Three Notes on David Mamet

Top o' the Stack.

The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.

Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:

Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert." 

Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.

PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.

Comments

[BV]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12658205/anti-Israel-protesters-clash-police-Brooklyn.html

Diana West. https://vimeo.com/876916110/b29cbfb87f

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/10/thought-for-the-day-15.php

[BV]

Hat Tip: Loren Kizzia. https://www.meforum.org/65071/a-q-a-primer-on-hamas-part-1-what-is-hamas

https://tactistaff.com/blog/tactistaff-newlaw2-liv.php?affId=CA9C63DD&c1=tacti_us_law_10160962&c2=1241283-74216&li_did=d5de4e46-372e-3e22-a51c-34c8cd59a797

[Vito B. Caiati]

With regard to the Gospel of John, I believe that biblical scholarship has shown that the term Ioudaios (Jew) and its plural form Ioudaioi (Jews), have a restricted meaning, referring to “By and large. . .to the opponents of Jesus,” and specifically, the Pharisees, who by the time of the composition of the Gospel, late 1st century A.D., are not longer, as in the Synoptics, “a group within Judaism, [but rather] sometimes seem to be identical with Judaism, or at least with its essence.” Thus, the equation Jews=Pharisees arises from the political and religious reality after the Roman War (70 A.D.), resulting in the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, after which “the process of retrenching and redefining Jewish life and collecting and codifying traditions that would eventuate in the emergence of Rabbinic Judaism as the heir of Pharisaism. The language of John's Gospel apparently reflects this state of affairs when the Pharisees are equated with the Jewish authorities, precisely the authorities who are able to say who belongs within the synagogue and who must be excluded.” This latter group included those, even if Jews, who proclaimed the divine status of Jesus, which was an affront to the strict monotheism of the Pharisees. Moreover, in the Gospel, the term Ioudaioi has positive connotations, since it is used to refer to Jesus; his followers; pious Jews, such as Nicodemus, who are friendly toward and help to bury him; and the family of Lazarus and his sisters, who host and declare their faith in him. “Moreover, throughout John's Gospel "Israel" and "Israelite" are used in a positive sense” (This and all other quotations from James H. Charlesworth, ed. Jews and Christians: Exploring the Past, Present, and Future [New York: Crossroad: 1990]: 76-96, which I think gives a serious and fair reading of the Gospel on this question, although there are certainly differences of opinion on the matter). So, I think that that we must read John 8:44 in terms of the tumultuous struggles following the disaster of 70 A.D., which resulted in the final separation of those Jews who believed in the divine nature of Jesus (the Jewish Christians) from their fellows, rather than as an antisemitic utterance aimed at the Jewish people in general.

[Dmitri]

Mamet, despite having seen the light, has a heavy tendency to oversimplify things. Black and white is his forte, shades of grey usually go unnoticed. That's a meta point summary of Bill's note on Stack for the TL;DR crowd.

Vito you have touched an important point that scholars are vigorously -- not to say endlessly -- debating. Here is a link to an overview https://brill.com/edcollchap-oa/book/9783657708406/BP000010.xml

[Whitewall]

Evidently Mamet is "growing" as he confronts the betrayal by Democrats of Jewish voters. "Playwright David Mamet urges Jews to stop supporting Democrats, anti semitic colleges". On Fox and Friends today.

[BV]

Thanks for the helpful comments, gentlemen. This is not a subject in which I am well-versed, so I have little to add.

Thanks to Dmitri in particular for the linked article where we find the following definition of 'antisemitism':

>>Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.19<<

Question: if antisemitism is a hateful perception of Jews, how can it be directed toward non-Jewish individuals? I am not a Jew, but I have been taken to be a Jew, and on a few occasions hostility has been attached to that misperception. So the definition above needs some work, but that is not my problem.

What interests me are the roots of Jew-hatred. It seems to me that any adequate theory would have to cite ENVY (about which I have several posts) as one of the main roots of Jew-hatred. The inferior tend to envy the superior: they feel diminished in their sense of self-worth by the superiority of the superior. Now Jews have made contributions to HIGH culture out of all proportion to their numbers. (Do you boys agree?)

Now there was a time when Muslim philosophers made world-class contributions to high culture. Some names: al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037), of whom Thomas Aquinas thought very highly, al-Ghazzali, Averroes (ibn Rushd, 1126-1198), and others. But since those days, what have Muslims contributed? That is not a rhetorical question; I am really asking. What have they contributed that comes to the level of the Jewish contributions?

So envy, in my opinion, is one of the roots of Jew hatred. Am I right? Another has to be the paucity of Jews. There aren't many of them. So they are easily scape-goated. But these are merely the opinions of a concerned educated citizen, not of a scholar in this area.

Don't forget: this is a blog. I am not 'pontificating.' NESCIO ERGO BLOGO!

[BV]

Here is one of my posts on ENVY: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/two-cures-for-envy

And here is another: https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/envy-jealousy-schadenfreude

[BV]

Dmitri,

If memory serves, you lived in Israel for a time. Yes? If so, I may ask you some questions about gun law in Israel, which, to this American makes no bloody sense at all. But I hear Netanyahu is calling for some reforms.

[Dmitri]

Hi Bill

Under the Israeli law, a personal weapons carrying permit is required for any individual not serving in the army. A person is eligible to such permit if he is a citizen or a permanent resident of Israel. Basic knowledge of Hebrew is also required. The applicant must be at least 27 years old, or at least 21 years old if he served in the army or in a national/civil service. In addition, the applicant must have a clean criminal record, receive a mental health clearance from an accredited medical institution and pass a weapons handling training program. You are correct that after this month's massacres, the government has issued emergency rules for simplifying this process in response to receiving a flood of requests after October 7 (over 100,000 according to the press which is a huge number).

My 2 cents of other sources of antisemitism: number one, by far, is constant brainwashing (aka "education"). In most parts of the Islamic world (not everywhere!), and especially in Iran and Hamas/PLO controlled territories, the children are subjected to virulent and violent antisemitic propaganda since birth in every social formation and context -- kindergarten, school, mosque etc. This website is quite good in simply translating media from Islamic world to English https://www.memri.org/. Its founder is an ex-Israeli security service officer Yigal Carmon who predicted -- time-stamped actually -- the current war in late August. https://www.memri.org/reports/signs-possible-war-september-october

[BV]

Dmitri.

You bring up a good point about the brainwashing of children. Talk about child abuse! That helps explain the prevalence of antisemitism in most parts of the Islamic world. Other explanations will have to be invoked to explain the antisemitism of so many college students here in the States.

[BV]

Why Jew Hatred?

Dennis Prager's answer: https://heartlanddailynews.com/2023/10/dennis-prager-the-hamas-slaughter-confirmed-everything-i-have-believed/

[BV]

https://wng.org/opinions/just-war-theory-and-the-war-against-hamas-1697666495

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-mortal-danger-of-yes-buttery

Bari Weiss: https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died