Sorry, Emile, you did quote from Pranaitis's work, whether you realized it or not. Maybe you took it from another source that was copying Pranaitis's text verbatim, I don't know. But the fact is that you have posted whole passages from Pranaitis (without attribution), word for word.
"Father Pranaitis" was not a "Russian linguist," by the way. He was not a Russian, in the first place, but a Lithuanian Catholic priest, who taught at the Catholic seminary in St. Petersburg. In the second place, he was not a linguist, as his miserable performance at the Beiliss trial attested. Incidentally, the Beiliss trial was one of the most disgraceful cases in the history of Russian "jurisprudence," with charges too preposterous for any rational person to believe, as the Minister of Justice who instigated the case in the first place (for purely political reasons) knew very well, and admitted in private. Pranaitis's willingness -- let's say eagerness -- to testify for the prosecution tells me a great deal about his general reliability.
Now, about my "level of scholarship."
I do not pretend to be a Talmud scholar. And most Talmud scholars, evidently, do not crusade on the net attempting to refute all the stuff that the anti-Judaic folks put out. I found only one site on the net that did attempt to respond to the Pranaitis & Co. charges, point by point. The explications did not strike me as "propaganda," but as efforts to address specific charges by referring to the original texts. You would be well advised to look at the responses, instead of dismissing them out of hand, simply because they come from a Jewish source.
You can study the Talmud from now to doomsday, Emile, but you will never make a Talmud "scholar." And that is because your mind is made up before you even look at the sources. An historian has to be more dispassionate than that. He has to weigh the evidence, and go with it, even if he does not like the direction in which it takes him.
I know enough about Orthodox Judaism to know that there is much I don't like about it. I also know that there are anti-Christian elements in it. By the same token, there is much in Orthodox Christianity that I don't like, and there has historically been a lot of anti-Semitism (okay, anti-Judaism) in it. The relationship between the two over the centuries has very complex, and neither side is completely without guilt.
But there is also Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism, just as there are many varieties of Christianity. (I am not even talking about secular Jews, many of whom never received any kind of religious education.) Your schema does not appear to take that into account. Rather, it dismisses these gradations as of no importance. That is not the approach a scholar would take. It is the approach a propagandist would take.
jbe
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