Darkness of Anti-Semitism Descends on the West
Certainly, the evidence of mounting anti-Jewish sentiment not only among the European intellectual classes but among the European laity as well cannot be doubted. Recent polls and studies reveal a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe, with Holland taking the lead, followed by France, Britain, and Belgium. Other surveys have pointed to Spain, Norway, and Sweden as aspirants to the tainted crown.
That Israeli officials are subject to impeachment if they set foot on British soil, or that a Spanish court is presently considering, under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” prosecuting Israeli leaders for “war crimes,” is only par for the course. Yet, with the sole exception of Sudanese strongman Omar Hassan al-Bashir, whose crimes became too massively conspicuous for the world to continue to ignore, not a single major Islamic political figure, responsible for promoting jihad or for committing terrorist provocations, is under pending legal threat in Spain, the UK, or any other European country. Terror-sponsoring and genocidal advocate Ahmadinejad, for example, travels freely.
But the form in which anti-Semitism reveals itself most conspicuously in the current historical moment is the political and media quarantining of the state of Israel, chiefly under the septic influence of the ubiquitous Left. Jew-hatred has been lateralized, so to speak, as ostracism of the Jewish state. The notorious Mohammed al-Dura affair is a prime example of the media and official complot against Israel. The Palestinian 12-year-old, ostensibly shot by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) at the Netzarim Junction in Gaza on September 30, 2000 — an “event” circulated by the government-controlled-and-financed France 2 TV and picked up by every major news outlet in the world — was almost certainly staged by pro-Palestinian interests.
That eight years after the original episode the French Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision against Philippe Karsenty, head of the Media Ratings website, who had been sued for defamation after he challenged the veracity of the France 2 scoop, has not had much effect on demythologizing the scandal. The mainstream media have been eerily quiet about the second trial and its verdict in Karsenty’s favor, giving the news not even a fraction of the coverage it lavished on the original event, which it accepted at face value. Burying the calumny plainly has face-saving value, but it also allows the media to shelter its overt anti-Israeli docket from public scrutiny.
Significantly, the media have refused to recognize that the true story, with all its emblematic implications, is not al-Dura, who was either shot by his own people as a “martyr” for the cause or not shot at all but spirited away after the event. The true story is the case of the Egyptian child suffering from cystic fibrosis who could be cured only by a medicine produced in Israel, called Creon 1000, which the Egyptian Ministry of Health has refused to import or accept. The fact that a child who might be saved by an Israeli product is left to malinger and possibly die is the true story of the Muslim Middle East.
This is in the nature of things. Whether it is Mohammed al-Dura, or the clueless Rachel Corrie who was accidentally killed when she placed herself before an Israeli bulldozer blocking an arms-smuggling tunnel and was immediately beatified as a victim of Israeli “brutality,” or any of the innumerable fabricated episodes during the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead in Gaza intended to demonize Israel, all exposed by accurate scrutiny as complete frauds, the topers in the meadhall of the Israel-bashing consensus will not be easily persuaded to end the party. They are having far too good a time of it. For the Jew has once again been gibbeted, in the shape of an Israeli, a Zionist, or a member of some immoral “lobby” subtly dominating the public arena — today’s detergent version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
We can detect the influence of this attitude throughout the American press corps as well. While providing hourly updates on the terrorist rampage in Mumbai in November 2008, it took them two days to report that the Lubavitcher Chabad House had been struck and its occupants butchered. For the New York Times, the scene of the attack was an anonymous “office building.”
Even on a more benign level, the anti-Jewish bias is evident. Many of our media conglomerates refuse to sell Internet promotional space to the Jewish Agency on the grounds that its message is “political.” They have doubtlessly forgotten that the message inscribed on the Liberty Bell, from Leviticus 25:10, is also political: “Proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” I suppose we should be grateful, too, that they have not agitated to remove another political message, that of the Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’ sonnet, “The New Colossus,” which graces the Statue of Liberty. But they have not lifted their lamp beside the golden door.
The lies and slanders continue to proliferate. In the miasma of popular sentiment, fiction and truth can scarcely be distinguished. From the standpoint of anti-Jewish sentiment in particular, fiction and truth are epistemological isomorphs and cannot be separated from one another. Which is to say, fiction becomes truth and truth, fiction. Unfortunately, the malediction of Isaiah has been forgotten or dismissed: “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”
This inversion has now become standard procedure. And Israel and its people, whom Isaiah called “a light unto the nations,” are now threatened by an encroaching darkness. But so, as it turns out, are we all.
I agree with a lot of what this author says ,especially around the liturgies of the Orthodox Church and the tridentine mass. Those who persecuted the Jews in the Name of Christ ,were ignorant of or disobeyed prophecy about Christ’s death ,in that He was going to suffer for out sins. Rembrant’s painting THE RAISING OF THE CROSS shows the true Christian position,for amongst the crowd of those pulling up the Cross with Christ nailed to it,the artist has painted himself-saying “It was my sins that put HIm here. Thus the reason for these liturgies to make reference to the Jews are incorrect from Scriptural perspective.
It is Christians who have stood up to protect Jewish people in the Nazi era. It is now essential that Christians stand up for the Jews again,especially in the presence of the evil of islamism and jihadists;betrayal by so called friends-watch the Obamagod go down that path- ,and apostate Christians who have a position of dhimmitude to placate Moslems but don’t care a stuff about the Truth of the God Who is Here and Who is never,never,Silent
Anti-semitism is anti-civilization, and Christianity is the root cause of anti-semitism. Thus Christianity is the enemy of civilization.
Congratulations Mr. Solway, you are guilty of exactly the same putrescent bigotry as you complain about in this article.
“…If Freud was right in claiming that the individual seeks his or her own path to the grave, so we might say that each civilization arranges its own death…”
Freud was also correct about the Oedipal wish to destroy The Father. Judaism is the father to Christianity and Islam. Rage directed at the father, and envy of the child for the father’s greater experience, presumed power and prowess, etc., are the driving forces.
Also, Judaism gave rise to no “perfect” beings; the patriarchs, Moses, kings, prophets — all were flawed human beings. Jesus and Muhammed are icons of perfection to their believers. This silliness rationalizes their respective attitudes of supposed superiority, which is a mask of rage and envy. In contrast, Buddhists, for example, don’t do this.
Jewish realism — “Israel” means “wrestles with God” — is more difficult to live — to face one’s life for what it actually is — than the magical, infantile thinking of unknowable after-life ascendence, “grace,” “martyrdom,” etc.
David Solway — I love how you think and what you write. You bring intelligence to an otherwise mostly insipid cultural dialogue. Thanks.
Wow Alex, that must have been between the lines, huh?
I think CHurchill had it best. The same aspirations that make the West remarkable and worth preserving are those that are signatures of Jewish culture : ie, science, rational understanding of the world and a self preserving ethic that demands hard work. I dont blame the church for anything other than keeping large numbers ignorant on these matters, and thus distrusdtful of those who werent. Forbiding ursury, which imbalanced Europe’s financial system in a manner that put Jews in a succesful but mistrusted light, did more to create antagonism than proclamations as to who killed Jesus. All of that said, its still not the real root of unease between two groups so long among each other as Christians and Jews, who have benefitted from each other’s neighbor status for so long. Jews were able to pursue sciences in the post Renaissance West and amass huge fortunes in the early industrial period. Western coutries benefitted from the breakthroughs in physics and medicine of Jewish scientists from the middle ages through the modern period; credit also due to the Gentile scientists like Newton, Gauss, Faraday, Ampere, Carnot and Maxwell, to name just a few, and who also conributed to the growth of Western industrial capability. Without them the fortunes of Morgans and Rothschilds would have financed little to build the modern world.
Without the closeness of Jewsish and Gentile populations, as well as the distinction between them, its unlikely we would have much of the modern industry that we have today. There is no certainty on these matters as its a ‘what if there werent..?’ kind of question. But I do think its clear that the two communities need each other now more than ever, right at the time a wedge is being driven through the Western world by liberals with Gramsci-esque cultural destruction Soviet legacy of destablization, and its not so new ally, radical Islam. Remember many of the radicals in that islamic and the third world in general of the 50′s-70′s went to Lumumba University in athiest Moscow.
Now the athiest liberals are being coopted by the radical Muslims for yet more efforts at destablization of the capitalist West. Jewish liberals of the deconstructionist schools in social sciences have sold themselves out much as Gentile neo-liberals are so vehement in doing along with them today with Muslims that would gladly subject all their homosexuality and feminism to Sharia Law.
The author blathers: “I would not hesitate to say that anti-Semitism is the social and intellectual tumor of Western civilization caused . . . by the doctrinal and ideological diet prescribed by the Christian church.”
Why am I not surprised that one commenter (#2 Irish Alex) calls this “putrescent” thinking?
This is really embarrasing Jewish rubbish. The orthodox Jews themselves admit that Jews should not talk to nor socialize with non-Jews, that Jews don’t even need to help non-Jews when they’re in trouble. Not even neighbors need to be helped. And then Jews wonder why people get annoyed by their presence. I’m not talking hatred here, just annoyance. But it indicates an incredible cultural naivety to think that ignoring your neighbor has no consequences.
Then to blame the results on Christian behaviour (Christians who adhere to the “love thy neighbor” principle) is the height of deceit and evil. And, I might add, ignorance, as many moderate Jews seem to be unaware of how the orthodox behave toward others. I’m simply astonished that Jews continue to remain blind to the reason they have so few friends in the world. Yet the Christians, God bless them, still try to be friends. David Solway needs a serious reality check.
It is meaningless to launch this type of thread on a mainstream forum.
Neither historical references nor actual facts are permitted to be posted that can be construed, suspected, perceived as derogatory to the people whose name I am afraid even to write it down.
Example: A. Solzhenitsyn’s monumental 2 volume works dealing with the history of the **** exist only in German and French translation:
Zweihundert Jahre zusammen (= “Two hundred years together”) is not translated to English.
If a Nobel Prize winner writer’s work is censored as it were the Mein*** then what are we going to talk about here?
David, you’ve struck a nerve! I see the anti-semites are coming out, and complaining Jews are being mean to them.
In every age natioms rise up against Israel, but it was the Gentile Christians who initiated the genocidal hatred for the Jews that still prevails. St. John Chrysostom, St Augustine, and the Sainted Martin Luther are the authors of all the derogatory names and epithets used against the Jews by the Muslims, they must have got them from the books they looted from monasteries and churches.
I believe Chrysostom called God a liar when he said ” The once chosen children of God are now the children of Satan”
because God had made an everlasting covenant with Israel, and as God cannot lie, He imposed a curse of blindness upon the Gentiles, which is why Western civilization is incapable of seeing that it is committing suicide. I also believe that God raised up Mohammed in retribution. See how quickly Mohammed’s hoardes cleared out the Christians from all the regions around Israel. Now they are taking over Western civilization, and the curse of blindness that has locked Western civilization into the curse of anti- Semitism, makes them capitulate, no questions asked.
Will the curse of blindness ever be lifted?
To Larsen E Whipsnade;
As an orthodox Jew I am very surprised that somehow I managed to miss such a law – you are an ignoramus. Perhaps you would like to back up your ridiculous claims with some actual names or texts.
To Irish Alex: We must have been reading different articles as I did not see what you claim the author wrote. Christianity is not the root of anti-semitism but it did adopt it fairly early on. Christianity has evolved and most sects no longer have anti-semitism as an integral part of their belief structure.
The people of the first covenant are to be loved and protected. Any person or group who would slander them deserves scorn and anathema. Any person or group who would assault them deserves whatever response or reprisal is necessary to prevent further assaults.
It is clear from this that David Solway has never studied the Bible, learned it incorrectly, or studied it and rejects it.
For the Torah (old testament) teaches that anti-semitism was God’s creation meant to endure until the coming the Messiah as taught in the Torah and Gemorah
Its here to stay until then and all of these explantions for it are just an attempt by the human beings’ limited mind, compared to Gods, to explain something that they will never understand.
However, if it makes someone feel better to try and explain it and by all means go for it as long as they don’t harm someone else in the process.
David is perhaps one of the finest essayists writing today. Not only is his style completely fluid, his analysis is flawless.
It is not for nothing that whenever chaotic events in the world are careening out of control, anti-semitism lurks in the foreshadows. It is as if the Jewish ‘problem’ underlines every ill known to man.
Therefore, a solid case can be made that not only is the Jew the canary in the minefield, but that the sickness of western society is very much gauged by the Jew hatred surrounding it. Not only that, but for a generation of Euros, many steeped in guilt over the Holocaust, it is too enticing for them NOT to imbibe at the anti-semitic poison.
IF at the same time they are able to exculpate themselves from the scarlet letter of anti-semitism-by branding Israel in all manner of Nazi imagery, no coincidence there-and they are also able to align themselves with the latest manifestation of Jew hatred via Islamic jihadism, surely it is an ‘offer’ too tempting for them to pass up.
“The orthodox Jews themselves admit that Jews should not talk to nor socialize with non-Jews, that Jews don’t even need to help non-Jews when they’re in trouble”
There are so many outright lies in this statement that it cannot go unchallenged.
While some orthodox Jews are indeed insular (not unlike the Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites, some Buddhists and other intensely religious communities) and while the Biblical commandments relating to a kosher diet restrict the range of social interactions between Jews and non-Jews it’s quite clear from Biblical, Talmudic and later rabbinic and non-Jewish historical sources that Jews, including religiously observant Jews, have an almost continuous history of social and business interactions with non-Jews.
As for Jews not helping non-Jews in distress, while Jews have religious obligation to help other Jews, Jewish law says that the non-Jewish poor of one’s own city have a higher priority for charitable contributions than the Jewish poor in another city.
Jewish law, to facilitate peaceful relations, obligates Jewish doctors to violate the Sabbath and other Jewish law in order to save the life of a non-Jew.
Studies indicate the somewhat obvious fact that orthodox Jews in the US give a larger percentage of their incomes as charitable contributions to Jewish institutions than their less religiously observant Jewish brethren. The same studies show that the supposedly insular orthodox are actually more charitable to secular non-Jewish institutions than non-orthodox Jews.
I’ve lived in orthodox Jewish neighborhoods for most of my adult life and I’ve always had at least one neighbor who solicited funds for the March of Dimes.
While most American Christians, including Catholics, are not hostile to Jews or Judaism, one can’t wish away the unsavory history of Christian antisemitism. At the same time it’s important to have some perspective. Bernard Lewis has said that the Muslim world never treated Jews as badly as Christians did at their worst, but that they also never treated Jews as well as Christian Europe did when it was tolerant.
10. Noah Guttman:
I thought you’d never ask:
From Devarim (Deuteronomy)7: ”
א כִּי יְבִיאֲךָ, יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, אֶל-הָאָרֶץ, אֲשֶׁר-אַתָּה בָא-שָׁמָּה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ; וְנָשַׁל גּוֹיִם-רַבִּים מִפָּנֶיךָ הַחִתִּי וְהַגִּרְגָּשִׁי וְהָאֱמֹרִי וְהַכְּנַעֲנִי וְהַפְּרִזִּי, וְהַחִוִּי וְהַיְבוּסִי–שִׁבְעָה גוֹיִם, רַבִּים וַעֲצוּמִים מִמֶּךָּ. 1 (When the LORD thy G-d shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee, the Hittite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, seven nations greater and mightier than thou;)
ב וּנְתָנָם יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, לְפָנֶיךָ–וְהִכִּיתָם: הַחֲרֵם תַּחֲרִים אֹתָם, לֹא-תִכְרֹת לָהֶם בְּרִית וְלֹא תְחָנֵּם. 2 (and when the LORD thy God shall deliver them up before thee, and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them;)
ג וְלֹא תִתְחַתֵּן, בָּם: בִּתְּךָ לֹא-תִתֵּן לִבְנוֹ, וּבִתּוֹ לֹא-תִקַּח לִבְנֶךָ. 3 (neither shalt thou make marriages with them: thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” )
In “Ask the Rabbi” in the Jerusalem Post, Rabbi Brovender advises:
“In the laws of Avoda Zara 10 4, the Rambam lists certain limitations in our dealing with the non Jew and ends by saying ‘and you cannot give them a present if it is for no particular reason’. ”
In response to Rabbi Brovender, an orthodox website replies: “Following this line of reasoning, a Jew can only give a gift to a non-Jew if giving that gift serves a purpose for the Jew. Either it must benefit the Jew in some tangible way (a gift to one’s employer on his birthday, for example) or it must be given to prevent antisemitism.
“But you can’t give a gift to your neighbor just because s/he’s your friend.
“Orthodoxy views non-Jews as inferiors. In an ideal world, according to Orthodoxy, Jews would have no contact with non-Jews at all. Non-Jews would be completely shunned.
“As it stands, this is not feasible, largely because non-Jews, experiencing this shunning, might react with hatred and, as long as they are the majority and greatly outnumber us, this hatred could lead to violence and Jewish deaths.” (http://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2008/01/orthodox-judais.html)
With the help of the internet, it’s no problem to see out how orthodox Jews view the world. What _IS_ a problem now is how dissemblers like David Solway & Noah Guttman blatantly try to conceal the narrow selfishness of orthodox Jewish thought by blaming Christians for all their problems.
Can Larsen really believe that orthodox Jews “admit” they don’t help or even talk to non-Jewish neighbours? Or that unlike Jews, Christians adhere to “Love thy neighbour?”
In reality he probably couldn’t produce a single Jew who begrudged kindliness to non-Jews. Tzedakah (charity) is a cardinal Jewish commandment. Some of the oldest british charities were founded by Jewish citizens. And synagogues often allot funds for non-Jewish good causes. Jesus (a Jewish rabbi) was of course quoting Leviticus xix (Old Testament)in preaching, “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”
Once more, I feel the need to defend Western Europeans from irrational attacks by those who should know better, even though I am glad that I left Western Europe and have no desire to go back.
First, David Solway should leave aside anecdotal evidence and refer to the Pew Global Attitudes Project:
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=262
This shows that European attitudes towards Jews have become more negative, but remain substantially better than European attitudes towards Muslims. If you are going to accuse Europeans of antisemitism, what about Islamophobia?
Second, he should ask himself: who is doing the most to make Jews unpopular? who is putting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict center stage, neglecting far more deadly conflicts in Africa? who introduced the notion that the Iraq war was the fault of the Jews? who, if not the American press and intelligentsia?
Perhaps it is selective memory, but I cannot think of any anti-American or anti-Zionist idea that I heard from the most left-wing of my family members and acquaintances, which I did not read months earlier in the British or American press; but my acquaintances invariably think that it is their original idea: they simply cannot imagine that such an obviously “left-wing” idea originates in America.
Funny that David Solway should quote Bruce Bawer to the effect that “the multicultural elite [is], almost without exception, allied with the Islamic right”, and then quote Pascal Bruckner in the same paragraph. Bruckner seems to think of multiculturalism as an Anglo-American disease, an opinion with which I am in complete agreement.
16. Walter: “Can Larsen really believe that orthodox Jews “admit” they don’t help . . .?”
Walter, either you, too, are dissembling, or you didn’t read the quotes. These are not my words, but the words of Rabbi Brovender and the orthodox website referenced. I’m only quoting two orthodox Jews on the subject. There’s tons more, if you have the stomach for it. For non-Jews reading this for the first time, this is pretty wrenching stuff, especially when hacks like Solway try to distract our attention from what the orthodox are saying to each other, persisting with the nonsense that the problem is the Christians of the world. It’s clear from the quotes that the orthodox are only pretending to be neighbourly when they actually despise their non-orthodox neighbours. Please, give your head a shake.
To# 17:
First, David Solway should leave aside anecdotal evidence and refer to the Pew Global Attitudes Project:
http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=262
This shows that European attitudes towards Jews have become more negative, but remain substantially better than European attitudes towards Muslims. If you are going to accuse Europeans of antisemitism, what about Islamophobia?
islamophobia??? Sorry, you garner no sympathy here if that is what you are seeking. Muslims and islam is seen this way: rioting, burning cars, destroying property over some cartoons.
Jews and Christians have been made fun of and insulted through cartoons, editorials for years and years. Savage killings, torturing innocent people just because they ARE NOT or REFUSE to be from another religion, or convert ot islam. Sniveling, whining, suing us at every turn when we here in the free world refuse or fight islam being FORCED upon us. A fast food joint serves pork, lawsuit. A muslim takes a job KNOWING he or she may have to handle products banned in islam. They take the job, then sue the company.
I can go on and on! This is the face of islam and muslims that ALOT of the world sees and they are sick of it. Do you see Jews or Christians acting in these ways?? Nope, not very often.
Europeans have their reasons to be antisemitic against islam and I do not blame them. This article has positive and negative points. Multiculturalism and diversity IS a western sickness. It has polluted everything from the inside out and now we are living with and through these results. Our education system should be ashamed of itself in the USA for allowing such garbage to pollute the minds of our children from kindergarten on up. Need an example: University of North Carolina asked Tom Tancredo to come speak. He actually had to leave the building due to violent harrassment from the KOOL AID stupified students of the left. Freedom of speech was denied to a US citizen. Whether you like TT or not, this is typical and dispicable of the left. I need to stop before I write something I would be booted off for as that is not my intention or style.
Let me begin by responding to to some of the yahoos commenting here.
Irish Alex: Your reflexive defense of the Church marks you for a fool.
Can you tell me what your ancestors were doing two thousand years ago when Joshua the Galilean preached? Do you even know what your ancestors worshiped at the time? Were they literate people with a written language? Where is their art and literature? What happened to your ancient Irish culture?
It was eclipsed Alex. Your priests and shamans who were your best and brightest were slaughtered. Their altars were razed. Their culture obliterated. Irish memory was wiped clean and replaced with a new memory beginning with Genesis.
The new skins into which Saul of Tarsus proposed to pour old kosher wine were not really new. The skins had all previously contained other wines of various vintages and flavors.
George Orwell was asked once whether he had modeled his novel, 1984, on Communism or Fascism. Neither, said Orwell. I modeled it on the Catholic Church.
The damage and suffering brought upon the Jews by the Church is nothing to the damage and suffering brought by the Church upon the Irish.
Whipsnade: The precept of “love thy neighbor” of which you are so proud is merely repeated in the gospels. It originates in Leviticus. Indeed, most of what Christians imagine is quintessentially Christian is borrowed from the Jews. In fact, if the Hebrew word “Mahiakh” translates to the Greek word “Christ,” Jews were Christians (messianists) long before any Gentile tumbled to such a notion.
When you can find Jesus preaching to anyone other than a fellow Jew anywhere in the Gospels, Whipsnade, be sure to let us know.
John Galt: Going off half-cocked and asserting that a Hebrew-literate Hebrew doesn’t know the Hebrew Bible is the height of arrogance.
Reading the Torah (AKA, Old Testament, AKA Hebrew Bible) in English is like reading Shakespeare in Hebrew. This is why Jews scratch their heads in wonder when Christians get “literal” about an English translation like the King James. There are thousands upon thousands of self-deluded “Bible scholars,” many of them with degrees from “respectable” divinity schools, whose “scholarship” is an insult to plain text. I suspect you are among them.
So much for fools and knaves. David Soloway makes a number of valid points and he makes them well. Steven’s comment is on the money, as well. I have several comments to add.
Pagan anti-Semitism has little in common with the Christian and Muslim variety. The Jews had no difficulties with Alexander the Great and remember him with affection. Alexander’s Hellenized Syrian successors attempted to force Hellenism and later Christianity on the Jews and enmity ensued.
Julius Caesar, the greatest of the Romans, held John Hyrcanus and his Judean soldiery in high regard. Jews were free Roman citizens and under Caesar enjoyed privileges in deference to their religious practices accorded to no other Roman minority. As Suetonius records, the Jews were inconsolable after Caesar’s assassination.
The Greeks and Romans were proud peoples with whose culture owed nothing to the Jews. Jewish culture was alien but it presented no more challenge to the ancient Greeks and Romans than it does to modern Hindus or Buddhists.
It was the Greeks not the Jews to whom the Romans owed their religion and culture and their prejudices against Greeks were strikingly similar to later Christian prejudices against Jews. Too learned; too proud; overrepresented in the professions, especially medicine; never to be fully trusted; always underfoot when something important was happening.
Christian and Muslim Jew-hatred is rooted in deep knowledge of their derivative nature. The Christian Communion is an imitation of the Jewish Kiddush. The Muslim Ramadan is an imitation of Yom Kippur. Before they took to imitating the Jews, Arabs didn’t acknowledge their ancestry from Abraham and happily ate pork.
Self-doubt, shame and jealousy drive Christian and Muslim animosity toward Jews. Jews aren’t hated because their beliefs are false but for fear they are true. That this Jew-hatred is turned inward and destroys the hater is inevitable. For what is a Christian or a Muslim but a freakish variety of Jew?
“I would not hesitate to say that anti-Semitism is the social and intellectual tumor of Western civilization caused in large part (though not only) by the doctrinal and ideological diet prescribed by the Christian church.”
Anti-semistism is a sin and threat to civilization. To deny my Lord Jesus Christ would be a bigger sin and lead to damnation. Sorry Mr. Solway I shall oppose anti-semitsm-I will NOT stand with you. I suppose we Christians are responsible of the muslims rants against “the jew”. Hitler and Stalin we both pagans–Stalin killed many more Christians than Jews-and he did indeed purge the Jews from the Party, but I imagine would would lie about that.
But Peter and Paul, both Jews, warned of us you. But I do stand with Jews who stand with me–you just aren’t one of them.
Can you tell us of any bigger anti-semite in America than the Jew George Soros?
I wonder where the aptly named Whipsnade is copying and pasting from. Hebrew text with the vowels intact for beginning Hebrew readers. Plus English punctuations–commas, colons, semicolons–a bizarre Anglo/Hebrew hodgepodge. Ten to one this twisted Jew-hater can’t read a word of Hebrew with vowels or without.
Obsessive Jew-hatred is a never ending wonder. It is entirely common for antiSemites to sacrifice their entire lives and careers to their perverse passion. They wallow all their days in things Jewish in order to feed their all-consuming Jew-hatred.
Orthodox Jews, indeed. One sick puppy is Larsen Whipsnade.
Jews were once hated for their religion, and this lasted for centuries. But most anti-Semitism is not about Judaism as faith: it is about the Big Group’s need, and ability, to have a Small Group to make itself feel superior to. Anti-Semites always – and I mean always – turn out to be anti-human. No anti-Semite has ever hated just Jews. The reason modern liberalism is anti-Semitic is because Jews are not anti-American, or, more specifically, the enemies of the Jews ARE anti-American and that is why liberals support them, or at least explain them away. They can’t support Saudis without hating Jews, so they hate Jews.
“”"”"”Certainly, the evidence of mounting anti-Jewish sentiment not only among the European intellectual classes but among the European laity as well cannot be doubted. Recent polls and studies reveal a sharp rise in anti-Semitic incidents in Western Europe, with Holland taking the lead, followed by France, Britain, and Belgium”"”"”"”
How many of these anti-Semitic incidents are by ethnically European citizens, and how much of it by the apparently huge influx of ignorant, lower-class recent immigrants form Islamic countries?
David Solway is a linguistic virtuoso and a virtuosic thinker; as such, he has written here, as he always does, an essay that is not only strikingly eloquent but luminously clear. That’s why many of the comments offered in response perplex me.
Nowhere does he say or imply that Christianity is the sole cause of antisemitism. Indeed, his opening paragraph makes perfectly plain that antisemitism can be found among the ancient Greeks and Romans and among present-day Muslims. He then goes on to say that the doctrine and the ideology of the Christian church were major contributors to antisemitism as we know it today.
This is hardly, it seems to me, an arguable point. In fact, it is the least original point in Mr. Solway’s essay. An endless line of historians, many of them Christians, have preceded Mr. Solway in making precisely the same point. Does any serious reader of Pajamas Media contend that there is not,and never has been, any link, any nexus, between the Christian church and the hatred of Jews?
None of this has anything to do with the idiosyncracies of Orthodox Jews or the Bible’s attitude toward the Amalekites or any of the other irrelevancies introduced by some readers. It has to do with a matter of plain historical fact. Readers who doubt Mr Solway’s knowledge of the inextricable entanglement of the Christian church and the growth of antisemitism might prefer to consult the works of A. Roy Eckardt, E. P. Sanders, James Parkes, W. D. Davies, S. G. F. Brandon, Paul Ramsey, Rosemary Ruether, or Franklin Littell, to name but a few. To the best of my knowledge, none of these writers is or was Jewish, and yet all of them, I’m confident, would subscribe to Mr. Solway’s thesis.
Darkness is, as Mr Solway warns us, descending on the West. That, it seems to me, is the point we should all be focusing on — before it’s too black out there for any of us, Christian or Jew, to see.
What’s with the tangential thread about orthodox Judaism? Most of the world’s Jews are not orthodox and have largely assimilated. The possible viewpoints of some orthodox and ultra-fundamentalists Jews don’t get to be the benchmark to excuse Anti-Semitism, since the typical anti-Semite makes no distinctions.
“”"”"Jews were once hated for their religion, and this lasted for centuries. But most anti-Semitism is not about Judaism as faith: it is about the Big Group’s need, and ability, to have a Small Group to make itself feel superior to.”"”"”"
That has been my observation from actual contact with zealous “Anti-Zionists.” Anti-Zionism is almost always thinly-disguised anti-semitism of the type described by James in post #23. The use of the term “Liberals” for the new brand of anti-semites is unfair and inaccurate, however. Some people of very liberal persuasion will often find themselves hostile to Israeli policies, for instance, and will, stupidly, align themselves in such cases with certain leftist radicals and certain “progressives” who feel and express the modern form of anti-semitism. What is also bizarre is that leftist radicals are indistinguishable from right-wing radicals (who are a very different breed of animal from conservatives — despite what Janet Napolitano and DHS may think). The only paradoxical and irrational distinction between extreme left and right on this issue is that Leftists refer to a “Zionist-Imperialist” conspiracy, and the Rightist radicals to a “Zionist-Communist” conspiracy. Dangerous, vicious clowns all.
Oh, by the way, absolutely no right-wing “anti-Zionists” exist in the U.S. federal government, but there are a few of the leftist kind at the Justice Department, and a few in Congress — distressingly, in the Congressional Black Caucus in particular. Go figure.
The comments so far confirm my initial observation expressed in my #7 post.
No one has the courage to tackle their role in contemporary and historical political development, their primordial weight in shaping our socio-political landscape and our mind.
No one has the temerity to question those who might have suffered greatly by certain ideological idea converted into brute force and genocide.
Ladies and Gentlemen: you are spewing hot air…keep on delving into the Bible for it’s safe and you wont be banned nor censored.
Regards
22. David Levavi: “I wonder where the aptly named Whipsnade is copying and pasting from…”
I wonder, (aptly named) David, if you are being deliberately obtuse, or are you just reacting emotionally? I gave you all the sources of the quotes, the first being the “Ask the Rabbi” column in the Jerusalem Post. Are you suggesting that I am an antisemite because I posted some Hebrew that you don’t like? I’m not the author of the Torah, nor am I Rabbi Brovender. You can’t win an argument by insulting all here. Your insults and name-calling tell us more about the shallowness and foolish rage of David Levavi than the people you’re trying to insult. Your rant has proved nothing. Solway is still a dissembler. And you are just a desperate noise-maker, hurling an army of straw men at your imagined “opponents”. I’m sure, if you try hard, you could provide a better argument than your last post. Do your best! We’ll all be waiting here for something intelligent to emerge. If it’s just another load of dissembling claptrap, we’ll be sure to let you know.
I think that the Left really turned hard on Israel during the period after the Six Day War. Two things were happening simultaneously. First, the European Community was exploring informal accords with the Arab League, and part of that deal required that Europe distance itself from Israel. Historical revisionism and Arab propaganda were also being cross-fertilized with North America’s academic communities too. That’s when you began to see more anti-Israel viewpoints percolating here in the U.S. Second, Israel was moving away from a country with a lot of kibbutzim, which were essentially socialist communes, to a more mixed economy with a heavy dose of capitalism. Once that happened, the Jewish Left and the Goyim Left turned viciously against Israel.
I reiterate ALTALENA’S comment: “David Solway is a linguistic virtuoso and a virtuosic thinker; as such, he has written here, as he always does, an essay that is not only strikingly eloquent but luminously clear.” And ask: if Solway is correct, is there anything the Jew can do, within reason, to defuse anti-semitism? If, for example, I am a hyper-critical person (let’s pretend the criticism is merited), and disliked for being that, I can change my behavior because I want to be liked. So what can the Jew do to get liked? And at what price?
I’m reminded of Jew hatred as it concerns money lending: a Catholic lends money at 4.5%, a Protestant lends money at 4.5 % and the Jew lends at 4.25% and for that, is a dirty Jew.
It’s interesting that so many people still insist on bringing up age-old Christian anti-semitism as if it had modern relevance. For all practical purposes I don’t think it does. I have met the rare Christian fundamentalist who is also anti-semitic, and strong hints of modern anti-semitism have supposedly reared their head elsewhere. Supposedly, Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” had scenes and dialogue that could be construed as anti-semitic. I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t see the movie. Gibson himself, unfortunately, chose to let loose with a Tequila-fueled rant that made him sound exactly like his lunatic Dad, so — who knows about his movie.
I see that some posters and the author reference liturgical examples of hostility towards Jews, but, really, how many practicing Christians pay attention or even know of these things?
Now, admittedly, I could be the one who’s wrong and naive, because I am citing examples from things I have not read and seen.
David D, where on this planet do you find “jewish money lenders”? Is there such a thing? Or is this just stupid jewish humor trying to put the words “dirty Jew” into a catholics mouth?
“Ladies and Gentlemen: you are spewing hot air…keep on delving into the Bible for it’s safe and you wont be banned nor censored.”
How big of you Thomas.
Gee, Thomas, you must be onto something so hefty, so profound, that you can only allude to it indirectly. Please do come down from the mountaintop, oh, Wittgenstein, and tell us this great cluster of wisdom you hold so tantalizingly out of reach. What is this great secret you hold about the people who cannot be named?
For goodness sakes folks, calm down already.
Jews are not the problem and Christians are not the problem. The problem is a world gone mad with selfishness and greed and a loss of BOTH FAITH AND REASON.
Academic, Cultural, and Political Elites have lost their minds as well as their faith and reason. We who depend on their leadership are simply lost in the darkness that they have descended into.
As a devout Roman Catholic I am proud to be from the Jewish spiritual and intellectual and moral root, as are all Catholics of good will and understanding of the ancient roots of our Church and civilization. God Bless the Jews, God Bless all God’s children, God Bless the poor blind Human race seemingly stumbling toward the end of its very existence.
All men and women of good will should vow never again to descend into the pit of hatred, revenge, blame, and rationalization of past horrid behaviour on all our ancestors parts Jew, Gentile, secular, pagan, etc.
God please have mercy on us all.
Gerald Kerr, Fort Scott, Kansas
@# uburoisc:
Sorry pal: It’s not permitted to say anything because it will deleted from this blog at once. It’s that simple. It had happened already.
Anyway I could not add much to those historical facts which are already public knowledge to learned people.
Study History like the Russian Revolution of 1905-1917 etc. That’s all I am (may be?) tolerated to say at most.
As I stated earlier things never happen without traceable reason and it’s up to you to decipher those motifs; – something very heavy must be at play if the ENTIRE WEST is succumbed to it – according to the writer.
gkerr @36, I’m with you on almost everything you’ve stated (Pax to you from a fellow RC). But there is a dynamic at work that goes beyond
“a world gone mad with selfishness and greed and a loss of BOTH FAITH AND REASON.”
Anti-semitism is a form of scapegoating. Scapegoating is one of the traits you find among people who are personality-disordered. M. Scott Peck wrote a book some years ago called “People of the Lie.” In it he expounds at length that people who are personality disordered are evil. He has clinical experience as a psychiatrist to back this up. One of the things that these people do is scapegoat other persons or groups of people.
It is an evil age we live in. Everything seems to be inverted. Evil becomes good and good is labeled as evil.
“Pascal Bruckner, in his recently published La Tyrannie de la Pénitence, has added a psychological twist to Europe’s hostility toward Israel and Jews, viewing it as an attempt to excuse its complicity with or passivity before Hitler’s Final Solution: if the Jewish state can be “proven” to be no different from or even worse than the Third Reich, then Europe is off the moral hook.”
Pascal Bruckner focuses more on the white guiltiness in general, saying it’s a post WW2 syndrom of our western countries, that, we, white people, can’t assume our past and comply to any communautarism revendications.
27. Roderick Reilly:
…How many of these anti-Semitic incidents are by ethnically European citizens, and how much of it by the apparently huge influx of ignorant, lower-class recent immigrants form Islamic countries…
My youngest just returned from several months of a backpacking in south and central America. She stopped into Guatemala City to celebrate Purim at the local synagogue. She remarks on how odd it was to celebrate the survival of the ancient Jewish community in Persia in a synagogue ringed layers deep in police and soldiers.
Were the Guatemalan authorities afraid of an attack on the synagogue by Muslims? Or did they fear Christian fellow-travelers the Muslims have inspired? I don’t know.
My middle daughter is in Germany for a year on a research project. She is well treated and has formed friendships with her German colleagues and neighbors. My wife and I, in turn, host German students visiting New York.
However, my daughter knows an Israeli doctoral candidate in another field at the university who is shunned and forced to tolerate continual hostility and can’t wait to get back home.
The university, like others in Germany is packed with Muslims. It is possible that those harassing and shunning a stranger far from home are all Muslims. But the Israeli girl’s German hosts are doing little to defend or protect her. This in a European country especially sensitive to antiSemitism.
Swedish and Belgian relatives with whom I keep in touch report a sharp rise in antiSemitism. My cousin in Brussels, speaks of deep anxiety on the part of Belgian-Jewish citizens living in the Belgian capital. She is a physician as are her two daughters. Her family, like many other Jewish families, are considering leaving Europe.
I asked my cousin before Passover what she saw as the cause for the change in atmosphere in the city where she has lived and practiced medicine most of her life. The journalists, she said without hesitation. They enthusiastically spew raw Muslim anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic propaganda day in and day out.
The journalists are not Muslim, Rod. It takes a Christian to make life unlivable for a Jew in Europe. The silence from the Vatican, which has yet to explain its silence during the holocaust, is deafening.
American Christians, Catholic and Protestant alike, are of a different moral species than their coreligionists in Europe. But the New York times and the Washington Post and CNN are working overtime to overcome that difference.
First, the West has allowed to many Muslims in, and with Muslims come hate for the Jew. Then there are the secular humanists that hate the morality Jews stand for, plus they want to appease the Islamists for oil production.
Although, Orthodox Christianty is full of paganism, the true followers of Christ, a Jewish Rabbi murdered on the cross, died for mankinds sins, and rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of G-d the Father, continue to give Israel 3.5 billion bucks a year.
Jews, and Israel are not alone just yet. However, I agree the writing is on the wall for all to see, and it is a shame. Those who curse Israel will be cursed. Israel exists again after almost two thousand years.
It exists once again because G-d up holds his bargains. To show the world what G-d has spoken will come to pass. The world hates the very thought of this. Therefore, the world’s hate for Jews, and why they would rather appease a pagan religion like Islam.
Over.
The Catholic church is not Christian. It states through works, and the dictates of the Catholic chruch will get you into heaven. There is nothing in the Bible that states that. Plus, they pray to Mary to forgive sins. This is Pagan. She is not the Queen of Heaven. Again Pagan.
Sorry if the truth hurts, but unless you say your prayers to G-d the Father in Christ name only, there is no getting to Heaven, as far as being a Christian is concerned.
So, David L., hello, and please do not mix Catholic, and Protestant. They are not the same.
Amanda, it was Jesus Himself who called the Pharisees children of the devil.
E=mc² and use it wisely. ♥
The Jews are the chosen people of God and with that comes a lot of pain and turmoil because God has placed Jews most high. If God gave his only begotten son to die and suffer on a cross for our sins, would he not put his chosen people through trials and tribulations too?
And it was Jesus Himself who was a Jew, son of a Jewish mother, and who said He came to fulfill the (Jewish) law, not destroy it.
For those who might want to know what Thomas is referring to, i.e., the modern roots of “anti-semitism,” which often has little or nothing to do with Judaism as a religion, but everything to do with anti-national-culture tribal behavior, please read Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century, especially Chapter 3 on the (ethnic) Jewish role in the Soviet Conquest of Russia. It is in its way the ‘short version’ in English of Solzhenitsyn’s suppressed Two Hundred Years Together. (If you read French, you can get Solzhenitsyn’s work from Amazon.fr) Read also Rothman and Lichter’s Roots of Radicalism for the history of the dominance of ethnic (again, not religious) Jews in SDS and in the US radical left. Many of the names and families are the same as those of the Soviet era. The red-diaper babies had parents and families. There are, alas, plenty of Jews who hate Christians, and I have met many of them in academia, banking, the musical world, and in the Los Angeles/New York clan of the husband of my leftist sister-in-law. As my Messiah said: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” There is also something in our shared Bible about Not Bearing False Witness.
#28 Thomas
Hey, I think I’ve figured it out, those people you say have had an undue influence on our culture!
Those people who insist that their religion be whitewashed, when taught in our schools? The ones who’ve bought up much of our mass media, exert an undue influence on our State Department and establish radical schools in the US to spread their religion? Who go ballistic, and riot, if they think they’re being mocked, even in mere cartoons? Who have an army of lawyers to defend them, whenever they claim “racism” or XXXXXophobia?
You mean Islamic radicals, and wealthy Moslem oil-ticks who use their wealth to further the Islamic Caliphate of course!
That’s who you mean, right? Right?
Thomas, if it’s not permitted to say anything, then why are you here saying it?
As my father once said: anti-Semitism is the AIDS of mankind, a virus for which a cure has not yet been found.
I’m sorry that I missed this until now.
Let me help things along here. My parents were both survivors of the Halocaust. I only had to hear their stories to realize just how much we were hated and by whom. If you start to list all that were complicit in killing the Jews, you have to include most of Europe. Except for Denmark all the countries under Nazi control aided the Nazi killing machine. Folks they were all Christian. The end of the war didn’t bring peace and brotherhood to all man. Jews who returned to Poland were murdered. Trains carrying Jews out of Russia to their homelands were ambushed. Anti Semitism didn’t end with the war, it just lay dormant like a seed ready to erupt. You can’t wipe out 2000 years of institutionalized hatred in one generation. Europeans are rational people; however, they choose to believe what the Moslems are spewing.
I had a dialogue with a young Moslem here on PJM who was studying in Poland. He couldn’t understand why the Poles still blame everything wrong on the Jews. There are no Jews around there. I had an easier time having this dialogue with this Moslem than I have with the enlightened of this country either far left or far right.
Larsen E Whipsade
You remind me of Reverend Shnorr on the Jerry Springer Show. “I have read the book and it says hear.” If you really want to make a rational comment study the Torah in its original form, study the Rashi, the Gemorrah, and the Talmud, then come back and lecture to us about our religion. You’re not living it and believe me quoting what you are doesn’t make you and expert in it.
Thomas
You’re still a horse’s rear end; but, I haven’t given up on you yet. Yah, I get censored all the time. Frustrating isn’t it.
David Levavi
No matter what you show or what you say some people are too stupid to understand. Keep up your good work
40. David L “It takes a Christian to make life unlivable for a Jew in Europe.”
You’re just being deliberately offensive and crude for no reason. For someone who talks a lot, you’re not making much sense.
Apparently one of the greatest enemies of the very idea of a Jewish state in its traditional homeland, Israel, is Georgy Soros (Schwartz), who apparently has a blend of socialist belief, mixed with Esperanto and some bastardized form of the philosophy of Karl Popper. He considers the Jews enemies and their embrace of a homeland to be inimical to the world he wants to create. For three decades he has had the wealth to sponsor think-tanks and various political movements all across the world to advance the idea of a One World Government. Big on his target list are the United States of America and the State of Israel.
Now he has all of his people in place to make it happen. Every single one of Obama’s appointments are people I am sure Soros has vetted and advanced. Watch very closely during the next three years and nine months what he and Obama do. I think they know that Obama is going to lose in 2012, and that they may lose a lot of seats in Congress and the Senate in 2010. Therefore, they are going to try to get things all in place well before 2010.
I think the Left is lapping its high water mark now, and that the push-back is beginning in earnest. The big question is how much damage will be done during the next four years and how long will it take for us to recover from it all after that. Fortunately for us, the U.N. and the EU are not militarily capable of enforcing the foreign will against the U.S. Neither a vastly armed populace nor its military will allow us to lose our sovereignty.
Israel will not have us for awhile to stand by it. So, they are going to have to rely on themselves to get through this very dark time.
I am undeterred in my appreciation for, protection of, and fraternal love of our Jewish brethren. I know some Jews probably don’t reciprocate because I’m Roman Catholic. That does not matter. I will be judged by my actions and attitudes, not theirs. They have to answer to God for theirs.
But, it has not escaped me how prominent apostate Jews have been in the Communist/Marxist/socialist/”progressive” movement. These truly awful people sell out their fellow Jews, all of us Christians, and put the entirety of Western Civilization into the hazard. And their are Christians who are also traitors to our heritage. They too shall be judged by God.
Larsen E Whipsnade:
Interesting that the article you you “quote” does not exist in the Jerusalem Post online archives – and the article that the blog you linked to does not contain the remarks it claims are there. The following quote does exist at the original article;
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?apage=2&cid=1196847373185&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
——-
Q: On a French website Q&A, it was said that it is forbidden to give a gift to a goy. Is it your opinion? Thank you.
A: The question of whether we can give presents to a non Jew is discussed in the gemara and properly formalized in the Rambam and the shuclchan aruch. The Rambam says (Matnot Aniyim 7,7):
“Jews are obliged to support the poor non-Jew with the poor of Yisrael, and this because it is the way of Shalom.”
In the laws of Avoda Zara 10 4, the Rambam lists certain limitations in our dealing with the non Jew and ends by saying “and you cannot give them a present if it is for no particular reason”.
The Rambam summarizes in Melachim 10 12:
“The Rabbis directed us regarding the non-Jews to visit their sick and to bury their dead with the Jewish dead, and to support their poor with the poor of Yisrael, and all of this in order to maintain the peace”.
In theory the notion that Jews need to be separate has much to commend itself. Clearly, in this world living in peace with your friends and neighbors is and important principle. The Rambam tells us that we have to navigate the two positions intelligently and that chazal have given us some operative directives. If you feel that it is important to give a present to a non Jew, then by all means do so. Shalom, peace, trumps all the other possibilities.
——
As someone who has studied both mentioned text let me explain further the meaning of the prohibition.
Jews are forbidden from being subservient to non-jews. A gift without any reason could be considered (and is by the rabbis) to be an act of tribute and therefore an act of subservience. Giving a gift for a birthday has a reason -> the birthday, therefore the prohibition does not apply. Furthermore the vast majority of Orthodox Jews vocally reject your claims – including you note the Rabbit you “quoted”
With regard to your quoting of Devarim (Deuteronomy) these directives only apply to that war of conquest of the land of Israel. You fail to mention that these nations had previously been given a chance to reject idol worship and live with us in peace. So yes we were told that after our peace offer is rejected we were to wipe out those living in the land (but not to pursue those who left). This is a law that ONLY applied to those nations – a fact made quite clear in the text.
If you are shocked by the fact that Jews are prohibited from intermarriage without conversion, I think that you need to take another look at religion in general.
I have no expectation that you will listed to reason – this was written to refute your nonsense so that other will not be misled.
Myth Buster. Jesus said this only to the Pharisees who were distorting the Jewish Scriptures and leading the ordinary people astray.
Chrysostom, Augustine and Martin Luther demonized the whole Jewish nation, and all Jewish people for all time. While Chrysostom and Augustine, both Catholics, were content with pogroms and letting the Jews wander homeless forever, Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism wanted the total extermination of the Jews.
Pots and Kettles. It seems the Kettles are blacker at heart.
To Leatherneck:
I have to be in agreement with your comments. The infiltration of islam and islamofacism cannot be ignored nor denied, for to do so is death, to all of us. Islamic hatred for the Jews is well founded and there is plenty in the qur’an that is hateful and negative exclusive to the Jews, and peoples of the book. Other religions have not fared much better and one only has to look to pakistan to see other ideaologies and religions fleeing the country, especially the Swat region where sharia law has been made the law of the region.
Jews, and Israel are not alone just yet. However, I agree the writing is on the wall for all to see, and it is a shame. Those who curse Israel will be cursed. Israel exists again after almost two thousand years.
Perhaps, but IF Israel gets pushed into a corner or attacked severely enough they will respond with their nukes and it will not just be Tehran that gets turned into a parking lot.
Damascus. all the rest would be obliterated back to the stone age. Israel would taken a thrashing but will not be vanquished, even as our current islamosympathizing administration of dhimmi cowards does all it can to chuck Israel and the Jews, under the bus of islamofacism.
“Let me begin by responding to to some of the yahoos commenting here.
Irish Alex: Your reflexive defense of the Church marks you for a fool.
Can you tell me what your ancestors were doing two thousand years ago when Joshua the Galilean preached? Do you even know what your ancestors worshiped at the time? Were they literate people with a written language? Where is their art and literature? What happened to your ancient Irish culture?
It was eclipsed Alex. Your priests and shamans who were your best and brightest were slaughtered. Their altars were razed. Their culture obliterated. Irish memory was wiped clean and replaced with a new memory beginning with Genesis.
The new skins into which Saul of Tarsus proposed to pour old kosher wine were not really new. The skins had all previously contained other wines of various vintages and flavors.
George Orwell was asked once whether he had modeled his novel, 1984, on Communism or Fascism. Neither, said Orwell. I modeled it on the Catholic Church.
The damage and suffering brought upon the Jews by the Church is nothing to the damage and suffering brought by the Church upon the Irish.”
I am in all honesty stunned by the vast quantity of pure ignorance in this comment. You clearly know nothing about Ireland, its history or its culture, yet you still presume to lecture me about it.
Your underlying assumption that I am a Catholic just because I’m Irish is also interesting. Yet another indication that you don’t know my country.
53. Noah Guttman: “Interesting that the article you you “quote” does not exist in the Jerusalem Post online archives” . . .”
Oh sure, we’re just making this stuff up. I think we’ve seen enough dissembling here to see why Christians get exhausted trying to befriend Jews. Some Jews, like yourself and the author Solway, are clearly deceitful Christian haters and that makes any productive relationship impossible. You can try all you want to blame your cultural problems on others, but we’re tired of listening. And, clearly, the whole of Europe is tired of listening. The point that the rabbi was making, and I was simply repeating, is that there is a real reason that Jews are short of friends, and we can see it clearly: Jews don’t give a rat’s ass about non-Jews. Thanks to the internet, the world can see through your clumsy attempts to blame Christians for the problems of the Jews and Israel. What’s really offensive is the crude attempt to smear the Christians who died trying to save Jews during the holocaust. Do you honestly expect others to really care any more?
Thomas, odd you should mention it, but I studied Russian History with Martin Malia at Berkeley, and I regard him as one of the finest scholars on the Russian Revolution to have ever written on the subject. I would call him and ask him what you are getting at, but he died a couple years ago. I do recall asking him about the link between the people who you will not name and Bolshevism, and he took the question graciously and systematically demolished the idea that Bolshevism was some kind of international plot by the aformentioned not named group (as Hitler so vigorously insisted).
There were a disproportionate number of Jews in radical movements, but then again there were a disproportionate number of (redacted) in the orchestra, and in medicine, and in the arts, and finance, and among the aid societies. Just as in the United States, a disproportionate number of (redacted) are working for the Left and the ACLU, an equally disproportionate number write eloquently for Commentary and National Review and advocate conservative principles of limited government and the rule of law.
I’m guessing you are referring to the writings of people like Anthony Sutton? If so, I can’t help you, you will just have to tread water in a sea of risible conspiracy theory all by yourself; I no longer try to dissuade crazy people from their crazy ideas, it’s too much work. Hopefully, you will eventually come around to more honest historians eventually.
The word “Antisemitism” conflates the Jewish people into one, implicitly homogenious group and this is a false premise from the beginning.
To equate the sinister, leftist Hungarian born Soros with the Hungarian born but fiercely America loving Edward Teller (H-bomb) is a logical fallacy.
Dennis Pager is not J. Stewart (Leibowitz) the radical leftist and the conflicting list is stupendous…ACLU Jews and AIPAC memebers…
Do you equate an Ivrit speaking, nationalist, Israeli Jew with a Chomkysta Jew who wants to erase his brethren from the face of the Earth?
How about the Bolshevik, Stalinist Jews who deported the religious Jews to Birobidjan, Eastern Siberia?
What has a mizrahi (Eastern Jew) got to do with Christianity since he lived for 2000 years in the M. East far away from Torquemada’s crew.
Here is my question:
which group of people is the subject of this discussion? The Commies? The Nationalist (Zionist)? The American Diaspora? The Sephardim (Iberian)? Orthodox? The religious? The Bolshevik atheists?
Why don’t you organize your thoughts into a coherent, logical system instead of submerging into incongruous altercations?
Oscar,the Poles don’t like to talk of their past as Jews haters, they want to show how good Allies they are, and they likely transfer their fault on the other EU nations, but their catholic priests and families associations still promote anti-semitism, with the support of the Kaczynski brothers that they help to gain power.
Tadeusz Rydzyk, director of Radio Maryja,
They also forgot to say that their resistance found natural to fight against the soviets (who were alliees by the WW2 times) rather than the nazis
http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Anti-Semitism-Poland-After-Auschwitz/dp/0375509240
Thank you Fred Mr Levavi, Marie-Claude and others for your comments which help this post be easier to relate to, Whipsnade, whatever! Mr Levavi, I do have one comment, the Irish actually weren’t converted by the sword, the Irish converted to Christianism relatively peacefully. The sword which destroyed their culture language and so forth came later, from Protestant England against the Papists, and ressembles Leatherneck’s comments.(that comment surprizes me…) I believe another person commented “People that are anti semitic, tend to be anti human” I do agree. Interesting post and most comments.
A modest factual correction from a Judeophilic Catholic:
“And the Vatican authorized the revival of the Tridentine Mass, which originally referred to Jews as “perfidious” and portrayed them as living in “darkness.” (Despite a papal modification, the mass still retains a prayer for their conversion.)”
That misstates the case. The old Tridentine Mass has only been approved for a tiny handful of parishes; more to the point, the citations you make only apply to the Tridentine Good Friday Liturgy (not a Mass), and they have been modified. This is the liturgical equivalent of that Model T you chug around the block once a month: an historical curio.
It is however the case that that history is indeed ugly. The main thesis is of course correct: the Catholic Church is very largely to blame for European antisemitism. But please, please, please be aware of the encyclical Nostra Aetate (1965) which condemned antisemitism in the strongest possible terms and labelled it a grave sin. Don’t hold today’s Catholics responsible for the sins of our fathers! And I would suggest that today’s antisemitism springs from the fusion of Islam with the atheist Left, not the Vatican.
Larsen E Whipsnade
“Jews don’t give a rat’s ass about nonJews” That’s why Jews and Israel is always there when there is a natural calamity with their help. There are more Jewish charities in this country than you can count and if you go to see what they do very often they don’t ask if you are a Jew or a Goy, they just help you.
As for the part where thousands of Christians died to save the Jews. Not one bomb was dropped on the rail lines going to the extermination camps. Roosvelt knew about them, refused to do anything about them. Churchill ordered them bombed, his airforce refused to carry out the order. The Poles, Ukranians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Romainians,Slovaks, Croats, Hungarians all aided the Nazi extermination. Those Christians who died fighting the Nazis were totally unaware of the mass murders of Jews. Only when they stumbled on concentration camps or death camps did they become aware. All you have to do is look at the historic films of the US army.
Let me help you here the war wasn’t about the Jews, it was about Nazi aggression. Only the Nazis claimed the war was about the Jews.
Your babble is a thinly valed excuse to blame the victim. Too bad you can’t do any better, you come off pathetic. Go goose step with your sisters. We Jews are tired of taking s*it especially from babble monkeys like you.
Thomas
You are right about Jews being a diverse and very often self opposing. It is the nature of being Jewish. Our Talmud brings up an ethical question and gives points that are pro and con. Each believes his own arguments and each believes he/she is right. The word Jew makes no distinction between a liberal or conservative, this type or that type. When being marched into the death camps of Europe, the Nazis didn’t ask any Jew about his politics. Today the Moslem rockets don’t ask for that distinction either. In Israel, you can have a hard line communist shoulder to shoulder with the most conservative/ orthodox fighting on the front lines. Its not a matter of politics, its a matter of survival. Here in the USA Jews are not faced with a survival ethic, that’s why the politics stand out so much. Believe one fringe believes the other is completely nuts.
Catch you later.
Marie Claude
I want to rub butter all over you and do unspeakable things to you. Pssst don’t tell anyone on this blog. Love you.
Oscar, then I’m toasted
another poll of ADL
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASInt_13/5465_13.htm
@64. Oscar the Grump:
As a person who was born in the vast expanse of Eastern Europe where the modern Jewish saga – its beginning and its tragic end – unfolded, I am much better acquainted with all the pertaining details than the American Diaspora Jews which enjoyed a safe, prosperous, sheltered life.
People “over there” faced all imaginable horrors from 1917 onward and everybody had shown their true colors: we saw the bloody rampage of the Bolshevik Jews and the German genocide in the Nazi death camps, from Ravensbrück, Dachau, Treblinka — all the way to the Kolyma river in Eastern Siberia, the last stop for the walking dead whom were disgorged by the millions from the cattle wagons….the victims of Marxism-Leninism.
Unfortunately my first hand knowledge of contemporary history is considered as “un-PC and will be deleted, censored and condemned on most forums.
Israel’s Jews have roots in that bloody land called Europe and they do know the rule of the game: I wish them strength to disavow and resit the Kapos in the Diaspora which make up the majority.
Mr. Solway writes superbly about the resurgence of anti-semitism and the tendency of the West toward self-destruction…
Thomas, Thank you for pointing out the extraordinary variety of the Jewish experience. Indeed, one of the confounding puzzles confronting a non-Jew of good will in this discussion is the reality of how Jews, seemingly more than any other ethnic group, have spanned the spectrum of good and evil. It is quite possible to admire Einstein,
Erlanger, (many of the) Rothschlids, (earlier generations of) Sulzbergers, Oistrakh, Schoenberg and Mahler, while being horrified by Kaganovich, Yagoda, Sverdlov, Schlichter and Trotsky; appalled by Chomsky, Rudd (Rudinsky), Dhorn (Ohrenstein) and Axelrod, and dubious about Soros, Rubin, Weil, Wolf, and Pritzker. What is dishonest in the discussion is to not only to lump all Jews together, but also to lump all Christians together and claim that some (spuriously homogeneous) “Christianity” is responsible for all bad opinions toward Jews, especially when American Christians have been THE most welcoming people toward Jews in perhaps all history. It would also help clear the air to admit that Jews were not only victim-objects, but (yes, sadly) in fact aggressor- subjects in history. Contrary to modern mythology, Germany was already mainly non-Christian in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and modern German anti-semitism owes far more to fear of the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers than it does to the Catholic Church. As Slezkine documents, Tsarist Russia was largely run by a government bureaucracy composed of (!) ethnic Germans — who were supplanted, and often liquidated by… Bolshevik Jews. Germans saw that up close and personal. Hitler (a Darwinist and Indo-mystic, not a Christian) was able to whip up a fatal poison from a real phenomenon. Uberoisc, I am afraid you were taught the usual sanitized version of the Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath. Read Slezkine (who is half Russian Jewish). Read about the Ukranian Terror-Famine and the Gulag, and the people who ran those operations.
Interesting. Let’s see if I have this right, on this Whipsnade issue. Whipsnade claims to have written proof from actual Jews to support his claim that Jews don’t care about non-Jews and actually practice antipathy towards them (which oddly ignores the many medical cures invented by Jews that help non-Jews as well). Guttman asks for scriptual and textual proof of this position that Whipsnade attributes to Jews.
Whipsnade quotes the Torah out of context and claims to quote a rabbi from the Jerusalem post.
Guttman says that passage from the Post doesn’t exist.
Whipsnade responds, paraphrasing, “Oh, like I’m making this up?” If Whipsnade was honest, he would provide a more definite link to his quotation. Otherwise, yeah, he’s making it up. Just like the Protocols, the blood libels, and thanks to video technology and the internet, all the news of Israeli atrocities. So, either Whipsnade can link to the Jerusalem Post directly, with an article from a rabbi who may or may not exist and who may or may not be a crackpot, this debate is over and Whipsnade is lying.
Thomas
My parents were from Poland, is that Eastern enough for you? I was born in Europe. Yes there were Boshevik Jews. Once in power the love affair between the communists and Jews ended, another utopia denied, another promise of equality squashed. 1950 was the end of the love affair, the Jews had used up their welcome. All Jewish intelligencia was murdered in one night. By the way, I know very well about the Gulag, my grandfather, my brother, my cousin, my sister-in-law are buried there. Also I’m very aware of the Kulaks.
I knew I could have a decent discourse with you. Welcome aboard and your view point is also important. Don’t be afraid of the censors so much. We want to see what you have to say. I might not agree with it,but, I still want to see it.
Well, done Thomas, and welcome to the discussion; having you say what you mean, even if I disagree, is infinitely preferable to the studied reticence.
Globalizer, there is no question as to the involvement of Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution; in fact, I recall making a lot of people at the university very uncomfortable by pointing out just how many there were, but I think it is pretty clear that the Bolsheviks who were Jews were in many respects as hostile to Judaic religious identity as their atheistic non-Jews in the Party. I don’t think you can make a very effective case that Bolshevism was uniquely or distinctly Jewish; it was a gangster regime of opportunists and political radicals.
I look forward to reading Slezkine, his book looks quite interesting, and I read the interview. Good to hear he is at Cal; I may go and look him up and chat with him.
66. Marie Claude,
Just tell Oscar Le Grump, “Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit!”
That’s a ‘Southern’ American saying but it cracks me up.
Thomas
An interesting note pogroms against the Jews were present way before the advent of Bolsheviks in Eastern Europe. What do you surmise was the cause of all that? All it took was for one person to say “Jerusalem has fallen.” That was enough to incite a mob into a murdering rampage. I don’t recall of any murdering rampages by Jews against Ukrainians or Poles or Russians. Yet pogroms continued after the end of the Second World War.
Don’t be myopic about looking at history. Lots of Jews suffered at the same time the Ukrainian famine was going on. Everything was collectivized, personal property confiscated and all kinds of people were sent to Siberia. Jews were even given a homeland there. After they built it up, it was taken by the same Soviets who sent them there.
I bet if you looked close enough you’d find that b*stards come in all denominations.
Delia and Marie Claude
I just got censored and all I did was suggest jelly.
@69. Globalizer:
@71. Oscar the Grump
@72. uburoisc:
I appreciate your understanding and let’s return to the gist of this thread namely the question of Antisemitism and censorship.
I am willing to discount the religion and race based Antisemitism because those view are rather obsolete, it belongs to earlier times and those practitioners are not numerous nowadays and sound anachronistic.
Let’s bypass the European version too which is verbatim corresponding to Marx: “The Jewish Question” treatise that is to be had on the net to read.
I believe the American resentment based on the 78%-factor, that is, those Jews are Leftist, they want a “Different America” the same way they wanted a “Different Russia, Hungary, Germany etc.” They equally conspire to destroy Israel (T.Judt: “The creation of Israel was a mistake”)….
The ACLU, So.Poverty Law Center, Code pink, N.Y.Times, Air America are all Anti-American Communist organizations run by Commie Jews.
And we do know it
Go to Dave Horowitz’:”Discover the Networks” web to learn who’s who in the Red Hell.
About the censorship: Any reference to the corrosive, insidious work of the aforementioned disciples of the “Frankfurt School” will be considered Antisemitic and banned.
Jewish people on the Jerusalem Post and Ynetnews -Israel forums have more freedom to criticize the hard left than we have here in the States.
They rejected the Kapos in the last election while 78% voted for them over here.
Thomas, Oscar and Uburoisc,
It seems that we are finally getting to the heart of the matter. And kudos to Pajamas Media for NOT censoring those of us who speak of hitherto unmentionable history. BTW, where is David Solway on all of this? What does he say to our concerns? What does he say about Ira Stoll’s anguish about the (ethnic, anti-religious) Jewish role in the current financial meltdown? I quite like the Jewish Religion that came up with the 8th, 9th and 10th Commandments. (In case you have forgotten, those are the Commandments that state: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness. Thou shalt not covet. ) But now we have a whole dominant political party, one seemingly led by Jews who have rejected Judaism, who follow the opposite of those principles! Obama is surrounded by such people: Summers, Orzag, Ruttner, Rubin, Pritzker, Soros, Frank, Schumer, Waxman, Boxer, etc. etc. Why, exactly, should those of us who are not part of the tribe NOT be worried?
I forgot Axelrod and Emanuel (Auerbach). Major omissions.
Thomas
That means that 22% voted conservative. Thats up from 5%, that’s real progress. I is what I try to work for progress. Jews belong in the conservative camp, they’re discovering it one at a time. Critical mass is reached when that number climbs to 50% and that what we need to encourage.
Old stereotypes die hard. On the other blog KansasCitywhatever couldn’t begin to realize that he was one of the reasons Jews hesitate to switch. The Democratic party is an old comfortable shoe but its growing into an uncomfortable fit.
70. naftali:”Whipsnade quotes the Torah out of context and claims to quote a rabbi from the Jerusalem post. Guttman says that passage from the Post doesn’t exist. Whipsnade responds, paraphrasing, “Oh, like I’m making this up?” If Whipsnade was honest, he would provide a more definite link to his quotation.”
More dissembling! One more time: I’m not quoting the Torah, I’m reporting what two Jewish scholars said about Jews CAUSING hatred of Jews. I gave the actual URL so you intellectuals could find it. Those are the words of Jewish scholars quoted, not mine. When you keep up with the fiction that I don’t know the Torah, you’re dissembling because it’s the rabbi that’s speaking, not I.
If you don’t like the sentiments, then you must summon up your courage and publicly state that those scholars don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s nothing to do with me – I’m just the messenger. I gave you quotes from prominent Jewish scholars on the notion that Jews themselves can (and do) create antisemitic reactions by reason of bad manners. Everything you need is there, including a piece of Deuteronomy (which I didn’t write). I can’t help you to follow source leads if you don’t know how. But after reading the deceitful and paranoid responses of some here, I sure do understand what the rabbi was getting at!
75. Oscar the Grump:
“I just got censored and all I did was suggest jelly.”
~
Oh Oscar, you adorable Grump! Petroleum ‘jelly’ is naughty! Grape jelly is okay though but… hmmm…
Did you get yourself into a ‘jam’?
P.S. I get censored from time to time too. I can never figure it out because some of my more outrageous statements will go through and some of my [what I deem] fairly ‘innocuous’ statements get da boot and never show up.
As to the topic?
Maybe it’s too simplistic but I think anti-Semitism stems from the green-eyed monster. Are all Jews good? Of course not! Are all Christians good? Hell to the NO. Peter Popoff, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker anyone [just to name a few]? People will always EFF up and there are always ‘bad eggs’ but to paint a whole group by a few bad eggs is definitely not the way to go.
I wanted to dissipate all form of accusation of Antisemitism whenever one brings up the question of Marxism, Stalinism etc.
Supporters of the State of Israel should look at the web
http://www.masada2000.org/
Wiki describes the site:
“According to its founders, it was established to counter “professional and deadly serious” websites with anti-Israel views.[1] They also have said that the site will “expose Jews who genuinely despise Israel and the Jewishness it represents”[1] and “‘progressive’ Jews who are into ‘social justice’ causes for everyone EXCEPT Israel’s Jewish population.”
There is a S.H.I.T. list section.(Self-Hating Israel Threatening Jews).
Here is Pink Code founder profile:
“Benjamin, Medea Susan In her view, America’s war on terrorism is itself a form of terrorism. Like any good anti-American, Fidel Castro-supporting Leftist, this founding director of Global Exchange [San Francisco, CA] and Green Party Candidate for U.S. Senate from California predictably advises us on how our support of Israel’s survival is the “root cause” of Arab/Muslim resentment.”
I wanted to underline the facts that morally courageous, valiant Israelis are not afraid to name the devil when they see one in their own home. Unfortunately, many American diaspora Jews are – with due respect to the minority – self-loathing Marxist whom are untouchable.
To tell the truth I am stupefied at craven cowardice with which people run away from sensitive debates: it reminds me to my life under Stalinism where walls had ears so we had to whisper incessantly.
Even the prison’s nickname was “The Whisperer” because we had to whisper lest an other prisoner might recognize our voice and the State cannot crack open our “conspiracy”.
Delia
Its not the jelly, its how it is used.
I can name a few Jewish names that make me want to vomit, Chomsky, Streisand, Boxer, Feinstein, Waxman, Barnie Frank, Bernie Madoff, and on and on. I bet my list is longer than yours.
83. Oscar,
Sorry, my leetle Grumpy Gus…but I can top you.
My own MOTHER was the worst, most hypocritical, abusive, psychotic supposed “Christian” of them all. Bat Sh*t Crazy, speakin in ‘supposed’ tongues whacko.
It took a long time for my heart to heal towards GOD after the crap I went through as a child. -But, God works in mysterious ways and we all have a purpose if we let ourselves be the vessel for the Holy Spirit.
Stranger things have been known to happen?
Do you want honey on that biscuit?
Oddly enough, I had Jewish friends who were ‘Wiccan’ of all things? Go figure that ‘un out? They had to move but it was an ‘interesting’ friendship whilst it lasted nonetheless.
uh, Oscar, I was told that we were the only kinky people
71. Oscar the Grump:”My parents were from Poland. . .”
What a surprise. My parents were from Europe, too. Most of my Christian ancestors died in the war trying to save your ungrateful sorry ass. And then you’ve got the nerve to try to perpetuate the Jewish hatred of Christians. Methinks you’ve maybe never been to Europe, that you’re just living on some comic book version of Jewish righteousness. I’m not surprised that Jews are feeling the bite of isolation in Europe. You can carry on being miserable, self-righteous, and ungrateful, but this is what a lack of gratitude leads to. Are you enjoying it? Does it feel good?
Globalizer,
As you note, to paint all Jews or all Christians with a broad brush is lazy and simple-minded usually indicating a lack of knowledge and confidence in ones own allegations.
As Thomas I think noted, to paint with such a broad brush is a form of scapegoating which if persistant and unexamined reflects moral failure and even personality disorder (Scott Peck and “People of the Lie”)
I don’t really understand the hatred for those who practice a belief in God that is manifest on so many blog sites. Over and over folks see religious motives when it seems to me that the origin of the malignant energy they criticize (at least in this modern era)is not coming from a religious perspective but an amoral utterly secular acting out of abandoned and deformed first principles.
Christian Faith and theology has not been the primary influence of European common culture for well over 250 years. The Zeitgeist has been secular and religion/tradition hostile for at least that long. Don’t people ever study history anymore?
N#86, I can’t believe that got posted! Uh, why don’t you just prove the author right about Chrisitans? Unbelieveable. Either that or you are a troll. Oscar the Grouch (and any other person offended) I am sorry for the insults of this “whatever.” Unbelieveable, and I actually now live in Europe (France to be exact, although I am an American).
On to ther thoughts: I am grateful for the above discussion, thank you for letting people know, this is why I keep coming to read Pajamas Media.
86.,
WTF? What bug crawed up your arse on this fine Saturday? Good grief! Jesus was a JEW for Christ’s sake [hey, I used that in the right context].
If you want to ‘hate’ anything, hate ISLAM. Those MuthaF*ckers want to take over the freakin’ WORLD and YOU are an infidel if you do not succumb.
Think about it…
Bill: A Judeophile Catholic deserves a forthright response. I agree entirely that “today’s antisemitism springs from the fusion of Islam with the atheist Left, not the Vatican.”
But why is His Holiness so silent on the subject, of anti-Semitism, brother Bill? Where has the spirit of Nostra Aetate flown? Jews are fleeing Europe. Does His Holiness imagine his own flock far behind?
How long does his Holiness imagine it will be before prominent catholic bishops and cardinals begin to see the light of Allah and his one true Prophet, PBUH? Does His Holiness imagine himself a modern-day Constantine, ready to pack up the whole Roman show and take it on the road? When, oh when will the Vatican gather the courage to sound a clear moral call for an end to Muslim encroachment into Christendom?
Leatherneck: Still storming beaches and lost none of your energy, I see.
Viewfromafar: On Irish history I accept your correction. Alex from the Emerald Isle is “stunned by the vast quantity of pure ignorance in this (my) comment.” To that charge, I offer no defense. My ignorance is indeed vast although, truth be told, some of it is corrupted by verifiable fact and less than pure.
I plainly acknowledge I know little of Irish History. Not for dislike of the Irish but for lack of interest. My overarching point was that Christianity swept away ancient cultures and memories in the west while Islam did it in the east. And both replaced those memories and cultures with a variant of Judaism.
My original complaint with Alex of Ire had to do with his expression of dismissive contempt toward a well-reasoned and rational post regarding an issue viewed by Jews of all stripe with burning anxiety. If I’ve gratuitously insulted the Church or Ireland, my apologies.
Anti-semitism is fundamentally wrong. No one who considers himself/herself a Christian can be an anti-Semite without denigrating the faith he/she professes. Nor may atheists or agnostics indulge in such hatred without isolating themselves. The agnostic culture in which we live will not survive. The trend of current events will force people to rely nore on one another, something that cannot be done in the midst of hatred. No government in the past has been able to spread happiness across the land nor will it be possible to do so in the present day any more than in the past. In the meantime militant Islam is becoming more militant.
Marie Claude
Kinky? What is Kinky?
Delia
Help us out here. Marie thinks were kinky? Huh?
Folks out there
We are not being kinky. We are just exchanging recipes!
Sorry Ladies I have a new love, Susan Boyle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PPlkOyaqaQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8r9lRJ6yHY
We are just exchanging recipes!
Oscar, there it is ! the recipes are un-bear-able
Oscar Le Grump,
Kinky? Ha-ha!
Totally Off topic but: I’ve been OBSESSED with Susan Boyle too. OMGosh! I cry every time I watch her video on youtube. I’m such a sap.
Her story makes me all verklempt. *sniffle*
Marie Claude
You’ve got to see these Susan Boyle vids. Maybe I’m just a sap too, but I feel like Delia does. LOL
Europe is the grave yard of the Jewish people. Hitler was not entirely successful in destroying European Jewry. Islamic Jew hatred imported into Europe by a civilization that has lost it’s Christian ideals will finish what Hitler couldn’t do. The Jews of Europe need to leave before it’s too late. Israel will be that much stronger when the remnant of European Jewry immigrates there. The Russian Jewish immigration turned Israel into a technological powerhouse.
If you look around the world, a country that has no Jews is not much of a country. At least not one that anyone in the “West” would find hospitable. And so all of Europe will be Judenrein and Islamic.
umm, Oscar, but I can draw, paint, sculpt, write a nice “baratin” on my works
yes, I saw and HEARD her singing, she has the gift that any human would like to possess, a voice, which, IMO, is the highest’s, and she knows how to use it
“Anti-Semitism is the public expression of the underlying irrationality that brings the great civilizing project of the West into serious question, from the time of the Greeks and the Romans through the advent and diffusion of Christianity to the present importation of Islamic Jew-hatred into the Western cultural matrix.” David Solway
What a grand pretention and what a voraciously ethno-centric proclamation.
Firstly, since “the civilizing project of the West” is decidedly not built upon utopian pretentions nor upon the perfectibility of man in any sense (decidedly to the contrary), there are many public expressions – and not singly or even predominantly anti-Semitism – that reflect that lack of perfectibility. Anti-Semitism is certainly one of them and often can be a tell-tale indicator of note, the proverbial “coal miners’ canary,” but it is one among many such indicators nonetheless. Likewise, there are both lesser and greater degrees of all forms of prejudice and bigotry, from mild on through to truly virulent and malevolent expressions, but that is in fact true of all prejudices and not merely anti-Semitism.
Secondly, in terms of that “underlying rationality,” one first needs to indicate what form of “rationality” is being suggested in the first place. Is that designed to prescribe a latter-day version of Marxian “scientific materialism” or some scientific positivism, a scientism, e.g., a la Al Gore & Co.? Or, from another vantage point, one might consider all the purportedly rational forms of formal legal analyses to appreciate the problems that inhere in any presumptive view of “rationality.” The human animal, certainly not in the social/political sphere, is not readily given to “rational” expressions in general, so to suggest anti-Semitism singly or most notably is “the” tell-tale indicator of that confounding irrationality is not at all apparent.
Finally, the flip-side of that coin is that such a grand, presumptive declaration allows one to stand aside, allows one to stand over and above others, allowing one to judge without subjecting one’s own assumptions, prejudices, biases, bigotries, etc. to critical review, whether they be ethno-centric prejudices, ideological inclinations and presumptions, or some other form of bias still.
A couple of examples, one dating from antiqutiy and one from the 20th century.
It is rarely noted – that’s “rarely,” as in virtually never – that from the 1st century C.E., in rabbinic and Talmudic texts, in other texts as well, a great deal of anti-Christian animus and malice is evidenced. And yes, that’s from the 1st and 2nd century, well before Constantine. Further, at least some of that malice can be ranked among the most vicious language ever used by one group against another.
Now from the 20th century, it certainly behooves Jewish communities to be aware of what is happening in the world, to be able to plumb it all with appropriate depth and breadth and therein to gauge more severe expressions of anti-Semitism and to then combat those expressions. (The United States, for all its imperfections, has long been a safe-haven for Jewish communities, among other communities as well. Imperfectly, but it’s been a salient historical fact nonetheless.) But Jews alone were not the sole sufferers in the 20th century, nor during any period. It may well be, for example, that Stalin’s and Kaganovich’s Ukrainian genocide was the greatest single genocide of the 20th century in terms of numbers exterminated. Similarly, a hundred million murdered by Marxist/Leninist regimes and their offshoots is nothing to sneeze at or shrug one’s shoulders at. Much suffering has and continues to occur in the world, anti-Semitism in some of its more extreme forms reflects one prominent subset, but one among many indicators nonetheless. Likewise, though it’s too often been exaggerated and cast for purposes of conspiratorial and demonizing effect, there was nonetheless a sizeable contingent of ideological, “secularist,” Bolsheviks Jews, some of whom, such as Kaganovich, fully participated in mass murder campaigns themselves. History does not proceed in a vacuum.
Perspective is needed. Attention to historical facts and larger realities is likewise needed.
Anti-Semitism is not one thing, it is many things. It takes mild forms and all too often in history has acquired malignant and malevolent forms as well. Also, some of what anti-Semitism is can be readily analyzed on a rational and historical/empirical basis while other aspects are deserving of a far more tentative, far more hesitant review, perhaps reflecting an aporia, an indeterminative quality, no matter our attempts to define it all on a more rational basis.
Larsen E Whipsnade:
The quote you claimed does not exist you have provided no link or any evidence that those statements were made by those people.
I provided a quote and a link directly contradicting your claims – I provided actual statements by the rabbi you mentioned. I can easily provide more.
You have not responded to with any facts or any links only with vitriol.
Oh and for the record the hebrew you “copied and pasted” was gibberish, the english version was a valid translation of the hebrew text, though as I stated previous you have taken it out of context.
Wow, there are some incredibly smug blowhards posting here, especially one particular pathetic suckling who bestows upon the author the complement of being a “virtuosic thinker”. You obviously know this author, why repress your latent homosexual feelings any longer.
My only comment about the article is what I could say to my friends, but won’t. It has become standard practice that anytime a Jewish persons character or actions are criticized, they almost universally defaul to the reaction of accusing their critic of being anti-semitic. If you are the Chosen ones, come up with a better defense than anti-semitism, it is sooooo tired already.
Goy out,
peace
Dude,
You are working on cure for disease we don’t have: “that anti-Semitism is the social and intellectual tumor of Western civilization caused in large part (though not only) by the doctrinal and ideological diet prescribed by the Christian church.”
The most dangerous anti-semites are NOT Christian. For example:
1. Islamic terrorists & Islam in general
2. Post Christian Socialist Europe
3. The Left in general (Venszula, most colleges, etc.)
The Jews most potent ally today is often a Christian; example, George Bush.
Or to be blunt; if Christanity suddenly vanished would Isalm or the Left suddenly support the existence of Israel?
Your article ignores the most important fact: The Jews have enjoyed far more safety & dignity in Christian America, England, Canada than any other cultures outside of Israel.
As an adherent to Yeshua’s teaching and one who was raised a Jew by Orthodox parents in the 50′s and 60′s, I am no longer amazed at Jew hatred from any section of American society or the world. Moreover, regardless of any institutionalized hatred or hatred stemming from quotes made by some of the more notable Christian leaders referenced in other comments, there is still the individual’s accountability to live out the “new commandment” (love God, love others), which was “new” in the sense of its applicability to non-Jews, enemies, and the liberation of women by Christ’s teachings (not man’s perversion of same).
Regardless of its rationalization or justification by anyone’s finite mind, an infinite God will judge the heart of those who engage in prejudice.
Michael B
It is rarely noted – that’s “rarely,” as in virtually never – that from the 1st century C.E., in rabbinic and Talmudic texts, in other texts as well, a great deal of anti-Christian animus and malice is evidenced. And yes, that’s from the 1st and 2nd century, well before Constantine. Further, at least some of that malice can be ranked among the most vicious language ever used by one group against another.
I can accept much of what you have to say, it has a lot of merit. The above is totally unfounded. As for my studies Christianity is hardly mentioned in the time slot. More over, there was much cross over between the two religious sects at the time. If you care to witness a similar phenomena the Habad movement of today is an exact parallel of what happened two thousand years ago.
Conversely some of the greatest butchers of humanity were Christian. Up to the twentieth century more people were butchered in the name of Christianity than any other group. You only have to look at the genocide in this hemisphere to see this.
What makes anti-Semitism unique is that it is a recurring theme for two thousand years. It hasn’t stopped, and it gets adopted enthusiastically again and again.
In reference to Kaganovich and the “Jewish” Bolsheviks as soon as the term Jewish is added to Bolsheviks without realizing it you have used an anti-Semitic term. Bolsheviks came in all kinds of groups none had any real ties to any religion instead rejected it. Is a Christian convert to Islam still labeled a Christian? What was horrible about the Bolshevik/Communist ‘theology’ was that human life was a mere commodity. People were a resource to use or discard at a whim.
The Gulags of Russia held many Jews as well as Ukrainians for that matter any other ethnic group in Russia. We see this same “theology’ again in China and Cambodia. People I’ve talked to told me the Communist system itself wasn’t bad, its treatment of people was horrible. Human life had no value.
John
I have to agree with you, I see the left and Islamism as a greater threat than Christianity. However, its hard to forget the past, WWII etc. There is two thousand years of being butchered in the name of Christ (a Jew) that makes us a bit uncomfortable with our new found friends. Are they really our friends or is this just a new way to steal our souls?
Let me let you in on a secret (promise not to tell), not all Christians “love” us.
Be well, love your input.
Oscar the Grump,
Firstly, I’ll give you credit for openly acknowledging that what was said “has a lot of merit.” However, without diminishing that credit, two exceptions of note:
I’m not indulging anti-Semitism – not consciously or otherwise – in noting there was a sizeable contingent of “secularist,” ideological Jews who participated in the early and later Bolshevik movement. I realize that tactic is used by anti-Semites, but it’s a historical reality nonetheless, one concerning which I specifically emphasized “it’s too often been exaggerated and cast for purposes of conspiratorial and demonizing effect.” It’s worthy of pointed emphasis in contexts such as this precisely because of the one-sided, insular quality reflected in the originating post. It’s worthy of emphasis for an entire range of other, related reasons as well, e.g., Marx’s own anti-Semitism could readily be brought into view within this same historical and ideological landscape: A Comprehensive Look at Marx the anti-Semite is the best source I’ve found on the web for that aspect of the historical/ideological review.
In terms of Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmudic references per se, Jesus in the Talmud is one place to begin. As with conspiratorial Bolshevik references, such works, too, can be used for purposes of anti-Semitic effect, but once again, that fact per se does not negate the historical realities.
Btw, it’s worth pointedly emphasizing the fact that Peter Schafer, the author of “Jesus in the Talmud,” is a Princeton based scholar of note and has written other works such as Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World. I pointedly emphasize that fact to help insure against any anti-Semitic uses the earlier reference might be put to, also for purposes of scholarly perspective and bona fides in general.
Oscar,
Well, you’ve finally made your hatred of Christians clear enough. I thought we were talking about Contemporary relations between Jews and Christians…and you go back to claiming that Christians were the “real” bad guys throughout history, or at least before the 20th Century when the Bolsheviks kicked off the really cool fashion for Mass Murder.
I had thought we were getting beyond tarring all members of one religion or group with the same brush, but I guess you have to keep doing that.
Also, I challenge you to present proof of your hateful assertion. Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, the Mongols, and the Arabs who conquered North Africa and India were FAR more murderous than any Christians or so-called Christians, and yes, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Latin America, which you and yours love to throw in our faces. Study some history, please. And face it, those deeds were dwarfed by your atheist friends of a certain ethnicity more recently. And like it or not, some of the killers (Kaganovich, Sverdlov, Yagoda) were you know what, or married to members of the Tribe (Stalin, Molotov, Dzerzhinsky, Yezhov, etc.)
To claim that Bolshevik Jews were somehow not Jews because they had rejected Judaism as a Religion, but not as an ethnicity or largely endogamous tribe, is word play. Somehow secular Jews still view us Christians as the enemy, no matter how much modern American generosity and good faith is shown to the contrary. SDS was led by ethnic Jews, the ACLU, Code Pink, and moveon.org still are. If you don’t like their form of modern “Jewishness,” please (yes, please do) take it up with them, not with us, your compatriots who at least heretofore were inclined to respect and even admire many of your like.
The worry we non-members of the Tribe have today is precisely about Secular Jews who have rejected the Ten Commandments, many of whom are descendants and relatives of those who gave Bolshevism to the world, and who worship Marx and Freud instead of G_d. They may not be religious, but they think they are still the “chosen ones” who should rule over us. Need I repeat their names among our current Obama entourage Nomenklatura?
If you want to reduce anti-Semitism, or the threat thereof, you might begin by talking to your own and asking them to follow Leviticus, if not Christ, in loving their (generally, in fact, well disposed) American neighbors.
I am perfectly willing to believe that you are a good person. It would reassure me further to know that you are at least somewhat religious in the sense of sharing in Judeo Christian principles of morality. But would you, Solway, and others please stop slandering and suppressing Christianity and Christians in return as part of the bargain?
My post is censored, deleted.
Makes no further sense to post anything.
Good bye.
Michael B
To my knowledge there is no mention of Jesus in the Talmud. Where Mr.
Schafer gets his information is beyond me. I will contact some Talmudic scholars and explore this further. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to clarify with certainty either your position or mine. Looking forward to our future discourses!
Thomas
Try again please. I found that if I closely watch my wording I get my ideas through.
Globalizer
You are right I am not proud of the non-secular Jews or the Jews in the Obama administration; but, try being a jew in the last two thousand years.
You rub Kaganovich and his ilk in my face. You forgot to mention the 887 pograms in the Ukraine alone prior to the Boshevik revolution (70,000 dead). Or the continued terror of the Jewish communities there by the Red army or the white army or various other groups. Kaganovich and his crowd were just as fast to send a Jew to the Gulag as anyone else. As a matter of fact, they gave the Jews a “homeland” in Siberia. Hundreds of thousands were sent to that homeland, there is no record of how many of them starved to death.
For the Jews who embraced Communism, it was just an attempt to have equality with everyone else. Stalin took care of all this great equality, the purge of 1950 where thousands of intellectual Jews, Soviet Jewish Leaders, Party members, officers were murdered.
I’m curios, how many good Christians killed each other in the Thirty Years War, in Ireland, in England, or any other European war. (or are we not allowed to count them) Christianity subjugated North America ( 3.5 Million Indians), South America, Africa, Australia (those are just the continents). Add to it other wars :all of Russia, India, China, New Zealand and hundreds of other places around the globe where indegenous people were slaughtered in the name of brotherly love.
113. Oscar the Grump:
When articles from the Maariv (ynetnews)Israel is deleted-censored which is germane to this thread, then few meaningful subject left to be discussed which is authentic Israeli.
We are not children to be treated like idiots when we respect the rule of civilized discourse overall.
Dear Oscar,
Your anti-Christian hatred and prejudice breaks my heart. You are so like so many of your cohort who see a Tsarist agent whenever they look at one of their fellow Americans.
Please note that Christianity as expressed in the New Testament didn’t kill anyone, rather the reverse given the martyrs under Rome back then, and in Turkey, Iran, and the Middle East now. Can you show me one place in the New Testament where anyone is urged to kill another human being???? (I have Jewish friends who have told me that they reject Judaism & the Old Testament because it is so bloodthirsty, BTW…)
Poor, horrible, sad, sinful, imperfect Human Beings DID do a lot of killing, alas. But I would still bet you a goodly sum to the effect that “Christians,” even those in name only, did a LOT less killing over the centuries than others. Without the conversion of pagan barbarians during the Dark Ages, many more killings would have been likely. (Read How the Irish Saved Civilization for one take on the matter.)
It IS a great tragedy that many Jews were killed in pogroms. Solzhenitsyn’s sources say 3,500. You say 70,000. Far to many, either way. (BTW, Slezkine indicates that a fair number of pogroms had to do much more with commercial rivalry over the grain trade than over religion or ethnicity…) That’s still an awful lot less than ~7 million in the Ukranian Terror Famine, or the (probable) 100-120 MILLION under communism. But of course, as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million (or two, or a hundred) is a statistic.
I am really sorry that you and yours hate us Christians so. You would find a lot fewer “anti-Semites” around in America were you to stop being so anti-Modern American Christian.
Thomas
Try it again, maybe it was a glitch. I certainly am interested especially if it is germane to this discussion. Discussions are designed to exchange ideas/points of view. Sometimes what you read makes you uncomfortable; but, the result is you go away having learned something.
Try again, please.
Thomas
I get censored on the average at least 2 times per week. One time I got censored 6 out of 7 times, another 4 out of 5 times. This hasn’t stopped me from being my obnoxious self. Do this just give us the hyperlinks to the articles. If you don’t know how to do this, I’ll talk you through it.
Sure, everyone who criticizes Israel is actually a Nazi. Just keep your hands over your ears and hum that tune.
Michael B & Oscar the Grump:
In reference to claim of anti-Jesus/Christian sentiments in the Talmud;
I have not read the book in question but some things are clear.
(1) Neither talmud contains any statements that speak directly about Jesus or Christianity. The book contains a collection of verses from the Talmud and other Jewish period writings that closely resemble parts of the New Testament while at the same time refuting it.
(2) The book claims (quite correctly) that the Jewish leadership of the time considered the notion of the Tanach (Old Testament) being superseded to be nonsense.
(3) The author himself does not consider the book to be a scholarly treatise, but only a kind of extensive essay
(4) The book is not about modern Jewish-Christian relations but rather about the debates/relations that took place when Christianity was in its infancy.
Globalizer
My sources said that more than 7 million died in the Ukrainian Hologrom, I think that it is probably a low estimate. Many were sent to the Gulag, many were shot, the most starved to death at Stalin’s orders. It was a totally unnecessary murder of innocents. 2 Million Jews died in the Ukraine. It was the center of what was called the Jewish Pale. Many Ukrainians were involved in their murders, they too were innocents. The concept of Ukrainian camp guards, concentration and death camps, was real and for good reason.
You assume too much about me without ever knowing me. You’re wrong on many counts; but, I don’t care. Assume what you want. I don’t feel that I need to defend myself. I am a product of Eastern Europe and my dead family gives me the right to be acid in my responses.
There are plenty of anti-Semites in the US. Unfortunately some of the worst are people who profess to be Jews. I can’t understand how a person can profess to be Jewish and never step in a synagogue. Also I can’t understand how anyone can profess to be Christian and not understand that Jesus was a Jew. He died a Jew and had a Jewish burial. At his death he prayed to the same God I pray to. The best thing you ‘good’ Christians can do is just leave us alone.
Has anyone noticed the amount of misconceptions about the Jewish scriptures among both the Jews and the non-Jews in this thread? I promise that the secular Jews know very little of what is in our literature, and many observant Jews know what is said literally, but don’t jump into the meaning.
For instance Noah said above that Jews aren’t supposed to give gifts for no reason–his reasoning, or the reasoning he’s been taught, we aren’t supposed to be subservient. That’s not exactly true. Throughout the Talmud there is a very clear understanding that the non-Jewish world is tempting as heck. I mean, think of a life where you’re not hated everywhere you go–that’s tempting.
And so there are rules to keep us from leaving our rules to a world of all you can eat lobster. The rationale, Jews aren’t strong enough to understand our scriptures. And I think our history bears this out.
Fortunately, our practices and our ability to study are the remedies to what ails us.
I think we were doing really well when we started talking about Susan Boyle. Talk about soul–which is what we should always be talking about. Wow.
107. Oscar the Grump:”Let me let you in on a secret . . . not all Christians “love” us.”
I can see that you didn’t go to Sunday School. Let’s start with a workable Christian definition of “love”: Love is wanting someone else to succeed. Please, just dwell on that for a moment. Now you should be able to understand that Christians love ALL other people, even the most unlovable. Even the Gentiles and the Samaritans. If you still don’t understand, then read the definition again.
Now, if Christians find Jews to be abrasive, insular, and irritating, this DOESN’T mean that Christians don’t love Jews. Jews are still loved and protected, regardless of their quirks. Jesus said that’s the only plan that works, and his followers believe it. I don’t know where you & Solway are getting your twisted inputs from, but we love you anyway, regardless of your miserable outlook.
Why is it anti-semitic if one states the obvious about the dreadful policies of Israel in occupied territories? By gluing the fate of Israel to the fate of jewish people, you are doing a great disservice to the jews, many of whom do not back the Israeli policies (but to you they are self-hating jews, people like Finkelstein and Chomsky). In fact you are making two mistakes; first, you support Israel blindly in all her actions. This is not only intellectually dishonest but also a big strategic mistake that has the potential to endanger the US interest in the muslim world to a much greater degree. Your second mistake is that you equate the jewish fate with the Israel’s fate as a state. This is false and silly. The jewish people have returned and been kicked out of the holy lands numerous times in their history. The jewish people will continue to live whether Israel exists or not but by putting all the jewish eggs in the zionist israeli government’s basket, you are asking for trouble.
Larsen E Whipsnade
Thank you. You made me feel giddy and warm all over. I so glad to see that all Christians love us so much. Thank you for speaking for all Christians. I be sure to remind those Christians that march so strongly for Hamas that they love us even though they are carrying signs calling us Nazis, baby killers and the like. Also I’ll be glad to remind the Bishop who is a holacaust denier that he really loves us. Next time I see a white power demonstration, I will go over and warmly shake the hands of the Nazis and Klan members because they love me so much.
igkick
Are you nuts? You want us to write off half the world’s Jewish population because you think we are wrong. Are you advocating an Israeli genocide? Your problem is not that you don’t want us to put all our eggs in one basket Your problem is that we have a basket. As things are going all over the world there really is not going to be a place for us anywhere else.
Just where are we supposed to go?
#124–
If one presents a clear picture of the present middle-east situation within the context of its history one will see this is a complex issue. How can you claim an Israeli policy is dreadful when it was initiated to stop a far more dreadful action that has already taken place at least three times? So for me, the obvious facts are the suicide bombings, the deliberate targeting of children–making them the primary target of murder, as well as the elderly, the rocket attacks, several wars initiated by the Arab world, and so on. I also see a steady stream of propaganda from an already independent PA that stirs its population to genocide, and I see a present civil war between Hamas and the PA that is simply brutal and cruel. Essentially, I see that for the citizens of Israel, WWII never really ended.
Now tell me how you ignore those facts. That you do ignore those facts is intellectually more difficult than seeing them. If you are willing to go to such extremes to blind yourself, and evidently, you’re not the only one, then I guess I need the State of Israel more each day because it is essential to the survival of the Jewish people.
I guess that would answer your rhetorical question.
125. Oscar the Grump: “Next time I see a white power demonstration, I will go over and warmly shake the hands of the Nazis and Klan members because they love me so much.”
Uh, no, Oscar. I don’t recommend you do that. Those are the guys that hate you. Let’s go over this one more time . . .
Oscar the Grump and Noah Guttman,
The volume in question – Jesus in the Talmud – is abundantly sourced, with specific citations to both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds and from other manuscripts from antiquity, many other citations as well. Also, at the link provided, it appears Amazon allows much of the book to be searched.
And Noah, you’re not responding to what was said. E.g., no one suggested the Tanakh, the O.T. in the Christian vernacular, was “superceded.” So regardless of your intentions, your points effectively serve as strawmen.
Larsen e Whipsnade
Its good to see that you have a sense of humor. I await your instructions.
Michael B
I’ve tried to read the JESUS IN THE TALMUD but I keep getting blocked at about page 19. Let me say somethings. First, that I was unaware of the Babylonian Talmud. The Jerusalem Talmud was the only one that I knew of, to my knowledge Jesus is not mentioned there. I did have a discussion with a scholar in reference to Jesus and the Talmud. I was told that Rabbi Lowe was allowed to see an ancient Talmudic text at the Vatican. How it got there or its history was not discussed. It did have references to Jesus in unflattering ways. Its validity remains in question.
It would not surprise me if the two texts are valid. I’m sure that the Rabbis were amazed at the Jesus/Christianity phenominum. I’m also sure that they tried to research it and explain it. You would have to be put in a defensive posture in the face of such a overwhelming thing. Much like what you see today in the Arab/Israeli conflict. It becomes who is lying, why that person is lying and so on. I really don’t think that anyone today is really equipped to back this or that. The only thing that I can see come out of something like this is to have a friendly disagreement or agreement about the subject. It isn’t going to change my mind about my Christian friends and I certainly hope it doesn’t change their minds about me. I promise you this, I will continue to investigate this. In the very least it facinates me.
Frankly I love this kind of discussion.
Anyone who would like to see a constructive take on the topic of this whole discussion, rather than more Jew-Christian finger pointing, check out David P. Goldman’s piece entitled Has Franz Rosenzweig’s Time Come at the Jewish-Christian relations website: http://www.jcrelations.net/en/?item=754 Goldman has just been revealed as the famous Spengler (see the Instapundit column at the top right of the Pajamas Media home page). He, as a religious, thinking, and historically aware Jew, and has a very different view of Christianity than do those who blame Christians for all Jewish problems. And he, correctly, I think, puts the cause of the problem(s) of anti-Semitism AND anti-Christianism on the historically latent, and today not-so-latent, Paganism of the post-French-Revolution West. Anti-Catholics should pay particular attention to Goldman’s examination of Pope Benedict and the Church. I find it most interesting that he, as a classical musician (which I too am in part of my life) understands better than most the role of Faith in the origin of both our shared art and in the development of our shared Judeo-Christian civilization, as well as the fact that the real anti-Semites are Pagans (an explanation for the anti-Semitic “Jews?”), not Christians.
Yo Michael B.–
I study Talmud on a reasonably regular basis, haven’t completed an entire 7 year cycle yet–the Talmud is big, but I haven’t come across anything mentioning Jesus yet, and I’ve even covered the most likely places. The big idea here, is to try to keep Gd inconceivable, outside of what Gd has revealed, which is some emotions and thoughts. But no physical conceptions. Still, regarding what is revealed in the Torah, there is quite a bit of room for interpretation and argument, which is the idea–to spend time arguing about it.
Another interesting note about the Talmud is that for whatever statements you read there, it’s a good bet there is an accompanying statement contradicting it. Again, spend time arguing about the interpretation.
More about the Talmud than you want to know. Folks rarely study the Jerusalem Talmud because the greater scholars lived in Babylon.
Regarding ‘Supercession’–it’s a part of Jewish thought, our understanding is that Christians do not feel obligated to keep the 613 (620) commandments because the acceptance of Jesus renders that obligation moot. I could be wrong, but that is my understanding.
The bottom line is that any understanding of the Talmud is remarkably complex, and most always wrong, given that we are to keep arguing about it eternally. Nevertheless, regarding those commandments, we’ve gotten enough agreement to know how to perform them properly. We are still working on the understanding part.
This is one reason to doubt anyone or anything that claims understanding of the Torah or Talmud. Even the rabbis are just one more step, for Jews, to an eventual understanding of the big picture.
Oscar the Grump,
Well, for emphasis, recall that in my original comment in this thread I wasn’t seeking to singularly emphasize this particular Talmudic subject. It does deserve some pointed emphasis, because it is most typically neglected or entirely unknown.
Still, the subjects raised in that original comment ranged from this aspect of historical Talmudic texts, to the Ukrainian genocide, to the non-utopian “civilizing project of the West” in general, to contrasting anti-Semitism with other prejudices and bigotries in history, Marx’s own pronounced anti-Semitism, etc.
Btw, in terms of the Ukrainian genocide, here’s a brief youTube acknowledging a Sept. 11, 1932 exchange between Stalin and Lazar Kaganovich.
Also, filling out Marx’s incredibly malevolent influence further still, Marx himself served to popularize the very phrase “the Jewish question” and also wrote in terms of “racial trash,” additionally indicating that certain inferior races and ethnic groups needed to perish in a “revolutionary holocaust.” This additional youTube helps to substantiate most of that.
Iow, virtually all of what I was seeking to emphasize are pivotal aspects of history that are largely unknown and suppressed, despite their determinative bearing upon 20th century history and the myriads of hecatombs that populate that century.
Marxism, then Fascism via Mussolini, then Hitler’s Nazism – that reflects both the chronological order and the ideological lineage. Yet that fact is also largely neglected and variously obscured.
Michael B
I know that in the terms of numbers discussed 30,000,000 Russians died during Stalin’s reign. I don’t know how many of the were Jews, Cossacks, Ukrainian or any other group. I know that the Ukrainians were targeted, so were the Jews, so were the Cossacks. I know that Jews were driven out of the shtetls and forced to work in the cities. My wife’s two uncles were shot by the Bolsheviks during that time. My cousin committed suicide when he realized what the utopia really meant.
The concept of races being inferior really started in this country. Its study was called racialism. It was the foundation of discrimination
in this country. It was used to force the Indians from their ancestral homelands to the west. Justified slavery. After the civil war it was used for segregation. In the 1890s it was the foundation of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Gentlemen’s Agreement (which barred Japanese from immigrating to the US) and other exclusionary acts against various groups. It brought into existence the use of IQ tests which was used on non-English speaking immigrants. In 1924 it was the basis of the Immigration Reform Act which barred Jews, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans and anyone who wasn’t white.
Karl Marx was a reporter during the Civil War and I’m sure he absorbed these ideas. These same ideas were used by the Nazis to prove their racial superiority. It doesn’t surprise me that Marx (born a Jew) would come up with the “Jewish question”. You can see it today in the left of our society only they won’t use those words. There are many budding young Marxists in that group.
Thank you for your insight. Your sources were excellent. I’ll be looking forward to future discussions with you.
Oscar The Grump:
I think the notion that the OTHER is an inferior race is pretty much perennial and universal for all the races since the fall. Cleansing rituals after exposure to the other predates this country by milennia. What Cromagnon didn’t feel superior to the neanderthal? Slavery is as ancient as conquest and implied a certain superiority of master to slave. The Irish were looked at as the monkey class of Europe before this country began-treated as subhuman animals by the English. Why else would Swifts satire recommend eating them?
There is nothing new under the sun as ancient writ noted long long ago.
naftali,
Firstly, I agree with most of what you are forwarding. Most certainly, I’m not doubting in the least the historical, cultural, literary, exegetical, etc. problems reflected in the Talmud and related ms., to the contrary.
Keep in mind however, by way of very briefly summarizing some things, 1) we’re referring to a very limited aspect of the Talmud; 2) we’re referring to aspects that, at least in substantial part (entirely?), have been redacted since the original (4th to 7th century C.E.?) compilations and editings of still earlier oral traditions; 3) the author in question is in fact a respected Princeton based scholar who does supply an extensive bibliography, including references to original ms., likewise providing extensive documentation and end-notes; 4) the author does take into account the problems you’ve alluded to, his is a meticulous, scholarly review; 5) for another ref., here’s a book review of the volume in question, a review by a Jewish writer.
In terms of the “supercession” topic, that can get into some theological and other nettlesome issues and I want to avoid becoming disputatious for its own sake, certainly. Suffice to say, from one perspective, that orthodox Christians rejected the heresy of Marcionism a long, long time ago. Christians accept Jesus Christ as the embodied fulfillment – and affirmation – of all the law; likewise, that only therein is the law more truly and completely fulfilled – and not merely “legalistically.” So, obviously there will be basic differences between Judaic and Christian views. Nonetheless, Marcionism, libertinism and similar views are decidedly rejected by virtually all (small “o”) orthodox Christian confessional communities. Hence, at least in terms of underlying principle, continuity rather than supercessionism is therein emphasized. Salvation is From the Jews, may also be helpful here.
Again, I trust you’ll understand none of that is forwarded to be disputatious or divisive for its own sake. Also, I’m not widely conversant with the term “supercessionism,” but to the extent it denotes/connotes any flavor of Marcionism, a triumphalism, a libertinism, etc – it should be roundly and decidedly rejected by serious, orthodox Christian communities. Also again, I’m an autodidact only, not a churchman or theologian or philosopher, so I’m only attempting to suggest a general tenor and tone. Basic differences remain, obviously, between Judaic and Christian theo-logical emphases, but any and all divisiveness per se should be resolutely eschewed, by both communities.
(And hats off to you for studying the Talmud as extensively as you seemingly have. I’m aware of how voluminous it is, not to mention related ms. and interpretive material.)