If one deems it conceivable to educate oneself by acquiring certain phrases and acknowledging certain facts, of course it makes no difference whether the person educated in such a fashion emerged as raw material from the rationalist institution of Prussia or from a Talmudist family in Russian Poland. The Gospel, however, does not place upon humans the demand that they be educated, but rather another, much more important one, i.e., that they be born anew. I have already pointed to the fact that Jesus is to Judaism as Copernicus is to Ptolemaeus, and that he probably hit upon the desire for rebirth precisely by way of Judaism. He believed it rather unlikely that its wooden tautology, lacking content, could be overcome by simply covering it up with clothing, as one would dress a mannequin. The two adversaries Graetz and Geiger are joined in agreement that the Pharisaic period was the greatest flourishing of which their nation is capable. Just as it does against the Pharisees, Jesus’ word in Matthew 23:27 levels the kind of scathing criticism against our modern-day educational frauds that would be expected from the author of the pronouncement recorded in John 3:3.
Faced with this demand by Jesus and the entire Christian church – I believe that even Socinians, Unitarians, and Protestants of the newest sort would not hesitate to submit to it – the Jews find themselves in a much more unfavorable position than anyone else born of a woman. Initially, the natural human is merely indolent as far as intellectual life is concerned; and the Semite, above all the Jew, is hostile toward it by nature. This is precisely the case because, for a number of reasons not to be listed here, the Gospel was preached first to the Semites, more specifically, to the Jews. Places like Israel – and, because of Israel and the Koran, Arabia, too – knew a degree of intellectual life even before the Gospel and thus cannot be indifferent toward the Gospel. On account of its teachings, they will either become far better or far worse than they were before. This is the most fundamental reason for the lack of success peculiar to Christian missions with respect to Muslims and Jews in particular. Jews and Muslims are not just below the freezing point, as are other peoples who are not born-again, but are in fact considerably lower on the minus scale than others as a result of their previous relationship to the truth: They are not ill, as others are, but hardened. There are humans and peoples for whom Jesus has come, as he himself put it, to sit in judgment.
I have already explained many times that, as long as it lives, each religion must claim to be the only true religion. As a result, I would also forgive Judaism for intolerance, but only the kind of Judaism that would represent religion. I have not known such Judaism in the form of an official synagogue for almost two millennia, however; I only know such Judaism as the religion of individuals whose existence would be denied by no one who recalls that Jesus was a Jew as well, and that according to Jesus, the spirit blows where it chooses. Because the church assumed responsibility for the task that the later prophets assigned to their nation – a task that the nation was unable to solve, and because the church deepened and spiritualized these tasks just as the Platonists had deepened and spiritualized the Pentateuch’s crudely sensual tale of humans being made in the image of god, and because Israel did not wish to hear that it was rightly forced to hand over control, Israel sank so low as to view dominance over other peoples as its only ideal, but failed to anticipate dominance as the inherent consequence of the blessing it would have brought to the earth. Post-Christian Israel is to historical development as the new Schelling is to Hegel, as Beust and Harry Arnim are to Bismarck, i.e., it is an impotent envier and yapper.
print version
return to list
previous document