Victorian Network

[Dinter] argued, as Fritsch had, that the Israelites were not Jewish and that the Prophets had been the voice of a subjected race battling “against foreign Jewish oppressors.” All of these writers supported the notion that Jesus was an “Aryan.”

[Liebenfels] supported the notion of Christianity as a “racial cult religion” and interpreted the Bible through a bizarre exegesis which argued that the Old Testament taught the dangers of racial admixture; which depicted Moses as a “Darwinist” and preacher of “racial morality”.

[Schrönghamer-Heimdal] claims that “Israel” was not a Jewish word but rather “ancient Aryan” (urarisch), meaning the people “of the ‘eternal Light-spirit,’ that is, the ‘people of God,’ the ‘chosen people’!” These chosen people “are and were, however, not the Jews,” but rather “the Aryan people”: “The Aryans, Arameans, Armanen, Germanic tribes are the predecessors and successors of Christ, the actual Christians who cling to the eternal Light-spirit.”

[Hitler] stated that there was a fundamental “division” between the “northern Israelite tribes” and the “nomadic” Jews “of the tribe of Judah and Caleb.” He claimed that this division had first been overcome by King David through the “cult of the god Yahweh,” and that “the Jews” had killed off the “original tribes in Palestine.”

[In 1922, Hitler] argued that Christianity was racially specific: “The Christian religion is created only for the Aryans; for other peoples it is absurd.” Shortly thereafter, he argued that “positive Christianity” meant “the sword with its grip in the shape of a cross,” not the religion that “asked one to turn the other cheek.”

King Egica announced he had learned of a conspiracy between Spanish and North African Jews to assist the Muslim armies in conquering Iberia. Thus, all Jews other than those residing in Narbonensis were to be made slaves and given to Christian masters in different parts of the kingdom who were to try and convert them fully to Christianity. Their property was to be confiscated and any children under the age of seven were taken from their parents.

"Would you be willing to put your race first, over God/religion?"

Euth: Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.

[...]

Soc. Good: but I must still ask what is this attention to the gods which is called piety?

Euth. It is such, Socrates, as servants show to their masters.

Soc. I understand—a sort of ministration to the gods.

Euth. Exactly.

To man, too, the Deity gave a general aim, that of ennobling mankind and himself, but he left it to man to seek the means by which this aim can be achieved; he left it to him to choose the position in society most suited to him, from which he can best uplift himself and society.

The early Bolshevik rule was marked by the increasing hostility of the revolutionaries to what they considered to be outmoded, archaic, and reactionary aspects of the old society. Religion was foremost among those. The hostility culminated in the purges of the late 1930s when most Soviet religious institutions - together with much else that belonged to the old world - were either eliminated completely or brought to the very edge of survival.