Why the Jews Have Attracted This Undying Hatred

Light of Truth

Why were the Jews hated and killed by the Nazis? It was none of their actions in history which was the reason for their mass murder, George Steiner himself a Jew wrote in his novel on Hitler. Hitler argues himself for his defence. “When I turned on the Jew,” Hitler states vigorously, “no one came to his rescue. No one. France, England, Russia, even Jew-ridden America did nothing. They were glad that the exterminator had come. Oh, they did not say so openly, I allow you that. But secretly they rejoiced. We had to find, to burn out the virus of utopia before the whole of our western civilization sickened. To return to man as he is, selfish, greedy, shortsighted, but warm and housed, so marvelously housed, in his own stench.” “We were chosen to be conscience of man,” said the Jew. And I answered him, yes, I, gentleman, who now stand before you: “You are not man’s conscience, Jew. You are only his bad conscience. And we shall vomit you so we may live and have peace. A final solution. How could there be any other?”
This hatred was not a onetime affair, all through history the Jews were hated even when the Black Plague was devastating Europe. This question was asked by Freud in his work Moses and Monotheism. It is here that Freud insists that there is no precept of greater importance in the Mosaic religion than “the prohibition against making an image of God–the compulsion to worship a God whom one cannot see.” It is here too that Freud tells the story about the founding of the “first Torah school” by Rabbi Jochanan ben Zakkai, a story that serves as a parable about what enabled the Jewish people to survive through the long history of their persecutions. “From that time on, the Holy Writ and the intellectual concern with it were what held the scattered people together.” The progress in spirituality as the advance of intellectuality based on an image of God and the strict morality of the Decalogue. To shoot a man because you disagree with him about Hegel’s dialectic is after all to honour the human spirit. For Freud, psychoanalysis is a further progress in spirituality or intellectuality. But consider again what Freud wrote: “Faced with new persecutions one asks oneself again how the Jews have come to be what they are and why they have attracted this undying hatred. I soon discovered the formula: Moses created the Jews.” This killing of the primal father is central to Freud’s account of the murder of Moses by the Jewish people. This murder “becomes an indispensable part of our construction, an important link between the forgotten event of primaeval times and its later emergence in the form of monotheist religions.”
The murder of Moses was a return of the repressed. It is plausible to conjecture that remorse for the murder of Moses provided the stimulus for the wishful phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and lead his people to redemption and the promised world-dominion. If Moses was the first Messiah, Christ became his substitute and successor, and Paul could exclaim to the peoples with some historical justification: “Look! The Messiah has really come: he has been murdered before your eyes!” They killed their prophets and built monuments for them. There are two moments, first is the killing which is the return of the repressed and then the cry for the prophet and the Messiah. The first is the return of violence they renounced but then they embraced. Such periods of history are in the church. Look at the crusades and killing of demons possessed and burning of the heretics. They ware instances when the repressed returned. Strict moral codes have this casualty. Every epoch and generation will have the temporal ways of living the past tradition more or less lax. Madness for some, and for the majority will become due to general discontent and widely ramified cultural pathologies born of an obscure, mostly unconscious. Return to the unconscious takes place with the general culture of thoughtlessness. The focus on life as structured and deformed by repression – i.e., by the unconscious created by our desperate need to keep ourselves unaware of what troubles us. This can happen in the leadership of the church. Egocentricity isn’t amorality, but a repression of values in which one indulges. Every local church will have its own dark times of relapse from the law of Christ and Christ being crucified in the Church. This relapse can happen in the leadership or in the followers lest they are eternally vigilant.

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