Is Antisemitism the Proof for the Existence of God?

‘The deeply anti-religious kernel of Hitler’s antisemitism is not difficult to discover… Jews represented symbolically the demands of a divinely established moral law, which stood in the way of his racial amoralism and his deification of the German State and Volk. His genocidal decision against the Jewish people represented, again symbolically, the annihilation of his moral (Jewish-Christian) conscience, which stood in the way of his grandiose dream of a Thousand Year Reich founded on an apotheosis of the German Volk and as himself as its Fuehrer and Saviour. This view is supported by his remarks about conscience as a Jewiah intervention and the need to get the “Thou shall” and “Thou shall not” out of Aryan blood. Seen in this light, his antisemitism appears in its ultimate essence as a nomophobia , a revolt against the divinely sanctioned moral law or, religiously speaking, as a revolt against God.’

From The Anguish of the Jews by Edward Flannery, 1965 (1).

Antisemitism has been called the world’s oldest hatred, the perplexing persecution of a single small ethnic group throughout history. Hitler proposed it as the solution to all Germany’s problems. Islamists endlessly plot the destruction of Israel to restore the honour of Islam. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia used Jews as a universal scapegoat, persecuting and murdering thousands. Saint John Chrysostom vilified the Jews in violent words and Voltaire in erudite language. England expelled its Jewish population in the thirteenth century and in the Nazi era put quotas on the number of Jews allowed to take refuge in the British Mandate of Palestine. Britain abstained from voting for the creation of the State of the Israel in the United Nations in 1947 and in the Jewish war of Independence that followed, they armed the Arabs. Shakespeare gave us Shylock to despise the Jews and Dickens created Fagin. Before departing for Jerusalem, the Crusaders of the Rhineland murdered the Jews who lived there. Once in the Holy Land, they slaughtered many more. France expelled its Jews and Austria expelled them, as did Hungary, Portugal, Switzerland and even parts of Italy despite many Popes being sympathetic towards them. The Inquisition, that ultimate expression of Spanish nationalism, permitted the expulsion of over 200,000 Jews. In Europe Jews were forbidden to own land and to join trade guilds, then criticised for finding employment in the few things allowed to them, money and academia.

The sad list goes on or, as Edward Flannery expresses it, ‘the millennia of horrors’. As Hitler’s star rose in pre-war Germany, even the United States was not immune. ‘A sign [was] posted on a road leading to a mountain resort: “1000 feet – too high for Jews.” Another one read: “Gentiles preferred.”’ (3)

Many theories have been proposed to account for antisemitism, but is it proof for the existence of God? As a Christian, I believe it is.

Jesus said, ‘salvation is through the Jews’ (John 4,22) and ‘[Jerusalem] will not see me again until you say, “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”’ (Matt 23, 39). The missionary Lydia Prince, who spent a large part of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in Jerusalem, wrote ‘God’s plan of peace and blessing for all nations can never come to completion until both Israel and Jerusalem are restored…he expects us to be his coworkers in bringing this to pass’ (2).

The world doesn’t see it this way, but the world is anti-God. ‘Those who hate you, O God, your enemies, [say] let us cut them off from being a nation, that the name of Israel may be remembered no more’ (Psalm 83:1- 4).

There are countless examples of antisemitism in history which demonstrate that, if your aim is to rid yourself of Jews, then it is also to rid yourself of the Jewish God. To the scholars of the European Enlightenment ‘attempting to devise a truly rational understanding of history, politics, and religion—Jewish thought presented a significant challenge’ (4). Indeed, the very reason for antisemitism follows war in heaven, God’s angels versus Satan’s.

Israel gives birth to the Messiah

‘A woman clothed with the sun and on her head a crown of twelve stars brought forth a male child who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. The dragon, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, stood before the woman so that he might devour her child, but the child was caught up to God and to his throne.

‘Now war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down and his angels were thrown down with him. Woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great anger, because he knows that his time is short!

Satan pursues Israel

‘When the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had borne the male child' (Revelation 12).

But ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel, which means God is with us.’ (Matt 1, 23). In our pain, in our grief, in the small tortures of daily life Jesus the Jew is there sharing our suffering. Yet Satan would far rather we live our lives in a brand of educated humanism. I have just watched the documentary series Australian Story about an elderly woman who, knowing that she hasn’t much longer to live, wonders who will love the disabled son to whom she has devoted her life.

Outside of Jesus, I don’t have the answer, except to rail against the humanism we live in which encourages the world to live courageously without God, and therefore without the Jews. I’m not very good at theology and psychology and it seems to me an insurmountable difficulty to say that a God who loves you created the Jews that the world hates yet are necessary for its salvation.

What is the point of hating the Jews? Who benefits?

The Jews are God’s people irrespective of their sins, and this says much about the faithfulness of God.

'Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes. I will take you from the nations and gather you from all the countries and bring you into your own land’ (Ezekial 36, 22-24).

I cannot conclude without considering Arab antisemitism and whether it is appropriate to our argument about the existence of God. Before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Jews and Christians living in Arab lands were referred to as dhimmi meaning ‘protected’. They were, however, subservient to Muslims and were governed by laws that kept them that way. They paid higher taxes. Regarding the actual murder of Jews, there is the much debated quote from the Hadith, ‘The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees and the stones and trees will say, ‘O Muslim, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him,’’ and Muhammad’s command to slay those who refused to convert and would not repent.

But the theological question of Arab antisemitism for God doesn’t make an appearance until the Islamic terrorism of our own day. It is important to understand that this is a modern phenomenon.

‘Palestinian Authority elites have built a three-stage case against Jewish existence…As their expert witness, they bring Allah himself who is said to have sent a message through the Prophet Muhammad that killing Jews is a necessary step to bring Resurrection. Stage 1 is characterized by a collective labelling of Jews as the enemies of Allah…Stage 2 teaches that because of their immutable traits, Jews represent an existential danger to all humanity. Stage 3 presents the necessary solution…the annihilation of Jews as legitimate self-defence and a service to God and man’ (5).

If God didn’t exist, would killing a Jew have been a necessary step to welcome the Resurrection? Would such slaughter have been a service to God?

I leave you with these thoughts so that the next time free-to-air television vilifies Israel you will consider their reasons for doing so.

(1) The Anguish of the Jews by Edward Flannery, Macmillan, New York, 1965.

(2) Appointment in Jerusalem, Lydia and Derek Prince, F.H. Revell Co. 1975.

(3) Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas, Thomas Nelson, 2010.s

(4) https://thelemur.org/2026/01/05/voltaires-antisemitism-an-adapted-final-paper/

(5) https://www.jstor.org/stable/25834644

Margaret Walker mwalkeristra.com

 

 

 

The Anguish of the Jews -- book review and reflections

‘The charge is pressed that the Zionist enemy has stolen Arab land, that they are duplicates of the Nazis and that their intent against Arabs is genocidal…A ubiquitous myth has taken root: an alien people (the Jews) have expelled an indigenous people (the Arabs) from their homes, forcing them to fester in poverty on the borders of their own homeland. The myth, incredibly, has been swallowed whole by many otherwise intelligent and fair-minded people without the least effort to verify any part of it…There are many who attribute Arab antisemitism exclusively to the present Arab-Israeli conflict. Actually, its roots run much deeper, going back through Arab and Islamic history to the Koran itself from which a twofold principle can be distilled: that the dhimmis (Jews and Christians) are not to dominate Muslims but be dominated by them, and that they are to be kept in a degraded state.’

Edward Flannery, the Anguish of the Jews, 1965.

If I said that this work was a resource to every expression of antisemitism in history, I would not be far from the truth. Its research is exhaustive and gives some understanding of why antisemitism seems to be the default setting of every age. I have added it to my blog War in the Balkans because of the Holocaust of the Jews in Croatia and Serbia during World War 2, and I will ask the question: to what extent can antisemitism be held accountable for the world’s response to the present Israeli Hamas conflict?

Edward Flannery was an American Catholic priest who published the work in 1965. On the subject of antisemitism, he doesn’t mince words. ‘The vast majority of Christians…are all but totally ignorant of…the immense suffering of Jews throughout the Christian era... because the antisemitic record does not appear in history books.’

I am a Christian and it grieves me to read that antisemitism, although present in ancient Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt (Maccabees 1 and 2), was cemented throughout the fourth century of the Christian era and into the early fifth century. It stemmed from ‘the full flowering of that theology which laid Jewish miseries to divine punishment to Christ’s crucifixion’. Neglecting St Paul’s exposition on God’s election and salvation of Israel in Romans 9 -11, the church fathers ‘turned upon the synagogue with the greatest vigour’. Indeed, the language of St John Chrysostom against the Jews reminds one of Hitler. Only St Augustine was faithful to St Paul. ‘Christians,’ he wrote, ‘have a duty to love Jews and to lead them to Christ,’ but ‘he is at the same time at a loss to understand their unbelief, this animosity towards Christians, and their unending misfortunes.’

During this same century, the centre of the Talmud was established in Babylonia and ‘It was forgotten or ignored that the Jewish dispersion began many centuries before Christ and that Palestine was never completely emptied of Jews.’

At this time, violence was perpetrated by both sides and some countries showed less tolerance than others. In Rome Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) respected the legal rights of Jews and ‘the Pauline teaching of special affection for Israel’. Under the Emperor Justinian (483-565), however, who reigned from Constantinople, rules restricting Jewish life were passed with liberality: what Jews could own, where they could be seen, the professions from which they were barred, where synagogues could be open or closed and where Judaism was outlawed.

From 1096, matters deteriorated in Germany, France, Austria and England, as the first Crusaders, eager to free the Holy Land from the Muslims, turned first upon European Jews. In what the author refers to as the ‘the superstitious zealotry of the mob’, Jews were offered baptism or death, and thus many were slaughtered. ‘From January to July of 1096 it is estimated that up to 10,000 died, probably one fourth to one third of the Jewish population of Germany and Northern France at that time.’ Once the Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land, the slaughter continued. ‘In 1099 at journey’s end in Jerusalem the soldiers of Godfrey de Bouillon found the Jews assembled in a synagogue and set it ablaze.’

With the onslaught of the Second Crusade in 1147, St Bernard was forced to condemn further antisemitism in Europe by again recalling St Paul. “Who is this man that he should make out [St Paul] to be a liar and render void the treasure of Christ’s love and pity?” In 1272 following incidences in the Rhineland and Bavaria, Pope Gregory X forbade forced baptisms and violence. Many Jews migrated to Palestine and, of those who remained, 100,000 throughout Germany and Austria were killed by mobs stirred up by noblemen.

The development of the Jews as usurers and money lenders was an outcome of the laws restricting their lives, and brought its own resentment from Christians. ‘By the end of the thirteenth century, Jews were expelled from France, England and most of Germany. In almost all cases, the expulsions found the origin in the business of usury.’ Yet the list of things they were accused of is a tribute to the Mediaeval imagination and the zealous peasant jumped at any excuse for murder and for the widespread burning of the Talmud. Jews were even blamed for the Black Death (1347-50). ‘Apparently, no enormity was too great to lay at the door of the Jews.’ In a chilling foretaste of the twentieth century, ‘the massacres were greatest in Germany’ and ‘by the end of the fifteenth century no more than three or four German cities still harboured a Jewish population… Most left Germany for Poland or Lithuania.’ Upon their failure to accept his teaching, Martin Luther also turned his fury against the Jews the following century.

Popes and Christian leaders condemned the atrocities. In 1418 Martin V ‘issued a decree which guaranteed protection [for the Jews] of their lives, rites, privileges and festivals [and] forbade forced baptism.’ St Bernadinus of Sienna (1380-1444) wrote, “As to the Jews, I say here what I say elsewhere: no one who has concern for his soul can injure the Jews, whether it be their persons or their faculties, or in any other way, for even to Jews, Christian piety and love must be shown since they possess a human nature.”

Only in Rome were the Jews never persecuted from the fall of the Western Empire until the close of the sixteenth century. ‘Jewish-Christian relations were intimate’ even to permitting intermarriage. Northern Italy had ample wealth and plenty of Christian usurers without them and they mostly benefitted from the friendliness of the Popes.

Until the end of the fourteenth century Jews also flourished in Spain, when the power and wealth attained by a few and their relationships with the royal family eventually provoked a downward spiral of resentment and persecution. 50,000 perished in a single massacre and worse was to come. In the wake of the Reconquista came an intense desire to strengthen the Christian state, and a conversion campaign was aimed at the Jews. Antisemitism against both Jews and converted Jews increased over the course of the fifteenth century and contained a strong racist element. However, the biggest problem was the ‘compromisers’, those Jews who by nominally accepting Christianity grew to power and wealth by having, as it is said, a foot in both camps.

Enter the Spanish Inquisition.

‘In 1479…Ferdinand and Isabella untied the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon’ and in 1483 the ‘fanatical Torquemada was appointed Inquisitor General.’ He was the most brutal and the most feared inquisitor and his job was to ‘ferret out’ Jews. Beginning with the dodgy converts, he continued to all the other Jews in Spain. ‘In 1492 the monarchs issued the fatal decree. All Jews must leave the realm by July 30th under penalty of death’. 300,00 departed.

Writing in the twelfth century, Peter Abelard nevertheless sums up the entire Middle Ages. ‘To believe that the fortitude of the Jews in suffering would be unrewarded was to declare that God was cruel. No nation has ever suffered so much for God.’

The Age of the Jewish Ghetto in Europe commenced in the seventeenth century and many Jews moved east to Palestine, the Balkans, Turkey or Poland where life was safer. However, a series of attacks upon Polish Jews by Russians, Cossaks and Swedes during one decade in the second half of the seventeenth century killed between 100,000 and 500,000 Jews and destroyed 700 Jewish communities. ‘With the exception of the Nazi period…the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries constituted the [lowest point] of post-Biblical Jewish history.’

In France, the Enlightenment and the change in ideas swept in by the French Revolution brought some measure of emancipation at the end of the eighteenth century, but the racist antisemitism present in Prussia is considered to be the beginnings of Nazi antisemitism. (Note the difference between religious antisemitism and racist antisemitism.) ‘From this point Germany became the undisputed cultural centre of antisemitism and the source of an endless stream of antisemitic books and pamphlets.’ The German-born Karl Marx is an example of a Jewish antisemite.

As religious faith [in Europe] declined… and the spirit of rationalism and scepticism rose, the need to justify the segregation [of the Jews] in purely secular terms grew…If the plight of the Jews did not stem from the crucifixion, it came from themselves, their ethnic make up; Jews, in a word, were innately perverse.’

Here begins a section marked ‘rationalistic antisemitism’ in which the French writer Voltaire stresses the rationalist grounds of his ‘utter contempt’ for the Jews and Judaism. ‘Jews are… “the most imbecile people on the face of the earth, enemies of mankind, a people most obtuse, cruel and absurd, whose history is disgusting and abominable.”’ His ideas were echoed by the German philosophers Fichte, Hegel, Herder, Schleiermacher and Harnack, and studied later by Hitler.

Under the final two Czars, government-approved pogroms against Russian Jews shocked the world and led to the immigration of over a million. Not content with this, Russia published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a piece of badly-written nonsense blaming the Jews for every crime in the universe. Nevertheless, it was well-received and translated into the major European languages and Arabic. ‘When otherwise brilliant minds are so deceived and…even after irrefragable disproof, persist in believing, we are at grips with a collective psychosis, with a will to hate and destroy well beyond the pale of human rationality…a secularized diabolism.’

Thus ended the nineteenth century and we all know what happened in the twentieth.

 

A REFLECTION ON THE OCTOBER 7th ATTACKS ON ISRAEL AND THE PRESENT CONFLICT IN GAZA

In the middle of January 2024, I witnessed Marxist groups outside Newtown railway station in Sydney ardently collecting pro-Palestinian signatures. As there has always a Jewish presence in Palestine, why not collect pro-Israeli signatures, I wondered. It is antisemitism that governs the choice. Why do the Federal Greens refuse to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7th? Why is the NSW Teachers Federation openly pro-Palestinian? Why does Sydney’s art and literary scene consider it appropriate to simplify the present complex situation in Palestine to Israeli attacks on Gazan children? Why are the two sides unequally reported in the media?

Because ‘hatred of Jews [is] a serious social and ethical problem,’ concludes Edward Flannery, and the Australians referred to above are following the tradition of mob mentality outlined in his book. History has established a culture in which it is acceptable to disbelieve Jews.

As an example, regarding the brutal Hamas rapes of Israeli women on October 7th 2023, ‘bone-chilling horrors – such as repeated gang rapes that were so brutal they left women and girls with broken pelvises and mutilated genitals’, I quote from Human rights groups’ hypocrisy on Hamas rape - opinion - The Jerusalem Post (jpost.com) 25th December 2023.

‘Amnesty International so far has issued 29 press releases entirely or mostly about Gaza since October 7. They, too, have been filled with baseless allegations about Israeli murders, “apartheid,” and the like. To this day, Amnesty still has not issued any statement about the Hamas rapes.’

And another article from Microsoft Why are feminists silent on Hamas's use of rape as a weapon of war? (msn.com) 20th January 2024.

‘The denial of widespread, preplanned mass rape and sexual violence on October 7 must therefore be treated with the same revulsion as Holocaust denial. Hamas has denied that the rapes occurred, despite overwhelming evidence. Speak up, an Egypt-based feminist initiative, inconceivably has launched a campaign to discredit Israeli victims, with coalition groups joining across the Middle East and a letter condemning The New York Times investigation into sexual violence by Hamas. Speak up boasts over 68,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and 250,000 Facebook members. Turkish public broadcasting has published an article claiming to debunk “outlandish Israeli claims of rape.” Unbelievably, their efforts have found sympathetic ears in Western academia…Ingrained antisemitism on the extreme Left leads to this moral failure.’

How else can we explain it?

Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. ‘He and the Israeli leaders Peres and Rabin received the Peace Prize for having opted for the olive branch by signing the so-called Oslo Accords in Washington. The agreement was aimed at reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.’ Yasser Arafat – Facts - NobelPrize.org

How quickly we forget.