Abraham and the birth of the Jewish Problem

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Nietzsche

For Nietzsche's contention is that the very origins of morality itself – and secular morality just as much as its Judeo-Christian predecessor – can be understood as springing from the same impulse.

It was the Jews who, rejecting the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = blessed) ventured, with awe inspiring consistency, to bring about a reversal and held it in the teeth of their most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless), saying:

Only those who suffer are good, only the poor, the powerless, the lowly are good; the suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly, are the only pious people, the only ones saved, salvation is for them alone, whereas you rich, the noble and powerful, you eternally wicked cruel, lustful, insatiate, godless, you will be eternally wretched, cursed and damned. (OGM 1:7)

With slavery, all values are reversed. "Blessed are the poor" says Jesus. Everything vibrant and life-affirming is redescribed as "bad" so as to undermine the authority of the strong. Morality is a put-down. And with this revolutionary redescription, Nietzsche contends, humanity degrades itself. Humanity withers.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/nov/03/nietzsche-slave-morality-religion

In the first essay of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (OGM), he lays out his famous accusation: Christianity is the religion of the downtrodden, the bullied, the weak, the poor and the slave. And this, precisely, is why it is so filled with hatred. For there is nothing quite as explosive as the sort of bottled up resentment that the oppressed feels towards their oppressor.

To understand (and defeat) Christianity, though, one must understand the “soil from which it sprung”: Judaism.

For him, Christianity is the “one great curse” visited upon humanity, and it was visited upon humanity by the Jews. the “slave morality” of Christendom

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/

Biblical principles of humility, charity, and pity are the result of universalizing the plight of the slave onto all humankind, and thus enslaving the masters as well. "The democratic movement is the heir to Christianity"^[6]—the political manifestation of slave morality because of its obsession with freedom and equality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

Freud

Sigmund Freud - Moses and Monotheism - Moses Murdered I presume that the bare plot (though not the essential drama) of Freud's Moses is, by now, notorious. Monotheism is not of Jewish origin but an Egyptian discovery. The pharaoh Amenhotep IV established it as his state religion in the form of an exclusive worship of the sun-power, or Aton, thereafter calling himself Ikhnaton. The Aton religion, according to Freud, was characterized by the exclusive belief in one God, the rejection of anthropomorphism, magic, and sorcery, and the absolute denial of an afterlife. Upon Ikhnaton's death,
however, his great heresy was rapidly undone, and the gyptians reverted to their old gods. Moses was not a Hebrew but an Egyptian priest or noble, and a fervent monotheist. In order to save the Aton religion from extinction he placed himself at the head of an oppressed Semitic tribe then living in Egypt,
brought them forth from bondage, and created a new nation.

He gave them an even more spiritualized, imageless form of monotheistic religion and, in order to set them apart, introduced the Egyptian custom of circumcision. But the crude mass of former slaves could not bear the severe demands of the new faith. In a mob revolt Moses was killed and the memory of the murder repressed.

The lsraelites went on to forge an alliance of compromise with kindred Semitic tribes in Midian whose fierce volcanic deity, named Yahweh, now became their national god. As a result, the god of Moses was fused with Yahweh and the deeds of Moses ascribed to a Midianite priest also called Moses. However, over a period of centuries the submerged tradition of the true faith and its founder gathered sufficient force to reassert itself and emerge victorious. Yahweh was henceforth endowed with the universal and spiritual qualities of Moses' god, though the memory of Moses' murder remained repressed among the Jews, reemerging only in a very disguised form with the rise of Christianity.

Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) Paperback – July 28, 1993 by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Author)

"Among the precepts of the Moses religion there is one that is
of greater importance than appears to begin with. This is the
prohibition against making an image of God - the compulsion
to worship a God whom one cannot see ... if this prohibition
were accepted, it must have a profound effect. For it
meant that a sensory perception was given second place to
what may be called an abstract idea - a triumph of intellectuality
over sensuality or, strictly speaking, an instinctual renunciation,
with all its necessary psychological consequences.
Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism"

"... those who felt themselves kept in tutelage, or
who felt dispossessed, revolted and threw off the burden of
a religion that had been forced on them . . . the savage
Semites took their destiny into their own hands and did
away with their tyrant.
"... The account of the 'wandering in the wilder
ness'—which might stand for the time of Moses' rule—
describes a series of grave revolts against his authority
which, by Jahve's command, were suppressed with savage
chastisement. It is easy to imagine that one of these revolts
came to another end than the text admits."

"Here we come contradiction: on the one hand, Judaism is often embraced to an unrepresentable deity, a collection of spiritual intellectual ideals; on the other hand, Jewishness is often utterly material, a weight which is schlepped around the Jewish bodies go. In his final book, Freud suggests that Jewishness are not necessarily at odds; rather, he reveals link between the conceptualization of Judentum as a body intellectual ideals and as a genealogical chain of material bodies.

I argue that in his final book, Freud attempts to make sense of the counter-intuitive connections between
Jewishness and Judaism and suggests that the geistig ideals of Judaism are inseparable from the physical survival of the Jewish people.
Freud insists on an idiosyncratic version of Geistigkeit not to deny the body (as Boyarín claims), but to make sense of the "special case" of bodily definition within Judaism.

Immaterial Materiality: The 'Special Case' of Freud's Theory of Jewishness, Eliza Slavet

Sartre

“Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."

The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may intervene to cast doubt on it." Anti-Semites are attracted by "the durability of a stone." What frightens them is the uncertainty of truth.^[2] "The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith." He has escaped responsibility and doubt. He can blame anything on the Jew; he does not need to engage reason, for he has his faith.

Anti-Semitism is a way of feeling good, proud even, rather than guilty at the abandonment of responsibility and the flight before the impossibility of true sincerity. The anti-Semite abandons himself to the crowd and his bad faith, he "flees responsibility as he flees his own consciousness, and choosing for his personality the permanence of the rock, he chooses for his morality the scale of petrified values."

He pulls down shutters, blinds, mirrors and mirages over his consciousness to keep himself in his bad faith away from his responsibilities and his liberty. The anti-Semite is afraid "of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews." He is "a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself." (p. 53.)^[2] The anti-Semite wallows in the depths of an extreme bad faith. "Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man."

The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank 1914

The hero is the child of very distinguished parents, and usually the son of a king. His origin is preceded by difficulties, such as sexual abstinence, prolonged infertility, or secret intercourse of the parents due to external prohibition or obstacles. During or before the pregnancy, a prophecy, in the form of a dream or oracle, warns against his birth, usually threatening harm to the father. Therefore the newborn child, usually at the instigation of the father or his representative, is doomed to be killed or exposed. As a rule, he is surrendered to the water, in a box. He is then saved by animals, or by lowly people (herders), and suckled by a female animal or a lowly woman. After he has grown up, he finds his distinguished parents in a variety of ways. He takes revenge on his father, on the one hand, and is acknowledged, on the other, achieving greatness and fame.

"One other difference between The Trauma of Birth and The Myth of the Birth of the Hero is the link now drawn between the hero and the artist. Rank now proposes the substitution of the term "artist" for hero to identify the cultural hero the one who in religion, art, or philosophy creates "sublime wish compensations" for the lingering frustration of life outside the womb" From Intro

The Trauma of Birth, by Otto Rank 1924