The Last Jew

 

After World War 3, when the East clashed with the West, the fighting didn’t stop.  The Holy Wars that followed were between religions that prevailed after the Digital Age collapsed.  World War 3 had involved the use of nuclear bombs, robotic soldiers, flying drones and electric guns.  But nobody remembered how to use them after a 100-year fallout blanketed the ground in radioactive dust.  Those brave enough to venture from the caves were soon poisoned by the dust, their bodies mutating into all sorts of strange figures. 

Once the dust had settled long enough, humans were able to salvage what little remains of civilization was left.  However, power was the ultimate motivator, not recovery.  Books were burned and technology destroyed, because the people who wanted power the most knew that words and inventions had made human societies more egalitarian.  The only books that weren’t burned were the Koran and the Bible- those that symbolized the resentment spawned from centuries of fighting between Eastern and Western civilizations.  There were no gray areas, you had to pick one side or the other, or you were killed. 

Genocide was common, crucifixions returned as the most popular method of execution.  Jews were systematically eliminated, facing even worse persecution than the Nazis had given them.  Many were able to hide, but without any protection from governments, and with limited arable land available, they quickly ran out of places to do that. 

The last of them was a 16-year-old boy, who decided he'd had enough with all the fighting going on.  This Jew was angry, and he would stop at nothing to earn his title as the greatest revolutionary who ever lived.  He wanted to break society, ending all the torment his people had suffered.  His revolution started in the former suburbs of Los Angeles, where the heat was suffocating.  He influenced a small group of people, young like himself, to spread his gospel of peace, peace by revolt, peace by refusal to submit.  Whenever they were attacked, his gospel gave them the green light to defend themselves by any means necessary.  War was inevitable for them, yet their moral code only made it possible to engage in it unless provoked by outsiders, so they were able to retain the dignity their religion taught. 

The farther the Jew’s gospel spread, the more people latched onto it, until a new religion spread across the Americas, a religion that didn’t have a god, that didn’t inspire people to kill in the name of divinity.  His religion taught people all the Biblical stories yet denied any supernatural presence in them. Many of the books from prior centuries were found by these revolutionaries. Instead of creationism, science was used to explain things like how the stars formed and where humans came from.  

When he led his people across Europe, to crusade on the capital of Israel, Jerusalem, that golden capital of capitals glowing in the Promised Land, the cardinals of the West and the caliphs of the East banded together, that they might stop this greatest of threats.  On entering Jerusalem, the sky finally broke open after 100 years of Fallout, letting the sun shine through to the ground.  The last Jew walked right through the battlefield, where everyone knew that Armageddon was taking place.  He gave himself to his enemies and was crucified on the spot.  Though they had lost the battle, the revolutionaries continued to spread his gospel, so much that the new religion completely subverted all the old ones.