Los judíos sencillamente suponen la preexistencia de un Dios omnipotente, que actúa pero al que nunca se describe ni caracteriza, y por lo tanto tien… - Paul Johnson

In Germany, as in parts of Yorkshire, laughing — at least among people with pretensions to rank — was regarded as a form of weakness. Goethe, whose own laughter was seldom observed, thought a lady might laugh where a gentleman should keep a straight face. Frederick the Great might laugh with a Frenchman, such as Voltaire, but “would not so condescend” with his compatriots.

Brecht’s ‘basic laxity’ was one reason why, apart from his satellites and those tied to him by party bonds, he was generally unpopular with other writers. He was much despised by the academic writers of the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Horkheimer, etc.) as a ‘vulgar Marxist’. Adorno said that Brecht spent hours every day putting dirt under his fingernails so he looked like a worker.

The more one examines the teachings and activities of Jesus, the more obvious it appears that they struck at Judaism in a number of fatal respects, which made his arrest and trial by the Jewish authorities inevitable. His hostility to the Temple was unacceptable even to liberal Pharisees, who accorded Temple worship some kind of centrality. His rejection of the Law was fundamental. Mark relates that, having ‘called all the people unto him’, Jesus stated solemnly: ‘There is nothing from without a man, that entering into him can defile him: but the things which come out of him, those are they that defile the man.’89 This was to deny the relevance and instrumentality of the Law in the process of salvation and justification. He was asserting that man could have a direct relationship with God, even if he were poor, ignorant and sinful; and, conversely, it was not man’s obedience to the Torah which creates God’s response, but the grace of God to men, at any rate those who have faith in him, which makes them keep his commandments.