The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit
Introduction

On September 12, 2006, Joseph Ratzinger made a triumphal return to his native Bavaria. Having chosen the name of Benedict XVI when he was elected pope, His Holiness returned not only to Germany but to the German university of Regensburg to express his gratitude for the time he spent there as a professor and to renew the Church’s commitment to the university. But more than that, Pope Benedict wanted to re-affirm the Church’s position on the relationship between faith and reason. In order to do that he had to refer to a tradition where that relationship has not been so complementary, a tradition which stands outside of Europe, namely, Islam.

Heirs to a long tradition of antisemitism, many Poles collaborated with the Nazis, betraying their Jewish friends and neighbors.

1648 Annus Mirabilis 

According to the Zohar, the year 1648 was to be the mystical year of resurrection, when the Jews could expect deliverance from their more than millennium long exile. Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew, a devotee of the Enlightenment and author of one of the most frequently cited histories of the Jewish people, calls the Zohar that "lying book" and by extension impugns the entire Kabbalistic tradition. Since the Enlightenment was in many ways a direct result of the disappointment which followed from the failure of the Messianic expectations which reached their fever pitch and denouement in the second half of the 17th century, his skepticism is understandable, as is his scorn for the Kaballah, the mish-mash what he considered Gnostic and Talmudic mumbo-jumbo that had led to the rise and fall of Messianic hope in the first place. Graetz espoused a worldview which was the complete antithesis of the Messianic fever of the mid-17th century. He was so convinced in his opposition to the Kaballah because he had the benefit of historical hindsight and could see where its vaporous illusions were leading the Jewish people. Expectation of redemption fostered by widespread dissemination of Kabbalistic doctrine made the Jews, in Graetz’s words, "more reckless and careless than was their custom at other times."