Here's the link I mentioned earlier. The entire book is this: The Controversy of Zion. It changed my perceptions of history. It especially changed my perceptions when I learned what happened to Douglas Reed's career after he began to publish on these matters in the 1940's and 50's. The Levites and the Law
"...Deuteronomy is to formal Judaism and Zionism what the Communist Manifesto was to the destructive revolution of our century. It is the basis of the Torah ("the Law") contained in the Pentateuch, which itself forms the raw material of the Talmud, which again gave birth to those "commentaries" and commentaries-on-commentaries which together constitute the Judaic "law".
Therefore Deuteronomy is also the basis of the political programme, of worldly dominion over nations despoiled and enslaved, which has been largely realized in the West during this Twentieth Century. Deuteronomy is of direct relevancy to the events of our day, and much of the confusion surrounding them disperses if they are studied in its light.
It was read, in 621 BC, to so small an audience in so small a place that its great effects for the whole world, through the following centuries into our time, are by contrast the more striking.
Before Deuteronomy was compiled only the "oral tradition" of what God said to Moses existed. The Levites claimed to be the consecrated guardians of this tradition and the tribespeople had to take their word for it (their pretensions in this respect chiefly caused the anger of the Israelite "prophets"). If anything had been written down before Deuteronomy was read, such manuscripts were fragmentary and in priestly keeping, and as little known to the primitive tribesmen as the Greek poets to Kentucky hillsfolk today.
That Deuteronomy was different from anything that had been known or understood before is implicit in its name, which means "Second Law". Deuteronomy, in fact, was Levitical Judaism, first revealed; the Israelites (as already shown) "were not Jews" and had never known this "Law".
Significantly, Deuteronomy which appears as the fifth book of today's Bible, with an air of growing naturally out of the previous ones, was the first book to be completed as a whole. Though Genesis and Exodus provide the historical background and mount for it, they were later produced by the Levites, and Leviticus and Numbers, the other books of the Torah, were compiled even later.
Deuteronomy stood the earlier tradition on its head, if it was in harmony with the moral commandments. However, the Levites were within their self-granted right in making any changes they chose, for they held that they were divinely authorized to amend the Law, as orally revealed by God to Moses, in order to meet "the constantly changing conditions of existence in the spirit of traditional teaching" (Dr. Kastein).
For that matter, they also c1aimed that Moses had received at Sinai a secret oral Torah, which must never be committed to writing. In view of the later inclusion of the Old Testament in one volume with the Christian New Testament, and the average Gentile's assumption that he thus has before his eyes the whole of "the Mosaic Law", this qualification is of permanent interest.
The Talmud, as quoted by Dr. Funk, says, "God foresaw that one day a time would come when the Heathen would possess themselves of the Torah and would say to Israel, 'We, too, are sons of God'. Then will the Lord say: 'Only he who knows my secrets is my son'. And what are the secrets of God? The oral teachings"."
"...None can now tell how c1osely Deuteronomy, as we know it, resembles Deuteronomy as it was read in 621 BC, for the books of the Old Testament were repeatedly revised up to the time of the first translation, when various other modifications were made, presumably to avoid excessive perturbation among the Gentiles. No doubt something was then excised, so that Deuteronomy in its original form may have been ferocious indeed, for what remains is savage enough.
Religious intolerance is the basis of this "Second Law" (racial intolerance was to follow later, in another "New Law") and murder in the name of religion is its distinctive tenet. This necessitates the destruction of the moral Commandments, which in fact are set up to be knocked down. Only those of them which relate to the exc1usive worship of the "jealous" Jehovah are left intact. The others are buried beneath a great mound of "statutes and judgments" (regulations issued under a governing Law, as it were) which in effect cancel them.
Thus the moral commandments against murder, stealing, adultery, coveting, bad neighbourliness, and the like are vitiated by a mass of "statutes" expressly enjoining the massacre of other peoples, the murder of apostates individually or in communities, the taking of concubines from among women captives, "utter destruction" that leaves "nothing alive", the exclusion of "the stranger" from debt-remission and the like.
By the time the end of Deuteronomy is reached the moral commandments have been nullified in this way, for the purpose of setting up, in the guise of a religion, the grandiose political idea of a people especially sent into the world to destroy and "possess" other peoples and to rule the earth. The idea of destruction is essential to Deuteronomy. If it be taken away no Deuteronomy, or Mosaic Law, remains.
This concept of destruction as an article of faith is unique, and where it occurs in political thought (for instance, in the Communist philosophy) may also derive originally from the teaching of Deuteronomy, for there is no other discoverable source.
Deuteronomy is above all a complete political programme: the story of the planet, created by Jehovah for this "special people", is to be completed by their triumph and the ruination of all others. The rewards offered to the faithful are exclusively material: slaughter, slaves, women, booty, territory, empire. The only condition laid down for these rewards is observance of "the statutes and judgments", which primarily command the destruction of others. The only guilt defined lies is non-observance of these laws. Intolerance is specified as observance; tolerance as non-observance, and therefore as guilt. The punishments prescribed are of this world and of the flesh, not of the spirit. Moral behaviour, if ever demanded, is required only towards co-religionists and "strangers" are excluded from it.
This unique form of nationalism was first presented to the Judahites in Deuteronomy as "the Law" of Jehovah and as his literal word, spoken to Moses. The notion of world domination through destruction is introduced at the start (chapter 2) of these "speeches supposed to have been delivered" by the dying Moses:
"The Lord spake unto me, saying. . . This day will I begin to put the dread of thee and the fear of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee". In token of this, the fate of two nations is at once shown. The King of Sihon and the King of Bashan "came out against us, he and all his people", whereon they were "utterly destroyed, the men, and the women, and the little ones", only the cattle being spared and "the spoil" being taken "for a prey unto ourselves". (The insistence on utter destruction is a recurrent and significant feature of these illustrative anecdotes).
These first examples of the power of Jehovah to destroy the heathen are followed by the first of many warnings that unless "the statutes and judgments" are observed Jehovah will punish his special people by dispersing them among these heathen. The enumeration of these "statutes and judgments" follows the Commandments, the moral validity of which is at once destroyed by a promise of tribal massacre:
"Seven nations greater and mightier than thou" are to be delivered into the Judahites' hands, and: "Thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them. . . ye shall destroy their alters . . . for thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God; the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are on the face of the earth . . . Thou shalt be blessed above all people . . . And thou shalt consume all the people which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine eye shall have no pity upon them. . . the Lord thy God will send the hornet among them, until they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed. . . And the Lord thy God will put out these nations before thee by little and little. . . But the Lord thy God shall deliver them unto thee, and shall destroy them with a mighty destruction until they be destroyed. And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven; there shall no man be able to stand before thee, until thou have destroyed them. . ."
By the Twentieth Century AD the peoples of the West, as a whole, had ceased to attach any present meaning to these incitements, but the peoples directly concerned thought differently. For instance, the Arab population of Palestine fled en masse from its native land after the massacre at Deir Yasin in 1948 because this event meant for them (as its perpetrators intended it to mean) that if they stayed they would be "utterly destroyed".
They knew that the Zionist leaders, in the palavers with British and American politicians of the distant West, repeatedly had stated that "the Bible is our Mandate" (Dr. Chaim Weizmann), and they knew (if the Western peoples did not realize) that the allusion was to such passages as that commanding the "utter destruction" of the Arab peoples. They knew that the leaders of the West had supported and would continue to support the invaders and thus they had no hope of even bare survival, save by flight. This massacre of 1948 AD relates directly to the "statute and judgment" laid down in chapter 7 of the book of The Law which the Levites completed and read in 621 BC."
"...As for the Judahites, or the Judaists and Jews who sprang from them, they seem to have acquired the unhappiest future of all. Anyway, it was not a happy man (though it was a Jewish writer of our day, 2,500 years later, Mr. Maurice Samuel) who wrote: ". . . we Jews, the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever. . . nothing that the Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".
