Passover is a Slave Revolt

By Francisco Gil-White

Editor’s Note: Francisco Gil-White is an historian, political anthropologist and academic expert on the Middle East. A political anthropologist and ethnographer with training in evolutionary and sociocultural theory, for 20 years he has studied the impact of the Jewish people on the political evolution of the West.

In March, Gil-White was hosted by the San Diego Jewish Academy, the Ken Jewish Community, Beth Eliyahu and Aish. He spoke about the impact of the Jewish people on the Western world to these audiences, and his lecture and subsequent zoom meetings were so thought-provoking that we asked him to write a story about Passover.

Why the Jews? This question has gotten many answers. Partly because it is really multiple questions. Why are the Jews special? Why do Jewish people capture so much attention? Why are Jews endlessly persecuted?

The universal answer, I believe, is in what the Jews celebrate on Pesach (Passover): the ancient slave revolt.

The Jewish people are special because they are organized around a body of law revealed to Moses following an ancient slave revolt that Moses led to free his people, the Israelites, from oppression in Egypt. This is the law of the freed slaves, designed to protect ordinary folk and to fight oppression.

Jewish practices draw attention because the Jewish law of the freed slaves, the Law of Moses, has been tremendously influential, inspiring movements of ethical reform and political liberation across the many centuries in which the Jews, originally from Mesopotamia, have been part of Western Civilization.

Jewish people are endlessly persecuted because their millenarian fight for freedom, and their tremendous influence, has always been a thorn in the side of those who would enslave us all. The slave masters would like to see the Torah, which contains the law of the freed slaves, gone. That’s why the oppressors (Muslim jihadists, German Nazis, Russian Boyars, Medieval Inquisitors, Roman aristocrats, and Greco-Macedonian aristocrats) have all made such great efforts to rid themselves entirely of the Jews.

And that’s why translating the Bible from Latin (spoken only by the priests) was forbidden to Europeans in the Middle Ages: the Catholic overlords didn’t want their European slaves reading the Christian Bible because the Christian Bible is about 80% Hebrew Bible. If ordinary folk were to read that, they’d learn about the Hebrew slave revolt organized by God; they’d come to know the laws—declared obsolete by the Church—that protect the weak from the powerful; and they’d learn that God sides with the oppressed—a tremendously subversive idea.

And, indeed, when the Waldensians, before anyone else and against the law of kings and popes, began in the Middle Ages to translate the Bible to European languages, a revolutionary ferment began in Europe that never stopped despite all the violence directed from above. This unbeatable ferment eventually produced the European Enlightenment and the modern revolutions that spawned modern democracy.

Today’s intolerant totalitarians, the jihadis, are following the eternal pattern: they persecute the Jews so that the Muslim slaves will not be inspired to break their own chains.

That’s why the slave masters poison Muslim minds—and Western minds, too—against the Jews.

This is the meaning of Pesach. It is the story of our Western liberation, anchored in the liberation of the ancient Israelites. It is the story of Moses, whose biography recalls that of an earlier revolutionary, Sargon of Akkad, a Semitic king, who led the first great revolution in the first civilization, Sumer, a good 4,300 years ago. It is the story of semitism, the ideology of the ancient Semites, who decided that kings should be protectors of their peoples. And it is the story of the eternal fight of semitism against antisemitism, that is, against the movement that seeks to enslave us all.

The views of the author do not necessarily reflect the views of L’CHAIM Magainze. To read more from Francisco Gil-White, visit:

https://franciscogilwhite.substack.com/p/semitism-vs-antisemitism-structure-of-history.