By David Garrett, from the Oporto Jewish Community, Portugal

On February 5 of this year, the author published an open letter addressed to the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, in which he pointed out similarities between him and Dostoyevsky in the danger of some of his writings about the Jewish people. The fact that Dugin has hundreds of thousands of followers and the impact that his philosophy may have on future generations cannot be underestimated.

Today, a new open letter is necessary, as the philosopher has returned to the charge with a striking new article entitled ‘Modernity is a sin of Satan and abandonment of the faith in the One God’. It compares contemporary Jewish leadership to Ba’al, the pagan deity who rivaled the God of Israel (Yahweh) and who tried to lead Israel astray, as once happened in reigns of bad memory.

Epstein was Jewish, it is true. Some attendees of his festivities and macabre rituals, were Jews, for sure. What is not correct is the appropriation of particular names of Jews completely dissociated from Judaism, to characterize them as a world Jewish elite that wants to drag the rest of humanity into chaos and infect it with a deadly virus.

The comparison is perhaps excessive, but the Nazis did the same with Stalin, connecting him to the Jewish world, placing him as a server to Jewish interests, despite knowing from the outset that the Jews were facing one of the greatest persecutions that their history of three millennia has known. Yes, Stalin's nickname was Djougashvili. Yes, "Djou" referred to the ancient island of Hormuz, part of the Portuguese Empire, while the suffix "shvili" means "son of". Yes, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, "thousands of Portuguese Jews" headed to the island of Djou and "there they prospered in silk and horse trading and as moneylenders", from the account of Zechariah Al-Dairi and many other minor authors. Yes, the Portuguese Fort "Nossa Senhora da Vitória", created by Afonso de Albuquerque in 1507, never knew peace under the permanent siege of Persians and Ottomans. Yes, the island was eventually taken from the Portuguese in 1622 by the Shah and the British East India Company, at a time when the Jewish community and its Hindu peers had already left for other territories. Yes, these are probably the origins of the Djougachvili family from Georgia. Yes, Stalin's son was named Jacob. Yes, Leon Trotsky wrote that Stalin married, for the third time, to "Rosa Kaganovich", an alleged sister of Lazar Kaganovich. Yes, after the fall of the USSR, the Kaganovich family, while distancing themselves from any blood relationship with Stalin, recognized that there was indeed a Rosa, who was Lazar's niece, daughter of his sister Rachel, and who lived in Rostov-on-Don.

There may have been a kernel of truth in Nazi propaganda hostile to Stalin, but the fact that he had no formal connection to Judaism and that, on the contrary, he hated Jews, massacred Jews, stole everything they owned and threw them into the gulags was concealed. According to Stalin's daughter, he "lived with an absolute anti-Jewish obsession" and "even saw Jews under his bed". These are the facts, just as it is a fact that Epstein left written in his own hand that he "hated" the Jewish state.

In the Jewish religious world, the worship of Ba’al symbolizes the greatest possible antagonism to Judaism. It is unbelievable that anyone would claim in good faith that the people of Israel oscillate between serving God and serving Ba’al, which in this case encompasses the most perverse idolatries existing among ancient peoples and includes sexual aberrations, sacred prostitution, human sacrifices to Moloch, and even worse perversions.

The essence of the Jewish people is their devotion to God. It is the fact that they are human that makes them individually inclined to both good and bad. If the yetzer hara (the evil inclination) causes many Jews to deviate from the path of God, as has always happened throughout history, this does not mean that devotion to Ba’al is part of their essence.

It seems hard that the author of these lines feels the need to affirm and underline, in the twenty-first century, and in response to a renowned philosopher, something as simple as the fact that Jews are human beings. Even this statement, apparently so simple to understand, requires more explanations, because Dugin seems to be unaware of what a Jew is. At Mount Sinai, when the "general conversion" took place 3300 years ago, most of the people who were there were not Hebrews, but slaves of other nations. From the very beginning, the Jewish people not only had a special relationship with God to contribute to the Creation that does not cease, but also had in their blood all humanity, all nations, which the fact of marriages has made inevitable.

The practice of evil is a human problem, not a Jewish one. Dugin often makes somewhat confusing considerations about the erev rav, and frankly, it's unclear whether he understands the meaning of the term. As detailed in Kabbalah, the erev rav is the deviant Jew, who poses a danger to society and thus to the Jewish people. He wears the clothes of good, but tries to lead all the souls around him astray from the right path, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. He is a foolish person, who harms himself and others and who must be "expelled from the camp" as happened to deviant Jews in the desert, after leaving Egypt.

From as early as the Revelation on Mount Sinai, the story of the golden calf and the hostility that this statue provoked among the common Jew became known. Similar examples can be found in all ethical and religious civilizations and cultures. There is no point in the Russian philosopher saying that the Jews can be "the best of the best", when he immediately puts them with the "worst of the worst" who run humanity.

The Soviets, in order to protect themselves from the international press and not be accused of generalized antisemitism, praised and gave voice to two handfuls of Muscovite Jews connected with "the Party", in order to destroy at the same time the Judaism of millions of Jews, as in fact they did, with corrupt use of the press and the police, a state policy that has never ceased.

The Russian philosopher should know, and he has an obligation to know, that Zionism is not representative of Judaism and that it cannot be related to evil (Ba’al). Dugin's demonization of Zionism by mentioning a kind of world government under Zionist control, a classic conspiracy theory of traditional antisemitism that tries to blame Jews/Zionists for all the problems affecting humanity, is unacceptable. It is astonishing that a renowned philosopher makes no effort to refer even to the complexity and historical diversity of religious, socialist, nationalist Zionism and its origin as a national movement of the Jewish people in response to the antisemitism existing in Eastern Europe and the need for a land for Holocaust survivors.

In summary, his discourse is hateful, because it dehumanizes Jews, the individual Jew, the collective Jew (community), and the Jew of the nations, making them the scapegoat responsible for contemporary universal problems. Not a single word is devoted to the great contributions made by the Jews and Israelites in the modern era. Modernity is not inherently negative.

Yesterday, in Iran, a statue of Ba’al was burned amid cries hostile to the Jews, the West and the State of Israel. As can be seen, it was not necessary to wait centuries to see the effects of the thoughts of Alexander Dugin and other authors who uncritically embraced their philosophy.