"The Jews"

"He's mad about conspiracy theories."

"Too much time on his hands."

"A lack of industry."

"He's probably somewhere on the Spectrum, so go a bit easy on him."

"Full of odd ideas about the Jews controlling the banks."

"Well, they do."

"What?" I inquired amid coffee after the Divine Liturgy, my conversants being visitors from an unnamed setting.

"Really? I had no idea!"

"Yes, they created the Federal Reserve in 1917, or something like that, to control the banks. The Rothschilds control 80% of the world's banks. But the Russians and Putin, who's a great Christian man, threw the Rothschilds out of Russia, so at least there is one Christian nation out there."

"You know," I trolled, "the Rothschilds got the Pacelli family into the Vatican."

They were not phased.

"And the Jews really invented Communism just so they'd have control over both conservative and modern governments. It's really ingenious."

"Who, pray tell," I asked, "are 'The Jews'?"

What followed was indiscernable, "paranoid style" clap trap so very typically of disempowered groups convinced of the self-evident goodness of their own ideas and so who can only explain the failure of those ideas with conspiracy and shadow. Who, I repeat, are "the Jews" in the context of this conversation? Can the Rabbi in Dallas put me in touch with the London or Neapolitan Rothschilds? I would like to join the New World Order; it sounds more lucrative than my current profession.

This sort of ignorant nonsense—Ignorance and Want being Charles Dickens' two great crimes—greatly hinders real and significant engagement that needs to take place with the Jewish diaspora. The systemic attempt by Hitler's Germany to exterminate ethnic Jews remains the most vivid and remarkable cruelty of the media age. Unfortunately, a lingering consequence of the "Final Solution" is that countries and cultures are more disposed to produce policy based on lasting guilt than on prudence.

The creation of a Jewish state had long been considered before World War II and after the War the Allied powers gave the Zionist pipe-dream of occupying the Palestinian coastline an eventuation in reality. Of all Great Britain's mistakes following the collapse of its Empire, and there were many, this was the greatest: to locate an ethnic and religious minority, who had not lived in that land since the days of Tiberius, in a hotbed of religious turmoil just as that place was entering modernity and putting off the hijab. Between the various players in the Middle East this writer is unconvinced there are any good guys, just lesser degrees of bad guys. Would it be terrible still without that 1947 United Nations decision? Yes. Would it be less bad? Absolutely.

James Meyer de Rothschild, Order of St George

And then there is the lasting identity that comes from what transpired in Germany during the Austrian corporal's reign. Jewish culture is not the only one which has made its victimhood from genocide a central element to its modern culture, but it certainly has done so to a point unprecedented by contrast with similarly suffering ethnic parties. No one who doubts what Hitler did will escape the label "Holocaust denier"; such a person can expect to lose his job, his livelihood, and any place in polite society. Meanwhile the European Union did not recognize the Holodomor—Stalin's deliberate starvation of Ukraine which resulted in comparable deaths to the Holocaust—until 2008; the United States has yet to recognize the event officially, although there have been commemorative events. Perhaps most alarmingly governments have been slow to recognize the Armenian genocide outside of Western Europe. Like what transpired in Germany, an ambitious government sought an orderly extermination of what it viewed as a potentially subversive minority; the Turks were just as evil as the Nazis, if less effective. Armenian immigrants in America have made recognition of the deplorable genocide a desiderium that hews them to their native culture. The younger, second generation Armenians are less enamored with the cause and find the cultural identification around genocide understandable if a bit morbid.

Which brings us back to post-Liturgy coffee hour. One could reasonably ascribe some of the Church's current malaise to post-War guilt; one only need listen to the Polish and German popes comments about 1944 Germany and the Vatican's resolute post-Conciliar optimism to see a Church racked with guilt over the idea that they contributed to a world which made the Austrian corporal possible. But if "the Jews" and Rothschilds are wholesale to blame for current woes perhaps such conspiracy theorists would better suited by ignoring the Federal Reserve and instead looking into that loan James Rothschild gave Gregory XVI.

Or maybe we should get out of coffee hour and talk to others about God rather than reflect within our own porous fortress.