Responsa: Yehuda Bauer’s Fake History
Well Professor Yehuda Bauer is at it again and this time he has managed to publish a piece that forces one to question if the ageing ‘Holocaust expert’ is going senile in his dotage or if he was always such an ignorant muppet, but managed to hide it from his employers and colleagues.
The piece in question, published in ‘The Jewish Chronicle’, starts off with the weird claim that:
‘There is no antisemitism in polytheistic cultures.’
This is simply wrong, because anti-Semitism – colloquially not academically defined which is how Bauer is using the term – has existed in polytheistic cultures many times in the past and indeed – despite many efforts to exclusively blame Christianity for it – it may reasonably be said that anti-Semitism first developed in polytheistic cultures like that of Egypt, Greece and Rome.
‘In India there were three Jewish population centers — one in the Cochin area, another near Mumbai (the Bene Israel), and a third, in more modern times, in north-east India, of mainly Iraqi Jews; Indian Jews were never persecuted.’
Indeed, but what Bauer forgets to mention is that these populations were both tiny and cut off from the broader jewish community for over a millennium while interbreeding with the local population. After two or three generations of interbreeding with the local community and without contact with the main body of the jewish people. These tiny outposts of a few jewish families had simply become part of the local population in all but the fact that they followed a weird foreign religion.
They were no more jewish than the isolated pockets of Slavonic pagans in Russia in the nineteenth century were any more culturally pagan than the Orthodox Christians around them. Like these Slavonic pagans, the jews of India and China had simply assimilated, which is why – incidentally – the jews of both countries look like the local people not like their distant relatives in Tel Aviv.
These communities were only rediscovered more than a millennium after they had been founded although rumours that they existed were known to some. They are no more representative of jewry than the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah could be held to be.
‘For polytheistic societies, the Jewish God was just another deity, and that was fine.’
Indeed, but if you remember your classical authors – Cicero, Martial and Tacitus for example – then you would recall that they specifically attacked the conduct of the jews on this point, because unlike other pagan gods. Yahweh insists he is the only real god and thus to the jewish people everyone else’s gods are non-existent or worse: they are demons.
Such an attitude is hardly like to be conducive to good relations between polytheistic cultures and the jews: no?
I mean it only triggered things like the (at least) three jewish revolts – or rather mass conspiracies to murder all the evil non-jews – against Rome among other things.
Just minor details of course…
‘Jews were craftsmen and traders, just like many of their Indian neighbours, and they were one of many Indian subgroups with their own social, religious, and cultural traits.’
Which, as I have explained, is a bad example, because two to three generations in; the jews had interbred with and become just like the locals. They had no connection to the wider jewish community and certainly didn’t follow any of the (rather important) developments of Judaism that occurred in the millennia that followed.
‘Antisemitism grows in monotheistic societies only,’
Which is completely disproved by the consistently negative Egyptian, Greek and Roman attitude to the jews.
Heck, the first pogroms in the world were launched by the Egyptian and Greek inhabitants of Alexandria largely because of the monotheistic beliefs and the resultant conduct of the jews not because the Egyptians and the Greeks were monotheists (in fact they were devout pagans).
‘And is the result of the fact that Jews developed a culture, religion and customs that were different from those of their surroundings.’
So then, according to Bauer, anti-Semitism results from jewish conduct, because when they ‘peacefully co-exist with their neighbours’ rather than ‘be different’ or do ‘different things’ – like stealing… sorry ‘liberating’… all of Pharaoh’s gold – then there is more inter-communal harmony and not because the local people are ‘irrational bigots’ or something of that ilk.
‘Peaceful co-existence of Jews with their non-Jewish neighbours was and is, therefore, contingent on a rejection, even if relative, of the view that sees in the Jew the stereotypical Other, the stranger, the competitor, and therefore, potentially, the enemy.’
So, in essence, what Bauer is saying here is that when the jews are in Rome then the Romans must do as the jews do, because if they don’t then it tends to cause the jews to get hurt, because the locals ‘just don’t understand’ why the jewish butcher tries to sell them rat meat as if it were ground beef.
‘Jews can live peacefully only in relatively liberal societies. By that I mean societies striving towards democracy, rule of law and independence of the legal system, freedom of religion; societies that strive towards gender equality, that guarantee freedom of speech and expression, that defend minorities, and so on.’
So, jews therefore, according to Bauer, are liberals and promote paedophile-acceptance, transgender bathrooms, mass immigration and the resultant issues, the destruction of traditional Europe values, religions and customs and so forth.
Good to know, especially as Bauer’s fellow member of the diseased and decrepit jewish intelligentsia Alan Dershowitz said something similar yesterday: i.e., ‘Jews disproportionately support racial equality and other liberal causes.’ (2)
I rest my case.
References
(1) https://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/yehuda-bauer-jews-will-suffer-as-the-world-gets-less-liberal-1.434799
(2) https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10131/the-bigotry-of-intersectionality