The Axis of World History

By Yuri Okunev

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 6, 2008
• ISBN: 9781469105703

Yuri Okunev

Yuri Okunev is a scientist and an author of several monographs and numerous scientific works in the field of system optimization. He got his Ph.D. in St.Petersburg, Russia, where he was the head of a university research center. In 1993 he moved to the United States and since then has been working in the American industry. Yuri Okunev published two books in the historical-journalistic genre in Russian: «Letters to My Loved Ones from the XX Century», 2002, and «The Axis of World History», 2004 (Iskusstvo Rossii, St.Petersburg, Russia). In 2006 the Hermitage Publishers (Auburn, PA, USA, www.hermitagepublishers.com) published the second edition of «The Axis of World History» in Russian. Recently English translations of new books by Yuri Okunev were published: intellectual thriller, anti-Utopia «The Lost War» (AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN, USA, www.authorhouse.com), and socio-political essays «The Axis of World History» (Xlibris, Philadelphia, PA, USA, www.xlibris.com). This pamphlet «Left-wing Liberalism: A Senile Disorder» first appeared in 2006 in Russian (Publishing House “Novyi Sovremennik”, Ryazan, Russia).

Book preview

THE AXIS OF

WORLD HISTORY

The Roots of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism

Second Edition

Yuri Okunev

Translated by SASHA MOSCOVIT

Copyright © 2008 by Yuri Okunev.

Photo ‘JERUSALEM: THE WESTERN WALL OF THE TEMPLE’ by Michael Bank has been used in the cover design.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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47157

Contents

FOREWORD TO THE

SECOND ENGLISH EDITION

FOREWORD TO THE

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

FOREWORD TO THE

FIRST RUSSIAN EDITION

PART I

CHAPTER 1.1

CHAPTER 1.2

CHAPTER 1.3

CHAPTER 1.4

CHAPTER 1.5

CHAPTER 1.6

CHAPTER 1.7

CHAPTER 1.8

CHAPTER 1.9

CHAPTER 1.10

CHAPTER 1.11

PART II

CHAPTER 2.1

CHAPTER 2.2

CHAPTER 2.3

CHAPTER 2.4

CHAPTER 2.5

CHAPTER 2.6

CHAPTER 2.7

CHAPTER 2.8

CHAPTER 2.9

CHAPTER 2.10

CHAPTER 2.11

CHAPTER 2.12

PART III

CHAPTER 3.1

CHAPTER 3.2

CHAPTER 3.3

CHAPTER 3.4

CHAPTER 3.5

CHAPTER 3.6

CHAPTER 3.7

CHAPTER 3.8

CHAPTER 3.9

PART IV

CHAPTER 4.1

CHAPTER 4.2

CHAPTER 4.3

CHAPTER 4.4

CHAPTER 4.5

CHAPTER 4.6

CHAPTER 4.7

CHAPTER 4.8

REFERENCES

To RACHEL and DANIEL—the grandchildren!

Prominent Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev wrote at the end of the XIX century that passing «through the entire history of the human race from its very beginning and to the present time, it is as though Jewry represents an axis of world history.»

Placing these words—the axis of world history—on the title page without the qualifier «as though,» the author emphasizes that in our time, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Vladimir Soloviev’s definition is as exact and appropriate as ever. It is no accident that the terrorism and neofascism that rise everywhere in the world today proclaim that Jews and Zionism are their chief enemies. Contemporary terrorism is trying to turn back the course of history by first breaking its axis.

This book searches for the roots of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

Why has the hatred of one people, one tiny fraction of this large world’s population—a people that has given so much to the human race—ignited such huge flames of antagonism for thousands of years?

Why has hatred of the national liberation movement of this people united even those who have nothing whatever in common with one another—from religious fanatics to militant atheists, and from right-wing neofascists to left-wing pseudoliberals?

Hidden deep in the human psyche, those roots lie deep in the history of human civilization. If they are hard to find, perhaps it is because so many people tend to mistake for roots matters that actually lie on the surface.

FOREWORD TO THE

SECOND ENGLISH EDITION

While preparing the second edition of The Axis of World History in English, I re-read the forewords to the first Russian and English editions and thought that there is probably little that can be added to them, and also that it would be good if the readers did not skip over these previous forewords.

The present edition, revised and considerably expanded, is being published by Xlibris in response to readers’ unflagging interest in this work. Apart from the usual corrections and additions that are standard in a second edition, the text has been organized in a more convenient way for the reader, with new divisions into parts and chapters. Each part represents a self-contained whole and can be read alone.

All that remains for the author is to comment briefly on the contents of the four parts of the book, in order to make it easier for the readers to decide what to read and what not to read.

The first part, with bears the traditional heading "The Jewish Question," explores the roots of anti-Semitism as a world historical phenomenon that has accompanied the life of mankind over the course of the greater part of its known history. Not all readers have been pleased by the book’s paradoxical conclusions on this topic. Many would prefer simple and familiar explanations (social, economic, political, or religious) of this complex phenomenon. Many would rather discover the roots of anti-Semitism on the surface of our life: after all, that would make them easier to pull out. Some well-meaning people would prefer, like an ostrich, not to see this dangerous of disease of mankind at all, to view it as nonexistent. This is what the well-known writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya proposes in her novel, Daniel Stein, Translator: This [the Jewish question] is the most odious question in the history of our civilization. It must be revoked as a fiction, as nonexistent. Alas, such good intentions are not going to become translated into reality, since all of the supposedly superficial roots of anti-Semitism turn out to be, in fact, not roots at all, but merely the toxic offshoots of a single root that is hidden deep within man’s psyche. This single noxious root is located in that part of man’s tragically cloven soul which consciously or unconsciously, and sometimes instinctively, rejects Biblical ethics, which is inextricably linked with the Jewish people. The author recognizes how difficult it is for many to accept the fateful conclusion: anti-Semitism is an incurable psychic illness, which can metastasize to societies that do not even have any Jewish members.

The second and third parts of the book are devoted to two interconnected and, at the same time, sharply antithetical processes of Jewish history, both of which received a colossal accelerating impulse on the same day: November 7, 1917. Two events of world historical importance took place on this day: the British government officially recognized the right of the Jewish people to a national homeland in Palestine and the Bolsheviks staged a coup in Petrograd. Subsequently, the first of these events became known to historians as the Balfour Declaration, and the second as the Great October Socialist Revolution.

The Balfour Declaration and the Great October Socialist Revolution opened two roads before the Jews, two diametrically opposed paths into the future, one of which turned out to be false and ended in a catastrophe. The first path—let us call it nationalism—involved the fundamental preservation of the culture and religious traditions of the Jewish people and migration to their national homeland in Palestine. The second path—let us call it internationalism—involved a complete rejection of their national and religious identity and assimilation among other people in exchange for the Communist International, which promised equal rights and fraternity to workers of all nationalities. The Jews who traveled along these two paths diverged more and more over time, turning into each other’s opposites, and sometimes even enemies. It was only in Stalin’s concentration camps—where both internationalists and Zionists were imprisoned—that the members of these two groups crossed one another’s paths.

The national component of Jewish history became the topic of the second part of this book: "What Is Zionism?" Two questions compelled the author to turn to this topic, which has been addressed in countless works of history and literature. First, if the experts have already gotten to the bottom of everything and made everything clear, then why is it that among the unfathomable number of people who are already sick and tired of Zionism, Jews among them, there are almost none who could say anything intelligible about it and to explain what exactly Zionism is? Second, why is hatred toward Zionism so exceptionally fierce, and why has no other national liberation movement—and not even any movement with a frankly racist slant—provoked such harsh, extensive, and, I would say, savage vilification as Zionism? Those who are interested in the answers to these questions may find it interesting to read the second part of this book. Although in narrating the history of Zionism the author tried to adhere strictly to the facts as they are laid out in historical scholarship, the result reads more like a lyrical portrait of Zionism, romanticized by the story of its tragic, but victorious path from the depths of antiquity to the twentieth century. Some well-meaning readers have criticized me for painting an impressionistic portrait of Zionism. In my defense, I can say only that this is how I see what I have written about, and there is nothing to be done. If you find it interesting, read on; if not, skip over it.

The internationalist component of Jewish history became the topic of the third part of this book: From International to State Anti-Semitism—The Script for "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question in the USSR. Recent years have seen a large number of publications on the history of Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism. The distinctive feature of the interpretation of this history that is presented here consists in the following. At the heart of the narrative is the tragic fate of the deceived generation—the generation of our fathers and grandfathers, who believed in the Communist International, who abandoned their centuries-old culture, their language, and their faith for its sake, who loyally served the Communist regime, and who were in the end cynically dumped by this regime into the garbage pit of Soviet state-sponsored anti-Semitism. The great and bitter fate of the deceived generation is a reflection of the fate of the International in the USSR. About half of the Jews who embraced the internationalist path were physically exterminated by the Nazis and by their internationalist" volunteer assistants on the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. The half that remained alive would have been destroyed by Stalin, had he lived long enough to do so. Nonetheless, both Stalin and his successors achieved considerable success in the spiritual destruction of Jewishness in the USSR and in Eastern Europe. The surviving remnants of former Soviet Jews finally managed to emigrate to Israel and other countries, effectively returning to Zionism, which their ancestors rejected in 1917: such are the paradoxical convolutions of history.

The fourth part, which concludes this book, bears the title: "The Three Pinnacles, Or, How to Fight Evil: The Judaic and the Christian Answers. The story of three Israeli mountains—the Mount of Beatitudes on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Mount Masada near the Dead Sea, and Mount Herzl in Jerusalem—raises a question that might have been posed by a child: How to fight evil?" In fact, the search for an answer to this simple question has been at the heart of a struggle between different worldviews for millennia. From Jesus Christ to Leo Tolstoy, from Leo Tolstoy to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, the Christian idea of not resisting evil with violence has traveled its path of sorrows. Over the ages, this idea has received a great deal of praise, but it has rarely been employed in actual life. By contrast, the Old Testament idea of violence in response to violence—as also the idea of preventive violence in the fight against flagrant evil—has been everywhere censured. But whenever it came time to confront an actual evil, it was used without much superfluous ceremony. People said that one must love one’s enemies, but when real live evil arose before them, furious hatred for their enemies led them into battle.

The gigantic scale of the evil that faced mankind in the middle of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries has made the ancient question of how to fight with evil more acute than ever before. However, even now this question has no clear answer. Just as three thousand years ago, when the Old Testament had already formulated the notion that the punishment must be adequate to the crime, just as two thousand years ago, when the New Testament pronounced that violence must not be used to resist evil, people have no unequivocal answer to this question. The Western world, founded on Biblical prophecies, finds itself in a particularly difficult position: how to defeat evil while staying within the ethical norms of the Judeo-Christian civilization?

In this book, I have attempted once again to answer the question: how to fight with evil. Many do not agree with the answer given here. Well then, let us argue it out once again. But keep in mind that we do not have very much time, since evil strikes mostly when the good side is busy discussing the most humane approach to fighting evil.

A grand conflict between Islamofascism and civilization is unfolding in the world.

Many are wondering whether this bloody drama—which is being performed before our eyes on a gigantic stage that stretches from the skyscrapers of New York to the mountains of Afghanistan, with a permanent epicenter in Israel—many are wondering whether this particular conflict might not be the last act of the battle between good and evil, which, according to the predictions of the great Biblical prophets, will decide the fate of world history.

This is the alarming situation that is highlighted by the title of the book’s final chapter: "Come to Your Senses, People—We Are Threatened by Genuine Evil!"

January 2008, Long Island, New York, USA

FOREWORD TO THE

FIRST ENGLISH EDITION

To be the axis of world history is not a privilege, nor is it the mark of the chosen, or a pretension to superiority or any other special virtues. It is a destiny stretching back several millennia, a most difficult historical function that the Jewish people have taken upon themselves to perform voluntarily since the ancient times when their prophets were writing the Bible.

Every turn of the bloody wheel of history that ushers in some catastrophe, every time its rotation skips a beat inevitably affects the axis, bending it, tearing it, twisting it, trying to turn it around or break it. Every attempt to turn back the course of history always and everywhere began with an act of violence to its axis.

The greatest (in terms of numbers) and the most bestial crimes of this sort were committed by the Hitlerite regime of Nazi Germany and Stalinist regime of the Communist Soviet Union in the twentieth century. Western civilization, grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics, barely withstood the assault, but in doing so, saved the whole world from a catastrophe.

In this rescue mission accomplished by the West lies the answer to the question of why philosophers identify Jewry with the axis of world history instead of, for instance, linking it with the axis of the history of the peoples who embraced the monotheism of Judaism as their own—that is, the Christians and the Moslems. Although there are many ancient Indian and Chinese civilizations based on other philosophical and religious doctrines, since the time of the European Renaissance—with its deepest roots in Judeo-Christian tradition—the momentum of world history has been defined and directed almost exclusively by the accomplishments, as well as the failures, of Judeo-Christian civilization. If the West had not, in the twentieth century, defeated the aggressive forces of evil in the world—from Nazi Germany in the West to the militaristic Japanese Empire in the East—then the fate of all nations, including the Indian and the Chinese, as well as the nations of Africa would, probably, be nothing short of apocalyptic.

According to the biblical prophesies, Jewry has eternally (up to the very last battle between good and evil in the world—and who knows how soon that will come) been assigned the unbearably difficult task of being the axis of the world history. An individual Jew may try to avoid that fate through assimilation, but the Jewish people as a whole may neither deny their function, nor avoid it, nor try to squirm out of it, for they have been earmarked for it by Providence, earmarked harshly and decisively, although with a purpose that may not be clearly understood by a human being. Some would say there is no such thing as Providence. To that I can answer with the words of the eminent English historian Paul Johnson: Possibly not. But human confidence in such an historic dynamic, if it is strong and tenacious enough, is a force in itself, which pushes on the hinge of events and moves them.

The historical function of Jewry is once again clearly manifested now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Such masses of fanatics are forming, training, and preparing for a most destructive war all over the globe as to make even the Fascist hordes of the Second World War seem small in comparison. This new army of evil is not formed into regiments and division but is, on the contrary, spread all over the surface of the planet like a thin, invisible layer of scum consisting of small terrorist groupings. Those groups are united not by a common Command Center but by the common obscurantism, the goal of which is the overthrow of the Western civilization they hate. It is entirely unsurprising and even natural that the holy war against the West began with the attempts to destroy Jewry and that it keeps roiling round and round it, as though turning on an axis, pulling in more and more countries and continents.

There is a hard struggle ahead for the freethinking and kind-hearted people of all nationalities, to be fought for the very foundations of their lives. That struggle is made more difficult by the fact that the forces of evil everywhere put on certain artful masquerades, contrived (as usual) to stir up everyone against the Jews and thus draw the fire of the forces of good away from them. The problem is that people sometimes do not see, behind the smiling masks of humanism and liberalism, the cynical grin of evil. Unfortunately, the inability to tell good from evil is fast becoming one of the symptoms of the grave and chronic sickness of Western civilization.

If this book will lead not to a cure, but at least to an increase in the number of people who clearly see the disposition of the forces in the world—wherein the good and wherein the evil—then the author will consider his function fulfilled.

January 2006, Long Island, New York, USA

FOREWORD TO THE

FIRST RUSSIAN EDITION

Anti-Semitism has always played, and I am afraid is playing now, a fatal role in the history of Russia and in the lives of its people. The greatest minds and best people of the Russian nation sounded their warning on the subject. In 1890, during the reign of Tsar Alexander III, Lev Tolstoy, together with Vladimir Soloviev, Klimentii Timiryazev, Vladimir Korolenko, and twenty other prominent Russian intellectuals, signed The Declaration against Anti-Semitism, which ended with the following words:

We wish to express, in no uncertain terms, our condemnation of the anti-Semitic movement that came to us from Germany, as immoral in itself, and as gravely dangerous to the future of Russia.

These prophets saw clearly, but very few people listened to them, for a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country. Unfortunately, in contemporary free Russia not even twenty intellectuals of national stature have been found to raise their voices against the filthy wave of anti-Semitism that overflowed bookstores, revived the once dead and gone Fascistic political movements, and gathered in noisome pools in the hallways of the Russian State Duma. It is as though nobody in Russia is any longer concerned with its fate. Why is that?

A well-known Russian author and screenwriter Yuri Nagibin, in his stunning confession The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel, maintained that it is happening because anti-Semitism is the only thing that unites the Russian population into a single nation. He writes, with harsh sincerity and with pain:

There is, however, one common quality or attribute that transforms the population of Russia into a semblance of a whole—I do not use the word people, for, I repeat, a people without democracy is nothing but a mob—and that attribute is anti-Semitism.

And further, Yuri Nagibin writes that "the word zhid (Yid—or kike, or sheeny) became as dear to the Russian people as their other most favorite three-letter word" (such words being the equivalent of the English four-letter ones):

Two best-loved three-letter words, plus the battle cry of  . . . your mother! so dear to the Russian heart, are what unites the population, spread out across the huge expanse of this land, into a unique in the entire world whole that may be considered a people.

Every fiber of my being protests against such a conclusion, even to being unwilling to discuss it!

Nevertheless, the author is right—the disease of anti-Semitism pervades Russia, appearing to many as incurable, and a discussion of this subject cannot be avoided. For me personally, what weighs heaviest on my heart is the historical fact of the participation of prominent Russian intellectuals in imparting this nation-unifying quality to anti-Semitism and the word Yid. Take, for instance, An Opinion by Gavriil Derzhavin or The Diaries of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and on and on—there are too many such for them all to be listed. Like a genetically inherited disease, this indecent, shameful infection is passed on from century to century, from generation to generation.

Recently I attended a function where the guest speaker was the well-known Russian commentator, writer, and professor of journalism Alexander Bovin. He was asked a number of questions about the book Two Hundred Years Together by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Alexander Yevgenievich Bovin defended the right of Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn to his own point of view, justified many of his unbiased anti-Jewish generalizations, and at the end said: Of course, there’s a bit of an anti-Semitic flavor; you can’t argue with that.

The delicate Mr. Bovin simplifies the matter considerably. Unfortunately, it is not just a bit of an anti-Semitic flavor. It is a powerful attempt by an eminent Russian writer, who lays claim to national spiritual leadership, to give anti-Semitism a new impetus and to revive the unifying function that was lost after the collapse of the Soviet empire. His proposals for organizing free Russia having been a fiasco, the writer and former dissident, who has done so much to promote the collapse of the Communist regime, is now using tricks unsurpassed in their pseudoscientific falsehood to foist on the Russian people the very same false unifying concept of anti-Semitism that flourished in the Soviet totalitarian state he has once unmasked.

Every fiber of one’s being rebels against this!

Why must the Russian people listen to the false prophets and again and again walk the befouled path of unification achieved through hatred? Why must the Russian people, as was maintained by their true prophet, Father Sergey Bulgakov, in their anti-Semitic fever, heap the burning coals upon their own heads, and so doom themselves to certain downfall?

Why do we listen so devotedly to the dishonorable voices of the Russian anti-Semites, forgetting the words and appeals of the Russian geniuses—Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, Nikolai Berdyaev? Those great prophets saw the factor that could unite the Russian people not in the squalid word Yid but in the great Judeo-Christian idea of brotherhood, not in the pedestrian hatred toward Jews but in the love for all that lives taught by the Bible.

Christianity and anti-Semitism are incompatible!—so taught the Russian Orthodox prophets. One would expect the Russian Orthodox Church to lead the movement towards uprooting anti-Semitism from Russian spiritual life and directing the Russian idea of unification into truly Christian, biblical channels. Nothing like that is happening, however; and once again the flock is handed church publications full of malicious hatred against the Jews, and once again they are printing brown-shirt ravings that go against both the letter and the spirit of Christianity.

And the vacuum created by the absence of goodness and spirituality sucks all kinds of fascistic scum to the surface of the Russian land, where a large mob, ready for any evil deed, follows them.

Nevertheless, my heart does not accept that Russian anti-Semitism is eternal or that it has some unifying function. The belief in the light at the end of the tunnel has not died in me yet.

In the 1970s and 1980s I used to pick up a lot of extra jobs, usually of the blue-collar variety. During summer vacations, a whole bunch of us—assistant professors, scientists, engineers—left Leningrad in order to earn some much-needed money (none of these professions being well paid in the Soviet Union) in the far regions of Russia: Archangelsk building camps, Bashkiria, Kolyma. No job was too dirty or too heavy for us—we felled trees, mixed cement, dug trenches for communication cables and pits for the telegraph poles. Our group, which we lovingly called The Band, consisted of both Russians and Jews in about equal proportion. Nobody in The Band preferred one ethnic group to the other, and it would never occur to anybody to censure another person because of his ethnicity. Colorful Russian curses were constantly flung at one or another member of The Band, but never because he was a Russian or a Jew. For a few months every year we became free people—without bosses, without Party committees—and the Soviet anti-Semitism that Russians and Jews were both accustomed to, somehow disappeared. A sense of an almost religious brotherhood came in its place, where no one was either a Hellene or a Jew, and sincere love for one another showed through the rough-male outward behavior. Hardened atheists suddenly began living according to the biblical commandment of loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

My experience of working those extra jobs gave me an unshakable feeling of confidence that friendship and brotherhood are the natural state of normal human beings, both Russian and Jewish, when they are not burdened by prejudice, Party instructions, or malicious preaching of others. That experience gave me an unshakable certainty that there is a light at the end of the tunnel!

But that same experience also convinced me that the tunnel was seriously blocked, for the knowledge of my truly well-educated fellow laborers—both Russian and Jewish—concerning the Jewish Question and the history of anti-Semitism and Zionism was, to put it mildly, primitive; and their understanding of the Judeo-Christian ethical roots of our civilization bordered on complete ignorance. That was when I conceived the idea of writing a series of essays on the Jewish issue. Years went by and intense workload and everyday troubles got in the way of my project, but finally, in the late 1990s, I began my work.

This book consists of selected pieces of what I managed to write. Those selections are an attempt to break through at least a part of the blocked tunnel toward the light. Such is the history of the motivation that drove me to write this book. But there was something else that drew me to this work.

Discussing the attitude of the nations of the former Soviet Union toward the Russians, Yuri Nagibin wrote in his autobiographic novella Darkness at the End of the Tunnel:

But no one loves us except the Jews who, even finding themselves safe in the land of their forefathers, continue to pine because of their unrequited love for Russia. That loyal, moaning, mumbling, either schoolgirl-like or slave-like love was the only thing that annoyed me about Israel.

I make so bold as to object that my love for Russia is neither schoolgirl-like nor slave-like but the natural feeling of a normal human being toward his homeland, the feeling of a man who does not lay claim to full reciprocity, as in the case of one’s love for a woman. Yes, that motherland was an unkind stepmother who humiliated and rejected me, but such were the consequences of the regime under which, unfortunately, I had to live.

And therein lies another, perhaps the biggest, motive for publishing this book. I consider the contemporary recurrences of anti-Semitism in Russia a most dangerous phenomenon for the Russian people and for the Russian state as a whole—this is what the book is about.

It is not my intention to frighten anybody, but just look at the monstrous new wave of hatred against the Jews rising among the Moslem fanatics, who are trying to make anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism into the dogmas of one of the world religions—a religion, moreover, that is followed by more than a billion people, which makes this especially dangerous.

Russian religious philosopher Georgi Fedotov said, Whenever some nation wants to forcibly tear away its ties to the rest of the humanity, what it does first of all is find Jews and exact vengeance on them.

Terrorist acts against the Jews in Israel and around the world are a prelude to and a part of the fundamentalists’ struggle against the Judeo-Christian ethical base of life and against Western civilization as a whole. Only the blind cannot see this.

What part Russia will play in this struggle—not the government or the foreign minister, but the Russian people—is of grave, of extreme importance!

October 2003, Connecticut, USA

PART I

The Jewish Question

The Jewish Question is a Christian question.

Passing through the entire history of the human race from its very beginning and to the present time (which is something that cannot be said of any other nation), it is as though Jewry represents an axis of world history.

As a result of this key significance of Jewry in the history of humanity, all positive as well as all negative forces of human nature are represented in this race with especial vividness.

Vladimir Soloviev

CHAPTER 1.1

The Axis of World History

O, please do not think that I am really venturing to raise the Jewish Question. I wrote that title as a joke. I do not have the power to raise an issue of such magnitude as the position of a Jew in Russia and the position of Russia that counts three million Jews among its sons. Such an issue is out of my league. But some opinion of my own I may allow myself to have . . .

Fyodor Dostoevsky

So, in 1877, began a diary entry entitled The Jewish Question, the classic of Russian literature Fyodor Dostoevsky. I feel the same way: It is not possible to raise such an issue, but I cannot keep silent either. Too often I hear absurd and even foolish talk about Jews (often from Jews themselves), talk and arguments that demonstrate the utter and absolute confusion in the heads of the speakers. Moreover, I consider it my duty to at least touch upon this eternal theme, which the eminent Russian philosopher and Russian Orthodox theologian Georgi Fedotov wrote about with such great respect:

It is not without hesitation that I offer the reader some thoughts upon this eternal theme. These thoughts have not much that is new in them, but the everyday opinions on this subject are so shallow and so full of prejudice and passions that it becomes the duty of everyone to give it the benefit of much closer attention.

The discussion of the Jewish Question should, probably, itself begin with a question: What does the Jewish Question (also known as the Jewish Problem) encompass, or what does it consists of? What is it, really, this Jewish Question or Problem? Since the entire subject is not a simple one, there are a great many answers. Besides, a difficult problem cannot even be stated simply, since the solution to a problem, as everyone knows, lies in this problem being correctly formulated. It is probable that all who ever thought about this subject, as well as those who never did, understand the Jewish Question in their own way and invest it with their own meaning.

The spectrum of the understanding or interpretation of the Jewish Problem stretches from the earthy and practical to the global level of world politics, and further still to the metaphysical concepts of humanity’s destiny, as it was predetermined by Providence. The Jewish Question figures as a separate problem in philosophical systems and in theological doctrines, in the programs of political parties, messages of religious leaders, and government decrees, as well as books on history and philosophy.

For instance, Dostoevsky understood the Jewish Question to mean primarily the question of whether Jews should or should not be given the same political and civil rights as Russians. Dostoevsky was just being sly, saying that he entitled his notes The Jewish Question as a joke. The writer was not joking at all, and he resolutely supported granting equal rights to Jews in the spirit of Christian charity. However, before casting his vote for those rights, he depicted the Jews as so self-seeking, so cruel, and such just plain repulsive creatures that any Russian reader, having finally gotten to his for vote, would immediately vote against. Which, by the way, is exactly what happened four years later, the year Dostoevsky died, when a monstrous wave of pogroms against Russian Jews killed many, and the refusal to grant equal rights to the surviving Jews became final.

Eugene Dühring, a well-known German philosopher of the late nineteenth century and almost a contemporary of Dostoevsky, familiar to many from the brilliant work by Friedrich Engels entitled Anti-Dühring, formulates the problem differently in his book The Jewish Problem:

I assert that the Jewish Problem is a racial problem plain and simple, and that Jews are a race that is not only alien to us, but also congenitally and irrevocably corrupt.

Another approach can be traced in the draft of the program of the Russian Party, published in 1991 immediately after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disbanded. A special section of the program entitled "The Jewish Question, suggested that the Jews should be exiled from Russia and that Zionism—that is, the Jews again—be pronounced guilty of… criminal takeover of power in Russia in 1917, of unleashing the Red terror, the civil war, and the genocide of the Russian people, of robbing the Russian people, of bankrupting Russia and driving Russians into the state of shameful penury, as well as of the creation of a Communist-Zionist economy, in which the shortage of major staples was artificially maintained in the interests of Zionocracy." This colorful document, clearly written by former professors of Marxism-Leninism, culminated with superlative apotheosis that suggested that Christianity be considered a Jewish ideology and an alien religion that promotes establishment of Zionist oppression in Russia, that Marxism-Leninism be considered a Zionist ideology in disguise, and that Bolshevism be considered a sort of Zionism.

One must admit that nowhere have the Jews and their national freedom movement called Zionism ever been favored with such a high—I would even say, mighty—appraisal as in this anti-Semitic opus. In it, Jewry appears as an evil giant that had the great Russian people tied hand and foot and brought to their knees. True, the Jews cannot accept such a lofty definition of their humble contribution to the history of Russia, because no part of this evaluation corresponds to reality, except the part that says that Russian Orthodox religion is at base a Jewish ideology. Here, the truth will out, as they say, for it cannot be argued with: Jesus Christ was a Jew named Joshua (or Yeshua) ha-Notzri and all the holy Christian books have really been written by the Jews—a long time ago, it is true, but that, of course, is no justification either.

In justice to the Russian Party, however, it must be said that the idea of solving the Jewish Problem by exiling Jews from the country was not invented by its KGB party gurus. That idea made its appearance soon after Poland became part of Russia and, strangely, not in tsarist, but in Russian liberal circles. Pavel Pestel, the leader of the secret society of Decembrists, in his proposal, entitled The Russian Truth, for a new Russian constitution suggested that Russia be freed of the Jews by the establishment of a special Jewish state in Asia Minor. Aside from that, one must acknowledge that the part of the pogrom program of the Russian Party concerning the liberation of Russia from the Jewish presence is being rather successfully accomplished not only in Russia but in all the countries of the former Soviet Union. Thus the Jewish Problem, as the term is understood by the benighted anti-Semites (quotations from whose words I promise to keep to a minimum from now on), is being solved.

The first post-Stalin leader of the former Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev, who, by the way, had been a party to many of Stalin’s crimes, including those against the Jews, once said that there was no Jewish Question in the Soviet Union, since the Jews of the USSR enjoyed equal rights together with all other nationalities. Khrushchev was, of course, lying in this case, as he was lying when he promised the Soviet people that they would live under true Communism by no later than 1981. The savagery of Soviet anti-Semitism both during Stalin’s time and in later regimes fell short only of Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany. Nevertheless, I quote those words of Khrushchev’s here, despite their utter worthlessness, only to show how militant atheists in general, and Bolsheviks in particular, understand the Jewish Question. Putting it plainly, they understand it in terms of are they beating the Yids in the streets or not? And if, for instance, they are not, then there is no problem whatsoever; but if they are, then it may need looking into. Such primitive and popular interpretation of the Jewish Problem is undoubtedly of practical interest, if mainly to the Jews themselves. We will not waste our time discussing it.

Unlike militant atheists and vulgar materialists such as Khrushchev, the eminent Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev understood the Jewish Question differently. He considered the Jewish Question to be a Christian question, thus emphasizing the global and historical significance of the being and the beating of the Jews, and the importance of this issue to the humanity as a whole. Comparing Jewry to the axis of the world history, Soloviev considered the Jewish Question to be the question of the direction in which that axis is pointed; of whether there is a definite, predetermined goal for the evolution of humanity and if so, what that goal is.

Explaining the Soloviev concept of the Jewish Question, Father Alexy, the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, said at the meeting with the New York rabbis in 1991:

Soloviev considered the defense of the Jews to be, from the Christian point of view, one of the important tasks of his life. For him, the Jewish Question was not a question of whether Jews are good or bad, but whether we, Christians, are good or bad.

Another eminent Russian philosopher and Russian Orthodox theologian, Sergey Bulgakov, gave the following interpretation of the Soloviev concept of Jewry:

Jewry is a genuine axis of the world history in terms of it being present in that history from beginning to end. They are the only people to hold their place in the variegated succession of different nations, in their historical rotation. And their strength does not fade, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Such is the major fact of the life of the chosen people, and it was predicted also in the books of the prophets, as testimony to the will of God that it be so. And that physical preservation and spreading of Israel is accompanied also by its introduction into the lives of all nations.

Equating Jewry with the axis of world history (as well as the corresponding interpretation of the Jewish Question) is not a concept that originated with Vladimir Soloviev. Many other thinkers throughout the centuries gave similar interpretations and persistently pointed out the connection between the purposeful movement of humanity toward some as yet not clearly understood goal and the fate of the Jewish people. Clear understanding or, at least, an intuitive sense of this connection, is what draws thinking people to the Jewish Question, drawing the apologists of Jewry, as well as those who abuse it—Judophiles as well as Judophobes. In the majority of cases, this attraction is subconscious, but no less strong because of that. For several millennia this attraction has been (and still is) creating constant, inexhaustible, occasionally somehow painful interest among non-Jews in the Jewish Question. This is what Sergey Bulgakov wrote on the subject:

The very existence of Israel as the true axis of history, its self-preservation throughout those centuries when kingdoms collapsed, and nations were massacred and destroyed, is capable of exciting a historical-nationalistic jealousy.

Even those whose attitude towards Jews is negative are irresistibly drawn by the image of this strange people who three thousand years ago bore in a wooden ark the fate of the world; the eternal wanderers who survived almost unchanged into our time.

Contemporary intellectuals also point out the direct connection between the fate of Jewry and the direction of the axis of human history. A prominent English historian, Paul Johnson, claims that he became interested in the history of the Jews because of, among other things, the chance to reconsider… the most intractable of all human questions: what are we on earth for? And further he writes:

Is history merely a series of events whose sum is meaningless? Is there no fundamental moral difference between the history of the human race and the history of, say, ants? . . . No people have ever insisted more firmly than the Jews that history has a purpose and humanity a destiny. At the very early stage in their collective existence they believed they had detected a divine scheme for the human race, of which their own society was to be a pilot. They worked out their role in immense detail. They clung to it with heroic persistence in the face of savage suffering.

All nations living on our planet have made their contribution—some more, some less—to human culture and to the development of the human civilization. The contribution of each nation is unique and valuable in its own way. However, we can certainly imagine our civilization without the contribution of one or another of those nations. We can certainly imagine the absence from the planet of, say, the nation X—let us not be specific, so as not to offend anybody. Anyone can make an appropriate mental experiment and ascertain that the corresponding model is imaginable. We can definitely say what we would lack, given the absence of the nation X; we can figure out what the world would be like without those people and how that world would differ from the one currently in existence. The Jewish people stand out among all other nations of the planet by it being almost impossible to imagine our world without it, as it is impossible to imagine rotation without the axis. This is what Paul Johnson says on the subject:

One way of summing up 4,000 years of Jewish history is to ask ourselves what would have happened to the human race if Abraham had not been a man of great sagacity, or if he had stayed in Ur and kept his higher notions to himself, and no specific Jewish people had come into being. Certainly the world without the Jews would have been a radically different place. Humanity might eventually have stumbled upon all the Jewish insights. But we cannot be sure. All the great conceptual discoveries of the intellect seem obvious and inescapable once they have been revealed, but it requires a special genius to formulate them for the first time. The Jews had this gift. To them we owe the idea of equality before the law, both divine and human; of the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person; of the individual conscience and so of social responsibility; of peace as an abstract ideal and love as the foundation of justice, and many other items which constitute the basic moral furniture of the human mind. Without the Jews it might have been a much emptier place.

Above all, the Jews taught us how to rationalize the unknown. The result was monotheism and the three great religions which profess it. It is almost beyond our capacity to imagine how the world would have fared if they had never emerged.

I ask my readers’ forgiveness for the numerous and often lengthy quotations. The subject is such that I cannot describe it without quoting eminent thinkers, philosophers, writers, scientists, and politicians, who have already expressed their weighty opinions on the theme so brilliantly that it cannot be said any better.

Turning around the Jewish axis, even if unconsciously, people—Jews and non-Jews alike—continuously asked themselves two eternal questions:

First, why do so many nations always and everywhere hate and persecute the Jews?

Second, how and why did the Jews manage to survive throughout millennia in the face of the absolute hatred and persecutions on the part of the nations surrounding them?

These two questions together are really what constitutes the Jewish Question in its historical-philosophical meaning. In the mind of Vladimir Soloviev and other thinkers far removed from crass and cynical materialism, this question (which concerns itself with the very axis of world history) is directly connected to the fate of humanity as a whole. We shall hold to this understanding of the subject, without, however, trying to avoid discussing other interpretations.

It is not difficult to present a simple, popular interpretation of the Jewish Question along the lines of the formula mentioned earlier and understood everywhere: Are they beating the Yids in the streets or not? The essence of the question turns out to be not Are they beating the Yids? but Why are they beating the Yids? and Why haven’t they beaten them to death?

It is interesting to note that the first, seemingly simple question of Why are they being beaten in reality turned out to be a most complex philosophical problem, one that nevertheless, elicits as many answers as there have ever been people whose opinions have been asked. Whereas concerning the other, apparently more difficult question of Why haven’t they been beaten to death yet there is an almost complete consensus among all at least somewhat serious thinkers, and one single, perplexing answer.

We will, therefore, begin with the second question and, to start with, will cite a splendidly colorful and detailed formulation given to it by the eminent Russian writer Alexander Kuprin:

Amazing, inscrutable Jewish people!

What further trials lie in store for them? They have passed through dozens of centuries, mixing with none, keeping fastidiously apart from all other nations, hiding in their hearts centuries-old sorrow and centuries-old flame. Motley and tremendous life of ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt have long ago become the stuff of museum collections, historical nonsense, old fairy tales, but this race that was already a patriarch when they were in their infancy, not only continues to exist but has kept everywhere its tough, hot-blooded, southern type, has kept its faith, full of great hopes and petty ritual, has kept the sacred language of its Holy books and its mystical alphabet, in the very outlines of which the letters breathe millennial antiquity.

What had it undergone in the days of its youth? Whom had it traded and made alliances with, and whom had it fought? Not a trace is left of its mysterious enemies, all those Philistines, Amelikites, Moabites, and other half-mythical peoples; but flexible and eternal, it lives on, as though following Someone’s divine predestination.

Its history is permeated by tragedy and horror and fully soaked in its own blood: hundred-year captivities, violence, hatred, slavery, torture, bonfires of human flesh, exile, deprivation of rights…

How could it have survived?

And so, the question is formulated clearly and distinctly: How could the Jewish people have survived? The writer did not ask this rhetorically. With the instinct of an artist, he discovered here a riddle of unimaginable depth. For not only did these people who had survived the unsurvivable remain alive, they show no signs of aging in the manner of the latter-day Roman Empire.

The lack of senility and dotage in the most ancient of the still-existing nations surprised yet another intellectual—the great American writer Mark Twain:

The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished.

The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

The subject of the mysterious survival of the Jews continues to excite the minds of contemporary researchers as well. Paul Johnson wrote in the foreword to his History of the Jews, published in America and Canada in 1987:

The Jews created a separate and specific identity earlier than almost any other people which still survives. They have maintained it, amid appalling adversities, right up to the present. Whence came this extraordinary endurance? What was the particular strength of the all-consuming idea which made the Jews different and kept them homogeneous? Did its continuing power lie in its essential immutability, or its capacity to adapt, or both? These are sinew themes with which to grapple.

I would love to answer that I will grapple with them! That, however, would be rather too arrogant on my part and, considering the paradoxical answers to the questions posed by the Jewish Problem that were arrived at by the eminent thinkers of the past, simply foolish. Therefore, without taking any obligations upon ourselves, we shall try only to touch upon, respectfully, this tragic and at the same time lofty theme.

Why does the history of the Jews, and only the Jews, prompt the question: How could they survive? Why does it surprise philosophers, writers, scientists, and historians for whom, it appears, there is no longer anything mysterious under the sun? Let us try to pinpoint those events in Jewish history that led Alexander Kuprin and many other eminent intellectuals to this question. Every one of those events, taken separately, does not appear unique or incomprehensible—one can discover similar occurrences in the history of other nations. But taken all together, while keeping in mind all the strange consequences as well… However, we are getting ahead of ourselves. Let us begin from the beginning, and for time-saving purposes, let this beginning lie in not-so-ancient times.

CHAPTER 1.2

A Short Excerpt from History

Tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast,

How shall ye flee away and be at rest!

The wild-dove hath her nest, the fox his cave,

Mankind their country—Israel but the grave!

George Gordon, Lord Byron,

Hebrew Melodies

It is curious that the history of the Jewish people is accompanied by constant prophesies of their imminent demise. Those unfulfilled prophesies have a wide spectrum of attitudes: From joyfully expectant, to violently hysterical, to lofty and sad as, for instance, in the Byron poem. The earliest known prophecy of Israel’s demise belongs, apparently, to the ninth century B.C. This first prophecy is forever fixed on a piece of black basalt, known to all Oriental scholars as the Stone of Mesha.

Discovered near the Dead Sea in 1868, the Stone of Mesha (Stella of Mesha) now stands in the Levantine Hall of the Louvre. This priceless monument of antiquity is unique in many ways. First, it contains the earliest historical mention of the people of Israel, not counting the more ancient texts of the Bible. Second, it is one of the oldest existing examples of the written word: The text on the stone is inscribed in the Western Semitic script, which is closely related to the ancient Hebrew and Phoenician scripts, and is considered the grandsire of all the alphabets in the world. And finally, the inscription on the Stone of Mesha contains the description of the victory of the Moabite King Mesha over the heirs of the Israeli King Omri and concludes with a joyful exclamation: The people of Israel are destroyed forever!

This, as we have already mentioned, is the earliest prediction of the demise of the Jewish people. The latest such prediction was made recently by a friend of mine. Having heard yet another piece of news about yet another failure of the American diplomacy to establish peace between Israel and the so-called Palestinian Autonomy, my friend exclaimed hysterically: This is it—Israel is finished! Actually, as you can imagine, he used a much more colorful word than finished to indicate what was about to happen to Israel.

Such prophecies have lately become commonplace in many publications that derive extensive support from both Islamofascist propaganda and left-liberal circles in the West and Israel. One would like to remind this strange conglomerate of false prophets that making predictions about Jewish history is a highly unreliable—one might even say risky—undertaking, since this history has a tendency to progress outside of any logical, positivist-historical path, and is not always easily explainable through simple, materialistic, causal connections. The true prophets had a different view of this problem. For example, the great Russian writer Leo Tolstoy said that the Jewish people, which preserved a prophecy for such a long time and conveyed it to the rest of mankind, such a people cannot disappear… Another leading Russian philosopher, Georgy Fedotov, wrote at the height of the Nazi genocide against the Jewish people that "its destiny in Christian prophecy is connected with the eschatological destiny of the world, and from this point of view, it not only must not die, but it cannot die." One must, however, acknowledge that the history of the Jewish people has provided and will continue to provide ample material for all kinds of speculations on the topic of their imminent elimination…

In 586 B.C. the warriors of the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, after laying siege to Jerusalem for almost a year, broke through the outer wall, captured the city, and together with a band of predatory Edomites perpetrated a total massacre inside. The king of Judea, Zedekiah, was first forced by Nebuchadnezzar to watch his sons’ heads being cut off, and then, after his eyes had been gouged out, he was taken to Babylon in chains. Acting on Nebuchadnezzar’s orders, his ferocious bodyguard burned the splendid Temple, built four hundred years previously by King Solomon, together with the Ark of Covenant where the future fate of the world was being kept. He also executed the High Priest and the entire Jewish cultural elite, razed Jerusalem to the ground, and carried the rest of the Jews off into Babylonian captivity. The Jewish state perished. Wild animals wandered the empty land, and jackals howled among the ruins of Jerusalem at night.

Apparently, the captured remains of the Jewish people were destined to dissolve in the enormous Kingdom of Babylon and sink into oblivion together with the teachings of the prophets about the one God and the Ten Commandments of the Lord.

Nevertheless, half a century later, the grandchildren of the Babylonian captives returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the country from the ruins, laid the foundations for a new Temple and, inspired by the religious teacher named Ezra, began writing down anew the teachings of Moses they had somehow preserved, in the form of a single book they called the Torah or Bible.

In the year 169 B.C., the Greek King Antiochus Epiphanes, infuriated by the Jews’ disobedience, burst into Jerusalem, looted the Temple, perpetrated, as it was customary, a bloody massacre, forbade Jewish religious services, and ordered the survivors to worship Greek gods. Everywhere in Judea the statues of the Greek gods were erected, and everywhere the Jews were forced to eat pork. On the 25th day of the month of Kislev in the year 168 services were held in front of the statue of the chief Greek god Zeus, placed upon the holy altar of the Jerusalem Temple. Thus began the first government-sponsored forceful conversion of the Jews. This action was accompanied by merciless executions and violence against the recalcitrant, as well as the coaxing of the apostates. The method of the carrot and the stick, later applied to the Jews a great many times, was used by Antiochus with all possible refinement and on a grand scale: Brutal torture and death for those that persisted in the Jewish heresy, and generous rewards and appointments for those who converted to paganism. Many Jews could not stand up against this raging might of a pagan state and gave in—it would be dishonorable to censure them for it. Besides, the very foundations of Jewish life were being rapidly washed away by the powerful stream of Greek culture.

It seemed there was no power in the world that could save the Jewish national identity from that stream, combined with the terrifying imperial might of Antioch…

Nevertheless, the persecuted people rose up and, led by the son of priest Mattathias of the House of Hasmoneans, the great general Judah Maccabee, in the course of a merciless, three-year war routed the hand-picked Syrian army, liberated Jerusalem, and on the 25th day of the month of Kislev lit the first Hanukah candle in the Jerusalem Temple, cleared now of all idols.

In A.D. 70, the Roman legions, led by the future emperor Flavius Titus, son of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, after besieging Jerusalem for half a year, brought up battering rams, broke through the walls to the Temple Mount, set fire to the splendid Temple built by King Herod, and, giving free reign to their unbridled hatred and malice, perpetrated a bloodbath in the city, sparing neither women nor children. The Judean state was no more. Nearly a million Jews were killed and crucified on the terrible Roman crosses, and more than a hundred thousand taken as slaves. The Judean lands, which became the property of the emperor, were divided into plots and either given to the Roman soldiers who settled there or sold to other pagans.

Sixty-three years after the destruction of the Temple, the Jews made one last desperate attempt to regain their sovereignty. Led by the courageous and heroic warrior Bar Kokhba, which means Son of a Star, they rebelled against Rome and, at first, routed the Romans out of Palestine. However, Emperor Hadrian sent his legions against the Jews, under the command of Julius Severus, the best general of his time. He methodically drove the rebels out of one town after another and blockaded them in the fortress of Bethar near Jerusalem. After a year of siege, Julius Severus captured the fortress and massacred the remaining Jews. Bar Kokhba was killed, and the rebels’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Akiva, was publicly torn apart with iron hooks. The Romans destroyed and suppressed all manifestations of Judaism. In Jerusalem, renamed Aelia Capitolina, they erected the Temple of Jupiter on the Temple Mount which was cleared of the last remnants of the Jewish Temple. The surviving Jews and Judeo-Christians were scattered across all the provinces of the enormous Roman Empire in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The many centuries of the history of the Jews in exile, in dispersion, began—the Diaspora, life among strange nations, without the single center, without Jerusalem, without the Temple, behind the fence made of hatred. Besides, the foundations of the specifically Jewish culture were now being rapidly washed away by the mighty stream of the all-invasive, universal Roman culture. The great Jewish writer Flavius Josephus, who was close to the emperors Vespasian and Flavius Titus, wrote in Rome the many volumes of his Judean Antiquities to preserve the memory of the ancient people for future generations.

It was clear that the existence of the Jewish nation was over