Nothing stirs the bile of those who call themselves Jews,
and gets them to cry out antisemitism more than the development known as the
Blood Libel of the Middle Ages. This was a time when the Europeans believed
that the Jews kidnapped Christian children at Passover, killed them and used
their blood to make the unleavened matzoh bread. We'll get back to this subject
in a moment but let's focus on the matter of antisemitism.
An antisemitic expression is supposed to convey intense
dislike or hate toward a race or an ethnicity called Semitic. But is there such
a thing? Yes, there is. The Semites are people who have roots in the Middle
East, the Levant, Western Asia and
North-Eastern Africa. Today, they comprise the Arabs and the descendents of
their Hebrew cousins if and when the latter can be found.
The problem with finding these people is that the Middle East has undergone a massive transformation both
from the ethnic and the religious angles. First, the ethnic transformation.
Situated at the crossroads of the ancient world, the Middle
East has served as the way station where everyone going from one
place to another stopped over and got to know the place well. Eventually, a few
returned to make of the place their permanent home, thus changed its ethnic
composition. As to the religious transformation of the Middle
East , the Judaism and animism that existed since ancient times
were smothered first by Christianity and then by Islam, leaving very few if
any, certain as to what their ancient roots may have been.
What remains without question is that Judaism started to
spread in Europe at the time that Christianity was taking roots in the Middle East – but made no waves for about two centuries.
When Christianity started to spread in Europe ,
converting the local animists and the Jews to it, the Jewish rabbis feared the
extinction of their religion and decided to overhaul it so as to “modernize” it
and be able to compete against Christianity. Animosity flared between the two
religions, Christianity won the hearts and minds of the locals who converted to
it and began to view the Jews as both ethnically and religiously different from
themselves.
The animosity between the two escalated to the point that
each side made up stories about the other based on lies and half-truths. One
story circulated by the Christians being that of the Jews kidnapping Christian
children at Passover, killing them and using their blood to make the unleavened
matzoh bread. But, where could a story like this have originated? The answer is
that three streams converged to make the story sound credible.
First, those who are familiar with the writings of Sigmund
Freud may recall how he explained the Christian sacrament of the Communion
which is supposed to represent the eating from the flesh of Christ (bread) and
the drinking from his blood (wine). According to Freud, the gruesome ceremony
did take place in real life in ancient times. Also, in medieval times, they
used to fill the cranium of dead courageous soldiers with wine, and they drank
from it to become as courageous as him. Perhaps it represented drinking his
blood.
Second, the Jews themselves celebrate each year the event of
Passover which is supposed to represent their becoming a nation as they “fled” Egypt to go to
the promised land. But they did not go quietly. They killed the first born in
every household at the same time as they made the unleavened matzoh bread. This
is not a Christian story; it is a Jewish story, told and celebrated joyfully to
this day.
Third, while the European Christians were Caucasians who
converted to Christianity, the Jewish rabbis sought to change the looks of
their community from the typical Semitic look (that was hated) to the Caucasian
look (that was tolerated) by adopting babies that had the right looks – blue
eyed, blonde babies, and raising them as Jews.
The problem is that there was no legal adoption at that time
because people needed as many children as they could have to look after them in
their old age. And so the Jews resorted to the ancient method of adoption by
kidnapping babies and raising them in hiding in the ghetto. It must be said
that the Jews resorted to the method of legally adopting blue eyed, blonde
babies here in North America after the Second
World War.