My Great Good Friends,
One of the wonderful things about this format is picking up prior themes questioned by one or two friends and elaborating upon the point, on the assumption others may share the question.
I recently had the opportunity to expatiate upon my statement in the essay “A confusing Week” that the term ‘Judeo-Christian‘ was a political contrivance to tamp down a nascent cold war wave of American anti semitism.
The 1950s rekindling of this irrational hostility was not solely attributable to ancient myths or (then) Catholic dogma. The source (in the depths of the cold war, with our principal advisory armed with stolen nuclear weapons technology), was the Government fueled fear of international Communism.
As I had used the New York Times’ content analysis algorithm to trace the term ‘Judeo-Christian‘ in common parlance, it coincided with western propaganda reviling Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union and beyond, many of which were Jewish. And this is not surprising given the pogroms of the Russian Orthodox Tsars.
AnyHowitzer, it was the constant revelation of Jewish — or assumed to be Jewish — names associated with the national fear (especially domestic nuclear spies) which threatened, by association, patriotic Jewish Americans. And hence the ‘Judeo-Christian‘ initiative to thwart a group condemnation for the acts of individual enemies and traitors.
After this explanation I offered to provide what would have been the names in the news fueling domestic concern to the point a counter narrative had to be constructed. The Encyclopedia Judacia lists hundreds (mostly obscure and unpronounceable) so I’ll provide aggregates.
Robert Wilton, Moscow correspondent for The Times (London), in his definitive “Les Derniers Jours Des Romanofs” lists the members of The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party as: Bronstein (Trotsky), Zinovief, Larine, Ouritski, Volodarski, Kamanef, Smidovich, Yankel and Steklof; nine Jews, and three non-Jews: Lenin, Krylenko, and Lounatcharski.
Similarly (names available);
- The Council of the Peoples Commissars: 17 of 22.
- The Central Executive Committee: 42 0f 60. And,
- The Extraordinary Commission of Moscow: 23 of 35.
So on the question of mid-century American anti Semitism, and the motivation for the ‘Judeo-Christian‘ construct, I suggest cold war fear and hostility conflated with the historic association of Jews with our then one mortal enemy; the Soviet Union, was probably the culprit.
And, lest anyone question that historic association, whilst Premier Khrushchev put the percentage of Jews in the initial Soviet hierarchy at two in three, recently President Putin in a speech at the reopening of the Schneerson Library within the National Jewish Museum in Moscow said; “Up to 80 – 85% of the first Soviet Union government members were Jews”.
-ATN