and, in this, their kikery functioned, Marx, Freud
and the american beaneries
Filth under filth. . .
Ezra Pound, “Canto 91”
The textual bases for what became the major anti-Semitic charges
against the Jews are in the Gospels. Some Jews were money
changers in the temple, tax collectors, liked money; some Jews
plotted to have Christ killed; some Jews asked Christ tricky legalistic questions to try to expose him as a poseur or a heretic (claiming to be God violated Jewish law); it was a crowd of Jew s—but not all
the Jew s—that demanded the crucifixion of Christ. Jews denied
Christ and Jews believed in Christ. Most Jews may have been the
enemy of this new God because they did not recognize him; but it
was Paul who made all Jews into the enemy of all Christians. The
acts against Christ came to represent, as Paul saw it, the Jewish
character; the acts against Christ summed up the Jews. It is Paul
who begins to build institutional Christianity by destroying the
institutions of Judaism; and it is Paul who begins to build a distinctly Christian character by annihilating the character of the Jews. The roots of the continuing association of the Jews as a people with culture, social liberalism (tolerating sin), and intellectual-ism go back to Pauclass="underline" he constructed the modern Jew in history.
Before the coming of Christ, the law was God’s word. The law
signified God’s presence on earth and among his people. The law
had a divine significance. The Jews did not consider the law social;
for them, one obeyed because it was written—obedience was faith.
The coming of Christ meant that God’s will was embodied in a
person: son of man. In Paul’s interpretation, the law became a
body of dogma that interfered with faith. It became cultural, not
sacred. It was the legalism of the Jews, their intellection, their pedantry, that kept them in sin, kept them from recognizing the Christ: in practical terms, the law became the symbol of Jewish
resistance to this personal God, this God whom Paul knew— unlike Abraham, Moses, or David. Paul could speak in behalf of this new God, and any adherence to law that challenged Paul’s authority was wickedness. The law of the Jew s, the intellect of the Jew s, and the culture of the Jew s in fact were the enemies of Paul’s
authority as one, sim ply, who knew Christ.
In undermining the authority of Jew ish law, Paul over and over
linked that law to sin, especially to homosexuality. It was the social
tolerance of the Jew s for homosexuality in private that proved the
corruption of Jew ish law. It was the lack of m asculinity implicit in
this tolerance that lost the Jew s physical circumcision as their mark
of supreme manhood; spiritual circumcision, the kind that would
not tolerate homosexuality, became the proof of manhood.
Paul named the Jew s the enemy of Christ, of Christianity, and
of Paul. He emphasized the Jew ish character, which he invented:
legalistic, intellectual, socially tolerant of sin, intellectually arrogant in putting law over revelation and faith, lost to Christ through intellection and abstraction and legalism and social liberalism, having a false relationship to God (no longer God’s people).
Paul was not talking about some Jews who did this and some Jew s
who did that; Paul was talking about the Jews.
It was especially important for Paul, in getting power, to change
the perception of what Jew ish law was and how it functioned.
Turning something holy, from God, into something cultural, the
work of a group of corrupt men, is to turn the absolute into the
relative. A nything cultural can be changed or abandoned or manipulated. The people whose law begins to represent culture, not divinity, are more imperiled than they were because their status depends on the status of culture in general in any given society: the
infamous “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”
denotes how low the status of culture can be with obvious consequences to those who represent it. Also, unless the law is made concrete because people obey it, it is abstract: and the abstraction
of Jewish law became, in Paul’s rhetoric, a major synonym for sin;
in a sense, concentrating on the abstraction of the law literally
turned intellection (more abstraction) into sin. What was not faith
in Christ was Jewish stuff: abstract laws, tolerance of sin, law and
writing and thinking as cultural diversions from the true faith.
What does it mean that Paul especially concentrates on the sin of
homosexuality in relation to the Jews and their law: the homosexual Greeks were at the pinnacle of culture five centuries before the birth of Christ—reading, writing, and ideas were their domain;
Paul passed the mantle of high culture to the Jews after the demise
of Greek culture—law substituted for both dialogue and tragedy.
Culture, through Paul’s agency, came to mean both homosexuals
(the Greek heritage) and Jews (the law as a basis for culture). For
hundreds of centuries, believing Christians have committed mass
murders, pogroms, vast persecutions, crafted and enforced systems
of civil and religious law so vicious and discriminatory that Jews
have been prohibited from owning land, denied citizenship and all
manner of civil rights, and even been defined as subhuman: sexual
intercourse with them has been regarded as a form of bestiality. In
at least two genocides of indescribable cruelty, both Jews and homosexuals were searched for, found, and killed: the Inquisition and the Holocaust.
The suffering of the Jews, the seemingly endless attempt to
purge the Jew from history and from society by driving him out or
exterminating him, has not made the Jews good. Jews remain human, to the astonishment of everyone, including Jews. But even more shocking to Christians is the undeniable fact that persecution
has not made Jews into Christians. As one liberal Christian leader
said on Sunday-morning television: we thought the Jews would
wither away; we have to face the fact that the Jews are still with us
and that even after the Holocaust there are still Jews who cling to
their identity as Jews; those of us who thought that conversion was
the answer to the Jewish problem have to face the fact that we
were wrong; we are going to have accept the fact that these are
God’s people in a very special sense— they cannot be wiped out, as
recent history has shown, as our attempts to convert them have