Pornography's Jewishness and Avowed Anti-Catholic Purpose: Jews are in Pornography to Corrupt Catholics

"The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks."
--Al Goldstein

Below I have copied the entire "Jewish Quarterly" article as found today on that website!

So, there are enemies of the Church who also bear responsibility for her crimes. And they are succeeding. Who said conspiracies don't exist! The pornography industry today has almost become mainstream.

This thought came to my mind as I read the Gospel for tomorrow's Sunday Mass: the parable Christ tells the chief priests and the elders of the people in Jerusalem of the murderous vine-dressers who kill the son of the owner and steal the inheritance, concluding with these prophetic words!

Jesus said to them, "Did you never read in the Scriptures:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
by the Lord has this been done,
and it is wonderful in our eyes?
Therefore, I say to you,
the kingdom of God will be taken away from you
and given to a people that will produce its fruit."

Sat, October 4th 2014  - 10th Tishrei, 5775

Triple-exthnics Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry Nathan Abrams  |  Winter 2004  -  Number 196       A story little told is that of Jews in Hollywood’s seedier cousin, the adult film industry. Perhaps we’d prefer to pretend that the ‘triple-exthnics’ didn’t exist, but there’s no getting away from the fact that secular Jews have played (and still continue to play) a disproportionate role throughout the adult film industry in America. Jewish involvement in pornography has a long history in the United States, as Jews have helped to transform a fringe subculture into what has become a primary constituent of Americana. These are the ‘true blue Jews’. Smut peddlers Jewish activity in the porn industry divides into two (sometimes overlapping) groups: pornographers and performers. Though Jews make up only two per cent of the American population, they have been prominent in pornography. Many erotica dealers in the book trade between 1890 and 1940 were immigrant Jews of German origin. According to Jay A. Gertzman, author of Bookleggers and Smuthounds:The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ‘Jews were prominent in the distribution of gallantiana [fiction on erotic themes and books of dirty jokes and ballads], avant-garde sexually explicit novels, sex pulps, sexology, and flagitious materials’. In the postwar era, America’s most notorious pornographer was Reuben Sturman, the ‘Walt Disney of Porn’. According to the US Department of Justice, throughout the 1970s Sturman controlled most of the pornography circulating in the country. Born in 1924, Sturman grew up in Cleveland’s East Side. Initially, he sold comics and magazines, but when he realized sex magazines produced twenty times the revenue of comic books, he moved exclusively into porn, eventually producing his own titles and setting up retail stores. By the end of the 1960s, Sturman ranked at the top of adult magazine distributors and by the mid-70s he owned over 200 adult bookstores. Sturman also introduced updated versions of the traditional peepshow booth (typically a dark room with a small colour TV on which the viewer can view X-rated videos). It was said that Sturman did not simply control the adult-entertainment industry; he was the industry. Eventually he was convicted of tax evasion and other crimes and died, disgraced, in prison in 1997. His son, David, continued running the family business. The contemporary incarnation of Sturman is 43-year-old Jewish Clevelander Steven Hirsch, who has been described as ‘the Donald Trump of porno’. The link between the two is Steve’s father, Fred, who was a stockbroker-cum-lieutenant to Sturman. Today Hirsch runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, which has been called the Microsoft of the porn world, the top producer of ‘adult’ films in the US. His specialty was to import mainstream marketing techniques into the porn business. Indeed, Vivid parallels the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in its exclusive contracts to porn stars who are hired and moulded by Hirsch. Vivid was the subject of a behind-the-scenes reality TV show recently broadcast on Channel 4. Nice Jewish girls and boys Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers as well as a sizeable number of female stars in porn movies of the 1970s and ‘80s. The doyen of the Hebrew studs is Ron Jeremy. Known in the trade as ‘the Hedgehog’, Jeremy is one of America’s biggest porn stars. The 51-year-old Jeremy was raised in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, and has since appeared in more than 1,600 adult movies, as well as directing over 100. Jeremy has achieved iconic status in America, a hero to males of all ages, Jewish and gentile alike - he’s the nebbischy, fat, hairy, ugly guy who gets to bed dozens of beautiful women. He presents an image of a modern-day King David, a Jewish superstud who supersedes the traditional heroes of Jewish lore. No sallow Talmud scholar he. His stature was recently cemented with the release of a pornomentary about his life, Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy. As probably the most famous Jewish male porn star, Jeremy has done wonders for the psyche of Jewish men in America. Jeremy has also just released a compilation CD, Bang-A-Long-With Ron Jeremy. For £7.99 (including delivery), the lucky listener gets to enjoy Jeremy’s hand-picked favourite porno grooves along with narration by ‘the legend’ himself. As the publicity blurb gushes, ‘Out of the brown paper wrappings and into the mainstream’. Seymore Butts, aka Adam Glasser, is everything that Jeremy is not: young, handsome and toned. Glasser, a 39-year-old New York Jew, opened a gym in 1991 in Los Angeles. When no one joined, he borrowed a video camera for 24 hours, went to a nearby strip club, recruited a woman, then headed back to his gym and started shooting. Although the movie stank, with a bit of chutzpah and a few business cards he wangled a deal with a manufacturer and started cranking out films. Within a few years, ‘Seymore Butts’ – his nom de porn which is simultaneously his sales pitch – became one of the largest franchises in the adult-film business. As the king of the gonzo genre (marked by handheld cameras, the illusion of spontaneity and a low-tech aesthetic meant to suggest reality), he is today probably the most famous Jewish porn mogul. Seymore Inc., his production company, releases about 36 films annually, most of them shot for less than $15,000, each of them grossing more than 10 times that sum. Glasser employs 12 people, including his mother and cousin Stevie as respectively genial company accountant (and matchmaker for her single son) and lovable but roguish general gopher. Glasser currently even has his own reality TV show (also broadcast on Channel 4), a ten-episode docu-soap called Family Business, whose opening credits show Glasser’s barmitzvah photo. In search of a buck Jews became involved in the porn industry for much the same reasons that their co-religionists became involved in Hollywood. They were attracted to an industry primarily because it admitted them. Its newness meant that restrictive barriers had not yet been erected, as they had in so many other areas of American life. In porn, there was no discrimination against Jews. During the early part of the twentieth century, an entrepreneur did not require large sums of money to make a start in the film business; cinema was considered a passing fad. In the porn business, it was similarly straightforward to get going. To show ‘stag’ movies or loops, as they were known, all one needed was a projector, screen and a few chairs. Not tied up with the status quo and with nothing to lose by innovation, Jews were open to new ways of doing business. Gertzman explains that "Jews, when they found themselves excluded from a field of endeavour, turned to a profession in which they sensed they could eventually thrive by cooperating with colleagues in a community of effort . . . Jews have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities". The adult entertainment business required something that Jews possessed in abundance:chutzpah. Early Jewish pornographers were marketing geniuses and ambitious entrepreneurs whose toughness, intelligence and boundless self-confidence were responsible for their successes. Of course, the large number of Jews in porn were mainly motivated by the desire to make profits. Just as their counterparts in Hollywood provided a dream factory for Americans, a blank screen upon which the Jewish moguls’ visions of America could be created and projected, so the porn-moguls displayed a talent for understanding public tastes. What better way to provide the stuff of dreams and fantasies than through the adult-entertainment industry? Performers did porn for the money. As ADL National Director Abraham H. Foxman commented, ‘Those Jews who enter the pornography industry have done so as individuals pursuing the American dream.’ Secular sex Like their mainstream counterparts, Jews who enter porn do not usually do so as representatives of their religious group. Most of the performers and pornographers are Jewish culturally but not religiously. Many are entirely secular, Jews in name only. Sturman, however, identified as a Jew - he was a generous donator to Jewish charities - and performer Richard Pacheco once interviewed to be a rabbinical student. Very few, if any, porn films have overtly Jewish themes, although Jeremy once tried to get several Jewish porn stars together to make a kosher porn film. The exception is Debbie Duz Dishes, in which Nina Hartley plays a sexually insatiable Jewish housewife who enjoys sex with anyone who rings the doorbell. It has sold very well, spawned a couple of sequels and is currently very hard to buy - perhaps indicating a new niche to exploit. Indeed, according to an editorial on the World Union of Jewish Students website, "there are thousands of people searching for Jewish porn. After things like Jewish calendar, Jewish singles, Jewish dating, and Jewish festivals comes ‘Jewish porn’ in the list of top search keywords that GoTo.com provide". Sexual rebels Is there a deeper reason, beyond the mere financial, as to why Jews in particular have become involved in porn? There is surely an element of rebellion in Jewish X-rated involvement. Its very taboo and forbidden nature serves to make it attractive. As I written in these pages before,treyf signifies ‘the whole world of forbidden sexuality, the sexuality of the goyim, and there all the delights are imagined to lie . . .’ (‘Reel Kashrut: Jewish food in film’, JQ 189 [Spring 2003]). According to one anonymous industry insider quoted by E. Michael Jones in the magazineCulture Wars (May 2003), ‘the leading male performers through the 1980s came from secular Jewish upbringings and the females from Roman Catholic day schools’. The standard porn scenario became as a result a Jewish fantasy of schtupping the Catholic shiksa. Furthermore, as Orthodox Jew and porn gossipmonger Luke Ford explains on his website (lukeford.net): ‘Porn is just one expression of [the] rebellion against standards, against the disciplined life of obedience to Torah that marks a Jew living Judaism.’ It is also a revolt against (often middle-class) parents who wish their children to be lawyers, doctors and accountants. As performer Bobby Astyr put it on the same website, ‘It’s an “up yours” to the uncles with the pinky rings who got down on me as a kid for wanting to be musician.’ As religious influences waned and were replaced by secular ones, free-thinking Jews, especially those from California’s Bay Area, viewed sex as a means of personal and political liberation. America provided the freest society Jews have ever known, as manifested by the growth of the adult industry. Those Jewish women who have sex onscreen certainly stand in sharp contradiction to the stereotype of the ‘Jewish American Princess’. They (and I’m speculating here) may have seen themselves as fulfilling the promise of liberation, emancipating themselves from what feminist Betty Friedan in 1963 called the ‘comfortable concentration camp’ of the household as they set out into the Promised Land of the porno sets of Southern California. It signified their economic and social freedom: they were free to choose to enter, rather than coerced into it by economic and other circumstances. Once they had lain down, they could stand on their own two feet, particularly as female performers typically earn twice as much as their male counterparts. Sexual revolutionaries Extending the subversive thesis, Jewish involvement in the X-rated industry can be seen as a proverbial two fingers to the entire WASP establishment in America. Some porn stars viewed themselves as frontline fighters in the spiritual battle between Christian America and secular humanism. According to Ford, Jewish X-rated actors often brag about their ‘joy in being anarchic, sexual gadflies to the puritanical beast’. Jewish involvement in porn, by this argument, is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion. Astyr remembers having ‘to run or fight for it in grammar school because I was a Jew. It could very well be that part of my porn career is an “up yours” to these people’. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, said (on lukeford.net), ‘The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.’ Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear. It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channelled into sexual rather than leftist politics. Just as Jews have been disproportionately represented in radical movements over the years, so they are also disproportionately represented in the porn industry. Jews in America have been sexual revolutionaries. A large amount of the material on sexual liberation was written by Jews. Those at the forefront of the movement which forced America to adopt a more liberal view of sex were Jewish. Jews were also at the vanguard of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Paul Goodman replaced Marx, Trotsky and Lenin as required revolutionary reading. Reich’s central preoccupations were work, love and sex, while Marcuse prophesied that a socialist utopia would free individuals to achieve sexual satisfaction. Goodman wrote of the ‘beautiful cultural consequences’ that would follow from legalizing pornography: it would ‘ennoble all our art’ and ‘humanize sexuality’. Pacheco was one Jewish porn star who read Reich’s intellectual marriage of Freud and Marx (lukeford.net): "Before I got my first part in an adult film, I went down to an audition for an X-rated film with my hair down to my ass, a copy of Wilhelm Reich’s Sexual Revolution under my arm and yelling about work, 'love and sex'." As Rabbi Samuel H. Dresner put it (E. Michael Jones, ‘Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos’ Culture Wars, May 2003), ‘Jewish rebellion has broken out on several levels’, one being ‘the prominent role of Jews as advocates to sexual experimentation’. Overall, then, porn performers are a group of people who praise rebellion, self-fulfilment and promiscuity. What are we ashamed of? This brief overview and analysis of the role and motivations behind pornographers and performers is intended to shed light on a neglected topic in American Jewish popular culture. Little has been written about it. Books such as Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America (New York: Knopf, 1992) simply ignore the topic. And you can bet that the 350th anniversary of the arrival of the Jews in the United States did not include any celebrations of Jewish innovation in this field. Even the usually tolerant Time Out New York has been too prim to deal with it, although the more iconoclastic Heeb plans an issue on it. In light of the relatively tolerant Jewish view of sex, why are we ashamed of the Jewish role in the porn industry? We might not like it, but the Jewish role in this field has been significant and it is about time it was written about seriously. Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in Modern American History at the University of Aberdeen. He has just completed a book on neo-conservatism in the United States. Abortionists' Anti-Catholic Bent Pedophilias' Ideological Foundations Pedophilia is number one problem in Hollywood

Promised Land not Exclusively for the Jews

Archbishop clarifies synod remarks condemned by Jewish organizations
November 12, 2010
Archbishop Cyrille Salim Bustros, the Melkite Greek Catholic bishop of Newton (Massachusetts), has clarified remarks made during an October 23 press conference presenting the final message of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East.

Archbishop Bustros was quoted as saying, “The Holy Scriptures cannot be used to justify the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of the Palestinians, to justify the occupation by Israel of Palestinian lands,” adding, “we Christians cannot speak of the 'promised land' as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people-- all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.” The archbishop’s remarks were condemned by Jewish organizations.

Archbishop Bustros told Jihad Watch:


During the press conference which was held at the end of the Synod, I presented this message in my role as president of the commission that drafted the message. I was then asked by a journalist: "What do you mean by this sentence: 'Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable'?" I answered: "Israel cannot use the Biblical concept of a promised land to justify its occupation of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of Palestinians who have been living there for centuries. We Christians cannot now speak about the Promised Land for the Jewish people. With Christ the Promised Land became the Kingdom of God": Jesus referred to this land in His sermon on the mount and gave it a spiritual interpretation: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of God... Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land." (Mt. 5:3.5)

In my answer I was thinking in particular of Jewish settlers who claim their right to build on Palestinian territory by saying it forms part of biblical Israel, the land promised by God to the Jews according to the Old Testament. I also warned against the risk of Israel becoming an exclusively Jewish state, with a consequent threat to the 1.2 million Muslim and Christian Arabs living in Israel. The Synod is acknowledging the separation between religion and politics, in stating that recourse to the Bible cannot be used to justify political events: "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." (Mt. 22:21)

As a Christian, and especially as a Middle-Eastern Christian-- and this is the unanimous opinion of the Middle-Eastern Christians, Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants-- I see that the concept of the Promised Land cannot be used for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948-- after the resolution of the UN in 1947 regarding the partition of Palestine which was under the British mandate between Arab and Jews-- is a political issue not a religious one. It is a fact of history like other facts: Jews who were persecuted in Europe and suffered the horrors of the Shoah decided to come to Palestine and build a country for their own. They chose Palestine because of the memory of the Jews who lived there 2000 years ago. They came in great numbers; a war arose between them and the Arabs living there, and they won the war; hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced to leave their homes and flee to the surrounding Arabic countries: Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Some of the Israelis based their return on the Old Testament theme of the Promised Land. But this does not mean that God is behind their return and their victory against the Arabs …

As for the idea of the chosen people, it is clear, according to Christian theology and especially to St. Paul, that after Christ there is no longer one particular chosen people! With Christ and in Him all men and women of all countries are called to become children of God and unite in one body, the Body of Christ.

Now in the Israeli-Palestinian issue we are in presence of two opposed religious extremist ideologies: from one part extremist Jews who say that Palestine is the Promised Land given to them by God, and that they cannot give up any part of it to the Arabs; and from the other part extremist Muslims who say that Palestine is a Muslim land given to them by God during the Arabic conquests, and that they cannot give up a part of it to the Israelis. With these two opposed religious ideologies it is impossible to find a compromise in order to reach a lasting peace.

The message of the Synod for the Middle East takes a moderate position and clearly advocates, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the two-State-solution … Then the message explicitly condemns all kinds of violence and religious extremism … By dialogue only-- a dialogue which requires compromises from both sides, not by war, and especially not by a war based on religious assumptions-- can the Holy Land reach a just and lasting peace.

Jews Took Christ out of Christmas

Jingle kvells! The great American Christmas was invented by Jews

Tanya Gold

The Jewish Chronicle

December 14, 2022

If you hate Christmas music, blame the eastern European pogromists that inspired it

The fact that the most beloved Christmas songs were written by American Jews is not an anomaly if you understand Jews. The idea of America in cinema was invented by Ben Hecht, Hermann Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder.
The superhero genre was invented by Jerry Siegel and Bob Kane; imagine Superman and Batman as surnames, and you can hear Siegel and Kane’s longing for superpowers a century on. So why not invent the American Christmas too?

The most glittering example is White Christmas by Irving Berlin, and his story is typical. His childhood name was Israel Beilin and he was born in Siberia, the youngest son of Moses, a cantor. Their home was burnt down by anti-Jewish arsonists when Israel was four or five. Berlin’s biographer, Jody Rosen, believes Israel’s earliest Christmas memories were of pogroms, which tended to reach a pitch during Christian festivals.

The family moved to America and Irving Berlin – now renamed after an English actor and a German city, said a wag – grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City.

He left school to become a busker, a singing waiter, and a songwriter at Tin Pan Alley where, in an act of chutzpah and subconscious fear, he turned himself into the perfect American. He wrote God Bless America, which became his adopted homeland’s anthem; Easter Parade; and White Christmas. When asked how a Jew could write a song about Christmas, he replied, “I wrote it as an American”. I’m not sure that is true.

“The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do?” wrote Philip Roth, Berlin’s most canny observer, in Operation Shylock. “He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow… He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em ….”

Even in America, Jews were excluded from so-called respectable professions. The established population had no interest in the new mass culture and the way was clear for a cultural flowering and symbiosis: Jews would make it for them. They had the tradition of Yiddish theatre and song, and the cacophony of Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot to draw on. “Had I been born on the Lower East Side,” Cole Porter, the only elite gentile songwriter of the time, said in tribute, “I might have been a true genius.”

White Christmas began as satire: a swell (the kind of man the half-Jewish but gentile-passing Fred Astaire always played) sitting in Hollywood, longing for the comforts of home. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…” But Berlin realised he had something more profound. He was an unreliable narrator with multiple stories of the song’s creation myth. It is possible that its wistfulness comes from the fact that his baby, Irving Berlin Jnr, died on Christmas Day 1928, but he would never have said so explicitly. He was a joy-maker who made myths.

White Christmas spoke to the itinerant soul of America. They had all, as refugees to the United States, or migrants from country to city during the Great Depression, left their homes behind. The critic Michael Beckerman wondered if the song was, “a kind of holiday Moby-Dick, a distant image of things that can never be reclaimed: the past, childhood, and innocence itself?”

It was first performed by Bing Crosby on Christmas 1941, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The Jewish songwriter must have a gentile singer as an avatar, which Rosen calls “a projection of Jewish desire… downtown street smarts but uptown ‘class’”. White Christmas became the anthem of the war: the musical version of Casablanca, a story about refugees who likewise cannot go home, likewise written by Jews from the Lower East Side – the Epstein brothers – and released in 1942. “Away down under this latest hit of Irving Berlin,” wrote Carl Sandburg, “catches us where we love peace”. It became the best-selling single of all time.

Many songs followed it. Let it Snow and Santa Baby were written by American Jews; so were Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland; Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire; Silver Bells; It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year; Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree; A Holly, Jolly Christmas; and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

These songs express the longing of the immigrant to create a world where he is safe, a dazzling act of tribute, cynicism, and control. If you hate Christmas music, blame the eastern European pogromists that tangentially inspired it. But I am with Philip Roth when he marvels: “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cosy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”

On a similar note, Hannukah is the Jewish Kwanzaa, a mid-20th century American invention intended to supplant and distract from Christmas.

https://www.bitchute.com/video/BAWcPBumLVvT/

Jewish Supremacy in Epstein Files: The Jewish Mafia!

Jewish Supremacy in the Epstein File?

—— Recently released emails, documents, and testimony contained in the Epstein files point to more than a network of abuse, revealing what appears to be an insular worldview grounded in hierarchy, entitlement, and contempt for outsiders. In private communications attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and associates, non-Jews are repeatedly referenced with mocking or derogatory language, reflecting what critics describe as a supremacist mindset operating alongside the abuse itself. Several of the released emails show Epstein using the term “goyim,” meaning non-Jews, in a dismissive and contemptuous manner. In one exchange with AI theorist Roger Schank, Epstein refers to profits from shipping futures by writing about “how the Jew makes money,” adding, “let the goyim deal in the real world.” Other communications show similar language used casually, suggesting that this worldview was normalized within Epstein’s private circles. In another email exchange, Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal asked Epstein whether an event would be “100% Jew night,” to which Epstein replied: “No, goyim in abundance — JPMorgan execs, brilliant WASPs.” In a separate message, Epstein accused a recipient of behaving “just like the GOYIM you do not respect,” language that further underscores the recurring pattern of contempt reflected in the files. An older testimony from Epstein survivor Maria Farmer adds further context. In a 2020 interview, Farmer said her abusers were motivated by an ideology of Jewish supremacy, citing a 1996 conversation with Ghislaine Maxwell in which she was told she would not be served food at an exclusively Jewish country club. Farmer stated that exclusionary attitudes toward non-Jews were a consistent theme among Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates. Maxwell has long been widely believed to have acted as Epstein’s handler or overseer within his broader operation. Taken together, the material suggests that the Epstein files document not only systemic sexual exploitation, but also a closed ideological environment in which power, identity, and hierarchy were intertwined, and in which contempt for non-Jews was expressed openly and without apparent concern.

"[M]any of the chief men also believed in him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, that they might not be cast out of the synagogue. For they loved the glory of men more than the glory of God." John 12:42-43

Pornography's Jewishness and Avowed Anti-Catholic Purpose: Jews are in Pornography to Corrupt Catholics

Jews Took Christ out of Christmas

https://plinthos.blogspot.com/search?q=jews

"Grace and Call Unrevoked" --Pope Emeritus Benedict

Benedict XVI writes about Christian-Jewish dialogue

The emeritus Pope Benedict XVI has taken up the pen once more and published a contribution "Irrevocable Grace Unrevoked" (Gnade und Berufung ohne Reue) to the Christian-Jewish dialogue in the July 12, 2018 issue of the journal Communio. The German Pope writes of the need to refine important paradigms of the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

[From Vatican News. Unofficial translation.]

The purpose of Benedict’s text was initially only a private reflection on the post-conciliar rejection of the so-called "substitution theory" and of the phrase “the covenant never revoked,” Cardinal Kurt Koch explained in his foreword. However, he was able to convince the emeritus Pope to publish the essay composed in October 2017. Benedict has always been very concerned about the Jewish-Christian dialogue.

A double need for more refinement

In fact, the text signed "Joseph Ratzinger - Benedict XVI" and dated October 26, 2017, offers a thoroughly critical reflection of previous "standards" in the Jewish-Christian dialogue or post-conciliar theological reflection on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Specifically, Benedict XVI sees a need to refine two key words "substitution theory" and "the unrevoked covenant”: "both theses – that Israel is not superseded by the Church, and that the Covenant has never been terminated - are basically correct, but "are in many ways inaccurate and must be given further critical reconsideration,” Benedict writes.

Thus, the "theory of supersessionism" – the idea that the Church has taken the place of Israel – "is not presented as such," clarifies the emeritus Pope, with reference to pertinent encyclopedias. Moreover, Judaism always has a special status from a Christian point of view, since Judaism is "not one religion among others," but "has a special standing and therefore must be recognized as such by the Church." In consequence, he explains his thesis on the basis of the lasting differences between Judaism and Christianity, specifically with regard to the temple cult, the cult laws, the status of the Torah, the question of the Messiah, and the land promise.

The question of the Messiah is "the real issue between Jews and Christians”

The “question of the Messiah” especially represents "the real issue of dispute between Jews and Christians," Benedict XVI firmly observes: If Jewish messianic expectation is focused on a – too politically understood – peacemaker, one would have to point out from a Christian point of view that Jesus "did not want to bring immediately the perfect new world of peace (...), but also wanted to show God to the Gentiles.”

So there remains a certain surplus of promise, inasmuch as the time of Jesus "is not a time of a cosmic transformation in which the final verdicts between God and man have already been made, but a time of freedom," said Benedict XVI.

Rejection of "political messianism"

As a result, the Church rejects every "political Messianism," which, for example, in a theological interpretation of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, sees it as a fulfillment of the biblical promise of the land. Therefore, the Vatican recognition of the State of Israel is not rooted in theological reflection, but in the recognition of the Jews’ "natural right" to their own land, according to Benedict XVI. "In this sense, the Vatican has recognized the State of Israel as a modern constitutional state, whose foundation cannot be derived directly from Scripture, but in a broader sense, on the faithfulness of God to the people of Israel."

[The "Covenant never revoked"]

The question of the "never-revoked covenant" between God and the Jews – a phrase that goes back to John Paul II and belongs to the now obvious interpretive horizon of Judaism from a Christian perspective – needs, according to Benedict XVI, for some distinctions to be made.

Although the phrase is in principle "considered to be correct, but in detail, nevertheless, many clarifications and greater precision are still needed" in the sense that there was not only one covenant between God and his people, but many covenants. Also, the notice of the dismissal of a covenant does not belong to the theological conceptual world of the Old Testament. Also the idea accompanying it of ​​an agreement between equals does not correspond to biblical theology.

"The formula of the “covenant never revoked” may have been of help in a first phase of the new dialogue between Jews and Christians, but it is not suitable in the long run to adequately express the magnitude of reality," Benedict concludes.

Judas non dormit! The eighth responsory of Maundy Thursday Matins (EF)

Latin text Responsorium: Una hora non potuistis vigilare mecum, qui exhortabamini mori pro me? Vel Judam non videtis quomodo non dormit, sed festinat tradere me Judaeis? Versus: Quid dormitis? Surgite et orate, ne intretis in tentationem. Vel Judam non videtis quomodo non dormit, sed festinat tradere me Judaeis?  Spanish translation Responsorium: ¿No habéis podido vigilar conmigo una hora, vosotros que decíais que moriríais por mí? ¿No habéis visto que Judas no dormía, sino que se apresuraba a entregarme a los judíos? Versus: ¿Por qué dormís? Levantáos y orad, para que no caigáis en tentación. ¿No habéis visto que Judas no dormía, sino que se apresuraba a entregarme a los judíos?

English translation Responsory: What, could you not watch one hour with me, you that were eager to die for me? Or do you not see Judas, how he sleeps not, but makes haste to betray me to the Jews? Verse: Why do you sleep? Arise and pray, lest ye fall into temptation. Or do you not see Judas, how he sleeps not, but makes haste to betray me to the Jews? Alternative version Responsory: Could ye not watch one hour with me, ye that were ready to die for me? Or see ye not Judas, how he sleepeth not, how he maketh haste to betray me to the Jews? Verse: Why sleep ye? Arise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation. Or see ye not Judas, how he sleepeth not, how he maketh haste to betray me to the Jews?

Knowledge of Faith Truths Too Leads the Magi to Bethlehem

In today's Epiphany homily of His Holiness Pope Francis, based on Matthew's Gospel, there is what I would call a serious rationalist mistake in exegesis.

The Holy Father says, in the context of the Magi's journey in search for the king of the Jews, that they "talk little and journey much. Ignorant of the truths of faith, they are filled with longing and set out." What the Holy Father neglects to say is that what the Magi do say and where they arrive and inquire is all based on divine revelation.

First, the Magi came, not to Bethlehem but to Jerusalem, the center of God's revelation (we would say to the "Holy See" of the day). The star leads them not to Christ but to the "Church" of Christ!, God's holy people: the Law and the Prophets and the Temple. The leaders of sound doctrine!

Second, it is ultimately from the chief priests and Scribes of the people that they learn, through Herod, "in Bethlehem of Judea."

Third, their very question itself is a question which could not possibly have come to them except through faith. They are in search of the newborn king of the Jews. They know of the Jews and they know of the birth of their great king. The Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, had already been in the academic language of those lands (i.e. Greek) for hundreds of years. Surely the Persians, etc. (e.g. Cyrus of Persia) had some knowledge of Judaism. Probably they had access to that revelation or at least had heard from people who had heard of it. And they go there in order to worship Him. It is a journey of faith, based on science, but very much enlightened by revelation!

Fourth, who said that pagans from the east did not have faith and doctrines? All of those lands had their own beliefs and religious doctrines. Surely they believe in God, they come to adore him. And on this journey they were following the doctrine of the one true God and the coming of the Messiah as revealed and promised to the Jews.

Thus, the Magi, though they "talk little and travel much" (which we frankly do not know anything about the quantity of their conversation, surely they talked much on the journey, for wise men can walk and talk at the same time! And if they are wealthy kings they are being carried and so have much leisure to do nothing but talk, study and pray along the whole journey), come in search of a truth of revelation which was corroborated by science. They were not, in this fundamental matter, "ignorant of the truths of faith."

What the Holy Father is doing here is the classic error of orthopraxis over orthodoxy. He puts all of the emphasis on doing the journey, don't worry so much about the doctrine. The problem is that without doctrine you can't know were to go or how to go or how to get there, or why even bother with the journey? The will needs the guidance of the intellect in order to know what to bite on!

“An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth. Mouths and minds were made to shut; they were made to open only in order to shut.” (Chesterton, "Illustrated London News," October 10, 1908)

“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” (Chesterton, Autobiography)

Joseph Ratzinger, in Truth and Tolerance has a section on the logical error of putting orthopraxis over orthodoxy. The Marxist proponents of the primacy of orthopraxis claim that "...one cannot comprehend the absolute, but one can do it. The question is: How, in fact? Whence do I derive right action if I have no idea what is right? The collapse of the Communist regimes resulted directly from the fact that they had changed the world without knowing what was good for the world and what was not; without knowing in what direction it must be changed so as to be better. Mere praxis gives no light." San Francisco: Igantius, 2004, 124.

Setting out is useless for those who know not where to go or why to go. You "get nowhere," as we say.

That is also where the star comes in. The star itself indicates God to them. The star itself proclaims the fundamental doctrines of faith: that God is real, that He is involved in history, that He guides men to Himself, that He owns and orders the cosmos. This is what the Church calls natural theology.

So the anti-doctrine rationalist bias separating the doctrines of faith from the journey of seeking Jesus Christ is erroneous theologically and philosophically. It is erroneous regarding faith and regarding reason, reason itself reveals doctrines of faith to those who look for God through the stars! Their very search is based on a doctrine of faith: "search for the truth!" That doctrine is based on another doctrine: "there is such a thing as truth!" And another, "you can find it, and it is a most worthy pursuit!" "It is good for man to look for the truth!" Here are an whole host of doctrines of natural faith, all based on the truth of the living God.

"For the invisible things of him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made; his eternal power also, and divinity: so that they are inexcusable." Romans 1:20

Now, if the message is simply that the faith journey is an essential element of faith and that God does reveal Himself to those who go out to find Him, then yes. But "the truths of faith" are essential and not contrary to that experience which itself may add to the "deposit" of faith truths for the individual. God does not cease to reveal himself in small and in great ways to those who journey to find Him. The Christian faith is indeed essentially a Way, a pilgrimage, intelligent, with grace, with and in the Church, and personal.

"Rarely has there been faith like to that of these three Eastern potentates; rarely has faith been so severely tested and so magnificently triumphant. It would be difficult to find faith in the Gospel like to theirs. by their faith they left their homes, by their faith they followed the star, by their faith they consulted the heads of the Jewish religion, and by their faith they recognised in the Babe of Bethlehem the Desired of the Nations, the Saviour of the World. In accepting this child, enveloped in obscurity, poverty and suffering from His birth, as their King and their Lord, they accepted His standards of value, His concept of life, and His principles of action."
Edward Leen, In the Likeness of Christ, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1936, 69-70.

The Jewish Anti-Resurrection Myth Conspiracy

The Gospel of this Second Day of Easter, Easter Monday, is Matthew 28:8-15 which records the encounter of the women with the risen Christ and their testimony to the Apostles, and the testimony of the soldiers who had witnessed the events of the Resurrection and reported it to the Jewish leaders. The Jewish leaders and the elders called a meeting and conspired to spread that lie blaspheming Christ and maligning the disciples of Christ. They paid the soldiers hush money with the order to spread that myth. The Gospel says that "this story has circulated among the Jews to the present day."

This anti-Christian Jewish myth calls to mind two modern lies of our present day, which are offshoots of that original big lie by the murderers of Christ and a direct fulfillment of today's Gospel: 1) the Enlightenment secular humanist cynicism which calls religion "the opium of the people," that all religion is simply an invention of men in power to manipulate and oppress people (popularized by the influence of Karl Marx, himself a Jew) and 2) The Black Legend which demonizes all things Catholic.

Those modern myths are part of the essence of a sort of anti-Catholic/anti-Christian/anti-God religion which is propagated, with supreme intolerance, in all of the public institutions of learning throughout the modern world and is effectively converting millions of souls in every generation to its anti-resurrection cause, the cause of Satan against Christ. Their great lie, which amounts to blasphemy and calumny, is that Jesus Christ and His followers should be liars and deceivers.*

Here is the passage.

"...[B]ehold, some of the guard [of the tomb] came into the city and reported to the chief priests all that had happened. And when they had assembled with the elders and had consulted together, they gave much money to the soldiers, telling them, "Say, 'His disciples came by night and stole him while we were sleeping.' And if the procurator hears of this, we will persuade him and keep you out of trouble." And they took the money, and did as they were instructed; and this story has been spread abroad among the Jews even to the present day." Matthew 28:8-15

This Jewish anti-Christian conspiracy also calls to mind another related fact. In our own day any Jew who converts to Christianity is expelled from the Jewish community. He is officially no longer considered a Jew by the Jewish people themselves, his own race and family will deny the fact that he is racially an ethnic Jew. He is totally cut off from his own people. There is a total rejection of Christ, the Messiah, the King of the Jews, and any of his disciples, to this day.

But "Scripture says, 'Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, chosen, precious; And he who believes in it shall not be put to shame.' For you, therefore, who believe is this honor; but to those who do not believe, "A stone which the builders rejected, the same has become the head of the corner,' and 'A stumbling-stone, and a rock of scandal,' to those who stumble at the word, and who do not believe. For this also they are destined." 1 Peter 2:6-9

And Peter, the first Pope calls on all men, beginning with the Jews, to lay aside lies and to embrace Jesus Christ, the Truth, the Way, the Truth and the Life, no one comes to the Father except through Him.

"Lay aside therefore all malice, and all deceit, and pretense, and envy, and all slander. Crave, as newborn babes, pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow to salvation; if, indeed, you have tasted that the Lord is sweet. Draw near to him, a living stone, rejected indeed by men but chosen and honored by God. Be you yourselves as living stones, built thereon into a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." 1 Peter 2:1-5

*As an example of the anti-Catholic bigotry of higher education consider the fate of the Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. It was considered intolerable that college students were converting to Catholicism in droves. But, "It is noteworthy that when students lose their faith while in college (years ago, the chaplain of the Newman club at Hunter College confided to me that 65 percent of Catholics lose their faith by their senior year), on one objects or even bats an eyelid. After all, the world tells us, colleges should open the minds of their students, and help them to get rid of their childish prejudices. Had students joined an oriental sect, become Buddhists or adepts or new Age, the news media would have remained silent. Had many of them shifted from one Protestant sect to another, it would not have been worth mentioning. But to become Roman Catholic, to enter into this dark fortress that robs people of their freedom and plunges them into a world of darkness and medieval ignorance: this was scandalous. Such people must be 'saved' from intellectual slavery. The work of the three professors--whose crime was to believe in the objectivity of truth and the universal validity of moral values--was destroyed." Father Francis Bethel, John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, Merrimack, New Hampshire: Thomas More College Press, 2016, xvii-xviii.

Another example would be the current massive conversions of people to Islam in the United States penitentiary systems. No one seems to mind as millions of people are indoctrinated and converted and taught to deny that Jesus Christ is God.

Holy Water Sprinkler (Aspergillum): Eastern Style

While in the Holy Land a few years ago, I came across the eastern style aspergillum. Very elegant and very practical. Below is a web-page on some very nice historic ones ("rosewater sprinklers") from China! Got to get one of those! I did acquire a very nice sterling silver one from Tiffany and Co. (about three inches tall-perfect for the pocket) of about a century ago, which I use on all my house blessings. Here is a link to a Lucknow which sold for £20,000.00 in 2010!

Next time you're in the Holy Land or India or anywhere in the Middle East or Far East pick one or two up for the parish, they are usually made of brass with etched designs and cost around $5-$20 for the basic types. A great deal! When I was in Bethlehem I bought a few for around $7 each, as I recall. However, one of them leaks (be careful at those shops). At Beit Sahour, a town just on the outskirts of Bethlehem has an Arabic Catholic Bookstore of Custodia Terrae Sanctae: Christ the King Book Store, which did have some nice brand new ones at around $30.

By Adrien von Ferscht

It was back in 2012 that I first wrote an article about Chinese Export Silver that was clearly made for the Islamic world. A further year of research has brought to light much more information; what was already an interesting niche in an even more interesting silver category has now become all the richer for this knew knowledge. For this reason, I’ve decided to revisit the subject in order to present a more complete picture.

By “the Islamic World”, in the context of Chinese Export Silver in the 18th and 19th centuries, we are talking of Arabia, South East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, the various “Stans” of southern Russia and Armenia. The silver, again in the context of Chinese Export Silver, is almost totally confined to rosewater sprinklers. What can be a highly decorative yet not particularly significant object in principle becomes quite a complex object in the context of silver made by Chinese artisans for cultures that are, in the main, not directly connected with China.

Firstly, the rosewater sprinkler is not an exclusively Islamic item, but it is intrinsically part of Islamic culture; it is to be found connected with Islam, Judaism and Hinduism and this has a relevancy when connected to Chinese silversmiths. The earliest silver that came into China in the Sung and Tang dynasties came from Sassania [modern-day Iran]. This silver, although created mainly by Jewish silversmiths that lived in Sassania, had what we would recognise today as having distinct Persian and Mediterranean influences. Many of those Jewish silversmiths eventually settled in Pien-Liang [Kaifeng] in China in the 10th century and carried on the family tradition of silversmithing down through the generations. Some 22 current Chinese surnames can trace their roots back to 10th century Kaifeng, including Ai, Gao, Jin, Li, Zhang, Shi and Zhau; a Jewish Chinese silversmith is to be found to this day in Kaifeng.  Two of these names, Jin and Shi, are equivalent to the traditional Jewish names of “Gold” and “Stone”. So it’s not totally incongruous that we find in the Qing dynasty – 1644-1912 [the last Imperial Chinese dynasty], Chinese Export Silver objects made specifically for the “Islamic” market; of these, the predominant was the rosewater sprinkler.

But it is probably us in the 20th and 21st centuries that regard the rosewater sprinkler as Islamic, when it was [and still is] used widely by Sephardi Jews in marriage ceremonies and ritual meals at Passover and New Year. At the Jewish festival of Shavuot [Pentecost], Sephardi Jews traditionally eat Sahlab andMahlabi, both rosewater infused dairy desserts. Certainly the Sassanian Jews would have used them – Sassania being modern-day Iran, but Sassanian Jews were not technically Sephardi; they were pre-Hasmonean Jews or remnants of the first exile after the destruction of the first temple in Jerusalem. Some Sassanian Jews also eventually settled in Bombay, again many of them being silversmiths. In the 18th and 19th centuries we have silver rosewater sprinklers being made in Canton and Bombay and is highly probable why it is often difficult to distinguish between Chinese and Indian work, especially before makers’ marks became the norm. Peranakan and Batavian silver rosewater sprinklers also have a similar style of work, silver filigree often being incorporated. The art of silver filigree was very much associated with Sephardi Jewish silversmiths. We also know that Jewish silversmiths took their filigree techniques with them when they were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century. Asian contacts in particular, not least through the founding of the Dutch East India Company, were to have a great influence on the further development of the technique of filigree. Jewish silversmiths, however, were adept at optimising ancient family and tribal links around the world; their trades and links were part of their naturally peripatetic survival mechanism. Karimnagar in Andra Pradesh and Trivandrum in Kerala were both known centres for highly superior silver filigree work; they also had significant Jewish populations. It is this ability to move their skills and their families to safer havens and the sharing of expertise with others that most probably helps account for the similarities between the various filigree silver work produced in South East Asia, the Indian sub-continent, North Africa and even Eastern Europe.

Rosewater sprinklers are also used in the Maha Shirvratri festival, a day dedicated to Shiva, a significant deity in Hinduism. Rosewater sprinklers have been used in the Indian sub-continent from the Mughal period (1526-1857) to the present day and are prevalent in many Islamic customs and rituals.

What is especially interesting is that given Chinese Export Silver is a large and highly significant silver category, we have almost no evidence of silver being made for use in Christian rituals. We have silver tankards in the high Chinese style that were adopted as novelty christening mugs but not specifically made as such, but hardly any chalices or other Christian ceremonial ware. Yet we do have Jewish “megillot” [scrolls of Esther] and Sabbath candlesticks and we have rosewater sprinklers that we can attribute to three religions, yet nothing overtly Christian. This is particularly strange since the China Trade had a predominance of Christian merchants from Great Britain and America. It’s a mystery yet to be unravelled. The only overtly Christian objects I’ve ever come across were made at T’ou Se We in Shanghai, which was run by Jesuit priests for Chinese orphans to learn artisan skills.

Perfumation and thurification have a very long history and can be traced back to prehistoric times. For thurification various types of incense burners were and are used until this day. For perfumation, rose-water was used that was stored and applied in specially made sprinklers. Rose, from which the rose-water was made, has a very long history. Some scholars claimed that the importance of the rose or indeed, the origin of roses, was discovered by the Persians – the biblical Hebrew for “rose” is “shoshannah”; the biblical Hebrew for Persia is “shushan”. Susa was the capital of Elam – residence of King Darius.

For storing perfumes the shape of the “tear bottles” or unguentaria was favoured. Evidence for the continuity of rose-water sprinklers is well provided by surviving bronze and later by copper and silver examples. The Arabic name for these rose-water sprinklers is qum-qum. In Iran and Central Asia, first of all in Afghanistan, such metal vessels became very popular and widespread during the early medieval Islamic period. There were several types made, but perhaps one of the earliest of these had pear-shaped bodies which was decorated with almond-shaped, or as they are sometimes called ‘tear-drop’ elements. These were not only decorative, but also functional since they provided better grips on the vessels. They had short waisted necks, opening mouths which had several small knobs around the rim. It is claimed that this type owes its origin to the earlier Roman bronze sprinklers. In Persian they are known as golabdan.

The word attar, which is today a synonym for rose oil essence, comes from the Arabic‘itr, meaning “perfume” or “essence.” The first description of the distillation of rose petals was written by the ninth-century philosopher al-Kindi, and more sophisticated equipment was described in the 10th century by al-Razi; one of the earliest centers of rose-water production was in southern Persia. Later, in the 13th century, rose water was produced widely in Syria, and the name of the oil-bearing rose genus Damascena may trace its origins to the city of Damascus. But true attar—rose oil as we know it today—was not produced until the late 16th century, when the double-distillation technique was developed.

Hand-held rose-water sprinklers, traditionally made with long straight necks and bulbous bottoms, have a time-honoured role in festivities in much of the Islamic world. To mark the end of a wedding feast, rose water is sprinkled on the hands and faces of guests; at a Sephardi Jewish wedding guests are greeted with the same ritual. Aesthetic appreciation and commercial demand have encouraged silversmiths and other artisans to develop exceptionally beautiful sprinklers, examples of which can be found in museums throughout the Arabian Gulf region. In the home, a precious rose-water sprinkler is a symbol of hospitality and, incidentally, a demonstration of social standing and affluence.

Rose water sprinklers were more often than not originally made as pairs. Today, it is a matching pair that will have enhanced value due their rarity.

Pictured right we have a particular fine example of a pair of late 18th century parcel gilt filigree rosewater sprinklers. This is actually a good example of silver filigree work not being able to be exactly identified, since these could either be Chinese or Batavian. Now part of the collection at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, they do come with the provenance of having been listed in the inventory of the Duke of Portland’s country seat at Welbeck Abbey. The early dating of these sprinkler would account for the lack of maker’s mark. Chinese Export Silver makers had not yet adopted the use of marks and Batavian silversmiths might well have been Chinese; only silversmiths who had converted to Christianity were required to mark their silver after 1730.

Shown left, we have one of the finest examples of Chinese Export Silver rosewater sprinklers on the planet in the shape of this exquisite pair of silver gilt and enamel filigree sprinklers that are part of the toilet set of Catherine the Great. They date from the mid 18th century and were acquired in 1789 from the Winter Palace main collection; they now sit in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

They have a globular body, long neck and flower-shaped perforated mouth for sprinkling. This shape originated in the Near East and became popular in India, China and even in Europe in the 18th century but are equally in the high Rococo style that Catherine admired so much. Such vessels were made from different materials including silver, porcelain or enamel. Both bottles were modelled from a sheet of silver, gilded and dressed into thin openwork gilded filigree of different designs. On the sides the sprinklers are decorated with small branches of flowers and leaves, cut from a silver sheet, gilded and covered with blue and green enamel and paint. The branches are fixed with wires.

Catherine the Great, probably one of the most voracious collectors of the 18th century, had an obsession of all things Chinese; one of many obsessions she maintained most of her life.

Here [right] we see the sprinklers in the context of the complete 32-object priceless toilet set. The objects of the toilet set were made in pairs and organized on a table symmetrically around the mirror. The exquisite and fragile pieces are made in such a way that we still admire the skill of the Chinese silversmiths: they look like a silver lace. The granulation is rarely used, but sometimes we can see additional decoration with gilding, enamelling, painting or with feathers and silk. The Chinese filigree has not still been surpassed in workmanship and thinness.

Apart from articles for the toilet of an aristocratic lady, there are two groups of decorative sculptures included into the set – pairs of birds on stands with branches and trees. They are brightened with paint, silk and feathers. The elaborate mirror and toilet set of Chinese make of the mid-18th century are still unique in the fineness of execution and completeness. Only a few similar individual objects or smaller groups can be found in other important collections, including  the collection of Lord Clive of Plassey [aka Clive of India] at Powis Castle, Wales and are listed in the 1774-5 inventory, some pieces of which we see on above right, including the Chinese Export Silver, silver gilt and enamel rosewater sprinkler.

On the left we have a single late 18th century Chinese Export Silver filigree rosewater sprinkler, made in Canton it is said for the Indian market. Very much in the high rococo style of their Catherine the Great counterparts – the globular body between two squat bulbous mounts on an arched foot, the tall slender neck rising to a terminal of stylised floral form. Silver and parcel gilt filigree decoration throughout with swirls and cellwork applied with enamel workflowers and vines.

This particular piece was sold at auction at Bonhams, London in April 2013 for $7600.

We have to contemplate whether rosewater sprinklers are, in fact, Islamic or is it a misperception due to our romantic ideal of the east and the orient. My own research indicates that it is a multi-cultural object that has its roots in ancient Persia. Which brings us back to the 10th century silversmiths in Kaifeng, because the rosewater sprinkler is also used in an ancient ceremony practiced by Sephardi Jews to mark the end of the Sabbath and the start of the new week; the Havdalah ceremony. Its name comes from the Hebrew word L’Havdel, meaning to separate or distinguish. It marks the separation of the Sabbath from the rest of the week. There are two blessings, the second is a blessing over spices. This is the only instance in Judaism when aromatics are used ritually. The use of rosewater pre-dates the more commonly used spices today by thousands of years, the container dispensing this being a rosewater sprinkler. The blessing contains the words Hebrew words borei minei besamim [who has created various fragrances]. All this would have been very familiar to the 10th century Kaifeng silversmiths.  On the right, we see a late 19th century Ottoman silver rosewater sprinkler specifically made for Havdalah, because the base [below left] has 3 Hebrew letters inscribed bet; mem; bet – standing for borei minei besamim.

It is not inconceivable, therefore, that many of the Jewish merchant families connected with the China Trade, such as the Sassoons and the Khadoories would have been using Chinese Export Silver rosewater sprinklers for Havdalah, while Maharajahs, Muslims and Hindus would have used them for other purposes, leaving Catherine the Great and Clive of India to treasure their decorative merits.

Finally, we should not forget that rosewater was and still is widely used in Arab, Persian, Indian and Sephardi Jewish cuisine and that rosewater sprinklers, apart from their ritual and decorative uses, would also have been used in the same way as condiment sets on a festive table.

______________________________________________________________________________________

Adrien von Ferscht is an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for China Research

Adrien von Ferscht is the Worthologist expert for Chinese Export Silver

This article also appears on MUSEUMSTUDIES.tumblr.com 

http://museumstudies.tumblr.com/post/56767785181/chinese-export-silver-in-the-islamic-world

Anti-Catholic Ideologies: The Sons of Judah

Judaism*

Islamism

Protestantism

Enlightenment Rationalism/Secularism

Communism

__

All of these present day ideologies have been violently opposed to Catholic/Orthodox aristocratic society, the Christian ordering of society under the watchful care of the Christ-instituted apostolic succession, with the consequent Catholic/Christian realms and aristocracies. They all are ideologically opposed to Christendom and the reign of Christ in the world, in His Church, the Catholic Church. The progenitor of this transhistorical anti-Christ is Judaism, which actually killed Christ, and which, to some degree, has spawned and, at least encourages them all, to our own day.

Notice, for example, that the outcome of communism is the destruction of Catholic aristocracies. It is a curious fact that communism, that Jewish/English invention has never been imposed on any possessions of the English Commonwealth nor on any Muslim country. It is almost exclusively used to destroy erstwhile prosperous Catholic countries like Cuba and Venezuela, etc. This ideological alliance solves that great modern political puzzle.

__
John Chapter 11

47 The chief priests therefore, and the Pharisees, gathered a council, and said: What do we, for this man doth many miracles?

48 If we let him alone so, all will believe in him; and the Romans will come, and take away our place and nation.

49 But one of them, named Caiphas, being the high priest that year, said to them: You know nothing.

50 Neither do you consider that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.

51 And this he spoke not of himself: but being the high priest of that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation.

52 And not only for the nation, but to gather together in one the children of God, that were dispersed.

53 From that day therefore they devised to put him to death.

Jews Conspire With Roman Soldiers Concocting the Body Snatching Myth Against Christians

__

The Prophesy to Judah is Fulfilled in Christ, the true King David of the Tribe of Judah

The Prophesy

Genesis 49

8 Juda, thee shall thy brethren praise: thy hands shall be on the necks of thy enemies: the sons of thy father shall bow down to thee.

9 Juda is a lion's whelp: to the prey, my son, thou art gone up: resting thou hast couched as a lion, and as a lioness, who shall rouse him?

10 The sceptre shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till he come that is to be sent, and he shall be the expectation of nations.

11 Tying his foal to the vineyard, and his ass, O my son, to the vine. He shall wash his robe in wine, and his garment in the blood of the grape.

12 His eyes are more beautiful than wine, and his teeth whiter than milk.

The Fulfillment

Apocalypse Chapter 5

5 And one of the ancients said to me: Weep not; behold the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

6 And I saw: and behold in the midst of the throne and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the ancients, a Lamb standing as it were slain, having seven horns and seven eyes: which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth.

7 And he came and took the book out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne.

8 And when he had opened the book, the four living creatures, and the four and twenty ancients fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints:

9 And they sung a new canticle, saying: Thou art worthy, O Lord, to take the book, and to open the seals thereof; because thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God, in thy blood, out of every tribe, and tongue, and people, and nation.

10 And hast made us to our God a kingdom and priests, and we shall reign on the earth.

11 And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures, and the ancients; and the number of them was thousands of thousands,

12 Saying with a loud voice: The Lamb that was slain is worthy to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and benediction.

13 And every creature, which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them: I heard all saying: To him that sitteth on the throne, and to the Lamb, benediction, and honour, and glory, and power, for ever and ever.

14 And the four living creatures said: Amen. And the four and twenty ancients fell down on their faces, and adored him that liveth for ever and ever.

Jesus Christ is the King of the Jews, Who Reigns Forever and Ever, Woe to Those Who Oppose Him or in any way Attempt to Destroy Him or His Reign! All men need to convert and come to the knowledge and love of Christ the Lord!

*Judaism here is referenced as an ideology which rejects Jesus Christ, that He is the Son of God, that He is God. It does not mean all the Jews or, even less, all the Semites. Jesus Christ Himself, His Mother Mary and most of the Apostles are ethnic Jews. Cf. E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Fidelity Press: South Bend, Indiana, 2015, pp. 1031ff.