After Dachau by Daniel Quinn Page B

from ancient times to the present. But this last thing is exactly what Miss Hastings has forgotten and what I’d like you to reconstruct for her.”
    Their eyes widened in alarm.
    “Miss Crenevant tells me that what you’ve been reviewing here is the period between the birth of Christ and the Great War. Is that right?”
    They nodded warily, as if they thought anything more exuberant might encourage me to spring a surprise quiz on them.
    “What did the combatants in the Great War think it was all about? Can you tell me that?”
    The girls shifted uneasily in their seats.
    Miss Crenevant stepped in to give them a hint. “You remember we discussed why, at the time, the war was so difficult for the combatants to understand or explain, even to each other.”
    After a moment the foxy-faced Sylvia shot her hand up into the air and began waggling it furiously.
    “Go ahead, Sylvia,” I said, taking charge.
    “They weren’t looking far enough back,” she said. “They didn’t see that this was just the final battle in a war that had been going on for almost two thousand years.”
    “A covert, undeclared war,” Miss Crenevant added, setting the record straight. “Carried on without guns and bombs. By other means.”
    I nodded. “I learned the same thing when I was in school—and so did Miss Hastings, of course, though she has utterly no memory of it now. She’s in the same position as the combatants in the Great War. That’s what we’re here to correct today. Who were the perpetrators of this covert two-thousand-year-old war?”
    The girls’ eyes widened in surprise. Surely it wasn’t going to be
this
easy! This was kindergarten stuff. A dozen voices supplied the answer:
    “The Jews!”
    I sensed, rather than saw, Mallory stiffen at my side.
    “And who was the war being waged against?”
    “Us!”
    “What was the background of the war? Why were the Jews waging war on us?”
    This was a bit more challenging. After a moment’s silence, Miss Crenevant fastened her eyes on the dark beauty known as Etta and reminded her that she had written her mid-term paper on this very subject. Even so, it took Etta a few seconds to connect her paper to my question. When she finally had it, it came out almost by rote.
    “The Aryan race in its European homeland represented the high-water mark of human evolution. Natural selection had made the Aryans the cream, the elite. The rest, for the most part, were just savages at one stage or another. They didn’t know or care that one race had stepped ahead on the evolutionary scale—except for the Jews. The Jews knew and cared, and they wanted to supplant the Aryans as the elite of the human race. Or if they couldn’t supplant them, they wanted to control them—manipulate them covertly. This is the background you need to have in order to understand the whole story.”
    “Okay,” I said. “But this period in history you’re studying begins with the birth of Christ. Why there? What did Christ have to do with it?”
    “He was a Jew,” someone noted.
    “Certainly, but why begin with this particular Jew? Why not with Moses?”
    After a bit of dithering, Sylvia took a stab at it. “At the time when Christ died, the Jews were not a tremendous force in the world.”
    “Yes, that’s true, but why does it matter?”
    “Because Christianity opened up the world to Jewish ideas.”
    “You’ll have to expand on that a little bit,” I told her. “It sounds almost like a contradiction.”
    “The original followers of Jesus were Jews living in Jerusalem. They thought of Jesus as one of themselves (which he was, of course), with a message for the Jewish people. Christianity, to the extent that it existed as a separate thing, was a Jewish religion, originally.”
    “Go on.”
    “It was Paul who thought of exporting it to the Roman world. But to do that, he had to … he had to—what’s the word I want?—he had to revamp it. The religion as it was being practiced in Jerusalem