Of
Jews and Israelis
KEITH: Of all peoples in the West, Jews strike me as being the ones
who most cling to Creator worship, to a religion which stresses the Creator, or
Jehovah, rather than some avatar, or Christ-equivalent figure, who stands,
chronologically speaking, in between the Creator and the future Ultimate
Creation ... of the Holy Spirit ... in the overall evolution of gods. Judaism would appear to be a largely
alpha-oriented religion, a religion anterior to Christianity in terms of
evolutionary development and, as such, many of its adherents would seem to be
biased towards materialism and more capable, in consequence, of pursuing wealth
as a desirable end than most of their Christian counterparts - much as though
the pursuit of material gain was of moral value in itself.
ROBERT: I agree that
Judaism is fundamentally more alpha-orientated than any other so-called World
Religion, with the possible exception of Islam, and could therefore be regarded
as pre-atomic rather than atomic. Now if
there is any connection between a people's lifestyle and their religion, then
it could well transpire that there is some truth in what you say about Jews
being more disposed to the pursuit of wealth in consequence of their paganistic cast - not all of them, of course, but still
quite a fair percentage, and irrespective of whether or not they still cling to
religious devotion.
KEITH: But what makes
them like that? I mean, why should they
continue to cling to a pre-atomic faith when other peoples have long abandoned
such a thing in favour of an atomic faith, like Christianity? Why must Jews be so materialistic?
ROBERT: A very
difficult question, but one that I am not entirely bereft of ideas about! In fact, I have only recently come to the
conclusion that the tradition of clinging to Judaism stems, in large measure,
from the Diaspora, from the fact that Jews took their religious roots into the
countries to which they were obliged to emigrate and, not possessing a national
state of their own, had to cling to such roots if for no other reason than the
preservation of a common ground between them.
KEITH: You mean that
rather than becoming Christians or Mohammedans or whatever, and thereby
severing connections with their principal form of cultural identity, they clung
to Judaism even in the face of persecution, in order to retain a cultural
identity with Jews everywhere, irrespective of to which country they had
migrated.
ROBERT: Yes, I broadly
subscribe to that contention. For
although I am aware that Jews were often prohibited from becoming Christians or
Mohammedans in the various countries to which they migrated, the fact that they
had been forced into exile by the Romans must have produced an inhibiting
effect on the degree to which they were prepared to assimilate themselves to,
or be assimilated by, the country of their hosts, with a consequence that, ever
desirous of a future return to Zion, they determined to cling to their
religious roots in the interests of ethnic identity. Thus whilst other peoples were acquiring and
furthering a semi-transcendental religious perspective, Jews remained, and to a
significant extent still remain, fundamentalist at heart, clinging to
alpha-oriented criteria in the hope that, one day, they would regain their
homeland and become a united, independent people again, with the prospect of a new
religious development, once the Messiah had come to lead them forward. Of all the civilized peoples in the world,
they are the only ones who, Second Comings notwithstanding, are still awaiting
a Messiah, having rejected Christ and other such atomic messiahs in loyalty to
their people, traditions, and apocalyptic hopes, not to mention historical
antipathy to the Romans, who of course became Christians.
KEITH: And yet we live
in a century when, after nearly two millennia, the Jews once again have a homeland,
which is the State of Israel, and are enabled to return to it if they so
desire, that is to say, if they have remained loyal to their people and want to
fulfil Biblical prophecy by returning home and awaiting messianic redemption.
ROBERT: That is so. But, of course, not all of them have remained loyal to
their people after all this time. Some
have become Christians and thus abandoned the religious hopes of their
ancestors; some, while remaining Judaic, have become more closely integrated
into the country of their adoption, or, more usually these days, birth; some,
preferring to abandon all religious traditions, whether Judaic or Christian,
have adopted atheistic positions in loyalty to Socialism, and thus become still
more closely integrated into the country of their adoption or birth, be it
Western or Eastern; and some, of course, are of mixed descent and thus hardly
Semitic at all by any racial reckoning.
There exists a whole range of Jews who aren't particularly interested in
Zionism and a possible future return to
KEITH: Yet many Jews,
whether in Israel or the Diaspora, whether Zionist or Internationalist,
European or American, are still basically materialistic, given to the pursuit
of wealth as a kind of virtue in itself, and consequently despised, not least
of all for their unwillingness to substitute Christian criteria for Judaic
criteria.
ROBERT: That may be so,
but while they live in atomic civilizations, as in the Christian West, they
cannot be persecuted outright, as by the Nazis both before and during the
Second World War, since Christian nations are still partly pagan, or
alpha-stemming, and therefore disposed to tolerate, if not openly admire, Jews
in their midst, irrespective of how un-Christian or pre-atomic some of them may
happen to be. Only nations tending away
from atomic civilization in a barbarous political guise would be inclined to
persecute Jews for being pre-atomic in cultural allegiance. For such nations tend, whether or not they're
aware of the fact, towards the transcendent, and must find fault with what they
take to be pagan or, in the Jewish case, quasi-pagan alpha-oriented 'laggards'.
KEITH: But surely the
Nazi persecution of Jews, to which you are doubtless alluding, was conducted on
a racist basis, without regard to moral or religious criteria?
ROBERT: To a large extent it was, even given the fact that one can't
wholly separate religious from ethnic considerations, bearing in mind that race
and culture are deeply interwoven. Yet
while that may have been the case on the surface, as it were, of the Nazi
persecution of the Jews, I incline to doubt whether there wasn't a deeper motive
underlying it which many Nazis may not have been consciously aware of
themselves, but which they were fated, as tools of malign history, to enact - a
motive, I mean, connected with the moral implications of leaving a
predominantly pre-atomic people at large in a world tending, from a barbarous
base, towards post-atomic criteria.
Admittedly, it is easy for civilized Westerners to see nothing more than
a racist dimension to Nazi anti-Semitism, since this was the apparent dimension, the one
most superficially recognizable. But
history often makes use of superficial means to attain to profounder ends, and
uses, in the process, unsuspecting accomplices in the pursuit of its ultimate
goals! Wasn't Nazism supposed to be a
quasi-religious ideology, opposed to 'Bolshevik materialism'? And might it not be that such an ideology was
fated to pursue policies which Marxists wouldn't have understood, since subject
to a different ideological prerogatives, but which history nevertheless
required, if only on a short-term basis?
KEITH: Your speculation
induces one to suppose that, despite its inevitable failure, Nazism may have
been of some service to history whilst it lasted, and primarily as regards the
liquidation of approximately six million covertly or overtly cultural adherents
of a pre-atomic religion who would not have been dealt with in such fashion by
Marxists!
ROBERT: Ah, but the
point is: Who were those six million Jews? Were they the cream of their race,
those who had fulfilled Biblical prophecy by returning to
KEITH: Yet even though
millions of Jews succumbed to Nazi persecution and were exterminated in a
variety of hideous contexts, one could nevertheless argue that many Jews who
would not otherwise have returned to Palestine did in fact do so in
consequence of Nazi pressures, and that the Nazis accordingly assisted, if
indirectly and in the crudest possible terms, in the fulfilment of Biblical
prophecy ... by inducing the more sensible or courageous or fortunate or fit
Jews to escape to freedom.
ROBERT: Indeed, and many Jews would doubtless have required such a
radical incentive for leaving
KEITH: You mean the
State of
ROBERT: Yes, though I
wouldn't go so far as to say that they should set such an example to the whole
world. For, speaking as an Irishman, I
would like to see
KEITH: So while you
don't have a particularly high moral regard for Jews ... conceived, in a way,
as exiled tribalists, you are prepared to concede
Israelis the possibility of spiritual redemption, even though, in the present
circumstances, many of them cling to Judaism for want of anything better.
ROBERT: Yes, I would
rather Israel became a bulwark of transcendental progress in the Middle East,
and thereby fully justified its presence there, instead of simply existing in
an open-society context, as at present.
After all, the adoption of Transcendentalism by
KEITH:
Yet, presumably diaspora Jews would be more subject
to harassment than Jews or, rather, Israelis in
ROBERT: That always
remains a possibility. Though if such
Jews aren't specifically intended, by historical necessity, to be in the Diaspora
to further Transcendentalism among European and other peoples when the
opportunity of doing so arises, then most of them would probably be better off
going to Israel and working for Israeli freedom, or the right of Israel to
exist. For it seems to me that the more
Jews there are in Israel, and the less Jews in the Diaspora, the better it will
be for Israel, which still hasn't entirely convinced the Arab world of its
entitlement to exist, and could therefore do with all the able-bodied help it
can get.
KEITH: So you are
convinced that the State of
ROBERT: Provided the
conditions to which I have alluded are eventually met and Israel thereupon
takes a lead in affirming Transcendentalism, as taught by the New Messiah, the
'Anti-Moses' of universal civilization.
Unfortunately, like Moses in the desert before him, this New Messiah,
who in Christian parlance loosely corresponds to a Second Coming, won't
personally enter the 'promised land' ... of the transcendental civilization
himself, because its global realization is only likely to come to pass in the
future, quite some time, in all probability, after his death. But he must nevertheless point the way
forward for his subsequent followers, of whichever race, to tend towards and
eventually enter this spiritual 'promised land' themselves, to be set firmly on
course for the post-Human Millennium and what lies beyond that epoch ... in the
heaven of literal transcendence. If some
peoples are destined to start along the road to that ultimate civilization
ahead of others, well and good! There
will continue to be a distinction between 'the quick' and 'the slow' for some
time yet, and he sees no reason why Israelis, in conjunction with peoples like
the Irish and Iranians, shouldn't be among the former. After all, Jews have been dragging their
feet, metaphorically speaking, for a sufficient period of time now to suggest
that a radical leap to higher things is timely!
The Diaspora may have held their religious aspirations in check, but the
State of