In the back of my mind, now forwarded to the front optics, has been a long term fantasy. I intend to read many of the world classics I either avoided, chose not to read or delayed reading until I reached this dramatically telling age. Recently I spotted and then bought a mint copy in 8 volumes of Edward Gibbon’sThe History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I read volume I enduring, rather, suffering that arch latinized English style of the 18th Century. It was grinding but I endured. I was going to read the entire work over a period of months, I imagine. In any case in volume II I came across his famous 15th and 16th chapters in which he examines the role of Christianity in Rome. I had heard that as a rationalist and man of the Enlightenment, I suppose, he would set about dissecting the deleterious effects of Christianity on Rome, if you choose to see it that way. In any case the Jews got in his way.
As he wrote about the beginnings of Christianity as a religion or sect, I came across that same severe tongue-lashing that Judaism gets from historians, old and new (Toynbee viewed Judaism as a “fossil” religion). It was annoying to put up with his aspersions and “critique” of judaism, with the implicit assumption that regardless of how you see the impact on Rome, Christianity was a significant improvement over the people of the mountain god, Yahweh. I stopped reading the book and it will be put up on Ebay. (I will give this series away FREE if you pay postage.) The anti-Semitism of Dickens, Shakespeare, Pound, Voltaire, Dostoevsky, Chaucer, Eliot runs like a clear stream through the western Canon as it does through Christianity itself. Here I am ready to read one of history’s classics and I am hit with this crap. I recall in college that the four term course in contemporary civilization only had two selections from Jews — Spinoza and Freud, as if to say that in 2,000 years it was the best Jews could do.
It wouldn’t be so bad but this week I had a participant in a writer’s class speak of a Jewess. Well, for those of you who don’t know, there’s no such thing except that expressed by the unlearned, ignoramuses and racists. Negress is equally unacceptable. Both terms denigrate minority women just as squaw does. When was the last time you came across a Catholicness or Protestantness — point made.
In the same group this participant went on to tell me that Freud had purchased a painting by Hitler in the early years of the 20th Century. It depends on what level you want to listen; I generally listen to levels equivalent to the basement and sub-basement, as I have been trained to do. Is this clown informing me about a piece of historical curiosa, if such an event did occur? Is he telling me that Freud was a variant of the self-hating Jew? Is he also telling me that Jews have no boundaries and they do whatever pleases them? In any case he thought he was sharing a tantalizing fact with me. I think not. Was I to shake my head at Freud’s indiscretion? Is it an indirect and not subtle way of telling me that Jews are this and that? And if I would take him on he could easily and comfortably say that I was reading too much into this. I think not. Human beings are like bowls of slopping gravy — they drip wherever they go.
Of course, this off-centered gent said that he had a Jewish ancestor which always makes me feel that this is an excuse for vile behavior or that it is a kind of fashionista thing to claim. Three years ago in a trip to Spain I sensed more than once that Spaniards could not talk openly about Jews or having Jewish ancestors (conversos) but that it was also an “in” thing to be connected — the ambivalence was strident. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes in which Chuck Heston is caged as a sample of his species.
Since I’m living in the Silver State now, whose listing in terms of education is extremely low, worse than Mississippi, to wit, a state made up of transients, much like Arizona, knowledge about other ethnic groups is dismal, I believe. The one religion that sticks in the craw of Christianity is grossly misunderstood and grossly misperceived which makes total sense. After all, Jews are one percent of the population of this country. Nevertheless, the assumptioms and hearsday about Jews borders on the appalling. I listen as some group members talk about what it is to be kosher, assuming all Jews are kosher and all such drivel. It is a naive to expect Jews to be humanized if they serve better purposes to be demonized. I sometimes feel as if I am a member of a rare species, to be spoken of, to be looked at, to be examined. I know more about Christianity than Christianity knows about me. And the black slave knew more about his white master than the master cared to know about him.
I step back and observe this appalling ignorance about a remarkable people who have made a monumental contribution to western civilization. . . So what else is new?
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