Mordecai Would Not Bow Down:

Anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and

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Mordecai Would Not Bow Down
Mordecai Would Not
Bow Down
Anti-​Semitism, the Holocaust,
and Christian Supersessionism

T I M O T H Y P. JAC K S O N

1
 3
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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Jackson, Timothy P. (Timothy Patrick), author.
Title: Mordecai would not bow down : anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and
Christian supersessionism / Timothy P. Jackson.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Contents: Prayerful Unscientific Preface—Judaic Holiness and a Holistic Approach to
Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust—Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther—The Perennial
Either/Or—Nazism and the Western Conscience—The Evils of
Supersessionism—Jesus and the Jews: Two Suffering Servants Incarnate—Naming Good and Evil:
Hitler’s Insidious Genius—A Closer Look at Schadenfreude and
the Prophetic—Conclusion: Guilt, Innocence, and Anne Frank.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051803 (print) | LCCN 2020051804 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197538050 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197538067 (updf) |
ISBN 9780197538081 (oso) | ISBN 9780197538074 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Christianity and antisemitism. | Holocaust
(Christian theology) | Jews—Election, Doctrine of. | Christianity and other
religions—Judaism. | Judaism—Relations—Christianity.
Classification: LCC B M535.J33 2021 (print) | LCC B M535 (ebook) |
DDC 261.2/6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051803
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051804

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538050.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
 This book is dedicated to Harold Bloom (RIP) and to the eleven murder
victims of the October 27, 2018, synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Human nature being anxious and despairing as it is, anti-​
Semitism will always be with us in history. God being who God is, philo-​
Semitism will also ever be temporally real. But may the Jews teach us the
crucial distinction between time and eternity, and between “I want” and
“I love.” Seventy-six years after the liberation of Auschwitz, let divine grace
move us to enact the Good—​for the Holocaust’s six-​million-​plus, and for
the world.
 When Haman saw that Mordecai would not bow down or do obei-
sance to him, Haman was infuriated. But he thought it beneath him
to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, having been told who Mordecai’s
people were, Haman plotted to destroy all the Jews, the people of
Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus.
—​Esther 3:5–​6

Here is my servant, whom I uphold,

my chosen, in whom my soul delights;
I have put my spirit upon him;
he will bring forth justice to the nations.
—​Isaiah 42:1

The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of

Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the
mass of numbers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of per-
sonality in man, contests the significance of nationality and race, and
thereby withdraws from humanity the premise of its existence and its
culture.
—​Adolf Hitler1

The liberation [of Germany] requires more than diligence; to become

free requires pride, will, spite, hate, hate, and once again, hate.
—​Adolf Hitler2

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first com-
mandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor

1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943), p. 65.
2 Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler spricht: Ein Lexicon des Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig: R. Kittler Verlag,
1934), p. 23, quoted by Richard Weikart in Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third
Reich (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2016), p. 370.
 as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.
—​Matthew 22:37–​40

For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of
the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on
the things of the Spirit. To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set
the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.
—​Romans 8:5–​6

The Jews have a special duty to save G-​d in the world.

—​Leonard Cohen3

3 “Leonard Cohen speaks about G-​d consciousness and Judaism (1964),” a YouTube video accessed

on November 21, 2017, at https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=cFMm_​x1qlPY. In the balance of this

essay, I will sometimes refer to “God,” even when discussing Jewish piety, but the devout reader might
substitute either “Adonai” (“The Lord”) or “HaShem” (“The Name”), as I do in places.
 Contents

Prayerful Unscientific Preface  xi

Acknowledgments  xv

Introduction: Judaic Holiness and a Holistic Approach to

Anti-​Semitism and the Holocaust  1
1. Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther  27
2. The Perennial Either/​Or  67
3. Nazism and the Western Conscience  93
4. The Evils of Supersessionism  121
5. Jesus and the Jews: Two Suffering Servants Incarnate  151
6. Naming Good and Evil: Hitler’s Insidious Genius  183
7. A Closer Look at Schadenfreude and the Prophetic  203
Conclusion: Guilt, Innocence, and Anne Frank  227

Bibliography  237
Name Index   249
Subject Index   257
 Prayerful Unscientific Preface

Moriah to Sinai to Calvary . . . Abraham to Moses to Jesus . . . never before had

the rights of Nature been so profoundly violated, and good and evil would
never be the same. Instead of gods goading humans to infanticide, aggres-
sive war, and other forms of hate-​filled bloodletting—​a picture common to
many (if not most) ancient religions4—​one God, one people, and one person
gradually emerged and struggled to call humanity to love, justice, and pro-
tection of the weak and vulnerable. It was and is a slow and fitful process, and
the people and person calling are not without anticipations in world history.
But they are remarkably long-​lived and distinctly inspiring as well as threat-
ening. This book examines the ideal embodiment of moral monotheism by
the Jews (including Jesus of Nazareth) and the violent resistance to their call,
especially in the form of the Nazi Holocaust and Christian supersessionism.
Walter Burkert observes: “The Hebrew Bible is full of atrocities committed
against . . . other tribes and cults in the name of Yahweh. Christianity has
taken strength and enormous propaganda from the persecutions by pagan
Rome but started its own persecution of pagans and more still of heretics
and Jews as soon as it came to power.”5 I do not deny for an instant, then,
that Judaism and Christianity have often propagated hate and hostility to-
ward others, but I read both traditions as, at their best, striving to overcome
their own vicious past and present in the name of God’s mercy and holiness.
It was during a 2008 visit to Babi Yar, the ravine outside of Kiev in the
Ukraine where some 33,771 Jews were shot during the last two days of
September 1941, that I first suspected that anti-​Semitism is fundamentally
due to hatred of God and of those whom God loves—​especially the frail
and defenseless. The symbolism of the mass murders being timed by the
Einsatzgruppen to coincide with the eve of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of
the Jewish calendar, pointed to a truth so obvious as to be easily overlooked.
The more I read and reread Mein Kampf and other Nazi documents, however,

4 See The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Violence, ed. Mark Juergensmeyer, Margo Kitts, and

Michael Jerryson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

5 Burkert, “A Problem in Ancient Religions,” in ibid., p. 438.
xii Prayerful Unscientific Preface

the more evident it became that the horrendous criminality of the Holocaust
was not merely absurd but largely driven by pagan ideology. The final piece
of the puzzle was the recognition that all of us have an inner Nazi that resents
a supernatural faith that challenges our natural desires and temporal loyal-
ties. We want Mordecai to bow down to our idols and our selves, and Yom
Kippur’s repentance and atonement before a righteous Creator are offensive
to us haughty creatures. So the Jews must be “put away” lest they remind us
of who we are: mortal and sinful. Or so the logic of anti-​Semitism supposes,
however subliminally.
Any text that, like this one, would measure the palpable wickedness of hu-
manity against the transcendent goodness of the biblical God must come to
grips with Isaiah 55:8–​9:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

nor are your ways my ways, says the lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

These words counsel epistemic humility, but not despair. Even dour Jeremiah
declares: “[The Lord] will give you shepherds after my own heart, who will
feed you with knowledge and understanding.” Pace some commentators,
the abomination of the Holocaust is not simply beyond all ethical and the-
ological analysis, but such analysis cannot proceed like a detached narra-
tive or a seamless deductive argument. Hatred of the Jews and the related
Shoah are shocking, ad hoc, and emotive, and so, too, to some degree are
my explanations of them that follow. My pages are also products of intellect
and will, of course, and I dedicate my Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2
to placing the issue of anti-​Semitism in a broad conceptual and historical
context and to defending my holistic approach. The unfolding chapters are,
however, more like flashes of light and meshed intuitions than like a list of
empirical facts or a series of logical propositions. I try to present my claims
coherently and to back them up with evidence and argument, but the pro-
cess is more like painting a picture than like writing an equation. As one of
the main instruments of the Holocaust, schadenfreude must be shown and
felt as a sin; it cannot merely be outlined or abstracted as a syndrome. The
prophetic, the contradictory and corrective of schadenfreude, is similarly
striking and mysterious. Neither evil nor good can be captured in a closed
 Prayerful Unscientific Preface xiii

scientific system, but to think that we are consigned to silence before horrific
animosity and desecration, others’ and our own, is to be guilty of bystanding.
When the human mind and heart reach their limits, there is still the possi-
bility of insight and action powered by God’s grace.
To maintain, as I do, that instinctive rejection of moral monotheism, in
favor of survival of the fittest, was a key reason for the Holocaust is not to say
that the Nazis were always aware of or candid about their own idolatry. Nor is
it to deny that there are typically multiple causes at work in anti-​Semitism: re-
ligious, ethical, aesthetic, political, economic, and/​or biological. I focus on a
primary overarching ingredient in anti-​Judaic malice—​natural resentment
of supernatural faith and judgment—​but I try studiously to avoid reduc-
tionism or false certitude.6 This book is dedicated to Harold Bloom (RIP) and
to the eleven murder victims of the October 27, 2018, synagogue shooting
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh killings and the still more re-
cent homicides in the kosher market in Jersey City, New Jersey, illustrate the
sad fact that hatred of the Jews (and of God) has myriad motives, yet there
is “method” to it even when it seems quite “mad.” Note, just so, the explicit
connection between anti-​Semitism in the Jersey City case and a despising
of the police and of law and order. Mosaic Torah and Christian Gospel7 re-
main two aspects of the one thing needful—​the divine law of love—​but we
rebel against it every day. The Nature-​god of the Nazis is us writ large: greedy,
jealous, cruel, violent, and most of all anxious and afraid. Ultimately, a crit-
ical encounter with genocidal hatred, however interdisciplinary, must be-
come a prayer of repentance and a prophetic call to reform.

6 Though far from a moral skeptic, Aristotle reminds us that “it is the mark of an educated man to

look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits.” See his The
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Book I, Chapter 3,
1094b25, p. 3.
7 By “Mosaic Torah,” I mean more that the first five books of the Hebrew Bible; by “Christian

Gospel,” I mean more that the first four books of the New Testament. I concentrate in what follows on
the written scriptures of Judaism and Christianity, but I am aware, as Adin Steinsaltz has observed,
that: “The sages believed it was the oral law—​the Mishnah and the Talmud—​that rendered the Jewish
people unique.” (See Steinsaltz, The Essential Talmud, trans. Chaya Galai (New York: Basic Books,
2006), p. 102.) In its broadest sense, “Torah” refers to the whole of Jewish thought and practice, even
as “Gospel” refers to the entirety of the Christian ethos and ethic. They are intimately connected,
however, both being eternity entering time, the projected heart and mind of G-​d.
 Acknowledgments

I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the many people who have offered
critical feedback on all or part of this monograph: Ira Bedzow, David
Blumenthal, Iris Bruce, Bryan Ellrod, Andrew Ertzberger, John Fahey,
Robert Franklin, Lenn Goodman, Eric Gregory, Jon Gunnemann, Jennifer
Herdt, Brooks Holifield, Carl Holladay, Kevin Jackson, Joel LeMon, Deborah
Lipstadt, Walter Lowe, Gilbert Meilaender, Brendan Murphy, Carol
Newsom, Edmund Santurri, Ted Smith, Jonathan Strom, Steven Tipton,
Richard Weikart, William Werpehowski, John Witte, Jacob Wright, and the
students in several iterations of my class on “Christianity and the Holocaust”
at The Candler School of Theology at Emory University.
From June 18 to 22 of 2012, I was fortunate to participate in a seminar on
“Understanding Complicity: The Churches’ Role in Nazi Germany” at the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I thank
Victoria Barnett and Robert P. Ericksen for their expert leadership of the ses-
sions; it was there that some of the ideas for this book began to germinate.
I would also like to thank Leslie Gordon, Executive Director of the William
Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta, Georgia; Rabbi Joseph Prass,
Executive Director of the Weinberg Center for Holocaust Education at the
Breman; Michelle Langer, Holocaust Speaker Coordinator at the Breman;
and Jennifer Reid, Director of Volunteer and Visitor Services at the Breman.
At a 2019 Summer Institute at the museum, I was edified by a number of
first-rate scholars of the Holocaust. I was also privileged to listen to and
speak with four Shoah survivors: Bebe Forehand, Robert Ratonyi, Hershel
Greenblat, and Tosia Schneider (RIP). Two other survivors, Murray Lynn
(RIP) and George Rishfeld, addressed me and my Emory students on dif-
ferent occasions. The witness of these six stalwart souls was and is a constant
inspiration.
Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to the superb professionals
at Oxford University Press: Editors Drew Anderla, Zara Cannon-
Mohammed, Hannah Kinney-Kobre, and Cynthia Read; and Project
Manager Haripriya Ravichandran. Without the patient assistance of all of
these individuals, this manuscript would never have come forth.
 Introduction
Judaic Holiness and a Holistic Approach
to Anti-​Semitism and the Holocaust

Original Sin and Nazism as Radical Evil

In 1821, Heinrich Heine famously wrote, “Where one burns books, in the
end one also burns human beings.”1 This quote is often (and rightly) cited as
an oracular anticipation of the Nazi Holocaust, which began in part with the
burning of printed works by Jews, communists, and others judged subhuman
or threatening. It is seldom (if ever) noted that Heine’s coupling of book
burning and people burning can also be reversed and expanded in the case
of the Jews and the Third Reich. Where the Nazis incinerated Jewish people,
they also committed Jewish texts, paintings, sculptures, films, buildings, and
religious artifacts to the flames. Why? If, as many argue (see Chapter 1), the
Nazi targeting of the Jews were simply irrational or based solely on the Jews’
supposed racial inferiority (genes), then there would have been no need
to target systematically their creedal affirmations and artistic expressions
(memes). But the Nazis did feel this need and acted on it, torching the oeuvre
of Heine himself, a reluctant Jewish convert to Lutheranism.
I contend in this book that Nazi anti-​Semitism was significantly moti-
vated by moral, theological, and aesthetic considerations, as well as biolog-
ical ones, all these factors being intertwined. The multidimensionality of the
Third Reich’s opposition to the Jews and Judaism was a Counter-​Sublime2

1 The full German quote is:

Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort, wo man Bücher
Verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.
These lines appear in Heine’s play Almansor (Berlin: Hofenberg, 2015), German edition, p. 11.
The partial translation is my own.
2 I take this word and its basic meaning from Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of

Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 15 and 99–​112.

Mordecai Would Not Bow Down. Timothy P. Jackson, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538050.003.0001
2 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

dictated in part by Judaic holiness itself. A single representative quote from

Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf sets the stage for my holistic approach:

The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature

and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of num-
bers and their dead weight. Thus it denies the value of personality in man,
contests the significance of nationality and race, and thereby withdraws
from humanity the premise of its existence and its culture.3

I attribute this rejection of Judaism as unnatural and anticultural to what

I call “original sin”: the natural proclivity to elevate self by denigrating others,
especially those who traditionally stand for supernatural goodness. Anxious
over our own finitude and mortality, we abuse or neglect our neighbors to
try to guarantee our power or at least to distract ourselves from our lack of
real power. We sometimes kill other people in order to avoid being killed by
them, but we also kill others in order to try to master mortality, to slay death
itself by objectifying it in enemies. In short, the quest for domination and
even genocide is an upshot of dread over our limitedness and vulnerability.4
Moses and the Hebrew Scriptures diagnose and obstruct this self-​involved
and self-​deceptive process.5
Moses’s vision of the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:1–​15) founded a revela-
tion of divine order and purpose for the world: the Sacred Name, a set of Ten
Commandments (Exodus 20:1–​17), and an associated way of life. The hall-
mark of that ethos was a holiness that emulates the steadfast love (’hesed) of the
Creator by caring for all “neighbors,” especially the widow and the orphan and
others who are weak and vulnerable (Leviticus 19:18, Leviticus 19:34, Exodus
22:21–​23, and Deuteronomy 10:18). Admittedly, the full emergence of uni-
versal love and suffering service to the world as Judaic ideals was as gradual and
fraught as their emergence in the life and teaching of Jesus. Even Jesus lapses
into invidious “us” versus “them” contrasts, as in his conversation with the

3Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1943), p. 65.
4See Søren Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis), The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte in
collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).
5 Paul Ramsey writes, “The connection between dread of death and sin, made prominent in

Christian consciousness, was nowhere better stated than in Ecclesiastes: ‘This is the root of the evil in
all that happens under the sun, that one fate comes to all. Therefore, men’s minds are filled with evil
and there is madness in their hearts while they live, for they know that afterward—​they are off to the
dead!’ ” See Paul Ramsey, “The Indignity of ‘Death with Dignity’,” in On Moral Medicine” Theological
Perspectives in Medical Ethics, 3rd ed., ed. M. Therese Lysaught and Joseph J. Kotva Jr. with Stephen E.
Lammers and Allen Verhey (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), p. 1050.
 Introduction 3

Canaanite woman (Matthew 15:21–​28), and he embraces his Passion only with
some ambivalence (see Matthew 26:36–​44). Nevertheless, the revolutionary
commitment to “the Other” and “the other” is a spiritual trajectory discernible
in both “the chosen people” (Deuteronomy 14:2) and “the Son” (Mark 10:45).
In the Jews, God uses a tribe to overcome tribalism; in Jesus, God uses an indi-
vidual to overcome individualism. This does not mean that tribes and individ-
uals are evil or illusory. There can be no humanity without just social relations,
even as the individual bears the image of God and thus is an irreducible locus
of value. Rather, Judaism and Christianity combine to illustrate, respectively,
how to avoid making idols of ethnicity and personality; hence, they both antic-
ipate and transcend modern communitarianism and liberalism.6 In turn, the
Holocaust and Christ’s Passion are not two unrelated, redundant, or (Heaven
help us!) antithetical crucifixions. Rather, they are consanguineous Suffering
Servants acting and being acted on in history, eternal Holiness translated into
time to address humanity’s specific needs and potentials (see Chapter 5).
To this day, the Torah and its moral monotheism remain at the heart of
Jewish culture and are a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6). That light, in-
tended to illumine the transcendental Good and to overcome earthly sin via
divine grace, is opposed and perverted, however. It confronts a profane vision
that rejects the atoning solidarity of Yom Kippur and its reminder that every-
body dies, and that seeks instead to visit death on “the other” in the name of
“natural law” and “survival of the fittest.” Such naturalism reached its abom-
inable zenith, or should I say nadir, in the ovens of Auschwitz. The burden
of my text is to explain (Nazi) anti-​Semitism and the Holocaust without
seeming to justify them. Judaism is no more culpable or causally responsible
for Nazism than the Mosaic Law is culpable or causally responsible for sin (cf.
Romans 7:7–​13), even though sin must be diagnosed and treated in terms of
the Law. I attempt such a diagnosis and treatment mainly by examining the
model of Mordecai in the book of Esther and by unpacking two related forms
of moral turpitude: schadenfreude and Christian supersessionism. The
tendency to find joy in others’ suffering and the insistence that one’s own
holy writ must supplant and even falsify all other testaments are two major

6 The communitarian goods of tradition and solidarity, together with the liberal goods of equality

and freedom, are affirmed in both biblical creeds yet subordinated to faith, hope, and love. Human
community and personal autonomy are trumped by theonomy and the holy love of all neighbors.
Such love bestows worth, rather than appraising it. See my Political Agape: Christian Love and Liberal
Democracy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015). I take the language of “bestowal” and “appraisal”
from Irving Singer, The Nature of Love, Vols. 1-3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 1984,
1987).
4 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

sources of the Shoah. The model of Jesus is also crucial to understanding

and overcoming anti-​Semitism but precisely because he (like Mordecai) is a
manifestation of Torah.
If I am correct, every Jew who was interred in a Nazi death camp was a
prisoner of conscience, even as every Jew who was murdered by the Nazis
was a martyr. This is so because it was Jewish conscience and Jewish faith
themselves that the Nazis loathed and wished to eliminate by degrading
and finally destroying the Jewish people. Again, I do not ignore the com-
plexity of the supposedly genetic factor in Third Reich and other forms of
anti-​Semitism, but I argue that the pantheistic naturalism at the core of
National Socialism inevitably conflicted with Jewish moral monotheism. The
erotic and eudaimonistic mind does not relish being dependent upon and
decentered by God’s righteousness (tsedaqah). If we insist that the Holocaust
was pure insanity or absurdity without any objective basis, then we fail to
appreciate its radical evil. If we blind ourselves to how Christian Scriptures
helped make the genocide possible (if not inevitable), then we both let “the
Church” off too easily and make it more likely that the Shoah will be repeated.
This is not to blame the victims but to name the victimizers: our instinctually
prideful selves.

Human Nature, Moral Monotheism, and Divine Fire

Human nature leans toward self-​deception, but, happily, that nature is com-
posite and dialectical: there is another side to us beyond the finite and mate-
rial. The biblical tradition typically conceives of humanity as a psychosomatic
unity, a combination of soul and body, but this conception has been elabo-
rated in various (yet related) ways. In Genesis 2:7, Moses recounts how “the
lord God formed man [adam] from the dust of the ground [adamah], and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” thus making him “a living being
[nephesh].” Saint Augustine refers to a human being as “animated earth [terra
animata],”7 whereas Søren Kierkegaard describes “the self ” as “spirit”: “a syn-
thesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom
and necessity.”8 It is Kierkegaard’s anthropology that I primarily draw on in

7 “Terra animata” can also be rendered as “dust with a soul.” See Augustine, City of God, trans.

Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), Book XIII, Chapter 24, pp. 541–​542.
8 Kierkegaard (Anti-​Climacus), The Sickness unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.

Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 13.

 Introduction 5

this volume. For him, the human person is self-​aware and capable of making
decisions that, within constraints, define and redefine one’s identity. I am not
a disembodied angel unencumbered by history, but neither am I merely the
blind consequence of matter in motion. More specifically, the self is both a
state and an activity grounded in “the power that established it”: God.9 The
bodily attributes and traits of character that I possess at any given moment
are both a given product from the past and an ongoing project for the future,
a function of impersonal forces, personal choices, and divine grace. As much
as I might try to flee from it, the process of self-​articulation with and through
God is endless until death.
Kierkegaard helps us discern the rather puzzling fact that the very same
human nature that often moves us to violence and aggression (“evil”) can help
occasion sympathy and cooperation (“goodness”). A shared sense of weak-
ness and fallibility can spark pity for others (and ourselves) and induce us to
band together for mutual support and protection. This banding is typically
limited to small tribal groups, but, in addition to inducing hostility toward
“the other,” anxiety can open us to solidarity with the whole human species,
a sense of being fellow sinners and fellow sufferers, creatures of the same
Creator. More positively, an appreciation of the sanctity and dignity of human
life—​its deepest needs and potentials—​can carry us beyond prudence to self-​
sacrificial love for God and all neighbors, a love which emulates God’s crea-
tive love for the world. As SK’s pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis, reminds us,
anxiety is the last psychological state before the leap into sin (the refusal to be
oneself) or into faith (the affirmation of self and others before God).10

9 Ibid., p. 49.
10 Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis), The Concept of Anxiety, pp. 92 and 114–​115. In The
Paradox of Goodness: The Strange Relationship between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
(New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), Richard Wrangham sounds strikingly Kierkegaardian in arguing
that there are compassionate and cooperative aspects of human nature together with aggressive and
selfish aspects. The former constitute a proclivity to charity and sacrifice for the weak and vulnerable,
while the latter tend to embrace hatred and survival of the fittest. Paradoxically, evolutionary forces
have selected for both capacities, for peaceful symbiosis as well as violent competition, leaving each
of us a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—​capable of great benevolence and great cruelty—​according
to Wrangham. In this text, I maintain that Hitler and the Nazis rejected charity and championed
survival of the fittest to such an extent that they embodied radical evil. Conversely, I contend that
the Jews traditionally stand for ’hesed and radical goodness. It may appear, then, that my account of
ethics and anthropology is in agreement with that of Professor Wrangham. This is not the case.
There is a key difference between my picture of morality and personality and his. Wrangham, a
primatologist, places both charity and cruelty entirely within the realm of time and human nature;
for him, human beings have “self-​domesticated” via natural selection. I, a theologian, see charity
as requiring the special grace of the eternal God interacting with human freedom; we are neither
self-​created nor self-​fulfilled. Evolution itself is designed by God (not us) to be teleological and to
cast up intelligence and ultimately love of God and neighbor. See my “Evolution, Agape, and the
6 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

It was Moses who, approximately 3,300 years ago,11 first formulated in

the West the alternative of universal love (call it “radical goodness”) in rig-
orously moral and monotheistic terms.12 I readily grant that there are some
precursors of these ideas in ancient Hittite religion and that, initially, some
interpreted the Pentateuch to be relevant only to Israelites. Some even today
read “love your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:18) as referring only to fellow Jews.13
But Leviticus 19:34 is more emphatically cosmopolitan:

Image of God: A Reply to Various Naturalists,” in Love and Christian Ethics: Tradition, Theory, and
Society, ed. Frederick V. Simmons and Brian C. Sorrells (Washington, DC: Georgetown University
Press, 2016); see also my “The Christian Love Ethic and Evolutionary ‘Cooperation’: The Lessons and
Limits of Eudaimonism and Game Theory,” in Evolution, Games, and God, ed. Martin Nowak and
Sarah Coakley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
We still need a cultural history that accounts for the emergence of symbiosis and even self-​
sacrifice among human beings. This text is a partial contribution to that end. Here a philo-​Semite
tries to make sense of the ubiquity of anti-​Semitism in the larger context of evolutionary forces. I be-
lieve that the Jews (a.k.a. the Suffering Servant) are the key to understanding virtue and violence cul-
turally, even as for Wrangham bonobos are the key to understanding them biologically. Accordingly,
I try to explain how ’hesed and agape were bequeathed to us by the Jews—​memetically and to a degree
genetically—​and how such a cooperative legacy confronts, calls up, and/​or recalls a Counter-​Sublime
based on hatred and aggression against “the other” (a.k.a. Nazism).

11 I conform to convention in attributing the first five books of the Hebrew Bible to Moses. Though

probably a mythic or composite figure, he is traditionally said to have lived between circa 1400 and
circa 1270 BCE, several centuries after Abraham was thought to have lived and died. Between the
time of Abraham and the time of Moses, the Talmud suggests that the people were called to live ac-
cording to the seven Noahide laws, given by Noah to his children.
12 Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten (ca. 1380–​ca. 1336 BCE) may have been the first monotheist,

but he was not a moral monotheist. Rather than teaching steadfast love for all of God’s children, he
insisted on unique privilege for himself and the royal family. In fact, the Sun disk (the Aten) wor-
shipped by Akhenaten, while singular, was apparently not the truly transcendent Deity Moses found
in YHWH. (See my brief discussion of Akhenaten in Chapter 1 of this volume.) Some doubt that
even Moses was a moral monotheist. In The Birth of Monotheism: The Rise and Disappearance of
Yahwism (Washington, DC: Biblical Archaeological Society, 2007), André Lemaire affirms that “the
divine name, the tetragrammaton (Greek for ‘four letters,’ in this cases four Hebrew consonants)
‘YHWH,’ goes back to Moses; and YHWH, at least to some extent, was brought into Canaan by the
group Moses led, the Bene-​Israel (Sons of Israel)” (pp. 20–​21). According to Lemaire, however, “early
Yahwism was not monotheistic” (p. 27). Yahweh was a national god, and Moses was a henotheist,
believing in multiple deities with YHWH at the top. Lemaire contends (p. 10) that truly universal
monotheism is espoused first by Deutero-​Isaiah in the sixth century BCE. I believe that Lemaire
overstates the contrast between henotheism and monotheism, at least in the Pentateuch, but (1) the
prophet who wrote Second Isaiah was no doubt a Jew, and (2) it is sufficient for my purposes that
Moses be traditionally identified with belief in one righteous Creator and Judge of the universe.
13 Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh maintains that a purely intramural love is bidden in Leviticus 19:17–​

18: “In the Torah, the Hebrew word reyacha explicitly means ‘your fellow Jew.’ It does not refer to
anyone outside the Jewish faith. ‘Neighbor’ is not an accurate translation for the word reyacha. The
Hebrew word for “neighbor” is shachen. . . . Thus the . . . verse veahavta l’reyacha kamocha, ‘You
shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ does not imply a universal neighbor. To be honest with the
text, the parenthetical ‘a fellow Jew’ must appear.” But then the good Rabbi brings to light the crucial
point: “However, the Torah requires a level of love for every one of G-​d’s creations. G-​d’s ultimate mo-
tivation for Creation is love. . . . The Ba’al Shem Tov teaches that a Jew must love all of Creation, as eve-
rything reflects G-​d’s motivation of love.” (See “Responsa” on the Gal Einai Institute website, accessed
on May 21, 2019: https://​www.inner.org/​responsa/​leter1/​resp22.htm.) As I point out, the universality
of the love required by God of the Jews, even for “the alien,” is made undeniable in Leviticus 19:34.
 Introduction 7

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you
shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am
the Lord your God.

I am pointing, then, to inclusive seeds that are undeniably present in a number

of Hebrew Scriptures and that developed across history. Interestingly, there
is an analogous but normatively reverse ambiguity with reference to Hitler
and Nazism. Some scholars hold that genocidal intent toward the Jews was
present and essential in the man and the movement from the beginning,
while others maintain that it arose only contingently and over time. Based
on my reading of Mein Kampf and other documents,14 I tend to side with the
former school, but Nazism and Hitler, like Judaism and Jesus, are not static
or monolithic. (Whether Hitler and Nazism were genocidal from the start is
as complex and ambiguous a question as whether Moses and Yahwism were
monotheistic from the start.) I trust, however, that some plausibly general
points, descriptive and prescriptive, can be made about both Judaism and
Nazism.
In the twentieth century, Mary Shelley’s “Modern Prometheus,” Victor
Frankenstein, and his monstrous creation came to life for real in Germany.
Whereas the Mosaic God of the Burning Bush warmed and enlightened
without consuming, Adolf Hitler hailed Victory and took the Promethean
theft of fire to its extreme (if not unavoidable) conclusion. In 1933, he used
the Reichstag blaze, which the Nazis themselves probably set, as an excuse
to suspend many civil liberties and to disenfranchise the Jews. In 1938, in
a kind of Nazified Walpurgisnacht, paramilitary Sturmabteilung members
and ordinary civilians battered and/​or burned over two hundred and fifty
synagogues on Kristallnacht, supposedly in retaliation for the assassination

(NB: The Ba’al Shem Tov was the founder of Hasidic Judaism in the eighteenth century; the syna-
gogue associated with his name in Medzhybizh, Ukraine, was destroyed by the Nazis.)

14 See, for instance, “the Hitler Letter” (a.k.a., “the Gemlich Letter”) acquired by the Simon

Wiesenthal Center in 2011 and displayed at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. Written by
Adolf Hitler on September 16, 1919, roughly five years before he composed Mein Kampf, a crucial
passage reads as follows:
an antisemitism based on purely emotional grounds will find its ultimate expression in the
form of the pogrom. An antisemitism based on reason, however, must lead to systematic legal
combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews
from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective [of such leg-
islation] must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.
(See “Adolf Hitler: First Anti-​Semitic Writing,” The Jewish Virtual Library, accessed on April 17,
2020: https://​www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/​adolf-​hitler-​s-​first-​anti-​semitic-​writing.)
8 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

of a Nazi diplomat by a young German-​born Polish Jew. “I watched Satan fall

from heaven like a flash of lightning,” Jesus told his disciples (Luke 10:18),
and in 1939 Hitler replaced biblical Shalom with lightning war (blitzkrieg)
against Poland and the world. He eventually sought to make a conflagration
of anyone and anything that turned away from Aryan blood and toward uni-
versal Deity. The weak and the vulnerable were objects of his contempt, rather
than compassion. In the Nazi state and its occupied territories, the ravenous
eagle of Prometheus was reconditioned and set on Jewish prey. Monotheistic
belief and believers were themselves considered base and polluted, hence to
be burned away with a stunningly rational efficiency. Thus divine fire fell into
its opposite.15

The Judaic Critique of Eros and the Book of Esther

The genius and offense of Jewish moral monotheism is that it demands ho-
liness rather than happiness, revolutionizing the many traditions of erotic
desire by subordinating them to the love of God.16 How often do our wants
and needs make an object of “the other,” even “the Holy Other,” and erase
them for our purposes. It is essential to Yahweh’s creative benevolence, in
contrast, that He speaks the world, including human creatures, into existence
and allows them “to be.” (Yahweh makes Hamlet’s pressing question possible

15 God is, according to Judaism, the source of radical goodness. Sinful human beings alone simply

do not have the wisdom or authority to deploy (putatively) divine fire, inwardly or outwardly, what-
ever the cause. Lest the Nazis seem entirely anomalous, I would remind us that, in 1945, at least
100,000 Japanese civilians died in the March 9–​10 firebombing of Tokyo by the American Air Force.
(See The Asahi Shimbun Cultural Research Center, “The Great Tokyo Air Raid and the Bombing
of Civilians in World War II,” The Asia-​Pacific Journal, 11-​2-​10, March 15, 2010.) Another 66,000
died in the August 6 atomic bombing of Hiroshima; and 39,000 in the August 9 atomic bombing
of Nagasaki. (These are the lowest numbers I have found; the usual minimum of immediate deaths
in Hiroshima is 75,000; in Nagasaki, 50,000; but nobody knows for sure the accurate figures.) This
means that, in these three raids alone, the United States directly killed at least 205,000 Japanese
citizens. These “burnt offerings” were individuals the vast majority of whom we knew to be “inno-
cent noncombatants,” according to traditional just war theory. Of the roughly 300,000 citizens of
Hiroshima, for example, only 43,000 were thought by the American military to be Japanese soldiers.
(See “The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History,” U.S. Department of Energy, Office of History
and Heritage Resources.) Yet we turned the whole city into what Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot of
the Enola Gay, described as “a black boiling barrel of tar.” (See Tibbets interview first broadcast on
April 4, 1974, in the episode entitled “The Bomb,” in The World at War series, produced by Thames
Television.) Many, if not all, of the Japanese noncombatants may have supported the war ideologi-
cally, but they were not materially prosecuting any aggression and therefore should have been im-
mune from direct attack by the standard conventions of war. The Allies were not genocidal, but by
those conventions, all of the aforementioned killings constituted mass murder.
16 I intend here both the subjective and the objective genitive: God’s love for us and our love

for God.
 Introduction 9

by proleptically answering it in the affirmative.) Moreover, He calls on us to

be similarly generous in our finite and fallible way. Mirabile dictu, Judaism
teaches this without vilifying natural desires but by refusing to allow them to
negate the neighbor and divinize the self. This is the difference that makes all
the difference, the difference that offends the Nazi in all of us. It is deeply trou-
bling, but we must face the fact that, for the Nazis, the killings of Jews were
not murders but executions. By any civilized standards, the Shoah was the
most egregious and abominable genocide, but Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich,
Göring, Goebbels, and others convinced themselves that it was justified cap-
ital punishment on a mass scale. The Holocaust was the opposite of a frenzied
and imponderable “witch hunt”; it was a methodical and intelligible pogrom
of the prophetic. Witches, as commonly conceived, do not exist; a prophetic
people, biblically understood, does.
Nazi anti-​Semitism, like most anti-​Semitism, is an effort to escape our
humanity before God: in despising and/​or executing the Jews, we are re-
ally rebelling against and/​or murdering ourselves as spirit. As with so many
things, going back to the Hebrew Bible helps us understand this. In the book
of Esther, Haman, King Ahasuerus’s favorite, hates Mordecai, a Diaspora Jew,
because he will “not bow down or do obeisance” to him (3:2). We are not told
precisely why Mordecai will not bow, but it clearly is a matter of his Jewish
identity and conscience (3:4).17 Haman is infuriated and encourages the
Persian king to target the Jews more generally because they have “different
laws” (3:8). As a people who serve God and keep their own counsels, the “al-
terity” of the Jews has long called up violent animosity that wants to dom-
inate and even to eliminate them. The natural mind is erotic and does not
relish being chastised and relativized by the demands of a supernatural faith.
Indeed, one of the deep paradoxes of human history is that unconstrained
erotic love often displays a dynamic similar to that of anti-​Semitic and other
forms of hatred. Consider the following two quotations:

“So,” she [Diotima] said, “the simple truth of the matter is that people love
goodness. Yes?”
“Yes,” I [Socrates] answered.
“But hadn’t we better add that they want to get goodness for themselves?”
she asked.

17 See Joyce G. Baldwin, Esther: An Introduction and Commentary (Leicester, England: Inter-​

Varsity Press, 1984), p. 28.

10 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

“Yes.”
“And that’s not all: there’s also the fact that they want goodness to be theirs for
ever,” she said.
“Yes, we’d better add that too.”
“To sum up, then,” she said, “the object of [erotic] love is the permanent pos-
session of goodness for oneself [τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἑαυτῷ εἶναι ἀεὶ ἔρως ἐστίν].”
“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed.

So reads Socrates famous speech in praise of eros at 206a of Plato’s

Symposium.18

“I had these obsessive desires and thoughts, wanting to control them [his
murder victims], to—​I don’t know how to put it—​possess them permanently.
“And that’s why you killed them?”
“Right, right, not because I was angry with them, not because I hated them,
but because I wanted to keep them with me. And as my obsession grew,
I was saving body parts, such as skulls and skeletons.”

So reads part of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer’s infamous interview with jour-
nalist Nancy Glass.19
The striking fact that Dahmer’s language of desire echoes that of Diotima
is rendered even more troubling by the comment of Dahmer’s minister that
“he was more normal than we want to think he was.”20 Dahmer secretly ate
various body parts of his victims and even had sex with their corpses, all in
the name of caring for or about them, while the Third Reich built an empire
on publicly despising the Jews. Nonetheless, Dahmer’s cannibalism and nec-
rophilia mirror aspects of Nazi practices in the Holocaust death camps. The
commandants of those camps sometimes made trophies of their inmates’
personal property and even fashioned lampshades out of human skin. One
can see Dahmer’s behavior as a horrible perversion of erotic attraction or as
a recognizable variant of that attraction,21 but I read it as a fundamental ca-
veat concerning the entire Western vision of erotic love, from Plato through

18 Plato’s Symposium, 206a, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 48;

emphasis in original.
19 “Dahmer on Dahmer: A Serial Killer Speaks,” Part I, an Oxygen documentary broadcast on

November 11, 2017.

20 Ibid.
21 Jeffrey Dahmer was found guilty of sixteen homicides but was judged sane by the courts. Serial

killer, Edmund Kemper, testified that in 1972–​1973 he murdered, dismembered, and then had sexual
 Introduction 11

Hitler. The Jews were perhaps the first to see and reject clearly, in effect, the
short course between Diotima and Dahmer, desire and death.22 (Harold
Bloom perceives: “Death the dark mother is a dancer offering total fulfill-
ment, and the erotic merger with her is absolute.”23) The Jews recognized,
that is, that human eros is insatiable and readily goes over into its seeming
opposite, wisdom becoming indistinguishable from madness.
As Ecclesiastes puts it:

All things are wearisome;

more than one can express;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing,
or the ear filled with hearing. (1:8)

And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly.
I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. (1:17)

Aware of the ubiquity of injustice and death, Qohelet approaches complete

psychic collapse:

How can the wise die just like fools? So I hated life, because what is done
under the sun was grievous to me; for all is vanity and a chasing after
wind. . . . So I turned and gave my heart up to despair concerning all the
toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes one who has toiled with
wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave all to be enjoyed by another
who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. (2:16–​21)

When we read “I commend enjoyment, for there is nothing better for people
under the sun than to eat, and drink, and enjoy themselves” (8:15), it can

relations with six female hitchhikers because he wanted them “for myself, like possessions,” but he
too was found sane by the judicial system. See “Edmund Kemper III, the hulking former construc-
tion worker serving . . . ,” United Press International Archives, June 3, 1985.

22 As the young Friedrich Nietzsche realized, eros without something controlling it is akin to

Dionysus without Apollo. The most ecstatic Dionysian revel ends in total effacement of all selves—​
mine, yours, and theirs. See Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy or: Hellenism and Pessimism, in Basic
Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966, 1967, 1968).
23 Bloom, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime (New York: Spiegel

and Grau, 2015), pp. 116–​117. In George Bataille’s words, “the urge towards [erotic] love, pushed to
its limit, is an urge toward death.” See Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood
(San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), p. 42.
12 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

sound like the triumph of hedonism. But the repeated phrase “under the
sun,” together with the previous labeling of “enjoy yourself ” a “vanity” (2:1),
makes it clear that self-​indulgence, too, is futile. The point of the text is that the
author’s extremity of pain and candor is required to turn us away from eros to
something higher. Being “under the sun” and buffeted by acquisitive fervor
must give way to being “under God” and serving as “a light to the nations.”
Even Qohelet, for whose Teacher “all is vanity” (12:8), mandates: “Follow the
inclination of your heart and the desire of your eyes, but know that for all
these things God will bring you into judgment” (11:9). Rather than world
hatred and despair being the last words, Judaism’s sacred texts record the ne-
cessity of human desire being healed and governed by divine righteousness
(tsedaqah) and steadfast love (’hesed).
This is made particularly clear in the book of Isaiah:

Zion shall be redeemed by justice,

and those in her who repent, by righteousness.
But rebels and sinners shall be destroyed together,
and those who forsake the Lord shall be consumed.
For you shall be ashamed of the oaks
in which you delighted;
and you shall blush for the gardens
that you have chosen. (1:27–​29)

I will recount the gracious deeds of the Lord,

the praiseworthy acts of the Lord,
because of all that the Lord has done for us,
and the great favor to the house of Israel
that he has shown them according to his mercy,
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.
For he said, “Surely they are my people,
children who will not deal falsely”;
and he became their savior
in all their distress. (63:7–​8)

Indeed, it was because the Jews thanked God for His supernatural grace
and saw it as a call to earthly holiness that they effectively unmasked and
challenged das Reich der Natur. Rather than privileging one nation and pro-
moting survival of the fittest, Judaism would redeem all nations and preaches
 Introduction 13

sympathy for the weakest (the widow and the orphan). In extremis, because
the children of Mordecai reveal and rebuke the natural nexus between in-
stinctual gratification and murder, the Nazis sought to annihilate them.
This is by no means to say that the Jews are sex phobic or body loathing.
Both Moses and Jesus affirm corporeal (including sexual) existence and the
human need for food and drink, family and fellowship, as good gifts of Yahweh.
The Father knows we have need of daily bread (Luke 11:3), yet we do not live by
bread alone (Luke 4:4). One need only read Genesis and the Song of Solomon
to appreciate that, in the Hebrew Bible, erotic desire is not evil as such, as
though intrinsically selfish and manipulative, or invariably homicidal. Cain’s
crime was no more inevitable than Hitler’s. But one need only read Ecclesiastes
and Isaiah, Amos and Hosea, to understand that natural appetites tend to be
misdirected and to get out of hand; thus, they must be reined in and redeemed
by a grace that the Hebrew Bible calls ’hesed. Cain was the first human to be
born, and we share his competitive anxieties, so his crime is intelligible. The
steadfast love to which human beings are called loves the other for his or her
own sake, however, rather than for one’s own fulfillment. So Cain, though one
of us, nevertheless stands for sin. To see Jeffrey Dahmer as a closeted Hitler,
and Hitler as a modern Cain, our unleashed self, is to be grateful to the Jews for
not leaving us alone with our own devices. It is also to be thankful to God for
the gift of the Jews and the prophets they provide to this day.
Political, economic, and cultural turmoil typically intensifies human
prospects for both goodness and evil. More specifically, suffering can lead
to either increased empathy or increased hostility toward others. The fer-
ment in Germany and Austria in the years immediately following the Central
Powers’ defeat in World War I gave rise to Martin Buber’s Ich und Du (1923)
as well as to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (1925). (Buber and Hitler were both
born in Austria-​Hungary, but both came to notoriety in Germany.) What
might the Fatherland have been like had it taken to heart the prophetic work,
rather than the demonic? Buber makes it clear that the two possible relational
attitudes toward reality—​the “primary words” of “I–​It” and “I–​Thou”—​are
both necessary, but that many living beings and God call fundamentally for
an “I–​Thou” orientation, in recognition of their subjectivity and transcend-
ence.24 In contrast to the openness and dialogue that Buber associated with

24 See Buber, I and Thou (2nd ed.), trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1958). A contemporary Jewish prophet who also teaches a holistic wisdom, sensitive to the truth and
beauty of subjects and objects, is Lenn E. Goodman; see his The Holy One of Israel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019).
14 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

relation to a “Thou,” Nazism can be seen as the merciless effort to approach

everything and everyone with an “I–​It” cupidity, eros gone berserk. Those
who were most to be reduced to an “It” were those who traditionally preach
honoring the presence of the divine and human “Thou,” even in the midst of
pain and conflict: the Jews. (In 1933, Buber resigned his professorship at the
Universität Frankfurt am Main in protest of Hitler’s being named Chancellor;
in 1938, Buber fled Nazi Germany for Jerusalem.)

Christian Supersessionism, Two Kinds of Light,

and More on Esther

Christian claims to supersede Judaism, rather than to be grateful for its pat-
rimony, are also a function of the all too human inclination to cope with
dread and limited resources with aggression. Either we want to be the chosen
people, or we resent the idea that God would use any one tribe to overcome
tribalism, any particular province to overcome provincialism. Cultural ag-
gression buys in on the “survival of the fittest” and “us vs. them” mentality
that neo-​Darwinians see as inevitable in biological contexts, the only differ-
ence being that conflict is now seen in terms of memes rather than genes.
We find joy in others’ socio-​cultural downfall, and the Christian Scriptures,
especially the Gospel of John and Revelation, are full of schadenfreude.
They already betray a resentment at the Messiah’s not being acclaimed by all
that goes beyond anti-​Judaism to an inchoate anti-​Semitism that pits Jesus
against his own people and tradition.
Some scholars distinguish between “anti-​Semitism,” defined as prejudice
against the Jews as a racial or ethnic group, and “anti-​Judaism,” construed
as objection to Jewish beliefs or practices. On this and related bases, some
academics consider it anachronistic or otherwise inappropriate to label New
Testament texts “anti-​Semitic.” J. N. Sevenster, for instance, writes that “the
word suggests a racial distinction which, scientifically, is highly disputable
and, to say the least, doubtful.”25 I find the contention that John 8:44–​47, say,
is merely lodging a theological disagreement to be unpersuasive, however.
There the author has Jesus condemn “the Jews” with “You are from your fa-
ther the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” This is more than

25 J. N. Sevenster, The Roots of Pagan Anti-​

Semitism in the Ancient World (Leiden: E.J. Brill,
1975), p. 1.
 Introduction 15

an ideological dissent; it is a vilifying of an entire group as such. Writers

in antiquity were not aware of the science of genetics and did not have our
(disputed) conception of race, of course; moreover, as Sevenster points out,
“the term Semites encompasses . . . other peoples as well as the Jews.”26 But
the ancients were cognizant of tribal and blood-​line distinctions—​as well
as discriminations based on sex, nationality, class, and so on—​and quite
capable of despising and dismissing an entire collective as such, even self-​
referentially.27 (To argue by analogy: male sexism is not just dissent from
what women say and do; it is also a dislike of their distinctive being, and it
is unjustified on both bases.) Thus, with the relevant qualifications, I find it
appropriate to label parts of the Christian Bible both “anti-​Judaic” and “anti-​
Semitic.”28 From early to late, the Jews have been hated for who they are as
well as for what they teach and how they act. Offense at their being “chosen
out of all the peoples on earth to be [God’s] people” (Deuteronomy 14:2)
is more than a doctrinal disagreement; it is resentment at Jewish identity.
(See my Chapters 4 and 5.) It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that Nazism
is the attempt to hate what can and should only be loved (God and His
people) and to love what can and should only be hated (the fallen self and its
concupiscence).29

26 Ibid.
27 As my colleague Carol Newsom reminds me, “Ezekiel 16 in its savage critique of Jerusalem leads
off with ‘your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite,’ suggesting that Jerusalem’s depravity
derives from her non-​Israelite origins, a kind of folk genetic theory, apparently” (personal email cor-
respondence of June 18, 2019).
28 Even Sevenster, citing M. Simon’s Verus Israel, concedes that “at times the anti-​Jewish polemic

[in the Gospel] can, indeed, be anti-​Semitic in form and manner of argumentation in the sense
usually attached to this term” (The Roots of Pagan Anti-​Semitism, pp. 3–​4). When he immediately
goes on to say “but not so with respect to principle and essence,” I have no clear idea of what he
means. At the very least, he seems to be splitting hairs. I am all for precise terminology, and I grant
that there is a theoretical distinction between “anti-​Judaism” and “anti-​Semitism.” Moreover, I have
readily acknowledged that the ancients did not have a modern conception of race. In reality, how-
ever, the quoted expressions are both needed to capture the full range of anti-​Jewishness, in the Bible
and elsewhere. I came across Sevenster’s work after I had largely completed this manuscript, but,
in spite of ambivalence about the word “anti-​Semitism,” it admirably states one of my fundamental
theses: “Hatred of the Jews, even in antiquity, undoubtedly springs from a more or less conscious vex-
ation with the exclusiveness, the distinctive behaviour of the Jews proceeding from their way of living
and thinking in accordance with the Torah” (Ibid., p. 5). Being a historian and exegete, Sevenster does
not elaborate the theological point, and, importantly, he does not emphasize, as I do, that Jewish “ex-
clusiveness” is ultimately in the service of inclusiveness.
29 When we try to hate God, we miss Him entirely; when we try to love ourselves as such, we in-

evitably fall into hubris or despair. A plausible definition of hatred is willing harm or evil for oneself
or others, and it would be wrong literally to despise oneself in this way, but the New Testament Jesus
sometimes uses the word “hatred” [miseō] to connote the radical relativizing of something before
God. See my comments on Luke 14:26 later.
16 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

The corrupt fire that descended into the Holocaust is yet to be

extinguished: we still burn books, crosses, our neighbors, and our own hearts.
Christian anti-​Semitism is ongoing, and we will see later how it significantly
contributed to the gassing and burning of Jews during the Nazi Reich. All too
often, the Wednesday ashes we Christians impose on our foreheads are from
the real or imagined corpses of our Jewish forebears. Some of us are even so
confused as to see historical suffering and death on a massive scale as the just
punishment of the Jews for killing Christ and the ultimate defeat of Esther
and her unmentioned God.30 The Holocaust is no more due to a failure of
Judaism than the crucifixion is due to a failure of Jesus. The Nazi death camps
and the Roman cross are simply artifacts of what happens when divine good-
ness meets human evil in the world.
In Genesis 1:3–​4, God said, “Let there be light” and saw that it was good.
As “a light to the nations” (Isaiah 49:6), the Jews display ’hesed, God’s collec-
tive love for all groups, and they suffer as a tribe, a people, so that tribalism
itself might be overcome in a universal salvation.31 As “the light of the world”
(John 8:12), Jesus displays agape, God’s specific love for all neighbors, and he
suffers as an individual, a person, so that individualism itself might be over-
come in a universal brotherhood.32 In spite of two thousand years of Christian
supersessionism, the two lights are not at odds or in competition. We con-
stantly afflict the Jews and Jesus for their parallel inversions—​their overcoming
of “us vs. them” and “you vs. me” hatred, respectively—​but the fault is in our-
selves, not our stars . . . neither the Star of David nor the Star of Bethlehem.
The deep singularity of Jesus is that he redeems the Gentiles as single individ-
uals, engrafting them one by one into a covenant with God. Unconditional
extension of worth typifies agapic love and glorifies the Messiah,

30 See, for instance, the creedal statements of the Deutsche Christen during World War II, es-

pecially the writings of Emanuel Hirsch, Gerhard Kittel, and Walter Grundmann, as discussed
in Betrayal: German Churches and the Holocaust, ed. Robert P. Ericksen and Susannah Heschel
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999) and in Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian
Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
31 The Hebrew word “’hesed” (a noun with no verbal counterpart) has connotations of loy-

alty and solidarity within a group, but in late biblical and post-​biblical contexts it increasingly has
connotations of graciousness and generosity as well. Hence tribalism transcending tribalism. In
Qumran Hebrew, “’hesed” is often paired with a term for “compassionate love” (“rahamim”). As
Carol Newsom points out, when Jeremiah has the Lord say to Israel, “I have loved you with an ev-
erlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (31:3), as well as when Hosea has
Yahweh say to Ephraim and Judah, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice” (6:6), the word translated
“love” in both cases is “’hesed.” The highest human love is to reflect the divine and to orchestrate life
around its shared light.
32 I thank my friend and colleague, John Witte, for helping me to clarify the relation between ’hesed

and agape.
 Introduction 17

not the triumphalist insistence that every knee shall bow to him as unique
spiritual despot (cf. Romans14:11 and Philippians2:10).
Carol Newsom descries that “the ‘light to the nations’ also may have some
triumphalist elements to it.” She points to “the kings and queens in Isa. 49:23
who ‘bow to you, face to the ground, and lick the dust of your feet.’ ”33 I my-
self am struck by Jeremiah 22:3–​4’s linking a majestic call for justice for all to
the guarantee of political connection and power:

Thus says the Lord: Act with justice and righteousness, and deliver from
the hand of the oppressor anyone who has been robbed. And do no wrong
or violence to the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood
in this place. For if you will indeed obey this word, then through the gates
of this house shall enter kings who sit on the throne of David, riding in
chariots and on horses, they, and their servants, and their people.

I can only reiterate that the steadfast love of Creator and creation that I find
ideally embodied in Judaism evolved amidst ambition, ambivalence, fear,
confusion, and backsliding. The Jews, too, are human, and the fact that they
repeatedly misunderstand, stretch, or violate their covenant with God does
not negate the reality of that covenant. It is an ironic confirmation of Jewish
virtue that the Hebrew Bible itself registers Jewish vice. The Lord continually
sends in-​house prophets to humble Israel and remind her of her redemptive
identity, even as the world continually seeks to deny or destroy that identity.
We Christians have had immense difficulty accepting a simple fact: the
Jews as a people are beloved of God and already saved and saving. Thus
we accuse them of “Judaizing” our faith, when, in reality, it is we who are
attempting (often violently) to “Christianize” theirs. This would have seemed
most odd to Jesus, who taught a recognizable yet radically personal form
of Torah piety. We Christians resent not being first in God’s timeline, if not
God’s heart, hence we make Jesus Christ himself the occasion for invidious
contrasts between “us” and “them” or “you” and “me”—​exactly the attitude
and behavior that Jews and Jesus came into the world to overcome. As the
Christ, Jesus has a distinctive commission from God, but it is primarily to
redeem the Gentiles seriatim. If the Son appealed to the Gentiles as a col-
lectivity, this would conflict with the Father’s prior election of the Jews, and,
even more importantly, it would not suit the particularity of non-​Judaic

33 Personal email correspondence of June 18, 2019.

18 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

conscience. It is hubris that denies this and makes of Jesus and oneself
an anti-​Semite. The cunning of history has a way of catching up with all
anti-​Semitism: Haman is hanged on the very gallows he had intended for
Mordecai (Esther 7:9–​10), and Germany is eventually de-​Nazified to the
point that virtually all of its citizens deny Hitler’s character and creed in the
thoroughgoing way he wanted Aryans to deny Jews. But, as Esther reminds
us, not bowing down to the temporal is already the triumph of Judaism, not
the execution of Haman (or the defeat of Hitler).
I am aware of the irony of using the Book of Esther to provide, in
Mordecai, a metaphor for Jewish moral monotheism. As Carey A. Moore
observes of the Hebrew manuscript (a.k.a. the Masoretic Text), “The king
of Persia is mentioned 190 times in 167 verses, but God is not mentioned
once. Neither Law nor Covenant, two key concepts running throughout the
entire Old Testament, is so much as alluded to, let alone acknowledged.”34
Some speculate that Yahweh is not referred to because Esther is an ethnic,
rather than a religious, Jew, but it is equally plausible that the divine name
is unspoken because it is literally ineffable. For my part, I take the moral
of Esther to be that a Jew must not bow down to temporal authority, or
to his or her own erotic preferences, even when God seems absent or un-
concerned. Esther’s Mordecai is a practical symbol of Hebraic faith and its
first confrontation with genocide; thus, the text is much more an aid to
action than a treatise on theology. More concretely, as Samuel Wells has
suggested, Esther should be read in tandem with Exodus and the story of
Passover, the latter recounting deliverance through divine grace and the
former depicting self-​help and the import of human agency.35 Wells writes
that “the story of Moses is a celebration of what God has done; the story of
Esther is a celebration of what the Jews can do.”36 This line is insightful, so
long as we remember that Exodus and Esther represent a both/​and, rather
than an either/​or. Like Moses and Esther, the two books capture the two
dimensions of Torah as indicative and imperative: “For I am the Lord who
brought you up from the land of Egypt, to be your God; you shall be holy,
for I am holy” (Lev. 11:45). Providence and free will are always insepa-
rable in Hebrew Scriptures—​the Jews are someone that God has enacted,

34 See Carey A. Moore, Esther: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, volume 7B

of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. XXXII.

35 Samuel Wells and George Sumner, Esther and Daniel (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press,

2013), p. 5.
36 Ibid., p. 13.
 Introduction 19

even as God is someone the Jews must reflect—​so it is reasonable to read

Mordecai’s “relief and deliverance . . . for the Jews from another quarter”
(4:14) as referring obliquely to God.37
Another stumbling block to mining Esther for models of radical good-
ness is, in Mary Joan Leith’s words, “the book’s enthusiastic account of the
Jewish communities’ slaughter of their enemies.”38 After Esther convinces
Ahasuerus “to avert the evil design of Haman . . . and the plot that he had
devised against the Jews” (8:3), the king goes so far as to issue letters, appar-
ently dictated by Mordecai, that “allowed the Jews who were in every city
to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any
armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their
women and children, and to plunder their goods” (8:11). The result is re-
corded as follows:

So the Jews struck down all their enemies with the sword, slaughtering, and
destroying them, and did as they pleased to those who hated them. In the
citadel of Susa the Jews killed and destroyed five hundred people. They killed
Parshandatha, Dalphon, Aspatha, Poratha, Adalia, Aridatha, Parmashta,
Arisai, Aridai, Vaizatha, the ten sons of Haman son of Hammedatha, the
enemy of the Jews; but they did not touch the plunder. (9:5–​10)

The next day, an additional “seventy-​five thousand of those who hated them”
are killed by the Jews, but, again, “they did not lay hands on the plunder”
(9:16). What are we to make of all this? For his part, Martin Luther took no-
torious umbrage:

Their [the Jews’] heart’s most ardent sighing and yearning and hoping is set
on the day on which they can deal with us Gentiles as they did with the
Gentiles in Persia at the time of Esther. Oh, how fond they are of the book of
Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, mur-
derous yearning and hope. The sun has never shone on a more bloodthirsty
and vengeful people than they are who imagine that they are God’s people

37 Some authorities begin with Esther and, finding it without explicit religious content, exclude

it from the biblical canon. I find it more cogent to reason in the other direction and to let the canon
guide our interpretation of the book. Cf. Mary Joan Winn Leith’s notes to Esther in The New Oxford
Annotated Bible (NRSV) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 708.
38 Ibid., p. 707.
20 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

who have been commissioned and commanded to murder and to slay the
Gentiles.39

If taken as a mandate for unbridled bellicism, Esther is undoubtedly dis-

turbing, but two mitigating factors must be pointed out: (1) all of the killing is
described as “defensive,” and (2) the killing is apparently not followed by rape
and pillage. These two factors provide cold ethical comfort, however, given
that innocent women and children seem to have been slain. It is hard to deny
that Esther conveys an element of joy at turning the tables on one’s foes, and
I will have much to say subsequently about schadenfreude, but Luther’s reac-
tion to the text remains ham-​handed and noxious. It is better to construe the
quoted verses as an allegory of how completely fidelity to Yahweh undercuts
the powers of this world. The eternal God wages total war, so to speak, on all
temporal values and institutions, not to destroy them but to relativize them.
To read Esther as a Jewish license for the mass murder of Gentiles is akin
to the literalism that would take Luke 14:26 as a prescription for patricide,
matricide, uxoricide, infanticide, fratricide, sororicide, and suicide. (Jesus
declares there: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my
disciple.”) We should look, rather, to the overall kerygma of Scripture. God
calls into being all that is and all who are, and He enlists the Jews and their
prophets to redeem them. “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the
brightness of your dawn” (Isaiah 60:3). God cannot despise His own crea-
tion, but He can insist that He come first in the ordering of creaturely priori-
ties. This, once more, is what Mordecai (literally) stands for as a Jew.
And what if Esther is an imaginary attempt to explain or justify Purim,
a pagan festival of excess taken over by Judaism? The consensus of schol-
arship appears to be that the book is a kind of “historical novel,”40 a mix of
historical fact and dramatic fiction, but the key issue is how to understand
Purim itself. Purim is not a bacchanalian worship of eros but rather a Jewish
humbling of it. (Even as the Christian rituals around Christmas incorpo-
rate and transform “secular” elements, like the decorated evergreen tree, so
Purim evidently appropriated and amended the Persian New Year.41) The
Greek paean to love, Plato’s Symposium, is occasioned by a drinking party

39 Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies” (1543), in Luther’s Works, Vol. 47, trans. Martin H.

Bertram (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), pp. 156–​157.

40 Moore, Esther, p. LII.
41 Ibid., p. XLVIII.
 Introduction 21

in which participants compete in their praise of eros, but the Hebrew wit-
ness to moral monotheism enjoins that we not bow down to the world and
only then celebrate with drink. The contrast is clear: the happy Greek gets
drunk first, the better to affirm and participate in possessive desire, while the
holy Jew gets drunk after, the better to expose and subordinate possessive de-
sire. Like Esther and Exodus, Purim and Passover go hand in hand as salutes
to a more steadfast love, with fasting preceding feasting. (The motto for the
Greco-​Roman world is “in vino veritas,” but the four cups of wine drunk at
the Passover Seder are post veritas, so to speak, in commemorating what G-​d
has already done.) Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the most holy ob-
servance and trumps everything.
The first two paragraphs of Esther refer to three “banquets” given by King
Ahasuerus and his Queen Vashti, with the first involving the display of “the
great wealth of his [Ahasuerus’s] kingdom and the splendor and pomp of his
majesty” (1:4). The king, “merry with wine” (1:10), first takes pride in his wife
and wants to show off “her beauty” to the court (1:11), but when she disobeys
his summons to appear, he is immediately “enraged, and his anger burned
within him” (1:12). He quickly deposes Vashti and eventually replaces her
with Esther. This is an example of what I earlier characterized as eros readily
going over into its seeming opposite. Together, Esther and Mordecai must
combat eros run royally amok, especially in the person of Haman. Again,
eros—​which I take as a proxy for appraisive desire, physical beauty, nature,
instinct, wealth, power, eudaimonia, and so on—​is not inherently evil, but
it requires ’hesed and agape to stabilize and civilize it. As finite beings, we all
live in part by eros, so it should not be vilified as such,42 but it must be reined
in and governed by a higher love. ’Hesed does this for groups, agape for indi-
viduals, but they are two sides of the same coin—​“the widow’s mite.” Unless
and until we understand these truths, we will fail to act against the sins of
both Nazism and Christian supersessionism.
To repeat, Christian supersessionists are so jealous or resentful of
Judaism’s historical role that they often exonerate Rome and blame “the

42 Anders Nygren overstates the case when he writes: “Eros and Agape are not merely two theo-

retical ideas that invite comparison, but different attitudes to life, different tendencies, which are in
actual conflict with one another.” (See his Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson [New York: Harper
and Row, 1969], p. 56.) Nygren presents the two loves as a stark either/​or, as though eros is to be dis-
pensed with as intrinsically sinful or base. He also puts agapic love and justice too completely at odds,
holding that “where spontaneous love and generosity are found, the order of justice is obsolete and
invalidated” (p. 90). I argue, instead, that agape transcends and regulates eros and justitia but that it
does not simply contradict or negate them.
22 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

Jews” for the crucifixion of Christ, pitting Jesus against his own tradition and
depicting him as a martinet Messiah who demands that every knee bend be-
fore him. Mordecai found it sufficient, even imperative, to bow down only
to YHWH, however, and the Son of God appears to agree (see Mark 10:18
and Luke 18:19). Even if one holds, as did Saint Paul and as do I, that Jesus
Christ is the divine means of salvation for the Gentiles, this does not dic-
tate that he play the same role for the Jews.43 Most importantly, Jesus was
executed by the Romans for the same reason that the Jews were gassed by
the Nazis: they both embodied God’s gracious love for and righteous judg-
ment of the world. The Holocaust was the Passion of the chosen people, the
Jews, as surely as the cross was the Passion of the anointed one, the Christ.
To depict Jesus as wanting the Jews to recant their faith is to reintroduce the
mimetic tribalism that both the Christ and the chosen people stand against.
At times, contemporary supersessionists adopt an anti-​Semitism that even
approaches Nazi extremes in rhetoric; see Aryan Nations, the Church of
Jesus Christ-​Christian.

Points and Counterpoints

Genocidal animosity can be generated by all sorts of group differences, real

or imagined, but the most real and fundamental distinction is that between
evil and good. The intensity of the Nazis’ hatred of the Jews is finally expli-
cable only in terms of the intensity of God’s love for the world. If God did
not call nations and persons to mercy and peace through the Jews and Jesus,
there would be no vehement anti-​Semitism. (The Holocaust is a cross born by
God, but so is Christian supersessionism, which sets God against Himself.)
Judaism and Nazism live one another’s deaths and die one another’s lives, so
let me move to end this Introduction by listing the substantive points and
counterpoints that will be central to the balance of this monograph:

43 See John Gager’s Reinventing Paul (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). The nature

and extent of Jesus’s own Messianic self-​understanding remains debated. I discuss this issue in
Chapters 5 and 7.
 Introduction 23

THE JEWS    THE NAZIS

“the chosen people” “the Master Race”
a light to the nations blitzkrieg against the nations
universal salvation through universal domination through
particularity  particularity
divine fire that warms and sustains human fire that burns and consumes
steadfast love that accepts suffering scapegoating hate driven by
and self-​sacrifice for the sake   schadenfreude that visits suffering
of others   and sacrifice on others
defense of the widow and the orphan “urge for self-​preservation”44/
 ​survival of the fittest
Genesis and the shared image of God eugenics and the elite SS Totenkopf
God as eternal and transcendent = god as temporal and immanent =
YHWH  Nature

In light of these basic contrasts, I am tempted to call the balance of my text,

“Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.”45 The central con-
tradiction is between Holiness and Holocaust, the all-​encompassing love
of God that is life giving and the all-​consuming law of Nature that is death
dealing. Hitler was quite frank about his anti-​biblical values, declaring early
on: “The liberation [of Germany] requires more than diligence; to become
free requires pride, will, spite, hate, hate, and once again, hate.”46 As I argue
in Chapter 1, Hitler, too, had one God, but it was ruthless Nature rather
than anything benevolent and supernatural. As he claimed in 1924, “Nature

44 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 135.

45 This was the title of Galileo’s 1632 work comparing the Copernican (heliocentric) and Ptolemaic
(geocentric) cosmological systems, the work which got its author into so much trouble with the
Inquisition and which was listed in 1633 on the “Index of Forbidden Books” by the Roman Curia. In
Germany in the 1930s, who played Ptolemy and who played Copernicus? Who played the church and
who played the unbeliever? In a kind of naturalistic reversal of the biblical paradigm, Hitler placed
man [sic] and racial self-​interest at the center of the universe, while Judaism places G-​d and self-​
sacrifice for the neighbor at the center. But there were also startling parallels between the Third Reich
and the fifteenth-​century Spanish Inquisition. Compare the Alhambra Decree expelling practicing
Jews from Spain and the Nuremberg and Citizenship Laws making Jews “aliens” in Germany. In an
extreme form of Christian supersessionism, Tomás de Torquemada sought to remove all “heretics”
(especially Jews) from Europe, burning many at the stake and forcing many to wear a sanbenito, a
yellow or black penitential garment marking its wearer as an outcast. In an extreme form of pagan
pantheism, Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all “subhumans” (especially Jews) from Europe, shooting
or gassing many and forcing many to wear a yellow or a blue star marking its wearer as an outcast.
Hitler burned books, then people, and finally himself.
46 Hitler, Adolf Hitler spricht: Ein Lexicon des Nationalsozialismus (Leipzig: R. Kittler Verlag, 1934),

p. 23, quoted by Richard Weikart in Hitler’s Religion: The Twisted Beliefs That Drove the Third Reich
(Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2016), p. 370.
24 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

knows no political boundaries. First, she puts living creatures on this globe
and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master’s right on
her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry.”47 To say, in opposi-
tion, that the Hebrew God is “eternal and transcendent” is not to imply that
YHWH is indifferent to human history and does not act in time and space.
Abraham, Moses, and the Prophets were not Deists postulating an indif-
ferent God, but they did insist that their fatherly G-​d was not to be wholly
equated with any natural object or force, any temporal process or people.
More generally, to compare “the Jews” and “the Nazis” as earlier is not to
suggest that these pages deal with two distant and fixed groups. Readers are
invited to see themselves in either ideological camp, or both intermittently;
the ideals in play are perpetual human possibilities, not bygone abstractions
or aberrations. We all have “an inner Jew” summoned to holiness and “an
inner Nazi” inclined toward hatred, but it is crucial to fathom their relation.
It is sometimes said that Hitler and the Nazis disparaged non-​Aryans and
waged “war on difference,”48 and so they did—​but with a difference. Like
other megalomaniacs, they thought of themselves as superior to everybody
else and aspired to dominate much of the globe, but the prime Nazi target was
not difference but those who would transcend it or deny it. It was not the non-​
Aryan whom Hitler most loathed but the anti-​Aryan. This is why the Jews
were so murderously singled out: they represent human solidarity before
God, the final irrelevance of biology and nationality to creaturely equality
and the Highest Good. The “better angel of our nature” that must combat
anti-​Semitism is not simply a liberal pluralism that tolerates diversity or
affirms personal autonomy. A constitutional democracy founded on human
rights can provide a bulwark against genocide, but, as the abuse of Native
Americans and the collapse of the Weimar Republic show, even democra-
cies can degenerate into extreme wickedness. Only a holiness that maintains
justice yet also loves the neighbor and is willing to suffer and die for her can
counter hatred. Only Semitism can defeat anti-​Semitism.49

47 Hitler, Mein Kampf, p. 134.

48 See Susanne C. Knittel, The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust
Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), p. 17.
49 Some object to the word “anti-​Semitism,” spelled with a hyphen and with the first “S” capital-

ized. The fear is that this orthography hypostasizes a singular and coherent racial/​ethnic group, “the
Semites,” in order to vilify them, when in fact no such group exists. I take the biological and so-
ciological point—​aren’t Arabs also “Semites”?—​and I also realize that the word “Antisemitismus”
was popularized in the late nineteenth century by Wilhelm Marr—​“a German journalist who
was a Jew hater,” as Deborah Lipstadt puts it. (See Deborah Lipstadt, Antisemitism: Here and Now
[New York: Schocken Books, 2019], p. 24.) But the arguably preferable rendering, “antisemitism,”
 Introduction 25

Mordecai’s not bowing down to temporal authority is the enduring icon

of Semitic holiness, but he needs Esther’s zeal to defend his virtue and make
it practical. There is no guarantee of earthly safety for a Jew who upholds
the Torah and embodies God’s steadfast love, any more than political or re-
ligious authorities could protect Socrates, Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln,
Holy Martyr Elizabeth Feodorovna, Mahatma Gandhi, or Martin Luther
King, Jr. But, with God’s grace, the righteous will always strenuously resist
the extinguishing of the light.

does not fully escape the problematic implication. Even if one removes the hyphen and makes the first
and second “s” lower case, one is still connoting being against something called “semitism.” For my
part, I make a virtue out of common usage and emphasize the distinctively Jewish beliefs, products,
and practices that infuriated the Nazis, proudly calling these “Semitic” or “Semitism.” I do so in the
same spirit of reversal as the early followers of Jesus who eventually embraced the Latinized Greek
term, “Christian,” to describe themselves. (Cf. the phrase “Black Power,” used by some who doubt
the biological reality of race.) According to Acts 11:26, “it was in Antioch that the disciples were first
called ‘Christians.’ ” According to Kenneth S. Wuest, however, “in Antioch, the name Christianos was
coined to distinguish the worshippers of the Christ from the Kaisaranios, the worshippers of Caesar.
It was a term of derision, flung into the teeth of the followers of the Christ by the proud worshippers
of the Emperor.” (See Kenneth S. Wuest, Word Studies from the Greek New Testament, 2nd ed., Vol. 2,
“Romans in the Greek New Testament” [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980], p. 19.) My goal in
talking about “Semitism” and “anti-​Semitism” is to recapture and redeploy a once prejudicial lan-
guage in order to heal rather than harm, to praise the Jews rather than blame them. I can understand
why some scholars prefer “antisemitism,” but the danger there is that one can seem to be denying any
real or important identity for Jews and Judaism. I discuss this issue at length in Chapter 1.
 1
Legitimating a Topic as Old as Esther

Explanation versus Justification

The mendacity of Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf (1924) is notorious. He accuses

the Jews and Judaism of being enemies of the German nation and its ideals;
indeed, the Jews are behind virtually every social ill Hitler can think of, in-
cluding both communism and capitalism.1 The common and entirely per-
suasive rebuttal is that (1) many Jews had been secularized and assimilated
into German culture prior to World War I; (2) many Jews fought loyally for
Germany in “the Great War”; (3) in any case, Jews constituted less than 1 per-
cent of the German population before, during, and after World War I, so they
could not have been a genuine threat to the body politic; and thus (4) the Jews
and their faith were merely scapegoated by Hitler and the Nazis. This broad
reply is rightly the first thing one says to Hitlerite falsity, but I explore in this
monograph the danger of leaving things at that. With fear and trembling,
I reopen the troubling issue of the partial truthfulness of Hitler’s claims about
the Jews. Unless and until we recognize that partial truthfulness—​warped
and deceitfully manipulated, to be sure—​we will not appreciate the radical
evil of the Nazi regime and its accompanying genocide.
To associate “truth,” in any degree, with Nazism will shock and offend
many readers. So let me begin again and proceed very slowly and care-
fully. Why did Hitler single out the Jews for such heinous vilification and
persecution? Obviously, the vast majority of Hitler’s propaganda against
the Jews represented a paranoid and falsified picture of reality. Equally ob-
viously, the Nazis’ genocidal assault on the Jews was staggeringly cruel and
massively unjust. But there was an insidious calculus in Hitler’s decision
to turn on the Jews that was, nonetheless, based in fact. Traditional Jewish
values and teachings—​especially about the inclusive love of God for the weak
and vulnerable—​were deeply antithetical to the ideology of the Third Reich,
and it is significantly for that reason that the Jewish people were isolated and

1 Hitler, Mein Kampf, esp. pp. 300–​327.

Mordecai Would Not Bow Down. Timothy P. Jackson, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2021.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197538050.003.0002
28 Mordecai Would Not Bow Down

murderously oppressed. This thesis would be virtually commonsensical, were

it not for our hyperscrupulosity about seeming to justify the Holocaust. The
Jews were scapegoated by the Nazis, and there is no justification for that, but
there is an explanation. There were many reasons why Hitler turned on the
Jews, but a central one can be summed up in one famous line: “Mordecai
would not bow down” (Esther 3:5).2
The context of this line is ancient Persia (geographically, contemporary
Iran), but I want to use it as a metaphor for the Jews’ founding an uncom-
promising commitment to moral monotheism. Such monotheism and the
attendant refusal of idolatry is, I contend, the primary, but not the only, cause
of anti-​Semitism. (Other synergistic factors include racism, greed, jealousy,
and suspicion of anyone who is distinctly different.) Immediately, however,
the word “monotheism” presents problems. Peter Schäfer points out that the
traditional Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4—​“Hear, O Israel: The lord is our
God, the lord alone”—​can be read as affirming both that Israel’s God is in-
ternally undivided and that Israel’s God is the one and only God.3 The latter
idea has seemed dogmatic, even belligerent, to some, even as the historical
record does not always support unstinting Jewish subscription to the former
idea. Schäfer writes:

The authors of the Hebrew Bible no doubt tried very hard to implement
and enforce the belief in the one God in its double sense, but they also faced
considerable resistance and were constantly fighting off attempts to thwart
their efforts and—​inspired by the customs of Israel’s neighbors—​to sneak
in ideas that ran counter to any strict interpretation of monotheism. Thus
it appears that the very notion of monotheism as a monolithic and stable
entity is misleading and that we need to distinguish between the rigid and
programmatic rhetoric of monotheism as opposed to its much less rigorous
practice.4

2 All biblical quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version.
3 Peter Schäfer, The Jewish Jesus: How Judaism and Christianity Shaped Each Other (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 2.
4 Ibid. Schäfer goes on to maintain that “the biblical and postbiblical speculation about ‘Wisdom’

(hokhmah) and the ‘Word’ (logos) prove beyond any doubt that Judaism was open to ideas that ac-
cepted divine or semidivine powers next to God” (p. 10). I fully accept this, so long as (1) we pay
due attention to the carefully qualified terms “semidivine” and “next to” and (2) we note (following
Schäfer) that it was primarily Babylonian Judaism, rather than Palestinian, that flirted with multiple
divine persons or potencies.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 LOS ATAUIOS DE LOS
CAPITANES D'ARMAS,
SOLO DE LAS ARMAS
Los adereços de los capitanes
solamente contaremos los de los
cauallos de armas e los de sus
personas para las armas, de los
quales el primero que aqui se
cuenta es el duque de Termens,
el qual entre otros cauallos
muchos que lleuaua vimos quatro
atauiados señaladamente, los dos
con dos pares de sobreuardas de
brocado e sus sayones de lo
mismo, otro con vnas
sobreuardas de terciopelo
carmesi e sayon con faxas de
raso carmesi, el principal con
vnas sobreuardas de terciopelo
morado y el sayon de lo mismo,
con vnos troncos bordados de oro
de martillo muy releuados con
vnos fuegos que salian por los
concauos dellos, de manera que
los troncos e las flamas henchian
el campo de los paramentos e del
sayon, con vnas cortapisas en lo
uno y en lo otro de letras grandes
del mismo oro bordadas en que
blasonaua la fantesia de la
inuencion.
El señor Prospero Colona hizo
seys atavios aunque entonces no
partio. El vno era de carmesi
vellutado, los dos eran el vno de
brocado rico, el otro de brocado
raso; los tres eran bordados, vno
de terciopelo negro con vnos
toros de oro en cada pieça o en
cada quarto del sayo muy
releuados; estaua el toro puesto
sobre vn fuego de troncos del
mismo oro de manera que se
henchia todo el campo. Era el toro
que dizen de Nero. En las
cortapisas hauia bordada vna
letra de letras de oro que dezia:
Non es questo simil al nuestro.
El otro atauio de raso azul con
vnos soles en cada canton de las
pieças en lo alto y en lo baxo,
vnos espejos en que dauan los
rayos del sol de do salian flamas
que sembrauan los campos de las
pieças. En las cortapisas estauan
como en lo otro, las letras de la
inuencion. El otro atauio e mas
rico, era de raso carmesi con vna
viña bordada por todas las pieças,
con sus sarmientos e hojas e
razimos maduros e por madurar,
hecho todo de oro tirado e plata e
matizes de seda de relieue, de
manera que la obra allende de ser
muy galana era muy rica.
El señor Fabricio lleuó cinco
cauallos de su persona; los dos
con atauios de sedas de colores,
el vno con vnas sobreuardas de
sayo carmesi e brocado hecho a
quartos, otro de brocado raso,
otro de brocado rico.
El marques de la Padula no hizo
alli ningun atauio por el luto que
lleuaua de su cuñada, pero lleuó
oro de martillo texido escacado
para vn sayo e sobre cubiertas e
brocados para otros atauios; su
hijo don Juan no lleuó otra cosa
sino paño negro por el luto de su
muger.
El conde de Populo lleuó sus
cauallos atauiados de brocados e
sedas, pero su persona no
llevaua mas que vna jornea a la
usanza antigua; mas lleuó su
sobrino don Antonio Cantelmo
que yua por su lugar teniente, tres
cauallos con tres atauios, uno de
brocado, otro de raso azul e
brocado a puntas, otro de raso
azul chapado de vnas matas de
siempre viuas muy releuadas.
El conde de Potencia lleuó dos
cauallos con sobre cubiertas e
sayones de sedas de colores e vn
otro atauio de brocado, y el
principal de raso azul con vnas
estrellas, en cada campo vna, que
los rayos della henchian toda la
pieça, eran de oro texido
bordadas muy releuadas, en las
cortapisas yua bordada la letra de
la inuencion.
El prior de Mesina hizo quatro
atauios para quatro cauallos; el
vno era de brocadelo e de
brocado rico a mitades; otro de
raso pardillo e terciopelo leonado
a puntas; otro de terciopelo
leonado e raso encarnado a
centellas con vnas tiras de tafetan
blanco sueltas por encima las
costuras como vnas lazadas de lo
mismo que las atauan a las juntas
de los centelles. El principal
atauio era de raso carmesi e
brocado rico de pelo hecho a
ondas a puntas. Hauia por medio
de la tira del raso vnos fresos de
oro que hazian la misma onda a
puntas, e de la vna parte e de la
otra dos tiras de margaritas de
perlas. Estauan juntado el
brocado e el raso con pestañas
blancas.
Antonio de Leyua lleuó quatro
cauallos de su persona,
atauiados, vno de raso naranjado
e raso blanco á puntas; otro con
vnas sobrecaidas e sazon de
brocado e damasco blanco hecho
a escaques, assentadas vnas
tiras angostas en torno del
escaque del brocado en el de la
seda, e de la seda en el brocado
e dos cees encanadas de lo vno
en lo otro, bordado todo de
cordon de oro. El principal cauallo
con vnas sobre cubiertas de
brocado blanco e terciopelo
carmesi hecho assimesmo a
escaques, e dos barras
travessadas en cada escaque de
lo vno en lo otro sentadas sobre
raso blanco, e en las barras de
brocado hauia en cada vna tres
candeleros de plata estampados y
en las de carmesi otros tres
dorados.
Don Jeronimo Lloriz lleuó quatro
cauallos de su persona; vno con
vnas cubiertas de azero, otro con
sobre cubiertas e sayo de azeituni
negro e de brocado hecho a
puntas. Otro con sobre cubiertas
e sayo de raso blanco e terciopelo
carmesi hecho a centelles con
vnas tiras de brocado de otro
tirado, assentadas encima las
costuras como vna reja, e vnos
lazos dentro en cada centelle del
mismo brocado, bordado todo de
cordon de oro. El otro cauallo
lleuó con vnas cubiertas de
carmesi raso de la manera de las
ricas del visrey.
Aluarado lleuó tres cauallos de su
persona; el vno con vnas sobre
cubiertas de terciopelo negro con
vnas tiras de raso amarillo; el otro
con vnas sobre cubiertas e sayo
de terciopelo morado e raso
amarillo a meatades, cubierto de
escaques de tres en tres tiras de
la vna seda en la otra, sentadas
sobre raso blanco. El otro con
vnas sobre cubiertas e sayo la
mitad de brocado rico e raso
carmesi, la mitad de brocado raso
e terciopelo carmesi, hecho todo
a escaques con vnas cruzes de
Jerusalen, de lo vno en lo otro,
bordadas de cordon de plata.
El capitan Pomar lleuó tres
cauallos de su persona; vno con
vnas sobre cubiertas e sayo de
raso carmesi con vnos entornos
de puntas de raso blanco; otro
con vnas sobre cubiertas e sayo
de raso blanco e terciopelo
carmesi e brocado hecho a
puntas de manera de vna venera;
el otro con vnas sobre cubiertas
de raso azul con vna reja de tiras
de brocado con vnas pieças de
plata estampadas, en cada
quadro eran vnas aes goticas.
Diego de Quiñones lleuó tres
cauallos de su persona; el vno
con vnas sobre cubiertas e sayo
de terciopelo negro e raso
amarillo hecho a puntas; otro de
terciopelo morado con vnas faxas
de brocado entorno; otro con vnas
sobre cubiertas e sayon de
brocado.
Carauajal lleuó cinco cauallos de
su persona adereçados los dos
de brocado con sus sayones, dos
de sedas de colores con sus
sayos, vno con vnas sobreuardas
e sayos de terciopelo carmesi
guarnecido de fresos de oro, con
vnas rosas de plata sembradas
por encima.
Los capitanes que nueuamente
con Carauajal yuan fueron bien
en orden; no los contamos porque
en nuestro tratado no estan
nombrados e no queremos turbar
los nombres para los que querran
sacar por los vnos nombres los
otros.
Rafael de Pacis se partió ante
deste porque se fue a viuir con el
papa e houo una conducta de
setenta lanças, pero lleuó tres
adereços fechos de Napoles para
su persona e tres cauallos. El vno
era vnas ricas cubiertas pintadas
con vn braço en cada pieça que
tenia vna palma en la mano, con
vn retulo reuuelto en ella con vna
letra que dezia:

La primera letra desta

tengo yo en las otras puesta.

Para este atauio lleuó vn sayo de

brocado negro; lleuó otro atauio
de brocado con vnas cruzes
coloradas de sant Jorge
sembradas por encima; otro
atauio lleuó de terciopelo negro
cubierto de lazos de brocado
sentados sobre raso blanco e
todos los vazios llenos de vnas
palmas pequeñas de plata a
manera de batientes.
El marques de Pescara lleuó
quatro cauallos con cuatro
adereços; los tres con
sobreuardas e sayos de brocado;
los dos de rico, el vno de raso. El
principal era de raso carmesi con
vnos fresos de oro entorneados,
vna mano vno de otro e de freso a
freso estaua cubierto el carmesi
de hilo de oro que cubria la seda,
saluo que de tres a tres dedos se
ataua el oro con vn cordoncico
pequeño fecha vna lazada e
quedaua entre vno e otro hecho
vn centelle de la seda y el oro
hecho dos medio centelles.
El conde Atorran Farramosca
entre otros atauios que lleuó, el
principal fue vnas sobreuardas e
vn sayon de raso carmesi con
vnas agudas de oro bordadas en
las pieças, de las quales salian
vnos fuegos que ocupauan todos
los vazíos. Era tan rico que se
cree que fuesse el atauio que
más avía costado vno por vno.
Su hermano Guidon Farramosca
lleuó el principal atauio de su
persona de brocado e terciopelo
carmesi hecho a triangulos, con
vnos triangulos del brocado en el
carmesi; del carmesi en el
brocado pequeños, con pestañas
de raso blanco.
Don Luys de Hiscar hizo dos
atauios de su persona; vno de
brocado de oro tirado,
sobreuardas e sayos, otras
sobreuardas e sayo de raso
amarillo e raso blanco a
meatades; el raso amarillo
cubierto de una red de plata con
vnos batientes de plata en los
nudos, y en lo vazio sobre el raso
vna cifra de plata estampada;
sobre el raso blanco la misma red
de oro con los batientes e pieças
doradas. Pero este murio ante de
la partida de Napoles.
Mossen Torel hauia hecho sin otro
atauio vnas sobreuardas e sayo
de terciopelo carmesi e raso
carmesi a meatades cubierto todo
de vnas tortugas de plata, saluo
que en las uardas eran grandes y
en el sayo pequeñas; pero este
tambien murio antes del partir e
llevólo su hijo.
El marques de Bitonto sin otros
atauios de brocado que lleuó hizo
vnas sobrecubiertas e vn sayo de
terciopelo negro con vnas
epigramas de oro bordadas por
él, muy ricas.
El prior de Roma hizo vn atauio
de brocado azul e terciopelo
carmesi hecho a triangulos con
pestañas de raso blanco, sobre
los triangulos de carmesi hauia
vnas pieças de oro estampadas
tan espessas que a penas se
descubria la seda.
Don Jeronimo Fenollet lleuó dos
atauios vno de terciopelo morado
e raso encarnado hecho a
centellas con tiras e lazadas de
tafetan blanco, como el del prior
de Mesina; lleuó otras uardas de
terciopelo negro con vna reja de
fresos de oro sobre tafetan
encarnado hecho a centelles; en
las juntas de los fresos hauia
vnas puntas de plata bien
releuadas e vn batiente en cada
punta; en los vazios del terciopelo
hauia vn centelle de plata
estampado tan grande que de
terciopelo se descubria tanto
como era el freso de ancho. Lleuó
con ellas vn sayo de raso blanco
e raso encarnado a meatades,
con vnos lazos de brocado por
medio de los girones e cortapisa
sentados sobre lo encarnado con
pestañas blancas, sobre lo blanco
con pestañas encarnadas Hauia
en los vazios de los lazos vnas
villetas de plata estampadas, en
lo blanco doradas, en lo
encarnado blancas, con muchos
batientes de la misma manera. El
cuerpo del sayo estaua forrado de
brocado muy rico acuchillado el
raso de encima e muy
guarnecido.
Mossen Coruaran fue por alferez
real; lleuó vn rico atauio bordado.
El duque de Grauina, el duque de
Trayeto, el marques de la Tela, el
marques Gaspar de Toralto, el
conde de Montelion destos no
especifica la escriptura
particularmente lo que lleuauan,
porque segun estos otros quien
quiera lo puede considerar e
porque sus atauios eran de
brocados e de sedas, sin manera
de deuisas ni inuenciones.
De Cicilia vinieron algunos
caualleros; aqui no se nombra
sino el conde de Golisano y el
lugar teniente de Cicilia que se
llamaua Don Juan de Veyntemilla.
Cualquier destos caualleros
napolitanos e cecilianos que no
tenian cargos, fueron tan
complidamente en orden, que
ninguno lleuó menos de veynte
gentiles hombres de cadenas de
oro de su nacion. De manera que
se estima que sin las mill e
dozientas lanças de ordenança e
capitanes, lleuó el visrey con los
cincuenta continos del rey y estos
señores e los italianos que con
ellos yuan e muchos otros
caualleros Españoles que viuian
con el rey, e otros que de nueuo
alli se llegaron delos otros
campos de Francia e venecianos
e del papa e de Ferrara,
trezientos caualleros de cadenas
de oro entre hombres de titulo e
varones e caualleros.
Agora hablaremos del dia qu'el
virrey partió; las damas que en
tres o quatro partes se juntaron,
porque por su nombre propio las
nombraremos, mas como
hauemos hecho los caualleros,
para quien quiera especular o
escaruar por los vnos nombres
los otros, pues que se podran
hallar vnos por el principio de los
nombres o titulos fengidos, otros
por las deuisas e colores; assi
que mire bien cada vno que no es
esto nada falso ni fengido.

LA PARTIDA DEL VISREY

El señor visrey partio de Napoles,
domingo a medio dia, ocho de
nouiembre, acompañado de todos
estos caualleros e otros muchos
principales e perlados e señores
que en la tierra quedaron, entre
los quales, fue el cardenal de
Sorrento, el arzobispo de
Napoles, el principe de Visiñano,
el príncipe de Melfa, el duque de
Ferrandino, el señor Prospero, el
duque de Bisella, el duque de
Atria, el conde de Soriano, el
conde de Matera, el conde de
Chariata, el conde de Trauento, el
almirante Villamarin, el marques
de Layno, el conde de Marco e
muchos otros caualleros. En
estos que aqui se nombran que
quedaron hay muchos de los que
en el tratado hallemos continuado
en las fiestas nombradas; los
quales son el marques de
Nochito, el duque de Bisella, el
duque de Ferrandina, el conde de
Marco, el conde de Sarno, el
conde de Trauento, el almirante,
el cardenal don Carlos de Aragon.
En las casas del principe de
Salerno estauan las señoras
reynas de Napoles con sus
damas, doña Juana Castriote, la
duquesa de Grauina, doña Maria
Enriquez, doña Maria Cantelmo,
doña Porfida, doña Angela
Villaragut, doña Juana Carroz,
doña Violante Celles, la señora
Diana Gambacorta, la señora
Maruxa, la marquesa de Layno, la
marquesa de Toralto e otras
muchas damas.
En Castel Novo estaua la
visreyna e su hermana, la
condesa de Capacho muger del
almirante, su hermana la muger
de don Alonso de Aragon, e otras
muchas señoras.
En casa del conde de Trauento
estaua la condessa e su hermana
la condessa de Terranoua e sus
hijas, la marquesa de Nochito, la
condessa de Soriano, la
condessa de Matera e otras
muchas señoras.
En casa de la señora duquesa de
Milan la señora su hija doña
Bona, la duquesa de Trayeto, la
señora Isabel, la señora doña
Maria de Aragon, la Griega e las
otras damas de la señora
duquesa e la condessa de Marco.
En casa de la marquessa de
Pescara estaua la marquesa, e la
marquesa del Guasto, la
marquesa de la Padula, la
condessa de Benafra, doña
Castellana muger de Antonio de
Leyua, la marquesa de Vitonto, la
duquesa de Franca Vila.
En casa de madame Andriana
estaua ella e su hija e doña Maria
Dalise e las hijas de Cario de
Fango.

LO QUE DESPUES DE PARTIDO

EL VISREY SE SIGUIO E LO
QUE FLAMIANO HABLÓ A
VASQUIRAN
DESPIDIENDOSE DEL.—
DONDE EL AUTOR TORNA A
USAR EL ESTILO PRIMERO
DE LOS NOMBRES
FENGIDOS.
Las otras damas que en aquel dia
houo no se nombran aunque
fueron muchas, mas no hazen al
proposito de nuestro tratado
porque en él no se han hallado.
Partido el visrey quedaron alli
algunos caualleros por algunos
negocios que les cumplian o
satisfazian, entre los quales
quedó Flamiano por poderse
despedir de Vasquiran más a su
plazer, él queriéndose partir
començo a hablar con Vasquiran
desta manera:
Agora, Vasquiran, conozco que mi
vida es poco o durará poco,
porque dos cosas que viua la
sostenian agora la acaben; la vna
era tener yo esperança de ver a
mi señora Belisena que della era
señora, la otra era tu compañia e
conuersacion que a los males
della ponia consuelo. Pues agora
el ausencia apartandome dos
bienes tan grandes no puede sino
encausarme dos mill males
mayores, por donde conozco en
mi que me acerco a la muerte,
apartandome de ti. Una cosa te
suplico, que no te enojes de
escriuirme, por que yo sé que
poco te durará tal fatiga. E si de
mi fuere lo que pienso que será,
ruegote que este amor tan grande
que agora nos sostiene e
conserua en tanto estremo de
bien querer, que de tus entrañas
no lo dexes amenguar ni venir a
menos, como muchas vezes
acontece, segun yo te lo he
escripto contradiciendote; mas
ante te suplico que en el pligo de
tus lastimas lo envueluas, para
que con aquellas, de mi te duelas
como dellas hazes. Esto te pido
no por darte a ti fatiga como dello
recibiras, mas por el consuelo que
mi alma recebira de ver la
memoria que de mi tienes, e
plega a nuestro Señor que en ti
dé tanto consuelo e alegria
quanto yo desseo e tú has
menester. No me cuentes esto a
pobreza de animo, porque
parecen palabras en algo
mugeriles, ante lo atribuye a lo
qu'es razon, porque lo mucho que
tu ausencia me lastima, la poca
esperança que de vida tengo me
lo haze dezir. Suplicote que en
tanto que aqui estaras no dexes
de visitar a mi señora Belisena,
porque sola esta esperança me
dara esfuerço para lo que me
quitará la vida, que será poder
caminar donde de su presencia
me alexase. No quiero más
enojarte con mis fatigas, pues que
siempre desseé complazerte con
mis seruicios, sino que me
encomiendo a ti, e te encomiendo
a Dios.

RESPUESTA DE VASQUIRAN A
FLAMIANO
Todo el bien que la muerte me
pudo quitar me quitó; todo el
consuelo e descanso que la
fortuna me podia apartar para mis
trabajos, me apartó en tu partida,
y esta lastima te deue bastar,
Flamiano, viendo con tu ausencia
quál me dexas, sin que con tal
pronostico más triste me dexes
como hazes. No son tus virtudes,
siendo tantas, para que tus dias
sean tan breues, porque muy
fuera andaria la razon e la justicia
de sus quicios si tal consintiesse.
Tu viuiras e plega a Dios que tan
contento e alegre como yo agora
triste e descontento viuo. Lo que
a mi memoria encomiendas, por
dos cosas es escusado; la una
por lo que he dicho, la otra porque
si otro fuesse lo que no será,
quien a tus dias daria fin a los
mios daria cabo, por muchas
razones que escusar no lo
podrian; mas en esto no se hable
más porque parece feo. Mandas
me que a la señora Belisena
visite; tambien es escusado
mandarmelo, porque quando tu
amistad no me obligara a hazerlo,
su merecimiento me forçara. Lo
que me pides que te escriua, te
suplico que hagas como es razon.
Yo me partire lo mas presto que
pudiere para Felernisa, negociado
que alli haya algunas cosas que
me conuienen, trabajaré de ser
muy presto contigo si algun graue
impedimento no me lo estorua, lo
que Dios no quiera. Entre tanto
viue alegre como es razon, pues
que vas en tal camino que por
muchas causas a ello te obliga.
La una yr en seruicio de la yglesia
como todos ys. La otra en el de tu
rey como todos deuen. La otra
por que vas a usar de aquello
para que Dios te hizo, qu'es el
habito militar donde los que tales
son como tú, ganan lo que tú
mereces e ganarás. La otra e
principal que lleuas en tu
pensamiento a la señora Belisena
e dexas tu coraçon en su poder,
qu'esto solo basta para fazerte
ganar quantas vitorias alcançar se
podrian. Una cosa temo, que la
gloria de verte su seruidor e las
fuerças que su seruicio te
ofreceran, no te pongan en mas
peligro de lo que haurias
menester. Yo te ruego que pues la
honrra es la prenda deste juego,
que dexes donde menester fuere
la voluntad e te gouiernes con la
discrecion. E assi te encomiendo
a Dios hasta que nos veamos e
siempre.

LA PARTIDA DE FLAMIANO
Acauados sus razonamientos
hablaron en otras muchas cosas
todo aquel dia, hasta la tarde que
Flamiano fue a besar las manos a
la señora duquesa e despedirse
della e de su señora con la vista.
A la qual embió estas coplas que
hizo por la partida, despues de
haberse despedido.

Poco es el mal que

m'aquexa
estando en vuestra presencia
en respecto del que ausencia
dentro en el alma me dexa
y en la vida,
porque siento en la partida
tanta pena e tal tormento
que no hallo a lo que siento
ya medida
ni me basta el suffrimiento.
E siendo mi pena tal,
no me quexo ni hay de quién
que quien nunca tuvo bien
no se ha de quexar de mal,
ni yo lo hago
porque con la pena pago
aunque me sea cruel
mi pensamiento, pues dél
me satisfago
con que no hay remedio en él.
Callo porque siempre crece
mi dolor que nunca mengua
pues ha callado mi lengua
lo que mi alma padece,
con tal pena,
mas agora me condena
este mal deste partir
para que os ose dezir:
aun no suena
que se acaba mi viuir.
Acabase porque veros
me mata con dessear
y el desseo con pesar
de verme no mereceros,
pues presente
de tal bien tan mal se siente
el triste que no os verá,
dezidme qué sentirá
siendo ausente,
claro esta que morirá.
Assi que, señora mia,
lo que siempre desseé
fue morir en vuestra fee
como agora se me guia,
si mi suerte
alcançasse con la muerte
tanto bien en pago della
qu'os pesasse a vos con ella,
menos fuerte
me seria padecella.
Mas nunca vos hareys tal
porque vuestro merecer
no lo consiente hazer
viendo que es pequeño mal
morir por ello,
assi que si me querello
será, señora, de mi,
porque nunca os mereci
e sin merecello
tantos males padeci.
E podeys ser cierta desto
qu'en veros supe juzgar
que no se podia pagar
tanto bien con menos qu'esto,
de manera,
que conocera quien quiera
pues que se muestra tan claro
que a muy poco mal me paro
aunque muera
e que no me cuesta caro.