Jewish Revenge Fantasies

Reading from and responding to Our God Is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us: Essays on Jewish Power, by Laurent Guyénot.

Part 1 Part 2

(Art by Michelle Horsley)

Conflicting Narratives

In the chapter, “Israel as One Man, Blood Covenant and Jewish Power,” Guyénot describes usury as “quintessential parasitizing” and claims that “the Yahwist priests were the first to conceive of enslaving entire nations through debt.” He quotes Deuteronomy 15:6: “For the LORD thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee: and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee.”

Admittedly that sounds bad, in the context of Guyénot’s multilayered case for the prosecution. Yet, in Deuteronomy 15:11, a mere five lines later, there is also this: “For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.”

So then the question becomes, which blueprint are (any given historical snapshot of) Judeans adhering to? If the OT is making promises of lands of plenty and supreme social clout, it is also stipulating the conditions for how to be worthy of those gifts. It is true that, Bible-history-wise, the Israelites are forever failing to live up to the covenant, and so losing the favor of Yahweh. But this is baked into the status of chosenness bestowed upon them—with great power comes great responsibility; and great potential for corruption.

The view of the OT as Hebrew History, composed by the Prophets and God-filled sages, about the liberation and continued struggles of God’s Chosen People, does not hold up to scrutiny, of course; but to try to force it into the frame of an evil aggrandizers’ manual for world domination requires an equally Procrustean feat of reductionism. Insofar as it is both these things, co-existing side by side in a single book—even sometimes on a single page—it is also neither.

Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer (in Jesus Against Christianity) sees many of the OT texts as a kind of power/revenge fantasy on the part of the exiled and oppressed Judeans who fiercely need to consolidate their idea of a supreme God who: a) is on their side; b) can and will prove it. This latter amounts to license to seize all the land, women, and spoils they need to thrive as a tribe.

The problem is that—as the book of Job makes explicit—God does not work this way.

God is not a transcendental reward and punishment system by which we can do what we think God wants and everything will go right for us (this idea was later reborn via Pentecostalism as “the prosperity gospel”). The New Testament makes explicit what is only implicit in the book of Job, that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

There can be little doubt that this reality—the one Job has to confront, that godliness does not guarantee prosperity, or vice versa—is why the afterlife became more and more essential to Judean faith—and then fully central to Christians. There is no guaranteed correlation between serving God and receiving social benefits (or even longevity and good health, vis a vis Jesus Christ).

The error that is written large in the confusingly contradictory OT—most acknowledged and wrestled with in the book of Job, an anomaly—seems to pertain to how the Israelites, or the later Hebrews, misread—even misconceived—the experience and the promises of Yahweh/Elohim, as a kind of personal, historical intervention that implied God was on their side; and that the proof was that he would act, not only through but for them, in worldly affairs.

Every Gift is a Test

With hindsight—which appears to have been far from 20/20 in the case of the OT patriarchs—the gift was a test, and the more the Hebrews failed it, the more they lost what they had been given, the more fiercely they lamented, and the more violent their fantasies became. As Nelson-Pallmeyer has it:

The idealized view of Exodus as liberation becomes the lens through which nearly all other biblical themes must be seen. Apart from the Exodus story, we cannot fathom the mixture of pride, pain, expectation, disappointment, fear, hope, anger, despair or confusion at the center of many texts. . . . Biblical portrayals of God as wrathful, vengeful, violent, and genocidal flow from a Jewish history in which people struggle for meaning (p. 93).

The main point I wish to make here, however, is that, since there’s more than one thing going on in the Old Testament writings, there’s probably more than one thing going in with “Jewish power.” Yet Guyénot rarely seems to acknowledge that. His message is as stark and ominous as the trumpet blast in Jericho:

In the inner spheres of deep political power, elite Jews unite in conspiratorial circles to steer history in their desired direction. . . . Such networks of smart tribal Machiavellian conspiratorial Jews are the key to the extraordinary cohesion of worldwide Jewry. . . . The cohesion of the Jewish community is always maintained by the most committed Jews organized in tight networks who control the Jewish masses through a paranoid network of extermination combined with a megalomaniac complex of superiority. . . . Jewishness is a system of mind control of the Jewish masses by the Jewish elites (p. 54, 55, 56).

To be fair, Guyénot is here summing up the evidence he has gathered so far, so these inflammatory statements are not trees falling in an empty forest. But this only makes them all the more incendiary. It is not that these statements are necessarily wrong—they are backed by evidence and good argumentation—it’s just that, once again, they do not provide a fully-rounded picture.

Case for the Defense

I can appreciate, even admire, Guyénot’s attempts to shed light on the reality of organized Jewry, the abuse of scripture and power, and the way it has fueled a kind of organized global criminal intelligence network (maybe even the original one, certainly one of the oldest still operating). Yet there’s so much more than meets the eye here that I regret he didn’t paint a broader, deeper picture that wouldn’t be so easy to dismiss (by them that are inclined, and they are legion) as “anti-Semitism.”

As I have been trying to formulate in recent posts, historically, I believe there is some basis for the chosenness of the Israelites in metaphysical truth, and not only mythic engineering, self-aggrandizement, and power politics.

(It’s too bad that what follows is behind a Paywall, but as long as my ongoing attempts to resolve the JQ seem to be losing me subscribers, I feel more obliged than ever to keep paywalling. To remove the paywall, not only for yourself but potentially for others also, consider becoming a paying subscriber.)