Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of 3,000 Years
By Israel Shahak, with a foreword by Gore Vidal. Published by Pluto Press (London, 1994).
When the Roman historian Tacitus pointed out 19 centuries ago that the Jews are unique among the races of man in their intense hatred and contempt for all races but their own, he was only repeating what many
other scholars had discovered before him. For the next 1,900 years other investigators came to similar conclusions, either from
a study of the Jews' religious writings or from a study of the Jews' behavior toward non-Jews.
Notable among these was the Great Reformer, Martin Luther, who in 1543 wrote in Von den JØden und Ihren LØgen : (The Jews and Their Lies)
Does not their Talmud say, and do not their rabbis write, that it is no sin to kill if a Jew kills a heathen, but it is a
sin if he kills a brother in Israel? It is no sin if he does not keep his oath to a non-Jew. Therefore, to steal and rob, as they do with their usury, from a non-Jew is a divine service. For they hold that they cannot be too hard on us nor sin against us, because they are of the noble blood and circumcised saints; we, however, are
cursed goyim. And they are the masters of the world, and we are their servants, yea, their cattle.... Should someone think that I am saying too much, I am not saying too much, but much too little. For I
see in their writings how they curse us goyim and wish us all evil in their schools and their prayers. The Jews responded to Luther like they responded to all the others. They put him down as just
another "hater," blinded by religious bigotry. And today that's still the Jews' standard answer to everyone who says or writes
anything about them except the most fawning praise.
When British newsman William Cash, Los Angeles correspondent for London's Daily Telegraph , reported late last year in a magazine article the simple fact that the executives in Hollywood's motion picture industry are nearly all Jews, they shrieked at him, "Hater!" and denied his fact. When spokesmen for patriotic organizations, discuss on radio programs the Jewish control of the news and entertainment media,the Jews also denounce them as "haters," and a call goes out to prohibit "hate" on the airwaves.
Thus, Israel Shahak's book is all the more important for being a document by a knowledgeable Jew--a Jewish "insider"--about the beliefs and behavior of his fellow Jews. Born in Warsaw in 1933, Shahak spent
a portion of his childhood in the concentration camp in Belsen, from which he immigrated to Palestine in 1945. He grew up in
Israel, served in the Israeli military, and became a chemistry professor. Like all Israelis, he became fluent in Hebrew. He also became acclimated to the peculiar moral atmosphere of Israeli society: a combination of overweening arrogance and deceit, a mixture of pugnacious self-righteousness and duplicity.
Unlike his fellow Israelis, however, Professor Shahak is deeply troubled by this peculiar atmosphere. Whereas the Jews around him take it for granted that the goyim on whom they depend for economic, military, and diplomatic support are too stupid ever to figure out what the Jews think about them and say about them behind their backs
and plan to do to them when they can, and too sheeplike ever to take effective action if they do figure it out, he worries. He's worried that if his fellow Jews continue behaving as they always have, they
will get themselves into some really serious trouble--again.
In particular, Professor Shahak is concerned about the behavior of those of his race who adhere to Judaism. He is not one of these himself, and so he is able to look with some degree of objectivity at the mixture of superstition, Jewish chauvinism, and hatred of non-Jews which makes up the Jewish religion and its sacred writings. He
deplores traditional Jewish teachings, not only because of the danger that some new Martin Luther will come along and spill the beans to the Gentiles, but because of the spiritually debilitating effect these
teachings have had on the Jews themselves. Of the world of medieval Jewry in Europe, the world of the ghetto and the shtetl which
modern Jewish writers refer to in euphoric tones as a world of quaint tradition and piety, Shahak says: "It was a world sunk in the most abject superstition, fanaticism, and ignorance . . . ."
He cites a number of specific instances of the ways in which Jewish religious authorities have kept their flocks under control. In general, the rabbis have taught their fellow Jews that their Gentile neighbors are spiritually and morally unclean; that they are subhuman, on a level with the beasts of the field; and that they hate
Jews and must be hated in return. Jews are taught that the Christian religion is a religion fit only for animals, and that
its founder, Jesus, was the son of a prostitute and is presently immersed in a pit of boiling excrement in hell.
Among the Hassidim (Hebrew for "pious ones") all of these teachings are kept current. Shahak points out that a central thesis of the Hassidic doctrine is that only Jews are human beings, and that the universe was created for them alone. Non-Jews were created only to be used by Jews. Although this teaching about the subhumanity of
Gentiles is most open and explicit among the bearded, sidelocked, black-hatted Orthodox Jews that one sees in Jewish strongholds such as New York City, it comes from the core of Jewish tradition and is
accepted to a greater or lesser degree by all pious Jews. It is, for example, a specific tenet of the Jewish Defense League and is
cited in the membership handbook for that group.
Especially frustrating to Professor Shahak is the clever deception which his fellow Jews use to conceal the true nature of Judaism from their Gentile neighbors. Regarding the veil of false piety which conceals from Gentile eyes the malevolent doctrine of the Hassidim, he writes: "A chief deceiver in this case, and a good example of the
power of deception, was Martin Buber. His numerous works eulogizing the whole Hassidic movement (including Habbad) never so much as hint at the real doctrines of Hassidism concerning non-Jews." Buber
(1878-1965) promoted Hassidism in Germany during the rise of the National Socialists--in fact, until 1938, when he left for
Palestine--and Shahak considers Buber's efforts, despite their deceptiveness, at least partly responsible for the
National Socialist reaction to the Jews.
Another example of Jewish deception given by Professor Shahak concerns the etymology of the Yiddish word for a Gentile girl, shiksa . He cites the popular English-language book The Joys of Yiddish (New
York, 1968), by Leo Rosten, which tells its readers that shiksa comes from the Hebrew word sheqetz , meaning "blemish." Writes
Shahak, "This is a barefaced lie, as every speaker of Hebrew knows. The Megiddo Modern Hebrew-English Dictionary, published in Israel, correctly defines sheqetz as follows: 'unclean animal; loathsome
creature, abomination . . . .'"
Professor Shahak writes with passion. He evidently feels that liberating Jews everywhere from the shackles of their misanthropic superstitions and freeing Israeli state policy in particular from the stifling influence of Judaism is a matter of some urgency. He focuses our attention especially on the inherent hatefulness of Judaism with
citations from a number of Jewish religious writings.
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