The Ark

The word 'cabal' refers to a group of people with sinister motives who are working in secret to exert their power over unsuspecting people. The term actually comes from Kabbalah (spelled Cabbala by Christians), the Jewish mystical tradition. How one gave rise to the other is the tale that historian Gordon Wiener unravels on this week's Ark.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Rachael Kohn: It didn't take long after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon for another version of the events to surface.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Ark on ABC Radio National.

Other accounts of 'what really happened' came from newspapers in the Arab world. For example, the attack was orchestrated by the Israelis in order to instigate anti-Arab sentiment. Jews having secret information stayed away from work at the World Trade Center that day, so the story goes. More recently, a similar Jewish conspiracy was said to be behind the Iraqi War. Dr Umaya Jalahma from King Faysal University addressed the Arab League Think Tank on how the US war on Iraq was timed to coincide with the Jewish holiday of Purim. Why Purim? Last year, Dr Jalahma made headlines when she published an article in the Saudi daily, Al Riyadh, in which she claimed that Jews need to obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries ...

This kind of interpretation of world events stems from the belief that Jews form an international cabal, a secret force that controls the world. It's a phenomenon that Gordon Wiener, Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona, has studied.

Gordon Wiener, a lot of people use the term 'cabal' to refer to a secret and suspicious kind of group. Without knowing that it's actually associated with the term 'Cabbala'. Now therein lies a tale. When was the term 'cabal' first used?

Gordon Wiener: Actually it's in the 17th century. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it's in the year 1646 that the first English use of the word 'cabal', meaning 'a secret or private intrigue of a sinister character formed by a small body of persons takes place'. This was broadened in the year 1660 to mean 'a secret or private meeting, especially of intriguers or of a faction.' And to this was added a notion of 'a small body of persons engaged in secret or private machinations or intrigue.' And the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that all of those meanings derived from the first and primary definition which comes from the Jewish mystical tradition as to their interpretation of the Old Testament.

'Cabbala' is definitely the source of 'cabal'. As a matter of fact my wife and I were sitting around the table last year at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and the people there were shaking their heads, could not believe that there was any connection whatsoever between 'cabal' and 'Cabbala'. But as my paper to the Jewish Studies meeting here clearly showed I think, indeed the anti-Semites in the 19th and 20th century did make that connection.

Rachael Kohn: Now if the term was used in the 17th century, were those people already associating their use of the term with those groups of people studying these secret texts? In fact were the texts secret?

Gordon Wiener: Well they were secret up to the point that Jewish rabbis and Jewish scholars began teaching Christian groups, that we call the Christian Hebraists, the Hebrew language. Obviously at that point, Hebrew text no longer was simply the sole possession of the Jews. And once Christian Hebraists obtained these texts, they were spread to a larger community, and a number of the scholars, particularly during the Reformation period, saw aspects of the Jewish Cabbala as magical texts.

Now magic can be good and bad, it can be black magic and white magic. There can be positive magic and negative magic. Now at times this works positively for the Jews. For example, Jewish physicians during this early modern period were favoured because the Christian community thought they possessed magic, positive magic. But at the same time magic can be sinister.

Rachael Kohn: Woe betide if the patient died.

Gordon Wiener: That's right, and indeed, one aspect of the black magic of course is that it originates from Satan, and it's that link to the Devil that also provides the linkage between medieval views of Jews as children of the Devil and involved and in league with the Devil with a plot to destroy Christianity, and modern anti-Semitism which takes the cabal with the Devil and places it not on a level of charging Jews with ritual murder any more, but seeing a secret Jewish plot, a sinister intrigue to dominate the political and economic universe, and thereby to dominate the world, again under the direction of Satan, albeit in a, shall we call it, a more Kosher 19th and 20th century terminology.

Rachael Kohn: Are you alluding there to the kind of documents that are still circulating today, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which actually purports to be a document of just such a cabal with designs on taking over the world?

Gordon Wiener: Unfortunately I think it goes well beyond the Protocols. The Protocols are well-known as a forgery that were first published in 1904, and even early 20th century anti-Semites recognised that there may be some trouble in trying to argue that the Protocols themselves which are still around, are true. But one bizarre thing that they argue is even though they may be a forgery, what they describe is true. But more sinister I think than the Protocols themselves, is the modern adaptation of the Protocols, which alas, really is still with us.

For example, Pat Robertson's 1991 book, 'The New World Order' is simply an updating of the Protocols, somewhat coded, somewhat hidden, but not much, where you have international Jewish bankers forming into a great conspiracy and Robertson even goes so far as to say that men, (and I'm quoting now) 'men of goodwill, like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter or George Bush' and I should add that's George Bush senior,' who sincerely want a larger community of nations living at peace in the world, are in reality and unknowingly and unwittingly carrying out the mission and mouthing the phrases of a tightly-knit cabal whose goal is nothing less than a new order for the human race under the domination of Lucifer and his followers.'

And then he goes on to show that it's international Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds that are financing precisely this sort of cabal. Yes, this notion of cabbalistic evil being used by Jews to take over the world is still with us. We're talking Pat Robertson, we're taking a man in charge of a very large political grouping in the United States that reaches into the millions and millions, and this really is a scary situation.

Rachael Kohn: This would seem to dovetail with some of the rhetoric coming out of the Muslim and Arab world about the West.

Gordon Wiener: Indeed it does. As a matter of fact I think the Arab world, interestingly, has picked up an aspect of this Christian anti-Semitism and is using it in this case for their own political purposes.

Obviously they are opposed to Israel and what they have been able to do is to take this aspect of Western Christian anti-Semitism and link it to world Zionism. The Christians themselves in the West do not talk about Jew hatred any more; that is, after the Holocaust, an anathema. Instead they code this and for them it becomes an anti-Zionism, 'we're opposed to Zionist world takeover', they argue, 'we are not anti-Semitic, we are not opposed to Jews, we are simply opposed to Zionist influence.' Well that is a coded phrase and it's my understanding that in the strategy, the right wing papers in even Australia, that that coding really is alive and well. Well obviously you can start talking in terms, Islamic fundamentalists, in their fight against the State of Israel, have obviously picked it up. But it's a secondary source in that case they were the originators, they were, shall we call it, the secondary users of this Western notion.

Rachael Kohn: Well what about the contemporary and widespread interest in Cabbala amongst Christians, for example, is that tempering any of this attitude?

Gordon Wiener: Well I think you have an interesting two-pronged approach on the part of Christians dealing with Cabbala. On the one hand you have Christian fundamentalists of the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell type that seek Cabbala and Jewish mysticism in the sort of negative world domination sense, and on the other hand you see a much more benign New Age use of Cabbala as a unifying doctrine trying to get to the sort of common mystical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Those are two different prongs of it, I don't think really in any way associated one with the other. I mean Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson hate New Age religion almost as much as they hate Judaism, the Jewish cabbalistic world domination, and obviously neither the twain shall meet.

I see the New Age use of Cabbalism much more benign, and a much less threatening use. The one that really scares me, however, are right-wing fundamentalist use of this, because it really is a resuscitation of that early 20th century anti-Semitism that led up to the Holocaust. That's the scary part. And one of the most intriguing and most puzzling things to me is that in the States now, you have right-wing Jewish conservatives turning the other cheek as to this fundamentalist anti-Semitism in return for their support of the State of Israel. And their argument is that you really shouldn't care what they really think theologically, as long as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson support Israel, let them think theologically whatever they will. But when we start seeing their resuscitation of the ideas and the protocols of the learned Elders of Zion, what we have to be very careful of is that this does not again become a second warrant for genocide.

Rachael Kohn: It seems the most insidious aspect of such a belief in a secret cabal is that being secret, it's never observable by ordinary means, one can always infer its existence, even though the objective facts point in the other direction, or suggest otherwise.

Gordon Wiener: That's the amazing thing about this, and I think the reason for its longevity. It doesn't exist. The notion that Jews had taken over freemasonry is ridiculous from a historical perspective, but if you have a secret, unnamed group with secret control, but you can never see, and that you can never touch, then you can never say that it doesn't exist either. It almost becomes a question of belief, and now for hundreds of years, people have believed that Jews are in possession of this secret power. Indeed I would take it back to the medieval notions that in a sense Jews are in league with the Devil, and that be it in its modern form or in its older medieval form, these notions which are so bizarre and so irrational simply cannot be disproved by any rational sense. They have become embedded almost, in certain aspects of the Western psyche, and to dispel them becomes almost impossible.

Rachael Kohn: Gordon Wiener is Professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona. One of his recent books is Jewish Christians and Christian Jews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Next Wednesday on The Ark, a gruesome tale, of Alexander Pearce, 'a man eater'. Always on the run, the convict Pearce was also on the run from his conscience. Join me for that story next week on The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

Publications

Title: Jewish Christians and Christian Jews from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
Author : Gordon Wiener