Two years ago, the infamous pickup artist Roosh Valizadeh announced that he was giving up his life of sinful fornication and getting himself right with God. Or at least right with a right-wing God, whom he apparently met in person after taking a megadose of ‘shrooms. (No, I’m not kidding.)
Now, instead of penning rapey pickup manuals, he writes posts on his blog with titles like “I Lived Most of My Life Under Demonic Influence,” “There is No Identity Without Christ,” and (somewhat unexpectedly) “Why I Don’t Trust American Dentists.”
Guess who else he doesn’t trust? The Jews.
Roosh has hated on Jews for a while now, and at one point he even got one of his tweets banned in France for promoting an antisemitic ASMR video. But he’s now getting serious about his antisemitism, blaming Jews for “most modern evils” from fornication to the Reformation.
In a recent post, Roosh reviews a book called “The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit” by a Catholic writer named E. Michael Jones, described by the Anti-Defamation League as a man “obsess[ed]” with “the damage that he believes Jews are inflicting on the Catholic Church and western civilization.”
Roosh’s book review — basically a series of long quotes from Jones’ book interspersed with relatively brief bits of editorializing from Roosh — blames Jews for everything from the Russian revolution to internet porn, and even for Roosh’s own fornication-heavy previous life.
If you decide to turn away from God, there will be a Jew to catch you with one of his degenerate movements, pseudo-intellectual ideologies, or money-making schemes. I fell for the Jewish trick of sexual liberation and paid dearly for it. Many others fall for greed, cosmopolitan living, new atheism, pornography, or the self-glorification that comes from Jewish-run social networking and dating apps. I must conclude that Jews are God’s punishment to those with weak faith. If you stray too far from God, you in essence become a Jew.
(Emphasis mine.)
In another section of the review, Roosh declares that:
Once you learn how to recognize Jewish names and physiognomy, it doesn’t take long to see that just about every moral degradation under the sun is spearheaded by Jews. There are certainly gentiles involved in such movements, but if Jews were wholly absent, many social revolutions and degeneracies would simply not exist.
There are a lot of similar proclamations in Roosh’s post. We “learn,” among other things, that:
Jews hate manual labor. … Unless you do manual labor, it could be argued that you are Jewish in character. …
In a society without tradition, rootless Jews can flourish. Their very first task when parasitizing a new nation is to break down the traditional order …
While many men have fantasies about defeating Jews or ridding them from the land, understand that they would never have gained power in the first place if people stayed close to God. Without faith, a man will not be able to resist the traps that the Jews set out for him, so the solution to constrain the Jew becomes a personal and then societal decision of faith.
Roosh is really cranking the antisemitism up to eleven.
Couldn’t he have found a God who was somewhat less of an asshole?
Follow me on Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you, its readers, to survive. So please donate here if you can, or at David-Futrelle-1 on Venmo.
@Chris Oakley
I can’t really see Roosh being a Marxist, because that would mean he’d have to care about someone who isn’t him.
Bad news: Parler is back up, now hosted by Epik: the home of incels.co and Gab.
That weirdly dressed QAnon guy who was part of the failed coup attempt has been arrested:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/man-pelosi-lectern-qanon-shaman-arrested-capitol-1112191/
I wonder how long until they’re *all* arrested? After all, as they themselves say …
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/13/956096928/bidens-german-shepherd-to-be-celebrated-with-indoguration-hosted-by-animal-shelt
Speaking of Judaism, and following on from our discussion about religious history, some folks might find this of interest.
https://nlisrael.typeform.com/to/RdsY3ZNS
It’s a talk about the interface between Judaism and Zoroastrianism.
I’ve already submitted a naive question about the three wise men.
I have a lot of love for zoroastrism because one of the nation I like in a videogame about ancient cultures clashing are zoroastrist birdmen. It’s not terribly hard to draw at least some comparisons with judaism, altho they are likely more superficial than I think.
While that might be a misconception, I had the feeling that old text in the bible are less monotheistic and less manichean than the newer one. In the old testament, the Pharaoh give strong vibes of being supported by third party deities that just aren’t as powerful as the god of the jewish ; meanwhile during the new testament the evil peoples are much more cartoonishly evil and visibly on the side of Satan and there’s neither mentions nor hint of a third force.
@ ohlmann
Me too; so I’m really looking for forward to this.
I am hoping they will address just how much cross pollination there was between the two faiths. There’s also the historical thing of how the OT was composed. There is a theory it was ‘commissioned’ by the Persian government. So maybe they’ll address that too.
As for you point about other gods, it seems that was the common belief at the time. It was just a matter of which god was best. The OT though is full of references that seem to accept their are other deities; they’re just not as good as YWHY/Elohim*.
But the first commandment is ‘Thou shall have no other gods before me’. It prohibits worship, not belief. So it’s more establishing the hierarchy. The religious language used tallies with the secular proclamations of kings. In other words; there may be other kings or pretenders** vying for my throne; but I’m top dog.
Although Maimonides did argue the interpretation was that no other gods actually existed. He knows a lot more about the Torah than me, so I’d be tempted to defer. But the fact it was something he felt the need to comment on shows the common belief at the time.
* whilst YHWH was definitely meant to be a single god, there’s debate as to whether Elohim was plural; and the OT uses various traditions as source material.
** as in the claimant to the throne sense, not that they weren’t real.
@Alan Robertshaw
One of the reasons I tend to lean towards the theory that multiple different people wrote the OT over a period of centuries is that it used various different names for God. Elohim is used in some sections, while others use YHWH or Adonai, which would imply a shift in beliefs over time as the people moved from a polytheistic belief system in which Adonai was king of the gods or the most powerful one, to a system with only one god.
Proponents of the “Ancient Aliens” conspiracy theories tend to believe that Elohim refers to a race of aliens which created the world, a theory which I do not endorse for obvious reasons.
@ naglfar
I think that’s generally accepted now. The discussion centres around the actual sources of material. Bit like the gospels thing. But this seems to be the consensus for the time being.
Again, that seems to be the accepted theory. Although God later does a retcon and says the other gods were all actually him all along.
https://biblehub.com/exodus/6-3.htm
today I met one of my new professors and we talked about the weather cause I was outside. I tried to say “it’s a tab bit nippy out here” but what came out was “it’s a tit bit nipply out here”. Didn’t help that my own nipples could cut diamonds at the moment and I wasn’t wearing a bra. I need to just burry myself now.
I would say that anti-Semitism is the last refuge of the incompetent, but its
often among the first.
It has to be the laziest form of bigotry around.
@Surplus: that cartoon brought back memories of many happy gaming hours. “Oooh NOOO!” *explosion* MAGAts aren’t at all cute, though.
@Naglfar: I guess it’ll make it easier for Biden’s FBI to keep an eye on them all?
@Lainy: At least he’ll remember you? I started my first day in college by literally having the desk fall over with me in it. As freshmen generally had the same students in each class, I was the one who suddenly had about 30 people I saw all day making desk jokes.
And of course Freddie Mercury was born into a Zoroastrian family.
@GSS
My professor is a woman.
@Robert: If anti-Semitism is the first refuge of the incompetent, racism is a VERY close second.
I, for one, am not surprised that monotheistic beliefs did not, as it were, spring, fully formed, from the brow of Zeus. As for the origins of the OT, might I venture an hypothesis of my own?
It’s an early attempt to create an encyclopedia.
Hence compiling a bunch of writings together, and the subject matters covered: the then-current creation beliefs, a capsule summary of the histories of the peoples in the region, treatises on law and moral philosophy, assorted adages and folk tales contemporary to the area, documentation of royal genealogies, commentaries on all of the above, and so on, and so forth.
Someone made an effort to document beliefs and practices throughout the to-them-known world, and compile everything they felt sufficiently important into a single combined work that would serve as a useful reference guide for any educated person. This effort likely included committing to writing heretofore only-oral traditions in some cases.
This hypothesis explains some of the peculiarities, too, for example that Genesis contains two slightly different creation stories in which the various plants and animals and such are created in a different order, but which are very similar to one another in broad strokes. These might have been the creation myths of two tribes living close by to each other, which had mutated somewhat from a fairly recent common ancestor, and which were finally given written documentation, side-by-side, by some anthropologist of the time.
Then the exact purpose and origins of the compilation were forgotten — probably also a gradual process — until it ossified into a holy book, the reference guide becoming increasingly the be-all-end-all first and final word on many topics, likely during one of history’s many periods of contraction, strife, and anti-intellectualism (an obvious candidate would be the big Bronze Age Collapse, or maybe an earlier collapse in Egypt).
Of course, history churns ever on and then we got newer schisms, books added or removed, controversies over what to include, and the like (as is well-attested with the early Church and the New Testament in the first centuries CE). Two of the results of such things would then be the Jewish Torah and the Christian Old Testament. Most likely there’s a subset that could be called the “Really Really Old Testament” that includes Genesis and predates Moses, perhaps an encyclopedia used by Egyptian scholars of a Jewish bent circa 1600 BCE, and then volumes added during/after the Exodus, including, obviously, Exodus itself but also Daniel and some others. (Non-Jewish Egyptian scholars had their own books documenting the majority beliefs, such as the Pyramid Texts. Egyptian Jews would quite logically have wanted documentation of their own to help sustain their own way of life and of understanding the world, and their own history. Think majority, white-Christian-centric texts in a present-day American university, and then the books assigned in Black, Indiginous, Ethnic, or etc. Studies classes, except 3600 years ago.) A trauma happened, during which there was a schism of the society and a large exodus of the Jewish minority. The descriptions point to a natural disaster as the precipitating incident, for which the Thera supereruption is the obvious candidate given the time-frame. It likely accelerated a structural-demographic crisis in Egypt at the time, as they lost a key trading partner (Minoan Crete) and experienced agricultural difficulties. Most likely, some sort of proto-Nazis gained political power and instituted pogroms, as often seems to happen during economic contractions. Jews fled or were expelled from the collapsing “Weimar Egypt” in increasing numbers, and hence the tales of Exodus. Passover seems to be related to a pogrom carried out around the relevant time.
I will of course accept any insights or corrections from Jewish members of this site. No disrespect to their beliefs or faith is intended here, only intellectual curiosity about the origins of the Old Testament and Torah.
One thing I will say is that the present-day versions of the Jewish holy books seem to be among the most useful instances of the holy-book genre. Full of debate as much as prescription, and weighted toward pragmatic advice and time-tested sets of laws and norms. Well, except for all the anti-gay stuff in Leviticus, anyway. I get the distinct impression of a more intellectual-friendly thing with the Talmud and Torah than with the Christian bible, where questioning anything is likely to be taken as blasphemy and the answer to pretty much any question asked in a Bible school setting is “just because”, or “God says so, that’s why”, or similarly, and thinking seems to be distinctly disdained if not downright treated as a gateway drug to heresy. Some of this may stem also from the apparent emphasis in Judaism on practice, versus the emphasis in Christianity on purity of belief. A lot might stem from Judaism having had several thousand more years to mature. That much history perhaps wears the rough edges down and cleaves off the least pragmatic aspects of such a text, until a smooth pebble remains that is as insusceptible to nature’s disproofs as to human critics. The lack of doomsday predictions, for example — those are extremely susceptible to nature’s disproofs, when the appointed hour comes and goes and it’s just business as usual.
This of course suggests that the last book of the New Testament will likely be outlived by much of the rest of it, given a couple thousand more years. Scholars of the 4020s might well be familiar with the Gospels and the Epistles but not even have heard of Revelation, while their contemporary Torahs look very much like a 2020s instance, once one of those is translated of course. Languages change a lot in that kind of time, unless they become fossilized like Latin was — admittedly, not a particularly improbable fate for Hebrew, or any other language with important works written in it. Or has this already happened to Hebrew, and the language for day-to-day matters that necessarily evolves and changes is Yiddish, when local majority languages like English are not being used instead? Again I know less than I probably should about the lives of contemporary Jews. But this would be an analogous situation to that of the Catholics, who still use Latin in religious ceremonial and scholarship functions, but not in day-to-day secular or even religious life, so again, not at all implausible either in the present or, at least, the future.
As far as I know, christians (and muslim) are very very prone to call everything a blasphemy and a heresy, but the books themselves don’t actually help with that. The new testament is from my amateur perspectives two type of story, with a lot that are in both category :
However, christianism is a lot more than the bible. It’s a big calcified set of haphazard guess and interpretations, and *theses* are the one you get yelled at if you don’t follow.
For example, a big source of conflict in early christianity was about the nature of god and jesus, and now questioning that is a good way to get yourself labelled an heretic. But that’s not in the bible. The internal strife within early church is probably *why* they insist that much on a particular interpretation TBH.
Also, the idea that jewish are in general more tolerant for heresy is probably also an optical illusion. Regular jewish and regular christians are a lot more tolerant about discussing interpretations than their fanatic version (respectively orthodox judaism and the Barbarin strain of french catholicism in my experience), and both have inspired their strain of far right authoritarism.
@Surplus
Re: Exodus, the prevailing theory I’ve heard is that the exodus is fictional, since the Egyptians kept detailed records and there is no evidence of Jewish slaves, or indeed any Jews, in Egypt until centuries after the book was written. Instead a common line of thought is that the exodus narrative was created to offer hope to Jews living under persecution elsewhere, in the sense of “we survived once before, so we can survive again.”
Regarding that bit, there is also a school of thought which suggests that it is prohibiting rape or pedophilia.
Indeed, this is a major difference between Judaism and most sects of Christianity. As a result, there are centuries worth of written records of arguments and commentary from scholars.
You’re sort of right. Hebrew has somewhat fossilized, as it was a solely liturgical language for thousands of years before a revival and modernization in the early 20th century. However, unlike other languages which have taken lots of loanwords, Hebrew, much like Icelandic, has a council which creates new words for modern concepts based on historic roots. So modern Hebrew, again like modern Icelandic, is quite similar to the historic variant in a way that is not true for English or many other contemporary languages.
Yiddish is not widely used anymore except in certain Orthodox communities, and as a result is considered an endangered language. It primarily was used by Ashkenazi Jews in Europe a few centuries ago as a lingua franca for Jews from different regions to communicate. It’s most closely related to German, but with some words borrowed from Aramaic and Slavic languages. However, now that Hebrew has been revived as a language for daily use, Yiddish is much less common. I don’t speak Yiddish and as a result don’t know how modern or antiquated it currently is.
@Naglfer,
I’ve been listening to Great Courses lectures on the Dead Sea Scrolls and now I’m moving on to lectures about archaeology in the ‘Holy Land’, another lecture series on understanding the old testament and another on the history of Judaism. I really need to understand where three of the worlds religions come from, so once I’ve covered Judaism I’m moving on to early Christianity and eventually Islam. Maybe, if I learn enough I can understand what all the arguing is about. They all worship the same god, they all arose in the same place and to a certain extent they share the same principles, prophets and pasts. I just don’t get what the arguing is about, either intra or inter-faith, is YHWH a dick who likes setting his worshippers against each other for funsies? Or are humans just arseholes? I’m going for both at this point in time.
Also, @whoever brought up ‘folkish’ Heathens – sorry brain frazzled – those gits give us all a bad name; luckily in the UK we tend to give them the side-eye and the big Heathen groups – UK Heathenry and Asatru UK – explicitly state bigotry is not acceptable. There’s an Odinist temple near me (relatively) and the Kindred I sometimes associate with refuses to have anything to do with them after they refused to allow a black member into the temple. Occasionally, when the Kindred has moots in Newark, the twits from the Temple try to crash the moot, but they are firmly escorted out of the pub if they act up, so I’m told. Due to my terrible anxiety in 2019 and the pandemic, I’ve yet to go to a moot; I look forward to seeing a ‘folkish’ Heathen being chucked out on his ear once I do.
@Naglfar:
French has something similar in l’Académie Française, and it seems like ‘not using the English word’ can be one of their principles. Which is why, despite the fact that ‘computer’ is derived from the Middle French/Late Latin ‘computāre’, the Modern French word for a computer is ‘ordinateur’, and the word ‘computeur’ is reserved for a person whose job it is to perform computations. (Which, of course, is also an older meaning for the word ‘computer’ in English.)
The understanding I had was that Yiddish started off as pretty much ‘Hebrew but using the German phonemes’ and that part of its purpose was maintaining their distinct language, while at the same time keeping their heads down by speaking in a language that would sound enough like German as to ‘pass’ for someone who wasn’t listening closely. Especially as this would have started before the unification of the German language (which wasn’t until Gutenberg’s time), and hearing something that sounded like German but wasn’t the German you grew up with wouldn’t have been unusual.
@Jenora
That maybe how it originated, but contemporary Yiddish has much more in common with German. They’re more or less mutually intelligible, but Yiddish uses a modified Hebrew alphabet instead of the German alphabet.
@Lainy – One of my profs said “orgasm” when he meant “organism”! He was teaching intro to psych, so he was like, “I wonder what Freud would’ve thought…” 😛
Yiddish is interesting. It’s classified as a West Germanic language along with German, Dutch, and English, but a lot of words are Slavic or Hebrew in origin. I guess the grammar is more like German (I don’t know Yiddish apart from a few words and I’m just on my 2nd German class) but not exclusively; e.g. some nouns have the plural ending -im, which is from Hebrew.
(And of course language “family trees” don’t tell the full story, because there’s usually a lot of borrowing. There’s a cool thing in historical linguistics where people are using software to create language “networks” which can show whether languages are related more like trees or webs.)
@Epitome
Yeah, word flops like to be very cruel to me. My husband can speak perfect with no trouble it seems. it’s stupidly unfair. Except when we were reading our vows to each other, he did mess up a little bit then.
@ naglfar
You still hear a fair bit of Yiddish in some parts of London. Stamford Hill especially. There’s a big orthodox community round there. Who for some reason all drive old Volvos. (I asked a shopkeeper about that and he said “They’re good cars.” Fair enough.)
A lot of Yiddish words have also found their way into London dialect.
I’m a big fan of the Vindolanda Letters. They provide some examples where people are writing Celtic words but using the Latin alphabet. I wonder what the chatter was like around Roman places in Britain. With people from all over the empire, I imagine it sounded like second century Bladerunner.
@Alan, re: old Volvos
Contrary to the stereotypes about Jews and wealth and all that, IME using things until they break is a Jewish tradition. As are dumpster diving, repairing things, and cooking amazing dishes with leftovers.
Many of us may be middle class now, but our culture remembers the ghettos.
Anyway yes, old Volvos are good cars, and can be driven for a very long time before they fail. 🙂
@ cyborgette
Oh I totally approve! That’s very much my attitude too.
I really like Stamford Hill. I lived just down the road in Hoxton; so it was a handy place to go shopping for interesting foodstuffs.
I did some Googling for you, and I found this!