The Jewish Problem in Ancient Times

[Evola As He Is]

The need to take up the pen to write once again about Julius Evola's views on the Jewish question developed from the combination of a meditation on the misleading claim that "What is highlighted here [in Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem] is the complex spirit of Hebraism, whose deep-rooted tradition seems to have been undermined by the disintegrating influences of Judaism" (http://www.edizionidiar.it/evola-julius/tre-aspetti-del-problema-ebraico.html), and of the will to draw explicitly the necessary conclusions which can be read between the lines in a recent well-documented article on J. Evola and the historical role of Judaism in the ancient world (http://it.narkive.com/2008/10/20/1015986-gerusalemme-contro-roma-parte-1.html), with the awareness that there are still misunderstanding about J. Evola's views on the problem at stake, whether they are due, in part or in full, to the reader, to the author, or, for that matter, to his exegetes. In this regard, our critical reading of `Julius Evola's Political Endeavors', based on full quotations from those works of his which have been published in English, resulted in some clarification, particularly as regards the statement that the Italian author's "writings never spoke out against orthodox religious Judaism." This examination led us to summarise his analysis of the Jewish question as follows : 1. a tradition existed in the shape of Judaism ; 2. the valuable part of its content was most likely not intrinsically Jewish ; 3. it degenerated into a ferment of decomposition on all planes, whether spiritual, intellectual, social or economic, through a process of secularisation. In this explanatory outline, the only variable in J. Evola's work concerns the element on which the emphasis is put, the extent of the borrowing and the determination of the traditions to which the borrowed elements originally belonged.

Here, we propose to do the opposite, which means to develop the three points we highlighted, breaking down the Italian author's argumentation into all the arguments it is constituted of, so as to make it easier to grasp, as crystal clear as possible. To achieve this, of course, our comprehensive account will be based on relevant quotes from his work. Then, a critical analysis of his line of reasoning will be provided in the light of the Ancient Testament, of the work of various Biblical scholars and of various historians of antiquity, as well as of recent genetic studies. With only a very few exceptions, such as the postface to `Il Mito del sangue' (Sear, 1995), the studies, such as P. di Vona's and G. Monastra's, on J. Evola's racial views, especially in relation to the Jewish question, work in a closed circuit, in that they check these, not against scholarly sources, not even – which is the icing on the cake, coming from writers who are scholars – against the Old Testament, one of the very best sources to study the Jews, but merely against their own views, perceptions and feelings on the Jewish question, which are based on mere personal opinions that are unsupported, or supported only by a unilateral and self-righteous reading of J. Evola's anti-Semitic writings. Whereas, as we shall see, the assumption is made in some of these that Judaism is an alteration of Hebraism, others do trace the origins of the distinctive traits of Judaism to the very nature of the early Jewish people.

In the ancient Hebrew tradition as in any other tradition there would a solar, heroic, component and a lunar, passive, component. A solar symbolism would be present in the events described in the book of Exodus, insofar as they are "capable of esoteric interpretation" (RATMW) ; Eliha, Enoch, as well as Jacob, would be heroic types. Yet, "these elements are sporadic and reveal a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness" (ibid;) ; the Kabala, that is, the initiatory tradition that is found in Judaism, "has some particularly involuted traits, which characterize it at times as an `accursed science'" (ibid.) ; the same oscillation can be noticed in the Jewish concept of kingship : on one hand, rulers such as David and Solomon belonged to a stock of king-priests, but, on the other hand, "the Jew saw in the full and traditional understanding of regal dignity a disparagement of God's privilege (whether historical or not, Samuel's opposition to the establishment of a monarchy is very significant)." (ibid.) In the earliest conception of the afterlife in the Jewish scriptures, not even the king can avoid to tread the lunar `path of the ancestors', the only path that can be tread by all dead.

Furthermore, these traits of a positive, virile, spirituality turn out not to be intrinsically Jewish (they are "most likely derived (…) from the Amorites, whose non-Semitic and Nordic origin is sometimes argued") (TAOTJP), with one exception : the idea of the king-messiah "had numerous common features with purely Aryan conceptions and ideals, from which, besides, the Jews, in this respect, often borrowed elements" (Trasformazioni del Regnum, La Vita Italiana, 1937) ; "the very idea of a `chosen people' destined to rule the world by divine mandate... is an idea that can also be found in Aryan traditions, particularly among Iranians, just as, among the latter, though with virile and non-passive Messianic features, the type of the future `universal master', Shaoshyant, a king of kings." (TAOTJP.) The only inborn characteristic of the ancient Hebrew religion would be "the so-called `formalism' of the rites", insofar as it is thought to have "more than likely" "the same anti-sentimental, active, determinative spirit that... was the characteristic of the primordial and even Roman virile Aryan ritual." (ibid.)

How could it have been otherwise on the religious plane ? How would the religious belief and practices of the Hebrews not have reflected their composite racial substance ? "Ethnically, and originally, very different bloods flowed into the Jewish people ; the Old Testament itself speaks of many tribes and races contained in this people and modern race research has come to admit, in it, the presence of elements even of Aryan or non-Semitic origins, as seems to be the case in particular for the Pharisees." (https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/presentation-of-the-jewish-problem/ ; see Ezekiel 16:3 ff) As "a half-caste people... The Jew is essentially a mix of the Levantine or Armenoid race and of the desert or Orientaloid race ; besides, he would also combine elements such as the Hamitic race, the Black race, then the Mediterranean and Alpine (Ostisch) race and of secondary races, whether Oriental or European... The Jewish people is an admixture of races, not to say a detritus of predominantly non Indo-European races." (Sulla Genesi dell'ebraismo come forza distruttrice, La Vita Italiana, July 1941).

What gave shape and unity to the Jewish people was the Law. "... in ancient Judaism we find a very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its `form', and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and of the common origins. From this formative action, which was connected to sacred and ritualistic values and preserved from the first redactions of the Torah to the elaboration of the Talmud, the Jewish type arose as that of a race of the soul [`race of the soul', and not `spiritual', as translated in the American edition of `Rivolta'] rather than of a physical race." (RATMW) "It has been said, by a Jew, that, just as Adam was formed by Jehovah, the Jew was formed by the Jewish law, (…)." (https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/presentation-of-the-jewish-problem/) "This `Law', in the Jew, replaces the homeland, the land, the nation, the blood itself ; this `Law' reacted to an original, chaotic and detrital racial mixture, imposed a shape upon it, had it assume instincts and attitudes of a special type, which would become hereditary through the centuries." (IMDS)

However, "Once the military fortunes of Israel declined, defeat came to be understood as a punishment for `sins' committed, and thus an expectation developed that after a dutiful expiation Jehovah would once again assist his people and restore their power. This theme was dealt with in Jeremiah and in Isaiah. But since this did not happen, the prophetic expectations degenerated into an apocalyptic, messianic myth, and in the fantastic eschatological vision of a Savior who will redeem Israel ; this marked the beginning of a process of disintegration. What derived from the traditional component eventually turned into a ritualistic formalism and thus became increasingly abstract and separated from real life." (ibid.) "... moreover, a connection was established with a human type, who in order to uphold values that he cannot realize and that thus appear to him increasingly abstract and utopian, eventually feels dissatisfied and frustrated before any existing positive order and any form of authority... so as to be a constant source of disorder and of revolution." (RATMW)

Now that a precise summary of J. Evola's views on the Jewish question in ancient times has been given, it is time to subject them to a critical reading. The problem of the historicity of the Bible, that of its dating, or, more precisely, of the dating of the various books of the Old Testament, that of the successive revisions they have undergone throughout the centuries, and that of its translation into the languages of the Gentiles, and, more particularly, of its first translation, the Septuagint, which was initiated and supervised by the Jews themselves, will hardly be taken into account. They are inextricable. Whether the authentic history of Israel only began with the monarchy (around 1000 BCE) or the earlier stories are mere allegories, whether the earlier stories were transmitted by oral traditions or from literary circles of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the extent to which the scriptural corpus was reinterpreted, amended, corrected, over the centuries, are questions which cannot be resolved positively in most cases from what we know at present, any more than it is always possible to identify with complete certainty whether some scriptures, whose study is however very important for the examination of J. Evola's assumption that the concept of Messiah was distorted after the destruction of the political life of Israel and the deportation of its leadership, are pre-exilic or post-exilic. Even so, the whole Jewish scriptural corpus, with a few exceptions that correspond to passages unanimously considered as dubious, will be taken, as it was by J. Evola, as it is, as the Jews want non Jews to perceive them.

According to Genesis, Japhet is the father of the white race, and, more precisely, of the Indo-Europeans of Western Asia and of Europe ; Shem, the father of the peoples of the Middle East and of Southern Asia, while the descendants of Ham are the Egyptians, the Ethiopians, the Libyans and the Canaanites, as well as the Black race. It is certainly not our intention to discuss the ethnographic conceptions of the ancient Hebrews, in whose maze biblical scholars themselves get mixed up. While much has been written about the Table of Nations since Flavus Josephus, the most important thing, the main point, may have been missed. It has been missed because most of those who have studied it have focused exclusively on the question of its historical accuracy and validity, thus overlooking the deep truth it contains, which should be sought, so to speak, upstream, and not downstream. The starting point for arriving at a clear view of the matter is not the lineage of Japhet, Ham, and Shem, but the fact that "Ethnically, and originally, very different bloods have flowed into the Jewish people ; the Old Testament itself speaks of many tribes and races contained in this people..." (TAOTJP) In other words, the Table of Nations should be read, so to speak, in reverse : it's not that the various races come monogenically from the ancestors of the Jewish people, it's that the Jewish people is made up of various races. Indeed, "... modern race research has come to admit, in it, the presence of elements even of Aryan or non-Semitic origins, as seems to be the case in particular for the Pharisees." (https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/presentation-of-the-jewish-problem/) The results of later genetic studies have confirmed that research unambiguously : "Haplotypes constructed from Y-chromosome markers were used to trace the paternal origins of the Jewish Diaspora. A set of 18 biallelic polymorphisms was genotyped in 1,371 males from 29 populations, including 7 Jewish (Ashkenazi, Roman, North African, Kurdish, Near Eastern, Yemenite, and Ethiopian) and 16 non-Jewish groups from similar geographic locations. The Jewish populations were characterized by a diverse set of 13 haplotypes that were also present in non-Jewish populations from Africa, Asia, and Europe." (http://www.pnas.org/content/97/12/6769.full) As a matter of fact, for example, "… members of the black, Bantu-speaking southern African Lemba tribe, who have some rituals similar to Jews and have tribal origin stories that they are descended from Jews, do indeed carry some Y-chromosome markers that are undoubtedly of Semitic, probably Jewish, origin." A study "by A. Oppenheim and her colleagues showed that about 70 percent of Jewish paternal ancestries and about 82 percent of Palestinian Arabs share the same chromosomal pool. The geneticists asserted that this might support the claim that Palestinian Arabs descend in part from Judeans who converted to Islam" (Human Genetics, December 2000) ; "In 2001, a team of Israeli, German, and Indian scientists discovered that the majority of Jews around the world are closely related to the Kurdish people -- more closely than they are to the Semitic-speaking Arabs or any other population that was tested" (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1626606/posts) ; the haematological research of A. E. Mourant shows that all Jews throughout the world have an admixture of at least 5% to 10% of Congoid blood, findings which do not prevent some contemporary authors who report them to be adamant that "Jews are a race". Such nonsense is widespread, not to say endemic, among suggestible anti-Zionist goyim who are led to identify Nuremberg Laws, which, besides, did not refer exclusively to the Jews, with the mission of enforcing the Torah ban on mixed marriages Ezra and Nehemiah were entrusted with by the God of Israel following the close of the Babylonian captivity and the return of some Jews to Israel. Miscegenation was as uncommon and was felt as unnatural in early twentieth century Germany as it was seemingly widespread and regarded as natural in pre-exilic Israel, judging by the avowed reluctance with which the Israelites sent away their foreign wives and children, when urged to do so by Ezra, by the readiness with which they began to intermarry again, by the time Ezra had returned to his Babylonian dwellings, and by the unanimous reaction of the Israelites, upon Ezra's return to Jerusalem to take further measures to enforce his earlier legislation : "Nehemias (he is Athersatha) and Esdras the priest and scribe, and the Levites who interpreted to all the people, said : This is a holy day to the Lord our God : do not mourn, nor weep : for all the people wept, when they heard the words of the law." (Nehemiah 8:9) : "And shall we also be disobedient and do all this great evil to transgress against our God, and marry strange women ?" (ibid. 13:27) It does not appear that endogamy was the rule among Israelites in earlier times : Esau was married to two Hittites (Genesis 26:34) ; Joseph was married to an Egyptian (Genesis 41:45) ; Moses – irrespective of his ethnicity and, for that matter, of his historicity - was married to a Midianite (Exodus 2:21) and a Cushite (Numbers 12:1) ; David – who is portrayed as a descendant of a mixed marriage in the book of Ruth - to a Calebite and an Aramean (2 Samuel 3:3) ; "And king Solomon loved many strange women besides the daughter of Pharao, and women of Moab, and of Ammon, and of Edom, and of Sidon, and of the Hethites : Of the nations concerning which the Lord said to the children of Israel : You shall not go in unto them, neither shall any of them come in to yours : for they will most certainly turn away your heart to follow their gods. And to these was Solomon joined with a most ardent love. And he had seven hundred wives as queens, and three hundred concubines : and the women turned away his heart" (1 Kings 11:1-3), to mention but a few examples.

On that basis, how are we to explain that there are proscriptions of exogamy in the Pentateuch and in the Deuteronomy ?

"Does this prohibition apply to all gentiles or only to the seven Canaanite nations ? The answer is clearly the latter. Moses commands the Israelites to destroy the seven Canaanite nations because they threaten Israelite religious identity and live on the land that the Israelites will conquer. Intermarriage with them is prohibited. The Ammonites and Moabites, somewhat more distant and therefore somewhat less dangerous, were not consigned to destruction and isolation ; they were merely prohibited from entering the congregation (Deut. 23:4). The Egyptians and Edomites were even permitted to enter the congregation after three generations (Deut. 23:8-9). The meaning of the prohibition of "entering the congregation" is not at all clear (…) but I presume that originally, at least, it was not a prohibition of intermarriage. Other nations, even further removed from the Israelite horizon, were presumably not subject to any prohibition. Internal biblical evidence confirms this narrow interpretation of Deut. 7:3-4." (S. Cohen, The Beginning of Jewishness).
Then, it would seem that Ezra's opposition to intermarriage did not result from the racial ties of foreign wives, but from a concern about the effects that their religious beliefs and practices would have on the relatively small Hebrew community of the time. The issue may have been simply of the religious order, as opposed to the racial justification of the Nuremberg laws. Solomon fell in disfavour with Yahweh, not because, as David, he had intermarried, but because "his heart was turned away by women to follow strange gods." (1 Kings 14)

The Jewish Encyclopaedia acknowledges, not only that "Whether regarded politically or ethnologically, Israel must be considered a composite people. This appears both from the genealogical statements of the Bible and from recorded instances of racial amalgamation" (of the twelve sons of Jacob, two – Judah and Simeon - married a Canaanite ; Joseph married the daughter of Putiphar, the captain of Pharaoh's palace guard), but also that "early and late Judah derived strength from the absorption of outsiders" ; of course, the nature of this strength is not specified.

The mixed character of the early Israelites would inevitably be reflected in their religious beliefs and practices. The early period of Israelite settlement was characterised by a strong tendency towards syncretism with the religion of the Canaanites, which had in turn borrowed heavily from their neighbours'. The combination of different forms of belief and practice in the religion of Israel in the period of the kings was so pregnant that M. Eliade was led to describe it as the "culmination of syncretism." (History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas, chap. XIV) "The Canaanites, with whom the Israelites came into contact during the conquest by Joshua and the period of the Judges, were a sophisticated agricultural and urban people. The name Canaan means `Land of Purple' (a purple dye was extracted from a murex shellfish found near the shores of Palestine). The Canaanites (…) absorbed and assimilated the features of many cultures of the ancient Near East for at least 500 years before the Israelites entered their area of control...
The religion of the Canaanites was an agricultural religion, with pronounced fertility motifs. Their main gods were called the Baalim (Lords), and their consorts the Baalot (Ladies), or Asherah (singular), usually known by the personal plural name Ashtoret. The god of the city of Shechem, which city the Israelites had absorbed peacefully under Joshua, was called Baal-berith (Lord of the Covenant) or El-berith (God of the Covenant). Shechem became the first cultic center of the religious tribal confederacy (called an amphictyony by the Greeks) of the Israelites during the period of the judges…The Baalim and the Baalot, gods and goddesses of the Earth, were believed to be the revitalizes of the forces of nature upon which agriculture depended. The revitalization process involved a sacred marriage (hieros gamos), replete with sexual symbolic and actual activities between men, representing the Baalim, and the sacred temple prostitutes (qedeshot), representing the Baalot. Cultic ceremonies involving sexual acts between male members of the agricultural communities and sacred prostitutes dedicated to the Baalim were focused on the Canaanite concept of sympathetic magic. As the Baalim (through the actions of selected men) both symbolically and actually impregnated the sacred prostitutes in order to reproduce in kind, so also, it was believed, the Baalim (as gods of the weather and the Earth) would send the rains (often identified with semen) to the Earth so that it might yield abundant harvests of grains and fruits. Canaanite myths incorporating such fertility myths are represented in the mythological texts of the ancient city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra) in northern Syria ; though the high god El and his consort are important as the first pair of the pantheon, Baal and his sexually passionate sister-consort are significant in the creation of the world and the renewal of nature.
The religion of the Canaanite agriculturalists proved to be a strong attraction to the less sophisticated and nomadic-oriented Israelite tribes. Many Israelites succumbed to the allurements of the fertility-laden rituals and practices of the Canaanite religion, partly because it was new and different from the Yahwistic religion and, possibly, because of a tendency of a rigorous faith and ethic to weaken under the influence of sexual attractions. As the Canaanites and the Israelites began to live in closer contact with each other, the faith of Israel tended to absorb some of the concepts and practices of the Canaanite religion." (http://history-world.org/canaanite_culture_and_religion.htm) The ritual system, the sacred sites and the sanctuaries of Yahwism were borrowed from the Canaanite religion, and the Yahwist sacerdotal caste was modelled on the Canaanite's. However, the external influences which imparted Yahwism as it took shape were far from being limited to the worship of their closest neighbours, who were themselves a mixed people, whose political organisation, too, as will be seen, owed much to foreign influences.

"The initial level of Israelite culture resembled that of its surroundings; it was neither wholly original nor primitive." (http://history-world.org/history_of_judaism.htm) From an Indo-European perspective, "… the idea that the ancient Jewish civilisation represented something privileged and superior is absurd, since the stature of Israel appears modest with respect to the ethics and the spirituality common to the ancient Aryo-Hellenic, Indo-Aryan, Aryo-Roman, and Aryo-Iranian stocks." (Importanza dell'idea ariana, in La Stampa, 13 XI-1942 ; now in I Testi de La Stampa, AR, Padova, 2004) "This nation, despite what has been claimed, never had a civilisation of its own any more than the Phoenicians did" (A. de Gobineau, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) "The Jews possessed neither arts, nor sciences, nor industry, nor anything of that which constitutes a civilisation. They have never made even the faintest contribution to the edification of human knowledge. They have never surpassed that semibarbarous state of peoples without a history. If they ended in having cities, it is because living conditions, amidst neighbours which had arrived at a superior level of evolution, made it a necessity for them. They were unable to build themselves their cities, their temples, and their palaces, and, at the peak of their power, under the reign of Solomon, they had to bring from abroad the architects, the workers, and the artists, of whom no imitator could be found in Israel and in neighbouring countries. During its long years of history, Israel produced only one book, the Old Testament, in which only a few lyric poems are worthwhile. The rest consists of hallucinations, of lifeless chronicles, and of prurient and gory tales." (G. Le Bon, Les Premières civilisations) "If Christianity had not triumphed, the history of the Jewish people would be more foreign, more unknown, more indifferent to us, than that of the peoples of Asia Minor, such as the Lydians, the Phoenicians and the Hittites, which have certainly played in the ancient world an infinitely more important part than the Jews, some small tribe with no culture, continuously defeated and conquered, subdued and scattered. In fact, what is taught as `Sacred History' is completely unrelated to the plane of history." (G. Batault, Le Problème juif, 1921)

"The tribal structure resembled that of West Semitic steppe dwellers known from the 18th-century-BCE tablets excavated at the north central Mesopotamian city of Mari ; their family customs and law have parallels in Old Babylonian and Hurro-Semite law of the early and middle 2nd millennium. The conception of a messenger of God that underlies biblical prophecy was Amorite (West Semitic) and found in the tablets at Mari. Mesopotamian religious and cultural conceptions are reflected in biblical cosmogony, primeval history (including the Flood story in Gen. 6:9-8:22), and law collections. The Canaanite component of Israelite culture consisted of the Hebrew language and a rich literary heritage -whose Ugaritic form (which flourished in the northern Syrian city of Ugarit from the mid-15th century to about 1200 BCE) illuminates the Bible's poetry, style, mythological allusions, and religiocultic terms. Egypt provides many analogues for Hebrew hymnody and wisdom literature. All the cultures among which the patriarchs lived had cosmic gods who fashioned the world and preserved its order, including justice ; all had a developed ethic expressed in law and moral admonitions ; and all had sophisticated religious rites and myths." (http://history-world.org/history_of_judaism.htm) Syncretism does not stop there. The `trial of jalousy' (Numbers 5:11–31), a test of innocence or guilt consisting for the priest in administering bitter water to a wife accused of adultery by her husband, bears a certain resemblance to a similar custom among the primitive tribes of Western Africa ; circumcision, one of the primeval rites of Yahwism, seems to have originated among certain tribes in sub-Saharan Africa. J. John Williams (Hebrewisms of West Africa, from Nile to Niger with the Jews) reports that "Professor Keller of Yale University, relying in great part on data gathered by William Graham Sumner, while treating of `Disguise and other Forms of Mourning', places many West African funeral customs in the same class with the ritual `sackcloth and ashes' of the Old Testament." www.angelfire.com/ill/hebrewisrael/printpages/hebrewism.html provides an overview of the striking resemblances of traditional African customs to some of those which are described in the Ancient Testament.

It is important to bear in mind that no element whatsoever remains unchanged when passing from one culture to another. This process has been extremely well studied from a dynamic perspective by Sigmund Mowinckel (He That Cometh) with respect to the institution of kingship in the early Hebrew community. In fact, his clear and enlightening presentation, which will give us further insight into the genius of the Jewish people and, more particularly, into the Jewish Messianic idea, into the radical changes that were undergone in it by elements borrowed from other cultures, is so relevant to the matter at hand and so free of confrontational positions that it will be incorporated into this study almost word for word, although in a pruned form, as a transition to the consideration of the matter of Messianism.

The settlement in Canaan and, more exactly, in Schechem, involved an entirely new way of life, whose inevitable consequences were a new social structure, and new political institutions and agencies, which in turn called for new forms and fashion. It was from the Canaanites that the Hebrews learned what a king was like. In legal and commercial transactions they often had to resort to the tribunal of these kings, and they had to use, or, of necessity, to submit to regulations for trade and agriculture which they had not had to develop when they were nomads. They learned that the monarchical system lay behind every attempt to establish a great empire, and that only a monarchy had the power to hold together scattered tribes and settlements, since only a king could have an army big enough for the purpose. Together with the monarchy it was natural that Israel should take over from the Canaanites a great many ideas and conceptions of kingship, the royal ideology, the `manner (mispat) of the kingdom', its etiquette and customs, the whole pattern of life which was bound up with it. The Old Testament does not conceal the fact that in many ways it was a new and alien `manner'. The ideal of kingship that the Hebrews took over from the Canaanites was actually a special development of the common oriental concept of kingship. The Canaanite kingship was not an indigenous creation, independent of foreign influences. The entire culture of the country was in large measure composite, mainly Syrian, but, like Syrian culture itself, subject to strong influence from Mesopotamia (Hurrian-Mitannian), from Babylonia and Assyria, from Asia Minor (Hittite) and from the neighbouring country of Egypt.

The god is thought of particularly as the god of fertility and creation. The most important cult festival is that of the New Year, when the world is created anew. In it the king goes through the humiliation and death of the god, his resurrection, combat and victory, and his `sacred marriage' with the fertility goddess, and thereby creates the world and makes its prosperity and blessing secure for the New Year. It is though that this pattern left its stamp on the cultic practice of the entire Near East, including that of Israel, but partly in such a way that the pattern was `disintegrated', that is, interpreted, re-interpreted and, at times, misinterpreted.

Behind this conception of kingship lies a thought which is found among many primitive peoples, and particularly among the Hamitic tribes of Africa, with whom the Egyptians had close ethnological and cultural connexions. The thought is that of a mana-filled chief of the type called `rainmaker-king', who after death remains a source of power, and who, inter alia, is incarnated in his successor, though he himself also exists everywhere and acts in other ways. Yet as early as the time of the ancient Sumerians, the idea of kingship differed considerably from that of Egypt in many ways. We are dealing here not simply with two variants of a common oriental ideology of kingship, but with a basic difference of principle, in spite of many similarities in detail to Egyptian phenomena. For instance, the individual has no prospect of lasting life, as in Egypt. The aim of the cult is to safeguard the continued life of the world, of nature, and of the race in `the land'. But even the gods need to be strengthened and renewed by the `service' and `food' of which the sacrifices consist. The gods created men to perform this service, and set a king over them. He is, indeed, the `great man' (Sumerian, Lugal), but nevertheless a man like other men. His task is to serve the gods, and carry out their will on earth. His relation to gods is that of a worshipper, not an equal ; he represents his people before them. Here too, of course, there is a background of the common primitive ideas of the mana-filled chief and leader of the cult, in whom the `power' of the community is concentrated ; he is the channel of divine life and power to the community.

Even after the emergence of permanent personal rule, the rulers do not usually call themselves `kings', but the `vicegerents' (Sumerian, ENSI ; Accadian, ifiakku) and priests (sangu) of the god of the city. And when the position of the king acquires a more political and military character, based as it is on force, a distinction may arise in practice between the king and the vice-gerent priest ; but it is still the king who is the link between the god and the community. He has a sacral character, inasmuch as he is an intermediary between the god and the people. As a rule he is presented as a man among men. Insofar as the Babylonian king is endowed with divine powers and qualities, he may be regarded as a `divine' being ; but he is not a god in the same sense as Pharaoh. In accordance with the will of the god he administers and governs the whole land, which is really the god's property, or the world and mankind, whom the gods created for their own service. The dominant thought is that the king has been designated and chosen by the gods, called by name, equipped with power, thought of beforehand in the heart of the god. In accordance with a common religious tendency, this divine election of the king is often regarded as predestination. The election of the king implies that he has a definite vocation and a definite task, namely to represent the gods before men and vice versa. The king is the intermediary between gods and men. By means of oracles (asked for or sent), he must discover the will of the gods and accomplish it on earth. He must represent men before the gods, and govern his realm in accordance with the law of the gods. In principle, therefore, he is also priest (sangu), even if there are professional priests, who in practice carry out the daily routine which forms part of his duties. He conducts sacrifices and performs rites. In relation to the gods, he is `servant', subordinate to them and dependent on them. The god is his `king' and `lord'. But the title of servant also implies that he has a task to perform by the god's authority. He also represents the people before the gods, and is responsible for relations between them. He must expiate and atone for the people's sins, and must personally submit to the rites of atonement. He may even have to suffer death for the sins and impurity of the people.

Through his good relationship with the gods, a relationship which is strengthened and made effective by means of the cult, the king is able to convey to men the blessings of nature, good crops, abundance, peace, and so on. The Mesopotamian royal texts are full of effusive descriptions of the material, social, and moral prosperity which abounds in the land when the rightful king has come to the throne, or when he has performed his cultic duties in the right and proper way, and complied with the will of the gods. But it is only after the king, by his vicarious and representative rites in the festival, has atoned for the impurity which has accumulated, that prosperity can be maintained.

It will have been noted that this characterisation of Semitic spirituality and religions fully supports that which is articulated in `Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem' and in `Revolt against the Modern World'.

Israel, S. Mowinckel goes on, did not take over either Canaanite religion, or the sacral kingship which was connected with it, unaltered. In Yahwism the royal ideology underwent profound changes. Even in the purified, Yahwistic form of the tradition in the Old Testament, there are many indications that the forms and ideas associated with the monarchy, which were originally adopted in the court ceremonial of David and Solomon, were strongly influenced by common oriental conceptions. Yet many ideas were adopted in a sense different from that which they originally carried in Canaan or Babylonia. Many a cultic rite may have been dissociated from its original context when it was appropriated for Yahwism, so that it now appears either as a survival or with a new meaning.

It should also be clear that the Israelite monarchy also inherited traditions from the old chieftainship of the semi-nomadic period and the time of the settlement. In the traditions about Saul, the account of his simple household, court, and bodyguard are reminiscent of the establishment of an ancient chieftain rather than of an oriental king's court. The chieftainship was in a measure hereditary. But the position of a tribal chief or sheikh depended primarily on his personal qualities, his ability to lead, advise, and help, and to settle disputes within the tribe or between tribes and clans. All the traditions about the Judges show that they attained their position because, in a given historical situation, they were able to rally the tribe, or several tribes, around themselves, to beat off the enemy, and thus `save' their people. This testifies to a more concrete aspect of the later "very visible effort on the part of a priestly elite to dominate and coalesce a turbid, multiple, and turbulent ethnical substance by establishing the divine Law as the foundation of its `form', and by making it the surrogate of what in other people was the unity of the common fatherland and of the common origins."

The comprehensive expression for all the chieftain's qualities and activities was that he `judged'. He was `judge', i.e., ruler, and leader, and magistrate, by virtue of his ability to do mispat, and his inherent `righteousness'. This chieftainship has been called `charismatic', as dependent on Yahweh's `grace-gift' ; and the legends often emphasise that the Judges were called to the task of liberation by a revelation from Yahweh Himself. We also hear that they performed their heroic deeds because Yahweh's spirit came upon them and endowed them with unusual power and insight. When the spirit seized them in the hour of crisis, the effect was ecstasy, a high tension of all the powers and faculties of the soul. Then they `went in this their might', with Yahweh as their protector and helper (Judges 6: 14; cf. I Sam. 10:1-7). There is no mention of a permanent endowment with the spirit, but of an abnormal communication of power from time to time.

In his activity the chief was dependent on the fact that he represented ancient use and wont and conceptions of justice, and on the approbation of the leading men of the tribe, `the elders'. He
had no independent power to enforce his commands. His authority was founded on the trust he enjoyed, the spiritual influence he exercised, and the approbation of public opinion and the common sense of justice. If he had the tribe or a personal following behind him, he might also enforce his will on other tribes.

Besides his activity as a judge, the chief was also in charge of the public cult of his tribe. The ancient unity of chief and seer-priest is reflected in the traditions about Moses ; the chief Ehud
appears as the bearer of an oracle from Yahweh (Judges 3:19).

The Israelite monarchy is the result of the fusion of the traditions of the old chieftainship with the laws, customs, and ideas of Canaanite kingship. Thence arose the early attempts at tribal
kingship under Gideon and Abimelech. In contrast with these, Saul represents a conscious attempt to create a comprehensive national kingship embracing all the tribes ; and he probably had behind him the old Israelite amphictyony of ten tribes. On the other hand, the kingship of David and Solomon represents a national and religious syncretism. But in Israel the tension between the traditions of chieftainship and those of kingship, and, in general, the hostility of the `desert ideals' to the monarchy were always present. This is evident in the opposition between the old standard of justice and the despotic mispat of the new monarchy. In the affair of Naboth they clash in the persons of Elijah and Ahab (I Kings 21). The opposition is still more plainly seen in. the theory that Yahweh alone should be king in Israel, and in the clear awareness that kingship was a Canaanite innovation, thoughts which find expression in one of the collections of traditions about Saul and Samuel (I Sam. 8 ; 10; 12 ; 15). When the cultic functions were transferred to the king, and the chiefs entered his service, it was left to the circles of old seers and prophets to conserve the traditions of nomadic times, or rather, what they believed these traditions, which are thought to have been post-exilic idealisations, not to say fabrications (Keith W. Whitelman, The Invention of Ancient Israel) to be. In the traditions about Moses he is not, as has been maintained, a partial reflection of the figure of the king : on the contrary, he represents the ideals and traditions which were opposed to the monarchy. It was this prophetic opposition which constantly renewed the claim that the king's task was to submit to and maintain `the justice of Yahweh', and not to claim to be more than he was, or to exalt himself over his `brethren'. It is emphasised that it was a warrior chosen from among the people that Yahweh exalted when he made David king (Ps. 64:20).

The stormy and conflicting nature of the covenantal relation between Yahweh and Israel is reflected, not only in this opposition, but also in the more or less latent conflict between Yahweh and the kings, in the frictions between the priests and the kings, in the infightings within the sacerdotal caste, in the implacable and incessant conflict between Baal and Yahweh, and in the tension between the nationalistic conception of religion and salvation and the universalistic conception of God, between a cosmic religion and the faithfulness to one God, which is illustrated by the contest Elijah demanded on Mount Carmel between the powers of Israel's God and the powers of Jezebel and the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18). The very establishment of a monarchy in Israel was not a sinecure. Both Yahweh and Samuel first opposed it (I Samuel 8:10-18). However, Yahweh had a change of mind and gave Samuel the responsibility of selecting a king for the Hebrews, on the sole condition that the king was the servant of Yahweh. Yahweh was praised as king. The idea of divine kingship did not depend on the institution of monarchy. Yahweh is the master of the world because it is Him who created it.

Yahweh was praised as king, so much so that, when he wanted to give guidance to a leader, he often gave it through a prophet (David had the prophets Gad and Nathan in his palace).
Kingship, whose opponents were highly critical of, was, as seen above, a foreign institution, likely to have been imposed upon Israel, according to some scholars, with the complicity of the Levites, a priestly group whose origins are unclear but unambiguously reach back to the tribe of Levi, and which lost its supremacy to the Zakodite priests of Jerusalem in the later monarchical period (http://www.answers.com/topic/levite#ixzz1W8rR3xVW) ; the king, whose function, by way of summing up the foregoing, was to maintain the cosmic order, to impose justice, to protect the weak, and to ensure the fertility of the land, was only the representative of Yahweh, his vicar, conceived as an entity distinct from him, as is typical of Semitic religions ; before taking the throne, the king was anointed by the prophet, who, besides, was himself previously anointed with the holy anointing oil (1 Kings 19:16) - Anointing itself, the sacramental act which more than anything else linked the king with Yahweh, seems originally to have been borrowed from the Canaanites, and was probably also practised among the Babylonians ; he was literally a crownless king ; in this regard, some psalms seem refer to the non Indo-European symbolic ritual of death and resurrection of the king – Yahweh, as to him, does not die and resurrect. The Temple, whose architecture was based on a foreign model, became the residence of Yahweh among the Israelites under the reign of Solomon and, therefore, the royal cult was identified with the state religion, but not fully, since the kings were criticised on certain occasions for having performed rites reserved for priests – it has not escape your notice that the frictions between the Levites and the kings, spurred by the fact that the latter encouraged the combining of the religious ideas and practices which were those of the two sections of the population, the Israelites and the Canaanites, are reminiscent of the medieval conflict between the emperor and the pope over the question of the superiority or not of the spiritual authority over the temporal authority. In the same vein, the break up of the united kingdom resulted from one of those religious conflicts for which early Israel is not renowned enough : "Solomon's policy, late in his reign, of conciliating all the major influential political-religious parties by granting them state recognition (1 Kings 11:1ff) was a significant departure from the policy of his father David who granted state recognition only to the political-religious cult-party of Yahweh (while making no attempt to stamp out the other cults in his territory). Solomon's liberal policy provoked the opposition of the exclusivist... Yahwist power caucus (1 Kings 11:9-13) and provided convenient opportunity for the Ephraimite school of Yahwist prophets to sow the seeds of disunity by instigating the ambitious Ephraimite Jeroboam to rebellion (1 Kings 11: 28-40)." www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the-political-subversive-role-of-the-prophets-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarchy-part-1/ Religious disunity, as medievalists know well, breeds political instability : "The received wisdom of popular pious opinion is that which correlates the periods of Israel's highest points of political, military and economic prosperity with the ascendancy of the Yahwist religious-political party. The entirety of the Books of Kings and Chronicles were written in defense of the dubious but historically influential thesis that the prosperity of the state of Ancient Israel hinged upon the loyalty of people and state to Yahweh, and that national disaster was the consequence of disloyalty to the Yahweh. Yet there is abundant evidence that rather than having been a source of stability, the cult of Yahweh, for most of the history of Israel, played a major subversive, divisive and politically destabilizing role and that the uncompromising insistence of its religious cult on exclusive access to power and state patronage generated unnecessary friction which heated up and destabilized the polity, especially in periods of ascendancy of the opposition Baalist political party. There is also evidence that the most effective and competent dynasties of Kings in Israel's post-United kingdom history were Baalist, and that the Yahwists consistently worked to stymie the efforts of the Baalist party at stabilizing the kingdom www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the-political-subversive-role-of-the-prophets-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarchy-part-1/

Yahweh's nature itself is universally known to be conflicting. He appears to his own people as both loving and hateful, benevolent and merciless, charitable and avenging, depending on the circumstances and, so to speak, without warning, sometimes apparently for no reason. On one hand, He is "a consuming fire, a jealous God" (Deuteronomy 4:24), and, on the other hand, He "is a merciful God : he will not leave thee, nor altogether destroy thee, nor forget the covenant, by which he swore to thy fathers." This bipolar disorder has been commented with humour as follows : "Apparently from the very start, being chosen was a mixed blessing because the God who did the choosing was himself mixed up" (Yahweh versus Yahweh : the enigma of Jewish history, Jay Y. Gonen).

A god with no name before the Israelites settled in Canaan, `Yahweh', whose actual pronunciation is disputed by those who are not in the know and whose meaning is uncertain to those who are not in the know either, ended up with seven names. The original nature of this god and even the emergence of Yahwism are so shrouded in mystery that it is as though no effort had been spared to muddy the waters. Since it is certainly not the place to review all the hypotheses that have been formulated on these matters, it is only that to which J. Evola made reference that will be explored here. "There are ancient traditions according to which Typhon, a demon opposed to the Solar God, was the father of the Hebrew ; various Gnostic authors considered the Hebrew god as one of Typhon's creatures. These are references to a demonic spirit characterized by a constant relentlessness, by an obscure contamination, and by a latent revolt of the inferior elements" (RATMW). These references are however undermined by J. Doresse's finding that in Gnosticism the values of Genesis underwent the same inversion as had the Egyptian myths. After all, in the Book of Jacob, doesn't Yahweh boast about the slaying of Leviathan, the personification of chaos in the Canaanite myth with which this Biblical account shares similarities ? The matter is nonetheless far more complex than appears at first sight. In fact, there is no need to refer to Gnostic sources to realise that Yahweh can easily qualify as a demonic force. While a dose of faith is needed to rationalise Psalm 137:9 ("Blessed be he that shall take and dash thy little ones against the rock") and Isaiah 13:16-17 ("Their infants shall be dashed in pieces before their eyes : their houses shall be pillaged, and their wives shall be ravished. Behold I will stir up the Medes against them, who shall not seek silver, nor desire gold"), there is still no consensus as to the interpretation of Exodus 4:24-26 ("And when he was in his journey, in the inn, the Lord met him, and would have killed him. Immediately Sephora took a very sharp stone, and circumcised the fore skin of her son, and touched his feet and said : A bloody spouse art thou to me"), in which commentators seem to be more concerned about finding out who is this ambiguous "him" and the reason for the attack than about uncovering who or what exactly "would have him killed". To Gershom, "We may be sure that Yahweh is no more a concupiscent demon-god than Zipporah is a virgin mother" ; to Gregory of Nyssa, an underestimated master of forgery, it is not Yahweh who encounters Moses, not even the "angel of the Lord", but simply an "angel". `Clarifying baffling biblical passages' (http://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/CBBP_Chapter_5.pdf) does not clarify anything in this regard, but does acknowledge that "It is a very ancient primitive story that pictures a `demonic' Yahweh (…) The original story may have concerned a demon or deity of the boundary between Midianite territory and Egypt whom Moses failed to appease." (J. Philip Hyatt, Exodus) This is dismissed flatly as nonsense by J.B. Jordan (Law of the Covenant), whereas Antti Laato and Johannes C. de Moor reiterate that "the fact is that we do have examples in the Old Testament where `evil' is attributed to Yahweh himself (…) and that these passages have been regarded as difficult interpretive problems already in ancient Judaism." (Theodicy in the World of the Bible) www.fundotrasovejas.org.ar/ingles/Libros/Subersibe%20hebrew%20bible/Exodus.pdf gives some more detail : "In its notes the Sagrada Biblia (Cantera – Iglesias, BAC) suggests that the primitive narration, probably Midianite, "would have referred to a local bloodthirsty demon later identified with Yahweh (see Jacob's struggle with an "angel/God" Gen. 32:24-32). In the demythologizing process, Yahweh replaced the demon, and the text was adapted to legitimize the circumcision of boys." It should also be mentioned that there are a few texts from the Greek magical papyri in which Iao (a Greek form of Yahweh) is associated, among other divinities, with Seth-Typhon (Iao is identified with Jesus in the Coptic magical papyri - www.scribd.com/doc/6540917/Seth-in-the-Magickal-Texts#) . See also `God at war : the Bible and Spiritual Conflict', p. 344 (
books.google.fr/books?id=Hj791_BeAF0C&pg=PA344&lpg=PA344&dq=%22demonic+god%22+yahweh&source=bl&ots=utlO801LRt&sig=wX7mkCa1KBvOA7aygmuLiAABNA4&hl=fr&ei=9wB-Tvv1G8GnhAf1hpAR&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CDwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=%22demonic%20god%22%20yahweh&f=false)

Let us pass on the fact that there are many examples of magical practices in the Old Testament (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Jeffers-Magic-and-Divination-in-Ancient-Israel.pdf), despite the Deuteronomic condemnation of magic and witchcraft, and that the cut-off point between magica licita and magica illicita is set, as is definitely the case in early Christian writings, too, by God (http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/Articles/article_88.pdf), in virtue of its claimed and perceived normativeness. Let us also pass on the fact that even a Biblical scholar who would swear on the Bible that "Moses and Aaron do not employ magic of any kind in Exodus 7:8-12 and 15:1-18, " lets the cat out of the bag in accepting that "the miracles they perform do have Egyptian analogs," and in noting "that prior to the parting of the Reed Sea we find the mention of a curse, not in connection with the magicians, but rather in connection with Yahweh. As Exod. 14:20 informs us, the cloud of darkness that Yahweh created `cast a curse/spell (rayw) upon the night, so that one could not come near the other all through the night.' Though `rayw' as presently vocalized favors the usual understanding of `cast light' rather than `cast a spell,' the original consonantal text would have been ambiguous. Moreover, the ordinary interpretation fails to explain why, if Yahweh cast light, `one could not come near the other all through the night.' This is a description of darkness and not illumination." (http://faculty.washington.edu/snoegel/PDFs/articles/Noegel%2019%20-%20JANES%201996.pdf) What merits some attention is that the author, when examining the question of magic in the Old Testament, unconsciously tapped into a key aspect of Yahweh that is closely linked to his demonism : fear and dread : "It is this fear and dread that magic ultimately invokes in the heart of the enemy if affected properly.
When we return to Exodus 15 we find a similar concern with how the death of the Egyptian at the Reed Sea brought dread upon Egypt's neighbors. Exod. 15:14-16 reads :
The peoples hear. They tremble
Agony grips the dwellers in Philistia
Now are all the clans of Edom dismayed
The tribes of Moab-trembling grips them;
All the dwellers in Canaan are melting
Terror and dread descend upon them;
Through the might of your arm they are as still as stone."
The connexion between magic in its lower form and fear in its most primal form adds a whole new dimension to this spell of an `unbelievable' violence that is cast at Gentiles : "And thou, O son of man, saith the Lord God, say to every fowl, and to all the birds, and to all the beasts of the field : Assemble yourselves, make haste, come together from every side to my victim, which I slay for you, a great victim upon the mountains of Israel : to eat flesh, and drink blood. You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth, of rams, and of lambs, and of he goats, and bullocks, and of all that are well fed and fat. And you shall eat the fat till you be full, and shall drink blood till you be drunk of the victim which I shall slay for you." (Ezekiel 39:17-18-19) Doesn't it ?

Magic in its lower form, however, can backfire : "Fear was the driving force behind the recurrent and obsessive enquiry concerning each and all events whether they were good for the Jews." (Yahweh versus Yahweh : the enigma of Jewish history). Jay Y. Gonen, returning to seriousness, shares this view : "Thus a dread of fateful duality runs throughout Jewish history in various incarnations and reincarnations. It saturates the Jewish heritage. Its origin, however, is the split image of Yahweh… It has become a shared fantasy that conditioned the Jews' collective response and their expectations of history" (ibid.). As the Jew, as any mixed people, is divided within himself, it should be expected that, if the Jew may be in the image of Yahweh, Yahweh is without any doubt in the image of the Jew.

It should be wondered whether the `dark side of Yahweh' could be linked to a peculiarity displayed by most Semitic gods : "In the beginning, they defeated the powers of chaos and death ; but every year these powers escape again, and threaten life with drought, and flood, and all such things as make life hazardous. The changes in the life of nature show that sometimes the god himself falls into the power of the forces of chaos. This concerns not only the gods of fertility and vegetation properly so called." Even more interestingly, the Hebrew word for `god', elohim, could be used "of many kinds of subordinate beings, such as the dead soul, the ghost that might be raised (…) The word may also be used of a demon which causes disease" (Job. 19:22) (He That Cometh).

Demonic gods can be found in all pantheons, including the Vedic one and its Greek, Roman, Slavic and Germanic counterparts. What sets Yahweh radically apart from them is His unique status and function. The recasting of "age-old mythological traditions amounts to the emergence of a new "myth", that is to say of a new religious view of the world likely to become a model. The religious genius of Israel converted the relationship of God with the chosen people into a `sacred history' of a previously unknown type. At a certain point in time, this `sacred history', which was apparently exclusively national, became an exemplary model for the whole humanity. What distinguishes the biblical narrative is the personal message of God and its consequences. Without having been invoked beforehand, God reveals Himself to a human being, and makes a number of requests followed by prodigious promises. This is a new type of religious experience : the `Abrahamic faith'." (M. Eliade) In this regard, the resemblance with Zoroastrianism is only superficial. "If, in Zoroastrianism as in Yahwism, the new religion is revealed directly from God, Zoroaster, in accepting it, imitates the primordial act of the Lord – the choice of goodness (cf. Yasna 32:2) – and that is all he asks his followers. Basically, the Zoroastrian reform consists in an imitatio dei. Man is summoned to follow the example of Ahura Mazda, but he has free choice. He does not feel like the slave of God, as the faithful of Yahweh or Allah do." (ibid.) Besides, this revelation is not the foundation of any monotheism. What Zoroaster announces, presenting it as a model for his followers, is the choice for God and other divine entities. Finally, "the very conception of the character of `justice' and `blessing' had a different basis in Babylonia and Assyria [as well as in Persia] from what it had, for instance, in Israel. We may put it in this way : the gods stand above justice ; `justice' or `blessing' is what the gods purpose ; but that is often arbitrary and incomprehensible. It too often seems as if what seems to man to be wise is contemptible in the eyes of the god, and what seems evil in the judgement of man is good in the eyes of his god. In Israel, too, Yahweh is the source of justice and blessing, and in the thought of the pious He is supreme over these qualities. But the real belief of the reading minds is that Yahweh is not arbitrary. There is a norm in His relation to mankind." (He That Cometh) Here we have the actual reason underlying the belief of Israelites in the superiority of Yahweh over all other gods, as well as the explanation as to why exclusivism and internationalism go hand in hand in Yahwism and its offshoots. Later, as a result of the dispersion and missionary activity, the tension between the nationalistic conception of religion and salvation, and the universalistic conception of God, was mitigated, and the universalistic elements in the doctrine of God became more prominent and coloured the conceptions of restoration and salvation.

A new type of god means a new type of man.

The tribal religion of the Patriarchs had a non cultic character, unburdened as it was with the high level of detail and the complexity of the rules for the construction and the decoration of altars and tabernacles that are attributed to Yahweh in the Torah. The only rituals were bloody sacrifices (zebah) and that which was linked to the massebah (standing stones), which, even though it was condemned later by Yahwism, seems to have been shared by the ancestors of the Hebrews. The two rituals that have played an enormous role in the religious history of Israel are the covenant sacrifice and Isaac's sacrifice, which was performed until Jeremiah's times and may have been borrowed from the Canaanite cult. However this may be, as well seen by M. Eliade, Abraham did not have a specific outcome in mind when he was preparing to sacrifice his son. He felt bound to his God by `faith'. He did not `understand' the significance of the actions that God had just asked him, whereas those who sacrificed their first born to a divinity were perfectly aware of the significance and of the power of the magic-religious ritual. "Abraham, M. Eliade continues, summing up his considerations without seemingly suspecting the implications of this `lack of understanding', did not perform a ritual (since he did not pursue any goal and he did not understand what his actions meant) ; besides, his `faith' made him certain that he was not committing a crime ; it seems that Abraham did not question the `sacredness' of his actions, which was `irrecognoscible', and, therefore, unknowable. The meditation on this impossibility of identifying the `sacred' (since the `sacred' is completely identified with the `profane'), will have enormous consequences", which, as we have just stressed, the Romanian author did not seem to fathom in their subversive aspects. By all means, take a pause for thought at this point and ponder over the significance of his considerations.

Faith is central to Yahwism. It is important to examine its centrality with respect to the cult and the worship of pre-exilic Israel. In propitiatory sacrifices, "the sacrificial gift was thought to have great influence in placating the angry Jehovah. But no special form of the propitiatory sacrifice was required. Apparently any ordinary sacrifice might be used for the purpose of making atonement ; Noah offered burnt-offerings (Gen. 8:20-22) ; David, burnt offerings and peace-offerings (II Sam. 24:25). It remained for later generations to develop an elaborate ritual for the specific purpose of atonement. In addition to this reliance upon sacrifice we have seen that even in preprophetic Israel the effectual, fervent prayer of a righteous man was thought to avail much in behalf of the guilty." (http://www.archive.org/stream/biblicalideasofa00burtuoft/biblicalideasofa00burtuoft_djvu.txt) According to M. Weber, "The necessity for having access to Yahweh priests knowing the law and ritual" increased ", in order to decipher God's will and the transgression necessary to be expiated." Whilst the focus came to be put on matters of rites and the rites became more and more complex, these were still based on faith and belief, a belief in a single creator, a unique and everlasting God, in His omniscience and omnipotence, a belief in the words of the prophets, the faith that God had a great future in store for His people, the faith that God's promises are genuine, and that God's purpose must be fulfilled, the belief in the revealed and redemptive character of the Torah (the objection that the concept of sin cannot be found in the Torah, since there cannot be sin in law, but only crime, and that the only offence to the Commandments was non observance, is a specious distinction, for the Torah is a set of moral codes and imperatives, and sin is a transgression of a religious or/and moral law). The pathos of the Babylonian rite of atonement is reflected in the penitential rites of the New Year festival, during which the king, acting as the cultic representative and embodiment of the people, bore Israel's sufferings, and performed the atoning rites and prayers meant to induce Yahweh to intervene and save. Atonement issues in the questioning of Yahweh as well as supplication sacrifices already played a pivotal role in the pre-prophetic cult of Israel. In post-exilic times, the Priestly Code of the sacrificial system developed into an ordinance of atonement, reflecting the growing consciousness of sin and the longing for atonement. (He That Cometh)

No matter how ritualistically correct the procedure had to be to be propitious, it is thus clear that "The so-called `formalism' of the rites in the religion", based it was on the faith factor, was unlikely "to have the same anti-sentimental, active, determinative spirit that... was characteristic of the primordial and even Roman virile Aryan ritual." (TAOTJP) It is irrelevant that, to quote M. Weber, "... the primitive way of answering concrete questions with "yea" and "nay" by throwing lots was burdened with an absolute minimum of esoterics, emotional or mystic irrationalism." Psycho-analysts are even less loquacious at work.

Yahweh was definitely a new type of god. He appeared as both inaccessible and dangerous, and he said he brought salvation. He decreed that the mortality of man was the consequence of original sin, particularly of Adam's attempt to be like God. As a slave to Yahweh, man must live in the fear of his God. Since the Law proclaims with precision God's will, the main thing is to follow the Commandments, a set of moral precepts. In early Yahwism, divine order is thus lowered to morality, that is to say, basically, to a purely human criterion, no matter how spiritualised – Jewish scholars might claim that the meaning of the word `Torah' is far deeper and wider than commonly thought, they do not seem to be able to tell us exactly in what ways. A code of conduct existed, whether in oral or in written form, in all ancient Indo-European peoples, without them ever feeling the need to resort to a divine revelation to enforce it upon the community and to make it clear to it. As to the Zoroastrian gathas, which were described as "burdened with moral concerns" by G. Dumezil, it must be understood that, no matter the translations he relied on, none of them appear to be reliable : "No one who has ever read a stanza of [the Gathas] in the original will be under any illusions as to the labour which underlies the effort [of translating the hymns]. The most abstract and perplexing thought, veiled further by archaic language, only half understood by later students of the seer's own race and tongue, tends to make the Gathas the hardest problem to be attempted by those who would investigate the literary monuments" (Moulton, James Hope (1906), "Bartholomae's Lexicon and Translation of the Gathas (Review)", The Classical Review 20 (9) : 471–472).

J. Evola pointed out that early Jewish Messianism bears some similarities with the Zoroastrian concept of Saoshyant (bearing in mind that Persian influence on the religion and culture of the East does not seem to begin until the sixth century), with the Kalki avatar in Hinduism, and with the prophecy of Maitreya in Buddhism. It is not the place to examine these similarities in detail, if nothing else because they are supposed to be quite well-known ; nor is it the place to dwell on the fact that, if, as mentioned by the Italian author, the Aryan like conceptions of a purely heavenly paradise is also present in Judaism, it is only described as such in the Apocalypse of Enoch and in other late writings, and appears to be the result of Persian influence. Let us get straight to the point by highlighting the main differences between the Aryan conception of the saviour, or better `transfigurer', and the Jewish notion of redeemer. The first difference is linked to the historicisation process that was undergone by the themes and mythical characters of the cosmogony which was actualised in the Yahwist New Year festival. Whereas Kalki, Maitreya, and Saoshyant are expected to come to end the present age of darkness, making permanent and ever-lasting the restoration that was meant to be performed only annually in the New Year festival, there is, as paradoxical as it may sound, no strictly eschatological dimension about pre-exilic Yahwism. In Yahwism, the New Year festival and its pattern were, in fact, completely transformed. "Its basis in the natural order is, indeed, still clear, even in Israel : what is created is, in the first instance, life on earth, fertility, crops, the cosmos. But the Canaanite thought that the god himself is renewed has disappeared ; and what the king obtains in the cultic festival is not primarily new life and strength, but the renewal and confirmation of the covenant, which is based on Yahweh's election and faithfulness, and depends upon the king's religious and moral virtues and constancy. To the renewal of nature there has been added another element of increasing importance, the renewal of history. It is the divine acts of election and deliverance in the actual history of Israel which are relived in the festival. Election and the covenant are ratified. In the cultic drama the historic events are experienced anew ; and victory over the political foes of contemporary history is promised, guaranteed, and experienced in anticipation. In Canaan the drama enacted the god's own fortunes, his birth, conflict, death, resurrection, victory, and cultic marriage with the goddess. In Israel we find no trace of the representation of the fortunes of Yahweh by the king. The Jerusalem cult had its own drama, which presented vividly and realistically Yahweh's epiphany, His conflict and victory, His enthronement, and His re-creation of the world, of Israel, and of life on the earth. Probably Yahweh's victory over the enemy was presented dramatically by means of a sham fight, as was done among neighbouring peoples. But in virtue of the marked historical emphasis which is characteristic of Yahwism from the beginning, it is not the conflict with chaos and the dragon which is enacted (as, for instance, in Assyria) but Yahweh's victory over His own historical enemies and those of Israel." (He That Cometh). This is so true that "In the cultic drama, the worshipper, undoubtedly often the king himself, does not here lament over suffering and death which he undergoes symbolically in the cult, but over actual present distress brought upon him by earthly enemies, foreign nations and traitors within the state, or over ordinary illness and the danger of death." The common oriental royal ideology underwent in early Israel quite fundamental changes under the influence of Yahwism and the wilderness tradition, and many of the forms which were borrowed acquired a modified or new content, whereby those common features which do exist must not be interpreted solely in terms of the meaning they had in Babylonia or Egypt, but in the light of the entire structure and the fundamental ideas of Yahwism. Whether or not the rites originally associated with the worship of the king were adopted in the Israelite cult without any thought of their original meaning, it appears plainly that their cosmic nature was deeply altered in the process.

It needs to be emphasised that "in the Old Testament, and particularly in its older parts, the Messiah is not a supernatural being who comes from above. He is indeed depicted in mythical colours ; but we find not more, but rather less of the mythical style than is usual in the ancient oriental conception of the king… the literal sense which it may originally have conveyed was weakened in Israel ; and the divinity of the king was not conceived as anything more (nor yet as anything less) than a divine adoption of an ordinary man and his endowment with power. The natural aspect in the mythical form was in Israel transferred to the PERSONAL AND MORAL SPHERE [emphasis added]. That the king, in spite of his divine quality, was an ordinary man of this world was not felt to be either a paradox or a problem. This is true no less of the Messiah, the future king, the more so since it was not the older, more mythical, Canaanite form of the conception of kingship which formed the background of the idea of the future king when it emerged, but rather the conception held in the later monarchy, or after the end of the monarchy, when the influence of the prophets, the sole lordship of Yahweh, and the growing sense of the distance between God and man had forced the mythical element in the ideal of kingship ON TO THE MORAL PLANE [emphasis added]." (ibid.) It is precisely in moral terms, as a result of an `original sin' and of the subsequent fall, that the entire re-creation of mankind and nature is dealt with in the eschatology of the Bible and of later Judaism. Clearly, many of the forms which were borrowed acquired a modified or new content which is really the shadow of what little traits of positive, virile, spirituality J. Evola thought he could see from an Indo-European perspective in the Jewish concept of King-Messiah.

Genuine Messianic prophecies and those which speak of the idealised and empirical king in Israel or Judah must be clearly distinguished. "The majority of the passages which popular theology interprets as Messianic are in fact concerned with the king of actual historical experience." (ibid.) However, needless to say that there is a connexion between the two set of ideas… those ideas which were associated in Israel with the king share all their essential elements with the concept of the Messiah. The only essential difference is that the ideal of kingship belongs to the present (though it clearly also looks towards the future), whereas the Messiah is a purely future, eschatological figure... `Messiah' is the ideal king entirely transferred to the future, no longer identified with the specific historical king, but with one who, one day, will come." (ibid.) Within our framework, it is not relevant whether the `Messianism hope' derived from the kingly ideology, as argued by Mowinckel, or vice versa, nor whether "(according to the most probable critical dating of the sources) the genuine Messianic sayings in the Old Testament belong to a relatively late period, most of them (perhaps all) to the time after the fall of the monarchy." What is relevant is that the conception of monarchy and that of Messianism (be it `genuine' or not) are basically similar at any period in the history of the Jews ; they are based on the same tenets : the over-arching theme of the Law is that Israel is the `chosen people' and that it is destined to dominate all the men, all the lands, and all the riches, so that all kingdoms will have to obey Israel. It runs through the whole Old Testament, in all the "Covenant between the parts", i.e., between Yahweh and His People, from the Abrahamic covenant to Deuteronomy 30:1-10, Deuteronomy 11: et al., 2 Samuel 7:8-16, and, finally, Jeremiah 31:31-34. Not that it cannot be found in the edifying Adamic Covenant (Genesis 3:16-19 ; Genesis 1:26-30; 2:16-17), too, as we shall see later.

The king, as the son of Yahweh, the God of all the earth, "has a rightful claim to dominion over the whole world. In David's supremacy over the other small states in and around Palestine, nationalistic religious circles in Israel and Judah saw a foretaste of the universal dominion over the peoples, which as goal and as promise was implicit in the election of the king as Yahweh's Anointed and deputy on earth… At the anointing, on the coronation day, and, later, at the great annual festival, the king received the promise of a filial relationship to Yahweh, of victory over all his opponents, of world dominion, of `everlasting priesthood'. Hence the prophetic author of Ps. ii can describe the situation at the accession of a new king in Jerusalem as if in fact all the kings and peoples of the world were plotting to throw off the yoke of Yahweh and His Anointed, but were awed into submission by Yahweh's words promising the throne to the chosen king, and threatening His opponents with destruction, unless they submit in time and `kiss his feet with fear and serve him with trembling'." (He That Cometh) "The righteousness of the king includes first of all the ability to save his people from their enemies round about (i Sam. ix, 16; x, i). The chosen king is the invincible warrior, filling the places with dead bodies. With his mighty sceptre he rules from Zion in the midst of his enemies : Yahweh makes them his footstool (Ps. ex, 2, 5f.)." Unchivalrously, "all his enemies will be clothed with shame (Ps. cxxxii, 18). His hand finds out all his enemies. His right hand finds out those that hate him. When he but shows his face, he makes them as a fiery oven", a detail which Robert II of France, whose very favourite book, according to his hagiography, was the Bible, must have missed, but that did not escape the notice of R. Faurisson, ten centuries later according to Scaligerian chronology. Speaking of will to extermination, "Their offspring he destroys from the earth, and their seed from among the children of men. When they plot evil against him and frame a malicious scheme, they achieve nothing ; for he makes them turn their backs when he takes aim at them from his bowstring (Ps, xxi, gff)." (ibid.)

Two passages cast in the same mould are quoted in extenso from Deuteronomy in `Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem' : "And the Lord shall make thee the head and not the tail : and thou shalt be always above, and not beneath : yet so if thou wilt hear the commandments of the Lord thy God which I command thee this day, and keep and do them (28:13)" ; "Thou shalt consume all the people, which the Lord thy God will deliver to thee. Thy eye shall not spare them, neither shalt thou serve their gods, lest they be thy ruin (7:16)." Thus, a strong animus against Goyim already existed among the early Hebrews. No effort seems to have been spared to cause the Jews to hate the Gentiles and vice versa. "Insofar as their actual existence (the heathens') is admitted, D. Reed notes, with more insight than is shown in other parts of `The Controversy of Sion', 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..."

2:25, 9:3, 9:11, 11:23, 12:2-3 are hardly less inspired, by Yahwist standards, than 7:16. So much so that the moral commandments prohibiting murder, stealing, coveting, bad neighbourliness, theft, false testimony, etc., end up being nullified by a plethora of statutes requiring formerly the `chosen people' to slaughter other peoples, to murder apostates, to destroy their cults and their nations, and the like ; as well seen by K. Marx, in the Jewish religion, "man's supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged. Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws. Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law." Deuteronomy begins with a historical introduction, moves to a list of laws and then to a long list of blessings and curses, and ends with the appointment of Joshua and the death of Moses ; of the sixty-eight verses of chapter 28, fourteen are blessings and fifty-four are curses, not just blessings and curses, but blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience to God's law. The blessings concern exclusively material prosperity, the defeat and the extermination of enemies and dreams of world dominion. Fanaticism and sectarianism are taken to a whole new level in Leviticus and in Numbers. In the Leviticus ("But let him be among you as one of the same country : and you shall love him as yourselves : for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God") as in Deuteronomy, the command to love one's neighbour turns into its exact opposite : "And of the strangers that sojourn among you, or that were born of them in your land, these you shall have for servants : And by right of inheritance shall leave them to your posterity, and shall possess them for ever. But oppress not your brethren the children of Israel by might." (25:45-46). Other contemporary kings in the Middle-East were not at all shy about emphasising their warlike exploits and boasting of having subjected foreign nations and countries to the dominion of their gods, yet they did not battle over world dominion in the name of their deity, nor did they plan a genocide.

In the Books of Zechariah, who is supposed to have prophesised during the reign of Darius the Great, six decades after the fall of Jerusalem, the substance is still the same : "Zerubbabel will be king over the restored Jerusalem, and will gain power and renown. From distant lands foreigners will come to join in building the temple of Yahweh ; the hostile world power will be destroyed before him ; for his sake Yahweh will again before long shake both heaven and earth and overthrow the throne of kingdoms, and destroy the power of the kingdoms of the nations, and overthrow the chariots and those that ride in them ; and horses and riders will fall, every one by the sword of his brother Israel will again subdue other nations. But these political ends will be attained only through Yahweh's action, without the help of man : `not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says Yahweh of hosts'. The message of Haggai and of Zechariah has nothing to do with eschatology. What they are waiting for is a complete historical revolution in the Near East, attributed, of course, to the guidance of Yahweh and to the intervention of His miraculous power, but developing within the course of empirical history and working through normal human means. `By His spirit' Yahweh will guide events so that the world powers destroy each other in the chaos which has arisen all over the east as a result of the death of Cambyses ; and Israel alone will remain unscathed and will reap the benefit." (He That Cometh) This might be described as a fantastic and unrealistic expectation, but the fact is that that there is nothing eschatological stricto sensu about it : "In Zechariah, the horses, riders, etc., are beings which really exist, and are always at hand, working as Yahweh's instruments like the angels, but as a rule, like Yahweh Himself, working behind and through natural agencies, whereas in the Revelation they have become apocalyptic entities, which do not come into existence, or, at least, into action, until the last times, their object being to precipitate the final catastrophe."

There is thus some truth and some flaw in the claim that "It is not the former Jewish Messianic idea, but its corruption and its materialisation, which is the real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at destroying for good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on earth." (Trasformazioni del `Regnum', La Vita Italiana, 1937). It is incorrect to speak of a "corruption" and of a "materialisation" of the former Messianic idea, and, in any case, of the type of the `universal master' that can be found in Aryan traditions, insofar as the earlier Jewish Messianic idea already testifies to a materialist conception of Messianism, and materialism means corruption. Furthermore, the intimate connexion between the early Jewish Messianic idea and the thirst for earthly riches and goods right from the start, and not just from Mosaic times, is fully recognised by the Italian author in a later article : "... the `Kingdom' supposedly promised to the Jewish people was not understood by any means in a mystical and supra-terrestrial sense, but as that which is to possess all the riches of the world." (IMDS) "It has been noted that the very way the Jews conceived of the relation between man and the divinity, a relation that was based on a mercantile mechanism of service and rewards, shows, de do ut est, a mercantilism that must have already constituted the essence of Judaism in ancient times ; however, this spirit could not but provoke the scorn of Aryan peoples, who were used to a different type of morality and conduct. As is known, in the ancient Law, the Torah, the Messianic idea was already intimately connected with earthly riches and goods, which would give rise to capitalistic speculation, and, finally, to economics as an instrument of power in Israel's plans." (Il Giudaismo nell'antichità). It would have been relatively more correct to state that it is not the former Jewish Messianic idea, but its further corruption and its further materialisation, which is the real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at destroying for good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on earth ; we have said "relatively", since it should be borne in mind that, while it is true that the Jewish Messianic approach resulted in the crassest materialist praxis as soon as the Jews were scattered throughout the world following the fall of Jerusalem, the concept of future kingdom, far from undergoing a "naturalisation", a "materialisation", during the Diaspora, came to be understood in religious and spiritualistic rather than in political and concrete terms, with an emphasis on the miraculous divine character of the kingdom, to be realised by God, not by His people. In the thought of the earlier period, the restored Davidic kingdom was "`a kingdom of this world', established, it is true, by a miraculous divine intervention, yet through political means, through the historical and political circumstances of the age. It was to be realized entirely within the `natural' course of world events, within `natural' human history, which continued its course in accordance with the same `laws' and `forces' as before." (He That Cometh) The concept of future kingdom did not materialise any more than the actual future kingdom (which, according to the Bible, extends far beyond the current borders of the state of Israel) did, it "became an ideal conception based on religion and permeated by religion." (ibid.) ; "the severance of the future hope from historical reality, from the contingent, from any causal connexion with circumstances," and its assumption of an absolute character, took place in Deutero-Isaiah. Nevertheless, "it was never forgotten that the starting point for the future hope was faith in the restoration of Israel as a free people among the other nations, on this earth, in the land of Canaan. Thus there persisted in eschatology an unresolved tension, a gulf between those elements which were political, national, and this-worldly, and those transcendental and universal elements which belonged to the world beyond." (ibid.) Of these two profoundly different conceptions of the future, the former "is older and more truly Jewish than the other." (ibid.) "The ideal of kingship at one and the same time belonged to the present and had a future reference, and might at any time be applied to a historic person. The difference is that in Haggai and Zechariah the Davidic kingdom has been destroyed ; but they regard the new historical situation as its restoration by Yahweh, and as already in process of being realized. The new ideal king of the ancient line is already present." (ibid.) These two profoundly different conceptions of the future - in the economy of which the Gentiles are looked upon as a specific historical and political entity and as the manifestation of a mythical, cosmic power, at enmity with God, respectively - were the breeding ground for the dialectic of schizophrenia.

The Messiah figure did not undergo more significant changes than the Messianic message did throughout the history of Israel. It is characterised by the Jewish passion for humility and mania for self-humiliation. The king, as the deputy of Yahweh, is completely dependent on and subordinate to Yahweh. Both at the regularly repeated festivals and on special cultic occasions such as the days of humiliation and prayer before war, the fact that the good fortune and blessing of the king are dependent on his obedience to the will and law of Yahweh is constantly emphasised. It is, therefore, entirely in accord with the Israelite conception that the king's humility is also emphasised. Just as it is the king's duty to sustain the humble and the oppressed, so he must himself be humble and meek. Not splendour, but justice to the lowly is the essence of kingship. On the days of humiliation and prayer and in the atonement liturgies, it is the king who, as a corporate personality, vicariously bears and lays before Yahweh all the misfortune, suffering, and distress which have befallen the people. They become his personal suffering and distress, making him ill and weak. On the other hand, in Europe, it was not until Christianity came to predominate that humility, one of the central themes of all millenarian movements, "became a `virtue' in a sense that is hardly Roman and was glorified as opposed to an attitude of strength, of dignity, and of calm awareness... In ancient Rome, it was considered as the exact opposite of `virtus'. It meant baseness, wretchedness, lowliness, abjection, vileness, shame – so that death or exile was said to be preferable to humility : `humilitati vel exilium vel mortem anteponenda esse'... It was also linked to the idea of race or caste : `humilis parentis natus' meant to be from a lower class background, of plebeian extraction, as opposed to an aristocratic origin, and, therefore, something quite different from the modern expression `of humble birth', especially as nowadays social status is solely based on the economic criterion. In any case, it would never have occurred to a Roman of the good old days to think of `humilitas' as a virtue, let alone to boast about it and to preach it. As for the so-called `moral of humility', it may be useful to recall the comment of a Roman emperor that nothing is more deplorable than the pride of those who call themselves humble." (Sfaldamento delle parole, in L'Arco e la Clava) History has shown those who have a sort of sixth sense to identify the scum wherever it hides what lies ultimately behind all the revolutionary movements whose ideological watchwords refer to the protection of "the humble and the oppressed".

The glorification of lowliness is brought to an entirely new level in the Songs of the Suffering Servant. First, S. Mowinckel points out, the Servant is the opposite of all that is humanly great and exalted, of all that is lordly, and mighty, and masterful. He is not impressive or attractive ; he has no outward glory or majesty, but is unclean, despised, and forsaken of men. The dirge does not describe him, as is usual, as a flowering tree, but as a root in arid soil ; not as a lion or an eagle (cf. 2 Sam. 1:23), but as a ewe, dumb before her shearers. But when he has been `vindicated' (justified), he will be the spiritual deliverer of Israel, and a light for the nations, who will be won for the true religion by the miracle wrought on him by Yahweh. Then, the Servant's task is to do the very thing which was not expected of the future king, and which experience had shown that none of the historical persons such as Zerubbabel, with whom the future hope was associated, could perform : to bring Israel back to Yahweh. The Servant will do this, not as a victorious king, but by his suffering and death. Finally, the main point is that the influence of the Servant on the conception of the future leads to a very important result : the Servant displaces the king, and himself becomes king. What no Messiah, as conceived by the Jewish national religion, could perform, the Servant performs. In connexion with the compelling shift of the Messianic idea we have pointed out above from the manly realm of action to that of rhetoric, it is also typical that his victory, not only over his opponents, but over the souls of men, is due to his ability to win the hearts of his own people and of his enemies, as he has already won the hearts of the poet-prophet and the prophetic circle.

These themes reach an apogee in the Book of Jeremiah and in the Book of Ezekiel. Jeremiah "is no longer his own master. Yahweh may even devastate his personal life in order to use him in this way as a powerful `portent' to attain His purpose. So it is with Jeremiah. Yahweh forbids him to marry and have children, or to have any human or social intercourse with his neighbours, to go to a house of mourning, or a party, or a wedding. In short, he cuts himself off from his natural environment, from all the sources of his life, and sacrifices his entire natural life, in order to be a vehicle of the message of doom which he has to convey to his people. That he felt it to be a grievous disaster and curse is evident from his complaints about his mission, as he sits alone because Yahweh's hand is upon him, and he is filled with Yahweh's own indignation. In the same way, Ezekiel has to swallow a scroll with lamentations, and mourning, and woe written on the front and on the back. He has to let all the disaster which will befall Jerusalem afflict his own person, lying bound three hundred and ninety days for Israel, and forty days for Judah, and `bear their punishment'. `And behold I shall put cords upon you, and you will not turn from one side to the other, till you have completed the days of your siege.' During this time he will eat bread by short weight, and drink water by short measure, and disregard the rules of cleanness, because this will also be Jerusalem's lot during the siege. Yahweh will take away from him the desire of his eyes, his wife ; and he may not mourn for her, or do honour to her memory in accordance with customary decorum. In this way, Ezekiel will be a portent to the Jews, indicating that the same fate will befall them all, the loss of wives, sons, daughters, and kinsfolk without their being able to lift a finger to help them. In this way, the prophets often had to share the burden of punishment for the people's sin." (He That Cometh) "The suffering and the martyrdom to which the prophets (…) were exposed in fulfilling their mission, were endured by them because of the people's sin, certainly not willingly, and with a strong sense of the injustice of it, but still as a consequence of their efforts to bring the sinful people to conversion, penitence, and salvation." (ibid.) What is important about this development of the Jewish concept of Messiah is that, the more the prophet is endowed with human characteristics or attributes and individualised, the more, of course, his suffering and his abjection can be portrayed with a profusion of increasingly sordid details, and the more he is identified with the Jewish people as a whole. As is well-known, the last will be the first (Mt. 19.30 ; 20.16 ; Mk 10.31 ; Lk. 13.30)

While J. Evola is thus right in saying that "Hebrew `prophetism'... originally displayed traits that were very similar to the cults of inferior castes, and to the pandemic and ecstatic forms of the Southern races" (RATMW), there is no indication that "The `prophet' type (nabî), inspired or obsessed by God (…) is substituted for the `clairvoyant' type (roeh)…" (TAOTJP ; see 1 Samuel 9:9), and that the nabî "was previously considered as a sick man" (ibid). In fact, there is a consensus among scholars, whether Biblical or not, about the contemporaneity of the roeh and the nabî. In 2 Kings 17:13, `seer' is used in parallelism with `nabî', thus suggesting that the two terms were equated. "The prophet (nabi') bore also the titles `ro'eh' and `ḥozeh' = `seer'" (I Sam. 9:9 ; II Kings 17:13) (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=230&letter=T#ixzz1W8Xit1z1) . "The word nabî expresses more especially a function. The two most usual synonyms ro'eh and hozéh emphasize more clearly the special source of the prophetic knowledge, the vision, that is, the Divine revelation or inspiration. Both have almost the same meaning ; hozéh is employed, however, much more frequently in poetical language and almost always in connexion with a supernatural vision, whereas râ'ah, of which ro'éh is the participle, is the usual word for to see in any manner." (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12477a.htm) In other words, as the roeh "beheld the visions of God," so the nabî "proclaimed the divine truth revealed to him as one of an official order in a more direct way", as a "spokesman for God, mediating for God to man." (http://www.bible-history.com/faussets/P/Prophet/). If a distinction is to be made between the nabî and the roeh, the former `translated' the latter's visions into words, in the process of which, thus, only the mode of revelation changed, while the state of revelation remained unchanged in its ecstatic essence. What is certain is that the roeh and the nabî were two different institutions. "The mass ecstatic Nebiim, under the influence of Canaanite orgiasticism and the irrational and emotional forms of magic", came from the North, and "the rational Levitical Torah and the rational ethical emissary prophecy", came from the South (M. Weber, Ancient Judaism)

To M. Eliade, "... the institution of the `seer' (ro'eh), which dated back to the nomadic times, was altered, after the conquest, under the influence of the nabîim, whom the Israelites had encountered upon their arrival in Palestine. By 1000 BCE, the Yahwist `seers' (such as Nathan) still coexisted with the nabîim (I Sam. 10:5). Both institutions merged gradually, and the final result was Old Testament classical Prophetism." It is not wrong to state, as does M. Weber, that the dualism between the mass ecstatic nabî and the rational ethical emissary prophecy "ran covertly throughout Israelite history since the beginning of the invasion. It became acute with the increasing rational character of the mentalities of the two powers opposed to the orgy : the Levites and the prophets of doom", provided that it is understood that the binary opposition no longer existed between two different institutions, two antagonistic brands of prophetism, but within the `prophets of doom' themselves, as well seen by M. Eliade : indeed, "the Yahwism the prophets proclaimed had already assimilated… elements of the Canaanite religion and culture, so bitterly abhorred by the prophets." For example, the marital simile used by Amos (783 ? -740 ?) to describe the relation between Yahweh and Israel, and which would become a recurrent theme in all main subsequent prophets, is dependent upon the Canaanite fertility cults he fought. (M. Eliade, History of Religious Beliefs and Ideas, chap. VII). While the "abominations" of the Israelites which are stigmatised, for example, in Isaiah 1:4, 8:9, 56:10-11, can be explained by "a curious oscillation, which is typical of the Jewish soul, between a sense of guilt, self-humiliation, deconsecration, and carnality and an almost Luciferian pride and rebelliousness" (RATMW), this "curious oscillation", as paradoxical as it may seem, is also found in the one who stigmatises them. For example, in Jeremiah, thundering words of defiance and bellicose imprecations (1:10) alternate with self-humiliating whining (20:7-8).

The ecstatic elements are present in the pre-exilic prophets as well as in the post-exilic ones : "The earliest historical references to prophetism come from the days of Samuel in the description of the ecstatic group encountered by Saul (1 Sam. 10:5-13)" (J. Jensen, God's Word to Israel). Whether in pre-exilic or in post-exilic times, whether in Amos or in Isaiah, the substance of the prophecies remains essentially the same : the emphasis is on the stigmatisation of the sins of Israel, and more specifically on the denunciation of the crimes of the rich against the poor. Only the tone changes : severe and unsentimental in Amos, it becomes fanatical and mawkish in Isaiah, and increasingly so in later prophets. This change in tone results in all likelihood from a process of individualisation of prophetism : "In Samuel's time, would arise the adoption of the Canaanite practice of consecrating `high places' of worship to deity in which sacrificial rituals were performed and song and dance ceremonies inducing ecstasy by group hypnotic methods was practiced (1 Samuel 10:5;1 Samuel 10:10). In Samuel 19:20ff, we are granted the opportunity of insight into the spirit possession cultic practice of Samuel's prophetic schools... Here we see evidence that there was a specific method or procedure of music, song and dance for inducing collective excitement, ecstasy and raving behavior termed `prophesying' (1 Samuel 19:20ff.)... With the independent prophets, the picture of things would change. Rather than the group, there would be the individual, alone with God. Elijah would set the standard of anti-cultic attitude of the new independent prophets and spearhead a theological development beyond the primitive conception of Levite tradition." (http://www.goddiscussion.com/75516/the-political-subversive-role-of-the-prophets-in-the-history-of-ancient-israel-the-early-independent-prophets-and-the-monarchy-part-1/) The process of rationalisation and intellectualisation that was undergone by the ecstatic elements as a result of the individualisation of the prophetic phenomenon is exactly what J. Evola refers to when he speaks of a connexion that was established in Hebraism with a human type who, because he is not able to realise the values he upholds, tends to consider them as more and more abstract and utopian (RATMW), an attitude which is closely akin to a complex of symptoms that came to be known in modern times as bovarism, understood as the comportment of those who are led by dissatisfaction to ambitious reverie. However, this process was greatly facilitated by the fact that "Hebraism, from the earliest times, developed [the] distinctly mathematical and intellectualistic-pantheistic interpretation of the world" (Gli Ebrei e la matematica, 1940) which ended up in the rationalism of modern times ; the effects, or, so to speak, the applied consequences that the Jewish propensity for abstraction, for visionary and unrealistic cogitation, have had in all areas, whether economic, scientific, cultural, social, spiritual or political, have been showed by J. Evola in all their further-reaching implications.

What did begin to materialise among the ambitious Jew in Babylon was the tangible benefit Israelites could reap from practices such as money lending, which they perfectly mastered and brought to perfection, once, from debtors, they became creditors, upon their leaving Egypt : "... as the official report narrates, they carried away what had been lent to them" (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) : "And I will give favour to this people, in the sight of the Egyptians : and when you go forth, you shall not depart empty." (Exodus 3:21) "Thus the promise made by God was fulfilled, the promise that may rightly be called the motto of Jewish economic history, the promise which indeed expresses the fortunes of the Jewish people in one sentence." (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) : "Thou shalt lend to many nations, and thou shalt borrow of no man. Thou shalt have dominion over very many nations, and no one shall have dominion over thee." The Jewish people "were divided into two sections, an upper wealthy class, which became rich by money-lending, and the great mass of agricultural labourers whom they exploited." (The Jews and Modern Capitalism) The business only extended in the Diaspora. In the Hellenistic and imperial periods, "the poorer Jews lent to the lower classes." (ibid.) "… the Arabs, to whom Jews lent money at interest, ... regarded this business as being natural to the Jew, as being in his blood." No matter how prosperous the Jews became in the Diaspora, this prosperity was nothing like the unshared wealth Isaiah prophesised Yahweh would bring them, once they gathered anew in Jerusalem and in the Promised Land, coming from the four corners of the earth and bringing the riches of the whole world with them (60:5b). The real point of reference for the subversive forces which aim at destroying for good our civilisation and at exercising a satanic dominion on all forces on earth rely on the post-exilic form assumed by Jewish Messianism in the apocalyptic and rabbinic literature for the simple reason that by then what the Jewish theologian Mordechai Kaplan called the "pathology of chosenness" had passed from potentiality to act. Pre-exilic Jewish Messianism and post-exilic Jewish Messianism are characterised by a difference in degree, not in nature. This process of actualisation of instinctively anti-goyim tendencies is exactly what is hinted at in the following passage of `Il Mito del sangue' : "Just think of the feelings which this certainty, this obsession with `chosenness' and with world dominion would inevitably give rise, once Israel ceased to exist as a political power and, with the triumph of Christianity, this people, that still felt `elected', was regarded as the lowest of the low, as a cursed and deicide bloodline that only deserved to be persecuted and condemned, by a fair punishment, to servitude. The `potential' created by this idea of Law would then be inevitably reflected in a deep and boundless hatred of all non Jews and crystallise into a snake-like praxis", the only effective approach that could be taken by a people who, in their central core, did "not forget the promise of the Regnum, in which Israel will rule supreme over all peoples and will own all wealth on earth", in a world where they had become nationless and where, as a result, they had no longer any political centre and any military force. In this, they only made a vice out of necessity, especially since they were more comfortable with words than with swords ; even before the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE, the Jews had not showed any warlike disposition, to say the least. On the other hand, they were as fish in the sea in the intellectual, economic and theologico-religious spheres, and, more generally, in the world of analytic and abstract thought. They still are. "Between 1870 and 1950, in proportion to their numbers in the population, Jews were represented 4 times more than would be expected in literature, 5 times in music and visual arts, 6 times in chemistry, 8 times in biology, 9 times in physics,12 times in mathematics and 14 in philosophy. Jews who are just two-tenths of 1% of the world's population won 14% of Nobel Prizes in the first half of the 20th century, 29% in the 2nd half, and, so far, 32% in the 21st century." (http://www.sifrumkin.com/pdf/jewishgeniusw.pdf) Faced with this reality, the reaction of the overwhelming majority of contemporary anti-Semites is similar to that of most of the anti-Semites of the pre-WW2 era, whose inconsistency J. Evola highlighted, stating that, once they have observed a high percentage of Jews in intellectual professions and in leadership roles in the economic and scientific arenas, either they do not trouble themselves about finding an explanation for this state of affairs, or they attribute this overpowering success to their astuteness and schemes and to their money power, and adding that, even if corruption and nepotism can explain their disproportionate presence in such professions, they cannot account for the fact that, once in office, they proved to be just as skilled and efficient as any White person, let alone that it is an understatement to say that the meteoric speed of technical advances, to which most White anti-Semites and racists are deeply attached and with which they are always impressed, seeing it as the hallmark of Western civilisation, are not constrained by the massive Jewish presence in the field of applied sciences. "The alternative is thus posed : either to come to a humiliating admission of inferiority or to undertake a total revision of values, likely to undermine, in the name of higher ideals, everything that is connected specifically with the pseudoélites of modern professional intellectuality, in which there are so many Jews." (TAOTJP) Here, a total revision of values means, as explicated by the Italian author in other writings, to take intelligence down from the pedestal on which it was put in a prevaricating manner by the high priests of the so-called education system that was developed at the end of the nineteenth century in Western Europe and in the United States, in order to subordinate it again, in accordance with the scale of values which is typical of Aryan traditional scale of values, to character, especially as the `skills' required for the vast majority of jobs in tertiary services, the ever-expanding parasitical sector of economy, and, in fact, for all the new `professions' that have been emerging as a result of the recent information technology revolution, are directly linked to increasingly lower forms of practical intelligence.

"The superior races are distinguished from the inferior races by their character as well as by their intelligence, but it is more especially by their character that the superior races are distinguished from one another. This point has considerable social importance, and it deserves to be clearly established. Character is formed by the combination, in varying proportions, of the different elements which psychologists are accustomed at the present day to designate by the name of sentiments. Among the sentiments which play the most important part must more especially be noted perseverance, energy, and the power of self-control, faculties more or less dependent on the will. We would also mention morality among the fundamental elements of character, although it is the synthesis of somewhat complex sentiments. By morality we mean hereditary respect for the rules on which the existence of a society is based. To possess morality means, for a people, to have certain fixed rules of conduct and not to depart from them… As these rules vary with time and place, morality appears in consequence to be a very variable matter, and it is so in fact ; but for a given people, at a given moment, it ought to be quite invariable. The offspring of character, and in nowise of the intelligence, it is not solidly constituted until it has become hereditary, and, in consequence, unconscious. The intellectual qualities are susceptible of being slightly modified by education ; those of character almost wholly escape its influence. When education does affect them, it is only in the case of neutral natures, whose will is almost non-existent, and who are ready in consequence to follow whatever impulse may be given them. These neutral natures are met with in individuals, but very rarely in an entire people, or, should they be thus observed, it is only in times of extreme decadence. The discoveries of the intelligence are easily transmitted from one people to another. The transmission of the qualities appertaining to character is impossible. They are the irreducible fundamental elements which allow of the differentiation of the mental constitutions of the superior peoples." (The Psychology of Peoples, G. le Bon - www.archive.org/stream/psychologyofpeop00leborich/psychologyofpeop00leborich_djvu.txt)

Since "The character of a people and not its intelligence determines its historical evolution, and governs its destiny," it follows that the character of a people must be broken before its society can be undermined and its destiny destroyed. It is of course easier to nip it in the bud than to destroy it. Hence the importance that compulsory schooling has always had in all subversive schemes. Charlemagne's admiration for formal learning and educational institutions is well-known – but much less well-known is the fact that the very young Saxons he captured were sent to the abbeys of Fulda and Herzfeld to be converted -, as is Napoleon Bonaparte's obsession with the centralised control of the educational system. School was made compulsory at the end of the nineteenth century in most Western Europe countries, at the instigation of Free-Masonry and Jews, as demonstrated by the Masonic archives which were seized a few months after France was liberated in 1939 ( www.the-savoisien.com/blog/index.php?post/2010/08/24/La-fausse-%C3%A9ducation-nationale-L%E2%80%99emprise-jud%C3%A9o-ma%C3%A7onnique-sur-l%E2%80%99%C3%A9cole-fran%C3%A7aise) – presented with a fait accompli upon their coming to power, National-Socialism and Pétainism did their best to mithridatise the centralised educational system they inherited.

"The influence of character is sovereign in the life of peoples, whereas that of the intelligence is in truth very feeble." As G. le Bon pointed out with great insight, along the same lines as J. Evola "The Romans of the decadence possessed intelligence far more refined than that of their rude ancestors, but they had lost the qualities of character of the latter ; the perseverance, the energy, the invincible tenacity, the capacity to sacrifice themselves to an ideal, the inviolable respect for the laws which had made the greatness of their forefathers."

Finally, let us not forget the important part that the emphasis placed on intelligence by the high priests of the education system played in spurring their flock to espouse the dogma of gender and racial equality and to actually believe in the egalitarian credo : "A negro or a Japanese may easily take a university degree or become a lawyer ; the sort of varnish he thus acquires is however quite superficial, and has no influence on his mental constitution. What no education can give him, because they are created by heredity alone, are the forms of thought, the logic, and above all the character of the Western man. Our negro or our Japanese may accumulate all possible certificates without ever attaining to the level of the average European. It is easy to give him in ten years the culture of a well-educated Englishman. To make a real Englishman of him, that is to say a man acting as an Englishman would act in the different circumstances of life, a thousand years would scarcely be sufficient. It is only in appearance that a people suddenly transforms its language, its constitution, its beliefs or its arts. For such changes to be really accomplished, it would be necessary that it should be able to transform its soul." (The Psychology of Peoples)

In Europe, the rise and glorification of rational, mathematical and practical intelligence at the expense of character has gone together with the rise of speculative capitalism, whose psychological roots, as has been recalled above, are to be found in the Tanahk. Now, the proto-Communist millenarian tones of Judaism must be duly unearthed and brought to light, to a light which is more organic than that in which it is examined by Marxist historiography, and which throws light on J. Evola's considerations on the "the two columns", "that of the democracies, the financial international, Freemasonry, and Judaism, on the one hand, and that of revolutionary Marxism, on the other" (https://evolaasheis.wordpress.com/2016/04/14/the-occult-war-conclusion/), while enabling one to see where the "basic idea of the Protocols" "that, despite all, the capitalist and the proletarian Internationals are in agreement, being almost two columns with distinct ideas but which act in unison at a tactical level in order to achieve the same strategy", comes from.

In this regard, Sombart's acknowledgment that the Jewish people were divided into two sections, an upper wealthy class and the great mass of agricultural labourers, as already were, three millennia before, the Ubadians (in this proto-Sumerian matriarchal society in which it seems that lending at interest originates, the two social classes were named the awilum - the Haves - and the muskenum - the Have-Nots), should set us thinking. "... the sympathy of the prophets, even of the most aristocratic among them, was entirely on the side of the poorer classes… The edge of their invectives was turned against the land-hunger of the landed aristocracy who "joined house to house and laid field to field," till a country of sturdy peasants was turned into a series of great estates ; against the capitalistic ruthlessness that "sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes," thrusting the poor freeman into slavery to collect a trifling debt ; against the venality of the judges who took bribes and had a double standard of law for the rich and the poor. This dominant trait of their moral feeling reacted on their theology, so that it became one of the fundamental attributes of their God that he was the husband of the widow, the father of the orphan, and the protector of the stranger." (Christianity and the Social Crisis) The stranger's "modern brother is the proletarian immigrant of our cities." Walter Rauschenbusch's point is quite right indeed. He was just not able to foresee that the stranger would gain full "share in the modern means of production" and some "political power to protect his interests". "When the prophets conceived Jehovah as the special vindicator of these voiceless classes, it was another way of saying that it is the chief duty in religious morality to stand for the rights of the helpless." (ibid.) "In Jeremiah and in the prophetic psalms the poor as a class are made identical with the meek and godly, and "rich" and "wicked" are almost synonymous terms" (ibid.), just as later in the New Testament. The attitude of the prophets derived from specific historical and racial factors. "When the nomad tribes of Israel settled in Canaan and gradually became an agricultural people, they set out on their development toward civilization with ancient customs and rooted ideas that long protected primitive democracy and equality. Some tribes and clans claimed an aristocratic superiority of descent over others. Within the tribe there were elders and men of power to whom deference was due as a matter of course, but there was no hereditary social boundary line, no graded aristocracy or caste, no distinction between blue blood and red. The idea of a mésalliance, which plays so great a part in the social life of European nations... is wholly wanting in the Old Testament." (ibid.) "Like all primitive peoples, Israel set out with a large measure of communism in land. It was used in severalty, but owned by the clan." (ibid.) Ultimately, however, the land belonged to Yahweh. Without going so far as to appeal to Gottwald's Marxist thesis that early Israel was an egalitarian socio-political movement surrounded by hierarchical systems, it is undeniable that pre-monarchical times were already characterised by an egalitarian spirit and, correlatively, by the seditious humanitarian exaltation of the poor : "The nature of YHWH kingship… is unexpected. He exercises his kingship on behalf of the weak and oppressed. This is implied already in the Song of Moses at the sea ; what is being celebrated is precisely the liberation of an ethnic minority community who had been undergoing economic exploitation, political oppression and eventually a state-sponsored campaign of terrorizing genocide... the startling claim in Deuteronomy 10 is, first, that this god who rules over the entire universe has chosen Israel of all people as his covenant partner (v. 15) and second, that the power of this God over all other forms of power and authority, human or cosmic ("gods and lords") is exercised on behalf of the weakest and most marginalized in society - widow, orphan and alien (v. 18) (Christopher J. H. Wright The mission of God : unlocking the Bible's grand narrative)

It's not just that the land belongs to Yahweh, that "In early Israel, Yahweh alone was the landlord" (Deuteronomy and city life, Don C. Benjamin), it's that the whole earth is Yahweh's due, as is implied in the Adamic Covenant. While the tendency to "turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth" (The Crisis of the Modern World) only developed in the late `Middle-Ages', the initial call to conquer and "to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end to himself" (ibid.) dates back to Genesis 1:28 : "And God blessed them, saying : Increase and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living creatures that move upon the earth." What is called for here is the advent of the reign of quantity, of an indefinite multitude of individuals. The biblical assignment of world wide dominion to covenant-keepers involves population growth. World wide dominion and population growth are closely linked. For various reasons, some of which can be inferred from some considerations brought forward in `The Reign of Quantity', population growth was a precondition for the empowerment of the forces of subversion, and over-population is a prerequisite, not just for their staying in power, but also for their very corporeal manifestation on our plane of existence. Masses act, not just in a manner of speaking, as a pull factor for the infra-human stuff the usual political schemers and influent `self-made-men' are made of.

As mentioned above, the slave holds a special place in the ancient Israelite's mind and Law. Every fifty years or so, a Jubilee was proclaimed, and any Hebrew who was hold in slavery at that time was supposedly freed (Leviticus 25:9-10). Hebrews were discouraged to own an Hebrew, and so were Gentiles ; on the other hand, it is acceptable for an Hebrew to own a gentile. (ibid. 25:44-46). More importantly, fugitive slaves were to be protected, as long as they were Hebrew (Deuteronomy 23:16). Could it be a reminder of their purported enslavement in Egypt and subsequent exodus ? What is clear is that both the Egyptian term `pr' (spelled `Habiru' or `Apiru') and the Akkadian `Hapiru' applied to runaway slaves (while, to Anson F. Rainey "the plethora of attempts to relate apiru (Habiru) to the gentilic (i.e. biblical word) ibri are all nothing but wishful thinking", to Weippert, on the other hand, the etymological relationship between `Habiru' and `ibri' can be established reasonably securely). Apart from etymology, the fact remains that, when the appellation `Habiru' "vanished from the Western Asiatic historical area", the term `Hebrew' continued to be used in Biblical Hebrew, and, when "examining the remaining biblical references in which the designation `Hebrew' is used, one recognizes two distinct features characterizing the original social position of the Habiru : (1) their status as aliens who have migrated to places far from their homeland, and (2) their low social status as enslaved and exploited workers." (http://www.ericlevy.com/Revel/Intro2/Na%27aman,%20Nadav%20-%20Habiru%20and%20Hebrews-the%20transfer%20of%20a%20social%20term%20to%20the%20literary%20sphere.pdf) Let us add right away that the scholarly debate as to whether the `Habiru' was a tribe, an ethnic group or a social class is quite sterile from our perspective, a perspective which is strengthened by the results of the various recent genetic studies which were hinted at the beginning of this examination. The point is that the two theses are not mutually exclusive : the `Habiru' could be a social group, or, rather, an infra-social group which formed sponte sua from the amalgamation of infra-racial elements from various ethnic groups, of (what is called in French) `forbans' of varied ethnicities, just like, for example, the pirates (see evolaasheis.proboards.com/thread/36/turtle), the closest word for `forbans' in English, if we are not mistaken. There is empirical evidence that a social group may form from elements of various ethnic and even racial backgrounds. Just as, as rightly noted in `Metaphysics of sex', women tend to `socialise' much more easily, much more instinctively with each other than men with each other in any given situation, so – this is not the place to explain why this analogy is perfectly legitimate - individuals uprooted from their respective original social and political milieu, no matter their ethnicity or their race, have a strong tendency to attract, to magnetise one another and to `coalesce', once in a new environment and, so to speak, on neutral ground, especially as this new environment is racially homogeneous. In any case, the results of various genetic studies tend to lend weight to Greenberg's claim that "all Israelites were Hebrews (Hapiru), but not all Hebrews (Hapiru) were Israelites" (Greenberg) and to Albright's conviction that the Habiru "were a class of heterogeneous ethnic origin, and that they spoke different languages, often alien to the people in whose documents they appear."(in www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/the_babylonian_woe.pdf) Even if, as more or less conclusively argued by www.tms.edu/tmsj/17f.pdf), the `Habiru' were listed as an ethnic group on the Memphis stele of Amenhotep II (1427?-1400?), a booty list for his campaign in Canaan and Syria, this would still not prejudge its composition.

"a mixt multitude of people" joined with "the children of Israel" (Exodus 12:37-38) as these marched out of Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Whether this "mix multitude" was the result of mixed marriages that took place in Egypt (Lev 24:10), a mixture of nationalities that were enslaved in Egypt together with the Hebrews (Exod 12:29) or mercenaries from different countries (Ezek 30:5), the expression speaks for itself. Whatever happened to them next, the following event, that is, the conquest of Canaan, gives us a great deal of ammunition, as read by Albrecht Alt in `Die Landnahme der Israeliten in Palästina', which "used the archaeological and literary evidence to show that the picture of a lightning war of conquest, given by the Book of Joshua must be abandoned in favour of a theory of infiltration. There was no lightning strike, but a gradual infiltration of a new people, some of whom may have come from Egypt under a shadowy figure called Moses. In fact the traditional `lightning strike' theory is contradicted both by the Bible itself, which shows that the conquest-stories apply only to the territory of the tribe of Benjamin and are balanced by biblical admissions that Israel could not conquer the great cities of the land until the time of David and Solomon. It is contradicted also by archaeology." (www.henrywansbrough.com/Genesis%20wt%20pix.doc) Indeed, infiltration has always been the favourite method of attack of the Jews, of revolutionaries, throughout history.

It is typical and telling that the Jewish scholar R. Wolfe takes pride in the lowliness, the restlessness and the rebelliousness of early Israelites and that, still referring to these, he equates "bandits" with "revolutionaries intent on imposing a new social order." (http://www.newenglishreview.org/Robert_Wolfe/From_Habiru_to_Hebrews%3A_The_Roots_of_the_Jewish_Tradition/) More generally, "In Jewish prophetism (and in primitive Christianity), one can pick up a set of themes that compose what has been called "religious communism" ; the typically millenarian scenario uniting these themes is always the same : first, a curse on the rich and a call to destroy them ; anathemas against private property and a valorization of poverty ; then, the announcement of a new society grounded on equality, in accordance with God's will and breaking thoroughly apart from the present society ; last, an attempt to work out the kingdom to be through the setting up of small religious communities." (J.P. Sironneau, Sécularisation et religions politiques - books.google.fr/books?id=fU7KmrJuDRAC&pg=PA584&lpg=PA584&dq=%22jewish+prophetism%22&source=bl&ots=XpTo9h2w1I&sig=Y9LJTVg-YMqIb3RIODpnR-AswDc&hl=fr&ei=dah1TuKYAtSyhAeCkeCsDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22jewish%20prophetism%22&f=false)

To conclude, J. Evola's contribution to the clarification of the Jewish problem is of an unprecedented and invaluable breadth and depth, owing to a clear definition of it from an Aryan standpoint, and, correlatively, to the criticism and the rectification of any of the vague, weak and incoherent ideas brought forward by most anti-Semites - the need for a "truly general standpoint" and for "doctrinal and historical premises" is not only felt theoretically, but is understood as "necessary to really legitimate, through a deductive procedure, any practical, that is to say, social and political, anti-Semitic policies." ; there is the examination of Jewishness in a totalistic manner, that is, from a biological standpoint, as well as from the point of view of the race of the soul and of that of the spirit, and, in accordance with the etymology of the often loosely used term `Semitism', there is also the acknowledgment that the `Jewish' element cannot be, purely and simply, separated from the general type of civilisation that formerly spread throughout the whole eastern Mediterranean area from Asia Minor to the borders of Arabia" (in this regard, the question of the systematic collusion between the Jews and the Arabs against European peoples in the military as well as in the political sphere since the birth of Islam should be addressed seriously and comprehensively) - the Zionist question, which has become a reason to live, a whim, in most European nationalist circles, is put back where it belongs : "It should be noted that it is not true that the dispersal of the Jews goes back to the second destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD) and thus that it has external causes. The Jews had already spread across the Mediterranean world for a long time, of their own free will and according to their interests. When the Persian king Cyrus allowed them to return home, most of the Jews had no plans to leave what they called their `captivity' : there, they had done lucrative business, they had accumulated wealth and goods, and they were hardly overjoyed by the prospect of returning to so impoverished a country. This also applies to many current leading members of international Jewry who are scattered throughout the world, who smile with pity at those who expect to fulfil `Zionism' in Palestine and would thus like the Jews to give up the plum jobs they hold in the Aryan countries to withdraw to this impoverished Asian chunk of land." (Il Giudaismo nell'antichità) Not only this is still valid, but it is more valid than ever. When it comes more specifically to the Jewish question in ancient times, we have seen that J. Evola's views can be considered as essentially valid and accurate, except, to some extent, with regard to the issue of Messianism, into which `He That Cometh' and M. Eliade offer great insight. The problem is that Messianism is conceived of as a belief of the materialist and practical order right from the start of the Jewish religion in some of the Italian author's writings, whereas this characteristic is considered as an alteration and a corruption of early Yahwism in others. As we have already pointed out, not only it is incorrect to speak stricto sensu of a "secularisation" of Yahvism, in that Yahwism was originally based on secular interests, but, as paradoxical as it may seem, the supra-worldly sphere was never stressed by prophets as much as it was in post-exilic times, just as Jews started to sample for good material wealth. This could be explained by the pressing need they may have then felt to be perceived as a religious sect rather than as a mercantile community.

However this may be, our critical and constructive examination of J. Evola's conception of the Jewish problem in ancient times in the light of the Old Testament and of a broad selection of the best scholarly literature available on the subject has resulted in the observation that the culture, the spirit and the character of the Hebrew people have changed in form, but not in substance, over centuries.


RATMW : Revolt against the Modern World
IMDS : Il Mito del sangue
TAOTJP : Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem