(This interview by ‘The Saker’ was made for the Unz Review)
The Saker: I would now like to touch upon the so-called “Noahide Laws” listed by “Rambam” (Maimonides) as: prohibition of idolatry, blasphemy, homicide, of sexual immorality, of theft, on (eating) a limb of a living creature and the imperative of legal system] and I would focus on the first one: idolatry. Rabbi David Bar-Hayim explains that it refers to “Avodah Zarah” or “foreign worship”. Modern Judaics explain that Christianity is a “special type of avodah zarah is forbidden to Jews but permissible to gentiles, so that a non-Jew who engages in Christian worship commits no sin”.
Hoffman: Thank you for making me laugh. I’ve had a difficult day so the mirth is welcome. They want us to believe that Chazal (the supreme sages of the founding era of the Mishnah and Gemara), issued a decree stating that idolatry is forbidden to the Jews, but permissible to gentiles who worship the hated Jesus? Whoever believes that, I have a mountain here in Idaho that I will sell them at a discount.
You mentioned Moses Maimonides. He is the principal halachic authority in Ashkenazi Judaism. He wrote in his Avodat Kochavim (chapter 10): “Show no mercy to a non-Jew.” In this same volume, which comprises part of his magnum opus, the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides decreed: “It is a mitzvah (religious duty pleasing to God) to destroy Jewish traitors, minim and apikorsim, and to cause them to descend to the pit of destruction, since they cause difficulty to the Jews and sway people away from God, as did Jesus of Nazareth and his students, and Tzadok, Baithos and their students. May the name of the wicked rot.”
The words min and minim have been explained away as denoting “idolaters, akum,” wayward heretical Judaics, and other villains. The authoritative Shulchan Aruch however, pinpoints the source of the words min and minim to rabbinic wordplay on a description ascribed to Christians, “the faithful.” To mock the Christians, the rabbis of the Talmud took to calling them “sorts” as in “all sorts of malefactors.” Min and the plural form minim are therefore primarily references to Christians, while Tzadok and Baithos are examples of apikorsim, i.e. opponents of the Talmud. Min and minim are references to both Judaic and non-Judaic Christians. There is indeed, admittedly, a more intense detestation of Judaic people who convert to Christianity, in that they may be classed in other penal categories such as rodef (“pursuer”) and moser (“informant”).
The notion that gentile Christians are exempt from being treated as idolaters under the Noahide Laws, is shown to be demonstrably false in Hilchot Avodah Zara 9:4, where Maimonides states without qualification of any kind, that Christianity constitutes avodah zara, the worship of a false god. Let the apologists for Orthodox Judaism show us where in the Mishnah and Gemara, or in Rashi, the Mishneh Torah or the Shulchan Aruch, there is a dogma that the non-Judaic worshipers of Jesus Christ are not idolaters?
One whole volume of the Babylonian Talmud is devoted to the study of Avodah zara (idol worship). This tractate starts out discussing ways to cause non-Jews “distress.” For example, three days before the “idol-worshiping festivals” of Christmas and Easter, Rabbi Yehuda teaches that repayment of debts should be demanded from the goyim because it will cause them distress during their festive season (BT Avoda Zara 2a).
There’s a long section in tractate Avodah zara going over the details pertaining to goyim and the kashrut (kosher) status of wine. If goyim have unsupervised access to wine intended for Jews, then it can no longer be considered kashrut—the supposition being that the goyim poisoned or otherwise tainted the wine. There’s a hilarious passage where certain thieves come to the town of Pumbedita and open numerous barrels of wine. The sages of the Gemara consider whether the wine is contaminated by the thieves and therefore no longer kashrut. One sage relieves their anxiety. He tells them not to worry, “The wine is permitted. What is the reason? Most of the thieves in Pumbedita are Jews” (BT Avoda Zara 70a).
The Saker: Furthermore, can you explain why in the US these rabidly anti-Christian laws have been proclaimed as the “bedrock of society from the dawn of civilization” by both President Reagan and Congress? Jews are a small minority in the USA, and Orthodox/Hasidic Jews are a minority amongst US Jews – so who is behind such weird and yet very official proclamations?! Is this the result of lobbying by the so-called “Christian Zionists”?
Hoffman: I will answer from the New Testament. “The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore God sends them a strong delusion so that they may believe a lie, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (II Thessalonians 2:9).
Americans have an insufficient love for vital truths and it is God Himself who permits them to be seriously deluded as a result of their indifference. The stuff that the denizens of Churchianity such as Vice-President Mike Pence believe about “Israel” (more properly termed “counterfeit Israel”), is a curse on Pence and the nation in which he is a government leader.
Mr. Pence and his fellow “evangelicals” make themselves believe that the religion whose holiest book places Jesus in hell being eternally boiled in hot excrement (BT Gittin 57A; cf. https://revisionistreview.blogspot.com/2018/03/farrakhans-defense-of-jesus-against.html ), is the apple of God’s eye. They take pleasure in being on the side of the powerful; the truth be damned. There’s a price to pay for that level of degeneracy and it is God who imposes it. The double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. The “patriotic” wars America has waged from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, have added to the grievous woes of this world. The Deep State inside the U.S. government, which we fund with our taxes and which has our nation sunk in a trillion dollars in debt, is our formidable enemy. These indicators of decline and others even worse, like the opioid and methamphetamine epidemic of addiction, are the price America pays for its indifference to truth—we prefer situation ethics—and by that yardstick, objectively we are already Talmudists.
The Saker: In your books you explain that the primary book studied by Judaics is not what Christians call the Old Testament, but the Talmud. Yet even in the Talmud there are numerous references to the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible). Do you think that most rabbis sincerely believe in the “official” characterization of Christ as a “magician” and “blasphemer” who was sentenced to death for his blasphemies, or have they rejected Christ because He, from their point of view, did not fulfill what they saw as God’s promise to the Jewish people, an earthly kingdom and, instead, gave to the “nations” (goyim) the world he has promised the Jews? Could it be that in their mysticism, the rabbis deliberately reject God’s Messiah and try put themselves into His place?
Hoffman: It’s difficult to say which path is taken among the majority, but both lead to the same destination: execration of the Gospel, which is often obstructed as much by internal subversion by Talmudic and Zionist agents within the churches, as from hostile forces external to it. The capture of the papacy in the 16th century was a watershed in this regard. This profound secret is contested by those who reply, “But the popes burned the Talmud!” Like the history of the enslavement of whites in early America, our rejoinder is, to which century are you referring? The experience of whites in bondage in the 17th century resembled in many cases chattel slavery. By the early 19th century that experience was almost entirely that of indentured servitude, although the whip smarted no less when it struck Andrew Johnson, future Vice-President of the United States, for whom a reward was offered and a wanted poster issued when he ran away to Tennessee to escape his bondage in North Carolina.
In the history of the Catholic Church, if the reference is to the incineration of Talmud manuscripts in the medieval era, for example in the wake of the Paris Disputation in the 13th century, in which Nicholas Donin, an eminent Judaic convert to Christianity, debated and defeated the rabbis in the presence of the monarchs of France, on the contested subject of the Babylonian Talmud’s malice toward Christ—then truly that burning was a sincere effort to eradicate it.
In the papal 16th century however, the token burning of the Talmud authorized by the popes was almost entirely for theatrical effect. In The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome we demonstrate that it was the papacy which supported the printing (and circulation) of the finest edition of the Talmud ever published in recorded history, the magnificent Bomberg edition (1519-1523), which it is fair to say permanently rescued the Talmud from the possibility of extinction. The only book more sacred to the pontiffs of the Renaissance was the Kabbalah, and we document an instance when, as part of a clever ruse worthy of the Mossad, agents of the papacy (led by Sixtus of Siena) burned the Talmud in order to distract from a rescue operation they mounted in Cremona to save copies of the Kabbalistic Zohar that had been printed by the Catholic publisher Vincenzo Conti. Sixtus of Siena’s patron and protector was Cardinal Michele Ghisleri, who as Pope Pius V would help inspire the the forces that defeated the Turks at the naval battle of Lepanto.
At this juncture we ask an inconvenient question: which is more damaging — the invasion of Europe by the Turks—or the invasion of the minds and souls of the Catholic intellectual elite by the Kabbalah? Renaissance (and post-Renaissance) Rome’s duplicity is of a depth that is more than most people can imagine, and having an insufficient love for the truth, they cling to the legends they have imbibed rather than the harsh reality that the documentary record imparts.
For the Messiah-rejecting Judaics, it’s an axiom among paleo-conservatives that the Leo Strauss school of Neoconservatism is its own messiah. You see this messianism in their secular sphere of action. Look at the headline on p. A12 of the New York Times of February 27, 2003, just days before George W. Bush invaded Iraq: “Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region.” The Times wrote: “Israelis are now putting…hopes in an American war on Iraq…‘The shock waves emerging from post-Saddam Baghdad could have wide-ranging effects in Tehran, Damascus, and in Ramallah,’ Efraim Halevy, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s national security adviser, said in a speech in Munich this month….Until recently, Mr. Halevy was the chief of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency. He said, ‘We have hopes of greater stability, greater enhanced confidence from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic shores of Morocco.’
“Israelis have also suggested that that an Iraq war may salvage their economy…Mark Heller, a senior researcher at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said the potential engine for change would be the example of a transformed Iraq. ‘It’s at least conceivable that Al Jazeera will end up showing pictures of Iraqis celebrating in the streets, in which case people in other places —like Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt —are going to start saying, ‘If Iraqis deserve decent government, so do we.”
This is the utopian stupidity the Israelis sold to the Americans. The Zionists and Talmudists are their own messiah and they will, at any cost in human life and material treasure, seek to “perfect” the world in pursuit of their messianic utopia. Megalomaniacs don’t learn from their mistakes, even when they are catastrophic blunders. Bill Kristol will maintain his trademark smirk no matter the consequences of his own derangement.
The only post-war “celebrating in the streets” the Iraqis did was in 2008 when the intrepid journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi attended a Baghdad news conference where President Bush was speaking, touting the allegedly marvelous achievements of the U.S. invasion. Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush, shouting, “This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog. This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” Guards tackled Zaidi. He was beaten in jail and sentenced to three years in prison (he served nine months). Zaidi’s insult to Bush made him a celebrated hero in the Arab world.
But is there more to it? Is there an occult side? Here’s the data, draw your own conclusions: the Satanic character of traditional Judaism is not particularly difficult to discern if one adheres to the facts. The principal sacred text of the Kabbalah is the openly Satanic Zohar, which states the following: “Israel must make sacrifices to Satan so that he will leave Israel unmolested” (Zohar 2:33a). Also this: “The evil impulse is good, and without the evil impulse Israel cannot prevail in the world” (Zohar 1:61a).
These are appalling statements in a sacred book revered by the most politically influential rabbinic organization in America, Chabad-Lubavitch. I wish I could say they are anti-Semitic fabrications, but they are not. I can xerox them for you, with their context intact, from the edition of the Zohar published by Stanford University. Palestinians and goyim in general have the right and duty to assess the impact of this demonic Kabbalism in light of events in the Middle East and de facto Zionist control of the White House and Congress.
At first glance, it’s a seemingly lurid, even crackpot question to pose: was the Iraq War one of the Kabbalistic sacrifices which “Israel” must make to Satan, as the Zohar counsels? In the interests of justice and the advancement of knowledge, the question should be asked, and the Zohar should be studied (in the uncensored Pritzker edition from Stanford), in pursuit of an answer. The Zionist-instigated Iraq invasion took the lives of approximately a quarter-million Iraqis and 4,000 American youth. The fact that America fought the Iraq war for so-called “Israel” is slammed as a “virulent anti-Semitic fabrication.” But we have only to read the Times of February 27, 2003 to learn that the Israelis virtually lusted for the U.S. to invade, while pushing a boatload of nonsense with which to persuade the collective American golem of the prudence of their messianic Neocon mission.
To address the other part of your question, yes, the Old Testament is the prestigious prop that Orthodox Judaism wears emblazoned upon its public escutcheon. But as Jesus declared in Mark 7 and Matthew 15, the Pharisees nullify the Word of God while adhering to their own “traditions of men.” They call it “Torah” but it is really only their anthropomorphic oral law (Torah she’beal peh), later committed to writing after their rejection of the Messiah of Israel, beginning with the Mishnah.
The only authentic Torah of Yahweh is the written Torah (Torah she’bich tav)—the Pentateuch of Moses. It’s perverse that sola Scriptura “evangelical” Protestants delude themselves into imagining that the Pharisaic Judaism that concocted two diametrically opposed Torahs, is of God. They criticize Roman Catholic and Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians for giving authority to apostolic tradition, yet they claim that God is in love with the religion that is predicated on the authority of a bogus oral “Torah,” which Jesus repeatedly refuted and chastised in His confrontations with the Pharisees.
The Saker: I want to ask your opinion about two very different movements: first, the Karaites, who say that they reject the Talmud and “Rabbinical Judaism” and of Neturei Karta which are Haredi, but who vocally oppose the state of Israel and secular Zionism. In the Russian Empire the Karaites petitioned the Czar in order not to be considered as “Jews” and that their petition was accepted. I was also recently told by a friend that Nazi Germany also did not consider Karaites as Jews. And yet, as far as I know, and please correct me if I am wrong, the State of Israel considers them as “Jews”. But since they reject the Talmud, would that not make them apikorsim-traitors? How would you characterize the Karaites? What about the Neturei Karta? They reject the state of Israel, yet they live there, even in Jerusalem’s Meah Shearim quarter. But they travel to anti-Zionist conferences, even to Iran, and have met with the Iranian President. How do they escape being condemned as traitors or moser-informants? How different are they, in your opinion, from the other Haredi?
Hoffman: Karaites are the Judaics that Christians imagine Orthodox Judaism to be: an Old Testament-only religion. The Karaites were contemptuous of the rabbis of the Talmud for masquerading as the avatars of the Old Testament. They were cruelly persecuted by the rabbis in turn. Karaites have sometimes served to assist Christian scholars in discovering and parsing recondite rabbinic texts. Historically they have exhibited scant devotion to Judaic racial-nationalism. In the past 20 years or so however, some Karaite groups have accommodated themselves to Zionism and to a Judaic racial identity which would have been anathema to their forefathers.
No doubt the Tsars had the good sense to differentiate between Karaites and Talmudic Orthodox Judaism. I have heard the rumor about the Nazis and until I see the documentation, I don’t believe it. Adolf Hitler was driven by a Helena Blavatsky-type of occult Jew hate, which he acquired through Dietrich Eckart and others in Eckart’s milieu. Hence, Hitler viewed Judaic people the way Orthodox rabbis view goyim: as irredeemably evil, without regard to mitigating factors such as whether or not they were Karaites. Many illustrious and sincere Judaic converts to Catholicism for instance, were nonetheless rounded up by the Nazis and died in concentration camps, among them the theologian Edith Stein and the author Irène Némirovsky (whose novel David Golder is now considered anti-Semitic). The Nazis rather mysteriously liquidated stalwart activists and publishers like the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, whose educational work had resulted in massive public revulsion toward Judaism and Freemasonry. Kolbe headed a Catholic publishing empire dedicated to revealing the perfidy of Talmudic rabbis and Freemasons. What was he doing interned in Auschwitz? From the information we have seen, Karaites enjoyed no special immunity from Nazi persecution or extrusion, unless there were individual acts of mercy on the part of German personnel lower down in the chain of command.
The Israeli state is replete with apikorsim and in fact was founded by them, as we have said. In “Israel” in 2018 it remains largely a matter of indifference whether one is an atheist-Judaic, a Buddhist-Judaic or a Karaite-Judaic. If you were born of a Judaic mother you have the right to take up residence under the 1950 “Law of Return.”
As for the Neturei Karta, which is a very small group relative to other anti-Zionist “ultra-Orthodox” Hasidim such as the Satmar, they achieved fame (or infamy, depending on your perspective), when they participated in the “Holocaust” revisionist conference in Iran in December, 2006 and maintained friendly and supportive relations with the revisionists who were present.
Another anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox group, the Eda Haredit community, are of interest, in part because they are offshoots of the more substantial Hasidic sects like Toldot Aharon and Satmar, and less prone to engage in publicity stunts, yet they cause headaches for the Israeli government. These groups are the heirs to the “old Yishuv” — the Talmudic community that resided relatively peacefully side by side with the Arabs in Palestine, before the conquest by Britain and the Zionists. They don’t accept Israeli government welfare payments or the National Insurance program. Most contentious of all, they despise the Israeli military and refuse to be conscripted. Eda Haredit members lynched an effigy of an Israeli soldier and hung it from a building in Jerusalem. They demonstrate in the streets against the draft and are beaten by Israeli police and soldiers. Dozens of them are in prison. They can’t obtain a passport until they reach 35-years-of-age — the age at which subjection to the draft ends. They are viciously attacked by the majority of the Hasidim who favor Zionism, such as in the pages of the influential Talmudic newspaper Yated Ne’eman.
In sum, yes, they are courageous dissidents vis a vis secular Israeli society and the mainstream of the modern Orthodox and Hasidic movements. However, if we revert back to the time before the founding of the Israeli entity, all of these groups — Neturei Karta, Satmar, Eda Haredit and their progenitors, detested Jesus, obstructed Christians, oppressed their adherents by micromanaging their lives, practiced the arts of deception and theft, and are suspected of widespread child molestation based on the halacha which permits sex with children under a certain age (for boys it is below the age of nine). The relevant Babylonian Talmud tractate shows that this permission to molest young boys is granted:
“The law is in accordance with the ruling of Rav….Rav says, ‘…the Torah does not deem the intercourse of one who is less than nine years old to be like the intercourse of one who is at least nine years old, as for a male’s act of intercourse to have the legal status of full-fledged intercourse the minimum age is nine years…if a child who is less than nine years old engages in homosexual intercourse passively, the one who engaged in intercourse with him is not liable” (BT Sanhedrin 54b).
This is plainly criminal and inhuman. Outside of Tantric Hinduism and the Church of Satan, we can think of no other religion which formally renders such abominable predation permissible. Consequently, in terms of the rehabilitation of their image, if they continue with their allegiance to Talmudic and post Talmudic halacha of the horrendously foul nature we find in Sanhedrin 54b, it matters not to a Christian whether a few Hasidic sects are implacably opposed to Zionism and the Israeli state. Their anti-Zionism does not absolve them of their other transgressions. They remain an offense to God and man.
The Saker: I have many secular Jewish friends, some who are somewhat aware of the kind of issues you have raised in your replies (those with at a least basic religious education), but most of them are totally oblivious to these facts. For example, they would dismiss the Hasidic rabbis and their followers as irrelevant nutcases and – correctly – point out that there are plenty of genocidal maniacs in other religions too!). In fact, many of them would very strongly suspect that those who, like you, raise these issues, of harboring strong anti-Jewish motives. There is, after all, a secular Jewish identity, at least since the 19th century, which is strongly based on the cultural aspects of “Rabbinical Judaism.”
Hoffman: On what basis can this writer be accused of “harboring strong anti-Jewish motives”? This monotonous jargon does not impress. Reckless accusations founded on nothing more than a morally superior interlocutor’s ignorant presumption that any rigorously critical study of Orthodox Judaism is hateful, does not call forth a response, other than pity. We would laugh out of consideration an Italian who came forward to announce that the articulation of harsh truths about the papacy was evidence of harboring strong anti-Italian motives. Here is the only standard that matters: res ipsa loquitur. The facts speak for themselves.
Who are these self-described “Jews” for whom the pidyon shevuyim (redemption of the captive) means nothing? What are their credentials for passing judgments on the accuracy of our research or the purity of our motives? Are they scholars? Clairvoyants?
If they “dismiss” the Hasidic rabbis as inconsequential “nutcases,” perhaps your secular Judaic friends may wish to look closer at the identity of the personnel holding many top ministerial posts in the cabinet of Binyamin Netanyahu, and influencing the United States government through the efforts of Chabad-Lubavitch and Agudath Israel of America. Maybe they will condescend to take a peek at demographic statistics showing that the strictly Orthodox are the fastest-growing Judaic population in the Israeli state and the United States.
Furthermore, throughout our conversation I have made reference to Orthodox Judaism without limiting myself to Hasidim. The “modern Orthodox” as they are known, to distinguish them from Hasidim, are heirs to the zealous Talmudism that pre-existed Hasidism (which arose in the 18th century). They number in their ranks Jared Kushner, Steven Spielberg, former Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), and tens of thousands of other movers-and-shakers in government, business and media. The modern Orthodox operate Yeshiva University in New York, which includes the prestigious Cardozo School of Law, whose graduates often become elite government and corporate attorneys and staff powerful non-governmental agencies such as the ADL. “Irrelevant nutcases”?
The Saker: I always try to explain that, unlike ethnicity, religion in a choice and thus a legitimate target for scrutiny and criticism and my secular Jewish friends accept that on a logical level, but on an emotional level they still feel like something dear to them is being attacked. How do you deal with that? How do we, by even raising these topics, avoid pushing our non-Haredi or, at least, non-Orthodox, Jewish friends or readers to “circle the wagons” with the hardcore Haredi? What do you think is the best strategy to completely separate issues of ethnicity/culture with specific issues of faith/religion?
Hoffman: If accurate scholarship pushes these supposedly confirmed secularists into the ranks of the religious-fanatic Hasidim (“Haredi”), then they must take the consequences of the choices they make. If our study of early modern papalism in The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome were to cause a defensive over-reaction on the part of nominal Catholics, who then swore fealty to the ultramontane extremes of popery, how would anyone overcome folly like that, made by one’s own free will? There is a Yiddish proverb: “A shpigl ken oykh zayn der grester farfirer.” (“A mirror can also be the biggest deceiver”).
The Saker: thank you very much for taking the time to reply to my questions!
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Historian Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York Bureau of the Associated Press and the author of nine books of history and literature. These include Judaism Discovered, as well as Judaism’s Strange Gods; Usury in Christendom: The Mortal Sin that Was and Now is Not; The Great Holocaust Trial; Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, and his latest, The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome. These volumes are available from Hoffman’s online store. Website: www.RevisionistHistory.org, and https://michaelhoffman.substack.com/.
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