The word Jew is Hebrew in origin. Duh!
The true start of this affair occurred on a day in 458 BC which this narrative will reach in its sixth chapter. On that day the petty Palestinian tribe of Judah (earlier disowned by the Israelites) produced a racial creed, the disruptive effect of which on subsequent human affairs may have exceeded that of explosives or epidemics. This was the day on which the theory of the master-race was set up as “the Law.”
At the time Judah was a small tribe among the subject-peoples of the Persian king, and what today is known as “the West” could not even be imagined. Now the Christian era is nearly two thousand years old and “Western civilization,” which grew out of it, is threatened with disintegration.
The creed born in Judah 2,500 years ago, in the author’s opinion, has chiefly brought this about. The process, from original cause to present effect, can be fairly clearly traced because the period is, in the main, one of verifiable history.
The creed which a fanatical sect produced that day has shown a great power over the minds of men throughout these twenty-five centuries; hence its destructive achievement.
Why it was born at that particular moment, or ever, is something that none can explain. This is among the greatest mysteries of our world, unless the theory that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction is valid in the area of religious thought; so that the impulse which at that remote time set many men searching for a universal, loving God produced this fierce counter-idea of an exclusive, vengeful deity.
Judah-ism was retrogressive even in 458 BC, when men in the known world were beginning to turn their eyes away from idols and tribal gods and to look for a God of all men, of justice and of neighbourliness. Confucius and Buddha had already pointed in that direction and the idea of one-God was known among the neighbouring peoples of Judah. Today the claim is often made that the religious man, Christian, Muslim or other, must pay respect to Judaism, whatever its errors, on one incontestable ground: it was the first
universal religion, so that in a sense all universal religions descend from it. Every Jewish child is taught this. In truth, the idea of the one-God of all men was known long before the tribe of Judah even took shape, and Judaism was above all else the denial of that idea. The Egyptian Book of the Dead (manuscripts of which were found in the tombs of kings of 2,600 BC, over two thousand years before the Judaist “Law” was completed) contains the passage: “Thou art the one, the God from the very beginnings of time, the heir of immortality, self-produced and self-born; thou didst create the earth and make man.” Conversely, the Scripture produced in Judah of the Levites asked, “Who is like unto thee, O Lord,
among the Gods?” (
Exodus).
The sect which attached itself to and mastered the tribe of Judah took this rising concept of one-God of all-peoples and embodied it in its Scripture only to destroy it, and to set up the creed based on its denial. It is denied subtly, but with scorn, and as the creed is based on the theory of the master-race this denial is necessary and inevitable. A master-race, if there be one, must
itself be God.
The creed which was given force of daily law in Judah in 458 BC was then and still is unique in the world. It rested on the assertion, attributed to the tribal deity (Jehovah), that “the Israelites” (in fact, the Judahites) were his “chosen people” who, if they did all his “statutes and judgments,” would be set over all other peoples and be established in a “promised land.” Out of this theory, whether by forethought or unforeseen necessity, grew the pendent theories of “captivity” and “destruction.” If Jehovah were to be worshipped, as he demanded, at a certain place in a specified land, all his worshippers had to live there.
Obviously all of them could not live there, but if they lived elsewhere, whether by constraint or their own choice, they automatically became “captives” of “the stranger,” whom they had to “root out,” “pull down” and “destroy.” Given this basic tenet of the creed, it made no difference whether the “captors” were conquerors or friendly hosts; their ordained lot was to be destruction or enslavement.
Before they were destroyed or enslaved, they were, for a time, to be “captors” of the Judahites, not in their own right, but because the Judahites, having failed in “observance,” deserved punishment. In
this way, Jehovah revealed himself as the one-God of all-peoples: though he “knew” only the “chosen people,” he would employ the heathen to punish them for their “transgressions,” before meting out the foreordained destruction to these heathen.
The Judahites had this inheritance thrust on them. It was not even theirs, for the “covenant,” according to these Scriptures, had been made between Jehovah and “the children of Israel,” and by 458 BC the Israelites, spurning the non-Israelitish Judahites, had long since been absorbed by other mankind, taking with them the vision of a universal, loving God of all men. The Israelites, from all the evidence, never knew this racial creed which was to come down through the centuries as the Jewish religion, or Judaism. It stands, for all time, as the product of Judah of the Levites.