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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (7056)	10/17/2001 3:56:46 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 23908

A part of history that is not understood is that while Jews were discriminated against throughout the millennia by their host countries, they were also subject to harsh and brutal rule by their own rabbis. These rabbis did not (and still do not) want to lose their iron grip. Do you know the story of the Bar Mitzvah? <<< Nicholas I of Russia was a notorious antisemite and issued many laws against the Jews of his state. But he also strengthened the forces of 'law and order' in Russia - not only the secret police but also the regular police and the gendarmerie - with the consequence that it became difficult to murder Jews on the order of their rabbis, whereas in pre-1795 Poland it had been quite easy. 'Official' Jewish history condemns him on both counts. For example, in the late 1830s a 'Holy Rabbi' (Tzadik) in a small Jewish town in the Ukraine ordered the murder of a heretic by throwing him into the boiling water of the town baths, and contemporary Jewish sources note with astonishment and horror that bribery was 'no longer effective' and that not only the actual perpetrators but also the Holy Man were severely punished. The Metternich regime of pre-1848 Austria was notoriously reactionary and quite unfriendly to Jews, but it did not allow people, even liberal Jewish rabbis, to be poisoned. During 1848, when the regime's power was temporarily weakened, the first thing the leaders of the Jewish community in the Galician city of Lemberg (now Lvov) did with their newly regained freedom was to poison the liberal rabbi of the city, whom the tiny non-Orthodox Jewish group in the city had imported from Germany. One of his greatest heresies, by the way, was the advocacy and actual performance of the Bar Mitzvah ceremony, which had recently been invented. >>> Tom