Semitism Ascendant: The story of ancient Mesopotamia [SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM Part 2]
An MOR series: SEMITISM vs. ANTISEMITISM: The structure of our history
If you didn’t read Part 1 yet, you may do so here:
In Part 1 of this series I mentioned Sargon of Akkad—a man with no equal—who led the ancient Semitic lower classes in revolution against their Sumerian rulers and established the Akkadian Empire 4,300 years ago.
This event—Sargon’s revolution—established a remarkably stable legal and political culture centered on the ideals of ethics, justice, and the protection of the vulnerable that, over the next 4,300 years, would liberate humans by the hundreds of millions. (Still at it…)
It is this remarkable culture, this ideology, that I am calling semitism.
In Part 2, which follows below, I’ll give you a sense for the literally epic impact of semitism on world history. I hope I can contribute something to a new self-awareness of Western semitism, so that it may continue to gather strength for one last great fight for liberty.
(I apologize for the Tolkienian overtones, but it’s… all true!).
A note on terminology (again)
Those important Mesopotamian kings who, in our deepest antiquity, defended the legal and political culture of semitism, I call semitic.
That’s ‘semitic’ with a lower case ‘s’ instead of the capitalized ‘Semitic.’ I am referencing ideology rather than a linguistic community.
Of course, there is a relationship here between language and ideology. It was speakers of Semitic languages who first established this ideology, and it was speakers of Semitic languages who preserved and developed it (that’s one reason I am calling it ‘semitism’). But speakers of non-Semitic languages may of course adopt this ideology—and over the centuries many have. In three important epochs, the peoples of Babylonia were ruled by non-Semitic speakers who lovingly ensured the continuity of semitism in that civilization.
Now, since the pursuit of compassion, ethics, tolerance, justice, and equality is what I call semitism, then it follows, staying within the strictest etymological logic, that the totalitarian quest to make us all slaves should be called antisemitism.
Well guess what? We already speak like that. The German Nazis meant to destroy democracy and make every one of us (including the Germans) slaves, and we do call them antisemites. Moreover, in perfect agreement with the distinctions I am pushing, what the German Nazis hated was not the Semites, but semitism.
I can prove that. All it takes is a short detour to consider the Nazi relationship to the Arabs. Because although Arabs speak a Semitic language, the Nazis were quite attracted to them. And Adolf Hitler himself was besotted with the Arab religion, Islam.
Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of armaments, wrote about that after the war in his contrite memoir, penned in prison. Hitler, Speer said, loved Islam because it was “a religion that believed in spreading the faith by the sword and subjugating all nations to that faith.” Had the Muslims conquered Europe in the Middle Ages, instead of “[getting] driven back at the Battle of Tours [Poitiers],” Hitler believed, then “Islamized Germans could have stood at the head of the Mohammedan Empire.”1
That’s interesting. It means that the German-supremacist Adolf Hitler would have liked the Muslim Arabs to militarily defeat the Medieval Germans! And just so that Germans could inherit Islam! This betrays a rather pronounced love of the Mohammedan religion.
And he would harp on this theme often.
“Hitler usually concluded this historical speculation by remarking: ‘You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. … The Mohammedan religion … would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity.’ ”2
Consistent with all that, before and during WWII, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis happily forged important alliances with leaders all over the Muslim Arab world, and these Muslim Arab leaders and their movements reciprocated Hitler’s love of Islam with open admiration for the German Nazis.
It all fits, because, despite all the talk of the ‘Abrahamic faiths,’ it is Judaism—and not Islam—that has come to our day as the human vehicle expressing the ideals of Mesopotamian semitism. Islam is something else entirely and has no real relationship to Judaism. Any claim to the contrary is a simple fraud—a fraud that is foundational to the genesis of Islam.
As Hitler correctly recognized, Islam expresses ideals either identical or adjacent, functionally and politically, to those of the German Nazis. So, of course, Hitler had no quarrel with Islam—to the contrary. His quarrel was with the human vehicle of semitism in the West, the Jews, and with the most sophisticated modern expression of semitism, which is Western democracy. That’s what the Nazis hated.
I claim my terms of art, and the model they support, nicely fit other centuries too. The way to test that is to consult the rest of our history. For if this really fits as a general model, then past haters of Jews should also have been totalitarians interested in enslaving every one of us (not just in killing Jews). And they are! The jihadists, the German Nazis, the Russian boyars, the ‘Holy’ Inquisitors, the ancient Roman aristocrats, and the ancient Greco-Macedonian aristocrats, all of whom committed genocide against the Jews, were all busy making slaves of everyone else too. They were enemies of everyone’s liberty.
Antisemites!
Of course, the medieval and ancient totalitarian oppressors of Westerners have been apologized for in our schools with the claim that slavery and oppression were universal in the past because, allegedly, before modern times, the condition of ignorance on matters ethical was suffered by all. But that story is false.
They’ve sold us on this story because we learn almost nothing about ancient Mesopotamia in school, so we’ve accepted the ethnocentric lie that the entire ancient world was as awful as the Greco-Romans, whom we were schooled into accepting as our main heritage. But some ancient societies, by stark contrast to the Greco-Romans, were liberal.
Yes, there was some slavery in Mesopotamia too, but those slaves were relatively few, and they were treated as persons, not animals (they didn’t have freedom, but they did have important legal rights, and they were not treated with cruelty, much less wanton cruelty).3 In their values and civilizational goals, Babylonian societies were remarkably similar to our modern, democratic Western States.
That similarity is no coincidence because Mesopotamian semitism—which has been fighting for everyone’s liberty from the earliest civilization, in Sumer—is also our heritage. Though the ancient defenders of semitism were ultimately defeated by the Greco-Macedonians in their home territory of Mesopotamia, the Jews, who survived the destruction of the Persian Empire, continued the political and ethical tradition of semitism in the West, and inherited this tradition to the Greco-Romans, whose Christian descendants at long last fulfilled the promise of semitism and produced modern Western democracy.
In sum, in this analysis, the struggle between semitism and antisemitism is the engine of our entire political history. And Judeophobia—the specific hatred of Jews (as such)—though it is certainly antisemitism, must be recognized as a special case of it.
Okay, enough about terminology. Now let’s get on with the story.
The mists of Mesopotamian antiquity
Yes, Judeophobia is a special case of antisemitism, but for a long time now this special case has been the entire game. That’s because, in the 7th century, Islam, that great antisemitic current, destroyed semitism in Mesopotamia, so the Jews (and their Christian progeny) are all that survives from ancient semitism. Yet the impact of Judeo-Christian thought to liberate all humans has been tremendous. Think only of the weekly day of rest, a blessing the entire planet inherited from the Jewish Sabbath. Or think of democracy, another modern consequence of Judeo-Christian semitism.
Semitism has always been doing this—it has always been fighting for us. To discover that millenarian pattern, we must go back to the beginning: to Mesopotamian antiquity.
In Part 1 I told you about Sargon of Akkad—Sargon the Great—who led the subjugated Semites in Sumer to revolt and with their help established the Akkadian Empire. This got semitism rolling 4,300 years ago. And the Akkadians kept themselves on that roll for a good 200 years.
But empires fall. The Gutians—who’d already been making trouble—came from the east and imposed themselves.
The scholar Bill T. Arnold explains that in Mesopotamia the “downfall of the Akkadian empire” was interpreted “for well over a millennium” in entirely moral terms. According to a cuneiform Mesopotamian document called the Weidner Chronicle, “Marduk, King of the Gods” sided with the Gutians against the Akkadian king Naram-Sin because the latter had allegedly become oppressive against his own people:
“Naram-Sin destroyed the people of Babylon. Twice [Marduk] summoned the Gutian army against him.”4
The archaeological evidence rescues the reputation of Naram-Sin, who appears to have been a good king. But even if the Weidner Chronicle—a religiously propagandistic text uninterested in historical accuracy, and written a great many centuries after Naram-Sin—is unfair to that king, what I am drawing attention to here is a Babylonian tendency to view historical events in moral terms. That’s something that we also find—and in spades—in the Hebrew Bible (Tanach), where God sends enemies to punish kings accused of deviating from ethical governance (see the Book of Kings and the Book of Chronicles).
And this appears to be a very old Babylonian tradition. Consider the manner in which Utu-hengal, who expelled the Gutians after they had ruled for about one hundred years, interpreted his success in the famous Utu-hengal victory stele or Tablet of Utu-hengal:
… Gu[tium], the fanged serpent of the mountain, who acted with violence against the gods, who carried off the kingship of the land of Sumer to the mountain land, who fi[ll]ed the land of Sumer with wickedness, who took away the wife from the one who had a wife, who took away the child from the one who had a child, who put wickedness and evil in the land (of Sumer) — the god Enlil, lord of the foreign lands, commissioned Utu-hegal, the mighty man, king of Uruk, king of the four quarters, the king whose utterance cannot be countermanded, to destroy their name.
The moral interpretation—where divine punishment follows unethical treatment of the governed—is impossible to miss: The god Enlil favored Utu-hengal because the Gutians had “filled the land of Sumer with wickedness,” meaning murder, because the Gutians had conquered Akkad by the sword, rape (“took away the wife from the one who had a wife”), and slavery (“took away the child from the one who had a child”). Utu-hengal understood the language of universal human rights: whoever brought murder, rape, and slavery “put wickedness and evil in the land.”
Now, historians have chosen to call Utu-hengal, his son in law Ur-Nammu, and Ur-Nammu’s dynastic descendants ‘neo-Sumerians kings.’5 I think that label is misleading. Yes, they were ethnically Sumerian, but they were entirely uninterested in recreating the ancien régime political tradition of Sumer. To the contrary, Utu-hengal and Ur-Nammu saw themselves as restorers of the revolutionary Akkadian Empire. They were ideological semites.
And that, in itself, is striking. It means that, by the time the Gutians came along, it no longer mattered whether the people of Babylonia were ruled by Semites or Sumerians because Sargon’s monarchical ideology—extending rights to everyone, and protecting the lower and vulnerable classes—had been thoroughly institutionalized during the two centuries of Akkadian rule and had transformed everybody. Utu-hengal and Ur-Nammu, ethnic Sumerians, were proud defenders of this semitic liberal culture.
As a check on this argument, consider the great expert on the ‘Sumerians,’ Samuel Noah Kramer. To him it is all ‘Sumer’ up until the end of the so-called ‘Neo-Sumerian’ Empire. And he waxes lyrical on the ethics of the ‘Sumerians.’ Thus, he writes that:
“The Sumerians, according to their own records, cherished goodness and truth, law and order, justice and freedom, righteousness and straightforwardness, mercy and compassion, and naturally abhorred their opposites, evil and falsehood, lawlessness and disorder, injustice and oppression, sinfulness and perversity, cruelty and pitilessness.”6
Yes, but all of his examples (without exception) of ‘Sumerians’ expressing such lofty values are from after Urukagina’s and Sargon’s revolutions. These, therefore, are the values of Akkadian civilization, which the post-Sargonian ‘Neo-Sumerian’ rulers such as Utu-hegal and Ur-Nammu had already been raised in.
The Akkadian gods were ethical, too. Kramer—for whom, recall, everything after Sargon and before the fall of the ‘Neo-Akkadian’ or ‘Neo-Sumerian’ Empire is still ‘Sumer’—writes as follows:
“The gods, of course, also preferred the ethical and moral to the unethical and immoral, according to the Sumerian sages, and practically all the major deities of the Sumerian pantheon are extolled in their hymns as lovers of the good and the just, of truth and righteousness.”7
This ethical orientation was so strong that even the gods were punished if unethical. Enlil, “the most important deity in the Sumerian pantheon,” despite his supreme powers, was seized by the other gods and punished after he raped the goddess Ninlil.8
To signal the restoration of this ethical civilization, semitism, Ur-Nammu and his successors adopted the title ‘King of Sumer and Akkad,’ and ‘King of the Four Quarters (of the Universe),’ earlier worn by the Akkadian emperors.
In the prologue to the Code of Ur-Nammu, the oldest known legal code rescued as a text from the mists of time, the king expressed in lofty tones the grand purpose of Akkadian civilization:
“… Ur-Nammu … in accordance with his principles of equity and truth … established equity in the land; he banished the curse, violence, and discord … The orphan was not delivered to the wealthy man; the widow was not delivered to the powerful man; the man of one shekel was not delivered to the man of one mina [= 60 shekels].”
The next emperor, Shulgi, son of Ur-Nammu, married a Semite, Abisimti, from which we may infer the perceived importance of sending the message, from the ‘neo-Sumerian’ throne, of the continued alliance and fellowship between Sumerians and Semites in the restored Akkadian civilization. Abisimti was “energetic and active,” and she retained the title of ‘queen’ after his death, under Shulgi’s three successors, in order: Amar-Sin, Shu-Sin, and Ibbi-Sin. The first two were sons of Shulgi, the third was his grandson (son of Shu-Sin). Of these three, as Samuel Noah Kramer points out, at least two bear Semitic names. These and other details together support Kramer’s comment that Shulgi “seems to have had a Semitic orientation.”9
Notwithstanding that, the same author observes that Shulgi loved Sumerian culture and literature, and as such became a patron of the edubba, the Sumerian school. The survival of this school during the Akkadian Empire until the ‘Neo-Sumerian’ Empire of Shulgi indicates that, from Sargon’s time, the mutual tolerance of both main cultures in the Akkadian Empire had been established.10
This tolerance was the product of the ethics of semitism, institutionalized from Sargon’s days forward, continued by the ‘neo-Sumerian’ kings, who in reality were neo-Akkadian kings, and quite proud to be representing that ethical tradition.
Shulgi, for instance, considered one of the greatest kings in Mesopotamian history, stated in the text ‘Shulgi, King of Abundance’ that among his monarchical obligations were the following:
“To let justice never come to an end. To throw evil in the Depths, as if it were a light stone, to let no man make his fellow a hireling.”11
The peoples of the restored Akkadian Empire (the ‘Neo-Sumerian’ Empire of historians) were fortunate to have rulers whose ambition was to be seen by the governed—even by the very weakest (widows and orphans)—as defenders of ethics and justice!
After the ‘neo-Sumerians’ it was ethnic Semites in power again, this time Amorites, during the long Isin-Larsa period about which little is known, when power was fragmented again in local city-States.
Then one Amorite King, Hammurabi, reunified Babylonia. Three hundred years after Shulgi and half a millennium after Sargon, Hammurabi renewed the title of ‘King of Sumer and Akkad’ when he founded the Old Babylonian Empire.
In the prologue to his famous legal code—which would be copied and studied by Mesopotamian scholars for a millennium to come—Hammurabi expressed what he understood to be his monarchical obligation:
“to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; … and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.”
This is semitism.
Antisemitism, then, seeks to destroy the empire of righteousness (ethics), the protection of the weak, and the well-being of mankind.
Hammurabi’s Amorite dynasty was ejected from Babylonian power when the Hittite King Mursili I came down from Anatolia and raided Babylon. Mursili quickly returned to Anatolia—his campaigns had strained his resources and produced much unrest at home—but not before leaving his Kassite allies in control of Babylonia.
The Kassites were highly successful rulers of Babylonia, the southern region of Mesopotamia, and ruled it longer than anyone else. We don’t know much about them, but everything we do know suggests that the Kassites, who did not speak a Semitic language, became ideological semites. The Kassite kings adopted the title ‘King of Sumer and Akkad,’ kept Akkadian as the official language, and kept also the bureaucratic structures of the Old Babylonian Empire. Such continuity would explain why, long after the Kassites, who themselves ruled for a good four centuries, Hammurabi’s Code continued to be tremendously influential.
At long last the Kassite Empire in Babylonia was undone by attacks from the Assyrian Empire to the north and from the Elamites to the east. The Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III conquered Babylon in the year 729 BCE.
The encounter between the Kassites and the Assyrians helps us see clearly, once again, that the terms employed here reference ideology, not language or ethnicity. For just as semitism could be adopted by rulers who speak a non-Semitic language, as with the Kassites, so could antisemitism seduce speakers of Semitic languages, such as the Assyrians, who spoke a dialect of Akkadian.
Evil had come to roost. Completely given over to war, slavery, and cruelty, the antisemitic Assyrians were consummate monsters, astonishingly and proudly brutal. Their strategy of control was terrorism, so in their inscriptions the Assyrian kings—quite unlike Sargon, Ur-Nammu, Shulgi, and Hammurabi—celebrated the suffering that they imposed on everyone, boasting of how they ravaged cities, exterminated and exiled entire peoples, tortured innocents, and enslaved the masses.
What Assyriologist Marc van de Mieroop calls “the ideological basis of rule in Assyria” presents some important functional similarities to the later jihadis, so obsessed with totalitarian order. Consider:
jihadis partition the world into Dar al Islam (the ‘House of Islam’) and Dar al Harb (the ‘House of War’);
jihadis conceive of those living in Dar al Harb as ‘infidels’ who’ll either join Islam or else be killed or enslaved (a process that, in their conception, brings ‘peace’); and
jihadis consider that terrorism is a good and proper method both for keeping existing Muslims in line and also for making additional Muslims.
Here’s the Assyrian version of all that:
“The king, as representative of the god Assur, represented order. Wherever he was in control, there was peace, tranquility, and justice, and where he did not rule there was chaos. The king’s duty to bring order to the entire world was the justification for military expansion. This idea pervaded royal rhetoric. All that was foreign was hostile, and all foreigners were like non-human creatures. Images of swamp-rats or bats, lonely, confused, and cowardly, were commonly applied to those outside the king’s control. This message was communicated through a variety of means. Royal inscriptions are the most eloquent to us today, but in Assyrian times they were incomprehensible to the mostly illiterate population. The people were informed through events such as victory parades, and there is evidence that certain campaign accounts were read aloud in the cities.”12
To get a sense for what Assyrian subjects heard when these kingly inscriptions “were read aloud in the cities,” let us consider Ashurnasirpal II, the third king. His idea of ‘order’ was apparently to demand the most oppressive tribute imaginable from the cities he ruled, which caused these cities to rebel. So he punished them. To boast of that punishment, Ashurnasirpal didn’t have the modern tools employed by the Hamas terrorists, who proudly broadcast on social media their gruesome crimes of October 7th, 2023. So this Assyrian king used official inscriptions and had them read aloud to his enslaved subjects:
“I built a pillar over against the city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted and I covered the pillar with their skins. Some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes and others I bound to stakes round the pillar. I cut the limbs off the officers who had rebelled. Many captives I burned with fire and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears, and their fingers, of many I put out their eyes. I made one pillar of the living and another of heads and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I consumed with fire. The rest of their warriors I consumed with thirst in the desert of the Euphrates.”
Mordor.
The shadow of death extended over a vast territory, for the Assyrians created the largest empire the world had ever seen.
Many people were cowed, so terrible was Assyrian violence. Yet the Assyrians couldn’t shake their ‘Babylonian Problem,’ as scholars have begun to call it: no matter how much violence the Assyrians directed at Babylon, the Babylonians would revolt again. Again and again.
This was no doubt because, for the Babylonians, who had discovered the secret of cultural tolerance and political freedom, nothing in the Universe could ever make sense again unless the psychopathically insane and bloodthirsty Assyrians were first utterly defeated. It was an existential fight, and it led to the first great ‘World War’ of antiquity (there would be two more).
That world war was won by Nabopolassar, believed to be a Chaldean (again, a Semite), and a man larger than life. It was he who led the oppressed Babylonians to destroy the Assyrian Empire.
After this, Nabopolassar declared himself ‘King of Sumer and Akkad,’ which is to say successor to Sargon, and formed the Neo-Babylonian Empire, restoring the culture of semitism in Mesopotamia. This happened 1,700 years after Sargon, in the year 609 BCE.
Semites and Iranians, unite!
To defeat the Assyrians, the Babylonian Nabopolassar had allied himself with Cyaxares, leader of the Medes, an Iranian people (to the northeast) also oppressed by the Assyrians. Following victory over the Assyrians, the Medes created a vast empire that did not, however, dispute Nabopolassar’s right to Babylonia or, indeed, to the rest of Mesopotamia.
But though that alliance held, the destruction of the Assyrian cities by the Medes had caused much shame in Babylonia, homeland of Semitism. The Medes had demolished and burned everything in the Assyrian cities, not even sparing the temples, and they had exterminated the population, including the children.
Nabopolassar was not entirely innocent but the point here is the shame, felt so keenly that later chroniclers in Babylon tried to exonerate Nabopolassar and blame the Medes entirely. Why so much shame? Because within semitism such violence, even against the cruel Assyrian terrorists, was considered a sin. As in the modern West, the Babylonians considered that war—even against terrorists—had to be conducted according to rules of ethics.
The Medes would not long stay so violent, however, as Iranian civilization was undergoing a profound transformation. The vast Median empire was lord over many eastern Iranians who already followed the path of universal peace, brotherhood, and justice preached by the Iranian prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra). In one of the most important religious transformations in history, the Medes—and also their allies, the Persians (another Iranian people)—converted to Zoroastrianism.
Thus it was that when Astyages, Cyaxares’s son, became oppressive, the Median nobles allied with the Persians, led by Cyrus, King of Anshan, who, spearheading a large army of peasants (according to Herodotus), overthrew Astyages in a new revolution. Cyrus—Cyrus the Great—re-founded the Median empire as the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550 BCE).
Soon after that, Cyrus successfully led a gigantic multi-ethnic army to defeat King Croesus of Lydia, an antisemite who had attacked Cyrus’s Western border and begun to enslave his people. And then Cyrus unseated Nabonidus, then ruler of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, who, judging by the alliance that Herodotus alleges he’d established with Croesus, was apparently becoming oppressive too (Cyrus’ propaganda certainly accuses that).
With the additional conquests of Cyrus’s son Cambyses, the Persian Empire became something never before seen. From Egypt and present-day Turkey (and even a tiny piece of Europe), in the West, to what is now Pakistan, in the East, this empire would encompass the peoples of Western Asia and bless them all with a combination of Zoroastrian and semitic ethics.
Cyrus was… the Messiah.
I am not indulging hyperbole—that’s a literal claim. The Book of Isaiah, origin of the Jewish messianic tradition, speaks of an ethical and revolutionary liberator (not a mystical sacrificial victim), and calls Cyrus the Messiah of the Lord: “Thus says the Lord to his Messiah, to Cyrus whom I took by his right hand” (Isa 45:1). He is the only figure to be given this title by Isaiah: the Lord’s Messiah. And he certainly looks the part: Cyrus ‘saved the world’: he brought peace almost to the entire oikoumene (what the Greeks called the ‘Known World’ of city folk).
Under Cyrus and his successors, the Achaemenid Persian Empire became a grand alliance of ideological semites and Zoroastrians, united in the common mission of universal peace, brotherhood, and justice.
Semitism, and the Achaemenid Persian Empire
Semitism, via the Jews and Christians of the West, continues to this day as a powerful force in World History, whereas Zoroastrianism has all but disappeared. Thus, it is attractive for my purposes to see the enduring Zoroastrian legacy primarily as a contribution to the historical stream of Babylonian semitism (with which Zoroastrianism has a deep ideological affinity).
This approach is also supported by other details.
First, though a Zoroastrian, Cyrus governed like a good Semitic king: 1) he incorporated Babylon into his empire and made it one of his capitals; 2) he added ‘King of Sumer and Akkad’ to his titles, thus declaring himself a successor to Sargon; 3) he ensured that the Babylonian Semitic traditions of religion and law continued; and 4) he made Aramaic—a Semitic language that had become the lingua franca of Mesopotamia by this time (much like English is today at a global level)—the official language of the Persian Empire in those regions settled by Semites.
But that’s not all. In Babylon, Cyrus encountered a great many Jews—also Semites—who’d been exiled there some 70 years earlier by King Nebuchadnezzar II (son of Nabopolassar) after an Israelite revolt against Babylon. Cyrus found in the Jewish legal and religious movement the most refined, mature, and sophisticated development of the legal project for peace and justice initiated so long ago by Sargon the Great. And so Cyrus, the Zoroastrian king of kings of Western Asia, the most powerful man who had ever existed, became the great patron of Judaism, a religion founded on the memory of a slave revolt (see Book of Exodus) that expressed the central values of Babylonian semitism in its most developed and exquisite form to date.
The Jews of that time were proselytizers: they wanted to convert the entire world to Judaism and thus put an end to war and injustice, establishing peace and brotherhood everywhere. According to what is narrated in the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (included in Tanakh, which is included in the Christian Bible), Cyrus appreciated these Jewish goals, and supported and subsidized the Jewish movement, as did his successors. Thus protected within the Persian Empire, the Jews carried a universal message of love, peace, and justice everywhere they went, becoming—in part through conversion—one of the largest populations of antiquity, spilling outside of the empire to the East, into Asia, and to the West, into the Mediterranean.
Persians vs. Greeks
In the Mediterranean, just beyond the western (Aegean) coast of present-day Turkey, which was the westernmost border of the Persian Empire, lay the most accomplished and dangerous antisemites of all: the Greeks.
Looking West from Babylon, the Persians worried about them.
Whereas the Babylonian kings had defended an ideology of government anchored in the memory of ancient and more recent revolutions that had shaken the yoke of oppression to establish and restore the pursuit of ethics and justice as a civilizational goal, the Greeks instead anchored their entire identity on the story of an ancient genocide.
That’s the story of The Iliad, which no doubt you were made to read in school under the heavily insistent interpretation that this is a wondrous work of art and something entirely to admire. The poetry is perhaps sublime (who am I to judge?), but peel that away and you’ve got the following story: Helen, the beautiful wife of the Spartan king, fell in love with the non-Greek prince Paris, from Troy, and escaped with her lover after a royal Trojan visit to Sparta; in reply, all the ethnic Greek kingdoms together sent their warriors to burn Troy to the ground and exterminate the Trojans. For the ancient Greeks, this genocidal crime was a proud memory and its perpetrators heroes worthy of emulation.
And emulate they did. Like the Assyrians, entirely and proudly devoted to war and slavery, the Greeks would go to war every spring, like the farmer to the soil. It had to be thus because the predatory political economy of the Greeks was largely based on pillage, material and human. Once they had defeated an enemy city, the traditional practice was to steal any valuables and execute in cold blood all surviving adult men among the citizens, then take the women and children away as slaves. Any slaves previously held by the defeated city were also war booty, of course.
This resulted in a particular social structure. As mentioned in Part 1, a census of the small Athenian empire in the late 4th century counted 21,000 Athenian citizens and 400,000 slaves. Many of those slaves, tens of thousands of them, were destroyed in the silver mines of Laurion, essentially death camps.
Mordor, again.
The Greeks were sharply aware that sooner or later they would have to destroy Mesopotamian semitism or be themselves destroyed. For semitism was now being promulgated and defended by the most powerful empire ever seen, the Achaemenid Persian Empire, larger even than the Assyrian. And semitism was seeping out of that empire and sneaking itself everywhere, seducing the entire world, threatening to break the chains of the slaves in Greece.
In consequence, world war returned to the oikoumene. Or I should say world wars (plural).
First were the two great Greco-Persian wars—wars so gigantic, and so awesome to those who witnessed them, that they gave birth, in the Herodotean reed, to the discipline of History. I consider them together as two episodes of one world war: the multiethnic Persian Empire’s attempt to conquer the Greeks.
That attempt failed: the antisemites in the Greek peninsula successfully resisted.
Amazingly (at least for those following my narrative), that outcome has been celebrated by Western historians as a victory for ‘democracy’ against ‘autocracy’! These historians evidently consider the suffrage of a handful of criminals at the top of Athens as entirely more precious than the copious legal rights extended to everyone in Babylonia and in the rest of the Persian Empire—even to the slaves (who were not so many).
Then came the next world war: the Alexandrian defeat of the Persians, a naked act of plunder and destruction, and the beginning of terrible oppression for Western Asians. Western historians have chosen to celebrate this too. Alexander—who is perhaps best compared to someone like Adolf Hitler—is supposed to have been a wonderful guy.
According to Plutarch, Alexander the Macedonian (not ‘the Great,’ please…), educated by his tutor, the philosopher Aristotle, was told that, upon conquering Asia, he should treat Asiatics “ ‘like plants or animals.’ ”13 Ever the good pupil, Alexander was fond of burning Asian cities to the ground and crucifying his war prisoners by the thousands (like he did, for example, in Tyre). He celebrated his conquest of the Persian Empire with a great drunken revelry and then set fire to the sacred city of Persepolis—a gem—in its entirety, after which he brought slavery—Greek-style—to the peoples of Western Asia.
Historian Gunther Hölbl considers Alexander “a fanatical autocrat.”14 It fits.
A light unto the nations
A darkness now befell the variegated peoples of Western Asia, who had known peace and freedom for two hundred years under the watchful and compassionate gaze of the Achaemenid emperors. But though semitism suffered a tremendous blow, it had quietly crossed from Mesopotamia over into the West—into the heart of Greek civilization—carried by a proudly idealistic human vehicle: the Jews.
Many, many Greek speakers became Jews (so many that a Greek edition of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, was created for them). Scattered throughout the Mediterranean, the Jews were having great success converting the Hellenistic pagans.
In reaction, Alexander’s successors in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires carried out great massacres of Jews. The great Seleucid genocide is narrated in the Books of the Maccabees, included in the Christian Bible (to this day, the Jews celebrate their miraculous military victory over their genocidal oppressors in the festival of Hannukah).
But the popularity of the Jews among the ancient slaves only grew and grew. The reason is not far to seek. To give just one example, in the Jewish Oral Law, later composed as the Talmud, it was commanded (Kiddushin 20a) that a slave should enjoy living conditions identical to his master’s! The practical consequence of such laws was that Judaism, founded on the story of a slave revolt, was abolishing slavery.
In the Roman period, the pagans of the Mediterranean, with the antisemitic Roman boot on their necks, likewise found much to admire in the Invisible God of the Jews, who’d led the ancient slave revolt of the Israelites and who stood in obvious solidarity with all subjugated and oppressed peoples.
Hillel the Elder—the most influential rabbi of all time—had come to Jerusalem from Babylon and was teaching that the entire purpose of Jewish law could be summed up in one commandment: “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).15 This message was heard loud and clear by many pagans, for the synagogues were open to them. They also heard about a coming Messiah—a revolutionary leader in the mold of Cyrus the Great—who would come to liberate them all from the Roman Empire.
Thousands and thousands of pagans converted to Judaism. And many who hesitated to take that plunge—called ‘God-fearers’ by the Jews—nevertheless admired the Jews, adopted some of their ethical and traditional laws, and supported them politically.
This struck terror into the Roman military aristocrats, who left us many testimonies of their fears.
The famous 1st century BCE statesman Cicero, for example, complained in a trial (in which he participated as defense attorney) about “the crowd of Jews” in the city of Rome that “sometimes in our [informal] assemblies they were hot with passion.” It seems that large numbers of disciplined and solidary Jews were leading the masses to pressure the authorities: “You know what a big crowd it is, how they stick together, how influential they are in informal assemblies,” Cicero accused.
And he was afraid of this influence, for he was defending Lucius Valerius Flaccus, accused in part of stealing Jewish monies. As he spoke, a large pro-Jewish mob was gathered outside and he feared to arouse it. “So, I will speak in a low voice so that only the jurors may hear; for those are not wanting who would incite [the Jews] against me and against every respectable man.” What Cicero meant by “respectable man” (some translations have “eminent man”) was a Roman aristocrat, for Cicero “frequently referred to Rome’s regular citizenry as scum and sewage” and moreover “disdain[ed] the office of the tribune,” which represented those low-born citizens.16 (You can imagine how he felt about slaves.)
The context is telling. Cicero’s client, Flaccus, had been praetor during Cicero’s consulship and had helped him defeat Lucius Sergius Catilina (‘Catiline’) in the latter’s attempt to lead a great coalition of liberal-minded people, high and low, against the tremendous oppression they were suffering from the Roman aristocrats in the 1st century BCE. This was an ideological movement, for it included slaves and also plenty of young aristocrats. There are good reasons to think (as I will argue in a forthcoming piece) that Catiline’s—and then also Clodius’—attempts at revolution in Rome were led by secret converts to Judaism.
That such high-level conversions were taking place is attested by what the early first century CE senator Seneca wrote when he lamented that “The customs of this accursed race [the Jews] have gained such influence that they are now received throughout all the world. The vanquished have given laws to their victors!”17
Another testimony to this is from Dio Cassius, the ancient Roman historian:
“I do not know the origins of this name [Ioudaios = Jews] for them, but it also refers to the other persons, even foreigners, who eagerly pursue their customs. And this people is even among the Romans. Though often curtailed, it increased to the greatest extent so as to win by force the freedom of its religious belief.”18 (emphasis mine)
As Dio Cassius obliquely indicates in the last sentence (“although often suppressed”), Roman emperors tried to exterminate the Jews in the first part of the 1st century CE. At that time, however, the Jews were numerous and had too many allies, as Cicero conveys, so the attempt failed (as I will narrate in a forthcoming piece). Yet the Romans continued their attempts, and in the second half of the century, and also in the following, they were more successful, eventually defeating the Jews and completing a genocide that, according to historians, was larger even than Hitler’s (in proportional terms).
Christian complexity
The popularity of semitism, however, remained undiminished—it simply couldn’t be stopped. So, after two more centuries, even the Roman emperor converted to a Greco-Jewish offshoot called Christianity.
This is where it gets truly complex. Because while the imperial conversion to Christianity meant that Rome was to some extent Judaized, Christianity, embraced by the empire, was also Greco-Romanized, and in this dual process the conflict between semitism and antisemitism—which had been between cultures, civilizations, even continents!—became a conflict internal to the West.
As if M.C. Escher had drawn a fractal fold upon its surface, Europe swallowed a paradox and lodged in the heart of its identity two precisely opposite moral and political philosophies: semitism and antisemitism. Both.
Yes, the Jewish texts had been adopted as sacred. And “love your neighbor as yourself,” at least officially, was raised as the highest value, along with its many corolaries (love the poor, love the sick, love your enemy, etc.). That was semitism.
But the identity and government of the Church were Greco-Roman. The Church justified the oppression of Jews as punishment for their alleged crime of deicide and celebrated this punishment as proof of Christian correctness and Jewish error. ‘Error’ lurked elsewhere, too, so the Church persecuted—with violence—everybody’s thoughts. And in the year 800 the Church itself brought back to life the Roman power that had oppressed everyone when it created the Germanic Holy Roman Empire. That was antisemitism.
So the Church became simultaneouly semitic and antisemitic! Once this Western paradox—and the tension it produced—is understood, the Western political dynamic of the last 2000 years becomes like an open book that anyone can read and understand.
In Part 3, coming up next, I will describe the Western paradox, with its origin in the paradoxical identity of the Catholic Church. In Part 4 and Part 5 I will explain how and why this paradox emerged. And then, in Part 6, I will brutally summarize Western political evolution by the light of this paradox.
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Speer, A. (1970). Inside the Third Reich. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. (p.96)
https://archive.org/details/insidethethirdre0000spee/page/96/mode/2up
For more context on this, read the excelent article by Andrew Bostom.
ibid.
For more context on this, read the excelent article by Andrew Bostom.
Gil-White, Francisco, Were the Greeks Any Good? WEIRD Morality, Democracy, and the Semiotic Paradox of Classical Historiography (April 23, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3583957 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3583957
Arnold, B. T. (1994). The Weidner Chronicle and the Idea of History in Israel and Mesopotamia. In Millard, A. R., Hoffmeier, J. K., & Baker, D. W. (Eds.), Faith, Tradition and History: Old Testament Historiography in its Near Easter Context (pp.129-148).
The relationship between Ur-Nammu y Utu-hegal is apparently not entirely clear. Based on the documentation it is believed that Ur-Nammu may have been a brother and also the son-in-law of Utu-hegal. There are also reasons to believe that perhaps Ur-Nammu was Utu-hegal’s son. According to Samuel Noah Kramer, Ur-Nammu usurped Utu-hegal’s throne.
See:
Vacin, L. (2011). Šulgi of Ur: Life, Deeds, Ideology and Legacy of a Mesopotamian Ruler as Reflected Primarily in Literary Texts (Doctoral dissertation, University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies) (pp.25-26)
Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Phoenix Books) (Kindle Locations 927-929). Kindle Edition.
Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Phoenix Books) (Kindle Locations 1594-1596). Kindle Edition.
ibid. (Kindle Locations 1604-1605).
ibid. (Kindle Locations 1604-1897).
Samuel Noah Kramer. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Phoenix Books) (Kindle Locations 943-946). Kindle Edition.
ibid.
Klein, J. (1995). Shulgi of Ur: king of a Neo-Sumerian empire. Civilizations of the ancient Near East, 2, 843-857.
Mieroop, M. V. D. (2007). A History of the Ancient Near East Ca. 3000 - 323 BC. United Kingdom: Wiley. (p.206)
Quoted in: Isaac, B. 2004. The invention of racism in classical antiquity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. (p.301)
Hölbl, G. (2001). A history of the Ptolemaic Empire. New York: Routledge. (p.12)
Buxbaum, Y. (2008). The Life and Teachings of Hillel. United Kingdom: Jason Aronson, Incorporated. (ch.20)
Tatum, J. (1999). The patrician tribune: Publius Clodius Pulcher. University of North Carolina Press. (pp.10, 118)
De Civitate Dei 6.11
Quoted in Slingerland, D. (1997). Claudian policymaking and the early imperial repression of Judaism at Rome. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. (pp.62-63).
Wow! No wonder the newest would be slave-masters - WEF, the Lords of Davos - hate Israel so much!
Thank you so much for going through this ancient history and for such a clear and concise presentation. Leaders of all countries should read this very enlightening gem. I wish I had you as a teacher at University when I started my first semester of Hebrew studies. I might have continued for a second term.