G.A. Bondarev
The Crisis of Civilization


XIV. The Problem of Messianism in the World Today

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We wish to open this chapter with a reminder of the fact that this book is not intended for a wide readership. The ‘wide readership’ today adheres exclusively to the political, national etc. superstition in which it has been nurtured. It clings fanatically to this superstition and experiences any view of things that differs or deviates from its own as heretical. This is an expression of the crisis of knowledge in our time.

The author by no means harbours in his soul the ‘most ardent wish’ that this book may be used as an argument in quarrels with the fanatical adherents of the current aberrations. On the contrary, we believe that people who have already fallen victim to the ‘black magic’ of the press should not have access to this book at all. All that the author still dares to hope for at present is that there may exist a small circle of people whose sense for truth is not extinguished, and who are willing to make every effort to ascertain what are the methods of spiritual science and the nature of its fruits of knowledge. Such people should, on a purely ideal basis, unite together in the world. They should create an oasis in which contemporary life in all its manifestations can without restriction be thought through on the basis of spiritual science, in the assurance that the brother in spirit present at one’s side is also solely guided by the search for the means that will bring healing to our life, that will free it from death-bringing prejudices and guard us from the fall into the abyss.

How and where we can stand before the public with our knowledge – this is a far-reaching question requiring independent consideration, that will only be answered if there are people in anthroposophical circles who are not led by superstition, who are unprejudiced and who are not so superficial and negligent as to demand a revision of spiritual science before they have even mastered it. They will then be able to take on the mighty task of developing the moral technique referred to in the Philosophy of Freedom. In the present epoch it is necessary to master this technique almost to perfection if one is to speak to the world of the causes of the madness into which it is falling. Much precious time has already passed by unused, and the worst thing is that the impulse of movement within cognition, elaborated by Rudolf Steiner, has been lost sight of. This is the point that lies at the source of, amongst other things, the immense difficulties we face in making possible an unprejudiced view of the world. But we must not relax our efforts towards this goal, any more than we can question the need to breathe.

We recall how, already in the ’Seventies, the theme of historical symptomatology was put on the agenda for the first time in the Soviet Union, in an anthroposophical group in Moscow. We worked at it for more than two years. Not only did we work on all that Rudolf Steiner has given us on this theme, but we also discussed all the events of importance that took place at home and in the world at large. We did so in the knowledge that every word we spoke was monitored and recorded on tape by the secret police, and although I saw that one or another of the friends paled and fearfully hung their head when it was said who the ‘dictators of the proletariat’ really are, who imported the revolution etc. Not all were mature for this work, indeed we must even admit that no oasis of knowledge grew out of this, that the ahrimanic spirits succeeded in taking revenge on the few for their ‘audacity’ of cognition; but something else is important here. Looked at externally it is nothing short of miraculous that it was possible in the dark ’Seventies to study these profound and far-reaching questions without being arrested. Of course there was persecution – the present author was regularly interrogated by the KGB. But not a single time was he asked about the content of our work. The leader of the investigations knew all too well that everything spoken about in the group was true. But we sensed that our work was blessed by the spiritual world, the hierarchies, who protected and surrounded it as if by a wall of light.

We saw our work as a contribution to the courageous and sacrificial battle that the dissidents of that time were waging against the terrible power. Every individual sought for his own form of battle. We turned to cognition as the force that is capable of truly overcoming evil, and we were not mistaken. When times changed, many dissidents stood helpless before evil that had changed its face but not its essential being. They were lacking in knowledge and the power of discrimination it can provide. But what we sowed on fertile soil at that time is now unfolding. And despite the hindrances encountered, we can experience that the quest for truth is growing, because it is the wish of the Gods themselves.


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The Ancient Hebrews and the Reflective ‘I’- Consciousness

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In the complicated world struggle, taking place on many levels, between the powers of light and darkness the forces of good are by no means always opposed by the forces of evil. As a global factor in world connections there works first and foremost the great antagonism of the luciferic initiates of the East and the ahrimanic of the West. Within Western civilization there lives the contrast between the Romanic and the Anglo-Saxon world. This contrast created a third factor – Bolshevism. At different times the various peoples are now an instrument, now a battlefield of the forces mentioned. Then the peoples are struck by misfortune. The Jewish nation is no exception. Those responsible for the afflictions do everything in their power to remain in the background, so that the peoples blame not them, but other peoples for their sufferings: the Jews blame the Germans, the Germans blame the Jews, Germans and Jews blame the Russians, the Russians the Germans and the Jews, etc.

Rudolf Steiner was reluctant to speak on this subject. It is difficult – he admitted – to speak about a theme that arouses much passion. Spiritual scientific truths leave no room for sympathy and antipathy if they are to be taken up properly.1  And what is one to say about the present, when a vertical ‘civil war’ of opinions is being waged on this question? Clearly we have to strive for peace and many-sided understanding under the principle formulated by Pyotr Chaadayev: The truth is more precious than our native land.

We will take as a starting-point for our discussion of the question of Messianism the article The Founding of the State of Israel as a Mirror of Europe’s Tragedy by A. Reuveni, published in the magazine Info3 (No. 1-1992). The article is interesting in that the strong, correct views on the problem we are about to examine combine in it in a particularly expressive way with the weak and incorrect views. This becomes especially clear when we compare the article with the book The Riddle of the Jewish People by Ludwig Thieben, first published in 1930, and reprinted in a new Edition in 1991.

Thieben’s book – it can be said without exaggeration – was an heroic deed. The author was successful in an extraordinarily difficult, even dangerous, undertaking. He was able as an Anthroposophist to raise himself above national and racist passions and speak purely out of the spirit of truth. How difficult this is, only those will know who have worked on other problems that are equally surrounded by countless ahrimanic spirits of the lie, of hatred, chaos and destruction. The entire strength of ahrimanic spirits, their existence itself, is based on human ignorance, and so these spirits will not tolerate a consciousness that is audacious enough to wish to examine their nature more closely. Whoever does this all the same will experience in his soul an incredibly refreshing, liberating effect surging in great waves over the world of all that is true. Thus, after reading Thieben we were able to experience in our soul something of the mood described in the Acts of the Apostles: Then were they all of good cheer... (Acts 27;36).

Let us look first at Reuveni’s article. In it he analyses the development of the individual thinking consciousness in the Jews of antiquity, who at the beginning of our era were at a stage reached by the other (European) nations only many centuries later. Here, however, it must be pointed out for the sake of precision that the Greek philosophers had already in the 4th and 3rd century B.C. attained the highest level in the development of conceptual thought, the principal aim of the entire fourth cultural epoch.

Still more questionable is Reuveni’s assertion that the Jews were able under the guidance of Jehovah to bring the new forces of the ‘I’ so far, that an incorporation of the Christ into a human body became possible. We ask why the author, when he turns to spiritual-scientific analysis, does not make the crucial distinction between the concepts of ‘incorporation’ and ‘incarnation’. We also know that the ‘I’ of the great initiate Zarathustra was incarnated in the body of Jesus of Nazareth until the baptism in the Jordan. It should be emphasized that an ‘I’ of this nature could not incarnate in any body imaginable. Where the Christ himself is concerned, the Nathan soul became his ‘godfather’ (Taufvater). We also know of the participation of the Nirmanakaya of the Buddha in the process of God becoming man. In short, the best that had been developed in the evolution of all of humanity by its great leaders – Zarathustra, Buddha, Moses, Abraham – united, so that God was able to live for three years as a human being. But Christianity, in Rudolf Steiner’s words, was born into the soul of the Jews, into the spirit of the Greeks and the body of the Roman Imperium (Dec. 24, 1918, GA 187). This into the soul of the Jews makes it difficult for us to agree with Reuveni when he states that the Jews were ahead of other nations in the development of thinking consciousness. The Greek culture was, after all, the ‘godfather’ (Taufvater) of Christianity. Not for nothing did Augustine call the Greek philosophers Christians before the coming of Christ.

The spirit of form, Jahve, gave the spark of the ‘I’ to all of humanity. It was this spark that even determined the evolution of the threefold body – the physical, etheric and astral – in the epochs of the root-races, the Lemurian, Atlantean, etc. In the post-Atlantean root-race the mastery of the individual ‘I’ took its course through the cultural epochs. The rational-soul, developed by the Greeks, is basically identical with the ‘I’, but only a few individuals in Greece, generally the philosophers, had mastered it.

The development of the Jews in antiquity, even in the old Egyptian epoch, is in many respects an exceptional phenomenon. The most important factor distinguishing them from all other peoples of that time, was that the spirit of form – a being of, not the third, but the second hierarchy! – assumed the leadership of this people. This mighty spirit had a tremendously strong influence on the formation of the physical brain of the Jews, which was endowed with the capacity for abstract thinking sooner than other peoples.

What does this imply? – That all humanity of ancient times moved on the path of evolution through the continuous development of the sentient-soul and later the rational-soul to the challenge of the ‘I’. In this process cultural work played the most important part. It represented a temporal process of gradual ascent from the group-consciousness to individual consciousness.

The structure of the threefold body of the Jews was transformed, under the mighty influence from above, so to speak into the vertical, with the line of inheritance being woven into it. And in this lay the importance and uniqueness of their development. They acquired the body that was able to be the bearer of the ‘I’-consciousness, in the line of inheritance and not through individual development. The latter took place on the level of the sentient soul or even the soul-body.

This made possible the incarnation of the two Jesus-children, whereby in the one, the Solomon-child, there dwelt the most advanced human ‘I’ (that of Zarathustra), whilst the innocent part of the soul of humanity that had remained completely untouched by individual earthly development was incarnated in the other.

A development somewhat similar to that undergone by the Jews in ancient times takes place in the Middle European peoples within our own cultural epoch. In the recent past the spirit of the German people was Michael – an Archangel who stood already on the level of an Archai, a time-spirit (but not a Spirit of Form). Under his influence the Germans received the impulse for the development of the ‘I’ – not of the ‘I’ that is identical with the rational-soul, nor yet the universal-human and highest ‘I’ that was bestowed by the Spirit of Form, but the ‘I’ as the mobile centre of self-consciousness, that is able to control and synthesize the activity of the threefold soul. This ‘I’ creates a bridge between the ‘I’ that is developed (horizontally) in the cultural-historical process, and the Christ-’I’ that descends to us (vertically) from above.

Reuveni has obviously not made all this clear to a sufficient degree, and so he continues: Through the premature development of the ‘I’ and of the power of thinking, the Jews became a robust and self-enclosed people ... A paradox arose in history when the Jews had already fallen into a decadence of their one-sidedly developed ‘I’-forces, when the other peoples of Europe – especially Middle- and Western Europe – were taking their first steps in this direction. This thought is not without originality, but its basic assumption is false.2  Before the coming of Christ the Jews merely experienced an illumination through the lighting up of the ‘I’. It acted as a uniting, tribal basis or principle, as a consolidating member, right down into the physical body, but did not lead to an individual development of the ‘I’. This process is comparable to what the Russians are living through now. The heavens, says Rudolf Steiner, speak in mysterious runes to the Russians through the mirroring on the earth. This causes an instinctive experience of the wisdom of the Spirit-Self to germinate in their souls, but it is in no way the fruit of individual striving. These inspirations have a certain influence on our threefold body, above all the astral, and prepare this for the future cultural epoch. With regard to the development of the individual ‘I’ and the threefold soul, the Russian has the same task as any other European (obviously with certain nuances).

Let us recall that the first seeds of sentient and consciousness-soul were implanted in man at the end of the Old Moon aeon, when racial differentiation did not yet exist. It is clear that these souls – a gift of the Spirits of Movement – formed an intermediate link between the spirit-self, which had also been bestowed on the Old Moon, and the threefold bodily nature. They worked out of the spirit on to this threefold nature and were thus the mediators for the creative impulses of the Spirits of Movement. It is clear that such a soul acted as a demiurge, super-personally.

All that man makes his own as a personal acquisition has already long before worked into him out of the spirit. When Moses received the Commandments from the Spirit of Form itself, they became an integral part, not of secular society, but of a system of religious education. Of course this was a special religion – the religion of the approach of the future ‘I’ that through its deeds can resurrect the dead. For this reason Christianity confesses not only to the New, but also to the Old Testament.

But just as in modern times by no means every Christian is equal to the lofty demands of the New Testament, only few of the Jews of antiquity were able to hold the ‘I’ in another human being in high regard, as it is written in the Commandments of Moses. The tragic destinies of the prophets testify to this. At the time of Christ the religious condition of Jewish society, and above all its spirituality, was in a state of general decline. Christ speaks of this many times. And this was so when the Elohim Jahve was still the spirit of the Jewish people.

The religious education of the Jews appealed to conceptual activity.3  In the synagogues they practised the commenting and interpreting of the articles of faith, of the laws and traditions. There was nowhere else in the ancient world where anything like this went on. It is only today that religious practice of this kind has become a common and familiar image. Truly, the Judaism of the Jews of antiquity was a religion of the future. But the majority of the Jews lived in the sentient soul as it had been developed in the third, the Egypto-Chaldean, cultural epoch. They were educated in the commandments through religion, through direct influence on the etheric body, which in its turn promoted the development of the physical brain as an instrument of abstract thinking. Thus the Jews found their relation to the rational soul in a very specific way, while the direct approach to its development in Greece and Rome led through the unfolding of astral and etheric body with the help of the increasingly secular culture and the various forms of societal life. There the ether-body was formed through cultural activity and philosophy, and the first beginnings of the book of common law.

These are a few guiding thoughts towards an understanding of the mission of the Jews. Their development in ancient times was an exception, not in the sense that they had anticipated evolution but in the sense of the fulfilment of a special task that is not realized by the forces of the immanent lawful structure of earth evolution, which takes place through a series of metamorphoses, each consisting of seven stages. This evolution had reached the lowest point of its descent to the earthly plane in the fourth cultural epoch. And now the development of the entire aeon stood before the task of gathering forces for the ascent. Now transcendentally, from above, the immanent lawfulness was ‘corrected’. God Himself united with man and the kingdoms of nature, and into all he implanted the impulse of ascent. This is the intervention from above that occurred only once in the evolution of the world, and which was of decisive significance for the development of the Jews in the pre-Christian era. Normally the lawful structure of earthly development changes in Pralaya, and in order for this to take place, the phenomenal world has to be spiritualized. Christ brought the great Pralaya immediately into Manvantara: he altered the lawful structure of the material world. In correspondence to this mission of the Christ the Jewish people was also led: As a result of this, not earthly evolution changed, but the transcendental force.

Here it is essential to take into account the following methodological consideration. In every cultural epoch a given nation (or several nations) has to fulfil the main task of development, working on the levels of evolution, culture and civilization. It fulfils this task through a process of creation, for which concrete life-forces are needed. Through this activity these forces are used up, and shortly before the fulfilment of the task the etheric aura of the nation is exhausted. As the seed-leaf wilts when the impulse of metamorphosis moves upwards with the stem of the plant, a folk that has fulfilled its task falls into decadence, whilst the impulse of cultural creation passes to another folk, or several others. One can see for oneself that this is so, through comparing the culture of Persia, Egypt and Greece today with their cultures in antiquity. There is nothing belittling or offensive in this observation, or in the circumstance that the life-forces of an aging person are in a process of decline. Development follows the path of sacrifice, and to this belong birth, flowering and passing away.

The Jews prepared the body for God and thereby fulfilled a special task of development. This demanded of them an extraordinary expenditure of life-forces. At the moment when God finally became man these forces were well-nigh exhausted. Because of the great abundance of life-forces required for this task, it is not conceivable that just any Jew could have made possible the incarnation of the God. The enhanced use of life-forces was necessary because the entire nation was as it were raised above the general human development where the gradual unfolding of the three-membered soul was taking place, and it was subjected to an influence of the higher ‘I’ such as otherwise only occurs in the process of preparation for initiation. Work was done with the Jews, in the same spirit as Socrates when he taught his pupils, as an esoteric exercise, to think in concepts. In those days it was truly a task of initiation pointing to the future. In the case of the Jews the development of conceptual thinking, as we have already mentioned, was accomplished on the path of religion, i.e. by using not astral, but the etheric forces. But from the moment of the exodus from Egypt, to God becoming man, the whole people was treading the path of Initiation. The Old Testament is not history in the usual sense of the word, but the story of a ‘path of initiation’, of trials of initiation on the path to the mystery, at the mid-point of which God Himself appears. With the event of the Mystery of Golgatha the end of this path had been reached.

In the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz we read how on the final day he simply returns home. And similarly the seventh alchemical seal (key) portrays a scene from everyday life, where a pupil who has passed through the complicated and movingly instructive path of initiation is shown in his laboratory amongst his instruments and books absorbed in his experiments, and as the only reminder of his experiences, sun and moon are shining together through the window. – This is the law of every rightful initiation: After its completion the pupil returns to the circle of his fellow-men and devotes himself to their service.

Thus it happened too with the old Israelites. This people in its entirety had travelled the path of initiation where everything is different from the everyday world. After the resurrection of the Lord it had the task of returning to the cradle of humanity in order to become the soil through which everything new that had been received through the greatest of all mysteries might be brought to humanity. On this new path the Jews had to bridge the gap in the development of the threefold soul as it evolves in the cultural-historic process, and thus attain a certain perfection through combining that which in the Old Testament pointed into the future, to the epoch of the consciousness-soul, with the New Testament, with the impulse of Golgatha and with all that had been achieved at that time by the Greco-Roman culture. In other words: the Jews had to give something to the world, and they had to receive something from the world. Therefore they were scattered over the world; it became their task to adapt to other peoples, to be assimilated and to dissolve in them. The chosenness was ended, the goal of initiation attained, through which they were qualitatively distinct from the other Semitic peoples. They had accomplished something that was of service to mankind as a whole, and that had to be brought to mankind as a whole. It was not appropriate for them to live like the other Semites, as peoples of the third Egyptian-Chaldean cultural epoch – just as little as a person who has gone through an initiation can continue to live as others do.

But luciferic and ahrimanic spirits had their part in the initiation process. Their intention to tempt Christ in the wilderness was also directed towards all the Jews. What they failed to achieve with Christ, was crowned by no mean success in the case of the clerics – the Pharisees and Sadducees. One ought to make some effort to grasp the fact that man, when he thinks in concepts, does something God-like – he creates out of nothing. In its initial manifestations conceptual thinking had, furthermore, a substance of a luciferic nature. Jewish antiquity overcame Lucifer through cultic service to Jahve – the countenance of Christ. But after Christ’s coming everything was new. One had either to accept Christ, or one succumbed to luciferic-ahrimanic temptations without the support of Jahve, who at that time ceased to be the spirit of the Jewish people.

In this constellation of forces is rooted the phenomenon of the human being who wished to be God – Ahasuerus. It was all the easier for this phenomenon to arise because the ahrimanic forces harboured a special antipathy against the Jews since they had fulfilled their mission. When the Mystery of Golgatha was accomplished Ahriman craved revenge. Under his influence there was conserved in a great number of Jews an attitude of expectation of a Messiah who is yet to come, which prevented them from being assimilated and from accepting Christianity. – The Mystery continued therefore, but it took on a tragic character; it became a Mystery in reverse.

If the Jews had not had a mission to fulfil, they would have been quite indistinguishable from the rest of the Semites. If they had only had to fulfil the task of the Greco-Latin culture, they would also have gone into decline together with that culture. If Ahriman’s hatred alone had prevailed, they would have been completely destroyed. But if they had accepted Christianity, they would have dissolved entirely in European and Asiatic humanity and the entire history of Christian civilization would in a certain sense have more successful. But, as so often happens in life, something far more complicated came about: The elements of all the variants mentioned here combined in the destiny of the Jews.

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The Man of the Old and the New Testament

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Rudolf Steiner says that the ancient Jewish people was kept in a culturally immature condition until the coming of Christ (but the Buddha could not simultaneously have appeared in this people). The Jews were unable to experience the law given to them through revelation, as having arisen in their own soul. As a result of this delayed development it was possible for the mission to be fulfilled at the right moment – the fruit had become ripe. We can understand the role in development of the old prophets who introduced the law, when we bear in mind that with their supersensible being they were lifted out of their bodily nature, their earthly incarnation (cf. Sept. 20, 1909, GA 114). Even in Moses intellectuality lit up in the form of the old clairvoyance, although he already mastered the new impulse (cf. Mar. 9, 1911, GA 60), the impulse of the individual ‘I’-consciousness.

The prophets had, as the leaders of the Jewish people, to preserve the connection to the supersensible, from which, as the Egyptian priests before them, they received the knowledge that enabled them to guide the people. But the basic tendency implanted in the people as a whole to develop towards intellectualism caused the old clairvoyant capacities to die out. They were replaced by the thinking which grew out of the forces of heredity. This capacity channelled all the interests of this people towards the earthly. Rudolf Steiner calls the world-view of the ancient Jews ‘geology’. God created for Himself a physical body for the earthly incarnation. It was a matter of creating a form in which a spirit could exist which came, not from below upwards, i.e. out of evolution, but from above downwards, from that realm where something inconceivable to our earthly imagination – Pralaya – exists. Every consciousness that has become Christian ought to come to terms with this fact. Man normally directs his attention from the earthly to the heavenly. But only now can he do this out of his own strength and in freedom, because once the ascent to the heights (to what is above) was accomplished by means of a deepening of the connection with the physical earth (to what is below). Such a development stood in stark contrast to all the principles of initiation in ancient times.

The Jews fulfilled their special task. They kept the principle of heredity pure, and created the physical body best suited for the descending God, a body that is permeated through and through with the ‘I’-force of the Spirit of Form, which works by way of the blood (and thus mainly through the ether-body). Outwardly the people, living under the conditions of the ancient-culture, was in an altogether pitiable state. At the time it was as though not of this world – deprived of clairvoyance, given over to everyday life with its purely materialistic interests much more than others, bound hand and feet by blood relationships – unsuited for the development of conceptual thinking.

Rudolf Steiner gives a description of the life of Jesus from the 12th to the 18th year when his soul penetrated the Jewish teaching ever more deeply, and was less and less able to be satisfied by it. Indeed, it increasingly caused him pain and suffering (Nov. 4, 1913, GA 148). The luciferic-ahrimanic influence made itself felt in him ever more acutely because the Jews were, sooner than all the other peoples, immersed in the earthly element to an extreme degree. But they were also the first to sense the impulse of liberation from the earthly, the impulse of a future elevation, although the old in its downward movement had already become very strongly subject to the law of inertia. How was this later mirrored in the Christian world? The ideas – we are told by Rudolf Steiner – that were current in the Old Testament ... the ideas of Old Testament Judaism that were made worldly in Romanism although it stands in contrast to Judaism; in the worldly sphere it is what Judaism is spiritually, these ideas have come into our present time via the roundabout path of Romanism, they steal in like spectres. This Old Testament thinking that has not yet been Christianized must be sought, as to its true origin, in human beings ...

This thinking is dependent on what can be passed down from generation to generation through the blood ... our thinking falls into two members, two parts. One kind of thinking is that which we have through our development up until birth, which we inherit from our fathers or from our mothers (so it is to this day, and in it is revealed the activity of the Spirit of Form who gave the ‘I’ to humanity). We are able to think as men thought in the Old Testament because we were embryos. This is also the essential feature of the old Jewish people, that in the world that is lived through between birth and death it did not want to learn more than what is acquired as a faculty through the fact that one has been an embryo until birth. The second, the earthly mode of thinking can only be acquired by man as an occultist, when he works through his experience in the spirit of the Philosophy of Freedom and Knowledge of Higher Worlds, because the Mystery of Golgatha in its unique character can never be grasped with the thinking that one has by virtue of one’s embryonic development. ... [it] has to be understood not from what is of the moon, but from what is of the sun ... This is the great difference between what is Christianized and what is not Christianized (Nov. 29, 1918, GA 186).

In this way the element with which the Jews first had contact – the development of thinking – now entered the evolutionary process fully and completely, just as the sentient and rational-soul had entered it at an earlier stage. But this thinking is not able to lead man out of the closed circle of evolution. It is geo-centric and egocentric. It is only capable of grasping what is given to man from nature. In ancient times it was the primary task of the human being, who was still a group being, to develop this Jahve-thinking. Already in the distant past Jahve for this reason removed from the earth the influence of the other six Elohim who, when the sun separated from the earth, remained on the sun. Thus, so Rudolf Steiner tells us, the knowledge of these Elohim that had remained on the earth was transposed into the sphere of fantasy. With the help of the elemental beings of nature Jahve began to counteract the activity of the sun-Elohim who, as a consequence of this, were able to express themselves solely through the Christ-impulse.

A world-wide historical necessity was active in the work of Jahve – the physical body (but not the spirit) had to be elevated for the God who was descending towards man. Expressed in modern terms, this was a movement upwards on a ladder that led downwards – a movement that is unique and unparalleled in its perfection. And it had its karma. Already in the middle of the 19th century A.D. (in the ’Forties) it happened that Jahve Himself in his influence on human consciousness (not only of the Jews) was gradually overwhelmed by the power of the spirits he had invoked ... So that the earlier quest for the one God in nature, through the influence of the forces working in opposition, went over to mere atheistic natural science, into mere atheistic natural-scientific thinking and, in the practical field, into mere utilitarian thinking ... in the field of social thinking it became Marxism and suchlike (Ibid.).

So strongly do the accents shift in the course of evolution. People today who are not willing to develop the new way of thinking want to bring humanity not to individual culture but, merely to folk-cultures, which already started to become an anachronism two thousand years ago. One should not believe that only National Socialism and the later Bolshevists pursue this goal. The call to divide the peoples into separate national entities was heard from America and resounds deafeningly in the Russia of the post-communist epoch. Wilson’s call, as characterized by Rudolf Steiner, is the ahrimanically retarded call for the founding of a culture where all peoples represent only folk-cultures; that is, cultures of the people of the Old Testament. All the peoples throughout the earth want to become similar to the Jewish people of the Old Testament, that is Woodrow Wilson’s call (Dec. 7, 1918, GA186). And apparently with the aim of realizing this, the most nationalistic state in the world is set up at the height of Western democracy – the immediate revival of the Old Testament Jewish nation. But with a way of thinking gained only through heredity, one cannot understand how atavistic such an initiative is.

Everywhere in the world, towards the end of the 20th century, the banners of state self-determination, arising from the influence of Jahve, are hoisted out of the force of nationalism. But this regression to the old religion of Jahve does not bring liberation. Behind it is concealed the deep spiritual and social crisis of Christian civilization, whose nature Rudolf Steiner describes as follows: People of the present time have, because they have lost the old mystery-wisdom that could point to the Mystery of Golgatha, more or less accepted .... the Jahve religion under the leadership of the liberal-worldly 'Chief-Rabbi WIlson'! (July 11, 1920, GA 198).

At the same time, Rudolf Steiner emphasizes, it is important to point out that for the last time mighty, far-reaching attempts of the Jahve-impulse will take place in what is understood as the international socialism of the proletariat. It is basically the final death-struggle of the Jahve-impulse. We stand before the peculiar fact that every nation will become a Jahve-nation, and every nation will at the same time claim the right to spread its Jahve-cult, its socialism over the entire earth (Dec. 7, 1918, GA 186). We would observe that it was for this reason that, for example, Russia’s border with Poland was no less secured than that with Turkey or China. Despite all the assurances of the brotherly unity of the nations in the socialistic camp, each nevertheless sat in its cubicle. And later came the quarrels over the various ‘models’ of socialism. And if under different circumstances a process of liberation takes place, as propaganda says, the end result, as in the Balkans, is invariably the same again: peoples are barred up in national cages like individual species of animals.


        

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In the sphere of spiritual life – Rudolf Steiner says –, rabbinical theology (not of Judaism, of course; the nature of European science is meant, as well as of theology) ... will always reinterpret through the intellect what is spread throughout the sense world as forces of heredity, and for which one should train oneself through spirit-perception, so that one may already in the inherited traits discover the spirit in the sense world (Oct. 6, 1918, GA 184). Here lie the origins of racial theories.

Finally it happens, says Rudolf Steiner in another lecture-cycle, when you go into those societies, into the Masonic Odd Fellows-Societies for instance, that do not have the new spiritual-scientific knowledge but their old knowledge ... [that you] find above all ... the Jewish element in them, the so-called Cabbala and so on (May 8, 1924, GA 353).

In this way the crisis of the entire civilization of today is determined by a universally active syndrome that may be called the Jahve-syndrome. But this arose because, since the time of the creation of the world on Old Saturn, an impulse of movement was given to evolution from above to below – from spirit to matter. In the course of this linear or, rather, half-circle movement (see figure 1) humanity was simultaneously endowed with the impulse of the ‘I’ together with the threefold body. This ‘I’ was brought to man partly from above through revelation, but primarily through a process of interweaving into the immanent structural law of the evolution of species. The biogenetic law had a partial effect also on soul-development. This law is a unified chain of metamorphoses moving forward in time: life processes – sense perceptions – sensation – sympathies and antipathies – judgments.

This entire path of evolution leads man to acquisition of the lower ‘I’ that can only unfold within the material world and can only work in the forces of heredity, because its genesis is rooted in the organic. With the coming of Christ, transcendental laws of development were bestowed on ‘I’-consciousness, and with it the impulse to ascent, to the spiritualization not only of civilization, but of the universe. Whatever is not willing to take up these forces will move further downwards, into the sub-material, and will fall out of the normal course of evolution. The three future aeons will have a kind of mirror-image or double in the ahrimanic-luciferic sub-natural world.

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But we cannot say that nothing good was done by Jahve when be brought the impulse of the ‘I’ into the forces of heredity. In post-Atlantean times human culture arose as bridge between blood relationships and the highest spiritual element. This enabled the developing threefold soul to free itself increasingly from the tribal. It had then to go through the epoch of materialism, which resulted in the final ‘completion’ of ‘I’-consciousness within the world of sense experience. But two thousand years earlier the mighty force of ascent, of up-ward striving, had already entered the forces of earth development.

Thus, we can imagine the principle of earthly development as a cross. Along the horizontal axis moves what is known as the evolution of species, not in the over-simplified Darwinist sense, but in the way it is described by Rudolf Steiner in Occult Science, An Outline. The hierarchy of descending and ascending sevenfold metamorphoses is active here. Each of its cycles has the form of a chalice, as depicted in the diagram. On one level of evolution there arises the ‘chalice’ of the seven root-races. The Spirits of Form, the Elohim, guide each of the seven members of this cycle of metamorphosis. Jahve who, as an exception, became the leader of the Jewish people, caused the mood to arise in this people that it was not a nation, but a race.

Jahve rules in the combined development of all seven cultural epochs that together form the fifth post-Atlantean root-race, but as a result of his acceptance, as a folk-spirit, of the role of an Archangel, his negative karma formed – Ahasuerus. The overcoming, the transformation of Ahasuerus frees Jahve from karma, which a Spirit of Form may not have.

But Ahriman, the spirit of matter, made Ahasuerus his instrument, and approaches his incarnation conscious of the cosmic legitimacy of his activity. In his opinion the coming of Christ – viewed cosmically – was an infringement of all laws, and the basis for this point of view can be seen to lie in the fact that the hierarchies allowed the existence of Ahriman only in the horizontal plane of world evolution. That is why he acknowledges only this evolution, by which he understands the force of descent, the densification of the spirit which, after having passed through a certain zero-point (the point of the material), has to go over into the sub-material, into sub-nature. In order to bring about such a transition, Ahriman must strive to incarnate in the physical world.

Through the deed of Christ becoming man, which took place on the basis of the law of ‘vertical’ evolution (the evolution of the free spirit, but not of species), the evolution of species acquires the force of ascent, of spiritualization. For Ahriman this means that ‘chaos’ is brought into the logically-constructed chain of the evolution of species. To him free-will is an absurdity. Even the angels, Ahriman seems to want to say, do not have free will – and now it is to be given to man, of all beings! Only through the stream of heredity shall man attain the ‘I’, whose highest point is abstract thinking. To Ahriman the absolutely free ‘I’ of man seems unnatural, an affront against all the laws of nature.

Ahriman is obedient to God the Father because the Father entrusted him with the role of consolidator of matter, but he is an opponent of God the Son and is unable to understand that the Father sent the Son into the world. Ahriman experiences the Christ after the Mystery of Golgatha as a kind of ‘thorn’ in the body of the earth, as a being who violates the laws of the existence of matter, who frees the human being from the destiny allotted to him by Ahriman, of sinking down into the sub-physical, into the so-called eighth sphere.

Ahriman believes that the Father entrusted the world to him and not to Christ. He errs, but he errs cosmically. In the ‘chalice’ of evolution on the level of the life-condition (the rounds, the kingdoms), the previous three, and the half of the fourth round in which the world is today, are so to speak a guarantee that he is right. They are at the same time the justification for his claim to send the remaining three and a half rounds into the anti-world and eliminate the vertical component of evolution. In the struggle for his goals of development, now immediately connected to his incarnation, he sets great store by Ahasuerus. Therefore Ahasuerus must be taken from him. The most important part to be played in the fulfilment of this task of development falls to the Jews. Thus anyone who rejects them on account of national traits drives them directly into the arms of Ahriman-Ahasuerus; Zionism does the same. Under this aspect and for this reason the question of the Jewish people has become a question for all mankind, indeed the entire world.

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The world today is going through a crisis because all old impulses of development are exhausted, they have come to an end. The human being is drawn out of evolution under their influence, and because the power of transformation given by Christ lives within him at the same time, he experiences an inner conflict of soul-forces, as in Goethe’s Faust:

        Two souls, alas, reside within my breast,
        And each would fain be parted from the other ...

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In the course of the last 150 to 200 years this separation has taken on a deeply tragic character that is also made use of by the dark occult-political forces. They promise restoration of the lost unity by offering simplified schemes for an understanding of the world – the ideologies. They all lead away from evolution.

Catholicism, National Bolshevism, Britannicism, Socialism-Bolshevism, materialism, secret societies – they represent that gigantic association of atavistic forces, where the ghosts of the Old Testament hold sway. And only in a true affirmation of the Christ, to which Anthroposophy leads, are contained the new forces of development that are able to overcome the crisis. For this reason, all working with Anthroposophy is a matter of great responsibility. It may not be ‘pursued’ superficially, according to whim, or in a mood of self-complacency or false egotistical positivity, at a time when the world is standing at the threshold of most important decisions, on whose outcome the continuation or the downfall of man and earth depends.

Expressed in modern language one might formulate it as follows: in a certain sense an earthly-cosmic ‘referendum’ is taking place. Three forces are involved. One comes from the heights – it is the force of Christ. It explains to people how things stand, and leaves them free to decide. The other two forces are opposed to a normal development. They are the forces of Lucifer and Ahriman. They use lies, intimidation and compulsion. A decision must be take by individuals as well as by entire nations. We are here concerned with what the opposing forces do to the nations; and also with the battle to save the human individual and mankind as a whole through the dissemination of spiritual knowledge. The Jews have a central place in this chapter. Their risk is here no less than that of the Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Russians, Italians etc. But in the destiny of each nation there is also something specific and this needs to be understood, because otherwise it is very difficult to understand what is specific in the idea of redemption.


Jahve, Ahasuerus, Christ

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We have already spoken of the fact that Jahve ceased to be the spiritual guide of the Jewish nation after the Mystery of Golgatha. The nation forfeited its higher ‘I’ and, as in the case of an individual human being, who cannot live without his ‘I’, it ought to have dissolved, dispersed. This was also the peculiarity of the ancient Jewish people. Other nations, after fulfilling their cultural mission, do not lose their archangelic leader; he merely withdraws somewhat and takes on luciferic qualities. But the spirit of the Jewish people was the Spirit of Form. The scale of the activity of such beings has a planetary character. Once, and only as an exception in the role of a folk-spirit, the Elohim Jahve required a mediator who would moderate, so to speak, the immense power of his spirit, that was directed to a nation. The Archangel Michael became such a mediator between Jahve and the Jewish people.

What would have become of the Old Testament Jewish people – Rudolf Steiner asks – if, instead of approaching Jahve through Michael, it had wanted to approach Jahve directly? It would have resulted in an intolerant, national-egoistic people, a people that can only think of itself. For Jahve ... [reveals himself] in the being of a nation (not the individual-human). Only thanks to Michael was the Jewish nation prevented from becoming so national-egoistic that not even the Christ Jesus could have come forth from the midst of this people (Dec. 25, 1919, GA 195).

So complicated is the weaving of the ‘pattern’ of evolution. And it would indeed be strange to expect it to be otherwise, if only we observe the development of an individual human being. Michael was the ‘countenance of Jahve’. After the Mystery of Golgatha he became the ‘countenance of the Lord’, the ‘countenance of Christ’. And the peoples who formed no connection to the development of the new Michaelic thinking are a prey to national egoism, from which the Jews of antiquity were protected. Their separation from the other peoples did not take place out of nationalistic feelings. It arose from the necessity to maintain the purity of the line of heredity, as a body was prepared for the God. We always need to bear in mind that this nation was rooted in the earthly in a special way. At that time (but not today) the Jews truly constituted another race, even within the Semitic peoples. In the period after the Mystery of Golgatha the Jews also forfeited the mediating help of the Archangel Michael. Only the after-effects of the Jahve-impulse remained: the tendency to continue striving towards the earthly, although this striving no longer has any sense; on the contrary, actually becomes dangerous! But as it insisted, the nation received leadership, and Ahasuerus became its leader, a human being who desired to be God.

The appearance of this exceptional phenomenon was due to the one-sided working of the law that had fallen into decadence. Let us recall how the Apostle Paul said that by virtue of a law he considered himself a perfect and, by implication, a divine (?!) being. Thus even the most legitimate impulse turns into its opposite when the task of development requires something new. Paul escaped the tragedy because he understood that his former perfection was as nothing before the countenance of Christ, since it had no forces within it that could transform and resurrect the body. But another ancient Jewish initiate, Ahasuerus, did not avoid this error.

Just as Christian tradition – Rudolf Steiner tells us – points to Christ Jesus, the God who lawfully became man, so, in connection with Christ Jesus one can also speak of Ahasuerus, the man who has unlawfully become God, and who has laid aside the mortality of human nature (in the astral) ... It exists, this Ahasuerus-figure ... the eternal Jew ... The human being will perhaps not always recognize him; he may take him for something else. But it is just as possible that the eternal Jew appears to a person, as it is possible (in another case) for the Christ to light up for someone when he looks into his own inner being (Mar. 24, 1922, GA 211). Ahasuerus wanders constantly over the earth in astral form. He appears as an astral spectre. This human being who becomes God, but a truncated God who loses the possibility of dying ... the God who remains on the physical plane ... develops the characteristics that may really only be developed in the land of dreams.

It is something tremendous, something spirit-filled that is placed before our souls. That to the God is added the man who has become God ... who within earthly development also receives the principle that the Godhead is not to descend to the physical plane: Judaism, the Old Testament world-conception (in the Christian era).

We encounter a mystery here. Whoever has insight into these things knows that Ahasuerus is a real being ... Ahasuerus exists, and Ahasuerus is the protector of Judaism after the Mystery of Golgatha ... Ahasuerus, who goes through world-development as a being, but as a spirit-being, and who continuously hinders man from returning through the Christ – the way that is appropriate to his development – to the spiritual world he left behind when he lost the atavistic clairvoyance (Mar. 21, 1922, GA 211).

In the following lecture Rudolf Steiner draws the following conclusion: Thus we have the polar opposite to Christ Jesus in Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus wanders around over the earth ... wanders from nation to nation ... sees to it for example that the Hebrew faith does not die out (Mar. 24, 1922, GA 211).

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If we look at these things without superficiality, if we do not misuse or make a sensation out of them but think of them in the light of spiritual science, we cannot take them in without an inner concern. Inevitably the question arises: What are we to do with this knowledge? Rudolf Steiner gives an answer, but under present conditions it should rather not be brought into the public arena. All hell will break loose, we will be accused of every mortal sin, because our entirely Jahveized civilization (in its essence, not through a supposed world-wide conspiracy of the Jews) seeks to play the ‘card’ of Ahasuerus in a very big way. It is particularly regrettable that passionate ‘players’ of this kind also exist in anthroposophical circles.

During a lecture Rudolf Steiner was asked about the mission of the Jews in the world today. He replied that, as soon as one only starts to speak on this theme, one is accused of agitation. But if we want to be entirely objective, we must say that the Jews did extraordinarily much to prepare the ground for the Christian development. For the sake of this they had to confess to the one God Jahve. The one God could have no image; he could only be grasped in the inmost soul, through the understanding. But it is also easy to see that, with this, human egoism was condensed to the highest degree; for the human being becomes a stranger to all that is outside him if he sees the spiritual only in his own person. And this indeed brought forth a certain folk-egoism in the Jews, it cannot be denied. The Jews, especially those who came from Persia to Europe, played a very great part in the development of medicine. But medicine thereby became ‘monotheistic’. We no longer know how a particular remedy works, just as little as it was known in Judaism what the individual nature-spirits are like. In this way an abstract spirit, an abstract Jehovah-service entered medicine, that is actually still in medicine today ... abstract Jehovah-medicine is actually suited to their whole thinking; it is attuned to them. Of course all this arouses antipathy towards the Jews, as always happens when a person is different from others.

But today, Rudolf Steiner continues, it is important to realize that this way of holding culture together and not letting it fall apart, as it has been practised for centuries by the Jews, will no longer be necessary in the future, but in the future this has to be replaced by a strong spiritual cognition ... Then a single people will not need to work in the unconscious. That is why I found it a matter for concern from the beginning, that the Jews, when they were quite at a loss, founded the Zionist movement. To set up a Jewish state means to be reactionary in the most appalling way, in the most shameful way to return to a reactionary attitude and in so doing one offends against everything that is necessary in this realm today (May 8, 1924, GA 353).

In conversation with a Zionist Rudolf Steiner asked: Are you not again separating out a part from humanity as a whole? And in the lecture quoted above he explains further: Let an answer be given to the assertion that everything has to develop, not out of the universal-human, but out of the national. It was the wish to separate that led to the world war. Thus the greatest tragedy of the 20th century has arisen out of what the Jews also want. We can say: Since everything that the Jews have done could now be done in a conscious way by all people,4 for example, the Jews could actually do nothing better than to be assimilated with the rest of humanity, to mix with the rest of humanity, so that Judaism as a people would cease to exist. That is what would be the ideal. But it is opposed on the one hand by the habits of the Jews, and on the other hand by the antipathies of others. Both must be overcome.

This fate of exile came about for the Jews through their own character; they are resilient and maintained themselves in foreign lands. This is why it was noticed so strongly in later times. The Jews themselves contributed much to the fact that they were seen as different from others. Today these things are not to be viewed nationally, but from the aspect of the universal-human (Ibid.).

Thus the Jahve-element is today an integral part of the nationalism of all peoples, including those who, unlike the Jews, should not as yet be assimilated. European thinking as such has in many respects preserved its Old Testament character. The overcoming of all this is furthered by culture and by the true Christianizing of life. The folk-spirits, the archangels, the spirits of language have a moderating influence on the materialistic and abstract spirit of the epoch. The Archangel Michael – the countenance of the Lord – leads the human beings who can take their development into their own hands, beyond the national, beyond the folk-element, to the level of the universal-human.

This level has absolutely nothing in common with Internationalism in the socialist sense. But it has become fashionable today – also with many who are active as ‘teachers’ among anthroposophists – to ‘preach’ this ‘homelessness’, this supra-national ideal in a purely Marxist sense. But the wish simply to break with the national on an ideological basis is just as dangerous as when everything is done only out of the national. Our task is simply to grow beyond it. In the Gospel Christ calls Nathanael the ‘true Israelite’ and it means the level of initiation where the pupil experiences what is common to the whole people, as something deeply personal. Only afterwards can the pupil raise himself to the level of identification with the universal-human. On the general exoteric cultural path we can rise to the universal-human only when the consciousness-soul is realized in us in the spirit of Michael, i. e. through the Christianizing of the soul, through laying aside our own ego in favour of the ‘I’ of the Christ. The Marxist as well as the new Pan-American Internationalism are based on the sentient- and (partly) the rational soul (materialism), and obstruct all paths to the consciousness-soul.

A human being who, in his development, has never seen the finest products of his national culture, who has not learned to experience deeply the aesthetics, poetic fantasy, mode of thinking and inner nuances of his own culture, which is inspired not only by the nation’s Archangel but also by the Spirit of the Time, will not learn how to appreciate all this in other cultures. He has no basis for comparison. But there exists also a one-sided national-egoistic experience of culture; this is the other extreme. Humanity has not yet grown culturally beyond the stage of national being, but it has outgrown the stage of the uniformity springing from blood relationships. One should not confuse these things! Brotherhood in spirit must triumph over blood brotherhood. That is the Michaelic impulse. In cultural life human beings have to bring the rich variety of nationally-coloured cultures into the spiritual possession of all humanity. Otherwise the nations will be rejected by their leading archangels and, instead of Christ, will be subject to the ahrimanic spirit of the epoch.

Owing to their unique, specific folk-destiny the Jews no longer have a leading archangel. If they wish to free themselves from the rulership of Ahasuerus, they must realize themselves in the impulses of those national cultures to which their incarnation has led them. Individual personalities like Spinoza and Lessing then appear; in Russia there were the artist Levitan, the composer Anton Rubinstein and others. When this does not take place, the working continues of the abstract-universalistic impulse that is acquired solely through the forces of heredity and makes of the Jews the ‘element of decomposition’ in modern civilization. It is no coincidence, says Rudolf Steiner, that the men who by their sharp, clear, but altogether materialistic thinking had the greatest influence in recent times on the European masses, Marx and Lassalle, were Jews (GA 262, p. 62).

There can be no differences of opinion in the question of anti-Semitism, just as little as in the question of Russophobia or Germanophobia etc. But the fanatical insistence that everything said or done by Jews is always right, that other peoples are always to blame for their misfortune, can also lead to no good. Such assertions merely carry the illness deeper into civilization and worsen the crisis all the more. The people who base their lives on the knowledge given by spiritual science must come to understand that the striving of the Jews to become a nation, or even a race, leads them unavoidably to the ruling influence of Ahasuerus. This is an occult fact that provides the basis for a fruitful conversation; from those who accept it we may expect judgments that accord with sense-supersensible reality. We must understand that the Jews will not be able to escape this danger without the support of other nations. But compassionate sighs with regard to their national separation are not productive of good. Complete national tolerance must be guaranteed for those Jews who wish to assimilate with the nations in whose midst they were born and grew up, not to mention those who have long acted in this way. In Russia, for example, before the ‘Agiotage’5 concerning emigration to Israel was set afoot, these were as many as 80%, maybe more.

This is one side of the problem. The other is the sting of Ahasuerus within the Jews themselves. Only they can overcome it. Ludwig Thieben writes: The tragic riddle of the Jewish people lies in the fact that the glory of the anticipation of Christianity became its shadow. This shadow took on the nature of a being, in Ahasuerus, the nurturer of post-Christian Judaism. To transform him from his sombre, stooping form into a being of light who joyfully serves the Christ is the mission of present and future Judaism.6

Thieben, himself a Jew and a European, was conscious of the fact that the destiny of Ahasuerus is a threat to the destiny of European humanity as a whole. But on the other hand the false immortality of these nations ... [is] the answer of the cosmos to the denial of the resurrection.7 In his uncompromising study Thieben provides the question with a consistently esoteric foundation and even rejects the Judaeophilia of Count Kalergi, which – we would add – had a purely political background. Thieben recognizes very precisely the lie of Zionism, which tries to work out of the principles of ‘blood and soil’ and would turn merchants and agents, journalists, lawyers and doctors ... into farmers again.8

Zionism and the idea of a mission – Thieben concludes – are spiritually irreconcilable. The mission of the Jews consists in tearing asunder the chains of Ahasuerus, in order to be able to follow the universal-human path to the central Being of our world, i.e. to Christ.9

It is by no means only a question of religious persuasion whether or not we should follow the Christ. The question of personal salvation, which came into the world with Christ, is connected with the ordering of our own karma, and of another karma that works within the progressive stream of incarnations. However, a progression is possible only if in each new incarnation the individual human spirit is active in a different nation or race. Thus a one-sided striving towards a particular nation should be avoided during life on earth. We should develop a concrete interest in, and sympathy for, other nations and races, and indeed for mankind as a whole, so that Christ can become the ‘Lord of our karma’. For if a human being, as Rudolf Steiner says, rejects such a leader of mankind, [he] will appear again (on the earth) in the same form. And if the same way of thinking (fixation in the national, earthly, this-worldly, in the ‘one-only existence’ on earth) lives in him again, then he will in the next incarnation again reject the leaders of mankind, and he will appear again and again in the same form ... because (in this case) he has only been able to create that one form. This, on a deeper level, is the idea of Ahasuerus, who must always appear in the same form because he rejected the hand of the greatest leader, the Christ.

Thus the human being has the possibility either to fuse together with the nature of one incarnation, to reject the leader of mankind, or to go through a transformation to ever higher perfection. Races would not grow decadent or pass away if there were not souls that cannot advance further ... But for those who want to remain behind, who want to merge with the race, the possibility exists that ‘with their own gravity’ they descend and dissolve in the material world. There are sixteen ways of merging with the race. They are called the ‘sixteen paths to ruin’ (May 16, 1908, GA 102).

Of the sixteen paths Jewish racism is the most dangerous. The deep compassion brought to it by the whole of ‘progressive’ humanity which supports Zionism, can evoke nothing but shock for, through expressions of sympathy, the peoples of the world are digging the grave of cosmic death for their human brothers. Premonitions of such approaching catastrophe moved Ludwig Thieben to write his book. Many anthroposophists have brought him understanding and sympathy. We cannot move forward to freedom armed with 365 prohibitions and 248 commandments of Maimonides, a reviewer observes. But in the anthroposophical press we frequently hear the old song of Herzl’s Zionism as a reaction to German hyper-nationalism, which has by now become a refrain (The words are written by the new Publisher of Thieben’s book in his epilogue). It would thus appear that Zionism arose through the fault of the Germans – not the National Socialists, but the entire nation, as Herzl started his work already before the First World War.10  Not even the Zionists themselves make such a claim. For the new Publisher it is as though Thieben’s book had never been written. The Ahasuerus syndrome shows itself with such startling clarity, when people continue to deny, even when they say ‘Yes’ to certain things. This means that the syndrome can be eradicated only under the conditions of unprejudiced self-knowledge. But this problem does not in any way concern the Jews who are not affected by such a syndrome. This distinction, too, is important.

The self-knowledge of the Jews is greatly disturbed by the world forces of which we have already spoken. But it would be absurd to speak of their Judae-ophilia, because these forces do not love any nation. Love is not at all their prerogative. Dominant in the Anglo-Saxon world, they oppress the English-speaking peoples just as in the Latin world they oppress the Romanic peoples; in Eastern Europe they persecute the peoples of Russia etc. For these forces it is helpful if one speaks in the world of the striving of the Learned Elders of Zion, rather than of Pan-Americanism, for global domination. For others this concept is also a welcome means to gather unconditional supporters. Generally speaking, the world-wide official voice of the media – including (as a rule) the anthroposophical press – which is dedicated to the struggle against anti-Semitism, serves only to aggravate it. The opposing side openly propagates anti-Semitism.

The assertion that the Germans, and now the Russians too, are to blame is just as absurd as its opposite – viz. that the Jews are to blame for everything.

We would like to illustrate this battle against anti-Semitism by means of an example. The Swiss Institute for Eastern Studies published in 1963 a brochure with the title Anti-Semitism in the USSR. It reports a conversation with a Jewish Moscow student, who is alleged to have said: ... the Russian nation, which is chosen to rule, and the Jewish nation, which is chosen to be hated.11 As a citizen of the USSR we can say in all conscience that whoever would have declared in the ’Sixties or would in Russia declare now, that the Russian nation is chosen to rule, is in serious danger of being considered insane. The author of the brochure also gives statistics indicating that 61% of those condemned to death in 1961 for economic crimes, in particular for theft in especially serious cases, were Jews. The author, when presenting this as proof of anti-Semitism in the USSR, was counting on the complete ignorance of the Swiss reader. If something like this were reported to Jews in Russia, they would merely tap their finger against their forehead.12  This does not mean that anti-Semitism does not exist in Russia. It does, just as it exists in all other countries of the globe. But we can only overcome it if its causes are analyzed from all sides.

Indeed the most varied kinds of anti-Semitism exist. Kol Israel (‘The Voice of Israel’) broadcasts regular reports on, not only German, but also English and American anti-Semitism etc. Does this mean that all the nations are bad? If we consider everything that has been discussed here, then we must reply in the negative. It is customary in the world to blame entire nations for what only a few have done. That is how the Jews are treated as well. So let us take courage and examine this question in more detail. For in following this path it will be possible for us to cut through the ‘Gordian knot’ of racism and chauvinism.


The Internationalists of Chauvinism

‘Would it not perhaps be a good idea to allow an exception for at least one form of racism?’ – someone may ask. We will not argue about this, but rather let the facts speak for themselves. They should be able to provide an answer to the question.

Salcia Landmann, the Swiss ‘internationally recognized Judaist’, as the press puts it, writes in her book The Jews as a Race: The Spanish Jews were successful in convincing the Moslems that an expedition into bountiful Andalusia was worthwhile. A large army of Arabs, Berbers and Jews went to Europe. The army defeated the West Goths, and then the Arabs and Jews settled on the Pyrenean peninsula. Soon a cultural symbiosis took place between them. The Jews did not assimilate with the local population as did their brothers in Germany, but it happened that they formed a kind of aristocratic upper class and they were fervent Zionists.13  Furthermore they were the most devoted servants of their Sultan, and the Spanish Christians were treated badly by them.14

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A recognized Judaist writes this, not an anti-Semite. And she does so for the simple reason that she does not want to falsify the historical truth that is recorded in a multitude of documents. But how can we understand the following: The public apology made last year by the Spanish King for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain five hundred years ago – after the termination of Arab rule? Is this not perhaps a demonstration of power? A humiliation of the Spaniards? In this case it would be the duty of every Jew with healthy common sense to protest against the apology, which will sooner or later have unhappy consequences.

It is also incomprehensible to us why no-one looks to the fact that the ‘children of Ahasuerus’ (we use this term, in order not to generalize, and to make it clear that what we say is not applicable to all Jews) build their State on the atavistic principle of ‘blood and soil’, which is after all what the National Socialists attempted to do. Why are some allowed to do this, while it is forbidden to others in the most categorical way? Why is it not forbidden to everyone? Instead, one prefers to keep silent and to use various ideological tricks. How much more honest then is Salcia Landmann. She writes openly that Zionism shares the views of racists of all shades (!), since it proceeds from the principle of the chosenness of the Jewish people, who neither can nor should be eliminated through however ardent a preparedness to be assimilated into the various nations of the world.15

This clearly-formulated opinion allows for an equally clear formulation of the consequences to be drawn from it.

The linking together of such factors as chosenness and racism, unquestionably presupposes that the chosen are set over against those who are not chosen, that equality of the races is denied, and this can only lead to racial and national confrontation. Each side is in its own way right and wrong at the same time. Each one may proclaim its racial superiority; under the rules of the racial game one racist is not better and no worse than the other. What right do we have to condemn National Socialism? S. Landmann does not condemn it either. She objects only to the wish to solve racial problems by violent means. But this wish is simply naïve.

It is not racial chosenness that helps humanity forward, but the spiritual and cultural mission of the peoples. Occasionally spiritual chosenness comes about. One or the other people fulfils a cultural task in the interest of humanity as a whole. All must have an interest in the fulfilment of such tasks. For they find their realization in the form of the national culture, but in their content they go beyond this and pour out into the whole world. Goethe is a German poet and thinker. It is hard to imagine that the phenomenon Goethe could have arisen on English or French soil, but still more improbable is Goethe as a purely German phenomenon.

The absolute opposite to spiritual chosenness is racial or national chosenness – each of which has its roots in blood relationships. This basis is atavistic through and through. It corresponds to the half-animal stage in the development of humanity. Unavoidably there re-echoes in it the sound of the struggle of the species, which in connection with the intellect made and makes this struggle appear in a terrible light.

Zionist racism is no exception. The historical occurrence in Spain is a logical consequence of the racist attitude. In our century the old ‘Spanish’ experiment was repeated in Russia. It was of course conceived on a larger scale to begin with (as we have already mentioned) but in its realization it was the same. This can easily be proven by means of documents and eyewitness reports. We have already touched on this question, but an argument backed up by documentation is never superfluous. Therefore we present a further document. In 1919 a White book was published by the English government. In a chapter devoted to the events in Russia an account is given of a report of Udendeyck, the Dutch ambassador in Petersburg, to Balfour. In it he wrote (in 1918): Bolshevism has been organized and realized by Jews who have no nationality, whose only aim is to destroy the existing order, to their own advantage. At the end of the 1960’s the famous Soviet poet of Armenian descent, Marietta Shaginian, wrote in the newspaper Novi Mir that Russia must be grateful to the Jews for the realization of the October Revolution (at the time it was still declared the greatest boon for humanity). The same article informs the Soviet public for the first time that Lenin is of Jewish descent on his mother’s side.

After the October Revolution of 1917 a government was formed in Russia which consisted exclusively of ‘children of Ahasuerus’. Today, since the activity of that government is widely verified and discussed, the bold initiative of Marietta Shaginian is judged to have been over-hasty. We are now told that the atrocities of the Bolshevik terror had their origin in the ‘innate’ characteristics of the Russian people (i.e. the question is dealt with in all variations on a racial basis) but that the composition of the government was purely coincidental.

But this is not of central importance. The more crucial question is how that government acted in Russia. It unleashed a terror never before known in the entire history of mankind, and it was the first in history16  to set up concentration camps. Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in the GULAG Archipelago that the names of the worst criminals, of murderers, should be displayed by laying out stones on the slopes of the Volga-Baltic-Canal, which was built by prisoners of Soviet concentration camps: Semyon Firin, Matvei Berman, Naftali Frenkel, Lazar Kogan, Yakov Rappoport, Sergei Shuk,17  behind each one of which around forty thousand lives should be inscribed. All of them – ‘children of Ahasuerus’. Already in the first winter 100,000 prisoners died of exhaustion and malnutrition on that building site! Frenkel, a millionaire from Turkey, developed in the land of the ‘victorious proletariat’ a special ‘theory’ of the ‘rational’ use of prisoners, where he shows that it is most practical to make each one work so that he does not last out more than 2-3 months.

Scarcely anyone knows that the first inventor of gas-chambers was also an ‘Ahasuerite’, Isai Davidovich Berg. In Russia in the ’Twenties there was no gas. So he had the idea of crowding prisoners into a van with a closed-off compartment, leading the exhaust gases into it and driving around Moscow for several hours, after which the corpses merely had to be dumped into a trench.

It could be objected that this was a clique of murderers who should not be equated with the Jewish people! But we do not equate, we merely offer to examine the facts. The murderers who carried out their work in Russia also had representatives of the intelligentsia on their side. The famous Soviet poet E. Bagritsky, now almost a classic, whose poems can be found in any school-book, wrote the following verses:

            My Jewish pride sang ...
            I would give much,
            If my ancestors in the long chalat,
            With the fox-cap, under which appear
            The Pesah in grey spirals
            ... and the scales fall down like clouds
            Would recognize their descendant
            Searchlight and bayonet fly over him
            The fellow who stands there like a tower!

In his poetic opus Bagritsky describes how during a razzia on a brothel he recognized one of the inmates as a girl who before the revolution had been a high-school pupil and the secret love of the poet whose affection, however, she did not return. Now he says to her:

            I: – Now what? Does she recognize me?
            Silence.
            – How much does it cost?
            Silence still.
            Without opening her mouth she says:
            Have pity on me; keep your money! –
            But I fling the money at her ...
            And charge in, without taking off
            Boots, shirt, holster.

            – I take you because my epoch was hesitant,
            And I was timid,
            For shame of my poor forefathers ...
            As my revenge on the world I take you,
            Where I could accomplish nothing.
            Receive me into your empty womb,
            Where not even grass grows – and maybe
            My nightly seed will flourishes in your desert.

This ‘classic’ of Soviet poetry advises in another opus:

            When it is necessary to lie – lie!
            When it is necessary to murder – murder!

These are facts of our history, or rather, of our falling out of history, which began on October 1917. It can in no way be justified with an alleged ‘hyper-nationalism’ of the Russians, because the first revolution in February had already granted the Jews the same rights as all other citizens of Russia. This is why people ever more frequently ask in Russia today: Why did the Jews so massively support the Bolshevik revolution by helping, for instance, to crush the numerous riots of farmers and workers protesting against the Bolshevik terror; actively participate in the forced recruitment for the Red Army; and take the place of the eliminated Russian intelligentsia in economy and industry? The answer is silence. But in questions of this importance silence is dangerous. And once in a while we can also hear people say: The ‘Holocaust’ – God’s punishment of the Jews for the crucifixion of Russia. – Without question an over-simplified and therefore false conclusion. Nor can the statistical facts alone explain the nature of events in Russia after 1917. But instead of investigating these things thoroughly, one simply denies them or interprets them in an entirely one-sided way. There is no-one who dares to look behind the scenes, because such attempts are closely watched and measures are taken to thwart them before anyone can even open his mouth. People prefer not to gain knowledge, but rather to accuse one another of chauvinism, where the age-old law prevails: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, blood for blood. And several things from the present day are added too, for instance the appeal: Away with idle intellectual reflection! But however deep may be the abyss into which humanity is thrown by some of its representatives, there is yet another, far deeper abyss. And sooner or later we will have to climb out of it again – rather sooner than later –, and it is hard to understand the people who do not realize this.

The examples given are not the only ones, either in number or in kind. But there are others that are different in principle. In Berlin in 1923 a collection of contributions by Jews who were not carried away by the dubious success of Bolshevism was published under the title Russia and the Jews. The authors wrote that the mass-participation of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution was an undeniable fact, that the Russian person now sees the Jew as a judge and hangman, but that one should not think that the honest uncovering, the acknowledgement of the facts and the fight against them could harm the Jews. ... silence cannot be helpful to the Jews, but their removal can, although among the Jewish intelligentsia a certain over-sensitivity, a certain laming of the motor-will and conscientiously-judging mechanisms appear in this question.18

These are tremendously important words. And to this very day they have not lost their actuality, nor will they lose it in the future, for as long, that is, as people exist who allow themselves to be led by the inspirations of Ahasuerus. For these do indeed cause a laming of the motor-will and conscientious-judging mechanisms.

The ‘children of Ahasuerus’ hold the Germans responsible for the genocide of the Jews. The peoples of Russia have no less reason to hold the ‘children of Ahasuerus’ responsible for the same crime. But on this path we drive the crisis still further down a blind alley. It is vitally necessary that within all races and nations people can be found who are able boldly and without prejudice to lay open the history of modern times with all that works in the background, and to found a counter-movement that can lead us out of this blind alley.

This can be achieved through knowledge and moral purification – which are asked of the Jews as well as the Russians and Germans, for the Russians bear responsibility for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks, as do the Germans for that by the National Socialists. In Germany the process of repentance started long ago and has now been inaugurated in Russia. Solzhenitsyn spoke of the need for the Jews to recognize their share in the responsibility, and repent also. But events show that such a step is quite out of the question. The world press tries to persuade us that owing to their consistent love of violence, fawning and despotism the Russians, and only they, are to blame for not only their own misfortune, but for that of other nations too. In frightening consonance with E. Bagritsky the voice of D. Markish sounds today from Israel:

            I speak of us, the sons of Sinai ...
            We ate bread from them
(the Russians) but the price was blood.
            The account is kept, but not settled.
            We take revenge – with flowers on our heads
            From their Nordic country.
            At the birch-coffin
(of the ‘Nordic country’) we will
            Stand guard of honour.

So, now we live in the expectation that the account will be settled with us; that flowers will be laid on the birch-coffin of our country, and apparently on all its inhabitants as well. But what would the poet say if the inhabitants of the Nordic country were to try not to lie down in the coffin? Or if a poet from the ‘other side’ were to write something like: ‘They ate bread, but the price ... ?’ Would it not be considered necessary in such a case to take international measures? Or will only the Russians be put into the grave? But the problem to be addressed here has yet another side. The wife of the poet Osip Mandelstam, Nadezhda Yakovlevna, who has sympathy for the Jews who were subjected to reprisals without a court ruling, said openly: Who could have guessed that, when we suspended the rule of law in the first years after the revolution, we suspended it for ourselves as well?

Echoing a well-known Russian proverb we could say: What the inspirators behind the scenes intend, this is spoken out by their victims who, after a special treatment, have become neurasthenics. When we read this poem the question immediately arises, whether the author possibly mistook us for someone else? Or whether he wanted to address it to someone else? – But then it becomes clear that here no mistakes were made, that here someone is in urgent need of a ‘Russian anti-Semitism’ to enable him to realize his plans. But in this case we should reflect fundamentally on anti-Semitism of whatever kind – what is it actually?

But if we take everything as it was written, then we must ask the unfortunate poet: To whom did you pay the price of blood? – To a Solzhenitsyn, a Shalomov, Marchenko, a Merab Kostava or the millions who, before them and after them and to this very day, have suffered and died for the sole reason that, as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, an endless social ‘experiment’ is conducted on us? Six million peasants of the Ukraine paid with their lives because they ate no bread – they were simply made to starve. What were they paying for? What offence did they commit against the sons of Sinai?

Madness shows its face openly in the world today. Sooner or later each individual will stand before the choice of joining in, succumbing to madness, or rejecting it, whatever this may bring. But we can already guess how our prejudiced opponent would like to fling at us his angry counter-argument:

'You only bring these examples because you are an anti-Semite in the first place!’

‘Do you think they should be completely ignored?’ – I reply. ‘

Yes, of course!’

‘Because they have nothing to say?’

‘Because anything at all can be proved with examples!’

‘But your argument is completely abstract’ – I reply. ‘Can we gain any knowledge at all if we ignore experience? And if statements about this kind of racism have nothing to say, then anti-Semitic statements should be ignored too.’

‘By judging in this way you prove again that you are anti-Semitic’ – my opponent says reproachfully.

Unfortunately, this is the level on which everything discussed in this chapter is condemned and rejected, in reality.

But if someone were to advise us to drop the discussion, for us to agree to this would mean to leave the structure of knowledge we have erected open on one side at least – i.e. with no inside wall. Something would arise that is contrary to nature and which would collapse under the slightest pressure of criticism, because its builder would be called a liar and opportunist.

No, one should not do such a thing. Zionism is a quite essential component of world politics, especially that behind the scenes. Of course, it has its special features that need to be known. It is considered all-powerful but is in reality, in the dubious, exaggerated politics of the 20th century, rather like Mata Hari, passed from one to another, wanted by everyone but ruinous to whoever had her – and in the end she was the only one to blame.

Anyone who is carried away by the slogan: The Jewish people and Zionism are one!19  – is past helping. But to all the rest, the reasonable people who are independent of their racial affiliation, this is only an expression of mass-psychoses corresponding to the Soviet slogan: Party and people are one!

Despite our harsh enough criticism of Anglo-Saxon and Latin political occultism, it is unlikely that anyone will accuse us of Anglophobia, Italophobia or consider us an Anti-Latinist, or an Anti-Anglist etc. Yet any critical word addressed to political Zionism is equated with racism.

When nationalism grows stronger it plays a repulsive psychological trick on people. It whispers to them: Take revenge on whoever you wish and in whatever way you wish; and don’t worry about the consequences, for you there will be none. – And thus the lowest and most evil nature gains the upper hand. Even a naturally good person who previously was never vengeful will begin to search inwardly (especially if he is encouraged again and again to take revenge) and sift through the past in order to find something for which he can take revenge on somebody.20 There were numerous examples of this during the Second World War. In the occupied areas the Germans appointed as policemen local people whom they did not supervise at all. And it turned out at once that a person who had been known from childhood to all the inhabitants of the village and who had been deeply and persistently insulted by many, now began violently to take revenge and to behave worse than any member of the occupying forces. Something of the psychology of such policemen can be heard in the poems of Bagritsky, Markish and similar ‘intellectuals’.

Some time it may be possible for this or that person to hear what is essentially the old Marxist formula in the following seductively renewed form:

‘Jews of all lands, unite! A non-Jew cannot understand a Jew. Only a Jew can understand a Jew. Therefore renounce individual consciousness and unite in the group –, in the racial consciousness with those who are close to you in blood. Renounce the spiritual, the cultural values that you acquired when you lived among other peoples. Despise these values and the cultures, and with them the peoples themselves. You are the only sufferers in history. All peoples of the earth are guilty before you. Seek for self-affirmation. Seek for self-affirmation at any price! The right to this is granted you by the old God Jehovah.’

All the elements of this formula are repeated millions of times, in every imaginable manner, in the form of the most varied supplements, and seasoned with the most varied ‘sauces’, over and over again in the mass-media of the world. And if there is someone who does not grasp that this formula is worse than its bloody prototype – Workers of the world, unite! – then we can only gather enough patience and courage, and wait until life itself will make it quite obvious.

But this formula can also be challenged. As a response to it something different can be heard, something that is in accord with the real life of our times. It is the statement that speaks of social and historical understanding and of the will to solve, not to aggravate, the social problems:

‘Jews of the world, isolate yourselves no longer, no longer be cocooned up in your racial unity. Through living among other peoples, through speaking their languages, assimilating with their culture, you have received the inestimable gift of the autonomous personality, to which it is given to ascend to unbounded spiritual freedom. Treasure this gift. Treasure the cultures in which you were nurtured, make your contribution to their healthy development, because their destiny is also yours. Outside these cultures you will find no happiness, no higher purpose of existence. Use the conditions of today that have never been so favourable for assimilation with the peoples in whose midst you were born and educated, and with whom in truth you already form a unity. Lend all your forces so that all peoples of the world may live in dignity. Be happy in the measure possible in the place where karma has placed you. Do not carry the arbitrary will of dark politicians into the realm where the cosmic laws of the eternal human spirit hold sway.’



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Notes

1. Margarita Voloshina, The Green Snake, Stuttgart, 1968, p. 205.


2. Without an understanding of the complicated and manifold processes through which in the course of evolution man gains his individual ‘I’ – in history and culture, through the racial and national element as well as in individual spiritual work, the theme of ethnography, of occult sociology, is better left alone. It is not for nothing that we have addressed our book to thinking people with the capacity for knowledge. It is important for us to enter into a dialogue with people who have already in some way made the methodology of spiritual cognition their own, without which none of the themes discussed here can be understood. It took us many years to understand the fundamental question of the evolution of the earthly aeon – the development of I- consciousness. The results of our study are presented in the book The Triune Man of Body, Soul and Spirit in the Light of Anthroposophy. And we refer to the conclusions arrived at in that book when we speak of the special character of the incarnation of the ‘I’ in various peoples in the different cultural epochs.

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3. Comparable to the way one appeals in Russia to the wisdom coming from above, the revelation experienced by a saint.

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4. In the former Soviet Union there are several dozen national groups who want to build their own ‘Israels’. And the same problems of the ‘Palestinian’ refugees arise, of confrontation etc..

5. A very popular expression used figuratively in Russian-speaking parts: The business of speculation – normally through exploitation of exchange-rate fluctuations – applied to social life.

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6. Ludwig Thieben, The Riddle of Judaism, Basle, 1991, p. 219.

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7. Ibid., p. 189.

8. Ibid., p. 216.

9. Ibid., p. 194, 203.

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10. In No. 1-1992 of Info3 an author writes the following: Because of Hitler’s diabolical ‘Final Solution’, the ‘Solution’ of Theodor Herzl cannot be questioned. The ‘People of Humanity’ must become a ‘Nation’ again. From a purely materialistic point of view this argument sounds entirely convincing. But not so when we work with spiritual science, which provides us with knowledge of the spiritual configuration of folk communities. The ease with which some people who speak in the name of Anthroposophy treat spiritual beings is quite alarming. In the one case they state clearly that a folk-spirit, an Archangel, distances itself from its people, and in another case they impose upon the folk-spirit their earthly will, for the founding of the State of Israel was only possible with Stalin’s approval, and only after this was given did an archangel in the spiritual world support it. But such a thing could never happen, for reasons that have been discussed in this chapter.

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11. Hans J. Pommer, Anti-Semitism in the USSR, Berne, 1963, p. 1.

12. We will present a concrete case as an example in particular for Western readers. At a Jewish concert in the autumn of 1993, broadcast by the central TV-station in Moscow, the master of ceremonies asked the audience: Why are we (the Jews) in the minority in all countries, but the majority in all institutions? In medicine – the majority, in music – the majority?

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13. We point this out especially to Thieben’s new Publisher.

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14. Salcia Landmann, The Jews as a Race, Olten and Freiburg, 1981, p. 256-270.

15. Ibid., p. 335.

16. We would draw this to the attention particularly of an anthroposophical author, who writes in Info3 (No. 12/1992, p.31): When we speak of a ‘prelude’ with regard to concentration camps, the ‘main act’ most certainly took place under the direction of German politics. Unfortunately this fact is ‘most uncertain’ and before daring to write an article of this kind one should first study the sources.

17. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago, Part 3, chapter 3.

18. This collection appeared in the magazine Volga, No. 3-6, 1992.

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19. Such a unity is far from being supported by all Jews. Rabbi Beck for instance, an activist of the ‘Naturae Charta’ movement writes: Zionism is a relatively new movement, founded on the dross of Judaism. He also states that the Jews swore (and here he refers to the Talmud) not to rise against the nations of the world ... not to take part in actions that hasten the end of the world ... not to return to the land of Israel all at the same time.

20. The comedian Gennadi Khazanov, already famous during Soviet times, was asked in a TV interview: Why can’t you feel yourself to be a Russian now? He answered:
Because I was once taunted in my childhood for being a Jew.

– What?! – exclaimed the reporter – You cannot forget an insult from the far-off days of childhood?

No! – confirmed the comedian – I am quite incapable of forgetting and forgiving insults. That is my character.

I find it hard to believe – the journalist insisted – could there be any other reasons?

There are others as well – Khazanov admitted. – I had a difficult childhood, I grew up without a father!

Thus we see how the psychological trick works, even with people who are reasonable and intelligent. What shall we say about the mob?

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Chapter 13 Contents Chapter 15