Unmasking the God of Israel: The Devil's Trick

[Patricia]

“The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist,” wrote Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen). He was wrong: the devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he is God.

Do I believe in the existence of the devil? It depends on the definition. I believe that humans are under the influence of the ideas that they have collectively engendered over the ages, for ideas are spiritual forces. And from that standpoint, I regard Yahweh’s impersonation of the Divine Creator as the most devastating deception ever played on the human race, a crime against divinity.

Am I a Gnostic? Not in the strict sense. If we are to believe their detractors, the early Gnostics taught that the God of the Old Testament was the evil demiurge who created the world from which Christ came to free us. I do not take Yahweh that seriously. On the contrary, I lament that he has been taken seriously by billions of people, Jews, Christians and Muslims. Yahweh is a character of fiction, but one that has gained tremendous influence over a huge portion of mankind, either directly or indirectly.

What I wish to demonstrate here is that Yahweh has the character of the devil as most people imagine it. That goes a long way towards explaining the satanic quality of Jewish Power that is becoming more and more apparent every day—a quality that Alain Soral is exposing in his most recent videos (now avalaible with English subtitles on the new ERTV International YouTube channel). If I were a Christian, I would quote John 8:44. But I am not arguing from a Christian viewpoint, for although I accept the principle that the Gospel story was designed as a cure for the Jews’ mental enslavement by the Torah, I also consider that, unless it could vomit the Old Testament, Christianity will remain forever infected by the virus it was intended to combat.

The Mosaic covenant as Faustian pact
The core of the Hebrew Bible is the Mosaic covenant. The deal is simple: in exchange for exclusive worship and obedience to his laws stressing strict separateness from other peoples, Yahweh will make the Israelites rule over humankind: “follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice,” and Yahweh “will raise you higher than every other nation he has made”; “You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none” (Deuteronomy 26:17-19 and 28:12).

Christians have never come to the realization that the Mosaic covenant is nothing but a program for world domination by the Jewish nation. That is because it is written right under their nose, in a book whose malice they cannot recognize because they have been told it is the Word of God. It takes a free-thinker like H. G. Wells to see the biblical idea of the Chosen People for what it is: “a conspiracy against the rest of the world.” In the books of the Bible, “you have the conspiracy plain and clear, […] an aggressive and vindictive conspiracy. […] It is not tolerance but stupidity to shut our eyes to their quality.”[1]

Christians have always failed to see the biblical god’s utter contempt for their own nations, although it is repeated again and again: “All the nations are as nothing before him, for him they count as nothingness and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17). “Devour all the nations whom Yahweh your god puts at your mercy, show them no pity” (Deuteronomy 7:16). The vulnerability of Christian nations to Israel’s collective sociopathy is directly related to the their self-inflicted blindness. For their own misfortune, Christians worship a deity who hates them (as one commenter to an earlier article put it).

Christian exegetes never seem to have noticed either that Yahweh’s covenant—domination over the nations in exchange for exclusive worship—is basically identical to the pact that the devil tried to lure Jesus into:

“the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these, if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’ Then Jesus replied, ‘Away with you, Satan!’” (Matthew 4:8-10)

As a matter of fact, Satan is hardly distinguished from Yahweh in the Tanakh. He is called an “angel of Yahweh” in Numbers 22 and 32. In 2Samuel 24, Yahweh incites David to do evil, while the role is given to Satan in the same episode told in 1Chronicles 21, where Yahweh, “the angel of Yahweh”, and Satan are used interchangeably. There is also no trace in the Tanakh of a cosmic struggle between Good and Evil, as in Persian monotheism. Happiness and misfortune, peace and war, health and sickness, abundance and famine, fertility and infertility, all have their unique and direct source in the capricious will of Yahweh. In his own words, “I form the light and I create the darkness, I make well-being, and I create disaster, I, Yahweh, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

Christ’s teaching to “store up treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20) is alien to Yahweh. He is the Greedy One, who wants “the treasures of all the nations” amassed into his Jerusalem residence: “Mine is the silver, mine the gold!” (Haggai 2:8). “The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity” (Zechariah 14:14). Interestingly, according to 1Kings 10:14, the amount of gold hoarded each year into Salomon’s temple was “666 talents of gold”—the “number of the Beast” in Revelation 13:18! Make of it what you want. Or ask Jared Kushner to explain it.


The Mosaic covenant functions like a classic pact with the devil: Israel will get wealth and power in exchange for becoming Yahweh’s “personal possession” (Exodus 19:5). The notion of a pact with the devil is especially relevant since Yahweh denies his worshippers an individual immortal soul, which is tantamount to claiming their souls for himself. As Voltaire once noted, Yahweh forbade the Jews to screw their goats (Exodus 22:18), he instructed them on how to defecate in a hole (Deuteronomy 23:14), but he didn’t give them “that most useful creed in a future life.”[2] That is because the Torah is essentially a tool of mental programming meant to lock the Jews into a watertight collective soul (see my article “Israel as One Man”).

Metaphysical materialism is the most fundamental aspect of Biblical anthropology, and, although it has been superficially amended in later Judaic developments, its sap runs very deep in Jewishness. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, the afterlife “is rarely discussed in Jewish life, be it among Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox Jews, […] in marked contrast to the religious traditions of the people among whom the Jews have lived. […] The Torah, the most important Jewish text, has no clear reference to afterlife at all.”

The relationship between Yahweh and his people is not moral, but strictly contractual and legalistic. According to Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “The Torah does not recognize moral imperatives stemming from knowledge of natural reality or from awareness of man’s duty to his fellow man. All it recognizes are Mitzvot, divine imperatives.”[3] The hundreds of mitzvot (“commandments”) are ends in themselves, not ways to a higher moral consciousness. Such Jewish legalism stifles moral consciousness, as Gilad Atzmon pointed out.

Naturally, there are moral precepts here and there in the Bible. But on the whole, it is a misunderstanding to believe that Yahweh expects from his people a moral superiority. The only criterion for approval by Yahweh is obedience to his arbitrary laws and to his antisocial or genocidal commands. To slaughter treacherously hundreds of prophets of Baal is good, because it is the will of Yahweh (1Kings 18). To show mercy to the king of the Amalekites is bad, because when Yahweh says, “kill everyone,” he means “everyone” (1Samuel 15). How can we expect from a people whose mentality has been shaped by these narratives and their layers of Talmudic commentaries, that they share the sense of good and evil that most other peoples regard as inherent to humanity? It is totally consistent for a future Israeli Prime Minister like Yitzhak Shamir (1986-1992) to declare (in 1943):

“Neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat. We are very far from having any moral qualms as far as our national war goes. We have before us the command of the Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any other body of laws in the world: ‘Ye shall blot them out to the last man.’”[4]

The jealous and murderous god
Yahweh is “the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). Although he is supposed to be the father of all national gods (Deuteronomy 32:8-9), he feels for them a murderous hatred, manifested in this command:

“You must completely destroy all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their sacred poles, hack to bits the statues of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.” (Deuteronomy 12:2-3)

Yahweh’s jealousy reached pathological proportions during his struggle with Assur, the national god of Assyria. In the oldest strata of the book of Isaiah, composed soon after the destruction of Israel by Assyria, Yahweh appears unable to cope with the frustration and humiliation, and consumed with the lust for revenge:

“Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, ‘Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria [Assur] in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?’” (Isaiah 14:24-27)

Listen to Yahweh fuming after his defeat, and you hear a dangerous narcissistic megalomaniac: “By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.” (Isaiah 45:23)

Yahweh’s struggle with Baal is even more revealing. In ancient Syria, Baal (a term meaning simply “Lord”, as the Hebrew Adonai), also known as Baal Shamem (“the Lord of Heaven”), was understood as the Supreme God, encompassing all the manifestations of the divine.[5] And so it is ironic that Yahweh, a tribal god, should compete with the great Baal for the status of Supreme God. The cult of Baal received royal support in the powerful kingdom of Israel under the Omrid dynasty (9th century BC). We learn in the Cycle of Elijah (from 1Kings 17 to 2Kings 13) that the Yahwist prophet Elijah challenged 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon a sacrificial bull: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed”—an implausible situation since Baal, being the God of an agrarian society, never required holocausts. Elijah wins the contest, and people then fall on their faces and scream “Yahweh is God! Yahweh is God!” Then they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1Kings 18). Later on, after a coup against the Omrids, the Judean general Jehu summoned all the priests of Baal for “a great sacrifice to Baal,” which turned out to be their own slaughter. “Thus Jehu rid Israel of Baal” (2Kings 10:18-28). This is the perfect illustration of how Yahweh became the God instead of Baal: by the physical elimination of the priests of Baal. The process mirrors the way Jehu became king over Israel, by exterminating the family of the legitimate king, as well as “all his leading men, his close friends, his priests; he did not leave a single one alive” (2Kings 10:11).


For the Egyptians, wrote German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, “the gods are social beings, living and acting in ‘constellations’.”[6] The peaceful cooperation of the gods warrants the harmonious functioning of the universe. That is because the gods form the organic body of the world. Such a conception, which Assmann calls “cosmotheism”, fosters a form of inclusive or convergent monotheism: all gods are one, as the cosmos is one. By contrast, the Bible’s exclusive monotheism is the expression of Yahweh’s narcissistic sociopathy. That is why some Egyptians, according to Plutarch (Isis and Osiris, 31), believed the god of the Jews to be Seth, the donkey-head god of the desert, famine, disorder and war, expelled from the council of the gods for having murdered his elder brother Osiris out of jealousy. Identifying the Jewish god with Seth was their way to account for the aggressive exclusiveness of Jewish religion.

Since the polytheisms of all great civilizations were cosmotheisms, they were translatable into one another. This was of practical importance, because, Assmann writes, “contracts with other states had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible. Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons.” And so, from the third millennium BC, the translatability of various pantheons was crucial to international diplomacy as well as trade. But Yahweh cannot be matched with any other god; Yahwism “blocked intercultural translatability.”[7] And when Yahweh instructed his people, “You will make no pact with them or with their gods” (Exodus 23:32), or “Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them” (Joshua 23:7), he was in effect preventing any relationship of trust with the neighboring peoples. The Jews must place their entire trust in Yahweh alone. Dietary laws are meant to prevent any socialization outside the tribe: “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).

What Israelites are asked, in fact, is to reproduce towards other nations Yahweh’s murderous sociopathy toward other gods. The war code of Deuteronomy 20 commands to exterminate “any living thing” in the conquered cities of Canaan. In practice, the rule is extended to all people who resist the Israelites in their conquest. It was applied by Moses to the Midianites, save their 32,000 young virgin girls, of whom 32 were burnt as holocausts to Yahweh (Numbers 31). It was applied by Joshua to the Canaanite city of Jericho, where the Israelites “enforced the curse of destruction on everyone in the city: men and women, young and old, including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all” (Joshua 6:21). In the city of Ai, the inhabitants were all slaughtered, twelve thousand of them, “until not one was left alive and none to flee. […] When Israel had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open ground, and in the desert where they had pursued them, and when every single one had fallen to the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and slaughtered its remaining population.” Women were not spared. “For booty, Israel took only the cattle and the spoils of this town” (Joshua 8:22-27). Then came the turns of the cities of Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, and Hazor. In the whole land, Joshua “left not one survivor and put every living thing under the curse of destruction, as Yahweh, god of Israel, had commanded” (10:40). A more cruel end was reserved by King David for the Ammonites, who were “cut with saws, and with harrows of iron, and with axes,” and “passed through the brick kiln” (2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3).[8]

Yahweh’s genocidal code of war was applied by King Saul to the Amalekites. Yahweh ordered Saul to kill them all, “man and woman, babe and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,” and Saul was punished for sparing their king Agag, whom Samuel had to butcher himself (1Samuel 15). In the Jewish mind, such stories are not just half-forgotten tales of the past. Biblical history holds the keys to the present and to the future. Rabbinic exegetes have constantly referred to Israel’s perceived enemies in biblical terms. Amalek, in particular, came to be associated with Rome and, from the fourth century onward, with Christians, or with the Armenians in particular. Amalek is also associated to Iran, because the villain of the Book of Esther, Haman, is said to be a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag. The hanging of Haman and his ten sons and the massacre of 75,000 Persians are often conflated in Jewish tradition with the extermination of the Amalekites and the brutal execution of their king. The Torah reading on the morning of Purim is taken from the account of the battle against the Amalekites, which ends with the conclusion that “Yahweh will be at war with Amalek generation after generation” (Exodus 17:16).[9] “Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews,” explains Jeffrey Goldberg in a New York Times piece called “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” adding: “I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: ‘Think Amalek.’”[10]

This is just one more illustration of the Israeli leadership’s biblical mind frame. Modern Israel is the son of Yahweh, and acts on the international scene in a biblical way, that is, with the same indifference and cruelty toward non-Jewish nations as Yahweh demanded of his people in the Bible.

Accusatory inversion
“The belief in a cruel god makes a cruel man,” wrote Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason, 1794). Countless biblical stories demonstrate that Yahweh is the spirit of murder and theft. We read in Samson’s legend in Judges 14:19, that when “the spirit of Yahweh seized on him,” he went on killing and robbing thirty men, “then burning with rage returned to his father’s house.”

Yahweh is the cruelest of gods, but he would have us believe that all other gods are abominations. Biblical history portrays all nations but Israel as repulsive idolaters. But they were not. The Egyptians had built the first great civilization; their goddess Isis had taught them how to grow wheat and bake bread, and the Greeks learned it from them—as everything else, according to Herodotus. They were a spiritual and peaceful people. The Assyrians were conquerors, and their god Assur was no angel, yet even the Bible recognizes that they did not slaughter the defeated Israelites, but deported and resettled them. The Babylonians dealt with the Judeans the same way, even allowing them to keep their tradition and their cohesion, and to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.

Assyrian soldier with prisoners of war
Assyrian soldier with prisoners of war
Reversed accusation of genocidal intention is typical of Israel, a country with nuclear warheads pointed at Iran, whose leaders have always denied having any nuclear arsenal at all, but who hysterically urges the world to stop Iran’s supposed nuclear military program and determination to erase Israel from the maps. It would be laughable if Israel were just paranoid. But Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, and get what they want.

The psychopath projects his own cruelty and lust for power on others. And so he thinks that those who resist his domination are out to get him. Therefore he must destroy them first. From the biblical point of view, nations must either recognize Israel’s sovereignty, and their kings “fall prostrate before [Israel], faces to the ground” (Isaiah 49:23), or be destroyed. Yahweh told Israel that he has identified “seven nations greater and stronger than yourself,” that “you must put under the curse of destruction,” and not “show them any pity.” As for their kings, “you will blot out their names under heaven” (Deuteronomy 7:1-2, 24). And we recall that, according to phony whistleblower Wesley Clark, son of Benjamin Jacob Kanne, the neocons had plans for destroying precisely seven nations—another proof that they are possessed by Yahweh.

Yahweh offers only two possible paths to Israel: domination, if Israel keeps Yahweh’s Covenant of separateness, or annihilation, if Israel breaks the Covenant:

“if you make friends with the remnant of these nations still living beside you, if you intermarry with them, if you mix with them and they with you, then know for certain that Yahweh your god will stop dispossessing these nations before you, and for you they will be a snare, a pitfall, thorns in your sides and thistles in your eyes, until you vanish from this fine country given you by Yahweh your god.” (Joshua 23:12-14)

Dispossess others or be dispossessed, dominate or be exterminated: Israel cannot think beyond that alternative. A good illustration is David Ben-Gurion’s paradoxical thinking in the early 1960s. Discussing Kennedy’s determination to stop Dimona, Avner Cohen writes in Israel and the Bomb (1998): “Imbued with lessons of the Holocaust, Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears of security. […] Anxiety about the Holocaust reached beyond Ben-Gurion to infuse Israel’s military thinking.”[11] Yet in the very same period, Ben-Gurion seriously considered that, within 25 years, Israel will dominate the world, and Jerusalem “will be the seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by Isaiah.”[12]

The prohibition of moral conscience

Accusatory inversion is the birth process of Yahwism, which presents a murderous demon as the supreme God while demonizing the supreme God worshipped by other peoples. This can clearly be seen in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, with a very simple historical critical analysis.

In the Garden of Eden allegory, Yahweh forbids man access to “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). The Hebrew word for “knowledge”, daat, translates in Greek as gnosis, meaning inner awareness or insight rather than intellectual knowledge, so that “knowledge of good and evil” can be accurately translated as “moral conscience”, which is man’s capacity to distinguish good from evil, right from wrong, in any particular situation. So that the prohibition of the knowledge of good and evil simply means the inhibition of moral conscience.

To contextualize that Genesis story, we must recall that Egyptian and Persian religions taught that immortality is the reward for the blameless life. Since immortality was synonymous with divinity, being immortal could be expressed as “being among the gods”, or “being like the gods”. But in the Hebrew Bible, it is the serpent, a liar and deceiver, who tempts Adam and Eve into eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with the guarantee that, “the day you eat it you will not die,” but “your eyes will open and you will be like gods, who know good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). The serpent speaks like the religious wisdom of great religions. The Hebrew scribes can present him as a liar because, for them, immortality (“not dying”) only makes sense physically: Yahweh, they claim, intended Adam and Eve to be physically immortal on earth, and provided no otherworld for their afterlife. From this materialistic standpoint, the scribes denounce the promise of immortality through knowledge of good and evil as deceptive, and implicitly portray the Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian gods as liars.

We have been educated for so many generations by this story, and are so used to assuming that the serpent of Genesis is the satanic deceiver, that it is hard to see the Torah’s message for what it really was: a direct attack against the higher religions and their moral teaching that knowledge and practice of good and evil is the way to the blessed afterlife. But, I ask, if trying to become like gods is a Luciferian impulse, why did the Greek Fathers of the Christian Church stress man’s potential for deification (theosis) under the logic that “God became man so that man might become God”?[13]

William Blake’s gnostic-romantic vision of the Serpent
William Blake’s gnostic-romantic vision of the Serpent
Lucifer, by the way, is the Latin translation of the Greek Phosphoros (light-bearer), traditionally applied to the Morning Star, the planet Venus. In Isaiah 14:12-17, the prophet blames the Babylonian king Nabuchodonosor II (605-562) for having tried to “rival the Most High,” and sarcastically asks: “How did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn [Lucifer in the Latin Vulgate]?” Discarding the reference to the Babylonian king, Christian exegetes conflated “Lucifer” with the serpent of Genesis, and declared him the chief of the fallen angels, cast away from heaven because of his rebellious pride. Yet, if we look at Yahwism from the revisionist perspective I am advocating, Yahweh, the tribal god who usurped the majesty of the Supreme God, fits the Luciferian archetype. Yahweh is the infernal demon that wanted to be God instead of God.

Yahweh Molech
To understand Yahwism—and thereby Jewishness and Zionism—it is important to know the background of its infancy, which has nothing to do with the birth of universal monotheism.

There is a mounting scholarly assumption that Yahweh was originally the volcano god of a tribal people specialized in metallurgy (read here).[14] Hence his volcanic character. Any portrait of Yahweh would have to be based on Psalms 18:8: “Smoke rose from his nostrils, from his mouth devouring fire.” According to the “Kenite hypothesis”, the cult originated with the Kenites, who believed that, as a result of a curse upon their fratricidal ancestor Cain, they must live as restless wanderers, but inspire fear to the people among whom they dwell by their Yahweh-given law of sevenfold vengeance—revised as seventy-sevenfold by Cain’s descendant Lamek (Genesis 4:15-24).


We are often told that Yahweh is the god who abolished human sacrifice, when after ordering Abraham to tie his son Isaac, he held back his hand and contented himself with a ram (Genesis 22). Yet long after Abraham, some Israelite leaders seemed unaware of that great progress, and sacrificed their own children as burnt offering to Yahweh: Jephthah in Judges 11:29-40, Hiel in 1Kings 16:34, King Azaz in 2Kings 16:3, and King Manasseh in 2Kings 21:6. Not to mention the 32 holocausted Midianite virgins in Numbers 31 (read my article “A Holocaust of Biblical Proportions”).

For his alleged abolition of human sacrifice, Yahweh has been compared favorably with the Canaanite god Molech or Moloch, to whom firstborn infants were ritually sacrificed. But biblical scholars like Thomas Römer speculate that Molech was in fact none other than Yahweh himself. One of his arguments is that the noun mlk, vocalized as Molek in the Masoretic text (the ninth-century Tanakh that introduced vowels into the Hebrew script), but Melek in the Greek Septuagint, is identical to the Hebrew word for “king”, melek or melech (malik in Arabic), applied more than fifty times to Yahweh. The expression Yahweh melech, “Yahweh is king,” is found in Psalms 10 and still in use in Jewish religious songs.

The second argument for Molek’s ancient identity with Yahweh comes from the Leviticus prohibition of infant sacrifices: the prohibition proves the practice, and in this case, it proves that sacrifices were made in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God” (18:21); “Anyone […] who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death, [for] he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (20:2-5). Jeremiah 7:30-31 confirms that “the people of Judah” continued “to burn their sons and daughters […] in the Temple that bears my name, to defile it.” Although Yahweh declares it to be “a thing I never ordered, that had never entered my thoughts,” the very fact that a scribe wrote this indicates that the people who sacrificed their children did claim that it was required by Yahweh. In fact, Yahweh is caught lying, since he admits to Ezekiel, around the same period:

“And for this reason I gave them laws that were not good and judgements by which they could never live; and I polluted them with their own offerings, making them sacrifice every first-born son in order to fill them with revulsion, so that they would know that I am Yahweh” (Ezekiel 20:25-26).

In Exodus we learn that every first-born male, human or animal, was originally sacrificed on the eighth day after birth:

“You will give me the first-born of your children; you will do the same with your flocks and herds. For the first seven days the first-born will stay with its mother; on the eighth day you will give it to me” (Exodus 22:28-29).

Since animals were offered to Yahweh as holocausts from time immemorial, the implication is that the first-born son of every Jewish family had once been sacrificed as a holocaust too.

According to biblical record, it is King Josiah (640-609 BC) who abolished the sacrifices of children, “so that no one could pass his son or daughter through the fire of sacrifice to Molech” (2Kings 23:10). But according to Römer, it is only in the Persian era that human sacrifices became taboo.[15] They were substituted by animal offerings, as we learn from Exodus and Leviticus:

“All that first issues from the womb belongs to me: every male, every first-born of flock or herd. But the first-born donkey you will redeem with an animal from the flock; if you do not redeem it, you must break its neck. All the first-born of your sons you will redeem, and no one will appear before me empty-handed” (Exodus 34:19-20; reproduced almost verbatim in 13:11-13 and in Leviticus 27:26).[16]

As in a palimpsest, we read here two things: in ancient Yahwism, the first-born male of humans and beasts were sacrificed to Yahweh, while in the reformed Judaism elaborated during the Exile, the first-born male of humans was “redeemed” by an animal offering.

The Lord of the foreskins
It was also in Babylon that the Levites introduced the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision: “As soon as he is eight days old, every one of your males, generation after generation, must be circumcised” (Genesis 17:12).

In religious reforms, innovations are presented as the restoration of ancient and lost practices. And so the Levites introduced their new rite as a pre-Mosaic commandment. For that purpose they used or invented Abraham: as a figure born in Mesopotamia and given the Promised Land in inheritance, he is the personification of the program of the priestly cast exiled in Babylon.

In pre-exilic Yahwism, every first-born male was to be offered to Yahweh on the eighth day of his life (Exodus 22:28-29), and in post-exilic Judaism, every newborn male was to be circumcised on the eighth day. That parallel is a strong clue that circumcision was introduced as another substitute for sacrifice.

Circumcision was not a novelty. It was unknown in Mesopotamia, but was practiced in ancient Egypt on fourteen-year-old boys. Circumcision of prepubescent or adolescent males was also practiced in Syria, but not uniformly: the Philistines, an Indo-European people from the Aegean world (they gave their name to Palestine), are called “the uncircumcised” in the Bible: David offered two hundred foreskins of slaughtered Philistines to Saul as bride token for his daughter (1Samuel 18).

Circumcision of adolescents in ancient Egypt
Circumcision of adolescents in ancient Egypt
Circumcision rites practiced in ancient Judea before the Babylonian Exile were probably consistent with the practices of neighboring peoples, which would explain why it is not even mentioned in the Mosaic covenant. According to the Book of Joshua, it is only when the Hebrews had settled in the Promised Land of Canaan that “Joshua made flint knives and circumcised the Israelites on the Hill of Foreskins” (5:3).

The Yahwist priestly cast who legislated over the Judean community in Mesopotamia may have valued circumcision as a marker of ethnic identity, in a land where nobody else practiced it. But why would they introduce the radical novelty of circumcision on newborn babies? Continuity with the ancient rite of sacrificing the first-born on the eighth day is one explanation. But I suggest a more sinister one: by eighth-day circumcision, Yahweh’s covenant is not only “marked in [every Jew’s] flesh as a covenant in perpetuity” (Genesis 17:13), it is impressed into the deepest and unreachable layers of their subconscious, through symbolic castration and traumatic pain. Unlike the child or teenager, the newborn baby is incapable of elaborating any positive meaning to the violence done to him, and to integrate it consciously as part of his identity. Eight days after emerging from his mother’s womb—a trauma in itself, but a natural one—what he needs is to build an unshakable trust in the benevolence of those who welcomed him into this world. The trauma of circumcision alters his relationship to the world in a deep and permanent way.


Because infants cannot speak, rabbis who defend the tradition speak in their place to minimize their physical pain. But according to Professor Ronald Goldman, author of Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma, scientific studies prove the neurological impact of infant circumcision, for which no anesthesia is used. Behavioral changes observed after the operation, including sleep disorders and inhibition in mother-child bonding, are signs of a post-traumatic stress syndrome.[17] During the ceremony of brit milah, the mother is normally kept away from the scene, and the baby’s shrieks of agony are partly covered by the cheers of the men—a message in itself. But when mothers happen to hear them, they suffer enduring trauma themselves, as can be read on the Circumcision Resource Center web page “Mothers Who Observed Circumcision”: “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.” Nancy Wainer Cohen: “I will go to my grave hearing that horrible wail, and feeling somewhat responsible.”

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It is reasonable to assume, at least as a working hypothesis, that the trauma of circumcision at the age of eight days leaves a deep psychological scar. Abuse by adults is known to trigger in very young children’s minds a mechanism known as dissociation. The pain, the terror, the rage, and the memory of the experience, will be pushed out of ordinary consciousness, and form, so to speak, a separate personality, with a life of its own and a tendency to ooze into the normal personality. The idea of the wickedness of parental figures is so devastating that the repressed anger will be deviated away from them—in this case, away from the Jewish community as a collective parent. Is it farfetched to suppose a causal link between the trauma of eighth-day circumcision and the fact that Jews tend to be incapable of seeing the abuse perpetrated on them by their own community, and instead see the rest of the world as a constant threat?

Could it be that the trauma of eighth-day circumcision has created a special predisposition, a pre-programmed paranoia that impairs the Jews’ capacity to relate and react rationally to certain situations? Was brit milah (“covenant by circumcision”) invented some twenty-three centuries ago, as a kind of ritual trauma designed to enslave mentally millions of people, an unbreakable “covenant” carved into their heart in the form of an incurable subconscious terror that can at any time be triggered by code-words such as “Holocaust” or “anti-Semitism”?

It has been suggested that traumas can be transmitted “epigenetically”. According to a study conducted under the direction of Rachel Yehuda at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, “the trauma of the Holocaust is transmitted genetically” by “epigenetic heredity”;[18] May I suggest to Professor Yehuda that he now conduct a study on the epigenetics of eighth-day circumcision?

Baruch Spinoza said that, “circumcision alone will preserve the Jewish nation for ever.”[19] That explains the fierce resistance of Jewish authorities against every attempt to ban it, from Roman Emperor Hadrian (117-138) to the recent Icelandic bill, condemned by European Jewish organizations as “anti-Semitic”. It must be said that opposition against infant circumcision has often come from enlightened Jews. Abraham Geiger (1810-1874), one of the founders of Reformed Judaism in Germany, advocated giving up this “barbarian and bloody rite.” But, on this issue as on all others, it is always “the more ethnocentric elements—one might term them the radicals—who have determined the direction of the Jewish community and eventually won the day” (Kevin MacDonald).[20] To protect their bloody rite from criticism, Jewish activists have managed to normalize it in England and North America from the 1840s to the 1960s, under fraudulent medical reasons—an amazing demonstration of their power over Christian civilization.

Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., has edited some of his Unz Review articles in book form, under the title “Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us”: Essays on Jewish Power. He is also the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, 2014 (now banned from Amazon).

Notes

[1] Herbert George Wells, The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939), p. 128, on archive.org.

[2] Read in Félix Niesche, Voltaire antisémite, KontreKulture, 2019.

[3] Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State, Harvard University Press, 1995, p. 18.

[4] “Document: Shamir on Terrorism (1943),” Middle East Report 152 (May/June 1988), on https://merip.org/1988/05/shamir-on-terrorism-1943/

[5] Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.

[6] Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.

[7] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.

[8] I have conflated the two almost identical accounts of the same episode in 2Samuel 12:31 and 1Chronicles 20:3.

[9] Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 122–125, 4.

[10] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal,” New York Times, May 16, 2009.

[11] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, Random House, 1991, p. 141, quoted in Michael Collins Piper, Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, American Free Press, 6th ed., ebook 2005, p.[56] 117.

[12] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116

[13] John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Fordham University Press, 1974.

[14] Ariel David, “Jewish God Yahweh Originated in Canaanite Vulcan, Says New Theory,” Haaretz, April 11, 2018, on haaretz.com

[15] Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015, pp. 137-138.

[16] Numbers 18:15-17 declares redeemable the “first-born of an unclean animal” (unfit for consumption), but forbids to redeem “the first-born of cow, sheep and goat,” which are destined for the consumption of the Levites.

[17] Ronald Goldman, Circumcision, the Hidden Trauma: How an American Cultural Practice Affects Infants and Ultimately Us All, Vanguard, 1997.

[18] Tori Rodrigues, “Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones,” Scientific American, March 1, 2015, on www.scientificamerican.com.

[19] Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-political treatise, chapter 3, §12, Cambridge UP, 2007, p. 55.

[20] Kevin MacDonald, Cultural Insurrections: Essays on Western Civilizations, Jewish Influence, and Anti-Semitism, The Occidental Press, 2007, pp. 90-91.