Actually, I was trying to guess what you had meant by the post I quoted. I then indicated why I did not think that two of my three guesses would have “worked” as your points, hoping to draw out an explanation from you. I am still unsure of the point that you were making.
(I’m not sure what bias I have displayed: A pro-Christian bias by indicating that there is no call in the tenets of Christianity to hate people? An anti-Christian bias by indicating that Christians have been hypocrites for hating a group?)
As I pointed out in my post, and as has been supported by the citation provided by sdimbert, persecution of Jews in Western Europe was did not occur immediately with the onset of Christianity. Additionally, persecution of the Jews in Asia Minor and, later, Eastern Europe, preceded the advent of Christianity.
It is the greatest shame of Christianity that the Churches (Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant) have tolerated and, far too often fomented, anti-Jewish sentiment and actions. My specific point is that it was not the religious beliefs of Christianity that led to this shame, but the incorporation of secular prejudices that were “baptized” into the religions. This in no way mitigates the sin within Christianity, but it provides a different understanding of anti-semitism to note that that evil has occurred in areas dominated by all three major Christian divisions, and by Islam, and by Zoroastrianism, and in various pagan situations.
Kyla, my “desktop” references are A History of the Jews, Simon Grayzel, Mentor Books. (It may no longer be in print, I’m not sure.) and To Be A Jew, Hayim Halevy Donin, Basic Books. Once I’ve found their short take on an issue, I generally use key words or names from their texts to do web or encylopedia searches to get more detail.
sdimbert: “the Church fathers decieded that Jews as a group should be persecuted because they ‘killed Jesus’”: Oh, really now? Got any minutes from that meeting? And which “Church” was this? This sounds like one of those “Protocals of the” things, ie made up out of whole cloth. Note, re “who killed Jesus”, see my thread here in GD, your input is desired.
The “Christians” who hate- do not hate or persecute Jews for any other reason other than they are different. To show this, note that almost every “Christian” who hates Jews is a rascist bigot who hates all sorts of minorities. Thus it has nothing to do with “they killed Jesus”, or “Church Fathers”, but it has everything to do with rascism & intolerance. Oh, sure, the excuse of “they killed JC” is sometimes given, but the same rascists use the OT to “justify” black slavery, and other stupid justifications. They don’t need or beleive these justifications really, it is jsut a way of cloaking their rascism in a holy book. The Muslims who hate Christians & Jews come up with the same sort of twisted “justifications”, as do those few “ultra-orthodox” Jews who are bigots over in Isreal.
Your point is well-taken… I didn’t write that, I stole it from the Aish HaTorah website. It seems that they got that “fact” from the writings of Bernard Blumenkranz, author of Jews and Christians in the Western World.
It’s not my statement… I can’t defend it. Your point.
**
Tut, tut… be careful. Now you’re doing it! We really can’t say that “almost every” anything hates Jews because of x, y or z.
As to the rest of your post, you’re right. People do bad things. All sorts of people.
As to why so many people happen to all do this bad thing… the online Seminar I keep refering to does a great job of exlaining. Check it out… Your input is desired! ;j
Well, about that “almost every”. True, it is hard to categorize, but those few rascists I know, and those groups we read about who have an openly anti-semitic agenda, all have an overall rascist agenda.
Of course, we are only talking about “the tip of the iceberg”, and I may be making a bad generalization by thinking that the openly rascist groups represent “the silent rascists”, but its the only thing I have to go on.
OH, and there have been “official” church persecutions of the Jews, but these also included the other heretics & unbeleivers also. Ie, the Inquisition was mainly to stomp out an early form of Protesantism. I’m sure that did not make the Jews that Torquemada applied the hot irons to- feel any better, tho.
The Inquisition was established to “defend” the church against error. Horrible idea, horribly executed. (Unfortunately, the Protestants who decried indulgences and the worldliness of the RCC didn’t think that the Inquisition was that bad an idea. They never established an office of their respective denominations to carry out those duties, but they did hang and burn a goodly number of “unfaithful” people.)
The Spanish Inquisition was an entirely different matter. Torquemada took control of the office of the Inquisition and used it explicitly to persecute Jews. It was a corruption of the original purpose (as bad as that was) for the express purpose of feeding Torquemada’s personal anti-semitic feeling. Their Catholic Majesties (who had borrowed heavily from Jewish financiers to support their war against the Moors of Granada) were quite willing to indulge Torquemada in his persecution as it removed their debts.
There have been other official persecutions by the RCC, as well. The worst was led by Pope Paul IV. It is true that many of the strictures were prompted by a Counter-Reformationary zeal to establish Church authority, but Paul IV was the one who, in 1555, created the edict ordering all Jews to live in ghettoes, prohibited them from engaging finance, reducing them to pawnbrokers and trash collectors, ordered them to wear distinctive clothing and yellow badges, ordered them to allow any Chritian preacher who wanted to preach “conversion” to be allowed into any synagogue at any time, etc.
Martin Luther, of course, merely called for their extermination after they failed to “realize” that his reformation of Christianity was what they had “really” been waiting for since the time of Jesus.
There’s a semantic problem in disinguishing a Christian from a citizen in a christian culture. I agree a true Christian does not hate, but America is considered a primarily christian culture despite the official government denial of that. I regret I did not make that distinction earlier.
The point of the reference to Matt:27:25 is that people who hate and who are primed to hate anyone different will use whatever excuse is handy. And the Jews in the Bible accepted blame for the death of Jesus. I agree it may not be a true quote of what the mob was saying, but whoever wrote the phrase believed it, and haters are willing to believe it.
Add to that the tribalism that puts down any non-tribal, (read different), person and you have targets for hatred. The greek word from which we get “barbarian” was a derogatory word for someone not Greek, and even the Jews use the word “gentile” to mean someone who is not a Jew. The dominant christian culture in the west has lived for 2000 years with the Jews known, correctly or incorrectly, as the “Christ killers”. Yes, it was technically the Romans who did the actual killing, but the Bible says it was the Jewish priest who pronounced Jesus a heretic and turned him over to the Romans for prosecution, then the Jewish populace scouraged Jesus and called for his death.
Any new government, new business manager or revolutionary religion tends to put down previous hierarchies. I can certainly imagine the early Christian church fathers having a protocol of putting down the killers of their God.
Any new government, new business manager or revolutionary religion tends to put down previous hierarchies. I can certainly imagine the early Christian church fathers having a protocol of putting down the killers of their God.
~~Hohenstein
–The point is the early Christian church fathers didn’t. I’m coming up with the same stuff Tom did.
Jews did very well in the era of the Great Migrations and the Germanic successor kingdoms to the Roman Empire, expecially in the period between 700 and 1050 CE. According to The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages Jews were under the protection of the most important and powerful political family of that era, the Carolingians, who loosely ruled France, much of western Germany, and some of northern Italy in the eight and ninth centuries. Jews were also under the patronage of the French arisocratic dynasty who ruled Normandy in the eleventh century and, after 1066, also England.
What I am running across (around 1200)is a combination of changing economic conditions and a highly emotional militant kind of Christanity that created a groundswell of anti-semitism.
If you have any evidence of any bigotry being unique to, or more common among ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel (or elsewhere), please post it. (For purposes of clarity, attempt to distinguish between ultra-orthodox and ultra-zionist - two radically different groups).
Tom&deb: actually the Spanish inquisition did not target Jews. Torquemada was sent to stifle a psuedo-protestant “heresy”. While doing so he noticed that some members of this heresy were “converted” jews. (Just a brief time before, Jews had been ordered out of that section of Spain, as some were sympathizers with the Muslims; some, in order to stay, “faked” a conversion). If you were an avowed jew, all T. could do to you was order you out of the area ( sub-kingdom). However, he did take an “unholy” delight in tracking down & ferreting out the “faked” conversions amoung the populace. Thus, he did, indeed, persecute and torture many Jews (and “protestant” “heretics”), but all had “converted” to the Catholic Church. He might well have been an anti-semitic, or maybe just really down on “heretics”-but he was certainly a religous zealot and a very cruel man.
Izzy: do the non-jewish get to vote? How about the ultra- orthodox throwing stones and yelling at those they considered “improper” to pray at the Wall? How about the ultra-orthodox wanting to exclude those “not Jewish enough”?
Izzy: posted before I saw your last remark- if any of these are the actions of “ultra-zionists” instaed of “ultra-orthodox”, please inform me. But does it really matter? What I am saying is that there are some Jews who are discriminatory and racist, too. For that matter, there are some Pagans, Buddists, Zorastrians, and every other religion, who are bigots.
There is a definite difference between the ultra-orthodox and the ultra-zionist. Ultra-orthodox do not consider the state of Israel to be of great importance (some deny its existance), they do not serve in the army, they do not live on kibbutzim, etc. They are, of course, very religious, and belong to the parties Shas, or Agudat Yisrael. They’re generally pro-peace process, because they don’t care about the borders of the State of Israel, but don’t like seeing Jewish kids dying on the borders.
Ultra-zionists, especially the early pioneers, can be atheists, or they believe that the all parts of the Land of Israel should also be part of the State of Israel - they belong to Mafdal, or whatsitsname…Benny Begin’s party. They serve in the army, of course.
Well, yeah. These are two different groups. But like all groups, they can be hateful towards those they disagree with. Ultra-Zionists would be more likely to speak against the Palestinians, and the peacenikim. Ultra-orthodox would be likely to speak against…well, everyone that isn’t them. (Sorry, as someone who has been harrassed and threatened by ultra-orthodoxim, I have a personal bias against them as a group. Although I have met wonderful ultra-orthodox people, it’s just the hateful ones who get the press, and spring into my mind first.)
Kyla, your last post makes me very uncomfortable. As a Barak-Shinui voter, who has beem too pissed off to read a newspaper this last month or so, I agree with you completely. But still, as a Jew, discussing these matters in a multinational board seems… wrong, like bringing internal family matters into the public eye. I’m just afraid that I might find myself attacking Jews in front of no-Jews or even worse - I may find myself defending the Haredim. Neither option seems very appealing.
For the record, I think that most ultra-right-wing, settler types are jerks. Still, there’s a difference between hating a harmless minority and hating a percieved enemy. The atotude these people hold towards Arabs is similar to that many Americans felt towards the Japanese in 1943 - petty and narrow-minded, to be sure, but not entirely incoprehensible.
Do you mean in elections? Of course. In fact, there many Arab members of the knesset. In any event, this has nothing to do with ultra-orthodox Jews.
I do not consider these actions bigotry. They are not being done out of hatred for non-orthodox jews, but out of anger that holy places are being defiled (in the case of the stonethrowers), or that religious laws will be corrupted (in the case of the disputes over Conservative and Reform recognition). This is not to say that I approve of stonethrowing (nor has any ultra-orthodox leader endorsed such tactics). But it’s not bigotry. It’s as if a Protestant group insisted on performing a Protestant ceremony in the Vatican. Hotheads might get worked up. I would call it bigotry if you could show that ultra-orthodox Jews were going up to non-ultra-orthodox jews out of the blue, and attacking them.
I am curious as to the remark by Kyla that “as someone who has been harrassed and threatened by ultra-orthodoxim” etc. What manner of harrassment and threats did you recieve? How did they come about?
Danielinthewolvesden:
That remark was in response to the previous post by Olentzero.
I agree with you that every group has it’s bigots, including ultra-orthodox Jews. But that is on an individual level. It had seemed from your remarks that you something special about ultra-orthodox Jews, as there was something in their beliefs which was bigoted, or at least made them prone to bigotry.
Sorry, I got a bit carried away. Change “most” to “some”. Note, though, that I was actually defending them, sort of.
However:
That really, really pisses me off. Since when does your group have sole rights to the Jewish faith? Just because we don’t agree with you, we’re not Jews? My friend, the Wall belongs to all of us - Datiim, Haredim, Hilonim, Conservativim, Reformim - equally. Jerusalem has no greater importance to you Orthodox than it has to us Conservatives and Reforms. I am sick and tired of you people acting like some sort of “priestly sect”, the True Guardians of Judaism. Believe me, you’re no closer to God then we are.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by sdimbert *
Some questions:
[list=a]
[li]Which Europeans used religion as a means “to control the masses?” Could you provide some detail? You’re generalizing and I tend to think that different Europeans throughout history might have had different motivations for their actions. All you’ve described here is some sort of Protocols of the Elders of Evil Clergy; a history-sweeping conspiracy to control the masses through religious persecution. [/li][/QUOTE]
You are quite right I was generalizing. As a form of population control, the use of Christianity in Europe was rather wide spread, but as you have pointed out, the active persecution of Jews did not happen in all European societies nor did it happen all the time.
[QUOTE]
[li]Do you mean to imply (as you seem to) that European despots invented Christianity as a means to control their subjects? [/li][/QUOTE]
Not “invented”, but conveniently adapted to control their subjects. I believe it was Emperor Constantine of Byzantium who was the first “European” ruler to openly convert to Christianity and married politics with religion. I’m afraid I don’t have access to my excellent reference library at the moment so I can’t give the exact date. What Constantine did was quite brilliant. He discovered that a majority of the population in his vast land was Christian. In one swift move he gained the loyalty and love of this majority by converting. This also helped Constantine unite the people and maintain control of his empire. From this point Christianity spread pretty rapidly through out Europe. The last notable group of Europeans to be converted/controlled was the Vikings about 1000 years ago. At that time, Scandinavia was rather tribal and there were a number of chiefs and self-proclaimed Kings. As I’m sure you are aware, the Vikings were basically pirates and traders. There was, what could be construed as, “borders” outlining various Viking nations, the Danes on the British Isles for example, but internally there were constant disputes between various Chiefs. King Harald Gormsson (aka Black-Tooth) was the first Danish King to unite Denmark (and Norway) in the 980s
and he did it through Christianity. Unlike Constantine’s people, Harald’s people were not necessarily Christians to begin with. So Harald systematically promoted and favored Christian Chiefs and a few decades later, the Danes were pacified and controlled by religion under one Christian ruler.
It doesn’t end there. Allow me to throw in a little theory here. I’m sure you would agree that there are ceremonies and such in Christian religious practice that would puzzle Jesus if he walked the Earth today. The Christmas tree for example. In reality it should be called the “Freia” tree after the Norse God of fertility, (she is still honored every Friday by the way). The Scandinavians used to hang offerings in the form of freshly slaughtered animals and slaves to Freia to beg for a fertile year. This was part of the Yule celebration held during the winter equinox. Conveniently the Viking Yule celebration was at about the same time as the birthday of Christ and the Christians cunningly hijacked “Yule”. So what is the point, you ask? The point I’m making, and hold on to your hat cause this one might shake a bit, is how do we know that the Bible has not been re-written by past rulers to promote one point of law or another. Think about it, the Bible as we know it today is a copy of a copy of a copy…etc. I’m not sure how old the oldest known copy of the Bible is, but I don’t think it is much older than 11-1200 years. (I’m sure someone with a copy of the Guinness Book of records can provide the answer). In other words, perhaps Constantine or some other ancient ruler had the Bible edited. Think about it, the common peasant in those days was often illiterate and uneducated. The word of God was spread, (sprinkle freely with threats of hellfire and damnation), by Bishops and Priests who where the brothers, uncles, nephews, cousins, second born sons of the King, Dukes, Counts, etc. of the ruling class. They were also the scholars. All I’m saying is, chances are the Bible today probably looks very different from the very first one.
And by the way, I am talking about the Christian version of the Bible. Perhaps I should start a new thread on this subject.
[QUOTE]
[li]Can you provide some detail as to how Jews and other “uncontrolled religions” were “potential threat to the rulers?” I am not a serious student of history, but I am unfamiliar with the “threat of an uncontrolled religion” you mention.[/li][/QUOTE]
I think I may have generalized a bit here. Perhaps a better answer would have been, the perceived threat of an uncontrolled religion. The Jews in Europe did not answer to the bishops and priests simply because they believed in another religion. The reaction to this was sometimes extreme, as in the Spanish Inquisition, but mostly the reaction was to spread Anti-Semitic messages in the churches and cathedrals. Then when there were Anti-Semitic riots, the rulers and priests closed their eyes.
Looking at your question from a different perspective, when the Protestant Movement started to take hold in Europe, there was a great period of struggle both external and internal. A struggle, which apparently still continues to this day in a small corner of Ireland. However that may be, when the conflicts finally settled in the rest of Europe and the borders between Catholic and Protestant nations were better defined. The new Protestant rulers were quick to standardize the various Protestant sects in their nations by naming them the official Church of the nation, (example; The Church of England). However, at this point the damage had already been done. Once the Catholic Church had been questioned and overthrown, new Protestant factions emerged and the Protestant Nations and their official Churches did not have the power to keep the new factions out. The official churches started loosing the power to persuade and with this decline in public control, the rulers also became questioned. In some nations, there were outright revolutions, (as in France) in others the monarchs gradually lost all power and are now purely symbolic. Again, perhaps a new thread on this subject should be opened.
[QUOTE]
[li]You say, “It is rather refreshing not to be burdened by beliefs of a religion… It just convinces me more that you find the truth only when your mind is unmuddled by religion.” Unless I’m mistaken, them’s fightin’ words. Unless you provide some data to back up your assertions, I am going to assume that you meant to say, “You find the truth only when your mind is unmuddled by factual accuracy.” [/li][/QUOTE]
[/list=a]
No offense meant. I respect your right to believe what ever you wish.
This turned out to be longer than I had intended. I hope I don’t put anyone to sleep.
As I share your professed distaste for engaging in this type of debate in this forum, I am refraining from addressing the larger issues of religious disputes in Israel. However, my earlier comments stand. No one is suggesting banning Chilonim, Conservatives or Reform from the Wall, or even attempting to discourage them from coming there. The sole issue is the type of services to be conducted there. Those who object to Conservative and Reform services at the Wall are not objecting to the presence of these people, but are objecting to services that are, in their eyes, sacreligious. You clearly disagree with this position. But it is not bigotry.