"The sun also arises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to his place where he arose."

 

    Flavius Josephus, Arguably Judaism's Most Celebrated Traitor
or Has He Been Recently Trumped?:

 

                  "Paul Christian" Debating the Rabbis, 1263 CE

 

  "Johaness" (Yosef) Pfefferkorn Debating Rabbis in 17th Century Germany

   As recorded in the Book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet), there really is nothing new under the sun.  Especially when it comes to the subject of betrayal within the Jewish community.  In times of stress (which times are virtually continual throughout Jewish history), the BF - Betrayal Factor - becomes fulsome and dominant.
In the High Middle Ages when the Church sought to humiliate Judaism by conducting "disputations" in the town squares of France, Spain and Germany, the Christian authority chosen to "debate" a rabbi was invariably a former Jew.  And so, in the infamous Disputation of Barcelona of 1263,one Pablo Christiani took up the sword of Christ to invalidate the Torah and Talmud, especially.  Previously, "Saul", now Pablo, a devout convert, took the ludicrous name of "Paul Christian", apparently to establish his non-Jewish credentials and to pay homage to the progenitor of Christianity, also a former Saul.
Three hundred years later, during a similar campaign to demonize Judaism accompanied by familiar Talmud burnings, we find one Johannes Pfefferkorn, engaging in the -by now - familiar anti-Jewish polemics against usury (unless it suited the borrowing practices of the nobility) and demands that Jews attend church services.
During the Roman period we have the example of perhaps the Jews' most celebrated traitor, Flavius Josephus, nee Yosef Ben Matityahu, whose memoirs of the revolt against Rome provide us with one of the only contemporaneous accounts of that stressful period.
Betrayal among Jews is even lauded in some circles as necessary for survival.  Problem is, the practice appears to flourish even at less stressful times. What was required for real, physical survival, namely conversion, has evolved into the modern period's urge to assimilate.
 
  Name changes, like the absurd morphing of Ginsberg to "Gainsborough" or Tomashevsky to "Tilson Thomas", while the subject of borscht belt shtick for decades, signal a darker aspect when stress rises to existential threats.  In a time of explicit exterminationist pronouncements by a global, resurgent Jihadist Muslim community, the ages old BF has reached new heights of fervor and popularity.

The most revealing method of chronicling current BF among the American Jewish Community is by examining a few of its more prominent practitioners.  As George Orwell quipped, "The worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents."  Unfortunately, the list of betrayers is so vast,  it is difficult to know where to begin.  Let's try anyway.  For starters, let's look at some notable pre-cursors of the current betrayal.   Sadly, organizations like J Street provide a home for many Jewish heirs of this centuries-old betrayal pattern.

The Strange Case of Samuel Roth

Samuel Roth's claim to infamy arose from his lifelong devotion to the world of literary erotica.  Born into shtetl poverty near Kiev in the late nineteenth century, he moved to New York where he continued his penurious existence, sometimes sleeping in the streets.  In 1916 he entered Columbia University on a scholarship and quickly discovered the brilliant prose of modernist writers like James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein.  He became a champion of literary free speech and proceeded to publish excerpts from Ulysses and other askanced works - without the authors' permissions.  He was subsequently sued, but continued to publish pirate editions of now classic works.  In the late 1920's his book warehouse was raided by police at the behest of the pornography equivalent of the Christian Temperance League resulting in year long prison sentence.

Embittered by what Roth perceived as a Jewish publishers' conspiracy against him, he authored a classic of Jewish anti-semitism entitled, Jews Must Live: “The Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization”.  At the time, the New York publishing business was dominated by Alfred A. Knopf, Bennet Cerf, Thomas Seltzer, and Roger Straus.

"Jews Must Live" was published in 1934 at the same time of Julius Streicher's authentically obscene antisemitic magazine, Der Sturmer in Hitler's Germany.  Indeed, some of the prose and illustrations in Roth's book could have leapt out from Streicher's pages.

 

 How Jews Persecute the World by Samuel Roth, 1934

Within its lurid narrative, Roth's hate-filled screed touches upon all the familiar tropes of ancient Jew hatred: Usury, gluttony, sexual excess, and the yearning for Zion, a transgression particularly familiar to current Jewish anti-zionists. 

Jewish Self Hatred is a term commonly applied to examples such as Roth.  I contend that this is a serious misnomer.  Current practitioners of Jew hatred, like Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, do not engage in self hatred - they adore themselves - it's other Jews, the bad ones, that they hate.  In effect, figures like Finkelstein and Chomsky are classic antisemites.  Just as Pablo Christiani survived and flourished through betrayal, so do his modern equivalents.  Next time...the strange case of Walter Lippmann.