What do I Care about the Pope?

by Yashiko Sagamori
Dear Yashiko,
What exactly do you mean by Judeo-Christian civilization? What good did the Christians
do during the 600 years of their existence before Mohammad?
What do we, Jews, have to do with the little brawl between the two of our worst haters?
Why should we worry so much what happens to Benedict?
Respectfully,
Alexander

Collecting blood for the matzos

Dear Alexander,
If someone asks you what globalization is, tell them this: It's when a Jew living in Germany
(as far as I can tell from your e-mail address) sends an angry letter in Russian to an American
Jew who writes in English under a Japanese pen name. You could also add, if you happen to
be so inclined, that globalization is one of the many colossal things produced by the Judeo-
Christian civilization.
For the sake of those, besides yourself, who might read this, I will explain that your letter
refers to my last article, Silence of the Sheep, and is reproduced above in a slightly abridged
version, which does not (I hope you will agree) change its meaning or diminish its intensity.
Let me address your questions one by one. The Judeo-Christian civilization is the
civilization created by the Christians with some influence from the Jews. This influence is
predicated on two factors: the origins of Christianity and the existence of Diaspora.
I hope you won't deem me an anti-Semite if I state that, for a number of reasons, Jews
have not created a civilization of their own. I will refer you, as an illustration rather than proof,
to the very same list of Nobel laureates I have so often and so proudly used to demonstrate
our incredible intellectual superiority over the rest of them. Jews take up about 20% of the list;
however, Israeli Jews figure on it less prominently. There are only 6 Israelis on that list.
(Technically speaking, there are 8; you figure out which two I refuse to count among the great
Israelis and why.) Just 6 out of 766; that is only as many as China, but fewer than Poland,
even after you remove every Jew from the list of Polish Nobelists.
Trying to explain why we haven't created a civilization of our own, I will name two reasons.
One is that, in order to create a civilization, the population must reach some critical mass,
some minimum number, below which such an accomplishment is not possible. Unfortunately,
when God promised Abraham that his loins would produce a nation as numerous as the
grains of sand in the desert, He meant Arabs rather than Jews. As a result, Arabs have
created their own civilization and forced one fifth of all people on earth into it, but Jews
haven't. Thank you, Lord! I hope You are happy, because nobody else is; most certainly, not
the Arabs.
The other reason for our failure if indeed it is a failure and not a part of the plan is
that we, in a sense, are not the people of Israel. We are the people of the Diaspora. We have
lived in the Diaspora for 2,000 years and contributed whatever we could to the civilization of
our hosts; but our own culture, as distinct and unique as it has always been, remained to an
enormous degree an offshoot of the host culture.
You can trace the trends of Jewish intellectual assimilation if you randomly pick a few
famous Jewish names throughout the history of the Diaspora.
Maimonides (1138-1204), who lived in Spain and Egypt, was a Jewish philosopher rather
than Spanish or Egyptian.
Spinoza (1632-1677) was a Jewish-Dutch philosopher. He was unquestionably Jewish,
but the Netherlands was his home, and among all the giants who had influenced his views
Maimonides was the only Jew. Year after year, century after century, the bloodstream of
Jewish culture was being infused with the spirit of the Diaspora.
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was a German poet.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) was a British statesman.
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was a German physicist, even though the Germans wouldn't
have hesitated to kill him at the very first opportunity.
Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) was a Russian poet, even though the Russians did
everything in their power to silence him.
Their Jewishness unquestionably was an integral part of their talents, but they weren't
Jewish poets, or scientists, or statesmen. They belonged to the lands of the Diaspora where
they were born, even if the countries they used to call home rejected some of them for being
Jewish.
To prove my point, Israel has not, as yet, become a melting pot. Its population resembles
a quilt, with each segment carrying for many generations the unmistakable signature of its
own old country. This is not meant as criticism; it is a statement of fact. The fact is that the
Jewish people, as a nation, present a snapshot of almost all of humankind.
I am not going to try and define here what it means to be a Jew. No matter what I write,
someone who qualifies for the task much better than I do will easily counter my arguments.
However, nobody can deny that a gigantic part of being Jewish is being the object of anti-
Semitism. You can argue about the meaning of Jewishness with any rabbi until both of you
are blue in the face, but you cannot argue with the Inquisition, or Eichmann, or a Muslim mob.
To a large extent, being Jewish means not asking, Why me? when they march you to the
ovens.
Anti-Semitism has played a crucial role in the forming of the Jewish national identity.
Nevertheless, you are wrong when you call Christians and Muslims our worst haters. They
are, practically speaking, our only haters. A polytheist has no reason to hate anyone, because
there are plenty of gods to keep everybody happy. Hatred emerges when people begin
competing for the attention of the only God, the Ultimate Boss of the entire Universe, from the
most distant galaxies, to the modesty of females members in the believer's household. And
the hatred of Jews is the immediate corollary of the simple fact that the Jews were the first to
encounter that one and only God and, therefore, in order to establish itself, every monotheistic
religion had to wrestle God from Jewish hands.
 Christianity emerged as a Jewish sect, whose members believed that the Messiah
promised by the prophets of the past had already come. Theirs was a seemingly minor
disagreement with mainstream Judaism. The trouble began when clever people (some of
them, inevitably, Jews) realized that, after some tweaking, Christianity could be used as an
ideology for acquiring political power. (They succeeded; otherwise, separation of church from
state would never have become an issue.) At that point, Jews, as the original owners of the
monotheistic idea, had to be discredited. That's why Jesus was killed by Jews rather than
anyone else: no one else needed to be eliminated from competition. That's why the deicide
committed by the Jews has become the cornerstone of Christianity. That's why Christianity is
inseparable from anti-Semitism.
The advent of Christianity plunged the world into the Dark Ages. Most of the intellectual
brilliance of antiquity was forgotten for many centuries; much of it was lost forever. If you have
a vivid imagination, you are invited to visualize the world we would have lived in today had our
development not been arrested for, roughly, a thousand years. Forty years ago, for example,
we might have celebrated the millennium of the first manned flight to the Moon. Where would
we be able to fly to today? Which planet would have been under our feet during that
celebration? Which sun would have been shining gently over its terraformed surface?
But it could have also been quite different from that alluring picture. Don't forget that while
Christian monks were scratching irreplaceable texts from ancient parchment rolls to replace
them with the records of minutia of the monastery life, Arabs had preserved whatever Greek
wisdom they could lay their hands on. When Europe was ready to start over, it was thanks to
the Arabs that it wasn't necessary to start over from ground level. And yet, Arabs themselves
have never, even to this day, come out of the Dark Ages, no matter what they didn't scratch
from the old parchments. Can it be that Christianity does have an inherent value that extends
beyond its teachings?
You are asking what good the Christians did during the 6 centuries separating the birth of
their religion from the emergence of Islam. Looking at it from a 21st century perspective, I can
assure you that something wonderfully good was happening there, even if my ignorance
prevents me from pointing it all out. Something was quietly, slowly brewing within Christendom
that eventually led, first, to the Renaissance, then to the Industrial Revolution, then gave birth
to democracy, and, I believe, is perfectly capable of bringing forth many unimaginably
splendid things in the future provided there is a future, of course, which, at the moment, is
not at all self-evident.
How significant was the fact that your ancestors and mine were present during the
process? I suppose at least as significant as the presence of a few molecules of catalyst in a
huge mass of reagents. Once again, ignorance prevents me from going into details, but I
believe our ancestors had something to do with inventing a few things, including banking, and
humanism, and, probably, something in between. The result is the cultural conglomeration in
the midst of which both you and I live. It most certainly is a very distinct civilization. Can you
suggest a better name for it than Judeo-Christian? Can you think of an appropriate name that
would be more flattering to the Jews?
Is it flawless? No, and it will never be. Has anti-Semitism affected its development?
Always. Does it mean our civilization should be dismissed as a failure? Absolutely not! With all
its gargantuan shortcomings, it is the best thing that has ever happened to humankind in
general and Jews in particular. You may point out that Jewish history contains incidents of
personal interaction with God whose significance exceeds the value of any civilization. I will
argue that this civilization was shaped by myriad events, including the personal interactions of
the Jews with God; and it is still the best thing that has happened to the Jews since God lost
His interest in personal interaction with us.
No, I am not forgetting the Holocaust. Nor am I ignoring the readiness with which
European armies offered to serve as human shields for Hezbollah. Notwithstanding the anti-
Semitism inherent in Christianity, notwithstanding the cowardice and ineptitude of Christian
leaders (can you sincerely claim that Jewish leaders are any better?), Christians remain our
allies against the common deadly enemy, Islam. It is true that most of them live in denial and
succumb to politically correct paralysis. But most Jews live in denial as well. Do you know how
many members of the Peace Now movement are Jewish? And isn't politically correct paralysis
a Jewish invention?
Realistically speaking, we will not survive the little brawl between Christianity and Islam if
we try to sit it out. This is our fight; there is no way around it. We can only survive as part of
Judeo-Christian civilization. And if we want our civilization to survive, we must lead this fight
rather than delegate it to the goyim.
The main difference between the last Holocaust and the coming one is that the last
Holocaust did not destroy the Judeo-Christian civilization. Israel's reemergence as a side
effect of the Holocaust has always been inseparable from the civilization whose terrible
spasms led to its restoration. Unlike Nazism, Islam aims at the total destruction of our entire
civilization. Unless Islam is defeated, Jewish communities all over the world will suffer the fate
of Jewish communities in the Muslim countries, or worse.
And now, I believe, the only thing left to discuss is my inexplicable concern about the
Pope. Really, isn't the Pope Catholic? What do I, a Jew, care what happens to him? Let him
rot!
Sure. Except for one little problem, which is not very easy to explain. But I will try.
You know how every accusation leveled against the Jews, as a nation, was a lie. We didn't
worship a donkey's head in the Holy of Holies of our Temple. We didn't kill Jesus. We never
mixed human blood or any other kind of blood into our matzos. We never stole organs
from Arab children. We never occupied Palestine or any other foreign land, real or invented
by anti-Semites. We never did any of the things our enemies accused us of throughout
history. This tells you that we, the Jews, as a nation, have a unique relationship with truth. In
every situation throughout our entire history, truth has been our salvation.
There must also be a reason why, whenever anything happens anywhere on earth, Jews
feel the urge to ask Is it good for the Jews? Consider it an indication that the wellbeing of the
Jews, as a nation, is finely synchronized with multiple aspects of the state of our universe.
God, in His inexplicable wisdom and kindness, gave us a very special place among the
nations. Every lie taking root anywhere in the world is inevitably directed against us. Every
unfairness anywhere in the world inevitably hurts us. Wherever something goes wrong a
bubonic plague, a blitzkrieg, a tsunami we are always the first to be blamed and punished.
For that, God awarded us 20% of the Nobel Prizes. Who am I to say that this is not a just
reward?
What does the Pope have to do with it all? Here's what. He has become the first Christian
leader in the modern history to speak the truth about Islam. Armed only with the moral
authority of his Church, he showed more courage and more moral responsibility than the
current or any future president of the United States will ever show, even though they
command more apocalyptic power than any Pope will ever ask for in his prayers. In plain
words, the Pope stated the plain fact: Islam is evil. For that he had to suffer public humiliation.
Do you believe the scale of that defeat was limited to Catholics only? Besides, to put it mildly,
that was grossly unfair. I don't see how this particular unfairness may fail to hurt the Jews.
That's why I worry. And you should too.
Sincerely,
Yashiko Sagamori