The Controversy of Zion

A PREFACE

By Ivor Benson

The Author: In Europe during the years immediately before and after World War II the name of Douglas Reed was on everyone's lips; his books were being sold by scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world by a vast army of readers and admirers. Former London Times correspondent in Central Europe, he had won great fame with books like Insanity Fair, Disgrace Abounding, Lest We Regret, Somewhere South of Suez, Far and Wide and several others, each amplifying a hundredfold the scope available to him as one of the world's leading foreign correspondents.

The disappearance into almost total oblivion of Douglas Reed and all his works was a change that could not have been wrought by time alone; indeed, the correctness of his interpretation of the unfolding history of the times found some confirmation in what happened to him when at the height of his powers.

After 1951, with the publication of Far and Wide, in which he set the history of the United States of America into the context of all he had learned in Europe of the politics of the world, Reed found himself banished from the bookstands, all publishers' doors closed to him, and those books already published liable to be withdrawn from library shelves and "lost", never to be replaced.

His public career as a writer now apparently at an end, Reed was at last free to undertake a great task for which all that had gone before was but a kind of preparation and education that no university could provide and which only the fortunate and gifted few could fully use - his years as a foreign correspondent, his travels in Europe and America, his conversations and contacts with the great political leaders of his day, plus his eager absorption through reading and observation of all that was best in European culture.

Experiences which other men might have accepted as defeat, served only to focus Douglas Reed's powers on what was to be his most important undertaking - that of researching and retelling the story of the last 2000 years and more in such a way as to render intelligible much of modern history which for the masses remains in our time steeped in darkness and closely guarded by the terrors of an invisible system of censorship.

The Book: Commencing in 1951, Douglas Reed spent more than three years - much of this time separated from his wife and young family - working in the New York Central Library, or tapping away at his typewriter in Spartan lodgings in New York or Montreal. With workmanlike zeal, the book was rewritten, all 300,000 words of it, and the Epilogue only added in 1956.

The story of the book itself - the unusual circumstances in which it was written, and how the manuscript, after having remained hidden for more than 20 years, came to light and was at last made available for publication - is part of the history of our century, throwing some light on a struggle of which the multitudes know nothing: that conducted relentlessly and unceasingly on the battleground of the human mind.

It needed some unusual source of spiritual power and motivation to bring to completion so big a book involving so much laborious research and cross-checking, a book, moreover, which seemed to have little or no chance of being published in the author's lifetime.

Although there is correspondence to show that the title was briefly discussed with one publisher, the manuscript was never submitted but remained for 22 years stowed away in three zippered files on top of a wardrobe in Reed's home in Durban, South Africa.

Relaxed and at peace with himself in the knowledge that he had carried his great enterprise as far as was possible in the circumstances of the times, Douglas Reed patiently accepted his forced retirement as journalist and writer, put behind him all that belonged to the past and adjusted himself cheerfully to a different mode of existence, in which most of his new-found friends and acquaintances, charmed by his lively mind and rich sense of humour, remained for years wholly unaware that this was indeed the Douglas Reed of literary fame.

Of this he was sure, whether or not it would happen in his lifetime, there would come a time when circumstances would permit, and the means be found, to communicate to the world his message of history rewritten, and the central message of Christianity restated. Interpretation: For the rest, The Controversy of Zion, can be left to speak for itself; indeed, it is a work of revisionist history and religious exposition the central message of which is revealed in almost every page, understanding and compassionate of people but severely critical of the inordinate and dangerous ambitions of their leaders.

In the final chapter, under the heading the Climacteric, Douglas Reed remarks that if he could have planned it all when he began writing his book in 1949, he could not have chosen a better moment than the last months of 1956 to review the long history of Talmudic Zionism and re-examine it against the background of what was still happening on the stage of world politics.

For 1956 was the year of another American presidential election in which, once again, the Zionists demonstrated their decisive power to influence Western politics; it was the year in which the nations of the West stood by as helpless spectators as Soviet forces were used to crush a spontaneous revolt and re-install a Jewish-Communist regime in Hungary; and it was the year in which Britain and France, under Zionist pressure, were drawn into the disastrous fiasco of an attempt to capture the Suez Canal, an adventure from which, once again, Israel alone gained any advantage.

Everything that has happened since Reed wrote those last sentences in 1956 has continued to endorse the correctness of his interpretation of more than 2000 years of troubled history.

The Middle East has remained an area of intense political activity and of the maximum falsification of news and suppression of genuine debate, and it was only the few with some knowledge of the role of Talmudic Zionism and Communism who could have had any chance of solving the problem of successive events of major importance, like the so-called Six Day War in 1967 and the massive Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

Those who have read The Controversy of Zion will not be surprised to learn that there were clear signs of collusion between the Soviet Union and Israel in precipitating the Israeli attack on Egypt, for it was only because Colonel Nasser had been warned by the Kremlin bosses that Israel was about to attack Egypt's ally Syria that he moved nearly all his armed forces to his country' s northern border, where they fell an easy prey to Israel's vastly superior army.

It seemed as if nothing had changed when in 1982 Israel launched a massive and most ruthless attack on Southern Lebanon, ostensibly for the purpose of rooting out the Palestine Liberation Organisation, but actually in furtherance of an expansionist policy about which Jewish leaders have always been remarkably frank.

By this time, however, the pro-Zionist mythology generated by Western politicians and media in which Israel was always represented as a tiny and virtuous nation in constant need of help and protection, was obviously beginning to lose much of its plausibility, so that few were surprised when the British Institute of Strategic Studies announced that Israel could now be regarded as fourth in the world as a military power, after the USA, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China - well ahead of nations like Britain and France.

More deeply significant was the reaction of the Jewish people, both in Israel and abroad, to an apparent triumph of Zionist arms in Lebanon. While Western politicians and media remained timorously restrained in their comment, even after news of the massacre of an estimated 1500 men, women and children in two Beirut refugee camps, 350,000 of the residents of Tel Aviv staged a public demonstration against their government and there were reports in the Jewish press that controversy over the Lebanese war had rocked the Israel army and affected all ranks.

Of this, too, Douglas Reed seems to have had some presentiment, for among the last words in his book are these: "I believe the Jews of the world are equally beginning to see the error of revolutionary Zionism, the twin of the other destructive movement, and, as this century ends, will at last decide to seek involvement in common mankind" .

IVOR BENSON.

Page 1

Chapter 1

THE START OF THE AFFAIR

The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as "the Law".

At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian king, and what today is known as "the West" could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and "Western civilization", which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.

The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author's opinion, has chiefly brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable history.

The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive achievement. Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea of an exclusive, vengeful deity.

Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first universal religion, so that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist "Law" was completed) contains the passage: "Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make man". Conversely, the Scripture produced in Judah of the Levites asked, "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the Gods?" (Exodus).

The sect which attached itself to and mastered the tribe of Judah took this rising concept of one-God of all-peoples and embodied it in its Scripture only to destroy it, and to set up the creed based on its denial. It is denied subtly, but with scorn, and as the creed is based on the theory of the master-race this denial is necessary and inevitable. A master-race, if there be one, must itself be God.

The creed which was given force of daily law in Judah in 458 BC was then and still is unique in the world. It rested on the assertion, attributed to the tribal deity (Jehovah), that "the Israelites" (in fact, the Judahites) were his "chosen people" who, if they did all his "statutes and judgments", would be set over all other peoples and be established in a "promised land". Out of this theory, whether by forethought or unforeseen necessity, grew the pendent theories of "captivity" and "destruction". If Jehovah were to be worshipped, as he demanded, at a certain place in a specified land, all his worshippers had to live there.

Obviously all of them could not live there, but if they lived elsewhere, whether by constraint or their own choice, they automatically became "captives" of "the stranger", whom they had to "root out", "pull down" and "destroy". Given this basic tenet of the creed, it made no difference whether the "captors" were conquerors or friendly hosts; their ordained lot was to be destruction or enslavement.

Before they were destroyed or enslaved, they were, for a time, to be "captors" of the Judahites, not in their own right, but because the Judahites, having failed in "observance", deserved punishment. In this way, Jehovah revealed himself as the one-God of all-peoples: though he "knew" only the "chosen people", he would employ the heathen to punish them for their "transgressions", before meting out the foreordained destruction to these heathen.

The Judahites had this inheritance thrust on them. It was not even theirs, for the "covenant", according to these Scriptures, had been made between Jehovah and "the children of Israel", and by 458 BC the Israelites, spurning the non-Israelitish Judahites, had long since been absorbed by other mankind, taking with them the vision of a universal, loving God of all men. The Israelites, from all the evidence, never knew this racial creed which was to come down through the centuries as the Jewish religion, or Judaism. It stands, for all time, as the product of Judah of the Levites.

What happened before 458 BC is largely lore, legend and mythology, as distinct from the period following, the main events of which are known. Before 458 BC, for instance, there were in the main only "oral traditions"; the documentary period begins in the two centuries leading up to 458 BC, when Judah had been disavowed by the Israelites. At this stage, when the word-of-mouth tradition became written Scripture, the perversion occurred. The surviving words of the earlier Israelites show that their tradition was a widening one of neighbourliness under a universal God. This was changed into its opposite by the itinerant priests who segregated the Judahites and established the worship of Jehovah as the god of racialism, hatred and revenge.

In the earlier tradition Moses was a great tribal leader who heard the voice of one-God speak from a burning bush and came down from a mountain bearing this one-God's moral commandments to the people. The time when this tradition took shape was one when the idea of religion was first moving in the minds of men and when all the peoples were borrowing from each other's traditions and thought.

Whence the idea of one-God may have come has already been shown, although the earlier Egyptians themselves may have received it from others. The figure of Moses himself, and his Law, both were taken from material already existing. The story of Moses's discovery in the bulrushes was plainly borrowed from the much earlier legend (with which it is identical) of a king of Babylonia, Sargon the Elder, who lived between one and two thousand years before him; the Commandments much resemble earlier law codes of the Egyptians, Babylonians and Assyrians. The ancient Israelites built on current ideas, and by this means apparently were well on the way to a universal religion when they were swallowed up by mankind.

Then Judah put the process into reverse, so that the effect is that of a film run backward. The masters of Judah, the Levites, as they drew up their Law also took what they could use from the inheritance of other peoples and worked it into the stuff they were moulding. They began with the one just God of all men, whose voice had been briefly heard from the burning bush (in the oral tradition) and in the course of five books of their written Law turned him into the racial, bargaining Jehovah who promised territory, treasure, blood and power over others in return for a ritual of sacrifice, to be performed at a precise place in a specified land.

Thus they founded the permanent counter-movement to all universal religions and identified the name Judah with the doctrine of self-segregation from mankind, racial hatred, murder in the name of religion, and revenge.

The perversion thus accomplished may be traced in the Old Testament, where Moses first appears as the bearer of the moral commandments and good neighbour, and ends as a racial mass-murderer, the moral commandments having been converted into their opposites between Exodus and Numbers. In the course of this same transmutation the God who begins by commanding the people not to kill or to covet their neighbours' goods or wives, finishes by ordering a tribal massacre of a neighbouring people, only the virgins to be saved alive!

Thus the achievement of the itinerant priests who mastered the tribe of Judah, so long ago, was to turn one small, captive people away from the rising idea of a God of all men, to reinstate a bloodthirsty tribal deity and racial law, and to send the followers of this creed on their way through the centuries with a destructive mission.

The creed, or revelation of God as thus presented, was based on a version of history, every event of which had to conform with, and to confirm the teaching.

This version of history went back to the Creation, the exact moment of which was known; as the priests also claimed to possess the future, this was a complete story and theory of the universe from start to finish. The end was to be the triumphant consummation in Jerusalem, when world dominion was to be established on the ruins of the heathen and their kingdoms.

The theme of mass-captivity, ending in a Jehovan vengeance ("all the firstborn of Egypt"), appears when this version of history reaches the Egyptian phase, leading up to the mass-exodus and mass-conquest of the promised land. This episode was necessary if the Judahites were to be organized as a permanent disruptive force among nations and for that reason, evidently, was invented; the Judaist scholars agree that nothing resembling the narrative in Exodus actually occurred.

Whether Moses even lived is in dispute. "They tell you", said the late Rabbi Emil Hirsch, "that Moses never lived. I acquiesce. If they tell me that the story that came from Egypt is mythology, I shall not protest; it is mythology. They tell me that the book of Isaiah, as we have it today, is composed of writings of at least three and perhaps four different periods; I knew it before they ever told me; before they knew it, it was my conviction".

Whether Moses lived or not, he cannot have led any mass-exodus from Egypt into Canaan (Palestine). No sharply-defined Israelitish tribes existed (says Rabbi Elmer Berger) at any time when anyone called Moses may have led some small groups out of Egyptian slavery. The Habiru (Hebrews) then were already established in Canaan, having reached it long before from Babylonia on the far side: Their name, Habiru, denoted no racial or tribal identity; it meant "nomads". Long before any small band led by Moses can have arrived they had overrun large Canaanite areas, and the governor of Jerusalem reported to Pharaoh in Egypt, "The King no longer has any territory, the Habiru have devastated all the King's territory".

A most zealous Zionist historian, Dr. Josef Kastein, is equally specific about this. He will often be quoted during this narrative because his book, like this one, covers the entire span of the controversy of Zion (save for the last twenty-two years; it was published in 1933). He says, "Countless other Semitic and Hebrew tribes were already settled in the promised land which, Moses told his followers, was theirs by ancient right of inheritance; what matter that actual conditions in Canaan had long since effaced this right and rendered it illusory".

Dr. Kastein, a fervent Zionist, holds that the Law laid down in the Old Testament must be fulfilled to the letter, but does not pretend to take the version of history seriously, on which this Law is based. In this he differs from Christian polemicists of the "every word is true" school. He holds that the Old Testament was in fact a political programme, drafted to meet the conditions of a time, and frequently revised to meet changing conditions. Historically, therefore, the Egyptian captivity, the slaying of "all the firstborn of Egypt", the exodus toward and conquest of the promised land are myths. The story was invented, but the lesson, of vengeance on the heathen, was implanted in men's minds and the deep effect continues into our time.

It was evidently invented to turn the Judahites away from the earlier tradition of the God who, from the burning bush, laid down a simple law of moral behaviour and neighbourliness; by the insertion of imaginary, allegorical incident, presented as historical truth, this tradition was converted into its opposite and the "Law" of exclusion, hatred and vengeance established. With this as their religion and inheritance, attested by the historical narrative appended to it, a little band of human beings were sent on their way into the future.

By the time of that achievement of 458 BC, many centuries after any possible period when Moses may have lived, much had happened in Canaan. The nomadic Habiru, supplanting the native Canaanites by penetration, intermarriage, settlement or conquest, had thrown off a tribe called the Ben Yisrael, or Children of Israel, which had split into a number of tribes, very loosely confederated and often at war with each other. The main body of these tribes, the Israelites, held the north of Canaan. In the south, isolated and surrounded by native Canaanitish peoples, a tribe called Judah took shape. This was the tribe from which the racial creed and such words as "Judaism", "Jewish" and "Jew" in the course of centuries emerged.

From the moment when it first appears as an entity this tribe of Judah has a strange look. It was always cut off, and never got on well with its neighbours. Its origins are mysterious. It seems from the beginning, with its ominous name, somehow to have been set apart, rather than to have been "chosen". The Levitical Scriptures include it among the tribes of Israel, and as the others mingled themselves with mankind this would leave it the last claimant to the rewards promised by Jehovah to "the chosen people". However, even this claim seems to be false, for the Jewish Encyclopaedia impartially says that Judah was "in all likelihood a non-Israelitish tribe".

This tribe with the curious air was the one which set out into the future saddled with the doctrine drawn up by the Levites, namely, that it was Jehovah's "chosen people" and, when it had done "all my statutes and judgments", would inherit a promised land and dominion over all peoples.

Among these "statutes and judgments" as the Levites finally edited them appeared, repeatedly, the commands, "utterly destroy", "pull down", "root out". Judah was destined to produce a nation dedicated to destruction.

Page 6

Chapter 2

THE END OF ISRAEL

About five hundred years before the event of 458 BC, or nearly three thousand years ago today, the brief and troubled association between Judah and the Israelites ("the children of Israel") came to an end. Israel rejected the chosen people creed which was beginning to take shape in Judah and went its own way. (The adoption of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was set up in Palestine in 1948 was transparent false pretence).

The events which led to the short-lived, unhappy union covered earlier centuries. The mythological or legendary period of Moses was followed by one in Canaan during which "Israel" was the strong, cohesive and recognizable entity, the northern confederation of the ten tribes. Judah (to which the very small tribe of Benjamin attached itself) was a petty chiefdom in the south.

Judah, from which today's Zionism comes down, was a tribe of ill repute. Judah sold his brother Joseph, the most beloved son of Jacob-called-Israel, to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver (as Judas, the only Judean among the disciples, much later betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver), and then founded the tribe in incest, (Genesis 37-38). The priestly scribes who wrote this Scriptural account centuries afterwards had made themselves the masters of Judah and as they altered the oral tradition, whenever it suited them, the question prompts itself: why were they at pains to preserve, or possibly even to insert, this attribution of incestuous beginnings and a treacherous nature to the very people who, they said, were the chosen of God? The thing is mysterious, like much else in the Levitical Scriptures, and only the inner sect could supply an answer.

Anyway, those Scriptures and today's authorities agree about the separateness of "Israel" and "Judah". In the Old Testament Israel is often called "the house of Joseph", in pointed distinction from "the house of Judah". The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, ''Joseph and Judah typify two distinct lines of descent" and adds (as already cited) that Judah was "in all likelihood a non-Israelitish tribe". The Encyclopaedia Britannica says that Judaism developed long after the Israelites had merged themselves with mankind, and that the true relationship of the two peoples is best expressed in the phrase, "The Israelites were not Jews". Historically, Judah was to survive for a little while and to bring forth Judaism, which begat Zionism. Israel was to disappear as an entity, and it all came about in this way:

The little tribe in the south, Judah, became identified with the landless tribe, that of the Levites. These hereditary priests, who claimed that their office had been bestowed on them by Jehovah on Mount Sinai, were the true fathers of Judaism. They wandered among the tribes, preaching that the war of one was the war of all, and Jehovah's war. Their aim was power and they strove for a theocracy, a state in which God is the sovereign and religion the law. During the period of the Judges they achieved their aim to some extent, for they naturally were the Judges. What they, and isolated Judah, most needed was union with Israel. Israel, which distrusted this lawgiving priesthood, would not hear of unification unless it were under a king; all the surrounding peoples had kings.

The Levites grasped this opportunity. They saw that if a king were appointed the ruling class would supply the nominee, and they were the ruling class. Samuel, at their head, set up a puppet monarchy, behind which the priesthood wielded true power; this was achieved through the stipulation that the king should reign only for life, which meant that he would not be able to found a dynasty. Samuel chose a young Benjaminite peasant, Saul, who had made some name in tribal warfare and, presumably, was thought likely to be tractable (the choice of a Benjaminite suggests that Israel would not consider any man of Judah for the kingship). The unified kingdom of Israel then began; in truth it survived but this one reign, Saul's.

In Saul's fate (or in the account given of it in the later Scriptures) the ominous nature of Judaism, as it was to be given shape, may be discerned. He was commanded to begin the holy war by attacking the Amalekites "and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass". He destroyed "man and woman, infant and suckling", but spared King-Agag and the best of the sheep, oxen, yearlings and lambs. For this he was excommunicated by Samuel, who secretly chose one David, of Judah, to be Saul's successor. Thereafter Saul vainly strove by zeal in "utter destruction" to appease the Levites, and then by attempting David's life to save his throne. At last he killed himself.

Possibly none of this happened; it is the account given in the Book of Samuel, which the Levites produced centuries later. Whether it is true or allegorical, the importance lies in the plain implication: Jehovah demanded literal obedience when he commanded "utter destruction", and mercy or pity were capital offences. This lesson is driven home in many other depictments of events which were possibly historical and possibly imaginary.

This was really the end, three thousand years ago, of the united kingdom, for Israel would not accept the man of Judah, David, as king. Dr. Kastein says that "the rest of Israel ignored him" and proclaimed Saul's son, Ishbosheth, king, whereon the re-division into Israel and Judah "really took place". According to Samuel, Ishbosheth was killed and his head was sent to David, who thereon restored a nominal union and made Jerusalem his capital. He never again truly united the kingdom or the tribes; he founded a dynasty which survived one more reign.

Formal Judaism holds to this day that the Messianic consummation will come about under a worldly king of "the house of David"; and racial exclusion is the first tenet of formal Judaism (and the law of the land in the Zionist state). The origins of the dynasty founded by David are thus of direct relevance to this narrative. Racial discrimination and segregation were clearly unknown to the tribes-people in those days of the association between Israel and Judah, for the Old Testament says that David, the Judahite, from his roof, saw "a very beautiful woman" bathing, commanded her to him and made her with child, and then had her husband, a Hittite, sent into the front battle-line with orders that he be killed. When he was dead David added the woman, Bathsheba, to his wives, and her second son by him became the next king, Solomon (this story of David and Bathsheba, as related in the Old Testament, was bowdlerized in a Hollywood-made moving picture of our day).

Such was the racial descent of Solomon, the last king of the riven confederacy, according to the Levitical scribes. He began his reign with three murders, including that of his brother, and vainly sought to save his dynasty by the Habsburg method, marriage, though on grander scale. He married princesses from Egypt and many neighbouring tribes and had hundreds of lesser wives, so that in his day, too, racial segregation must have been unknown. He built the temple and established a hereditary high priesthood.

That was the story, concluded in 937 BC, of the short association between Israel and Judah. When Solomon died the incompatible associates finally split, and in the north Israel resumed its independent life. Dr Kastein says:

"The two states had no more in common, for good or evil, than any other two countries with a common frontier. From time to time they waged war against each other or made treaties, but they were entirely separate. The Israelites ceased to believe that they had a destiny apart from their neighbours and King Jeroboam made separation from Judah as complete in the religious as in the political sense". Then, of the Judahites, Dr. Kastein adds, "they decided that they were destined to develop as a race apart. . . they demanded an order of existence fundamentally different from that of the people about them. These were differences which allowed of no process of assimilation to others. They demanded separation, absolute differentiation. "

Thus the cause of the breach and separation is made c1ear. Israel believed that its destiny lay with involvement in mankind, and rejected Judah on the very grounds which recurrently, in the ensuing three thousand years, caused other peoples to turn in alarm, resentment and repudiation from Judaism. Judah "demanded separation, absolute differentiation". (However, Dr. Kastein, though he says "Judah", means "the Levites". How could even the tribes-people of Judah, at that stage, have demanded "separation, absolute differentiation", when Solomon had had a thousand wives?)

It was the Levites, with their racial creed, that Israel rejected. The next two hundred years, during which Israel and Judah existed separately, and often in enmity, but side by side, are filled with the voices of the Hebrew "prophets", arraigning the Levites and the creed which they were constructing. These voices still call to mankind out of the tribal darkness which bec1ouds much of the Old Testament, for they scarified the creed which was in the making just as Jesus scarified it seven or eight hundred years later, when it was long established, at the Temple in Jerusalem.

These men were nearly all Israelites; most of them were Josephites. They were on the road to the one-God of all-peoples and to participation in mankind. They were not unique among men in this: soon the Buddha, in India, was to oppose his Sermon at Benares and his Five Commands of Uprightness to the creed of Brahma, the creator of caste-segregation, and to the worship of idols. They were in truth Israelite remonstrants against the Levitical teaching which was to become identified with the name of Judah. The name "Hebrew prophets" is inapt because they made no pretence to power of divination and were angered by the description ("I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's son", Amos). They were protestants in their time and gave simple warning of the calculable consequences of the racial creed; their warning remains valid today.

The claims of the Levite priesthood moved them to these protests, particularly the priestly c1aim to the firstborn ("That which openeth the womb is mine," Exodus), and the priestly insistence on sacrificial rites. The Israelite expostulants (to whom this "so-called law of Moses" was unknown, according to Mr. Montefiore) saw no virtue in the bloodying of priests, the endless sacrifice of animals and the "burnt offerings", the "sweet savour" of which was supposed to please Jehovah. They rebuked the priestly doctrine of slaying and enslaving "the heathen". God, they cried, desired moral behaviour, neighbourly conduct and justice towards the poor, the fatherless, the widow and the oppressed, not blood sacrifices and hatred of the heathen.

These protests provide the first forelight of the dawn which came some eight hundred years later. They find themse1ves in strange company among the injunctions to massacre in which the Old Testament abounds. The strange thing is that these remonstrances survived the compilation, when Israel was gone and the Levites, supreme in Judah, wrote down the Scriptures.

Today's student cannot explain, for instance, why King David suffers Nathan publicly to rebuke him for taking Uriah's wife and having Uriah murdered. Possibly among the later scribes who compiled the historical narrative, long after Israel and the Israelite expostulants were gone, were some of their mind, who contrived in this way to continue their protest.

Conversely, these benevolent and enlightened passages are often followed by fanatical ones, attributed to the same man, which cancel them, or put the opposite in their place. The only reasonable explanation is that these are interpolations later made, to bring the heretics into line with Levitical dogma.

Whatever the explanation, these Israelite protests against the heresy of Judah have an ageless appeal and form the monument to vanished Israel. They force their way, like little blades of truth, between the dark stones of tribal saga. They pointed the way to the rising and widening road of common involvement in mankind and away from the tribal abyss.

Elijah and Elisha both worked in Israel, and Amos spoke solely to the Josephites. He in particular attacked the blood sacrifices and priestly rites: "I hate, I despise your feasts and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Yea, though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meal offerings, I will not accept them. Neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs" (the Levites' chanted liturgies) "and let me not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run as water and righteousness as a mighty stream". And then the immortal rebuke to the "peculiar people" doctrine: "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel, saith the Lord".

Hosea, another Israelite, says, "I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings". Hosea exhorts to the practice of "justice and righteousness", "loving kindness and compassion and faithfulness", not discrimination and contempt.

In Micah's time the Levites apparently still demanded the sacrifice of all the firstborn to Jehovah:

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil. Shall I give my firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? It hath been told to thee, O man, what is good and what the Lord doth require of thee: only to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God" .

These men contended for the soul of the tribes-people during the two centuries when Israel and Judah existed side by side, and sometimes at daggers drawn. During this period the Levites, earlier distributed among the twelve tribes, were driven more and more to congregate in tiny Judah and in Jerusalem, and to concentrate their energies on the Judahites.

Then, in 721 BC, Israel was attacked and conquered by Assyria and the Israelites were carried into captivity. Judah was spared for that moment and for another century remained an insignificant vassal, first of Assyria and then of Egypt, and the stronghold of the Levitical sect.

At that point "the children of Israel" disappear from history and if promises made to them are to be redeemed, this redemption must evidently be from among the ranks of mankind, in which they became involved and merged. Given the prevalent westward trend among the movements of peoples during the last twenty-seven hundred years, it is probable that much of their blood has gone into the European and American peoples.

The Judaist claim, on the other hand, is that Israel was totally and deservedly "lost", because it rejected the Levitical creed and chose "rapprochement with neighbouring peoples". Dr. Kastein, whose words these are, nearly twenty-seven centuries later ardently rejoiced, on that very account, in their downfall: "The ten northern tribes, with their separate development, had drifted so far from their kindred in the south that the chronicle of their fall takes the form of a brief bald statement of fact unrelieved by any expression of grief. No epic poem, no dirge, no sympathy marked the hour of their downfall".

The student of the controversy of Zion has to plod far before he begins to unveil its mysteries, but very soon discovers that in all things it speaks with two tongues, one for "the heathen" and one for the initiates.

The Levites of that ancient time did not, and today's Zionists do not believe that the Israelites "vanished without leaving a trace" (as Dr. Kastein says). They were pronounced "dead", in the way that a Jew marrying out of the fold today is pronounced dead (for instance, Dr. John Goldstein); they were excommunicated and only in that sense "vanished".

Peoples do not become extinct; the North American Indians, the Australian Blackfellows, the New Zealand Maoris, the South African Bantu and others are the proofs of that. For that matter, the Israelites could not have been "taken away captive", had they been physically exterminated. Their blood and thought survive in mankind, somewhere, today.

Israel remained separate from Judah of its own will, and for the very reasons which ever since have aroused the mistrust and misgiving of other peoples. The Israelites "were not Jews"; the Judahites were "in all likelihood non-Israelitish".

The true meaning of the assertion that Israel "disappeared" is to be found in the later Talmud, which says: "The ten tribes have no share in the world to come". Thus, "the children of Israel" are banned from heaven by the ruling sect of Judah because they refused to exclude themselves from mankind on earth.

The Chief Rabbi of the British Empire in 1918, the Very Rev. J.H. Hertz, in answer to an enquiry on this point said explicitly, "The people known at present as Jews are descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin with a certain number of descendants of the tribe of Levi". This statement makes perfectly clear that "Israel" had no part in what has become Judaism (no authority, Judaist or other, would support the claim made to blood-descent from Judah, for the Jews of today, but this is of little account).

Therefore the use of the name "Israel" by the Zionist state which was created in Palestine in this century is in the nature of a forgery. Some strong reason must have dictated the use of the name of a people who were not Jews and would have none of the creed which has become Judaism. One tenable theory suggests itself. The Zionist state was set up with the connivance of the great nations of the West, which is also the area of Christendom. The calculation may have been that these peoples would be comforted in their consciences if they could be led to believe that they were fulfilling Biblical prophecy and God's promise to "Israel", at whatever cost in the "destruction" of innocent peoples.

If that was the motive for the misuse of the name "Israel", the expedient may for the time being have been successful; the multitude was ever easily "persuaded". However, truth will out in the long run, as the surviving remonstrances of the Israelite prophets show.

If the Zionist state of 1948 could 1ay claim to any name whatever taken from far antiquity, this could only be "Judah", as this chapter has shown.

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Chapter 3

THE LEVITES AND THE LAW

During the hundred years that followed the Assyrian conquest of Israel, the Levites in Judah began to compile the written Law. In 621 BC they produced Deuteronomy and read it to the people in the temple at Jerusalem.

This was the birth of "the Mosaic law", which Moses, if he ever lived, never knew. It is called the Mosaic law because it is attributed to him, but the authorities agree that it was the product of the Levites, who then and later repeatedly made Moses (and for that matter, Jehovah) say what suited them. Its correct description would be "the Levitical law" or "the Judaic law".

Deuteronomy is to formal Judaism and Zionism what the Communist Manifesto was to the destructive revolution of our century. It is the basis of the Torah ("the Law") contained in the Pentateuch, which itself forms the raw material of the Talmud, which again gave birth to those "commentaries" and commentaries-on-commentaries which together constitute the Judaic "law".

Therefore Deuteronomy is also the basis of the political programme, of worldly dominion over nations despoiled and enslaved, which has been largely realized in the West during this Twentieth Century. Deuteronomy is of direct relevancy to the events of our day, and much of the confusion surrounding them disperses if they are studied in its light.

It was read, in 621 BC, to so small an audience in so small a place that its great effects for the whole world, through the following centuries into our time, are by contrast the more striking.

Before Deuteronomy was compiled only the "oral tradition" of what God said to Moses existed. The Levites claimed to be the consecrated guardians of this tradition and the tribes-people had to take their word for it (their pretensions in this respect chiefly caused the anger of the Israelite "prophets"). If anything had been written down before Deuteronomy was read, such manuscripts were fragmentary and in priestly keeping, and as little known to the primitive tribesmen as the Greek poets to Kentucky hills-folk today.

That Deuteronomy was different from anything that had been known or understood before is implicit in its name, which means "Second Law". Deuteronomy, in fact, was Levitical Judaism, first revealed; the Israelites (as already shown) "were not Jews" and had never known this "Law".

Significantly, Deuteronomy which appears as the fifth book of today's Bible, with an air of growing naturally out of the previous ones, was the first book to be completed as a whole. Though Genesis and Exodus provide the historical background and mount for it, they were later produced by the Levites, and Leviticus and Numbers, the other books of the Torah, were compiled even later.

Deuteronomy stood the earlier tradition on its head, if it was in harmony with the moral commandments. However, the Levites were within their self-granted right in making any changes they chose, for they held that they were divinely authorized to amend the Law, as orally revealed by God to Moses, in order to meet "the constantly changing conditions of existence in the spirit of traditional teaching" (Dr. Kastein).

For that matter, they also claimed that Moses had received at Sinai a secret oral Torah, which must never be committed to writing. In view of the later inclusion of the Old Testament in one volume with the Christian New Testament, and the average Gentile's assumption that he thus has before his eyes the whole of "the Mosaic Law", this qualification is of permanent interest.

The Talmud, as quoted by Dr. Funk, says, "God foresaw that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel, 'We, too, are sons of God'. Then will the Lord say: 'Only he who knows my secrets is my son'. And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings" .

The few people who heard Deuteronomy read in 621 BC, and then first learned what "the Mosaic Law" was to be, were told that the manuscripts had been "discovered". Today's Judaist authorities dismiss this and agree that Deuteronomy was the independent work of the Levites in isolated Judah after Judah's rejection by the Israelites and the conquest of Israel. Dr. Kastein puts the matter like this:

"In 621 BC, a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages was discovered among the archives. It contained a curious version of the laws which had been codified up to that time, a sort of repetition and variation of them, giving a host of instructions regarding man's duty to God and to his neighbour. It was couched in the form of speeches supposed to have been delivered by Moses just before his death on the farther side of Jordan. Who the author was it is impossible to say".

Thus Dr. Kastein, a zealot who awaits the literal fulfilment of "the Mosaic Law" in every detail, does not believe that its author was either Jehovah or Moses. It is enough for him that it was produced by the lawgiving priesthood, which for him is divine authority.

None can now tell how closely Deuteronomy, as we know it, resembles Deuteronomy as it was read in 621 BC, for the books of the Old Testament were repeatedly revised up to the time of the first translation, when various other modifications were made, presumably to avoid excessive perturbation among the Gentiles. No doubt something was then excised, so that Deuteronomy in its original form may have been ferocious indeed, for what remains is savage enough.

Religious intolerance is the basis of this "Second Law" (racial intolerance was to follow later, in another "New Law") and murder in the name of religion is its distinctive tenet. This necessitates the destruction of the moral Commandments, which in fact are set up to be knocked down. Only those of them which relate to the exc1usive worship of the "jealous" Jehovah are left intact. The others are buried beneath a great mound of "statutes and judgments" (regulations issued under a governing Law, as it were) which in effect cancel them.

Thus the moral commandments against murder, stealing, adultery, coveting, bad neighbourliness, and the like are vitiated by a mass of "statutes" expressly enjoining the massacre of other peoples, the murder of apostates individually or in communities, the taking of concubines from among women captives, "utter destruction" that leaves "nothing alive", the exclusion of "the stranger" from debt-remission and the like.

By the time the end of Deuteronomy is reached the moral commandments have been nullified in this way, for the purpose of setting up, in the guise of a religion, the grandiose political idea of a people especially sent into the world to destroy and "possess" other peoples and to rule the earth. The idea of destruction is essential to Deuteronomy. If it be taken away no Deuteronomy, or Mosaic Law, remains.

This concept of destruction as an article of faith is unique, and where it occurs in political thought (for instance, in the Communist philosophy) may also derive originally from the teaching of Deuteronomy, for there is no other discoverable source.

Deuteronomy is above all a complete political programme: the story of the planet, created by Jehovah for this "special people", is to be completed by their triumph and the ruination of all others. The rewards offered to the faithful are exclusively material: slaughter, slaves, women, booty, territory, empire. The only condition laid down for these rewards is observance of "the statutes and judgments", which primarily command the destruction of others. The only guilt defined lies is non-observance of these laws. Intolerance is specified as observance; tolerance as non-observance, and therefore as guilt. The punishments prescribed are of this world and of the flesh, not of the spirit. Moral behaviour, if ever demanded, is required only towards co-religionists and "strangers" are excluded from it.

This unique form of nationalism was first presented to the Judahites in Deuteronomy as "the Law" of Jehovah and as his literal word, spoken to Moses. The notion of world domination through destruction is introduced at the start (chapter 2) of these "speeches supposed to have been delivered" by the dying Moses:

"The Lord spake unto me, saying. . . This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee". In token of this, the fate of two nations is at once shown. The King of Sihon and the King of Bashan "came out against us, he and all his people", whereon they were "utterly destroyed, the men, and the women, and the little ones", only the cattle being spared and "the spoil" being taken "for a prey unto ourselves". (The insistence on utter destruction is a recurrent and significant feature of these illustrative anecdotes).

These first examples of the power of Jehovah to destroy the heathen are followed by the first of many warnings that unless "the statutes and judgments" are observed Jehovah will punish his special people by dispersing them among these heathen. The enumeration of these "statutes and judgments" follows the Commandments, the moral validity of which is at once destroyed by a promise of tribal massacre:

"Seven nations greater and mightier than thou" are to be delivered into the Judahites' hands, and: "Thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them. . . ye shall destroy their alters . . . for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are on the face of the earth . . . Thou shalt be blessed above all people . . . And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them. . . the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed. . . And the Lord thy God will put out these nations before thee by little and little. . . But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed. And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them. . ."

By the Twentieth Century AD the peoples of the West, as a whole, had ceased to attach any present meaning to these incitements, but the peoples directly concerned thought differently. For instance, the Arab population of Palestine fled en masse from its native land after the massacre at Deir Yasin in 1948 because this event meant for them (as its perpetrators intended it to mean) that if they stayed they would be "utterly destroyed".

They knew that the Zionist leaders, in the palavers with British and American politicians of the distant West, repeatedly had stated that "the Bible is our Mandate" (Dr. Chaim Weizmann), and they knew (if the Western peoples did not realize) that the allusion was to such passages as that commanding the "utter destruction" of the Arab peoples. They knew that the leaders of the West had supported and would continue to support the invaders and thus they had no hope of even bare survival, save by flight. This massacre of 1948 AD relates directly to the "statute and judgment" laid down in chapter 7 of the book of The Law which the Levites completed and read in 621 BC.

The incitements and allurements of Deuteronomy continue: ". . . Go in to possess nations greater and mightier than thyself . . . the Lord thy God is he which goeth over before thee; as a consuming fire he shall destroy them, and he shall bring them down before thy face; so shalt thou drive them out, and destroy them quickly, as the Lord hath said unto thee. . . For if ye shall diligently keep all these commandments which I command you . . . then will the Lord drive out all these nations from before you, and ye shall possess greater nations and mightier than yourselves . . . even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be. There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon . . ."

Then Moses, in this account, enumerates the "statutes and judgments" which must be "observed" if all these rewards are to be gained, and again "the Law" is to destroy:

"These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do . . . Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods. . . When the Lord thy God shall cut off the nations from before thee, whither thou goest to possess them, and thou succeedest them, and dwellest in their land: Take heed to thyself that thou be not snared by following them. . . and that thou inquire not after their gods."

This tenet of "the Law" requires the faithful to destroy other religions. It was impartial when enacted but gained a specific application in later centuries from the fact that the Christian faith grew up in, and the mass of Jews then moved into, the same geographical area: the West. (This made Christianity the primary object of the command to "utterly destroy the places. . .", and the dynamiting of Russian cathedrals, the opening of "anti-God museums", the canonization of Judas and other acts of early Bolshevist governments, which were to nine-tenths comprized of Eastern Jews, were evidently deeds of "observance" under this "statute" of Deuteronomy).

The ideas of the inquisition of heretics and of the informer, which the West has used in its retrogressive periods and repudiated in its enlightened ones, also find their original source (unless any can locate an earlier one) in Deuteronomy. Lest any such heretic should call in question the Law of destruction, summarized in the preceding paragraphs, Deuteronomy next provides that "if there arise among you a prophet or a dreamer of dreams . . . (he) shall be put to death"; the crucifixion of Jesus (and the deaths of numerous expostulants against literal Judaism) fall under this "statute".

The denunciation of kinsfolk who incur suspicion of heresy is required. This is the terrorist device introduced in Russia by the Bolshevists in 1917 and copied in Germany by the National Socialists in 1933. The Christian world at the time professed horror at these barbarbous innovations, but the method is plainly laid down in Deuteronomy, which requires that any who say, "Let us go and serve other gods", be denounced by their brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, wives and so on, and be stoned to death.

Characteristically, Deuteronomy prescribes that the hand of the blood-kinsman or spouse shall be "first upon" the victim of denunciation at the killing, and only afterwards "the hand of all the people". This "statute of the Law" is still observed today, in a measure dictated by local conditions and other circumstances. Apostates cannot be publicly stoned to death in the environment of foreign communities, where the law of "the stranger" might hold this to be murder, so that a formal pronunciation of "death" and ceremony of mourning symbolically takes the place of the legal penalty; see Dr. John Goldstein's account both of the symbolic rite and of a recent attempt to exact the literal penalty, which during the centuries was often inflicted in closed Jewish communities where the law of "the stranger" could not reach.

The Law also demands that entire communities shall be massacred on the charge of apostasy: "Thou shalt surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly, and all that is therein".

In this matter of destroying cities, Deuteronomy distinguishes between near (that is, Palestinian) and far cities. When a "far off city" has been captured, "thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword, but the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself. . ." This incitement in respect of captured women is a recurrent theme and Deuteronomy lays down the law that a Judahite captor who sees among captives "a beautiful woman" may take her home, but if he had "no delight in her" may turn her out again.

The case of a near city is different; the law of utter destruction (against which Saul transgressed) then rules. "But of the cities of these people which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth; But thou shalt utterly destroy them. . . as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee". (This verse 16 of chapter 20, again, explains the mass flight of the Palestinian Arabs after Deir Yasin, where nothing that breathed was saved alive. They saw that literal fulfilment of the Law of 62l BC was the order of the day in 1948 AD, and that the might of the West was behind this fulfilment of the Law of "utter destruction".)

The Second Law continues: "Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself, above all the nations that are upon the earth". Further "statutes and judgments" then provide that "anything that dieth of itself", being unclean, may not be eaten, but "thou shalt give it to the stranger . . . or thou mayest sell it to the alien; for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God".

Every seven years a creditor shall remit his "neighbour's" debt, but "of a foreigner thou mayest exact it again". Chapter 10 (surprisingly in this context) says, "Love ye therefore the stranger; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt", but chapter 23 brings the familiar cancellation: "Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother . . . unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury" (and graver examples of this legal discrimination between the "neighbour" and "the "stranger" appear in later books, as will be seen).

Deuteronomy ends with the long-drawn-out, rolling, thunderous curse-or-blessing theme. Moses, about to die, once more exhorts "the people" to choose between blessings and cursings, and these are enumerated.

The blessings are exclusively material: prosperity through the increase of kith, crop and kine; the defeat of enemies; and world dominion. "The Lord thy God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth . . . The Lord shall establish thee an holy people unto himself . . . And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee. . . thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath . . ."

These blessings occupy thirteen verses; the cursings some fifty or sixty. The deity in whose name the curses are uttered clearly was held capable of doing evil (indeed, this is explicitly stated in a later book, Ezekiel, as will be shown).

Literal Judaism is ultimately based on terror and fear and the list of curses set out in chapter 28 of The Second Law shows the importance which the priesthood attached to this practice of cursing (which literal Judaists to this day hold to be effective in use). These curses, be it remembered, are the penalties for non-observance, not for moral transgressions! "If thou will not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and statutes. . . all these curses shall come upon thee . . ."

The city and the dwelling, the children, crops and cattle, are to be cursed "until thou be destroyed and until thou perish utterly". Plague, wasting, inflammation, mildew, botch, emerods, scab, itch, madness, blindness, famine, cannibalism and drought are specified. Men's wives are to lie with other men; their children are to be lost into slavery; any that remain at home are to be eaten by their parents, the father and mother contesting for the flesh and denying any to the children still alive. (These curses were inc1uded in the Great Ban when it was pronounced on apostates down to relatively recent times, and in the fastnesses of Talmudic Jewry are probably in use today).

The diseases and disasters were to be visited on the people "if thou wilt not observe to do all the words of this law that are written in this book, that thou mayest fear this glorious and fearful name, the Lord Thy God: . . I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live for ever".

Such was the life and the blessing which the Judahites, gathered in the Temple in 621 BC, were exhorted in the name of Jehovah and Moses to choose by their tribal chieftain Josiah, the mouthpiece of the priesthood. The purpose and meaning of existence, under this "Mosaic Law", was the destruction and enslavement of others for the sake of plunder and power. Israel might from that moment have counted itself happy to have been pronounced dead and to have been exc1uded from such a world to come. The Israelites had mingled in the living bloodstream of mankind; on its banks the Judahites were left stranded in the power of a fanatical priesthood which commanded them, on pain of "all these curses", to destroy.

To the terror inspired by "all these curses" the Levites added also an allurement. If "the people" should "return and obey the voice of the Lord, and do all his commandments. . .", then "all these curses" would be transferred to their "enemies" (not because these had sinned, but simply to swell the measure of the blessing conferred on the rehabilitated Judahites!)

In this tenet Deuteronomy most clearly revealed the status allotted to the heathen by The Second Law. In the last analysis, "the heathen" have no legal existence under this Law; how could they have, when Jehovah only "knows" his "holy people"? Insofar as their actual existence is admitted, it is only for such purposes as those stated in verse 65, chapter 28 and verse 7, chapter 30: namely, to receive the Judahites when they are dispersed for their transgressions and then, when their guests repent and are forgiven, to inherit curses lifted from the regenerate Judahites. True, the second verse quoted gives the pretext that "all these curses" will be transferred to the heathen because they "hated" and "persecuted" the judahites, but how could they be held culpable of this when the very presence of the Judahites among them was merely the result of punitive "curses" inflicted by Jehovah? For Jehovah himself, according to another verse (64, chapter 28) took credit for putting the curse of exile on the Judahites:

"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other . . . and among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest…"

Deuteronomy employs this Doublespeak (to use the modem idiom) throughout: the Lord makes the special people homeless among the heathen for their transgressions; the heathen, who have no blame either for their exile or for those transgressions, are their "persecutors "; ergo, the heathen will be destroyed.

The Judaist attitude towards other mankind, creation, and the universe in general, is better understood when these and related passages have been pondered, and especially the constant plaint that Jews are "persecuted" everywhere, which in one tone or another runs through nearly all Jewish literature. To any who accept this book as The Law, the mere existence of others is in fact persecution; Deuteronomy plainly implies that.

The most nationalist Jew and the most enlightened Jew often agree in one thing: they cannot truly consider the world and its affairs from any but a Jewish angle, and from that angle "the stranger" seems insignificant. Thinking makes it so, and this is the legacy of twenty-five centuries of Jewish thinking; even those Jews who see the heresy or fallacy cannot always divest themselves entirely of the incubus on their minds and spirits.

The passage from Deuteronomy last quoted shows that the ruling sect depicted homelessness at one and the same time as the act of the special people's god and as persecution by the special people's enemies, deserving of "all these curses". To minds of such extreme egotism a political outrage in which 95 Gentiles and 5 Jews lose their lives or property is simply an anti-Jewish disaster, and they are not consciously hypocritical in this. In the Twentieth Century this standard of judgment has been projected into the lives of other peoples and applied to all major events in the ordeal of the West. Thus we live in the century of the Levitical fallacy.

Having undertaken to put "all these curses" on innocent parties, if the Judahites would return to observance of "all these statutes and judgments", the resurrected Moses of Deuteronomy promised one more blessing ("The Lord thy God, he will go over before thee, and he will destroy these nations from before thee, and thou shalt possess them. . . ") and then was allowed to die in the land of Moab.

In "the Mosaic Law" the destructive idea took shape, which was to threaten Christian civilization and the West, both then undreamed of. During the Christian era a council of theologians made the decision that the Old Testament and the New should be bound in one book, without any differentiation, as if they were stem and blossom, instead of immovable object and irresistible force. The encyclopaedia before me as I write states laconically that the Christian churches accept the Old Testament as being of "equal divine authority" with the New.

This unqualified acceptance covers the entire content of the Old Testament and may be the original source of much confusion in the Christian churches and much distraction among the masses that seek Christianity, for the dogma requires belief in opposite things at the same time. How can the same God, by commandment to Moses, have enjoined men to love their neighbours and "utterly to destroy" their neighbours? What relationship can there be between the universal, loving God of the Christian revelation and the cursing deity of Deuteronomy?

But if in fact all the Old Testament, including these and other commands, is of "equal divine authority" with the New, then the latterday Westerner is entitled to invoke it in justification of those deeds by which Christendom most denied itself: the British settlers' importation of African slaves to America, the American and Canadian settlers' treatment of the North American Indian, and the Afrikaners' harsh rule over the South African Bantu. He may justly put the responsibility for all these things directly on his Christian priest or bishop, if that man teaches that the Old Testament, with its repeated injunction to slay, enslave, and despoil is of "equal divine authority". No Christian divine can hold himself blameless if he so teaches. The theological decision which set up this dogma cast over Christendom and the centuries to come the shadow of Deuteronomy, just as it fell on the Judahites themselves when it was read to them in 621 BC.

Only one other piece of writing has had any comparable effect on the minds of men and on future generations; if any simplification is permissible, the most tempting one is to see the whole story of the West, and particularly of this decisive Twentieth Century, as a struggle between the Mosaic Law and the New Testament and between the two bodies of mankind which rank themselves behind one or other of those two messages of hatred and love respectively.

In Deuteronomy Judaism was born, yet this would have been a stillbirth, and Deuteronomy might never again have been heard of, if that question had rested only with the Levites and their captive Judahites. They were not numerous, and a nation a hundred times as many could never have hoped to enforce this barbarous creed on the world by force of its own muscle. There was only one way in which "the Mosaic Law" could gain life and potency and become a disturbing influence in the life of other peoples during the centuries to follow. This was if some powerful "stranger" (among all those strangers yet to be accursed), some mighty king of those "heathen" yet to be destroyed, should support it with arms and treasure.

Precisely that was about to happen when Josiah read The Second Law to the people in 621 BC, and it was to repeat itself continually down the centuries to our day: the gigantic improbability of the thing confronts the equally large, demonstrable fact that it is so! The rulers of those "other nations" which were to be dispossessed and destroyed repeatedly espoused the destructive creed, did the bidding of the dominant sect, and at the expense of their own peoples helped to further its strange ambition.

Some twenty years after the reading of Deuteronomy in Jerusalem, Judah was conquered by the Babylonian king, in about 596 BC. At the time, this looked like the end of the affair, which was a petty one in itself, among the great events of that period. Judah never again existed as an independent state, and but for the Levites, their Second Law and the foreign helper the Judahites, like the Israelites, would have become involved in mankind.

Instead, the Babylonian victory was the start of the affair, or of its great consequences for the world. The Law, instead of dying, grew stronger in Babylon, where for the first time a foreign king gave it his protection. The permanent state-within-states, nation-within-nations was projected, a first time, into the life of peoples; initial experience in usurping power over them was gained. Much tribulation for other peoples was brewed then.

As for the Judahites, or the Judaists and Jews who sprang from them, they seem to have acquired the unhappiest future of all. Anyway, it was not a happy man (though it was a Jewish writer of our day, 2,500 years later, Mr. Maurice Samuel) who wrote: ". . . we Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever. . . nothing that the Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".

At first sight this seems mocking, venomous, shameless. The diligent student of the controversy of Zionism discovers that it is more in the nature of a cry of hopelessness, such as the "Mosaic Law" must wring from any man who feels he cannot escape its remorseless doctrine of destruction.

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Chapter 4

THE FORGING OF THE CHAINS

The Babylonian episode was decisive in its consequences, both for the petty tribe of Judah at the time and for the Western world today.

During this period the Levites achieved things which were permanently to affect the life of peoples. They added four Books to Deuteronomy and thus set up a Law of racio-religious intolerance which, if it could be enforced, would for all time cut off the Judahites from mankind. By experiment in Babylon, they found ways of enforcing it, that is to say, of keeping their followers segregated from those among whom they dwelt. They acquired authority among their captors, and at last they "pulled down" and "utterly destroyed" their captors' house; or if this did not truly happen, they handed on this version of history to a posterity which accepted it and in time began to see in these people an irresistibly destructive force.

The first "captivity" (the Egyptian) seems to have been completely legendary; at any rate, what is known confutes it and as Exodus was completed after the Babylonian incident the Levitical scribes may have devised the story of the earlier "captivity", and of Jehovah's punishment of the Egyptians, to support the version of the Babylonian period which they were then preparing.

In any case, what truly happened in Babylon seems to have been greatly different from the picture of a mass-captivity, later followed by a mass-return, which has been handed down by the Levitical scriptures.

No mass-exodus of captives from Jerusalem to Babylon can have occurred, because the mass of the Judahite people, from which a Jewish nation later emerged, was already self-distributed far and wide about the known world (that is, around the Mediterranean, in lands west and east of Judah), having gone wherever conditions for commerce were most favourable.

In that respect the picture was in its proportions very much like that of today. In Jerusalem was only a nucleus, comprizing chiefly the most zealous devotees of the Temple cult and folk whose pursuits bound them to the land. The authorities agree that merely a few tens of thousands of people were taken to Babylon, and that these represented a small fraction of the whole.

Nor were the Judahites unique in this dispersion, although the literature of lamentation implies that. The Parsees of India offer a case nearly identical and of the same period; they, too, survived the loss of state and country as a religious community in dispersion. The later centuries offer many examples of the survival of racial or religious groups far from their original clime. With the passing of generations such racial groups come to think of their ancestors' homeland simply as "the old country"; the religious ones turn their eyes towards a holy city (say, Rome or Mecca) merely from a different spot on earth.

The difference in the case of the Judahites was that old country and holy city were the same; that Jehovaism demanded a triumphant return and restoration of temple-worship, over the bodies of the heathen destroyed; and that this religion was also their law of daily life, so that a worldly political ambition, of the ancient tribal or nationalist kind, was also a primary article of faith. Other such creeds of primitive times became fossilized; this one survived to derange the life of peoples throughout the ages to our day, when it achieved its most disruptive effect.

This was the direct result of the experiments made and the experience gained by the Levites in Babylon, where they were first able to test the creed in an alien environment.

The benevolent behaviour of the Babylonian conquerors towards their Judahite prisoners was the exact opposite of that enjoined on the Judahites, in the reverse circumstances, by the Second Law which had been read to them just before their defeat: "Save nothing alive that breatheth. . ." Dr. Kastein says the captives "enjoyed complete freedom" of residence, worship, occupation and self-administration.

This liberality allowed the Levites to make captives of people who thus were largely free; under priestly insistence they were constrained to settle in closed communities, and in this way the ghetto and Levite power were born. The Talmudic ruling of the Christian era, which decreed the excommunication of Jews if without permission they sold "neighbour-property" to "strangers", comes down from that first experiment in self-segregation, in Babylon.

The support of the foreign ruler was necessary for this corralling of expatriates by their own priests, and it was given on this first occasion, as on innumerable other occasions ever since.

With their people firmly under their thumbs, the Levites then set about to complete the compilation of "The Law". The four books which they added to Deuteronomy make up the Torah, and this word, which originally meant doctrine, is now recognized to mean "the Law". However, "completion" is a most misleading word in this connection.

Only the Torah (in the sense of the five books) was completed. The Law was not then and never can be completed, given the existence of the "secret Torah" recorded by the Talmud (which itself was but the later continuation of the Torah), and the priestly claim to divine right of interpretation. In fact, "the Law" was constantly changed, often to close some loophole which might have allowed "the stranger" to enjoy a right devolving only on "a neighbour". Some examples of this continuing process of amendment have already been given, and others follow in this chapter. The effect was usually to make hatred of or contempt for "the stranger" an integral part of "the Law" through the provision of discriminatory penalties or immunities.

When the Torah was complete a great stockade, unique in its nature but still incomplete, had been built between any human beings who at any time accepted this "Law" and the rest of mankind. The Torah allowed no distinction between this Law of Jehovah and that of man, between religious and civil law. The law of "the stranger", theologically and juridically, had no existence, and any pretension to enforce one was "persecution", as Jehovah's was the only law.

The priesthood claimed that the Torah governed every act of daily life, down to the most trivial. Any objection that Moses could not have received from Jehovah on the mountain detailed instructions covering every conceivable action performed by man, was met with the dogma that the priesthood, like relay runners, handed on from generation to generation "the oral tradition" of Jehovah's revelation to Moses, and infinite power of reinterpretation. However, such objections were rare, as the Law prescribed the death penalty for doubters.

Mr. Montefiore remarks, accurately, that the Old Testament is "revealed legislation, not revealed truth", and says the Israelite prophets cannot have known anything of the Torah as the Levites completed it in Babylon. Jeremiah's words, "the pen of the Scribes is in vain" evidently refer to this process of Levitical revision and to the attribution of innumerable new "statutes and judgments" to Jehovah and Moses.

"Sin" was not a concept in the Torah as it took shape. That is logical, for in law there cannot be "sin", only crime or misdemeanour. The only offence known to this Law was non-observance, which meant crime or misdemeanour. What is commonly understood by "sin", namely, moral transgression, was sometimes expressly enjoined by it or made absolvable by the sacrifice of an animal.

The idea of "the return" (together with the related ideas of destruction and dominion) was basic to the dogma, which stood or fell by it. No strong impulse to return from Babylon to Jerusalem existed among the people (any more than today, when the instinct of the vast majority of Jews is completely against "return", so that the Zionist state is much more easily able to find money abroad than immigrants).

Literal fulfilment was the supreme tenet and that meant that possession of Palestine, the "centre" of the dominant empire to come, was essential (as it still is); its importance in the pattern was political, not residential.

Thus the Levites in Babylon added Exodus, Genesis, Leviticus and Numbers to Deuteronomy. Genesis and Exodus provide a version of history moulded to fit the "Law" which the Levites by then had already promulgated, in Deuteronomy. This goes right back to the Creation, of which the Scribes knew the exact date (however the first two chapters of Genesis give somewhat different accounts of the Creation and the Levitical hand, as scholars believe, is more to be seen in the second chapter than the first).

Whatever has survived of the former Israelite tradition is in Genesis and Exodus, and in the enlightened passages of the Israelite prophets. These more benevolent parts are invariably cancelled out by later, fanatical ones, which are presumably Levitical interpolations.

The puzzle is to guess why the Levites allowed these glimpses of a loving God of all men to remain; as they invalidated the New Law and could have been removed. A tenable theory might be that the earlier tradition was too well known to the tribes-people to be merely expunged, so that it had to be retained and cancelled out by allegorical incident and amendment.

Although Genesis and Exodus were produced after Deuteronomy the theme of fanatical tribalism is faint in them. The swell and crescendo come in Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers, which bear the plain imprint of the Levite in isolated Judah and Babylon.

Thus in Genesis the only fore-echo of the later sound and fury is, "And I will make of thee a great nation and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing; and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. . . and the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land. . ."

Exodus is not much different: for instance, "If thou shalt indeed, . . do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy unto thine enemies. . . and I will cut them off"; and even these passages may be Levitical interpolations.

But in Exodus something of the first importance appears: this promise is sealed in blood, and from this point on blood runs like a river through the books of The Law. Moses is depicted as "taking the blood and sprinkling it on the people" and saying, "Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words". The hereditary and perpetual office of the Aaronite priesthood is founded in this blood-ritual: Jehovah says unto Moses, "And take unto thee Aaron thy brother and his sons with him that he may minister unto me in the priest's office".

The manner of a priest's consecration is then laid down in detail by Jehovah himself, according to the Levitical scribes:

He must take a bullock and two rams "without blemish", have them butchered "before the Lord", and on the altar burn one ram and the innards of the bullock. The blood of the second ram is to be put "upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons and upon the thumb of their right hands and upon the great toe of their right foot" and sprinkled "upon the altar round about. . . and upon Aaron, and upon his garments, and upon his sons and the garments of his sons".

The picture of blood-bespattered priests, thus given, is worth contemplation. Even at this distance of time the question prompts itself: why was this insistent emphasis laid on blood-sacrifice in the books of the Law which the Levites produced. The answer seems to lie in the sect's uncanny genius for instilling fear by terror; for the very mention of "blood", in such contexts, made the faithful or superstitious Judahite tremble for his own son!

It is all spelt out in Exodus, this claim of the fanatical priests to the firstborn of their followers:

"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Sanctify unto me all the firstborn, whatsoever openeth the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and of beast: it is mine".

According to the passage earlier quoted from Micah, this practice of sacrificing the human firstborn long continued, and the sight of the bloodied Levite must have had a terrible significance for the humble tribesman, for in the words attributed to God, quoted above, the firstborn "of man and of beast" are coupled. This significance remained long after the priesthood (in a most ingenious way which will later be described) contrived to discontinue human sacrifice while retaining the prerogative. Even then the blood which was sprinkled on the priest, though it was an animal's, was to the congregation still symbolically that of their own offspring!

Moreover, in the Talmudic strongholds of Jewry this ritual bloodying of priests has continued into our time; this is not a reminiscence from antiquity. Twenty-four centuries after Exodus was compiled the Reform Rabbis of America (at Pittsburgh in 1885) declared: "We expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the administration of the sons of Aaron; nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish State". The importance of this statement lay in the need, thus felt in 1885, to make it publicly; it shows that the opposite school of Jewry still practised literal observance, including the ritual of "sacrificial worship". (By the 1950's the Reform Rabbis of America had lost much ground and were in retreat before the force of Zionist chauvinism).

The Levitical authorship of the Torah is indicated, again, by the fact that more than half of the five books are given to minutely detailed instructions, attributed directly to the Lord, about the construction and furnishings of altars and tabernacles, the cloth and design of vestments, mitres, girdles, the kind of golden chains and precious stones in which the blood-baptized priest is to be arrayed, as well as the number and kind of beasts to be sacrificed for various transgressions, the uses to be made of their blood, the payment of tithes and shekels, and in general the privileges and perquisites of the priesthood. Scores of chapters are devoted to blood sacrifice, in particular.

God probably does not so highly rate the blood of animals or the fine raiment of priests. This was the very thing, against which the Israelite "prophets" had protested. It was the mummifying of a primeval tribal religion; yet this is still The Law of the ruling sect and it is of great potency in our present-day world.

When they compiled these Books of the Law, the Levitical scribes included many allegorical or illustrative incidents of the awful results of "non-observance". These are the parables of the Old Testament, and their moral is always the same: death to the "transgressor". Exodus includes the best known of these, the parable of the golden calf. While Moses was in the mountain Aaron made a golden calf; when Moses came down and saw it he commanded "the sons of Levi" to go through the camp "and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour", which these dutiful Levites did, so that "there fell of the people that day about three thousand men".

Christendom also has inherited this parable of the golden calf (having inherited the Old Testament) and holds it to be a warning against the worship of idols. However, a quite different motive may have produced whatever trend among the people caused the Levites to invent it. Many Judahites, and possibly some priests, at that time may have thought that God would be better pleased with the symbolic offering of a golden calf than with the eternal bleating of butchered animals, the "sprinkling" of their blood, and the "sweet savour" of their burning carcasses. The Levites at all times fought fiercely against any such weakening of their ritual, so that these parables are always directed against any who seek to change it in any detail.

A similar case is the "rebellion of Korah" (Numbers), when "two and fifty hundred princes of the assembly, famous in the congregation, men of renown, gathered themselves together against Moses and against Aaron and said unto them, Ye take too much upon you, seeing all the congregation are holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them; wherefore then lift ye yourselves above the congregation of the Lord".

The Israelite "prophets" had made this very complaint, that the Levites took much on themselves, and the parable in Numbers is plainly intended to discourage any other objectors: "So the earth opened and swallowed Korah and his two hundred and fifty men of renown" (however, the congregation "continued to murmur", whereon the Lord smote it with the plague, and by the time Aaron interceded, "fourteen thousand and seven hundred" lay dead.)

The lesson of these parables, respect for the priesthood, is driven home immediately after this anecdote by the enumeration, in words attributed to the Lord, of the Levite's perquisites: "All the best of the oil, and all the best of the wine, and of the wheat, the first fruits of them which they shall offer unto the Lord, them have I given thee".

Presumably because the older tradition imposed some restraint in the writing of history, Genesis and Exodus are relatively restrained. The fanatical note, first loudly sounded in Deuteronomy, then becomes ever louder in Leviticus and Numbers, until at the end a concluding parable depicts a racio-religious massacre as an act of the highest piety in "observance", singled out for reward by God! These last two books, like Deuteronomy, are supposed to have been left by Moses and to relate his communions with Jehovah. In their cases, no claim was made that "a manuscript hoary with the dust of ages" had been discovered; they were just produced.

They show the growth of the sect's fanaticism at this period, and the increasing heat of their exhortations to racial and religious hatred. Deuteronomy had first decreed, "Love ye therefore the stranger", and then cancelled this "judgment" (which probably came down from the earlier Israelite tradition) by the later one which excluded the stranger from the ban on usury.

Leviticus went much further. It, too, began with the admonition to love: "The stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself" (chapter 19). The reversal came in chapter 25: "Of the children of the stranger that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land, and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever: but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule over one another with rigour".

This made hereditary bondage and chattel-slavery of "strangers" a tenet of the Law (which is still valid). If the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New, professing Christians of the pioneer, frontiersman or Voortrekker kind were entitled in their day to invoke such passages as these in respect of slavery in America or South Africa.

Leviticus introduced (at all events by clear implication) what is perhaps the most significant of all the discriminations made by the Law between "thy neighbour" and "the stranger". Deuteronomy, earlier, had provided (chapter 22) that "if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die; but unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death; for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter". This is the kind of provision, in respect of rape, which probably would have been found in any of the legal codes which were then taking shape, and for that matter it would fit into almost any legal code today, save for the extreme nature of the penalty. This passage, again, may very well represent the earlier Israelite attitude towards this particular transgression; it was impartial and did not vary according to the person of the victim.

Leviticus (chapter 19) then provided that a man who "lieth carnally" with a betrothed woman slave might acquit himself of fault by bringing a ram to the priest "as a trespass offering", when "the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him", but the woman "shall be scourged". Under this Law the word of a woman slave clearly would not count against that of her owner, on a charge of rape, so that this passage appears to be an amendment, of the discriminatory kind, to the provision in Deuteronomy. Certain allusions in the Talmud support this interpretation, as will be shown. .

Leviticus also contains its parable depicting the awful consequences of non-observance, and this particular example shows the extreme lengths to which the Levites went. The transgression committed by the two allegorical characters in this case (who were themselves two Levites, Hadab and Abihu) was merely that they burned the wrong kind of fire in their censers. This was a capital offence under "the Law" and they were immediately devoured by the Lord!

Numbers, the last of the five Books to be produced, is the most extreme. In it the Levites found a way to rid themselves of their chief prerogative (the claim to the firstborn) while perpetuating "the Law" in this, its supreme tenet. This was a political move of genius. The claim to the firstborn evidently had become a source of grave embarrassment to them, but they could not possibly surrender the first article of a literal Law which knew no latitude whatever in "observance"; to do so would have been itself a capital transgression. By one more reinterpretation of the Law they made themselves proxies for the firstborn, and thus staked a permanent claim on the gratitude of the people without any risk to themselves:
"And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, And I, behold. I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the firstborn that openeth the matrix among the children of Israel: therefore the Levites shall be mine; because all the firstborn are mine. . ." (As the firstborn to be so redeemed outnumbered their Levite redeemers by 273, payment of five shekels each for these 273 was required, the money to be given "to Aaron and his sons".)

Proceeding from this new status of redeemers, the Levites laid down many more "statutes and judgments" in Numbers. They ruled by terror and were ingenious in devising new ways of instilling it; an example is their "trial of jealousy". If "the spirit of jealousy" came on a man, he was legally obliged (by "the Lord speaking unto Moses, saying") to hale his wife before the Levite, who, at the altar, presented her with a concoction of "bitter water" made by him, saying, "If no man have lain with thee and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse. But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband. . . the Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell."

The woman then had to drink the bitter water and if her belly swelled the priests "executed the law" of death on her. The power which such a rite put in the hands of the priesthood is apparent; ascribed to the direct command of God, it resembles the practices of witch doctors in Africa.

The final touch is given to "the Law" in the last chapters of this, the last book to be compiled. It is provided by the parable of Moses and the Midianites. The reader will have remarked that the life and deeds of Moses, as related in Exodus, made him a capital transgressor, several times over, under the "Second Law" of Deuteronomy and the numerous other amendments of Leviticus and Numbers. By taking refuge with the Midianites, by marrying the Midianite highpriest's daughter and by receiving instruction in priestly rites from him, and in other ways, Moses had "gone a-whoring after other gods", had "taken of their daughters", and so on. As the whole structure of the law rested on Moses, in whose name the commands against these things were laid down in the later books, something evidently had to be done about him before the Books of the Law were completed, or the whole structure would fall to the ground.

The last small section of Numbers shows how the difficulty was overcome by the scribes. In these final chapters of "the Law" Moses is made to conform with "all the statutes and judgments" and to redeem his transgressions by massacring the entire Midianite tribe, save for the virgins! By what in today's idiom would be called a fantastic "twist", Moses was resurrected so that he might dishonour his saviours, his wife, two sons and father-in-law. Posthumously he was made to "turn from his wickedness", to validate the racio-religious dogma which the Levites had invented, and by complete transfiguration from the benevolent patriarch of earlier legend to become the founding father of their Law of hatred and murder!

In Chapter 25 Moses is made to relate that "the anger of the Lord was kindled" because the people were turning to other gods. He is commanded by the Lord, "Take all the heads of the people and hang them up before the Lord against the sun", whereon Moses instructs the judges, "Slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor" (Baal-worship was extensively practised throughout Canaan, and the competition of this cult with Jehovah-worship was a particular grievance of the Levites).

The theme of religious hatred is thus introduced into the narrative. That of racial hatred is joined to it when, in the direct sequence, a man brings "a Midianitish woman in the sight of Moses". Phinehas (the grandson of Moses's brother Aaron) goes after them "and thrust both of them through, the man of Israel, and the women through her belly". Because of this deed, "the plague was stayed", and "the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Phinehas hath turned away my wrath from the children of Israel, while he was zealous for my sake. . . Wherefore say, Behold, I give unto him my covenant of peace!"

Thus the covenant between Jehovah and the hereditary Aaronite priesthood was again sealed (by the Levitical scribes) in blood, this time the blood of a racioreligious murder, which "the Lord" then describes as "an atonement for the children of Israel". Moses, the witness of the murder, is then ordered by the Lord, "Vex the Midianites and smite them". The symbolism is plain. He is required, in resurrection, to strike equally at "other gods" (the god of the high priest Jethro, from whom he had received instruction) and at "strangers" (his wife's and father-in-law's race).

The Levites even made the ensuing massacre Moses's last act on earth; he was rehabilitated on the brink of eternity! "And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites; afterwards thou shalt be gathered to thy people". Thus ordered, Moses's men "warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males. . . and took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of their cities, and all their flocks, and all their gods, and burnt their cities".

This was not enough. Moses, the husband of a loving Midianite wife and the father of her two sons, was "wroth" with his officers because they had "saved all the Midianite women alive. Behold these caused the children of Israel. . . to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregations of the Lord. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves". (The booty is then listed; after the enumeration of sheep, beeves and asses follow "thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him". These were shared among the Levites, the soldiers and the congregation; "the gold" was brought to the Levites "for the Lord".)

With that, Moses was allowed at last to rest and the Books of the Law were concluded. Incitement could hardly be given a more demoniac shape. Chapters 25 and 31 of Numbers need to be compared with chapters 2, 3 and 18 of Exodus for the full significance of the deed foisted on Jehovah and Moses by the Levites to become apparent. It was a plain warning to the special people of what Jehovaism was to mean to them; it remains today a warning to others.

On that note The Law ended. Its authors were a small sect in Babylon, with a few thousand followers there. However, the power of their perverse idea was to prove very great. By giving material ambition the largest shape it can have on earth, they identified themselves forever with the baser of the two forces which eternally contend for the soul of man: that downward pull of the fleshly instincts which wars with the uplifting impulse of the spirit.

The theologians of Christendom claim more for this Law than the scholars of Jewry. I have before me a Christian Bible, recently published, with an explanatory note which says the five books of the Torah are "accepted as true", and for that matter also the historical, prophetic and poetic books. This logically flows from the dogma, earlier quoted, that the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New.

The Judaist scholars say differently. Dr. Kastein, for instance, says that the Torah was "the work of an anonymous compiler" who "produced a pragmatic historical work". The description is exact; the scribe or scribes provided a version of history, subjectively written to support the compendium of laws which was built on it; and both history and laws were devised to serve a "political purpose. "A unifying idea underlay it all", says Dr. Kastein, and this unifying idea was tribal nationalism, in a more fanatical form than the world has otherwise known. The Torah was not revealed religion but, as Mr. Montefiore remarked, "revealed legislation", enacted to an end.

While the Law was being compiled (it was not completed until the Babylonian "captivity" had ended) the last two remonstrants made their voices heard, Isaiah and Jeremiah. The hand of the Levite may be traced in the interpolations which were made in their books, to bring them into line with "the Law" and its supporting "version of history". The falsification is clearest in the book of Isaiah, "which is the best known case because it is the most easily demonstrable. Fifteen chapters of the book were written by someone who knew the Babylonian captivity, whereas Isaiah lived some two hundred years earlier. The Christian scholars circumvent this by calling the unknown man "Deutero-Isaiah", or the second Isaiah.

"This man left the famous words (often quoted out of their context), "The Lord hath said. . . I will also give thee for a light unto the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth". This was heresy under the Law which was in preparation and the Levite apparently added (as the same man presumably would not have written) the passages foretelling that "the kings and queens" of the Gentiles "shall bow down to thee with their face towards the earth and lick up the dust of thy feet . . . I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh and they shall be drunken with their own blood, as with sweet wine; and all flesh shall know that I am the Lord thy Saviour and thy Redeemer" (This sounds like the voice of Ezekiel, who was the true father of the Levitical Law, as will be seen.)

Jeremiah's book seems to have received Levitical amendment at the start, because the familiar opening passage sharply discords with other of Jeremiah's thoughts: "See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy . . ."

That does not sound like the man who wrote, in the next chapter: "The word of the Lord came to me saying, Go and cry in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith the Lord: I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown . . . What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me . . . my people have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters . . ."

Jeremiah then identified the culprit, Judah (and for this offence well may have come by his death): "The backsliding Israel hath justified herself more than treacherous Judah". Israel had fallen from grace, but Judah had betrayed; the allusion is plainly to the Levites' new Law. Then comes the impassioned protest, common to all the expostulants, against the priestly rites and sacrifices:

"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord. . ." (the formal, repetitious incantations) ". . . but thoroughly amend your ways and your doings, oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place" (the ritual of blood-sacrifice and the ordained murder of apostates). . . "Will ye steal, murder and commit adultery, and swear falsely. . . and come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are de1ivered to do all these abominations" (the ceremonial absolution after animal-sacrifice). "Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? . . I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings or sacrifices…."

In such words Jeremiah, like Jesus later, protested against the "destruction" of the Law in the name of its fulfilment. It seems possible that even in Jeremiah's time the Levites still exacted the sacrifice of firstborn children, because he adds, "And they have built the high place. . . to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart".

Because of these very "abominations", Jeremiah continued, the Lord would "cause to cease from the cities of Judah, and from the streets of Jerusalem, the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride; for the land shall be desolate".

This is the famous political forecast which was borne out; the Levites, with their genius for perversion, later invoked it to support their claim that Judah fell because their Law was not observed, whereas Jeremiah's warning was that their Law would destroy "treacherous Judah". Were he to rise from the earth today he might use the word without change in respect of Zionism, for the state of affairs is similar and the ultimate consequence seems equally foreseeable.

When Judah fell Jeremiah gave his most famous message of all, the one to which the Jewish masses today often instinctively turn, and the one which the ruling sect ever and again forbids them to heed: "Seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it; for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace". The Levites gave their angry answer in the 137th Psalm:

"By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept….. Our tormentors asked of us mirth: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. . . O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed, happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones".

In Jeremiah's admonition and the Levites' reply lies the whole story of the controversy of Zion, and of its effects for others, down to our day.

Jeremiah, who was apparently put to death, would today be attacked as a "crackpot", "paranoiac", "antisemite" and the like; the phrase then used was "prophet and dreamer of dreams". He describes the methods of defamation, used against such men, in words exactly applicable to our time and to many men whose public lives and reputations have been destroyed by them (as this narrative will show when it reaches the present century): "For I heard the defaming of many, fear on every side. Report, they say, and we will report it. All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".

While Jeremiah was a refugee in Egypt, the second Isaiah, in Babylon, wrote those benevolent words which glow like the last light of day against the dark background of the teaching which was about to triumph: "Thus saith the Lord, Keep ye judgment, and do justice…… let not the son of the stranger, that hath joined himself to the Lord, speak, saying The Lord hath utterly separated me from his people . . . The sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants . . . even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer . . . for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people".

With this glimpse of a loving God of all mankind the protests ended. The Levites and their Law were left paramount, and therewith the true captivity of "the Jews" began, for their enslavement to the law of racial and religious hatred is the only genuine captivity they have suffered.

Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah, like the earlier Israelite remonstrants, spoke for mankind, which was slowly groping its way towards the light when the Levites reverted to darkness. Before the Law was even completed Prince Sidharta Gautama, the Buddha, had lived and died and founded the first religion of all mankind, founded on his First Law of Life: "From good must come good, and from evil must come evil". This was the answer to the Levites' Second Law, though they probably never heard of it. It was also time's and the human spirit's inevitable answer to Brahminism, Hindu racialism and the cult of the perpetual master-caste (which strongly resembles literal Judaism).

Five hundred years ahead lay a second universal religion, and five hundred years after that a third. The little nation of Judah was held back in the Law's chains from this movement of mankind; it was arrested in the fossil stage of spiritual development, and yet its primitive tribal creed retained life and vigour. The Levitical Law, still potent in the Twentieth Century, is in its nature a survival from sunken times.

Such a Law was bound to cause curiosity, first, and alarm next among peoples with whom the Judahites dwelt, or to their neighbours, if they dwelt alone. When the Judahites returned from Babylon to Jerusalem, about 538 BC, this impact on other peoples began. At that moment in time it was felt only by little clans and tribes, the immediate neighbours of the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem. It has continued ever since in widening circ1es, being felt by ever greater numbers of peoples, and in our century has produced its greatest disturbances among them.

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Chapter 5

THE FALL OF BABYLON

Before this first impact of "the Mosaic Law" could be felt by other peoples came the event of 536 BC which set the pattern of the Twentieth Century AD: the fall of Babylon.

The resemblance between the pattern of events today (that is to say, the shape taken by the outcome of the two World Wars) and that of the fall of Babylon is too great to be accidental, and in fact can now be shown to have been deliberately produced. The peoples of the West in the present century, had they realized it, were governed under "the Judaic Law", not under any law of their own, by the forces that controlled governments.

The grouping of characters and the final denouement are alike in all three cases. On one side of the stage is the foreign potentate who has oppressed and affronted the Judahites (or, today, the Jews). In Babylon this was "King Belshazzar"; in the first World War it was the Russian Czar; in the second war, it was Hitler. Confronting this "persecutor", is the other foreign potentate, the liberator. In Babylon, this was King Cyrus of Persia; in the second case, it was a Mr. Balfour; in the third, it was a President Truman.

Between these adversaries stands the Jehovan prophet triumphant, the great man at the foreign ruler's court who foretells, and survives, the disaster which is about to befall the "persecutor". In Babylon, this was Daniel. In the first and second world wars of this century it was a Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist prophet at foreign courts.

These are the characters. Then comes the denouement, a Jehovan vengeance on "the heathen" and a Jewish triumph in the form of a symbolic "restoration". "King Belshazzar", when Daniel has foretold his doom, is killed "in the same night" and his kingdom falls to the enemy. The Jewish captors who killed the Russian Czar and his family, at the end of the First Twentieth Century war, quoted this precedent in a couplet "written on the wall" of the room where the massacre occurred; the Nazi leaders, at the end of the Second Twentieth Century war, were hanged on the Jewish Day of Atonement.

Thus the two World Wars of this century have conformed, in their outcomes, to the pattern of the Babylonian-Persian war of antiquity as depicted in the Old Testament.

Presumably the peoples who fought that ancient war thought that something more than the cause of the Judahites was at stake, and that they strove for some purpose or interest of their own. But in the narrative that has come down through the centuries all else has been expunged. The only significant results, in the picture which has been imprinted on the minds of peoples, are the Jehovan vengeance and Judahite triumph, and the two world wars of this century followed that same pattern.

King Belshazzar survives only as the symbolic foreign "persecutor" of the Judahites (although Jehovah made them his captives, as a punishment, he is nevertheless their "persecutor" and hence must be barbarously destroyed). King Cyrus, similarly, is but the fulfilling instrument of Jehovah's promise to visit "all these curses" on "thine enemies" when they have served their turn as captors (and thus deserves no credit in his own right, either as conqueror or liberator; he is not truly any better than King Belshazzar, and his house will in turn be destroyed).

King Cyrus, from what true history tells of him, seems to have been an enlightened man, as well as the founder of an empire which spread over all Western Asia. According to the encyclopaedias, "he left the nations he subjected free in the observance of their religions and the maintenance of their institutions". Thus the Judahites may have benefited by a policy which he impartially applied to all, and possibly King Cyrus, could he return to earth today, would be surprised to find that his portrait in history is that of a man whose only notable and enduring achievement was to restore a few thousand Judahites to Jerusalem.

However, if by any chance he thought this particular question to be of paramount importance among his undertakings (as the Twentieth Century politicians demonstrably think), he would at his return to earth today be much gratified, for he would find that through this act he exerted a greater influence on human events in the 2,500 years to come, probably than any other temporal ruler of any age. No other deed of antiquity has had consequences in the present time so great or so plain to trace.

In the Twentieth Century AD two generations of Western politicians, in the quest for Jewish favour, competed with each other to play the part of King Cyrus. The result was that the two World Wars produced only two enduring and significant results: the Jehovan vengeance on the symbolic "persecutor" and the Jewish triumph in the form of a new "restoration". Thus the symbolic legend of what happened at Babylon had by the Twentieth Century gained the force of the supreme "Law", overriding all other laws, and of truth and history.

The legend itself seems to have been two-thirds untruth, or what today would be called propaganda. King Belshazzar himself was apparently invented by the Levites. The historical book which records the fall of Babylon was compiled several centuries later and was attributed to one "Daniel". It states that he was a Judahite captive in Babylon who rose to the highest place at court there and "sat in the gate of the king" (Nebuchadnezzar) through his skill in interpreting dreams. Upon him devolved the task of interpreting the "writing on the wall" (Daniel, 5).

King "Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar", is then depicted as offering an insult to the Judahites by using "the golden and silver vessels" taken by his father from the temple in Jerusalem for a banquet with his princes, wives and concubines. Thereon the fingers of a man's hand write on the wall the words, "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin". Daniel, being called to interpret, tells the king that they mean, "God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it; thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting; thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians". Thereon King Belshazzar "in the same night" is slain, and the Persian conqueror enters, who is to "restore" the Judahites.

Thus the end of a king and a kingdom is related directly to an affront offered to Judah and given the guise of a Jehovan retribution and Jewish vengeance. What matter if Daniel and King Belshazzar never existed: by its inclusion in the Levitical scriptures this anecdote gained the status of a legal precedent! When the murder of the Russian Czar, his wife, daughters and son in 1918, again, was related directly to this legend by words quoted from it and scrawled on a blood-bespattered wall this was at once an avowal of authorship of the deed, and a citation of the legal authority for it.

When an ancient legend can produce such effects, twenty-five centuries afterwards, there is little gain in demonstrating its untruth, for politicians and the masses they manipulate alike love their legends more than truth. However, of the three protagonists in this version of the fall of Babylon, only King Cyrus certainly existed; King Belshazzar and Daniel seem to be figures of Levitical phantasy!

The Jewish Encyclopaedia, which points out that King Nebuchadnezzar had no son called Belshazzar and that no king called Belshazzar reigned in Babylon when King Cyrus conquered it, says impartially that "the author of Daniel simply did not have correct data at hand", and thus does not believe that Daniel wrote Daniel. Obviously, if an important Judahite favourite at court, called Daniel, had written the book he would at least have known the name of the king whose end he foretold, and thus have had "correct data".

Evidently the book of Daniel, like the books of the Law attributed to Moses, was the product of Levitical scribes who in it patiently continued to make history conform with their Law, already laid down. If a King Belshazzar could be invented for the purpose of illustration and precedent, so could a prophet Daniel. This, apparently mythical Daniel is the most popular prophet of all with the fervent Zionists of today, who rejoice in the anecdote of the Judahite vengeance and triumph foretold on the wall, and see in it the legal precedent for all later time. The story of our present century has done more than that of any earlier one to strengthen them in this belief and for them Daniel, with his "interpretation" fulfilled "in the same night", gives the conclusive, crushing answer to the earlier Israelite prophets who had envisioned a loving God of all men. The fall of Babylon (as depicted by the Levites) gave practical proof of the truth and force of the "Mosaic" Law.

However, it would all have come to nothing without King Cyrus, who alone of the three protagonists did exist and did either allow, or compel, a few thousand Judahites to return to Jerusalem. At that point in history the Levitical theory of politics, which aimed at the exercise of power through the acquirement of mastery over foreign rulers, was put to its first practical test and was successful.

The Persian king was the first of a long line of Gentile oracles worked by the ruling sect, which through him demonstrated that it had found the secret of infesting, first, and then directing the actions of foreign governments.

By the present century this mastery of governments had been brought to such a degree of power that they were all, in large measure, under one supreme control, so that their actions, in the end, always served the ambition of this supreme party. Towards the end of this book the reader will see how the Gentile oracles were worked, so that the antagonisms of peoples might be incited and brought into collision for this super-national purpose.

However, the reader will need to look into his own soul to find, if he can, the reason why these oracles, his own leaders, submitted.

King Cyrus was the first of them. Without his support the sect could not have set itself up again in Jerusalem and have convinced the incredulous Judahite masses, watching from all parts of the known world, that the racial Law was potent and would be literally fulfilled. The line of cause-and-effect runs straight and clear from the fall of Babylon to this century's great events; the West today owes its successive disappointments and its decline even more to King Cyrus, the first of the Gentile puppets, than to the ingenious, stealthy priesthood itself.

"Judaism originated in the name of the Persian king and by the authority of his Empire, and thus the effect of the Empire of the A1chemenides extends with great power, as almost nothing else, directly into our present age", says Professor Eduard Meyer, and this authority's conclusion is demonstrably true. Five hundred years before the West even began, the Levites laid down the Law, and then through King Cyrus set the precedent and pattern for the downfall of the West itself.

The five books of the Law were still not complete when King Cyrus came to Babylon and conquered. The sect in Babylon was still busy on them and on the supporting version of history which, by such examples as that of "King Belshazzar", was to give plausibility to the unbelievable and supply the precedent for barbaric deeds twenty-five centuries later. The mass of Judahites still knew nothing of the Law of racial intolerance which was being prepared for them, though religious intolerance was by this time familiar to them:

The sect had yet to complete the Law and then to apply it to its own people. When that happened in 458 BC, under another Persian king, the controversy of Zion at last took the shape in which it still implacably confronts its own people and the rest of mankind. The umbilical cord between the Judahites and other men was then finally severed.

These segregated people, before whom the priesthood flaunted its version of the fall of Babylon like a banner, then were set on the road to a future which would find them a compact force among other peoples, to whose undoing they were by their Law dedicated.

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Chapter 6

THE PEOPLE WEPT

The first people to feel the impact of this "Mosaic Law" which the Levites were developing in Babylon were the Samaritans, who in 538 BC warmly welcomed the Judahites returning to Jerusalem and in token of friendship offered to help rebuild the temple, destroyed by the Babylonians in 596 BC. At the Levites' order the Samaritans were brusquely repulsed and at this affront became hostile, so that the restoration of the temple was delayed until 520 BC. (The feud against the Samaritans continued throughout the centuries to the present time, when they have been reduced to a few score or dozen souls).

The friendly approach shows that the new "Law" of the Judeans was unknown to their neighbours, who were taken by surprise by this rebuff. It seems to have been just as little known to, or understood by the Judeans themselves, at that period. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon and, despite anything the priests may have told them, they c1early did not at that time realize that they were to be racially, as well as religiously, debarred from their fellow men.

The repulse of the Samaritans gave the first hint of what was to follow. The Samaritans were Israelites, probably infused with other blood. They practised Jehovah-worship but did not recognize the supremacy of Jerusalem and on that account alone would have incurred the hatred of the Levites, who probably saw in them the danger of an Israelite revival and absorption of Judah. Thus the Samaritans were put under the major ban; even by taking a piece of bread from a Samaritan a Judahite broke all the statutes and judgments of the Levites and abominably defiled himself.

After this first c1ash with their neighbours, the Judeans looked around them at ruined and depopulated Jerusalem. None of them, unless they were ancients, can have known it before. They were few in number: those who "returned" numbered about forty thousand, which was perhaps a tenth or twentieth of the total, for centuries self-dispersed in other lands.

It was not a happy or triumphant return for these people, though it was a major political success for the priesthood. The Levites met the same difficulty as the Zionists in 1903, 1929 and 1953: the chosen people did not want to go to the promised land. Moreover, the leaders did not intend to head "the return"; they wished to stay in Babylon (as the Zionist leaders today wish to stay in New York).

The solution found in 538 BC was similar to the one found in 1946: the zealots were ready to go, and a hapless few, who were too poor to choose, were rounded up to accompany them. Those who desired the privilege of remaining in Babylon (under their own prince, the Exilarch, in his own capital!) were mulcted in fines (just as the wealthy Jews of America are pressed today to provide funds for the Zionist state).

The Jewish nation was already and finally dispersed; obviously it could never again be reassembled in Canaan. That was a fact, unalterable and permanent; "from the exile the nation did not return, but a religious sect only", says Professor Wellhausen. But this symbolic "return" was of the utmost importance to the priesthood in establishing its mystic power over the scattered mass. It could be held up as the proof that "the Law" was true and valid, and that the destiny of the "special people" was to destroy and dominate.

The "return" meant quite different things to the few who returned and to the many who watched from the dispersion. To the few it meant the possibility to practise Jehovah-worship in the way and on the spot prescribed by "the Law". To the many it was a triumph of Judahite nationalism and the portent of the final triumph foreseen by the Law.

This watching mass had seen the means by which the success had been achieved, the conqueror undone and overthrown, and the "captivity" transformed into the "return". Segregation had proved effective, and the chief methods of enforcing this segregation were the ghetto and the synagogue. The ghetto (essentially a Levitical concept) had been tried out in Babylon, in the form of the closed-community in which the Judahites lived.

The collective reading of the law had also proved to be an effective substitute for the ritual of worship which, under the Law, could be performed only at the temple in Jerusalem (this was the beginning of the synagogue). The institutions of the ghetto and the synagogue were adopted by the communities of the dispersion, and gave them a feeling of union with the exiled Judahites and the returned Judeans.

Thus the "religious sect" which "returned" to an unknown Jerusalem was also the core of the nation-within-nations, state-within-states. The priesthood had shown itself able to maintain its theocracy without a territory of its own and under a foreign king. It had ruled its followers under its own Law; and of this Law as it was first imposed in exile on the Judahites in Babylon Dr. Kastein says: "Instead of the constitution of the defunct state, communal autonomy was established, and, instead of the power of the state, there came into being another power, more reliable and more enduring: the stern and inexorable regime enforced by the obligation to render unquestioning obedience to the regulations of the ritual."

The words deserve careful study; many of "the regulations of the ritual" have been quoted in this book. The Levites had succeeded, in "captivity" and on foreign soil, in "enforcing" a "stern and inexorable regime". The achievement is unique, and it has been a continuing one, from that time to our day.

"Strangers" are usually puzzled to imagine any means by which the ruling sect could keep so firm a hold over a community scattered about the world. This power is based, ultimately, on terror and fear. Its mysteries are kept hidden from the stranger, but by diligent study he may gain some idea of them.

The weapon of excommunication is a dreaded one, and the fear which it inspires rests to some extent on the literal Judaist's belief in the physical efficacy of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy and other books; the Jewish Encyclopaedia testifies to this continuing belief. In this matter there is a strong resemblance to the African Native's belief that he will die if he is "tagati'd", and to the American Negro's fear of voodooist spells. Casting out of the fold is a much-feared penalty (and in the past was often a lethal one), of which examples may be found in the literature of our day.

Also, for pious (or for that matter superstitious) Judaists the Torah-Talmud is the only Law, and if they submit formally to the laws of countries where they dwell, it is with this inner reservation. Under that only-Law the priesthood wields all judicial and magisterial powers (and often has had these formally delegated to it by governments), and literally the Law includes capital punishment on numerous counts; in practice the priesthood in closed-communities of the dispersion has often exacted that penalty.

The Jerusalem to which a few returned was far from Babylon, in those times, and after their first coup (the repulse of the Samaritans' offer of friendship) the Levites apparently found themselves unable, from a distance, to restrain the normal impulses of human kind. The Judahites, in their impoverished fragment of land, began to settle down and intermarry with their neighbours for all that. They broke no law comprehended by them. The books of the Law were still being compiled in Babylon; they knew about Solomon's hundreds of wives and Moses's Midianite father-in-law, but did not yet know that Moses had been resurrected in order to exterminate all the Midianites save the virgins. Thus they married their neighbours' sons and daughters and this natural intermingling continued for about eighty years after the return.

During that period the Levites in Babylon completed the Law, the impact of which all nations have felt ever since. Ezekiel of the High Priest's family was its chief architect and probably all five books of the Law, as they have come down, bear his mark. He was the founding-father of intolerance, of racialism and vengeance as a religion, and of murder in the name of God.

The book of Ezekiel is the most significant of all the Old Testament books. It is more significant than even Deuteronomy, Leviticus and Numbers because it seems to be the fountainhead from which the dark ideas of those books of the Law first sprang. For instance, the student of the curses enumerated in Deuteronomy is bound to suspect that the deity in whose name they were uttered was of diabolic nature, not divine; the name, "God", in the sense which has been given to it, cannot be coupled with such menaces. In Ezekiel's book the student finds this suspicion expressly confirmed. Ezekiel puts into the very mouth of God the statement that he had made evil laws in order to inspire misery and fear! This appears in chapter 20 and gives the key to the whole mystery of "the Mosaic Law" .

In this passage Ezekiel appears to be answering Jeremiah's attack on the Levites in the matter of sacrificing the firstborn: "And they have built the high places to burn their sons and daughters in the fire; which I commanded not, neither came it into my heart". Ezekiel is not much concerned about the lot of the sons and daughters but is c1early enraged by the charge that the Lord had not commanded the sacrifice of the firstborn, when the scribes had repeatedly ascribed this command to him. His retort is concerned only to show that God had so commanded and thus to justify the priesthood; the admission that the commandment was evil is casual and nonchalant, as if this were of no importance:

"I am the Lord your God; walk in my statutes and keep my judgments, and do them….Notwithstanding the children rebelled against me; they walked not in my statutes, neither kept my judgments to do them…. then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them, to accomplish my anger against them in the wilderness….Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good and judgments whereby they should not live; And I polluted them in their own gifts, in that they caused to pass through the fire all that openeth the womb, that I might make them desolate, to the end that they might know that I am the Lord."

The ruling of Christian theologians, that the Old Testament is of "equal divine authority" with the New, presumably includes this passage! Ezekiel, in his day, forbade any protest by quickly adding, "And shall I be enquired of by you, O house of Israel? As I live, saith the Lord, I will not be enquired of by you".

Ezekiel experienced the Fall of Judah and the removal of the sect to Babylon, so that his book is in parts an eye-witness account of events. Its other, "prophetic" parts show this founding-father of literal Judaism to have been a man of dark, even demoniac obsessions; indeed, parts of the book of Ezekiel probably could not be publicly printed as anything but Scripture.

Early in it he portrays (in words which he also attributes to the Lord God) a siege of Jerusalem in which he, Ezekiel, to atone "for the iniquity of the people", is commanded to eat human excrement baked before his eyes. At his plea, that he has always scrupulously observed the dietary laws and never taken anything abominable in his mouth, this is mitigated to cow's dung. Then he threatens transgressors with cannibalism, a curse on which the Levites laid marked stress:

". . . the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee and the sons shall eat their fathers…. a third part shall fall by the sword…. and I wil1 scatter a third part unto all the winds….famine and evil beasts…. pestilence and blood….."

All this is to be the retribution for non-observance, not for evil deeds. Pages of cursings follow and Jehovah promises to use the Gentiles as the rod of chastisement: "Wherefore I will bring the worst of the heathen,.. and they shall possess your houses".

Portraying what will happen to those who worship "other gods", Ezekiel in a characteristic vision sees "them that have charge over the city" (Jerusalem) "draw near, every man with his destroying weapon in his hand," One, with a writer's inkhorn by his side, is commanded by the Lord, "go through the midst of Jerusalem and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof" (these are the zealots in "observance"). The foreheads having been marked, Ezekiel quotes the Lord, "in my hearing", as saying to the men, "Go ye through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children and women; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark . . . and they went forth and slew in the city".

After Ezekiel's time men may have thought it wise to be seen sighing and crying in Jerusalem; hence, perhaps, the Wailing Wall. Chapter on chapter of menaces follow, always with the alluring proviso that if the transgressors turn from their wickedness towards observance, even worse things will then be visited on the heathen:

"I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land…. And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers, and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God…. Assemble yourselves, and come; gather yourselves on every side to my sacrifice that I do sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice for you, even a great sacrifice upon the mountains of Israel, that ye may eat flesh and drink blood. Ye shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth…. And ye shall eat fat till ye be full, and drink blood till ye be drunken…. and I will set my glory among the heathen, and all the heathen shall see my judgment that I have executed, and my hand that I have laid upon them".

While the school of scribes founded by Ezekiel continued for eighty years, in Babylon, to compile their Law, the repatriated Judahites in Jerusalem gradually developed normal relationships with their neighbours. They had never known the regime of bigotry and exclusion which was being prepared for them in Babylon. Many of the people still prayed to "other gods" for rain, crops, sun and herds, and to Jehovah in tribal feuds.

Then, in 458 BC, the Levites struck.

Their Law was ready, which was not by itself of much importance. The Persian King was ready to enforce it for them, and that was of the greatest importance, then and up to the present moment. For the first time the ruling sect accomplished the wonder which they have since repeatedly achieved: by some means they induced a foreign ruler, who was their ostensible master and to all outer appearances a mighty potentate in his own right, to put his soldiers and money at their disposal.

On this day in 458 BC the Judahites in Jerusalem were finally cut off from mankind and enslaved in a way they never knew in Babylon. This was the true "start of the affair". The story is told in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Levitical emissaries from Babylon who were sent to Jerusalem to enforce Ezekiel's law.

Ezra of the high priesthood came from Babylon to Jerusalem with some 1500 followers. He came in the name of the Persian King Artaxerxes the Longhanded, with Persian soldiers and Persian gold. He arrived just as Dr. Chaim Weizmann arrived in Pa1estine in 1917, supported by British arms and British gold, and in 1947, supported by American money and power. Ezra was in legal form a Persian emissary (Dr. Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew, was in legal form a British emissary in 1917).

What means the sect found to bend King Artaxerxes to its will, none can now discover; after King Cyrus, he was the second potentate to play a puppet's part and in our century this readiness has become a strict qualification for public life.

Ezra brought the new racial Law with him. He enforced it first among his own travelling companions, allowing only those to accompany him who could prove that they were Judahites by descent, or Levites. When he reached Jerusalem he was "filled with horror and dismay" (Dr. Kastein) by the prevalence of mixed marriages. The Judahites were finding happiness in their fashion; "by tolerating miscegenation with neighbouring tribes they had established peaceful relations based on family ties".

Dr. Kastein (who was equally horrified by this picture many centuries afterwards) has to admit that the Judahites by this intermingling "observed their tradition as it was understood at the time" and broke no law known to them. Ezra brought Ezekiel's new Law, which once more supplanted the old "tradition". In his status as emissary of the Persian king he had the Jerusalemites assembled and told them that all mixed marriages were to be dissolved; thenceforth "strangers" and everything foreign were to be rigorously exc1uded. A commission of elders was set up to undo all the wedlocks forged and thus to destroy the "peaceful relations based on family ties".

Dr. Kastein says that "Ezra's measure was undoubtedly reactionary; it raised to the dignity of a law an enactment which at that time was not included in the Torah" (which the Levites, in Babylon, were still writing down). Dr. Kastein's use of the word "dignity" is of interest in this connection; his book was published, in Berlin, in the year, twenty-four centuries later, when Hitler enacted exactly the same kind of law; it was then called "infamous" by the Zionists, and the armies of the West, reversing the role of the Persian soldiers of 458 BC, were mobilized to destroy it!

The effect of this deed was the natural one, in 458 BC as in 1917 AD: the neighbouring peoples were affronted and alarmed by the unheard-of innovation. They saw the threat to themselves and they attacked Jerusalem, tearing down the symbols of the inferiority imputed to them: its walls. By that time Ezra, like any Twentieth Century Zionist, had evidently returned to his home abroad, for once more the artificial structure began to crumble and natural tendencies were resumed: intermarriage began again and led anew to "peaceful relations based on family ties". Only force can prevent this from happening.

After thirteen years, in 445 BC, the elders in Babylon struck again. Nehemiah was another figure, as typical of our century as of that time in Babylon. He was of Judahite descent and stood high in the Persian king's favour (as Zionist "advisers" today habitually stand at the right hand of British Prime Ministers and American Presidents; the parallel could not be much closer). He was cupbearer to Artaxerxes himself. He arrived from Babylon in Jerusalem with dictatorial power and enough men and money to re-wall the city (at Persian expense; the parallel with today continues), and it thus became the first true ghetto. It was an empty one, and when the walls were ready Nehemiah ordered that one in ten of the Judahites be chosen by lot to reside in it.

Race thus became the supreme, though still unwritten tenet of the Law. Jehovah-worshippers who could not satisfy Persian officials and the Levite elders of their descent from Judah, Benjamin or Levi were rejected "with horror" (Dr. Kastein). Every man had to establish "the undisputed purity of his stock" from the registers of births (Hitler's Twentieth Century edict about the Aryan grandmothers was less extreme).

Then, in 444 BC, Nehemiah had Ezra embody the ban on mixed marriages in the Torah, so that at last what had been done became part of the much-amended "Law" (and David and Solomon presumably were posthumously cast out of the fold). The heads of clans and families were assembled and required to sign a pledge that they and their peoples would keep all the statutes and judgments of the Torah, with special emphasis on this new one.

In Leviticus the necessary insertion was made: "I have severed you from other people that ye should be mine". Thenceforth no Judahite might marry outside the clan, under penalty of death; every man who married a foreign woman committed a sin against God (Nehemiah, 13.27; this is the law in the Zionist state today). "Strangers" were forbidden to enter the city, so that the Judahites "might be purified from everything foreign".

Nehemiah and Ezra were both eye-witnesses. Nehemiah is the ideal, unchallengeable narrator: he was there, he was the dictator, his was the deed. He says that when Ezra for the first time read this new Law to the Jerusalemites:

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law".

These twelve words of contemporary journalism bring the scene as clearly before today's reader as if it had occurred twenty-four hours, not twenty-four centuries ago. He sees the weeping, ghettoized throng of 444 BC through the eyes of the man who, with Persian warriors at his side, forced them into their first true captivity, the spiritual one which thereafter was to enclose any man who called himself "Jew".

Nehemiah remained twelve years in Jerusalem and then returned to the Babylonian court. At once the artificial structure he had set up in Jerusalem began to disintegrate, so that some years later he descended again on the city, where once more mixed marriages had occurred. He "forcibly dissolved" these, also setting "the severest penalties" on further transgressions of the kind. Next, "with a view to applying rigorously the selective principle, he again carefully studied the register of births" and ejected all, including even Aaronite families, in whose descent the slightest flaw could be detected. Last, he "ruthlessly purged" the community of all who had failed in "unquestioning and unhesitating allegiance to the established order and the law" and made the entire people renew their pledge.

This is known as "the New Covenant" (as Deuteronomy was the Second Law; these qualifying words are the milestones of the supplanting heresy). It had to be signed, at Levite order and under Persian duress, by every man in Jerusalem singly, as if it were a business contract. Then Nehemiah finally departed for Babylon, his home, having "completed the task of isolation" and "left behind him a community which, agreed as it now was on all fundamental questions, was able to fend for itself. He had organized their everyday life for them and built up their spiritual foundations". These words are Dr. Kastein's; the reader has seen, also in his words, by what means these Jerusalemites were brought to "agree on all fundamental questions".

By this time about four hundred years had passed since the repudiation of Judah by Israel, and three hundred since the Assyrian conquest of Israel. This period of time the Levites had used to complete the perversion of the older tradition, to put their racio-religious Law in writing, and at last to clamp it, like shackles, on the Judahites in the little Persian province of Judea. They had succeeded in setting up their fantastic, tribal creed and in establishing their little theocracy. They had started the catalytic agent on its journey through the centuries.

For more than a hundred generations, since that day when the New Covenant was enforced by Persian arms, and the people who had wept were compelled to sign it anew, a mass of human beings, changing in blood but closely or loosely held in the bonds of this Law, have carried its burden and inheritance, in spiritual isolation from the rest of mankind. The singular paradox remains: though their enchainment was devised by the Levites the chains were Persian. On that day as ever since, though the fanatical sect has dictated their continuing captivity, foreign arms and foreign money have kept them in it.

Where does responsibility lie between those who incite to a deed and those who commit it? If the answer is that the greater and final responsibility lies with the perpetrator, then the verdict of history is incontestably, though strange1y, that responsibility for the heresy of Judaism lies with the Gentiles, who from the time of the Persian kings to this century have done the bidding of the sect that devised it.

It was a heresy: On the day when King Artaxerxes's soldiers forced the Jerusalemites to sign Ezekiel's New Covenant, the perversion of the earlier Israelite tradition was made complete and the affirmation of God was supplanted by the denial of God.

No resemblance remained between the God of the moral commandments and Ezekiel's malevolent deity who boasted that he commanded men to kill their firstborn in order to keep them in awe of himself! This was not revealed God, but a man-made deity, the incarnation of primitive tribalism. What those ancient people signed under duress, in the New Covenant, was either the formal denial of God or the formal claim that God was Judah, and this in fact is the claim expressly made in many Zionist utterances of our time, so that the heresy is openly avowed:

"God is absorbed in the nationalism of Israel. He becomes the national ethos . . . He creates the world in the Hebrew language. He is the National God" (Rabbi Solomon Goldman).

"We and God grew up together. . . We have a national God. . . We believe that God is a Jew, that there is no English or American God" (Mr. Maurice Samuel).

"It was not God who willed these people and their meaning. It was this people who willed this God and this meaning" (Dr. Kastein).

These statements are explicit, and such phrases are easy to pen in this century, in New York or Chicago, London or Berlin. But at the start of this affair, as Nehemiah recorded:

"All the people wept when they heard the words of the Law" and since that day it has given very many cause to weep.

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Chapter 7

THE TRANSLATION OF THE LAW

The most important event (as it proved) of the next four hundred years was the first translation of the Judaic scriptures (later to become known as the Old Testament) into a foreign tongue, Greek. This enabled, and still enables, "the heathen" to become partially acquainted with the Law that ordained their own enslavement and destruction and the supremacy of Judah. Save for this translation the nature of literal Judaism must have remained a matter of surmise, whereas the translation made it appear to be one of evidence and proof.

For that reason it is at first sight surprising that the translation was ever made (as tradition says, by seventy-two Jewish scholars at Alexandria between 275 and 150 BC.) Dr. Kastein explains that it was undertaken "with a definite object in view, that of making it comprehensible to the Greeks; this led to the distortion and twisting of words, changes of meaning, and the frequent substitution of general terms and ideas for those that were purely local and national".

Dr. Kastein's words in this instance are carelessly chosen if they were intended to disguise what occurred: a matter is not made "comprehensible" to others by distorting and twisting it, changing its meaning, and substituting ambiguous terms for precise ones. Moreover, so learned a Judaic scholar must have known what the Jewish Encyclopaedia records, that the later Talmud even "prohibited the teaching to a Gentile of the Torah, anyone so teaching 'deserving death'." Indeed, the Talmud saw such danger in the acquirement by the heathen of knowledge of the Law that it set up the oral Torah as the last repository of Jehovah's secrets, safe from any Gentile eye.

If the Judaic scriptures were translated into Greek, then, this was not for the benefit of the Greeks (Dr. Kastein wrote for a largely Gentile audience). The reason, almost certainly, was that the Jews themselves needed the translation. The Judahites had lost their Hebrew tongue in Babylon (thereafter it became a priestly mystery, "one of the secret spiritual bonds which held the Judaists of the Diaspora together", as Dr. Kastein says), and spoke Aramaic. However, the largest single body of Jews was in Alexandria, where Greek became their everyday language; many of them could no longer understand Hebrew and a Greek version of their Law was needed as a basis for the rabbinical interpretations of it.

Above all, the elders could not foresee that centuries later a new religion would arise in the world which would take over their scriptures as part of its own Bible, and thus bring "the Mosaic Law" before the eyes of all mankind. Had that been anticipated, the Greek translation might never have been made.

Nevertheless, the translators were evidently reminded by the priests that their work would bring "the Law", for the first time, under Gentile scrutiny; hence the distortions, twistings, changes and substitutions mentioned by Dr. Kastein. An instance of these is apparently given by Deuteronomy 32.21; the translation which has come down to the heathen alludes vaguely to "a foolish nation", whereas the reference in the Hebrew original, according to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, is to "vile and vicious Gentiles".

What was translated? First, the five books of the Law, the Torah. After the "New Covenant" had been forcibly imposed on the Jerusalemites by Ezra and Nehemiah, the priesthood in Babylon had given the Torah yet another revision: "once again anonymous editors lent their past history, their traditions, laws and customs a meaning entirely in keeping with theocracy and applicable to that system of government…. The form which the Torah then received was the final and conclusive form which was not to be altered by one iota; no single thought, word or letter of it was to be changed."

When mortal men repeatedly "lend meaning" to something supposed already to be immutable, and force all spiritual tradition into the framework of their worldly political ambition, what remains cannot be an original revelation of God. What had happened was that the earlier, Israelite tradition had been expunged or cancelled, and in its place the Judaic racial law had assumed "final and conclusive form".

The same method was followed in the compilation of the other books, historical, prophetic or lyrical. The book of Daniel, for instance, was completed at about this time, that is to say, some four hundred years after the events related in it; small wonder that the anonymous author got all his historical facts wrong. Dr. Kastein is candid about the manner in which these books were produced:

"The editors who put the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings into their final form gathered every fragment" (of the old teachings and traditions) and "creatively interpreted them . . . It was impossible always definitely to assign particular words to particular persons, for they had so frequently worked anonymously, and, as the editors were more concerned with the subject matter than with philological exactitude, they were content with stringing the sayings of the prophets together as best they could". (This method might account for the attribution of the identical "Messianic" prophecy to two prophets, Isaiah 2, 2-4, and Micah 4, 1-4, and for the numerous repetitions to be found in other books).

The subject matter, then, was the important thing, not historical truth, or "philological exactitude", or the word of God. The subject matter was political nationalism in the most extreme form ever known to man, and conformity with this dogma was the only rule that had to be observed. The way in which these books were compiled, after Judah was cast off by Israel, and the reasons, are clear to any who study their origin.

The resultant product, the growth of five or six hundred years and the work of generations of political priests, was the book which was translated into Greek around 150 BC. After the lifetime of Jesus it, and the New Testament, was translated into Latin by Saint Jerome, when both "came to be regarded by the Church as of equal divine authority and as sections of one book" (from a typical modern encyclopaedia), a theological dictum which was formally confirmed by the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century of our era and has been adopted by nearly all Protestant churches, although in this matter they might have found valid reason to protest.

In view of the changes which were made, at the translation, (see Dr. Kastein's words, above), none but Judaist scholars could tell today how closely the Old Testament in the Hebrew-Aramaic original compares with the version which has come down, from the first translation into Greek, as one of the two sections of Christendom's Bible. Clearly substantial changes were made, and quite apart from that there is the "oral Torah", and the Talmudic continuation of the Torah, so that the Gentile world has never known the whole truth of the Judaic Law.

Nevertheless, the essence of it is all in the Old Testament as it has come down to Christendom, and that is a surprising thing. Whatever may have been expunged or modified, the vengeful, tribal deity, the savage creed and the law of destruction and enslavement remain plain for all to ponder. The fact is that no amount of twisting, distortion, changing or other subterfuge could conceal the nature of the Judaic Law, once it was translated; although glosses were made, the writing beneath remains clear, and this is the best evidence that, when the first translation was authorized, the universal audience it would ultimately reach was not foreseen.

With that translation the Old Testament, as we now call and know it, entered the West, its teaching of racial hatred and destruction only a little muted by the emendations. That was before the story of the West even had truly begun.

By the time the West, and Christianity, were nineteen and a half centuries old, the political leaders there, being much in awe of the central sect of Judaism, had begun to speak with pious awe of the Old Testament, as if it were the better half of the Book by which they professed to live. Nevertheless it was, as it always had been, the Law of their peoples' destruction and enslavement, and all their deeds, under the servitude which they accepted, led towards that end.

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Chapter 8

THE LAW AND THE IDUMEANS

While the Judaic scriptures, thus compiled, were on their way, thus translated, from the Alexandrine Jews to the Greeks and thereafter to the other heathen, Persian, Greek and Roman overlords followed each other in little Judea.

These chaotic centuries brought in their course the second significant event of the period: the enforced conversion of the Idumeans to Jehovaism ("Judaism" is a word apparently first used by the Judean historian Josephus to denote the culture and way of life of Judea, as "Hellenism" described those of Greece, and originally had no religious connotation. For want of a better word it will now be used in this book to identify the racial religion set up by the Levites on their perversion of the "Mosaic Law".)

Only one other mass-conversion to Judaism is known to recorded history, and that one, which came about eight or nine centuries later, was of immediate importance to our present generation, as will be shown. Individual conversion, on the other hand, was at this period frequent, and apparently was encouraged even by the rabbis, for Jesus himself, according to Saint Matthew, told the scribes and pharisees, rebukingly, that they "compass sea and land to make one proselyte" .

Thus, for some reason, the racial ban introduced by the Second Law and the New Covenant was not, at this time, being enforced. Presumably the explanation is the numerical one; if the racial law had been strictly enforced the small tribe of Judah would have died out and the priesthood, with its creed, would have been left like generals with a plan of battle, but no army.

Evidently there was much intermingling, for whatever reason. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says that "early and late Judah derived strength from the absorption of outsiders" and other authorities agree, so that anything like a purebred tribe of Judah must have disappeared some centuries before Christ, at the latest.

Nevertheless, the racial Law remained in full vigour, not weakened by these exceptions, so that in the Christian era proselytizing virtually ceased and the Judaists of the world, although obviously they were not descended from Judah, became again a community separated from mankind by a rigid racial ban. Racial exclusion remained, or again became, the supreme tenet of formal Zionism, and the Talmudic ruling was that "proselytes are as injurious to Judaism as ulcers to a sound body".

Fervent Zionists still beat their heads on a wall of lamentation when they consider the case of the Idumeans, which, they hold, proves the dictum just quoted. The problem of what to do with them apparently arose out of the priests' own sleight-of-hand feats with history and The Law. In the first historical book, Genesis, the Idumeans are shown as the tribe descended from Esau ("Esau the father of the Edomites"), who was own brother to Jacob-called-Israel. This kinsmanship between Judah and Edom was apparently the original tradition, so that the Idumeans' special status was still recognized when Deuteronomy was produced in 621 BC, the Lord then "saying unto Moses":

"And command thou the people, saying, Ye are to pass through the coast of your brethren the children of Edom. . . Meddle not with them; for I will not give you of their land, no, not so much as a foot breadth. . . And when we passed by from our brethren the children of Esau . . ."

When Numbers came to be written, say two hundred years later, this situation had changed. By then Ezra and Nehemiah, escorted by Persian soldiery, had enforced their racial law on the Judahites, and the Idumeans, like other neighbouring peoples, became hostile (for exactly the same reasons that cause Arab hostility today).

They learned, from Numbers, that, far from being "not meddled" with, they were now marked down for "utter destruction". Thus in Numbers Moses and his followers no longer "pass by our brethren the children of Esau"; they demand to pass through the Idumean land. The King of Idumea refuses permission, whereon Moses takes another route and the Lord promises him that "Edom shall be a possession" .

From other passages in The Law the Idumeans were able to learn the fate of cities so taken in possession; in them, nothing was to be left alive that breathed. (The scribes dealt similarly with the Moabites; in Deuteronomy Moses is commanded "Distress not the Moabites, neither contend with them in battle; for I will not give thee of their land for a possession"; in Numbers, the divine command is that the Moabites be destroyed).

From about 400 BC on, therefore, the Judeans were distrusted and feared by neighbouring tribes, including the Idumeans. They were proved right in this, for during the brief revival of Judah under the Hasmoneans, John Hyreanus, who was king and high priest in Judea, fell on them and at the swordpoint forced them to submit to circumcision and the Mosaic Law. Of the two versions of The Law ("not to meddle" and "take possession") he obeyed the second, which might have been a satisfactory solution if the matter had ended there, for any good rabbi could have told him that either, neither or both of these decrees was right ("If the Rabbis call 1eft right and right left, you must believe it": Dr. William Rubens).

But the matter did not end there. A law set up in this way throws up a new problem for each one that is solved. Having "taken possession", was John Hyreanus to "utterly destroy" and "save nothing alive that breatheth" of "our brethren, the children of Esau"? He disobeyed that law, and contented himself with the forcible conversion. But by so doing he made himself a capital transgressor, like Saul, the first king of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah, long before. For this very thing, stopping short of utter destruction (by sparing King Agag and some beasts), Saul had been repudiated, dethroned and destroyed (according to the Levitical version of history).

John Hyrcanus had to deal with two political parties. Of these, the more moderate Sadducees, who supported the monarchy, presumably tendered the counsel to spare the Idumeans, and merely by force to make them Jews. The other party was that of the Pharisees, who represented the old despotic priesthood of the Levites and wished to restore it in full sovereignty.

Presumably these fanatical Pharisees, as heirs of the Levites, would have had him exact the full rigour of the Law and "utterly destroy" the Idumeans. They continued fiercely to oppose him (as Samuel opposed Saul) and to work for the overthrow of the monarchy. What is of particular interest today, they later claimed that from his clemency towards the Idumeans the entire ensuing catastrophe of Judea came! They saw in the second destruction of the temple and the extinction of Judea in AD 70 the prescribed penalty for John Hyrcanus's failure in observance; like Saul, he had "transgressed".

The Pharisees had to wait about 150 years for the proof of this argument, if proof it was to any but themselves. Out of the converted Idumeans came one Antipater who rose to high favour in the little court at Jerusalem (as the legendary Daniel had risen at the much greater courts of Babylon and Persia). The Pharisees themselves appealed to the Roman truimvir, Pompey, to intervene in Judea and restore the old priesthood, while abolishing the little monarchy. Their plan went agley; though the Hasmonean dynasty was in fact exterminated in the chaotic decades of little wars and insurrections that followed, Antipater the Idumean rose until Caesar made him procurator of Judea, and his son, Herod, was by Antony made king of Judea!

In the sequel, utter confusion reigned in the little province so that even the shadow of independence vanished and Rome, left no other choice, began directly to rule the land.

For this denouement the Pharisees, as the authors of Roman intervention, were apparently to blame. They laid the fault on "the half caste" and "Idumean slave", Herod. Had John Hyrcanus but "observed the Law" and "utterly destroyed" the Idumeans, 150 years before, all this would not have come about, they said. It is illuminating to see with what bitter anger Dr. Josef Kastein, two thousand years later, took up this reproach, as if it were an event of the day before. A Twentieth Century Zionist, who wrote in the time of Hitler's advent to power in Germany, he was convinced that this offence against the racial law had brought the second calamity on Judea.

However, the calamity of Judea was also the victory of the Pharisees, as will be seen, and this is typical of the paradoxes in which the story of Zion abounds from its start.

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Chapter 9

THE RISE OF THE PHARISEES

These Pharisees, who formed the most numerous political party in the little Roman province of Judea, contained the dominant inner sect, earlier represented by the Levite priesthood. They made themselves the carriers of the Levitical idea in its most fanatical form, as it had found expression in Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah; they were sworn to "the strict observance of Levitical purity", says the Jewish Encyclopaedia.

As the Levites had triumphed over the Israelite remonstrants, and had succeeded in severing Judah from its neighbours, so did the Pharisees, their successors, stand ready to crush any attempt to reintegrate the Judeans in mankind. They were the guardians of the destructive idea, and the next chapter in the story of Zion was to be that of their victory; as in the case of the Levites, the background to it was to be that of Jerusalem destroyed.

Among the priests themselves, the passing generations had produced something of a revolt against the process of constant amendment of The Law, begun by the scribes of the school of Ezekiel and Ezra. These priests held that The Law was now immutable and must not be further "reinterpreted".

To this challenge (which strikes at the very root of Judaist nationalism) the Pharisees in deadly enmity opposed their reply: that they were the keepers of "the traditions" and o that oral Law, directly imparted by God to Moses, which must never be put in writing but which governed all the rest of The Law. This claim to possess the secrets of God (or, in truth, to be God) is at the heart of the mystic awe in which so many generations of Jews hold "the elders"; it has a power to affright which even enlightened beings on the far fringes of Jewry cannot quite escape.

Nevertheless, the instinctive impulse to break free from this thrall has at all times thrown up a moderate party in Judaism, and at this period it was that of the Sadducees, which represented the bulk of the priesthood and stood for "keeping the peace of the city" and avoiding violent conflict with the Roman overlords. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were bitter foes. This internal dissension among Jews has continued for twenty-five hundred years into our time.

It is chiefly of academic interest to the rest of mankind (though it has to be recorded) because history shows that whenever the dispute for and against "seeking the peace of the city" has reached a climax, the party of segregation and destruction has always prevailed, and the Judaist ranks have closed behind it. The present century has given the latest example to this. At its start the established Jewish communities of Germany, England and America (who may be compared with the Sadducees) were implacably hostile to the Zionists from Russia (the Pharisees), but within fifty years the extreme party had made itself the exclusive spokesman of "the Jews" with the Western governments, and had succeeded in beating down nearly all opposition among the Jewish communities of the world.

The Pharisees occupy the second place in the pedigree of the sect which has brought about such large events in our time. The line of descent is from the Levites in Babylon, through the Pharisees in Jerusalem, through the Talmudists of Spain and the rabbis of Russia, to the Zionists of today.

The name "Pharisee", according to the Judaist authorities, means "one who separates himself", or keeps away from persons or things impure in order to attain the degree of holiness and righteousness required in those who would commune with God. The Pharisees formed a league or brotherhood of their own, admitting to their inmost councils only those who, in the presence of three members, pledged themselves to the strict observance of Levitical purity. They were the earliest specialists in secret conspiracy, as a political science.

The experience and knowledge gained by the Pharisees may be plainly traced in the methods used by the conspiratorial parties which have emerged in Europe during the last two centuries, and particularly in those of the destructive revolution in Europe, which has been Jewish-organized and Jewish-led.

For instance, the Pharisees originally devised the basic method, resting on mutual fear and suspicion, by which in our day conspirators are held together and conspiratorial bodies made strong. This is the system of spies-on-spies and informers-among-informers on which the Communist Party is built (and its Red Army; the official regulations of which show the "political commissar" and "informer" to be a recognized part of the military structure, from the high-command level to the platoon one).

The Pharisees first employed this device, basing it on a passage in Leviticus: "Ye shall place a guard around my guard" (quoted by the Jewish Encyclopaedia from the Hebrew original, in use among Jews). The nature of the revolutionary machine which was set up in Europe in the Nineteenth Century cannot be understood at all unless the Talmudic knowledge and training be taken into account, which most of its organizers and leaders inherited; and the Pharisees were the first Talmudists. They claimed divine authority for any decision of their Scribes, even in case of error, and this is a ruling concept of the Talmud.

Under the domination of the Pharisees the Messianic idea first emerged, which was to have great consequences through the centuries. It was unknown to the earlier Israelite prophets; they never admitted the notion of an exclusive, master-race, and therefore they could not be aware of the later, consequential concept of a visitant who would come in person to set up the supreme kingdom of this exclusive master-race on earth.

The nature of this Messianic event is clear, in the Judaist authorities. The Jewish Encyclopaedia says the Pharisees' conception of it was that "God's kingship shall be universally recognized in the future. . . God's kingship excluded any other". As Jehovah, according to the earlier Torah, "knew" only the Jews, this meant that the world would belong to the Jews. The later Talmud confirmed this, if any doubt remained, by ruling that "the non-Jews are as such precluded from admission to a future world" (the former Rabbi Laible).

The mass of the Judeans undoubtedly expected that "the Anointed one", when he came, would restore their national glory; in the perfect theocratic state he would be their spiritual leader, but also their temporal one who would reunite the scattered people in a supreme kingdom of this world. The Messianic idea, as it took shape under the Pharisees, was not an expectation of any kingdom of heaven unrelated to material triumph on earth, or at any rate it was not this among the mass of the people.

The Messianic expectation, indeed, must in a sense have been the logical and natural result of the sect's own teaching. The Pharisees, like the Levites whose message they carried on, claimed to know all things, from the date of the world's creation, and its purpose, to the manner of the special people's triumph.

Only one thing they never stated: the moment of that glorious consummation. The burden of observance which they laid on the people was harsh, however, and it was but natural that, like prison inmates serving a term, the people should clamour to know when they would be free.

That seems to be the origin of Messianism. The people who once had "wept" to hear the words of the New Law, now had borne its rigour for four hundred years. Spontaneously the question burst from them: When? When would the glorious consummation come, the miraculous end? They were "doing all the statutes and judgments", and the performance of them meant a heavy daily task and burden. They were doing all this under "a covenant", which promised a specific reward. When would this reward be theirs? Their rulers were in direct communion with God, and knew God's mysteries; they must be able to answer this question, When?

This was the one question which the Pharisees could not answer. They seem to have given the most ingenious answer they could devise: though they would not say when, they would say that one day "the Messiah the Prince" would appear (Daniel), and then there would be given to him "dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him".

Thus the compressed, ghettoized Judean spirit was anaesthetized with the promise of a visitant; Messianism appeared and produced the recurrent outbreaks of frenzied anticipation, the latest of which our Twentieth Century is experiencing.

Such was the setting of the scene when, nearly two thousand years ago, the man from Galilee appeared. At that time those Judeans who remained in Judea had spent the six hundred years since their casting-off by Israel in what Dr. John Goldstein, in our day, calls "Jewish darkness", and at the end of this period had come to wait and hope for the liberating Messiah.

The visitant who then appeared claimed to point them the way to "the kingdom of heaven". He was the very opposite road from that, leading over ruined nations to a temple filled with gold, towards which the Pharisees beckoned them, crying "Observe!"

The Pharisees were strong and the foreign "governor" quailed before their menaces (the picture was very much like that of our day) and those of the people who saw in the newcomer the Messiah they awaited, despite his contempt for worldly rewards, put themselves in danger of death by saying so. They were "transgressing", and the Roman ruler, like the Persian king five hundred years earlier, was ready to enforce "the Law".

Evidently many of these people were only too ready to listen, if they were allowed, to any who could show them the way out of their darkness into the light and the community of mankind. However, victory lay with the Pharisees (as with the Levites of yore), so that, once more, many of these people had cause to weep, and the catalytic force was preserved intact.

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Chapter 10

THE MAN FROM GALILEE

When Jesus was born the vibrant expectation that a marvellous being was about to appear was general among the Judeans. They longed for such proof that Jehovah intended to keep the Covenant with his chosen people, and the scribes, reacting to the pressure of this popular longing, gradually had introduced into the scriptures the idea of the anointed one, the Messiah, who would come to fulfil his bargain.

The Targams, the rabbinical commentaries on the Law, said: "How beautiful he is, the Messiah king who shall arise from the house of Judah. He will gird up his loins and advance to do battle with his enemies and many kings shall be slain".

This passage shows what the Judeans had been led to expect. They awaited a militant, avenging Messiah (in the tradition of "all the firstborn of Egypt" and the destruction of Babylon) who would break Judah's enemies "with a rod of iron" and "dash them in pieces like a potter's vase"; who would bring them empire of this world and the literal fulfilment of the tribal Law; for this was what generations of Pharisees and Levites had foretold.

The idea of a lowly Messiah who would say "love your enemies" and be "despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows" was not present in the public mind at all and would have been "despised and rejected", had any called attention to these words of Isaiah (which only gained significance after Jesus had lived and died).

Yet the being who appeared, though he was lowly and taught love, apparently claimed to be this Messiah and was by many so acclaimed!

In few words he swept aside the entire mass of racial politics, which the ruling sect had heaped on the earlier, moral law, and like an excavator revealed again what had been buried. The Pharisees at once recognized a most dangerous "prophet and dreamer of dreams".

The fact that he found so large a following among the Judeans shows that, even if the mass of the people wanted a militant, nationalist Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans, many among them must subconsciously have realised that their true captivity was of the spirit and of the Pharisees, more than of the Romans. Nevertheless, the mass responded mechanically to the Pharisaic politicians' charge that the man was a blasphemer and bogus Messiah.

By this response they bequeathed to all future generations of Jews a tormenting doubt, no less insistent because it must not be uttered (for the name Jesus may not even be mentioned in a pious Jewish home): Did the Messiah appear, only to be rejected by the Jews, and if so, what is their future, under The Law?

What manner of man was this? Another paradox in the story of Zion is that in our generation Christian divines and theologians often insist that "Jesus was a Jew", whereas the Judaist elders refuse to allow this (those Zionist rabbis who occasionally tell political or "interfaith" audiences that Jesus was a Jew are not true exceptions to this rule; they would not make the statement among Jews and seek to produce an effect among their non-Jewish listeners, for political reasons). *

This public assertion, "Jesus was a Jew", is always used in our century for political purposes. It is often employed to quell objections to the Zionist influence in international politics or to the Zionist invasion of Palestine, the suggestion being that, as Jesus was a Jew, none ought to object to anything purporting to be done in the name of Jews. The irrelevance is obvious, but mobs are moved by such phrases, and the paradoxical result, once again, is that a statement, most offensive to literal Jews, is most frequently made by non-Jewish politicians and ecclesiastics who seek Jewish favour.

The English abbreviation, "Jew", is recent and does not correspond to anything denoted by the Aramaic, Greek or Roman terms for "Judahite" or "Judean", which were in use during the lifetime of Jesus. In fact, the English noun "Jew" cannot be defined (so that dictionaries, which are scrupulously careful about all other words, are reduced to such obvious absurdities as "A person of Hebrew race"); and the Zionist state has no legal definition of the term (which is natural, because the Torah, which is the Law, exacts pure Judahite descent, and a person of this lineage is hardly to be found in the entire world).

If the statement, "Jesus was a Jew", has meaning therefore, it must apply to the conditions prevailing in his time. In that case it would mean one of three things, or all of them: that Jesus was of the tribe of Judah (therefore Judahite); that he was of Judean domicile (and therefore Judean); that he was religiously "a Jew", if any religion denoted by that term existed in his time. Race, residence, religion, then.

This book is not the place to argue the question of Jesus's racial descent, and the surprising thing is that Christian divines allow themselves some of the statements which they make. The reader should form his own opinion, if he desires to have one in this question.

The genealogy of Mary is not given in the New Testament, but three passages might imply that she was of Davidic descent; St. Matthew and St. Luke trace the descent of Joseph from David and Judah, but Joseph was not the blood father of Jesus. The Judaist authorities discredit all these references to descent, holding that they were inserted to bring the narrative into line with prophecy.

As to residence, St. John states that Jesus was born at Bethlehem in Judea through the chance that his mother had to go there from Galilee to register.

* Rabbi Stephen Wise, the leading Zionist organizer in the United States during the 1910-1950 period, used this phrase for the obvious political motive, of confusing non-Jewish hearers. Speaking to such an "inter-faith" meeting at the Carnegie Hall at Christmastide 1925, he stated "Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian" (Christianity was born with the death of Jesus).

For this he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Rabbis Society of the United States, but a Christian Ministers Association "hailed me as a brother". Rabbi Wise adds the characteristic comment: "I know not which was more hurtful, the acceptance of me as a brother and welcoming me into the Christian fold, or the violent diatribe of the rabbis".

Judaist authorities, again, hold that this was inserted to make the account agree with Micah's prophecy that "a ruler" would "come out of Bethlehem".

The Jewish Encyclopaedia insists that Nazareth was Jesus's native town, and indeed, general agreement exists that he was a Galilean, whatever the chance of his actual birthplace. Galilee, where nearly all his life was spent, was politically entirely separate from Judea, under its own Roman tetrarch, and stood to Judea in the relationship of "a foreign country" (Graetz). Marriage between a Judean and a Galilean was fobidden and even before Jesus's birth all Judeans living in Galilee had been forced by Simon Tharsi, one of the Maccabean princes, to migrate to Judah.

Thus, the Galileans were racially and politically distinct from the Judeans.

Was this Galilean, religiously, what might today be called "a Jew"? The Judaist authorities, of course, deny that most strenuously of all; the statement, often heard from the platform and pulpit, might cause a riot in the synagogue.

It is difficult to see what responsible public men can mean when they use the phrase. There was in the time of Jesus no "Jewish" (or even Judahite or Judaist or Judean) religion. There was Jehovahism, and there were the various sects, Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, which disputed violently between themselves and contended, around the temple, for power over the people. They were not only sects, but also political parties, and the most powerful of them were the Pharisees with their "oral traditions" of what God had said to Moses.

If today the Zionists are "the Jews" (and this is the claim accepted by all great Western nations), then the party which in Judea in the time of Jesus corresponded to the Zionists was that of the Pharisees. Jesus brought the whole weight of his attack to bear on these Pharisees. He also rebuked the Sadducees and the scribes, but the Gospels show that he held the Pharisees to be the foe of God and man and that he used an especial scarifying scorn towards them. The things which he singled out for attack, in them and in their creed, are the very things which today's Zionists claim to be the identifying features of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism.

Religiously, Jesus seems beyond doubt to have been the opposite and adversary of all that which would make a literal Jew today or would have made a literal Pharisee then.

None can say with certainty who or what he was, and these suggestive statements by non-Jewish politicians ring as false as the derisive and mocking lampoons about "the bastard" which circulated in the Jewish ghettoes.

What he did and said is of such transcendental importance that nothing else counts. On a much lesser scale Shakespeare's case is somewhat comparable. The quality of inspiration in his works is clear, so that it is of little account whether he wrote them, or who wrote them if he did not, yet the vain argument goes on.

The carpenter's son from Galilee evidently had no formal schooling: "The Jews marvelled, saying, How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?"

What is much more significant, he had known no rabbinical schools or priestly training. His enemies, the Pharisees, testify to that; had he been of their clan or kind they would not have asked, "Whence hath this man this wisdom, and these mighty works".

What gives the teaching of this unlettered young man its effect of blinding revelation, the quality of light first discovered, is the black background, of the Levitical Law and the Pharisaic tradition, against which he moved when he went to Judea. Even today the sudden fullness of enlightenment, in the Sermon on the Mount, dazzles the student who has emerged from a critical perusal of the Old Testament; it is as if high noon came at midnight.

The Law, when Jesus came to "fulfil" it, had grown into a huge mass of legislation, stifling and lethal in its immense complexity. The Torah was but the start; heaped on it were all the interpretations and commentaries and rabbinical rulings; the elders, like pious silkworms, span the thread ever further in the effort to catch up in it every conceivable act of man; generations of lawyers had laboured to reach the conclusion that an egg must not be eaten on the Sabbath day if the greater part of it had been laid before a second star was visible in the sky.

Already the Law and all the commentaries needed a library to themselves, and a committee of international jurists, called to give an opinion on it, would have required years to sift the accumulated layers.

The unschooled youth from Galilee reached out a finger and thrust aside the entire mass, revealing at once the truth and the heresy. He reduced "all the Law and the Prophets" to the two commandments, Love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself.

This was the exposure and condemnation of the basic heresy which the Levites and Pharisees, in the course of centuries, had woven into the Law.

Leviticus contained the injunction, "Love thy neighbour as thyself", but it was governed by the limitation of "neighbour" to fellow-Judeans. Jesus now reinstated the forgotten, earlier tradition, of neighbourly love irrespective of race or creed; this was clearly what he meant by the words, "I am not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil". He made his meaning plain when he added, "Ye have heard that it hath been said . . . hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemy". (The artful objection is sometimes made that the specific commandment, "Hate thine enemy", nowhere appears in the Old Testament. Jesus's meaning was clear; the innumerable injunctions to the murder and massacre of neighbours who were not "neighbours", in which the Old Testament abounds, certainly required hatred and enmity).

This was a direct challenge to The Law as the Pharisees represented it, and Jesus carried the challenge further by deliberately refusing to play the part of the nationalist liberator and conqueror of territory for which the prophecies had cast the Messiah. Probably he could have had a much larger following, and possibly the support of the Pharisees, if he had accepted that role.

His rebuke, again, was terse and clear: "My kingdom is not of this world . . . The kingdom of Heaven is within you . . . Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth. . . but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal".

Everything he said, in such simple words as these, was a quiet, but direct challenge to the most powerful men of his time and place, and a blow at the foundations of the creed which the sect had built up in the course of centuries.

What the entire Old Testament taught in hundreds of pages, the Sermon on the Mount confuted in a few words. It opposed love to hatred, mercy to vengeance, charity to malice, neighbourliness to segregation, justice to discrimination, affirmation (or reaffirmation) to denial, and life to death. It began (like the "blessings-or-cursings" chapters of Deuteronomy) with blessings, but there the resemblance ended.

Deuteronomy offered material blessings, in the form of territory, loot and slaughter, in return for strict performance of thousands of "statutes and judgments", some of them enjoining murder. The Sermon on the Mount offered no material rewards, but simply taught that moral behaviour, humility, the effort to do right, mercy, purity, peaceableness and fortitude would be blessed for their own sake and receive spiritual reward.

Deuteronomy followed its "blessings" with "cursings". The Sermon on the Mount made no threats; it did not require that the transgressor be "stoned to death" or "hanged on a tree", or offer absolution for non-observance at the price of washing the hands in the blood of a heifer. The worst that was to befall the sinner was that he was to be "the least in the kingdom of heaven"; and most that the obedient might expect was to be "called great in the kingdom of heaven".

The young Galilean never taught subservience, only an inner humility, and in one direction he was consistently and constantly scornful: in his attack on the Pharisees.

The name, Pharisees, denoted that they "kept away from persons or things impure". The Jewish Encyclopaedia says, "Only in regard to intercourse with the unclean and the unwashed multitude did Jesus differ widely from the Pharisees". Echo may answer, "Only!" This was of course the great cleavage, between the idea of the tribal deity and the idea of the universal god; between the creed of hatred and the teaching of love. The challenge was clear and the Pharisees accepted it at once. They began to bait their traps, in the very manner described by Jeremiah long before: "All my familiars watched for my halting, saying, Peradventure he will be enticed, and we shall prevail against him, and we shall take our revenge on him".

The Pharisees watched him and asked, "Why eateth your Master with publicans and sinners" (a penal offence under their Law). He was equally their master in debate and in eluding their baited traps, and answered, swiftly but quietly, "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick . . , I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance".

They followed him further and saw his disciples plucking ears of corn to eat on the Sabbath (another offence under the Law), "Behold, thy disciples do that which is not lawful to do upon the Sabbath day". They pursued him with such interrogations, always related to the rite, and never to faith or behaviour; "why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders, for they wash not their hands when they eat bread?". "Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophecy of you, saying, this people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men" ,

This was the lie direct: The Law, he charged, was not God's law, but the law of the Levites and Pharisees: "the commandments of men"!

From this moment there could be no compromise, for Jesus turned away from the Pharisees and "called the multitude, and said unto them, Hear, and understand: Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man, but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man".

With these words Jesus cast public scorn on one of the most jealously-guarded of the priestly prerogatives, involving the great mass of dietary laws with the whole ritual of slaughter, draining of blood, rejection of "that which dieth of itself", and so on. All this was undoubtedly a "commandment of man", although attributed to Moses, and strict observance of this dietary ritual was held to be of the highest importance by the Pharisees, Ezekiel (the reader will recall) on being commanded by the Lord to eat excrement "to atone for the iniquities of the people", had pleaded his unfailing observance of the dietary laws and had had his ordeal somewhat mitigated on that account. Even the disciples were apparently so much under the influence of this dietary tradition that they could not understand how "that which cometh out of the mouth" could defile a man, rather than that which went in, and asked for an explanation, remarking that the Pharisees "were offended, after they heard this saying".

The simple truth which Jesus then gave them was abominable heresy to the Pharisees: "Do not ye understand, that what whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: these are the things which defile a man; but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man".

This last remark was another penal offence under the Law and the Pharisees began to gather for the kill. They prepared the famous trick questions: "Then went the Pharisees and took counsel how they might entangle him in his talk". The two chief questions were, "To whom shall we render tribute?" and "Who then is my neighbour?" A wrong answer to the first would deliver him to punishment by the foreign ruler, Rome. A wrong answer to the second would enable the Pharisees to denounce him to the foreign ruler as an offender against their own Law, and to demand his punishment.

This is the method earlier pictured by Jeremiah and still in use today, in the Twentieth Century. All who have had to do with public debate in our time, know the trick question, carefully prepared beforehand, and the difficulty of answering it on the spur of the moment. Various methods of eluding the trap are known to professional debaters (for instance, to say "No comment", or to reply with another question). To give a complete answer, instead of resorting to such evasions, and in so doing to avoid the trap of incrimination and yet maintain the principle at stake is one of the most difficult things known to man. It demands the highest qualities of quickwittedness, presence of mind and clarity of thought. The answers given by Jesus to these two questions remain for all time the models, which mortal man can only hope to emulate.

"Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?" (the affable tone of honest enquiry can be heard). "But Jesus perceived their wickedness and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? . . . Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's. When they heard these words, they marvelled, and left him and went their way".

On the second occasion, "a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" In his answer Jesus again swept aside the great mass of Levitical Law and restated the two essentials: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart . . . and thy neighbour as thyself". Then came the baited trap: "And who is my neighbour?"

What mortal man would have given the answer that Jesus gave? No doubt some mortal men, knowing like Jesus that their lives were at stake, would have said what they believed, for martyrs are by no means rare. But Jesus did much more than that; he disarmed his questioner like an expert swordsman who effortlessly sends his opponent's rapier spinning into the air. He was being enticed to declare himself openly; to say that "the heathen" were also "neighbours", and thus to convict himself of transgressing The Law. In fact he replied in this sense, but in such a way that the interrogator was undone; seldom was a lawyer so confounded.

The Levitical-Pharisaic teaching was that only Judeans were "neighbours", and of all the outcast heathen they especially abominated the Samaritans (for reasons earlier indicated). The mere touch of a Samaritan was defilement and a major "transgression" (this continues true to the present day). The purpose of the question put to him was to lure Jesus into some statement that would qualify him for the major ban; by choosing the Samaritans, of all peoples, for the purpose of his reply, he displayed an audacity, or genius, that was more than human:

He said that a certain man fell among thieves and was left for dead. Then came "a priest" and "likewise a Levite" (the usual stinging rebuke to those who sought the chance to put him to death), who "passed by on the other side". Last came "a certain Samaritan", who bound the man's injuries, took him to an inn, and paid for his care: "which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?"

The lawyer, cornered, could not bring himself to pronounce the defiling name "Samaritan"; he said, "He that showed mercy on him" and thereby joined himself (as he probably realized too late) with the condemnation of those for whom he spoke, such as "the priest" and "the Levite". "Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise". In these few words, and without any direct allusion, he made his interrogator destroy, out of his own mouth, the entire racial heresy on which the Law had been raised.

One moderate Judaist critic, Mr. Montefiore, has made the complaint that Jesus made one exception to his rule of "love thine enemies"; he never said a good word for the Pharisees.

Scholars may debate the point. Jesus knew that they would kill him or any man who exposed them. It is true that he especially arraigned the Pharisees, together with the scribes, and plainly saw in them the sect responsible for the perversion of the Law, so that the entire literature of denunciation contains nothing to equal this:

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men; for ye neither go in yourselves neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in . . . ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves ….. ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy and faith. . . ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of extortion and excess . . . ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness. . . ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepu1chres of the righteous, and say, if we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have partaken with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers. . ."

Some critics profess to find the last six words surprisingly harsh. However, if they are read in the context of the three sentences which precede them they are seen to be an explicit allusion to his approaching end, made by a man about to die to those who were about to put him to death, and at such a moment hardly any words could be hard enough. (However, even the deadly reproach, "Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers", had a later sequel: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do".)

The end approached. The "chief priests, and the scribes, and the elders" (the Sanhedrin) met under the high priest Caiaphas to concert measures against the man who disputed their authority and their Law. The only Judean among the Galilean disciples, Judas Iscariot, led the "great multitude with swords and staves", sent by the "chief priests and elders of the people", to the garden of Gethsemane and identified the man they sought by the kiss of death.

This Judas deserves a passing glance. He was twice canonized in the Twentieth Century, once in Russia after the Bolshevist Revolution, and again in Germany after the defeat of Hitler, and these two episodes indicated that the sect which was more powerful than Rome, in Jerusalem at the start of our era, was once more supremely powerful in the West in the Twentieth Century.

According to St. Matthew, Judas later hanged himself and if he thus chose the form of death "accursed of God", his deed presumably brought him no happiness. To Zionist historians of Dr. Kastein's school Judas is a sympathetic figure; Dr. Kastein explains that he was a good man who became disappointed with Jesus and therefore "secretly broke" with him (the words "secretly broke" could only occur in Zionist literature).

The Pharisees, who controlled the Sanhedrin, tried Jesus first, before what would today be called "a Jewish court". Possibly "a people's court" would be a more accurate description in today's idiom, for he was "fingered" by an informer, seized by a mob, hailed before a tribunal without legitimate authority, and condemned to death after false witnesses had spoken to trumped-up charges.

However, the "elders", who from this point on took charge of events in exactly the same way as the "advisers" of our century control events, devised the charge which deserved death equally under their "Law" and under the law of the Roman ruler. Under "the Mosaic Law", Jesus had committed blasphemy by claiming to be the Messiah; under the Roman law, he had committed treason by claiming to be the king of the Jews.

The Roman governor, Pilate, tried one device after another, to avoid complying with the demand of these imperious "elders", that the man be put to death.

This Pilate was the prototype of the Twentieth Century British and American politician. He feared the power of the sect in the last resort, more than anything else. His wife urged him to have no truck with the business. He tried, in the politician's way, to pass the responsibility to another, Herod Antipas, whose tetrarchy included Galilee; Herod sent it back to him. Pilate next tried to let Jesus off with a scourging, but the Pharisees insisted on death and threatened to denounce Pilate in Rome: "Thou art not Caesar's friend".

This was the threat to which Pilate yielded, just as one British Governor after another, one United Nations representative after another, yielded in the Twentieth Century to the threat that they would be defamed in London or New York. Evidently Pilate, like these men nineteen centuries later, knew that his home government would disavow or displace him if he refused to do as he was bid.

The resemblance between Pilate and some British governors of the period between the First and Second World Wars is strong, (and at least one of these men knew it, for when he telephoned to a powerful Zionist rabbi in New York he jocularly asked, as he relates, that the High Priest Caiaphas be informed that Pontius Pilate was on the line).

Pilate made one other attempt to have the actual deed done by other hands: "Take ye him, and judge him according to your law". With the ease of long experience it was foiled: "it is not lawful for us to put any man to death".

After that he even tried to save Jesus by giving "the people" the choice between pardoning Jesus or Barabbas, the robber and murderer. Presumably Pilate had small hope from this quarter, for "the people" and "the mob" are synonyms and justice and mercy never yet came from a mob, as Pilate would have known; the function of the mob is always to do the will of powerful sects. Thus, "the chief priests and elders persuaded the multitude that they should ask Barabbas, and destroy Jesus".

In this persuasion of the multitude the sect is equally powerful today.

The longer the time that passes, the more brightly glow the colours of that unique final scene. The scarlet robe, mock sceptre, crown of thorns and derisive pantomime of homage; only Pharisaic minds could have devised that ritual of mockery which today so greatly strengthens the effect of the victim's victory. The road to Calvary, the crucifixion between two thieves: Rome, on that day, did the bidding of the Pharisees, as Persia, five hundred years before, had done that of the Levites.

These Pharisees had taught the people of Judea to expect a Messiah, and now had crucified the first claimant. That meant that the Messiah was still to come. According to the Pharisees the Davidic king had yet to appear and claim his empire of the world, and that is still the situation today.

Dr. Kastein, in his survey of Judaism from its start, devotes a chapter to the life of Jesus. After explaining that Jesus was a failure, he dismissed the episode with the characteristic words, "His life and death are our affair".

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Chapter 11

THE PHARISAIC PHOENIX

Then comes the familiar, recurrent paradox; the catastrophe of Judea, which followed within a few decades of the death of Jesus, was the triumph of the Pharisees, for it left them supreme in Jewry. By the crucifixion of Jesus they rid themselves of a "prophet and dreamer" who would have cast down their Law. The brief remaining years of Judea rid them of all other parties that contended with them for power under that Law.

After the death of Jesus the Pharisees, according to the Jewish Encyclopaedia, found "a supporter and friend" in the last Herodian king of Judea, Agrippa I. Agrippa helped dispose of the Sadducees, who disappeared from the Judean scene, leaving all affairs there in the hands of the Pharisees (whose complaint about the Idumean line, therefore, seems to have little ground). They were thus left all-powerful in Jerusalem, like the Levites after the severance of Judah from Israel, and as on that earlier occasion disaster at once followed. In rising, phoenix-like, from the ashes of this, the Pharisees also repeated the history of the Levites.

During the few remaining years of the tiny and riven province the Pharisees once more revised "the Law", those "commandments of men" which Jesus had most scathingly attacked. Dr. Kastein says, "Jewish life was regulated by the teachings of the Pharisees; the whole history of Judaism was reconstructed from the Pharisaic point of view . . Pharisaism shaped the character of Judaism and the life and the thought of the Jew for all the future . . It makes 'separatism' its chief characteristic ".

Thus, in the immediate sequel to Jesus's life and arraignment of the "commandments of men", the Pharisees, like the Levites earlier, intensified the racial and tribal nature and rigour of the Law; the creed of destruction, enslavement and dominion was sharpened on the eve of the people's final dispersion.

Dr. Kastein's words are of especial interest. He had earlier stated (as quoted) that after the infliction of the "New Covenant" on the Judahites by Nehemiah, the Torah received a "final" editing, and that "no word" of it was thereafter to be changed. Moreover, at the time of this Pharisaic "reconstruction" the Old Testament had already been translated into Greek, so that further changes made by the Pharisees could only have been in the original.

It seems more probable that Dr. Kastein's statement refers to the Talmud, the immense continuation of the Torah which was apparently begun during the last years of Judea, although it was not reduced to writing until much later. Whatever happened, "the life and the thought of the Jew" were once again settled "for all the future", and "separatism" was reaffirmed as the supreme tenet of the Law.

In AD 70, perhaps thirty-five years after the death of Jesus, all fell to pieces. The confusion and disorder in Judea were incurable and Rome stepped in. The Pharisees, who had originally invited Roman intervention and were supreme in Judea under the Romans, remained passive.

Other peoples of Palestine, and most especially the Galileans, would not submit to Rome and after many risings and campaigns the Romans entered and razed Jerusalem. Judea was declared conquered territory and the name vanished from the map. For long periods during the next nineteen hundred years no Jews at all lived in Jerusalem (the Samaritans, a tiny remnant of whom have survived all the persecutions, are the only people who have lived continuously in Palestine since Old Testamentary times).

Dr. Kastein calls the seventy years which ended with the Roman destruction of Jerusalem "The Heroic Age", presumably because of the Pharisaic triumph over all others in the contest for the soul of Judaism. He can hardly intend to apply the adjective to the fighting against the Romans, as this was so largely done by the alien Galileans, of whom he is no admirer.

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Chapter 12

THE LIGHT AND THE SHADOW

Before Jerusalem fell in 70 AD two bands of travellers passed through its gates. The disciples bore a new message to mankind, for Christianity had been born. The Pharisees, foreseeing the fate which they had brought on Jerusalem, removed to a new headquarters from which (as from Babylon of yore) the ruling sect might exercise command over "the Jews", wherever in the world they lived.

These two small groups of travellers were the vanguard of parties of light and of darkness which, like a man and his shadow, have gone ever since through the centuries, and ever westward.

The crisis of "the West" today traces directly back to that departure from doomed Jerusalem nineteen centuries ago, for the two groups bore into the West ideas that could never be reconciled. One had to prevail over the other, sooner or later, and the great bid for victory of the destructive idea is being witnessed in our generation.

In the centuries between the story of the West was always, in essentials, that of the struggle between the two ideas. When "the Law" according to the Levites and Pharisees was in the ascendant, the West made slaves of men, brought heretics before an inquisition, put apostates to death, and yielded to primitive visions of master-racehood; thus the Twentieth Century was the time of the worst backsliding in the West. When the West made men and nations free, established justice between them, set up the right of fair and open trial, repudiated master-racehood and acknowledged the universal fatherhood of God, it followed the teaching of him who had come to "fulfil the Law".

The Romans, when they took Jerusalem, struck medals with the inscription, "Judaea devicta, Judaea capta". This was a premature paean; Jerusalem might be ruined and Judea be empty of Jews, but the ruling sect was free and victorious. Its opponents around the temple had been swept away by the conqueror and it was already established in its new "centre", to which it had withdrawn before the fall of the city.

The Pharisees were as supreme in this new citadel as the Levites once in Babylon, but in the outer world they espied a new enemy. The sect which believed that the Messiah had appeared, and called itself Christian, did not acknowledge this enmity; on the contrary, its ruling tenet was "love your enemies". But as the first tenet of the Pharisaic law was "hate your enemies", this was in itself a deliberate affront and challenge to the elders in their retreat.

They saw from the start that the new religion would have to be destroyed if their "Law" were to prevail, and they were not deterred by the warning voices which (at this juncture as on all earlier and later occasions) were heard within their own ranks; for instance, Gamaliel's words when the high priest and council were about to have Peter and John scourged for preaching in the temple: "Consider well what you are about to do. If this be the work of men, it will soon fall to nothing; but if it be the work of God you cannot destroy it". The majority o the Pharisees felt strong enough, in their own manmade Law, to "destroy it", and if necessary to work for centuries at that task.

Thus the Pharisees, when they left the surviving Judeans to their fate and set up their new headquarters at Jamnia (still in Palestine), took their dark secrets of power over men into a world different from any before it.

Previously their tribal creed had been one among many tribal creeds. Blood vengeance had been the rule among all men and clans. The neighbouring "heathen" might have been alarmed by the especial fierceness and vindictiveness of the Judaic creed, but had not offered anything much more enlightened. From this time on, however, the ruling sect was confronted by a creed which directly controverted every tenet of their own "Law", as white controverts black. Moreover, this new idea in the world, by the manner and place of its birth, was forever a rebuke to themselves.

The Pharisees in their stronghold prepared to vanquish this new force that had risen in the world. Their task was larger than that of the Levites in Babylon. The temple was destroyed and Jerusalem was depopulated. The tribe of Judah had long since been broken up; now the race of Judeans was dissolving. There remained a "Jewish nation", composed of people of many admixtures of blood, who were spread all over the known world, and had to be kept united by the power of the tribal idea and of the "return" to a land "promised" to a "special people"; this dispersed nation had also to be kept convinced of its destructive mission among the nations where it dwelt.

"The Law", in the form that was already becoming known to the outer world, could not again be amended, or new historical chapters be added to it. Moreover, Jesus had addressed his rebukes specifically to the falsification of these "commandments of men" by the scribes. He had been killed but not controverted or even (as the growth of the Christian sect showed) given his quietus. Thus his arraignment of the Law stood and was so conclusive that not even the Pharisees could expect to convince anybody simply by calling him a transgressor of it.

Nevertheless, the Law needed constant reinterpretation and application to the events of changing times, so that the "special people" could always be shown that each and every event, however paradoxical at first sight, was in fact one of Jehovan fulfilment. The Pharisees at Jamnia invoked once more their claim to possess the oral secrets of God and began, under it, to reinterpret the "statutes and commandments" so that these could be shown to apply to Christianity. This was the origin of the Talmud, which in effect is the anti-Christian extension of the Torah.

The Talmud became, in the course of centuries, "the fence around the Law"; the outer tribal stockade around the inner tribal stockade. The significance lies in the period at which it was begun: when Judea was gone, when "the people" were scattered among all nations, and when a new religion was taking shape which taught that God was the father of all men, not merely the patron of a selected tribe.

Looking back from this distance of time, the task which the Pharisees undertook looks hopeless, for the wish to become part of mankind must surely have had strong appeal to a scattered people.

The Pharisees, as the event has proved, were successful in their huge undertaking. The Talmud was effective in interposing a fence between the Jews and the forces of integration released by Christianity.

Two examples from our present time illustrate the effect of the Talmud, many centuries after its compilation. The brothers Thoreau in their books give the diligent student some rare glimpses behind the Talmudic walls; in one book they depict the little Jewish boy in Poland who had been taught to spit, quite mechanically, as he passed the wayside Calvary and to say, "Cursed be thou who created another religion". In 1953, in New York, a young missionary of the Moravian Church in Jerusalem described the seizure by the Zionists of the Moravian leper home there, called "The Jesus Mission"; their first act was to putty over the name "Jesus" which for more than a hundred years had been inscribed above its door.

Such incidents as these (and the ban on the mention of the name Jesus) derive directly from the teaching of the Talmud, which in effect was another "New Law" with a specifically anti-Christian application. For this reason the next period in the story of Zion is best described as that of the Talmudists, the former ones being those of the Pharisees and of the Levites.

While the Pharisaic Talmudists, in their new academy at Jamnia, worked on the new Law, the tidings of Jesus's life and lesson spread through the territories of Rome.

A Pharisee greatly helped to spread them; Saul of Tarsus set out from Jerusalem (before its fall) to exterminate heretics in Damascus and before he arrived there became a follower of Christ. He preached to Jew and Gentile alike, until he was prevented, and he told the Jews, "It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you; but seeing that ye put it from you and judge yourselves worthy of everlasting life, we turn to the Gentiles".

Dr. Kastein says of Saul, named Paul, that "he made all those whom he persuaded to believe in his prophecy renegades in the widest sense, whether they were Jew or Gentile".

However, what Paul (and others) said was in fact inevitable at that point in time, because men everywhere were groping towards the universal God and turned to the teaching of Jesus as growing things to the light. Possibly this impulse in men was also the reason why Jesus had to appear among the Judeans; the Judaic creed was tribalism in its most fanatical form, even at that time, and, as every action produces its reaction, the counter-idea was bound to appear where the pressure was greatest.

This was a fateful moment for that great area, then little known or populated, which today is called The West. Had not the disciples turned their faces westward, the term, "the West", and that which it denotes, might never have come about.

What is called "Western civilization" cannot be conceived without Christianity. During the nineteen hundred years which followed the death of Jesus the West improved so greatly that it left the rest of the world behind. In material things its advance was so great that at the time when this book was written it was on the brink of the conquest of space; it was about to open the universe to exploration by man. But that was much the lesser part of its achievement.

Its greatest improvement was in the field of the spirit and of man's behaviour towards man. The West established men's right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.

The shadow that followed the disciples out of the gates of Jerusalem, before the Romans entered, also followed Christianity into the West and the Talmudic sect dogged it during all those centuries. The West, in the Twentieth Century, became the scene of the struggle between the nations which had risen with Christianity and the sect dedicated to the destructive idea.

Not only the West is involved in its issue. About five hundred years after the life of Jesus the instinctive impulse of men to seek one God produced another challenge to Talmudic racialism, and this time it came from among the Semitic masses. The Arabs, too, attained to the concept of one God of all men.

Muhammad (dismissed by Dr. Kastein as "a half-educated Bedouin"), like Saul on the road to Damascus, had a vision of God. His teaching in many ways resembled that of Jesus. He held Jesus to have been, like Abraham and Moses, a prophet of God (not the Messiah). He regarded himself as the successor of Moses and Jesus and as the prophet of God, whom he called Allah. There was but one God, Allah, the creator of mankind, and Allah was not the tribal god of the Arabs, but the God of all men.

This religion, like Christianity, taught no hatred of other religions. Muhammad showed only reverence for Jesus and his mother (who are both the subjects of profane derision in Talmudic literature).

However, Muhammad held the Jews to be a destructive force, self-dedicated. The Koran says of them, "Oft as they kindle a beacon fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth; but God loveth not the abettors of disorder ". All down the centuries the wisest men spoke thus of the tribal creed and the sect, until the Twentieth Century of our era, when public discussion of this question was virtually suppressed.

Thus was Islam born, and it spread over the meridianal parts of the known world as Christianity spread over the West and Buddhism, earlier, over the East. Great streams began to move, as if towards a confluence at some distant day, for these universal religions are in no major tenet as oil and water, and in the repudiation of master-racehood and the destructive idea they agree.

Christianity and Islam spread out and embraced great masses of mankind; the impulse that moved in men became clear. Far behind these universal religions lay Judaism, in its tribal enclosure, jealously guarded by the inner sect.

In the Twentieth Century this powerful sect was able to bring the masses of Christendom and Islam to the verge of destructive battle with each other. If the present generation sees that clash, the spectacle will be that of one great universal religion contending with another for the purpose of setting up the creed of the "master-race".

Towards this strange denouement, nineteen centuries ahead, the two parties of men set out from Jerusalem long ago.

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Chapter 13

THE FENCE AROUND THE LAW

The story of Zion, from its start, falls into five distinct phases: those of the Levites, the Pharisees, the Talmudists, the "emancipation" interlude and the Zionists. This narrative has now reached the third phase.

The Levitical phase was that of isolated Judah, the Babylonian "captivity" and "return", and the production and enforcement of "the Mosaic Law". The Pharisaic phase, which followed and roughly coincided with the Roman over-lordship of the province of Judea, ended with the second destruction of Jerusalem, the dispersion of the last Judeans, the Pharisaic supremacy and the withdrawal of the "government" to its new "centre" at Jamnia.

The third, Talmudic phase was much the longest for it lasted seventeen centuries, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. During this period the Jews entered the West and the "government", from a succession of "centres", worked tirelessly to keep the dispersed nation under its control, subject to "the Law", and separate from other peoples.

As this was also the period of Western civilization and of the rise of Christianity, it was inevitable that Christendom specifically (and not merely the generic "heathen", or "strangers", or "other gods") should become the chief target of the Law's destructive commands.

In the eyes of the dominant sect and its devotees, this period, which seems so long and important to Western minds, was essentially as insignificant as the Babylonian period. The fact that the one lasted seventeen centuries and the other fifty years made no real difference: both were merely periods of "exile" for the special people; and under the Law the long Western episode, like the short Babylonian one, was ordained to terminate in disaster for the "captors", a Jewish triumph and a new "return", all of which some new Daniel would interpret in those terms.

The seventeen centuries represented a new "captivity", under the Law, which laid down that wherever the chosen people dwelt outside Jerusalem they were in captivity, and that this captivity was in itself "persecution".

To a literal Zionist like Dr. Kastein, therefore, the seventeen centuries which saw the rise of Christendom form a page of history which is blank save for the record of "Jewish persecution" inscribed on it. The rest was all sound and fury, signifying nothing; it was a period of time during which Jehovah used the heathen to plague the Jews while he prepared the triumph of his special people; and for what they did the heathen have yet to pay (he cries). The one positive result of the seventeen Christian centuries, for him, is that the Jews emerged from them still segregated from mankind, thanks to their Talmudic governors.

Certainly this was an astounding feat; in the entire history of negative achievement, nothing can approach the results obtained by the elders of Zion. In the Talmud they built that "fence around the Law" which successfully withstood, during seventeen hundred years, all the centrifugal forces which attracted the Jews towards mankind.

While they reinforced their stockade, European men, having accepted Christianity, toiled through the centuries to apply its moral law to daily life, by abolishing serfdom and slavery, reducing privilege and inequality and generally raising the dignity of man. This process was known as "emancipation" and by the year 1800 it was about to prevail over the system of absolute rulers and privileged castes.

The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.

Nevertheless, in the case of the Jews there was an obvious paradox which repeatedly baffled and alarmed the peoples among whom they dwelt: The Jewish Law expressed the theory of the master-race in the most arrogant and vindictive form conceivable to the human imagination; how then could the Jews attack nationhood in others? Why did the Jews demand the levelling of barriers between men when they built an ever stronger barrier between the Jews and other men? How could people, who claimed that God had made the very world itself for them to rule, and forbade them to mix with lesser breeds, complain of discrimination?

Now that another hundred and fifty years have passed, the answer to such questions has been given by events.

It was true that the Jewish clamour for emancipation was not truly concerned with the great idea or principle at issue: human liberty. The judaic Law denied that idea and principle. The Talmudic governors of Jewry saw that the quickest way to remove the barriers between themselves and power over nations was to destroy legitimate government in these nations; and the quickest way to that end was to cry "emancipation!".

Thus the door opened by emancipation could be used to introduce the permanent revolutionary force into the life of nations; with the destruction of all legitimate government, the revolutionaries would succeed to power, and these revolutionaries would be Talmud-trained and Talmud-controlled. They would act always under the Mosaic Law, and in this way the end of Babylon could be reproduced in the West.

The evidence of events in the Twentieth Century now shows that this was the plan to which the Talmudic elders worked during the third phase of the story of Zion, from 70 AD to about 1800 AD. Thus there was the widest possible difference in the understanding of "emancipation" by the Christianized European peoples among whom the Jews dwelt and among the Talmudic rulers of the Jews. For the great mass of peoples emancipation represented an end: the end of servitude. For the powerful, secret sect it represented a means to the opposite end; the imposition of a new and harsher servitude.

One great danger attended this undertaking. It was, that the destruction of barriers between men might also destroy the barrier between the Jews and other men; this would have destroyed the plan itself, for that force would have been dispersed which was to be used, emancipation once gained, to "pull down and destroy" the nations.

This very nearly happened in the fourth phase of the story of Zion; the century of emancipation (say, from 1800 to 1900 AD) brought the peril of "assimilation". In the century of "freedom" a great number of Jews, in Western Europe and in the new "West" oversea, did evince the desire to cast off the chains of the Judaic Law and to mingle themselves with the life of peoples. For that reason our Zionist historian, Dr. Kastein, considers the Nineteenth Century to be the darkest age in all Jewish history, fraught with the deadly peril of involvement in mankind, which happily was averted. He cannot contemplate without horror the destruction, through assimilation, of the Judaic barriers of race and creed. Thus he calls the Nineteenth Century movement towards emancipation "retrograde" and thanks God that "the Zionist ideology" preserved the Jews from the fate of assimilation.

That led to the fifth phase, the one which began in about 1900 and in which we live. The Talmudic stockade held fast and at the end of the fourth phase the Jews, fully "emancipated" in the Western understanding, were still segregated under their own Law. Those who tended to escape, towards "assimilation", were then drawn back into the tribal enclosure by the mystic power of nationalism.

Using the power over governments which it had gained through emancipation, the ruling sect achieved a second "return" to the chosen land, and thus reestablished the Law of 458 BC, with its destructive and imperial mission. A chauvinist fever, which yet must run its course, was injected into the veins of world Jewry; the great power wielded over Western governments was used to a co-ordinated end; and the whole destructive ordeal of the West in the Twentieth Century was related to and dominated by the ancient ambition of Zion, revived from antiquity to become the dogma of Western politics.

This fifth phase is about fifty-five years old as the present book is written, and its first results are formidable. The "Mosaic Law" has been superimposed on the life of Western peoples, which in fact is governed by that law, not by any law of their own. The political and military operations of two world wars have been diverted to promote the Zionist ambition and the life and treasure of the West have been poured out in support of it.

Forty years of continuous bloodshed in Palestine have obviously been but the prelude to what is yet to come there. Any third world war may begin and spread outward from Palestine, and if one were to start elsewhere it would in its course foreseeably revolve around and turn on the ambition of Zion, which will not be fulfilled until a much greater area in the Middle East has been conquered, "other Gods" have been thrown down, and "all nations" have been enslaved.

Dr. Kastein sees in this fifth phase the golden age when "history may be resumed" (after the meaningless interregnum known as the Christian era) and Zionism, as "the possessor of a world mission", will re-enter into a destined inheritance, culminating in world dominion, of which it was criminally dispossessed in AD 70 (when "history" was interrupted).

This narrative has now reached the third of these five phases, the long one when the Talmudic scribes in the Academy at Jamnia began with infinite industry to spin The Law into a much greater web, of endless ramifications, from which a Jew could hardly escape without dire penalty. By means of it the seemingly impossible was achieved: a breed of people dispersed throughout the world was for seventeen hundred years kept apart from mankind and was trained for a destructive task in the Twentieth Century of the Christian era.

Some account of that remarkable period of preparation and organization, when a fence was built around the Judaic Law, so that "liberty" should not absorb the special people or weaken their destructive force, is here appropriate.

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Chapter 14

THE MOVABLE GOVERNMENT

The Pharisaic elders who moved to Jamnia from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 AD intended, like the Levites in Babylon earlier, to set up a centre of power and remote-control, from which they might keep in subjection a tribal organization, by that time distributed over the earth. They took with them to Jamnia the accumulated experience of Jerusalem and Babylon and the stored secrets of ages and they succeeded in establishing a mobile government which has continued to exercise authority over the Jews until the present day.

Before the last battles with Rome (says Dr. Kastein) "a group of teachers, scholars and educators repaired to Jamnia, taking the fate of their people on their shoulders so as to be responsible for it through the ages . . . At Jamnia the central body for the administration of the Jewish people was established . . . As a rule, when a nation has been utterly routed as the Jews were on this occasion, they perish altogether. But the Jewish people did not perish . . . They had already learnt how to change their attitude during the Babylonian captivity . . . And they followed a similar course now".

At Jamnia the Old Sanhedrin, the source of all legislative, administrative and judicial authority, was established under a new name. In addition, an academy was created for the further development of The Law. In it, the scribes continued the revelation of Jehovah's mind and the interpretation of The Law, so often said to have been put in its final form. In fact, as the dogma is that the Law governs every act of human life in circumstances which continually change, it never could or can be finally codified and must ever be expanded.

Apart from that permanent reason for revision, the new factor, Christianity, had arisen and the Law's application to it had to be defined. Thus the Torah (the Law) began to receive its huge supplement, the Talmud, which was of equal or greater authority.

From Jamnia the Law was administered which "raised an insuperable barrier against the outside world", enforced a discipline "rigid to the point of deadliness", and "kept proselytes at arm's length". The aim was to "make the life of the Jew utterly different from that of the Gentiles". Any law that received a majority of votes of the Sanhedrin became enforceable throughout the dispersed Judaist communities everywhere; "opponents were threatened with the ban, which meant being excluded from the community".

In this way, "the centre of the circle was finally fixed, and the circle itself fully described in the form of the law and the hedge that was set about the people". During this period (before Christianity became the religion of Rome) the secret edict went out from "the centre" at Jamnia, authorizing Jews to pretend denial of their creed and profess conversion to "pagan religions", if circumstances made this expedient.

The period of government from Jamnia lasted for about a century, and then it was transferred to Usha in Galilee, where the Sanhedrin was re-established. "Judaism set limitations about itself and grew ever more exclusive"; at this time the special curse on Jewish Christians was pronounced. In 320 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity, and enacted laws which forbade marriages between Christians and Jews and forbade Jews to keep Christian slaves. These were the natural response to the Law of exclusion and "stranger"-slavery administered by the Talmudic government at Usha, but they were held to be "persecution" and to escape their reach "the centre" was moved back to Babylonia, where the Judean colony, which eight centuries earlier had preferred to stay there rather than "return" to Jerusalem, "was still intact". The Talmudic government was set up at Sura, and academies were established there at Pumbedita.

The Talmud, begun at Jamnia and Usha, was completed at Sura and Pumbedita. "A ring of vast proportions and colossal elasticity" was built around the Jews everywhere; the mystic circle of fear and superstition was drawn tighter. From Sura an Exilarch (prince of the captivity of the house of David), ruled, but in time he became a figurehead. Thereafter "the president of the academy" (in effect, the high priest and prime minister) "laid down the rules and regulations not only for the Babylonian Jews but for the whole of Judaism . . . The Jews throughout the world recognized the academies in Babylonia as the authoritative centre of Judaism, and regarded any laws they passed as binding".

Thus the nation-within-nations, the state-within-states, was enfettered and ruled by the Talmudic government in Babylonia.

The core of dogma remained as Ezekiel, Ezra and Nehemiah had shaped and enforced it; but the Talmud, in effect, had taken the place of the Torah, as the Torah earlier had supplanted the "oral traditions". The heads of the academies of Sura and Pumbedita were called Gaonim and began to exercise autocratic power over the scattered Jews. The shadowy Exilarchs (later Nasim, or princes) were dependent on their approval and the Sanhedrin surrendered its functions to them, or was deprived of these. When doubt arose among Jews, anywhere in the world, about the interpretation or application of the Law in any matter of the day, the question was referred to the Gaonate. The verdicts and judgments returned (in the name of Jehovah) from the distant government were the Gaonic Reponses, or laws enacted from Babylonia, to which Jews everywhere submitted, or incurred danger of excommunication.

In this manner the Talmudic thrall spread round the dispersed Jews, wherever they dwelt, "like a closely woven net . . . over ordinary days and holidays, over their actions and over their prayers, over their whole lives and every step they took . . . Nothing in their external lives was any longer allowed to be the sport of arbitrary settlement or of chance". This is the picture of an absolute despotism, different from other despotisms only in the element of distance between the despots and their subjects. Given a benevolent mission, a community of people so closely controlled might immensely fructify the life of peoples; given a destructive one, their presence among others is like that of a blasting charge in rock, operated by a distant hand on a plunger.

For six hundred years the Talmudic government, at Jamnia, Usha, and Sura, remained in or near to its native, oriental climate, where its nature was comprehended by other peoples; they knew how to cope with and counter the savage tribal creed and, as long as they were not hampered or constrained by foreign powers in their dealings with it, they were always able to find a workaday compromise, which enabled all to live in practical amity side by side.

Then came the event which has produced such violent results in our time: the Talmudic government moved into Christianized Europe and established itself among peoples to whom the nature of its dogma and its methods were strange and even incomprehensible. This led, in the course of many centuries, to the recurrent clash of the alien ambition and creed against native interest, which our century is again experiencing.

The nature of Westerners (more especially in the northern latitudes) is to be candid, to dec1are purposes, and to use words to express intention, and Christianity developed these native traits. The force which appeared among them was of the opposite character, oriental, infinitely subt1e, secretive, conspiratorial, and practised in the use of language to disguise real purposes. Therein lay its greatest strength in the encounter with the West.

The removal to Europe came about through the Islamic conquests. The Arabs, under the Prophet's banner, drove the Romans from Palestine. By this means the native inhabitants of Palestine, who had inhabited it some two thousand years before the first Hebrew tribes entered, became the rulers of their own country, and remained so for nine hundred years (until 1517, when the Turks conquered it). An instructive comparison may be made between the Islamic and the Judaic treatment of captives:

The Caliph's order to the Arab conquerors in 637 AD was, "You shall not act treacherously, dishonestly, commit any excess or mutilation, kill any child or old man; cut or burn down palms or fruit trees, kill any sheep, cow or camel, and shall leave alone those whom you find devoting themselves to worship in their cells". Jehovah's order, according to Deuteronomy 20.16, is, "Of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shall save alive nothing that breatheth".

From Palestine, Islam then spread its frontiers right across North Africa, so that the great mass of Jews came within the boundaries of the same external authority. Next, Islam turned towards Europe and invaded Spain. Therewith the shadow of Talmudic Zionism fell across the West. The Moorish conquest was "supported with both men and money" by the Jews, who as camp-followers were treated with remarkable favour by the conquerors, city after city being handed to their control! The Koran itself said, "Their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth"; the Islamic armies certainly facilitated this aim.

Christianity thus became submerged in Spain. In these propitious circumstances the Talmudic government was transferred from Babylonia to Spain, and the process began, the results of which have become apparent in our generation. Dr. Kastein says:

"Judaism, dispersed as it was over the face of the globe, was always inclined to set up a fictitious state in the place of the one that had been lost, and always aimed, therefore, at looking to a common centre for guidance . . . This centre was now held to be situated in Spain, whither the national hegemony was transferred from the East. Just as Babylonia had providentially taken the place of Palestine, so now Spain opportunely replaced Babylonia, which, as a centre of Judaism, had ceased to be capable of functioning. All that could be done there had already been accomplished; it had forged the chains with which the individual could bind himself, to avoid being swallowed up by his environment: the Talmud".

The reader will observe the description of events: "individuals" do not commonly bind themselves, of choice, with chains forged for them. Anyway, the Jewish captivity was as close as ever, or perhaps had been made closer. That was for the Jews to ponder.

What was to become of vital importance to the West was that the Jewish government was now in Europe. The directing centre and the destructive idea had both entered the West.

The Talmudic government of the nation-within-nations was continued from Spanish soil. The Gaonate issued its directives; the Talmudic academy was established at Cordova; and sometimes, at least, a shadowy Exilarch reigned over Jewry.

This was done under the protection of Islam; the Moors, like Babylon and Persia before, showed remarkable benevolence towards this force in their midst. To the Spaniards the invader came to bear more and more a Jewish countenance and less and less a Moorish one; the Moors had conquered, but the conqueror's power passed into Jewish hands. The story which the world had earlier seen enacted in Babylon, repeated itself in Spain, and in later centuries was to be re-enacted in every great country of the West.

The Moors remained in Spain for nearly eight hundred years. When the Spanish re-conquest, after this long ordeal, was completed in 1492 the Jews, as well as the Moors, were expelled. They had become identified with the invaders' rule and were cast out when it ended, as they had followed it in.

The "centre" of Talmudic government was then transferred to Poland.

At that point, less than four centuries before our own generation, a significant mystery enters the story of Zion: why was the government set up in Poland? Up to that stage the annals reveal no trace of any large migration of Jews to Poland. The Jews who entered Spain with the Moors came from North Africa and when they left most of them returned thither or went to Egypt, Palestine, Italy, the Greek islands and Turkey. Other colonies had appeared in France, Germany, Holland and England and these were enlarged by the arrival among them of Jews from the Spanish Peninsula. There is no record that any substantial number of Spanish Jews went to Poland, or that any Jewish mass-migration to Poland had occurred at any earlier time.

Yet in the 1500's, when the "centre" was set up in Poland, "a Jewish population of millions came into being there ", according to Dr. Kastein. But populations of millions do not suddenly "come into being". Dr. Kastein shows himself to be aware that something needs explanation here, and to be reluctant to go into it, for he dismisses the strange thing with the casual remark that the size of this community, of which nothing has previously been heard, "was more due to immigration, apparently from France, Germany and Bohemia, than to any other cause". He does not explain what other cause he might have in mind and, for a diligent scholar, is on this one occasion strangely content with a random surmise.

But when a Zionist historian thus slurs over something the seeker after knowledge may be fairly sure that the root of the matter may by perseverance be found.

So it is in this case; behind Dr. Kastein's artless conjecture the most important fact in the later story of Zion is concealed. The "centre" of Jewish government was at this time planted among a large community of people who were unknown to the world as Jews and in fact were not Jews in any literal sense. They had no Judahite blood at all (for that matter; Judahite blood must by this time have been almost extinct even among the Jews of Western Europe) and their forefathers had never known Judea, or any soil but that of Tartary.

These people were the Khazars, a Turco-Mongolian race which had been converted to Judaism in about the 7th century of our era. This is the only case of the conversion of a large body of people of quite distinct blood to Judaism (the Idumeans were "brothers"). The reason why the Talmudic elders permitted or encouraged it can only be guessed; without it, however, the "Jewish question" would by now have joined the problems that time has solved.

This development (which will be further discussed in a later chapter) was of vital, and perhaps even mortal importance to the West. The natural instinct of Europe was always to expect the greatest danger to its survival from Asia. From the moment when "the centre" was transferred to Poland these Asiatics began to move towards, and later to enter the West in the guise of "Jews" and they brought Europe to its greatest crisis. Though their conversion had occurred so long before they were so remote that the world might never have known of them, had not the Talmudic centre been set up among them, so that they came to group themselves around it.

When they became known, as "Eastern Jews", they profited by the confusing effect of the contraction of the word Judahite, or Judean, to "Jew"; none would ever have believed that they were Judahites or Judeans. From the time when they took over the leadership of Jewry the dogma of "the return" to Palestine was preached in the name of people who had no Semitic blood or ancestral link with Palestine whatever!

From this period the Talmudic government operated with a masse de manoeuvre of a different Asiatic order.

Once again, a virtually independent state was formed within the Polish state, which like so many states before and after showed the greatest benevolence to the nation-within-nations that took shape within its gates. As in the earlier and later cases this in no wise mitigated the hostility of the Talmudic Jews towards it, which was proverbial.

Dr. Kastein gives the picture of this independent Jewish government during the Polish phase. The Talmudists were allowed to draw up "a constitution", and through the 1500's and 1600's the Jews in Poland lived under "an autonomous government". This administered "an iron system of autonomy and an iron religious discipline, which inevitably resulted in the formation of an oligarchic body of administrators and the development of an extreme form of mysticism" (this gives the picture of the training, under rigid discipline in close confinement, which produced the Communist and Zionist revolutionaries of our century).

This autonomous Talmudic government was called the Kahal. In its own territory the Kahal was a fully-empowered government, under Polish suzerainty. It had independent authority of taxation in the ghettoes and communities, being responsible for payment of a global sum to the Polish government. It passed laws regulating every action and transaction between man and man and had power to try, judge, convict or acquit.

This power only nominally stopped short of capital punishment: Professor Salo Baron says, "In Poland, where the Jewish court had no right to inflict capital punishment, lynching, as an extra-legal preventive, was encouraged by rabbinical authorities such as Solomon Luria". (This quotation reveals the inner meaning of Dr. Kastein's frequent, but cautious, allusions to "iron discipline", "inexorable discipline", "discipline rigid to the point of deadliness", and the 1ike).

In effect, a Jewish state, Talmud-ruled, was recreated on the soil of Poland.

As Dr. Kastein says, "Such was the constitution of the Jewish state, planted on foreign soil, hemmed in by a wall of foreign laws, with a structure partly self-chosen and partly forced upon it . . . It had its own Jewish law, its own priesthood, its own schools, and its own social institutions, and its own representatives in the Polish government . . . in fact, it possessed all the elements which go to form a state". The achievement of this status was due "in no small measure to the co-operation of the Polish Government".

Then, in 1772, Poland was partitioned and this great community of "Eastern Jews", organized as a state-within-the-state, was divided by national boundaries, most of it coming under Russian rule. At that point, for the first time in more than 2500 years and less than two hundred years before our own day, the "centre" of Jewish government disappears from sight. Up to 1772 there had always been one: in Poland, Spain, Babylonia, Galilee, Judea, Babylon and Judah.

Dr. Kastein says that "the centre ceased to exist". The suggestion is that the centralized control of Jewry at that moment ended, but the length and strength of its earlier survival, and the significant events of the ensuing century, confute that. In a later passage Dr. Kastein himself reveals the truth, when he jubilantly records that in the Nineteenth Century "a Jewish international took shape".

Clearly "the centre" continued, but from 1772 in secret. The reason for the withdrawal into concealment may be deduced from the shape of later events.

The century which followed was that of the revolutionary conspiracy, Communist and Zionist, culminating in the open appearance of these two movements, which have dominated the present century. The Talmudic "centre" was also the centre of this conspiracy. Had it remained in the open the source of conspiracy would have been visible, and the identification of the Talmudic, Eastern Jews with it obvious.

In the event this only became clear when the revolution of 1917 produced an almost all-Jewish government in Russia; and by that time power over governments in the West was so great that the nature of this new regime was little discussed, a virtual law of heresy having come into force there. Had the visible institution continued, the masses of the West would in time have become aware that the Talmudic government of Jewry, though it led the clamour for "emancipation", was also organizing a revolution to destroy all that the peoples might gain from this emancipation.

The Russians, among whom this largest single community of Jews at that time dwelt, knew what had happened. Dr. Kastein says, "The Russians wondered what could possibly be the reason why the Jews did not amalgamate with the rest of the population, and came to the conclusion that in their secret Kahals they possessed a strong reserve, and that a 'World Kahal' existed". Dr. Kastein later confirms what the Russians believed, by his own allusion to the "Jewish international" of the Nineteenth Century.

In other words, the "government" continued, but in concealment, and probably in the different form suggested by Dr. Kastein's word "international". The strong presumption is that the "centre" today is not located in any one country and that, although its main seat of power is evidently in the United States, it now takes the form of a directorate distributed among the nations and working in unison, over the heads of governments and peoples.

The Russians, who at the time of the disappearance of "the centre" from public view were better informed than any others about this matter, have been proved right.

The manner in which this international directorate gains and wields its power over Gentile governments is no longer quite mysterious; enough authentic, published information has come out of these last fifty years to explain that, as this book will later show.

The mystery of its age long hold over "Jews" is more difficult to penetrate. How has a sect been able to keep people, distributed around the globe, in the c1utch of a primitive tribalism during twenty-five centuries?

The next chapter seeks to give some insight into the methods used during the third and longest phase of the story of Zion, the Talmudic period which lasted from AD 70 to about 1800. These methods have so much of the Orient and of Asia in them that they are puzzling to Western minds and are best comprehended by those whose own experience took them much among the communities of "Eastern Jews" before the Second World War, and into secret-police states, where rule is also by fear and terror.

PRECURSORS
TO THE PROTOCOLS
OF ZION
By Dr. Harrell Rhome
We must be the most deceived population
of all times, yet when the information-age
possibilities are considered, we should be
the best informed. But we are not, and are
most often our own worst enemy -- the
willingly deceived Euro-American.
We accept, and proclaim from our pulpits
and schools, the most idiotic drivel about
the modern history of the world...Read More