The Nine Worthies, Part 2: The Jews

This is my God, and I'll praise Him, my father's God, and I'll hail Him

Introduction

I was very happy to see the reception my last essay received. Many readers responded well to the notion of viewing the Nine Worthies as a paradigm for the reintegration of the heritage of the West into modernity. The great project of the Medieval mind was the reconciliation of the pagan heritage of Classical Antiquity (and to an extent, the Germanic and Celtic spheres) with religious sensibilities inherited, in large part, from a particular branch of Semitic people whose vision of a universal ethical monotheism would shape the development of the West profoundly. A similar moment of reconceptualization is upon us in modernity. If they could do it with parchment and patience, imagine what we, with all the tools at our disposal, might accomplish.

Of course, not everyone on the right is on board with this project. I expected I might get some pushback from the based pagans- and I did- but it was surprisingly limited. I also figured that some of the more doctrinaire Evangelicals might look askance of the prospect of a revived Medievalism, but though I’ve encountered this sentiment in real life, it did not manifest in my comments. I expect that those readers of mine who are of that confession skew a bit younger, because the biggest hurdle to the sort of traditionalism I envision are the older sort, those for whom American liberalism and low-church Protestantism amount to largely the same thing. The most stark division on the right (very broadly conceived) at the moment is at once generational and ideological exactly along those lines. The people currently attacking Tucker Carlson and what they believe he represents have their own revival project in mind, but theirs is a quest to restore an older form of a political ideology currently dying on the vine. What I write of here is going to the very roots. And here, that necessarily means Jews.

Older American conservatives, with a better sense of the scope of history, understood the debt that the West owes Judaism. Russell Kirk wrote movingly of a line that runs through the prophets of the Old Testament through Calvin and thence to the Puritans who so thoroughly impressed their character on the US. Interestingly, and relevantly, this reverence sat side by side with Kirk’s lifelong anti-Zionism and criticism of the State of Israel’s influence in US politics. There are strong echoes of this mindset in Tucker Carlson, and the same accusations of antisemitism that dog the latter were leveled at the former, often by the same people.

This is because the interpretation of the Jewish contribution to the Western project cannot be divorced from the Jewish … um … Inquiry. There is a tension that runs throughout the history of the West between a Judaism that represents a religious predecessor to Christianity and actual existing Judaism with its own truth claims. And this makes for a problem at least as acute as that of how to incorporate the legacy of the pagans, if not more so. Constantine the Great could theorize that Sol Invictus and the God of the Christians were one in the same, but Church and Synagogue represented mutually exclusive propositions. If Jesus was the Christ, the latter was superfluous at best; if not, the former had no reason to exist. Constantine decided for Christianity and his religious policies followed that logic, inaugurating a period of oppression in varying degrees that would last until- well, Mark Levin would probably say the present and beyond.

I swear on Mike Huckabee’s personal copy of the Scofield Reference Bible that am not a part of the Groyper-Nazi-Islamist-Marxist-Democrat-Matt Walsh conspiracy.

I should note my own stance here. One can believe that the Church’s claims to transcendent truth are justified and still concede that its treatment of the Jews was ugly. One can concede the ugliness in turn without embracing a religious and political stance wherein one’s loyalties to a foreign state are considered identical with one’s love of Christ. But regardless of one’s feelings about the nation of Israel, there is no reason to hate Jews qua Jews- quite the contrary. I’ve known Jews my whole life. Where I grew up in the South there is a large and active Orthodox Jewish community; I attended a friend’s bar mitzvah at their synagogue as a young teen. I had the great honor of studying the Old Testament under Dr. Richard E. Friedman at UGA, and his theories contribute much to this essay. I have no doubt I’ll get some flak from some people in the comments posting links to stories about the USS Liberty or Israelis dancing on 9/11, but for my part, my interactions with Jews have been almost universally positive. I say almost positive because for some, my lukewarm indifference to Israel is itself a sign of incipient Groyperism. I sympathize with the sentiment, and I wish all of the people of Israel well, but I have my own country.

I also like Indians and Indian food, so there.

With all that said, the Medieval Christian civilization of the West looked just as unhesitatingly to the Ancient Israelites for examples of warrior kingship as they did with the pagans. The literature of the Old Testament with which they were familiar encompasses all of the extant Hebrew texts from before the Exile, and represents the oldest prose writing on Earth. Created from the recension of four main sources, with the addition of later material, the Hebrew Bible forms the national epic of a people, their laws, their history, their poetry, their wisdom, and their genius. The Medievals knew the Jews almost exclusively from these texts, apart from those who deigned to make the acquaintance of a despised minority in their midst, and the contrast with the image presented of the former was quite different from the everyday stereotypes of that age (and ours) regarding the latter.

The Jews of the Old Testament were a fierce people, the descendants of a desert sheikh from the borderlands of civilization, a wandering sacker of cities like Odysseus. The God of his people made a series of covenants with them, relating to the land they were meant to occupy. Theirs was not a story of autocthony, but rather of a homeland held in perilous contingency, defended by sometimes unlikely heroes who fought in the service of their one God, a God unlike that of any other nation- not a force of nature or a personification of some attribute, but a Being beyond being who had willed the universe into existence and cared deeply about the ethical condition of His chosen people. He revealed Himself to them as their tribal God, though as their nation endured and struggled and suffered, they came to know Him as much more, the God of the whole earth, who wrote His divine law on the hearts of all men. He revealed that Abraham was both a carnal and spiritual father, and his descendants would be as numerous as stars in the sky; for Christians, this is manifest as the Gospel binding together men of all nations. The notion that one can have both a biological and spiritual race, with the former less important than the latter characterizes the thought of many traditionalist thinkers, even those like Evola who hated Christianity, at least as it existed in his time.

With that notion of the Israel of God being those who serve the Lord Sabaoth (the Lord of Hosts), it is clear why Longuyon chose his three Worthy Jews.

The Worthy Jews

Joshua (Josue, Ἰησοῦς, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ)‎

Des enfans d’Irael fuge fort ames,
Qant Diu fist pour miracle li soleill arester,
Le flum Jordain partira pa saie la rouge mer;
Les Flinstins ne purent contra moy endurer:
Je ocis XXXII roys: puis moy fenir,
XIIII.C ans devant que Diu fust nee.

__

Among the Children of Israel I was a valiant heart,

When God made a miracle, stopping the sun,

I parted the River Jordan as the Red Sea had been crossed,

The Philistines could not stand against me,

I slew thirty-two kings, and after me,

It was 1,300 years before God was born.

Joshua, a world-altering conqueror like Alexander, is also analogous to Hector in the sense that historians doubt he was a real person; interestingly, this is because they doubt the historicity of the central event with which he was associated, the conquest of Canaan. Centuries of archaeology have revealed no convincing evidence of the events described in his eponymous book from the Bible. I say interestingly because the Hector’s war was also once doubted by smug skeptics, until a self-taught, so-morally-grey-the-word-shady-is-literally-true businessman bribed his way into being allowed to dig a monumentally destructive tunnel into a hill in Turkey and silenced all the haters (they actually continued to criticize him harshly for the rest of his life). The world awaits Vivek Ramaswamy’s face turn as a biblical archaeologist for a similar retconning of our current understanding of the fall of Jericho.

Jericho is often considered the oldest continually inhabited place on Earth; they keep rebuilding it. Not pictured: walls.

Or perhaps not. The story told in The Book of Joshua is of a people hardened by the biblical forty years of wandering, a generation literally born in the wilderness, descending upon the people of Canaan as the righteous instrument of God. Throughout the Bible, native Semitic religious practices are characterized as abominable, featuring the child sacrifice beloved by their descendants in Carthage. A superficial reading of Joshua has him and his proto-Fremen annihilating the indigenes to the last man, woman, and child; a more careful reading shows that many of these people were still around later on and quite unexterminated, a finding backed up by both the aforementioned archaeology and genetic evidence.

Friedman postulates an interesting theory reconciling these conflicting notions. He surmises that there was in fact an Exodus (and a historical Moses), but that it consisted only of the Levites, who brought the worship of Yahweh from Midian to a people who worshiped El, and they together came to be understood as a single god, indeed, the single God. With this theological union came a tribal one, with the Levites becoming a sort of Hebrew Brahmin caste. He also notes that phrases like “destroyed them utterly” were commonplace in royal propaganda in the Ancient Near East, a type of idiomatic hyperbole similar to the way a sportswriter might describe a team having been “crushed” or “slaughtered” by a rival; everyone reading understands they’ll be playing again next week.

Note: The Tennessee Titans may actually be utterly destroyed, literally.

The Book of Joshua is continuous with a larger narrative known as the D (Deuteronomist) source, which begins with Deuteronomy and continues through Joshua, Judges, 1st and 2nd Samuel, and 1st and 2nd Kings, composed during the reign of King Josiah by someone close to the Prophet Jeremiah, with a bit of material added post-Exile. It functioned as a kind of prose national epic for the southern Kingdom of Judah, justifying the centralizing of worship in the Temple in Jerusalem (the E source favors the northern Kingdom of Israel) and Josiah’s religious reforms. D, along with J and E, represent the oldest works of history proper on Earth, predating Herodotus by centuries. It thus makes sense that Joshua, the conquering hero-founder, would be described as being at the head of a coalition of all tribes, wiping out the native Canaanites and their vile rites, and instituting the worship of Yahweh with his Tabernacle as a kind of proto-Temple, complete with the central cult object, the Ark of the Covenant.

The Medievals lacked the finer points of German Higher Criticism, and so much the better for them, because their Joshua narrative was all the more vividly real for it in both a practical and spiritual sense. Crusaders loved the story of Joshua; it figures into the contemporary lore to a significant degree. From Raymond of Aguilers:

The city [Jerusalem] was taken, and the Christians entered it, slaying all they found there, both men and women, without distinction. In the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and wonderful judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies. The city was filled with corpses, and the blood flowed down the streets like water. The victors waded in blood up to their ankles. In the Temple and porch of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins . . . Some of our men, moved by pity, spared some of them, but this was contrary to the divine command, as Joshua had commanded the total destruction of Jericho and Ai. For the Lord had said through His prophets that the land should be cleansed of the wicked, and that no mercy should be shown to the idolaters. Therefore, those who showed mercy were rebuked, and the slaughter continued until no Saracen remained alive in the city, except those who had fled to the Tower of David, where about three hundred were besieged and later ransomed or killed. After this great slaughter, the leaders of the army went to the Sepulcher of the Lord, giving thanks to God for the victory.

Such slaughter horrifies the modern man in a way that myriads of dead from indiscriminate aerial carpet-bombing and drone-strikes does not, the reason being of course that annihilating Al Qaeda for hating freedom represents a more correct religious impulse to liberals that killing them for being Muslims. We can forgive our leaders for collateral damage, but not our ancestors for their terrifying notion that God’s love and His justice are one, and fallible, corrupt men are even scarier when they wholly subordinate their wills to His, acting in His terrible purpose. The liberal hears the trumpets of Israel blasting outside of Jericho, and they shrink from the sound, because they cannot bear the thought of some higher and more compelling thing than peace and comfort. They recoil from Elijah and his massacres, from Samuel hewing Agag to pieces on the altar of God, and from Joshua and his barefoot, starving hordes, storming the fallen walls of their conquests to slaughter even the livestock of those who stood against the Most High. It’s all quite alien to us, which is not wholly to our credit.

Joshua is an explicit forerunner of Jesus; in Hebrew, the name is actually the same- Yeshua (Yahweh saves), or Ιησούς in the Septuagint. The Book of Hebrews, chapter 4, makes much of this, and the Church Fathers loved the comparison. Joshua’s conquest of the Holy Land is ultimately a spiritual one, one we must wage in our own lives and hearts. But it is still more true that the battle is ultimately one by God, whom we must invite to fight for us.

This militant spirituality is reflected in the earliest Hebrew literature. The Song of the Sea, which appears in Exodus on the scene following the destruction of Pharaoh and his army, is much older than the rest of the text, probably dating to the actual period of the events described, and is possibly the oldest passage in the Bible- one of the oldest extant songs on Earth. Below, in part:

15:1 “I will sing to the Lord,
for he is highly exalted.
Both horse and driver
he has hurled into the sea.

² “The Lord is my strength and my defense;
he has become my salvation.
He is my God, and I will praise him,
my father’s God, and I will exalt him.
³ The Lord is a warrior;
the Lord is his name.
⁴ Pharaoh’s chariots and his army
he has hurled into the sea.
The best of Pharaoh’s officers
are drowned in the Red Sea.
⁵ The deep waters have covered them;
they sank to the depths like a stone.
⁶ Your right hand, Lord,
was majestic in power.
Your right hand, Lord,
shattered the enemy.

It’s at once radically distinct in its devotion to the One God and yet expresses sentiments that would have been familiar to Soma-chugging Vedic Aryans or Odin’s berserk adepts, or even the rhapsodes of the great halls of Mycenae. And on that note…

David (Davit, דָּוִד)

Je trovais on de harpe e de sauteriom;

Si ay tue Goliath, un grant geant felon;

En meintes batailles moy tient-on a prodome:

Apres li roy Saul tien je la region;

Et fui vray prophete de l’incarnacion:

Mort fui VIII.C ans devant que Diu devint hom.

—

When young I was found with harp and psalter,

I slew the great evil giant Goliath,

I was the champion of many battles,

After King Saul I ruled the land,

I was a true prophet of the Incarnation,

I died 800 years before God became man.

If Joshua was similar to Alexander, David can best be compared to Caesar in the sense of both being a warrior and a monarch. His son Solomon might be Augustus in this scheme, giving cultural and religious form to his father’s political settlement, but David, though beloved of God, was a man of blood forbidden to build His Temple. He is a complex figure whose depiction owes much to influences beyond that of the Israelite world, sometimes in very interesting ways. He figures in the Biblical narrative as both a forerunner and actual physical ancestor of Jesus.

David, unlike Joshua, is almost certainly a historical figure, with near-contemporary attestations of his line from neighboring peoples. Like Joshua, he is a major character in the work of the Deuteronomist, and another point in his favor as having lived is the vivid characterization he gets, much more so than the son of Nun. This is true for many of the people around him as well, and the author of the D source was clearly drawing on primary works or perhaps even memories in sketching them. As we’ll see, he may even have cast a wider net than court records.

David enters the story as a young man in the service of the first King of Israel, Saul. interestingly, the story varies considerably according to whether one uses the Septuagint or Masoretic versions. In the former, David is introduced as already being in Saul’s service, and the narrative is fairly straightforward, while the latter gives the backstory about him being a shepherd boy and conveys the impression that he is much younger. Brave and charismatic, Saul is also melancholy and unstable, the latter traits coming to predominate as David’s popularity grows. And of course, that popularity stems from David’s most famous feat, the slaying of Goliath.

The above represents a severe retconning.

The Philistines, who with the Amalekites represent the great national enemies of the Israelites, established a confederation on the southwestern side of Saul’s kingdom. They were connected in some way with the Pulisti, Peleset, or Sea People, who had earlier attacked Egypt and had destroyed Bronze Age kingdoms throughout the Near East. They were probably not a single people, but rather the cumulative domino effect of conquests- victims pushed out of their territory become the marauders of their neighbors in turn. The Philistines in particular seem to have been refugees from the collapse of Mycenaean Greece. Their personal names and equipment are distinctly Indo-European even as they adopted the local Semitic gods.

This is important because the David and Goliath story, and the David narrative more generally, is very unlike the rest of D or the Old Testament as a whole. Nowhere else in the Bible is single combat between champions shown. Notably, this very Homeric challenge comes from Goliath. David is also the only character in the whole of the Old Testament who has a friend, and his relationship with Jonathan definitely has some … Greek … interpretations (which this author dismisses). David’s qualifications to fight the giant Goliath (the Septuagint has him at an unusual but plausible 7’ or so, while the Masoretic version makes him closer to 10’) include his conquest of animals, and that, coupled with his near magical and therapeutic mastery of the harp, and visionary psalms attributed to him, led to ubiquitous comparisons between him and Orpheus in the ancient world. There is very much a mystical, almost shamanic quality hinted at in the narrative, a trait overshadowed by the harem intrigues of the later story.

There is more, but there’s enough to posit that D perhaps had a Greek source- now lost- for his material on David’s early life. It’s not implausible that the Philistines might have recorded their own take on the king, who while a fugitive from Saul actually lived among them, like El CID among the Moors. But David’s story represents a fusion of influences from both the proto-West and his own culture, and the latter predominates in the stories connected to his reign. Perhaps the most important for understanding the character of David and the God he served is the story of Uriah the Hittite.

David surrounded himself with a picked group of elite fighters, much in the fashion of Achilles’ Myrmidons. These are the Mighty Ones, or Mighty Men of Valor. (hagGībōrīm, הַגִּבֹּרִ֛ים). The Mighty Men had followed David into exile and served him at court when he assumed the throne. Among them was Uriah the Hittite. The moniker places him as one of the expatriate Hittites who formerly controlled much of Anatolia before the Bronze Age Collapse. In other words, he was not born a Jew, and it’s unclear how or even if he converted. But David covets his wife, and sends Uriah on a suicide mission to cover up their affair.

Take it from an actual Cohen; the story is compelling.

David is then confronted by Nathan the Prophet, who tells the king of a great injustice. A man with nothing but a little lamb he loves like a daughter (this is the first mention of a pet in all of literature) has it stolen from him by a powerful neighbor. What does David think should happen? David of course demands justice, whereupon Nathan reveals that the blood of Uriah the Hittite cries out to God against the king. God took the side of a non-Jew against His own anointed king, and for this reason David’s house will never know peace. It’s a powerful notion unlike anything in contemporary works elsewhere, that the one God cares about truth more than blood or station. And as we will see with the final example, His justice is thorough.

Judah Maccabees (Judas, המכבי יהודה, Ιούδας Μακκαβαῖος, Iudas Maccabaeus)

Je vi en Jerusalem, en la grant regiom,

Makabeus

E la loy Moyses metre a defensiom;

Ceus qui adorent les idoles, mecreans e felons,

Je mis en destrucion; e contra eus mena lay

A pou de compagnons.

E mori V.C ans devant l’incarnacion.

—

I lived in Jerusalem, in the Great Kingdom,

The Hammer,

The Law of Moses I defended,

Those who worshiped idols, lawless miscreants,

I brought them destruction, and I went against them,

With but few companions,

I died 500 years before the Incarnation.

Judah Maccabees represents a return to the type represented by Joshua, though with distinction that Judah’s career is generally framed less as conquest than defense. That said, it involved no small amount of coercion of an unwilling population, both in terms of the alien empire he warred against and his subject fellow Jews and quasi-Jews whose indifference he regarded as an obstacle to be violently overcome. At one point, his story was widespread in the West, though this changed after the Reformation, and for the Medievals he served as an archetype of the sort of war that could be regarded as righteous. Of the three Worthy Jews he’s probably the least well-known today, and his name enjoys nothing of the popularity of Joshua and David (though to be fair, the once very common name Judah or Judas acquired something of a negative connotation after the Gospels were written).

I don’t know why they made Judas Iscariot look like a 70s porn actor, but in a way I also do know.

The poet gets things a bit off with his dates here; Judah’s career begins in the mid-second century BC, not the sixth. This was the late Hellenistic Age, the period of both cultural glory and endless war between the Diadochoi kingdoms that emerged from Alexander’s ephemeral empire. The Jews had been largely autonomous subjects of the Persian Empire, whose literally messianic Shahanshah Cyrus had liberated them from their Babylonian Exile. But Alexander had destroyed that tolerant polity, and after no small amount of fighting, the Jews wound up under the Seleucids who ruled a huge but steadily decaying kingdom in much of Western Asia.

The latest dynastic tyrant-king was Antiochos IV Epiphanes (“god made manifest”), who took power in 177 BC. Interested in improving relations between his Greek and Jewish subject, he hit upon an excellent idea- everyone would worship everyone else’s gods. Thus he decided to create a hybrid Zeus-Yahweh cult complete with statues and sacrifices in the Temple, and to get rid of all those misanthropic laws that isolated the Jews from everyone else. What could go wrong?

As first, nothing. Many of his Jewish subjects actually seemed to like the idea, bound up as it was to a broader cultural project of integration with the wider Hellenistic world. The Jews of Alexandria, certainly, were highly Hellenized, speaking Greek as their first language, into which they’d translated their scriptures. But the balance achieved in Egypt was the product of a long period of organic interaction, not a top-down social engineering project on the part of a man whose subjects had nicknamed Epimanes (“the nutcase”). Antiochos had hoped for peaceful assimilation. What he got instead was a massive anticolonial rebellion.

In one sense, Judea was something of a backwater, outside the main currents of the age, very unlike the aforementioned Alexandria or the cosmopolitan Tarsus of the Apostle Paul. But in another, this made for an environment where traditional cultural forces could find refuge and flourish. This was especially true in the countryside, and for the traditional Aaronid clans who’d held the hereditary priesthood before Antiochos had started auctioning off those jobs. Mattathias the Hasmonean, living in the more conservative countryside, was confronted by a messenger from the king ordering him to sacrifice according to the rules of the new cult. Mattathias killed him, and for good measure killed a fellow Jew who’d offered to make the offering instead. He began the revolt, but already elderly, he turned things over to his three sons, the oldest of whom was Judah, surnamed Maccabees, or, the Hammer.

The Oscar-winning biopic

Judah Maccabees is fairly solidly historically established. Josephus mentions him, and he figures into other contemporary works. The books that bear his name date from roughly his time as well, at least the first two. The dynasty set up by his family had a coinage and correspondence with Rome. That said, it’s impossible to separate the historical figure from the legend that grew up around him. Fortunately, since we’re thinking medievally, we won’t need to anyway.

Judah, befitting his resources, launched a guerrilla war against the Greeks and their Jewish collaborators. This was a crusade (Jewsade?) characterized by frenzied, fanatical courage, of a character that mystified the Hellenes. A people could and should fight for their land, for their kings, for honor- but religion was an odd thing to insist upon, especially when the issue at hand seemed so reasonable. You worship our gods and we’ll worship yours; why was that so hard to accept? What was wrong with these people? The wider sphere of Classical authors of the period and later commonly referred to the Jews as misanthropoi, haters of humanity.

Of course, for the rigorists among the Jews, the issue was that what the Greeks offered was, for all their cultural prestige, simply less advanced than their own idea of a universal ethical monotheism. The better pagan philosophers had figured this out, and for many Greeks and Romans the Jewish conception of God was profoundly compelling, but this did little to stifle the Hellenistic urge to make the Jews like everyone else. They could become one and indistinct, or they could fight. Judah chose the sword.

Above: A scientific reconstruction of a period Jewish warrior

And driving out the Greeks was only part of the plan. Over the centuries, Judea had accumulated a large population of people who were only superficially Jewish, and many who were not Jewish at all. Judah dealt with this situation by having his fedayeen descend upon the various Arabs, Edomites, Ammonites, Aramaeans and other miscellaneous random Middle-Easterny types in the territories he brought under his control and Jew them up proper. This meant circumcision, an end to non-Levitical sacrifices, strict obedience to the Law of Moses, and an absolute cessation of the worship of any foreign gods.

Antiochos’ work earned the sobriquet “Abomination of Desolation” in Maccabees, a phrase with great resonance for later Christians.

Did it work? Surprisingly well. After a series of harrowing battles, Judah and his army took Jerusalem. The celebration of the cleansing and re-dedication of the Temple lasted for eight days, despite the oil supply only being such for one- thus Hanukkah (it’s not Temu Christmas as some detractors claim). Though Judah would later die in battle, his brothers would go on to found the penultimate dynasty of Jewish kings, the Hasmoneans. They were less successful at ruling than they were at fighting, and the long-term effect of their Hebrew Salafism can be gauged by the number of Greek names that show up in their line.

Judah Maccabees was the subject of the First and Second Books of Maccabees. Once well-known deuterocanonical Biblical literature, they were largely dispensed with in Protestant countries, despite Luther drawing on them for his arguments. Depending who you ask, there are between two and four of them, and they not only fill the historical gap between the age of the prophets and the advent of Christ, but are also deeply spiritually profound. The Medievals appreciated this; writing on the question of whether war can be just, Aquinas cities Maccabees approvingly. William of Malmesbury references the books as examples for crusaders to follow. And there are no shortage of modern analogues.

To bring us back full circle, here we see Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the war his nation is currently prosecuting, a war inaugurated by a treacherous act of terror and since characterized by horrors on all sides, addressing one of his wounded soldiers. Summoning the man to stand before the audience, he salutes him in terms a Medieval man would have understood, for the most part:

“You are the spirit of Joshua, you are the spirit of David, you are the spirit of the Maccabees.”

Of course, where the Medievals would have diverged was the expression of this sentiment wedded to the purpose of Jewish nationalism. This is certainly one valid way to integrate these tropes into modernity, but we heirs of the Christian West have forebears who offer insight from ages past in reconciling the full scope of both pagan and Jewish heritage. The final installment will deal with the Christian Worthies, and their legacy for us today. Until then, here’s Mel Brooks: