that side for power. He was opportunistic, politically brilliant, and
a master of propaganda. It was the shrewd Paul who finally undermined the law that had for centuries kept patriarchal power intact but now was failing, in decline. He scapegoated homosexuals as
unnatural, deceitful, full of m alignity, worthy of death, the source
of intolerable evil; and then he blamed the Jew s, and especially the
law of the Jew s, for the existence of homosexuality. “Therefore, ”
Paul proclaimed in Romans 3: 20, “by the deeds of the law there
shall no flesh be justified in his sight: for by the law
into it too. In Christian countries, the two groups have suffered contempt, persecution, and death in each other’s shadow ever since; they have been linked by demagogues seeking power
through hate—demagogues like Paul; trying to pacify the likes of
Paul, they have often enough repudiated and hated each other; and
each group has hidden from the soldiers of Christ in its own w ay.
*
Democracies electing their sewage
a dung flow from 1913
and the american beaneries
Ezra Pound, “Canto 91”
The textual bases for what became the major anti-Semitic charges
against the Jews are in the Gospels. Some Jews were money
changers in the temple, tax collectors, liked money; some Jews
plotted to have Christ killed; some Jews asked Christ tricky legalistic questions to try to expose him as a poseur or a heretic (claiming to be God violated Jewish law); it was a crowd of Jew s—but not all
the Jew s—that demanded the crucifixion of Christ. Jews denied
Christ and Jews believed in Christ. Most Jews may have been the
enemy of this new God because they did not recognize him; but it
was Paul who made all Jews into the enemy of all Christians. The
acts against Christ came to represent, as Paul saw it, the Jewish
character; the acts against Christ summed up the Jews. It is Paul
who begins to build institutional Christianity by destroying the
institutions of Judaism; and it is Paul who begins to build a distinctly Christian character by annihilating the character of the Jews. The roots of the continuing association of the Jews as a people with culture, social liberalism (tolerating sin), and intellectual-ism go back to Paul: he constructed the modern Jew in history.
Before the coming of Christ, the law was God’s word. The law
signified God’s presence on earth and among his people. The law
had a divine significance. The Jews did not consider the law social;
for them, one obeyed because it was written—obedience was faith.
The coming of Christ meant that God’s will was embodied in a
person: son of man. In Paul’s interpretation, the law became a
body of dogma that interfered with faith. It became cultural, not
sacred. It was the legalism of the Jews, their intellection, their pedantry, that kept them in sin, kept them from recognizing the Christ: in practical terms, the law became the symbol of Jewish
resistance to this personal God, this God whom Paul knew— unlike Abraham, Moses, or David. Paul could speak in behalf of this new God, and any adherence to law that challenged Paul’s authority was wickedness. The law of the Jew s, the intellect of the Jew s, and the culture of the Jew s in fact were the enemies of Paul’s
authority as one, sim ply, who knew Christ.
In undermining the authority of Jew ish law, Paul over and over
linked that law to sin, especially to homosexuality. It was the social
tolerance of the Jew s for homosexuality in private that proved the
corruption of Jew ish law. It was the lack of m asculinity implicit in
this tolerance that lost the Jew s physical circumcision as their mark
of supreme manhood; spiritual circumcision, the kind that would
not tolerate homosexuality, became the proof of manhood.
Paul named the Jew s the enemy of Christ, of Christianity, and
of Paul. He emphasized the Jew ish character, which he invented:
