Religion and Nationality exist together in Judaism.  Their togetherness is not coincidental.  They are bound together in essence and origin.  The religion is the nation and the nation is the religion.  The two together constitute a civilisation.  

Nothing else existed within that civilisation when it was established in political power in a territory awarded to it by its God.  

When its political power in its own territory was broken, and it lost control of its national territory, it did not cease to be a nation.  It did not become a mere religion without national pretensions and become part of the surrounding civilisations in everything but the peculiarity of its beliefs—or its story—about the Creation of the world and the Fall of Man.

It tightened itself up as a nation while living within alien political structures, and emphasised the distinction between itself and all others.  

The miscellaneous ‘others’ were unified—without hierarchical distinction—into Gentiles, or the Goy.

The future of uncompromised Judaism was assured by intensive scholarship on the heritage of the Jewish past, so that it would be preserved for the future.  The Kings and Priests were lost with the fall of the Kingdom and the destruction of the Temple.

Their place was taken by the Rabbis.  

And the Torah, which is, roughly what the Christians call the Old Testament, was followed by the Talmud.  The Talmud, as far as I could gather, is a kind of casuistic interpretation of the principle of the Law inherent in the Torah, which serves as a guide to how Jews should live in Gentile states.

Forty or fifty years ago, when I had reason to try to figure out Judaism, I searched for a copy of the Talmud.  If it had been published, it had not been translated.  It now seems to have been published in translation in America, which has a low threshold of tolerance of confidential authority, but it has not come my way.

In the Jewish view of things the human race is divided into Jews and Gentiles.  The most important quality of Gentiles is that they are not Jews.

When I first came across this way of looking at the world, I was familiar with the word “gens” as meaning the sub-division of a tribe, and took it that the Jews, as a nation, saw the rest of the world as consisting of a confusion of tribal fragments, in which there might be brief surges of power, but those surges could not stabilise themselves because they rested on mere impulse and were not grounded in Law.

Law in that usage means something utterly different from what it means in current democratic usage.  There are now law-making factories called Parliaments, which make one law on some detail today and may make a contrary one tomorrow.  The law-making factory today is not itself bound by any law.  At least that is the case in Britain where the system was founded, and where the establishment of an over-riding power to curb Parliamentary impulse of capricious law-making is not tolerated.

Law was something very different in the Judaic system—and not only in that system.  It meant a way of living in accordance with conditions laid down authoritatively.  Life was to be lived within the constraints of those conditions.

The Christian development within Judaism sought to establish freedom from the Law.  The Jews, under a kind of Home Rule within the Roman Empire, were feeling their way towards a future that would be in keeping with their past, and one line of feeling led to what became Christianity.  This was entirely Jewish to begin with, but the conservative elements of Judaism resisted it, and the Christian cult gradually opened itself to the Gentiles.  Male body mutilation as a cost of entry was abolished and the rest is history.

Brendan Clifford

To be continued