Nations have historically looked to usurp Israel’s place in the Divine plan.
By David P. Goldman, AMERICAN MIND 2 May 2024
The Jews formed the first nation-state, that is, the first polity defined by common language and religion. The pagan empires were agglomerations of subject peoples; the only empire of antiquity that survives in recognizable form is China, with its 200 dialects and countless ethnicities. Not until Polybius in the second century BCE did it occur to any Greek thinker of note to unite all the Greeks into a single polity, more than 800 years after David established his kingdom in Jerusalem.
Biblical Israel, the “paragon and exemplar of a nation” in the words of Franz Rosenzweig, was the political model that St. Isidore of Seville taught the Visigoths and St. Gregory of Tours taught the Merovingians in seventh century Spain and France, respectively. By accepting the universality of the Church as a higher authority, the petty barbarian chieftains who had inherited the depopulated, devastated Roman Empire were promised the same divine mandate that was bestowed upon the dynasty of David.
From the Church’s efforts to create Europe out of the ruins of the Roman Empire, there emerged a model of dual citizenship: the Christian was both a citizen of a state defined by ethnicity as well as a member of a universal Church that knew neither Greek nor Jew. Repeatedly, the balance between these two dimensions of European citizenship collapsed as each European country in turn arrogated the concept of divine election to its own ethnicity. That is what makes the national aspirations of the Jewish people a matter of existential importance for Christians. By acknowledging that only one nation, namely Israel, is elected in the flesh, Christians exclude the pretensions of other nations to election in the flesh.
In his 2018 book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony wrote: “The first premise of a conservative political theory is that men are born into families, tribes, and nations to which they are bound by ties of mutual loyalty.” But there is a mortal leap between families and tribes on one hand and nations on the other, the latter of which requires a central government that in some way represents the interests of diverse and sometimes warring families and tribes.
Very few of the world’s tribes have achieved nationhood. Except for the original Israel, the nation enters history as an adoptive child of the Church. There is no natural process of agglomeration of affinities that turns a family into a clan, a clan into a tribe, and a tribe into a nation. If the minimum precondition for a nation is a common language, it is noteworthy that nearly 150,000 languages have been spoken on Earth since the dawn of man. A tiny fraction of these became nations. Eight hundred thirty-nine languages presently are spoken in New Guinea, none of which will give rise to a nation.
Tribes are transient; nations are, or hope to be, enduring. A nation must embody a vision of continuity and establish institutions that support that vision. That is what the Church gave to the barbarian chieftains of the Dark Ages, in the form of language, administration, and a self-conception as a new incarnation of God’s Chosen People. The agency of this vision is the national state.
The Church’s creation of a new European civilization on the ruins of the Roman Empire, along with the nations that flowered there, was one of history’s great triumphs. But it also had a tragic flaw. St. Isidore and St. Geoffrey were the Bialystock and Bloom of the low Middle Ages: they sold 100 percent of the show to every one of their investors. Each of the European nations decided at some point it was a new Chosen People and God’s agency on Earth. The Thirty Years’ War—still the bloodiest conflict in modern history—was less a Protestant-Catholic religious war than a battle to the death between the France of Richelieu and Mazarin, who believed in the divine destiny of the French nation, and the Spain of Philip IV and the Count-Duke Olivares, who believed that Spain was God’s agent on Earth. Hitler’s “Master Race” was a Satanic parody of biblical election.
The original premise of European—that is, Christian—nationalism was that the nations of the world would coexist under a universal Christian empire, the explicit vision of Aquinas and Dante. Instead, they tore each other to pieces.
The Almost-Chosen Peoples
America is exceptional and unique, the only great polity in the world founded without an ethnic identity. But we are not immune to national idolatry.
Woodrow Wilson’s “Social Gospel” Christianity produced a variant of national election in the United States, which supposedly had the obligation to spread its secularized Christianity to the rest of the world. George W. Bush’s Second Inaugural Address reeked of national election. Bush’s mainline Protestant outlook dovetailed with the neoconservative agenda to export America’s political system to tribal societies. The same impulse tempts many evangelicals, for example, Michael Pompeo, to dream of regime change in China along with the conversion of the Chinese.
Lincoln warned us about this with his quip about Americans as an “almost-chosen people,” the equivalent of saying that a woman is almost pregnant.
The Jewish theologian Michael Wyschogrod has observed that, uniquely among the peoples of the world, the Jews are the People of God as a nationality, whereas Christians must be dual citizens of the People of God and their nation of birth. For that reason alone, a Jewish state must have at least some theocratic elements, although in other respects it is subject to the same law that applies to all states. Wyschogrod explains:
As understood by Christianity, a model of dual loyalty develops. The individual belongs both to a nation and to a religion. He is a Frenchman and a Christian or a German and a Christian. As a Frenchman or German, he is a member of a national community with territorial and linguistic boundaries. But he is also a member of the supra-national church which has no national boundaries…. The church is a spiritual fellowship into which men bring their national identities because they possess these identities but not because such identities play a role in the church. The church thus understands itself as having universalized the national election of Israel by opening it to all men who, in entering the church, enter a spiritualized, universalized new Israel….
Israel refuses to invent the idea of a church that forces men to live in two jurisdictions and to assume two identities: a member of a nation and a member of a church. When such a bifurcated existence is decreed for human life, European wars in which Christian fights Christian, not as Christian but as German, Frenchman or Pole, become possible. That such a church-sanctioned conflict was the rule rather than the exception in the history of Europe was not simply the result of a failure of Christianity. Once religion and nationality are separated, the historical order in which national destinies are realized is almost inevitably de-Christianized.
The residual paganism of Christianized nations has invariably expressed itself in the idolatrous desire to be a Chosen People in the flesh. That is the secret of so-called Christian anti-Semitism: it is not Christian at all, but rather expresses pagan resentment against Israel and jealousy of its unique form of election.
From the Gothic invasion of Italy in 401 to the defeat of the Magyars at Lech in 955 and the conversion of St. Vladimir in 987, the barbarians often entered Christian life not as individuals joining the new People of God but as tribes brought into Christendom through conquest or alliance. Christian universalism triumphed over the ethnocentric impulses of the converted tribes through a supranational political model, from Constantine to Charlemagne and finally until the time of Charles V, when the Christian polity broke up in the Reformation and wars of religion.
Because Christians are a new people called out of the nations, Christian theocracy must be supranational in character. The various political states of Europe were fostered by the Church, which furnished them with language and culture; but those states were subordinated, in some sense, to a Latin-speaking supranational Church that was a senior partner to a universal empire.
No Christian thinker from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas doubted this. Never has the Church taught that the destiny of each ethnic group must be realized independently. On the contrary, Christianity can only flourish within a political model that transcends nationality such that the Christian’s citizenship in the People of God takes precedence over citizenship in a Gentile nation. As a citizen of a universal empire, the individual Christian was subject to a supranational political authority that stood above the Gentile nations and suppressed their ethnocentrism.
Apart from this European model of universal empire, only one other political form has appeared that fosters Christian universality—that is, the nonethnic state embodied in the United States of America. Americans, too, belong to no single ethnicity. If a special grace accords to America, then it is by design rather than accident that America is both the most Christian of all industrial countries and home to the largest Jewish population outside the State of Israel.
Nationhood and Idolatry
Despite the 1,000-year reign of the Christian universal empire, the ethnocentric impulses of the converted tribes never disappeared. Indeed, Christianity gave them a new and, in some ways, more pernicious morphology. As Franz Rosenzweig observed, once the Gentile nations embraced Christianity, they abandoned their ancient fatalism regarding the inevitable extinction of their tribe. It is the God of Israel who first offered eternal life to humankind, and Christianity extended Israel’s promise to all. But the nations that adhered to Christendom as tribes rather than as individuals never forswore their love for their own ethnicity. On the contrary, they longed for eternal life in their own Gentile skin rather than in the Kingdom of God promised by Jesus Christ. After Christianity taught them the election of Israel, the Gentiles coveted election for themselves and desired their own people to be the Chosen People.
As Rosenzweig put it,
Precisely through Christianity the idea of Election has gone out amongst the individual nations, and along with it a concomitant claim upon eternity. It is not the case that such a claim upon eternity conditioned the entire life of these peoples; one hardly can speak of this. The idea of Election, upon which such a claim [upon eternity] uniquely can be based, becomes conscious for the peoples only in certain exalted moments, and in any case is more of a festive costume than their workaday dress…. Still, there sleeps upon the foundation of one’s love for one’s own people the presentiment that someday in the distant future it no longer will be, and this gives this love a sweetly painful gravity.
Rosenzweig understated the significance of his insight, for the Gentile nations too often turned what he called the “festive costume” of ethnocentric election into a military uniform. With the hindsight of the twentieth century’s terrible events, we should look less benignly on the Gentile nations’ longing for divine election.
There is a fine but definite line, to be sure, between the Gentiles’ identification with Israel and their idolatrous desire for election in place of Israel. It is one thing for the Puritans to speak metaphorically of a new Chosen People in a new promised land, and quite another for Joseph Smith to rewrite Scripture in order to place Jesus Christ on American soil. African Americans saw themselves as suffering Israel in Egypt, and their emancipation as a new exodus; that is not the same as James Cone’s eccentric claim that Jesus was black and that blacks are the Chosen People.
Most of the great European nations at some time styled themselves the Chosen People. England’s schism from Catholicism under the Tudors portrayed the British as the Chosen People and their monarch as a new King David. Germany was a latecomer to self-election, but in the twentieth century, the Germans embraced ethnic idolatry in its most horrific form.
Theocracy is toxic for Christian nationalism: once the clergy join the state, it is hard to avoid worshipping the state. America’s concept of separating church and state makes possible a nationalism that is also Christian, as opposed to a Christianity subordinate to national idolatry. Theocracy, however, is possible in a Jewish state. The Jewish religion is grounded in nationhood. Jews are not only permitted but divinely commanded to be nationalistic, in a very specific way. The existence of a nation that is uniquely chosen in the flesh helps Christians avoid the trap of national election, with its tragic consequences in modern history.
@stevenl Well, technically, Judaism says the seven Noachide laws are universals.
Universalism!
Aren’t the “Ten commandments” universals?
My official position on religion was succinctly expressed by Jabotinsky:
“I can vouch for there being a type of Zionist who doesn’t care what kind of society our “state” will have; I’m that person. If I were to know that the only way to a state was via socialism, or even that this would hasten it by a generation, I’d welcome it. More than that: give me a religiously Orthodox state in which I would be forced to eat gefilte fish all day long (but only if there were no other way) and I’ll take it.”
😀
quoted publisher’s blurb excerpt about recent book on the Rumanian Orthodox Church,the largest church there, it’s collaboration in the Holocaust and it’s attempt to cover that up disappeared. Michael quoted some complaint about a Rumanian Christian being hindered by the Communist authorities by way of telling me that recalling the Holocaust is being “a crybaby.” I’m more curious about what this guy’s family was doing 80 years ago and what he thinks about that. Anyway, here’s the link.
https://readingreligion.org/9780253029560/the-romanian-orthodox-church-and-the-holocaust/
Now, if you want to talk about the very real genocide going on against Christians in Africa and Pakistan, I’m all ears. As for this? Talk about “crybaby” nonsense. Some guy who got religion and was censored? Whatever. You’re talking to a guy who used to like Enver Hoxha. Conversing like this with religious antisemites kind of makes me nostalgic for the good old days when I used enjoy reading WWII antifascist novels from Albania. 😀
– Excerpt from publisher’s blurb for “The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust
By: Ion Popa
Series: Studies in Antisemitism
256 Pages
HARDCOVER
ISBN: 9780253029560
Published By: Indiana University Press
Published: September 2017
https://readingreligion.org/9780253029560/the-romanian-orthodox-church-and-the-holocaust/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTUyS9WkZXo
Text: https://www.ubm1.org/?page=dumitru_duduman
Sebastien, this happens all the time. Don’t be a crybaby. You have only one person to blame for your bad attitude: you.
Elkins, Michael “Forged in Fury” Judy Piatkus Publishers ltd. London. 1971. pp.79-80. Typed by hand just now by yours truly SZ.
@Michael
Yes, exactly, who are you to say, or even inquire for that matter? Please speak to the topics I raise and leave any assessments of me out of the discussion. I am not a topic to be dissected and discussed, but rather I am just a commentator, so speak to my comments and avoid any analysis of me.
So short you seemed to prefer to ignore that it ever took place, but it did take place and lasted nearly two centuries, which is not that much less than the length of time in which the US has dominated the North American continent. Notably, you seem to find some relevance in the notion that the Soviets ‘created’ the state of Ukraine in 1945 which was not even a century ago. So, while it lasted but two centuries, there is no reason to ignore the fact that it existed at all. Your hyperbole, such as it is, is not blunted by using the facts as we all know them to be, you included it would seem, so why are you debating the issue further?
The irony of this statement is that taken all by itself, you could just as easily be talking about today, but it doesn’t change the fact that our ancient nation fell in the first Century CE and not the 6th Century BCE, so again, why are you debating this issue further?
I just want to stick with the facts as they are, as we all know them to be. There is no need to ignore our history, nor to remake it. It is what it is because it is history, which is how I would and do suggest we define Israel as having a country some 2000 years ago, an no quotations marks are needed to reference this statement.
No, I would suggest that is you who are talking nonsense, first ignoring a vital element of our history, and then trying to validate doing so as if doing so is itself not nonsense.
Look, Peloni. You’re talking nonesense, and you know it. Are you trying to make us believe I was giving a lesson in Jewish history? I was telling Sebastien how to get rid of his “hatred of religion”, which I “hinted” was caused by his own sins (which of course, I could not specify, though Moshe has done so). You too may have a similar problem, but of course, who am I to say?
Yes, the Jews had a short-lived statelet in the 1st-2nd centuries BC. Many in Israel did not consider it to be legitimate, because its ruling house descended from Levi, not from David, so it was disputed. I gave Israel a little grace, including the reign of Zedekiah as “Jewish”, though of course they were tributaries of the Babylonians.
However you want to define Israel as “having a country”, you don’t make your case any better. Sebastien blamed Jesus for causing his father’s misfortune, because his father lived in “Hungary, a Christian country”. Very well, then. By his logic, those thousands of people crucified by the priest-king under the Hasmonians were persecuted by… whom? Moses?
@Sebastien
Thank you for noting this, I was about to raise this point myself.
It is best for all if we stick to the facts, even as it detracts from the preferred hyperbole of some. No doubt Michael did not intend to mislead the timing of our most recent national destruction, but it is still important to keep these things as both honest and accurate.
I found the tilte of the book you cited to be particularly relevant as it is labeled as “The Forgotten History of the Term “Palestine”. You will no doubt find some humor in this bit of situational irony, that is if you had not already taken note of it, which you likely did.
@Michael BCE. And you’ve got your dates wrong. The Bar Kochba revolt was crushed in 135 CE.
“In 135 CE, after stamping out the province of Judea’s second insurrection, the Romans renamed the province Syria Palaestina—that is, “Palestinian Syria.” They did so resentfully, as a punishment, to obliterate the link between the Jews (in Hebrew, Y’hudim and in Latin Judaei) and the province (the Hebrew name of which was Y’hudah). “Palaestina” referred to the Philistines, whose home base had been on the Mediterranean coast….”
“The Forgotten History of the Term “Palestine”
by Douglas J. Feith. Dec 13, 2021
Mosaic Magazine
https://www.hudson.org/node/44363#:~:text=In%20135%20CE%2C%20after%20stamping,the%20Hebrew%20name%20of%20which
But, I have good news for you. If there is such a God as you believe in, he may spare you because you said I was funny. I think that’s what they call “saving grace,” right? I believe the scriptural source is:
George Burns: “Say Goodnight, Gracie.”
Gracie Allen: “Goodnight Gracie.”
– The Burns and Allen Show (1950) 8 seasons.
😀
“LIfe is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” – Forest Gump. (1994)
But, seriously volks, I don’t hate the Christian Churches. How could I? The Church has been providing steady employment for classical musicians and standup comics since at least Bach’s time, as well as mimes during the Holocaust. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. 😀
So, everything that happens in a “Christian” country, is caused by Jesus’ phoney love.
Wow! The Jews are really off the hook! They haven’t had a country since the 6th Century BC! You know you’re talking bullshit. Stop it, and start speaking the truth. If you’re having trouble with God, His word or His Messiah, believe me, it’s not because of whatever country you happen to be in: it’s between you and God. Get that straightened out, and you’ll solve the problem. Beyond that, we don’t have much to talk about, do we?
@Michael My mother was a spiritual person and my father was a rationalist who despised religion as superstition. Funny thing is my father had the same background in that respect. (My paternal grandmother was the observant daughter of a presumably traditional Orthodox rabbi.) My parents weren’t murdered and I wasn’t imprisoned and tortured in the name of “Jesus’s love,” of course (remember Hungary is a Christian country). Though both his and my grandparents were. And my mother was more oriented towards Indian mysticism and Unitarian-Universalism/Theosophy which is to say, wholistic and alternative healing (think the magazine section at the checkout counter at Whole Foods which didn’t exist then 😀 ) rather than worship oriented and eclectic, New Age, think, John Lennon, 1970’s which you said you were in to, briefly. I wasn’t taught nonsense about how God would save us the way he didn’t. We didn’t have a bible in the house, just books by Alan Watts and Madam Blavatsky
I once read a book that cited a poll that indicated that the Holocaust deepened whatever beliefs people already had. People who doubted religion came to despise it, people who were somewhat religious became very religious.
Christians have been telling us we will go to hell if we don’t convert and then singling us out and murdering us anyway for thousands of years, Michael. I’m too polite to tell such people where they are invited to go.
I mentioned previously that I have come to believe that there is a God who intervenes where he cares based on observation of objective facts but the only proof that such a being exists is the constant miracles being exerted for the state of Israel since 1948 and the punishments wreaked on the U.S. for trying to divide Eretz Israel since 1990, too many to dismiss as coincidence.
Other than that, I still believe In karma and reincarnation, the universe, or multi-verse, rather, as a self-governing mechanism with its own laws, with no beginning, no end, and no creator. On the days I believe in anything. 😀
Politics is my form of religion. Solidarity with Israel is my particular form of worship.
Sebastien, I see you lighting up the board with my name. If I understand you correctly, your father was tortured by the New Testament, causing him to attack Judaism???
I don’t think that excuse will wash on Judgment Day. We will all be judged for our own works, not our parents’. The judgment is simple: Your Creator has told you how to live, from every angle: from creation itself, from the Word of God and finally from His chosen one Jesus. For “some reason” (Hint: sin), it seems, you have chosen to reject all three. What do you expect?
This is a common situation. Anyone can do it, if he wants to.
@Michael My father, who was imprisoned and tortured – without breaking – by first the Hungarian Nazis and then the Hungarian Communists – during which year 1945-46 – he said he memorized the New Testament because they gave him nothing else to read and there was nothing else to do – used to sarcastically mutter, “God is Love” randomly for no apparent reason and to no one in particular.
Ah, such fond memories. It’s been nice treading down memory lane mit you.
@Michael My response disappeared as soon as I hit enter.
@Michael My father said he memorized the New Testament during the year he spent in a Hungarian Communist Prison awaiting trial.* I remember every so often, he would randomly mutter, “God is Love,” sarcastically.
Like many Jewish teenagers, he escaped from a forced labor camp and infiltrated the Hungarian Nazis working with the Zionist Youth Movement, getting good fake ID’s to Jews in hiding, getting them food, medicine and doctors, making sure inspections never
Turned up any Jews. moving them around so the real Nazis couldn’t find them. He was eventually caught. He escaped again only later to be arrested by the Hungarian Communists until some of the Jewish families he had saved banded together, came from all over Hungary to testify for him. He was unanimously acquitted after spending 1945-46 in prison and being tortured. First the Nazis (Arrow Cross) tried to torture him into confessing he was a Jew pising as a Nazi, then the Communists tried to torture him into confessing he was a Nazi posing as a Jew. He never broke.
My father hated religion. He used to say, “I only attack Judaism because it’s the one I know best.”
Hi, Sebastien
The Bible has not been a depressing read to me, though I didn’t read it through until I was 25.
The first Bible I ever saw, my parents bought from a door-to-door peddler, when I was about 13. It sat on the coffee table, and my mother dusted it off every week. One day, when my parents were gone, my sister and I read well into the book of Exodus, until our parents came home.
When I went into the Army, I somethow acquired a pocket edition, containing the New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs. I never read it, but used to carry it around in my pocket.
Shortly after getting discharged, I was hitch-hiking, and got picked up by someone in a pickup truck, After a few miles, we pulled over to pick up another hitchiker, whom the locals knew by the name “Pleasure”. He handed me an old Bible through the car window, and asked me to drop it off at the library when I was in town. The library was never open when I was in town, so I was stuck with the thing. I lived alone in the forest at the time, so I decided to start reading it. I got well into Numbers.
A few months later, my car broke down while I was living on the beach below a Christian commune. The folks there let me work on my car there, so while I was waiting for parts for the car, I read the pocket Bible I had gotten in the Army. After three days, I had gotten through most of the New Testament.
About seven months later, I got lost in the forest, and cried out to God. He answered me, and I gave my life to His service. Within a year, I had read the New Testament six times through, and gone through the Old Testament once. After a couple of years, I had read the NT through many times, and the OT about three times. Then I bought my first comprehensive world history book, and read it through. I think it was, “The Columbia History of the World”.
Over the years, I’ve ventured into the apocryphal and pseudepigraph, studied Hebrew, etc., and taken college classes in history and archaeology. In recent years, my wife and I have spent much time together, doing all the above, as well as learning and singing dozens of psalms and songs, which we know by heart. It’s never been dull.
I have never jumped off a bridge, nor have been tempted to. If I fall out of a window, or my airplane falls out of the sky, or I seem to hang myself in the jail cell when the cameras are mysteriously turned off, I didn’t do it. I love life.
@Michael
“Why do parents say if your friend jumped off a bridge would you?
When you were a kid and wanted to do something your parents or teachers didn’t like, you may have heard the question, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” The idea is that it’s not good to do something stupid, even if everyone else does it. The logic is think for yourself instead of following the crowd.”
“People also ask
What is the fallacy of your friends jump off a bridge?
bandwagon fallacy
The question is asked because we have in fact already “jumped off of a bridge” with everyone else. It’s what is known as the “bandwagon fallacy.” It describes our tendency as humans to accept something as true or acceptable because it is widely accepted or popular.”
“Jumping off bridges: A lesson on peer pressure – Seymour Tribune” (that one’s from a Baptist minister who also quotes Corinthians
https://tribtown.com/2021/01/21/jumping-off-bridges-a-lesson-on-peer-pressure/#:~:text=It's%20what%20is%20known%20as,is%20widely%20accepted%20or%20popular.
Though, of course, I am more familiar with the original “oral” text:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxGczs1rIUE
– from googling various sites.
@Michael And that’s why modern Israel was born a democracy. Practically the whole bible is just one illustration after another of the adage, “Power corrrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (And why it’s such a depressing read to slog through.)
1Sam.8
[1] And it came to pass, when Samuel was old, that he made his sons judges over Israel.
[2] Now the name of his firstborn was Joel; and the name of his second, Abiah: they were judges in Beer-sheba.
[3] And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment.
[4] Then all the elders of Israel gathered themselves together, and came to Samuel unto Ramah,
[5] And said unto him, Behold, thou art old, and thy sons walk not in thy ways: now make us a king to judge us like all the nations.
[6] But the thing displeased Samuel, when they said, Give us a king to judge us. And Samuel prayed unto the LORD.
“…like all the goyim…”
Hmm…