love peace and chase after peace.

Cara Drook, Reclaiming La Belle Juive, (2022 –).

"Looking Jewish"

a collage i made of a ton of photos of Jews past and present. our beautiful faces.

I recently read that after Napoleon went to Egypt in 1798, France really wanted to start a French-Arab Empire. And it weaponized antisemitism really, really hard. Basically, trying to get the Arab world to unite with it against a common enemy.

The book I was reading heavily implied that France helped create and disseminate the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You know: the unhinged tome that pretended to be a collection of minutes from a Secret Zionist Meeting, about how non-Jews were cattle and Jews would take over the world and stuff. The one that inspired and created support for the Nazis, and which the Nazi Party then republished and disseminated.

The one that was written by a Russian-French guy, published in Paris, and originally written in French.

This blew my mind. I was like, I'm sorry, are you saying that France helped create the Protocols?? because it wanted to build a French-Arab empire???? I need you to cite your sources????

I am very picky about my nonfiction books in this area, fortunately. It cited its sources. And I am reading the main one now. Which is available free online.

It's already kind of a lot?!??!

I'm only on the Foreword????

It talks about how Christianity, at its very beginnings, was in kind of a battle to separate itself from Judaism and get people to become Christians, not a new denomination of Jews. In Antioch, people were backsliding into becoming Jews:

I knew that there was a long, long pattern of people thinking of Jews as nefarious, murderous, destructive, evil, "baby-killers." I knew that French consuls and French church leaders pushed that narrative in multiple places in the 1800s, like the Damascus Affair.

But I didn't know it was so fucking explicit. I thought there was some plausible deniability involved. Not just, "Heyyyy, Jews are evil murderers, okay? You don't wanna be JEWS."

I looked this guy up to see when he said this.

The strongest attacks on Jews and Judaism by the Church Fathers are to be found in the Homilies of Chrysostom (344-407 C.E.) in his Antioch sermons.

uhhhhh that's at the very beginning of the Church. that's at the beginning of the Roman Empire adopting it as a state religion and giving it a ton of power and structure. that's the beginning.

He is considered to be among the most beloved and admired in Church history.

*naive nervous laughter*

His discourses were prompted by the fact that many Christians were meeting on friendly terms with Jews, visiting Jewish homes, and attending their synagogues.

I can tell it's way too early to be breaking out that gif. but it's my favorite gif. we're just gonna. take it as read that this is my reaction to, i'm betting, literally everything from here on down.

Hang on, I'm gonna read more of this actual book, but first I just need to share a few of the Chrysostom quotes from that site.

"The Jews sacrifice their children to Satan....they are worse than wild beasts. The synagogue is a brothel, a den of scoundrels, the temple of demons devoted to idolatrous cults, a criminal assembly of Jews, a place of meeting for the assassins of Christ, a house of ill fame, a dwelling of iniquity, a gulf and abyss of perdition."

"The Jews have fallen into a condition lower than the vilest animal. Debauchery and drunkenness have brought them to the level of the lusty goat and the pig. They know only one thing: to satisfy their stomachs, to get drunk, to kill, and beat each other up like stage villains and coachmen."

"The synagogue is a curse, obstinate in her error, she refuses to see or hear, she has deliberately perverted her judgment; she has extinguished with herself the light of the Holy Spirit."

Chrysostom further said that the Jews had become a degenerate race because of their "odious assassination of Christ for which crime there is no expiation possible, no indulgence, no pardon, and for which they will always be a people without a nation, enduring a servitude without end."

He elaborated further on God's punishment of the Jews:

"But it was men, says the Jew, who brought these misfortunes upon us, not God. On the contrary, it was in fact God who brought them about. If you attribute them to men, reflect again that even supposing men had dared, they could not have had the power to accomplish them, unless it had been God's will...Men would certainly not have made war unless God had permitted them...Is it not obvious that it was because God hated you and rejected you once for all?"

"I hate the Jews because they violate the Law. I hate the synagogue because it has the Law and the prophets. It is the duty of all Christians to hate the Jews."

The Crusades sound fun:

I just watched a YouTube video last night where someone said research shows that the "Myth/Fact" format of debunking things doesn't work. Like, when you repeat a myth a bunch of times, and then give people the truth, what they remember (at least subconsciously) is the myth you just repeated three times. It reinforces misinformation instead of fixing it.

Also, I could have happily lived the whole rest of my life without hearing about "torturing the consecrated wafer."

I know, I know, this is on me, I chose to read about people's nonsense.

welp

w e l p

Then the French Revolution and industrialization both led, at the same time, to massive changes across Europe. The former led to Jews getting citizenship rights and basic fucking civil rights for the first time. This was obviously (in retrospect) going to lead to a backlash. (It also wasn't a straightforward event. A lot of places in Europe went back and forth on it for decades.)

Fun!!

Hard disagree. I just read a massive thread on r/lgbt the other day, about the car ramming of a Pride parade in Europe, that immediately devolved into blaming all "Abrahamic religions."

A few people wanted to blame all religion; the response was consistently, "No, what about Buddhism and Wicca" and maybe a few others. Basically going, "no, not all religions come from Abraham, the father of the Jewish people."

He says the Protocols are "only the most celebrated and influential in a series of fabrications and forgeries reaching back almost to the French Revolution."

It's not looking good for France, y'all!

WOW. I was ready to make, like, a quick bullet-point list of the "fabrications and forgeries" and whatever. Then we took a SHARP turn into the Order of Templars????

I swear I've watched stuff where different characters had "Knights of Templar" conspiracy theories. I refuse to go look it up. Feel free to add on in the notes.

....

Also: THAT'S why Hamas's founding covenant calls out the Freemasons and the French Revolution???

I'm just.... I

I don't even know. I'm just gonna. Keep reading.

lmao

also, for the conspiracy-minded, I actually am gonna finish that screenshot

and apparently at the time most Freemasons were Catholic monarchists and "were guillotined by the hundreds."

Eyyyy, we might get some bullet points after all?

Barruel got the idea from the Scottish mathematician John Robison

Who was himself preparing a book called Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Freemasons, Illuminati and Reading Societies

Eighteenth-century mathematician: READING IS BAD, OKAY???

Also eighteenth-century mathematician: Except my book. You should read my book.

It came out the year after Barruel's. Barruel's was published in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, "and made its author a rich man."

holy shit it was FIVE VOLUMES LONG

in 1806 he got a letter "which seems to be the earliest in the series of antisemitic forgeries which was to culminate in the Protocols"

from an alleged army officer nobody has ever heard of or found called J. B. Simonini,

who claimed to have pretended to be Jewish and learned the greatest secrets of the Jews,

like that Jews everywhere were supposedly disguising themselves as Christians, supposedly infiltrating the highest ranks of the Church, supposedly had founded the Freemasons and Illuminati…

and now that some countries were giving them full civil rights, the Jews supposedly planned to buy up ALL lands and houses so Christians would have nowhere to live

which is extra wild. like. never mind how much money he had to imagine Jews had somehow gotten. just, like: "they're gonna BUY YOUR HOMES FROM YOU!!!!!"

oh no?????? don't do that???????? i guess????????

this would supposedly result in Jews then somehow abolishing all other religions and turning all the churches into synagogues and shit

like. how... I know this was early in the days of mass media, but how on earth did someone even in 1806 think that the Catholic Church controlled the entire world, and that getting control of it would let you eliminate every religion on earth

like sweetie. buddy. buddy sweetie. if that were possible, do you not think the Catholic Church would have already done it???? you can't project that level of power and control onto the Jews unless the Catholics already have it???????

idk maybe he was catholic and he thought only the catholic church could be trusted to... let other people have religions

and not enslave people hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

because he also thought Jews would enslave everyone after that

like. buddy, are you saying that a religion with the level of power and reach of the Catholic Church is going to uhhh.... kick every member of every other religion off of its land... then send people around the world to seize land and enslave people????

(Sophia on Golden Girls voice) PICTURE IT. Spain. 1492.

this footnote tho

I'm sorry, the League of Assassins is from real life???????

I mean. Not all of it, obviously.

In reality, the Freemasons felt much the same way about Jews as DC does: they're okay in very, very small doses, but they shouldn't really be a major part of anything.

yes, i do like my analogy, and i do feel pretty smug about it :D

Oh, this is a great footnote over here, actually: "Internal evidence has shown that [the Simonini letter] does indeed date from around 1806. M. Leon Poliakov, in a private communication to the author, has argued convincingly that it was fabricated by the French political police under Fouche with the object of influencing Napoleon against the Jews at the time of 'the Great Sanhedrin'; see below...."

In 1806, Napoleon fucked up. Not only was he already associated with the Jews, because the Napoleonic Codes gave them (and queer people!) civil rights. But then he organized an assembly of prominent French Jewish rabbis and scholars for political reasons - like making sure they were as submissive to him as the rest of France - and:

great move, bro