Is God an Antisemite?

A Critique of Robert Spencer’s, Antisemitism: History and Myth, from Bombadier Books, 366 pages.

by G. M. Davis, PhD, author of Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization, from Uncut Mountain Press

Mr. Robert Spencer has published his twenty-ninth book, entitled Antisemitism: History and Myth (henceforth Antisemitism).  Mr. Spencer is mainly known for his work on the study of Islam and jihad (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam [and the Crusades], The Truth About Muhammad, The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran, and numerous other titles), though he has also published on other subjects as well, including titles such as Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization, and, from Uncut Mountain Press, his small but useful book, The Church and the Pope.  Mr. Spencer, a prolific and best-selling author, also serves as director of the website JihadWatch.org, and also gives lectures, seminars, and television appearances.  He is a Senior Fellow at the "Center for Security Policy" and a "Shillman Fellow" at the "David Horowitz Freedom Center."

It would be fair to classify my treatment here of Antisemitism as more of a limited critique rather than a true review; a proper critique would no doubt require a book unto itself.  Furthermore, one imagines that the book will be reviewed elsewhere, and, due to its many claims and rather want of structure, a straightforward review of its many moving parts while simultaneously trying to extricate its core assertions would, at least for this writer, be quite difficult.  One might even describe Mr. Spencer’s book as an exercise in pilpulism; a relevant term to any investigation of Judaism and thus antisemitism, though Mr. Spencer never mentions it.  We will have occasion, therefore, to discuss at length several of Mr. Spencer’s central points with the inclusion of relevant outside quotations in order to facilitate our analysis.

Mr. Spencer gives as his reason for writing Antisemitism as follows: he states toward the end of his introduction that, "one of these former friends [sic] accused me of inconsistency," namely, inconsistency with respect to taking Islamic doctrine and history to task but not Judaism and Jewish history.  "If I did carry out such an investigation, one longtime associate insisted, I would see that what I was dismissing as antisemitism was justified and reasonable suspicion and that to dismiss it as such was tantamount to dismissing concern about jihad as 'Islamophobia.'  Very well.  Here, old friend, is that investigation." (Antisemitism, xxx) Furthermore, in his "Acknowledgements", Mr. Spencer states, "The idea for this book arose from discussions with two people I had respected and admired, but not in the usual way." (Antisemitism, 365) "They know who they are, and I dedicate this book, in particular, to them, in the somewhat quixotic hope that it will move them to reconsider their positions." (Antisemitism, 365) One wonders why Mr. Spencer is reluctant to tell us about the people who prompted his writing of Antisemitism, especially if a stated goal is to dissuade them of their views. Possible insight is provided by Mr. Spencer when he proceeds to quote Martin Niemoller’s famous statement about the German failure to stand up to the National Socialists:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.  Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.  Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.  Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me." (Antisemitism, xxix) 

We will have occasion to remark on the various laws and proposed laws to curtail antisemitism; needless to say, "they" are not coming for Mr. Spencer but for the alleged antisemites.  In this case, the tide is running strongly with rather than against him.

Antisemitism in the Dock

Mr. Spencer begins with what one takes to be an antisemitic canard:

The question at hand is whether Judaism actually teaches and condones such [immoral and antisocial] behavior, and whether Jews have really engaged in it on a large scale in order to further shadowy goals of conquest and world domination that they have done their best to conceal but that non-Jews have nevertheless discovered. (Antisemitism, xxix)

The first part of this statement is in principle at least open to debate; the second part, especially with regard to "concealing" actions, i.e., operating as a conspiracy, is almost by definition impossible to prove: a competent conspiracy by nature remains hidden; to discover a conspiracy is to render it no longer effectively conspiratorial.  In this essay, we will concentrate on the first part of Mr. Spencer’s claim and whether Jews have "really engaged in it on a large scale"—notwithstanding "shadowy goals of conquest and world domination".

Many of Mr. Spencer’s claims are so obvious as not to warrant a great deal of attention: orthodox Islamic sources such as the Quran and Hadiths are inveterately anti-Jewish (they are); Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were very, very bad people who really hated Jews and killed millions of them (true—as well as millions of others, a point often neglected); judicial torture during the Middle Ages was a very bad thing and testimony derived from it is unreliable (of course); many people to this day (especially Muslim activists) evince all manner of Jew-hatred (yes, sadly); the Crusades turned into repeated anti-Jewish rampages; we could go on.  We will take the space available to us to focus on Mr. Spencer’s more relevant claims for Orthodox Christians (of which Mr. Spencer is one though he does not here say so), namely, that such luminaries as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. John Chrysostom evinced antisemitism.  We will have occasion to quote the Lord Jesus Christ Himself and His indictment of the Jewish leadership of His day as evidence of the objective, irreducible divide that separates the Orthodox Christian and Judaic faiths.  We will note the great Prophet Moses’ and other prophets’ admonitions to the ancient Israelites.  We will briefly examine the disastrous Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  And we will also explore in some depth the nature of the greatest bloodbath ever to befall an Orthodox Christian people, namely, Bolshevik Communism.

With Mr. Spencer’s polemical study of antisemitism in one’s lap, two questions immediately spring to mind: 1) how far, in the current social/cultural atmosphere, can one critique the policies of the Jewish state, the State of Israel, before one attracts the epithet "antisemite"; and 2) is a critical analysis of the Judaic religion itself possible, to any serious degree, without attracting a reflexive accusation of antisemitism?  Mr. Spencer’s book amounts to a great deal of "anti-antisemitism", and it suggests the phenomenon of how the term "antisemitism" may be used against even ingenuous critics of policies of the State of Israel and certainly anyone who approaches the third rail of Judaism itself.  Mr. Spencer comes across as ambivalent when it comes to actually forbidding through law what he identifies as antisemitic speech, e.g., denying the Holocaust, which is illegal in many European countries and has led to prison time for convicted offenders.  (See Europarl.europa.eu.)

(NB: This reviewer insists on using the title "State of Israel" in reference to the Jewish state rather than the shorter and more conventional "Israel" for the following reason: "Israel", in Orthodox Christianity, is a precise and profound theological term meaning, roughly, "the people of God" or "those who see God", i.e., the faithful of God’s Holy Apostolic, Catholic, Orthodox Church.  As St. Paul tells us: "Therefore know that only those who are of faith are sons of Abraham." (Gal. 3:7)  "And as many as walk according to this rule, peace and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God." (Gal. 6:16)  "For we are the circumcision, who worship God in the Spirit, rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh." (Phil. 3: 3)  The Church in short is the True Israel, not a manmade political entity today in the Levant.  As Orthodox Christians, we must not cede the meaning of such an important concept to those who do not accept the Church and Jesus of Nazareth as the True Christ.)

What is Antisemitism?

A significant omission in Antisemitism is the absence of a working definition of what "antisemitism" actually means.  What is, exactly, "antisemitism"?  Mr. Spencer seems to assume that we already know.  He does mention "hatred of Jews"; but if antisemitism roughly translates to "hatred of Jews", then we need to have a reasonably clear understanding of what it means to be a Jew, another term that Mr. Spencer leaves undefined.  (We will come to what it means to be a Jew in modern society in due course.)  One is compelled to ask, why the broad term "antisemitism" for something that specifically means "hatred of Jews"?  Why not a more precise term such as "anti-Judaism", "Judeo-phobia", or even "Miso-judaism" or "Miso-jew" ("miso-" from the Greek meaning "hatred")?  "Antisemitism" as a term in the public mind first made its appearance in the nineteenth century, in the German press, long after antipathy towards Jews appeared as a historical phenomenon and after the emancipatory policies that largely freed Jews from the ghettoes, which policies became widespread throughout western and central Europe following the French Revolution and the First French Empire (1789-1815; NJOP).  After all, many Jews are not Semites and most Semites are not Jews.  (One might also observe, further, that many Jews are not Zionists and most, or many, Zionists are not Jews.  See TorahJews.org.)  Still, "antisemitism" is what has come down to us today and is the subject of Mr. Spencer’s book, so we will continue to make reference to it, though with caution. 

Orthodox Christian Attitudes Towards the Synagogue

A basic reality, and our starting point for analysis of Mr. Spencer’s book here on an Orthodox Christian platform, is that there has always existed, from the days of the Lord’s sojourn on earth and the early Church, a fundamental disagreement and tension between the Church and what became Rabbinic Judaism.  Mr. Spencer is clearly aware of this tension, but all too readily seems willing to cast it into the bin of irrational antisemitism.  Whenever there is question as to who stands in the wrong, either Rabbinic Judaism or Orthodox Christianity, he invariably seems to side with the former.  The Gospels themselves and many of the Apostolic Epistles testify to this tension, as do many of the great early Church fathers.  Mr. Spencer takes to task St. John Chrysostom (347-407), who stated in a series of homilies:

But do not be surprised that I called the Jews pitiable. They really are pitiable and miserable. When so many blessings from heaven came into their hands, they thrust them aside and were at great pains to reject them. The morning Sun of Justice arose for them, but they thrust aside its rays and still sit in darkness. We [Orthodox Christians], who were nurtured by darkness, drew the light to ourselves and were freed from the gloom of their error. They were the branches of that holy root, but those branches were broken. We had no share in the root, but we did reap the fruit of godliness. From their childhood they read the prophets, but they crucified him whom the prophets had foretold. We did not hear the divine prophecies but we did worship him of whom they prophesied. And so they are pitiful because they rejected the blessings which were sent to them, while others seized hold of these blessing and drew them to themselves. Although those Jews had been called to the adoption of sons, they fell to kinship with dogs; we who were dogs received the strength, through God's grace, to put aside the irrational nature which was ours and to rise to the honor of sons. How do I prove this? Christ said: "It is no fair to take the children's bread and to cast it to the dogs" [Matthew 15:26]. Christ was speaking to the Canaanite woman when He called the Jews children and the Gentiles dogs. (St. John Chrysostom, Against the Jews, homily 1; II, 1, 2; Tertullian.org)

But at any rate the Jews say that they, too, adore God. God forbid that I say that. No Jew adores God! Who says so? The Son of God says so. For he said: "If you were to know my Father, you would also know me. But you neither know me nor do you know my Father" [John 8:19]. Could I produce a witness more trustworthy than the Son of God?

If, then, the Jews fail to know the Father, if they crucified the Son, if they thrust off the help of the Spirit, who should not make bold to declare plainly that the synagogue is a dwelling of demons? God is not worshipped there. Heaven forbid! From now on it remains a place of idolatry. But still some people pay it honor as a holy place. (St. John Chrysostom, Against the Jews, homily 1; III, 2, 3; Tertullian.org)

Many things doth He intimate by this parable [of the vinedresser, St. Matthew 21: 33-41], God's providence, which had been exercised towards them [the Jews] from the first; their murderous disposition from the beginning; that nothing had been omitted of whatever pertained to a heedful care of them; that even when prophets had been slain, He had not turned away from them, but had sent His very Son; that the God both of the New and of the Old Testament was one and the same; that His death should effect great blessings; that they were to endure extreme punishment for the crucifixion, and their crime; the calling of the Gentiles, the casting out of the Jews. (St. John Chrysostom, Homily 68 on Matthew 21; Documentacatholicaomnia)

It is important to bear in mind that in the time of St. John Chrysostom to be a Jew meant that one practiced the rabbinic Judaic religion—not simply that one was ethnically Jewish (and the two are not one and the same in our time, sixteen centuries later—more anon).  St. John had in mind Judaic beliefs and practices in his homilies.  So we ask: was St. John Chrysostom calling out a legitimate difference between Jews and Christians, or was he indeed proving himself antisemitic as Mr. Spencer implies?  Could it have been that St. John Chrysostom was concerned for the spiritual welfare of his flock, much as St. Paul had been, and regretted the judaizing tendencies of some of his parishioners?  Let us recall the words of St. Paul:

For you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, just as they did from the Judeans, who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they do not please God and are contrary to all men, forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, so as always to fill up the measure of their sins; but wrath has come upon them to the uttermost. (I Thessalonians, 2: 14-16)

And the scathing words of the Lord Himself:

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets.’  Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers’ guilt. Serpents, brood of vipers! How can you escape the condemnation of hell? Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes: some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation." (Matthew, 23: 29-36)

Were St. John Chrysostom, St. Paul (an educated Pharisee), and the Lord Himself all evincing antisemitism?  But what, one might ask, does all of this have to do with Judaism today?  It is important to remember that the Pharisees of the Lord’s time were the intellectual and spiritual forbears of what became Rabbinic Judaism in the early centuries AD, and which continues to this day as "classical" or "Orthodox" Judaism. (Bible Odyssey)  Yet, in the modern age, many Jews are not religiously observant (just as many Christians and others are not either), and one hesitates to apply these condemnations to people who neither believe nor practice the Judaic faith—even if they continue to identify as secular Jews.

Thus, a brief summation of the Orthodox Christian attitude toward Judaism and its adherents: "Do not be deceived, O Jews!  Learn the sayings of the prophets and understand!  Truly, Christ is the almighty redeemer of the world." (Stichera of the Resurrection, Tone 5)

Judaic Attitudes Towards the Church

As if to inoculate his more sensitive readers to what follows, Mr. Spencer introduces Princeton Professor Peter Schafer’s Jesus in the Talmud with the words, "In his fascinating and groundbreaking book … the contemporary scholar Peter Schafer discusses passages from the Talmud that have been taken as referring to Jesus …" (Antisemitism, 214)  And we must remember that in Judaism, it is the Talmud—especially the Babylonian Talmud—rather than the Old Testament, that is the ultimate authority: "'Not only does the Talmud contain the entirety of Jewish law, from ritual law, to family laws to torts; it is also a work of ethics, philosophy, biography, literature, history, and folktales.'" (Rabbi Noson Weisz as quoted in Antisemitism, 171) 

The Talmud is the prism, receiving, refracting all light. … [I]nto that writing all prior canonical writings emerged; to it, all appeal is directed; upon it all conclusions ultimately rest.  In the language of Torah itself: study of the Torah begins, as a matter of simple, ubiquitous fact, in the Talmud…. In all decisions of law that expresses theology in everyday action, the Talmud forms the final statement of the Torah, mediating Scripture’s rules. (Rabbi Jacob Neusner, Rabbinic Judaism, 205 as quoted in Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 27)

"Jewish tradition holds that the Talmud is the 'oral Torah,' or a verbal explanation of the laws that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai, and that Moses taught to others.… [W]hat is lesser known … is that Moses and God had a good chat on that mountain that ranged far beyond what could be inscribed on the tablets that he brought with him when he climbed back down.  It is this information, transmitted orally from God to Moses, and then from Moses to the generations that followed him, that is the basis for the Talmud." (Rabbi Aaron Parry as quoted in Antisemitism, 173)

Of course, the "good chat" between God and Moses was recorded at length in the Book of Exodus with its extensive instructions and commands to the Israelites rather than existing off-the-record in oral form as Judaic scholars would have us believe.  The Old Testament tells us:

So Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord and all the judgments. And all the people answered with one voice and said, “All the words which the Lord has said we will do.” And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord [emphasis added]. And he rose early in the morning, and built an altar at the foot of the mountain, and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes of Israel. Then he sent young men of the children of Israel, who offered burnt offerings and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord. And Moses took half the blood and put it in basins, and half the blood he sprinkled on the altar. Then he took the Book of the Covenant and read in the hearing of the people. And they said, “All that the Lord has said we will do, and be obedient.” And Moses took the blood, sprinkled it on the people, and said, “This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you according to all these words.” (Exodus 24: 3-8)

In short, it was the "Book of the Covenant"—not any additional "oral Torah"—that God sanctified with the people of Israel on Mount Sinai.  Yet to read the Book of Exodus seriously (as well as the rest of the Old Testament) and acknowledge the invalidity of the "oral Torah" would rob the rabbis of their interpretative authority.

This supposed transmission of the "Oral Torah," the tradition of the elders, from Moses to Joshua, to the prophets, was challenged by Jesus Christ who termed it not Torah, but the commandments of men which nullify irrevocably the word and doctrine of God, making the tale of the transmission itself a fraud. (Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 187)

[Jesus] answered and said to them, "Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written: 'This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.  And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.'  For laying aside the commandments of God, you hold the tradition of men—the washing of pitchers and cups, and many other such things you do." (Mark 7: 6-12)

As the Talmud, these "commandments of men", which Christ censured for suffocating ordinary Jews and twisting the Word of God, eventually came to be nothing short of divinized in Orthodox [Rabbinic] Judaism.  Whereas in Orthodox Christianity, God became flesh in Jesus Christ, in Orthodox Judaism, "… the Babylonian Talmud represents God in the flesh," not unlike the Qur’an in Islam, which orthodox Muslims regard as uncreated and pre-eternal. (Rabbi Jacob Neusner and Bruce D. Chilton, God in the World, 9 as quoted in G. M. Davis, Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization, 318)

To return to Dr. Peter Schafer’s Jesus in the Talmud, the question arises as to what the Talmud actually teaches vis-a-vis Jesus Christ, His Most Pure Mother, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, and the Church in general.  Mr. Spencer asks, rhetorically, whether the Talmud is "an absurd, ugly, and immoral book?" (Antisemitism, 167)  Mr. Spencer’s answer is no, but Professor Schafer’s research belies the truth of the matter.  The Talmud indeed maligns Christ, His Mother, and His followers—and in truly ugly ways.  Dr. Schafer, who is clearly not a Christian partisan, interprets the (Babylonian) Talmudic treatment of the Church’s claims as a

powerful counternarrative that was meant to shake the foundations of the Christian message: for, according to them [the Amoraim or rabbinic compilers of the Babylonian Talmud], Jesus was not born from a virgin, as his [sic] followers claimed, but out of wedlock, the son of a whore and her [Roman] lover; therefore he could not be the Messiah of Davidic descent, let alone the Son of God. (Schafer, 10)

Jesus Christ, the Messiah of the Church and Second Person of the Holy Trinity, was, furthermore, according to the Talmud, "a bad student", who rebelled against his rabbinic teacher, and, accordingly,

the rabbis passed upon him their harshest judgement…. Not only did he entertain lewd sexual thoughts, but, when rebuked by his rabbi, he became apostate and established a new cult.  The message, therefore, is that the new Christian sect/religion stemmed from a failed and insubordinate rabbinical student (chapter 3). (Schafer, 11)

Accordingly—and one has to say shockingly—"Jesus’ fate consists of sitting forever [in Hell] in boiling excrement," (Schafer, 13) "and that those who follow his example up until today will not, as he has promised, gain eternal life but will share his horrible fate." (Schafer, 129)  Strangely, the Talmud does not strictly deny all power to Christ and His followers; it acknowledges what might be described as Christian "magic", but it absolutely condemns Christianity as possessed of any divine mandate.

Hence, our story ultimately conveys the message: this Jesus and his followers claim to have the keys to heaven, to use their magical power with divine authorization—but they are dead wrong!  The fact that heaven accepts what they do does not mean that it approves of it.  On the contrary, they are tricksters and impostors who abuse their power.  The real power and authority still rest with their opponents, the rabbis. (Schafer 62)

The rabbis—"the heroes of rabbinic Judaism" (Schafer, 63)—who hold an interpretative monopoly over the Talmud—convey an inverted interpretation from the Orthodox Christian understanding of Christ’s sacrificial death that both confirms the Church’s teaching as well as stands the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice on its head.  The Babylonian Talmud affirms that:

[Y]es, the Roman governor [Pontius Pilate] wanted to set him [Jesus] free, but we [the Jewish Rabbinate] did not give in.  He was a blasphemer and idolator, and although the Romans could probably not care less, we insisted that he get what he deserved.  We even convinced the Roman governor (or more precisely: forced him to accept) that this heretic and impostor needed to be executed—and we are proud of it. (Schafer 74)

Rabbinic pride in their role in the execution of the Lord Jesus echos the Gospel message that the Jewish leadership of their day were indeed guilty of deicide and that their spiritual heirs—those who maintain pride in the killing of Christ—are as well ("And all the people answered and said, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'" [Matthew 27: 25])  Presumably, not all Jews or even Judaic believers today persist in taking "pride" in the killing of Jesus of Nazareth—yet they do persist in rejecting Him as the Christ.  Spencer treats the charge of deicide and the cry of the Jerusalem mob that "His blood be on us and on our children" in a novel and peculiar way.  He argues that, "The ancient charges of deicide, as mainstream as they were, were incompatible with the fundamental tenet of Christian theology that it was the sin of all human beings that put Christ on the cross, not one particular group." (Antisemitism, 85)  Here, he has a point, though, as a matter of logic, the theological conviction in the universality of human sinfulness that underscores the Crucifixion of Christ does not negate the historical reality (as accounted in the Gospels and confirmed in the Babylonian Talmud) that it was the Judaic leadership of the day that was the proximate cause for the death of God on the Cross.  Yet according to Spencer, the mob’s apparent self-imprecation represents "not an everlasting indictment of the Jews, but a statement of the mechanism of redemption." (Antisemitism, 85)  Indeed, the Blood of Christ is central to the saga of redemption for all people—all people, that is, who accept Jesus as the Christ, rather than as a malefactor Who was rightly condemned, executed, and Who properly spends eternity in Hell in circumstances one would rather not repeat.

The tension between the Church and Rabbinic Judaism simply cannot be resolved; it is and has been a permanent reality of Orthodox Christian and Judaic relations throughout history.  Neologisms such as "Judeo-Christian" (a phrase that, happily, Mr. Spencer does not employ though one of his adulants, Bat Ye’or, does), whether in reference to actual religious belief or to a vaguer "ethic", simply fail to wash: they are, really, oxymorons that try to paper over the very real and irreducible differences between the two faiths for social, political, or other reasons.  From an Orthodox Christian perspective, while always being guided by the Lord’s command to love one another and indeed to love our enemies, there is simply no ground for compromising with the Judaic rejection of Jesus as the Christ.  Indeed, to love people, including Jews, requires the unwavering affirmation that Jesus is the Christ and the Orthodox Church is His Body on earth and the means by which all peoples can achieve salvation through the grace of God.  Anything less is a cop-out and a disservice to those outside of the Church who are perishing for want of true, loving, Orthodox Christian witness.

Antisemitism in the Old Testament?

But the tension between the Church and the Synagogue predated the Advent of Christ and can be observed throughout the course of the Old Testament between those of the Hebrew people who kept the Lord’s commands and laws, and who loved Him in their hearts, and those who "played the harlot with other gods, and bowed down to them. [Those who] turned quickly from the way in which their fathers walked, in obeying the commandments of the Lord; they did not do so." (Judges 2:17)  "In the old days the Jews acted impiously toward the prophets; now they outrage the Master of the prophets."  (St. John Chrysostom, Against the Jews, homily 1; VI, 7; Tertullian.org)  The great Moses himself testified against the early Israelites and foretold their future rejection of God and His laws; he is worth quoting at some length:

“Do not think in your heart, after the Lord your God has cast them out before you, saying, ‘Because of my righteousness the Lord has brought me in to possess this land’; but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the Lord is driving them out from before you…. Therefore understand that the Lord your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stiff-necked people.

“Remember! Do not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you departed from the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the Lord. Also in Horeb you provoked the Lord to wrath, so that the Lord was angry enough with you to have destroyed you. When I went up into the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant which the Lord made with you, then I stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights….

“Then the Lord said to me, ‘Arise, go down quickly from here, for your people whom you brought out of Egypt have acted corruptly; they have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them; they have made themselves a molded image.’

“Furthermore the Lord spoke to me, saying, ‘I have seen this people, and indeed they are a stiff-necked people. Let Me alone, that I may destroy them and blot out their name from under heaven; and I will make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.’

“So I turned and came down from the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire; and the two tablets of the covenant were in my two hands. And I looked, and behold, you had sinned against the Lord your God—had made for yourselves a molded calf! You had turned aside quickly from the way which the Lord had commanded you. Then I took the two tablets and threw them out of my two hands and broke them before your eyes. And I fell down before the Lord, as at the first, forty days and forty nights; I neither ate bread nor drank water, because of all your sin which you committed in doing wickedly in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. For I was afraid of the anger and hot displeasure with which the Lord was angry with you, to destroy you. But the Lord listened to me at that time also. And the Lord was very angry with Aaron and would have destroyed him; so I prayed for Aaron also at the same time. Then I took your sin, the calf which you had made, and burned it with fire and crushed it and ground it very small, until it was as fine as dust; and I threw its dust into the brook that descended from the mountain.

“Also at Taberah and Massah and Kibroth Hattaavah you provoked the Lord to wrath. Likewise, when the Lord sent you from Kadesh Barnea, saying, ‘Go up and possess the land which I have given you,’ then you rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God, and you did not believe Him nor obey His voice. You have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you. (Deuteronomy 9: 4-24)

And the Lord said to Moses: “Behold, you will rest with your fathers; and this people will rise and play the harlot with the gods of the foreigners of the land, where they go to be among them, and they will forsake Me and break My covenant which I have made with them. Then My anger shall be aroused against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide My face from them, and they shall be devoured. And many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’ And I will surely hide My face in that day because of all the evil which they have done, in that they have turned to other gods." (Deuteronomy 31: 16-18)

So it was, when Moses had completed writing the words of this law in a book [again, contravening the idea of the "oral Torah"], when they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying: “Take this Book of the Law, and put it beside the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there as a witness against you; for I know your rebellion and your stiff neck. If today, while I am yet alive with you, you have been rebellious against the Lord, then how much more after my death? Gather to me all the elders of your tribes, and your officers, that I may speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to witness against them. For I know that after my death you will become utterly corrupt, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you. And evil will befall you in the latter days, because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger through the work of your hands.” (Deuteronomy 31: 24-9)

The Prophet Isaiah continued in the vein of Moses:

Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth!

For the Lord has spoken:

“I have nourished and brought up children,

And they have rebelled against Me;

The ox knows its owner

And the donkey its master’s crib;

But Israel does not know,

My people do not consider.”

Alas, sinful nation,

A people laden with iniquity,

A brood of evildoers,

Children who are corrupters!

They have forsaken the Lord,

They have provoked to anger

The Holy One of Israel,

They have turned away backward.

Why should you be stricken again?

You will revolt more and more.

The whole head is sick,

And the whole heart faints.

From the sole of the foot even to the head,

There is no soundness in it,

But wounds and bruises and putrefying sores;

They have not been closed or bound up,

Or soothed with ointment." (Isaiah 1: 1-7)

"I have stretched out My hands all day long to a rebellious people,

Who walk in a way that is not good,

According to their own thoughts;

A people who provoke Me to anger continually to My face….

These are smoke in My nostrils,

A fire that burns all the day.

“Behold, it is written before Me:

I will not keep silence, but will repay—

Even repay into their bosom—

Your iniquities and the iniquities of your fathers together,”

Says the Lord,

“Who have burned incense on the mountains

And blasphemed Me on the hills;

Therefore I will measure their former work into their bosom.”

Thus says the Lord…

“But you are those who forsake the Lord,

Who forget My holy mountain,Who prepare a table for Gad,

And who furnish a drink offering for Meni.

Therefore I will number you for the sword,

And you shall all bow down to the slaughter;

Because, when I called, you did not answer;

When I spoke, you did not hear,

But did evil before My eyes,

And chose that in which I do not delight.”

Therefore thus says the Lord God:

“Behold, My servants shall eat,

But you shall be hungry;

Behold, My servants shall drink,

But you shall be thirsty;

Behold, My servants shall rejoice,

But you shall be ashamed;

Behold, My servants shall sing for joy of heart,

But you shall cry for sorrow of heart,

And wail for grief of spirit.

You shall leave your name as a curse to My chosen;

For the Lord God will slay you,

And call His servants by another name;

So that he who blesses himself in the earth

Shall bless himself in the God of truth;

And he who swears in the earth

Shall swear by the God of truth;

Because the former troubles are forgotten,

And because they are hidden from My eyes. (Isaiah 65: 2-16)

Thus do the great Old Testament Prophets speak of the Hebrew nation at large: not as "God’s chosen" but as "a curse to My chosen".  Mr. Spencer objects to St. John Chrysostom referring to the Jews as "fit for slaughter" (Antisemitism, 43); but what about does he object when it is God Himself through the Prophet Isaiah Who prophesied that "I will number you for the sword, and you shall all bow down to the slaughter"?  Is God an antisemite?

The core faithful of the Old Testament Hebrew nation, the remnant that remained obedient to the commands of God despite the waywardness of their compatriots, this, the True Israel, received their Messiah in Jesus Christ during His earthly advent and became the early Church; those who had rejected God in the Old Testament continued to cling to the "tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ," (Colossians 2:8), and became Rabbinic Judaism with its traditions based in the Talmud, which was put to writing roughly between the second and fifth centuries AD. (BBC)

The Chosen of God

Surely one of the most deleterious notions in the false "Judeo-Christian" cultural universe is that of Jews as the contemporary "chosen people" of God. (TheJewishRoad)  The Hebrew nation, the descendants of Abraham, was indeed "chosen" by God as the stewards of the Divine Law and, most importantly, the people from whom the Messiah, Jesus Christ, was to come.  As the Lord Himself affirmed, "Salvation is of the Jews". (John 4:22)  But with the rejection of Jesus as the Christ, adherents to Judaism today throw away all doctrinal and soteriological connection to the One, True, God for the contemporary fiction of tribal "chosenness".  As the Lord Himself affirms: "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through Me." (John 14:6)  As we have tried to clarify, it is the Orthodox Church that is the "chosen" of God, the True Israel.  Indeed, the idea that adherents to Judaism—to be differentiated from "Jews" more generally (more anon)—are the "chosen" of God is exceptionally harmful to the welfare—certainly the spiritual welfare—of Judaic believers.  In the general context of "chosenness", salvation is implied, rendering Judaic believers prone to the Protestant idea that they are "saved" and not in need of the salvific power of Christ and His Church.  The Orthodox Christian understanding of "chosenness", if anything, would reject the idea of an earthly state of salvation beyond the susceptibility of being lost or changed.  Those whom we know to be saved are the saints of the Church who, having run their earthly race with faith in Christ and the cultivation of virtue, through the grace of God, have received their reward in Paradise.  Indeed, the whole Protestant heresy regarding being "saved" in this life probably derives from the Judaic notion of "chosenness" (see Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements, by Louis Israel Newman, PhD, 1925; available at Archive.org). 

We have so far referred to Judaic believers or adherents of the Jewish faith (in its different forms, "Reformed", "Conservative", and "Orthodox", though our emphasis has been on the latter; see MyJewishLearning), but it is apparent that, under various historical circumstances, including today, the term "Jew" connotes more than explicit religious affiliation.  St. Paul observes what it means truly to be a Jew:

For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh; but he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the Spirit, not in the letter; whose praise is not from men but from God. (Romans 2:28-9; also see Revelation chs. 2 and 3)

Though it may seem confusing in modern circumstances, for St. Paul, a true "Jew" is a devoted follower in his heart of God and His Christ, i.e., a faithful Orthodox Christian.  The historical and social reality of the Christian era as it developed, however, has been to designate followers of Christ, the True Messiah, as "Christians" rather than Jews, while the latter connotes adherents of the Torah-Tamud, which does not accept Jesus as the Christ. (MyJewishLearning)  While bearing in mind the words of St. Paul, for our purposes, we will accept the prevalent usage of "Jew" to indicate followers of the Judaic religion—but, indeed, the contemporary meaning of "Jew" means more than that, and, again, is a term that Mr. Spencer fails to define.

Who is a Jew?

The most salient example today of a definition of what it means to be a Jew is that given by the Jewish state itself, the State of Israel: "The [immigration] Law [of the right of return] provides that for the purposes of its application, a Jew '… means a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion'", which provides for the historic principle of matrilineal descent: if one's mother is a Jew, then one is, too, notwithstanding whether one practices one’s religion or not—as long as one does not practice another. (Loc.gov)  Thus, religion and spirituality blend into ethnicity and genetics in the understanding of what it means to be a Jew.  Indeed, the authority of Chabad.org ("Chabad-Lubavitch is the largest and fastest growing Jewish organization." Chabad.org), affirms that, even after formal conversion to another religion, one still remains a Jew: in short, one cannot stop being a Jew; one cannot reject one’s "Jewishness": "…you can’t quit.  No one can throw you out—not even G-d." (Chabad.org)  "Jewishness", then, amounts to an irrevocable hereditary stamp—a concept strangely harmonious with much antisemitic thought that treats Jews in much the same manner, as a "race" rather than a religious body, and one totally at odds with the Orthodox Christian understanding of the efficacy of baptism, which implies a rebirth in Christ in which one’s former religious identity is literally washed away.  The Israeli scholar Professor Shlomo Sand, wrestling with the question of what it means to be a Jew on both the personal and collective levels, wrote an autobiographical book entitled, How I Stopped Being A Jew.  Even while he rejects his status as a Jew, according to Chabad and the State of Israel, Professor Sand remains a secular Jew.  Secular Jews today, defined either by matrilineal descent or by possessing a Jewish self-consciousness, abound.  "Antisemitism" as understood by Mr. Spencer seems to apply just as much to secular Jews, who may be otherwise unrecognizable, as it does to Orthodox Jews, known for their religious practices and distinctive dress and public appearance.

Ironically, like many race-minded antisemites, Mr. Spencer seems to agree with the identification of Jewishness as racial/hereditary when he observes:

Many of the Jews who were forced to leave Israel [i.e., the Holy Land over the centuries] did, of course, settle in various parts of Europe, but the claim that is made is that they are native Europeans with no background in the Middle East.  The [antisemitic] objective here is obvious: if the Jews of today have no ethnic connection to the ancient Jews of the land of Israel, then they have no right to return and claim to be the indigenous people of the land. (Antisemitism, 356)

If we can put aside the notion that God is a real estate broker, we proceed to observe that Mr. Spencer cites a December 2013 study by Bihar, et al. in Human Biology that sought to refute the "Khazar" thesis, namely, that Ashkenazi Jews of today are descendants of converts from the ancient Khazar kingdom and have little hereditary connection to the ancient Israelites (see Antisemitism, 355-6). According to Mr. Spencer:

Ashkenazi Jews share the greatest genetic ancestry with other Jewish populations and, among non-Jewish populations, with groups from Europe and the Middle East.  No particular similarity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations form the Caucasus is evident, particularly populations that most closely represent the Khazar region. (Behar et al. as quoted in Antisemitism, 358)

The Jewish State

So, the logic runs, today’s Jews, defined under the Jewish State’s "Law of Return" as those of matrilineal Jewish ancestry, are indeed Jews not because they practice Judaism or follow the laws of God as given on Mount Sinai to Moses, but because of their genetics, and have the undisputed right to live in the State of Israel whether they were born in Tel Aviv, Moscow, or New York. 

Israel, in the early twenty-first century, defines itself as the state of the Jews and as the property of the "Jewish people," in other words of Jews living anywhere in the world, and not a possession of the ensemble of Israeli citizens [ie, including Arab Israelis and others] residing on its soil—which is why it is appropriate to define it as an ethnocracy rather than a democracy. (Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, 324)

Indeed, in the Jewish State, while there is Israeli citizenship, there is no "Israeli" nationality, only "Jew", "Arab", "Druze", etc., with the former naturally taking pride of place in the world’s only official "Jewish State".  While Israeli non-Jews are nominally afforded the rights of their Jewish counterparts, in practice they suffer various types of discrimination.  "Most of the discrimination is, however, rather covert." (Smooha 1990, 401 as quoted in MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, 323)  Furthermore, "While it is legal, but not legitimate, in Israel to reject publicly or act against Zionism, according to the 1985 amendment of the election law, one may not run for the Knesset on an election slate which denies Israel as the state of the Jewish people." (Smooha 1990, 397 as quoted in MacDonald, 323)  To analogize the situation in the State of Israel for the benefit of non-Israelis and non-Jews, Ilan Pappe wrote in 2017:

Imagine if in the UK or the United States, Jewish citizens, or Catholics for that matter, were barred by law from living in certain villages, neighborhoods, or maybe whole towns?  How can such a situation be reconciled with the notion of democracy? 

 Thus, given its attitude towards two Palestinian groups—the refugees and the community in Israel—the Jewish state cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be assumed to be a democracy.  But the most obvious challenge to that assumption is the ruthless Israeli attitude towards a third Palestinian group: those who have lived under its direct and indirect rule since 1967, in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip.  From the legal infrastructure put in place at the outset of the [1967] war, through the unquestioned absolute power of the military inside the West Bank and outside the Gaza Strip, to the humiliation of millions of Palestinians as a daily routine, the "only democracy" in the Middle East behaves as a dictatorship of the worst kind. (Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, 91)

"House demolition", "blocking up houses" (in which all windows, doors, and access ways are sealed with bricks and mortar), and other forms of "collective punishment" are all too common in the territories under Israeli occupation, in which the Palestinians are treated as neither citizens of the Israeli state nor persons under the protection of the rules of war. (Pappe, 93, 95)  Israeli settler "vigilante gangs" have been allowed by the government to harass, vandalize property such as homes and farms, and even to shoot randomly at Palestinians under occupation. (Pappe, 94)

Let’s take this in stages.  Firstly, assassinations—what Amnesty’s report calls "unlawful killings": about 15,000 Palestinians have been killed "unlawfully" by Israel since 1967 [as of about 2015].  Among them were 2,000 children.  Another feature of the "enlightened occupation" is imprisonment without trial.  Every fifth Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has undergone such an experience….  As for torture, the reliable website Middle East Monitor published a harrowing article describing the 200 methods used by the Israelis to torture Palestinians.  The list is based on a UN report and a report from the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.  Among other methods it includes beatings, chaining prisoners to doors for hours, pouring hot and cold water on them, pulling fingers apart, and twisting testicles. (Pappe, 95)

"For most Israelis, these counterarguments are irrelevant at best and malicious at worst." (Pappe, 96)  Both Pappe and Spencer do seem to agree that the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process", which has proceeded along its tortuous and halting way for decades, has been disastrous—though needless to say for different reasons. 

"A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People"

Turning to an especially relevant time in the history of Russian and world Jewry, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Mr. Spencer makes reference to the great Zionist Winston Churchill’s 1920 essay in the London Illustrated Sunday Herald, "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People"—after treating Bolshevik Communism as, somehow, antisemitic: the Bolsheviks criminalized antisemitism on July 26, 1918, a week after they murdered the Russian Imperial Family. (Keithwoods.pub)  Churchill’s essay remains a helpful document to understanding the social and political dynamic surrounding the early years of Russian Communism.  Mr. Spencer dismisses Churchill’s main point, namely, that Bolshevism was essentially a Jewish phenomenon, as "simply expressing common assumptions of the time; the idea that Communism was a Jewish movement, and that those who engineered the Russian Revolution were all Jews". (Antisemitism, 306)  Now obviously "all" of the Bolshevik revolutionaries were not Jews, but whether Churchill was catering to the biases of his readers remains a question that needs a serious answer; and, if he was doing so, from where did those "common assumptions" arise and why?  Could there have been truth to them?  How much truth?  Mr. Spencer seems willing to touch on these important questions but not to delve into them satisfactorily.

Was early Communism a substantially Jewish phenomenon? (See Antisemitism, 145)  We will proceed with Churchill’s analysis.  Though a committed Judeophile (Aish), had he been writing today, Churchill would likely have attracted the epithet of "antisemite" by virtue of pointing out what was then the ongoing intra-Jewish struggle at the time between Zionism and Bolshevism, in which both political movements Jews were heavily involved.  Churchill’s essay remains a document of great historical interest written by one of the twentieth century’s leading statesmen.

Churchill very straightforwardly gives the lie to the claim that Jews had little connection with the chaos and savagery of early Communism that followed the toppling of the Russian monarchy (Tsar St. Nicholas II abdicated on March 15, 1917) and the October/November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution (or, really, coup d’etat).  Again, writing in 1920, Churchill sums up the situation in Russia:

And it may well be that this same astounding race [of Jews] may at the present time be in the actual process of producing another system of morals and philosophy [ie, Bolshevik Communism], 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 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 proceeds to applaud the lives and social contributions of what he calls "National Jews", i.e., Jews who express loyalty and patriotism to the various nations in which they find residence (this at a time preceding the birth of the modern State of Israel in 1948).  Then, under the sub-heading, "International Jews", Churchill writes:

In violent opposition to all this sphere of Jewish effort rise the schemes of the International Jews….  This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt [Johann Adam Weishaupt, 1748-1830] to those of Karl Marx [1818-83], and down to Trotsky [Bronstein, 1879-1940] (Russia), Bela Kun [Kohn, 1886-1938] (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg [Rozalia Luksenburg, 1871-1919] (Germany), and Emma Goldman [1869-1940] (United States), this world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.  It played, as a modern writer, Mrs. [Nesta] Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognisable part in the tragedy of the French Revolution [see Webster’s The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy and Secret Societies and Subversive Movements available at Amazon.com, Guthenburg.org, and Archive.org]. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

Churchill then proceeds under the sub-heading, "Terrorist Jews":

There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin [Ulyanov], the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders. Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek—all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combating Counter-Revolution has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses. The same evil prominence was obtained by Jews in the brief period of terror during which Bela Kun ruled in Hungary [1919]. The same phenomenon has been presented in Germany [1918-19] (especially in Bavaria), so far as this madness has been allowed to prey upon the temporary prostration of the German people. Although in all these countries there are many non-Jews every whit as bad as the worst of the Jewish revolutionaries, the part played by the latter in proportion to their numbers in the population is astonishing.

Thus, The Rt. Hon. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, in February, 1920, statesman and future prime minister of Great Britain and its Empire, on the "Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People".

Jews and Bolshevism

While there has been a great tendency in contemporary circles to whitewash the outstanding role Jews played in early Communism and its enormous crimes, references to earlier works and primary source materials belie the reality.  Indeed, even in America, the 1920s may be thought of as Jewish Communism’s "golden age". (History.Osu)  One might also reflect on the twentieth century itself as The Jewish Century, a time during which emancipated Jews came both to participate in, as wells as to dominate, many aspects of social, cultural, and political life.

But it was in the higher reaches of the [Russian Communist] Party and Government that Jewish dominance was so striking. Douglas Reed [Times of London correspondent in Europe, 1927-38; lived 1895-1976; see his excellent, if flawed, The Controversy of Zion available at Amazon.com and Archive.org] writes: "The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin) and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the Executive Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19 Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People's Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Cheka (secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of 556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in 1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of small, supposedly 'Socialist' or other non-Communist parties… were 55 Jews and 6 others." (Academia.edu)

[Russian and Soviet historian] Richard Pipes [1923-2018] admits: "Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading figures in Bela Kun's dictatorship. They also were disproportionately represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist International." (Academia.edu)

In a white paper to the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, dated September 17, 1918, Sir Mansfeldt Findlay wrote:

The question "who governs Russia?" receives a categorical reply in the simple enumeration of the responsible officials of the irresponsible Soviet government.  The data contained in this pamphlet has been carefully taken from the Bolshevist official organs such as Izvestia Gold Trouda, the Red Gazette, and others…. The fundamental fact is incontestable: the Soviet bureaucracy is almost entirely in the hands of Jews and Jewesses, whilst the number of Russians who participate in the Government of the Soviets is ridiculously small.  It is impossible to evade this fact, which stands as a solemn warning to countries and states which claim to be Christian and which believe in national modes of existence, in contradiction with the unlimited internationalism [one might today say "globalization"] in which the Jewish nation is the dominant power. (Heritage-History)

It is important to note that during those chaotic, bloody years of early Communism and civil war, many Jews suffered the fate of so many Russian Christians: death or exile.

The Russian Revolution liberated the largest Jewish community in the world. It also opened the floodgates for the greatest massacre of Jews before the Second World War amid the civil war and its aftermath in 1918-21. Once the Bolshevik rule was then consolidated, Jews entered into nearly every sphere of Russian life while, in time, much of the singular richness of Jewish cultural life in Russia was flattened, eventually obliterated. (Yivo; Berdichev)

Indeed, Communism, like so many revolutions, would devour its own children in time—but this in no way minimizes the central role Jews played in the crimes of early Communism (1917-37).  And, indeed, there was a serious reaction to Jewish domination of the Communist Party and security apparatus in due course: the most extreme example of which was the rise of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Worker’s Party in Germany, which leveraged politically the specter of "Jewish Bolshevism" to attain supreme political power with horrifyingly destructive results for both the enemies and the constituents of the Third Reich. (See Michael Hoffman’s, Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People)  As an aside, when people today speak of "Russian antisemitism" in the past, they often fail to realize that most such episodes—such as the pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 that killed forty Jews; the infamous Kishinev pogrom of April 1903 that killed forty-nine and damaged 1,500 Jewish homes (News.Harvard); and the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, Ukraine, that killed between 400 and 800 (Faculty.History.Umd); as well as the pogroms committed during the civil war—occurred outside the boundaries of contemporary Russia and were committed preponderantly by non-Russian nationalities.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn on Bolshevism

A significant omission from Antisemitism is that of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s tremendous work on the history of Jews in Russia since the 1795 partition of Poland, Two Hundred Years Together.  Mr. Spencer is willing to make use of Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote that, "'Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts'" (Antisemitism, 361), yet he fails to mention even the existence of the great man’s actual major contribution to the whole question of the history of Jewish life in Russia and the Soviet Union.  Solzhenitsyn’s scholarship strongly militates against the thrust of Antisemitism, which is that antisemitism is exclusively the result of irrational hatred on the part of non-Jews, both individually and collectively, and has absolutely nothing to do with religious and social friction contributed by Judaic beliefs and actions themselves.  As a testament to the persistent difficulty in examining Judaism and Jewish history frankly and openly, the Nobel Prize-winner Solzhenitsyn was unable to get Two Hundred Years Together (originally printed in Russian in 2002) published in English during his lifetime (1918-2008); an English translation appeared online in 2018 (available at Archive.org), which has been this critic’s source.

When Alexander Solzhenitsyn began work on a book called 200 Years Together, he was criticized for what touching this taboo issue [sic]. His own comments to the press didn’t help the matter, claiming two-thirds of the Cheka (secret police) in Ukraine were Jewish. "I will always differentiate between layers of Jews. One layer rushed headfirst to the revolution. Another, to the contrary, was trying to stand back. The Jewish subject for a long time was considered prohibited." (JPost)

Lest one consider Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the modern prophet and Nobel laureate, to have been guilty of antisemitic impulses, it is worth recalling that he was married to a Jewish wife (Ekaterina, m. 1973) with whom he raised three sons as Jews. (JTA)

While many ordinary Jews did not participate directly in the destruction and murders of the early Bolshevik regime, a significantly disproportionate number of the Jewish intellectual class did, and, as Solzhenitsyn powerfully describes in a book of nearly eight hundred pages and more than three thousand footnotes, the early Communist regime in Russia could never have achieved its brutal scope and zenith without the active participation of Russian and international Jewry. 

The Jewish population in its mass showed a suspicious, even hostile attitude towards the Bolsheviks [before the revolution]. But when, as a result of the revolution, it had acquired complete freedom which fostered a real expansion of Jewish activity in the political, social and cultural spheres—a well-organised activity to boot—it did nothing to prevent the Bolshevik Jews from occupying the key positions, and these made an exceedingly cruel use of this new power fallen into their hands.

From the 40s of the twentieth century onwards, after Communist rule broke with international Judaism, Jews and communists became embarrassed and afraid, and they preferred to stay quiet and conceal the strong participation of Jews in the communist revolution, however the inclinations to remember and name the phenomenon were described by the Jews themselves as purely antiSemitic intentions.

In the 1970s and 1980s, under the pressure of new revelations, the vision of the revolutionary years was adjusted. A considerable number of voices were heard publicly. Thus the poet Nahum Korzhavin wrote: “If we make the participation of the Jews in the revolution a taboo subject, we can no longer talk about the revolution at all. There was a time when the pride of this participation was even prized... The Jews took part in the revolution, and in abnormally high proportions.” M. Agursky wrote on his part: “The participation of the Jews in the revolution and the civil war has not been limited to a very active engagement in the State apparatus; it has been infinitely wider.” Similarly, the Israeli Socialist S. Tsyroulnikov asserts: “At the beginning of the revolution, the Jews... served as the foundation of the new regime.”!

But there are also many Jewish writers who, up to this day, either deny the Jews’ contribution to Bolshevism, or even reject the idea rashly, or—this is the most frequent—consider it only reluctantly.

However the fact is proven: Jewish renegades have long been leaders in the Bolshevik Party, heading the Red Army (Trotsky), the VIsIK (Sverdlov), the two capitals (Zinoviev and Kamenev), the Comintern (Zinoviev), the Profintern (Dridzo-Lozovski) and the Komsomol (Oscar Ryvkin, and later Lazar Shatskin, who also headed the International Communist Youth). (Solzhenitsyn, 440)

The Bolsheviks’ "Willing Executioners"

The fact is that the Bolsheviks went to great lengths to fight any "antisemitic" reaction to their increasingly brutal rule, which they regarded as a grave threat—again, going so far as to make antisemitism actually illegal. (Eprints.bbk)  Solzhenitsyn estimates that some sixty-six million Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and other nationalities within the Soviet Union perished during the Russian civil war (1917-23) and the first decades of Communism, during both its Lenin-Trotskyist and Stalinist years. (Hawaii.edu)  (Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, mostly Russians, would perish during the German invasion in World War II, 1941-45 [Pubmed]).  Professor Kevin MacDonald gives a lower total figure of deaths, but notes:

The Soviet government killed over 20 million of its own citizens, the vast majority in the first 25 years of its existence during the height of Jewish power.  It was a "state against its people" (Werth 1999), mounting murderous campaigns of collective punishment (usually involving deportation or forced starvation) against a great many ethnic groups…. Although individual Jews were caught up in the Bolshevik violence, Jews were not targeted as a group. (MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, xxxvii)

While after Stalin’s (Dzhugashvili’s) purges of 1937-8, Jewish representation in the Communist Party and the iniquitous security services declined, until that time, for roughly the first twenty years of its history, it may be said that Soviet Communism possessed a strongly Jewish hue.  Still, "Jews were highly overrepresented in positions of economic and political power as well as cultural influence at least into the 1940s." (MacDonald, 58)  Particularly bloody were the Bolshevik crimes against the Russian Orthodox Church, from hierarchs and clergy to ordinary Orthodox believers, millions of whom were tortured to death, shot outright, or sent to their deaths in the gulags under the official policy of atheism; parish churches were burned; icons and property looted and sold abroad; cathedrals were dynamited. (See, for example, Jonathon Van Maren at TheBridgeHead.ca)  When one reflects on the staggering death toll under Jewish Communism and the virtual silence on the subject in modern mass media versus the countless books, documentaries, and feature films made about the Holocaust, one becomes cognizant of an enormous contemporary cultural and intellectual disconnect. 

Political and cultural crimes committed by Jewish Bolsheviks against the Russian population have been widely documented, not least by the journalist Robert Wilton, Russian correspondent to the Times of London during the Bolshevik takeover and the years of the First World War leading up to it, in his books, Russia’s Agony and The Last Days of the Romanovs (available at Amazon.com and Archive.org).  Wilton (1868-1925) and his outstanding reporting have today been thrown on the ash heap of antisemitism, thus discarding some of the most powerful eyewitness testimony to the events that shaped the early Communist Soviet Union. (See Goodreads.com and Wikipedia.com—the latter for his current popular status as an antisemite.)   He describes Jewish involvement in the November 1917 Bolshevik takeover of the Provisional Government, the subsequent systematic persecution and killing of "counter-revolutionaries" (namely, anyone suspected of monarchist sympathies or Christian faith) during the years of the Red Terror, the savage murder of the Imperial family in 1918, and the early years of civil war. 

Taken according to numbers of [the Russian] population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the commissars that rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten; if anything the proportion of Jews is still greater. (Academia)

Wilton goes out of his way to identify Jews involved in Bolshevism as "pseudo-Jews", i.e., Jews who publicly had, for the most part, shed their religious sympathies and accepted the official atheism of the new regime (as Churchill pointed out also), while culturally and in private retaining their Jewish self-consciousness (and would continue to be identified as Jews according to the principle of familial descent as still promulgated by the State of Israel and, again ironically, by many antisemites).  To borrow a phrase, one might say that the many Jews in Russia (and from all over the world, who flocked to the nascent Bolshevik regime), who lent themselves to the gruesome machinery of early Communism, composed the Bolsheviks’ "willing executioners", in the words of author Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, describing what he believed was the complicit attitude of the German population to the crimes of the Third Reich (available at Amazon.com), and willingly participated in what are probably the greatest crimes in history committed against an Orthodox Christian population.

On June 9, 1919 Captain Montgomery Shuyler of the American Expeditionary Forces [to Russia] telegrammed from Vladivostok on the makeup of the presiding Soviet government: “… (T)here were 384 ‘commissars’ including 2 negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians, and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come to Russia from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.” (Academia)

How to summarize Jewish involvement in early Communism?  (We have here concentrated on the Bolsheviks, the party that emerged victorious in the political struggle, even while their more socialist rivals, the Mensheviks, were overwhelmingly Jewish as well. JPost)  Seth J. Frantzman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, a century after the Bolshevik coup, observed that many Jews "ended up being murdered by the system they helped create."  He continued:

With 100 years of hindsight it is still difficult to understand what attracted so many Jews to communism in the Russian empire.  Were their actions infused with Jewishness, a sense of Jewish mission like the tikkun olam [meaning, roughly, to "repair the world"] and "light unto the nations" values we hear about today, or were their actions strictly pragmatic as a minority group struggling to be part of larger society?  The answer lies somewhere in the middle. (JPost)

Mr. Frantzman is on to something.  "Their actions" were "infused with Jewishness, a sense of Jewish mission like the tikkun olam".  The reason that so many culturally adrift Jews gravitated to utopian Communism was due to the cultural hangover of worldly messianism that imbues their erstwhile faith.  Rabbinic Judaism has for centuries envisioned a conquering messiah in the vein of King David or Simon bar Kokhba, the leader of the disastrous revolt against Rome in 132-136 AD, who would emerge to crush the enemies of Jewry and usher in a new realm of peace, prosperity, and global harmony—with the Jews in pride of place. (See, for example, Aish.com and Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 300-04)  Communism was a secularized version of Judaic messianism (conceived by the convert Jew [to Lutheranism] Karl Marx), which, like all such efforts since the time of bar Kokhba, would end in catastrophe both for its immediate (Christian) victims as well as its (Jewish) perpetrators.  The current efforts to bring about a "one world order" through "globalization" are yet other variations on a theme. 

Mr. Spencer’s own answer regarding Jewish involvement in Russian and international Communism comes across as remarkably facile. 

It must be granted that many Jews, particularly in Russia, did join the ranks of the Communists, hoping that they would create a society in which they would be relieved of the second-class status and periodic pogroms they had suffered under the rule of the czars.  This was far, however, from establishing that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement, devised in order to advance Jewish aims, any more than the preponderance of black Americans in the National Basketball Association means that professional basketball is an inherently black enterprise.  A culture that values learning and scholarship will fill the ranks of movements that are intellectual in scope or that require intellectual labor, and that is true not just in politics but in numerous other fields as well. (Antisemitism, 308-9) 

Murderous Communism v. professional basketball.  According to Mr. Spencer, because Jewish culture values "learning and scholarship" it was natural for so many Jews to become Party officials, commissars, agents of the secret police, informers, and general executioners of so many innocent Russian Christians in the hopes of creating a better society—is that really what he would have us believe Jewish culture logically produces? 

Jews in Contemporary Life

Mr. Spencer provides a similar apologia for Jewish domination in other areas of contemporary life:

Just as Jews became bankers and financiers when the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition on usury closed those fields to Catholics, so also the wider society’s disdain for pornography tended to make it a field to which those who were marginalized and often treated as outcasts gravitated, and some Jews got involved in it…. the Jews’ culturally cultivated creativity and dynamism lead to their being despised and relegated to the margins of society. (Antisemitism, 323-4)

It’s not the Jews’ fault that they slaughtered millions of Russian Christians as revolutionary Bolsheviks, became so adept at usury, became media barons, rose to the heights of behind-the-scenes political control (see, for starters, The Israel Lobby by Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt), and went into pornography—rather it was the fault of Christian society and the result of the Jews’ own superior ethic.  With respect to being "well represented in the financial sphere" (perhaps an understatement), Jews were just "making lemonade out of lemons". (Antisemitism, 300)

If there are Jews at high levels of the pornography industry, this is not because they are Jews executing some subversive Jewish agenda, but because in that field, as in so many others, people who are intelligent, capable, motivated, and driven—all qualities that Jewish culture generally encourages—tend to rise to the top. (Antisemitism, 329) 

It is clearly not acceptable by Mr. Spencer’s standards to criticize Jewish culture—that would amount to antisemitism—but it is just fine to praise it to the heavens, even in the context of one of our time’s greatest moral/social blights, namely, industrial-scale pornography.  Jewish pornographic entrepreneurs are not scarce on the ground: from the God-hating Al Goldstein (who Mr. Spencer describes as seeing "himself as a victim of anti-Jewish prejudice and sees working in pornography as a way to strike back" [Antisemitism, 326-7]), to the rabbi/attorney Solomon Friedman, the head of Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub (of course, Rabbi Friedman "does not appear to see his efforts as destructive at all" [Antisemitism, 330]), Jews are well-represented in contemporary pornography.  Nathan Abrams has written an interesting article, "Jews in the American Porn Industry: A Disproportionate Role in Adult Entertainment", the title of which pretty much sums it up.  With regard to possible Talmudic sanction of child abuse, Mr. Spencer asks about "pedophilia and child trafficking?", which of course he denies. (Antisemitism, 204)  Whether elements of the Talmud permit child abuse is open to question (see Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 422-36), but certain contemporary problems in the Jewish State are not exactly reassuring on this score: for example, "How Jewish American Pedophiles Hide from Justice in Israel"—apparently a "widespread problem"; "Tens of Thousands of Pedophiles Operate in Israel Every Year"; and "Israel Becoming a 'Refuge for Pedophiles,' Warns Advocate for Child Sex Abuse Victims"—apparently, "there may be a 'significantly higher proportion' of cases in the ultra-Orthodox community".  Mr. Spencer affirms the obvious when he writes, "there are criminals and perverts in all cultures and groups", but he denies that there is anything peculiar to Jewish culture that manifests "a worldwide Jewish imperative to subvert and destroy non-Jewish society." (Antisemitism, 211)  That, of course, would be a difficult thing to establish beyond a reasonable doubt, though we have certainly seen that Judaism’s holiest book, the Babylonian Talmud, is scurrilously anti-Christian; that Rabbinic Judaism takes pride in the judicial murder of Christianity’s Holiest Person; that Jews were overwhelmingly represented in murderous anti-Christian Bolshevism—the crimes of which in absolute numbers dwarf even those of the criminal German National Socialists; that Jews have "a disproportionate role" in the contemporary pornography industry; etc.  (One is even tempted to reference the significant roles Jews have played in organized crime: see, for example, "Jewish American Mobsters and Organized Crime Figures".)

Jews and Christian Society

Dr. E. Michael Jones, PhD, (who may be found at CultureWars.com as well as among the Anti-Defamation League’s greatest hits) proffers an interesting theory in his immense book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, which much more accords with the bloody historical record of Jewish Communism and the culturally subversive nature of Jewish involvement in pornography and other anti-Christian undertakings.  Mr. Spencer gives Dr. Jones a modest hearing in his book, for example:

Rooted in nothing, radical Jews frequently seek to make others equally rootless by tearing down their religious, national, communal and traditional allegiances.  Such Jews carry on the traditional Jewish hatred of false gods [including, one supposes, Christian idolaters] but without offering anything to replace the scorned allegiances…. Rather, the most important result of the domination of non-Jewish [i.e., non-Judaic] Jews in these fields is their war on traditional values.  Porn is just one expression of this rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism. (Jones as quoted in Antisemitism, 324)

When Jews became and/or become emancipated from the straightjacket of Rabbinic Judaism without converting to another faith such as Christianity, they take with them into the larger (Christian) society a rootlessness that—many of them—seek to translate to the larger culture.  Should this be so surprising?  Mr. Spencer sees it as a function of Jewish cultural superiority; some traditional Christians such as Jones see it as cultural subversion.  To a great extent, they are in agreement; it is merely a question of perspective.  If the rabbis were indeed "proud" of killing Jesus Christ—as Dr. Schafer has told us—why should not their cultural heirs incline toward destroying a culture based in His name?  Such a lingering antipathy toward Christian culture may not constitute "a massive and insidious Jewish plot" (Antisemitism, 324), but a nonetheless real social/cultural antagonism for what remains of Christian society.  Mr. Spencer himself remarks on the glee demonstrated by multiple contemporary rabbis who rejoice in the ongoing destruction and Islamization of Christian Europe:

Jews should rejoice at the fact that Christian Europe is losing its identity as a punishment for what it did to us for hundreds of years were in exile there [sic]…. [N]ow, Europe is losing its identity in favor of another people and another religion, and there will be no remnants and survivors from the impurity of Christianity, which shed a lot of blood it won’t be able to atone for. (Rabbi Baruch Efrati, YNet News, November 11, 2012, as quoted in Antisemitism, 312-13)

"The Messiah will only come when Edom, Europe, Christianity has totally fallen.  So I ask you, is it good news that Muslims are invading Europe?  It’s excellent news!  It means the coming of the Messiah!  Excellent news!" (Rabbi David Touitou, YouTube, May 11, 2024, as quoted in Antisemitism, 313)  Mr. Spencer hastens to point out that the "statement of a handful of individuals, however, does not make for a Jewish conspiracy," (Antisemitism, 313) which is logically undeniable, but the cultural antipathy to what remains of Christian Europe is palpable.  Mr. Spencer points to one other rabbi, David Rosen, who does not support his colleagues’ sentiments—proving, evidently, that rabbis can disagree. (Andrew Rettman in the EU Observer, November 30, 2010 in Antisemitism, 313)  It is evident, however, that, as Europe grows more Islamic due to immigration and higher birth rates among Muslim families, the situation for both Jews and Christians in Europe will continue to deteriorate, as Mr. Spencer has argued on various occasions.  But one beneficiary is surely the Zionist movement and its notion that Jews in general should emigrate to the State of Israel: as Europe grows more dangerous for Jews, fleeing to the Jewish State grows relatively attractive.  A significant point that Mr. Spencer fails to bring up.

When it comes to analyzing possible Jewish motivations for anti-Christian social and political behavior, a major lacuna in Mr. Spencer’s book is the absence of evolutionary psychologist Professor Kevin MacDonald, who approaches Jewish collective behavior clinically from a group evolutionary perspective, and whom we have had occasion to mention.  His well-researched works such as A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism As A Group Evolutionary Strategy, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements, Understanding Jewish Influence, and others, all Mr. Spencer sees fit to ignore (see KevinMacDonald).  Professor MacDonald points out that the broad Jewish support for multiculturalism (with important exceptions such as the relatively new phenomenon of Jewish neoconservativism) functionally undermines the hitherto dominant Christian culture while providing the Jewish minority, with its greater cultural cohesion, social and political advantages.  To take a crucial example, that of raising children:

Moreover, traditional Western supports for high-investment parenting were embedded in [Christian] religious ideology and, I suppose, are difficult to achieve in a postreligious environment.  Nevertheless, as Podhoretz (1995, 30) notes, it is in fact the case that Jewish intellectuals, Jewish organizations like the AJCongress, and Jewish-dominated organizations such as the ACLU have ridiculed Christian religious beliefs, attempted to undermine the strength of Christianity, or have led the fight for lifting restrictions on pornography.  Further, we have seen that psychoanalysis as a Jewish-dominated intellectual movement has been a central component of this war on gentile cultural supports for high-investment parenting.  Whereas Jews, because of their powerful genetically influenced propensities for intelligence and high-investment parenting, have been able to thrive within this cultural milieu, other sectors of the society have not; the result has been a widening gulf between the cultural success of Jews and gentiles and a disaster for the society as a whole. (MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, 328)

There is little gainsaying Professor MacDonald’s broad observations.

Other significant works of contemporary scholarship on Judaism are similarly absent from Antisemitism.  For example, references to the works of Michael Hoffman including, Judaism’s Strange Gods, his massive and exhaustively documented Judaism Discovered, and Adolf Hitler: Enemy of the German People, nowhere appear in its pages (see RevisionistHistory.org).  While Mr. Spencer mentions various translations of the Talmud into languages accessible to Christian Europeans over the centuries, and the ensuing controversies, he omits the most striking example, namely, that of Johann Andreas Eisenmenger’s Judaism Unmasked (or The Traditions of the Jews), published and suppressed in the early eighteenth century in Frankfurt.  Perhaps because Eisenmenger had mastered Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish, and thus was able to provide a highly scholarly critique of the Talmud as a vehicle for the conversion of Jews to Christianity, Mr. Spencer chose not to engage him.  (There is also no mention in Antisemitism of the Judaic Kabbalah; see Michael Hoffman, Judaism Discovered, 790-96.)

Antisemitism and the Contemporary Jewish State

Turning to Zionism and the Jewish State today, Mr. Spencer is especially worried about the rise of antisemitic sentiments since the Hamas attack on the State of Israel on October 7, 2023.  Mr. Spencer takes to task, for example, "conservative journalist Elijah Schaffer" (Antisemitism, xxii) for condemning the attack on the following day but adding context: "1. What Hamas did was evil 2. What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is evil 3. Both think each other are the terrorists 4. One is in an open air prison." (Elijah Schaffer as quoted in Antisemitism, xxii)  Of course, most of the examples of antisemitism provided by Mr. Spencer are from Islamic activists, who, as Mr. Spencer would hasten to point out, are inveterately antisemitic by virtue of being Muslims.  He proceeds to observe, one would say accurately, that, "Jews and Israel occupy an outsize portion of the world’s attention, and a very great deal of that attention is negative"; and, in an apparently related vein, "Christians warned me that ancient prophecies held that the Antichrist would arise from modern-day Israel." (Antisemitism, xxviii)  (Antichrist, or conversely the Judaic messiah, will most likely arise from within the region of the old Roman Empire, namely, the Euro-Mediterranean basin, and then move his capital to Jerusalem. [see my book, Antichrist: The Fulfillment of Globalization, ch. 1])  Indeed, Churchill got to the heart of the matter when he opened his article "Zionism versus Bolshevism" with the words, "Some people like Jews and some people do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world."  In other words Jews do, and have for centuries—though especially now that there exists an explicit Jewish State—played an outsized role in world affairs, far exceeding their relatively small numbers.  Churchill can see this fact; Spencer can, too, though he laments that "a very great deal of that attention is negative."  There are two logical possibilities for that negative attention: first, that the rest of the world labors under the disease of irrational Jew-hatred or antisemitism; or, two, that Jews and the State of Israel are doing things that warrant negative attention—and the two, of course, are not mutually exclusive.  Surely, there are inveterate antisemites out there, especially in the Islamic world; but could, possibly, the State of Israel be acting badly itself?  Is it antisemitic to entertain the idea?

As of the publication of his book, Mr. Spencer regards Israeli military activity post-October 7, 2023 as "defensive": the State of Israel was attacked, it responded, and will continue to respond.  One might analogize the situation to the surprise Japanese attack of December 7, 1941 against the US or to the lunatic declaration of war by Germany a few days later and the ensuing American/Allied response.  Surely the United States was acting defensively?  Surely, yes, though one can wonder about the subsequent targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure that claimed the lives of millions of non-combatant Japanese and Germans.  At the time, it seemed all in a good cause, but with hindsight one hesitates to affirm that destroying the German cultural center of Dresden with incendiaries in 1945 or vaporizing the Japanese Christian center of Nagasaki in the same year were categorically good.  Similarly, one can raise questions, at least, about the behavior of the State of Israel both before and after October 7, 2023. 

Mr. Spencer refers to the State of Israel as "the most hated state" in his title to chapter twelve. (Antisemitism, 333)  We ask: why is it so hated?  Is the entire world implacably antisemitic, or are actions of the State of Israel in some way driving negative perceptions of it?  Could not the latter be at least somewhat true?  Mr. Spencer does not seem to think so.  He marches out a small parade of left-wing politicians, perennial critics of the Jewish State, to bolster his case. (See Antisemitism, 333-5)  He does not engage more serious criticism like that of the American Jewish journalist Max Blumenthal, for example, who questioned the accepted narrative of October 7 in his impressive documentary, Atrocity, Inc.  Mr. Spencer also faults the previous Biden administration for insufficient support of Israeli policies in Gaza (Antisemitism, 335-6), even while Biden consistently gave the State of Israel just about everything it wanted in terms of munitions, money, and materiel, as well as vetoing UN Security Council resolutions against it (see "100 Times Biden Supported Israel" in The Times of Israel, November 19, 2024)  What more was American policy supposed to do?  Give the State of Israel nuclear weapons?  (No, it already has them.)

Mr. Spencer is also unhappy about the reported Palestinian death toll in the Israeli Gaza campaign—not because of the high number of fatalities, but because he regards the figures, originating with the Hamas Ministry of Health, as inherently unreliable.  Would Hamas have an incentive to inflate the numbers?  Presumably—it’s just that Israeli intelligence has accepted them as generally accurate (see "Israeli Intelligence Has Deemed Hamas-Run Health Ministry’s Death Toll Figures Generally Accurate" in Vice.com, January 25, 2024).  Since the Vice article, Hamas’ numbers have, needless to say, changed, generally increasing but sometimes declining, which Mr. Spencer takes to be an indication of their unreliability, whereas by actually downgrading their numbers from time to time Hamas may be trying to retain some standard of accuracy and is willing to recognize when it has made a mistake.  Still, "Israel’s military has also accepted in briefings that the overall Gaza casualty numbers are broadly reliable," as reported on March 24, 2025 by Reuters.  Additionally, The Lancet reported that, as of June 30, 2024, total mortality in the Gaza Strip had been underreported by the Hamas Ministry of Health by forty-one percent.  Even the arch-Zionist President Donald Trump acknowledged that Gaza looked like "a demolition site" following the Israeli campaign in 2023-24.  The very real problem of "the fog of war", in which it is almost impossible to determine with accuracy total casualties, fatalities, and who particularly has been killed while combat operations are underway or just recently halted, seems lost on Mr. Spencer.

Another relevant fact is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, chief proponent of the Gaza war, (currently on trial for corruption, again), has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court along with his former defense minister, Yoav Galant (see Newsweek, November 22, 2024)  Mr. Spencer, who regards the United Nations as antisemitic, no doubt would classify the ICC along the same lines—though he makes no mention.  Part of the indictment against the two Israeli ministers pertained to a speech given by Mr. Netanyahu on October 28, 2023 in which the Prime Minister invoked the memory of "Amalek" mentioned in various places in the Tanakh (the Hebrew Old Testament) but especially in Deuteronomy, in which God instructs the Israelites to "blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven," (Deuteronomy 25: 19) for crimes against the Hebrews that the Amalekites had committed.  Mr. Spencer is able to produce numerous accounts of Muslim preachers and activists calling for, in some way, to "blot out the remembrance" of the Jewish State and Jews generally, but he overlooks a comparable case—prominent on the international scene—when it involves the Israeli Prime Minister.  Was Mr. Netanyahu calling for ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Palestinians?  Certainly, evidence has surfaced that ethnic cleansing has occurred in Gaza as reported by Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders (see NBCNews.com).  Mr. Netanyahu’s imprecation sounds not far removed from the passage from the Haggadah, recited by observant Jews every Passover:

Pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not acknowledge You, and upon the kingdoms that do not call upon Your Name.  For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation.  Pour out Your indignation upon them, and let the wrath of Your anger overtake them.  Pursue them with anger, and destroy them from beneath the heavens of the L-rd. (Chabad.org)

Mr. Spencer acknowledges the Talmudic injunction, "Kill the best of the Gentiles in time of war." (Bloch, 204 as quoted in Antisemitism, 193; see also 195)  Perhaps that is what the State of Israel is doing.

But if indeed God has given "Eretz Yisrael" (the Land of Israel) to modern-day Zionist Jews, then one can wonder what the God-given boundaries of the Jewish State are really supposed to be: those outlined by the UN in 1947; those created by "facts on the ground" since 1967—or something else.  The "biblical" boundaries of Eretz Yisrael are clearly open to interpretation, but at least some Zionist groups both within and without the Jewish State see those ostensibly God-given boundaries as very expansive indeed, stretching from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in Iraq and including much of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Saudi Arabia. (Mondoweiss.net)  If, indeed, the "Greater Israel Project" is a serious one, the future implications for the Jewish State, its great ally, the United States, as well as the Middle East in general, are profound and disturbing. (See also "The Greater Israel Project: A Critical Analysis of Its Implications and Impact", and "The Millennium Report", June 22, 2017.)  One can easily foresee a continued string of Middle Eastern wars, waged on various pretenses, to expand the Jewish State to its "rightful" frontiers—all done in the name of God, that most hazardous of political motivations.

Lawfare and Antisemitism

As we approach the end of this exercise, let us pull back and make a general observation.  One of the characteristics of totalitarian regimes, as observed by the great German-American political scientist Eric Voegelin (1901-85, who narrowly escaped the Gestapo in Vienna in 1938), is the prohibition of questions: that there are certain questions that simply cannot be asked because they strike at the heart of the regime’s unspoken assumptions.  (For a start on the prolific Voegelin, one recommends his small volumes, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, and, second, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, also available at Archive.org).  While we can remain grateful that freedom of thought and speech continue to endure in the West (one hesitates to say "thrive"), and especially in the United States thanks to its explicit constitutional protections, it is also evident that our culture is sliding, perceptibly, toward repression.  (For the case of contemporary Britain, see JonathanTurley.org.)  Even Mr. Spencer has been the victim of restrictions on freedom of speech on multiple occasions; in 2013 he was denied entry into the United Kingdom on the grounds of his outspoken anti-Islamic views. (BBC.com)  Regarding the violent nature of Islam and the social/political threat that Islamic immigration poses to the West, Mr. Spencer is spot on, and that so many should dismiss him and others who hold comparable views (including this author, see my House of War) as "Islamophobes" is both unfair and harmful to the exchange of ideas. 

Yet, as the saying goes, what is good for the goose is good for the gander.  It is evident that serious critical analysis of Judaism and Jewish history are, in the contemporary Anglosphere, largely forbidden areas that the prevailing cultural and intellectual atmosphere simply reject out of hand: one may not do it in polite society, else one reflexively attracts the epithet "antisemite" and forfeits whatever social and professional standing one might have had.

And, indeed, the Overton window seems to be closing further.  Moving from the realm of social peccadilloes to that of political repression, we must now observe that in the United States a campaign is afoot to codify offenses of "antisemitism" by way of federal legislation and/or presidential executive order.  Already, green card holders are in jeopardy of deportation for the expression of views hostile to the State of Israel. (CNN.com)  Now, the "US administration argues it can deport [a] prominent anti-Israel activist over his beliefs". (TimesofIsrael.com)  The pending "Antisemitism Awareness Act", making its tortuous way through the US Congress, would render the "International Holocaust Remembrance Agency’s" "working definition of antisemitism", currently an unofficial guideline, into law—for US citizens:

Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities. (HolocaustRemembrance)

Thus, "a certain perception … which may be expressed"—i.e., a state of mind, an Orwellian accusation against which one would have no practical defense—could result in federal government action on the basis of "anti-discrimination".  The "Antisemitism Awareness Act", which targets colleges and universities under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—though who knows how broadly it might be applied—is expected to pass the US Congress (by virtue of its Republican majorities) and be signed into law by President Trump sometime in 2025. (Debevoise)  That such an egregious violation of the principles of freedom of thought and speech, as well as of the First Amendment itself, is seriously being considered in contemporary America, is a testament to how far down the slippery slope of Voegelin’s totalitarian prohibition of questions we have fallen.  Interestingly, and to their great credit, numerous Jewish scholars have taken a stand against the imposition of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. (Commondreams.org)

Still, with the way things are going, one wonders if, in ten years’ time, "antisemitism" will be as much a criminal offense in the United States as it was once in Communist Russia.  One does not hear from Mr. Spencer regarding the "Antisemitism Awareness Act" in his book; perhaps he has chimed in elsewhere.  We can hope that, having suffered from campaigns to silence him on Islam, he will lend his voice to those committed to freedom of thought and speech on the matter of "antisemitism"—out of principle, at least.  Yet, when one reflects on the sheer demonstrated power of America’s enormous Judeo-Zionist lobby, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the United Democracy Project, the American Israel Education Foundation, etc. (see also TrackAIPAC.com), let alone the string of influential private Jewish political donors such as the Adelson family, the Schwartzman family, Donald Sussman, the Simons family, Michael Bloomberg, etc., all of which collectively pour hundreds of millions of dollars—or more—into an election cycle, one can feel the noose tightening.  "The general message of Goldberg’s (1996) book Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, is that American Judaism is well organized and lavishly funded.  It has achieved a great deal of power, and it has been successful in achieving its interests." (MacDonald, 304)  Fighting that kind of crowd is, as the saying goes, bad for business. 

Jews contribute between one-third and one-half of all campaign money in federal elections, the donations motivated by "Israel and the broader Jewish agenda" (Goldberg 1996, 275).  Jews are thus overrepresented in campaign contributions by a factor of at least 13 based on their percentage of the population and are overrepresented by a factor of approximately 6.5 if adjustment is made for their higher average income.

(MacDonald, 305)

One has to ponder the direction in which matters have evolved since Professor MacDonald, writing over twenty years ago and relying on research from prior decades, affirmed his conclusions—before Google, Facebook, and Amazon came into their own.  Having come to the end of Antisemitism, one hopes that one will still be able to make such observations going forward without being punished.  One remains optimistic; after all, "This isn’t Spain; this is England!" (A Man for All Seasons)

Concluding Observations

"Jew-hatred is as old as Judaism itself.  It has persisted for centuries.  It will not end," (Antisemitism, 362) laments Mr. Spencer; it is a "social contagion" (Antisemitism, 361)—apparently even Mr. Spencer doubts the convincing power of his book.  He proceeds to observe, "Against social contagions, rational argumentation is only of limited value." (Antisemitism, 362)  Indeed, by the end of Antisemitism, one has the impression that Mr. Spencer has just about given up on rational argument; would he in turn support coercive measures such as "The Federal Task Force to Combat Antisemitism" and the "Antisemitism Awareness Act" to meet the "contagion" of antisemitism?  One wonders.  For contemporary critics of the policies of the State of Israel, and for analysts of Judaism itself, there may be precious little breathing room left in the coming years.  Still, we will here reaffirm that antisemitism, or for that manner hatred of anybody, violates the Orthodox Christian directive to love all people regardless of who they are; even while, as Orthodox Christians, we must persistently affirm the truths of our faith and stand up for what we believe—in particular, the sanctity of Jesus Christ and the Most Holy Theotokos, whenever they are attacked, by followers of the Talmud or by anybody else.  Yet, despite the weaknesses of Antisemitism, the fact remains that so much of Mr. Spencer’s other work has been bold, truthful, and important, especially regarding Islam.  His JihadWatch.org is an outstanding resource for learning about Islam and jihad in our time, especially in regions such as Asia and Africa, which receive scant attention in the Western press.

But by the end of Mr. Spencer’s book, we are still in the dark about the why of antisemitism: why has virtually every culture that has come into contact with Jews and Judaism at some point reacted with hostility?  What is the overarching common denominator across cultures, times, and civilizations?  What would Occam tell us?  Is it possible to point out that the common factor is Jews and Judaism themselves?  Could that have something to do with it?  Or would that be just another antisemitic remark to be dropped down the memory hole along with observing the anti-Christian contents of the Talmud, the Jewish role in the massive crimes of early Communism, God’s rebukes to the ancient Israelites through Moses and the Prophets, the Lord Jesus Christ’s excoriation of the rabbinic leadership, the warnings of Orthodox Christian luminaries such as St. Paul and St. John Chrysostom, etc., etc.?  By the end of Robert Spencer’s book, Antisemitism: History and Myth, we still do not know.