The Naked Crowd: The Jewish Alternative to Cunning Humanity by José Faur

The Naked Crowd: The Jewish Alternative to Cunning Humanity

by José Faur

Cover of The Naked Crowd Are You Being Deceived?

For thousands of years, humanity has suffered at the hands of cunning tyrants, individual men who use charm, rhetoric, and deception to maintain power over the masses. From the ancient times of the biblical tyrant Nimrod and the Pharaohs, through the terrible reigns of the Caesars, to the despotic regimes of the Hitlers and Stalins of more recent times, human society has been structured to benefit those in power at the expense of the common people. The sole exception to this arrangement - the only society to be formed around the needs and rights of its members and not the selfish whims of flesh-and-blood rulers - is the Jewish society. Thousands of years ago, the Jewish nation became what Nobel laureate Elias Canetti called a "naked crowd"; a society built on transparency and inclusiveness, impervious to the attempts of would-be tyrants to control the "crowd" through mind-games, linguistic manipulation, and mass hysteria. While the Jewish people have, over the course of history, occasionally lost touch with this foundation of their society, they have never lost the dream of a truly free society for all.

In this book, José Faur articulates the essence of the Jewish alternative to the cunning societies of world history.

Welcome to the Naked Crowd.

Chapters include:

The Iberian and German Experience
The Anti-Maimonidean Ideology
The Effects of the Anti-Maimonidean Ideology on the Mind-Set of Modern European Jewry
Ejecting the God of Sinai
The Kindness of Strangers
La Suprema and Scripted Truth
Cunning Humanity
The Emergence of Greek Rationality
Seizing the Snake by its Tail
The Hebrew Alternative: A sacar! A juntar!
The Four Phases of Hebrew Wisdom
Nakedness in Paradise
Paradise Regained
En route to the Promised Land
The Berit at Sinai
God and Man in Jewish Thought
The Berit Contracted at Sinai-Moab
Morality, Exclusiveness, and Universality
Monolatry and Idolatry
Election, Love, and Redemption
Re-designing Adam and Eve
Paul and the Spirituality of Metis
Paul the Man
Paul's God same as his "Father in the Flesh"
Wedding Widow Israel
Oedipal Theology
Mitigating Oedipal Tension
"Sold Under Sin"
Paul, "a Roman to Romans" - in Earnest!
Paul and Rome: Putting their Shoulders to the Wheel