"What you forget is that the Jews have been hated and mistreated since the time of Jesus, when they were blamed for his treatment."
Hi Len,
While it is clearly true that the Jewish people have frequently been abused and mistreated in the last 2000 years, I believe history records significant abuses by the Jews against other people in the last two thousand years. The real question is: why has this antagonism and hostility between the Synagogue and the Church survived for over l900 hundred years? I believe that some light might be shed by quotes taken from from a book by the former Rabbi Rachmiel Frydland's- When Being Jewish
was a Crime In this book, the Rabbi gives an intimate description of the educational formation of young
Jews in the yeshiva and Rabbinical schools. Although Rachmiel tries to maintain a loving,
sensitive objective stance towards his Jewish people and the teachings of modern Judaism, he, because
of his Christian love of truth, boldly exposes modern Judaism's Babylonian Talmudic
foundation as well as the profound hatred and rejection of Jesus contained in the Babylonian Talmud. Rabbi Frydland's clearly demonstrates that the Talmud is the central literature used in the formation of young Rabbis.
Do you consider former Rabbi Rachmiel Frydland antisemitic, obsessive or hateful in revealing these truths to Christian and Jewish people? I think it is love that makes him reveal the hatred of the Talmud, and not hate. Here are his own words:
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Ch 5, page 51:
"In these early years I had few contacts of any sort with Christianity. At about this time I
learned the stories Of jesus from the Jewish point of view. They are given in the
infamous book of legens composed in the Middle ages and entitled Toledot Yeshu (The
History of Jesus). Some of the material is already embodied in the Talmud: that Jesus
was born an illegitimate child and He forced Mary His mother to admit it; how He
learned sorcery in Egypt; how He made Himself fly up into the sky by sewing the
ineffable name of Jehovah into the skin of his leg, but a famous rabbi did the same and
brought Jesus down."
Page 34
"The method of education in the yeshiva differed little from the previous schools, but we
had longer hours of study.....
The studies were now only talmudic. The teachers recited the lecture in the
Mishna(the traditions) and the Gemara(the commentaries)
the two parts of the Babylonian Talmud....We repeated and discussed the lecture after
the teacher, and then we studied more of the Talmud by ourselves.
Thus in the yeshiva, the Talmud reigned supreme. The Old Testament Bible could
be used only for reference".
P. 34,35
"I had not contacts with Christianity at all. On the way to school we passed a Roman
Catholic church and a Russian Orthodox church, and we spat,, pronouncing the words
found in deuteronomy 7:26, "thou shalt utterly dtest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it; for
it is a cursed thing." I said it halfheartedly because of my previous favorable contact with
Christianity and because some questions were beginning to creep into my mind. Why
should we say such horrible words? The people looked so pious, and they never
bothered us. ?
"As I continued studying the Talmud, I came to a passage that told of a cruel
punishment for that Sinner of Israel, meaning Jesus.
For one sin of deriding the rabbis, He was punished forever and ever with cruelty as to
be "judged in boiling excrement." I did not like this story at all. Did it really mean what it
said? did not I also have doubts about the rabbis' claims (talmudic claims) that their
teachings were given to Moses on Mount Sinai? What then would my punishment be? It
was many years before I dared to proclaim these doubts openly."
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Emile |
