In his “Epistle to Yemen,” Maimonides tells us how the nations have tried to destroy Israel. He prefaces his analysis by saying “God has made us unique by His laws and precepts.” “Our pre-eminence is manifested in His rules and statutes, as Scripture says… ‘And what great nation is there that has statutes and ordinances so righteous as this Law [the Torah] which I set before you this day’” (Deut. 4:8)?

To be sure, history records various individual gentiles who have spoken of the Jews in superlative terms. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s successor at the Lyceum, called the Jews “a nation of philosophers.” Harvard graduate John Adams, second president of the United States, declared: “The Jews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.”

Friedrich Nietzsche writes: “Wherever the Jews have attained to influence, they have taught to analyze more subtly, to argue more acutely, to write more clearly and purely: it has always been their problem to bring people to ‘raison.’”

Six ways the nations try to destroy Israel

Israel, its neighbors, and disputed territories. Graphic: Central Intelligence Agency

Such praise stands in striking contrast to the calumnies the nations have heaped upon the Jewish people. Maimonides explains: “[Because of Israel’s unique and divinely inspired way of life], all the nations, instigated by envy and impiety, rose up against us …” In each era they employed a new method to destroy Israel and her Torah. Maimonides first mentions conquest or brute force, e.g., Amalek, Nebuchadnezzar, and Hadrian.

A second and more refined method was argumentation. Thus, the Greeks sought to demolish the Torah by means of philosophical controversy.

After this, says Maimonides, “there arose a sect which combined the two methods, conquest and controversy, into one because it believed that this procedure would be more effective in wiping out every trace of the Jewish nation and [its faith]. It therefore resolved to lay claim to prophecy and to found a new faith, contrary to our Law, and to contend that it was equally God-given [but that it superseded the Torah].” None of these methods, Maimonides points out, has succeeded in destroying Judaism or in thwarting the will of God. The Jews survived and remained loyal to their Torah.

Turning to modern times, a fourth method has been used to undermine the Torah, namely, “biblical criticism,” which denies the Torah’s divine origin and, therefore the Jews as the Chosen People. This method, which begins with Spinoza in the seventeenth century, was amplified by the nineteenth-century German school of bible critics. These critics tried to prove by literary analysis that the Torah is a human product having multiple authors.

I now turn to more recent methods used to destroy Israel and the Torah. One is by means of “peace.” Ever since the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel miraculously regained possession of Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights, the nations have sought to roll Israel back to its precarious 1949 armistice lines; most cunningly by means of a fraudulent policy of “territory for peace,” which entails the establishment of a factitious Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland, Judea and Samaria, including Jerusalem.

Pope Francis recently gave his blessings to this fraud. Its implementation would destroy Israel and give the Catholic Church significant entrée to Jerusalem, Jewish possession of which is a bone in the throat of Roman Catholicism and its anti-Jewish doctrine of “replacement theology” (which also animates Islam’s lust for Jerusalem).

Even more subtle and current among nations seeking to undermine the Torah and Israel is their nullification of laws prohibiting same-sex marriage. This paganism is a direct attack on the Creation Narrative of the Book of Genesis. Genesis embodies the Seven Noahide laws of universal morality, which are encapsulated in the American Declaration of Independence as “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

Why do the nations rage?

To oppose same-sex marriage merely on moral grounds obscures the real nature of the issue. This is a theo-political-power issue which involves Jerusalem, the City of Truth, of the Temple, the domicile of the Torah. The Torah is the only solid rational foundation of the State of Israel.

The truths of the Torah are now being revealed by science, by the hitherto unknown convergence of science and Kabbalah. This revelation by scientists constitutes a mortal threat to the Catholic Church and its doctrine of “replacement” theology.

Therein is the real reason why the Vatican has for decades given its blessings to the murderous Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, which alone is positioned to wrest Jerusalem from the Jews. On the issue of Jerusalem pivots the perpetuation of Rome.◙