The Tribe … embraces the mythical charge of “Christ-killing” in order to reverse it: Christians are Jew-killers. — Joe Sobran

JOE SOBRAN, a courageous writer fired from the conservative flagship magazine National Review, apparently for being too outspoken, noticed in the 1980s the pall cast over intellectual discourse by fear of offending Jews. This was odd, he said, given the Jewish loathing of their timid critics. In “The Jewish Faction,” Sobran, who died in 2010, wrote of the intensity of this hatred:

The organized Jewish faction is what I call the Tribe. It’s a bit more specific than “the Jews”; but it includes most Jews, who, as many opinion polls show, overwhelmingly support the state of Israel and, furthermore, overwhelmingly favor “progressive” causes like legal abortion, “sexual freedom,” and “gay rights.”

What is striking about the Tribe is not that its positions on such matters are necessarily wrong, but that they are anti-Christian. They are even anti-Judaic, in that they contravene the moral code of Moses. Jews today define themselves formally by descent (or, less politely, race, though the term is taboo) rather than by religion; and, less formally, by antagonism to Christianity. It would be inaccurate to say that the Tribe adopts certain social attitudes and political positions even though these are repugnant to most Christians. It adopts them chiefly because they are repugnant to Christians.

Within the Tribe, one of the worst sins a Jew can commit is to become a Christian, as witness Jewish hostility to Jews for Jesus. An irreligious or atheist Jew may claim Israeli citizenship at any time, but a Jew who has converted to Christianity may not. This antagonism is so predominant that the Tribe opposes not only government endorsements of Christianity, but even the public exaltation of the Old Testament (as in displays of the Ten Commandments on public property) because Christians have adopted it too. The “Judaeo-Christian tradition” is a sentimental myth, treasured by many Christians but by very few Jews.

The Tribe has no pope or authoritative body defining its creed, but its attitudes aren’t hard to discern. As Samuel Johnson says, a community must be judged non numero sed pondere — not by numbers, but by weight. And the preponderance of Jewish sentiment is clear: it loathes Christianity and Christian influence in public life. It resents Christian proselytizing, one of the first Christian duties (virtually banned in Israel). It considers the Gospels the very source of what it calls anti-Semitism. In fact, the very word anti-Semitism is basically a Tribal synonym for Christianity.

This was all spelled out for even the most naive observer by the fierce Tribal reaction to Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ. The barely concealed hatred of Christianity came roaring forth long before the movie was even finished. The columnist Charles Krauthammer spoke for many Jews when he wrote that the story of Christ’s Passion had “resulted in countless Christian massacres of Jews, and prepared Europe for the ultimate massacre — six million Jews systematically murdered within six years — in the heart, alas, of a Christian continent.” Alas indeed!

That Christianity caused the Holocaust, along with “countless” other Christian persecutions of Jews “for almost two millennia,” was a given for Jews commenting on the film. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, along with other Jewish leaders, flatly predicted that Gibson’s film would cause hatred and violence against Jews — implying, of course, that Christians are fully capable of such rabid conduct even now, though it would be directly contrary to Christian doctrine. William Safire of the New York Times virtually blamed the Holocaust on Christ himself, citing the words “I come not to bring peace, but a sword” as evidence of Christianity’s inherent violence.

Since the allegations about the past are never more definite than Krauthammer’s unspecified “countless” (would that be more, or less, than six million?), we are dealing here not with genuine historical memory, but with a mythological caricature of Christian history that still obsesses the Tribal mind, both shaping and expressing its present feelings. So much for “interfaith dialogue.” As Rabbi Jacob Neusner has observed, for most Jews today Auschwitz has replaced Sinai as the definitive moment in the Jewish past. And Auschwitz is projected all the way back to Calvary.

It’s now a Tribal article of faith that until the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the Catholic Church taught that all Jews were “Christ-killers.” This is of course false, as older Catholics know first-hand and as anyone else can easily ascertain. The notion that the Church “reversed” this supposedly ancient teaching displays modern ignorance of the way the Church does business: It assumes that she can arbitrarily make and unmake doctrines, like a contemporary dictator changing the Party line overnight. She acts slowly and deliberately precisely because she can never repudiate a settled teaching while claiming infallibility. Even Catholic children used to grasp that.

When I joined the Church in 1961, the only Jews I knew personally were some quite amiable neighbors. If anyone had told me that the Halman family down the street bore special responsibility for the Crucifixion, I would have been utterly mystified. So bizarre an idea would have been an impediment to my conversion: it simply wouldn’t have made sense. And it never occurred to my Catholic mentors; they didn’t need a new Church council to tell them that it was nonsense. They didn’t speak nonsense. It had nothing to do with loving or hating Jews as such. I was far more inclined to hate Protestant heretics at that point, but I never even thought of blaming them for, say, Communist persecution of Catholics. It would have been about as rational as blaming Julius Caesar for Pearl Harbor.

The Tribe, however, embraces the mythical charge of “Christ-killing” in order to reverse it: Christians are Jew-killers. And it all began, by implication, with Christ himself, whose followers, immediately after his death, naturally began implementing his principles of charity by persecuting Jews, a course they have persisted in “for almost two millennia.”

Astute readers will sense a discrepancy here. Christians were in no position to persecute anyone for nearly three centuries, until the conversion of Constantine in A.D. 313. Meanwhile, they suffered some pretty severe persecution themselves. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it began with the Jews who rejected Christ and tried furiously to exterminate the infant Church. We also know this from the testimony of one of the persecutors themselves, the turncoat Saul of Tarsus, whom we know as St. Paul. Paul himself died as a result of charges brought by the Tribe before Roman officials, just as Christ had.

The Tribe’s cohesion and survival over the two succeeding millennia has often seemed miraculous, even to Christians. By a fine irony, the Talmud claims “credit” for Christ’s death beyond what the Church has actually taught: It says that “our sages” justly condemned him to death as a sorcerer, not even mentioning a Roman role in the event. The Gospel of John merely says that “his own received him not” and the creeds say that he “suffered under Pontius Pilate,” passing up golden opportunities to affix Tribal guilt at the outset.

At any rate, Christians knew from the start how the Tribe felt about them, and nothing has changed since then except that today’s Christians have become remarkably naive about it. Christ tells us to forgive our enemies, but he doesn’t ask us to pretend that they are our friends. He predicted persecution as the natural price of discipleship; hence we are to be “wise as serpents, but harmless as doves.” Christians have often failed on both counts, but the guidelines are clear enough. In fact, Church officials have often condemned popular Christian outrages against Jews, the worst of which occurred during the Black Death of the fourteenth century. Not only Christian charity but worldly common sense could see that the Jews were being victimized by a superstitious fury, a madness brought on by an inexplicable calamity.

Anyone who concentrates on the Tribe risks losing his sense of proportion. This includes, preeminently, the Tribe itself. If the history of Christian Europe is the history of persecution of Jews, the first question that naturally arises is why the Jews have chosen to live in Europe for so many centuries. If you were wanted for murder in Detroit, why would you choose to move to Detroit, of all places on earth? Why have “Diaspora” Jews persistently settled in Christian lands, instead of rushing en masse to their “homeland” in the Middle East, the Holy Land itself? “Next year in Jerusalem”? Why, as Dodger fans used to say, “wait till next year”?

May I utter here, in the privacy of my own newsletter, the dark and reactionary suspicion that the perpetually plaintive Tribe was actually content to live in Christian lands? Even today, more Jews choose to live in Christian America than in the state of Israel, typically attacking Christians for supposed bigotries they harbor instead of thanking Christians for their long record of tolerance and benevolence.

Again, the Tribe seems, by its own account, to have a long and puzzling tradition of migrating to anti-Semitic countries. Or rather, “anti-Semitism” is the explanation it gives for its own perpetual unpopularity, and at the root of anti-Semitism, it insists, is Christianity (though a new explanation has to be found for its unpopularity in the Muslim world).

Enough already. It’s time to face the possibility that Jewish problems are sometimes due to Jewish attitudes and Jewish behavior. My father once remarked to me that the Jews are disliked everywhere they go because of “their crooked ways.” Though, as I later learned, Dad had been an altar boy, he said nothing about Christ-killing; he’d long since left the Church and he didn’t particularly care who had killed Christ. As a matter of fact, he didn’t particularly dislike Jews; but he did think it was their ethics, not their biblical record, that had earned them their low reputation.

[…]

Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, two of the greatest Catholic writers of the last century, were often critical of the Jews — each wrote a book about them — and today are routinely referred to as anti-Semites. Neither of them accused the Jews of killing Christ. In fact, both sought solutions to the “Jewish problem” which would be fair to Christians and Jews alike; Chesterton was pro-Zionist, Belloc anti-Zionist, and both spent many pages defending the Jews against common charges. But neither of these alleged bigots thought the accusation of deicide was worth mentioning, either to assert or to refute.

In truth, the charge of “Christ-killing” is hard to find anywhere, outside of schoolyard taunts. Yet the Tribe “remembers” it, just as innumerable baseball fans used to “remember” seeing Babe Ruth’s legendary (and apocryphal) “called shot” in the 1932 World Series, the most famous home run never hit. Such non-happenings are a regular feature of Tribal memory, as witness the many testimonies of “Holocaust survivors” that have turned out to be delusions or outright forgeries. A large proportion of the Tribe is still absolutely convinced that Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope,” despite mountainous, and mounting, evidence to the contrary. (Hitler’s media called Pius “the Jews’ mouthpiece.”)

Similar bogus memories of victimization surround the state of Israel. Far from facing extinction in 1948, Zionist Jews enjoyed great military superiority to the Arabs and ruthlessly drove the native Palestinians from their homes with liberal applications of terrorism. Since then the Jewish state has behaved according to the harshest Jewish stereotypes, deceitfully, parasitically, and cruelly. It was supposed to provide Jews with a safe haven from persecution, where they could at last be self-sufficient; instead, it has depended for its survival on foreign aid, chiefly American. Proclaiming democracy and equality, it has imposed racial tyranny of the sort the Tribe roundly condemns everywhere else.

And it has failed in its whole original purpose of ensuring Jewish safety. Despite its military power and nuclear arsenal, it has engendered such hatred among Arabs that Jews are afraid to go there and fret for its survival — even as they fret about nonexistent Christian anti-Semitism in pro-Israel America. As the Good Book says, “The guilty flee when no man pursueth.” Zionism has vividly shown that the Tribe is perfectly capable of making enemies without the help of the Christians it still, after almost two millennia, loathes.

What is the source of this deep enduring hatred of Christianity? No doubt there are several; an obvious one is the Church’s claim to be the New Israel, a spiritual one, supplanting the old ethnic one. Even many secular Jews resent “supersessionist” Christian theology; it’s apparently an affront to be replaced as God’s Chosen People even if you no longer believe in God. This offense is avenged by blaming Christians, especially popes, for the Holocaust, any doubt of which the Tribe treats as heresy. In many Western countries the Tribe has succeeded in criminalizing the expression of such doubts.

Moreover, Christianity’s universality has given it a worldwide appeal that Judaism by its nature can never enjoy. This consigns the Tribe to a permanent minority status, confounding its proud expectation that with the coming of the Messiah it would rule all nations. Worse, Christians take it for granted that their ethic is immeasurably superior to that of the Jews; this isn’t even debatable, for the Tribe can find no ground for persuading Christians that the Jewish ethos is better. Just as the dwarf is obsessed with height in a way people of normal size can hardly imagine, the Tribe is obsessed with its marginal minority status, which it experiences as victimization, imagining slights and insults — “anti-Semitism” — even when none are intended. Its inverted pride expresses itself in claims of persecution. The Jews are still “chosen,” if only for a singular Christian hatred. The emergence and military power of the Zionist state have partly assuaged this ressentiment, while Arab hatred and Western disapproval have also reinforced the feeling of persecution.

A subtle twist on this theme is offered by John Murray Cuddihy in his book The Ordeal of Civility. For the Jews, argues Cuddihy, adapting to the modern West has indeed been an “ordeal,” as they have found themselves regarded as backward and “crude” against the “refined” standards of Western Christian man. Such Jewish ideologies as Marxism and Freudianism are disguised apologias for the Jews, denying the superiority of Western standards. For Marx, capitalism boils down to mere greed; while for Freud, romantic love boils down to mere lust. Both view Western manners as mere hypocrisy, self-deluding airs put on by the goyim. Marxist and Freudian reductionism have had tremendous attraction for Jewish intellectuals, and not a few gentiles who feel alienated from the Christian world.

The exaltation of alienation has been the distinctive achievement of the Tribal intellectual. To be alienated is to be superior, “chosen.” There is something richly symbolic in the creation of the state of Israel, where an alien population has claimed the right to dispossess the native one. Here is the psychic Tribal drama played out in the real world, with the usurpers of Palestine brazenly calling their regime a “democracy,” while feeling victimized by the angry population they’ve robbed and murdered.

President Bush sometimes says that minority children suffer from “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” They get the message that nobody expects them to achieve anything, so they don’t even try. The very term minority now signifies a group not only recognized as having what Cuddihy nicely calls “accredited victim status,” but felt to be incapable of meeting normal standards of conduct. Polish-Americans, for example, are a numerical minority, but not a “minority” in this subtly condescending sense.

One might also speak of a “soft” anti-Semitism of low moral expectations. Most gentiles respect Jews for their intelligence and ability, but they have also come to take certain kinds of Jewish misbehavior for granted. Israeli racial supremacism is assumed as inseparable from “Israel’s right to exist”; loose Jewish charges of anti-Semitism, especially against Christians, are likewise so predictable as to cause little surprise or outrage. In public life, at least, the Tribe has embraced this baneful form of “minority” status and the implicit contempt that goes with giving up hope of normal civility.

As with other “minorities,” the Christian habit with the Tribe is simply to pretend not to notice obvious and distressing things. This, we assume, is just their nature; they aren’t going to change; maybe they can’t help being this way.

This is what “interfaith dialogue” has come to: Christian despair and surrender.

— Comments —

Bill R. writes:

Yet one more brilliant article by the ever-memorable Joseph Sobran. A few quotes I found especially memorable in this article:

“As Samuel Johnson says, a community must be judged non numero sed pondere — not by numbers, but by weight.”

Nowhere does this rule apply more strikingly than with Jews living in Christian societies, which somehow they never seem to tire of doing, as Sobran points out, even though it means surrounding themselves overwhelmingly with people they regard as forever hating and persecuting them, and worse. Could it be that the answer to this lies in the fact that they don’t really fear us that much, but that they do, in fact, hate us that much, and being so near us affords them so much better opportunities to harm us, à la Michael Corleone in The Godfather, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer?” Actually, I think the rest of the answer lies in the fact that Jews, like anyone, prefer to live in materially successful and advanced societies, and being an urban people with high verbal intelligence but a centuries-old cultural revulsion for manual labor, they are not very good at creating the kind of wealth and productivity required for such a society (one reason Israel is in constant need of, and utterly dependent on, imports and foreign aid from Christian societies such as the United States and Germany), although they are brilliant at handling and manipulating that wealth and productivity’s medium of exchange, and handling it to their own benefit and to the deliberate detriment of those producers of wealth.

“We are dealing here not with genuine historical memory, but with a mythological caricature of Christian history that still obsesses the Tribal mind.”

Indeed. Jews wouldn’t even bother about the “Holocaust,” let alone support laws that imprison people for denying it, if they could not lay the guilt for it far beyond the feet of mere evil Adolf and his Nazis. You can’t support a Jewish racial homeland on the backs of dead men, after all.

“Christ tells us to forgive our enemies, but he doesn’t ask us to pretend that they are our friends.”

Christians everywhere would be wise indeed to always bear that distinction in mind. It is particularly apt when it comes to Jews and the kind of policies (e.g., open borders, racial equality, integration, licentiousness, normalization of homosexuality) most Jews advocate for white Europeans and the Christian West (but, of course, always the very opposite for Jews and Israel), and which is advocated by virtually all of the most influential Jews — in other words, following the motto non numero sed pondere, advocated by what is essentially all of their real weight. Hence it becomes quite reasonable and accurate to speak generally of “the Jews” in this context and not be tempted into weasel words by fussing over the inconsequential exceptions to this rule that exist among them. The voices of those exceptions are to be appreciated, but they have no more effect on the prevailing Jewish attitude toward the civilization of the white European than the appearance or behavior of an elephant would be altered by dumping a handful of ants on its back.

Ben M. writes:

Here’s a gracious Sobran column about Jewish influence.

Laura writes:

What he says is very true. The world would be duller without Jews.

Jews have extreme qualities, on the good side and the bad.

Mark Jaws writes:

As someone who spent considerable amounts of time in his youth among Jews, I will add my two cents to this thread. First, I must disclose that my time spent in in these all-Ashkenazi environments was over 40 years ago when impressions of the Holocaust were fresher and when intermarriage between Jews and Gentiles was far less than today.

I am always amazed at how many Gentiles think that Jews do not harbor some historical sense of grievance against Christian Europe for what we Ashkenazim perceive as “two thousand years of persecution.” And yet, these same Gentiles will readily acknowledge that the Irish have good cause to dislike the British (as my Irish-American son in-law reminds me), and the Poles are righteous in their hatred of Germans for past oppression. But somehow, in the mindset of these noble and genteel Gentiles, we Jews are not capable of such human failing. Wrong. To paraphrase Shakespeare, “If you kill us, do our hearts not bleed and cry out for revenge?”

To what extent intermarriage and time have healed these wounds, I cannot say. Undoubtedly, as more adult semi-Semites begin to show up at Jewish community centers and Bar Mitzvahs praising their Gentile extended families, the level of Goyophobia will likely subside. But as a chosen Son of Abraham, I will swear on the Talmud that the number of Jews who dislike (at best) Gentiles will remain significant for decades to come.

Laura writes:

I think that’s not true. Gentiles concede a great deal of resentment to Jews. Would they allow themselves to be uncritically bathed in Holocaust education if they did not?

Mr. Jaws responds:

Yes, but they cannot imagine this resentment would cause some Jews to subvert their society. That is the main point I am trying to make.

Laura writes:

Agreed.

Jan 15, 2016

Bill R. writes:

Mr. Jaws writes that “they cannot imagine this resentment would cause some Jews to subvert their society.” That is some of it, but he forgets the other, and, in my mind, even more important, part of the subversion equation. And that is Jewish supremacism. They want revenge, all right (and however perceived rather than real many of their so-called persecutions have been), but they want to rule you, too, because they think they should because they think they’re better than you. And they feel that wherever they go, horizontally or vertically — geographically or morally; they feel that no matter what country they’re in and no matter how far down in the gutter they go. If they’re in the gutter, you’re still lower. They don’t even really hate us; I always imagine them tittering and giggling to each other behind the goyim’s back as the latter incessantly wring their hands over how mean and nasty they’ve been toward the poor, little Jew, the Jew meanwhile knowing full well what that hand-wringing signals; more money and power on the way.

No, what seems like hate, or even merely resentment, from them is really just that quintessential emotion that always lies behind the superior attitude: contempt. They don’t hate you, they just look down on you and are extremely annoyed with your willful inability to see and acknowledge your inferiority to them.

They want to dominate and control every country they’re in, and ultimately be Lords of the entire planet. That’s what their subversion is about. That’s the real fire in their belly. Not any hurt feelings. The endless whining and moaning about how terribly they’ve been mistreated — with the Holocaust that never happened being the crown jewel in this histrionic display of self-pitying woe — is, for the most part, a ruse, another manipulation in the service of their primary cause; gaining ever more power.

And when you think about that, remember Orwell’s important lesson about power from his novel, 1984, especially when you consider the particularly acute and gratuitous viciousness with which Jews go about their subversion of your civilization (such as is vividly demonstrated, for example, in the ugly and hateful kinds of films they make about your race and culture and values), and that lesson is that obedience is not enough; that the only way you can know you have truly gained power over someone is by being able to make him suffer, otherwise how can you know that, in their obedience, they are not merely following their own will rather than yours? And perhaps, after all, that is also why Jews seem so eternally dissatisfied with the white European show of remorse toward them, why no amount of contrition from him is ever enough, why, no matter what he concedes, there is still another layer of villainy in the white European waiting to be exposed; and that is because it seems so altogether something the white European already wants to do, this penance, indeed, likes to do; so you keeping pulling, keep needling, keep condemning, until finally you start pulling out of him something he really doesn’t want to give up, that he does not like to do, something, in short, that makes him really suffer — then, and only then, will you know you truly have power over him at last. And that is the goal of the Jew.

Laura writes:

You say, “That is the goal of the Jew.” But that revenge would only be felt and pursued by a small number of Jews.

Jan. 17, 2015

Bill R. writes:

You write, “You say, ‘That is the goal of the Jew.’ But that revenge would only be felt and pursued by a small number of Jews.”

When I said “the goal of the Jew” I was referring mainly to his quest for power. Revenge, yes, but I would say that’s the little fish; the big fish he’s after is power (and all the things like money, of course, that go with it). Now, also, part of this is inevitably a matter of practicality; you have to have power before you can exact revenge, as for example with the revenge the Jews longed for toward the Russians (for the Russian crime of resistance to Jewish supremacism) and were finally able to take once the Jewish Bolshevik Revolution that occurred there was successful. As for the small number, well, I suppose that’s a debatable point. For the time being, I will just refer back to Sobran’s reference to Samuel Johnson’s point about a community being judged “non numero sed pondere — not by numbers, but by weight. And the preponderance of Jewish sentiment is clear: it loathes Christianity and Christian influence in public life.” And I would add to that observation of Sobran’s that they loathe that influence not just because it’s Christian, but because it’s not Jewish, and it’s an article of faith with them that it should be. I would also refer back to Sobran’s first paragraph in which he spoke of “the organized Jewish faction” he called “the Tribe,” noting that “it’s a bit more specific than ‘the Jews’; but it includes most Jews.”

I would tend to subscribe to the opinion that most Jews, particularly the hard core of Jewry, Jews that tend not to intermarry with Gentiles — especially most of them — are Jewish supremacists, that is to say, they take it as axiomatic that they are superior not just to Christians but to everyone else, and are uniquely fitted to rule us all because of that. Now, as for Jews actively pursuing revenge, that may be a small number (but with a large influence); I do not believe it is a small number of Jews who think they are superior. I think that goes for most of them. In fact, that is perhaps the most salient feature of “the Tribe.” And when Jews feel superior — which, in fairness, is not, in and of itself, something unique to them — it tends to become supremacism, that is, a superior attitude which has become coupled with the desire to control not only one’s own destiny, but that of others as well.

I would like take this opportunity to address one other point (and this also has a relationship to the dialogue that developed between Mr. Jaws and the commenter Sheila in the more recent thread Jewish Resentment, cont.). When Mr. Jaws writes in the present thread that, “To what extent intermarriage and time have healed these wounds, I cannot say,” I submit that it has and will change (or “heal”) precisely nothing in regard to this issue (of Jewish hostility toward, and subversive designs on, white Christian European civilization). The reason for this begins with the fact that there will always be a hard core of Jews, the “true Jews,” who do not intermarry. Now, this also means, of course, that this number of true Jews, this hard core of Jewry, will always remain relatively small, though stable, but all the more racially pure for that reason. When these Jews see what Mr. Jaws is pleased to call a “semi-Semite” — the less loyal, less true Jew, as they see it, or product thereof — they simply see another branch of the racial tree that’s about to be pruned, as it should be, from their point of view. Jews have never been interested in a Jewish quantity, anyway; it’s Jewish quality they prize. That’s one reason Jews are not interested in converts like Christians and Muslims are. Quite the opposite. They run a very closed shop and the reason for this is that Judaism is more to them about race (or descent, to use what Sobran aptly calls the more polite term) than it is about a religion or even a culture (although that is not to say those factors are unimportant to Jews).