reality and therefore it was “essentially empty and false”. Science was regarded by [Jews] to be such a great threat to faith that even medicine was rejected by some of the rebbes. When the terrible cholera epidemic of 1831 broke out, Hersh of Zydaczow deemed it necessary to write a letter enjoining his Hasidim and Munkacs against being treated by physicians. He justified this prohibition by claiming that the true healer is the zaddik, who is the link between the Jews and the Almighty, the “healer of the sick among his people”, Israel. Hersh’s remedy for cholera in the 19th century was to, “recite all of Psalms every week, pledge to charity after completing each of the five books of the Psalms, recite the ketoret before ‘May it be Thy will’, and examine the mezuzahs to ensure that they are ritually fit.” (Mahler 2001: 15-16) Even amongst Jewish intellectuals, the poor state of Jewish education and their inability to embrace the scientific revolution taking place around them was seen as a terrible limitation. This can be seen in a passage written by M. Renan and quoted by Max Muller, the Jewish . . .character is religious rather than political, and the mainspring of their religion is the conception of the unity of God. Their religious phraseology is simple, and free from mythological elements. Their religious feelings are strong, exclusive, intolerant, and sustained by a fervour which finds its peculiar expression in prophetic visions. Compared to the Aryan nations, they are found deficient in scientific and philosophical originality. Their poetry is chiefly subjective or lyrical, and we look in vain among their poets for excellence in epic and dramatic compositions. Painting and the plastic arts have never

319 arrived at a higher than the decorative stage. Their political life has remained patriarchal and despotic, and their inability to organize on a large scale has deprived them of the means of military success. Perhaps the most general feature of their character is a negative one, their inability to perceive the general and the abstract, whether in thought, language, religion, poetry, or politics; and, on the other hand, a strong attraction towards the individual and personal, which makes them monotheistic in religion, lyrical in poetry, monarchical in politics, abrupt in style, and useless for speculation. (Renan as seen in Muller 1871: 339-340) The contrast between the view of Jews mid-way through the 19th century compared to the way non-Jewish people like Lynn, Peterson, Harpending, Cochran and Murray speak and think about Jews today is stark and is evidence of their success at reversing people’s attitudes. Even by the middle of the 20 th century, Baron (1949: 210) could write, “. . .liberal student bodies appreciated their more brilliant Jewish colleagues . . .” So already by the middle of the 20th century, in less than 100 years, the view of Jews had been reversed. Towards the end of the 19th century, the uneducated state of Jews in Europe became viewed as a problem that had to be addressed for the good of all Europeans. It became orthodoxy that the burden of Jews refusing to embrace modernity simply could no longer be carried by European societies. In response, Jews were forced, against the ardent protests from Orthodox Jewish leaders who feared assimilation, to attend state ran education programs and learn the local European languages. These steps taken by European governments to include Jews into mainstream societies through education continue to be portrayed even today in the contemporary literature as an example of Western Christian abuse of Jews. This period of coerced assimilation, supported by some Maskilim who thought education was the road for Jews to leave the ghettos and best shape Western civilization, was in no small part intended to give Jews more opportunities in society by making them more productive. Despite this noble motivation, these intervention are today portrayed as an attack against “Jewishness”. One cannot help but to get the impression that if European governments had of left Jewish communities in their state of religious ignorance or if they had forced Jews into education either strategy would today be portrayed as “antiSemitism”. What this period in European history does show, against claims like Ariel, is that Jews have not always, indeed not until very recently, cherished “education and skills”. As will be explained later, traditionally Orthodox Judaism fundamentally rejected the value of any scientific discoveries as all secular knowledge, they believed, was a movement away from God. Science, at least at that time, relied on abstraction in terms of objectification and Jews generally believe that such abstraction was a kind of deification, a kind of polytheism. In this regard, positivist science, as it continues to be today, was thought

320 to be a sin against God amongst Jews. A Jew’s life, again as it continues to be today, was to be dedicated to God and not concerned with secular knowledge of any kind. Throughout history, and actually still today when properly understood, Jews viewed education purely in religious terms, education was seen to serve an exhaustively religious function. As Lookstein wrote, “A Jew learned in order to perform God’s will. He studied in order to observe God’s law.” (Lookstein 1960: 37-38) This is still true today but under the sway of Gnostic Judaism, in contrast to orthodox Judaism, how God was to be served was viewed differently by many Jews in the mid-19th century to how Jew’s view service to God today. This is certainly not a minor point. Gnostic Jews will engage with history, for just one example, is done for religious purposes. Study in engaged in order to achieve strategic ends. The Christian tradition, in contrast, studies history, like the ancient Greek scholar Heraclitus, in the pursuit of truth. Truth is never the aspiration of Gnostic Jewry because it just does not exist. They believe that everyone pursues research to achieve strategic ends and therefore they do the same. As will be elaborated upon in detail, it was only in the 19th century that a generation of disillusioned Jews, with the support of the growing secular state, broke with the traditional blindness of Jewry to begin to read a broader literature. The biographies of people like Ahad Ha’am, Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Chaim Zhitlovsky, central figures in the advent of contemporary gnosticism, who were all expelled from their communities for reading “educational” material, are concrete examples of the struggle within Judaism between those who aspired to realise a “New Hebrew”, an educated Jew, against those who remained wedded to the old ways of Jewry. As their stories, and many others, will confirm, the claim made by Ariel, that Judaism was somehow more tolerant of dissent than Christianity, is simply outrageous and flies against all historical evidence. Christian communities had to continuously protect Jewish thinkers who dared break with orthodoxy, such as reading prohibited books, to save them from being killed. Others, such as Berdyczewski were forced to flee, often escaping the threat of violence, to find solace with small renegade Jewish communities who held similar ideas. It should be remembered, at least according to scripture, that Jesus Christ, who sharply broke with Judaism and established a new spiritual tradition by establishing a new relationship with God, was literally crucified at the request of Jews for his dissenting voice despite advancing a message of universal love, unconditional forgiveness, and nonviolence.185 These threats to the lives of dissenters included extremely prominent Jewish thinkers such as

185

This act makes it ludicrous that so many people, including the majority of Christians, claim that Jesus was a Jew. As Osborn can be seen to express, “The third lie . . . is the least recognized because it is the most subtle and convincing. Here Christians directly deny . . . that he is Jewish. However, since as a matter of historical fact Jesus was Jewish, a person who existed and was human only as a Jew, this denial is tantamount to a rejection of Jesus altogether . . .” This claim can be approached in two ways. If Osborn is claiming that Jesus was a Jew because he

321 Baruch Spinoza who, although today praised as an early expression of New Judaism, was for centuries demonized by the wider Jewish community and threatened with violence during how own lifetime. Historically, Jews were considered to be of lower intelligence throughout Europe because of their strict adherence to orthodoxy and self-imposed ignorance. The tendency for Jews to dominate intellectual disciplines is an extremely recent phenomenon without historical precedent. Indeed, as Leo Strauss makes clear (Strauss 1962/1997: 325), becoming intellectual leaders is nothing more than a strategy, a “way toward” “the end”, of quite recent invention, to gain control and further their heretical religious agenda. Although it is surprisingly common for Jews to claim genetic superiority because they are the “chosen” by God and for such claims to be made without attracting any criticism, James Watson, one of the scientists who was credited with discovering the structure of DNA, has claimed that, based on IQ tests, white people are more intelligent than black people and that this difference in intelligence explains their relative success. Although there is at least as much support for this claim, if not more, as there is for that being made by Jews, indeed for the same reasons, Watson has been heavily criticised for his “unfounded comments on race” and that he fails to acknowledge that these types of claims, “harm. . . our science”.186 (Begley 2019) Watson’s claims have been met with extremely vocal ridicule and open hostility from a range of people. He has personally lost academic posts, been ostracised by his academic peers, had his historical scientific contribution questioned, and was continuously hounded, because he dared to suggest that “white” people were intellectually superior to “blacks”. But these very same claims are made by many Jews all the time in published material and yet nothing is ever said or done. Indeed, what research is undertaken on Jewish IQ seems to be undertaken by those who are already convinced by the claims of the intellectual superiority of Jews and are certainly not undertaking research with the aim of discrediting those beliefs. Jewish intelligence, judging from internet discussions, is a common conversation point in

had a Jewish mother, then this is buying into the argument that Jewishness is a “race” and that argument is extremely difficult to maintain. If though, Osborn is claiming that Jesus practiced the Jewish faith then the question is why did they call for him to be killed if he was simply a practicing Jew? Jesus was not a Jew and Jews know this to be true but deliberately try to present Jesus as a Jew so that they can advance their agenda. Many evangelicals in the United States are taught that Jews are the chosen people, indeed Osborn also claims, “To know the Jews as they really are is to know their God, and to know their God inevitably entails knowing them as God’s chosen sons and daughters” who, the Evangelicals argue, simply cannot be wrong. Indeed, Osborn goes so far as to claim that we can trust that Jesus brings the truth of God because He was a Jew and therefore chosen which is to go against Christian teaching in a fundamental way. This ignores a thousand years of Christian thinking that argues Jews broke their covenant with God by refusing to recognize Jesus as the true Messiah. Many American Christians, brainwashed as they are, now advance the Jewish argument that the Jews themselves know to be false. People like Osborn, to my mind, merely display their ignorance of Judaism because much of what Jesus says is inconsistent with Judaism. Christianity is like Judaism +. For just one prominent example, Jews teach to love your neighbor whereas Jesus taught to love your enemy. 186 Genetics.

322 the Jewish community and broadly accepted by the wider community. As Senior admits, “Growing up, most children in Jewish households are at least vaguely aware of their intellectual aristocracy.” It is interesting that today Jews grow up learning about their genetic intellectual superiority while white children grow up today learning only that white people are racists that drove, and continue to sustain, historical dispossessions. It is continuously argued that white people have the benefit of white privilege and that any claim that white people have ever done anything of note is just an expression of white supremacism. Many people associate Jewish success with Jewish superior intelligence and that this is the result of the genetic superiority. Charles Murry and Jewish author Richard Herrnstein, who wrote the highly contentious book The Bell Curve in 1994, claimed that, Insofar as I am suggesting that the Jews may have had some degree of unusual verbal skills going back to the time of Moses, I am naked before the evolutionary psychologists’ ultimate challenge. Why should one particular tribe at the time of Moses, living in the same environment as other nomadic and agricultural peoples of the Middle East, have already evolved elevated intelligence when the other did not? At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily refutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people. (Murray and Herrnstein 2007) Murray explicitly claims that “the extravagant overrepresentation of Jews, relative to their numbers, in the top ranks of the arts, sciences, law, medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and the media” is because of their “elevated IQ” that is a gift from God. That an academic might argue, as though it is a proven fact, that “at the time of Moses” a people were chosen by God to have elevated intelligence because there is no other explanation is outrageous. Simply beyond accepted academic standards. To claim that Jewish IQ is a gift from God is unbelievable but to make such claims certainly does not harm one’s career. Harry Ostrer, head of NYU’s human-genetics program has publicly stated unequivocally about arguments for Jewish genetic superiority is, “. . . bad science – not because it’s provocative, but because it’s bad genetics and bad epidemiology.” (Ostrer as seen in Senior 2005) Ostrer is opposing claims of Jewish genetic superiority not because it causes offence, an argument made too often these days to silence nonconforming voices, but simply because it is wrong. Despite the questionable scientific basis for claims of Jews intellectual superiority, these sentiments continue to be regularly argued. Jared Diamond, an extremely well-respected Jewish author of the bestselling book, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, in which Diamond argued Western success was not, as many might suspect, the result of cultural or religious factors, such as Protestant Christianity, but simply the result of good fortune or blind luck. Not only is Diamond dismissive of the historical success and influence of Western civilization, about which he is highly critical, but he is also the perfect example of the tension

323 between denying any possible claim that white people might be more intelligent than black people while, at the same time, advancing the idea that Jews are more intelligent than everybody else. Diamond rightly argues that claims that white Australians are ‘genetically superior’ and more intelligent than the Aboriginal people of Australia, a claim that, as an Australian, I have never heard any white person make, is nothing more than being “racist” and is “loathsome” but he then happily reflects on the claim that genes linked to high intelligence, which I have heard several Jews claim, had been positively selected “in Jews from the intelligence putatively required to survive persecution, and also to make a living by commerce because Jews were barred from the agricultural jobs available to non-Jewish people.”187 (Diamond 1994: 291) So, claims of ‘white’ genetic superiority to explain relative success is ‘loathsome’ but to march out the old trope that it is Jewish intellectual superiority that is the result of Christian persecution that explains Jewish success appears to be an undeniable fact. Such accounts, that Jews are naturally more intelligent than anybody else, are merely confirmation for some Jews of their chosenness by God. This claim of superior intelligence serves to justify their gross overrepresentation in positions of wealth, power, and prestige without the need for positing a conspiracy theory. This is despite the general belief that “We seem to have come to a fairly general consensus I would say that claims for ethnic or racial superiority place you outside the realm of acceptable political discourse.” (Peterson 2019) This is true of white people when such a claim “places you outside the realm of acceptable political discourse” but if you are Jewish and make the exact same claim it is not only politically acceptable but worse, academically acceptable. Despite the general belief that claims of racial superiority are no longer acceptable, it continues to be the case that even those who are critical of Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power seem ready to accept the argument that Jews are simply naturally more intelligent than “gentiles”. Even the most important contemporary critic of Jewish influence, Kevin B. MacDonald, the author of The Culture of Critique, amongst other books, agrees that “High intelligence . . .has given Jews a marked advantage in their affairs with Gentiles. . . Jews exhibit a significantly higher average IQ than the population at large. It would then seem to follow that Jews would be more successful and influential.” (MacDonald as seen in Michael 2006: 792) MacDonald, apparently an “anti-Semite”, argues that Jews have an average IQ of 117, an extraordinarily high number that I have not found anybody else accept, to explain why Jews are so successful.

187

The claim that Europeans blocked Jews from agricultural jobs is one of these complex issues simplified. Jews did not want to do agricultural work for religious reasons. Catering to the demands from Jewish leadership, laws were often drafted to reinforce Jewish religious beliefs. Even if there were indeed laws blocking Jews from doing agricultural jobs it may well have been at the request of the rabbinate.

324 Gilder, a Jewish author, amongst others, goes so far as to argue that Jewish intelligence explains ‘antisemitism’ because people of lower intelligence are simply jealous of the natural gifts of the Jews that have brought them such disproportionate success. As Gilder wrote expressing this surprisingly widely held view, “Whether driven by culture or genes, or like most behaviour, an inextricable mix, the fact of Jewish genius is demonstrated. The source of antisemitism is Jewish superiority and excellence.” (Gilder 2009: 32) Despite continuous claims of “Jewish superiority”, to even suggest, what is quite obviously true, that there is a “Jewish supremist” movement is quickly shouted down as antisemitism. Gilder is certainly not alone in making such Jewish supremist claims. As Oystein also observes, “Most of the hatred directed against Jews was rooted in the fact that Jews were more successful than their neighbours. Whenever Jews excel in a given nation and dominate the economy, the brewing anger and jealousy of the natives culminate in the implementation of discriminatory laws and/or violence.” (Oystein 2012) Yes, Oystein, a black American, claims it is the “jealousy of the natives”. I thought such language disappeared with the British Raj. I could not imagine what would happen if a white Australian claimed that Aboriginal anger against the proposed “invasion” of Australia by white Anglo-Saxons was motivated by “jealousy of the natives” and yet Oystein is published making such claims. After reading these volumes, perhaps reflect back on this kind of statement, it is not because of September 11 or the global financial crisis or World War II or the intentional destruction of Western civilization, but jealousy that encourages animosity against Jews. Reading history, it seems that much of the anger directed against Jews arises from deep and legitimate concerns about Jewish behaviour towards the majority population. For just one example of the kind of triggering event that brought rage against Jews, according to the famous German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, in the early 16th century, Victor of Karben, who had been a Jewish Rabbi, converted to Christianity. Shortly afterwards, Victor publicly denounced the beliefs and practices of the local Jews. He claimed that they “evilly-disposed toward the Christians and . . . despising everything Christian”. (Graetz 1867: 2) The former Rabbi also “accused his former brethren of the most shameful blasphemies against [Christianity]”. (Graetz 1867: 2) To appreciate what is happening here, this is a former Jew familiar with Jewish beliefs and practices claiming that the local Jews, despite being treated with respect, were “evillydisposed” to Christians and committed shameful act of blasphemy at a time when blasphemy against Christ really mattered. It was only after Victor’s revelation that “all the Jews living in the region of the lower Rhine were banished”. (Graetz 1867: 2) This treatment of Jews does not seem to be the result of “jealousy”, jealousy did not seem to enter the equation, but that the local Jewish community, despite being well treated, expressed nothing but the most vitriolic hatred towards those who had proffered friendship. Despite what the former Rabbi revealed, Graetz remains critical of the Christians for exiling

325 the local Jews. This might be surprising when considering what happens in Israel and Palestine against the Palestinians even today. Exile looks like a preferred outcome to the that being enacted by the Jewish state against Muslims. Others, even people of note, have also blamed anti-Jewish sentiment on jealously. None other than Sigmund Freud claimed, “The deeper motives of antisemitism have their roots in times long past; they come from the unconscious . . . I venture to assert that the jealousy that the Jews evoked in other peoples by maintaining that they were the first-born, the favourite child of God the Father . . .” (Freud as seen in Beker 2008: 2) As an interesting thought experiment, imagine somebody claiming that “whites” were genetically “superior”, the “chosen by God’, and that people were only angry today with whites, BLM, ANTIFA, indigenous etc., because they were jealous of white people’s natural superiority. It would at least be the end of the claimant’s career and any future prospects and yet this claim is made by Jews continuously. The argument that Jews are naturally more intelligent than other races and that this explains their relative success is simply an extension of the traditional Jewish idea that Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews who lived for a period of time in Eastern Europe, are in some way “chosen”. In short, it is part of the theopolitical ideology that justifies Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power and, therefore, it should be actively denounced as what it is and no longer tolerated. Whenever a Jew claims genetic superiority, it needs to be forcefully called out for the racism that it is. Despite a range of figures being advanced regarding the degree of Jewish intellectual superiority, remembering that the average is around 100, there is proposed anything from 110 to 117. Although this does not look like a significant difference, 10 to 17 points, the upper limit of this range would put the average Jew as outperforming 68% of the population. There is very little evidence to support the upper end of this range, most people who do advance the argument that Jews have superior intelligence suggest the lower figure as being more correct. Against such claims is the fact that independent tests have been unable to replicate the same results as those supposedly achieved by Jewish researchers. One problem with the argument that Jews are more intelligent, one of many, is that it reifies the category of “race” that many Jews fought so hard to deny in the years following World War II. As has been observed, The downside of using race, whether in research or in the practice of medicine, is that we are reifying it as if it has more biological significance than it deserves. Race is an imperfect surrogate for the causative information we seek. To the extent that we continue to use it. We are suggesting to the rest of the world that it is very reliable and that racial categories have more biological meaning than they do. We may even appear to suggest something that I know is not true: that there are bright lines between populations and that races are biologically distinct. (as seen in Gilman 2008)

326 That is, argument for superior intelligence based on racial claims goes against many of the arguments made historically by Jews themselves that were being deployed to undermine exclusive immigration laws in Western countries. Today some Jews seem to have shifted 180 degrees. As Goldstein argues against the established science, Until recently, most human geneticists almost . . . disallowed discussion about genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups. Really. So many awful things had been done with genetic research in this last century that they developed a policy of “Just say no”. But there’s actually a lot of difference between groups, when you consider there are 10 million polymorphic sites on the genome. So, it’s not scientifically sound to rule out the possibility of differences corresponding to our geographic and ethic heritages. It overlooks the basic point: The genome is just a huge place. (as seen in Senior 2005) Why do so many Jewish scientist who should know better continue to argue the case for a racial theory of intelligence? The truth is that there is a need for Jews to be intellectually superior, a belief that only begins in the 19th century, in order to explain the massive overrepresentation of Jews in esteemed positions. As Jordan Peterson rightly observed in a YouTube interview, IQ results, . . . can be used to justify a kind of social hierarchy but then if you reverse it you see the reverse problem emerging as in the case of Ashkenazi Jews because they’re overrepresented in most positions of competence, let’s say, and authority, radically overrepresented, especially at the top, and unless you are willing to posit something like IQ differential that will account for it, you have to come up with a conspiratorial theory . . . The question that needs to be asked is not simply why do these people argue that they have superior intelligence, the reasons for that are rather obvious, but why do such claims not generate the kind of outrage that has been meted out to Watson? Everyone seems to have become so compliant, so disheartened, so existentially defeated, by this extremely assertive theo-political movement and its tactic of calling any criticism, any opposition antisemitism, that somebody can claim that your cultural practices and natural intelligence is inferior, and we now just quietly accept that this is true like the compliant sheep we have all become. The question is, as Hollinger explicitly raises, “What explains the overrepresentation of Jews among the rich, the powerful, and the smart?” (Hollinger 2004: 596) There are two prominent answers to this question as already observed. Firstly, it is claimed that Jews are, “. . .superior . . . genetically to African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians . . .and superior genetically also to non-Jewish whites.”188

188

Which seems to suggest that there are “Jewish whites”.

327 (Hollinger 2004: 596) Jews are simply more intelligent than everyone else and therefore they become natural leaders. As a famous Jewish historian was overheard claiming when discussing Jewish success, “I personally think it is genetic, but I would never say this in public.” This is a theme, as the reader might have already observed, that is common of this claim, Jews acknowledged that they are simply genetically superior to everyone else, but they never admit this to gentiles. Another common explanation, as already presented and the one given by Hollinger himself, is that, for one reason or another, Jews promote behaviours that are conducive to success. As Hollinger observes, Jews developed to a higher degree than other European descent groups the distinctive set of skills on which the modernization process most depended: calculation, language fluency, recordkeeping, close attention to detail, a facility for abstraction, and the mobility and flexibility required to move around and to deal with a variety of parties . . . These are the very skills that form much of the basis for our modern notion of what it means to be “smart”. (Hollinger 2004: 598) In short, Jewish traditional practices, either acquired through their unique religious practices, the demand for rational consistency in Talmudic law or that Jews were so persecuted that they had to develop unique skills to survive, are more suited to the modern condition and they are, therefore, our ‘natural’ leaders. Both of these explanations, and this is important, attribute Jewish success to internal factors, they are either more naturally intelligent or display behaviours conducive to success. There already exists research that places Jewish claims of superior intelligence in question. Nisbett has shown that even if we accept Jews are more intelligent than everyone else, as Nisbett himself does, he argues that it still does not explain the overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power, influence, and wealth. Any discussion of Jewish overrepresentation has to acknowledge the extremely high level of overrepresentation. Despite this issue not being well known and certainly not widely discussed especially in relation to other discussion of overrepresentation, such as white males. It is very difficult to navigate through a day without coming across something claiming that white males have a disproportionate amount of power and hold positions of authority and, more, that this is a problem that must be addressed. In truth, as already observed, what exactly is a “white male” is never made clear. For example, there are often discussion, at every Academy Awards, that white males dominate Hollywood but if you distinguish, as Jews do, between white Western males and Jews, which is how they think of themselves, then the entire phenomenon of white male overrepresentation in Hollywood magically disappears. In a recent survey of senior management positions in Hollywood, it was found that Jews are massively overrepresented in senior management positions in Hollywood. The largest media conglomerate in the world today is Walt Disney. At the time of writing, Disney’s Chairman was Michael Eisner, CEO is Bob

328 Chapek, Chairman of Walt Disney International was Andy Bird, Senior Executive Vice President was Alan Breverman, Senior Vice President of Global Security was Ronald L, Iden, the Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Business Development was Kevin Mayer, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer was Zenia Mucha, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer was Jayne Parker, Senior Vice President of Planning and Control was Brent Woodford, Chairman, The Walt Disney Studios was Alan F. Horn, Co-President of Disney Interactive is James Pitaro, Co-Chairman, Disney Media Networks Group and President ESPN is John Skipper, and Chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts was Thomas O. Staggs. Unbelievably, all of these Hollywood executives are Jews. Three out of 18 executive positions were occupied by white non-Hispanic gentiles (only one of which is a white male). Around 83% of Disney executives at time of writing are Jews. The Disney Empire controls Walt Disney Television, Touchstone Television, Buena Vista Television, its own cable network and two production companies. The feature film arm of the business, Walt Disney Picture Group, was headed by Jewish American Joe Roth. Walt Disney Picture Group is an umbrella organization which oversees Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures and Caravan Pictures. Miramax Films, which is also owned by Disney, was ran by the Weinstein Brothers. Walt Disney Company also owns ESPN which is an American cable sports channel whose CEO was American Jew George Bodenheimer. The next largest media conglomerate in the world is Time Warner Inc. Time Warner Inc., chairman and CEO was the American Jew Gerald Levine. Time Warner owns HBO which is the United States largest pay TV cable network. Time Warner produces feature films through Warner Brothers Studios. Beyond these interests it has a significant interest in music, Warner Brothers Records, which was headed by Jew Danny Goldberg, and publishing, whose editor-inchief was American Jew Norman Pearlstine. The third largest conglomerate in the United States is Viacom Inc. Again, Viacom Inc., was headed by American Jew Sumner Redstone (born Murray Rothstein). Viacom produces and distributes a raft of TV programs for leading networks. It has a major movie pictures arm called Paramount Pictures which was headed by Jew Sherry Lansing. The fourth largest player in the United States is Australian former Catholic Rupert Murdock’s News Corporation which owns fox Television and 20th Century Fox Films. The person who heads Murdoch’s film studio and TV production was Jew Peter Chermin. Although the fifth biggest studio is the Japanese owned Sony Corporation, the U.S. subsidiary, Sony Corporation of America, was ran by American Jew Michael Schulhof and Sony Pictures was ran by American Jew Alan Levine. These five motion picture companies, Walt Disney, Times Warner, Viacom, 20th Century Fox and Sony Corporation account for over 70% of box office receipts. DreamWorks, which drives a powerful anti-western message to our youngest children, whose logo and name are replete with Gnostic

329 Jewish symbolism and was intentionally created to respond to the success of the more wholesome Pixar, was controlled by David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, all Jews.189 As can be seen, unlike white overrepresentation, Jewish overrepresentation is a very real phenomenon and is massively disproportionate. Double the representation of a population is surprising, when you get the 30 or 40 times, which is sometimes the case for Jews, then it truly is something extraordinary and, with all things extraordinary, demanding explanation. That explanation is not supplied by increased intelligence alone. As Nisbett simply observes, “The degree of overrepresentation of Jews in intellectual realms is actually greater than would be expected on the basis of Jewish IQ.” (Nisbett 2009: 173) Nisbett found that if you attribute the Jews as having an average IQ of 110, a widely accepted figure, then this would mean that Jews should have an IQ expected of a Nobel Prize winner, 140, in a ratio of 6:1 relative to a white person. What is actually found is that Jews are overrepresented by at least x 5 to T where T is the expected average for a population. If you include people with only one Jewish parent, then the overrepresentation becomes even greater. Even if you attribute an average IQ to Jews at 115, and very few people suggest this high a figure, then it continues to be inadequate for explaining Jewish overrepresentation. As Nisbett argues, “We might also arbitrarily specify 130 as the average IQ of Ivy Leaguers, professors at elite colleges, and Supreme Court law clerks. Assuming an average IQ of 110 for Jews, we would expect them to be overrepresented by a factor of 4, far less than the approximately 15 to 1 that obtains.” (Nisbett 2009: 173) Again as Nisbett concludes, these results mean that even if one were to accept that Jews do have elevated intelligence, even levels of elevated intelligence above what is usually claimed, then it still cannot explain the disproportionate success of Jews. At least it suggests that Jews are extraordinary overachievers even given their supposed natural talents. Even if we accept, which I do not, that “Jews” are extraordinarily intelligent there continues to be the need for an explanation as to why they are so overrepresented in positions of wealth, power, influence, and prestige. Nisbett’s findings assumes that the claim that “Jews” are indeed more intelligent than other groups in the population, but this assumption is highly questionable. Allen Mazur found in his research, A Statistical Portrait of American Jews into the 21st Century, that the argument that Jews are naturally more

189

In the Jewish gnostic tradition this world we live in, with its morality and objectivity, is nothing but a dream, so the title of Dreamworks is a reference to how this organization “works” to shape the “dream”. In Freudian psychology, there is a movement from the subconscious to the “dream”. This occurs in “dreams”, as such, and are therefore open to interpretation, but it also happens in the world. You might dream about dogs, but your subconscious is telling you about sexual desires unfulfilled. The process by which the subconscious becomes coded into a dream is called the “dream-work”. This is what they see themselves doing, as all “art” does, coding our subconscious into acceptable expressions from their religious perspective.

330 intelligent as evidenced by elevated IQ performance is actually mistaken. Mazur argued that when Jews are found to have a higher IQ performance than non-Jews the results never consider variables that are known to affects IQ test performance. It has long been known, for example, that variables like the kind of IQ test taken and the income of participants in the test affect IQ performance. As Unz (2012) observes, “. . .the IQs of ethnic groups appear to be far more malleable than many people would acknowledge, and may be particularly influenced by factors of urbanization, education, and affluence.” Mazur concluded, using data from the General Social Survey (GSS), that Jews performed at the same level in a 10-word vocabulary test as people from the same socio-economic background with a non-Jewish heritage (in fact he found that Jews performed slightly worse than white, non-Hispanic participants). This is surprising as research has shown time and again that Jews perform exceptionally well in verbal tests, much worse in maths assessments190 and are average when it comes to visuospatial ability.191 (Unz 2012) So a vocabulary test should have actually favoured Jews relative to other ethnic groups. It has been found that the vocabulary intelligence test correlates extremely well to the Full-Scale IQ test (Wechsler, 1958) and the Full-Scale IQ test is generally accepted as a good measure of general intelligence (Jensen, 1998). According to these results, Jews cannot claim superior intelligence as an explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in prestigious and influential positions but that it is actually the result of overrepresentation and access to educational resources that explains Jew’s IQ test results. Jews are simply not more naturally intelligent then other populations but, at least based on IQ performance, slightly less intelligent than some demographics, such as white non-Hispanic when variables known to influence IQ results, such as income, are taken into consideration. When Jews are in positions of power and wealth then they can access all the benefits of a privileged education that improves IQ performance. As none other than Max Horkheimer observed when being critical of the skills and apparent intelligence of those with class privilege, “He has the good fortune, due to a series of accidental configurations of circumstances, to get an education and to win influence. But this good fortune then appears to him and his patients to be the result rather of greater talent and superior human worth; in other words, an inform quality rather than a social conditioned one.” (Horkheimer 1972: 94) So, as with other socially and economically dominant cohorts, Jews appear to have superior intelligence simply because they get opportunities others do not. Intelligence is not an intrinsic quality but extrinsic as a reflection of such extraordinary privileges. As will be established, the difference in the case of Jews, in contrast to the average middle-class person, is that this situation has not been just the result of “good fortune” but part of a deliberate religiously motivated

190 191

Despite their massive overrepresentation in quantitative subjects It has been argued that visuospatial IQ tests are the least affected by variables like income.

331 strategy to rule the United States and, through the United States, eventually the world. This finding is consistent with research that found that although Jews are extremely overrepresented in elite Ivy League Universities, constituting around 33% of the student body and approximately equivalent of the faculty, (Nisbett 2009: 172) it has been discovered that in 2010 and 2012 only around 4-5% of Jews reached the NMS semi-finalist lists of the top 2000 high school performers in California. This result is broadly consistent with their 3.5% representation in California’s overall population. (Unz 2012) That Jews are not performing exceptionally well in aptitude tests, such as NMS, and yet continue to be massively overrepresented in Ivy League Universities in California and elsewhere appears to be even further evidence that Jews are not exceptional academic performers, they are not exceptionally intelligent, and yet continue to attain disproportionate representation in elite universities. How is this happening? It is required that there is an explanation for why Jews are overrepresented in positions of power, wealth and prestige in the United States if claims of superior IQ have been debunked. How is Jewish Ivy League overrepresentation to be explained? The German historian Sombart (1911/2001) argued that Jews were successful in European society because their religion nurtured character traits that enabled success. He claimed that Judaism nurtured a strong work ethic and exception will-power. Lenski argued that Jews were successful because Jewish culture resembled Protestantism in possessing “individualistic, competitive patterns of thought and action linked with the middle class and historically associated with the Protestant ethic or its secular counterpart, the spirit of capitalism.” Herz and Rozen concluded in 1982 that, “success is so vitally important to the Jewish family ethos that we can hardly overemphasize it . . . we cannot hope to understand the Jewish family without understanding the place that success for men (and recently for women) plays in the system”. Thernston argued that the achievements of Jews are, “the product of cultural values that they have brought with them and transmitted from generation to generation over a long time.” Friedman (1998) argued that there has always been a stress on education in Jewish families and that the importance of education is even emphasised in one-parent families. In short, it is often argued that features of Jewish religious, often misunderstood as ‘culture’, values success more than other cultures and that this explains Jewish overrepresentation. Recently, the Professor of Modern Jewish History and Holocaust Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, Deborah Lipstadt, responded to a question about Jewish performance agreed with the “Jewish values” argument saying, I do think in the Jewish community, amongst many Jews . . .there is a great emphasis on education, there is a great emphasis on achievement, there is a great emphasis on doing well, there’s almost an expectation, and if your kid is not doing well then you’ve got to do everything in your means that is possible to ensure that will happen. So, in a society like

332 that, which has been like that for millennia, for generations, then . . . you do have a societal emphasis, a communal emphasis on achievement, on intellect, on learning . . .it’s nothing genetic, I really believe it’s a societal, communal emphasis that may have genetic implications but it’s not something inherently biological. (Lipstadt 2020) Nisbett claimed in 2009, “It would be possible to list numberless anecdotes showing that Jews value intelligence, the intellectual life, and achievement . . . But the sum of evidence about the cultural value placed on intellectual achievement would amount to only a pile of anecdotes. We have no quantifiable measure of cultural influence on intellectual achievement . . .” (Nisbett 2009: 180-181) That is, although it is continuously claimed that Jewish religion/culture both nurtures attributes associated with success and value success more than other cohorts and that it is this that explains their massive overrepresentation in positions of wealth power and prestige. Nisbett must have been unfamiliar with research undertaken by Lynn and Kanazawa (2007) which found in How to Explain High Jewish Achievement: The Role of Intelligence and Values that cultural values could not explain Jewish success. Using results from the same GSS data used by Mazur, Lynn and Kanazawa found that Jews do not particularly value practices that are usually associated with success any more than any other group. Jews did not value ‘success’ itself more than Protestants or Catholics indeed, they appeared to place less value on success than these other cohorts. This same pattern is followed with ‘studiousness’. Jews valued ‘studiousness’ less than their Protestant and Catholic counterparts. As might be expected, the study concludes, “Jews do not differ much from others in the values they would most like their children to have.” In short, as with claims of elevated intelligence, Jewish religious values can also not explain the grossly disproportionate success of people who identify as Jews. The claim made by Ariel in their online comments that “the Jewish family will insist their kids study hard, graduate from high school with grades that would earn them a college scholarship. The other family would be just as happy if a kid got a job at 15 or 16 and started earning” is simply as racist and disparaging as it first appears. This systematic racism appears systematic in literature being written by people who identify as Jews even being repeated by highly respected scholars like Lipstadt. Really what they are claiming is that everybody else, every non-Jew, every goy, is not as intelligent as they are and do not really care about the success of their children. Jews are intelligent enough to care more about our children then other demographics and that this explains why we are so much more successful than everyone else. Such cultural elitism has disappeared from Western societies, in which it was once endemic, but is certainly alive and well in Jewish circles. The reason for many Jews enthusiastic promotion of the claim that Jews are just naturally more intelligent and/or that they encourage behaviours that result in success is in order to explain Jewish overrepresentation, overrepresentation that has actually been expressed for hundreds of years in

333 Western societies despite claims of systemic racial exclusion, disproportionate success not replicated in Jewish communities in the Middle East, must be explained. Neither genetic superiority or unique cultural practices can be used to explain the overrepresentation of Jews in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States. Indeed, according to the research, Jews are actually slightly less intelligent than white non-Hispanic Americans and they value success less than their Protestant and Catholic counterparts. If intelligence and practicing behaviour known to result in success was what was determining success, as we are so often told, then white Protestants should, as they have historically, populate positions of wealth, power and prestige. As this is the case then how then can Jewish overrepresentation in the United States be explained? Peterson has already indicated a possible direction of inquiry. He suggested that if superior IQ does not explain Jewish overrepresentation, then one is forced to look at conspiracy theories. That is, if Jews do not have superior IQ or prize cultural practices that result in success then one must look into the possibility that Jews are using some kind of deliberate strategy to achieve their massively disproportionate success. The two aspects that explain Jewish overrepresentation in the United States is ‘aristocratic radicalism’ and ‘racism’. Just like revealing who was behind September 11, this conclusion is intended to entice the reader to continue reading the document. Racial Solidarity Not Adequate for Explaining Jewish Overrepresentation One of the main explanations for Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power, wealth and prestige, in the United States is that Jews have been acknowledged, through the ages, as being extremely ethnocentric or what might better be referred to as “tribal”. As Jewish writer Jonathan Silverman (2011) admitted, Since Jews stick together as a group, they pull and shove each other up the ranks of corporations and pull strings ensuring members of their race are given first shot at student openings in the major universities and top jobs throughout the areas of their dominance in every type of business imaginable. This strong ethnocentrism, the preferential treatment of people from one’s own ethnic group, has been observed amongst Jews and criticised throughout history. As Mykola Kostomarov observed in the 1860s, when reflecting on “medieval Jews” that they “cared only about their own comfort and that of their tribe”. (Kostomarov as seen in Kohut 2003: 157) The very earliest known mention of Jews by a Greek author, in the work of Hecataeus of Abdera, hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, criticised Jews for choosing to withdraw from others, showing concern only for their own kind and their brutal disregard for others. (Boys-Stones 2001: 63) Most recently authors like the Jewish historian Shlomo Sands observed that the tendency for Jews to be extremely ethnocentric and that this ethnocentrism was expressing itself in the

334 most extreme forms of racism. (Sands 2014) Here are three accounts, pre-Christian, Medieval, and contemporary, where Jews are being criticised for ethnocentrism. As observed, historically many different people around the world have been ethnocentric but Jews seem to attract special scorn even in times, such as the 19th century, when ethnocentrism was dominant, for their extreme promotion of the Judean tribe. Why are Jews so particularly ethnocentric? One common reason given for their extreme “in group” solidarity, that has been described by Jews like Sands as “Judeocentrism”, is that Jews have been historically marginalised and persecuted as outsiders for centuries and that this brutal and cruel treatment has only reinforced the belief that Jews must stand together if they are to survive at all. By this account Jews have no choice, they rely on and support each other as they will get nothing but cruelty from gentiles. As a result of this forced isolation, they have developed extremely tight bonds with each other as they have suffered equally. In short, this argument is that solidarity is required by Jews if they are to survive the terrible abuses of the gentile. Unable to find sympathy and support in the wider community, as others do, they have been forced to look inwards, relying on each other, to find the kind of solidarity necessary for them to just survive the hardships of their lives. Although the reasons for this ongoing and unique enmity is never considered, there is some truth to this claim. Jews have been treated as outsiders, they have attracted a great deal of enmity from those who they see as being below them but, as the history record shows, this has been in no small part the result of their own actions. As far as the recorded history goes, times that are often portrayed today as times of senseless violence against Jews are at least more complex than they are presented, as in their treatment by Germans during World War II, as well as time when Jews were actually treated in a more respectful manner than they had treated others, such as in the Soviet Union after World War II. So, there is some truth that, as a religious minority, they have been ostracised and because of their special mission tasked to them by God, Jews have been forced to remain apart and to support and rely on each other. As Hollinger accurately observes, “Jewish social solidarity has a long history, perpetuated by external persecution as well as by internal religious adhesives . . .” (Hollinger 2006: 143) It is not that Jews have never been “persecuted”, there is ample historical evidence that at times Jews have most certainly suffered at the hands of enraged people, but the degree that “external persecution” has contributed to Jewish solidarity and isolation is what is questionable. Between the two poles, that Jews have been forced as a result of persecution to rely on and support each other in order to survive or that Jews chose to support each other and to exclude themselves as a religious obligation, then Jews most certainly belong to the latter group rather than the former. Part of the inaccuracy of how we think about Jewish history because we are continuously told to think a particular way as part of their political strategy. Any

335 accusation that Jews have too much control in the United States and are using this control in a destructive manner is quickly met with the counter, this is just another example of Jewish persecution where “Jews are master puppeteers who threaten white America”. It is a strategy that has worked very well to silence sincere concerns and marginalize legitimate accusations. The truth is that there have been long periods of time, centuries, when Jews have not only just been allowed to survive but have thrived amongst their non-Jewish neighbours. As Vernadsky observes, . . .the Jews during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries steadily migrated to the countries of Eastern Europe and the Near East. In most of these countries they were welcomed because they were expected to contribute to the growth of industry and commerce. They soon succeeded in becoming prominent in the economic life of Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, Turkey, Moldavia, and the Crimea. In most of these countries the Jews were granted complete freedom as to their organization and cultural life. In Turkey, for example, the chief rabbi was granted the same privileges as the Greek patriarch. In Lithuania, they formed most of the customs and played an important role in commerce, both domestic and foreign. They were protected by legislation of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania; and some of them even served as cavalrymen in the troops of the Grand Duke. Others were employed in the financial administration. . . Protection was granted to the Jews of Hungary, especially by King Matthew Corvinus. The Duke of (Voivoda) of Moldavia also was favourably inclined to the Jews: and in the Crimea they had played an important part throughout the middle ages since the times of the Khazar kingdom in the seventh to the tenth century. (Vernadsky 1933: 448) Vernadsky’s account is consistent with many other accounts at different periods of time in different places where Jews have not only not suffered persecution but have been allowed to thrive in quite extraordinary ways not dissimilar to their current “blessings” in the United States. Whenever this is acknowledged in Jewish literature it is quickly followed with the claim, Jews were left unmolested and given protections and benefits because of “the perceived economic benefits of Jewish mercantile networks” or some similar claim. The point that is being made is that it is not because others might be generous, giving, caring towards Jews and their well-being, that could never happen according to their worldview, but only out of self-interest, only as a result of greed. In observing this, just like many other communities that live as religious minorities within larger populations, Jews have gone through times where, for various reasons, they have been persecuted, shunned, exiled and even killed. Judging by history, the times when Jews have been permitted to flourish far outweigh periods of persecution. This tension of narrative is acknowledged by Jews. Recently, Jewish author Gary Rosenblatt (2020) wrote, “Jews are thriving in America as never before. Ivy League universities . . . now have Jewish presidents at the helm. Joseph Lieberman, an observant Jew, was almost elected vice president in 2000 . . . Michael Bloomberg mounted a serious campaign for the presidency; Bernie Sanders remains in contention for the

336 Democratic nomination. And Jews are prominent as leaders in business, medicine, science, fashion, theatre, and other professions” yet, he claims, “Anti-Semitism goes back to the very beginnings of Jews as a people. Since biblical days, Jews have been seen as “the other”, outsiders, victims of conspiracy theories and myths that have no rational source. The pages of Jewish history are bloodstained from countless persecutions and pogroms. . . Anti-Semitism drove Jews to the New World, and it followed them there.” As is so often the case, to carry their narrative of a persecuted minority, the “success” of Jews in the United States has been greatly downplayed, no discussion of the massive overrepresentation of Jews in Ivy League Universities, and the persecution exaggerated. This is how they have dealt with the tension between their own narrative about being a persecuted minority suffering for their God to redeem the world and the reality that Jews have often been well treated and been granted extremely privileges and, indeed, have often been extremely cruel and violent to those over whom they have had power. If Jews have generally been welcomed within the realms of European societies and have been allowed to thrive then why do Jews express such uniquely strong in-group solidarity and choose to remain as outsiders? As already stated, the reason is primarily the result of religious beliefs. Indeed, their continuous claims of excessive and unique persecution is an important part of their religious identity and, therefore, does not necessarily reflect reality. Their “narrative”, to use this language, is that they are a persecuted minority, suffering exile in alien lands, loathed by everyone whom they loathe in return, as a punishment by God until their offences have been forgiven. As Halperin (2007: 15) observes, “How, for example, would a prosperous and well-acculturated [Jewish] physician or merchant in Rembrandt’s Amsterdam fit into the identity of a persecuted and harassed exile . . . under the perennial wrath of an offended God?” The reality of Jewish privilege and the narrative of persecution have not always been consistent. Indeed, even today in the United States, despite their incredible privileges and power, some American Jews still want to retain the label of persecuted. Part of the motivation behind this narrative is a way of encouraging ingroup solidarity. As Dershowitz recently wrote in his book The Vanishing American Jew (1997), The good news is that American Jews, as individuals, have never been more secure, more accepted, more affluent, and less victimized by discrimination or anti-Semitism. The bad news is that American Jews, as a people, have never been in greater danger of disappearing through assimilation, intermarriage, and low birth-rates. As can be seen from Dershowitz account, if Jews do believe that they are being well treated and there is nothing to fear then they must fear that which is most dangerous, assimilation. In a way, from a Jewish perspective, those amongst whom they live just cannot win. Either they welcome Jews and therefore endanger Judaism with assimilation or persecute Jews and therefore threaten Judaism through violence.

337 Persecution is preferred by Jews, as pre-World War II Germany confirms, or the belief in persecution, because it is then used to bind Jews together as outsiders in response to the threat of those they view as “insiders”. If Western civilization is not an expression of all things evil and cruel than it is very difficult to justify the need for its destruction. They had to ensure that their narrative was consistent with their theology and their political agenda even if that narrative went against the reality of their lived experience. This is perhaps one of the most important features of Gnosticism, they cannot let reality stand in the way of their theology because it is the theology that is “real” while “reality” is only an expression of human power. Even today, in the United States, when they live as an extremely privileged minority, Gnostic Jews spend a large amount of in-group resources ensuring that they find plenty of examples of persecution. As a result, they must emphasise and collectively remember times of actual persecution to maintain their identity as who they are, a persecuted people struggling for survival against evil forces they must ultimately overcome and destroy. One example of how history must be told by Jews to affirm their identity was the case of the Cossack uprising in the Ukraine known as the Khmelnitsky Uprising. This is an event known by every Jew around the world even though very few Gentiles would have heard about it. This uprising has been remembered by global Jewry, and even recorded in contemporary history books, as a pogrom in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were killed by Christians filled with bloodlust. As Jewish author Alex Ryvchin (2020), co-chief officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, claimed, “the Cossack Rebellion led by Bogdan Khmelnitsky in seventeenth-century Ukraine, in which hundreds of thousands of Jews were tortured and killed, demonstrated the sadism, vulgarity and blood revelry that abounds in seemingly ordinary men”. This account is far removed from actual historical events. The truth is that not only are these numbers greatly exaggerated, at most tens of thousands of Jews were killed, but that this uprising was not even primarily directed against Jews. The uprising was against Polish overlords who were cruel and demeaning to the local inhabitants. They created so much poverty by charging such high taxes that the region was being quickly impoverished driving local women into prostitution. The reason why Jews were targeted along with the Poles was not just as an expression of “sadism, vulgarity and blood revelry”, as Ryvchin asserts, but was an act of a desperate, impoverished, tortured people who hoped to overthrow their oppressors. It is that those oppressors operated through Jewish agents, who by all accounts enthusiastically functioned in these roles with excessive cruelty, that Jews were caught up in the whole affair. As an eyewitness of Jewish behaviour wrote, just prior to the Khmelnytsky War, In the towns, the Jews mistreated the Cossack, who was not allowed to keep any spirits at home – not just wine, vodka or beer, but even mash. Cossacks who went fishing beyond the [Dnieper} rapids had to give every tenth fish to the [royal] commissioner at Kodak;

338 they also had to give [some fish] to the captains to the aide-de-camp, and to the chancellor. . . Meanwhile the lazy scoundrel, the lazy Jew grew richer, riding a carriage drawn by several pairs of horses and thinking up new taxes: the ox tax, the hand mill tax, the measuring tax, the marriage tax and others, seizing [debtors’] estates. . . (as seen in Kohut 2003: 145-146) The seizure of property due to unpaid debts was so great that it was resulting in a significant transfer of wealth into the hands of the Jewish overlords. The reason Jews would not allow the local Cossacks to keep alcohol at home was because in this region, really up until the Napoleonic reforms which forbade Jews from running taverns, Jews had a monopoly over the local taverns so making the storage of alcohol illegal meant that you had to go to Jewish taverns if you wanted to drink. These taverns were seen as seedy places where immoral activity was encouraged. So, pushing family men into the taverns placed pressure on them to get drunk and to then behave in immoral ways. As it said in a Ukrainian poem, “o you Jews, You children of pagan parents . . . Why did you build three taverns per mile?” It was all these factors, various taxes and charges, exploitation, opulent displays of wealth, and being forced to use their taverns, that together motivated the Khmelnytsky Uprising. The Khmelnytsky Uprising was not a pogrom, understood as an organized massacre of Jews as Jews, but it an uprising against oppression which was being instigated by Jews. Context cast these massacres in a totally different light to how they are portrayed today. This was not an attack against a vulnerable religious minority innocently going about their business being punished because of their religious beliefs but this was an uprising against a community with a monopoly on power who were using that power to punish an entire population. The problem is that the truth of the Khmelnitsky Uprising does not fit into contemporary narratives about the historical treatment of Jews. As Gerrits observes (2009: 11), Jews have nurtured a narrative “of powerlessness and suffering” and the idea, as they have been several times in history, that they were brutal rulers over an oppressed majority certainly undermines this dominant narrative. As Mills writes, presenting the established narrative, “. . . Jews were traditional outcasts, victims of the Inquisition, pogroms, expulsions, forced conversions, massacres.” (Mills 1998: 79) Nothing here of “. . . cruel and greedy exploiters of Christians”. In truth, the entire account of victimhood disappears when context is understood. Jews are shown for who they have always been, active in their own destiny and in part responsible, as everyone is, for what happens to them in terms of how they are treated by others. What this means is that one cannot look only at oppression to explain Jewish solidarity because it is largely, although not exhaustively, a myth. It is a powerful myth that, as most myths do, has real world implications. The myth of Jewish oppression is forcefully promoted in our schools, in our media, and in our entertainment. Indeed, it is so pervasive that it is difficult to go through a single day without some exposure, in a documentary, Hollywood movie, radio program or book, to this myth being reinforced. But, as it did not really happen, it cannot be used to

339 explain Jewish ethnocentrism. Indeed, that Jews are particularly persecuted is just one aspect of a much larger religious project that does explain Jewish overrepresentation in the United States. Again, this project is not found, as it is so often suggested, in an ancient religion that began thousands of years before Christ, by their account, soiled the world, but is the product of a much more recently invention. This movement, of course, is Gnostic Judaism.

Conclusion Jewish overrepresentation in the positions of power, prestige, wealth and influence in the United States simply cannot be denied. It also cannot be denied that Jews have used this disproportionate power and wealth to achieve a particular political agenda. It is also a political agenda that cannot be easily recognised as simply benefiting Jews. This agenda includes fighting for; feminism, multi-culturalism, separation of Church and State, minority “rights”, unconditional support for Israel and opposing; the nuclear family, patriarchy, marginalizing white nationalism, encouraging “family planning” and enabling sexual license by opposing “heteronormativity”. Look at the political program of Jewish politicians, judges’ decisions, Hollywood movie content, media bias, academic publications and what is found is a clear agenda that is being continuously and forcefully promoted with a kind of zealous singlemindedness that is difficult to understand. Han Chinese also have a disproportionate amount of power in the United States and are also politically active in trying to realize that agenda but their motivation seems understandable, they are motivated by their own community’s advancement, and, at least historically, fought with much less determination. Even if one were to accept multiculturalism, unconditional support for Israel and separation of Church and State, as understandable to advance the direct interests of American Jews, how is feminism, sex education, opposition to the nuclear family, encouraging sexual license etc., contextualised easily under the umbrella of advancing the interests of Jews? When you look at Israel, the Jewish state, none of these issues are of particular concern there. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Israel is a theocracy, there is no separation between “church”, as such, and “state”192, women are certainly not particularly empowered, it is an extremely homogenous society that is struggling to be more so, has divorce rates about half that of the United States, is extremely nationalistic, is extremely racist (a Jew cannot marry a Muslim or vice versa in Israel), not particularly sympathetic to homosexuality or androgyny, and does not seem to be particularly sexually liberated. In short, the agenda being driven in

192

Even the wording of the separation, between “church and state” carries an intrinsic bias as in Jews do not go to church, Muslims to do go to Church, on Christians go to church, to separate church and state is to focus attention on the involvement only of Christianity in politics and not even religion as such. In Israel, the state funds numerous religious organization in a way that is simply outlawed in the West.

340 the United States and other Western countries by Jews is not being particularly pursued in Israel. There are two obvious questions. Firstly, how have Jews achieved such disproportionate success in the United States? Secondly, why do they pursue this particular political program? This chapter began by giving evidence supporting the claim, that nobody denies, that Jews are indeed overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States. The claim was that this overrepresentation did not matter if American Jewish political aspirations were perfectly harmonious with the political agenda of the American public more generally. It was questioned that if Jews and Anglo-Americans did aspire to realise the same political agenda then why do Jews insist on maintaining their own distinct identity and promote a particular political agenda? As American Jews do fight to retain their own distinct Jewish identity, even continuing to support miscegenation when such ideas are considered obsolete in Anglo communities, then it seems that Jews do not strive for the same political agenda as other Americans. All the evidence seems to support that conclusion. Although the political agenda of Jews has grown in popularity over the decades, in no small measure as a result of their determined efforts, it can still be shown to be not aligned with most Americans. Therefore, the questions remain, how have Jews achieved their disproportionate success in various fields of endeavour in the United States and why do they pursue their unique political agenda? This chapter argued that the two most common explanations for the overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power, wealth and prestige in the United States, superior intelligence and encouraging behaviour known to be conducive to success do not explain the massive disproportionate success of Jews in the United States. Indeed, Jews neither appear to be no more intelligent do they value traits known to result in success any more than other populations in the United States. The next chapter will begin to answer these two pressing questions. Answer them, it turns out, is not easy because the two questions, the how and the why, the means and the ends, are actually the same. Indeed, there is a certain circularity that needs to be appreciated if their strategy and outcome are to be understood. The simple explanation as to why and how Jews have achieved disproportionate success in the United States is because many American Jews now practice Gnostic Judaism and, as gnostic Jews, they worship a different God to the Christian and Orthodox Jewish tradition and want everyone else to “bend their knee” to this other God. The more everyone worships this other God, through what they believe and do, the more Jews rise into positions of power. The more Gnostic Jews rise into positions of power, the more they drive their theopolitical agenda. That the how and the why require the same explanation, both the theological commitments of Gnostic Judaism and why Jews strive to be in positions of influence need to be told together. This is the challenge that will be addressed over the next two chapters.

341

Chapter Three: The Real Reason for Jewish Overrepresentation in the United States These storms have created a darkness so readily visible that it is now almost a work of supererogation to describe it. Whether we think of the far-flung conflicts between imperialisms and of their exploitations in the domestic spheres or in the colonies, of the growth of monopoly and the concentration of wealth and economic power, of the disparity between increasing powers of production and decreasing purchasing power, of the opposition between the classes, of two world wars within our generation, of the inability of capitalism to use the full resources of the economy except in time of war or of depression and unemployment; whether we consider the “thingification” of man through the rationalization of industry and through his being made into a mere quantity of working power subject to the laws (or changes) of the market, or the “thingification” of nature through its being viewed as something only to be conquered and used as only something to be shovelled about; whether we think of the prostitution of education to merely utilitarian ends or of the complacency accepted corruption of politics through special interests; whether we think of the irresponsible and commercial vulgarization of the idea industries (radio, movie, and printing), of the increase of agitation, propaganda, and mass-production methods for the influencing of public opinion (with the consequent weakening of individuality and tolerance and responsible discussion), or of the decline of ethically powerful and uniting symbols in the democracies and in the churches – in each and all these tendencies we discern the causes or the consequences of the disruption of “automatic” harmony. This disruption has created a mass society in which reason has lost its depth and dignity (having created a huge impersonal machine which it does not control); in which societal sadism and insensitivity to suffering and injustice are taken for granted; in which the average individual is lost and lonely; in which the fear of insecurity and lack of spiritual roots produce neurosis and cynicism; in which mental-hygiene hospitals and psychiatric counselling have become major institutions; in which the sense of personal insignificance is compensated by egregious group egotism; in which a flat secularism, the spirit of “self-sufficient finitude”, prevails in church and society, exhibiting contemporary man’s blunted sense of his relatedness to the creative depths of personality, existence, and meaning; and therefore in which there is a void of meaninglessness, a yearning for meaning. 193 James Luther Adams 1948 If a society stops believing its foundational story, it cannot be transmitted to the next generation and culture is lost. Aren’t the glories of Western civilization worth more than an embarrassed shrug? Alexander Adams 2020

Introduction

193

Adams, James Luther (1948) Tillich’s Concept of the Protestant Era. In Paul Tillich (1948) The Protestant Era. Tran. James Luther Adams. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago: 283-284

342 As superior intelligence, cultural practices and ingroup solidarity are inadequate for explaining Jewish overrepresentation in positions of wealth, power, and influence in the United States then the question remains, why are Jews so overrepresented in prestigious positions of power, wealth, and influence in the United States? This chapter will argue that the main explanation for Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power, wealth, and influence, in the United States is because it is a central strategy to realize the theological agenda of Gnostic Judaism. This chapter will begin by introducing Gnostic Judaism. As most people are totally ignorant of what this religious tradition believes, this chapter will begin with a brief overview of Gnostic Judaism. This will be followed by an account of this religious movement’s origins and early historical development. It will then briefly present some basic ideas of the mystic tradition, kabbalah, with which it shares many of its beliefs to begin to develop a deeper appreciation of what and why this religious sect promotes the realization of the world that it does. The remainder of the chapter will explore Gnostic Judaism in increasing depth. It is only by understanding Gnostic Judaism that an adequate understanding of Jewish overrepresentation in the United States can be explained. Before beginning to reveal the true religious beliefs that now informs our world, it has to be appreciated that this can really only be a relatively brief overview of the beliefs and practices of Gnostic Judaism and how these beliefs inform those practices. To just consider the brief section of kabbalah, entire libraries have been devoted to explaining what kabbalah believes the account given here must, out of necessity, be an extremely brief introduction. Although later volumes will elaborate on the theories and practices of Gnostic Judaism, even that will be no better than an introduction. What will be presented here is hopefully enough to inform the reader what is happening in their world, why it is happening and who is behind it.

What is Gnostic Judaism Gnostic Judaism is a religious sect with ancient origins that has survived, often on the margins of Jewish society, in parallel with the historically dominant and more familiar Rabbinic, or “Orthodox”, Judaism. As an ancient religious movement, Gnostic Judaism has changed over the centuries, most markedly through the influence of 17th century Jewish mystic and self-declared messiah, Sabbatai Tzevi, whose significant contribution will be considered at length later in this chapter. Because Gnosticism generally, which has pagan, Christian and Jewish expressions, which are all quite different, it is difficult to give an overview of “gnosticism” as such if such a thing exists at all. As Segal observed, “Gnosticism is an extremely widespread phenomenon in the late Hellenism occurring in many different communities – Jewish, Christian and pagan – so no history of traditions in any one community can account for the whole development definitively.” (Segal 1977: 245) This diversity means, as Benjamin Walker (1983: 11-12)

343 rightly observes, “there can, therefore, be no synoptic presentation of gnosticism, and any attempt to reconstruct it must be a patchwork made up of heterogeneous material culled from widely disparate sources”. It has to be appreciated that many religious movements that we today might identify as “gnostic” simply would not have historically self-identified in these terms. As Herskowitz (2021: 2) writes, Gnosticism is very much a “blanket term referring to a collection of ancient Mediterranean sects emphasizing the radical distinction between a transcendent God and the fallen world and the secret knowledge offering salvation from the world . . .” If one were to give a general definition of gnosticism then Herskowitz’s account given here would be pretty close to the mark. In the broadest terms, gnostics believe that God is not a part of this world, had no role in creating this world and that there exists secret knowledge that will destroy this world of deception and sin bringing redemption to mankind and once again uniting man with God. The aim of this section is just an introductory overview that is intended to orient the reader broadly into the “Jewish” expression of the gnostic tradition as practiced by the political actors being considered in this volume. To start with what might be considered the beginning, the defining feature of Gnostic religious beliefs generally is that they, “proclaim a mystical esotericism for the elect based on illumination and the acquisition of a higher knowledge of things heavenly and divine.” (Scholem 1965: 1) This is to observe that redemption, according to Gnostic Judaism, is not achieved through faith, about which it is extremely critical, and certainly not realised through doing “good works”, but depends on a certain acquired knowledge – gnosis – that was passed on as “divine revelation communicated only to a few elect, morally and intellectually prepared. . .” (Simonetti as seen in Preparata 2001: 24) In the Gnostic Jewish tradition, it is because a chosen few have this special knowledge that even many who enthusiastically advance their project may not know. It is a secret knowledge. To have this knowledge is to be “enlightened” or “illuminated”. For this reason, one name that has historically been used for those who have this knowledge is the “illuminati”. This secret gnosis is believed to explain to those who are initiated how to redeem the world, God, and their fellow Man. So, gnosis is knowledge about redemption. According to Gnostic Jews, this higher knowledge is communicated in sacred texts, such as those that constitute the written kabbalah but, most especially, in the Torah. Gnostic Jews return the hatred expressed towards them in texts such as the Talmud by seeing these texts as an invention of the Rabbinate in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, under the influence of foreign moralizing beliefs, most usually identified with Babylon, and therefore not a source of ancient knowledge but something evil. By their account, the Talmud does not present the correct interpretation of Jewish Law as past down orally by Jews from the time of Moses as Orthodox Jews believe but that the Talmud is merely an expression of Rabbinic power that in turn was the

344 result of foreign interventions and therefore it should, rightly, be ignored. This is the most fundamental difference between Rabbinic or Orthodox Judaism and Gnostic Judaism. Because there is a different understanding of what is being communicated and how that information is being communicate in the sacred texts of Judaism, Orthodox Jews and Gnostic Jews have radically different approaches to reading the sacred texts. The Gnostic tradition reads Torah allegorically in a way not dissimilar to how the early Christians read their Bible. They read the meaning behind the words. So “wine” is “spirit”, “bread” is “body”, “water” is “chaos”, “Sun” is “intellectual knowledge”, “Moon”, rather ironically, is “earth” etc., etc. Indeed, it has been an accusation of Rabbinic Jews that because of this interpretive approach to reading the sacred text, Gnostic Jews have been overly influenced by Christianity. According to the Gnostic tradition, adherence to sacred Laws is not the way to redemption any more than faith or being good. The only way to redemption according to the Gnostic Jewish tradition is through the secret gnosis that has been revealed only to the select. This is why gnosis, the secret knowledge, is used to distinguish this movement. Despite its centrality to this “Jewish” movement, which values Hebrew as a sacred language, “gnosis” or “Gnosticism” is not Hebrew. Gnosis is derived from the Indo-European (Aryan) root word “gno”. “Gno” is the root word for the contemporary English word “know” (some believe that it should be pronounced the same way) and means, as those reading this text will know, to “have knowledge”. It is this secret esoteric knowledge, a little of which will be revealed in these pages, that will realize redemption, according to Gnostics, and not adherence to the traditional sacred Laws that have been so central to the Jewish tradition for millennia. It has always been expected that those who have this knowledge must keep it to only those who are judged to be ready or worthy of this knowledge. It even says on one of the Gnostic texts discovered amongst the Nag-Hammadi library, that believers are warned that “these revelations are not to be disclosed to anyone in the flesh. They must only be communicated to the brethren who belong to the generations of life.” (as seen in Frend 1976: 3031) That is, this knowledge should not be disclosed to anyone who lives and prizes this world but revealed to only to the “brethren” who value the spirit of “life”. In contrast to the Gnostic tradition, the historically dominant rabbinic tradition reads Torah, in a way similar to some contemporary evangelical Christians, as a factual historical text. So, when the Bible says that the world was created in seven days then it was in fact created literally in seven days or when it talks about the Garden of Eden then it is talking about a real “garden”, in the world, that people could go out and find. The reason that the midrash was used for interpreting Torah as a historical text, was, according to Talmudist David Halivni, to ensure that scripture would be read primarily as a legal text. (Magid 2008: 19) Those in the mystic tradition of Judaism, by contrast, wanted to preserve the texts

345 hermeneutic potential, embrace languages ambiguity in order to encounter it as a living text, while those in the Rabbinic tradition wanted to impose an authoritative reading in order to remove all ambiguity so that it could be read with the certainty required of a legal code. Again, according to Halivni, the rabbinate wanted their audience to focus on the text in a way that was secured which would then reveal Jews daily obligations while the mystic tradition wanted their audience to read through the text at the hidden meaning. Just like the world is a veil that hides reality so is the text of the Torah, if God is to be encountered then one must seek what Shaul Magid calls, “mystical gnosis” or the mystical knowledge hidden within the sacred texts. This is akin to what Gnostic Jewish scholar Jacques Derrida calls “reading between the lines” where what is written is encountered like a kind of secret message and the reader must seek out what was really intended. The Orthodox approach to reading the sacred text is to discover what is the Law that the Jewish people must obey until the advent of the Messiah while the mystic reading tries to access the knowledge hidden within the text. (Magid 2008: 19-20) These two approaches to reading the Torah, result not only in two very different readings and two very different practices but are based on two diffent different understandings of God. This claim has certainly been made from within the Jewish tradition itself. The historical reading encourages Jews to be, as Robert Alter (1995) observes, “reasonable and keenly analytic expounders of the Law” while the mythological reading, Alter seems to critically observe, opens a space for Jews as “ecstatics, ascetics, theosophists, enthusiasts, apocalyptic extremists, and magicians”. One tradition reaches out for God using reason while the other reaches out to God through high emotions. Indeed, as Gruenwald (1981: 716) observes, “. . .the Gnostic writers desired to show that Scripture had to be understood in an inverted manner: what the Jews considered as good was in fact evil.” It is in this inversion that these two quite distinct approaches seem to want such different things of humanity that they simply cannot be worshipping the same God. The person who aspires to “evil” is not worshipping the Father. Not only do Gnostics generally advance the idea of a mystical knowledge hidden within sacred texts but, traditionally at least, this knowledge is not for everyone to know but only for a very small group of select elites. As Rudolph observed, “Gnosis [is] knowledge of divine secrets which is reserved for an elite”. These “elite” were chosen to have this knowledge because they were thought to be more attuned to spirit. This movement is not like mainstream Christianity, for example, which wants everyone, even non-Christians, to understand what Christianity believes in and what it expects from its adherents, but the knowledge that Gnostic teachers possess is exclusive to only an elite vanguard, whose responsibility it then is to make others conform to the dictates of this knowledge without them even explicitly knowing anything about the true motivations for conforming to certain behavioural expectations. As Daley wrote,

346 (Gnosticism) was rather a type of elitist religious thought, present in Jewish and philosophical pagan circles, as well as a fairly wide range of Christian ones that claimed privileged access to a kind of knowledge that could revolutionize the believer’s understanding of existence. It is not necessary, indeed it might be easier, if those over whom Gnostics hope to impose their vision of reality remain ignorant of what really motivates their actions as it makes it easier to persuade people to accept certain beliefs and act in certain ways if they remain ignorant of their religious origins. It is believed by Gnostics that this special esoteric knowledge that elite practitioners of gnosticism possess can be found hidden within sacred texts. Ancient philosophical texts are also thought to carry this secret knowledge and it is believed that some authors, Plato’s work in particular, intentionally obscured their true intentions out of fear of reprisals from their community.194 This Gnostic practice of esoteric writing can be found today amongst contemporary practitioners of Gnostic Judaism. The influential and extremely dangerous Jewish political theorist, Leo Strauss, acknowledged the practice of esoteric writing that had found expression in “Jewish” authors for centuries. Strauss argued that “philosophers” were always in contest against those amongst whom they lived because the local authorities wanted to continue to advance local customs and beliefs, worship established gods, while philosophers, such as himself, had knowledge that was universal, and this knowledge was necessarily opposed to the customs and beliefs of those amongst whom they lived. As Drury observes, Strauss, . . .is a philosopher with a unique and disturbing set of ideas of which he is reluctant to give a clear and unambiguous account. Instead, he hides his own views behind a veil of scholarship. The esoteric art of writing that he attributes to the writers of antiquity is not just a hermeneutic for studying the history of political thought . . . It is a style necessitated by a particular political philosophy. In particular, it is a philosophy that considers philosophical truth to be dangerous to political order and stability. To uncover the content of this terrible truth is to discover the reasons that prevented Strauss from ever giving a clear and unambiguous account of his teachings. (Drury 1985: 315) As Drury rightfully notes, Strauss should be read esoterically, as a self-confessed “philosopher”, along with those who inspire him, because, like them, he himself hides his own dangerous Gnostic agenda that is opposed to the beliefs amongst whom he lived, shallowly hidden but easily recovered, within his texts.

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This kind of belief is expressed in contemporary Jewish thinker particularly Leo Strauss who argued that in the work of Plato, Aristotle and others there is a hidden meaning that these authors indicate by how they present the material. Certain points, Strauss argues, are not well argued or are obviously ridiculous therefore these claims need to be dismissed, they are only to please those in power, while other claims are developed at length and substantively supported. The Italian intellectual Guénon had already argued that important authors wrote esoterically to communicate ideas to the initiated. He thought writing in such a way had functioned throughout history, in the works of people like Dante, to communicate dangerous eternal truths across the generations. (see Furlong 2011: 50)

347 Esoteric writing, of course, is not a practice unique to Strauss. Many other 20th century Gnostic Jewish scholars who have been extremely influential in shaping our lives, including Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, to name just a few of the most prominent, also wrote esoterically to hide their true agenda.195 Leo Strauss most certainly advanced a Gnostic form of Judaism and, at least according to Drury, advocated for its realization as a political project. That these authors must hide their true agenda under the liberal conditions of modernity is an indication of its destructiveness. As already observed, the gnostic’s knowledge is continuously revealed to those already open to the esoteric writing of Gnostic “philosophers” in their writing if the reader is watchful for the message. It is for this reason that textual evidence is readily available, especially when text was the only way to communicate broadly, revealing what they hope to achieve. One method used by esoteric writers, as Strauss himself observes, to reveal their own agenda without attracting sanction from those amongst whom they live, is to use the voice of others, to read others in a non-conventional way so that is not easily accepted as accurate. This novel interpretation allows the astute reader to understand that what is being proffered is not the subject’s theories but the author’s position. Strauss can be read as using the voice of Farabi to present his own understanding of the role of the philosopher in the city. Strauss wrote that “We may say that Farabi’s Plato eventually replaces the philosopher-king who rules openly in the virtuous city, by the secret kingship of the philosopher who lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which he tries to humanize within the limits of the possible.” (Strauss as seen in Drury 1985: 319) The project that Strauss attributed to Farabi, to rule as a secret philosopher-king who lives within the imperfect city to manipulate the citizens in secret to realize their own vision of how the world should be is exactly how Gnostic Jews, like Strauss, achieve their agenda. Although Jews are indeed massively overrepresented in government in the United States, this is not where their seat of power primarily rests. Government is too accountable, it is too public, it is too scrutinized. The truly powerful Gnostic Jews rule, as Strauss claims Farabi saw in the work of Plato, through a “secret kingship . . . who lives privately as a member of an imperfect society which tries to humanize” it. Much more can be achieved for generations by writing a school curriculum filled with Gnostic beliefs for an entire state or even an entire country than can be achieved sitting in parliament. Gnostic Jews need to be overrepresented in various fields, but they are not

195

Drury identifies ways that Strauss believed esoteric writing might be discerned, this included, “contradictions, principles frequently stated but silently contradicted by upholding an incompatible view, inexact repetitions, pseudonyms, strange expressions, a frequent use of technical language, ambiguity of expression and other infelicities of style.” (Drury 1985: 317) One cannot help but laugh when looking back at the earlier list of my suggestion of esoteric writers and find that they are all guilty of using many of these techniques.

348 necessarily the institutions tasked with power and this is so that they can rule in secret. There could be no better account of just how the Gnostic Jews believe they should rule our world today and, indeed, why than that given by Strauss. Their project is not simply, as a moral project, to make the societies in which they live better, but to literally “humanize” it. To make it respond to human needs and human aspirations so that it no longer responds to the higher calling of God. They believe that they have a special relationship with God in being allocated the responsibility to create the world, it is their task to “humanize” all societies, to realize the era of the “Anthropocene”. In truth the Western world today has become a theocratic “cryptarchy” in which all real power is retained by Gnostic Jews. Most readers of Strauss, even today, do not know that his reading of Farabi is an instruction to Gnostic Jews in the United States about how they should “assimilate” in order to “humanize” what they think of as a broken world and this ignorance results in some terrible interpretations of just what Strauss is arguing. The ultimate aim of all Gnostics in their secret rule, like Strauss etc., is to reunite Man with the distant God and nature or to redeem both Man and God. Gnostics perceive the human condition as being utterly isolated from God or what they call galut. As a result of this alienation from God, humanity is also alienated from the “real” world or what might better be understood as Nature196 and, therefore, unable to act “morally” in the usual sense of acting morally, to follow a rational decision on the right course of action.197 As Lazier (2003: 619-620) observes, “This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from the material, sensual universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge.” Because of this ignorance of God, a God unknown and unknowable, which grants the experience of the good as constitutive of the world worthy of the name, everything that humanity does, everything that is, is evil. As Scharf (emphasis added 2019) observes from a Christian perspective, “Gnosis is the ultimate form of heresy because it denies the potential goodness of the world, it is radically exclusionary, and worst of all: it denies the possibility of dialogue.” It is this last point why Gnosticism is so particularly toxic to the Christian tradition, a tradition where some, including myself, as will be elaborated upon, understand Jesus as symbolic of logos. Christianties opposition to gnosticism was so great that it almost defined itself as being everything that gnosticism was not. Gnostics believe that because the world is evil then any act in that world, any act harmonious with that evil world, is itself also evil. Writing this book, for example, would be an act of evil because it undermines their project. As Wink wrote of Gnosticism generally,

196 197

I will use a capitalized “N” when referring to that which Gnostic Jews prize and how to uncover. Think of Marx’s notion of alienation in his own political economy. It is the notion of galut.

349 . . .the Demiurge represents the alienated ego, while at the level of the collective unconscious it represents the whole alienating world in its forgetfulness of the Source of life. . . The alienated personal ego of “this world” is thus the socialized product of the Domination System, just as the alienating spirituality of the Domination System is the product of millions of alienated egos trapped in an illusory fantasy. The Demiurge is thus at once the unredeemed personal ego and the world-atmosphere of hybris that plays itself out in the wars and conflicts . . . (Wink: 22) So, to adjust oneself to the world, to become “well adjusted”, is to adjust oneself to evil, to simply accommodate evil, to become, in the eyes of gnosticism, evil. Gnostic Jew Erich Fromm, who broke with some of the beliefs of Gnostic Judaism attracting the ire of many of his peers (See Kamau 2012) gives voice to this view from a psychoanalytic perspective, It would of course be a mistake to assume that the foregoing remarks imply that only those who are “neurotic” have failed in this task of self-emancipation, while the average well-adjusted person has succeeded in it. On the contrary, the vast majority of people in our culture are well adjusted because they have given up the battle for independence sooner and more radically than the neurotic persons. They have accepted the judgement of the majority so completely that they have been spared the sharp pain of conflict which the neurotic person goes through. While they are healthy from the standpoint of “adjustment”, they are more sick than the neurotic person from the standpoint of the realization of their aims as human beings. (Fromm 2013) Fromm, at time of writing in the aftermath of World War II, was claiming that everyone in society is enslaved, by this he specifically means Christian societies, because they are well-adjusted. It is adjustment to evil that has caused them to compromise their true selves. These people have accepted “evil” as good and are therefore more sick than the actually person who is a diagnosed as neurotic. The only healthy path is to rail against norms, to shatter the accepted good life that has historically dominated Western civilization and made it globally dominant and instead embrace, as we have indeed today, the Gnostic lifestyle and life according to our natural drives. As Gnostic inspired German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig claimed, giving voice to this belief, “Every human act becomes sinful as it enters history – although the actors intend otherwise, the morality of an act is nullified by the material world of necessity.” (Rosenzweig as seen in Mendes-Flohr 2019: 73-74) Rosenzweig is observing that every action, no matter the sincerest motivations to be a “good” actor, to follow one’s “faith”, to live in accordance with the society’s norms, it is necessarily made evil, from his Gnostic perspective, because the real world, the one veiled by this world, makes such acts “sinful”. As Wink wrote, “The fundamental mythic insight here is that human beings are socialized into an alienating and alienated world that is antithetical to the emergence of true selfhood and, in fact, is positively hostile to it.” (Wink: 16) Being “good” in this tradition, is to in fact be “evil”, no matter the purity of our motivations, because the world in which we live is an

350 “evil world”. By contrast, in Christianity, “The resurrection of the flesh . . . presupposes that matter has been created by God and is good.” (von Balthasar 1981) This will be elaborated upon, but for now it is important to note that “Earth” in the Jewish Gnostic system, unlike the usual account given in the Western tradition, is active, in the same manner as the God of heaven, and not inert as the Western tradition teaches. To be good according to Gnostic Judaism is to be evil. To act against the natural demands of the earth is, as God, by definition evil. The reason why this position negates the possibility of dialogue is because dialogue assumes the possibility of agreement based on a shared experience of the world. For agreement to be achieved it must be believed that one is in a shared, true world. Dialogue “works” only in so far as there is a presupposed shared reality where a shared truth, a universal truth, can be discovered. Gnostic Jews deny the very possibility of the universal outside if being an expression of oppression. As Sands writes of Gnostic Jew Lyotard, he . . . could not continue to cling to the vestiges of hope, still fundamentally universal, that persisted in Foucault’s theoretical work: individual creative activity remained the only intellectual function that could oppose the existing order. Since all universalism, according to Lyotard, ends up in a totalitarian obsession . . . (Sands : 2018) The only possibility for a shared experience, to be truly shared is if it is not an expression of power. Something totalitarian. Dialogue though is only possible if God is part of the conversation and His decision is universally binding. That is, for what might be termed “objective presence” there must be a view from nowhere, the universal third “person”, and such a position can only be inhabited by a God. Mortal man must, as mortal, inhabit a space, exist in a place, but a God, as a God, inhabits no place, exists in no space, and manifests in His being the view from nowhere. According to Gnostic Jews, as there are no shared experiences, without a shared experience of God, then there is no reality which might bring dialogue to agreement. One of the most important things that we must recover if we are going to address Gnosticism intellectual, which is where the battle must be fought, is that agreement is never achieved in a two-way conversation between two mortals, as they have only their own perspective, but must always include another, a third party which is God, and it is God that the conversation is trying to reach. It is only by harmonising with God that mortals can persuade each other because that is the event of truth. From a Gnostic, who denies the possibility to this kind of communion with God, there is no truth beyond this realty as an expression of power therefore there simply can be no dialogue. Dialogue becomes recast as propaganda or rhetoric. Gnostic commitments have historically manifested two distinct responses to our alienated condition. As Lazier observes, “Such anti-cosmism [belief that the world is evil] could license both ascetic

351 retreat from the world as well as an antinomian descent into the worldly abyss. . .” (Lazier 2003: 620) That there are two possible responses to Gnostic beliefs was also noted by Preparata who observed that Gnostic, . . . emancipation can only be attained by way of separation, alienation, withdrawal from the world—a withdrawal that may take the form of asceticism, or, more interestingly, of a sovereign disregard for all human law, something describable as a self-satisfied sentiment of “perfection” immune to the scruples of ordinary, pious men. In other words, all sorts of “infamies” are permissible to the “perfects” so that they may free themselves . . . (Preparata 2011: 24-25) Interestingly, some, such as Hans Jonas, argue that very early expressions of Christianity were also Gnostic. As Blumenberg claims, “The Gnostic trauma of the early centuries of the Christian era is buried deeper than the trauma of the bloody persecutions that contributed to the glory of testimony to the new faith.” (1985: 126) That Christianity at any time was truly Gnostic is questionable but what is known is that early Christianity, although antinomian, responded to the human condition with a soft “ascetic retreat from the world”. It was only “soft”, because Jesus certainly did not permanently withdraw to the desert and live a life without food or material comfort. Jesus did not simply deny the material world and bodily comforts in order to satisfy the demands of God. Compare the behaviour of the Cathars, who were a Christian Gnostic sect of the 11th and 12th centuries, who refused to eat any food that was the product of procreation and believed that any procreation, including human procreation, was inherently evil, to Christianity’s call for sexual restraint where sex is to be enacted only between a married couple in love with aim of procreation. Jesus lived his life amongst the people, with his disciples, leading what reads as a reasonably “normal” life, given His responsibilities, without unnecessary suffering but also without any excess. In contrast to both the Cathars and Christians, Sabbateanism, which, as will be discussed, informs contemporary Gnostic Judaism, adopted the other and opposing trajectory available to Gnostics, it became an anti-nomian “descent” into the dark abyss of sensuous pleasure, sexual licence, if not perversion, drug induced ecstasy, and, ultimately, praising every base desire as noble thereby hoping to transcend this evil world. As King observes, “Their basic conclusion was God did not create the world and humanity . . .[and]. . . that one should love the spirit and hate the flesh, a view that could only lead either to a false ascetic rejection of life or to a libertine flaunting of traditional mores.” (King 2005: 8) According to the later Sabbatian tradition that emerges in the 17th century, it does not simply embrace sin as sin but embraces sin as a strategy to both destroy this evil world and renew their relationship with God. That is what is meant by redemption through sin. Consistent with the secret knowledge, known only to the “elect”, humanity can be redeemed by uniting what has been ripped apart, by uniting both Man with God

352 and earth with heaven. The way that Man can access God is by first revealing the “earth” upon which we live, the nothingness, the void, the abyss, which is prior to this world and the only knowable reality. (Mendes-Flohr 2019: 71) As Gnostic Jew Meyer wrote, “Humans in this world are imprisoned, asleep, drunken, fallen, ignorant. They need to find themselves – to be freed, awakened, made sober, raised, and enlightened. In other words, they need to return to gnosis.” (Meyer 2009: 3) These gnostic redemption narratives, at least since the influence of Persia on the exiled Jews, requires at least a, if not, as is argued by the contemporary Gnostic movements today, numerous messiahs.198 It was by “. . .recognizing the significance of nothingness, Israel has access to a different, more profound, and elemental wisdom” than other nations. (Boyarin & Boyarin 2002: 2) Until this insight is appreciated by all nations, until Mankind is redeemed by being united with the female immanent aspect of God, there remains a gulf between a silent, unknown God and an isolated, vulnerable, lonely Man. It is the burden of Gnostic Jewish elites, because they alone carry the spark of God, to once again bridge this gap between Man and God, to mediate the relationship between Man and God giving them a way of ascension and deliverance from worldly entrapment. (Preparata 2011: 24) As Rudolph observes, “The knowledge of God’s mysteries guarantees salvation; knowledge . . . and redemption are closely connected.” (Rudolph 1987: 278) In the Jewish Gnostic tradition, perhaps through the influence of Zoroastrianism, it is the task of the messiah to bring humanity to God. There is certainly a lot of evidence to suggest that the very earliest expression of “Christianity” was inspired by an already existing Gnostic spirit. As Carus wrote “Christiantiy is a branch of the gnostic movement”. Such an account would most certainly explain the many, so called, “Christian Gnostic” movements that were being practiced around the Mediterranean in the first few centuries AD. As Segal observes, It may be that Christians and Gnostics . . . are entirely different movements which were put together by the rabbis because of certain gross similarities. Yet, complete separation of the two communities should not be seen as probable because, in characterizing Gnostics as Christian heretics, even the church fathers admitted an intimate relationship between the two. (Segal 1977: 244) Early Christian critics of gnostic Christians thought, most famously Irenaeus of Lyons, that these movements could all be traced back to Simon Magus. (Burns 2019) But to observe that Christianity began within Gnosticism before being increasingly influenced by the Graeco-Roman tradition that was truly “Western”, does not mean, as some then conclude, that “Jesus was a Jew”. Some even claim that Jesus

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A messiah according to contemporary Gnosticism is just like a philosopher was thought to be in ancient Greece, somebody between God and man who has the secret knowledge and must manifest that secret knowledge in the world. Messiahs, so understood, are not only associated with philosopher’s but also the god, Hermes.

353 was really a Gnostic Jew and this claim motivated many of the narratives that claim that “Jesus was a Jew”. There are actually very few Christian theological texts today which do not assert at some stage the supposedly “undeniable truth” that Jesus was a Jew. As Kreeft unequivocally makes clear, The first fact we must know about Jesus to understand his metaphysics – in fact, the one fact that is the necessary historical key to understanding everything He says, and the fact that has been denied, forgotten, ignored, or downplayed by every heretic in history, in one way or another – is the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He was not a Gnostic or a New Ager. He was not a Modernist or secular humanist. He was not a Marxist or socialist. He was not a Platonic philosopher. He was not a Brahmin pantheist. He was not an Aryan racist. He was not a social worker or a pop psychologist or a pagan myth or a magician. He was not a Democrat or a Republican; in fact he was not an American. He was not a libertarian or a monarchist or anb anarchist or a radical or a neo-conservative. He was not a medieval or a modern man. He was Jew. The main reason for claiming Jesus is a Jew is to impose a particular reading onto Jesus’ teachings no matter how such a reading seems to require that Jesus’ words and actions get twisted into something that seems quite alien to their intent. Christians, who thoroughly accept the Jesus is a Jew story, actually must become Jews themselves and then, in totally ignorance, turn Christianity into something that serves another agenda. As an anonymous web site article concluded when discussing the degree to which Jesus might be considered a Jew observed, “Disassociating Jesus from his ethnic roots can lead to violence toward Jesus’ own people.” That is, if Jesus is not recognised as a Jew, then this might result in harm coming to the Jewish people. Truth is never well served when it is advanced for a purpose. A number of advocates for this position seem to be quite explicit in claiming that there is a need to recognise Jesus’ Jewish origins so as to protect Jews. That is, Jesus should be recognised as a Jew not as a statement of fact but, in instrumental terms, in order to protect Jews. This argument is advanced by converted Jews to Christianity (supposedly), Rebekah Simon-Peter, who forcefully argues in her book The Jew Named Jesus, that acknowledging Jesus as a Jew means, “if we adore a Jesus who was a Jew through and through, then it would follow that the church ought to treat Jews with love, respect, and honour. . . What a gift this would be in our multicultural, multifaith, multiethnic, multilingual world!”199 (Simon-Peter 2013: 22) What a gift to Jews to be “honoured” by Christians. Here is the perfect expression of a “Christian” who advances the “Jesus is a Jew” argument that then openly advances the Gnostic Jewish agenda. As will be explored at length, no true Christian could aspire for a “multi-cultural”, “multifaith” world. This is to observe that in Simon-Peter can see the necessary consequences of accepting Jesus as Jew.

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The exclamation mark is part of the original quote.

354 But insisting that Jesus is a Jew that has been misunderstood by the ignorant goy for centuries presents as a challenge to Christians, as Simon-Peter emphasises, as it means that Christians must learn the true Jesus by first learning about Judaism. Of course, not only Protestants want to reinvent Jesus as a Jew. Many Catholics also want to acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew. As Leon Bloy wrote, Suppose that there were people round you continually speaking of your father and mother with the utmost contempt, who had nothing to offer them but insults and offensive sarcasms, how would you feel? Well, this is just what happens to our Lord Jesus Christ. We forget, or rather we do not wish to know, that our God made man is a Jew, nature’s most perfect Jew, the lion of Judah, that his mother is a Jewess, the flower of the Jewish race; that the Apostles were Jews, as well as all the Prophets; and finally, that our whole sacred Liturgy is drawn from Jewish books. In consequence, how may one express the enormity of the outrage and blasphemy of vilifying the Jewish race. (Bloy as seen in Berdyaev 1954: 1) When critically scrutinized, this is a strange argument to be made by a Catholic because Bloy seems to be implying, at least in the first sentence, that Jesus had both a Jewish mother and father when, of course, unless God is indeed a Jew, Jesus’ father was God. What this passage shows is that a lot of the established Christian tradition would need to be rethought if it were to be accepted that Jesus was indeed substantively a Jew. The argument that Jesus was a Jew rests upon a fairly recent conception of “Jewishness”, as clearly expressed by Bloy, that is only about 150 years old. This is thinking about “Jews” in terms of being a race and not a religion. As Quispel (2015: 60) wrote expressing this view, “. . .a Jew who is alienated from the religious traditions in which he was brought up remains a Jew, because he belongs to a specific nation: a Dutchman who revolts against his Calvinistic background remains Dutch.” But can we draw such simple conclusions to the way people thought 2,000 years ago. Even in the late 19th century, unlike today, to identify Jews in racial terms remained highly contentious. As late as the rabbinical conferences held between 1844 - 1846, it was affirmed that Judaism was a religion and not a nationality. (Rosenstein 2018: 258) Indeed, the need to embrace the term “Semite” in a racial context was originally devised by Jews as a way of continuing to identify as “Jews” even if they no longer practiced the Orthodox Jewish faith. It has been argued by Jews for centuries that if a Jew converts to another religion, then not only is that individual lost but also all of his/her descendants. Historically at least, one could not remain a Jews and not be Jewish. Conversion was, in part, so particularly demonized in the Jewish tradition because it presented as an existential threat. As Gnostic Judaism emerged in the late 19th century, the idea that being a Jew was a racial term meant that Jews could more easily reject Orthodox Judaism while remaining a Jew. The invention of “Semite” at the time, now understood as a racial term, was a revolution in thinking as it enabled Jews to embrace the unorthodox practices of Gnosticism while retaining their identity as

355 Jews. This generation of Jews was so successful at conceptualizing Judaism in racial terms that the term Semite is no longer required because everyone accepts that Jews remain Jews even if they no longer practice Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the One for Israel movement, which tries to persuade Jews that Jesus was the Jewish messiah, going so far as to call Jesus by his Hebrew name ‫ ישוע‬or Yeshua (Joshua), even speak of “Christian Jews”.200 Such a claim would once have been thought to be as impossible as saying a “square circle”.201 Indeed, in a recent survey, 34% of American Jews believed that one remained a Jew even if they accepted that Jesus was the Messiah. (DeSilver 2013) The same survey found that 62% of all Jews and 83% of non-religious Jews thought that Jewishness was the result of ancestry unrelated to religion. (DeSilver 2013) Jewishness has moved in the opposite direction of just about every other identity in affirming racial identification at a time when most of the world is denying race. This understanding of Judaism in racial terms might explain why under Israeli domestic law there is no such thing as an “Israeli”. Israeli citizens are registered according to their le’om or “ethnic identity” as “Jew”, “Arab” etc., while none are identified as Israelis. Importantly, the early Church scholars, drawing inspiration from an older Greek tradition, did not think of Jesus as a Jew. The early Church “Fathers” differentiated between a very ancient religious tradition that they identified as “Hebrew” and a post-Mosianic “Jewish” tradition. The idea of a “JudeoChristian” was alien to classical Christian thought even in its very early expression. What the early Christians were trying to observe is a distinction between the authentic people who were blessed and “chosen” by God, who might be thought of as “good Jews”, who were identified as Hebrews, against those who were at that time called “Jews” who had fallen into evil practices and had lost God’s favour. {Inowlocki 2006: 107) This loss of favour is said to have occurred, at least according to the author of The Epistle of Barnabas, when Jews turned to false idols causing Moses “to cast the two tablets out of his

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This is most probably incorrect because “Jews” at the time of Jesus did not speak Hebrew and had not spoken Hebrew for centuries. The people who lived in Judea at that time probably primarily spoke Western Middle Aramaic, which is now, unlike Eastern Aramaic, no longer spoken. Van Staden has argued that people in this region would most probably have been bi-lingual in speaking both Aramaic and Greek. The Jewish historian, who wrote around this time, Flavius Josephus, refers to several Jewish people actually using the koine Greek version of Joshua (which originally meant “YHWH is Salvation”) Ἰησοῦς (Iesous) which is then Latinised as Iesus. Iesus is rightly pronounced in English as Jesus. 201 The racial understanding of being a Jew that is advanced in so much published material is not consistently applied. In 1962 Oswald Rufeisen who was formerly a Polish Jew but had sincerely converted to Catholicism, sought to immigrate to Israel under the “right of return” laws in 1948. Rufeisen argued, “my ethnic origin is and always will be Jewish. I have no other nationality [except we may assume Polish but . . .] If I am not a Jew, what am I? I did not accept Christaintiy to leave my people. I added it to my Judaism. I feel as a Jew.” The Supreme Court of Israel ruled in the case that by converting to Catholicism Rufeisen was no longer a Jew and therefore had forfeited his right of return.

356 hands, and their covenant was broken, in order that the covenant of Jesus the Beloved should be sealed in our hearts in hope of this faith”. (as seen in King 2005: 41) As De Lange concludes, “Ioudaios [Jews], in many mouths, was a sneering expression, even perhaps a term of abuse; Hebraios [Hebrews] on the other hand, was a liberal’s word, leaning over backwards to give no offense.” This distinction is evident in Aristides Apology where he wrote, “Thus Jesus was born of the race of the Hebrews . . . he himself was crucified by the Jews.” (Aristides as seen in Inowlocki 2006: 107) Jesus was a Hebrew, one can affirm that, living in God’s grace like the pre-Mosianic people living in Egypt, whereas the “Jews”, those who were ruled by the fallen Jewish tradition, killed Him. The word “Jews”, at this time, was used almost exhaustively by the Christian tradition in a polemical context, a term of abuse, to label those that Christianity vehemently opposed whereas Hebrew designated a “good Jew” who lived broadly in agreement with the Christian tradition. (Inowlocki 2006: 108) Just like Christianity, the early “. . .Hebrews had a spontaneous intuition of both piety and virtues and did not need any law whereas the Jews were subject to Mosaic law.” (Inowlocki 2006: 113) Boys-Stones (2001: 62-63) gives an account, as recorded by the Greek historian Hecataeus, where the earliest Jews lived alongside early Greeks in Egypt. These early Jews living in a “Golden Age” did not possess wisdom but were simply naturally wise. This was how the Greeks understood the Golden Age. As von Schubert wrote of these times, At the dawn of time, there was an age of gold when man was at one with nature, when the eternal harmonies and laws of nature were more clearly expressed in man himself than they have ever been expressed since. Even today, we regard those moments in which our being is at one with the whole of nature as instants of perfect bliss. After leaving the cradle of civilization in Egypt, the original home of philosophy, the Greeks embraced all they learnt from the Egyptians and went on to develop that learning further into the rich Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. By contrast, the Jews “were embittered by their experience [in Egypt], and became increasingly misanthropic, retreating instead into a new theology of isolation”. The Jews had shared in the same origins as the Greeks, were exposed to the same blessings, but they had chosen to reject that rich tradition and instead developed a worldview that wanted nothing but to destroy everything such a positive worldview might manifest. As a result of this misanthropy, as displayed by their ancestors in Egypt, the Greeks thought that Jews should not be tolerated to live amongst them because they were so antagonistic to everything that the Greeks held sacred. (Boys-Stones 2001: 63) The important point of this early distinction between Hebrew and Jew is that the features the early Church attributed to the Hebrews, who lived according to conscience with knowledge of “the good”, are characterisation consistent with later developments in Christianity but inconsistent with Gnostic Judaism. The Graeco-Christian tradition speaks of an emergent religious belief, as Augustine would voice, one that believes that the cosmos is

357 good, that the creator God is the Father and the highest God, and that God is good. All this GraecoChristian beliefs are fundamentally opposed by Gnosticism. As Jonas observes, A Gnosticism without a fallen god, without benighted creator and sinister creation, without alien soul, comic captivity and acosmic salvation, without the self-redeeming of the Deity – in short; a Gnosis without divine tragedy will not meet specifications. For those are the things we have to account for when truly asking for the origins of Gnosticism. (Jonas 1963: 293) This affirms that claims of a “Judaeo-Christian” tradition are of recent invention, in the years following World War II, and was created as a term of politics not of fact. As Carus (2007/1909: 11) observed at the turn of the 20th century, rightly capturing, if we like it today or not, the historical relationship between Judaism and Christianity, “Judaism refused to recognise Christianity as its child, and we think rightly so. The strangest thing about it is that the aversion is mutual. The Jews looked with disdain upon the Gentiles, and the Gentiles held the Jews in contempt”. What changed after the Second World War was not a change in theological convictions by Jews who now wanted to recognise Christianity as having legitimacy but that claims of a shared history served the dual political purpose of appearing to lessen the differences between Christianity and Judaism at a time when Gnostic Jews were focusing their attention on the United States while helping to ensure that, despite Gnostic Jewish attempts to undermine the traditional values of the United States, no harm would come to people who did identify as Jews. Gnostic Judaism is a very different religious tradition not only to rabbinic Judaism, but Christianity. It really is the direct reversal of Christianity. That Gnostic Judaism is different from the Orthodox tradition must be appreciated and widely known if the West is to effectively respond to our current condition of crisis. This difference is nicely captured in the hermeneutic tension in a statement made by gnostic psychoanalyst Carl Jung, “It is the experience of the fullness, the pleroma, of Being that matters.” (Jung as seen in Quispel 1981: 26) Why this statement is so revealing is not simply what Jung might have meant by this claim but the inherent ambiguity in the claim in terms that it can be read in two opposing ways depending if it is read by a gnostic or by a Christian. In the Christian tradition, Jesus is the fullness or the completeness, in Greek pleroma, of Being in terms of being the true messiah who unites heaven and earth as an act of grace, thereby allowing humanity to know the Father. As it says in the Epistle to the Ephesians, we are told “that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth”. In Christ, heaven and earth are united thereby granting knowledge of the Father. As Irenaeus (as seen in von Balthasar 1981) wrote, “He [Jesus] united man with God and brought about communion between God and man.” It was with this union, Heaven and earth, man and God, that this reality is understood as the best of all possible worlds. Whereas in the

358 Gnostic tradition, pleroma of Being, if this can actually be said, requires overcoming the sin of the material world thereby overcoming all opposites, good/evil, male/female, truth/lie returning to the primordial unity or oneness of Nature. Christianity and Gnosticism both agree that “it is in the experience of pleroma of Being that matters” but they are both seeking very different outcomes in affirming this statement. Christianity is looking to heaven, looking to the good with the hope of overcoming evil, and in this pure light of goodness, as made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus, guided by faith, the Kingdom of Heaven will be realised on earth. It is to affirm the world, aspire to become more civilized, to progress towards a better future. By contrast, gnosticism demands we overcome this evil world, destroy civilization as something barbaric, and return to Nature, the Garden of Eden, and be guided by our instinctual drives, our Id, and there the pleroma of Being will be realised. As Bloom observes, Gnosticism hopes “to create a freedom out of and by catastrophe”. (Bloom 1981: 62) Bataille characterises Gnosticism as expressing “love”, “a peculiar, hopeless love, but for destruction.” (Preparata 2011: 38) Christianity, by contrast, hopes to create, create a freedom of conscience. This is the basic choice with which we all face, and it is the task of this volume to make this choice explicit and as clear as possible so that all people can decide for themselves. Gnostic Judaism is primarily destructive, it believes that it is up to man to redeem the world for God, and it believes that the world that we live in, the world around us, is nothing but an evil veil restricting access to God and therefore must be destroyed. It is this religious sect that has come to dominate the world by moving those sympathetic with its project into positions of power. To simply recognise an outline of what they believe does not give an adequate account of why they want to rule the world or how they are, but it does take the initial step in understanding why particular Jew’s act in such strong solidarity and introduces the reasons for their collective actions.

Origins of Gnostic Judaism With a basic understanding of what Jewish Gnosticism is, it is informative to understand the long road Gnostic Judaism has followed on its way to becoming the dominant religious tradition in the world today. What are its origins? How has it survived? Gnostic Judaism has ancient origins but just how ancient those origins are is what remains contested. The first known expression of Gnostic Judaism, in contrast to conjectured, was practiced alongside the pupate Rabbinic tradition of Judaism in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. As with other times when Gnostic Judaism has risen into prominence, this was generally a time when Gnostic religious beliefs were widely accepted outside of the Jewish tradition, and the Jewish form of Gnosticism existed in parallel with other Gnostic traditions, Christian and Pagan. This period might be referred to as the First Gnostic

359 “Revival”. The point of contestation between Rabbinic and Gnostic expressions of Judaism was that the Rabbinic, at that time known as “conservative”, “observed the letter of the Law” while the Gnostic tradition, which at that time was known as the “philosophers”, “regarded the letter of the Law as peripheral”. (Pearson 2006: 12) The early centuries of the Christian era202, when we know that this contest within Judaism was already under way, was a period of turmoil and change for the Jewish people generally. In 6 A.D., Judea, which had at that time been a Roman vassal state for 40 years, was finally incorporated into the Roman Empire as part of a fully-fledged province. The motivation for this annexation was not because Rome was particularly interested in Judea, the region contributed little to the Roman coffers and it was viewed as a cultural backwater, from a Roman perspective, on the fringes of civilization. The value of Judea was geographic, it lay on the land route to the extremely wealthy and much prized province of Egypt. In stark contrast to Judea, the revenue from Egypt was extremely valuable. Egypt was at that time, as it had been for centuries before and would continue to be for centuries to come, an important and reliable source of food for the entire Mediterranean and, therefore, generated a great deal of wealth. To give some indication of the economic importance of Egypt, by the mid-1st century AD, it has been estimated that 2/3rd of the Roman Empires total revenue was being generated out of Egypt alone. If this estimation is even close to being true, then Egypt truly was the gem in the crown of the Roman Empire. Famously, Egypt had been declared a Roman province in 30 BC following the widely known events surrounding the intrigues and affairs between Julia Caesar, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Once Egypt became a Roman province, then Judea became an important province by default. After becoming a Roman province, already tense relations between the Judean population and the ruling Romans quickly deteriorated. The most troubling problem for the Judeans seems to have been the Roman penchant for collecting taxes. The Romans were famously flexible in their interactions with those they ruled. Their imperative to keep the money and goods flowing out of Egypt required maintaining peace in Judea. This imperative meant that the Romans actually went even further than usual to accommodate what seemed to the Romans and Greeks unreasonable demands of the Judeans. Despite these acknowledged efforts, the Jews continued to feel the yoke of imperial Rome as an unacceptable burden. A burden that, like they had successfully achieved through the Maccabean Revolt against the Greeks in the 2nd century BC, they hoped to alleviate.

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Although they themselves would not have thought about their time in terms of it being a “Christian Era”. At this time the “religious” situation within the Roman Empire was still very contested. The dating system continued to be based on the year of the reign of the Roman Emperor.

360 As a result of the Jews endless demands and refusal to worship the Roman gods, so central to Roman understandings of civic life, growing anti-Jewish sentiments, already high throughout the Hellenised region of the near East, intensified throughout the Empire. Indeed, some have suggested that it was actually because of the unprecedented privileges afforded Jews by the Romans, in their determined effort to maintain peace, that anti-Jewish sentiments became magnified. Whatever the cause, these ethnic tension within the Empire, particularly the historically tense relationship between the culturally dominant Greeks and the determinately independent Jews, eventually boiled over into bloody conflict. The First Jewish Revolt, as this conflict has been remembered, lasted seven long bloody years. That a small, under-developed province using armies consisting of local militias with little, or no training, could resist the might of the professional armies of Imperial Rome at the peak of its powers for so long is evidence of both the Judean’s tenacity and the massive cost that this resistant demanded from the Jewish people. During the crucial battle for Jerusalem, a group of zealots203 used the Temple in Jerusalem as a fortified bastion to resist the Roman legions. As a result, this district of Jerusalem became the scene of the fiercest fighting of the entire siege. When this part of Jerusalem was finally stormed in 70 AD, after overcoming stiff and resourceful resistance, the so-called “Second Temple” was destroyed. Despite the way this event is continuously portrayed, as though after defeating the Jews the Romans then went and maliciously destroyed the Temple, it is generally acknowledged by historians today that Titus, who commanded the siege, had no wish to see the Temple destroyed. Indeed, as was the practice of the times, the Roman’s intended to have the Temple rededicated to Roman Gods following their victory. Most of the destruction of the Temple seems to have been the direct result of the fighting. In the account of the Siege of Jerusalem given by Jewish historian, and the rebellions initial leader, Joseph ben Mattathias (who would be enslaved and take the family name of his owner Vespasian becoming Josephus Flavius), he claims that the Romans set fire to the building mid-battle as part of the struggle, and it was this fire that seems to have actually destroyed most of the temple. After the conquest, much of the city which was heavily damaged was raised as Romans traditionally did to cities that rebelled. It was at this time that the remaining Temple ruins were fully dismantled. Despite this terrible defeat, the First Jewish Revolt was followed by two more rebellions in quick succession. By the end of this period of war, turmoil and disease (66-136 AD), the true cost of the

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The zealots were a political movement who took a particularly militant stand against the Romans. They were very critical of some Jewish groups for being too accommodating to the Romans. They believed that Roman rule was not only a violation of the Jewish people but an affront to their God because, “God is to be their only Ruler”. The zealot cause was dealt a blow with the capture of Jerusalem that would eventually lead to the end of the movement and accommodation with the Romans.

361 resistance against Rome was evident. The Jewish population in Judea had been decimated. The practice of the Romans of massacring entire population in the cities they conquered certainly contributed to the devastation. 40,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the siege of Jotapata alone.204 In the siege of Gamala, the Romans killed every man, woman and child leaving only two women alive to tell the tale. The great loss of life in the region generally was not only as a direct result of the violence during the wars. Famines and diseases are also known to have taken a heavy toll as a direct consequence of these extended conflicts. Beyond losses due to the war and its associated ills, some Jews seem to have embraced the teachings of Jesus, who is thought to have been crucified in the early 30s AD, converting to Christianity, a religion of love, peace and forgiveness. It is simply unknown how many Jews died as a direct result of the war, how many died as a result of starvation and disease, how many were dragged off into slavery or how many converted to Christiantiy. Whatever the proportions, what we do know is that by the end of this period, there were simply not that many Jews left in “Judea”. Perhaps less than a million people who continued to identify as Jews remained in Judea and this population continued to fall sharply in the following decades. Despite this period often being spoken about historically as a time of “exile”, the Romans never actually “exiled” Jews from Judea. The decline in the population of Jews living in the region was purely the result of war, famine, enslavement, immigration, and conversion. From this time onwards, until after World War II, the geographic region now called Israel205 could not be said to be “Jewish” because there simply were very few Jews left. In parallel to this conflict with Rome, throughout the first century AD, there continued to be a contest between nomian and antinomian factions that was already under way within the Jewish community as attested to by the Greek scholar Eusebius of Caesarea. That this contest was taking place in the 1st century AD, prior to these wars unfolded, is also confirmed in the work of Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexander, who wrote in The Migration of Abraham, critical of the antinomian faction,

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The siege at which Josephus was captured. Although with everything to do with this region, what is the Levant, often associated with land that was the Holy Land or what has come to be called Israel, is contested. The word is derived from the French lever, “to rise”, as in “the Sun rise”. In this sense it refers to “the east” generally. It was later used as a synonym for Anatolia (Turkey) but was used prior to that to refer to the region contested during the crusades, Tyre, Sidon, Jerusalem. The word has definitely been used in the past to refer to the entire eastern side of the Mediterranean including all the land from Libya, through Egypt, into modern day Israel, Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, all of Syria, Iraq, around to Turkey and even Greece (as it was for many years part of the Ottoman Empire). In the more recent application of the word, “the levant” refers to the region that might be called the Near East, which is the land from Syria, the Western portion of Jordan, bordered to the South by the Sinai Peninsula. Beyond the Near East was the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran Afghanistan etc. The Levant will be used in this sense, to refer to the region from Syria in the north to the Sinai Peninsula in the south, in this text. 205

362 There are, however, people who regard the written law as images of spiritual concepts, take great pains in exploring the latter, while neglecting the former. These are people that I must censure. For one must be careful to do both: to explore the hidden meaning and to practice the plain meaning. Even though the commandment on Sabbath observance contains the hidden meaning that action is the prerogative of God and His creatures should remain passive, this does not absolve us of the obligation to observe the sanctity of the Sabbath. (Philo, Migration: 89, as translated in Wolfson 1948: 66-71) Philo himself was a Hellenised Alexandrian Jew who was critical of some Jews for being too cavalier in their observance of the law. Philo also wrote about a distinction between those with “true” or “false” gnosis. (Pearson 2006: 16) True gnosis, according to Philo, is characterised by following God and this worship is in the tradition of Abel (Sacr. 2) whereas false gnosis believes all things are derived from the human mind (Sacr. 2) therefore, they reject truth and are godless (Post. 53). What Philo is characterising as “false gnosis” looks very much like the beliefs and practices of contemporary Gnostic Jews. Indeed, his emphasis on the tradition of Abel is probably directed against the Cainites who were a Gnostic Jewish sect vying for power at the time. The important distinction between these two communities that was causing the contest was not one primarily between those who used an allegorical approach for interpreting the Torah against those who remained more authentically “Jewish” and read the Bible literally as an historical document, but the contest was between those who had little regard for the law against those, like Philo himself, who thought adherence to the law was central to Jewish identity and their service to God. (Pearson 2006: 13) As Philo wrote, It follows that, exactly as we have to take thought for the body, because it is the abode of the soul, so we must pay heed to the letter of the law. If we keep and observe these, we shall gain a clearer conception of those things of which these are the symbols . . . Philo is actually saying something deeply important here. Philo believed that the social laws that Jews were expected to obey, such as dietary prohibitions, were “symbols” that, through their practice, helped humans to realize the underlying truth that these laws symbolized. These laws were in place to ensure that the desired outcome, whatever that may be, was achieved even if people remained ignorant of the true meaning. The need to obey the law closely was so that there could be a better understanding of what those laws were intended to achieve. As will be discussed later, the advent of the messiah, who reveals explicitly what the laws are intended to achieve, makes practicing those laws redundant. This is why the Christian tradition no longer practiced the law because they believed Jesus revealed the reasons behind what the laws merely symbolized. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them.” [emphasis added] This is not to say that originally Christians obeyed the law, as is often argued, but that after the advent of

363 the true messiah, because he knew the reasons for practicing the laws and revealed this meaning to His followers, Christians could fulfill the purpose for which the laws just symbolised. As Jesus goes on to say, “For I tell you truly, until heaven and earth pass away, not a single jot, not a stroke of a pen, will disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.” Heaven and earth, in a sense, did pass away with Jesus’ message because his coming and death brought the potential of the Kingdom of God, which was the unity of heaven and earth, into the world. As Martin Luther affirms, “That which is impossible for you to accomplish by trying to fulfil all the works of the law – many and useless as they all are – you will accomplish quickly and easily through faith.” It is the ends to which the laws are oriented that is important and what the messiah reveals. By this account, a good Christian through faith can never break the Law of the Jews because, by following their faith, after Jesus redeemed humanity of their sin, they are fulfilling the true purpose of the Law if not living according to the letter of the law. It is in this sense that it is said in 1 Tim. 1: 9, “the law is not laid down for the just” because justification is realized through faith. The Old Covenant, according to Christiantiy, is not broken, as though Jesus brought a new covenant in terms of rejecting the old, but the old covenant was simply fulfilled by Jesus the Messiah and he articulates the new covenant as presented in the New Testament. By contrast, Philo, who seems determined, despite his probing at the margins, to remain a Jew argued that even if the purpose for the laws is known the formal laws should still continue to be obeyed because beyond the laws serving a spiritual purpose, they also fulfilled a practical purpose, and the practical purpose continued to be served by obeying the letter of the law. By this account, Christians should not rightly be called antinomian but hypernomian as in living beyond the Law in fulfilling the intent of the Law through moral behaviour. It is for this reason that the early Church scholars presented Christianity as being the inheritors of the “Hebrew” tradition as distinct from the “Jewish” tradition. Despite the contest between nomian and antinomian factions, it seems that these two communities successfully lived side by side in relative peace and harmony. Again, as Pearson wrote, “Heretical gnosis reached Palestine at least by the early first century. “Gnostic” mystical doctrines were tolerated and fostered by some in orthodox circles, so long as “the honour of the Father in Heaven was served, and the unity of God maintained.” (Pearson 2006: 16) The danger, at least according to Philo, was that the antinomian tradition manifested a “self-loving and godless mind which regards itself as equal to God.” As will be elaborated upon later in this chapter because Gnostic Jews believe that they have true knowledge that the world in which we inhabit is not real, but a veil created by humans, then with this true knowledge and acting accordingly, by eating the fruits from The Tree of Life, then they themselves become like Gods. As this is the case, Philo’s criticism seems to have been squarely directed at Gnostic Jews who

364 were both anti-nomian and thought themselves to have become God-like. Again, as will be elaborated upon, this break with nomianism has also marked a time when the “Father in heaven” is not the focus of worship but His consort, as the immanent aspect of God, is given most attention because it is the task of humanity, to redeem God as much as it is God who redeems Man. Both these claims therefore, the primacy of the Father and the unity of God, seem to implicate the Gnostic Jewish tradition. After the devastation of the wars between the Jews and Romans, a new group of leaders emerged amongst the dominant nomian faction of remaining Jews called, in English, Rabbis.206 As Rosenstein (emphasis added 2018: 138) observes, “Over the next two centuries – until the compilation of the Talmud – the Rabbis gradually consolidated their control of the interpretive process,207 so that ultimately “Judaism” came to mean Rabbinic Judaism.” It was perhaps as a result of the criticisms of Greek scholars and early Christians that Jews identified more strongly as the centuries progressed with the formal legal tradition about which these other traditions were so critical. The resultant rabbinic Judaism would define what it meant to be a Jew for the next 1500 years. The rabbis consolidated their power in harmony with and under the watchful eye of the Roman authorities. One important feature of these new community leaders was their devotion to Tanakh in what they understood to be both its written and oral forms. The written Tanakh included the first five books of Torah, the Nevi’im and the Ketuvim. Collectively, these books are basically equivalent to the Septuagint or the canonical books translated mainly from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek probably in the 2nd or 3rd centuries BC which had come to be accepted later, by supersessionist Christians, as the Old Testament.208 The word Torah carries a lot of meaning and is not easily translated into one word. At its most basic, Torah means “teachings” or a “body of teachings”. The Torah is a completed work not because Judaism from the completion of that book was finished, a completed project, but because the revelations of the prophets was complete with the Torah and, with this completion, Jews understood a new period had occurred when the Jewish people lived in knowledge

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“Rabbi” is from the Hebrew “rav” meaning “greater/larger” as in a “greater, more important, person” or “master”. Some believe that Rabbi is derived from the Hebrew “rab” meaning “teacher” as in “my teacher” but in Hebrew Jews literally say “rav” not “rab”. Rav is often followed by “sheli” which means “my”, “rav sheli” as in “my master”. Although in Hebrew they continue to use “rav” in English the words “rav” and “sheli” became conflated to form “Rabb-i” which continued to mean “my master” not “my teacher”. In the same way that “Adon” meaning “lord” and “sheli” meaning “my” became conflated as “Adonai” in the sense of “my Lord”. Adonai is one of the “names” used by Jews for their God. Rav sheli was used for Abba Arika the man who established the yeshiva at Sura where the Talmud was compiled and written. This is the reason for the strong association of Rabbi with Talmudic or Rabbinic Judaism in particular. 207 Of the Law. 208 The term Old Testament is offensive to Jews as it does suggest that what they believe is now “old” and no longer applicable. As a Christian myself, I do read these texts as being superseded by Jesus’ message but, out of respect of Jewish readers, I have usually avoided the term in preference for Tanakh.

365 of the full disclosure of the prophets. As Herford wrote, “. . .the Torah, as Ezra understood it, meant divine teaching upon all and everything that concerned religion. It was not confined to commands, positive or negative, but included everything that bore upon religion at all.” (Herford 1912) It is because of this completeness why nothing can be added or subtracted from the Torah. It is considered not only complete, but necessary. From at least the time of the Pharisees, it is claimed since the time of Moses, alongside the written Torah is the “unwritten Torah”. Jews have always believed that the written and the unwritten Torah are both essential as the complete Torah. The written Torah, of course, is what is written but the unwritten Torah is an account, thought to be passed through the generations, of what the Torah meant. The Pharisees believed that although both the written and unwritten Torah were sacred, the unwritten Torah was more important because it explained how Torah was supposed to be read. It explained what the Torah meant. The unwritten Torah became known, because of how it was passed from generation to generation, as the “oral Torah” or “the oral revelations”. The oral revelations are believed to be ancient interpretations undertaken by the Jewish community, believed to originate at the time of Moses, on how to interpret these sacred writings. As Rosenstein (2018: 149) observes, “The Rabbis’ ideology held that their interpretations actually originated at Mount Sinai and that prophecy had ended in the first generations of the return to Zion, so the Rabbis’ teachings were the closest we could now get to revelation.” The sacred oral traditions initially referred to the Mishnah (meaning “to repeat” in terms of repeat until learned) and its supplement the Tosefta. Later still, the external traditions of Gemara (meaning “completion”) were also included along with the exegetical saying about the Scriptures called the Midrash. (Neusner 1969: 1-2) These written oral traditions, known by what became known as “Orthodox Jews” as the “Torah-that-was-transmitted-orally” or more simply, the “Oral Torah”, that collectively became known as the Talmud (which means “study” or “learning”). So, there are two series of sacred texts that are intimately related and inseparable in the Rabbinic tradition of Judaism. The written Torah, supposedly written by Moses, and the unwritten or oral Torah, passed down by learned Jews from the time of Moses on how the Torah should be understood. These two texts become known, as a result of their intimacy, as the “two Torahs”. The Talmud is considered to have a higher standing in the Rabbinic tradition because what a text means is more important than what is written. As Orthodox Jewish scholar James Kugel clarifies, “Although these two bodies of writing were, and are, said to be of equal authority, in practice, the Oral Torah always wins. The written Torah may say “an eye for an eye”, but what these words mean is what the Oral Torah says they mean, namely, monetary compensation for injury.” Unlike the Torah, understood as consisting only of the written scriptures, which is prized by all Jewish traditions including Gnostic Jews, the Talmud was prized only by the dominant Rabbinic tradition. Some question

366 the claim that the Talmud is an oral tradition that stretches back into the period before the destruction of the Second Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from Judea. The Talmud was never prized as a sacred text by Karaite, Samaritan, or Gnostic Jews. It is for this reason that the Jews remembered the period following the Roman conquests as the “early Talmudic period” in reference to the gathering together and original veneration of these texts. It is this religious movement that modern day Orthodox Jews continue to practice today. Along with the two Torah’s is the Synagogue (from the Greek, “brought together” syn “come together” and agein “put in motion”). It is claimed by many that the Synagogue is an ancient institution that existed prior to the reintroduction of the written Torah to the Jewish people by Ezra. The Hebrew word for Synagogue is Beth-ha-Knesset which means “meeting-house”. It seems that this institution always had a religious purpose. It has been theorised that the synagogue began during the Babylonian exile when the Jewish people could not attend the Temple in Jerusalem because the first Temple had been destroyed. While in Babylon, the Jews would gather for religious purposes such as worship in a “meeting house”. Herford proposes that the Synagogue was a new institutional innovation of Jews in the Babylonian period in being a place for a congregation of worshippers. Up until that time, Herford claims, people would gather in a temple or shrine to offer sacrifices or gifts to various gods but to simply gather to worship and learn about God, to not give sacrifices or gifts, was unique and original. Even when the Second Temple had been built, the Synagogue continued as an important functioning institution for the Jewish people. It was because of the Synagogue that Christianity formed “Churches” which functioned in the same role as the synagogue. So, hymns, prayers, scripture readings and sermons are all features of Synagogues. One centre of Jewish life in the years before the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem was Alexandria in Northern Egypt. Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC and although it was in the Nile Delta, it was culturally a Greek city whose citizens spoke Greek and practiced Greek culture. The city was built in order to facilitate the free exchange of ideas and trade between Greece and the extremely wealthy and highly cultured Greek dominated Ptolemaic Egypt. Alexandria quickly became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean. So much so that some thought that Alexandria might one day eclipse the authority of Rome itself. Despite presenting as an alternative cultural centre to Rome, Alexandria and the Alexandrians were very different to Rome and the Romans. Whereas Rome achieved its power and influence through military conquest, Alexandria was renowned as a centre of Greek learning and culture. “The environment at Alexandria, still the supreme archetype of the university town, was one of ongoing intellectual and philosophical fusion, and the collection of the library, which fuelled the process, is known to have exceeded 400,000 papyrus scrolls.” (Fideler 1993: 5) It was through Alexandria’s

367 cultural influence, and as an important trading centre, that Alexandria achieved its special standing, not through military might. It is believed that Jews constituted around 35% of the Alexandrian population prior to the First Jewish Revolt. 209 To give that number a contemporary context for comparison, Jews constitute around 13% of New York’s total population today so 35% was certainly an influential minority.210 The Jews of Alexandria, as was the case for many Jews around the world at that time, were extremely Hellenised. As with many urbane populations, educated Jews of Alexandria would have been heavily inculcated in terms of using the Greek language and accepting Greek norms and learning. An educated Jew in Alexandria would have spoken Greek and been ignorant of Hebrew, dressed in a Greek fashion and been familiar with Greek philosophical ideas. As Fideler observes, “the Jews of Alexandria had become so thoroughly Greek that the Old Testament and other scriptures had been translated into Greek, presumably because most [Jews] had forgotten how to read the original Hebrew.” (1993: 5) It is widely believed that it was in the city of Alexandria, in the years prior to the birth of Jesus, that “Jewish Gnosticism” received its final gloss. As already observed, Jewish Gnosticism was definitely practiced in the post-Temple period of the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD and was in contest with the Rabbinic tradition. A contest that seems to have become increasingly tense. That there even was a Gnostic Jewish tradition had been lost to Western scholarship for centuries resulting in Gnosticism being “regarded as a purely Christian movement, a perversion of the Christian faith into a speculative theology, the ‘acute Hellenization of Christianity.’” (Bultmann 1965: 162) But, as Bultmann himself goes on to observe, “Further research has, however, made it abundantly clear that it was really a religious movement of pre-Christian origin, invading the West from the Orient as a competitor of Western Christianity.” (Bultmann 1965: 162) So, although it was known to be practiced in the 2nd and 3rd century AD, it was established centuries earlier. One of the preeminent Jewish scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, agrees, observing that for many years Gnosticism was thought to be an exclusively Christian heretical sect but, “modern research has progressively broadened this traditional range by arguing the existence of a pre-Christian Jewish and a Hellenistic pagan Gnosticism . . .” (Jonas 1958: 32) Today it is generally accepted that Gnosticism is a “religious movement which originally had nothing at all to do with Christianity and whose essence is completely explicable without reference to it.” (Bousset as seen in Rudolph 2015: 22) The earliest claim that Gnosticism may not be originally a

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After the conflicts, “Jews continued to live in Alexandria itself, but they no longer formed an important element in the city’s life. Their public institutions ceased to function, some temporarily, others forever.” (Marsden 1981: 59) 210 Just by way of comparison, Jews constitute approximately 13% of New York city’s population.

368 Christian movement is found in J. D. Michaelis Syuntagma Commentationum, published in 1759. In this text, interestingly, Michaelis observes that there are sections of the Septuagint that is directed against Gnostic “errors”. For example, he claims that there are sections against there being two Gods, which most Gnostic traditions uphold. If Michaelis’ reading of these passages is correct, as the Septuagint was gathered some time prior to the 3rd century BC, from documents some of which date from perhaps a thousand years before, then, “. . .the history of Gnosticism retires far back into the ages antecedent to Christianity, and identifies its main doctrines with a state of opinions essentially unconnected with the Gospel . . .” (Anonymous 1831: 375) If Gnosticism is not originally Christian, then who were the original Gnostics? In 1837 Rev. Edward Burton proposed that Gnosticism first arose in Alexandria and was the result of Jews returning from their exile in Babylon, which occurred after the Persian defeat of the Babylonians in 539 BC. It is claimed that this mystical movement combined “oriental philosophy, Platonism, and Judaism” to form Gnosticism. As Burton rather critically wrote in a way consistent with attitudes towards Gnosticism at that time, The Alexandrian Jews were not only the corrupters of their religion from heathen sources: but their doctrines as they explained them to the Grecian philosophers, were already debased with a considerable alloy from Babylon and Persia. The conquests of Alexander, and the communication between Egypt and the East, which flowed from them, were another means of introducing the Persian doctrines into Alexandria: and thus from these three sources, the philosophy of Plato, the religion of Moses, and the theology of the Magi, a new and heterogeneous system sprang up . . . the ravings of Gnosticism . . . (1837: 79) As can be seen, the origins of what might rightly be called Jewish Gnosticism, to differentiate it from pagan and the later Christian Gnosticism, if we are to accept these conclusions, can be pushed back from the commonly cited 2nd – 3rd centuries AD to at least the 5th century BC which, I personally believe, is closer to the true founding. Moritz Friedlander is widely acknowledged as the first really influential scholar to claim that gnosticism began within Judaism. (Pearson 2008: 12) In his Der vorchristliche judische Gnosticismus in 1898, Friedlander claimed that, “. . .Gnosticism is a pre-Christian phenomenon which originated in antinomian211 circles in the Jewish community of Alexandria”. (Emphasis added Pearson 2006: 11) That would put Jewish Gnosticism emerging in what Karl Jasper’s calls the “Axial Age” which would put it in

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Antinomianism simply means rejecting laws or legalism. This can be done in various ways. For example, Christians were antinomian in rejecting the dictates of Jewish social laws, while upholding their moral laws, believing that, with the advent of the Messiah, people were now properly directly in their social activities by their conscience. So dietary laws no longer applied to Christian by the ten commandments continued to be binding. As will be discovered, some antinomian groups, as with those being revealed here, reject all legal restriction as immoral instead arguing that human action should be informed by natural drives.

369 contest with the emergence of moral “religions” that was taking place at that around the world. Many other authors including Erik Peterson, Jean Danielou and Hans Joachim Schoeps all argued that the very first Gnostics were Jewish. After the Second World War, it became generally accepted that Gnosticism was of Jewish origin being sustained if not invented in the city of Alexandria. This was partly the result of the discovery of what has been called the Nag Hammadi “library” which was a small collection of books found in 1945 stored in a large earthen jar. These texts are thought to have been of Gnostic origin. (Fossum 1985: 3) As a result of this discovery, “The contribution of Jewish traditions and ideas to the development of Gnosis, which had been recognised even earlier, can now be shown more clearly and more cogently.” (Rudolph 2001: 52) Gilles Quispel (as seen in Wilson 1974: 182) argued that, “in so far as Gnosis is preChristian, it goes back to heterodox Jewish conceptions, e.g., about Adam and the Name and to the preAsiatic syncretism in general. In its origins Gnosis is Jewish Near-Eastern occultism, Oriental mysticism.” More recently Pearson concedes, although critical of some aspects of the arguments that have been used to justify the conclusion, “. . .that Gnosticism, as a religious movement of late antiquity, originated in sectarian Jewish circles independent of, and prior to, Christianity.” (Pearson 2006: 125) Kurt Rudolph agrees, “. . .the majority of gnostic systems came into existence on the fringes of Judaism.” (Rudolph 1987: 277) Most scholars on this topic today agree that Gnosticism is not originally a Christian or pagan tradition but began as a Jewish religious movement somewhere around the 5th - 3rd century BC if not before. Some even argued, during the Jewish/Gnostic revival period at the start of the 20 th century, that Gnostic Judaism was the original form of Judaism, that preceded the nomian tradition. They argue that it was actually the Rabbinic tradition that was introduced into traditional, gnostic, Judaism as a result of influences from Babylonian religious traditions thereby reversing an older argument that it was gnosticism that arose in Babylon and was then brought into nomian Judaism. There are actually ancient sources, such as Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 7.17) and Tertullian (Haer. 29ff), that give support to this claim. Perhaps the most important piece of evidence to support the argument that Gnostic Judaism was the original form of Judaism were a number of papyri, over 150 documents, that began to surface at the end of the 19 th century and into the 20th century in “grey markets” that traded ancient Egyptian artifacts. These texts, known as the Elephantine Papyri, were written in the 5th century BC by a community of Jewish soldiers posted on the Egyptian border of the Persian Empire on the Elephantine River. At that time, Jews worked underneath Persian overlords as soldiers and administrators. Judging by what is written in the documents, these Jews seemed to have been loathed by the local Egyptian population, as might be expected, for functioning in this role. What is interesting about these texts is that they show a community of Jews who seem to know nothing about what we think of as “Judaism”. They do not refer to bondage in Egypt, exodus

370 from Egypt or any of the prophets. They do not mention Moses, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel or David. Their texts show a community who do identify as “Jews” and do indeed worship the God Yahweh but not in a way that was practiced by Rabbinic Jews. For just one important difference, in these documents Yahweh is presented as having a consort, Anat-Yahu. Anat is an Egyptian Goddess sharing many of the characteristics of the Shechinah. Indeed, there are documents concerned with a temple that had been dedicated to “Yahou” which was destroyed by the local Egyptians when the Persian garrisons left the city. The local people took this opportunity to destroy the local Jewish temple to Yahou. This shows both that the Jews must not have been well-liked by the local Egyptians and how Jews and Persians cooperated during this period. After their temple was destroyed, the Jews living in Egypt wrote to their Persian overlords requesting assistance to rebuild the destroyed temple. So, here is a community of Jews with their own temple outside of Jerusalem and yet, that his is the case, does not seem to be unusual or of any concern. What is revealed in this papyri, is a community of people who identify as Jews who display what appear to be extremely Gnostic beliefs, such as there being a male and female God, while displaying no “Rabbinic” beliefs. These documents emerged at the exact time that the Gnostic revival was under way at the turn of the 20th century and must have added a great deal of weight to their argument that Gnostic Judaism was the authentic form of Judaism, and the Rabbinic tradition was a later invention. That Jews may have been “gnostic” and that the legalism of later Jewish practice is a foreign imposition means that those, such as Ithamar Gruenwald, who are unconvinced that Gnosticism originated as a Jewish religious movement because “the views which hold that here was a Jewish Gnosis from which Gnosticism arose, or that Gnosticism arose from within Judaism, appear to me to infer too much from too little” (Gruenwald 1981: 720) are seeking out evidence that just could not exist. The reason for questioning the role Jews had in formulating Gnosticism is because, according to Gruenwald, there is a lack of textual evidence to support claims that Judaism began as a nomian tradition and then transitioned into a gnostic tradition. By arguing that Gnostic Judaism was the original Jewish religious practice then there simply could not exist documents showing a transition from legalism to gnosticism because no such transition happened. Jews were originally gnostic so all that might be available is evidence of a legalistic takeover of power. This evidence might already be readily available in the Torah itself. The Torah may contain traces of an older, possibly polytheistic heritage, that is then overran by a later legalistic tradition. That the Torah may be read as being literally full of such conflicts begins to recast from traditional Judaism defeating heretics when, actually, the reverse in a sense was the truth. The myth of the “sacred cow”, a known symbol of earth goddesses, by this account, for just one example, becomes one of Moses imposing his foreign and heretical legal system onto Gnostic Jews using violence. The

371 evidence for dramatic religious reform, by this account, is right there, in the Tanakh and in plain view, if the primacy of Gnosticism is assumed. This position would require reading the Tanakh against itself in terms of it not being read as the development of a truly Jewish religious identity but as the imposition of an alien, heretical form of Judaism on a pre-existing authentic Jewish religious tradition. The argument that Gnosticism was the original “Jewish” religion was promoted around Europe towards the end of the 19th century as part of a strategy to persuade young Western Jews that becoming a Gnostic Jew was not rejecting the Jewish tradition but affirming it. These claims will be explored in greater detail later, what most scholar with the most authority believe, most especially the highly respected Gershom Scholem, Moritz Friedlander, and, more recently, Gilles Quispel, is that at least Jewish Gnosticism was the original Gnosticism from which all other expressions of gnosticism are derived if not the original expression of the Jewish religion understood as such. As with other forms of Gnosticism, those who practiced Jewish Gnosticism, as seems to continue to be the case today, would not have self-identified as practicing “gnosticism”. The suffix -ism was not attached until the Cambridge Platonist Henry More used it as a disparaging term in 1669, in the midst of the third Gnostic Revival of the 17th century, in his anti-Catholic treatise titled Antidote Against Idolatry. (Lazier 2009: 28) More used the term Gnosticism as a blanket term for all early Christian heresies. (Burns 2019) As the title of More’s book suggests, he thought that Catholic tolerance of other religious doctrines was an expression of Catholicism’s own debt to “Gnosticism”, what he thought of as an idolatrous movement, which made it, in turn, morally compromised. (More 1669 as seen 2021) The introduction of this suffix to “gnostic” encouraged a particular way of thinking and even researching the Gnostic tradition. From this time onwards, there is a search for a movement, “Gnosticism”, which shifts researcher’s attention to “Gnosticism” and away from seeking to understand an esoteric tradition informed by a particular knowledge. This meant that research from that time onwards focused on finding the origins and development of a “movement”, with associated institutions, and less time reflecting on exactly what gnosis means. Understanding of “Gnosticism” as a discrete movement seems to have been quite alien to the ancient world. Some have argued recently that the terms gnosticism is applied so broadly and attached to people who themselves would not identify as being gnostics that it has lost all sense of meaning and distinctions. (William 2996) The ancient Greek word “Gnostikos” is not found in many of the most ancient Greek texts and is actually rare. Its absence in pre-Socratic texts has led Morton Smith (1981: 799) to conclude that Plato may have actually coined gnostikos as a poetic term for a particular kind of privileged knowledge. The term is first found in Plato’s Politicus 258e-267a. In Politicus, Plato uses gnostikos in the context of differentiating technical or craft knowledge, gnostike techne, that is possessed

372 by the ideal politician, perhaps something like the “art of gnosis” (Smith 1981: 799) where gnosis is understood as a kind knowledge most appropriate to politics in the sense of being most appropriate for informing future actions. This would mean that as philosophy is seen by Plato as best for informing political action then Plato seems to be associating gnosis with philosophy. This would be consistent with the Jewish practice of identifying antinomian factions, which may have been gnostic, as “philosophers” perhaps to emphasise that they were influenced by Greek thinking. Given this context, it is of little surprise that gnosis attracts the attention of astute readers of Plato who would instantly think of gnostikos as an extremely privileged knowledge, one that would enable one with such knowledge to rule over men in a “Godlike” manner. One important conclusion that can be drawn, if it is indeed true that Plato coined the term gnostikos, is that, as Smith observes, it becomes certain that it is indeed a Platonic term, as later Gnostics assume, and not a stoic term as some have argued. (Smith 1981: 800) The term gnosis next appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, in Plato’s student’s work, Aristotle, who uses gnostic (Analytica Posteriora: 100a11) when he contrasts “concepts” that arise from experience, the empirical, from “gnostic hexeis” which might mean “possessing or existing with a particular kind of knowledge”, a more intuitive or subjective kind of knowledge that was being contrasted to empirical knowledge. To capture this different sense of gnosis, the Aristotelian philosopher Strato of Lampsacus uses “gnostic” in relation to dreams. When asleep, Strato claims, dreams arise from the irrational aspect of the psyche at a time when the psyche can be ruled by “gnosis”. Contextualizing a concept that had such a respected philosophical heritage in Plato and Aristotle to “dreams” might look like an attempt to denigrate this kind of knowledge to the contemporary reader but but Strato’s association of gnosis with dreams is not only consistent with the earlier uses but it in no way trivializes the value of gnosis. Strato is suggesting, by associating gnosis with dreams, that this is a knowledge not derived from lived experience but, like sophia, is a gift from the gods. Dreams, for the ancient Greeks, as it is for Gnostic Jews, were, as Del Corno (1982: 55) observes, “a means of being certain of the will of the gods and an instrument for predicting the future”. Dreams were thought to be a way by which the gods communicated themselves directly to Man. As in Freudian psychoanalysis, the dream needed to be interpreted to uncover the true meaning that God/subconscious was trying to communicate but it was a valuable insight into what we should do in the future. As Rabbi Hisda said capturing this sense of God’s means of communicating, “A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.” When the human controlled part of the psyche was not dominating, as a person went about their daily lives, it was then that the gods, especially the chthonic gods, took the opportunity to instil “gnosis”, which seems a particular kind of spontaneous knowledge not accessed through reason or experience. For the ancient Greeks, dreams were “a mysterious revelation of a world

373 unknown to man, and yet just as real as the world in which they lived”. (Del Corno 1982: 55) Dream states were like a meeting room where mortals and gods met and, therefore, a space deserving reverence. The knowledge transferred from Gods to mortals in dreams, at least according to Strato, was gnosis. In his On the Creation, Philo of Alexandria, links gnosis to the all-important creation myth in Genesis. Philo claims that this myth should be understood allegorically and that the trees in the Garden of Eden, the Trees of Life, in that they were endowed with souls, are symbols for all the various thought that Men may hold or from which they may “eat”. Philo is extremely vague in this passage, which would suggest the potential for an esoteric reading, but, on the surface at least, Philo seems to suggest that from the trees of life, consistent with Western thinking, Man should eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Op. 154) The fruits from this tree, Philo seems to claim, are the virtues of wisdom and moderation which allow humanity to “distinguish” things that are “contrary in their nature”. This discernment, this judgement, is, he claims, gnosis. Gnosis, at least by Philo’s account, is a knowledge that orients humanity away from natural drives to what me might think of as morality. Philo then claims that humanity, mainly as a result of sexual desire, tends naturally to evil and so cannot live in the Garden of Eden. (Op. 152) This is to suggest that gnosis has redemptive implications in uniting humanity with God if only we could overcome our instinctual drives in a way consistent with Christianity that was yet to emerge. Plutarch also associates gnosis with intellectual discernment in contrast to knowledge acquired through experience. This continuous tendency to understand gnosis in intuitive and intellectual terms, not derived from experience, is again to associate more strongly with knowledge as a direct gift from God. In the 2nd century AD, the concept of gnosis had become institutionalised into a school of thought that included people such as Valentinus and Basilides. As with the previous Greek tradition, gnosis seems to have had no specifically religious connotation despite its association with the gods. That it is not explicitly a “religious” term might be the result of the ancient world not clearly being able to differentiate between a secular and religious world. The presence of the gods for the ancient Greeks was just a part of life and to pick such thinking out as “religious”, as though it had its own discrete domain, as philosophy itself evinces, would be an abstraction not yet available to the ancient mind. Over time, as was suggested in the ideas earlier use, “gnostic” was later used to describe certain religious ideas that had currency at that time. This might not be the result of changing conceptualization of the word gnosis but changing understandings of “religion” in the highly contested spiritual world of the first centuries AD. Although gnosis was taking on religious significance, there was still no equivalent to “Gnosticism” or what might be identified as a “Gnostic movement”. This is in the same sense that we might describe “messianism” today, where some Christian and Jewish traditions emphasise the return or advent of the messiah as a core belief

374 and are therefore described as advancing a “messianic” tradition, this would not mean that such advocates are no longer thought of as Christian or Jewish. Messianic beliefs are thought to be acceptable within the established confines of the various religious traditions and therefore can be accommodated without the need for distinction. Some Jews, some Christians and some pagans, promoted the idea of gnosis but as already observed, remained within and in harmony with other beliefs of these traditions. Jews that accepted gnostic teachings were just Jews not practicing “gnosticism”. Gnosis might be thought of as a kind of knowledge that certain people had that indicated knowledge about oneself, the world and God. It may have been present in all these different traditions but some within these traditions moved it to the centre of their thinking. The people that we refer to as Gnostic Jews probably simply self-identified as “Jews” except that, unlike the majority of people who identified as Jews in the 3rd century AD, they also believed in the importance of a “special esoteric knowledge”. This knowledge, they believed, just like the Christians anticipating the return of messiah, was of the greatest significance to them and their understanding of Judaism, God and the world. Throughout its use, gnosis is associated with discernment, judgement, the best knowledge for leadership and informing future actions, a knowledge supplied by God and, perhaps most importantly, it was a knowledge that granted somebody special authority over those who did not possess this knowledge. A person with gnosis was positioned, according to Smith, as having special, privileged knowledge of God and therefore they saw themselves as natural leaders. The important aspect to gnosis from these earlier uses is, as Smith observes, “. . .an individual possessed of such powers . . . would be the ideal king, the only man capable of knowing God, who would therefore act as the mediator between God and man; he would be, in effect, the nous of his subjects, in whom he would restore their lost contact with the heavenly world from which he came.” (Smith 1996: 186) Gnosis seems to be the knowledge of the God-King or messiah or, at least, and this might be the same thing, somebody who possesses sophia which, at least according to Plato, is knowledge of the Good which is best for guiding the city. That one with gnosis performed this mediating role is extremely important. In the ancient world, prior to the Hellenic period, kings were thought to fulfill this same role, as mediators with God, and, if things went bad, they were thought to have lost gods’ favour and that this knowledge had been withdrawn. The Egyptian Pharaoh filled this role as well as a tribal leaders like Moses. That the king was thought to be inspired and guided by God continued to be the case in East Asia until very recently. Indeed, in the Jewish Gnostic tradition, all those with gnosis, all those with the secret knowledge for how society should be, are messiahs, are in important ways that will be discussed, the “sons of God”. It is perhaps because people who advocated a gnostic agenda lacked religious distinction, as continues to be the case today, that not a great deal is known about Jewish Gnosticism’s origins or even

375 when it first began. People might write about the origins of Judaism, but Jewish Gnosticism did not seem to be adequately differentiated to require its own independent history. Myers suggests that the word “gnostic” may have been originally applied in a religious context by a group of heresiologists as a way of identifying Jews who claimed, “so-called gnosis”. (Meyers 2009: 9) As King observes, “Although the ancient polemicists did not actually use the term “Gnosticism” they did occasionally refer to groups of which they disapproved as Gnostics.”. (King 3005: 26) Others (Williams 1996: 42; King 2003: 167; Smith 2015: 132) have observed that although critics of gnosticism certainly deployed the term “gnostic” to identify heresies, no text that has been labelled “gnostic” have used this term in any way to self-identify. Traditionally, gnosis seemed to always be used to indicate “personal knowledge” even “elite personal knowledge”, knowledge that very few people had that others may not share. It is in this distinction that sophia and gnosis may be found. Sophia was universal and objective, and therefore valuable. For this reason, gnosis, a feminine form, might be contrasted to the masculine form eidein more commonly used for the “conceptual knowledge” of sophia. This is a similar distinction as that between the French connaitre in contrast to savoir. Gnosis might suggest a kind of personal knowledge, such as that in dreams, in the sense that it is “personal” whereas eidein is universal knowledge such as the difference between kennen and wissen in German where kennen means when you know something personally, like if you know a person in the sense of familiarity, in contrast to reading something about a historical figure and gaining factual knowledge like when a King ruled. As gnostic Jew Peter Wilberg (2017) distinguishes, The word gnosis . . . came to refer to each individual’s capacity for a direct wordless knowledge of spiritual reality, free of signs and symbols. Gnosis is not objective knowledge; it is not knowledge that is merely “about” some “object” or “thing”. Instead, it denotes the sort of knowing we refer to when we speak of being intimately familiar with ourselves or another person . . . What it equally suggests is that this was a private revelation, a subjective knowledge with universal implications. Lazier (2009: 23) claims that gnosis, as a kind of knowledge, “does not refer to something man attains by his own devices, whether by experiment or contemplation. It describes instead a revelation in the world issued form a transcendent beyond, a revelation in the world that ensures salvations from the world.” This was intuitive knowledge, knowledge that could only be gifted by God and not intentionally sought. It was this knowledge that distinguished Gnostic Judaism from the then dominant forms of Judaism. Nobody really knows the original source for the particular beliefs of Gnostic Judaism. We may be able to unpack the meaning of gnosis in the Greek tradition, but this does nothing to explain the beliefs of Gnostic Judaism as passed from generation to generation who adopted this word most probably in

376 Alexandria. As Gruenwald rightly observes, “. . .there is still no consensus as to the source and the means by which the Jewish material came to the knowledge of the Gnostic writers.” (Gruenwald 1981: 713) It has been claimed and will be explored in depth in the following volume, that gnostic beliefs were initially formed by a Semitic speaking people, who probably originated from the mining district in the Sinai Peninsula, called the Hyksos by the Egyptians, who came to actually rule areas of ancient Egypt for a century between 1650-1550 BC. This is to claim ancient origins for Gnostic Judaism indeed. It is claimed by the Egyptian historian Manetho, that when the Egyptian people did eventually overthrow these foreign invaders, the Hyksos, that they moved into the Levant to found a city that they initially named Heirosyla (Temple-Pillage) but later renamed Hierosolyma (Jerusalem). (Boys-Stone 2001: 66) This would mean that the story of Exodus is grounded in an historical event, “Jews” fleeing Egypt, but not an enslaved people fleeing to liberation, a myth to add legitimacy to their flight, but vanquished conquerors fleeing the wrath of an enraged indigenous population seeking revenge. According to the accounts given by Manetho and Lysimachus, these “Jews”, under the leadership of “Moses”, display many of the features of the later Gnostic tradition such as antipathy to the established gods of other people in that they were “overthrowing any temples and altars of the gods where they were found” and would deliberately eat the sacred animals of the indigenous inhabitants over whom they ruled in a deliberate display of sacrilege. (Boys-Stones 2001: 65-66) According to Manetho, after being driven out of Egypt, where they had inflicted terrible death and destruction on the indigenous inhabitants, the Hyksos entered into the land that would come to be known as Judea. Once they arrived, as retold in the Tanakh, they massacre every man woman and child of the existing inhabitants and destroyed their sacred temples (Boys-Stones 2001: 66) as the name of their new city boasts (Temple-pillage). These Hyksos were renowned for their iconoclasm. The original inhabitants of the Levant may well have been a Canaanite people who worshipped the creator God El thus beginning the tension within “Judaism”, still being enacted even today, between those who worship an all good God that created the world, and what would become the Gnostic tradition which worshipped the Egyptian Goddess Iah, (which might also explains why Jewish names in the Torah end with “. . .iah” which could have been pronounced as “Jew”). Iah is an Egyptian moon God who is related to the goddess Anat who was certainly seen as the female consort or Yahweh according to the Elephantine Papyri. This difference between the existing Canaanite population who worshipped an all-good male creator God, as told in Genesis I, and the invading Hyksos’ God, Iah, who is neither good nor evil but most importantly mysterious and unknowable, as presented in Genesis II. Perhaps it was in an attempt to find a peaceful resolution to what was a devastating war between these two people that both sides agreed to

377 try to synchronize these two very different deities. Over time, the Yahwists became increasingly dominant taking every opportunity to dominate the Elohists. Others, have argued (See King 1887: xiv-xvii) that Buddhism may have found its way into Alexandria and actually been the intellectual basis for Jewish Gnosticism but, beyond observing the many shared commitments of these “Eastern religions”, there seems to be little reason to believe that Buddhist ideas managed to spread from India to Alexandria in the centuries prior to Jesus.212 In the mid-3rd century AD, according to Porphyry, the extremely influential philosopher Plotinus joined the army with the hope of learning the wisdom of the East that he thought could be secured in Persia or India. This suggests that towards the end of the period under consideration, 500 BC to 300 AD, when we know Gnostic beliefs had already been established and were contested, there was some limited possibility for exchanging ideas between the East and the West, but that Plotinus thought he needed to join the army to access that learning is evidence that there were no institutional arrangements that would facilitate such an exchange of ideas. This makes it extremely unlikely the Buddhist ideas were circulating in Alexandria hundreds of years before Plotinus. That Plotinus’ work shows no clear evidence of Eastern influence suggests that either he failed to get to Persia and India or, less likely, that what he found there was intellectually uninspiring. Friedlander, offering a more plausible origin of Gnosticism than claiming it was derived from Buddhism, claimed that Jewish Gnosticism emerged from a number of Jewish sects, the Ophites, Cainites and Sethians in the centuries following Jesus Christ. These were spiritual movements advanced by Diaspora Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple who were indeed living in Alexandria. (Pearson 2006: 13-14) Although these movements are widely recognised as gnostic, it is unclear whether these sects were ‘originators’ of these ideas or merely ‘adherents’ participating in the ongoing ‘development’ of what we call Gnostic Judaism that actually had its origins many years, maybe centuries, earlier. The Cainites, for example, positively identified with the slayer of Abel and embraced the approbation “first born of Satan”. They valorised this statement because they believed that this world was made by an evil demon and their project was to ensure that this world, the product of evil, was destroyed. They believed that one should not only not avoid evil but embrace it, rush into committing it, because, as this world was

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In 1864, Charles King claimed that Gnosticism was maintained until it was passed to the Knights Templars in Medieval Europe. Through them, it was then passed on to the Freemasons whose secret ceremonies were tied to gnostic beliefs. (Trompf 2019) Finally, he identified the famous Rosicrucians as a secret gnostic organization which held a great deal of power. As Trompf (2019) observes, “King . . . traced “Gnostic remains” into Mithraism, Sufism, and the Druze, on to the Templars, Rosicrucians, and the Freemasons.” Such ideas today might be used for movie scripts like The da Vinci Code but, as with so much of this extraordinary material, it would be too easily classified a “conspiracy theory”.

378 made evil, everything in it that is “good” is really “evil” and therefore should be destroyed. The Ophites too have been recognised as Gnostic because they were an antinomian Jewish movement that, like the Cainites, venerated the serpent as an incarnation of “divine wisdom” or sophia. Sophia was believed by many Gnostics, including Christian Gnostics, to be a Promethean figure who gave humanity true explicit intellectual knowledge against the wishes of the ignorant and/or degenerate creator God that Christian Gnostics identified as Yahweh. This knowledge, from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, made humanity itself into a kind of God, as Genesis appears to suggest, implanted aspects of the divine in at least some Men, and it was this knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil derived from the Tree of Knowledge, that was gnosis/sophia and informed the Ophites’ actions. Of course, the origin story in Genesis of the “serpent”, sometimes characterised as a “dragon”, in the Garden of Eden can be seen reflected through a distorting mirror in these gnostic narratives.213 Also consistent with later gnostic movements, the Cainites rejected all moral conventions including the Law and Yahweh. A privileged role for a female serpent god, the rejection of moral conventions, and a belief in a higher and lower expression of God, are all features of that would come to be associated with contemporary gnosticism. By the time that the Talmud was written and broadly accepted as authoritative, the Gnostic tradition within Judaism seems to have been much more clearly demonized, along with Christianity and other formerly “Jewish” sects, and the previous tolerance towards some degree of diversity within Judaism, perhaps accepted in more certain and secure times before the Roman wars, had been replaced by more intolerant views when Judaism was faced with the very real possibility of extinction. As Segal wrote, By the end of the second century, at least two different kinds of heretics were opposed in rabbinic polemic. The earliest polemic was designed to counter apocalyptic, mystical or Christian identifications of a manlike figure enthroned as judge next to God, as described in various epiphany texts. The second to emerge involved the claim that the creator was ignorant of a higher god and that there was a complete separation of divine mercy from divine justice, even to the extent of making them properties of two different Gods. (Segal 1977: 244)

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Interestingly, it was claimed that when Plotinus died in 270 AD, he said, “Try to bring back the god in us to the god in the universe.” Such a line would be harmonious with Gnostic teachings about reuniting God after Sophia turned humanity into or instilling into humanity, God. It was also claimed that upon Plotinus’ death a snake, which the creator God supposedly turned Sophia into after she disobeyed him, slithered out of his room through a hole. Are these subtle hints, left for the knowing reader, made by Porphyry indicating that Plotinus was, indeed, a Gnostic teacher?

379 In short, the rabbinic tradition had hardened its positions against “heretics” and had clearly identified the gnostic tradition, along with Christianity, in these terms. The Talmud seems to refer to Gnostic Jews as mÎnîm, a certain kind of Jewish religious teacher, and the Gnostic heresy as mînût. Historically, it was believed by some Jews that the terms mÎnîm and mînût referred to Christians and Christianity because, obviously, Christianity was itself, from a Jewish perspective, antinomian. Gnostic scholar, Friedländer, by contrast, argued that mÎnîm never referred to Christians at all but was exclusively aimed at Gnostic Jews. (Pearson 2006: 17) As Quispel also observes, “mînîm” were Gnostic because they “distinguish between the Unknown God and his vicegerent, the angel of the Lord, his anthropomorphic representative, who, according to some, even created the world: this is certainly the idea underlying the Gnostic split within the Deity.” (Quispel 2015: 59) The Talmud applies the name mÎnîm to the earlier mentioned Ophites who practiced “free love”. It was their practice of “free love” that motivated Rabbi Jonathan to cry out in frustration and horror, “Is this the way for Jews to behave!”. The early Christian fathers also attributed the practice of “free love” to the Ophites and they were equally scathing in their criticisms. As with so much else, Christianity and conservative or Rabbinic Judaism shared more in common than Rabbinic Judaism and the Gnostics. As Herford observed, “Modern Jewish historians not unnaturally lay much stress upon the similarity between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Rabbis, at all events the best of them; and that similarity cannot be denied. . .” (Herford 1912) Friedländer also observes that the Talmud calls for the “Books of the Minim”, the very books that may have been used in or inspired kabbalah, to be burnt in a fire along with the ‘azkarôt or the “divine names” which are written within them. Although, again, this passage has sometimes been interpreted as an order to burn the Christian Gospels, as Friedländer rightly observes, this belief is rather transparently false as the Gospels do not contain azkarôt so using these passages to justify anti-Christian practices actually makes no sense. The truth is that throughout the Tanakh, the Jewish people are warned against being seduced by Gnostic beliefs and to stay true to the light of the Father. As it says in Isaiah 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” This is said during a criticism of Israel and the “men of Judah”. Again, as Pearson notes, it says in Psalms 139: 22, for Jews “Such heretics are to be hated with “perfect hatred” (Ps. 139:22), for they sow “wrath between Israel and their Father in Heaven” (Sabb. 116a). These passages apply more naturally to Gnosticism than Christianity. Indeed, it is important to note that the hatred developed by the rabbis against the Gnostics was “matched only by that of the church fathers who polemicized against the same heretics.” (emphasis added Pearson 2006: 18) What can be seen in this intensifying opposition to

380 Gnosticism is that the emergent Rabbinic tradition was becoming less tolerant of diversity within the Jewish community as a result of their vulnerability. If these passages in the Talmud do indeed refer to Gnostic Jews, as seems likely, then the Talmud expresses a growing level of hatred against gnostic teaching that explains why Jewish gnosticism became, from this time until the Medieval period, an underground movement. As Quispel questions, Would it not be wiser to say that apocalyptic, Wisdom schools, Samaritanism, Essenism, Zealotism, Sadduceeism, mînîm, the Hellenistic monotheism of Philo and his fellows, magic, syncretism, Merkabah mysticism, Mandeism, Manicheism, Christiantiy and Gnosticism were all varieties of the religion of the Jews in Palestine and the Diaspora which were suppressed by incipient Judaism (“normative Judaism”) as it gradually developed from the small group of Pharisees after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A. D.? (Quispel 2015: 59) The emergent Rabbinic tradition was systematically marginalizing and demonizing other expressions of Judaism, such as Christianity and Gnosticism, in order to assert exclusive authority. As an increasingly underground movement marginalized by the rabbinic tradition, it was sustained exclusively through an oral tradition where it could be whispered from one generation to the next in isolated darkness where others could not hear. The Talmud seems to suggest that the minim should be “lowered into a pit, but not raised out of it” and even goes so far as to argue that they should be killed for their heresy. Again, it should be remembered, that many Jews have interpreted these passages as permitting the murder of Christians but, if Friedlander and Pearson are correct, these directives were aimed not at Christians but squarely at Gnostic Jews. It is these very same Gnostic Jews that have not only come to dominate global Jewry but, also, reshape Western civilization. This hatred of the minim finds expression around the same time that the Gnostic tradition was moving out of its forced silence in the form of kabbalah when none other than that influential Jewish rationalist scholar Maimonides identified five heretical beliefs that allow the “minim” to be identified. (1) he who says there is no God and the world has no leader; (2) he who says the world has more than one leader; (3) he who ascribes to the Lord of the Universe a body and a figure; (4) he who says that God was not alone and Creator of all things at the world’s beginning; (5) he who worships some star or constellation as an intermediating power between himself and the Lord of the World. Obviously, this list simply cannot refer to Christianity but, as will be elaborated upon, matches very well to the Gnostic Jewish tradition. It is the Gnostic Jews even today who claim that, from a human perspective, God is dead, that every generation produces at least one if not numerous messiahs, or spiritual leaders, who argue that God did receive a body in the form of Sabbatai Tzevi, who argue that the earth was not created by God Most High at all and, finally, they appear to worship the “morning star” –

381 Lucifer and the constellation Libra which they associate with their Goddess – the Shekinah. Maimonides does not appear to have Christianity in mind here at all, as it just does not fit, but, almost certainly, the heretics of the Gnostic Jewish tradition. From what we know, from the time when the Rabbinic tradition rose to dominance in the 3rd century AD until very recently, the Jewish Gnostic tradition was always a minority sect that attracted every kind of response from adoration through to the most passionate hatred. Then, in the 13 th century, when Jewish Gnosticism re-emerges and was written down in the Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah through to end of the 18th century, “the esoteric teaching of Judaism, and with very few exceptions all the great Jewish scholars treated it with great respect . . . This attitude existed in all the various Jewish communities, and even in groups which were opposed to each other like the Hassidim and the Mitnagdim . . .” (BenShlomo 1985: 23). The oldest text acknowledged as part of the kabbalistic tradition is the Bahir (Book of Brightness). (Ben-Shlomo 1985: 28) If this is the case then Jewish Gnosticism seems to have been passed from one generation to the next as an underground oral tradition for at least 1,000 years. (Dauber 2012: 1) As David Biale observes, “Scholem suggests . . . thirteenth-century kabbalah was the product of an underground tradition of Jewish Gnosticism which started in late antiquity.” (Biale as seen in Dauber 2012: 9) The tradition itself claims that its origins date from the time of Moses. As Berg (2002) claims, “. . .the entire understanding of kabbalah was presented in its oral form to Israel on Mount Sinai”. Jewish Gnosticism, Scholem proposes, can be seen in kabbalah’s understanding of the sefirot, which is the Jewish form of what other Gnostic traditions call the Aeon. The sefirot/Aeon are emanations from the one God. These sefirot/Aeon become increasingly degraded as they move away from the Ein Sof into this world. According to the Gnostic tradition, it is not knowledge of good and evil that should inform Man’s life, which is nothing more than an expression of human world creating power that legitimize themselves through nurturing feelings of guilt and remorse etc, that distances one from God, but life should be directed by what they call the Tree of Life which finds its fullest expression in pleasure and emotions like happiness. This changed very sharply towards the end of the 18th century when the maskilim changed their attitude towards the esoteric traditions and then, in 1815, in their own way, so did the Hassidim. Famously, the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz said that the mystic tradition was inherently un-Jewish and carried traces of polytheism that opposed everything that was prized and thought meaningful in Jewish religious practice. (Dan 1985: 39) Graetz went so far as to label the Zohar, the Book of Splendour, the “great book of lies”. (Ben-Schlomo 1985: 24) The main concerns the “conservative” Jews had with the Gnostic tradition is that it was antinomian and that, after Sabbatai Tezvi, it promoted libertine practices

382 like excessive drinking and sexual license. The other concern was that the esoteric tradition read Torah allegorically and this meant that an extremely unorthodox reading was advanced using terms that were not found in the Jewish Bible. This mainstream Jewish opposition to gnosticism was enforced until the emergence of a sect from amongst the erudite Spanish Jews who gave substance to a mystical gnostic Jewish movement called kabbalah in the 12th and 13th centuries. Kabbalah was initially expressed in written form in the then dynamic Jewish centre of Spain around the middle of the 13th century. Although this text, the Zohar, is known to have been written by Moses de Leon, he claimed that it had its origins from the time of the Siege of Jerusalem when the, so called, “Second Temple” was destroyed. It is probably no coincidence that from the 13th century onwards there was growing hatred of Jews across Europe that resulted in numerous expulsions. Jews were expelled from, the Kingdom of England in 1290, the Kingdom of France 1394, Vienna 1421, Linz and Colonia 1424, Augsburg 1439, Bavaria 1442, Perugia 1485, Vicenza 1486, Parma 1488, Milan and Luca 1489, Sicily 1493, Florence 1494, Provence 1498 and, most significantly, Spain 1492. (Perez 2012: 8) Within 200 years of the formalizing of the Jewish Gnostic tradition, Jews had been expelled from large swathes of Europe. Prior to this time, very few expulsions are recorded, and it seems that Jews and Christians did indeed live in apparent harmony. This is to suggest that it may be the case that it was only with the advent of kabbalah as an influential intellectual force on global Jewry that tensions between the Jews and Christians emerged. Just prior to the final expulsion of the Jews from Spain, an important mystic scholar Meir ben Ezekiel ibn Gabbai gathered together all the Jewish mystical writings and conceived them, quite possibly for the first time, as part of single mystical tradition. His most important work, the Avodat Hakodesh, is where he presents kabbalah as a complete system of mystical thought. In this text, Ezekiel undertakes a close reading of Maimonides in order to refute what was understood to be his “rationalist” approach to Judaism. One of his main goals was to argue for an expanded role for the Sefirot in Jewish mystical practice. The most vibrant centre of Jewish learning in the 15th century had been Spain but with their expulsion many Spanish Jews refused to convert to Christianity and moved to the near Middle East which brought them within the boundary of the then growing Ottoman Empire. One of the more important refugees from Spain to live within the Ottoman Empire was a man called David ben Solomon ibn Abi Zimra or, as Jews often do with their influential historical scholars, Radbaz. Radbaz is important because he, along with the most important mystic scholar Rabbi Moses ben Jacob Cordovo or Ramak, were responsible for teaching the most influential teacher of Kabbalah in Jewish history Isaac Luria. Luria “polished” many important practices of traditional Judaism and, perhaps most importantly, predicted the imminent arrival of the true Jewish Messiah. It was because of Luria’s teachings that global Jewry was anticipating the arrival of the Messiah in the 17th century.

383 It was into this world, populated by the descendants of Spanish Jews, informed by the teachings of Radbaz, Ramak and Luria, anticipating the arrival of the Messiah, that Sabbatai Tzevi emerged in the 17th century. It was with the arrival and mature expression of Sabbatai Tzevi who advocated that “the violation of the Torah is its fulfillment” (Scholem 1941/1995) that realizes a “new form of Gnostic dualism of the hidden God and the God who is the Creator of the world” (Scholem 1941/1995) which today dominates the world.

Kabbalah Gnosticism, as a recognisable movement, has ebbed and flowed in terms of being accepted and thought important. At times, as today, is has been venerated while at other times it has been despised as heretical. Times of prominence and general acceptance have coincided with times of great social unrest and change. Gnosticism has risen into prominence at times when old certainties were being critically interrogated and new problems were emerging. This is not to say that Gnosticism necessarily caused these times of disruption but that at times of disruption, gnosticism emerges to justify the destruction. In his intriguing book, Cracking the Gnostic Code, on the interaction between spiritual/power and social order, Walter Wink claims that gnosticism appeals to people during times of social change because it questions whoever holds power. Gnosticism rejects every existing social order, whatever that social is, and offers the promise of something new. As Wink claims, Gnosticism generally is “a vehement protest against the actual order of the world, its socio-political as well as its spiritual aspects.” (Wink 1993: 5) Gnosticism by its very nature opposes everything that constitutes a world, its social order, its political order, and its religious order. This is not to claim that gnosticism simply initiates times of change, this is not a reductive causal explanation of sharp social change, although it may indicate an interesting line of inquiry, but that gnosticism resonates within societies at times of great social change. This is understandable because gnosticism presents as an option when old gods and obsolete social arrangements are no longer thought to be legitimate as it offers a way to a new world order. These conditions were definitely at play in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD when various gnostic traditions vied for legitimacy and authority against, Christianity and other forms of Judaism. History shows that Christiantiy and Judaism initially withstood this early challenge and would dominate for centuries. Then in the 11th and 12th centuries, during a similar period of change, gnosticism again emerged, mainly in France and Italy but also England and Spain. Again, it was overcome, not occasionally through violence, particularly by Catholics, but also the rationalism of Maimonides. Then again in the 16th and 17th centuries, a time called the “Crisis of the Seventeenth Century” by Voltaire, when medieval institutions and beliefs were no longer persuasive, but the modern world had not yet emerged. 17th century Europe, according to Şişman, (2017: 37) was a time of “bad

384 harvests, pestilence, plagues, famine, poverty, starvation, and death for millions”. Such times present as the greatest challenge to those in power and the institutions upon which that power rests. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argues in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, that history is indeed punctuated by moments of gnostic revival that challenges the dominant beliefs and institutions where it emerges. Such times, Blumenberg argues, require invention and reinvigoration of positive traditions, realism, thereby “overcoming” these gnostic challenges. The reason for these gnostic revivals, Blumenberg argues, is not just that times of crisis make gnosticism look appealing but that each past overcoming has been “incomplete”. If, after all, gnosticism had been properly overcome then how does it keep emerging as an option. Gnosticism is like a chronic disease, waiting for when the host is sick, then it rises up and tries to take over control of the host. Each positive response to the gnostic challenge has, obviously, been flawed or it would no longer be a viable option. As Blumenberg wrote, The thesis that I intend to argue here begins by agreeing that there is a connection between the modern age and Gnosticism but interprets it in the reverse sense: The modern age is the second overcoming of Gnosticism. A presupposition of this thesis is that the first overcoming of Gnosticism, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, was unsuccessful. A further implication is that the medieval period, as a meaningful structure spanning centuries, had its beginning in the conflict with late-antique and early Christian Gnosticism and that the unity of its systematic intention can be understood as deriving from the task of subduing its Gnostic opponent. (Blumenberg 1985: 126) That is, the positivist tradition, in terms of Blumenberg identifies three moments of Gnostic overcoming, that which spawned the early Christian era or late antiquity, that which spawned the Middle Ages and, finally, that which spawned the Enlightenment. The idea of “positivist” is not being deployed here in terms of “positivism”, a philosophical system aimed at denying God or a legal theory devoid of morality, as though everything positive is opposed to God and morality, but in the more common sense, less technical, sense of the word as in claiming that the world is actually “real” and “good” and that we can know about that world and the God that constituted it. Positive religion is simply a religion like Islam, Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, that claims that we can, either through revelation as codified in law or thought direct experience, know God and know what we should do morally [to some degree]. In many senses, the word “positive” is being used in this work in the opposite way it was politicised in the 19th and 20th centuries to suggest that we cannot talk about the real world or that morality has no role. It was positivist movements that each tried to overcome gnostic events in history. Each of these positive historical attempts have been, according to Blumenberg, incomplete. Each newly crafted positive response to gnosticism has actually created the conditions for a future gnostic revival. So it was again with the scientific response of the

385 Enlightenment to gnosticism also incomplete thereby allowing for the gnostic revival in the late 19th early 20th centuries. A gnostic revival that has come to dominate the world. Although gnosticism has ebbed and flowed, especially in the West and near Middle East, in terms of influence and power, the Jewish tradition has long nurtured a particular expression of gnosticism within its wider traditions. This traditional gnostic practice within Judaism is called kabbalah. Kabbalah is an extremely well-known mystic tradition within Judaism that has survived in various forms for centuries. It is important to understand kabbalah because runs like a red thread through Jewish history and, as Gershom Scholem, amongst others, have observed, the original ideas presented in kabbalah, especially, as Dan observes, “the system of the ten divine emanations, the sefirot, which are arranged in the form of a tree, and the feminine element within the Godhead, the Shekinah, as well as the attitude towards the power of evil” are all central themes in gnostic Judaism. Because of this ongoing influence, if there is to be an adequate understanding of Gnostic Judaism there must be at least the most basic understanding of kabbalah and its role in the Gnostic Jewish tradition. Even if kabbalah has not always have been synonymous with gnosticism, Gnostic elements, as Scholem and Tishby (1955) amongst many others observe, were certainly emphasised, thereby stimulating gnostic features within the movement, by the important contribution of Isaac Luria. Again, as Dan (1995: 313) observes, there has been a “changing emphasis of Gnostic elements in various periods of kabbalah, which were most fully expressed in the teachings of Isaac Luria”. It is Lurianic kabbalah that is the most influential branch of kabbalah within Judaism today and it was as a direct result of its influence, both in heralding a Sabbatian like figure and emphasising gnostic features, that Gnostic Judaism could re-emerge into a prominent position in the general Jewish tradition in the late 19th century. The word kabbalah literally translates as “tradition”, so kabbalah is making the claim to be at least “a” Jewish tradition. Kabbalah’s status within the wider Jewish tradition has at times been highly contested over the centuries. Some Jews accept kabbalah as a legitimate expression of authentic Judaism by pointing to its ancient origins within the Jewish tradition and that it has been sustained by Jewish communities for centuries. Such advocates might point to the fact that kabbalah has been taught within the Rabbinic tradition as a kind of advanced learning for centuries. Kabbalah was reserved within the Rabbinic tradition exclusively for mature men over the age of 40 who were already respected scholars within the Rabbinic tradition. It seems, by these particular restrictions, that one needed a kind of Rabbinic inoculation prior to being exposed to the potentially dangerous ideas of kabbalah. Despite being maintained within Jewish communities and being taught in the Rabbinic tradition, there have certainly been periods in history, such as from the late 18th through to the early 19th century, the most “rationalist”

386 period of Rabbinic Judaism, when kabbalah seems to have been mainly characterised as part of a heretical movement that had somehow crept into the mainstream and legitimate Jewish tradition. In order to attack the nascent Jewish gnostic revivalist movement, in 1846, Heinrich Graetz published Gnosticismus und Judentum in which he described kabbalah as “essentially superstition and contrary to the spirit of Judaism”. (as cited in Scholem 1987: 7) As Huss observes, . . .since the late eighteenth century, Kabbalah and the traditional Jewish circles that adhered to it – mostly the East European Hasidic movement that emerged at the same period – were vehemently criticised by some of the central figures of the Haskalah and its successors in the nineteenth century. (Huss 2007: 107) Shlomo Rubin used well known parallels between kabbalah and Jewish Gnosticism, like those observed by Scholem, in the 19th century to try to demonstrate that kabbalah was originally a pagan practice, in the sense of having multiple expression of God that have at least the taint of polytheism. As it was polytheist, Rubin argued, therefore it was not truly part of the Jewish spiritual practice. (Dan 1995: 309) Those who opposed the increasing interest and power of kabbalah in the wider Jewish community towards the end of the 19th century argued that kabbalah did not arise in the Jewish tradition until the 13th century and that was probably as a result of parallel ideas emerging in Christiantiy around the same time in the same region as kabbalah was first recorded. Against those who argued that kabbalah was only introduced into the Jewish tradition in the 13th century, that most important Gnostic Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, argued that although kabbalah was formalized only in the 13th century by Rabbi Abraham ben Isaac of Narbonne; his son-in-law Rabbi Abraham ben David and Rabbi Jacob ben Saul, (Dauber 2012: 3) it is actually a much older tradition dating to at least the 2nd or 3rd centuries AD and giving ample indications that he believed that it was much older. As Wieczynski (1975: 22) wrote, . . . The kabbalah purported to be a body of secret learning that had been revealed by Moses to his followers, the transmitted orally to medieval times. Kabbalah . . . drew upon astrology and taught that the astrologist guided by the kabbalah could foretell the future and influence the course of events upon earth. As can be seen, just as the Rabbinic tradition claimed the content of the Talmud could be traced back to the time of Moses, the tradition also argues that it can be traced back to the same period therefore making it at least equally authoritative as the Talmudic movement. The reason why people like Scholem and Friedlander argue that kabbalah is so ancient is because if kabbalah can be shown to be primarily and originally a Jewish practice dating back hundred if not thousands of years before Jesus, then it could be legitimately used to inform the “Jewish Renaissance” that began at the end of the 19th century and is in many ways still unfolding. Drawing on research from the late 19th century, these scholars want to portray

387 Gnosticism as the most authentic kind of Judaism and therefore appropriate for revitalization Judaism and liberating it from what they believe is Rabbinic medievalism. The claim is that it was in these centuries prior to Jesus’ revelation that Judaism changed into something that it was previously not. By their account, Judaism changed under the influence of external forces into something that could then and only then become Rabbinic Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism by this account is actually the alien force within Judaism that needs to be abolished in favour of kabbalah and the general gnostic aspects. Whereas Jewish theorists like Hans Jonas, who claim that they hoped to marginalize the growing influence of kabbalah within Judaism, argued that pagan or Christian Gnosticism preceded the Jewish form therefore claiming Gnosticism in any form, including kabbalah, is not part of the Jewish tradition at all. They want to emphasise what they see as pagan elements even in contemporary Gnosticism and argue that kabbalah, as an expression of this Gnosticism, is rightly a pagan practice. As a pagan practice it has no role to play in informing Jewish life at any time no matter adequate to Judaism’s revitalization. Jonas argued that Gnosticism shows an “antagonism to the Jewish people as a whole, a kind of metaphysical antisemitism, which precisely the sources most lavish in the use of Jewish motifs (at the same time the most archaic ones) evince.” (Jonas as seen in Fossum 1984: 3) Scholem argues that although kabbalah appears to come from nowhere, suddenly emerging in Languedoc and Catalonia in the 13th century before moving to Spain, the sources from which this material is derived is much older and probably dates from antiquity. (Dan 1885: 312) As Dauber (2012: 1) wrote, It would be a mistake to refer to the very first kabbalistic texts of which we are aware – those written in the first half of the thirteenth century in Languedoc and Catalonia – as marking the beginnings of kabbalah. Scholars have increasingly come to accept that claims made by the authors of these texts that their written work records kabbalah (traditions) that for generation had been transmitted orally. It is that it is believed to be ancient, that it is believed to be pre-Rabbinic, that it is argued to be authentic, that it comes to be accepted by sections of the modern Jewish community as authoritative in the late 19th century. It is that it has this influence that it managed to shape Jewish thought at a time of great change within Judaism in the early 20th century and then developed throughout the 20th century until it came to be the dominant form of Judaism around the world today.214 That it emerges in the same region as gnostic Catharism was active simply cannot be a coincidence and it is surprising that Gershom Scholem and many

214

As will be explored in the following volume, this contest might have its origins in an even older contest that informs the content of Torah between Egyptian influenced “Jews” that lived in the southern Levant and worshipped the God Yahweh and Canaanite Israelites who lived in northern Levant and worshipped the God El.

388 other Jewish scholar researching the emergence of kabbalah do not reflect more of this historical fact. It is, after all, widely acknowledged that elements of contemporary Gnostic Judaism have Christian elements, especially in its conceptualization of the role of the messiah and what the advent of the messiah means for Jewish law, and that the revival of kabbalah at this time might explain how these Christian elements crept into gnostic Jewish practice. It should also be noted that even if we do acknowledge that the emergent practice of kabbalah, in its written form, and Catharism did influence each other in some way, there is no certainty as to which community originated the gnostic revival and which draw inspiration from this revival, it is to simply observe that they were both active at the same time in the same region and that this must be significant. The Zohar, written in the 13th century, is considered the foundational work of the written kabbalah although, as already discussed, not itself foundational. (Scholem 1987: 6) Perhaps not coincidently, the Zohar was written at the exact same time that the rationalist tradition of Maimonides was also being recorded across the Mediterranean in North Africa by that great Jewish scholar Maimonides. Again, we see two greatly influential currents of Jewish thought, as seems to be so often the case in the history of Judaism, emerge at the same time and in contest. This must be more than a coincidence. Some scholars, such as Heinrich Graetz (1817 – 1891) and David Neumark (1866 – 1924) consider that Jewish rationalism and Jewish mysticism are both responses to the same social conditions, addressing the same concerns. This would be consistent with Blumenberg argument that the positive religions respond or overcome gnostic movements which is to cast Rabbinic Judaism as the response to gnosticism within Judaism itself in the same way various movements within Christian society are contextualised by Blumenberg as attempts to overcome gnosticism. This would be reasonable to conclude. Christianity and Orthodox Judaism share a similar vision of what it means to be good, what it means to be evil, what the best society looks like. This is evinced by the accusations made between these two communities that one side or the other was more “bodily”, that one side or the other was “greedier”. These accusations say a lot about what they believe in in terms of what is evil and what they believe in is, by these criticisms, very similar. The main difference is authority, Jews believe the Torah as interpreted through the Talmud is authoritative for directing human behaviour while Christianity believes that conscience guided by the words and actions of Jesus is authoritative. Whatever the source, each, as does much of Islam, has a similar vision of what a good person looks like. A good Christian, a good Orthodox Jew and a good Muslim would not look that radically different. A good Gnostic Jew, a good Gnostic Muslim, and we have clear examples of both in Gnostic Judaism and Muslim Brotherhood, is very different from their positivist opponents.

389 The Zohar consists of a series of books, coming to many volumes, including a commentary on the secret meaning of the Torah and scriptural interpretation. It is also thought to be a kind of map that reveals the spiritual landscape of reality that also explains how the universe came into being. Finally, it is a guide on how to live. How do you live a life so that the true purpose of human existence is fulfilled? The Zohar must be read in an esoteric manner if the full meaning of what is being communicated is to be appreciated. The language and conceptual framework of the Zohar, with its emphasis on messianism, which, surprisingly today when messianism is understood to be so central to the Jewish tradition, does not seem to have been an important feature in Judaism prior to the Zohar. Traditional and influential kabbalists, such as Moses Cordovero, Scholomo Alkabetz, Joseph Caro, Isaac Luria and Moses Luzzatto, the most respected kabbalists in history, all claimed that the Zohar was first written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and he son Elazar who, poignantly, sought refuge in a cave while fleeing the Romans. (Scodel 2010) Drawing upon authoritative textual studies, many observe that the Zohar simply could not have been written in the 2nd century, due to the language used and ways of presenting ideas, and they are, therefore, for all intents and purposes, a forgery that has been accepted uncritically into the Jewish tradition. Others, more contemporary scholars, maybe for their own political reasons, argue for a much older origin, perhaps in ancient Egypt. But, as already observed, these conclusions might be inspired by researchers who want gnostic influences like kabbalah to be accepted so that it can shape the Jewish revival. Of course, obviously, there is a narrative where all of these competing accounts can be reconciled in a way that also explains aspects that each individual argument fails to address. This account would claim that the origins of the Zohar are indeed ancient, as contemporary scholarship would agree, but in the 2nd century, a moment of undeniable crisis, Shimon, amongst others, tried to preserve these ancient teachings by distributing them more broadly as an oral tradition and maybe even, at least partly, a written tradition. These ideas have then circulated amongst Jews as mostly an oral tradition until they were drawn together in order to make them more broadly accessible at a time when such ideas were prized by Moses de Leon. Therefore, the gnostic elements of kabbalah are probably, as Scholem amongst others argues, an extremely ancient and truly Jewish tradition. The Zohar was espoused and expanded upon by the revolutionary spiritual mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria in Safed in the 16th century. Some claim that Luria’s work begins the Golden Age of kabbalistic study and practice. (Berg 2002) Luria’s contribution changed kabbalah dramatically and introduced features that really did break with many of the well-established central teachings of Judaism up until that time. The Lurianic development in the gnostic tradition is called “Lurianic kabbalah”, to clearly differentiate it from what preceded it, and it is presented in most of the contemporary literature as the most influential

390 form of kabbalah today. Luria was first exposed to the Zohar as a teenager living in Cairo. He was considered such an exceptional student that his teacher recommended that he travel to Safed, in Galilee, where there was an established kabbalistic community of some renown flourishing under to direction of Rabbi Moses Cordovero. It is claimed that before Luria was born, the prophet Elijah, who is thought to be the harbinger of the Messiah, came to Luria’s father, and said, I have been sent to you by the Almighty to bring you tidings that your holy wife shall conceive and bear a child, and that you must call him Yitzchak. He shall begin to deliver Israel from the Klipot [forces of evil].215 Through him, numerous souls will receive their tikkun216. He is also destined to reveal many hidden mysteries in the Torah and to expound on the Zohar. His fame will spread throughout the world. The important thing about this prophecy is not that it actually happened, although probably not on the timeline that they expected at the time, but that it shows what was thought to be required by those who came to follow Luria. Here is an agenda, “deliver Israel from the Klipot217” and “tikkun” of souls or healing of souls. This agenda would be begun through a new interpretation of Torah. The need for “healing” emerges because according to Luria, as an expression of Gnosticism, creation is not a perfect act of God but became a descent into chaos realizing an evil world. So, chaos is not the condition before the world or when the world is not functioning, but chaos is the true condition of the world. To account for this condition of the world, Luria claims that God is not omnipotent Because of the limitation of God, Luria argues that He requires active participation of Jews in the world to reunite a shattered God and realised the ordered condition that He originally envisioned. God requires humanity in order to both understand itself and to realise its purpose. As a result of understanding God as not present in the world, as being pure potential, Luria and his followers thing of God as becoming and not being. Redemption was reconceptualized in terms of bringing the unity of God into this world and this was to be achieved through human intentional action. As with much of Luria’s teachings, this was a fundamental change to traditional Jewish thought that resulted in a significant change in the attitude and behaviour of many Jews around the world from that time onwards. It is for this reason that Luria’s interpretation and elaboration on the Zohar initiated a mystical revival amongst European Jewry in the 16th century. As just one part of Luria’s

215

Which includes Christianity Healing 217 Klipot, Qliphoth, Qlippoth or Kelipot are all different spellings for the Hebrew ‫ ְקלִ יּפֹות‬which literally means “shells” or “husks”. This refers to the external aspect of things that hides or covers over the inner divine spark. The term was historically associated with paganism in the sense that accounts of multiple gods hid the true unity of the one God. In the Gnostic tradition, klipot might be used to refer to everything in this world as all objective presence hides the unity of Nature. 216

391 radical alteration of the kabbalistic tradition, whereas it had only been taught to a few prior to Luria, Luria wanted everybody in the world to live according to his teachings and, as Berg observes, that is “a process that continues to this day”. Luria was supposed to prepare the way for the Messiah so, in the years following Luria’s death, Jews were vigilant for the Messiah’s arrival. Burton claimed that, The Jews . . . who embraced Gnosticism, would couple this expectation [of the Messiah] with their peculiar doctrines. They would give out that the person, who was to come, would free the world from the corruption of matter and the tyranny of the evil principle, and once more restore the knowledge of the true God. (Burton 1837: 79) Of course, these brief notes on kabbalah are not intended to be instructional or even to outline content, it is merely to give some orientation to the reader about how kabbalah fits into a Gnostic Jewish tradition. The mystic tradition was written at a high moment in Gnosticism in Southern France. The claim of that author is that it is a much older text, dating back to the 2nd century AD when Judea was under attack from the Romans. That older source claims that it is an ancient oral tradition, derived from the days of Moses. As kabbalah is a gnostic tradition, the two accounts, origins of Gnostic Judaism and origins of kabbalah are probably the same stories with a shared origin. What is important to note is that there was a significant increase in interest and distribution of kabbalistic material after Luria’s contribution in the 16th century. Amongst the many changes he instilled, including that proactive nature of Gnosticism is that there will arrive shortly a Jewish messiah.

Sabbatai Tzevi It was into this world, a world where Jews were watchful and expectant for the true Messiah, a population indoctrinated on a combination of mysticism and messianic expectations, that Sabbatai Tzevi emerged claiming to be the Jewish Messiah. Gershom Scholem argued that it was as a result of Lurianic kabbalah that the messianic expectations had been heightened thereby preparing the way for Sabbateanism. (Halperin 2007: 16) It can only be imagined how the long patient Jews must have responded when the predictions of the highly respected Luria, like a 16th century John the Baptist, appeared to be realised. Sabbatai Tzevi is the single most influential thinker in Judaism in at least the last 500 years and possibly the most influential person on the planet today having eclipsed the influence of Jesus some decades ago. Maciejko states unequivocally, “Jesus of Nazareth and Sabbatai Tsevi were the two most important Jewish messiahs in history.” (Maciejko 2017: xi) Just like Jesus, Sabbatai Tsevi should be a household name but because his followers practice secrecy and deception this is not the case. Sabbatai’s renown should not just be the result of his important contribution to Judaism, although this is undeniably significant, but, because, and this is no exaggeration, no other single religious figure has been

392 so influential in shaping the way our world is today and how we think about that world then Sabbatai Tsevi. Not Darwin, not Marx, not Nietzsche, not Freud. Nobody has been as influential in shaping how people think today on a whole range of issue, possibly not even Jesus Christ himself, as Sabbatai Tzevi. As Gershom Scholem acknowledged, Sabbateanism is the matrix of every significant movement to have emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, from Hasidism, to Reform Judaism, to the earliest Masonic circles and revolutionary idealism. The Sabbatian believers felt that they were champions of a new world which was to be established by overthrowing the values of all positive religions. (Scholem 1995) Indeed, that great observer of Gnosticism and its contemporary impacts, Ioan Petru Culianu, goes much further. Just before he was mysteriously murdered, he claimed quite correctly, “Once I believed that Gnosticism was a well-defined phenomenon belonging to the religious history of Late Antiquity . . . I was to learn soon, however, that I was a naif indeed. . . [the] Reformation was gnostic, communism was gnostic, Nazism was gnostic, liberalism, existentialism and psychoanalysis were gnostic too . . .” (Culianu as seen in Lazier 2009: 21) Culianu is perfectly correct with this list. So much of our world today, including Nazism and communism, are indeed inspired by gnosticism and that is all due to Sabbatai Tzevi. Our contemporary emphasis on negative freedom, individualism, feminism, multiculturalism, the sexual revolution, materialism, pornography, humanism, anti-Christian sentiments, decommodification, and environmentalism, and this list could go on and on, are all expressions of a particular and uniquely gnostic way of viewing the world that is directly indebted to Sabbatai’s influence. Hans Jonas was unequivocal regarding the contemporary reach of gnosticism, honestly stating simply, “the gnostic era is also our own”. (Lazier 2009: 147) Our era is the gnostic era. That gnosticism is so influential is because of Sabbatai Tzevi. All those middle-class, educated women pawing through “New Age” self-help books in a vain attempt to find meaning in an increasingly meaningless, materialist, hyper-sexualised world, their shelves weighed down to near breaking point with heavy Buddha statues and plaques to the lunar goddesses are simply one expression of Sabbatai Tzevi. Beside them are those university educated, enraged women with their hair cut short, wearing pants, screaming at the world at every opportunity against “patriarchy” are also the product of Sabbatai Tzevi. The many thousands of women kept awake, their drawers filled with sex toys, their heads filled with sweaty night-time fantasies about tantric sexual encounters are, without knowing it, also conforming to the vision of Sabbatai Tzevi. Simply put, and this cannot be overstated, the world we live in today would be a completely different place, almost unimaginably different, a much more Christian, much more moral, much less technological place, if not for the Gnostic Jewish “messiah” Sabbatai Tzevi.

393 Despite his importance, the many millions and millions of people around the world who helped advance his agenda every by promoting particular forms of “social justice”, out of some twisted “morality”, are not only totally ignorant of who he is, but they are even ignorant that they are advancing a single theological agenda no matter one initially advanced by somebody identified as a heretic in his own day. As a messiah, Sabbatai came with a new message and mission of redemption for the Jewish people and, therefore, a new message and mission of redemption for the entire world. Unlike the many other messianic claimants since the time of Jesus, who might have achieved local acceptance during their lifetime and maybe some regional influence for a short period of time, John Evelyn claimed that there had been 24 prior claimants to being the messiah, (as seen in Popkin 1994: 46) Sabbatai’s claim resonated with Jews around the world. (Scholem 2016: 2) Because of Luria’s prediction the expectation of the Messiah amongst Jews had reached fever pitch. As the Christian Paul Rycaut observed, This opinion [about the conversion of the Jews and their restoration of their temporal Kingdom] was so dilated and fixt in the Countries of the Reformed Religion, and in the heads of Fanatical Enthusiasts, who dreamed of Fifth Monarchies, the downfall of the Pope and Anti-Christ, and the greatness of the Jews. (Rycaut as seen in Popkin 2016: 46) Jews were extremely vigilant for the “anti-Christ” who would remove the Pope, realize the destruction of Rome, and return the Jews to Judea, in fulfillment of the conditions for redemption. Not only had a Jewish messiah been predicted by the kabbalah scholar Luria and accepted passionately by many Jews but Christian Millenarians predicted, based on a particular reading of the Book of Revelation, that “. . .this Year of 1666, was to prove a Year of Wonders, of strange revolutions in the World, and particularly, of blessing to the Jews, either in respects of their Conversion to the Christian Faith, or of their Restoration to their Temporal Kingdom.” (Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 129-130) Sabbatai had been trying to convince people of his messianic status for two decades, from 1948, but nobody was interest in just another Jew claiming to be the messiah. What changed Sabbatai’s standing was when the renowned young kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza, in 1665, spent time with Sabbatai to investigate whether he was indeed the messiah. After spending some time with him, Nathan publicly endorsed Sabbatai’s messianic claims. Nathan now claimed that not only was Sabbatai the long-awaited messiah but that he, Nathan of Gaza, was his prophet. As Goldish affirms, “By means of his prophetic vision and maggidic possession, Nathan inserted himself directly into an ancient and powerful tradition of prophetic messianism.” (Goldish 2004: 69) Nathan has been described as “the head of the movement, the leader of its scholars and its beating heart”. There is little doubt that it is through Nathan’s influence and documentation of ideas that he attributes to Sabbatai, but which were consistent with his own beliefs,

394 added a great deal of legitimacy to Sabbatia’s messianic claims. It was only after Nathan supported Sabbatai that Jews “discovered” Sabbatai and accepted him as their true messiah. It is also true that it is mainly through Nathan’s writings, that the ideas attributed to Sabbatai have been passed down to us while the real Sabbatai seems relatively silent. As Goldish observers, “Nathan of Gaza, [was] the brilliant theologian behind the success of Sabbateanism . . .” (Goldish 2004: 57) Nathan of Gaza, whose full name was Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi, was born in 1643 in Jerusalem. Although he was born in Jerusalem, importantly, Nathan’s parents were from Poland, the epicentre of Gnostic Judaism, and had then moved to Germany before finding their way to Jerusalem. Nathan’s father was a renowned Jewish scholar who was well known for collecting funds from both Europeans and wealthy men in the Ottoman Empire to help the then destitute Jews of Jerusalem. (Goldish 2004: 57) It is interesting to observe the relative well-being of European Jews in comparison to those who lived in the Ottoman Empire. Although it is common to hear of about the tolerance and openness of the Ottoman Empire, such accounts are often exaggerated and extremely simplistic. The relative wealth of European Jews is confirmed by Cossacks who claimed that they signed a treaty with the Ottoman Empire instead of Muscovy in 1654, around the same time, because Jews were not leaseholders in the Ottoman Empire unlike within Muscovy. (Kohut 2003: 150) That is, the Ottoman’s knew how to treat their Jews unlike the Europeans. Before people judge the Cossacks for their attitude towards the Jews, it has to be appreciated that this agreement was struck in the shadow of the terrible Khmelnytsky Uprising that was the Cossack response to ruthlessly cruel treatment at the hands of Jews and their Polish overlords. Nathan married into a wealthy family from Portugal where he moved in 1663. One of the more influential and miraculous events, repeated as a factual historical event in the work of Matt Goldish (2004), was that Nathan claimed that he had his first prophecy of Sabbatai, later known as the Great Vision, early in 1665. This date is not only highly questionable but, as will be revealed, Nathan is not exactly a trustworthy source. Nathan himself claimed that he lived his entire life without sin, prayed in poverty, and did not profit from his teaching. After years of studying the Zohar and the Lurianic writings, the two most influential writing of kabbalah, Nathan had his “Great Vision”. This Great Vision was a powerful prophetic event that lasted for 24 hours, during which time he “saw visions of God all day long and all night”. In these visions, which began with God using the line from the ancient prophecies “Thus saith the Lord”, Nathan was told that Sabbatai was the messiah and his messianic message. Despite the intensity of the prophecy, Nathan did not talk of this supposed event to anyone until 1668 when he had a conversation with Rabbi Moses Pinheiro. Nathan swore by God to those to whom he told this story that it was true and therefore many who truly held faith believed him. (Goldish 2004: 60) Goldish claims that Nathan

395 contributed a “quasi-Gnostic Sabbatian worldview, in which good and evil, redeemer and antichrist, righteousness and sin stand not in dialectic relationship, but balanced in a sort of matrix in which neither can exist without the other, so that they are in some sense equal.” (Goldish 2004: 72) It was Nathan who brought Polish Gnostic beliefs to the Sabbatian tradition. Indeed, prior to Nathan’s involvement, it seems that Sabbatai may have held quite conventional “orthodox” views of Judaism. As will be elaborated upon, Goldish’s account of Sabbateanism is not very revealing, but it does begin to show how “Sabbatai”, of then through the writing of Nathan, presents as both the “redeemer and the anti-Christ” and these two, as with good and evil, are in some way supposed to be “balanced”. Why might we be suspicious that Nathan’s claim of a vision of Sabbatai’s messianic status directly from God which, conveniently, he was not allowed to tell anybody about until after Sabbatai himself had declared that he was indeed the messiah? In 1665, a year before Sabbatai publicly admitted to being the true messiah, Nathan suddenly produced an “ancient” apocalypse document. Nathan claimed that he personally had found the document in an ancient jar in a cave after being guided to it by a “spiritual source” which many came to believe, perhaps after Nathan’s suggestions, was Elijah himself. This document became known as the Vision of Rabbi Abraham. Of course, that there was an ancient document found by Nathan that was only discovered through Elijah’s guidance, was incredible news indeed. This document was said to be “in a very ancient script and paper rotted with age” and told of “dragons” and encounters with the “Shechinah” which were events that could be read as accurately foretelling Sabbatai’s own life. This document was an amazing confirmation of Sabbatai’s messianic claims and many more became persuaded to the truth of Sabbatai’s claims after its contents were made public. That the arrival of Sabbatai had been foretold thousands of years before the events and written down in a document to be discovered by his “prophet” just when Sabbatai was emerging as the messiah must have seemed like a miracle indeed to the Jewish people that had no other precedence except Jesus himself. Unlike in the case of Jesus, the problem with this incredible find was that it was a deliberate forgery carried out by Nathan’s own hand. Yes, the man who claimed that he had never sinned had deliberately forged a document to add weight to his and Sabbatai’s claim that Sabbatai was the messiah. John’s words do come to mind, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” (1 John 1: 8) The truth does not appear to have been in Nathan. Nathan had intentionally “distressed” the document, a relatively common practice at the time as the more ancient the text the more authority it claimed, to make it appear ancient. Apparently, those who discovered the forgery thought that it was not even a very good attempted forgery. Sasportas, the most vocal critic of Sabbatai’s messianic claims, instantly saw it for what it was. As Goldish observes,

396 Nathan did not execute his ruse in the artless spirit of traditional Midrashic and kabbalistic pseudepigrapha, however. He deliberately distressed the manuscript to give it the illusion of great antiquity. He invented a myth about its discovery and vouched for its truth on public record. He wove motifs and passages from Midrashic and biblical sources directly into the radically specific main message. He wrote a dry, learned kabbalistic commentary to the text. (Goldish 2004: 75) This is the same person who claimed that he had a prophetic experience where God came to him and told him that Sabbatai was the messiah. This he swore to God. Despite its inauthenticity, the thousands of people anticipating the arrival of the messiah that had heard the then well-respected Nathan verify Sabbatai’s messianic claims paid little heed to whether the document real or not. Goldish claims that unlike the Christian tradition, where “ancient” documents were instantly critically scrutinised to discovery their authenticity, the Jewish tradition had a history of blindly accepting forged ancient documents as true without giving them further consideration. The reason for this, Goldish proposes, is that “the obvious complexity of this tradition (Talmudic) may have made Judaism open to works whose substance was deemed valuable and holy, whatever their alleged pedigree. In other words, specific authorship may have been less important to Jews than it was to Christians”. (Goldish 2004: 74) So, in rather standard but questionable fashion, it was because of “complexity” of the ingenious Talmudic Jewish tradition, that prized a document’s explanatory power over its authenticity, that explained why forgeries were accepted uncritically. It was not because Jewish people were so desperate for the arrival of their messiah, had been moved to a state of frenzied anticipation by the writing of Luria, so they were just happy to have their expectations fulfilled. It was not, to say the same thing differently, because they were religious zealots unconcerned with truth, but, that the Jewish ideas are so complex a document can have value beyond being authentic. Once again, it might be suggested, what might appear to many observers, such as myself, as a possible weakness of Jewish religious practice is cast by Goldish as an actual strength. Probably the main difference between the way Jews and Christians encounter claims of ancient texts is because the Christian tradition, as a positive religion, places a great deal of importance on truth. According to Christianity, truth is Godliness. To live in truth is to live in Jesus or to live in the real world. As Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Jesus is the truth. To waver from the truth is break with God. Truth is of central importance to a realist tradition of Christianity. The Jewish tradition, like most Eastern religious practices, does not place the same emphasis on “truth”. As even Goldish observes, things, including documents, are prized for how they work, how they, in a sense, function. Nathan’s documents, although forgeries, were still valuable because they appeared to grant insight and, like a work of art, carried its own kind of truth. If a document grants insight into the Torah or Talmud,

397 even if it is not authentic, the document is still valuable. It is underappreciated today, although it was historically well known, how much the West prized truth relative to Eastern cultures. In our own times when truth matters less to people than it did historically, claims that Eastern cultures value truth less than the Christian West is hastily disposed of as racism, but it is true that the West does indeed prize truth more than Eastern cultures. The reason is simple, Christianity is a positive religion, it claims to know the world and that world is the materialization of God. To live in truth is to move into God. This claim is not to denigrate Eastern cultures and is most certainly not “racist”, it is simply an observation of the difference between Eastern and Western cultures because of different onto-theological beliefs. Eastern cultures value a “good lie” in the sense that a lie can achieve things that are prized. Just look at Chinese foreign policy, which systematically lies to achieve their ends, contrasted to even the former Soviet Union which was much more honest in their dealings with the international community. The Chinese government comes out and says they have withdrawn troops from some hot spot and the truth comes out a few months later that they have actually been concentrating their military forces in that very same place. There is nothing wrong for a Chinese person to do this. Indeed, it is clever to be able to trick people through deception. A good deception which achieved outcomes is better, in the Eastern tradition, more reasonable even, than to tell a truth which might cause harm. In a sense, the Eastern perspective makes more sense if you take an experience of God out of the equation. As Nietzsche asked, why value truth? Why not prized untruth? Scientific research actually supports this claim, it was found in a recent study that out of people from 15 countries studied, the Chinese were the most deceptive while the British were found the be the most truthful. (Wang 2015) This is not an insult or racism; the Chinese would be proud that they were so clever. This is why Nathan’s early deception would have been of great concern to the Christian tradition, it would have been discovered and that discovery would have been seen to taint Nathan as a man probably to a degree that it would have stopped the entire movement. The Gnostic Jewish tradition, by contrast, is just not that concerned with truth. After all, in an evil world where all “truth” claims are just deceptions why should Nathan’s transgressions be given special significance? It is, after all, truth which must be ultimately overcome if the world is to be destroyed. This is why not only were Jews at the time unconcerned to even investigate the authenticity of the documents but when Sasportas revealed the deception, it had no effect on the movement. Nathan and Sabbatai met in April 1665, supposedly after Nathan had his powerful prophetic experience, as Nathan was returning from a trip from Cairo to Jerusalem. Nathan was just 21 years old but was already a highly respected Lurianic kabbalist. Nathan had heard about Sabbatai, as had many Jews, but he had not yet publicly come out about his “prophecy” regarding the mystic. It was only after

398 Nathan became convinced that Sabbatai Tzevi was indeed the long-awaited messiah, that Sabbatai’s fame quickly spread, and excitement grew. The two men, who supposedly became friends, travelled to the Jewish communities living in Jerusalem and Hebron several times promoting Sabbatai’s messianic claims. (Şişman 2017: 38) Before meeting Nathan, it is widely believed that Sabbatai was ignorant of Isaac Luria’s kabbalah, and it was only due to Nathan that Sabbatai become interested in this tradition. It then seemed to become central to Sabbatai’s mission. The movement initially grew slowly. Sabbatai was calling for the local Jews to repent and to pledge him obedience. Nathan enthusiastically supported these efforts in whatever ways he could. It was through their combined efforts that a small community of adherents arose from out of these communities. Amongst the early supporters was Israel Najera, Samuel Primo, Mattathias Bloch, Israel Benjamin and Moses Galante. (Şişman 2017: 38) It was shortly after gaining this small but dedicated following of believers that Sabbatai came out for the first time, on the 17 th of Sivan (21st of May 1665) as the messiah. Sabbatai, at this stage, was 39 years old. A significant public event occurred in that same year. At that time, Jews, which constituted about a 1/3rd of Jerusalem’s total population, and Christians, were not allowed to wear certain colours, such as green and white, nor were they allowed to ride horses. These were signs of authority retained by the ruling Muslims. In a public display of grandeur and deliberate disobedience of authorities, Sabbatai donned beautiful green clothing, mounted a horse, and began to circle Jerusalem. A large crowd quickly gathered to watch this grand spectacle of rebellion and pride as the extremely handsome Sabbatai rode his horse grandly around Jerusalem dressed in his green finery. The records say that a large crowd of Jews began to follow him as he circled, getting bigger and bigger with every circumambulation. This grandeur, this display of earthly power, the obvious use of grand symbolism, might all be contrasted to Jesus’ entry into the city of Jerusalem under similar circumstances. Jesus too was claimed to be the messiah and his entry into Jerusalem was expected to fulfill prophecies. It was anticipated by the Jews of Jerusalem that he would declare himself to be the King of Jews which would have placed him in direct conflict with the existing Jewish leadership. When Jerusalem heard that Jesus was on his way, as with Sabbatai, the people also got very excited at the potential realization of David’s lost kingdom. But Jesus actually went against these expectations and instead communicated a very different message. He wore his normal, humble clothing, appropriate for a carpenter. The crowds of expectant followers gathered and brought branches from palm trees to cover the road so that Jesus would not soil his feet. This was done as the local people were too poor to bring him a proper carpet but Jesus, the man born in a manger, was unconcerned. Jesus did not circle the city; he did not put on a grand display. Jesus was mounted atop a donkey not a grand horse. Jesus entered the city dressed like everyone else, riding a donkey, humbly accepting the kindness of palm

399 leaves to ease his way as he entered Jerusalem. The point that Jesus was making was the exact opposite of the one that Sabbatai was trying to make, Jesus was not concerned with earthly power, he was the messiah of God, not a King on earth. He was the redeemer, perfect in every way, He did not need nor want finery or a grand horse, props for a performer, but He brought what was most prized, His words, words of love, peace, harmony and forgiveness. His Kingdom was not David’s, His kingdom could be realized through faith in God, thereby uniting heaven and earth. Just like Jesus’ humbler, but more enduringly powerful entry into Jerusalem, Sabbatai also attracted the authority’s attention. It was perhaps because of Sabbatai’s display of such insecurity that many rabbis knowledgeable in Torah denied Sabbatai’s messianic claims. These detractors included Abraham Amigo, Jacob Hagiz, Samuel Garmison (Nathan’s teacher) and Jacob Zemah. With Nathan’s endorsement and rapidly increasing following, it became widely believed that at long last, after thousands of years waiting, the Jewish Messiah had indeed arrived. Considering the speed of communication and border restrictions, although the printing press was available and was used to spread the word of Sabbatai’s arrival, Sabbatai was quickly accepted, within mere months, by an eager Jewish population around the world as the true Messiah. Halperin claims that actually “the majority of Jews of the time” accepted Sabbatai as the messiah. (Halperin 2007: 1) If the Bible story of Jesus is to be accepted, for reasons only known to the Jews themselves, Sabbatai’s claim to messianic status seems to have been more persuasive and resonated with more force than Jesus’ revelation. Many, many Jews accepted Sabbatai as their messiah. As Maciejki observes, Sabbatai “. . . captured the entire Jewish world and all strata of Jewish society . . .” (Maciejko 2017: xi) What has to be appreciated is the general and unprecedented acceptance of Sabbatai as the messiah and how much excitement and anticipation the advent of the true messiah’s arrival created amongst global Jewry. The rich and poor, the educated elite and the common man, Rabbis and the laity, Jews from England to Iran, from Poland to Egypt, all accepted that the messiah had indeed at last arrived.218 Again as Maciejki acknowledges, “. . .aside from Jesus, Tzevi was the only Jewish messiah whose gospel gained sufficient momentum to break through the confines of a particular social group or a specific geographical milieu.” (Maciejko 2017: xi) Whereas it took Jesus’ Christian movement decades, even centuries to gain broad acceptance, Sabbatai’s fame seemed to spread

218

To be clear, some wealthy Jews and some Orthodox Jews along with Rabbis were sympathetic with Sabbatai’s claim but it was from this group of elites that the greatest resistance emerged. As Scholem observes, “True enough, opposition to Sabbatai Tzevi included rich merchants, lay leaders, and rabbis, that is, members of the ruling elite.” (Scholem 2016: 5) But as he also observes, “All the more surprising is the real proportion of believers and unbelievers within the ruling classes. All later statements notwithstanding, the majority of the ruling class was in the camp of the believers. . .” (Scholem 2016: 5)

400 through the early Enlightenment Jewish world like wildfire. Even a few Christians at the time, such as English scholar Peter Serrarius, became extremely curious about Sabbatai’s messianic claims while others may have even accepted Sabbatia as the true messiah. (Maciejko 2017: xii) The Christian John Dury investigated how the coming of a Jewish Messiah might have implications for Christiantiy or even if Sabbatai might be the fulfillment of the Christian covenant and the second coming which would occur with salvation219. (Popkin 1994: 43) In simple terms, Sabbatai Tzevi, “initiated the largest messianic movement in Jewish history since the tragic Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century CE.” (Van der Haven 2012: 7) Jews around the world became excited by the arrival of their Messiah and they anticipated their immanent return to the promised land and redemption. As Sabbatai made his way through Jewish communities, travelling from town to town, his fame grew, and grew. His following increased and Jewish expectation of redemption reached fever pitch across Europe and the Middle East. Some Jews were so certain of Sabbatai’s Messianic claims that they sold all their possessions and closed their businesses in preparation for their imminent return to Israel. As an English observer of these events wrote, capturing the urgency and excitement by which news of Sabbatai was greeted, In this manner millions of people were possessed, when Sabbatai Tzevi first apper’d at Smyrna and published himself to the Jews for their Messiah, relating the greatness of their approaching Kingdom, the strong hand whereby God would free them from bondage and gather them from all parts of the world. It was strange to see how the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabbatai and his Doctrine flew through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited, the latter of which were so deeply possessed with a belief of their new Kingdom, and riches, and many of them with promotion to Offices of Government, Renown, and Greatness, that in all parts from Constantinople to Buda I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to prepare themselves and families for a journey to Jerusalem. All their discourses, their dreams and disposal of their affairs tended to no other design but a reestablishment in the Land of Promise, to Greatness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah, who’s origin, birth, and education are first to be recounted. (Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 129130) His influence was so great that before Sabbatai, it could honestly be said that to be Jewish was to be a rabbinic or Orthodox Jew, after Sabbatai, the movement initially fractured into various “denominations” as a direct result of different responses to Sabbatai’s message. They all perceived different strategies to fight Sabbatai’s “war without hands” (war with ideas). (Goldish 2004: 72) Sabbatai “forced open the gates of modern Hebrew history” and ignited “new fires” from the “eternal rocks of religion”. (Lazier 2009: 114) Sabbatai spawned a range of Jewish denominations all trying in different ways to be “true” to Sabbatai’s

219

Jesus “will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him.” (Hebrews 9: 28)

401 covenant and realize his vision in the world. Many denominations of Judaism, the Dönmeh, Frankists, Hasidic, the Haskalah, reform, communism, Zionism and conservative, are all directly indebted to the teachings of Sabbatai Tsevi and tried, and continue to try today, to fulfill his covenant. It is because of Sabbatai that Neusner (1969: 2) could claim, “Judaism as it was known from the first to the end of the eighteenth century was rabbinic Judaism” from the end of the 18th century, after the many seeds sown by Sabbatai had begun to sprout, this could no longer be honestly claimed. For just important example of how Sabbateanism reshaped, particularly mystic, Judaism. Prior to Sabbatai, most Jewish intellectuals, including people like Abulafia and Rabbai Isaiah, “conceived of sexual intercourse as an explicitly negative activity”. (Idel 2008: 130) So much so that Abulafia described sex as “the evil act of intercourse”. Abulafia as seen in Idel 2008: 129) So, despite many contemporary Jews claiming that unlike Christianity Jews have never demonized sex but have always embraced it as healthy the truth is for hundreds if not thousands of years the view of Jews towards sex was similar to that held by Christians at the time, sex was indeed something “evil”. The reason for the popularity of Sabbatai, as it is for the popularity of Adolph Hitler or the popularity of Theodore Delano Roosevelt, is complex. The single most influential factor for explaining Sabbatai’s success in the 17th century was that, like the late 19th century that would again see Gnostic Judaism triumphantly re-emerge and unite many Jews again in common cause, it was a mystical time. Europeans generally in the late 17th century turned to mysticism and Gnosticism and messianism went through a period of popular revival amongst Christian as well as Jewish communities. This was so much the case that some refer to the 17th century, in no small part because of the advent of Sabbatai Tzevi, as “The Gnostic Revival”. (Smoley 2009) This was a time when, Europeans “. . .in general demonstrated a deep belief in providence, astrology, portents, and prophecy . . .” (Goldish 2004: 16) Christians like Knorr von Rosenroth, Pico della Mirandola, and Johannes Buxtorf, turned to gnostic texts with renewed enthusiasm seeking out new revelations. (Kilcher 2010: 16) The 17th century, like the 2nd century AD, and again in the 12th century, was a period of transition. It was a transition from an Aristotelian, medieval worldview, that involved the general acceptance of astrology, alchemy and prognostication, to one that embraced astronomy, chemistry and statistical analysis220. The worldview that emerged from this moment of unrest, which should rightly be thought of as an actual response to gnosticism, was most especially a movement that saw God removed from the material world and the beginning of a process of

220

Although researching astrology and trying to explain how it worked was legitimate academic research until the end of the 18th century. It was really only with the world-shaking events of Napoleon, that a more scientific worldview emerged that no longer paid serious attention to astrology or alchemy.

402 disenchantment that finds its ultimate expression in the modern world. This transition to modernity was lived in the lives of people like Isaac Newton (1642-1726), Henry More (1614-1687), John Napier (15501617), Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and even Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790). Many of these men spent at least as much time, in many cases much more, researching astrology and alchemy as they did studying the “science” for which they are today renowned. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, for example, like many people at the time, easily combined mysticism and esoteric studies, especially Gnosticism, with the emergent scientific practices that were becoming seen as epistemically authoritative. Napier spent as much time studying prophecy as he did studying the mathematics for which he is today renowned. As Firth observes, “It is certain, however, that Napier regarded his work on the prophecies of the Apocalypse as his true vocation and the study of mathematics as the occupation of his leisure.” (Firth 1978: 133) Indeed, how mystical beliefs fertilized the growth and acceptance of scientific practice, in terms of positing unseen forces operating externally on passive matter, now denuded of God’s presence, and that these hidden natural forces needed to be discovered and understood, as a deliberate attack on Aristotelianism, is fascinating to consider and undeniably extremely important to understand. Indeed, in the minds of most scholars at the time, the two pursuits, the mystical and the scientific, were thought inseparable. As Goldish (2004: 19) rightly observes of mystical practices like magic and natural science, They are both concerned with methods for getting beyond the surface world and understanding its underlying dynamics. They both strive to define the boundaries of the knowable. Science and some forms of prophecy attempt to plumb the future and what will happen under prescribed circumstances. Both seek to improve the human condition through knowledge. Goldish seems to be suggesting that the modern project was, at least originally, gnostic throughout in terms that it was knowledge that should rightfully guide human action into the future. Both these esoteric beliefs and natural science were sceptical about the reality of the world that they could see and were motivated to find the hidden truth, true knowledge, that was not to be readily discovered by the senses. Real “truth” remained locked behind a deceptive veil demanding the intellectual move beyond mere appearances to discover the hidden truth. As Wieczynski wrote, “This willingness to apply ancient learning, however esoteric, to the formulation of truth did much to free the minds of Renaissance thinkers from dogmatism and rigorism and prepared the way for the later scientific investigation of all reality.” (Wieczynski 1975: 23) This willingness was not just because of the originality or ancient truths but because they believed that all knowledge had already been discovered in Ancient Egypt and Greece so there was an imperative to link new “scientific” discoveries to ancient sources to add credibility to the findings. (Golding 2009: 57)

403 As an expression of this period, amongst the influential text of the times, were the works by esoteric mystic Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-greatest Hermes”). The supposed author of these texts had adopted the name of the Greek god Hermes, “the ‘scribe of the gods’, who dwelt in old Egypt in the days when the present race of men was in its infancy”. (Three Initiates 2006: 4) Others credited as possible authors included, an Ancient Egyptian priest, the Egyptian God Thoth, the biblical Enoch or, even, the Muslim Idris (some claim that Idris, Enoch and Hermes Trismegistus are actually the same person known under different names). Whoever was really the author or authors of this text, it came to be believed in the 17th century that these volumes revealed deep mystical secrets about the remotest past and contained highly valuable ancient knowledge that had been lost to history. (Smoley 2009) As Wieczynski writes of the conditions and influence of these texts, Since the rebirth of learning in Western Europe, many thinkers had been intrigued by some of the mystical, magical, and occult theories that had interested the sages of ancient times. Medieval theologians, while applying the metaphysics of Aristotle and Plato to the formulation of Christian dogma, had often been captivated by the idea that some of the more exotic ideas of the ancients could also be pressed into the service of the faith. This attitude explains the fascination medieval Christian thinkers had felt toward the works of Hermes Trismegistus, whom they erroneously believed to have been an Egyptian sage who lived long before Christ. Hermeticism, as the teachings of Hermes came to be known, could be accepted only by Christians who affirmed that the human mind could attain a religious knowledge higher and fuller than that revealed by Christ and the Scriptures, for they emphasized the cultivation of intuition. . . In time the practiced adherent of Hermeticism could, through mystical revelations and intuition, grasp fully the divine purpose in creation. (Wieczynski 1975: 21) Interestingly, in harmony with ancient Greek and Gnostic beliefs, as would be revived in modern form in the work of Sigmund Freud, dreams were one of the main avenues to revelation in this period as the way God revealed His divine purpose. As Wieczynski wrote, God’s plan . . . could be understood through dreams and revelations that came to initiates who disciplined themselves in asceticism and contemplation.” (Wieczynski 1975: 21) As a sign that this was a period of transmission, when some of the old beliefs mingled easily with new emerging ideas, scholars in the 17th century continued the Medieval belief that older texts were more authoritative. As Goldish (2004: 56) observes, “The presumption, inflated from its place in medieval religious thought, was that the ancients, being closer to the time of Adam, or at least to the classical age of prophecy, knew far more of the world’s secrets than their progeny. There was no discovery – only recovery of knowledge lost over the centuries.” That it was believed at the time that this was an ancient text, written thousands of years before Christ, added authority and legitimacy to the claims made within the text. The writings seem to be inspired by Greek philosophy, Jewish theology and Egyptian mysticism. (Broek 2008: 1) Today, it is believed that these Hermetic texts

404 were actually originally produced during the first wave of gnostic dominance in the 2st or 3nd centuries AD. (Meyer 2009: 7) Unlike in the 17th century, the content of this text is not today understood to be particularly insightful and certainly do not reveal, “lost truths”, but that they are a confused and derived set of writings that carry historical interest about religious beliefs in the 3rd century but present little substantive philosophical or theological insights that might be of interest to a contemporary scholars. (Smoley 2009) As we all know, they are not running courses at our universities on these Hermetic texts. This contemporary denial of the importance of the Hermetic texts may be true if these texts are indeed being understood properly or it may actually be the truth that they are of great value, but that value is being missed by contemporary scholars who, in the West, dismiss anything “spiritual”. Our contemporary age, unlike times past, has grown arrogant and closed minded to the various paths to truth as it has embraced technology at the expense of all other modes of encountering and comprehending the world. This hubris, as these volumes make clear, is certainly misplaced. Our universities, all those highly paid scholars who are responsible to know, are ignorant of so much yet they seem proud of their ignorance. Most importantly, Hermeticism, like kabbalah, shares many Gnostic beliefs including that the world is a deception, that the purpose of humanity is to unite or “cleave” to God and that because God is androgynous Mankind is also rightfully androgynous. As this passage from the Hermetic texts affirms, There is no room for . . . [the good] . . . in the material body, which is squeezed on all sides by vice, sufferings, pains, desires, angry feelings, delusions and mindless opinions. And the worst of all, Asclepius, is that here below they believe that each of the things I have just mentioned is the greatest good while actually it is insuperable evil. . . the eye cannot see god, neither can it see the beautiful and the good, for they are integral parts of god alone. . . (ed. Copenhaver 2000: 22) This section seems to affirm the gnostic belief that what is considered moral is actually evil because everything that people think of as “good” is, in fact, “evil” because God cannot be known. Hermeticism should rightly be considered a Gnostic movement that shares many Gnostic beliefs even if they are, as perhaps they should be, wrapped in Egyptian motifs. (Meyer 2009: 7) Indeed, three works from the Corpus Hermeticum were found along with an apparent Platonic text and Gnostic treatise within the Nag Hammadi library which was discovered in 1945 which clearly links Hermeticism with the gnostic tradition. The popularity and influence of the text by Hermes Trismegistus, therefore, presents as a concrete example of a popular and influential gnostic text that was driving the gnostic revival movement in the 16th and 17th centuries Europe at the same time that Sabbateanism captured the global Jewish community. The Hermetic texts make all kinds of claims about creation and the nature of the good and God and humanity’s relationship with God. This was also the first time in history when the earlier Gnostic sources

405 were being read, not as deranged heretical texts that at best needed to be refuted if not burnt, but as long-lost holders of precious knowledge, precious knowledge that may have been historically suppressed by the organized Christian religion. (Smoley 2009) As Kurt Rudolph writes expressing this “enlightened” perspective on the Gnostic thinking, The development of orthodoxy was a lengthy process, which did indeed build upon certain basic statements but grew out of a very manifold variety of early Christian thought and action. This entirely valid multiplicity, to which the Christian gnostic movement also belongs, was only declared to be heretical and unorthodox in the course of the discussion, and this was a disqualification which rested purely upon theological judgements. (Rudolph 2001: 52) While the Gnostic tainted Hermetic texts were sweeping across Europe presenting an alternative vision of Christianity to an accepting Europe, Kabbalah was also gaining followings in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. The point is, it is into this exact period of renewal of mysticism and Gnostic teachings in particular, as expressed in Hermeticism, that Jewish Gnosticism, as expressed in kabbalah, also goes through a revival in part driven by Sabbatai Tzevi. Indeed, the Sabbatian movement erupted into Europe at the wellspring of the scientific revolution. Sabbatai Tzevi reached his highest level of popularity in his lifetime in the very same year as Isaac Newton’s anni mirabliles. (Goldish 2004: 18) That Jews may have turned away from the Aristotelian influenced rationalist teachings of Maimonides at the exact same time as Christians were also turning away from an Aristotelian worldview must be seen as more than a coincidence but the result of a general mystical revival. It is also an example of an important cross insemination, between European Christians and European Jews, that inspired many Jews at that time to embrace the Gnostic mysticism that was being advanced by the heretical Sabbatai Tzevi. Sabbatai reached the peak of his influence that he would have during his lifetime, on the 18th of June 1666, when he affirmed the claim, first made in 1648, that he actually was indeed God. How long Sabbatai secretly harboured this delusion is unknown but as a child, people from his hometown of Izmir remembered him quoting Isaiah 14:14 “I will ascend upon the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.” The day, the 18th, is most likely not itself a reference to 666 as sometimes claimed but is a reference to the belief that Sabbatai was the eighteenth prophet. The first prophet was Adam followed by Abraham, Jacob, Moses and Ester etc. In his 18 commandments, Sabbatai says in the first one that he “came to this world eighteen times under the names Adam, Abraham etc.” and that “Jacob, Moses etc., are only sparks of Sabbatai’s soul”. This is quite a claim that “Moses” and “Abraham” and “Adam” are only “sparks” of Sabbatai’s soul which is fully developed and complete. Importantly, by this stage, there seems to have been a break in the personal relationship between Sabbatai and Nathan as they were no longer in contact.

406 Indeed, except for the three months they spent together travelling between Hebron and Jerusalem, after which Nathan acknowledged Sabbatai as the true messiah, they seem to have taken different paths and advanced different interpretations of what Sabbatai’s messianic message was. As Şişman (2017: 41) concludes, “Nathan’s and Sabbatai’s perceptions of the messiah and the messianic age were different from the start.” Indeed, Şişman argues that it was only after Sabbatai died, in 1676, that Nathan’s Lurianic kabbalah became influential within the Sabbatian movement. (Şişman 2017: 42) The reason why Sabbatai chose 1666 to affirm his status as God was probably for all the reasons observed in the 17 th century text “Two Journeys to Jerusalem” which is a contemporary eyewitness account of the Sabbatian phenomenon. 1666 was thought by many Christians to be the year the events foretold in Revelations, with its obvious link to “666”, would come to pass. It was believed to be a particularly important year for the Jews when they would either convert to Christianity or begin their path to redemption through a return to Jerusalem. Indeed, Nathan wrote that 1666 was indeed the start of the messianic age demanding followers to do penance, repentance and devotion until that time arrives. (Şişman 2017: 42) Interestingly, the Isaiah quote that Sabbatai had said his entire life was originally said by “Lucifer” who, Isaiah warned, “shalt be brought down to Hell, to the uttermost parts of the pit” which might be read as a reference to the project of striving for the Shechinah. To emphasise his intimacy with God, Sabbatai claimed that his name and the phrase “God moved”, as in the line from Genesis which says, “the spirit of God moved upon the waters”, were numerically equivalent. Sabbatai was using the magical practice of Gematria, an alphanumeric practice to assign values to names and phrases,221 to claim being equivalent to God’s spirit, to the “darkness” upon the deep. As it says in Genesis 1:2 “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Some have claimed that this passage is associating “darkness” with the “spirit of God” because they are both portrayed as moving upon “the deep” and the “face of the waters”. As Sabbatai’s name is numerically equivalent to “God moves” then Sabbatai claimed that he was the “spirit of God”.222 That Sabbatai identified with the “darkness” which he understood to be the “spirit of God” explains why he symbolically married the Shechinah, the divine spirit of God, which is potentially present in the world, while living in Salonica. (Şişman 2017: 28) Although this act was later interpreted as Sabbatai claiming to be the embodied persona, the physical presence, of the Shechinah (Şişman 2017: 28) it should simply by understood as Sabbatai claiming to be the male aspect of God reuniting with the feminine, the Shechinah.

221

It continues to be a very popular practice amongst Jews even today. As in the American Jew Paul Simon’s opening lines to Sound of Silence, “Hello darkness my old friend, I’ve come to talk to you again” is probably a reference to the Gnostic Jewish God. 222

407 If this is the case, then this union would mark the start of the messianic age. Such an interpretation would be consistent with Sabbatai’s continuous declarations that “there is no division, distinction, or separation whatever between me and Him (God).” Sabbatai, like Jesus, in the Christian tradition, was God incarnate in the world. The claim, by this account, is that the teachings of Sabbatai functioned as the reunion of the Shechinah, the unity of God, that was physically realized when he symbolically married the Shechinah. Sabbatai wanted to be identified unambiguously as being everything that Jesus was not, the Messiah, the incarnate God, that he made a declaration to “all the Nations of the Jews”, that he was “The only, and first-born Son of God, Sabbatai Tzevi, the Messiah and Saviour of Israel, to all the Sons of Israel, peace. Since that you are made worthy to see that great Day of Deliverance, and Salvation unto Israel, and Accomplishment of the word of God . . .” To affirm his identity as the true Messiah, Sabbatai himself would sign letters, “the First Created”, “the only Son of God”, “the Messiah and Redeemer of Israel” and “the Lord your God, Sabbatai Tzevi”. (Şişman 2017: 48) Not only did he explicitly declare himself the Messiah, the one and only Son of God, but, in a way consistent with Jewish beliefs about an earthly kingdom, Sabbatai also claimed to be King of all the Jews. This was a title mockingly given to Jesus before he was crucified. Guards insultingly put a purple robe around Jesus and pushed a crown of thorns onto His head and called him “the King of the Jews”. It was all just a way of degrading him and to make the point that he was not the “King of the Jews” at all, he was not the “anointed one”, he was not the messiah. Sabbatai, drawing on an earthy understanding of messianism, embraces being a king on earth. He claimed to be “the High King above all Kings of the Earth”. (Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 147) This might be contrasted to Jesus who made it clear that he was not upon the earth to realize an earthly kingdom but that His kingdom was in Heaven which, after Jesus, was ruled again by God. When Jesus was asked by the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate if he did claim to be the “King of the Jews”, Jesus replied, “You say so” as in he had been mocked to that effect. With the appearance of Sabbatai and his declaration that he was in fact God, the Messiah, on earth, many European Jews felt unworthy to return to Israel. Not yet understanding Sabbatai’s heretical message, they believed, based on Orthodox teachings, that they remained tainted by sin. Based on established Jewish teaching, many Jews took extreme measures to make themselves free of sin and therefore worthy to return. As a contemporary observed, But so forward was everyone now in his Acts of Penance, that they stay’d not for the Sentence of the Chocham, or prescription of any Rules, but apply’d themselves immediately to Fasting; And some in that manner beyond the abilities of Nature, that having for the space of seven days taken no sustenance, were famished to death. Others buried themselves in their Gardens covering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads

408 only excepted, remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the cold and moisture: others would endure to have melted Wax drop upon their shoulders, others to roll themselves in Snow, and throw their Bodies in the Coldest season of Winter into the Sea, or Frozen Waters. But the most common way of Mortification was first to prick their Backs and Sides with Thorns, and then to give themselves thirty-nine Lashes. (Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 138-139) All these acts were undertaken, as the passage says, not under the direction of the hakham223 (Chocham) but according to their own personal beliefs about what might be appropriate to redeem their sins. Many wealthy Jews gave away large sums of money to poor Jews as it was prophesised that all Jews would be wealthy beyond the need of labour before they would be allowed to return to Israel and, as this was most certainly not the case in 1666, they did everything that they could to make it so. What was not being understood by these European Jews who were still informed by the Talmud was that because Sabbatai claimed that he was the Messiah, he claimed to bring a new covenant between God and Man. In the same way that Christians believed that Christ brought a new covenant, where the old social laws of the Jews, sanctions on food, required rituals, fasting days etc., were no longer to be obeyed. Sabbatai taught that, “[humanity] had entered a messianic age and that their messiah had direct knowledge of the will of God. As a result, many were convinced that this enabled the suspension of halakhic rules . . . they were meant for exilic time in the absence of direct access to God.” (Van der Haven 2009: 8) God was no longer silent but revealed himself as Sabbatai and therefore people now had direct access to God. His will was revealed to them in the form of Sabbatai Tzevi. As influential “gnosticallytinged”224 Jewish thinker Rosenzweig observes, Jews generally understand revelation as presenting a struggle between God and man. This struggle is not a struggle between their God and Jews but between the God that created this world, the creation of Man, and the Jews. The highest expression of the creator God on earth is the Christian tradition and Christianity, from the very start of Sabbateanism, Edom, was always their ultimate enemy. (Şişman 2017: 42) By this account, revelation from the true messiah gives humanity direction in how to act in this world, a true path to redemption. This path was the polar opposite of Christianity. Gnostics believe that it was an aspect of God that created even this degraded world as a veil that would challenge humanity to navigate his way back to God. (Mendes-Flohr 2019: 74) It was against this aspect of God that the Jews must struggle or fight. Indeed, the etymology of the word Isra-el is “struggling” or “fighting” (Isra) with God (El). This might be understood, in light of Rosenweig’s

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A hakham or chakam, what these authors have called a “Chocham”, is a man who is an extremely knowledgeable Torah scholar. He must be not only learned but also wise. Such a person does not need to be a Jew. As it says in the Talmud, “He who says a wise thing is called a hakham, even if he be not a Jew.” 224 Paul Mendes-Flohr described Rosenweig’s thinking in these terms. (Mendes-Flohr 2019: 73

409 observations, that gnostic Judaism is about struggling against or fighting against this world that a fallen aspect of God created. This is a struggle against everything and everyone in it, as instructed by revelation, and that because this world was indeed created by an aspect of God., fighting against this world and those who inhabit it is, at the same time, a struggle with God - Israel. As it says in Genesis 32: 22-32, after Jacob fought God throughout the night, he asked for a blessing, and God said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” This is why Israel is called Israel, it is a mark that the Jewish people have fought against the creator God and man, and continue to, and have indeed so-far prevailed. Sabbatai was encountered, as a Messiah, as giving a new revelation to guide human action in its fight against God and other people. It was a war that he had declared, a war without weapons. Sabbatai promised that if the Jewish people obeyed his dictates, then the Jews “shall have Dominion over the Nations, and not only over these who are on Earth but over those Creatures also which are in the depths of the Sea: All is for your Consolation and Rejoicing.” (Sabbatai as seen in Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 140) The basic idea behind the revelation, as already noted, was of reversal. The primary reversal was to see society, civilization, morality as the cause of evil and nature, the material, understood as the spirit of God, as the path to redemption. As part of this reversal, Sabbatai’s movement, as is Gnostic Judaism, is antinomian. As one of his most ardent proponents wrote, My meaning is that the kavvanot (prayer intentions) discovered by our teacher Rabbi Isaac Luria, may his saintly and righteous memory be blessed, are no longer appropriate to our own times, because the raising up [of the divine worlds] has entered a new phase, so that it would be like employing kavvanot intended for a weekday on the Sabbath. Therefore, let everyone beware of using them, and likewise let none of the kavvanot or homilies or writings of Rabbi Isaac Luria be read henceforward, for they are abstruse, and no living man has understood them . . . (Nathan as seen in Scholem et al (1971)1995) This is one of the motifs identified by Scholem used by Sabbatai and his followers, the “figure of the six days of the week and the Sabbath as archetypes of world history which runs its course in a great cosmic week and a Sabbath which follows thereafter.” So, Luria’s teaching is for the weekday, a time before the Messiah and redemption, whereas Sabbatai’s, whose name references the Sabbath and the number seven, antinomianism is for Saturday, the Sabbath, the Messianic Age, the age of redemption through sin. This is to associate his teaching with the 7th and highest heaven which is the highest ideal in traditional Jewish mysticism. The basic idea behind redemption through sin is that all of humanity had to be free of sin, or they needed to “purge their consciences of sin”, if the world is to be healed and their God was to be brought into this world. Although this is often read in terms of the need for people to live without sin, to live good

410 lives, Sabbatai interpreted this as requiring people to learn that what was once thought be sin is not really sinful at all but is the truly good. As already observed, this draws on the kabbalistic idea of “descent for the sake of ascent” or to enter the demonic in order to retrieve what is good. This project requires that what was once thought to be good, what has historically been thought of as virtuous, must now be shown to be evil. As Martin Buber observed, “Our [Jewish] belief in redemption is not the belief in redemption from sin.” (Buber as seen in Scharf 2019) Jewish redemption is not about being free from sin at all but, at least according to Sabbatia, recovering the lost spark of God through sin. The very first step in this process is the total rejection of the traditional Jewish laws that have informed Jewish life for millennia. This antinomianism finds expression in Judaism in opposition to halakhic rules but in gnosticism as antimoralism. Sabbatai called for a new reading of the Torah, one that required no alteration of the actual words but demanded a totally new interpretation. In the esoteric tradition generally, The Torah demands high levels of concentration on the words of the text so that the hidden meaning behind the words or, as Jacques Derrida might say, “between the lines”, can be discerned. As a Jewish commentator wrote, “Jews read the Bible the way a person reads a love letter, trying to squeeze every last little bit of meaning out of it.” One of Sabbatai’s most central teachings, derived from Luria, was the idea of gathering the sparks which, Sabbatai claimed, required his followers to enter into ‘evil’, understood as such, to do ‘evil’, in order to reunite what was perceived to be evil with God, recontextualizing what was once thought to be evil as “good”, and thereby “heal” the world [tikkum olam] or, what has come to us today as, redemption through sin. Sabbatai’s basic claim meant that everything that society thought was civilizing is in reality was barbarous. Of course, this is the exact argument that will be repeated by German Jew Walter Benjamin in the middle of the 20th century as already observed. In light of this conclusion, what was therefore required of humanity, as Luria also observed, was the utter destruction of civilization and to nurture Nature, in all its forms, including human nature. In practice, this project demanded the reversal of all existing values. This is not only reversal of the Christian tradition of Western civilization, a reversal he obviously embraced by self-identifying with the “anti-Christ”, but at least equally, the reversal of the Orthodox Jewish tradition. As Scholem argued, “The Sabbatian believers felt that they were champions of a new world which was to be established by overthrowing the values of all positive religions.” It is this systematic reversal of traditional religiosity itself why Sabbatian and post-Sabbatian Gnostic symbols are often sacred symbols reversed or turned up-side down including Jewish ones. For example, the Tree of Life, a common kabbalah Jewish symbol, is often shown by those who support Sabbatian Gnosticism as

411 being upside down with the branches of the tree at the bottom and the roots at the top or the Christian cross is sometimes shown upside down as a physical representation of Sabbatai’s reversal.225

What this image portrays is that the base of the Tree of Life, usually identified with the Shechinah, is also the King or the top of the Tree of Life, so that Base is also the Crown. The Shechinah is often symbolized by non-Jews by the downward pointing triangle, but she is rightly captured by the upward pointing triangle as is shown in this picture. The Shechinah, the base, the earthly, is also the heavenly or that towards which she aspires according to the Gnostic Jewish tradition. So, the Shechinah is most rightly symbolized by both triangle united which is the Star of David as emblazoned on the Israeli flag.

To this end, Sabbatai would personally commit numerous acts of sexual depravity and violate Jewish dietary restrictions in order to enact his new covenant with God and encouraged all Jews to do the same. (Şişman 2017: 47) This required Jews to enter into evil, paedophilia, sadomasochism, theft, greed,

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Marx’s communism, which has undeniable Sabbatian traces acknowledge by several thinkers, speaks of Hegelian mysticism being turned upside down. As Marx wrote of Hegel, “With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Even the word “shell” is deeply meaningful in the kabbalah tradition to describe what is evil.

412 violence, etc., in order to return these “sins”, capture their inner “spark”, to God. He advocated for women to read Torah, dismissed rabbis and community leaders while appointing his followers as future “kings of nations” amongst whom he divided the world for them to rule. (Maciejko 2017: xiv) For just one example, the Ninth of Av, when Orthodox Jews mourn the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans trying to defeat the zealots by fasting, Sabbatai declared that it was now a feast day to celebrate his birth. It was now to be celebrated “with choice meats and pleasing drinks, with many candles and lamps, with music and songs, because it is the day of the birth of Sabbatai Tzevi”. It was also a day where “to converse with Christians on that day is unlawful”. As part of this new covenant, Sabbatai and his third wife would personally be highly promiscuous, advocating and participating in orgies and other acts of sexual license that some might even call depravity including incest. Although the accusation of breaching incest is often made as the ultimate prohibition to demonize others in this case it is, by all accounts, true. In Gershom Scholem’s influential book, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, he wrote, Following upon these trains of thought we find as early as Nathan of Gaza and Cardozo the appearance of an additional motif which in the Sabbatian heresy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries proves to be very effective, but also especially offensive and objectionable: the abrogation of sexual taboos, and of the incest prohibition in particular, as indices of the Messianic Torah. (Scholem 1995) There is no need to “demonize” Sabbatai Tzevi as he wants to be the anti-Christ, he wants to be Lucifer, he, as other Gnostics have before him, embraces the idea of being a Satanist. He is his God on earth and that God is Lucifer. Sabbatai advocated “free love”, especially for women, as a strategy to overcome the asceticism of Rabbinic Judaism and, ultimately, undermine Christian morality. Sabbatai married an extremely promiscuous woman, Sarah, on March 13, 1664, who, it was claimed, was perhaps a prostitute. Whether she was a prostitute or not what was clear was that she was highly sexual. As Jacob Sasportas wrote, although it should be remembered that he was one of Sabbatai’s staunchest opponents, [Sarah] was a witless girl who used to deliver, to the general amusement, demented speeches about how she was going to be married to king messiah. She went off to Leghorn, where, as Rabbi Joseph Halevi writes me, she made a practice of going to bed with anyone and everyone. Sabbatai Tzevi got wind of the nonsense she spouted, and also that she was quite good-looking . . .and so he let [Raphael Joseph] in on some of his secretes – that he was king messiah, for example, and the woman in Leghorn his destined bride – and sent for her and made her his wife. (Sasportas as seen in Halperin 2007: 6) Sabbatai had been married twice before but had refused, or was unable, to consummate either marriage thereby creating grounds to justify divorce. That Sabbatai married such a highly promiscuous women

413 became an important part of his messianic message. Some even argued that it was necessary for the messiah to marry a highly promiscuous woman. It was Nathan of Gaza, the person who publicly recognized Sabbatai as the true messiah, who hoped to link the messiah to the Shechinah. He communicated what was written in the Visions of Rabbi Abraham to a wider public. In that text it said, When he is six the Shechinah, which has revealed herself to us, will appear to him in a dream as a flame, and cause a burn on his private parts. Then dreams shall sorely trouble him, but he shall not tell anybody. And the sons of whoredom will accost him so as to cause him to stumble, and they will smite him, but he will not hearken unto them. (as seen in Stuckrad 2010: 289) At the time, Sabbatai married somebody like Sarah who seemed to symbolically represent the Shechinah, who was a highly sexualised woman. Unlike his earlier relationships, Sabbatai had a highly sexually active relationship with Sarah, that established a sexual inclination that he would continue to practice for the rest of his life. Sabbatia supposedly had two children with Sarah although, because of her sexual behaviour, nobody could be really sure exactly who was the biological father. Sarah, in particular, was thought to be a hyper-sexual woman who, quite possibly, introduced the centrality of licentiousness into Sabbatian messianic movement from a Polish source that would become, as will be elaborated upon, a core feature of the entire Gnostic Jewish movement. (Şişman 2017: 30) Exactly who Sarah was remains contentious. There are a wide range of accounts from various sources, but there is general agreement, and I think this is important, that she was from Poland. The importance is that the Gnostic Judaism that dominates the world today is widely acknowledged as having its origins in Poland. Poland remained the headquarters of the Gnostic movement until the Second World War when it moved to the United States. Sabbatai himself claimed that Sarah was a childhood survivor of the Khmeinytsky (present day Ukraine) Uprising. This uprising was caused by rage against the treatment of the local population against their cruel Polish overlords. Tragically, these Polish overlords had relied on Jews to manage their estates and therefore, when the local inhabitants rose against their oppressors, Jews were held responsible for the excessive taxes and other acts of greed that the Cossacks had suffered. As a result, Jews were killed in their thousands, possibly even in their tens of thousands. Shaul Stampfer (2003) estimates that the Jewish death toll alone may have been somewhere between 18-20 thousand. Sarah apparently lost her entire family in the slaughter and was then, supposedly, taken in and raised by a Christian family. She later reconnected with the local Jewish community. Once returned to her people, she began to make strange prophecies. One of her prophecies was that she would one-day marry the Jewish messiah. Indeed, by some accounts, she was said to have even named the messiah “Sabbatai” years before she could have heard of Sabbatai Tzevi. Upon hearing of Sabbatai, Sarah first travelled to Amsterdam, then Western Italy

414 before finding her way to Egypt. An incredible journey for the day. It was rumoured that Sarah would sleep with just about any man she could while she travelled and that she was “a sexually hedonistic sinner who got involved with every man she could find during her journeys”. (Stuckrad 2010: 290) While in Egypt, Sabbatai heard both of her prophecies and that she was extremely attractive. Sabbatai sought her out in Egypt, and they were married in 1664. This marriage fulfilled both Sarah’s prophecy, thereby legitimizing Sabbatai’s later messianic claims, and by marrying somebody who behaved like the Shechinah, honoured Her. As Stuckrad (2010: 291) acknowledges, “Her tikkun is ordained through her own prophecy and that of Sabbatai: she would be the wife of the messiah”. Even after she married Sabbatai, it was claimed that she would try to sate her insatiable sexual appetite by having sex with many of the men who frequented Sabbatai’s messianic “court”. Indeed, this may also have been a method to recruit supporters as the Polish Sabbatian, Jacob Frank, was rumoured to use sexual favours with his wife, an astonishingly beautiful Bulgarian Jewish woman, to enlarge his cult. (Antelman 2018) Her sexual practices included having sexual relations with several men at once which may have been part of orgiastic rituals to the Shechinah. It is unclear if Sabbatai himself participated in these orgies at that time. It was claimed that both Sabbatai and Sarah would engage in these orgiastic activities as part of prescribed “religious practices” or sacred rituals (Van der Haven 2009: 11) that were intended to bring them closer to their God. Sabbatai himself, who was considered extraordinarily handsome and charismatic, was accused of impregnating the wives of his followers after insisting on having sex with betrothed virgins on the night before they were to be married. This behaviour, of course, would ensure that an ongoing stable monogamous relationship would not necessarily be as easy to maintain for the young couple. Apparently, what informed Sabbatai’s antinomian activity was the Talmudic teaching, “the Messianic Age will come when all men are righteous, or all men are sinners”. (Şişman 2017: 30) It would appear easier that he tried to make all men sinners rather than struggle to make all men righteous. Sabbatai’s hold was so great that observers claimed that when Jews first met Sabbatai in person they would spontaneously, “fall first into a trance, foamed at the mouth, and recounted the future prosperity, and deliverance of the Israelites, their visions of the Lion of Judah, and the triumphs of Sabbatai.”226 (Timberlake and Brett etc. 1692: 141) Because Sabbatai advanced such a different interpretation of Judaism from what was at that time an extremely uniform and well established, many Jews, from the very beginning, opposed his messianic claims and rejected his religious project. At the time, observers spoke of Samuel Pennia, a person of high

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This kind of behavior was later attributed to being the work of the Devil, a “diabolical delusion”, intended to deceive the Jewish people into believing that Sabbatai was, indeed, the Messiah.

415 standing and excellent reputation in Smyna, where Sabbatai was born. Pennia argued that Sabbatai could not be the Messiah because, as was obvious, not all the conditions for the coming of the Messiah had been met. The many supporters of Sabbatai were so outraged by Pennia’s claims that they not only railed against him but threatened to kill him. As was written at the time, “. . .had he not timely conveyed himself out of the Synagogue, and thereby escaped the hands of the multitude, who now could more easily endure blasphemy against the Law of Moses, and the profanation of the sanctuary, than contradiction, of misbelief of the doctrine of Sabbatai.” Observers were claiming that so many Jews had become corrupted by the teachings of Sabbatai that murdering a man in a Synagogue was now a real possibility. Sabbateanism was so different to Orthodox Judaism that even those sympathetic with Sabbatai’s teachings, it was argued that, like Christianity, he was founding a new religion. As Goldish expresses, “Because every person who believes in the coming of a messiah has a different understanding of these expectations, the designation of an individual as a Jew, Christian, Muslim, or Sabbatian does not communicate the whole range of the person’s messianic beliefs.” (Goldish 2004: 10) Goldish is clearly listing Sabbateanism as a separate religious tradition to Judaism like Christianity and Islam. Orthodox Jew James Kugal dismisses any other reading of the Tanach except for that presented in the Talmudic tradition because, Read the Bible in this way [as presented in the Talmud] and you are reading it properly, that is, in keeping with the understanding of those who made and canonized the Bible. Read it any other way and you have drastically misconstrued the intentions of the Bible’s framers. (2008) Here, Krugal is advancing the rabbinic understanding of the history of Judaism where the Talmud is the written account of those who with Moses understood his words. By this account, you interpreted the Tanach in any way other than the Talmud then you are no longer being truly Jewish. In many respects, as will be revealed in detail later in this volume, Christianity and Orthodox Judaism share much more in common than Orthodox Judaism does with the heretical Jewish Gnostic tradition of Sabbatai. The reason for Orthodox Judaism being more like Christianity then Sabbateanism is because, unlike these traditions, Sabbatai “. . . recommended the conscious and systematic desecration of the values of traditional religion as the way of the elect to true redemption. . .” (Maciejko 2017: xvii) As Scholem observes, Sabbatai advocated, “. . .a commandment that is fulfilled by breaking of commandments”. So, whereas Christianity and Orthodox Judaism both advance similar understandings of what constitutes a “family”, Sabbatai advocates the utter destruction of traditional family relations because, from his perspective, in historically being thought of as good they are really evil. As Friedman observes of the current culture wars contrasting two opposing forces on family values,

416 Traditional Catholicism, fundamentalist Protestantism, Orthodox Judaism . . . all take very similar positions. All of these religions are being split internally, as are all societies. In the United states, where we speak of the “culture wars”, the battlefield is the family and its definition. All societies are being torn between traditionalists and those who are attempting to redefine the family, women and sexuality. (Friedman 2009: 51) The shocking truth is that those individuals who are primarily motivating the redefinition of the family are those who adhere to Sabbateanism and those influenced by those under Sabbatai’s sway. Christianity and Orthodox Judaism share more in common with each other than Orthodox Judaism and Sabbatian influenced Jewish Gnosticism no matter how forcefully or how often these Gnostic Jews assert their identity as “Jews”. The contemporary demands for a redefinition of the family are based on Sabbatian religious, anti-moral, anti-Talmudic beliefs. Against claims that Sabbatai Tzevi founded a new religion, Jewish intellectual Gershom Scholem argues that although Sabbateanism is antinomian and hoped to overcome the petrification of Orthodox Judaism, it remains, “distinctly Jewish in character”. Scholem argued, “Sabbateanism must be regarded . . . as a single continuous development which retained its identity in the eyes of its adherents regardless of whether they themselves remained Jews or not, but also, paradoxically though it may seem, as a specifically Jewish phenomenon to the end.” This is one of those subtle passages deserving closer scrutiny. Scholem says that even those who no longer explicitly remained Jews, including therefore the Dönmeh and Frankists, “retained its identity”. Such groups remained Jewish. Scholem is saying here, though obliquely, that Jews who “converted” under the Sabbatian banner, whether as Frankists, Dönmeh or, in truth, the Maskilim (advocate for the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment), they retained their identity as Jews.227 So that we can critically integrate the claim that Sabbatians remained Jews, we can consider just one passage in Torah interpreted in a Sabbatian way. In Genesis 9:20-27, it tells the story of a when Noah, “a man of the earth”, got so drunk that he passed out with his genitals on full display for all to see. His son, Ham, saw his father in this apparently degrading condition and told his two brothers who, entering their father’s tent backwards, threw a cover over Noah’s nakedness in an apparent attempt to save their

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False conversions by Jews to Christianity happened in other contexts. In the 16 th century, therefore before Sabbatai, a number of Sephardic Jews, nobody knows how many, falsely converted to Christianity. Robert Maryks (2010), who researches the role of Judaism in the Jesuit order, tells the story of a Sephardic Jew, whose family fled Spain and moved to Polermo and Trabia (Sicily) in Italy, who approached him in 2007 and told him that the eldest son of his family, although appearing Catholic, secretly remained practicing Jews. This practice was passed from father to eldest son for hundreds of years. The man was now a Jesuit priest. The rest of the man’s family, as far as the Sephardic Jew knew, were genuine, devote Catholics.

417 father’s dignity. When Noah woke up, he angrily yelled, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” Ham was thought to be the origin of the Canaanites whose land the Jews took to form Israel. Noah woke and seeing his situation he cursed Ham and all his descendants. The obvious question is, why? What was so wrong in Ham telling his brothers to cover their father’s genitals until he had sobered up enough to regain his dignity? Ham’s actions seem not only reasonable but thoughtful. One could imagine a lesser son smirking at his father’s dis-grace and even calling out to his friends to look at the ridiculous display of a drunk old man revealing himself. Noah’s rage seems not only excessive but incomprehensible. Why did Noah curse Ham and all his descendants when his son seemed to be only thinking of his father’s dignity? The rabbinic tradition claims that Noah was so angry with Ham because he had shamed his father by even looking upon his nakedness. His two brothers, by contrast, had their backs to their father the whole time so they never saw his nakedness and therefore never brought shame to their father. Again, as with much of Orthodox Judaism, this is an interpretation of events that would be broadly harmonious with a Christian’s understanding. Noah’s reaction becomes understandable, in that Noah could have respected his father more by not even looking at his father’s situation like, it might be argued, his more respectful brothers. Although this account makes Noah’s actions understandable; it still appears an excessive response to a relatively minor infringement. but it may still appear excessive to curse Ham and all his descendants for such a minor transgression. Even with this account, there still needs to be a better explanation that will account for why Noah’s rage was so extreme. Not only cursing Noah, which would be excessive in itself, but cursing all his descendants. But it is perhaps in exploring who was cursed that an even more convincing explanation of Noah’s actions might be found. The Jewish rationalist tradition, which broadly claims that there is a justifiable reason behind everything written in the Torah even if we today do not understand what that is pays attention to the fact that it is the Canaanites who are cursed by Noah as a result of Ham’s actions. They argue that this myth justifies the actions of the Jews against the Canaanites. It makes the fact that they took the land from the Canaanites morally correct because, after all, Noah had cursed them. As with all rationalist accounts, this myth loses any spiritual significance and becomes a political convenience that justifies the actions of the Jews. To my mind though, why not come up with a more convincing reason for cursing the Canaanites? Why not create a myth where Ham massacres a village full of women and children or he rapes the wife of a king? The problem with the rationalist account is why this story? Why use such an innocuous event to justify the dispossession of the Canaanite’s land? The final account is one consistent with Sabbateanism and both explains Noah’s rage and why this event was adequate to trigger that rage. By this reading, Ham and his descendants are cursed

418 because, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, Ham had brought knowledge of good and evil, in this case shame and guilt, to Noah. In the story of the Garden of Eden, Mankind at first has no knowledge that nakedness is anything about which to be ashamed. As it says, “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” This is exactly the condition of Noah after the flood. The flood, after all, was to bring about a new era, a new beginning, one that perhaps did not carry the sins of Adam. What was created initially after the flood was a return to the Garden of Eden, a situation where mankind could live according to natural drives and seek bodily pleasures like getting drunk and lying naked. Noah could have been ignorant that he was doing anything wrong. He could have simply woken up, gotten dressed, and got on with his day but Ham had made that an impossibility. Ham had drawn attention to Noah’s situation and had also told others so when Noah woke up and found himself covered, then he felt shame and guilt. It was not that Ham had told others of Noah’s situation, it is that Ham had cast the situation in terms of being disgraceful and it was in this act that he had shamed his father. As it says in Genesis 2 about Adam and Eve, “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so, they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” It was this knowledge that made Noah, like Adam and Eve, sin, as such. He had also instructed his brothers that what Noah had done was a sin. In truth, like libertine sex acts or prostitution or drunkenness etc., etc. these acts are not in themselves “sins” but are cast as sins by the moral gaze. It is knowledge of good and evil that makes them sins. By bringing guilt and shame into the world, Ham moved Noah away from the spirt of God, away from Nature, away from the Shechinah into the barbarity of “civilization”. The Sabbatian tradition would argue that it is by overcoming the experience of sin being advanced by Ham, revealing the truth that God Himself could not make sin in this world, this is healing the world. When Noah curses Ham and all his descendants he is not just cursing the Canaanites but cursing all those who would claim to know good and evil. After all, it must be remembered, that it was the Canaanites who worshipped El, the creator God of Genesis I. Noah is cursing all experiences of creator Gods as such in rejecting morality. As Hasidic Tzadik Menachem Mendel Morgensztern said, “There is no judgment and there is no judge.” To pass judgement, to show prejudice, that something is shameful or sinful, is to bring sin and shame into the world as a movement away from God. Morgensztern is saying that there is no judge, there is no God as God withdraw, God is dead from a human perspective, and therefore there is no judgment except for human judgement and that judgement, because it is made in ignorance of God, is intrinsically evil. As it says in Isaiah 1: 18, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.” Isaiah here might be read as saying that our primordial condition is one where what appears to be “sin” is actual “white as snow” and not a sin at all.

419 This would be to recover the “spark” in “sin”, to find redemption through sin. It is like treating anxiety using cognitive psychology, thinking about it differently makes it different. When all sin is overcome, then there is no separation between “heaven” and “earth”, “man” and “woman”, “good” and “evil”, “rich” and “poor”. All such binaries are the result of human knowledge and, therefore, must be overcome in order to be reunited with God. It is in overcoming these binaries that unity and harmony is brought to the world. This is why it is argued that when the Malkuth (the Shechinah) and the Tifiret (the sixth sefirah symbolizing the masculine aspect of God) are united it is not like a sexual union but something more intertwined, it is to become androgynous. As Wolfson concludes, “Redemption in its ultimate sense does not signify pairing of male and female, but the reconstitution of the androgyny in the Godhead in which the gender dimorphism is superseded.” (as seen in Stuchrad 2010: 288) It is for this very reason that they also hope to overcome gender in the world so as to realize the more primordial condition of androgyny. To seek harmony with the natural world against the Western aspiration to know and control has long been seen as a distinguishing feature between the East and the West. As Paglia observes, To name is to know. . .the West’s greatness arises from this delusion of certitude. Far Eastern culture has never striven against nature in this way. Compliance, not confrontation is its rule. Buddhist meditation seeks the unity and harmony of reality. . . [Such conclusions] cancels the West’s intellectual and moral assumptions. (Paglia 2001: 5) By negating the experience of sin, the worldliness of sin, then sin itself is banished and becomes an impossibility. From a Gnostic point of view, the spark of God’s creation is recovered through overcoming Western morality, and nakedness, for example, is returned to being something Natural and, therefore, perfectly acceptable. This aspiration also motivates Sabbatai’s advocacy for sexual freedom. Sexual freedom is enjoyable, it is life affirming, unlike sin, it is therefore a product of the God Most High. It was only after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that sex became something ‘sinful’, something about which we should feel shame. It is again, the shame that is the sin and if we think about sex differently, if we think about it as something that we should all freely participate in openly and without moral constraint, to feel shameless, is to return to return to our instinctual selves with God, with Nature. It was Hermes, the God that so many Jews identify with, who gave Pandora, an Eve like figure in the Greek mythological tradition, “a shameless mind and a deceitful nature”. He also gave her the power of speech, putting in her “lies and crafty words”. This is the task of Gnostic Jews as Hermes, Hermes was “known as logos . . . the guide of souls” (Segal 1977: 247), who want to guide women to become shameless and

420 deceitful, so that woman will practice “lies” because, after all, from a gnostic perspective all truth is nothing but lies. It has been claimed that the original meaning of Wisdom [sophia] was knowledge of divine patterns and forces, recorded in songs and proverbs. This knowledge of ultimate truth did not distance sages from the world, but it was manifest in their ability to live a full human life in accordance with this divine plan: Possessing wisdom meant knowing the rules that governed the natural world, the way people (both righteous and wicked) behaved, and the way the gods treat each person according to his or her merit. These rules were hidden beneath surface appearances, and the task for the wise was to uncover them and transmit them to later generations. (Trowbridge and Farrari 2008: 90) This is exactly what the Gnostic Jews believe they are doing. They have to get humanity back in touch with their “natural” or “instinctual” selves, with physis, and with that knowledge they can once again shape “laws” that are in harmony and do not stand opposed to Nature. As Lazier (2009: 178) writes of this attitude, “God’s apparent evacuation from creation licenses a form of Jewish subjectivity that negated the actual world even as it sought, if it sought, to create its own. God’s absence, in other words, opened a space . . .” a space for Jews to fill as Gods. Think about the arguments made around the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the ongoing advocacy for nudity and the demand to get in touch with your sexuality. The real aim of Gnostic Jewry is to overcome the possibility of feeling shame. Shame has been historically important, as Graves (1971: 478) affirms, because it points to the important distinction between crimes and taboos. Crimes are legal sanctions which, when broken, do not necessarily cause one shame. For example, when caught not wearing a seatbelt one does not feel shame. By contrast, to break something that is held to be sacred, a taboo, that causes shame. It is for this reason that shame is so intimate to religion. The pre-Roman Latin meaning of religio was what we would describe as “taboo”. As Balazs Mezei wrote, The original meaning [of religio], however, was close to what we call “taboo” today. The prefix “re” in “re-ligio” does not refer to the meaning “back” or “again” in this case, but rather to the emphatic confirmation of “ligo”, “to bind”. Thus “religio” was in pre-Roman Latin language something strictly bound by a higher, divine power. (Mezei 2013: 30) Religions, as religions, guide people on what to do. Of course, religio was taken up by pre-Christian writers like Cicero and Christian authors like Augustine to mean rules of behaviour revealed by God. One might say, “I eat fish on Friday because of my religion” which would mean that one is bound by their God to eat fish on Friday and, to not do so, would result in shame. Based on this, as might be expected, shame has been very important to Christianity, shame is a guide, reflecting the experience of God, and that experience is about which a Christian must retain faith. It is because of this belief that the Russian Jewish member of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova, prominently displayed a sign during her performances, “The

421 Shameless in Power”, this is exactly what they have achieved, those who cannot feel shame, those who are never restrained by guilt, are indeed in power. Gnostic German Jew Norbert Elias argued in 1939 that it was as a result of increasing shame, demanding increased self-restraint, that was the conditions for the emergence of Freud’s “super-ego”, the shared moral experience the defines a people as such, to be formed in Western Europe. Western civilization, by Elias’ account, is the result of the imposition of an experience of shame through, what Austrian Jew Stefan Zweig identifies as, “art, science, morality, the family, the Church, the school, and the university”. (Zwieg 1932/2012) As such it is these practices and institutions that particularly need to be corrupted if the Protestant attitude to sex is to be overturned. To do away with shame, especially regarding sex, is to do away with Western civilization. The point that the Gnostic tradition always tries to emphasise is that humans are like Gods if they only realize their potential to shape the world according to their will as natural beings. It is this emphasis on individual autonomy and power why this movement self-identifies as a humanism. If the moralizing God of judgement is dead, or at least silent, and humanity becomes the measure of all things then, as Heidegger observed, Mankind falls into the delusion of being the creator of the world. Sabbatai is drawing attention to the fact that the potential to return to God, and thereby redeem the world, is always here and now, as it always was and as it always will be, according to the Gnostic tradition. Even the name Yahweh is related to the Hebrew verb “to be” and has the sense of perpetual presence as though God is always ready to accept the redeemed world and move into Mankind’s everyday lives. This knowledge is actually one of the gifts uniquely granted to the Jewish people. As it says in Torah, “I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as God Almighty [El Shaddai]228 but by My name, Yahweh, I did not make Myself known to them.” His name as Yahweh was for the Jewish people alone, therefore, from this time onwards it is known by the Jews that God is always potentially present. This is affirmed in the way that Yahweh can be read as a combination of HYH “was”, HWH, “present”, YHWH, “future” or YHWH is the “Ever-Present-One” in the sense if people choose to bring Him into their lives by overcoming sin then God, Nature, the temporal, is revealed in terms of having always been there. But as an Orthodox Jewish website cautions in a way that might well apply to these gnostic teachings, like those of Antiochus, “Thus, if the “prophetic” word one receives mirrors the actions of Antiochus and seeks to abrogate God’s Holy Law or Holy Feast Days . . . run! It is not a Word from the LORD.” It is almost as though the writer of this passage had Sabbatai Tzevi and his movement in mind.

228

Which means “god of the mountain” referring to the Mesopotamian divine mountain. This would mean it has the same meaning as El Gabal the “Sun” god worshipped by Elagabalus who in Latin was known as Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (203-222 AD).

422 Again, as will be elaborated upon in the following volume, the God that the Sabbatian’s worship is a divided God, a God consisting of both a masculine and feminine aspect that is androgenous. The feminine aspect of God is called the Shekhinah (also known in other Semitic cultures variously as Astarte/Anat/Tanit) and it is actually the feminine aspect of the Godhead that is most valued or worshipped because it can, unlike Heaven, with the destruction of this world, be accessed. The masculine separation followed the feminine in terms that, Gnostic Jews argue, matter precedes intellect. It is to this feminine aspect of God that Sabbatai is actually deliberately trying to identify. This feminine aspect of God is sometimes called the Shekinah Glory. The Shekinah or Shekinah Glory, as with the other Semitic goddesses like Astarte, Anat, and Tanit, was associated with the Morning Star, Venus, which is most often symbolised by an 8-pointed star. The morning star was known in the ancient world as Lucifer, the bringer of the light in the sense of rising or heralding the coming light of the Sun. This goddess is a goddess of Nature, a Saturnine figure of the underworld or “Earth” understood as Nature, who was worshipped as the supreme being, many argue, before the patriarchy of the highly rational and moralizing Gods like Jesus - Gods of the “world”. In the early period of culture, tillage, cattle-breeding, and the parental bent “worked together to bring the women into the chief place in the technological scheme”; the mother-goddess bequeathed upon men “a peaceable culture” sustained by the gift of agriculture. This sort of civilization is properly designated as chthonic, that is, “subterranean”—of the earth—given its sacred emphasis on the powers of generation, which germinate from the underground womb. (Preparata 2011: 12-13) In moralizing times, when civility and not natural drives rule, these “Nature” gods/goddess, associated with sex, feasting, and other excesses, became demonized as evil. As Preparata observes of French intellectual Georges Bataille, a student of Russian Gnostic Jew Lev Shestov, who claimed, . . . practices referred to as “evil” by the Churches were, once upon a time, sacred themselves. That is, no less sacred, and religious, than those pertaining to, say, Jehovah or Christ, but of a different, opposed polarity. Though “evil gods” and their practices might have been stamped out of collective behavior and erased from the sacred narrative, Bataille reminded us that these orgiastic deities have never ceased throughout the centuries to manifest themselves—in their purity, all the more bloodily and intensely— even as the monotheistic Churches have tirelessly striven to keep them at bay. (Preparata 2011: 13) Everything that affirmed life, the Gnostic Jews argue, was cast as “evil” while everything that was life denying, modesty, chastity, humility, sacrifice became praised as “good”. The first place this happened, according to my research, was with the God Ahriman in the Persian Zoroastrianism tradition. Ahriman was the Lord of Darkness and Chaos, the source of human confusion and strife. The figure of Ahriman has been

423 understood by religious scholars as influential in being the original figure behind Satan in Rabbinic Judaism and the Devil in Christianity. John R. Hinnels describes Ahriman’s nature as . . . the demon of demons, [who] dwells in an abyss of endless darkness in the north, the traditional home of the demons. Ignorance, harmfulness, and disorder are the characteristics of Ahriman. He can change his outward form and appear as a lizard, a snake, or a youth. His aim is always to destroy the creation of [Ahura Mazda] and to this end he follows behind the creator’s work, seeking to spoil it. As Ahura Mazda creates life, Ahriman creates death; for health, he produces disease; for beauty, ugliness. All man’s ills are due entirely to Ahriman. (Hinnels 1997: 52) Although to the Christian and Orthodox Jewish traditions this is a figure of evil, the Gnostic tradition of Sabbatai Tzevi, thought that claims of “goodness” are evil while what is called “evil” is actually good in terms of “life affirming”. Ahriman began as a minor God but rose in authority especially after the reforms of Zoroaster which manifested the first enduring monotheistic religion. Although these ideas did influence Conservative Judaism, the Gnostic tradition seems to have rejected the claim that Ahrim, equivalent to the Shekinah, was indeed evil but, continued to be understood as an expression or the spirit of the God Most High (in the Persian Zorvan tradition known as Zorvan). The task is to reunite what has become known as evil, Ahriman, with Ahura Mazda, which, at least according to Sabbatai’s “Credo” “dwells in [the Sphere of] Tiferet” (Şişman 2017: 177). This union will overcome this world of good and evil and thus healing “world” and “earth” by uniting God’s name. That is combining human natural drives as civility. As it says in Deuteronomy 30:19 “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; choose life, that you and your descendants may live.” This is why Gnostic Jews describe their religion as “life affirming”. Technically, it is true that the Sabbatian’s, Dönmeh, Frankists, Maskilim (conservative Jews, reform Jews) and Neo-Hasidic Jews, from a Christian perspective, do worship the Devil as such but they believe that Jesus, at least how He has been understood by Christianity, is the real evil one, by denouncing the other aspect of the true God and that it is the Jewish Gnostic tradition, therefore, that are worshipping the true God and doing good. As an example of how Sabbateanism shaped modern Judaism, the reform movement began amongst German Jews who sought to base Judaism on monotheism, God is one and therefore, necessarily, both good and evil (understood in Sabbatian not Jewish Orthodox terms). As part of the Jewish revival, that will be discussed shortly, the teachings of Sabbatai became extremely popular amongst German Jews. Michael Brenner claims that the increased popularity of Sabbatai Tzevi for turn of the century German Jews was because they were searching for a new form of Jewish authenticity that was not available through Orthodox Judaism. As will be explored in the following volume, thinkers like Baruch Spinoza and

424 Sabbattai Tzevi, who were peers even though Sabbatai probably had not even heard of Spinoza, also became popular and it was the synthesis of these two trajectories of Jewish radicalism in the late 19 th century, which could only be achieved because Spinozism was really, as Georg Wachter, Sigmund Gelbhaus, Carl Bebhardt and Fritz Mauthner, argued, (Lazier 2009: 163) completed by people like Martin Buber. Martin Buber’s influence was undoubtedly great, as Joseph Dan wrote when writing about different expression of Hasidism, In the period after the war, the same trends continued to develop, but a new dimension was added to them, an ideological one. The central figure in this new phase was, undoubtedly, Martin Buber. In his works Hasidism represents not only Judaism as it was, but Judaism as it should be. (Dan 1991: 186) And as esteemed Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher elaborates, We knew the Talmud; we had been steeped in Hassidism. All its idealisations were for us nothing but dust thrown in our eyes. We had grown up in that Jewish past. We had the eleventh, and thirteenth and sixteenth centuries of Jewish history living next door to us and under our very roof, and we wanted to escape it and live in the twentieth century. Through all the thick gilt and varnish of romanticists like Martin Buber, we could see, and smell, the obscurantism of our archaic religion and a way of life unchanged since the Middle Ages. (Deutscher 1968: 46-47) The trajectory that Buber brings to completion in the years following World War II actually has its origins towards the end of the 19th century. To find a new Jewish authenticity, that would need to be imposed on society at large, many Jewish intellectuals at the time, including Herzl and Wassermann, turned an embraced the “heretical ideal” that these thinkers presented. As a result, reform Jews such as Rabbi Samuel Holdheim, argued that Jewish ritual law and custom, such as food laws, had to be forgotten and that these no longer held a claim over Jew’s lives, but that Jews needed to live in a modern world where the future emphasis should be on personal freedom. (Falk 2014: 21) Freedom from socially constructed restraints. The first wave of Sabbateanism came to an end when the Sultan Mehmet IV of the Ottoman Empire, at that time in history the single most powerful man on the planet, arrested Sabbatai and brought him to him. The reason for attracting the Sultan’s attention was that “Sabbatai Tzevi was an international celebrity, the most notorious messianic claimant since Jesus of Nazareth. Jews everywhere were breathless for the expected new of how he would graciously, bloodlessly, receive the empire from the sultan and go on to establish his dominion over the earth.” (Halperin 2007: 1) It was his claim to wanting to replace the Sultan that would have attracted, above all else, the Sultan’s attention. Once before the Sultan, the most powerful man on earth gave him a choice; either convert to Islam or die. This episode

425 began as a result of increased tensions within the Jewish community of the Ottoman Empire. Some Jews, following Rabbi Aaron Lapapa, rejected Sabbatai’s messianic claims and his new interpretation of Torah. Others, such as respected scholar Hayim Benveniste, accepted Sabbatai’s claim and embrace the new reading of Torah. This division within Judaism was beginning to impact trade and social harmony in the Empire, so the vizier decided to bring it to an end, one way or another. Sabbatai was ordered to appear before the grand vizier in Istanbul. Sabbatai was attended to by his three “kings”, Moses Galante, Daniel Pinto, and R. Elijah. (Şişman 2017: 49) Sabbatai was not the first messianic claimant of the 17th century. In June 1638, a man by the name of Ahmet claimed that he was the Mahdi and the second coming of Jesus Christ. After a brief conflict, requiring two major set piece battles aimed at crushing Ahmet’s supporters, Ahmet himself was captured. As part of his messianic claims, he claimed that he was impervious to weapons. To publicly discredit the “Mahdi”, the Ottomans made sure that everyone knew, in the most gruesome of ways, that weapons could indeed harm Ahmet. To this end they began by cutting his fingers off, one at time. Every finger removed from Ahmet’s body confirmed that he was not the Mahdi. True to his claim, Ahmet displayed no sign of feeling any pain through the entire macabre process. Indeed, it is reported that he asked his torturers to, “take your time in doing your job!”. They did. After removing his fingers, they removed his nose, they his ears, then his hands, one at a time before finishing with his feet. At some stage of this torturous process, despite showing no signs of agony, Ahmet succumbed to his injuries. (Şişman 2017: 53) Let us hope it was sooner rather than later. Part of the reason for such brutal, public displays of punishment was to discourage future claimants. The Ottomans struggled for peace and harmony within their Empire above all else and people who claimed to be a messiah were sure to disrupt the social harmony. In light of such behaviour in the past, Sabbatai would have known that he faced just such a fate if he did indeed refuse to convert to Islam. Unlike Jesus Christ and many of his followers, who suffered terrible, drawn-out deaths, as a display of devotion to their faith, and this is extremely important for understanding the future strategies of this movement, Sabbatai chose apparently conversion without hesitation. Indeed, during the trial he blatantly lied and publicly denied that he had ever claimed to being the true Messiah. He said, “I am neither a king nor a prophet. I am not a notable but a common man who earns his living by reading.” Christians would see such behaviour as cowardly and the final proof, if that was required, that Sabbatai was certainly no messiah. The Son of God knew what was about to happen and understood that through his sacrifice he would redeem the world. But to make this comparison is to miss the ethos of these two very different movements. It must be appreciated, Sabbatai argued that to be “good” is to sin so being “brave”, “honest” and “committed”, to be virtuous, is to betray his God. For Sabbatai lying was not only not evil but necessary if the movement was to succeed and he advocated for

426 his followers to lie in order to advance his messianic project. To explain his conversion, Sabbatai argued that God must want him to convert for His purposes and, therefore, a noble death would be to betray God. To repeat the account of Sabbatai’s conversion in full as penned by Abdi Pasha (1630-1692), the official court historian of Sultan Mehmet IV. Some time ago a rabbi (haham) appeared in Izmir. Because the Jewish community (taife) showed extreme fondness and leanings toward him, he was exiled (nefy) to the Fortress of the Strait (Boğazhisarı) in order to eliminate the sedition (defʿi fitne). But Jews gathered there too, and according to their false beliefs, they said, “he is our prophet” and there events reached the point of being sedition because of corruption and disturbance (bais-i fesad u ihtilal), and hence, the mentioned rabbi was brought to Edirne by order of the Sultan. On Thursday the 16th of Rebiulevvel, in a meeting (akd-i meclis) in the New Pavilion under the imperial gaze (nazargah-ı hümayun), the kaimmakam pasha, sheikhulislam, and Vani Efendi questioned the rabbi. His majesty, our illustrious Sultan, watched and listened to [the meeting] secretly from a window. After all the dialogue, the aforementioned rabbi denied all the follies attributed to him. When it was proposed that he embrace Islam and he was told this with certainty at the end “after this meeting there is no way to get away! Either you embrace the faith, or you will be immediately put to death. If you became a Muslim, then we will intercede for you with our merciful Sultan,” the aforementioned rabbi, with the guidance of God, the Lord who forgives, immediately became the recipient of the Truth, ennobled with the light of faith and a responsible believer in God. From the exalted graciousness of the Chosroes-like emperor, a Middle Gate Pension (kapu ortası tekaʿudu), valued at 150 aspers, was granted to him. He was immediately taken to the bath of the pages of the inner palace, where he was adorned in new clothes. He was dressed in a fur [coat] and a cloak of honour, and a purse of silver coins was also bestowed upon him. His partner (refik) who came with him at this time was given the position of sergeant (çavuş) by exalted imperial favour. (Abdi as seen in Şişman 2017: 45-46) This account is interesting in several ways. That attention is paid to the fact that he got so much material benefit from his conversion ensures that not only does the Sultan appear generous and forgiving but Sabbatai appears greedy. Many Jews and Christians who heard the conditions under which Sabbatai had committed apostasy and had converted felt the same. Many Jews around the world were devastated by Sabbatai’s apparently easy conversion and it certainly destroyed any credibility what-so-ever in the eyes of Christians. But it was not the end for all Jews, not at all, not by a long way. Some Jews claimed that Sabbatai was merely being consistent with his message and fulfilling his mission. Sabbatai was entering into sin, entering into Islam, in order to ultimately return it to God. As Baruch of Arezzo said is his account of Nathan, “When the sage, Nathan, heard that they placed the holy turban on his head, he knew wholeheartedly that our master gave himself to the [demonic] shell in order to purify from there the sparks of holiness, just as Abraham took Hagar the Egyptian, Jacob the daughters of Laban, and Moses the daughter of Jethro. . . He had to do this in order to rectify the world in the Kingdom of Shaddai.” (Baruch as seen in Şişman 2017: 96) Wolfson claims that Sabbatai was uniting the feminine with the masculine

427 therefore uniting into one what had been split. He was entering into evil so that what is evil can be returned to God. Of course, lying was not original to Sabbatai or his movement. Plato even argues that if it was permissible for anyone to lie than it was permitted for the philosopher kings as it would be for the benefit of everyone. Sabbatai and Sabbatians would probably cast their own deceptions in the same light, for an ultimate good for everyone, to be rid of the evil world, then it was permissible for those in power to lie to achieve their universally beneficial ends. After his conversion Sabbatai, who for a period of time took the name Aziz Mehmet Efendi, seems to have remained a Jew who continued to believe himself to be the messiah. He wanted to use Islam, which he did very successfully, to further his aims. The truth is though, that very few actually know what Sabbatai hoped to achieve because he did not honestly share, by his own account, his motivations and beliefs with very many people but kept his true beliefs and intentions to an extremely small circle of elect. (Şişman 2017: 98) Sabbatai would have been aware that at least initially everything that he did, everything that he wrote, would be scrutinised. The price paid for apostasy away from Islam in the Ottoman Empire was death. He had to appear, at least publicly, for a period of time to have truly converted. Although initially careful not to reveal his secret agenda, by 1674, eight years after his “conversion”, Aziz (Sabbatai) felt secure enough to again sign his letters as “the Messiah of the God of Israel” and was again using the name “Sabbatai Tzevi”. (Şişman 2017: 83) Tellingly, in 1668, Sabbatai told his follower, Jacob Najara of Gaza, about a dream. In that dream, he fell into a dark pit, then his parents appeared at the mouth of the pit and threw down a rope so he could climb out to freedom. Obviously, this is not an account of a real dream but seems to be a shallowly veiled account of his predicament. Islam is the “dark pit”, living amongst the qelippah, and it is only his people, his tribe, represented by his parents, who can save him. By the early 1670s, the Ottoman officials began to be suspicious that his conversion was insincere. That he had converted falsely was probably not their main concern, conversions achieved through threats of violence, as they knew, were rarely sincere, but they would have been concerned about what he was doing as a result of his false conversion. Middle Eastern culture is less concerned generally about what you think or believe but what you do. Firstly, one of Sabbatai’s “converts” claimed that Sabbatai had impregnated his wife. This was followed by several complaints from various Jews regarding certain questionable night-time activities in which Sabbatai was a participant. As a result of these reports, Sabbatai was placed under surveillance. One night, in 1672, one of those assigned to investigate Sabbatai heard questionable noises emanating from a house near where Sabbatai lived. Upon hearing the disturbance, the official burst into the house and found Sabbatai and several followers singing Psalms while drinking alcohol while, apparently, participating in a sexual orgy which appear as some kind of

428 mystical ceremony. (Şişman 2017: 106) This was the first time that an accusation had been brought against Sabbatai that he was indeed organizing and participating in erotic mysticism. Sabbatai was arrested on the spot. Other witnesses quickly came forward and claimed things such as Sabbatai had been seen drinking wine, not allowed in Islam, while singing and dancing with women. He was seen doing this while wearing a kippa and prayer shawl. Based on these and other eyewitness accounts, Sabbatai was found guilty and, as was standard practice for such acts at the time, he was sentenced to death. Fortunately for Sabbatai, or probably more likely by design of his captors, his trial ended just at the start of the month of Ramadan began and no executions were carried out over this period. When Ramadan was over, and the public outrage had died down, the sentence was changed to banishment to Dulcigno in Montenegro. A region where very few Jews lived. There he supposedly died on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) on the 17th of September 1676 after living in banishment for his community for just three years. His death, as was much of his life, is surrounded in mystery. The problem is that nobody is sure where, or even if, he was buried. To explain this lack of a grave, some claim that Sabbatai died, as claimed, and that he then ascended into heaven. It is because he had physically ascended to heaven that there was body to intern. Others claim that Sabbatai falsified his death at that time and that he actually fled to Tomor, in northern Albania, where he lived a long, happy life amongst Jews before dying many years later. As with most such accounts, nobody is sure what the truth is regarding Sabbatai’s death. Sabbatai’s death still provokes strong passions from some Jews. People who oversee a shrine in Izmir to Sabbatai, his place of birth, recently reported that a New York woman visited the shrine and paid a large sum of money to be left alone with the shrine. During her visit she was heard sobbing loudly over the shrine for many hours. (as recounted by Halperin 2007: 15) This is just one example of the level of passion that Gnostic Jews feel towards Sabbatai Tsevi even today. It is a fanatical commitment. A fanatical commitment to the worship of someone that might be held by the guy riding in the lift next to you at work or by your doctor yet one about which most people remain ignorant.

Neo-Hasidism is Gnostic Judaism Sabbatai was denounced publicly by large sections of the Rabbinic community as a heretic, particularly after he apostatized to Islam to avoid execution229230 in 1666. How this betrayal was

229

I say “interestingly” because it seems that they allowed sexual license and breaking traditional law but to apostatize, that was too much. 230 This might be contrasted to the honourable behaviour of Jesus and the early Christian martyrs This is important although it cannot be explored here. Jesus died instead of denouncing his teaching because he was doing good in being prepared to die for his convictions. Sabbatai always advocated lying as acceptable. After all, you are lying in

429 experienced by many Jews who had so enthusiastically embraced Sabbatai’s messianic claims is nicely captured by the German Jewish memoirist Glückel of Hameln who reported that her father-in-law had packed all his possessions into trunks in 1666, upon hearing of Sabbatia’s Messianic claims, in anticipation of his imminent return to the Holy Land. Glückel says that it was not until 1669, that the now defeated man could finally admit that Sabbatai was not the Messiah and bring himself to finally unpack all his belongings. (as seen in Helperin 2007: 12) How the global Jewish community must have been devastated to its core by the realisation that all the excitement that had been generated by Sabbatai was, in the end, for nothing. They had all gotten excited over a man who turned out to be a cowardly apostate. Perhaps because of the heightened levels of anticipation, despite his apostasy, Sabbatai continued to be accepted by some Jews as the true Messiah. How could this be reconciled, how could Sabbatai be both an apostate and the messiah? Understanding this is important for understanding contemporary Gnostic Judaism. It seems that initially Sabbatai’s conversion may have been sincere. He seemed to have convinced himself that God had put him into a situation where he had no choice but to convert. But if God wanted him to convert to Islam, if this was part of his messianic mission, then what was it that God wanted from His messiah? Initially, after his conversion to Islam, Sabbatai continued to express sympathy for the broader Gnostic tradition including currents of Gnosticism that flowed within Islam, particularly Sufism. As Sepehr observed, “Sabbatai held Sufism in high regard, and practiced it’s Gnostic techniques”. (Sepehr 2015) It is claimed that Sabbatai actually joined the Sufi lodge in Edirne. (Şişman 2017: 89) Sepehr claims that initially the goal of Sabbatai’s conversion, “was to bring about a sacred reconciliation between the two religions, rather than to practice either.” (Sepehr 2015) If this was his initial aspiration, it quickly changed into something different. Sabbatai returned to his Jewish origins and, from at least this time if not before, his conversion was nothing more than a convenient deception. It might be true that Sabbatai and those who followed him into Islam did not simply want to continue their Jewish practices unchanged, although this well may have been the case, but that they hoped to educate people about Sabbatian theological ideas and to introduce those ideas into their newly adopted religions became central to their project. One of Sabbatai’s rules that he left for his followers, was that it was their “duty to simulate the quality of being Muslim, and to stay entirely Jewish in your innermost [being]”. Sabbatai’s, and the Jews who followed him, conversion was not sincere but that had to be kept a secret. As Liebes states about the Sabbatians motivations for conversion, they had two important

the service of God whereas for Jesus and the Christian tradition lying would be to go against God where ‘truth’ is to live in Jesus Christ.

430 motivations, “one of anger and revenge, which brought them to convert out of a desire to destroy their newly adopted religion from within; and the other a friendly one, including attempts at religious renewal assisted by other religions.” (Liebes as seen in Şişman 2017: 98) Even this account is potentially misleading. What they hoped to achieve in their new religion may be described as “renewal” but renewal in terms of making their newly acquired fellow religionists develop a more gnostic religion. This “renewal”, therefore, was no different to the desire for revenge in that both strategies ended in destruction. So, the explanation for Sabbatai’s conversion became, even if it was not initially, as Şişman observes, that “Nathan, by using Lurianic scheme, understood the conversion as a “holy ruse” by which the messiah had entered the “gentiles” world, not to save it but to hasten its utter destruction”. (Şişman 2017: 135) The idea was to try to show that the old religion might be renewed in a way thoroughly compatible with Gnosticism. As Halperin notes, “The last ten years of Sabbatai’s life can be understood as a prolonged effort . . . to be both, to prove to himself and the world that the two identities of Jews and Muslim can be fused in a single human being.” (Halperin 2007: 10-11) Despite the quickly developing account for explaining why Sabbatai converted, that did not mean that he was simply a greedy coward, many Jews were indeed disillusioned and rejected his messianic claims. This period of denouncing Sabbatai and his followers meant that those many who continued to support him, for whatever reason, were driven underground. As Scholem wrote, “As long as Sabbateanism remained a vital force within the Jewish ghetto, threatening to undermine the very existence of rabbinic Judaism, its opponents laboured ceaselessly to root out and systematically destroy whatever of its writing came into their possession. . .” (Scholem 1971) Especially in Europe, less so within the Ottoman Empire, the Rabbis were determined to destroy the entire movement. European Rabbis like, Jacob Sasportas, Naphtali Cohen, Moses Hagiz and Jacob Emden, were all sincerely committed to flush out any Sabbatians and ensure that his movement was dead along with its founder. This hatred of Sabbattai’s theological challenge to orthodoxy ran so deep that when they were forced to use Sabbatai’s name they would add, “may his name and memory be blotted out” and this is exactly what they set out to achieve. (Şişman 2017: 88) For just one example of this post-Sabbatian persecution of his supporters, Cardozo, who was a vocal advocate for Sabbatai’s teachings, was expelled by the Jewish authorities everywhere he went. He wandered from city to city preaching Sabbateanism causing the local Jewish authorities to force him to move on, Tunisia, Livorno, Izmir, Istanbul, Dardanelles, Rodoscuk, Edirne only to return to Rodoscuk and Izmir to start again. The situation was such that he was even expelled from Eirne in 1697 by Primo who was, in fact, a secret Sabbatian. This episode shows the general attitude towards Sabbateanism and the standing of his followers within Judaism and how it managed to survive. It did not survive through public

431 advocacy, through persuasion, this is no repeat of Jesus, but strictly through secret transmission. A strategy that was so successful that it continues today. Primo’s hand would have been forced because if he did not expel Cardozo from Eirne the people would have been suspicion that he was indeed sympathetic to Sabbateanism making him a target of attacks. (Şişman 2017: 127) As Sabbatian Gnostic Judaism was so harassed it is difficult to make an accurate assessment of support for Sabbatai’s teachings after 1666 because the movement did largely move underground. As Scholem et., al., admit, “. . .for various reasons, internal as well as external, its [Sabbateanism] affairs were deliberately hidden from the public eye. . . its spokesmen refrained from committing their beliefs to print, and the few books that they actually published concealed twice what they revealed.” Internal motivation to remain silent were the result of the Gnostic tradition demanding adherents remain secretive about their knowledge and their agenda. It was for this reason that one of Sabbatai’s rules to his early followers, was that “you will be punished if you speak of your religion”. They had to remain secret because at that time, unlike today, what they taught would have been thought to be evil by most Jews and all Christians and Muslims and being judged “evil” in those days could easily result in death. One indication of both the need for secrecy and the movement’s ongoing popularity was when a three-volume set of Sabbatian writing, titled Hemdat Yamim, was published by an anonymous editor in 1731-1732 perhaps marking 50 years commemoration of Sabbatai’s death. The volumes quickly sold out and then went on into many further editions. It eventually became a best-seller amongst the Ottoman Jewry. (Şişman 2017: 127) What makes this apparent interest for Sabbatai’s works more surprising is that 1732, and the following few decades, were the peak of the oppression of the Sabbatian movement by Jews and non-Jews alike. The suppression was so widespread, the need for secrecy such, that some called this period the “dark ages”. That the volumes were edited anonymously and sold so well is both evidence that there was a need for secrecy and that there continued to be great interest. Not only was the amount of support for Sabbatai difficult to quantify, because of the secrecy, but what actually continued to be seen as Sabbatian also becomes difficult. Instead of an army of Jews converting to Islam and integrating into the wider Ottoman ruled community, as many Muslims at the time may have hoped, “. . .a tightly knit sectarian group that consisted of nominal Muslims and nominal Jews and whose primary religious identity was neither Jewish nor Muslim but Sabbatian was formed.” (Maciejko 2017: xiv) These people became known as the Dönmeh. The Dönmeh were a group of Jews who were passionate followers of Sabbateanism and, therefore, followed Sabbatai into conversion. They first established their community in Salonica, in modern day Greece, which was both far enough away from the border of the Empire to not be under continuous surveillance but close enough to the border so that the Dönmeh could move back and forth into Europe to communicate

432 with Jewish communities particularly with Polish Jews with whom, perhaps through Sabbatai’s wife, they seemed to have a special affinity. (Şişman 2017: 119) Although their precise numbers are unknown, as it is difficult to assess given their peculiar circumstances, but they never constituted anywhere near the majority of Salonica’s population. The first relatively reliable count of their proportion of the population was an estimate made in 1777, a hundred years after Sabbatai’s death, by the French consul to Salonica that they numbered an estimated 5,000 Dönmeh out of the total population of 70,000. (Şişman 2017: 157) Assuming that their numbers in relation to the wider population remained relatively constant over time, they constituted around 7% of the population. There were also other Jewish populations in Salonica who did not identify as Dönmeh which would have increased the overall Jewish influence in this city. Unlike his direct influence on the theology of Sabbatai, which was probably only slight considering the short time they spent together, Nathan really had a lot of influence in shaping the theological beliefs of the Dönmeh especially after Sabbatai died. (Şişman 2017: 124) Sabbatai himself was quite possibly not that inspired by Lurianic kabbalah, about which he remained largely ignorant his whole life, but that it was through Nathan of Gaza that Lurianic kabbalah became a central feature of Gnostic Sabbateanism. Nathan was close to messianic claimant Jacob Philosophos, who later changed his name to Jacob Querido, who was the first leader of the Dönmeh in Salonica. He was the younger brother of Sabbatai’s last lover before he died, Esther. (Halperin 2007: 13) It was through Nathan’s personal relationship that Nathan was so influential. As Sabbatians, it is known that the Dönmeh continued most of his practices including “redemptions through sin”. Amongst the Dönmeh this commitment was called mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah or “commandment fulfilled by breaking another commandment”. One example of their antinomianism, despite the secrecy, that became public knowledge was known as the “Lamb Festival”. The Lamb Festival was one of the most important ceremonies on the Sabbatian calendar for the Dönmeh. The festival involved participants, usually consisting of several couples, eating boiled seasoned lamb served, despite becoming Muslim, with alcoholic drinks. This festival used the lamb to symbolise the body of Sabbatai and, by consuming the lamb, the participants were entering into the community of Sabbatians. This ceremony seems innocent enough in the sense that it seems to have functioned in a way very similar to the Eucharist in Christianity. What made the Lamb Festival very different from the Eucharist was that after dinner, the participants would snuff out the lights and, in the darkness, randomly select people with whom to have sex. The sexual activity that followed was an orgy. Any children conceived on the night of the orgy were considered holy and potential future messiahs. As heard from a participant in such events, Ben Zei, recounts,

433 The candles are put out in the course of the dinner which is attended by orgies and the ceremony of the exchange of wives. There is reason to believe that this ceremony has not been entirely abandoned and continues to this day (1940s), particularly among the Karakas and Capanajis. . . [because] of the communal holding of wives . . . adding that there was communal holding of property as well as of wives. (Zei as seen in Şişman 2017: 184) The Lamb Festival may have been conceived as a kind of spring festival to celebrate the fertility of Nature, a celebration of the gifts of Mother Earth. The candles being snuffed out may have been a symbolic of entering into a cave or the darkness of the Underworld and the sexual activity to an expression of those base desires. Some have claimed, as is so often the case with behaviour surrounding Sabbatai, that this was a revival of an ancient Jewish ritual to worship the goddess of the Underworld. The children from such behaviour were thought to be the children of the tribal God, the Shechinah, and not the child of any particular earthly “father”. Such children were conceived of as the “Son of God” and would be raised collectively to fulfill ceremonial roles where they would not be aligned with the interests of any particular family but would serve the collective interests. Interestingly, Plato espouses a movement in the opposite direction in his allegory of the cave as resented in The Republic, This presentation, especially in its dramatic part, is a reversal of the traditional mysteries and of their orgiastic cults. Those cults already aimed if not at a fusion, then at least at a confrontation of the responsible and the orgiastic. The cave is a remnant of the subterranean gathering place of the mysteries; it is the womb of Earth Mother. Plato’s novel idea is the will to leave the womb of Earth Mother and to follow the pure “path of light” that is, to subordinate the orgiastic entirely to responsibility. Hence the path of the Platonic soul leads directly to eternity and to the source of all eternity, the sun of “The Good”. (Patocka 1999: 104) It was certainly no deep secret that the Dönmeh’s conversion to Islam was not sincere. It was so widely known that even an English consul to Salonica, who was not native, questioned why the Turks allowed them to operate unmolested. As he wrote, “They profess publicly the Mahometan religion, and retain privately the Jewish rites . . . they intermarry, inhabit together in the same part of town, and never mix with Mahometans . . . they never frequent synagogue. . . It is difficult to conceive how they remain unnoticed by the Turks . . .” (Porter as seen in Şişman 2017: 157) This was especially true as the Donmeh also rarely went to the mosques which, at least in the early years of their existence, must have attracted attention. Even the Turks were not ignorant that the Dönmeh’s conversion was not sincere, calling them mockingly Dunme to indicate that “they were always Jews”. (Şişman 2017: 159) For this reason they were, as one observer claims, “unfortunate fellows, being despised by all, whether Jews, Greeks, or Turks”. It has been claimed, by people such as Jacob Najara, that this lack of persecution was miraculous, a sign of divine favour. This is a nice example of what may have been an act of tolerance on behalf of the Ottoman

434 officials not being attributed in these terms but being merited as an act of God, a miracle. In truth, the reason they were left unmolested probably had a more prosaic explanation. Perhaps one reason why the Ottoman officials left them on their own was because of the Ottoman practice of harassing minority religions within the Empire. As a result, there were many “crypto” religious groups who had falsely converted to Islam to save themselves from persecution. The Ottoman Empire generally left such groups unmolested despite the motivations for their conversion being questionable. As long as they did not cause any trouble and were reasonably discrete about their true faith then they would be left alone. Such conversions seem to have functioned within the Empire at that time, as was the case in earlier Roman Empire, a civic function in terms of being a display that the group was not intending any real trouble. They were not separatist movements or rebellions but merely people practicing their own religion. Such conclusions would explain Sabbatai’s own response to questions about his claims to being the true King and expecting to be handed the throne to the Ottoman Empire. The Dönmeh, especially in the early years when it mattered most, must have been adequately discrete in their behaviour not to attract undue attention. Halperin suspects that the Ottoman officials simply thought “Sabbatai and his interfaith antics are entirely harmless, and too amusing for anyone to want to stop . . .” (Halperin 2007: 11) Because of the central geographic situation of Salonica, the Dönmeh managed to maintain contact with many Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. These relationships were known to involve the Dönmeh promoting Sabbatai’s claim. One reason why the Dönmeh became influential enough that they could shape global Jewry, despite their relatively small numbers, was because they were, as William Leake observes, “generally rich and among them are some of the wealthiest Turks at Saloniki”. Because they were “secretly” Jews, getting benefit from the Jewish community, while confessing to be Islamic, thereby getting benefit from the Ottomans, they were in a unique intermediary position that benefitted them in trade. As Şişman (2017: 158) observes, “These developments were the main reasons that Jews and Dönmeh’s were increasingly globalizing and had grown in economic power by the arrival of the nineteenth century.” The role of the Dönmeh has attracted a lot of attention in Turkey over recent years with a spree of bestselling books published linking the Dönmeh to both the original dismantling of the Ottoman Empire and the secularization of Turkey following the First World War. It is argued in these volumes that Mustafa Atatürk actually served the Dönmeh and was mostly concerned with creating the right conditions for realizing a Jewish state of Israel rather than benefiting the Turks themselves. The truth is that, in many ways, the Dönmeh can be seen to establish the basic model that would be used by all Sabbatian inspired movements including those in the United States today. This activity involved a small group of highly

435 organized, highly motived knowledgeable elites working largely in secret, forbidden with the threat of murder, not to reveal their true agenda, operating as a “vanguard” advancing Sabbatai Tzevi’s messianic message. This small group used their financial resources to coordinate the wider Jewish community, who would have varying degree of knowledge about who they ultimately served, to achieve their objectives. It is of more than passing interest that Sabbateanism emerged in the Ottoman Empire at the peak of its powers. After the emergence of the Dönmeh, the Ottoman’s would begin the long slide that would see their empire destroyed. It was actually during Sabbatai’s lifetime that the Turks won their large major victory over the Europeans in the Poland district. It is informative for understanding not only the Dönmeh but all Gnostic Jewish movements to recount the 18 commandments supposedly left by Sabbatai Tzevi for the Dönmeh to follow. His authorship has been cast into doubt and I would suspect, based on the strong current of Lurianic kabbalah running through the commands, that it was at least heavily edited by Nathan of Gaza. This is the list as translated by Cengiz Şişman mainly from a German version as recorded by the anti-Gnostic German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz in 1884. Şişman has also included sections written by Theodore Bent who included sections that, perhaps for political reasons, Graetz failed to include. Bent’s contribution is presented in brackets. To quote in full, 1. God is One and Sabbatai is his Prophet. Adam, Abraham, Jacob, Moses, and Ester and others are only parts of Sabbatai’s soul. This way, the maaminim maintain that Sabbatai came to this world eighteen times under the names of Adam, Abraham, etc. The world is created for the maaminim. The Muslims have the purpose of protecting only this. From that the saying of maaminim: There is no egg without a shell. [Bent adds: the Turks are the shell (qelippa); the maaminim are the egg.] 2. The non-Israelites are qelippas. 3. A believer is not allowed to marry a qelippa or a Jewess, until the Israelites recognize that Sabbatai is the Messiah. 4. Paradise is created for the maaminim and for the Israelites. [Bent: The maaminim have a share in the other world; the others have not.] 5. The souls of the qelippas sink to the lower world with the body. [Bent: The souls of eggshells go down to Gehenna, but never ascend out of it again] 6. The Israelites are not maaminim, but they will one day arrive at the truth and will confess that Jacob, Moses, etc. are only sparks of Sabbatai’s soul. [Bent adds: and then they themselves will become sparks of the Messiah.] 7. What concerns your rights, duties, and business, subject yourself to the Law of Moses! 8. Hate the Israelites not, for they will be your brothers shortly. 9. You will be punished if you speak of your religion to a qelippa or an Israelite. 10. The Israelites will be inspired by the Creator (i.e., will be led on the right

436 path); you are obliged not to show them the way to paradise. [Bent: God alone will show them the way to the other world.] 11. Your first duty is to simulate the quality of being Muslims, and to stay entirely Jewish in your innermost [world]. 12. It is not a sin in the eyes of God to kill a maamin who reveals the secrets of his religion. Hate these traitors. Even kill him, if he is dangerous for the maaminim. [The second sentence is missing in Bent.] 13. The maaminim must obey the government of Islam. The Muslims will protect, even wage war for you. Always assert that you are of Islam. Defend Islam, simulate reading Qur’an, and performing Namaz, etc. But never take refuge in the Islamic court; on the contrary, the Law of Moses may serve as your law in all of your quarrels. You shall always have your Beth-Din. Remain obedient to the Muslims, do not seek to substitute them (?) [Bent adds: They are to be subject to the Turks, but they are in no way to abase themselves before them more than they can help.] 14. God forbids the maaminim from imbibing intoxicating drinks. 15. You shall have two names, one for the world, the other for paradise. [Bent: All maaminim must have two names, a Turkish one, for public; and a Jewish one, by which only you shall be known amongst yourselves.] 16. Bring the name of the Creator to mind twice every day! The Dönmeh self-identified as maaminim which translates as “believers” as in believers in Sabbatai’s messianic claims. So much could be written about these commands that they deserve a volume of their own but, as there is limited space, to briefly draw attention to some of the more important points. They believe that the “world is created for the “believers”” only. Others, the goy, are not full participants, no matter what they believe, in the future world ruled by Gnostic Jews. The Muslims also have a role, as also indicated in the Torah, in terms of being the servants of the Jews, and their role is to help ensure that the world is for the believers. The sentence “There is no egg without a shell” is a reference to Lurianic kabbalah where the qelippah, the evil elements, is usually translated as “evil shell” indicating that the “divine sparks” of God are trapped within. Here the believers are cast as being the divine sparks living within the Turkish. The task of the Jew in the gnostic kabbalah tradition is to release the divine sparks, allow these sparks to return to God, by breaking or destroying the evil shell. Not only are non-Jews qelippah but the entire cosmos. Contemporary gnostic Jews adhere to these same beliefs, everyone is the evil shell, “the non-Israelites are qelippas”, and they are the divine sparks trying to destroy the world of the qelippah, so that they can be free to live as they want in accordance with Sabbatai’s teaching. The distinction continuously drawn between “believers” and “Israelites” is important. Orthodox Jews are not “believers”, nor is it an exhaustive reference just to the Dönmeh, but any believer in Sabbatia and his gnostic message is a believer, is maaminim. This is a point that I have tried to emphasise, Gnostic Jews are

437 not Jews. Indeed, Orthodox Jews would find most of what Sabbatia says sacrilegious in the extreme and it is for that reason that, until the late 18th century, it was a movement operating in secret. One of the more important entries is that “the souls of the qelippas sink to the lower world with the body. The souls of egg-shells go down to Gehenna but never ascend again”. As will be elaborated upon shortly, Gehenna is, rather simplistically, translated into English as “Hell”. Gehenna is actually a real valley, in the world, near Jerusalem. This valley was historically used to sacrifice children to the cow headed goddess Molech. According to the Bible, there used to be a hollowed-out statue with outstretched hands. The child sacrifice was placed in the hands, and it would roll down into a furnace in the stomach of the statue. Child sacrifice was practiced by many Semitic cultures including the Carthaginians who sacrificed their children to the goddess Tanit and the Canaanites may also have practiced child sacrifice. This ceremony was called in Greek, holocaust, which means “burnt sacrifice”. The word Gehenna is used in the sense of a place evil people not dissimilar to “Hell” as in when you are evil you go to Gehenna. What is being said in point five is that after creation everyone went to the “lower world”, which is our world, but, unlike the “Israelites”, the goy’s souls also went down. By contrast, the Israelite’s souls remained with God even if their bodies went down. This idea that Jews have a unique soul, often characterised as a dual soul, one part in earth but one part remaining in heaven, is a common trope in the Jewish literature. That is why one day they will return to God, through redemption, whereas the goy can never “return”, they will descend into their animal existence and there they must remain. I have mentioned, cautiously, that there was great danger in revealing what is being revealed in these pages. I have been cautious because it might sound paranoid, it might make some people think I am delusional, but it is absolutely true. As rule twelve makes clear, “It is not a sin in the eyes of God to kill a maamin who reveal the secret of his religion. Hate these traitors. Even kill him, if he is dangerous for the maaminim.” As this claim is so inflammatory it is written in an esoteric fashion making it extremely ambiguous. Is the last sentence in reference to “maamin who reveal secrets” or is it the start of a new point, as in, “Even kill him [people], if he [they] is [are] dangerous for the maaminim.” The way it is written, in an intentionally awkward way, so that the subject is ambiguous, is a classic strategy of Gnostic Jewry that can be found in much of their writing. I am sure that what is being claimed in this command is that it is permitted to kill somebody who “is dangerous to the maaminim”. Couple this with the level of surveillance, as revealed by Edward Snowden, in contemporary society and the disproportionate representation of Jews in positions of power in the United States and some appreciation of our contemporary condition begins to become apparent. Interestingly, in conclusion, the Gnostic Jews were forbidden to “substitute them”. Although they may not be allowed to substitute Muslims, because, interestingly, one day they will fight on their behalf, but substitution has

438 been the strategy in the West. Assimilation, as Leo Strauss makes clear in his Why Remain Jews lecture, is the strategy in the West. That one day the Muslims would fight for the Jews is today a reality. The Dönmeh have shaped the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey, Egypt and throughout the Middle East, thereby helping to ensure not only their success and continued adherence to Gnosticism (Baer 2013: 523) but directed them to declare war on the West. Some scholars deny that the Dönmeh have had an influence on Turkey because, as Baer claims, the accusation cannot be true because such accusations appear to be so inconsistent. The various projects attributed to the Dönmeh include both the secularization of Turkey and supporting a religious fundamentalist movement like the Muslim Brotherhood. Baer’s argument is shown to be mistaken when the Gnostic element in the Dönmeh’s struggles are appreciated. As should already be evident, it is actually perfectly consistent with Sabbatian Gnostic Judaism to fight for both secularisation and a gnostic religious movement. Gnostic Jewry do this every day. Gnostic Jews vehemently oppose Orthodox Judaism and Christianity while at the same time demanding that Jews retain a strong religious identity all the while fighting to realise secular, humanist society. This is not, when properly understood, inconsistent or contradictory but merely the agenda of Gnostic Jewry based on their theo-politics. Beside the Dönmeh, there was another group of Jews who converted to Islam who remained even more recognizably Jewish in Turkey called the Krakas. In the 18th century, Jacob Frank claimed that it was the Krakas, the most antinomian and zealous inheritors of the Sabbatian tradition in Turkey, who directly inspired him and his followers to become apostates and falsely “convert” to Catholicism. It was as a result of the Krakas missionary work, sending emissaries to Jewish communities in the 1730’s and 1740s, to encourage Jewish communities to embrace Sabbatian Gnosticism that Frank became inspired to try to infiltrate Catholicism. As Scholem observes, Frankism was “for generations nothing more than a radical offshoot of the Dönmeh, only with a Catholic façade”. (Scholem as seen in Şişman 2017: 154) Jacob Frank had been raised in the Sabbatian tradition. His father was a Sabbatian who moved to the Balkans where Sabbateanism remained strong. (Şişman 2017: 151) Frank travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire between Jewish communities as a merchant trading in textiles and precious stones. These associations only strengthened his Sabbatian beliefs, and, in accordance to his messiah, he first “converted” to Islam. Later he again converted but this time to Catholicism while encouraging other Jews to do the same. As might be expected, the Catholics initially welcomed these conversion perhaps believing that at last the Jews had accepted the messianic status of Jesus. It was later discovered by the Catholic Church that the Frankists hoped to replicate the success of the Krakas and Dönmeh in Turkey against Islam but this time against the Catholics. The Frankists, as this “Catholic” movement became known, reached it peak in the

439 18th century. Frank went so far to claim that he was not merely an adherent of Sabbatai Tzevi’s religious teachings but that he was actually the reincarnation of Sabbatai Tzevi himself. This is evidence, at least, of the desire to continue Sabbatai’s project unchanged into Catholicism. The baptisms around these conversions became major public events which some Catholic Poles excitedly believed, as their Muslim peers had previously hoped in Turkey, might be the beginning of the end of the apparent “eternal war” between Christianity and Judaism. In truth, as was later discovered, as had been the case with Sabbatai, it was not the end but merely a new strategy. It was discovered that the conversions were a ruse to infiltrate Catholic ranks in the same way that the Dönmeh had infiltrated Islam. While publicly claiming their faith in Catholicism they “continued to practice in secret the Sabbatian principle of the holiness of sin.” (Lazier 2009: 143) It was widely claimed that Frank and his followers would participate in various sexual transgressions including wife swapping, adultery, and paedophilia. They came to these practices through the study of the banned Sabbatian books. Frank himself seems to admit to engaging in antinomian and immoral sexual practices, as he wrote in his diary, The Lord set up a guard in the courtyard made up of our people, so that no one might dare even to look through the window, and he himself went in with the Brothers and Sisters, undressed nude and also Her Highness, and ordered all those gathered [to do so], and after having taken a little bench he drove a nail into the centre and set two burning candles on the [bench] and hung his cross from the nail, and so after having knelt before it himself he took the cross and bowed to the four sides and kissed; then Her Highness and then everyone he ordered to do so; after that, the sexual relations took place thereafter according to his ordination. At that, one of the women laughed, then at that moment the Lord ordered the candles put out, saying: If they would let the candles burn, they would see what would happen. (Frank as seen in Şişman 2017: 153) Here, of course, Frank is “the Lord” and his wife would have been “Her Highness”. This is obviously an account of an orgy that would have been undertaken in the worship of the Shechinah. Because of such activity, Frank was arrested in 1760 and, following his confession, was found guilty of heresy. He served only 13 years in prison. Some of his followers moved to France where they played a direct role in the more bloody and cruel elements of the French Revolution (Lazier 2008: 143) including the “Reign of Terror”. This practice of false conversion has never stopped. A Jewish activist who was raised as a Jew in “Reform Judaism”, then moved to Orthodox Judaism before, “converting” to Christianity and becoming an ordained elder in The United Methodist Church, Rebekah Simon-Peter, admitted in her writing that, Once I thought I had to shed my Jewishness to follow Jesus. No more. Instead, I have adopted a wider embrace of the different spiritual streams that run together and feed me. I think of myself not as a convert from one religion to another . . . but rather a person who views the world through multiple lenses at the same time. (Simon-Peter 2013: 21)

440 This is the exact claim being made by those “converts” to Islam, the Dönmeh and Frankists, who did not so much as “convert” as to seek out a synthesis between the practices of the religion to which they converted and Sabbateanism. Simon-Peter seems to be admitting, without shame, that this has been her project in converting to Christianity. Another group who was influenced by the missionary work of the Karakas were those in the early Hassidic circles of Eastern Europe. (Şişman 2017: 150) At the same time that Frank was promoting his form of Sabbateanism within Christianity, elements of Sabbatai’s teachings were being used by the legendary Ba’al Shem Tov in Eastern Europe to inform a Jewish revival project in Eastern Europe. This movement came to be known as Hasidism. As Gershom Scholem obliquely observes, “The Sabbatian movement in its various shadings and configurations persisted with remarkable obstinacy among certain sectors of the Jewish people for approximately 150 years after Sabbatai Tzevi’s conversion.” (Scholem 1995) What Scholem is referring to is that the early Hasidism 1737-1815 of Eastern Europe, as will be presented in greater detail in the following volume of this series, continued to promote Sabbatai’s teachings. As Şişman (2017: 150) observes, “It is little wonder that the legendary founder of Hassidism, Ba’al Shem Tov, and the Hassidic elders made constant disguised references to the Sabbatian affair in those years.” People like the Ba’al Shem Tov could not come out and clearly state their affiliation with Sabbateanism at that time as it remained a marginalized movement within Judaism and sympathy with it might still attract sanctions. Despite the need for secrecy, as many have observed, the Ba’al Shem Tov uses a particular vocabular and certain imagery to reveal to those who might recognise it that he was indeed a Sabbatian who was trying to advance Sabbatai’s global project. Early Hasidism’s beliefs included the ideas that perfection is attained through sin, the “natural” human condition is androgynous, the Godhead has a feminine aspect that needs to be recovered, advocating sexual licence, striving for a return to Zion and advancing an explicitly active political agenda. It is important to note that the early Hasidic movement, that spread quickly through the entire Eastern European Jewish community, is different in kind to the mature Hasidic movement that begins from 1815 and is still practiced today. Another teaching that affirms early Hasidism’s gnostic roots is that it taught Sabbateanism acosmism. As Lamm observes, according to early Hasidism, “nothing exists other than God, all else is illusion. There is, in realty, no cosmos, no world, nothing at all but God.” (Lamm 1999: 4-5) It seems, when properly understood, that Sabbatai in Islam, Frank in Christianity and Shem Tov in Judaism, were all attempts to coerce or corrupt these religious traditions so that they would become substantially Gnostic in the Sabbatian tradition. The fourth front, if you like, is the Maskilim of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah, who hoped to corrupt the secular world from within. Of course, these strategies are still being played out today in their different ways as will be discussed. As might be expected,

441 in small part because Sabbatai Tzevi was Jewish, the movement has been most successful in Judaism, less successful in Islam, with success not just with the Dönmeh and Karakas but, most importantly, with the Muslim Brotherhood. It seems, although less transparently, that gnosticism has also made clear inroads into Christianity particularly Catholicism. This was not just through the famous example of Frank Jacobs as already discussed but I fear that many Jews who have converted over the last 300 years have not been sincere and have tried to poison Christianity from the inside. The truth is that the degree by which these religions are infiltrated by Sabbateanism is difficult to gauge because, as Ba’al Shem Tov himself instructed, Sabbatians are instructed to “keep [their] ways hidden”. (As seen in a Hassidic story as told in Buxbaum 2005: 19) They are ordered to lie upon punishment of death. The truth is that by the middle of the 18th century, Sabbatians were spreading his message throughout Europe in secret so as to avoid official sanction from the established Jewish authorities. (Şişman 2017: 151) There certainly are some strange rumours circling within Christianity that indicate beliefs and practices consistent with Sabbateanism. There have been repeated rumours that in the Catholic Church, for example, there is what has been described as a “Satanic” ring that is said to initiate young boys into their circle using paedophilia. That homosexual practices might be used as a strategy by Gnostic Judaism has been proposed by others including a recent video by Kay Griggs. Indeed, when considering the work of people like Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, that children are naturally sexual is a central claim of Jewish Gnosticism. It is, therefore, deeply concerning that such rumours persist. Deviant practices attributed to this cabal within Catholicism, such as homosexuality, drunkenness, and drug use, would all be perfectly harmonious with Sabbateanism and might be traces of past Sabbatian infiltration into the Catholic faith. What is interesting is that although stories about “Satanic” practices in Catholicism emerge from numerous independent sources, they all give very similar accounts. In Australia, for example, there are indications of Sabbatian behaviour in relation to the brutal unsolved murder of Maria James, who was stabbed 68 times while in her second-hand books store in Melbourne, Australia. James’ disabled son had been sexually abused by a local Catholic Priest. This was suspected to be just one part of a larger paedophile ring operating in Melbourne at that time that involved Father Buongiorno and Father O’Keeffe. The disabled boy told his mother, just before she was murdered, of the sexual assaults and it is suspected that the priests may have killed her after she threatened the priests that she would go public. (Brown 2018) During the journalist’s investigation into the murder of Maria James, a James Shanahan called the investigators and claimed that he was also a victim of Father O’Keeffe but his claims went much further. He claimed that in the 1960s he was abused in a “type of cult, a satanic one” and at one of the “Satanic” rituals, he watched four people get murdered as a blood sacrifice. (Brown 2018) Again, the theme

442 of blood sacrifice circles this movement like paedophilia. Although no material evidence for his claims could be found by investigators, police accepted that Shanahan’s claims were made sincerely and that at least he believed them to be true. The journalists covering the story admit that the claims are incredible but felt that they were made in such a persuasive manner that they should be included as potentially being pertinent to the murder. If this was the only time that somebody claimed that there was a Satanic paedophile ring operating within the Catholic Church then it might be dismissed as a delusion, but this is just one of many very similar claims regarding what people describe as Satanic paedophile rings in the Catholic Church from around the world. At St Ninian’s in Falkland, Fife, Scotland, a Dave Sharp claimed that there was a paedophile ring operating in the Catholic Church that ran between 1971 - 1975. Sharp recounted his experiences at The Independent Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry. Sharp said that he had been placed in childcare after his mother died when he was just a baby. He claimed that when he was older, he had been “groomed” by one of the religious brothers for a period of time before being raped at the age of 12. Sharp claimed that “two or three” other boys were trafficked around Scotland and Ireland and used at what he described as “Satanic” drink-fuelled sex orgies. (Anonymous 2019) On one occasion, Sharp claims, 10 men took turns raping a defenceless boy. William Kennedy wrote a book, Lucifer’s Lodge, (Kennedy 2004) in which he claims that there is indeed a “satanic” paedophile ring deep within the Catholic Church that performs drunken orgies to their God which, he makes clear, is not the Father. These Satanic rituals do not only involve homosexuality, sexual abuse, and paedophilia, but also ritualistic murder. This book tells one particularly disturbing story about Father Paul R. Shanley of the Boston Archdiocese231 who engaged in countless homosexual and predatory paedophilic sex acts. Interestingly, Shanley was also one of the most vocal supporters of the Boston Gay Rights movement in the 70s. This is what happens when Christianity adopts the gnostic agenda. What might be being recounted in these many stories are the practices of Sabbatian’s who have first infiltrated the Catholic Church and have established enclaves within it to carry out their evil deed aimed at honouring Sabbatai’s God, the Prince of Darkness, Lucifer. Just as in Christianity, Islam, in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood, also express clearly identifiable Gnostic beliefs. The most influential contributor to the Muslim Brotherhood was the movement’s founder, Sayyid Qutb. Even the name “Qutb” is a word from the Gnostic Sufi tradition that is used to refer to a spiritual leader who has a divine connection with God. Such a person is expected to pass

231

That he was in the Boston Archdioceses actual adds credit to his claim because Boston is the epicenter of Gnostic Judaism in the United States.

443 their divine knowledge to others as an esoteric teaching. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before serving time in the American security facility Camp Bucca. While there he served the American military as a go-between with the Islamists. All the core features of Gnostic Judaism can be found in Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps most pronounced is the belief that this world is in some way evil, as Eid said, “Al-Shadid taught us that society was corrupt and that we must have as little contact as possible with the outside world.” (Eid as seen in Gerges 2018: 246) The belief that the world must be “healed” by uniting a fractured God. As Qutb himself, the ideological founder of Muslim Brotherhood, confirms, “It [unity with God] is brought into being by a group of people understanding the task, believing in it completely and conforming to it as closely as possible. . . striving to this end with all they possess.” (Qutb as seen in Gerges 2018: 246) They agree with Gnosticism in advancing a binary world view where there is a historical struggle between truth and falsehood where all claims of truth are, in fact, falsehoods. As Gerges observes, “Qutb’s vision of history was reduced to that of an eternal struggle between truth and false hood. Qutb preached that Islam would ultimately prevail and would rule the earth, a Manichean struggle, acknowledged his disciples.” (Gerges 2018: 246) Manicheanism, of course, was a gnostic movement. All cultures, they claim, including Middle Eastern ones, must be destroyed of God will ever be united. They must be destroyed because they are jahili or ignorant of the “right path”. Again, as Gerges observes, “Qutb defined jahiliyya as a deviation from the worship of One God and the way prescribed by God – as a society which derives its systems, laws, regulations, habits, standards, and values from a source other than God.” (Gerges 2018: 245) Qutb goes so far, as might be expected if properly understood, to claim that traditional Muslim practices and beliefs are also jahiliyya. As Qutb wrote, “Our whole environment, people’s beliefs and ideas, habits and art, rules and laws – is jahiliyya, even to the extent that what we consider to be Islamic culture, Islamic sources, Islamic philosophy, and Islamic thought, are also constructs of jahiliyya.” (Qutb as seen in Gerges 2018: 245) Qutb does not only want to destroy cultural practices but also, as with Gnostic Judaism, all the practices of traditional Islam. Just as Sabbateanism and Jewish Gnosticism more generally anti-Jewish so is Islamism anti-Islam. It is as a result of this association that the Israeli government nurtured Hamas which is the Palestinian wing of Muslim Brotherhood. While the Israeli government did everything it could, including extra-judicial assassinations, to destroy the secular revolutionary Fatah Party of Yasser Arafat, the most popular Palestinian movement for many decades, the Israeli government did nothing to limit the open activities of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood in the Gaza strip. The Israeli Government admits publicly that they supported the activities of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Muslim Brotherhood’s agent in Palestine. As an Israeli official admits,

444 Israel’s military-led administration in Gaza looked favourably on the paraplegic cleric, who set up a wide network of schools, clinics, a library and kindergartens. Sheikh Yassin formed the Islamist group Mujama al-Islamiya, which was officially recognized by Israel as a charity and then, in 1979, as an association. Israel also endorsed the establishment of the Islamic University of Gaza, which it now regards as a hotbed of militancy. (Israeli official as seen in Tharoor 2014) If the Muslim Brotherhood had solidified its power in Egypt, then all the Middle East would have been most definitely lost and a terrible human tragedy would definitely have unfolded. In Syria, the United States and Israel have adopted strategies that helped to arm radical Islamists. The guns used by the Islamists were supplied by the United States military. This is an extremely brief account of a very complex situation, but from this brief account it should be clear that the United States have not been focused on eliminating radical Islam but easing the way for radical Islam to take power. Who has suffered from the United States intervention in the Middle East has been any nation, which does not include ISIS or Saudi Arabia, which opposes or even resists Israel? The final group who are of interest that were shaped by the heretical beliefs of Gnostic Judaism as expressed by Sabbatai Tzevi were those who became known as the Maskilim who were advocates of the Haskalah. The Haskalah is the Jewish term of what in English became known as the Jewish Enlightenment. The Jewish Enlightenment is a group of Jews who in the late 18th century entered into European life, often learning local European languages and dressing the same as the local people but who retained a distinctive Jewish identity. The problem that faced Jews in places like Poland and Amsterdam and to a lesser degree in France and Germany, was quite different to the challenges facing Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire. Unlike in the Ottoman Empire, the Jews of Amsterdam and Poland did not simply exist as a kind of impoverished underclass who lived secluded lives from the rest of the people surrounding them but these Jewish communities in particular, by the end of the 17th century, had become part of an established social order in which they were not only not excluded but in which they were embedded. As Halperin acknowledges, “Jewish Amsterdam in the 1660s was neither deprived nor anguished; the 1660s on the whole were not a particularly bad time for the Jewish people.” The challenge that confronted the Jews of places like Poland and the Netherlands was how to both be part of Christian European society, embrace its clothing, language and customs, while remaining Jews? It was here that powerful resonances were seen with Sabbateanism. What was Sabbatai’s conversion into Islam and the behaviour of the Dönmeh except an example of Jews who had entered into another culture, accepted their clothing and language, but retained a Jewish identity? We know as a matter of fact that Sabbatian ideas were being actively promoted in Poland towards the end of the 17th and well into the 18th century

445 by the Ottoman Jews. It was these very people who influenced Jacob Frank in Poland. From Poland these ideas could easily have first moved to the Netherlands then to Jewish communities in England, France and Germany. It has to be appreciated that not only did Sabbatai’s Gnostic teachings offer a way to reconcile tensions in their lives but, importantly, it also offered a project. In the same way Sabbatians in Turkey were motivated by a mix of hatred and revenge along with a desire to reform from within, so where these Sabbatian inspired Europeans also motivated to achieve these same outcomes. To both destroy Christian Europe as an act of revenge and fulfill their Jewish mission while altering the thinking of Europeans so that it was harmonious with Gnostic teachings. Either way, Christian Europe would be destroyed. None other than Leo Strauss makes this very agenda transparent in his account of “assimilation” as presented in his presentation, “Why We Remain Jews?” Using the esoteric strategy of speaking through another’s voice, Strauss uses Friedrich Nietzsche, the “deepest analysis ever made” to what assimilation might mean. What it means, if we look at the quote of Nietzsche’s that Strauss uses, which I must apologize for, but I will quote in full because of its importance, as it reveals the strategy of what assimilation means to Sabbatian influenced Gnostic Jews, Of the people of Israel - To the spectacles to which the next century invites us belongs the decision of the destiny of the European Jews. That they have cast their die, crossed their Rubicon, is now quite obvious: it only remains for them either to become the lords of Europe or to lose Europe, as once in olden times they lost Egypt, where they confronted a similar either/or. In Europe, however, they have gone through a schooling of eighteen centuries such as no other people here can show, and in such a way that the experiences of this terrible time of training have benefited not merely the community but even more the individual. As a consequence of this, the psychic and spiritual resources of today's Jews are extraordinary; they, least of all those who inhabit Europe, reach, when in distress, for the cup for suicide in order to escape a deep dilemma—as the less gifted are so prone to do. [Strauss: Every sociologist knows that, regarding suicide, the situation is terribly changeable. That was still the old sturdy Jews of Europe he means.] Every Jew has in the history of his fathers and ancestors a treasure of examples of coldest self-possession and steadfastness in dreadful situations, of bravery under the cloak of wretched submission, their heroism in spernere se sperni (despising that one is despised) surpasses the virtues of all the saints. One has wanted to make them contemptible by treating them contemptibly for two millennia, and by barring them access to all honours, to everything honourable, and by all the more deeply pushing them down into the more sordid trades— and indeed, under this procedure they have not become cleaner. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, nor have the virtues of all sufferers ever ceased to adorn them. The way in which they honour their fathers and children, the reason in their marriages and marriage customs, distinguish them among all Europeans. In addition, they have understood how to create a feeling of power and eternal vengeance out of the very trades that were left to them (or to which one left them); one must say in the excuse even of their usury that without this occasionally pleasant and useful torture of those who hold them in contempt, they could hardly have endured holding fast to their self-respect for so long. For our self-respect is tied to our

446 ability to retaliate in good and evil. In all this their vengeance does not easily carry them too far, for they have all that liberality, also of the soul, to which frequent changes of place, climate, customs of neighbours and oppressors, educates man; they possess by far the greatest experience in all human intercourse, and even in their passions they practice the caution taught by this experience. They are so sure in the exercise of their spiritual versatility and shrewdness that they never, not even in the most bitter circumstances, find it necessary to earn their bread by physical force as manual laborers, porters, or farmhands. [Strauss: Well, he knew only Germany.] Their manners still show that one has never put noble chivalric feelings into their soul and beautiful weapons about their body: some-thing obtrusive alternates with an often tender and almost always painful submissiveness. But now that they unavoidably intermarry more and more, from year to year, with the noblest blood of Europe, they will soon have a good heritage of the manners of soul and body so that in a hundred years already they will appear noble enough so that as lords they will not awaken the shame of those subdued by them. And that is what matters! Therefore, a settlement of their case is still premature! They themselves best know that there can be no thought of a conquest of Europe or of any violence whatsoever; but also, that at some time Europe may fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hand, which only casually reaches out. In the meantime, it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes. Then they will be called the inventors and guides of the Europeans and no longer offend their shame. And how shall it issue forth, this wealth of accumulated great impressions which Jewish history constitutes for every Jewish family, this wealth of passions, virtues, resolutions, renunciations, struggles, victories of every kind, how shall it issue forth if not at last in great spiritual men and works! Then, when the Jews will be able to exhibit as their work such precious stones and golden vessels as the European peoples of shorter and less profound experience neither can nor could bring forth, when Israel shall have changed its eternal vengeance into an eternal blessing of Europe, then that seventh day will once again be here when the old Jewish God will be able to rejoice in Himself, His creation, and His chosen people—and we all, all will rejoice with Him! Strauss claimed that this passage from Nietzsche was the “deepest analysis ever made”. Strauss was obviously trying to make the point that deep truths were revealed in this passage. As Strauss, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century and certainly one of the most influential Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, thought that this passage was of such great importance it is worth spending some time reflecting on exactly what is being said. The passage begins by observing that the Jews have decided to go to war, they have “crossed the Rubicon”, and now it is only to be decided as to who will win. There is no going back. The reference to Egypt is not, as might be suspected, a reference to the Torah but a reference to an historical event when a Semitic people who have come to be known as the Hyksos232 managed to invade ancient Egypt. Some historians, such as Manetho in the 3rd century BC through till today, associated

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From the ancient Egyptian Hekau Khasut which is probably not the name of the people but simply picks them out as “rulers from foreign lands” or, more simply “invading rulers”.

447 these invaders with the Jews. These people, whoever they were, brutally ruled over the Egyptians for around 100 years (1650-1550 BC), desecrating all their sacred temples, before they were driven out of the country. Manetho, according to the Jewish historian Josephus, claimed that at this time, under the leadership of Moses, they moved to the Levant and established Jerusalem. Nietzsche is referring to this event and not the supposed time of slavery in Egypt before being freed by Moses. Nietzsche claims that ever since that time, Jews have had to struggle to survive and, therefore, they are incredibly strong and resilient as a people. They never came to see themselves as other saw them, a wretched immoral people, but always believed that they themselves belonged amongst the highest. As Nietzsche wrote, “They themselves have never ceased to believe themselves called to the highest things, nor have the virtues of all sufferers ever ceased to adorn them.” He believes that their greatest strength, their heroism, arises not from the aspiration to be “good”, like most heroism, but out of “despising being despised”. Yet they never change. He then talks about what might be terms strategy. Nietzsche observes that they, at that time, were marrying into the noblest families of Europe and they were. These were not relationships of love but because many of the old nobility were becoming impoverished and Jews had managed to accumulate a lot of wealth and so the family benefitted from the injection of money while the Jews were benefiting by getting respectability. Nietzsche believed that through this process Jews will one day become respectable, at least respectable enough to enter into the highest echelons of society. From this position of respectability, they will then be able to determine what is considered “excellent”. They will be able to determine the new standards for what is “good”. At that time, “they will be called the inventors and guides of the Europeans and no longer offend their shame”. So instead of thinking of the behaviour of Jews, materialism, promiscuity, greed etc., as “shameful”, they will determine what is right and wrong such behaviour will no longer be seen as shameful but will, as has been the case, be seen as “good”. To live a highly sexual life, to pursue sexual gratification, is today thought to be the highest good. To pursue material wellbeing, again, the highest good. Their behaviour will become definitive of what it is to be excellent. This project will be realised by “great men” and their “works”. That is, certain people who will rise to lead in every field of excellence will define what is right and wrong, good and bad. When that day happens, “Israel shall have changed its eternal vengeance into an eternal blessing of Europe, then that seventh day will once again be here when the old Jewish God will be able to rejoice in Himself, His creation, and His chosen people—and we all, all will rejoice with Him!” That is, their Sabbatian strategy of vengeance, their incursion into Western civilization to destroy it, will have become understood as what it means to be blessed. The West will look at their world, now reflecting Jewish values, and think that it is the best of all possible worlds, a world without the nuclear family, a world without gender identity, a

448 highly sexualized world, a world where indigenous cultures are praised as superior to established civilizations, a world without property or objective reality, in such a world, drawing on a Sabbatian technique of referring to days of the week when the Sabbath is the new world order, on the seventh day then the Jewish God and all Israel will rejoice because they have shaped how we think, we will rejoice at the world they have created with them because now we will be worshipping their God. This vision is what Leo Strauss thinks is the only acceptable concept of assimilation available to Jews, repeating the Sabbatian assimilation into Islam, Jacob Franks assimilation into Catholicism, the Gnostic Jews assimilation into Western civilization. This is the world that they have realized in just 150 years. Strauss is actually perfectly correct, Nietzsche’s insights are indeed the “deepest analysis ever made”. What then occurs at the start of the 20th century, as will be elaborated upon later in this volume, that manifests Gnostic Judaism as the globally dominant movement, is that a wave of Eastern European Jews, some of which remained true to Sabbateanism as nurtured in some factions of Hasidism, moved into Western Europe bringing their gnostic form of mystical Hasidism to the globally dominant West. Out of these refugees from Russia, emerged a movement that was highly critical of Western Jewry for being too assimilated. This was actually a continuation of a disagreement within Gnostic Judaism between competing faction that began in the 18th century about what was the best strategy for realising the Gnostic agenda. Sabbatai, Frank and the Maskilim, concluded that forgoing traditional Jewish isolationism and entering into the world of their opponents, the qelippah, and destroying them from within or to retain their own unique identity, remain a people apart, and realize their agenda through maintaining a distance. Sabbatai converted to the then dominant Islam of the Ottoman Empire, Frank converted to Catholicism that was dominant in Southern and Central Europe while the Maskilim embraced the Enlightenment thereby being welcomed into Western society. The Ba’al Shem Tov and his followers argued, by contrast, that the best strategy for realizing the Gnostic agenda was to remain a “people apart”, as they had done for thousands of years, but to continue to agitate to fulfill their Jewish Gnostic agenda. Both strategies, in Western and Eastern Europe, could claim some success. Eastern European Jews had successfully initiated Zionism and, by the turn of the 20th century, had turned it into a globally significant movement. Many Eastern European Jews were also promoting a kind of spiritual materialism as originally voiced by Karl Marx. By the end of 19th century “Marxism” was a significant movement across Europe but most especially, and according to Marxist Orthodoxy most inexplicably, in the industrially underdeveloped Eastern Europe. By presenting themselves in respectable middle class Western Europeans, Jews had managed to control large sections of Western European economic markets, especially in the financial sector, and had made unbelievable inroads into owning and controlling large swathes of the media in

449 France, Germany and England. Perhaps most importantly, Jews had also managed to establish themselves into positions of authority within foreign embassies and within academia. As academics they were able to undertake an extended program, continuing to unfold today, of what might rightly be called “ideological subversion” which is, as former KGB agent Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov describes it, “to change the perception of reality of everyone to such an extent that despite the abundance of information no one is able to come to a sensible conclusion in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.” This project still dominates most people’s thoughts today, despite all the evidence that people who identify as Jews are indeed taking over the world, people refuse to accept it because they have been raised on the falsehood. If somebody was told by one person that there was an elephant in the next valley, one might be sceptical that this unusual occurrence was actually true, but if a hundred people told you that there was an elephant in the next valley, one would probably come to accept that there was indeed, however unlikely, an elephant in the next valley. With claims of Jewish global domination, the exact opposite seems to be the case. The more people that come forward and claim that there is indeed a sect of Jews who are trying to take over the world the less people believe it to be true. The Eastern strategy of retaining a clearly discrete identity encountered the predominantly Western approach of assimilation when the Russian Tsarist government drove many politically active Jews out of Russia in the early 1880s. Some of these Jews moved to Palestine, some to the United States while the majority moved into Western Europe. Then the most powerful and wealthiest place on the planet. These Eastern European Jews, who had maintained a clearly distinct identity as advocated by the Ba’al Shem Tov, expressed shock and disappointment to the degree by which Western European Jews had come to accept European beliefs and practices. They argued that Western Jews had surrendered too much of their Jewishness for what they had achieved in return and argued that unlike in the East, their strategy had failed. That this claim might be made by people exiled form their country because of their subversive behaviour in contrast to the entrenched and established Western European Jews but history is full of brazen arguments that fly in the face of evidence that have, for reasons unknown, been persuasive. The assimilation of Jews into Western European society had happened to such a degree that, the Eastern European Jews argued, true Judaism in the West now faced the real danger of extinction. Again, perhaps a surprising argument to express concern about the fate of Orthodox Judaism from a group of people who had been practicing what many had come to understand was a heretical form of Judaism in Eastern Europe for over 100 years but only the previous point could be repeated here. These Eastern European Jews developed a solution to what they perceived as a crisis in Jewry and that is to use some of the core beliefs of Breslov Hasidism and use these ideas to inform a revival or renaissance of Jewish life across all of Europe

450 and the United States. This revitalizing project, that drew inspiration from elements of the Eastern approach, particularly Gnostic elements of Hasidism and maintaining a separate Jewish identity, like attending Synagogue, learning Hebrew and aspiring to return to “Israel”. This revivalist movement, as will be elaborated upon later in this volume, came to be called neo-Hasidism and neo-Hasidism is the Jewish term for what is called in these volumes’ Gnostic Judaism.233 One interesting concrete example of these generational shifts occurring in Europe can be seen in the life of that most influential scholar of mysticism, Gershom Scholem. (Ben-Shlomo 1985: 25-26) The family in which Scholem grew up thought of themselves, as many German-Jewish families did at the time, as loyal, patriotic Germans. They thought of themselves as Germans first and, therefore, refused to even allow Yiddish, then the lingua franca of the Jews, to be spoken in their house. Although continuing to identify as Jews, the Scholem’s practiced Christmas and would decorate a Christmas tree and exchange gifts on the 25th of December in the German fashion. Picking up currents flowing through the Jewish German community after 1880, the young Gershom Scholem came to loathe what he understood to be a kind of Jewish self-abasement. As an expression of what he thought of as his newly found “Jewish pride”, he sought out what he thought was an authentic Jewish way of life. Interestingly, around the same time, a generation of young Christian German boys were breaking with their fathers in a similar manner and these boys would grow up to populate the ranks of the Nazi Party. Just like the Nazi hatred of Jews, Scholem, along with other German Jews at the same time including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, developed a deep and abiding hatred of Christian Germany. As Scholem makes clear, “You [Jews] are Orientals and not Europeans, you are Jews and humans not Germans . . .” (Scholem as seen in Lazier 2009: 151) Scholem is clearly suggesting that Jews are human while Germans were subhuman. Such thinking justifies all kinds of brutality. This same accusation was often made by Nazi Germans against the Jews. It was this standing, as animals, why Scholem fundamentally rejected, his entire life, and this is very important, the possibility of entering into a productive dialogue with Gentiles. Even if it was necessary to resolve the growing animosity between the two communities at the time. The logic was, of course, that you cannot reason with animals. The problem with this conclusion, as history shows, is that without the possibility of dialogue, which actually has deeper causes in the gnostic psyche, the only way to resolve

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I decided not to use the term neo-Hasidism because I wanted to emphasize that this was not only a theological movement but also a political movement thus Gnostic Judaism. Also, not everyone who advanced Gnostic Judaism identifies as a neo-Hasid. The Jewish reform movement advances most of the features of Gnostic Judaism and do not, to my knowledge, identify as neo-Hasidim. I wanted a term that would capture the full movement, no matter how they identified religiously, because I am primarily concerned with a political movement that draws inspiration from a particular theological tradition emerging within Judaism.

451 disagreements is through conflict. As part of his search for an authentically Jewish way of being, Scholem learnt Hebrew and began to visit a local synagogue, something his parents never did. Scholem understood the revitalizing of Hebrew to be central to the Jewish revivalist movement arguing in 1918 that “Judaism should be derived from its language”. (Scholem as seen in Kilcher 2010: 21) Judaism, Jewishness as such, originated in the Jewish language, Hebrew. As with many others, Scholem also became a passionate Zionist joining the German Zionist youth movement. Again, as a loyal German, his family found this kind of behaviour objectionable. As a result of his growing religious zealotry and his fanatical commitment to Zionism, against his families wishes, his father became so angry at his rebellious Judeophile son that it caused a deep rift in the family that became so irreconcilable that, as was the practice of middle-class families of the day, Scholem left his family home. The interesting thing about Scholem’s story, that is more than a little sad, is that it is one that seems to have been repeated across Germany at the time. In both Jewish and German families. There was an intergenerational tension, as will be explored later, that was turning sons against their fathers not dissimilar to what happened in 1960s United States. As Scholem had no real experience with what Judaism as traditionally practiced was, his family had broken with their religious traditions, the young Scholem was vulnerable to anybody who claimed that they held the secret to a true version of Judaism adequate for a revivalist movement. Scholem fell in with a group of Jews, learning Hebrew, being a Zionist, and being highly critical of Gentile society, which are all features of Gnostic Judaism that was historically marginalized by mainstream Orthodox Judaism. The Hebrew language, for example, had not been spoken by Jews for thousands of years, many hundreds of years before Jesus was born, but because the mystic tradition of Gnostic Judaism believed that the Hebrew language had special, magical properties, Gnostic Jews thought that Hebrew needed to be revived and had to be used in any future Jewish state.234 Zionism again was not part of European Jewish life until introduced by Eastern European Jews practicing the highly proactive politicised form of Gnostic Judaism. Lazier rightly observes, that it was as a direct result of the impetus of the Sabbatian movement that initiates what would become known as Zionism. (Lazier 2008: 142) Also, the aggressive demeaning attitude to Gentiles is a feature of Gnostic Jewry, as previously advocated by the Ba’al Shem Tov and infused into Hassidism, were more extreme than what might be expected from those expressing traditional German Jewish life. Finally, the idea that assimilation was a form of self-hatred was also part of the Gnostic Jewish narrative that was unfamiliar to the German Jewish tradition. Gershom Scholem, one of the truly great scholars of the 20th century and certainly not an unintelligent person, as is so often

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Just think how successful they have been in this project. Hebrew was a dead language, like Latin, and yet they have managed to revive

452 the case today, was not making a free choice to seek out this understanding of what is an “authentic experience of Judaism” but he was actually being captured by a religious cult that was at the time targeting young Western European Jews. The explanation for how he became caught up in the web of gnosticism is actually clearly revealed in his biography. After being thrown out of home, Scholem went to live with a group of Jews from Eastern Europe who are today like a pantheon of Gods to Gnostic Jewry. Amongst those with whom he lived included, Zalman Shazar, S, Y. Agnon, Bialik, and Ahad Ha’am and these luminaries exposed him to the neo-Hasidism that was gaining traction, in no small part because of these men’s advocacy, in Western Europe. The emergence of this particular expression of Gnosticism, as expressed by Shazar, Agnon and Bialik, through a particular and selective understanding of Hasidism, to the forefront of Jewish thinking around the world has its roots in this European “Jewish” revival. Maybe ironically, this revival has its origins most particularly in the work of Heirich Graetz’s Gnosticismus und Judenthum (1846) which influenced many young Jews including Scholem. In this book, Graetz argued, quite rightly as already observed, that the forms of progressive Judaism that had been increasingly popular in Germany from the start of the 19th century were actually indebted to the infiltration of heretical Gnosticism into Western European Judaism. In response to this infiltration, many young German Jews, as Scholem himself observes, began to seek out an authentic form of Judaism untainted by Gnostic influences. The problem is that what they were discovering, mediated by people whom they praised highly, like Bialik, was just another expression of Gnosticism but one of a different variety. They were fleeing gnosticism into the arms of gnosticism. They were told by Eastern European Jews that Reform Judaism was indeed not true Judaism but what was offered as an alternative was just another expression of Gnostic Judaism. It is a bit like moving between socialism and liberalism, they are two movements with shared origins and, ultimately, a shared destination. It was through Graetz’s attempt to overcome Gnosticism that he helped to advance its cause. As will be explored in greater detail later in this volume, it was when these different gnostic currents within Judaism, the German Reform movement. The Western Haskalah, and Eastern Hasidism, come together to form neo-Hassidism in the late 19th century, that Jewish Gnosticism becomes the single most dynamic force within modern Judaism. Other important thinkers in the Gnostic revival include, Simon Dubnow, Peretz Smolenskin, Moshe Leib Lilienblum, David Frishman, Micha Josef Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, Martin Buber and, the so-called ‘teacher of the Jews’, Ahad Ha’am. As Dan observes of this movement, “The image of Hasidism which emerged from the works of Buber and others was that of a “super-Judaism”, the true “super-ego” of Jewish religion and ethics, which transcends the mundane demands of Jewish law and presents a Jewish spirituality which reveals a universal message

453 to modern humanity.” (Dan 1991: 186-187) Scholem’s experiences and reactions to conditions in Germany explains his later academic project. He turned to neo-Hassidism in order to escape what Graetz identified as heretical Judaism only to find a new heresy. Scholem then spends the rest of his life reflecting of the possibility that this “heretical” form of Judaism might not be true Judaism while Orthodox Judaism is actually the heresy. The greatest challenge that confronted the aspiration of many Jews who were coming to embrace Gnostic Judaism as a central part of the Jewish renaissance in Europe is how do you live and thrive as a gnostic Jew in a Christian society? The problem was, as that great synthesizer of theology and politics Eric Voegelin rightly observes, Christianity, the dominant force in European life at the turn of the 20th century, was the antithesis of Jewish Gnosticism. Christianity is positivist, Gnosticism is relativist, Christianity is rational, Gnosticism is mystical, Christianity believes in a direct experience of God, Gnosticism believes humanity cannot experience God, Christianity believes humanity has some direct knowledge of God’s will (as expressed in conscience), Gnosticism believes humanity has no direct knowledge of God’s will, Christianity believes in the absolute importance of morality, Gnosticism believes all established moral claims are merely human creations that are, therefore, evil, Christianity believes that the world is good, Gnosticism believes that the world is evil, Christianity believes in equality of the sexes living in discrete spheres, Gnosticism believes there is no gender distinction, Christianity was a civilizing project, Gnosticism believes we should return to Nature and embrace instinctual drives, Christianity believes in being chaste and living in monogamous, stable family relationships, Gnosticism believes in being promiscuous and living in “open”, “free” relationships where children are raised more collectively, in Western society that means by the state, Christianity believes in doing good, Gnosticism believes that doing “good”, in terms of controlling natural drives like greed, lust, competitiveness, is nothing but an expression of patriarchy, Christianity believes in private property, Gnosticism believes in decommodification. This contrast could go on, and on but the simple truth is that Jewish Gnosticism is Christianity turned upside down, it is Christianity reversed, as their dominant religious symbolism suggests. Unlike Orthodox Judaism, which shares many of the same beliefs of Christianity, including worshipping the same God, Gnostic Judaism is the polar opposite of Christianity. It is because of this polar opposition that Sabbatai Tzevi, pre-empting Nietzsche’s self-identification by hundreds of years, enthusiastically embraced the title of being the “antiChrist”. So, how do you live and thrive as a Gnostic Jew in a Christian society? The short answer is that you cannot. If society remains truly Christian, then a Gnostic Jew would forever be labelled “immoral” and would be unable to thrive. As Gnostic Jews they would be marginalized and demonized in a truly Christian society. The answer to this conundrum, consistent with their messianic project, is that the only way that

454 Gnostic Jews can live in a Christian society is to destroy that Christian society. Christianity is fundamentally opposed to Gnostic Jewish beliefs and therefore, if Gnosticism is to be realised as the road to redemption not only for Jews but for all of humanity then Christian society, and the Western civilization built upon it, must be destroyed. This destructive strategy is prophesied in Jewish lore as the “end-of-days”. The actual idea of end-of-days, like many elements of Jewish teaching, is actually indebted to Zoroastrian theology. In Zoroastrianism there is a period of time, that they called wizarishn or “the end of history”,235 which is a time when all evil is destroyed in the world. The removal of all evil in the world meant that the world was restored or returned to its original state, equated in Judaism with the Garden of Eden, a time before knowledge of good and evil. As the destruction of Western civilization is part of the Messianic process to realise a “New World” then this destruction becomes the raison d’etre of neo-Hasidism. As Lazier (2009: 144) writes of Rubashov, “creation proceeds out of negation, a world on the heels of its ruin.” It is perhaps informative to pause for a moment and consider the life of just one of those who were extremely influential in giving birth to a new Gnostic Jewish tradition that was identified for a period of time as neo-Hasidism. Typical of these authors who were giving a new Gnostic influenced expression to at the time was a Russian writer named Berdichevsky. Berdichevsky was born in Miedzyborz, Ukraine, which was a small town with a vibrant Hasidic population. It was actually the same town in which Ba’al Shem Tov served as the local kabbalist teacher. Berdichevsky’s father was the town rabbi who was himself from a long line of Hasidic rebbes. As a youth, Berdichevsky remained true to his family’s practices and quickly gained a reputation in the Jewish community for being a brilliant young Talmudic scholar. Then, at the age of 17, everything changed. As with many young Eastern European Jews at that time, Berdichevsky began to read books that brought him into contact with the Haskalah and he seems to have been persuaded by their criticisms of traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Berdichevsky’s disillusionment with Hasidic teaching was soon discovered and the seriousness with which such matters were handled was on full display when he was expelled from the Yeshiva, forced to divorce his wife, and was exiled from his village. (Bialle et al 2018: 560) For the next ten years Berdichevsky wandered through Eastern and Central Europe being influenced by the dynamic currents of the time. He first moved to Volozhin, where Berdichevsky undertook studies at a more progressive Yeshiva, before moving to the political hothouse of Odessa. In Odessa Berdichevsky became acquainted with giants of the pupate Zionist movement including Ahad Ha’am. Berdichevsky continued to develop his “profane” learnings by reading Heine,

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Many scholars will write about today being the “end of history”. Most famously Fukuyama who advanced the argument that we were living at the “end of history”. He was thoroughly supported in his argument by neoConservatives.

455 Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Zola, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Such scholars are often listed as important for shaping late 19th century Jewish thought. At the age of 27, again harmonious with many Jews of that generation, Berdichevsky moved West to Berlin where he became captivated by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He then used Nietzschean arguments to lead what some refer to as the “Nietzschean revolt” against more established figures like Ahad Ha’am. (Bialle 2018: 560) In voicing this Nietzschean revolt Berdichevsky made important contributions to the development of neo-Hasidism. Central to Berdichevsky’s project, again consistent with Gnosticism, was the Nietzschean/gnostic principle of “transvaluation of all values”. As Golomb observes, “The spirit of rebellion and of radical transvaluation kindled by Berdichevsky’s Nietzschean stand . . . were the strongest formative forces on the new Hebrew culture and literature.” (Golomb 2004: 71) Other neo-Hasidim were to join him, indeed many became thought of as his “followers”, including Shmuel Horodetzki, Yosef Brenner, and Uri Gnessin. With its tolerance and inclusions of Jews, unlike in Russia, Germany quickly became a centre of this neoHasidic Hebrew revival. This basic outline of Berdishevsky’s story, as Dekel observes, was one that was being played out by thousands of Eastern European Jews at that time but usually with far less influence. Driven by the same historical forces, the same curiosity, the same despair, the same hope. Their task, a task undertaken by Peretz Smolenskin, Lilienblum, Frishman, Isaac Peretz, and Shmuel Agnon, was to articulate a new Judaism, a new Judaism for a new Hebrew, a new Judaism informed by what they thought was the ancient tradition of Gnosticism. This movement was extremely critical of Orthodox Judaism. The main point of departure was the perceived passivism of Orthodoxy. Berdischevsky argued that that there was a “subterranean vitalism”, that should be recognised as Jewish Gnosticism, that ran parallel to the Orthodox tradition. The main difference between these two traditions was that the “subterranean” version argued that Jews were not just “people of the book” but also “people of the sword”. Although some authors, such as Bialle et al (2018: 560), have argued that this idea of being of the sword is a violence to Hasidism and is an example of Berdichevsky imposing onto “Hasidism everything he wished to see” but the point that Berdichevsky is making is that the Gnostic tradition has always acknowledged that action was required, even violence, to realise their agenda and this is consistent, as already shown, with that tradition.

There is a story retold by Berdishevsky’s son, Emmanuel Ben-Gurion, who visited the

Nietzschean archive, like a pilgrimage as his father had done many years before, and recalled that while there, . . .the old woman [Nietzsche’s sister] remembered her meeting with Berdishevsky twentyfive years earlier, and recalled a certain scene from a novel, The Leave Taker, which he had told her about. One of the characters (the hero of the novel or his friend), rejected the Torah, which he saw as the curse of his people, took hold of a Torah-scroll, stabbed it with

456 a knife, and blood flowed from the parchment . . . I can’t say any more. The manuscript has disappeared and was perhaps destroyed. (Ben-Gurion as seen in Ohara 2019) The stabbing of the Torah-scroll, as Ohara observes, “symbolized to an extraordinary degree the revolt of the culture of the Hebrew revival against historical Judaism at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” (Ohara 2019) In this “rebellion from within”, Berdichevsky sought the spirit of Judaism, not in Rabbinic Torah Judaism, but in Gnostic inspired Hasidism and hoped to nurture a Jewish identity that could not only survive in a modern setting but dominate that modern world. The form of neo-Hasidism advanced by Berdichevsky was one that looked to real world, saw Hasidism’s traditions as important but if it was thought to inhibit the ultimate goal of global dominion then it could be discarded. A central argument made by Berdishevsky is that Hasidism should not be thought of as a “sect”, (Bialle 2018: 561) as it so often was especially by Orthodox Jews, but see for what he thought it was, a potential for the spiritual revival of all Jews, the vehicle for realizing a Jewish state and, ultimately, the means for global dominion. As Kaplan famously quipped, “Tradition has a vote, not a veto.” And as Ross further summarizes, the “. . .form of Neo-Hasidism promoted by Berdichevsky: The religious traditional element was for him no more than a dispensable garment adopted by the old-time Hasidism.” (Ross 2008: 43) This garment could be dropped at any time if it impeded the primary practical political project. Berdichevsky’s Neo-Hasidism was then communicated to not only the Western European Jews who had lost their way but could also enhance the Jewish life of Eastern European Jews moving to Western Europe and beyond. Although the majority of thinkers in this Hasidic revival were at least once part of Hasidism some were not. Perhaps most notable of this kind of neo-Hasidic was Yitshak Leib Peretz. Unlike Berdichevsky, who wrote in Hebrew, Peretz wrote in the much more accessible language of Yiddish in which he was acknowledged as a great writer. Like his peers, he too both embraced aspects of Hasidism while rejecting other aspects. He wrote a story titled “The Streimel” which had the famous Hasidic hat dominate any Jew who wore it which was an obvious criticism of the ultra-orthodox positions that most Hasidim accepted at that time. Perhaps his most insightful contribution was to distinguish between what he called Hasides (Hasidism) and Hasidieshe (Hasidic). Hasidism was a mindless acceptance of passive orthodoxy while the Hasidic was revolutionary that embraced even socialist ideals. What Peretz identified as the Hasidic is the Gnostic, the same forces that Berdichevsky identified as “subterranean”. (Biale 2018: 561) The banner under which writers like Berditchevski marched was that it was a choice “to be the last Jews, or the first Hebrews.” (Berditchevski as seen in Yerushalmi 1970/2014: 58) This was a call for what they understood to be a more authentic expression of Jewishness, one being part of a living culture

457 and not one which remained within the historical confines and formal constraints of Talmudic dominated Rabbinic Judaism. As Ohana observes, “Many Jews, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the first half of the twentieth century, adapted themselves to modernity, meaning the Promethean passion to form themselves by themselves, to create a new Jewish identity. . .” (Ohana 2019) It was a call for what some have called a “Hebrew revival” in an attempt to retain a kind of racial identity but reject the term “Judaism” which, at that time at least, was so strongly associated with Talmudic Judaism. As is evinced by the ways Jews think and the things that are most prized in their lives today, those involved in this movement were extremely successful at spreading Gnostic inspired neo-Hasidism not only throughout the global Jewish community but as a shared set of beliefs for everyone around the world but most especially in the Anglosphere. Their success is so surprising as not only were they calling for a Jewish revival, as many who have called for a Christian revival can attest this is no easy task, but that they were advancing what had long been thought for centuries to be a heretical form of Judaism. Neo-Hasidic political materialism has been so successful at converting swathes of global Jewry to accept its revolutionary new form of Judaism that, Jewish historian Eliyahu Stern could claim, “Over the course of the twentieth century Jews would increasingly come to believe that “there is nothing purely spiritual that stands on its own. . . Everything spiritual requires a necessary material basis.”” (emphasis added Stern 2018: 6) They had turned Orthodox Judaism on its head in such a way that through much of the 20 th century, especially in the years prior to World War II, materialism, and its associated existentialism, came to dominate not only Jewish thought but, through them, Western intellectual thought in general. After all, as Hans Jonas observes, there were actually a great deal of resonances between existentialism and gnosticism. (Burns 2019) This should hardly be surprising as the founding thinker of existentialism was Eastern European communist Jew Georg Lukacs. It was perhaps because of this origin that “. . .the existentialist” reading of gnosticism, so well vindicated by its hermeneutic success, invites as its natural complement the trial of a “gnostic” reading of Existentialism.” (Jonas 2001: 213) Gnostic inspired Neo-Hasidism has been so successful that today, many Jews have come to accept the belief that neo-Hasidism with its associated political agenda that includes Zionism, humanism and a “progressive” political agenda simply is Judaism. This is despite the historical accusation for Western European Jews that Hasidism was nothing but a heretical sect. As Rabbi Shai Held observed, “The impact of neo-Hasidism on contemporary Jewish life cannot be overstated; its influence has penetrated farther and wider than is usually acknowledged.” In part this lack of acknowledgment is out of ignorance in the Jewish community itself about just how far and how much Judaism changed, as a social and religious practice, over the course of the 20th century. Just one aspect in shaping this new identity was, as Golomb

458 observes, the “persistent Zionist call for the cultivation of an authentic “new Hebrew””. (Golomb 2004: 3) This might be contrasted to fears over challenges to Orthodoxy which “indisputably contributed to the distrust with which Hasidism was regarded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (Zuroff 1999: xl) This change in the way Hasidism was viewed was because many neo-Hasidim helped shape how Jews self-identified. As Myers observes, “Beginning with the 1920’s, such figures as Gershom Scholem, Yitzhak Baer, Akiva Ernst Simon, and Martin Buber exercised a profound influence upon the education goals and directions of the emerging Jewish identity.” (Myers 1986: 261) This was not only a revival of Hasidism but Hasidism itself, as already suggested, drew on Jewish Gnosticism and this revival was also a revival in the older Jewish Gnostic tradition that Berdichevsky claimed ran parallel to Orthodox Judaism. (Biale et al 2018: 560) This gnostic renewal in Judaism is captured most powerfully by that giant intellectual of the Jewish tradition Gershom Scholem. As the highly distinguished Jewish intellectual Harold Bloom236 wrote, “As much as the stories and parables of Kafka, Scholem’s work helped inaugurate [an age of] Jewish Gnosticism.” (Bloom as seen in Lazier 2008: 147) As one of the most important founders of neo-Hasidism, Hillel Zeitlin wrote, Neo-Hasidism, . . .wants to be for Jewry what Hasidism was a hundred and fifty years ago. This was Hasidism in its origin, that of the Besht. This does not mean that [neo-Hasidism] wants to be that original Hasidism. It rather wants to bring into contemporary Jewish life the freshness, vitality, and joyful attachment to God, in accord with the style, concepts, and joyful attachment to God, in accord with the style, concepts, mood, and meaning of the modern Jew, just as the Besht did – in his time – according to the style, concepts, mood and meaning of Jews of that time.” (Zeitlin mid-1920s/2019:15) They wanted to move away from the distinctive dress and Zaddik’s courts of Eastern Europe, ruled by tzaddik for generations, which alienated modern Western Jews but embrace what they came to interpret was Hasidism’s core principles. As Daniel Matt writes, “Over the past century, a number of creative spirits have reimagined Hasidism – infusing it with new energy, liberating it from its insularity and dynastic power structures, and translating its radical wisdom into a modern idiom.” It was the mindset of early Hasidism, as already presented, which attracted these neo-Romantic scholars as a point of resistance to potential

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Harold Bloom’s father, William Bloom, was born in that hot bed of radical Jewish thought Odessa. Indeed, Bloom’s areas of study are like a list of required reading for the contemporary intellectual Jew. That reading included, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sigmund Freud, Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Hermeticism. All of these traditions have shaped the contemporary Jewish worldview but the rich tapestry that these traditions present for contemporary Judaism simply cannot be given here due to limited space. Bloom himself identifies as a Jewish Gnostic. As he says, “I am using Gnostic in a very broad way. I am nothing if not Jewish . . . I really am a product of Yiddish culture. But I can’t understand a Yahweh, or a God, who could be all-powerful and all knowing and would allow the Nazi death camps and schizophrenia.” (as seen in Pakenham 2003) That is the God who made the world must not be all powerful but must be a lesser God.

459 annihilation and not the institutional practices of Hasidism. As Ross wrote capturing what these thinkers hoped to recover from Hasidism, these writers, . . .while seeking a modern and reconstructed Jewish identity, still felt that Jewish identity even in the future should be based upon on some sort of original Jewish spirit. What primarily attracted their attention was not the Hasidic movement or its way of life as such, but rather the conviction that these embodied the core of Jewish existence, that point or spark of Jewishness. . .these modern seekers of Jewish identity were more interested in this Jewish mindset than in preserving the principles of Jewish faith or religious practice. (Ross 2008: 38-39) It was this “return” to authentic Jewishness, a Jewishness not only untainted by the West but untainted by any Aryan influences including Zoroastrianism. It was this project that drove many intellectual Jews to recover what was thought to be at that time the “true” origins of Judaism untainted by Aryan influences and seek out that primordial Judaism as it initially emerged out of Egypt. As Neumann wrote when discussing the rebellion of Hasidism against Rabbinic Judaism, “It was not until Hasidism, and before that to some extent in the Kabbalah, that this recollectivising was suspended. This enabled, on a new, inner level of history, a reconnection with ancient Judaism . . . which saw religious individualism as the core of religious revelation.” (Neumann 2019: 165) That they turned to Hasidism might seem a surprising choice as many Jews, “have considered Hasidism to be a complete break with the rabbinic tradition that held sway for millennia, holding on to a number of externals of language and appearance but intrinsically constituting a new and cold theology”. (Zuroff 1999: xxix) But if it is appreciated those who advanced the hope for a Jewish revival was both seen as necessary and instigated by Hasidic Jews almost exclusively then such people would turn to the cult with which they were familiar.

Healing the world “Jewish Gnostics, like all Gnostics, believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world, there is too much evil and pain and death in the world, and so there must have been something wrong with creation”. (Meyer 2002: 2) Gnosticism, like Orthodox Judaism and Christianity, is faced with a problem, the world was apparently made by an all-good God and yet it seems to be filled with evil. The answer that Gnostic Jews gave to this conundrum is that as God cannot create anything evil therefore this world, our world, must not be the real world. Evil must have been brought into this world by a creature that is capable of evil. Gnostic Jews argue, consistent with all Judaism, that there is only one creature in the world that is capable of evil and that is humanity. If God created humanity with the capacity to be evil, then humanity could not be truly good as they would be incapable of doing differently. So, one creature, unlike God or animals, that is capable of creating something evil is humanity. As Lubarsky wrote, “Evil

460 happens not because God allows it to happen, but because of the choices that are made by other free creatures who freely choose to ignore or oppose God’s will . . . “ (Lubarsky 2004/2929: 34) It is, therefore, by humanity ignoring God, acting against God’s order, that humanity can bring evil into this world. Gnostic Jews conclude therefore, that, as humanity is capable of evil and this world is evil therefore this world is the product or “construction” of Man. Because the world is a product of Man, the world actually blocks access to the God Most High, the God that is all “wise and good”. This Gnostic rejection of the “world” has been characterized as “world enmity”. (Miliopoulos 2013: 129) As the world is broken into discreet things and as God is pure unity then He simply cannot enter into a divided world. One of the most important aims of Gnostic Judaism is to unite the world or “heal” the world. Healing the world, tikkun olam, which means ‘repairing’ or ‘restoring’, ‘mending’, or ‘healing’ the world, is the overcoming of this world of division to recover or reveal the hidden unity. (Shatz et., al., 2005: 1) Tikkun olam is the belief that “Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but for the moral, spiritual, and material welfare of society at large”. (Shatz et., al 2005: 1) The word tikkun itself only appears three times in the Tanach where it is used in the sense of “to straighten, to repair, to fashion” in the sense of fixing of repairing shoes, roads or household equipment. (Rosenthal 2005: 215) At its most basic, tikkun, healing or repairing, is uniting the earth with god or the material with the spiritual. As Rosenthal writes, “. . .by performing mitzvot, Israel accomplishes the tikkun that unites the sefirot of Tiferet (God) and Malkhut237 (Shekhinah) which radiate blessings to all.” (Rosenthal 2005: 223) What is being said here is that when a Jew performs his religious duties, say helping another Jew in his career, then they accomplish ‘healing’ by helping to bring God into the material world. In contemporary context, tikkun olam has the meaning of “improving society”. There is no need to develop the idea in too much detail here, but it is simply the obligation on all Jews to repair the world according to their values. This project is not primarily to advance the material interests of Jews, although I am claiming that it does just that, but it is a religious belief, a theo-political commitment, that is central for Gnostic Judaism and their desire to rule the world. Joseph Dan believes that “the most powerful idea ever presented in Jewish thought” is tikkun. (as seen in Rosenthal 2005: 226) This idea has infused many strands of Jewish thought, as Adler observes, “What Marx had secularized and universalized was the traditional Jewish commitment of tikkun olam, a Promised

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Malkut or Malkuth is associated with the realm of matter and, like the way the moon reflects the suns rays, it is not an attribute of God but emanates from God’s creation. To show what a radical departure neo-Hasidism that informs Gnostic Judaism is from Orthodox Judaism, they see the creations of God to be the result of a lessor God and that Malkuth which is not the creation of God all creation reveal it which IS god or, better, Mother Earth or the Great Mother. Neo-Hasidism has reversed the order of Orthodox Judaism but has become the dominant form of Judaism over the last 100 year around the world. That is why it is wrong, in many ways, to speak of “Jews” because real Jews, Orthodox Jews, would have little to do with this movement.

461 Land for all humanity.” (Adler 2000: 196) The reason why this is a special task for Jews is the same reason why imperialist believe that it is their burden to improve the life of those people over whom they ruled, only they have the knowledge. Jews believe that God told them and set them the special task, of preparing the world for His entry. The reason why Jews are particular set this task is because they know what needs to be done while all other groups, pagans, are simply ignorant of what is required. Jews have a special knowledge that nobody else has and this special knowledge is what informs not only their actions in the world but should be used to shape everyone’s actions in the world. It is because of this obligation to tikkun that Gnostic Judaism has a liberation project, but it is a liberation project very unfamiliar to that which many have historically held to be important. In the Western tradition, the task of improving society is to make it more civilized, more moral, to impose the good onto a chaotic and unpredictable material world. The moral ideal was granted priority over the natural. Making a society more civilized has meant making it ‘better’, making it more moral, more human in the sense of humanity being a spiritual being. As Strauss and Howe (1997) write expressing the Western view, To fix crime we have to fix the family, but before we do that, we have to fix welfare, and that means fixing our budget, and that means fixing our civic spirit, but we can’t do that without fixing moral standards, and that means fixing schools and churches, and that means fixing the inner cities, and that’s impossible unless we fix crime. Although the point the authors are making is that it appears that everything needs to be fixed at once for any one problem to be solved but the point equally being made, although probably not intended, is that solutions involve making society more moral, “fixing the civic spirt”, “fixing moral standards”, “fixing churches” but, as should already be clear, these are the very features of society Gnostic Jews hope to destroy. They want to release chaos and have humanity embrace their animal drives that lay just below the surface of the human condition and making humans more cultured, more sophisticated, more creative, more moral is antithetical to their project. As Strauss and Howe, themselves conclude, While we grope for answers, we wonder if analysis may be crowding out our intuition. . . How can we best bring the primal forces of nature to our assistance? Deep down . . . we suspect that our history or biology or very humanity must have something simple and important to say to us. But we don’t know what it is. If we once did know, we have since forgotten. Consistent with Gnostic Jewry, they argue that we should not rely on rational decisions but “intuition”, in order to “bring the primal forces of nature to our assistance” because “deep down” there is something we once knew, in the Garden of Eden, that we have forgotten. The liberation project of the Gnostic

462 Judaism is the exact opposite of making society more moral but making it more natural, more base, less civilized. The aim of Gnostic Judaism is to destroy civilization, to nurture humanities animal drives, freeing humanity from moral constraints, and allowing humanity to reject the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and instead eat from the Tree of Life. The centrality of the Tree of Life, that some believe finds symbolic expression in the menorah, shows the indebtedness of Judaism to the Assyrian religion particularly its mystic tradition of Gnostic Kabbalah. As Parpola (2000: 166) observes, as in the Assyrian religion the “. . .imagery relating to the unity of the divine powers, many of (most importantly the symbolism of the menorah/Tree of Life) occupy a central position in post-exilic Judaism and Jewish mysticism. What is more, it can be shown that many centrally important Assyrian doctrines resurface in Gnosticism . . .” Because Gnostic Jews have embraced the Tree of Life those who are sympatric or supportive of this project, such as contemporary bankers, will be successful while those who desire for a more civilized society, one drawing from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, will be inhibited and therefore struggle for success. Slezkine admits that this “Semitising” project has been very successful and that we should think of the 20th century as the ‘Jewish century’ where Jewish nomadic thinking has come to dominate the world making “. . .everyone trying, with varying degrees of success, to play the Jew.” (Slezkine 2004: 49) This is the point that was being made by Nietzsche, whereas historically Christian norms reigned and to not live according to those values would have left one struggling for success whereas today the opposite is true. Gnostic Jewish thinking has come to dominate the world through their project of tikkun and now we are all trying to become Jews. In biology they describe this reordering of society as ‘modifying social hierarchy’. A ‘social hierarchy’ is defined as, “. . .the rank ordering and the accordant power, prestige, and life chances of people. . .” At the turn of the 20th century, Protestants were at the top of the social hierarchy around the world including in the United States. This meant not only did European Protestant lead much of society, understood broadly to include the United States, Australia, Canada etc., but the values that they advanced were accepted as the dominant ethos of the times. One feature of social hierarchies and the ecology within which they function is that they are usually, “. . .relatively stable and are reproduced over time. . .” The reason for the enduring nature of social hierarchies is that over time they become institutionalized and reinforced through ‘external’ practices such as education. So, once a group has achieved dominance in a society then this dominance is usually maintained over time as the standard to be achieved and the measure of success. For example, what it means to be intelligent is a reflection of the norms expressed by the dominant group. This judgement, in turn, allows the dominant group to accumulate material resources that ensures their power is reproduced in the following generations. In

463 India, for example, except for a short period to European domination, that society has been controlled by the same group of Indo-Europeans for millennia. There have been changing accounts of how social hierarchies are formed that reflect the social order that dominates a society at the time that a theory is espoused. In Medieval society, social hierarchies were not only believed to reflect God but also indicated relative access to God. Although up until the end of the Roman Republic there was a commitment in the West to the idea that everybody had equal access to the gods and no single person was naturally superior to another, the Roman Empire introduced the Eastern belief that some people, the Emperor for example, had privileged access to the gods or, still later, that the Roman Emperor was god. This imperial belief, that justified the rule of a single man, continued into the Middle Ages when it was genuinely believed that Kings had greater access to God then other people. It was believed that Kings knew the will of God better than others. It was for this reason, that it was believed that a legitimate King, being blessed by God, could miraculously cure people of their illness through their touch in a manner similar to Jesus. Indeed, the ability to achieve miraculous cures has extremely ancient heritage as it was first attributed to Roman Emperors. Later, consistent with more ancient Western values, Protestantism returned to the belief that all people, from farmer to Lord, from street urchin to priest, potentially had equal access to God. Why some people were leaders while others were followers was now believed to be the result of natural gifts, bestowed by God, such as intelligence or dexterity. Social hierarchies, at least legitimate social hierarchies, were now to be considered the result of merit. All people were of equal worth before God, it is just that some were more blessed with abilities that allowed them to do more demanding tasks in the service of God then others. All people, no matter their standing, were to be respected for what they did do for society. Whether cleaner or King because everyone had their role to play in society in the service of God. This is the much-discussed Protestant Ethos. Marx literally turned this belief upside down. He argued, as a materialist, that society did not trend towards revealing God but that the means of production determined the social hierarchy. A stone hammer permitted a tribal leader, oxen drawn ploughs allowed feudal Kings and industrial production allowed capitalists. Society was not determined by ‘the good’ as an experience of God but the good was determined by society or, at least, one part or ‘class’ of that society. Nietzsche argued that society was not fundamentally informed by the means of production but by the ‘will to power’. The problem with contemporary society, according to Nietzsche, was that it was informed by a ‘slave morality’ or a life denying set of values that it inherited from Christianity. So, although humanity should affirm sex as necessary, natural and enjoyable, Christianity had taught people that it was vulgar and base. It was this

464 “morality: that permitted a degenerated group of resentful people to become leaders of society. By this account, social hierarchy was the result of one group of people living according to their values and another group simply accepting those values as theirs. Weber will use Nietzsche’s ideas to argue for the leadership of a bureaucratic elite who assert their values as though they are universal, a kind of “bureaucratic ubermensch”. Gramsci will develop these ideas by arguing that social hierarchies were not the result of a group having power over another, as Max Weber appeared to argue, but that social hierarchies were maintained through the masses accepting particular relations of power or hegemony. Hegemony is the “social or cultural predominance or ascendency of one group over another”. Importantly for what is being argued here, Gramsci was arguing that hegemony was the result of one group acquiescing to another groups authority. Louis Althusser, who claimed that Jesus Christ only brought ‘strife’ not peace into the world, identified a range of institutions that maintained the cultural hegemony of white Christian Protestants including; religion, education, family, legal, political, trade unions, mass communication (to which social media today would now be included) and artistic. Althusser’s work suggested that whoever controlled these institutions and determined what they believed then a relatively small group of people could control an entire society or even the world. Social Hierarchies, in short, depended primarily on what people think. Control their thoughts, and you control the world. It was in the shadow of the work on power by Gramsci and Althusser, in his essay as already introduced, Why We Remain Jews, that Leo Strauss explicitly argued that Jews needed to move to the forefront of every academic discipline in order to reverse Christian society’s values and thereby allow Jews to rule the world. Strauss argued that the best strategy for allowing Jews to rule the world was to change the way people thought. As Gutkind succinctly argues, “Live at the apex of reality – or – perish.” (Gutkind 1952: 14) Jews must dominate the intellectual landscape, live amongst the elite of society and determine that societies values, or face resistance and, ultimately, perish. Strauss was not the first to propose this as a strategy. Brandes suggested that reversing the values of Christian society would be the best way to rule the world. If the task set Jews, to lead the goyem and teach them true reality, was to be realised that would need to take leadership through other means. That other means, he suggests, is to take control of the intellectual landscape so that everybody comes to think as Jews do. This resulted in “. . .methodological scepticism was directed towards all universal standards or attempts at asserting generalized “laws” or deterministic regularity in describing cultural, social, or historical processes that were said to be unavoidable or eternal.” (Picard, Revel et., al., 2016: 12) When Gnostic Jewish values have been affirmed by everyone, Strauss argued, then Jews will be welcome as the ‘natural’ leaders of the world. Under these conditions, as Selzer wrote in a review of Rozenzweig’s book Star of Redemption,

465 “From a Jewish point of view, which is the only one that Jews (and, I would argue, others) should care about, anything else is beside the point.” (Selzer 1972: 45) That is, by becoming ‘leaders’ in all the intellectual disciplines they could change the way everyone thought about everything so that everyone would come to think like Gnostic Jews. Once everyone thought like Jews, then they would become thought of as the natural leaders in every academic discipline. If people could come to think like Jews, then they would not only be welcome as natural leaders but the goyem would come to hate themselves and the way their societies were traditionally informed by Christian morality. In no small measure, the ideas of Freud were important for developing this strategy. Freud argued that the mass was the result of leaders, that is the mass identified with each other as the result of a leader so by becoming leaders they would form the mass. It was Freud and then the Frankfurt School which placed identification at the centre of their analysis of the group. That people self-identified with a leader or an idea is why, according to Freud, people conformed with the mass. In this project, they have been extraordinarily successful. As Jones observes, in the West, “The religion most practiced by millions is none.” Through this process of changing the way people thought, Jews could come to dominate the world without facing resistance. This is simply an exercise in modifying social hierarchies. The aim of the project outlined by Strauss is to change the values of society so that they reflect those of the Jewish religion. When those new hierarchies are in place Jews will be the natural leaders. Prior to the work of the ‘new left’, the primary strategy for modifying social hierarchies was revolution, it was only with the new-found importance of ‘thinking’ that this new strategy for hegemony, cultural hegemony, or better anti-cultural hegemony, could be achieved. The project was to destroy all “cultures” as such, to make everywhere a cultureless wasteland because cultures are deceptions of power. As Gershom Scholem wrote of Germany, Jews would “leave culture in its disreputable form in Europe” and “create over there, where our hearts are, a true people without all these lies and deceptions.” (Scholem as seen in Lazier 2009: 151) This is not a poorly constructed sentence. Scholem did not mean that he wanted Jews to leave “German culture” behind, but he hoped Jews would leave “culture” itself behind, in Europe, because all cultures are nothing more than “lies and deceptions”. Gnostic Jews see all cultures as deceptions of an experience of the good. Rightly understood, and this is not anti-Semitism, but Jews do not have, nor have they ever had, a “culture” in any meaningful sense of this word because Jews have never experienced the good. As authoritative political theorist Leo Strauss wrote of the Jewish condition, “. . . the rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash . . .” What Strauss is rightly observing is that Judaism has no real culture but is founded upon a religion and the dictates of that religious tradition. As he went on to say in the same speech, “Why We Remain Jews”, “Judaism cannot be understood as a culture . . . The substance is not culture, but divine

466 revelation.” Western countries have historically had a culture, understood as such, because they experience the good, they have a separation between the formal religion and culture, understood in these terms, as en expression of spirit. This explains the feeling of loss experienced by so many in our society today, it is because there truly is loss, loss of not only the culture that would once have been passed from adult to child but loss of the institutions, or at least them being fundamentally rethought such as ‘the family’, that once made the intergenerational transfer of cultural norms possible. This is equally the much discussed “end-of-days” when all evil is overcome, and the world is returned to its primordial condition. If “world” and “earth” are to be brought together, once again united, then what is required is the destruction of the pre-existing experience of the “good” which, from the perspective of earth, is now actually “sin”. The words of Gogal come to mine, “It is sad not to see any good in goodness” but this is exactly the claim of Gnostic Judaism. When rightly understood Karl Marx project, as outlined in his famous tome, Capital is this very project, to overcome all historically dominant claims of goodness and replace it with pragmatism. Therefore, from their perspective, turning to “sin”, understood from a moralizing perspective, is to turn to what is really “good”. Sin is goodness. It is for this reason that the early Gnostic practices of the Carpocratians, “attaining perfection through sin” also informs later Jews such as the Sabbatians who aspire towards “sacred sin”, the Frankists “redemption through sin” and Hasidism “sinning for its own sake”. Sinning for its own sake has been explicitly linked to Sabbateanism. (Biale et., al. 2020: 180) What can be seen in claims of the redemptive power of sin is the aspiration to realise a revaluation of all existing values. As already observed, the world from a Jewish Gnostic tradition is evil because it is informed by a false experience of the sacred, some speak of it being a form of paganism. If we look at what is thought to be good, it is good to be chaste, it is good to be humble, it is good to be modest, it is good to be honest, it is good to be truthful. All of these “goods”, it might be argued, go against human nature. Humanity loves sex and not nice, caring sex but, if pornography is a measure, slapping, chocking, aggressive, sex. Humans are also, as anybody who lives a life will attest, “naturally” boastful, greedy, and, when it suits them to achieve something, dishonest. We see in such behaviour the Hobbesian state of nature where life is short, nasty and brutish. If sinning is understood as an affirmation of instinctual drives, as an expression of shekhinah the goddess of violence, emotions and sex, that why indeed do we advocate for morality? The true good, from the Gnostic perspective, is to affirm life, to not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil but to eat from the Tree of Life. As Sepehr observes, “. . .these heretical kabbalists believed that acts which benefit God included deliberate forays into the world of sin, where the illusory nature of evil could be more readily exposed, and the sparks thereby elevated to their source.” To use the example of homosexuality but feminism or indigenous rights follows the exact

467 same principle. The argument made by Gnostic Judaism is not just that Christian Western society is oppressive in demanding us all to conform to their morality but that we internalise these narratives and experience our natural selves as evil. As Rothblum and Bond write, Although many of us now no longer believe in the need to go to heterosexual therapists like Socarides to be cured of our homosexuality, we now go to lesbian and gay therapists to be cured of internalized homophobia. The focus is yet again shifted away from the oppressor and back onto the victim of oppression: The clients are helped “to see all the ways in which they maintain a victim attitude or provoke and perpetuate their social isolation”. (1996: 10-11) As can be seen here, one enters into “evil”, “homosexuality”, but discovers that it is actually the true “good”, it is not truly good because it is the highest expression of human potential but in being the simplest, the basest, the natural. What is evil is the way morality makes people feel guilty about who they are and, therefore, making them grow to hate themselves. Paglia gives a nice account of the Western attitude to sex238, nature and society. In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of God were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our attitude towards nature. Sex is a subset to nature. Sex is the natural in man. Society is an artificial construction, a defence against nature’s power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature. (Paglia 2001: 1) Paglia is observing that humanity begins in nature, and our natural drives are the constant backdrop to morality, but that society is created as a “defence” again nature. Interestingly, she describes “nature” as a “storm tossed on the barbarous sea”. It is to calm the stormy sea of nature that is the purpose of Jesus and His teachings. Gnostic Judaism, by contrast, wants to overcome the idea that the natural is “sin” by revealing it as the good, to be cured of internalized homophobia, and, thereby, returning what appears to be evil to God as the good. People who once might have thought their actions “evil”, drug addicts, sexually licentious people, are not really evil but they are now shown as “victims” of what is evil, Christian morality. Once this morality is overcome, once they embrace their deviance as good, are proud of what they really

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Although of very high quality, Paglia found it extremely difficult to get her work published because she challenged many dominant ideas, such as the binary nature of human sex being natural. It was only because one individual drove her book through to publication that it was published at all. For believing, “Society is not the criminal but the force which keeps crime in check. When social controls weaken, man’s innate cruelty bursts forth. The rapist is created not by bad social influences but by a failure of social conditioning.” This goes against the dominant neo-Romantic vison of Gnostic Judaism and so was almost banned by not being published. Our society is so extraordinarily restricted that even a book that just touches on the borders of the impermissible cannot be published. Yest publication remains the measure of excellence.

468 are, by seeing themselves as oppressed, then they will be truly free. This is how Freud linked sex with affirming life and abstinence with denying life. As he wrote, [T]he sex drive transformed itself for us into Eros, which seeks to push together and hold together parts of a living substance . . . These speculations then have Eros operating from the beginning of life and acting as a “life drive” in contrast to the “death drive”, which arose through the animation of the inorganic. These speculations seek to solve the riddle of life by assuming these two drives struggling with each other from the very beginning. Because Christianity wants to marginalise sex, in order to develop the internal discipline required to pursue excellence, what the Greeks called arete, it is associated with the “death drive” in denying life. This meant that everything wrong with society was the result of Christian Western morality marginalizing “natural drives”. As Heinze acknowledged, “Freud believed that neurotic and hysterical behaviour derived from suppressed sexual drives. Those drives were fundamental to all human beings, and they conflicted with the standards of moral behaviour that ruled Western society. Therefore, modern people all suffered a terrible conflict between eh urgings of the libido and the restraints society imposed on those urges.” (Heinze 2004: 68) As a result of this argument, Freud could assert, “A complete absence of sex is the only thing which can be properly considered sexual deviance. Everything else is just a matter of taste.” By Freud’s account, consistent with modern feminism and psychology, there is no such thing as sexual deviance unless one chooses to live a life of abstinence. Putting these Gnostic ideas into practice when they achieved power, the former Soviet Union’s Criminal Code removed bigamy, incest, adultery, and homosexuality as crimes. (Gsovki 1947: 74) Even polygamy was permitted in the Soviet Union as long as it was practiced in regions which were not predominantly Muslim. That is, if polygamy was being practiced out as an expression of religion, then it continued to be criminal, but if it was merely an expression of free sexuality then it was acceptable. Freud argued, along with several other Jewish scholars at the time such as Gross, that everyone was what he termed “innately bisexual”, and it was heterosexuality that was an “unnatural” imposition that resulted from Christian morality. Indeed, the son’s sexual desire for both his father and mother was a central idea in Freudian psychology.239 It is interesting that Freud is not only

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Understanding these kinds of arguments, it really does make me wonder how anybody could have taken Freud seriously. He argued that the ego begins to form when the father orders the baby to be removed from the mother’s breast. At this time in the child’s development, the child is confronted by the otherness of the mother, what Lacan stupidly calls “mOther”, and the child begins to differentiate itself from his mother’s breast. From this separation, a vague sense of self beings to emerge, the start of an ego. That is, the ego begins when the father figure demands that the child be removed from the breast that he thinks is his. It is that the father/Father, plays this role of disciplinarian, that explains the link between Christianity and authoritarianism. What Freud/Lacan discover, surprisingly, is that Western Christian society is authoritarian. How does a baby even “know” that the father asks for the baby not to be breast fed and what happens when the father does not say this? The whole thing is crazy. What man asks his wife not to breast feed because he must have access? It just does not make any sense.

469 denying the possibility of sexual deviance generally, including paedophilia and bestiality, but Catholic priests and nuns who chose to abstain from sex are the ones who are now rightly cast as “deviant”. This ignores the fact that, “. . .much of the traditional discourse about the dangers that carnal love poses to the spiritual life.” Two Jewish sociologists, Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda, argued in their extremely influential book Moral Panics: the Social Construction of Deviance, that all claims of “deviance” were merely “social constructions” that could, just as easily, be constructed differently. Interestingly, they explicitly identified Satanic rituals as an example of “moral panic”. Goodes was arguing not that Satanic rituals did not happen but that they should not be a moral concern. They should not cause outrage. Klein also lists examples of “moral panic” which includes, comic books in the 1950s, marijuana use in the 1960s, rock’n’roll in the 50s and 60s and fear of mass Jewish immigration in the early 1970s. It is so interesting when you read this particular list that the very things he lists as examples of unreasonable “moral panic” are the very things that Gnostic Jews have used to undermine Western civilization. Comic books, for example, were indeed used by Gnostic Jews to drive their agenda to children. Drugs and rock’n’roll in the 1950s and 1960s were also used to turn people away from rationality, to turn people away from calm contemplation to being driven by passion and mystical delusions. One area where Goode and Ben-Yehuda paid special attention was claims that drug use is “deviant”. They argued that “marijuana in the 1930s, LSD in the 1960s, PCP in the 1970s, crack cocaine in the 1980s, Ecstasy beginning in the late 1980s, and methamphetamine in the twenty-first century” (Goode & Ben-Yehuda 2009: 1989) are all examples of irrational and exaggerated “panic, fear and hysteria”. As such they spoke against anti-drug legislation seeming to claim that drug use was a civil liberty even a “human right”. That 70,000 Americans died, most of them young, from drug related overdoses in 2019 alone would suggest that concern in relation to drugs is not just “hysteria” but is taking the lives of our young and contributing to the destruction of the West. This rate of death due to drugs is a massive increase even in relation to numbers of deaths in 1999 (around 18,000). This reflects the more permissive attitudes towards drug use that begins with arguments that marijuana is acceptable, but this is a gateway drug to much more dangerous drugs. Methamphetamine is a drug particularly appealing to disillusioned white males who have lost just about everything over the last few decades. They have lost their standing in the family, society and relative to immigrants. They have lost their careers and their self-respect. Of course, Gnostic Jews believe that drugs are one way to return to our pre-civilizational natural condition, so they advocate for drugs, especially hallucinatory drugs, and oppose claims of “deviance” in relation to drugs because deviance is exactly what they hope to realise.

Despite this obvious craziness, the nonsensical nature of the entire theory, entire libraries of books and highly paid careers have been built around this rubbish.

470 CIA agent and MK-Ultra Director, Sidney Gottlieb, from an Eastern European Jewish family, worked tirelessly in the 1950s to circulate LSD amongst various creative sections of American community, artists and musicians, claiming that it was a way of accessing creativity. By the 1970s the death toll was rising and any claim that such drugs improved creativity were shown to be false. What was discovered is that one cannot really be “liberated” from deviance because deviance is not arbitrary but effectively draws a line between a good and bad life. Overcoming the concept of deviance has resulted in people no longer even trying to overcome their destructive condition of suffering but that such suffering is natural. The lesson of Eastern mysticism. Black Americans in particular were taught that they were not taking too many drugs, being too violent, not being well adjusted, but that they were victims of white society’s oppression. They should embrace who they are, no matter how destructive to themselves and the society in which they lived that state might manifest, join gangs, take drugs, shoot each other on the street, because it was “the man” who was wrong, not themselves. This resulted in decades of degradation, suffering, immorality from which the black community of America is just barely recovering. It is only now that many of these behaviours are being normalized more broadly that they are starting to emerge for their self-imposed living hell. This is what Jewish Gnosticism teaches, not liberation, but to endure suffering. Not freedom, but true enslavement. This strategy moves to the very heart of Christianity and the moral framework that it advocates. With Christian morality, or rightly Greek morality introduced into Judea and advocated by Jesus against the Jewish tradition, there emerges a new subjectivity. In John 8:3-12 and to quote at length, And the scribes and Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught committing adultery, in the very act. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say?” But they said this to tempt Him, so that they might have reason to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote with His finger on the ground. But when they persisted in questioning Him, He stood up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” And again, He stooped down and wrote on the ground. And when they heard that, they went out one by one, beginning with the older ones. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman stood where she was, in the midst. And Jesus stood up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” And she said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more.” Again, therefore Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world; he who follows Me shall by no means walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.” This is such a beautiful story. The imagery of the terrified woman left standing alone unharmed with the distracted Jesus because those set upon judging others realised that they themselves were unworthy. The point of giving this quote at length is because it shows the internalized judgement that Jesus is

471 encouraging. He does not ask the people, as the scribes and Pharisees expect, to reject Moses’ law or even to carry it out as they understand it and stone the poor woman, but he asks those present to pass judgement on themselves first and he who passes that test, who finds in themselves someone who has not sinned, then they are permitted to pass judgment and carry out the sentence. First the older people leave, for age definitely leaves us not only with our fair share of sins but with better insight to know them, but then the younger ones eventually realise that, as mortals, we have all sinned. The adulteress is left standing alone with the distracted Jesus drawing on the ground. The story does not end there. Jesus then asked her, almost as though surprised, “Where are they? Has no one condemned you?” Realizing that they have been left alone he does the only thing a person who does not sin can do. He certainly does not hurt her. He does not yell at her or punish her. He does not even point out to her the people that she is hurting through her selfish actions, her husband and her children. In a sense he does nothing. He refuses to condemn the known and self-confessed sinner not because he is without sin, like everyone else, but because he is without sin. In this condition of sinlessness, He simply asks her to sin no more. I almost physically cry every time I read this story. It is such a warm, tender expression of unconditional, nonphysical love. Love our true humanity, our frailty, our weakness, but our potential to always do better. Our potential to always be good. It would be nice to think that this is just what she does. That she returns to her family, looks again at her imperfect husband whose body has grown far too familiar but who, hopefully, tries his best to support her. She then holds her children who need her love and undisturbed attention so much, and she does what is both the simplest and hardest thing for us as mortals to do, sin no more. He is asking her to critically reflect on herself and her actions through the moral lens made available by God. To continue to reflect on her behaviour in the future so that when she might next want to sin, and sin calls to us all the time to do the wrong thing, as God observes in the Tanach, “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth”, but Jesus offers us a way to be also truly free humans, unlike animals, who can choose not to follow our evil inclinations and be good. The adulteress is not an animal driven by uncontrolled lust but as a human she can control herself. She is truly a human, with knowledge of what it means to be good and evil. Jesus does not say, “what you did is not really a sin you were just doing what thousands of years of evolution has told you to do in pursuing multiple sexual partners so that the “best” can impregnate you so just keep up being your natural self”. He does not instruct her to sin again and again until she finally realizes that having sex outside of marriage, sating her lust, is not really a sin at all but the claim of “sin” is actually an expression of patriarchal power and can, therefore, be ignored. He simply, beautifully, peacefully, lovingly, compassionately asks her to “sin no more”. This story is why I am a Christian today and why I invite everyone to join me. Jesus then goes on

472 to claim, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus is the “light of the world”. Jesus is the way of manifesting a world. Without Jesus, as every other religious tradition in the world verifies, there simply is no World as such. This is not the God of the underworld, a chthonic god of darkness and fire that seems to feature so prominently in the Old Testament. This is a God of light. A God of truth. A God of goodness. That light opens a space of experience, a clearing for beings. It is this light that has, until recently, guided Western civilization. As again Paglia observes, “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means “of the earth”.” (Paglia 2001: 5) In Gnostic Judaism, by contrast, redemption is a task left for the free human in the sense of free of moral restraint. As Fromm observes, If it is true that the “evil drive” is possible only after man has emerged from the original unity with nature and has acquired self-awareness and imagination, it follows that only man can sin, can regress, can lose himself. In the Jewish view man is born with the capacity to sin, but he can return, find himself and redeem himself by his own effort and without an act of grace from God. (Fromm 1966: 127) The “evil drive” is only possible after man has emerged from unity with nature. It is because humanity has left nature behind that ‘man’ can sin. This is the capacity of man to sin. The all-important capacity to selfreflect, to judge one’s own behaviour, is actually the cause of sin in Fromm’s tradition. To overcome this, according to the Gnostic Fromm, he can return, return to nature, and with this return redeem himself without God’s help. Gnostic Jews believe that it is the task of man himself to heal the world, to realize redemption without grace or faith. Man heals himself, the world and God by returning to his natural condition. Jesus, by contrast, is the righteous light that buries the darkness of instinctual drives, the earth, and it is only through Jesus that God can be found. Man cannot, according to the Christian tradition, do it alone. Jesus advances an understanding of the human condition that is neither enslaved to their instincts nor wholly “controlled” by God but, by living between heaven and earth, He is truly free. Free to be dutiful. Free to be good. What is advanced in Christianity is a person who knows divine Grace, through the act of faith, and, therefore, can be good. Jesus is the bringer of human dignity and truly human freedom (which is the opposite of “free will” which was long understood as an expression of our animal selves). This is why Jesus was always portrayed as a shepherd, “the guide of souls”, Jesus is logos, reason, the word, because reason can be directed by an experience of the good, the beautiful and the true. As Fideler wrote (1993: 110), “The power of Reason in the soul both organizes and leads the irrational passions in the same way that a shepherd guides his herd.” As it says in Mark 6:34, Jesus “saw a great throng, and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.” Christianity has been so captured by Jewish Gnosticism that it has forgotten its own

473 purpose, its own message, and instead sees itself through the eyes of those who hate it. The Gnostic tradition says that judgement is enslavement to power where Christianity teaches that a person left to be a self-critical free agent, is one that is truly can be truly moral. Our entire legal system is built on this understanding of human agency, an understanding that is being eroded every day. The light, Jesus, manifests a “world” but only through human freedom. Heidegger affirms this existential position when he wrote, “the question of the essence of human freedom is the fundamental question of philosophy, with even the question of Being entwined in it.” (Heidegger 1976: 89) The kind of moral freedom advanced by Jesus has ontological implications. This is the principle that informed Western civilization and it is one worth hanging on to and not surrendering to the authority of Jewish Gnosticism. By contrast, the ethos advanced by Jewish Gnosticism sees moral freedom exhaustively as an expression of power, white over colour, men over woman, rich over poor and therefore destructive to the human condition. Understood in these terms, freedom necessarily requires the destruction of the civilizing project suggested in Jesus’ teachings. This is why Gnostic Judaism’s most loathed enemy is Christianity. Civilization has been the claim of individuals progressing towards the experience of the good, the civil, and away from natural drives, what is understood as the sinful. To embrace chaos, in the sense of the unordered, the Underworld, Nature, requires, according to this theo-politics240, a return to a primordial condition, as captured in accounts of the Garden of Eden, before humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Therefore, early Hasidism has a tendency “. . .to seek mystical union and perfection by retreating to the simplicity and wholeness of the ”secrets of Genesis”, in the complete unity and harmony of the universe . . . before creation of the world introduced the conflicting elements of present existence.” (Dan 1988: 58) From their perspective, the problem becomes this, how in a world that is ordered by an experience of freedom informed by “the good”, that manifests discrete things, “objects”, can the underlying unity of Nature or Earth, as the spirit of God, become uncovered or revealed? To put it like this, how can Mother Earth be released from her casket sealed by the weight of the patriarchal world? Neo-Hasidic Jews think of this reconciliation as ‘uniting the name of God’. As it says in Zechariah 14: 9, “The Lord will be king over all the land, in that day the Lord will be one and his name one.” So, what does it mean for the world or ‘the land’ to be one and his name one? Christianity believes that Jesus was the

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Although this term “theo-politics” will be elaborated upon at length in the second volume of this series, just by way of introduction, it is to simply agree with David Martin (2014: 1) that there is an importance to “analyzing religion and politics in the same conceptual frame”.

474 Messiah or, in its Greek form, Christ. Jesus’ message and notions of redemption were interpreted through a Greek lens. As Fideler rightly observes, Christianity, as a world religion, is a Greek religion. The New Testament is written entirely in Greek, and Greek was the primary language of Paul, the first New Testament writer. Paul . . . reveals an equally profound debt to Greek philosophical and religious thought. (1993: 5) The Christianity that informed Europe should rightly be called the Graeco-Christian tradition and certainly not the “Judeo-Christian” tradition which is, again, primarily a political term. In truth, as Jaeger rightly observes, “. . . the Jews were Hellenised by the time of Paul, not only in the Jewish Diaspora but to a considerable extent also in Palestine itself . . .” (Jaeger 1961: 6) It was actually this Hellenised Jewish population who came to initially embrace Christianity (Jaeger 1961: 6) because Christianity is more a Hellenic religious movement than a Jewish one.241 The term Judeo-Christian was popularised by President Eisenhower, whose father was Jewish, when claiming in a speech in 1952 that the United States was founded on “Judeo-Christian” beliefs. The term “Judeo-Christian” is so widely used today because, as the Jewish scholar Stephen Feldman rightly observes, “Most importantly the myth of the Judeo-Christian tradition insidiously obscures the real and significant differences between Judaism and Christianity.” (Feldman as seen in Stockton 2020: 268) A better account of Christianity’s origins is given by Paul Carus who argued in 1909 that, Without denying the enormous influence which Judaism exercised on Christianity from its very start, we make bold to say that Judaism did not bring forth Christianity, but that Christianity is, so to speak, a grandchild of ancient paganism. . . A world-religion of the character of Christianity would have originated in the same or quite a similar way, with the same or quite similar doctrines, with the same tendencies and the same ethics . . . even if Judaism had not existed. . . The spirit of Christianity is pagan, not Jewish; - yea, it is unJewishly pagan, it is Gentile, and it continued to retain a very strongly pronounced hostility towards everything Jewish. (Carus 2007/1909: 3) The term Judeo-Christian makes it appear, as an act of politics, that there are in fact no substantial differences between Christianity and Judaism, they are, fundamentally, the same religion believing in

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As Jaeger observes, all of the first generation of Jewish converts to Christianity all had Greek names, Philippos, Nikanor, Prochoros, Timon, Parmenas, Nikolaos even though they were from “Jewish” families. Greek was also spoken in synagogai (a Greek word) all around the Mediterranean. The Septuagint was originally written in Greek not, as is sometimes argued, for a Greek audience but because in Alexandria where the volume was written, the Jews of that city spoke Greek. That is why Philo of Alexandria wrote his work in Greek, for an educated Jewish audience. Although it is increasingly popular to call Jesus by his Hebrew name Yeshua, in truth because of the influence of Greece, the fact that nobody spoke Hebrew and Jesus, going off what he argues, was most certainly a Hellenized Jew, then he should continue to be called by the Greek version of his name as written in the Bible, Jesus.

475 basically the same things, worshipping the same God. Such a claim would have shocked Christians and Jews of the very recent past. This continuous obfuscation of the very real differences between Judaism and Christianity has real world consequences. As Jones observes, Prior to Vatican II, Christianity was held as a marriage of Jewish tradition and traditional Greek philosophy. Afterward, the Church largely abandoned its Greek heritage, basing itself almost entirely on a Jewish tradition. . .. This meant the abandonment of the very doctrine that the Church had once regarded as core since its inception, scholasticism based on realism. (emphasis added Jones 2019: 13) Jones is observing that it was only after the influence of Gnosticism that Christianity itself turned to try to recover its supposedly “lost” Jewish heritage but, as Jones rightfully observes, there actually is no such heritage to be recovered. This attempted “return” is nothing but a novel fabrication. German Orientalist Friedrich Delitzsch argued that Judaism was shaped by Babylonian influences while Christianity was shaped by Greek influences and therefore to claim that “Jehovah [Yahweh] has anything to do with our Christian God, is an unheard-of fraud perpetrated on all humanity”. (Delitzsch as seen in Beker 2008: 105) Indeed, the more one reads the New Testament the more one discovers how critical Jesus is of Judaism and how fundamental is His departure from its practices. As Jesus said chiding the Jews for their hubris and believing that they alone are “chosen” by God, Do you really believe that the Deity threw the human species into the world and left it at the mercy of nature without a law, without awareness of the purpose of its existence, and without the possibility of discovering within itself how it might become pleasing to him? You are certainly most fortunate that you alone have been endowed – for no apparent reason, in this one corner of the world and out of all the nations of the earth – with knowledge of the moral law. This must be what has all of your narrow, self-absorbed heads spinning. As for myself, I cling only to the untainted voice of my heart and conscience; whoever listens to these honestly receives the light of truth. And all I ask of my disciples is that they heed this voice too. This inner law is a law of freedom to which a person submits voluntarily, as though he had imposed it on himself. . . Obliged I am to awaken men to this law, I, like any responsible shepherd, am prepared to give up my life for my flock. Perhaps, you will take my life; but if you do, you will not be robbing me of it, because I offer it freely. You, however, are slaves. You stand yoked by a law imposed on your from without; and this is why you are powerless to wrest yourself free of bondage to your inclinations through self-respect. (John 8:21-31) Judeo-Christian indeed! Jesus is so Jewish that he describes them as “slaves” and “yoked by a law imposed on you from without” in contrast to His message of “freedom” which requires you to voluntarily submit to the “voice of my heart and conscience” which, at other times, He suggests is accessed through reason. Delitzsch concluded that, “Christianity . . . is an absolutely independent, new religion – no mere higher stage in the development of Judaism . . . [and therefore] the New Testament must be freed from its

476 embrace by the Old Testament. . . the teachings of Jesus must be worked out in their purity.” (Delitzsch as seen in Beker 2008: 105) The Christian Church, from its founding with Paul, was always primarily Greek in the sense that it prioritized truth as logos. The phrase “Judaeo-Christian” that is bandied about at every opportunity today was simply not used until well after the Second World War. It was only after fabricating a Jewish foundation that Christianity could forgo Greek realism and begin to incorporate the kind of relativism that informs shallow attempts at “multi-faith dialogue” as somehow a feature of its teaching. These are not abstract religious principles that are rightly the purview of theologians, but they have real world implication that are played out every day. It is these ideas that shape Western civilization and made it the light of the world for 300 years until it lost its faith, lost its traditions and lost its legitimacy. Some neo-Hasidim, most famously Martin Buber, claim that Jesus’ message has been misunderstood and that He was, if properly understood, himself a Gnostic Jew. This claim may or may not be true, it certainly is interesting to explore this matter in depth especially in light of the discovery of the Gospel of Judas, but in relation to how Western society has been informed over the last 2,000 years, this does not matter. Jesus’ account of redemption was interpreted through a Hellenised worldview and it was this interpretation that informed Western civilization. In ancient Greece, the soul (psyche) was both the vitalizing aspect of living things as well as the site of mediation between God and human moral agency. When a person died, even in the Homeric poems which were written half a millennium before Christ, it was thought by the Greeks that the soul separated from the material body and could have an autonomous existence. In the Greek tradition, it was the soul that lived on after death and it was the soul, not the body, that was held responsible for the sins performed in life. Perhaps the oldest expression of soul/body dualism is expressed in Ancient Persia where there was thought to be “an ontological contrast of matter, or body, and spirit.” (Rudolph 1987: 283) Interestingly, both Persia and Greece are Indo-European or Aryan cultures so the soul/body distinction may have been a feature that is unique to the Indo-European tradition. The Jewish tradition, indeed, the entire Semitic tradition, had no conception of the separability of soul and body, no separation of the spiritual and the physical. Jesus grew up in a Hellenised Judea and spoke the Syrian Semitic language of Aramaic. Jesus’ radical claim was that the Jewish Messiah was not sent by God to realize a new Kingdom on earth, a vision of an empire for the Jews that would allow them to one day rule the world, but that the Kingdom of God was in heaven, redemption was about the soul after death and had nothing directly to do with the political world. As Jesus says in Matthew 5:12, “Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.” And again, in Luke 6:23, “Rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, our reward is great in heaven. . .” As a promise that after death one

477 would be with God in heaven, Jesus opened the mind of Mankind to the “Holy Spirit” of the Lord, symbolized by wine, or what is the personal experience of the good. This conception was the gift of Christianity to the world. No longer was Mankind alienated from God, as he had been since the Garden of Eden, but now humanity once again knew God, lived in the grace of God, as revealed in the world. Although Jesus’ message was about the soul in the afterlife, this revelation certainly had real world implications. Firstly, under these new conditions, there was no longer any need to obey the traditional Jewish social laws because every person could now experience the good directly and should act according to their conscience as morally free agents. Now that the world could truly be experienced, as real, knowledge became the highest good, as an experience of God, while ignoring the divine revelation was now what was evil. Knowledge of good and evil is the foundational judgement that constitutes the entire world of reality as such. Truth becomes central tenant of the Western tradition because truth is like following the trail of God’s grace. Knowledge of good and evil is place. Everything that is consists within this normative judgement of good and evil. The chair that is beautiful and true, is good, while the chair that is ugly is, although a person would not use this language, evil or, better, inadequate to really being a chair at all. This inadequacy, this lack, is chaos, disorder or not being. The thing might continue to function as a chair, but its full manifestation in terms of the beautiful, the good and the true, would remain unrealised. As can be seen from this example, moral freedom, the experience of good and evil, as Heidegger observed, has ontological implications. As the first recognised philosopher of ancient Greece is supposed to have claimed, “everything is full of gods”. Everything that is, is in terms of being full of gods. What is meant by this was much later clarified by Aristotle, It is indeed an ancient idea, traditional among all mankind, that all things are from God, and are constituted for us by God, and nothing is self-sufficient if deprived of his preserving influence. So, some of the ancients were led to say that all the things of this world are full of gods. (Aristotle On the Cosmos 397b) Of course, this revelation permitted judgement, one could now say how excellent another person was, but Jesus emphasises that this revelation is not primarily about judging others but the requirement to judge ourselves. These most basic of Christian ideas have been totally forgotten by the West who now praises Eastern religions like Buddhism or even Islam about which they have only the crudest knowledge, but this crudest knowledge is more than what they know about their own noble traditions. This reminds me of Jung’s (1955: 215) warning when expressing his concern about the threat of Eastern spiritualism in 1933, “China hardly believes that European science and technology are preparing her ruin. Why should

478 we believe that we must be destroyed by the secret, spiritual influence of the East?” Yet ruin is exactly what Eastern spirituality has in store for the West. The second real world implication is that the division between soul and body, spirit and matter, informs the separation between church and state. Semitic religions, like Islam and Judaism, know nothing of this distinction and that is why Israel has been realised, like Saudi Arabia, as a theocracy. In Christianity, although leaders should obey their conscience and try to be good, the Church should not determine political policy. These ideas even informed the Medieval Christian world, through the work of Augustine. With the advent of modernity, the separation between Church and state, allowed for the realization of a democratic society. In contrast to the Gnostic tradition, God had created the world and it was good. Jesus had opened people’s ears and eyes to an experience of the good, the divine nous, in which people could freely participate if they chose. If Medieval Catholicism looked for internal motivations, then Protestantism looked for external forces shaping the world and the people in it. Government functioned in Protestantism as a kind of correcting force for those who had not adequately embraced Christianity and, therefore, remained evil. As Martin Luther makes clear, All who are not Christians [and here he means true Christians] belong to the kingdom of the world and are under the law. There are few true believers, and still fewer who live a Christian life, who do not resist evil and indeed themselves do no evil. For this reason, God has provided for them a different government beyond the Christian estate and kingdom of God. . . If this was not so, men would devour one another, seeing that the whole world is evil and that among thousands there is scarcely a single true Christian. No one could support wife and child, feed himself, and serve God. The world would be reduced to chaos. For this reason, God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal, which restrains the un-Christian and wicked. . . (Luther 1968/1523: 47) Those who could experience the good and lived accordingly could live in accordance with their own council while government was for those who could not. This “ocular turn” informed the increasing importance of the visual arts through the Renaissance into early modernity. It was at this very time, as Andrew Heinze (2004: 50) observes, that, “the art of individual portraiture soar to great heights . . . the mass marketing of mirrors and the popularity of writing personal letters, keeping diaries, and reading selfimprovement books all gave new meaning to “self-reflection””. The idea increasingly became one of educating and training people both vocationally and morally into becoming the best people they could be as part of a cosmological order in everything that they did whether cleaning the house or raising children. The task of moral education was primarily left to women who were thought to be responsible if family members did not behave as they should. The project was to overcome human instinctual drives and

479 societal limitations and help people to reach towards heaven, trying to materialise a paradise on earth. Almost all of William Shakespeare’s works explore ideas of self-reflection and the challenges that confront personal projects of self-improvement. If a good society was to be realised, everyone was expected to adjust themselves so that they could become the best individuals that they could. This is to observe that externally was the divine order while internally were base drives, the human animal in contrast to divine order. It is this orientation that has meant today “right and wrong reside not in some invisible external order but within the inner reaches of our own heart” (D’Souza 2007) but what is “within” is nothing but our animal drives. To be directed by instinctual drives is to become base. Many within the Jewish tradition have also historically argued that the human project is to overcome our animal drives. Menachem Mendel Lefin argued in the 17th century, in his extremely influential Accounting of the Soul, which was aimed against the tzaddikim of Hasidism, that the aim of self-improvement was to achieve “the purity of your heart and the triumph of your intellectual spirit over the animal spirit”. (Lefin as seen in Heinze 2004: 47) Drawing inspiration from an external force, God, also informed the Protestant project of trying to help others around the world to become the best that they could. Of course, this was not always done adequately, but it might be contrasted to the conquest of the Mongols or the Muslims who had little regard for the welfare of those over whom they ruled. The purpose of humanity became the imperative to develop ever more sophisticated accounts of reality by carving reality up into ever more detailed and refined features and describing the forces that caused the world to be how it appeared. What was required for this positivist project was an experience of what the ancient Greeks called peras or the divine borders that make things, as such, sacred. The Torah by contrast, mentions “heaven” only in passing and it is certainly not a primary feature of Jewish text. Jews, as many continue to believe today, think the Messiah is a political figure, even a military figure, like the generally accepted Messianic claims of Simon bar Kokba. The Jews on Cyprus were extremely violent during the Kitos War systematically massacring around 250,000 civilian Greeks. After Rome retook the Island, Jews were forbidden to ever set foot on the Island again.242 This was a Jewish Messiah not one with the promise of rewards in heaven but an earthly

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Interestingly, Jewish educational textbooks, such as Jerusalem to Jabneh: The Period of the Mishnah and its Literature by Norman Marsden, portrays the expulsion and exclusion of Jews from Cyprus as an act of Roman “antisemitism”. As the textbook says, “The collapse of the revolt had a decisive effect on the fate of the Jews in most of the countries that had participated in it. In Cyprus, where Jews had lived in all parts of the island, the entire community was exterminated, and Jews were forbidden even to set foot on its shores; “Even if one {Jew} is forced to seek refuge there because of a storm, he is put to death.” The Jewish communities in Cyrenaica and Libya also suffered greatly.” Nothing is said of the legendary brutal destruction perpetrated by the Jews against the Greek Cypriots and others during the Kitos War (115-117 AD) that was the reason for their expulsion. The brutality of the Jews was so extreme that it is thought to have contributed greatly to Christianity distancing itself from Judaism. That history is greatly distorted in Jewish history texts is, honestly, quite common. Jews are always

480 kingdom, a political kingdom, a kingdom ruled by Jews. As Jesus was not the Messiah, the world is not redeemed, they all believe that we are ultimately ignorant of God’s desires or even the features of His/Her existence because humanity has no direct experience of God. Hasidic Jews, as inheritors of the Gnostic tradition, believe that “Nature” reflects God so the project of this religious community is to first recover Nature, thereby return to the Garden of Eden and live, not according to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but according to the their ideas, live by the Tree of Life. The agenda is to force people turn away from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and affirm the Tree of Life. It is a move away from the Sun god of Apollo to the Bacchanalian playground of natural drives, joy, and harmony. It is for this reason that Judaism has been rightly described as “enlightened Hedonism” or “moderate Epicureanism”. (Schechter 1888: 51)

Destruction of Everything/Reversal of all existing values The gnostic beliefs introduced into Western society by Sabbatian inspired Gnostic Jews which wants to return humanity to a state of nature, to worship humanities natural drives as the product of God, believe that this post-civilizational condition can only be realised by destroying everything that is. Again, in contrast to the Protestant imperative to improve the world, Gnostic Judaism believes that what is required is the destruction of everything deemed ‘good’ thereby liberating everything that has traditionally been termed “evil”, the divine spark, back to God as what is the truly good. This process was called by one of the founders of neo-Hasidism, Berdichevsky, as the “transvaluation of all values” “in which he rejected books and ethics in favour of nature and vitalism”. (Biale et., al 2020: 560) This transvaluation of all values is perhaps the central project of Gnostic Judaism. This destruction is what is meant by healing the world. What it is really demanding is the destruction of what we have come to understand as “culture” when “culture” is understood as an experience of what is good. Or, as King wrote, Culture, as Boas and his students understood it, is the ultimate source for what we think constitutes common sense. It defines what is obvious or beyond question. It tells us how to raise a child, how to pick a leader, how to find good things to eat, how to marry well. Over time these things change, sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. Yet there is no more fundamental reality in the social world than the one that humans themselves in some measures create. (King 2019)

portrayed as the victims of persecutions although the real story, as will be revealed in these volumes, is always far more complex than the simple accusation of anti-Semitism would have us believe. This historical view might be contrasted to Anglo-Saxon histories which today focus sharply on every excess, every mistake, without any attention to the positive contribution made by “white people” around the world.

481 This is especially true of what Gnostic Judaism thinks is the greatest evil, Christian culture, where Jews feel particularly alienated. As it says in Jeremiah 30:11, “Says God; I will bring annihilation upon all the nations among whom I scattered you, but upon you I will not bring annihilation.” This destructive project is harmonious with the Hasidic teaching of Bitul ha-Yesh or “Negation of all Existent” which teaches that all experience of the “eyes of the flesh” are superficial and should be destroyed.243 All things that were experienced as ‘good’ must be overcome, not simply through reversal but, ultimately, through a process of dialectic deconstruction or what the Jewish theologian Theodore Adorno called “negative dialectics”. Whereas the Christian tradition, like Orthodox Judaism, hoped to encourage people to overcome “sins” like greed and lust, overcome their natural instinctual drives, in order to become virtuous men and women, Gnostic Judaism believes that it was God who made us greedy and lustful and therefore to return to this condition, free from the guilt of moral constraints of Western Christianity and Orthodox Judaism, is to bring their God into the world. Uniting God and earth for this sect is to unearth instinctual drives as manifestations of God and thereby “heal” the world from the terrible ravages of the moral order. As Schmithals observes, Gnosis... [is] radically revolutionary. To change the world means for them to do away with it. Their judgement of the world is judgement of history as such. They rebel against all rulers and long for the world without laws. They negate the existent completely for the sake of that which no eye has seen, nor ear has heard. They have no interest in any existing order, for nothing is in order, and they strive for a world that needs no ordering hand. They put God and the world into opposition, thus claiming God entirely for themselves.” (Schmithals as seen in Rudolph 1987: 280) This destructive project of course is resisted at times by those who are losing their civilization and this resistance is so often characterised in the Jewish tradition as persecution of Jews or anti-Semitism when it could actually be seen as a defensive strategy. As Wisse writes, as an apology for Jewish amorality, “The obligation to be decent is complicated for Jews by the knowledge that other societies feel driven to eliminate them from the world.” But this aggression against Jews is driven by their desire to destroy everything in the world as their redemptive project. Who is wrong here becomes simply a theological dispute, in the sense that to protect civilization as a good from a Christian perspective is to be moral while to destroy civilization thereby releasing human instinctual drives is good from a Gnostic Jewish perspective, and is therefore is certainly not as transparent as people like Wisse, and so many others, like to portray. Christianity advances the exact opposite to the Jewish Gnostic project, from a Christian

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To contrast with the Christian tradition, the new testament says that with Jesus Christ; “. . .the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. . .full of grace and truth”. Jesus Christ meant that humanity now experienced the world, in terms of being good or bad, in a way that was not available to the Jews.

482 perspective this world is good, as it says in Genesis 1, because it is created by God. It is the World that is good. The only task set man is to live according to God’s spirit as revealed in the promise of there being a Kingdom of God. Living in a way guided by conscience makes the world ever more synchronized with God’s creation. The utopic vision of Gnostic Judaism, utopic used here in the Ancient Greek sense of “no place”, is nicely summed up by Jewish historian Yosef Yerushalmi who observed that the “Age of Aquarius”, another name for the Messianic Era from the astrological redemption tradition, will involve; the realization, that nothing is sin, except what is thought of as sin, that humanity belongs to the “Liberty of Nature” and all that humanity desires should be satisfied, greed, lust, infidelity, and that finally, “free man” is right to do whatever gives him pleasure, satisfying desires, whatever they may be, is not morally wrong. (Yerushalmi 1970/2014: 54) The new morality is that there should be no morality. This is a bacchanalian vision, a hedonistic dream, some might say a ‘luna-cy’244, driven by what the Hasidic Jew Sigmund Freud would describe as the “pleasure principle”. All the things that populate the world, according to this tradition, are false idols that must be destroyed. As it says in the Aleinu, a prayer said three times a day by Jews and following the full moon, beseeching God, “to cause detestable (idolatry) to be removed from the land, and the (false) gods will be utterly ‘cut off’, to takkein olam [fix/repair/establish a world] under the Almighty’s kingdom.“ This has been achieved by claiming that everything is nothing more than a “social construction” or mere “value” and that the world could, therefore, be valued differently. To give just one example at this stage, whereas the Christian tradition in all its various manifestation thought being a virtuous man or virtuous woman was “good”. To be virtuous, one had to suppress their natural desires to conform to an experience of ‘the good’. Gnostic Judaism, by contrast, argues that what is perceived as ‘good’, by the Christian account, is nothing but a social construct which is, if properly understood, “evil”. Gendered virtues are actually an expression of toxic gender norms that need to be swept aside and both men and women encouraged to embrace their “baser” desires, enthusiastic sexuality, homosexuality, pornography, and that this should be now experienced as the true “good” because it is Natural. What is Natural is a reflection of God. When all the trappings of civilization are swept aside, and we are closer to this than might be apparent if our contemporary condition is understood, and we are driven by our animal instincts then, according to Gnostic Judaism, God/Earth, is united. It is this emphasis on humanities animal being, that humanity is fundamentally and primordially

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This is the exact notion of “lunacy” in that such ideas were associated with the moon which was thought to be far away from the Sun. The Sun represented good, civility, order, morality, while the moon was its opposite, sin, natural drives, chaos, immorality. To desire or practice the latter was madness or ‘lunacy’. The myth of the werewolf exposes the supposed savagery in Men when the moon captures them turning them into brutal killing machines without remorse.

483 an animal, that, “The Rebbe said that it takes both wisdom and great effort to be like an animal. The wisdom one needs to be like a beast is alluded to in the verse (Ex. 36:1) “All whom G-d bestowed wisdom is a beast.245”” Nathan of Nemirov speaking of Nachman of Beslovv 1981: 119) The idea of tikkun olam has been explicitly voiced by several high-profile people in a political context to justify what has come to, wrongly, be thought of as a ‘progressive’ agenda. These ideas are only progressive in terms of progressing towards realizing the agenda of Gnostic Judaism. Former President Clinton, (Rosenthal 2005: 214) used the idea of tikkun olam, New York Governor Mario Cuomo (who worked as a shabbas goy [a non-Jew who does the work of Jews on the Sabbath]) spoke about tikkun olam during a t.v. interview, California Congressman Henry Waxman, who has been described as the “dean of the Jewish caucus”, described his entire career as being informed by the drive to tikkun olam, and the high profile writer and editor Michael Lerner have all explicitly invoked the idea of tikkun olam in relation to a particular political project.

Metaphysics It was because of this need for “freedom” from moral constraint, in terms of the destruction of everything or the revaluation of all existing values, that one of the main targets of Gnostic Jewry has been Western metaphysics. Understanding metaphysics is so important for understanding our contemporary crisis because, as I believe Martin Heidegger recognised, it really is through ontology that a permanent response proper to Western civilization must be found. Metaphysics is the belief that there is a truer reality, a “realer real”, that in some way underlies, precedes or determines the possibility of experiencing the “world”, understood in terms of consisting of a series of “things”. As Moody nicely characterizes it, Metaphysics. . .has for long had the special connotation of being a science of ultimate causes of existence, of suprasensory realms of being, and necessary and eternal truths known a priori. In this more special sense metaphysics is the kind of knowledge repudiated by empiricism in its more specific and customary meaning. (Moody 1975: 292-293) The important element of this definition is that it is a kind of knowledge that people are believed to have that allows them to experience the world. In short, the metaphysical is the intelligible. Plato’s ‘forms’ are often identified as an early expression of what would later become known as metaphysics and is the most well-known. Martin Heidegger rightly observes that the actual originator of the Greek metaphysical tradition was not Plato but Parmenides. Metaphysics captures the distinction between the intelligible and the potential. Heidegger argued that metaphysics was the central and defining feature of Occidental

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This is a very unusual interpretation of this text. It is usually translated, “All whom G-d bestowed widwom in them.” But the phrase “in them” is the Hebrew Behamah which also means “is a beast”. This latter interpretation would be out of context.

484 thought. What Heidegger meant by metaphysics, was that metaphysics is the problem/solution, that set the Western tradition on a particular trajectory, a particular way, of thinking that differentiated it from the way other traditions thought. As Heidegger wrote, With regard to this early thinking in the Occident, among the Greeks, we distinguish between beginning [Beginn] and onset [Anfang]. “Beginning” refers to the coming forth of this thinking at a definite “time”. . . . The “onset” is what, in this early thinking, is to be thought and what is thought. . . . The onset is not something dependent on the favour of these thinkers, something with which they deal in such and such a way. On the contrary, . . . the thinkers are the ones who are set upon [An-gefangenen] by the on-set [An-fang], overtaken by it and gathered upon it. The metaphysical is not the beginning of Western thought in the sense of it being a moment in time, the origin of thought in the past, but what calls Westerners, as Western thinkers, to thought. Metaphysics is a knowledge that exists just out of reach of explicit knowing that demands explanation, perhaps demanding years, decades, even centuries of intellectual effort, to articulate. The metaphysical, by Heidegger’s account, is a problematic that assails the thinker to thought. Using “onset” [Anfang], in contrast to Beginn, is intended to capture the active sense of the word, as in the onset [Anfang] of a disease. The sense that it is the disease that is active on the patient whereas it might appear otherwise when it comes to thinking, that is, it might appear that it is the patient who is determining the disease or the thinker bringing the world into being. It is this very reversal that informs the self-actualizing mentality of contemporary popular thinking. The thinker does not bring into being reality, as is argued by the Jewish Gnostic tradition, but the other way around, the thinker is constituted as a thinking subject through the metaphysical claim over their being. Such an experience in the past would all too often simply have gone by the name of God, in terms of God being the sustainer of thought, that which calls us to thought. Heidegger acknowledges that this is certainly one way to talk about this phenomenon, it can be explored theologically, but he wants to approach the problem philosophically. Aristotle, and many besides, acknowledge that the metaphysical was also, and by necessity, the theological. It was because of this potential that the metaphysical thought, like God, might be called arche. The verb forms archo, archein means “to begin” or “to initiate”, in the sense of a source of action. Interestingly, by extension, it also means “method of government”, “to command” or “to rule” in the sense that the ruler or commander initiates actions, for example, by declaring war. In the New Testament, arche is variously translated as “beginning”, “origin”, “source” or “ruler” as in “monarchy”, mono-arche, one ruler. Arche, like “onset”, continues to be a part of what unfolds in the same way that the command resonates through the actions that follow and the consequences that flow or the disease remains at work as the symptoms appear and then subside possibly leaving permanent disability. It is because the arche remains in what unfolds that

485 Aristotle understood that arche, the guiding principle of a thing’s being, as a thing’s peras, or limit, as well as its telos, or end. The arche is a things beginning, endures within as it unfolds as what it is and its end. Arche is the source, origin or root of all things that exist as what they are. It is that which orders in terms of the cosmos that might be contrasted to chaos. Heidegger seems to be claiming, therefore, that the metaphysical is what calls Western thinking to thought while also presenting as a limit and an end. The Greeks acknowledged that arche was godlike by ascribing it divine attributes. It has to be appreciated that, for the Greeks, it was the arche and not man that values all things as the things they are and that man responded to arche. This is why Gnostic Jews are so concerned with overcoming metaphysics of any kind. As already presented, the most basic idea shared by all Gnostic movements is that this world that we live in is not the creation of the God Most High. This table, this mountain, this moon, this tree, these things that populate our world, as a World, are not the creation of God Most High but the product of a lower God or demiurgos a “divine craftsman” or, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, Man himself. This explains why the world we live in has so much pain, suffering and imperfections. Gnostic’s generally ask why an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God would create a world that is so imperfect. Different expressions of Gnosticism answer this question differently, but the basic answer is that the world is so imperfect because it was not created by the omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God at all but by a demiurgos of some kind that is either understood to be malevolent, therefore creating this world of pain and hardship out of malice, or just ignorant, he could not do better because he simply was not omniscient, omnipotent or omnibenevolent. Gnostic Judaism seems to think that some men are so individually powerful that they become like Gods in shaping the world as they see fit. This idea seems to also be taken up in Nietzsche’s idea of the Ubermensch. Certain men become like the God Mercury, able to mediate between God and earth and thereby constitute a world but as the true God has withdrawn, is no longer accessible, the world created by such men is simply a human judgement and therefore evil. Such a world is nothing more than an expression of power, not divine power, as discussed by Wink, but merely human power. Whatever the reason for this less than perfect world, according to the Gnostic tradition, the result is that this world is evil and, therefore, needs to be overcome, destroyed or, as the Jewish Gnostics argue, again highlighting the contradictory nature of reality, “healed”. This is an act understood as a kind of creative destruction or the destruction that is, at the same time, creative. Interestingly, it was on this matter, where creativity begins, that early Christianity clearly differentiated itself from Jewish practices in the 2nd century AD.

486 The difference between the Christian and Jewish traditions can be understood through the different accounts of creation given by the Christian Clement and the Jew Philo who are both, although writing many years apart, said to be from Alexandria. Philo and Clement agree that God is arche, God is the source, the origin, genesis. It is also God that enduringly sustains creation, but, and this is of the utmost importance246, Philo disagrees with Clement by arguing that matter is also an arche and, indeed, the primordial arche. Philo argues, physis precedes nomos or that matter is more originary, more primordial, than form. Clement, by contrast, like Aristotle, accepts that matter existed prior to form but that as matter is “nothing”, it was inert, matter was not an archai. Matter was not a God. To think of this debate in historical terms. As already observed, it has been claimed that early civilizations worshipped a goddess of earth as the supreme deity. Goddesses like Anat, Astarte and Ishtar, were thought to be gods of Nature, gods of fertility and abundance as well as gods of wrath. These were thought to be “female” which, in themselves were neither good nor evil but, depending on the context, might be either good or evil. For example, it might be argued that war in itself is neither good nor evil, but it is context that grants war its moral worth. Parpola gives an account of the Assyrian goddess Ishtar, who embodied all other goddesses in herself, and is an example of just this type of goddess. Ishtar, . . .has been characterized as a “paradox and a coincidence of opposites”. On the one hand she was “the queen/mistress of heaven (and earth/and the stars), the queen of queens, the lady of ladies, the goddess of the gods, who holds all the powers; the creatress of gods/all mankind, the mother of men, mother of those who give birth, midwife; the merciful goddess/mother; the veiled bride, wise, knowledgeable.” On the other hand, she also was “the prostitute, the whore, the raging deluge, the lady/goddess of battle/strife and war.” (Parpola 2000: 168) This is an identical account of how to understand the Shechinah. She is also the Queen of Heaven, as consort to the God in Heaven but also the goddess of Earth, Nature, a virgin and a prostitute. Some have argued that the reason for this high standing of a fertility goddess was because nomadic peoples or early settler people were reliant on the flow of nature in order to survive and worshipping such Gods were thought to ensure survival. They relied on the rain to fall at a particular time to nourish the crops and for the soil to be fertile so that the crops would be abundant. They relied on the floods to be predictable and manageable. When it did rain the crops needed to be nurtured into their fullness. Under such conditions the goddess of Nature or Mother Earth was primary to human flourishing. It is for this reason that people needed to ingratiate themselves to this goddess, a goddess who was responsible for these domains. All

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It never ceases to amaze me how extraordinarily little differences result in major differences in understanding the world. There are few better examples of this then this apparently minor difference.

487 these practices were nurturing, cultivating, raising which are attributes historically associated with the feminine. As civilizations “developed”, and became more sophisticated, they became increasingly reliant on knowledge and less reliant on nature. Advanced societies, with complex systems of production were required to support larger and more diverse populations. Such societies needed to know things not just about the natural flow of the world but more about technology, about how to develop relationships with neighbors which are not defined by conflict, answer the problem of what kinds of laws should apply and who is the best for enforcing them. In short, the problem of how to order society became more pressing than mere survival in the natural world. This “masculine” knowledge slowly became more important for a well-ordered, successful society than natural processes. Indeed, it might be theorized that much of the wealth created in tribal societies would once have been largely the product of woman’s labor, which research affirms, such as early agriculture, but as cities grew traditional male tasks of calculation, craftsmanship and theorizing became not only more important but more valuable. Wealth creation shifted from traditional female tasks to traditionally male tasks. This shifting social and economic situation is then reflected in religious beliefs and practices. What becomes “good” under these changed conditions are those things that reflect the new world order. Whereas in the original settlements goddesses of the earth were worshipped as the God Most High, in settler civilization, male Gods, Gods of knowledge and morality, law-givers who were increasingly seen to allow a “world” as such became dominant. In the same way that God makes the world, qua world, so does this same God make a moral code that is no longer one claiming to be harmonious with Nature but one guided by a moral God accessed through reason. So, whereas matriarchal societies live according to natural drives and primal human instincts, patriarchal societies live according to moral codes that demonize, literally, those natural drives and instincts. As Lerner observed in the 1950s, through most of Western history, people, . . . held that the natural instincts are corrupt and the human passions dirty, that human sin can be checked only by community vigilance and the individual’s inner censor. They held that codes are broken only by willfulness and weakness, and that the answer is a system of legal and social penalties, since morality can be established by law and enforced by community scrutiny. (Lerner 1955: 671) Sex, greed and anger, natural drives, become evil because these are disruptive to sophisticated civilizations while virtue, modesty and reason become most prized. Matter, Nature, is at first demoted to being a lesser God and then removed as a God altogether and “falls” to become a demonic figure of temptation. Over time, the creator God becomes associated with all things intellectual, wise and good, while everything natural is personified as an evil figure like the devil who dwells in chaos “beneath” the world, a domain of darkness and death. Philo seems to actually propose a dualist account of creation

488 where two Gods, are arche, which is, according to Couliano, the core teaching of all dualisms. Such ideas might be indebted to Zorostrianism where there are two spirits of creation, one responsible for good creations and one responsible for evil creations. If this is true than it shows a kind of simplicity. As Couliano observes, “Sophisticated as it may become, dualism is essentially a very simple solution devised by the human mind to account of the manifest flaws of existence.” (Couliano 1992: 24) Philo’s dualism may be an expression, of a kind, of the Gnostic dualism between the God most High, who is primarily responsible for creation, and the lower, trickster God who as a result of incompetence, ignorance or because his is playing a trick, spoils creation. As Couliano (1992: 25) observes, “. . .the Trickster appears as an antagonist of the Primordial Being.” In the Bible, Jesus Christ claims to be “the arche of the creation of God” (Rev. 3:14) Although this passage can, of course, be read in different ways, one way of reading this passage is that Jesus was saying, “I am the source/limit/end of what God has created”. As Jesus says giving support to this reading, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Rev. 22:13) These are all attributes of Aristotle’s understanding of arche, the origin, limit and end of everything. Jesus Christ, as logos, is the experience of truth. It was for this reason that the intelligible in the Western tradition was always associated with morality, because it was through intellect, through knowledge, the truth, that people came to the good or, to put it how it is in the New Testament in quite explicit terms, Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Jesus is saying that it is only through the logos, only through Him, only through the use of reasonable dialogue, that the good, the Father, the truth, God, can be secured. All of these features, the good, dialogue, truth were all constitutive of a World. World is what is full of things, World is the cosmos, and it is expressions of masculinity that allow a World as such. Gnostic Jews target this onto-theology by questioning metaphysics itself, as Nietzsche quoted the Jewish scholar Paul Rée, “The moral man is no closer to the intelligible (metaphysical) world than the physical man.” (Rée as seen in Donnellan 1982: 596) Rée is explicitly trying to undermine the idea that one needs to be moral to access truth, that the physical man, the man of action, is as close to truth, in his world perhaps closer, than the good man using his intellect. Morality, reason, truth, in the Christian tradition, are all intimate with each other and are required for there to be a World. By this account the moral man is indeed closer to truth than the “physical man”. As Kreeft rightly observes, “Ethics is based on metaphysics, it is logically posterior to metaphysics . . .” (Kreeft 2007: 8) There must be a prior reality accessed as truth for there to an ethics at all. Do away with metaphysics and you do away with all ethical systems. It is around understandings of order and competing priorities where there is contest between

489 Clement and Philo. Philo is arguing that matter, Nature, is the primordial arche or God while the God of the intelligible, the knowable God, the God of goodness, is a lesser arche or, as others would argue, something evil. Clement is agreeing with the Greek philosophical tradition that matter is like a receptacle, like a woman, whereas the intelligible is active in the forms giving shape to the world, like the ancient Greek understanding of the role of the phallus in reproduction, giving form to matter. In Plato the body is evil while in later Platonism, all matter in general becomes understood as evil. Matter cannot be known whereas the forms, the intelligible, is knowable. This knowledge becomes understood in the Greek tradition as metaphysics or that which follows after the physics in the sense that, once the student has learnt about Nature now, if you have mastered that, you can now learn about the more advanced teachings, the ontological. The philosophical tradition is replete with myths giving accounts of this transition to the new ordering of the universe. In the Allegory of the Chariot presented in the Phaedrus, Plato writes of a chariot being pulled by two horses, one mortal and one immortal. The mortal horse is black, deformed and obstinate a “crooked lumbering animal, put together anyhow . . . of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur.” The immortal horse is noble and game, “upright and cleanly made . . . his colour is white, and his eyes dark; he is a model of honor and modesty and temperance, and the follower of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip but is guided by word and admonition only.” The charioteer’s destination is the ridge of heaven beyond which he may see the ideal Forms of everlasting truth and absolute knowledge. If the driver manages these two drives, one oriented towards earth, the carnal, and one oriented towards heaven, the divine, and perceives the ideal Forms, then the horse’s wings are nourished and the chariot does another round of the heavens, if he fails to do this then the wings of the horses’ wither and the soul, consisting of its three components, “falls” to earth and inhabits a human body. The charioteer in this metaphor has been interpreted as representing reason or logos. The dark horse is instinctual drives in the form of eros or erotic love, and the white horse is thumos or spirit that is glory and honor, the virtues. The feminine is associated with eros while the masculine is associated with spirit but every psyche, male and female, has both. In this metaphor reason guides towards the direction of virtue or the good but against this are the base desire, the animal spirits, that drag humanity to earth. This allegory captures the changing values at the time and one proposal of how they co-exist. The important feature of this allegory is that the thinker, the true philosopher now worthy of the name, can be carried up to know the Ideal Forms through reason aided by virtue. This belief is what informs the Western tradition. The Gnostic Jewish tradition, by

490 contrast, an Eastern tradition, believes that humanity can never know the Forms, is always ignorant of heaven. The Christian tradition believes that because Jesus was the redeemer, Jesus was Christ, the world we live in is pure goodness and, therefore, this is the “best of all possible worlds”. The basic idea is that when we experience this “tree” or this “table” what we are experiencing is the mind of one God, pure goodness, which is most definitely derived from Plato’s Forms. Jews believe that humanity became estranged from God when they disobeyed God and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Irenaeus of Lyon, who was a student of Polycarp who was, in turn, the student of John “the divine” the supposed author of “Revelations”, was a passionate opponent of Gnosticism. In the preface to Adversus haereses, Irenaeus was the first to associate gnosis with heresy. (Rudolph 2015: 27) Irenaeus claimed that John wrote the words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” to directly refute the Gnostic teachings of Cerinthus. Cerinthus taught that the world was created by a power far removed from and ignorant of the Father and, therefore, strict adherence to Mosaic Law remained necessary for Christians if they were to achieve salvation. That is, it was only through good works in accordance with the Jewish law that Mankind could be with God. God is too distant to know what to do in his absence. Cerinthus’ argument reveals how gnostic beliefs broadly are not only embedded within the general Jewish tradition, making it particularly susceptible to Sabbatian Gnosticism, but how it results in nomianism. It also suggests how Jesus, understood as logos, is the polar opposite of such arguments. By contrast, the Graeco-Roman Christian tradition, influenced especially by the philosophy of Plato, that was, we know today, very prominent amongst Jews also around the birth of Christ, argued. The disciple of the Lord therefore desiring to put an end to all such doctrines [of Gnosticism], and to establish the rule of truth in the Church, that there is one Almighty God, who made all things by His Word, both visible and invisible; showing at the same time, that by the Word, through whom God made the creation, He also bestowed salvation on the men included in the creation; thus commenced His teaching in the Gospel; “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made. What was made was life in Him, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. Here is a direct exchange between an early Christian and the Gnostic tradition around the issue of metaphysics. Jesus Christ is the world/word whereas the Gnostic tradition may go so far as to agree that the world is indeed Jesus, the false experience of Jesus does indeed constitute the world, but that just means that Christiantiy is evil. In the Christian tradition, when humanity sees a “table” as a table the origin, limit and end of “tableness”, the arche, is revealed through logos, which, as we have been told, is Jesus

491 Christ. As was said of Jesus, “What was made was life in Him, and the life was the light of men”. What was made, this world by the Father, was “life in Him”, the world was the life in Jesus, and that “life” was the “light of men”. This ordering principle, the relationship between the Father and the Son, drove the darkness away, drove earth into the underworld, because “the darkness comprehended it not”. The idea is, of course, that what informs the possibility of the world is an experience of or, better, a participation in the mind of good/God that is enabled by Jesus Christ. The arche here, what calls us to thought and gives us limit and end, is our experience or encounter with God. What is behind every thought of table, is the mind of God or “divine nous”. The medieval Catholic tradition believed that humanity experienced the mind of God with a high degree of certainty. This might feel alien to people today after being heavily influenced by Jewish Gnosticism for over a century. The idea was that we may be uncertain if that thing that is seen in the distance is a desk or may be a life sizes picture of a desk, but we cannot be uncertain that we know what a “desk” is which is the very possibility for error. Skeptical arguments can only be introduced if there is already knowledge of a situation that is beyond question. This knowledge is a matter of faith given to humanity by God as intuition as an act of Grace. This certainty of the mind was because humanity participated in the mind of God after the redemption of Jesus Christ. People might think of the work of the Catholic Descartes when reading this section and although he is often contextualized as perhaps the first modern thinker, because of his skepticism as a strategy but that he found certainty in the mind and God shows his indebtedness to a Western tradition that went back to at least Plato. The important point is that the Christian tradition, whether in the domain of ideas or Protestant experience, was always realist. As already introduced, the account that dominates Gnostic Judaism today and informs Gnostic Judaism was voiced by Sabbatai Tzevi and, according to this tradition, the demiurgos is Man himself. Such an argument would be familiar to many university educated people because of the level of control that Jewish Gnosticism has achieved over our education. By this account, when humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil it was humanity who now could judge, according to their standards, unmediated by God, because God is not of this world. No longer was there an experience of God as encountered in the Garden of Eden, but only human valuing that was necessary for the creation of this world. God withdraw to allow Man to become judge in this demonic sphere. This human creation then had to be enforced through the creation of false gods that legitimized the world. All truth, all relations, all Being is, by this account, nothing more than power. Gnostics believe that this world, the very experience of good, was, as Cerinthus also argued, evil and was most certainly very far away from being the “best of all possible worlds” or, as the comic antagonist in Voltaire’s Candide, Dr Pangloss says, “All is for the best

492 in this best of all possible worlds”. The problem that Gnostic Judaism has with metaphysical claims, as a Gnostic movement was the belief that there was a truer, enduring, unchanging, reality before, underneath or primordially, that allows the world to be what it is because, simply, there was no such thing. The world, as an experience of limits and ends, estranges us from a true experience of God and forces us to live in a degraded, evil, world as though it was good. What permits claims of certitude has been the positing of metaphysics. Prior to the articulation of this uniquely “Western” experience, as expressed in the postParmenidean philosophical tradition, Greeks too believed that chaos, not order, was the arche. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, Chaos is the primordial condition of the world. Chaos is presented as a “void” between earth and sky which consists of a formless matter. As has often been observed, the cosmogeny of Hesiod resonates in the Biblical story of Genesis which also begins with chaos as a void, an ontological nothingness without limit. What the tradition of kabbalah might name as the Ein Sof, the infinite. The Gnostic tradition appears to argue, in a way that is only too familiar today, that beings are exhaustively an expression of human power. All things, all truths, all existents are the result of what Nietzsche called, the ‘will to power’. How the world presents is merely an expression of historical power relations that have become concretized over time and now potentially dominate us as “real” or “true”. As we do not experience God, according to the Gnostic tradition, we cannot have the real or the true or anything that flows from such beliefs. As the undeniably Gnostic Gutkind wrote, “Metaphysics – or ontology – is controversial from the Hebraic point of view, because it establishes substances besides God. In other words, it gives absoluteness to what is only relative.” (Gutkind 1952: 143) In the account being given here this is not true, the metaphysical was always associated with God but it permits a different account of God than that in the Jewish tradition. Nietzsche characterized this concern in his earliest of writings as an exclusive focus on the Apollonian, the personification of the divine borders or limits, the intellect, that endure over time, and he suggested in those early writings, before coming under the sway himself of Gnosticism, that we need to turn more to the Dionysian, the chaotic, the changing, the chthonic, to find a kind of balance between chaos and order, earth and world. Nietzsche did not see one existing without being in a dynamic flux with the other as was experienced, he claimed, in Greek tragedy. As Paglia (2001: 6) seems to affirm, “Tragedy is the most Western literary genre. It did not appear in Japan until the late nineteenth century. . . It is no accident that tragedy as we know it dates from the Apollonian fifth century of Athens’ greatness . . .” Paglia is saying that metaphysics became central to the Western mind in the 5th century BC, the Axial Age, and this is expressed as an experience of the tragic. Nietzsche is arguing that the experience of tragedy is the Apollonian meeting the Dionysian and, further, through this tension, through this conflict, comes

493 redemption. As Nietzsche challenges his readers, “Dare not to be tragic men, for ye shall be redeemed!” Eastern civilizations, like Japan, did not begin to express the tragic experience until the 19th century probably as a result of the influence of the Western worldview. It is not an accident that the Jewish scholar Lukacs argued that the new world that he hoped would soon be realized would be one that “rules out the pan-tragic point of view”. The reason is that the tragic, according to Nietzsche’s account, demands the Apollonian an experience the gnostic Jews hope to destroy. Metaphysics argues that the preconceptual reality, the immanent that is God, should be granted priority as the truest true or what Heidegger appears to call Aletheia. To put the same thing differently, Gnostic Judaism’s central concern was to oppose positive claims of ‘objectivity’ in preference for “relativism”. To oppose the Apollonian. Why would such a philosophical issue be of such concern for a religiously motivated political movement? The reason for their opposition to metaphysics is because this ontology has theological foundation or is onto-theological in being concerned with the relationship between God and existence. When contextualized in these terms, then the theological concern with metaphysics becomes obvious. Gnostic Judaism rightly understands metaphysics as an expression of a particular onto-theological trajectory that has its roots in the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman thinking. This onto-theology then informs a particular understanding of the world that is nurtured through Christianity. Although metaphysics has its well-spring in classical Europe, it finds its ultimate expression in the Protestant Christianity. To understand why metaphysics, or any claim to experience reality is opposed by Gnostic Judaism, it is interesting to briefly look at two aspects of God, as Martin Luther distinguished them, Deus revelatus, what God has revealed about Himself, the known God, and Deus incognitus, the unknown God. In both Christianity and Judaism, as perhaps in all religious traditions, there is a belief in both a “known” and an “unknown” aspect of God. As it says in the Zohar, Come and see. Man’s soul can be known only through the organs of the body, which are the levels that perform the work of the soul. Consequently, it is both known and unknown. In the same way, the Holy One, blessed be He, is the soul’s soul, the spirit’s spirit, hidden and concealed from all. But through these gates (i.e. the sefirot) which are the doors of the soul, the Holy One, blessed be He, may be known. (as seen in Tishby 1991: 682) Although this will be greatly elaborated upon in the next volume, the basic difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Christianity has historically prioritized the ‘known aspect of God’, Deus revelatus, as communicated by Jesus Christ. Jews, of course, believe that Jesus was Christ or that Jesus was the Messiah, and that humanity was redeemed through His death. As Protestant reformer Calvin says, “This redemption was procured through the blood of Christ, for by the sacrifice of his death, all the sins of the

494 world have been expiated.”247 Redemption is the “act of rescuing from sin and its consequences”. For God’s sacrifice, humanity receives, as Martin Luther observes, “the divine gift of Grace”. God forgives our sins thereby opening our way to heaven without the need to obey the letter of Law. The sins of Adam have been forgiven and so humanity again experienced God, could know God, through faith as a result of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In being redeemed, humanity could, as an act of faith, know what was good and evil, what was right and wrong, and act accordingly. God reveals Himself through spirit to grant true knowledge of Himself, divine nous, to those who, in faith, open themselves to His divine gift. From the Pentecost, the time when the Holy Spirit descended upon the followers of Jesus as Christ. A Christian could rightly be guided by their conscience or, to say the same thing, be guided “with knowledge”. Knowledge of good and evil. By contrast Judaism, as possibly advanced by elements of pre-Constantinian Christianity, prioritized the ‘unknown aspect of God’, Deus incognitus, where God’s will is a mystery that cannot be ‘known’ by mortals. In the Gnostic Jewish tradition, as in the Islamic tradition, God is conceived of being absolutely unknowable and therefore certainly not to be found in this world. As Maimonides wrote giving voice to the distance between God and humanity, How then can a relation be represented between God and what is other than God when there is no notion comprising in any respect both of the two, in as much as existence is, in our opinion, affirmed of God, may God be exalted, and of what is other than God merely by way of absolute equivocation. There is, in truth, no relation in any respect between God and any of God’s creatures. What Maimonides is arguing here is that all that can be said about God is revealed in Torah and even God’s very existence is revealed when God says to Moses “I am who am”. Everything else in the world, beyond knowledge of God’s existence, is in an ambiguous, uncertain way and can, therefore, be doubted. Maimonides is basically claiming that the only thing that exists is God and beside God there is, literally, nothing. This level of skepticism is the starting point for a Christian thinker like Descartes’ except that Descartes turns to a Christian experience of God, which he claims is self-evident, clear and distinct and secured in such a way that makes sustaining skepticism unthinkable, to overcome this skepticism. As Descartes wrote, “Once we have become aware that God exists it is necessary for us to imagine that he is

247

Is this sacrifice, God’s sacrifice of His son, a reference to the Jewish tradition of sacrificing children to the Goddess, Astarte/Anat/Tanit in order to be forgiven for their sins? Is God giving the ultimate sacrifice to this chthonic Goddess of the “earth” in order that humanity may be forgiven for their sins? Hermann Cohen understood the sacrifice of Jesus as just such a ceremonial act and he argued that this kind of practice had long been abolished in Judaism prior to the sacrifice of Jesus. According to Cohen, Jewish law abolished the need for human sacrifice whereas, Cohen claims, Christianity supported the practice in terms that the sacrifice of Jesus functions in Christianity to abolish the law to be replace with God’s grace and human conscience.

495 a deceiver if we wish to cast doubt on what we clearly and distinctly perceive. And since it is impossible to imagine that he is a deceiver, whatever we clearly and distinctly perceive must be completely accepted as true and certain.” (Descartes emphasis added) Descartes appears to maintain that humanity alone, using reason, can find their way to truth but that God was necessary for any truth claim. This strategy can be read as a direct response to the popular Gnostic beliefs of the times. The American Jewish scholar Richard Bernstein argued that Cartesian certainty was a response to “Cartesian anxiety”, which was more of a psychological condition of anxiety motivated by a crisis in Western civilization where tradition and social bonds had broken, and substantial relationships of love were substituted for knowledge. Descartes was equally reacting to a crisis created by Gnosticism at the time and recognized the need to reestablish a point of certainty that secured knowledge in a way consistent with Christiantiy but denied by the Gnostic Jewish tradition. Far from Descartes re-founding being the result of a loss of love, love being the original response Paul developed against the Gnostics, it was the foundation for the emergence of modern romantic love which was not about wealth transfer or power but about individuals knowing their own emotions with some degree of certainty and finding an emotional bond with another. Descartes is overcoming the Gnostic arguments by showing that God cannot be a deceiver, therefore, things exist. God once again becomes the one unmovable point in the universe that can be used as a fulcrum for all of reality. In the Jewish tradition, by contrast, all that is known about God is what was revealed to Moses and written in the Torah, therefore, nothing positive can be said about God directly but only what God is not or in terms of a negative theology. In negative theology nothing positive can be said about God, as this would be to claim some knowledge of God, but only negative things can be claimed of God or what God is not. In the Jewish religion, God and what is right and good is reveal exhaustively through the ‘word’ as written in Torah whereas with the advent of Jesus Christ the word was made flesh or the word, what is ‘good’ and ‘right’, is now known and finds expression in the human voice. A voice permitted by grace and the word of God as revealed in the Bible that allows experience as world. This difference in emphasis and priority between Christianity and Judaism, has significant and wide-ranging consequences which sets Christianity and Judaism in opposite directions. It is this fundamental difference in foundational beliefs why it is impossible to talk of the recently coined ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’. This political term cannot be used because Christianity prioritizes the known God, they believe that the world is experienced as ‘good’, as most clearly voiced in the theology of early Christian theologian Augustine, and that this good can be explicitly expressed through human reason. For example, the ‘tree’ is a real and true ‘tree’, according to this Christian onto-theology, because it is an expression of the mind of God or the ‘divine nous’. The ‘tree’ is a true and good tree because it is judged as being adequate in relation to the God’s revelation of trees.

496 This transcendental experience of ‘tree’, understood to be universal and unchanging, allowed the everyday experience of all the particular ‘trees’. This underlying reality becomes understood, through various philosophical twists and turns, in modernity as ‘objective truth’ accessed through a transparent and certain ‘subject’. It is a ‘fact’ when, “something is consistent with objective reality”. Like factual truth, objective truth is a truth which is universal, non-perspectival, and unchanging. In simple terms that will be elaborated upon in the following volume, objective truth inherits its attributes and authority through the Christian tradition’s belief that everything is an expression of God and therefore “is good”. To believe that a thing has an existence beyond its use, from the Jewish perspective, is to fetishize the thing as having a real existence, to turn it into something that it is not, a fully present thing imbued with God’s presence. To believe that one knows what is good and right, as Christians do, is, from a Gnostic Jewish perspective, to literally be evil. It is evil because to worship false Gods, and this is what must be happening if one believes they truly experience the world, from this perspective, is revealed to be wrong in Torah. To do anything because you believe it is good or right is to be evil because such belief is subjective and ultimately arbitrary. It is nothing more than expressions of human power disguised as a God. Such an experience of the good is not informed by anything substantial. This means to adhere to cultural practices, such as wearing particular clothing, objecting to certain sexual practices or argue that certain human practices, such as gender, are good is hubris. To force women to wear clothing as a cultural good is to impose an arbitrary expression of somebody else's power. Indeed, all cultural practices and social hierarchies are just expression of power as they have no other substantive foundation. A cultural tradition might inform a people on how women should dress so that they are beautiful but, according to Gnostic Judaism, this is immoral as gentile women should dress in a way that displays their sexuality so that they can best sate their natural sexual desires. This is the world we live in today. From the Gnostic tradition, nothing that is natural can be evil. The task of all non-Jews, according to political Hasidim, is to produce for Jews so that they can fulfill their God given mission uninterrupted by the demands of the world. Gentiles should achieve excellence in a worldly way, instrumentally, while Jews need to realize a Divinely inspired excellence. To inhibit any behavior because it is the ‘right thing to do’ is, according to Gnostic Judaism, simply evil. No better confession of the influence of this political movement then written by the Jewish poet Chaim Bialik, It cannot be doubted that those remnants of idolatry which existed in Christianity were the source and origin of the internal falsehood which was latent within it. On the one hand we find the avowal of principles of complete righteousness commanding one to give one’s coat to the man who has stripped off the shirt, to turn the right cheek when the left cheek is struck – and on the other hand deeds of murder and enmity, unceasing warfare and a

497 thoroughly rotten cultural outlook – the sort of outlook which finds a trenchant expression in the latest book of Spengler who holds that the abstract Jewish culture was the thing which crippled the higher type of humanity. . .it is quite true that Judaism, by penetrating into all the nations actually did undermine the remnants of that sort of idolatry. The process of undermining was conducted with the considerable help of Jews – help in a thousand aspects, a thousand forms and a thousand ways, through all the world’s languages, by means of assimilation and enlightenment and cosmopolitanism; and also by the belief in the “Jewish Mission” from the early days of emancipation up to the present time. But perhaps the strongest forces in this process were our “apostate” or “assimilated” Jews of all types who entered into the very body of Christianity and stirred its very bowels, and went on slowly undermining the remnants of paganism as a results of their Jewish volition and their Jewish blood. . . These were the men – although often the names of great non-Jews are called in their stead – who smoothed the roads for the great movements of Freedom all over the world: The Renaissance, Liberalism, Democracy, Socialism and Communism. The entire road, a steep and checkered road – always ascending towards freedom and progress, was marked out principally by all sorts of unnoticed or anonymous Jews. There were apostate Jews who mingled with Gentiles and produced many a great questioner; there was the influence of Jews who merely stood behind the scenes of enterprises in the cause of freedom and liberation; there were professors and teachers of Jewish stock ever since the Middle Ages who produce thousands of pupils to take the lead in liberating movements. Even the Protestant movement had leaders who had been educated by Jewish teachers. And the influences have existed in every age right up to the movements of our own time in which many Jews have participated, openly or recessively. Anti-Semites sometimes have clear discernment. Jewish influence has indeed been very powerful in this connection; we ought not to deny it. Marx was not only a Jew by origin, but his way of thinking was Jewish, his sharpness of intellect was Jewish, and one of his grandfathers had been a renowned and sharp-witted Rabbi. As might be expected when a minority group living within a dominant culture claims that the dominant “hospitable and congenial” (Whitfield 2015: 3) culture in which they have been welcomed and allowed to flourish in peace is, in fact, sinful and that they are duty bound to do everything in their power to destroy it. It is when this destructive project is understood, perhaps through history, that has resulted in acts of resistance or even, in extreme cases, violence. In 1946, Stalin argued against the criticism of ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’, that was being advanced by Jews as a result of their dominant position in the Soviet Union. Stalin obliquely said, Recently, a dangerous tendency seems to be seen in some of the literary works emanating under the pernicious influence of the West and brought about by the subversive activities of the foreign intelligence. Frequently in the pages of Soviet literary journals works are found where Soviet people, builders of communism are shown in pathetic and ludicrous forms. The positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitan that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded. In the theatre it seems that Soviet plays are pushed aside by plays from foreign bourgeois authors. The same thing is started to happen in Soviet films.

498 Referring to “cosmopolitan” is inferring that those who are undertaking this strategy of emanating works critical of Soviet heroes were Jews. This was the start of the Russian’s attempt, began by Stalin but continued with more earnestness after his murder, really a contest that continued until the fall of the Soviet Union, of purging the Soviet Union of Gnostic Judaism. As Gerrits (2009: 1) critically observes, “After the death of Stalin, when bitter infighting marked the initial phase of de-Stalinization, communist leaders in East Central Europe invented their own variant of “Judeo-Communism”: the myth of “Jewish Stalinism” . . . Stalinism was imposed upon the nations of East Central Europe by outside forces, by “non- or antinational” elements, in other words: by Jews!” Although Gerrits (2009: 1) describes this argument as “the rather pitiful traces of [a] once powerful idea”, the “fancy of the lunatic fringe”, it seems to be a perfectly historical account of how events unfolded that many Russians continue to advance today. Under the influence of kabbalah inspired gnosticism, many Jews have come to believe that redemption is a real-world demand that can be brought about through human agency. Even in the Zohar, the idea that human transgressions can delay redemption and therefore human actions that improve the world will progress redemption finds expression. The Zohar recognises “the ability of man to harm the divine powers by committing transgressions and thereby diminishing his own chances of perfection. This ability on the part of man to influence God both for good and ill . . .” (Tishby 1991: 680) This interplay of man, God and redemption, can be seen allegorically represented in the story of the Exodus, where the Jews must be physically freed from the enslavement of the gentile in order to receive God’s truth, in the case of Exodus, the Torah. As Edel wrote, “. . .liberation from Egypt was intended solely for the reception of the Torah, which is predicated upon making the Jews wise . . .” (Edel 2011: 28) The political act of freeing the Jews must be realized before redemption, the values of the world must be changed so that Jews can walk the world as Jews, before spiritual redemption. The Messianic Age, the Kingdom of God, by this account, can be realized by extinguishing the worship of false idols, have Jews control Israel and rebuild the temple, have Jews control the world and make that world reflect their values, and, have nonJews serve Jews as their leaders. In achieving this New World Order, as they often call it in their literature, there is minimal consideration for the well-being of non-Jews. The realization of the New World Order is understood by political Hasidim as a ‘global showdown’ that, after thousands of years, is reaching its final conclusion. This is a struggle that began before Christianity and has its true roots in the philosophical turn of Plato and Aristotle. As Gutkind wrote expressing this conflict in his revealingly titled book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, Thus, understanding our actual “Now” will help us realize not only the imminence of the global showdown, but that it has already started. That does not necessarily mean a new

499 war, though there is clearly such a danger. A war, even the most destructive, would not settle the gigantic conflict which divides mankind from top to bottom. The war as such is not the same as the global showdown. The war may provide momentum for change, as some believe. But it might just as easily paralyse change, for a long while. Yet – war or no war – this time it will be a real showdown. No substitute, no delaying action will suffice. This time we will have to make the definite decision: Is Man willing to accept life here in this world or not? Can he be made to understand that life on this earth can be brought to perfection? What the Bible calls “Paradise” is here in this world. Here, on earth, is our greatest possible chance to achieve our highest goals. This time will decide definitely whether or not Man is willing and capable of building up this world in utter earnestness and truthfulness. In short, we will be confronted with the basic question of the Bible, the ultimate Yes or No. The Primal Decision, the Original Start, once again is open to Man, as only in very rare moments of history. (Gutkind 1952: 4-5) These words, written in 1952, captures the mentality of Gnostic Jews as they moved their focus of attention to the United States from Eastern Europe and after having successfully established the Jewish state of Israel. The Second World War marked the start of the final phase, the “end game”, the final struggle between gnosticism and positivism and Gnostic Jews were no longer prepared to settle for anything but total global victory. It was a struggle between those who thought the Good, acquired through reason, was the primary aspiration against those who denied a role for God, those who thought it was about returning humanity to their base drives, sexuality and greed understood as a liberation project against those who believe that God does have a role in our lives, God in terms of knowledge of good and evil, that there are higher pursuits more worthy than worldly pleasures. This is not, as Gnostic Jews so often present it, a struggle between those who believe that happiness needs to be achieved in this world against those who believe happiness is in the next world but between those who believe that happiness is what should be pursued, through the never ending striving to satisfy our base needs, against those who believe that contentedness can never be achieve through pursuing sex, or money, or material goods because these drives can never be satisfied but instead we should look away from these naïve pleasures to uncover a condition of human contentedness through love, forgiveness, humbleness and the explicit understanding that trying to satisfy base motives will inevitably lead to dissatisfaction, restlessness and, ultimately, terrible unhappiness. Was Jeffrey Epstein, for just one example, ever really happy? A man with everything, money, women, drugs and yet few envy him. With all his wealth and his apparently endless pursuit to satisfy base needs even if it meant destroying other people’s lives, did Jeffrey Epstein ever find that calming sense of completion, experienced the love of God while watching the rain fall? One cannot help but think back to one of the quotes used to introduce this book, where it was claimed that the culture wars were between those who believed that “God is . . .” against those who thought “God isn’t . . .”. The author of this quote was close to the truth but not quite right. It is a struggle between two different

500 understandings of God, one where God plays an active role informing our lives so that we can truly live a contented life on earth against those who believed that God has no role to play therefore we should simply live without God, live according to our animal selves. For the West, the end of the Second World, the war the West supposedly “won”, might rightly mark the beginning of the end. It begins that time when Gnostic Jews would finally have the power, for a short period of time controlling both the Soviet Union and the United States, to realize their agenda, using even another war, to make ‘Man’ realize that there is only this world, and that this world can be perfected according to their vision. A vision of a decadent society where the only “freedom” on offer is freedom from moral restraint. What is realised in such a world, according to the Western tradition, is actual “enslavement”, enlavement to physical needs. What is consumer society, with all its porn, sexualization and materialism, then enslavement and the unhappiness that this enslavement brings to humanity? There is no spirit world, no culture, no experience of the good, nous, no self-discipline that is required to move towards the mind of God and true fulfillment. Indeed, for all intents and purposes, God is dead in such a world. It is up to ‘Man’ to realize the paradise that they threw away when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now humanity must just eat from the Tree of Life. This is the Primal Decision, the Original Start, do away with our idols, destroy the burden of civilization, and surrender to our animal drives as though they are sacred. Start again. This is the showdown. This is a contest between Gnostic Jew and Western Gentile, again as Gutkind again observes, No Jewish group, no section of the Jewish people could ever escape the Jewish destiny. Sooner or later the big showdown has caught up with even the most cocksure. . . The attempt to evade this meeting with the Jewish destiny may partly originate in the fact that for time sections of the Jewish people go through relatively short periods of rest, just as battle-troops are for a while withdrawn from the battle-front to regain their fighting power and are replaced with fresh troops. (Gutkind 1952: 12-13) This is now a project for all Jews to be active, to be the soldiers they must be, in this war about which the other side is not even prepared to fight. Some Jews might try to find peace, try to live in harmony with their neighbors, even love them, but Gutkind believes that this restful relationship will always end, and the battle will once again be engaged as Jews must embrace their destiny. This account explains the title of his book, Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt, choose to eat from the Tree of Life, which is revealed in the Torah, as interpreted by Sabbatai Tzevi, which is a ‘call to revolt’. The harm inflicted on non-Jews in realizing this project, I would even propose to consider the harm on Jews, is justified as they are on a God given project of destruction, they have the sanction of God to do what needs to be done, they are ‘chosen’, which is far more important than any other consideration. Abraham was prepared to kill his own son in

501 the service of God, these fanatics do not feel differently. They would kill anyone, without hesitancy, to achieve their aims because they are certain of the good of their project and believe that because they are chosen their actions are sanctioned by God. Martin Buber, an important theorist for the political Hasidic tradition, appears to argue that if a task is successful then it must have the blessing of God. If powerful people believe this, just imagine what might be considered legitimate and that the fact that it is achieved through human agency, then it has the blessing of God. It is little wonder the world is how it is. It is metaphysics that causes the most affront to Gnostic Judaism because metaphysics is a postAristotelian account of nous and the unveiling of nous using logos. According to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, there is no experience of God so there is no reality, no truth, there is only power. All that remains from this theo-ontological perspective, is to return to the oneness of nature, the oneness of the Goddess Tanit/Ishtar. It is for this reason that they oppose gender because gender makes something appear as something, a woman, when, in their understanding of reality, there really is nothing. It is for this reason that they oppose “heteronormativity” because, again, heterosexuality relies on a commitment to real sexual differences and sexual difference is not, according to the Gnostic tradition, “natural”. Sigmund Freud continued within this tradition and argued that humanity is really innately bisexual and that this is the natural condition of humanity and the only healthy way to live. More recently, people like Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman have supported a, . . .critique of the ‘essentialism’ and ‘binary oppositions’ heretofore characteristic of Western philosophy . . . to open up the prospect of a radically new type of thinking in which the categories of male and female are flued rather than fixed. This, it is argued, allows us to emancipate ourselves from rigid stereotypes of gender behavior that is especially useful for feminist theory and practice. (Appel 1997: 512-513) Far from this being a “new type of thinking” it is actually a thinking indebted to an ancient mystical tradition. Further, Lurianic Kabbalah argued that gender must be overcome in order to diminish the demonic, like Christianity, and allow God, the God of the Underworld, to enter into the Overworld. True gender and sexual difference are only possible from out of a metaphysical perspective, as historically advanced by the Western philosophical tradition, and, therefore, must be evil. Property, in terms of commodification, is also evil, in the sense that things appear as separate and discrete items that can be privately owned. Gnostics believe that everything appears only in relation to other things, and they have no autonomous existence therefore commodification, which underlies property, is something that they oppose as a form, as Marx himself argues, of reification. It might appear that decommodification has not progressed as far as some of the other aspirations of Gnostic Judaism and that at least in this area, unlike gender, sexuality and race, they have made little progress but these first impression would be wrong. Car

502 ride and hire services means that increasingly people do not actual own the cars they use and many other pieces of equipment, but things are on “standby” ready for use. The music we access through Spotify is no longer owned but we merely buy access. The movies we watch, the credit cards in our pockets, the phones we use, none of which we own but are merely accessible for use. They are being turned into primarily a use value instead of primarily an exchange value. Like so much raised in this volume, the issue of decommodification requires its own volume to properly understand what is happening in this arena but from these few examples it might begin to be appreciated just how decommodification is achieved and indicate how far we have moved to a post-capitalist reality.248 Indeed, recently, people like Karl Schwab, executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Prince Charles and Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, are all advancing for the need in a post-Covid world for a “Great Reset”. The core promise of this Great Reset is that by 2030, when “Western values will have tested to the breaking point”249 then “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy”. That is, by 2030, all private property will cease to exist because everyone will rent everything.250 These are all things that it is highly likely you do not own but merely access for a period of time. Private property is actually being withdrawn and being replaced by a system when we access things as we need them. The entire political agenda of Gnostic Judaism can be understood through a fight against metaphysics. What they understand to be the worship of false idols, the fetishization of “world” as real when we should all be turned to “earth”, not the light of the Sun but the reflection of the moon. For this reason, science, sciencia, by definition “knowledge”, offers no haven for truth. As ever since the contribution of English Jew Karl Popper, in the aftermath of the destruction of WWII, science no longer is believed to make ‘truth’ claims at all but is understood to propose ‘refutable theories’. As Popper wrote, Science is not a system of certain, or well-established, statements; nor is it a system which steadily advances towards a state of finality. Our science is not knowledge: it can never claim to have attained truth, or even a substitute for it. . . . We do not know: we can only 248

As others have observed, the kind of decommodification promised in communist societies, for example, does not really mean that nobody owns things. What it does mean is that somebody still has control over access or denial of services. Somebody still determines the conditions of access and can withdraw that access when they wish. Decommodification does not mean that nobody owns things, just that you no longer own things. Decommodification has always allowed dispossession and the concentration of wealth and power in the hand of a few who may not “own” what they are “selling” but retain control. 249 The movement gives no justification for this odd, out of place, claim. Why are Western values tested to breaking point and not Eastern values? Why will the future mean that Western values will be tested at all after all, it seems to me, the main public advocates for this great reset are Westerners? 250 Another requirement of the Great Reset is that the developed world will welcome millions of environmental refugees.

503 guess. And our guesses are guided by the unscientific, the metaphysical (though biologically explicable) faith in laws, in regularities which we can uncover – discover. . . . The old scientific ideal of episteme – of absolutely certain, demonstrable knowledge – has proved to be an idol. The demand for scientific objectivity makes it inevitable that every scientific statement must remain tentative forever. Here Popper’s language is revealing, as it so often is, he says that knowledge is impossible that the old ideal of episteme is an “idol”. He is being quite literal here, to believe in objective truth, facts, is, from a Gnostic Jewish perspective to worship a false idol and such idolatry is a sin worthy of death. We have moved beyond Nietzsche’s predicted, “Twilight of the Idols” to the “destruction of the idols” to manifest a world that is utterly unknowable and about which we must remain sceptical. As Peat succinctly observes, because of “scientific progress”, it was believed that, “[t]he twentieth century would be an age of knowledge and certainty. Ironically it ended in uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt.” (Peat 2002: ix) Between the Protestant optimism at the start of the century and the Gnostic scepticism of the end, scientific theorist, Karl Popper, had concluded that no scientific theory can ever said to be ‘true’. Science simply cannot make positive truth claims at all. All that a scientific theory can do is be formulated in such a way that if it is false then it can be shown to be false. By this account, scientific theories are either refuted and found to be false or remain open to potential future refutation. By Popper’s account of falsifiability, there simply never is a truth claim made in science. Truth is impossible because, from Popper’s perspective, the revealed God is dead. That truth becomes nothing more than an expression of power, that truth becomes a ‘value’, that truth becomes an ought, is only possible within the ontotheological horizon of modernity’s division of reality into “facts” and “values”. The centrality of this division to technological society has already been observed. That the ‘fact/values’ distinction, the separation of the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, is a feature of modernity, Nietzschean philosophy and the political movement that is of concern to this document, is certainly not coincidental. The primordial truth, experiential knowledge that informs our practical involvements in the world, could never satisfy the demands placed upon it to become a ‘fact’. As presented here, such an experience could never be universal, ahistorical, unambiguous and certain beyond doubt. As already discussed, this experiential knowledge was necessarily situated in a particular time and place or, to put the same thing differently, experiential knowledge was time and place. The only thing that could satisfy the standards of being factual, ironically, was something that was fabricated, artificial, imposed. Once this is understood then, as with all constructed things, the ‘fact’ is just an expression of what could be called ‘values’. So, if we take a ‘tree’, as an example, the experiential knowledge of a ‘tree’ is inadequate because it is necessary situated. To turn experiential knowledge into

504 formal knowledge there needs to be a definition of what all trees, if they are tree, must manifest. With this definition, it does not matter where one is at what time, the definition says what a tree is. If this formal definition happens to clash with some places experience, then it is the formal definition that is ‘true’. All Nietzsche's discovery was, was to observe that ‘facts’ had really become, or could only possibly be, “values”. As a value, truth became nothing more than an expression of ‘power’. So, whoever determines the definition of a ‘tree’ are those who have power, this is then imposed on the world as a universal truth. But the universality can only be maintained in the presence of God. If God is dead, then the only foundation for formal truth claims is power. It was this condition of disenchantment that first allowed the modern condition but set the human mind on its path to gnostic post-modernity or the realization that such a reality was nothing more than a social ‘construct’. Reality becomes nothing more than an expression of power. An evil veil. Once this situation was realised all it took, like the proverbial powder keg and spark, was for a political movement to realise the true nature of modernity and turn knowledge into a weapon of power. This was realised by the political movement being revealed in this document. They realised, as a political strategy to achieve power, that all existing values, everything prized by Western society, could be revaluated by manifesting a technological society. This was Sabbatai’s “war without hands”. It is not a war using weapons, a war requiring armed combat but “war with the mind”. In this way, all of societies values could be reversed so that all that was noble could be recast as base and all the was once considered base could be ennobled. If God is dead then Man, qua Man, is also dead. This is not man as a biological entity, not animal man, but Man as a project of improvement, Man as an ideal, Man seeking perfection through participation in God. Marmur and Ellenson aske, . . .instead of asking whether God is dead, we might better raise the question whether man is dead. This seems to be the central problem of man in twentieth-century industrial society. He is in danger of becoming a thing, of being more and more alienated, of losing sight of the real problems of human existence and of no longer being interested in the answers to these problems. If man continues tin this direction, he will himself be dead, and the problem of God, as a concept or as a poetic symbol of the highest value, will not be a problem anymore. (Marmur and Ellenson 2020: 23) The death of God is the death of Man because Man only exists in relation to God. As Foucault observes that with the death of God, “Thus we may well bet that man will dissolve like a face drawn in the sand by the line of the sea.” (Foucault as seen in Preparata 2011: 91) Man, as such, Man as that towards which we were once oriented to manifest can no longer be in the absence of God. Cast free of reality, Gnostics could now construct reality to advance their vision. They had realised a weapon more powerful than an atomic bomb, they had weaponized the plasticity of the experience of reality. By weaponizing knowledge, they

505 colonized our very minds so that our decisions today are expressions of their God while we have lost all contact with our God. The loss of place is the claim that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age. “Since the Greeks, and perhaps long before them, men have believed that to the central questions about the nature and purpose of their lives, and of the world in which they lived, true, objective, universal and eternal answers could be found.” (Berlin 2013b: 244) But this trajectory is rejected by Gnostic Jewry, as perhaps its most influential theorist of the post war years, Leo Strauss, observes, What then do we know? I disregard the innumerable facts which we know, for knowledge of mere facts is not knowledge, not true knowledge. I also disregard our knowledge of scientific laws, for these laws are admittedly open to future revision. We might say, what we truly know are not any answers to comprehensive questions but only . . . questions imposed upon us as human beings by our situation as human beings. (Strauss 1997b: 361) From the very foundations of the Western tradition in the work of Parmenides truth has been what is most prized. The ancient Greeks prized arete or excellence and excellence can only be pursued if it is known. Excellence was supposed to inform Greeks in everything that they did from war to sport. It was this powerful relatracialionship with the gods that motivated these people above all others to do the cultural, artistic and philosophical achievements for which they even today held in esteem. In Steve Fuller’s book Post-truth – Knowledge as a Power Game, it is argued that there no longer is a unified legitimate claim of ‘truth’ and, further, that this is the usual condition of history. It is only when there is an extremely powerful institution, he argus, that there can be claims of ‘The Truth’. Of course, Fuller is not alone in claiming, in the shadow of Nietzsche, that ‘truth is power’ and without power there is no truth. As Nietzsche said, "What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations . . .truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins that have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.” What was once considered truth has now been abstracted into “discourses” which are believed, as Nietzsche argued, only expressions of power. As Preparata (2011: 2) observes, “So-called truths, one heard, formed just a tangle of discourses—discourses ever changing, the one hardly “truer” than the other, all of them manifestations of evolving power relations.” Science offers no haven for truth. Ever since Karl Popper’ contribution, science is thought to no longer make positive truth claims but simply proposes refutable theories. A theory, by this account, is never ‘true’, science does not make positive claims at all. All that a scientific theory can do is either be refuted and found to be false or remains open to potential future refutation. There simply never is a truth claim in science. As Berdyaev observed in 1935, “Nowhere is the decadence

506 of our epoch better expressed than in its falsity. Falsehood has ceased to be recognised as such, and we seem to be in the process of developing a new sort of consciousness in which the differentiation between truth and falsehood is lost.” (Berdyaev 2009: 23) The origins of the post-truth era were greatly progressed by the philosophy advanced by German Jewish physicist Albert Einstein. Einstein famously changed our understanding of the physical universe in a way only comparable to Isaac Newton with the publication of a series of papers in 1905. This feat is all the more remarkable because, at the time, he was working full-time as a patent clerk. This unbelievable workload might explain why his original paper that first laid out the theory of relativity had no references. Today such a lack of references would raise suspicion of plagiarism but at the time it was thought to mark the originality of his discovery. One of the reasons why Einstein was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics is not, as is often claimed, that he was Jewish and the judges were ‘anti-Semites’, such accusation were used to apply pressure on judges to ensure that Einstein would indeed be awarded the prize to ensure his standing as the undisputed genius of the 20th century would be secured, but because many physicists at the time believed that the physical evidence for his theory was absent and, more importantly, that what Einstein had really developed was not a theory of physics but a kind of philosophy. Philosophy, or more correctly theology, definitely played an important role in Einstein’s work as it does in all science whether the scientist is aware of God’s presence or not. Ever since at least the time of Parmenides, the Western tradition has been dominated by thinkers who posit a universal truth that is that towards which humanity strives towards as knowledge. This basic idea is taken up by an extremely Hellenised Rome before finding expression in Christianity. Consistent with the ancient philosophers, the universal becomes understood as the mind of God or divine nous. Later, for reasons that will be explored at length in the following volume, the universal is moved from being purely conceptual, a scholastic vision of reality, access through isolated contemplation, to becoming understood as embedded in the fabric of experience itself. What is experienced when humans ‘see’ the world is the universal that allows the experience of the particular thing as an individual expression of the universal. This shift in the experience of God, this apocalypse, brought an end to the Medieval world and began what would eventually become the Modern mind. There is a lot that needs to be understood in this reorientation in the encounter with God, brought about not by human endeavour or intervention but merely responded to, but this shift resulted in a change in emphasis away from the conceptual to the empirical, from mind to seeing. This change in perspective permitted the scientific revolution. Science’s early motivation was to know His creation, the Book of Nature, in order to know the creator. This Christian onto-theology can be seen to be at work in the mechanistic theory of physics proposed by people like Isaac Newton. Concerned with the apparent relative nature of reality,

507 Newton hesitantly posited universal time and universal space as the unchanging foundations upon which his universal theory rested. These solid foundations permitted the kind of metaphysical certainty that was not only native to the Western tradition but was necessary for science as such. In the same way that Newton spent much of his time attempting to establish simple, universal rules for reading the prophets in the Torah that would allow them to be unambiguously understood so did his scientific theories allow for Nature to be “read” with a certainty appropriate to God. As Berdyaev wrote capturing the Christian experience of objective reality, The failure of history is none other than the tragedy of the lack of agreement between what exists as human and personal on the one hand, and on the other all objectivization, which is always extra-personal, non-human, anti-personal and anti-human. Every objectivization of history is non-human and impersonal. Man is fated to live in two different orders: that of existence, which is always personal although full of super-personal values, and that of the objectivized world, always non-personal and quite indifferent to personal values. (Berdyaev 1935/2009: 10-11) It was necessary that the world be divided into these two spheres in one form or another, whether it is Descartes mind/body dualism or Newton distinction between the universal and the transient, the Western tradition has always divided the world between the subjective and the objective, what is believed and what known, what is opinion and what is truth. By contrast, commitment to universals was never part of Jewish onto-theology. Jews believed that humanity has no knowledge of God beyond the prophets revelations. Consistent with the determined monotheism of Judaism, there is no distinction between the universal and the particular, the one and the many. This has resulted in the subjective sphere being expanded to encompass the entire universe, everything is perspectival and relative. It was the positing of universal time and space that Einstein’s theory aimed to overcome. In Einstein’s theory, as with Jewish onto-theology, there simply are no universals prior to the experience of reality, prior to subjective values, there is only the perspectival experience that varies according to variables like velocity. Reality was in flux and context dependent. As Jewish philosopher Rosenzweig concluded in his influential but rather insubstantial philosophical book ‘The Star of Redemption’, prior to the particular thing there is nothing. Einstein’s conclusion meant that the concepts of space and time could no longer be thought of as discrete but were merged to become space/time. This meant that lengths of things, as merely subjective, changed depending on how the observer moved relative to that being observed. As Gimble (2013) writes of what this meant for science generally, “The Jews replaced reality with formalism, and science became nothing but a game of symbolic manipulation.” Einstein’s theory was met with scepticism from the wider scientific community not

508 because it was bad science but because its claims belonged rightly to the domain of onto-theology. Again as Gimble observes, “Relativity, they argued, was not a mistaken physical theory, but a philosophical problem, a methodological fallacy.” (Gimble 2013) It was argued by philosophers and scientists at the time, perhaps most persuasively by Martin Heidegger, that such an abstract formalism was no longer related to “being in the world”. As happened to Darwin’s theory of Evolution by natural selection, Einstein’s theories were quickly applied to other contexts where, “even claimed truths in general, could also be regarded as just relative – depending on the view, the education, the cultural background or the heritage of the group, government, church or court referring to them.” (Gustafsson 2018: 46%) Einstein’s theory was not the starting point of our post-truth condition, that mainly emerged from philosophy independent of physics, but it gained legitimacy in how Einstein applied this philosophy to the natural world. As Gimble rightly observes, Einstein’s theory appeared in 1905, during a period of upheaval across the intellectual spectrum, from mathematics, science, the social sciences to the humanities and the arts, the same year that Freud published his major works on psychoanalysis and sexuality. . . and Mahler scored his seventh symphony. In virtually all of these simultaneous revolutions, prominent Jews led the way, and thus the term “Jewish” implied the rejection of classical forms and norms across the board. (Gimble 2013) This was not simply “classical” norms but the norms that had shaped Western civilization itself. As an example of how Gnostic theology, as applied in the work of Einstein, has shaped our contemporary condition, it is interesting to look at the similarities between what is understood as post-Modernism and Gnostic Jewish theology. Truett Anderson claimed that the four pillars of post-modernism are.

1. The social construction of the concept of the self: Identity is constructed by many cultural forces and is not given to a person by tradition. 2. Relativism of moral and ethical discourse: Morality is not found but made. That is, morality is not based on cultural or religious tradition, nor is it the mandate of Heaven, but is constructed by dialogue and choice. This is relativism . . . in the sense of believing that all forms of morality are socially constructed cultural worldviews. 3. Deconstruction in art and culture: The focus is on endless playful improvisation and variations on themes and a mixing of “high” and “low” culture; and 4. Globalization: People see borders of all kinds as social constructions that can be crossed and reconstructed and are inclined to take their tribal norms less seriously. (Anderson as seen in Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020) Obviously, all of these ideas are consistent with Gnostic Judaism. In his book on post-modern Jewish Theology, which is a book on Gnostic Judaism, observed five features of modernism that post-modernism

509 rejected; (a) epistemological foundationalism, which is the belief that humanity can acquire knowledge about the world, (b) individualism, the idea that individuals can be understood and are morally responsible outside of their social context, (c) self-presence, that the subject has a foundation intuition upon which all explicit knowledge rests, (d) universalism, that knowledge is universal in its scope, and (e) master narratives, in which “post-modernists” like the thorough gnostic Lyotard, argued that the West privileged certain models of human behaviour that should be emulated by others. (Ochs 2000: 7-9) In his introduction, Ochs is more explicit than many text on post-modernism how the West in particular is the target of its critiques. However, it is characterised, modernism is actually protestant Christianity that never “failed”, expressions such as communism and Nazism were not rightly attributed to the modernist project but are rightly seen, as their main theorists Marx and Nietzsche attest, as Gnostic inspired postmodern movements. Everything is aimed at denying “objective reality” and raising “the word”, without the flesh, to primacy. It is now thought text not reality as being more foundational to the human experience. This argument is nothing new, Jews have argued this for centuries. The greatest crime today, the greatest error that can be performed in contemporary society, is prejudice. But, prejudice, to pre-judge, is exactly the experience of the ‘good’ that allows a world to come forward as it is at all. Pre-judgement is the domain of the Father. Without pre-judgement, without nous, there simply is nothing that exists beyond instrumentation to populate a world. There is, under such conditions, no truth. We have a prejudice against taking drugs, we have a prejudice against nudity, we have a prejudice about what it means to be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. Meaningfulness itself is prejudice. If we look at the things that we cared about just fifty years ago and what we care about today, what we consider as ‘progress’ would have been considered, just 50 years ago, as markers of degeneracy. Indeed, to even draw upon the notion of ‘degeneracy’ today seems antiquated because of the sanction against judgement. Loss of meaning, is loss of culture, is loss of authenticity, is loss of care, is soul sickness. Soul sickness is literally the sickness of our relationship to the revealed God. The God that we know. We are now in a position to more clearly identify the alienation felt so acutely today. Now, of course, as individuals living in a real world, we actually really do care about divorce, violence and substance abuse. Indeed, when it is made explicit, we as individuals probably care more about these kinds of issues than LGBTQI+ ‘rights’, advancing diversity, encouraging immigration or even, possibly, white supremacists. Indeed, some of the things that we are supposed to care about, that we are continuously told to care about, such as overcoming ‘hetro-normativity’ or ‘toxic masculinity’, are probably not even a real concern for most people at all. Heterosexuality is probably still experienced by most in society as being ‘good’ or “normal” although many would no longer feel entitled to judge those who are homosexual or transsexual. As people

510 living in the real world, we care primarily about the same things that our grandparents were concern about. The point that is trying to be made is that as a society, what we are mainly told what to care about, are things that we do not really care that much about, whereas other things, that on reflection are very important, are not attracting much attention. The concrete is what we truly experience while the abstract is just an idea or, even, an ideal. It is not that we freely choose not to care about some issues while other issues take up all the public debate but that we are losing our very capacity to care about what we want to care about. We are losing our experience of God. As a community we have shifted from a norms-based society derived from experiential knowledge aspiring to achieve moral outcomes based upon cultural norms, in terms of aspiring to realise a ‘good life’, into an increasingly technological society concerned with short term technical outcomes such as productivity and profit. Historically we may have pursued productivity and profit as markers of a good life, as means to an end, but increasingly, these are becoming ends in themselves. It is as though the quality of life is no longer meaningful. This is exactly what is happening. We can no longer judge the quality of life because we need to have an experience of the good, we need to be near deus revelatus, if we are to make such judgements. John Lear wrote in Radical Hope that we now live in a post-truth condition, We live in an age of deep and profound angst that the world itself, as we know it, is vulnerable and could break down. We are confronted with global warming, nuclear conflagration, weapons of mass destruction . . . And even the demise of civilization itself. Events around the world . . .terrorist attacks, violent social upheavals . . .have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot name. (Lear 2008: 7) Anthropologist Marc Augé, harmonious with what has been presented above, argues that we are losing our sense of place as a result of postmodern condition. Augé argues that place has traditionally been thought of as a “society anchored since time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil.” He argues that such places are receding in importance and are being systematically replaced by ‘non-places’. The multiplication of what we may call empirical non-places is characteristic of the contemporary world. Spaces of circulation (freeways, airways), consumption (department stores, supermarkets), and communication (telephones, faxes, television, cable networks) are taking up more room all over the earth today. They are spaces where people coexist or cohabit without living together.” (Augé 1999: 110) As a central strategy to move to this post-truth condition is to undermine the historical worth of the ‘Western tradition’ this is just one part of a deliberate and strategic attempt to marginalize the Western tradition by marginalizing important texts and overstating the influence of other, less influential, traditions. It is rare today, for just one example, to see courses studying ‘Western civilization’ but

511 increasingly there are courses on ‘Mediterranean Studies’ or ‘Confucius Centres’. The idea behind Mediterranean Studies is to emphasise the point that there were other voices, outside of the European tradition, such as the Jews, who contributed to history, but for a Western country this was just empirically highly questionable. One example of this cultural struggle was around a ‘core curriculum’ course at Columbia University which featured a course called Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy. The course explored the traditionally important works of Ovid, Homer, Dante, Augustine, Montaigne and Woolf. All European, ‘western’ thinkers that have impacted on contemporary understandings of the world. In 2015, a protest by just four undergraduate students, there background is not revealed, argued that because students ‘need to feel safe in the classroom’ they needed to stop teaching many ‘texts in the Western canon’. The argument was that these thinker’s works were “wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression” and, this is where it gets ‘interesting’, these works contained “triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom”. (Lukianoff & Haidt 2018: 5-6) This was just one expression of a movement in the early 21st century to stop teaching Western thinkers and replace them with alien voices. The problem with this becomes apparent when we think that in Asia, they learn Asian thinkers, in India they learn the Indian tradition but, in the West, we are no longer allowed to learn our tradition but must feel shame over the greatest civilization ever to be realized on the planet. As Ellul observed some years ago as these sentiments would no longer get published, The West has a bad name these days; in fact, everywhere people are trying to escape from the sinking ship. The West alone is to blame for everything. It has descended on the rest of the world, subjugating peoples who wanted only to live in peace . . . These peoples were happy, productive, prolific, and well fed; they were ignorant of war, evil, and slavery; they enjoyed security and were supported by philosophy. . . Then along came the West with its train of catastrophes. It came with its mail-clad warriors who were greedy for gold and silver and deceived the poor peoples who received them with the kind of hospitality you might have found in paradise. . . They destroyed cultures and thus the social groupings, leaving the individual isolate where earlier he had fitted so wonderfully into a balanced society. . . Such was the official history told to schoolchildren . . . How can we fail to see that we were nothing but their conquerors, the foreigners who considered them fair game and stole their women and their wealth? (Elull 1978: 1-3) This account of Western history that has become standard at all levels of education today resulting in a kind of white self-loathing that has nurtured a ‘strong sense of guilt’, (Elull 1978: 5) where my children, from an extremely humble, indeed in honesty quite an impoverished background, come home speaking of their ‘white privilege’. When they did tell me about their white privilege, I reminded them of an article that I read by a white Australian “academic” (Ashman 2019) that used as the example of “white privilege”

512 a group of physics students, whose background was from Nigeria, who were sent to Cambridge University and reported upon their return that while there they felt that they had been followed around by shopkeepers to ensure that they did not shoplift. The assumption was that these students were being treated with suspicion because of the colour of their skins. Nobody asked the shopkeepers why they behaved as they did or even it this was in fact the case or was the whole episode just a misunderstanding of the students. Despite this, the academic confidently claimed that this would not happen to “a white person in a society like Britain, the U.S. or Australia” because they experience “the privilege of being able to walk around a shop without being the subject of suspicion”. This is supposed to be a concrete example of “white privilege”. This particular example really made me laugh because I grew up in very humble circumstances in Australia. As a young man in the early 1990s, I would walk around stores with my flannelette shirt and torn black jeans with ragged work boots and I can assure everyone that even though I was a white person in Australia I attracted a lot of suspicion from store owners. Not only was I continuously scrutinised by shopkeepers, but I was stopped on the street and searched by police for no reason at all on several occasions and nothing was found. Once I was stripped searched in a car park by police. I had done nothing wrong. As a young man, I was also told after successfully getting a job as a storeman that I was extremely fortunate getting the job because the employer usually did not employ people from “the Western suburbs” (the “poorer” side of town where I had grown up). The truth is that authors like Greg Ashman write what they do because they have an agenda to marginalize white people that will eventually make them disadvantaged. The author seemed to miss the fact that the students who had supposedly suffered increased surveillance because they were not white had in fact been given the amazing opportunity to travel to Cambridge University to study an opportunity, despite a strong academic record, I was not afforded. I cannot help but to wonder if white students of equal academic performance and from equally difficult financial backgrounds were being given the same opportunities. The truth is that opportunities are increasingly being determined, along with school captaincies, scholarships, and employment opportunities, in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, by the colour of people’s skin in such a way that it discriminates further against disadvantaged white children, and this is exactly what people like Ashman hope to achieve. White marginalization has reached such levels that Hollywood actress Rosanna Arquette, who is in fact Jewish, expressed feeling shame over being “white”. As she said, “I’m sorry I was born white and privileged. It disgusts me. . . I feel so much shame.” (Arquette as seen in Henderson 2019) “Whiteness” itself is now being associated with “privilege” when it is simply empirically not true. Indeed, the next day she elaborated upon her earlier statement in case she had been misunderstood saying, “I am privileged just because I’m white.” (Arquette as seen in Henderson 2019)

513 This was to make it clear that she was not ashamed of her privileged background along with being white but just because she was white . . . apparently. It was her “whiteness” that was shameful, nota any other advantage. Although it was once the case that white, Anglo Saxon, Protestants did dominate “virtually all the major institutions of American life”, in recent years this particular cohort had become “a small and beleaguered minority . . .” in just about every significant American. (Karabel 2005: 536) The truth is that the most vocal voices “confessing” to their “white privilege” in the United States are often Jews. This fact raises one of the most troubling elements in this entire debate, how is whiteness defined? Some studies conclude that white people are extremely advantaged and that this advantage finds expression in every aspect of a person’s life. As the privilege leads to inequity, it needs to be addressed. After all, a society cannot have gross overrepresentation of any one group. The problem with this “research”, and it is supported with evidence, is that it usually includes Jews as “white”. The problem with this is that throughout history including today, Jews have always argued against “whites” and have been determined not to become assimilated. As the Jewish author Shalom Wald easily writes when speaking of Sino-Jewish relations, “One more hidden reason for Chinese attention to the treatment of the Jews by the “white man” is that it challenged the claim of [white] moral superiority, which an arrogant West added to its already unchallenged military and economic superiority.” (Wald 2004: 66) 251 As we have already seen, by not factoring in the massive overrepresentation of Jews, who most definitely do not identify as white despite sometimes making the claim when it suits their agenda, distorts any analysis making claims of “white privilege” because Jews are such an extremely privileged minority that their inclusion distorts figures for the entire populations despite their small numbers. Despite continuous discussion of white privilege and how we must address it as a matter of urgency, nothing can be said about “Jewish privilege” despite this being a much more obvious phenomenon. Recently a Twitter account called “Jewish privilege”, that was trying to draw attention to Jewish overrepresentation in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States, was trending. Jews responded to the tweet by posting stories, without context, of how their ancestors had suffered thereby, apparently, delegitimising any claim of Jewish

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I could not imagine if it was ever written in an official government report that “Christians suffered at the hands of Jews thus undermining their claim to moral superiority.” It would be denounced as anti-Semitism before the ink dried and yet this kind of statement can be found throughout Jewish literature. The truth of what they called the Holocaust is revealed in Vol. III. Even based on the widely accepted myth of the Holocaust, it was the white, Russians, English and Americans, who fought against the Germans which means that “whites” were just as much on the side of “good” as perpetrators of atrocities and yet this support is never acknowledged. The truth is that “whites” are never given credit for their valiant struggle and great cost. The problem is that we have become so accustomed to a certain narrative about evil, white, Christians perpetrating the Holocaust that we do not stop for a minute to question it validity.

514 privilege in the 21st century United States. In response to Jewish outrage that anyone would dare claim that Jews were privileged, the account was quickly closed by Twitter because it was deemed “antisemitic” and, therefore, nothing but “hate speech”. (Mazzig 2020) Jews make the most outrageous claims against “whites” and this is simply historical analysis or statements of fact but the minute the truth of contemporary society is revealed it is labelled “hate speech” and shut down. It is more than a little revealing that my children learn about white privilege in high school, before developing the kind of critical skills required to reflect on such claims, when it is literally illegal to raise the issue of “Jewish privilege”. Rather ironically, the Jewish writer and political activist, Tim Wise, wrote one of the more influential books on white privilege titled, “White like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son”. (Wise 2004) This book was not about how he is privileged as an American Jew but “revealed” all the supposed privileges accrued by Wise because he was “white”. So, here is a Jew admitting to being privileged by the conditions of his birth, so much so that he wrote a book about it, and yet when the explicit hashtag was circulated on Jewish privilege, which we might assume Wise might embrace, it was utterly denied. It seems that Wise as a white man is privileged but, despite the empirical evidence, as a Jew he is not. The real question is to ask why Jews might be so enthusiastic about promoting the idea of “white privilege”? In truth, Jews identify as white when they are found to be doing something wrong, such as sexual misconduct, or want to point out their supposed underserved “privileges” but choose to be Jewish when they want to focus on Western Christian violence or historical oppression. This movement has been incredibly successful at shaping school curricula to include voices that are contextualised as opposed by Western values and traditions. The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers. Extremists have proliferated on the far right and the far left, provoking one another to ever deeper levels of hatred. (Lukianoff & Haidt 2018: 4) This polarization of Western society is the exact reality that Gnostic Judaism hopes to realise as can be seen by the overrepresentation of Jews on the political extremes while being sparse in the sensible centre. Indeed, this is the exact situation they intentionally nurtured in Germany in the inter-war period of the Weimar Republic. The far left of Marx and the far right of Friedman or Strauss are the two expressions of Gnostic Judaism dominating our entire political intellectual landscape. Fuller’s account of a post-truth age is too simplistic. A healthy society that is confident in itself and continues to have meaningful social bonds has a ‘truth’ and that truth is one of the ‘true opinions’ that is the in-between, the certainty of knowledge and agnosticism of ignorance. This everyday truth, the truth

515 that informs our everyday lives allowing us to navigate our world, cannot be reduced to power, but it is a product of something far too complex to be adequately comprehended. Because we are mortal our knowledge is necessarily limited. That is why the good, the beautiful and the true are attributed to the ‘gods’. Everyday truth, the truth that the table is here, or the tree is outside the window or that it is raining in Brisbane, is a culturally dependent judgement that we know to be true, in the everyday sense of knowing, and they are understood to be true for all reasonable observers. It is that we are suffering from ‘soul-sickness’ that we have moved away, not from the experience of this primordial truths, everybody needs these to navigate their lives, that has certainly not happened, but that this experience of truth no longer matters. As Allan Bloom wrote when considering our contemporary condition. There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of; almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the students’ reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes them, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about. . . The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. Bloom’s point is that the only certainty available is an expression of the modern preference for quantitative truth in opposition to relativism. Such an argument could only be made with the modern turn to reality as measurable “extension”. The relativity of truth has been affirmed because to deny this relativism is understood to be oppressive to capital ‘O’ “other”. None other than Benedict XVI said in 2005, Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. (As seen in Wasserstein 2009: 790-791) Truth is a challenge to the open, free society. A challenge to egotistic desires. Many from various political heritages are now acknowledging that the loss of truth has major political implications. Former head of U.S. Intelligence, James Clapper, has argued that the tragedy of Donald Trump’s election is that it is a symptom of the loss of the “beacon of truth”. He argues that Trump’s presidency is a symbol of the wider issue, “. . .where now it’s fashionable to have alternative facts or where ‘truth is relative’ . . .” This loss of truth finds expression in the loss of trust in foundational institutions like the media, large corporations, the judiciary and government. There has been an ongoing trend towards increasing distrust of these foundational institutions. Academics are increasingly being seen as ‘guns for hire’ not in the pursuit of truth, which is no longer conceptually persuasive, but in order to achieve political outcomes. As Marx

516 wrote of this condition, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. . .” Marx is absolutely correct, again as Elull observes, We become iconoclasts towards all that the West represents; everything was bad, everything must be destroyed: only African art, and even perhaps African science, has been a truly fine thing; only politics as practiced by the Chinese is authentic. The only revolt that is just is the revolt going on in Latin America. We acknowledge that all accusations are justified, and we are filled with masochistic rage. Yoga and marijuana, Zen and selfdestruction – that’s the way to our real liberation! (Elull 1978: 5) In the post-Sept. 11 world, this is exactly what is happening, Hollywood movies clearly portray white Christian males as malevolent, criminals while people of ‘colour’ or homosexuals and presented as unquestionably good. This, as will be elaborated upon in the next chapter, but already touched upon, is how the reversal of all existing values is being expressed as a strategy of Gnostic Judaism to gain power at the cost of historically dominant people. The loss of truth is just an expression of ‘soul-sickness’. The question remains, how did we get the bad society that we live in today? Where did the good, the beautiful and the true, the foundations of Western civilization, go? Jung identified how the sphere beyond ‘time/space’ offers the potential for philosophical contemplation as it is the sphere of the ‘timeless’. This is a reiteration of the traditional, Platonic, metaphysical view that beyond ‘time/space’ is the ‘timeless’ domain of the universal. This has been traditionally understood as the domain of “The Good”. The Good table was a universal table whose existence allowed the everyday experience of the table there before us. It is also the domain, according to post-Constantine Christianity, of the Christian God. It is here that Heidegger’s exploration of the beyond ‘time/space’ as a dynamic process understood as ‘Being’ might offer a trajectory out of ‘soul sickness’. Heidegger, in this context, is the most important philosopher of our times. Soul sickness is not rightly understood as a ‘psychological condition’ if psychological is understood as ‘arising in the mind; related to the mental and emotional state of a person’. Soul sickness is a break down in the fundamental beliefs and practices of a society. It is when all that was once most highly valued, to use this language, becomes valueless. It is a falling into meaninglessness in the sense that all that was meaning-ful is now devoid of meaning. Everything that was once valued now appears worthless whereas everything that was once despised has taken on an ‘imperative of meaning’. Things must be valued today not because they are worthy in terms of satisfying a ethical judgement but because they are necessary. To value what calls to you as meaningful is to practice ‘free judgement’ but to value what is necessary, because this necessity is external to you, is to be enslaved. To take just one quick example, to choose to study a subject at university because it appeals to you, is to make a free judgement, to choose a subject because it will secure

517 employment or because it will make society more productive, is to be enslaved. In our technological society, all of our decisions are made out of necessity. We exist as slaves. Our truly human potential of freedom has somehow disappeared. Many Aboriginal people of Australia have historically expressed clear signs of soul sickness. It is when the things that are of most worth become of no value and people become lost in meaninglessness. Torn away from traditional meaning they cannot identify with any new formations of meaning which results in substance abuse, mental illness, domestic violence and a general feeling of loss. These sentiments are the exact feelings that one hears many Westerners are beginning to express. The institutions of a society are built around what is meaningful and of worth. Institutions are material manifestations of meaning. When what is noble loses value then social institutions themselves fail. It might be argued that Aboriginal Australians are regaining their own self-wroth as they assert more power within Australia. Indeed, it seriously claimed in a book that the “indigenous people of Australia” “have been here since the beginning of time” which is an onto-theological belief that some people who identified as “indigenous Australians” believed but which we now know is wrong and should not be stated as fact in this way. This is just sign of how Australia is being altered by Gnostic Jewry and, indeed, there is a growing narrative that can be seen to have emerged, only in the last 20 or so years, where indigenous people now claim they worshipped a Mother Earth (See Firebrace 2001: 42) when a review of slightly older accounts of Aboriginal spirituality (See Stanner 1979) fail to mention anything about a Mother Earth goddess.252 It is highly likely that gnostic Jewish beliefs have been imposed on people who identify as Aboriginal, as they had no writing such a change of narrative is quite simple to achieve, in order to find a concrete example of how indigenous people did indeed practice the kinds of spiritual beliefs that Gnostic Jews now advocate despite the lack of any real evidence that this was the case.

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Indeed, the massive differences in these two accounts, just 20 years apart, are astounding. In the 1979 account, Stanner observes, “It is thus perfectly consistent that the myths should depict men as they do – always in a “human, all too human” fashion, good and bed, cowardly and brave, open and deceitful, filial and unfilial. As thought to say, “this is how men are, this is reality””. Where as in the latter account, many of the stories are more like Western moral stories that are often oriented, interestingly, towards looking after the environment which, I am sure, was not a concern to the Aboriginal people prior to very recently indeed. This points to a very serious problem with a lot of the discussion in relation to indigenous issues in Australia, what does it even mean to be Aboriginal? Is it the case that it is a purely genetic argument that if you carry anything that you identify as “indigenous” then you have enduring entitlements? If so, this would be highly problematic by today’s standards. The problem is that these discussions are not even allowed today because if you question anything to do with “indigenous rights” then you are labelled a racist. Such practices may be consistent with indigenous practices, I do not know one way or another, but I know such practices go against everything that the West has believed in since ancient Greece.

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Chapter Four: Explaining Jewish Overrepresentation in the United States Introduction Nobody denies that Jews are grossly overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States. What has not been adequately explained is why, why are Jews overrepresented amongst the elite in the United States. This overrepresentation is certainly not unprecedented. Jews were grossly overrepresented in pre-World War II Germany and pre-World War II Russia/Soviet Union. This overrepresentation in positions of power and influence is not slight, as the previous chapter showed in regard to the United States, but the same situation existed in Germany and the former Soviet Union, but hundred of times overrepresented. Jews are massively, grossly, overrepresented.

Gnostic Jewish Cosmology The primary motivation behind the actions of Gnostic Jews is for humanity to be reconciled with God. This is achieved by Jews dwelling on Earth under Heaven thereby living in a World. It is bringing together these three elements, what might be termed the “3-fold”, Man, Earth, and Heaven that humanity will redeem God and, in turn, redeem all of humanity. These different elements Heaven, Earth, and World can be brought together because they share something in common and it is this common feature, a feature Jews also share, that is primordial and therefore primary. It is because of its primordiality, that this shared aspect is prized in the Gnostic Jewish theology above everything else. Understanding what is involved in redemption for Gnostic Jews is to understand not just their theology but, the main purpose of this volume, to understand their entire political program. Understanding Gnostic Jewish ideas of redemption is to understand why they fight for female sexual “freedom”, deny the nuclear family, denounce Christianity, advocate to decriminalize drugs, and oppose the Western rationalism project that has historically been oriented towards sophia. This is one of the things that confuses many contemporary commentators who see that there is something wrong but cannot think of what might motivate this particular constellation of political activities. To be clear, so that the pro-active nature of Gnostic Judaism,

520 in contrast to the passivism of Orthodox Judaism, is made evident, the task of redemption is not left for God, God is actually quite passive in Gnostic Jewish theology, but it is the task of Man. It is not just the task of “men”, generally, to unite Heaven and Earth but the task of Jews as the chosen people of God. This redemptive act of uniting Heaven and Earth, to realise a World can only be achieved by overcoming this world, this mistake, this abhorrent evil. As Wink wrote of gnosticism generally, . . .in Gnosticism there was for the first time a categorical rejection of all extraneous rule and authority. Not only all institutions, but . . . the world itself, were a cosmic blunder that fragmented the deity. The religious impulse is thus not only to save oneself from this irrational and lugubrious mistake, but to rescue the Godhead as well, bringing the soulsparks scattered in the prison of matter back to the divine and restoring it at last to its primordial unity. The world will then be dissolved; nothing else will be saved. The Powers – the social structures of reality, political systems, human institutions such as the family or religion – all will be brought to an end. . . there is no dialectic of good and evil . . . the tendency is totally to demonize them. (Wink 1993: 17) This world, the cosmos, everything that is, is evil, all divisions, all distinctions, all things, are nothing more than idolatry and are evil. The demand is to overcome this evil world and that is achieved by what they call “uniting the sparks” back to God. Once this is achieved then this world will be “dissolved”, it can no longer exist if redemption is to be realised. Everything, but most especially the nuclear family, positive religions, human institutions including political institutions, must be destroyed. Their task is simply one of destruction, but it is, as already observed, destruction that is, at the same, creative, creative in uniting Heaven and Earth. To understand this idea of redemption there has to be some basic understanding of Gnostic Jewish cosmology. Cosmology is simply an account of the origin of the cosmos. Redemption is, from a Gnostic perspective, a return to the proper order of the cosmos, which is understood as a Natural order, an order that was actually created by God, that is prior to Man’s fall from Divine grace into this pseudoworld of illusions. Although it is certainly not clearly stated and obvious to a casual reader, Gnostic Jews claim that their cosmology, their account of the origin of things, can be found hidden within the Bible creation story as told in Genesis. Genesis is a Greek word which means the “origin” of something and in this case, it is being used in the sense of the ongoing origin of the cosmos or, equally, the origin of Being. As Tinker observes, “Creation is not just a past act, it is a present one.” (Tinker 2010) Cosmology and Genesis are concerned with the same event. The Bible’s “myth” of Genesis, as it reads, was not originally written at one time by a single author, despite what is claimed in the Orthodox tradition, but is a collection of stories brought together, perhaps over an extended period of time, in an attempt to tell a single, unified story. That this is the case seems rather obvious when reading the text. Not only does the style of writing

521 change throughout but even what is being said seems inconsistent. Some sentences seem to be just added on as a kind of afterthought or even correction of what has just been written. Although the origins of Genesis as a single volume are unknown, what is certain, as Jean-Louis Ska observes, is that “the book of Genesis does not belong to the literary genre of historiography”. (Ska 2012: 3) It is not a historical account of the start of the universe. What the authors were trying to give was an account of what is the origin of “thingness”, the origin of beings or what we might call, in a more philosophical register, an “ontology”. Those people, many of them claiming to be Christians, who oppose theories of evolution because it appears inconsistent with the Biblical story of Genesis, simply misunderstand both what Genesis and the theory of evolution hope to achieve. They were not presenting what we would think of as a science. As Augustine wrote, Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics (cosmology), and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticised and rejected as unlearned men. (Augustine) Darwin’s theory of evolution is trying to explain a natural process, it has nothing at all to say about Being, it is silent in every way on ontological questions. It is trying to explain a physical/biological process by which animals have evolved into what they are over time, it has nothing what-so-ever to say about the human encounter with particular beings. As even Origen wrote, What person of intelligence, I ask, will consider as a reasonable statement that the first and the second and the third day, in which there are said to be both morning and evening, existed without sun and moon and stars, while the first day was even without heaven? . . . I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history. (Origen 1936) This is to observe that the story of Genesis and the theory of evolution, as they are exploring two quite distinct domains, are, as they stand today, perfectly compatible. Darwin’s theory does not disprove Genesis and Genesis is silent on Darwin’s theory. In a sense they talk past each other and never enter into a discussion. The starting point for understanding Gnostic Jewish cosmology as the means for understanding Gnostic Jewish accounts of redemption is with ein sof or “limitlessness”. Ein sof is the most common negative statement for describing the Godhead. When giving an account of ein sof in terms of “limitlessness” or the “infinite” it is not to identify a special positive attribute. “Limitlessness” is not an

522 attempt to pick out some feature that distinguishes the Godhead in terms of saying, the ein sof is the greatest being in the universe because it is without limit. In most respects, the exact opposite is trying to be communicated, ein sof is simply to affirm the basic Jewish belief that nothing positive can be attributed to the highest expression of God. Gnostic Jews believe that any attribution of a positive quality, pure goodness, omniscience etc., requires limitation within human potential of the greatest thing imaginable but that it is to think of God in terms of what He is not, bad, ignorant etc. It is this attempt to limit God that is problematic from a Gnostic Jewish perspective. God is all, and all, in its unity is, at the same time, nothing. This leads to the apparently paradoxical situation where pure “isness” is pure “nothingness”. To elaborate, imagine a universe that consists of just a plain white surface that goes on forever in all directions without any distinguishing features, this surface would be one thing, a unity, it cannot be differentiated, but it would also be nothing in the sense that it is undivided. If somebody pointed to this surface and said what is on that surface, they would say “nothing”. In its pure Being, but, in its unity, it is, at the same time, pure nothingness. This is the claim being made of ein sof, not that it is special in being limitless, but that it is undifferentiated. As Dan & Kiener (1986: 8) observe of ein sof, “. . .this term does not contain any specific meaning that renders it superior to any other negative terms such as “no beginning” or “no colour”.” In the same vein you cannot say that it is “good” because that would be to place a “limit” which, as already said, it lacks, so all that can be said is that the ein sof is not just goodness, but it is not evil either, it is both and neither. As it says in text of the Explanation of the Ten Sefirot, Know that everything that is finite is insignificant. Conversely, that which is not limited is called ein-sof and is absolutely undifferentiated in a complete and changeless unity. And if He is without limit, than nothing exists outside Him. And since He is both exalted and hidden, He is the essence of all that is concealed and revealed. But since He is hidden, He is both the root of faith and the root of rebelliousness. . . Furthermore, the philsophers are in agreement with these statements that our perception of Him cannot be except by way of negative attribution. (as seen in Dan & Kiener 1986: 89-90) Although ein sof is discussed in gendered terms this is merely a means of communicating as, of course, ein sof is without gender. Calling this thing anything, even in terms of the ein sof, is to knowingly misrepresent it but, it must be granted some kind of conceptual boundary, no matter how conditional, to enable any kind of understanding. Like Wittgenstein’s famous ladder, names for ein sof, . . .serve as elucidations in that following way; anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

523 Hegel begins his metaphysical considerations with “Being, pure being, without any further determination” because pure Being even lacks a verb in terms of “isness”. Ein Sof is just the same as calling it Nothing. To call this thing the Godhead is just to artificially constrain it thereby making it thinkable in the most basic terms for human comprehension. As Ben-Shlomo (1985: 29) observes, the mystic scholars, . . . called this hidden aspect Ein-Sof and did not refer to it by any of the accepted names of God (the Holy One, Blessed be He, Elohim, etc.), and not even by the Ineffable Name. . . They called it ha-ahdut ha-shavah (the equal unity), ha-metzi’ut ha-gedola (the great reality), shoresh kol ha-shorashim (the root of all roots)253, ma she-ein ha-mahshavah masegit (that which – not even he whom – thought cannot conceive), ha-davar ha-ne’elam (that which is not revealed) and other similar titles which do not describe any positive characteristics. Despite Gnostic Jews reading the Ein Sof into the Genesis story many Jews believe that “the Ein-Sof is not hinted at either in the Torah or in the Prophets or in the other Scriptures, nor in the words of the Sages, but the mystics have received some slight intimation of it.” (as seen in Ben-Shlomo 1985: 29) To simplify the Gnostic cosmological account greatly, in so far as this is required to explain the Gnostic Jews political agenda, the Ein Sof tzimtzum. How tzimtzum has been translated, and therefore what it actually means, remains contested. The influential scholar Gershom Scholem in the 20th century claimed that tzimtzum should be translated as “withdraws” as the ein sof “withdraws”. The more traditional translation is “contracts” in terms of becomes more concentrated. Some have interpreted this in terms of concentrates down, into something denser, it pulls into itself. The Godhead is said to tzimtzum in order to make way for a created world or to make way for “beings”. The Godhead tzimtzum in order to make way for trees, mountains, rivers, humans. In His unified, undifferentiated perfection, there cannot be irregularities as this would compromise the perfection of the Godhead. The Godhead must tzimtzum, withdraw or concentrate, in order to open a space for beings. Imagine a unified white ball of energy. It is an undifferentiated unity. Perfectly consistent without any irregularities. Nothing can be distinguished in this unity, if there are to be the irregularities of beings the pure light, “withdraws” in the sense of opening a space within itself, like an expanding balloon, where the pure white light moves to the outer circumference. Within this mass, in the space opened by his “withdrawal”, there can now be differentiation, there now can be limit. Such an account would also have been consistent with Aristotelian

253

This characterization is extremely important, “the root of all roots”. At the base of the Tree of Life is the Shechinah but before that division is the oneness of the Ein-sof, the root of all roots. All movement into being is a movement away from the unity of the primordial, primary God. For Christianity, the opposite is the case, pure thought is the highest good, accessed through reason or logos. Gnostic Judaism is Christianity turned upside down and visa versa.

524 cosmology, where stars were thought to be windows into the pure light of the heaven’s beyond, which was popular with scholastic scholars at the same time as the idea of tzimtzum was being popularised in kabbalah. The sense that is being communicated in all these different interpretations, as Paul Franks observes, is the sense that the word originally carried. Tzimtzum was used to translate the verb “conceal” when Rebekah hid herself behind a veil. (Franks 2021: 41) Tzimtzum was also used in the sense of “confine” as in constraining an animal. (Franks 2021: 41) In the eleventh century, an important time when the word was being incorporated into the Jewish mystic tradition, Nathan ben Yehiel of Rome translated the verb as “to press, confine, conceal”. (Franks 2021: 41) Nathan’s definition of tzimtzum seems to capture all the different senses of what the ein sof is doing. It is concentrating itself. It is confining itself. It is concealing itself. It is “withdrawing” in terms of concentrating, confining and concealing. God “withdraws” in order to make “space” for beings, in order to make a space for the cosmos. Although the idea of the Godhead withdrawing into heaven thereby allowing a space for being is consistent with Aristotelian cosmology, it does not mean that it is in any way tied to Aristotelian thinking. Today, people try to apply the idea of tzimtzum to the theory regarding the expanding universe that is the result of the Big Bang. That is, the idea can be interpreted in different ways, at different times, depending on our current cosmological knowledge. The truth is that these different “applications” of these ideas are irrelevant to the ontological intentions of the account. Aristotelian, or indeed contemporary cosmology, may be proven wrong, but that these theories are false have no impact on the onto-theological relevance of tzimtzum. The importance of the idea of tzimtzum cannot be overstated. It is here that Gnostic Judaism differs from Christianity most profoundly. For a Christian’s God is present, in the world, in our lives, every day, and in our everyday experiences whereas, for this Gnostic tradition, God has withdrawn beyond the human world therefore He plays no part in our lives. Every other difference between Gnostic Judaism and Christianity might be understood to flow from the idea of tzimtzum. To continue with the simplified account to avoid going down the rabbit hole of religious mysticism more than what is necessary, it might be said that the ein sof withdrawal is the event of the divine emanations. In the Gnostic Jewish tradition, as expressed in the kabbalah, God emanates 10, what they call, sefirot. The advent of these emanation of the sefirot is the event of withdrawal. This is akin to Einstein’s project, which is fundamentally Gnostic Jewish, of seeking to discover an inner unity between the apparently different forces of the universe. Just as all beings are concealing the primordial unity of God so are the various physical forces, electricity, magnetism, gravity, really just one force. The Christian project, by contrast, is to increasingly categorise the world, breaking it into ever finer discrete bits and understanding how these different bits interact and influence each other. The Jewish project is to seek

525 out the underlying unity that the apparent differences conceal. The Jewish project is to find how all the apparently discrete forces of nature are really one and this one force to rule them all was understood, at least by Einstein, to be God. That energy is equal to mass is a movement past the veil of objectivity, “energy” and “mass” to move towards the hidden unity of the Gnostic Jewish God. In the same way that the emergence of energy and mass hides the prior unity so do the sefirot hide the ein sof. It is in this sense that the sefirot are really only symbols that hint at the truth of the ein sof. Joseph Dan uses the metaphor of an iceberg where the sefirot are, . . .the one-ninth of the iceberg that floats above the surface of the water, while the full import of the symbol is the hidden iceberg below. There is a deep, inherent connection between the protruding tip and the whole; the texture is the same, as are the temperature and colour. But the shape, the size, and the meaning are completely different. On the one hand, the tip is undoubtedly a part of the iceberg; but on the other hand, it cannot be said that the tip is the iceberg. Anyone who takes the symbol, the tip, to be the whole truth is making a great mistake. (Dan 1986: 7) The sefirot are emanations or attributes of God, kindness, beauty, wisdom etc., therefore they are the Godhead. The God Most High, the equivalent to the Ein Sof, is presented as the sefirot Keter, which in turn are associated with the two highest sefirot, understanding (Binah) and wisdom (Chochmah). As the Godhead withdraws, He plays no role in creating the world or interacting with humanity. According to this account, as far as humanity is, God has gone silent. This world has been left by God, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, as an act of love in order to make way for human freedom. This point is extremely important because it situates a particular conception of “freedom” as that without moral restraint of an experience of God. Again, the exact opposite of Christian understandings of “freedom” where freedom is understood as obeying the civilizing dictums of morality. In Lurianic kabbalah, a later expression of kabbalah, the various sefirot coalesce into two spheres, some form Heaven and one forms Earth. Heaven is perfection and it seems that in an unredeemed world, like the Ein Sof, heaven is also beyond any human conception or encroachment. Heaven is transcendent. Heaven is also conceptualized in the Jewish tradition as “the Father”. The Father is represented by six of the Sefirot, Chesed, Gevurah, Netzach, Hod, Yesod and Tiferet. Together these are captured or united in the single Sefirot, Tiferet. That is Tiferet, “the Father”, seems to be most primarily associated with compassion and harsh judgement. The Father balances these two aspects of himself in perfect symmetry to realise beauty. Obviously, compassion and harsh judgement are attributes that have traditionally been associated with a good father. A good father needed to be harsh but fair in showing compassion towards those to whom he was responsible. The notion of beauty here is not an aesthetic beauty but more in these

526 sense of mathematical beauty; abstract, pure, simple and orderly. In judgement and love, the Father is associated with being responsible for real things which are not accessible in our fallen condition. Heaven is often thought to be captured in the first three letters of the Tetragrammaton YHW. As in the Christian tradition, after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as especially emphasised by Martin Luther, Man cannot find his own way to heaven. Interestingly, in some Gnostic accounts, the “serpent” that offers Eve the forbidden fruit of knowledge, is Sophia thereby directly associating that knowledge, which, I claim, has been most prized in the Western tradition, the result of logos, with the fall from divine grace. The myth of the Tower of Babel might be read as making this very same point. Man cannot reach heaven through good works, but his attempts are always and necessarily “confused”. This claim is important for both the Christian and Gnostic Jewish traditions but, in the Christian tradition, Jesus is the messiah who actually reveals the way to heaven thereby bringing redemption. The Gnostic Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Tzevi, who will be discussed shortly, offers a very different path to heaven. Because, like the ein sof, heaven is beyond the domain of humanity, it is unknowable, in our fallen condition, it plays no role in humanity’s life. The other aspect into which the unity of God fractures might be called the “Earth”. Just as Heaven, because of Heavens attributes, are associated with the masculine aspect of God, there is also, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, a female aspect of the Godhead which is associated with the Earth. The Father is often associated with the Sun while the female aspect is associated with the Planet Venus which is also called The Morning Star or Lucifer. Lucifer was called the “Lord of Darkness” because of its unique brightness and the way it heralded the Sun. Heaven is light from the source of the ein sof, therefore the association with the Sun, while the Earth is the dark Abyss, the underbelly, the darkness of the Godhead. The female, captured in the sefirot by Malkuth, is known as the Shechinah which means in Hebrew simply “in-dwelling”. According to Primo, . . .there is in the First Cause an infinitely simple Will which had from all times been contained in its root. When this Will willed that existence should come into being, it emanated from the Lord, or the owner of the Will, like light from its source. From the simple Will also the Shekhina, which is of the nature of Din, proceeds. Shekhina is signified by the final H of the Tetragrammaton, YHWH, and when she descends into the emanation, she clothes herself in the Malkhuth. The simple Will, the Holy One Blessed be He is signified by the first three letters YHW of the Tetragrammaton, and it is clothed in Tiferet. (Primo as seen in Şişman 2017: 98) Ben-Shlomo observed, identifying these different names for the one thing, that “malchut, the shekhinah, the tenth sefirah, [is] also called “earth””. In the Gnostic cosmology, like the Ein Sof, the transcendent perfection of heaven, the Father, the Tiferet, is not accessible to mortals, but what is potentially accessible

527 to mortals is the immanent aspect of God or the Shechinah. The Shechinah has come to be understood as the potential majestic presence of God in the world which has resonances with the meaning of “place” in the Western tradition. It is so important to Gnostic Judaism and for their political agenda because it is immanent, it can be brought into the world and the being chosen by God for this task are the Jews. In associating the Shechinah with place does not mean that “she” represents knowledge or meaning in the Western sense of topos as the Shechinah is undifferentiated, the Shechinah is the unity of Nature. As with many goddesses, she is a fertility God while also being a God of high passions and the grossest of violence. The unity of Earth must be revealed first, humanity must enter into the Abyss, before being able to see the light. They must, in a sense, go down before they can go up. It is as a result of this unity that “she” is thought of as androgynous. As Quispel notes, “. . .the spouse of God, a female symbol of wholeness, is sometimes called Metro-pator, Motherfather, because she has synthesized the male and female principle.” (Quispel 1981: 19) The Shekinah is the spirit of God materialised as “earth”. (Dan 1995: 312) “Earth” and the human “world”, in which many of us continue to inhabit, by this account, need to be clearly distinguished because one, as it currently exists is evil, the world, while the other is pure goodness, the Earth, the natural. Through this process, Man, or more particularly Jews, can become one with God, because they are already united with God through the Shechinah. In acknowledging their divinity, Jews enter into God and become Man-Gods. Some clarification of what is meant by the Shechinah, and why it is so important to the Gnostic Jewish theo-political agenda, can be found in the work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is informative for understanding Gnostic Judaism because, as Wolfson observes, “. . . certain kabbalistic ideas made their way into Heidegger’s thought . . .” (2019: 9) How this may have happened, perhaps through Edmund Husserl or Hannah Arendt, or why is not of concern here, but it does open the possibility of drawing on Heidegger’s work, as can also be done with Nietzsche, as a way of understanding what the Gnostic Jewish tradition advances. The place to start an explanation of “Earth” is to acknowledge a resonance between Heidegger’s account of “earth”, the ancient Greek account of “physis” and Hölderlin’s account of Nature. All these terms are dancing around the same subject and are therefore, in different ways, saying the same thing. Earth, the Shechinah, emanates from the Ein Sof (limitlessness) after His voluntary self-withdrawal (TzimTzum). As should already be evident by equating earth, physis, and Nature with an emanation from God, “earth” is not being deployed here as the name of the planet on which we all live. Earth has this spiritual meaning proceeds the naming of our planet as Earth in that it precedes the knowledge that we are even living on a “planet” at all. In Heidegger’s work, earth, particularly in The Origin of the Work of Art, is opposed to world. Heidegger introduced the distinction

528 between earth and world, a distinction that is also important in this work, through a Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes. He describes in a poetic manner the worn nature of the shoes, how that wear indicates the “fallow desolation of the wintry field. . .[the] uncomplaining worry as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death”. The shoes shown in the artwork seem to disclose the World of the peasant. In the work of art that shows the pair of shoes shows that, “This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman”. So, the artwork reveals that the shoes “belong to the earth” and “is protected by the world”. But how can shoes belong, as though they are properly owned, by the earth. Heidegger says that the peasant woman does not think about how world or, indeed, the earth, she simply wears her shoes and walks around without giving them another thought. What is revealed in the woman’s relationship with the shoes is that the “equipmentality” of equipment and that is reliability. As long as the peasant’s shoes function as shoes, as long as she mindlessly slips them on every morning and goes about her farming day then she is “privy to the silent call of the earth” and “sure of her world”. Equipment is central to her way of being in that as long as it is reliable then “World and earth exist for her”. So far in this account there has not been a lot of progress made towards understanding what Heidegger meant by “earth” or indeed “world” but Heidegger claims that something has indeed been discovered. It was the artwork that allowed us to understand the essence of equipment is reliability. It is, Heidegger claims, that the artwork achieves this revelation that the art “works”. Heidegger claims, “The artwork lets us know what shoes are in truth”. (Heidegger 1993: 161) Truth, in this sense, that is the work of art, is like aletheia, the Greek word that is often simply translated as “truth”, which actually means “unconcealment” or “the disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is”. The work of art grants things a “presence”, allows the thing to “stand” as the thing that it is. Heidegger wants to emphasise that truth happens in the work of art not because it is an accurate copy of something in existence. It is not true because it closely resembles the thing that is being represented. To make his point, he draws on the Greek temple which, as a work of art, also grants something a presence, allows something to stand. What the temple allows to stand is the god represented within. As Heidegger wrote, The building encloses the figure of the god, and in this concealment lets it stand out into the holy precinct through the open portico. . . The presence of the god is in itself the extension and delimitation of the precinct as a holy precinct. . . It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. (Heidegger 1993: 167)

529 The building in housing the god not only limits spaces, limits things as what they are including the holy precinct, but it grants people direction and meaning in their lives. Heidegger claims that “tree and grass, eagle and bull, snake and cricket first enter into their distinctive shapes and thus come to appear as what they are” because of the work of art. What is a disaster, what it means to be a blessing, what is a disgrace are all giving limit, all come forward as what they are because of the temple as a work of art. The work of art does not only allow a world, setting limits so that the meaningful is possible, but also allows the earth to be the earth. Although World is also important here, but the “work” of art allows the earth to be earth. Earth here, according to Heidegger, is the “raging storm” that “manifests itself in its violence” and the “lustre and gleam of the stone”, the “breadth of the sky and the darkness of the night”. Earth is the grassiness of grass, the rockiness of rocks, the weightiness of metal, the squeakiness of bed springs. As Heidegger would write in a later work, Building Dwelling Thinking, “Earth is the serving bearer, blossoming and fruiting, spreading out in rock and water, rising up into plant and animal.” (Heidegger 1993: 351) Earth is a unity; it is a continuum that is in continuous turbulent flux. Rising up here, falling back there. Heidegger explicitly associates “earth” with what the Greeks equated with Nature or physis. This is Nature, distinguished by capitalization, not in the sense of the environment that can be understood as “natural”, in terms of being unaffected by humanity, but Nature as that which is prior to Man’s conscious experience of individuated things. This is Nature as that which is prior to the meaningful. Prior to the Divine limits. Matter, at least for Aristotle, who presents the most influential account of matter in his Physis, is that from which all form has been expunged. The resulted “thing”, traditionally called “prime matter”, which is equivalent to the Earth, is understood to be “nothing” in terms of it no longer being a true thing. Importantly, for Aristotle, as it seems to have been for Plato in his own way, in founding the Western tradition, he concludes that “essence” is the true “substance” of a thing and a things essence, that what it is, is found when through “a definition” as “an account (logos)”. Aristotle unequivocally rejects “matter” as being adequate for things substance, but a things substance is its essence which is revealed, known or made explicit, through logos which functions in the same mode as Heidegger work of art. Earth is that which brings body to form. The important point about the way Gnostic Jews think about this primordial “ground” is that it is granted primacy over world. In doing this reversal, in prioritising physis, the mystical tradition of gnosticism can be understood as reversing the Western philosophical tradition which has always prioritized “forms” or “essences” which are accessed through logos over “Earth” or “matter”. As a kabbalist said in regard to the philosophical tradition with which they were extremely familiar and indeed hoped to overcome, “Our feet are where their head is”. (as seen in Ben-Shlomo 1985: 29) The kabbalist is

530 saying that where the philosophers begin is where we end, whereas where their end is our beginning. One cannot help but to think of Marx’s famous claim that he “stood Hegel on his head”. As Marx wrote, The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. (Marx & Engels 1970: 47) Here we can see how Gnostic ideas have invaded Western culture in various forms through various means only one of which was Marxism and, more recently, cultural Marxism. Marx is saying that ideas, consciousness, arose from human interaction with the material conditions of production he understands in terms of “real life”. Although ideas may appear as the engine of change, as though we think things through and then behave accordingly as the Western tradition has argued at least since Plato, it is actually the material conditions that change and human involvement in those material conditions then shape the way we think. To look at the world as the philosophers do is to look at the world up-side down, as though looking through a camera obscura. Marx’s project, perfectly consistent with Gnostic Judaism, is to have humanity recognise the priority of the material over the intellectual and the rational. It is that Marxism resonated with Gnostic Judaism that Jaff Schatz could write, “Had not the Marxist ethos strongly corresponded to the essential core of their [Jew’s] heritage, it would never have succeeded in attracting such a large and intense following [amongst Jews]”. (Schatz 1991: 51) As Robert Wolfe also asserts, “Understanding Jewish radicalism as a movement means understanding it as an expression of Jewishness.” The way the immanent expression of God is accessed is not, as would be expected, through logos, as the highest expression of God, the Father, the good, the beautiful and the true, as found in Christianity, but through humanity’s most powerful and irrational emotions. Abulafia, thought to have been influenced by the Gnostic Sufi tradition, wrote in the 13th century in his Sefer ʾOr ha-Sekhel that “. . .the letter is like matter, and the vocalization is like spirit, which moves the matter, and the apprehension of the intention of the one moved and of the mover, is like the intellect; and it is that which acts in spirit and matter, while the delight received by the one who apprehends, constitutes the telos”. (Abulafia as seen in Idel 2008:

531 126) Although this appears a fairly innocuous statement, Abulafia is actually performing a revolution to Aristotelian philosophy. Abulafia is arguing, according to Idel, that it is delight, joy, which has erotic connotations, (Idel 2008: 126) that is the telos of thought and not, as Aristotle argues, the apprehension of the divine that might guide one to lead a morally good life. Many Gnostic Jews argue that it is through taking hallucinogens or highly emotive frenzied dancing, like the dervishes, or, most commonly, sexual arousal in the orgy, that grants access to the Shekinah. Revolution in Marx’s schema is not a rational necessity, as that which is reasonably required to move from one social arrangement to the next, it is that revolution relies on a moment of high group emotions, and strong passions, a time, as history shows, when collectives of people will do the most hideous of acts, and it was under such conditions that humanity united with the Shechinah. It is in this way that the gnostic and Marxist traditions are indeed intimate. In the Gnostic tradition, as Philo argued centuries before, it is matter or earth, as the vital expression of God, that is active and in which humanity primarily interacts. Not in the Christian God, not in Jesus Christ, logos, but in the material conditions, the Shechinah. This exchange between mortals and earth is what shapes human consciousness, in a sense, behind their backs. “World”, as already explained, is the meaningful aspect in terms of experiencing particular things that together, as a totality, constitute a “world”. So, World and Earth stand in opposition in terms of Earth being the meaningless continuous void upon which a World emerges. Earth is, from both Gnostic and Christian traditions, prior to World. This prior oneness is pure potential, the unknown and unknowable, in that it has not yet become any-thing. Jonas claims that this understanding of “Earth” was one that involved understanding it as “alive”, as self-motivated, which, “. . . is more cognate to the human mind and more familiar to the basic experience of man” that the Western scientific view. (Jonas as seen in Lazier 2003: 633) This view is found, to my mind, in the thinking of somebody like Marx and other materialists who think of the pre-cognitive being dynamic and determining the cognitive. As Lipszyc claims of tzimtzum but what would more correctly apply to the Shechinah. This thinking, . . .implies a radical materialism; such materialism escapes Platonism as well as naturalism, both of which imply the belief in a stable structure of the world, which can be immanently known – and thus both can be seen as forms of idealism, self-conscious and inadvertent, respectively; radical materialism is to be understood less in terms the ultimate substance of the world – although matter does matter – and more in terms of the anti-idealist belief in the essential non-self-identity of all things. . . (2021: 194) What this tradition posits is a purposiveness to Nature, or material, that has been questioned by the scientific world from at least the time of Bacon. Even Kant was unequivocal when he asserted against any teleological destiny for Nature, “How can anyone presume to speak of a destiny of the earth? . . . Mankind

532 must be able to stand without leaning on anything like that . . .” The idea that “earth” is moving intentionally towards something, the God of the Underworld, is central to Gnostic teachings because it cast the cognitive, the substantively rational, as being at least derived but, more importantly and more dangerously, oppressive. Jonas believed that the Holocaust had brought an end to the Baconian project of controlling nature. He believed that a new era had come, the era that would be dominated by the “hidden God” where “mortals” will live comfortably in a “mysterious world”. As Lazier (2009: 25) observes, Jonas believed that “after Auschwitz must come neither Jerusalem nor Israel, but Earth”. That is, after the Holocaust, after the sacrifice of so many, the goddess of earth, it might be claimed the receiver of the living sacrifices, would now be the primary God. He was, of course, perfectly correct. This account of a Father and Mother God has ancient roots. According to the oldest “Jewish” documents ever discovered, dating from between 495 BC to 399 BC, Jews at that time continued to be “polytheistic”. The documents, written on Egyptian papyri, were written by a group of Jews who were stationed by the Persians to protect their Egyptian border. At that time, the Jews worked for the dominant Persians to suppress the Egyptian people. These Jews were assigned to a fortress on the Elephantine and Aswan. These documents are incredible because they show no evidence of any kind of the Jewish tradition that we would recognise today. There is no talk of Torah and no reference to Moses, indeed, there is very little that is identifiably “Jewish”. As Arthur Crowley wrote, So far as we learn from these texts Moses might never have existed, there might have been no bondage in Egypt, no exodus, no monarchy, no prophets. There is no mention of other tribes and no claim to any heritage in the land of Judah. Among the numerous names of colonists, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Samuel, David, so common in later times, never occur (nor in Nehemiah), nor any other name derived from their past history as recorded in the Pentateuch and early literature. It is almost incredible, but it is true. (Crowley 2006) Not only are all the usual markers of Judaism absent but the community was asking their Persian overlords for help rebuilding a temple that had been destroyed by the local inhabitants who seemed to resent their presence. Despite many of the usually features of Judaism being absent, one thing that these text do talk about is Anat-Yahu in terms of both being his “wife” and as the hypostatized or “inner” aspect of Yahweh. One of the papyri says, “Even in exile and beyond, the veneration of a female deity endured.” Anat is a well-known north-Western Semitic goddess who was depicted with all the usual features of such a goddess. She was goddess of war and peace who was both highly sexualized and a virgin. In battle Anat is portrayed in the Ba’al Cycle as wading knee deep in blood and striking off the heads of those who opposed her.

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The Knesset Israel As already claimed, God, Heaven and Mortals can be united only because they already share something in common and that common feature is the Shechinah. The Jewish people have a special role, according to Gnostic Judaism, in the redemptive process. It is in trying to fulfill this special role that Gnostic Jews are so overrepresented in positions of wealth, power, and prestige in the United States and why, especially after the contribution of Sabbateanism, Jews have supported each other so determinately. The key idea for understanding the special relationship between Jews and the Tree of Life, which is central to human redemption, there first needs to be an account of Knesset Israel. To quickly dispense with what might cause some confusion, the Knesset Israel is very different from the Israeli Knesset although one idea obviously has played some role in inspiring the other. The Israeli Knesset is simply the legislative branch of the Israeli government that is like the combined Lower and Upper Houses of Parliament in the Westminster system. It is a unicameral house of government to which sitting members are elected who can then form government and elect the Prime Minister. The Knesset Israel, in the Gnostic Jewish tradition, is something very different indeed. The Shechinah, that can be brought into the world through human agency, is, as already observed, translated as “in-dwelling”. This “in-dwelling” is to live first intimately with Nature and, therefore, with God. Neumann writes of the Shechinah as, The Great Earth Mother who brings forth all life from herself is eminently the mother of all vegetation. The fertility rituals and myths of the whole world are based upon this archetypal context. The centre of this vegetative symbolism is the tree. As fruit-bearing tree of life which is female: it bears, transforms, nourishes; its leaves, branches, twigs are “contained” in it and dependent on it. (Neumann 1991: 48-49) So, there are a number of ideas being brought together in the Shechinah. She represents, as already expressed, the fertility of earth, the rising up of natural growth in vegetation or the warmth of the rock lying out in the sun or the cold weight of metal having laid out in the moist darkness of the night. Such a goddess has ancient roots. There was found a small statuette called the Lady of Lemba that is thought to represent a fertility goddess. This statuette is thought to be over 5000 years old.

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As can be seen, she is an extremely shapely, “full” woman who represents the fullness of fertile “Nature”. Interestingly though, her head appears to form the shape of a penis and, in this context, her “breasts” become like a pair of testicles. She is the personification of both males and female reproductive organs. She is the embodiment of reproduction. She is the well spring, like the Greek goddess Venus, of earthly life. It is this association with life that the Shechinah is also associated with the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew creation myth. The Shechinah is the Knesset Israel, the collective soul of the people of Israel, and these two concepts become a single symbol as shown by the tenth Sefira, which is both the Shechinah and the Knesset Israel. “The Shekinah becomes the symbolic participation of part of the divinity itself in the historical process by means of the people of Israel, and on the other hand the historical people of Israel receive a metaphysical status as a symbol of one of the divine forces – the tenth Sefira.” This “indwelling” was historically associated with the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. Before the destruction of the Temple, “. . .the Shechinah of the divine Majesty was in the Holy of Holies. . .” (Elimelekh of Lizensk as seen in Sherwin 1997: 105) This was God brought into the world and should be understood simply as the dwelling of an elements of God amongst the Jewish people. It is as though the spirit of God is another subject walking amongst the Jewish people but is understood in the Gnostic tradition as both the personification of the immanent aspect of God as Earth and the soul of the Jewish people as a whole or the Knesset Israel. The Shechinah is understood to have lost her place of dwelling, in the Holy of Holies in the Temple, and entered into exile with the Jewish people when the Temple was destroyed. That the Jewish parliament is called the Knesset, the Shechinah, is simply further evidence of how the mystical Jewish tradition has shaped Zionism and, through that movement, contemporary Israel. In kabbalah, the Knesset Israel is thought in terms of being like the “Mother” of Jewish individuals. They speak of the Father

535 God and the Mother Knesset Israel/Shechinah parenting together Jewish individuals who become conceptualised as “the son”. As the son, all Jewish people are potentially a messiah in terms of seeking to realize redemption. It is believed that when a Jewish person reaches a certain level of knowledge and understanding then the Shechinah finds her abode in that individual. As Elimelekh of Lizensk (as seen in Sherwin 1997: 105) wrote, “. . .if the Shekhinah should find a place to rest, a clear place, a person (but only a person cleansed of sin and transgression) is the place where the Shechinah (God’s presence) will rest.” In this way, the Knesset Israel is akin to the “spirit” of the Jews, that which holds them together, which some have thought was the precursor to the Christian notion of Holy Ghost as the third aspect of the Trinity that infuses all Christians with the experience of God. Also, as already mentioned, Jesus associates himself with the Temple and as the “son of God” as the messiah because he was without sin, he was the perfect human and, as such, the site in which God enters the world, the messiah. Interestingly, this feminine spirit is also understood to be the consort of God. This is a portrayal wrapped in traditional gendered thinking. God in Heaven is masculine, and he is in a familial relationship with all Jewish people. This triune relationship, heaven, earth and mortals, is portrayed in familial terms where, in the Gnostic tradition as already advanced by Philo, the earthly, the feminine “mother” is granted primacy, in terms of primordiality, the material and the emotional, in relation to humanity, over heaven, which is the masculine, rational expression of God. As Gershom Scholem writes, “In the allegorical reading of the Song of Song, Knesset Israel is thought of as being married to God, and it assumes the undeniable characteristics of a female figure.” (1997: 146) Heaven is the masculine expression and this understanding has been maintained in the Christian tradition as Kreeft writes from a Catholic perspective, “He is the Wooer, and we the wooed; He is the Impregnator, and we are the impregnated; He is the Bridegroom; we are the bride. . . That is why God is always “He” and never a “She” in the Bible.” (Kreeft 2007: 40-41) Here the “we”, the soul of people, known in the Jewish tradition as Knesset Israel, is being allegorically referred to as a wife and ultimately mother who is impregnated by the heavenly God, the Father or ideals. That is, “matter”, to employ this vocabulary, is an arche prior to “form” in time and in importance. Matter, potential, may, in the future, become formed by God but until that day, anything that is, is an abomination. Matter, it should be remembered, is the Underworld, the darkness, the chaotic. The domain of human emotions like lust and violence. It is for this reason that she is personified in terms of a bloodthirsty warrior who uses her sexuality to achieve her ends, the Shechinah also goes by the names Anat and Astarte depending on the particular Semitic tradition. She is the Queen of Heaven, the consort of the male aspect of God but, as told in numerous myths, currently inhabits the Underworld in her dark crypt until she can be released into the world. Of course, these are mythical accounts, of course,

536 allegorically revealing theo-ontological understandings of the cosmology and the purpose for humanity. The Shechinah or the Knesset Israel is understood to be the mother of each individual Jewish man who then becomes understood as the Son of God. It is in this way that these various ideas, in-dwelling, the female spirit of God, and the Tree of Life are all united in the Gnostic Jewish tradition so that the Shechinah is God’s potential presence in the world, God’s dwelling, among the people of Israel and the soul of the Jewish people. As Goldstein et., al., observe, “The soul [of a member] of the house of Israel emerges from the trunk of the tree, and thence the souls fly into this earth, into the recesses of her womb.” (as seen in Goldstein etc.: 679) Some insight into what the Shechinah means in the Gnostic Jewish tradition can be gleaned through the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart and his account of what he calls “grunt” in German or, in English, “ground”. The “ground” is one of the central themes in Eckhart’s theological teachings and it is certainly at least that important to Gnostic Judaism. The German term grunt has a broader, you might say richer, meaning than the word ground in English. As McGinn observes, Grunt can, first of all, be understood as physical ground, that is, the earth. Grunt can also mean the bottom of lowest side of a body, surface or structure. Abstractly, grunt is employed to indicate the origin, cause, beginning, or proof of something. Finally, grunt is employed as what is inmost, hidden, most proper to a being – that is, its essence. (McGinn 2001: 39) All of these meanings were important for Eckhart’s account of “grunt” and certainly resonates with Gnostic Judaism’s account of the Shechinah. The Shechinah is the underside of God, in a way, in terms of the physical expression of God. The Shechinah is also the origin, more primordial in their theology than heaven. It is hidden but also most proper to being, it is things, including humanity’s “true being”. In Eckhart’s account the ground of the human soul and the ground of God are the same ground. As Eckhart unequivocally says, “God’s ground and the soul’s ground is one ground.” The Shechinah functions in the same way. It is both the soul of the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people not gentiles, and the ground of God, in contrast to heaven. In Eckhart’s mysticism, it describes the essence of reality itself. The ground is called the Abyss and it is the essence not only of reality but also of God. Everything, God, reality and humanity all emanate from the ground in the same manner as the Gnostic Jews see all things emanating from the Shechinah. By moving beyond the cosmos, by destroying the cosmos, one penetrates into the shared foundations of the Shechinah and there encountering God, Nature and true Humanity while, at the same time, transcending all these distinctions.

537 This allegorical cosmology can be seen recounted in the story of the Garden of Eden as told in Genesis 1 and 2. The Garden of Eden is humanity’s animal condition, the Golden Age, when humanity lived in perfect harmony with Nature and God. In living in harmony, Man lived according to natural laws just like any other creature. And just like any other creature knew nothing of morality. The only restriction place on humanity by God was that humanity was not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because if humanity did eat from this tree, then God told them that they would die. Of course, humanity did eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The knowledge acquired from eating from this tree is not knowledge of God, it is not knowledge of ultimate Good and Evil but merely knowledge of human good and evil, what might be called mere opinion in the Greek philosophical tradition or what we would call “tradition” today. This experience expels humanity from living in harmony with God and nature and instead living according to merely human judgement, living not by the light of the Sun but by the light of an artificial fire. This experience initially motivates humanity to aspire from clothing to cover their shame but to then go on and build worlds, worlds full of shame and anger but also worlds filled with great Cathedrals and the most brilliant works for art. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil humanity must also work for what they want, they now must labour, unlike any other animal, and now, of course, can die. They can die only in a way that humans can, in terms of death being an anticipated event in their future. Human death and human existence are bound together where the anticipation of death is the conditions for human being. What is different between the Christian and Jewish conceptualization is because God is distant, withdrawn, the relationship is never conceptualized as “consummated” or “intimate”, as Gershom Scholem wrote, “The abyss between the bride and the bridegroom is never bridged, and any sexual imagery that might suggest otherwise is meticulously avoided.” (Scholem 1997: 146) The relevance of introducing the concept of Knesset Israel here is that the collective actions of the Jewish people are cast in terms of a woman and, in the Jewish tradition, that means that God is being cast as the moral agent who must control, through punishment and rewards, his often-wayward young bride. This is the exact relationship that is found in the Tanakh between God and His people. God chastises, coerces, “woos”, the Jewish people, trying to keep them respectable, trying to stop them from going astray, trying to keep them faithful for their own good. To use sex, which as will be discussed, is central idea to the Gnostic Jews and their political program, as an example. Naturally, humans enjoy sex. Sex brings us happiness. Instead, our world has historically demonized sex, constrained its importance and practice. Sent what should be central to our lives to the margins while bringing what is marginal to the centre. Men should show off their sexuality, tight shirts to show off their chests and tight trousers to

538 accentuate their endowments. Women should wear clothes that show off their breast and their thin waists. Men and women should pursue guilt free, commitment free, sex, what some call “free love”, at every opportunity because this is the way we are, they argue, ‘Naturally”. After all, why not. God made us as highly sexual beings and why should we deny God’s plans? By removing the historical “moral” restraints on sexuality, we move onto the lowest rung of the Tree of Life. The more we access the Tree of Life, the more Godlike, in terms of the Shechinah, that we ourselves become. We come to realize that the reality we live in is nothing but a human construct that is destroying our true selves by demonizing who we really are. By moving back to our natural condition, we start our path of redemption which is also characterised as Jacob’s Ladder. The lowest rung is the Shechinah, but if we live according to our natural drives, without the constraints of “civility”, then we have automatically moved onto the next rung and come to know the Father. That is, our morality, instead of destroying us, affirms life, affirms who we really are. Father and Mother are united, and, with this union, the world is redeemed. The name of Yahweh is combined. This is the basic theo-political project of Gnostic Judaism. As the collective expression of the Jewish people is personified allegorically as the “wife” of God, this suggests two related obligation of the Jewish people towards God. Firstly, the Knesset Israel is synonymous with the Shechinah, the female expression of God, the final Sefirot, who is also understood as God’s wife. That is, the Shechinah and Knesset Israel are not related or interrelated but identical. The Shechinah is the chaotic, wild, emotional and Earthly, that which is to live within nature unconstrained by civilizational expectations. As the Knesset Israel, they are to embrace this identity collectively, they are the Dionysian. Secondly, Jews are required, as a religious obligation, to help others of the Knesset Israel to achieve wealth and success. This has meant that Jews learnt to “love themselves as a matter of faith” (Slezkine 2004: 52). In the kabbalah tradition, neither the people of the world nor God can be redeemed until all Jews are so wealthy that they no longer need to work. That is, they can live their entire lives in the service of God. By identifying as the Knesset Israel, the community of Jews, this forms a strong form of identity where others are treated strictly as outsiders while those included within are supported unconditionally. As respected Jewish author and intellectual Bloom observes, “In the same way as the God of the Hebrews has separated himself from “other gods”, so, by its daily behaviour, must the holy people separate itself from the other nations surrounding it.” (Bloom 1998: 106) Although this attitude is alien to the Western ideas derived from community, which like other Indo-European people order society in terms of caste or “class”, this is a strong tribal relationship. A Jew, as a Jew, is conceptualized, as the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary states, in terms of being “one of the tribes of Judah; hence, any person of the Hebrew people . . .” The Knesset Israel is an umbrella over the tribe of Israel, the female spirit overseeing

539 Her people. Serving the Knesset Israel, serving the Jewish people collectively, takes on a religious tone unfamiliar to Western cultures. Frighteningly, because helping other Jews is a task relatable to God, some Jews believe that anything can be done in the service of Jews. This would include lying, threats and yes, perhaps as September 11 evinces, even murder. These actions against non-Jews are not even immoral because serving other Jews is intimate to serving God. In the same way that a man would help the wife and children of an absent neighbour, so are all Jews obliged, drawing on the same sentiment, to help the Knesset Israel and Jews. God is away, for now, and it is only for other Jews to ensure the well-being of his wife and children. Again, as Silverman honestly wrote, “If a Jew is up for a job against a non-Jew, and the one doing the hiring is Jewish, guess who gets the job?” This is a very different sentiment to the direction Western civilization took beginning in the marble statue lined streets of Ancient Athens. Nietzsche explores individuation in contrast to the tribal identity in his first published book, The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche sees individuation as springing from the same Apollonian force as all Socratic inspired objective truth is grounded. The Apollonian aspect that realizes the dawn of the Axial Age, is an expression of the same Socratic metaphysical commitments that permit an encounter with objectification as such. In the Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche contrasts this Apollonian view to the more undifferentiated expression found under the sway of the God of chaos, Dionysus. The Dionysian, according to Nietzsche, overcomes the ecstatic condition of Man and returns Him to the primordial unity of Nature where the barriers between man and man and man and nature are undone. The Dionysian, as would be expected, shares many of the same features as the dominion of the Shechinah and is often characterised as the “male” expression of the erotic Goddess of Earth. As In Dionysism, Eros becomes “sacred frenzy,” mystic orgiasm: it is the highest possibility inherent in this direction and it is aimed at undoing the bonds of matter and at producing a transfiguration through frenzy, excess and ecstasis . . . Dionysus was also represented as a demon of the infernal regions, and was often associated with the principle of water . . . The ecstatic and pantheistic orientation associated with the sexual element, predominates in the Mystery of the “sacred orgy”; frenzied contacts with the occult forces of the earth and maenadic and pandemic liberations occur in a domain that is simultaneously that of unrestrained sex, night and death. (Evola 1995(1934): 223-224) The rituals in homage to Dionysius involved intoxicants and trance-inducing techniques, like those practiced in tribal societies around the world, especially frenzied dancing, which was practiced by the Hasidic Jewish tradition when it was thought that ecstatic dancing that was aimed at losing themselves in order to find God, (Sherwin 1997: 3) in accompaniment to hypnotic music. If one were to look at the nightclubs of our own age, with their promotion of mind-altering drugs, structureless frenzied dancing and trance inducing repetitive rhythmic music, then our contemporary return to the Dionysian as an

540 expression of the current dominance of Gnosticism becomes evident. As with the contemporary environment of Western night clubs, so were Dionysian rituals trying to remove the participant from the civilizing formalities of modernity, the “cultured”, and, as with the identification of the Knesset Israel with the Shechinah, overcome the individuating objectifying forces of the metaphysical and return the participants to their natural, primitive state where they find a kind of union with other participants and, ultimately, nature. Harmonious with the aspiration to overcome civilization that manifests the individual as such, just like the Shechinah, Dionysius was a chthonic god, dwelling in the darkness of the Underworld, the pre-World, the state of chaotic Nature. According to Nietzsche, both the Apollonian, individuation and the morality associated with the ecstatic condition of human being, and the Dionysian, the return to the primordial chaos, were potentials of the human condition and both find expression in the performance of tragedy in ancient Greece. The Dionysian finds expression in the Greek chorus, which is a group of nonindividualized performers singing collectively commenting on the dramatic action. As Nietzsche said of the Greek chorus, “. . .in the dithyramb we have a community of unconscious actors, who mutually regard themselves as transformed among one another.” They are transformed from individual morally responsible agents into the impassioned mob, the mob of protest, the mob of chaos, the mob of revolution. The chorus would narrate events and even elaborate on what the character was feeling. These were all shared expressions, what everyone would feel in such circumstances, in contrast to the individual desires and aspirations of the individual actor. This is the Knesset Israel, the collective spirit which reflects Natural values, Natural law and, what is perhaps tragic itself, Natural justice. We as individuals may scheme and desire all kinds of things, we may will to rule the Kingdom or get revenge on our enemies but, as the chorus shows, there are forces beyond the individual that dwarfs his efforts. It is the Dionysian itself, the primordial unity of man with man and man with nature, that offers humanity a form of redemption, the same redemption Gnostic Jews seek, the tragedy of Adam and Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden. Christian redemption, Apollonian redemption, is to reunite with God potentially uniting heaven and earth by seeking goodness, truth and beauty. Christianity asks us to constrain our base desires but to realize a higher good, brotherly love not sex, self-effacing humbleness not self-aggrandising boasting, rich in friendship and truth, not in material goods that result from greed. From the 5 th century BC, the role of the chorus declined. This was manifested in increased separation between the dramatic action and the chorus. There was increased attention paid by the spectators on character development and improvement requiring the chorus to play less of a role. This shifting of emphasis happened over many years, but it marks the shift to the Axial Age, when morality, associated with the individual, was

541 thought to play more of an important role in our lives than Nature. This shift in sentiment was no small matter, infused with the Apollonian, the Greek armies of Alexander the Great would conquer the world.

What Tribalism Means It is this understanding of the Knesset Israel as being the spirit of their God that they share with the Father explains why Jews are so “tribal” and why they have such little respect for others. The reason for this disdain of those who are not Jews, literally understood as the “unclean”, a disdain for others acknowledged before the time of Christ, is that they believe that as members of the Knesset Israel they are the “chosen of God”. As Slezkine observes, Jews “preserve . . . collective identity in an unclean world”. (2004: 53) This sense of chosenness or exceptionalism informs everything that Jews do in the world. From the very beginning of the West coming into contact with Jews this tribalism has been noted. Tacitus, a Roman historian of the first century AD observed that, The Jews are extremely loyal towards one another, and always ready to show compassion, but towards every other people they feel only hate and enmity. They sit apart at meals and sleep apart, and although as a race they are prone to lust, they abstain from intercourse with foreign women. (Tacitus as cited in Moshe 2008: 1) The difference between Jewish thinking and Western thinking on this matter is that Jews emphasise the collective identity, the Knesset Israel, the Shechinah, above the individual whereas the Western tradition, more so since the advent of Christianity, sees individuals as being the locus of responsibility and therefore in some senses prior to the collective identity, the community. Whereas Jews believe, as being the children of the Shechinah, that the individual is derived from the tribe and therefore it is the tribe, the spirit of God, that is responsible for individuals’ actions, the Christian tradition believes that the individual is the proper locus of moral responsibility. In the Western tradition the individual should aspire towards excellence in all areas, moral and productive, because that moves them closer to their experience of the divine. The Eastern tradition, by contrast, sees progress as not a movement towards excellence and truth but towards the true Nothingness of reality. This difference can be seen throughout the different worldviews of Jews and Christians. This difference in emphasis, this difference in priority, is no small matter but goes to the heart of a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western thinking. When a person, for example, does a crime in the Western tradition, they prosecute, not the ‘tribe’, not the ‘family’ but the individual. Indeed, to hold others responsible for the actions of an individual, collective punishment, has historically been thought to be immoral in the Western tradition. This idea has ancient roots in the West. The ancient Romans thought of the state as res publica, literally “the public affair”, which was thought to be an

542 agglomeration of individuals who come together to realise the common good. (Goodman 2007: 32%) Social contract theories that justify certain social and economic relationships are premised on the primacy of the individual who then enters into a social arrangement. Jews, by contrast, will place less emphasis on individual responsibility and understand the primary identifier as the tribe or the aggregate from which a person comes. It was Jewish thinkers, like Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel who, at the turn of the 20 th century, reoriented social research, in the shadow of Karl Marx, to prioritize the aggregate. Freud wrote about “mass” or “group” psychology in books such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. This book alone was an extremely influential volume and would be taken up by the Frankfurt School of critical theorists as the foundational text in their considerations on the authoritarian personality. As Jonsson (2013: 55) observes, “From a historical perspective, however, there is no doubt that Freud’s book crossed a threshold, as it presented a theory that shed light on all the new ways in which masses and collectives were represented and analysed in interwar European culture.” Freud believed that “individuality” was not the free expression of a moral agents, an account reliant on Christian theological foundations, but that the individual was the result of repression and inhibition of the primordial instinctual internal drives, most particularly sex, and that this repression ultimately manifested itself in neurosis. As none other than that loyal student of Freud clarifies, The basic structure of psychoanalytic theory is the theory of instincts. Of this, the most solidly founded part is the theory of the libido – the doctrine of the dynamics of the sexual instinct. The instinct is a “borderline concept between the psychic and the somatic”. By the term “libido” Freud understands the energy of the sexual instinct. (Fromm 1972: 1415) It is human instincts, or what they understand to be “natural”, that should be prioritised and valued in the Gnostic Jewish tradition. This is what is meant when Gnostics like Benjamin say that civilization is barbarity, as outlined in the introduction, they are claiming that civilization functions as the instrument of oppression and that it is, therefore, barbarity. It is the idea that “we”, as individuals, never “see” a “world” but the patriarchal, Christian, authoritarian society inhabits or colonizes “us” as an act of power and that is consciousness. Freud’s target, for theological reasons, in is work, was those who argued the individual could exist outside of the social context into which he was born. It was not just a moral argument that society shaped individuality but out of necessity. The German Jew Georg Simmel, at the same time, also argued that the collective was the most important level of analysis because it was most primarily responsible for forming subjectivities. (Jonsson 2013: 55) There is an important theological component to this disagreement. Christian societies do not argue that the individual appears, ex nihilo, but that the individual is individuated as a human individual through their relationship with God. It is that humans have

543 a conscience that grants primacy to the individual in the Western Christian tradition. The Western tradition never prioritized the “social” or the “collective”, as Parmenides and Plato’s work verifies, but wisdom as informed by divine nous. This is the real target, if you like, of the Gnostic Jews, they are implicitly arguing that people do not get their moral compass from an experience of God or an experience of the good but are exhaustively shaped by the social context, by power, in which people live. As an academic said to me as an undergraduate probably without realizing how literal her statement was, “context is everything”. This goes against the Western tradition that up until that time, and for some time afterwards in the work of Martin Heidegger, the individual was the site of “responsibility, rationality, consciousness, creativity and identity”. (Jonsson 2013: 56) Power might be contrasted to claims of living in Jesus Christ. The “masses” from the Western perspective was the point when differentiation broke down and was usually cast by sociologist up until World War II as something problematic a place devoid of thought. It is the Gnostic emphasis on how individuals are shaped by the society in which they live that primarily informs our understanding of the world today rather than how individual decisions shape a person’s life. This way of thinking about group psychology and how it shapes individuals was centrally important for shaping the research of a generation of social theorists including Theodor Adorno, Hermann Broch, Elias Canetti, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Robert Musil, Wilhelm Reich and Arnold Zweig. (Jonsson 2013 55) They all worked on the premise that it is people’s tribal identity that both explains behaviour and allows for the allocation of responsibility. Of course, these ideas do not originate with Freud but are simply expression of his Gnostic heritage. Goodman observes that nowhere, for example, in the Tanach, is the concept of “individual freedom” expressed or valued. (2007: 32%) It is important to note the links between this way of understanding the world with deeper ontological commitments that differentiate East and West. Philosophically, it is this difference in emphasis that has informed a fairly recent movement from the historical importance of, what LeRon Shults calls, “substance” to “relationality” or the claim that individual things are not constituted through their substance but only exist in relation to other things. The Christian tradition focuses on individuals, things and people, they are what is called today, “essentialists” because they argue that things are good or evil. The Eastern tradition, in contrast, focuses on context so things are not, in themselves, “good” or “evil” but merely cast that way in particular contexts. This difference can be seen in regard to the discussions around pornography. Jewish academics Goode and Ben-Yehuda argue, Lurid, titillating, shocking, offensive, disgusting, degrading, immoral, oppressive, violent – some observers have used these and even stronger adjectives to describe pornography. As we might infer from this list, most of these adjectives harbor condemnation rather than a description of porn. And most definitions are not only negative, they are essentialistic:

544 They spell out an abstract quality that presumably pornography possesses. Such a definition refers to a specific, objective quality that dwells within its core, its very essence or inner being. It is what it is: there is no room for disagreement. (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009: 218) But an essentialist account would mean that pornography is good or evil. By contrast, the Gnostic Jewish tradition want to cast pornography as “good” as it helps liberate the oppressed libido so they “deessentialize” it, to make in relative judgement or a social construct. Jewish American sex therapist, Marty Klein (2016), claims that concern about online sex is just an example of “moral panic”, which terms “pornpanic”, and there is really nothing to be concern about. Gnostic Jews believe that reality is how it is used, how things are contextualized, not what a thing is. For a thing to exist, one way or another, there must be an experience of God and, of course, that does not exist in Gnostic Judaism or in an Eastern tradition like Buddhism. Context, from an Eastern perspective generally, is everything. As Goode and BenYehuda go on to write, Definitions are neither wrong nor right; they are useful for a purpose but may not be useful for another, different, purpose. Objectivist definitions rely on the assumption that all of us can locate the designated intrinsic quality within a given phenomenon, whether that quality within a given phenomenon, whether that quality is violence, sexual coercion, sexism, or “smut”. . . What purports to be an objectivistic definition turns out to be very subjective indeed. (Goode and Ben-Yehuda 2009: 218) What Goode and Ben-Yehuda are arguing is that judgements are at work when we define something, judgements of a things worth. As there is no experience of God then all that is left is a “subjective” judgment which, in the Gnostic tradition, is evil. They are evil if they do not serve a purpose. The Eastern tradition general, and Gnostic Judaism in particular, define things by not what they are but by what they do, according to their function. This difference, of course, has significant real-world implications. To remain on the topic of pornography, prior to 1957, obscene material was defined as material that tended to “deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”. The moral worth of the material was central to understanding if it obscene or not. In 1957, an American Jewish pornographer originally from Eastern Europe, Samuel Roth254, fell afoul of the law when he sold erotic and pornographic material through the mail. The case went to the Supreme Court where the standard of obscenity was changed from an objective criteria, material being immoral, to a relative standard, if it was offensive to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards”. By defining something in terms of being “immoral” attributes features to the thing itself. In contrast, “community standards” are just what

254

Roth is believed to have been responsible for publishing the first “men’s magazine” in the United States named Beau.

545 people are considered as judging at any one time in history. The Western Protestant tradition is captured in Justice Potter Stewarts famous “definition” of “hard-core pornography”, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand [as hard-core pornography] . . . But I know it when I see it . . .” Experience is primary, in the Protestant tradition visual experience, as it is the “Father” who is “seen”, the divine nous. Potter did not say that he could not define hard-core porn, and this would be the domain of Jesus, logos, the word made flesh. This difference in perspective from Western Christianity to Eastern Gnostic Jewry can be seen in the work of Karl Marx. It is not that the individual constitutes the society but that the society constitutes the individual. The implication of this difference in perspective, as already suggested, is immense. What is captured in this account is the difference between what is incorrectly characterised as a progressive vs a conservative agenda. From a Western Christian perspective, the drunk person living on the street is there because of the decisions he made. Any crimes he commits reflect his poor character, his lack of morality. If he does do any crimes, he should be held to account and punished accordingly. By contrast, the Eastern Gnostic perspective is that the man lives how he does because of systemic prejudices built into the system. Any crimes he commits are not only the result of social pressures but even that they are considered criminal reflect specific power relationships that oppress some while valorising others. In truth, the “progressive” view has come to dominate not only our universities but even our legal system. In the Western tradition it is assumed that all people potentially experience God equally, the Christian belief in “general redemption”, therefore all people can, as individuals, be held individually responsible. Personal responsibility becomes paramount with the advent of Protestantism and the emphasis on the individual and everyone’s potential equal experience of God. The prioritizing of the “aggregate” is nicely captured in the work of 18th century sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz, as already introduced, who argued that sociology was primarily about “the operation of groups and aggregates of men on one another” not about understanding individual behaviour. This might be contrasted with a Western sociologist like Max Weber who was interested in explaining individual behaviour through the religious beliefs that informed his actions. As Jon Elster’s description of methodological individualism employed by Weber observes, by this account, “The elementary unit of social life is the individual human action. To explain social institutions and social change is to show how they arise as the result of the actions and interactions of individuals.” (Elster 1989: 13) It is the individual actors who, when thought in terms of collectives, constitute the institutions in which they live. People are not, by this account, mindless automaton shaped by the society in which they live, but active, knowing agents both living within while shaping the institutions around them.

546 This difference in perspective, this difference in emphasis and priority, is drilled into people emerging from out of very different onto-theologies, the East and the West, from birth even though the various parents doing the teaching would most probably be largely ignorant, at least in the West, as to why they are doing what they are doing and the importance that this early education holds. It is through these different frames of reference that both Easterners and Westerners become encultured into the different ways of experiencing the world. If we look at Marx’s analysis, he was embedded in Jewish ways of thinking and seeing the world. He had been raised in a family with a long and well-respected history in the rabbinic tradition. Marx’s emphasis was on collective identity and shared responsibility. As Lowith observes, He was a Jew of Old Testament stature, though an emancipated Jew of the nineteenth century who felt strongly antireligious and even anti-Semitic. It is the old Jewish messianism and prophetism – unaltered by two thousand years of economic history from handicraft to large-scale industry – and Jewish insistence on absolute righteousness which explains the idealistic basis of Marx’s materialism. (Lowith 1949: 44) The German Jewish Lowith is really being generous. Marx’s “scientific” materialist account of social change is theological throughout. He is indeed critical of Orthodox Judaism, but he is perfectly harmonious with the Gnostic Jewish tradition. Marx understands societies as consisting of different tribes, that he calls ‘classes’, and that these tribes are embroiled in a zero-sum conflict. According to Marx, the tribe (class) that dominates society is the tribe who determines the way everyone else thinks and what they believe to be “good”. Marx’s work will later be more explicitly interpreted as not being a “class war” at all but as being a historical racial conflict between the West, the Aryans, and the East, the Semites. This development on Marx’s materialism does not occur at the hand of Christian German thinkers, which you may expect if you read the work by the Frankfurt School on the causes of fascism, but exclusively at the hands of Jewish thinkers like Moses Hess as expressed in his influential tome Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question. These basic ideas were developed and made popular through the work of Russian Jew Gumplowicz in Imperial Russia who claimed in his 1883 book, The Race Struggle, that race and not class, as Marx argued, was the engine of social change. According to Gumplowicz, “. . .the race-struggle lies at the very foundation of society, it is the condition of the origin and development of the state and without it no state, no civilization at all would have been possible.” It was these arguments, accepted enthusiastically by the emerging political movement of Gnostic Judaism, that caused some Europeans to turn against their own tradition and embrace the deficient aggregated thinking of the Eastern tradition to advance a kind of race based “Aryanism”. Of course, this is the conflict that justifies

547 the Second World War that results, not coincidentally, in the establishment of the Gnostic Jewish state of Israel. So, although it is often claimed, The world’s obsession with the Jews found very strong expression in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was then that Gentile intellectuals created the strange and volatile cocktail of half-religious and half-scientific truths that led to the racist ideas and pathological hatred of the Jews adopted by Nazi Germany. (Beker 2008: 103-104) The true origins of the idea of a racial conflict were certainly derived not from Christian Germans but from the Jewish Gnostic tradition. These arguments can be traced from Marx, through Hess to Gumplowicz and are not native to Christianity. As Westerners from the Christian tradition, we must reject such ideas as the poison they are and hold individuals to account for what they say and what they do. Thinkers like Gumplowicz and Hess see history in terms of tribal conflict and the most powerful tribe, not necessarily the most militarily powerful tribe, will eventually win the battle of history and impose their worldview upon the world. It is in terms of tribal conflict that Jewish intellectuals have interpreted just about every aspect of the world. There is the women’s tribe, the black tribe, the poor tribe, the Islamic tribe, the homosexual tribe . . . All these tribes are thought of as being in a continuous state of conflict of all against all for dominion of the world. The Jewish tribe forms coalitions to advance their interests of overcoming civilization by supporting tribes that might advance their cause. Feminism helps undermine the traditional nuclear family, “characterised by high levels of female domesticity, low average age of marriage, high marriage and fertility rates, and low divorce and illegitimacy rates” (Wasserstein 2009: 559), leaving children vulnerable to “re-education” where they will no longer learn of individualism and the responsibilities that attach to its enactment. As Wasserstein (2009: 765) observes, “By the 1990s the nuclear family was in an advanced state of dissolution. . .”. “Gay Rights” helps emphasise a person’s sexuality as definitive of a person’s identity. In turn this encourages people to think about themselves as primarily sexual beings moving them away from the primacy of reason. The list, of course, could go on. Tribalism has always been viewed negatively in the West. As devout Christian, Australian Prime Minister Morrison spoke against tribalism in the wake of the attacks on Muslims in Christchurch New Zealand in 2019, If we allow a culture of ‘us and them’, of tribalism, to take hold; if we surrender an individual to be defined not by their own unique worth and contribution but by the tribe they are assigned to, if we yield to the compulsion to pick sides rather than happy coexistence, we will lose what makes diversity work in Australia. As debate becomes more fierce, the retreat to tribalism is increasingly taking over, and for some, extremism takes hold.

548 Reading only news that we agree with, interacting with people only we agree with, and having less understanding and grace towards others that we do not even know, making the worst possible assumptions about them and their motives, simply because we disagree with them. This is true of the left and the right. And even more so from those shouting from the fringes to a mainstream of quiet Australians that just want to get on with their lives. Hate, blame and contempt are the staples of tribalism, it is consuming modern debate, egged on by an appetite for conflict as entertainment, not so different from the primitive appetites of the colosseum days, with a similar corrosive impact on the fabric of our society. Contempt is defined by the philosophers as “the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another”. The worthlessness of another! That is where mindless tribalism takes us. (Morrison 2019) This is as true of Jewish tribalism as it is true of all tribalism. Examples of this growing tribalism are everywhere, but a nice example of the mind-set of tribalism was displayed in a world-famous pod-cast series called ‘Serial’ which is written and performed almost exclusively by Jewish Americans. This particular podcast, the third series, was trying to explore how the legal system in the United States is unjust, broken and in desperate need of repair. It develops this argument by giving different examples, every week, of racism, sexism and other prejudices that they claim are on displayed in the United States legal system. The show focuses on the personal stories of those brought into the judicial system, their difficult upbringing, their marginalization in society, and then claiming that their criminal activity is derived from their social situation and that they should not rightly be judged on an individual basis. The basic claim of the show when it is boiled down is to claim that these people from a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds are criminals because of the White Christian society in which they are raised and then they are unjustly punished by a Christian legal system. In short, Christianity and the society it has created is unjust. The suggestion to these claims is if we just move beyond white Christian society towards recognising how people belong in aggregates then we do not only no longer have criminals, crime like sin is overcome by thinking it away, but we also have a fairer justice system. Throughout the show, for those who are vigilant and knowledgeable, there are clear examples of Jewish tribalism. In the second episode of the season, for example, the main presenter, Sarah Koenig, an American Jew, says that the first thing she thought to herself when she entered the county court was “. . .where are all the Jews?” The second thing she claims she thought was, there are “. . .so many Irish.” If an Irish person entered a Jewish dominated court and said this in reverse they would be roasted as racist

549 anti-Semites, but Jews say this thing all the time, in public, and nothing is ever said. Indeed, Koenig finds herself being critical of one of the very few courts in the United States where there are no Jewish judges. This is surprising, because, as Lynn’s research evinces, Jews are very much overrepresented in the American judiciary all the way up to the Supreme Court. The interesting thing about the program in relation to Gnostic Judaism is Koenig’s lens through which she conceptualises the world. She sees the world in tribal terms; Jews, Irish, Protestants, Catholics . . . She even draws attention to a judge named “Synenberg” which she says “sounds like my kind of judge” by which she means that this judge has a Jewish sounding name. She then regretfully informs the listeners that this woman is only married to a Jew but is actually of Italian descent. What Koenig is doing is making it unequivocally explicit that, even though one of the judges in the court might have a Jewish name, there are no Jews in this court. Do not be mistaken, any criticism of these judges does not reflect negatively on any Jewish judges. This is the reason for going to such lengths to make it clear to the listener that this is a criticism of Christian judges and therefore has no implication for Jewish judges. It is this Jew free courthouse that Koenig choses to focus her criticisms of the American judiciary. The fact that there are no Jews in this courthouse, and she has made this fact explicit, is no mistake. It is actually central to the subtext of the show. The point being made is, ultimately, that Jews would do things differently and they would do it better. Week after week the podcast gives examples of how all the prejudices, the marginalization of black youths, the poverty in which disadvantaged Hispanics live, is the real reason why these criminals are in the courthouse in the first place only to find themselves judged unfairly by a Christian system that created this criminal behaviour in the first place. What is not being recognised, according to the shows repetitive argument that they drive home every show, is that the legal system does not adequately consider the background or the environment, the tribal conditions, that shape these people’s lives. The Christian legal system is ignorant and judgemental because it is too individualistic. In the Christian tradition, unlike most religions, all people, women, men, rich and poor, are believed to have equal access to God’s grace or what is called general redemption. The redemption of Jesus Christ applied to all people not just “the elect”. This means that all people, no matter their circumstances, are held to be equally responsible for their actions. The rich man is as responsible for doing wrong as the poor man and their different circumstances is not the important consideration in judging guilt but that they intentionally turned away from God or the good. It was once thought to be demeaning to the individual not to hold them responsible for their actions. Out of general redemption comes equality of responsibility. Although the pod-cast tries to argue that ignoring the social context from which people emerge is “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobic” the truth is that it is a sign of the highest respect. The

550 system, far from being racist or sexist, as is so often claimed and now accepted without the need for justification, is actually informed by a certain kind of commitment to equality and respect for the individual. The choice is with the individual actor. It is indeed a strange claim, that treating people equally is thought to be systematically prejudicial. The Jewish perspective, by contrast, is actually informed by elitism, exceptionalism and is actually demeaning. It is saying that because you are black, or because you are a woman, you cannot do differently, you are incapable of truly knowing what is right and wrong, good and bad, and therefore you cannot be held responsible. This criticism actually emerges from a deeper onto-theological criticism that will be discussed at length in the second volume of this series.255 For now, it can be simply observed that this different onto-theology is the result of Koenig’s Jewish view that Christians believe that everyone knows the good and are therefore quick to judge. Koenig is claiming that this judgement is being made when the real reason for their criminality is the society/tribe in which they live. In contrast to Christianity, Jews have historically advanced a strict hierarchy of access to God. Levites are above other Jews, male Jews are above female Jews256, Jews from a matrilineal line are above those from a patrilineal line, established Jews are above recent converts, all Jews are above gentiles. . . The distinctions go on and on. In this understanding of the world, of course, a gentile cannot be held as responsible for their actions as a Jew, it is like holding an animal responsible for killing its prey, they both just do not have access to God. What looks like tolerance actually hides something that many from a Christian cultural background would find highly offensive. “Serial” does reveal the judges do behave with Christian righteousness and judgementalism but, as most would recognise, there is also something to the view that we all have choices and not all poor people end up committing crimes and not all rich people never commit crimes. The point at this stage though, is how a different worldview, one that is tribal and

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Onto-theology was a phrase first coined by Emanuele Kant to describe a method of explore theological issues without recourse to religious authority or texts. It was theology through ontology. Heidegger would later use the phrase critically to refer to a trajectory of thought, certainly practiced by Plato, that grounded ontological claims on theology. In many ways it is quite synonymous with metaphysics itself. Kant argued that this way of thinking arises from a confusion between what could be imagined as an ideal, an imagined ideal, that is then reified into something real, God. In this volume it is used in the Heideggerian sense but not critically. That is, to claim that ontology and theology, as a full understanding of Heidegger’s position also affirms, are indeed intimate. There is no clearing, there is not potential, without some conception of God. 256 This has actually produced the perverse outcome that Jewish woman were very worldly because Jewish men studies Torah while women were responsible for worldly needs. As Estelle Roith notes, “If anyone is sheltered, it is the scholarly man . . . whereas the scholar ideal was one distinguished by physical passivity, the woman controlled the crucial domestic ritual on which her husband’s piety depended. She may have managed the livelihood, as well as the home and the children, and thus have spoken the local language and moved about the countryside more than her husband.” (Roith 1987: 80) In Christian homes woman were morally equal and equally obliged to participate in Church services but were more secluded into the domestic sphere while men were active in the public sphere. It was not that one sphere was better or more important, but it was a strategy to help maintain the family by creating discrete sphere inhabited by the different sexes.

551 aiming to be systematically critical of another tribe, informs every episode of this show and yet the many millions listening to this heavily promoted program will not know what informs the show and therefore cannot be critical of that perspective. It is this tribalism that partly explains why Jews advance the interests of other Jews to such a high degree. A Jew enters a room and sees gatherings of different “tribes” while someone from the Western tradition enters the same room and sees individuals who might then be seen to belong to a shared community. The difference is that from a Christian perspective an individual is judged as to who they are as an individual, honest, sincere, etc., etc., and not by the colour of their skin. As Koenig only makes too clear, from a tribal perspective everyone is prejudged according to their tribe. The problem that confronts the Jewish encounter with the world is that any cohort can be divided into an infinite number of tribes. It depends on the prejudices of the viewer how those tribes will be dissected. What determines how Jews divide the world today is not because they think this is the best way to divide the world, how could this be the case in the absence of an experience of the good, but how can the world be divided so that it advances their theo-political agenda. As with everything that Gnostic Judaism appropriates, a cohort will be appropriated in instrumental terms in the service of their God, the Torah and the Jewish people. Gnostic Jews advocate for blacks, Hispanics or women, not as a liberating project for the oppressed but as a strategy to unite the cohort with their god, the Shechinah, in terms of overcoming all categorical divides, and, at the same time, as a strategy for gaining power. The most basic evidence for this argument is that despite the enthusiastic participation and funding of early liberation projects in places like the United States and Australia, Israel, at a governmental level, remains a deeply racist, deeply segregated county. As the Or Commission investigating the conditions of Israeli Arabic population concluded, The state and generations of its government failed in a lack of comprehensive and deep handling of the serious problems created by the existence of a large Arab minority inside the Jewish state. Government handling of the Arab sector has been primarily neglectful and discriminatory. The establishment did not show sufficient sensitivity to the needs of the Arab population and did not take enough action in order to allocate state resources in an equal manner. The state did not do enough or try hard enough to create equality for its Arab citizens or to uproot discriminatory or unjust phenomenon. (Or Commission 2003) And this was an internal inquiry that, from Israel, simply cannot be trusted. The concern with Israeli tribalism is because “Israel is the sovereign state of the Jewish people” Israel is, exists, as a racist entity. I could not imagine a claim that, “the United States is the sovereign state of Anglo Protestants.” Arabs may become Israeli citizens, but they can never possess the nationality of an Israeli because nationality is exclusively reserved for Jews. It is for this reason that the earlier observed failure to allocate resources to

552 Arab Israelis, which cannot really be said, is because Arabs and others simply cannot be serviced as equals by Jewish institutions. Despite this terrible and disgraceful systemic racism, Jews have been strong advocate for not only equality for minorities in places like Australia and the United States but have argued that these minorities need privileges. As more white Protestants in the United States are driven into poverty, the class distinction is not emphasised as much as race or gender. The difference in worldviews between Christian individualism and Jewish tribalism cannot be overstated and the impacts it has in the world must be appreciated if we are to come to terms with out contemporary condition. As Berdyaev observes, The only serious racial philosophy to have existed in history is that of the Jews. The synthesis in which blood, religion and nationality were fused, the faith in a people’s Election, the concern for racial purity, are so many ideas of Jewish origin. I sometimes wonder whether the German racialists are aware of the influence they submit to. Racialism contains precisely no Aryan element. The Hindu and the Greek Aryans were far more in favour of individualism. (Berdyaev 1954: 10) The dominant dictum of the West has been e pluribus unum – from many, one. This captures the Western traditions movement, indebted to a kind of polytheism, which moves from the many to the one, the many gods to the one reality. By contrast, the Jewish mystic tradition cannot even conceive of moving from the one to the many as they deny the ontological status of the many. The West moves from community to individual, from the essential to the countable, Jews Gnosticism stop at the one, the primordial unity, essences or countables cannot really have a meaningful place because the world isn’t. So, as Western civilization back to the ancient Greeks have prioritized the community, which is then thought to consist of individuals, they did come together as communities, they did have, by necessity, a shared identity. Indeed, it might be claimed that it was from the time Rome loosened its exclusiveness by expanding the status of Roman citizenship to everyone within the Empire Rome really began to decline. As already observed, white Protestants have always had a shared identity, however it was conceived, and have often thought their cultural practices and religious beliefs were superior to that held by others. If not, then why continue to practice them? Without a shared identity then that group can no longer exists as a community. This is to claim, drawing on a distinction made by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, that communities, what Tönnies called Gemeinschaft, are held together by shared moral sentiments which are maintained as an end in itself, which is contrasted by Tönnies to Gesellschaft, which are social groups held together as means to further ends. Indeed, this distinction might be seen as informing the different narratives around “society” and “community”. “Communities” are informed by shared norms; they function as an end-in-themselves in terms of being good. “Societies”, by definition, are understood as a “group centring

553 about some one or more common interests”. A society, as in a “stamp society” or a “book society” are defined by having shared interests. This idea of human order is expressed by none other than that early advocate for race conflict Ludwig Gumplowicz who thought early groups of people were the result of men “feeling themselves closely bound together by common interests”. (Gumplowicz as seen in Barnes 1919: 408) A society is defined by pursuing “ends” external to the collaboration. What I am claiming is that Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities were held together by shared norms, as an experience of the good that could be accessed through reason, and that these shared norms are valued as superior to the bonds that hold other social groups together. Today, such relationships for Anglo-Saxons are thoroughly discouraged, through education programs, Hollywood movies, and the arts, not to think of themselves collectively. Indeed, for white people to think the way Koenig and many Jews explicitly think would be utterly unacceptable and called out as “white supremacism”. I simply could not imagine a radio program where the host enters a court dominated by black Americans, for example, and asking, “where are all the whites?” Never in history has identity politics been so pervasive and powerful. Black pride, advocates for the ridiculously named ‘people of colour’, and so many other identities to advance the worth of their communities but white people are excluded. The danger of all these pride movements, black pride, gay pride, transexual pride, is that pride, a focus on the ego, as Jewish American scholar observes, makes us look at our own interests and not that of either the community or God. By making everyone just think of themselves and what their needs are they are not humble and self-sacrificing. The ego becomes so enlarged that it ignores the super-ego in pursuit of Id. As Gnostic Jews wish to encourage ego development so that people look away from the divine, they encourage conflict which nurtures a focus on the self. White people become represented as the problem because that ensure people look to their own interests and not necessarily that of the divine or the community. The worst thing you can be is a Nazi and to advance white pride is too close, according to some, for being a Nazi. This perspective on our contemporary condition is so pervasive, so entrenched in our university system, that many white Protestants, although it is against their interests, now advocate powerfully on behalf of these movements. This is the perfect expression of what Nietzsche called a ‘slave morality’. Nietzsche believed that the most powerful expression of a ‘slave morality’ was expressed by the Jews of the late 19th century. By the start of the 21st century one can go no further to find the perfect expression of slave morality then to look at white Protestant males advancing the project of, so called, minorities. This is how Jewish intellectuals have divided communities and turned them into competing tribes. It is women against men, disabled against abled, ‘people of colour’ against ‘white’. A war of all against all which is the condition of nature according to Hobbes, the most uncivilized condition but one deliberately

554 desired by this theo-political movement. Democracies only work in communities of individuals where you are supposed to be interested in the shared benefit to everyone even if they are your individual enemy. When blacks fight for black interests, Asians fight for Asian interests and everyone is just fighting for their “tribal” interests, when politics is no longer about truth, beauty and goodness but about power then the true domain of politics is no longer operating. What is realized is the worldview that Jewish intellectuals do not only understand but a situation in which Jews thrive. From a Western perspective it is a degenerate situation, a mark of decay. What is lost in the tribal worldview is any sense of the common good or universal truth that might mitigate and serve to resolve the conflicts, convert your enemy into your friend, but, as will be explored at length later, this irreparable division is exactly what Gnostic Judaism hope to achieve. Jonah Goldberg (2018) claims that the current crisis in Western civilization is the result of the “suicide of the West” where internal liberal forces are ripping the United States apart. This “suicide”, according to Goldberg, is the result of the rebirth of tribalism, populism, right wing nationalism, and the dominance of identity politics. It might be viewed as ‘natural’ or ‘instinctual’ for everyone to be fighting for what is in their interests and that to demonize this kind of self-interested competition is nothing more than a human imposition of an experience of the good. Tribalism is not a transient phenomenon, identity politics did not come from nowhere, it is evidence of the dominance of a Jewish worldview and the marginalization of a Christian ethos.

Tribalism or Communalism Tribal societies are primarily concerned with conformity and agreement, disagreement is treated as treachery or heresy and is thought to be very dangerous and treated usually in the severest of terms. This is because the collective consciousness, symbolised in the Gnostic Jewish tradition by the goddess Shechinah, takes primacy over individual moral responsibility. By contrast, communities cherish some level of disagreement between members which is expected as a price paid for some level of diversity. As Jordan Peterson observes, “the issue is whether or not the individual identity is primary and the group identity is secondary or the group identity is primary and the individual identity is secondary”. In the Western tradition, the individual was thought to belong to a group while from a tribal perspective the tribal or group identity, whether that is understood as class, gender or race, is primary and individual identity is secondary. Disagreement is tolerated in societies where individual identity is primary and, at times, valued, as an expression of that individuality. Disagreement is prized when it is raised with the intent of helping the entire community but not if it is thought to benefit individual or sectional interests. When disagreement is primarily oriented towards realizing a new understanding of the universal good then it is not only tolerated in a community but embraced. This difference in attitude towards contest and

555 disagreement, part of the Protestant ethos, emerges from a different relationship to God between tribal relationship and communal relationships, as Assmann rightly observes, Tribal religions are ethnocentric. The powers and ancestral spirits that are worshipped by one tribe are irreducibly and untranslatably different from those worshipped by another. By contrast, the highly differentiated members of polytheistic pantheons easily lend themselves to cross-cultural translation or “interpretation” . . . . The sun god of one group, culture, or religion is the same as the sun god of another. (Assmann 2008: 54) Because tribal gods are gods for a particular tribe then those people not only believe that they have a special relationship with their god, as in the case of Gnostic Jews, but that their god has a special relationship with them. The God chose His tribe, this tribe, above all the others, allowing them to worship Him/Her. Being the chosen is a central concern of tribal religions. This is a masculine God selecting the feminine people as an expression of devotion, and like any lover, expecting reciprocation. Others will never have the same standing before their God, nor will others ever properly understand the tribe’s God. This is the special relationship. “. . .every permanent political association had a special god who guaranteed the success of the political action of the group. When fully developed, this god was altogether exclusive with respect to outsiders, and in principle he accepted offerings and prayers only from the members of his group . . .” (Weber 1965: 17) Tribalism is by its very nature exclusive. Of course, this sounds again very much like a domestic relationship. Indeed, in Romans 11: 11 it said, “I ask then, they did not stumble into an irrevocable fall, did they? Absolutely not! But by their transgression salvation has come to the Gentiles, to make Israel jealous.” It seems here as though God sent Jesus to the Gentiles in order to make Jews jealous. This is just like a man might flirt with another woman to make a wayward lover appreciate just what she has. This kind of relationship with a local tribal god, “resulted in an uncommon strengthening of political particularism”. (Weber 1965: 18) By contrast, urban communities have universalised gods that can and well may be worshipped by everyone. Everyone not only can but should have the same relationship with a universal God. When one community meets another community, it is not the case that one side imposes their understanding of God upon another, but to seek out what is the other’s experience of the same universal god. Again, as Assmann observes, one community has a sun god that is universal, and another community has a sun god that is universal, therefore, it would be reasonable to think that they are the same god. This universal attitude towards the Gods demands a certain tolerance for disagreement and contest that tribalism does not require or tolerate. It is only by letting others speak that the true nature of the universal God can be revealed. Such an attitude is also the condition for universal “truth”. You might have a certain word for an object, and we have a word for an object but the object, their God, is universal. The different Sun gods might have different responsibilities or capacities

556 but, because they are universal, there must be a conversation to settle the disputes to reach agreement. It was the need to understand another God that lied at the origins of philosophy itself. Philosophy grew from the possibility for a shared universal reality and logos as the means for understanding it. Nightingale explored the social conditions under which the philosophical “theorist” emerged, and his conclusions are central to how we might respond to Gnostic Judaism. Indeed, his conclusions are important for understanding the Western tradition and their conceptualization of the human condition. Nightingale draws attention to there being three groups of people who attended an ancient Greek festival. As Heraclides of Pontus observed, The life of man resembles the festival [at Olympia] celebrated with the most magnificent games before a gathering collected from all of Greece. For at this festival some men trained their bodies and sought to win the glorious distinction of a crown, and others came to make a profit by buying or selling. But there was also a certain class, made up of the noblest men, who sought neither applause nor gain, but came for the sake of spectating and closely watched the event and how it was done. It seems odd to draw attention to the spectators as consisting of the “noblest” of people. Today, it would be the athletes themselves who might be viewed as the noblest as it is they who put so much effort into their sport. It is the athlete who becomes so highly skilled at what they do, and it is their excellence that people actually come to watch. It would be amongst the athletes, even today, as “good sports”, humble winners and graceful losers, where one would seek nobility at a sporting event. But Heraclides seems to want us to think that it is the spectators, sitting to the side and watching, who are the “noblest” of men. The reason why this group should be so respected is because, as Heraclides makes clear, these men did not attend the event for applause, fame or financial gain, but they come to watch. They are there as spectators, pursuing spectating as an end-in-itself. It was they who watched and saw excellence, judged excellence, and it was this that made the spectator noble. The point that Heraclides is making is that life should be lived as an end-in-itself and not as a means to some other end. Life is not about accumulating riches or achieving fame, but it is about living a life continuously judicious of excellence. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it was this final group, the spectators, the theoroi, the ones who watched as an end-in-itself, who became the model for the philosopher. The claim being made by Heraclides is that philosophers too spectate in a disinterested manner. They are disinterested not because they are not absorbed by the contest but disinterested in that they are not, unlike the athlete, personally interested in winning. What they are really spectating when they watch the athletes perform, displaying their excellence in their sport, is not the athletes at all but what the spectators is there to witness are the gods. Like the spectators, philosophers do not want fame or wealth for themselves but seek the gods as an end-

557 in-itself. Aristotle too makes the same point in his Protrepticus (B44), the philosopher is not interested in personal glory or financial gain, indeed the philosopher is, in an important sense, outside of the community of men. They are not in exchange with their fellow polites but spectating in a way that is distanced, they are definitionally, as spectators, uninvolved. It is because they are outsiders, they do not participate in events, that they are not wedded to establish “truths”, that they can properly spectate purely in the service of “the nature of truth and reality”, in the service of the gods. This orientation is presented by Martin Heidegger in his analysis of the work of art. That is why it is necessary to know about these thing-concepts, in order thereby to take heed of their provenance and their boundless presumption, but also of their semblance of self-evidence. . . To this end, however, only one element is needful: to keep at a distance all the preconceptions and assaults . . . of thought, to leave the thing to rest in its own self, for instance, in its thing-being. What seems easier than to let a thing be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly if such an intention – to let a being be as it is – represents the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favour of an unexamined concept of Being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its Being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own essence. This is what is required of the philosopher as spectator. He must not be wedded to existing account or preconceptions even if they are “self-evident” but must distance himself from his city. This is not a “looking away” because of indifference but a distancing in order to allowing every experience to come forward for consideration. A true philosopher does not want to discuss politics in order to gain power, although he may want to discuss politics. A true philosopher, according to this tradition, does not want to win arguments for the respect of his peers, indeed, the philosopher should not want to win arguments at all. The motivation of the philosopher is not glory, power, or fame, the motivation for the philosopher is in the service of truth. That most important God of the Western tradition. It is not that they are disinterested, nothing could be further from the truth, the spectator at a festival could certainly not be said to be disinterested, they are attentive to everything that happens and are positioned in a vantage point that allows them to see everything, but they are not interested in personal gain, power, wealth or glory. Aristotle goes so far as to claim that the theoretical life of the philosopher, those responsible for the metaphysical age, is “that of a foreigner, detached from political participation”. The philosopher, like the spectator, is such an outsider that they are like foreigners, detached from the interests of the polis, they must be foreigners, aliens, if they are to see as a disinterested spectator and serve the interests of truth.

558 Not everyone in Ancient Athens agreed with this account of the philosopher. Isocrates, unsurprisingly the first to establish a school, argued that the title of philosopher should be reserved for, “those who learn and practice the studies which will enable them to manage wisely their private households and the commonwealth of the city, since it is for the sake of these things that one should work, philosophize, and act.” (Isocrates as seen in Nightingale 2004: 21) Philosophy should be concerned with improving the city and those who live in it according to Isocrates. So, there is a contest about the nature of the philosopher. Is the philosopher a person who gains knowledge for practical purposes, to improve the polis, or is it a person who gains knowledge for the sake of truth? One account firmly embeds the philosopher into the polis the other suggests that he is a wanderer, an outsider, who must forever go his own way in the service of his master, truth. He must, become an intellectual nomad in order to be truly embedded, like no other, as a polite. As Harold Bloom observes, “If philosophy is, as Novalis said, the desire to be at home everywhere, then Gnosis is closer to what Nietzsche thought the motive of art: the desire to be elsewhere, the desire to be different.” (Bloom 1981: 63) The philosopher does aspire to be at home because he dwells in truth wherever he goes, the gnostic wants to destroy “truth” as an expression of evil, the imperative is not to conform, not be well-adjusted, but to be “different”. The philosopher must metaphorically leave but only in order to return with truth. As Plato said of Thales, “only his body lives and sleeps in the city” because his mind rises to the heavens, he visits the gods, he pursues truth. (Plato as seen in Nightingale 2004: 24) Why there was this emphasis on being outside the polis, as being beyond the concerns of the city, according to Nightingale, was because the philosophers of the 4th century were invoking the images and practices of a specific civic institution that the ancients called “theoria”. (Nightingale 2004: 3) In the preSocratic practice of theoria, an individual, called the theoros, would journey, either as a self-funded individual or as an official ambassador of his city, to spectate at another city’s religious festival. This institutional practice was thought to begin with the individual leaving their home, journeying to another city and then returning to report his experiences, to inform those who remained of what he had seen and what he thought about his experiences. (Nightingale 2004: 4) This was an onerous task allocated to only the most respected citizens. The obligation was for the theoros to spectate the worship of another city’s gods to see what, if anything, his city of origin might learn. Such an exercise would not only require enough insight to properly spectate the city to which the theoros would travel but, it would also require a great deal of insight into his city of origin. The theoros would need to both be intimate with the gods of his city of origin, in an explicit way, but also retain enough distance so that he remained open to learning something new. He was not just a spectator of the festivals of other cities but, in an important way, a

559 spectator of his own city. Such an orientation is not pure openness, like an emptiness, as already discussed there can be no progress without an appreciation of the sacred borders, but one cannot be too closed that there is no possibility for criticism. This captures the tension in the theoros of both belonging and being a stranger to a particular place. I suspect that it was this stance, their particular and peculiar orientation, that informed the experience of the universal. A perspective that appeared to be deeply situated but deeply situated in no particular place except with the truth. As has been observed of Hegelian philosophy in contrast to gnosticism, “Whereas Hegelian negation also insists that true knowledge begins when philosophy destroys the experience of daily life, such destruction is a phase on the way to a universal, and so Hegelian truth finally negates both the per se existence of the object and the individual ego. But Gnosticism would not accept this shifting of the truth to a universal.” (Bloom 1981: 63) That is, both gnosticism and philosophy, both in their own way, destroys the experience of daily life, the norms by which we live by, the objective and the understanding of themselves, the philosophy only does this in order to return, in order to posit a universal in the place of the particular. The Gnostic, by contrast, only destroys, only negates as an end in itself, he wants to do away with order and civilization. It is as part of this destructive process that the theorist must have been expected to be able to view his city of origin with fresh, critical, eyes. There is myth told of Dionysus who comes to the throne as a child. Those who wish to see him killed, give him a mirror to distract him in which he becomes fixated unable to avert his gaze. While gazing into the mirror the young Dionysus is killed by the monsters and torn to pieces. Only Dionysus’ golden heart was saved. Quispel interprets this myth as saying that Dionysus, when he saw his eidolon, his reflection in the mirror, he became reflected and vanished into eh mirror being dispersed through the universe. (Quispel 1981: 30) Apollo gathers the pieces together and puts him back together bringing him back to life. What is happening here is the process of learning, of gaining knowledge and the tension between the Dionysian and the Apollonian in this process. Myths can be read, as Quispel (1981: 22) observes, “. . .in terms of the predicament of man in search of himself.” Knowledge must first be negated, it must be critically engaged with, it must be destroyed. This process is like the destruction of world and subject but only in order to cut Dionysus up again, only to return to order. This is the process that can be seen in Hegel’s dialectic. As Bloom observes, “Whereas Hegelian negation also insists that true knowledge begins when philosophy destroys the experience of daily life, such destruction is a phase on the way to a universal, and so Hegelian truth finally negates both the per se existence of the object and the individual ego.” (Bloom 1981: 63) In this process, Bloom claims gnostic are more akin to poets than philosophers because philosophers return, they break free and critically engage with tradition but only to return with

560 the universal truth. Considering what was happening in Egypt and what would happen in Rome, that was not just a Greek practice, but such institutions as the theoros may have existed in other sophisticated, urbanized communities that had moved beyond tribal relationships. It is known that the synchronizing of gods goes back to at least the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and that these kinds of practices became widespread throughout the Near East in the second millennium BC. (Assmann 1998: 3) In the Greek institutional arrangement, the theoros would return to his city of origin and report, perhaps, that the city he had visited also had a Sun god, but their Sun god is also responsible for overseeing parenting practices or their Sun god is married to the daughter of earth. This kind of practice would explain the obsessive recontextualizing of gods, renaming and, synchronizing that will be explored in depth in Vol II. It must be remembered when making this claim that these myths were not just ‘religious’ but were important for explaining reality, understanding human relationships with the gods, and, indeed, for understanding the human condition. It was in this light that the wise men would have understood the seriousness of their project. This kind of practice would also explain why some gods seem to have up to five names and why there are such similarities in myths throughout the entire region of the ancient world. According to Nightingale, the emerging practice of philosophy draw upon this institution to legitimize, explain and inform others, what they themselves were trying to do. The difference was that philosophers were not just visiting another city, although many philosophers, Pythagoras, Thales and Plato, were known for their traveling, but they also presented themselves as leaving their city, intellectually, and going into the realm of the gods, “heaven” for truth. As Nightingale observes, this is exactly what is recounted in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave. The slave is chained into his city but, once freed from his chains, is forced up, through different layers of consciousness into the light, into the truest reality, before returning to tell the others still chained in the cave what he had experienced. As Nightingale wrote, “According to Plato, the philosopher is altered and transformed by the journey of theoria and the activity of contemplation. He thus “returns” as a sort of stranger to his own kind, bringing a radical alterity into the city.” (Nightingale 2004: 5) Might this not also be an explanation for the narrative in Exodus, presented in the Tanakh, where a group of “slaves”, are “freed” and then guided by a wise leader informed by God on an extended difficult journey to ultimately discover truth through revelation which, upon accepting, allows them to enter into the promised land. Upon finding this truth they have found their true dwelling place. It is that the “Israelis” broke with Egypt, broke with the God’s of Egypt, that they could find the truth of revelation and this truth is then written down literally as a guide for others. Indeed, as Wajdenbaum wrote,

561 Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, in book VII of the Republic (514b-17b), shares a similar framework with the Exodus narrative. In the cave allegory, a man is freed from a cave, where his comrades and he had been held. The shadows they saw on a wall appeared to them as deities. Once freed from the cave, the man realizes that the shadows had been mere projections of objects, passing in front of a source of light. Realizing this, he understands that the light of the sun was the ultimate source of light. . .The man freed from the cave, whom Plato compares to a philosopher, is then compelled to go back into the cave to free his comrades that he might bring them to a higher spiritual horizon. However, he might also try to refuse this difficult task for fear that he could not be heard by his former comrades. . . Moses is freed from the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt (comparable to Plato’s cave), first by being raised at the court and, later, by fleeing to Midian. Moses meets Yahweh (comparable to Plato’s idea of the good, a metaphor of the single god) on Mount Horeb. Yahweh reveals his name to him and grants him the task of going back to Egypt to liberate the people of Israel and bring them to the Promised Land. The plan of this Promised Land is, in fact, very similar to the twelve-tribe law-governed state, conceived by Plato in the Laws. Moses, like Plato’s character from the cave allegory, is tempted to refuse this difficult mission, because he fears that the Israelites will not listen to him. (Waidenbaum 2016: 82) Indeed, Aristobulus, the first known Jewish philosopher, claimed that Plato was actually familiar with Moses’ writings. (Franks 2013: 221) Although there are significant resonances to be found between Plato and the Torah, there are also important differences. These differences grant insight into the difference between the philosopher and the prophet, the community and the tribe. Moses returns to liberate his people from enslavement to another “tribes” not to liberate them from their own cultural practices. Although both the Jews and the Athenians are brought to freedom, what they are freed from and under what conditions is significantly different. The Jews are freed from slavery under another “tribe” and in order to be free many from the other tribes are killed with the help of the Jewish tribe’s God. In contrast, Plato frees the Athenians to their individuality, they are freed to the space of the Good, so that they too can then know the Good and improve themselves as individuals. The God of Plato is the God of all people while the God of Moses is a God just for the Jews. Plato returns to persuade the people the falseness of their beliefs and hopes that they will accept the revelation of the Good through logos. Moses returns to his people with a tablet listing laws that must be obeyed. Refusal to obey is heresy and treason and many die upon his return who have committed sacrilege. The Athenians who do not accept Plato’s revelations, it is assumed, will not be killed, there is no suggestion that they will or should be harmed in any way, but, perhaps worse, they will remain enslaved to tradition, they will not be freed to truth. The difference between the Greek communality of the West and the Hebrew tribalism of the East is that any disagreement with the tribal leaders is understood in terms of being a heresy. In the Western tradition, the theoros thought other communities partook of the same universal God and therefore, one could learn from other communities in order to move closer to a shared truth. In a tribal setting, by

562 contrast, another people’s beliefs could be simply ignored, or better destroyed so that their Gods could rule in their stead. Sound familiar? Those of the tribe believe all others deemed to be members are simply ignorant if they do not accept the dominant interpretation and, therefore, need to be coerced to accept the truth that has been uniquely revealed to them or removed. It is often claimed that universal claims about God are intolerant because they posit an exclusive account of truth and falsity. As Assmann wrote expressing this view, “What then is religious violence? By this term I mean a kind of violence that stems for the distinction between friend and foe in a religious sense. The religious meaning of this distinction rests on the distinction between true and false.” (Assmann 2008: 144) Assmann is claiming, consistent with his Judaism, that an experience of God that permits claims of truth and falsehood is what motivates religious violence whereas, what he does not say, Gnostic Jewish beliefs that there is not truth or falsehood outside of human power manifests a tolerance and openness that does not result in violence. Today this is a common belief as it has been promoted by Gnostic Jews. This is to claim that the Apollonian is intolerant and oppressive in contrast to the freedom of the Dionysian. Our world is evidence that this argument is false. Gnostic Jews argue that because there is firm distinction between truth and falsity it therefore results in violence. The argument that pluralistic societies are more peaceful has been accepted to such a degree that it now shapes government policy. What is being discovered, if one cares to look, is that the opposite is actually true. That there is a shared truth that is binding to everyone motivates harmony in both the possibility of a shared truth and the process by which that shared truth is secured. As Jesus, the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy for the “Prince of Peace” said, “I am the way, the Truth, and the Life.” It is tribalism, where others are excluded from truth, where one group has their truth and other group has their truth, where the only permitted relationship is between slave and master, where all disagreement, as our world evinces, is silenced as dangerous, that is the conditions for violence. There must be both the potential for truth and an agreed means to secure that truth for peace to be a possibility at all. The Gnostic Jew, Francoise Lyotard, claimed that any conflict between groups “cannot be equally resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments,” because “there is no neutral ground upon which to adjudicate between competing claims, no synthesizing master discourse that can reproduce the speculative unity of knowledge.” (Lyotard as cited in Preparata 2011: 113) Under such conditions conflict is all that can result, and this conflict can only be resolved as an expression of power. Any attempt to claim agreement, to resolve conflict on the basis of truth is only an expression, according to Lyotard, of “cultural imperialism”, one of the words used to denigrate Western civilization. As Lyotard wrote, “This unequal positioning is an intrinsic effect of rules of each [discursive] game. We know its symptoms. It is the whole history of cultural imperialism since the beginning of the

563 West.” (Lyotard as cited in Preparata 2011: 113) Claims of truth as conflict resolution are simply an expression of Western power and, Lyotard seems to suggest, that such practices have been practiced by “the West” forever. In contrast, in a community where everyone is oriented by one truth there must be a degree of tolerance, the acknowledgment and space for difference and a peaceful mechanism for resolving disputes that arise if communities are to function as they should. The Enlightenment happened in a Christian society, Jews chose to live for thousands of years in Christian societies, not China, not Arabia, not India, but Christian, because of this peacefulness. The proof is not something that one asks another to accept on the basis of the argument alone but is proven in history. This is why the tribalization of contemporary Western societies is so dangerous. Black against white, man against woman, indigenous again “colonialist”, the rich against the poor, heterosexuals against homosexual, the conflicts multiply and the trust decreases. This is what is ripping Western societies apart to the degree that they are now bursting. This tribalization affects every aspect of contemporary Western societies, nowhere is untouched. Even the response to hardship is different from a tribal perspective when hardship hits the tribe, they believe that their God is punishing them whereas when hardship afflicts a community with a universal experience of God then they can but question themselves, “Know thy selves”, presenting as a challenge to self. The greatest challenge to the tribal theological system of belief is the simple question what if their understanding of God and reality is just wrong? What processes do they have within the tribal system to work through or to try to think differently about God and their relationship with others? It seems to be that the only recourse to disagreement in a tribal setting is violence, as the Tankah affirms time and again. Jesus offers another way, a way that had already been prepared by the Greek tradition, a way by word, a way by truth, a way by peace.

Trust Betrayed Although the Christian ethos, with its commitment to community and the individual, has undeniable strengths for ordering a society, like any ethos it also has weaknesses. Those weaknesses have been effectively exploited by Gnostic Jews. The basic reason why Gnostic Jews have been able to achieve their massively disproportionate overrepresentation through in-group support without the level of resistance that might be expected from any other society in the world is because Christian communities’ function internally on trust. Tribal relations are ordered, as is the case in Judaism, through patrilineal or matrilineal family descent. Trust is afforded to someone who is a member of a tribe through family relationships. As Wade writes, Tribal societies, for instance, are organized on the basis of kinship and differ from modern states chiefly in that people’s radius of trust does not extend too far beyond the family

564 and tribe. But in this small variation is rooted the vast difference in political and economic structures between tribal and modern societies. (Wade 2014: 10) One is recognised as a member of a tribe if, and only if, they are the child of a parent who is recognised as a member of the tribe. In Arabic nomadic tribes, for example, woman who married into another tribe, as was expected to avoid in-breeding, were never allowed to eat with their husbands or children because they never became members of the new tribe. Only through legitimate descent does one become a member of the tribe, does one become a “son” of Knesset Israel. Marriage into the tribe was inadequate to infer tribal membership. She remained an outsider. As Chatty (2018: 239) observes of Arabic tribal relationships, “The woman who married into a family from outside was always something of an outsider.” As an outsider, as a “foreigner”, these women would never be considered worthy or fully trusted to contribute to all areas of tribal life. This is an incredibly secure safeguard against the kind of infiltration the West has suffered at the hands of Gnostic Jews. As Jews readily admit, unlike Christianity, you can never really simply become a Jew because Judaism is irreducibly tribal and, as such, the only way to really be a member of the tribe is through recognised paths of familial descent. Western societies, like ancient Greece, took other measures or indicators of community membership and thereby expanded the circle of those who were member and also those who were trusted. Again, as Wade observed, “The break from tribalism probably requires a population to evolve such behaviours as higher levels of trust towards those outside the family or tribe.” (Wade 2014: 178) The shift from family tribal relationships to truly communal relationships was symbolically represented in ancient Greece by the sacred fire of the goddess Hestia, which was originally found in the family hearth, to be moved to the centre of the city/polis as the public prytaneum. This is probably what Heraclitus also meant when he said, “This world-order, the same for all, no god made or any man, but it always was and is and will be an ever-lasting fire, kindling by measure and going out by measure.” The ever-lasting fire of Hestia might be the founding ordering principle according to Heraclitus in terms of nomos (custom). By using the metaphor of fire, What he [Heraclitus] wants to talk about is the “world-order”. This is, we would say, not itself a thing but an abstract pattern or structure in which the things of the world are displayed. Heraclitus, though, hasn’t quite got that degree of abstraction, so he uses the most ethereal, least solid thing he is acquainted with to represent this world-order: fire. (Melchert & Morrow 2019: 18) Fire was symbolic of tradition and local customs, nomos, local experiences of the good.257 This is why in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, the fire is a kind of false belief in that the shapes on the wall are

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Nomos is equivalent to what we call culture today.

565 shadows of the local understanding, and is truer than the shadows, but it was not until the philosopher emerges under the Sun, the Apollonian universal, which ensures order over chaos, that the truest true, the truth of the philosopher, which is sophia, is found. As Daniel Webster wrote, “Knowledge, in truth, is the great sun in the Firmament. Life and power are scattered with all its beams.” What is meant here is that the Sun is what allows us to see everything in the world and that is why it is the ultimate good in contrast to local beliefs. It is for this reason that Jesus Christ is often explained through the metaphor of the Sun. As C. S. Lewis observed, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” It is because Christianity and Christ’s message allows for everything to be real and exist why he is like the Sun. Hestia, by contrast, is the “order” god for the Greeks, which is local custom, nomos. Hestia represented the shared values of an historical people, she was thought to bind the people together, and that her “fire” was moved to the centre of the city represents the new experience of everyone in that city becoming members of a new social arrangement, the order of the city or a community now no longer restrained by family loyalties. Common language, common religion and common values were the new markers of membership in a community, no longer primarily a persons’ descent. Hestia is an interesting choice as the personification of a Greek community’s spirit. At first glance Hestia is the exact opposite of the Shechinah. The Shechinah is highly sexual, passionate, and hedonistic, a warrior goddess who finds pleasure in the blood of her victims and satisfaction through child sacrifice. Hestia is the opposite of this, she is caring, nurturing, the protector of the domestic sphere of the home. She is the eternal virgin goddess, who rejects the suits of Poseidon and Apollo preferring her chastity so she can better serve. Hestia is the protector of domesticity and ensures the fulfilment of duty even if it involves self-sacrifice. It is this God, the God of home and hearth, amongst all the Gods, that the Greeks say, “Among all mortals she was chief of the goddesses”. It was Hestia, not Athena, who was the chief of the goddesses for all Mankind. The truth is that Hestia and the Shechinah, although they both in a way represent the soul of a people, and are very closely related, but are indeed opposites. Some insight into how these goddesses relate to each other is found by considering the Hindu goddess Adi Parashakti. On her own Adi Parachakti is thought as the First Supreme Being of energy, the primordial force underlying the entire natural universe. Adi Parachakti is the incarnate “wife” of Lord Shiva. Shiva is an ascetic god who abstains from earthly pleasures to contemplate the pursuit of goodness that brings perfect happiness. As Lord Shiva’s wife, Adi Parrachakti actually has two different manifestations, Parvati and Kali. Kali is a totally destructive force. She destroys the evil in society to protect those for whom she is responsible. Kali is portrayed as having four arms. Some of her hands are shown to

566 be dripping with the blood of her many victims. One of her hands is often portrayed as carrying a severed head while her other hand wields a sword. She is often depicted with a garland of skulls around her neck as a proud display of her past victories. She is a goddess of violence, war, bloodshed, and sexuality, she is the Indian form of the Shechinah. As is written in the Markandeya Purana, Kali of terrible countenance, armed with a sword and noose. Bearing the strange khatvanga,258 decorated with a garland of skulls, clad in a tiger’s skin, very appalling owning to her emaciated flesh, with gaping mouth, fearful with her tongue lolling out, having deep reddish eyes, filling the regions of the sky with her roars. . . (as seen in Klostermaier 1984: 213) Another expression of Adi Parachakti is Parvati, the goddess of fertility, beauty, harmony, marriage, and children. She is devoted to family life and dedicated to her domestic duties. She is dedicated to the needs of her husband Shiva. She is gentle and nurturing, the Mother goddess. As evidence of the normalcy of her life, Parvati is usually portrayed as having two arms. Kali is often portrayed as physically standing upon her prostrate husband or at least resting one foot on his strewn body lying on the ground. Whereas when she is in the form of Parvati, she is portrayed as seated or standing next to her husband. She is his peer, neither his ruler nor his slave. As Parvati, it is she who calms Shiva’s violent tendencies which can be world destroying whereas in the form of Kali it is Lord Shiva who must calm her. As Kinsley observes of these changing relationships, Parvati calms Shiva, counterbalancing his antisocial or destructive tendencies, she brings him within the sphere of domesticity and with her soft glances urges him to moderate the destructive aspects of his tandava dance. Kali is Shiva’s “wife” as it were, provoking him and encouraging him in his mad, antisocial, disruptive habits. It is never Kali who tames Shiva, but Shiva who must calm Kali. (Kingsley 1997: 75) So, there is a particular ordering in this relationship, the maternal, mothering Parvati calms Shiva, encouraging his fatherly, nurturing side that brings harmony to the entire universe. Together, Parvati and Shiva promise the clam certainties of domestic bliss while Kali encourages his violent side, the side that must go into battle leaving his children and the humble tasks of fatherhood behind for the challenges and rewards of battle. During these times of violence, Shiva can destroy the universe bringing to an end a cycle of order. This act of destruction heralds a period of chaos, when Kali rules, before a new period of order can be manifested. It is then up to Shiva to calm Kali, but Kali never tries to calm Shiva as his destruction is required if she is to be set free. Parvati is unconditionally calm and domestic, loving and fertile, she is

258

A staff with a skull at the top as a handle.

567 never tempted to violence. Shiva can be violent or domestic depending on who is his wife at the time. Kali seems to be only violent, her husband trying but always failing to calm his wife’s destructive tendencies. What is being communicated here is shown in how the gods are portrayed in relation to each other. Kali is shown dominating Shiva, which suggests that when the female aspect is dominant in society then it is a time of violence and bloodshed.

Kali standing upon Lord Shiva covered in the blood of her victims with the garland of severed heads around her neck.

This violence can be brought to an end by male authority, when Shiva calms her down thereby heralding a new cycle of order, but in times of chaos then Shiva rules. By contrast, when Shiva and Parvati work together, as husband and wife then it shows a period of domestic bliss, then there is the calmest period when the cycle of order is established, and Kali is locked away. A peaceful time of prosperity. The time when the nuclear family dominates, and, as a result, everyone benefits. Feminists have denounced such polemic portrayals of women. The radical feminist Adrienne Rich, who had many connection to Judaism including a Jewish father and poetry exploring internal tensions, argued that polemic views as unrealistic or overly critical. As Rich wrote, Throughout patriarchal mythology, dream-symbolism, theology, language, two ideas flow side by side: one, that the female body is impure, corrupt, the site of discharges, bleedings, dangerous to masculinity, a source of moral and physical contamination, “the devil’s gateway”. On the other hand, as mother the woman is beneficent, sacred, pure, asexual, nourishing; . . . these two ideas have become deeply internalized in women, even in the most

568 independent of us, those who seem to lead the freest lives. In order to maintain two such notions, each in its contradictory purity, the masculine imagination has had to divide women, to see us, and force us to see ourselves, as polarized as to good or evil, fertile, or barren, pure and impure. What Rich is not disclosing here is that women are symbolic of good and evil, like all humanity, they have the potential of being good or being evil. When portrayed in the role of “good”, domestic, fertile, nurturing, etc., then order and abundance is achieved for everyone. When women are highly sexual and violent, when women rule, then there is a period of chaos, of disorder, of violence, of pestilence. Order is regained only through a period of male domination, when calm is returned to the cosmos. Women reading this may question this claim, the need for men to bring order like Shiva, but if women are honest with themselves, they will acknowledge the truth to this claim. It is, after all, in contemporary Western society, during a time when women have been set free from moral restraint that they have chosen, themselves, to display themselves sexually. They have chosen to use their sexuality to achieve their goals. It is women themselves, who choose to wear the shorty shorts and the extremely revealing dresses. One cannot help but to think of Nietzsche’s much criticised passage on women, Woman wants to become self-reliant – and for that reason she is beginning to enlighten men about “women as such”: this is one of the worst developments of the general uglification of Europe. For what must these clumsy attempts of women at scientific selfexposure bring to light! Woman has much reason for shame; so much pedantry, superficiality, schoolmarmishness, petty presumption, petty licentiousness and immodesty lies concealed in women . . . so far, all this was at bottom best repressed and kept under control by fear of men. Woe when “the eternally boring in women” – she is rich in that! – is permitted to venture forth! When she begins to unlearn thoroughly and on principle her prudence and art – of grace, of play, of chasing away worries, of lightening burdens and taking things lightly – and her subtle aptitude for agreeable desires! Although this passage has been much maligned, and as should have been made clear in what has been written I certainly could not agree with this passage in full, but is it that far wrong that once “freed” from moral restraints women have released the “eternally boring” including “licentiousness” and “immodesty”? It has been women themselves who have chosen to wear revealing clothing to exercise in when there is no practical requirement to wear such clothing. In truth, if women are truthful with themselves, women know the power of their sexuality, they know that it allows them to control men, to advance their careers, to earn more money. Women, when free of moral restraint, have chosen to prostitute themselves. The vision of Shiva has indeed been manifested and we do live in an era of increasing chaos. This is an age when morality plays no part and we have all been cast free and women have chosen, themselves, to be sexual rather than be respected for what they can do and who they are as people.

569

This image shows Shiva and Parvati as two aspect of one person or a perfect unity. This is not an androgynous image as the two halves are distinct but maleness and femaleness coming together like in marriage.

The ultimate aspiration is for men and women to live in harmony without one or the other having power over the other. A time when both men and women’s lives are guided by an experience of what is good. Both knowing their roles and living accordingly. This same dynamic is happening with Hestia and Shechinah. Hestia is ordered bliss, domesticity, reproduction, where the Shechinah is Kali, violent, bloodthirsty, destructive. In times when Hestia and her husband live together then Kali type goddesses are demonised as in traditional Christian societies, like Anat, Astarte, Lucifer, and visa versa. This is what is happening today, Virginal figures like Mother Mary are ridiculed and our heroic women, if we are to go off Hollywood movies, are domineering, violent, independent, even bloodthirsty. Women who may want to live at home and look after their husbands and children, in so doing express a certain kind of power both in the family and in the wider society, are demonized because we live increasingly in the times of Kali, times when traditional orders are destroyed, a time when the nuclear family is increasingly portrayed as something evil, something oppressive and, interestingly, it is an extremely violent time. It is a time of increased sexuality when gender norms are being undermined etc., etc. These different aspects of the goddess were recently on display in the Hollywood movie Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, as YouTube commentator Jonathan Pageau (2018) observes, is basically a theological homage to the goddess of war and sexuality. The screenplay of Wonder Woman was written by Jewish American Allan Heinberg and starred Israeli actress Gal Gadot as Wonder

570 Woman. The movie commences with her as a “good” woman, by traditional measures, Diana Prince. Her name well may be a reference to the Graeco-Roman goddess Diana. As the movie progresses, she leaves this persona behind and discovers that she really is, interestingly, a “god-killer” (Isra-el). This is the role Gnostic Jews identify themselves as performing, killing Gods who oppose their God. Now as “Wonder Woman” she enters into a life and death struggle with the God “Ares”. Diana’s alter ego is a highly sexualized, warrior goddess who seeks to kill all her enemies in order to protect Man. One of her enemies, apparently, is the Christian Church. In one of the most important scenes of the movie, her entire military group is being held down by a well-positioned fascist sniper ensconced in a Christian Church steeple replete with a clearly displayed cross. Wonder Women gets a lift from her American male allies into the Church steeple where she kills the sniper and, most importantly, destroys the Church steeple that afforded him his privileged position. It is men supported by the Church that suppresses everyone and only the Shechinah can liberate them. In the one action, Wonder Woman kills the sniper and also kills that which supports the fascist sniper, the Christian Church. After killing the sniper and destroying the steeple, Wonder Woman walks forward to where the steeple had stood. Blazoned across her forehead is the 8pointed star of Venus/Lucifer, shining forth from the position that the cross had recently occupied but was now replaced. In Wonder Woman there are the two faces, if you like, of this goddess, Diana and Wonder Woman, the virgin and the prostitute. As is also displayed in the children’s movie Shrek, she rejects Diana and embraces Wonder Woman, rejects begin a princess but wants to be the Ogre, protecting the vulnerable but obedient humanity against the evils of false Gods, Christianity. Historically, as the centrality of Hestia in the Ancient Greek world evinces, Western communities’ prized domesticity, Diana, as constituting prosperity through harmony and would demonize the highly sexualized warrior goddess as creating conflict and poverty. Unlike in a tribal situation, once recognised in a community, a person could move from one family to another, through marriage, and remain a member of the community. Once recognised as a member of a community, sharing the same values, then one is granted trust. So, with the advent of the community comes also the individual seen in a new light, as Nietzsche himself also acknowledged, “know thyself” is what is required by a member of a community, self-improvement, morally and expertise becomes a central motivation for living. It was development through individual internal reflection, magnified a thousand-fold with the advent of Christianity 500 years later, that is definitive of community. Jews were historically excluded from European society not because they were Jews but because they maintained “their national distinctiveness through language, culture, education and social institutions”. (Wisse 2007: 7) Jews were historically not seen as members of European communities because they remained, out of respect for their own God, their own distinct

571 “tribe”. As outsiders, Jews were never fully trusted within European communities and, for this reason, were restricted in certain ways in what they could do. Such exclusions are not only understandable but in light of our contemporary condition they are wise. By trusting people who choose to remain outsiders, and this is exactly what has indeed happened, it has allowed Gnostic Jews to corrupt the entire society, to undermine its institutions and ridicule its values. In claiming that historical exclusion was nothing but “anti-Semitism”, that is racism, they are misrepresenting the situation. Jews were historically excluded because they wanted to be excluded. They adhered and advanced different values that were not only opposed to Western Christian values but in exact opposition to them. Exclusion was always conditioned on remaining outsiders. If Jews showed themselves as insiders, then they were allowed to rise into positions of authority but, history shows, that such activity was usually nothing but a deception. What happens in the shadow of Sabbatai Tzevi is that some Gnostic Jews, unlike Orthodox Jews who continued to maintain their distinct identity and did not want to enter into European society, appear to want to assimilate into European society. As already observed, some even pretend to become Christian, but the majority simply pretended to accept Western cultural norms such as language, appearance and education. This was, as already shown, just a strategy to achieve the kind of domination that they have achieved. This is a strategy that has worked extremely well. Once Jews appeared to accept a common language, culture and, in some respects, religion, then they were welcome as trusted members of the community. Yes, there were changing views on human dignity and religious tolerance, undeniably, but there continued to be the conditions of inclusion that, by contrast, Orthodox Jews failed to meet so, even today, they are not really welcomes or included in the same way as “assimilated” Jews. But this was only a deception. A way to gain trust in order to destroy as Sabbatai Tzevi had taught. The only people being assimilated through this strategy were Westerners into Jewish ways. That this strategy has worked shows a fundamental weakness in Western criteria of community, at least how practiced today, in contrast to tribal societies like those in the Middle East. As a Christian born to Christian parents, it does not matter what I do, even if I convert as converts will verify, I will never be accepted into Jewish tribal life as a trusted member nor will my children. Jews, by contrast, are completely trusted members of my community who have been afforded every opportunity as everyone else plus the benefit they get from help from Jews. Western communities came to extend insider trust to people who simply, as history shows, should never have been trusted. This was part of a deliberate strategy originally devised and practiced by Sabbatai Tzevi and adopted and practiced by his Gnostic followers.

572 In Dante’s Inferno, the deepest circle of Hell is saved for treachery. This deepest well of Hell is a large frozen lake and trapped within the ice are those who were guilty of treachery or betraying trust. The reason why the deepest well of Hell is frozen is because, as Ciardi writes, The treacheries of these souls were denials of love (which is God) and of all human warmth. Only the remorseless dead centre of the ice will serve to express their natures. As they denied God’s love, so are they furthest removed from the light and warmth of His Sun. As they denied all human ties, so are they bound only by the unyielding ice. (1996: 270) This distancing from the Sun has all kinds of symbolic meaning in being not only the furthest from warmth but the furthest from ultimate truth, as characterised in Plato’s famous allegory, the furthest away from goodness. As Colpe (1981: 44) observes, there was time when the seven planets, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn were associated with the seven metals, gold, silver, iron, electrum, tin, copper, lead. This was thought to be a movement from good to evil, gold/Sun to lead/Saturn. According to Baron Rudolf von Sebottendorf (1924,2013) the Sufi tradition believes, Sun = God, Moon = Spirit, Saturn = Matter. Venus, the planet of Lucifer, by this account, represents “Earth”. The Islamic tradition uses the moon as its primary symbol as they believe they lack knowledge of God while the Christian tradition used the Sun. Jesus has no planetary allocation as he brings together, Sun, Moon, Saturn and Venus to manifest a “World”. In such accounts, alchemy, astronomy and morality are brought together in a shared schema. Time can also be introduced if it is appreciated that the seven planets were linked to the seven days of the week with Sunday, in the Western tradition being “good” while Saturn, Saturday or Sabbatai in Hebrew, “matter” is “evil”. Like the planet Saturn, also Sabbatai in Hebrew, was once thought to be the furthest planet from the Sun and therefore the site of what is most evil, Hell if you like. Not only is it the case that the treacherous deny all human ties and offers of love that might affirm their love of God, as love of each other always entails the love of God, but that the love that was freely and generously offered to them was betrayed. In Dante’s account, the ninth circle is further divided and one of those finer divisions is the particular sin of betrayal of your community. This circle of Hell is named Antenora after Antenor the Trojan soldier who betrayed his city to the Greeks which resulted in its destruction. The reason why Dante thinks the deepest of the deepest pits of Hell is treachery against your community is because communities exist on trust. Societies rise and fall on trust as the West is discovering today. The particular kind of trust that is afforded members of a community is that insiders serve the common interests of the community as a whole and no longer primarily serve their own or even their family’s interests. Even if you hate your enemies’ guts and disagree with everything that they say, as long as that person is trusted as a member of your community then they are, at the same time, offered love.

573 This is the true meaning of the Christian belief of loving not only your neighbour but loving your enemy. In the Christian tradition loving others as you love God is the most important teaching that Jesus gives. In Matthew 22: 27-40, Jesus claims that everything written in the Torah is derived from loving those around you. That is, to be good, to experience God, requires that you love and trust those around you because from this love every other Law is derived. Trust, as we all know, is a significant part of love. What is unique about Christianity is that one of its aspirations is to seek the benefit of others. No other religious tradition in the world positively advocates that one must suffer for the benefit of those around us as Christianity does. But this beneficence is for the improvement of society as a whole. That is, it relies on trust. Trust must exist if the institutions that help order a community can function. It is because of trust that virtues of honesty, truth, justice, norms all have their relevance. These are virtuous from out of the same individuating forces identified in the work of Nietzsche, that is found in Socratic metaphysics. Why prize honesty without trust? Why prize truth without trust? Even if I disagree with you in a public debate about a certain course of action, as a member of my community, I trust that you are being truthful and honest and motivated by the same concerns as myself although you disagree with me. All the Western virtues emerge from community relationships and perhaps the single most important of them is trust. When somebody you trust gives you advice you listen to it in a different way to advice from somebody who has their own agenda that may be against your own interests. Jacob Peterson argues that trust is what enables long term peaceful cooperation. He argues that trust simplifies all relationships, allows them to proceed without them being threatened by scepticism. If you trust somebody and they tell you something, then you do not have to consider underlying motivations or desires that make the exchange too complex, but you simply accept what is said is being said sincerely. If trust breaks down, as it has today, then chaos arises and, like a marriage where the trust has been lost, it will not survive. Gnostic Jews, unlike Orthodox Jews, have betrayed our trust.259 They have pretended to be members of our communities while in practiced they have not only remained outsiders but opposed to Western aspirations. They have pretended to work on our behalf when really, they have worked to destroy us. They have pretended to be working towards the common good, in literal terms, but have been working against that good and done everything they could to undermine it. In the centre of Hell, to which the 9th circle surrounds, is the Devil himself, Lucifer. The Lord of Darkness. The God of chaos and disorder. The God the Gnostic Jews serve. If people do ever act, it will be a reaction not against a people or even a religion but against an act of treachery and treachery has historically been punished, because of its seriousness, with violence. Jews

259

Orthodox Jews have not betrayed our trust because they never asked for it. They have always insisted on remaining apart, outsiders. In so far as they are members of our society, they vow to obey our laws.

574 were trusted by Europe when they were allowed to take control of the European banking system. Jews were trusted when they were allowed to control European newspapers. Jews were trusted when they were placed in overseas embassies. All this trust, as Volume III in this series will show, was repaid with the First, quickly followed by the Second, World War. What has happened in Western societies is that people have not lost trust in Gnostic Jews but, because of their actions, have lost trust in each other. That is why people will not take vaccines, because they no longer trust the producers or those who tell them that it is safe. People do not trust governments. People do not trust the police. Trust has broken down and this is reflected in a less functional society. As outlined in the beginning, people no longer trust government, business or NGOs and that is because everyone knows something is happening, but they do not know exactly what.

The Rise and Fall of “Race Theory” Although Gnostic Judaism obviously expresses itself in a kind of tribal “racism” through exclusion of “gentiles” and preferential treatment of people who identify as “Jews”, this tribalism is never discussed openly in the United States. It is not so much that it is a secret, many Americans know and would readily acknowledge that Jews help each other to succeed, it is the subject of many jokes in Hollywood, but nobody is allowed to talk seriously about it. If a person does publicly accuse Jews of being racist, in terms of preferential or discriminatory behaviour based on a person’s “race”, they are labelled an anti-Semite. You can speak openly about “white men” and how they supposedly help other thereby explaining why they have disproportionate power, few white people today would not have experienced derogatory reference to “white people” in everyday conversations, but you are never allowed to speak publicly about Jewish racism. How did we come to our current understanding of “race”? How did being racist become both the worst thing that a person could be while, at the same, becoming a central analytical tool for understanding contemporary society? To be extremely racist, like many contemporary Jews are, has not always been seen as a bad thing even for Westerners. The word “racism” did not enter the Oxford English Dictionary until 1910 which is long after claims of race as a scientific fact became common currency. Before 1910, and in practice for a long time afterwards260, being a “racist”, to be prejudiced against someone based on their membership to a particular ethnic group, was expected. It was not that long ago in the United States, as late as the mid-

260

Anecdotal accounts in England claim that even in the 1950s, throughout most of Britain, a black person would have been socially isolated and even publicly abused because they were black and fear about the values that person prized.

575 1960s in some states, that it was illegal, as it continues to be in Israel today, to enter into an interracial marriage. To be a ‘racist’ only became a widely used pejorative term in the West following World War II when fighting “racism” was used to justify the terrible costs of that war. Prior to World War II, there was a determined and extremely popular anti-immigration movement in the United States based on racial prejudice. This attitude is perhaps best exemplified by the National Origins Act of 1924. This act prohibited immigration from Asia and greatly limited the number of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This mapping of immigration, of course, reflected the dominant Protestant ethic of the United States prior to World War II. The expectation in American prior to World War II was for those who did immigrate to assimilate into American society by embracing American values. As Victor Davis Hanson observes, We used to say, “You chose to come here. We didn’t ask you. You chose to have a different paradigm from where you left and we’re gonna have a brutal bargain. We’re gonna assimilate you, we’re gonna integrate you, we’re gonna make you a perfect American and if you do this you have just as much right as someone who came across on the Mayflower.” (Hanson 2021B) The expectation from those who were established in the United States was that, “All citizens should give up their own ethnic racial, and tribal primary identities. Only through such a brutal bargain of assimilation can they sustain a common culture.” (Hanson 2021) People were expected to no longer be “Jews” or “French” or “Russian” but would now all become Americans and only Americans. As this was the deal, it was appreciated that Protestants from Western Europe would assimilate more easily into American society than Asians or even those from the Catholic South of Europe or the Orthodox Eastern Europeans. Most Americans continued to be openly “racist” in the years prior to the outbreak of World War II and for many years afterwards. Pre-war Europe and the United States were rife with what many today would consider as racism. What changed was that the moral justification for World War II became built around the emergent idea of “racism”. Throughout most of the Second World War, Americans were not clear on exactly why they were fighting. They had travelled halfway around the world to fight an “enemy” that was very much like they were. This was so big an issue that even towards the end of the war, just after liberating the Jews being held in the Ohrdruf concentration camp, it was claimed, “General Eisenhower fixed [a soldier] with a cold eye and when he spoke each word was like that drop of an icicle, “Still having trouble hating them?”” (as seen in Whitlock 2014) It seems that even after fighting the Germans for years, many soldiers found it difficult to think of the Germans as ‘the enemy’ and finding the gallows, the emaciated and diseased Jews and the piles of dead bodies, was now the unequivocal justification for fighting the entire war. By the end of the war, it was being generally argued that the West was fighting Nazi racism but most

576 especially Nazi anti-Semitism. It was in large part the result of this justification that it was only “[i]n the decades following World War II and the Holocaust . . .[that] the concept of race slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category.” (Morris-Reich and Rupnow 2017: 1)

Anti-Racism cartoon created by Dr Suess and published on June 11, 1942.261

The claim that the Second World War became justified in terms of it being a struggle against racism, particularly anti-Semitism, can be seen in the distribution of a pamphlet, written by two cultural anthropologists, Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, titled The Races of Mankind. This pamphlet was distributed amongst the U.S. troops fighting in Europe to inform them about why they were fighting. The Races of Mankind claimed that, although the United States remained racist, one day the “Nazis’ race tactics will be outmoded” and America will “stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race.” (Benedict and Weltfish 1943: 35) The implication was, that although the Americans were fighting against racism, they retained traces of the same racist mindset of their enemy. Because of this racist mindset, they could not stand unashamed before their enemy. One day, though, America will be rid of its racist tendencies, and then they would be able to oppose the Nazis’ ideology without hypocrisy. One of the authors of this document, Dr. Ruth Benedict, attended the New School for Social Research.262 This research organization became known as the “University in Exile”

261

A lot of unintended things are communicated in this cartoon. The role of the state, represented by Uncle Sam, as being that institution responsible for inoculation against the “disease” of racism. Seeing racism as being like a public health issue, like treating STDs, which would be rolled out to “treat” the masses of their “illness”. The determination to stop the United States being racist was most certainly institutionalized and the education system played a central role. 262 Amongst the known Gnostic Jews associated with this college were, Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer, Leo Strauss and Hans Jonas. It really is who’s who of Gnostic Judaism in the years just before and just following World War II.

577 because so many prominent Jewish German scholars fleeing the Nazis became associated with it. These scholars included Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer, Aron Gurwitsch, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Franz Boas and Leo Strauss. As the reader should be already able to recognisable, this is a veritable who’s who of Gnostic Jewry in the United States who were mainly responsible for shaping academia in the years following World War II. Indeed, Benedict had been supervised by none other than Franz Boas who, as previously discussed, was one of the most vocal opponents of “race theory” and one of the more influential men of the 20th century. Benedict, along with Margaret Mead, practiced what became known as “applied anthropology” which was in practice a form of political activism primarily aimed at overcoming “racism” but most especially anti-Semitism in the United States. (Guimaraes 2008: 72) Benedict’s coauthor, Gene Weltfish, was an exiled German Jew who, as might be expected, found Hitler’s antisemitism, and any form of Western racism, noxious. The systematic and extremely organized attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the concept of “race”, undermining any claim to the “naturalness” or “essential being” of a people, was the main aim of this entire movement. The dominant belief prior to World War II, one advanced by many Jews including Freud, Einstein, and Adler (Heinze 2004: 76) was the idea that people were genetically predisposed to behave in certain ways. The Chinese, for example, behaved in certain ways, it was believed, because of their “race” and not because of how the conditions under which they were raised. Even the way people thought differently was attributed not to religion or culture but to race. As the 1905 Nobel Prize winner in physics wrote, “In reality, as with everything that man creates, science is determined by race and blood . . . Nations of different racial mixes practice science differently.” (as cited in Gimble 2013) This widely held belief informed all kinds of practices but, perhaps most importantly, immigration policy. If people were essentially a particular way, then the hoped for outcome of assimilation was literally impossible. A Chinese person would forever be Chinese as a German would forever be German no matter the situation in which they lived. It was this racial essentialism that the Boasian school was determined to overturn. Despite racial essentialism being advanced by many Jews, including radical progressives like Russian Chaim Zhitlovsky (See Hoffman 2005), there was a concerted effort from the Boasian school to link such thinking to the Nazis. As Boas himself made clear, The attempt that is being made by those who are in power in Germany to justify on scientific grounds their attitude toward the Jews is built on pseudo-science. No one has ever proved that a human being, through his descent from a certain group of people, must of necessity have certain mental characteristics. (Boas 1934: 11) Against the claim that certain races, or genders, were biologically pre-disposed to expressing certain characteristics, Boas and his followers claimed that racial and gender characteristics are exhaustively the result of “culture”. Behaviour was not natural but the result of nurture and, therefore, something that

578 could be easily altered over a very short period of time. Although it is claimed, even today, that Boas’ conclusions and that of his “little group” were based on science, in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Boas was motivated by his Gnostic Jewish religious beliefs and the only way that one could be successful within his sphere of influence, as his “little group” of unusually “loyal” followers knew only too well, was to deliver what he wanted to hear. If one did not deliver the political program of Boas they were quickly dismissed. The basic argument was that because character was cultural and not “natural”, then the United States, and other Western countries, should implement a “non-discriminatory” immigration program where there was no distinction between black, white, Italian or Jew. Everyone, they were arguing at that time, should be equally welcomed into America because, within a generation, everyone would become “American”. Again, as Boas wrote, For instance, exact observations have been made on Negroes who have moved from the country to the city, and it has been shown that assimilation of these people to the behaviour of the city population takes place within a few years. Likewise, it has been shown in the case of Italian immigrants that they grow to resemble the Americans in behaviour the longer they have been in this country. (Boas 1934: 10) Despite such claims going against the everyday experience of most people, where ethnic characteristics last generations, such arguments greatly influenced immigration policy. Both Weltfish and Benedict belonged to the “Boas School” of sociology, which was viewed as an extremely “leftist”, school of thought.263 As what was believed to have been at the time part of their leftist program, the Boas School denied the very existence of “race” and argued further that sex and gender, until then barely issues of academic consideration, were actually more important considerations for understanding social hierarchies. Benedict and Weltfish’s anti-racist pamphlet were intended to inform the U.S. troops as to why they were killing white European Protestant Christians with whom they shared so much in common, looked the same, believed in the same things, while harbouring Jews that many Americans thought, rightly, opposed everything in which they believed. The Races of Mankind was later withdrawn from circulation amongst the troops by the military who feared that the document was too subversive, too critical of the troops, too “anti-American” and, quite possibly, communistic.264 The withdrawal of the document shows just where the minds of many in

263

Boas was forcefully advancing his arguments in the United States at the same time that Chaim Zhitlovsky was advancing an essentialist argument in support of Jewish uniqueness in the Soviet Union. 264 Dr. Weltfish later accused the Americans of using biological weapons in the Korean War. This rumor was started by known communist sympathizer and husband of a German Jew, Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. Despite the claim being widely circulated no evidence for this claim has ever been found but well may communists simply trying to besmirch the West in defense of their communist Chinese comrades.

579 the American establishment were at that time. There certainly are a few sections of Benedict and Weltfish’s pamphlet that read like pieces of Soviet communist propaganda. In the section on how to overcome racism they apologetically write of how “Russia”, then the Soviet Union, was criminalizing racism. They claimed, The Russian nation has for a generation shown what can be done to outlaw race prejudice in a country with many kinds of people. They did not wait for people’s minds to change. They made racial discrimination and persecution illegal. They welcomed and honoured the different dress, different customs, different arts of the many tribes and countries that live as part of their nation. The more backward groups were given special aid to help them catch up with the more advanced. Each people was helped to develop its own cultural forms, its own written language, theatre, music, dance and so on. At the same time that each people was encouraged in its national self-development, the greatest possible interchange of customs was fostered, so that each group became more distinctly itself and at the same time more a part of the whole. (Benedict and Weltfish 1943: 26) Such claims were indeed just propaganda. By 1943, all kinds of racial prejudices and in-group privileges, including massively disproportionate overrepresentation of Jews in positions of power and authority, were taking place across the Soviet Union. Non-Russian speakers were being systematically forced to adopt humanist beliefs while having their traditional religious beliefs, which must be understood as “cultural”, outlawed. What is interesting is just how close to the actual situation in the post-1980s West that Benedict and Weltfish’s description of an “ideal” Soviet Union has become. They propose the two pillars of postcultural society, on the one hand the state actively supporting cultural diversity while educating people to accept every culture without judgement or what might be called cultural tolerance. These two strategies have realized Western countries as cultureless wastelands where judging other for how they dress for holding unconventional beliefs is itself judged harshly. Another interesting attempt to reshape American thinking on race was a film made by the Army Signal Corps during the war, in 1943, Don’t Be a Sucker. This short film shows a young American, Mike, who is initially attracted to what a fascist agitator is saying to a crowd. A key moment in the film occurs when a “refugee” who was born in Hungary but lived for a period of time in Berlin, pulls the young Mike aside to teach him about what happened in Nazi Germany and how Americans must be vigilant for their deceit. Although it is not stated explicitly, claiming that the man was born in Hungary and moved to Berlin before fleeing the Nazis, strongly suggests that the man educating the naïve American is a Jew. Indeed, the role is acted by American Jew Paul Lukas. It must be appreciated that this is exactly how Jews wanted Americans to see Jews in the years following the war. They thought that Jews should be seen as educators and moral guides to a naïve and dangerously “Christian” country. It of course should be appreciated, that

580 the Jewish refugee was actually working his own subversive propaganda on the ignorant white American but in the way that Gnostic Jews spread their propaganda. The Jewish refugee says, I thought Nazis were crazy people, stupid fanatics, but unfortunately that was not so. You see, they knew that they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split Germany into small groups. They used prejudice as a practical weapon to cripple the nation. Of course, that is not easy to do. They had to work hard to do it. You see, we human beings are not born with prejudices, always they are made for us. Made by someone who wants something. Remember that when you hear this kind of talk. Somebody is trying to get something out of you. This is not classroom theory . . . I saw it happen. The irony is, of course, that this is exactly what Gnostic Jews were trying to do. They continue to split society, into ever smaller and smaller units, man against women, black people against white, Christian against Muslim, rich against poor, they keep fracturing society until nobody is left with enough power to offer any resistance. It is when everyone is against everyone else, when it is a Hobbesian state of nature with all against all, when the only shared sentiment is hatred, then Gnostic Jews will rule. Although Don’t be a Sucker continues to be celebrated in the United States even today, what it does show is a newly arrived European Jew teaching an established American on how he should think. The Jew is cast in the role of “the educator”, the one who is informed and wise speaking in what seems to me to be an extremely patronizing way to the supposedly naïve and ignorant white American. This is exactly how the urbane, cosmopolitan European Jews did think when they arrived in the United States. In the film “Mike” is quickly persuaded to see the world as he should . . . through the eyes of a Gnostic Jew. The refugee recognises that Mike is not evil, but he also knows that because of Mikes stupidity and natural Christian tendencies that one day he could be. It was the refugee’s task, his burden, to ensure that that day never came. How this movie resonated with people on the ground at the time would be interesting to know. Knowing what I know now I found it disturbingly insulting and demeaning but America was, and sadly continues to be, naïve, in a way that Europe at that time was not, and Jews have managed to take control so many Americans may not have perceived what was actually taking place as they watched the film. This is exactly how the German Jewish immigrants like Franz Boas saw themselves in relation to the established population. They were there, in America, to ensure that America did not go down the road of fascism and the most important step in avoiding that was to not only address “racism”, now a pejorative, but most especially anti-Semitism. In the year the war ended, 1945, another short video, produced by American Jew Mervyn LeRoy265, which featured the song The House I Live In by Frank Sinatra, was released which

265

LeRoy would later produce the anti-Christian film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz written by the theosophist L. Frank Baum.

581 told the story of a group of American boys chasing a Jewish boy through the streets. Sinatra, playing himself, intervenes and points out to the young American boys that they should not chase Jews as everyone is an American and one person’s blood was as good as any others. Religious beliefs were irrelevant in America, a young Sinatra assured the American boys. After delivering his wisdom, Sinatra broke into the song The House I Live In. Although the millions of lives lost by the United States and the West generally in the Second World War were eventually justified in hindsight as a fight against the racist policies of Hitler’s Germany, thus beginning the journey of denying any sense of racial identity for white Americans, Gnostic Jews continued, and continue today, to be extremely racist. Many Jews fought extremely hard to have the West deny their racial identity, as all the above examples shows, in the years during and directly following World War II while they continued with their extremely racist Zionist ideology uninhibited. Despite the important contribution of Jewish scholars in establishing modern conceptualizations of race in the 19th century, when racial essentialism was used to inform Jewish nationalism, Jewish scholars like Hans Jonas n the middle of the 20th century rejected the concept of race in the United States and began to claim that the concept was “anachronistic, irrelevant, almost farcical” (Jonas as seen in Lazier 2009: 63) despite race being central to Jewish claims over Israel. This forceful denial of the concept of race was then used to overcome domestic resistance to mass immigration in the West allowing first immigration from Southern Europe and then non-European immigration. As MacDonald (2010: 304) observes, “. . .it is probable that the decline in evolutionary/biological theories of race and ethnicity facilitated the sea change in immigration policy brought about by the 1965 law.” Today, just 70 or so years later, surprisingly to those who care about such things, race has returned as a central theme being deployed for understanding contemporary society. These new reflections on race approach the concept “critically” which means that it is supposedly used as a tool for understanding unequal distribution of wealth and certain features of disproportionate allocation of power. Race is being used to criticise the status quo. The difference is that today, instead of the concept of “race” being used to justify certain exclusions, today it is being used “critically” to undermine traditional social hierarchies especially against “whites”. Race is only taught today in Western schools and universities in order to enhance people’s “critical” vocabulary not as a way for Westerns to develop a shared identity. As “feminist” scholar Mary Maynard writes, Feminist analyses which are concerned with “race” and gender, not just as subjects for study, but for the power relations to which they give rise, and which need actively to be challenged . . . When questions of “race” are raised this usually means focusing on black peoples, its victims, who are thereby constructed as “the problem”. Yet the processes of

582 racism and racial oppression might be better understood by concentrating, as well, on the exercise and mechanisms of white privilege and power. (Maynard 2001: 130) Here the intimacy between second wave feminist and race, both “critical” traditions, is made explicit. One question is what is different in this critical strategy that is not what is warned by the character of the Jewish refugee against fascism as told in Don’t Be a Sucker? How is this not a group of people acknowledging that “they were not strong enough to conquer a unified country, so they split [Americans] into small groups. They used prejudiced as a practical weapon to cripple the nation.” Historical attempts, promoted by Jews, to overcome race, to delegitimize it as a tool for analysing power, was in order to recognise the universal equality of Man, overcome exclusion, and undermine notions of nationhood built around racial identities that informed policies like the White Australia Policy in Australia. Today race is used to acknowledge “difference”, divide society into self-interested tribes with the ultimate aim, as Benedict and Weltfish acknowledge in their war pamphlet, of overcoming most ethnic differences. But to do away with ethnic identities, to do away with culture as such, to realise a post-cultural world, is to realise the vision of Gnostic Jewry. It is to look away from the established religions with their gods and look at the Gnostic God as the last God standing. This is taking place even in countries like France, Germany, England, and Sweden where “white people” have been the indigenous inhabitants for thousands of years. Prior to the Second World War, and for quite some time afterwards, countries like New Zealand and Australia were determined to remain pre-dominantly Anglo-Saxon and continued to refuse to allow immigrants who were not “white” to enter their country. As the American Earnest Hooton wrote in private correspondence expressing views in terms that would have been widely held throughout the Anglosphere prior to the Second World War, “I don’t expect that I shall agree with you at every point, but you are probably aware that I have a basic sympathy for you in your opposition to the flooding of this country with alien scum.” (Hooton as seen in Marks 2007: 233-234) The historical reality is that if immigration from non-white countries had not been historically opposed, in the 19th and for most of the 20th century, then places like Australia, New Zealand and the United States would be very different places today and will be very different places in the future because there is no longer any opposition. Today, of course, such exclusive attitudes to immigration are only acceptable in places like Israel. This Israeli exceptionalism was recently on display when a group of 40,000 Africans, who were seeking asylum in Israel, were threatened with deportation by the Israeli government if they did not voluntarily leave. This tough government stand against immigration received broad public support in Israel and very little media attention abroad. Indeed, on March 17th, Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef called black people “monkeys” and the Hebrew equivalent of “nigger” in a public discussion of the issue. As journalist David Sheen

583 admitted, “To be fair, racist comments from state-paid rabbis aren’t exactly rare in Israel. Israel’s other chief rabbi, Yisrael Lau, used the N-word to describe Black athletes on his very first day in office in July 2013.” Such statements simply would not be made by a Western religious leader, especially not a “statepaid” religious leader as they do not exist, today. You would have to go back some time in history before you found such statements being made in public by Christians. Indeed, sections of the Christian Church in the West, Anglicanism for example, have actually become one of the more vocal promoters of critical race theory and actively advocate on behalf of refugees. Racist attitudes like those expressed in Israel against black Africans has resulted in acts of violence being perpetrated against black people in Israel both by individuals and the state. Perhaps most shockingly, but certainly not uniquely, in January 2014 an Israeli man walked up to an African woman carrying her one-year-old baby and stabbed the baby in the head multiple times. Perhaps most shocking of all, the perpetrator served no prison time for this abhorrent and senseless crime. Unlike much less violent crimes, such as “unconscious racism”, that are attributed to “whites” in places like the United States, this terrible crime attracted no international media attention. Contrast this to so called “systemic racism” in the West, which is when people are not intentionally racist but there are unconscious biases built into institutions, attracts a lot of global media attention. Indeed, the Jewish president of the American Psychological Association, Sandra Shullman, the association responsible for deciding what is “normal” and what is “mentally ill”, claimed that, “We (the United States) are living in a racism pandemic.” People get arrested in the West for just using racial abuse, no matter committing physical violence. The stabbing of the baby in the head was so violent, so senseless, so brutal and intentionally directed against somebody who was defenceless and in no way responsible for their situation, that it was indeed clearly meant as a warning. A warning to black people in Israel that they risked experiencing extreme acts of violence if they try to immigrate to Israel and that this violence, as it has been against Palestinians for generations, will be implicitly condoned through inaction by the state. The Israeli state does not only express its racist beliefs through inaction. It was revealed that Ethiopian Jews who hoped to immigrate to Israel were forcibly injected with long-acting birth control. The aspiring Jewish immigrants were told that they either accepted the contraceptive or they would not be allowed to enter Israel. Even after entering Israel, the forced injections continued. These and other measures have caused the Ethiopian Jewish population to fall to 20% in just 10 years because there has been a 50% decline in birth rates. It truly is a kind of genocide. As Knutsen (2018) observes, “. . .Israel’s implicit intent to limit “burdensome” portions of the population recalls the dark eugenics experiments of World War II.” When the story first broke the Israeli government lied and flatly denied the accusation but as the evidence built to levels where the truth could no longer be denied, the Israeli government did eventually admit that

584 this was official policy. Despite such activity, Shullman is silent on Israel’s disgusting and outrageous racism especially considering these are Jews.266 That is, the only difference is the colour of their skin. With Shullman’s silence, it would appear that Israel is not suffering through a “racism pandemic”. The treatment of the African baby and the Ethiopian immigrants are on a few particular examples of what is really a racist state that has institutionalized violence and oppression again black people. The message being sent by the state of Israel is that Africans should stay out of Israel or face violent repercussions. Racism in Israel is not even hidden. For one quick example, newspapers often write things like, The most concerning aspect of the report pertains to Israelis’ low aptitude in mathematics, reading-comprehension and problem-solving in a computerized environment. Even among the strongest sector of the population – non-Haredi Jews – aptitude in maths is below the OECD average. Arab Israelis are at the bottom of the list. (Zwick and YacobiHandelsman 2019) Not only is performance categorized along religious lines, Haredi and non-Haredi Jews, but Arab Israelis are paid special attention for their particularly poor performance as though these people are tarnishing Israel’s performance. If the same results were found in Australia in relation to their Indigenous population such racially informed identification simply would not be allowed and, if it were done, Australian Jews would be at the forefront criticising it. The surprising thing is that the Western media, so enthusiastic in its criticism of the West, is largely silent, or at least soft, when covering these issues. The BBC, at the vanguard of anti-racist, anti-sexist measures in the U.K., presented the story, written by Jewish journalist Yolande Knell, with the rather ambiguous heading, “Israeli Ethiopian Birth Control to be Examined”.267 Jewish journalists, usually so passionately vocal on issues of race, did everything they could to relativise such unforgivable behaviour and even went so far as to claim, that “. . .the lie about Israel’s sterilization of Ethiopians will doubtless become another weapon in the arsenal used by extremists to delegitimize the Jewish state” (Sternthal 2013) but, even after reading the article, there is no lie to the claim that Israel did indeed try to sterilize Ethiopians. The only lie that was told was expressed by the Jewish state itself that it was not carrying out the program. This is the kind of obfuscation that the media does on issue in relation to Jews.

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Racism in Israel is at such level that blood donated by Africans is disposed of unused because black blood will taint the purity of white Jews. 267 “The Guardian”, again one of the more militant anti-racist media sources, took up the coverage began in Ha’aretz, contextualizing the forced contraception as an example of “a shameful history of abuse of powerless women and communities”. So, it is driving the Gnostic agenda against men and minority ethnic groups while relativizing the behavior of Israel as only what others have done through history. If Australia was doing this to Aboriginal people it would be cast in terms of “white people” against “people of colour”.

585 That Jews drove “civil rights” activities in places like Australia, the United States and South Africa has been well documented. Today, many Jews take pride in their involvement. In places like Australia and the United States, Jews have not only been advocates for non-discriminatory immigration policies, but they have ensured that places like the United States are not only racially diverse but, quite differently and more importantly, culturally diverse. Jews have been acknowledged as the most vocal supporters of the rights of “people of colour” for over 100 years and yet Israel takes every possible measure to ensure racial and cultural homogeneity within its borders along with the near total exclusion of “blacks”. Israel treats black people with state sanctioned violence and systemic discrimination, and nothing is said, while in the United States a police officer may have accidently contributed to the death of a known drug abusing serial criminal who was refusing to obey police directives268 and there are massive and extremely destructive riots fully supported and funded by Jews269. This is all supported by the Jewish controlled media who then sympathetically covered the riots in terms of being a “peaceful protest” when they were obviously extremely violent and destructive. Both the silence regarding Israel and the disproportionate response in the United States to supposed acts of racism are encouraged by Gnostic Jews who are massively overrepresented in academia, the government, and the media. If one were to actually take the time to see who actually established the black rights movement in the United States, what is found is that it was largely established, initially led and primarily funded, by a mix of American Jews and Marxists. Jews proudly admit to their involvement in establishing and supporting the “civil rights” movement and often try to claim moral superiority over Christians for their involvement who are cast as the instigators of exclusive racist policies. Although the early Jewish immigrants from Europe to the United States were highly assimilated into Western European society, many of whom became slave owners themselves and were amongst the early supporters of slavery, later Jewish immigrants who came from Eastern Europe opposed slavery in the hope of undermining white power. These later arrivals, numbering in their millions, quickly saw a potential alliance between Jews and blacks whom they considered to be the most suppressed people in the United States therefore potentially the most disruptive. (Fiebert 2011: 92) In

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And the levels of drugs in his system may have been the primary cause for his death but the American legal system has become so compromised and coward that justice in this case was never going to be served. 269 George Soros, to name just one of several high-profile Jews who fund disruptive social movements, poured hundreds of millions of dollars, into various racially divisive movements including Black Lives Matter, Black Voters Matter, and Poor People’s Campaign, along with funding various “family planning” initiatives which are, of course, all consistent with the agenda of Gnostic Jewry. Although this foundation may or may not directly fund protesters, the accusations have lingered that his is exactly what they do, but that they pour vast sums into these movements ensures their longevity, people will follow the money, and vibrance. Soros’ civic minded stops with paying his fair share of taxes. Between 2016 to 2018, while supporting radical political movements, he paid no federal income tax despite reportedly earning hundred of millions of dollars.

586 1909, the Jew Henry Moscowitz was the driving force and financier, despite not usually being mentioned in the founding “myth” of the civil rights movement, of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP). Julius Rosenwald, an American Jew who owned Sears, Roebuck and Company, promoted the idea that the plight of black Americans was the most serious political concern of the times and put a large portion of his considerable wealth into building schools to educate black children, housing and a number of YMCAs for black people, along with several other projects. (Fiebert 2011: 93) He claimed, expressing the kind of justification as to why Jews are so supportive of black issues, that, “The horrors that are due to race prejudice come home to the Jews more forcefully than to others of the white race, on account of the centuries of persecution which they have suffered and still suffer”. I wonder how the Ethiopians and Palestinians think of this assertion as they are turned away from the Israeli border? The fact that Rosenwald was an extremely wealthy and powerful man when he claimed that Jews had been so severely persecuted and oppressed is concrete example how, unlike in Israel today, over 100 years later, that there had been no substantial barriers to him achieving success as a Jew in the United States. Of course, Rosenwald’s philanthropy, nor Moscowitz activism, had anything at all to do with their concern over the plight of black people as an end in itself. In parallel to this support that nurtured resentment against Christian whites, Jewish storekeepers and landlords economically exploited black Americans and often only interacted with black people as low-level staff or domestic helpers. It was as a result of this exploitation that Jewish merchants were a particular target of the Harlem riots of 1935. (Fiebert 2011: 93) This has been the historical tension in Jewish/black relations that continues in places like South Africa today. Jews enthusiastically support black communities to overcome white Christian oppression but are only too eager to then impose their own oppressive and exploitative practices. In truth, “human rights” movements are just a strategy to begin to undermine both the power and, most importantly, the shared values, of the United States. If there were any questions about this, in Israel there is extreme and explicit racism at levels never experienced in places like Australia or the United Kingdom, which is condoned by the state. Why, it has to be asked, are Jews so proactive in fighting for liberal immigrations laws, minority rights and multiculturalism all around the world, and this is a phenomenon that began in Eastern Europe in the late 19th century aimed at undermining the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, claiming that it is a fundamental belief of Judaism but in Israel, the Jewish state, they govern what is probably the single most racist country on the planet today that rejects not only non-Jewish immigration but also Jews with the wrong skin colour? To answer this question there needs to be an understanding of the history of the concept of race and its use in a political agenda. This will explain the race-based conflict, growing out of “critical race

587 theory”, that is increasingly ripping the United States, and the West more generally, apart. Many histories on the concept of “race” begin in the 17th century, as though there was no concept of race prior to this time. As Jewish historian Ran HaCohen inaccurately claims, “. . . one should be alert to anachronism: the concept of race is a modern construct that emerged just a couple of centuries ago”. (RaCohen 2018) It is true that the 17th century marked the start of a particular, modern, “taxonomic” conception of race, but some sense of “race” or “people” were expressed in the most ancient documents. Distinctions between people have probably been a feature of humanity since the advent of consciousness itself and, despite what people are taught at school today, to claim that such distinctions are a relatively recent invention is simply wrong and goes against all the available evidence.270 The Kalahari “bushmen”, who are understood to have maintained a very early form of culture unchanged, divide everyone in the world into two groups, the Jul’hoansi, “real people”, fellow Kalahari, and !ohm, which is everyone else including inedible animals. (Wade 2014: 17) The suggestion is that you are either part of the tribe of the Kalahari or you are the equivalent of an animal that should not be eaten. In the centuries preceding the birth of Christ, China called itself the “Central Kingdom” and regarded all those who lived outside its borders as “barbarians” who were barley recognised as human. Even the Bible, in both testaments, time and again, distinguishes between different people. The term “race” was originally used in a number of European languages from at least the 13th century. The word was used to capture a sense of shared identity. The early meaning of ‘race’, Italian razza, Spanish raza, Portuguese raca and French race, referred to the sense of a long ancestral heritage or line of descendants with shared “blood” and shared physical characteristics living in a particular region. (Morris-Reich and Rupnow 2017: 1) Conceptualization of “race” or “people” have always been multifactorial and could never be reduced to one variable, say eye or skin colour. The modern taxonomic approach to race is thought to have been introduced in the 18th century. The famous categorist, Linnaeus, recognised four races, Homo americanus (Native Americans), Homo europeaus (Europeans), Homo asiaticus (East Asians) and Homo afer (Africans). In 1795 the anthropologist, Johann Blumenbach, divided the human species into 5 distinct “races”, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian and American, and this division continues to inform research even today. Blumenbach was explicit in arguing that humanity belonged to one species, but that humanity could be further divided into another subgroup, “races”, and that this term said something meaningful about the human condition. That species are further subdivided is certainly not uniquely applied to humans, dogs, cats, and horses, amongst other

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Although brazen untruths have been made and allowed to stand in the past. Such as claims that there was no distinction between low and high culture or that the idea of the West only emerged in the 19 th century. Such blatant untruths have not only been published but have been influential. It has actually become the established position at universities that “race” was a modern invention that had no precedence.

588 species, are understood to be parts of one species but are then further divided into “breeds” based primarily on appearance. These “breeds” are often thought to display certain characteristics such as aggressiveness, obedience, or intelligence. An important period for thinking about race occurred in the middle of the 19th century when Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, in his crude short essay On the Inequality of Human Races, claimed that there were three races, white, yellow, and black, and, unlike either Linnaeus or Blumenbach, that these races could be ranked in a hierarchical ordering with “whites” at the top, “yellow” in the middle and “black” at the bottom. This is an ugly, unsophisticated document written by a person who was not, even by the standards of the time, a trained scientist and should not be thought to be expressing views held by sophisticated Europeans of the day. To describe Gobineau’s account of race as a “taxonomy” would be a gross inaccuracy although it is probably informed by the taxonomic mentality dominant at that time. In this document, Gobineau speaks of “black” people as being little better than animals driven by the “desire to eat, to eat furiously, and to excess” where “no carrion is too revolting to be swallowed by him”. The “black” man’s animal brutishness is displayed in his ability, supposedly, to be either totally indifferent to suffering or to be so cowered by the slightest suffering as to quickly seek refuge in death. The only thing of interest in Gobineau’s account is his negative attitude towards the instinctual drives of humanity. The “yellow” man is portrayed by Gobineau as having some sophistication but only in so far as it is required, and he never lifts to the higher ideals of morality that exist beyond necessity. Of course, in polar opposition to “blacks”, “the immense superiority of the white peoples in the whole field of the intellect is balanced by an inferiority in the intensity of their sensations.” Gobineau continues with the traditional belief that white people are intellectual while all other people are at best pragmatic but most probably pleasure-seeking brutes. What is interesting though, is what Gobineau values, “intellectualism”, and what he demonizes, “sensuality” such as sexual pleasure. According to Gobineau, these pure racial types all interbred in the distant past to produce the different nationalities that we have in the world today. The Finnish are a mix of white and yellow while the Malay are a mix of black and yellow. Each combination expressing the features of their constituents in proportion to the mix. Another interesting feature of Gobineau’s document is that he deploys the words “Aryan” and “Semite” as racial terms. The basic claim is that the more purely white a people are the more superior they are while the more mixed a white population becomes, with the other two groups, the more inferior they become. Once whiteness has been diluted through mixing with the others then there is no return to the lost purity. As Gobineau wrote, The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, and strength. By its union with other varieties, hybrids were created, which were beautiful without

589 strength, strong without intelligence, or, if intelligent, both weak and ugly. Further, when the quantity of white blood was increased to an indefinite amount by successive infusions, and not by a single admixture, it no longer carried with it its natural advantages, and often merely increased the confusion already existing in the racial elements. This document holds little of interest today except that it may have been the origin of thinking in these kinds of racial hierarchical terms and if not the first then certainly one of the earliest uses of “Aryan” and “Semite” in a racial context. At around the same time that Gobineau was writing his hierarchical account of race, ideas of “race” were being infused into existing “redemption narratives” amongst European Jewish thinkers who were formulating modern Zionism. Jewish intellectuals, most especially Moses Hess, were contorting the work of Karl Marx to argue, in his book Rome and Jerusalem (1862), that the primary contestants over scarce resources were not “classes”, as Marx had argued, but “races”. As Waxman (1918) observed, . . .Hess came to the conclusion that Society is not a mere abstract idea but is composed of definite subdivisions known as races, each of which has definite hereditary mental and physical traits which are unchangeable. . . Society, according to this conception, is an organic body composed of organs, the races. Each of these organs or races has a different function to perform for the benefit of the whole. . . Ultimately, history, properly understood, was not a class war but a race war. A race war that was premised on racial essentialism. As Hess wrote, “The race war must first be fought out and definitely settled before social and humane ideas become part and parcel of the German people . . .” (Hess 1918: 80) Informed by a particular account of history, which emphasised the ancient conflict between the Romans and the Carthaginians, it was argued that this race war would ultimately be settled as a contest between Semites and Aryans. Gobineau was simply stating these “races” in a hierarchy whereas it was Hess who proposed a theory of racial conflict that simply accepted Gobineau’s racial essentialism. Aryans were thought to be productive, but the Semites were posited as the moral guides of all of humanity. The struggle, according to Hess, was to ensure that all of humanity, including the Aryans, recognised Jewish values as that which should guide them in the future. Hess was perhaps the first, but certainly not the last, to argue that securing Israel was simply a means for achieving global dominance and certainly not the end of their struggle. One important feature of Hess’ work was to emphasise, against the beliefs of many Jews at the time, that Judaism was indeed a race and not just a religion. As Hess wrote, . . . so little will the tendency of some Jews to deny their racial descent fulfil their purpose. Jewish noses cannot be reformed, and the black, wavy hair of the Jew will not change through conversion into blond, nor can its curves be straightened out by constant combing. The Jewish race is one of the primary races of mankind that has retained its

590 integrity . . . and the Jewish type has conserved its purity through the centuries. (Hess 1918: 59) Here is Hess using features to identify what is “Jewishness”. It is almost as though Hess is responding to the claims of universal dilution of the races being advanced by Gobineau by claiming that not only are Jews a “primary race” like “whites” but that unlike “whites” they had not been “diluted”. To Hess, Jewish “blood” was more powerful than that of Europeans and they were naturally more beautiful than other peoples. Jews, according to Hess, were superior in every way. It has to be appreciated though, that his passionate advocacy for “Jewishness” and the Jewish “race” is not just against Germans but equally targeted at Jews who hoped to assimilate into German society. Hess argued that just as a Jew cannot comb the curves out of his hair so can he never simply remove his fundamental “Jewishness’. For this reason, Hess praises Eastern European Jews who practiced Hasidism for maintaining a more authentic Jewish identity and for leading the way in aspiring to realize a future Jewish state. (Hess 1918: 76-77) Hess’ work was all about maintaining Jewish identity distinct from others in order to undertake the global racial war. Above all he opposed, “The “New” Jew, who denies the existence of the Jewish nationality, who . . . is also a traitor to his people, his race and even to his family.” Races had, according to Hess, a certain fixity that meant persuasion was not easy but a difficult challenge. As Hess wrote, Life is a product of the mental activity of the race, which forms its social institutions according to its inborn instincts and typical inclinations. Out of this primitive life-forming source springs later the life-view of a race . . . but is never able to alter essentially the primal type which continually reappears and takes the ascendency. There is no easy way for changing the races according to Hess, he was an essentialist. If this is carried through to the extreme, the only way to settle the “race war” was through effective annihilation, genocide of the Other. Interestingly given what is happening today, one way of achieving genocide was though racial dilution or encouraging a pure race to have children with people from other races. Hess’ book is certainly more sophisticated and developed, more academic, than Gobineau but certainly no less ugly and certainly more violent. It is passionate racism from start to finish although, surprisingly, his work rarely seems to attract much critical attention in contemporary commentaries on racism and books considering Hess’ contribution are regularly published even today. Indeed, unlike with the work of people like Marr and Hitler, a collection of Hess’ writings was published in 2005 by Cambridge Press. Hess’ work was the first to propose such racially loaded ideas and they seem to be extremely influential within Gnostic Judaism today. Ideas of racial conflict, dilution of other races and changing the way people think to conform to the dominant race’s beliefs are all central ideas that inform the practices of Gnostic Judaism today.

591 Although not widely read at the time, Hess’ work would resonate and influence both a generation of extreme Zionist nationalists, such as Theodor Herzl271 and Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, as well as German nationalists like Wilhelm Marr. Marr was a journalist whose importance was to adopt Hess’ basic argument and to no longer criticise Jews because of their religious beliefs, Marr himself had rejected Christianity and identified as an “atheist”, but because of what they were doing to shape the way Germans thought. Marr opposed Jews because they appeared to be carrying out the program voiced by Hess. For this new way of criticizing Jews, Marr has been described as the first to express “modern anti-Semitism”. Wilhelm Marr wrote his 1873 volume, The Victory of Jewry over Germanism, where he expressed concern that Hess’ vision, whose work Marr was most certainly familiar with, was indeed being realized and the German people were being “Judaized”. As Marr is often thought to be the founding thinker of a German tradition that culminates in Nazism, Marr must be understood as engaging with the work of Hess. One interesting feature to this influence, it is often claimed, in just about every volume to discuss these matters, that Wilhelm Marr was the first person to coin the phrase “anti-Semite” in 1873. As Heinze wrote, “As bad as it had been, antisemitism actually worsened and became starkly racial after the 1870s, the decade in which a German enthusiast coined the term itself [he is referring to Marr], by forming a League of Anti-Semites.” (Heinze 2004: 73) but it was actually Hess who had already deployed that phrase as a criticism several times in his 1862 volume. Hess’ work spoke of racial theories in scientific terms that suggested, as Hess already had argued, that race and cultures were tightly bound as an expression of “blood”. In agreement with Gobineau, Marr argued, consistent with understandings of culture at the time, that different people could be hierarchically ranked. Marr argued, consistent with exactly what had just been argued by Hess, that Jews hoped to undermine German culture and pollute the purity of German blood. Today, when this material is considered, Marr’s concerns are presented as just a crazy expression of racial hatred but when it is appreciated that Hess had just written a volume arguing that this is what needs to be done then Marrs concerns seem to be a more than “crazy racism” but well-founded concerns. As a result of the arguments of people like Marr and Hess, Hermann Ahlwardt could argue in 1890, “The people which first and most thoroughly rids itself of its Jews and thus opens the door to its innate cultural developments is predestined to become the bearer of culture and consequently the ruler of the world.” Ahlwardt is simply saying that the racial conflict predicted by Hess can be won by removing Jews from Europe.

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Herzl would write after reading Rome and Jerusalem, “since Spinoza Jewry had no bigger thinker than this forgotten Moses Hess” and Jabotinsky would list Hess along with Herzl, Rothschild, and Pinsker in his The Jewish Legion in the World War, as enabling the Balfour Declaration.

592 The more widely read and more influential book that advanced a similar argument to that presented by Hess was The Race Struggle written by Russian Jew Ludwig Gumplowicz’s in 1883. The Race Struggle also argued that all of history was a racial conflict for world domination. Hess’s and Gumplowicz’s books, along with the work of Wilhelm Marr, were the first books to argue the ideas that informed the Second World War that racial conflict was the engine room of social change. These books were seminal in promoting certain understandings of race and how races interacted and functioned as forces of historical change. These ideas were also introduced into German society more generally and would eventually, only after the events of the First World War, shape Nazism. Hess’ and Gumplowicz’s books could be pointed to by German nationalists, like Marr, as evidence that there really was a race war, the race war was between Aryans and Semites, and how that race war was being fought, through intellectual/cultural domination. The Nazi’s simply parroted Hess’ and Gumplowicz’s argument that history was indeed a race war, and that race war would ultimately be settled through a showdown between Semites and Aryans. Nazis did not introduce anything new to this argument that had not already been expressed by Jewish scholars, except to conclude incorrectly, as history has shown, that Nordic peoples would eventually be victorious. To be clear, although it is argued as almost a definition of fascism, that it is a racist political movement, thereby encouraging any movements that argues anything racial to be labelled “fascist”, the truth is that the majority of fascist governments, Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy, were not particularly racist. Indeed, Mussolini’s long-time lover, who is believed to significantly contributed to the formulation of Italian fascism, who was hung by his side when he was eventually killed by a vengeful mob, was a Jew. Racist elements were introduced into German fascism as a response to the thinking of Hess, Gumplowicz and Waton, along with experiences in Germany during and after World War I. After World War I, Jews were “perceived as radical revolutionaries aiming to undermine the Holy Trinity of state, nation, and religion”. (Gerrits 2009: 16) As with so much of the Nazi movement that dominated German society in the 1930s, the idea of a race conflict has the same origins as Zionism. It was not accidental that Hitler clamped down particularly hard on non-Zionist Jewish groups, such as Orthodox Jews and highly assimilated Jews, while basically implementing that nationalist agenda of the Zionists. The only two flags that were allowed to be flown in Nazi Germany were the Swastika and the Zionist Star of David.272 These political movements

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Of more than passing interest is that both the Swastika and the Star of David are gnostic symbols. The Swastika was used in Eastern, particularly Hinduism, to portray that unchanging Absolute, the point where the lines met, surrounded by the dynamic and everchanging cosmos. Early thinkers in the Thule society, such as Eckhart, were influenced by Eastern thinking especially the idea of “Maya”. Maya are the magical illusions of this world that appear real when they are not. Maya is “the powerful force that creates the cosmic illusion that the phenomenal world is real." The only thing that is real, according to this thinking, is the unchanging, unknowable Absolute at the

593 functioned in a symbiotic relationship where the success of one ensured the success of the other. These two political movements, dividing the world into Aryans and Semites, worked so closely together that many German Jews were deeply concerned, even suspicious, regarding the involvement of Zionism in the establishment of Nazism. Indeed, a person who is closely associated with recruiting Hitler into the early nationalist movement at the end of World War I, Rudolf Freiherr von Sebottendorff, who established the Thule Society, alongside Anton Drexler, was an active occultist who spent time in the Dohme dominated city of Thessaloniki273 where he was befriended by the extremely gnostic Termudi family. After spending time in Thessalinki, Sebbottendorff became an extremely active occultist converting to a gnostic form of Islam called Sufism. Although he later publicly fell out with the Nazis and was forced to flee back to Turkey when they rose to power, some have suspected that that was because his Jewish inspired mysticism might have raised unwanted suspicions regarding the motivations for literally establishing Nazism and being responsible for introducing Adolf Hitler into the movement. Sebbottendorff wrote an extremely revealing book, much prized in occult circles, Secret Practices of the Sufi Freemasons where he presented a “lost” form of Freemasonry that was older than that practiced in the West. Not only did mystical gnostic Germans help Hitler rise to power but, as Harry Waton admitted in 1938, “. . . many Jews in Germany helped the Hitler movement, in spite of its violent and brutal anti-Semitic character.” (Waton 1938: 3) The reason for this “help” was not because they were secretly collaborating with the Nazis but simply because they wanted the same thing, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. The intimacy between Hitler and the Zionists resulted in various conspiracy theories being developed at the time in Germany and since including claims that Hitler was himself a Jew. In 1974, Hennecke Kardel wrote perhaps the most convincing account claiming that Hitler was indeed a Jew. Kardel claimed that Hitler was the grandson of a wealthy Austrian Jew named Frankenberger and many in Linz knew this to be the case. It was because of this relationship, Kardel argues, that everything Hitler did was aimed at realizing a Jewish State outside of Europe. (Kardel 1974) This was not, according to Kardel, because Hitler sympathized with the Jewish cause as a Jew and was, therefore, simply deceiving the German people into their own destruction, but because he came to hate Jews with such a passion, for their refusal to help him in his time of need that he wanted to punish them by getting them removed from Europe. Kardel claims that Hitler’s uncle’s refusal to give him financial assistance when he was impoverished resulted in an abiding hatred of all Jews. It was this hatred that motivated Hitler to want to remove all the Jews from Europe as the ultimate

center. That the National Socialist Movement was grounded in such thinking shows just how far removed was the Nazi movement from Christian, Western thinking. 273 Sabbatai Tzevi himself spent many years in this city and recruited many supporters. Thessaloniki was a hotbed for gnostic Judaism until the establishment of Israel.

594 solution. It was the removal of all Jews out of Europe, preferably to Palestine but more likely to Madagascar as most people prior to World War II believed that the Palestinian Arabs would never allow it, that was Hitler’s ultimate, not final, solution. Detailed research into the actual truth of Kardel’s claim is beyond the scope of this volume but it is interesting to observe that Hitler asked his close friend and financial adviser, Hans Frank, to reveal to the world the identity of his grandfather. Frank’s “research showed that he [Hitler] was likely Jewish. Frank thought that he had found that Hitler’s grandmother had been a domestic servant for a Jewish family in Graz and that their nineteen-year-old son had impregnated her.” (Gimble 2013) It was as a result of such claims that many have viewed with suspicion the generous support Hitler gave to German Jews prepared to immigrate to Israel. Driven by hatred or not, Israel simply would not, could not, have come into existence in 1947 without this support. Harry Waton himself seems to suggest, fairly transparently, that both Fascism and communism (what he calls “state capitalism”) are actually at the service of Jews. As Waton wrote, “Let the Jews never forget what the Bible tells us. The Bible tells that it was none other than Joseph – a Jew – who established state capitalism and fascism in Egypt. Joseph saved the Jews by this. And so it is now.” (Emphasis added Waton 1938: 10) As Joseph did not establish fascism or communism in Egypt, but he is credited with saving the Jewish people by manipulating the Egyptian Pharoah, it seems that if we read between the lines, what Waton is trying to communicate is that both fascism and communism are actually created by Jews to serve the Jewish causes. As Waton goes on to write, History cannot be stopped; history has a great task to perform, to bring out a rational human race – a race that shall live in peace and enjoy happiness. Shall history suspend its function because millions of reactionary lunatics do not want to make a step in progress? Since these reactionary lunatics are a hindrance in the way of progress, history must remove them as the surgeon removes a cancer from the body that the man may be saved.274 (Waton 1938: 11) To be clear here, the “reactionary lunatics” are the people of Western countries. Waton seems to be fairly clearly arguing that Hitler is functioning to sweep away the reactionary “lunatics” so that society can be remade in a way harmonious with Waton’s vision. Only then, when Gnostics rule the entire world, will there be a time of peace and, he claims, happiness.

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By a “rational human race” he does not “rational” in a Western sense, dealing with reality, but rational in an instrumental sense, as technology. Reason here means to do away with anything that gets in the way of achieving ends. He also personifies “history”. It is “history” that will do this or that when “history”, a written account of events, actually does nothing. It is people who first manifest history through their actions and then write it down, history is knowledge of events not the engine room of change.

595 The race ideas of Hess and Gumplowicz, especially Gumplowicz, influenced many Europeans who, by the end of the 19th century, agreed with Hess that, . . .beautiful phrases about humanity and enlightenment which he employs as a cloak to hide his treason, his fear of being identified with his unfortunate brethren, will ultimately not protect him . . . In vain does the enlightened Jew hide behind his geographical and philosophical alibi. It is of no avail. Mark yourself a thousand times over, change your name, religion and character, travel throughout the world incognito, so that people may not recognise the Jew in you . . . (Hess 1918: 74-75) The only way Jews will be safe is if they win the race wars. History was a racial contest, a racial contest between Aryans and Semites. This conflict will only be resolved with one winner. These ideas were later advanced by the extremely influential Kojeve, how argued that all human life is realised through conflict and the need to be recognised as superior. All of history was a war to become master and force the other to become a slave. (Preparata 2011: 159) Jewish scholars continue to promote these same ideas. American Jewish academic Jonathan Haidt, wrote in his widely read book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, that, Human nature is 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. We are like chimps in being primates whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of individuals with their neighbours. But we are like bees in being ultrasocial creatures whose minds were shaped by the relentless competition of groups with other groups. Humanity is exhaustively shaped by contest according to Haidt. Either contest between individuals or contest between “groups” or “tribes” so, by this account, there is little room for collaboration or an agreed upon peace. The human condition is informed by contest over resources and not by the aspiration for universal peace sought by Christianity. As the reader should already be aware, Haidt’s position is a clear expression of a tribal mindset, reflecting the materialism of Judaism, not a communalist mindset of Westerners built more on collaboration and mutual benefit. There is no conception in Haidt’s account of a situation of cooperation without the ulterior motive of competition, struggle, and contest. There are only winners and loser. There is no suggestion in this tradition, that humans can come together, cooperate, out of love for each other, so that life can be improved for everyone, that finds a voice in the Christian Western tradition.275 As racial ideas were increasingly used in Europe, especially Germany, to try to again marginalize Jews in the aftermath of World War One, (Herskovits 1953: 3) the idea of “race”

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And they believe that this discovery, that everything is an endless war of everyone against everyone else, has given them an evolutionary advantage that is allowing them to outcompete, dominate and, as I truly believe they plan, to annihilate, the West.

596 began to come under attack from a number of Jewish authors in Western countries. As Prescott F. Hall, secretary of the Immigration Restriction League, wrote to Madison Grant in frustration, What I wanted . . . was the names of a few anthropologists of note who have declared in favour of the inequality of races. . . I am up against the Jews all the time in the equality argument and thought perhaps you might be able offhand to name a few (besides Osborn) whom I could quote in support. (as seen in Samelson 1975: 467) This organized opposition to the use of concepts of race, especially in the years directly following World War II, was in no small measure a response to Nazi race theories but certainly not aimed at their own racialized thinking in terms of their “chosenness” or entitlements. One of the most vocal and effective advocates for rejecting theories of race because of what he described in 1925 as “the anti-Semitic drift of our times” (Boas as seen in Glick 1982: 557) was Franz Boas. As with many who fell under the influence of Gnosticism, Boas embraced the natural sciences and materialist theories that dominated science in the late 19th and early 20th centuries while publicly denouncing the practices and beliefs of Orthodox Judaism. These public statements were often applauded by prejudiced Westerners in Germany and elsewhere who believed that by rejecting Orthodox Judaism then Boas was no longer a practicing Jew. As should already be appreciated, rejecting Orthodoxy certainly did not mean that a Jew was not informed by religious beliefs. Boas continued to strongly identify as a Jew and viewed his research as having important theo-political implications that would benefit Jews. (MacDonald 2010: 306) This tendency to read Boas as rejecting Judaism for “universal humanism” is argued even today but it needs to be recognised that from at least the middle of the 19 th century Jews were claiming that the “essence of Judaism is humanitarianism . . . the realization of humanitarian ideals which is the aim worth striving for; - and Judaism . . . must ultimately become absorbed and disappear in the larger fellowship of humanity . . .” (Hess 1918: 118). So, it had long been claimed that true Judaism was, at the same time, true humanism. In a 1982 article, Leonard Glick (1982) claimed, Boas had joined many German Jews at the time and had “abandoned the struggle to integrate Jewish identity with German nationality and had opted for an all-out effort to assimilate themselves out of existence.” (Glick 1982: 546) This is to claim that these German Jews wanted to see an end to their Jewish identity, but, in truth, the exact opposite was the case. As the previous quote shows, this was only in recognition of humanism that they saw in Judaism and was not simply the rejection of Judaism as such. What they hoped to realise was the incorporation of everyone into Judaism in terms of humanism. After Sabbatai Tzevi converted to Islam there was a squabble within Judaism about what strategy to employ to realise Sabbatai’s aspirations. This contestation coalesced into three identifiable groups. One group of Sabbatians forwent anything that

597 might be identified as Jewish and accepted the aims of strategies of Karl Marx. Marx’s theory was perfectly harmonious with the aspirations of Gnostic Judaism so fighting to realise Marxism was, at the same time, to realise the Gnostic Jewish humanist agenda. It is not a coincidence that Marxism and Gnostic Judaism ultimately say the exact same thing. The second group are mainly found in Eastern Europe and followed the Ba’al Shem Tov. These Jews retained distinctive Jewish clothes and religious practices but advocated for a Sabbatian agenda, at least initially, within that cohort. These people believed that race and the Jewish mission were inseparable. It did not matter what happened to the goy as long as Jews redeemed God. It is from this movement that Zionism gets its primary momentum. Finally, the group Boas belonged to, were a group of Jews who wanted to follow the Marxists, by doing away with at least most of the markers of Jewishness, become unrecognisable as a distinct group, and then convert or assimilate the goy amongst who they live without them even knowing it was happening. This last cohort are primarily identified with the German Jewish Reform movement. This commitment explains why Boas was so opposed to attributing characteristic to any race, not because, as Glick claims, he did not want the negative attributes associated with Judaism to be applied to himself but that Germans and American could be converted to accept the universal message of Gnostic Jews if Jews remained an identifiable group. It was for this reason that, as Sacher says, “The moment Jewish liberals were singled out, even by their friends, as German Jews, or members of the Israelitish “race”, rather than Germans of the Jewish “faith” or “persuasion”, they bristled as if they had been mortally insulted.” (1977: 109) This is exactly how accusations of anti-Semitism work. You can call somebody anything you like but do not pick him out as a Jew or that will be called anti-Semitism. It was not the case that Boas aspired to “defining Jews out of existence through recourse to anatomical studies” but the exact opposite. His point is that the Jewish message was never intended for Jews as a “race”, but Jews were the messengers, Hermes, of a universal message for the whole world. By “assimilating” into European society, everyone could be persuaded of the righteousness of the Gnostic Jewish message. To this end, Boas was arguing that there is no such thing as races. In this argument he was perfectly sincere. He truly wanted to prove that what made a Jew a Jew was not their genes, in the same way as what made an Aryan Aryan, but their “culture”. As long as people retained their race identities then they would look to their cultural traditions, and this was the real threat to Gnostic Judaism being embraced as the universal religion. This is why Boas paid so much attention to physical anthropology; it was to overthrow the very idea of race. This is also why Boas was utterly determined to see the world “as the natives saw it”. This is equivalent to what Otto Gross calls the “will-to-relate”. They recognise that “relating”, to have relationships with others, is a fundamentally human feature. It is not by simply

598 imposing Gnostic Jewish beliefs onto a population, that task in a way would be impossible, but to relate to their true selves and then helping them to bring this true self to the surface. Gay, Indigenous, transgender . . . what-ever else, the fundamental belief is that “the greatest obstacle in the search for truth are self-delusion and self-deception, that is, living a lie and taking it to be the truth” and this is exactly what Gnostic Jews believe all people are doing. It is for this reason that Jews must make people think like Jews, in order to unlock their true selves from the cruel rule of Western civilization. The best way to achieve this is to become invisible as an outsider, to appear as a “local”. As Boas write, “It cannot be shown by the widest stretch of the imagination that descent makes it impossible to partake of any given type of culture, provided the individual is completely socially one of the people among whom he lives and, what is more important, is considered also by society as one of its members.” (Boas as seen in Glick 1982: 561) What he is saying here is not what Glick claims, that he was saying Jews could assimilate if there were no barriers to that assimilation, but that Germans could be freed to be themselves if Jews were indistinguishable from those they were trying to “liberate”. As long as the “other” culture trusted that Jews were not trying to realise their own distinct agenda then they could be easily deceived to believe anything. This is why he railed against “race” because he did not think it important, what was important was “culture” and anyone could be made to accept any culture by anyone if they were trusted. It is because Glick fails to understand what Boas hopes to achieve that he thinks Boas’ “writings on the subject of culture and assimilation turn out on critical examination to be not only ambiguous but at times absolutely contradictory” but that is not the case at all. It is simply that Glick does not understand Boas’ broader project. This same approach and justification can be seen over and over again in the United States. Jews that have embraced Gnosticism have a fairly consistent public response to questions in relation to their religious beliefs. They will usually claim that they are “agnostic”, rather than atheists, in terms of not knowing God but, of course, such a position is perfectly harmonious with Gnostic Judaism and its claims of not knowing God. One example, amongst the many that could be used to show how these claims work to deflect ideas of religious motivations, is Congressman Barnett Frank of the Democratic Party who served for over 20 years. Frank was born into a Jewish family whose father, as did many Jews at the time, had known “mob” connections. For his criminal activities, Boas’ father would serve a period of time in prison. For his entire life Frank was an extremely vocal advocate for what has come to be understood as a “progressive” Gnostic program, as he said in an interview, “Personal freedom, an end to discrimination, particularly race at that time, because gay rights wasn’t even on the agenda, and diminishing economic unfairness”. (Frank as seen on Solman 2015) As Paul Solomon also observes, “. . .for almost half a century,

599 his was one of America’s loudest voices for progressive policies, both economic and social, a devotee of using government to help redress inequality.” (Solman 2015) One of the most infamous moments in his career was when he “hooked up” with a male prostitute by the name of Stephen Gobie. Gobie advertised in a local paper that he had a “hot bottom” and “large endowment”. Frank quickly became besotted with this young man and entered into a long-term “arrangement”. While in this “arrangement”, Gobie ran a prostitution service out of Frank’s Capitol Hill apartment. (D’Souza 2007) Gobie would later claim that Frank was fully aware of what was taking place in his apartment. Frank also made deceptive recommendations to public officials on behalf of Gobie as well as organizing for his parking tickets to be waived. When asked about his religious beliefs, Frank claimed that he was “agnostic” about God, “I am not an atheist,” he said, “I don’t know enough to have any firm view on the subject . . . I have had a lifelong aversion to wrestling with questions that I know I can never answer.” Of course, the media and political commentators took this response, as is intended, to mean that Frank was no longer a practicing Jew, and that Frank was not driving a theologically inspired political agenda. He became, to many Western eyes, an “acceptable Jew” pushing a progressive secular, humanist program that often appeared to be opposed to the beliefs of Orthodox Judaism. But through his actions, Frank revealed that every decision he made as a politician, including unconditional support for Israel and an almost fanatical commitment to “progressive” causes including, of course, homosexual “rights”, were motivated by his Gnostic Jewish beliefs. Such “converts” to Gnostic Judaism are potentially even more zealous in their beliefs than Orthodox Jews they just happen, for reasons that have already been explained, to look like everyone else making them less conspicuous and, in truth, much more dangerous. This is the same with Boas. As an expression of gnostic beliefs, Boas rejected racialized arguments that might underpin Western feelings of superiority that might sustain resistance to his Gnostic agenda. Boas’, “. . .life-long assault on the idea that race was primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture.” (emphasis added Degler 1991: 61) Throughout his work, Boas did not only promote the primacy of “culture” over genes, but he embraced neo-Romantic sentiments praising the “barbaric” over Western civilization. As Boas wrote about the Innuit (that he called Eskimos), I often ask myself what advantages our “good society” possesses over that of the “savages” and find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them . . . We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us. We “highly educated people” are much worse, relatively speaking. . .

600 Boas was being surprisingly candid in this account but the wording, as always, is interesting. Boas asks, “what advantages our “good society”” drawing attention Western claims of “goodness”. “Highly educated people” are much worse, he goes on, than the indigenous people. Although this type of argument was in part motivated by Boas’ widely acknowledged loathing for Western civilization, it was more indebted to the ideas of Gnostic Judaism. Boas’ basic argument was that these indigenous people are much closer to human nature, as God made us, and quite far removed from civilization, unlike the West, and therefore were indeed superior. Boas is unequivocal in moving from observing that Westerners have no right to “look down” on the “savages” so we should instead look down on “educated” Westerners because it is they who are more immoral and brutish and are the real “savages”. This is, obviously, just another expression of the consistent reversal of values advanced by Gnostic Jews. Indeed, the word “goy” that is used to refer to non-Jews means “savages” in the same sense of the English word “barbarian”. Goy basically means “barbarian from another tribe”. Goy was later translated into the Latin form as “gentile” which was derived from the Latin “gens”. It was Boas’ consistently voiced argument, that indigenous people were really noble while Westerners are savages, that has resulted in the contemporary situation where “white”, European civilization today is continuously portrayed as inferior and less moral than indigenous peoples. In Australia, this argument today has become pervasive and is at least implicitly taught to all Australians from primary school through to university. Indeed, it is continuously argued that the West actually has much to learn from Indigenous people.276 Boas himself argued that Native American culture was superior to European cultures.277 This claim is purely an expression of Jewish Gnosticism’s historical loathing of Christian Western civilization and the valorising of a life lived closer to “Nature”, a culture free from the civilizing influence of Christianity. Boas was highly motivated to realise his broader agenda and managed to assert an incredible level of control over the entire discipline of anthropology in the United States. As early as 1915, the “Boasian School” of anthropology controlled the American

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Interestingly, Boas was also amongst the first, in 1940, which is the first I have been able to find, to claim the blatantly false argument that “White Australians” “invaded” the Aboriginal people’s land. There are accounts to describe what happened when these two very ways of living clashed and, from an Aboriginal’s perspective it may have felt like an invasion, but from a European perspective it most certain was not so why give a distorted view of history by only giving one perspective? (Boas 1982: 256) 277 This argument might be more convincing if millions of people from developing countries were not enthusiastically moving to the West. Why, if these other cultures are so superior are not millions of Westerners moving to Africa, South East Asia or living as Indigenous people in the place now called Australia once lived? The problem with these types of arguments is that they are really just emotional arguments aimed at delegitimizing Western Christian societies that have dominated global events for hundreds of years. Although at the time such arguments were almost laughed at, today they are so widely accepted because Westerners have been made to feel guilty over a largely fabricated history that at best tells half-truths if not simplistic lies. The West has a lot to be proud of about its past and how it has developed and every immigrant that desperately wants to move to the West is evidence for this claims.

601 Anthropology Association by holding two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. (Stocking 1968: 286) By 1926, the department of anthropology in every Ivy League university in the United States was headed by a student of Boas. What this meant in practice, as White observes, out of Boas’ most influential students, Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, and Leslie Spier, the vast majority were Jews so the vast majority of department of anthropology heads were also Jews.278 American Anthropology is a very good early example of how Jews come to dominate American universities. It shows how they favour other Jews who advance a particular political agenda, and how that political agenda is realised. Because nobody knows even today that he was driven by a heretical religious movement, Boas is praised as the genius of his time for not portraying indigenous cultures as inferior to the West, like Western anthropologists were at the time. Boas, it is argued, is a man of our times, a man of the future, when Western civilization is rightly seen as degenerate while societies not shaped by Western Christian moral beliefs are now praised as superior.279 The argument that Western civilization was not superior to less “developed” people led to Boas’ most significant and enduring contribution to anthropology. Boas began to write at, . . . the height of the Victorian era, when the supremacy of the European way of life was never more taken for granted. . . it saw the theory of the primacy of the white race and of European civilization reach its greatest acceptance. It witnesses the rapid extension of European political control over the world . . .” (Herskovits 1953: 2-3) Boas must have looked at this situation and seen the massive job ahead of him, to turn this established self-confidence into one of self-loathing. To not only make “white people” become thought of by others as inferior to all other people, racist, violent, oppressive, the cause of all the pains in the world, but to make white people themselves believe they are unworthy. One arm of this project was to realise mass immigration, truly mass immigration like the West is experiencing today, so as to dilute the culture of the West with those Boas thought were superior, but the other arm was through the popularization of his understanding of culture. Culture was a central concept for Boas. Indeed, it was in no small part the result

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Alfred Kroeber (who was married to a Jew), Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Even this way of phrasing this discussion is burdened with Gnostic commitments and is further evidence just how hard it is to talk today. Why is “technology” being used as the measure of civility? Historically this was most certainly not the case. A technologically advanced civilization may we be seen as barbarous because of lacking civility. Civility meant, just that, more civilized, more polite, more courteous, more aware of correct behavior, more cultured. These discussions have been made impossible because civility is not longer prized. Instead of talking about civility we now, at best, talk of technology which, as already argued, is the contemporary marker of progress. 279

602 of his reliance on this concept that it rose to the unquestioned prominence that it holds today in the social sciences. Culture is used today as a ready-made explanation for just about everything that people are, what they do, and what they believe. As Hammersley observed, ““Culture” is one of the most widely used terms in the social sciences. Yet while its meaning has long been recognized as problematic . . . it is often employed in ways that ignore this.” (Hammersley 2019: 1) The concept of culture definitely existed prior to Boas but it was as a result of the Boas School’s dominance in the decades prior to World War II that the concept of culture became so prominent as a concept of explanation. Boas also was significant for changing how the word “culture” was used. As Hammersley observes, An important tension within the meaning of the term “culture” relates to whether it is singular or plural. In the nineteenth century, it tended to be used in singular form . . . in the early twentieth century, partly under the influence of German anthropology, social and cultural anthropologists in the U.S. and the U.K. began to frame their discipline as concerned with studying “other cultures”, rather than with charting the evolutionary development of “Culture”. (Hammersley 2019: 4) The “German anthropologist” most responsible for this change was Boas and it was he, and his school, which introduced culture into the English-speaking world. Prior to Boas, “culture” was usually used as an abstract ideal, like beauty, love or knowledge.280 Again as Hammersley observes, “In its earliest formulation, this first interpretation of the term treats culture as singular, as relating to universal human ideals, and as referring primarily to forms of literature, drama, art, music, and ideas that are judged to be especially valuable.” (Hammersley 2019: 7) People expressed culture, or they did not. In the same way that a person had some degree of beauty or some level of knowledge, so were people considered to have some level of culture or they did not. Against this Boas and his school advanced what they called “cultural relativity” or what become known as “cultural relativism”. The basic argument Boas and his school advanced was that we create our own agreed upon truths. Under such conditions, the idea that societies progressed from a primitive underdeveloped condition into an increasingly civilized condition simply could not longer be maintained. As King observed, “The implications of the idea that we make our own agreed-upon truths were profound. It undermined the claim that social development is linear, running from allegedly primitive societies to so-called civilized ones.” Boas school argued the extremely

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For the same reason as “culture” became a countable noun so is “knowledge” now a countable noun. There is no longer just knowledge but different kinds of “knowledges” or “epistemes” such as “black knowledge”, “feminist knowledge” and, even more peculiarly “black feminist knowledge”. That ever cohort now has its own “knowledge” might appear to go against the claim that people have knowledge at all but that each cohort has its own episteme is actually evidence that we have no knowledge because each cohorts “truth” each cohorts knowledge claim is necessarily partial and, therefore, not really knowledge at all. (See Preparata 2011: 121)

603 counterintuitive argument that there was no qualitative difference between orchestral music and the incredible artwork being created by Western artists and body tattooing or canoe making in tribal societies. Indeed, Boas’ full agenda was to argue the opposite, to argue that what we call civility was a decline into barbarity, the barbarity of Christian morality away from the noble condition of tribal societies. Consistent with his relativization of the concept of “civility”, Boas popularized culture as a count noun so that it could be said in plural terms like “bridge”. (King 2019) This apparently slight semantic emphasis actually marked a revolution in thinking. Prior to Boas, culture was generally thought of as a singular ideal, like it was in the work of Kant, towards which one “progressed”. Indeed, the very possibility for “cultural progress” was that “culture” was an abstract ideal. As Edward Tylor understood culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Culture was a universal standard. But after it was turned into a count noun, there were potentially many “cultures” that were all now worthy of the label. Again, as Hammersley observes, “. . . later, social classes, minority ethnic populations, religious sects, and youth groups came to be seen as displaying distinctive cultures or subcultures, or as representing counter-cultures.” (Hammersley 2019: 5) One no longer could say that the Native Americans were more or less cultured than their European counterparts, as Boas claimed in his early work, but now they all simply expressed a different culture. Culture, “on this view there are diverse cultures, each having internal coherence, their differences perhaps resulting from variation in environment (climate, resources, etc.), or from the fact that they are uniquely created forms expressing distinctive identities.” (Hammersley 2019: 8) There might be black American culture, poor culture, country culture, urban culture . . . “Culture” was now only constrained by the imagination. As a result, “Culture becomes whatever any group or researcher wants it to mean . . . Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct ‘cultures’ constitute American society.” (Jacoby 1999: 39-47) As none other than Allen Bloom observes in The Closing of the American Mind, we now “call everything a culture - the drug culture, the rock culture, the street gang culture, and so on endlessly and without discrimination. The failure of culture is now culture.” (Bloom 1987: 184) Any group activity, no matter how base, could now be called a “culture” and all cultures, now by definition, were equal but different. When Bloom concludes that “failure of culture is now culture” he is cleverly using “culture” in two different registers drawing attention to this change in meaning. The first use is as an abstract ideal, and the second use as a count noun. The failure to be a good culture is now counted as just another cultural expression. This shift in usage, which informs a shift in thinking, was so important because there simply could be no such thing as multi-culturalism without this shift in emphasis. There could not be a struggle for

604 “Indigenous culture” or “black culture”, as identity struggles, without this change. Indeed, the arguments against immigration that were being widely used at the time, which claimed that uncultured people should not be allowed to immigrate because they would erode the culture of the indigenous people, simply no longer made sense. As MacDonald (2010: 302-305) observes, “. . .by the time of the final victory in 1965 which removed national origins and racial ancestry from immigration policy and opened up immigration to all human groups, the Boasian perspective of cultural determinism and anti-biologism had become standard academic wisdom”. It was as a result of this new academic consensus that, “. . .it became intellectually fashionable to discount the very existence of persistent ethnic differences. The whole reaction deprived popular race feelings of a powerful ideological weapon.” (Higham 1984: 58-59) Race became not only irrelevant but, more powerfully, offensive to raise such concerns because it was culture that mattered, and all cultures were equal. All identity politics owes a debt to Boas because the idea of one culture towards which everyone aspired no longer existed. Now, in itself, this change in thinking might be acceptable. That is, if Boas truly thought that all races were equal and that this was his global aspiration then it might be viewed as a reasonable argument, but the real end goal was to realise just another global order. This was a strategic argument aimed at undermining Western confidence and allowing mass immigration as a way of destroying the West. This is where the deception occurs. Boas does not really believe in the abstract idea of culture in any way. He really wants to oppose all claims of culture understood in terms of collective norms. He is not an advocate for multiculturalism but an advocate for cultural extinction. Just like his students, Benedict and Weltfish argued in their pamphlet, encouraging cultural diversity and general acceptance of cultural differences results in culture becoming meaningless. The means to realise the demise of culture is to confuse the cultures to such a degree that nobody really has a culture. Just like the story of the Tower of Babel, when pursuing a single good, what might be understood as culture as such, then everyone is united to realize this goal, to manifest the one God in the world, whereas when divided, when encouraged to realize different and often competing aspirations, then any authoritative claim to culture no longer resonates. We all become in practice cultureless or, to say the same thing, godless. We all become nomadic barbarians without a home or God. Just like the story of the Tower of Babel, we cannot reach God when confused about what is good. To realize this confusion, Boas first divided the Christians homogenizing project of “culture”, as that single outcome towards which everyone aspires, to eventually realize the Gnostic Jewish homogenizing project of a godless, cultureless world of chaos. Boas concluded, in a way utterly unconvincing, that the reason why the West developed to such a sophisticated level while cultures in the pre-Columbian Americas remained relatively underdeveloped, a question that has occupied the creative forces of many Jews, was not, of course, the

605 result of Christianity or anything to do with Western “culture” but, as Gnostic Jew Jared Diamond will also argue 50 years later, that it was mere “chance” which resulted in “accidental differences”. As Boas wrote, Although much stress has been laid upon the greater rapidity of development of the races of the Old World, it is not by any means conclusive proof of exceptional ability. It may be adequately conceived as due to the laws of chance. When two bodies run through the same course with variable rapidity, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, their relative position will be the more likely to show accidental differences, the longer the course they run. (Boas 1940: 8) Pre-Columbian societies were going to achieve the same social and technological outcomes as the Christian West eventually, but they were following their own path and that path was slower as an expression of mere chance. Although Boas’ intellectual contribution to anthropology was significant for advancing the Gnostic project, the person most influential in seeing the delegitimization of European race identity in practice was the “colourful” British Jewish “intellectual”, and in some ways a student of Boas, Ashley Montagu. Ashley Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg. He was born into the established Jewish community in the East End of London. In 1931, in an apparent attempt to begin a career, Montagu moved to the United States. Before relocating, he drafted a letter which he sent to Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton hoping that he would find employment. The letter read, I am twenty-six, educated at Cambridge, Oxford, London, Florence, and Columbia. M.A., Ph.D., etc. fifteen anthropological publications. Recommended very generously by Sir Arthur Keith, who has furnished me a too-glowing testimonial which you may see if you wish. Sir Arthur once told me that I can always say that he will speak for me, so I may as well mention this too, for if you hold him in as great respect as I do, this should be impressive. (Montagu as seen in Marks 2007: 245) The quality of Montagu’s correspondence should give some indication that most of what was being claimed in this letter was a lie, a deliberate fraud. Montague had not graduated from Cambridge or Oxford and he did not at that time have a Masters qualification in any subject no matter a PhD. (Marks 2007: 245)281 Indeed, nothing in this self-promoting letter is probably true. Montagu probably did not know

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In many Eastern cultures, there is nothing wrong with deception. Indeed, in some cultural traditions being good at deception is seen as a useful skill that should be nurtured and to be able to lie well is seen as good practical skill. Such behavior shocks people from a Christian cultural background because Christianity prizes honesty to such a high degree. Honesty is to remain with God. People from Christian cultures are raised that doing something wrong is bad but lying about it makes everything worse. Although many will claim that this is a racist trope such a claim is itself actually racist. All that such a person is doing is asserting a cultural norm as a universal necessity. Somebody with a different set of values would say that the kind of honesty promoted by Christianity is debilitating, naïve and immature. As will be developed, lying plays an important role in the Jewish Gnostic tradition. Sabbatai Tzevi

606 Arthur Keith no matter come with his recommendation. He was simply trying to present himself as being much more qualified and respected in the United Kingdom than he actually was in order to secure himself employment at the prestigious Harvard University. Despite this blatant attempt at fraud, Montagu did actually have some formal education. In 1922, Montagu entered the University College London and graduated with a diploma in psychology. He also studied at the London School of Economics under highly respected anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, but he did not seem to have been particularly well respected or thought to have any special potential. That such an brazen attempt at fraud should have seen the end of any career aspirations in anthropology, especially at a time when scholarly circles were much smaller and reputations were much more brittle than today, but the opposite seems to have been the case. In many ways, although the attempted deception was discovered, Montagu’s strategy worked. The young Brit did indeed manage to begin a career in anthropology as he had dreamt. Montagu did indeed manage to establish himself in America anew, now as a respected anthropologist. Montagu gained more respect with the publication of his extremely influential 1942 book on race titled, Man’s most Dangerous Myth. In this book, published during the horrors of World War II, Montagu argued that the concept of race was not just a myth but a dangerous myth that had no biological justification. Race, like Gnostic Jews argued of all distinctions that constitute reality, simply did not exist.282 Montagu argued that all of humanity formed just one species that could not be scientifically divided into discrete races. Instead, he argued, in a way perfectly consistent with Gnostic teachings, that underneath the apparent distinctions there was really just an underlying unity. Montagu’s personal rejection of the concept of race arose at a time when race was still a very important concept for individual identity, for informing national policies and for shaping scientific research. In the aftermath of the Second World War, there was a resolution drafted by the UN Social and Economic Council recommending that UNESCO should develop a “programme of dissemination of scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of that which is commonly called race prejudice”. This was just one aspect of a general attempt, seemingly motivated by global Jewry, to delegitimise the very notion of race. The very people who had done so much to move ideas of race to the centre of European thinking now, around 100 later, were determined to see its demise. To realise this

claimed that it was perfectly acceptable to lie to get what you wanted or to avoid suffering. The example of Montagu is just a concrete example of a religio-cultural practice of trying to deceive to get what one wants. 282 Montagu really must be seen as one of a relatively small group of really militant, transparent Gnostic Jews who is obviously shaped by Sabbateanism. Amongst his titles are “The Natural Superiority of Women” 1852 – which was one of the few books written by a man that that was recognized as being extremely influential in shaping second wave feminism.

607 programme of stopping “race prejudice”, that had antisemitism firmly in its sight to stop any future threat of Nazism in places like the United States, UNESCO’s president, Julian Huxley, sought to have a formal statement on race drafted that was informed by science. The person initially selected to lead the panel was Brazilian anthropologist Arturo Ramos. Ramos was an enthusiastic political activist against racism with close ties to many Boasians. Ramos “engaged anthropology in the struggle against racism and the post-war democratic rebuilding of democracy” (Guimaraes 2008: 69) so was certainly no impartial academic seeking the truth. Despite Ramos being an extremely active left leaning anthropologist with a clear radical political agenda, he was not a gnostic Jew. Unfortunately, Ramos suddenly died at the age of just 46 leaving the way open for Montagu to be promoted into acting “rapporteur” for the entire panel. Like Montagu, Ramos was also critical of the concept of “race” because, as a cultural anthropologist, he believed that culture was the most important distinction between people and that the concept of “culture” was necessary for understanding a people’s historical development and interactions with others. (Carneiro & Ivy 1951: 73) Like everyone selected for this panel, Ramos thought that the idea of “race” could not be scientifically sustained but that cultural differences remained an important objective fact. The implication of such conclusions was that, if culture was important, then the exclusive policies against immigration in places like Australia, New Zealand etc., remained legitimate based on cultural differences if no longer legitimate on racial grounds. With Ramos gone, arguments for important cultural differences would not be a factor in the panel’s final conclusions. The actual panel that would draft UNESCO’s position on “race” consisted of Montagu, born in England into an Eastern Europe Jewish family, Juan Comas, from Mexico, E. Franklin Frazier, an African American sociologist who drew upon Freudian psychology to argue that racial prejudice was a “white person’s” pathology informed by a “Negro-complex”, Claude LeviStrauss, the extremely famous and influential French Jewish anthropologist, Ernest Beaglehole, a New Zealand psychologist from the Freudian school, ethnologist Morris Ginsberg, a Lithuanian Jewish sociologist, Luiz de Aguiar Costa Pinto, Brazilian sociologist who specialized in “race relations”, and Humayun Kabir, a Bengali poet, political activist and “intellectual”. So, out of a panel of eight members, three were Jewish, one was “white”, one was Bengali, one was African American, and two were Latin American. The panel did seem weighted rather heavily with Jews, nearly 40% of the panel, considering their minute numbers globally this was an unimaginable overrepresentation. Many scientists were extremely critical of those selected for the panel, not because they were Jews of course, this was a “postHolocaust” reality where everyone now feared being labelled an “anti-Semite”, but because the panel was asked to draft a scientific document but there were no scientists on the panel. Of those selected to

608 draft what was supposed to be a scientific paper there were psychologists, anthropologists, a few sociologists . . . and a poet. There was nobody specialising in genetics, biology or even medicine. At the first discussion on the problem of race, it was chiefly sociologists who gave their opinions and framed the ‘Statement on Race’. That statement had a good effect, but it did not carry the authority of just those groups within whose special province fall within the biological problems of race, namely the physical anthropologists and geneticists. Why were there no physical anthropologists or geneticists whose area of expertise was to question the scientific basis of race? Despite this early criticism, the panel worked on a draft “Statement on Race” and submitted it for public review. It was from the physical anthropologists, a now extinct discipline which was significant at the time and battled with the cultural anthropologists like Boas, looked to physical differences to define race, and geneticists who were particularly critical of the draft document. Other scientists that were initially “opposed to the statement” included intellectual luminaries such as, Cyril Dean Darlington, Sir Ronald Fisher (one of the greatest statisticians of the 20th century who used mathematics to combine Mendelian genetics with the theory of natural selection thereby achieved what became called the “modern synthesis” of genetics and natural selection. For this contribution Fisher has been called “the greatest of Darwin’s successors” – a true genius), Hadley Cantril, Edwin Conklin, Gunnar Dahlberg, Theodosius Dobzhansky, L. C. Dunn, Donald Hagar, Julian Huxley, Otto Klineberg, Wilbert Moore, H. J. Muller, Gunnar Myrdal, Joseph Needham, and Curt Stern. (Marks 2007: 245) All the renowned scientists of the day who specialized in the areas that might be most knowledgeable for considering the scientific basis of “race” were highly critical of the statement. The English scientific community, the most empirically inclined in the world, was particularly critical of the methods used to reach their conclusions. (Marks 2007: 246) The response to all this criticism was not to broaden the expertise of the panel to include those with relevant scientific knowledge, but it was left to Ashley Montagu alone, without any interference from a “panel”, to redraft the statement in a way that was supposed to be more acceptable to the scientific community. The panel on race had now been reduced to one Eastern European Jew who was dreadfully underqualified for the task and extremely politicised not to mention his historically proven dishonesty.283 The second statement, written by Montagu alone, focused on the biological aspect of the race argument, despite not being qualified in the field, as had his book. Most physical anthropologists and geneticists, still excluded from the process, continued to disagree with this final statement but this time, unlike previously, they were simply ignored. The truth is, as the “request” from the U.N shows, the whole

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A meteoric rise by Montagu if you think about, from panel member, to leading the panel, to being the sole member of “the panel”.

609 process was not really an exercise in science at all. Scientific exploration does not begin with the aim of achieving a stated political outcome. This was always, as those selected for the panel affirms, an exercise in politics not science. An exercise in politics that was ultimately informed by gnostic Jewish theology. The purpose of the “research” from the outset, as openly admitted, was to delegitimise the concept of race as a first step to overcoming “race discrimination” with particular concern with antisemitism. The ultimate hope at the time was to eventually realize a world government. Forces, including Gnostic Judaism, wanted to remove race as an underlying justification for most claims of nationhood (except Israel) to open the way for liberalized immigration policies. In many ways, this historical attempt to delegitimise the concept of race, an idea that, in one form or another, has been meaningful since recorded history began, is one of the great victories for Gnostic Judaism. Although Einstein’s theory of relativity was certainly important and Freudian psychology has been extremely influential, as will be discussed, it really was with the acceptance of the arguments against race that the Western intellectual tradition was successfully eclipsed by an Eastern worldview. Unlike the draft document, Montagu’s statement was forced through the U.N. despite strong resistance from most of the prominent scientists in fields relevant to race theory at the time. The problem with the entire strategy of trying to reject the concept of race on biological grounds is that it was informed by a recent conceptualization of race, and it therefore failed to consider, no matter “address”, historical understandings of race, understandings of race that actually informed restrictive immigration policies. As already raised, it was really only from the mid-19th century, with its emphasis on scientific materialism, that biological arguments were used to define race. For most of history, from the times of ancient Rome if not before, notions of “race”, in one form or another, existed but were far more complex. It considered things like biological features but also language, art, dress, and morality. As Jewish scholar Leonard Glick argues, Jewishness meant “identification with a people who were united by a sense of shared history, culture, and destiny”. (Glick 1982: 546-547) As Glick rightfully observes, identifying racially as a Jews does not mean just or even primarily something biological, biology is rarely mentioned in discussion of “race”. The reason why Montagu ultimately focused on the biological elements of race, without having any qualified geneticists contributing to the report, is because there was at that time no exhaustive biological criteria to inform a discrete notion of “race”. As none other than esteemed Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss admits. ““Race” as it is used in any human context is not a subject about which biologists can say anything.” Race is not in the purview of biologists but is much more complex. You cannot really genetically test somebody and say with certainty that they are French, Jewish, or Sudanese. That is because identity cannot be reduced to genes. As we know today, you can design a disease that targets certain genetic

610 markers that might affect 80% of any given population, say in China, but you cannot say with certainty that this chain of genes the disease is targeting belongs to everybody who identifies, even looks, Chinese. As has been historically acknowledged, like most things in the world, notions of race cannot be reduced to scientific abstractions but just because something is more complex than a simple scientific abstraction does not mean that it does not exist. This is where ontology asserts its historically recognised authority over science. As was presented in the introduction, notions of a people include culture, religion, language, place, destiny, meaning and more. As Cohen observes, The meaning of the term “race” changed over the course of the nineteenth century. . . [race was originally] described as a “nation”, a “tribe”, or a “race”, less often as a “class” or “people”. Like “tribe” and “nation”, race conveyed a sense of religious, cultural, and historic separateness . . . (Cohen 2002: 472) To reduce this complex idea of race to an exhaustively biological criteria does a violence to the term as inherited through the centuries, but it was a required violence if those with a political agenda, who were determined to see the idea of race, at least at a time when European races claimed superiority, to disappear. The strategy used by a number of Jewish intellectuals against the concept of a “people” or “race” would be used time and again for things that might inhibit the advance of the Gnostic project. It has progressed so far that to claim that there is “the good”, “reality” or even the “truth” attracts sharp criticisms. This is our “post-truth” or “post-modern” condition where there are no genders, there are no nations, there are no disabled, these are all just “social constructions” that operate primarily to actively exclude and marginalize. Our post-modern condition is one which “rejected the underlying modernist desire for authenticity, unifying narratives, universalism, and progress”. (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020) Race was amongst the first to be delegitimized despite its intuitive and long-standing appeal. The ancient Greeks had a saying, “all the things of this world are full of gods.” (see Aristotle, On the Cosmos: 397b) What this saying is drawing attention to is that “things”, like gods in general, require belief, faith, at a primordial level, if they are to retain a claim over our lives. Just like if people stop believing in a particular god, then that god no longer calls to the unbeliever. At that stage, the god is dead. The claim that all “things of this world are full of gods” is to observe the truth that everything is present as a matter of “faith”. Despite rejecting the biological basis for race, Leo Strauss admits that there continues to be currency in the term “race”, at least for Jews, in the sense that it is a people who “believe themselves to be descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”. This understanding of Jewishness, Strauss claims, is a kind of “heroic delusion” and this heroic delusion is that it is “The Jewish people and their fate are the living

611 witness for the absence of redemption.” What makes a people according to Strauss’ understanding is “by virtue of what it looks up to”. It is its shared experience of God that makes a people a people and this is something that Jews know all too well. It is something that Strauss is clearly expressing, and it has also been true of Western peoples. What once made Australians Australian was that they worshipped the same God in the sense of agreeing to shared values. All nations were once united by the same Straussian “heroic delusion”. This is not, as Strauss makes clear, a choice. We are, to draw on Heidegger’s account, “thrown” into a world that is already there. We are da-sein, we are “there-beings”, and this account cannot be reduced to biology. Today to be Australian has been reduced to a merely formal legal criteria that satisfies the demands of nationality. Any sense of shared values or culture has disappeared. We have become literally a culturally neutral landscape. Ironically perhaps, this cultureless void is the very conditions for multi-culturalism because if we truly had a culture such a term would be noxious. That Australian is now culturally neutral, like the United States, is not small part the result of multiculturalism being heavily promoted in our education system from pre-school. Once multiculturalism has been accepted then nothing can be said against the massive waves of immigration that wash against our shores every year. In such a world we actually become isolated individuals in a meaningless world without belonging anywhere. Of course, read any book by Jews and you can clearly see that they remain absolutely committed to the idea of a “Jewish race” and a “Jewish nation” which thinks like “Jews”. Indeed, it seems that Chinese, Indians, Indigenous people, . . . can all claim some kind of shared identity but Westerners, especially AngloSaxons, are no longer allowed to advance such beliefs. Anglo-Saxons can no longer say they are proud to be Anglo-Saxon, but we must be ashamed of our “white privilege”. As Westerners have become increasingly individuated, no longer sharing a collective identity, Jews have coordinated their activities until they now dominate not only our nations but are successfully destroying what remains of our culture. They can do this because there no longer is any “our”. If not the first step, certainly an important step, towards our post-truth condition was the rejection that the concept of “race”. If one were to look at the world in 1950, when the UNESCO statement of race was drafted, you would have seen a world where you could clearly experience the differences between an Englishman, an Egyptian, an indigenous Zimbabwean, an indigenous Australian, and a Maori New Zealander. They had different cultures, different languages, different religions, different ways of dressing, and plainly looked different. Use the term race or use the term people, use whatever term you like, but these different people were identifiably different. When it became accepted that races do not exist, when we lost faith in the idea of “a people”, when the Gods had departed, in the aftermath of the iconoclasm of Gnostic Judaism, then race in fact no longer exists. Being a people no longer matters.

612 Nobody can care about their own people because “races” no longer exist. Today, every advertisement on T.V. and every movie out of Hollywood promotes inter-racial relationships, black men with white women, white men with Asian women etc., which would have been extremely rare just 50 years ago. This advocacy for inter-racial relationships, as with all such advocacy, is most certainly not accidental nor does it reflect current norms or even changing expectations. It is all designed to make it fashionable for our young women and men, no matter how difficult such relationships are in practice and how much they are doomed to failure because of ingrained differences. By contrast, in Israel, cross-cultural relationships are actively discouraged. Indeed, publications are still being produced even in the English speaking world that argues against Jewish women marrying “out”. For example, Alan Dershowitz (2000) recently identified one the greatest dangers confronting American Jewry was “inter-marriage”, along with the threat of assimilation and a low birth-rates amongst wealthy Jews. He observed that “If all American Jews were to make aliyah (emigrate) to Israel, the problems of assimilation and inter-marriage would be largely solved.” Dershowitz is merely maintaining an old argument. As Peter David Homik argued, “Aliyah offers the only reasonable assurance that one will have Jewish descendants. The inter-marriage problem in America is well known, the figures appalling. . .” (as seen in Brownfeld 1987: 53) Jewish women marrying non-Jews is “appalling”. Homik and Dershowitz’s arguments do not, as it may initially appear, ignore the fact that 20% of Israel’s population is ethnic Arabic therefore moving to Israel is not to move into a world exclusively populated by Jews because it remains illegal in Israel for Jews to marry Arabs. It actually continues to be illegal for inter-faith marriages to take place in Israel. In Israel, unlike anywhere in the West, a Jew cannot legally marry a Muslim or a Christian. As Judaism is so strongly associated with notions of race, in effect, this ban on inter-faith marriages is actually a sanction against interracial marriages. Although restricting inter-racial marriages would be considered abhorrent throughout the Anglo-sphere today, inter-racial marriages continued to be illegal in regions in United States for most of the 20th century. For Westerners today though, to even suggest that “intermarriage” was a “problem” is viewed as deeply racist and utterly unacceptable despite people from places like India continuing the practice. The drive to change laws restricting inter-racial marriages in the United States was driven, surprisingly given their own attitudes towards such matters, by a number of Jews operating in the legal profession but, again, Franz Boas and the school he created laid the intellectual foundations for making such legal changes in the United States possible.

Creative Destruction According to Gnostic Judaism, the world can only be “healed”, when world and earth are again reunited, with Man, and for this union to be realized there must first be recognition of the primacy of

613 “Earth” through the destruction of “World”. That this destruction is what needs to be achieved is part of the secret knowledge, gnosis, which should inform the actions of our society’s true leaders, the Gnostic Jews. With this secret knowledge, those select few who know this secret become themselves like Gods. As Moore and Turner wrote of Gnosticism, . . .the binding thread connecting the disparate texts so often called ‘Gnostic’ is the idea that, although this world is the product, not of the highest God or One, but of a lower entity of lesser power, it is possible for humans to transcend this world through the insight (gnosis) from which the divine human self originates and can re-assimilate itself to the highest God. (Moore and Turner 2001) It is for this reason that the God Hermes is an important figure for Gnostic Jews. Hermes is best known as a Greek God although the origins of this God are unknown. Hermes was most commonly portrayed artistically as a traveller or a shepherd. The earliest accounts strongly associated Hermes with the Underworld or Earth. Hermes was thought to be “the god of the road between the Under and the Upper world” or the God that travelled between the God/Goddess of the Underworld and the World of mortals. Some accounts have him being born to a human mother with a God for a father, like Jesus, while other accounts have him being born from two Gods. In the accounts where Hermes is born from two Gods his mother was Maia, the goddess of growth and fertility. Because she was the goddess of fertility, Maia was strongly associated with the Earth goddess Gaia. Hermes father, in most accounts, is Zeus. The God Most High, the God of morality. Maia was sometimes presented as the female aspect of Vulcan, the Roman God of underground fire who was thought to be both creative and destructive. Hermes was later identified as the God of divine borders. Square pillars, topped with the head of Hermes with an erect penis protruding out from its base, were built to mark the midway point, which was the boundary, between two villages. The erect penis symbolized fertility or a creating force which, as the God of borders, Hermes characterised. Hermes was also worshipped as a shepherd God which, some claim, is the origin of the iconography of “The Good Shephard”. Later still, Hermes became understood as more of a mortal figure, the mortal author of the gnostic Hermetic texts whose wisdom supposedly ran as a guiding thread through all religions waiting to be recovered. Hermes was therefore associated with a kind of wisdom or knowledge that was granted from the Gods. Of course, much of this iconography can be seen resonating in the figure of Jesus, born from a mortal mother and godly father, generator of divine borders, an intermediary between the divine Father and mortals, and, of course, the “Good Shephard” who is prepared to sacrifice everything, even His life, for the well-being of his flock. But Hermes is also a “trickster” god, like Loki, who deceives mortals and does malicious acts to achieve his ends. More like the mischievous gangly teenager that he is often portrayed as being rather than the mature bearded God of moral guidance, wisdom, and

614 knowledge that is Jesus. Gnostic Jews see themselves to be the bodily expression of mortals but with a soul that is derived from the Gods, both the Father and the Mother. As Goldstein writes, “We have learned the mystery of the matter. It signifies that the soul has a father and mother just as the body of earth has a father and mother, and it signifies also that in all realms, whether above or below, everything derives from male and female.” (as seen in Goldstein etc.: 680) It is in having a soul that is the product of the gods that Gnostic Jews see themselves as Hermetic. Far from being the protector of divine borders like Hermes, Jews see their task as one that must destroy the World in order to liberate Mother Earth from her crypt. They are themselves not God, they cannot really “make” a world, but their task is to mischievously destroy this world so that Mother Earth can again be united with her exiled husband. They “repair” the world in the same way that, in Genesis, God asked Man, under His supervision, to name the animals thereby completing creation, so it is the task of the Gnostic Jews to once again complete creation by liberating the Earthly God by destroying this world of sin. As none other than the first President of Israel, Ben Gurion, exclaimed, “A Jew, who does not live in Israel, lives in a sin!” Gurion does not say “lives in sin” as in two people living together and thereby living in a situation opposed to God’s will, which might be claimed of Jews not living in Israel, but he explicitly says “lives in a sin” as in everywhere but Israel is a place of sin and, because of this status, it can be legitimately destroyed. Jews, having a soul derived from both the Mother and the Father, possesses, like Hermes, a secret knowledge and therefore becomes an intermediary, philognostia, creating the conditions for redemption of Man and God but his redemption requires the realization of a New World Order. It is in this task of completion that the Gnostic Jews, steeped in the mystical teachings of the Hermetic tradition, themselves, become Messiah’s. In practice, this means that Gnostic Jews believe that it is the task of the Jewish people to force the ‘end-of-days’. In Orthodox Judaism, the end-of-days are heralded by a period of terrible catastrophe. As Lange and Meyers (2011: 30) wrote, “Apocalypticism looked forward to an imminent period of catastrophic upheaval that would mark the end of this present age and usher in a new world order characterized by the fulfillment of divine promises.” This was supposed to be a period of wars, violent upheavals, plague284, famine and a general defection from God. It is like a terrible period that people should be vigilant for and know when they arrive that they are in the end game now. The end-of-days were characterised as, . . . terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love,

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There will be much being made of Covid 19 as a plague marking the end-of-days. Everything, Napoleon, the First World War, the Influenza outbreak in 1918 etc., etc., are all interpreted as markers of the end-of-days.

615 unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God . . . They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth . . .” (2 Timothy: 3-7) Gnostic Jews see the end-of-days as the necessary upheaval that arise from the “birth pangs” of the start of the Messianic Era. (Scholem 2016: 9) This view is consistent with their political activism. It is that the Messiahs, the knowledgeable Jews, the “elect”, are realizing the new world order that there has been over the last 100 years a period of wars, famine and plague, the signs of the Shechinah, necessary to realise this transition. According to the Gnostic account, in difference to Orthodox Jewry, People should not patiently wait to see the end-of-days but, realizing his God-given project that must, by necessity, “force” the end-of-days if the new world order is to be realised. One of the first aims of this emergent theo-politics was to intentionally aspire to realise a Jewish state in Israel. Although this might surprise many people, even possibly many Jews today, but Rabbinic Judaism, indeed the vast majority of Jews around the world, at the turn of the 20th century, were deeply opposed to Zionism. Rabbinic Jews believed that Zionism, humans acting in such a way as to realize biblical prophecies, was deeply sacrilegious because it was thought to be “contradictory to the holy scriptures. . .” (Friedman 1965: 147) The Jews, in the Rabbinic tradition, had to wait for the messiah before they can return to Israel. As Neumann admits of Rabbinic Judaism, By moving outside of ordinary history, Jewish history made itself into a mere object and spectator. The Jewish person renounced the active role, because, although exile was regarded as a punishment, its end was seen as a gift of liberation, depending solely on the divine. To be sure, this end should be prepared for by the attitude of the Jews, but it could also happen, even without that, when the plan of salvation was fulfilled. (Neumann 2019: 169) Most rabbis at the turn of the 20th century thought that Zionism presented as a dangerous break, perhaps the greatest danger, with the Jewish past because they tried to “force the people away from their belief in the principles of the Torah and the commandments”. (Meisel as seen in Sherwin 1997: 96) Zionism was certainly a movement inspired by Sabbatian tradition and not Rabbinic Judaism. Hillel Zeitlin saw the emergence of Zionism amongst Polish Jews in the years prior to World War II as a fundamental betrayal of Judaism. Even today, there continues to be sections of the Jewish community, such as the Neturei Karta and Satmar, who passionately oppose Zionism as something fundamentally anti-Jewish. Those opposed to Zionism argue that Jews were exiled from Judea for their sins and that only the advent of the messiah can allow them to return. Although such groups are genuinely loathed by the now dominant gnostic

616 Zionist movement, these groups are right to point out that for most of history their view of the Jewish condition dominated and that they, at least since the 4th century AD, represents the “the position of the Torah and authentic unadulterated Judaism”. The shifting “centre” of Judaism, so that it now embraces Zionism, shows just how successful the gnostic sect has been. The belief that Jews should not struggle to “return” to Israel was so deeply that after the treatment of Jews during the Second World War, as Deborah Feldman admits, some Jews thought that it was a punishment sent by God for Zionism. (Fledman as heard on Kanowski 2020) It was only under the influence of Gnostic Judaism, that Zionism, the aspiration to realize a Jewish theocracy in former state of Palestine, became part of the wider Jewish project to “push for the end” or intentionally realise the Messianic Era. As Gnostic influenced political activist Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Kalischer wrote Do not imagine that the Almighty will suddenly descend from heaven to blow the great trumpet for the dispersed of Israel and raise a wall of fire round them . . . The redemption will be in a natural manner, set in motion by a human agency and promoted by the willingness of a government to resettle a small portion of Israel’s dispersed remnants in the Holy Land. (Zevi as seen in Rabinowicz 1982: 77) Just like communism, that was both primarily theorised and brought into being by Eastern European Jews, and even the more extreme expressions of liberalism, which disregards traditions and morality in preference for an exhaustively instrumental logic, like that voiced by Jewish-American Milton Friedman, they are just fronts, like the Dönmeh, for realizing the theologically inspired agenda of Gnostic Jews or, to put it different, to force the “end of days”.285 As Neumann (2019: 169) wrote about Zionism, “Here, too, an energetic counter-movement begins with the Kabbalah, because it saw as its highest goal to “push towards the end” through the individual’s ascetic and mystical effort, that is, to exert an increasingly active influence on the meta-historical course.” Or, to put it in more accessible language, Gnostic Judaism, inspired by mystical Kabbalah, promoted the idea that the Jewish people should no longer wait for God to bring redemption, but it was up to the Jewish people to fulfill the prophecies presented in the Torah. As Heschel insists, “The Torah calls on man . . .” (as seen in Heschel 1955: 145) Considering the earlier discussion of the “crisis” of Western civilization, the culture wars, this account of the end-of-days seems a very good account of our own times. The forcing of the “end-of-days” is thought to be in term of God

285

As Werner Sombart observed in 1911 (143), “Let me avow right away; I think that the Jewish religion has the same leadings ideas as Capitalism. I see the same spirit in the one as in the other.” Sombart is absolutely correct if he is referring to the amoral free market principles advanced by Milton Friedman.

617 needing man, God needs man to prepare the way for His coming. To complete the world in the sense of opening the way to Nature. Actions like realizing a Jewish state in Israel are undertaken not as an end-in-itself but was always understood in the Jewish religion not as a particular region in world but the entire world. They believe that everything that has happened to them, the exile, the return of some Jews to Israel, taking control of nations and making people, men and women, effectively slaves, is all just aspects in the fulfilment of a religious prophecy. The Jewish state was never intended as an end but merely as an important means in their larger struggle to take their rightful position as rulers and “educators” of the world. As it says in Torah in no uncertain terms, . . . once again he will choose Israel and will settle them in their own land. Foreigners will join them and unite with the descendants of Jacob. Nations will take them and bring them to their own place. And Israel will take possession of the nations and make them male and female servants in the Lord’s land. They will make captives of their captors and rule over their oppressors. (emphasis added Isaiah 14:1-2) This passage might actually be used to justify Sabbatai’s apparent apostasy and legitimate the strategy that has been used by many Jews to insinuate themselves within other people’s cultures. To substitute themselves for in place of the existing elite. This passage might be read as saying that God will return the Jews to Israel. Foreigners, like the Palestinians, will live with them on that land. Foreign nations will bring some Jews into their own nations thereby allowing them to also take possession of those nations. This will allow the Jews to make slaves or servants of the people who live in those nations because they lack a divine soul, they are not the product of Gods, and therefore they are merely intelligent animals. As ultraOrthodox Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said in 2010, Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel . . . Why are gentiles needed: they will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. . . With gentiles, it will be like any person: They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for his Jews. (Yosef as seen in Oster 2010) The gentile’s task is to work to accumulate wealth for Jews is undeniable. Gnostic Jewish control of the accumulated wealth in Western societies is ubiquitous and almost complete, especially in the United States. The only task left for the soulless slaves that the majority of Westerners have become is to ensure that the trains run on time so that the wealth of those who truly rule over us is efficiently increased

618 so that they can, in turn, further their project. Shlomo Sands observes that even the Western tradition of the critical intellectual, so vocal and powerful from the 18th to the early 20th century, no longer exists. Today, against this substantive critical tradition oriented by truth, the “literati increasingly became technical experts called on to perfect the material and spiritual products of the post-industrial affluent society”. (Sands 2018) The main reason for the demise of the Western intellectual, is that those in power, those to whom we should be critical, have grown so powerful that criticism is no longer allowed leaving only a technical space for intelligent gentiles to operate. Academics and politicians have been domesticated so that it is they, the Gnostic Jews, who decide the important questions about where society is heading, it is they who decide what will be the next important issues to address and how that issue is to be addressed, it is they who decide if war is needed, when it will take place, how long it will go for and under what conditions it will end. The Vietnam War was the last war that the United States fought that did not serve the interests of Gnostic Jews. They did everything in their power to ensure that war did not only end but end in a way that they wished. Some Jews genuinely believe, and they would be quite right in this belief, that those who once ruled over them are now their slaves. As Gnostic sympathizer Paul Sartre observed, “When the privileged class feel comfortable with their principles, when they have a good conscience, when the oppressed are well convinced of being inferior creatures and are even proud of their servile condition, then the artist is at ease.” (Sartre 1950) This is our contemporary condition. It is one that has become easier and easier to live with and harder and harder to challenge. Gnostic Jews honestly believe, as their religion teaches them every day of their lives, that “the whole world was created only for the sake of the Jews” (Mahler 2001: 16). As Schechter wrote, “But if there is anything sure, it is that the highest motives which worked through the history of Judaism as the strong belief in God and the unshaken confidence that at last this God, the God of Israel, will be the God of the whole world . . .” (emphasis added Schechter 188: 51) Everyone, whether they know it or not, will indeed come to worship the Lord of Darkness, which, as Jewish author Goldziher claims, is one of the epithets of the Hebrew God. (Goldziher 1877/2015) Israel, from its very establishment, was always intended as a vast training institution for diaspora Jews to learn the beliefs and practices of Gnostic Judaism so that they could return to their country of birth with the aim of first destroying it as the nation it once was before making the people that lived there nothing better than productive mules. As Myers observed, people like Scholem and Buber, “. . .contributed to a heightened awareness and over-all reconsideration of the Jewish character of the Zionist286 enterprise as a necessary first step towards defining a new idiom for Jewish identity.” (Myers

286

Zionism or Zionists are people, and there is a significant Christian Zionist movement, who believe Jews have a special claim over the region we now call Israel. Some believe that the land that rightly belongs to the Jews is much

619 1986: 261-262) The Messianic Era, when realised, will be a time of “neither famine or war, envy or competition for good will flow in abundance and all the delights will be freely available as dust.” (Maimonides: Melachim Milchamot 12:5) Good will flow with abundance because everything that was once viewed as evil, greed, avarice, lust, etc., will be recast by this tradition into being perceived as “the good” while what was once viewed as good, chastity, sobriety, modest etc., will be demonized and expunged from the world. Go to your local “red light” district and see the Messianic Age of peace and plenty for yourselves. Just look at the world we live in even today, women work like men, they physically fight each other, in the boxing ring, for the entertainment of the masses. Homosexuals walk down the street openly advertising their sexuality, transsexuals are regularly used in advertising campaigns displaying a life that is supposed to be envied, the sexual revolution has meant that everyone now sleeps around so much so that modern workplaces have become orgies, and many suburban people, once God abiding community members who organized Bible readings and would help each other out in times of need, now organize orgies where they commit, while others enjoy, demeaning sex acts as we have been instructed to do by pornography. This is no longer about love. This is people fucking like mindless animals seeking a purely physical pleasure. Closely following on sex is greed. To not be greedy today, to not pursue material things, is to be thought almost sub-human, to have become something irrational. Greed is literally portrayed as highest good. If you do not pursue material ends and accumulate stuff, then you a failure. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, private property is being undermined through our digital age when we no longer own things but lease them when we use them as a kind of Heideggerian “standing reserve”. Christianity is dead. The relic of what was once an organized religion now advances the same agenda as gnostic Judaism, gay rights, indigenous entitlement, feminism, because that is what they have come to believe is what will stop their slide into irrelevance when, in truth, it will only hasten the end. Wars are no longer fought to bring peace and civility but are now fought when and where Jewish Gnosticism want a war to further their global aspirations. From a Christian Western perspective, the more debauched the world becomes, the more wars serve the basest aspiration of power, according to gnostic Judaism, the more the “good will flow in abundance”, that is, the more debauched the world becomes the more the world progresses towards their utopian vision. This belief is the result of the commitment to reverse all existing values as the world destroying/healing project. For some, the Messianic Era is not some time in the future but, because

greater than modern day Israel and should replicate the borders of captured by the mythical King David. With a little reflection that whole argument is simply ridiculous and has been a terrible misjustice to the Arab populations that inhabited the region prior to the mass immigration of European Jews.

620 Sabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah (or at least a Messiah) and much of their project has actually been realised in a world dominated by Gnostic Jews, the Messianic Era has, to a large degree, already been achieved. As Magid (2014: 317) boasts, “. . .we are not living on the cusp of the messianic era but rather deeply inside it.” (emphasis added) Influential Jewish-American theologian Irving Greenberg agrees, as he unequivocally wrote, “We are living in the Messianic times, yet our motto seems to be ‘business as usual’”. (Greenberg as seen in Kleinberg 2016: 68) Greenberg is claiming that Jews simply need to embrace the reality that the Messianic Era has arrived and live accordingly. This shifting of the world as a conceptual exercise is central to Gnostic Judaism’s teachings. As the Shem Tov made clear, ““Turn from evil and do good.” (Telhillim 34: 15) This is to argue that there is the need to “transform evil into goodness.”” (Kesser Shem Tov 2013: 69) Not stop doing evil and become good, a Christian project, but “transform evil into goodness”. It is like a “cognitive politics”, change the way we think and the world changes. The central project is to dominate the way people think so that everyone comes to think like Gnostic Jews. IT is then they become acceptable to Gnostic Jews and can thrive. The reason why the Messianic Era may be missed is because Jews understand that the Messianic Era will not be fundamentally different from any other era. As Maimonides observed, “Do not presume that in the Messianic age any facet of the world’s nature will change or there will be innovations in the work of creation. Rather, the world will continue according to its pattern.” (Maimonides: Melachim Milchamot 12:1) This statement actually discloses the central feature of the Messianic Era in contrast to every other, it is true that nothing will change except the “world” will now “continue according to its pattern”. The world will be harmonious with what they understand to be the flow of Nature which is how God reveals itself in its “oneness”. No longer will humanity fight against nature, in a civilizing project, but will just release their natural drives onto the world. As the extremely important Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav wrote when writing of the Messianic Era, On that day, Hashem will be “One and His name will be One”. “On that day” is the ultimate goal, which is “all good”, because the One is all good. . . But now is He not one? Rather, now we recite the blessing “the true Judge” over evil and “He Who is good and does good over good”. But in the future days, people will recite the blessing, “He Who is good and does good over everything.” And that is all good, for the ultimate is all good. This is because even in regard to all of the troubles, sufferings and evils that a person experiences, heaven forbid, if he looks at the ultimate, they are certainly not evils at all but rather great favours. This is because all sufferings are certainly purposefully directed by God for a person’s good . . . (Nachman as seen in Zvi 2009: 40-41) Just like “sin”, Jews should embrace hardship and suffering in their lives because it gives them the opportunity to gather the spark from those experiences and return those also to God. The only real change, therefore, in the messianic age is that “Jews” with the secret knowledge revealed in these

621 volumes, who reach the highest levels of consciousness and are therefore Godlike, will rule the world for ever. This active role tasked Jews to redeem the world is contrary to everything Orthodox Judaism teaches and why Gnostic Jews, the originator of this political movement, has traditionally been thought of as a “heretical sect” which many Jews consider as actually being outside of Judaism.

Uniting Heaven and Earth This political activism to destroy the world is nowhere as impactful as it is in shaping the “culture” of the United States. There is barely a movie or T.V. program which does not promote the Gnostic agenda of, “free love”, feminism, multiculturalism, and homosexuality while explicitly denigrating Christian morality exemplified by white males. Through a range of strategies, realizable through their massive overrepresentation generally but perhaps primarily through their control of certain influential tertiary institutions, Gnostic Jews have been able to shape how Americans, and Westerners more generally, think and, therefore, shape how they live. That the collective identity of the tribe of Jews is synonymous with their God, the Shechinah, does not, therefore, only manifest itself in intolerance to “outsiders” and an insistence on “internal” conformity but it means that Jews have an obligation to manifest their “culture”/religion in the world. It is through these measures that the Shechinah will be brought into the light of the world furthering their project of redemption. Gnostic Jews do not simply help other Gnostic Jews to rise into positions of power and wealth as an end in itself but there is an obligation that goes with this promotion and that obligation is that Gnostic Jews must then pursue, with single-minded determination, to spread the values of their God, otherwise known as Lucifer, over the world in everything that they do. Harold Bloom (1979) writes of this agenda in his fictional representation of Gnostic Judaism, The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy, which tells, in the style of the Pilgrim’s Progress, of a journey towards Lucifer, towards what he understands as “freedom”, towards his God. Gnostic Jews hope to nurture the spirit of the Shechinah into this world from her dark dominions below the world into the light of day and when this has been done then God’s name will be united. This is the redemption of both the world and God. This explains why Gnostic Jews continuously claim the god-like status of Hermes, because as the “sons” of God, then they, literally like an army of messiahs, do indeed have a God for a spiritual “parent” giving them a demi-God like standing in being responsible for bringing the spirit of the “mother”, the collective spirit of the Jewish people, Lucifer, the Prince of Darkness, into the world of light. That is, by making the immanent aspect of God come to presence, they, the Jewish people, become not only the redeemers of God, which is their task, but “world creators/world destroyers”. It is in this way that they are collectively the spirit of the Shechinah, they manifest her characteristics of blood lust and world destruction as an act of healing and creativity. These are the paradoxical traits of the Shechinah,

622 manifested in the collective Jewish identity. There is a YouTuber who says that he places all contemporary arguments through what he described as a kind of thought experiment by asking, “what would people in the 1950s think?” What the YouTuber is doing is observing how, if the “culture” is not open to certain ideas, then they just would not be accepted. He is suggesting that many of the arguments that are accepted by today’s world simply would not have been accepted as recently as the 1950s. The argument does not change but the world that judges the worth of the argument does. This is to simply observe that Jews helping other Jews to advance their careers as a religious obligation is only one side, if you like, of Jewish overrepresentation. The other side is that once in positions of power they fulfill their redemptive mission of liberating their spiritual Mother, the Shekinah, into the world. These two “sides” then form a complete circle where people are moved into positions of power, shape the society they are in, thereby making future arguments that advance the Gnostic project more palatable. This in turn manifests a world that is more amenable to Jews. It has to be emphasised at this time, that this intimacy, the identification of the Jewish people, the Knesset Israel and the Shechinah, only applies to the Gnostic Jewish tradition and not the Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox Jewish tradition also recognises that the Godhead has both a male and female aspect, but this is not a central feature to their theology. The task of Christianity is the exact opposite of the Gnostic Jews, whereas Gnostic Jews seek to liberate the Shechinah into the world the task of Christianity is to make her civilized, to bring out her nurturing side, encourage her in her virginal ways, so that she serves all the people in society as a good, nurturing, caring mother. Mary Magdalene is the Christian expression of the Shechinah who moves from prostitution to leading a life of devotion to Jesus. As none other than Martin Luther wrote, [Jesus’] righteousness, life, and salvation are unconquerable, eternal, omnipotent. By the wedding ring of faith, He shares in the sins, death, and pains of hell which are His bride’s. As a matter of fact, He makes them His own and acts as if they were His own and as if He Himself had sinned; He suffered, died, and descended into hell that He might overcome them all. (Emphasis added Luther 1968/1520: 11) Jesus’ “bride” is “sin, death and the pains of hell”. This is Mary Magdalene before embracing Jesus’ message. Luther seems to be suggesting that the Goddess that might be characterised as Lucifer/Shechinah is indeed Jesus’ bride. As Karl Barth wrote, “The salvation of man is his translation out of sin into righteousness before God and out of death into the fullness of life with God. This translation is not his own work but that of God. And this work of God is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ . . .” (Barth 1938: xviii) Jesus takes his wife’s sins as His own but only so that He can overcome them and redeem her as he does for all of humanity. This is the meaning of the resurrection, Jesus’ salvation is

623 unconquerable, iēsous Invictus, even in death, He is eternal and omnipotent. He entered “Hell”, the Underworld, he was embodied and faced all the temptations that we all face as embodied beings in this world to which we, as lesser beings, all too often succumb, but he will never be conquered by base desires, he will domesticate them and thereby make them pure. This is the true meaning of “entering into sin” that Sabbatai and his followers have simply misunderstood, it is not to embrace the sinful as the new standard of good thereby becoming evil but to enter into sin in terms of face the temptation but remain good. Mahatma Gandhi would sleep with young women in his later years naked but never touch them sexually. He said that he wanted to become to “become a eunuch mentally”. The purpose of such acts is to treat the other as fully human, to not objectify them as something for “use” or “pleasure” but as an end in themselves. The Christian narrative is inspired by ancient Western creation myths more so than the one told in Genesis. In many ancient Western creation myths, in the beginning is chaos, which is total disorder and darkness. From out of chaos emerges Mother Earth and Father Sky/Heaven. To give a concrete example, as told in Hesiod’s Theogony, the Greek origin myth begins with Gaia, Mother Earth, who initially conceives heaven, personified as Uranus.287 Uranus and Gaia ceaselessly engage in sex conceiving several Titan children including, lastly, a boy; Cronus. There are interesting parallels in this creation myth to the one told in Genesis. In the Hebrew creation myth, God creates heaven and earth and there is darkness upon the face of the water, the spirit of God. Both creation myths begin with heaven and earth. Indeed, many creation myths around the world begin with the separation of heaven and earth. As Yasumaro wrote of the Japanese creation myth, “Heaven and earth first parted, and the three Kami performed the commencement of creation. The passive and active essences then developed, and the two spirits became the ancestors of all things.” (Yasumaro as seen in Massey 2007: 402) Heaven and earth in the Japanese myth are identified with Izanagi and Izanami or with Yin and Yang from the Chinese tradition. (Massey 2007: 402) To return to the Greek myth, Uranus and Gaia endlessly engage in sexual intercourse because of the insatiable sex drive of Uranus. Although Uranus impregnates Gaia, he never leaves her birth canal vacant long enough for her to actually give birth. This means that all of Earth’s children remain stuck inside her unable to escape. At the prompting of his mother, Cronus, not yet born, rises against his father and, after overcoming him, cuts off his father’s genitals. Cutting off his father’s genitals means that he can never again be intimate with Gaia. He can never again stand in the way of fertility. Heaven and Earth are,

287

In another account by Alcman and Callimachus, Aether, the god of heavenly light, fathers Uranus with Gaia.

624 from this time onwards, separated and can, obviously, never be united again. Neumann writes about such myths, The World Father is joined to the World Mother in uroboric union, and they are not to be divided. They are still under the rule of the primordial law; above and below, father and mother, heaven and earth, God and world, reflect on another and cannot be put apart. How could the conjunction of opposites, as the initial state of existence, ever be represented mythologically except by the symbol of the conjoined World Parents! (Neumann 1954/1986: 18) Of course, Neumann gives a very Gnostic Jewish reading of the Greek creation myth that tries to cast the separation of Heaven and Earth as something that somehow breaks with the Natural laws but, at least to my reading, the opposite is being communicated. The permanent separation of Heaven and Earth that permits a world is something good or, at least, something that has happened and cannot be reversed. In the Greek myth, after cutting off his father’s genitals, Cronus throws them into the ocean from out of which comes the seductive war goddess Aphrodite, the fertility goddess of sexuality, passion, and pleasure. Aphrodite expresses Divine Wisdom, knowledge of God. Cronus, after separating heaven from earth, is then responsible for fertility in the shape of Aphrodite. Aphrodite represents disorder in the sense that she is thrown into the sea which represents chaos. Again, in the Gnostic tradition, the Ein Sof withdraws, to make space for Heaven and Earth, Heaven being the first three letters of Yahweh’s name and the last letter being Earth, personified as the Shechinah. Cronus, like the Roman Saturn, was thought to rule during a ‘golden age’, a paradise, marked as the Garden of Eden in the Hebrew myth, where people lived without the need for laws and there was perfect harmony between nature and God. Saturn celebration was the saturnalia, one the major festivals in the Roman calendar which was marked by role reversal where slaves would dress like masters and masters as slaves or men would dress as women and visa versa. As Pretparata wrote of such celebrations, The celebration of the Great Goddess in its violent guise, whereby the mother gives way to the hetaera (the whore)—took place during special sacred festivals (saturnalia, Sacchean feasts, Cybele’s Mysteries, etc.), which entailed a variety of liturgies. To name but the most notorious: the slaying of a person representing the male regal figure, whom the Great Goddess had loved only for pleasure and not for procreation; self-castration on the part of priests, who, possessed by the Goddess, sought to transform themselves into the feminine type (e.g., the famous myth of the shepherd Attis, who emasculated himself in a Dionysian trance); and the inversion of sex, whereby (1) statues of the goddesses would display masculine features, and (2) men in the Mysteries would adorn themselves with the clothes of women and women with those of men—all signs that the virile element had “come to be looked down upon as irrelevant,” “as a source of embarrassment.” (Preparata 2011: 13)

625 Later, Zeus, Cronus’ son, overcomes the Titans and banishes Cronus to Tartarus, a formless, dark, void, below the earth, where he dwells in judgement of humanity when they die. The masculine aspect of Yahweh needs to be thought of as a god like Cronus in the sense that he to withdraws into darkness. Yahweh was . . .the heavenly war lord of His people, a “god from afar”, essentially unapproachable and separate; this sight of Him was deadly, and only Moses was said to have seen His back. Like the Indian god Indra, Yahwe thirsts for the blood of enemies and the disobedient. In the boundless might of His passion He devours them with fire and throws them into the sea. In keeping with this warlike image Yahweh also was a god of natural catastrophes. His appearances were accompanied by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fires, desert winds, and storms. He punished the enemies of His people with locusts, He sent snakes to punish His own people and pestilence to the Egyptians. . . [He presented as a] frightful and demonic image . . . (Bendix 1998: 229) As already observed, in Psalms 18: 11 it says of Yahweh, “He made darkness his hiding place.” Like Cronus, Saturn and the Egyptian Osiris, there is something fundamentally chthonic about Yahweh, both the masculine and the feminine aspects. Just like the chthonic gods of ancient Greece, like Cronus, Yahweh too demands sacrifices and especially values the sacrifice of living creatures.288 The ancient Greek chthonic gods received burnt offerings that seem not dissimilar to the Hebrew holocaust where an animal, or possibly even a child, was burnt on an alter until there was nothing left as a sacrifice to their God. In the Greek tradition, the banishment of Cronus to Tartarus marked the end of the golden age where people lived without the need for governments, laws, or civilization in the same way that Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil marked a “fallen time” in the Hebrew myth. The rule of Zeus marked a fallen condition where, initially, there was a period of war and chaos followed by a period where moral guidance was required, informed by knowledge of good and evil. Some claim that this also marks the shift from matriarchal order to patriarchal order but there is little historical evidence that this really happened but is just another myth to support the claims of a god. Laws were believed to have been imposed on ignorant Mankind by Zeus that reflected the moral principles known only by the Gods. That is, mankind was granted

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There are traces of human sacrifice in the Jewish tradition. It was once believed that dearer the sacrifice the more likely the God would listen. This belief could result in child sacrifice. This was also true in the Hebrew tradition. As Asimov observes, “In times of dire distress, then, children would be sacrificed, even perhaps the child of a king. In the later days of the Israelite kingdoms, when affairs were frequently desperate, such child sacrifices were performed. One suggestion is that living children were burnt to death in a fire built within the brazen idol [holocaust], but it may be that the children were slain first and then sacrificed . . .” Nine other than King Solomon, thought to be the wisest Israeli King, built a temple to Moloch to which children were sacrificed. King Ahaz of Judah, the southern kingdom of Yahwists, sacrificed his son even though it is clearly forbidden in Judaism. As it says in Jeremiah 7:31, “And they . . . burn their sons and their daughters in the fire; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart.”

626 access to the mind of God. Zeus is the God of the bright sky, the God of light, and was later worshipped as a solar deity that became closely associated with Apollo. Zeus was often associated with natural justice and the enduring law. Yahweh, who was sometimes called Ba’al Shameem and associated with the God Hadad (Adad), a God of the barren desserts, like Cronus, was thought to dwell in darkness, the void, and appears to be hidden or withdraws with the advent of the light which is knowledge of the good. In the 12th century, influential, prolific and prodigious, Jewish mystic Abraham ibn Ezra, argued that Jews themselves are Saturnine, in that, like the Roman god Saturn, the Roman version of Cronus, Yahweh’s, “. . . portion of the earth is caves and dark places, because it suits a melancholic nature to be in solitude. . .” (Ibn Ezra as seen in Idel 2011: 10) Unlike in the Orthodox Jewish tradition, which remains in this state of being bound by legal forms revealed by a great lawgiver, gods like Hermes and Jesus, mediate the relationship between mortals and God thereby allowing humanity to overcome their fallen condition and reunite with the mind of God directly. There is no need for the relationship to be mediated by laws. The revelation of these mediating Gods shows that men and women must be different, men must be men and women must be women, but they then come together, as symbolized in marriage, to from a unity while maintaining their difference. So, it is with heaven and earth, yin and yang, these are discrete, but both are required to form a whole. Only Gnostic Jews interpret these myths as demanding that the world must be destroyed, including Gender and moral restraints, to return to a primordial conditions of oneness determined by natural laws. Yet it is to realize their unorthodox views that Gnostic Jews are determined to shape culture so that their extremely anti-Christian arguments might resonate as persuasive. This is why the YouTuber’s thought experiment of asking what people would have thought in the 1950s is so revealing. What would have people in the 1950s have thought about a performer that was a bearded man wearing a dress? Today, as Conchita Wurst confirms, they are lauded as exemplary figures who should be emulated as some kind of ideal. That such a radical change in views has occurred over such a short period of time is the direct result of Gnostic Jews. As the changing reception of Boas’ once highly controversial views on a range of issued evince, if the wider “culture” is not receptive to an argument, if it cannot resonate with an audience as persuasive, then people with certain views can be advanced into positions of power and influence, but they will never actually have any real power or influence because everyone would simply ignore what they were saying or, which is more likely, argue that what is being proposed is wrong, immoral or both. Boas, who passionately fought for extended civil liberties and non-discriminatory immigration into the United States, is claimed to be “. . . farsighted and clear-eyed as anyone in his time, an opponent of racism, ethnocentrism, inequality, chauvinism . . .” Today his ideas in the United States are seen to be “before his

627 time”, even though they have obviously had no impact in Israel amongst his fellow Jews, but his supposed “insights” are not because of his “unique genius” but because the world of those who now read his work has changed so that what was once received as outrageous, like Conchita, is now not only accepted but praised. This change in cultural values is not accidental, it is not natural, it has been intentionally realised by Gnostic Jews. Boas’ contribution, though important, is actually only one very small aspect of a much larger strategy of cultural hegemony. Boas today is thought to be the single greatest anthropologists of all time. He is called the “father of American anthropology”. The question is how does a German Jew whose ideas were extremely controversial at the time become praised today as an innovative genius? A man of the future? The answer to this question is not found simply in the arguments of Boas, as their initial reception confirms, but, as Machiavelli argues, the goddess Fortuna is more important than individual ability. That is, it is the values and beliefs of the world in which somebody presents arguments that makes them influential. It is changing this world that is the project of Gnostic Jews or what might be described as “cultural imperialism” or “the systematic penetration and domination of the cultural life . . .” of a people to serve the interests of another. Cultural imperialism is often thought to be about the colonisation of the mind, the way people, usually thought of as “white” Europeans, impose their vision of the world, thereby inhabited ways of knowing that are not only no longer native to the person experiencing those thoughts but potentially destructive. If one’s mind is inhabited with thoughts of selfloathing, possessed if you will, then this is not only destructive to the individual but is destructive for everyone who lives in that world. If this argument sounds familiar, it is because it has been used in indigenous struggles and by feminists who argue that formal equality alone is inadequate for these groups to be liberated. What is actually required, by these accounts, is the “freeing” of one’s mind from the oppressive thought of those, usually understood to be “white males”, who make other think how they would like then to think to advance their interests and/or power. This colonizing of the mind certainly captures something about what Gnostic Jews have achieved in the United States, but it also misses what is most important. What we understand in terms of cultural imperialism is also about people’s relationship with the divine and it is potentially destroying one’s relationship with what is sacred, that is where the real destruction takes place. To understand the relationship between cultural imperialism and God, the role performed by words like “culture” need to be appreciated. In many ways, once one accepts the vocabulary of culture then they have denied the space for any meaningful account of God. Indeed, one of the aims of Kant’s philosophy, the man who coined the modern conception of culture, was to ensure that certain beliefs in physicotheology are shown to be inadequate. Physicotheology, which was extremely popular at the time that Kant wrote, is the argument that the existence of God is verified by seeing

628 purpose and design in the natural world or that God expresses himself through His creation. To do this, Kant had to give an account of nature where God was not present in his creation, where God was most certainly not experienced in the world. This was the key to Kant’s onto-theology, his ontology did not rely on any kind of theological commitments. Kant’s alternative ontology would eventually result in the forgetfulness of God in nature and therefore the forgetfulness of God as such. Kant’s conceptualization and deployment of the term “culture” was the crucial moment in confirming the rupture in Western civilization’s relationship with their living God. After Kant, God might well be said to be dead. To properly appreciate what Gnostic Jews are realising in contemporary society, what might be called “cultural imperialism”, there must be a proper understanding of the important function of the concept of culture in modern and post-modern or contemporary thought. “Culture”, or better the concept of culture, emerged as part of the response to the 17th century Gnostic Revival. It was in this response to the nihilism and scepticism that is native to Gnosticism that the conditions for the current Gnostic Revival, that began in the late 19th century, had its origins. The ground of the 20th-21st centuries was prepared in the 17th. The concept of “culture” is not itself part of the Gnostic worldview but is a uniquely modern conception that was used by Gnostic Jews, especially Franz Boas and his school of anthropologists in the early to mid-20th century, to form part of an intellectual ecology of the later 20th century that allowed Gnostic arguments to be persuasive. Without the concept of culture functioning as it did by the mid-20th century, then the post-World War II gnostic arguments simply could not have been persuasive. It should not really be surprising that the idea of culture is important for understanding our contemporary condition because the idea of culture is so absolutely central, so deeply embedded, in explanations of how we understand the world and society. Everything today, including history, is explained in terms of culture. We commonly speak of culture in the way that we do because culture seems to have incredible explanatory power. Why do we believe what we do? Because of our culture. Why do we build things that way that we do? Because of our culture. Why did the ancient Greeks act as they did? Because of their culture. Why do we practice the religions that we do? Because of the culture in which we live. The concept of culture is omnipresent because it seems to explain so much about how humans, as cultural creatures, live. As the concept of culture is so central to our understanding of reality, culture must surely be extremely ancient. The concept of culture must be deeply embedded within the Western vocabulary alongside concepts such as “democracy”, “reason” and “liberty”. When one begins to research the history of the idea of culture, in contrast to researching the history of a culture, to “deconstruct” the idea of culture, this is exactly how things are often portrayed. One of the first things that almost every account of the history of the concept of culture begins with is that the modern English word “culture” is derived from

629 the Ancient Latin word cultura. Cultura, as all these volumes quickly observe, means “to tend”, “to cultivate”, and “to till”. It is a word associated with the farming and maintenance of crops. It is because of this context that all these volumes considering the historical meaning of “culture” then elaborate on the meaning of cultura by observing that its proper context is to have the prefix ager (field), as in “agricultura”, which literally means “field tilling/tending”. Cicero is known to have combined the words cultura and animus, [animus means “rational soul”, “mind” or “mental powers” - something very close to the Greek word psyche] to form the phrase “cultura animi”. Cicero was drawing on an agricultural metaphor, to communicate the sense of “cultivating the soul” in terms of “self-development” or “self-improvement” or better, to capture the moral implication that he intended, “character building”.289 Cicero was using the word cultura in the sense of nurturing yourself to become a better person. An attitude that would become central to the Christian ethos that still lay over 100 years in the future. From this brief historical account, it might appear that “culture” is indeed an ancient Western concept that has always functioned in a similar way that it does today, meaning something like the norms that inform human conduct, from ancient Rome to contemporary social science. If that were indeed the case, then that would explain its pervasive and unproblematic use today. It is an established concept with ancient origins that is native to the Western tradition. With just a little more research though, a different truth begins to emerge. “Culture” is not an ancient concept at all. Despite what those many historical accounts of the concept of culture suggest, the concept of “culture” actually has not functioned as a concept in the Western historical narrative. Indeed, it is not until the late 18th century, in the work of that extremely influential philosopher Immanuel Kant, around 250 years ago, that the word “culture”, or more specifically the German Kultur, received its modern gloss. As Allan Bloom observes, “culture in the modern sense was first used by Immanuel Kant”. Even after it had been legitimized by Kant, it was still not commonly used. The Kantian philosopher Herder used Kultur to argue that each people nurtured its own specialities thereby each contributing in their own way to Kultur, but he was an exception and not the rule. Although some suggest that Herder was the first to posit the idea that there exist “cultures”, as others have also observed, this is not an accurate reading.

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Such aagricultural metaphors seem to have been often used in the ancient world as might be expected. In Luke 13: 6-9 Jesus tells the parable of the man who was going to cut down the fig tree because it had not born any fruit. Another suggested that they do not cut the tree down but tend to it properly and then see if it will bear fruit. Obviously, Jesus is suggesting that one should not give up on a person just because they do not readily embrace Christianity but must spend time to cultivate people to embrace Christian teachings. Jesus, therefore, is using an agricultural metaphor in the same way that Cicero was using it, the idea that people are like crops, tend to them properly, take the time to address their needs, and they will be “fruitful” or they will become good people.

630 What Herder was arguing is that each “people” had their own area of excellence which then contributed to a universal understanding of Kultur. The Chinese might be great at formality and the French might be excellent at social theory, but they were all contributing in their own way to one culture. These were not understood to be different “cultures”, the Chinese and the French, but unique areas of excellence that each people brought to culture. Despite Herder’s influence, the concept of Kultur was still not widely used. It remained more of a technical word, understood to be of recent minting, rather than part of everyday vocabulary that could be easily deployed for its explanatory power. Although coined by Kant and used by Herder, it is not until the work of the cultural anthropologists in the early 20th century that the word gains popularity and enters into common use. It was at the hands of the Boasian School of anthropologists that the word “culture” was forcefully introduced into the English language in such a way that it functions today. Why do people hold the “values” that they do? Because of the “culture” in which they live. Why do people act as they do? Because of the “culture” in which they are raised. Why do people practice the religion that they do? Because people are “inculcated” into a set of religious beliefs. The Boasian’s used the concept of culture to explain everything. They were, after all, “cultural anthropologists”. The concept of “culture” was to be used to explain the human condition. This is how the concept of “culture” functions even today. After culture became common currency, things were no longer thought to be “natural” or the result of God, but everything was relative to the culture in which people were embedded. In many ways the person was emptied of meaning and everything that they were was externalized in terms of culture. The problem that primarily motivated the Boasian school of anthropologists was the need to argue that “race” did not really exist. Whereas prior to this school, if a people were thought to be deceptive then it was attributed to who they were racially. For example, it might be claimed that the Chinese were deceptive as a people, and this would be thought to be a “natural trait” of the Chinese as a people. What the Boasian School hoped to achieve was for people to no longer attribute character traits as being in some way natural, one way or another, but as a result of the culture in which they had been raised. These arguments were then used after World War II to justify mass immigration. Everyone should be allowed to immigrate from anywhere, no matter the setting from which they were from, because once they became inculcated onto Western society then they would be indistinguishable from everyone else. The who that we were was now characterised as being highly malleable and the circumstances under which our subjectivities were formed was “culture”. But exactly what is being said by claiming that people are constituted by the culture in which they live? On one hand, such explanations seem transparent enough. They are claiming that we are shaped by the human environment in which we live. This may be true, but it does not really say very much as the

631 concept of culture remains incredibly vague. As Hammersley observed, capturing this equivocation, “culture” is used interchangeably with “tradition”, “civilization”, “custom”, “myth”, “perspective”, “worldview”, “ideology”, “discourse” and “habitus”. (Hammersley 2019: 2) The point that Hammersley was making is that although culture can be used interchangeably with all these other concepts, there is no sense that these words are synonymous with culture. One could not easily exchange “myth” for “culture” or even “discourse” with “culture”. So, it seems that culture, like Being, can be said in different ways. Before we can make the argument that Jewish Gnostics, in manifesting the female aspect of their God into the world, are colonizing “culture”, there needs to be an understanding of what “culture” really means in this context or, at least, how the word “culture” functions in contemporary society. How could Kant mint the term “culture” at that particular moment in history in such a way that it was persuasive and, ultimately, able to be adopted and deployed hundreds of years later by the Boasians? What occurred in the intervening years, from late antiquity through to the Enlightenment, that there arose either a need or the possibility for using a concept like “culture”? What is discovered through these questions is that the Gnostic revival that began in the late 19th century was made possible as a result of the incomplete response to gnosticism during its 17th century revival. That is, modernity, as a response to gnosticism, opens the way for the gnostic revival of the late 19th century. As Gumplowicz argued towards the end of the 19th century, race wars are not won through violence but in the domain of ideas. One needs to uncover why certain ideas are being used to what end and why that particular use may be inadequate. What is “culture” covering over? The quick answer to the question of why the concept of culture emerged when it did is that the concept of “culture” could not have existed prior to the modern strategy used to overcome the gnostic revival of the 17th century. The concept of “culture” is germane to the strategy to overcome the 17th century challenge of Gnosticism but in this response are the very conditions for the current Gnostic revival. Understanding how this happened might suggest an adequate response. The strategy that resulted in the viability of “culture” was removing “faith” from the justification of a positive “reality” which does not simply open the space for the possibility for conceptualizing culture in causal terms but necessitates that there must be something like it as a result of the death of God. The modern trajectory had been to remove God, as an object of faith, from empirical experience in order to secure the certainty necessary for the quantitative scientific project as a way of overcoming Gnostic scepticism. In order to secure a new point of certainty, adequate for overcoming the scepticism of Gnosticism in claiming “truth”, the Western tradition, ironically perhaps, marginalized God. The final step in this process of removing God from the experience of realty was, at least to some degree, the Kantian desire to overcome

632 physicoteleology. Once God was removed from experience, removed from claims of truth associated with “facts”, then the question becomes; if God is not responsible for informing human judgements, then what is? What will fill the empty space in terms of shaping humanity? If God was no longer part of this world, if God was now properly thought to be dead, then what now guides human action? What gives humanity meaning? It was not a coincidence that the man perhaps most responsible for overcoming physicoteleology was the person responsible for coining the word “culture” in the way that it would function in the modern world. Kant’s intuited categories function in the same place in Kant’s ontology as Plato’s Forms and are, therefore, the conditions for the possibility of experience. These “categories” are then made explicit, by Kant’s account, consistent with the general Western philosophical tradition since Plato, through reason or logos. It is this explicit knowledge that is then presented in Kant’s work as Kultur. Culture, like faith, is a kind of knowledge and functions in its stead. Understood in this way, Kant’s schema looks extremely familiar. What Kant is really presenting, as he himself describes it, is an onto-theology. Kant describes his philosophy as an onto-theology because he understands it as a secularizing of a preexisting religiously inspired philosophical account. Kant uses the term onto-theology in the same sense that Schmidt deploys the term “theo-politics”, as a secularized expression of political institutions that are in truth grounded in religious beliefs. As Rotenstreich observes, by Kultur. Kant wanted to convey, apparently, that the explication of reason in metaphysics or in philosophy is an explication of that which is inherently present in reason. Reason as knowledge out of principles being spontaneous, is an ultimate datum, but it has to be explicated and formulated. The latter aspect of reason, as a kind of actualization of its potentiality, is the scene for culture, that is, of an explicit articulation of reason by reasons itself. (Rotenstreich 1989: 304) What Rotenstreich is saying is that what Kant means by “culture” is the manifestation of what is ultimate in reason, the categories as a spontaneously intuited ideal that informs reason or logos as its end. But unlike Plato and most of the Western tradition, there is no role for any conception of God in relation to the categories. Culture is understood as the telos of reason, reason coming to its ideal. When reason actualizes the categories potential, making it explicit, then that disclosed ideal is culture. When Kant is considering this matter, in The Critique of Pure Reason, then what he is primarily concerned with in that text is the limits of reason. It therefore seems reasonable to extrapolate his account of reason, that it manifests the categories, to anything that equally achieves the same outcome, poetry, photography, music, or art. This is exactly what is found in his Critique of Judgement. Kant argues that human beings are “free” by virtue of their capacity to use nature to reveal the a priori ground that gives purpose to human lives. Humanity needs to show commitment and dedication, learn a set of required skills, which means

633 choosing not to seek short-term physical pleasure, which emerges from our inner animal nature, or discipline. Indeed, one cannot help but be brought to Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art and think that this is the work of art, is to show the limit of things as what they are, then it might be said that, according to Kant, reason is art in that they both work the same, truth happens. Art, at the same time, is culture, so culture is where truth happens in Kant’s work. Immanuel Kant famously claimed that it was David Hume’s philosophical conclusions that motivated his own reflections. As Kant wrote in the Preface of the Prolegomera, “I freely admit that the remembrance of David Hume was the very thing that many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.” What Hume observed is that many of the most important concepts and principles by which humans’ thought were true were “nothing but custom arising from its experience” and therefore “merely empirical, i.e., intrinsically contingent rules, to which we ascribe a supposed necessity and universality”. As derived from experience, it simply became a matter of faith to ascribe any universal lawlike conclusions to these experiences. In the way that from experiencing the Sun rising every day, we might conclude that it is a natural law that the Sun will rise everyday but, really, because the Sun rising is merely empirical, any law like conclusions are merely just a matter of faith. Hume’s conclusions resulted in a kind of devastating scepticism which left little untouched. Hume argued that we draw universal conclusions from such experiences, and we have faith in them being necessary, but this was just not a rational conclusion. There was, according to Hume, something almost religious to such law like beliefs. Kant recognised that Hume’s argument was a fundamental challenge to the very possibility of science itself and the revolutionary natural laws that had been articulated by people like Isaac Newton. One such matter of faith that Hume was casting doubt over was the claim that every event had a cause. Another equally confronting consequence of Hume’s attack on causality, beyond undermining science, is Hume’s famous attack on morality. Hume argued that you cannot rationally move from a statement of fact to a prescription. As Hume wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to

634 recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality and let us see that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason. There are significant implications that result from facts being indeterminately related to norms. All too often, Hume argued, there are apparent rational arguments that are actually non sequitur. Climate change is causing a mass extinction therefore we should limit the environment impact of humanity. Black Americans suffer systematic racism and suffer terrible financial hardship as a result therefore we should pass laws to improve the conditions for black Americans. A mother axed her children to death therefore the mother should be punished. According to Hume, none of these statements are rational. Using the Western understanding of rationality, Hume is arguing that rational claims can only be made in terms of statements of fact about the world as experienced and ought statements are not about the world but about how the world should be. The environment should be protected, conditions of black people should be improved, and murderers should be punished. So, there is nothing rational in the statement of fact that climate change is causing mass extinctions that would suggest that we should do anything about it. The implication of Hume’s conclusions seems to be that there can never be a rational argument to justify moral actions. These conclusions have resonated into the modern world. As Jung rightly observes, “” It was only through dividing the “is” and the “ought”, the “is” of intellectual rationalism and the “ought” of blind faith that allowed them to lead people into the emptiness of both. By the middle of the 20th century, neither was persuasive.” Jung is observing the nihilism of modernity, that became ultimately our postmodern condition, was the result of dividing “is” from “ought” in such a way that neither statements of fact nor prescriptions are persuasive. Indeed, there are sections where Hume appears to suggest that any moral action in being irrational is actually morally wrong in the sense of being irrational. Hume’s conclusions build upon a trajectory of thought, as expressed by people like Pierre Bayle, that philosophy and theology should be sharply separated because unlike philosophy, theological claims, and any claims derived from theology, could not be supported using reason but were exhaustively matters of faith. Hegel observed that it was this separation, between knowledge and faith, that “. . .has acquired quite a different senses and has now been transferred into the field of philosophy itself. In earlier times philosophy was said to be the handmaid of faith. Ideas and expression of this sort have vanished, and philosophy has irresistibly affirmed its absolute autonomy.” (Hegel 1977: 55) The separation of knowledge and faith, facts and prescriptions, is extremely important. From this time there are “matters of fact” and “matters of faith” and they are two different and distinct kinds of things that must always be kept apart and inquired into using distinct disciplines. Statements of fact are explored through reason while statement of prescription are simply matters of faith. To confuse these two practices is to fall into a logical error. Hume can be read

635 as extending Bayle’s argument by drawing the conclusion that all normative claims are just matters of faith. Of course, these ideas continue to be extremely influential today especially in psychology. “Should” statements are called by psychologists such as the extremely influential Jewish American psychologist Albert Ellis290 “musterbation” and were, according to Ellis, the founder of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, as fundamentally irrational. The claim that facts and norms, the “is” and the “ought”, are discrete, can also be found in Descartes’ philosophy. Descartes, as is well known, argued that thinking or ideas were the one thing about which one could never be sceptical. If one were to express scepticism about thinking then one must necessarily be thinking, Descartes argues, thereby one is necessarily affirming, and indeed doing, what one is trying to deny. One cannot think that thinking does not exist without succumbing to a contradiction. By making this argument, Descartes was arguing that there are matters of fact that do not succumb to the sceptical argument but that there were things that remained vulnerable to scepticism. As was observed earlier in this volume, in the Western tradition up until Descartes, God was nous, human thinking was the psyche participating in the mind of God. The pre-modern mind thought about truth in terms of reality corresponding to the concept in the subject’s mind but, in so far as the human mind/spirit participates in the divine intellect or the divine nous, that was intuited through the individual’s mind. As Heidegger elaborates, this account demands that things, everything that is, conforms to the thoughts in the mind of God. It is “the coming of beings themselves, as created, into agreement with the Creator, an “accord” with regard to the way they are determined. . .” (Heidegger 1883/1949: 119) The material world comes into the form which is that which is the mind of God. The form is the telos to which the material world tends and realizes to various degrees of perfection. The “tree” grew to conform, to some degree, with the ultimate potential of “treeness”, as an end, a telos, that exists as the mind of God. This is what is meant by physicoteleology, the physical world comes to fulfill the teleology which, in one sense or another, is God/good. In thinking, humanity participated in the mind of God to then see the particular tree as being to various degrees adequate to the universal “treeness” that is God. Learning, gaining knowledge, is to increasingly make explicit the forms that are the mind of God. It is for this reason that, according to medieval thinking, to try to know what trees are, one went into a monastery, cutting themselves off from

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Ellis was also important in forming the sexual revolution. His widely read book, “Sex without Guilt” helped justify liberal attitudes towards sex. Ellis promoted the idea that all “should” statements were a kind of “distorted” thinking that was extremely destructive to one’s “emotional health”. You should not use should statements as they resulted in all kinds of pathologies. This was particularly true of sex where anything was acceptable and there was no space for “should” or “should nots”. As part of this mindset that was perfectly consistent with Gnosticism, he expressed loathing for positive religions in his pamphlet “The Case Against Religiosity”.

636 all the distractions of the material world, to contemplate the form of “tree” and not a process of experiencing “trees”. The aim was to move closer to God, move closer to the source and origin of knowledge, and therefore come to explicitly know “trees”. According to this way of viewing the world, norms were always and necessarily implicated in matter of fact. Philosophy was the handmaid of faith. Some early Christians, as already noted, thought of Jesus as logos or reason. The “is” and the “ought” were necessarily indistinguishable. Faith and reason, by this account, simply could never be separated in the way Hume suggests because they were the same thing. God, the Father, was the primordial forms and Jesus, the son, was logos. Both were expressions of the same thing, reality as such. In Descartes work, by contrast, and this is the point that was being made earlier, thinking seems to occur exclusively in the “I”. It is the “I” that thinks, and it is this “subjective” thinking that became understood as the one point of certainty. That the subject’s thought was one experience that was not, in any way, a matter of faith. God seems to no longer play a part in Descartes account of thinking. God exists, according to Descartes’ philosophy, but He is irrelevant for securing the certainty found in the thinking “I”. By Descartes’ account, God Himself is something that is known in terms of subjective certainty, as being something “within me”. The subject’s and God’s existence are secured, according to Descartes, exactly because thinking is not a matter of faith. God continues to be central to Descartes philosophical position though because God, as the original cause of my subjective being, cannot cause errors, as this is the opposite of His being, therefore, by definition, God cannot be an evil deceiver. As certainty is secured through our subjective thoughts and God cannot be the cause of a subject’s error or ignorance therefore our thoughts about the world and God are mutually affirming and must be true. The Gnostic claim that the world is the result of a deceptive God is erased as this would go against the nature of God. As can be seen from this argument, Descartes secures thoughts independently of God. The primordial intuition that allows thinking is not the divine nous but occurs in the mind of the subject. Certainty is now to be thought subjectively. The thoughts are not a matter of faith and, indeed, neither is God. Overcoming scepticism, overcoming claims that the world is an evil veil, Gnosticism’s central argument that was gaining a strong following at the time that Descartes made his arguments, is not solved by remaining committed to faith but is secured through the certainty of reason. Dyrness (2007: 5) observed that, beginning with Descartes, but developed in the work of Locke, Hume, and Kant, that they “all share the assumption that to find meaning one has to turn one’s attention inward, and examine the contents of the mind.” No longer is thinking understood as a participation in the mind of an external God as the source of thinking, the telos to which everything seeks to return, but it has become some kind of process that unfolds “in the mind”, subject to an individual’s will.

637 The other side of the Cartesian’s thinking subject, res cogitans, is that the world, things, have become simply extended things or “res extensa”. That thinking occurs in the subject does not mean that realty is “subjective”. The world is “not my invention but have their own true and immutable natures.” A spherical object, for example, exists because, as a thing that physical extends in the world, it has certain essential features that define it as what it is which are not the result of an individual’s invention. A subject may wish to alter the way the sphere extends in space, for example distorting the shape so that it is now elongated in parts and no long are the sides all an equidistance from the centre, but the sphere, if it is to remain a sphere, resists all subjective desires. Descartes draws from this fact that there must be something essential to the extended shape itself in the sense that what an individual brings to something he can remove but no matter how hard an individual tries he cannot remove certain essential features. The things that make an extended thing the thing that it is cannot be arbitrarily added and subtracted but are essential to the thing as it is extended in space. Even if the person experiencing the thing had never thought of certain essential features, they are, in fact, already there in the thing if it is to be the thing that it is. That a thing may have essential features that the observer is ignorant about is further proof that these properties “cannot have been invented by me”. It is by understanding reality in these terms, a sphere or a cube has certain features as things that are extended in space, that Descartes thinks about all of reality in terms of extension. One could carry out a thought experiment and remove everything from any particular cube that is non-essential but, if it is to remain a cube, certain things cannot be thought away. The colour of the cube is non-essential, cubes come in all kinds of colour or could even be transparent. The smell is non-essential, again, cubes could be made of all kinds of matter, smelling in all kinds of ways or not at all and remain a cube. Even its weight is non-essential. One could easily imagine a cube that weighed “nothing” and floated up into the sky, but it would remain a cube. What cannot be removed, what cannot be changed, that is essential to it being what it is, is that it extends in space and that it extends in space in a particular way. It has certain dimensions, height, breadth, and depth, and these are essential to the things being. It is a thing, in being extended, that can be captured using a Cartesian three-dimensional graph, that captures the essence of a thing. With this thinking, the modern world is born. Meaning is the mind; the world is a series of extended things. Being is no longer associated in any way with God but matter is now denuded of His presence and beings express themselves in certain dimensions of length, breadth, and depth. Features that can be quantitatively secured granting a level of certainty. In Descartes metaphysics, there is “nothing else but thinking substance itself and extended substance itself, that is, mind and body”. Of course, this conclusions results in the great Cartesian Dilemma that will occupy thinkers for the next few centuries, how does mind and body interact?

638 Pascal was one of the first to appreciate the experience of a disenchanted world that is the result of the Enlightenment’s understanding of the cosmos. “Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which knows me not, I am frightened.” What meets the modern man as a result of both the intellectual rationalism and empty formalism, now denuded of the presence of God is not, as Jonas observes, the “insignificance of man as a magnitude in this vastness” but “the silence”. Man stands before reality alone and frightened because the world has fallen silent. For Pascal, “Nature is such that it signifies everywhere a lost God both within and outside man.” God under such conditions was no longer heard. The silence of God. God no longer speaks as divine logos out of the world and therefore the world no longer speaks to Man as God. Humanity encounters a world of mystery but is also encountered as a mystery to the world. It is the utter isolation of Man “the utter loneliness of man in the sum of things” now no longer enchanted that is novel to the Enlightenment experience. Jonas attributes the first steps, as many others also observe, of the isolation of Man, to Descartes and his conclusion that primordial being is res extensa – body, matter, external magnitude – which no longer “thinks” as nous, inviting man to participate in God but now it is the subject who “thinks” a meaningful world. The challenge that will occupy European thinking until Kant, is how to bridge this gulf, opened by Descartes, between thinking and thing. God does play a part in Descartes philosophy, but He too must be established without recourse to faith but exhaustively manifest as the product of reason. A reason that does not draw authority through faith. Descartes, most think unsuccessfully, uses a form of the ontological argument as rational proof of God’s existence thereby assuring harmony between thought and world. That there is a world, that we are beings in that world, that we can know that world, is no longer thought to be adequate to support God’s existence. These shocking and unprecedented conclusions were not missed by people at the time. Descartes was called an atheist by his peers probably because God was moved to the margins of his thinking. The Roman Catholic Church placed his books on the Index of Prohibited Books in the year of his death, 1667, recognising the dangers of his arguments. What they scholars seemed to fail to appreciate, is that it was by marginalizing faith that Descartes had successfully addressed the sceptical argument of the Gnostic revival that was raging through Europe at that very time. The world was again secured with certainty, but it was a certainty grounded, to some degree at least, on the subject and his selftransparency. To understand properly what was happening in Descartes account and why it is so important for understanding our contemporary condition, there needs to be an understanding of how Martin Luther positioned God in the world. Luther’s rejection of the mediating role that the Catholic Church had adopted between Man’s relationship with God involved two new priorities. Most famously, Luther turned to the

639 text of the Bible as having conditional authority over Church orthodoxy. It is generally believed that Luther had actually been influenced by Rabbinic Jews to turn with renewed enthusiasm to the actual text of the Bible in a way consistent with Orthodox Jewry. Such reliance on the text of the Bible had not been central to the Catholic tradition up to that time. In the Bible, Luther hoped to find a more authentic Christianity, free of Pagan Greco-Roman influences that had so obviously shaped the theology of the Catholic Church. What Luther found, of course, was a Bible that did not talk about “saints”, a Bible that did not talk about “purgatory”, a Bible that did not clearly legitimize “indulgences”. So much that had become accepted teachings of the Catholic Church was absent from the actual text of the Bible. Where did these non-Biblical ideas originate? Luther used scripture as a kind of wrecking ball to remove all those pagan features introduced into Christianity that seemed alien to the true message of Jesus as Christ. Although initially influenced by Rabbinic Jews, who encouraged Luther to prioritise text over Church orthodoxy, Luther turned to scripture most certainly as a committed Christian. As a Christian, Luther acknowledged that Scripture was written, by their own account, by men and not by God. Matthew, Peter, Luke, and John all claimed to be mere mortal men and were not even prophets no matter Gods. They were all men who, at that time at least, were believed to have known Jesus, had seen with their own eyes the miracles about which they wrote, but the Christian texts were mortal accounts of God. Any individual gospel could be mistaken and what was thought to have been seen may well have been a mistake. The Bible was authoritative. It certainly held more authority than Church dogma. It was the closest account available of what Jesus said and each Gospel was in broad agreement, but the text of the Bible was not infallible. The Jewish tradition, by contrast, in harmony with Catholicism, believed that the Bible was a divine revelation and therefore infallible. Any apparent inconsistencies in the Sacred Text were, just that, apparent and not the fault of the text itself. As the Christian Bible seemed to advocate, Luther prioritised each individual man’s direct and unmediated relationship with God and marginalized the need for the mediation of the Church. It was because of this direct and unmediated relationship that humanity could find and criticise inconsistency in the Bible. Not, of course, because God errs but because errors could have been introduced by those who wrote the sacred texts. Scripture, therefore, became one way by which each individual could access God. It was a way that required no mediation by the Church. According to Luther, unlike other traditions, and in contrast to some Christian traditions even today, the Bible was not thought by Protestants to be infallible because those who wrote the text may have simply been mistaken. That Luther prioritised Man’s direct, knowing relationship with God, meant that God could also be directly experienced in an unmediated and primordial way. God was experienced in the world independent of Scripture. As Handelman wrote, “Luther’s . . . insistence on a direct unmediated presence

640 that could be independent of Scripture, and available to the mind of every individual worshipper” was crucial for understanding Luther’s revolution against Catholic scholasticism. (Handelman 1982: 124) Luther’s God was a living God that directly informed human action. God was “within, without and above all creatures” and therefore was manifest in His works as well as being revealed through His words. Both of these commitments, conditional primacy of Scripture and direct experience of God in the world, arose from Luther’s determination to seek Man’s primordial relatedness to God. At what point in human being did God enter Man’s life? Luther’s answer was that God was the very condition for human beingness as such. What differentiated humanity from animals was Man’s relationship with God. For Luther, the human condition was premised on a relationship with God. Human being was possible because of God. The most important consequence of this conclusion was that Luther argued that one could not do good works in order to received God’s grace, but that humanity must already live under a condition of Grace if one was to do good works at all. How, after all, could one do good works if God had not already granted divine Grace? One must already be knowledgeable, understood by Luther as faith, about what it meant to be good in order to act in a manner approved by God. So, faith in Luther’s theology, was always understood as a kind of knowledge and most certainly not as belief without evidence. One could not be good in the world unless one already experienced God as a guiding light in the world prior to knowing. According to Luther, before experience, before acting, there had to be faith or how could the world be experienced as it was or how could one know what was good? It was through this faith/knowledge that Man affirmed God’s existence and presence in the lives of humanity. It was for this reason that, despite Luther’s reorientation towards the importance of Scripture, early Protestants could say, as Zwingli does, “He who is born of the spirit is no longer solely dependent on a book.” Spirit, and Man’s experience as a result, was now understood to be primordial and even Scripture, though of the highest importance, could now be judged as wanting from this experience. Every Man who had received God’s grace had faith, prior to experience, prior to acting, that was the very conditions for experiencing reality as a human being. As God was already in the world as experienced and in a relationship with Man, as a matter of faith/knowledge, then coming to understand reality offered the most certain access to God. As Sigurd Burckhardt observes, Let us assume that God created the world, and that he did so in such a way as to instruct and enable men to understand it. The world, then, would be an object of interpretation from which the Creator’s design and thus probably also his “meaning” could be known and understood. Our assumption describes the concept of nature held by the West for the greatest part of its history. From the natural philosopher of the Middle Ages to the scientist of the nineteenth century, men have regarded it as their task to interpret the “Book of Nature” and thus reveal the meaning of creation. . . To the medieval mind, it seemed that

641 the Creator had manifested His will in two books: in the “Book of Books” and in the “Book of Nature”. But, to the Medieval mind, God was accessed primarily through reason and only secondarily though experience. Stanley Jaki elaborates, The scientific quest found fertile soil only when faith in a personal, rational Creator had truly permeated a whole culture, beginning with the centuries of the High Middle Ages. It was that faith which provided, in sufficient measure, confidence in the rationality of the universe, trust in progress, and an appreciation of the quantitative method, all indispensable ingredients of the scientific quests. (Jaki 1990) People believed that nature was rational because it was created by God and that it did actually exist for there to be interest in coming to understanding it as a scientific project. Burckhardt seems to pay limited attention to the particular role of Jesus specifically when he speaks of God that “he did so in such a way as to instruct and enable men to understand it”. The world was indeed an object of interpretation but the guide to that interpretation in word and deed, particularly to the early Christian Church, was Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ can be understood to function as the personification of “art” in the sense that He brings God’s creation into presence as a world. It was Christianity uniquely that supplied a commitment to the reality of the world which could not be found in any of the Eastern religious traditions, including Judaism. It was for this reason that Protestantism, as expressed by Luther was not primarily intellectual, it was about knowledge, but ontological, it was about being. The Catholic position, as expressed in the 20th century by people such as Guénon prioritized the intellectual, prioritized knowledge over being, whereas the Protestant tradition, as expressed in the thinking of somebody like Evola, argued that Being was prior to knowing.291 For this reason, as Furlong (2011: 43) observes, Catholic thinkers like Guénon ”. . . seemed to . . . resist the notion of knowledge as subordinate to being, and to leave the soul, the spiritual entity, in a passive state of meditation before the absolute rather than as an increasingly active expression of it.” In contrast to Christianity broadly, because Judaism could not affirm the world as a result of the absence of God, “The usual split between what’s real and what’s artificial didn’t mean much to him [Jews].” (Heinze 2004: 70) What is real and what is merely a human “construct” are indistinguishable from a Jewish perspective because God Most High is not revealed in the world. That Christiantiy affirmed the world as

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As a right leaning intellectual in the years prior to World War II, Evola did think that Christianity was actually responsible for prioritizing the intellect or epistemology over ontology. Evola thought that it was this aspect of Christianity that was destroying the West. Evola did not seem to differentiate between Catholic and Protestant Christianity. Martin Heidegger would later acknowledge the important role that Luther played, along with Augustine, in prioritizing the ontological which was, in turn, constituted through human action informed by an experience of the Absolute.

642 real and knowable in terms of the living presence of God that the science of nature became a possibility at all. As Professor Rodney Stark makes clear, The rise of science was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine. Nature exists because it was created by God. To love and honour God, one must fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Moreover, because God is perfect, his handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, we ought to be able to discover these principles. (Stark 2003) It is only through Jesus that we secure the world as an object that might be understood as an object of explicit knowledge. Such a claim will be confronting to contemporaries where all religions are portrayed as having equal worth and validity, they are all thought to argue the same thing, but it is true. Only the Western tradition through Christianity positively secures a real world. Buddhism, for example, believes that change, not continuity, is the essential feature of reality. Spiritual enlightenment therefore merely teaches the student of Buddhism that life is impermanent, full of suffering and ultimately uncertain. Mindfulness is to achieve a state that appreciates realty as ultimately being “nothing”. Realty is the individual mind imposing itself on an undifferentiated continuum. This world is not, by the Buddhist’s account, understood as the best of all possible worlds but merely a human created veil. Enlightenment, in this tradition, is to realise reality as a veil. That these ideas resonate with the Eastern tradition of Judaism has been observed by many scholars. It is no coincidence that 30% of all American Buddhists also identify as being Jewish. (Abernethy 1998) Hinduism also teaches that the cosmos is in reality Nothing. It teaches that the cosmos comes from nothing/chaos and will eventually return to nothing/chaos. Hinduism therefore has no developed idea of progress or improvement. It is for this reason there has historically been a kind of fatalism in India where the world is the way it is and nothing can be changed, nothing can be improved. God, in the Hindu tradition, is nothing and Hinduism’s purpose is to help humans to transform and merge into the nothing, the unity, the undifferentiated infinite, which is Nothingness/God. This belief has resulted in life not being as highly valued in India as it has been in the West. (Mangalwadi 2011) Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, all these eastern traditions, none of these religious traditions allow for an enduring reality encountered positively in terms of “reality”. As Jesus rightfully claims, “I am the way and the truth and the life, No one comes to the Father except through me.” It is not by luck that the West dominated the world for hundreds of years, it was not as a result of geography or climate as Jewish scholar Jared Diamond argues, but it was because of Christianity and how Christianity secures reality in a way that is different to all other spiritual traditions that allowed Christian societies to dominate the world.

643 Of course, that Protestantism, developing on beliefs and practices already present in Catholicism, turns to the world of experience, the “Book of Nature”, to secure explicit knowledge of the creator God is critical for the development of science. As already observed, the Medieval Man who wanted to understand the world, for example wanted to understand the qualities of “whiteness”, entered a monastery, and developed thought experiments about gradients of “whiteness”. Such an approach can certainly be productive, Albert Einstein came to his revolutionary theories in physics at the start of the 20th century primarily using thought experiments and not through empirical experimentation.292 Protestantism, establishing a different emphasis, believed that God was experienced in the world and, therefore, turned to the real world. According to Luther, the Book of Books, as a merely human text, was fallible but, Man’s direct experience of God, the Book of Nature, held a certainty as a direct experience of God that even the Bible could not assume. As Handelman observes, . . .the radical difference between medieval natural philosophy and classical science was the assumption basic to science that the only reliable method for interpreting the Book of Nature was what he [Burckhardt] calls the intrinsic method, i.e., empiricism. . . the ability to deduce from the phenomena under study their authorized agent . . . According to Luther both interpreting the Book of Books and the Book of Nature relied on faith, but the Book of Nature promised a level of certainty no longer assured through the Book of Books. Luther himself, therefore, opens the way for Pierre Bayle’s distinction between religious matters, as revealed in Scripture, which becomes understood as a matter of faith, and the certainty of the empirical that is secured by means that actually no longer relies on faith at all. God was not present in the text of the Bible, as this was written by mortals, but He was certainly the creator of the world. The world, as experienced, granted humanity access to God in a way that scripture simply did not. The Book of Books relied on faith whereas the Book of Nature could be known with certainty. As already suggested, the distinction between the religious and the secular has a long history in Christianity that has its origins, at least, in the philosophy of Augustine, but, as the work of Galileo evinces, by his time the modern expression of this distinction had already taken hold. In his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany, written in 1615, Galileo distinguishes between matters of the book and matters of nature in a way that seems clearly imprinted by Reformation thinking. Writing just 70 years after Luther, the Catholic Galileo actually disagreed with the Protestant Luther in maintaining the traditional Catholic belief that the Bible “can never speak untruth” but, ultimately, this makes no substantial difference to the modern condition because Galileo

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Although empirical experimentation had helped revealed that the established ways of thinking about physics, that dominated the 19th century, were inadequate.

644 argued that although the text of the Bible was infallible it was read by mere humans who were fallible and so, although the Bible could not be wrong, those interpreting Biblical text could err. So, by a different means, the Catholic tradition finds itself in the same place, the Bible was no longer unquestionably authoritative but, according to the Catholic Galileo, we cannot misunderstand our experiences. Galileo grants experience a certain level of certainty like Bayle and Luther that is not achieved in matters of “faith”. As Galileo wrote, certain people, “. . .would extend such authorities [Biblical] until even in purely physical matter – where faith is not involved – they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses . . .” Galileo, of course, was referring to his many discoveries that contradicted the way the Bible had presented the world. Galileo championed the heliocentric model of what would come to known as the “solar system” but was being heavily criticised for advancing a position that appeared to contradict scripture. Scripture appeared to argue that the earth was at the centre of the cosmos. Although Galileo’s account is obviously different to Luther’s, it shows the same kind of thinking. Experience of reality offered a level of certainty that will later become understood in terms of “facts” whereas scripture was words open to interpretation and were matters of faith. Religious beliefs, as expressed in the Book of Books, lacked the certainty of empirical experience. It is in the certainty of experience, the repositioning of faith, that is the modern response to the third Gnostic Revival of the 17th century. The Gnostics’ basic claim is that the faith that most people have in this world being real is misguided because this world is really nothing more than an evil veil. Reality is a deception or at least an expression of power. It is, by the Gnostic account, the product of an “evil demon” that blocks access to true reality. So, the Gnostic argument is in relation to misguided faith in this reality. The modern response, as found explicitly stated in Descartes but heralded in Luther and Galileo, is to say that the Gnostic scepticism about this world not being real is false because my certainty about reality, as experienced, is not a matter of faith at all. Gnostic scepticism cannot counter this argument and so must again withdraw into being, as it becomes in practice, an underground movement. Descartes then argues for the certainty of subjective thinking, the certainty of extended things and, even, the certainty of God without recourse to faith. The response to the scepticism of the 17th century really is to reject a role for faith in anything that was necessary. Faith, now being understood, not as Luther understood it, as a kind of knowledge, but as belief without evidence. Hume simply follows this general argument all the way to its logical conclusion. He also wants to remove any trace of faith from thinking and so carries it through to the empirical project itself. The result of Hume’s sceptical inquiry is not a new solid ground of certainty but a new and even more troubling scepticism. Hume finds that many of the things that people believed were derived from experience, the book of Nature, were really just inherited matters of faith. As already discussed, causality, time,

645 transcendent subject, were all really just matters of faith that could not really be said to be experienced. What people were trying to do, according to Hume’s revelations, was to make rational claims from empirical observations. People were moving from the certainty of body to reach a certainty of mind and Hume argued that this simply cannot be done. At the end of Hume’s critical scrutiny, very little of what had been secured at the outset of the scientific revolution remained untouched. The scientific project and moral judgements both lay in ruins as Jung would later observe. Faith was, apparently, more important to people’s lives than they cared to even consider no matter admit but the fearless Hume insisted on revealing the role of faith from all its hiding places. What had resulted from Descartes’ argument against Gnostic scepticism, that realty is an illusion, was a gap between two points of certainty - the thinking subject and the extended world. This gap finds expression in two competing traditions - rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism supplied certainty and allowed for law like claims but what did those rational claims say about the real world that seemed to remain out of reach while empiricism was most certainly about the real world but, as Hume argued, one could neither make law-like claims based on them nor were they amenable to moral arguments. Either Man was locked in his head full of certainty but unable to say anything meaningful about the world or he could see and know the world but could not be certain about anything. Both roads led to a crippling uncertainty. This problem just could not have existed in the Medieval world because God was thought to secure reality and allow for Man’s knowledge of that world. Jesus, as logos, mediated between subject and object so there could be no “gap”. Kant’s solution to Hume’s challenge is ingenious but, perhaps not as original as it may at first appear. Kant argued in his Critique of Pure Reason that humanity does have a priori or rational knowledge, knowledge not derived from experience, and, consistent with the trajectory of the times, this knowledge was not reliant on faith. He argued that the sensual world, the phenomenal world, is constructed by the human imagination that combines sensory matter, that is passive, with intuited a priori forms, which are actively imposed on matter. Once the forms are imposed on the material world then reality is experienced as something rational. Humanity can have a priori knowledge about the sensible world in so far as that sensible world is captured or revealed through intuitively imposed a priori rational forms expressed through out cognitive faculties. As Kant famously said, “we can cognize of things a priori [or rationally] only what we ourselves have put into them.” Experience is indeed the limit to what can be known but knowledge is not derived from experience. It truly is an ingenious response to a serious dilemma. According to Kant’s account, to experience “the Sun” means to experience something that rises every day. We can know, with certainty, that the Sun rises every day, as a law-like claim, based on experience because we are experiencing a “Sun” which is something that rises every day. “Nature” may not follow any rules

646 at all, but humanity can only see what has been manifested through the imposition of rational forms. Law like conclusion can be drawn from experience because experiences have already been constituted by intuited a-priori rational concepts. Kant’s conclusion also addressed, at least according to Kant’s criteria, the moral concern raised in Hume’s philosophy because what could not be experienced, the sensuous that was outside of the categories, could not be known. As it cannot be known, it is outside of the deterministic materialist theories as developed by scientist like Newton. It was here that the domain of what Kant thought of as the “thing-in-itself”, the noumenal, the material aspects outside of cognition, existed. As Kant wrote, “from this deduction of our faculty of cognizing a priori . . . there emerges a very strange result . . ., namely that with this faculty we can never get beyond the boundaries of possible experience, . . . [and] that such cognition reaches appearances only, leaving the thing in itself as something actually for itself but uncognized by us.” It was in this realm, the pre-cognitive, that Kant posited God and the human soul, no longer objects of human knowledge, because not experienced, but now exhaustively by necessity matters of faith. Faith, as it had come to be understood, as belief without evidence. God was now a matter of what might be termed “blind faith” in that God cannot be experienced. God was no longer understood to be a living presence in people’s lives. Kant’s philosophy pushes God “beyond theoretical understanding, while simultaneously transforming the spatio-temporal world into a domain of subjective appearances”. (Hunter 2020: 5) Kant does all this, quite intentionally, without any reference to biblical sources. A method that he termed “onto-theology” or approaching God philosophically without reliance on biblical authority or Church dogma. Kant managed to bridge the gap between mind and matter, the rational and the empirical, while ensuring faith played no role in securing the world, by saying that the mind imposed itself on the material world meaning that what was experienced was what was rational. In so doing, it is often claimed, Kant saved the scientific project but, at the same time, he killed the living God. It is as a result of Kant’s work that Hegel could claim that it is “. . .the feeling that “God Himself is dead” upon which the religion of more recent times rests. . .” (Hegel 1977: 1990) From this time onwards, religions themselves taught that God was matter of faith, now understood as belief without evidence, which was a teaching totally alien to the Chrisitan tradition up until that time. Through this strategy, it can be seen how Kant did not only secure the scientific project but, in a strange way, actually made room for faith. As Kant wrote, “Thus, I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.” This is an important opposition, knowledge against faith. What he means is that he had to deny knowledge of God if he was to manifest a God as purely a matter of faith. By his own account, and this is important, Kant is not making room for God, or even morality. In truth, Kant does appear to be genuinely that concerned about God and morality, but morality becomes understood as “a law laying in

647 man’s own reason” (Hunter 2020: 5) and not, importantly, something derived from an experience, encounter or knowledge of God. If Kant is making room for faith, it would be reasonable to assume that he is expressing an understanding of faith consistent with his Lutheran Protestant upbringing. That is, the central contest that informed the Reformation was Martin Luther’s principle of Sola fide or by “faith alone”. Good works were not a means or requisite for salvation, one was not proving themselves just by simply being “good” but that justification, as the New Testament appears to confirm, is by faith alone. Kant’s determination to open a space for faith beyond knowledge, which seems inconsistent with Luther’s own account, is the only possibility for God. Kant might be read as actually affirming his Lutheran origins and concluding that it is indeed through faith alone that justification is received. It is perhaps for this reason that Kant has sometimes been declared “the philosopher of Protestantism”. This is actually not the case, and this explains why Kant’s conclusions, like Descartes’, were despised by his Christian contemporaries. Faith for Kant was aligned with some modern understandings of faith in terms of it being “strong beliefs based on spiritual convictions rather than evidence”. God, like the soul (psyche), was beyond experience and so was a matter of faith that could not be known. This was a radical departure indeed from the previous Christian tradition that had always argued that God was known both through Jesus’ revelation as revealed in the “book of books”, the Bible, and through the “book of Nature”. It has to be appreciated that Kant accepts Hume’s basic postulate that facts and values are discrete phenomenon. It is not by reuniting them that Kant hopes to overcome Hume’s challenge. Kant’s response is not to expand the domain of faith but, as he rightly identifies, by limiting knowledge. Thus his “critique” in the senses of discovering the absolute limit of what is knowable. He does this “critique”, he claims, in order to open a space for faith. According to Kant, in full agreement with the Jewish mystical tradition, humans cannot have any conceptual knowledge of God, because, again in agreement with the Jewish Gnostic tradition, humans no longer experience God. (Hunter 2020: 5) God seems to have withdrawn, in Kant’s account, away from this world to inhabit the darkness of the Underworld or the noumenon. To appreciate just what a radical and disruptive departure from the Christian tradition that this claim is, with this argument Kant is implicitly denying the messianic nature and revelation of Jesus as Christ. As Hunter (2020: 5) acknowledges, “Kant’s theoretical philosophy undermined . . . Christian teachings that presumed God’s capacity to reveal himself directly in real space and time . . . or through his incarnation as Jesus”. God was no longer present and knowable through the book of books or the book of nature but was now exhaustively a matter of “faith”. The Christian tradition, especially the Protestant tradition espoused by Luther, argued that God revealed himself both through his creations for humanity to encounter with a certainty that was even more secure than the Bible. By remaining within Hume’s facts/values binary, that

648 motivates Kant’s “critique”, Kant rejects Christianity itself. As we do not experience God, as we do not, therefore, know God, then God’s existence becomes just a matter of blind faith. God is now dead not because nobody believes in Him or because He has become irrelevant but in a more literal way, God is dead in these sense that He is no longer a living God. Everything that made Western civilization unique had been dismissed. This conclusion continues to resonate even today. As Jung wrote capturing the educational implications of Kant’s work into the 20th century, All the old arguments against unreasonableness, self-deception and immorality, once so potent, have lost their effectiveness. We are now reaping the fruit of nineteenth-century education. Throughout that period the Church preached to young people the merit of blind faith, while the universities inculcated an intellectual rationalism, with the result that today we plead in vain whether for faith or reason. (Jung 1955) Jung is observing that by his day, in 1933 when these words were written, that the arguments that justified the Western world, rationality, truth and morality, were no longer persuasive to anyone because it was taught through the 19th century the Kantian conclusion that faith was blind, and reason was something that lived in the subject’s head, and neither were adequate for persuading that generation of youths to stay true to the Western project of experiencing reality. These conclusions were understood fully by Jews who lived in Germany and Austria who were raised on an educational program of Kant and Bible stories. As Jewish scholar Andrew Heinze confirms, “The formative education of Freud, and of virtually all Austrian and German Jews, consisted of equal parts Kantian philosophy, with its emphasis on the morally free individual, and Jewish exegesis, with its Hebraic constellation of moral heroes.” (Heinze 2004: 72) Their “philosophy” was being affirmed in the sense that both Kantian philosophy and Gnostic Jewish theology were harmonious. No longer did one have to conform to God’s wishes, the knowledge of God, as Christianity demanded, but now that God was dead one could shape their own lives, find their own values, and assert those values as though they were universal. As Saint Augustine said, “Do you understand and grasp, brethren, God’s grace towards us? Marvel and rejoice, we have become Christ. For if he is the head, we are the members; he and we together are the whole man.” Jesus is like the head giving guidance while the “body” are Christians who obey. More recently, it was believed that public decisions may remain open for dispute, but what became known as the private sphere was determined in being ordained by God. Gender roles, for example, were not something about which people could choose, they simply were as an expression of God. But now, with the death of God, the private sphere has become political. Whereas historically, as Schmidt would later observe, public institutions were acknowledged to be expressions of an experience of God, legal, disciplining and enabling institutions, were all expressions of a particular understanding of God, from the

649 time of Kant everything slowly changed so that not only were public institutions demystified by so were people’s private lives. Foucault’s famous observation, already popularised by various feminists, that the personal was now political was built on the Kantian death of God. As Drews observes, Nothing at all is to be gained for the understanding of Christianity from the completely modern view that religion is an expression of personal life and experience. Religion is understood as person life only in so far as this differentiation has been accomplished. From the very beginning religion makes its appearance as a phenomenon of social life; it is a group religion, a folk-religion, a State religion; and this social character is naturally transferred to the free associations which are formed within the limits of tribe and the State. The talk about personality as the centre of all religious life is with regard to the origin of Christiantiy absurd and unhistorical, for the reason that Christianity grew up in religious associations, in communities. From this social religion our personal religion has only been developed historically in the last century. Only after great struggles has personal religion been able to succeed against an essentially older form. What devout people of today call Christianity, a religion of the individual, a principle of personal salvation, would have been an offence and an absurdity to the whole of ancient Christendom. It would have been a sin against the Holy Ghost which was never to be forgiven; for the Holy Ghost was the spirit of Church’s unity, the connection of the religious community, the spirit of the subordination of the flock to the shepherd. (Drews 1998: 386-387) Christianity had always been a shared religion which informed both the public institutions, the law and government, as well as the private lives of individuals. This was fractured with the death of God carried through in the work of Kant. In order to adequately understand how Kant changed the Western tradition laying the foundations for the late 19th century Gnostic revival it is important to have a better understanding of what Luther meant by faith to address concerns that it meant, for him, belief in the absence of evidence. In the “Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans”, in Luther’s German Bible of 1522, Martin Luther expands on his understanding of faith in a way that seems to be an attempt to address the questions that emerge from his advocacy for sole fide. As already observed, what Luther is concerned with is our primordial relatedness to God. Humanity cannot be justified in the eyes of God through good works because to do good works, to know what good works are, an individual must already be redeemed, must already have not only the potential to be good as “just” but, more importantly, knowledge of what is good and just. As Luther wrote, “[People] think that, when you hear the gospel, you start working, creating by your own strength a thankful heart which says, “I believe”.” Luther is observing that according to previous Chrisitan teaching one hears God’s message and then, as though through their own efforts, then affirms their belief in God. It is as though, through human works, God’s righteousness is understood. It is as though through human strength, an expression of human will, that they affirm God and His goodness. If this were the

650 case, then humanity would be responsible for His own redemption, as an act of the human will, by discovering God but, Luther argues, such thinking is reversed to how things actually must be. Luther instead argues, especially in On the Bondage of the Will, a book Luther seemed to prize above all others describing it as “the centrepiece of the Reformation”, that it is God who grants humanity grace and justification, and it is not an act of human will. It seems that a human’s will, as an expression of human bodily desires, is nothing but evil. Humanity wills to have sex, to eat, to seek material comforts but man cannot “will to affirm” God. The human will is an expression of our animal selves while God’s guidance is our truly human selves. When we aspire to do good, we are responding to the gift of God’s grace and not as an expression of our individual human will. God is inviting us to be good as an alternative to human wilfulness, but this invitation is only possible because we are already redeemed. If we are to explicitly know what a “tree” is, we must already implicitly know the good that is “treeness” otherwise how could we ever know what a tree is? Jesus is the only way to access that prior knowledge. The apparent will to do good is really a response to the call of God where our freedom is the refusal to listen to God and not obey. Luther was claiming that prior to any affirmation of belief in God and the determination to do good to please Him, God must have already opened Man’s hearts and mind to goodness, as it says in the New Testament, in forgiveness for the sins of Adam. As Luther wrote, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.” We cannot find our own way to God/goodness but must already be in God/goodness. Faith is that prior knowledge. It is for this reason that everything for which God is responsible for in this world, the world as such, is good. So just as much as justification is not through good works nor simply in the determination of the “I believe” which seems to be a direct rejection of the kind of declaration of faith being advanced by Kant. The wilful assertion of “I believe” in the absence of redemption and divine grace would not sustain, as history evinces and Jung affirms, one’s devotion to God. It is too empty. Human determination alone cannot play a central role in Man’s relatedness to God as Man is far too weak. Man cannot be the valuer of things, they cannot assert that this act will please God, but it is God that determines what is good and reveals this to Man. As Luther directly says addressing Kant’s kind of conceptualization of “faith”, “this is a human idea, a dream, the heart never learns anything from it, so it does nothing and reform doesn’t come from this “faith”, either.” As Kant himself admits, almost confirming Luther’s argument, faith is literally directed towards an “idea” of God which, to be fair, is equivalent in Kant’s philosophy with God Himself, as it seems to also be in Descartes, but can this be sustained in the absence of experience? How

651 can I love whom I do not experience and who I do not know? It may be true that Kant may express some form of Protestantism, but it most certainly is not the Lutheranism of his childhood. Luther himself says in the “Introduction to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans”, . . . faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn’t stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. . . Faith is living, bold trust in God’s grace, so certain of God’s favour that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. . . The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire! . . . Ask God to work faith in you, or you will remain forever without faith, no matter what you wish, say or can do. “Faith is God’s work in us, that changes us and gives new birth”. This is not faith in the sense that Kant uses the terms, it is a million miles away from Kant’s understanding of faith. This is not “faith [based on] strong belief . . . [or] spiritual conviction rather than proof”. This is God actively intervening in our lives, giving us knowledge that we did not have prior to being graced with this “faith”. This is the Holy Spirit entering our lives, giving us direction, demanding that we do good in a way that we cannot say no without great effort. Without this faith, being good is impossible. It was this revelation that informs all of Luther’s later contribution. This understanding of faith is Luther’s awakening. As Luther wrote in his semibiographical Preface to the first volume of Latin writings (1545), At last, . . . I gave heed to the context of the words, namely, “In it the righteousness of God is revealed”, as it is written, “He who through faith is righteous shall live.” There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. . . Here I felt that I was born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. (Luther 1968: 2) Faith is not something that one has, it is something that one is given as a gift that allows for what is truly human action. As already presented, “faith” in Luther’s account is a kind of knowledge that has also been known as sophia. For example, in loving one’s enemies, one might begin by trying, as hard as they can, to love the person as asked by God but how sincere can that love be? How long could such a forced love endure? Luther is saying, by contrast, look at the world and look at the people around you, including your enemies, there is God. Now go, be with the one you love. The ontological implication is that it is a gift prior

652 to all experience. It does not matter how much we “wish, say or can do”, without Luther’s faith humanity remains something different, remains in the condition of Old Adam, forever beyond the reach of God and unable to truly do good works. To see what such a world would look like, a world devoid of a loving, living God, look at the place in which you live today. A world filled with greed, violence, hatred, bloodshed, drugs, depression. God has not left us, God will never desert Man, He granted us eternal redemption, but we have turned away from His presence and, therefore, live in a world without love. The only thing required of humanity by God to address our current predicament is to ask for faith to work within us. We already have faith; Jesus dies to grant us that faith and therefore we are filled with knowledge and ready like Martin Luther to be born again but we must orient ourselves to allow it to work. As it says in Matthew 7: 7-8, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that asketh recieveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. Luther acknowledges that Man must ask for this faith to work but not to seek faith. The work of faith is truth. That is, Man must address God, intentionally turn to Him with the desire to communicate in the same way that we would address any another person. It is like going to sleep, one must get prepared to sleep in order to fall asleep but the potential to sleep is already within us and so it is with God and faith. As Augustine interprets Metthew 7: 7-8, “Asking, is that we may get healthiness of soul that we may be able to fulfil the things commanded of us; seeking, pertains to the discovery of the truth. But when any has found the true way, he will then come into actual possession, which however is only opened to him that knocks.” Humanity must ask or address God and is then ready to receive faith, but it is only by acting, only by following that knowledge acquired in faith, living in Jesus, “knocking”, that one actually affirms their relationship with God. Protestantism needs to be understood as a selective renewal of traditional Christian beliefs that, to a large degree, tried to do the impossible and realize a Christianity without Graeco-Roman influences. It was an attempt to return to Christianity’s authentic origins, as Luther intended it to be, and not something novel. What Luther was addressing was a kind of wilfulness, a belief that humanity could find their own justification and reveal God’s righteousness, through intentional “good works”. Luther responded to this growing tendency by arguing that justification is only achieved through God’s righteousness as gifted humanity by God in faith. As Karl Barth observed, Mankind “. . . cannot understand his faith as a work which he would be free to do by means of his own strength, for which he would possess

653 in his own powers the organ and the capacity, and which he could prepare for, start, persevere in or continue by his own skill and achievements.” (Barth 1938: xx) Justification could only be achieved through the grace gifted to humanity through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. As it says in Romans 10: 4, “Christ is the end of the law, that everyone who has faith may be justified.” Luther was concerned that the practice of justification, in the fullest sense of this word, had crept into Catholic teaching in terms of pursuits that were, rightfully understood, merely human goods, material concerns. For humanity to believe that this is even a possibility is to “set himself up as an idol in his heart” in the sense that humanity himself becomes the valuer of things. It is actually in this tradition, of man become an idol in his own heart, to which Kant belongs. By Kant’s account, humanity can posit as a logical possibility an ideal that is derived from the pure concepts using imagination. As Kant said, “The imagination is very powerful in creating, as it were, another nature, out of the material which the real one gives it. We entertain ourselves with it when experience seems too mundane; we transform the latter.” This positioning of the imagination, not originating with Kant, suggests that humanity becomes the creator of its own values. This is the road that passes through the “Will to Power” to the Gnostic Jews and the Nazis. This is the route to where humanity becomes that which determines everything of value as the rational. Humanity desires sex, food, and material comfort and these become conceived as the good, but these are merely animal desires. For the ancient Greeks, what we might think of as “imagination”, mediated in such a way as to allow conceptual knowledge as a participation in nous. For the ancient Greeks, Imagination functioned to embed Man into reality. Luther’s account is consistent with this ancient thinking. In Luther’s account, to see a mother kill her children is already imbued with normative meaning in terms of good and evil so it is perfectly rational, as most of us would intuitively accept, to draw moral conclusion from actual events because facts already are norms. Having sex with whomever, whenever we want is immoral not because it hurts people we love, even though it does, and not just because it has a negative impact on society, even though this is also true, but because God tells us that it is immoral. The fact of promiscuity in itself is immoral. The problem that Hume creates that awakens Kant’s philosophy is not a problem in Luther’s nor in most accounts of Christianity. Facts and values, to use this language, are necessarily united. How could we experience anything without already infused with the knowledge that faith imbues? To Nietzsche’s question; why truth instead of untruth? The answer is because God is truth. To understand what is being claimed in this statement one must again return to Kant. Kant, in responding to Hume’s pseudo-problem, posits the imagination as that which creates “ideals” that are derived from concepts. According to Kant, such ideals are created all the time as archetypes for reflection. For example, when considering purchasing a house, one might envision an ideal house with certain

654 optimal specifications. Kant proposes that there is the possibility for an ideal that is not limited by experience at all which might rightly be called ens realissimum or what is most real. It is for this reason, as Dyrness writes, (2007: 5), today “We universally celebrate the power of the “imagination” to deliver us from the bondage of everyday life and live creatively.” This is also why the so called “creative class” is so prized as that group of people whose creative forces are such that they improve the world. As already observed, for the ancients, imagination did not “liberate” a person’s thoughts from reality, moving them to some kind of space of the imagination, literally, a utopia. The imagination was thought to bring reality into being. Kant explicitly rejects Luther’s account of faith in terms of it being a prior knowledge of good and evil, thereby pre-empting Feuerbach’s famous and influential arguments against God, arguing instead that problems arise not in the imaginative creation of ideals but when the constructed ens realissimum is posited as something that really exists beyond our world and are not merely creation of the mind. This, according to Kant, is where certain conceptions of God find their origins. To sharpen what is being claimed here, according to the ancient Western tradition that also finds expression in Christianity, when one looks at a bed and sees that it is too short and that legs are too fragile what is being experienced is the truest reality as an expression of the imagination. The good bed in the imagination is “realer” than the inadequate bed there before us because it is the good that allows for experience at all. This good is God or divine nous. According to the Kantian position that informs modernity, the bed there before us is most real while the “ideal” bed is the product of subjective imagination. An important error, Kant argues, is when people confuse this product of the imagination with reality or suggest that it is God. These different conceptions of imagination and reality have obvious political implications. As can be seen in the important work of ever insightful Richard Hooker, the early English Anglican, early Protestant thinking was more in harmony with the older Christian tradition in which had been educated. Hooker argues that God is the highest good towards which everything is inclined or tends. Every particular, in being at all, seeks to “participate” in God as the highest good. Everything aspires to participate in God’s perfection as that which is most real. It is that everything in the particular must to some degree imitate God’s supreme goodness to be at all even if that being is inadequate or lacking. It is because of this, despite their imperfections and inability to achieve this outcome, why “all things that are, are good”. Everything, no matter how imperfect, in having an adequate proportion of goodness, is necessarily good simply in terms of being what things are. As Hooker wrote, “The next degree of goodness is that which each thing coveteth by affecting resemblance with God in the constancy and excellency of those operations which belong to their kind. . . His absolute exactness they imitate, by tending unto that which is most exquisite in every particular.” (Hooker 1968/1593: 273) Hooker seems to be advancing the very account of God that

655 Kant is explicitly rejecting, that what is most excellent, according to Kant, is merely a creation of the imagination that should not be reified into “God”. If Kant were to accept this ancient account of God, then he would have to admit that in everything that is experienced are not “ideas” but the mind of God. In Kant’s philosophy, the only things that exist are what is experienced. The imagined ideals, like God, are not experienced in the world, according to Kant, but merely exist in the mind. As might be expected, prior to the modern era, undertaking such creativity was thought highly dangerous as it was an expression of human wilfulness. Even in the mid-18th century, Jonathan Edwards warns that “impressions which some have made on their imagination, or the imaginary ideas which they have of God or Christ, or heaven, or anything appertaining to religion have nothing in them that is spiritual or of the nature of true grace.” (Edwards as seen in Dyrness 2004: 4) Edward’s is trying to limit accounts of God to what can be potentially experienced as the true. Where the ancient’s imagination brought humanity to grace “imaginary ideas” now dangerously separated humanity from grace. Indeed, Luther seems to warn regarding the same concerns, “Great people and champions are special gifts of God, whom He gives and preserves; they do their work, and achieve great actions, not with vain imaginations, or cold and sleepy cogitations, but by motion of God. . . God’s special grace.” (Luther 2010: 82) Great people do great things not because they are more determined or because they have a greater imagination but because they are especially blessed by God. This is akin to Plato’s criticism of art in The Republic where art is portrayed as dangerous because it is unrestrained by reality. For Kant, imaginative creation become the realist real, not because they exist in reality, or that would mean God could be known and not remain a matter of faith, but that these were against that which does exist. This seems to make Man the measure of all things, an idol in his heart. As Kant wrote, There is a God. There is a being in me, that differs from me, and that stands in a causally efficient relation to me. Itself free, i.e., without dependence on natural laws in space and time, this being inwardly judges me (justifies or condemns). And I, man, am myself this being, which is not some substance outside me; and, what is most surprising, this causality is a determination to act in freedom (not as natural necessity). (Kant 1993: 229-230) What Kant is saying here is that there is a certain ambiguity about who is legislating judgement on what is right and wrong, what is good and what is evil. “There is a God” he begins, but that God is “I . . . am myself this being” which seems that Kant is claiming that we are all our own Gods in legislating our own morality and for all intents and purposes this is exactly what he is saying but, in fact, he is saying that we simply do not know where those commands emerge from but that this ignorance makes no difference. As Kant wrote,

656 The veiled goddess before whom we bend our knees is the moral law within us. . . . To be sure, we hear her voice and clearly understand her commandments, but are, in hearing them, in doubt as to who is speaking: whether man, in the self-sufficient power of his own reason, or Another, whose nature is unknown, and who speaks to man through the medium of his reason. Perhaps we would do better to refrain even from inquiring. For such a question is merely speculative, and our duty remains the same, whatever the source from which it issues. In light of what has been written it is interesting that Kant now refers to God as a “veiled goddess” to whom we “bend our knees”. In the Gnostic tradition, the Shechinah, reality, the truth, is “veiled”. As Byron Sherwin wrote, “Following the earlier Jewish mystics, the rabbi of Kitzk taught that in our world, truth is veiled . . .” (Sherwin 197: 108) Whatever the motive for his language, the point is, consistent with Gnostic Judaism, that we do not know the origin, the source is mysterious. Despite this once we accept that legislation then it becomes law not only for us but is universal, it becomes a law for everyone. Shallowly, Kant might be read as being firmly entrenched in the Platonic Western tradition of philosophy. As Franks (2013: 221) wrote, “Kant’s critical philosophy has an explicitly Platonic dimension . . . Kant insists on the necessity for ideas, too: rational forms that wholly transcend the senses and that are incapable of instantiation by sensible matter.” By “explicitly”, Kant himself claimed that he understood Plato better than Plato understood himself. Kant thought himself to be the perfect Platonist. The feature that makes Kant’s work so different from Plato’s is that for Plato, the Forms were outside of the subject, the highest good is equivalent to God, and it was this that allowed a world. For Kant, although universal, these conceptual constraints that frame reality in order to be both experienced and understood are inside the subject’s mind. This is what allows Kant to talk about Man as being a self-legislating being like a God. Kant seems to be claiming that these concepts are imposed on the world by the rational subject. This imposition might be thought to be an act of the agent to “construct” the world. Then there is the feature of humans being able to create an ideal using concepts and reason that seems to create something outside of experience. This allows Kant to posit the res publica noumenon or the ideal republic which has never been experienced as that towards which everyone should aspire not as an experience or participation in God but as a human posited ideal that results from the imagination. This is how Kant’s ideal culture is one that manifests morally sophisticated forms of social organization as an expression of hope. This ideal is not readily accessed but must be something striven for through the education and development of individuals. As Murray writes, “Kant holds that individual moral development contributes to the gradual development of society, since morally sophisticated individuals – both leaders and citizens – are less likely to face moral impediments from their inclinations.” (Murray 2015: 3) This is why his famous motto, “Sapere aude! Have courage to make use of your own understanding!” Do not just accept what has been

657 inherited but pursue the limits of your conceptual knowledge, not as a kind of personal imposition, but as an expression of the universal ideal made possible by reason and the categories. Even though Kant does value the use of reason and knowledge to pursue the highest cultural expression as a universal he also uses these ideas to justify imperialism. He argues that it is acceptable to settle on the land of people who are just “shepherds and hunters” because “despite the fact that sufficient specious reasons to justify the use of force are available; that it is to the world’s advantage, partly because these crude peoples will become civilized.” So, the man who first really and definitively removes God from the human experience is one who also advocates European imperialism. Kant was definitely of the school that Europe had reached the highest cultural expression because they “are always making progress” towards the “perfection of human nature” and that primitive people would receive a benefit from this progress. As is widely acknowledged, Kant must be seen as one of the pivotal thinkers of history but not in the way that he is usually understood. His contribution is both an important moment in the modern strategy for overcoming 17th century Gnosticism but also in opening the conceptual landscape for the reemergence of Gnosticism in the late 19th century. That strategy involved positing an “objective reality” or a domain of “facts” that was distinct and discrete while being devoid of any “faith”. Despite Kant’s determination to limit knowledge to experience, nothing can be known that is not experienced, he actually, perhaps unwittingly, makes an important contribution towards freeing ideas from the constraint of ‘reality’ through his novel positioning of the imagination. Whereas I might experience poverty and would be justified from that experience to do something to alleviate somebodies suffering, Kant is arguing that one can construct or imagine an ideal, unconstrainted by the experience of poverty, that is an “ideal” towards which society should aspire. The moral law is one that is formed freely and then pursued as though it is a universal law. For Kant “. . .the moral law is a law of autonomy, a law one gives oneself in an act of freedom. . .” (Franks 2010: 262) For Kant there is no moral imperative that can be imposed from outside, even by God, unless it is, at the same time, self-imposed. (Axinn 1968: 11-12) This is Kant’s conception of “freedom”. A radical choice in selecting those moral principles that will operate as a constraint and those that will not. This is little more than a self-legislated ideal that can be imposed by the subject as an act of will on the world and others as though it was a universal law. As Fackenheim wrote (1963), “Kant’s thesis, the will, in imposing moral law on itself, creates that law. Moral law is the collective creation of the human spirit and is moral only because it is so created. In rising to the life of morality, man actively transforms his own being by means of ideals which are themselves a human creation.” Kant makes important contribution to the possibility, as is the case today, where a reality worthy of the name, a reality that constrains human action, is lost. God is forgotten because He becomes irrelevant, and we live in a

658 world surrounded by abstract “ideas” simply as an expression of wilful power. Even if an individual did do what seems to me almost impossible and maintained faith without evidence, which to my mind is not even rational, that God demands obedience and sacrifices would be irrelevant in light of the centrality of the principle of individual choice. Again, as Fackenheim observes, “. . .in imposing moral laws on itself, the will need not and indeed cannot, pay heed to their God-givenness.” In short, Kant makes space for faith, in terms of belief without evidence, which is far removed from Luther’s account of faith, but only to make that faith irrelevant. What really matters is the self-legislated moral ideals. It is the role of such ideals as the product of the imagination that makes room for the dominance of political ideologies through the 20th and 21st centuries. This dominance of political ideologies includes those which are theologically motivated such as that being imposed by Gnostic Jews. Almost against the intent of Kant’s philosophy, aimed at opposing idealism by limiting it to experience, ideas are actually released from the constraint of experience because experience is no longer, at the same time, an experience of God. The divine borders created by the Father and then made known by the Son is replaced by self-legislated borders constructed in the imagination which can then be imposed on the world as though universal. God almost disappears from Kant’s account at least a God with any real purpose in an individual’s life. Indeed, Nietzsche seems to add little to Kant’s schema but to clarify the implications of Kant’s thinking. It may be true that in Kant’s philosophy God is not dead, but God is irrelevant. If Nietzsche is the witness of God’s death than Kant is the man who first made Him irrelevant, made Him insignificant and, thereby, preparing Him for the executioner. It is Kant who makes way for Schopenhauer’s bold humanist assertion, “The world is my representation” (emphasis added Schopenhauer 1969: 3) which is taken up by Adolph Hitler who said, “Do you understand now the profound significance of our National Socialist movement? . . . It is even higher than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.” It is that God has been so marginalized that culture is from that time required as an explanatory concept. Whereas prior to Kant it would have been claimed what permits experience, guides human action, and set moral restraints was God, with the withdrawal of God into an invisible domain of pure faith in terms of unjustified belief where He no longer functions in this world, there is the reed for something to explain what is the highest good towards which everything tends. What is it that guides human action and allows for a reality and that something become Kultur? As with so much that emerges from Western civilization uniquely, democracy, science, philosophy, and the idea of “culture”, it is tied to a certain Western onto-theology that finds expression only in Christianity. A Buddhist society could not generate the concept of culture because there is no experience of the highest good, the ideal, that needs to be explained. Reality is nothing but an illusion in the Buddhist tradition and so the highest ideal become the

659 realization of this truth. This is not to say, of course, that China or Japan does not produce beautiful “artifacts” that might come to be called culture but that the concept of “culture” would be lacking in the Eastern tradition as it was prior to the 18th century in the Western tradition. The conditions for the concept of culture just cannot exist in a society that does not believe that God is immanent in the world and that language and art function to bring God into the world. Kant’s account of the intuited categories replaced the Father as divine nous and culture replace Jesus as logos thereby removing Christianity from the experience of reality. There still needed to be an account of what it means to manifest the ideal, to be excellent, as it was such a central concept in the Western tradition, but one denuded of any “religious” content as this was exactly what Kant hoped to achieve. This role was filled by culture. As Heidegger elaborates many years later in his own thinking, truth no longer happens through Jesus Christ but through art, architecture, poetry, fine foods, in short, through culture. Jesus said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life”, He was “the light of the world” but, after Jesus is marginalized, culture functions as the light and truth of the world. This conceptualization of culture functions in this way for the next 150 years until the contribution of Boas and his school from the 1920s turn culture into a count noun thus manifesting a thoroughly Gnostic worldview but this worldview was made possible because of the contribution first of Kant and then, of near equal importance, Nietzsche. It was because of this positioning of Jesus and the Father that Jews were extremely attracted to the philosophy of Kant. As Axinn (1968: 9) observed, in what is really an understatement, “Immanuel Kant has always had a special fascination for Jewish philosophers.” Kant was an obsession not only for Jewish philosophers but Jews generally. Herman Cohen, one of the more famous Jewish neo-Kantians of the 19th century, is understood to have reconstructed Judaism in light of Kantian philosophy trying to re-create it as a “religion of reason”. (Mittleman 1990: 12) This particular prioritizing, interpreting Judaism through a Kantian lens, caused many Jews a great deal of offence, encouraging a generation of Jews, such as Isaac Breuer, to ensure that Kant was properly interpreted through a Jewish lens and not the other way around. (Mittleman 1990: 12) It is that Judaism, however that is understood at any one time, is the lens through which the world is understood that explains why many have thought Jews were incapable of true academic research. Although Kant himself was explicitly “critical” of Judaism, it is difficult to gauge how serious these criticisms were or what they meant for Judaism. Kant claimed, for example, that “in its original form, Judaism was really not a religion at all, but merely a political entity.” (Axinn 1968: 9-10) Kant seemed to be suggesting that because Judaism legislated behaviour then it did not meet the moral demands required of “religion” in the Christian sense of the word. It was legislation intended to order society and therefore it was thoroughly political. Kant further argued that Jewish law was oriented upon

660 external acts and made no demands on what a Christians would understand as morality. He believed that all rewards and punishments were only a concern of this world, such as the desire to realise a Jewish state and accumulate great wealth and, therefore, again, was not properly religious but primarily political. Kant is drawing attention to the distinction in the Christian tradition between the secular and the sacred which does not exist in the Jewish tradition. Finally, the idea of being a “chosen people” displayed enmity towards all other people, according to Kant, and, thereby, attracted enmity towards themselves. But, except perhaps for the final point, as Axinn (1968) observes, these “criticisms” actually seem to make Kant’s Judaism consistent with his own philosophy. Whatever may be the case, most comparisons compare and contrast, including Kant’s own, Orthodox Judaism and Kantian philosophy but not the Gnostic tradition and Kant’s philosophy. What can actually be discovered in Kant’s philosophy is a thoroughly Gnostic position where God has withdrawn from the world and Nature is immanent but mysterious. Also consistent with Gnostic Judaism is the role of humanity in being self-legislators who impose their own realty on the world. It might be argued that the only thing that separates Kantian philosophy and Gnostic Judaism is that Kantian philosophy believes in universals where culture, consistent with Christianity, is thought universal and the highest ideal is the highest ideal for all peoples around the world. This is why Kant can express sympathy for imperialism. Again, as already suggested, it was primarily through the work of Boas that this universalism was destroyed once and for all and was replaced with what the Boasian cultural anthropologists called their theory of “cultural relativity”. This was the claim that, “. . .we make our own agreed-upon truths . . . [which] undermined the claim that social development is linear, running from allegedly primitive societies to so-called civilized ones.” (King 2019) The Modern World British popular historian Bettany Hughes produced a history T.V. series for the BBC where she explored the most important and influential people of the modern era. The series was called, Genius of the Modern World and the people she chose as the most influential people of the modern era were Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. There could be little argument with her selection. The only other candidate that might come to people’s mind as being as influential as these three might be Albert Einstein but, as a theoretical physicist, his social influence is less obvious. The interesting thing about this list of “geniuses”, that would also include Einstein, is that all of them are extremely pro-active gnostic thinkers. Two of them, the Jews Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, are obviously gnostic Jews while the third, Friedrich Nietzsche, was famously influenced by the Gnostic Jew Paul Rèe and even after their friendship had waned Nietzsche remained a committed gnostic until his final autobiographical publication, Ecce Homo written just prior to him going insane. Nietzsche was a Gnostic, although best understood as a

661 “German Gnostic”, that certainly expressed clear support for many of the teachings of Gnostic Judaism. Nietzsche’s work was later popularized by enthusiastic Gnostic Jews, particularly Georg Brandes, who not only promoted Nietzsche’s work as a work of genius but, at least in the case of German Jew Walter Kaufmann, who was originally tasked with translating Nietzsche’s thoughts into English, emphasised Nietzsche’s Gnostic sympathies. It was Brandes who coined the term “aristocratic radicalism” towards the end of the 19th century to describe the political implications of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Brandes was promoting a philosophy which required a person to assert their values as though they were universal.293 Brandes was almost single headedly responsible for popularizing the work of Friedrich Nietzsche at the turn of the 20th century. What is interesting is not simply why the work of Nietzsche, Marx and Freud are understood to be so influential. Certainly, at the time of their writing and shortly afterwards, these three men would not have been seen by their peers as the greatest thinkers of their time. Nietzsche’s work was both criticised and largely ignored by intellectuals at the time of writing. Why have their stars risen to such unequalled heights so as today to be recognised as the greatest geniuses of our era? The simple answer is that Gnostic Jews have managed, in part as a result of these men but much more the result of many hundreds of men that nobody has ever heard about, is that our times now reflect the values of Gnostic Jews. In the same way that Boas was thought at the time that he wrote by his peers as an unconventional maverick whereas today he is understood to be a genius who expressed ideas that were before their time. The reason these thinkers are held in such high esteem is that the “times” have been intentionally changed, our shared values, in such a way that Gnostic beliefs now appear as the smartest ideas ever to be expressed. Gnostic Jews have managed, as part of a deliberate strategy, to strategically change societies values, indeed, to reverse societies values. Today what it means to be intelligent, what it means to be moral, is now harmonious with Gnostic Jewish thinking and is the exact reversal of traditional Christian values. In her documentary series, Hughes does not observe that because of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, we have suffered men like Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin or Franklin D. Roosevelt. She does not draw attention to the literally millions of men who have died as a direct result of the ideas of these very same men. The horror of these people’s humanism is determinately ignored as though their stature should not be tainted by the truth. The reason for this silence is because one is not allowed to be critical of gnostic humanism. She does not even observe that all these men were passionately anti-Christian and explicitly opposed to

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Other books that explore this idea are The Hero in History by Austrian Jew Sidney Hook, You Shall be as Gods by Erich Fromm and, We the Living, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. All these books develop the idea of how individuals shape the world and the strategies used to realize their projects.

662 morality. Nietzsche even self-identified, with more honesty than his peers, as the “anti-Christ”. Instead, Hughes focuses on their supposed positive contribution, that without these men no feminism, no critical race theory, no class conflict, no opposition to reason. That is, without these men society would not be the place that it is today. At the start of this volume, it was observed that contemporary society has seen all Western values being turned upside down as though looking through a camera obscura. Everything that would have been held as being most important, of most value, everything that was thought to be sacred, even as late as 1970 in the Anglosphere, would now be viewed as immoral. The reason for this change is not the result of the natural flow of history or cultural development, whatever that might mean, is the result of a strategic efforts by a theo-political movement to shape our society so that all of society conforms to the religious beliefs of a deviant breakaway sect within Judaism. The idea was that once the wider society’s ideas conform with the ideas of this sect then Jews will be seen as the natural leaders of Western societies. Looking at the society we live in today, those beliefs have been proven to be true. The term social ecology was coined by American Jew, who had immigrated from Russia, Murray Bookchin.294 Bookchin’s argument was that the way society is arranged determines our relationship with “nature”. Here, Bookchin is not talking about “the wilderness” or “the bush”, as though there is discrete spheres of “nature” that might be contrasted to city or town, but Nature is used here in an Aristotelian sense of physis as the inner drive of change. A tree grows naturally, by Bookchin’s account but not Aristotle’s, when it is determined by its inner being to become what it always was. According to Aristotle, who continued the Platonic ordering that prioritize Form, it was that towards which the material tended, the telos or full potential, of natural things was that which was ultimately responsible for the thing being what it was. A chair, by contrast, is unnatural in the sense that it relies on the skill of a craftsman that is external to the thing in order to be brought into the world or reliant on techne. Drawing on the political theology of Sigmund Freud, which will be discussed shortly, Bookchin argued that human nature needed to be freed from the moral constraints of society and once this “freeing” is realised then humanities relationship with all of Nature will be altered. Bookchin is arguing something important here. It is the priority of God, what he terms

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I initially draw upon this word without knowing its heritage or who coined it but that it is today a widely used term of the intellectual vocabulary. That it was coined by a Jew from the tradition that we are interested in is further evidence of just how our thinking today is shaped by Jewish thought. Social ecology is actually greatly burdened with theo-political implications but when we all use it, we are ignorant of that baggage. Just by using this vocabulary we are actually brought into thinking a particular way about the world and humanities relationship with that world. If you question that validity of this brief observation, think about the use of Freudian terms in our everyday language.

663 social ecology, that opens the way for Nature. It is establishing a new relationship with God that motivates Bookchin’s project. Through this new relationship, humanity will be redeemed. “Social ecology” is how things are experienced in terms of what is sacred, norms, shape the social order and, indeed, humanities relationship with the natural as such. Not only does an experience of the sacred determine social order, which will be explored in much greater detail in the following volume, but it grants meaning to the world. More than that, it constitutes reality as it is. That is, the sacred, the theological understood as such, has ontological implications. What is right and wrong, good and bad, implicates what is intelligent or what is dumb. This is where the relevance of this discussion joins with the matter at hand. Jews appear intelligent today, in contrast to a Christian dominated 19th century, because they have deliberately shaped, they have engineered, everybody’s experience of the sacred so that it reflects their values. It might appear that the goddess Fortuna smiles on Gnostic Jews, but the truth is that the goddess Fortuna has been violated by Gnostic Jews, left torn, battered and bruised, because Gnostic Jews have forced her to do their bidding, to satisfy their ungodly desires. This is why they reduce everything to power because this is how they understand their own experiences. They have through an expression of their power imposed their will on the world and they have been very successful. A person raised in the Christian tradition would find the works of Marx, Freud, or Bookchin almost unfathomable. These thinkers just approach the world in a different way to the way somebody from within the Christian tradition, even if they do not identify as Christian, and when people inculcated in a broadly Christian tradition comes to their work, its meaning is far from transparent. I have spoken to Western academics who have studies Freud for years who simply fail to understand his work. This is because it comes from such a mysterious place for someone inculcated into the Christian tradition that they miss what is actually being argued. The same can be said of Marx. You can only understand Freudian psychology or Marxist sociology properly when you have an adequate understanding of their theological project. Freud says what he wants to say in fairly transparent terms, as does Marx and Bookchin, but if you do not understand their theological commitments, if you do not appreciate their true project, then their work is almost impossible to properly understand. As I used to experience Marx as a young person who identified as a “Marxist”, you are always expecting them to say the opposite of what they actually do say, and this becomes extremely confusing. Every reader will get something, they will extract something of relevance, out of all these authors but to properly understand what these thinkers are saying you need to understand gnostic Judaism. They are clearly saying what they want to say but from a Christian perspective often what they have to say is so outrageous, such as the idea being advanced by Freud that the moral restraints around women’s sexuality is destroying people’s

664 lives, it just cannot be taken seriously on these terms. It is quickly concluded, therefore, that something else must really have been meant. By contrast Gnostic Jews understand exactly what is being argued, why they are arguing it, and therefore can move to appreciating there work much more easily. There are no cultural barriers to understanding. Therefore, Gnostic Jews appear more intelligent, more insightful, but only because they are working within a theoretical/theological frame with which they are already familiar. With such authors, including the likes of Jacques Lacan, Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida, they must simply be held to what they actually say not what we may want them to say. What happens is that interpreters impose their beliefs and commitments onto the authors work under scrutiny to try to force them to “make sense”, to “be reasonable”, to even try to make them into moral authors, but to do this to their work simply does a violence to what they have actually written. People like Freud knew of this difficulty, and he explicitly questioned whether a Christian, like Jung, could understand Freudian psychology properly and the answer at that time, looking at Jung’s work, is probably no. To look back on the statement given earlier on the lack of intelligence of Jews as perceived in the 19 th century, Renan claims that Jews primary concern was religious and not political and that they lack “mythological elements”. Renan then suggests, without apparently appreciating the irony, that Jews are “exclusive, intolerant, and sustained by a fervour” and that they display limited interest in “science or philosophy”. He claims that they lack artistic merit and also military acumen. He concludes by observing that they have an “inability to perceive the general and the abstract” but have a “. . . strong attraction towards the individual and personal” which makes them “useless for speculation”. (Renan as seen in Muller 1871: 339340) What is revealed in this statement are features that Renan praises, as a Christian, that today would be thought to be signs of stupidity, at least, if not immorality. Today to seek out the “mythical”, as Renan praises, is viewed as wrong because today we should always acknowledge that reality is subjective. Renan fails to recognise that with his statements he too is being “exclusive, intolerant, and sustained by a fervour” but we can observe this today because the universal perspective that would have informed his worldview no longer has a claim over our lives. To remain in the “general and abstract” universal, to embrace metaphysics, is viewed as outdated and instead we should value the individual and the personal in the sense that all reality is perspectival. In many ways, because of this new commitment, the visual arts are not as prized as once they were beyond their potential political message because politics has occupied the space that was once reserved for the “real”. So, everything that once made Jews “useless for speculation” would now be praised while poor old Mr Renan would be viewed as an obsolete positivist and, therefore, immoral. Few better examples of how the values of our society have been reversed. What Renan was critical of 160 years ago would now be praised.

665 As already observed, this reversal of values has not been a natural historical development, it has not happened independent of human intentional actions, as was the case with Protestantism, but, as will be shown, has been a deliberate, clearly articulated strategy, aimed at gaining power and furthering Jewish influence in the world in the service of their God. The Protestant worldview was deliberately replaced with a Gnostic Jewish worldview through the work of German philosophers, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. To claim that we have all been manipulated into accepting a worldview that enables a certain cohort to thrive is undeniably a shocking claim. That a relatively small group of people have managed to subvert the free flow of historical development to serve their own purposes is also shocking but, just because it is shocking, does not in itself make it untrue. Success in liberal society, what could be called the Protestant myth of success, is believed to be the result of individual merit. It is believed that because one person is more intelligent, more educated or more skilled, then they will be more successful. As has been shown, it is these very same liberal commitments that have been used to justify Jewish overrepresentation in the United States today. It is argued that Jews are just naturally more intelligent than gentiles or that the Jewish religious values are more conducive to success, such as a strong work ethic, more than other cultures and that it is these variables, natural intelligence and behaviours conducive to success that have resulted in Jewish overrepresentation. The truth of Jewish success in the United States is closer to Machiavelli’s claim that ‘Fortuna’ or the “ecosystem” in which an individual is born, determines success more than individual capacity. As Machiavelli said in The Prince, “I conclude therefore that, fortune being changeful and mankind steadfast in their ways, so long as the two are in agreement men are successful, but unsuccessful when they fall out.” If the ecosystem suits an individual’s way of thinking and behaving then they will be successful but, if they ‘fall out’, then the individual will not be successful. This is why it was important to be attuned to God because it was God who determined what was good and evil, noble and base, so to be attuned to God was to find oneself to be a “success”. If we think of somebody like Oprah Winfrey. Yes, obviously, Oprah, as she is most commonly known, has incredible individual talent but if not for changing cultural values, inclusions of black Americans, new opportunities for women, then there is simply no way that she would have been successful. Nobody beats Fortuna. Machiavelli, in conceptualizing what might be called the “ecosystem” in terms of a god, Fortuna, thinks that it functions outside of human intention, beyond the ability of the human will to manipulate, but with new technologies and new social arrangements, such as the importance and power of the nation state, Gnostic Jews have indeed managed to overpower Fortuna and make her serve their purposes. Jews have recognised that the ecosystem, a word again that replaces conceptions of God, is more important than individual endeavour because it was the Christian God, the Christian ethos, that forced Jews of the

666 19th century to conform to dominant norms. Gnostic Jews have managed to change the environment in which they live and, as humans do, made it harmonious to Gnostic Jewish ways of thinking and behaving. For a quick example and one that, for Australians, is quite topical. Not that long ago, up until the 1980s, it was considered essential in the banking sector that you were a person of good repute. It was believed that you needed to be an honest, upstanding, socially conservative, upholding good family values, and that these traits would lead to success in the banking industry. In the 1980s, that all changed. The entire culture of the entire industry was changed. I was personally working in the banking industry when it all happened over less than a decade. No longer were banks seen to be delivering a public service but now they were selling “products”. Banking shifted from both delivering a service and making profits out of that service delivery, to being exclusively informed by maximizing profits for their shareholders. Honesty and integrity were no longer valued but sharp salesmanship and, as the recent banking royal commission showed, dishonesty, corruption and greed. The old bank managers, honest, solid family men who were incorruptible, were replaced with young wolves, snorting cocaine before a day work, hungry for money, promotion, and success. Obviously, in these two environments, different people would be successful. In one a rather conservative, honest, trustworthy person would be successful. Someone who believed that the most important demand on someone in the banking industry was integrity and honesty. What was required was person guided by moral principles. After the cultural change who was required was a brash, dishonest and greedy person, free from the constraints of a family to commit the long hours demanded of success. What Gnostic Judaism has achieved over the last 100 years a shift away from the Protestant ethos that was so important for establishing capitalism to an ethos devoid of morality. For a more concrete example. Pornography has historically been demonized in the Christian Western tradition for appealing to our baser selves, but Gnostic Jews have continuously advocated for the liberalizing and acceptance of pornography into our society. Marty Klein wrote a book, His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting America’s PornPanic with Honest Talk about Sex (2016). If there is honest talk about sex in this volume it is the only honesty that Klein reveals. What she argues in this volume is that there is nothing wrong with pornography and that women should no longer be concerned about their husbands using porn. She does not advocate that men should control themselves, that men should respect women, again in our age of supposed “feminism” the kinds of arguments that one might expect, but, no, women have to “get over it” and accept that porn is a part of everyday life and that this is not a bad thing. What Klein does not observe is that Gnostic Jews have been behind establishing pornography as an industry in America, that Gnostic Jews have fought through the legal system for decades to ensure that there were no legal restraints to the free availability of pornography and that this is all because of Gnostic Jewish religious beliefs in opposition to

667 the historically dominant Christian morality. As with everything Gnostic Jews do it is through deception, certainly not through honesty, that Klein can achieve what she wants. “PornPanic” is a reference to a phrase advanced by Gnostic Jews, “moral panic”, that is used whenever Western societies express moral concern about what is happening to their world. What can be seen in Klein’s book is a concrete example of an attempt to reverse the values whereas porn was once seen as “bad” or “evil” we should instead, if we are “liberated” and appreciate human sexuality, think of it as “good”. As Klein wrote, In and before the 1950s, pornography had historically been attacked as “immoral.” During the Cold War years, some members of Congress even declared it was part of a Communist plot to weaken the character of America’s youth and husbands. Religious figures like Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen had enormous national followings, enjoying regular audiences with sitting presidents. Their portfolio was protecting America’s morals, and pornography was a key battleground. This immorality crusade defined pornography as broadly as possible; in 1956, for example, the influential Legion of Decency condemned the film Baby Doll (“a steamy tale of two Southern rivals and a sensuous virgin”) for its “carnal suggestiveness.” Francis Cardinal Spellman denounced the film from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral before it opened, saying it had been “responsibly judged to be evil in concept” and would “exert an immoral and corrupting influence on those who see it”; he called for all Catholics to refrain from seeing the film “under pain of sin.” And this was a high-concept film, written by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Karl Malden. But morals change; even more important, the role of morals changes as well. In the 1960s, recreational drugs, rock music, and films imported from Europe, along with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, challenged the landscape of American morality. The birth control pill changed the definition of what “good” girls do. A president was eventually impeached as madly lustful—although not convicted. Political battles about abortion raged, with anti-choice activists justifying the eventual murder of 11 physicians and other clinic personnel (and the attempted murder of 26 others) as moral. A battle also raged about an alleged “homosexual agenda,”3 and whether “morality” precluded or required withholding a variety of common rights (family hospital visits, tax breaks, adoption, etc.) from gay people. Planes were hijacked and flown into American buildings, and a new kind of “them” enacted their morality by targeting American lives in Boston, Chattanooga, and elsewhere. Catholic priests—seen by millions as the last bastion of rock-solid, oldfashioned morality—were exposed as having coerced thousands of children into sexual activity. Finally, in 2003, the Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas.5 In addition to decriminalizing same-gender sexual behaviour, the majority wrote that an alleged majoritarian morality was not a sufficient basis for a law regulating private behavior.6 The Court had turned 180 degrees in only 17 years, when it had ruled that morality was a legitimate basis for depriving citizens of their rights to privacy and sexual choices in their own homes.7 Clearly, the place of “morality” in American public life—however “morality” was defined—had changed forever.

668 People and organizations attempting to control American sexual expression, used to doing it through the time-honoured vehicle of promoting “morality” and preventing “immorality,” were stuck. To maintain their political power, social prestige, and financial standing, what were they to do? It is interesting that she frames watching pornography as a “human right”. Indeed, Gnostic Jewry has defined what are human rights to align with their religious beliefs. Klein is perfectly correct though in her conclusion, if you are going to be successful under changed moral condition then the only thing that one can do if they are to be successful is to either stay true to their moral convictions and suffer the consequences or embrace the new morality in order to retain power, prestige, and wealth.

Lucifer “Lord of Darkness” The Christian tradition claims that, because Jesus is the redeemer, this world is “good” and that it is, in being at all, the “best of all possible worlds”. Gnostic Judaism, by contrast, claims that it is obvious and beyond contention that this is not the “best of all possible worlds”. That the world has not been redeemed is the central teaching of all Judaism. As Leo Strauss observes, “The Christian assertion that the redeemer has come was always countered by our ancestors with the assertion that the redeemer has not come.” Later in the same speech, Strauss says, “The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption. This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people; the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption.” That is how central the claim that the world is not redeemed to Jews, they are chosen for the task to show everyone that the world is not redeemed. The meaning of “chosenness” is intimate to humanity’s lack of redemption. The reason that Jews must remain Jews, the burden of Jewishness as such, by Strauss’ account, is to remind the world that it remains unredeemed. If redemption had indeed occurred, if Jesus was indeed the redeemer, then, because the world would be Jewish, ruled by Jews, then they would no longer need to retain a distinct identity. Jewishness will indeed disappear but only when everyone has become Jewish. Strauss argues that we do not know what is good and evil, we do not live in intimacy with God, and, for this reason, Jews are chosen. They argue that the Natural earth, the continuum, is the immanent aspect of God, the spirit of God, the Shechinah, but humanity ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and, in so doing, fell away from God, opened a gulf between God and Man, into a world. This world, though, was the result of human prejudice manifested in the ignorance of God. When things are properly understood, this world, beings, are, therefore, actually made by Man. It is this Man-made world consisting of “objects” that is not suitable for God. As already observed, according to Gnostic teachings, this world, in being the product of Man, is actually evil. It is evil not because it is chaotic and disordered, but, the opposite, because people

669 experience it as ordered. People experience it as good, and this is the “base delusion” that takes Man from God. The problem is, according to Gnostic Jewry, that this world is ordered according to a supposed knowledge of God, knowledge of what is right and wrong, knowledge of what is good and evil. The danger of this belief, according to Gnostic Jews, is simply that this is not the case. Humanity remains estranged from God, trapped in a world that appears to be full of objects whose parameters are closed and therefore has no real knowledge of good and evil. To help understand the different claims being made here, Hans Jonas, a major 20th century Jewish scholar of gnosticism, wrote, . . . God is not a sorcerer who in the act of caring also provides the fulfillment of His concern: He has left something for other agents to do and thereby has made His care dependent on them. He is therefore also an endangered God, a God who runs a risk. Clearly that must be so, or else the world would be in a condition of permanent perfection. The fact that is it not bespeaks one of two things: that either the One God does not exist (though more than one may), or that the One has given to an agency other than Himself, though created by Him, a power and a right to act on his own and therewith a scope for at least codetermining that which is a concern of His. That is why I said that the caring God is not a sorcerer. Somehow, he has, by an act of either inscrutable wisdom or love or whatever else the divine motive may have been, forgone the guaranteeing of his selfsatisfaction by his own power, after he has first, by the act of creation itself, forgone being “all in all”. (emphasis added, Jonas as seen in Marmur and Ellenson 2020: 13) As with many of these kinds of passages, a lot is actually being argued here but would be missed by someone without some understanding of Gnostic Judaism. God did not make the world perfect, by this account, but left something for agents separated from Him to complete. To complete the world, which is the act of redemption in combining heaven and earth, is the task of humanity. It is through human action that God will be redeemed not humanity redeemed through divine grace. This is, Jonas claims, a dangerous strategy because if his agents, humans, fail to take up this burden then God may remain hidden forever. Eventually forgotten under human creations that result from his freedom. This is one danger that motivates the zealotry of so many Jews. God is in their hands. We know that God left this task for humanity, gnostic Jews believe, because this world is not perfect. For reasons unknown to Man, God has not made himself present to humanity so that He appears as “all in all” but there remains something for Man to do. It becomes, by this account, Man’s task to redeem the world. It is this belief, the centrality of the role for humanity, that really informs humanism. That is why there can be no separation in Judaism between theology and politics. As Sandberg wrote, . . . there is no separation in the Torah between what might be considered “secular” concerns, such as liability in a personal injury case, and what is referred to as “religious” concerns, such as observance of the holy days. The Israelite was commanded by God to be obedient to the Torah in all things, both “secular” and “religious”. (Sandberg : 4)

670 They rail against the very category of “religion” which they interpret as something institutional, something with limited application to a particular sphere of life which is just their misunderstanding of Christianity. For Jews, religion is everything, there is no cultural expression outside of religion, but religion is everything therefore the word “religion” is in a way meaningless as it is equivalent to “life”. It is, therefore, something thoroughly political. Life and religion, like everything else, are properly understood as one. The reference to “all in all” here is interesting because it was a phrase used by Christians to communicate the omnipresent and all-pervasive nature of the Christian God. That is, God is everything, in everything, or God is “all in all” as seen in the Jonas quote. What seems to be lost in the Jewish understanding is not, strangely, “life”, as they argue happens in Christianity, but the religious as such. The sphere of moral obligation, the sphere of shame. It is because of the Christian understanding of God, as a result of Jesus being the Messiah and redeeming the world, that Christians believe that Man lives in the “best of all possible worlds”. By the Christian account, all that is left for humanity to nurture their relationship with God, have faith in God, in terms of knowledge, and, through faith, live a life according in the full glory of God’s grace and God’s world will be manifested in our world, heaven will be brought to the earth upon which we live. It is by this account that Christiantiy can have a religion as such, as institutionalized as a Church, humanities relationship with God is direct and personal, the Church does not mediate that relationship, does not enable it, but is there is help humanity to sustain their intimacy with God. Each individual is the keeper of their own covenant with God, positive religions are just competing accounts of how to understand the individual’s relationship with God, what kinds of rituals and ceremonies are necessary to sustain that relationship. As Augustine wrote in On True Religion, “Religion is to be sought . . . only among those who are called Catholic or orthodox Christians, that is, guardians of truth and followers of right.” Catholics are understood as “guardians” of truth while orthodoxy is the “followers” of right, they take on a distinct institutional order only in terms of fulfilling these obligations whereas every Jew, in having no relationship with God, is exhaustively constituted by religion, in a Western sense, as such and therefore, there can be no divide between culture and religion as has already been observed. In Judaism, everything has to be changed, the world, qua world, has to be destroyed so that we can, one day, access God. Even humanity, if they live as a Christian, is expressing a kind of evil and needs to be altered so that they can at least move towards the true God. Freedom is the premise of human existenz, to stand out into beings, therefore, to do away with freedom, to return humanity to their animal condition of being enslaved to natural drives, then evil, in all its forms, along with human conceptions of good, are removed from the world.

671 In the Gnostic tradition, Man is ignorant of reality because he lives a life devoid of God’s ordering presence. To use language embedded within the tradition, the “Earth” is not yet truly a World”, the uniting of the “material” and “spiritual”, heaven and earth, because Nature is not yet present in the world, God cannot be united. A Midrashic saying perhaps shines light on what is being claimed here, “He is the place of the world, and the world is not His place.” (Genesis Rabbah 68:9) This might be read as saying God is “the place”, the meaningful as such, reality, which is, as already discussed, “world” but this world, where we are today, is not His place. This world, as we have it now, is not constituted by God Most High. Indeed, the Gnostic Jew Harold Bloom claims, “the second half of this topological aphorism, the Gnostics were in agreement, but they dissented altogether from the first half”. (Bloom 1981: 72) Bloom says this because God is absent from the world, God withdrew, so God has no place in the world. In the absence of God, the only moral ordering principle that can guide human activities legitimately from a gnostic perspective is technical. Something is good or bad if it works. For example, is greed good or evil, well greed is actually good, as Adam Smith’s economic theory appears to conclude, because it works, it increases production and therefore increases the wealth of nations in this world. Is being boastful good? It is if it means that the best person, here understood as the most productive, gets the “right job”. Morality can play no part in such a world because humanity has no access to morality because God is silent. Beyond this technical ordering, which is not informed by an experience of the good, any claim that the world as experienced is real is simply the result of deception. A deception that is ultimately the result of human power. God truly desires to live in His world, as a place proper for Him/Her to first enter and to then dwell forever. There will be a time, the Messianic Age, when Man too can dwell with God in the real world, when earth, heaven and Man are united. This time will be a return to Eden. Yest this time remains unrealised. . In 2 Timothy 3 it describes the end-of-days as, . . . terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God . . . Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth. This was not simply an account of a time when humanity endured hardship but was seen by Gnostic tradition as the necessary endpoint of redemption. When greed is thought to be good, then human natural drives are liberated into the world and, as free market capitalism will attest, greed becomes the only rational way to live. Through sin comes redemption. It is almost like a road map or political manifesto on how to realize the Messianic Age. How well does the account given in Timothy express our own times?

672 One section that is pertinent to what is being considered here is that the end-of-days are a time when people “worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women”. Sabbatai thought that the only way to realise a world where people would not be “lovers of the good” is to make people look away from their experience of the good, to reject what is reasonable, by making everything that was evil be revealed in its goodness. All that was once thought to be good will be revealed as what is actually evil. In short, there needed to be a reversal of values. This was one of the tasks demanded of the ‘anti-Christ’ in the Bible, which was an identity Sabbatai, hundreds of years before Nietzsche, embraced for himself and, of course, like Nietzsche, advanced as a the true good.295 If everyone came to reverse their values, and believe that evil was in fact good, then the Messianic Era would be realized, the conditions outlined in 2 Timothy would be met. As R. Gershon Henokh from the Hasidic tradition argues, When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave some to her husband and he ate [Genesis 3:6]. This is the first action that is mentioned in the Torah that comes about by means of desire. This was the birth of desire. [Desire] is the intermingling of good and evil. It is impossible for man to receive goodness unless it is enveloped in the garment of this world. Therefore, goodness is also found in evil in that goodness fell into evil as a result of this action. Desire, instinctual drives, are the intermingling of good and evil, the ideal state, and this is achieved when it is realized that all true goodness is hidden in this world as evil. We may be in the final stages of transitioning to that world, the “end-of-days” or the “end of history”. Not all people have anticipated this “end of history” as much as Gnostic Jews, as Fukuyama expresses, The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination and idealism will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. The end of history is the reign of the technocrat, a time when, as Max Weber observed in a speech given to the Association for Social Policy in 1909, “the world could be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones.” But before this end can be realised,

295

To preempt a discussion that will be presented in later volumes, this is the problem with the Hasidic position, it remains within the binary opposition of “good and evil”. All Sabbateanism hopes to achieve is reversal and, as Heidegger observes, to reverse remains within the same horizon of thinking. Indeed, this is one of the gifts of Jesus Christ, to move beyond the binary to the tertiary. Christ presents a dialectical movement, if properly understood, that goes beyond good and evil. It is the task of the moral thinker to find the new truth which literally is Jesus Christ. This is what was meant when Paul would speak of Jesus in special terms as “For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Gal 3:27-28) To live in Christ is to move into the constraints of truth.

673 when the world has lost all meaning, we must overcome, from their perspective, it current broken condition. The future paradise can only be realised when reality is fractured into human created pieces that are no longer bindingly meaningful. Jewish Gnosticism teaches that before the spirit of God can enter this world, the world first needs to be “healed” or tikkun (“repaired”) by being brought back to its true unity. This healing requires humanity altering the world so that it once again reflects God’s life force. God’s life force that finds expression in Nature or Mother Earth - Shekinah. As the essence of God is oneness then, as the Gnostics say, “as above, so below – as below, so above”, so if Mother Earth is a single unity, oneness, below, then the world above must also be shown in its oneness. No races, no nations, no gender, no disability, no human as opposed to animal, no property, nothing. The nothing that this is the true being of God, the eyn sof. Just the oneness, the perfection, of Nature. This is why so many Jews so often advocate what might be termed ‘social justice’, as a social and political act of “healing or repairing the world”. (See Wisse 2007: xi) It is overcoming the borders that divide this space into a meaningful world. As the Kabbalah tradition emphasises, from Ayin, “nothingness”, the first manifestation of Sephirah, comes Yesh “existent being”. The world, according to the Jewish gnostic tradition, existent being, becomes healed by being manifested or revealed in its prior unity before separation, before becoming demonic. As Magid (2008: 24) observes, “The first stage of return is to the womb of the primordial mother . . . As the extremely important Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig observed of earth, “It is situated before the Yes and before the No. It would be situated before all beginning-if it were situated. But it is not “situated”.” (Rosenweig 2005: 34) In order to be situated it would have to be in space and time, but the essence of God is before these transcendentals that present, as even Kant observed, as the necessary conditions for things or Being as such. Prior to Being is nothing. It is knowledge of the primordial oneness that has priority over world that is redemption. This nothingness is achieved through “the nullification of all existence, returning everything back to the undifferentiated God of eyn sof.” (Magid 2008: 23-24) So, a “tree”, by this account, as the objective “tree”, is in the “world” and is not Nature. The “tree” is in space/time. This is evidenced by the way different languages refer to this “thing”, “tree”, in different ways. By contrast the Natural “tree” (presented here using erasure to symbolize moving from “world” to “earth” as anything of the earth can only be represented in erasure or as negation as the Gnostic tradition knows in negative theology) simply is. Yahweh said, “I am who I am” or “Being that is Being”. Nature, according to the Gnostic tradition, is the continua that substantiates the “tree” not in objective being but, if this can be said, sensuously. Nature, by this account, is not some discreet area that stands beyond the constructed, some line demarcating what we in Australia might call ‘the bush’ from ‘the city’. It might best be understood as the distinction between the “man-made”, constructed, and that which comes forward by its own

674 motivation, the Natural. The word “tree” by this account is part of the “constructed” or “socially constructed” world. Indeed, as it says in Genesis, Now the LORD God (Yahweh) had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So, the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. (Genesis 2:19-20) It is Man that names things, it is Man that divides the world up into things according to their tradition, not God. By their account, something like gender, therefore, is not Natural, it is not made by the God Most High, but is merely a human or “social construct”. Gender is in this sense man-made and therefore evil. It is an assault against the God Most High. Naturally, following this logic, humanity must be rightfully androgynous or, as seems to have recently become fashionable, non-binary which, in being natural is also moral. To be androgynous or non-binary should not, if properly understood, mean that you have an ambiguous appearance that is neither male or female, as this would obviously merely affirm through negation the gender binary, the socially constructed, but it is to not be gendered. The same with sexuality, although many people who could be identified as political Hasidim often claim that all people are “naturally” bi-sexual, as will be shown later in this volume, as not finding the “opposite” sex sexually attractive, it might be better to say that our sexual selection should not be determined by gender. If you are sexually attracted to somebody then that is all that is of interest not what might pre-determine parameters of acceptability as these parameters are Man-made and, as a result, evil. Indeed, “non-binary” is the desired human orientation of the political Hasidim. If it were possible for the human mind to step outside the objectification that is world and just look at what could be seen then it would appear, according to this tradition, as a continuum. This undifferentiated oneness is the female aspect of the God Most High. Nature, therefore, is everything and nothing at the same time. It is truly u-topic, not just in the sense of being ideal, God is this, but also in the sense of it not being a “place”, a “u”/non, topos/place or a non-place. It is here in reaching an understanding of what Jewish Gnosticism seeks that it is discover why everyone is, as already discussed, placeless today. We have all become nomads. We are nomads because place is where our good and bad confronts us, oppose us in having an objective presence, and this, from a Jewish Gnostic perspective, is what needs to be overcome. Arabs and Jews are largely nomadic people, Jews had really only settled, if we accept the account in Tanach, for a few generations from a nomadic life before being taken to Babylon as captives. Culturally they had no real opportunity to develop a sense of place. Important Russian Jewish historian, Simon Dubnow, argued that it is because Jews have always lacked a territory, they instead focused their efforts to “strengthen the social and spiritual factors for unity” (Dubnow as seen in Wisse 2007: 7). This would explain why all nomadic people have such strict

675 and exclusive in-group/out-group criteria. This also explains why, as nomadic people, Jews see settling, becoming placed, as immoral. Not because settler peoples are less spiritual but that their spirituality finds expression through the place in which they live. It is this very expression of spirituality, one that experiences it in terms of reality, that Jews reject and instead value the underworld. When trying to discuss the “underworld”, although it is something very “real”, one quickly moves to quite mystical language when, in a sense, it is actually quite the opposite. It is in a way the non-mystical. One way to think about it is if you lined up all the ancestors of a particular species of bird, from the first unicellular organism through till the current bird. This line of creatures would consist of “animals” where each iteration only changed ever so slightly so that from one manifestation to the next barely any change could be discerned at all but, in order to “know”, and thereby experience the good, humanity draws lines along this lineage and says that this is one species while that is another. The line of animals is the “underworld”, “Nature”, “Mother Earth”, while the naming of the species is “world”, “knowledge”, “Father Sky”. This even of naming can be seen in Genesis 2:19 when Adam is tasked with naming the animals. “God formed, from the ground, every beast of the field and bird of the air. He brought them to the human to see what he would call them. Whatever Adam called each living creature was its name.” What is happening here is, before the “fall”, Adam is tasked of uniting heaven and earth through the word or logos. As Pageau observes, Adam’s mediation between heaven and earth involves “lowering meaning” and “raising matter”. This cosmic process is symbolized in a variety of ways in the context of the Bible. For instance, Adam’s first job in the Garden of Eden is to name the animals, which is a clear case of “lowering heaven into the earth”.” (Pageau 2018: 54) Or perhaps better to say uniting heaven and earth. The Christian Western tradition is oriented by the conceptual, the ideal, understood as an experience of God, the divine nous. It was long believed that everything tended towards the ideal, the conceptual. The Jewish Gnostic tradition prioritises Mother Earth as a reflection of the God Most High in its unity. Mother Earth is the product of God most High whereas the “world”, fractures along all kinds of lines of demarcation, is the product of a lesser God, a Demiurgos, who makes the world qua “world”. It is for this reason that Jewish Gnosticism is where, as Goldish observes, “Universal salvation might literally mean that saving and redemption of the whole universe, physical as well as human . . . In the Messianic times God would come and put the entire world right again, restoring harmony to the cosmos and eliminating disease, starvation, and the ultimate physical deterioration of the earth.” (Goldish 2004: 9-10) Redemption is a very real-world project to reconcile world and earth, male and female, right and left. This also explains why materialism, for the second half

676 of the 19th century well into the 20th century had a religious claim of many Jewish scholars, because materialism was the God Most High’s spirit – Mother Earth. As already observed, humanity cannot look at Nature, in a sense, because all humanity can ever see are things. As Kant observed, the noumenon is beyond humanity, the thing itself is necessarily mysterious. This is Heidegger’s point when he wrote that, We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things – as this thing-concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound, we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly. (Heidegger 1993: 151-152) In experiencing a world, humanity is always judging, before even explicitly thinking about, before trying to assess, they are already prejudicial in experiencing what is adequate in terms of the thing that it already is in relation to perfection. As Augustine observes, True equality and similitude, true and primal unity, are not perceived by the eye of flesh or by any bodily sense but are known by the mind. How is equality of any kind demanded in bodies, and how are we convinced that any equality that may be seen there is far different from perfect equality, unless the mind sees that which is perfect? (Augustine 1953: :253) The “chair”, in being experienced as the chair that it is, is judged, measured if you will, in the Greek sense of mathesis, in its “chairness” or in terms of it being judged adequate or equivalent for it to be a “chair”. There is, therefore, judging or prejudice in all experience. Historically, such prejudice was something about which you could be judged as having “good taste” or being “tasteful”. It is perhaps because of this conclusion, the human all too human drive to judge, that explains why the Gnostic Jew Menachem Mendel Morgensztern, whose dictum was “There is no judgement and there is no judge”, spent the last 20 years of his life living in total isolation in a closed darkened room. Morgensztern simply could not leave his darkened room, creating a deliberate abstract space that was without judgment, and therefore, by his view, without sin. This is the inevitable destiny of all those who are sincere about not displaying any prejudice . . . they must live in the darkness of their Goddess. Although today displaying prejudice is popularly characterised as one of the worst things that one can do, it was historically thought to be an important aspect of the human condition. Pride or prejudice was considered truly a choice and prejudice was preferred to pride. This phenomenon was central to Heidegger’s philosophy. In Heidegger’s sense, humanity is necessarily prejudiced, in making judgements in the event of cognition, without using reason

677 and can, therefore, never look at Nature in its purity as this would demand looking abstractly. Indeed, for Heidegger, even the individual thing followed on from the universal. Again, as Heidegger wrote, “When I perceive simply, moving about in my environmental world, when I see houses, for example, I do not first see houses primarily and expressly in their individuation, in their distinctiveness [and thus, in their incompleteness]. Rather, I first see universally: this is a house.” (Heidegger 1985: 66-67) Humanity can never look upon the face of the Jewish God. As it presents God as saying in Exodus, “you cannot see my face, for man shall not see me and live.” If all prejudice could truly be removed, if all judgement could be done away with, then, under these conditions, the Jewish God could indeed be seen but then one would not be human. Man cannot really choose between “to be” or “not to be” but is, if they remain alive, a human being. This is why many contemporary Gnostic Jews promote “mindfulness”, or the meditation method for overcoming judgement that is popular in the Easter traditions. They hope, as the Kabbalah tradition teaches, that meditation can bring humanity to God by overcoming judgement. Overcoming judgement is the aim of mindfulness. When humanity left the Garden of Eden, where they actually could see God, humanity was already trapped in knowledge because Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. After eating from this tree, humanity is banished from Eden forever to live in the world. In the same way that Cronus was castrated by Zeus thereby forever ensuring sky and earth remain apart for there to be a world, so was humanity’s banishment from Eden permanent. Humanity from that time is doomed to work and, most significantly, produce. One never sees a lion or a giraffe working, they most certainly never produce, but humanity works and must produce because Man knows good and evil. Man literally dwells in prejudice. But the Jewish Gnostics believe that most of humanity does not really know good and evil but merely human experiences of good and evil, cultural deposits, such things are not adequate to God. This is like when one city thinks the God of the moon looks like a woman while the next city thinks the same God looks like a wolf. These are all just false idols. When humanity is raised to be chaste or humble or virtuous then this, Jewish Gnostics believe, is against the wishes of the God Most High. It is for this reason that they truly believe that “this world is dominated by demonic powers . . . seeking to build an unbridgeable gulf between God and man.” (Wilson 1974: 185) The demonic here is human. It is for this reason that the world, the moral system of beliefs, must be destroyed, culture must be rejected by this account because it is a force of evil, a product of man like the Tower of Babel and it must be brought down. As Carl Jung wrote expressing this Gnostic vision, . . .Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he

678 became the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a counter-will of its own. Because God willed this, we are told in Genesis 3 that he gave man the power to will otherwise. Had he not done so, he would have created nothing but a machine, and then the incarnation and the redemption would never have come about. Nor would there have been any revelation to the Trinity, because everything would have remained One for ever. What Jung is observing is that Lucifer, who might for reasons already explained be associated with Shekinah, is the one who understood the God Most High, in the same way that some argue that Judas, who appears to betray Jesus, actually may have understood Jesus, and what had to be done better than anybody else. The Shekinah created Nature and broke against God in doing this and, therefore, brought human freedom into the world. This is the same “serpent” who encouraged humanity to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The act of betraying God is free will, eating from the Tree is knowledge, the two together are the human condition, freedom, the power to act against God’s will, and knowledge. Shekinah here is the serpent, chaos, who is the same as Tiamat of the Babylonian creation myth. Interestingly, the vision of Man from the God Most High is to be like an animal or maybe even a machine, an automaton, a cyberman, because with the cyberman, without human judgement, truly exists in “the One”. If returned to this state, if we were to become cyborgs, according to this tradition, we would again be reconciled with God. Only by recovering Nature, chaos, can humanity be again united with God. The fight for feminism is important here. Woman were seen through history as representations of nature, passion, emotions while man was of the created world, rational, and unemotional. Woman love, as mothers, was given unconditionally. A mother loves all her children if they are the most successful and “good” or if they are total failures and commit the greatest evil. This is why mothers are loved unconditionally in return. Male love is thought to be conditional. Men demand certain behaviour from their children, require them to be good, successful and then they receive the fathers love. Religions follow these archetypes. The Father of Christianity loves conditionally, if you are good then you will be allowed into heaven, Jesus functions more in a feminine role, in terms of forgiving all trespasses, all sins. What Gnostic Jews hope to achieve by encouraging women into leaderships roles is that the social leaders will no longer judge but allow people to be whoever or whatever they are and still be accepted. Women push for open border because they do not want anybody to suffer. Women argue against gender norms because that means that some people must be judged as doing the wrong thing and this goes against the female inclination. This is the Gnostic vision of freedom and the new individuality. Do not conform to society by being “good” but simply express yourself whatever that may involve. This is achieved by unlocking female sexuality and violence as these are only impositions of the Father. It is, according to Gnostic Judaism, an imposition of men that women should be modest and demure, as an expression of

679 their power. It was this expression of male power that robbed woman their true authority and dignity. Balance is achieved, the end of the demand to be “good”, by bringing the Gnostic vision of womanhood into the world as a countermeasure to thousands of years of male dominance. By this account, in harmony with Rousseau, society with its morality corrupts the natural goodness of humanity which is made by God/Nature. In Nature, women are not chaste and modest, they believe, but are highly sexual, physically aggressive, more in the image of the Goddess Anat/Astarte/Tanit/Tiamat than the Virgin Mary. The fight for women’s rights is about marginalizing universal morality, undermining the requirement that people be “well adjusted”, in favour of nurturing deviance, maladjustment, as the true instinctual condition of all of humanity. As Gnostic Jew Erich Fromm wrote about the task of psychotherapy from their perspective, We find that according to one conception adjustment is the aim of analytic cure. By adjustment is meant a person’s ability to act like the majority of people in his culture. In this view those existing patterns of behaviour which society and the culture approve provide the criteria for mental health. . . In the second view the aim of therapy is not primarily adjustment but optimal development of a person’s potentialities and the realization of his individuality. Here the psychoanalyst is not an “adjustment councillor” but, to use Plato’s expression, the “physician of the soul”. This view is based on the premise that there are immutable laws inherent in human nature and human functioning which operate in any given culture. These laws cannot be violated without serious damage to the personality. (Fromm 2013) What is really being said here is that prior to it being co-opted by Freud, psychotherapy was about adjustment, about making someone “well adjusted” so that they conform to the norms of a society, a fatherly vision, but when Gnostic Jews took over the discipline it became about bringing out people’s natural drives or natural inclinations understood by Fromm as a “person’s potentialities”. The “immutable laws” are those they think of as “natural”, like forgoing sexual norms, and letting people be how they are without the constraining influence of civilization. In a way this might sound good but what if my “natural inclination” is to violence, or to hyper-sexuality, or having sex with children. In so many ways we have to “adjust”, and such adjustment “is good”. That Jews were extremely active in formulating the emergent practice of psychoanalysis attracted attention and criticism but, as with all such claims, such concerns were quickly labelled “anti-Semitism”. As Jewish historian Andrew Heinze claims, Long haunted by the image of a demonic and sinister Jewry, European Christian culture could hardly avoid incorporating it into mystical cosmologies that highlighted the play of mysterious psychic forces. . . One prominent Russian occultist presented . . . a bizarre inversion of the mesmeric idea: instead of healing Christian folk, hidden forces now drained their life substance. (2004: 54-55) Heinze is suggesting that it was because of “Christian culture” that people were concerned about the overrepresentation of Jews in the formulation of psychology in the mid to late 19th century when in truth

680 this inversion was exactly what Gnostic Jews were indeed trying to achieve. They were now draining people’s “life substance”. For example, the relationship between “people of colour” and “whites” is possible only with the amplification of differences and conflicts between people of colour and whites. This amplification is required if there is to be argued that there is a relationship of power. That differences and grievances were indeed magnified, at a time when such differences meant less than they had at any time in history, was the direct result of Gnostic Jewish efforts. Their fight for trans-gender rights is again about recognising that people are not really gendered but that everyone is somewhere inbetween and yet, neither, if set free from “moral” constraints, if no longer required to conform to the immoral imposition of “the good”. When “freed” from morality people are not constrained to have sex with just those who are of the opposite “gender” but are free to have sex with whomever they chose. Everyone becomes bisexual. This has become such a dominant narrative in our society that Gnostic Jews have managed to have those who reject homosexuality to now be thought of has having a newly minted psychological pathology called “sexually rigidity”. (see Rothblum and Bond 1996: 10) Their advocacy for homosexuality, their attempt to lure young boys into homosexuality through what many might think of as abuse, is because being heterosexual, by their account, is to deny features of one’s true sexuality. To deny who you naturally are, to embrace a socially constructed identity, like being virtuous, must be overcome before sexuality is distorted, in childhood. The world is not ordered into neat things with borders, from a Jewish Gnostic perspective, that separate them from other things, but the world is really chaotic and fluid, it is the abyss which only appears as something solid and fixed as a result of human power. What they are actually arguing is something ridiculous at the most basic level. Gnostic Jews are saying that if someone is left alone then they will truly express themselves, but this is truly a ridiculous argument. To capture the ridiculousness of this argument, in 1493, King James IV of Scotland carried out an experiment where two babies were left and raised by a deaf-mute woman. The aim of the experiment was to discover what language people “naturally” spoke. What was the language given to people by God naturally? This experiment has actually been carried out in one form or another by various people from Herodotus in ancient Greece and the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I through to Emperor Frederick II. Often, as in the case of Frederick the II, the poor child who was the subject of the experiment died of neglect. Of course, with such experiments, the children, if they survived, learnt no language at all and would have been unable to speak for the rest of their lives but, as Sir Walter Scott commented on the James IV experiment, “It is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the goats and sheep on the island”. In the same way that humanity has no “natural language” so is it the case that we are not naturally highly sexual or chaste. We are not naturally aggressive or passive. As humans we are necessarily

681 the product of our environment which is, in turn, either informed by an experience of God or not. That is why in discouraging morality, Gnostic Jews actually encourage immorality. They worship the opposition to Christ, they worship the anti-Christ, Lucifer. All the ideas supported by Gnostic Jewry, second wave feminism, trans-gender rights etc., will be familiar to any university educated person. As James Hunter observes, these ideas have been completely incorporated into the progressive political program of contemporary Western intellectuals. They too argue that gender roles and sexual relationships, including opposition to homosexuality, is at least an arbitrary social construction that could easily and without consequence be otherwise. (Hunter 1991: 126) Others see many of the traditional norms as more than mere arbitrariness but actually an expression of male power intended to suppress Others. That is, if Jewish Gnosticism is properly understood then the reversal of all values becomes revealed for what it is, part of their theo-political project. The Western Christian tradition, in agreement with most of the world296, believing in universal truths, taught that homosexuality was a mental illness whereas now, with the dominance of this Gnostic thinking, it is being suggested that excluding homosexuality as a possibility should be classified as a mental illness. (See Cochrane 2004: 167) Perhaps the first to actively oppose the claim that homosexuality was an illness was Sigmund Freud who write, “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness.” In 1972, the year before DSM removed homosexuality as a mental illness, American Jewish psychologist George Weinberg, the man who coined the term “homophobic” in 1969, argued that “I would never consider a patient healthy unless he had overcome his prejudice against homosexuality . . .”297 (emphasis added Weinberg 1972/2010: 1) The culture wars are revealed for what they really are, the theological contest between Christianity and Gnostic Jewry. Their entire destructive project is about restoring Nature, Eden, as they understand it, into Her

296

According to the World Values Survey carried out by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, rejection of homosexuality is deeply entrenched. The practice is opposed by 71% in India, 92% in China, 94% in Iran and 99% in Bangladesh and Egypt. (as seen in D’Souza 2007) 297 This movement seems to take a militant Christianity and then reverses into a new militancy. Christianity is not about orthodoxy but about an experience of the good, the beautiful and the true. So, the 19th and 20th century stance on homosexuality I find not to be good. But equally, the idea of sex rooms in the back of bars I find equally confronting. Perhaps we should look for the quality of the relationship and not the people in it. A polygamous relationship, for example, could be filled with love and care, raising good children as much a homosexual one or a heterosexual one. Sections of Christianity have embraced critical engagement and that is because it is through debate that truth is revealed. Between tradition and anarchy is the way of Jesus Christ. Reversing intolerance does not give us tolerance it just gives us, as we now have, a new intolerance. Paul the Apostle said to the Galatians, “You cannot belong to Christ unless you crucify all self-indulgent passions and desire. . .” (5:24) It is through leaving excessive earthly demands behind, to kill the excesses of instinctual drives, “self-indulgence” that frees us to be good, to experience the true, to live in Jesus. This is not about orthodoxy, but a critical project informed by truth, criticism without truth is destructive, criticism constrained by truth, is a blessing.

682 position of authority, thereby, redeeming or healing the world. Nature is brought into the “world” when that world no longer presents as consisting of enduring objects that stand in opposition to other objects and Man. They have been very successful in realising their vision. As Wasserstein (2009: 769) observes, “. . .in the early twentieth century homosexuality had been regarded by respectable society as a form of deviance. It was something to be hidden and to be ashamed of. . . By the end of the century homosexuality was chic and it was no longer necessary to keep secret.” Indeed, many public figures around the turn of the 20th century were building their careers based on being a vocal homosexual despite it remaining a minority activity practiced by around 1.4% of the population. An early flagging of Jewish gnostic ideas can be clearly seen expressed in the historical materialism of Karl Marx and his idea of “commodity fetishism” which he equates with a religion where “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enters into relations . . . with . . . the human race.” It is because of such claims that communism has been described as Judaism for the modern world. (Wisse 2007: x) God, from the Jewish gnostic perspective, is not in a relationship with Man, thereby He cannot reveal what is morally good. Indeed, Jewish Gnostics believe that the world is text. As text, it can be rewritten. So, the “tree” can be shown in light of it being “timber”, or as “shade”, or as a “habitat”, or as “old growth”, the tree is “open” when it is understood that it no longer has an objective hold over us. This historical hold, truth, is a delusion that id only the result of power. When truth is overcome, then this allows the “world” to be exhaustively instrumentally contextualised. So, historically, Western journalism sought to be true above all else, truth is what mattered. That is why journalism as such really only existed in Western countries until it was adopted around the world. The success of Jewish Gnosticism has been such that journalism today no longer believes in truth but is merely another weapon to achieve power. This is the role of “journalism”, so called, in places like China and increasingly in the West, it is never intended to seek the truth because today we all operate with such impoverished understanding of truth. Journalism is just a tool of propaganda. This surrender of truth, withdrawal from the real world, has left the common person living in the West, still substantively culturally Christian, distrustful of journalism because it has lost it historical purpose. It could lose this purpose because it long ago lost the sense of truth upon which it was historically built. People do not trust journalism anymore because journalism has lost its very possibility to exist. It has just become another front in the culture wars. The question no longer is; “what is the case?” but “how can this case be presented in a way that is useful for realizing a predetermined agenda?” Everything loses its objective presence and is replaced with an exhaustively instrumental metaphysics. “Openness”, therefore, is a very important concept in Gnostic Judaism, to be contextualised in multiple ways as both a hermeneutical as well as a practical exercise, as a theoretical trope and as a

683 principle for ordering society. As Bloom observes, the modern inclination has become a “longing for the unlimited”. (Bloom 1987: 101) When the Jewish billionaire George Soros establishes and funds to the tune of millions of dollars the institution, “The Open Society” this must be understood as a vehicle for realizing just that, an open society. Soros wants to “open” the “world”, overcome all places where it is “closed”, remove all prejudice, because all closure can only exist as an experience of “the good”. According to Gnostic Judaism, to remain committed to an “objective world”, where the actual world is “real”, is to remain enslaved to the demiurgos and that will mean that one can never be redeemed with the God Most High. If the individuation of things is overcome, then the female aspect of God is brought forward, what some have called Mother Earth. World, the fixed, the Apollonian, is “male” and has dominated for the last 2,500 years, but the instinctual, the pre-conceptual, the material, was historically thought to be “female”. The gnostic tradition raises this female aspect, in its male form, above the male in male form. Some traditions call this the “left hand way” or “emanations from the left”. That is because in the Jewish tradition the right is male, and the left is female. That is why their project is often identified as being of the “left”. For this reason, the Talmud instructs people to “wash your right hand first, put your right sock on first, clip the fingernails on your right hand first”. Because the right-hand side is male, and the male is primary in the Orthodox tradition, while the left-hand side is female and secondary. By recognising that the world is “open” and acknowledging the primacy of “mother earth” then in a way, world and earth are reconciled. As Green writes of neo-Hasidism, Our world suffers from a great imbalance of energy between the typically “male” and “female” energies. Neo-Hasidism needs to be shaped by the voices of women alongside men, as full participants in every aspect of its emergence. We welcome devotion to the one God through the channels of shekhinah and binah, God as saving and protecting Mother. (Green : 173) The revolutionary nature of this theo-political movement begins to be appreciated when it is understood that neo-Hasidism does not worship a God in “heaven”, like orthodox Judaism and Christianity claim, but worships a God that is both everywhere and nowhere and is reflected, is present, in the “Underworld”, not a God of light but a God of darkness, a chthonic God, not a God of order but a God of chaos, not a God of morality but a God of instinct. This is the new aeon for the Gnostic tradition, when “evil” is brought back into the world to bring balance to the universe. Graetz rightfully referred to those who advance this understanding of God as “enemies of the light”. (as seen in Scholem 1987: 8) It is for this reason that one of the epitaphs for the Hebrew God was the Lord of Darkness. (Goldziher 1877: 223) At first coming across this idea many readers, steeped in the Christian tradition, will be extremely confronted. When such claims are made by QAnon it is generally met, along with claims of institutional

684 paedophilia, with derision. This confrontation can be so intense that people unfamiliar with what is happening simply cannot believe that any religious tradition could actually worship the Prince of Darkness. It is often claimed by those who know something of what is being revealed here, and they do exist, that Jews in the Sabbatian tradition, Gnostic Jews, worship Satan or the Devil. The reason for this claim is obvious. Sabbatia explicitly and unapologetically identifies with the “anti-Christ”. Sabbatai then claims that the anti-Christ, himself, is God but, by this account, who is God unless it is rightly identified with the Christian figure of Satan? The Christian idea of Satan, of course, is derived from ancient visions of mischievous Nature Gods, like Pan, who were highly sexual, and lived in harmony with Nature and not against her. Further, those who are sympathetic with Sabbatia’s message hope to destroy civilization by whatever means including violence. Another feature that might be associated with the Devil is that they believe that the world, created in the Christian tradition by the Father, is evil. They believe that the world is evil and must be destroyed and that this is achieved by various methods but, most especially, by embracing evil or, what they term, “redemption through sin”. A Christian might think that only Satan would allow somebody to be redeemed through sin. Those in the Sabbatian tradition also promote free love, group sex (some texts even advocate paedophilia), destruction of the family, greed, deception, boastfulness etc., etc., and these are all again seen, from a Western perspective, as evil. They can clearly be seen to be actively promoting the seven deadly sins. Finally, some trajectories of Sabbateanism promote technology in all its forms, including psychology, as a means to turn people away from an experience of the good, the beautiful and the true, away from God’s grace, in favour of materially satisfying criteria such as production and efficiency. This again has been associated with Satanic practices and the Devil. For all these reasons, and more as will revealed, some who know something about the larger Sabbatian tradition advance the argument that these “Jews”, often without differentiation, worship “Satan” or the “Devil”. They conclude that, “Jews are Satan worshippers”. In some respects, the claim that Gnostic Jews of the Sabbatian tradition do indeed worship Satan or, at least, Lucifer, but this observation needs to be understood in clear terms who is being worshipped and why. Only after these features have been clarified can an appropriate assessment of claims of Devil worship be made. It is difficult to appreciate, and this point will be elaborated upon in several section in the following volumes but, to be clear, in committing these “evils”, in worshipping the “Lord of Darkness”, Sabbatai and his followers claim that they are actually doing good in reuniting God’s name. This claim is important to understand because it is rightly difficult for people to understand why somebody would want to be evil. By contrast, in the Graeco-Christian tradition, God is understood to be the God of light, spirit and truth. Knowing is divine, ignorance is evil, morality is sacred, the instinctual base, society ennobling,

685 nature debasing. To live in darkness is to never see the light. As Jesus said, “The eye is the light of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!” Jesus seems to be saying that if you seek out goodness then you will be filled with goodness, whereas, if you seek out with your eye sin, pornography and ogling women as though they are just sexual objects, then you will be filled with sin. Gnostic Judaism’s entire project might be called making our whole body to be full of sin filled with darkness. The idea of being led by another to work against the good was the original idea of possession in the Christian tradition. The original idea of Christian possession did not involve a “demon”, in the sense of some kind of evil spirit or monster, but simply meant having your actions controlled by an being with bad intentions. One could simply be possessed by any real person, who was evil. Such a person could possess your soul, make you believe things that were untrue and make you do things, such as being sexually promiscuous, that were opposed to being good. Possession, as might be expected when Christianity is adequately understood, involved making the person behave irrationally, driven by emotions or instinctual drives, therefore no longer living in reality, living in koinonia. If we are dark within, perhaps because of being led astray, then we cannot see the light. From a Christian perspective, therefore, it appears that Gnostic Judaism does indeed worship “the Devil”, “Satan” or “Beelzebub” and their actions demonic. In plain truth, from a Christian perspective, this political movement literally is pure evil. Indeed, it is surprising how easily the Sabbatian tradition has managed to co-opt so many cultural Christians so easily in such a short period of time into not only accepting its agenda but often, enthusiastically promoting it. I certainly have promoted the Gnostic agenda most of my life.298 Sabbatai Tzevi explicitly identified as the ant-Christ for this very reason. But from another perspective, from what some might call the “left hand” perspective, what this movement proposes is not “pure evil” but, because it is the Christian tradition that is “evil”, worshipping a God of the Underworld is to be good. This argument is actually quite

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As a young Marxist I would wonder if I could really ever kill someone for the revolutionary cause. I most certainly could and did carry placards against racism, sexism and homophobia (the front line of the New Left which had left truly working class struggles to history), but I always knew, deep down, I could never kill someone just because they were from the wrong “class”. This, I am sure, is the conclusion reached by most well-meaning, mixed up, young Westerners who are motivated by a sense of moral outrage against unjust elements of our society. The only way, and this is true, the only way that a communist revolution was successful in Russia, despite an atrocious and terribly costly war, was because there was the highest population of Gnostic Jews in the vanguard who were prepared to carry out the necessary violence, such as killing the Russian Royal Family, which Christians, no matter how they suffered, would not have been unable to do. It really strikes me as ridiculous when I read Jews criticize Christianity for being violent or brutal against Jews when, historically, Jews have generally been well treated by Christians especially if it is appreciated that they have usually expressed nothing but bad will against those amongst whom they have lived. Jews lived in Christendom for a reason and that is because they were so well treated. The preparedness for Jews to do terrible acts of violence, when given the opportunity, is just a historical fact that will be developed mainly in Vol III.

686 reasonable and can be supported with very good arguments that are quite persuasive as evidenced by contemporary society. That is why environmentalism is such a significant political movement today. Indeed, especially today, many people, perhaps the majority, will actually have actively fought for many of the ideas that are being advanced by those who worship the God of the Underworld, the devil, even if they are not explicitly aware that they are. If you support feminism, multiculturalism, disability rights, gay rights, transgender rights, environmentalism etc., basically the contemporary “progressive” political agenda, then you are advancing not a traditional Christian notion of ‘goodness’ but what they until very recently actually viewed as ‘evil’ or, to say the same thing, the agenda of Gnostic Judaism. Indeed, throughout much of history, worshipping the God of the Underworld was the dominant religious conviction. That they worship a God of darkness, a god of the Underworld, explains why these political activists do what they do. It is not simply because they are “evil”, as though evil is without perspective or context, but they believe, as so many who fight for the things listed earlier believe, and actually have very good reasons to believe, that they are doing good. I myself enthusiastically fought for all these things for most of my life and I am not a young man. The basic idea is that God is perfect unity, but in order for there to be a “world”, he must first withdraw in order to make space for a world to be created. A world, after all, consists of discrete things if it is to be a world and discrete things disrupt the perfect unity of God. In the Babylonian creation myth, Tiamat, the primordial oneness, is physically cut into pieces by the God Marduk thereby forming the world. In the Jewish Gnostic tradition, God’s withdrawal is called tzimtzum, and in the empty space opened by God’s withdrawal a lesser aspect of Himself, the feminine aspect, then creates the earth. It is this event of creation that is told in Genesis. The earth then, the unity of Nature, withdraws “under” the masculine world. The earth, the chaotic, the Natural, growing wildly as it does, in an untamed manner, reflects the God Most High, is His spirt. This is why myths around the world have an early God-King, like Cronus, Saturn or Osiris, defeated by a judging God who know morality such as Zeus, Jupiter or Ra. As a result of this defeat, the earlier God is portrayed as being exiled to the “underworld”. All these myths capture the advent of world burying the experience of the unity of Nature or the advent of Man as knowers of good and evil. Christians live in a moral world of Zeus, Ra or Jesus, while Gnostic Jews desire to live in a Natural world of Cronus, Saturn or, Osiris (who, as will be discovered in Volume II has interesting links with Yahweh). The divisions that are “world”, as made by positive science for example, are thought to be the “light of truth” in the Western tradition but can be seen as a great violence against the Natural order from an Eastern perspective. The conceptual, rational, moral, is often associated with the male aspect which might be seen dominating the female, the emotional, the holistic, the pragmatic. The Highest

687 God, therefore, is understood to be before or “under”-world. God is the underlying continuum that is prior to, and the conditions for, creation. Before the world is divided into particular things, it is a continua and this continua can be understood as “Mother nature”. Again, as Green wrote, God’s presence (shekhinah) underlies, surrounds, and fills all the existence. The encounter with this presence is intoxicating and transformative, the true stuff of religious experience. “Serving God”, or worship in its fullest sense, means living in response to that presence. In our daily consciousness, however, divinity is fragmented; we perceive shekinah in an “exilic” or unwhole state … hidden everywhere. (Green: 171-172) This prior Oneness is like a goddess, the feminine as aspect of the Godhead. The union of God is often associated with the moon and this association grants insights into this higher God’s nature. The moon is dark because it generates no light. As such, the moon itself is mysterious and unknown. It is only when the light from the Sun shines onto the surface of the moon that it glows as a reflection of the Sun. This is like the relationship between earth and spirit where things appear as what they are only through the light that is knowledge. It is this intimacy between light and knowledge that “. . . for millennia, light has served as a metaphor for consciousness”. (von Balthasar 1981) Plutarch believed that “the moon was the repository of souls” (Wink: 5) and that was because the moon symbolized an in between, between earth and Sun. The moon historically symbolized “reality”. It is for this reason that the Hebrew word for “understanding” is connected to the concepts of “in-between”. Without the Sun, the moon was a dark abyss. That is why the moon was associated with the “spirit of God” in the sense that the Spirit of God was upon the face of the water. Water or the ocean has long been associated with the feminine, the Shechinah, Generally speaking, it is possible to establish a relationship between the feminine spirituality and pantheism, according to which ultimate reality is conceived as a great sea into which the nucleus of an individual merges and becomes dissolved like a grain of salt. In pantheism, personality is an illusory and temporary manifestation of the one undifferentiated substance, which is simultaneously nature as well as the only reality; in the Weltanschauung there is no room for any transcendent order. (Eliade 1959: 103) The reason why the Shechinah is associated with water was because, “Darkness is repeatedly associated with “the Abyss” or the element of water - “tenebrous, frightful, damned, wicked. . .” (Preparata 2011: 25) Indeed, gnostic imagery continuously refers to water, as Foucault notes, “Water [is] an infinite, uncertain space, dark disorder, moving chaos.” (As cited in Miller 1993: 100) For this very reason, water was historically associated with the irrational, the unreal, madness. In Plato’s Symposium, one of the guests, Aristophanes, a comic playwright, gives what might be intended as a humous account of a “myth”. This myth claims that males were descended from the Sun, females from the earth while those who are

688 androgynous were descended from the moon. The moon is half-way between the masculine Sun and the feminine earth and is the perfect symbol for the oneness of the Gnostic God where the feminine and the masculine are thought to unite. In the myth told by Aristophanes, everyone was once androgynous, with four arms, and four legs and two heads. Then, and this is important, Zeus, divided them into males and females. It was Zeus who brought judgement to the world and thereby dividing men and women into two separate things. It was as a result of everyone trying to reunite with their other half that motivates people to fall in love and to engage in sex. Sex functions as the point of union when the male and the female are properly reunited into a four legged, four-armed, two headed creature. The moon has also historically been associated with an arc or boat. A mythically imagery that inspired the English artist Blake in several of his works.

Blake: “The Angelic Boat Wafting Over the Souls for Purgation.” Courtesy of the Trustee of the British Museum

The association of the moon with a boat or ark is that during times of catastrophe, between the stabilizing periods ruled by the Sun, a period of crisis that is often characterised with water, a stormy sea or flooding, then it is this time that is ruled by the moon. The in between times. During these times of chaos, the moon

689 goddess protects those she favours. As can be seen in the Tanakh, this account is also given in the Jewish apocalyptic vision. They bring about a time of chaos, by worshipping Mother Earth who is destruction, but they are protected by the God of the united in-between, she is also potentially nurturing, so when the apocalypse has been realised, the “End of Days”, then it is living according to the moon by which you will be saved. The story of Noah’s ark, of course, is the most familiar example from the Jewish tradition, itself derived from the Mesopotamian flood story the oldest known version of which was actually written in Greek in the 3rd century BC, as adopted by the Graeco-Christian tradition. As Knight observes, The Ark is a great Moon and Sea symbol, and thus early origins of this cult can be traced in the story of Noah’s ark . . . Although the Moon symbols refer much to fertility it is not only a matter of physical fertility but also of fertility of the mind and imagination and soul as well. The higher teaching of the Ark is that it is a vessel of Mystery, a primitive and Eastern type of the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the point of fusion between planes, where a receptacle is made in lower consciousness that can act as a container or giver of form to forces of higher consciousness. (Knight 1978: 184) This is the same role performed by the imagination in the Greek philosophical tradition where primordial experience passes through the imagination and becomes nous or implicit intellectual knowledge which is the mind of God. The moon symbolizes the mystery of God for Eastern religions and the role of imagination in the sense that it is pre-cognitive. It is literally prior to reason. The moon symbolizes the receptacle or container, that resides in lower consciousness or what might equally be thought of as “earth”.

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Anonymous artwork: Le retour de la coulumbe a l’arche” plate XXV of La Bible toute historiee et figure de la John Rylands Librarty. Courtesy John Rylands Library

Jesus was also portrayed as being on board a fishing boat, in the image below very much resembling a moon, where he calms the water or brings order to chaos. Here Jesus is human reason, carried by imagination, to bring order to chaos. As it says in Proverbs 3: 20, “by his knowledge the watery depths were divided” as in through reason order is restored to chaos or the waters of heaven are divided from the waters of earth, or a world is opened “in-between”. Things become what they are in being acknowledged as having divine borders. The themes of riding through hardship and those who are blessed are saved like fish in the ocean. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” Again, in the artwork of “Christ Calming the Sea” the vessel is shown to look like a crescent moon.

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Anonymous: “Christ Calming the Sea” from The Stuttgart Psalter. Courtesy of Princeton University Press and the Department of Art and Archaeology of Princeton University with the cooperation of the University of Utrecht

The moon is that upon which one travels, intimate to the Earth, in times of chaos. As it said of God in Psalms 89:9, “You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them.” The moon symbolises the receptacle of Nature, fertile like the moon, Jesus calming the storm, like God, is a portrayal of his task, to bring order, to establish a new era, the era of Christ. The moon Goddess, Mother Nature, is the feminine in the Godhead, what kabbalists call the shekinah. It is the divine presence. Again, the traces of Gnosticism are clearly evident. This account has moved from a Christian understanding, where Nature is evil and must be overcome, to understanding the Prince of Darkness, Nature, Mother Earth, the Moon, as something nurturing, as something that gives comfort to those who seek her out. A ship to ride out times of chaos, that upon which the chosen to survive while those who sin is left to chaos’ wrath.

Conclusion Jewish people are significantly overrepresented in positions of economic, political and intellectual elite. The one area where Jews are underrepresented is in the United States military where Jews only make up about 0.33% of United States soldiers. The first question is does it matter? It most certainly does. This overrepresentation has meant that, “Americans of Jewish background have become an elite group in American society, with a cultural influence far beyond their numbers.” Indeed, the entire argument for redistributing traditionally ‘white’ roles to ‘people of colour’ is because proportional representation seems to have become a principle for organizing society. According to the statistics given in this chapter, there are certainly areas of American society where white men are not only fairly represented but areas

692 where white men are significantly underrepresented. The concern is not just that people will act to further their own interests the thing that is of most concern with that they will work in the service of their God. To put the same thing differently, the concern is that people will try to impose their values, no matter how opposed to the established population, on everybody else. This very much appears to be happening in the United States and the domination of Gnostic Jews. Jews themselves recognise this overrepresentation with more than a few even boasting that they run the United States. The basic argument is that Jews have achieved disproportionate success in the United States and that we should simply, “. . . praise those individual Jews who, by dint of hard work and talent, have earned their place, as individuals, in so many areas of American life”. (Dershowitz 2011) It is because of “hard work”, attributes Jews are especially supposed to value, and “talent” which covers the supposed superior intelligence of Jews over other populations. In this sentence, Dershowitz actually touches upon the two most common justifications for Jewish overrepresentation, Jews are naturally more intelligent than other populations and therefore rise to positions of power or the Jewish religion values success more than other cultures. According to research, and indeed common sense, neither of these claims explains Jewish overrepresentation. When variables that are known to affect IQ results are considered then, as would be expected, Jews do not outperform other groups in IQ tests. Further, according to research Jewish religion does not value success more than other cultures, indeed, it might value success even less. After all, if Jews are superior to all other people in the world as they then why is Israel not an incredible state? Jewish success in the United States demands other explanations. Tribalism is not only important for explaining Jewish overrepresentation, but it also explains how this tribalism is impacting on various areas of American society. It was argued that ‘tribalism’ needed to be contrasted with individualism. Jews, not specifically those who advance Gnostic Judaism but all Jews, think primarily in tribal terms, as nomads, as do Arabs and other Semitic299 peoples. Tribalism is simply when the aggregate is prioritised above the individual. This attitude can be contrasted to traditional Western beliefs, observed since ancient Greece, of prioritising individuals who are then understood to constitute communities. It was the individual, as the locus of moral responsibility in the Western tradition,

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Despite “Semitic” and “Aryan” becoming highly politicized on the build up toward World War II, both are actually legitimate academic terms. What they point to are linguistic group which, as they share a similar heritage, also share cultural practices and beliefs. Traditionally, Semites populated a region along the east coast of the Mediterranean for modern day Syria, to Jordan, modern Israel, the Sinai Peninsula down to Ethiopia. The Aryans constitute some people in India, Iranians, and most of Europe including the Slavic peoples. This needs to be clarified as the term Aryan, because of its association with Hitler, is not used but has been replace with the equivalent term “Indo-Europeans”. It is being used in its technical sense here and not in the political sense it acquired before World War II.

693 that explains why Christianity resonated the way it did in Western societies with its call for individual moral introspection and yet failed to resonate as convincingly with Semitic tribal societies or even in the Far East with their more tribal or collectivist perspectives. Not only has individualism been traditionally dominant in Western societies shaping the moral perspectives that these societies advance but Western legal and political systems also function on the basis of individuality. The shift from individuality to an emphasis on the aggregate is undermining the moral foundations of the Western legal system that is based on the idea of individual responsibility and free choice. As is portrayed time and again in the Tanach, such as in Deuteronomy, collective punishment and reward is perfectly acceptable from a tribal perspective. Tribalism means that people are not individually responsible for their actions or for their situation in life. If, for example, a “person of colour” cannot be held to be morally responsible, as an individual, for their actions because of the “tribal situation” in which they live then the Western legal systems can no longer function. Once this difference in emphasis is adequately understood, it explains an extraordinary amount of the different ways Jews and gentiles encounter, interpret, and understand their worlds and the degree to which Eastern thinking has come to capture the West. Indeed, when understood, the dominance of ‘tribalism’ in contemporary society goes a long way towards explaining the extremely recent phenomenon of ‘identity politics’, which could be rightly understood as ‘tribal politics’, in the United States and throughout the West. It was not so long ago that prioritizing collective sub-group identities in Western societies was viewed as morally irreprehensible as politics was not about advancing collective interests of a fractured social sphere but about universal values of truth and goodness and how these resulted in the betterment of everyone or the community at large. Jewish scholars see such a morality as ignoring the “spiritual” element or the way communities are informed by God. As none other than Martin Buber wrote, “Opposite the self-reliant, spirit-forsaken civilization religion, there stands here for all to see God’s ancient instruction of the nomad tribes.” (Buber 1960: 172) Buber is contrasting the appearance of self-reliance expressed in civilizations like the West, which ignores how our actions are guided by our God. Is a judge who finds a person guilty of a crime and sentences them to ten years in gaol expressing an individual actions or merely expressing a hidden shared commitment to which he is no more responsible for than any other in the tribe? Buber, consistent with this tribal perspective, finds individual proportional punishment reprehensible. Buber argues that punishment should be collective and impersonal without proportion because it is primarily about the spirit, God, and nobody is actually responsible for God but God. In the Torah, the Jews are continuously instructed by their God to wipe out entire tribes, every man, woman and child, so that there is nobody left so that the Jewish tribe can advance their interests. This action is not immorally directed against an individual or because of a particular act

694 but is directed against a God. This perspective actually explains the actions of Israel in the world, they are not out to punish particular wrong doers, it does not matter who is hit by the bullet, it is the tribe that is being punished and, ultimately, the tribes God. This is equally true of the Jewish people. They suffer collectively and are often not angry about that because it is their God that is punishing the people not an individual. Again, as Braitman (1998: 64) observes, “. . .people suffer when the community sins, when its members turn away from God or against each other. God does not directly make sinners suffer.” This emphasis on tribal responsibility means that American politics today is increasingly looking more like Middle Eastern politics where group identity determines social standing and is used to explain individual outcomes instead of the other way around. As D’Souza observes, the Middle East ensured that the different groups lived together and, in some respects, “apart”, “Many Americans may regard this as crude, bogus form of toleration, although as we shall see, it is precisely the form of toleration that today’s brand of liberalism employs towards orthodox believers of all faiths.” (D’Souza 2007) D’Souza is perfectly correct; this is the exact social situation emerging in the United States as the United States moves from being a community that consists of individuals informed by universal truths to tribal arrangement where each is allowed to live according to their own tribal experiences. One of the most important contributions to the tribalization of Western societies was the anthropology of German/American Jew Franz Boas who argued that “culture” was not rightly understood to be an “abstract idea”, as it has been thought up to his time that could only be discussed in the singular, as in these people were cultured while those others were not, but was better understood as a “count noun” which could be spoken about as a plural, as in, “they are expressing different cultures”. The idea of “cultures”, in contrast to “culture”, was once as impossible as talking about different expressions of “money”, “beauty” or “knowledge” (against historical precedent these are all spoken about today as “count nouns”). It will be concluded that there are two basic reasons for Jewish overrepresentation in the United States, the intentional reversal of historically dominant social ecology creating conditions where Gnostic Jews thrive and, what might generously be called, “tribalism”. As part of this account, the example of “second wave” feminism will be used and elaborated upon at some length to give a concrete example of how Jewish Gnostic thinking has shaped contemporary society.

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Chapter Four: Gnostic Jews: Creating the Anthropocene “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire “Logic can be met with logic, while illogic cannot. It confuses those who think straight. The Big Lie & monotonously repeated nonsense have more of an emotion appeal . . . than logic & reason. While the people are still searching for a reasonable counterargument to the first lie, the totalitarians can assault them with another.” Joost Meerloo on how authoritarian governments take power

Introduction The previous chapter considered why Jews are so overrepresented in position of wealth, power and prestige in the United States. Jewish overrepresentation is not marginal, it is not double or even triple but hundreds of times higher than their proportion of the population. This is massive levels of overrepresentation that seem to be particularly concentrated in the media, government, law and, of course, academia. The question the previous chapter raised is why is this the case? Are Jews just geniuses as they claim or is it that Jewish cultural practices enable success? Quantitative research proves that the first explanation is impossible. Even if we accept, unquestioningly, that Jews do indeed have a higher intelligence then others, it is not adequate, not even close, for explaining Jewish overrepresentation. The second claim is more difficult to unequivocally reject as the variables are just too complex to isolate but there is evidence, as presented, that Jewish overrepresentation cannot be explained in terms of being the result of cultural traits. As these oft sighted explanations for Jewish overrepresentation are inadequate then why are Jews so overrepresented? The claim made in the previous chapter is that there are two basic explanations for why Jews are so radically overrepresented in positions of wealth, power and prestige in the United States. Firstly, Jews are extremely ethnocentric and help each other at every opportunity. The reason for this is because it is a religious commitment to help other Jews because helping the those from tribe of Judea is equivalent to serving God. Despite this widely acknowledged ethnocentrism, which is acknowledged even by Jewish scholars, being an important feature for explaining Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power it is not the most important. The most important reason why Jews are so massively overrepresented in academia, it was argued, is because Gnostic Jews have managed

696 to shape the way society thinks so that it conforms to their worldview. This particular, and from an Orthodox Jewish perspective heretical, worldview is one that was shaped by Sabbatai Tzevi’s revelations in the 17th century where redemption is achieved through sin. It is by sinning, by valorising what has traditionally been considered sinful, that Man reconciles himself with God. Although this influence began in the years prior to World War I, through people like Marx, Einstein, Freud and Gross, it was really not until after the Second World War that Gnostic influence became pervasive through the work of people like Buber, Strauss, Adorno, Horkheimer, Derrida and countless others who are widely acknowledged as the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. It is through Gnostic Jews shaping the way that we think, in the service of their Goddess the Shechinah, that Gnostic Jews have also been able to shape our behaviour. Greed, gluttony, sexuality, materialism, emotions, and humanism, were all demonized by the Western tradition for centuries but are today increasingly acceptable. If one was not humble, chaste, honest in the past then one would not have easily succeeded in Western societies because they would have been considered immoral. By changing the way people think about morality and God, Gnostic Jews have changed the way people act in a way that is harmonious with their own values. In this chapter, it will be shown how Gnostic Jews managed to shape the way we think and thereby shape how we act. That what is base and what is noble, what is good and what is evil have been reversed over the last 50 years has been the direct result of Gnostic Jews political activities. If the aim of Gnostic Jewry was to change the values of Western society so that they were harmonious with Judaism, then how was this achieved? This chapter will answer that question. The basic claim of this chapter is that it was by becoming overrepresented in positions of power, wealth and authority, that Gnostic Jews, informed by the example of their messiah Sabbatai Tzevi, were able to shape the Western worldview so that it became harmonious with Gnostic Jewish beliefs. The account of this process of domination, some might think of it as menticide, begins with the Zeit Geist of Western Europe and North America around the turn of the 20th century. It was a time when there was deep concern regarding the disenchantment of modern industrial society. The response to this disenchantment was not to turn to Christianity with renewed vigour but to seek out a supposed authentic cultural expression that was thought to exist in pre-industrial societies. The idea was to uncover the authentic way to be German or English or Swedish. The means by which this was to be achieved was to seek out the stories that were still believed to be told in isolated communities, that expressed the true spirit of a people. One of the first to seek out the folk tales that were thought to be threatened through modern methods of education was the Grimm Brothers and their collection of fairy tales first published in 1812. Although this was one of the first attempts at seeking out a more authentic cultural voice, it was

697 followed around the world by Western societies seeking to do the same. It was in this environment of reenchantment, out of what was considered an environment of crisis, that Jewish authors like Michael Rodkinsohn, Martin Buber, Gershom Sholem and Micha Berdyczweski sought out an authentic Jewish voice that would express an untainted authentic way of being Jewish. Surprisingly, as a result of the unique condition that resulted from mass immigration of Hasidic dominated areas in Eastern Europe, the tradition that they sought out an authentic Jewish voice was not Orthodoxy, in the same way the Western tradition did not turn to Catholicism or Protestantism, but in the Hasidic Jewish tradition of Eastern Europe. It was by collecting Hasidic tales on what it meant to be Jewish that Jews hoped to reinvent themselves in a more authentic way. This “Jewish Volkism” was achieved by combining features of two resultant Sabbatian traditions, the Haskalah and Hasidism, into one new, reinvigorated movement that some refer to as neoHasidism but should rightly be called Gnostic Judaism. It was out of this movement that Gnostic Jews began to militantly advance their new agenda for redemption firstly through the Orthodox Jewish community and later throughout Western Europe. The means for achieving this was to rise into positions of power and authority and through these institutions, such as the law and academia, reshape the thinking of Western civilization. This chapter will begin by looking at the conditions in Europe at the end of the 19th century that opened a space for Gnostic Judaism to re-emerge as not only a force amongst European Jewry but as a force in the world. The chapter will end by considering the foundation of Gnostic Jewry in the United States. Although Gnostic Judaism begins in the United States at a similar time that it takes place in Europe, American Jewry is initially more resistant and the simple number of Jews in the United States made their influence, although quite large, less important than it was in shaping European society. The following chapter will consider the influence of Gnostic Jewry in the United States after the Second War when Eastern European Jews fled Europe to escape Nazism and established themselves in such a way as to enable them to really begin to shape first the United States and then the world.

The Political History of Gnostic Judaism Western European Jews As already briefly introduced when presenting the historical development of Gnostic Judaism, by the end of the 19th century, many characterised Judaism as facing numerous crises on multiple fronts. In Western Europe, new opportunities were presenting themselves for Jews with new challenges to historically authoritative hierarchies that some came to think were not only potentially harmful to Jews but actually presented as the single greatest danger to have ever confronted Judaism. For centuries prior

698 to the late 18th century, family life, educational services, adult study and religious services and ceremonies, were conducted by Jews in exclusively Jewish communities. (Katz 1973: 20) Jews operated as a “people within a people”, a nation within a nation and this was not just tolerated by those amongst whom they lived but facilitated. Much that is characterised today as forms of mistreatment against Jews were actually strategies agreed to by the Jewish leadership in order to encourage Jews to retain their distinct and discrete identity in Christian dominated societies. From around 1770, as a result of changing conception of Man, in no small part shaped by Jewish intellectuals like Baruch Spinoza300 and Moses Mendelssohn, there emerged new conceptions of equality and freedom that encouraged a changing relationship between church and state, religion and political authority. As a result of these changes, some Jews were slowly “freed” from the religiously motivated isolation that had limited the possibilities of Jews from becoming full members of European society. As Jewish historian Yerushalmi wrote, . . .German Maskilim abandoned Hebrew after a brief flirtation, and their disciples rushed headlong to becoming Europeans, believing with messianic fervour, that the era of Man with a capital “M” was dawning, and that the Jewish past was but cumbersome baggage with which to enter into the new society. (Yerushalmi 1970/2014: 57-58) Yerushalmi is actually highlighting that it was with truly messianic fervour that these Jews were becoming Europeans. Jews were, whether every individual Jews knew this or not, motivated by the Messianic antinomian message of Sabbatai Tzevi in the 17th century, to “enter” your enemy’s world in order to change both the individual and the society from within. Sabbatai himself had done this act by falsely “converting” to Islam with the real intention of moulding what he thought was the enemy’s evil world into something harmonious with Sabbatia’s Gnostic vision. What were increasingly being viewed as “superficial” features of being “Jewish”, Orthodox practices and beliefs, were surrendered, such as distinct clothing and obedience to Halakha, as Sabbatai had instructed, in order to realize what was becoming understood as the real agenda of Judaism, bringing the Shechinah into the world. It was as a result of these new Jewish beliefs that Western European Jews advanced the humanist cause with such passion and zeal in such a way that man was now to be conceived with a capital “M”. That is, God was being replaced by the creative agency of Man. It was a humanist cause, or what Antelman (2007) calls “secular nihilism”, squarely aimed at marginalizing not religion in general, although this would be achieved, but Christianity in particular.

300

At the time, Jews like Baruch Spinoza were viciously attacked by the European Jewish community. In light of what has happened this history has been rewritten and today Spinoza is seen as a significant figure in the current success of Jews. Even Leo Strauss argued that although Spinoza’s theology is noxious, that he fought to overcome Jewish isolation is praised. The stiffest resistance to overcoming Jewish isolation was not from Christendom but from within Jewish communities.

699 Long maintained and enforced restrictions on where Jews could live, what Jews were allowed to do, and with whom Jews could associate, policies encouraged by the Rabbinic leadership, were being hurriedly disregarded as no longer being important. This was in no small measure the result of Sabbatian antinomianism. This new expression of Judaism, that many Westerners understandably misunderstood as a rejection of religiosity as such, was encouraged and embraced by Europeans. If Jews were prepared to forgo their traditional religious beliefs, then they would indeed be permitted to become full members of European society. The truth was these Jews were coming to embrace a new emergent, heretical form of Judaism that, unlike Orthodoxy, was aimed at destroying Christianity. As a result of European ignorance of the motives behind changing Jewish behaviour, many of the historical barriers to Jewish participation in the wider societies in which they lived, particularly in Central and Western Europe, were being no longer observed, thereby allowing Jews to influence European society in way that had historically been impossible. Why, after all, restrict “agnostic Jews” from becoming academics alongside their increasingly atheistic colleagues? What was different between an atheistic Jew and an atheistic European? “By the middle of the nineteenth century, the last legal disabilities hindering the Jews had fallen. . .” (Mittleman 1990: 2) Germany, which had the highest number of Jews outside of Eastern Europe led the way. The problem was that these Jews were advancing an extremely religious and dangerous agenda, it was just one about which Western European Christians were, and remain even today, ignorant. Ignorant of their true motivations, Christian Europeans welcomed these “assimilated” Jews into their world without restraint, conditions or oversight. Jews were, at least elite, wealthy, educated Jews, treated as equals with no barriers ensuring conformity. One important restriction that was removed in toto by the end of the 19th century was access to academic position in higher education institutions. It should be remembered, as Fackenheim (1963) notes, in northern Germany there remained, well into the 19 th century, “. . . exclusion from positions of authority in the military and the civil service, strict limits on achievable rank in universities . . .” (Glick 1982: 547) What changed was that Jews were increasingly allowed to not only attend tertiary education, by Jewish and Christian communities, but were allowed to then go on to become academics within those institutions without any expectation of even the shallowest display of conversion. Being identified as an “assimilated” Jew was enough to open all the doors that had been historically closed. Perversely, such attitudes encouraged the adoption of this new religion amongst European Jewry thereby furthering the agenda of a destructive project. But this “assimilation” was like the “secularism” of American Jew Hayim Greenberg, as told by fellow Jew Israel Goldstein, His was not a surface religiosity, but a sense of the mystery of life and an awareness of a guiding Force in the universe and in history which defies human comprehension. Rabbis and observant laymen applauded his strictures on those who would dispense with two

700 Jewish fundamentals – God as Reality and Israel as Am Segulah, a Chosen People. I believe it is fair to say that Hayim Greenberg assigned to the Jewish people a unique place in the human drama and that, to quote Dr. Yeshayahu Aviad, the Mizrahi leader, “he was no one who submitted to the yoke of traditional observance but was one who submitted to the yoke of Divine Kingship”. (Goldstein 1984: 333) This was indeed the “New Jew” that was being welcomed into Western European societies, with no open display of religiosity, perfectly attuned to the emergent secular society that was then being embraced in the West, while remaining totally committed to God as a mysterious force in the world and maintaining that Jews, as the Chosen People, had a special and unique role in shaping, indeed leading, the future world. Westerns had, and still have, no knowledge of this agenda whatsoever and this has been part of a deliberate strategy of deception. A deception encouraged by Gnostic Judaism. At the same time, as a result of Sabbateanism, the Rabbinate, who had encouraged Jewish isolation and discouraged Jewish participation in the wider society, were losing their authority and legitimacy. (Gellman et., al., 2018: 532) As Habermas rightly observes, inclusion in Western society demanded “Jewish emancipation from Judaism itself. It not only secured an urbane attitude and worldly tolerance on the part of Christians; it also offered the philosophical tools with which the grand self-dynamism of the Jewish spirit sought to master its religious and social destiny.” (Habermas 2002: 43) Historically, the Rabbinate had feared that without Jews living separate lives to those around them, in accordance with Jewish Talmudic dictates, then at least some Jews would truly choose to assimilate. They encouraged Western governments to enforce laws that isolated Jews from the “dangers” of assimilation, but Sabbateanism had eroded their authority to the degree they could no longer enforce isolation. The new Sabbatian strategy, as exemplified by his own life, was to enter into the world of evil, the world of your enemy, and change them from within. This process was indeed observed by German scholars in the late 19th century but their concerns, difficult to prove, were dismissed using the emergent but effective concept of “anti-Semitism”. Accusations that such claims are motivated by anti-Semitism continues to be the first strategy aimed at concerns of Jewish overrepresentation and power. As a result of living in Western Europe in the 18th century, the most dynamic, vibrant and powerful place in the world at that time, Jews were being given the opportunity to enter into not only a new world but a powerful, globally dominant, new world. Just think about the incredible, unprecedented opportunity that had fallen into the Gnostic Jews laps. They must truly have thanked their God for this unique opportunity. Gnostic Jews just happened to live amongst the people who had unlocked the secret to global supremacy and all they had to do was take control of the existing apparatus of power and the world would

701 fall into their hands like a ripe piece of fruit ready for picking. In the 19th century, although Jews continued to face some forms of prejudice and ostracism, . . . they benefited from being Europeans, from being citizens of the continent that increasingly dominated the world. They benefited materially, as all Europeans did, from European imperialism. They benefited culturally, by being considered citizens of the superior global culture. And they benefited “ontologically”, being classed with the privileged global race of whites. (Mill 1998: 80) It was as a result of two changes, the view that all Men were created equal regardless of race, colour or creed, resulting in restriction being removed on Jewish movement in principle and new opportunities that arose from the historical leadership, and the old hierarchies, the monarchies and the rabbinate across Europe, losing their historical authority. This time in history, from the middle of the 19 th century, as Jews really entered into European society, has gone down in history as the “Jewish Emancipation”. It is important to acknowledge that this was not just emancipation from Christian domination, for quite some time Europeans had been actively encouraging Jews to embrace modernity in order to become more productive, but at least equally “emancipation”, perhaps more so, from Orthodox Judaism. Indeed, the Jewish Elders in Altona, Hamburg, in 1818, argued that it was morally wrong to both insist that Jews “pursue useful activity”, thereby becoming full members of European society, and to impose a special Jewish tax, because a real Jew simply could not pursue useful activity. It was a paradoxical demand. It was this attitude that Jews had to be liberated traditional Jewish controls at least as much, if not more, than European Jews needed to be liberated from Christian exclusion. Despite resistance form many Jews at the time, this new “freedom” meant that Jews could generate great wealth in a wider range of endeavours, such as international finance, academia and the public service, from which they had been historically excluded. Even the military became an option. In saying that new opportunities for wealth accumulation were now available, it has to be appreciated that this was not emancipation from an existing destitution to now being allowed to create wealth because some Jews were already an extremely wealthy and privileged minority in places like Germany, France and England. Evidence for this privilege is shown when Jews “participated prominently and disproportionately in the revolutionary struggles” of 1848 were singled out for hypocrisy. That Jews were central to this uprising find expression in Jews being “intimately identified in the public mind with the revolution”. (Baron as seen in Glick 1982: 547) As Rothman observes, “During the upheavals of 1848, Jews played a very prominent role among those calling for a democratic (or even socialist) republic in Germany.” (Rothman 1996: 84) This participation in revolutionary activity was criticised by many working-class Europeans because Jews were perceived to be part of the privileged classes and, therefore, were thought to be active participants in the system of exploitation that

702 revolutionaries hoped to overturn, and people simply could not understand their involvement. (Baron 1949: 231) As would be important in the radical politics of American Jews in the 1960s, unlike their European and American counterparts, wealthy Jews and their families supported radical leftist politics. So, it has to be appreciated that by the period of Jewish emancipation, thought to be from the mid-19th century through to turn to the 20th century, many Jews were already established in many positions of power, wealth and authority, but they continued to be excluded from some important opportunities, even in Germany, such as the military, public service and, most importantly for their agenda, academia. The truth of the “Jewish emancipation” was that it aimed to overcome the final few places from which Jews remained excluded so that Jews could truly be considered formally equal in terms of not be restrained from pursuing any career they wanted. The Jewish emancipation was a struggle to be treated just like anybody else and not to be treated like Jews. Even though many Jews were already established in positions of wealth, power and prestige in Europe, emancipation meant that even more Jews became wealthier and more educated than had been the case previously. These increased opportunities did allow Jews to live fuller, and viewed from a European perspective, more “normal” lives as respected participants in Western European society. The unknown truth at the time was that there was a conspiracy within sections of this very European Jewish community to impose Jewish Gnostic beliefs and practices onto Western society. As already discussed, the European Enlightenment that initiated the scientific revolution, in the 17th and 18th centuries, were primarily expressions of a new kind of “visual turn” in Protestant Christianity. This “turn” had its origins in the two centuries prior, in the 15th and 16th centuries, within the learned institutions of the Catholic faith as expressed in the artistic revolution of the Renaissance and the men of learning like the genius Leonardo Di Vinci. This “optic turn”, as it has been called, would inspire the reformation and Protestantism as a new experience of the divine demanded new social institutions that reflected this new experience. As already presented, this new mindset believed that one could know God through His creation, know God through nature and the rational laws of nature that He imposed. This meant that the mind of God could be revealed through empirical scientific inquiry. As none other than the extremely influential Elizabethan Anglican clergyman and theologian Richard Hooker wrote, “God worketh nothing without cause. All those things which are done by him have some end for which they are done; and the end for which they are done is a reason of his will to do them.” (Hooker as seen in Thompson 2016) This is a kind of physicoteleology that Kant would later do everything he could to deny. The end towards which all of nature oriented was good. So, to understand the laws of nature, what caused the world to be how it is, to know how things “worked”, was to enter the mind of God. Again, as Hooker

703 wrote, “This world’s first creation, and the preservation since of things created, what is it but only so far forth a manifestation by execution, what the eternal law of God is concerning things natural?” (Hooker as seen in Thompson 2016) The Laws of Nature were the Laws of God and to understand them allowed humanity to also obey those laws in order to maintain the natural order of the cosmos. To become detached from Nature, to no longer see reality, was extremely dangerous. As Thompson (2016) observed, “Hooker warns of the dear consequences for mankind of loss of divine cosmic law and order.” Like Christian scholasticism, which emphasised learning through dialectical reasoning to extend human knowledge therefore progress human knowledge of God, Orthodox Jews had not generally had any interest in understanding the workings of nature through empirical research. Up until the start of the 20th century, including the work of Albert Einstein, Jews did not really participate in empirical science but were more attracted to theoretical science. That empiricism had become the dominant way of understanding the world was the direct result of the empirical or ocular turn in Protestantism and this had no impact on Judaism. Within their own communities, Jews had historically been restricted to learning a very narrow body of religious texts, so much of the great advances of the scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries had not been reconciled or even acknowledged within Jewish thinking. Even Karl Marx, in the middle of the 19th century, was critical of empirical science arguing that it was wrong because it began with the object independent of humanity and not the social relationships under which that objective thing came forward as it was. As a result of this self-imposed isolation and freely chosen ignorance, many Europeans thought, unlike today, that Jews were an uneducated, unintelligent cohort who were, because of this ignorance and lack of interest, a net burden to the societies in which they lived. As already observed, by the very late 18th and into the early 19th century, this isolationist attitude began to change. Beginning with the revolutionary steps taken by Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century peer of Sabbatai Tzevi, Jews did not only begin to familiarize themselves in regard to this new scientific knowledge but to undertake their own scientific research. As a result, Jews began to make important contributions to the Western corpus. This was the beginning of Jewish Gnostic inspired ideas shaping the wider European development that some call the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. Many Jews in Western Europe, through most of the 19th century, did indeed accept some level of assimilation as a necessary veneer if they were to be welcomed into Western European society but most did this with a view to realizing a distinctly Jewish Gnostic theological program. The truth was, as history has shown, people like Karl Marx, Moses Mendelssohn and Aaron Halle-Wolfssohn, were doing more to shape European culture than European culture was shaping Jewish thought.

704 The problem that some Jews saw resulting from these significant achievements was the increased danger of assimilation. Amongst turn of the 20th century German Jews, there was a sense of a “loss of Jewish wholeness, a progressive enervation of Jewish energy and soul” and this motivated a drive for a “new orientation” of Jewishness. Despite the vast majority of maskilim retaining core Jewish beliefs and many traditional practices, as Habermas observes, “Jews became all the more Jewish in their private lives as . . . their environment allowed less and less room for them to present themselves publicly as anything other than emphatically German”. (Habermas 2002: 43) As the old maskilim maxim stated, “Be a Jew at home and a human being on the street.” Despite the desire for many to firmly remain Jews at heart, some Jews did appear to genuinely accept Western values and some even converted to Protestantism. As a result, many Jews began seeing emancipation and enlightenment not as an opportunity to be unconditionally embraced but as the greatest threat to ever confront Judaism. As Arnold M. Eisen said, expressing the concern of some European Jews, “In sum, the Jewish world, the world of Judaism, was under siege.” (Eisen 1994: 1) According to the mindset voiced by Eisen, these historical changes were a threat to the distinct identity of Judaism. This more harmonious trajectory of Judaism with their European neighbours was brought to an abrupt end with the flow of Eastern European Jews into Western Europe. As result of the influence of these immigrants, by the end of the 19th century, “. . . the twin curatives of assimilation and emancipation were no longer the means and ends to which Jews devoted their intellectual and personal energies, as they had a century earlier.” (Myers 1986: 261) These new Jewish emigres from Eastern Europe argued that the strategy of entering into Western society, in the way advanced by the Maskilim to undermine Christianity, had failed. Such arguments angered many Western European Jews who thought that their mission of assimilating Western Europeans into their Jewish thinking was advancing at pace. What resulted was that, Most German Jews were profoundly ambivalent and at times overtly antagonistic toward the new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. In Germany, such people had been looked on by assimilating Jews as “uncouth, uncultured and offensive” a threat to their own aspirations towards unqualified acceptance as proper Germans. (Glick 1982: 553) Western European Jews had argued that “Every man is born with certain rights; the Jews are human beings” therefore they also had equal rights. It was through the idea of “equal rights” that Jews hoped to shape European society so that Jewish ideas would be seen as “common elements of all monotheistic religions” and that these would eventually realize “a single, non-sectarian faith” (Lazier 2009: 7) but a faith that was, in fact, perfectly “Jewish”. Equal rights meant ultimately one common monotheistic religion. The Eastern European Jews who arrived from Russia thought that this way of thinking was at best dangerous if not sacrilegious because it failed to acknowledge the superiority of Jews and the Jewish way of life, both

705 morally and intellectually, and that the special task assigned to Jews by God might not be fulfilled. According to their perspective, Jews were not merely equal to other “men” but were as “the chosen” by God they were superior to all other men. Jews should not, therefore, really mix amongst other Europeans as though they were their equal. How would Gentiles come to acknowledge the special position of Jews as leaders if they thought of them only as equal. The Eastern European Jews wanted it universally recognised that Jews were not equal but superior. They were more intelligent, more capable and, if you had Jews living amongst you and they were leaders, then you would benefit. Jews are like Gods living amongst animals that appeared to be human-like, but the problem was that most Europeans at that time, unlike today, failed to acknowledge their superiority. Without Jews themselves embracing and promoting their own moral and intellectual superiority, some Eastern European Jews thought that the assimilationist mindset, would manifest a kind of selfloathing where Jews would come to accept a Christian understanding of Jewish beliefs. Such a mindset, they thought, was already finding expression in Jewish writers such as Nordau. Assimilation, therefore, was turning into an existential threat to Judaism. As Golomb claims, Nordau’s “attack against the patterns of degeneration is simultaneously a critique of Jews, containing in no small measure the element of deeply rooted self-hatred”. (Golomb 2004: 50) Jews were, Golomb claimed drawing inspiration from the language used by Nietzsche, expressing “Selbsthass” (self-hatred). (See Golomb 2004: 3) These “New Jews”, either from Eastern Europe or increasingly inspired by them, did not simply want to be equal; they did not want to be treated like everyone else and their religion viewed as equal to Christianity, they demanded to be recognised as primarily different, and, ultimately, superior to everyone else. The task was to ensure that everyone else recognised this superiority. It was the mystical ideas of kabbalah that was being reintroduced into Western Europe that meant Jews were both different and superior. As Lazier observes, “The partial retrieval of nonrational elements in the Jewish tradition was therefore enacted in the name of Jewish difference and distinction.” (Lazier 2009: 7) The ultimate aim was to have Western Europeans see Jews the way that they saw themselves, as being naturally more intelligent and more moral and therefore the natural leaders. In this struggle, as our contemporary society proves, they have been very successful. As Whitfield observes, “Even when the terrain shifted from the struggle for the right to be equal to the assertion of the right to be different, the Jews have prevailed”. (Whitfield 2015: 2) Now they not only wanted to remain distinct, remain Jews that identify as Jews, that live as Jews, according to their own values, and fundamentally rejected, so called, “Western civilization” as barbarity. Jews did not only want only to be seen as different, but Jews wanted everyone else to acknowledge them as superior. The only way this was to be achieved was to change the way Westerners thought.

706 Eastern European Jews The same period proved to be at least as challenging for Jews in Eastern Europe. It should be remembered that by the start of the 19th century, the innovative, socially radical days of Hasidism were behind it and, what some contemporary Gnostic Jews believe, it was going through a period of steady decline. This decline is marked, from a Gnostic perspective, in terms that many Hasidim had once again embraced the Talmudic tradition. What aided these changes in Hasidism was that the role of the community leaders, the tzaddik or rebbes, was changing. In the earliest expression of Hasidism, consistent with contemporary Gnostic Judaism, every Jew was supposed to aspire to the level of spiritual attainment characteristic of the tzaddik and thereby become a vessel for the Shechinah, the female aspect of God who dwelt on earth. Once the spirit of the Shechinah had entered an individual then they became truly part of the Jewish community and carried the sparks of Adam in their bodies as a messiah. Every Jew was supposed to be an intermediary between God and Man with the power to shape the world according to their will. Towards the end of the 18th century, many of those who had converted to Hasidism were arguing that this hope was an unrealistic expectation as higher levels of consciousness were simply beyond most Jews. Uneducated, working Jews continued to embrace the morality of the Orthodox Judaism with which they were familiar and could not understand the arguments of Sabbateanism that redemption was achieved through being sinful. According to influential Hasidim, R. Yaakov Yosef, only the leaders of a Hasidic community could reach the higher levels of spirituality characteristic of the tzaddik, and the best others could do is to attach themselves to him and then learn over time through his leadership. (Zuroff 1999: xliv) Only the community leaders were free of sin and therefore adequate vessels for the Shechinah. Over time, this understanding of the tzaddik came to dominate most Hasidic communities or what came to be known as “courts”. From everyone hoping to realize an existential condition called tzaddik, who like an ubermensch should come to realise that they could shape the world as intermediaries between God and Man, now Hasidism came to believe that, . . .the tzaddik, is divinely inspired, and that his soul is constantly connected with the higher realms of the divine hierarchy of forces (which Hasidism adopted from the symbolism of the kabbalah). The tzaddik thus represents a divine power and serves as an intermediary between the worshipper and God himself. This understanding of the Hasidic community leader in these terms was certainly not an aspect of either orthodox Judaism or the early form of Hasidism as advanced by the Ba’al Shem Tov. To be clear, as Dan observes,

707 The role of the tzaddik in [Hasidism] did not reach its full development, in theory and in practice, until the third generation of the Hasidic movement, and its final form was established towards the end of the 18th century by the disciples of Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezeritch, the disciple of the Besht. Unlike the original form of Hasidism, the tzaddik became understood as leaders who would mediate the common man’s relationship with God. Although initially acceptable and requiring little change in how Hasidism was understood and taught, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s upheavals, at a time when enlightenment principles were thought by some to be threatening Jewish communities across Europe, this emerging steeply hierarchical social structure made the entire movement susceptible to succumbing to the reintroduction of orthodoxy as the entire movement now rested on the decisions of very few community leaders. Fearing modern incursion into Jewish life, many of the Tzaddik returned to the established orthodoxy as written in the Talmud. This meant that by the middle of the 19th century, as a response to modernity, Hasidism had changed from a socially radical social movement hoping to reverse the established moral beliefs and static inactivity of Medievalism in Jewish life, the ultimately Gnostic vision, to becoming itself a bastion of unchanging, inactive, Medievalism by once again embracing Orthodoxy. As Gellman observes, As Hasidism became more entrenched in the nineteenth century, it lost its aura as a radical religious movement. . . Hasidism of the turn of the twentieth century was reactionary, an unyielding bulwark against modernity. It was far more an expression of Orthodoxy and conservative cultural values than of the radicalism that some perceived in its origins. (Gellman et., al., 2018: 557) The result of this transition to Orthodoxy is nicely captured when the Russian government hoped to force changes upon Jewish communities by insisting on new ‘modern’ dress rules that would no longer allow Hasidic Jews to wear their distinctive garb and changes to Jewish education curriculum making it more modern. Although resistance to these new laws was not uniform across Eastern Europe, many Hasidic leaders did indeed passionately try to resist the new dress codes including some, such as Yitshak Meir Alter of Ger and Avraham Landau of Chekhanov, who argued that a Hasidic Jew should rather die than compromise their dress codes. (Gellman et., al., 2018: 533) As this resistance to modernization was happening, similar resistance was being organized against other proposed steps in the ‘Russification’ of Jews, including the requirement to introduce the Russian language into the heder, or Jewish, education system (Gellman et., al., 2018: 546). That Hasidim did indeed eventually lose these struggle against the new dress codes, at least for a period of time, and that the traditional clothing of Hasidic Jews was

708 successfully outlawed by the Russian government301 affirmed the powerlessness of the tzaddik. This failure also explains why many “ultra-Orthodox” Jews, as they became called, moved away from Eastern Europe into Western Europe, the United States and Australia, where such clothing restriction were not imposed. The demand by the Russian government for Jews to wear modern clothing, similar demands had already been made of Christian communities in Russia, is just one example of the way modern forces both concretising the stance of the Hasidic movement into a more Orthodox position and where, by taking that stance and failing, the tzaddik showed that they actually lacked the capacity to impose their agenda as the true leaders of the Jewish community. This might be contrasted to the success of the Gnostic Jews who helped initiate the First World War to the great benefit of Jews and then managed to overthrow the Tzar to become the true leaders of post-Tzarist Russia. The Tzaddik were proving their incapacity around the same time the Gnostic Jews were displaying, in the most unequivocal terms, their devastating potency. Such examples were not lost on the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe. In the Habsburg Empire of Austria and Hungary, many Jewish leaders were aggressively also trying to limit the erosion of their authority presented by new social freedoms being offered to Jewish communities by Christian leaders. In response to these erosions of its traditional power, the Hasidic movement in Russia created new educational institutions called the yeshivot. The establishment of these Talmudic schools marked most unequivocally the return to traditional Talmudic inspired forms of Judaism which were inconsistent with the Gnosticism of early Hasidism. These schools were not only aimed against the incursions of Western modernity but were equally attempts to resist the growing Gnostic antinomianism of Marxist influenced Russian Jewry. (Assaf and Sagiv 2013: 263) It was not an accident that many of these Orthodox Russian Jews were moved, killed or imprisoned by the new Gnostic dominated Soviet Government. In 1867, Jews were permitted to become full participating members of political organizations, and this resulted in a number of specifically Hasidic political parties being formed. (Gellman et., al., 2018: 532) These new sites of empowerment and Jewish political expression meant that the traditional hierarchies that worked to

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These kinds of laws were most certainly not just targeted against Jews in particular. It has to be appreciated that Tzars had previously outlawed traditional Russian clothing and even introduced a beard tax to encourage men to shave in order to become more Western. This was just how aristocracies achieved their outcomes, not through the kinds of manipulations that we suffer today but through direct legislation. Today we would have movies encouraging new clothing, singers would suddenly start wearing new clothing and not shaving, psychologists would come out to say how mentally ill it was to retain traditional way. . . It is not that today’s leaders, the Gnostic Jews, are any less controlling, they just have more effective strategies that meet less resistance to achieved their desired outcomes.

709 represent the interests of Hasidic Jews were no longer the only avenue by which a distinctly Hasidic voice might be heard. Around the same time, many Jews in Eastern Europe were embracing the growing nationalist movement called “Zionism” and hoped to “return” to Palestine to create a new “Jewish state”. Although “Zionism” most definitely has its origins in Beshtian Hasidism, with what might be called the Orthodox turn after 1818, many Hasidic leaders were no longer supportive of a return to Israel. It was not that some factions of Hasidism did not support a return to Palestine, it was how that return was to be achieved and who would initially immigrate. Hasidim preferred learned Hasidic Jews, steeped in the secret knowledge of gnosticism, as the first wave of immigrants and for them to establish institutions that would ensure the future state of Israel was not only a Jewish, and not secular state, but a Gnostic Jewish state. To this end, Hasidic leaders had supported limited immigration to Palestine, but would only support the “old Yishuv”, or those who were Orthodox, moving to Palestine and not the “new Yishuv” or those new immigrants driven from Eastern Europe by the Russian pogroms after 1881 who had varying degrees of commitment to or knowledge of Judaism as understood by these Hasidic leaders. More nationalistic factions of Zionism hoped for a mass movement and encouraged any Jew, no matter their level of commitment to Orthodox Judaism or Judaism at all, to travel to the pupate Israel. Those who advocated mass movement to Palestine also received support from many Hasidic leaders, especially from those who lived in the Russian Pale, Poland and Romania. Because the general position of ultra-Orthodox Hasidism in the late 19th century was to oppose Zionism, the support from these Hasidic leaders was done secretly and it was hoped that this support would never be made public.302 (Gellman et., al., 2018: 451) There were also massive waves of Jewish immigration away from the regions that were traditionally under the influence of the Hasidim. It is documented that tzaddikim collected money to support these Jews who wanted to move to Palestine and help them to live there using a practice of collection that crossed national borders. (Assaf and Sagiv 2013: 242) This movement of Jews was first one from small towns, where the tzaddik ruled, to large cities. This movement from small towns to large cities was not just the result of the May Laws but was part of a much larger socio-economic movement that was

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Earlier expressions of Hasidism had encouraged a return to Israel, and this continued to be the case as late as 1891. Hayim Israel Morgenstern, wrote, “Even though those who deal with [them] are not so righteous, we have already learned that the spirit of God may find contentment in the simple Jews more than in the completely righteous. . . and we cannot know who the Almighty favors more to sanctify His name, and whose favor will be the greater for it.” This is an affirmation of the belief that nobody knows God’s intentions and that, indeed, ‘bad’ Jews are really the ‘good’ Jews as they are motivated by more natural drives and not by ‘laws’. In evil is the greatest goodness.

710 forcing many rural families, Christian and Jewish, to embrace the hectic prosperity of late 19th century European cities which were increasingly the centres of wealth creation that replaced the former standing of rural towns. Urbanization, industrialization, and the population explosion were as impactful on Jewish populations as they were for the general population of Europe. The population of Jews in Eastern Europe (Russia, Congress Poland, and the Habsburg Empire) grew from 1.2 million in 1800 to a staggering 6.2 million by 1900. This growth occurred despite nearly a million Jews immigrating to either Western Europe, the United States or Palestine between 1880-1900. (Gellman et., al., 2018: 536) This massive growth in population, along with the waves of immigration, further undermined traditional practices and institutions that were not designed for these new conditions. Indeed, Slezkine rightly observes that it was these specific population movements of Jews, all involving Eastern European Jewry, Jews moving into cities, into Western Europe and the United States, and Palestine, set the conditions for Jews to become the dominant global force by the late 20th century. (Slezkine 2004: 12) Finally, the tzaddik courts that had come to be the dominant institutional arrangement of the Hasidic community after 1818, after a period of growth that allowed ostentatious displays of wealth, were in steep decline. Above the observed decline in their perceived potency to achieved outcomes on behalf of Eastern European Jewry, economic forces were also wording the traditional role of the Hasidic court. Although there continued to be lavish displays of wealth, as was expected of the tzaddik as a display of his success, some tsaddik and their families towards the end of the 19th century, the capacity of the tsaddik to generate wealth from depleted communities, for all the reasons already noted, was becoming increasingly difficult. There were simply less Hasidim, due to immigration to cities, the West, and Palestine, and more tzaddik, as male children of tzaddik were expected to form their own courts, and these contradictory forces could not sustain vibrant, wealthy regal courts. As Assaf and Sagiv observe, The depleted and much-impoverished Jewish population of the countryside was now less able to make the regular financial contributions that maintained the Hasidic leaders and their courts in the manner to which they had been accustomed. The appeal of the courts was clearly on the decline, and towards the end of the century, many were experiencing loss of financial clout, and even financial ruin. But the turn of the century, few tsadikim in Russia were still enjoying either the salutary economic conditions of the past of the prestige they had once commanded well beyond their immediate circle of followers. (Assaf and Sagiv 2013: 266) This tension would eventually drive many tzaddik into bankruptcy and force them to close their courts thereby freeing Hasidim from traditional bonds. The truth was, as acknowledged by some Hasidim at the time, the Hasidic movement had lost its vitality and it had drifted from being a voice for radical social change into become a voice for defending Orthodoxy against change. It was argued by Gnostic Jews that

711 they had, as Gellman et., al., claim, “sacrificed spirituality for rote observance” (Gellman et., al., 2018: 555) In short, the very thing that the Ba’al Shem Tov hoped to overcome, Jewish medievalism, it had become. What can be seen is that in Eastern Europe traditional Jewish social structures were breaking down under combined pressures of modernity and modern ideas, new institutional arrangements and new economic situations. The New Jew As these accounts of what was happening to Jewish communities in the West and the East around the turn of the 20th century show, there were a range of forces within Judaism coming together that would profoundly shape the 20th century about which most people today are ignorant. Just as European society was going through quite dramatic changes, Jewish populations were going through a period of crisis. They too were seeking new certainties with which they could move forward confidently into the 20 th century. Many European Jews came to believe that these changes would necessitate the emergence of the ‘new Jew’, or ‘new Hebrew’, who was required to both address challenges and realise the New World Order foretold through certain messianic interpretations of Torah. The identity of this new Jew, the theology which promised this revitalization, was also available in the form of Jewish Gnosticism as particular shaped by the Messianism of Sabbatai Tzevi. Sabbatai’s teachings had already inspired the Haskalah, Frankism, Hasidism, Marxism, and Zionism amongst other movements, and although it had waned in influence through the late 18th and 19th centuries, these new conditions of crisis brought about its revival. Championed by prominent Jewish thinkers like Berditchevski, Michael Rodkinsohn (Frumkin), Yitzhak Baer, Akiva Ernst Simon, Y. L Peretz, Scholem Asch, Judah Steinberg, Gershom Scholem and Martin Buber, Gnostic Judaism would, a century later, dominate Jewish life. These people were not Rabbis but were mainly literary figures. It was to these literary Jews that disillusioned European Jews turned for a new vision of Judaism faced with crisis on all fronts with a new vision of what should be prized by Jews in the future. As historian Menachem Brinker wrote, Different movements were operating for the organized immigration to the United States, for cultural autonomy for Jews in the nations in which they resided, for enlistment in the Russian socialist movement, and finally for gradual immigration to Eretz Yisrael and the erection of a new Jewish centre. The fermenting Jewish youth wrangled between these options. Yet even those youngsters who were still living a partial Jewish life had lost faith in the ability of the rabbinical authorities to lead them. According to the model set by the educated Russian youth – though for utterly different reasons – the young began to look to writers and literary intellectuals for spiritual guidance. (emphasis added, Brinker as seen in Dekel 2010: 170)

712 There was growing agreements amongst Jews that there had to be change, there had to be a rejection of the old ways to find something new and that this new vision was being articulated by these literary figures. Many of the problems facing Judaism at the turn of the 20th century seemed to replicate the conditions under which Hasidism had first arisen in the 18th century. As Lookstein observed, “The conditions that contributed to the rise and spread of Hasidism in the eighteenth century reappeared in the twentieth century.” (Lookstein 1956: 250) In the West, the majority of Jews, after over a century of emancipation and active enlightenment, had apparently embraced Western practices to such a degree that many Jews were sincerely converting to Protestantism. Indeed, there are many people living in places like England or France today who are ignorant of the fact that their relatively recent ancestors, in the late 19th century, were practicing Jews. This process of inclusion into European life was so successful that it seemed that many young Jews at the turn of the 20th century had lost or had actually forgotten what it even meant to be Jewish. The problem that confronted the desire to reinvigorate Judaism was that European Jewry, especially in the West, was suffering from what Yerushalmi described as “Jewish amnesia”, they had forgotten what it meant to be a Jew. As Neumann (2019: 174) also observes, The Jew’s loss of memory in the nineteenth century refers to his entire collective attachment to Judaism, both outer and inner. Forgetting and denying one’s origin, and the violent tendency to exclude this collective layer, characterizes this era of Jewish attempts at assimilation. Only now does this second and real rootlessness of the Jewish person take place. As an atomized individual, he has also lost and abandoned the inner seedbed of his collective ties, which had until then, albeit with great difficulty, compensated for the loss of a real homeland and the foundation for a livelihood.303 The “rootlessness” did not occur when Jews decided to leave their historical homeland after the destruction of the Second Temple, but their true rootlessness was happening in the 19th century, with the forgetfulness of what it meant to be Jewish. Into this meaningless void, this tabula rasa, anything could be constructed and then imposed on Jews as “authentic” Judaism no matter how heretical these ideas might have appeared to Orthodox Judaism in the centuries since they left Israel. This was in no small part the result of the influence of Nietzsche on a generation of “young, sensitive, and highly impressionable Jews in the midst of acute personal crises that involved existential agonies concerning their personal identities.” (Golomb 2004: 4) As a solution, Nietzsche proposed the need for “authenticity”, and it was

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It is of more than passing interest to see how the successful reversal of values has meant that it is now the average Westerner who is, “an atomized individual” who “has lost and abandoned the inner seedbed of his collective ties”. This is exactly what was intended with the reversal of all existing values, it is not the Westerner without roots, without meaning, without a home. The Westerner now occupies one of any number of “multicultural” spaces each equally devoid of meaning or shared purpose.

713 the desire to find Jewish authenticity that motivated young Jews to try to rediscover or, even, reinvent Jewishness. As Lazier observes, capturing the resonance of Nietzschean thinking for this movement, This was no call for liberal reform. It was a call for existential revolution, a thoroughgoing reorientation of the self. The invention of self-writ small in this fragment and writ large in the diaries was meant to erase every trace of exile and to emerge – cleansed, pure and whole – as something prophesied by a Jewish version of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. (Lazier 2008: 149) This new “authentic” identity could not be supplied by the Rabbinate who claimed Judaism was anything but what was required of the Ubermensch. The Rabbinate were seen, in many ways, as being a large part of the problem by a new generation of rebellious Jews. Buber, for example, argued that the responsibility for the 19th century trend to assimilationism could be blamed on the rabbinic tradition itself because of the way it tried to sustain an untenable “Jewish” way of life that was out of step with modernity and denied Jewish vitality. (White 2007: 367) The rabbinate appeared to give the no win option of either remaining marginalized and isolated from modernity by believing in medieval ideas or assimilate. This was part of a general faltering of trust in traditional Jewish leaders, as shown by their inability to defend their particular vision of Jewishness against Christian state incursions in places like Russia, that had European Jewry actively seeking alternatives. In this vacuum of authority, many young Nietzschean influenced Jews, sometimes collectively referred to as the Tse’irim or “the Young Ones”, (Golomb 2004: 79) turned to Jewish literary intellectuals. One group formed around the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, German Jewish brothers who were well respected authors and critics. In 1899, the Hart brothers invited Gustav Landauer, renowned Jewish anarchist and Martin Buber, a then emergent Jewish intellectual, to meet at the Neue Gemeinschaft (New Society). This meeting can be seen as an attempt to bring together very different visions of what might be a Jewish future and shows the attitude of unity, synthesis, and originality that Jews at the turn of the 20th century hoped to nurture. Other writers in this circle were Jewish anarchist Erich Muhsam, Else Lasker-Schuler, German-Jewish poet, and Jewish Austrian theatre critic and satirist Fritz Mauthner along with incredibly influential Jewish authors like Micha Yosef Berdichevsky, Yehoshua Tahon, Mordechai Zeev Braude, and Zvi Melter, (Ohana 2019) for their new direction and all these intellectuals had not only Hasidic heritage but were considered to be advancing an “heretical religiosity”. (Ohana 2019) Berdichevsky, more than anyone else, voiced what it meant to be a New Jew at the turn of century through a recreation of early Hasidism, one that synthesised elements of the Haskalah, which was a novel invention. Incredibly, this new expression of Judaism would eventually come to thought of as Judaism as such by millions of Jews around the world. As Ross observes,

714 In their appeal to Hasidism, these authors did not seek to recapture the very same religious or traditional framework which they had already abandoned in their youth. What they sought was, rather, their identity as Jews, drawing spiritual sustenance from a world whose original religious content was already destroyed from them beyond repair. (Ross 2088: 46) There was no return to a “lost” Jewish identity, as they had no way of return, they had no ‘bridge’ by which they could return, as everything in the past had been forgotten. As Mendieta wrote, many Jews, . . . committed to the values of the Enlightenment, which had catalysed their incomplete assimilation, and set adrift from their traditions by centuries of secularization, assimilation, and religious amnesia, Jewish intellectuals were poised in a unique social position from which they could seek to salvage and refashion their religious traditions while at the same time trying to save the best of the Enlightenment from the corrosive effects of capitalism. (Mendieta 2020: 4) These Jews were seeking out something new but, at the same, trying to draw inspiration for an established tradition about which they had forgotten. (Ohana 2019) As a correspondent wrote of American Jewry in 1889, acknowledging that spiritual Judaism had been forgotten, “There is no faith and no knowledge of the Lord among most of our brethren who live in this land . . . the younger generation has inherited nothing from their parents except what they need to make their way in the world; every spiritual teaching is foreign to them.” (as seen in Sherwin 1997: 92) This project of reinvention was both extremely critical of traditional Judaism, yet advanced an optimistic project, the voicing of a new Judaism that was not an absolute break with the past. Reform Jews argued that the old ways were passive and responsible for the terrible suffering that Jews had suffered over the millennia. To make this argument resonate, they greatly exaggerated the historical suffering of the Jews at the hands of Christians to convince young Jews, who had never experienced these hardships, that these reforms were necessary. Sherwin argued (1997) that Jews with a political agenda used this narrative of oppression to contrast a supposed passive time, when Jews suffered terribly at the hands of the goy, to an active time, where determined and heroic efforts of the new political leaders was liberating global Jewry. This is what made neo-Hasidism not only innovative in terms of its creativity but appealing in terms of its declaration of traditional beliefs even if those “traditions” had no precedent. This was certainly not just a transformation for Jews but one that they were certain was so important, so revelatory, that it was a new direction proper for the whole world to embrace as God had demanded. As influential Jewish scholar Green wrote, “Neo-Hasidim” consisted of, “believers in an “essential spirit” or in certain teachings of Hasidism which they sought to promulgate in the non-Hasidic world.” (Green 1984: 11) Christianity, although some tentative steps were made in the years surrounding the Second World War, has yet to take these strides that rejects elements of orthodoxy to make it harmonious with modern life.

715 In those early years of the 20th century, this relatively small group of religiously informed but secularly educated intellectuals reinvented Judaism thereby creating a new vision for the entire world. As Gnostic Jews, influenced by kabbalah, they all took Nietzsche’s observation that “God was dead” seriously but this did not result, as it did for Christians, in secularism but in a turn, in part, to the mystical tradition of kabbalah where, as already outlined, God was thought to have withdrawn from the world and was, therefore, from a mortal perspective, “dead”. It was this distance from God, the deafening silence of God, that allowed Jews around the turn of the 20th century to describe the Jewish revival in terms of allowing “religious atheists” as Lukacs describes them or “non-secular secularists” as Scholem described them (Mendieta 2020: 6) or advocating a “humanistic religion” as Erich Fromm described it. (Fromm 1950) All of these authors are trying to capture the humanist religion that would emerge from these times, Gnostic Judaism, a religion in which there was no active God, a religion where man asserted its own Natural drives on the world as the universally true. Fromm writes of such a religion that is “centred around man and his strength”. This kind of religion has “the experience of oneness with the All, based on one’s relatedness to the world . . .” That is, it was through the total commitment and orientation onto the world that the oneness of everything, the Shechinah, was to be recovered as the first stage of redemption. Such religions are about achieving greater strength, greater autonomy, greater self-expression, which they understand as “freedom” and not about obedience to God. It is above all about “self-realization” or “self-expression” which they understand as being “free of all doctrine or dogma, allowing you to discern and verify for yourself what is true.” It is this untainted “self” that is above all thought to be a natural creature as a perfect vessel for the spirit that is the Shechinah. As Jewish scholar Joshua Liebman wrote in 1946, “Psychotherapy is a method by which we stop being someone we thought we were (or have been told we ought to be) and become ourselves.” (Liebman 1946: 12) Psychotherapy was all about uncovering our true selves, our sexual selves, our greedy selves, that self we were taught by Christiantiy to deny. What psychotherapy is really saying is to affirm yourself, be proud of who you are, if you are a homosexual, greedy, lustful, affirm that as who you are and embrace it. This attitude was nicely captured when actor Will Smith sought help from a “sex therapist”. Smith said, What [the therapist] was doing was essentially cleaning out my mind, letting it know it was okay to be me and be who I was. It was okay to think Helle is fine. It doesn’t make me a bad person that I’m married, and I think Halle is beautiful. Whereas in my mind, in my Christian upbringing, even my thoughts were sins. That was really the process that [the therapist] worked me through to let me realize that my thoughts were not sins and even acting on an impure thought didn’t make me a piece of shit. (Smith as seen in Lowery 2021)

716 This captures exactly what Gnostic Jews are trying to persuade people to do, to embrace their “natural drives”, like lust, and denounce Christian morality as “life denying” by making people feel guilt. What is being asked is for people to “love yourself”, as you are, without guidance by the Father and this goes in the exact opposite direction of Christianity. As St Augustine wrote, “The city of God is made by the love of God pushed to the contempt of self; the earthly city, by the love of self, pushed to the contempt of God.” This is exactly what psychotherapy is advocating, love yourself and do not try to be something better, love yourself, as you are, and have contempt for God. Properly understood, psychotherapy is just an arm of the Gnostic project. God, in such a religion, is “a symbol of man’s own powers which he tries to realize in his life” not about a God having “power over man”. Here can be seen all the Gnostic features of this new religious movement. It is humanistic, seeing no role for God, aimed at “experiencing the . . . All” which is achieved only by destroying the world, it is about material comfort, self-realization and about the power of humanity to affirm life through sex and drugs but this can only be achieved by re-creating the world. The list of such religions that are also “humanistic” is fascinating. He includes, “early Buddhism, Taoism, the teachings of Isaiah, Jesus, Socrates, Spinoza, certain trends in the Jewish and Christian religions (particularly mysticism) . . .” (Fromm 1950) Jesus and the mystical Christian tradition are mentioned because Fromm is insinuating that Jesus was in fact a Gnostic Jew that has been misunderstood. Although it is argued that uncovering this inner self brings some kind of peace, overcomes a struggle with oneself, in truth it seems to just initiate a never satisfiable drive for more sex, more money, more power. It is the opposite of Jesus’ message of peace. These different ways of referring to the emergent new Judaism certainly affirms that this revival was most certainly not a desire to embrace the then contemporary practices of mainstream Hasidism but turned to this movement for mystical inspiration in order to once again understand, or so they thought, what it meant to think like Jews in the modern world. After all, “. . . Judaism is not only a way of living but a way of thinking. . .” and it was so that this thinking would become universal that the Gnostic aspired to realize. As Hillel Zeitlin wrote, This was Hasidism in its origin, that of the Besht304. This does not mean that [neo-Hasidism] wants to be that original Hasidism. It rather wants to bring into contemporary Jewish life the freshness, vitality, and joyful attachment to God in accord with the style, concepts,

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As already noted, the Besht is an acronym for the Ba’al Shem Tov who is believed to have been the founder of Hasidism. The neo-Hasidim or Gnostic Jews thought that they were returning to his original vision of Hasidism while thoroughly rejecting the Orthodox Hasidism of the turn of the century Jews.

717 mood, and meaning of the modern Jew, Just as the Besht did – in his time – according to the style, concepts, mood and meaning of Jews of that time. (Zeitlin 1920s/2019: 15) It has to be appreciated, that, as Rabbi Moses Hayyim Efraim of Sudlikow taught, “The Torah must be interpreted in each generation according to that generation’s needs and according to the soul-root of those who live at that time.” (as seen in Sherwin 1997: 101) The Torah must be contextualised within the times as is any other instrument. As Scholem also wrote, “I do believe that deep philology can have a mystic function if it fosters, accompanies, and evokes the changes of time in its works, and that the worthy transmission of the legacy of the generations [. . .] may involves a deeper relation to the kabbalah, once which is not without reason termed “transmission”.” (Scholem as seen in Kilcher 2010: 24) Sacred text are not the conveyer of unalterable universal truths but should be interpreted as required by the Jewish people at the time. It was thinking like a Gnostic Jew that was most highly prized and certainly not living as a traditional Hasid. As Huss Boaz observed, “These scholars, who identified Kabbalah and Hasidism as Jewish forms of mysticism, affirmed their philosophical, literary and especially, historical value but . . . showed no interest in them as living cultural traditions.” (Huss 2007: 108) None of the scholars identified with neo-Hasidism practiced institutional Hasidism. Indeed, although just about all of them came from Hasidic families, they themselves often lived extremely secular lives and were critical of Hasidism’s practices at the turn of the 20th century. As Green, one of the most important neo-Hasidic thinkers in contemporary society, expresses of contemporary Hasidism from a neo-Hasidic perspective, Contemporary Hasidism largely lives in a very frightened and suspicious relationship with the world around it. Since its alignment with ultra-Orthodoxy early in the nineteenth century, and its fierce battle with emerging secularism as that century proceeded, it has dedicated most of its energies to preserving the old ways of Jewish life in every detail rather than seeking out new realms in which to proclaim God’s presence. The creative and spiritually expansive teachings of the first generation came to be replaced by an extreme conservatism. (Green et al 2019: xxi) Exactly how to understand this revitalization of Judaism is contested. Some, such as Persico and Neumann, think of the Gnostic revival in terms of Neo-Hasidism as a spiritual revival, a kind of response to the failed rationalist project of the Haskalah, what Green et al (2019: xvii) describe as a “quest” for “fiery spiritual devotion”. Others, such as Ross, (Ross 2008: 39) argue that this movement should not be thought of as a spiritual revival at all, as no Rabbis were involved in its development, but more as a search for national identity, a secular and political project wrapped up in a newly minted religiosity. When the earlier account of Gnosticism is considered, it can be seen to be both a spiritual revival and a national political project. IT sought spiritual revival through a thorough going involvement in the world. Neo-Hasidism is highly political and oriented towards the real world and therefore ‘secular’, but it is informed by a particular

718 understanding of Judaism that is not ‘spiritual’ in a Christian sense but is humanist in seeking to return to the natural human drives as expressions of the Shechinah that were believed to have shaped Man in the Garden of Edan where the force that informs Nature and change is thought to be an aspect of God. It is what I have characterised as onto-theological and is therefore prior to the distinction between the secular and the profane. This explains why Judaism is so highly political, the distinction between politics and theology simply does not exist. This politics is a spirituality for the New Age that has found expression in Israel. They encountered Hasidism not only as a way of serving God, although this is important, but also as a way of establishing a national identity that was ethnically Jewish. As again Buber argued, this movement was not concerned just with “the central truth of Judaism and Hasidism” but its ability to help “our age renews its ruptured bond with the Absolute.” (Buber 1963: 218) It was this national/spiritual task of renewal that was characteristic of Neo-Hasidism. This new identity crystalized around a way of thinking that is essentially Jewish and self-consciously differentiates them from the European tradition. Other influential voices in the establishment of neo-Hasidism were Yitzchak Leibush Peretz, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber, Hillel Zeitlin, Yehuda Steinberg, Ahad Ha’am and Shmuel Abba Horodetzki, amongst others, who represent the vanguard of this new Jewishness. It was because this new movement was so strongly associated with identity that it could be easily applied to a political project. Hasidism was a “’spiritual’ response to a more nationalist striving” that was particularly well suited to the Jewish project at the time. As Greenberg observes, “the Emancipation and westernization washed away the Torah centred community framework of our lives as a people.” (Greenberg as seen in Kleinberg 2016: 69) In the late 19th – early 20th century, as many Eastern European Jews migrated into Germany, fleeing Russia as a result of what was perceived as persecution, they brought with them the tainted and worn remnants of a Jewish revival that some believed continued to carry the potential seed of a bright new, reinvigorated Jewish future. At the same time, young Westernized, highly assimilated Jews, were open to accusations, being made by their Eastern brethren, that they had lost their “unique Jewishness” and had come to accept Christian criticisms of Judaism in such a way that they were living with a kind of self-loathing. Many young, angry Jews, continuously reminded of their Jewishness but not necessarily knowing much about it, began to believe that their parents had betrayed Judaism by accepting Western practices. Their parents had made too much of an accommodation with Western Christianised society in pursuit of material success and had lost their unique souls in the process. As a result, many Western Jews were feeling a deep sense of loss and low morale at the turn of the 20th century not dissimilar to the way many Western youths who no longer find their worlds affirmed or their traditions praised feel in today’s world. Eastern European Jews used this sentiment or anguish and resentment to advance their cause and

719 their arguments about the failure of assimilation. This Jewish revival was a “revolt against bourgeois elders, the rejection of assimilation, doubts about the Deutschtum-Judentum synthesis” (Aschheim 1996: 36) The very first author of the new Hasidic revival, who wrote Romantically about Hasidism but did not write about its religious practices, such as the role of the tzaddik, was Michael Rodkinsohn in 1863 in Kehal Hasidim (A Congregation of Hasidim). The attempt to embrace what was perceived to be the positive aspects of Hasidism while rejecting what it had become resonated powerfully with enough young Western Jews, often from wealthy, highly assimilated families. After all, what young person does not like to hear that they are the chosen of God with a special mission to be leaders amongst men. As part of this new learning, these young Jews began to learn not only their religion as presented by people like Rodkinsohn but, as mark of the kind of nationalist fervour informing this movement, they also revitalized their lost language, Hebrew. Hebrew, that was up until that time, like Latin today, a functionally dead language except for ceremonial purposes, suddenly went through a revival as the Hebrew language was identified as one of the indispensable features essential to “Jewishness”. Indeed, this search and differentiation between what was truly essential to Judaism and what was merely peripheral, swept through every aspect of Jewish life. Torah essential, Talmud, peripheral, Hebrew, essential, Halakah, peripheral, Israel, essential, Rabbinic authority, peripheral. If one were to go through this systematically, everything essential is an expression of Sabbateanism while everything peripheral was Rabbinic. It was as a result of this Sabbateanism that “The guiding themes of this renaissance – and its respective emphasis on cataclysm, apocalypse and redemption, on radical anti-evolutionary Utopian modes and the rediscovery of (Jewish) mystic and messianic materials. . . (Aschheim 1996: 34) In their supposed “return” to Gnostic/Hasidic beliefs, that was authentic Judaism, they were actually reinventing what it meant to be a Jew. The embrace of Hebrew as the language of the Jews is the perfect example of how young Western Jews were taking up the Jewish tradition in totally novel ways because they were actually totally ignorant of “real” Jewish life. It was as a result of this ignorance that Hasidic stories resonated so powerfully with 19th century European Jews seeking not only authenticity but validation. The authentic relationship with Judaism that had developed up until the early 19th century had been irrevocably compromised as their parents had followed Sabbatai and tried to move into that which they opposed. These new converts enthusiastically adopted whatever they were being told was what it meant to be a ‘real’ Jew. These novices in the Jewish religion and culture were a tabula rasa upon which anything could, and was, being written. As an insight into how these Jews were thinking towards the end of the 18th century, they their primary publication Aleph, the first letter of the Jewish alphabet, “because they are the first “Hebrews”” thereby refusing to be “the last Jew”.

720

Jewish Gnosticism as Part of the Wider Folk Movement As with so much that takes place within Judaism, the rise of Gnostic inspired neo-Hasidism to prominence within the Jewish community at the turn of the 20th century has its origins as much outside of Judaism as motivated by internal forces. Modernity was not just, as Max Weber observed, a process of “disenchantment”, a process where religious or spiritual causes were delegitimized from accounts of how the world worked as an expression of the Modern mindset, but, in parallel, there was a process of “reenchantment”, or an intentional effort by many Europeans to identify a new role for what some understood to be “spiritualism”. As with the Jewish revival, this was most certainly not just a revitalization of traditional Christianity but aspired to be something not only new but distinctly anti-Christian. This “new spiritualism” from this era has come to us today as the “New Age Movement”. By the turn of the 20th century a number of social experiments by the Jewish community seemed, according to some, to be ultimately unrewarding if not dangerous. As Lookstein queries, in light of these failures, “Can we really blame twentieth century man and twentieth century Jew for their loss of faith in pure reason, for their distrust of barren knowledge, for their suspicion of a soulless intellectualism?” (Lookstein 1956: 251) There was a hunger for the natural, the emotional, the mystical, at the turn of the 20th century and early Hasidism appeared to be the key to a new mystical, revitalized Judaism. Scholem for example, On the one hand, Hasidism was a direct continuation of the chain of tradition and innovation of Jewish mysticism, which started a millennium and a half before the eighteenth century and the Besht. On the other, Hasidism was the modern stage in the long historical process which started int the fifteenth century and made Jewish mysticism a historical force, influencing and sometimes shaping the fate of Jewish communities facing the non-Jewish world. (Dan 1987: 319-320) It was in light of the perceived failure of previous movements that there was a reconciliation that ended the animosity between the Haskalah and Hasidism. It has to be appreciated that “Among the more secularized opponents of the Hasidim were the maskilim, or “enlightened”.” (Sherwin 1997: 105) There was a great deal of animosity, even violence, historically between the maskilim and the Hasidim. The reconciliation between these two movements has its origins in 19th century Hasidism when some schools began to understand that the principles of the Haskalah were perfectly compatible with their project. At the turn of the 20th century there was an “end of [Hasidism’s] great battle with Haskalah”. (Green 1984: 11) Part of what ignited this synthesis was, Romanticism . . . a nostalgic and often desperate attempt to re-enchant the world, through poetry, myth, religion, mysticism, utopia . . . [formed] a powerful current in Central European culture at the beginning of the twentieth century, [which] usually took a

721 conservative and restorative character – the main exception to this being the Romanticism of Jewish intellectuals . . .” (Lowy 2014: 49) It was this idea of “re-enchantment” that was also finding expression amongst Europeans at this time, a re-enchantment that was to a lost ethnically based past and not a revitalization of existing religious practices. This so-called “New Age Movement” was a search for spiritual meaning and significance, that included a rebellion against the established religions, and how this spiritualism might help affirm a renewed sense of racial identity. The emphasis on the Jewish people as a race reflects a changing understanding of what it actually meant to be Jewish. For millennia it was believed that the Jewish religion constituted the Jewish people. Without the Jewish religion there was no such thing as the Jewish people. In the 19th century, under the influence of emergent race theories particularly in Western Europe, it began to be believed that it was the Jewish people that constituted collectively the Jewish religion. (Sherwin 1997: 7) The intimacy between ethnicity and Judaism was greatly strengthened. By this account, it was more reasonable to think of oneself as being a Jew even if they were not religiously “Jewish”. From a Christian perspective, at least initially, this made no sense, Judaism was, after all, a religion like Christianity. It was to help others to understand that the Jewish people preceded the Jewish religion why the term “Semite” was embraced with such enthusiasm at this time. More generally, this ethnic movement became interwoven with the folk nationalist movements that gripped Europe, including European Jews, in the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries. Different peoples throughout Europe, it was thought, whether they were Nordic, Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, appeared to display certain attributes and these attributes were thought to be “natural” expression of certain “races”. There was proposed an intimacy between emergent evolutionary theories and culture. Different people’s cultural practices were increasingly thought to be, what we would describe, as “hardwired” into different races in the same way that certain gendered practices and beliefs were “hardwired” into the different sexes. Italians were passionate, English were stoic, Germans were precise etc. One concern was that these natural racial features were being lost or suppressed by the homogenising effects of modern industrial society. From this fear arose the desire to return to the most “authentic” expression of those racial attributes that were being “alienated”. This was to be achieved through revitalizing the “folklore” of different peoples where these lost attributes might be rediscovered, recovered and invigorated. The very term “folklore” was not coined until 1846 by the Englishman William Thomas as an expression of a movement that was interested in the study of a specific, romanticized, sub-populations within Europe that were predominantly rural and largely illiterate. Indeed, it was believed that these attributes, isolation and illiteracy, had quarantined

722 these populations from the influences modern society and had allowed them to retain their authentic, pre-Christian heritage. Thomas hoped to document the oral histories of the remaining English peasantry with the aim of maintaining, reinvigorating, or discovering, a pre-Christian “Englishness” that was being both destroyed by industrialization, urbanization and forgotten with the introduction of national education programs that were aimed at deliberately marginalized local traditions in their struggle to create a national identity. Thomas was echoing the work of people on the continent like The Brothers Grimm in Germany, who had published their Kinder und Hausmarchen in 1812, Krohn and Antti Aarne in Finland who collected folk poetry, and Frances Child in the United States who was interested in gathering the popular ballads of the English and Scottish immigrants in an attempt identify an authentic “Americanness” that was being lost in an increasingly industrialized and cosmopolitan America. These movements were not just individuals searching for a return to a disappearing past with the hope of invigorating a new beginning, but institutions emerged to further this process of collection. This became part of a state building enterprise informed by notions of race and national character. For example, The British Folklore Society was established in 1878 followed shortly after by the American Folklore Society, which was established in 1888. These societies were established with the explicit aim of uncovering or recovering a primordial national identity that was untainted by the violent imposition of Christianity. It must be appreciated, that Max Muller and Friedrich Nietzsche, indeed, even Martin Heidegger, must be seen as participants in this neo-Romantic revivalist movement, with Muller searching for authentic ‘Aryan’ culture untainted by Christianity in India and Friedrich Nietzsche seeking out the ‘blond beast’ as a preChristian ideal European way of being. As was written in Germany in 1933 expressing this concern. [The West] . . . fails to see that we must lay the blame for the intellectual confusion of our middle class at the doors of Max Muller, Oldenberg, Neumann, Deussen, Wilhelm and others like them. What does the example of the Roman Empire teach us? After the conquest of Asia Minor, Rome became Asiatic; even Europe was infected by Asia and remains so today. Out of Cilicia came the Mithraic cult – the religion of the Roman army – and it spread from Egypt to fog-bound Britain. Need I point to the Asiatic origin of Christianity? (Jung 1955: 216) It is people like Muller and Neumann who praised the East that has helped nurture a great danger in the West. Unlike those of the Third Reich, Heidegger did not simply see Christianity as the problem but the metaphysics of Plato and Greek philosophy more generally that was tainted, as Nietzsche had observed, by Eastern Persian Zoroastrianism, that prioritized the enduring over the dynamic, was where the West, according to Heidegger, had taken a wrong turn and he hoped to deconstruct the metaphysical tradition to unearth another beginning, a missed opportunity, in the work of the Pre-Socratics. It was in the PreSocratics that the authentic European way of being might be recovered. The bombed cities of Europe that

723 resulted from the Second World War really put an end to this nationalist movement in Europe and the United States. This was the irony of the entire enterprise that those participating, despite their obvious intelligence, failed to properly appreciate, it was only from the vantage point of the modern state that their research could really make any sense. The Nazis should really be understood as the ultimate Western expression of this neo-Romantic revival, as will be explored in depth, and despite what is so often claimed today, Christianity was most certainly not involved because this was a decidedly anti-Christian, antimodern, movement that hoped to dismantle what it saw as nothing more than a secularized expression of older Christian beliefs. According to scholars like Mosse ([1970] 1987: 92-93), acknowledging the social milieu from which it emerged, they see neo-Hasidism as giving voice to a neo-Romantic “Jewish Volkism” like that being expressed in England, the United States, the Nordic countries and Germany. Like the Europeans, these Jews were trying to establish a founding national myth, an authentic way of being, for the Jews as a race. It was as part of the neo-romantic turn that Jewish writers hoped to recover the magical, emotional, mystical, and ultimately, political, dimensions of a lost Judaism, free of the taint of Babylon. Perhaps surprisingly given its recent invention, it came to be believed that this authentic Jewish expression would have to involve Hasidism. The reasons for this rather surprising conclusion have already been suggested. Immigration waves from Eastern Europe, a sense of loss of Jewish identity in Western Europe and, which has not been mentioned, a story telling tradition, made Hasidism the right intellectual movement at the right time to reshape Jewish identity. As Dan observes, “In the late 19th century, Hebrew writers began to develop an attitude of sympathy and nostalgia towards Hasidism. . .” (Dan 1991: 184) What Rabbi Lisa Goldstein has described as the “Neo-Hasidic revolution” was the Jewish attempt to revitalise Jewry, to initiate “a radical rethinking of what it means to be a Jew” (Lazier 2009: 9). People like Michael Rodkinsohn, Martin Buber and Micha Berdyczewski in Germany, Hillel Zeitlin and Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira in Poland and Yosef Brenner and Gershom Scholem in Palestine, gathered the stories and sayings of the teachers of Hasidism together, as though Hasidism offered the same opportunities as German folk tales did to the Brothers Grimm. The hope was not to adopt Hasidism’s Orthodox practices but to glean the essence of what it meant to be Jewish from the Hasidic folk tradition. As Dan again wrote, there, . . . is a literary-ideological movement, represented by writers and thinkers like Y. L. Peretz, Scholem Asch, Judah Steinberg and Martin Buber, which puts forward in a most forceful manner the notion that the Hasidism as presented in its writings is the true expression of Jewish and universal humanistic values, while disregarding the theological and mystical

724 dimensions of the concept of the Zaddik, and does not adhere to one or another Zaddik. (Dan 1991: 180) They aspired to capture the essence of Judaism, without taint, and this essence would be found in Gnostic inspired Hasidism. It was being argued at the same time that Orthodox Judaism was not the original Judaism at all but that the mystical tradition of kabbalah, which runs through every element of Hasidism, was the true original Judaism. Hasidism was what was thought to be essential to Judaism and their core beliefs could inform a revitalized political program. Perhaps the most heretical claim of this movement, consistent with Sabbateanism, was that Talmudic law no longer applied. As Lazier observes, “This was first an antinomian Judaism that rejected revelation and law. It was happy to acknowledge itself as deviant.” (Lazier 2009: 8) It was in Hasidism that it was believed that the lost genius of Judaism could still be discerned in all its antinomian glory. As none other than Ahad Ha’am, the so called “teacher of the Jews”, wrote in around 1900, To our shame we must admit that if today we want to find even a shadow of original Hebrew literature, we must turn to the literature of Hasidism; there, rather than in the literature of the Haskalah, one occasionally encounters, in addition to much that is purely fanciful, true profundity of thought which bears the mark of the original Jewish genius. (Ha’am as seen in Scholem 1995: 335) Although it was agreed by the Jewish Gnostics that early Hasidism was important for renewing Judaism in the 20th century, the Hasidic literature itself was delivered differently by different authors. For example, Martin Buber drew particularly on the brief anecdotes, the homilies, and the hagiographic stories told amongst the Hasidic communities. (Dan 1987: 318) Scholem, by contrast, drew upon the main literary text and ideological tools of the established Hasidic works. (Dan 1987: 318) Scholem was critical of Buber approach which he saw as undertaking “anti-philological, demystifying translation practices” which tried to modernise gnosticism “ecstatically” and not philologically. (Kilcher 2010: 23) Scholem wanted to use a thoroughly academic approach to reinvigorating Judaism that opposed to kind of emotional dependence being promoted by Buber. Whatever feature of Hasidism that was emphasised and presented as authoritative, this entire movement needs to be contextualised as an expression of the national revivalism that was inspiring intellectuals to unearth stories and myths that were thought to capture the essential nature or “spirit” of a race. That there was this racial element is important for understanding how this movement managed to shape the world. It was no coincidence that shortly after Rodkinsohn wrote the first work in this tradition in 1863 that both Zionism and the revolutionary spiritual socialism began to dominate European Jewish life. As Dan observes, “A short time after the beginning of his [Rodkinsohn’s] literary activity there appeared the first beginnings of the Love of Zion movement and

725 then of Zionism . . . At the same time, we find the first utterances of the new socialistic ideas among Jews . . .” (Dan 1991: 184) That is, a clearly political agenda, associated with Jews as a race, began to be forcefully advanced. Rodkinsohn, as with many other Jews, was associated with both currents of thought, Zionism and Marxist communism. Neo-Hasidism used various historical sources to search for the ‘Jewish soul’ that some thought was being lost in Modern Christian dominated societies. (Ross 2008: 44) As Martin Buber, himself from an Eastern European Hasidic background, wrote in 1908, “The Hasidic teaching is the proclamation of rebirth. No renewal of Judaism is possible that does not bear in itself the elements of Hasidism.” (Buber as seen in Persico 2014: 288) Reading such an assertion is strange because Hasidism was not a very ancient movement and it had historically been understood by Orthodox Jews as Heretical yet, around the turn of the 20th century, this Gnostic form of Judaism was somehow seen as the only way that Judaism could move forward authentically. Part of the reason for this association can be found in certain scholarly texts that were being published at the time. One important voice for uniting this revitalization with a political program was written by the Christian scholar Robertson Smith in his series of books on the Religion of the Semites which concretely tied together the theological, the ontological and the political as an intimately woven fabric of Judaism. As none other than Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim observed, . . .it was not until 1895 that I achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life . . . all my previous research had to be taken up afresh in order to be made to harmonized with these new insights . . . [this re-orientation] was entirely due to the studies of religious history which I had just undertaken, and notably to the reading of Robertson Smith and his school. (Durkheim as seen in Bloom 1998: 105) This experience was shared by many other intellectually inclined young Jews at the time. Another important text at this time was Moritz Friedlander’s Der vorchristliche judische Gnosticismus which argued Jewish Gnosticism predated other forms of Gnosticism therefore identifying this movement, that remained alive in Hasidism, with what was truly Jewish. What many European Jews were craving was a Jewish revival or renaissance in light of the realization of the important role “religion” played in shaping society generally. As German Jews Eugen Fuchs defiantly declares as much to the older generation of Jews as to the Gentiles, the Jews “want inner regeneration, a renaissance of Judaism, not assimilation. And we want proudly to remain true to our characteristics and our historical development.” (Fuchs as seen in Bolkosky 1975: 13) Also their perceived destiny. These influences created what should rightly be called a renaissance, in the fullest sense of this word, in Jewish thinking and it was being driven by primarily Eastern Europe Jewish authors informed by Eastern European Judaism. Because of the prevalence of Eastern European Jews, Neo-Hasidism became a deliberate and self-conscious attempt to draw inspiration

726 from early Hasidic texts and practices in order to realize a spiritual and cultural revival, but this was not an authentic reappropriation, it was not an attempt to return to Judaism of their fathers, whether those fathers be Orthodox or Hasidic, which they had all definitively rejected. As Lazier observes, “Neither could a mere appreciation for the irrational elements of the Jewish tradition on the part of change-minded liberals compete with the wholesale revival of a heretical ideal among the sons. In some instances, this revival was lived out without much sense for its fact. In others, it was paradoxically and knowing calculated to revitalize Jewish life in the modern world.” (2009: 8) The “fathers” may have expressed some sympathy or appreciation of a mystic tradition and advocated for liberal causes, but this acceptable agenda was seen the hot-headed next generation as an unacceptable compromise. The “sons” saw in the heretical ideas of Zionism and socialism not only the best future for Judaism but its most authentic past. Again, as Martin Buber wrote, his intention was not to reconstruct Hasidism as a practice but to “recapture a sense of the power that once gave it the capacity to take hold of and vitalize the life of diverse classes of people.” (Buber 1963: 218) This was not just a turn to a depleted intellectual tradition but primarily a renewal that was trying to draw on the same inspirational material that had informed the Hasidism of the 18 th early 19th centuries but make it relevant to the contemporary world.

Not Just a Jewish Revival but a Gnostic Jewish Revival The final factor that contributed to the emergence of Gnostic inspired Hasidism as the dominant force in the lives of global Jewry was a general gnostic revival taking place in Western Europe towards the end of the 19th century into the 20th century. Just like what had happened in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe, so again in the late 19th early 20th centuries there was a Gnostic revival. As Lazier (2009: 23) observes, Gnosticism (or a host of phenomena going by the name and understood as such) was revived with a vengeance in this period – on the occult scene, in philosophy, in theology of all persuasions, even in the natural sciences. Its (Gnosticism’s) revival dovetailed with the breakdown of the triumphalist story of the modern West . . . From the very start of the Gnostic revival in the 17th century, Gnosticism was not opposed to the modern project but functioned in a dialectic relationship that sought to reshape modernity into a vision appropriate to gnosticism. As Kilcher (2010: 15) wrote, . . .the issue of the modernity of philology in its kabbalistic variety is far more complex. Its relation to modernity is not antithetical, but dialectical. More precisely, its dialectics re those of procedure and intent, method, and agenda. Whereas the philological methods in the kabbalistic model do indeed correspond to modern scholarly practice, they are at the same time subordinated to a higher goal that lies beyond academic study in its purely

727 pragmatic and didactic intentions. This goal is precisely that of renewal. In theological terms it even reveals itself to be messianic. So the methods so prized by modern epistemologies were also intended to realized a messianic project not oriented by truth, which does not exist, but theological. Perhaps the first author to generate interest on the subject was French academic Jacques Matter, Professor in the Royal Academy at Strasburg, with his Histoire Critique du Gnosticisme (Critical History of Gnosticism) published in 1828. The originality and impact of Matter’s work in Europe at the time is captured in a review which says, “There is perhaps no work which treats this obscure subject at so much length, or which contains so much information concerning it.” (Burton 1829: 379) Just a few years later, Ferdinand Christian Baur wrote two publication that added significant fuel to the smouldering fire of interest in Gnosticism throughout Europe, The Manichaean System of Religion, written in 1831, and the seminal, ground-breaking and extremely influential, Christian Gnosis, written in 1835. The important contribution made by Baur was that he did not encounter the Gnostic tradition critically, as Matter had, through a Christian theologically lens, but wanted to analyse Gnosticism scientifically in an attempt to find “internal connections, in the internal progression of its own respective concept, and to actualize the totality of their moments.” (Baur 1835L iv) Obviously influenced by the work by Hegel, whose own work has been identified as gnostic, Baur wanted to understand how Gnosticism unfolded according to its own internal logic to find its completed expression. Perhaps unsurprisingly given his sympathies, (Scharf 2019) Baur even managed to reconcile Christian Gnosticism with the philosophical system of Hegel. Baur’s work met with a receptive audience which was experiencing dramatic cultural changes associated with the Industrial Revolution. But what is often credited with inspiring the Gnostic revival of the late 19th century most was the discovery of the Philosophumena or The Refutation of all Heresies, a work attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, in 1851. Massive social changes and the growing influence of Gnosticism meant that many Europeans began to challenge Christian Church orthodoxy. These challenges to the traditional Church received a potential direction with the publication of the most influential texts on Christian Gnosticism written in English, C. W. King’s The Gnostics and Their Remains, Ancient and Medieval. This volume was followed by Adolf von Harnack’s massive historical study, The History of Church Dogma in 1888. One of Harnack’s central claims, when he came to talk about Gnosticism, was that it was influential in the early formation of Christianity. He argued that there were multiple currents in Christianity in the early centuries AD. There was both a speculative-philosophical current and a cultic-mystical current. The speculative-philosophical current, which has probably received most of the attention in this volume, was the result of Hellenization in the early Christian Church that many have associated with Gnosticism. This current manifested both

728 gnostic and philosophical features into early Christianity. Besides this Greek influence was an “oriental” or Eastern influence that informed the “cultic-mystical” tradition. In a way, all the dominant regions of the Mediterranean, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, have battled internally throughout history with these competing forces. One more rational, and more influenced by Greek thinking, the other more mystical, more Eastern. Harnack claims that when the Hellenistic tradition dominates and Gnostic currents are widely accepted, as has indeed happened at times in history, then claims that the world is inherently evil come to dominate. As will be explored in greater depth, Gnostic beliefs find two opposing expressions, one is to turn away from the world to live more in the mind with a supposed intimacy with the divine, like scholasticism or the Essenes, the other is to embrace Nature, reject morality and embrace chaos as the best understanding of reality. These different responses are, in a way, explored by the next significant commentator on Gnosticism, Wilhelm Bousset with his Main Problems with Gnosis. He contextualised Gnosticism into a wider historical contest between “light” and “darkness”, “order” and “chaos”. He thought Gnosticism was a syncretic phenomenon that draw on a range of traditions including the Mandaean myths. The Mandaean myths speak of a struggle between the female daemon of darkness that rose from the dark abyss and the masculine god of light who descended to earth from heaven. There was also the Babylonian myth that spoke of the clash between Marduk, the god of light, and Tiamat, the goddess of Chaos. In a way, both trajectories in the response to the Hellenic influence on Christianity can be seen in the traditions that come to inform Christian Gnosticism, one response to embrace the God of light and order, the other is to turn to the God/goddess of darkness and chaos. Both light and darkness are potentialities in the Gnostic tradition. One is ascetic while the other is hedonistic, but both are world denying. Richard Reitzenstein also made an important contribution by exploring pre-Christian gnosticism and how gnosticism appears in the New Testament. By the turn of the 20th century, Gnosticism was not only a theoretical consideration in the history of Christianity but was having a real impact in the world. These rumblings within Christianity were greatly amplified with the publication of the English version of the Gnostic Text Pistis Sophia in 1896 which fed a growing appetite in Europe for authentic Gnostic texts. The re-emergence of Christian Gnosticism had authors trying to claim that there was a more authentic Christianity that had been intentionally suppressed by a male dominated Catholic Church of Rome in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.305 They argued that the Christian Gnostic texts showed the early church to be one primarily informed by “love” and not

305

Of course, this account was resurrected first in the novel by Dan Brown and later in the movie titled “The Da Vinci Code”. These explore the idea that the early Christian Church suppressed the female aspect of Christianity and that she is actually the long sought “Holy Grail” that fled to France to escape persecution.

729 primarily driven by the Greek influences of “intellect”, “reason” and “reality” as Catholic orthodoxy had taught. What political activists in the 19th and early 20th century found in Christian Gnosticism was a radical political agenda, that appeared to coincide with emergent social causes that were already being agitated by Gnostic Jews. These neo-Gnostics believed that Gnosticism presented with an alternate agenda than that historically pursued by the Christian Church and that this alternate vision had been actively suppressed over the centuries by a patriarchal church informed by its own political agenda. What some authors found in Christian Gnosticism was a political program advancing ideas of equality, justice and selffulfilment that seemed to challenge the hierarchal institution that the Christian Church had become that seemed determined to maintain established orthodoxies. One of the groups that enthusiastically accepted this reading of the Christian Gnostic texts was the emergent feminist movement who thought that the female element that was strongly expressed in the early Church had been intentionally suppressed. This belief was harmonious with a growing movement amongst working woman that it was not right that they were not being treated like men in the workplace. As Jenkins observes, “Late nineteenth-century activists saw Jesus and his first followers as proto-feminists, whose radical ideas were swamped by a patriarchal orthodoxy.” (Jenkins 2002: 125) These Christin Gnostic ideas were also enthusiastically embraced by the extremely active occult movement that thrived in late 19 th century Europe. At this time “occultism was as popular as spiritualism”. (Heinze 2004: 54) This female dominated social phenomenon that was extremely popular, and lucrative for some, at the time came to advance the idea that Gnostic Christianity and Judaism was actually the authentic expression of these movements as, it was claimed, advanced by the antinomian Jesus. These “progressive” ideas, they argued, were then suppressed by the male dominated Church. It was this movement, perhaps for the first time, that successfully recontextualised ideas that had historically been thought “deviant” or “degenerate” as “social progress”. Occultists like H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant and Anna Kingsford, all argued for a “return” to what they came to believe was the authentic Jesus movement. A Jesus movement with a significant female presence. Gnosticism continued to influence Western intellectuals well into the 20th century. People like Carl Jung, although explicitly trying to rationally explain Gnostic myths through his psychological frame, was actually applying a Gnostic influenced thinking to Gnostic myths even though at times, he seemed ignorant of his own gnostic meta-analysis. Most importantly, not only did these academic investigations into Gnosticism sometime advance the idea that Christian Gnosticism was in some way the authentic Christianity but that the earliest forms of Gnosticism were also the authentic expression of Judaism. People like Burton argued that Jews were exposed to the ideas of Zoroastrianism while exiled in Babylon

730 and that these ideas were important for shaping the mystic tradition that became known as kabbalah. As Burton wrote, The kabbalah . . . contains many doctrines concerning angels and other mystical points, which can only have come from an Eastern quarter; and the secondary, or allegorical, interpretation of Scripture, with which the kabbalah abounds, began soon after the return from captivity. (Burton 1829: 383) Burton is observing the earlier identified fracture within Judaism of the late pre-Christian era as one of contest between those who were using allegorical understandings of scripture to reach conclusions not readily available from a conventional reading of the texts and that these Jews were developing a form of Judaism at odds with Talmudic forms. It was being argued that it was only after returning from exile that Jews displayed these “Eastern” ideas. So, Gnosticism did not only offer a more authentic expression of Christianity, one that could be wielded to support political principles active at the time, but it also offered a more authentic Judaism. Indeed, it was being discovered by academics at the time that Jewish Gnosticism, once totally unknown, actually preceded all other Gnostic teachings and had been the result of a hybridization between very ancient Jewish beliefs and Zoroastrianism. As already observed, this led some scholars to believe that Rabbinic Judaism, that emerges after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, was actually an inauthentic expression of Jewish beliefs and one that may have done a great deal of violence to the original intent of the movement. These ideas would resonate powerfully with a group of Eastern European Jews raised on a Hasidism shaped by the Gnosticism of kabbalah believing that the Messiah had been Sabbatai Tzevi and he had reinterpreted this tradition giving it new vitality. A forward for Jews seemed open to a group of enthusiastic young men prepared to take that opportunity. Early attempts at assimilation seemed to confirm the argument made by some Jews that Jews would never be truly welcomed as Jews into European society. Jews who were prepared to forgo their Jewishness and assimilate into Christian society, accept European norms, might be conditionally accepted into European society as formal equals but Jews, as Jews, thinking like Jews, valuing as Jews, would never be accepted as equals because Christianity found truly Jewish behaviour noxious and immoral.306 A good

306

One important moment in the formation of this mindset was what has become known as the Dreyfus Affair. This was a situation where a senior French military officer of Jewish descent, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, was accused and initially found guilty of treason for handing secret military information to the Germans. Through the efforts of French non-Jews, Dreyfus was eventually found innocent and the apparent real culprit Ferdinans Walsin Esterhazy, was discovered. Whatever the truth of the guilt or innocence of Dreyfus, the French are vindicated either way as it was French people who fought for both his prosecution and his release. But this has gone down in Jewish history as an important example of how Jews would never be welcome in European society. They would always suffer persecution. It must be remembered, at the time, global Jewry were definitely supportive of German interests and hoped the German King would, as he had promised, help realize a Jewish state in Palestine. When clear examples

731 example of this contest between these two communities was when, during World War II, numerous Jews from East End London were moved into country communities for their safety. These rural communities opened their doors and initially welcomed the fleeing Jews into their homes. In return, to the surprise and disgust of the rural communities, these urban Jews became enthusiastic black-market traders, selling things that nobody else seemed to be able to acquire at highly inflated prices. As a result of this kind of behaviour, hatred towards Jews rose dramatically over a very short period of time in areas where Jews had been placed. As Cyril Radcliffe observed in a most English way, Jews were displaying “a lack of pleasant standards of conduct as evacuees” because they were showing “an inordinate attention to the possibilities of the ‘black market’”. (Radcliffe as seen in Philpot 2018) Many in Britain had come to understand the entire war effort as largely being undertaken in the defence of European Jews against Nazism but, while their husbands and children were away fighting and dying, fighting against those who would once have been thought to be good Protestant Christians like themselves, Jews were on the home front profiteering. Apparently trying to take advantage of those who had opened their doors to them to offer them comfort and safety. What is really happening here is not a simple case of immorality or lack of appreciation but the expression of two very different moral frameworks, two different worlds, with conflictual even opposing views, coming into contact for the first time and, as happens under such circumstances, resulting in conflict. From a Christian perspective to “exploit” those who have helped you, suffered for you, sacrificed for you, is to be ungrateful, underhanded and greedy. We can see in this list of character attributions not only a list of “sins” but also stereotypical portrayals of the way Christians see Jews. Racketeering is immoral behaviour from a Christian perspective in the sense that, again as Radcliffe observed, “in wartime when a nation dislikes the struggle for individual advantage and feels the need for homogeneity above everything else”. (Radcliffe as seen in Philpot 2018) A community, as a community, sacrifices together to achieve a shared beneficial outcome. Jews were refusing to participate in the moral community as they were not sacrificing individual gain for the collective good. From a Gnostic Jewish moral perspective, to inhibit people pursuing their own material interests to benefit themselves is the immoral behaviour. This is life denying. This behaviour is not just reserved for non-Jews. Even amongst Jews, one will ask what will be given in return when considering doing anything for someone else. People, from a Gnostic Jewish perspective, that is all people, are naturally greedy and utility maximisers so to try to subvert this natural inclination, as instilled in us by God, with man-made “moral constraints” is not only

of miscarriages of justice are considered, like the trial of historian David Irving, the truth of the Dreyfus Affair may never be known. It was such an important trial for world history that the newly emerging political Hasidim, with the wealth of the Rothschild’s behind them, would do anything to make this appear as an example of antisemitism to delegitimize future accusations against Jewish anti-Western activities.

732 “life denying”, psychologically harmful as somebody like Russian Jew Ayn Rand explicitly argues, but ultimately evil. As Erich Fromm criticises Western civilization, “Children in Sunday school learn that honesty and integrity and concern for the soul should be the guiding principle of life, while “life” teaches us that to follow these principles makes us at best unrealistic dreamers.” This is how Gnostic Jews see the world. To believe that one should be “good”, to be honest and truthful is to be a fool, a dreamer. That is because they themselves are often not honest and truthful and therefore transfer those beliefs onto the world. Westerns are taught to be good, to be honest, while Gnostic Jews are raised, from birth, to believe that morality is not just difficult, not even wrong, but evil. It is as a result of these different ways of seeing and acting in the world that it was believed through much of Europe that, The essential problem was that Jews were by nature ethically deficient: their religion, if it could be called that, was nothing more than a fossilized relic of a tribal code of values, in which ethical behaviour toward outsiders was neither practiced nor preached, and they had little if any capacity for appreciating cultural morality. Hence their disquieting success in the new realms of industry and commerce which rewarded just such instrumentalism. Hence, too, their absolute disqualification for being accepted into the German nation. (Glick 1982: 550) From a Jewish perspective, it is not, after all, the British people who saved the Jews from the bombs and gave them comfort and safety but their God. In being safe they were indebted to their God for saving them and the best way to do that was to continue their God given mission as the chosen people by carrying through “Her” project with even more enthusiasm and determination. As Heschel asks regarding the making of ‘bread’, should “the farmer, the merchant and the baker” be credited for the bread on the table or should all thanks be given to God? Heschel argues, “Just as we pass over the mystery of vegetation, we go beyond the miracle of cultivation” and “bless Him who makes possible both nature and civilization”. (Heschel 1955: 63) That is, it is not the farmer, the merchant or the baker who should be credited for putting bread on the table because, human causation, surprisingly for what has come to be understood as an extremely humanist movement, is that God deserves all the credit because God made the vegetation and allows it to grow as well as creates the “civilization” within which it is made. No God, no bread. You should bless God who makes both nature and civilization possible not the human who simply functions in their role. So, Jews have no debt to the people of England or to anyone else for saving them or for dying in foreign lands on their behalf or for trying to address past wrongs but what Jews are morally obliged to do is to take advantage of God’s blessings and advance their interests and their God as is proper and reasonable to human Nature. In this particular situation, the Jews that had been moved to the country were asked by authorities to stop black market racketeering but flatly refused and instead requested the British government to do something about the growing ‘antisemitism’. Here is a perfect

733 example of the irreconcilability of these two worldviews, Gnostic and Christian. The only way that we can live together is, as is happening, if one side loses their God, loses contact with the divine. If all sides were to accept that we are just greedy by nature and that we should just pursue self-interest and to not do so is actually a kind of madness, as is happening, then we can not only live side-by-side, but Jews can be seen our natural leaders for showing the error of our past behaviour. Does this sound familiar? What we clearly have is Christianity prepared to surrender its God. As Jewish scholar Eric Neumann rightly boasts, . . .a progressive de-Christianisation is taking place today, because the collective movement of modern man entails an obvious regression to earlier pagan levels, against which the individual cannot defend himself . . . Thus, this process is especially affecting the Christian peoples, who – as peoples – are not actually Christian, and whose Christian culture has fallen into decay. (Neumann 2019: 164) One cannot be angry about what Neumann observes; we could not deny that de-Christianisation is taking place and that “Christian culture has fallen into decay”. The realization that Jews would never be accepted into European society as Jews encouraged some, a very small minority at the turn of the 20th century, to embrace neo-Hasidism. As Lazier (2009: 7) observes, “Before, liberal Jews had disavowed Hasidim as retrograde enthusiasts. They banished these “daughters of darkness” from sight. But in the inter-war years, they stressed the affinities of Hasidism for liberal Judaism . . . declared it born in the spirit of liberalism.” Reading Leon Pinsker’s Auto-emancipation, the clearest text for understanding the early motivations for Zionism, one can only conclude that it is a call to Jews to be Jews and the realization that this outcome cannot be realized in a Christian society. Some, therefore, called for the establishment of a Jewish state. Not, to be clear, a state for Jews but a Jewish state. Another response to the same realization was an attempt to reinvigorate Judaism with the ultimate aim of dominating and eventually destroying Christianity. This destructive project motivated Austrian writer Karl Kraus to described Eastern Europe at the turn of the century as “an experimental laboratory for the end of the world” (Kraus seen in Heuer 2017: 1) It is not that they were planning to physically destroy everything but that the annihilation of things, in terms of denying cultural norms, as the things themselves and not as instruments, was core to their project. They truly planned for the end of the “world” qua world. Just like folklorists across Europe and the United States who were searching for a lost authentic mode of national identity that was being eroded by the forces of modernity. Gnostic Judaism Begins in the United States. Although Zionism and spiritual socialism had a presence in the United States before the turn of the 20th century, it was not until a wave of immigrants, particularly Michael Levi Rodkinsohn (who changed

734 his name to Frumkin), came to the United States from Europe and actively promoted their peculiar and novel form of Judaism that Gnostic Judaism had a voice in the New World. Prior to the arrival of Eastern European Jews, American Jews, largely from Germany, were usually quite conservative with many not only owning slaves in the South but actively advocating for the pro-slave cause. After the arrival of these Eastern European Jews to America in the 1880s, Jewishness changed in the United States, and they not only no longer advocated in support of slavery but began to help nurture black resentment against their condition. Michael Rodkinsohn, whose first book on these matters was published in 1863, a good date for marking the start of Gnostic Jewish revival as a whole, was one of the first people to introduce Gnostic inspired Judaism to the New World. Indeed, like Berdichevsky, Rodkinsohn’s biography is informative for understanding who these new arrivals were. Like so many others who contributed to the foundations of Gnostic Judaism, Rodkinsohn was born into an eminent Hasidic family in Dubrovna, Russia. Again, as was typical of many of the founders of gnostic revival, at quite an early age he rejected being, what he described, “a flaming Hasid”. Like Berdichevsky, this break from Orthodox Hasidism either occurred with or as a result of exposure to the practices and beliefs of the maskil. (Heller 2004: 77) As is also common of many who would help re-establish Gnostic Judaism as a modern movement, in 1881, that most auspicious of years, Rodkinsohn moved from Eastern Europe to Berlin which was then the cradle of the neo-Hasidic revival. As Aschheim wrote, “This movement found institutional representation with the Juedisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, the Juedische Volksheim and the utopian socialist Safed society in Berlin, the Heidelberg sanitorium that combined Judaism with psychoanalysis and the “metaphysical magicians” in Oskar Goldberg’s circle.” (Aschheim 1996: 37) Rodkinsohn was just one of thousands of Eastern European Jews, including Berdichevsky, who were fleeing Russian responses to Jewish intrigues to be shaped by the new thinking in Germany. The general sense was that the Russian people had grown tired of their scheming and just wanted them out. Upon arriving in Germany, Rodkinsohn quickly joined a Reform branch of Judaism. There, he was exposed to radical left-wing politics which he quickly accepted and promoted. As already observed, from 1848, Jews became identified with radical leftist politics despite many of them coming from wealthy families. Ferdinand Lassalle, one of the founders of the German Social Democratic party, was Jewish. (Rothman 1996: 84) He became so critical of Orthodox Judaism that many of his peers suspected that he had actually come to reject Judaism all together. (Heller 2004: 79) Again, as was common with many early neo-Hasid, he travelled around Europe, including spending time in London in 1883, where he was exposed to the heady blend of neo-Romanticism, new Gnosticism, racial nationalism, revolutionary Marxism and a reinvigorated “spirituality” that was gripping Europe at the time. As was common for many Eastern

735 European Jews, Rodkinson moved to the United States in 1889 moving through the Jewish centres in the United States of New York, Chicago and Boston. Rodkinsohn wrote extensively as he intellectually returned to his Hasidic origins but with new religious insights and a new, sometimes critical, understanding of Hasidism. As critical Jewish author of “the new Hasidism”, Ephraim Dynard, wrote about Rodkinson’s Hasidic influenced writings in the United States, Rodkinson has paved the way with his wonder tales of these rabbis, and imitators have grown up like wild grass around him, so that now there is not a single rag [Yiddish journal] in all of America that does not print “the deeds of the holy ones” almost daily, and every lying good-for-nothing has found a way to make his living off of them, and the bigger the lie, the bigger his name and his paycheck. Claims that Rodkinsohn was lying to get a bigger “paycheck” may be in reference to rumors amongst the Jewish community, most of whom loathed Rodkinsohn and his agenda, that Rodkinsohn had admitted to a wood merchant from Riga that he had published books claiming that they were collections of traditional Hasidic Tales when they were in fact largely fabricated. As already discussed, around the middle of the 19th century, there were many books being written claiming to be authentic traditional myths told by people living in isolated communities. This was part of the folkish turn where people confronted by the radical social changes being brought about by the industrial revolution were seeking solid foundations upon which to hang their identities. The idea was that these myths carried the authentic cultural experience, untainted by modernity. Apparently, Rodkinson admitted to the merchant that, although some of the tales were indeed heard form an old Hasidic woman in Dubrovna, most of the book was simply made up, a total fabrication. The motivation for this deception was that he needed to publish a book urgently to recoup serious financial losses that he had suffered. (Heller 2004: 80 – 81) Given that this is the person credited by some as the founder of neo-Hasidism and, therefore, largely responsible for the Gnostic revival, then this accusation is no minor matter. It has since been claimed that these old Hasidic tales were the authentic expression of Judaism so if it turns out that they were simply fabrications for money then this must have important implications not only for our understanding of Rodkinsohn and his legacy but for the entire political project of neo-Hasidism. The truth is there continuously swirled accusation of greed and immorality directed at Rodkinsohn. It was claimed by his detractors at the time, and there were many, that Rodkinsohn had married several wealthy women, each time stealing their money, before moving on. Indeed, it was claimed that for this behavior he was actually arrested and jailed

736 for bigamy and extortion.307 (Dan 1991: 183) Whatever the truth of these claims308, these accusations were directed at Rodkinson time and again towards the end of the 19th into the early 20th century. Although such behavior would, of course, offend the many Orthodox Jews living in the United States at that time, such behavior would be acceptable to a Sabbatian inspired Gnostic Jew. In fact, these accusations could mark the beginning of the emergence of the New Judaism as one where morality, demands to be good, were being outed as evil. Despite the particular features of possible deception and dishonesty continuing to taint Rodkinsohn’s legacy, his biography is one repeated again and again by Eastern European Jews from influential, middle-class families within the more traditional Hasidic community, who reject many traditional practices of Hasidism and Judaism more generally but believe that there is a core to Hasidism that is not only true for Hasidism but the key to revitalizing Jewry. As Dan noted, within this new “. . .nostalgic, popular meaning of the term “Hasidism”. Their system of values represents “perfect Judaism” . . .” (Dan 1991: 179) These men leave Russia as a result of the social unrest in the early 1880s, perhaps because they were deeply implicated in political agitation, and usually travel widely through Europe. As part of this travel, they inevitably spend some time in Berlin where they are familiarized with aspects the Haskalah. These Eastern European Jewish immigrants were loathed in Germany with many Germans distinguishing between good German Jews and these new Eastern European troublemakers. This sentiment in Germany may indeed point to something important about the role of these Eastern European Jews in politics in Germany. Although many people important in establishing Gnostic Judaism share a similar biography to Berdichevsky and Rodkinsohn it is actually this final commonality that is most revealing. What these thinkers do, and some claim that Rodkinson was the first to do this, is that they successfully, as Dynard observed, bring together Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment to realize what Dynard called “Enlightened Hasidism”. (Dan 1991: 182) As Dynard claimed, Now Rodkinsohn, the originator of this phenomenon, is the father and first cause of this period, and his disciples, whether they know it or not, copy his behavior and follow his teachings . . . Rodkinsohn, their father, began his work with nonsensical stories, “Kahal Hasidim”, “Adat Zaddikim”, “Arba’ah Metivei Lekhet”, vulgar lies suitable for the ignorant and the lazy and for old women; later, when he wanted to spread “enlightenment” among his adherents he started to be “modern” and changed the nature of the books of nonsense and gave them a “modern” title, “The History of Habad”, etc., . . . so that they will seem 307

But is such behavior inconsistent with “redemption through sin”? This movement has always denounced traditional monogamous relationship and would see greed as a natural human trait so to fight greed is like fighting gravity. This is the world they hoped to realize. The world they have realized. 308 If you were somebody who had become convinced that lying is not only acceptable but necessary and believed that everything that people believed was good is evil, why would you not fabricate tales for money?

737 like works of “enlightened Hasidism”, according to the fashion of the time. (Dynard as seen in Dan 1991: 182) It is actually here, in the way that they found a convincing way of uniting Hasidic and Haskalah traditions that these authors were able to, “create a new trend in Jewish culture”. It is this “new trend”, “Enlightened Hasidism” or, simply, “neo-Hasidism” that is the result of this synthesis. What informed this new direction in Jewish scholarship was that some scholars, like Rodkinsohn, Berdichevky and Parvus, realized that Reform Judaism, spiritual socialism and Hasidism, all emerged from the same source, Sabbatai Tzevi. It was Sabbatai who had voiced a new ideal that would shape Judaism and the world in the 20th and 21st century. Again, as Dynard critically observed of Rodkinsohn and the bringing together of Hasidism and the modern Enlightenment, that neo-Hasidism was “Hasid by inheritance and enlightened as a drunk”. This realization though, meant that they must, if they were to achieve this synthesis, reject traditional Talmudic teachings making it appear to many that they were no longer truly Jewish when, in truth, they had just embraced a historically heretical form of Judaism, Gnostic Judaism. As observed by Dynard, what Rodkinsohn publishes is telling. Rodkinsohn begins by publishing works on early Hasidism, with particular attention to the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. He then published a version of Tanya [It is Stated] which again is a very important early Hasidic text, originally published in 1796 by one of the most influential thinkers in the early Hasidic movement Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Tanya draws upon Jewish Medieval philosophy and Lurianic Kabbalah to give voice to a particular kind of spiritual Hasidism. As a result of drawing upon Lurianic Kabbalah, many see suggestions of a Gnostic agenda hidden within Tanya. Rodkinsohn deserves special recognition for his contribution to the Gnostic revival at the turn of the 20th century because he managed to make these works speak to many non-Hasidic Jews. The reason for this resonance, according to Rodkinson, is that he understood “the true nature of Hasidic mystical leadership”. That is, he presented a new reading of the original Hasidic leaders’ thoughts and Rodkinsohn was perhaps the most prominent advocates of this new “literary-ideology” movement that was also promoted by authors like Berdichevsky and, later, Buber. Rodkinson’s influence was so great that Dan suggests that instead of calling this trajectory neo-Hasidism it should rightly be called “Frumkinian Hasidism” acknowledging Rodkinson’s original name “Frumkin” as the true founder of this trajectory of thought. None of these men, Rodkinson, Berdishevsky or Buber were Rabbis, they were all from a literary tradition and probably became initially inspired through the wider literary currents shaping Western European thought at the time such as Gnosticism and the folk revival. Just as some German and English scholars feared that modernity would see the demise of authentic German and English culture, these Jews came to accept the need for Judaism to reinvigorated, reinvent itself, free from historical “foreign” influences, or die. These authors were so successful that today, one hundred or so years later, Jewish commentators

738 such as Martin S. Jaffee (2009) warn that the culture of American Judaism has changed from one informed by European Ashkenazic norms to one dominated by “Asian Hasidim”. This is an incredible shift in thinking that a once marginalized sect explicitly identified as haram from Eastern Europe/Asia has come to not only culturally dominate American Judaism but America itself. Few were more influential in achieving this outcome than Michael Levi Rodkinsohn. These ideas did not persuade that vast majority of American Jews who continued to practice their earlier traditions. What did happen is that a small group of wealthy, influential and powerful Jews, in banking, media, business and government, as will be discussed in detail in the Third Volume of this series, were persuaded by people like Rodkinsohn and these were the people that mattered. Despite their growing influence, traditional forms of Judaism continued to dominate American Jewish life. Where Gnostic Judaism was growing quickly was in the newly emerged Soviet Union and Germany between the wars. Despite these early writings and early acceptance by some expressing a legitimate “Jewish voice”, it was not until between the wars that that there emerged a broader spiritualist, Hasidic inspired, Jewish “renewal” movement. As Lazier observed about the current dominance of this “heretical ideal” in Judaism, This ideal was born of Europe between the world wars. To its interwar advocates, however, it has seventeenth-century roots, and in one episode above all. In 1665, a twenty-three-year-old named Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi – Nathan of Gaza for short – identified as the messiah a sometime Jerusalemite called Sabbatai Tzevi, and roused Jews on three continent who proved eager to heed his call. (Lazier 2009: 1) That is, the neo-Hasidic revival of the inter-war years was directly indebted to the messianic claims of Sabbatai Tzevi in the 17th century. This movement established itself in the United States only after the Second World War when many highly educated European Jewish immigrants fled Germany for the safety of America. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/growth-of-the-u-s-jewish-population

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Some of these immigrants, who were already under the sway of neo-Hasidism as a result of a concerted conversion effort in Europe but most especially in Germany, were part of the German Jewish “reform” movement, which really began in the early 19th century. This movement rejected what they understood to be the “empty formalism” of orthodox or Rabbinic Judaism, in favour of “prophetical teaching” that seems to have been heavily influenced by Sabbatai Tzevi. As Falk observes, The German immigrants [to America} largely rejected Rabbinical Judaism, which is commonly called Jewish Orthodoxy and is principally concerned with the minutiae of Jewish ritual, with particular emphasis on the food laws. The point of view argued that Judaism had become rigid and unresponsive to the modern age. Reform Jews sought to rid Judaism of what they called “empty formalities”. The reformers claimed that they were restoring Judaism to its original purity . . . (Falk 2014: 22) The tone of Falk’s paragraph is that these were not the “religious zealots” that wear funny clothes, but they rejected Rabbinic Judaism, they were assimilated, Westernized Jews. They were “good” Jews. This is a continuous theme as this heretical movement managed to infiltrate Western institutions. To the Western eye, these new zealots, with at least as much religious commitment as the Orthodox Jews but with an intentionally destructive agenda, were thought to be the face of acceptable Judaism. The truth, as should already be appreciated by the reader, was that these Jews were more fanatical in their religious convictions. The truth was that they at least practiced a different form of Judaism but, as argued, really worshipped a different God. The claim of “renewal” in Falk’s paragraph is significant. As already observed,

740 this is exactly how Gnostic reformers characterised their efforts, but they did not only “reinvigorate Judaism” but fundamentally changed it. These immigrants who moved from Germany into the United States found an American Jewry, as they had in Western Europe 50 years before, that was, according to them, “spiritually empty”. That is, they used the same strategy against American Jewry, really a strategy that played upon the insecurities and uncertainties of Jews, as had been used against Western European Jewry. They were saying, “You are not real Jews like us. You might practice Rabbinic Judaism, but you do not believe it. You are not passionately dedicated to its cause with every waking moment of your life like us. Join us and we will teach you real Judaism. A Judaism that is relevant to the modern world. A Judaism that you too can be fanatically committed.” As famous and influential theologian-activist Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “The modern temple suffers from a severe cold. The services are grim, the voice is dry, the temple is clean and tidy . . . No one will cry, the words are still-born.” Herschel, one of the most active advocates of Neo-Hasidism in the United States, wanted a synagogue which demanded the kind of devotion where people would weep in the presence of God. The argument was, as it had been to Western European Jewry at the turn of the 20th century, American Jewry worshipped in a way that was formally correct, but their utter commitment and devotion to God had withered and they now lacked spiritual substance. American Jewry had lost their emotional passion for God. They had lost their obsession with God. As might be expected, many American Jews thought this was nothing but a long argued Christian criticism against Jewry but now was being invoked by European Jews unfamiliar with the situation in the United States. The strategy used in Western Europe was to create relatively small groups of Gnostic Jews, consisting of around 50 people, intentionally undermining Orthodox practices with the promise of spiritual renewal. This same strategy, which had worked quite well in Germany, was repeated in the United States. Perhaps inspired by the Tzadik ‘court’ of Hasidism, these groups were often led by charismatic leaders who were delivering an extremely radical program against Orthodox Judaism that looked reformist and therefore did not attract the attention of the people of the United States. The truth was that it was a new radical kind of Judaism, that accepted the teachings of a false messiah and worshipped a female Goddess. For example, the interestingly named Aquarian Minyan, a reference to the Age of Aquarius, was founded by Rabbi Zalman Schachter in the mid-1970s. The explicit purpose of this minyan (which is a meeting of Jews over a certain age required for the purpose of public worship) was, “to renew the old and make holy the new”. A very neo-Hasidic program indeed. The historical debt to neo-Hasidism was not secret, as it says on the Aquarian Minyan web site today, Because of our focus on the immediacy and joy of worship, we feel very akin to the historic movement of Hasidism, which in the eighteenth century sought to create a joyful mode of personal and communal worship. As a contemporary egalitarian community, we

741 incorporate and transform the values of Hasidism and call ourselves neo-Hasidic. Often, we study the mystical and spiritual practices of the Hasidic masters. The important points in this passage are that they look explicitly to 18th century Hasidism, when it was a socially radical movement, and not the ultra-Orthodox Hasidism of the 19th century. Another important point is the emphasis on emotions. This is joyful worship not reflective worship. This is typical of the strategy used by this movement to convert American Jewry to their cause. Although Neo-Hasidism was not secret about what they hoped to realise, many Jews were knowledgeable enough about the contest between Eastern and Western Jewish practices that they could not really keep their program a secret, but how well the Jews of the United States understood exactly what this movement hoped to achieve, its debt to Sabbateanism and its radical theo-political agenda, is highly questionable. The most basic teaching of these minyan, beyond the need for joyous love of God, is that halakha should be used as a guide but should not determine behaviour. (Salkin 2003: 356) Hillel Zeitlin had tried to establish what he called the Yavneh fellowship which was to consist of small groups of spiritually minded Jews who would meet with the intention of renewing Jewish life. This movement directly informed the establishment of the havurah (chavurah) movement in the United States in the late 1960s. Rabbi Zalman Schachter met Natan Hafshi, the Hebrew translator of Zeitlin’s Di Teyvah, which was a guidebook for Jewish spiritual renewal, while he was visiting Jerusalem in the late 1950s. (Green et al 2019: 11) For this reason, Salkin admits, Which Jewish denomination would have the most to offer the havurah movement? As it turned out, Hasidism . . . The Havurah movement was truly a modern Hasidism, coming into fruition after the Holocaust, and it borrowed many Hasidic practices, especially ecstatic prayer, meditation, and niggunim. (2003: 356) Schachter moved from Austria to the United States and initiated the havurah movement which aimed to create small groups of Jews, between ten to fifty, which gathered independently of the synagogue, to facilitate Shabbat and holiday prayer services. The aim was to create a shared Jewish communal experience and encourage Jewish learning outside the influence of Rabbinic authority. The first group was the Havurat Shalom in Somerville, Massachusetts, founded in 1968 by Arthur Green an extremely influential and widely published Gnostic Jew. (Salkin 2003: 361) This group met for serious and intense prayer and concentrated study to learn the things presented earlier in this volume. Each service might feature Hasidic chanting, meditation and singing. Such practices could continue for two hours as the aim was, as with the Islamic Dervishes in Iran, was not to reach God through thoughtful reflection but emotionally as an ecstatic experience in the true sense of the word, “involving an experience of mystic self-transcendence”. As this passage written by Rumi says, Water that’s poured inside will sink the boat,

742 While water underneath keeps it afloat. Driving wealth from his heart to keep it pure, King Solomon preferred the title “Poor”: That sealed jar in the story my sea out there, Floats on the waves because it’s full of air, When you’ve the air of dervishood inside You’ll float above the world and there abide . . . This passage shows many of the spiritual themes already introduced, “water” underneath a boat, the boat on rough seas, is the life of living with God, to ride above chaos in the order promised by the guidance of God. Of course, as has been made clear, Gnostic Jews worship the God of chaos, they want the boat to be destroyed. The first minyan was quickly followed by a New York Havurah, which insisted that parents also attend lessons along with their children. This was a re-education program for all of American Jewry, certainly not to be restricted to the children. These early minyanim were quickly followed by the establishment of groups across the United States. This spread was facilitated by a national body, The National Havurah Committee. Of course, as would be expected from a movement which forcefully rejected Orthodoxy and advanced a totally new social and political agenda, this neo-Hasidic/Gnostic movement had many critics amongst the American Jewish community. Perhaps the most vocal in the very early years of neo-Hasidism in the United States, was Ephraim Deinard (1846-1930). Deinard was a prolific writer and, when not writing travel journals (which he published so many that he was called “The Traveller”) he was often criticising the emergent movement of neo-Hasidism. Deinard’s most basic criticism was, as academic Joseph Dan would phrase it, that the scholars were voicing “the Hasidism that never was”. Deinard was claiming that writers like Eliezer Tsvi Hacohen Zweifel, Samuel Abba Horodecky, Avraham Kahana, Hillel Zeitlin and, perhaps most especially, Michael Levi Rodkinson were charting “a new course” using “the New False Haskalah” to articulate a Hasidism that never existed. These writers were crafting “Hasidic hagiography in Maskilic clothing”. That is the originality of combining Hasidism with the Haskalah was creating something new that was being sold to the Jewish people as the historically authentic Judaism. That they would claim that a Gnostic movement, fundamentally altered by an 17th century false Messiah, adapted into a socially radical political agenda in Eastern Europe called Hasidism that was initially loathed by Western Orthodox Jews could generate the “authentic Jewish experience” was certainly brazen. Deinard claimed that these neo-Hasidim were really apologists for a deviant form of Judaism that they were trying to reinterpret through an enlightened lens. They were, therefore, giving a distorted account of Hasidism by presenting it in a modern light that it did not deserve. Deinard was explicit in associating this new direction in Judaism with Sabbateanism seeing them, as Hasidism had once been identified, as

743 nothing better than a sacrilegious sect when, “Such as these have already arisen, and without a doubt there will arise more half-Maskilim and half-Jesuits to cover the nakedness of Hasidism in the cloak of the Haskalah, who will blind the eyes of the people, leading them to believe in the new path of Israel Baal Shem Tov . . .” He thought that they were promoting an evil mysticism inspired by the degenerate world of the Kabbalah. Deinard seems to advance the idea that neo-Hasidism was the spiritual well spring of Jewish mysticism, “fraudulent” Zionism, socialism, anarchism, reformers and the common rabble. He certainly did not restrain his criticism claiming that the new movement promoted “lewdness” and “whoremongering”. Deinard in the 1890s moved to the United States just when a number of the founders of this movement, such as Michael Rodkinson, were also moving to the United States to promote their new ideas. His enmity to this movement continued his whole life with unrestrained passion. When justifying his life’s work, Deinard wrote, I am aware that many people wonder why I have gone to such lengths to recount the abominations of this particular scoundrel [Rodkinson], when my people do not lack for scoundrels who are not worth the ink it takes to write of them; but my goal was not only to make it known who this son of Rodke was, but to alert the next generation, lest they be left unwitting and confused.

Conclusion

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Chapter Five Gnostic Jews in Post-World War II America Introduction This chapter is primarily concerned with giving an account of how Gnostic Jews captured the United States and reshaped it into the kind of place that it is today. How did a strongly Christian, Protestant, white nation, dominated by masculine norms, become the leading nation in post-Christian multiculturalism? As was touched upon in the previous chapter, Gnostic Judaism certainly had a presence in the United States prior to 1945. It was American Jews who funded the Japanese war against the Russians that marked the starting point of Imperial Russia’s decline into Gnostic controlled communism. Gnostic Jews also managed to capture the United States reserve bank which ensured massive revenue streams to help them realise their global agenda. Finally, Gnostic Jews were central in the Roosevelt government and did everything that they could to ensure there firstly was a Second World War, which most European countries did not particularly want, and, ultimately, that the United States would enter that war to become a global power. These matters are elaborated upon in later volumes. This chapter is concerned with how Gnostic Jews managed to capture the United States after World War II and turn it into the place that it is today. But what is the United States today? What do we see when we look at the United States? The best way to characterise the United States today, and this claim will be highly contentious, is that it is a nation transitioning into post-Christian matriarchy. Once observed, this transition can be seen in just about every aspect of American life. Firstly, is the slow disappearance of white men in public life. Universities, for just one example, once a bastion of white, Protestant males, today is increasingly being dominated by women or at least a massive increase in “diversity”. Not only are women becoming lecturers at higher rates then men, even though they publish less, and their published work has less impact, but they are being promoted into positions of power within the university system in such a way that they are having a much greater say over what is researched. Another space where men, particularly white men, are disappearing is in the media. In the 1980s there was a concerted effort to get equal representation of women in the media. From the noughties, this struggle turned into one that was trying to remove men from having a voice in the media all together. So there has been a clearly observable movement from all men, to a mix of men and women, to a situation today when a panel of women will be interviewing experts and other journalists who are women. Of course, when I say women not just any woman gets access to

745 these roles but the right sort of woman. It is a woman who has been fully indoctrinated into the theories of second and even third wave feminism. What this increasing dominance of women in positions of power means is that, secondly, the legal and institutional order of the United States is increasingly reflecting female values. So, easily accessible contraceptives now allow women to be sexually promiscuous without having to live with the consequences of their actions or even having the illicit dalliances revealed to partners. Easy access to abortions, likewise, permit a certain kind of lifestyle without consequence. It is not 18-year-old girls just beginning their sexual lives who accidentally fall pregnant and instead of them having their lives, apparently, “ruined” by the miracle of birth they have an abortion, it is women in their late 20s and 30s, who make up 85% of all abortions in the United States, who are accessing these “services”. Nearly 90% of women who have abortions are in a long-term relationship.309 These are often women who are falling pregnant to their lovers and work colleagues but want to keep their pregnancies a secret from their husbands. Laws on prostitution are also being liberalized in such a way that the men who access a prostitutes is charged with a criminal act whereas the prostitute herself faces no punishment. What can be seen in all these examples, as should be expected from what has been written so far, is the reversal of the patriarchal ordering that had dominated Western societies up until the 1980s. This reversal is as wrong as only criminalizing women’s immoral behaviour while turning a blind eye to men’s weaknesses. The greatest consequence of this emergent matriarchy is the slow dominance of the non-judgemental attitude of women over the historical dominance of male judgment. Just for one example, there is no longer any restrictions placed on immigrants, they are no longer judged as being adequate or not to be allowed into Western countries but such judgements themselves are now thought immoral. This is just one marker of the transition from a patriarchal society of judgment to a matriarchy of permission. Ultimately, the creation of a matriarchy in the United States is just part of the systematic reversal of all existing values. This is what is really happening in the United States, the reversal of Protestant Christian values into its opposite and this process is now called “progress”. Why Gnostic Jews would want to realize this reversal should already be understood. Sabbatai Tzevi believed that redemption could be achieved through sin. The best way to make everyone into a “sinners” is to make sin appear as though it is “good”. One important part of this general reversal is to bring the immanent aspect of God, the feminine aspect of God, the Shechinah, into the world. The best

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Although these women generally report that their partners were supportive of their decision to have an abortion that is based on self-reporting. As men are not asked to verify the women’s claims, we simply do not know how many of these men knew of their partners decision. Female researchers often argue that there should be no obligation for women to inform their partners that they are having an abortion with some arguing that it can result in marital conflict.

746 way to bring a female Goddess into the world, the goddess of chaos, emotion, and irrationality, to make society worship that Goddess, is to realize a matriarchy. The “why” should already be understood by what has already been written, what will be explained in this chapter therefore is the how. How did Gnostic Judaism realize the kind of America that exists today? A post Christian, post-culture, post-modern America that is increasingly being dominated by women. In the most basic terms, the way that America has been shaped into what it is, is by demonizing traditional Western Christian values while valorising its opposite. Perhaps the most important way that they have achieved this is by arguing that traditional Western Christian values are associated with “authoritarianism” and oppression. Such ideas were first argued by the Frankfurt School when they fled Nazi Germany to establish a research centre in the United States. They used arguments that were already being circulated in Germany and simply moved them to the United States. Masculinity, strong gender identity, heterosexuality, morality, and the nuclear family all became associated with authoritarianism despite there never having been a Western, Christian authoritarian state. At first these ideas were either ridiculed or ignored but, today, we are living in the reality of not taking these claims seriously. Today the West can be thought “barbarian”, it can be thought oppressive, because of the arguments made by Gnostic Jews from the Frankfurt School. To be clear, when criticising certain expression of feminism does not mean to be opposed to women or even opposed to feminism. This chapter will begin with claims that are made today by people like Ashley Jardina that “white identity” is intimately linked to “authoritarianism”. I then ask how can this claim even be made? I then consider the historical development of the argument that Western Christianity is patriarchal, oppressive and tended towards authoritarianism. Such ideas are first voiced by Bachofen in the middle of the 19th century. He suggests that there was a matriarchal age when nobody owned property, people lived according to the laws of nature and were not informed by morality. These ideas are initially developed by Friedrich Nietzsche under the influence of Paul Ree. Bachofen and Ree, along with Marxists like Friedrich Engels, argued against Western Christianity and the gender norms that emerged from within that tradition. It is because they open a space that Freud, Gross and Weininger can argue, at the turn of the 20th century, that the problem with the West was “patriarchy”, a term this group made viable, and that this “patriarchy” was oppressive. These basic ideas are then developed through the Frankfurt School first in Germany and then in the United States. Once the basic argument had been made, I then trace certain institutions that helped turn these ideas in action against everything that the West historically prized. It is then left to feminists and leftists to slowly turn the values of America upside down so that everything that was once noble is now base while everything that was once base is now noble.

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How Jewish Gnosticism Shaped the United States After World War II An author on “white identity”, Ashley Jardina, one of the most respected commentators in the United States opposing “white identity politics”, recently claimed, “It seems reasonable to postulate that white identity and authoritarianism are related.” (Jardina 2019: 112) It is an interesting assertion. One that should come as a surprise, especially to historians. In what way might “white identity” and “authoritarianism” be related? After all, there has been a number of communist authoritarian states, Stalinist Soviet Union, Maoist China, Castro’s Cuba, Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam to name just a few, and although most have drawn inspiration, in one form or another, on a hybridized mix of modern nationalism, from the West, and Marxist communism, from the Gnostic tradition, none of them based their form of authoritarianism on “white identity” in any way. Why, after all, would Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam or, indeed, Kampuchea, find inspiration in embracing “white identity”? Even European authoritarian states, like Mussolini’s fascist Italy or Francoist Spain, did not use “white identity” which, as modern Italians and Spanish, would not have resonated at all. The only authoritarian state, just one of over a dozen, that justified itself in any kind of racial theory was, of course, Hitler’s Germany. But even in this example, ideas of “white identity”, as such, are absent because this movement draw inspiration from theories of Teutonic racial superiority or what might be called Aryanism and the kind of white identity politics that has appeared in the United States or even South Africa was most certainly absent from Hitler’s Germany. Indeed, German racial theories shadowed similar developments amongst the German Jewish populations, as voiced by Moses Hess and Harry Waton, which also claimed racial superiority over the Gentiles in the same manner that Germans were claiming racial superiority over Jews. Scholem himself, one of the most respected scholars of the 20th century, wrote [while a young man], You are Orientals and not Europeans, you are Jews and humans, not Germans and decadents, your God is called Haschem, and not the belly. You have gone [morally] bankrupt, or you make, and this is worse still, compromises. Because, so you say, one must not attempt to run through the wall with [one’s] head, [for] the head will split apart! . . . We, however, the coming generation, we believe this . . . We believe that we must run into the wall without heads and that the wall will split in two, not our heads. (Scholem as seen in Lazier 2009: 151) It is undeniable that Scholem will change his position radically away from what he is claiming here but what is clearly revealed is a racist, nationalistic vitriol that was also being expressed by German Jews in the same way that it was being expressed by Germans. This kind of racist vitriol, clearly associating Germans with animals who are controlled by their baser animal drives, seems equal to the hatred spewing from the mouths of Nazis around the same time. As already introduced, race was such a central theme

748 for understanding the world prior to World War II that Wasserstein (2009: 34) could rightly observe, “The root of European disorder in 1914 was not, as some thought, class but ethnicity. Solidarities and antagonism based on ethnicity, for reasons that lie buried in human hearts, answer to some of the most deeply rooted and instinctive social feelings of our species.” Wasserstein is claiming that it was deeply held racist convictions that informed international relations prior to World War II and that it was such thinking that resulted in World War II. Such attitudes were also most certainly held by European Jewry as Scholem’s paragraph confirms. The idea that race found expression in certain characteristics was thought to be the defining problem from the late 19th through to the early 20th centuries and was certainly not unique or even particularly pronounced in “white” societies at the time. Liberal attitudes seem more reflective of white societies such as England, the United States and Australia, than authoritarian thinking. As American Jewish author Max Lerner observed in the mid-1950s, America was “. . . deeply individualist, anti-authoritarian, concerned with sin and salvation, yet secular and rationalist in its life goals . . .” (Lerner 1955: 705) The white America of the post-war years was particularly “anti-authoritarian”. So why did Jardina claim that white identity and authoritarianism are so intimate? Beginning in Germany To understand how authoritarianism became associated with “whiteness” there needs to be an understanding of how the race conflict emerged into European politics in the first place. Theories of racial conflict as the engine of social change were first voiced by European Jews. The Russian Jew, Gumplowicz, agreed with the German Jew Moses Hess that history was primarily a race war but that in modern societies that race war was no longer fought using violence, as it had in the past, but was now an intellectual war. These Jews argued that the ruling race, informed by their essential natures, determined how all the subordinated races should think. Eventually, they argued, all the races of the world would one-day be dominated by one single race and everyone on the planet would think just like them. They believed at that time that the final contest for global racial superiority was between the Germanic people, such as the Anglo-Saxons, and the Jews or the Aryans and the Semites. At the time, these ideas were absolutely alien to the Western Christian tradition. Unlike the racial exclusiveness of Judaism, Christianity teaches that ideas are about reality and not, as the Gnostic tradition teaches, about power. From a Christian perspective, it does not matter what “culture” is dominant at any one time as the “highest culture”, as Martin Heidegger would later argue in agreement with Aristotle, is simply the truest. The Gnostic tradition, which finds inspiration in Kabbalah, then Marxism, Moses Hess and Gumplowicz, believes that there is no “reality” that might shape ideas therefore how could reality ever constrain truth claims? All Gnostic Jews can argue, in full agreement with Nietzsche, that truth is just an expression of power. They

749 argue, against all the scientific evidence, that gender, for example, is nothing but an expression of power that has no material foundations. Truth, by this account, is just politics. Gumplowicz’s ideas were later adopted by Franz Oppenheimer who wrote about the formation of the state in terms of it being the result of a conflict between competing “groups” in Germany in the years between the wars. As Oppenheimer wrote, The state, completely in its genesis, essentially and almost completely during the first stage of its existence, is a social institution, forced by a victorious group of men on a defeated group, with the sole purpose of regulating the dominion of the victorious group over the vanquished, and securing itself against revolt from within and attacks from abroad. Teleologically, this dominion had no other purpose than the economic exploitation of the vanquished by the victors. No primitive state known to history originated in any other manner. Wherever a reliable tradition reports otherwise, either it concerns the amalgamation of two fully developed primitive states into one body of more complete organization, or else it is an adaptation to men of the fable of the sheep which made a bear their king in order to be protected against the world. But even in this latter case, the form and content of the State became precisely the same as in those states where nothing intervened, and which became immediately ‘wolf states’. (Oppenheimer 1922: 15) The state is purely the product of a contest between competing groups, whether that be understood as racial or religious, in order to effectively facilitate exploitation. If you were a minority group with your own distinct identity and came to accept Oppenheimer’s conclusions, then that would mean that the state was nothing more than a relationship of exploitation and all rebellion becomes instantly legitimized as a struggle for liberation. The argument being made is that the ruling race’s ideas become the ruling ideas of the time and it was whoever could rule the world of ideas would shape the society and be the effective rulers. Early supporters of German racial nationalism, such as Eckart, described by Preparata as Hitler’s “teacher”, (2005: 133) believed that Jews were indeed trying to shape German thought and were like a “bacteria” within the German nation striving to realize the ”end of time”. (Preparata 2005: 60) As one of the most important proponents of these ideas, Harry Waton argued in 1939 for an American Jewish audience, in his pamphlet A Program for the Jews, For thousands of years the Aryans will work, struggle and achieve; they will clear the swamps, they will bring out a beautiful world and make mankind a free humanity living on a free earth; but then the Aryans will die; they will die as Aryans and will be born again as Jews. Not as Aryans will they enjoy the fruit of their labour, but as Jews. This was already foretold by Noah. The Aryans will enlarge and beautify the earth; but they will settle to enjoy the world which they created only in the tents of the Jews. These tents are communism, internationalism, the universal brotherhood of man, the emancipation of the working class and the human society . . . The destiny of the Aryans is to become Jews, to recognise Yahweh and to identify themselves with Him.

750 This was not a secret document but was available for all who chose to read it. They really are extremely confronting claims. As can be seen by what Waton wrote, the eventual intellectual dominance of Jews will turn Aryans into Jews and it is only as Jews that people will be allowed to settle peacefully to enjoy the world that the Aryans had already built. Remember, this was written on the cusp of the most destructive war ever known to history and one in which Jews were heavily implicated. It was also the war, above all wars, that marked the clear beginning of the decline of Western Europe, a decline that, it could be argued, continues till this very day. So, this was written just as many Europeans thought of the Second World War at least in part in defence of German Jews and people like Waton seemed to be saying that it was all part of a plan to allow Jewish global dominion. It could be argued that this process of turning Germans into Jews was being undertaken from the late 19th century but really gained pace during the instability in Germany between World War I and World War II. As Gutkind confidently observed after the Second World War, We may be confident, therefore, that Israel will not fail today, when we are confronted with a global conflict of a magnitude surpassing all previous conflicts. Israel has gone through the cataclysms of the Empires, Pharaonic, Assyrian, Persian and Greek, through the end of the wild beast that was Rome, through the crumbling medieval Empires, the downfall of Spain, through the hellish end of Germany, and today through the crumbling of the British Empire. Having survived all of them. Israel is confronted today with an impending metamorphosis of humanity, which means not only partial change but total change. (Gutkind 1952: 15-16) Gutkind is claiming that Jews have “seen off” various global powers that have challenged Jewish dominion but with them out of the way then the last stage of human development, to become Jews, is about to take place. How would the many Europeans who had lost people they loved during the war, supposedly liberating Jews, only to read Gutkind claiming that it was all really about Jewish global dominion? Such claims certainly do not justify German treatment of Jews in the 1930s and 40s, but it does go some way towards explaining those actions. If it is admitted that history is indeed a race war and the ruling race’s ideas are the ruling ideas of the times designed to exploit those races over whom they rule, then how do you make a people think differently? If physical violence is no longer used to achieve this outcome, then how do you make people conform to your way of thinking? How do you undermine a society to such a degree that it will be open to a completely new set of ideas? A complete, as Gutkind says, metamorphosis? The place to begin to develop an understanding of how this was in fact achieved one must begin in Germany in the middle of the 19th century with the work of German anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen. To be clear, as has been argued throughout this volume, as with other European thinkers, Bachofen’s work did not instigate

751 anything, what his work permitted was an opportunity for Gnostic Jews to progress their agenda through Bachofen’s work. That is, Gnostic Jews could promote and draw upon Bachofen’s work, as they had already done with Kant, as it seemed to have resonances with their own thinking, in order to advance their agenda. This was the dominant strategy employed by Gnostic Jews through the 19th century when religious awareness remained such that, unlike today, Jewish authors continued to be read as Jewish authors and not simply as authors. So, although a writer like Engels used Bachofen’s conclusions to advance the argument for a return to some kind of lost utopian, communist society ruled by women, it was not Bachofen’s conclusions but Gnostic Judaism that supplied the primary motivation or vision for what kinds of changes were required to realise such a future. Bachofen’s work merely functioned as a reference point, an acceptable justification, that could be used to advance the pre-existing Gnostic program. 1848 to 1914: The Female Struggle to Maintain the Traditional Family Bachofen was a Swiss anthropologist who was born into an extremely wealthy Basel310 family. Although, unlike his contemporary Karl Marx, his work was extremely influential for half a century following its publication but is largely unknown today. Bachofen’s important contribution, in opposition to Marx’s class analysis and Hess’s racial conflict theory, that cultural and religious change was the result of a conflict between male and female principles. (Davies 2010: 11) So he agreed with those earlier traditions by advancing a conflict theory but one which proposed it was the conflict between the genders that informed social change. Bachofen argued that an early stage of human development was what he called a Gyneocracy (Greek gyne “woman or wife” and arche, “ruler” or “to be the first”) which is equivalent to a “matriarchy”. Consistent with the materialist thinking of Marx and Hess that came to dominate the early 20th century, Bachofen argued that the leading ideas of an era reflected the interests of those who ruled. So, in a matriarchy the dominant ideas, as expressed in religion, the law and reflected in who would lead the community and own all property, reflected the ideas reflecting female prejudices of “Mother right”. What manifests women as community leaders is that they are the first “humans”. Women are the first, as the Bible also teaches, to leave Eden, Nature, as human and express a concern about something or somebody beyond their own survival. As Bachofen wrote, “Raising her young, the woman learns earlier than the man to extend her loving care beyond the limits of the ego to another creature . . . Woman at this stage is the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead.” (Bachofen as seen in Davies 2010: 12) Women were the first human beings

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Basel was home to a particular intellectual tradition that included luminaries such as Ranke and Nietzsche.

752 to move beyond mere self-preservation and extend her care to others even if that care remained limited to within her family or “tribe”. According to Bachofen, it was in being concerned with others that culture, some basic social institutions, and the earliest religion, all originated. As this social arrangement was dominated by woman, everything within this society reflected what they valued because whoever was perceived to rule society also ruled the way that society thought. The God Most High in such a society, according to Bachofen, was a woman. This Goddess was a fertility goddess, a goddess of the earth or “Mother Earth” that was also thought to oversee the protection of the people and so was also a warrior goddess. This Goddess functioned in the role of “mother” or her people, she was caring, nurturing, fertile but also potentially vicious in protecting those she loved. She was certainly not a universal god, but a particular god, of a particular people. So, as can be seen, Bachofen was giving an account of the Gnostic Jewish Goddess of earth and of course this would have been thought to be extremely important at that moment in history when Gnostic Judaism was moving into the West and, most particularly, into Germany. Bachofen argued that not only did religion reflect woman’s principles, but other social institutions, such as the introduction of monogamous marriage, which also reflected woman’s concerns in terms of marriage being a way for women to protect themselves and their offspring from violence. Such a view of marriage would not be accepted today when marriage is seen by contemporary feminists as a patriarchal institution designed to control women, especially their reproduction, exploit women sexually and, perhaps most especially, to expose them to violence. It is this type of account that cast monogamous marriage as an expression of male power and, even, insecurity. Although Bachofen’s claim that monogamous marriage was a female innovation might appear as being quite conservative today, and Bachofen’s project was indeed a conservative one, his innovation was to argue that monogamous marriages were not “natural”. He was arguing that it was not simply natural for men and women to live in monogamous relationships for life but that the institution of marriage served a functional purpose whether that be for the protection of women or to ensure paternity. To understand marriage in these terms was absolutely revolutionary at the time. (Davies 2010: 15) For the first time, marriage was being cast in terms of being an expression of power, male or female, and not natural. Bachofen was arguing that marriage was an expression of the power of women to be able to force men into monogamous marriages in order to serve their interests, but this argument opened the way for later feminists to argue that marriage was an expression of male power. Although to argue that marriage was “natural” would be unconvincing today, this had been the understanding of marriage through most of history. That monogamous marriage was an institution for women to protect them physically and to offer some material security under which to have children, that under such conditions “husbands” had certain

753 obligations to their wives as husbands, was actually argued by both men and women up until at least the 1970s. Bachofen certainly had a romantic vision of this period of female dominated societies seeing them in terms of it being a time of “universal freedom and equality”, a time without private property, a time when moral order was sustained in terms of it being “accepted” and not sustained through coercion. As Erich Fromm (1966: 48) observes, Bachofen saw the “. . .positive aspects as a sense of affirmation of life, freedom and equality which pervades the matriarchal structure.” Women were indeed thought to be in Bachofen’s theory, a perspective popular in Europe at that time that continues to be believed today, more moral than men and that they entered into relationships that required personal sacrifice for the benefit of others. As Davies observes, “The notion of women as “the moral sex” has had a long and, depending on one’s perspective, distinguished or undistinguished career, but it comes into play whenever theories of matriarchy are discussed. . .” (Davies 2010: 41) Even today women are seen as victims and blameless in any domestic disorder. The many dysfunctional ways that women behave towards men and their families are being intentionally institutionally ignored with an exclusive focus on male disfunction. That men are seen as the instigators of all social disfunction is enabling women to rise into positions of authority because they are innocent of the crises that are affecting the West. In opposition to contemporary views, the dominant institution of matriarchal society, according to Bachofen, during the rule of the “Mother Right”, was the family. The monogamous family has been, for millennia, thought to be the true domain of womanhood even under matriarchy. The family was the site in which people’s lives unfolded and its preservation was the purpose towards which all society was oriented. Bachofen argued that this rather idyllic matriarchal society was brought to an end with the rise, in the first millennium BC, of male dominated societies. Whereas in the most primordial societies, economic wealth was produced through traditional female labour tasks, gathering of food, weaving, and raising large families, this shifted over time to male productive roles in the 2 nd millennium BC of the kind Socrates interlocutors practiced, “metal-workers, shoe-makers, tanners”. (Metlchert & Morrow 2018: 99) Society was no longer metaphorically thought of as just an extended family requiring a “mother” to nurture “the children” into the fulness of physical well-being but metaphors such as society being a “sick patient” requiring a “doctor”, who were always male, or that society was a ship requiring a “pilot”, came to prominence. Social order began to be thought more in technical terms like those professions normally associated with males. It was believed, again as Fromm (1966: 49) observes, that males were “less rooted in nature, [therefore] he is forced to develop his reason, to build up a man-made world of ideas, principles and man-made things which replaced nature as a ground of existence and security”. Men did not menstruate, they did not carry life in their bodies for 9 months, following the cycles of the moon, men

754 seemed less physically embedded in the natural flow of the earth, and it was this distance that allowed them to think in more abstract terms. This shift may reflect changes in the economic foundations of society when they become founded on masculine pursuits and as men rose in economic power as these pursuits became more profitable. It has also been argued that under matriarchal order it was believed that women came into bloom, like plants, and this is how humans reproduced. By this account, women were the miraculous font of life like Earth itself. Some argue today that it was only when it was discovered that male semen was part of the reproductive process, monogamous marriages were thought to become important as men wanted to ensure that they truly were the biological fathers of the children upon whom they were expending resources. Many explanations have been proposed as to what informed this shift from matriarchal order to patriarchal order but, whatever the reason, it was argued that men began to think about society in terms requiring their abilities. In matriarchies, a man . . .started out as a food gatherer and hunter and were it not for primitive tools and the use of fire he could be said to differ but little from the animal. In the process of history his skills grew, and his relationship to nature is transformed from a passive into an active one. He develops animal husbandry, learns to cultivate the land, achieves an ever-increasing skill in art and craftsmanship, exchanges his products for those of foreign countries and thus becomes a traveller and trader. (Fromm 1966: 52-53) The transition from passively encountering nature to forcing her to bend to his will is important for how men begin to think about the world. As a conflict theory of social change, Bachofen saw these epochal transitions from one ordering principle to the next, from matriarchy to patriarchy, to be times of great disruption, violence and, ultimately, oppression. This period of social turmoil can be discerned in ancient myths, such as the myth of the Amazons, and contemporaneous artwork. It was only through such acts of violence that the kind of fundamental social changes demanded of a new ordering principle could be realised. So, the transition from a time when women ruled in accordance with natural law to a time when men ruled according to moral principles is captured in various myths from all around the world. The “Mother Earth” goddess is replaced with the dominance of a “Father Sky” God. There is a socio-religious movement rooted in nature adapting to worshipping a god who is Himself rational, judgemental, moral, and oriented towards what became understood as “civilization”. The ideal that drove this emerging society was that it was “. . .the destiny of humanity to overcome progressively the law of mere matter and rise above the material side of its nature that connects it to the rest of the animal world, and to attain a higher, purely human existence.” (Bachofen as seen in Davies 2010: 13) This project can be seen voiced in the work of Socrates who exhorts people to learn what is good, acquire knowledge of what is good, listen to the moral guidance of the Daemon against his natural inclinations, in order to live “good lives”. In

755 leading good lives they would become truly human in terms of that would now be understood to be very distinct from animals and the brutality of nature. There is a movement here away from the concerns of “Mother Earth” and “caring for land”, getting one’s identity from the land, to one of being concerned with the individual soul, of living a moral life. Everything becomes informed by the need to distinguished human beings from mere animal being. What comes to be associated with being human, rationality, morality, constraint, discipline, bravery, which are all opposed to “natural” inclinations, becomes understood as everything that is “good”, everything that is masculine, while being merely an animal, embracing our animal drives, everything that was associate with being a woman, becomes understood as literally “evil”. According to Bachofen’s account of human development, ancient myths about historical conflicts between men and woman are not, as Freud would later argue, about suppressed libido but were actual real accounts of historical events explained and justified through mythology. The defining moment in this conflict was when women themselves came to accept that male domination was not only “natural” but a reflection of the desire of the gods or part of the divine order of the cosmos. That is when women began to see with the “male gaze”. The revolutionary nature of these claims should be rather evident especially considering the male dominated societies of the mid-19th century. To be clear, before presenting how Bachofen’s arguments were greeted, Bachofen did not write his work as a proto-feminist call to action but, quite to the contrary, as Davies observes, Bachofen “had no sympathy for any progressivist, feminist interpretation of these ideas, and his thinking is symptomatic of a post-revolutionary period in which social utopias are projected into a distant past as a way of criticising an increasingly unbearable present.” (Davies 2010: 42) Davies is claiming that is a kind of projection of an ideal into the past was a way of escaping the contemporary reality of the social unrest that was ripping Europe apart in 1848. Bachofen’s ideas and his conservative way of viewing the world were actually quite harmonious with the gender struggles of the late 19th into the early 20th century. It was in the aftermath of the social conflicts of 1848 that really shaped the political debates and contests for the rest of that century. This was a century of growing prosperity which included expanded entitlements and, perhaps most prized, an enduring peace. The 19th century, overall, for a European, was a glorious century. Despite this new prosperity, throughout Europe there was growing criticism of modern industrialization with its inequity and challenges to traditional, pre-modern social arrangements. As early as 1836, before the unrest of 1848, the National Trades Union questioned the need for female labour on the grounds that, “the husband, or the brother is deprived of a sufficient subsistence to support himself and family, when, without the auxiliary aid of the female, by his own labour alone he might have supported himself and family in decency and kept his wife or relative at home.” (1836 as seen in May 1982: 401) The argument

756 being made by the workers generally at that time was a socially conservative one. Men should be compensated to a level whereby he alone could support his wife and family without requiring woman to go out and earn money. It was against the expansion of capitalist relations of production into all areas of society, thereby challenging traditional family relationships and gender roles, that the early woman’s movement itself opposed. Perhaps the greatest concern confronting society at that time was the shift from cottage industry production, where women worked from home churning milk and preparing food for markets while fulfilling her other domestic obligations, to exclusively industrial production. Industry was initially a place where men found work and was, at least initially, thought to be unsuitable for women. What barred women from working in factories was primarily that it would require them to move away from the home for extended hours thereby forcing them to neglect their domestic duties. What was of central concern to most people, men and women alike, was how to maintain the traditional “nuclear” family in an industrial age. Men and woman both had important roles to perform in a well-ordered society, according to the increasingly dominant thinking of the late 19th century, and these roles needed to be protected against the eroding forces of modern industrial society. This is where the earlier identified “folk movement” harmonised with industrial action, it was to preserve something that people feared was being destroyed. As Davies observes, “Motherliness is in this view not restricted to child-bearing but instead becomes a metaphor for women’s specific contribution to social life.” Women’s function in the family was a microcosm of what woman positively brought to the entire society. As Eskine observes, To the mother belongs the privilege of planting in the hearts of her children those seeds of love, which, nurtured and fostered, will bear the fruit of earnest and useful lives. It is she who must fit them to meet the duties and emergencies of life, and in this work of training she keeps her heart fresh and young, and thereby ensures the growth of the powers with which nature has endowed her. (Erskine as seen in Mararey 2001: 38) The purpose of the industrial struggle was to ensure that married woman remained in their proper historical space, the domestic sphere, keeping a good household and raising moral children, as this was the most important contribution women could make to society. As was discovered in a World Values Survey, by Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, they found that around the world even today “both men and women willingly adhered to the traditional division of sex roles in the home. Men in these societies are not actively restricting and silencing women’s demands. Instead, both sexes believe that women and men should have distinct roles”. (as seen in D’Souza 2007) This was also true of pre-feminist women and men in Western societies. Indeed, this was true until around the 1980s. Traditional gender roles were embraced by both sexes, no matter how it was initially manifested, therefore they should not rightly be thought to be exhaustively an expression of male power. This remains true in large sections of the world

757 today, where Western feminism is seen as a potential scourge that is perfectly targeted to destroy traditional societies and, despite how this is portrayed in the Western media, who jump on public expression of female dissatisfaction no matter how unrepresentative such view are, is opposed just as passionately by women as it is by men. As Kahlid Baig wrote of feminism, “It is hard to imagine a more diabolical and wicked program to destroy Muslim societies from within, and create the same mess there as is visible in the Western world.” (Baig as seen in D’Souza 2007) To allow women to fulfill their traditional role in society, male and female workers demanded a living wage for men that would support an entire family comfortably without requiring women to work in paid labour. As it says in the labour publication Ten Hour Advocate, written in the year of worker’s revolutions of 1848, before Marx’s theoretical contribution, “we hope the day is not distant when the husband will be able to provide for his wife and family, without sending [the wife] to endure the drudgery of a cotton mill.” (as seen in May 1982: 401) Again, in the pamphlet the End of the “Family Wage”, workers are asked to . . .[o]ppose [employment of our women folk] with all your minds and with all your strength for it will prove our ruin. We must strive to obtain sufficient remuneration for our labour to keep the wives and daughters and sisters of our people at home . . . That cormorant capitalism will have every man, women, and child to toil; but let us exert our families to oppose its designs. The argument was that women were just too valuable to the family and society at large to be wasted in the productive process. These were struggles grounded in the reality of lived lives, working people fighting so that women should be respected for intrinsic reasons, as women, and not just for their productive potential. People also opposed women entering the workforce for pragmatic reasons, women performed such an important role in society outside of production that they needed to be protected for the good of society as a whole. It is important that it is appreciated that Christian morality shaped the early worker’s movement, indeed, really until 1917, more so than “scientific Marxism”. As Marsden observed, “the moral and organizational roots of the British Labour Party owe far more to Methodism than to Marx”. (Marsden 1998: 12) There was a moral argument being made by the working class, both men and women, aimed at protecting working class woman and their families from being exploited by capitalist employers and have them recognised, as were middle-class woman of the time, for the social and creative contribution women made. Woman functioned in a moral capacity with the task of ensuring that morality was spread to the next generation. As May observes, “Working mothers’ neglect of the duties of nurturing and properly socializing their children was viewed as detrimental to the future of the human race, a social problem that could be addressed by adequate male wages.”

758 This early worker’s movement on behalf of women began to bear fruit towards the end of the 19th century. It was actually only towards the end of the 19th century that married woman, driven by the relative impoverishment of the working class, and possibly as a result of the very earliest influences of consumerism, began to enter the workforce in greater numbers in places like Germany, England, and Sweden. Before this time, it was expected that a working woman would leave her place of employment once married in order to fulfill her domestic obligations within the family. The number of women working in Germany rose in just 25 years from under 400,000 in 1882 to 2.1 million in 1907. (Fuchs and Thompson 2005: 71) In light of this new trend to working married women, European governments rushed to introduced family friendly policies that supported traditional Western views of the family. In the 1870s and 1880s, the German government, along with the governments in England, France, and Sweden, introduced gender specific policies aimed at encouraging women to stay at home and raise children. (Fuchs and Thompson 2005: 71) Laws were introduced to support the family such as, limiting the hours women were permitted to work to 11 hours a day, ensuring that women did not work on Sundays so that they could attend Church with their families and ensured segregated working spaces for men and women aimed at reducing the obvious temptations that might result in infidelity. With the introduction of electricity, factories began to work longer hours. As it was thought inappropriate for woman not to be home of a night to look after their children and be with their husbands, laws were introduced making it illegal for woman to work after dark. Working woman certainly did not want to work long hours and thereby being forced to neglect not only their domestic duties but were also missing out on opportunities for self-development and education. As the Cripple Creek (Colorado) Daily Press expressed in 1902, the new laws were designed to, “keep his wife and children out of competition with himself and give them the same opportunities for improvement and intellectual and moral training and comfortable living as are enjoyed by those who do not labour.” (as seen in May 1982: 402) It was argued that middle-class women did not need to work and that they benefitted from this privilege and working-class women deserved the same opportunities for intellectual and moral self-development. Once woman did join the workforce, some joined organized labour unions and their industrial struggles reflected their aspiration to spend time with their families. When female textile mill workers took industrial action to reduce their working hours from 11 to 10 hours a day, their slogan was, “One more hour for our families”. (Fuchs and Thompson 2005: 71-72) The Reichstag, between 1890 and 1899, responded to workers’ demands in Germany and expressed sympathy for the aspirations of working people against the capitalists by trying to maintain traditional family arrangements. Government reports at the time revealed that workers, including women, wanted women to stay at home with their families, especially after having children. The growing

759 concern was that one income was thought to be inadequate to support a family with basic necessities. As is often the case today, women were not choosing to work as an act of liberation and individual selfexpression but were being forced to work in order to survive. In response, the German government introduced the labour code of 1891 that supported the traditional family model with the male working as the main breadwinner and woman staying at home to raise a family. (Fuchs and Thompson 2005: 72) It was to encourage traditional family arrangements that many of the formal inequalities in income were introduced. It was a strategy trying to address the increasing pressures that were forcing women into he workforce. For disparity of wages functioned in the same way as taxing second incomes heavily, a strategy used in many Western countries including Australia until the very end of the 20 th century, it was a disincentive aimed at helping people make what were considered at the time the “right choice”. The point is that European governments towards the end of the 19th century were trying to support traditional family relationships like those being advanced by Bachofen in accordance with the wishes of the working people of Europe at that time. It was radical leftists and extreme right-wing industrialists, a minute proportion of the population who inhabited the absolute extremes of the political spectrum, who opposed these strategies. Perhaps ironically, industrialists hoped that women would be forced to work, as they are today, because at that time the measures introduced as a disincentive for women to work made them more profitable as workers. As evidence for who was interested in exploiting women, the new legislation that emerged from the 1870s through to 1914 to protect women and families encouraged some employers to operate outside of the regulatory framework ensuring that they could exploit women as they wished. (Fucks and Thompson 2005: 72) One group who stood against working class aspiration in wanting women to join the workforce as “equals” were the communists. The Gnostic Jewish Marxist tradition, in full agreement with the liberal capitalists, believed that woman’s “liberation”, at that time a questionable term, could only be achieved by woman working like men. This required the abolition of the traditional family that was so prized by both the middle and working classes. As Marx argued, “The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex into public industry and . . . this in turn demands the abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.” As American Jew Betty Friedan would later concur expressing a view perfectly consistent with Marxism in the years following World War II, “The only way for a woman . . . to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” (Friedan as seen in Brower 2015: 22) Authors like Marx and Friedan were arguing, that women’s domestic work, so prized by European societies, raising moral children and ensuring that their husbands domestic needs were being met, was worthless and did not allow women to develop creatively.

760 By contrast, apparently, doing the repetitive work of the factory floor was the site for women to become fully human, of being completely free, and to be able at last to truly become themselves. Unlike the vision being expressed by the working-class men and women, who saw domestic life for women as potentially fulfilling and rewarding as well as necessary for a good society, the Gnostic Jewish tradition argued that the domestic sphere was intrinsically oppressive, and it was only through paid work in a capitalist system of production that women would find their own liberation and fulfillment as humans. After all, if you come from a position that sees all morality at best a waste of time but more likely as something evil then obviously a pursuit oriented towards realizing a more moral society has no value at best but is potentially destructive. The Gnostic Jewish Marx, along with free-market capitalism, saw the “liberation” of women, not in terms of being maintained as respected woman functioning in traditional caring roles within the family thereby contributing to the moral improvement of society as a whole, but now ‘liberation’ was the exact opposite of what appears to have been the desire of women and working people in general at the time, liberation was to be achieved by integrating women into the exploitative economic system of production by tearing her away from the social relations of reproduction and the unique educational and creative opportunities that this role permitted to ensure that she was fully integrated into production. Such a strategy did not only destroy the unique and privileged status of the domestic sphere but as has been the case, the destruction of the “feminine” as such because the sphere for the feminine was demolished. In practiced, this was the annihilation of a way of life that had existed in Western society for millennia. Yet this was, as the work of Gross and Weininger makes transparent, exactly what the Gnostic Jews hoped to achieve, the destruction of the feminine as such. They ultimately want women to be indistinguishable, in terms of social roles, from men but to perform in those roles without moral codes and this was to be achieved by encouraging women to first do traditional male tasks including male sports but to ultimately fill positions of power. Most importantly, curiously without understanding the gnostic context, it is the sexual liberation of women to be realised with the destruction of the monogamous family that motivated much of Marx’s efforts. Long before Freud or Gross would make their important contribution to “liberating” female sexuality, Marx was arguing that the key to breaking “patriarchy” and the society that it had built, Western civilization, was by encouraging female sexuality. Indeed, the person who did more than anyone else to promote the arguments advanced by Bachofen in a political direction that he personally would not have supported was Engels, Marx’s one time co-author, who wrote at length on the ideal situation of a return to the lost matriarchy. Unlike Bachofen’s own arguments, which argued women advocated for monogamous relationships to protect their own safety and well-being, the Marxist tradition argued that

761 woman should be liberated from monogamous relationships and “freed” to express their sexuality with whomever they pleased. Here is an early example of a particular conception of “freedom”, in terms of living without moral restraint, that has come to dominate our post-modern condition. Indeed, and this is of the utmost importance, it was through female sexuality that patriarchal society was to be overturned. So, the instrument by which society was to be made anew, the way that the West was to be made to think differently, was primarily, although not exclusively, through female sexuality. Ensuring women were promiscuous, that they were “freed” from the monogamous relationship and the protective environment for raising children under the care of both a man and a woman, has been a long-term goal of Gnostic Jew’s political activism including, as will be discussed shortly, and most importantly, Sigmund Freud and Otto Gross. Later Marxists, like Heidi Hartmann, argued that the working-class aspiration for traditional families in monogamous relationships raising moral children was an expression of bourgeois male power who hoped that women would be excluded for decision making roles. Women should not have a say over their own futures, she argued, because they were under a false consciousness, but needed to be forced to be free. This most certainly went against everything that Bachofen argued. (Hartmann 1979) According to the vision of both the capitalists and the Marxists, women’s future was not with the family, not as ‘virtuous womanhood’, living in monogamous relationships, married to their loving partners surrounded by a supportive extended family, raising moral confident children, assured of their place in society, but the highest ideal was now to be sexually liberated or, “in touch with their sexuality”, “free” from the constraints of traditional marriage and able to be exploited equally to men. This was all intentionally aimed at undermining the traditional family so that women could be fully incorporated not only into the productive process but as a means of eroding societies moral conventions. If a future matriarchy was to be realized and if Gnostic Jews were to change the thinking of Western civilization, then women had to be changed into something different from who they had been historically first. As Margaret Sanger argued in 1950 in a way perfectly consistent with Gnostic Judaism, Through sex, mankind may attain the great spiritual illumination which will transform the world, which will light up the only path to an earthly paradise. So much we necessarily and inevitably conceive of sex-expression. The instinct is here. None of us can avoid it. It is in our power to make it a thing of beauty and joy forever: or deny it, as have the ascetics of the past, to revile this expression and then to pay the penalty, the bitter penalty that Society today is paying in innumerable ways. (Sanger 1950) But was what Sanger was saying true? It is not a coincidence that at a time when such assertions are being made most forcefully that we, at the same time, life in a post-truth age when questions of truth can no longer be raised. Despite such argument, the issue must still be raised, were the 1950s, even after the war

762 that had been instigated by Gnostic Jews that ripped Western civilization apart, so much more terrible than the 1980s when the Gnostic vision had become much more of a reality? Sanger was not to know about the drugs, violence, rampant sexuality, single parent families and criminality as they were all still in the future. She could still dream of a utopia built on sexual freedom even though we know today that it would never be realized. Sanger’s account though is a perfect expression of the Gnostic vision of the relationship between sexual freedom, the family, and women. It was to be through sexuality, conceived here as a “natural drive”, the Shechinah, that an “earthly paradise” would be manifested. Sex truly was to be the road to Western metamorphosis into something new, something more authentic to the human condition. This was a deliberate strategy to turn women in particular away from the civilizing project that had informed human aspirations for thousands of years and to return humankind to an explicitly more “animal” like existence. To again embrace our primitive drives as an end in itself freed from the guilt of a Christian ethos. Everything Sanger says is perfectly consistent with the sentiments of Marx and other communists towards the end of the 19th century. It is through sex that spiritual illumination, the spiritual illumination of “Mother Right” spoken about by Bachofen but increasingly being thought to be an expression of the Shechinah, would be brought into the world. This would be an illumination of earth, the illumination of the goddess of darkness and chaos. The God of the Underworld released onto the world. The opening of Pandora’s Box where the only thing left trapped in the box is hope. It is this that is the earthly “paradise” about which Sanger speaks. It is against the world but for the earth that Gnostic Jews fight for sexual liberation. Emotions over reason, pleasure over duty, the feminine over the masculine. Here we clearly see all that was once praised as good, reason, duty and masculinity, cast in the role of evil. The exact program of Black Lives Matter voiced a hundred years ago by Marxists. It is not so much that through female sexuality that the West would be made to think differently but female sexuality was the West thinking differently. Female sexuality was an end in itself. To be sexually liberated was to think like a Gnostic Jew. The justification for this is that it is simply instinct, it is the way we were made by God. Not that we are uniquely a creature capable of civilization, creatures able to reach the highest intellectual goals and productively control our natural drives but, Sanger argues, this is not what we should aspire towards. We must overcome our shame and guilt and surrender to our basest orgiastic instincts as the ceremonial worship of the Shechinah. The reason we can be sexually liberated without guilt is because humanity can recreate the world as they see fit. They can turn what is noble into what is base and what is base they can ennoble. Through this act of ennobling, Sanger argues, we can overcome the “ascetics” of the past, Christianity, and turn sex into something beautiful and thereby no longer suffer the many ills that society did in her time for this act of morality. But is not art, beauty, great works of literature,

763 comprehending and encountering God of greater value than sex? The problem is, and they are fully aware of this, the younger you introduce a person to sexuality, the more they masturbate as teenagers, the more they turn to sex for comfort and meaning, the more sex does fulfill these functions in society and the more important sexuality becomes and the more it is normalized by society. Instead of arguing that meaningfulness and caring are far more important than sex, which in excess might rightly be cast as a mental illness, the centrality of sex becomes normalized, and it is when people are not concerned about sex, when sex is not central to their lives, that they become pathologized and medications are produced to ensure this “normal function” is returned. The pathology becomes understood as the new normal and the industrial medical system is only too prepared to respond to this new conception. It was only by putting a sexually liberated woman, free of guilt or any moral restraints, into positions of leadership that the Gnostic vision of the future, where moral judgements would no longer inform public life, could be realised. As already suggested in passing, the aim of overthrowing patriarchy is not simply about “liberation” but about ensuring women act like men in certain ways and function in traditionally male roles. The most important role that they must function in is as social leaders. As argued in the Jewish magazine appropriately named Tikkun, as this project goes global, “There can be no democracy in Iraq without a fundamental redistribution of legal, economic, political, and social power toward women and their equal representation throughout the region’s economies and governments.” (as seen in D’Souza 2007) The ultimate aim is not “equality’, equality is only the first step, it is not to simply giving women a voice, whatever this might mean, but to ensure that the lost matriarchy of the warrior Queen is once again realized so that people are liberated from the moral constraint associated with male dominion. What must be realized “moving forward” is a particular kind of society that, as they wished, worships the Jewish god, the goddess of darkness. What they want is a women who is active like a man, a woman who hopes to impose her vision on the world, but not one that has accepted the moral worldview of masculinity. It is a vision of a woman who continuous to offer the unconditional love of the mother but one who is confidently striding the public stage as a leader. If the public sphere is understood as the “. . .rationalizing [of] public authority under the institutionalized influence of informed discussion and reasoned agreement . . .” (McCarthy 1989: xii) then what we see today is not, as is often claimed, the expansion of the public sphere into private lives but the expansion of the female dominated private sphere into the public domain. This is increasingly a sphere where judgements are not made, where everyone is welcome unconditionally as simply who they are, and where emotions are expected to play a more important role than reason. It is not a coincidence that the submission in passionate support for identifying as inter-gender are always

764 written by women. No wonder women, or more accurately “feminists”, have struggle determinately against the Western ideal of the public/private divide justifying this attack in terms that this division has historically subordinated women. They will now celebrate as the public sphere becomes colonized by a private sphere determined to remove rational debate seeking agreement informed by a shared experience of the good and see it replaced by emotional arguments that necessitate the systematic exclusions of those, such as white males, who are no longer considered worthy of having a voice. At the turn of the 20th century, such struggles remained far in the future. Unlike most of the 19th century, after the First World War, the ‘feminist’ movement had been reduced to “merely a desire to be “free”, to shake off the trammels of motherhood” so that women could enter into economic and sexual relationships without the constraints of traditional expectations. (See Weininger 1906: 332) Interestingly, to live without family relationship, unburdened by the demands of “motherhood”, was the exact conditions of slavery in the ancient world. Slaves in ancient Rome were maintained in “communistic slave barracks and had sex with whomever they wanted. (Weber 1999: 144) The reason why slaves were treated like this was not to ensure their “freedom”, not as an easily accessed pleasure against the drudgery of their lives, but as an expression of their condition of slavery. They were like animals, satisfying their animal drives to produce more, as slaves were called, “talking inventory” (instrumentum vocale). Like cows in the paddock, their sexual activity was reduced to a merely functional act or reproduction without the associated blessings (burdens) of parenting and family. As none other than Max Weber observed, “. . . the slave in his barracks is not only without property but without family . . .” (1999: 144) The institutions of “private property” and “private family” always coincide as together they are expression of a truly human freedom, according to a Western view, which might be contrasted to the freedom of an animal, free from moral demands, which is, for a human, a condition of slavery. Animal freedom is human slavery. To remove private property is to undermine the institution of the family and visa versa. For the female slave, “Sexual intercourse for them is a kind of controlled prostitution with bounties awarded to female slaves for raising of children”. (Weber 1999: 144) Fathers played no role in raising slave children as no man was sure which was “his” because this was one of the functions of the monogamous nuclear family. The basic reason for this license was because the slaves had no need for moral agency. The slave owner would determine the behaviour of the slave, the owner would determine how long a person worked at a task and for how long, so autonomy, self-restraint, agency would never be a concern. It was imply assumed that a slave would steal if given an opportunity as they were, after all, little better than animals and animals displayed no moral restraint so why should slaves. Indeed, morality probably made slaves more difficult to manage, as with the vast majority of the population today, and this explains why slave owners

765 preferred criminals as slaves, because they were easier to manage. (Weber 1999: 144) The same principles that applied to slaves in the past are today applied to the entire Western world. Agency is a difficulty that makes people troublesome. Better a person without morality as they are easier to manage and to ensure a productive return. Could a truly moral person, guided by conscience, work in insurance, banking or even government today? The institution of slavery in Rome was greatly undermined with the advent of Christianity which raised the slave to the status of serf. This new standing was the result of slave initially permitted to live in families. (Weber 1999: 146) Unlike Judaism, the assumption of the moral equality of all of humanity and the universal message of redemption meant that slaves too would be required to learn Christian morality and act accordingly. This meant that they had to be permitted families and raise their families as human beings. Although few would like to admit it today, it was Christian moral obligation that saw human property move from the slave barracks into peasant cottages adequate for housing a family. (Weber 1999: 148) Along with Bachofen and Marx, the other important 19th century thinker who would shape the inter-war years and helped to create the conditions for the re-education of a population was Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s work is so valuable because, after striking up a relationship with the Gnostic Jew Paul Rèe, Nietzsche seems to be familiar with the agenda of Gnostic Judaism and, under their direction, appears to have come to developed what might be described as Teutonic Gnosticism. It was Teutonic Gnosticism that would result in the authoritarianism of the Nazi movement and not Western Christianity. As respected scholar on Nietzsche’s politics, Abir Taha, observes, “Nietzsche’s greatest political influence has been on the Nazi ideology”. (Taha 2005) Nietzsche’s work can be read as giving rare insight into what 19th century Gnostics believed. This discovery does not only advance scholarship on our contemporary condition but is also important for scholars of Nietzsche who can now, finally, understand the real motivations for what appears to be, from a Christian perspective, such innovative, and destructive, work. Paul Rèe was, for a period of time, an extremely close friend and father figure for the rather weak and impressionable Nietzsche. This was despite Rèe being five years Nietzsche’s junior. (Donnellan 1982: 595) Although Nietzsche’s ever compliant sister, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, would claim that her brother’s enthusiasm for Rèe was the result of him finding an intellectual companion who agreed with his own way of thinking there is no evidence to support this claim. Why would Nietzsche develop such ideas in secret only making them public after associating with somebody expressing similar ideas? Nietzsche’s sister developed an apology for Nietzsche that was primarily designed to ensure her brother’s historical legacy was be secured and part of this meant exaggerating the independence of Nietzsche’s work from the work of Rèe’s. One of Elizabeth Forster’s concerns seems to be that Rèe would be given all the credit for

766 Nietzsche’s work. Nietzsche’s first two books, after all, written independent of Rèe’s influence, The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, although revealing great potential, indeed many seemed to think at the time that they were better than what he would later produce, showed little of the direction that Nietzsche would take after reading Rèe and then coming to know him personally. Indeed, it shows quite a different direction of thought, more along the lines of Martin Heidegger and Erich Fromm, in terms of seeking harmony between “earth” and “sky”, “mother” and “father”, rather than the simple reversal that he advocates as the self-confessed “anti-Christ”. Although today these “early” books are commonly portrayed as immature “failures” that were dismissed by Nietzsche’s peers, a view Nietzsche himself would claim, the truth seems to be more along the lines that these were books that were recognised as showing a great potential. Those scholars who were interested in seeing Nietzsche’s future development seem to be greatly disappointed, at least, with what Nietzsche wrote under the influence of Rèe. Indeed, some even seem to find Nietzsche’s writings under the influence of Rèe as offensive and many who read his earlier works sympathetically seem to break all contact with him as a result of later publications. What intervened on the expected development of Nietzsche as a scholar was the result of being invited by Malwida von Meysenbug villa in Sorento to participate in a study and work community with Paul Rèe and Albert Brenner. It was during this visit that Nietzsche was exposed and apparently became convinced by the arguments of the Gnostic Jew Paul Rèe. Whether Gnostic Judaism was explicitly stated to Nietzsche, portrayed as some kind of secret learning that he was being given, or presented as new ideas that allowed for a particular reading of the ancient classics that were harmonious with the French moralists, will probably never be known. What we do know is that there was a Nietzsche before Paul Rèe and a Nietzsche after meeting Paul Rèe and these two Nietzsche’s argued very different things. In the crudest of terms, Rèe’s influence on Nietzsche’s rather more famous work can be seen in Rèe’s publication, The Origin of the Moral Sensations, published in 1877. In that volume, Rèe argued that altruism, an apparently moral sentiment, was an innate human drive, an instinct, that had, over centuries, evolved through a process of natural selection. So, although altruism appeared to be an ego denying sacrifice for the good of another or society at large it was, when properly understood, according to Rèe, ultimately motivated by the same selfish material concerns as any other instinct informed by the need to survive. The revolution in Rèe’s argument, although it does not seem to have been a particularly influential book, is to give a thoroughly non-metaphysical, materialist account of the moral sentiment. Rèe had, in effect, at least tried to remove God, the Father, from the last domain in which He was thought to be relevant. In the same way that Darwin had argued that there was no need for a divine creator in order to explain biological order, so, according to Rèe, there was no need for a God to explain human moral

767 behaviour because, when properly understood, it was not moral at all but merely instinct. It was not, to use the language of Gnosticism, the Father but the Mother, not the God Head but the Shechinah. Just as God was not the creator of the biological world but it was the result of material forces, the “Earth”, so humanity’s experience of good and evil was just an internal natural process of our minds, an instinct, that had evolved over time under the same selective forces as legs. Rèe’s argument, although not well received or widely read at the time, was actually quite important in the sense that it had been argued up until that time that although humanity’s biology had indeed evolved through a process of natural selection, just like every other species, the uniquely human act of morality, knowing good and evil, as most especially expressed in altruism was the result of the ascent of Man, the ascent of man towards being “good” or, equally, the ascent of Man towards God. God was responsible for humanity’s moral sentiment. Rèe’s arguments proposed that this was simply not the case. There was no room for a transcendent God in Rèe’s humanistic universe. The gnostic vision of the cosmos was correct, Rèe was implicitly arguing, God had indeed withdrawn from this world and any apparent experience of God was either an illusion or, as was more likely, a deception. Nietzsche’s “middle period”, beginning with the publication of Human, All-Too-Human (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, 1878), which Nietzsche initially readily acknowledged was influenced by Rèe, was most certainly under the tutelage, and this is the right word, of Paul Rèe. The influence of Rèe was so transparent that those who knew both men seemed to feel that Rèe had corrupted the potential greatness of Nietzsche that had been displayed in his earlier works like The Birth of Tragedy. (Donnellan 1982: 597) Nietzsche’s colleague, Rohde, was so disappointed with the new direction that Nietzsche had taken that he asked, “Can a person simply discard his soul like that and assume another one? Can he suddenly become Rèe instead of Nietzsche?” (Rohde as seen in Donnellan 1982: 597) This is a poignant question and the language he chose to use seems to implicate Nietzsche’s moral soul. Was Rohde simply saying that Nietzsche had apparently come to accept the position of another man so thoroughly that he had lost his own self-expression or was he observing that Nietzsche had embraced the soul of somebody who was amoral? Has Nietzsche swapped the soul of a well-liked Christian for the soul of a disliked Jew? Whatever Rohde meant by his question, what we do know is that Rohde’s concerns and disappointment were shared by others. A similar concern was expressed around the same time by Nietzsche’s one-time mentor Richard Wagner. After Nietzsche sent Wagner a copy of Human, All Too Human, Wagner broke all contact with the emerging scholar. This indicates the level of disappointment that met Nietzsche’s work at the time from those who held out such hope in Nietzsche. It was not his early works that were rejected by his peers, these works showed great potential, but his work produced in the middle period. Although Nietzsche tried

768 to defend this work against its many critics, especially against the accusation that it was indeed overly indebted to Rèe, it was this work that seems to have resulted in the famous marginalization of Nietzsche by the German establishment. Donnellan (1982: 597) concludes, Nietzsche’s claim that Ree’s work was not the inspiration for Human, All Too Human, . . .remains somewhat dubious, however, since, apart from the preparatory sketches of The Ploughshare, written in the late summer of 1876, there is very little evidence in Nietzsche’s works and notebooks before October 1876 to suggest his subsequent temporary positivism, and what there is may have been influenced by his reading of Rèe’s Psychological Observations in 1875. The debt that Nietzsche appeared to owe Rèe can be seen throughout this period and indeed for the remainder of his career. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche argued in a way that seems obviously inspired by Rèe’s post-Darwinian arguments against morality. As Nietzsche wrote, “When seen from outside, the actions and events in man’s life seem very diverse and manifold, but, seen from within, they are almost all caused by just a small number of instincts, namely the instinct for self-preservation and acquisition, the sexual instinct, and vanity.” This is Ree’s exact argument. Humans may be seen to act in all kinds of ways, as a result of all kinds of motivation, but all these actions can in fact be reduced to base instinctual drives but especially the desire for sex. In his final book, his autobiographical work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche continued to express sympathy with Rèe’s argument despite their relationship having long come to an end. In that final book, Nietzsche gathers “’God’, ‘soul’, ‘virtue’, ‘sin’, ‘the Beyond’, ‘truth’, ‘eternal life’” and denounces the entire project that they represent as mere “imaginings, more strictly speaking lies from the bad instincts of the sick.” (EH “Clever” 10) That is ideas such as God, sin, virtue are merely expressions of a slave morality, informed by the need to survive, and are certainly not “life affirming”. Such ideas seem to be at least a development of Rèe’s ideas if not simply their repetition in a more inflammatory form, a form permitted from a Christian in the 19th century that would not have been permitted from a Jew. So, according to Nietzsche, what appears to be a moral act, such as altruism, can in fact be reduced to self-interest in terms of being motivated by self-preservation, greed, lust, or vanity. No wonder Freud, and numerous other Gnostic Jews, would later be so taken by Nietzsche. What did Nietzsche actually know about Jewish mystic tradition of kabbalah or Gnosticism more broadly we simply do not know. What we can see are clear expressions of a Sabbatian influenced Jewish Gnosticism with some rather shallow references to “blond beasts” thrown into the mix to affirm “Germanness” and no longer narrowly “Jewish”. These small changes do not stop his arguments from being Gnostic but takes such thinking in a direction that would make it palatable to the future Nazis. This is why it is so offensive when people like German Jewish scholar Erich Fromm argue that authoritarianism emerged from

769 Protestant Christianity when the break from morality, embracing Nietzschean philosophy, is Gnostic through and through and has nothing, as Nietzsche’s explicit identification with the “anti-Christ” affirms, with Christianity. Nietzsche, who became important for opening a space for Gnosticism to become publicly acceptable, argued that Christianity promoted a life denying set of beliefs, or what he termed a ‘slave morality’, for guiding how people should live. The greatest danger to this kind of life is that it is this slave morality that has come to dominate Western civilization. In harmony with Gnostic Judaism’s criticisms of Orthodox Judaism, Nietzsche argued that Orthodox Jewish values, developed under conditions of slavery in Babylon, were incorporated uncritically into Christianity. Those values were originally generated by Hebrew slaves who were primarily concerned only with survival and not flourishing. Because of this they are literally an expression of a ‘slave morality’. The core feature of a slave morality is that it is a life denying mode of existence. According to Nietzsche, a master, in contrast, will prize behaviours that affirm their vision of the world; military prowess, bravery, pridefulness, and authority, were all expressions of a master morality. Interestingly, as might be expected, Nietzsche’s features of a master morality map nicely onto traditional masculine virtues. As Nietzsche wrote of the master morality, “The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges, “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself”; it knows itself to be that which first accords honour to things; it is value-creating.” In contrast, a slave will prize behaviour that will allow them to survive while under the control of others. Such behaviour might include humbleness, gentleness, forgiveness, love and obedience. The master preferred humbleness, for example, because it was he who was great and needed to be recognised as such. The main difference between these two moralities is not, as might be expected, the nature of what is valued but the conditions under which they are embraced. The master choses freely what he values while the slave is forced, as a matter of survival, out of the instinct to survive, to embrace a set of values. It is the ability to assert the values as reflective of their interests that marks the master morality. The features of a slave morality do not easily graft onto Christianity, but they do align very closely with traditional feminine virtues. Today, with women being well known to adopt and forcefully advocate for the entire “woke” agenda, it might appear that once again women are not choosing values that express their interests but simply struggling to please their new masters. They are simply once again trying to please Gnostic Jewish men but this time they are rejecting their families and traditional morality in order to please another. Women, like former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel, who allowed literally millions of radical Sunni Muslims into Germany or Jacinta Arden, who is implementing legislation that ensures that the “indigenous” Māori, who at most constitute 16% of New Zealand’s population, will now

770 hold 50% of political power, are not doing so because they morally believe that it is the “right thing” to do, although their “caring”, unconditional love is consistent with Gnostic understandings of the feminine, but primarily because they unconsciously trying to please society’s true leaders. As such, these women are not adhering to an experience of the divine. Despite how this statement may appear, this is not a criticism of women as such, but it is simply to explain why so many women are such enthusiastic advocates for the Gnostic program even when they fill positions of power. They are simply pleasing their new masters. Woman, as Nietzsche observes, too often seek external validation from others for their actions thereby making them susceptible to uncritically advancing agendas of those with power even it that is destructive to their immediate families. Does the kind of free love, no commitment society really benefit women? Lesbian feminists or feminists who advocate for a post-relationship societies most certainly believe that it does. Feminist pornographer, Betty Dodson, claimed that her great breakthrough came when she discovered from a group of B & S lesbians that sex was primarily about power. Indeed, Gnostic Jews, and I find this surprising from my own experience, as part of their argument that everything is power continuously argue that sex is primarily about power. As Klein, (2016) the Jewish American sex therapist wrote, argued in agreement with Dodson, “In the world of human sexuality, power is a primary currency, so our sexual imagination is rich with it”. It is because sex is about power that sex needs to be explicitly negotiated in order to reach a contractual agreement. Again, as Klein (2016) wrote, “. . .two people cooperatively agree to divide up power in an asymmetrical way for a specified time period.” She argued that, far from what should be most prized, “Romantic love is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for women . . .” (Dodson 2013: 26) It is interesting that one of innovations of Western civilization, romantic love, is again portrayed as one of the most damaging features of our world. Sex, Klein argues, is not about love, sex is not about sharing intimacy, it is not about letting a person into your private space or showing them just how much you care. Sex is not even about pleasure. According to Dodson, sex is all about power. This is a way of thinking about sexual relationships that fits much better into the Eastern tradition of arranged marriages for financial benefit and social standing then the romantic Western tradition where people lose themselves to the demands of love. What has this radical, even perverse, mindset where sex is perceived as power achieved for woman? The massive increase in female homelessness, the faltering domestic sphere, high rates of divorce and extremely high rates of old age loneliness, might suggest that their current life choices are perhaps not ion their best interest. Merkel allowing waves of Muslim fundamentalist men into a country is a perfect expression, Nietzsche might argue, of a slave morality where women are forced to not only forgive their enemy their trespasses, illegal immigration, but valorise their incapacity to say no by coming to love them no matter

771 how much their values might offend. Such love is a love not freely given, but a love granted by the weak because they have no real choice. This slave morality can be seen increasingly amongst the general white community when they silently accept racist commentaries against themselves that demean Western civilization while praising practices Westerners once demonized. Nietzsche believed that the origins of the slave morality began with the Jews but was introduced into the West via Christianity. As Nietzsche wrote, . . .the Jews achieved that miracle of inversion of values thanks to which life on earth has for a couple millennia acquired a new and dangerous fascination – their prophets fused “rich”, “godless”, “evil”, “violent”, “sensual” into one, and were the first to coin the word “world” as a term of infamy. It is this inversion of values (with which is involved the employment of the word for “poor” as a synonym for “holy” and “friend”) that the significance of the Jewish people resides: With them, there begins the slave revolt in morals. When Christianity came to dominate Western civilization in the 4th – 5th centuries AD, these Jewish values were adopted, Nietzsche claims, depending on your view, by the up until then dominant and ‘noble’ Europeans. Christianity was first embraced by slaves, the poor and women as a means to at first valorise their strategies of survival but was later used to undermine Roman authority. Within a few hundred years of Jesus being recognised as the messiah, Christianity had become the official state religion of Rome and it was at this stage, Nietzsche argued, that the West itself became enslaved. This argument can be seen as an elaboration on the earlier work undertaken by fellow German philologist Max MüIller and his interest in early Hindu teaching which he associated with ‘Aryans’, who himself was expanding on the conclusions of English historian Edward Gibbon who characterised the Antonine period before Christianity as the happiest time in human history (Wink 1993: 3). According to MüIller, Hinduism, with its race-based caste system, was the ideal expression of Aryan social order that was untainted by Christianity. The term “Aryan” is from the proto-Indo-European word for ‘noble’. In a master morality, aspects that affirm the master’s world are prized while in a slave morality, the opposite is the case, those life affirming values are denounced as ‘evil’ because if adopted by slaves it would mean certain death. In agreement with Marx and the Gnostic tradition, Nietzsche argued that one aspect of a person’s life where a slave morality is enacted is in sexual relations. Whereas sex, it could be argued, should be seen as a positive, if not a necessary, part of human life, that should be affirmed and enjoyed by all consenting adults, 19th century Protestant Christianity systematically marginalized sex by thinking of it in terms of being “sinful”, overly “sensuous” and even “subhuman”. As Nietzsche wrote, “It was Christianity, with its heartfelt resentment against life, that first made something unclean of sexuality: it threw filth on the origin, on the essential fact of our life.” Sex, by historical Christian accounts, should only be performed

772 for procreation and not freely undertaken for pleasure. Sex and reproduction were, to their worldview, inseparable. The Christian tradition emphasised the intellectual aspect of humanity, humanity’s reason, and intentionally marginalized the sensual, especially the sexual. Nietzsche hoped to inspire Europeans to see sex in a much more positive light. Sex should be seen as an essential part of a healthy, fulfilling, and enjoyable life. As Nietzsche wrote, “All contempt for the sexual life, all denigration under the concept ‘impure’ is the essential crime against Life – against the Holy Spirit of Life.” This, obviously, is a criticism of Christianity but there is also a more subtle message here. He explicitly identifies the denigration of sex with an expression of the Holy Spirit which has historically been associated with the Shechinah. Indeed, “Holy Spirit of Life” would be a perfectly good name for the Shechinah. This was part of Nietzsche's attempt, like Hasidism, to reverse the life denying aspects of Jewish inspired Christian thinking through a “revaluation of all existing values”. The Holy Spirit of Life might, by their account, be equated with Yahweh. Nietzsche envisioned a different expression of women and his overall strategy, according to Oppel, was, “to demonstrate that our attitudes towards sex-gender are thoroughly cultural, are often destructive of our own potential as individuals and as a species and may be changed . . . “woman-as-such “. . . is shown to be a . . .construct.” (Oppel 2005: 1) This was especially true of woman’s sexuality which Nietzsche, in agreement with historical thinking, seemed to think was stronger than in men. Nietzsche believed, women are, “. . .raw sexuality, which Nietzsche does not see as a bad in itself, and in this he differed from his contemporaries.” (Diethe 1989: 865) Nietzsche believed, a belief certainly not unique to Nietzsche, that women were primarily sexual creatures, and that this sexuality was being suppressed by notions of the “feminine”. To stop women suffering the pathological suffering of denying women sexual expression, notions of the feminine needed to be changed so that it would encompass their driving sexual needs. Nietzsche’s argument, that Christian attitudes to sex was making people mentally ill, is germane to the work of Jewish psychologist Sigmund Freud but, to be absolute clear, Freud most certainly did not learn of this argument from Nietzsche. Although space is an issue, it is interesting, before elaborating on Freud, to consider the origins of psychology/psychotherapy. Psychology, rather surprisingly, begins with a problem of mysticism or, more specifically, astrology but ends with morality or, better, overturning morality. In the throws of the early scientific revolution, a time when rationalism was embraced and intuition was being marginalized, the problem of how astrology worked became pressing. Science used materialist accounts to explain phenomenon but here was no adequate account to explain astrology. It appeared to work but how it worked remained a mystery. By the 18th century, people knew what planets were and what the Sun was, but the question remained as to how the movement of these bodies far out in space could affect the lives of humans. Consistent with scientific thinking of the day, it was theorised

773 that there must be some kind of natural force that pervaded the universe, but the nature of that force was a mystery. One concern that troubled people in the late 18th century was that medicine, informed by science, was become detached from spirituality and nature. What people sought was an approach to medicine that was all things, scientific, spiritual, and mystical, just such an approach was about to be proposed. One person who studied the problem of astrology using scientific methods was an affluent doctor named Franz Anton Mesmer. It is rather surprising that Mesmer chose such a controversial subject. Mesmer was from an extremely wealthy and highly respected family. People such as Mozart, Haydn, and Cluck frequented his opulent residence. He was renowned in his native Austria as a man of learning and a very good conversationalist. To appreciate the direction Mesmer’s life was about to take, as with anyone, it has to be appreciated both the times and the place in which Mesmer lived. Like many wealthy men of his age, Mesmer claimed to be a man of letters who kept abreast of the latest developments in geology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, and philosophy. Although extremely wealthy, there was an expectation that men at that time contributed to “science”. This is important to appreciate if Mesmer’s life is to be understood. He was not only interested in science but, again consistent with the times, he was also a musician who played the pianoforte, violoncello and is credited with introducing the then newly invented glass harmonica into Austria. His house seems to have been a social hub for the establishment. He invited intellectuals and musicians from across Europe to present seminars and perform their latest works including his personal friends Haydn and Mozart. Mesmer was not only blessed with wealth, talent, and intelligence, but he was also said to be physically attractive. He was described as being tall and of “noble bearing”, a feature highly prized at the time, possessing full lips, a strong chin, and a broad, intelligent forehead. Mesmer was also not simply an amateur. He undertook formal study in medicine and was awarded a doctorate in 1776 for his essay titled De Planitorum Influxu. His thesis was relevant to the path his later life would take. It was a pseudo mystical paper, again consistent with the times, that proposed there existed a “fluid” like substance that flowed through the universe that he named gravitas universalis. Mesmer claimed that it was this liquid that allowed the far-off planets to influence the lives of Men on Earth thereby explaining astrology. Although these ideas sound outrageous today, the worst pseudoscience imaginable, but such ideas were harmonious with the mystical thinking that dominated European thought at the time. After completing his studies, Mesmer was told by a Jesuit priest, an astronomer by the name of Father Maximilian Hell, that he had been asked to procure a magnet to treat a sick person and that this treatment had indeed been successful. The use of magnets to treat patients was actually a well-established and generally accepted method of treatment at the time that had been used since at

774 least since the Middle Ages. Mesmer’s contribution was to combine this well-known practice, that magnets possessed curative powers, with his own work on forces flowing through the universe. Magnets, after all, come to earth from space in the form of meteors and so it made sense that they carried the force that flowed through space. Mesmer was living in a world where Luigi Galvani had just discovered the link between electricity and the animal nervous system. A discovery that suggested to many, as Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale affirms, that there was some kind of link between “life” and “electricity”. Mesmer simply extrapolated on these ideas, associating the curative power of magnets, with the power of electricity to create life, and the mysterious “liquid” that he posited permeating the universe. Electricity, magnetic power, and the cosmic force were all related to life and human well-being. Magnetism, what Paracelsus called “the monarch of secrets”, had been a significant scientific curiosity for centuries although it, at the end of the 18th century, was not well understood. Most people believed that they were two distinct forces but Hans Christian Oersted, in 1820, began to discover that electricity and magnetic force were indeed related but that was still 50 years in the future for Mesmer. How, many wondered, in the same way a magnet would fascinate a young Albert Einstein, did magnets apparently “know” what direction was north? This metal would move to point north, every time, but, of course and, therefore, it was not unreasonable to thing that as it was motivated that it may be related to “life-force”. In the Middle Ages, leaned men thought that the powers that resided in a magnet were of an astral nature. After learning the effectiveness of magnets for treating ailments, Mesmer concluded that his rather mysterious cosmic fluid was actually a magnetic force that also worked upon humans or the “animal” body. The appeal for Mesmer was probably that such a force appeared to bring together science, spirituality and mysticism, the mystical teachings of the ancients with the scientific discoveries of his contemporaries. Just as Papin had shown how heat could be harnessed to serve practical ends in the steam engine so, Mesmer hoped, could the magnetic force, that flowed through the entire universe, be tamed to serve human needs. Mesmer believed that he had made a great discovery and this belief occupied the rest of his life. At first Mesmer used magnets in the same fashion as earlier Medieval doctors to treat his patients but he came to believe that the same supposed benefits achieved with magnets could be achieved by directly laying hands on a patient thereby transferring the “animal life-force” directly and unmediated. After all, Mesmer never believed that it was the magnets themselves that were curative but the force that flowed through the universe that the magnets contained that this force was fundamental to human life therefore it was perfectly consistent to do away with the magnets. Mesmer concluded that, “Of all bodies in nature none is so potent in its influence upon man as is the body of man himself.” As his ideas developed and he more clearly conceived of the force flowing through the universe as a life force, he re-named this

775 force, that ran through electricity, magnets, and the universe. “animal magnetism”. Although not something discussed in everyday conversation, the idea that there is some kind of life-force flowing through the universe that affects human behaviour has been extremely important for explaining human behaviour. Maynard Keynes, for just one example, used the idea of “animal spirits” to explain economic behaviour. Far from Mankind being a purely rational creature, he was arguing, people actually make investment decisions on limited knowledge, emotions and psychological drives that are not understood. What is Freud’s concept of the “libido”, that positive life-force that motivates human action, other than a kind of “animal magnetism”. More recently Roszak argued that “the psyche is rooted inside a greater intelligence once known as the anima mundi, the psyche of the Earth itself” (Roszak 1995: 16) Animal magnetism was understood as a life-force that flowed through the entire material universe much like the Gnostic Jewish conception of the Shechinah, the Goddess of the Earth so Roszak’s conclusions seems to affirm the Gnostic idea that it is the earth Goddess that lies within us all. Freud himself contrasts Thanatos to the libido, a “death force” to what he thinks of as a “life-force”. The libido, his own anima mundi, motivates all the actions associated with the Shechinah or with the positive life-force while Christian morality would, in Freud’s mind, be what is rightly associated with the death force. Perhaps unsurprisingly today, although Mesmer clamed all kinds of miraculous cures, its best results were achieved by treating conditions that affected the “soul” or the psyche. Despite claims of medical success, his medical peers were less enamoured with his theories. Mesmer began to try to prove his theories using established scientific methods which he personally seemed satisfied were a success, but which seemed to be unpersuasive amongst his peers. At one point he invited all his old friends and associates to visit his hospital to prove to them that he was adhering to established medical practices but absolutely nobody came. The medical establishment of Vienna had made their minds up, a medical practice that relied only on the touch, with no other interventions or medications, was at best fraudulent but potentially dangerous. Over time, the medical establishment of Vienna moved from quietly marginalizing Mesmer to publicly ridiculing him. An apparently spontaneous campaign began to flourish in Vienna ridiculing the entire practice of “magnetic medical cures” that was implicitly ridiculing Mesmer. Letters were published in medical journals and public presentation were given denouncing Mesmer’s methods directly often moving to ridicule. The attacks became so bad that Mesmer was basically forced out of Vienna in shame. He moved to the more cosmopolitan, dynamic, and “open” city of Paris in 1778. Unsurprisingly, Paris’ medical establishment were no more accepting of Mesmer’s radical ideas than Vienna. Indeed, the same pattern of acceptance by the public and rejection by the medical establishment that he had experienced in Austria

776 was repeated in Paris. Upon arriving in Paris, Mesmer was warmly welcomed into court at the highest levels. This welcome probably had more to do with his charm, grace, and manners (as well as because he was a Freemason) than as a result of this “medical” theories. Marie Antoinette herself, the Queen of France, was total taken by this tall, well-built, attractive Austrian. She promised him her ongoing patronage. Antoinette’s endorsement was followed by other members of the French court supporting his “hospital”. Despite his ideas finding an enthusiastic reception amongst the nobility, the Academy of Medicine in Paris thought his ideas were bogus. To try to address emerging concerns, Mesmer again invited the Paris medical establishment to his hospital at Creteil near Paris so that they could see for themselves how his hospital worked but again, as in Vienna, the invitation was ignored. Acknowledging the influence Mesmer was attracting from his court but being a sceptical man of the Enlightenment and not so easily swayed by Mesmer’s charms, Louis XVI established an official commission to investigate the merits of Mesmer’s claims. This commission of the most highly respected physicians of Paris at the time, including the American ambassador Benjamin Franklin, wrote a damning report for the King. It concluded simply that “animal magnetism” did not exist, that it therefore could not cure people and any positive effects that people did report must, therefore, be the result of their imagination. No clearer or more definitive denunciation of Mesmer’s work could have been written. In light of the report, Mesmer’s ideas would never be accepted by the medical establishment. Not despite the report but perhaps, in no small part, because of it, Mesmer’s treatment became more popular than ever for the wealthy of Paris. By this stage, perhaps to appeal to this audience, Mesmer began to introduce theatrical elements into his “treatment”. Accounts of his methods claim that Mesmer had patients sit in dimly lit rooms, the walls covered with heavy hangings, designed to deaden the sounds, which were covered in strange astrological markings. Scented steam rose from a large Baquet that stood in the centre of the room. Mesmer had the “patients”, now being treated in groups to accommodate their large numbers, either hold hands, touch fingers or be connected by cords laid between them that supposedly allowed the animal magnetic forces to flow like electricity through the group. Mesmer himself would suddenly appear, dressed in a lilac robe carrying what appeared to be a small wand like a Zoroastrian priest, moving between the patients, touching one and then fixing the next with an intense stare. To his many critics, it seemed that Mesmer’s “treatment” required elements of the ceremonial, the magical, even the religious, to convince those present that it was effective. During such “treatment sessions”, women would become hysterical, scream, and faint while men would break into spontaneous seizures. This was to be expected according to Mesmer’s larger theory. Mesmer proposed as “theory of crisis” which meant that treatment required bringing the patient to crisis, thereby the screams and seizures, if treatment was to be effective. Mesmer

777 claimed that his treatment had made the blind see, the deaf hear and the lame to walk. Despite Mesmer’s theories and practices falling being totally ignored by the medical establishment of the day, they were not ignored by everyone. To help earn money, Mesmer began to give lessons in how his treatment was to be performed. The man who did more to legitimise Mesmerism than anybody else was Count Maxime de Puységur. Puységur was a student of Mesmer’s, and it was his work that would bring legitimacy to the practices in such a way that it would, eventually, become accepted. Puységur, like Mesmer, was from a distinguished family which took part in Paris’ fashionable society. It was probably as a result of his social connections that Mesmer’s ideas became known to the young Puységur. After being trained in the techniques of mesmerism, by Mesmer himself, Puységur set up a practice on his private estate at Buzancy. It was not the fashionable aristocrats that frequented Meser’s practice that came to see Puységur on his rural estate. It was the local people, soldiers, farmers, and milk maids. Common people with common concerns. Being independently wealthy and philanthropically oriented, Puységur never accepted payment for his services. Unlike Mesmer, Puységur was not a qualified doctor. He had not attended university and he was not familiar with the latest discoveries in geography, chemistry, or mathematics. He was an amateur, a dilettante, to the practice of medicine. Despite this difference in qualifications and knowledge, it was Puységur who made the intellectual breakthrough that would result in Mesmer’s name continuing to grace the pages of academic texts. According to Mesmer’s crisis theory of treatment, the aim of the treating doctor was to induce an intense condition of crisis and by coming through this crisis would result in the patient being cured. It was believed that the more intense the crisis, the better the patients’ chances of overcoming their ailment. What was expected, therefore, in the process of treatment using mesmerism was a moment when the patient would, in a rather obvious way, break down. This moment of crisis would see patients scream and thrush about as though in seizure. When this crisis was overcome, according to Mesmer, then the healing process would be achieved. One day, Puységur was treating a young local shepherd boy named Victor when a strange turn of events occurred that would change not only Puységur’s life but would eventually, and this is not an exaggeration, the world. Against the expectations of Puységur, as he stared into the young man’s eyes while stroking his body with his fingers as he had been trained by Mesmer, Victor’s eyes slowly closed, and the patient fell into what at first appeared to be a deep sleep. Puységur, concerned that this was not the correct treatment, first gently and then with more enthusiasm tried to arouse the young Victor from his “sleep”. No matter what Puységur did, Victor remained in what appeared to be a deep sleep. What Puységur discovered next amazed Puységur and would prove to be the breakthrough that would make

778 Mesmer’s work significant even today. Victor was not asleep because, although he could not be brought back into a normal state of consciousness, Puységur discovered that the shepherd boy would obey Puységur’s every demand. When told to stand the young man would stand. When told to sit the young man obediently sat. Puységur realized, much to his credit, that he had managed to induce the condition of the sleepwalker in his young patient. Victor was “asleep” but not asleep to the state that he was unable to do things. Excitedly Puységur took the opportunity to explore the condition further. He tentatively asked Victor a question and, to his amazement, the boy responded. Puységur did, eventually, manage to rouse his young patient back into full consciousness but a new door had been opened. One that has had immeasurable implications for our own time. The questions were obvious. What was this strange condition between being awake and being asleep? To whom where they talking when they asked the entranced person a question? Who was it that was responding to the questions? The questions were certainly not new but what Puységur had discovered was a way of inducing the “in-between” state so that now it could be studied. Over time Puységur discovered that in many his patients he could induce this state using the same methods. While “under”, patients were found not only in a highly suggestive state, but that if they were told to do something while in a somnambulant state, they would carry out that request when returned to full consciousness without knowing their motivation. Of course, this raised the question of who was really in control of our agency? What it the conscious brain or whoever it was that they were talking to while the patient was “mesmerised”? Many years later, the practice of inducing this in-between state was named “hypnosis” by James Braid. That there was a state between sleep a wakefulness had been known for millennia. Paracelsus had given an account of monks who would use shiny objects to distract patients from their ailments and pain during treatment. They were asked to “fascinate” on the object which would result in the patient being moved into a state of calm where they no longer suffered from the symptoms of their ailment. The breakthrough of Puységur’s approach was that he could now study the phenomenon using the techniques of science. Mesmer had previously reported that some patients, as he stroked their bodies and stared deeply into their eyes, had become dulled and unresponsive but he never linked this condition to being brought into an in-between state of consciousness. Soon after the discovery of how to access the domain of the “unconscious”, some people, such as the poet Heinrich von Kleist, characterised this pseudoconscious state as being on the “night side of nature”. By this analogy, the conscious state was in the clear light of day while what was being uncovered was what lay hidden, in the “darkness” of the mind. While hypnotized, people certainly behaved very differently to how they did when conscious. As Heinze (2004: 24) observed, “Under the influence of hypnosis, patients displayed completely distinct traits from those

779 that normally identified them.” It was like meeting a different person hidden within the body that everyone knew. It has to be appreciated that although today we have a vocabulary for talking about the condition that Puységur had discovered, “the unconscious”, “suppression”, “transference”, that is familiar to everyone, at that time this vocabulary was yet to be articulated. What was being unlocked by Puységur, according to some, was the female domain of chaos, the uncovering of the creature of darkness, the encountering of the abysmal depths, which refused discovery by our conscious selves. Others thought about the situation very differently. At the turn of the 19th century, the age of rationalism had given way to an age of romanticism. The world of Puységur was not the world of Voltaire but a world dominated by Rousseau, Schelling, and Fichte. Society was not, for such men, a positive force enhancing the human condition but, the opposite, society, civilization, was a corrupting force that poisoned the ideal Adam. The inhabitants of the islands in the Pacific Ocean, the “noble savage”, was the ideal towards which people should aspire and not the Protestant pastor who had been shaped by Christian ethos. When, as a result of further investigation by Puységur, it was found that not only was the hypnotized person unable to resist the orders of the doctor, apparently lacking the wilfulness required for selfishness, but that they were also unable to lie, then the hypnotized state began to have moral implications. While hypnotized, patients admitted to criminal acts and illicit dalliances that they had refused to acknowledge while conscious. It seemed that in the half-asleep mind of the “in-between”, people did not think that they had uncovered the Prince of Darkness or the hidden feminine but a precivilizational being, an unsullied Adam, who, though possessing no knowledge of good and evil, lacked the capacity to do wrong. The subconscious simply could not be evil. Here some men found a condition that was more attuned to Jesus’ pure goodness than the darkness of chaos. What they had discovered, some people, such as Phineas Quimby, believed was a window into the human soul, the psyche. Quimby believed that humanity participated in God’s wisdom and was attuned to the Divine nous. He proposed that what was being uncovered through hypnotism was not the Prince of Darkness but the unsullied prefallen human potential. Whether people accepted the idea that what had been uncovered was the chthonic condition of humanity or access to God, what was generally accepted was that “Everyone, it seemed, had a fragile, divisible psyche.” (Heinze 2004: 24) There, in the country practice of Puységur, was born psychology or rational reflection on the psyche. In light of this important discovery, the unimaginable result of Mesmer’s first tentative steps, what “. . .had hitherto been regarded as transcendental and magical could now be logically grasped by the sober sense.” What had become a possibility was not only could an account of the psyche be given but it could be analysed or interpreted. Mesmer’s aspiration to find the potential

780 nexus of the mystical, the religious and the scientific, seemed to have been achieved. Through the act of being mesmerized/hypnotized, a person could, it was believed, become a “truth-Sayer” blessed with deep insight into not only their own internal condition of well-being but were considered to be able to comment with perfect insight about the world in which they lived. Some of Mesmer’s students even came to believe that “during the crisis, somnambulists can read the future, their eyes can penetrate to the farthest horizons, and in every direction.” They did not only have superhuman insight into the past and the present, but the future was also now able to be revealed by the mesmerized soul. As the century progressed, more and more research was undertaken on Puységur’s discovery. One strange, but eventually important phenomenon, was that when women went to see these psychologists, they would often express powerful emotional bonds to their therapist such as love and sexual attraction. This might seem unsurprising with a little reflection. Here is a situation where a woman sits intimately close to a man who expresses deep concerns about her well-being, listens attentively to everything that the woman says, while staring deeply into her eyes. The whole time the man gently rubs her body. A situation open to misunderstandings indeed. This was at a time when genders lived quite separate lives and touching between genders who were not intimate was discouraged. Such stimulating action simply must have led to a lot of confusion and misunderstandings. Whatever we might say about the phenomenon, it was around the time of this discovery that educated, “assimilated” Jews became interested in studying mesmerism. What these Jews probably thought was discovered, through their gnostic lens, was a practice that moved into the “subconscious” caverns of a person’s mind. Whereas Christian scholars thought they had found the original Adam, gnostics believed that they had discovered the realm of the Shechinah. Here was a generally socially accepted practice that appeared to “release” women from the evil conditioning of Christianity. What was being uncovered, by this account, was women’s true being, highly sexual, predatory women. What had been discovered, quite by mistake, these gnostic intellectuals must have thought to themselves, was a mechanism for destroying Western civilization. It has to be appreciated just how Gnostic psychoanalysis became in the late 19th century mainly through the contribution of Sigmund Freud. One of the core teachings of Eastern European Jewry, from where Gnostic Judaism emerged, is the belief that “The spiritual quest demands candid introspection. . . The spiritual pilgrimage commences with an inward gaze, with the individual’s encounter with his or her own self.” (Sherwin 1997: 108) It is this inward gaze, that is critical of everything external, but most importantly the Christian experience of God, that is the starting point of psychoanalysis. Of course, by the time Freud came to psychoanalysis he would have already been only too familiar with Gnostic arguments and knew only too well that Christian sexual morality suppressed instinctual

781 drives and was already committed to the belief that this was the sole cause of all evils in the world. What occurs in late 19th century, is that the Christian God is quietly removed from any explanation of the human condition by a series of Gnostic thinkers. Once God is dead, as Nietzsche himself observed, then morality itself loses legitimacy. Without God, not only the question as to why be moral becomes a legitimate question but why have morality at all? Morality itself, with its associated feelings of guilt and shame, becomes the problem. The best strategy to undermine morality and, thereby, overcome shame and guilt is through “freeing” sexuality. As the Jewish psychologist Zweig observed in 1932, prior to Freud “. . .doctors had not yet learned where to discover the root of the trouble, namely, in the sexual life, and, inasmuch as the “respectable” and “moral” psychology of pre-Freudian epoch did to grope into the forbidden abysses [of sexuality].” (Zweig 1932/2012) It was as a result of Freud’s ideas, which are a transparent expression of Gnostic Judaism, that morality became thought of as being no longer a gift from God but an oppressive expression of male power. Again, as Zweig, a revealing commentator on Freud, wrote, “. . .in Europe, the sexual question was kept in quarantine. It was neither denied or affirmed, neither mooted or solved, but quietly kept out of sight behind a high wall. A huge army of guardians, functioning as schoolmasters, tutors, clergymen, censors, and governesses, was enrolled to ensure that young people should be fenced away from the possibility of unconstrained bodily pleasure.” It was this “wall” or “fence” that Freudian psychology was determined to tear down, especially for women, in order to ensure that Western civilization, grounded in Christian morality, would be destroyed through highly sexualized and, at least from within that tradition’s perspective, immoral behaviour. Freud’s project was not, despite how it is presented, motived by the concerns of a “disinterested” scientist driven by the desire to find truth, and then use that truth for the good of people, such a pursuit would be immoral from his perspective, but by a theo-political project to change the way we think and act. As Handelman wrote, “Freud’s contribution . . . was an extension of the line of Jewish Rabbinic hermeneutics . . .” (Handelman 1982: 130) Although it is not well known, indeed the information was deliberately suppressed, Freud was raised in a strict Hasidic household. Freud’s father arrived in Germany from the Hasidic communities of Eastern Europe as part of a wave of immigrants fleeing Russian responses to Jewish aggression. As Freud states in a 1930s letter to A. A. Roback, “It may interest you to hear that my father did indeed come from a Hassidic background. He was forty-one when I was born and had been estranged from his native environment for almost twenty years.” (Freud as seen in Salberg 2010: 8) Freud’s father, Jacob Freud, was from Galicia in Eastern Europe. He was raised and remained as a devote Hasidic Jew his entire life. (Roback 1957, Merkur 1997: 12) Jakob Freud was described as “a “traditional-minded Jew” who likely studied Talmud daily, kept a kosher home, and spoke Yiddish with his family”. (Yerushalmi 1991/2014: 337-338)

782 The gnostic imprint from Hasidism can be seen in just about every aspect of Freud’s, so called, “psychoanalysis”. As Jung et., al., observed, psychoanalysis has “a truly religious character, even when they pretend it to be scientific.” (Jung, Dell and Baynes 1955: 207) Freudian psychology is in reality a religious practice that is not scientific in any way. As Roback rightly observed as early as 1929, . . .we are entirely on safe ground in regarding Freud as the Hassid in the history of modern psychology . . . Not only is he affiliated with Hassidism by virtue of his humanitarian interests, but the very catholicity of his views, as well as the mystic halo surrounding his doctrines, gives his outlook on life a peculiar colouring, which brings it into line with Hassidism in its philosophical and historical aspects. Hence it is, too, that Freud has succeeded in creating disciples instead of merely training pupils, as most of the other psychologists have done. (Roback 1929: 160) It is for this reason that the many claims of success, that have not been repeated, of early psychoanalysis must be seen for what they were, deceptions. For just one example, the Eastern European Jewish psychoanalyst, Boris Sidis, who moved to the United States claimed that he treated a severe case of multiple personality disorders, bringing unity to the psyche, through hypnotism in 1905, such results have not been repeated. Hypnotism has been proven to be ineffective in the treatment of multiple personality disorders. So, how did Sidis achieve his well-publicised “cure” in 1905? In truth, he probably did not really achieve anything but, as with many claims in the early days of psychoanalysis when it was trying to gain legitimacy, it was probably a deception intended to legitimize psychoanalysis.311 It was this religious elements that explains why Freud established himself as a tzaddik and was not simply a colleague or even a teacher. He saw himself as an intermediary between man and God and therefore demanded, like Boas in anthropology, strict and unquestioning obedience. Even sympathetic Jewish readers of Freud, such as Erick Fromm, criticised Freud for surrounding himself with ardent devotees who agreed unquestioningly with everything that Freud proposed. (Kamau 2012: 196) The role of dream interpretation in Freudian psychology is a kabbalistic practice that can be seen performed in terms of revealing God throughout the Old Testament. It is because of this mystical heritage that emotions were thought to be so important to psychoanalysis and, in the same way that the Hassidic tradition prizes “joy”, ‘happiness’ was promoted as the ultimate outcome for a healthy life. Happiness was not to be only the aspiration of the individual but for the whole of society. As Tauber observed, psychoanalysis, according to Freud, was not just a “therapy for unhappy neurotics, but the master critique of a dysfunctional

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The truth is that not only were the “doctors” Jewish but many of the early, well-publicized, patients were also Jews. This was also true of Frued who made many of his most famous breakthroughs on Jewish patients. (Heinze 2003: 75) This would make sense if the intention of the entire scheme was to deceive. Gentiles may have been less prepared to lie that their “treatment” had worked.

783 culture.” (Tauber 2012: 5) Freud’s work did not only operate at an individual level but was primarily aimed at undermining the Christian Protestant culture that was dominant at the time that Gnostic Jews believed suppressed human happiness. This society wide happiness was to be realized by releasing Mankind’s basest drives. Again, as Zweig wrote, “. . .the destructive and reconstructive activity of Sigmund Freud does not become fully comprehensible except as a counterthrust against the pre-war312 (or rather lack of view) of the human impulsive life.”313 It was to uncover the “impulsive” or instinctual drive of humanity, especially in relation to sexuality, that was the primary motivation for Freud to destroy the dominance of Protestant Christianity with the aim of realizing “happiness”. Bloom observes that Freud’s idea of “ego negation” “is very close to the Gnostic Negation of Time and of the Creation”. (Bloom 1981: 64) That is, Freud’s project of negating realty is akin, it emerges from the same motives, as gnostic’s negation of “creation”. Despite this debt to gnostic Hassidism, this is becoming increasingly public, Freud himself, like Einstein, appears to deliberately minimize the Hasidic aspect of psychoanalysis, as Merkur states, “We may sympathize with Freud’s concern to protect psychoanalysis from “the danger of becoming a Jewish national affair”. By concealing the extent of his debts to Judaism, Freud sought to minimize his critics’ recourse to ad hominem argumentation. Psychoanalysis was the creation of a Jew and, as such, a Jewish cultural expression.” (Merkur 1997: 17) Despite this secrecy about the religio-cultural baggage of psychoanalysis, there were moments when Freud explicitly acknowledged that Judaism did shape his thinking. Interestingly, in the preface of the Hebrew edition of Totem and Taboo, Freud acknowledged, that he “has yet never repudiated his people, [and] feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew and who has no desire to alter that nature.” (Freud as seen in Bernstein 2009: 1) He could have elaborated on what he is suggesting clarifying, “but I have every desire to alter the nature of the Christian West”. Freud’s psychoanalysis is simply an expression of his theological beliefs. It is not so much that God is dead, Gnostic Jews do not believe that God is dead, but that we are so ignorant of God that, from a human perspective, God might as well be dead. Consistent with Hasidism, like Nietzsche, Freud acknowledges biological differences between males and females, but he quickly concludes that these biological differences are insignificant for understanding the human condition. Freud wrote, “These sexual

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World War I The First World War was an extremely important event for Europe as it became understood, wrongly, as a failure of Western civilization. As Jung & co.(1955: 199), wrote in 1933, “Think of nearly two thousands years of Christian ideals followed, instead of by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, by the World War among Christian nations and its barbed-wire and poison-gas. What a catastrophe in heaven and earth!” The First World War marked the failure of the Christian tradition and this greatly aided Frued’s project because, as Germany evinces at this time, people were searching for something different. 313

784 differences are not, however, of great consequence: they can be outweighed by individual variations. For our immediate purposes they can be disregarded”. (Freud 1961: 117) Because some men are more “feminine”, and some women are more “masculine”, as individuals, then the very concept of biological determination of gender can, according to Freud, be “disregarded”. This may seem hasty to dismiss a phenomenon that has informed society for eons and seems to be central to the process of reproduction no matter how “feminine” a man is or how “masculine” a woman may appear, but it is a belief that lies at the very foundations of Freudian psychology. Freud argued that certain ‘feminine’ behaviour was imposed on women by society and that these behaviours went against woman’s “instinctual life”. For example, Freud thought that society-imposed constraints on women expressing “aggressiveness” and that this oppression manifested itself in “powerful masochistic impulse”. Such arguments were perfectly harmonious with the Kabbalah belief that there was a reason behind all human action, a slip of the tongue was not just a mistake but was an expression of hidden motivations, a “Freudian slip”, that revealed something suppressed about the agent. Indeed, according to Freudian psychology most of what informed our lives were not consciousness, not part of the masculine civilization, but was the feminine unconscious. As Freud wrote, Man could not be thought of as being informed by God’s grace because, Man’s craving for grandiosity is now suffering the . . . most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavouring to prove to the “ego” of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. And so, it was with women. It was the unconscious drives of sexuality and aggression that really drove woman and not beliefs about being a virtuous. What was required was to reverse the traditional feminine virtues in order to realise truly “natural” womanly behaviour. In arguing that we descended from animals, like all other creatures, Freud was “implying an ineradicable animal nature” to humanity. Therefore, according to Freud, woman do not express, “peacefulness, sensitivity, tranquillity, tolerance,” as the Christian Bachofen argued in his account of matriarchy, but “aggression” and “sexuality”. They are not “innocent and chaste” but “promiscuous”.314 The problem confronting women was that these instinctual behaviours were being suppressed by patriarchal societal expectations and the imposition of femininity. (Freud 1961: 116) As the Marxist communist psychoanalyst Franz Jung, a close collaborator of Otto Gross who will be discussed shortly, wrote in 1922,

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As will be discovered in the following volume, these “natural” attributes of women are expressed by the ancient Canaanite/Hebrew goddess Astarte/Anat who was, at one stage, thought to be the concubine of Yahweh but later they seem to become synthesized as the male and female attributes of primordial being. Freud’s account is not scientific materialist as he would like to portray but, when properly understood, exhaustively theological.

785 . . . it is the . . . distorted and sick movement of the individual towards the collective . . . Correspondingly, this movement is based on the concept of ensuring safety in order to preserve normality and equilibrium. The rupture in earlier experience which leads the individual into the conflictual tension of a new concept, i.e., that of rape, projects as transference the idea of authority. Authority is being born in the mind of the oppressed. Then it gets converted into convention as an authoritarian organization that appears to organically belong to the individual – as family, religion, etc., and finally the state . . . Decisive is the formation of authority within the lonely experience of the individual, the striving towards being ruled over, out of which grow ruler and rule. (F. Jung as seen in Heuer 2001: 664) The individual is coerced into the ‘collective’ by framing the world in a particular way. This framing has notions of authority that then colonize the subjective mind making authority and the institutions that support that authority, like the family, appear organic or natural when nothing could, according to the Freudian school, be further from the truth. Freud is arguing that, as Jewish Marxist scholar Marcuse voiced, “civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts” (Marcuse as seen in Tauber 2012: 12) As Freud himself claimed, “Civilization is something imposed on a recalcitrant majority by a minority who understood how to take ownership of the means of power and coercion.” That the Frankfurt School would see resonances between Marx and Freud becomes transparent in such assertions. Again, as Freud said, “We live in a thoroughly strange time in which we are surprised to note that progress is marching in step with barbarism.” Here is the well-spring of the argument cited in the introduction that “civilization is barbarism”. What the West was calling “progress” was really “barbarism”. What the West called civilization was actually “built up on renunciation of instinctual gratification” and this was the barbarity. The goal of this barbarism was to suppress human instinctual drives as a civilizing project, to demonize the earlier “mother right” when humanity lives in harmony with nature and did not pursue morality. This particular ordering became justified, at least according to Bachofen by claiming that conscience was an experience of God and not an expression of male power. As Freud wrote, “Conscience is the consequence of the renunciation of instincts.” Based on these religiously inspired assumptions, the solution to ‘freeing’ humanity, consistent with a particular kabbalah influenced Hasidic understanding of Judaism, must be to destroy civilization in order to release these natural drives and one expression of civilization was ‘the feminine’. Freud claimed, “the more civilization, the more repression”. Civilization was something that had to be overcome as a medical necessity, as an imperative to keep humanity “healthy” or to realize a “sane society”. As Marcuse observed, “freedom from repression is a matter of the unconscious, of the subhistorical and even subhuman. . .” (Marcuse as seen in Tauber 2012: 13 emphasis added) So, against the historical tendency to continuously try to make society better by making it more moral, more civilized, the aspiration of all European psychologists prior to the

786 Freud led Jewish takeover, this relatively small but extremely influential group of scholars was arguing the opposite, we have to make society more primal, more animalistic, less moral, and more instinctual, less “civilized” and more barbarous, and this was a theo-political liberating project. Freud claimed, “The liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization.” Freud was merely expressing, indeed admits to being inspired by late 18th century romanticism through the filter of a particular tradition of Hasidism. He perhaps should have been mindful of Paglia’s warning, “Romanticism always turns into decadence. Nature is a hard taskmaster.” (2001: 3) But decadence, especially of a sexual kind, is exactly what Jewish Gnosticism hopes to realise. As the political Hasidic theorist Eric Gutkind wrote, “Is not the very essence of genuine Judaism profoundly identified with the attainment of purity, of a soul free from destructive and perverted elements, of the restoration of sexuality, which today is dislocated and therefore harmful, like a misplaced fire that burns the house instead of warming it.” (Gutkind 1952: 20-21) It would seem that thinkers like Freud and Gutkind see human sexuality in the same light as Lawrence, “. . .man as an integral being is lost in the mystical elements of sex; man becomes a function of sex instead of sex being a function of man. This is not pornography; it is a reflection of the same dehumanizing process. . .” (Berdyaev 1935/2008: 35-36) This simple statement by Berdyaev says everything wrong with Freud’s analysis. Freud, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, argued, “It may well be asked whether an attribution of “degeneracy” is of any value or adds anything to our knowledge” as it was traditional Western notions of degeneracy that he and Gross were promoting as a liberation project. Instead of these animal instincts being an expression of humanity, Freud appears to turn everything upside down and sees humanity as an expression of these animal drives. Freud’s insights about female sexual oppression were foundational for informing Freud’s entire social theory which presents the “view that liberating ‘desire’ represents the only effective antidote to an ever-repressive society.” (Tauber 2012: 6) As Freud’s analysis of female sexuality is so central to his social theory the same criticism can be made. Freud sees society rightfully as a function of these instinctual drives instead of seeing these instinctual drives as a function of society.315 Freud’s entire work, a strategy that proved ineffective for treating mental illness but highly effective for changing gender relations and the society built upon gender virtues, is nothing more than an expression of Gnostic Judaism. It is for this reason that some who have come to understanding Freud’s true project have described his contribution as ‘cryptoreligion’. (Szasz 1990: 19) As David Bakan observed in 1958, “Freud, consciously or unconsciously, secularized Jewish mysticism; and psychoanalysis can intelligently be viewed as such a secularization.”

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Instead of seeing society as the result of instinctual drives such as sex, sex should be seen as expression of society. Instincts should not determine society but society should determine right behavior.

787 (Bakan 1958: 25) Indeed, Freuds work initially met with a great deal of hostility from the medical profession in the early decades of the 20th century. (Wasserstein 2009: 240) Freud’s ideas remained highly controversial until the 1930s when, after years of forceful promotion by powerful interests, Freud’s work began to be recognised for being a revolution in understanding the human condition. The fact that babies were revealed in Freudian psychology as complex beings was thought a revolution in thinking. Babies were, according to Freud, . . . a bundle of powerful inner drives – of possessive love for his mother, of powerful inner rage in moments of inevitable frustration, of deep fears and uncertainty in facing a strange world, satisfying and frightening at one and the same moment. Toward his brothers, sisters and father he develops a duality of emotions. He loves them, yes, but at the same time fears and even at moments furiously hates these rivals in the kingdom of love. (Liebman 1946: 11) This is a shallow account of Gnostic Judaism with the fondness for the Shechinah and fear and hatred towards the “father”, Yahweh. Despite this, Freud’s thinking “. . . was far-reaching, extending into social work, the social sciences, religious thought, the arts and literature. Like Darwinism half a century earlier, Freudianism permeated the public mind. . .” (Wasserstein 2009: 241) How these ideas are interpreted at the turn to the 20th century can be seen in a book written by German Jew Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, which was written in 1903. Otto Weininger was an Austrian Jew who was born into comfortable circumstances as the son of a goldsmith. He graduated from the University of Vienna, then one of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world, having studied philosophy and psychology, in 1898. For the next few years, Weininger worked on his first manuscript, Eros and Psyche, which was accepted by his supervisors, Freidrich Jodl and Laurenz Mullner, in July 1902 for the award of a PhD. Shortly after being awarded his PhD, when most of his work had been written, Weininger suddenly claimed that he had converted to Protestantism. Weininger then quickly added three new chapters to the end of his manuscript, one titled “Judaism”, and, now claiming to be a Protestant author, he published the manuscript. The book was published under the title, Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Despite the vast majority of this volume having been written while Weininger self-identified as a Jew, the book and its views have gone down in history as “. . . uncomfortable reading precisely because it threatened to expose the centrality of misogyny to the turn-of-the-century ideological complex – at least to the Anglo-European cult(ure) of educated

788 masculinity – and to expose it, moreover, as a cultural pathology.”316 (Kavka 1995: 129) So, this book today is seen as a testament to “Anglo-European” misogyny in that it supposedly reveals the “pathology” of that culture despite it being written by an Austrian Jew. The book itself was panned by most reviewers at the time with one humorously writing “one will first be silent about it, then one will destroy it . . . it will be destroyed very, very often”. This is what the majority of Christian Germans thought of what was claimed in the volume at that time. It was a book only worthy of being destroyed which is a fundamental criticism indeed. The reason for this book being absolutely despised by European reviewers is that the views being advanced were so totally alien to a Christian European worldview. A Christian European would simply not even begin to understand what was being proposed in this volume no matter possibly agree with its conclusions. It just would not make sense from out of a Christian worldview. Indeed, the book was so hated that one of the few European intellectuals who actually praised the book was Austrian Jew Karl Kraus. (Kavka 1995: 127) Another person who was influenced by Weininger’s conclusions was antiChristian pseudo-fascist “poet” Dietrich Eckart who became one of the founders, along with occultist von Sebottendorff, of Völkischer Beobachter, an anti-Jewish newspaper that was the voice of von Sebottendorff’s occult beliefs and Eckart’s hatred of Jews. (Preparata 2005: 60) Sex and Character is an expression of Sabbatian inspired Gnostic Judaism and when it is understood in this context only then does the work begin to make sense. It needs to be remembered that Sabbatai Tzevi himself falsely claimed to convert to Islam while continuing to practice his form of “Judaism” and advocated for others to follow him into falsely converting to other religions knowing that trusted “insiders” can do far more damage than those deemed “outsiders”. Just as Sabbatai hoped to undermine Islam and ultimately make it harmonious with Gnostic Judaism, so does Weininger hope, with Sex and Character, to undermine German culture while disguised as one of their own. That he influenced those who founded Nazism in Germany is, of course, extremely significant. More recently, Weininger’s book has become a popular tome for contemporary feminists, and it is continuously used as evidence for the oppressive attitudes of “patriarchal” Christian Europe at the turn of the 20th century. These “feminists”, unconcerned with finding the truth but determined to drive a political agenda of hatred, ignore the highly critical reviews of Weininger’s book by the majority of readers at the time that is evidence that Sex and Character was not reflective of German attitudes at the time. With the content in this volume, Weininger’s work can at last be firmly contextualised as coming out of a Gnostic Jewish tradition which is foreign and antagonistic to

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The author here is suggesting that Weininger’s book is an expression of the “cult” of misogynistic AngloEuropean masculinity despite it not even being written by an Anglo-European and that it was sharply criticized by Anglo-European masculinity who simply did not understand the book.

789 Protestant Christianity. That Sex and Character is now cast as an example of Protestant Anglo misogyny really shows just how truly effective the strategy of false “conversions” has been for advancing the Gnostic Jewish theo-political agenda while making it appear that such ideas have their origins somewhere else. False conversions have not only been effective at corrupting the ideas of other religions but also for encouraging misattribution. Despite Sex and Character being perfectly consistent with Freud’s own ideas, which is why Weininger approach him in regards to publication, Freud refused to recommend the volume. Although this is speculation as there is no concrete evidence, perhaps Weininger’s work was too transparent an expression of Gnostic Judaism for Freud at that time to officially endorse. Perhaps it was Freud himself who insisted that Weininger first convert to Protestantism before these ideas could get published so as to not attract anger towards European Jewry. Whatever may be the case, Sex and Character was published less than a year after Weininger “converted” to Protestantism, and, despite the book being full of unreformed Gnostic Jewish teachings that has no place in the Protestant Christian tradition, the book has gone down in history as a Protestant Christian book. It must always be remembered when reflecting on these issues, conversion is never recognised by Jews so conversion is without any real significance. This allows Jews to falsely convert without consequence. Despite its peculiar origins, Sex and Character is not significant for understanding Anglo-European views on sex and gender but it is very important for understanding the emerging Gnostic Jewish arguments that lay at the foundation of second wave “feminism”. Weininger begins Sex and Character by observing that, The self-assertion of the mind over the world of facts in all its complexity of innumerable resemblances and differences has been compared with the rule of the struggle for existence among living beings. Our conceptions stand between us and reality. It is only step by step that we can control them. (Weininger 1906: 1) Pre-empting Richard Dawkins shallow ideas of the “meme”, Weininger argued that just like genes struggle for survival, so do the “ideas” that mediate our experience of the world. The ideas that survive are then imposed on the continuum that is the primordial “reality”. Through this neo-Kantian device, or, equally, this expression of Hasidic idealism, Weininger was arguing that people should not think of the world as having any kind of objective reality, but that the cosmos was an expression of ideas being imposed on the world. If this truly is the nature of reality, then with enough wilful determination, one could control the way the world is “framed”. The way the world comes forward becomes nothing more than a product of human will, a product of human power. This worldview finds an intimacy, as Nietzsche would explicitly observe, between “will” and “power”. Capturing the intimacy between the theories of Sigmund Freud and

790 Weininger, Freud expresses similar ideas in terms that, “A large part of what is real within us is not comprehended, and that which is comprehended is not real.” What Freud is saying is that the human mind separates the world into ‘facts’ in terms of “same” and “difference”, but this ideational “framing” blocks access to what is truly “real”. What is truly real is not the world of “ideas”, the world of objective presence, but the primordial reality which is, in fact, unified and undifferentiated. What we know are necessarily just deceptions. It is the “underworld”, which is real, the subconscious that is “within us”, but we do not comprehend is reality. Once the relationship between reality and the categories have been established, then people intellectually move beyond being constrained by “facts” or “objective reality” and move to a higher consciousness that is “free”. This understanding of “freedom” is at the heart of the new expression of individuality. “Reality”, understood in these terms, no longer constrains agency, but primordial agency, liberating from the false idols of the World, is now positioned to control “reality” itself. It becomes the responsibility of the individual, as already practiced by Gnostic Jewry, to reshape the world to conform to these inner drives. According to Freudian psychology, this moment of realizing human potential, what might be called today in the shadow of The Matrix, the “Neo moment”, is the key for realizing human happiness. The constructed world, the World as such, is corrupted, painful, certainly not intended for the emotional realization of “happiness” not matter “joy”. Joy is only realised by moving beyond “the World” into the preconceptual thereby liberating the primordial drives, the Tree of Life, from suppression. It is through the underworld, entering Lucifer’s domain, that true human happiness resides. The conceptions of the mind are not really in the world, they are not, after all, God’s creation, ‘the thing-in-itself’, but ours, Man’s creations. They are the subjects’ ideas being imposed on the world of continua that becomes legitimized with recourse to a living God. One of those creations, one of those divisions, is between men and women. Weininger argues, consistent with Kabbalah inspired Hasidic Jewish tradition, that men and women consist of their opposite and therefore we should understand gender as a continuum and not in binary terms. Everyone, in reality, if they understand this, are actually non-binary. As Weininger wrote, The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition. Any individual, “A” or “B”, is never to be designated merely as a man or a woman but . . . is a composite of male and female characteristics in different proportions. . .” (Weininger 1906: 8) Freud agrees with this conclusion writing, “In human beings’ pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.” Freud and Weininger are in full agreement on this issue. That is because, according to the Gnostic Jewish tradition, ‘primordial man’ was originally a

791 ‘man/woman’ or that the original Adam, that was prior to the creation of women, was androgynous and that this continues to be the underlying reality today to which we should return. (See Weininger 1906: 10) It is this mix of both sexes that informs, according to Weininger, not homosexuality but, as gnostic Jewry continuously argue, the natural tendency for all men and all women to be ‘bisexual’. (Weininger 1906: 48) For this reason, that all men also consist of the feminine, according to Weininger, there is “no friendship between men that has not an element of sexuality in it”.317 This is an important claim because it moves to the very heart of Western claims, that find expression in Plato, that love between men is the highest love because it is not physical. It is purely an intellectual love that is devoid of lust. This basic outline of how the genders truly relate to each other allows him to begin his intellectual quest; what is the character of men and women? The starting point in answering this question is that such a character is certainly not fixed by nature. The categories of the masculine and the feminine are merely human creations. The most basic observation is that women are exhaustively sexual while men are only partially sexual. Men have beliefs and values outside of sex that determines the who that they are while woman, according to Weininger, because they are exhaustively sexual, have no beliefs themselves but simply adjust their beliefs to those with whom they are having sex. So, if a woman has sexual relations with a right-wing nationalist, then she will become herself a right-wing nationalist whereas a man would never compromise his beliefs just to please a women to obtain sexual favours. As Weininger characterises this situation, “man possesses sexual organs; her sexual organs possess woman”. (Weininger 1906: 92) Consistent with the Jewish tradition, but very much opposed to the Christian tradition, woman, according to Weininger, are empty in the sense that they have no real knowledge of good or evil. Women simply live an animal like existence, driven by natural instinctual drives exhaustively oriented towards sexual gratification. As Weininger wrote, “The absolute female knows neither the logical nor the moral imperative, and the words law and duty, duty towards herself, are words which are least familiar to her. The inference that she is wanting in super sensual personality is fully justified. The absolute female has no ego.” (Weininger 1906: 186) According to Weininger, because women are empty, they are vessels waiting to be filled, they can never be geniuses in the true sense of the word because genius requires originality and creativity and is, therefore, ‘conscious maleness’. Again, as Weininger wrote, “Women’s thought is a sliding and gliding through subjects, a superficial tasting of things that a man, who studies the depths, would scarcely notice. . . A woman’s thought is superficial . . .” (Weininger 1906: 191) Weininger acknowledges that Christian

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As a man I must say that this is just not what I feel. I like men because there cannot be any sexual element in the relationship. In a way, this means the relationships are more relaxed. This might be Weininger transferring his own homosexuality onto all men.

792 society at the time, as it did, claimed that women were actually on a higher moral plane than men, as people like Goethe explicitly argued, but Weininger warns, this is not really the case. Women appear at times to be more moral because women can successfully copy male moral behaviour thereby fooling men into believing that they are actually moral beings. In truth, according to Weininger, woman have a complete “absence of a moral sense”. (Weininger 1906: 196) It has to be made clear that feminine women are not, by Weininger’s account, evil or anti-moral but simply “non-moral” or “a-moral” as they cannot experience God. The belief that women cannot directly experience God, a belief fundamentally foreign to the Christian tradition, is Weininger’s key distinction between woman as “mothers” and woman as “prostitutes”. Woman can potentially either fill traditional roles as mothers, caring for their children and husbands, or enjoy a highly sexualized life aimed at their own physical and material wellbeing. As mothers, women make poor prostitutes and as prostitutes, of course, women make poor mothers. The mother, he argues, is informed by the imperative to preserve their race, and recognises the need to raise the next generation of encultured people with national pride while the prostitute, by contrast, is only concerned with herself, is only concerned with her own power, and is only concerned with satisfying her insatiable needs for sex and money. The mother is selfless while the prostitute is driven by purely selfish motives. This vision of a future when women are prostitutes and are interested only in being sexually satisfied and achieving material comfort was advanced by none other than German Gnostic Jew Wilhelm Reich who wrote in his journal in 1939, The past few nights I wandered the streets of Oslo alone. At night a certain type of person awakes and plies her trade, one who these days must view each bit of love with great fear but who will someday hold sway over life. Today practically a criminal, tomorrow the proud bearer of life’s finest fruits. Whores, ostracized in our day, will in future times be beautiful women simply giving of their love. They will no longer be whores. Someday sensual pleasure will make old maids look so ridiculous that the power of social morality will slip out of their hands. I love love! Interestingly, Reich can see no difference between prostitution and love. Indeed, he seems to suggest that every financial exchange for sex is an act of “love”. He then suggests, consistent with Gnostic Judaism and Weininger’s argument, that they will be “proud bearer of life’s finest fruit” and moral chaste women, who he refers to as “old maids”, will look ridiculous as “the power of social morality slips out of their hands” and the prostitute is seen as the new ideal. That the prostitute vision of womanhood is dominating the way woman see themselves is obvious. Few single women today do not include being a good sexual partner and having money as the criterion when seeking a good partner while being kind, funny, caring,

793 intelligent, or a good father, seems to hold only limited appeal. Women today are also active in promoting degrading and highly sexualized visions of themselves. The bestselling book, Fifty Shades of Grey, was written by a woman, the screen play was written by a woman, the movie rights were bought by a woman and the head of the studio that developed the movie project was, again, a woman. Welcome to the matriarchal age. As has already been observed, many feminists, and it is in no way rare, promote pornography and advocate for the liberalization of prostitution as a form of female empowerment. They argue that the porn industry and prostitution allow women to live independent of male control or interference while finding pleasure and financial rewards. Porn stars really are the Gnostic ideal. Marty Klein, who identifies as a feminist, argued, Recall that before broadband Internet became freely available in 2000, pornography was only semi-legal. Playboy and Penthouse could not be openly displayed in many outlets, such as 7-Elevens; adult bookstores operated in a twilight zone, just one zealous prosecutor away from financially ruinous arrests and years of imprisonment. Sending “obscene” videos through the mail was illegal, and if a prosecutor could simply find 12 jurors willing to say a video was worthless trash, its makers and marketers lost all protection of the First Amendment. I have testified in such cases as an expert witness, looking on helplessly when defendants were jailed. Although millions of people were using adult porn on the eve of broadband’s introduction, the federal government had spent decades pursuing, prosecuting, and jailing Americans for creating adult porn or for selling it to other adults. The high point of this campaign was when born-again Christian President George W. Bush directed the Department of Justice to create a new task force to go after those in the adult pornography industry. For such victimless crimes, hundreds of people languished in jail for many years. (Klein 2016) Klein is observing how Western societies historically viewed pornography as something smutty and degrading and how Gnostic Jews, like herself, have been extremely active in undermining those Western values. She had actively represented pornographers and those profiting from pornography in legal cases as thought they were the victims of an overly moralizing, live denying, legal system. It is like arguing that drug traffickers are “victims” because they bring so much happiness to so many people. This all changed, of course, as Klein observes, when they managed to ensure free pornography was streamed directly into people’s homes. It could have been stopped. It could still be stopped. Just try to download the latest Hollywood movie or the original recording of Victoria Nuland arguing with Pyatt over the Ukraine when she said, “Fuck the EU” and you will discover just how good they are at controlling internet content. To be clear, pornography and prostitution are certainly not victimless crimes. The porn stars are victims, especially when they get buggarized so bad that they suffer permanent harm, but so is the entire society in which porn becomes available. Such content shapes men and women, encourages unfaithfulness with

794 the promise of something amazing. There are many victims of pornography including our entire civilization. The pornography that is freely available today, at least to my mind, certainly does not show empowered woman free from male domination. As Osama bin Laden wrote in his “Letter to America” criticising American feminism for enabling sexual exploitation, “You are a nation that exploits woman like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of woman.” (bin Laden as seen in Friedman 2009: 50) This is the point that Weininger is making, it is an either or, either women are “consumer products” or they are “mothers”, they simply cannot be both. Osama bin Laden and Weininger are both right. Osama bin Laden is claiming that the decision that the West has made is that women are to be prostitutes. It would come as a surprise to many people today to learn that up until the 1930s women did not generally wear make-up because it was associated with prostitution. (Wasserstein 2009: 225) It was considered over sexual. This sexualization, objectification, and ultimately, enslavement, of women to bodily desire is perfectly consistent, of course, with Gnostic Judaism. Gnostic Jews argue, in harmony with Bachofen, that although the Godhead consisted of both a male and female element, ancient societies were matriarchal. They were matriarchal because they were not determined by morality but by pragmatism and hedonism. This movement argues that the masculine pursues morality and that men then impose this morality onto women, restricting their behaviour in a way that suits themselves. Males then claim that such actions are a form of feminine virtues when they are in reality created by and serve men. Naturally, according to Gnostic Jews, women are driven by baser desires, emotions, sexual appetite and violence and this is good. This argument is not intended to marginalize or criticise women, it is because women are driven by lust and not morality why they should run society. The highest God of ancient societies, Gnostic Jews claim, were Goddesses in the form of Astarte/Anat/Tanit (the same goddess in different Semitic cultures, Canaanite, Hebrew and Carthaginian respectively). These were goddesses of war who were highly sexualized. The argument from Gnostic Judaism is that society should be led by a woman but, of course, not a feminine woman but a masculine woman, a woman that was both active (masculine), driven to achieve the ends that she desired, but continued to live without a moral compass. It was none other than Sabbatai Tzevi who introduced the liberation of women onto the modern political program in the 17th century. As Goldish rightly observes, Another messianic expectation, perhaps a unique one, was expressed directly by Sabbatai Tzevi himself: the redemption of gender. When he was in women’s company, he liked to quote from Psalms 45:10, “Kings’ daughters are among thy favourites; At thy right hand doth stand the queen in gold of Ophir.” He would add on his own: “And you, downtrodden

795 women! How unfortunate are you, that because of Eve your pain is so great when you give birth? What is more, you are subservient to your husbands, so you are unable to do a thing, small or great, without their approval.” And on he went in this vein. “But thank God that I have come into the world to redeem you from all your sufferings, to free you, and to make you happy like your husbands – for I have come in order to annul the sin of Adam. (Sabbatai as seen in Goldish 2004: 9) Sabbatai was claiming that women were suppressed because women and men ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Sabbatai, as the true messiah, is claiming that he has come to specifically overturn the punishment for this sin. The way to overcome the sin, to redeem mankind, is to overcome, to ultimately reverse, existing knowledge of Good and Evil. From this time Sabbatai, or his many followers, would “worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women” in order to turn them into “liberated women” by in part making them become more like men. The ultimate aim was to make them into lovers of sexual pleasure, predatory in being the pursuer of their own sexual gratification, over lovers of the good or, to say the same, lovers of God. To become lovers of material wealth instead of lovers of their children. In short, to make women into prostitutes, like the Semitic goddess Ishtar, and not “good women” like the Virgin Mary. This might be contrasted to what is argued in the New Testament by Timothy who writes of the virtuous woman as “faithful to her husband, and is well known for her good deeds, such as bringing up children, showing hospitality . . . helping those in trouble and devoting herself to all kinds of good deeds.” It was this vision that has informed femininity until the advent of Gnostic Judaism. If women were, as Goethe claimed, the foundations of a moral society then destroying “feminine women”, as such, is to destroy civilized society. This is exactly their project. To realize chaos, their true God, in the world. In all that is being said, it has to be remembered that none of these traits or behaviours are thought to be natural to women, according to Weininger, as biological beings, but are only social constructs and, as such, they can be changed. How is this change to be realised? Otto Weininger is the first theorist that I can find who advances the founding principle of second wave feminism that, “The greatest, the one enemy of the emancipation of women is woman herself.” (Weininger 1906: 75) Weininger is arguing, replicating the Gnostic argument against Orthodox Jews, that the reason why women are how they are, the reason why they are “empty”, is because they accept the socially constructed role of being a woman. This is the argument that it is the way that women view themselves that reinforces “patriarchal oppression”, and it is not just or even primarily the result of men dominating women. This idea operates within the horizon of the argument that consciousness is masculine while the unconscious is feminine. Women view themselves as objects through the “male gaze” and it is this way of

796 seeing themselves that is the most destructive feature of womanhood. As Marxist Freire (2000: 51) observes, “One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings consciousness.” Patriarchal “reality” absorbs the suppressed women through their gaze submerging their consciousness to serve existing power relations. This explains why so many women involved in woman’s political struggles up to that time and for many, many years beyond, actually fought for the things that Weininger opposed. “Feminist” theorists were not supporting a popular movement by any means and their views certainly stood opposed to dominant views of woman themselves and these ideas addressed those beliefs. Weininger concludes that the only way that women will overcome their decrepit condition of oppression as women is to stop embracing the feminine virtues, stop being women. The project that woman should adopt, according to Weininger, is to stop being women by becoming men. As Weininger wrote, “the present method of tying woman down to the needs of her husband and children and forbidding her certain things because they are masculine” needs to be overcome and “woman must cease to be womanly and try to be manly.” (Weininger 1906: 340-341) Women need to pursue careers, power, sex and wealth like men if they are no longer to live the kind of decrepit lives that they, supposedly, did at the time. Woman, as the old saying went, had to wear the pants. Consistent with the neo-Hasidic revival that was stirring at the turn of the 20th century, Weininger is arguing that women need to become androgynous, they need to nurture their masculine side so that they can overcome the terrible constraints of family and child raising and finally try to satisfy their selfish insatiable need for sex and money. They need to return to what God made them not what civilization has required of them. As Weininger argued, “That which must be fought against (being a woman) is not an affair of ever unchangeable existence and essence: it is something which can be put an end to, and which ought to be put an end to.” (Weininger 1906: 344) What needed to be ended was ‘the feminine’ and that was achieved by becoming more masculine, freeing herself from monogamy and entering the male workforce with the same selfish purpose.318 It is only through the destruction of being feminine that ‘she’ can become a fully formed ‘human being’. The suggestion is that as a feminine woman she is not a human being at all. As he concludes, “So long as there are two sexes there will always be a woman question, just

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This is only one point where this kind of argument breaks down and is shown to be nothing but a religious expression of Hasidic Judaism. Speaking as a man with a family, men are motivated by all kinds of drives to work, achieving excellence, satisfying the needs of the family, personal fulfillment. The drive to production cannot be reduced to greed and selfishness. This is why many men have pictures of their family in their offices to help motivate them to achieve their goals. What Weininger is expressing here is simply a Jewish view of human motivations that is abstract and overly reductive.

797 as there will be the problem of mankind.” (Weininger 1906: 345) He concedes that, “. . .those who have displayed sexual inversion. In fact, sexual inversion has usually been regarded as psycho-pathological, as a symptom of degeneration.” What he hoped would be realised in the future is that “[t]his view . . . [will fall] into disrepute.” (Weininger 1906: 46) The idea of sexual inversion, of females becoming males, was once viewed as a symptom of degeneration, but he hoped that this understanding would, as it has today, be overcome and it will be realised that the destruction of femininity itself would be the true liberation of woman. From what has been presented over the last couple of paragraphs, it can be seen that Weininger argument is that, Women have no existence and no essence; they are not, they are nothing. Women has no share in ontological reality, no relation to the thing-in-itself, which, in the deepest interpretation, is the absolute, is God. . . Woman has no relation to the idea, she neither affirms nor denies it; she is neither moral nor anti-moral; mathematically speaking, she has no sign; she is purposeless, neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil, never egoistical; she is as non-moral and she is non-logical. . . So, woman has no existence. Woman is untruthful. An animal has just as little metaphysical reality as the actual woman, but it cannot speak, and consequently it does not lie. (Weininger 1906: 287) This argument is perfectly harmonious with Gnostic Jewish teaching. Women are not being liberated as themselves, as how they have been for millennia, authentically, but liberation is understood through a theo-political lens as the need to become men, to overcome the gender distinction itself. But it must be done on the terms of woman, as not being informed by an experience of God. Women are “liberated” if they do male sports, if they do male work, if they wear clothes like men, if they lead a life like men. Women become acceptable in so far as they can become men. The ultimate purpose behind this ‘feminism’ is the destruction of Western civilization and its experience of the good. Women have been fooled into adopting the position of a political ideology into a self-destructive, self-denying, way of living. It is for this reason that the halls of academic feminism are filled with lesbians and those who identify as “transgender” even though only 1.7% of the population identify as homosexuals and 0.3% of the population identity as transgender. This 2% of the populations have been placed into positions of power as an expression of Gnostic Judaism. It is that Jews understand such thinking that they often excel in contemporary feminist studies. They believe it, they hate the feminine. Weininger shows the animosity being expressed towards women, the hatred and the commitment that gender is not natural but merely a “social construct”. What is not asked is this assumption that informs so much of our society even true? Most women do not identify as bisexual. Looking around at how the world works most women like to adopt most of the feminine virtues even today. Although it is being seriously eroded, most women remain in longer term

798 monogamous relationships expressing that their greatest joy and highest achievement has been raising good children. This is despite over 100 years of the most concentrated attack on this identity. Around the turn of the 20th century, the now largely forgotten but “hugely influential” German Jewish scholar Otto Gross began by agreeing with Bachofen that human societies were once matriarchies. (Davies 2010” 50) He then mixed these ideas, which are rather conservative, with the Gnostic thinking of Nietzsche, Freud and Weininger, and contextualised them to voice a clearly extremist political agenda. Freud certainly helped Gross’ career, but Freud was more subtle about his agenda while Gross was much more transparent and enthusiastic. Their desired outcome for woman was identical. Gross was extremely influential at the turn of the 20th century and certainly had influential admirers. Carl Jung wrote to Freud claiming, “In Gross I experienced all too many aspects of my own nature, so that he often seemed like my twin brother.” (Jung as seen in Heuer 2001: 658) In turn, Freud believed that Gross was one of the few, “capable of making an original contribution” to psychoanalysis. (Heuer 2001: 658) Otto Hans Adolf Gross was born on the 17th of March 1877 in Gniebing near Feldbach in Styria, Austria. He was born into an extremely wealthy, highly educated, well respected, Jewish-Austrian family. While in Austria, Gross received the best education that money could buy and became a medical doctor in 1899 at the age of just 22. (Heuer 2001: 658) In the early years of the 20th century, Gross worked as a psychiatrist and began publishing papers on the topic. His work was so impressive to those in positions of power within the psychoanalytic establishment, the vast majority of whom were Jews, that he was offered a lecturer’s position in psychopathology at Graz University in 1906. His approach to psychoanalysis has been described as “Freudian, Nietzscheanism”. (Krockel 2007: 130) Gross must be contextualised as one of the men of the Jewish revival that was taking place at the turn to the 20th century who were heavily influenced by the gnosticism that was sweeping through Judaism at the time. Indeed, some have misunderstood this gnosticism for romanticism by observed that after Nietzsche and Freud, it was the philosophy of Rousseau that most informs the work of Gross’ psychoanalytical theories. (Heuer 2001: 660) This is not to deny that Rousseau did influence Gross as Rousseau was an active Freemason which, as already observed, had been shaped by gnosticism. Gross advanced a number of Sabbatai’s arguments and strategies. He argued that there was a need for society to realise a “revaluation of all values” that should be inspired by the “thoughts of Nietzsche on the background of the soul and with the discovery of the so-called psychoanalytic technique by S. Freud” (Krockel 2007: 130). Like Nietzsche and Freud, Gross argued that traditional conceptions of the feminine were causing neurosis and alienating women from their unconscious, subhuman, natural drives. If women could be liberated from social norms of the “feminine” and their unconscious allowed to manifest their natural drives then they, along with the entire society, could

799 become a Nietzschean “freie Geist” (“free spirits”). (Krockel 2007: 130) Freedom was to return to the wild. As will be explored at length in the following volume, these ideas draw upon the Neo-Hasidic belief that Judaism originally worshipped an androgynous god/goddess, like many other religions, and that what is required is a return, in a romantic fashion, to these societies informed not by morality but by natural or instinctual drives as discussed in the work of Bachofen. The problem with the contemporary society in which Gross lived was that Christianity promoted a moral position that cast the true “natural” condition of womanhood as sinful. According to Gross, notions of ‘femininity’ were simply being used to suppress women. Because Christianity advocated that sex, especially promiscuous sex, was ‘sinful’, then, to overcome Christianity and the culture that it nurtured, the ‘sinful’ elements of sex should be embraced and shown to be the truly noble. In order to realise this outcome, to turn woman into highly sexualized beings, Gross’ motto became, “The coming revolution is a revolution of the mother-right”. Which has a certain irony in the sense that the political movement that he was referring to aimed to ensure that woman were not “good mothers” that was his real project therefore not “mother-right” but, more, “prostitute right”. To advance this project, Otto Gross affirmed many sexual activities and relationships that were marginalized at the turn of the century. Gross affirmed homosexuality, denounced marriage, and advocated promiscuity, especially for woman. Whereas Gross saw these animal drives, these instinctual motivations, as the true condition of woman, Christians like Nicolas Berdyaev would see such arguments as “the deification of the bestial”. (Berdyaev 1935/2009: 27) These ideas of free love and the destruction of the traditional family were not simply theoretical commitment for Gross but were fundamental for informing the way that he lived his life. Early in life, Gross fathered two young boys to two different mothers, one his wife the other his lover. In what appears a particularly cruel act, Gross named both boys Peter. Gross then had an affair with his son’s mother’s sister, Frieda Weekley, who would later marry D. H. Lawrence. Gross left this relationship and fathered two more daughters with two other women. He therefore fathered at least five children to five different women. He was not a real father, in terms of raising them, to none. Gross would offer his partners to his friends for sex and was known to be a strong advocate of what he termed at the time “free love” which seems to mean sex free from love. He seemed to think that it was through males sexually pleasing woman that women could become liberated to themselves. That is, it was through the male penis that woman came to know who they truly were. Gross did not only advocate changing notions of the feminine. While serving as a naval doctor in South Africa, Gross, like Freud with cocaine, developed a drug addiction which he would maintain his whole life and would result in his premature death. As Gross admitted in 1913, “By the way, almost everything I published I have written under the influence of a double intoxication induced

800 by cocaine and morphine. This was so intense that I no longer recognised the ceiling and had an illusion of a golden vault instead.” Not only could Gross’ behaviour be questioned in terms of his attitude towards sex and drugs, but he seemed to be ‘free’ with his patients. He recommended his patients have sex with their therapists as a form of treatment to supposedly ‘free them’ to themselves. Another, even more questionable practice, was to tell patients that their condition was incurable and suggested that they might be better off dead. He would then leave “poison” within the patients reach. He apparently believed that, “A beautiful death is better than a low probability of cure.” Two of his patients died of poisoning in this manner, Lotte Hattemer in 1906 and Sophie Benz in 1911, the latter of which Gross confessed to having encouraged. Gross said, “When I could no longer intervene analytically, I had a duty to poison her”. In response to this confession, police sought to convict him of murder through assisted suicide. To save his son, Hans Gross, Otto’s long-suffering and extremely wealthy and influential father, arranged for Gross to be committed to the Tulln lunatic asylum. This was purely an intervention to avoid his son serving, at best, a long prison sentence if not facing the death penalty. In a way, Gross’ life is tragic but, in another way, this is the kind of life led by a person informed by the moral framework of Gnostic Judaism. You actually see it repeated time and time again. Drugs, sex, violence, death. How many people have died after being lured into the temptations of Gnosticism? Gross himself would have no inhibitions against murdering someone. Why not commit murder? The only reason we do not commit murder is because we believe that it is morally wrong to kill an innocent person who becomes a personal or professional inconvenience. If you are truly unrestrained by morality, then Gross’ life becomes not just understandable but reasonable, indeed, expected. Gross did not only hurt himself as a result of his worldview, a thing of little concern, resulting in his premature death, but those around him were also hurt as a result of his immorality. The benefit of knowing how Gross lived is that the consequences of such a life are made transparent. Yes, as we all know, sex is fun, but if sex becomes too important in a person’s life, if it takes over, then they lose sight of other things, like family, friends, a rewarding professional career, and, ultimate, the saddest thing of all, as will be explored, true love. These, as many of us know through our lived experiences, are ultimately even more rewarding than the transient physical pleasure of sex. Gross appears to be someone without constraint and his tragic life shows what such a life is like not only for him but for those around him. Moral constraints are not there to just inhibit pleasure, they are not just lifedenying, as neo-Hasidism argues, but help us to be disciplined in the pursuit of “shallow” pleasures so that we can pursue things that are ultimately more rewarding in life, like being a good parent, a good friend to those around you, and a good partner to those we love. Our society increasingly reflects the values of Gross. Porn is an everyday experience for many from a very early age. Ideas of faithfulness and

801 being a good father or mother have less demand over many people’s lives. Divorce has become an epidemic. To live like Gross at the turn of the 20th century would have been seen as being mentally ill whereas today, after the sexual revolution of the 60s and our sexual education on porn sites, living like Gross is increasingly acceptable if not enviable. Jung captures the sadness of Gross’ life when he wrote, “He never accomplished any systematic work in his life . . . I have not observed any other indications of a genius in him unless one sees wisecracking and incessant chatter about problems as a creative symptom. He was morally and socially totally derelict and physically run-down, too, as a consequence of his excesses, so that he died of pneumonia already before the war.” (Jung as seen in Heuer 2001: 670) Although Gross argued that patriarchy, really understood by Gross and his peers as equivalent to Christian Western civilization, conceptions of the feminine, and heteronormativity, were making people mentally ill, these were all targeted because they worked to suppress the primordial “feminine” as the foundation of Christian civilization. The argument made by Gnostic Jewry is that patriarchal societies marginalize the materiality and naturalness of the primal feminine instead prioritizing the abstract “ideal” form which is nothing but an expression of power. Plato’s work can be seen, therefore, from this perspective, as the true well-spring of patriarchy. As Erich Neumann wrote expressing this very perspective, The accent of a symbol depends in large measure on the matriarchal or patriarchal culture situation in which it is embedded. In a patriarchate, for example, the mater character of the symbol materia is devaluated; matter is regarded as something of small value in contrast to the ideal – which is assigned to the male-paternal side. Similarly, the symbol ϋλη [material] is not revered as the foundation of the world of growth but, as, for example, in all Gnosticising religions from Christianity to Islam becomes inert, negatively demonized “matter”, as opposed to the divine spirt aspect of the male υούς [thinking].” (Neumann 1991: 49-50) This is because Gnostic Judaism, as an expression of a Gnosticising religion, prioritizes the “material”, especially at this stage of its development around the turn of the 20th century, as though it is God. As preeminent scholar on this phenomenon Eliyahu Stern claims, Hasidism developed “. . .a distinct ideology developed by Russian Jews in the late nineteenth century that defined Judaism and Jewish identity in terms of what its espousers explicitly called – whether in Russian, German, Yiddish, or Hebrew – the “material” (material’nyi, meteriali, gashmi, homri) aspects of the universe.” (Stern 2018: 5) As Gross’ anarchist friend Erich Mühsam observes of Gross’ work, “It should be our task to heal not only the sexual “complexes” but maybe even more the social and the religious ones, to help the individual develop a sense of community and to re-experience the buried beauty of the world.” (Mühsam as seen in Heuer 2010: 2000: 61) Here we see Hasidic ideas of “healing the world” through liberating female sexuality in

802 order to “heal” the “social and religious” “complexes” to “re-experience the buried beauty”, here he is referring to the fall into civilization began with eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the “buried beauty” or the “underworld”. He wanted to see the end of western civilization in order to open the way for a new society unconstrained by false experiences of “the good” and a return to humanity being ruled by what he, and others, understood as natural drives. Like Freud, Gross thought of psychoanalysis as a tool to realize a cultural revolution aimed at reversing the values of society to reflect his own religio-social commitments. (Heuer 2001: 660) As Nicolaus Sombart summarizes, [Grosses] first thesis was: The realization of the anarchist alternative to the patriarchal order of society has to begin with the destruction of the latter [patriarchal order of society], without hesitation, Otto Gross owned up to practicing this. . . by the propaganda of the “example”, first by an exemplary way of life aimed at destroying the limitations of society within himself, second as a psychotherapist by trying to realize new forms of social life experimentally in founding unconventional relationships and communes . . . His second thesis: Whoever wants to change the structures of power in a repressive society, has to start by changing these structures in himself . . . It is the achievement of psychoanalysis as a science to have created the preconditions and to have provided the instruments for this. (Sombart 1991/2001: 110-111) Emphasis added. Gross is explicitly identifying psychoanalysis, as Freud also obscurely advances, as an instrument for overcoming the repressive structures of civilized society which are, by Gross’ understanding, Christian morality. The strategy that he proposed was not to adopt Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-power’ but what he called “the will to relating”. As Gross wrote, the “will to relating in contrast to the will to power [. . .] as the highest, essential goal of revolutions.” (Gross as seen in Heur 2010: 60) The “will to relating” is Gross’ most important contribution as a theo-political strategy. With Gross’ usual humbleness, he believed that the idea of the “will-to-relate” was more important than Nietzsche’s much more famous “will-to-power”. The politics of relating is simply the process of shaping cohorts so that their dissatisfaction is thought to be satisfied through the theo-political agenda of Gnostic Jews. Erich Fromm claimed that there were two ways for humanity to relate, Man can attempt to become one with the world by submission to a person, to a group, to an institution, to God. In this way he transcends the separateness of his individual existence by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself, and experience his identity in connection with the power to which he has submitted. (Fromm 1966: 36) The other method for overcoming separateness and relating with others is, “. . .man can try to unite himself with the world by having power over it, by making others a part of himself, and thus transcending his individual existence by domination.” (Fromm 1966: 36) The common feature of both these strategies is that they are about “relating”. The role set for most of us is to be the former, we need to submit to the

803 Gnostic Jewish agenda, adopt their beliefs and practices, and therefore we can learn to relate. Gnostic Jews, in contrast, as ‘masters’, adopt the latter orientation, of having power over people. The earliest expression of this strategy can be seen practiced by the person most responsible for the modern revival of Gnostic Judaism, Sabbatai Tzevi in 1666. Earlier in that same year, Sabbatai Tzevi declared, as many had suspected, that he was indeed the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. As such, many Jews believed that not only were Jews about to return to Israel but there would be realized a global empire under the control of Jews. Sabbatai began handing out regions of the world that his most devoted followers would rule when they had indeed conquered the world. Such sentiments, as could be imagined, attracted the attention of local authorities. Upon arriving in Constantinople in 1666, Sabbatai was imprisoned by the order of the grand vizier Kopruluzade Fazil Ahmed Pasha. On behalf of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at that time, Mehmed IV, Sabbatai was given the choice of converting to Islam or being put to death. To the amazement and disappointment of many Jews around the world, Sabbatai chose to convert. Although many Jews believed that Sabbatai had been cowardly and unprepared to face death for his beliefs, others argued that Sabbatai had actually fulfilled God’s plan. Sabbatai had advocated his entire life to enter into sin and to return the spark of that sin to God. This seems to have involved rethinking what that sinful act was, reinterpreting it, so that it could be seen as good, as the true product of the God most High. Extending this idea, it was claimed Sabbatai entered into an evil practice, Islam, in order to rethink it, not to simply turn it into a form of Gnostic Judaism, but to enter into a dialectical process that would return the practice to God as understood by the Gnostics. Along with Sabbatai’s conversion, 300 Jewish families converted to Islam along with Sabbatai. Collectively, these Jewish converts to Islam were called the Dönmeh or “converts”. These converts attracted a lot of suspicion amongst Ottoman and later Turkey Muslims. Entire books have been written on their Gnostic activity. Some have even linked them to Muslim Brotherhood, a theory that will be explored in depth in Vol III. Other groups replicated Sabbatai’s actions, in Poland, a Jew named Jacob Frank claimed in the middle of the 18th century that he was the reincarnation of Sabbatai. Consistent with the teachings of Sabbatai, which had continued to percolate through Europe, Frank taught that as Sabbatai had been the Jewish Messiah the Talmudic traditions and practices no longer applied. Jews no longer had to adhere to halakha because “all laws and teachings will fall”. Frank seemed to take Sabbatai’s teaching of redemption through sin to new levels of depravity and decadence including mass sexual orgies. Again, following the path already opened by Sabbatai, Frank persuaded thousands of Jews to convert to Catholicism. Unlike Sabbatai, Frank’s real agenda was quickly discovered, and he was imprisoned for his deception.

804 Although the Dönmeh and the Frankists are generally acknowledged as Sabbatians, other groups must also be included as Sabbatian. The Ba’al Shem Tov in Eastern Europe promoted a form of Sabbateanism in the mid-18th century. He was a peer of Frank and even engaged in a public debate with Frank. The disagreement was not regarding Frank’s beliefs but the strategy of conversion. The Besht, as he is known, argued that Jews should not convert but he seemed to agree with the Sabbatian agenda. He too rejected most aspects of the Law and seemed to advocate entry into sin. The Besht was the founder of Hasidism which would quickly spread and come to dominate large regions of Eastern Europe. I would also argue, in agreement with other scholars, that the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment was also an expression of Sabbateanism. The first Maskilim, or practitioner of the Haskalah, can be thought of as Baruch Spinoza. Baruch’s teachings are extremely unorthodox and attracted much criticism for the Rabbinic community but are very harmonious with Sabbateanism. Like Sabbatai, Spinoza rejected the existence of a providential God in favour of a view of God as immanent and equivalent to Nature. He also claimed, consistent with Sabbatai, that the Jewish Laws were not given by God nor were they binding on the Jewish people. Others followed Spinoza’s example and, after extensive education in Torah and Hebrew, “crossed” over into Western European culture. Once there they can consistently be seen as advocating a Sabbatian or Gnostic agenda from within the intellectual establishment of Europe that continues to be productive even today. So, the Dönmeh, Frankists, Hasidim and Maskilim, can all be seen to be initiating the practice of “political relating” or moving into a community that might have resisted Gnostic teachings and then subverting those movements from within. Join into their movements, their lives, and corrupt their ways of being from within. It is this principle that informs all the “liberation” movements such as feminism, gay rights, indigenous rights etc. As Franz Werfel observed in 1929 of Gross and his politics, “’Relationship’ was the central focus of his teachings for renewing the world.” (Werfel as seen in Heuer 2017 emphasis added) This strategy involves relating to the ‘supressed’ aspect of people, nurture resentment about that supposed suppression, in order to realise a revolutionary outcome. This is because Jewish Gnosticism generally understands social order as coercion and the expression of power. As important Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz nicely expresses regarding the state, If nothing but the universal and essential characteristics of every state were incorporated in the definition, an agreement could easily be reached for there are but two. First, there are certain institutions directed to securing the sovereignty of some over others: secondly, the sovereignty is always exercised by a minority. A state, therefore, is the organized control of the minority over the majority. This is the only true and universal definition; it is apt in every case. (Gumplowicz as seen in Barnes 1919: 405)

805 By this account, communities do not live together in harmony because of shared beliefs or a shared experience of the divine but because of the need for a small minority to control everyone else. To destroy such a social order one need but relate to those disaffected, those marginalized, those considered outsiders, and use them against the minority who ruled. This is not only strategically useful but perfectly harmonious with Jewish Gnostic teaching where those who are marginalized, or outsiders are cast in that light because who they are has traditionally been seen as unacceptable. Although the Dönmeh, Frankists, Hasidim and Maskilim originate the practice of political relating, it is certainly not the end of the practice. Various forces, social, political and technological, resulted in the various expression of Gnosticism, which had taken quite different and opposing directions from the middle of the 18th century, came together in the late 19th century. Now vitalized with socialism and Zionism, these different strands of Sabbateanism sought to make common cause through the work of a very small group of Jewish intellectuals. This group created a movement called Neo-Hasidism, which can be seen to combine aspects of Hasidism and the Haskalah into a new potent political force that I call Gnostic Judaism. As Dan observes, The phenomenon which seemed to both Dynard and Cohen-Zedek as impossible, namely the union between Hasidism and Enlightenment, the two main spiritual powers within Judaism in the prior hundred years, and movements that were extremely inimical to each other for generations, is actually one of the most meaningful new characteristics of the next stage in the development of modern Hebrew literature. In the late 19 th century. Hebrew writers began to develop an attitude of sympathy and nostalgia towards Hasidism, whereas their predecessors in the Enlightenment movement treated the Hasidic tradition with hatred, expressed often in devastating satirical works, like those of Joseph Perl and Isaac Erter. (Dan 1991: 184) From the very start, this movement used the fact that they had been welcome into European society and trusted in positions of authority to serve their ends. As will be explored in Vol. III, NeoHasidism used its inclusion in German, British, Russian and American societies, to manipulate the world first into World War I and then, more transparently and requiring much more effort and manipulation, into the World War II. Between the wars, this group moved into Orthodox Jewish communities of Europe, particularly in Germany, and spread their particular form of Gnostic Judaism, sometimes using state funded organizations, attracting converts and depleting the authority of the Rabbinate. Many children of Orthodox Jews accepted the teachings of this new hybrid form of Judaism and became extremely critical of what they thought were their parent’s short fallings. The very first victim of Gnostic Judaism was traditional Orthodox Judaism. After the Second World War, as has already been introduced, Gnostic Judaism came to dominate and direct the feminist movement to serve its purposes of undermining what they presented as “patriarchy” which was just another term for Western civilization with its various

806 cultural expression including the nuclear family and monogamous marriage. They have been so successful in this project that not only is the nuclear family now threatened but the institution of marriage itself is being undermined. (Wasserstein 2009: 765) Then between 1960-1980, Gnostic Jews used nurtured by funding and giving institutional support for the Gay rights movement, the black “rights” movement, and indigenous “rights” movement amongst others. As John McWhorter, a black man, wondered in a Youtube interview when discussing the Black Lives Matter protests, There is a cultural issue and it’s not about black culture going back centuries, it’s not about black culture even going back 50 years ago but there was a turn in the mood in the 1960s where, in ways that fascinate me, how this percolated from a small radical group into a general mood in the whole community, really fascinates me, something happened between 1960 and 1980 that taught an awful lot of people, especially young black men, that black authenticity involved “checking out”, that black authenticity means you get a pass because “the Man” doesn’t like you and as vague as that sounds the difference between the black culture in 1970 and white culture in 1950, even amongst the poor, is stark and unmistakable. Something happened. What happened? Who was encouraging young black men to believe that they were no longer required to conform to society’s norms and could just “drop out” and hate conventional society? It was Gnostic Jewry. This changing attitude was terribly destructive to black communities which fell into drugs, gang warfare, and violence. In some black suburbs, awash with powerful cheap weapons, the average male life expectancy fell into the early 30s. This new attitude, this new view of the world, embracing chaos, was extremely destructive to the black situations. The Orthodox American Jew Antelman claims that it was because of Jews, who “subscribed to similar philosophies”, such as Albert Axelrad, Roland Gittelsohn and Judea Miller, (Antelman 2007: xiv) that “on the American scene the average loyal, law-abiding American Blacks have been cursed with self-appointed leaders who spout virulent Marxist rhetoric . . .” stoking social unrest and promoting a certain rebellious attitude amongst American Blacks primarily aimed at fracturing society as a whole. These militant Jews with agnostic beliefs were teaching young black men to be angry, to seek revenge, and then funding their activities. This was simply repeating the same strategy used within European Jewish communities just 50 years before. The strategy was the same as with Orthodox Jews and women, that conformity to what they claimed were white norms, not Christianity as they did with Jews or masculine as they did with women, itself was the problem, that striking against what was understood to be an imposed good was the project and this required embracing “sin”. This is the same pattern, over and over and over again. It is the dominant vision of a good society, adherence to shared cultural norms, that is what is oppressing us. We turn away from white, Christian, Protestant society and we will be free. “Free” here means no longer constrained by an established morality. It is for

807 this reason that the black rights movement coincided, as it has in Australia and other countries, with a boom in black people committing crimes, often violent crimes. The reason is just what has been presented, they did more than turn their back on established norms, they came to accept that breaking them was good. The most tragic element of these young men accepting these arguments was that most of the violence occurred in their own communities, against their own family and friends. As perpetrators, they then filled the prisons. If they had stayed true to Martin Luther King all of this would have been avoided and we would all be living in a much better society, but he, of course, was killed by an unknown gunman. By turning to “sin”, by turning to outsiders, and praising such “lifestyles”, such as transexuals and prostitutes, as the noble life while marginalizing monogamous heterosexual relationships, power can become dislodged. As an example of this eagerness to find suppression everywhere, Rothblum recently argued that, as a homosexual, “I am harassed by having to live and work in a society in which heterosexuality is everywhere flaunted – from the wedding photographs on my colleagues’ desks to the heterosexual student couples entwined around each other all over the campus.” (1996: 11) To find such things as photographs on an office desk or people being loving in a park as harassment really is extraordinarily sensitive and extremely intolerant which is just the mentality Gnostic Judaism hopes to nurture in the groups to which they relate. This strategy to revolution, as Gross observed, stood, “in opposition to the will to power, and it needs to be uncovered as the elementary contrast between the revolutionary and the adjusted – bourgeois-psyche and it has to be presented as the highest and true goal of the revolution.” (Gross as seen in Heuer 2001: 662-663) What this means is that psychoanalysis can disrupt the “adjustments” that each subjectivity makes to the established norms of society, the compromise of our individual desires that everyone makes as they mature into adulthood as good members of society. One of the aims of their project is to stop people reaching full maturity or what is called the condition of puer aeternus (Latin for “eternal child:). Marie-Louis von Franz argued that people in modern society remained adolescent their whole lives and never mature into adulthood. She claimed, that puer aeternus refers to someone who “. . . remains too long in adolescent psychology; that is, all those characteristics that are normal in a youth of seventeen or eighteen are continued into later life, coupled in most cases with too great a dependence on the mother.” In short puer aeternus “denotes a neurotic condition during which the maturational process is arrested”. The reason why this condition should be nurtured by the political Hasidim is because while juvenile, people are more compulsively driven by their “id” or the “pleasure principle” whereas adults seek more enduring and substantial pleasures. Juveniles are driven by unruly passions and sensuous pleasures without reaching the mature rewards of

808 leading a good life. Puer arternus has become such a common phenomenon that today it has “reached epidemic proportions”. As Jordan Peterson observed, who has called for men in particular to “grow up”, of this permanent state of being juvenile, There is nothing uglier than an old infant. There is nothing good about it. People who don’t grow up don’t find the sort of meaning in their life that sustains them through difficult times, and they are certain to encounter difficult times, and they’re left bitter and resentful, without purpose and adrift and hostile and vengeful and arrogant and deceitful and of no use to themselves and of no use to anyone else and no partner for a woman. There is nothing in it that is good. (Peterson 2018) As already observed, one of the features of domestication is the preservation of a juvenile state in domesticated species. That is because they are kept in environments that do not allow the species to mature into full adult hood. The reason why these environments are created in such a way to maintain juvenile behaviour is because juvenile creatures are easier to manage. They are less aggressive, less independent, and a feature of adulthood is the need to compete for resources against others who seek those same resources. For this reason, as Freire observes, “Functionally, oppression is domesticating.” One feature that human juvenile behaviour encourages that suits the dominant ideology in contemporary society is that a feature of human adulthood is to live in reality. Whereas juveniles can maintain their juvenile delusions about themselves and the world without consequence, as they will be supported by adults through this phase, who must take responsibility on their behalf. Adulthood requires that people live in the world the way it really is and forgo juvenile delusions. Forgoing delusions is the antithesis of Gnostic Judaism which hopes that we will all live within the ideologically determined world that they have created. Even today, there is so much one cannot say about gender, for example that women are more emotional and less rational, that has been accepted for millennia, despite it being true, simply because we are not allowed to live in true reality but must live within their ideology. A world where sexuality is chosen, where literally everything is exhaustively presented as an expression of power, and, perhaps most poignantly, that the world exists in such a way that it can be manipulated to serve the will of humans. This is the child crying when the mother is doing something else than focusing on them because they have not developed to the point where others are also understood to have their own needs. What is manifested under such conditions is a narcistic personality. It is because of the juvenile refusal to accept reality as a constraint, remain under the protection of the mother, that gnostic Jews can be very passionate about an impossible political ideology or some impossible vision of the future, that a wiser, older mind, as a fullgrown adult, knows is not only impossible but not even desirable. As Fromm observed of the negatives of “the matriarchal structure”. “. . .by being bound to nature, to blood and soil, man is blocked from

809 developing his individuality and his reason. He remains a child and incapable of progress.” (Fromm 1966: 48) The famous philosopher Bertrand Russell worked with the Frankfurt School on methods of mass mind control. He argued that the aims of the organization were to teach people at two levels, one level of education for the controlled and one for the controllers, In like manner, the scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psychoanalysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play . . . All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called ‘co-operative’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them. Russel seems to be clearly arguing for the need to stunt individual growth so as to remain juvenile, puer aeternus. This is what has come to be called, in the same manner as the political Hasidim, the New Age movement that finds expression in books like the best seller, The Secret. This lack of living in reality, of valuing historical institutions and acceptable behaviour, . . .poses a threat to Western civilization. It underlies the prevailing cultural and moral relativism in the Western world. The puer aeternus refuses to take root in our common heritage. He has no love for our great cathedrals nor for our intellectual heritage. Cultural unfaithfulness, together with the refusal to grow up, has given rise to an ideology of multiculturalism according to which “anything goes” . . . [puer aeternus is] keeping people locked up in the Kindergarten of uniformity. But this is the exact condition that those who run society today hope to realise. It is by keeping people in a juvenile condition by controlling their environment that people are manipulatable and controllable so that they can be easily and effectively utilised as mere resources like domestic cows. Of course, the technocrat and the puer aeternus are linked in that the technocrat takes responsibility for domestication while the puer aeternus becomes the domesticated. They are in a symbiotic relationship that permits those outside of this co-dependent relationship to rule unobstructed by either cohort. By nurturing the disruptive, the primal, the instinctual, the marginal, the deviant, Gross believes that this was the road to revolution, the road to changing the existing social order, and, ultimately, the road to human redemption. Through the cultural revolution, the political revolution will be realized. A recent example of this “will-to-relate” is a case in the United States where a woman, Jessica Krug, who promoted a radical and disruptive vision of being a “black American”, eventually confessed that she was actually a Jewish woman from Kansas who was not “black” in any way. It seems that she had adopted a

810 black identity when she was young in order to radicalize black American politics from the inside. She quickly rose to becoming a Professor in racial politics. Klug did not only adopt one false identity but she actually developed several. As she confessed, To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim: first North African Blackness, then US rooted Blackness, then Caribbean rooted Bronx Blackness. (Krug as seen in Furedi 2020b) Of course, there have been many other examples of this kind of Sabbatian inspired practice of “false conversion”, if you like, as I have already recounted. One potential example is the case of “Sister Pia” who was one of the original organizers in the German Nazi Party. Sister Pia was born Elenore Mayr. She was an extremely wayward teenager who had at least two children out of wedlock by the age of 20 and politics records suggest she was a prostitute. At the age of 20 she supposedly travelled to Egypt from which she miraculously returned a devoted Catholic self-identifying, despite not have any real relationship with the Catholic Church, as “Sister Pia”. Shortly after returning to Germany, she quickly became involved in the German right wing nationalist movement. When spewing her vehement anti-Jewish rhetoric, she wore a massive cross, about 40 cm long, to all her public events as though ensuring that she would be identified as a Catholic. The Catholic Church generally opposed Nazism, although of course, some Catholics individually did become involved in the Nazi movement, and many, many priests were sent to the concentration camps where they died. Against the official position of the Church and the German Priesthood, “Sister Pia” was an extremely active and vocal supporter of Nazism. She was most appreciated as an organizer who ensured that the early Nazi rallies were well attended. She was actually with Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch where she was wounded. In later years, she would show her wound on her buttocks to anyone she could while, as those who had the experienced confessed, flashing everything else at the same time. Privately, she had a reputation for being highly sexual and all too prepared to hop into bed with anyone. She really was part of Hitler’s inner circle and helped shape the founding ideas of the national socialist party. After the war, she was tried and found guilty of extreme war crimes but, unlike others found guilty of similar offences, she only served one year in prison. Upon her release from prison, she was given a pension and generous compensation from the West German government. Despite her passionate involvement in helping to build the Nazi movement, “Sister Pia” did not only avoid punishment but seemed to receive a reward. This is the exact kind of role that Gnostic Jews would do, relate to the disaffected nature of Germany after the First World War, nurture hatred of Jews with the ultimate aim of destroying Europe and establishing Israel upon the pyre of Europe. This is exactly what did indeed happen.

811 Other more certain examples would include the “right wing extremist” named “Anderson” who, in the early 80s, started pressuring people to undertake acts of violence in the Southern states against various targets including the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. He gained such a notorious public profile that Anderson was featured in a television documentary broadcast entitled “Armies of the Right”. In this documentary, Anderson was cast as a typical “white supremist”, just one of any number that could have been used and is shown making racial slurs and threats against racial minorities. Anderson was supposed to be the perfect example of “white supremacy” in contemporary United States voicing their agenda of hate and violence. It was later revealed that Anderson’s real name was James Mitchell Rosenberg, and that he was in fact a New York Jew who had been trained by the Israeli Defence Force. It seems that he had deliberately adopted a persona that was then, conveniently given their agenda, shown in a documentary with the purpose of trying to show southern whites as potentially violent racist extremists. That Gnostic Jews had to turn to such an extreme strategy, which may have been authorized by Israel, to try to show southern whites in a bad light shows just how foreign these kinds of ideas are to real southern whites. Another example of adopting a false persona to help radicalize a movement was the “radical Islamist”, Australi Witness. Australi Witness claimed that he was an ISIS agent living in Western Australia. Australi Witness posted numerous inflammatory posts on the internet advocating extreme acts of violence should be perpetrated by Muslims against white Australians. This was not just rhetoric. Australia Witness went so far as to post clear instructions, with staged pictures, on how to make real bombs. Experts later testified that these bombs would have worked. These bombs had “2 lbs of explosives inside” and were designed to spray nails through crowds that, he instructed, should first be dipped in rat poison. It does not need to be said that such toxic and potentially destructive posting draw wide criticism from Australians against Muslims and encouraged racial tensions. As with Anderson, it turned out that Australi Witness’ real name is Joshua Ryne Goldberg, an American Jew living in Florida. To be clear, Australi Witness’ posts were not just a harmless hoax undertaken by a young man trying to be funny. Goldberg encouraged extreme violence and gave genuine information that enabled murder. Under the name Australi Witness, Goldberg argued that a violent act should be undertaken by American Muslims against a specific exhibition that was to be held in Garland, Texas. This art exhibition apparently showed images of the Prophet Mohammed. Goldberg encouraged Muslims to disrupt the exhibition with “weapons, bombs or with knives”. Two Muslim took inspiration from Goldberg’s posts and did indeed attempt to attack the exhibition. Both men who responded to Goldberg’s call were unfortunately killed by the police. My heart goes out to these poor mislead individuals who paid with their lives for the intrigues of Goldberg. These are just some of the transparent examples where Jews have entered into

812 movements, like Sabbatai Tzevi, nurture resentment and encouraged violence. Sometimes, the ideas of Jewish Gnosticism might seem like reasonable ideas. We have, after all, lived under their sway for quite some time now and ideas of “liberating” “gays” or “transexuals” or decriminalizing drug use might now seem not only reasonable but, to some, virtuous. These examples show that one should be cautious in actually embracing this movement. They believe in a lot more than merely distorting the notion of human rights. They have promoted extremely deviant behaviour, including revolting sex acts and extreme violence, all in the service of their God. Karl Lowith, a highly respected German Jewish critical theorist, wrote to Leo Strauss saying, “For the Greeks it was – I commend them for this – completely natural to consort with women, youths and animals.” (Lowith as seen in Lazier 2009: 124) Lowith, the supervisor of one of my supervisors, then went on to claim that it was “the bourgeois marriage”, not bestiality, that was “unnatural”. Such conclusions would be consistent with everything that I have read. Lowith actually concludes that “political order” is “always afflicted by the unnatural – simply qua order”. (Lowith as seen in Lazier 2009: 124) That is, political order is what is unnatural while chaos, chaos is natural. Some men just want to see the world burn. It is this belief, that chaos is good, that explains why these same people are also instigating wars, assassinating innocent people, performing terrible terrorist acts, and generally just out to be destructive. The truth is that you cannot have one without the other, you cannot simply reject some moral restraints while embracing others in an arbitrary fashion, either morality has a claim over our lives and promoting a homosexual lifestyle is wrong or bestiality is “natural”. Every day in everything that we do, and we must be attentive to all of God’s demands. We do have knowledge of good and evil and we can use reason to access that knowledge, or we do not. If not, then any brutal self-serving act is legitimate. Has the black liberation movement over the last 50 years been good for blacks? Have all the drugs, gun violence, gang wars, domestic violence been good for Western civilization? Were the black communities in the early 1950s torn by drugs and the most terrible violence? There seems to have been another path available, one voiced by Martin Luther King, one where blacks were brought into the wider community, raised to be good people first, what would once have been called well-adjusted people, where whites were shown through reason and example that blacks were equal moral agents, as Christianity itself actually teaches, and that, as Martin Luther King Jr argued, people should “not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. It should be realized, and this book has probably too often fallen into a simple polemic of Gnosticism contrasted with the past thereby obscuring that truth that gender relationships can legitimately change, sexual relationships can change, race relations can change, it is not about for and against, but about the conditions of change, who is determining the change. If women are

813 motivating their own position in society, then that adds legitimacy but what is being argued here is that women are being used merely as pawns, as means to an end, to achieve a religiously motivated agenda about which they are ignorant. Drawing upon the older Greek philosophical tradition, Christianity argues that change should be informed by nous, accessed as sophia, not by simply sustaining traditional practices or changing according to the whims of subjective opinion. Communities, properly understood, are not just about power and conflict, they are not just strategies for securing resources, but are potentially about a shared experience of the good that can be accessed through the correct use of reason and that this is how we should move forward together, in peace seeking mutual understanding, not in conflict. No deception no “will-to-relate”, no “will-to-power” but a “will-to-God” and a “will-to-good” will secure the kind of future most of us want, not by nurturing resentment and violence. Gross’ project was made quite explicit by Eastern European Jewish psychoanalyst and close collaborator with Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi, who claimed at the First Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg in 1908 in a paper ‘Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy’ that psychological research was about removing, “absurd religious superstition and the customs of the cult of authority, the clinging to decrepit institutions of society” what was required was the “liberation from unnecessary inner coercion as the first revolution that would create a true relief, whereas political revolutions usually just dealt with outer powers, i.e., means of coercion, changing hands”. (Ferenczi as seen in Hauer 2001: 663) The project became one to change the inner self or perhaps to turn to that inner self, as the most effective site of social change. Although Heuer advances Gross’ idea on relating as some kind of “message of love” (2010) nothing could be further from the truth. It was about disruption, revolutionary change, and creating a new social order. This agenda was resonating. As Davies observes of Germany, “Around 1900, the masculine narratives of the late nineteenth century are no longer able to integrate masculinity and femineity, and the stories of masculine socialisation tended to stress failure, collapse, and the irreconcilable opposition of male and female.” (Davies 2010: 47) This sounds very much like early 20th century United States. What was required to realise a social revolution to address the crisis of masculinity was a revolution in our inner selves, the way we think and view the world, and what we believed, a disruption of the ‘adjustments’ that we make to realize a “well-adjusted society” that is harmonious and wealthy. What was proposed in Germany at the time was new forms or expressions of masculinity, ones that were highly androgynous by the standards of the time, ones in which “. . . men become – or fail to become – men by moving through, or returning to and leaving again, narrative situations and spaces connoted as female: bourgeois masculinity is thus written as that which crosses boundaries between public and domestic, paternal and maternal, rational and emotional, history and myth.”

814 As will be revealed, by the 1920s, this same phenomenon is happening to perceptions of the feminine, with woman encouraged to cross traditional boundaries and adopt masculine norms. This was all to be achieved by nurturing resentment which was then used to undermine the authority of the institutions that promoted historical adjustments and show these new visions as liberation projects. Women, as Gross makes clear, is the most important site for the revolutionary destruction of society. Nurture in woman resentment against “patriarchy” by promising an as yet unrealized utopia by highlighting what could be seen as “oppressive” features of society and that most basic civilizing institution of any society, the family, becomes a battlefield. When this is achieved then instead of woman wanting to adjust to being “virtuous”, being good partners and good mothers, in the same way that men should adjust to be good partners and good fathers, then they can be made to desire the opposite, they can be made to desire sinfulness and, therefore, be disruptive. Gross is perfectly correct; our world is confirmation of this, nurturing dissatisfaction or grievances is the road to destroying civilized society. As it says in 2 Timothy 3, “They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible woman, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.” No better account could be given of Gross’ strategy and capturing who Gross was as an individual. Women are not freed to themselves through the male penis, but they can, like men, as has been known for generations, loose themselves to it. What Gross realised was that political revolutions only changed the names of those who inhabited existing institutional arrangements of society while leaving the agent unaltered and intact. The “will to relating” by contrast caused a subjective revolution, a change to agency itself, and it was this change that was necessary if the full revolutionary agenda was to be realized. The final outcome of this revolution for the vast majority, as Gross knew, is not “freedom” but slavery. What Gross hoped to realise is a slave society in two senses. Without morality we become slaves to our base desires and drives. We no longer choose to be “good” but merely react as our biology demands. This is why slaves were historically “bred”, like animals, and were not allowed to form families, it was to ensure that they were indeed slaves. But it is also the realization of a society ruled by people who identify as Jews, the purpose for the vast majority of people is to serve their needs to allow them to serve their God. This is the exact project that Gnostic Judaism has undertaken. Morality is freedom for the human condition and only humans can be moral. Only humans can relate to God. Like the neo-Hasidic tradition generally, Gross saw psychoanalysis as a tool to achieve transgressions of established boundaries, to destroy the sacred borders that constrain life and live the life of a true iconoclast. That this project has been successful is evidenced in the fact that the perverse vision that people like Otto Gross

815 promoted at the turn of the 20th century is the normal world that we live in today. The reversal of all values has largely, although not completely, been realised in just 100 years. As Elull sarcastically wrote, today, Expiation can be made only by destroying the West root and branch, by denying all that is most precious to it; its religion, its morality and its virtue. A purifying anger sweeps over us when we think how our fathers left us a world so corrupt and evil. We are ready to light the pyre and burn the corpse we have discovered in the cupboard of the house we thought so clean. The great day of purgation has come: We must without delay oppose all the imperialists schemes the West has under way! (Elull 1978: 5-6) To all this, of course, could also be added patriarchy. This is exactly how this movement wants us to think and it is exactly how large swathes of our educated elites have been taught to think through out tertiary institutions and are now teaching the next generation how to think. In a recent book, Jewish American author Thomas Laqueur (1990) argued that the assertions that sexual difference is binary was only first established in the late 18th century. The claim that there were men and women in the world only occurred in the late 18th century! Wow, I am sure that that would have come as a surprise to generations of people. That this nonsense is published and held to be not only authoritative but “ground-breaking” shows the degraded condition of not only academia specifically but our society more generally. As was observed by President Chopp of Swarthmore College when Laqueur was presented with the Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, Laqueur had, “. . .as an educator, historian, and social commentator transformed our way of looking at the world”. If we do indeed accept his argument, then it would actually be an understatement to observe that he had indeed transformed the way we looked at the world. Laqueur was also one of the first academics to establish a “black history course” which suggests that this must be different from “white history”. Just like the “culture” became a count noun now we have “histories”. What can be seen in such arguments is simply the reversal of all existing values as Sabbatai Tsevi preached. Sabbatai believed that we needed to enter into evil to recover the spark of God to be like the God Mercury and travel down into Hell in order to return to heaven. As Heuer wrote for those who know how to read, “Otto Gross has remained largely unknown to this day because it might be said that in true mercurial fashion he travelled deep into the underworld and high into the heavens, trying to hold together experiences of both realms.” That is, he was trying to unite the name of God in a way consistent with Hasidism. This is the “serious message” that lies hidden in work of Gross that Gnostic scholars like Heuer can appreciate. In opposition to the “Great Mother” there arose a kind of counter movement that actually springs from the same origin. As already introduced, people like Moses Hess and Ludwig Gumplowicz broadly

816 agreed with Marx’s analysis but, instead of history being a class conflict, they argued that it was better understood as a race conflict. It was a race conflict that was initially fought, hundreds of years ago, as a physical contest but later became a contest over ideas or different ways of seeing the world. The ruling races ideas become the ruling ideas of the time. As one of the most important proponents of these ideas, Rabbi Waton wrote in 1939, the first year of World War II, in his pamphlet A Program for the Jews, For thousands of years the Aryans will work, struggle and achieve; they will clear the swamps, they will bring out a beautiful world and make mankind a free humanity living on a free earth; but then the Aryans will die; they will die as Aryans and will be born again as Jews. Not as Aryans will they enjoy the fruit of their labour, but as Jews. This was already foretold by Noah. The Aryans will enlarge and beautify the earth; but they will settle to enjoy the world which they created only in the tents of the Jews. These tents are communism, internationalism, the universal brotherhood of man, the emancipation of the working class and the human society . . . The destiny of the Aryans is to become Jews, to recognise Yahweh and to identify themselves with Him. Waton is arguing that although Aryans – which includes most Europeans– will make a beautiful world, when this world is reaching perfection Jews will not just take it but the Aryans themselves will be turned into Jews, they will be made to think like Jews and, therefore, become Jews. They will, be made to accept a Gnostic Jewish worldview. Of course, many who identified as Aryan were determined to resist this project and so began the burning of books by certain Jewish authors and a general attempt, from people as highly respected as Martin Heidegger, to resist “Judaization”. Amongst those who resisted the encroachment of Jewish thinking was ethologist Heinrich Schurtz. Against those who argued that “primitive peoples” were matriarchal Schurtz argued that it was association consisting exclusively of men that constituted civilization. Schurtz agreed with Bachofen that throughout history, at all times and amongst all peoples, there has always been a social division between men and women and that this division has been a conflictual relationship over competing visions of social order. Women played a more prominent role in the family because of their “sexual instinct”, women were naturally nurturing, while men played a more significant role in public institutions because of their “social instinct”. Women dominate tribal societies that are grounded in familial relationships, but men, because of their social instinct, are motivated to leave the confines of the family, and woman’s domination, to form “men’s houses” or Männerbünde (male societies). These male societies become the public institutions upon which civilization rests. So, the Roman Senate, the government assembly for ancient republican Rome, which consisted exclusively of men, is an example of a male society. Because men form these social institutions in order to debate issues and reach rational conclusions, it is men who are exclusively

817 responsible for “high social order” that realizes civilizations that extend beyond the tribal. As Schurtz argued, The woman stands predominantly under the influence of sexual love and the feelings for the family that derive from this; the man on the other hand is determined in his behaviour more by the pure “social instinct”, which brings him together with his peers. Therefore, woman are the nursery of all forms of society that emerge from the union of two people of opposite sex, the man on the other hand is the representative of all kinds of union that are purely socially driven and thus of the higher forms of social organization. (Schultz as seen in Bruns 2011: 155) This shift, from matriarchal tribal society to patriarchal complex society is an event that happened in time and continued to inform Western civilization until very recently indeed. Some might claim that this shift from family centred forms of social order to complex societies, with new centralized institutions informed by morality and reason, is captured when the flame of the virgin goddess of ancient Greece, Hestia, was moved from the household hearth to the centre of the Greek polis and cultic practices were overseen by men “who [now] have the supreme power in the polis.” What is marked by this shift is that primary loyalty was no longer to the family but to the polis or community. As Hanson (2021A) observes how this shift to primary loyalty to the community continued to influence the United States until recently, “Until the late twentieth century, the United States suffered only sporadic episodes of blood and soil exclusivity and instead, usually through intermarriage and assimilation, made the idea of racial or ethnic purity inert.” From the late 20th century, the United States has become more tribal. As Hanson elaborates, “Once a man owes more loyalty to his first cousin than to a fellow citizen, a constitutional republic cannot exist.” The move of the Goddess Hestia from the hearth to the centre of the polis informed Western social order until very recently indeed. The public setting of worship of the goddess Hestia in the public hearth or prytaneum has been acknowledged as being of both a religious and political significance. That is, this shift marked not only new religious arrangements but marked new political realities. Directly from the Männerbünde movement emerged the Wandervobel movement. This was a group of young men, from the turn of the 20th century, who sought company exclusively with other young men. These all-male youth groups, a movement which also saw the emergence of Britain’s Boy Scouts, advocated for young men to return to nature and develop the skills required to survive outside the restrictive confines of civilization. One of the early advocates for this movement was Hans Blüher who wrote a famous history of the movement in 1912. These youth groups consisted of boys who, as a result of dramatic social changes, were becoming estranged from their fathers and therefore no longer respected their outlook. They believed that their fathers had become overly feminised by associating with women in the domestic sphere as a result of having embraced Christianity. As Blüher wrote,

818 So now we have seen that the youth who had become Wandervogel were exasperated by their fathers, that the latter had even become almost ridiculous to them – with good reason! But their inextinguishable father-son bond demanded a real replacement; the growing youth transferred these feelings onto a better kind of father. Blüher argued that these young men sought out older men within these groups with whom they could respect in the absence of their biological fathers. The point that Blüher was making, according to Bruns, was that “. . .the traditions or customs of the older generation could no longer be seamlessly continued [was a] common experience of the “front generation” . . .” These young men were being told that the traditional ways being advanced by their fathers were in some way tainted by the overly feminine Christianity and there was a need to return to the Teutonic purity of the German forest. By 1913, there had emerged a small but definite anti-Jewish sentiment amongst the Wandervogel which identified the feminisation of German society not just with Christianity but, as Nietzsche argued, with Judaism. As Faull observes, “These homosocial groupings, first organized to resist the threat of the “Great Mother”, are then radicalized . . . by the experiences of the First World War into anti-Semitic organizations that identify Jews with all that is non-masculine, non-German, and sick.” (Faull 2011: 8) In truth, this sentiment has much more to say than to merely identify Judaism with the non-masculine. Jews had indeed betrayed Germany during World War I in order to satisfy their side of the condition for the Balfour Agreement by helping to bring the United States into the war. As an expression of this growing anti-Semitism, in 1913, Edmund Neuendorff, a schoolteacher who was extremely active in the youth movement, asked the Wandervogel delegates to no longer accept Jews into the movement. This request was apparently soundly rejected by the delegates but that it could be raised shows that at least some elements within the movement had affirmed the association of Jewishness with what they hoped to overcome. The surprising aspect to this movement was that Blüher argued, drawing upon Freudian psychology, that the strong attachment developed between the boys and their elder leaders, that would find its most powerful expression in the unconditional adoration of Adolf Hitler, was an expression of a supressed homoeroticism. Just as the male institutions of ancient Greece famously practiced pederasty, so was there an element of homosexuality, at least according to Blüher, in the Wandervogel movement. This was a more radical and significant claim than it may at first appear. By this account, the Wandervogel movement was not just about young men going off into the forest together to get naked and roll around in the mud as an expression of healthy brotherly love but was actually about the foundational institutions of civilized society. If homosexuality was indeed intrinsic to the male bonding, as Freud himself argued, that constituted public institutions, Blüher concluded therefore that “Sexuality between men should no longer be considered a pathological force, but that which actually made of man a zoon politikon, because it

819 granted him the ability for social bonding.” Blüher was arguing that homosexuality was at the core of public institution in giving men the ability to “bond”. By Blüher’s account, men did not act as they did out of an altruistic drive to improve society to manifest what was good but because they was driven by sexual desire. Homosexual attraction was, therefore, not a mental illness or something evil, as had been historically argued, but actually the very condition for politics and the state. As might be expected, these ideas were enthusiastically adopted by homosexuals in Germany seeking to have their lifestyles not just affirmed but positioned as foundational of social order. Homosexuality was not “sick” or “degenerate”, an uncivilized act of unmitigated animal lust and therefore a danger to civil social order, but Blüher had shown the opposite, homosexual desire was the founding motivation of the male only sphere of politics and, therefore, of public life and social order in general. By this account, homosexual desire is what made men form male only institutions, motivated to exclude women because they were no longer sexually interesting, and it was these institutions which allowed for the establishment of the kind of patriarchal societies discussed by Bachofen. Unsurprisingly, Blüher’s theories were enthusiastically embraced by elements of the scientific community in Germany, and he published numerous essays in journals edited by Jewish sexual reformers like Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud. So here was a movement with a nascent anti-Semitism, now advancing a theory that was harmonious with their gnostic beliefs. Homosexuality was indeed not deviant but was actually foundational to civilization. Although mainstream German society was highly critical of Blüher’s conclusions and the Wandervogel movement were determined to distance themselves from his outrageous conclusions, the important point is how both the advocates for matriarchy and those advocating for patriarchy were in agreement in both being inspired by the work of Bachofen. As Erich Fromm observed, It is interesting to note how these two aspects of the matriarchal structure have been seized upon by two opposite philosophies in the last hundred years. The Marxist school embraced Bachofen’s theories with great enthusiasm because of the element of equality and freedom inherent in the matriarchal structure. After many years in which Bachofen’s theories had hardly found any attention, the Nazi philosophers seized upon them and showed equal enthusiasm, but for the opposite reason. (Fromm 1966: fn 48-49) Elements of the Wandervogel movement appealed to Gnostic Jews from this time also who saw a different justification for reaching their goals. Not only was the Wandervogel movement seen to have potential for Gnostic Jews but it “provided such strong ideological ground for the chief ideologue of the National Socialist Party, Alfred Baeumler” (Faull 2011: 8). That is, the Wandervogel was also important for informing the Nazis.

820 From these accounts, it can be seen that between the wars there were three clear social trajectories in Germany and not just, as historians like the German Jew Eric Hobsbawm argues, only two, Fascist and Communist. The first group, extreme leftists, were thoroughly and transparently shaped by Gnostic Judaism. As Rothman observes, when the left was forming in the 19th century, . . .the role of Jews in such movement has become sufficiently significant to warrant comments by scholars as well as anti-Semites. . . Jews at that time were playing a key role in social parties in almost every European country in which they had settled in any numbers. While Jews also played a minimal role in conservative movements, their natural position was on the Left, in Germany and elsewhere. (Rothman 1996” 84) As a “Jewish” movement, leftists generally but Marxists in particular argued that early human societies were matriarchal. They argued, in opposition to Bachofen, that the matriarchal society was a golden age when people lived without property or social division. This was a time, according to this movement, where material concerns motivated people’s actions and not concerns about what was right and wrong, good and evil. At this stage of human development, people lived more “natural” lives, in harmony with nature and, at least according to Freud, were motivated by their natural or instinctual drives. OF course, the reason why people like Sigmund Freud argued in defence of matriarchy was not because of Bachofen’s claims but because Gnostic Judaism thought that this was a reiteration of the gnostic creation story told in the kabbalah tradition. These people, consistent with Gnostic Judaism, argued for a return to these times, a return to a time before the distinctions that would come to define a world existed. A time when women entered sexual relationships freely without the moral constraints of male dominated Christianity. This trajectory, as can be seen from the writing of Engels, was most often associated with the extreme left. Then there was group, who argued for the Männerbünde and Wandervogel who agreed with the premise of Bachofen, that society was once a matriarchy, but that complex civilizations, which bound around extra-familial institutions, relied on exclusively male associations. These people basically reversed the arguments of the “left” by claiming that men needed to separate themselves from the feminising forces found in the domestic sphere and return to the masculine demands of out-door life. Part of this return to nature meant the rejection of traditional Christian values regarding nudity and sexuality including, at least according to some, embracing homosexuality. So, although headlines in the United States claim that Boy Scouts: A Wholesome US Institution Poisoned by Predators, the truth is that there has been a known homoerotic element to these kinds of organizations from their very beginning. And, as we know, paedophilia has been an aspect of Gnostic Judaism from its modern foundations and continues to be important today. As the majority of people who embraced the arguments of Bachofen in favour of a historical matriarchy, as did the revolutionary left, were indeed Jewish, some from the Wandervogel

821 movement associated Jewishness with femininity and true non-Christian Germanness with masculinity. What is interesting is that although these two movements did indeed have opposing views about the ideal future society, one matriarchal one patriarchal, these two trajectories of political thought shared so much in common. There was a glorious past, whether that be an early matriarchy or a later patriarchal ancient Greece, to which modern Germany needed to return to manifest a new and glorious future. Both movements, each in different ways, wanted to disrupt traditional gender and sexual norms to realize something new that was perceived to be ancient. One of the most central beliefs for both traditions, not dissimilar again to modern America, is that both these movements loathed Christianity and held it to be primarily responsible for the fallen condition of contemporary Man. As can be seen in both of these accounts, neither of these movements could be characterised as “conservative” in any way. Like socialism and liberalism today, they are both progressive movements that want to see a distinct break with tradition. It is because fascism was such a progressive movement that many truly conservative political movements in Europe, such as King Carol in Romania, actual entered into a violent conflict with the Iron Guard who were Romanian fascists. (Wasserstein 2009: 244) The difference between the left progressives and the right progressives, is that they have slightly different visions of what that future should be. Should it male dominated, ruled by a strong male fatherly figure, a fuhrer (leader) or should it be female dominated, a society ruled by a new kind of woman, a woman that was tough, active, productive and highly sexualized. They both advanced a radical social agenda that posed a new emerging generation against the older generation. The vast majority of the German population, up until the Second World War, supported neither of these movements. By far the largest group thought that traditional Christian morality continued to be adequate for informing the future German society. Although many did want reasonable changes in gender relations as reflected in the Weimar Constitution in which Article 109 stated, “All Germans are equal before the law. Men and women have fundamentally the same civil rights and obligations”. Article 119 of the Civil Code stated that “Marriage is based on the equality of the sexes”. While Article 128 affirmed equal employment opportunities for women stating, “All citizens without distinction are eligible for public office in accordance with the laws and according to their abilities and achievements. All discrimination against women in the civil service are abolished.” These policy changes that are all perfectly harmonious with the Western Protestant Christian tradition of merit, gave women who wanted to have a more public role in society the opportunity to do so but many women still adhered to traditional gender norms and existing sexual prohibitions. To understand the relative success of the radical left, right in contrast to the centre, it is interesting to look at the German federal election results from 1919 to 1932. (In 1933 Hitler

822 declared himself “Leader and Reich Chancellor of the German People” ending democracy in Germany) Early in this period centre left and centre right parties, the Social Democratic Party, the Centre Party and the German Democratic Party, the so-called “Weimar Coalition”, won 76.2% of the votes. It was not until 1924 that the Communist Party of Germany and the then National Socialist Freedom Movement, an early iteration of the NAZI Party, began to have any impact what-so-ever on the elections when they finished fourth and sixth respectively. Even in the federal elections of 1928, just five years before Hitler seized power, centrist parties continued to dominate German politics with the communists again finishing fourth, with only 10% of the vote, and the NAZI Party finishing a dismal nineth with just over 2% of the vote. In 1930, portrayed in the history books as the year when Germans embraced Nazism in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression, some Germans did indeed, really for the first time, turn to the extremes of politics but they never gained a large majority. Despite the general feeling of chaos, the Social Democrats remained the largest single party but now the NAZI’s had moved into second place, with just 18% of the vote, and the communists moved into third place with 13% of the vote. Radical politics, of the left and right variety, appealed to around 30% of the voting population while the rest continued to vote somewhere in the centre. It will come as a surprise for many to learn that at no stage in German history did the NAZI’s receive more than 32% of the German popular vote. When they seized power, their percentage of the vote was actually declining to below 30%. Indeed, this decline in support may have been what motivated the Nazis to seize their opportunity. These figures definitely cast into doubt claims by some historians, such as Hobsbawm, that Germans had rejected “liberal democracy” and were now left with a choice between the extreme left or the extreme right. The point that I am trying to make is that the cultural revolution in Germany, with its aim of encouraging Germans to reject traditional Christian morality, as advocated by both the communists and the fascists, was never very appealing to the general public. This same pattern can be seen in Italy where Il Duce managed to seize power despite electorally winning “only a tiny minority of seats”. (Wasserstein 2009: 157) Those who Nazism did appeal to were people who had embraced the Gnostic advanced cultural changes. As Voegelin, one of the more insightful commentators on totalitarianism observed, there must first be the “death of God” before a totalitarian politics can be successful anywhere in Christendom. The fascists, as Karl Schmitt’s enthusiastic and important involvement in the Nazi movement proves319, embraced Schmitt’s

319

Despite apparently being forgiven for all his sins in the years following World War II by being embraced within academia, Schmitt’s legal arguments in defense of the Nazi takeover of power against the strategizing of Alfred Hugenberg, the leader of the German National People’s Party, to stop him allowed for the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933 which brought an end to democracy in Germany. Schmitt also approved of the burning of books by Jewish authors and demanded an extensive purge of German universities, not only of Jews but also of Germans

823 ideas. They agreed that the modern state was nothing more than a secularized expression of Christian beliefs and therefore the states destruction, through the Enabling Act of 1933, could be legitimized only in terms of Nazism being a fundamental and profound rejection of Christianity. The reason for this, despite what we are told, is because traditional Christianity is so opposed to what fascism proposes that only in its absence of Christianity can fascism thrive. This animosity was reciprocated as evinced by one of Mussolini’s founding policies, proposed in 1919, was a commitment to expropriate Catholic Church property. (Wasserstein 2009: 160) Not only was fascism oriented to destroy Church power, but it opposed what Christianity advocated preferring, as Betty Dodson (2013: 28) observed, “Emotionalism without intellect . . .[as] the basic strategy of fascism. . .” Mussolini’s government took active steps to erode Christian morality in Italy, for example, by actively trying to remove the stigma associated with unmarried mothers. (Stephenson 2013: 6) Despite the fundamental tensions between Christianity and Fascism in all its expressions, so much contemporary literature, out of ignorance or malice, try to characterise Nazism as a conservative, pseudo-Christian movement. As American Jew Jonathan Haidt argues, in societies inspired by divine direction, which, it should be noted Gnostic Judaism is not one, particular cohorts get pushed down and treated badly, “Look at the conditions of “untouchables” in India until recently, or at the plight of Jews in medieval Europe and in purity-obsessed Nazi Germany. . . The American religious right now seems to be trying to push homosexuals down . . .” (Haidt 2005: 210-211) Haidt is trying to associate Nazi Germany with a society claiming “divine direction” when this was absolutely not true. The truth is, as the previous sections show, the Nazi movement draws inspiration from a tradition which not only denounces Christianity, and soundly rejected traditional conceptions of “purity”, but sees it as the source of European decline. This tradition can be seen to have its origins in the work of Gibbon, then developed through Nietzsche before finding ultimate expression in Hitler. As Hitler nicely expresses after his failed attempt to seize power, “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times, but the Goddess who presides over the Eternal Court of History . . . acquits us.” (as cited in Preparata 2005: 133) It was anti-Christian sentiment and the authority of the “Goddess” that motivated the Nazis and not our Father in Heaven. Despite this it is a fairly typical misrepresentation of Nazism that associates Christian Western society with Nazism when, in truth, nothing could be more different. Most Christians with a platform used that platform to publicly denounce Nazism. The Lutheran theologian,

who were thought to be too influenced by Jewish ideas. Schmitt is explicit, and apparently proud, in taking credit for developing the theoretical foundations for the Nazi regime. He never rejected Nazi ideas for the remainder of his life despite being very popular, as might be expected, with important Jewish gnostic thinkers like Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes and Alexandre Kojeve

824 Rudolf Karl Bultmann, for just one example, despite his friendship with short term Nazi sympathizer and apparent neo-Pagan Martin Heidegger, never accepted Nazism. Bultmann’s main concern with Nazism, which would be true of all Christians, is its division of society along racial lines. It was that humanity should be divided along racial lines that helped nurture fascism. As Geore Orwell wrote, “It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys.” Bultmann argued that intensified racial distinctions as those expressed in the “Aryan Paragraph”, the laws excluding Jews from university etc., were “incompatible with the essence of the Christian Church” because true Christianity, unlike Judaism, simply recognised no racial distinctions. George Orwell argued that it was not Christianity that resulted in authoritarianism but the loss of objective truth and the hyper-politicization that followed. As Orwell wrote, “This kind of thing frightened me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of this world.” Indeed, Orwell claimed, “Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such as things as “the truth” exists.” It was this fading of objective truth that were the conditions for authoritarian government as they used this loss of objectivity to create their own reality. That the centre held in Germany as a cultural force until World War II does not mean that the German Cultural Revolution had no impact on German society. Quite the contrary. As in the United States today, the Weimar Republic was a time of radical social change and upheavals that manifested a steep decline in the moral behaviour of German civilization. As Wilhelm Reich boasted, the “cultural revolution” that was underway in Germany had achieved a great deal of change. As he wrote, Fifteen or twenty years ago, it was a disgrace for an unmarried girl not to be a virgin. Today, girls of all social strata are developing the attitude, more or less clearly, that it is a disgrace still to be a virgin at the age of eighteen, twenty, or twenty-two. Not too long ago it was a rigorously punishable offense if a couple who wanted to marry had physical knowledge of each other prior to marriage. Today, quite spontaneously and in spite of an opposing church, conventional medicine, philosophy et., the view has penetrated wide circles of the population that it is unhygienic, imprudent, and perhaps destructive for the future if a man and a woman who wish to establish a permanent relationship are tied to each other without previously being convinced that they are sexually compatible. Extramarital sexual intercourse, which only a few years ago was still a disgrace, and even branded by the law as an “offense against nature”, has today become a matter of course and a vital necessity. Not long ago, the idea that a sexually mature girl of fifteen or sixteen could have a boyfriend seemed absurd . . . in a few years it will have become just as self-evident as it now the right of the unmarried woman to have a partner. In a hundred years, the insistence that woman teachers should not have any sexual life will evoke the same

825 surprised smile that it reserved today for the time when men forced women to wear chastity belts. The idea still generally prevails that a woman must be seduced and should not herself be the seducer. But who today does not find this ludicrous?” (Reich 2013) As Reich’s account suggests, it was a time of increased sexual licence, humanism, and decline in Christian values. It was a time when any attempts at censorship was cast in the light of “suppression” and “authoritarianism” (Weitz 2009: 298) and books and movies became increasingly sexually explicit and consistently anti-Christian. It was a time when people came to accept a much more “freer” attitude towards their bodies. Nudity and sex were promoted by influential German intellectuals like Magnus Hirschfeld, Wilhelm Reich, Max Hodann and Theodor Hendrik van de Velde as the cure to all the emerging social ills. Under the influence of Bachofen but inconsistent with his arguments, people claimed that there was a matriarchal past when sexual relationships were freer and that Christian morality, the patriarchal family and constraints on sex, were destroying German society. Such claims encouraged a small army of prominent German anthropologists to go out into tribal societies in Africa, Latin America and Asia to find this primordial condition in action where free love and homosexuality were socially accepted under the vigilant leadership of amoral women. Most researchers at the time admit that they found little if any evidence of either free love or true homosexuality in tribal societies. They did find, as might be expected, youthful experimentation by young adults with people of the same sex or sexual intercourse between men who, on long hunting trips for example, as a result of the lack of available women, as occurs between heterosexual men in prison, who did participate in homosexuality but, when having a choice, no evidence for any contemporary expression of a matriarchal society which was sexually permissive and condoned homosexuality in terms of adults with access to the opposite sex participating in sexual relations.320 This might be contrasted with the unbelievable success of Hirschfeld who, after interviewing a very small sample of indigenous people who were “touring” Europe in “human zoos” early in the 20th century, could claim that homosexuality was indeed practiced around the world as normal sexual behavior.321 Following

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This is unsurprising if one were to live in a tribe with less than 200 hundred people the likelihood that 2 people of a similar age would be “naturally” homosexual, which is practiced in Western societies by less than 2% of the population, very small. In such a setting homosexual would probably live their lives as “normal” men but live, sadly, unhappy lives. It is only with the advent of large cities, of hundreds of thousands at least, that a homosexual culture, as such, can emerge. Despite all the evidence, Gnostic Jews believe that all people are really homosexuals, but this is suppressed. They retained this belief despite the evidence from anthropology which they quickly ignored. 321 Today with the politicization of research and career benefits of reaching certain conclusions it would be career suicide to argue that homosexuality was not practiced around the world throughout history as “normal”. My limited research into this topic shows that throughout most of the 20 th century, it was argued that true homosexuality, adult men choosing to have sex with other adult men despite women being available, was vanishingly rare at best and never socially accepted. The likelihood that out of Hirschfeld’s minute sample that he came across homosexuality is extremely unlikely. Then, after 1970, researchers suddenly discover that the earlier

826 on from this surprising “discovery”, Hirschfeld was one of the first to argue that humans are not binary, male and female, but a continuum. Based on these extremely unorthodox and unrepeated “discoveries”, Hirschfeld circulated a petition to overturn the law against homosexual acts that was signed by luminaries, now familiar to us through this work, such as Albert Einstein, Max Brod, Karl Kautsky, Edward Bernstein and, of course, the ever enthusiastic, Martin Buber. Hirschfeld’s argument that “homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love” caused an outrage across Germany at the time. It was akin to saying pedophilia was “natural” and simply equivalent to “normal” love. We move forward into today’s world, after 100 years of efforts by Gnostic Jews to normalize homosexuality, Orthodox Jews are actually more determinately opposed to homosexuality than the Christian tradition, and homosexuality is today not only seen as “normal” and perfectly moral but, in many ways, superior to heterosexuality. Even “chic”. As already observed, a heterosexual who finds homosexuality acts disgusting today is now thought to be suffering from a mental illness of “sexual inflexibility”. Hirschfeld’s research verified the Gnostic belief that there was indeed a matriarchal order, but, against Bachofen, claimed that it was not monogamous but promiscuous which, conveniently, is harmonious with Gnostic Jewish teaching. Reich went so far as to claim that “sexual repression”, a Freudian term, was actually a “plague” on German society that was causing all the ills that Germany was experiencing. (Weitz 2009: 303) To try to address this terrible blight, “scientists” began to tour Germany giving talks to huge crowds about how to liberate their sex lives and make it more interesting and rewarding. The explicit purpose of these talks was to help Germans to overcome their sexuelle Not (sexual misery). As Weitz observes, Velde and legions of other reformers, mostly physicians, provided the diagnosis and the cure. With explicit descriptions of sexual techniques and friendly counselling, they would show Germans how to lead pleasurable and healthy sex lives. And that, in turn, would create a sound, flourishing, productive, and fertile society. (Weitz 2009: 298) Some Germans also came to accept the idea of the “new woman” which was a new ideal for what it meant to be a woman. These new woman “. . . had short hair . . . [and were] slender, athletic, erotic, and amaternal. She smoked and sometimes wore men’s clothes. She went out alone, had sex as she pleased. She worked, typically in an office or in the arts, and lived for today and for herself . . .” It was

findings were wrong and, in fact, homosexuality is practiced widely and was socially acceptable. Despite the near consensus in contemporary literature on the matter, the evidence to support these claims seems very “thin” at best. The politicization of academic research must be one of the first things to be addressed if Western civilization is to survive. If homosexuality was practiced and condoned in small tribal societies then this should be reported but, and this should not need to be said, it must be true and not just a political convenience. The problem is that if you publish the wrong thing today in academia then you simply will not get employed. This is the pressure research operates under today.

827 argued by people like Elsa Hermann, a German Jew, in her extremely successful So ist die neue Frau (This is the New Woman) that woman had historically lived for their children and their husbands in Germany but now it was time for woman to live for themselves. The German Jew Stefan Zweig claimed that traditional woman, aristocratic women, bourgeois housewives, each with its own “hypocritical sexual morality”, were now woman of a bygone era and it was time to remove obsolete barriers and embrace the New Woman, free from traditional constraints and responsibilities entering the workforce but, most importantly, having lots of sex. Interestingly, and this is not trivial, it was noted by some woman at the time that the exhaustive program of pursuing a fulfilling sex life, undertaking the required exercises and having a career meant that many women simply no longer had the time to read and think. The old Christian paradigm of allowing women to stay at home to not only raise the next generation but to develop themselves in the arts and culture was replaced by the “new women” who was so busy having sex that she could no longer nurture what was really most important. Many women today, to be honest, are exactly like this. Using Tinder to pursue men based primarily on their sexual attractiveness but not really taking much time to read. As Gnosticism required of the goy, the physical seemed to be being advanced at the cost of the intellectual. As one woman wrote, “Often I am so tired and exhausted that I can’t read or write. I need the time to sleep so I have the necessary energy for my physical exertions. Intellect is the stepchild, always neglected.” (as seen in Weitz 2009: 308) One concern commonly expressed at the time was that German woman were becoming too much like men. Stephenson observes that women in 1920s Germany were indeed trying to imitate men, It was not only in the most noticeable aspects, such as the wearing of trousers, the copying of men’s hair styles, the ostentatious smoking of cigarettes in public, that women had tried to imitate men, and thus prove their equality with them. The founding of the Open Door International for the Economic Emancipation of the Woman Worker in 1929 by radical feminists from several countries had led to the raising of demands in Germany that measures of labour protection – measures actually favourable to women in terms of their physical health – be removed, since they prevented women from enjoying complete equality on the labour market. (Stephenson 2013: 9) Indeed, a lot of what was being created in media, entertainment and intellectual books at the time in the Weimar Republic seemed to promote an androgynous vision of womanhood. A vision that Axel Eggebrecht described as “genderless”. (as seen in Weitz 2009: 311) This “new woman” broke so much with traditional visions of womanhood in Germany that Zweig thought they were acting more like prostitutes and that this was a good thing. It seemed clear to everyone that the Germany of 1900 was a totally different place, with different values and different aspirations, to what it had become by 1926. Although authors on liberating sexuality like Velde were generally conservative when it came to

828 homosexuality, German Jews like Hirschfeld and Reich, along with pseudo-NAZIs like Blüher, actively promoted homosexuality as normal and healthy. These authors, as already discussed, made sure that sections of their sex manifestos promoted a new accepting attitude to homosexuality. As might be expected for a group that argued for sexual license and advocated for homosexuality, the traditional nuclear family was being demonised as the despotic domain of the “patriarch”. The reasons for this was communicated recently in book by renowned Jewish psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012), who argued that “. . .parents and other authorities were obstacles to moral development. . . don’t lecture them [children] about the Ten Commandments. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t force them to obey God or their teachers or you.” The reason for this, for marginalizing parents as moral guides is because parents advanced a more “conventional” way of life whereas Gnostic Jews believe that this is a stunted morality worldview that denies life and that the true morality is to obey natural drives, to be guided by emotion, to act according to our animal selves. It is because of this belief that scholars like German Jew Eric Fromm argued that “The patriarchal family is one of the most important loci for producing the psychic attitudes that operate to maintain the stability of class society.” (Fromm 1970: 120) He argued that because of the traditional Western family was a “patricentric complex” which involved “affective dependence on fatherly authority, involving a mixture of anxiety, love and hate; identification with paternal authority vis-à-vis weaker ones; a strong and strict superego whose principle is that duty is regarded as the foundation (or at least one of the important supports) of society.” (Fromm 1970: 124) In one of his last books, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), he basically identifies Western European societies, as does Sigmund Freud, and its traditional views of masculinity and femininity as the cause of “human destructiveness”. These significant changes to German society were all facilitated by “the role played by Germans of Jewish background in the “nonattached” radical group of journalists, intellectuals, and producers of culture in the Weimar Republic.” (Rothman) This journey into darkness for Germany was began by Friedrich Salomon Krauss who published annual collections of sexual folklore titled Anthropophyteia.322 People who helped Krauss to publish this material included Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud and Ivan Bloch. A veritable who’s who of Gnostic Judaism at the time. This was not an academic exercise. “Krauss . . . never for an instant made the slightest pretense. Erotic folklore was to be collected for the same reason that it proliferated: because it is about sex.” Klein’s publication of sexually explicit material was brought to an end in 1913 when he was brought to trial as a pornographer. One of the most famous and influential social

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A word coined by Krauss himself which means something like “anthro” – human pophyteia which is derived from “paraphilia” which would literally mean “beside love” but was used by Krauss to mean “sexual perversion” as in not involving love, so Anthropophyteia meant “human sexual perversion”.

829 changers was Reich himself who coined the term “sexual revolution”. Consistent with Gnostic Judaism, Reich hoped to overcome “the life-negating sexual order, a preparer of “marriageability”, of “goodness” . . .” (Reich 1936/2013) To achieve this, Reich wrote an extremely influential book, The Sexual Revolution in 1936. In this book he claimed that it was “morality which we reject (abstinence for children and adolescents, absolute and eternal marital fidelity, compulsory marriage, etc.) it itself pathological and causes the very chaos it feels called upon to master.” (Reich 1936/2013) In short, he agreed with Freud that sexual morality was a reflection of an authoritarian society which resulted in general neurosis and that the way to realise a “free society” was through the female orgasm. As Reich wrote, We have seen that authoritarian society has the greatest interest in suppressing adolescent sexuality. This suppression is essential for maintaining compulsory marriage and family as well as for producing submissive citizens. The sexual moralist, by confusing authoritarian society with human society, also says that the existence of human society itself is imperilled if the young, as he typically puts it, “live out” their sexuality. Reich believed that it was perfectly acceptable for children as young as 13, if not younger, to have sexual intercourse. He agreed with Freud that “Abstinence is dangerous and absolutely deleterious to health.” (Reich 1936/2013) It is actually continuously argued in the Gnostic literature that children are sexual beings and if they are not then this is a problem. Marty Klein, a Jewish American sex therapist when responding to the question if porn sexualizes kids too early responded, What exactly does this mean? Our culture has become more sexually oriented since the Internet came to most homes 20 years ago. . . As our culture evolves, we need to adjust our parenting accordingly. . . I observe that people moaning the loudest about kids getting sexualized too early are the most uncomfortable that kids are sexual beings. . . our kid’s sexuality is a healthy part of them . . . (Klein 2016) This continuous insistence that kids, yes very young children, are sexual certainly goes against my own experiences.323 Her only concern again, as with Gnostic Judaism generally, is the possibility of guilt, guilt must be overcome by normalizing if not encouraging sexuality at the earliest opportunity. Reich’s main target, as with Gnostic Judaism generally, was the nuclear family which was maintained through monogamy and marriage. “. . .the institution of marriage . . . corresponds exactly to the social function of the authoritarian family structure.” (Reich 1936/2013) He believed those, who made up the vast majority

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What I mean by this is that even as a child I was attracted to girls, and I had crushes on my schoolteachers, but these were not “sexual” in the way that I thought about things at 18. Girls were pretty and smelled nice, but I do not remember considering “breasts” not to mention the sex act. The difference today is that children are being exposed to the most explicit sex acts, extreme sex acts, that children may find sexually arousing but they should not be exposed to these images, they should be innocent of such things. The Kleins of the world think the opposite, that children should be encouraged to be sexual and any restriction on this is authoritarian oppression.

830 of Germans, who believed that people should wait until after the age of 17 before having sex were being “. . . only an unconscious tool of a life-negating sexual order advocating goodness. . .” He would move to the United States prior to the outbreak of World War II where he would continue to radicalize his ideas on the liberating power of the female orgasm. He would later claim that there was a biological cosmic energy, like a force associated with the libido, which he called “orgone energy”, orgone from the word “orgasm”, which could be “trapped” in a device that he called an Orgone Accumulator which could be used to cure everything from cancer and radiation sickness to minor ailments including Freudian “repression”. (Turner 2011) As time went on, as might be expected from somebody who denies reality, he became increasingly detached from the world around him. He became paranoid that powerful people, such as the Rockefellers, were intent on harming him because of his research and that the planet was being invaded by aliens who were arrived in flying cigar shaped UFOs. It was during this period of his life that he started “Organomic Infant Research” which used “massage” techniques to overcome children’s “muscular armoring” against having orgasms. As might be expected from a treatment for children structured to manifest “orgasms”, several of the children who attended these “treatment sessions” would later admit to being sexually abused as part of their “treatment”. In 1947, Harper’s Magazine wrote an article on Reich describing him as the leader of “a new cult of sex and anarchy”. In part, as a result of this article, the FBI and the Food and Drug Administration rightly became concerned with Reich’s various claims and activities. His “scientific” claims regarding the Orgonon Energy, used to justify the “treatment” of children, were judged in court by the FDA as being fraudulent. Accusations, obviously, supported by the wider scientific community. In 1954, Reich was ordered to stop selling material related to orgonon energy including accumulators. When he refused, the FDA ordered that all material related to orgonon energy, including the accumulators, should be destroyed. Some of Reich’s apologists, of which there is a surprisingly large amount, outrageously claimed that this was the worst example of censorship in U.S. history.324 The American Civil Liberties Union, dominated by Jews, criticized the burning of Reich’s books although even they remained silent over the orgasm “accumulators”. He would later be found guilty of contempt of court and sentenced to two years in jail. He was not jailed because of his fraudulent claims, as some suggest even today, but because he continued to sell orgonon energy material thereby violating the court injunction. Just prior to his possible release, after a planned parole review, Reich died in prison of a heart attack. He was 60 years old. The Jewish literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote in his journal,

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Indeed, many texts, such as Adventures in the Orgasmatron, suggest that Reich’s books were burnt by the state because their content advocated for sexual freedom. It is suggested that this was an act of moral censorship. This was not official the case at all and without evidence to the contrary that claim, supported by many scientists, that his claims were clearly fraudulent although they may have been the result not of malice but of mental illness.

831 “Everybody of my generation had his orgone box . . . his search for fulfillment. There was, God knows, no break with convention, there was just a freeing of oneself from all those parental attachments and thou shalt nots”. And this is exactly what the generation of Reich’s meant for Germany and later the United States, the end of the “thou shalt nots”. Of course, with knowledge of Gnostic Judaism, Reich’s program loses all originality, all claims of authenticity, all claims to any kind of creativity at all, because everything that he did and wrote, his advocacy for sexuality, overcoming Christian morality, encouraging base drives and even his pedophilia, were all just expression of Gnostic Judaism. Another example of how German Jews were shaping Germany prior to World War II was the radical journal Die Weltbuhne. Die Weltbuhne was renowned for its sharp satirical criticisms of traditional German society expressing what could only be termed loathing for everything historically understood as “German” such as the military, the judiciary, and the middle classes. (Rothman) One influential author, for example, Kurt Tucholsky, a German Jew, ruthlessly ridiculed traditional German values. By the end of the decade, Tucholsky was arguing in unequivocal terms that Germans were either idiots or simply evil. Terms that white Americans might increasingly feel is being directed against them. Die Weltbuhne, and other similar publications, became extremely influential in Germany in the 1920s and helped shape the emergent attitudes in post-war German society. Istavan Deak has estimated that of the sixty writers who worked on Die Weltbuhne, forty-two were Jewish, two more had a least one Jewish parent, three more were married to Jews while only twenty-one might be said to have no Jewish ancestry or relationships with Jews. It was largely as a result of these Jewish influences in shaping culture that they managed to fundamentally change German society in a matter of months. As Istavan Deak observes, . . . Jews were responsible for a great part of leftist literature in Germany. Die Weltbuhne was in this respect not unique; Jews published, edited, and to a great part wrote the other left-wing intellectual magazines. Jews played a decisive role in the pacifist and feminist movements, and in the campaigns for sexual enlightenment. The left-wing intellectuals did not simply “happen to be mostly Jews” as some pious historiography would have us believe, but Jews created the left-wing intellectual movement in Germany. Deak is not simply claiming that Jews created a political movement narrowly but a political movement in the sense of shaping every aspect of German society, gender relations, attitudes towards sex, and normalizing homosexuality, in the years prior to World War II. As a result of these dramatic social changes, as election results confirm, there emerged two Germanies, the vast majority who continued to advocate for a sober, sexually modest traditional family informed by Christian values and another which argued that the future was one free of moral constraints,

832 where God played no role, and sexual pleasure became the most important aspect to a fulfilled life. This was truly becoming a situation where sex was for a political purpose. (Weitz 2009: 299) Does any of this sound familiar? Despite this agitation, the vast majority of Germans remained conservative. What was being demanded, as it was in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, was a sexual revolution as the path to realizing a social revolution. Despite a concerted effort to fundamentally change German society, most especially women, most Germans remained rather conservative. The number of radical feminists was a tiny minority. (Stephenson 2013: 9) Even moderate “feminists”, who were led at the time by Gertrud Baumer the founder during World War I of the National Women’s Service in 1914, hoped that women would find a good husband, marry, and settle down to applying all their energy to their families. (Stephenson 2013: 10) One result of this sexual “freedom” and “openness” was an epidemic of venereal disease, unwanted pregnancies and children growing up in single parent families. How much did this generation of fatherless boys open a space for Hitler to become their de facto father? As Weitz observes as the consequences of these changes, “. . .the divorce rate had skyrocketed, and every year probably a million women (out of 32.2 million German women in total) had an abortion”. (Weitz 2009: 305) As one would expect without little reflection, the Nazis grew out of the trajectory in German thought that promoted free sex and humanism and were extremely critical of traditional Christian morality. They were Nietzscheans not Christians. Many who would embrace Nazism thought Christianity had undermine true Teutonic ways of being, as Nietzsche argued, but, perhaps most especially, masculinity. Some Germans, like Hans Suren as expressed in his extremely widely read, Der Mensch und die Sonne (Man and Sun) believed that people needed to return to a more primal state, of sun and nudity, to restore what had been depleted by the corrupting forces of modern Christian civilization. As might be expected, Hans Suren embraced Nazism. It is only after understanding the situation in Germany that what unfolds in the United States during and just after World War II can be properly understood. How Gnostic Jews hit the ground running, prepared for what they were about to do, trained for the purpose, knowing exactly what needed to be done. With the rise of Nazism, numerous German intellectuals, because of the particular circumstances in Germany at the time almost all of whom were Jews, were found academic positions mainly in the United States. Part of this immigration of German Jewish intellectuals was supported by the “progressive” Rockefeller Foundation. From 1933, when Hitler passed legislation making it illegal for Jews to by employed by the state, this included universities, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the “Special Research

833 Aid for Deposed Scholars” which helped German Jewish academics like the physicist Leo Szilard,325 Wilhelm Reich himself, Erich Fromm, Max Wertheimer, Leo Strauss and Claude Levi-Strauss, to find academic position in the United States. This really is a list of evil when you read their works through the lens of what has been revealed here. These scholars constituted the “first wave” of academic refugees finding safety in the United States. As might be remembered from what preceded, these are the same names who were driving the German cultural revolution of the Weimar Republic primarily through the Institut fur Sociolforschung (Institute for Social Research). As the situation in Europe deteriorated, a new scheme was developed from 1940 called the “Emergency Program for European Scholars” which ran until the end of the Second World War. These programs helped find positions in Western Universities, mainly in the United States, for 303 Jewish scholars and helped fund a further 1600 from 1936. The scholars who received support were all individually selected by members of Roosevelt’s government which itself was dominated by Jews. Perhaps surprisingly given that they were individually selected, if there was no understanding of Roosevelt’s government, almost all the intellectuals brought to America promoted extremely radical, mainly left-wing, political views. From 1934, early in the program, participating institutions were required to give assurances that the temporary positions were likely to become permanent. This guarantee meant that as the Rockefeller funding was withdrawn most of these German Jewish radical scholars managed to secure permanent academic positions in the United States. A survey undertaken in 1939, just as the war in Europe was beginning, found that 61% of refugee scholars had been granted permanent positions by that time and that a further 21% were considered likely to be granted permanent positions in the near future. That is at least 80% of these radical “leftist” refugee scholars received permanent academic positions in American universities. These numbers, less than 2000, may not look significant, but this was academic life in the 1930s and 40s. There were not a lot of academic positions available, and these scholars were concentrated in particular, elite universities that were disproportionately influential in shaping the intellectual landscape. Not only were they concentrated in elite universities, but they were concentrated in particular disciplines, psychology, law, anthropology and the social sciences, which allowed them to be much more influential in shaping American society than if they were in the natural sciences, medicine or engineering. When these factors are taken into account, the relatively small academic community at the time, the concentration in particular elite institutions and concentration in particularly socially influential disciplines, then it can be understood how these 2,000 academics managed to shape post-war American society. The wave of immigrant academics, many of

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Szilard, with his colleague Albert Einstein, were responsible for encouraging the United States to develop the nuclear bomb hoping that would be dropped on their former homeland, which they had both loathed, Germany.

834 them early in their careers, attracted expressions of concern from American institutions at the time who feared that American universities had reached saturation and that many more worthy American academics were not getting opportunities because so many roles were being filled by Jewish German refugees. One thing that hampered these American academics from effectively limiting inclusion of these Jewish refugees was a combination of Jewish control of American media, not allowing the debate a public airing, and that everyone already at that stage was terrified of being accused of being an “anti-Semite” and possibly being associated with Hitler. Some American scholars at the time complained that these German Jews were making no effort to integrate into American life but formed very closely knit exclusive groups that deliberately refused American academics entry. These very same academics were the culture war warriors fresh from the old front line of Germany. They brought to America the same plan, using the same strategy, desiring the same outcome that was being realised in Germany. The United States at this time was a social conservative, extremely Christian society, that worshipped the very society these German Jews hoped to destroy. The reality was that this first wave of radical Jewish intellectuals managed to shape American academic life directly for the next 20 years, because many of them were so young, but it is their legacy, their tendency to either employ Jews or people who agreed with their Gnostic vision that allowed their movement to blossom into a thousand movements. Unlike the first generation, with their German accents and European affect, the next generation were “American” and therefore less visible although promoting the same agenda of their forebears. Despite this general exodus of elite Jews from Germany, many Jews, for a range of reasons, did not leave Germany. Some were simply patriotic Germans with only tenuous, if any, connections to Judaism. These Jews, perhaps forming the majority of those who stayed, perhaps expected to be ultimately safe in a place they truly considered “home”. Some Jews only learnt of their Jewish heritage when the NAZIs knocked on their door to tell them that one of their grandparents was, in fact, Jewish. Orthodox Jews were unconcerned where they lived and opposed attempts by Zionists to use the rise of Nazism to push Jews out of Europe and into Palestine. These Jews stayed in Germany out of a religious conviction that the messiah had not yet come and therefore it was not time to return to Israel. Some Jews were simply too poor to leave and so were forced to bet that things would not get too bad. The ones who left, and some such as Leo Strauss left early indeed, were the most militant Gnostic Jews in Germany. The ones who left usually strongly identified as “Jewish” but were not Orthodox. They were the ones with no loyalty to Germany and, indeed, many, like Albert Einstein and Theodore Adorno, expressed nothing but an absolute loathing for Germany, even before the advent of Nazism, which they would now direct towards the United States. The Jews who quickly left Germany, many to live in the United States, were

835 the cultural war vanguard, the elite drivers of social change who were carrying through the Gnostic agenda and these were the very ones who arrived in the United States ready to carry through the next phase of their strategy for global conquest. Many of those who arrived in the United States were so prized by global Jewry that they received financial support from the wider global Jewish community to ensure they could move and usually had arrangements for their employment secured in advance. The ones who received this level of support were the worst of the worst. Sadly, it was the decent Jews, the Orthodox Jew, the highly assimilated, the patriotic Germans and the poor, the ones about which the Gnostic movement was unconcerned, who were left behind to die of disease and starvation in the concentration camps of Germany while the ones who had created the situation of animosity that opened the way for Hitler fled Germany. The Jews that died were basically chosen by the Gnostic Jews to die because they were, from their perspective, the undesirable Jews. The ones left behind, the patriotic German Jews, those distanced from the Jewish community, the poor and the poorly educated, the Orthodox, they were chosen by the Gnostic Jews as sacrifices to their blood thirsty Goddess so that they could achieve their dream of a Jewish state in Palestine. Most of the German Jewish refugees did not move to the Soviet Union where, as Jewish communists, you would think that they would find a welcoming environment, but this cohort of Jewish communists and social radicals chose to move to the Christian capitalist country of the United States which, in theory, opposed everything that these men passionately supported. It was these very same refugees who brought the idea of an “authoritarian personality” and identified it with white, Christian Americans, that was the wellspring for Ashley Jardina’s outrageous assertion that “whiteness” and “authoritarianism” were related.

Living in America The question that started this chapter was how did “whiteness” become associated with “authoritarianism” when this relationship seems so problematic? The place to begin to answer this question was with the work of Bachofen who wrote in the aftermath of the social unrest of 1848. It was Bachofen who proposed that there was once a matriarchal society that was not guided by morality or reason but by natural, instinctual drives. The age of the matriarchy reflected female values and they worshipped female goddesses in a way that is similar to Gnostic Jewry. Bachofen argued that this rather idyllic matriarchal age, where there was no individual property, and everyone lived in harmony with nature ignorant of good and evil was ended with the advent of the patriarchal age which might be equated with the Axial Age. Men traditionally practiced crafts such as animal husbandry and manufacture and these pursuits began to generate more wealth in society. With this shift in wealth production there was also a shift in power and perspective. As wealth generated from traditional male pursuits grew, so did

836 male power until power rested solely with men in a patriarchy. Patriarchies, more reflective of the father, prized morality and reason and their love, unlike a mother’s love, was conditioned on behaving in certain ways thought to be consistent with morality and reason. Over time, according to Bachofen, after much conflict and social disruption, society emerged around the middle of the first millennium with new social orders that now prized a male worldview. The primary Gods in such societies were now conceptualised as male and these male Gods, like all fathers, now expected obedience and goodness from his people. The important aspect of Bachofen’s work is not that he was giving an accurate account of human history but that his ideas resonated with the emergence of Gnostic Judaism at the exact time that Eastern European Jews were moving into the West. These gnostic thinkers embraced Bachofen’s theories and together helped begin to shape the intellectual landscape of Europe. Bachofen’s work resonated at the same time that Nietzsche’s writing was also being accepted as important. With the way prepared by Bachofen and Nietzsche, the two most influential thinkers of the 20th century, Marx and Freud, rose into prominence. They both argued that it was the Christian Protestant Western tradition that was oppressive by not allowing the “natural” drives of humanity to guide human life. They argued that the patriarchal morality expressed by the Christian West, especially in relation to sexuality, needed to be overturned and a new set of values, the exact reversal of the Christian West, needed to be affirmed. The Marxist tradition was dominant in Russia while the Nietzschean/Freudian tradition was most influential in Germany. All the intellectual current which were coming to be seen as important were explicitly anti-Christian, anti-moral and anti-Western. What the Gnostic Jew recognised in these narratives claiming that there was once a matriarchy was their interpretation of the Garden of Eden, which they associated with the matriarchal age, and the “fall” was to gain knowledge of good and evil or to act according to moral dictates brought about by male domination. Such “knowledge”, gnostic Jews believed, was against God because God Most High had “withdrawn” from the cosmos. God had withdrawn to both open a space for beings in their inadequate existence and to allow humanity freedom. It was believed that the world “man” had manifested was an evil world because there is no greater evil than to claim to know God, to claim to know good and evil. In the shattered Europe in the aftermath of World War I, Gnostic Jewish intellectuals, no longer speaking through “Christians”, were reshaping the West in their image. Especially in Germany, which had suffered terribly during World War I, the argument was being made that what had caused German failure was the Protestant Christian ethos. The German people no longer needed to feel guilty about their natural drives but should instead question the role of reason, self-disciplines and constraint advocated by Christianity. Germans should be sexually free. These arguments resonated most powerfully with the young but never persuaded anywhere near the majority of Germans. The only way governments

837 informed by these ideas could gain power was through taking it through undemocratic means. There has never been a communist or fascist government elected to power by a majority vote of the people. With the rise of the Teutonic Gnosticism of the German Nazi Party, thoroughly humanistic and having nothing to do with any Christian tradition, many Gnostic Jews managed to flee Germany and find very good academic positions in the United States. Most of those who fled, though not all, were associated with the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School. These German Jews who were guided by a synthesis of Marxism and Freudianism, identified, quite against reality, the traditional family, patriarchy, transcendental God, universal norms and clearly defined gender roles as the conditions for authoritarianism. Although authoritarian governments, like that in Nazi Germany, had taken steps to undermine traditional family values, embraced Nietzschean humanism and advocated for sexual license, somehow when this movement came to America the truth was so distorted that some actually believed that the features so often identified with Western Christianity were, indeed, proto authoritarian. It is because of these arguments that movements like Antifa today, and many academics, identify rationalism, self-disciplines, morality, the nuclear family and belief in a transcendental god with fascism. In this section, the way these arguments were developed in the United States, the institutions and individuals who promoted them and how they moved into mainstream politics. The association of “whiteness” with “authoritarianism” was initially proposed in the United States by a number of German Jewish intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School prior to the Second World War. Although the Frankfurt School and its many luminaries will be familiar to anyone who has attended Western universities in the last 30 years, because their standing is held in such high esteem, for those who may not have been able to endure the mind-numbing conformity demanded from modern universities, and I know such people exist, the Frankfurt School was responsible for promoting and popularizing “neoMarxism”. It is neo-Marxism that informs contemporary social movements such as critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement. As Illing (2016) observes, “The Frankfurt School consisted mostly of neo-Marxists who hoped for a socialist revolution in Germany . . .” The Frankfurt School produced radical leftist material that opposed both Stalinism, not the Jewish Trotskyism, and liberal capitalism. The school was famous for being extremely multi-disciplinary in its approach drawing upon economics, philosophy, history, cultural studies and psychoanalysis to formulate its position. What became their main concern was trying to explain why the “socialist” revolution, predicted by Marx, had not happened in Western European countries. Everything seemed in place for communism, particularly in Western Europe and the United States, yet the West seemed particularly immune to its allure. What was stopping Marxism

838 (Gnostic Judaism) from ruling the world? As “group biographer” of the Frankfurt School, Stuart Jeffries, said of the Frankfurt School in an interview, In the 1920s, they were wondering why there was no socialist revolution in a sophisticated and advanced industrialized country like Germany. . . They concluded that culture and the use of the media was the primary tool for oppressing the masses without the masses realizing that they’re being oppressed.” (Jeffries as seen in Illing 2016) They argued that what was stopping them from taking over the West was cultural products, music, movies, art, religion and the mass media. These cultural products were counteracting the material forces that were naturally tending towards revolution. Remember, these material forces were understood by the Gnostic tradition at that time to be the Shechinah so what the Frankfurt School was really inquiring into was what was stopping their God, the goddess of the Underworld, from coming to presence in the world. The basic answer, one they would have been familiar to them before being explicitly stated, was that Christianity, and its belief in reason and morality, was impeding the God of the Underground from emerging from her dark crypt into the light of the world. This argument, of course, is quite true. It was Christian morality that was inhibiting the emergence of their God, the Goddess of chaos and destruction, from entering into the world and that God was sustained through “culture”. In light of this truth, what was required, those of the Frankfurt School concluded, was a broad critical orientation towards Western “culture”. As Adorno said regarding what he understood to be the mass delusion of God, such delusions “are products of the total organizations of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed.” (Adorno as seen in Jonsson 2013: 70) The delusion that there is a Christian God, that had been institutionalized throughout Western society, could only be overcome by changing society as a whole. The strategy is largely derived from the work of Sigmund Freud, as Erich Fromm wrote, The conditions for the cure of individual pathology are mainly the following. 1) A development must have occurred which is contrary to the proper functioning of the psyche. In Freud’s theory this means that the libido has failed to develop normally and that as a result, symptoms are produced. In the frame of reference of humanistic psychoanalysis, the causes of pathology lie in the failure to develop a productive orientation . . . The fact of suffering, whether it is conscious or unconscious, resulting from the failure of normal development, produces a dynamic striving to overcome the suffering, that is, for change in the direction of health. . .326 2) The first step necessary to permit this tendency for health to operate is the awareness of the suffering and of that which is shut out and disassociated from our conscious personality. In Freud’s doctrine, repression refers mainly to sexual strivings. In our frame of reference, it refers to the repressed irrational passions . . .

326

It is of more than passing interest that it continued to be the case in the broad tradition of psychology that the old Mesmerian idea of the body striving for health continues to resonate even in the mid-1960s.

839

3) Increasing self-awareness can become fully effective only if a next step is taken, that of changing a practice of life which was built on the basis of the neurotic structure, and which reproduces it constantly. A patient, for instance, whose neurotic character makes him want to submit to parental authorities has usually constructed a life where he has chosen dominating or sadistic father images as bosses, teachers, and so on. He will be cured only if he changes his realistic life situation in such a way that it does not constantly reproduce the submissive tendencies he wants to give up. Furthermore, he must change his system of values, norms and ideals . . . The same conditions . . . are also necessary for a cure of social pathology. (Fromm 1966: 240-241) So much is being said by Fromm in this relative short passage that it is deserving of an extensive essay. What can be exposed is that in point three, Fromm seems to suggest that “fathers” are “sadistic” and that to accept male bosses and teachers, is only an expression of neurosis. This is why this entire movement has promoted women, both in theory and in practice, into leadership roles. The liberation of women has not just involved the empowerment of women in traditional female role, but every effort to ensure women are in leadership roles traditionally held by men. When women do get into positions of power, they face less criticism from the media even if they do perform badly. In Australia, the male voice is totally disappearing from the mass media. Whereas for many years the aim was balance, one woman and one man, more recently women now fill most of the important media roles in Australia such as the morning and afternoon “drive time” slots on the highly influential publicly funded national radio broadcaster. Often it is women interviewing women. It is because women, Gnostic Jews believe, and it does seem to be true, accept people unconditionally. Just like mothers in a domestic situation, women do not place any conditions upon the love they offer which might be contrasted to men who expect a certain moral behaviour. Women are much more likely to embrace policies of open borders and allow asylum seekers into the country whereas men are more likely to expect conditions to be met, especially what might be thought moral conditions, before people are allowed to immigrate. Increasingly, to expect certain behaviours is, according to contemporary thinking, to be “authoritarian”. According to Fromm, how to help somebody to become “productive”, most importantly not “good” or “well adjusted”, the aspirations for pre-Freudian 19th century psychology, was the same for a society as it was for the individual. The goal is to identify the supressed irrational “passions”, the role performed by sex in Freudian psychoanalysis, and to then overcome the values, the norms, that are sustained and transferred through cultural production, that function to suppress the irrational drives, the “base”, and therefore reproduce “neurosis”. The “problem” of Christian capitalist cultural production, what they officially termed “bourgeois society” by which they referred to Western Christian society, that was stopping the Gnostic revolution and therefore needed to be overcome using what became known as “critical theory”. Klein Jewish American sex therapist, Marty Klein, (2016) claimed that “The United States was an enormous

840 tangle of sex problems. If it has been a person, it would have needed medication; if it had been a couple, it would have required marriage counselling; it is had been a teenager, ti would have been grounded, sent to its room without dessert.” So, what were these terrible “sex problems” that plagued America? “School sex education was driven by the abstinence model – its federally mandated goal was preventing kids from having sex, not educating them about it . . .”, “Congress and Presidents Bush I and Clinton had been trying to censor the Internet since its commercialization in the 1990s; states including New York, Michigan and Arizona tried, but were defeated in federal court”, “. . .America was the land of sexual dissatisfaction . . .”, Most organized religion was actively encouraging people to feel guilty about their sexuality – their desires, arousal patterns, preferences, fantasies. . . The Catholic Church still presented pre-Marital virginity as an ideal for all women . . .” and “Fear of homosexuality had reached a boiling point.” (Klein 2016) This is what had to be overturned, these points of resistance against Gnostic Jewry had to be destroyed and the means to achieve that was through critical theory. Critical theory focused attention on the nexus between culture and politics and the role the mass media and the arts broadly played in shaping the way people think. In short critical theory was a critical approach to the systems by which “culture” is produced and reproduced from one generation to the next in a way that sustained Western civilization. The Frankfurt School’s single most important contribution, and the importance of this cannot be overstated, was to articulate a form of Marxism that harmonised different currents of Gnostic Jewish thought, “spiritual Marxist” and Freudian psychoanalysis, into a single strategy/solution to the problem of Western Christian dominance. As Jonsson observes, “Many researchers of the exiled Institute for Social Research . . . extracted the political dimension of Freud’s mass psychology, which thus became a theory of fascism and authoritarianism. These ideologies were in turn seen as dominant features of contemporary Western society.” (Jonsson 2013: 69) Orthodox Marxism, as even expressed by Georg Lukacs, thought the mind or the “psyche” played a limited role in the lives of people. As Marx famously said, “In is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” It is that people belong to a particular class within a particular system of production that people thought how they did and not the other way around. This was Marx’s reversal of Hegelian philosophy or the Gnostic influence on sociology. It was, as already observed, the Christian West which argued that it was rational ideas, understood as participating in the mind of God, that directed not only human activity but all of creation. Everything tended, it was believed ever since the ancient philosophers, towards the ideal. Gnostic scholars who did not believe we experienced God, who did not believe that the world was real, could not adhere to a theory that posited the ideal as that which informed human action. It was the Shechinah who directed human actions and it was she who needed to

841 be released into the world as an act of redemption. Freudian psychoanalysis argued, and this naming is important in that it is not psychology, it is not the logos of the psyche but analysis of the psyche, it does not even assume the reality of the psyche in the same way that analysis of a commodity does not need to assume that a commodity is “real”, that it was not conscious thoughts, logos, which primarily directed human action but deep “unconscious” drives. The Shechinah was not just material forces, as it had been argued, but this structure was repeated in humanity in terms of the “subconscious”. The Freudian ideas that influenced the Frankfurt School, therefore, as Wilhelm Reich observed, “Just as Marxism was sociologically the expression of man’s becoming conscious of the laws of economics and the exploitation of a majority by a minority, so psychoanalysis is the expression of man becoming conscious of the social repression of sex.” (Reich 1929/1972: 41) Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis shared the Gnostic ideas that notions of “the good” and “the true” in Western Christian capitalist society were oppressing the free expression of humanity in terms of what they really were. Marx’s idea of “superstructure” becomes equivalent to Freud’s idea of “superego” and Marx’s “base” becomes equivalent to Freud’s “Id/libido”. In short “morality” was suppressing the “will-to-life” or, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was functioning without the Tree of Life. In Freudian psychology, Freud claimed that, . . .the child learns to submit to family authority. It evolves an obedient character structure that prohibits every impulse to revolt, no matter how rational and justified such a revolt may objectively seem. Just as a child learns to suppress its libido by internalizing a punishing superego, so this superego, once it becomes an integral part of the psychic apparatus, will continue to punish and suppress the adult’s desire to live according to his or her own wishes. (Jonsson 2013: 69) These ideas that appear to demonize Western Christian society’s nuclear family are then used to explain the emergence of what they called the “authoritarian personality” or the “authoritarian character”. Of course, the early account of Gnosticism and its criticism of Christianity resonates in every word of this synopsis. The “father” in the family insists on obedience and uses forms of reward and punishment to make the child conform. The main target of the father’s control is to restrict the child’s libido which is the primary primordial drive of human action. The father’s moral beliefs are imposed on the child, the masculine is consciousness, and the child, eager to seek approval from the dominant person in their lives, embraces the father’s restrictions and adopts them, internalizes them, as their own. This obedience then gets transferred by the child as they grow up onto God. Why do so many Westerners accept the moral teachings of Christiantiy, it is because of the patriarchal, nuclear family. As Adorno et., al., wrote,

842 A basically hierarchical, authoritarian, exploitative parent-child relationship is apt to carry over into a power-oriented, exploitatively dependent attitude towards one’s sexual partner and one’s God and may well culminate in a political philosophy and social outlook which has no room for anything but a desperate clinging to what appears to be strong and a disdainful rejection of whatever is relegated to the bottom. (Adorno et., al., 1969: 475) Adorno et., al., are drawing all the separate parts together into one faggot. The father/child relations become transferred onto the husband/wife relationship which becomes transferred onto the worshipper/God relationship which can, ultimately, find expression in the citizen/leader relationship. This goes back to the argument being presented in the Weimer years by Blüher and the transfer of erotic desire in the Wandervogel onto the male leader. Freud argued that instead of the child behaving how it “wants”, “free” of moral restraint, to “do what we wanna do” as such, the child is raised to be “good” and to deny these “natural drives” or “instincts”. Of course, moral restraint, from a Gnostic Jewish perspective, is equally the suppression of “mother earth” and is, therefore, evil. It was because of the role of the father in raising children in the nuclear family in Western societies that they were, supposedly, prone to authoritarianism. Freud claimed, “The leader of the mass is still the feared primal father; the mass still wishes to be dominated by absolute power (it is the highest degree addicted to authority in Le Bon’s expression; it has a thirst for subordination). The primal father is the mass ideal that dominates the ‘I’ in place of the ‘I’-deal.” (Freud as seen in Jonsson 2013: 67) This primal mass is what Freud describes as the “primal horde”. Remember, unlike Le Bon who, in his book The Psychology of the Masses, was considering rioting crowds and leftist industrial action, Freud is concerned with social groups like the “army” and the “Christian Church”. That is, Le Bon wanted to understanding situations of high emotion when people were behaving in irrational ways often in blind obedience to a leader. By contrast, Freud was applying Le Bon’s thinking to social groups that epitomised calm reflection and disciplined order. It is these groups rational, tempered, organized groups that Freud is referring to in terms of the “primal horde” who live in fear of the “primal father”. The army with its military hierarchy and the Christian Church supposedly obeying God. It is that Freud is drawing upon Gnostic to undermine the most respected institutions in Western Christian society that Freud must be read not as a scientist, not as an objective researcher, but as a passionate religious fanatic who loathed Western Christian society and was doing everything that he could to see it destroyed. As Freud himself wrote in a letter to his friend and colleague Wilhelm Fliess, “I am not really a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, and not a thinker. I am nothing but by temperament a conquistador.” (Jonsson 2013: 61) This is not an imprecise use of the word, a conquistador fought for his God, conquered others in the name of his God, this is exactly what Freud is inferring, his is indeed a conquistador, a soldier for his God or, better, Goddess. As Freud said to his fellow psychoanalyst Carl Custav as they waved to adoring crowds gathered to see them arrive on the docks of New York, “Don’t

843 they know we’re bringing them the plague?” (Freud as seen in Turner 2011) Again the wording is important, the plague has long been associated the female goddesses like Anat and the Shechinah. Erich Fromm is one of the central figures in the synthesis of Freudian and Marxist ideas. It was Fromm who first developed Freudian ideas within a Marxist framework and was, therefore, the first to coin the term “authoritarian personality”. (Kamau 2012: 191) Such a synthesis went against Freud’s own thinking on the matter. As Reich observes, “The connections between Marxism and psychoanalysis were fundamentally rejected by Freud, who said that the two disciplines were opposed to each other.” (Reich 1929/1972: 4) How they were opposed to each other is that the Marxist tradition, as Reich observes, had actually embraced the “positivism” that was popular in the years prior to World War II in rejecting that the “mind” or “psyche” existed at all. As Reich wrote, “According to this view, psychological phenomena as such do not exist: the life of the soul is simply a physical process. To such materialists the very concept of the soul, or psyche, is an idealistic and dualistic error.” (Reich 1929/1972: 11) Reich claims that such “vulgarized Marxism” can be maintained as it would deny any consideration of “class consciousness”, “revolutionary will” or “religious ideology”. (Reich 1929/1972: 13) This could be quite a direct attack on Lukacs who had argued in his review of Freud Freud’s Psychology of the Masses, just before publishing a book titled History and Class Consciousness, basically repeating Marx’s criticism of Hegel that Freud begins with what is actual the consequence of social condition in an attempt to explain human behaviour when what needs to be explained is the productive conditions under which certain social relations form. So, Freud tries to explain the nuclear family by drawing upon his theory of sexual repression as though families were universal and unchanging. Reich is arguing in reply, that such an attitude is ignoring the very feature of bourgeois society that is inhibiting the revolution. Yes, Reich would agree, the psyche is the result of particular conditions of production, so a certain consciousness does emerge along with particular religious beliefs as a result of a certain condition of production but then those features of the “superstructure” function to inhibit change. Just as there was a liberated way of living that was in harmony with the material condition of life so was there a way of thinking, especially in regard to human sexuality, that also screamed to be liberated. Indeed, it is surprising that Freud would argue that as the two tradition harmonise so seamlessly, and Freud was only too aware of their shared true origins in Gnostic Jewry. Freud may not have wanted others to easily see just how harmonious these two shallowly different traditions actually argued basically the same broad argument. Freudianism and Marxism both propose that Western civilization has resulted in humanity’s true self being suppressed or “alienated” and that these lost selves can be recovered or “redeemed”, not by becoming more civilized, but by turning to our base drives of self-interest (Marx) or

844 sexuality (Freud). Despite incorporating Freudian psychoanalysis into its political program, the Frankfurt School remained firmly on the “left”, it was most certainly an extension on spiritual Marxism, but also self-consciously indebted to what is tactfully called “Jewish utopian messianism” or what might more accurately be called Gnostic Judaism. (Mendieta 2002: 2) The project was to make the world think like Gnostic Jews so that the Shechinah can finally be freed into this world. It was the aim to develop these ideas further and to implement them in the real world that informed the work of the Frankfurt School. It was because of this argument that there had been a cultural revolution in Germany in a first attempt to realize the Gnostic Jewish New World Order but, as will be revealed in the third Volume, their strategy was actually much more complex than that. In the years preceding World War II, there was a wave of Gnostic Jews from Germany who moved to the United States with the aim, it seems by what they say, of replicating the unfinished cultural revolution that had been partially achieved in Germany in the United States. The obvious question to confront such an aspiration is how? How do you enter a prosperous, successful, confident, country and argue that everything that they believed in at their very core, everything that they prized, their entire way of life that many had already died to maintain, their religion, their family structures, their institutions, their mores, everything that constituted the world of Americans, was no longer acceptable? What made this task especially difficult is that what truly motivated these intellectuals was simply an onto-theology and one could not come out and make that truth transparent. Such an explicit assertion, of course, to use a gross understatement, would simply be dismissed or, more accurately, ridiculed. Those who proposed such an argument would have been literally driven out of the country. The Gnostic Jews, of course, knew this. There needed to be devised a strategy as there had been in the Weimar Republic. The problem was that the same strategy could not be used in the United States that had achieved relative success in Germany. Weimar Germany had been a country emerging from a defeat in a catastrophic war and was deflated as a result, lacking confidence. This is to claim that what made Germany, uniquely out of the Western Protestant countries which included, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, Sweden etc., to first embrace dramatic social change and then for some to turn to authoritarianism was not Christianity, the nuclear family or the famous Protestant discipline, the Christian West generally has actually proved to be uniquely resistant to authoritarian encroachments unlike say Southern Europe, Russia, large parts of Asia and Africa, but because Germany questioned its heritage in light of defeat and fell under the sway of Gnostic influences including Nietzschean philosophy. It was that the “old Germany” had failed that some were open to visions of a “new Germany”, one free from the failed traditions. This

845 vulnerability was then leveraged by Gnostic Jews who had made a home in Germany and the rest is an episode of catastrophic history for Europe generally. This was not the case in the United States. The first strategy proposed by those from the Frankfurt School to change the way American’s thought was to claim that they were fighting anti-Semitism. It is still argued even today that the “primary objective” of Jewish political activity of the Frankfurt School “was . . . to prevent the emergence of an antiSemitic reactionary mass movement in the United States”. (Svonkin 1997, 1998) Such concerns were not totally unfounded. There were indeed active fascist movements, informed by German Nazi ideas, that were operating on the fringes in the United States prior to World War II. These were not large movements that had a great deal of support or funding but there certainly were Nazi styled political organization operating in the United States. The theories that had already been developed by the Frankfurt School in Germany claimed that antisemitism emerged into societies that were, Christian (particularly Protestant), prized the nuclear family, and valued traditional gender roles. That is, according to their theories, the United States was fertile ground for the emergence of a National Socialist movement. But American public sentiment at the time was not particularly concerned about small fringe political movements that were opposed to global Jewry. Still, at that time, unlike today, Jews were identified as Jews so a group of leftist Jews arguing that everything that the United States represented had to be overturned because there was a danger of anti-Semitism was not, let us say, persuasive. Gnostic Jews had shown already by that time that if you want to achieve something, you have to make it look as though it was in the best interests of everyone that certain outcomes were to be achieved. It was no good arguing, “change your behaviour as that will benefit us”, but “change your behaviour and that will benefit us and you”. Although not well known today, the distinguishing feature of the Nazi Party, what made them unique in the German political landscape in the 1920s and 30s, was that they were the only political party that wanted to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. That Jewish financiers funded Hitler, that Jewish controlled media promoted his program, and that even Hollywood catered to his wishes, might be read as part of an intentional strategy to persuade the German people that, as Hitler himself passionately believed, it was in Germany’s best interests to establish a Jewish state in Palestine. The situation that the Zionists had managed to nurture in pre-World War II Germany, one that angered many German Jews, was that it was not only good for Jews to realize a Jewish state in Palestine, but it was also beneficial to Germany. This is just another expression of Otto Gross’ idea of the “will-to-relate”. It is to persuade those they want to change that that change is in their best interests. Whether it is women, orthodox Jews, black Americans, whomever, there single repeated strategy is to say that it is in your interests to behave in a way that we want. It is for this reason that there is no group, outside of the Gnostic Jews themselves of course, as responsible for the

846 establishing a Jewish state in Palestine than the Nazis. In the same way that the Zionists had convinced Germany that it was in their interests to support the program of Gnostic Jews so did they have to persuade America. To argue that an entire culture needed to change to help Jews to stop anti-Semitism was simply unpersuasive. What was required was an argument that made it appear that change was in the best interests of the United States. To this end, it was not only antisemitism that they ultimately expressed concern about but the nexus between anti-Semitism and authoritarianism. These communists moved to the United States to save America from its greatest threat, it was in grave danger of becoming authoritarian. With just a little reflection the claim is incredible. Here is a group of neo-Marxist, after much of the truth about what was happening the Soviet Union was known, going to the freest, most democratic, most market based, country in the world and saying, you are in danger of becoming authoritarian. This was at a time when Japan, the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany, and Spain were actually authoritarian, one of them informed by Marxist ideology, and yet they went to the United States to warn them that if they did not change their ways, they would end up becoming an authoritarian state. To push this agenda, they drew upon the work of German Jew Wilhelm Reich who, as discussed, had already developed the features of an “authoritarian character” while in Germany. The idea of an “authoritarian character” was also presented by the communist German Jew Wilhelm Reich, a student of Freud, in his 1933 book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The features of an authoritarian character are, 1. Conventionalism. Rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values. 2. Authoritarian submission. Submissive, uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities of the ingroup. 3· Authoritarian aggression. Tendency to be on the lookout for, and to reject, and punish people who violate conventional values. 4. Anti-intraception. Opposition to the subjective, the imaginative, the tender-minded. 5. Superstition and Stereotype. The belief in mystical determinants of the individual's fate; the disposition to think in rigid categories. 6. Power and "toughness”. Preoccupation with the dominance-submission, strong-weak, leader-follower dimension; identification with power figures; overemphasis upon the conventionalized attributes of the ego; exaggerated assertation of strength and toughness. 7. Destructiveness and cynicism. Generalized hostility, vilification of the human. 8. Projectivity. The disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses. 9. Sex. Exaggerated concern with sexual things “goings-on”. (Kreml 1977: 15-16) If you take out the evaluative language, then it does make for revealing reading. “Adherence to conventional values”, “uncritical of ingroup moral authorities”, “punish people who violate conventional

847 values”, “opposition to the subjective” (I guess by valuing the objective). This does not address them all as some do require further elaboration and clarification that is beyond the scope of this volume but, depending on how these elements are understood, they well might identify an extremely moral and conscientious person as seen from a Christian perspective. Indeed, as we know from Gnosticism and the influence of Sabbatai Tzevi, this is exactly what they had in mind. Another thing that is interesting is that Gnostic Jews themselves are extremely obedient to their own leaders and are never critical of what they have been taught. They have extremely strong in-group attachments, are extremely, extremely aggressive etc. The only point that Gnostic Jews do not embrace is the final point but even there they are concerned that people are not having sex with everyone all the time so actually are, in fact, overly concerned with “sexual things”. Being built from out of a Gnostic/Freudian worldview, it is perhaps unsurprising that the authoritarian character was thought to be the result of suppressing sexuality in children. As Reich wrote, Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, this makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, good and adjusted in the authoritarian sense; it paralyses the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. Initially, the child has to submit to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family, which process makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and anxiety. This is a fascinating passage that really demands detailed consideration. The claim being made by the extremely influential Reich, who many in the New Age movement still today consider a genius, is that the authoritarian character was the result of the sexuality of children being suppressed. When children are prohibited from thinking about sex, expressing their sexual curiosity and restricted from masturbating, then, and this seems quite a leap, it paralyses rebelliousness because inhibiting sexual thoughts inhibits all thinking but most especially critical thinking. Any kind of critical thinking, in not being condoned by those with power, becomes laden with the same anxiety and guilt as that created in relation to thinking about sex in childhood. In many ways, it seems that Reich, as a Gnostic Jew, was identifying the moral restraint on childhood sexuality as the founding moral restraint that informs all other social sanctions. As morality was, by their view, an expression of power then, of course, those in power made it immoral to

848 be criticised.327 This is not the first time in the German tradition that the family, sexuality and power had been intimately related. In the research by left and right scholars at the turn of the 20th century, as already discussed, it was argued that boys removed from their families and inculcated into male only organization would transfer their sexual desire to other boys and their familial obedience to the group leader. Reich is claiming that it does not matter how miserable a person’s life becomes, they will transfer their blind obedience to a political leader if they are already conditioned by the family unit in relations to sex to do so. In the Western Christian tradition, the reason why sexuality is “suppressed”, is to ensure that people learn to pursue other, more substantial, goals than just sexual pleasure that are the result of selfdiscipline. The sanction on sex is to ensure people will pursue intellectual goals and are able to realize moral outcomes. Contemporary research shows that excessive masturbation as a teenager, without restraint, results in such people later expressing “hyper-sexuality” as adults. Such people find emotional as well as physical comfort in sex. Such people are extremely destructive not only to themselves and others but also to the communities in which they live. These people will have children to multiple partners, they cannot maintain long-term stable relationships, they threaten the families around them as they try to seduce other people’s partners and do not pay adequate attention to their families. So, Reich is quite correct to identify sexual restraint as an important factor in developing all kinds of related restraints that result in a well-adjusted, high functioning, individual. This, though, is exactly what Reich, as a Gnostic Jews, opposes. As he says, “suppressing” childhood sexuality results in suppressing rebelliousness, and resulted in good, well-adjusted people. Although sex is important in Reich’s account of the rise of the authoritarian character, the real well-spring of morality, by Reich’s account, is the patriarchal nuclear family. It is that the family, particularly the father, imposes these restraints, shapes the moral psyche, and the family that results in the authoritarian state because the family is a mini version of an authoritarian state. If sexual restraint, informs moral restraint, that suppresses rebelliousness, and this is all enabled by the patriarchal nuclear family then the Gnostic project becomes pretty obvious. If Gnostic Jews want to see the end of morality, the sexualization of women and rebelliousness, then the key institution that must be destroyed, as the recent Black Lives Matter movement demanded, is the nuclear family. The way they would characterise their vision, is that the real person, the person not disciplined by morality, the person sexually

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Making criticism of our leaders immoral is exactly what has happened in the West. Gnostic Jews are our leaders, but it is now immoral to criticize them. It is immoral today to say that Jews have too much power, or that Jews are greedy, or that Jews are immoral. Indeed, you cannot criticize Jews at all because that is anti-Semitism and there is nothing as immoral as being an anti-Semite.

849 free, rebel, the person who is not shaped by the nuclear family becomes their ideal. In short, Gnostic Jews through these scholars from the Frankfurt School want people to “be themselves” in the sense of not being well-adjusted. As they wrote, “For the fascist potential to change, or even to be held in check, there must be an increase in people's capacity to see themselves and to be themselves.” Here they directly equating fascism with Christian morality and the hope of returning to what they believe are humanities “Natural” instincts. The way to release humanity from the constraints of morality is through the very strategy suggested by Freud. As the Frankfurt School claimed, “We need not suppose that appeal to emotions belongs to those who strive in the direction of fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and restraint. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy." This is a fascinating claim. They are saying that reason, logos, making the intuited experience of the good explicit for informing future actions, that which was identified at the start of this volume as synonymous with Western civilization, with fascism. They associate eros, sexual desire, with democracy. Of course, those of the Frankfurt School are not the first to associate democracy with emotions, Plato criticised democracy for being prone to being overly emotional, identifying sexual attraction as one of the dangers that might result in the election of a leader lacking the right attributes. As erotic desire is associate by the Gnostic Jews of the Frankfurt School, with rebelliousness, immorality, high emotion, democracy and maladjustment, then the key for unlocking Western civilization was through encouraging sexual freedom above all else. Interestingly, as Peter Hitchens observes, It is also a matter of historical fact that those societies which have been most sexually unchained, and most relaxed about intoxication, have seldom been politically free. By contrast, political liberty in the modern world seems to have arisen mainly out of the Puritanism of the American Pilgrim Fathers and of the Cromwellian Ironsides. (2013) The reason for this is sexual license is about sensuous pleasure, pushing the mind away from reflection on the good. The simple truth is that you cannot be sexually promiscuous and good, and this is not just a moral claim about sexuality. What this means is that more is at stake in encouraging sexual restraint than sex. You cannot be good wife, you cannot be a good mother, you cannot be a good person, you cannot have a career, you cannot become highly educated, if you focus too much of your attention away from the intellect to pursuing sex. What the focus on sexual pleasure does is that it undermines all discipline. It undermines Jesus’ call for us all to strive for the perfection of the Father. Without a notion of the good what does politics even mean? It becomes just about struggle between competing interests for power. True politics, the understanding which has informed Western democracies, cannot exist under such

850 conditions. Another avenue of liberation, well known in such Gnostic traditions as Sufism and Hasidism, besides sex is rhythmic music and hallucinogenic drugs. As Adorno wrote in The Philosophy of Modern Music, It is not that schizophrenia is directly expressed therein; but the music imprints upon itself an attitude similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration. . . He imagines the fulfillment of the promise through magic, but nonetheless within the realm of immediate actuality. . . Its concern is to dominate schizophrenic traits through the aesthetic consciousness. In so doing, it would hope to vindicate insanity as true health. They are fully cognisant of how the network of beliefs, institutions, and practices, are woven together into creating a consistent worldview. A worldview determined to seek the good, known by all who open their hearts to God, that can then be made explicit in this world through philosophy. By picking at just one loose thread, female sexuality, they can, and largely have, undone the entire warp and woof of Western civilization. All of these ideas were promoted uncritically by the Frankfurt School as justification for undermining traditional American values. Indeed, criticism was certainly not welcome either within Freudian psychology or the Frankfurt School. Fromm himself claimed that Freud demanded unquestioning devotion and Fromm himself was dismissed for being too critical of key positions of the school. (See Kamau 2012) One of Fromm’s criticism of Freud was that he, . . . projects into the little boy the sexual feeling of the adult man; the little boy having as Freud recognized, sexual desires, was supposed to sexually attracted to the woman closest to him, and only by the superior power of the rival in this triangle, is he force to give up his desire, without ever recovering fully from this frustration [but] . . . by explaining it as a sexual [desire] the emotional – the true- meaning of the tie is denied. (Fromm 1966: 45-46) Although remaining within the Gnostic tradition, at least Fromm was critical of some of the core features of Gnosticism. As a rule, Gnostic Jews do not care about the truth or falsity of claims because they were being deployed for theological and strategic reasons not because they were empirically true. It was truth that the Christian tradition, like the Greek and Roman traditions before that, has associated sexuality in general with being an animal drive over which the rational person should assert control, but evidence would suggest that sexual restraint is not a bad thing. Sex, like many human drives, can overtake a person’s life just like gambling or alcohol. If people are not raised to situate their sexuality into a fuller life that includes caring for others and deferring to the authority of morality, then sex can become, as has happened, the single defining feature of who we are as individuals. Such as life, as many could attest, will

851 result in hurting others and, ultimately, in hurting yourself. Sexuality, like education or maintaining physical fitness, are only ever an aspect of a fuller individual’s life and not, as Freud seemed to claim, the raison d’etre of human existence. A truly human life, a life guided by conscience, to live with knowledge, is not one motivated solely by the pursuit of sexual pleasure. It is also not true that raising children who are “obedient”, and “respect of authority” is not necessarily bad. Children should respect authority for their own safely if not for so much more. Even young adults’ benefit from respect of authority to help them navigate the difficult journey into adulthood. Contextualizing sexuality, acknowledging a role for authority and raising people to respect authoritative figures, are all part of realizing a well-ordered society. But it is the well-ordered society that Prof. Reich, as a Gnostic Jew, fundamentally opposes and wants to see destroyed. He does not want people who are “good”, people who are relatively chaste, people who are well adjusted, but he wants the opposite, he wants chaos, as a theological commitment. In their final analysis, the Frankfurt School claims that authoritarian characters believe in, “a transcendent God”, the nuclear family, were ethnocentric, prioritized people with whom they identified, were patriotic and believed that children “should respect their elders” and “have good manners” (Jardina 2019: 112). As Martha Nussbaum wrote of patriotism, “The emphasis on patriotic pride is morally dangerous . . . We should give our first allegiance to . . . the moral community made up of all human beings.” (Nussbaum as seen in D’Souza 2007) The authoritarian character seems to look lot like the average Christian, Protestant, Western European and their well-behaved children in the years following World War II. As the most catastrophic war in human history unfolded in Europe, the German communist academics were not, it would seem, putting all their greatest effort into realizing an allied victory but, using money supplied by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) [where David Rosenblum was the chairman as well as being chairman of the extremely powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL)], to generate a number of surprisingly influential reports, not about fascist Germany, as might be expected, not even about the evils of totalitarian Stalinist Russia, but papers highly critical of the United States of America. Upon arrival in the United States, these German Jewish scholars who identified with the Frankfurt School, initially claiming that they were interested in studying the causes and how to stop “antisemitism”. As Adorno later wrote, “[a] new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” After much discussion and negotiation with those Jewish organizations funding the research project, it was decided that the research would claim to be concerned with the political function of antisemitism and the effect that possible post-war changes to European and American societies might have on antisemitism. From its very initial conceptualization, this research was oriented by the perceived

852 need to change American, and Western European societies more broadly, in such a way so as to address the supposed danger of “anti-Semitism”. The premise of the research was that American society, as a Christian society, was potentially antisemitic and any antisemitism was totalitarian. (Wheatland 2009: 235-236) The necessary funding for this research was secured through Jewish organizations in a way consistent with Gnostic Judaism, they changed the way the research was to be presented so that it appeared to be no longer concerned with antisemitism but, if you like, the other side of equation, the growth of totalitarianism. What they tried to argue, which was already self-evidently wrong, was that totalitarianism and anti-Semitism were synonymous. Through associating antisemitism with totalitarianism these researchers managed to make their research appear as though it was addressing a threat to American society when it was better to understand the research itself as being a threat to American society. As the Institute argued, The new antisemitism is totalitarian. Its aims are not only at exterminating the Jews but also at annihilating liberty and democracy. It has become the spearhead of the totalitarian order, and the aims of function of this order can be vastly clarified by a study of antisemitism . . . the attacks on the Jews are not primarily aimed at the Jews but at large sections of modern society, especially the free middle classes, which appear as an obstacle to the establishment of totalitarianism. Antisemitism is a kind of rehearsal; when the results of the rehearsal are satisfactory, the real performance – the attack on the middle classes – takes place. (as seen in Wheatland 2009: 236) Looking at how this research proposal developed historically, this argument is nothing, but a total deception simply aimed at making it look as though what was of concern to Jews was of equal concern to the American public. The Nazis never turned on the German middle classes. It was a brazen attempt at the “will-to-relate”, the American middle class are endangered by the same forces that endanger Jews so that had better respond the way Jews are telling them to respond. We identify with your fears and your fears are the same as ours. Fighting our enemies is not just in our interests but in your interests as well. It is reminiscent of the claims made by the “dancing Israelis”, we are Israelis, your enemy is our enemy, the Palestinians are our enemy, when in truth the Israelis were the greatest enemy. It is certainly motivated by the same principles. The insinuation behind the entire research project, what they understood as an “infection model”, was that the United States was heading in the same direction as Germany, so if America hopes to avoid authoritarianism, then it had better destroy the same forces that threaten to destroy Jews. Interestingly, one of their fears, and it was one that they should have feared because it was true, was that Western countries would hold Jews actually responsible for the War causing antisemitism to rise. The researchers hoped to get funding so that they could articulate a critical stance against traditional American institutions, practices and, most especially, religious beliefs. They wanted to first see traditional America

853 destroyed so that they would be secure in beginning to undertake their ultimate project. The whole thing was justified in terms of being for the sake of democracy. Interestingly, Naomi Wolf recently argued the exact same argument, in her extremely popular, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (Wolf 2007), in rather ridiculous terms that rightfully attracted a lot of criticism. This book is supposed to be a warning from Wolf to “patriotic Americans”. She was inspired to write the book after what she described “naïve inaction” from a young Chinese American couple. The argument, perhaps ironically, was that there were dangerous currents at work in the United States and that these mirrored exactly what happened in Germany prior to World War II. This Chinese couple, she argued, should be politically active and march in the streets to protect a certain vision of America. The vision, of course, that she wants them to defend is not traditional America but her Gnostic Jewish vision of America. It was this vision of America, Wolf rightly argued, that would serve the interests of the Chinese Americans. Her explicit concern was how to keep her vision of liberty into the future when the “open society” was threatened by the potential dangers. The explicit dangers that she identifies is, of course, Western morality. As Zweig wrote expressing the gnostic attitudes towards morality, “. . .we are filled with contempt for that morality (which we cannot but hate because of all we suffered in youth at the hands of its apostles) . . .” (Zwieg 1932/2012) This rather strained book was, as is so often the case, turned into a well-funded documentary that was widely distributed. Although the book, strangely when I read it in light of what is revealed here, actually made her a hero of the American right. Criticising Wolf’s books will get one shouted down in public forums by Bible belt white Americans who seem to have missed entirely, as is so often the case, what she was actually arguing. The book left those with knowledge of both the historical situation of Nazism and contemporary America wondering just how she was drawing these comparisons. What was actually similar about early 21st century America and Nazi Germany? Her follow up book, Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (Wolf 2008) is just that, a handbook for American revolutionaries. It is a handbook for those who want to overthrow those who have held power historically. This book is not aimed at the same kind of revolutionaries that fought for American independence from Great Britain but contemporary revolutionaries, those who want to rebel against Western civilization. Those who oppose all morality. Those who do not want to see an America that might begin to live according to moral values. These are the revolutionaries that she hoped to make of the American Chinese couple not those who have misunderstood the book living in America’s Bible belt. This book again resonated with sections of the American right who saw it as a kind of republican handbook about street level resistance to woke government interventions and what they perceived as unfair taxes. The book outlines the best strategies and techniques, straight from the historical Jewish

854 Gnostic field guide, on how to shape a society using grass roots activism. It is basically arguing that the cultural revolution is moving along nicely but so it was in pre-War Germany and looked at what happened there. Either the fact that the Gnostics Jews, in collaboration with the Soviet Union, actually created Hitler was either above her pay grade and she truly believed what she was arguing or that she just wanted to continue the tired deception that was began by the Frankfurt School in the shadow of World War II will probably never be known. People need to be politically active, she argues, to avoid the same thing happening in the United States. People might actually turn to Christianity and again become moral and reject the permissive “open society” that is realizing so much destruction, but this must be actively dismantled before it can even begin. Wolf is, of course, an insignificant thinker, although one who has had the ear, perhaps even much more, of past presidents, that she repeats the same arguments, in dumbed down form for contemporary consumers, that were presented in the direct aftermath of the Second World War to me is fascinating. It is for a very good reason that we are literally drowned in “holocaust porn”. It is so that the links between nationalism and antisemitism can never be missed. The problem is, as will be revealed in a later volume, this is not even what really happened. The reports created by the Frankfurt School in the United States argued, unsurprisingly when considering what is revealed in these pages, that, despite millions of “white” people, many of whom were Americans328, fighting on behalf of Jews and leftists against right-wing authoritarian fascism, inspired by the Reich’s definition, it was white America which actually expressed “authoritarian characteristics”. Amongst those involved in this project of branding white Americans as “authoritarian” were renowned scholars like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Daniel Levinson, Herbert Marcuse, Franz Neumann and Else Frenkel-Brunswik. Many of whom are household names even today as a result of their influence. Horkheimer would later sack Marcuse, Fromm, Neumann and Kirchheimer from the Frankfurt School to ensure both his control over the organization continued and that it remained firmly within the constraints of Gnostic orthodoxy. Dangerously for the United States, all these communist academics who were removed from the Frankfurt School quickly found employment with the United States government. (Wheatland 2009: 232) The claim that many Americans displayed “authoritarian personalities” meant that white American society itself became understood as authoritarian and something that needed to be fundamentally changed. Again, we are reminded of the German Jewish academic Walter Benjamin’s claim that civilization is barbarity. It was at this very point in history, with the publication of the report by the Frankfurt School refugees, that to be white became wrong. The Frankfurt School in America found that,

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Half a million of whom died fighting Hitler’s Germany and nationalist Japan.

855 It seems obvious, that the modification of the potentially fascist structure cannot be achieved by psychological means alone. The task is comparable to that of eliminating neurosis, or delinquency, or nationalism from the world. These are products of the total organization of society and are to be changed only as that society is changed. It is not for the psychologist to say how such changes are to be brought about. The problem is one which requires the efforts of all social scientists. All that we would insist upon is that in the councils or round tables where the problem is considered, and action planned the psychologist should have a voice. We believe that the scientific understanding of society must include an understanding of what it does to people, and that it is possible to have social reforms, even broad and sweeping ones, which though desirable in their own right would not necessarily change the structure of the prejudiced personality. For the fascist potential to change, or even to be held in check, there must be an increase in people's capacity to see themselves and to be themselves. This cannot be achieved by the manipulation of people, however well-grounded in modern psychology the devices of manipulation might be. . . It is here that psychology may play its most important role. Techniques for overcoming resistance, developed mainly in the field of individual psychotherapy, can be improved and adapted for use with groups and even for use on a mass scale. Based on this research, it was argued at the highest levels of the United States government in the years following World War II, thoroughly supported by the best efforts of the CIA, that American society itself was intrinsically “authoritarian” and that if nothing was done, and done quickly, then the United States itself was in danger of becoming fascist. What was required, according to the Frankfurt School, was the desperate need to change the way Americans thought both about themselves, the family, their nation, and others. If the United States was not denuded of its authoritarian tendencies in the years to come then authoritarianism, especially “antisemitism”, would come to dominate the United States. Following this initial research, there followed research on how the latest scientific knowledge could be used to shape the way people think. To this end, the United States government, mainly the State Department and the CIA, arranged for research to undertaken by reformed communist sympathiser and highly respected atheist philosopher, Bertrand Russell, to explore ways of contextualising culture as a battleground against authoritarianism. In his highly acclaimed but what must be seen as highly provocative book, The Impact of Science on Society (1953), Russell considers the scientific techniques available for shaping or impacting on society. He claims, and to quote at length, I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far, its professors have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called

856 "education." Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part. What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler's with a speech of (say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment. This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship.329 Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician's paradise. (Russell 1953/1968: 29-30) The ideas of Russell on how to change the way people think were quickly and enthusiastically implemented by a government fearing the emergence of authoritarianism in the United States. Russell’s paragraphs are beyond fascinating and entire books could be written on each of these paragraphs both on what he is arguing and how that program has been implemented in the world. What should be noted is that these are the techniques used by those who rule over us today. One of the first instruments identified by Russell to be employed to make America and the West less “authoritarian” was the education system. For generations now, people increasingly learn their values not through the family, which Russell, along with the Frankfurt School, identified as “obstructive”. The family is obstructive because it is one of the truth institutions of Western society, it was oriented by the need for truth and if you are going to create a crazy society where lies become truth while objective truth becomes impossible then you must

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Another name for technocratic society.

857 destroy the nuclear family. To the possible question as to why my father’s generation opposed homosexual relationships whereas my generation, as a whole, accepts homosexual relationships, the simple and honest answer is the “education” system. Like with so many other “values”, the education system did more to shape my system of values than my family and this is even more the case with my children. I can remember having heated arguments with my parents on all kinds of issues from homosexual relationship through to question about sex being “natural”, with me thinking with the arrogant confidence of the child that I was, that they were so out of date and old fashioned whereas I was contemporary, when, in truth, all I was advancing was what I was being told was true at school. I was the conformist, not them. Question issues of orthodoxy today, transgender, toxic masculinity, militant feminism, indigenous rights, or some of the dubious claims made in support of these movements, with my children’s generation and like Greta Thunberg’s speech to the U.N. Summit on Climate Change, you will be met with a highly emotionally charged but totally insubstantial response. This is because those in power noted the need to make anyone who disagrees with the program to be understood as showing “a morbid taste for eccentricity”. I suspect that this is an obscure reference to something Nietzsche said that the time will come when anybody who disagrees with his agenda will voluntarily go quietly to the insane asylum. It has literally happened that to oppose the current narrative in relation to homosexuality or to find sexual acts between men repulsive is now literally understood as a mental illness. They have taken this much further and now to disagree with the so called “anti-authoritarian” agenda as laid out by the Gnostics is not just to be thought of as “eccentric” but “immoral” or, equivalently, evil. To disagree that transexuals are “normal” or to not embrace the libertine homosexual lifestyle, to advocate for Christianity or to advocate for a reasonably homogenous population is today to be characterised as evil. It happens every day. To disagree with the agenda that was began by the Frankfurt School in the aftermath of WWII is today to be thought of as being authoritarian, to advance something oppressive that denies people their “freedom”, it is to have become something evil. Of course, to achieve this, all the other mediums were also quickly employed, the press, media, cinema, and radio. One important aspect, amongst many, in this quote is the claim/observe that humanity is not really a rational animal, as the Greeks and, later, Christians believed and taught, a central idea of Western civilization, but that we are more responsive to emotional cues like “brass bands”. To conclude by way of introduction with Russell’s observations, it was seen by Russell that it was of the utmost importance that not only how convictions are established remains hidden by who was behind the need to establish those convictions. Those whose beliefs are being changed must believe that they are natural or organic, concluded through individual decision making and not as

858 the result of a deliberate strategy to realise an agenda. That so much popular music that our children are exposed to every day, is about sex and drugs is only further evidence of adhering to Russell’s suggestions. The central conclusion was that the authoritarian character or personality should be changed as a matter of urgency and Russell introduced the tools, most of which they were already employing, to achieve their goals. The most pressing target of anti-authoritarian activity observed by everyone, psychologists, philosophers and political radicals, was the destruction of the monogamous nuclear family. As Reich himself argued, From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which supports it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system; the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation. In this connection, the findings of Morgan and of Engels are still entirely correct. (emphasis added) Reich, consistent with the Romanticism of Gnostic Judaism, looked the sexual practices of Trobriand Islanders in the Pacific as a model for guilt free sexual relations that was not tainted by Christianity. (Weitz 2009: 302) As a starting point to destroy the traditional monogamous, nuclear family that was viewed as so dangerous, the first phase of anti-authoritarian activity in the United States was to fund a number of anti-authoritarian “feminist” theorists such as Gloria Steinem to begin to undermine traditional family relationships with the explicit aim of destroying the “nuclear family”. The groundwork for our contemporary anti-white, anti-nationalist, anti-nuclear family, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, thinking, as clearly expressed in the Black Lives Matter Movement, had its origins in the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School from Germany. It is because of concluding that white American society was in some way intrinsically dangerous, because of what it believed, that a “resist coloured people” conference organized by white people where “coloured people” would not be allowed to attend so “whites” could “feel safe” would not be allowed. In contrast to white American society, the cultural practices of minorities, like American Jews who opposed everything that they defined as authoritarian, nationalism, the nuclear family, capitalism, and Christianity, became the goal. From this time onwards, as will be elaborated upon, Western, white, Christian society would be demonized and increasingly portrayed as “barbarous” while outsiders, the historically marginalized, would increasingly be seen as bringing much needed civility. The surprising thing about the influence of this group of neo-Marxists is that Jews were central to realizing the authoritarian government in the Soviet Union which advocated for the same ideals as those advanced by the Frankfurt School – rejection of traditional role for women so that they would become as productive as men, early

859 education aimed at changing cultural norms, rejection of organized religion (belief in a transcendental God), introduction of sex education to “liberate” people (mainly women) from outdated attitudes toward sex, social progress driven by technological innovation. They phrased this, and continue to present it in these terms, as developing “critical thinking” skills but it is only critical towards historically dominant moral attitudes and not critical of sex education or what they teach. One of the central aims of sex education, is, to quote the World Health Organization, to develop “freedom from shame, guilt, false beliefs and other psychological factors inhibiting sexual response and sexual relationships.” What we are not supposed to feel guilty about is sex before marriage, pre-marital pregnancies, sex with married people, sex to advance your career . . . As will be explored in detail in Volume III, the resonances between pre-World War II authoritarian Soviet Union and contemporary Western countries like the United States is astounding and, of course, not accidental. Why did America listen to a group of Marxist German Jews who should have themselves been strongly identified with authoritarianism who claimed that it was America which risked becoming authoritarian? Amongst those who were participating in this struggle for the hearts and minds of the Germans were those communists from the Frankfurt School who operated through the Institute for Social Research. In many ways, this contest pre-empts all the central features of the contest that has become known as “identity politics”. The central ideas of history being primarily a contest for power and resources between competing “identities” or worldviews is voiced by a group of Jewish scholars that includes Hess, Gumplowicz and Waton. They all came to believe that this contest had been diluted to be a contest between “Semites” and “Aryans”. The Frankfurt School, consisting of only Jews, praising the Semitic worldview while opposing what it understood to be the Aryan worldview that was, in fact, in many ways, the Protestant Christian worldview. The entire focus of the Frankfurt School was to destroy white, Christian, what they understood as, patriarchy. As Waton identified even in 1939, part of this project meant “liberating” or “educating” historically marginalized groups like the “working class”, blacks, women and homosexuals, to support them in their struggles. It was as a result of this movement that, as Vltchek could recently observe, although ignorant of the heritage of such claims, “Our planet has been reduced to only two races: White and “the other”!” (2020) The danger that the Frankfurt School most feared was that in realizing their agenda that there would emerge in the United States, as there had in Germany, a nationalist resistance. As will be discussed in Vol. III, that a national resistance arose in Germany between the wars was not accidental or against their plans but was actually part of a fairly successful strategy to allow communism to dominate Europe, but such a movement was not necessary in the United States at that time. The best way to ensure that this would never happen in the United Sates is to make it impossible

860 for people to positively identify as “white”. This means that the agenda of the Frankfurt School can be advanced in such a way that the only legitimate struggle permitted is for expanding the power and privilege of the once marginalized, the once dispossessed, or the “people of colour”. This whole paradigm, as will be revealed, actually has its origins in humanism, the rejection of faith, which reduces truth to power. As already observed, this strategy is certainly having real effects in the world. As will be discovered, it is no coincidence that time and again over the last 120 years complex social relationships have been reduced to a simple binary conflict. Whether it is the proletariat facing the bourgeoisie, the Aryans facing the Semites or even the Hutu opposing the Tutsi, the outcome after such ahistorical, crude political identities have been imposed has always been tragic. Now that there was a belief that the then mainstream American character was “authoritarian” and they had a method by which to permanently change that character, as outlined by people like Bertrand Russell, George Counts and Harold Lasswell, all that was needed were institutions to realize their agenda. One of the most important institutions created in the United States to begin to realise this “antiauthoritarian” agenda and change the American character so that it was no longer “authoritarian” was the interestingly named, Congress for Cultural Freedom. The historical context in which all this was taking place really needs to be understood if what was happening in the United States at the time is to be understood. After 1947, Eastern European Jews were being systematically marginalization in the Soviet Union. Prior to and throughout the Second World War, global Jewry had supported the Soviet Union, apologized for its excesses, wrote apologetics for its actions and many spied on its behalf. The reason for this support was partly, as has been discussed, that Marxism was an expression of humanist, materialist, Gnostic Judaism, and partly because Jews were very much overrepresented in both achieving the revolution and running the Soviet Union after it had been established. Jews were unprepared to criticise or undermine the actions of their brethren in Russia. This all came apart when Stalin, largely because Israel was established as a Jewish theocracy which seems to have genuinely shocked many Russians who had suffered through so much hardship, suffering the systematic destruction of their religious institutions, to see those who had largely been responsible for the establishment of communism suddenly turn into committed religious Jews. Many in Russia felt played. From 1947, many Slavic Russians turned on Soviet Jews by removing them from positions of power. This was most especially true in the area of culture which, many Russians had come to believe, the Soviet Jews were particularly critical. In response, American Jews began the cold war against the Soviet Union. Prior to this turn, many American Jews spied for the Soviet Union or wrote extremely sympathetic material. Without the contribution of American Jews spying, the Soviet Union would have taken at least 10 years longer than they did to develop their own

861 nuclear program. The Soviets obtained the nuclear bomb very cheaply in contrast to the $2 billion spent by the United States. Out of the 14 most significant Soviet spies in the United States, 12 were Jewish, most from Eastern Europe. These included, Morris Cohen, Harry Gold, David Greenglass, Theodore Hall, George Koval, Irving Lerner, Julius Rosenberg, Ethel Rosenberg, Oscar Seborer, Morton Sobell, Melita Norwood, and Arthur Adams. Beyond these, two other spies, most notably Klaus Fucks with a minor contribution by Alan May were not Jewish. It was in the context of this new global reality, where Gnostic Jews no longer dominated the Soviet Union, that these institutions were being formed. Because of the historical context under which this organization was formed, all participants continued to be “radical leftists” but they could no longer identify with Soviet Communism which become known as “Stalinism”. The aim of these institutions, therefore, was to maintain a communist Gnostic agenda but, at the same time, criticise the Soviet Union. For this reason, the “. . . Congress’s anti-Communism was that it felt itself to be of the Left and on the Left.” ( ) The idea for a group of writers, artists, scientist and intellectuals (when the West still had some intellectuals) to form an “anti-Stalinist” institution to reshape the American mind was first raised in 1949, just two years after Jews began to be purged in the Soviet Union, by three Jews, Ruth Fischer, Franz Borkenau and Melvin Lasky. The basic idea that was being formulated was an institution for changing the culture, to undertake a “cultural war”, that was actually more aimed against the United States than against the Soviet Union. That they were giving voice to the emergent “cold war” was a justification for the institutions actions which were most definitely directed equally against Russia and the U.S. In 1950, with funding from the CIA, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was established. The Congress for Cultural Freedom is, if you think about it, an unusual title for an organization bent on realizing cultural change. After all, what exactly is “cultural freedom”? Demanding cultural freedom was certainly not part of an established political narrative at the time or, indeed, since. People are not marching in the street screaming, “Hey, hey . . . Hey ho . . . cultural freedom give it a go!” The first sense of what it might mean, is that it is an organization dedicated to realising cultural freedom in the sense of the “freedom” to practice whatever culture one would like. If this is indeed what is intended, then it continues to be strange because culture is not normally thought of as something you are free to choose but something within which you are embedded, culture is a kind of an inheritance. What is meant by “cultural freedom” is that same that is meant whenever this movement uses the term “freedom” which it does often. It is freedom from cultural constraint. The real intent is not really “cultural freedom” but “freedom from culture”. As rock music icon Mick Jagger rightly observed of his own generation, Teenagers are not screaming over pop-music anymore, they’re screaming for much deeper reasons. We are only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Teenagers the world

862 over are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living. They want to be free and have the right of expression, of thinking and living without any petty restrictions. (Jagger as seen in Hitchens 2013) This is the vision of the Gnostic individual that was emerging in the years following World War II. As Peter Fonda’s rebellious character said in the 1966 classic, The Wind Angels, importantly to the Preacher, the symbol of moral conformity, “We wanna be free! We wanna be free to do what we wanna do.” The “baby boomers” were raised to try to realise a world without responsibility, a world without moral demands. Ultimately, they did indeed achieve this vision. Look at young “respectable” people today and many have died coloured hair, body piercings, tattoos. These are expression of “individuality”. Expressions of nonconformity. As program creators of a “youth” national broadcaster comedy, Why Are You Like This, Australian writer Humyara Mahbub recently stated during an interview, “I don’t think young people are concerned with being good even internally to themselves, like I don’t think that is a preoccupation I have inside myself that I am a “good person”. I don’t know, that’s not important to me.” (Mahbub as heard on Law and Wang 2021) Of course, Humyara Mahbub is not a Christian Protestant name but is probably from the East, likely Bangladesh, but she does honestly express a sentiment of her generation. Her co-writer of the show, Naomi Higgins, from a Christian background responds, It’s important to me. . . It is how I approach being a good person that is different to the way an older person would approach it. I don’t care about manners; in fact, I actively hate the concept of manners because I just think its words for words sake. I think it’s more important to just, like, love the people you love and try not to cause harm to the wider community and not be racist or sexist that is much more important to me than like caring individually what some, like, middle-aged man thinks. I could care less. (Higgins as heard on Law and Wang 2021) Higgin’s moral vision, in some ways, is more of a concern than the nihilism of Mahbub. Higgens, having grown up being exposed to the Gnostic Jewish agenda is perfectly harmonious with their vision. It is not that she has simply gone down the Eastern road of claiming not to know what is good or evil but embraces a Gnostic Jewish vision of what is good and evil. She is unconcerned with “manners”, a real target for Gnostic Jewry, but is concerned about sexism and racism. What this generation want to be above all else is what they think of as “self-actualizing”. They believe that who they are and what they believe is being subjectively or internally motivated. Who they want to be is untainted by the moral framework of “middleaged white men”. As Margaret Sanger wrote in 1922 in her The Pivot of Civilization, The individual is fulfilling his duty to society as a whole by not self-sacrifice but by selfdevelopment. He does his best for the world not by dying for it, not by increasing the sum total of misery, disease and unhappiness, but by increasing his own stature, by releasing

863 a greater energy, by being active instead of passive, creative instead of destructive. This is fundamentally the greatest truth to be discovered by womankind at large. And until women are awakened to their pivotal function in the creation of a new civilization, that new era will remain an impossible and fantastic dream. The new civilization can become a glorious reality only with the awakening of woman’s now dormant qualities of strength, courage, and vigor. As a great thinker of the last century pointed out, not only to her own health and happiness is the physical degeneracy of woman destructive, but to our whole race. . . her greatest duty to society lies in self-realization . . . What Sanger is arguing here is that woman must become more like men. They may have historically sacrificed their lives for the good of society at large but that sacrifice is no benefit at all as the greatest benefit is by self-development or self-actualization. Women must become like the goddess, active and creative but, although Sanger does not say this, this situation can only be realized through the destruction of Christian society. This is the new civilization that she envisages. A society where women take on the virtues of men in being strong, courageous and vigorous but she does not identify that what is lost, as we see today, is a society that is caring, loving and nurturing. As in rugby league, to be a little flippant about an important issue, the world is not improved by woman trying to men but by women being the best women that they can be. What these people are all arguing, if they know it not, is the position of turn of the century men, 17th century men, pre-Christian men, they are just advancing the destructive agenda of Gnostic Judaism but their ignorance that this is the case means that they believe they are the authors of their reality. Such a world, of course, is without reward and this is exactly where drug culture functions. Drugs represent this “freedom”. The “freedom” from convention, the “freedom” from “being good”, the “freedom” to fun that they believe is self-actualizing. The path to this lifestyle is so easy, the rewards so lacking, that drugs replicate this same phenomenon. Shallow reward with the need to work for it. As Peter Hitchens rightly observed, Drug taking, which separates reward from effort, walks in step with the sexual revolution, which separates the sex act from fertility, and so also separates it from marriage, patience, fidelity and constancy. It also marches in time with the successful campaign to end the taboo against pornography, ludicrously disguised as a battle against censorship. (Hitchens 2012: 4)330 This is exactly what the Congress for Cultural Freedom hoped to realise. It was a world free of moral norms, free of adult expectations, free of the notion of hard work to achieve good outcomes, a world free

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It is more than interesting, but revealing, that the subjects that Goode and Ben-Yehuda focus on as examples of what they call “moral panic” in their 2009 book, Moral Panic: The Social Construction of Deviance, is drug use, pornography and deviance. That is, opposing expressions of moral concern in relation to drug use, pornography and labelling people as deviant. Others have looked at Satanic worship and child pornography as examples of moral panic.

864 of “petty restrictions” where people could “do what they wanna do” while being unconcerned with being “a good person”. The almost inevitable aspect to such a life is drug culture. “Culture”, now devoid of substantive meaning beyond expressing autonomy, beyond self-actualization, from their perspective, becomes nothing but a choice, and it is up to the individual to create his/her own reality. But it’s not. It is not their realty at all. It is the reality of Gnostic Judaism and their vision of reality, the role of women as slave like producers, the destruction of Western civilization and, ultimately, the destruction of all human as such, humanity in terms of being related to God. One no longer surrenders, conforms or adjusts to preexisting expectation of good behaviour but people are now “free” in a way that Gnostic Jews envisioned freedom. Freedom from constraint, freedom from the divine borders, freedom to become animals because, animals make the best slaves. They argue this because “reality” has no hold over them, reality is just “socially constructed” so it can be constructed anew. One of the central freedoms that they hoped to realise because it achieved so much was sexual freedom. Sexual freedom targeted the female body, brought sensuous pleasures without the need to work for love, and, as has been known for millennia, it turns the mind away from intellectual things to the sensual pleasures, from the human to the instinctual. As Camille Paglia nicely concludes, “Sexual freedom, sexual liberation. A modern delusion.” (Paglia 2001: 3) More accurately, a religious delusion imposed upon us by a secret cult. Cultural freedom is not simply the freedom to practice any culture but the freedom from any culture. The congress fought to make the United States and Western Europe, cultureless or free from cultural constraints After all, all the features that the Frankfurt School academics found to be authoritarian, belief in a transcendental God, monogamous marriage, and being well-adjusted, are all traditional expression of Christian Western culture. It is this culture that such organization of the Congress for Cultural Freedom hoped to undermine at every opportunity.

The first meeting of the Congress was sponsored by Der Monat (a magazine published by the U.S. Military Government in Berlin). (Coleman 1983)

865 The person chosen to establish this institution was an Eastern European Jewish immigrant to the United States, Michael Josselson with the assistance of fellow Russian Jew Melvin Lasky. It was now the case that two Eastern European Jews were now apparently responsible for saving Western civilization. As fellow Russian Jew, and Congress participant, Edward Shils triumphantly observed, “these two Russian Jews decided to save Western civilization” or, at least, change it into something that they wanted it to become. Josselson and Lasky quickly brought in numerous, so called, “left leaning” Jewish intellectuals, like Arthur Koestler, Franz Borkenau, Raymond Aron, and Michael Polanyi to help advance this project. Although Jews were very well represented, they were not the only ones who were included. People like Andrew Malraux, Denis de Rougemont and, the already discussed, socialist Bertrand Russell were also brought into the congress. To find those leftists that they wanted, in contrast to those they did not, a new idea was coined, “Stalinists” or “Stalinism”. Stalinists were those Jews who supported the new Soviet Union, the Soviet Union which had turned against its Jewish members. This was contrasted to the wing of communism that was still controlled by Jews, Trotskyists, who were now literally characterised as the “the good” communists. The requirement was that the people involved were radical leftists without being Stalinist. If it needs to be state4d, this was most certainly not a diverse group voices no matter how loudly or how large the print claimed that they promoted “freedom”, this was a group of likeminded people many of whom also shared the same theological commitments. As Howard Fast, another participant observed, We (people at the Congress) had a common culture . . . we read the same books, went to the same art shows and foreign films, shared the same convictions in favour of the underdog – the Negroes, the Jews, the economically underprivileged – and against such institutions as the Catholic hierarchy and the U.S. State Department. The narrowness of permissible views is a prelude to our contemporary society which is extremely intolerant to different views. Another anti-Communist, “leftist” group was called the Americans for Intellectual Freedom (AIF). The AIF was established by former Marxist “philosopher” and Austrian Jew Sidney Hook. Hook had submitted a lecture proposal to the World Committee of Partisans for Peace that was held at the Waldorf Hotel. Soon afterward he learnt that his lecture had been rejected by the committee. Upon learning of his rejection, Hook quickly contacted all his radical leftist friends and learnt that actually none of them had been invited. Those selected, Hook believed, were only those people who would not be critical of Stalinist Russia. In response to this rejection, Hook founded the AIF. Those who attended a preliminary meeting of the organization included Jews such as, Arnold Beichman, Bertram Wolfe, and Horace Kallen (who is

866 credited with coining the phrase, “cultural pluralism” an idea that opened the way for “multiculturalism”). Non-Jews in attendance included, the economist William Phillips, After realizing that the selected guests to that meeting were all communists, he decided to organize another conference consisting of non-communist progressives. Amongst those to attend the first meeting

The aim of this movement is to make us look away from the intellect and sophia, the means for articulating the intellect. The advocacy of sex, drugs and rock and roll really is to turn people away from the intellectual experience of the good and instead seek to maximise the pleasure principle. This idea finds expression in the mid-20th century in the work of “psychologist” Erich Neumann. Neumann was a Gnostic Jew who worked on “scientific theory” in the field of psychology. As Kilcher (2010: 15) admits, “The kabbalistic model [of science] most pointedly differs from the modern understanding of science in having a theological component. In extreme cases it functions, qua philologia sacra, as an antithesis to modernity.” Neumann is an excellent example, one of many, where Gnostic theological ideas are smuggled into “science” to shape society. For Gnostic, science and theology cannot be separated but one, science, is merely a tool for realizing their theological vision. Neumann begins his theory of the “Great Mother” by differentiating between an “elementary” and a “transformative” feminine. The “elementary feminine” endures and is unchanging, like an essence of the feminine, while the “transformative feminine” is a cultural product and, therefore, is dynamic. Consistent with Gnostic Judaism, Neumann claims that all people are in part constituted by their opposite, just like the goddess is constituted by apparent contradictions so are all people “made”. Neumann describes this unity of opposites the “hermaphrodite quality” of the human condition. (Neumann 1991: 24) As he wrote, “In other words, the man possesses an inner, though primarily unconscious, experience of woman, and the woman of man.” (Neumann 1991: 24) Again, the idea that woman is the unconscious or subconscious, the “underworld”, while man or maleness is the conscious, the world, engaged with “heaven”. According to Neumann in both males and females, “the active ego consciousness is characterized by a male symbolism, the unconscious as a whole by a female symbolism.” He argues that the elementary, unchanging character of the feminine can become evident in men and women if the ego and consciousness is underdeveloped so that the unconscious is allowed to be dominant. (Neumann 1991: 25) The weaker the ego the stronger the expression of the unconscious. What is displayed in this elementary feminine that lies within everyone is “the original situation of the psyche” which is like being an “animal in the psychological sense”. Neumann claims when the ego is underdeveloped then, “The determining role of instincts and drives in

867 the creatures of this stage signifies that they exist essentially as parts of the species or, in our terminology, that they are still wholly dominated by the Great Mother.” If the earlier discussion of the myth of Genesis is remembered, then the condition of the Great Mother is like living in the Garden of Eden, in intimacy with God/Nature. The ego consciousness, in this account, is equivalent to the masculine which is knowledge of good and evil. In both men and woman, just as the elementary condition is female in men and women the ego condition is masculine in both men and women. As Neumann wrote in his supposedly “scientific” work on consciousness, But one thing, paradoxical though it may seem, can be established at once as a basic law: even in women, consciousness has a masculine character. The correlation “consciousnesslight-day” and “unconsciousness-darkness-night” holds true regardless of sex, and is not altered by the fact that the spirit/instinct polarity is organized on a different basis in mean and women. Consciousness, as such, is masculine even in women, just as the unconscious is feminine in men. (Neumann 1954/1986: 42) That is, the world, including how women see themselves, is masculine in that it is the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is at this level that what Neumann calls the transformative character, in contrast to the elementary character, which changes depending on culture and age that one lives in, belongs actually to the masculine or the Great Father. The Great Mother is symbolic of what is good and evil, right and wrong, life and death. She is, for this reason, symbolised as a black-and-white egg as it contains its opposite, earth and heaven, day and night. Because the Great Mother is a container she is symbolized as a “cave” or “underworld”. Neumann writes that, “To this world belong not only subterranean darkness as hell and night but also such symbols as chasm, cave, abyss, valley, depths, which in innumerable rites and myths play the part of the earth womb that demands to be fructified.” (Neumann 1991: 44) Here is a clear reference to the start of Genesis which speaks of the “darkness” and the “abyss”. The Great Mother is also symbolized, according to Neumann, by “water” which is the “containing water of the primordial womb of life” which is the water “below”. Of course, again, it is a reference both to the myth of Genesis and the Egyptian myth of Nu. The surrounding water from which all life springs. It can even, and this again ties in with Astarte/Anat who donned the head of a cow to become Queen to whom children were sacrificed at the ceremony of Moloch, be symbolized as the “milk of the celestial cow” (Neumann 1919: 47). Buber, in a way, draws links between sacrifice, Astarte/Anat, and Yahweh even closer when he claims that, . . .the child-sacrificers did not suppose themselves to serve a god with his own nature and name, but the melekh YHWH of the manner of the melekh-gods of the neighbouring peoples. What is involved here is a popular degeneration of YHWH cult, the practice of a

868 popular syncretism beside the religious order of the temple whose mid-point was the valley of Hinnom.” (Buber 1967: 180) So, Buber is saying that this was Jews adopting the sacrificial practices of their neighbours and sacrificing to YHWH the same way neighbouring tribes sacrificed to their gods. Buber is saying that it was possible to syncretise Yahweh with the neighbouring gods associated with cows. Again, according to Neumann, along with the symbolism of the matriarchal feminine of the Great Mother are symbols of bisexuality males and hermaphroditic symbolism. (Neumann 1919: 48) This is Hasidic Judaism presented as psychological science to justify a clearly political agenda of, so called, “feminism”. In Gross’ and Neumann’s attacks on patriarchy, their demand to re-evaluate the feminine and advocacy for bisexuality, they articulated the founding principles not only of Gnostic Judaism but of second wave feminism. Their determination to destroy the dominant Christian culture or indeed any culture, and the affirmation of what was once considered base or immoral in order to realise Sabbatai’s prophecy find the divine spark in evil making it something noble and thereby returning it to god. Gross’ advocacy of sex, drugs, and rejecting “femininity”, are all ways of unlocking the irrational passions by overcoming the values that have resulted in their suppression. This agenda will find its initial voice in the interestingly named ‘counter-culture’ of the 1960s-70s but many things that he advanced, like homosexuality, destruction of so called “patriarchy”, rejecting monogamy, promoting birth control and undermining the role of the traditional family in society, have become generally accepted aspiration in Western society at large. It is for this reason that when feminist struggle is reengaged after the Second World War, supported by funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the CIA331, it is ‘natural’ for Jewish thinkers to dominate this literature. These Jewish voices included, Esther Peterson, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Naomi Weisstein, Heather Booth, Shulamith Firestone, and Eva Cox. All these “feminist academics”, who were all extremely influential in the development and promotion of ‘second wave feminism’ were all Jewish, every single one of them. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to find a significant voice, except for Simone Beauvoir who was herself greatly influenced by a Jewish man, in the development of post-World War II feminism, which promoted the argument that it is the acceptance of the ‘feminine’ which is the problem in contemporary society, who was not Jewish. The reason for this overrepresentation is not that Jews are

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Although militant feminists, like Betty Dodson, have tried to cast the CIA as the enemy of feminism who they oppose, the truth is such claims may well be being made by CIA sponsored agents. The CIA had taken every step that they can to further the aims of feminism as part of its anti-communist, anti-authoritarian agenda. They feared that the communist state could utilize female capacities better than the West and thereby achieve an advantage. Instead of fighting this mentality of thinking about woman exhaustively as a resource to be utilized, the CIA fought to make woman more productive than the Soviet Union ever could.

869 naturally more intelligent or that they have a better work ethic or that their culture has an expectation of success but that the entire movement, from the 17th century onwards, is derived from Jewish thought. As Slezkine observes, “no one is better at being Jewish than the Jews”. (Slezkine 2004: 11) Not only will Jewish thinkers be more comfortable thinking within the foundations laid by Sabbatai, Weininger, Freud and Gross, then people coming from a Christian normative worldview where the good, the true and the beautiful, have historically been prized above all else and are motivated to improve civilization and not destroy it, but that Jews advance the interests of other Jews helped this movement to become dominated by Jews. Despite, when reading these early feminists “one is struck by their crudeness, their intellectual weightlessness, their virtual unreadability”, (D’Souza 2007) their work was heavily promoted in the Jewish controlled media and subsidised by government. The Western tradition, like pre-Freudian psychology, are primarily concerned with adjusting people to established norms and treating deviance in terms of maladjustment then post-Freud thinking where it is the adjustment that is the problem. The project became one that saw morality and social norms as the problem and find the solution in rejecting social norms by nurturing what were thought to be more primal, instinctual drives that ignores gender. Technocratic feminism actually adopts and advances unaltered the exact argument voiced by political Hasidim against Europeans just decades before. Emancipation from patriarchy, according to technocratic feminism, is inadequate for true ‘liberation’ because the most oppressive feature of society is the way women see themselves as feminine. In the same way that Gnostic Judaism argued that Jews hated themselves because they viewed themselves through a Christian lens. In contrast, If Jews affirmed the beliefs of neo-Hasidism as true Judaism and then imposed those values on the world as universally true, a movement from the demand for equality to the demand to be recognised as “Other”, then Jews would be not only liberated but, like the blind man in the land of the blind, in terms of moral guidance, they would be Kings. One example of this shift in values is that Jews were often thought of historically as being promiscuous and, of course, promiscuity from a Christian perspective is sinful. Even in the times of ancient Rome there are accounts attesting to the promiscuity of Jews. The Gnostic Jews believed that if they could overcome the moral denial of sexuality, then, by “freeing” human sexuality, they would overcome antisemitism and all neuroses. (MacDonald 1998) By embracing promiscuity as noble, promiscuity as healthy, then Jews could live as they wanted without being judged in terms of being “immoral”. Indeed, if everyone comes to think of sexual freedom as “good” then Jews are not only no longer judged negatively, but as Leo Strauss observed, they become seen as the natural leaders of society. Promiscuity is no longer seen as something about which to be ashamed but something that can be advocated for others to follow. Gnostic Jews become seen as the most “intelligent” people in our communities because

870 Gnostic Jews have defined what it means to be intelligent. Just for one quick example, Amy Schumer, a Jewish-American comedian who, judging by her comedy is obsessed with sex, argued on Fox News that people should have sex when they first meet someone against someone else who was arguing that people should wait to get to know somebody first and then have sex. What was once have been seen and criticised as promiscuous behaviour is now valorised as “good” and people like Amy Schumer, instead of being ashamed of their promiscuity, are now seen as the new “voices” or our society. Somebody like Bette Midler functioned in the same way. Instead of being seen as crass and crude they are praised for being “brave” and “progressive”. They then publish books on the benefits of promiscuity and criticise people as prudish, as Amy Schumer does, if they think promiscuity is wrong. Gnostic Jews become the social innovators determining what is right and wrong, good and evil, and it is the reverse of traditional Western values. If they could change the values of society then it would be those who stood opposed to their values who would now come to be marginalized as reactionary.332 Acknowledging this, Otto Rank, a psychoanalyst who was extremely close to Freud, argued explicitly that Jews were uniquely qualified to cure neurosis and be the healers of humanity because, unlike other civilizations who were guided by an experience of the good, Jews never repressed their primitive sexuality. “Jews possessed special creative powers since they had been able to maintain a direct relation to ‘nature’, to primitive sexuality” (Klein 1981: 129) So, promiscuous behaviour now becomes a guiding principle advanced by Jews to “heal” the world. Sexuality, changing gender norms, can be seen as just one part of the liberating project of Jews not really as part of a liberating project for woman. Judaism held within itself the potential for overcoming all worship of false idols and thereby bringing human behaviour into line with their animal instincts. It is this redemptive capacity which will allow, “The spirit of the Jews . . . [to] . . . conquer the world.” (Wittels as seen in Klein 1981: 142) In the same way, conceptualizations of the feminine, it was argued, oppressed women and if they broke free from these inhibitions then they too could be truly “free”. Both the advocacy for more promiscuous sexual behaviour and altering conception of the feminine undermine not only traditional Christian values of European societies but feminine values that precede Christianity by hundreds of years. Indeed, this exact argument, that it is the way people think about themselves that is a problem, has been repeated time and again for ‘African-Americans’, ‘for gay rights’, for ‘minorities’ and,

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A women’s movement has recently begun called the ‘tradwife’ movement where women are choosing to stay at home and look after the children while their husband’s go to work and earn money. That such a basic aspiration could be called a “movement” is interesting in itself. As this very small women’s movement grew it quickly attracted brutal attacks from the “feminist” establishment. Some feminists went so far as to claim that these women were “brainwashed” like Isis slave brides. It just shows how feminism has moved against women being allowed to freely express their desires. It also shows how to disagree with the political agenda of the political Hasidim now attracts sharp rebuke.

871 most recently, ‘transgender’. The ultimate aim is to remove guilt from the world. As “psychoanalyst” and critical theorist from the Frankfurt School, Erich Fromm wrote, “The problem of guilt plays no less a role in psychoanalytic procedure than it does in religion. . . It is usually not difficult to discover that this allpervasive guilt reaction stems from an authoritarian orientation. They would give a more correct expression to their feeling if instead of saying that they feel guilty they said that they are afraid – afraid of punishment or, more often, of not being loved any more by those authorities whom they have disobeyed.” These movements have not sought to progress towards a new shared experience of what is ‘good’ but have argued that there is a plurality of discrete experiences of the good each with equal, though contradictory, legitimacy. This was the invention of the modern “individual”. It became an aspiration to not be like everyone else. To express yourself in your own unique way. The aim came for everyone to die their hair a different colour, to have unique body piercings, to have tattoos to mark your individuality. The new primary principle to guide people today is to not judge, to not discriminate because judging requires an experience of the good and that is something that we simply do not have according to Judaism. It is only after movements like “gay rights” have been successful that anybody can dare to propose ‘multiculturalism’, in many ways their final solution. Each movement is targeted at destroying a feature of the historically dominant Christian society and a shared experience thereby opening the way for humanities basest drives to become ennobled. This is the destruction of civilization aspired towards by Otto Gross and Sigmund Freud. The problem, or even the danger, with arguing that traditional conceptions of the eternal feminine are oppressive is to ask what understanding of the feminine will be used in its stead? Women themselves cannot determine what it means to be feminine as they are, it is argued by the second wave feminists, under the sway of a political ideology and most removed from their true selves. More removed, it would seem, then the Jewish men who initially told them how removed from their true selves they were. They are, by their account, further removed from what it means to be a “good woman” then anybody else. Indeed, under these conditions, everyone is actually now ignorant of what is the good for women because the inherited meaning in the problem. As Jewish philosopher Maimonides argued in the 13th century, in the absence of an experience of “the good” all that remains is an instrumental metric. It is in the empty space opened by the criticisms of second wave feminism that technocratic feminism emerges and dominates. What replaces the cultural identities of male and female, masculine and feminine, is not a new “norm” now free of patriarchal imposition that values the ‘female’ differently but, as our contemporary society evinces, the feminine is replaced by a purely technical measure that realises the Sabbatian dream of androgyny. This is why it should be called technocratic feminism. Women, as with

872 men, become measured by their productive capacity or how they function in society in relation to fulfilling the political program of the leaders of our society, now the political Hasidim. Woman’s clothing, for just one example, is no longer a cultural expression capturing beauty and grace but, increasingly, clothes serve either a political function, as in the extremely masculine clothing worn by “butch lesbians”, or, it serves a practical function, as the increasing number of blue collar female workers who dress in the glowing safety clothes, or both, as in former communist countries where women’s clothing, undifferentiated from men’s, was both practical and political. This is why, despite women supposedly becoming more equal and achieving a higher degree of ‘independence’, our society has in no way become more feminine. Indeed, the ‘feminine’, as traditionally understood, has never been so despised and marginalised in history as it today. Our society is certainly not more caring or nurturing, which have historically been associated with women, it is certainly not a more honest society, but, quite the opposite, our society is more ruthless, cruel, dishonest, and corrupt. But wait, this is the exact way that Gnostic Judaism understands the true nature of woman, violent, aggressive, deceptive, and cruel. The old sites of concern, like a loving mother, have been vacated and we are left as productive animals or what Hannah Arendt called animal laborans. We have become, in every way, exactly what political Hasidim wants us to be. As Jewish second wave feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote, “The end goal of the feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” (Firestone 1970: 11) Around 50 years after Freud wrote that he thought that the gender distinction was nothing but a social construction where biology was unimportant, Firestone, in agreement with Weininger, is calling for the end of the gender distinction itself. This is the Gnostics true agenda. This hatred of the feminine and their traditional role in society can be seen in the massive increase in girls wanting gender reassignment in recent years. In the U.K, in 2010, there were 40 requests from girls for gender reassignment to become boys which was already a significant increase on what has traditionally been an exclusively male condition. In 2017, that number rose to a staggering 1,808. Today, young women make up the majority of transgender reassignments in places like the United States and the United Kingdom. It is as though women have come to hate being woman so much that they think they want to be men. In her fascinating and frightening book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, Jewish American author Abigail Shrier333 observes that historically gender dysphoria was extremely rare. It used to affect less than

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Which once again affirms that the phenomenon that is being observed in these volumes is not about “Jews” but about a subset within the Jewish community that have accepted Gnostic beliefs that, up until the turn of the 20th century, was an extremely small group on the fringes of Jewish society who have, over the 20 th century, come to dominate Jewish religious practices.

873 0.01% of the population and when it did occur it almost exclusively affected boys. As might be expected, the traditional onset of this condition was between 2 – 4 years old. As Shrier observes, “Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender”. (Shrier 2020) Over just the last 5 years, young women, in their late teens, are now claiming gender dysphoria at alarming rates and are choosing to identify as “transgender”. In some areas, as many as 1/3rd of girls in any given class identifies with a gender that is not on their birth certificates. These young women, who are experiencing this “feeling” of disconnect with their birth sex today, are not young children at all but are more often in senior high school or even university. This dysmorphia often onsets suddenly after leading a life of being comfortable with their sex. Then suddenly they feel discomfort with their womanly bodies. This often occurs after hearing a “comingout” story that today are presented in school assemblies and popular YouTube posts where there are popular “advocates” for gender change, or they discover a high-profile transgender person on a social networking platform like Tik Tok. These readily available sources, often promoted on Facebook, are intended to “help” change people’s attitude towards the transgender community. The dysmorphia “craze” is evidently such a socialised condition that, “clusters of adolescents in a single grade, [are] suddenly discovering transgender identities”. As Vigo writes, . . .for many of us who have conducted academic research or written about gender dysphoria – and its previous incarnation, gender-identity disorder – we have noted the huge increase in the numbers of those identifying as transgender over the past decade. In particular, there has been a huge increase among teenage girls and female university students, most notably in the US, the UK and Scandinavia. (Vigo 2020) The girls that succumb to this phenomenon are often girls who are a little socially awkward and feel marginalized by their peers. These young, vulnerable people can suddenly become “cool” and popular, incredibly, by identifying as “transgender” or, at least, “non-binary”. Instead of the medical profession critically questioning these girls because of the late adoption of this position, suspecting, as it most probably is, an attention seeking strategy, doctors are fully indoctrinated into unquestioningly accepting these girls desire for gender reassignment and rush to accommodate their passing whims. Within a couple of visit of seeing a GP, these young women are being placed on sex replacement hormones and within months of receiving these “treatments” they are undergoing extremely invasive surgery to be “reassigned”. Part of the difficulty doctors face in questioning these people’s choices is that being transgender was reclassified from being a “gender identity disorder”, listed amongst “rare mental illnesses”, to it becoming an acceptable expression of an individual’s identity. Gender, for the first time in history, became a choice. According to the World Health Organization, transgender is “not actually a

874 mental health condition” and, they argue, this reclassification will have a “liberating effect worldwide”. Dr Lale Say said, “It was taken out from mental health disorders because we had a better understanding that this was not actually a mental health condition, and leaving it there was causing stigma.” This recategorization of this “condition” from being a “mental illness” to it being understood as a “normal” part of people’s development means that even if doctors felt that it might be an expression of an underlying mental health issue, such as social isolation or, as some have claimed, even mild autism, they are now forced to accommodate gender reassignment requests or face accusations of breaching an individual’s human rights. According to Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, the participation rate for gender reassignment is up by 3,200% overall and the participation rate for girls has increased by 5,337% compared to just ten years ago. (Robertson 2019) Today, in the U.K., children as young as 3 or 4 are choosing to participate in gender transition programs. One of the most vocal activist groups to change the classification of dysphoria to being “normal” was one of the front organizations for Gnostic Judaism, Human Rights Watch, whose Executive Director is one of the most vocal and influential Gnostic Jews in the world. Human Rights Watch claimed that changing the status of dysphoria would have a “liberating effect on transgender people worldwide . . . Governments should swiftly reform national medical systems and laws that require this now officially outdated diagnosis.” Megha Mohan, the BBC gender and identity “correspondent”, suggests that these changes are unimportant unless more resources are funnelled into “attitudinal education” so that people more enthusiastically embrace gender reassignment and access the available resources. It is this very “attitudinal education” that we know encourages older girls and young women to question their natural gender and usually becomes most pervasive at the very age when young women are most vulnerable. An age when young women are confused and unsure about how to move into adulthood. It is “attitudinal education” practices that are in reality encouraging woman to hate themselves because of their personal experience of femininity and are eagerly conforming to what they see as social expectations in their historically well documented desire to please. The problem is that these girls, often after undergoing invasive surgery and taking puberty blockers and other extreme interventions, quickly regret their decision and wish they had developed normally as women. Anecdotally, I noticed myself, before this book was published, that there is now a noticeable cohort of young women who are choosing to appear decidedly more masculine by trying to grow facial hair and adopt a more masculine look even at the local shopping centre when just a few years ago there was literally no one that looked like this. Today, sexual identity has become so important to young people, I recently became part of an online community and noted that the older people, like myself, would put what country they were from as the primary way that they would communicate their identity while younger people primarily

875 identified with their sexual orientation. As a 23-year-old member of the group introduced herself, “I’m bisexual, multi-racial, poly-cultural” which might be contrasted to an older person who wrote, “I come from and currently live in Aotearoa New Zealand, but I lived in England and Germany for quite a while . . .”. That is, young people’s primary identity now is no longer the place in which they live or even how they identify culturally but their gender identity and sexual orientation especially if it is “cool”. Interestingly, Amazon refused to allow Shrier to promote her book on their platform, although they did allow the hardcover versions to be sold. The reason Amazon gave for not allowing the book to be promoted on their platform was that it “. . . contains elements that may not be appropriate for all audiences, which may include ad copy/book content that infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation. Hence, this campaign will not be allowed to be advertised.” So, one can promote the ideal of homosexuality or transgender but to question such claims, no matter how academically the argument is formed, is no longer allowed to be made in public. Since when did a well-researched academic book pointing out a new dangerous social phenomenon become a “campaign”? As Shrier herself noted, Amazon will happily promote a book “celebrating troubled teenage girls suddenly coming out as “transgender”” as something positive but if you write about the real risks behind young women identifying as transgender when it is not real, and this is the important point the author is making, then they refuse to promote it. For writing this rather orthodox book, as with so many who become classified as marginal radicals on the weakest of grounds, Shrier has been cast in the media as some kind of reactionary conservative who has overstepped contemporary acceptable norms. It is as though she is promoting genocide when she simply recommends mothers should tell their daughters that childbirth is “life’s greatest blessing” thereby affirming the true blessing of womanhood. It is ok to encourage women not to have children and to try to become more masculine. Women should be encouraged to become cage fighters or join the army but to claim that childbirth is life’s greatest blessing and most significant event in a woman’s life, is now being cast as some kind of unacceptable reactionary political stance. This ostracization of Shrier is despite many in the trans community being extremely supportive of her book. As Scott Newgent, a transgender man, wrote, “I am a transgender man and I have read this book in its entirety, and it has facts that the average public does not understand. The medical transitioning phenomenon is about money. Transition is brutal on the mind body and soul and it’s no place for children.” The gender dysmorphia trend is a great concern because research has shown that around 50% of people who undertake gender reassignment later regret that they undertook the procedure and, if Shrier’s analysis is correct, then this figure is about the increase greatly. Indeed, what research is being undertaken on the outcomes of gender reassignment are finding no benefit to a “patients” mental well-being but further harm. A 2016 paper by the Centres for Medicare

876 and Medicaid Services drafted a Proposed Decision Memo for Gender Dysphoria and Gender Reassignment Surgery which said, Based on a thorough review of the clinical evidence available at this time, there is not enough evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria. There were conflicting (inconsistent) study results—of the best designed studies, some reported benefits while others reported harms. The quality and strength of evidence were low due to the mostly observational study designs with no comparison groups, potential confounding, and small sample sizes. Many studies that reported positive outcomes were exploratory type studies (case-series and case-control) with no confirmatory follow-up. (Jensen, Chin, Rollins etc 2016) These are not isolated findings, research undertaken by Birmingham University’s Aggressive Research Intelligence Facility in 2004 was reported on by David Batty who summarized the results, . . .that none of the studies provides conclusive evidence that gender reassignment is beneficial for patients. It found that most research was poorly designed, which skewed results in favour of physically changing sex. There was no evidence of whether other treatments, such as long-term counselling, might help transsexuals, or whether their gender confusion might lessen over time. (Batty 2004) Indeed, there are concerning relationships between those who undergo gender reassignment and suicide. As a researcher, Dr Hyde, the director of the Birmingham facility concluded, “. . .there’s still a large number of people who have the surgery but remain traumatized – often to the point of committing suicide.” (as seen in Batty 2004) Indeed, when the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services people were undertaking their research, they found that they could not secure the data from many because there was “considerable lost to follow-up” as a result of suicide. A very study undertaken in Sweden to determine the long-term consequences of gender reassignment found that suicide rates were 19.1 times higher amongst those who had undertaken gender reassignment compared to a control cohort. (Dhejne, Lichtenstein, Boman et., al. 2011) What is interesting about Shrier’s conclusions is that she does not, as some online reviewers have been quick to observe, attribute this phenomenon to modern criticism of traditional conceptions of ‘the feminine’, perhaps this conclusion was too obvious, but she blames, strangely, social media like Tik Tok and Facebook, for disrupting the normal development of girls’ by interrupting their socialization. To me, this seems to be an odd claim when we have a massive social movement encouraging girls to become more masculine, to pursue masculine pursuits, to do masculine sports, to undertake masculine professions, to dress in a more masculine way, and that this more readily explains why young impressionable women, are doing their utmost to be more masculine in every way as society appears to

877 demand. Feminism hates women. Contemporary attitudes to femininity seem to be a more obvious explanation for why our young women want to become men than blaming social media. Despite the obviousness of this argument, Shrier does not even mention this phenomenon in her book about a female identity crisis. It should be remembered that once being a little too masculine for a girl was thought to be a passing phase as any mother, drawing upon her intergenerational “mother-wisdom”, would have told anyone even just 30 years ago. Again, research supports this conclusion. 70% of children who express gender confusion as children grow out of it and adopt socially accepted gender roles. (Shrier 2020) The truth is that this is not, as some have suggested, about an industry trying to make money, it is not about social media distorting normal gender development, but it is about a group of Gnostic Jews who believe that gender is a violence to the oneness of Nature and therefore gender identity must be overcome. This argument is having other real-world consequences, some governments, such as the Tasmanian government, are removing gender assignment from birth certificates arguing that gender should be a choice that can be made later in life. (Humphries and Coulter 2019) Gender, as with all positive experiences of the world, must be destroyed. They hate the feminine, as they hate the masculine, and have done everything that they can do to destroy both. No wonder women, after an intense decades long program of promoting masculine women, even back to movies made in the 1930s if people care to look, are beginning to pay attention and hate their culturally indebted gender identity. Why is becoming transgender “cool”? The challenge that must be made to technocratic feminism is not to return to ‘patriarchy’, the entire account of ‘patriarchy’ seems a political reduction that does not reflect reality, that reduces Western culture, as such, to male power and this was never, could never, be the case. What we need to do as a people is to undergo the slow process of re-inculcation so that the masculine and the feminine conform to our experience of the good. The earliest moves in feminism were to acknowledge that changing social relationships around production were challenging the traditional role of women in society. They sought to find a powerful and meaningful space for women as women in a society that had swung significantly behind valuing masculine virtues exclusively. It is this project that needs to be reinvigorated, women finding their voice for what they want as inculcated beings. Woman themselves need to decide if they want babies at 18, and if my eldest daughter is anything to judge by, their natural urges are directing them to do just that. The more society is divided and turned in on itself, the less culture determines social relationships and the more it is determined by power. The people who will fill this void are those who are most capable of acting without cultural norms and those people, as the current situation shows, are political Hasidim.

878 The ultimate purpose of technocratic feminism, and it is purposeful, as a tool of Gnostic Judaism, was to encourage working mothers to send their children off to publicly funded childcare and early schooling in order to drive a wedge between experiencing and learning models of behaviour from their parents and instead learning what to think and how to behave from schools. Having already captured government funded institutions in the aftermath of the Second World War over to their warped ideology by applying the theories of people like George Counts. These institutes were designed to intentionally indoctrinate children into a way of thinking that was sympathetic towards the political Hasidim’s project. As Jewish commentator Reuben Yakobovitch admitted in recent comments on the internet, Yakobovitch: We created feminism to destroy the families of the goyim. It was a great success. Now we are pushing feminism v2 (rainbow stuff) on to the goyim, to destroy what is left. Soon your state, which we control, will own your children, and teach them to be good Noahide slaves for when the Moshiach (Messiah) comes. HaraldRoller: Cultural Marxism at work. Dumb White people fall in millions for it. Yakobovitch: We now control upbringing of the younger generation. That was our main goal. The double tax from the family was just a good bonus for us and allowed us creating a bigger and more controlling state. Also, it helped us staying in power easily. Women always will vote more left than men, it’s in their genes, they want to be protected. Not even the so-called wise men of the goyim understand this. Mo Pathc: Sarcasm???? Yakobovitch: The goyim are so stupid that even if they are given the truth plain and simple, they still don’t believe it. HaraldRoller: Wrong. There are many Europeans who figured this out a long time ago. But they are politically neutralized in Western Europe and the U.S. Yakobovitch: Like five or six and everybody thinks they are crazy. They are not a threat at all, we call them anti-Semites and people stop taking them seriously.334 By implementing feminism and destroying the family they expose children to more extra-familial ‘education’ that, of course, expresses a worldview that has already been captured by Gnostic Judaism. As Inglehart rightly observes, “One of the most pervasive concepts in social science is the idea that people tend to retain a certain basic character throughout adult life once it has been formed in childhood and youth.” (Inglehart 1977: 23) Once a child accepts an idea as true, multiculturalism, feminism, white privilege etc., etc., then “. . . the probability of [a change in values] diminishes substantially after one reaches adulthood.” (Inglehart 1977: 23) As already discussed, in his 1953 book The Impact of Science on

334

As seen in comments for RT on the 17/02/2020 posted on the 16/02/2020 @ https://www.rt.com/op-

ed/480879-tradwives-brainwashed-isis-feminism-patriarchy/

879 Society, Bertrand Russell, who worked with members of the Frankfurt School in their efforts to develop methods of mass social engineering, observed that, “not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten” because after this time ideas are formed in such a way that becomes much more difficult to “shape” beliefs. He also observed that research had found that “the influence of home is obstructive” to achieving what those who hope to indoctrinate want to achieve. Russell argued that all mass media played an important role, but the most important institution was early childhood education. Russell, “hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.” It is interesting to reflect on the words of Plenty Coups, the Crow chieftain who said, We followed the buffalo herds over our beautiful plains, fighting a battle one day and sending out a war-party against the enemy the next. My heart was afire. I wished so to help my people, to distinguish myself, so that I might wear an eagle’s feather in my hair. How I worked to make my arms strong as a grizzly’s, and how I practiced with my bow! A boy never wished to be a man more than I. (Plenty Coups as seen in Counts 1932: 16) This is somebody who is raised into a culture with a clear vision of their gender and their future responsibilities in their society. This is a person who wants to become an adult. It is this kind of intergenerational continuity, continuity in gender identity, continuity in purpose and vision of what it meant to be a good person, that political Hasidim has schemed to interrupt. It is because of this interruption that so many dining table conversations today with teenagers, and this has been the case since the 1950s when “teenager” was invented, is so full of conflict because children, particularly vulnerable children from the ever-increasing broken homes, become indoctrinated with ideas that conflict with those of the previous generation. This strategy is not unique to the post-World War II West. The exact same approach was used in the pre-World War II former Soviet Union and as will be shown in the third volume of this series, carried out by the same forces. From its original articulation at the hands of Marx, Communism, unlike worker’s movements, saw women in terms of being supressed and that liberation for women meant becoming part of the productive workforce like men. As far as I know, neither the privileged Marx nor Engels ever worked a day of physical labour in their lives and yet this was, supposedly, the road to liberation for women. Such arguments could only be made by men who had never worked in the controlled, unrewarding, restrictive conditions of the factory floor. But of course, this is to miss the point, the role of the goyim is to be productive slaves, that is why God made the goyim at all. To produce for those who run society. Karl Marx, consistent with Jewish Gnosticism and its political expression Gnostic Judaism, appears to have accepted the then widely held view that societies were once matriarchal, peaceful paradises that “fell” or were driven into violence before the ascendency of

880 patriarchy. As Engels wrote, “the overthrow of mother right was the world historic defeat of the female sex.” (Ruether 2005: 16) The Russian Jewish sociologist Ludwig Gumplowicz also argued for an early matriarchal society where tribal identity was guaranteed through matrilineal descent. Like Marx, he also argued that this early society was peaceful and lacked social hierarchy. It was only with the collapse of these societies and the advent of patriarchies that social hierarchies formed and, thereby, the first exploitative relationships. From this first expression of exploitation, all future generations of women were suppressed with the only hope for their liberation being a future communist society. When communism was realised, women were idealized in masculine form, prepared to enter into any task that had been traditionally undertaken by men, as a necessary requirement to increase productivity and social wellbeing. Soviet society also believed in raising children collectively, thereby, “freeing” the mother from her maternal tasks of not only caring for the child’s physical well-being but also the child’s moral well-being and making her labour available for productive purposes. This is the exact same justification for early education in contemporary Western societies today. Although this kind of policy is cast as an “equity” issue it is really a form of coercion to help drive woman into the workforce and decouple the child from being raised by the family but by the state. The aim of very early education in the former Soviet Union was to allow the state, firmly in the hands of Gnostic Judaism, to indoctrinate children into their beliefs. As George Counts, a person who was supported by various political Hasidim because of what he was arguing, believed that, “. . . the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction. To the extent that they are permitted to fashion the curriculum and the procedures of the school they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals, and behaviour of the coming generation.” (Counts 1932: 28-29) The difference between Counts vision and the world of today is that, as a Westerner, Counts believed that the teachers should drive a political agenda for “the common and abiding interests of the people” whereas our education system serves the interests of a very small minority of Gnostic Jews. These same strategies are being undertaken in the West today. Recently, for example, sex education programs implemented across the West that not only introduced children to sexual practices at a very young age but militantly normalised homosexuality and was critical of a “binary” view of sexual identity. As The guiding principle [of sex education] now seems to be that any assumption of differences between men and women is outdated and should be erased. This new policy adheres to the principle: human beings are the creators of themselves and can construct themselves, according to their will, as a man or woman or something in-between. (Ahrbeck & Felder 2020)

881 All these ideas are from Gnostic Judaism. The important point is that if you can have access to young children then you can shape what they think of as being good. As Nietzsche’s influential Jewish intellectual companion, Paul Rèe, wrote in 1877, Once the distinction had been established between egoistic behaviour as bad and nonegoistic behaviour as good, people set out to impress it upon children. Today too this distinction is forced into us from childhood. We constantly hear the selfless person praised and the egoist condemned. The books we read and the plays we see present that same opposition; finally, we are directly taught that unselfishness, compassion, benevolence, and sacrifice are good, and that hard-heartedness, envy, and malicious pleasure are bad. If anyone were raised in exactly the opposite conditions, if from his childhood he heard hard-heartedness, envy, and malicious pleare called good and praised, and selflessness in contrast called bad and blamed; if it were directly impressed upon him that it is praiseworthy to kill as many as possible of his fellows (from the same state), or else to hurt, annoy, and torment them, whereas it would be bad and blameworthy to give in to the impulses of the non-egoistic instinct and to care for others; if this distinction were also constantly impressed upon him by books and plays, then it would become natural for him to describe the Iagos, Richards, and Gonerils as praiseworthy and good, and the Posas as evil. (Rées 2003: 100) Jewish Gnostics have always argued that good and evil could be reversed if they controlled the school curriculum so that everything that the old Western Christian tradition thought was bed would be praised as good and vice versa. The idea that we actual can create ourselves because, in the absence of God, we have been created by someone, therefore humanity can recreate us and our moral landscape differently. The way to create the world in contemporary society is free of constraints that form objects because they are sacred borders and everything sacred must be destroyed. In 2019, a new mandatory sex education program was introduced in England that normalised homosexuality in part because the old sex education method “included worrying references to ‘virtues’”. (Busby 2019) This new program was seen as problematic by many parents because it taught children mature sexual ideas, often in conflict with what parents themselves believed, at a very young age. The trouble was that, unlike earlier sex education programs, which remained at the discretion of the parents, this new program was mandatory. The sex education program was introduced by Amanda Speilman who has strong connection to the English Jewish community. The danger of these types of programs were observed by Elull, who wrote, What you are preparing the way for with your sexology is a human being who is disgusted with sex, who will no longer have the slightest idea of what love is, and who will be even a little more fed up with things than he is now. And, by heaven: we all know what happens when a human being gets bored, jaded, fed up: he finally commits suicide. Your sex education in the schools is training a generation of torturers who will end in suicide. You

882 are taking from them the passion of love . . . then they will develop a passion for death. (Elull 1978: 154) What Elull means is nicely expressed by Bloom (1987: 98-100) who observed that in the 1960s a woman sleeping with her boyfriend before they were married in a “good family” would have resulted in the young woman being thrown out of the house by her parents in disgrace. As Max Lerner observes of the sexual mores of the 1950s, The American girl, with wide leeway in choosing friends, clothes and schools, books and magazines, movies and plays, places to go and people to see, with freedom of movement, education and opinion, is nevertheless closely watched and admonished on everything affecting sexual relations. Even the American male adult, who may be ruthless in business and is expected to be inventive and adventurous about his work, comes up against a strong taboo when he is tempted to show the same qualities in his sex life. (Lerner 1955: 677) By the 1980s, in a mere 20 or 30 years, parents not only allowed boyfriends to “sleep over” with their daughters for sex but if a parent objected to their young adult daughter, 16-20, sleeping with her boyfriend it was the parents who would now be judged for being overly protective and prudish. In response to Bloom’s observation about the changing sexual norms, “A very nice, very normal, young woman responded, “Because it’s no big deal.”” (Bloom 1987: 99) Bloom claims that this is the reason why “freeing sex”, educating people openly about sex from a young age, permitting sexual intercourse so readily, results in the loss of love, because, under these conditions, sex becomes nothing, sex becomes meaningless, sex becomes thought of as being “no big deal”. Sex, when it is talked about and displayed everywhere, especially to those at a very young age, is no longer about love, it is not about intimacy, how can one be “intimate” with a stranger, but it is about the physicality of sex. It becomes, as the Gnostic Jew Reich hoped it would, about the orgasm. The was Reich’s central argument, “There is one thing wrong with neurotic patients, the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction.” (Reich 1073: 37) The physicality of the orgasm, especially the female orgasm, because the cure all for everything wrong with our society but, most importantly, sexual freedom and orgasms were to be the strategy for avoiding what they presented as “authoritarianism”. As Russian communist feminist Alexandra Kollontai, who worked as Commissar for Welfare in the Soviet Union between 1917-1918, said, sex should be made as unremarkable as “drinking a glass of water”.335 (as seen in Wasserstein 2009: 222) Any stranger, any creep, anybody of any age, with any beliefs what-so-ever, can give someone an orgasm.336 Love, by contrast, is

335

Apparently, Lenin replied, disproving of “free love”, “Would a normal man drink from a glass when its rim has been sullied by dozens of other lips?” 336 Although there may be many female readers who might disagree with this statement.

883 precious. Love in our individual lives is rare. True love says something so much more about who we are than the physical attractiveness of those we desire. It speaks of shared beliefs, shared aspirations, and a shared experience of the divine. This is why the ancient Greeks prized love between men as the highest expression of love, not because they were homosexuals as is suggested far too often today, but, as they say, because it is a love that is devoid of physical attraction, it is a love built upon all the foundations that make substantive love meaningful. Sex can be successfully completed in less than five minutes with orgasms delivered all round. To establish substantial love takes months and involves getting to really know someone, spending a lot of time together, and sharing special moments. Even after this hard-earned love has been kindled, it takes a lifetime of effort to sustain. Many people today, of course, confuse the two, love and lust, as people always have, and thereby manifest a meaningless, purely physical relationship that is doomed from the beginning. The rise in divorce is not just because it is easier to get out of a relationship but equally, at least, that it is easier to enter to get into one. This is especially true today when women are continuously told that sexual gratification is the key not only to a successful relationship but to a successful, fulfilled life. Shows like Sex in the City, just like the “teen” magazine of the 1960s, were created solely in order to give an image of women leading a particular kind of highly sexualized lifestyle. They literally display a life where sex comes first. It was in part to try to ensure that there was more to a relationship than sexual attraction explains why young people were not permitted to carelessly enter into sexual relationships. Older people oversaw interaction knowing the desires of young people to help them to not make stupid mistakes. As mature people we all come to learn, at least those who manage to grow up, that sex can all too easily manifest confusion. I myself lived in a meaningless relationship for 25 years because I entered into a sexual relationship far too quickly. As Aristotle wrote, “Young people are amorous too; for the greater part of the friendship of love depends on emotion and aims at pleasure; this is why they fall in love and quickly fall out of love, changing often within a single day.” It should be remembered, that until the early 1970s, male and female undergraduate dorms were strictly gender segregated, and any known sexual activity would have been punished. Klein observes (2016) that when the dorms were made co-ed then at the same time the university dispensed contraceptive pills knowing that sex would inevitably follow but that women should not take responsibility for their actions. Today, by contrast, and this sadly is not an exaggeration, university students in Australia have institutionalized sex parties where young undergraduate “women” (teenagers) walk around with coloured armbands indicating what sexual

884 acts they were prepared to do. Red for fellatio, green for anal etc. It was a mark of “sophistication”, you were “cool”, if a young lady’s arm was covered in coloured bands.337 What is lost with the focus on sexual satisfaction over meaningful love is something extremely important, it is a particular kind of way of being in the world, of love that is not informed by selfishness. One of the many unique features of Western civilization was the centrality of philia, a love that was devoid of self-interest. A really close friendship, love between people of the same sex, was characterised as philia. Love between people of the same sex was called philia because it was unimaginable that people of the same sex would find each other sexually attractive. For the ancient Greeks, philia was “commonly understood to be a selfless desire for the dear one’s well-being and constituted a bond among people that was no based solely on exchange”. (Konstan 2018) Aristotle defined philia as “wishing for someone the things that he deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one’s ability.” (Aristotle 1380b36-81a1) That is why the current use of the word paedophilia is being used incorrectly. Paedophilia would be what many consider the right kind of love for a child, a love that is strictly not physical, paedophilia properly understood would not be erotic in any way. Paedophilia would capture a love that was unconditionally concerned for the child’s well-being with no expectation for anything in return. What we call paedophilia should properly be called paedoerotica and that has always, at least until Gnostics scholars like Freud and Reich, been viewed as immoral. Philia was not only a love expressed between people of the same sex or with children. It was philia that was thought to be what endured even between people of the opposite sex in a fulfilling relationship because eros would pass leaving only philia as a bond. Philia was not only important for personal relationships but was also thought to be that which bound the polis together in homonoia or harmony. (Konstan 2018) It is this trend to ever more meaninglessness, towards the loss of substantial love, that finds its tragic expression in increased rates of suicide. If not suicide, then love is replaced by the endless

337

This story was recounted to me by a mature New Zealand woman who initially tutored in a university dormitory before becoming a sleep-in supervisor. Nothing was done to inhibit this kind of activity. Nothing probably could have been done. Everyone attending university is over the age of sexual consent, which is 16 in Australia, and therefore they are “free” to do what they wish. This is what Peter Hitchens calls “Jaggerism”, named after Mick Jagger, the assertion of total “sovereignty over our own bodies”. It is no longer the university’s place, as once it most certainly was, to help young people to navigate the challenges of early adulthood. Indeed, teaching people the “correct” way to behave was once central to the university experience. Today, not only are universities no longer allowed to set moral standards but even parents, once their most important task, are also not allowed to set moral standards. As Hitchens observes, “Parents are no longer really parents, and teachers are no longer really teachers. If they acted as if they were, they would probably be prosecuted.” The role of parents and teachers today is to get out of the way and let Hollywood, popular music and a radically progressive high-school education system do their job of creating the next generation free of the burden of morality.

885 unrealisable search for sexual gratification, as evinced by the growth of sex “hook-up” internet sites and telephone “apps” where you meet people exclusively for “casual” sex. This new attitude to sex is encouraged by the omnipresent pornography. As Luke Ford338 readily observes, Jews are dramatically overrepresented in the pornography industry. It might be reasonably said that, in the United States, porn is exclusively owned, controlled, and distributed by Jews. One of the creators of the modern pornography industry in the United States, the American Jew Al Goldstein, who published the first real porn magazine Screw339 in 1968, claimed that the reason Jews are responsible for the pornography industry in the United States is simply because, . . .we [Jews] think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism. Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. (Ford 2004) This really does give a succinct account, including the reference to Christianity being “authoritarian”, of why Gnostic Jews have nurtured pornography in the Christian West. Pornography achieves a lot to undermine American cultural values including changing attitudes towards women, changing women’s attitude towards sex and what they understand sex is about, and encouraging more adventurous sexual behaviour. Nobody knew of half the things that young women are expected to do today just 30 years ago. Through pornography we are reduced to an animal existence, devoid of the things that define as human. This is the exact existence that Gnostic Jews want us to live because, they believe, it moves us closer to their God. As Gail Dines, in her book Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality rightly observes, “Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings – boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Woman are reduced to three orifices and two hands. . . If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn.” (Dines 2011) As can be seen from this list Dines creates, pornography, the sexual revolution, achieves everything that Gnostic Jews hope to achieve. The erosion of divine boundaries, the end of peras, the loss of

338

Luke Ford was born into a strict Seventh Day Adventist family but converted to Judaism in 1992. As part of this conversion, he did what he thought was the right thing and burnt his entire pornography collection. Later in life, he began to investigate the San Fernando Valley’s hardcore pornography industry. He found it to be utterly controlled and promoted by Jews. What his investigations revealed was so explosive that his local rabbi told him to stop investigating or be disbarred from attending his synagogue. Ford agreed and he sold his main website that was used to expose the truth about the pornography industry in the United States. I would like to think that a Christian Church leader, no matter the denomination, would insist that Ford should continue his work even if it did show Christians in a negative light. 339 Screw was the first publication to claim that the once highly respected J. Edgar Hoover was a homosexual in an article titled, “Is J. Edgar Hoover a Fag?” There is no evidence that Hoover was either a homosexual or a crossdresser but most people have come to accept these claims.

886 creativity, the end of authentic being. In short, it makes us distant from God. It is incredible how Gnostic Jews have focused on potential weaknesses, perhaps humanities greatest weaknesses, and then leveraged those weaknesses wider and wider as the 20th century progressed until today the gap is so wide all of civilization has fallen into the void. It is also interesting that Ford once again associates Christianity with authoritarianism, what Gnostic Jews mean when they make this association is that Christianity demands, requires, certain moral behaviours, instils certain constraints, in terms of what is “good”, but these constraints are experienced by Gnostic Jews, and increasingly the whole of society, not as a positive and joyous experience of the living intimately with God but as a restrictive, controlling, “authoritarian”, presence that must be overcome. In the 1990s, pornography dramatically changed. I first saw porn when I was 18. They were videos form the local video store that a group of us managed to lay our hands on. What was shown was two normal looking people, nothing too graphic or detailed, engaging in conventional sex. In the 1990s a new rougher, less respectful, less emotional, form of sex, that ofteninvolved groups of people, especially multiple men with one-woman, interracial sex that reinforces racial stereotypes (black men are sexually savage, Asian women are repressed but eager, Latino woman are submissive but passionate), large age disparities and terrible, brutal acts of anal penetration. “In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate.” Porn became a kind of erotic brutalization of young woman. A performance of domination. An expression power and control. Porn simply became more and more degrading where the only question today is; where will it all end? How far can they take this stuff? As Hedges (2015) observes, JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat fucking” or “face fucking” videos such as the “Gag Factor” series, in which women gag and often vomit. It ushered in “swirlies” in which the male performer dunks the woman’s head into a toilet after sex and then flushes . . . Repeated and violent anal penetration triggers anal prolapse, a condition in which the inner walls of a woman’s rectum collapse and protrude from her anus. (Hedges 2021) The women who participate in these acts of porn should not be hated, they should not be judged, but they should be pitied for living lives of self-loathing, lives without knowledge of love not only from others but for themselves. To once again consider 2 Timothy 3, it was listed that the end-of-days will be a time “without love” and pornography manifests most certainly a world without love. As Elull observed, it is no coincidence that as we sexualise our children at a younger and younger age then the highest human emotion, love, withers, to be replaced by our bassist animal drive, lust. As a sad expression of this loss of substantial love, in 2017 there were 5,821 registered deaths by suicide in the United Kingdom or 16

887 suicides per day. Rates of marriage per 1,000 people over the age of 16, as an indicator of meaningful love in contrast to just sexual gratification which, as anybody with experience will affirm, necessarily quickly passes, have plummeted since 1970. As Cramer (2019) notes, The median age for a first marriage today is about five years older than it was in the 1960s. Among young adults, cohabitation with a committed partner is increasingly common, rising to over 9 percent today from around 6 percent in 1997. In recent years, the social acceptance and legal sanction of same-sex marriages has created new opportunities for family formation, as has the rise in interracial marriage, which has increased from 5 percent in 1980 to 14 percent in 2015. Perhaps surprisingly, this systematic degradation of woman attracts very little negative attention from feminists, academics or social commentators. Indeed, as D’Souza (2007) observes, “. . . a sizeable minority of feminists have been vocal in their denunciation of pornography.” If feminists are critical, it is usually more on the grounds of equality, as in men are not being exploited in the same way and to the same degree as women, rather than on grounds that the behaviour itself is immoral or particularly exploitative. (D’Souza 2007) Indeed, by their logic, if men were in fact degraded the same way, then there would be nothing about which to be concerned. As Jewish feminist Marty Klein wrote in, “His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting American’s Porn Panic with Honest Tal about Sex”340, which was aimed at persuading women to enjoy pornography and to not judge their partners for using it, My feminism is the belief that people should have equal civil rights and civic responsibilities regardless of their gender. I also believe that sexuality is an essential, vibrant part of being both a woman and a man. Therefore, portraying female and male sexuality – and supporting the enjoyment of each of those by others – is in keeping with feminism. (Klein 2016) Personally, I cannot see how you move from the first two sentences to the last. The “therefore” suggests that the prior points logically entails the conclusion, as though this is a deductive argument, but the last sentence is not indicated by the first two at all. Especially if we consider the kinds of material that is being produced today and freely circulated which, I would argue, breaches one’s civic responsibilities especially when it is made available for children. Against the many Kleins who are, in practice, advocate for the porn industry (for the same reasons outlined by Goldstein), in the late 1970s, early 1980s, some feminists did try to fight against porn which meant fighting those feminists who were advocating for the porn industry.

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This idea of “moral panic” is one that has become increasingly common amongst the Gnostic Jewish literature. The suggestion is that being concerned about anything, including porn, is a kind of irrational “panic” that will go away if the subject matter is considered reasonably. It is fascinating to note where this term is applied, pornography, drug use, and, interestingly, Satanism.

888 In the United States, a group of feminists founded Women Against Pornography (WAP), which what become known in the usual capturing the debate “pro-sex feminist” (as though to disagree with porn is to be “anti-sex”) would disparage them with hyperbolic assertions claiming they were “feminists in the same bed as Christians preaching the gospel”. (Dodson 2013: 27) Indeed, it has been claimed that founding WAP began, surprisingly, the most bitter conflict within feminism of the latter half of the 20th century. This contest would come to be called the “Sex Wars”. As with all of the culture wars, this conflict was fought on many fronts. One avenue that has been successful used to advance the Gnostic cause has been the legal system. As so many judges are Gnostic Jews, it is one area in the United States, especially within academia, where Jews are massively overrepresented for obvious reasons, many of the judgements have actually been presided over by Gnostic Jews. Jewish Canadian feminist lawyer, Brenda Cossman (See Cossman & Kline 1992: 299), opposed the introduction of obscenity laws in 1991. The laws were intended to outlaw the production of only the most extreme forms of pornography in Canada. Cossman opposed these laws because such laws were “informed by the same conservative sexual morality that has traditionally framed obscenity laws” in making “problematic assumptions about the nature of sex and sexuality”341. (Cossman1997: 107-108) So, to pass laws that outlaw the portrayal of young woman buggerised so often and so hard that their bowels begin to fall out of their rectums and opposed to women being physically forced to have penises rammed so far down their throats that they choke and vomit, for money, is the imposition of a “problematic” “conservative sexual morality”? The decision of the court was that extreme forms of pornography would not be deemed obscene simply because it breached publicly accepted notions of morality342, but the much more permissive and consequentialist criteria of coercion and violence would now be used. In effect, from this time onwards, the very idea of “obscenity” was removed from the legal books of Canada and replaced with the harm principle. As a result of this license, young boys, from around the age of 11, are now exposed to extremely violent sexual representations, shaping their sexuality, and they grow up expecting this kind of sex when they do eventually meet a woman. Young women now feel obliged to practice pornographic sex so that they are not considered “frigid”. Indeed, that women are not ready for great orgasmic sex every day is increasingly being pathologized by the medical industry as though the sole purpose to a woman’s life is her pursuit of

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By “problematic” she meant that they were laws that were informed by Western beliefs that opposed the Gnostic Jewish project. 342 Amongst those on the Supreme Court who made the judgement was John Sopinka, the son of Eastern European Jews. As is the case with many Gnostic Jews, Sopinka had a meteoric rise when he was selected by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to serve as a supreme court judge while working as a practicing lawyer. Usually, experience as a judge is expected prior to being promoted to the Supreme Court.

889 pleasurable sex. Today, as many readers will know, young people now have sex that involves regular “anal” penetration and “deep throating”343, a practice almost unknown until the movie Deep Throat (1972) moved from the pornographic fringes into the “mainstream” after being reviewed by pro-sex feminist and American Jew, Ellen Willis in the prestigious New York Review. As Aitkenhead observes, If your partner is over 40, his sexual development was probably inspired by the underwear pages of a Kays catalogue. Just 10 years ago, most teenagers might have seen only soft porn magazines such as Playboy. Yet today’s children are just a click away from a world of “scat babes” (women covered in excrement), “bukkake” (women weeping in distress while several men ejaculate over their faces), or websites offering an entire menu of rape scenes, from incest to raped virgins. (Aitkenhead 2010) The main justification for the creation of such material is “freedom”, which should be understood in the Gnostic sense of this word, freedom from moral constraint, freedom from any kind of social expectation, ultimately, freedom from civilization. Moral constraint is understood by Gnostic Jews as an expression of “patriarchy” and is “authoritarian”. The availability of pornography has helped Gnostic Jews make our society more sexualized and less moral, more sensual and less conceptual, more physical and, perhaps most sadly, less meaningful. The “feminists” who led the struggle to liberalize pornography laws was American Jew Ellen Willis, American Jew Garle Rubin, bisexual trans man Patrick Califia (born a biological woman) and Dorothy Allison, a tragic victim of extended childhood sexual abuse. As pornographer and feminist activist Betty Dodson said when justifying the distribution of material that was labelled as “disgusting and pornographic” to children, “. . .sex was nice and censorship was dirty and that kids were never upset by my art, but their parents often were.” (Dodson 2013: 24) “Censorship is dirty”, this really has become the dominant attitude. Dodson does not seem to realise that yes, sex is nice between two adults who love each other but it is not appropriate for children. Although historically the majority of active women who identified as feminists supported the anti-porn movement, as our world evinces, the minority movement of “pro-sex” feminists who were more determined, better funded and often in positions of power, ultimately won the struggle. Dodson argued, quite rightly, that a movement that had fought for “birth-control, abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism” should also fight for the liberalization of pornography. (Dodson 2013: 27) In part, as a result of these “feminists” struggles, 1 in 10 children under the age of 10 have seen pornography and the average age of a child’s first exposure to pornography is 11 years old. Our children are growing up and watching the most explicit pornography. Dines believes, “The porn industry has

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A movie Al Goldstein, editor of Screw Magazine, described as “The very best porn film ever made.”

890 hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture and is lying waste to a whole generation of boys. And when you lay waste to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a generation of girls.” It is this early exposure to pornography that seems to be most destructive, Men talk about their compulsive use of how difficult it is to stop. Men are telling me that all they know about sex they learned from pornography, because they started using it at such an early age – it’s almost like it’s encoded into their sexual DNA. Some want to bring porn into their intimate relationships, others need to conjure up porn images to ejaculate with partners, and still others have lost interest in sex with real women. To show just how porn destroys creativity, men have told me that once they stopped using porn they didn’t know how to masturbate. (Dines, Thompson, Whisnant and Boyle 2010: 21) Of greatest concern is this is not even the porn of the 1970s and 80s which portrayed relatively normal sex between consenting adults with normal bodies and pubic hair, but the rough, demeaning, degrading kind of sex, where women remove all their pubic hair, originally to avoid venereal diseases but it has since become fashionable, that they grow up thinking is normal. Indeed, research by Bitdefender has reported that children under the age of 10 constitute 22% of the online porn consumption for people under the age of 18. This is not a mistake, this is not an oversight, the is the result of a deliberate strategy of a religious movement which believes that people, particularly women, should be highly sexualized and that any restraint on sex, any imposition of notion of respect or decency, is oppressive. Multiculturalism, deforming traditional family relationships, praising “diversity”, criticising nationalism, promoting sexual freedom and, indeed, rejecting, marginalizing or ridiculing morality in any form, are all established parts of today’s school curriculum. The cost of this type of “education” appears evident in the society in which we live. Historically, what we call “culture” was primarily passed through the family but, by ripping families apart, ensuring that women work, and encouraging “child-care”, Gnostics Jews have managed to reposition such education into the schools and universities. Although various mechanisms have been used to help destroy enduring families, including porn which makes illicit sex look fantastic, it is well known today that the CIA funded Gloria Steinem's ‘Ms’ Magazine with, as Reuben Yakobovitch observed, the stated aim of increasing taxation and breaking up traditional family relations in order to encourage women into the workforce. Elements in the United States government in the years following the Second World War were enthusiastically promoting the idea that the Soviet Union would be more economically successful because they had successfully moved beyond the family and were successfully utilizing women in the productive, and not the reproductive, process. Secret service agencies around the world, which were created after the Second World War, have been manipulated into being a significant part of the Gnostic Jewish program. Just one generation ago, in the 1950s and 1960s, as this

891 strategy really gaining traction, it was common in Australia to support the ‘White Australia’ policy and to oppose non-Anglo-Saxons from entering Australia, New Zealand or the United States, not to mention nonEuropeans. Homosexuality was thought to be immoral and was criminal. To be clear, it was not the discrete act of homosexuality that was problematic but the open expression of homosexuality and practices like “hanging” at the local public toilets. The reason for this, as with most things that were once viewed as immoral, was that such fracturing of community, would undermine the sense of duty towards benefitting the common good. The reason why this was so confronting was because the common good in a Christian society was the call of God so, from a Western perspective, to undermine the shared experience of the good was dangerous. This was also the reason why there was diligent policing of gender identity. My children, so just 40 years or so later, express an exact reversal of all these ideas and openly and enthusiastically support gender reassignment on request, believe homosexuality is an acceptable “lifestyle choice”344, believe that white people are responsible for the terrible state the world is in today and are mostly if not exhaustively responsible for racism. Perhaps as an expression of what must manifest a form of self-loathing, their peer group drinks more (especially women) and takes more drugs, they have more mental illness and are much more likely to commit suicide, they are more casual about sex, less supportive of ‘traditional’ family relationships, advocate for multi-culturalism and believe that a debate on dramatically slowing immigration is nothing less than racism.345 In short, there has been a total cultural revolution realised in Australia in just 40 years and one important front in that revolution, the one that has allowed them all, has been second wave or technocratic feminism that really gripped the west only in the 90s allowing children to be exposed to influences outside of the family from a very young age. It is not rare for babies to be lined up, like the worst images from the Soviet Union, in a Western childcare centre

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My daughter called me a “homophobe” for expressing concern over certain aspects of a homosexual lifestyle. It is interesting to review changing attitudes to immigration in the United States. In 1965, although immigration by today’s standards was only a trickle, 33% of Americans thought immigration should be lowered, 39% thought it should stay at the existing level while only 7% thought it should increase. Rates increased dramatically. By 1977, as the first significant waves of immigration were settling in, the number of Americans who opposed immigration had increased to 42%, with 39% believing that rates should stay the same while, again, only 7% thought it should be increase. Through the 1980s immigration increased to astronomical levels and has never slowed. It was not until the 1990s that attitudes softened towards immigration. Indeed, despite the massive waves of immigrants now distorting polling and decades of an education system promoting immigration as an unequivocal good, only twice in America’s history have those wanting to increase immigration outnumbered those who want it to be decreased. That was in 2020 and again in 2021. It has to be appreciated that around 15% of America’s population was born overseas. When you add those who are the children of immigrants, roughly 18%, then the figure moves towards those who want to see immigration increased. These figures were derived from Gallup polling on immigration between 1965 to 2021 as seen on the 16th Sept 2921 @ https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/Immigration.aspx 345

892 while their mothers are away at work. In short, our youth are being ‘re-educated’ by a state controlled by a political movement that wants to destroy everything that our cultures have traditionally believe in. The reason why the eternal feminine virtues have been prized in Western civilization for thousands of years is because they enable strong families which, in turn, allows for raising “good children” that make a strong, moral, productive, well ordered, society. It cannot be overstated how important the experience of the good is in shaping the Western world. It was once taught that one should strive for excellence in everything that they do. To improve yourself at every opportunity. To bring heaven into the world. To have this experience removed from the world thought the destruction of the family is having profound effects. As the rates of violent crimes in the United States support. Through the early 1960s, violent crimes were extremely rare, by the mid-90s the United States was going through a violent crime epidemic. This increase maps nicely on the rates of divorce.

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These levels of violent crime may not look too bad. It looks as though as families initially broke down with the new family situation there was a sharp increase in crime, but then society adjusted, and crime went down. The question is what was involved in this “adjustment”? As will be revealed in Vol. III, the period from around the mid-1950s through to the very early 1990s was a period when this political movement hoped to undermine the Christian Western values that had informed society in the first half of the century. The strategy was, as had always been the case, to use young people to turn against society as these people are more manipulatable then older people who have already come to accept established norms and have real-world knowledge derived from those beliefs. Jews, particularly Eastern European Jews, took control of the popular music industry from the 1920s and continued to control it in the years following World War II through until today. It was these very people who moved Western civilization away from cerebral forms of classical music to more emotion, tribal, percussion driven, forms of music. Much of it, as is well known, derived from the Afro-American community. The main theme of this music, from the very beginning, was about sex and this theme has gotten ever more explicit. Although we have become immune to it as a result of constant exposure, today’s music is smut, our young woman saying that they have to walk sideways because they have been having sex all day and are therefore too “sore” to walk normally. Music videos today are really soft porn with extremely high levels of sexually explicit imagery. This material is shown on a Saturday morning to pre-teen children as though it is “normal” and “acceptable”. It should not surprise us that by the age of 15 young Western woman walk around in skin-tight “shorty shorts” and

894 mid-drift tops without bras while still not fully aware as to why exactly they need to be on sexual display. Again, feminism is not only silent on the sexualization of young woman but actually actively promote the idea that woman should be “free” to wear whatever they like and if people sexualize them because of what they wear then it is the person who sexually objectifies the woman, usually a man, who is at fault and not the women. It seems that with such arguments their undying commitment that society shapes individual choices seems to have somehow been forgotten. The aim of removing morality as a principle for organizing society was achieved really by the early 1990s. The Jewish psychologist Steve Pinker has called this period, from the end of World War II through to the early 1990s, “Decivilization”. Decivilization is when civilization itself was undone and replaced with an exhaustively technological society. Free markets were the ordering principle without the restraints of morality. From the mid-1990 through until today has been a period when white dominance of society in any form, not just culturally, was to be undermined. If the period from the mid-1950s through till the early 90s was about destroying Christian society, the following period was about destroying white ethnic dominance. It was aimed at destroying Anglo-Saxons as a people. One part of this new strategy was to imprison anyone who were now affecting the function of society, no longer just its morality. As a result, there is a huge increase in prison populations that is particularly sharp from, you guessed it, 1990.

895 The rates of incarcerations have skyrocketed. This massive increase in imprisonment is despite significantly improved methods of crime prevention such as massively increased levels of surveillance and new methods, such as modern public transport ticketing systems, for knowing where people are at all times. As these systems of social control improve there well may be a downturn in both violent crime and imprisonment but such a downturn will not be because societies are now working but because they are more controlled. Beyond these factors, as we have become a less moral society, many “crimes”, drug use, homosexual sex, prostitution, abortion, pornography and much more beyond this are simply no longer criminal. The ultimate aspiration of technocratic feminism is the ‘freeing of women from the tyranny of reproduction’. This “freedom” operates at many levels including allowing lesbians and homosexuals men to have “biological” children but, it also allows women to have the same kind of career trajectory as men. This was the dream of Canadian American Jewish feminist Shulamith Firestone (born Shulamith Bath Shmuel Ben Ari Feuerstein) in 1972. The aspiration to liberate women from reproduction is just the ultimate expression of a movement that began with Sabbatai Tsevi, reframed through Marx, voiced by Weininger, given the gloss of science by Freud and Gross before, in the end, being taken up by a group of well-funded and extremely active Jewish women in the mid to late 20th century. Although most women wondered what these radical “feminists” were talking about at the time and their ideas did not resonate with their peers, when the generation who experience the gender relations that the feminists were so critical of had passed away, and there was no longer any direct experience, past gender relations could now be convincingly cast as evil. That is why it is not until the 1990s that feminism moves into the mainstream. Since the 1990s feminists have been very successful, as Wasserstein (2009: 767) observes, “Women’s employment increased greatly in the last quarter of the century while men’s declined. In Germany, the proportion of men between fifteen and sixty-five who were employed fell between 1975 and 2004 from 83% to 71%; during the same period women’s employment rose from 46% to 59%.” These changes, of course, have had real world, destructive, consequences. The most obvious consequence is that women are not having children. In the 1960s European people, including Americans, Australians, and Canadians, numbered 750 million which was one-fourth of the global population, that number as a proportion of the global population has fallen dramatically. To make up for the falling birth rate but maintain economic growth has resulted in massive increases in immigration despite hostility towards immigration being widespread.346 (Wasserstein 2009: 764) A report in 2001 by the Population Reference

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Again, it was not until the 1980s when school curriculum started promoting multiculturalism as the only moral position that attitudes towards immigration softened. Even with this intense program of “educations”, many people express concern with immigration in private.

896 Bureau stated that if France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom wasted to maintain their populations then they would need to triple immigration from 237,000 a year to 677,000 a year. (PRB 2001) This is despite the fact that “By the early twenty-first century all the countries of western Europe had large immigrant populations”. (Wasserstein 2009: 762f) These would have been fairly homogenous populations sprinkled with very few immigrants from non-European countries. By 2000, the global population had doubled to six billion, but the European population had stopped growing and was now at just 1 billion, only 1/6th of the global population. Making these figures worse, these European countries would now include many immigrants from non-European background such as the Middle East and Asia.

In 2016, 28.55% of the total resident population of Australia was born overseas. Of that, 4.8% were born in Asia (mainly China). The population of white Christians fell by 11% in the United States between 2007-2016. (Jardina 2019: 106) The United States changed from a majority of people identifying as white Christians (54%) to them becoming a rather beleaguered minority (43%). (Huntington 2004) In Europe alone, excluding the United State etc, in 2000, there were 728 million people, at the present birthrate, that number will fall to only 600 million by 2050 without immigration. As Friedman observes, Some of the most important, advanced countries in the world, like Germany and Russia, are going to lose large percentages of their population. Europe’s population today, taken as a whole, is 728 million people. The United Nations forecasts that by 2050 it will drop to between 557 and 653 million, a remarkable decline. The lower number assumes that

897 women will average 1.6 children each. The second number assumes 2.1 children. In Europe today, the fertility rate per woman is 1.4 children. (Friedman 2009: 52) Part of this decline might be explained because men in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand have declining sperm counts with lower levels of motility while men from South America, Asia or Africa are not. (Moss 2021) What is concerning about these findings is not just the specificity of the decline, but that South America are the same people as Europeans and yet are not suffering the same decline. It seems that for some as yet unexplained reason, sperm counts in Western men specifically are falling but not in non-Western men. Although the condition of male sperms may play some role in falling birth rates by far the main reason why Western women are having less children today is simply because of what is euphemistically called “family planning”. Family planning are strategies that enable families and/or single women to control their fertility. One of the most important, perhaps the single most important, figure involved in advocating for family planning was William Sanger. Sanger was a German Jew who moved to the United States in 1878. Before he left Germany, as many European Jews, Sanger had already become radicalized into Marxist politics so when he moved to the United States, he quicky involved himself in radical left-wing politics. Unlike many of his peers, Sanger’s main concern was to encourage “family planning”. In 1902 Sanger married the Irish Catholic woman, Margaret Higgins, who was pursued by her husband’s radical left-wing politics and also began to advocate for the cause of family planning or, as it was also called, “birth control”. Margaret Sanger was fortunate to have had three children of her own to William Sanger. The reason why Margaret and William were such passionate advocates for birth control is because they accepted the now largely discredited population theories of Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued in his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, that as population growth outpaced productivity growth then, in the near future, there was going to be great famine and hardship especially for the poor because society would run out of food. Malthus argued that instead of people having children, people should regulate population growth through sexual restraint and use productivity growth to improve the welfare of societies poorest. Two things Malthus missed. Firstly, in the decades following the publication of his incredibly influential work, it helped shape Darwin’s theories of evolution, came the Industrial Revolution which greatly increased the productive capacity of society. Secondly, as the West is discovering today, without population growth you have higher wages which then negatively impacts productivity so, far from low population growth improving the conditions of the poor it actually makes it worse. If the good people of England had indeed restrained themselves in their night-time duties, then the necessary pools of cheap labour required to man the factories in the early decades of the 19th century just would not have existed. Despite these now widely accepted oversights, Margaret and William Sanger, even in the early 20th century, claimed to accept Malthus’ arguments.

898 In 1915, while promoting birth control, William Sanger was arrested. That people were arrested for promoting birth control, something that everyone accepts today as a “right”, shows just how odious such ideas were to early 20th century Western Man. The presiding judge on the case said, Your crimes are not only a violation of the laws of man, but of the law of God as well, in your scheme to prevent motherhood . . . If some person would go around and urge Christian women to bear children, instead of wasting their time on woman suffrage, this city and society would be better off. As can be seen from the judges surprising forceful words, the idea of stopping families from having children was abhorrent. It was against nature and God. In the judge drawing attention to the fact that William Sanger was stopping “Christian women” might well be an acknowledgement that Sanger was Jewish. William and Margaret separated in 1913 and Sanger left his three children in the exclusive care of his wife to be raised in a single parent family. As far as I can discern from the available information, Sanger seemed to have nothing more to do with his “old” family after he left. Despite William disappearing from the birth control scene, Margaret was tireless in her pursuit of methods for birth control. Her passion was not just the result of Malthus’ theory, Margaret would find common cause with the eugenics programs that were popular in Europe prior to World War II. Eugenicists hoped to use methods of modern science to ensure that only the best human specimens would be allowed to breed. One continuous concern for European eugenicists, as voiced by Francis Galton in his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius, is that measures should be taken, just like breeding programs for horses or dogs, to ensure that the best human specimens had children with the best human specimens. One of the slogans for this movement was “assist the race towards the elimination of the unfit.” Margaret established the American Birth Control League (ABCL) in 1921 which received a great deal of financial support, much of it secretly, from that consistent supporter for Gnostic causes, John D. Rockefeller Jr. Margaret Sanger approached the innovative American Jewish biologist Gregory Pincus at a dinner party in 1951 to inquire if he could develop a new form of contraception. Pincus, at that time, was most famous for impregnating mammals without a “males” involvement although, surprisingly, his methods for artificial insemination could never be independently repeated. What did motivate some scientist to want to realise “parentless” children was the belief, as captured in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, that children born outside the human body without a biological father would be “soulless”, a very desirable aim for Gnostic Judaism which claims that we are indeed ignorant of God and, therefore, a human soul for a goy serves no purpose. Within months of her inquiries, Pincus and Chinese American biologist Min Chueh Chang had used established technology, the use of progesterone to inhibit ovulation, to develop the contraceptive pill. After a trial on poor Puerto

899 Rican women, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the contraceptive pill in 1960. Everything was now in place for the sexual revolution. The development of the contraceptive pill that was made available to the women of the United States in 1960 was only a means for liberating women from motherhood, the challenge was to make then take it. In the early 1960s, traditional Christian morality still dominated Western societies including, if not most especially, in the United States. The challenge was how to create a reason for women to want to use the contraception pill. The answer was to incorporate contraception into feminism. Up until the mid1960s, feminism did not advocate for sexual freedom but, actually, usually, quite the opposite. Although second wave feminism, feminism that argued that what oppressed women was not formal inequality but the way that women thought about the world through the male gaze, was being advanced by mainly Gnostic Jewish women, not even this movement, despite the arguments of Nietzsche, Freud and Gross, advocated for sexual freedom. As Sue Browder wrote in her extremely revealing and literally titled book, Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement, “In the beginning, the women’s movement and the sexual revolution were distinctly separate cultural phenomena.” (Browder 2015: 11) There had been some inroads to change the attitude of women towards sex, most conspicuously Helen Gurley Brown’s 1962 Sex and the Single Girl, but this was not read by nor intended for a “feminist” market. Indeed, although Sex and the Single Girl was supposed to be a tale of a modern woman who “could climb the corporate ladder and have lots of orgasms along the way by working hard and granting sexual favours to married and unmarried men” alike, the author, Helen Gurley Brown, was in, and remained in her entire life, an established sexually exclusive relationship with her husband David Brown. David Brown, who was very powerful in the film, theatre, and publishing industries, helped his wife’s career as an author greatly. It was on his advice that she wrote her influential tome, and it was his old job at Cosmopolitan that his wife would famously inherit using the platform to realize her own agenda. The only restriction on the life that Helen Brown was promoting was that women could not fall pregnant. They could have sex with whomever they pleased, they could bed older men, young men, their boss, married men, but they could not get pregnant. Nothing stops the life of a swinging singles gal like a baby. Many feminists at the time, including Betty Friedan, thought that Brown’s book was obscene. Feminists in the early 60s were fighting for equality in the workplace and equal pay, but not, at that stage, sexual freedom. Most American women thought that sex was something that men wanted, and men would use women to get their pleasure if they could only to eventually leave the girl lovestruck and lonely. Men might want a sexual revolution but women at the turn of the decade certainly did not.

900 Despite feminism and calls for a sexual revolution being quite distinct movements in the very early 1960s, as Marx, Freud, Gross and Nietzsche evince, they actually made natural partners because both movements actually wanted the same things, the end of the nuclear family, the end of monogamy, the end of what they thought of as patriarchy and, most importantly, an end to traditional Christian morality. The Gnostic agenda would be realised by incorporating second wave feminism into the sexual revolution. The most basic strategy of this attempt to link feminism with sexuality was to argue that it was really a struggle about women getting what they want. Second wave feminists had to persuade American women that it was not men that wanted sex, as had been traditionally taught, and it was the woman’s responsibility to say “no” but women, like the Shechinah, were actually naturally highly sexual and this sexuality needed to be “liberated”. Orgasms were not the entitlement of men but were rightly the true entitlement of women. As Comella (2017: 5-6) observes, . . . second wave feminists . . . challenged the patriarchal status quo that had taught women to see sex as an obligation rather than something they were entitled to pursue for the sake of their own pleasure. They wrote essays about the politics of the female orgasm, attended sexual consciousness-raising groups, and positioned masturbation as a decidedly feminist act. It has to be appreciated that Second Wave Feminism, like pre-World War II communism, was an almost exclusively Jewish movement, so these were Jewish scholars “raising the consciousness” of Christian American women on what was to be rightly understood as “normal” sexuality. Sex was to be dramatically reconceptualized in terms of not being about reproduction, after all the contraceptive pill ensured the decoupling of sex and pregnancy, it was not even about intimacy with someone you loved, it was now all about orgasms. The first step in achieving this new emphasis was ensuring teenage girls masturbated . . . and masturbated a lot. The more teenage girls masturbated the more young women would find emotional comfort in sexual activity. Of course, encouraging masturbation went against Christian teaching so it was central to once again bombard society with new pseudo-science on the “benefits” and “naturalness” of masturbation. Pseudoscientific books, such as Betty Dodson’s “Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love”, cast masturbation as “normal”, “healthy” and, most importantly, “expected”. Traditional sanctioned against masturbation was recast as prudish, old fashion if not, which was often the case, “unhealthy”. This is despite the truth that nobody has ever suffered harm by not masturbating, indeed the discipline of not self-indulging serves people well later in life, but many people have lost their entire lives after becoming obsessed with sex which begins, as any psychologist will admit, with excessive masturbation. This ensured that generations of women would grow up finding emotional comfort through

901 sexual pleasure.347 Dodson’s entire project was to realize a generation of women who were both feminists and highly sexualized. As Dodson wrote, “I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants in bed and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist to fuck!””348 (Dodson 2013: 30) Within just ten years, one of the central aspiration of feminism was the struggle for women to expect orgasms. A true feminist, according to the feminism of the late 1960s, did not only want sex, enjoyed sex, but proactively sought sex out. True feminists were sexual predators. The single most important person for synthesising sex and feminism was a Jewish American man by the name of Lawrence Lader. Lader himself argued that women’s sexual freedom, “struck at the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church and fundamentalist faiths, but even more important, at the whole system of sexual morality [in America] to which the middle class gave lip service”. Lader was fully aware just what was to be achieved through the sexual revolution, what was being targeted through its implementation, to destroy “the whole system of sexual morality”. The contraceptive pill allowed women to live the kind of promiscuous sexual life that was being intentionally promoted as an ideal in movies, songs, novels, and teenage magazines. It was this triumvirate, the contraceptive pill, feminism, and the sexual revolution, that was intended to rip Western civilization apart. Again, as Dodson (2013: 31) wrote, showing just how aware these people were about what they were trying to achieve, “Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we will change the world” Bringing feminism and the sexual revolution together was not difficult. As Browder observes, “the women’s movement and the sexual revolution secretly joined forces behind the scenes largely due to the influence of one man I had never even heard of – a master propagandist skilled in the manipulation of public opinion named Larry [Lawrence] Lader.” Lader convinced fellow American Jew and prominent Second Wave Feminist Betty Friedan to include contraception, abortion, and sexual freedom onto the post-war feminist agenda. At the same time that he managed to persuade Friedan to promote female sexuality through feminism, there was a general drive in Hollywood, publishing, the music industry, and magazines, promoting sexual freedom. As Comella (2017: 4) observes, “Women were witnessing more open cultural portrayals of sexuality all around them in movies, magazines, and novels . . .” This was NOT, of course, a spontaneous cultural expression, something “natural”. As should already be appreciated, the entire movement was orchestrated by Gnostic Jews who were in position of power in Hollywood, publishing, the music industry, and the media. Women were not liberating themselves from

347

This is the real reason Christianity always opposed masturbation, it was so that as children transitioned from finding comfort from their parents to comforting themselves they would do it in a way that did not rely on sex or drugs. 348 Sure, that is how we want men to think of our daughters, “I’ve got to get one to fuck!” Not I want to meet an intelligent, attractive woman that I can spend time with but no, “Find me one to fuck”.

902 the moral constraints of Christan society, women were being intentionally manipulated into believing that it was expected that liberated women wanted sexual freedom. It was Friedan, coincidently, whose research supposed “discovered” the surprising conclusion that “white, middle-class women wanted to talk about their sexual adventures, many of which involved men other than their husbands . . .” (Comella 2017: 4) Friedan’s research discovered, and nobody else was finding this at the time, the “frustrated sexual hunger of American women”. (Friedan as seen in Comella 2017: 4) This was at the exact same time that women seemed to be embracing the domestic lifestyle expected of them after the disruptions of the Second World War. Because Friedan was intentionally promoting a particular kind of lifestyle her research, though trusted at the time, should be treated, as with all Gnostic Jews, with extreme scepticism. A religious movement that does not believe in truth and advocates for universal politics should never be trusted. Claims that research showed that American women were secretly highly sexually active with other men and even women was being loudly promoted in magazines like Cosmopolitan. Browder, who worked on the teen magazine Cosmopolitan at that very time, now admits that she systematically lied about the inner-city, single female, sex life, as she was asked to do. She was explicitly told to make the life of innercity women who were highly sexual sound more appealing to the young suburban women and pre-sex teens who were then reading the magazine. As Brower (2015: 12-13) admits, “I confess to the many dark lies we told at Cosmo to soft sell the sexual revolution to single women.” She elaborates, “This was hardcore sex-revolution propaganda masquerading as fluff.” (Brower 2015: 40) She was encouraged at the magazine, as magazine policy, to lie in order to promote the sexually liberated lifestyle and if she did not then she would not have had a job. She lied to her teenage readership that American women were more sexually active than they actually were, and that sexual freedom was mature, liberated, and exciting. Young, vulnerable American girls devoured these lies and came to aspire for a highly sexual lifestyle that increasingly included multiple sexual partners. Brower write, “Many of the alleged “real people” we wrote about in the magazine were entirely fictitious. Helen had even written a set of writers’ guidelines suggesting it was fine for us to make up “experts” to quote and to invent anecdotes about ordinary single women . . .” (Brower 2015: 37) The experts were sex experts advancing the idea that masturbation was normal and healthy and that women were actually highly sexual and to inhibit this sexuality was a form of abuse. The aim was to encourage women to have guilt free sex. Again, as Brower wrote, “We urged the lonely single woman to let go of her “guilt” and to sleep with any man she pleased, even if he was married.” (Brower 2015: 37) Much of this material today has become so orthodox that it is now used in sex education settings for our children.

903 At the time that Cosmo and other magazine were promoting this lifestyle, this new way of being a woman, in reality this person simply did not yet exist. Women in those days just did not sleep around casually with a range of men and women whenever it pleased them especially if the men were married. (Brower 2015: 37) Brower (2015: 37) claims, “Within a decade or so, those of us who wrote regularly for the magazine began to find single women openly sleeping with their boyfriends everywhere, and I no longer had to make up so many anecdotes . . .” They were creating the “modern” woman and it was a woman who looked not only strikingly like that envisaged by Freud etc., at the turn of the 20th century but one that had already existed in inter-war Germany. “By the end of the 1960s, there was ample evidence to suggest that American society . . . had become more visibly sexualized.” (Comella 2017) Gnostic Jewry was so successful at shaping “feminism” that by the mid-1970s, feminist sex worker Candida Royalle could write, “. . .contrary to later misrepresentations, the woman’s movement at that time embraced sexual freedom . . .” (Royale 2013) What had occurred within a very short period of time was that “. . . female sexuality functioned differently than it had previously in mainstream society: it was unattached to reproduction, motherhood, monogamy – even heterosexuality.” (Comella 2017) The whole time that Brower intentionally fabricated a lifestyle that encouraged young women to be promiscuous, she was, like Gurly herself, leading a life of married monogamous bliss with her husband and a child. Of more than passing interest, Brower claims that the magazine, “. . .turned every conventional value upside down. Bitchiness and selfishness were good, generosity and putting others first were bad.” (Brower 2015: 39 emphasis added) That sexual freedom was being promoted as something good and these changing attitudes were being fuelled by a steady supply of increasingly explicit pornography began to attract a lot of public attention by the late 1960s. In response to growing public concern, President Johnson appointed an eighteen-member panel called the Advisory Commission on Obscenity and Pornography in October 1967. What motivated most of the public concern was a number of decisions that were made by the supreme court that allowed ever more explicit porn to become increasingly available that went against general sentiments at the time. There were public concerns that many of those assigned to the commission were also members of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) an organization which had, since the 1920s, actively advocated for more liberal obscenity laws. Although the panel itself consisted of a range of people, the scientific research that that commission relied upon for creating its final report was created by Danish Jew Berl Kutchinsky, a vocal advocate for liberalizing pornography in Denmark. Considering Kutchinsky’s “scientific” contribution, it should not surprise anyone that the commission concluded in 1970 that, “much of the ‘problem’ regarding materials which depict explicit sexual activity stems from the

904 inability or reluctance of people in our society to be open and direct in dealing with sexual matters.” It was not that pornography and magazines were promoting a more sexually free society, which they were, but the “problem” was not the pornography or claims of feminism but that the American people were not “open” enough on “sexual matters”. An extremely Gnostic Jewish answer from a Gnostic Jew. The findings caused an outrage when they were made public, and the Senate rejected the commission’s findings by a vote of sixty to five. (Comella 2017) Indeed, it is interesting to observe how Gnostic Jews managed, like psychoanalysis, to pass their theological aspirations as “science”. The Jewess, Joani Blank, claimed that she was a “sex therapist” and worked to expand “planned parenting” and enabling women to experience orgasms. When laws were passed restricting the sale of sexual products, Blank navigated around the laws falsely presenting sex products as massage equipment. Along with sex products she also published sexually explicit reading material. In 1978, she expanded her series of “playbooks”, instruction on how to enjoy sex, to children with the “Playbook for Kids about Sex”. It was this pill, along with the accompanying sexual revolution, more than anything else, that has resulted in the plummeting birth rates that have done more than anything to encourage women to embrace sexual freedom and enter the workforce. Gnostic Jews would be pleased that, in the United States, “The overall birth rate hit a record low in 2018, dropping for the seventh straight year. Today’s fertility rate is 1.72 percent, significantly below the “replacement” rate of 2.1 percent. Only 29 percent of women ages 18 to 29 have had children, down from 41 percent in 1998.” (Cramer 2019) In Europe the situation is even worse, In 2005 Europe’s population had reached what experts predicted would be its all-time peak of 740 million. For the first time since the Black Death, the continent’s population as a whole was expected to decrease over the next generation. Almost every country in Europe had a below-replacement level of natural increase. Absolute population decline in the period 2000 to 2005 was reported for nearly all the former Communist states as well as Switzerland and Italy. . . The main cause of population decline was a fall in fertility below replacement levels. The trend was especially marked in eastern Europe where birth rates had been declining since the mid-1980s and fell even further after the collapse of Communism. In east Germany the rate dropped by almost half between 1989 and 1991. In Romania and Ukraine it fell by 30 per cent. Most disastrously, in the early twenty-first century deaths were exceeding births in Russia by nearly a million a year. (Wasserstein 2009: 758-759) The West is dying, and it is birth control, changing attitudes towards marriage, motherhood and sex, that have greatly contributed to its demise. The development of the pill was both made possible by and permitted the progress of technocratic feminism by enabling the rejection of the eternal feminine virtues without paying a price. As young female professional Mills expresses in a popular “teen” magazine,

905 “If I had a kid,” said Jane, an advertising executive, thoughtfully, “I wouldn’t be able to do half the things I take for granted. Every Saturday at 10:30 A.M. when we are still in bed, my husband and I look at each other and just say, ‘thank God we weren’t up at 5 A.M. caring for a brat’. We have such a great time just the two of us; who knows if it would work if we introduced another person into the equation?” (Mills 2000) For a woman to think like Jane does just 50 years ago would have attracted accusations of selfishness and lacking social responsibility (not to mention ignorance of the selfless pleasures of parenting). This is what our young girls read in their publications today and, just as Brower admits, it is probably not even a true account. Indeed, how many actual mothers who have experienced the absolute joys of motherhood while being surrounded by a supportive family would continue today to think of such comments as juvenile and selfish. Here is a woman who has not matured into a breeding adult, if she exists at all, but has remained a juvenile unprepared for the responsibility of motherhood. Sadly, as should be expected when our children are being fed this stuff every day in magazines such as Friedan’s own Ms Magazine, such attitudes are increasingly the norm. Instead of such ideas being seen as the folly of a youth, still too frightened to step into the role of adulthood, such ideas are potentially maintained throughout a woman’s life or at least until, sadly, it is too late. Later in life Germain Greer, one of the feminist icons of the 20 th century, admitted to deciding that she did indeed want to become a mother later in life. “I was desperate for a baby and I have the medical bills to prove it.” She admitted in the British magazine Aura, “I still have pregnancy dreams waiting with vast joy and confidence for something that will never happen.” One of the revelations that brought Greer to her late found maturity was when she cared for a friend’s child, “Ruby lit up my life in a way that nobody, certainly no lover, has ever done. I was not prepared for the incandescent sensuousness of this small child, the generosity of her innocent live.” Greer directly attributed her early reluctance to have a child to feminism because they argued, “Getting pregnant meant the end of all good times . . .” This attitude was first voiced by Friedan herself in her extremely influential, in the United States, The Feminine Mystique, which argued that American women were miserable because they thought of themselves as mothers and housewives. Friedan’s book, of course, affected a generation of young women who had not yet entered into motherhood but took Friedan’s word that it was a life of drudgery and misery and the city life advocated, again falsely, by people like Browden and Gurly, pursuing orgasms with multiple partners, was going to give them greater “happiness” and “freedom”. The danger that confronts so many women today who do choose to have children is that because of high divorce rates, any child that she has will probably be raised in a broken family. In the West “. . . a growing proportion of children now lived in one-parent families. In Britain by 1994 21% of all families with children included only one parent”. (Wasserstein 2009: 766) In the United States around 19 million

906 children were being raised in single parent households mainly by the mother. Perhaps this in part explains why the number of births in Western countries continues to decline. To address these concerns and “produce” children as required, developing on the early work of Pincus, there has been an intensive program to develop an artificial womb to “free” women from childbirth. This project has progressed so far, with ready access to vast resources to ensure this particular project moves ahead quickly, that in 2017 a lamb was brought to term outside of a sheep’s uterus. If motherless births are ever realised, then, as they once argued, children could be born without a “soul” meaning that children will be born without any moral guidance because they would lack a conscience. As Huxley himself asked, what kind of monsters would result if they do successfully develop this technology? Yet, this is the ideal person from the perspective of Gnostic Jewry as it is, according to their onto-theology, the true condition of humanity. The truth is today Gnostic Judaism is extremely confident that they have already won the culture war and have destroyed the family in the West and will take this revolution successfully around the world. Everything indicates that this belief is true. As this radical revolution reaches a conclusion, most people are utterly ignorant that a revolution has even occurred. This is why it has been so easy. The horrifying truth is that not only will the revolution not be televised, but it will not even be noticed. As Jewish gnostic scholar George Friedman confidently wrote, the cultural conflict around defining what is a family and the role of the woman in the family, . . .is going to intensify in the twenty-first century, but the traditionalists are fighting a defensive and ultimately losing battle. The reason is that over the past hundred years the very fabric of human life – and particularly the life of women – has been transformed, and with it the structure of the family. What has already happened in Europe, the United States, and Japan is spreading to the rest of the world. These issues will rip many societies apart, but in the end, the transformation of the family can’t be stopped. (Friedman 2009: 51) You can feel the intense pride coming from Friedman as he confidently declares victory though admitting that a few final battles still lay ahead. The wording here is interesting and, as usual, informative. Friedman does not make the claim that women have changed their lives over the last century, but that women’s lives have been “transformed”. This is actually quite correct. Women’s lives have been re-shaped, they have been “transformed” and women have only been passive passengers adapting to these transformation and certainly not instigators. Women have not chosen, at least in any meaningful sense of this word, to live how they do today. As has been shown, one can read at the turn of the 20th century Jewish men presenting the kind of women that they want to see and the kind of society that they want to realise, and it is the very society in which we live today. Second wave feminism, the triumphant form of feminism, was initiated by a very small group of highly activist religious zealots, like Betty Friedan,

907 adhering to their Gnostic teachings that have shaped what it means to be a woman. None other than Sue Browder, the woman who admits to being tricked into lying on their behalf, expresses sympathy for Friedan but that is only because she is ignorant of her true motives. She believes, as she expresses in her book, that Friedan and women like her are only interested in the wellbeing of woman when nothing could be further from the truth. Even their research cannot be trusted as they are truly prepared to lie to achieve their aims. So, when Betty Friedan claimed in her book that she had undertaken research into the lives of woman at that time and found they were all depressed her results cannot and should not be believed. Interestingly, Browden admits that Friedan’s account did not resonate with her personal experiences, as she had a very supportive father who encouraged her independence, as fathers usually do, but fearing what she was being told was her terrible fate if she did choose to become a mother, she was included, at 17, not to become one. Bowden, despite the apparent harm Friedan’s work has had on her life still does not condemn her. Browder did suspect that Friedan might not be sincere, that she might have ulterior motives but, as nobody has heard of Gnostic Judaism nobody can suspect that is what she is secretly advocating but instead, Browder suspect Friedan might be a communist. Some believe that Betty Friedan was secretly a communist and therefore asked, “Was the Feminine Mystique not an honest investigative report, but cleverly disguised propaganda?” It was propaganda but not strictly for communism but more what communism itself expressed, Gnostic Judaism with the intention of destroying Western families as the conditions required for destroying Western civilization. It is through the ordering institution of the family that morality and traditional sexual relationships have been transferred from one generation to the next with its demise this will no longer occur, and Gnostic Judaism has achieved their desired outcome. One sad consequence of the destruction of the family is that older people today are much lonelier than they were in the past. As Wasserstein (2009: 761) observes, “Changes in family structure had stranded many who in earlier times would have received closer social and psychological support from their children.” Before leaving feminism, it should be made clear that there is no requirement to oppose feminism as such. Heidegger expressed concern about any ‘ism’. The reason for this concern was because political ideologies were an early expression of the instrumental rationality, that he seems to attribute to Eastern Jewish thinking, about which he was concerned. Political ideologies emerged only in the 19th century as a result of the loss of an experience of the good and have no precedence before this time. They can be seen as voicing a series of, if you like, key performance indicators against which ‘progress’ can be measured that are no longer derived from experience. It gives an account of reality, identifies supposed ‘problems’ and offers solutions, in pure

abstraction. Many

political ideologies, like

liberalism

or

908 communism/socialism, are explicit in their rejection of being informed by an experience of ‘the good’. Although there is a danger when actions are informed by abstraction, the greatest danger, as with all technology, is that it can be easily co-opted to serve special interests who are able to control the instruments of order, education, and communication, and thereby largely controls the trajectory of human desire. This is exactly what has happened to feminism. To redirect feminism into something that is true to that name, all that is required is that woman themselves come to determine their own movement. Women must be liberated from the Gnostic project and come to advocate for their own interests. become included in informing the direction of feminism. As I have questioned, many militant feminists who see men as the oppressors, child raising as a burden and heterosexual sex as loathsome, now determine the entire “feminist” movement. When was the last time that everyday women, going about their lives, were asked what they want out of their feminism? The benefit of this inclusion is not because it will realize better outcomes for more women, although of course it will, but, most importantly, it will once against be informed by a universal experience of what is good and evil, right and wrong and not be co-opted to serve some bizarre religious agenda about which most of those militant feminists, with all their insights, are ignorant. Historically men were risk takers. As Junger (2016) observes, men “drive too fast, get into fights, haze each other, play sports, join fraternities, drink too much, and gamble with their lives in a million idiotic ways. Girls generally don’t take those kinds of risks, and as a result, boys in modern society die by violent and accidents at many times the rate that girls do.” These practices are undertaken not only to have standing in the eyes of other men but, as any male will attest, mating practices amongst humans when competing with other men for a woman’s affection is a risky undertaking only ventured by the foolish or the brave. This is why it is a task best suited to the young. Studies have shown (Petraitis, Boeckmann etc., 2014) that men who are risk takers are more sexually attractive to women than men who do not. Such activities also prepare men for the potential defence of the community in whose protection they should be prepared to die bravely. Women were raised, and still are, to be risk averse. Risk averse women are sexually more attractive to men then risk-taking women despite a century of the most intense propaganda to reverse such valuation. Science has supported the ongoing traditional difference today even in Western societies (Harris & Jenkins 2006) as Byrnes etc., concluded, “male participants are more likely to take risks than female participants”. (Byrnes etc., 1999: 377) The evolutionary explanation for this kind of behaviour is rather obvious. Only physically fit, brave, and determined men had the genetic credentials to breed and risky behaviour was a way of weeding out those who were either unable or unprepared to prove themselves. Men are also much more likely to risk their lives to save others but most especially women, children and the elderly. Historically, women were not

909 only just too valuable to the community to risk their well-being in dangerous activities like hunting and fighting but where physically not well suited to these tasks. Men, by contrast, and nature does not do mistakes, are both physically well suited to hunting and fighting and not as valuable because, as each individual male produces millions of semen, they are more expendable then the 12 precious ovum women make available every year. One male could impregnate numerous women whereas women can only give birth to a limited number of children. For millennia, the most important role for most women in society was reproduction and the task of nurturing that was all part of human reproduction. Although today the traditional role of ‘mother’ is portrayed as something that results from female oppression where “Women come to be seen as mothers first and workers second” (McDaniel 1988: 1). Men were thought to produce in order to free women to take primary responsibility in reproduction. Interestingly, in ancient Sparta, the only people who were honoured with a name on their graves were, as Plutarch notes, “. . .men who had died in battle or women who had died in childbirth.” (Dillon 2001: 270) Childbirth was seen to be contributing to society and of being of equal importance as dying in battle in the defence of the polis. This does not seem to show reproduction as unimportant but, the opposite, of amongst the most important undertaking for the betterment of the community at large. Gnostic Judaism, as will be explored at much greater length in the next volume, think of non-Jews exhaustively as productive beings which makes sense if human’s do not have a unique dignity of being in relation with God then what else is a human except another productive animal, what the Latins would have called an animal laborans. As Israeli Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said in 2010, Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel . . . Why are gentiles needed: they will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. . . With gentiles, it will be like any person: They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for his Jews. (Yosef as seen in Oster 2010) Gentile’s exclusive role in society in the absence of any intrinsic worth is to create wealth in society for the exploitation of those who rule. The ruler’s task is to direct society, shape society so that it will conform to the vision of those who determine what is to be valued. In a sense this makes all non-Gnostic Jews sacred because anything cast in the service of god becomes sacred but, it is the same sacredness of a donkey. Gentiles are effectively seen as high function productive animals who are incapable of living full, meaningful, adult, lives as they are incapable of living with knowledge of God. Cybernetic feminism is in part concerned with ‘freeing’ women from the burden of reproduction and turning them into primarily productive beings. Women should, by this account, take as many risks as men if they are to be effective

910 and efficient producers. Thereby we get governments and industry promoting risk taking sports, like boxing, mixed martial arts and football, for women. Women and the population generally are uninterested in seeing these events, but they increasingly get equal funding as men’s sport in order to drive their agenda from the top. My argument against technological feminism is that in fact it is not progressive at all but oppressive. It is oppressive because women present from out of the movement ultimately only in their instrumental, productive value and, as already argued, coming forward in these terms is not coming forward at all as a fully formed human being. As Kant famously argued, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” To be exhaustively a means of production is to live the life of a slave or an animal. For feminism to progress it must once again be informed by an experience of the good, virtue, so that if a woman excels in a pursuit then they should be recognised, acknowledged, permitted to advance, but if a woman wants to look after their children then this is of at least equal if not a greater contribution. Culture of Critique and Grievance Studies Modern feminism and psychology are two of the most important and revealing ways where Jewish Gnosticism have been successful at shaping how we think. In fact, when properly understood, there are actually very few academic disciplines today that have not only been inspired by Jewish Gnosticism but have come to speak with a Gnostic voice. Jewish Gnosticism has influenced everything for theoretical physics, with theories of multi-verse and string theory which are all derived from Kabbalah and as a result of physics being persuaded to try to make these theories work through scholarships and employment opportunities, physics has stalled for decades, through to Milton Friedman in economics. As with most disciples today, contemporary feminism can be seen where Gnostic Judaism has been nurtured and promoted so that there is a reversal of values which then allows intellectuals sympathetic to those beliefs to ‘naturally’ become the dominant actors within that discipline. In the Western tradition, another example of where Jewish Gnosticism has shaped thinking is to observe that not that long ago, to not know what was good and bad, to not have a conscience, was considered one of the most serious and dangerous pathologies called psychopathy. To be a psychopath was considered to be one of the worst, most social destructive, mental illness that a person could express. In DSM I, published in 1952, there was a condition called “sociopathic personality disturbance” that was identified explicitly as being equivalent to having a “psychopathic personality”. In DSM III, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association, excluded the criteria

911 of a lack of guilt from the diagnosis of what was now to be called “anti-social personality disorder”349. (Crego and Widiger 2015: 666) The central diagnosing criteria for antisocial personality disorder was no longer a lack of conscience, as expressed in not experiencing guilt or shame, things that we must deny according to the Jewish Gnostic tradition, but “disregard for society’s laws” and the “violation of the physical or emotional rights of others”. When the role of formal ‘laws’ informed by universal ‘rights’ are understood as strategies for destroying cultural traditions has been made clear in volume III of this series, the change that has occurred here will become even more transparent but, for now, it should be evident that the criteria has shifted from one grounded in the Western Christian tradition of ‘morality’, ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’, that requires an experience of good and evil, to one grounded in the gnostic tradition of universal human right that were championed by influential Gnostic Jew Leo Strauss. The original impetus for human rights was that it marginalized religious teachings. As Murray rightly observes, “In place of religion came the ever-inflating language of “human rights”. (Murray 2017: 9) Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an extremely Christian document, the way human rights have been used over the years has been to undermine cultural difference and replace it with pragmatism. Once again, in the case of changes to the definition of psychopathy, what passes as an apparently insignificant change, a change in the criteria for having a mental illness, is revealed as just another step, another minor change, one amongst the thousands, that moves the entire society inexorably towards realising a Gnostic reality. For example, the right to be free from discrimination has been taken up as a licence for anything except to be good. This is how such a relatively small group of people has come to rule the world. Everything they do, everything they write, everything they research, everything they argue, literally everything, is oriented towards the service of their God, Israel and Torah as interpreted through a Sabbatian Gnostic lens. This is the real ultimate motivation behind the revaluation of all existing values, it is so that all the people of the world will fight for the Gnostic god, so that all the people in the world will fight to realise their vision of the world, even if this vision is actually a form of self-loathing and therefore, self-destructive. As it says in Tzephaniah 3:9, “I will transform the peoples to a purer language that they all will call upon the name of God and serve Him with one purpose.” Torah does not differentiate between Jew and others, everyone must bend the knee to the Gnostic God, everyone must recognise the leadership of His chosen people and everyone must swear allegiance. As it says in the Aleinu, a prayer said three times a day, We therefore put our hope in You, O Lord our God, that we may speedily behold the splendour of Your might, when You will remove the idols from the earth, and the false

349

It must be remembered, that from their perspective to be anti-social is to be truly good because this society must be destroyed.

912 gods will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the kingdom of the Almighty, and all human beings will call on Your name, and when all the wicked of the earth will be turned towards You. Let all who dwell in the world recognise and know that to You every knee must bend, and every tongue must swear allegiance. Before You, O Lord our God, let them bend the knee and prostrate themselves, and to Your glorious name let them render honour. Let them all accept the yoke of Your Kingdom, so that You may reign over them speedily, and for ever and ever. For the kingdom is Yours, and You will reign in glory for all eternity. As it is written in Your Torah: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” And it is said: “And the Lord shall be King over all the earth: on that day the Lord shall be One, and His name One. (As translated by political theorist Leo Strauss (Strauss 1997 (1962): 327-328)) When we advocate for indigenous rights, multiculturalism, technological feminism, opposing toxic masculinity, then we are all, without knowing it, and I was once personally a strong, at times militant, advocate for all these causes, fighting to realise their vision of God. A vision of the world where white people hate themselves and their traditions, a vision of the world without cultural norms, a vision of the world without genders or the nuclear family, a vision of the world devoid of everything except instrumental logics. This is what is meant when Jewish scholars observe the special mission of Jews as the Chosen by God, as Jewish scholar Beker wrote, Chosenness is an all-encompassing term that covers different dimensions of the unique condition of the Jews . . . Chosenness in the Bible also refers to the “Chosen” or “Promised” Land and the Chosen City, Jerusalem, all of which continue to be a critical part of the conflict in the Middle East. Chosenness is also the fundamental reason behind the uniqueness and separateness of the Jewish people wherever they live, in whatever age, in different cultures, in dictatorships, or in democracies. It includes the biblical mission of the Jews to act as a “Light unto the Nations”, in the words of Prophet Isaiah (32:6), and to deliver a special moral message whether in religious or in secular life, whether rabbis or as antireligious revolutionaries. We will illustrate how even Jews who had distanced themselves from their religion, and sometimes had actively fought against it, were still imbued with this sense of a special mission to “repair the world” (tikkun olam in Hebrew). (Beker 2008: 3) As the reader might remember, all these notions of “chosenness” harmonise with different expressions of redemption. Jews are chosen in terms of being the instruments of redemptions. Reflect not only how these beliefs might relate to Aleinu but how absolutely outrageous such claims are. These people believe that they are entitled to a stretch of land and a city because it is the “Chosen Land” and the “Chosen City” for the “Chosen People” by God. What hubris to believe that it is your mission to be the “Light unto the Nations”, no matter your current social arrangements, because your knowledge of God is such that it grants you a unique status amongst Men. How delusional to believe that it is your “burden” to “deliver a special moral message” whether they are religious or “antireligious revolutionaries”. They truly believe

913 that even if Jews reject Judaism, like Karl Marx, they continue their “special mission” to heal the world. What makes this especially noxious is that Jews have been thought, wherever they have lived, to be the most immoral of people or, as Greek composer Mikos Theodorakis observed in 2004, they are “the root of the world evil”. (Theodorakis as seen in Beker 2008: 4) Beker is honest enough to link revolutionary movements like Bolshevism with this Jewish idea of Chosenness and their obligation to “repair the world”. It is because of such beliefs that they see humans as mere slaves of Jews and not as internally motivated beings as ends in themselves. Not only has the reversal of values to reflect Gnostic aspirations been extremely successful, but there is also hardly a school of thought in tertiary education today, including theoretical physics, which has not been thoroughly shaped by Gnostic Jewish intellectuals. There is no discipline where this is more the case then with “feminism”. Feminism attracts particular attention because it is so central to the Gnostics overall project, they have been extraordinarily successful at realizing their agenda. Every household now is the front line of a gendered culture war for power that sees traditional values being systematically overturned through an enduring domestic conflict which has left few unharmed and many deeply wounded, most especially our children, ultimately aimed at destroying the Western nuclear family. This movement believes, as it says in a recent article, that the “white family” is “an expression of the desire to breathe life into whiteness – that is, to perpetuate and maintain it – by means of the nuclear family structure.” (Samudzi 2020) It is the place, as Nietzsche observes, where “piety, pity, [and] love” are taught to the next generation much to his disgust. It is the central role in which the nuclear family functions why it has received special attention over the last 120 years. It is because it is the institution that is the measure of a successful Western society, more so than any other, why it has been a special target for destruction. It has long been known by Gnostic Jews that the best way to destroy the nuclear family is through “freeing”, in terms of undermining historically imposed moral constraints, of female sexuality. Female sexual freedom has been one of the central projects, if not the most important project, of Gnostic Jewry. That they have expended so much effort in realizing it evinces the importance of its realization. From at least the work of Sigmund Freud, monogamous, married women have been cast as not only those who lead miserable lives of self-sacrifice that results in all kinds of mental illness but that the nuclear family, which requires such monogamy, has been portrayed as the primary source of social disfunction. Indeed, destruction of traditional families and the associated end of private property have long been thought to be indicators of social decline. It was with the hope of encouraging sexual licence amongst women that was the true driving force behind encouraging women to enter the workforce not any vision of “entitlements”, “rights” or “liberation”. Ensuring that women no longer inhabited, and dominated, the

914 private sphere, ensured that women were not only readily accessible to predatory men to be exploited like everyone else but that some women would be financially independent of their husbands when it did indeed come time to break up the family. The particular feminism advanced by Gnostic Jewry, and that there are different kinds is important to acknowledge in the sense that it is not simply a choice of “for” or “against” “feminism” but what kind of feminism does Western civilization truly hope to realize. Gnostic Jewry has promoted a feminism that wants to do away with the gender distinction all together, realize men as women, and encourage a particular expression of womanhood. A vision of womanhood that is highly sexual, physically aggressive and materially focused. Talk to just about any woman today, those multitude desperately flicking through dating apps, especially younger women, and this is the exact kind of woman that one encounters. The perfect male partner today is not somebody who is caring, loving, a good father, but someone who is sexually fulfilling and financial established. The Gnostic vision of womanhood seems to have been realised in terms of becoming prostitutes. This is, again, an exact reversal of what has been valued as feminine virtues for millennia as advanced by thinkers as diverse as Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche himself. It is important to appreciate that this vision of womanhood is not merely a strategy of divide and conquer, although it is this, but a necessary step in the process of destroying Western civilization and enslaving women. This outcome took decades to realise, as already observed it was not until very recently indeed that most women really came to accepted feminist arguments because historically the kind of gender conflict “second wave” feminist were proposing just did not exist. Today women enthusiastically turn their backs on traditional roles of nurturing and raising the next generation of moral children and then drawing on those experiences creatively to influence the public sphere to realizing their vision of the world. Friedrich Nietzsche argued, I think with great insight, that women actually expressed their greatest power over the public sphere when they exercised their power in the private sphere. As Appel (1997: 521) observes, according to Nietzsche, “It would be in women’s best interests to submit to the natural order of unequal gender relations, for they would thereby retain the advantages of their abilities in one crucial area where . . . Nietzsche believes they exercise great power: the area of personal relations with men.” Appel’s account may not be quite right in the sense that Nietzsche himself was advancing the much more ancient argument, not that women are “unequal” and should just accept that but that women express their power as equals but in a different way. Nietzsche believed, “. . .that women’s true interests are best defended not through “unnatural” feminist demands for equal access to the male terrain of public power but rather through woman’s more “natural” range of activity in the private sphere.” (Appel 1997: 519) He explicitly argued, that by fighting for “grammar school education, trousers and the political rights of voting

915 cattle” women lose their true power in exchange for the same illusion of power that have entranced the disempowered men for centuries. After all, if there is one thing that this volume should have made clear to even the most casual reader, that is primary power in Western societies does not truly rest with white male politicians. Contemporary politics at best ensures that the “trains run on time”, the maintain social function, while the real decisions about what our society believes, what it pursues as a society, are being made secretly and then imposed onto society from above for the technicians to implement. Nietzsche is arguing that women exercised their greatest control over society in part by having the power, in Western societies, to choose a particular partner and then to raise the next generation of children. Men once conformed to what women wanted, would behave in a way that women prized, in order to try to attract a high-quality life-partner. Women today are seen as sexually available but long-term relationships are no longer highly prized. It does not matter so much what a woman believes as much as what she is sexually prepared to do. As can be seen, under such circumstances women have lost the power to shape society at large in exchange for sex. Further, in being mothers, women raised the next generation in what they believed. In handing this task over to governments, Gnostic Jews now determine what the next generation will learn. Woman have lost so much, long term loving Browdrelationships, being treated in a privileged manner, power over men in relationships, and determining the values of the entire society, for a career that is often one with only low status. The reason why Gnostic Jews focused so much attention on the way woman are, is not to “liberate” them, Gnostic Jews only think of serving their God and care nothing for women, but because they once held so much power. Power that they have surrendered to Gnostic Jews. Nietzsche was perfectly correct with his analysis. The ultimate aim of Gnostic Jewry is to turn women from reproductive members of our society, that had a great deal of power expressed through the domestic sphere, into just another productive slave without power working under ever more liberal labour conditions for the benefit of those who truly determine the direction society will take. One cannot help but to think of Aristotle’s argument that not all people should be enslaved but only natural slaves, that is, people who benefit from their enslavement because they are unable to live without their master’s instruction. This is exactly how the Gnostic Jews view Westerners and, worst of all, this is how Westerners have come to view themselves. Not only do Gnostic Jews dominate our society, which they do, but one must learn to think like they do if one wishes to achieve success in our society including academia. They have managed to change the ecosystem within which we all live our lives so that they, or people just like them, will be successful while those who believe in morality and those who, therefore, can seek the truth, are marginalize even denigrated. This really has been an unbelievably successful strategy that has changed our society fundamentally in only seventy or

916 so years. It really is an impressive achievement. Although it is a great achievement it is certainly not unprecedented. A very small group of American Jews managed to realise the Chinese Cultural Revolution with its motto, destroy the “four olds” – old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. (Angang 2016: 283) In a period of mere months, crazed young people were physically dragging once respected academics from their lecture theatres into public spaces, holding show trials and physically hanging them for maintaining traditional values such as genders. Within months after its onset, China was ripped apart by terrible violence as young “activists” were directed to purge China of all traditions. Those who were lucky enough not to be killed were sent for “re-education”. Recently, CrossFit CEO Greg Glassman was questioned by a Black Lives Matter protester over his businesses silence, and he observed, rightly, that he thought she was “delusional”350. This response outraged young Americans and led to a massive public backlash against Glassman if not driven at least supported by the media. That is, the media presented the public response as reasonable and Glassman as somehow ignorant or out of touch. When his comments became public, other businesses, cowered by the ferocity and power of the Black Lives movement, began withdrawing support for CrossFit and refusing to buy his products. This campaign was so effective that it forced Glassman to resign. His career was destroyed because he called a delusional protestor “delusional”. Again, Australian TV personality Sam Newman described George Floyd as a “piece of shit”, saying that although his death was “disgraceful” and that it “should never have happened”, people should not put Floyd on a pedestal because he was a serial criminal. Newman was observing the fact that George Floyd was indeed a habitual criminal with a serious drug problem who, as the full video confirms, simply refused to obey police directives. The quantity of drugs in his system would have put a strain on his body without the physical exertion involved in his struggle to resist the police. Given the facts, Newman’s comments were blunt, which was what he was famous for, but certainly could not be said to be wrong. Despite the truthfulness of Newman’s observations, and the fact that he had been a successful broadcaster for decades, the public outcry over his comments was so great that he was almost instantly dismissed. Despite the apparent broad public outrage against any criticism of Black Lives Matter and the unconditional support for the movement, a survey was undertaken in the United States which found that 78% of Americans voter said that the statement “all lives matter” was closest to their personal views when contrasted with “black lives matter”. Only 11% of respondents said that the statement “black lives matter” was closest to their personal view. That is, as with so much of these apparently “mass movements” most of it is hype that is promoted and advanced by a compliant media. This voice of a few is greatly magnified

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Few truer observations have been made.

917 by having access to resources. American Jew George Soros was a strong financial supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement as he was of many disruptive social movements. Despite the media and the financial support. only 11%, strongly supportive of the “Black Lives Matter” movement which suggests that not only did the majority of white people not support the Black Lives Matter movement, nor most of the Latino and other minorities, but some portion of the black community also must have found the movement’s aims questionable (around 13% of the United States population is “black”). (Rasmussen 2015) Along with these personal attacks against people speaking the truth, there is also a movement to tear down statues of historically important figures, change the content of classic books and stop showing old show and movies with content now deemed “inappropriate”. Just look at our society. Really, look at the place we live in today. Society really has been turned in on itself even though such ideas are not even popular. Orwell’s worst nightmares have become a reality. We really are going through a cultural revolution comparable to that experienced in China and it is motivated by the same forces. As Sidney Rittenberg said, an American Jew who was instrumental in implementing the Chinese Cultural Revolution, quoting American poet Edwin Markham, They drew a circle that shut me out Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout But love and I had the wit to win; We drew a circle that took them in.351 That is, the Jewish Gnostics have now drawn a circle, defined truth and progress, not so that it will exclude but, as Sabbatai Tzevi taught, so that everyone will be “brought in”, everyone will come to adopt their ideas, and this is their strategy to power. Sabbatai’s strategy, like Jewish Gnosticism generally, were once called heretical by the Orthodox Jewish community but they really have successfully turned everything around. As Markham is observing, this is much more dangerous, much more difficult phenomenon to fight, and has proven to be much more effective. Another front for this cultural war is in academia. Today, the most decrepit “academic work” is seen as legitimate feminist ‘analysis’ while legitimate quality research that might challenge the political program of Gnostic Judaism is not only marginalized, not only does it not get published but attracts ridicule and hatred. For just one concrete example of the influence of Gnosticism, in 1952, the Jewish scholar Hans

351

Here Rittenberg is referring to the way that people have historically excluded Jews from mainstream society because they were viewed as destructive and dangerous. Jews, particularly neo-Hasidic Jews, were “heretics” and “rebels” but they have the “wit” to draw a circle that “took them in” or, whereas Jews were excluded the neoHasidic strategy is to inculcate people to their system of beliefs. The later strategy is much more effective because it is harder to resist.

918 Jonas wrongly argued that the apparent symmetries between Heideggerian scholarship and gnostic beliefs was because Heidegger’s existentialism replicated gnostic nihilism in both advocating the belief that man was set against the world in God’s absence. Therefore, to overcome Heideggerian philosophy was to overcome Gnosticism. Later, in 1964, Jonas adjusted his argument against Heidegger by removing Gnosticism from his analysis and instead arguing that it was actually a deep paganism, hidden beneath the surface piety, and not Gnosticism that made Heidegger vulnerable to the Nazi allure. Why this change of heart is significant is that it was this second speech that became a popular sensation. It received prominent coverage in the New York Times. For making this argument, for forgiving Gnosticism of being implicated in Heidegger’s Nazism, Jonas was rewarded by “the fame reserved for the most celebrated of academic stars”. (Lazier 2009: 36) The reason for presenting this example is certainly not to claim that anything Hans Jonas wrote was in some way superficial but how when you deliver a particular agenda you get rewarded whereas if you go against that agenda, by rightly observing that there is indeed an intimacy between Gnosticism and Nazism, you get punished. That they can promote a particular political agenda through what should be a truth institution like a university is because if it is believed that all truth is power then there is no understanding of truth that has a convincing claim over our lives. Anything that people disagree with no longer has to be considered and engaged but is understood as just expressions of power. In practice, this attitude means that intellectual exchange, argument using reason, is no longer required but merely an emotional response, using rhetorical devices like ridicule or disparagement, that disregards anything that a person might oppose. As this is the case, it means that no scientific observation or sound argument can undermine the political agenda of Neo-Hasidism because they simply deny the very possibility of truth. On a program on the Australian national broadcaster, Stop Everything, a ‘feminist’ academic argued that the cartoon ‘My Little Pony’, a facile children's cartoon targeting pre-school aged girls, was being dismissed, according to the guest “feminist”, because it was an expression of “girl culture” and, she claimed, “girl culture” was always demeaned in “patriarchal societies”, like ours, as ‘low culture’.352 A more obvious reason for suggesting that ‘My Little Pony’ is not given the status of “high culture” is not because it is an expression of ‘girl culture’ in a patriarchal society but because, just like

352

That this has not historically been the case is shown time and again. Quite to the contrary, it has been well documented that as early as the 15th century women were making important contributions to writing that were very well respected. Sarah Ross (2009) writes of several authors in this period, from both England and Italy, who were extremely well respected, and influential authors who were read in parlors of their times. Further, Wendy Arons (2006) has also revealed that German women in the 18th century were making important cultural contributions to the public sphere through writing. To argue ‘girl culture’ is not a valued as equally as ‘boy culture’ is facile and simplistic lacking in nuance and really just radical politics that is absolutely underserving of having any standing within academia.

919 Thomas the Tank Engine353, it is a children's program that makes no claim to be high culture. It is not valued as high cultural expression like quality classical music, truly great works of art or, even, high-quality popular music, simply because it is not high culture. It is not a great work of art. It is a rather meaningless program intended to entertain children. Arguments that deny the distinction between “high” and “low” culture, of course, have their own history. Eastern European American Jew Lawrence Levine argued in Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, that the division of art into high culture and low culture only emerged in the 19th century as an expression of class distinction and therefore, as with class distinction, should be removed. Unsurprisingly, as with just about everything this theo-political zealot argues, this claim has been shown beyond doubt to be wrong, as even a passing familiarity with art history and cultural artifacts would attest. Yes, the conceptual turn in Western art takes place in the late 19th through the 20th century, where art turns away from traditionally dominant realism to become something disruptive and highly political, but this was because art had lost its true purpose. Realism, as such, cannot be political. What emerged in the late 19th century was an art movement where it is claimed you need certain artistic knowledge to appreciate its true artistry. This argument was made because most of 20th century “art” is shit. (Indeed, shit was literally sold as art) This was done because Gnostic Jews reject realism not because, of course, they do not like it on aesthetic grounds but how can there be realist art when there is no such thing as reality. In the absence of the real there can be no such thing as “realist art”. Instead, they promoted conceptual, “narrative art”, that had a political agenda. Everything, by their account, must serve an instrumental purpose to exist as a thing including “art”. Prior to this conceptual turn, art was still judged on its quality, of course, with some visual artist’s and sculptor’s works being seen, literally, by everyone, from a child through to the most sophisticated art critic, as being of high quality while other people’s output, like that of the child’s, was seen as low quality. So yes, that conceptual art became “high art” and other art became “low art” emerged in the 19th century but that is the result of Gnostic influence not an argument against quality in the Western tradition. To return to colourful, cake shitting, ponies, to the feminists out there who may be confused, My Little Pony, by this everyday measure, is low quality. The problem with contemporary society, and this really is the most important feature of our contemporary crisis, is that through the work of people like Lawrence Levine, we have not only lost the ability to judge what is high or low culture, but nobody is allowed to judge what is high or low culture. There no longer is any non-instrumental cultural measure of any kind. There are no standards. The destruction of culture, as such, disguised as that

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I cannot believe I have to make this argument.

920 impossible monstrosity “multi-culturalism”, is that people cannot judge at all what is good or bad, what is base or noble. It is the religio-political aspiration, the destruction of the experience of ‘the good’, derived from particular theo-ontological beliefs, that is the aspiration of Gnostic Judaism. The kind of facile argument that “My Little Pony” is disregarded as high art because it is “girl culture” is not only being made in feminism but is replicated in ‘ethnic studies’ or ‘critical race theory’. These are entire university disciplines, paid for with the taxes of hard-working white people, dedicated to undermining traditional white Protestant civilization. As even the President of the United States observed, The left is attempting to . . . divide Americans by race in the service of political power. By viewing every issue through the lens of race, they want to impose a new segregation, and we must not allow that to happen. Critical race theory, the 1619 Project, and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country. (Trump 2020) Indeed, this ‘culture of critique’, as MacDonald calls it, is being realised across every university in the Anglosphere if not every university in the Western world. Indeed, an Australian academic (Ashman 2019) recently employed the phrase “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”. What he was trying to claim is that education is not about giving people knowledge, filling the emply pail of the mind with truth, but primarily about energising political activism, lighting the fire, in students to change society.354 It is this exhaustive political agenda, that starts in schools, that leads to poor research because it is not true, but it is “interested”, it is for a purpose, it is political. To draw attention to the degrading quality of academic research, three academics, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose, published ridiculous papers that appeared to be in the disciplines of feminism and cultural studies. They successfully published these absolutely outrageous papers in highly respected “academic” journals. One of the many academic papers that were successfully published, argued that dog parks were “rapecondoning spaces” that, through the lens of ‘black feminist criminology’, provided insights into how to train “men” out of their “sexual violence” and “bigotry”. These academics called the publication of such low-quality research, research that is being increasingly taught not only at university but also in our high schools, ‘grievance studies’ because “they operate primarily by focusing upon and inflaming the grievances of certain identity groups”. This is research not to fill the pail but to light the fire. In the same

354

Which, ironically, is a representation of a quote from Plutarch who actually wrong in his essay “On Listening”, “For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting – no morethen it motivates one towards originality and instils the desire for truth.” Plutarch is being inspired by the traditional understanding of “fire”, not in terms of social unrest, but, in many ways the opposite, creativity and truth. This is why Prometheus is said to steal fire from the Gods to give humanity creativity and truth and why Jesus is claims to be the “light” and the “truth”. It is such a wicked misrepresentation.

921 way that feminism nurtures women’s grievances against men and “patriarchal society”, creating conflicts in the home and in society at large, and so-called, ethnic studies which nurtures racial conflict, so does this research try to leverage conflict between people within society as a disruptive force. This is the exact strategy of Gnostic Judaism proposed by Otto Gross, to relate to the “outsider”, turned into viewing themselves as an outsider, to nurture grievance amongst certain groups, women, minorities, the disabled, and then supporting these groups in their struggle so that society is not only disrupted but that historical conceptions of ‘the good’ are undermined. This is what Martin Buber, one of the most influential scholars of the neo-Hasidic movement, argued was the I-Thou relationship. He argued that the “other” should not be seen as consisting of isolated qualities that are a fixed part of the objective world but that through dialogue the “unity of being” a human can be discovered that will sweep aside notions like ‘the feminine’ to be replace with ‘the human’. This might sound convincing today but, this is nothing but an expression of a religious belief that objective reality, the divine borders, do not exist. All division are nothing but human constructs that must be revealed for what they are in order to be swept aside. Both the feminine and masculine virtues, by this movement’s thinking, are nothing but a violence against “natural” humans who do not really belong to such binary arrangements. Hasidism, in developing the ideas of Jewish Gnosticism, believe that all people, like their God, are really androgynous and masculine and feminine virtues only do a violence to their God’s creation. This conclusion, of course, is not based on research but is merely an article of faith that they are doing everything that they can to realise in the world. In our schools today, brainwashed nuts are paid to attend and tell young boys that they do not need to grow up and be strong, resilient, emotionally constrained individuals but that this historical vision of masculinity is dangerous and ‘toxic’. No wonder young men are killing themselves more than they ever have ever before in history. This is not a message about loving yourself but a message to hate yourself. Lukianoff and Haidt argue that as a result of these kinds of strategies there has been nurtured a kind of collective madness that is having real world impacts. As they write, . . . we argued that many parents, K-12 teachers, professors, and university administrators have been unknowingly teaching a generation of students to engage in the mental habit commonly seen in people who suffer from anxiety and depression. We suggested that students were beginning to react to words, books, and visiting speakers with fear and anger because they had been taught to exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions. Such thought patterns directly harmed student’s mental health and interfered with their intellectual development . . . At some schools, a culture of defensive self-censorship seemed to be emerging . . . (2018: 10)

922 This nurturing of grievances is not just poor-quality research that attracts government funding, but it is part of a deliberate strategy to destroy historical power relations in order, ultimately, for a group of religiously motivated actors to seize power. It is a way of controlling how and what we all think.George Orwell argued that such thought control was an expression of authoritarianism. As Orwell wrote, “[Authoritarianism} not only forbids you to express – even to think – certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct.” No better account of our contemporary condition could be written. This education is making our society sick. As can be seen from earlier in this chapter, this strategy has been very successful. Tertiary education has been described as an “antidote to parochialism. One might not be surprised, therefore, to learn that higher levels of education are associated with reduced prejudice, lower levels of ethnocentrism, and greater levels of tolerance.” (Jardina 2019: 94) It is good to see that the efforts of Gnostic Judaism are being rewarded. For just one example of how effective grievance studies have been, as late as 2009 only 44% of America’s black population and 22% of white population believed that racism was a “big problem”, just 8 years later, 8 years of intense propaganda especially through Hollywood movies, 81% of America’s black population and 52% of America’s white population now believe that it is a “big problem”. (PEW Research Centre 2009 ABC News) Interestingly, over a period of time when actual racism had been eroded, not only did those who thought racism was a big problem almost double amongst the black population but more than double in the white population. This would suggest that these massive increases are not being driven by experience but by something else. This “something else” is most probably education. The cost and extent of this nurturing of grievances cannot be overstated. The costs are immeasurable not only culturally but productively. Increasingly, the only way to navigate the university system, not only to be promoted within it but to even get decent marks as an undergraduate, is to advance the agenda of grievance studies, to advance the project of Gnostic Judaism. This has meant not only are poorer quality students who adhere to the new orthodoxy uncritically advancing through our education system filling positions of power and influence while truly critical thinkers are not only marginalized but literally harangued out of the education system. Professor Sean Stevens observes when speaking on gender difference that, “I don’t know any real researcher of human behaviour who would say it’s all nature or all nurture.” For making this basic observation that goes against the political program of Gnostic Judaism, Professor Stevens and his peers have faced “political pushback”. As he says, “Many people are uncomfortable with the idea that gender is not purely a social construct.” For this his work has faced extreme form of “critical attention”. (Stevens as seen in Goldhill 2018) This is not only happening to highly qualified academics, a recent study found that 81% of people with high levels of white racial

923 consciousness failed to graduate college. (Jardina 2019: 97) Although factors that inform this kind of statistical outcome are complex, that toxic environment against someone who strongly identified as “white” would make tertiary education a difficult space to navigate. To show how publication is related to a particular agenda, the authors who revealed the nature of ‘grievance studies’ originally wrote any stupid thing believing that it was just poor-quality research that was being uncritically published. The aim initially was to simply show the deterioration of academia generally, but they had no success with this approach. They could not get published. It was only when they tailored their fake poor-quality research so that it addressed issues like ‘white power’ or ‘hetro-normativity’, while drawing upon certain established literature such as “black feminism” that suddenly everything that they began to write was suddenly published. The point is, it is not just that many authors write rubbish and get funding and published in respected journals, it is not a reflection of a general deterioration in our academic institutions, it is that you have to write a particular kind of rubbish, one harmonious with the political movement called Gnostic Judaism. In parallel with the publication of rubbish research is the attack on quality research and the denial of truth that, of course, runs counter to this ideological approach. Nothing dampens religious zeal like the truth. A renowned physicist with a strong publishing record, Professor Alessandro Strumia, claimed that, based on publishing impact derived from citations, women were being employed and promoted at lower levels of competence then men. Although it is well known by everyone in academia, the government and many other professions, that at the moment women are being ‘fast-tracked’ in their careers so that formal gender equality is realised, nobody is allowed to officially acknowledge this well-known practice is taking place. After publishing his credibly research, Strumia suddenly failed to get any of his research in physics published, although he claimed it adhered to researching standards, research standards that he had satisfied time and again in his long career. Finally, he was dismissed. These are not isolated examples. This kind of thing is happening in universities around the world. The resonances with China’s Cultural Revolution are clear. Although destroying the normative framework that permits culture and replacing it with technical values has permitted Gnostic Jews to both intellectually excel and be understood as ‘intelligent’ and succeed as the constraint of cultural norms no longer impedes their social advancement. Greed, for just one example, was once view as ‘bad’ and to be too greedy would have impeded someone’s progress because they would be viewed as immoral. When greed is no longer viewed as ‘bad’ but affirmed as the new ‘good’, because, after all, everyone is really greedy, then anyone who is ‘greedy’ will succeed. This altering of social hierarchy is not the full account of Jewish overrepresentation in positions of power and influence, as already discussed, but it certain does explain both some of Jewish success and how they have

924 managed to shape the values of the West. Aristotle famously argued that only a good society can produce people of naturally good character. This is reflected in the writing of the Bible “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” (Matthew 7:18-20) The reason Aristotle and Matthew argue this are twofold. Firstly, of course, it takes people who know what is good and can be good role models to raise good children. If a person’s parents lack morality or if the community leaders are immoral then how could that society raise good children? But there is another element to this, one that is poignant to our current situation, in a bad society bad people flourish and good people suffer. As an example of this, as already touched upon, prior to the 1980s bank managers were respected people. They were socially conservative but could be trusted to make thoughtful and considered judgements. They did work for a bank, but they also delivered an essential public service. In short, bank managers were long thought to be necessarily people of good character. Then, in the late 80s in places like England and Australia, this older generation of bank managers were forcefully and unceremoniously replaced by young mavericks who thought of banking exhaustively as a “product” and banking generally as a profit-making enterprise. This new generation of bankers were certainly not respected nor conservative but more akin to fasttalking wheelers and dealers who would have once sold used cars. From this time onwards, banking was no longer thought to be a public service, a common good, as well as a business, but according to their thinking, exhaustively a profit-making venture. We are still trying to clean the mess in banking that this generation created but no amount of regulation will stop dishonest men for being dishonest. The point is that in a society that values people of good character then their leaders must have a good character, people of good character flourish in societies that value good character traits. In a corrupt society, corrupt people flourish. It is in both of these ways that bad societies cannot produce good people, they cannot be raised in the first place and, even if they could, they would not flourish. As Joseph de Maistre rightly observed, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” A bad society deserves and will get a bad government while a good society, informed by the principle of goodness, will get a good government because in such a society, good people will flourish. Research contrasting policies that contributed to nation building, as against those which inhibited nation building and, therefore, were related to ‘failed states’, found that states that have populations that speak the same language, share broadly agreed to social norms, and have a strong sense of loyalty to their nation, build strong, successful, wealthy nations. (Wimmer 2018) The same study found that divisions along ethnic lines or a sense that the state is not concerned with everybody’s well-being were identified as attitudes that resulted in failed states. Surprisingly, considering the enthusiastic pursuit of diversity in the West, the research found that true diversity, “hampers the prospects of political integration across

925 ethnic divides by making it more difficult to knit encompassing networks of alliances” (Wimmer 2018: 229) and that such division resulted in failed states. It must be remembered that cultural diversity is not simply the result of people coming from a range of different racial backgrounds but when people identify with a distinct identity, maintain a separate language, nurture norms not shared by others and believe that they were not benefiting equally as others, then this resulted in a failed state. Today, of course, ethnic divisions are being amplified and actually formed into a simplistic and deeply questionable dualistic opposition between “people of colour” and “whites”. This division, as with the older class division between “working class” and “middle class”, has been part of the project of Gnostic Judaism, to nurture small groups to advocate for their interests in order to undermine the collective identity and any belief in mutual benefit. It is this fracturing that we know results in state failure. These conclusions are, of course, not surprising to anyone. It has long been known that nurturing ethnic divisions can destroy the unity of a country. The United States spent billions of dollars nurturing ethnic division in the Ukraine in order to oppose Russian hegemony in that country. They deliberately funded Ukrainian nationalism, even some organizations on the margins of acceptability, in order to amplify divisions so that the society would fracture along ethnic lines. People who identified as ethnic Russians on one side and those who identified as ethnic Ukrainians on the other. The truth is that grievance studies is doing the exact same thing in Western countries except that is funded by the state. Grievance studies nurtures gender and ethnic divides and will inevitably result, if not reversed, in failed states. An example of this nurturing of grievances dividing communities can be seen when a scholarship for United States “First Nations” people was offered at a prestigious American university. Not long after the program was introduced, an academic visiting the university was shocked to find that the scholarship recipients were studying a wide range of courses and were mixing freely with other, non-Indigenous, students in the university. To fix this ‘problem’, the academic worked with the university so that all scholarship recipients were forced to undertake a course in “Indigenous politics”. This course focused on historical harms done to First Nations people and outlined a political program aimed at supposedly addressing these past wrongs. In a very short period of time, the First Nations people separated themselves from the wider student body and became politically active on campus fighting for First Nation People’s “rights”. The academic who arranged this situation was very proud of her success at nurturing First Nations ethnic identity and political activism and the division within the student body that this strategy realized. In contrast, according to Quah, [t]he rationale for the Singapore government’s approach to nation building has always been and continues to be the nurturing of the growth of Singaporean national identity among the population, which will surmount all the chauvinistic and particularistic pulls of the Chinese, Malay, or Indian identities of the various ethnic groups on the island. The

926 objective of the political leaders is to build a nation of Singapore out of the disparate groups in the city-state. The government has relied on many instruments to promote national integration, including the promotion of economic development, public housing, national service, educational policies, the mass media, periodic national campaigns, and grassroots organization. (Quah 1990: 45) Places like Singapore and even China itself, both dominated by ethnic Han Chinese, work very hard, wielding all the instruments of state, to realize homogenous populations with a shared national identity.355 Singapore, about which there is more public information, readily acknowledges its multiracial and multilingual populations but never promotes multiculturalism as this might fracture the sense of homogeneity and shared purpose of its population. As Velayutham observes, “Multiracialism is a fundamental pillar of postcolonial Singaporean society. It is a political ideology that is actively promoted by the city-state to recognise/represent Singapore . . .” (2007: 1) The deliberate homogenizing of “national” populations was probably first used anywhere in the world in 18th and 19th century Europe to create the national identities that drove modernization projects in these countries. What can be seen in the difference between a place like Singapore and a place like Australia and New Zealand today are two different vision of how nations can move forward with their racially diverse populations. One vision aspires to have indigenous and ethnic minority groups freely mixing with the general population each group earning the respect and friendship from the other as equals. This would realise the kind of society envisioned by Martin Luther King, where “people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character”. Against this, researchers like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2010) have argued, expressing the dominant academic view in the West, that statements like, “Colour should never be a way to define one’s identity. Your colour has little to do with who you are as a person. One’s environment makes a bigger impact than skin colour” or “Why would my skin colour effect who I am as a person? The colour of someone’s skin does not define them” are viewed as subtle forms of racism. According to the dominant academic view in the West, such statements are as problematic as overt racist statements like, “Asians are inferior to Europeans” because, as Jardina (2019: 151) claims, they “allow whites to deny the existence of racial discrimination, and it legitimizes practices that maintain racial inequality.” This is a vision, the dominant one being nurtured today by Gnostic Judaism for numerous reasons, that is dividing society thereby undermining Christian universal norms. This is a vision of society where ‘people of colour’ are fighting against ‘white people’ in a never-ending zero-sum game for power and wealth. It is this second vision that is being nurtured by grievance studies courses throughout the West and it is the road to ruin

355

This is certainly not to suggest that extreme forms of racism are not expressed in places like Singapore or China. These are deeply racist countries.

927 for both whites and the people of colour alike as societies fall into chaos. Political Hasidim know that this is true. It might be argued that if everyone were colour-blind then everyone would be measured on who they are, but this is exactly why the political Hasidim want to erode valuing someone according to their character because it relies on a universal experience of the good. The truth is that they want to do away with the very ideal of ‘the good’ or ‘excellence’ so the only measure left is formal. It might be true that men are not as good at nursing as women or that people of colour are better athletes then whites, but these measures rely on universal standards of excellence which are, according to Gnostic Judaism, ‘evil’. We are left with no other measure then proportional representation of minority groups where every perspective, no matter how in conflict with the other, is granted equal worth. The early feminists fought for equality in the sense of being colour blind, they argued that if you were a woman that was excellent at maths or physics then you should be allowed to be a professor of mathematics or physics. After the war, this struggle was replaced because political Hasidim made the measure itself the problem. Without a standard of excellence by which merit might be measured then the only just allocation is to argue that there must be 50% of every cohort of each sex whether those people are meritorious, according to an agreed standard, or not. To finish this section, some people within academia and other professions have tried to resist the spread of this destructive culture of critique by arguing in support for the well-established Protestant right to criticise in the name of truth even if this does offend. Protestantism argued so forcefully for critical engagement because it believed that truth was with God. Truth was God, so to move towards the truth was to become more intimate with God. Against those who try to argue for freedom of speech, they are met, by people like Amada Taub, (2015) with the claim that there is no organized movement trying to wedge society apart along gender and ethnic lines but merely marginalized people trying to have a voice. She claims that calls for freedom of speech to criticise are actually designed to marginalize legitimate “grievances” and that any resistance to “demands for inclusion” is simply a reaction to uncomfortable “truths”. As Taub writes, These critiques basically accuse their targets of being oppressors, or perpetuating injustice, and that’s a deeply hurtful accusation. Indeed, that kind of criticism hurts most if you are someone who cares about social justice or do think that discrimination is harmful when it’s implicit as well as when it’s explicit. (Taub 2015) Many feel that such restriction have undermined the historical highly prized “freedom of speech”. As Hitchens argues, “. . .it would be possible to argue that freedom of speech and thought have actually diminished in Britain since 1967, especially thanks to the speech codes of political correctness . . .” (2013)

928 Hitchens says this ignorant of the full extent of the silencing being undertaken by Gnostic Judaism. Douglas Murray has argued that claims like Taub’s are framed in such a way that any attempt to undermine it simply cannot win. Either one stays quiet and lets the ridiculous argument stand or one points out the weaknesses of the argument and is labelled at least as someone feeling uncomfortable with the facts if not, indeed, a “sexist” or “racist” or whatever. How can you, given these constraints, respond to her claims? Ultimately, Taub’s argument is that people should not call out ridiculous arguments because this could be “hurtful”. This is a perfect example of how Gnostic Judaism responds to attempts to criticise their highly destructive theo-political agenda. Amanda Staub is President of the Greater Wenatchee Jewish Community. She does not say that there is a heretical Jewish theo-political movement to which she belongs that has worked since the turn of the 20th century to undermine all existing virtues because a heretical movement within Judaism tells them that this must be done. She does not say that the ultimate aim is for this religious movement is to determine every aspect of other people’s lives because people are incapable of controlling their own lives. They cannot control their own lives as they are ignorant of God’s will. She does not say that with this article she is participating in a strategy to deliberately relate to an historically marginalized group in society in order to undermine the existing social order so that the resultant leadership void can be filled by her own people. No, she appears to take the high moral ground and claims that it is those calling for free speech who are the real danger while people like herself who are shutting down counter arguments and trying to reveal the truth are being forced to accept deceptions, half-truths and misrepresentations, are the real oppressors. Anybody who has even a passing familiarity with the historical treatment of the Arabs in Israel and Palestine or indeed have read the continuous claims of Jewish racial superiority in text published even in English, will know that this movement does not really care about “human rights”. As will be explored at length later in this series, it will be revealed how Leo Strauss advanced the argument that Gnostic Judaism should fight for “human rights” because they erode cultural norms and can be manipulated over time to serve his movement’s purposes. Advocating for human rights has nothing to do actually with human rights. Human rights have proven themselves to be the perfect instrument for nurturing division, undermining “morality” and to ultimately realize an extremely homogenized world that is totally intolerant of alternative points of view. That is, if Amanda Taub was honest and admitted that she was silencing criticism because it undermined her theological beliefs, then people would rightly dismiss what she had to say as religious fanaticism because that is what is. That is why Taub and the many others like her hide behind the fear of “offence” or any other justification for silencing any kind of substantial engagement with these kinds of claims. Interestingly, in the argument Taub does present, she quickly moves from what might be an acceptable demand, changing

929 the name of the “Washington Redskins”, to the increasingly less convincing and more radical claims, such as opposing “microaggressions”, giving “trigger warnings” and, finally, supporting trans women (men who dress as women and often claim to have become women) in their protests against biological woman who want to define womanhood as “people with vaginas”. (Taub 2015) It is a long journey from changing the name of the Washington Redskins to claiming that one of the defining features of biological woman is having vaginas. This woman is obviously being extremely hypocritical in claiming those who disagree with her are just concerned about power.

Conclusion

930

Conclusion: How to Respond In the most basic terms, the main purpose of this volume is to educate people so that they can find a peaceful and just way to respond to this theo-political movement. I have personally vacillated several times over the years on what I think of this movement while researching and writing this volume. When I learnt of their involvement in September 11, I thought they were the very definition of evil and my early writing reflect this sentiment. These early drafts were very angry, calling for revenge against those who perpetrated the terrible carnage of that day. I wanted to be the agent not only of change but vengeance. My writing in those early drafts were certainly more polemical and less intent on reaching understanding and was intended to persuade and not to communicate what they believe. But then I learnt more about what they were trying to do, how they are motivated to bring peace into the world by overcoming all binary oppositions to reveal the prior unity. Anybody motivated by the aspiration to realize a world of peace and harmony, I began to think, cannot be pure evil. All religions at different times have done immoral things to realize what they understand to be their vision of the “good”, this relatively new religious movement, has committed extreme violence and encouraged and enabled worse, but I reasoned, their motivations were good. Then I began to appreciate the terrible destruction of their method for achieving this ideal. Drugs, sex, violence, paedophilia, nurturing humanity’s basest desires in order to destroy humanity’s experience of God. Think about all those young people, mainly men, dying in gutters alone with syringes sticking out of their arm that is directly the result of these people’s beliefs. Was it their mother’s face smiling down on them as children that was the last thought that went through their mind? Was it regret that they had not opened themselves to the love of Jesus? Or was it, which is more likely and more poignant, “this feels good”? Think of all those innocent children growing up in broken families not getting the right instructions on how to conform as fully participating member of our community. As it says in Matthew 7:15-20, a quote that has often entered my mind as I have researched the false messiah Sabbatai Tzevi, Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore, by their fruits you will know them.

931 It truly is by their fruit that Gnostic Judaism must be judged, and the only verdict is that it must be judged by the light of Jesus Christ as evil to its core. We are left with no choice. Where I have changed my mind is that I am no longer as angry as I was at the outset. I have come to truly believe that Jesus’ message was in response to the exact beliefs advanced by these gnostic Jews in ancient times. He accepted some of the premises of Gnostic Judaism but offered an alternative God, a God of goodness, a God peace, and God of love. As these positive attributes attest, a known God. A God that is reached through the use of reason and affirmed by agreement. From the very beginning, Christians, along with conservative Jews, worshipped a God of light against the god of darkness. This is the one condition placed on Gnostic that meant they remained within the Jewish tradition, but it is just one of the conditions that they have broken. If this is true, then the only way to respond to this movement is with the by seeking the guidance of Jesus Christ our God. The way back to civility out of barbarity is not through more barbarity. Violence is not a solution to the situation that we find ourselves in today. It is only by engaging critically with their beliefs and offering a persuasive alternative that the West can not only find a way to respond to Gnostic Judaism but to also find a way back to civility, back to the truth, back to God. Gnostic In these terms, Judaism presents as the perfect foil for Western civilization to not only survive but to advance as a civilization. To aspire for the highest of goals in order to reach new levels of civility. It is for this reason that knowledge of what Gnostic Jews are actually fighting to realize is so important. Without knowledge of what we are being forced to accept then, no matter how forcefully they argue otherwise, we cannot be “free” in any meaningful sense of that word. As everyone would agree, freedom implies at its very least a choice and if there is no choice, if everyone is left in the dark, then there can be no freedom. Gnostic Jews may claim that their theology presents humanity with true freedom, they wrap all their strategies up as liberation movements, but all they ultimately offer is freedom from morality, freedom from established norms, freedom from tried and tested traditions, freedom from all those constraints that have shaped Western civilization, freedom from the constraints that make us truly human. The freedom offered by Gnostic Judaism is actually what it has historically meant to be a slave. A slave to sex, a slave to material things, a slave to greed, a slave to our basest selves. Gnostic Judaism offers the freedom of the animal which necessarily denies the freedom of a human. Human freedom is in being able to rationally reflect on choices, drawing upon all the available information, and through reading Scripture, finding inspiration in the life of Jesus Christ, and deciding a way forward that is consistent with our individual conscience as a participation in God. This is the Western tradition that Gnostic Jews hope to destroy and have come a very long way towards realizing this destruction. The freedom to place all claims under critical scrutiny so that

932 God’s path can be known is to affirm the intimacy between truth, goodness, logos, and sophia. The freedom to decide what is right or wrong by weighing the relative worth of competing claims is Christianity. Yet, this is the very understanding of freedom that we are all being denied as part of their evil theological project. Darkness is not just a metaphor for chaos, not just a metaphor for the Underworld, but it seems to be also a condition under which they want the majority of people to live. I hope with these volumes that freedom will once again be enabled and enacted. With freedom nobody would choose evil, nobody would voluntarily choose chaos over order, darkness over light. If people have the capacity, the control, the power, to be good, then that is what they will be. Despite this personal conviction, this volume is intended to furnish the readers themselves with the knowledge for them to make up their own minds and this aspiration will have failed if I give an inadequate account of post Sabbatian Jewish Gnosticism or my best understanding of the Western Christian tradition at its best. What gives support to the claim that the Jesus movement was a response against Gnostic Jewish arguments is how Jesus is not only different from Jewish Gnosticism but, in fact, diametrically opposed. This opposition finds its strongest expression after the intervention of Sabbatai Tzevi who self-identified as the “anti-Christ”. This self-identification was so important for Sabbatai Tzevi, to be the anti-Christ, that he chose the significant date of 18th of June 1666, with its reference to “666” the “number of the beast”, the “anti-Christ”, as the day he chose to publicly re-announce that he was indeed the true Jewish Messiah. Christian ideas, so formative of the Western ethos, are actually largely unknown to most Westerners today. This alienation has partly been the result of an extremely literal reading of the Bible by some fundamentalist Christian sects, where people run around talking gibberish claiming to be “talking in tongues” and shallowly denying the theory of evolution for “creationist” theories that seem to posit God as a kind of demi-urgos. There is a long tradition, in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity, from its founding, of an allegorical reading of the Biblical text. Such a reading does not necessarily manifest a mystical understanding of God but actually allows for an extremely rational Christianity. The danger of the so-called literal reading is that results in a version of Christianity that few, including myself, could accept. There has also been a deliberate attempt by Jewish Gnosticism to turn the world against all positive religions that worship the creative God and part of this strategy has been to persuade the masses, through popular representations, that Christianity is ridiculous, that it does worship a bearded man in the sky that gives people their wishes if they are good. Perhaps Christianity has sometimes promoted itself in these terms for a popular audience but, as Gnostic Judaism shows us, people are ready for something more substantial, they are ready for the truth. Ignorance of the truth, perhaps through promoting the most unappealing forms of Christiantiy, allows for deception about what Christianity actually teaches and

933 why. The West as the West is dying, this death has not been the result of conquest or that the Western tradition proved itself inadequate against other traditions, the opposite has always been the case, but it is dying through the slow erosion of everything that the West once held sacred. That there is no longer any familiarity with Christianity, or even the text of the New Testament, such a beautiful and insightful tome where one feel heartbroken that our children are growing up without a familiarity with it, is evidence of just how successful Gnostic Judaism has been at both undermining positive religions and changing the values of our society. As Carl Jung rightly observed many years ago, “In our civilization the spiritual background has gone astray. Our Christian doctrines have lost their grip to an appalling extent chiefly because people don’t understand it anymore.” (emphasis added Jung) This is an important point, the Christian God is dying not through systematic opposition or that the Western God was in some way found wanting, for example in the face of science, or because the Christian ethos no longer resonates as meaningful, but primarily through neglect. This has been one of the more sinister aspects of Gnostic Judaism, the West is being defeated from the inside by eroding its experience of its God and it is by this erosion alone that the West could have been defeated. As long as the West continued to pursue excellence, aspired to be perfect, continued to be brave, good and true, then nothing could have resisted it as the 18th and 19th century evinces. The demise of the West has been in perfect relationship with the demise of Christianity, and this is not coincidence but intimately related. The exact opposite of neglect of their God is the case in Israel where, as Anastasia Ohrimenko makes clear, in Israel “. . .we study the Bible (the Tanakh) from the moment we can speak. So, in kindergarten you use scripture for stories and in first grade you use the Bible to learn how to read and write . . .” (Okhrmenko 2020) This is just unimaginable today in Western schools where, in no small measure the result of Jews, Christianity has been driven out of our education system. To have the Christian Bible used in such an instructive manner, in a way that would ensure everyone is at least familiar with what is actually said in the Christian Bible, is now illegal in most Western countries. This again, is part of their larger strategy because with ignorance of what Jesus said has then allowed Jews to misrepresent Christianity in a way that makes it unpersuasive. To begin to reintroduce the West to their God, the most basic claim of Christianity is that Jesus was Christ or Jesus was the true messiah. Jesus was the redeemer of humanity as the Son of God. The role of the messiah, in the Jewish tradition is that He brings order to an otherwise chaotic and sinful world. As the Christian Eugen Rosenstock claimed, After revelation there exists a real Above and Below in the world, and a real Before and Hereafter in time. In the “natural” world and in “natural” time the point where I happen to be is the centre of the universe; in the space-time world of revelation the centre is fixed, and my movements and changes do not alter it.

934 The point is that an experience of the divine, realizing a view from nowhere, brings order as a world. As American Jewish scholar Haidt confirms, “. . .groups create supernatural beings not to explain the universe but to order their societies.” (Haidt 2012) Haidt is obviously trying to be critical and is absolutely wrong, although consistent with his Gnostic Jewish teachings, when he claims that Gods are “created” to bring order to chaos. In the Christian tradition, God is revealed and then experienced. It is important to understanding in the Christian tradition, against the Gnostic Jews, order is something found not imposed. The humanist position of Haidt, consistent with Gnostic Judaism, is that supernatural beings, “gods”, unlike their God, are just human creations, as an expression of power, to impose an artificial order, in terms of not being “natural”, on the world. It is that God functions to order human societies and enable ways of identifying that Gnostic Jews have specifically targeted humanity’s relationship with the divine as a means of destroying Western civilization. In his claim about God granting fixity and perspective to reality, Rosenstock is actually responding to the relativistic claims made by the German Jewish theoretical physicist Albert Einstein. Although almost totally forgotten today, but Einstein’s Theory of Relativity presented with at least as great a challenge to traditional Christian beliefs at the dawn of the 20th century as Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection did when it was published in 1859. Rosenstock is claiming that nature may indeed, as Einstein claims, be relativistic, nature may be determined by material forces, which is consistent with Einstein’s space-time theory of nature, but the Messiah, through revelation, gifts the human world a transcendent fixity, an enduring permanence, as a world. After the revelation of the Messiah, there exists a real ‘above’ and ‘below’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’, ‘before’ and ‘after’ that is no longer determined, by the perspective of the viewer. After Jesus, Christian’s claim, time itself was cast anew in terms of BC/AD (Before Christ/anno Domini). Rosenstock claims that before revelation, everything is just perspectival or subjectively relative. You see the world one way and I see it another. This is the unredeemed condition before the revelation of Jesus Christ. From any one perspective, each view has equal authority and legitimacy independent of power as any other perspective. After the messiah’s revelation, Rosenstock is claiming, the world becomes real, objective, enduring and fixed. You can move away from the centre or towards the centre, yet the centre, as such, remains fixed where it is, as what it is. Knowledge of God manifests reality in the human sphere. Christianity has historically tended toward ontological realism because it has taught that Jesus was Christ and revelation brings order, direction and substance to an otherwise meaningless and chaotic universe. In the War Scrolls of the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed to have been written by a Jewish sect, the Essenes, in the years following Christ, it is claimed that the “kingdom of God” that was expected to be soon realised after the Messiah’s revelation, was a military-political kingdom to be realised on earth.

935 This claim relates to a particular understanding of Jewish Messianism. Gershom Scholem proposed two different kinds of Jewish Messianism, restorative and utopian catastrophic. Restorative messianism aims to realise Jewish political sovereignty such as that which was thought to have existed under King David. This was the kind of Messianic view espoused in the “War Scrolls” as found in the ben Hammadi “library”. By divine kingdom, Gnostic Jews do not think that this is some limited space in the near Middle East now called Israel, or even what is known by some as “Greater Israel”, but the divine kingdom to be realised on earth as a real functioning form of political order is the entire globe involving everyone on it. Utopian-catastrophic messianism, by contrast, sees the realisation of a new world order following the destruction of the old world. This new world order is realized through a return to an intimacy with God as experienced in the Garden of Eden. Gnostic Judaism embraces both forms of Messianism in the sense that restoration is the prelude to the utopian catastrophic. As Martin Buber expresses, Judaism by kingship “is a kingship whose power and means are political, only that its raison d’etre is the political actualization of the will of God for the nation [Israel] and all other nations.” So Jewish Messianism is, according to the very Gnostic Buber, about realising the will of God over the entire world as a real political phenomenon and “. . . that Jewish messianism paves the path towards the transcendence of political strife advancement towards a complete and utter redemption from the tragedy of the human predicament.” This is the utopian vision towards which Jewish rule aspires. What Strauss spoke about in terms of the “humanization” of a corrupt society. By contrast, the Kingdom of God in Christianity is not a worldly kingdom at all. As Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from this world.” (John 18: 36) If the Kingdom of God is not a political kingdom that can be achieved through armed struggle, then what is the Kingdom of God in the Christian tradition? The truth is that Jesus’ is not clear exactly what is to be understood by Divine Kingdom, or the Kingdom of God, and it therefore remains contested. Some Christians claim, and this is the account that resonates with me, is that Jesus Himself symbolically represents the Kingdom of God in terms that He is the perfect or ideal expression of humanity. As Jesus says both rejecting the restorative messianism of Judaism and giving support to the reading given here, “Do not wait for someone else, you must undertake your own improvement. Set yourselves a higher aim than to become once again what the Jews of old were. Better yourselves – then will you bring forth the Kingdom of God.” Jesus is quite explicit in saying that to simply manifest the Kingdom of David in this world and thereby become again the Jews of old is not enough. Humanity should aspire, as individuals, towards continuous self-improvement. As Jesus said, “You must be perfect as My Father in Heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 5: 48) In Christianity, the Father is

936 pure and utter goodness and so Jesus is calling for us to all things that are most good in being perfect as perfection is the Father. You must strive for self-improvement in accordance with the insight granted by the Father as revealed by Jesus the Christ. You must be so determined to improve yourself morally that you should aim for perfection. The Kingdom of God is the intuitive and an implicit knowledge gifted from the Father by grace in terms of what is good and evil. It is that towards which we should aspire to realise in our individual lives and as our social order. To become good, to encounter the Father, which can only be known through the Son, logos, is to manifest the Kingdom of God. Many of these ideas that came to inform Christianity were already known in the Greek philosophical tradition. By claiming that when Jesus is identified as “the word made flesh”, He is being identified as the word with reality. Jesus is literally the ‘above’ and ‘below’, the ‘true’ and the ‘false’, the ‘good’ and the ‘evil’. The divine word, the Father, made flesh. By this account, Jesus is symbolic of an ontology of reality that would have been perfectly consistent with ancient philosophical thinking in the early centuries AD when Christianity was being formulated. At this time, the early Christian scholars saw Christianity as inheritors not of the Jewish tradition, about which they were extremely critical, but as inheritors of an older Hebrew tradition that had, by the time of Jesus, largely withered. As Sabrina Inowlocki (2006: 107) wrote, “So, from the early days of the Christian tradition onwards, one may find evidence that the term “Hebrew” is used to designate “loyal”/”good” Jews and more specifically Jews who still lived in agreement with their biblical ancestors’ way of life.” Hebrews practiced a free and natural relationship with God, they had true knowledge of God and both were loved by and loved God. Eusebius writes that “these men [Hebrews] were not involved in the errors of idolatry; moreover, they were outside the pale of Judaism.” (as seen in Inowlocki 2006: 110-111) This was contrasted to Jews who simply obeyed the laws of the Jews, Jews as such, who had broken with the Hebrew tradition. In recognition of this all-important distinction, Boys-Stones (2001: 153) suggests that we should speak of a “philosophically unified Hebraeo-Christian tradition” that recognises the distinction between Hebrew and Jew in the early Christian Church. What might be found here is a Hellenised people imposing a Hesiod indebted Golden Age but seeing the Hebrews as an expression of that Age, a time when There was no talk in the early Church of a “Judeo-Christian tradition”, indeed there was no talk for thousands of years in either the Christian or Jewish literature of a Judeo-Christian tradition. This did not emerge until after the Second World War as an act of politics not truth. In contrast to the ontological realism of the Christian tradition, Gnostic Jews approach morality epistemologically, not what is but what can be known. This was as a result of other commitments that meant, as Berdyaev rightly observes, “thinkers who devote themselves to epistemology seldom arrive at ontology.” (Berdyaev 1980: 1) What has to be appreciated is that, by the account of Jesus being given

937 here, God is most certainly not some kind of “man” in the clouds, but an onto-theology expressed in a religio-mythical or allegorical form as was the practice of the Fathers of the Church in the first centuries following the time of Jesus. This is the kind of reading advanced in the English Anglican Protestant tradition by people like Thomas Woolston in his 1728 masterpiece A Discourse on the Miracles of our Saviour where Woolston claimed that the miracles performed by Jesus should not be read as literal events that take place in history but as parables that reveal a deeper spiritual truth. This approach is taken, as it was by Woolston, “. . .not for the service of infidelity, which has no place in my heart, but for the honour of the Holy Jesus, and to reduce the clergy to the good old way of interpreting prophecies, which the church has unhappily apostatised from. . .” That is, Woolston undertakes this hermeneutic approach not as an expression of a loss of belief in the Christian trinity but as an act of true devotion. In using this approach, Woolston draws inspiration from amongst Christianity’s greatest authorities including Origen of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Jerome of Stridon, Augustine and Theophylact. This hermeneutic method of understanding the Bible seems to have been originally derived from the Greek tradition although such an approach may not have been alien to other sophisticated spiritual traditions such as those of Ancient Egypt or the Phoenicians. Some scholars, such as Domaradzki, (2010: 233) claim that the origins of an allegorical readings of “mythical” texts began with Greek apologists who were responding to claims that Homer and Hesiod were impious. He argues that at the time it was being argued, perhaps out of a new moral experience that has become known as the Axial Age, that Gods, in being all good, simply could not have done the kinds of things attributed to them in the works of Homer and Hesiod. In these myths the gods are shown doing all kinds of utterly abominable things, such as eating their children, and being unfaithful so how could a being that is all good ever commit such heinous acts? If the gods were indeed all good then these once revered authors, particularly Homer, should actually now be thought of as impious. As Isocrates wrote, . . .you have followed the calumnies of the poets, who declare that the offspring of the immortals have perpetrated as well as suffered things more atrocious than any perpetrated or suffered by the offspring of the most impious of mortals; aye, the poets have related about the gods themselves tales more outrageous than anyone would dare tell concerning their enemies. For not only have they imputed to them thefts and adulteries, and vassalage among men, but they have fabricated tales of the eating of children, the castrations of fathers, the fettering of mothers, and many other crimes. For these blasphemies the poets, it is true, did not pay the penalty they deserved, but assuredly they did not escape punishment . . .Therefore if we are wise, we shall not imitate their tales, nor while passing laws for the punishment of libels against each other, shall we disregard loose-tongued vilification of the gods; on the contrary, we shall be on our guard and consider equally guilty of impiety those who recite and those who believe such lies.

938 As a strategy to exonerate these esteemed poets and show that the Gods as revealed by the poets were indeed “wise”, Domaradzki (2010: 233) argues, Greek scholars like Metrodorus and Diogenes defended the poets by claiming that Homer and Hesiod should not be read literally, as such claims would indeed be sacrilegious, but that they were writing allegorically. Although this account well may be true, it may actually be the case that all religions up until that time were in fact allegorical and the priestly class always knew of this allegorical reading but, to justify the resources being allocated to their lives of contemplation, they were forced to explore these issues allegorically in terms of “gods”. By this account, the allegorical reading does not have it origins with people like Anaxagoras but merely that this secret fact was being written down and made public for the first time thereby opening the way for people to explore the same material in a more direct manner. This later account would explain why so many mythical traditions, even those in distant meso-America, have so many extraordinary similarities. These similarities over great distances between cultures that apparently had no contact would therefore be explained in terms that they were all actually giving an account of the human condition which is unchanging and common to everyone. This conclusion would mean, as Aristotle states unequivocally in what has come to us as The Metaphysics, that “theology” and philosophy were both exploring the same subject matter, sophia, but whereas religious scholars justified their activities in terms of “gods”, the philosophers, the lovers of sophia, could more directly explore their subject matter. Indeed, it was not until Pierre Bayle at the turn of the 18th century insisted that philosophy and theology should be sharply separated that philosophy and theology were thought a discrete discipline. By this account, more should actually be made of the fact that the Greek philosophers actually take the name “philosophers”. They self-identify as lovers of the goddess Sophia or the goddess of explicit intellectual knowledge. Is this itself a claim of a kind of theological allegiance that we today no longer appreciate its implications? Explicit intellectual knowledge, sophia, is something that we do not know, at least according to Socrates, in an explicit way, but it is the task of philosophers to pursue it and know it and, thereby, lead the people. Nous is intellectual knowledge that guides our lives and our creativity but which we do not know explicitly, and one has sophia when that intellectual knowledge is made explicit. This means prioritizing a certain kind of knowledge, beyond faith, as the most important aspect of both the philosophical and Christian traditions. It should be remembered that in the New Testament, written in Greek, God’s knowledge and knowing God as a Christian are all identified as gnosis and are prized in terms of being sophia. (Rudolph 2015: 27) Only in 1 Timothy 6: 20 is gnosis used to portray a “false knowledge”. To help explain what is being claimed here, it is informative to look at some Graeco-Roman thinkers to see if continuities can be found between these philosophers and later Christian theologians.

939 In the third century, Plotinus argued that Being was equivalent to the intellect or nous. It was up to the philosopher to intuit an Idea that would then serve as the master plan for an entire culture. According to Plotinus, it was through human labour that this intuited ideal could be manifested in the world as a good society. It is in this manifestation of divine nous in matter that the Idea necessarily became degraded in the world, we are, after all, mere mortals, but we should aspire to make it align as close as possible to the Idea. For the divine intellect to be materialised in the world, there needed to an entire society, consisting of philosophers, artisans and craftsmen, who through intellection and faith could materialise the Ideal in the world as an ordered society. In this way, the material world reflected the divine order. As James Russell Lowell observed, “The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it.” This ideal is not an abstraction but the realist real, the concretist concrete, that was simply brought, usually inadequately, into being. Although there seems to be no mediating role for a messiah, that task seems to be filled by workers and thinkers, but Plotinus’ ideas were extremely influential on Medieval Christian thinking. Jesus conceptualized as logos mediating the relationship between Man and God is also developed in antiquity. In the philosophy of Proclus, who wrote in the 5th century AD, it was argued that realty consisted of a triatic relationship consisting of the thinking thing - the divine intellect or nous, the thing being thought the intelligible or the receptacle, and, finally, what brings these two realms together - that which is both intellectual and intelligible – sophia or explicit intellectual knowledge. Sophisticated Greek influenced Christian theologians saw resonances between these kinds of Pagan philosophical ideas and the emergent Christian mythology. Indeed, long before Proclus, Heraclitus argued that logos was the ordering principle underlying the changing appearance of things while associating the order of the cosmos with nomos or custom. Xenophanes claimed that God was a divine intellect that he called nous. Plato famously claimed that “the Good” was responsible for all sensible phenomena. As Thompson writes, The Greeks were the first in history to differentiate and emphasize reason as a human faculty, as well as the structuring principle of the cosmos, making it a crucial factor in knowledge, and immense contribution to thought. Later Christian thought from Philo through Augustine and Aquinas established that ultimately, reason must be traced to God. Since Christian thought holds God to be the ultimate source and ground of reason, reason in itself cannot be construed as bad or faulty, but only its improper use. . . The problem with Enlightenment reason is that its basis in God was abandoned, and recentered in the subject/self/mind. These Greek ideas fed into the culture of Hellenised Jews, like Philo of Alexandria, who, as already discussed, thought of Jewish religion through the lens of Greek philosophy. Philo established the equivalence between logos and sophia (Hebrew Hokmah). As Philo claimed,

940 Thus God sharpened the edge of His all-cutting Word, and divided universal being, which before was without form and quality, and the four elements of the world which were formed by segregation from it, and the animals and plants which were framed with them as materials. So, according to Philo, there is universal “being” which is “divided” by the “word”, logos. Is this so far removed from what Jesus can be said to be claiming? Despite expressing ideas that might challenge Jewish beliefs, Philo seems to go to some lengths to avoid the possible accusation of apostasy. That is, Philo is determined to continue to be identified as a Jew. Despite this apparent belief, that might be the result of all kinds of reasons including many, such as personal relationships, Philo’s work is evidence that there were indeed Jews around the time of Jesus that were heavily influenced by Greek culture and philosophy who were creating, as Jesus himself seems to, synthesised beliefs. Indeed, Wajdenbaum goes so far as to claim that the Jewish religion, by which he is talking about Orthodox Judaism, was inspired by Platonic philosophy. As Wajdenbaum wrote, “It is likely that Platonic dialogues have been used by the author(s) of Genesis-Kings. . . Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, in book VII of the Republic (514b-17b), share a similar framework with the Exodus narrative.” (Wajdenbaum 2016: 78) By this account, Jesus, as logos, became the personification of reality, the combining of heaven, the Platonic Good, with the inert earth, the intelligible, in order to be that which preserves and endures as reality. The sharpened edge which divides the world. Jesus is the logos, but the logos or the “word” made flesh, the logos as sophia. As it famously says in John 1: 14-18, And the Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth . . . For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God . . . He (Jesus) has made Him (God) known. Couliano argues that this is perhaps the earliest instance where Jesus is identified with the “divine hypostasis called Logos”. (Couliano 1992: 9) This reading would allow a new interpretation to sections like Luke 12:34 “Do not assume that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Jesus has not come to allow the earth to rest in peace, rest in its unity, but he brings to the earth, to the continuum, the sword to carve it up into its particulars. One of the advocates for reading Jesus as logos was Theophilus of Antioch in 169 AD. The extremely influential theologian, Origen of Alexandria, also advanced the idea of logos/sophia as Jesus. The idea was that God had always been the divine logos/sophia but in the body of Jesus, at least according to Apollinaris of Laodicea, Christ was “God mad flesh” meaning that God’s logos had replace Christ’s human mind, as it says in the Bible, Jesus was the logos made flesh. It is as though Jesus was thinking in perfect harmony with the unfolding logic of God. Interestingly, Sabellius claimed that God was a monad that might be called Sonfather. Like the sun,

941 Sonfather radiates heat and light without division. God is a unity with three “modalities”, as creator He is the Father, in human redemption is he is the son and as grace He is Holy Spirit. These ideas are taken up by the 17th century, Protestant Christian mystic, Jakob Bohme, who claimed that the trinity consists of the Father as fire, the son as pure light while the Holy Spirit is the principle of life. Ridiculous These three aspects of the one God seem to correspond to the three covenantal principles of Judaism as expressed by Shaul Magid (2008: 21), God as creator (fire), God as redeemer (pure light), and God as revealer (Holy Spirit). Fire has long been associated with creativity and fire, of course, gives off light and through the light of the fire things around it can be seen as what they are and what things are reveal the creator. Many of the features that shaped early Christianity were also happening for Gnostic Judaism. Gnostic Judaism also takes an allegorical approach, reading the sacred text not as an historical document. It is this different reading of sacred text that emphasises different features of the Jewish tradition, if the sacred texts are read historically then this emphasises the obligatory aspect of the text as codified in Law, whereas, if the sacred texts are read allegorically then the potential relationship with God is emphasised. In the gnostic focus on God, they, at least, de-emphasise the legal component in a way not dissimilar to Christianity. This attention to God means that there is a great deal of weight given to sacred knowledge over faith for directing human action. The most important difference between the Gnostic and Christian traditions is that the Gnostic tradition, as does Philo, prioritizes the “earth” and matter, the receptacle from which the intelligible becomes a possibility while the Christian tradition, consistent with the GraecoRoman heritage, prioritizes the intellectual as materialised in the world through human intervention. It is acknowledged that Jesus was and remains what in Greek is the pleroma which means “completeness” and (moral) “perfection”. Jesus is the fulfillment, the moral and intellectual completeness, the limit and the end, that informs Christians’ lives and is that towards which they direct their lives – the Holy Spirit. It is this guidance, a gift of grace, from God (in that nothing is asked for in return nor is it earnt as if an exchange but is just freely given as an act of love), that allows a world to endure and have permanence as a world.356 By contrast, Gnostic Jews believe that these two realms remain separate, the intelligible and the intellectual, and still need to be reunited because Jesus simply was not the Messiah. The Christian tradition believes that because Jesus was the true Messiah, he is the uniting force through what He said as written in the New Testament, what He did by way of example (how he lived his life) and how He is

356

This account has resonances in other Indo-European cultures like Hinduism where the trinity or Trimurti (the similarity is extraordinary) consists of Brahma, the god of creation, Shiva, the goddess of destruction and untamed passions, and, finally, Vishnu, the equivalent of Jesus, the preserver and protector of the universe. The one who physically returns to earth to restore the balance of good and evil. Some Hindu sects, the Vaishnav, believe that Vishnu is the only real god, and all other “gods” are demi-gods.

942 experienced today by those with faith. The Kingdom of God is, therefore, the united experience of the divine intellect and the intelligible in the form of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said to the Father, “I have made you known to them.” We, those who are Christians or inheritors of that tradition even if they no longer believe in that which continues to inform their world, are guided by the life and sayings of Jesus Christ in as much as He brought together the good and the beautiful as the true. As Jesus answered to the Pharisees, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “there!” for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” Jesus seems to be claiming that the kingdom of God is not something to be conquered or realized, it is not some marked event that will involve trumpets but is already potentially real as it is amongst “us” or we are within it. Just as the intelligible, the thought and those combined, form one reality, so is the Father and the son combined as the Holy Spirit. As Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” The Heavenly Kingdom, by this account, is making nous, the divine intellect, explicit, sophia. This is Jesus, this is the Heavenly Kingdom, when the divine intellect, the cosmic nous, is made explicit through reason. As Jesus said, What! You are a teacher in Israel, and you don’t grasp what I am saying? Let me assure you that my conviction in this matter is every bit as alive as the certainty I have concerning what I see and hear. But then how can I expect you to believe it on my word when you don’t even hear the inner testimony of your own spirit, of the divine voice? Only this voice from heaven can instruct you concerning the higher demands of reason; and only by believing in it and heeding it does one find peace of mind and true greatness, and thus discover the dignity of which mankind is capable. Indeed, by endowing man with reason the Deity so distinguished humankind from the rest of nature that man came alive with the reflected splendour of the divine essence; and only through his faith in reason does man fulfill his high destiny. Reason does not condemn the natural impulses, but governs and refines them; and whoever does not listen to it – by not duly appreciating its light, by failing to nourish it in himself – passes judgment on himself, having thus shown by his actions what sort of a fellow his is. Such a man shrinks away from reason’s light, for it imposes morality as a matter of duty; his evil works, which would otherwise fill him with shame, self-contempt, and remorse, bristle at its illumination. But whoever undertakes his tasks with self-honesty approaches reason’s tribunal willingly, fearing neither its reprimands nor the self-knowledge it gives him; he does not need to conceal his actions, since they but attest to the spirit which animates him, the spirit of the rational world, the spirit of divinity. This really is one of the most revealing passages in the Christian Bible, the content of which might surprise many contemporary Christians raised on a very “spiritualized” and anthropomorphized understanding of God and Jesus Christ. This passage gives weight to the claims that people should speak of the GrecoChristian tradition and not the Judeo-Christian tradition, because Jesus was a Hellenised Jew, as many Jews at that time were, who became critical of the kind of crude literalism of the then dominant forms of Judaism. It was for this reason that the New Testament was written in Greek. If it was written in Hebrew

943 then perhaps, there might be more sympathy with claims of there being a “Judeo-Christian” tradition, but it was not written in Hebrew or even Aramaic, which is thought to have been the language that Jesus spoke, but Greek. Berdyaev argued that “Christianity, in its human origins, is a religion of messianic and prophetic type, the spirit of which, as utterly foreign to Greco-Roman spiritual culture as to Hindu culture, was introduced into world religious thought by the Jewish people.” (Berdyaev 1954: 1-2) Although Berdyaev does have great insights at times, with this claim he is wrong for two reasons. Firstly, it is widely recognised, and also admitted by many Jews, that Judaism did not invent messianism at all but that it was introduced by the Persian Zoroastrian tradition and then adopted into Judaism. The Persian messiah was called “Saoshyant”. The Saoshyant was believed to be someone who would one-day realise a condition when evil will be vanquished from the earth and everything in the world will then be in unity with god. This seems very close indeed to the Jewish understanding of messiah. Berdyaev actually goes on to assert, “The ‘Aryan’ spirit is neither messianic nor prophetic; to await the coming of the Messiah – the irruption into history of forces beyond history – is foreign to it.” (Berdyaev 1954: 2) The irony to this statement becomes transparent when it is appreciated, of course, that the Persian Zoroastrians are ‘Aryan’. Far from the messianic spirit being alien to the Aryans, messianism was their invention. Something brought to the Jews. Secondly, and to the point made earlier, Jesus’ messianic claims, when properly understood, are harmonious with Greco-Roman philosophical rationalism. The spirit of Judaism is foreign to the GrecoRoman tradition but not those elements shaped by fellow Aryans the Persians which then shapes the spirit of Christianity. As history shows, and the Bible discusses at length, Greco-Romans had an affinity with Christianity that was lacking in dominant conservative Jewish traditions of the time. What Jesus is prioritising in the above passage is the “divine voice” or “inner testimony” of God. It is this inner voice that you must “believe in” and “listen too”, not as a matter of faith, it is available for all who are prepared to listen because it is intuitive. This voice must be acknowledged and listened to for instruction for the full dignity of being human. This is the primordial encounter with God, the divine nous, accessed through logos as the fulfilment of Mankind’s dignity. This does not mean to reject natural drives, like sexual appetite or the desire for food, but to use reason to refine them, to appreciate the complex tastes of sophisticated foods and how they look as well as how food satisfies hunger. Accept one’s sexual drives but incorporate them into a full and truly loving relationship with somebody else, who you prize for a range of gifts, not only their sexual organs. Reason, by this account, as the Greeks argued, permits humanity to feel the important emotions of “shame”, “self-contempt” and “remorse” as guides on how to live in accordance with God’s grace. Everyone knows people who drink too much, gamble too much, pursue sex with too much zest, because they have not brought these natural drives under reasoned constraint. Reason is the

944 light that shows the real world. The “clearing” is the Father, manifested as an expression of the good, which is intuitive and Jesus, logos, allows that world to be explicitly known. As Jesus said in quite unequivocal terms, “I am the light of the world”. It is the world that is revealed through reason. Contrast this to the Jewish philosopher Martha Nussbaum who argued that we should do away with “shame” and “disgust” because they are intrinsically “hierarchical”. Disgust and shame are inherently hierarchical; they set up ranks and orders of human beings. They are also inherently connected with restrictions on liberty in areas of nonharmful conduct. For both of these reasons, I believe, anyone who cherishes the key democratic values of equality and liberty should be deeply suspicious of the appeal to those emotions in the context of law and public policy. (Nussbaum as seen in Sanchez 2004) In practice, Gnostic Jews always oppose shame, self-identify in terms of being the “shameless”, because, as Jesus seems to suggest, shame is one way in which nous, the divine logos, is encountered or understood. As Hartmann wrote in 1931, “shame” which is “determinative of the whole life of man . . . allows the elevation of the sexual relations of Man into a higher sphere than that of the animals.” According to Hartmann, shame is an expression of civilization, the less one experiences shame the less civilized one is. It is unsurprising, therefore, that Nussbaum praised the actions of Crates and Hipparchia who “copulated in public and went off together to dinner parties” because this was “the life of the cosmopolitan”, shameless. (Nussbaum as seen in D’Souza 2007) Of course, as we all know, shame was actually what motivated Adam and Eve to first don clothes. Whereas Gnostic Jews oppose the civilizing project of the West and hope for us to return to instinctual drives of the Garden of Eden when nobody experienced shame, they claim any restraint on these drives, civilization as an experience of the good, is cast as restricting freedom. Conversely, all attempts to erode civilizational restrain is now cast as “liberation”. Gay liberation, trans liberation, the liberation movements grow and grow. Freedom here is really “freedom from moral restraint” or, to say the same thing, “freedom from God” or “freedom from civility”. Freedom from such restraints are what they believe is the moral position because any restraint on such freedom is immoral. They never clearly, unambiguously state it like this, in such transparent terms, because this would cause outrage, especially in the early decades of the 20th century, but this is exactly what they mean. From a Christian perspective, the spirit that animates humanity, informs his actions, is rightly reason responding to the divine voice within. Nous, the divine intellection, and sophia, that knowledge made explicit through reason is God and His Son, reason, brings explicit intellectual knowledge. The fire and the light. This experience is “the creation of the world” as without this united experience, without the Trinity being one, there simply can be no world. We would become nomads without the divine

945 voice and logos. It is this experience that truly differentiates us from animals and motivates us to civility. Jesus becomes the ordering principle, and it was this particular and peculiar experience that shaped the unique identity of Western civilization. Unlike what the Gnostic tradition claims, humanity is not alienated by this world to live in evil but, according to the Western Christian tradition, is blessed to dwell within God/Jesus Christ. As Paul says in Romans 8 1. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” For those guided by Jesus Christ, guided by reason and living the Holy Spirt, there is no condemnation for they truly know the good, the beautiful and the true. They live in Jesus Christ. Here is also the perfect contrast between two different accounts of reason. Nussbaum argues that something is unreasonable if it has no negative consequences, she, like all Gnostic Jews, deny substantive reason but think of reasonableness in exhaustively instrumental terms. Jewish scholar Erich Fromm draws attention to these different ways of thinking by differentiating between intelligence and reason. Fromm argues that reason, “aims at understanding; it tries to find out what is behind the surface, to recognise the kernel, the essence of the reality which surrounds us. Reason is not without a function, but its function is not to further physical as much as mental and spiritual existence.” (Fromm 1966: 152) In contrast to “reason”, what I am calling substantive reason, is intelligence or “the ability to manipulate concept for the purpose of achieving some practical end”. (Fromm 1966: 152) This is the difference between substantive and instrumental reason. According to the Gnostic tradition, which Fromm would become quite critical, to be rational is to advance your own interests. Christianity, by contrast, advances a substantive reason grounded on a true experience of reality. As Nussbaum herself admits, Devlin argued that the disgust of the average member of society was a sufficient reason to make a practice illegal, even if it causes no harm to nonconsenting third parties . . . Kass concludes that disgust is a sufficient reason to ban a practice that causes no harm to nonconsenting parties. . . Today, large segments of the Christian Right openly practice a politics based upon disgust. . . [such laws] violate a fundamental paradigm of political rationality: laws made in response to such animus lack a rational basis. (Nussbaum 2010) Nussbaum classes all morally justified claims as immoral because from her onto-theology it is. She rightly, in a sense, describes it as a response to animus or a response to geist (mind/spirit), nous, but she dismisses this in a derogatory way because, from her perspective, it is a fantasy or, more accurately, a dream. One is not “awake” or “woke” if they remain within a moral framework. From a Christian perspective, it constitutes reality as it is, and it is that towards which we are all ultimate oriented as the truest thing there is in the world. To make laws based on disgust and shame are reasonable from a Western Christian perspective because they practice a substantive rationality, because Gnostic Jews have no experience of reality, deny its existence, they can only have an instrumental rationality built here on third party harm.

946 According to both the Jewish and Christian traditions, instinctual drives can find expression in tradition or what the Greeks called doxa, mere opinion. Christianity believes that because Jesus was the true messiah then He reunites humanity with God through reason making the inner voice explicit. As Jesus said, “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you; sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.” Jesus explicitly asks for the “earthly” to be “put to death”. Jesus wants the Shekinah, Anat, Astarte etc., to be put to death because such practices is to worship the wrong God, another God to the one that Jesus brings knowledge about. The pleasure principle becomes something evil. As it also says in Romans, 7: 21-25 about the struggle between a man’s bodily desires and those of his mind [nous], “So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind [nous] and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” This death is symbolically re-enacted in European culture, for just one example, with the killing of bulls in the Spanish bullfights.357 Jesus calls for the death of these Gods. After humanity is redeemed by Jesus, people should now live in the Kingdom of God. From the time of Jesus, indeed for quite some time before, it was believed it was “good” to be humble, chaste, honest etc., and that it was “evil” to be boastful, promiscuous, deceptive etc. Gnostic Jews believe that this is a false belief and that humanity still does not know good and evil and therefore to defer to their directives is to deny life. Why be chaste? Why deny sexual pleasure based on deception? According to the Gnostic Sabbatian tradition, our current experience of good and evil is not a true experience but merely an expression of human, particularly male, power justified in terms of being sanctioned by God. As it says in the fourth Epistle to the Ephesians, written shortly after Paul’s death, “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord”.358 The Sabbatian tradition argued that the claim that woman should be faithful and chaste and submit to male authority was not the result of an experience of God, knowing good and evil, but merely an expression of male power intended to oppress woman and deny them their true liberty and

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The bull was often associated with this god. For example, Astarte puts a bull’s head on her own head and the Lord Shiva is usually depicted as a bull. 358 It should always be appreciated when reading the new testament, and practicing Christians will know this, but there are the Gospels, supposedly written by the disciples who heard what Jesus said and wrote of their experiences, along with sections written by others, including Paul. Today, even some of the sections attributed to Paul are thought to have been written some time after Paul had died. This passage, under the title “Instructions for Christian Households” is believed to have been written by a follower of Paul. This idea of submitting to your husband is in a certain tension with what Jesus actually said. It certainly goes against the idea that everyone is equal before God. I actually think it goes against the most fundamental principle of Christianity, that all people have been redeemed and can know God equally. I use it here to present a particular point.

947 sexuality. Denying women their animal drives which is their true freedom. In Genesis 2: 16, it is when Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that God says because of this, because of knowing good and evil, “Your desire will be for you husband and he will rule over you.” From a Gnostic reading, it is because of Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, passively accepting a certain account of good and evil, that she is now ruled over by men. It is because morality, knowledge of good and evil, is, by the Gnostic account, masculine therefore knowledge of good and evil results in women living under the authority of men. By overcoming this knowledge, by returning to nature, women not only overcome the knowledge of good and evil, but they also become masters, like demiurgos, and they can now create their world no longer under the authority of men. But first they must overcome good and evil, they must embrace sin, they must nurture their sexuality, destroy the monogamous family, have children raised collectively, and learn to become just like men. In a contemporary setting, the Gnostic Jewish philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2001) argued in the appropriately named, The Fragility of Goodness, that the ancient Greek philosophers’ belief that “the aspiration to make the goodness of a good human life safe from luck through the controlling power of reason” was mistaken in the sense that living a rational life, guided by an experience of the good, did not mitigate human vulnerability to arbitrary external forces compromising individual human flourishing. A person might be the best person that they can be, curtail life’s excesses through the correct use of reason, and yet that person may still die at 24 of a brain tumour. In short, Nussbaum is arguing that living a good life, like Christians aspire to realise, does not guarantee a good life. Although living a good life does not guarantee good outcomes it would most certainly guarantee the denial of pleasurable aspects of life. For example, demanding that women should be chaste and faithful is life denying, according to the Jewish Gnostic tradition, or turning away from human instinctual drives which is, for Gnostic Jews, turning away from their God. Such turning away does not ensure human flourishing, but it does guarantee self-sacrifice, as Jewish scholar Jonathan Haidt argues, “spiritual transformation is essentially the transformation of the self, weakening it, pruning it back in sone sense, killing it – and often the self-objects. Give up my possessions and the prestige they bring? No way! Love my enemies, after what they did to me? Forget about it.” (Haidt 2005: 207) This was said in a kind of psychology-based self-help book following a section where he praised the idea of reciprocity, as in “an eye for an eye”, as the single foundational idea of the human condition. When you look for it, the amazing thing is just how consistent these Jewish authors and academics are in not only systematically denigrating the Christian tradition, however they can, at every opportunity and in every context, but at praising their Gnostic Jewish teachings. The point being continuously made, of course, is that Western Christian morality is so life-denying, so “ego killing”, so

948 destructive that nobody should accept it. The Western “moral” trajectory finds it fullest expression, according to the Gnostic tradition, in the “patriarchy” of 19th and early 20st century Protestant Europe. These Gnostic arguments will be familiar to many today as they are indeed central to many disciplines including contemporary feminism. I wonder if such arguments lose any of their persuasiveness if the inspiration behind them is revealed to an Eastern theology? In positing that all truth claims, all moral claims, are simply expression of power, therefore, all moral constraints on female action becomes interpreted as nothing more than “patriarchy”, they argue that because Man made this world as an expression of his power it is in Man’s power, if he embraces the ability, to remake the world differently. As Horkheimer wrote expressing these views, “Men therefore continue simply to accept and confirm where they might be shapers, and to do without the freedom they need ever more urgently, namely, to regulate and direct.” (Horkheimer 2002: 92) The reason why men can “regulate and direct” is because reality as empirically encountered is not real, it is not a constraint. Against as Horkheimer wrote, The appeal to an entirely other that this world had primarily a social-philosophical impetus. It led finally to a more positive evaluation of certain metaphysical trends, because the empirical “whole is the untrue” (Adorno). The hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word is, to be sure, a non-scientific wish. Horkheimer as seen in Mendieta 2002: 5) The point is that people such as Horkheimer and Adorno cannot allow the “earthly horror”, the then dominant world of Christianity, to continue because it is simply “untrue”, it is not real, and the desire to overcome this condition is not scientific but religious in nature. Humanity must become ubermensch, or messiahs, and embrace their world making power. When reality becomes nothing more than a “social construction”, an expression of the “untrue”, then there simply cannot be a neutral position, once understood as truth, but everything is an active expression of power. What was once understood as “reality”, as neutral, can only be granted such a standing only by the presence of God. Every “belief”, every “truth claim”, according to the Jewish Gnostic position, becomes an active imposition of interests and power. As Dirks, Eley and Ortner wrote, The notion of culture has recently been undergoing some of the most radical rethinking. . . the core dimensions of the concept of culture has been the notion that culture is “shared” by all members of a given society. But as anthropologists have begun to study more complex societies, in which divisions of class, race, and ethnicity are fundamentally constitutive, it has become clear that if we speak of culture as shared, we must now always ask “By whom?” and “In what ways?” and “Under what conditions?” (1994: 3) This has meant that everything today is understood through the lens of a kind of “tribal power”. We no longer live in one community but are now advocates for tribal interests. As Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020)

949 observe when discussing the influence of critical theory, a movement consisting almost exclusively of Jews and clearly advancing a Gnostic vision, They are obsessed with power, language, knowledge, and the relationship between them. They interpret the world through a lens that detects power dynamics in every interaction, utterance, and cultural artifact – even when they aren’t obvious or real. This is a worldview that centres social and cultural grievances and aims to make everything into a zero-sum political struggle resolving around identity markers like race, sex, gender, sexuality, and many others. The problem with the claim that all culture is only power is that any claim to “a reality” is undermined in terms of being “shared” if we begin by looking at class, race and ethnicity as constitutive of identity. As E. P. Thomson’s influential study, The Making of the English Working Class shows, class identity, for just one example, is not outside of political and institutional influence. It was simply the relationship of individuals in production that constituted class identity but those identities needed to be created as a political project. If culture is accepted by a given society, and contested on the margins, then it becomes an inspiration towards which all people live their lives. If culture is, as it should be, understood as a way of manifesting nous, then it is effectively undermined through claims that it is just an expression of power and promotion of divisions within, those very encouraged by Gnostic Jews, race, class, and ethnicity, turn people away from this shared experience, community, the divine, to pursue self-interest. It is to turn away from a shared engagement in substantive reason to accepting an exhaustively instrumental reason. It is for this reason, in part, that self-interest, egotism, greed etc., has been so demonized in the Western tradition and yet praised in the Gnostic Jewish tradition. “Liberation”, freedom, realizing “human rights” becomes understood, from the Gnostic perspective, as a struggle against established power. As a result, there is “the recognition of cultural constancy . . . as a problem rather than a natural state of affairs. . . [that results from] . . . the centrality of the notion of the “constructed” nature of culture in general . . .” (Dirks, Eley and Ortner 1994: 6). This is the advent of the “culture wars”, culture is no longer linked to an intuition of the good made explicit through reason, God, but is thought exhaustively as an expression of interests and power. It is this kind of thinking that has resulted in our education system no longer being informed by truth but, as Counts argued should be the case, a justification for deliberately politicizing education with the aim of intentionally indoctrinating our young children to accept “progressive” ideas, My thesis is that complete impartiality is utterly impossible, that the school must shape attitudes, develop tastes, and even impose ideas . . . in making of the selection the dice must always be weighted in favour of this or that. Here is a fundamental truth that cannot be brushed aside as irrelevant or unimportant; it constitutes the very essence of the matter under discussion. (Count 1932: 19)

950 Counts is certainly right to claim impartiality, objectivity, is impossible, in the absence of God, and that under such conditions all decisions become political, or, as they say, “the personal becomes political”. Once power is seen as the source of everything then it becomes meritorious to resist it. As the libertine homosexual Michel Foucault famous said, “Where there is power, there is resistance.” Once realty is lost in these terms, once it is understood to be nothing but power, then relativism, denial of truth and claims of the ubiquity of power becomes the necessary consequence which in turn demands resistance. These ideas of Count, that were so utterly contentious when he made them in 1932, are now mainstream academic foundations and inform the teaching practices of most of the educational staff who have become, in effect, political activists. It is this activism that also informs feminism which has been told for generations that reality is just an expression of male or patriarchal power. This claim, that reality is just an expression of male power, can only be made with the death of God or, conversely, its promotion is aimed to realize the death of God. Of most importance, it has to be appreciated that the result of many women embracing the conclusion that the “feminine” is just an expression of male power has not resulted in the empowerment of woman. Western society has not become more feminine. Not at all. Quite the opposite. Woman do not decide their own fate once the feminine has been associated with obsolete expressions of male power because, according to this thinking, if they had been asked up until very recently what do they want they would have said, as many still do, that they want to stay at home and raise their children and be a good wife to their husbands. Women only said this, Gnostics would claim, because they lived under the sway of moralizing patriarchy. Woman, therefore, from a Gnostic Jewish perspective, cannot be asked what they want as, in their fallen condition, they are incapable of answering. Instead, what has resulted from embracing the idea that reality is a reflection of male power, a social construction where men have been the builders, is that, because women are under the sway of male power, they are unable to determine their own future. Women therefore must now be manipulated into accepting the dictates of somebody else, somebody who does know what it means to be an authentic woman, that just happens to be those with esoteric knowledge, those with gnosis, Gnostic Jews. Many women today would be surprised to learn that their liberation is found in the revelations of a 17th century Jew who claimed to be God. The obvious evidence for this conclusion is to observe that it cannot be mere happenstance that contemporary feminism is in lockstep with Gnostic Judaism. It is because Gnostic Jews have determined what feminists should believe that feminism is so harmonious with Gnosticism. As will be elaborated upon, so called second wave feminism that came to dominate feminism in the years following World War II, was theoretically founded, and practically funded, by male Gnostic Jews who had a religiously inspired vision

951 that involved sexualizing women and “liberating” them from the monogamous nuclear family. Their project was to nurture the masculine aspect of woman and the feminine aspect of men, thereby demonizing traditional expressions of masculinity (toxic masculinity) and femininity, so as to return them to what they understood to be their original androgynous animal condition as cryptically referred to in the Torah. It is for this reason that feminism has seen the destruction of the feminine and the promotion of androgyny where women are encouraged to be more masculine. Woman today are encouraged to do traditional male activities, such as physical sports, laborious work, and science and technology, and this is being forced onto society at large, often at great expense and with great disruption, despite extremely limited real appetite for non-lesbian women wanting to pursue these kinds of outcomes. My daughters have argued passionately for woman to be allowed to play full contact rugby league, a very physical sport displaying the masculine virtues of strength, endurance, comradery and bravery, and for this to be promoted equally on T.V. When full contact rugby league was introduced and made available on T.V., heavily subsidised by the male version, my daughters had no interest what-so-ever in actually watching it. Indeed, looking at the ratings, nobody did. This is the dissonance between who women today think they should be, because of the theological propaganda being continuously forced upon them in schools and through the media, in contrast to what they truly continue to want. Their generation has been raised on a theo-political ideology and are literally being forced to live this dual existence where they continuously struggle, as young women do, to both please those in power while trying to continue to pursue who they truly are. It was for this reason, the lack of its persuasive power, that radical feminism had virtually no real-world impact outside of the United States until the 1970s. Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal tome, The Second Sex, was largely ignored across Europe. (Wasserstein 2009: 560) That is because the Western Christian tradition still resonated in Europe with its claim that God was responsible for the experience of the good or, God is the experience of the Good, and therefore woman should make their own decisions as duty bound moral agents to do what they believe is right and good. This is why democracy is only found in Western societies and no-where else.359 Woman, Christianity argues, not some invisible religiously motivated guiding hand, are the best people positioned to make their own decisions. By believing that

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Many would be quick to observe that woman did not get the vote before woman fought very hard to achieve it but this argument misses the point that men had only achieved democratic representation a few decades before woman. So yes, women were later than men, poorer people were later than the wealthy, but democratic representation was still achieved within a Christian world and that is a stark contrast to anywhere else. The struggle for the vote should be contrasted to the struggle for the recognition of a separate experience of the good. This is not to say that the West did not recognize that women thought differently, this was at the heart of gender distinction, but that it was agreed upon by everyone how woman were different. The claim that was made after World War II is that women had an experience of the good that was beyond male comprehension. A very dubious claim indeed.

952 humanity knows God, as revealed through the word, teachings, and experience of Jesus, who is logos or reason, then the experience of “the Good” (nous), the beautiful (the intelligible before it has become known) is united in revealing the true/Being. The most significant difference between Eastern Gnostic thinking and Western Christian thinking is that Gnostic Jews begin with an assumed separation between knowing and reality. From this starting point “knowing”, or epistemology, becomes independent of “reality”. Knowledge becomes an end in itself while that about which knowledge is often thought to be concerned is sceptically dismissed as “unreal” or “a deceptive veil”. Western thinking terminus is reality, being, Eastern thinking ends with the realization of Nothingness. As Habermas writes of these different trajectories, Unlike the monotheistic worldviews, Eastern religions are based not on the acting person but on the impersonal consciousness of an entirely indeterminate Something. They propel the dynamic of abstraction in the opposite direction: not via the heightening of personal achievements toward the “omnipotent”, “omniscient”, and “all-loving” God, but rather via the continuous negation of all possible properties of an object of perception and judgement. . . The same cognitive operation which led the Greeks to the “Being of beings” in a theoretical intention, leads here, in a moral intention, to a “Nothing”, which has shaken off everything constitutive of “something in the world”. (Habermas 2002: 149) The Western trajectory of thought aspires towards a God that is known and knowable whereas the Eastern tradition, because there is nothing “beyond” believes in a God that is radically unknowable. As God is unknown in Eastern thinking there can be no truth. As mystic Buddhist scholar Huineng makes clear, There is nothing true anywhere, The True is nowhere to be found. If you say you see the True, This seeing is not the true one. When the True is left to itself, There is nothing false in it, for it is Mind itself. When Mind in itself is not liberated from the false, There is nothing true; nowhere is the True to be found. (Huineng as seen in Huxley 1947: 146) Even during World War II, the Japanese had come to believe that because the West believed in “things” that they were an overly “spiritual people” while the Japanese were grounded in materiality because they appreciated that reality was the “Nothing”. They believed that in a contest between these two worldviews, the material worldview will win over the spiritual delusion. (See Benedict 1947: 22-23) It was, they claimed, “pitting of our faith in things against their faith in spirit”. (as seen in Benedict 1947: 22) The problem with the Eastern approach is that it creates a separation, even an opposition, between knowledge and existence. As Berdyaev argues, “The primary fact is that knowledge itself is a reality and

953 takes place in reality.” This understanding might be contrasted to those who argues that “knowledge is concerned with objects which lie outside it and must somehow be reflected and expressed in it.” Reality, by this account, is illuminated through knowledge. There is a separation or cleavage between knowledge and reality. As Berdyaev wrote, In saying that being is primary I am referring not to being which has already been rationalized and shaped by categories of reason, but to “first life” prior to all rationalization, to being which is still dark, though this darkness signifiers nothing evil. Only a reality which has already been modified and rationalized by acts of knowing can stand over against the knowing subject. “First life” does not confront him as an object, for originally he is submerged in it. The severance between knowledge and reality is the fatal result of rationalism which has not been thought out to the end. . . But if reality stands over against knowledge, there can be no inner connection between the two, and knowledge does not form part of reality. Hence, knowledge is not something, but is about something. The knower does not take his knowledge seriously. The world of real ideas ceases to exist for him, and he is left only with ideas about the real; there is no God but only various ideas about God which he investigates; there is no real good and evil but only different ideas about good and evil. It is the separation of knowledge from existence that explains most of the ideas and resultant practices of Gnostic Jewry. They operate in the scepticism of epistemology while Christianity moves in the realism of ontology. Again, as Berdyaev wrote, “Knowledge means consecration into the mystery of being and life. It is a light which springs from being and within it.” Jesus is the symbol of that moment as logos. He is the bread and the wine, being and life, earth and spirit, as being. It is this experience that was the historical civilizing motivator of the West. It is this very experience, according to the Jewish Gnostic tradition, that has taken us away from an intimacy with “earth”, an intimacy with the Shekinah, an intimacy with the divine. We have come, by their account, to worship merely man-made things as though they are God. Our world, our moral compass, our experience of reality and claims of truth are a form of idolatry writ large, the worst of sins. The task of Gnostic Judaism, therefore, is to turn humanity away from an experience of the good, the beautiful and the true, towards what they understand to be our Natural human drives. It is because of their position that there is such an emphasis on human’s being merely animals. This is quite against the Western tradition that recognised animal elements of humanity but sought the distinction of human being. In the Western tradition, humanity is not merely an animal, but it is logos that differentiates humanity from animals. If we think about humanity as primarily an animal, driven more by instinct than reason, then happiness becomes prized more than duty. Happiness, an emotional outcome, becomes more prized than the preparedness to forgo pleasure in the embrace of the good. Sabbatai invites people to eat from the Tree of Life not from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. This reversal of priorities means that everything that was perceived to be good in the Western Christian tradition, chastity,

954 temperance, kindness, forgiveness, love and humility, is properly understood as evil by Gnostic Judaism because it is “life denying”, while everything that has historically been perceived to be evil, lust, greed, and pride is good because it is “life affirming”. If there is one message scholars as shallowly diverse as Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas and Gershom Scholem argued, and that is that “Jews ought to affirm the world” and that this was a debt they all owed to their Gnostic sympathies. (Lazier 2009: 15) For this reason, Gnostic Jewish intellectuals always reduce human motives to base drives, greed or sex and encourage egotism, because these are our true motivations, our “natural” motivations. Freud, Marx, Friedman, name the Jewish scholar and you will find this argument, humanity is truly a brutish creature but, we should embrace this brutish being as humanities highest possible expression. As the Russian Jew Ludwig Gumplowicz argued towards the end of the 19th century, “Investigate the cause of any political revolution and the result will prove that social progress is always produced by economic causes. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise since man’s material need is the prime motive of his conduct.” It is not a noble cause, or a principle, or even the result of a divine revelation, everything, according to Gnostic Judaism, is reducible to “material needs”. Freud, in turn, would reduce humanity to their sexual drives, their libido, and see moral constraints placed on this drive as the most important corrupting force over the human condition. It has long been taught in Lurianic Kabbalah that not participating in sex is “evil”. By their account, woman’s sexual desire must be encouraged as it they that initiate the sexual encounter between men and woman. (Magid 2008: 21) To be alongside a man and not have erotic desire is, according to this tradition, to live in the demonic sphere. By turning away from the Shekinah, Nature, humanity has denied life and, further, denied the God Most High’s creation. So, for the Gnostic tradition, there is only one true God, but that one God has been assailed and divided into various “things”, reality as such, and the way to reunite God is to overcome this vision of reality or destroy civilization itself. The only way we can liberate ourselves from the oppression of reality as expressions of power, according to Sabbatai Tzevi, is to enter into evil, to seek out evil and redeem those claims of evil for the one true God as actually being good. The task set these Gnostic Jews is to undertake a systematic reversal of values and show that all that was once thought to be “noble” is base and all that was once thought to be “base” is noble. As Lazier (2009: 16) rightly observes, Scholem, Strauss and Jonas, he could include all Gnostic Jews, “revived an ancient Greek distinction: they set law and convention (nomos) against teleological notions of nature (physis), and for the most part they adjudicated this contest in favour of the latter”. Jordan Peterson argued for the importance of ‘culture’ in the human condition and the existential horror that we face when people’s shared experience is threatened. Culture can be understood as the experience of the unknown known and the known known that is manifested in the good, the beautiful

955 and the true. Culture, by this account, is both constitutive and constituted in our shared knowledge, products and actions, and operates as the ‘groundless ground’ that is our truest reality. The loss of an experience of culture is, at the same time, the loss of and experience of the good, the beautiful and the true which is the ‘chaos’ and disorder of meaninglessness that is ‘soul sickness’. As Peterson writes expressing this importance, Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand. The thing we cannot see is culture, in its intrapsychic or internal manifestation. The thing we do not understand is the chaos that gave rise to culture. If the structure of culture of disrupted, unwittingly, chaos returns. We will do anything-anything-to defend ourselves against that return. (Jordan Peterson 1999: Preface) Peterson says something fundamentally profound in this paragraph. Culture, by the account given so far, cannot be ‘seen’ as it informs everything that is in its isness. It has an absolute priority over all things that can be seen. As this is the case, any account of the causes of culture are necessarily, at best, limited because of our limited human condition. We are necessarily situated in a time and place so we are limited by these necessary horizons that we cannot see beyond. The only way to give an account of the causes of culture would be to be immortal or a god and that, so far, has been denied humanity as mortals. So, an account of the causes of culture would be a known known but, as such, it would be limited. As Wittgenstein wrote, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”, chaos is often understood as the complete absence of order so prior to culture, from which all things originate, is chaos about which nothing can be said. Culture is the sacred borders that limit things so that they come forward as what they are. Plato understood his metaphor about the Sun as being about nothing because it was prior to thingness as such. Importantly, that there is order arising from chaos is repeated time and again in mythology. As will be explored at length in the second volume, there has long been recognised two aspects of God, depending on your view on these matters, one is the ‘hidden’ or ‘unknown’ god, deus obsconditus, and the other is the ‘revealed’ god or ‘known’ god referred to by Martin Luther as deus revelatus. God is described in the Jewish tradition as being an indivisible one. God is everything and everywhere. God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and eternal. Of central important to the following discussion, God, according to the Jewish tradition, is both good and evil, there is no Satan that creates evil, it is all derived from the unknown God that they call Yahweh. As it says in Isaiah 45:6-7, “I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light and create the darkness; I make peace and create evil. I am the Lord, that does all these things.” Although people anthropomorphise gods, the God being discussed here is the undifferentiated oneness that is prior to thingness from which, necessarily, both

956 good and evil have a well-spring. It is deus obsconditus because the undifferentiated simply cannot be known. In the Western tradition, culture, although not seen is known. Culture reveals itself to us in terms of showing what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly', ‘true’ or ‘false’. As is supported in the work of thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, the God that is ‘the Good’, the Divine Nous, is a Western God that is quite alien to the Jewish experience. An aspect of culture, the known God, is the gift of the ‘son’, in the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ, and is all good. It is this experience of ‘the Good’ that permits the experience of differentiation into objects, ‘the many’, that can be subsumed under true knowledge or ‘the one’. This knowledge might, therefore, be termed ‘sophia” or revealed intellectual knowledge in the sense that it is indeed knowable. This is the god of revelation or deus revelatus. For a quick example, all of humanity is just an undifferentiated ‘one’ unless we have an experience of what it is to be a ‘good’ male and a ‘good’ female. This is not simply a ‘moral’ claim of being ‘good’ in terms of ‘well behaved’ but an ontological ‘good’ in terms the different ways of being. In production, if a table is to be fabricated, there must be knowledge of what a table is, an understanding of beauty if it is to be a high-quality table, and knowledge of how it allows people to live a good life so, in the table being made, the good, the beautiful and the true must be brought together and manifested in the table. It is with this ‘revelation’ that we experience the sacred borders around being, for example, male and female. Gender is, therefore, most definitely a cultural phenomenon and one to which we must conform if we are ‘free’ but it is certainly not reducible to being ‘subjective’ and cannot be determined by individual choice. Although cultural disruption has happened, for one reason or another, throughout history, the current situation, as will be shown, is not ‘unwitting’ but intentional and strategic. Place is meaningfulness (Relph, 1976; Houston, 1978; Jacobs & Appleyard 1987; Hayden, 1995; Arefi, 1999) and meaningfulness is culture. Culture brings order to chaos. The ability to judge that someone is ‘angry’ or ‘shy’ are cultural products that are not fundamentally different from any other cultural artefact such as chairs or houses. It is this meaningfulness, in a primordial way, that many of us as individuals and all of us as a society as a whole are losing. We are losing our culture and that is playing with our minds. We are, quite obviously, falling into chaos because the “something we cannot see” that “protects us” is being deliberately destroyed because some value ‘chaos’. This destruction can be called ethnocide where ‘ethnic’ is “a category of people who identify with each other based on similarities such as common ancestry, language, history, society, culture or nation.” The world Gnostic Jews want to realise is a world populated by nomads, placeless people, people who do not live intimately with ‘culture’ or, more accurately, without an experience of God. Under such conditions people are alienated from the place, the meaningfulness, in which they have historically lived

957 (Indeed, one of the original meanings of ‘culture’ was to live authentically with oneself, this meaning is pertinent in understanding what has been lost). Jewish historian Yuri Slezkine has argued that Jews are truly nomads, not just because they did not have a place to call home for thousands of years but instead chose to predominantly live amongst Westerners, but because they “traversed boundaries . . . embraced the cosmopolitan and universalistic aspects”. (Slezkine as seen in Stern 2018: 4) They rejected the culturally specific experiences of good and evil in the pursuit of that which was true for everyone and, therefore, no-one. This has meant that the Gnostic Jewish condition, or to adopt Slezkine’s argument, is actually to live as ontological nomads determined, with religious zealotry, to the generalized application of iconoclasm. It is this condition, nihilism, the loss of God, that they hope will be eventually experienced by everyone. There hope is for everyone to wander this earth with no place to call home, with no place which is meaningful, where nowhere is God encountered to inform us of what is good and what is evil. This would be a world that is not informed by an experience or knowledge of the peras or divine borders but is driven by instrumental rationality or some account of what is natural that is posited to transcend all particular social conditions. It is when humanity has accepted this understanding of the human condition as reality, which is very close indeed, that there will no longer be any possible account of social progress. As has happened in several publications, social progress is reduced to technological or economic progress when really these are two semi-autonomous regions of the human experience. What would be realised in such a space, beyond doubt, is the domination of Gnostic Jews or people like Nietzsche who are extremely sympathetic with their worldview and therefore progress their project. It would be a world where the media (social and traditional) are controlled by Gnostic Jewry, it would be a world where a disproportionate amount of the world’s wealth and power rests in their hands. It would be a world where real politics, the pursuit to realize ones vision of what is good in the world, has been made an impossibility because of the dominance of theological convictions alien to politics will no longer allow a space for politics, as such. It would be a world that is less caring, a world where if you are not part of the productive process serving Gnostic Jews then you have no worth. It would be a world where education is exhaustively technical in nature, the arts are in the service of realizing social change and would have no purpose beyond this role of social engineering. Indeed, I fear that the ultimate aim of this political movement is to literally do away with most of humanity, except for Gnostic Jews and use cyborgs or robots, who are guaranteed not to experience God, to serve them in place of real humans who might prove to be just too difficult. To be clear, the reason why those advancing Gnostic Judaism want to rule the world, beyond the power and freedom to act as they wish that this power allows, is because they believe it is their God given responsibility to ‘fix’ or ‘heal’ the world, tikkun olam. It is a moral imperative for these religious zealots to

958 stop people believing in what they think are false idols and ensure that people do not make decisions on moral ground but exhaustively in accordance with instrumental concerns or nature. Their religion has taught them that Jews are responsible for teaching the world how to live. There is a worldly orientation to Judaism which believes that salvation and the messianic era will be realized when humankind acts collectively in a way that Jews believe humans should. They do what I believe are evil things, as will be expanded upon over the next two volumes, such as start global wars, undertake acts of terrorism, and carry out assassinations, because they believe with such certainty that they are doing God’s work on earth. As it says in Sefat Emet [True Language], “The children of Israel became guarantors to correct the entire world … everything depends on the children of Israel. To the extent that they correct themselves [and become united], all creations follow them. As the students follow the teacher, the whole of creation follows the children of Israel.” In today’s world such beliefs are no longer acceptable. An important turn that occurred in Hasidic teaching, but was pre-empted in the Lurianic kabblah, is the belief that it was not God’s role to bring redemption to the world but for the Jewish people to redeem the world for God. This difference is crucial for understanding Gnostic Judaism because it is a new feature of Judaism that is in conflict with traditional practices. The problem with the belief that people must redeem the world for God, as with everyone and anyone who believes that they know what is best for the world without critical reflection, is that they do not pay enough attention to the primacy of the hidden God or the creator God. Because of the Talmud and the Midrash, these Jews believe that they know the desires of God, they know how the world should be, they know all the answers. This level of certainty is dangerous indeed. One of the central teachings of Hasidism is Bitul ha-Yesh or “Negation of the Existent”. In experiencing the world and the things in it, people are making an implicit judgement that these things are adequate to what is being claimed of them, or to claim that they are ‘good’. This experience of the good, that allows existents to appear as what they are, has been called ‘culture’. But Gnostic Judaism teaches that we do not know the good therefore all culture is just worship of false idols. One of the central teachings of Judaism, emphasised in the Hasidic tradition, is that all existents are in fact evil. The word “reality” is derived from the Latin res meaning thing or existent. Destroying culture is an example of the realisation of the Jewish teaching of the negation of the existent. The danger that inspires this belief is being certain of knowledge whether it be revealed by Moses or the result of a direct relationship with God. In many ways this has also been the curse of many Christian movements in the past, when they also believe that they have the answers and know the mind of God explicitly with certainty. The truth is that humanity is mortal. We will never explicitly know the mind of God because we die. Because of this reality our knowledge is necessarily

959 limited. We did eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and thereby secured nous but for that nous to be made explicit through reason, was forbidden to us because we are mortal. According to this Gnostic Judaism, as Scholem wrote, the conditions which must be met to realise the Messianic Age are; . . .presumption will increase, and respect disappear. The empire will turn to heresy and there will be no moral reproof. The house of assembly will become a brothel, Galilee will be laid waste, and the people of the frontiers will wander from city to city and none will pity them. The wisdom of the scribes will become odious and those who shun sin will be despised; truth will nowhere be found. Boys will shame old men and old men will show deference to boys. . . On whom shall we then rely? On our Father in heaven. (As told by Scholem based from the Mishnah tractate Sota 1971: 7%) Could there be a better description of our times than this. “no moral reproof”, “house of assembly will become a brothel”, “people . . . will wander from city to city and none will pity them”, “who shuns sin will be despised”, “truth will be nowhere to be found”, “old men will show deference to boys”. That this vision of the Messianic Era perfectly maps over our world is not a coincidence. Of course, this is not some act of God. This is the work of men acting in a way that they believe is on behalf of God. There are many voices in Judaism who fight against this trajectory and hope for a more reflective, less ‘worldly’, interpretation of Judaism. Indeed, the spiritual trajectory of Judaism has dominated for most of Judaism’s history. So, to punish ‘Jews’ for what is being presented would be like holding all Muslims responsible for the acts of ISIS. Up until the late 1960s early 1970s Gnostic Jews were definitely a very small minority. It was only in the late 1960s and early 1970s that this movement began to rise to prominence within the world of Jews. The danger is that this trajectory seems to be growing. The difficulty is differentiating those who support certain actions out of solidarity or fear of reprisals and those who are the “true believers”. This political project has become so dominant in Jewish society today that it is now taught to young Jews because, as the Israeli government proposed in the 1970s, it is now “part of our defence system”. (Selzer 1972: 46) In these lessons young Jewish people are taught “. . .once again, to suspect the world and fear their neighbours. “Slowly, slowly children learn to hate”” (Picard, Revel et., al., 2016: 11) It is this fear and hatred that is taught to many Jews around the world from childhood that then justifies the terrible acts asked of some of them and nurtures a ‘ghetto’ mentality no different to the isolation experienced in the 18th and early 19th centuries. They may not directly experience violence, they may not directly experience being marginalized but they are taught that it is real potential if they do not act to stop it from happening. I know that some young Jewish children are so indoctrinated into thinking like this that they have nightmares about being put in concentration camps. My fear, my greatest fear, is that these lesson of fear

960 and hate, that express themselves in terrible attacks on the people around them, will actually become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As already suggested, the most horrifying truth of Gnostic Judaism is that it may ultimately envisage the death of all non-Jews. The kabbalah tradition, that evil mystical tradition that many Jews rejects unequivocally, teaches that gentiles are the embodiment of evil. As the world becomes increasingly redeemed over time, the kabbalah teaches, that evil must be destroyed. As Scholem observes, authentic kabbalah “. . .predicted that utter disintegration, collapse, and death of the qelippah (evil) once the complete tiqqun (healing) deprived it of the source of its vitality. As the divine parsuf, or “countenance”, is restored in the world, that of the qelippah vanishes.” (Scholem 2016: 46) This passage follows the observation that the gentiles are the qelippah. (Scholem 2016: 46) The ultimate aim of this political movement seems to be the total destruction and ultimate murder of all gentiles. We must never succumb to the political Hasidim vision of the world. One that is exhaustively driven by power, fear and hatred. Love, forgiveness, humbleness and justice, is never a weakness but, if only we had truly adhered to these principles, this evil theo-political movement would never have gained traction within our society in the first place. This political movement uses, hate, jealously, divisions, greed to achieve its ends. The saving power is reality and reality can only be realised, not with power or violence, but with love. Today we live in a theological cryptarchy where a small group of people who are religiously motivated by a particular and recently developed interpretation of Judaism determine what is history, what we now believe to be reality and, therefore, what our future should be. Their power and influence simply cannot be overstated. Most of us, as I too once was, have become merely productive widgets for their exploitation. As German Jew, Franz Oppenheimer, argued, There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labour or the forcible appropriation of the labour of others. Robbery! . . . I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labour and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labour for the labour of others, the ‘economic means’ for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequired appropriation of the labour of others will be called the ‘political means’. (Oppenheimer 1926: 11) Our society has become one where a very small group of people exploit, rob from, the many for their material benefit. According to Oppenheimer, this is the function of politics. Politics, by this account, is merely a means to realise this theft. For this reason, we most certainly do not live in anything resembling a democracy but are in reality living under a brutal and restrictive theocracy overseen by a group of invisible people who believe that God is absent from the world. We live in a theocratic cryptarchy. Those that wish harm against the majority have deliberately and strategically taken control of the institutions of

961 mass communication; Hollywood, the internet, news media and education, so that much of what we are exposed to, from birth until our death, now comes filtered with the purpose of realising a particular political agenda. True art, historically informed by an experience of the sacred and/or, equally, the true, has almost completely disappeared as “art” and has been replaced with a continuous stream of politically loaded messaging or meaningless objects that have only a precarious relationship to reality. Everything from world politics to children’s programs now comes with a message of how we should think and behave. Because we have trusted these people, we have allowed them to thrive and take control of almost every aspect of contemporary society. We have been unaware of the corrosive project that they have deliberately undertaken to take control of our society, destroy civilization and establish their new world order. As Unterman recently wrote, confessing to performing this role, It is not the rich and cultured members of gentile society who control the world, for all that they seem to have the reins of secular power in their hands. It is the outcast and rejected People of Israel whose service of God is what really keeps the world going. (Unterman 1999: 215) What has occurred in the West is the annihilation of culture and the annihilation of the reality within which that culture thrived. The West was once informed by knowledge acquired through reason, which demands an experience of the ‘good’. This has been replaced by an almost animal-like existence where the freedom from morality has resulted in all our actions being overdetermined by the demands of base desires or productivity. As the influential Jewish scholar Eric Gutkind tried to persuade America in the year following the atrocities of the Second World War, the, . . . object is to demonstrate . . . that we need not fear far-reaching changes [to society], and that their pace should be deliberately and systematically quickened. Men are afraid because if the changes are too rapid, they fear a disruption of [society] . . . It is obviously impossible to expect that social conditions can remain static . . . while . . . technological changes proceed much more quickly. No one wants to preserve bad things, and everyone knows that these are bad. Yet they remain as they are. Why? Because we are too “realistic”; instead of getting rid of our shallow belief in surface values we nurse them with an almost suicidal obstinacy. They have degenerated into empty conventions which cannot hold together the disintegrating structure of humanity. (Gutkind 1946: 3-4) But are our historically once much valued ‘conventions’, culture, really just ‘surface values’ that are destroying us. Gnostic Judaism claims that what is “reality” is really just an evil “shell” that can be discarded and that this act reveals the true inner Nature that is the true reality. Gutkind is arguing, consistent with Jewish Gnosticism, that technology advances so fast that it demands revolutionary social change and that this is good because, as we know, what will be changed is civilizations and all civilizations are evil. To hang onto our culture, according to Gutkind, is to hang onto something that will eventually

962 destroy us when, it might be argued, it is these cultural features that is exactly the thing that hold us together. Interestingly, the German Jews Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx argued version of the exact same argument. They also claimed that Western values, that it might be claimed created the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen, lifted millions from poverty, founded the well-fare state, initially liberated women, and so, so much more, is actually evil. It is because the West believes that they experience the good that they have tried to realise their utopic visions of a better society that Sabbatai inspired Jews like Gutkind loathe so much and hope to destroy. With this destruction we now live in a society where we increasingly no longer care about the people around us but are increasingly caught in a Hobbesian condition of ‘nature’, a condition Gnostic Jews believe is the ‘real’, where everyone is in a state of permanent war against everyone else. As Berdyaev wrote, “The bestialism of our time is a continuation of the war, it has poisoned mankind with the blood of war. The morals of war-time have become those of “peaceful” life, which is actually the continuation of war, a war of all against all.”360 (Berdyaev 1935/2008: 28) Women oppose men, blacks oppose whites, Asians oppose whites, rich oppose poor, homosexuals oppose heterosexuals. The conflicts multiply and the voices of harmony, like Martin Luther King, are silenced with a bullet from an anonymous gun. George Orwell famously wrote about a perpetual war in his extremely famous book 1984 where, “This war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.” The reason for this continuous war is so that the elite can achieve their agenda over the embattled masses. This is exactly what is happening in our world today. It can clearly be seen in the fracturing of our once united political community into small groups of special interests that everyone is just out to achieve what benefits them. The experience of the common good has been corrupted and is withering away so that we no longer know what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ or even think in these terms. Instrumental rationality has come to dominate us to such a degree that it is now understood as exhaustive of what it means to be rational at all. To question like the age at which a child is legally responsible there is no longer a moral discussion, but we think about it in terms of developmental harm and functional impacts. This might, at first, be thought as just another experience of inculcation at odds with the Western tradition but the unique feature of our current ethnocide, in contrast to previous ethnocides, is that there is not one normative framework being replaced by another, but one system of norms is being replaced with nothing. We are all becoming nomadic nihilists. We are becoming like animals. For the first time in history, humanity will

360

It is interesting to note that many of the core features of contemporary society have their origins during the Second World War. In many ways, consumer society is a strategy of replacing the destruction of war with inbuilt obsolescence. People became treated after the war as they were during the war. The same mentality, the same drives for efficiency, the same view of ‘human resources. Is it not a time for true peace? A time when humanity can be granted its full dignity.

963 live in the void and chaos of living without a culture. It is this lack of culture that finds expression in our contemporary experience of loss. These Gnostic Jews have captured our education system and systematically and deliberately reversed what the West once held to be of highest value. This project is most clearly articulated by the influential political theorist Leo Strauss in 1962, although this project proceeds Strauss’ words, in the work of Brandes, Ha’am, and Buber. In the presentation, Why We Remain Jews,361 Strauss clearly argues that Jews must remain “Jews” not because he believed in Jewish Orthodoxy, as he unequivocally and unambiguously stated, “I am not an orthodox Jew”. Indeed, Gershom Scholem argued, when considering one of Strauss’ books, that it “begins with an unfeigned and copiously argued (if completely ludicrous) affirmation of atheism as the most important Jewish watchword”. (Scholem as seen in Lazier 2009: 118) The reason why Jews should remain Jews was so that they could move to the forefront of all academic disciplines in order to shape the way Western society thinks and thereby become the “natural leaders” of the world. Strauss sympathetically quotes Nietzsche’s most ‘profound’ and ‘radical statement’ on ‘assimilation’ when he wrote, . . . in a hundred years already [Jews] will appear noble enough so that as lords they will not awaken the shame of those subdued by them. And that is what matters! . . . They themselves best know that there can be no thought of a conquest of Europe or of any violence whatsoever; but also, that at some time Europe may fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hand, which only casually reaches out. In the meantime, it is necessary for them to distinguish themselves in all the areas of European distinction and to stand among the first, until they will be far enough along to determine themselves that which distinguishes. They will be called the inventors and guides of the Europeans and no longer offend their shame. And how shall it all issue forth, . . . how shall it issue forth if not at last in great spiritual men and works! Then, when the Jews will be able to exhibit as their work such precious stones and golden vessels as the European peoples of shorter and less profound experience neither can nor could bring forth, when Israel shall have changed its eternal vengeance into an eternal blessing of Europe, then that seventh day will once again be here when the old Jewish God will be able to rejoice in Himself, His creation, and His chosen people – and we all, all will rejoice with Him! (Nietzsche as seen and translated by Strauss 1997: 325)

361

The question ‘why remain Jews’ seems to have first been asked by Eric Gutkind in 1952. There he was asking “. . .why remain a Jew? Why not simply be a “radical”? What Gutkind was asking is if Judaism is exhaustively a progressive political program then what does Judaism bring to these activities. Why remain a Jew? The answer Gutkind gives is that there is “something lacking in the progressive movements today. Something that makes them ineffective, problematic, without a genuine focus.” Judaism focuses all progressive movements into an ‘irresistible religion’. (Gutkind 1952: 20)

964 Strauss is referring to European assimilation into the Jewish world and how this will allow ‘Europe [or the West] to fall like a perfectly ripe fruit into their hands’. The Jew that he observes as being most successful of assimilating Westerners into Jewish thinking is none other than Einstein. (Strauss 1997: 326) This project, Strauss goes on to observe, could not be realised by individuals “however numerous, dedicated, or gifted” acting together but requires “. . .an act of a national cleansing or purification; and this, in my mind, was the establishment of the state of Israel.” (Strauss 1997: 326) This project has been extremely successful. As Neumann affirms using the same play on assimilation where he is referring to Western society assimilating to Judaism, “. . . a passionate assimilation now began, unprecedented in its energy, in which the Jewish person committed all his strength to assimilating the western world. Over the course of two to three generations, he achieved this, at least outwardly, to an extraordinary degree. As a result of this development, we see Judaism’s conquest of western positions in all fields.” (Neumann 2019: 174) Neumann is absolutely correct to observe that extraordinary success of this endeavour, the assimilation of the Western world, over such a short period of time. Today, little that is taught at university has not been shaped by Gnostic Jews. Strauss is observing a two-pronged attack, one pincer is from Gnostic Jews rising to the forefront of academia and determining what is good or bad and thereby shaping society from above, but this can only be done with a nation state supporting those actors and this nation state is Israel. Israel was never established as an end in itself, a Jewish home, Gnostic Jews can have no home, but merely as a means to the end of global dominion. As none other than Ahad Ha’am. The so called “teacher of the Jews” and extremely influential Zionist wrote, If we agree, then, that the Overman is the goal of all things, we must also agree that an essential condition for its attainment is the Superior Nation: that is to say, there must be a single nation that by virtue of its inherent characteristics is better adapted to moral development than other nations; order its whole life in accordance with a moral law which stands higher than the common ordinary type. This nation will then function as a “fruitful soil” essentially and supremely fitted to produce the desired “Overman”. (Ha’am as seen on Golomb 2004: 144) The nation that Ha’am is considering is the nation of the Jews. The “superior nation” is superior because of its determination to stamp out all established expressions of positive religion. Indeed, the name Israel has been translated to mean “to rule, have power over, prevail over, struggle with . . . God”. Before Israel was named, most people assumed a Jewish state would be called Judea, as it has been historically known, but a very small group of people insisted that the state instead be called “Israel”. Jacob was named Israel “because you have struggled with God and Man and have overcome”. This is from a rather unusual passage in Genesis 32, which is actually concerned with Jacob’s return to the land of his family and the apparently aggressive response to this return from his brother Esau who had used unethical means to

965 obtain Esau’s true birthright, but suddenly says, from out of nowhere, “So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak”. Where did this “man” come from? Why did they wrestle. It is as though, again, that this section is a later addition to the text. It should read, one would assume, “So Jacob was left alone” and there the narrative is taken up in Genesis 33 with Esau’s arrival. But this kind of discontinuity attracts special attention from Jewish scholars. What is this passage about? It says that Jews must struggle, wrestle or fight with God and Man. Israel seems to be a perfectly accurate account of the Gnostic Jews’ exact project. In this passage, Ha’am literally means “Over-man”, the “production” of people that will rule “over” “mankind”. This is exactly how Israel functions in the world today. As September 11 evinces, for Jewish global dominion they need the support, resources and backing of a nation state and the state that enables this is Israel. It is certainly true that not all Zionists, in the past or even today, realise that this is how Israel was always meant to function, but it is a fact that this is exactly how it was always supposed to function and how it does function today. The strategy of dominating thought around the world so that we revalue all values in such a way that Jewish thought is no longer offensive but the new ‘good’ has been extremely successful. Not too long ago, being greedy, for example, was believed to be morally bad, a disgrace, whereas today, in a formal sense, which can be contrasted to our everyday lived experience, greed is good. Greed is ‘good’, not because greed is an end in itself, greed is not “good” in the sense that it is an expression of living a ‘good life’, but because greed has become an apparently necessary part of the post-capitalist productive process. Greed is why we work 10 hours a day and neglect our family obligation. All just to purchase our next wide screen T.V. Greed has become an efficient way of running and controlling society so as to maximise exploitation. As Jewish “academic” Sheldon Solomon observed in a recent interview, “Greed is a complicated alloy of motivational forces that . . . is good for us.” This is a common theme amongst Gnostic Jews. Greed is good, according to Gnostic Jews, is because being greedy not only “works” but reflects our primordial pre-moral condition. To use contemporary jargon, Gnostic Jews have changed our social ecology in order to allow themselves to thrive. Once, again not too long ago, we prized the liberal arts above all else but, today, we do not even know what is. At best the arts have become a hobby about which few need to really know anything about. This is because Gnostic Judaism oppose all ‘arts’ and believe that the world should be appropriated through the ‘word’ or via ‘narrative’. Once we valued someone who did good deeds but now, they are seen as self-righteous ‘do-gooders’ at best detached from reality at worst destructive people who do not understand how the real-world works. Once we valued patriotism but now patriotism is seen as dangerous zealotry that must be tempered instead it flower and inhibit the mass movement of people for maximum efficiency. Once, we appreciated the dangers in technology but now we pursue it without the necessary

966 caution technology deserves. Everything that we valued just 50 years ago has been diametrically and systematically turned upside down. Not only how did this happen but, more importantly perhaps, why? Why would someone want to turn the meaningfulness of a civilized society upside down? Of course, the other question is how? How did the values of a society get reversed? The ultimate aim of these people is to not only to destroy Occidental society but to simply rule the entire world in the name of their God. They mean to do this by making the world reflect their own ontotheological vision and therefore they will be welcome as our ‘natural’ leaders. This project is not something that I have identified but is what is unequivocally argued by influential Jewish intellectuals like Leo Strauss. Indeed, it was Leo Strauss, under the influence of German intellectual Carl Schmitt who has helped orchestrate this project in plain sight for those who care to look. Gnostic Judaism is what underlies our postmodern condition. The Gnostic Jew Lyotard characterises the postmodern condition as the “conscious deconstruction of traditional stereotypes and narratives”. (Stuckrad 2010: 293) The conditions that allow postmodernity is the separation of ‘facts’, or what is, and ‘values’, or what we believe. This dichotomy, fact/values, is often called the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Gnostic Judaism could not have had the success it has had if the soil had not been prepared in advance. It was this division, which demarcated factual claims from normative claims that permitted the modern trajectory that oriented us towards our contemporary post-modern condition. This division was most famously voiced by British empiricist David Hume. Hume argued that an evaluative statement cannot be derived from a purely factual statement or you cannot derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Once the dichotomy between ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is established then the ground is prepared for the primacy of formal reason, understood as ‘facts’, as the materialization of the divine mind. That is, ‘facts’ were supposed to express all the attributes of God by being unchanging, universal, non-perspectival and un-situated in a time or place. Facts were statements consistent with objective reality that is verifiable. Facts could only exist as fabrication, as normative abstractions imposed on a world consisting only of continua. That is why German filmmaker Werner Herzog, rightly claims a distinction between facts and truth, “Facts creates norms, and truth illuminates” (Herzog 2010). Herzog’s insight is to observe that ‘facts’, as simplified impositions on a complex, pluralistic world, are constructed whereas ‘truth’, in contrast, reveals the world, shows the world to be in the particular way that it is. But truth is lost to postmodernity. Once ‘God is dead’, as Nietzsche famously observed, and the foundations for ‘facts’ is eroded, then the truth that there remains only ‘oughts’ or ‘values’ is exposed as the new enduring “reality”. Everything that ‘is’, in terms of being factual, becomes understood in terms of being a mere value. These transitions are what allows Gutkind to speak about Western civilization and its experience of reality as mere ‘surface values’. Once

967 everything is a value then reality itself becomes an expression of will and power or, again as Nietzsche expressed, ‘will to power’. It is this onto-theological belief, that God is dead, and reality can be exhaustively reduced to power, that has allowed Gnostic Judaism to rise to the fore. Political Hasidim is the first political movement to weaponize our very experience of reality. In their attempt to impose their religiously driven vision upon the world, they manifest their myths in terms of a total lack of spirit or Geist. In 2 Samuels 6:1-7, there is story told about an incident when David is returning the Ark of the Covenant from the Philistines to the city of David. While transporting the Ark, an ox pulling the cart stumbles. Fearing that the Ark of the Covenant will fall to the ground, one of the men transporting the Ark, Uzzah, reaches out to steady the Ark and ensure that it does not fall to the ground. Upon touching the Ark, Uzzah is struck down by God dead. The interpretation given to this event by Jewish scholars is that although Uzzah thought that he was doing a ‘good’ thing, people had been told by God Himself not to touch the Ark. God would not have let the ark fall if He did not want it to. Uzzah was claiming to know what is good above God. Man believing that they know what is good is overstepping the mark. So, although Uzzah thought that he was doing a ‘good’ act he was, in fact, betraying God and breaking God’s laws. This account emphasises the Jewish belief that mortals do not know what is good or bad and cannot act on their own inclinations but must obey God’s law. God’s law is how we were created, before we knew of good and evil, in a state of nature. I like another interpretation of this story. Uzzah is punished, not because he has transgressed humanities limits and touched something sacred. Uzzah is punished because he touched the sacred at all. It was for touching, or trying to control, the sacred itself that Uzzah is killed. This is the same reason why Socrates was forced to drink hemlock by the people of Athens. To touch the sacred, to interfere with the sacred things path, is to attract the most extreme of sanctions from God. This ‘touching’, this ‘interference’ is exactly what the political Hasidim are doing. It is a transgression against God. Humanity cannot, must not, like Uzzah, control the sacred. By doing so humanity transgresses their limit as they did when they tried to build the Tower of Babel. That a group of politically motivated actors are trying to take over the world is undeniably shocking and simply must be addressed but it also reveals the basic truth of Schelling’s conclusions. What has taken place is like a grand social experiment and what has been revealed is what a society is like that is not informed by ‘spirit’. The problem with trying to live without spirit is revealed through the work of German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Eric Voegelin, although much can be learnt from Michael Oakeshott, C. S. Lewis and George Orwell. The simple response proposed by Heidegger to an impoverished understanding of reality is to develop a rich one. But, as his work evinces, this is no simple task. As Heidegger appreciated only too well, the project is not to develop a richer ethics, as this would just nurture

968 the division of reality into ‘is’ and ‘ought’, but the project is to develop a richer ontology or a richer experience of Being. This is what Browder is trying to ask in regards to womanhood, No, we can’t go back again. But there’s no moving forward, either, until we do the hard work of addressing the difficult questions my generation asked in the 1960s and ‘70s but failed to answer. How can a woman find her true identity? What will promote her genuine freedom and happiness? What does a woman’s personhood mean? Unless we embrace the steady, diligent work required to answer such fundamental questions, we will never be able to answer the questions so many thoughtful women are now asking . . . how can she navigate a safe course across the roiling sea of cultural confusion my generation has left in its wake? (Browder 2015: 15) This is not only a question for women and what it means to be a woman but are the kinds of questions we need to ask of our culture generally. We certain have a lot of hard work ahead of us, a lot of research, a lot of thinking, if we are to find our way to return to, what I think we should, our experience of God. The truth is that reality cannot be reduced to power unless we have already forgotten or lost true reality, what is sacred, in its pre-existing unity. As Jan Assmann wrote expressing this view, “the power of religion rests on nonviolence. Only through a complete rejection of violence is monotheism able to fulfill its liberating mission of forming an alternative counterpower to the totalizing claims of the political.” (Assmann 2008: 145) That is, only when religion, of the divine, is not concerned with power, can it function as a counterweight or limit to politics. The mythological framework that I would situate such a richer understanding of reality is difficult to articulate without a better understanding of the problem but, just by way of introduction, a rich ontology or onto-theology involves the hidden God, the revealed God (which in turn consists of three aspects, the God of creation, the God of the enduring, and the God of endings), God of nature and, finally, mortals. In the Greek tradition these might be aligned with Zeus (hidden god), Apollo (God of the enduring/Jesus?), Dionysus (associated with dayspring, the morning), Demeter (God of nature), Hesperus (God of endings) and, of course, humanity. Together, the underlying unity of this pantheon grants initial insight into the eternal and unchanging condition of reality. That is, what is revealed by understanding the gods is the eternal and unchanging condition of humanity which will be for as long as humans are human as such. Under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, Gnostic Jews believe that they are trying to behave like ‘aristocrats’, they can transgress the traditional constraints of reality and realise the world in accordance to their values. They can impose their vision of reality on the world. In so doing they affirm life and become like Gods themselves. The truth is, the historical truth, is that aristocrats were never allowed to impose their will, their values, onto the society around them as an expression or manifestation of their power but had to conform to an understanding of reality as passed to them through tradition and custom. Aristocrats

969 had to conform to a shared experience or vision of what was experienced as ‘the good’ or what could be termed ‘civilization’. No better account of civilization can be found outside of that voiced Jewish scholar Mordecai Kaplan, who wrote to a more traditional understanding of Judaism before the influence of Gnostic Judaism, when he wrote, “A civilization is not a deliberate creation. It is as spontaneous a growth as any living organism. Once it exists it can be guided and directed, but its existence must be determined by the imperative of a national tradition . . . Civilizations live by the inherent right to direct the child into their ways.” (Kaplan 2001: 181) So much is said in this brief passage. The most important lesson is that the spontaneity that is civilization cannot be crafted. It cannot be an expression of intentions. Civilization is an artform that must be nurtured forward. What we must realise above all else is to allow the children to be guided into ‘their ways’, not to be made to obey the parents, this is not the parents task, but to nurture children into ‘their ways’. Carl Jung said, “Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not as yet begun to comprehend.” (Jung 1991:3371 (p:815)) What our current situation shows is that Jung was perfectly correct. The impact of losing a sense of meaningfulness has yet to be appreciated. Now that we can see the kind of society that results from a loss of meaning we can now fully appreciate the importance of ‘spirit’ or God both in our everyday lives and in society at large. We must rediscover not so much our past but recover the present. We must therefore be again attentive to Jesus Christ and his message as the way to experience the good. This is what Eric Voegelin was arguing was the response to our post-modern condition, One cannot restore political science today through Platonism, Augustinianism, or Hegelianism. Much can be learned, to be sure, from the earlier philosophers concerning the range of problems, as well as concerning their theoretical treatment; but the very historicity of human existence, that is, the unfolding of the typical in the meaningful concreteness, precludes a valid reformulation of principles through return to a former concreteness. Hence, political science cannot be restored . . . by means of a literary renaissance of philosophical achievements of the past; the principles must be regained by a work of theorization that starts from the concrete, historical situation of the age, taking into account the full amplitude of our empirical knowledge. (Voegelin 2000: 89) We can begin this project by exploring our history with fresh eyes unburdened by the lens of a destructive political ideology. We must learn again who we are through the myths that we tell about ourselves. We must learn anew what we believe in, what is right and wrong, and who and what we care about. We must learn to once again affirm our identities in positive terms and move forward with the knowledge of grace into the future with the explicit aim of realizing our shared dreams. To be simplistic, the truth is something along the lines that the Jewish tradition teaches us to be humble and modest with our claims of being

970 good. We are mortals, our experiences are necessarily limited and, therefore, the ultimate good and what constitutes that good will always be mysterious no matter the small insights we achieve from time to time. The Christian tradition teaches us that although the ultimate good is beyond human comprehension we must be guided by the limited experience of the good that do have. The redemption we have been granted is the best we can achieve, and we must act according to its dictates. If we progress balancing these competing forces with open minds and hearts, then the excesses and tragedies that have resulted from both traditions may be avoided. What did I hope to achieve with this document? My main concern was primarily with disclosing the truth. As Browder (2015: 14) wrote in relation to feminism, “To decide which ideas from the women’s movement need to be uprooted and which more tenderly cultivated, we must re-examine contemporary claims to see how they were implanted in the soil of history.” This really has been the project undertaken in this volume. To reveal how certain ideas have entered into Western history so that we begin, just begin, to think about how to respond. I do not believe that we can fight back or even that we should fight back. To do so would be to simply play their game. People should be made aware of what is actually happening. What informs many of the thoughts and actions in our world today. Once people are informed then they can work out, in their own way, how to respond to our contemporary condition or even if they want to respond to our contemporary condition. Perhaps they agree with a world without morality. What I most certainly do not advocate is any kind of violence. What initiated my research that eventually revealed the power and practices of Gnostic Judaism is because of the indiscriminate violence perpetrated on innocent people in the attacks on the Twin Towers. It so disgusted me that I had to do something. I was responding morally to actions in the world. Our response must be one that aims at truth and justice and most certainly not hateful revenge. This, of course, is a lot to ask. During World War II, a Jewish author, Theodore Kaufman, argued in a booklet titled Germany Must Perish! that, although there were at least 15 million innocent people living in Germany, that no Germans can be spared from collective punishment. The guilty and the innocent should share the same fate because many Germans have caused wars in the past and they will do so again in the future unless they are annihilated. (Kaufman 1941) The strategy that he proposed to achieve this genocide was the mass sterilization of all German males because this approach was “practical, humane and thorough”. As Kaufman said in an interview carried in the September 26 th, 1941, issue of The Canadian Jewish Chronicle, I believe that the Jews have a mission in life. They must see to it that the nations of the world get together in one vast federation. “Union Now” is the beginning of this. Slowly but surely the world will develop into a paradise. We will have perpetual peace. And the Jews will do the most to bring about this confederation,

971 because they have the most to gain. But how can you get peace if Germany exists? The only way to win an eternal peace is to make the punishment of waging war more horrible than war itself. Human beings are penalized for murder, aren’t they? Well, Germany starts all the wars of magnitude. Let us sterilize all Germans and wars of the world domination will come to an end! (Ribalow 1941 :5) Kaufman wanted to annihilate every German, commit genocide, in the simplest, most effective, most efficient, way. This was his response to the actions of the Germans against his people. This proposal becomes particularly offensive when it is learnt the role played by Gnostic Judaism in the rise and arming of Hitler’s Germany as will be revealed in Vol. III. Kaufman’s arguments could be used against the Jews today. By their own admission, they are destructive and wish for nothing more than to destroy the societies in which they live. This is an established part of their religious doctrine. This, though, should never be our way. One thing that differentiates the West from the East is the centrality of the individual over the collective. This is the founding principle to our legal system. We are who we are because we do not take collective revenge. We might seek justice because it is the right thing to do, the good thing to do but mass sterilization of innocent people can never be our way without us losing our way, losing our way in the same manner as a minority of Germans did when under the influence of fascism. I once saw just one Jew who adhered to this political agenda manipulate an entire university department into employing somebody and everyone went along with it because they were ignorant of that individual’s true motivations. Knowledge allows people to make better choices. Allows people to be more critical of what they are being told. We must use the New Testament not only as a kind of spiritual guide but treat it for what it is, a guide for ordering society. Jesus’ teachings do offer a path, perhaps the only path at this stage, into the future that will not result in terrible violence against innocent people. Doing the right thing makes us very strong and impervious to manipulation. It must be made clear, just because homosexuals have been used as a tool to undermine ‘normal’ family relationships, does not mean that we should turn violently against homosexuality. What we have to do, in a way, is start over. In light of what has been revealed in these pages we need to start again and use reason to reveal what is the right thing to do. Although homosexuals make up less than 2% of our population, they must have a say over how we should proceed in way that is both moral and forgiving, righteous and just. This is the reason for writing these books, to educate, to inform, in order to give some guidance on how to move forward in way that will not devastate the world. The question remains, how do we, Westerners, respond to this political movement? The answer to this question is certainly not clear. In calling for action, as history shows, we must certainly be cautious. In the short term the greatest danger confronting Western civilization is that it responds to this political

972 movement with replication through reversal. This is what happened in the mid-20th century Germany with the rise of Fascism. In this scenario, ‘white people’ come to develop a strong in-group identity that reacts against the strategies being deployed by Gnostic Judaism and artificially try to materialise a lost set of “cultural” values. Gnostic Judaism encourages plurality, the West responds with insularity. Gnostic Judaism promotes feminism, the West responds with patriarchy. Gnostic Judaism advances the belief that there is no such thing as disability362, the West responds by marginalizing, or worse, the disabled. The point is that the West could respond to Gnostic Judaism by simply trying to reverse the influence of this political movement. This kind of response can already be seen arising in places around the world and has already produced a number of political organizations and terrorists’ such as Christchurch 2019 and Norway 2011. The danger of reversal, as with any reversal, is that it remains within the same paradigm. Reversal becomes, as MacDonald rightly observed “strategic mimicry”. As he wrote, . . .strategic mimicry will, once again, lead to a “Judaization” of Western societies not only in the sense that their social organization will become more group-oriented but also in the sense that they will be more aware of themselves as a positively evaluated ingroup and more aware of other human groups as competing, negatively evaluated outgroups. (MacDonald 1995) Reversal would be strategic mimicry. The greatest problem that I see from such a strategy is that it is ultimately merely a response to an existing situation. Reversal is a form of passivity where external forces shape human action. A more Western response to seek internal motivations, conscience, realizing a good society, to inform actions and therefore be truly human. Perhaps the greatest danger in responding to this political movement is the temptation of violence but, again, such a response remains within the horizon of Gnostic Judaism and fails to enact a true alternative. The danger is that the political strategy of political Hasidim itself seems to encourage a violent response. If we acknowledge that Gnostic Judaism aims at undermining an experience of the good, then when that good actually does wither away then the ‘native’ group wreaks its terrible revenge without moral restraint. Abraham Foxman observed that the conditions are emerging in which what he terms “anti-Semitism” has historically arisen. Foxman wrote, “We’re living in an environment today that is more user-friendly to the virus [of anti-Semitism], a time of incivility, lack of tolerance, no respect for the truth. And with it comes politicization, polarization, frustration, anger, hate – all the elements that fuel the virus.” But “incivility,

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Gnostic Judaism has made incredible strides in denying any distinction between “normal” and “disabled”. As Ahrbeck and Felder (2020) observe, “They argue that those who describe others as ‘disabled’ assign children, young people and adults an unbearable status, and view this as a human rights violation.”

973 lack of tolerance, no respect for truth” and core teachings of gnostic Judaism that can find expression in violence. Few better descriptions of what happened in Nazi Germany could be given then this very phenomenon. As Hitler himself seemed to admit, There are two possibilities in Germany . . . either the Left: then God help us! For it will lead us to complete destruction – to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power. So, it only when there is utter despair, when there is no faith in anything and society has lost its spirit, when there is no longer any moral restraint, when God is indeed dead, then the conditions are right for the Nazis. Few truer words have ever been said. It is as though the strategy being deployed by Gnostic Judaism has an inbuilt failure mechanism. As none other than it says in the clearest single articulation of Gnostic Judaism, the work of Jewish scholar Eric Gutkind, Choose Live: The Biblical Call to Revolt, Doubtless, American Jewry will soon have its meeting with history. The relation between the American Jews and America did not yet reach that degree of profundity which the Jews had achieved in ancient Greece, in Russia and in Poland, and during their long sojourn in Germany. However, a deep antagonism went alongside, such as the Jews in America have never encountered. There are elements of profound kinship between Judaism and Americanism, but they must be brought into the open and be clearly defined in order to build up a sound relationship. Can there develop a deep antagonism also in the American sphere? This depends upon the further evolution of American culture. It is an experience of the Jews gained in their long history that all cultures eventually abandon their ideals and their basic conceptions. They decay into mere power systems. The decline of a nation begins when it becomes power focused. And this is precisely the moment when a nation tries to detach itself from the Jews. The “No” of the Jews is directed against the powersystem . . . (Gutkind 1952: 13) Gutkind is observing that Jews came to dominate ancient Greece, Russia, Poland and Germany, but this domination resulted in antagonism against Jews and, eventually, liberation from their control. The reason is because as the dominant culture is eroded, or ‘evolves’, when there is no faith left in anything, then that culture is made to abandon its ‘ideals’, its experience of the good, it has lost contact with its spirit. It is at this point that the system of contest around ideals becomes a ‘mere power system’ a zero-sum power struggle where the good, the beautiful and the true no longer matter to anyone and can no longer function as a reasonable constraint. It is at this stage that the settled population turn on their adversary, the nomadic Jews, often with terrible violence, because the naked power struggle that the settled population has really been engaged in is only then transparent. The project in America, as history has shown, is to actually target the possibility of a ‘power-system’ itself, white male power in particular, and erode that

974 system of any power thereby overcoming the most likely point of resistance. The danger is that at some stage, absolutely inevitably, elements of that group are going to try to strike back. To avoid reducing the conflict to a power struggle, it is perhaps safer and ultimately more rewarding to engage with Jewish Gnosticism’s theo-politics directly by critically engaging with its ontological assumptions using substantive reason. In the 1930s-1940s German philosopher Martin Heidegger recognised that people do not constitute their realities, even those realities with which one may disagree with, but are themselves captured by their gods. The strategy to respond to the emerging dominance in Germany of Jewish Gnosticism, according to Heidegger, was not by targeting a people but by reinvigorating the ontological question that allows a set of beliefs to flourish. It has to be appreciated that the fundamental beliefs about reality being advanced by Gnostic Judaism has an “approach to knowledge and to wisdom that is diametrically opposed to that of Heidegger”. (Gordon and Gordon 2006: 4) In contrast to Heidegger’s ontology, Gnostic Judaism gives an account of a reality that is pliable, reducible to narrative as though only words matter, irredeemably perspectival, and, therefore, without adequate constraint to people’s aspiration. It is as though Neo, from the movie The Matrix, was real. The question that Heidegger wrestles with, if he is properly understood, is to ask if this understanding of reality is actually an adequate account of the human condition. Although deeply theological, Gnostic Judaism ultimately presents an anthropocentric view in the sense that there truly is no God known to be present yet in their system of religious belief. As this is the case, then there is no perspective outside of that of the individual human. As the Jewish Gnostic position makes most clear, there simply is no “reality” that might resist the wilful appropriation of the world. Heidegger was quite correct, writing at a time when this movement was consolidating it position, that the question of Being has been forgotten in this theology. This movement operates with a dualist view of the world, there is the “construct”, which is the result of “narratives”, which, as DeConick (2016: 6) nicely sums, “views all labels as colonial impositions that people in power construct and then use to control native populations” and then there is the prior oneness, or the continua, Mother Earth, the Shekinah, the undifferentiated unity that is infused with the spirit of God. The primordial reality, the underground, is constituted by God as a continuum but the “world”, named by man, the world of things, is only the product of the human mind. Things, by this account, have no durability, no endurance, offer no resistance to power, but are transient as the myth of the Tower of Babel affirms, all things made by Man will eventually be brought low by God. To consider gender, which is a theme explored at length later in this volume, Jewish Gnosticism believes that “gender” is nothing but a Manmade border, and, as such, an expression of power. How could men dominate women if gender were not imposed on reality that constitutes both who has power and who is dominated? For a patriarchy to

975 exist there must first be genders. Not only genders, but these gender formations must in themselves manifest or enable a relationship of power. Jewish Gnosticism believes that “women” are Naturally just as sexual and physically violent as “men”, but men have imposed what has come to be called the “feminine virtues” onto women as an expression of power. By shaping “the feminine” as faithful, obedient, loyal, weak, nurturing, they materialize an identity that is compliant to their domination, the ones who are powerful, leaders, intelligent etc., It is men who benefit when woman are chaste, faithful, quite, etc., and not the subject of that identity as an expression of power, in this case, “women”. It is because of such accounts that Gnostic Judaism believes that power lies behind all of reality. Truth, as the like to claim, is power. As Gnostics, they do not believe in reality as such as we have no communication with God, but reality is what humans make of it, therefore, all claims of reality, including gender, are human creation. As human creation they are an expression of power. In light of this, Gnostic Judaism argues that the most oppressive feature of patriarchy is not simply men but people’s, including women’s, conceptions of femininity. The first step in liberation, being free in the sense of not being a slave to “reality/power”, it to move beyond the constructed reality. God, by their account, did not make women feminine, but Man did. As such, the feminine not only can be undone, but morally it should be undone. We can rethink what it means to be a woman informed not by civilization, not by culture, but according to their view of Nature. This is Gnostic Jew Sigmund Freud’s life project, to make women “free” themselves from the destructive beliefs imposed by Christian morality and come to terms with their instinctual selves. The Freemason Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that “The first persons who, having enclosed a plot of land, took into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” According to Gnostic Judaism, this does not apply just to property but to all the borders of being including gender. Things, as such, constitute “civil society” in a historical sense and these things push us away from our true selves. By contrast, humanities instinctual self, unlike virtues, are the product of God. The human is Naturally good, as the product of God, but civil society has turned humanity, through knowledge of good and evil, into something that is now truly evil, not according to human cultural values but, in the eyes of God/Nature. Women need to be freed to their sexuality, freed to their violence and rage, freed to their greed and avarice, and, in this animal like condition, the highest level of the human condition, they will be once again united with God. It is because of this belief that in pre-moral societies, it was believed that orgies and other extreme sexual activity brought a person in touch with the Gods. Western civilization argued the opposite, that the best way to be truly human, to dwell with the God of goodness, love and beauty, was to abstain from sexual activity.

976 There is another way of thinking about the Gnostic myths than how Gnostic Jews have interpreted them. These different interpretations would mean that the things that Gnostic Jews advocate about the world are simply wrong. One might claim that the feminine is the God Most High, as the Greeks might agree, as it is through intuition that nous is originally accessed, and intuition has often been associated with the feminine, but this does not mean that the world must be destroyed for her to be released from her crypt into the world but that it is actually through substantive reason that this God is actually freed? That nous is accessed through reason to realize explicit intellectual knowledge or sophia and Jesus is simply the personification of this reason, logos. This would mean that the Gnostic Jews have misunderstood the androgynous nature of God but that the one God has both a male and female aspect might be to claim that both a male element and a female element are required, as men and women, to access God and to live in Eden. What if the slow evolution of the Western experience of femininity was just part of the process of raising moral children, that is the need for an alternate view on the world that is unlike men’s, the possibility for a different kind of creativity, as has actually been argued throughout history, or that the sex hormone was important for shaping the way women and men, as generalizations, think? The current science on these matters certainly sides with the argument that gender is indeed natural, that it is not a social construct and that men and women do indeed think differently. That certain gendered behaviour is not just the expression of power. As Professor Sean Steven simply states, “I don’t know any real researcher of human behaviour who would say it’s all nature or all nurture.” For a professor in science to say such a definitive statement indicates, as the research has shown time and again, that the evidence must be extremely strong. Indeed, what if the development of the experience of a good woman was actually so complex that it went beyond our very conceptions of “nature” or “nurture”? What if the experience of being a good woman was the result of so many variables and influences that what constitutes the experience of the feminine, that has developed over thousands of years, that what it means to be a virtuous woman, is ultimately beyond human understanding? The domain of the primary creator God of mystery, what the Christians call the Father. That the mix of nature, society, creativity, human relationships, technology, all come together so that the ultimate cause for what is understood to be a virtuous woman is mysterious. It is as a result of the chaos of so many variables over so long a time that not only are woman shaped by the experience of the feminine but, far from being the instigators, enforcers and beneficiaries of the feminine, so are men. From the abyss of complexity, the Apeiron363, emerges the experience of femininity that simply cannot be reduced to power. Humanity must accept this

363

From the Ionic Greek peras which means “end, limit, boundary” and the negating ‘a’ which changes the meaning of course to be “unlimited”, “boundless”, and “infinite”.

977 experience of the good, as with many experiences of the good, as a matter of faith but they are discovered through reason, logos, Jesus Christ. These are the sacred borders, the peras, that constitute a world as meaningful, the place in which we live. To use a different vocabulary, the mysterious God, the Father, has gifted us the experience of the feminine and we must accept this experience humbly, as mere humans, as a matter of faith. God, understood as the unfathomable, but all knowing, ever present and eternal “being”, that is responsible for our experiences of the world, for our experience of what is good, and is, therefore, responsible for the experience of femininity. The experience itself, that becomes known through reason, a gift from God, His Son, Jesus Christ, and it becomes sophia, explicit intellectual knowledge. As Fideler wrote, “As is well known, in the first centuries of the common era, Jesus was widely perceived and represented as the Logos – the cosmic power of Harmony, which was seen as underlying the order of the universe by some of the earliest Christians.” (Fideler 1993: 2) Jesus is the Word made flesh, the mysterious made known, the possibility of a world in which to dwell. Jesus is the light and the truth. He walks amongst us, died and rose again. We need both a mysterious aspect of God, that is necessarily unknowable, as the Jewish Gnostics affirm, and a known aspect of God, our world, reality, that is a matter of faith, this is the gift of the Western tradition, the Graeco-Christian tradition. Before I can be a good person, before I can be a good man, I must have faith in the experience of the good. This affirms Martin Luther’s Protestant conclusion, Sola fide. It seems to me, despite what we are told, that Western men from a Christian tradition do not want to dominate women and they most certainly do not hate women. Equally so, women do not hate men. Most people identify very strongly with their genders even today and find it deeply offensive if they are, for example, mistaken for being the opposite sex. Indeed, the very first question that continues to be asked today when a child is born, or usually before; is it a boy or a girl? Most people like that men behave in a masculine manner and that women behave in a feminine way. We all find some features of the opposite sex annoying, frustrating, or more often than not, confusing, but ultimately endearing. It seems generally to be an undeniable truth that the single person we love most in the world is our partner who is, in over 95% of the time, a person of the opposite sex. We happily sacrifice short term pleasures, like multiple sexual partners or spending all our time with friends, to nurture, not joy, certainly not just sexual ecstasy, those most fleeting of emotional pleasures, but the enduring feeling of contentedness, of being satisfied, or what the Ancient Greeks called agape. Agape was considered by the Greeks “the highest form of love”, akin to the love of God, and was thought quite different to eros (sexual desire). Unlike eros, which is necessarily fleeting, can be selfish, and cannot be satisfied, agape is about self-sacrifice in order to realise an enduring love between two people that goes beyond physical demands. Porn and increasingly

978 degrading sexual demands, such as “anal sex” and “deep throat”, (favourites of the pornography industry) do not show loving respect for our partners no matter agape and yet is promoted, interestingly without apparently attracting much attention at all from contemporary feminism, as expressions of our natural drives. Men simply would not do such things to a woman that they truly loved, cared for, and respected. Who wants to see somebody that they love gag until they almost vomit? The problem that confronts the program of Gnostic Judaism is that, without much effort, it can be shown to be riven with internal tensions. For example, as will be explored in the next volume, they aspire for an ‘open society’, because any ‘closure’ requires an experience of the good, but because their god is absent, they are manifesting just another kind of ‘closed society’. They are manifesting, as they did in the former Soviet Union, an extremely oppressive society. As will be revealed, there is a great deal that cannot be spoken about or criticized in our society today and these restrictions are increasingly finding expression in law. For example, in British law there is restrictions on freedom of speech that might incite, “racial and religious hatred”. Interestingly, there is no caveat regarding “truth” in these laws. If there are people behaving in a way that is destructive and use racial and religious ways of identifying, then they can only be identified in these terms. If a claim is true, then it should never be unlawful. The problem that has allowed such broad generalization to enter into our legal code is because in our post-truth reality how can saying something against a religion, even if they are destroying our civilization, be true because truth just no longer has that traction. But if a religious group, the Christian right or Catholics, which we actually hear criticised all the time, are doing something wrong, or if Chinese people are undermining our society, then people should be allowed, without restriction, to reveal these truths. The truth is that entire episodes in history are being hidden behind walls of silence even though the truth is readily available. The problem is that exposing these sacred cows for what they are, to show them as the lies they are, is increasingly illegal. It is in this discovery, perhaps, that the road to a better future may be gleaned. Manifest a truly open society but one oriented by an experience of the good, informed by truth, aspiring to beauty. Openness seeking to be closed by a richer experience of God. Perhaps guidance for what such a life may look like, that can be embraced by Jew and Christian alike, can be seen in the life of Jesus Christ. Not the religion of Christianity, as will be discovered is a largely Western phenomenon that Jews would find confronting, but the life lived by Jesus Christ as told in the Gospels. If, as Jewish scholars, including Martin Buber, advocate, that this is indeed an admirable life, then Jesus presents as the potential point of agreement for how we can move into the future together. The aim should not be an “open society”, “free” from moral constraints, the life of an animal, an ignorant brute, but a well-adjusted society where everyone works together in harmony informed by a shared experience of morality to realize aims with the hope of a

979 contented future. This may require a period of tyranny, after all if properly understood we do not have a democracy today, but centralized control with special privileges to deal with current crisis. Whatever is to be done, it had better be done quickly. Technology is reaching the stage where those with power will be able to have a mechanical army that will be more powerful, more skilled, more capable, more ruthless, then any human military. Such a force in the hands of the political Hasidim really would see the “end game”. The scenario presented in such dystopias as “Terminator”, “The Matrix” or “Mother” could become all too real all too quickly. This outcome would not be accidental but the desired outcome of Gnostic Jews. Gnostic Judaism, at this very moment, is wielding all its pressure and manipulation to force the United States into spending billions of dollars, billions of dollars that it cannot afford, to develop its weapons that will one day be turned on humanity. We must unite and act before this day comes or nothing will be able to be done.

980

Appendix A A Peek Behind the Screen – The 1998 Kay Griggs Interview One of the more revealing and extremely confronting insights into the contemporary power of gnostic Jews and how they operate in the United States is through the 1998 video interview of Kay Griggs. Before proceeding with an account of what is revealed in this interview, there needs to be some justification as to why this video might be considered as a reliable source despite its unbelievable claims. Many documents that claim to reveal the truth about sinister “Jewish” activities in the world are probably fakes. Famous documents like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that was first released to the public in Russia in 1903 before being circulated around the world, claimed to be a leaked document revealing the intentions of a cabal of powerful Jewish conspirators who hoped to take over the world, or The Hidden Tyranny, which was a pamphlet that claimed to be a transcription of a conversation between a journalist and Harold Wallace Rosenthal, revealing the true activities of Jews in the United States, just before Rosenthal himself was supposedly murdered for publicly revealing too much, are to my mind probably not authentic.364 When you read these documents, they resonate with some truth, after all, as already revealed, people who do identify as Jews are indeed massively overrepresented in certain sectors of the American economy such as finance, government and entertainment, and do indeed collaborate to achieve collective ends. Jews themselves are on the public record admitting to much of this therefore claims to this effect are undeniably true. The problem with these documents more broadly though, is not what they observe, but that they present a particular vision of Judaism in terms that, from what has been revealed in this document, just does not resonate with Gnostic theology. Gnostic Jews are indeed scheming to destroy Western civilization, but they do so not simply because they are evil in some non-contextual way but, as hopefully made clear, because they believe that they are doing “good”. They believe that they are serving their God and that they are overcoming an evil, destructive force in the world. As was presented, these Gnostic Jews believe that it is Christian Western civilization that is destructive, in denying “natural” aspects of the human condition, and it is because of this harm that it needs to be destroyed. This is, from their perspective, a liberation project, as all their political agitations make perfectly clear, from an oppressive force, patriarchal, Christian, Western civilization. As with so many fanatical political movements, Gnostic Jews can do what they do, they can scheme in such a way that hundreds of millions

364

Julius Evola claimed that the Protocols of Zion were probably fake but that that was not important. What was important about this and similar documents, according to Zola, was that such conspiracy theories could be true and therefore informed political action. (See Furlong 2011: 50)

981 of people have already died as a result of their efforts and millions if not billions more will die before they are done, not because they are simply “evil”, although to do such acts some, such as myself, would say they are by definition evil, but because they believe that they are fighting evil. They believe they have God on their side. It is for this reason, that they would not self-identify as being “evil”, they do not believe themselves to be sinister but, as they claim so often in the published material, they believe that they are the most moral people in the world who carry a special responsibility to overcome evil. They can maintain their rage against Christianity and people from the West generation after generation for thousands of years because they believe Christianity is evil. Read authors like Sigmund Freud, Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am, Isaiah Berlin, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Leo Strauss, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and Milton Freidman, to name just a few of the more famous Gnostic Jews, and you hear the authentic voice of Gnostic Jewry. When you read these authors, some of what they say may cause concern, some of what they say might initiate a reflective pause to ask if what they claim is really the case, but none of these authors easily read as evil. Indeed, Martin Buber, who I would argue is one of the most dangerous moral theorists of the 20th century, was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize seven times.365 What you find in these authors is that, although they might be said to represent the full spectrum of Western political views, from the extreme right to the extreme left, they actually share many basic commitments in common. This is evinced by the fact that all of the intellectuals listed above do indeed represent the extremes of the political spectrum and none could be said to populate what some people call the “moral middle”. To uncover how they might be conceived as evil from a Western Christian perspective, one must be attentive to what they actually write and not what readers often want them to say or what readers might even expect them to say. As will be revealed, all these thinkers can be said to be evil from a Western perspective in denying the possibility of being able to reasonably know what is good, the very definition of evil according to Augustine, but they most certainly do not think of themselves as evil. This is where texts like The Hidden Tyranny, I believe reveal themselves as fakes. They are representations from what seem to be a Christian perspective about what an evil “Jews” would say. So, both texts, Hidden Tyranny and Protocols, have some basic insights into what is really happening in the world, Jewish control of global finance and media, but these “revelations” are so obvious and so well documented by authoritative authors (see the work of Arthur Nelson Fields for example) that such “disclosures” really reveal nothing new. These documents, because of their lack of any real disclosure, do

365

Some knowledgeable reader might observe at this point that nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize is not that honorable a distinction. Adolph Hitler was nominated in 1939, the year World War II erupted after Germany invaded Poland.

982 not in themselves represent a threat to the Gnostic Jewry. What is not properly presented in these texts, which is revealed here, is the Gnostic undercurrent that informs some contemporary Jews. To state the obvious, Gnostic Jews know their own religion and motivations, while these texts, unlike the work of, say, Lyotard, Freud, Marx, Gross, or Friedman, do not. What is found in texts like The Hidden Tyranny is a gloating, demonic figure, boasting openly about how they have achieved victory over the goy. Again, there is certainly arrogance and often a self-congratulatory tone to many Gnostic Jewish texts and actions, using vans with a mural of a plane crashing into the Twin Towers on the side of a van used in the operation on September 11, 2001, might be one rather obvious example, but such activities are not equal to presenting a clique Christian vision of an evil Jewish figure. When I began researching this subject, I simply refused to read anything that was critical of Jews. Simply to ensure the integrity of my research, I only used material written by people who either identified as Jewish or seemed, like Lynn, to highly respect Jews. The truth is, there is more than enough material written by such sources, as this volume shows, which clearly reveal what they are doing and why that there is, as a generally rule, no need to draw on sources that have been historically portrayed as “antiSemitic”. Of course, what is labelled as “anti-Semitic” are authors, no matter how thoroughly they have undertaken their research, who are in any way critical of Jews. In the final analysis, I could not carry my research project to completion by only drawing upon sympathetic authors because, for example, researching Jewish overrepresentation requires drawing on authors concerned with such issues and to express such concern is to be an anti-Semite. I had to eventually draw on some, very limited, material that Gnostic Jews would not affirm. I only included such material after I was confident that I understood what was the Gnostic Jewish project and the strategy that they were using to fulfill it. Authors like Robert Sepehr, David Irving, and Kevin MacDonald, who are all academics figures cast to the fringes because of the subject matter they choose to research, but whose research is simply too valuable to ignore. I first came across Sabbatai Tsevi, for just one example, through the rather under-developed, self-published book by Robert Sepehr but one that tweaked my curiosity. That being said, like Sepher, Irving and MacDonald, the Kay Griggs interview is definitely not like the Protocols or Hidden Tyranny. It is obvious that a lot of what Griggs observes she simply does not even understand herself. Far from this ignorance raising question about her claims it actually adds to her credibility. Only after reading what is written in this volume does what the extremely brave Kay Griggs have to say really make sense. It is like a layperson who has spoken to a theoretical physicist and then is asked what they know about theoretical physics. By what they know they prove that they did indeed speak to a theoretical physicist, but because of what they do not know, the shallowness of their account and huge gaps in their knowledge, shows that they

983 themselves are not theoretical physicists. They have heard from a theoretical physicist, but they themselves are not theoretical physicists. This is what is exciting about the Kay Grigg interview. She confirms a lot of what has been claimed in these texts, indeed in some details she goes well beyond what is claimed in this volume, to reveal the full extent of how these theologically motivated actors are doing, while also showing that she does not properly understand that about which she is speaking. The Kay Griggs video is the most important video that has been produced in the last 30 years. Kay Griggs, or Katherine Pollard Griggs, was the wife of U.S. military General George Griggs (who later became a U.S. Marines Colonel). She agreed to do a tell-all interview with Pastor Rick Strawcutter, a U.S. Protestant preacher. She believed that she was being mistreated by the legal system regarding their divorce because of her husband’s powerful connections. She claimed in the seven and half hour interview that she had warned those who were not giving her fair treatment through the divorce that if she continued to be mistreated by the legal system then she would reveal everything that she had learnt from her husband. She claimed that her husband had a severe drinking problem and during these binges he would confess to her everything, not only about secret operations, but about his own childhood and what he had experienced growing up. As she actually reveals in the interview, revenge for mistreatment during the court case is not her ultimate motivation. The claims that she does make in the interview are, to use an inadequate clique, shocking. By themselves, because of their unbelievable nature, her claims might simply be rejected, as I am sure they actually are by many, as either nothing more than a bizarre attempt at revenge by a wronged wife or, as was claimed in public in the years following the making of the video, that she was suffering from some kind of mental breakdown. Neither of these claims could be true. Given what has been revealed in this text, Kay Griggs’ revelations must be appreciated for what they truly are, a rare and extremely privileged insight into the American socio-political reality and the role Gnostic Judaism plays in shaping every aspect of contemporary American life and how this is achieved. Indeed, Kay Griggs can be seen to substantiate the strategies and institutional arrangements presented in these volumes although not, of course, in the depth and detail presented here. During the interview, Mrs Griggs claimed that her husband and many others, including, interestingly, the Royal family of Saudi Arabia, were brainwashed into what she describes as a “Jewish cult” that controlled every aspect of their lives and demanded total obedience. This cabal achieved this level of control over people who did not identify as Jews through a process of mental and physical abuse that begins in childhood and does not really end until the supplicant is fully indoctrinated. One important method of mental abuse, interestingly given what has been revealed in this volume, is child sexual abuse. Griggs claimed that powerful ‘Jews’ begin their brainwashing by finding young intelligent but totally

984 vulnerable children. Unsurprisingly, but again interestingly considering what has been revealed here, this meant finding children whose father may have died or whose parents had divorced, and their fathers had not had a lot to do with the children. Their main interest, obviously, was to find people who grew up without a father figure. Although Griggs does not say this, the obvious reason for selecting children without fathers is because they grow up without a strong sense of morality. After all, this is one of the reasons why Gnostic Jews try to undermine the nuclear family, to ensure that women are primarily responsible for raising children and not men because, as already argued, women’s love is unconditional while men expect certain moral behaviour before expressing love. This is why fathers are so dangerous. Lacking a father figure, having no male role models, not being raised as “good men”, was the main selection criteria. They wanted men who had been dominated by women, men who had nobody who had ever really tried to make them conform to social norms. It is no accident that homosexual men often come from single parent households that are dominated by strong women. Under such conditions, men confuse their role with a woman’s and, like women, become sexually attracted to men. They develop a female ethos. Men, raised by women, are raised in environments where there is no moral restraint, where they are affirmed no matter how they behave, and see a role model that is not only primarily pragmatic but one that is pursuing male approval. Considering the astronomical rates of divorce in the West, which has been one of the many social destructive objectives of Gnostic Jewry, we can expect growing rates of homosexuality, gender dysmorphia and morally weak men in the future. According to Kay Griggs, these vulnerable young boys were selected from a very young age, firstly because of their vulnerability but also because they were intelligent, and then slowly indoctrinated into the Gnostic Jewish worldview. They were indoctrinated into this religious cult to such a degree that they gave them total obedience. A similar process was carried out by the Ottoman Turks who would take young Christian boys from the Balkans and then raise them, in the absence of their fathers, to become fanatically faithful and determined Islamic fighters. The same process is really happening here, vulnerable Christian boys are raised by this cult and through a process of physical, sexual and mental abuse, they destroy their ego to make them obedient servants. The boys taken by the “Jewish cult”, according to Griggs, were trained in such a way that they would be prepared to do anything that was asked of them because they were so desperate to seek approval for their male handlers. Their handlers, obviously, came to replace their fathers, as strong male figures who would only love them under certain conditions, but they were raised without morality, without a sense of the divine. They were basically raised to obey their handlers ever whim. The basic, and rather obvious need for such people, men who were not Jews nor related to Judaism in any way but who would be fanatically loyal is rather obvious. Such people were required to fill positions to keep certain

985 appearance. Although Jews can be dramatically overrepresented without too many questions being raised, they cannot be seen to fill every position. 50% or 60% of positions in an organization filled by Jews might raise concerns, 90% to 100% of positions filled by Jews shows that that organization is under Jewish control. Jews cannot be seen to exert that much control. To properly realise their agenda, these cult leaders would select particular goyim who are then ‘educated’ so that they unconditionally support the complete project of gnostic Jewry. That is, they become convinced, as do many young Jews, that what is being asked of them is not only a matter of being obedient but of actually being a good person that is fighting against evil. As was made clear in the introduction, not all Jews are gnostic but, it is also important to remember, not all Gnostics Jews are Jews. For this reason, people should not be judged by their affiliations, although I admit that these people are simply easier to identify, but by what they say and what they do. Say there is a situation where a Jew is being accused of murder and there is a really strong case, if a Jewish judge reaches an innocent verdict, then everyone raises eyebrows about Jews not being prepared to convict other Jews, whereas if somebody raised as a “Catholic”, say, reaches the same verdict in the same situation then, at worst, he is thought to have made a poor judgement. The “Jewish factor”, as such, becomes invisible. Kay claims that when her husband, General Griggs, would get drunk, which was often the case as he was an alcoholic as a result, Griggs claims, of the brutal indoctrination process, he would tell his wife about everything. He would tell her about how he was indoctrinated, he would tell her about what he had been raised to believe, and he would tell her about what they did. Kay Griggs claimed that her husband, along with members of the Saudi Royal Family, were all forced to attended ‘The Hun School’366. The Hun School is a primary and secondary extremely elite private school with strong historical links to well-known Gnostic Jews. The school was re-opened shortly after the Second World War, when, as will be revealed later in this volume, Gnostic Jews were really beginning to assert their authority in the United States, by none other than the highly politically active Jewish scientist Albert Einstein. Einstein, as will be revealed later in these volumes, is one of the most important figures in advancing the early Gnostic cause. Einstein’s name arises again and again in relation to the activities of this movement. He was so politically active that it is a wonder he found time for science. For example, not only did he advocate for the development of the atomic bomb, along with Hungarian Hasidic Jew Leo Szilard, originally intended to be dropped on

366

Using a school called the Hun School is just the kind of humor that political Hasidim always display. Huns were a nomadic tribe who, in the 5th century AD, under their leader Attila, managed to successfully defeat many Roman armies and eventually invaded Italy. As Gnostic Jews identify as nomads who are invading the West the idea of using a school called The Hun School, teaching people how to be Huns, would be appealing.

986 Germany in revenge for their treatment of Jews (Einstein’s country of birth which he loathed), and made several approaches to Walther Rathenau, the German Jewish statesman, on behalf of Jewish interests (Volkov 2012: 206) but he also personally persuaded Winston Churchill to guarantee German Jewish “academics” positions in Western universities in the years preceding World War II (Rowe and Schulmann 2007: 261) Even this list does not come close to exhausting the political activities of this passionate Gnostic Jew. As will be argued, the positioning of German Jewish academics in tenured positions in Western universities in the aftermath of World War II was the origin of Jewish intellectual dominance of Gnosticism in the West. The current dominance of critical theory and neo-liberalism would be impossible without this wave of immigrant academics securing posts in prestigious universities. That his happened was in no small part the result of Albert Einstein. Indeed, Einstein has all kinds of links to those who can be said to be known actors of the Jewish Gnosticism including getting regular financial support from the Rothschilds family, being close friends with Kurt Blumenfeld (head of the German Zionist Organization) and exchanging correspondence with fellow German Jew and important neo-Hasid Martin Buber. When properly understood, Einstein is perhaps the single most influential political figure of the 20th century. As a reward for his efforts, Einstein has become synonymous with what it means to be a genius. How many other theoretical physics can most people name? This is not an accident, this is not because of Einstein’s unique contribution, this fame was because Jews needed to change the dominant perception at the turn to the 20th century that Jews were unintelligent. That the claim that Jews might be unintelligent would be unimaginable today, they are usually thought of as more intelligent than others, but this is because of this deliberate program. That Griggs mentions a school that was, utterly unknown to her, opened after the war by a figure so enmeshed within Gnostic Jewry, is the kind of evidence that gives credence to her claims that are just not found in publications like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion or The Hidden Tyranny. Griggs further claimed that these specially selected vulnerable children were moved from The Hun School to Princeton University where their education and training is completed. Many figures who are associated with Gnostic Judaism go through Princeton University and Princeton undoubtedly advances a “progressive” agenda that is, of course, perfectly harmonious with Gnostic Judaism. Boston generally, like New York and Los Angeles, is a centre of Gnostic Judaism. Throughout their education, these specially selected boys are closely monitored by their Jewish handlers to ensure that they are developing as required. Griggs does not reveal or does not know what happens to boys who do not successfully become useful to this movement. Griggs claimed that people who have been recruited and trained in this manner are then promoted, with the support of an established network of people in places of power, into positions of power and influence in the military, judiciary and government.

987 Kay Griggs claimed in this interview that absolutely nothing can be done in the United States without this cult’s approval. One of her more interesting claims in respect to the research undertaken here, that actually further validates what she is saying, is that she claims that these recruits are indoctrinated into the philosophy of existentialism. Existentialism, with its thorough going agnosticism, humanism, instrumental rationalism, and anti-moralism, is perfectly harmonious with Gnostic Judaism. As Lookstein observes humorously, “The Hasidic rabbi was an existentialist with a shtreimel367. As such he preceded Kierkegaard by almost a century.” (Lookstein 1956: 248) As was argued, existentialism is Gnostic Judaism for gentiles. Indeed, one of the founding theorists of neo-Hasidism, Hillel Zeitlin, wrote a passage in 1910 on the fundamentals of Neo-Hasidism titled Being and Nothingness which, of course, was later used as the title for Jean-Paul Sartre’s magnum opus on existentialism that was published in 1943. As Rabbi Berkovits rightly observed, “In regards to values, the positions of Buber368 and Sartre are not very much apart from each other. The freedom of choice from among existing possibilities is basic for Buber, too.” (1970: 21) Without knowing that Hasidism, neo-Hasidism and Gnosticism advance a form of philosophical existentialism, Griggs’ claim that they educate people as existentialists would be uninteresting or at least raises questions but, once what is revealed in these volumes is understood, then the fact that Kay Griggs claims that these goyim are educated as existentialists adds even more legitimacy to her claims. Finally, Kay Griggs claimed that there are many ‘Israelis’ in the United States government who were furthering the interests of Israel using the resources of the United States. This is especially true, as already observed, in the State Department’s Middle Eastern Affairs Department. Griggs claims that the Middle Eastern Affairs department is adorned with pictures of the Israeli Prime Minister and is lined with Israeli flags and not the picture of United States’ president or American flags. Kay Griggs further claimed that at the time when she spoke, in 1998, that it was increasingly the case that many U.S secret service officers, including assassins, were being trained in Israel where, she suggested, they were undergoing a special “education program” so that they would see the world in a particular way. Kay suggested that his was dangerous as it might compromise the soldiers to serve Israel and not the United States. Kay Griggs’ claims are certainly shocking. Everything that she says, the Hun School, the role of the father, Princeton University, child sexual abuse, and existentialist philosophy, is supported by the research presented in these volumes. Why did K. Griggs really risk everything to reveal the truth about a cult that she knew, better than anyone, exactly what they were capable of doing? In truth, it was not just about getting revenge on her husband for poor

367

A shtreimel is a black fur hat worn by Hasidim. As will be developed later in this volume, Martin Buber is one of the most influential neo-Hasidic thinkers of the early to mid-20th century. 368

988 treatment, as she herself ultimately admits, but because she “. . . believes in this nation, in my state Virginia, my people, my culture, my God, this is important . . .” It is because she could still experience her God, the divine, and get moral guidance from that God that she risked everything to reveal the truth. The basic message that Griggs is really trying to communicate is that there is a political movement, a cult, that has infiltrated every institution of American society and corrupted it so that it now serves their religiously motivated purposes and no longer either serves the American people or America’s God. She speaks of things written in her husband’s diary where he had murdered people, including Americans, which he justified as being his duty in the service of his handlers. In the context of what is being presented here, it reveals just how far Jewish influence in government might have spread. After all, Grigg’s husband was in the army, which, because Jews do not join armies, was long thought to be at least one of the bastions that might resist Jewish power in the United States. Political Hasidim really does control what we see on our screens, what we hear on the radio, and, what we learn in our schools, and they can do this because we are ignorant of their activities. It is their invisibility that makes their task so easy. That they still have our trust and trusted people can be the most destructive. The enemy sitting at your table is far more dangerous than the enemy at the gates. As already said, it is because of this ignorance that the primary purpose of these volumes is to educate people so that an informed debate can be undertaken so that we can determine the kind of society in which we want to live. Do we want to live in an undemocratic theocracy where people behind the scenes control our thoughts in order to achieve their religiously motivated purposes? That is only a question that each of us as individuals can answer. What happened to Kay Griggs is really unknown. After giving the interview she literally disappeared. Family members said that she was getting treated for what was obviously a mental breakdown. This is, of course, deeply concerning. The Kay Griggs being interviewed by the Pastor certainly does not appear mentally ill. All you need is a doctor to sign a piece of paper and you are literally locked away unable to talk to people outside and potentially exposed to all kinds of terrible abuse behind the scenes. Years after her interview, Griggs did, supposedly, do a number of radio interviews but she just seems to be different. Her claims make less sense. It is as though somebody were trying to discredit her. Later still, she was seen in public, remarried but never again, as far as I can tell, elaborated upon or referred to her interview. The terrible things, most especially in the domain of mind control, that these people can do is shocking and I certain fear for Kay Griggs must have suffered for her bravery and nobody was prepared to do anything in her defence. A sobering example indeed.

989

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999 Dirks, Nicholas B., Eley, Geoff., and Ortner, Sherry B. (1994) Introduction. Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory. Princeton University Press Dobson, James (1995) “Why I Use ‘Fighting Words’: A Response to John Woodbridge’s “Culture War Casualties”. Christianity Today. June 19: 27-30 Dodson, Betty (2013) Porn Wars. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. Edit. Tristan Taormino, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young. The Feminist Press Domaradzki, M. (2010) Allegoresis in the Fifth Century BC. Eos 97: 233-48 Donnellan, Brendan (1982) Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Rée: Cooperation and Conflict. Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 43, No. 4: University of Pennsylvania Press Dowling, C. (1981) The Cinderella Complex: Women’s Hidden Fear of Independence. London: Fontana Driggers, Ronald G. (2012) Personality and Character. Optical Engineering. 51(10) D’Souza, Dinesh (1996) The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. Free Press Paperbacks Dweck, Yaacob (2016) Introduction to the Princeton Classical Edition. In Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626-1676. Princeton University Press Einstein, Albert (1950) Out of My Later Years. Philosophical Library. New York Eliade, Mircea. (1959) The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion. New York: Harcourt Brace Elster, Jon (1989) Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press Ernst, Sheila. & Goodison, Lucy. (1981) In Our Own Hands: A Woman’s Guide to Self-Help Therapy. J. P. Tarcher. Etkes, Immanuel (2013) On the Motivation for Hasidic Immigration (Aliyah) to the Land of Israel. Jewish History. Vol. 27, No. 2/4: 337-351 Evola, Julius. (1995/1934) Revolt Against the Modern World. Rochester, VA: Inner Traditions Fackenheim, Emil L. (1963) Kant and Judaism. Commentary: Politics and Ideas. As seen https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/emil-fackenheim-2/kant-and-judaism/ on the 24/05/2021

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1002 Friend, John (2017) Jewish Academic Details Role of Israeli Mossad on 9/11. American Free Press. As seen at https://americanfreepress.net/jewish-academic-details-role-of-israeli-mossad-in-911/ on the 21/1/2021 Fromm, Erich. (1966) You Shall be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and its Tradition. Fawcett Premier: New York Fromm, Erich (1967) Psychoanalysis and Religion. Open Road Integrated Media Fry, Stephen (2018) Political Correctness: A force for Good? A Munk Debate. As Seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST6kj9OEYf0 on the 9/4/2020 Fuchs, Rachel G. & Thompson, Victoria E. (2005) Women in Nineteenth Century Europe. Palgrave MacMillan Fuller, Steve (2018) Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game. Anthem Press Furedi, Frank (2020a) The Birth of the Culture Wars: This Century-Long Conflict is Born of the Western Elite’s Loss of Cultural and Moral Authority. Spiked. Published on the 19th June 2020 as seen @ https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/06/19/the-birth-of-the-culture-wars/ on the 31/07/2020 Furedi, Frank (2020b) Another White US Female Professor has been Exposed as Falsely Claiming to be Black. What Lies Behind this “Pretendian” Phenomenon? Russia Today. 4th Sept. 2020 https://www.rt.com/op-ed/499888-white-professor-black-krug-university/ as seem on the 9th September. 2020 Furlong, Paul (2011) Social and Political Thought of Julius Evola. Routledge Gabler, Neal (1988) An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Crown Publishers Gay, P. (1987). A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Geetz, Clifford (1973) Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. Basic Books Gellman, Jerome. (2006) Hasidic Mysticism as an Activism. Religious Studies. Vol. 42: 343-349 Gerges, Fawaz A. (2018) Making the Arab World: Nassar, Qutb, and the Clash that Shaped the Middle East. Princeton University Press

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1009 Jackson, Ashley (2013) Buildings of Empire. Oxford University Press Jacobs, A. & Appleyard, D. (1987) Toward an Urban Design Manifesto: A Prologue. Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 53(1), p: 112-120 Jacobs, Emily (2020) University of Chicago only Accepting English Students Willing to Work in Black Studies. New York Post. As seen @ https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/uchicago-only-admitting-englishstudents-to-work-in-black-studies/ on the 9/7/2020 Jacobs, Sean (2019) Is Our Next Governor-General Too Safe, Too Male, Too White? Spectator Australia https://www.spectator.com.au/2019/01/is-our-next-governor-general-too-safe-too-male-too-white/ Jacobson-Maisels, James (2019) Neo-Hasidic Meditation: Mindfulness as a Neo-Hasidic Practice. As seen in A New Hasidism: Branches. Ed. Arthur Green and Ariel Evan Mayse. University of Nebraska Press. Jacoby, Russell. (1999) The End of Utopia, Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy. New York: Basic Books Jaeger, Werner (1961) Early Christianity and Greek Paideia. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press Jaki, Stanley L. (1990) Science and Creation. University Press of America Jarrett, Christian (2019) The Way Children Draw Human Figures Has Changed Since the 1970s, Reflecting Modern Society’s Attitudes to Gender – German Study. Big Think. https://bigthink.com/culturereligion/gender-differences-childrens-drawings?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1 as seen on the 26 June 2020 Jensen, Tamara Syrek. Chin, Joseph. Rollins, James. Koller, Elizabeth. Gousis, Linda and Szarama J. E. W. Jr. (1967). EDITORIAL: Church and State in England. Journal of Church and State, 9(3), 305-316. Retrieved August 2, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/23913731 Katerine. (2016) Proposed Decision Memo for Gender Dysphoria and Gender Reassignment Surgery. Centres for Medicare & Medicaid Services. https://www.cms.gov/medicare-coveragedatabase/details/nca-proposed-decision-memo.aspx?NCAId=282 as seen on 26/05/2021 Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (1930) Lord Rothermere Attacking Jews Advises Hitler to Eliminate Antisemitism from Program. Jewish Daily Bulletin (Sunday, October 5, 1930)

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1011 Katz, Ant (2013) 60% of White Treason Trialists were Jewish. South African Jewish Report. https://www.sajr.co.za/news-and-articles/2013/11/18/60-of-white-treason-trialists-were-jewish as seen at 11:55 on the 7/3/2020 Kavka, Misha (1995) The “Alluring Abyss of Nothingness”: Misogyny and (Male) Hysteria in Otto Weininger. New German Critique. No. 66, Special Issue on the Nineteenth Century: 123-145 Kavka, Martin & Rashkover, Randi (2012) Revisioning the Jewish Philosophical Encounter with Christianity. Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century. Ed. Aaron W. Hughes & Hava TiroshSamuelson. Brill Kellner, Douglas. (2004) 9/11, Spectacles of Terror, and Media Manipulation. Critical Discourse Studies. 1(1): 41-64 Kelly, Peter. (2016) The Self as Enterprise: Foucault and the Spirit of the 21st Century Capitalism. Routledge. London & New York Kemp, H. V. (1992) G. Stanley Hall and the Clark School of Religious Psychology. American Psychology. 47 (2): 290-298 Kennedy, William H. (2004) Lucifer’s Lodge: Satanic Ritual Abuse in the Catholic Church. Reviviscimus Khalidi, Rashid (2016) The Occupation of the American Mind: Israel’s Public Relations War in the United States. Dirctors Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp. The Media Education Foundation Khazan, Olga (2017) A Shocking Decline in American Life Expectancy. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/12/life-expectancy/548981/ Kilcher, Andreas B. (2010) Philology as Kabbalah. In Kabbalah and Modernity: Interpretations, Transformations, Adaptations. Ed. Boaz Huss, Marco Pasi and Kocku von Stuckrad. Brill Kilcullen, David (2020) The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. Oxford University Press. Kimball, Roger (2002) What We are Fighting for: The Example of Pericles. Our Brave New World: Essays on the Impact of September 11. Ed., Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, Hoover Institution Press: Stanford Kindelberger, Roy D. (2017) God’s Absence and the Charismatic Presence: Inquiries in Openness Theology. Wipf & Stock Publishers

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1017 Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (1970) The German Ideology. Ed. Christopher John Arthur. International Publications May, Martha (1982) The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dollar Day. Feminist Studies. Vol. 8, No. 2 pp: 399-424 Mazzig, Hen (2020) How Jewish Twitter Users and Celebrities Took Down a Virtual Anti-Semitic Mob, Think: Opinion, Analysis, Essays. https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/how-jewish-twitter-userscelebrities-took-down-virtual-anti-semitic-ncna1233915 McArthur, Shirl (2013) A Conservative Estimate of Total U.S. Direct Aid to Israel: More Than $130 Billion. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. https://www.wrmea.org/013-october-november/aconservative-estimate-of-total-u.s.-direct-aid-to-israel-more-than-$130-billion.html Accessed on 6/11/2019 McCarter, Jr. Kyle P. (2011) Dualism in Antiquity. Light Against Darkness: Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World. Ed. Armin Lange, Eric M. Meyers, Bennie H. Reynolds III and Randall Styers. Vandenhoaeck & Ruprecht McDaniel, Susan A. (1988) Women’s Roles and Reproduction: The Changing Picture in Canada in the 1980s. Atlantis Vol. 14 No. 1: p 1 – 12 McClellan, David. (1995) Ideology. Palgrave McCormack, D. (1994). Immigration and multiculturalism. In Censorship Immigration and Multiculturalism, by J. Bennett. Australian Civil Liberties Union. Mbembe, Achille (2016) The Society of Enmity. Radical Philosophy. https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-society-of-enmity as seen on 16/12/2020 Melchert, Norman & Morrow, David R. (2019) The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. Oxford University Press Mendes, P., (1993) The New Left, the Jews and the Vietnam War, 1965-72. Melbourne: Lazare Press Mendes-Flohr, Paul (2019) Gnostic Anxieties: Jewish Intellectuals and Weimar Neo-Marcionism. Modern Theology. 35:1 Mendieta, Eduardo (2002) Introduction. As seen in Jürgen Habermas: Religion and Rationality – Essays on Reason, God and Modernity. Ed. Eduardo Mendieta MIT Press

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1022 Persico, Tomer. (2014) Neo-Hasidic Revival: Expressivist Uses of Traditional Lore. Modern Judaism – A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experiences. Vol. 34, Issue 3. Petraitis, John, Boeckmann, Robert J., Lampman, Claudia, Falconer, Evan M. (2014) Sex Differences in the Attractiveness of hunter-gatherer and Modern Risks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology. Vol. 44, No. 6 Piętka, Dariusz (2015) The Concept of Intuition and its Role in Plato and Aristotle. Organon. Volume 47: 23 - 40 Pilcher, S. & Torii, K. (2017) Expenditure on Education and Training in Australia 2017: Update and Analysis. Mitchell Institute Policy Paper No. 05/2017. Mitchell Institute, Melbourne. Pinker, Steven. (2018) Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Penguin Books Limited: United States Pinkus, Benjamin (1990) The Jews of the Soviet Union: The History of a National Minority. Cambridge University Press. Pluckrose, Helen and Lindsay, James (2020) Cynical Theory: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity and Why This Harms Everybody. Swift Press Polkhen, Klaus. (1975) Zionism and Kaiser Wilhelm. Journal of Palestine Studies. Vol. 4, No. 2 (Winter). University of California Press Popkin, Richard H. (1994) Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Tzevi Story. Jewish History. Vol. 8, No. 2 Postman, Neil. (1993) Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage Books: New York PRB (2001) Europe: A New Immigration Area? Population Reference Bureau. https://www.prb.org/europeanewimmigrationarea/4/ Primm, S. L. et al (2014) The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection. Science 344, No. 6187 Rasmussen Reports. (2015) Black Lives Matter of All Lives Matter? https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/august_2015/black_lives_ matter_or_all_lives_matter

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1024 Rothman, Stanley and S. Robert Lichter (1982) Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left: Oxford University Press Rorty, Richard (1991) Freud and Moral Reflection. In Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Essays on Heidegger and Others. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge Rosenblatt, Gary (2020) Is it Still Safe to Be a Jew in America? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/anti-semitism-new-normal-america/608017/ as seen on the 27/05/2021 Rosenstein, Marc J. (2018) Turning Points in Jewish History. Jewish Publication Society Rosenthal, Gilbert S. (2005) Tikkun ha-Olam: The Metamorphosis of a Concept. The Journal of Religion. Vol. 85, No. 2: 214-240 Roskies, David G. (1999) Against the Apocalypse: Response to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture. Syracuse University Press Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. (2009) The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England. Harvard University Press. Rothberg, Michael (2020) The Specters of Comparison. Latitude. https://www.goethe.de/prj/lat/en/dis/21864662.html as seen on 16/12/2020 Rothblum, Esther & Bond, Lynne A. (1996) Preventing Heterosexism and Homophobia. SAGE Publications Rothman, Joshua (2014) The Meaning of “Culture”. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/meaning-culture as seen on the 15/04/2021 Rowe, David E. & Shculmann, Robert. (2007) Einstein on Politics: His Private Thoughts and Public Stands on Nationalism, Zionism, War, Peace, and The Bomb. Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford Rozsa, Matthew (2019) QAnon is the conspiracy theory that won’t die: Here’s what they believe, and why they are wrong. Salon https://www.salon.com/2019/08/18/qanon-is-the-conspiracy-theory-thatwont-die-heres-what-they-believe-and-why-theyre-wrong/ as seen on the 23/04/2021 RT. (2020) Social Justice comes from the Boardroom: Goldman Sachs Declares war on the Straight, White, Male Corporate Board. https://www.rt.com/usa/479105-goldman-sachs-diversity-women/ accessed on 25/01/2020

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1026 Segal, Alan F. (1977) Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism. Brill Academic Publications Scharf, Orr (2019) A Tale of Love and Darkness: Martin Buber’s Gnostic Canon and the Birth of Theopolitics. Religions Vol.10 No.4 Schechter, S. (1888) The Dogmas of Judaism. The Jewish Quarterly Review. Vol. 1 No. 1: 48-61 Schoffstall, Joe (2020) Columbia Professor Who Thanked Fauci for Wuhan Lab Messaging has Links to the Chinese Communist Party. Fox News. Seen at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/columbiaprofessor-lipkin-fauci-wuhan-lab-china on the 12/07/2021 Scholem, Gershom (1965) Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America Scholem, Gershom (1970(1936)) Redemption Through Sin. Scholem, Gershom (1987) Origins of the Kabbalah. Ed. R. J. Zei Werblowski. Trans. Allan Askush. Princeton University Press Scholem, Gershom (1946/1991) Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Schocken Books Scholem, Gershom (1997) On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. Edit. Johathan Chipman. Schocken Books Schurmann, Reiner (2003) Broken Hegemonies. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Indiana University Press: Bloomington & Indianapolis Schwartz Matthew S. (2019) Facebook Bansd Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan and Other “Dangerous” Individuals. National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2019/05/03/719897599/facebook-bans-alexjones-louis-farrakhan-and-other-dangerous-individuals Sears, Dovid (1996) The Path of the Baal Shem Tov: Early Chasidic Teachings and Customs. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., Senior, Jennifer (2005) Are Jews Smarter? New York. As seen @ https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/1478/ on the 9/6/2020

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1028 Smith, M. L. R. (2020) University of Fear: The Paradox of Modern Higher Education. CIEO. As seen @ https://www.cieo.org.uk/research/university-of-fear/ cited on 9/15/2020 Smoley, Richard (2009) Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism. HarperOne Solman, Paul (2015) How Barney Frank used Government to Fight Inequality. PBS News Hour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/barney-frank-used-government-fight-inequality as seen on 16/05/2021 Sombart, Werner (1911/2001) The Jews and Modern Capitalism. Trans. M. Epstein. Batoche Books: Kitchener Stanner, W. E. H. (1979) White Man Got No Dreaming. Australian National University Press. Stewart, James B., Goldstein, Matthew, Silver-Greenberg, Jessica. (2019) How Jeffrey Epstein Planned to ‘impregnate 20 women at a time’. The Irish Times. Nov. 23, 2019. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-andstyle/people/how-jeffrey-epstein-planned-to-impregnate-20-women-at-a-time-1.3978469 Slezkine, Yuri (2004) The Jewish Century. Princeton University Press Stockton, Brooky (2020) A Commentary on Revelation: Standing Firm in our Time. BrookyStockton Strauss, Leo (1997 (1962)) Why We Remain Jews. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Edited by Kenneth Green. The University of New York Press. Albany Strauss, Leo (1997b) On the Interpretation of Genesis. Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought. Edited by Kenneth Green. The University of New York Press. Albany Strauss, William & Howe, Neil (1997) The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. Broadway Books Stearns, Peter N. (2003) Western Civilization in World History. Routledge Swan, Betsy Woodruff & Bender, Bryan (2021) “Be Aware”: The Pentagon’s Target List for Extremist Infilitrators – Right and Left. Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/27/military-extremismtarget-list-478200 as seen on 1/04/2021 Szamuely, George (2002) Nothing Urgent. New York Press, Vol. 15, No. 2 http://globalresearch.ca/articles/SZA202A.html

1029 Szasz, Thomas S. (1974) The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct. New York: Harper and Row Tankha (2006) Ancient Greek Philosophy: Thales to Gorgias. Pearson Education India. Tauber, Alfred I. (2012) Freud’s social theory: Modernist and Postmodernist Revisions. History of the Human Sciences. Taub, Amanda. (2015) The truth about “political correctness” is that it doesn’t exist. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2015/1/28/7930845/political-correctness-doesnt-exist as seen on the 20/6/2020 Tharoor Ishaan (2014) How Israel Helped Create Hamas. The Washington Post. As seen at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/07/30/how-israel-helped-create-hamas/ on the 29/07/2020 Three Initiates (2006) The Kybalion: A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece. The Yogi Publication Society: Masonic Temple Chicago, Ill. Timberlake, Henry. Brett, Samuel, R. B. etc., (1692) Two Journeys to Jerusalem. Nath. Crouch at the Bell in the Poultrey near Cheapside Timeslive (2018) Marius Fransman Ordered to Apologise for Offending Jewish Community. Sunday Times (South Africa). 14th September 2018. https://www.timeslive.co.za/news/south-africa/2018-09-14marius-fransman-ordered-to-apologise-for-offending-jewish-community/ as seen at 12: 06 on the 7/3/2020 Tishby, I (1955) Gnostic Doctrines in Sixteenth Century Jewish Mysticism. Journal of Jewish Studies. VI: 146-152 Tramontana, Katharine (2021) The Long Fight for the Female Orgasm: Revisiting the Sexual Revolutionary Wilhelm Reich. Esquire. https://www.esquire.com/uk/life/a36554013/fighting-for-thefemale-orgasm-wilhelm-reich/ as seen on the 30th Sept. 2021 Treisman, Rachel (2020) DOJ: Yale Discriminates Against Asian American and White Applicants in Admissions. National Public Radio. August 13, 2020 https://www.npr.org/2020/08/13/902335422/dojyale-discriminates-against-asian-american-and-white-applicants-in-admissions as seen on 14/10/2020 Trowbridge, Richard Hawley & Ferrari, Michel (2011) Sophia and Phronesis in Psychology, Philosophy, and Traditional Wisdom. Research in Human Development. Vol. 8 No. 2: 89-94

1030 Trump, Donald (2020) Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History. The Whitehouse. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trumpwhite-house-conference-american-history/ Posted on the 17th Sept. 2020 as seen on the 24th Dec. 2020 Unz, Ron (2012) The Myth of American Meritocracy. The American Conservative. (November 28th) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/ as seen on 5/10/2020 Veevers, Jean E. (1980) Childless by Choice. Toronto: Butterworth Velayutham, Selvaraj (2007) Everyday Racism in Singapore. Centre for Research on Social Inclusion. Macquarie University Vernadsky, George (1933) The Heresy of the Judaizers and the Policies of Ivan III of Moscow. Speculum. Vol. 8, No. 4 Vigo, Julian (2020) Irreversible Damage: The Trans Threat to Girls. Spiked. Written on the 15th July 2020 as seen @ https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/07/15/irreversible-damage-the-trans-threat-to-girls/ on the 31/7/2020 Vitchek, Andre (2020) It is all About Race: Awful Hypocrisy to Say It’s Not. As seen @ Information Clearing House. June 12, 2020 http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55215.htm Vorhies, Zachary (2019) “Something dark & nefarious”: Google insider leaks docs revealing search engine “blacklist”. Russia Today. 15th Aug. 2019 as seen @ https://www.rt.com/news/466513-googlekept-website-blacklist/ Wald, Dr. Shalom Salomon (2004) China and the Jewish People: Old Civilizations in a New Era. Strategy Paper. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute Walsh, Sylvia (2018) Kierkegaard and Religion: Personality, Character, and Virtue. Cambridge University Press Wang, Beverley (2019) Australia’s Creative Industry is Shockingly White. But Don’t be Discouraged. The Guardian. 15th Aug. seen @ https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/aug/15/australias-creativeindustry-is-shockingly-white-but-dont-be-discouraged

1031 Wang, Jeanette (2015) Chinese the most dishonest, Japanese and British the least, study finds. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1879850/chinese-most-dishonestjapanese-and-british-least-study-finds as seen on the 9/5/2021 Wasserstein, Bernard (2007) Barbarism & Civilization: A History of Europe in Our Time. Oxford University Press Waton, Harry (1938) A Program for the Jews and an Answer to All Anti-Semites: A Program for Humanity. PRISM: Political & Rights Issues & Social Movements. 28 Webb, E. (1981) Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press Webb, Adam K. (2006) Beyond the Global Culture War. Routledge. Webber, Max (1965) The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff, Introduction Talcott Parsons. Methuen & Co. Ltd. London Webber, Max (1999) Essays in Economic Sociology. Ed., Richard Swedberg. Princeton University Press Webster, Richard (2005) Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis. Oxford: The Orwell Press Weil, Simone (1997) Gravity and Grace. University of Nebraska Press Weinberg, George (2010) Society and the Healthy Homosexual. St. Martin’s Publishing Group Weissman, Myrna, PhD; Roger C. Bland, MB; Glorisa J. Canino, PhD; Carlo Faravelli, MD; Steven Greenwald, MA; Hai-Gwo Hwu, MD; Peter R. Joyce, PhD; Eile G. Karam, MD; Chung-Kyoon Lee, MD; Joseph Lellouch, PhD; Jean-Pierre Lépine, MD; Stephen C. Newman, MD; Maritza Rubio-Stipec, MA; J. Elisabeth Wells, PhD; Priya J. Wickramaratne, PhD; Hans-Ulrich Wittchen, PhD; Eng-Kung Yeh, MD. (1996) Cross-National Epidemiology of Major Depression and Bipolar Disorder. JAMA. 276(4): 293299. Weininger, Otto (1903/2005) Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles. Trans. Ladislaus Lob. Ed. Daniel Steuer & Laura Marcus. Indiana University Press Whitlock, Flint (2014) The Buchenwald Concentration Camp: Patton’s Bastardly Discovery. Warfare History Network. https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/2020/10/13/buchenwald-concentration-campgeneral-pattons-bastardly-discovery/ as seen on the 20th April 2022

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1033 Zelikow, Philip D., Carter, Ashton B., Deutch, John M. (1989) Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy. The John F. Kennedy School of Government - Visions of Governance in the 21st Century. Zreik, Raef (2008) Notes on the Value of Theory: Readings in the Law of Return – A Polemic. Law & Ethics of Human Rights I: 34-42 Zwick, Gilad & Yacobi-Handelsman, Hili (2019) Report: Employment rate in Israel is Higher than the OECD Average. Israel Hayom: This is Where We Stand. As seen @ https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/08/05/report-employment-rate-in-israel-is-higher-than-the-oecdaverage/