The Controversy of Zion

by Douglas Reed

Proceeding from this new status of redeemers, the Levites laid down many more ―statutes and judgments‖ in Numbers. They ruled by terror and were ingenious in devising new ways of instilling it; an example is their ―trial of jealousy.‖ If ―the spirit of jealousy‖ came on a man, he was legally obliged (by ―the Lord speaking unto Moses, saying‖) to hale his wife before the Levite, who, at the altar, presented her with a concoction of ―bitter water‖ made by him, saying, ―If no man have lain with thee and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse.

The reader will have remarked that the life and deeds of Moses, as related in Exodus, made him a capital transgressor, several times over, under the ―Second Law‖ of Deuteronomy and the numerous other amendments of Leviticus and Numbers. By taking refuge with the Midianites, by marrying the Midianite highpriest‘s daughter and by receiving instruction in priestly rites from him, and in other ways, Moses had ―gone a-whoring after other gods,‖ had ―taken of their daughters,‖ and so on. As the whole structure of the law rested on Moses, in whose name the commands against these things were laid down in the later books, something evidently had to be done about him before the Books of the Law were completed, or the whole structure would fall to the ground.

With that, Moses was allowed at last to rest and the Books of the Law were concluded. Incitement could hardly be given a more demoniac shape. Chapters 25 and 31 of Numbers need to be compared with chapters 2, 3 and 18 of Exodus for the full significance of the deed foisted on Jehovah and Moses by the Levites to become apparent. It was a plain warning to the special people of what Jehovaism was to mean to them; it remains today a warning to others.

The Judaist scholars say differently. Dr. Kastein, for instance, says that the Torah was ―the work of an anonymous compiler‖ who ―produced a pragmatic historical work.‖ The description is exact; the scribe or scribes provided a version of history, subjectively written to support the compendium of laws which was built on it; and both history and laws were devised to serve a ―political purpose. ―A unifying idea underlay it all,‖ says Dr. Kastein, and this unifying idea was tribal nationalism, in a more fanatical form than the world has otherwise known. The Torah was not revealed religion but, as Mr. Montefiore remarked, ―revealed legislation,‖ enacted to an end.

Fifteen chapters of the book were written by someone who knew the Babylonian captivity, whereas Isaiah lived some two hundred years earlier. The Christian scholars circumvent this by calling the unknown man ―Deutero-Isaiah,‖ or the second Isaiah.

This is the famous political forecast which was borne out; the Levites, with their genius for perversion,

In Jeremiah‘s admonition and the Levites‘ reply lies the whole story of the controversy of Zion, and of its effects for others, down to our day. Jeremiah, who was apparently put to death, would today be attacked as a ―crackpot,‖ ―paranoiac,‖ ―antisemite‖ and the like; the phrase then used was ―prophet and dreamer of dreams.‖

The sons of the stranger, that join themselves to the Lord, to serve him, and to love the name of the Lord, to be his servants … even them will I bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer … for mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all people.‖ With this glimpse of a loving God of all mankind the protests ended. The Levites and their Law were left paramount, and therewith the true captivity of ―the Jews‖ began, for their enslavement to the law of racial and religious hatred is the only genuine captivity they have suffered.

was also time‘s and the human spirit‘s inevitable answer to Brahminism, Hindu racialism and the cult of the perpetual master-caste (which strongly resembles literal Judaism).

The Levitical Law, still potent in the Twentieth Century, is in its nature a survival from sunken times.

The grouping of characters and the final denouement are alike in all three cases. On one side of the stage is the foreign potentate who has oppressed and affronted the Judahites (or, today, the Jews). In Babylon this was ―King Belshazzar‖; in the first World War it was the Russian Czar; in the second war, it was Hitler. Confronting this ―persecutor,‖ is the other foreign potentate, the liberator. In Babylon, this was King Cyrus of Persia; in the second case, it was a Mr. Balfour; in the third, it was a President Truman.

at the end of the First Twentieth Century war, quoted this precedent in a couplet ―written on the wall‖ of the room where the massacre occurred; the Nazi leaders, at the end of the Second Twentieth Century war, were hanged on the Jewish

the Twentieth Century AD two generations of Western politicians, in the quest for Jewish favour, competed with each other to play the part of King Cyrus. The result was that the two World Wars produced only two enduring and significant results: the Jehovan vengeance on the symbolic ―persecutor‖ and the Jewish triumph in the form of a new ―restoration.‖ Thus the symbolic legend of what happened at Babylon had by the Twentieth Century gained the force of the supreme ―Law,‖ overriding all other laws, and of truth and history.

When an ancient legend can produce such effects, twenty-five centuries afterwards, there is little gain in demonstrating its untruth, for politicians and the masses they manipulate alike love their legends more than truth.

However, of the three protagonists in this version of the fall of Babylon, only King Cyrus certainly existed; King Belshazzar and Daniel seem to be figures of Levitical phantasy!

If a King Belshazzar could be invented for the purpose of illustration and precedent, so could a prophet Daniel. This, apparently mythical Daniel is the most popular prophet of all with the fervent Zionists of today, who rejoice in the anecdote of the Judahite vengeance and triumph foretold on the wall, and see in it the legal precedent for all later time. The story of our present century has done more than that of any earlier one to strengthen them in this belief and for them Daniel, with his ―interpretation‖ fulfilled ―in the same night,‖ gives the conclusive, crushing answer to the earlier Israelite prophets who had envisioned a loving God of all men. The fall of Babylon (as depicted by the Levites) gave practical proof of the truth and force of the ―Mosaic‖ Law.

Judahites still knew nothing of the Law of racial intolerance which was being prepared for them, though religious intolerance was by this time familiar to them: The sect had yet to complete the Law and then to apply it to its own people. When that happened in 458 BC, under another Persian king, the controversy of Zion at last took the shape in which it still implacably confronts its own people and the rest of mankind. The umbilical cord between the Judahites and other men was then finally severed. These segregated people, before whom the priesthood flaunted its version of the fall of Babylon like a banner, then were set on the road to a future which would find them a compact force among other peoples, to whose undoing they were by their Law dedicated.

It was not a happy or triumphant return for these people, though it was a major political success for the priesthood. The Levites met the same difficulty as the Zionists in 1903, 1929 and 1953: the chosen people did not want to go to the promised land. Moreover, the leaders did not intend to head ―the return‖; they wished to stay in Babylon (as the Zionist leaders today wish to stay in New York).

the stern and inexorable regime enforced by the obligation to render unquestioning obedience to the regulations of the ritual.‖ The words deserve careful study;

During that period the Levites in Babylon completed the Law, the impact of which all nations have felt ever since. Ezekiel of the High Priest‘s family was its chief architect and probably all five books of the Law, as they have come down, bear his mark. He was the founding-father of intolerance, of racialism and vengeance as a religion, and of murder in the name of God.

Ezekiel puts into the very mouth of God the statement that he had made evil laws in order to inspire misery and fear! This appears in chapter 20 and gives the key to the whole mystery of ―the Mosaic Law.‖

By this time about four hundred years had passed since the repudiation of Judah by Israel, and three hundred since the Assyrian conquest of Israel. This period of time the Levites had used to complete the perversion of the older tradition, to put their racio-religious Law in writing, and at last to clamp it, like shackles, on the Judahites in the little Persian province of Judea. They had succeeded in setting up their fantastic, tribal creed and in establishing their little theocracy. They had started the catalytic agent on its journey through the centuries.

Dr. Kastein‘s words in this instance are carelessly chosen if they were intended to disguise what occurred: a matter is not made ―comprehensible‖ to others by distorting and twisting it, changing its meaning, and substituting ambiguous terms for precise ones. Moreover, so learned a Judaic scholar must have known what the Jewish Encyclopaedia records, that the later Talmud even ―prohibited the teaching to a Gentile of the Torah, anyone so teaching ‗deserving death.‘‖ Indeed, the Talmud saw such danger in the acquirement by the heathen of knowledge of the Law that it set up the oral Torah as the last repository of Jehovah‘s secrets, safe from any Gentile eye.

The subject matter, then, was the important thing, not historical truth, or ―philological exactitude,‖ or the word of God. The subject matter was political nationalism in the most extreme form ever known to man, and conformity with this dogma was the only rule that had to be observed. The way in which these books were compiled, after Judah was cast off by Israel, and the reasons, are clear to any who study their origin.

Whatever may have been expunged or modified, the vengeful, tribal deity, the savage creed and the law of destruction and enslavement remain plain for all to ponder.

encouraged even by the rabbis, for Jesus himself, according to Saint Matthew, told the scribes and Pharisees, rebukingly, that they ―compass sea and land to make one proselyte.‖

Nevertheless, the instinctive impulse to break free from this thrall has at all times thrown up a moderate party in Judaism, and at this period it was that of the Sadducees, which represented the bulk of the priesthood and stood for ―keeping the peace of the city‖ and avoiding violent conflict with the Roman overlords. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were bitter foes. This internal dissension among Jews has continued for twenty-five hundred years into our time.

The name ―Pharisee,‖ according to the Judaist authorities, means ―one who separates himself,‖ or keeps away from persons or things impure in order to attain the degree of holiness and righteousness required in those who would commune with God. The Pharisees formed a league or brotherhood of their own, admitting to their inmost councils only those who, in the presence of three members, pledged themselves to the strict observance of Levitical purity. They were the earliest specialists in secret conspiracy, as a political science.

The Pharisees first employed this device, basing it on a passage in Leviticus: ―Ye shall place a guard around my guard‖ (quoted by the Jewish Encyclopaedia from the Hebrew original, in use among Jews). The nature of the revolutionary machine which was set up in Europe in the Nineteenth Century cannot be understood at all unless the Talmudic knowledge and training be taken into account, which most of its organizers and leaders inherited; and the Pharisees were the first Talmudists. They claimed divine authority for any decision of their Scribes, even in case of error, and this is a ruling concept of the Talmud.

The Messianic idea, as it took shape under the Pharisees, was not an expectation of any kingdom of heaven unrelated to material triumph on earth, or at any rate it was not this among the mass of the people.

In few words he swept aside the entire mass of racial politics, which the ruling sect had heaped on the earlier, moral law, and like an excavator revealed again what had been buried. The Pharisees at once recognized a most dangerous ―prophet and dreamer of dreams.‖ The fact that he found so large a following among the Judeans shows that, even if the mass of the people wanted a militant, nationalist Messiah who would liberate them from the Romans, many among them must subconsciously have realised that their true captivity was of the spirit and of the Pharisees, more than of the Romans. Nevertheless, the mass responded mechanically to the Pharisaic politicians‘ charge that the man was a blasphemer and bogus Messiah.

generations of lawyers had laboured to reach the conclusion that an egg must not be eaten on the Sabbath day if the greater part of it had been laid before a second star was visible in the sky.

The young Galilean never taught subservience, only an inner humility, and in one direction he was consistently and constantly scornful: in his attack on the Pharisees.

―Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?‖ (the affable tone of honest enquiry can be heard). ―But Jesus perceived their wickedness and said, Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? … Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar‘s; and unto God the things that are God‘s. When they heard these words, they marvelled, and left him and went their way.‖

―Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise.‖ In these few words, and without any direct allusion, he made his interrogator destroy, out of his own mouth, the entire racial heresy on which the Law had been raised.

The longer the time that passes, the more brightly glow the colours of that unique final scene. The scarlet robe, mock sceptre, crown of thorns and derisive pantomime of homage; only Pharisaic minds could have devised that ritual of mockery which today so greatly strengthens the effect of the victim‘s victory.

During the few remaining years of the tiny and riven province the Pharisees once more revised ―the Law,‖ those ―commandments of men‖ which Jesus had most scathingly attacked. Dr. Kastein says, ―Jewish life was regulated by the teachings of the Pharisees; the whole history of Judaism was reconstructed from the Pharisaic point of view … Pharisaism shaped the character of Judaism and the life and the thought of the Jew for all the future…. It makes ‗separatism‘ its chief characteristic.‖

For long periods during the next nineteen hundred years no Jews at all lived in Jerusalem (the Samaritans, a tiny remnant of whom have survived all the persecutions, are the only people who have lived continuously in Palestine since Old Testamentary times).

In the centuries between the story of the West was always, in essentials, that of the struggle between the two ideas. When ―the Law‖ according to the Levites and Pharisees was in the ascendant, the West made slaves of men, brought heretics before an inquisition, put apostates to death, and yielded to primitive visions of master-racehood; thus the Twentieth Century was the time of the worst backsliding in the West. When the West made men and nations free, established justice between them, set up the right of fair and open trial, repudiated master-racehood and acknowledged the universal fatherhood of God, it followed the teaching of him who had come to ―fulfil the Law.‖

What is called ―Western civilization‖ cannot be conceived without Christianity. During the nineteen hundred years which followed the death of Jesus the West improved so greatly that it left the rest of the world behind. In material things its advance was so great that at the time when this book was written it was on the brink of the conquest of space; it was about to open the universe to exploration by man. But that was much the lesser part of its achievement.

man‘s behaviour towards man. The West established men‘s right to public charge and open trial, or release, (a right which was again in jeopardy in the Twentieth Century) and this was the greatest advance in the entire history of man; on the survival or destruction of this achievement depends his future.

and the Talmudic sect dogged it during all those centuries.

This religion, like Christianity, taught no hatred of other religions. Muhammad showed only reverence for Jesus and his mother (who are both the subjects of profane derision in Talmudic literature). However, Muhammad held the Jews to be a destructive force, selfdedicated. The Koran says of them, ―Oft as they kindle a beacon fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth; but God loveth not the abettors of disorder.‖ All down the centuries the wisest men spoke thus of the tribal creed and the sect, until the Twentieth Century of our era, when public discussion of this question was virtually suppressed.

Christianity and Islam spread out and embraced great masses of mankind; the impulse that moved in men became clear. Far behind these universal religions lay Judaism, in its tribal enclosure, jealously guarded by the inner sect.

The Levitical phase was that of isolated Judah, the

third, Talmudic phase was much the longest for

WTF

The seventeen centuries represented a new ―captivity,‖ under the Law, which laid down that wherever the chosen people dwelt outside Jerusalem they were in captivity, and that this captivity was in itself ―persecution.‖

The one positive result of the seventeen Christian centuries, for him, is that the Jews emerged from them still segregated from mankind, thanks to their Talmudic governors.

The Jews, directed by their Talmudic rulers, took a leading part in the struggle for emancipation. That in itself was fair enough. The masses of Christendom held from the start that the liberties to be won should ultimately accrue to all men, without distinction of race, class or creed; that was the very meaning of the struggle itself, and anything else or less would have made it meaningless.