Lest We Forget, the Late Christopher Hitchens Loathed Judaism in No Uncertain Terms

Amidst all the glowing eulogies it behooves us to remind ourselves that the late polemicist's views on Jews (borne at least in part of the secret he kept for so long and revealed only in his 2010 memoir Hitch-22--i.e. that his mother was born a Jew?) were notably and unforgivably ugly:

Hitchens's bestselling atheist jeremiad, God is Not Great (2007), provides an excellent overview of its author's sentiments on the topic of Jews and Judaism. While the book is ostensibly opposed to all religions equally, Hitchens goes out of his way not merely to criticize Judaism but to portray it in the ugliest possible terms, invoking many of the classic themes of anti-Semitism in order to do so.

He informs us, for example, of the "pitiless teachings of the God of Moses, who never mentions human solidarity and compassion at all," and whose Ten Commandments have nothing to say about "the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide." Indeed, according to Hitchens, "some of these very offenses are . . . positively recommended" by the God of the Hebrews, with far-reaching historical consequences. According to Hitchens, the Jews' genocidal God and His order to drive the Canaanite tribes out of the land of Israel form the basis not only of a "19th-century irredentist claim to Palestine" but of the current debate among Israeli rabbis over "whether the demand to exterminate the Amalekites is a coded commandment to do away with the Palestinians." Who these rabbis might be, the extent of their influence, and whether anyone listens to them are questions that go mostly unaddressed.

For Hitchens, the evils he lists are not just religious tenets; they are ingrained in the Jews themselves. The rituals and practices of Judaism, he charges, are debased by the Jews' obsession with money, as exemplified by the "hypocrites and frauds who abound in talmudic Jewish rationalization" and who operate according to the principle: "'Don't do any work on the Sabbath yourself, but pay someone else to do it for you. You obeyed the letter of the law: who's counting?'" (Hitchens's world abounds, apparently, in dutiful shabbos goyim.) Circumcision, he claims, is the "sexual mutilation of small boys" and "most probably a symbolic survival from the animal and human sacrifices which were such a feature of the gore-soaked landscape of the Old Testament." As for anti-Semitism, the Jews brought it on themselves. "By claiming to be 'chosen' in a special exclusive covenant with the Almighty," Hitchens writes, "they invited hatred and suspicion and evinced their own form of racism."

Hitchens's loathing for Judaism, or rather the grotesque caricature he refers to as Judaism, is particularly evident in his treatment of Hanukkah, a holiday marking the 2nd-century B.C.E. victory of a Jewish revolt led by the Maccabees. For Hitchens, the Maccabees' defeat of the Hellenistic regime of Antiochus Epiphanes was a disaster, because Antiochus, far from being a villainous tyrant, had "weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith."

To put it kindly, this is false; for the rather less benign details, one may consult I Maccabees and Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews. In brief, the "weaning away" lauded by Hitchens involved the forcible suppression of Jewish culture, religion, and ritual, along with torture, imperial occupation, and mass murder, including the slaughter of children: in other words, the very things that this self-proclaimed global humanist violently denounces whenever the Jews are not involved.

For Hitchens, the Jewish rejection of Hellenistic Greek culture in favor of what he calls "tribal Jewish backwardness" constitutes something like a crime against humanity. This belief is an important one, and he appears to have come by it very early on. In his recently published autobiography, Hitch-22, he laments that, in the world-historical struggle between Athens and Jerusalem, the former tragically lost out to the latter's "stone-faced demand for continence, sacrifice, and conformity, and the devising of ever-crueler punishments for deviance." The fact that, historically speaking, the "ever-crueler punishments for deviance" were inflicted by Athens upon Jerusalem, and not vice-versa, is something that, for Hitchens, is apparently not worth mentioning.

In short, Judaism is to blame for everything Hitchens hates about monotheism as a whole...

That's not unlike how Hitler (whose regime would have considered Hitchens Jewish and would therefore have slated him for elimination) looked at it. Ironically enough.