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It seems patently false that Christianity introduced sin and sin-guilt. First, if that's true, and if it is, as you say, what Nietzsche equated with morality, then if Judaism lacked this, the thesis of Ravage's article is made absurd. Either Judaism transmitted that morality to Christianity, or it didn't. If it did, then Judaism contained the sin and the sin-guilt concepts, hence Christianity did not introduce these, but rather refined and elaborated a tradition that had pre-existed.

You are correct that Judaism introduced linear time. But we ought to be careful to ascribe this directly to the Jews. Instead, Jewish history tends to be a story of serial captivities, during and after which the captured Jews assimilate a great deal of the cultural and religious material from their captors. A linear sense of time, for example, was a key feature of apocalypticism, which flourished only after the Babylonian captivity, and was actually a forerunning 'theme' that fomented the coming of Christianity. Jesus Christ himself was an apocalypticist.

It just begs the question to say Judaism is responsible for the de facto European identity, since Jewish identity is such a fluid thing. To accept your premises here means I have to treat the Jewish tradition as a more or less unbroken, continuous, homogenous thing from its inception. It was radically influenced by Assyria, Babylonia, Persia and Rome - it might even be said that Judaism assimilated and preserved the identities of these other civilizations as religious mythos, law and custom, after those other civilizations had come and gone.

Your comment about the English pagans and the pope's call is perhaps trivially true. If the English pagans had no interest in Byzantium or in the 'holy land' so called, then of course they wouldn't answer the call to arms of a figurehead in a religion they were not committed to themselves. There was no Jewish influence needed to inculcate a will to fight for what a society had interests in, which is to say Jews did not have a monopoly on fighting for cultural possessions and values. It could be said Christianity did unify many of these pagan interests through the assimilation and ultimate destruction of their native gods and religions. But I can just reject that Christianity did this because of Judaism. The historical evidence provides me just as much (if not more) of a case for saying Christians did this in spite of Judaism.

I'm also very skeptical of this exaggerated, overly simplistic view where Judahites (or just ancient Palestinians) were all chaste prudes while all other inhabitants of the European continent were a bunch of sexually depraved barbarians. Of course, there is some truth in all stereotypes, but let's not act like long-lived European societies were like today's liberal nudists.

The anthropologist J.D. Unwin did an extensive study in the first half of the 20th century, in which he researched dozens of primitive tribes as well as six more developed civilizations. He looked at the historical, anthropological and sociological evidence for all of these. The book was a whopping 800 page tome of conclusions.

I'll let Aldous Huxley's review speak for it, since Huxley will say it better than I can:


There is a correlation between complex development in societies (an elaboration of institutions and hierarchy) and the growth of institutions for limiting sexual relations. As monogamy and chastity rise, the signs of civilization go up. It would be absurd, I think, to suggest that Judaism purchased that knowledge for the world, or invented it. Rather, it's something abstract, like a law of economics, but which applies to the social realm. Jews, being smaller in number and the subjects of such frequent threats, probably exhibited the tendency of demonstrating the truth of this correlation, since they were more often on the brink of 'tribal extinction'.

But we shouldn't think these principles were absent in any other long-lived European civilization prior to Jewish/Christian arrival.

Nor should we think that, because those principles were present in pagan societies, that this means one would have escaped seeing any public nudity in them. Just consider a modern city and the way a city stratifies socio-economic status, morals and behavior spatially. You can have a core of more sophisticated, wealthier people in the center of a city with more restricted sexual behaviors, even while in certain 'compartments' of the city, say along its fringes, there are lower-class, sexually primitive people.

At least, I think I understood it. I found the rhetorical strategy a bit odd, given the 'charges'. It seems as if he was not denying any of the charges typically levied by JQ-ers, but rather confirming them and then employing irony. In a nutshell, you goyim are so alarmed about all of these other, less significant ways we are dominating you, while you don't even recognize the most fundamental way we are dominating you. But the ironic element of his suggestion is, that if the goyim in the west only recognized the character of that more fundamental dominance, they'd recognize that Jewish dominance has been a boon for the west, not a detriment.

All in all, "you have us to thank for your western civilization with all its values." And moreover, "this should make you skeptical about questioning our ongoing dominance in all of these other areas, and just understand the Jews as your cultural stewards."

To say the least, well, it's bombastic. At worst, just horsefeathers.

On the one hand you're tempted to talk about the irrationality of grand conspiracy theories, but on the other, you're going to talk about how one man, the apostle Paul, took down the Roman empire, in a self-conscious and active conspiracy to Judaize the imperial cult. Other than maybe at the absolute fringes, there is no scholar of history or religion that is going to buy that Paul's beliefs were held by him falsely as an active conspirator. All of the evidence suggests Paul believed what he preached, regardless of what effects this Christianity would have on Rome later. If anything is true and aligned with Jewish history (I mention this in my other response to you from this thread), it's that Christianity in the Roman province was initially far more Jewish/Hebraic, and (like the Jews who assimilated Babylonian beliefs/customs) probably became increasingly Romanized with time. In other words, Roman Christianity became a distinct entity. But this leads into a different discussion that, while interesting, is too bloated to deal with here. But let me say that Christians could certainly be justified if they are critical of Roman Christianity ala Catholicism.

It also seems to ignore the elephant in the room. If true, Christianity would have been a boon for world Jewry. In some ways it has, but not really until there was a hodgepodge of disunified Christian sects in the church-and-state separated paradigm of the United States, where evangelical revivals became aligned with world Zionism.

The elephant in the room, then, is why Jews have been actively opposed to Christianity for most of its history, and in many respects continue to be to this day. Communistic movements, for example, made no bones about their opposition to Christianity and its values, along with their intent to totally undermine them. But the history of Jewish opposition to Christianity goes back much further.

Ravage cites Luther as a force for re-Judaizing Christianity, which is, again, a pretty absurd claim. Luther was a reactionary, responding to perceived Jewish influence in the church of Rome.

What I sense in Ravage's article here is an attempt to draw a continuous line between ancient Hebrews, Rabbinism in the antique period, all the way through to modern day, and for Christianity to be a kind of 'side car' to this tradition. That's just not the way it was.

I also sense Ravage is trying to paper over the distinctness of post-Temple Judaism from Christianity and to act as if these are just two examples of religions cut from the same cloth. This is just false. He wants to obfuscate the reality and the significance of the Jewish rejection of Christ. He wants to minimize that difference, but since he is probably coming from a secular Jewish consciousness, the significance is lost on him. He's connecting the two traditions through surface level features and tokens.

The Jews rejected Christ and this is definitional of their identity ever since.