Laurent Guyénot: Yahweh to Zion. The Clash of Civilizations 2018
Three Thousand Years of Exile: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land
Translated into English and edited by Kevin Barrett
Review by Raeto West 6 October 2023
Both author and translator/editor seem totally immersed in Jewish mythologies, and not able to dispassionately analyse the events they discuss. I presume (but don't know) that this version was approved by the author.
Guyénot reminds me of Baigent & Leigh. But (born 1960) a decade younger. His books include this one, and titles on J F Kennedy to 9/11, the 'porn industry', Prophets and Kings and God and Man, Jean Baptiste.
The online version is subdivided by bold summaries of what follows, which is helpful in scanning through the book, being of course much shorter than the entire volume. It has no index, but 754 titles, mostly books, many by Jews, some French.
My dislike of this book comes from its unbending ordinariness. There's no deep criticism. So much so that I suspect both Guyénot and Barrett are (or think they are) 'Jews'. In what is also Roman Catholic tradition, 'God' is assumed to exist in some sense, and to be solitary, and have moods. 'Blood' and 'soul' are given literary or cantorial significance. The kahal 'maintained the cohesion of the
community by prohibiting competition among its members'—well, that's one way of putting it. The symbiosis between the Catholic Church (forbidding borrowing for others, except from Jews) is unknown to Guyénot; so is the manufacture of Islam by Jews. Guyénot seems to have no doubts about the 'Holocaust'. Even the title seems to accept the stories. And so on.
There's nothing much on the influence of the discovery of the New World, which must, for example, have effects on the centre of gravity of Jews, moving from the Med to northern Europe and to the U.S.A. and south America.
The funding of wars is not detailed; anyone wondering what compensation should be taken from Jews will find nothing here. There are no estimates of the damage they caused.
When the going get rough, the undefined abstract polysyllables get going:
‘Judaism sacralizes genetics above everything else. An so it is the entire chosen people, acting “as one man” (Judges 20:1), who is
somehow heroized in the Bible.’
‘If to seek in oneself the causes of the violence of others means the capacity to examine oneself by putting oneself in the place of others, then it is an empathic process, based on the premise that the other shares with oneself the same humanity and therefore a comparable way of seeing and feeling things.’
‘Based on a few observations by Freud, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Török introduced the notion of the “phantom,” defined as “a formation of the unconscious which has the peculiarity of never having been conscious […] and resulting from transmission, the mode of which remains to be determined, from the unconscious of a parent to the unconscious of a child.”’
‘mothers who happen to witness the ritual empathize with the trauma of their
child, and suffer enduring trauma themselves: “The screams of my baby remain embedded in my bones and haunt my mind,” says Miriam Pollack. “His cry sounded like he was being butchered. I lost my milk.”’
‘There is no need to question the sincerity of Jewish thinkers [Why not?] claiming that the Jewish people is “the seed that is germinating the humanity of the future” (Jacob Kaplan, chief rabbi of France), or “the living ladder that meets the sky” (Emmanuel Levinas), or that “Israel equals humanity” (Emmanuel Levinas),761 or that “The Jew is closer to humanity than any other,” so that “the enemy of the Jews is the enemy of humanity” and therefore killing Jews is “murdering all mankind” (Elie Wiesel).762 Worse, “Hitting a Jew is hitting God Himself,” according to Cardinal Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger,763 taken almost verbatim from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 58b: “Hitting a Jew is like slapping the face of God himself”).’
‘Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. Here is how the author begins his book: “When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades’ [A preumable tenured professor at Cambridge]
‘“You will understand nothing of anti-Semitism,” wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “if you fail to remember that the Jew, that object of so much hatred, is perfectly innocent, nay harmless” (Réflexions sur la question juive, 1946). ['George Orwell' though Sartre a 'bag of wind'—but missed everything important about Jews, at least in public’
‘Persecution is also the central theme of the liturgy and Jewish feasts: Passover, Hanukkah, Purim, Yom Kippur. ... Holocaust cult has now replaced the worship of Christ.’ [unclear whether he means for Jews or 'goyim']
Here's the final sentence:
‘Only when the biblical Yahweh is correctly diagnosed and publicly exposed as a sociopathic myth will the Jews have a chance to collectively break away from his psychopathic bond, renounce the curse of being the chosen people, and learn to empathize with the rest of humankind. Until then, courageous Jews, from Jesus and Paul to Shlomo Sand and Gilad Atzmon, will continue to pave the way in solitude, vilified as self-hating Jews by those they wish to liberate.
’
Guyénot's book provides many interesting quotations, though inevitably without much context. There's an amusonly laughable one from Foxman, for example. Possibly the original text had abundant foot- or end-notes. But that's about all it does, unless a reader wants to know the highly censored official story of Jews through the ages.
RW