Blaming the Jews: An international pastime

Ironically, Hamas’s gruesome attack on Israeli civilians on October 7^th, instead of unleashing a flood of criticism of jihadist Muslims, has turned up the fire under the apparently ever-simmering cauldron of anti-Semitism.

Everyone seems focused on the Jews—even obsessed with them. But the loudest voices are those raised in condemnation of the Israelis, their supporters, and worldwide Jewry.

There are a number of tropes that Jew haters dredge up on such occasions: the debunked but widely disseminated Russian psy-op pamphlet The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; the Jews as Christ-killers; the popular trope that the Jews “own the banks;” claims they’re out to control the world as “Greater Israel;” claims they’re Satanists; and the old blood libel, that they make Passover matzahs from the blood of gentile children.

THE KHAZARIAN MAFIA HOAX

But I’d be remiss if I left out one of the more recent libels: that of the Khazarian Mafia—which turns out to be a clever remix of “the Jews own the banks,” “the Jews are out to control the world” and “the Jews are evil Satanists,” rolled into one.

This bizarre theory claims that 90% of the world’s Jewry, the Ashkenazi Jews, are not really Jews at all, but “Khazars” from some ancient kingdom whose people were supposedly forced to convert to Judaism—although throughout history it was the Jews who were forced to convert to other religions.

The evil genius of the Khazar myth is that its proponents get to have their cake and eat it too: They can claim they aren’t anti-Semites, as they don’t hate Jews, only the “fake Jews,” i.e. the Khazars—which frees them to dredge up all the old libels against the Jews and simply attribute them to the “Khazars”.

A couple of problems with this, other than the obvious chicanery: DNA studies have shown there’s generally at least an 80% match between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews; there’s no cultural or linguist trace of Khazardom among European Jewry; and there’s no sign of Turkic language, songs, or traditions.

 A study by Dr. Harry Ostrer and co-author Martin Richards from 2013 came to this conclusion after examining mitochondrial DNA of Ashkenazi Jews:  

Virtually none came from the North Caucasus, located along the border between Europe and Asia between the Black and Caspian seas.

The finding should thoroughly debunk one of the most questionable, but still tenacious, hypotheses: that most Ashkenazi Jews can trace their roots to the mysterious Khazar Kingdom that flourished during the ninth century in the region between the Byzantine Empire and the Persian Empire.

An Amazon reviewer of John Entine’s book Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People, writes: “DNA analysis has served to put to rest the crackpot theory that Ashkenazic Jews were all descended from Khazarian converts, an idea especially popular with leftists according to the author.”

Surprisingly, even Wikipedia gets this one mostly right:

The Y chromosome of most Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews contains mutations that are common among Middle Eastern peoples, but uncommon in the general European population, according to a study of haplotypes of the Y chromosome by Michael Hammer, Harry Ostrer and others, published in 2000.[29] According to Hammer et al. this suggests that the paternal lineages of Ashkenazi Jews could be traced mostly to the Middle East.

Hammer et al. add that "Diaspora Jews from Europe, Northwest Africa, and the Near East resemble each other more closely than they resemble their non-Jewish neighbors."

And here’s the skivvy from Stanford Medicine’s Scope Magazine, excerpted from Bruce Goldman’s 2013 article: New genetic study: More evidence for modern Ashkenazi Jews’ ancient Hebrew patrimony:

Plausible at the time, the Khazar-origin premise has crumbled under the onslaught of modern molecular genetics. The latest volley: a study published this week in Nature Communications. The study's senior author, Stanford geneticist Peter Underhill, PhD, works in the lab of  Carlos Bustamante, PhD, whose high-resolution techniques have highlighted the historical hopscotch of other migratory peoples.

Underhill, Bustamante and their co-authors analyzed the Y chromosome - a piece of the human genome invariably handed down father-to-son - of a set of Ashkenazi men claiming descent from Levi,  the founder of one of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. (Names such as Levy, Levine and Levitt, for example, bespeak a Levite heritage.)

If Ashkenazis were the spawn of Khazar royals, their DNA would show it. But those Y chromosomes were as Levantine as a levant sandwich. The same genetic "signature" popped up on every Levite sampled (as well as a significant number of non-Levite Ashkenazis), strongly implying descent from a single common ancestor who lived in the Fertile Crescent between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago. That signature is absent in the Y chromosomes of modern European non-Jewish men, and in male inhabitants of what was once Khazaria.

It's also telling that the only video I’d found online exposing the conspiratorial “Khazarian Mafia” psy-op has been censored, whereas there are numerous posts with titles like these: The Hidden History of the Incredibly Evil Khazarian Mafia, Khazarian Mafia’s Globalist NWO Agenda to Destroy Every Nation’s Sovereignty, A Brief History of the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia, etc.

As a side note: According to the Khazarian hoax, Hitler made a big mistake. Someone should have told him that the 6 million Jews he exterminated were…wait for it…not really Jews! If only they’d told him beforehand…

Egyptian TV host Maged Abdallah, April 28, 2020 on Elsharq TV (Turkey-based Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood)

THE ACTUAL ROLE OF THE JEWS IN HISTORY

I’ll return to the “Christ-killer” charge shortly, but first let’s consider a few things one can reasonably blame the Jews for: one being Monotheism, another being the Bible—both the Old Testament and the New. Another being the moral code established in the Ten Commandments that has served as the cornerstone of Western Civilization.

Said another way, without those selfsame Jews so roundly denounced, hated, and not infrequently massacred throughout history, there would be no Bible, no Judaism, no Jesus, no Christianity, and no Western Civilization.

There’s a reason we have the phrase “the Judeo-Christian tradition.”  It’s the foundation of the West and all the first-world nations, including the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States.  Especially in America, we have the Jews and the Bible to thank for our experimental government based on what Thomas Jefferson inscribed in the Declaration of Independence as our God-given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  And these rights are “endowed by their Creator”—i.e. God, as revealed in the Bible—not Gaia, not Buddha, and most emphatically, not Allah.

Moses with the Tablets of the Law, oil on canvas, by Rembrandt Van Rijn

THE CHARGE AGAINST THE JEWS AS “CHRIST-KILLERS”

Returning to the “Christ-killers” accusation: In fact, it was the Romans—with their barbarously excruciating and deadly punishment of crucifixion—who killed Jesus.  But yes, the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership at that time, did seek it.  So let’s parse that.

First and foremost, the Sanhedrin didn’t speak for all the Jews.  We know this for a fact from the New Testament and other historical records of the time.  Christ’s Disciples were…wait for it…Jews!  And they clearly disagreed with the Sanhedrin’s charges against Christ.

So when anyone accuses “the Jews” of being “Christ killers”, he means the Jewish government/leadership of the day.

Let me ask you a question: How many of us in America today agree with all of our government’s decisions?  How many oppose much of what our government decrees?  So why isn’t the charge against the Jews in the First Century made factually: “The Jewish leadership condemned Jesus by charging him with blasphemy, and of claiming to be King of the Jews,” rather than “the Jews killed Christ”?

One of the charges the Sanhedrin brought against Jesus was that of working on Shabbat, after Jesus famously healed people on the Sabbath.  Instead of saying “My bad! You’re right! I won’t do it again,” Jesus pointed out that healing is a loving and compassionate act and not the sort of “work” that should be subjected to that law.  This made the leadership see red.  They themselves were caught up in the lawyerly minutiae of do’s and don’ts Rabbis had enumerated in regards to this law, which Jesus openly challenged.  Furthermore, they’d likely not dare to disobey the law, and certainly, had they done so, would never argue that they answered to a higher power than the written law, i.e. the Torah.

So one can understand their reluctance to believe that this young Rabbi was actually acting on a higher moral authority than theirs, and than that of the Torah itself.  He would have seemed quite an upstart to them, so one can comprehend their fears as they saw that he was attracting a following.  

We can debate the Jewish leaders’ motive for wanting Jesus’ death—they may well have believed he was an impostor who was committing blasphemy; they may have worried that he’d overturn the Torah—the Jewish law recorded in the first five books of the Bible—the law they were responsible for upholding. They may have feared losing their own power and position. Their decision may have had elements of all the above, though it’s doubtful they truly believed Jesus was the Messiah, because we can assume they’d know better than to mess with God’s will.

But did they mess with it—or did they help to fulfill it, regardless of their own intentions?  Recall Joseph’s message to his brothers who’d sold him into slavery, “But as for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good…”.

THE CHRISTIAN PARADOX

Speaking of God’s will, consider this: For the gift of salvation through belief in Christ to be offered, Jesus would have to first die as the ultimate Passover Lamb of God, taking on the sins of mankind while suffering on the Cross. Only then could he rise in a miraculous resurrection, defeating death itself in a prefiguring of salvation, and finally taking his place at the right hand of God in heaven.

What does this mean? It means that those who call the Jews “Christ-killers” are in effect blaming them for Jesus’ substitutionary death for sinners—i.e. human beings—as well as for his resurrection and offer of salvation to those who follow Him.

Put more simply: Christians and Jewish followers of Christ have the Jews to “blame” for their salvation!

Suppose the Sanhedrin leadership had said, “Free Jesus, and crucify the thief Barabbas instead!” What would have been the result? No sacrificial death of Jesus on the Cross means everyone carries his own sins on his back—the wages of sin being death. It means no salvation by grace through faith. It means no eternal life in heaven. Not to put too fine a point upon it, according to the New Testament, it means damnation.

In other words, from the Christian point of view, it was God’s plan all along that Jesus, the most famous Jewish Rabbi in history, suffer death on the Cross on Passover, as the Lamb of God who died for the sins of everyone else.

So before you “blame the Jews” for ancient and modern tropes that demonize the Lord’s chosen people, remember you’re simultaneously scourging them for their divinely appointed role of introducing God and the Bible to the world, fulfilling prophecy, and, as Christians and Messianic Jews believe, providing the world with the Messiah, whose birth we once again celebrated a mere three weeks ago.