CHAPTER
III
CRYPTOJUDAISM AND OPUS DEI
3. The Jewish roots of Escrivá
de Balaguer
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We reach the secret secretorum, the most stealthy key of those kept in
the impenetrable silence of the Work, the ineffable and also the most
absolute truth that must be clarified, discovered and revealed. These
are the Mosaic roots of the founder of Opus Dei and his work in the
service of Israel and its finances.
We should not forget the exact and extensive name of his own creation,
which generally remains, despite being the official and registered
name, in the ostracism of deliberate omission. The name of Opus Dei is
"Priestly Society of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei," and in its very name
the key to a mystery is closed, the enigma of which has been deciphered
by the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, who wrote in his well-known and
widely read History of the Sows the following: "in Barcelona, where if
a Sow said 'Let's go today to the Church of the Holy Cross,' he was
referring to the secret synagogue so called. (69) It is a suspicious
coincidence that the name chosen by Escrivá de Balaguer for his
organization coincides exactly and cryptically with that of the "secret
synagogue" in the language used by the Jews.
One can be aware that talking about the Jewish subject, and especially
if it alludes to it without praise, is a taboo subject. We must begin
to call things by their name, to say that in Escrivá de
Balaguer's mind a Jewish brain was seething, that Escriba - which was
his real name - was a crypto-Jew and that it is not possible to
understand his work or to interpret it if it is not related to the
essential phenomenon of his inner and outer Judaism.
Escriva has dissimulation in his blood, just as his fellow Jews do; he
is a Pharisee and a hypocrite who believes in the Talmud and its
teachings more than in the Gospel and its Good News.
Escriva is going to use the Church as an instrument to form little
groups where unwitting Christians will be the victims of the
machination.
In the biographies of Escrivá de Balaguer we miss three
essential elements of his nefarious personality; three basic facts are
disguised in order to understand the man and his Work: that is, that
Escrivá is a Jew, that he was practically a homosexual, and that
he created Opus Dei to serve the ends of the hidden and sinister Jewish
power, never for the greater glory of God and his Church. Escriva uses
the Church and not vice versa.
Right from the start, we may be suspicious of the fact that Escriva
changed his name so often during his lifetime, a practice common among
Jews. The undoubted and truthful document of his surname is that of
Escriba, and so it is inscribed in the Register. The surname Escriba,
if we stick to its etymological meaning, is derived from the Latin
voice scriba, which means "doctor and interpreter of the law among the
Hebrews" according to the first and main acceptance of the Dictionary
of the Spanish Language. (70)
In the Mosaic law "sofer", the archaic Hebrew root meaning to write, is
used to designate the scribe, male - women are forbidden to be scholars
and interpreters of the Law - consecrated to the strict observance of
Jewish law. Ezra was called "a scribe or a doctor very skilled in the
law of Moses" (Ezra VII, 6) who is instructed in the word and the
prescriptions imposed by the Lord who covenants and allies himself with
the people of Israel. The scribe was therefore the priest.
The scribes were very influential in the courts of Judah and Israel,
especially during the reign of David and Solomon. In Ecclesiasticus,
chapter XXXIX, their relevance as repositories of wisdom and prophecy
is considered. In the Solomonic era there were even schools that
prepared for these tasks. In Deuteronomy XVI, the scribes are also
assigned judicial functions.
The scribes, from their captivity in Babylon, will be the doctors of
the Law. They were the scribe-priests. Their influence led them to
dominate under their tutelage the people who considered the profession
of scribe as "the most noble", as watchmen and hermeneutics of the
Mosaic Law . The scribes grouped and organized themselves in the
synagogues, dividing themselves into tendencies such as the Sadducees,
the Pharisees, or the Essenes.
In the beginning the scribes of Israel followed the oral tradition for
their work. Later they collected the maxims that they spread and made
to be observed in the Mischna. The first and foremost duty of the
scribes was to zealously collect the Jewish Law. Thus, the Talmud
prescribes that "he who forgets the precept, taught by the scribe,
spoils his life.
Before becoming scribes, they went through an apprenticeship. They were
Talmids, that is, students who, in contact with their teacher, received
his teachings and from the age of 40, if they had assimilated the
subject, they were ordained doctors (hakam). The scribe was the
authority to resolve legislative, religious and ritual issues. They
held the key positions in law, administration and teaching.
Only the scribes were allowed access to the Sanhedrin. The Pharisee
party of the Sanhedrim was composed entirely of scribes. The scribes
were par excellence the bearers of a secret science: "the esoteric
tradition". The cabala was the hermetic science of the scribes who
reserved their knowledge. In Jerusalem, where they explained their
teachings, the people sat at their feet, as a sign of submission. This
account or interpretative key is the patronymic charge that Joseph Mary
Scribe carries in his blood and in his genes.
The people of his original surname Escriba is equivalent to a rabbi. He
carries his origin in his own family name. If he is called a scribe it
is because his ancestors, more or less distant, close or remote, were
"doctors and interpreters of the law among the Hebrews", that is,
rabbis. Christ, in his Gospel, speaks of the character and disposition,
in many of his passages, of the "scribes and Pharisees", who they were,
how they behaved, what their feelings were and how great their
duplicity was.
Escrivá de Balaguer was a Jew by blood and spirit.
His work, the sect of which he is the charismatic leader, is made in
the image and likeness of the small and impenetrable Jewish
communities. Opus Dei is still a ghetto, its laws and statutes obscure,
untranslated and hidden, its lack of sincerity with respect to its
other brothers and sisters, the Christians, to whom they deny their
membership of the clan, their mutual aid, but only among themselves,
their zeal for profit and money, the monetarist sense they imprint on
their lives, the worship of the Golden Calf, the words and passwords
they use, the wills they force upon them and all their paraphernalia
are the extrapolation of the laws of Kahal embedded in the Church.
Escriva may appear to be Christian, but his background is Jewish. As
Jewish as the trade of his father, a cloth merchant, typical of the
Hebrew and sow communities. The history of the Jewish community of
Huesca provides countless examples of this. Among the shops of the
Jewish quarter in 1238 there was a famous one, that of the silk
merchant Abraim Aborrave. It is also known that a certain Xalema Xuri
was a silk merchant and supplier to the royal house. (71) Already in
1290, the members of the Huesca aljama were granted the power to run
dry-cleaning shops for rags from France. There is also news of the
Jewish trade in textiles, having stood out for its significance, apart
from those already mentioned, the ragman from Huesca Abrahim Alamaca,
or the Jews Solomon Ablatorell and Mosse Abulbaca, ragmen from Huesca
like the father of Escriva, who in the year 1311 were sanctioned and
condemned to pay 1500 salaries and compensation for the purchase of
textiles, knowing that they were stolen in the town of Sariñena
by the also Jewish Caredin.
So deep-rooted and widespread was the involvement of the Jews in Huesca
and its territory - where Escrivá de Balaguer comes from and is
a native - in the textile business and trade, that in the capital there
was even a silk quarter within the Jewish quarter. (72) Among the
activities of the Jews in Huesca we find those of doctors, spice
makers, halberdiers, pinchers, silk workers, silversmiths, dyers,
tailors, rag pickers, merchants and moneylenders. (73) Escrivá's
family was engaged in one of the usual trades of those of his tribe,
that is, in the business and trade of cloth, and as indicated in
chapter II of this work, the father, after committing a collective
swindle in Barbastro on his neighbors, did not stay in the town to meet
his obligations and responsibilities, but fled at night to consummate
the swindle and not have to pay his creditors.
Escriba is a descendant of the rabbis of Huesca and its demarcation. In
1480 there were 9 rabbis in Huesca who practiced in the aljama, which
is the preferred voice of the scribes to designate the Jewish
community. The aljamas were concentrated and located in the call or
streeter, a term that derives from the Hebrew kahal, community or
neighborhood where the Semites were grouped.
In Barbastro there was an influential Jewish nucleus and both the
rabbinate and the disgorging were offices provided by royal
commandment. (74)
There was a synagogue, and the story goes that the
Jews of Barbastro tore down the old synagogue of the town and built a
new one because of the size of the larger community. King Alfonso III
himself, upon learning of the uprising and construction of the new
synagogue to house more Jews in Barbastro, ordered, while the king was
in Ejea on October 3, 1287, to recognize the work and ordered that if
it was larger than the previous synagogue, to proceed against the
aljama.
An interesting and curious document in relation to the crypto Jews of
Barbastro is found in Konrad Eubaer who informs us in his work how Pope
Benedict XIII, on April 27th 1415, orders the barter of the synagogue
of Barbastro into a church because the Jews of his aljama converted to
Christianity. (75)
Barbastro was the fifth most important Jewish
quarter in Aragon and the aljama was located in the vicinity of the
city's castle of La Zuda, next to the wall, where James I granted the
powerful Jewish community authorisation in April 1271 to open a gate in
the wall, so that they could enter directly from the road to Huesca,
with a width that could be travelled by both men and beasts of burden.
The aljama of Barbastro was one of those denounced for usury, which
gave cause to open an investigation that ended with the imposition of
the payment of 1000 salaries in April 1298.
The phenomenon of false conversions of Jews to Christianity in the area
of Huesca began from the very moment of the conquest of Huesca by the
Aragonese King Peter I in 1096. The cases of Rabbi Moisés
Safardó are famous. He was baptized in the cathedral of Huesca
in 1106 and took the name of Pedro Alfonso, who became a member of the
clergy and wrote two works: La Disciplina clericalis and
Diálogos contra los judíos. The canon of the cathedral,
Pedro de Almería, was also converted. Bishop Vidal de Canellas
gives us a clue of his inclinations when he bequeathed in his will 300
salaries to a certain Magpie, of Jewish race. Notorious and symptomatic
was the mass conversion of the family of Azach abin Longo or Abelongo.
So were the Santvicent or San Vicente as well as the Santángel,
some of which were families from Barbastro, the Alborit - Albás
-, Azacha, Avin, Solomon, Argelet...
There were 35 Jewish quarters in the Kingdom of Aragon, some of which
were of royal origin and others were under the rule of the Church or
the nobility.
Escrivá seems to constantly turn his eyes to his past; his
historical memory immersed in the Jewish concept leads him to write his
main work, The Way, as moral proverbs, as maxims, as short sentences,
adages of moral content and often recriminatory. These moral teachings,
which came from these Greek communities, sometimes ambiguous, sometimes
with double meanings, sometimes with interpretative differences, were
very common in the literary production of the converts and crypto-Jews,
and when well analyzed, they show a background of Hispanic-Hebrew
spirit. With its moral aphorisms it recreates the conversational
tradition of the 16th and 17th centuries in Spain, especially the
ascetic literature written by converts.
If we were to look for the sources or the precedents of his work The
Way, we would have to allude and make obligatory reference to works
such as La certeza del Camino (The Certainty of the Way) - here the
word way is even reflected - by Abraham Pereira, who also wrote his
Espejo de las vanidades del mundo (Mirror of the Vanities of the
World); or the works of the convert Luis de Granada Guía de
Pecadores (Guide of Sinners) and Introducción al símbolo
de la Fe (Introduction to the Symbol of Faith); or Diego Estella's book
Descripción de las vanidades del mundo (Description of the
Vanities of the World), the controversial treatise by the crypto-Jew
Miguel de Molinos published under the title of Guía Espiritual
(Spiritual Guide). All of them are models, stereotypes that in one way
or another have been consulted and used; some maxims have been copied
and the thoughts have been plagiarized when back in 1934, in Cuenca,
Escriva was writing his Spiritual Considerations, which was first
called the draft and draft, the Prince's edition of what would later
become popular as the catechism of the "chosen people" as the members
of Opus Dei boast, under the name of The Way. Of course, the
inspiration and slogans had a contrast of authenticity and good line in
the Talmud, the original and total source of Escriva's inspiration
These are the books written on the basis of moral proverbs, on
anathemas, on works with an instructive sieve and with a didactic
orientation, where the rules and precepts, the norms, were the clue to
know that he was a moralizing convert, a pig author, which used
semantic tricks consisting of transcribing concepts with Jewish
feelings, ideas and beliefs by changing the meaning and intention of
the terms, the meaning of the words and using a language that is a
mixture of piety and caricature, which in both worlds are identical as
if it were a semantic fraud.
In the same line of thought and action is found the oft-repeated phrase
that Escrivá liked to repeat so often: "We are the rest of the
people of Israel. We are what is left of the people of GOD..." The
quote was so pleasing to him that it has even been taken up in Vicente
García's novel: "In the name of the father" (76) when he tells
us a pose by Escrivá telling us that "the Father emerges, who
straightens up and raises his arms above his head and thunders with his
voice, exclaiming 'We are the people of Israel, my daughters! We are
the people of Israel! Again and again he recreates this in the same
context: 'we are the remnant of the people of Israel' (77)
His apparent humility was as false as he himself. Once while praying,
he said aloud "here is your mangy donkey" to which immediately and from
on high he received the answer from God himself: "a donkey was my
throne in Jerusalem". (78)
Such was Escriva's Semitic profile that a priest from Madrid, a friend
of the writer Luis Carandell, in a conversation about Opus Dei, "took
the opportunity to make the joke that Opus Dei was made up of 'a scribe
and seventy thousand Pharisees,' and added the very Spanish question of
whether the bishop was not of Jewish origin. (79) The anthropologist
Julio Caro Baroja did not deny or affirm the origin of the name,
although he did point out that it was not the best name to use in
camouflage.
It is therefore not surprising that in his report to the diocesan synod
of 1985, the rector of the seminary of the Diocese of La Rioja accused
the clergy of Opus Dei of "going on the hunt for heresies" and went on
to say: "... they believe they belong to the Melchizedek race" (80), a
direct allusion in a metaphorical sense.
The character of his divine filiation, of his covenant and pact with
God himself, was experienced by the Founder personally "...this reality
on a summer day in 1931, in a tramway in Madrid. While he was wondering
how he could carry out the mission God had entrusted to him three years
earlier, on October 2, 1928, he had a clear answer - which was engraved
in his soul with fire - through some words of Psalm II: "You are my
son; today I have begotten you. With his soul flooded with joy, he
began to repeat aloud, like a child, "Abba, Pater, Abba, Pater! Abba!
Abba!" (81)
Escriva had rightly been denounced before the Special Tribunal for the
Repression of Freemasonry, because he considered that in a Spain of
Catholic effervescence and profound Christian sentiment "Opus Dei was
the Jewish branch of Freemasonry.
An anecdote that is innocently told in the biography of Escrivá
written by his chief praiseworthy man (83) tells us that "near
Caracas,
on February 14, 1975, there arose a young man with a full and wide
beard, who enhanced his joviality.
- Father, I am a Hebrew...
The founder of Opus Dei interrupted him: "I love the Hebrews very much,
because I love Jesus Christ very much - madly! - who is a Hebrew. Do
not say was, but is: Iesus Christus, hier et odie, ipse et in secula.
Jesus Christ continues to live, and he is a Hebrew like you. The second
love of my life is a Hebrew, Mary Most Holy, Mother of Jesus Christ. So
I look at you lovingly, go on..." Her Jewish instinct, which she
sometimes did not know how to or could not restrain, came out, although
it adorned her imprint with allusions to God and his Holy Mother, to
leave the most attenuated thing, that the message be understood without
being completely discovered.
One of the people who knew Escrivá's intimate reality was his
friend Professor Viktor E. Frankl, a Jewish specialist in psychology
who has left several testimonies of his meetings with the founder of
Opus Dei, where he has left us a record of his capacity for adaptation
and simulation, his metamorphosis, typical of his race, stressing "his
amazing ability to immediately tune in to his interlocutor. He lived
totally in the present moment and gave himself to him completely. (84)
So thoroughly Jewish was Escriva that he did not want, following the
Jewish custom, his parents to rest in Christian burial in a Catholic
cemetery, thus following the tradition of the Hebrews who took their
elders' bones with them if they were dug up. Escrivá did not
want his parents' remains to be buried in holy ground, so he buried
them in the crypt of the house of Opus Dei in Madrid's Calle de Diego
de León, an exhumation of dubious legitimacy if we abide by the
municipal rules and ordinances on burials that were in force when they
were buried outside the walls of cemeteries in an unsuitable street and
place.
Another trend that stands out as traditional in many Jews is that of
"seeking connections to aristocratic lineages". (85) And the
acquisition and fraud of the title of "Marquis of Peralta," for which
Escrivá had no legitimacy whatsoever, either in origin or in
practice, and only his Jewish instinct, dragged him into the fair of
earthly vanities, with the search, investigation and awarding of a
noble title for which he had to resort not only to deception, knowing
that he had no right, but even to the falsification of documents and
the malfeasance of public positions in the Spanish Ministry of Justice
that were attached to Opus Dei.
Another clear sign of unreliability, at that time widely used by Jews
of all times, is the constant change of names in order not to be
recognized. Let us recall here that Mendizábal, the author of
the most famous ecclesiastical disentailment, a liberal minister under
discussion, who in reality was called Alvarez y Méndez and who,
as Caro Baroja emphasizes, "following the very common custom among his
lineage, modified his surname. (86)
The system of changing one's name
and locality is underlined by speaking of Blázquez Miguel
cryptojudaism, as a usual and homologated technique among Jews.
And speaking of tactics and techniques, of behavioral patterns,
Escrivá's behavior on March 28, 1975, when he celebrated his
golden anniversary as a priest in private, is significant, according to
his usual rule of conduct "to hide and disappear is my thing" (87),
immersion and archetypal concealment of cryptojewish.
According to the historian Pulgar the converts in Aragon "were many"
(88) and
according to the Jewish historian Baer "there would be some
six thousand Jewish families in the kingdom of Aragon, which
proportionally meant a lot" (89)
The famous Green Book of Aragon is a
chilling documentary account of the contamination and lack of
cleanliness of blood in a large number of families of the Aragonese
nobility where a large part of the privileged classes were truly of
Jewish origin. Bernáldez, in his Historia de los Reyes
Católicos informs us that "as soon as they could acquire honour,
royal offices, favours from kings and lords, some mixed with the sons
and daughters of old Christian knights with plenty of wealth" (90) and
then led a double life of profit.
For the crypto-Jews, as for Escrivá de Balaguer, ethics was
reduced, in short, to doing what was useful in the final term in the
hierarchy of values.
For Cobo Martinez, Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer is one
of the most qualified and efficient servants of Judaism. (91) His
services to the Jewish cause and the damage that his actions caused in
the Catholic Church gave him the great title of favorite son of Israel.
Hence his inclination to the hidden life and the constant calls to
imitation, not to the doctrine explained by Christ, not to Christian
love and charity, but "to the thirty years of the Lord's hidden life"
with an obsession for compliance and obedience as befits a religion,
the Hebrew religion, which is based not on faith but on the
prescriptions of an uncompromising law where, as Escriva said, "To obey
always is to be a martyr without dying. Blind obedience, on love and
truth. That is the great difference.
As Don Julio Caro Baroja warns us "we must be very careful with the
bloody wolves that pass among us disguised with the skins of false
sheep". (92)
REFERENCES
69. Roth, p 27.
70. "Escriba," Diccionario de la Lengua Española, Edition 19
(Real Academia de la Lengua, 1970).
71. Duran Gudiol, p 34.
72. Ibid, pp 34-35.
73. Ibid, p 42.
74. Ibid, p 56.
75. Cantera, Francisco, "Sinagogas españolas" (Madrid: CSIC,
1984), p 170.
76. Gracia Vicente, p 63.
77. Walsh, p. 196.
78. Ibid, p 211.
79. Carandell, p 80.
80. Walsh, p 131.
81. "Le Tourneau", p 132.
82. Ibid, p 46.
83. Bernal, p 263.
84. West, p 54.
85. Caro Baroja, "Races, Peoples and Lineages", op cit, p 128.
86. Caro Baroja, "Destiny of the Hispanic Jew", op cit, p 416.
87. Le Tourneau, p 19.
88. López Martínez, p 103.
89. Baer, Die Juden, Vol I, p 813.
90. Bernáldez, "Historia de los Reyes Católicos", p 600.
91. Cobo Martínez, "Faro inconfundible", No. 23 (June, 1988), p
10.
92. Caro Baroja, "Races, Peoples and Lineages", p 133.
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