Jews and Christians United for Israel® (JACUFI)

Martin M. van Brauman

 

 

For you are a holy people to the Lord, your God; the Lord, your God, has chosen you to be for Him a treasured people above all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.  Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the Lord desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples.  Rather, because of the Lord’s love for you and because He observes the oath that He swore to your forefathers did He take you out with a strong hand and redeem you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.  You must know that the Lord, your God – He is the God, the faithful God, Who safeguards the covenant and the kindness for those who love Him and for those who observe His commandments, for a thousand generations. Deuteronomy 7:6-9

Theological anti-Semitism developed from the established church leadership and influenced by the dominance of Hellenistic thought and Roman law.[1]  The Jewish people are identified by a religion and contrary to other religions the religion of Judaism is inseparable from the Jews.[2]  With Judaism as the root of the other monotheistic religions of Christianity and Islam, religious rivalry has fostered a continuing hostility, which is embedded within their very teachings and official religious dogma.[3]

The religious foundation of the Christian Church was based and still today on the traditional church dogma of replacement theology, in which the Jewish people’s rejection of Jesus resulted in the loss of their covenantal link to God and in their eternal damnation.  Christian theological anti-Semitism was derived from three primary causes: the rejection of Jesus as the messiah, the doctrine of chosenness and the accusation of deicide, or Christ-killers.[4]

Cultural anti-Semitism developed from the language, images and instincts over centuries of a Christian dominating environment as defined by theological anti-Semitism.[5]  To understand theological anti-Semitism is to understand the role of a small ancient tribe of people standing against evil in every age, in which they have lived.[6]  Generally, theological anti-Semitism is fundamentally a hatred of Jewish values, beliefs, chosenness and God Himself.  Judaism consists of five components: (1) God, (2) Torah [the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy], (3) chosenness, (4) Jewish nationhood and (5) Israel.[7]  The Jews’ affirmation of one or more of these components threatens the gods, national allegiance, laws and cultures of non-Jews.[8]  Unfortunately, most Christians do not understand the Scriptural significance of these five components.

To recognize the evils of anti-Semitism as an attack on God, one must understand these components of Judaism, which are puzzling to the Christian community still wrapped up in the images of the legalistic religious authorities at the time of Jesus as representing Judaism.  These legalistic Temple administrators created a barrier to the people’s relationship to God.  With the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the disappearance of the Sadducees, God removed that barrier.  For Judaism is not a religion, but a relationship with God.

Judaism is a living faith, a religion of history and a religion of time not space, aiming at the sanctification of time.[9]  The Jewish Sabbath symbolizes the sanctification of time, in which “the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” representing a day of separation from space and the material things that fill it, a day of devotion to time and the eternity that fills it.[10]  The observance of Jewish law is not as ritual and ceremony, but as a manifestation of religious Truth, Tiferet.[11]

Abraham Heschel wrote that the “central thought of Judaism is the living God.”[12]  Heschel has described Judaism as a “relationship between man with Torah and God.”[13]  He wrote that there is a way that leads to understanding of God in which “. . . you will find Him, if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.”  Deuteronomy 9:29.[14]  Heschel wrote that:

Knowledge of God is knowledge of living with God.  Israel’s religious existence consists of three inner attitudes: engagement to the living God to whom we are accountable; engagement to Torah where His voice is audible; and engagement to His concern as expressed in commandments.  Engagement to God comes about in acts of the soul.  Engagement to Torah is the result of study and communion with its words.  Engagement to His concern comes about through attachment to the essentials of worship.  Its meaning is disclosed in acts of worship.[15]

Faith is vision, sensitivity and attachment to God.[16]  By living as a Jew one may attain his faith as a Jew, but one does not have faith because of deeds.[17]  In response to God’s Will, we perceive His presence in our deeds.[18]

The Jews’ monotheism, which has been perceived to conflict with the divine and messianic claims of Jesus, has been the contributing aspect in the Jewish perception of Christianity.[19]  Both Jews and Christians believe that God is One and there is no other god besides Him.  However, most Christian church dogma over the centuries has presented deviations from and conflicts with the teachings of the Christian Gospels, which have influenced this Jewish perception of all of Christianity worshiping a different God, a non-Jewish Jesus, instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Primarily, the monotheism debate has centered on God in different manifestations as He relates to man, since God is infinite and without form.  The Holy Bible speaks in the language of men.  “In the language of men” the spiritual attributes of God are described.  The Holy Bible adjusts the picture of God, so man can understand the conveying theology, and presents God in human terms with respect to seeing, hearing, walking and reaching out even though God is without form.

Does God reveal Himself using many manifestations in communicating with man?  In Genesis 1:2, the breath of God was hovering upon the surface of the waters, which means the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters as a manifestation of God.  Isaiah speaks “And now My Lord, My God, has sent me with His spirit.” Isaiah 48:16.  God sent Isaiah with His spirit to speak in His name.

Is the coming of the Messiah another manifestation of God?[20] Jewish faith is a faith of expectation, a waiting for God, a waiting for the Davidic Messiah’s arrival and the coming of the promised day of the Lord, a day of judgment followed by salvation when evil is consumed.[21]  For the Jew, the coming of the Messiah represents the promise of the Exodus and the Revelation at Sinai being fulfilled.

A staff will emerge from the stump of Jesse (David) and a shoot will sprout from his roots.  The spirit of the Lord will rest upon him – a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and strength, a spirit of knowledge and fear of the Lord . . . He will strike [the wicked of] the world with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.  Righteousness will be the girdle round his loins, and faith will be the girdle round his waist. Isaiah 11:1-5. 

Behold, a day is coming for the Lord . . . the Lord will go out and wage war with those nations, as He waged war on the day of battle.  His feet will stand on that day on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east . . Zechariah 14: 1-4.

Under Deuteronomy 6:4 (The Shema), the Torah says that God is the One and Only as “an inner harmony for all that He does, though human intelligence cannot comprehend what it is . . .  [but] . . . will be understood at the End of Days, when God’s ways are illuminated.”[22]  This concept of God’s ways is like a ray of light seen through a prism in which, though the viewer sees a myriad of different colors, it is a single ray of light.[23]  Likewise, God’s many manifestations are truly One and the Jew bears witness to God’s Oneness by the recitation of The Shema.[24]

In Genesis 1:3 when God said, “Let there be light,” the “light” was not natural light, but the Divine utterance, the “commanded emanation of light from the light of Torah,”[25] which also points to the coming of the Messiah, the “Light” to the world in the End of Days.  The Torah is the blueprint of existence of the world and represents the eternal foundation of Judaism, the destiny of Israel and the essence of the Jewish people.  Since the Torah is the blueprint for creation, it preceded creation and since the Torah is made of Hebrew letters, the letters themselves preceded creation.[26]

Abraham Heschel said in God in Search of Man that:

The Torah, we are told, is both concealed and revealed, and so is the nature of all reality.  All things are both known and unknown, plain and enigmatic, transparent and impenetrable.  ‘Hidden are the things that we see; we do not know what we see.’  The world is both open and concealed, a matter of fact and a mystery.  We know and do not know – this is our condition.[27]  

The Torah is the organic part of the Jewish spiritual being and cannot be exchanged or replaced with anything else.[28]  The Torah is the bridge from heaven to earth.

The Torah is the eternal, living monument of God’s rendezvous with Israel, the nation’s raison d’etre, the soul that enables the nation to survive every trial, to rise to undreamed of spiritual heights and realize the goal and hope of its Creator.

Whenever the Torah is read, Jews relive the Revelation at Sinai, when our ancestors gathered around a lowly mountain and heard God speak to them.  As they did then, we seek to come closer to our Maker by hearing His teachings and rededicating ourselves to their fulfillment.

. . .

‘The Torah should not seem to you like a stale royal decree that no one values, but like a new one, toward which everyone rushes.’ (Deuteronomy 6:6)[29]

Moses Maimonides, also known as the Rambam, formulated two principles of Faith concerning the Torah out of his Thirteen Principles[30] as the immutable word of God in Ani Maamin:

 I believe with complete faith that the entire Torah now in our hands is the same one that was given to Moses, our teacher, peace be upon him.

I believe with complete faith that this Torah will not be exchanged, nor will there be another Torah from the Creator, Blessed is His Name.

Every letter in the Torah is “infinite” and “there is a depth far deeper in the words of Torah than the human consciousness can conceive.”[31] Forever, the Lord, Your word stands firm in the heavens. Psalms 119:89. Grass withers and blossom fades, but the word of our God shall stand forever. Isaiah 40:8. Jesus said that It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law. Luke 16:17. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. 2 Timothy 3:16.  Rabbi Nosson Scherman wrote in “An Overview: Torah – Written and Oral” in The Chumash,

Torah is the blueprint and its study is the soul of Creation, were it not for My covenant [i.e., the study of Torah], day and night I would not have appointed the ordinances of heaven and earth (Jeremiah 33:25).  The privilege of accepting the Torah from God, of carrying out its precepts, and of finding its sacred sparks in the darkest corners of earthly existence, belongs to Israel.  Thus, the Torah and Israel are twin purposes of Creation.  To embody Torah in a physical garb and to enable Israel to elevate spiritual potential from the morass of the mundane, were heaven and earth created.

Abraham Heschel wrote that the participation in Torah and Israel, the leap of action, with discipline in daily life, brings us close to Him.[32]  Israel is that people to whom God gave His Torah from Sinai and who accepted God’s Torah at Sinai.[33]

The Chofetz Chaim [Rabbi Yisroel Meir Kagan of Radin, 1835-1933] would say that solutions for all of life’s trials and tribulations can be found in the Torah. . . There is no question in the world that does not have an answer in the Torah. Even a wood merchant pondering the purchase of a forest can find his answer within the Torah.  All that is needed is ‘illuminated’ eyes to find it.[34]

All of life’s happenings are inscribed in the Torah: all that was, is, and will be [forever] – everything is included in the Torah.[35]

All Israel in every generation stands before Sinai and Israel became free, not at the Red Sea, but at Sinai.[36]  All Jewish souls, living, dead and yet to be born stood at Mount Sinai.  Within all Jews is a spark of memory of Sinai and an affinity to Torah and its study and values.  That spark lies deep within Jewish souls that makes one Jewish as a people, a nationhood, a faith and the light to the world. Not with you alone do I seal this covenant and this imprecation, but with whoever is here, standing with us today before the Lord, our God, and with whoever is not here with us today. Deuteronomy 29:13-14. The covenant was binding even on unborn generations who were not present to enter into it.  The body is but a moment in the life of the soul that is eternal, for the soul is not in the body but rather the body is in the soul.[37]

The Torah is God’s revelation from Sinai.[38]

If all the oceans were ink

All the reeds quills

Skies scrolls of parchment

And All living men scribes

They would not be able to

Record all the wisdom of

the Torah.[39]

 Israel has a divinely ordained mission to bring knowledge of the true God and Divine Law, the Torah, to the nations of the world.[40]

And now, if you hearken well to Me and observe My covenant you shall be to Me the most beloved treasure of all people, for Mine is the entire world.  You shall be to Me a kingdom of ministers and a holy nation. Exodus 19:5-6.

“A kingdom of ministers” means that the entire nation of Israel is to be dedicated to leading the world toward an understanding and acceptance of God’s mission.[41]  Along with being a nation of priests, the Jewish people are a people set apart from the nations of the world. I am the Lord, your God, Who has separated you from the peoples . . . You shall be holy for Me, for I the Lord am holy; and I have separated you from the peoples to be Mine. Leviticus 20:24, 26.

The Jewish soul (“being Jewish”) has the mission as the torch-bearers, the light among the nations, of the Torah, which is the spiritual light contained within the Torah.  God’s purpose in giving the Jews the Torah was so Jewish souls would be alive in His Torah.[42]  The Torah is the Tree of Life through which God “planted eternal life within us,”[43] a tree of life to those who grasp her. Proverbs 3:18.  In Genesis, the Tree of Life is in the center of the Garden of Eden, representing eternal life.  The cherubim were the guardian angles of the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and they were the two figures placed above the Ark of the Covenant containing the Torah.[44]

May Your dead (God’s righteous people) come to life, may my corpses (Isaiah’s people, Israel) arise. Awake and shout for joy, you who rest in the dirt! For Your dew is like the dew that [revives] vegetation. May You topple the lifeless [wicked] to the ground! Isaiah 26:19.

This is God’s promise and Israel’s hope of restoration eschatology.[45]

Many of those who sleep in the dusty earth will awaken: these for everlasting life and these for shame, for everlasting abhorrence. The wise will shine like the radiance of the firmament, and those who teach righteousness to the multitudes [will shine] like the stars, forever and ever. Daniel 12:2-3.

Eschatology refers to the events that Jews believed God had ordained to occur at the end of history.[46]  Restoration eschatology arose from the prophetic reaction to the Jewish experience of exile in Babylonia in the 6^th century B.C.E., as well as out of reflections during the postexilic period of foreign domination in Israel.[47]

Chosenness has nothing to do with merit, but by His grace for “You shall be holy for Me, for I the Lord am holy; and I have separated you from the peoples to be Mine.” Leviticus 20: 26.[48]  Jews are the chosen people and chosen as a people, they are not a people consisting of individually chosen persons.[49]  Chosen means to have no choice.[50]  God chooses by His grace and the Jewish people were chosen to be not like the gentiles.[51]

 . . . How, then, will it be known that I have found favor in Your eyes – I and Your people – unless You accompany us, and I and Your people will be made distinct from every people on the face of the earth!”  The Lord said to Moses, “Even this thing of which you spoke I shall do, for you have found favor in My eyes, and I have known you by name.” Exodus 33:16-17.

It is their mission that separates them, which is to attest to the chosenness of every human being.[52]  Every human being is holy and that is the testimony that the Chosen People are elected to bear.[53]  The Jewish people believe that “compassionate righteousness and moral justice” eventually will take over the world and that through the Jewish people the world will be blessed with peace and freedom as proclaimed in Genesis 18:19.

God’s election of Israel is the foundation for everything that Israel has to tell the world and for its continuing existence as His witness.[54]  Israel testifies of God by telling its own history as a history with God.[55]  The Jewish people understand themselves linked to God and so are witnesses to the eternal covenant between themselves and God.[56]  Every Shabbat observed, every kosher meal eaten, every mitzvah performed, every son circumcised, every act of solidarity with the people is another expression of that witness.[57]

Rabbi Moshe Ben Nachman (1195-1270)(referred to as the Ramban or Nachmanides) declared that the three basic principles of faith are the existence of the Creator, His providence over the world and the truth of prophecy.[58]  By observing the commandments of the Torah with the proper intent of heart, the Jewish people continually witness to the creation of the world, the Creator’s providence over the world, and their belief in prophecy as well as in all fundamental principles of the Torah.[59]  The purpose of the commandments of the Torah is to protect Israel against deviating from these principles.[60]

The declaration of the continuance of the Jews’ divine election has been a major cause of theological anti-Semitism by repudiating Christian replacement theology.  The belief that God chose the Jews over all other religions, tribes and nations to be His messengers to the world has fueled theological anti-Semitism.  Jewish chosenness has meant that Jews have believed themselves to be chosen by God to spread ethical monotheism to the world and to live as a moral “light for the nations.”  The doctrine of chosenness is not a doctrine of superiority, but a doctrine of special responsibility to God.[61]

 He said: It is insufficient that you be a servant for Me [only] to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the ruins of Israel; I will make you a light for the nations, so that My salvation may extend to the ends of the earth. Isaiah 49:6.

Judaism, unlike other religions, incorporates nationhood, which means that committed Jews in the Diaspora are theoretically members of two peoples – the Jewish people and the people among whom they reside in the Diaspora, a nation within a nation.  As James Parkes stated in A History of Palestine From 135 A.D. to Modern Times, the Jewish people

 even when they were scattered in a thousand ghettoes in innumerable different Christian and Muslim countries, the Jews recognized themselves as, and were universally recognized by others to be, a single people . . . They were recognized as both a religion and a nation, and it occurred to no one that there was anything inconsistent in the dual attribution . . . This recognition by themselves and others that they were still a single people reinforces the naturalness of their continued association with the land of their independent history and of the lawgivers and prophets.[62]

While the Jewish people were scattered throughout the world, they never ceased to see the Land of Israel as their ancient homeland and to realize in their own lives the religious duty of pilgrimage.  God’s covenant with Abraham of Jewish nationhood and the connection with the Land of Israel are eternal, for “even though the merit of the Patriarchs may have dissipated over the generations, a covenant, by definition, is irrevocable.” Genesis 15:9 (commentary).

And He took him outside, and said, “Gaze, now, toward the Heavens, and count the stars if you are able to count them!” And He said to him, “So shall your offspring be!”  And he trusted in the Lord, and He reckoned it to him as righteousness. He said to him, “I am the Lord Who brought you out of Ur-kasdim to give you this land to inherit it.” Genesis 15: 5-7.

. . .

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants have I given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates River: the Kennite, the Kenizzite, and the Kadmonite; the Hittite, the Perizzite, and the Rephain; the Amorite, the Canaanite, the Girgashite, and the Jebusite.” Genesis 15: 18-19.

. . . the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him, I am El Shaddai; walk before Me and be perfect.  I will set My covenant between Me and you . . . your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations . . .  I will ratify My covenant between Me and you and between your offspring after you, throughout their generations, as an everlasting covenant, to be a God to you and to your offspring after you; and I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojourns – the whole of the land of Canaan – as an everlasting possession; and I shall be a God to them. Genesis 17:1-8.

And God appeared to Jacob . . . Your name shall not always be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name. . . The land that I gave to Abraham and to Isaac, I will give to you; and to your offspring after you I will give the land. Genesis 35: 9-12.

Hatred toward the Jews is as old as the Jewish people with the first signs indicated at the time of the Revelation at Sinai.[63]  Before Christianity, pagan hostility to Judaism existed with Judaism’s rejection of the pagan gods and the pagan way of life.[64]  Jewish hatred was expressed as irritation, primarily as cultural anti-Semitism, resulting from Jewish separateness, rather than the distinct hatred that later characterized theological anti-Semitism.[65]

When God revealed himself at Sinai and entered into a covenant with them as His people, He gave the gentile world Sin’at Yisrael, hatred of Israel.[66]  Elie Wiesel has stated that hatred of the Jews was born with the Torah before Christianity.[67]  The hostility to Jews in the Hellenistic pagan world was connected with Jewish monotheism and the fact that Judaism demanded a distinct separation of Jews from the general population.[68]

Judaism has been the basis of the universality of anti-Semitism over thousands of years from Hellenistic and Roman times to today and into the future as foretold in Deuteronomy 28:37, 64-68 below.[69]

You will be a source of astonishment, a parable, and a conversation piece, among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you.[70]

The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples, from the end of the earth to the end of the earth, and there you will work for gods of others, whom you did not know – you or your forefathers – of wood and of stone. And among those nations you will not be tranquil, there will be no rest for the sole of your foot; there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, longing of eyes, and suffering of soul.  Your life will hang in the balance, and you will be frightened night and day, and you will not be sure of your livelihood. In the morning you will say, “Who can give back last night!” And in the evening you will say, “Who can give back this morning!” – for the fright of your heart that you will fear and the sight of your eyes that you will see.  The Lord will return you to Egypt in ships, on the road of which I said to you, “You shall never again see it!” And there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as slaves and maidservants – but there will be no buyer!

“[T]here will be no buyer” for the world did not want the impoverished Jews, stripped of their properties, possessions and citizenships trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe in the 1930s, or whenever they were driven out from any country in the past or the present, Christian or Muslim.

In Canaan, Amalek tried to destroy the Jewish people after their Exodus from Egypt, since the Amalekites were the descendants of Esau who hated Jacob.[71]  Haman, a descendant of the Amalekite king Agag, attempted to destroy the Jewish people in the Persian Empire during the 5^th century BCE, because Jews lived by their own laws (Esther 3:8), rather than by those of the Persian state, and were seen as an impediment to the Persian government.[72]

Cicero, a Roman statesman and philosopher (106-43 BCE), wrote how the pagan ‘gods’ had turned against the “superstitious” followers of the God of Israel:

Justice demands that the barbaric superstition [Judaism] should be opposed; and it is to the interest of the state not to regard that Jewish mob which at times breaks out in open riots . . . At one time the Jewish people took up arms against the Romans; but the gods showed how little they cared for this people, suffering it to be conquered and made a tributary [of the Roman Empire].[73]

Apion of Alexandria, a Greco-Egyptian writer, had vilified Jewish worship in the late 30s and early 40s of the 1^st century CE and made the first accusation of ritual murder in temple ceremonies.[74]  For Apion and other anti-Semitic writers, such as Lysimachus, the primary motivation for the vilification of Jewish religion and history was to prevent any Jewish claim to citizenship, since the Jews refused to worship the Alexandrian gods or the emperor and were considered outsiders.[75]

Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian, rebutted Apion in his Contra Apionem.[76]  According to Josephus, Apion claimed that the Jews belonged “to a tribe of lepers capable, if not desirous, of contaminating the entire world.”[77]  Apion expanded the Egyptian popular myths that depicted the Jews as sordid and disease-ridden people, who were driven out of Egypt as lepers.[78] Both Apion and Democritus accused the Jews of ritual murder.[79]  The attempted rewriting of the history of the Jewish Exodus favorable to the Egyptians is a pattern of historical revisionism by the enemies of the Jewish people that still exists today with the creation of a Palestinian people, who never existed as a people or a country, and the denial of the ancient Jewish homeland in Israel with Jerusalem as its capitol and even of the Holocaust.

The Jews’ attempt to attain citizenship in Alexandria was the cause of the riots of 38-41 CE, since they held a privileged status as the middlemen between the Greek rulers and the native Egyptian population.[80]  The local Greek community accused the Jews of having dual loyalties when the Judean king Herod Agrippa I visited Alexandria during this period.[81]  The Roman governor Flaccus, rather than punishing the rioters, drove the Jews into the first known ghetto in a small quarter of Alexandria and took away their civic rights.[82]  The Greco-Egyptian and Greek writers claimed that the Jewish separateness and chosenness was a conspiracy against the Greco-Egyptian population and the values shared by all civilized society.[83]

Apion spread his anti-Judaism ideas to Rome and influenced the writings of Seneca, Juvenal and Tacitus.[84]   With the rise of the anti-Semitic movement in 19^th century Germany, the intellectuals fashionably cited to these ancient writers to support their anti-Semitism and how the Jews should be treated.[85]  However, political and cultural anti-Semitism could not have developed to the intensity experienced in Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe without the injurious image of the Jew that emerged from theological anti-Semitism.[86]

Riots erupted again in Alexandria in 66 CE following the news of the first Judean revolt against the Romans.  The Roman governor’s “troops reportedly killed 50,000 Jews.”[87]  When Rome waged the first Jewish war during 66 through 73 C.E. and destroyed Jerusalem, 600,000 Jews were killed according to Josephus and Tacitus and in the second Jewish War from 132 to 135 C.E. over 850,000 Jews were killed.[88]

In 130 CE, Emperor Hadrian sought to destroy Judaism by building a pagan city, Aelia Capitolina, over the ruins of Jerusalem and honoring the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus.[89] After the Second Jewish War, Judea was renamed Syria Palestina, an ancient Greek designation referring to the Jews’ old enemy, the Philistines and later the term “Palestine” was adopted by the Arab conquerors.[90]

Palestine was an incorrect translation of the word Philistia from the Hebrew word Peleshet, the Land of the Philistines.[91]  During the late Roman period, the name Palestine appeared as the name of the province and general area but vanished after the beginning of Arab rule.[92]  The name Palestine does not occur in the New Testament.[93]  The formation of a political entity called Palestine was one of the lasting novelties of the British Mandate period.[94]  During the prior Ottoman period Jerusalem was the capital of the district of Jerusalem, but the Holy Land was composed of several separate districts ruled from other cities, such as Safed, Nabulus and Gaza, and with all of them sub-dividsions of larger provinces governed at various times from Damascus, Sidon, or Beirut.[95]

During the second Roman war against the Jews, the total defeat of the Jews led to a complete split between Judaism and Christianity in the second century and the Christians viewed the destruction of the Jewish Temple and the Jewish state as an act of God’s punishment towards the Jews.[96]  The Gospels, written after the first Judean revolt, shifted the responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion to the Jews instead of the Romans and for deicide the Jews became an accursed people condemned to permanent exile and wandering, while the Christian church became the new “Israel” and the only recipient of the divine promises to Abraham.[97]

Theological anti-Semitism is rooted in one of the most controversial passage in the synoptic Gospels of Matthew 27:22-26, which portrays the Jewish crowd demanding the execution of Jesus and exclaiming “[h]is blood be on us and on our children!” after Pilate, washing his hands, declared himself innocent of the shedding of Jesus’ blood.[98]  This passage became the centerpiece of the Christ-killer accusation and the basis for Jewish violence by the Christian community over the centuries.

During the first centuries, there was a gradual separation between what would later be categorized as “Rabbinic Judaism” and “Christianity” with the New Testament being referred to as “a discourse of divorce.”[99]  The earliest form of Christianity has been referred to as “Jewish Christianity.”[100]

The Gospel of Matthew dates from the late 70s or early 80s of the first century.[101]  During this time period with the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66-70) and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple (70), most Jews assumed that the disasters expressed the will of God for his people, forsaking their covenant with Him.[102]

Out of these disasters, the rabbis of the Talmud replaced the Pharisees and Temple worship administered by the Sadducees.[103]  The Sadducees were an aristocratic, upper-class religio-political group movement that administered the rites of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem since the time of King Solomon and who insisted on a literal reading of the Written Torah without any interpretation.[104]  When the Temple was destroyed, the Sadducees disappeared from history.[105]  The Pharisees were a religio-political party that helped shape the future Rabbinic Judaism by believing that two Torahs, or sets of instructions, were revealed by God at Mount Sinai, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah.[106]  The Oral Torah was finally written down and became the Talmud, which added enrichment, insights and constant interpretations to the Written Torah.[107]

The Pharisees honored the Rabbis and Sages who believed in continuous revelation and that spiritual enlightenment and God’s teachings are continuous and constantly evolving.[108]  They believed that the Written Torah and Oral Torah did not require a Temple to ensure the survival of Judaism, but by teaching to the dispersed, establishing synagogues and teaching Torah.[109]

Under Rabbinic Judaism, the three pillars that support the very existence of the universe are the Torah, service of God and kind deeds and at the pinnacle of the universe stands prayer.[110]

. . . when the Holy Temple stood, “service” was the sacrificial service, and following its destruction, prayer took the place of the offerings . . . man’s obligation to pray is the commandment that man should serve God with all your heart (Deuteronomy 11:14).  What is the service of the heart?  . . . when the Torah speaks of “service,” it refers to the offerings brought in the Temple or on an altar . . . What service is performed in the heart? . . . That service . . . is prayer . . . It equates the Jew’s daily prayer to the sacrificial service in the Temple, the most sacred place on earth. [111]

Thus, the sincere prayer of every Jewish person represents their personal “service of the heart” that is elevated to the “pinnacle of the universe!”[112]

During the early 2^nd century, a believing Jew to accept Jesus would have to take a position requiring a “demeaning of the Jewish scriptures, the Jewish cult, [and] the Jewish covenant with God.”[113]  Ironically, a Jew would accept Jesus “only by rejecting – betraying – everything Jesus himself believed.”[114]

The early Christian community believed that the Jews, who had rejected Jesus, had effectively removed themselves from God’s favor and as the Chosen People.[115]  The Church never ceased to fear the rival influence of Judaism and contact of Christians with Jews.  The first law insisted by the Church on the new Christian empire was the prohibition of Jews to make converts, turning Judaism into a more closed faith.[116]  Christianity had the task of imposing moral standards that were Jewish morality on a pagan world, while Judaism was trying to survive within its own community without a Jewish homeland, government, or Temple.

During the middle of the second century, Melito of Sardis prepared an Easter liturgy, On the Pascha, condemning the Jews collectively as Christ killers and forfeiting their favored status in God’s plan for the salvation of the world.[117] On the Pascha sought converts from Judaism by contending that the Jewish Passover was now worthless by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, cancelling the Law of Moses.[118]

In his Epistles, Ignatius of Antioch (ca. 70-107) contended that the church is the new Israel and the prophets and heroes of Israel were spiritual ancestors of the church and thus they were Christians before their time and not part of Judaism.[119]  The Christian churches initially observed both the “Lord’s Day,” the first day of the week as the anniversary of Christ’s resurrection, and the Jewish Sabbath, but Ignatius insisted that churches cease to observe the Jewish Sabbath.[120]  In Exodus 20:8-11, the fourth commandment says to remember the Sabbath day, to sanctify it and to remember that He is the Creator by observing the Sabbath.  Sunday was a pagan Roman day of sun worship.  Later, the Christian annual calendar separated Easter from its origins in the Passover celebration.[121]  Easter was a pagan fertility festival and December 25, Christmas Day, was the Roman day of Saturnalia, a day of orgy.

Ignatius wrote that the Lord’s Supper was the “medicine of immorality”, as symbolic language, but by the time of Irenaeus, during the ritual after the bread had been consecrated, it was no longer bread but had been transformed to convey spiritual grace to men and women.  Justin Marty taught about 165 CE that baptism completes Salvation and Iraneaus, who wrote about 185 CE, contended in his writings that baptism is the New Birth and brings Regeneration.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper were given the name sacrament from the Latin military oath of loyalty, which carried with it the idea that the physical elements possessed Salvation and spiritual grace.  The water of baptism came to be viewed as having saving efficacy.  Once the Church established that baptism and the elements of the Lord’s Supper were channels of grace, then the Church decreed that only a priest authorized and ordained by the Church could administer this grace.

All of the ancient pagan cults had their priests and rituals as part of their religious worship.  The introduction of pagan ideas of external efficacy in the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper demanded that such power be preserved by securing trained and qualified persons to administer them.  People began to believe that only the bishop or those trained and authorized by him could effectively call forth the grace resident in these ordinances.  Salvation became identified with the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and these were effective only under the supervision of the bishop.  Since every pagan religion in the ancient world had its female deity, some converts from these systems placed emphasis on Mary, the mother of Jesus, until she likewise became an object of adoration and worship.

From the first century, The Epistle of Barnabas designated the Jewish Scriptures as the “Old Testament,” which were treated in an allegorical interpretation to bring out the Christian and spiritual meanings, but suppressing the historical and literal meanings and the uniqueness of Jewish history and people.[122] The Epistle to Diognetus (ca. 150) appropriated Jewish heritage while referring derogatively to the living Jews.[123]  For the “Old Testament” or “Old Covenant” was fulfilled in the person of Jesus through his death and resurrection with such religious fulfillment illuminated in the “New Testament.”  Origen, who was born in Alexandria, Egypt about 185 CE, applied Greek philosophy to Biblical interpretation, resulting in interpreting the Bible allegorically, which influenced theologians of the Middle Ages.

Two centuries later, St. Jerome established with the consensus of the church leadership the Christ-killer image from the verse “His blood be on us and on our children!” from the Gospel of Matthew and its relationship to the Jews by saying “[t]he curse has been fulfilled in their eternal damnation.”[124]  In Three Books of Testimonies Against the Jews, Cyprian (d. 258) wrote:

There is a new dispensation and a New Law, with abrogation of the Law of Moses and the old temple;

The Man of Righteousness was put to death by the Jews; they fastened Him to the cross;

 Now the peoplehood of the Jews has been cancelled; the destruction of Jerusalem was a judgment upon them; the gentiles rather than the Jews will inherit the Kingdom;

 Finally, by this alone the Jews could obtain pardon of their sins, if they wash away the blood of Christ slain in His baptism, and, passing over into the Church, should obey His precepts.[125]

In 250 CE, Bishop Cyprian of Carthage wrote in On the Unity of the Church that no person can have God as Father who does not have the Church as mother and thus Salvation outside the Church was impossible.  Bishops at this time extended their authority over the churches in their area.  Cyprian conceived of one universal Church in the world composed of many bishops who were the successors of the Apostles and only those who were part of the Church were saved.

With the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the 4^th century, the Jewish position was further condemned.[126]  A theological “mystical anti-Semitism” emerged within Christianity, in which Jews were demonized with occult power.[127]  These mystical anti-Semitic stereotypes were used and effectively manipulated later by the Nazis.[128]

Before Constantine, the cross was not Christianity’s central symbol, but the life of Jesus rather than his death formed the basis of his followers’ belief.[129]  The adoption of the cross was to have inhuman consequences for the Jews.[130]  The cross of Jesus was wielded as a sword by Constantine.[131]  By using its power against the Jews, the official church betrayed the essence of Jesus’ faith and the church became the embodiment of the very power that killed Jesus, the power of the state.[132]

In the 4^th century, the meaning of the cross changed in the Christian imagination with Constantine into the “spear and transverse bar.”[133]  When Constantine had assembled his army in 312 for battle to take Rome, he saw in the sky above the Milvian Bridge on the Tiber a cross of light above the sun and the inscription “In this sign, Conquer.”[134]  According to Eusebius (260-339 C.E.), the bishop of Caesarea in his Life of Constantine on the strength of the vision and victory, the emperor became a Christian and so did the empire.[135]

With the Roman Empire in decline, Constantine sought a strong internal unity by proclaiming Christianity as the cement of the empire to achieve loyalty against the attacks of the barbarians.  Constantine maintained all of his pagan superstitions and placed the image of Apollo on one side of his coins and the name of Christ on the other.  On March 321 CE, Constantine decreed that the worship of Christians on Sunday be celebrated as the “Day of the Sun” as well.

Though pagan anti-Judaism emerged from Jewish separateness and chosenness of Judaism earlier in the centuries, it was not inspired by inter-religious rivalry as was with Christianity.[136]  Emperor Constantine legalized the privileges of the clergy and standardized church doctrine at the worldwide Church Council in Nicaea held in 325.[137]  At Nicaea, named for Nike the goddess of victory, Constantine forbid the observance of Easter at Passover time by declaring “[i]t is unbecoming that on the holiest of festivals we should follow the customs of the Jew; henceforth let us have nothing in common with this odious people.”[138]

Until the Constantinian period, there was not such a separation between church and synagogue with Jewish Christians still honoring Torah and Christian Jews observing Shabbat and the Sunday Eucharist.[139]  The separation became between life and death with the “discovery of the True Cross” in Jerusalem by Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, and the construction of the basilica of the Martyrium, the tomb of Jesus.[140]  Emphasis shifted from Jesus coming to bring “life, life to the full,” to Jesus’ death for the sins of the world.[141]

With the Christian symbol of the cross, the “death of Jesus” replaced the “life of Jesus” at the center of Christian theology.[142]  The Crucifixion took the place of the Resurrection as the saving event and Christ the victim took the place of Christ the victor as the symbol of God’s love for the world.[143]  With the cross at the center of salvation, the blame for the cross shifted to the Jews.[144]   The “war of the cross” was a short journey from Constantine’s Milvian Bridge to Auschwitz for the Christ-killers.

St. John Chrysostom greatly impacted theological anti-Judaism by portraying the Jews as Christ killers and punished by dispersion.[145]  John Chrysostom (the golden-mouthed), a religious leader in late fourth-century Antioch becoming later the patriarch of Constantinople, used the Christ-killer label to proclaim that Christianity and Judaism were mutually exclusive.[146]  Chrysostom called the Synagogue “the temple of demons . . . the cavern of devils . . . a gulf and abyss of perdition” in order to sever any relationship between the Church and the Synagogue.[147]  Chrysostom delivered his sermons under the title “Against the Jews” during the mid-380s, several years after Emperor Theodosius I had made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire.[148]  The Nazis used Chrysostom’s sermons with the deicide charge as anti-Semitic propaganda in their “war against the Jews.”[149]  Also, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) affirmed that the Jews killed Jesus, ignoring that the Romans actually put him to death.[150]

In the 6^th century, the abbey of St. Denis called the Kingdom of France the Chosen Nation, replacing Israel of the Old Testament, and national idolatry in Europe began.[151]  The vanity of national election remained embedded in French Catholicism into the 20^th century.[152]  During the 7^th century, Spain became ruled by the Visigoths, who claimed to be the Chosen People and Nation.[153]  Visigoth King Richard I (586-601) established the first anti-Semitic laws in Europe with prohibitions against circumcision, kosher food, Jewish Sabbath and festivals, and other forms of observance enforced with death by burning.[154]

Pope Urban II, in rallying Christians to join the First Crusade in 1096, instructed the crusaders to “take up the Cross,” to emblaze it on their clothing as a sign to take up arms against the infidels and to avenge the crucifixion of Jesus.[155]  Urban II promised a guarantee of eternal salvation to those who died in the struggle against the infidel with death as a religious act bringing grace.[156]

Since the year 638, the Muslims occupied Jerusalem, which was six years after the death of Muhammad (570-632).[157]  The Pact of Omar (637) by Omar I govern the relations between the Moslem and the people of the Book, in which Jews were forbidden to hold office and paid a head-tax in return for protection and exemption from military service.[158]

By the 10^th century, Jews were no longer admitted to the Temple Mount and in the early 11^th century all Jewish and Christian places of worship in Jerusalem, including the Holy Sepulcher, were destroyed by the ruling caliph.[159]  Christians were allowed in 1048 to rebuild a remnant of the Holy Sepulcher, but Jews could not rebuild their synagogues.[160]  To rescue “captive Jerusalem” and the Holy Sepulcher were to rescue a kidnapped Jesus and Jews were linked with the Muslims as the defiling enemy.[161]

During the First Crusade in 1096, half a million soldiers moved across Europe to Jerusalem, devastating the countryside as a hostile army with about 40,000 soldiers reaching Jerusalem.  Pope Urban II promised forgiveness of sin to those dying in the crusade.  There were eight other crusades, including the Children’s Crusade in 1212.  The papacy achieved prestige and profits from the crusades.

The Christian chronicler Guibert of Nogent (1053-1124) wrote “[w]e desire to combat the enemies of God in the East, but we have under our eyes the Jews, a race more inimical to God than all the others.”[162]  Godfrey of Bouillon, leader of the First Crusade, promised in 1099 “to leave no single member of the Jewish race alive.”[163]

The First Crusade was created by political leaders who exploited people’s fear of the Antichrist and the devil and, even before the official Christian armies assembled, gangs throughout the Rhineland attacked Jewish communities as the other “infidel” people.[164]   Widespread anti-Jewish violence occurred in Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Regensburg, Cologne and its surrounding communities of Metz and Trier and to the east in Prague.[165]

Although based on the Books of Moses, Judaism emerged as the culture of the Talmud, a culture of conversation, written and oral, reflecting on a compilation of the commentary of scholarly rabbis over the centuries.[166]  In the Rhineland Jewish communities, scholarly Talmudic learning centers were formed with Mainz as the most influential center of teachers.[167]  Rabbi Simeon the Great was the leading scholar of Talmudic learning during the 11^th century in Mainz.[168]

In the 11^th century, the international connections of the Rhineland Jews were highly valued as sources of exchange and commerce and they developed the Jewish practice of medical science.[169]  Jewish translators brought to Christian Europe knowledge of the Arabic culture and Greek classics, such as Aristotle.[170]  Local and Hebraic literatures were taught at Jewish schools such as the school in Mainz, which ranked with the best in Europe.[171]  Christians knew essentially nothing about Jewish learning and high culture during these centuries and throughout history.[172]

Peter the Prelate, or Peter the Hermit, was the leader of the Peasants’ Crusade whose sermons in the Cologne Cathedral linked the Crusade to the death of Jesus by the Jews.[173]  His congregation would run through the streets killing the Jews of Cologne.[174]  From April 17 to July 1, 1096, the number of Jews murdered or forced to suicide is estimated from 5,000 to 10,000, representing probably over one third of the Jews in northern Europe.[175]  After the pogroms throughout the Rhineland in the spring of 1096 with the deaths of thousands of Jews, a Christian theologian commented that “A beast was set loose and it would never be completely caged again.”[176]

In Worms and Mainz, almost the entire Jewish communities were exterminated.[177]  Many Jews chose to die as martyrs, Kiddush HaShem (for the holiness of God’s name), rather than to convert.[178]  During the Crusades, the periodic expulsion and return of the Jews led to the revival of the ancient myth of the “wandering Jew,” Ahasuerus, condemned to wander homeless until the Second Coming of Christ.[179]  After the First Crusade, Jews were denied many occupations and were restricted to the anti-Christian endeavors of banking and money lending.[180]

Pope Eugene III in March of 1146 launched the call for the Second Crusade.[181]  When the pope sought to organize the Second Crusade, Peter the Venerable, abbot of the French monastery of Cluny, urged King Louis VII of France to participate and openly called for attacks on the Jews at home.[182]  Peter the Venerable accused the Jews of dealing in holy objects stolen from churches and continuing to offend Christ and Christianity.[183]

Beginning from the end of the 11^th century, Catholic Christianity focused on the humanity of Christ that emphasized the pain and suffering of Jesus’ Passion.[184]  The Christ that now dominated the Christian religious mind and spirit was less a majestic creator-king than a human savior, whose crucifixion offered redemption to those who would have faith.[185]  The dogma of transubstantiation obligated Christians to recognize the human body of Christ in the Eucharist, in which the death of Jesus was the climax of his life.[186]  Christ’s actual presence in the Eucharist became the dominant icon of the late medieval church, which intensified the conception of the Jewish Christ-killer image and the anti-Jewish libels of Host desecration, ritual murder and ritual cannibalism.[187]

Religious sermons on what motivated the Jews to kill Jesus bore directly on the way in which Christians perceived and treated the Jews.[188]   St. Augustine in On the City of God explained that God did not slay the Jews in punishment for their crime of deicide, because of their blind ignorance of not recognizing Jesus as the Messiah and to serve as witnesses to the triumph of Christianity over Judaism.[189]  The “blind ignorance” of Augustine’s Jewish Christ killers needed to survive as part of medieval Christian society to demonstrate biblical prophecies of Jewish infidelity toward God.[190]  Augustine found support in Psalm 59:12 where God gives instructions for dealing with his enemies in: “Slay them not, lest at any time they forget your law; scatter them by your might.” (Augustine’s Old Latin translation).[191]

Also, Augustine in Contra Judaeos detached the biblical heroes of the Old Testament from Jewish history by representing Cain, Hagar, Ishmael and Esau as the Jews who have been rejected and portraying Abel, Sarah, Isaac and Jacob as foreshadowing the election of the church.[192]  Augustine preached that the Jews, who were no longer chosen of God, were transformed into the sons of Satan and were to bring into the world “the son of perdition,” the Antichrist.[193]

Innocent III took the title Vicarius Christi, Vicar of Christ, and claimed to be between God and man, lower than God but higher than man, who judges all and judged by none.[194]  Rather than standing in the “Shoes of the Fisherman,” the pope claimed absolute spiritual authority at the right hand of God.[195]

Innocent III was the first pope to demand that Jews wear the yellow Star of David and persuaded the Fourth Lateran Council to make this church law, but he was unsuccessful in banishing the Jews of Europe into ghettos.[196]  Following the demand made by Innocent III and the Lateran Council of 1179, Pope Paul IV instituted the first ghetto in Rome and beginning from 1555 Jews were confined to walled-off areas where their occupations were severely limited and they lived in crowded poverty-stricken conditions.[197]  The Jews’ enforced separation was designed to keep their demonic influences away from Christian society.[198]

Pope Paul IV believed that the Reformation was a Jewish-inspired plot to destroy the Vatican as the Jews were the “fathers of iniquity and parents of Protestantism.”[199] In the papal states and in Rome, Pope Paul IV banned Jews from many trades and professions, banned the Talmud, banned Jewish High Holidays, banned kosher food, destroyed synagogues, prevented Jewish land ownership, forced the wearing of the yellow Star of David and special head coverings to warn Christians of Jewish presence.[200]

During the 3^rd Crusade, German nobles in 1197 formed the Teutonic Knights with allegiance to the crusading Pope, Innocent III.[201]  In the 13^th century, the Order of Teutonic Knights crusaded against the Hungarians and the original Prussians, a Baltic people.[202]  The Knights exterminated the indigenous people in Prussia, seizing lands and reducing the remaining natives to serfdom.[203]  They encouraged colonists from the German states to settle in Prussia and were constantly crusading against Poles and Russians.[204]  In the 16^th century, the grand master of the Teutonic Knights, a member of the Hohenzollern family that produced the future Kaisers, converted to Lutheranism.[205]

Pope Innocent III followed Augustine’s assumption that the Jews belong in Christian society by declaring that “Christian piety accepts the Jews who, by their own guilt, are consigned to perpetual slavery because they crucified the Lord.”[206]  However, beginning in the 1230s the church expressed concern over the Talmud and contemporary rabbinic Judaism, which did not fit within the Judaism of the Old Testament that Augustine had imagined Judaism to still be.[207]

In 1239, Pope Gregory IX issued orders for the confiscation of the Talmud and in 1240 King Louis IX of France condemned it as a perversion of the Judaism of the Old Testament and ordered its destruction.[208]  While the Talmud was burned in Paris during 1242, King James I of Aragon (1213-1276) issued an edict requiring all Jews in his kingdom to attend conversion sermons by the Dominicans and Franciscans.[209]

Pope Clement IV at the Synod of Vienna in 1267 proposed ecclesiastical enactments against the Jews, in which Jews and Christians could not have any contact or participate in any festivities, Christians could not take medicine from Jewish doctors, Jews were forbidden outside during Easter, Jews must pay taxes to the local clergy and Jews must wear the badge of the Tables of the Law.[210]

The Christian church realized that Judaism continued to develop, after Jesus’ crucifixion on the day when the New Testament replaced the Old.  If the New Testament charted the only legitimate direction, in which the religion of biblical Israel could develop and, if the Jews had survived only to testify to the Old Testament that gave birth to Christianity, then Talmudic Judaism was heresy and the Jews no longer filled the role that God had given their ancestors.[211]  Christians began to consider the Jew as a deliberate unbeliever and no longer the blind and ignorant Old Testament Jew, killing Jesus in error, but an agent of Satan.[212]

The leading English cleric Alexander of Hales (1183-1245) regarded the Jews as blasphemers and the same as the pagans that the Church was fighting in the Holy Land.[213]  The results of the writings of clerics such as Alexander and Robert Grosseteste, the bishop of Lincoln, changed the perspectives on the Jews from the Augustinian position of “slay them not” to everything was permitted from forcible conversion, expropriation, expulsion and murder.[214]

Beginning in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, allegations of brutal crimes were fabricated against the Jews, which often resulted in anti-Jewish violence and the seizing of property, livelihood and life itself.[215]  Accusations of ritual murder and ritual cannibalism, targeting Jews in the ancient Greek world before the birth of Christianity, were emerging again through (1) the charges of ritual murder by Jews killing innocent Christians, (2) the blood libel of Jews killing innocent Christians for their blood being used in Passover bread and (3) Host desecration by Jews defiling and attacking the consecrated Host of the Eucharist.[216]

As Christian devotion to Jesus’ blood evolved, Jews were accused of ritual murder for blood to mix into the unleavened bread for Passover, which was known as Blood Libel.[217]  However, for the Jew – Any person who consumes any blood – that soul will be cut off from its people. Leviticus 7:27.

The first recorded ritual murder charge occurred in 1146 in Norwich, England, where Jews were accused of having crucified a Christian boy, William, during Passion Week (who was apparently an epileptic and died after a seizure).[218]  Following the Norman Conquest, French Jews first arrived in England as chattels of the king with more Jews arriving to escape the crusader massacres, but the Anglo-Norman Jewish community lasted only 200 years before being driven out of England in 1290.[219]

Thomas of Monmouth, a Benedictine monk, arrived in Norwich five years after the mysterious death of William of Norwich to reconstruct the “truth,” to establish sainthood for William and to prove that the Jews abducted William for ritual murder.[220]  In his Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, written in the early 1150s, Thomas by proposing sainthood for William probably received considerable personal gain and increased reputation among the clergy.[221]  The fame of a local Christian martyr and saint would have enhanced the religious importance of Norwich and its cathedral as a stream of pilgrims to William’s relics would bring prosperity to the town.[222]  Perhaps, Thomas believed that attacking the Jews could serve to unite Christian England and to improve the relationship between the Norman rulers and the conquered Anglo-Saxon population.[223]

Also, Jews were accused of crucifying boys in 1147 in Wűrzburg, in 1168 in Gloucester, in 1171 in Blois, in 1182 in Saragossa and repeatedly all over Europe even until the 20^th century.[224]  Although Pope Innocent IV issued a bull proclaiming the falsity of ritual murder, such as the alleged ritual killing of an eight-year old boy named Hugh of Lincoln, whole Jewish communities were slaughtered nevertheless.[225]

Repeatedly, Jews were accused of poisoning wells in Europe to kill Christians and as a result Jews were executed in Bohemia in 1163, in Breslau in 1226 and in Vienna in 1267.[226]  In 1321, Jews were accused of a plot to poison all the wells in France, resulting in Jews being burned at the stake and expelled from Paris.[227]  When the 1348 Black Plague was blamed on wells poisoned by the Jews, over 300 Jewish communities, including Mainz, Trier and Cologne were destroyed by anti-Jewish mobs.[228]

During the 11^th century, the Catholic Church established the sacrament of Holy Communion, whereby the duly ordained priest re-creates the Passion of Christ on the altar by consecrating the Eucharist and transforming the wafer and the sacramental wine into the body and blood of Christ.[229]  The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 formalized this belief that the wine and wafer were the blood and body of Christ and without communion no one could be saved and only the Catholic Church could administer it.[230]

The Catholic Church was founded as a church of ideas, of spirituality and of reaching souls.[231]  When the church acquired power, it realized that it was no longer the soul that mattered but earthly power.[232]  The Codex Iuris Canonici was developed in the 12^th century as the canon law of today’s Catholic Church, which enshrined the pyramid of ordained hierarchy with the pope as the supreme head of the Church and of creation.[233]

By the 13^th century, the Jews were accused of “desecrating the Host,” in which they would sneak into churches and stab the consecrated wafer until it spurted “blood.”[234]  In stabbing the host, the Jews are depicted as crucifying Christ once again.[235]  The “libel” spread throughout Europe, resulting in the deaths of thousands of German Jews in the Rintfleisch massacres in 1298 and in the Armleder massacres in the late 1330s.[236]

In 13^th century England with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290, the ballad “Sir Hugh, or the Jew’s Daughter” celebrated a famous blood libel and Christopher Marlowe’s Machiavellian The Jews of Malta and Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice established a literary tradition of anti-Semitism.[237]  Although the Jews had been driven out since 1290, Shakespeare’s image of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice portrayed the English stereotype of the Jew as the image of the greedy money lender, the religiously unassimilable “other,” and with Shylock’s demand for the “pound of flesh” the ritual blood libel murderer.[238]  

The slaughter of all the Jews in the town was the happy ending in Chaucer’s “Tale of the Prioress” in The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400),[239] as a result of the ritual murder charge against the Jews.[240]  Blood Libel survived into the 20^th century with the most recent cases being the Beiliss trial in Kiev in 1912 and the riots in Kielce, Poland in 1946.[241]  Into the 21^st century, the Muslims have carried the Blood Libel charge against Israel.

Thomas Aquinas and his colleagues portrayed the Jews as the perpetrators of Jesus’ crucifixion and preached that the Jews understood who Jesus was and killed Jesus anyway.[242]  The Host-desecration libel implied that the Jews of all generations shared the guilt for the Crucifixion by knowing that Jesus was present in the Eucharist when they pierced it.[243]  The ritual murder and crucifixion libel was built on the conviction that all Jews of all times crucified Jesus and they reenact their crime relentlessly.[244]

The Host-desecration libel influenced “historical” chronicles, sermons, theater plays, holy site attractions for pilgrims and religious art even in the absence of Jews in the country.[245] For example, King Edward I expelled the Jews from England in 1290 and the Jews did not return to Britain until the late 1650s, yet Host-desecration stories in England continued during the 14^th and 15^th centuries.[246]

Ritual murder, the Crucifixion, the Jewish celebration at Passover, the bread of the Eucharist, partaking of Christ’s body that the bread became, the mystery of the blood of Christ all converged in anti-Jewish libels of ritual cannibalism known as “blood libel.”[247]  Not only were the Jews charged with ritual murder, but the Jews allegedly used the blood of their Christian victims for the ingredient in the unleavened bread for Passover, the Passover wine, and various medicines.[248]

The first reference in Continental Europe to medieval blood libel occurred in the German village of Fulda in 1235.[249]  The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II established a commission to investigate the blood libel at Fulda but found no evidence.[250]  The most celebrated blood libel was attached to the death of Simon of Trent on Easter Sunday in 1475.[251]  Simon of Trent was transformed into a martyr and saint by the blood libel and ritual crucifixion claimed by the Church.[252]

The bishop-prince of Trent, Johannes von Hinderbach, and a number of Franciscan preachers, such as Bernardino da Feltre, spread the popular Simon cult beyond Trent with woodcuts showing the martyrdom in dramatic details.[253]  The first book printed in Trent was The History of Simon of Trent in 1475 by Bishop Hinderbach’s physician.[254]

Not until the Second Vatican Council’s declaration of October 1965 did the Catholic Church withdraw the status of saint from Simon of Trent and declared that the Jews, who were tortured and executed for his murder, were innocent of the crime.[255]  Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) did denounce the persecution of the Jews on charges of blood libel and cannibalism.[256]  Nevertheless, the accusations of blood libel only became more entrenched in Christian culture.

During the Black Plague between 1348 and 1351, 20 to 25 million people representing approximately one-third of the European population died of the disease, which was caused by a bacillus in the blood of rats.[257]  The Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning the wells and by the end of the plague few Jewish communities remained in Germany and the Low Countries after the slaughter in the Rhineland.[258]

During the Black Death, Jews in Berlin were either murdered or driven out of town and were not allowed back for four years.[259]  In 1510, the Jews of Berlin were accused by the Church of desecrating the Host and stealing religious vessels and over a hundred were arrested, resulting with 38 Jews burned at the stake along with the Christian who actually stole the vessels.[260]  In 1571, all Jews were expelled from Berlin and not until 1671 were Jews grant a writ of privileges to restore a Berlin Jewish community.[261]

After 1348, anti-Jewish stereotyping became more vicious as the Jew became the mortal threat against the Christian community.[262]  Medieval Christianity disseminated a grotesque and dehumanized image of Jews through sermons, passion plays and visual arts.[263]  The medieval passion plays re-enacted the crucifixion, in which Jews were cast as the traitorous executioners, wearing contemporary dress with the yellow Jewish hat and moneybags hanging from their belts as the people of Judas rather than the people of Jesus.[264]

During the 14^th century, gangs of “Jew-bashers” (Judenschläger) murdered Jews in Alsatia, the Rhineland and Swabia under the protection of the nobles who claimed they had divine inspiration to kill Jews as the Jews killed Jesus.[265]  The massacre of Jews occurred in the communities of Rouffach, Ensisheim, Ribeauvillé, Colmar and Mülhausen.[266]  The more Christians identified with Jesus’ suffering, the more they hated the Jews.[267]

By the summer of 1391 as Jewish communities were massacred across Spain driven by anti-Jewish clergy, a new class of people, the conversos, emerged of Jews who converted to avoid being killed.[268]  The mass conversion of the Jews in Spain resulted from two generations of sermon-inspired violence of convert or die.[269]

The Jewish presence in Western Europe was gradually declining with expulsion from England in 1290, from France in 1306 and in 1394 and from much of Germany during these periods and with banishment from Spain and Sicily in 1492, from Portugal in 1497 and southern Italy in 1541.[270]  Where they remained in Germany, the Papal States and in northern Italy, Christian hostility increased against the Jews.[271]  The accusations of blood libel and ritual crucifixion followed the Jews into Central and Eastern Europe and, with the return of the Jews to Western Europe, the libels returned.[272]

In 1399, the Jews of Poznan in Poland were accused of killing three Christians for use of their blood in matzo and thirteen Jewish elders were burned to death.[273]  In 1407, a priest in Cracow accused Jews of murdering a Christian child, which was followed by a massacre of Jews and burning Jewish property.[274]

Between 1530 and 1545, Blood Libel was spread by local Christians in the town of Amasiya in Black Sea region of northern Anatolia under the rule of the Ottoman Empire.[275]  The Amasiya Blood Libel was started by an Armenian woman who reported seeing Jews murder a Christian boy for blood at the Passover meal.[276]  The “murdered” boy was found alive, but the Jews who were accused had already been tortured and hanged.[277]

Since 1572, the Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square of Prague strikes each hour with the Twelve Apostles emerging and Death ringing a bell while mocked by Vanity, the Turk and a bearded and horned Jew.[278]  After 1945 to whitewash Central Europe’s medieval anti-Semitism that culminated in the Holocaust, the beard and horns were removed and the figure was renamed Greed.[279]  However, greed was the anti-Semitic portrayal of the stereotype Jew during the medieval passion plays.

The fury of the Inquisition in Spain was directed against Moors, infidels, heretics and Jews and Jews professing Judaism were burned alive.[280]  Torquemada began the Inquisition in Spain in hopes of receiving the favors of the Pope, making the Dominicans the most powerful and richest of the religious orders and securing a Cardinal’s hat.[281]  In 1555, Gian Pietro Caraffa, the papal nuncio in Spain and the grand inquisitor who had burned Jews, Judaizing Christians and the Talmud, became Pope Paul IV bringing the Inquisition into the papacy and issuing the bull Cum Nimis Absurdum.[282]  The bull mandated Jews to live in ghettos and they were forbidden to own real estate, to attend Christian universities and to hire Christian servants.[283]  Male Jews in Rome were required to wear yellow conical hats and women were to wear veils.[284]  In the preface to the bull, the pope explained that the purpose of the polices were to force Jews to conversion and to abandon the Augustinian view that Jews served God’s purposes by continuing to live as degraded “witnesses” among the Christians.[285]

In 1611, Pope Paul V allowed the blood purity standard from the 1547 Statute of Toledo, Spain, to enter the Roman Catholic Church in Rome by denying persons of Jewish descent to be admitted to canonicates of cathedrals, dignities in brotherhoods and offices entrusted with the care of souls.[286]  Blood purity regulations (limpieza regulations) were eventually revoked, but race entered into church history and race-based hatred became a part of theological anti-Semitism.[287]  Some Catholic institutions like the Jesuits were still applying blood purity restrictions, the limpieza legacy, into the twentieth century.[288]

The squalid ghetto below Vatican Hill lasted for 300 years as the whim of the popes until the soldiers of the French Republic imprisoned the pope and dismantled the ghetto in 1796.[289]  After Napoleon’s defeat, Pope Pius VII (1800-1823) rebuilt the walls of the ghetto until it was finally abolished when Pope Pius IX (1846-1878) lost control of Rome to the Italian nation in 1870.[290]  Pope Pius IX, who referred to Jews as “dogs,” was beatified to sainthood by John Paul II.[291]

Since the church outlawed the earning of interest by Christians, the nobility who owned the Jews used them to make loans to Christians and enriched themselves at the expense of the peasantry and the Jews.[292]  The Jews were casted forever as the demonic, blood-sucking usurers.[293]  By the late 16^th century in England, France and Spain, the image of the Jew as the blood-sucking usurer had become a literary stereotype, which was later adopted by Russian and American writers.[294]

George Sandys, an English visitor to the Ottoman Empire commented about the dhimmi status of Jews in Jerusalem in the early 17^th century by saying that:

Here also be some Jewes, yet inherit they no part of the land, but in their owne country do live as aliens, a people scattered throughout the whole world, and hated amongst whom they live; yet suffred, as a necessary mischief: subject to all wrongs and contumelies, which they support with an invincible patience . . . Many of them have I seene abused, some of them beaten; yet never saw I Jew with an angry countenance.[295]

With such popular English works as Chaucer’s The Prioress’s Tale, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Dickens’ Oliver Twist, literary anti-Semitism reinforced the acceptable Christian behavior of humiliation, expropriation, forced conversion and death towards the Jews and influenced generations of authors and playwrights in England and in other countries.[296]

In 1840, the ritual murder-blood libel accusation appeared in Damascus when seven leaders of the Jewish community were tortured after being accused of killing a Christian cleric, Father Thomas, with his Muslim servant and used their blood for the Passover rituals.[297]  Local Christians accused the Jews of murdering the two men.[298]  Also, 63 Jewish children were imprisoned and Jewish homes were destroyed.[299]  The French government strongly supported its anti-Semitic consul in Damascus who accused local Jews of their involvement in the ritual murder.[300]  Later, it was determined that the friar had been killed by a Muslim.[301]

Around Damascus and in Palestine, there were nine incidents and four incidents of blood libel, respectively, between 1840 and 1900.[302]  In 1844, there were incidents in Cairo created by the Muslims and one in Alexandria created by the Greek Orthodox Church.[303]  The historian Tudor Parfitt described the blood libel in the Middle East:

In 1866, in Hamadan in western Iran, eighteen Jews were massacred following a ritual murder accusation – two more were burnt alive while the rest of the community only managed to escape the fury of the mob by converting en masse to Islam; there were further libels in Alexandria in 1870, in Smyrna in 1871, and Damanhur (Egypt) in 1871 and 1873, initiated by Muslims, and again in Smyrna in 1873.  In 1875 there was a blood libel in Aleppo, as a result of which the Pasha of Aleppo had to send troops to guard the Jewish quarter.  In 1876 there was another blood libel in Smyrna and one in Constantinople, while 1877 saw libels in Damanhur and Mansura, where the local Muslims accused the Jews of kidnapping a Muslim child and killing it in order to use its blood for matzot.[304]   

Between 1870 and 1940, more accusations of ritual murder, crucifixion and cannibalism emerged against the Jews than in all previous centuries combined.[305]  The Arab world continues to use Blood Libel in its anti-Jewish attacks, such as the Saudi newspaper Ar-Riyadh in 2002 publishing an article by a lecturer at King Faysal University concerning Blood Libel and the use of blood in the preparation of pastries for the Jewish Purim holiday.[306]  The leading newspaper of the Arab world, Al-Ahram, continues the blood libel lies.  The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published racist blood libel accusations that the IDF was selling organs of Arab terrorists after Operation Cast Lead ended in January of 2009.

Through the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the Jews of Central Europe were forced to live in poor and overcrowded ghettos, subject to special taxes and restricted to money-lending, pawn-brokering and dealing in secondhand goods.[307]  After 1648, many a prince had a “Court Jew” handle his finances and should the prince’s high taxes or usurious loans anger his citizens; it was blamed on the greed of the Court Jew.[308]

Beginning in 1634 and every ten years thereafter the famous Passion play at Oberammergau, emerging from German Passion plays of earlier generations, demonized Jesus’ Jewish enemies on the stage and carried forward the Christ-killer myth from the Middle Ages.[309]  Hitler viewed the 1934 plays and the posters publicizing the 1934 production reflected the new Nazi propaganda, acknowledging the menace of Jewry.[310] The preface to the 1934 Jubilee Text of the Play describes how today “all of the German tribes feel again like one people,” saved from Jewish “Bolshevism” by the “suppression of the antichristian powers in our fatherland” and are experiencing a “new life which unites us all in our race.”[311]

In the 17^th century, the duchy of Brandenburg merged with Prussia to form East Prussia, which never lost its feudal ethos.[312]  In 1648, the settlement of the Wars of Religion gave each prince the right to enforce his own religion in his state and in Prussia the Lutheran clergy became essentially a part of the state.[313]  The Evangelical Lutheran church was the “spiritual army of the Hohenzollerns,” the kings of Prussia and the Kaisers of a united Germany.[314]  Nazi intellectuals, following in the footsteps of the Teutonic Knights, believed it was Germany’s destiny to seize Eastern Europe from the inferior Slavs and resettle it with Germans in pursuit of Germany’s sacred racial mission and the dominance of the Aryan people.[315]

In 1711, Johannes Eisenmenger published, with the help of Frederick I of Prussia, Judaism Unmasked that portrayed the Talmud as commanding the Jews to lie, cheat and murder non-Jews and repeating every Christian myth about the Jews.[316]  As a popular book for anti-Semitics in Europe, Eisenmenger’s book insisted that Christians must destroy the synagogues, confine the Jews to ghettos, degrade them in every way and avoid all unnecessary contacts.[317]

Dutch Calvinism and English Puritanism were more scripture based Christianity and considered the Old Testament as important as the New Testament, which led to increased religious tolerance extending to the Jews.[318]  In contrast, Martin Luther created a specifically “Germanic” way of being Christian, connecting it with nationalism.[319]

The German Lutheran tradition did not challenge political authority, but was subordinate to the state.[320]  In Germany, there was a union between government and the altar, as shown in government procedures in requiring the notation of religious affiliation in official documents and the government levy of an ecclesiastical tax.[321]

In contrast, the Huguenots and the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church supported freedom of worship even for Jews.[322]  Lutheranism in Prussia supported princely authoritarianism through the reign of Prussian kings and Kaisers to the appointment of Hitler as chancellor, which was welcomed by the vast majority of the German Evangelical clergy.[323]  The few Protestant clerics who opposed Nazi anti-Semitism, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Niemoeller and Martin Dibelius, came from the Calvinist wing of the German Evangelicals, who had been commanded by the king to merge with the Lutherans in the Evangelical Protestant Union of 1817.[324]

Lutherans and Calvinists joined together to create the Evangelical Church of Prussia in 1817 with the belief of many that a religious union would lead to national union.[325]  For over a century, the Hohenzollern dynasty ruling Prussia were Calvinist and the general population was predominately Lutheran.[326]  The nationalist organizers merging the two Protestant faiths included in the draft constitution an explicit ban on Judaism, which they regarded as a “creed . . . detrimental to the causes of mankind.”[327]

In August of 1819 after the end of Napoleonic occupation, rioters in Bamberg, Frankfurt am Main, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Dresden and Heidelberg attacked the Jewish neighborhoods across southern Germany blaming Jews for the bad harvests driving up the price of bread, food shortages, unemployment among artisans and the overall blaming Jewish financiers for their sufferings in the Hep Hep Riots.[328]   The rioters called out “hep hep” as they drove the Jewish communities out of their homes and towns.[329]  The phrase “hep hep” was allegedly derived from a Latin saying that was used during the Crusades, but another interpretation alleged that it represented the sound of a goat to mock the image of the Jewish beard.[330]

Although the 1812 Edict allowed Jews living in the Provinces of Brandenburg, Saxony, Pomerania and East and West Prussia to receive citizenship, which was a major event towards Jewish equality, true emancipation was achieved through conversion. [331]  Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Germany was considered the “third golden age” of German Jewry and living in Germany was a privilege.[332]  Jews in Germany were seen as the model of successful assimilation and Polish and Russian Jews looked to Germany for refuge and inspiration.[333]

In the 19^th century, many Jews saw Christianity not so much as “a name for a religion,” but as a culture rather than a religion and conversion as a means for emancipation.[334]  Felix Theilhaber, a Zionist critic of assimilation, published Der Untergang der deutschen Juden (“The Disappearance of the German Jews”) in 1911, arguing that German Jews through several generations of conversion, intermarriage, late marrying, and low birth rates were committing racial suicide where by the end of the 20^th century German Jewry would be extinct.[335]

After the Holocaust, Rabbi Maybaum, a Berlin rabbi during the 1930s, raised the question of whether God acted to prevent the disappearance of the European Jew by allowing this overwhelming disaster by the free-will of evil men.[336]  Yaakov Astor wrote that the Holocaust became the only connection many Jews had to Judaism and it became the unifying event reconnecting Jewish identity.[337]

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: the Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 82.

[2] Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism From Prejudice to the Holocaust, (English Translation 2005), p. 15.

[3] Ibid., pp. 15-16.

[4] Jocelyn Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism, A Short History, (1^st ed. 2003), p. 164.

[5] Littell, p. 82.

[6] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin.Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, (2^nd ed. 2003), p. xix.

[7] Ibid., p. 13.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Abraham J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, (1^st ed. Sec. printing 1976), p. 8.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Glatzer, Nahum N., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, (1^st ed. 1953), p. xxxi.

[12] Abraham J. Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism, (1^st ed. 1955), p. 25.

[13] Ibid., p. 167.

[14] Ibid., p. 27.

[15] Ibid., p. 281.

[16] Ibid., p. 283.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p. 282.

[19] Prager and Telushkin, p. 16.

[20] Alexander A. Mandelbaum, Redemption Unfolding, The Last Exile, The Final Redemption, and Our Role in These Fateful Times, (3^rd ed. 2007), p. 83.

[21] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel, An Echo of Eternity, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1969), p. 98-99.

[22] The Chumash, The Stone Edition, Deuteronomy 6:4 [commentary].

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] David Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul,(1^st ed. 2008), p. 131.

[26] Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[27] Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 59.

[28] Abraham I. Katsh, ed., Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1965), p. 157.

[29] The Chumash, The Stone Edition, Preface, p. xiii.

[30] Maimonides Thirteen Fundamental Principles of Faith: (1) I believe with perfect faith that God is the Creator and Ruler of all things. He alone has made, does make, and will make all things. (2) I believe with perfect faith that God is One. There is no unity that is in any way like His. He alone is our God He was, He is, and He will be. (3) I believe with perfect faith that God does not have a body – physical concepts do not apply to Him. There is nothing whatsoever that resembles Him at all. (4) I believe with perfect faith that God is first and last. (5) I believe with perfect faith that it is only proper to pray to God. One may not pray to anyone or anything else. (6) I believe with perfect faith that all the words of the prophets are true. (7) I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of Moses is absolutely true. He was the chief of all prophets, both before and after him. (8) I believe with perfect faith that the entire Torah that we now have is that which was given to Moses. (9) I believe with perfect faith that this Torah will not be changed, and that there will never be another given by God. (10) I believe with perfect faith that God knows all of man’s deeds and thoughts. It is thus written, “He has molded every heart together, He understands what each one does.”[Psalm 33:15] (11) I believe with perfect faith that God rewards those who keep His commandments, and punishes those who transgress Him. (12) I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. How long it takes, I will await His coming every day. (13) I believe with perfect faith that the dead will be brought back to life when God wills it to happen.

[31] Betsalel Philip Edwards, transl. & edit., Living Waters, The Mei HaShiloach: A Commentary on the Torah by Rabbi Mordechai Yosef of Isbitza, (1^st Rowman & Littlefield ed. 2004), p. xvi.

[32] Heschel, God in Search of Man, p. 283.

[33] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 153.

[34] Mandelbaum, p. 9.

[35] Ibid., p. 15.

[36] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 156.

[37] Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul, pp. 152-153.

[38] Van Buren, p. 159.

[39] Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Israel is Living, G-d is Living: The teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, (1^st ed. 1994).

[40] Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God After Auschwitz, (1^st ed. 1965), p. 36.

[41] The Chumash, Exodus 19:6 [commentary].

[42] David Patterson, Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary,(1^st ed. 1999), p. 107.

[43] Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 82.

[44] Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption. (1^st ed. 2010), p. 201.

[45] Heschel, p. 99.

[46] Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 5.

[47] Ibid.

[48] David Patterson, Wrestling With the Angel: Toward a Jewish Understanding of the Nazi Assault on the Name, (1^st ed. 2006), p. 45.

[49] Van Buren, p. 122.

[50] Maybaum, p. 26.

[51] Ibid.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Van Buren, p. 116.

[55] Ibid., p. 122.

[56] Ibid., p. 123.

[57] Ibid.

[58] Rabbi Charles B. Chavel, trans., Ramban (Nachmanides) Commentary on the Torah, Exodus. (1^st ed. 1973), p. 171.

[59] Ibid., p. 173.

[60] Ibid., p. 171.

[61] Hellig, p. 166.

[62] Maurice M. Roumani, The Case of the Jews From Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue. (1^st ed. 4^th printing 1983), p. 20; James Parkes, A History of Palestine from 135 A.D. to Modern Times. (1^st ed. 1949), pp. 173-174.

[63] Elie Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969-,(1^st ed. 1999), p. 48.

[64] Prager and Telushkin, p. 72.

[65] Hellig, p. 138.

[66] Hellig, p. 90.

[67] Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile, (1^st ed. 1990), p. 38.

[68] Hellig, p. 105. The Hellenistic period was inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great (365-323 B.C.E.). Ibid., p. 113.

[69] Prager and Telushkin, p. 72.

[70] Rashi’s Commentary: “Astonishment” means that all who see you will see bewilderment over you. “A parable” means they will say of a similar suffering befalling a person. A “conversation” means they will retell of you.

[71] Exodus 17:8-16; Genesis 27:39-41.

[72] Hellig., p. 138.

[73] James Rudin, Christians & Jews Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future, (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 86-87.

[74] Hellig, pp. 145-146.

[75] Ibid., pp. 146-147.

[76] Ibid., p. 145.

[77] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 48.

[78] Hellig, p. 144.

[79] Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full, p. 48.

[80] Hellig, p. 147.

[81] Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, (1^st ed. 2010),/p. 81.

[82] Ibid.

[83] Hellig, pp. 149-150.

[84] Ibid.

[85] Ibid., p. 153.

[86] Ibid., p. 154.

[87] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 81-82.

[88] James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, (1^st ed. 2001), p. 90.

[89] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 83.

[90] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 90; Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 84.

[91] Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 153.

[92] Ibid., pp. 153-154.

[93] Ibid., p. 153.

[94] Ibid., p. 154.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 84.

[97] Ibid., p. 85.

[98] Jeremy Cohen, Christ Killers: the Jews and the Passion From the Bible to the Big Screen, (1^st ed. 2007), pp. 28-29, 32.

[99] Jesper Svartvik, “Why is this Light Different from All Other Lights? The Berlin Theses as a Beacon Light of Hope in the History of Jewish-Christian Relations,” Sigtunastiftelsen, Stockholm (October 6-7, 2010), International Council of Christians and Jews, p. 4.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Cohen, Christ Killers, p. 29.

[102] Ibid.

[103] Ibid.

[104] Rudin, pp. 24-25.

[105] Ibid., p. 25.

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid.

[109] Ibid., pp. 25-27.

[110] Siddur, p. xxiii.

[111] Ibid.

[112] Ibid.

[113] Carroll, Contantine’s Sword, p. 147.

[114] Ibid., p. 148.

[115] Cohen, p. 31.

[116] James Parkes, Conflict of the Church and the Synagogue: A study in the origins of antisemitism, (1^st ed. 1934), p. 120.

[117] Cohen, pp. 56-59.

[118] Ibid., 62.

[119] Littell, p. 26.

[120] Ibid.

[121] Ibid.

[122] Ibid., p. 27.

[123] Ibid.

[124] Ibid., p. 32.

[125] Littell, pp. 27-28.

[126] Hellig, p. 126.

[127] Ibid, p. 86.

[128] Ibid., p. 90.

[129] Hellig, pp. 206-207.

[130] Ibid, p. 207.

[131] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 152.

[132] Hellig, p,.207.

[133] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 175, 193.

[134] Ibid., p. 171.

[135] Ibid., p. 173.

[136] Hellig, p. 157.

[137] Hellig, p. 206.

[138] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 55.

[139] James Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 101.

[140] Ibid.

[141] Ibid., p. 102.

[142] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 175.

[143] Ibid., p. 191.

[144] Ibid.

[145] Hellig, p. 210.

[146] Littell, p. 56.

[147] Norman Cohen, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,(1^st ed. 1967), p. 21.

[148] Littell, p. 61.

[149] Rudin, p. 18.

[150] Littell, p. 75.

[151] David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), (1^st ed. 2011), p. 165.

[152] Ibid., pp. 201-202.

[153] Ibid., pp. 165-166.

[154] Ibid., p. 166.

[155] Cohen, pp. 119-120.

[156] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 240.

[157] Ibid., p. 238.

[158] Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315-1791, (1^st ed. 1938), p. 13.

[159] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 252.

[160] Ibid.

[161] Ibid., p. 253.

[162] Ibid.

[163] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 19.

[164] Hellig, p. 211.

[165] Cohen, p. 120.

[166] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp . 248-249.

[167] Ibid., p. 249.

[168] Ibid.

[169] Ibid., p. 249.

[170] Ibid.

[171] Ibid.

[172] Ibid.

[173] Ibid., p. 250.

[174] Ibid.

[175] Ibid., p. 257.

[176] Carroll, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, p. 135.

[177] Hellig, p. 212

[178] Ibid.

[179] John Weiss, Ideology of Death, Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, (1^st ed. 1996), p. 31.

[180] Hellig, p. 212.

[181] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 269.

[182] Cohen, p 122.

[183] Ibid., p. 123.

[184] Cohen, p. 125.

[185] Ibid.

[186] Ibid.

[187] Ibid., pp. 125-126.

[188] Cohen, p. 83.

[189] Ibid.

[190] Ibid., pp. 84-85.

[191] Ibid., 84.

[192] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 86.

[193] Norman Cohn, p. 21.

[194] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 280.

[195] Ibid.

[196] Weiss, p. 32.

[197] Ibid, p. 30. The ghettos in Italy were not abolished until 1797. Ibid, p. 264.

[198] Hellig, p. 264.

[199] Weiss, pp. 29-30.

[200] Ibid., p. 30.

[201] Ibid., p. 32.

[202] Ibid., p. 33.

[203] Ibid.

[204] Ibid.

[205] Ibid.

[206] Cohen, p. 87.

[207] Ibid., p. 88.

[208] Ibid.

[209] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 333.

[210] Anthony Julius, Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England,(1^st ed. 2010), p. 132.

[211] Cohen, p. 88.

[212] Ibid., p. 93.

[213] Julius, p. 130.

[214] Ibid .pp. 130, 133.

[215] Cohen, p. 93.

[216] Ibid.

[217] Hellig, pp. 212-213.

[218] Ibid., p. 213; Haim Beinart, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History, (1^st ed. 1992), p. 44.

[219] Julius, p. 105.

[220] Cohen, p. 94.

[221] Ibid., p. 102.

[222] Ibid.

[223] Ibid.

[224] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 272-273.

[225] Hellig, p. 213.

[226] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 277.

[227] Ibid.

[228] Ibid.

[229] Ibid., p. 106.

[230] Ibid., pp. 106-107.

[231] Elie Wiesel and Richard D. Heffner, Conversations With Elie Wiesel, (1^st ed. 2001), p. 19.

[232] Ibid.

[233] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 279.

[234] Hellig, p. 213.

[235] Ibid., p. 214.

[236] Cohen, p. 103.

[237] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, pp. 364-365.

[238] Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey From the Rock, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 18.

[239] Cohen, p. 103.

[240] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 273.

[241] Cohen, p. 103.

[242] Ibid., p 108.

[243] Ibid., p. 109.

[244] Ibid.

[245] Ibid., p. 103.

[246] Ibid.

[247] Ibid.

[248] Ibid., pp. 109-110.

[249] Ibid., p. 110.

[250] Ibid., p. 113.

[251] Ibid., p. 110.

[252] Ibid., p. 111.

[253] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 89.

[254] Ibid.

[255] Cohen, p. 112.

[256] Ibid.

[257] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 338.

[258] Ibid., pp. 339-340.

[259] Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past, (1^st ed. 1997), p. 21.

[260] Ibid.

[261] Ibid.

[262] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 340.

[263] Hellig, p. 211.

[264] Ibid.

[265] Julius, p. 15.

[266] Haim Beinart, Atlas of Medieval Jewish History, (1^st ed. 1992), p. 60.

[267] Hellig, p. 211.

[268] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, pp. 341-342.

[269] Ibid.

[270] Cohen, p. 111.

[271] Ibid.

[272] Ibid., p. 114.

[273] Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, (1^st ed. 1986), p. 13.

[274] Ibid.

[275] Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 89.

[276] Ibid.

[277] Ibid., p. 90.

[278]Martin Gilbert, Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past,(1^st ed. 1997), p. 71.

[279] Ibid.

[280] John J. Stockdale, The History of the Inquisitions:including The Secret Transactions of Those Horrific Tribunals, (1^st ed. 1810), pp. 107, 276.

[281] Ibid., p. 113.

[282] Carroll, Constantine’s Sword, p. 375.

[283] Ibid.

[284] Ibid., p. 376.

[285] Ibid., p. 377.

[286] Ibid., p. 381.

[287] Ibid., p. 382.

[288] Ibid., p. 509.

[289] Ibid., p. 379.

[290] Ibid.

[291] Ibid., p. 380.

[292]Hellig, p. 212.

[293] Ibid.

[294] Ibid., p. 216.

[295] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, pp. 90-91.

[296] Julius, p. 153

[297] Cohen, p. 115.

[298] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 108.

[299] Ibid., p. 109.

[300] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 281.

[301] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 109.

[302] Julius, p. 89.

[303] Ibid.

[304] Ibid.

[305] Cohen, p. 115.

[306] Ibid., pp. 115-116.

[307] Weiss, p. 30.

[308] Ibid., p. 31.

[309] Cohen, pp. 214-215.

[310] Ibid., p. 214.

[311] J.A. Daisenberger, The Passion Play at Oberammergau: A Religious Festival Play in Three Sections With 20 Tableaux Vivants. (1934 Jubilee Text), p. 9.

[312] Weiss, p. 31.

[313] Ibid., p. 33.

[314] Ibid., p. 34

[315] Ibid., p. 33.

[316] Weiss, pp. 31-32.

[317] Ibid.

[318] Hellig, p. 264.

[319] Ibid.

[320] Weiss, p. 28.

[321] Philippe Burrin, Nazi Anti-Semitism: From Prejudice to the Holocaust, (1^st English ed. 2005), p. 33.

[322] Wiess, p. 29.

[323] Ibid.

[324] Ibid., p. 34.

[325] Deborah Hertz, How Jews Became Germans: The History of Conversion and Assimilation in Berlin, (1^st ed. 2007), p. 149.

[326] Ibid.

[327] Ibid., p. 150.

[328] Ibid, pp. 159-160.

[329] Ibid., p. 160.

[330] Ibid.

[331] Ibid., p. 108.

[332] Ibid., pp. 12-13.

[333] Ibid., p. 12.

[334] Ibid., p. 11, 13.

[335] Ibid., p. 14.

[336] Maybaum, p. 52.

[337] Yaakov Astor, The Hidden Hand, Uncovering Divine Providence in Major Events of the 20^th Century, (1^st ed. 2007), pp. 53-54.

 Martin M. van Brauman

 

It shall be on that day that I will make Jerusalem for all the peoples a burdensome stone, all whose bearers become lacerated; and all the nations of the world will gather against it . . . It shall be on that day that I will seek to destroy all the nations that come upon Jerusalem. I will pour out upon the house of David and upon the inhabitant of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and supplications.  Zechariah 12:3, 9.

 

From Exodus 1:9-16, the first familiar pattern of anti-Semitism in denying the Jewish people’s right to exit emerged with the Egyptians frightened by the growth of the Jewish people.  Pharaoh’s objective was not the need for slave labor in the society, but the extermination of the Jewish people, since he considered them a threat in the event of an outside invasion.   The sole purpose of the slave labor was to inflict suffering on the Jewish people and destroy their high birth rate.  However, God intervened and increased the birth rate in spite of Pharaoh’s persecution.

Since Israeli statehood in 1948, 95 percent of the Jewish populations in the Middle East, North Africa and Arabia have been denied the right to exit and were driven out in one generation.[1]  By 1972, 586,070 Jewish refugees from Arab countries had arrived in Israel and over 200,000 had found shelter in other countries.[2]  The number of Jewish refugees who fled from Arab countries was almost identical to the number of Arab “refugees” who voluntarily left Israel before the invading Arab armies of plunder and extermination.[3]

After the establishment of the State of Israel, Jews in Arab countries continued to be the targets of riots, pogroms and mass arrests.[4]  Like the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935, Arab legislation was introduced to confiscate Jewish property, restrict their employment and limit their freedom of movement.[5]  As a result, Jews became refugees compelled to flee their homes and seek refuge with the majority in Israel and the rest in Western democracies.[6]  The Arab countries refuse to recognize the Arab ethnic cleaning and the nationalist anti-Semitism that led to the driving out of almost 1,000,000 Sephardic Jews from Muslim countries since 1945, which also has been ignored by the United Nations and the international community.[7]

In Aden during December of 1947, a mob attacked the Jewish quarter killing 82 Jews, wounding 76 and the burning of over 100 shops.[8]  In Egypt during July and September of 1948, over 150 Jews were killed.[9]  In Iraq, 300 Jews were arrested in May of 1948, when Zionism was made a capital crime.[10]  The ancient Jewish community of Mesopotamia came into existence after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem in 587 BCE.[11]  By the early 1900’s almost a third of Baghdad’s population was Jewish.[12]  Known as Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, a mass exodus of that ancient Jewish community from Iraq to Israel occurred from 1950 to 1951.[13]  By the end of 1951, 113,545 Jews had fled Iraq legally and another 20,000 illegally.[14]

On “Black Saturday, January 26, 1952, Muslims instigated by the Muslim Brotherhood rioted through Cairo destroying over £10 million of Jewish property.[15]  On July 23, 1952, the Free Officers Movement led by Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser forced King Farouk into exile.[16]  By June 1954, Nasser came to power and on July 26, 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal, which began the Suez War.[17]  The Suez War resulted in the arrest and detainment without trial of 3,000 Jews and over 24,000 Jews were served with deportation orders from Egypt to leave within days with all of their homes, property, businesses and capital expropriated by the government.[18]

The pan-Arab Sofar summit of September 1947 urged the Arab states to open their countries to Palestinian Arab refugees if war occurs.[19]  Later the following month, Haifa’s Arab leadership drew up evacuation plans to neighboring Arab countries.[20]  During November-December 1947, King Abdullah promised Palestine Arabs refuge in Transjordan and in January 1948, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and his commander, Abdel Qader Husseini, pledged refuge in the Arab states to the Palestine Arab before the conflict.[21]

Instead of taking responsibility of their policies as promised before the invasion, the Arab countries, except Jordan, consistently refused to absorb the Palestinian “refugees” in contrast to the integration of other World War II refugees elsewhere by their host countries.[22]  For political reasons, the Arab League has deliberately forced as many Arab refugees as possible into camps, which has produced terrorism against Israel and the West.[23]

The Palestinian failure to set up a state in 1948, as proposed by the UN, and the invasion of Israel by Arab armies in the same year were the two factors responsible for the creation of the Arab “refugee” problem.[24]  However, a refugee is defined as one who flees in search of shelter, usually as a result of political persecutions.[25]  The Arabs were not compelled to leave Israel, nor were they subject to political persecution.

The Palestinian Arabs have remained on independent Arab soil since December 8, 1949 under the artificial “refugee status” of the UN agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).[26]  No similar type of UN Agency, perpetuating an annual renewal of “refugee status,” was set up for the approximately equal number of Jewish refugees deported from Muslim countries, or for the more than 11 million European refugees from the Second World War.[27]  After the war, the UN agency, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), was charged with the sole purpose of finding new countries for the refugees in the Displaced Persons camps, not for the purpose of maintaining an ongoing “refugee status.”[28]  It is estimated that the amount of land and property expropriated from Jewish families forced to leave Iraq, Egypt and Morocco totaled 100,000 square kilometers, or 5 times the size of the state of Israel.[29]

In The Haj, Leon Uris has the character Dr. Mudhil during the mid-1950s speaking to young Ishmael about the refugee problem that epitomizes the Arab mindset:

 . . . the Jews are not bleating to the world to make charity cases of their brothers. They are dismantling their refugee camps as quickly as they can build towns.  They are moving thousands into decent homes and giving them useful work.  They are clearing land to be farmed.  The lives of those Jews who fled Arab countries destitute will be different than yours.  Do you realize, Ishmael that over twenty million refugees are in the world today from India to Africa?  Of them all, the Arabs alone have the resources to dissolve their refugee problem, if they wanted to.  We have vast oil moneys, more jobs in the Gulf states than can be filed by all the Palestinians put together. We have rich lands in the Euphrates Valley and the vast emptiness of Libya.  The only thing we lack is the one thing the Jews have in abundance. . . Love. Yes, the Jews love one another.  They will not tolerate fellow Jews living in such pestholes as Aqbat Jabar.[30]   

 At the time of the initial migration in 1947, Palestinian Arabs did not possess a national identity.[31]  The national identity was created through the denial of equal rights from Arab leaders upon the Arabs that left Israel prior to the invading Arab armies.  Ahmed Shukeiry, the Saudi Arabian delegate to the UN, told the UN Security Council on May 31, 1956 that “[i]t is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but southern Syria.”[32]  Under the Ottoman rule, “Palestine” was only a geographical expression and the territory was comprised of a number of Ottoman administrative areas, such as the Independent Sanjak (District) of Jerusalem, the Sanjaks of Beirut, Acre and Balqa, and the Vilayet (Province) of Beirut.[33]

There was no separate Palestinian people as of March 31, 1977, when Zuhair Moshsin, the leader of the pro-Syrian Palestinian guerrilla organization, published in the Dutch paper TROUW in Amsterdam that there is “not a separate Palestinian people” but “it is in the national interest of the Arabs to encourage the Palestinian existence against Zionism . . . Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical reasons. . . The foundation of a Palestinian state is a new tool to continue the battle against Israel and for Arab unity.”[34]

The Jew is not a fabricated people and, for the first time in almost 2,000 years, the Jew had now re-established his ancestral home in the world with the State of Israel.  Contained in the Israeli Declaration of Independence is the principle of unlimited admission of Jews to Israel, which was enacted as the Law of Return in July 1950 and provided every Jew the right to immigrate and to immediate citizenship.[35]  The Law of Return is a statement to the enemies of the Jewish people that Jews will never again as during the 1930s find themselves without a place to go.[36]  With the Law of Return, Israel has a unique relationship with the Jewish Diaspora.[37]  The Law of Return requires only one Jewish grandparent (based upon the Nazi laws defining a Jew for extermination) to be considered Jewish, even though under Jewish religious law one has to be born of a Jewish mother, or convert to Judaism, to be considered a Jew.

Over 500,000 Holocaust survivors, one-fourth the county’s population, had immigrated quietly bearing horrific nightmares within themselves into Israeli society, until the Eichmann trial in 1961 changed the social and cultural status of Holocaust survivors in Israel.[38]  The poet Nathan Alterman said about the Eichmann trial that:

All of us had known that there were among us some people who had come from that world [original emphasis].  We met them on our daily business . . . As a clerk in some office was handling us a form . . . we noticed that he had a bluish number tattooed on his arm . . . However, it seems that only this awesome and sublime trial . . . made us realize that those people are not just a bunch of individuals but part of the terrible memories of our nation.[39]

The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and his trial, in which he signed an agreement to stand trial in an Israeli court, was considered in Israel “historical justice of the highest order.”[40]  However, on June 22, 1960 Argentina lodged a formal complaint with the UN Security Council and the American representative John Cabot Lodge delivered a speech supporting the Argentinean position that Eichmann should be returned to Argentina and those responsible for his abduction be arrested and tried.[41]  Argentina’s UN representative, Mario Amadeo, was a Catholic nationalist who had supported Franco, Mussolini and the Axis powers.[42]  Amadeo declared to the UN Security Council that Israel’s actions threatened world peace and security and demanded Eichmann’s return.[43]

Although Eichmann was a major participant in the Final Solution, it meant absolutely nothing to Argentina, a safe haven for Nazi criminals, and to the U.S. State Department and the “enlightened democratic” world that ignored the suffering of millions of European Jews who had nowhere to escape.[44]  Unfortunately, nothing has changed 50 years later with the British government expelling an Israeli diplomat for the use of forged British passports and many other governments protesting to Israel about the mysterious assassination on January 20, 2010 of Mahmoud al-Mabhouth.  Al-Mabhouth was a founding member of Hamas’ military wing, responsible for the kidnapping and murder of two Israeli soldiers, the mastermind behind the continued funneling of weapons from Iran to Hamas and many other horrifying crimes against humanity.  Dubai accused the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, for the assassination by unknown people using British and Australian passports, but the innocent Jewish blood on the hands of al-Mabhouth meant nothing.

Israel’s attorney general and the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial, Gideon Hausner, linked that trial with how the Holocaust would be remembered forever in Israel by giving his unforgettable opening speech:

In the place in which I stand before you, judges of Israel, to prosecute Adolf Eichmann – I stand not alone.  With me, at this moment in time, I am joined by six million prosecutors.  But they are unable to rise to their feet, to point an accusing finger at that glass booth and to cry out against the man sitting there: I accuse. Because their ashes have settled among the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, were wasted by the forests of Poland, and their graves are scattered across the length and breadth of Europe.  Their blood cries out, but their voices are unheard.  I shall therefore be their mouths and I shall read in their names the terrible bill of indictment.[45] 

However, anti-Semitism marches forward in the world arena unimpeded, when the USSR in 1965 formally proposed in the U.N. that Zionism be linked to colonialism, racism and all imperialist evils, while the Soviets were inciting both Egypt and Syria against Israel.[46]  With Jordanian control over the Old City and eastern Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, Jordan destroyed 55 synagogues and reduced the Western Wall area to a slum.[47]  Jerusalem was divided by barbed wire, minefields and concrete walls with innocent Jewish civilians subject to sporadic shooting from the Jordanian sector.[48]

Between 1948 and 1967, Jordan violated Article Eight of the armistice agreement in denying access to the Jewish holy sites and cultural institutions under its control.[49]   All Jews in the world were barred from the Western Wall, the Mount of Olives Cemetery, Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem and the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron by the Jordanian government in violation of the armistice agreement.[50]

In spring of 1967, Syria was trying to divert half of the water of the Jordan River from Israel, while shelling Jewish villages in the Hula Valley from the Golan Heights, and President Nasser was moving the Egyptian army and air force into the Sinai, while ousting the U.N peacekeepers and blockading Israel’s Red Sea port Eilat.[51]  President Nasser signed a war pack with King Hussein, placing the Jordanian Army under Egyptian control, and the other Arab states joined the alliance to totally annihilate the Jewish state.[52]

On June 4, 1967, the Arab leaders were predicting Israel’s destruction and promising their subjects the spoils of Jewish property to undo the defeat in 1948.[53]  On June 5^th, Nasser prophesied that “the battle will be total and our basic aim will be the destruction of Israel.”[54]  The Six-Day War of 1967 was the second Arab attempt to destroy Israel with Egypt, Syria and Jordan leading the attack.

When, in May and June 1967, it appeared that another Holocaust loomed, Christian men of God remained silent.  Pope Paul VI remained silent.[55] The National Council of Churches of the United States remained silent as Nasser rallied the Arab world to destroy Israel, but upon Israel’s survival the mainline Christian world found its voice and condemned Israel’s territorial expansion in unison with Arab rhetoric.[56]  Both the National Council and the World Council of Churches have denounced Israel’s response to terrorism as only acts to further territorial gain and Israel’s alleged “occupation” is to blame for everything.[57]

The Christian churches were guilty again of silence against a genocidal threat against the Jewish people.[58]  According to Elie Wiesel, the Jew is not supposed to overcome death for the world “love[s] the Jew only on the cross; if he is not there yet, well, they can oblige.”[59]  From the period prior to and during the Six-Day War, there was a deafening silence of the Christian churches when Israel faced extinction by the Arab nations.[60]  However, when the promised Holocaust did not take place during the Six-Day War, the world begrudged Israel its victory.[61]

The world is stunned. The eternal victims of history, the Jews, have risen in a single generation from the ashes of the Holocaust to win, in six swift days of June 1967, the greatest military victory since the Second World War.

 In the West the media stammer astonished admiration. In Communist and Arab countries they rage against aggressive Israel and claim that American carrier planes took part in the air strikes. In the United Nations the Soviet Union leads a bitter fight to reverse the victory politically and force the Israelis back behind the old armistice lines of 1949. But various withdrawal proposals worked up by the Russians and the Americans are rejected one after another by the Arab governments, who in August have met in the capital of the Sudan and issued the Khartoum Declaration, embodying irrevocable NO’s – NO negotiation with Israel, NO recognition of Israel, NO peace with Israel.

In Israel, and among Jews around the world, all is light, gladness, joy, honor, and euphoria . . . [62] 

Israel’s triumphant against four armies and some twenty nations did not conform to the image and destiny that the world desires of it, in which Israel is defeated, on its knees and humiliated.[63]  As Wiesel said the world was incensed because “[t]he lamb dares refuse the sacrifice.”[64]

During the battle for the Old City of Jerusalem, Colonel Motta Gur reported to headquarters these simple words “The Temple Mount is in our hands!”[65]  With the radio broadcast of these immortal words, “everywhere, on every front, in every house, in every place of business, in every yeshiva – officers, soldiers, children, and old men wept and embraced.”[66]

When the Lord will return the captivity of Zion, we will be like dreamers. Then our mouth will be filled with laughter and our tongue with glad song. Then will they declare among the nations, ‘The Lord has done greatly with these.’ The Lord has done greatly with us, we were gladdened. Psalms 126:1-3.

Yaȅl Dayan, the daughter of General Moshe Dayan, in her Israel Journal: June, 1967 related the surprise when entering Jerusalem that the “Western Wall” was a real wall, “grey with age and smooth with touch, flowers sprouting from its cracks,” rather than “expect[ing] it to be an abstract container of tears, prayers of generations floating in midair, a tune of music hovering over a marked spot.”[67]  She wrote that

I didn’t notice reality and all I knew was one big abstract emotion of, ‘We are here. In the old city of Jerusalem.’  I looked at faces and didn’t see them. I looked at road signs and couldn’t read. My fingers shyly felt the smooth old stones [of the Wall] and didn’t sense it. It was beyond words, beyond sensations, beyond me and . . . the armed soldiers who walked amazed in the alleys.[68]

After the liberation of Old Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation, an Israeli airman although an atheist experienced biblical faith by remarking: “I had the feeling that I would like to bring all my ancestors, through all the generations, and say to them, ‘Look, I’m standing by the Western Wall.’”[69]  Elie Wiesel during his visit to Jerusalem in early June 1967 described this experience:

The fighting was still going on at various fronts. Snipers were everywhere. But this did not prevent a jubilant people from running toward the Old City, still under siege.  Soldiers and Talmudists, Hasidim and grocers, schoolchildren and old people, survivors of every hell, faces of every destiny – I saw them breathlessly running, almost flying, toward the winding alleys, the barricaded houses, running to meet the Wall.  And there, incredulous and awed, like children afraid to wake up, they all came to an abrupt halt.  I recall the quality, the density of the silence that fell upon us: nobody dared breach it, not even by the incantation of prayers.  Then some began to sob, others to dance.  As for me, I told myself this spectacle was not new; I had experienced it before, elsewhere, in another life, eternities ago.

And in a flash I glimpsed all the faces that have formed my own: schoolmates, neighbors, heroes met in books, friends from the camps, companions left behind on the long road through countless small towns.  They had never been so near, so present. Suddenly I understood: Jerusalem was bringing us closer to all the provisional Jerusalems-in-exile that the enemy had covered with ashes. Just as I never evoked Jerusalem better than in my small native town of Sighet, so I never recalled Sighet better than in Jerusalem.

Everyone was weeping.  We were looking back, searching for our invisible forerunners, fallen along the way, victims of chance and misfortune.  In what way did we deserve what they were refused? We wept, for there was nothing else we could do, surely not for them.[70]    

Jerusalem is not just a symbol, but a home and the land is not an allegory but a possession, a commitment of destiny.[71]  Yaacov Herzog explained that “a revolution of Jewish consciousness started in 1967, when Jerusalem  . . . as it became reunited . . . makes the whole of Israel one great family, from one end of the world to the other, far surpassing any physical contact.”[72]

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.  Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joys. Psalms 137: 5-6.

Wiesel has remarked that Jerusalem is not divine; her life depends on the Jewish presence.[73]  Alone, Jerusalem is desolate and silent, with the Jewish presence Jerusalem is a witness, an echo of eternity.[74]  During the recapture of Jerusalem in June 7 of 1967, the Jewish soldiers did not enter alone into the City of David.[75]

Streams of endless craving, clinging, dreaming, flowing day and night, midnights, years, decades, centuries, millennia, streams of tears, pledging, waiting – from all over the world, from all corners of the earth – carried us of this generation to the Wall.  My ancestors could only dream of you – to my people in Auschwitz you were more remote than the moon, and I can touch your stones! Am I worthy? How shall I ever repay for these moments?[76] 

Traditional Christianity and most Christians are still influenced by the theological and cultural anti-Semitism of the past and believe that given enough suffering and wandering the Jews will finally convert.[77]  Thus, the rebirth of Israel with Jerusalem regained after 2,000 years and the resurgence of Judaism are problems for mainline denominational Christians.

For the UN and many world leaders, the new code word for anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, but no one can be an enemy of Zionism and be a friend of the Jewish people.[78]  The world cannot tolerate an eternally abnormal nation.  Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked when attending a United Nations session that “We have no family there . . . Israel is entirely alone there . . . But why should that be?”[79]  Is it because as Balaam, the prophet of Moab, foretold that “. . . it is a nation that will dwell in solitude and not be reckoned among the nations?” Numbers 23:9.  Balaam was paid by King Balak of Moab to curse the Israelites, but Balaam could not curse those blessed by God. Numbers 24:9.

There is no other country that shares the same history, geography, culture, language, religion and the only blood tie with the Jewish Diaspora, representing small minorities in their host countries.[80]  The Jewish people uniquely “dwell in solitude” because of the synergy of the Exodus and Sinai – the Jews entered history as a people during the Exodus from Egypt and entered history as a nation-faith by the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai.[81]

Judaism’s believe in God is different from Christianity for Jews do not believe in God, but rather Jews know God exists by His revealing Himself to the Jewish people through miracles that He performed for the Jewish people in Egypt, in the desert and by speaking directly to the Jewish people when He uttered the Ten Commandments at Mt. Sinai.  For God introduced Himself to the Jewish people as I am the Lord, your God, Who has taken you out of the land of Egypt, from the house of slavery. Exodus 20:2.

The late 19^th and early 20^th century Zionists thought that once Jews possessed a land of their own they would become a normal nation like all other nations and anti-Semitism would fade away.[82]  However, Balaam’s prophecy foretold of the Jewish people as an eternally abnormal nation.[83]

Dr. Yaacov Herzog in A People That Dwells Alone wrote about this inseparable destiny of nation and faith in 1975:

The theory of classic Zionism was national normalization. What was wrong with the theory? It was the belief that the idea of a ‘people that dwells alone’ is an abnormal concept, when actually a ‘people that dwells alone’ is the natural concept of the Jewish people.  That is why this one phrase still describes the totality of the extraordinary phenomenon of Israel’s revival.  If one asks how the ingathering of the exiles, which no one could have imagined in his wildest dreams, came about, or how the State of Israel could endure such severe security challenges, or how it has built up such a flourishing economy, or how the unity of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora has been preserved, one must come back to the primary idea that this is ‘a people that dwells alone.’  More than that, one must invoke this phrase not only to understand how the Jews have existed for so long; one must invoke it as a testimony to the Jewish right to exist at all in the land of their rebirth.[84]

Herzog has called the State of Israel a paradox, in which all the normalities have been proven unsupportable.  It is a nation that lives by faith, in which it lives in the present, but its rights go back to the past and everything is joined and intertwined in a process of redemption that lies ahead into a new era of Jewish history.[85]

Muslim anti-Semitism has continued to be brutally expressed over the centuries through today.  Since the Second World War, most of the Arab countries have been the only place where hard-core Nazi-style anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Zionism is publicly and officially endorsed and propagated.[86]  After the Koran, the most frequently cited book at the International Conference of Muslim Scholars gathered in Cairo in 1968 was one of the most infamous forgeries in Western history, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[87]  King Faisal of Saudi Arabia presented a beautifully bound copy of the book to each Western visitor.[88]  During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, newspapers in Damascus, Beirut, Cairo and Jordan were sympathetic for Eichmann and regretted that he “had not finished the job.”[89]

Nazi murderers found sanctuaries in the Muslim countries, such as Syria granting asylum to SS Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner, Eichmann’s “best man.”[90]  Brunner was convicted in France in 1954 for the murder of over 140,000 Jews and became an adviser to Syrian intelligence services.[91]  Also, Franz Rademacher, a senior Eichmann aide who was involved in the mass murder of Jews in Belgium, the Netherlands and Croatia, became an official in the Syrian Secret Service on Jewish Affairs.[92]

Several thousand Nazi war criminals were able to escape punishment in Egypt and “in Egypt they could continue their war against the Jews.”[93]  Egyptian anti-Semitism during Nasser’s rule was influenced by those Nazis who were given sanctuary in Egypt and worked in Nasser’s secret services and were specialists in anti-Semitic propaganda, such as Louis Heiden, formerly of the Reich Security Main Office, who translated Mein Kampf into Arabic under the name Louis al-Hadj.[94]  The Nazi journalist Franz Buensche continued his anti-Jewish publications in Egypt and other Arab countries.[95]

Nazi propagandist Johann von Leers became a political adviser and propagandist for the Nasser government under the Muslim name Omar Amin and actively promoted the Protocols in Arabic, reviving blood libel, organizing anti-Semitic radio broadcasts and encouraging Holocaust deniers around the world.[96]  Earlier in the late 1930s, von Leers had been placed as a full professor at the University of Jena by Alfred Rosenberg and specialized in the Protocols, The Rabbi’s Speech and Jewish ritual murder.[97]

Otto Skorzeny, the Nazi commander considered by the United States Office of Strategic Service (“OSS”) as “the most dangerous man in Europe was brought into the Nasser government by Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.[98]  Joachim Däumling, Gestapo chief and involved in SS operations in Croatia, established the Egyptian secret service patterned after Himmler’s Reich Security Office.[99]  Wehrmacht General Wilhelm Fahrmbacher was placed in charge over the central planning staff in Cairo.[100]  Many SS men assisted in the training of the Egyptian army and over 200 German and Austrian scientists worked at the aircraft and missile center at Helwan, where the staff physician was Dr. Hans Eisele, SS captain and medical torturer at Dachau and Buchenwald.[101]

In the 1950s, the Egyptian government published a complete edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Nazis’ Arabic-language propaganda during the war found a permanent home in North Africa and the Middle East with radical Islam.[102]  During this time, Nazi émigrés spread also the disease of the Protocols to South America.[103]

On October 29, 1956, war broke out by Nasser nationalizing the Suez Canal and Britain and France joining to take back the canal and topple Nasser, who had overthrown the monarchy by a military revolt in 1952.[104]  While Soviet troops were moving into Hungary to crush a revolt against Communist rule, the Soviets threatened to attack London and Paris over the Suez crisis.[105]   Shockingly, President Eisenhower abandoned his traditional allies and aligned with the Soviets to demand a cease-fire in the Middle East.[106]  With the end of the Suez war on November 6^th, Nasser vowed to rid Egypt of all “foreigners” and to exterminate the Jewish state.[107]

The persecution of the Jewish community, which had lived in Egypt for centuries, became more extreme under Nasser than immediately after 1948 and during the first Arab-Israeli war.[108]  Under the Nasser regime, Jewish families forced to leave Egypt could take no more than the equivalent of $200 upon their departure with the promise of never returning.[109]  Except for clothes, they could not bring out of the country their jewelry, family antiques, heirlooms, and works of art belonging to their family for generations.[110]

From 1969 to the August 1970 cease-fire, Nasser waged a “War of Attrition” of constant armed conflict against Israel.[111]  Anwar Sadat took over from Nasser in October 1970.[112]  Sadat, who was tried and convicted by the British as a Nazi spy, wrote a letter on September 18, 1953 to the Egyptian paper Al-Mussawar, expressing admiration for Hitler that even though he appeared to have been defeated in reality he was the victor.[113]  On Yom Kippur in October 1973, Sadat launched his army in a surprise attack across the Suez Canal, while Syria invaded the Golan Heights.

When you go out to the battle against your enemy, and you see horse and chariot – a people more numerous than you – you shall not fear them, for the Lord, your God, is with you, Who brought you up from the land of Egypt.  It shall be that when you draw near to the war, the Kohen shall approach and speak to the people.  He shall say to them, “Hear, O Israel, you are coming near to the battle against your enemies; let your heart not be faint; do not be afraid, do not panic, and do not be broken before them.  For the Lord, your God, is the One Who goes with you, to fight for you with your enemies, to save you.” Deuteronomy 20:1-4.

During the Yom Kippur War when the existence of Israel was again threatened with another Holocaust, the government of Great Britain refused to condemn the surprise attack by Egypt and Syria, refused landing privileges for planes carrying emergency equipment to Israel, refused to ship machine parts to Israel that had been purchased and paid for and the British government continued to train Egyptian pilots during the fighting.[114]  France refused delivery to Israel of equipment already paid for, continued arms shipments to Libya and Saudi Arabia and continued to train Arab pilots.[115]  In these countries, the public expression of anti-Semitism surged.[116]

The Yom Kippur War demonstrated once again that the Christian establishment cannot be counted on for even humanitarian intervention to prevent or even impede the mass murder of Jews.[117]  The continued existence of Israel and its social, educational and cultural growth depended primarily upon the strength of Israelis and the support from worldwide Jewry.[118]

Arab Muslims reach back to the theological roots of Islamic anti-Semitism in their attack of the Jews and Israel.[119]

Behold, you will conceive, and give birth to a son; you shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard your prayer.  And he shall be a wild-ass of a man: his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and over all his brothers shall he dwell. Genesis 16:11-12.

The Jewish people for thousands of years have suffered from Arabs who hate peace and fight endless and meaningless wars.[120]  They speak about peace, but in their hearts they are planning war.[121]  With regards to the nation of Ishmael, Maimonides wrote to the Jews of Yemen, knowing of the Crusader attacks on European Jews, that:

 No nation has ever done more harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us.  None has been able to reduce us as they have.[122]

The Holy Bible speaks of the eternal character trait of Ishmael and his descendants being forever a wild character who takes the form of man and thus a people willing to sacrifice their lives and children to the “holy war” of terror, destruction and the glorification of annihilation.[123]  There is a saying that peace will only come when Arab mothers love their own children more than they hate the Jews.  However, according to the Holy Bible that character trait of a “wild man” will always be.

 All the nations surround me; in the Name of the Lord, I cut them down! They encircle me, they also surround me; in the Name of the Lord, I cut them down! They encircle me like bees, but they are extinguished as a fire does thorns; in the Name of the Lord, I cut them down!

You pushed me hard that I might fall, but the Lord assisted me.  God is my might and my praise, and He was a salvation for me. Psalms 118: 10-14.

The Arabs are like the bees that sting and immediately die for they will rise up and sacrifice their lives to kill.[124]  Since they are not afraid of death, it is not possible to threaten or frighten them.[125]  Under Islamic teachings, Allah replaced the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and the genealogical line from Abraham is through Ishmael rather than through Isaac and Jacob, denying the validity of the Holy Bible for Jews and Christians and with Islam as the only acceptable religion in the world.  Islam incorporates and sanctifies the tyranny of tribal society, such as the Koran’s defense of wife-beating, honor killings, arranged consanguineous marriages and female genital mutilation that all are vestiges of the ancient pagan world.[126]

The Muslim legal code prescribes the treatment of Jews and Christians, or dhimmis, which acknowledges their subservient position to Muslims.[127]   As long as the Jews adhere to their dhimmi status as inferior to Muslims, Jewish existence as individuals is acceptable, but never the State of Israel.[128]  The emancipation of Jews in Israel/Palestine from Muslim rule in 1948 was a theological-political catastrophe to the Muslim society of master over slave with the dhimmis breaking out of the social and political discrimination within the dar al-Islam (abode of Islam).[129]

It is the Jews’ refusal to accept an unequal, inferior status that lies at the heart of the Arab-Muslim hatred for Israel.[130]  A Jewish state is incompatible with the view of Jews as “humiliated or wretched.”[131]  For Muslims, the source of their hatred remains the Jewish state’s existence, not its policies, nor its borders.[132]

For the Commentaries of Rashi remind us that the Holy Bible begins with the narrative of creation in Genesis1:1-5 to establish that God is the Sovereign of the universe and the entire universe belongs to God:

One day the nations of the world will tell the Jews, this land is ours; you stole it from us.  And we will reply: the land belongs to God; He alone has the right to say who will live there.  And He gave this land to us.[133]

In Muslim religion, the world is divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which Muslim governments rule and Muslim law prevails, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and ruled by infidels.[134]  The duty of jihad, armed struggle for Muslim power, will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either converts to the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule.[135]

In the Muslim religion, Judaism and Christianity have been superseded and replaced by Islam.[136]  Suicide bombings against Israel are driven by anti-Semitism and religious extremism, not by desperation and hopelessness.[137]  Islamic terrorists murder Jews because of their religious ideology; it is their religious duty to do so.[138]

Hagar bore Abram a son and Abram called the name of his son that Hagar bore him Ishmael. Genesis 16:15. And he shall be a wild-ass of a man: his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him; and over all his brothers shall he dwell. Genesis 16:12.

Rashi says that “[h]e would be an untamed brigand, a hated plunderer, and warrior.” Onkelos “translates the description of Ishmael in the economic sense: He would be dependent on other nations, and they, in turn, would be dependent on him.”

For the terrorists, the slaughter of innocent civilians is not collateral damage, but it is the prime objective.[139]  As the former Israeli Ambassador and historian Michael Oren has pointed out “[f]or all the kudos discreetly given SS killers by the regime, Nazi Germany never publicly lionized them, they never plastered their pictures on the streets, or openly encouraged children to emulate them . . . That kind of adoration for mass murderers can only be found in abundance, among the Palestinians.”[140]  Their primary purpose is not to defeat or weaken the enemy militarily, but to gain publicity and to inspire fear, a psychological victory.[141]  Any counterattack against terrorists who do not wear uniforms is difficult, since they use innocent civilians as shields.[142]

In 2001, the United Nations World Conference against Racism was held in Durban, South Africa, which was an anti-Semitic hate-fest governed by well-organized and well-funded Muslim groups.[143]  The Ford Foundation was a major contributor of the Arab and far-Left groups behind the Durban Conference in the spirit of Henry Ford, an anti-Semitic and admirer of Adolf Hitler.  Though officially banned in South Africa, copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were sold at the conference and their slogan “Kill the Jews” were heard and felt from the Arab delegates.[144]  Also, the Muslim Brotherhood distributed Arabic translations of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.[145]

What was disturbing was not the open anti-Semitism of the Arabs, but that few other delegates had the courage to combat them, or was it simply that the masks were removed and their true feelings revealed.[146]  Anti-Semites tell the world that the story of six million Jewish victims is but a myth and the world, in its naïveté, will believe it, if not today, then tomorrow or the next day.[147]

Yasser Arafat was the successor to Haj Amin al-Husseini and in 1969 the PLO recruited two former Nazi instructors, Erich Altern, a leader in the Gestapo’s Jewish affairs section, and Willy Berner, a former SS officer at the Mauthausen extermination camp.[148]  Former Nazi Johann Schuller supplied arms to Fatah.[149]

Arafat was the “godfather of modern terrorism,” yet he was received at the UN with a pistol on his hip, lionized by the world’s diplomats and dignitaries and emerged as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.[150]  Arafat promoted terrorism by totally controlling the Arab educational system’s curriculum, television, radio and newspapers as propaganda instruments against Israel.[151]  Arafat infused in his people the belief that through endless suicide bombers and armed resistance the Israelis will surrender and leave Israel.[152]

The world ignored the facts or did not care that Arafat was responsible for the premeditated murder of countless Israeli and Jewish civilians and of American and other diplomats as in Khartoum in 1973.[153]  Arafat organized the Munich Olympic Games massacre, actively promoted two intifadas, nearly destroyed Jordan in 1970, helped begin the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s, supported Saddam Hussein’s attack of Kuwait in 1990-1991, pioneered airline hijacking to a grand scale and had the PLO commit over 200 major terrorist acts in countries outside Israel.[154]  After the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in June 2001 by the PLO, Arafat declared, “The heroic martyrdom operation [of the man] who turned his body into a bomb [is] the model of manhood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homeland.”[155]

Hamas, an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, proclaims the struggle for Palestine is neither a political dispute between two rival nations nor a struggle for national self-determination by an indigenous population against a foreign occupier, but a struggle in a global holy war to prevent territory of the House of Islam to be controlled by infidels.[156]  Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar stated that “Islamic and traditional views reject the notion of establishing an independent Palestinian state . . . In the past, there was no independent Palestinian state  . . .  our main goal is to establish a great Islamic state, be it pan-Arabic or pan-Islamic.”[157]

Mahmoud Abbas is more clever than Arafat to avoid denying in public statements to the West Israel’s right to exist, but in his statements to the Arab media he does not accept the legitimacy of the Jewish claim to Palestine, denies the existence of the ancient Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and is nonnegotiable on the sacred Palestinian right of return.[158]  There are no historic Muslim connections to Jerusalem, but Jerusalem is only important in Islamic end-time theology, in which the Mahdi, a “Muslim Jesus,” will establish his kingdom in Jerusalem.

Fatah’s 6^th General Congress, convening in Bethlehem in August 2009, reaffirmed its commitment to the “armed struggle” as “a strategy, not tactic . . . in the battle for liberation and for the elimination of the Zionist presence . . . This struggle will not stop until the Zionist entity is eliminated and Palestine is liberated.”[159]  The Palestinian perception of peace is not a matter of adjusting borders and settlements, but rather the destruction of the Jewish state.[160]  Abbas continues the same hate propaganda to the Palestinian public that equates justice with murdering Jewish women and children and suicide bombing to heroic martyrdom,[161] for the Muslim are the descendants of Esau.

Was not Esau the brother of Jacob – the word of the Lord – yet I loved Jacob.  But I hated Esau . . They may build, but I will tear down!  They will be called ‘the boundary of wickedness’ and ‘the people whom the Lord has condemned forever.’  And your eyes will behold it, and you will say upon the territory of Israel, ‘May the Lord be glorified!’ Malachi 1:2-5.

On September 23, 2008, President Ahmadinejad’s United Nations hateful anti-Semitic speech in New York, drawing inspiration from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was acclaimed by the General Assembly and his lethal anti-Semitism being accepted as normal presented “an ominous sign.”[162]  His Hitlerian language did not stop the General Assembly president from Nicaragua, Miguel d’ Escoto Brockmann, from warmly embracing him.[163]  During the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, Ahmadinejad has been identified as one of the torturers of the American hostages.[164]  As Professor Wistrich has commented about the event “[s]ixty-four years after Auschwitz, the politics of genocidal anti-Semitism and the indifference that made it possible are still with us.”[165]

The indifference of the democracies will always strengthen the will of the anti-Semitic murderers to conduct genocide against the Jewish people.  Rabbi Greenberg wrote that the “ideology of universalism (‘this is a war to make the world safe for democracy’) was used as an excuse not to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz and not to make special efforts to save the Jews.”[166]  Today, universalism is the ideology used by many democracies and “liberal” political leaders to oppose Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

The most insidious method by which Muslims today are forcing their Islamic agenda is to use the international and state court systems to wage their jihad against the Jews and Christians and to silence all criticism against Islam.  Islam seeks to replace Western democracies with Sharia law and an Islamic global state.  The Nazi Joseph Goebbels made the statement during the rise of Hitler, “We availed ourselves of the instrumentalities of democracy to put democracy out of business.”[167]

While Islam wages war on Western civilization and Iran promises to destroy Israel and threatens Europe and the United States with the development of nuclear weapons, the world does nothing.   When Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations on October 14, 1933, the world did nothing.  When Hitler embarked upon rearmament and proclaimed universal, compulsory military service on March 16, 1935 and marched into the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, nothing happened.   When foreign representatives were ousted from the directorates of the Reichsbank and the Reichsbahn contrary to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles on January 30, 1937, nothing happened.   When Hitler served notice that Germany was no longer subject to the Treaty of Versailles, nothing happened.  With the German overthrow of the Austrian government, the forced cession of the Sudetenland to Germany and the annexation of Bohemia-Moravia and Memelland as a German Protectorate, the world did nothing.  So why should the world react any differently today?

One of the Holocaust deniers’ main aims is to delegitimize Israel.[168]  Holocaust denial presents the same anti-Semitism, the same irrationality, the same demonization of the Jews and the same cosmic conspiratorial powers of the Jews.[169]  Once upon a time it was thought by Herzl and others that if the Jews had their own homeland that anti-Semitism would disappear; however, Zionism has failed to eliminate anti-Semitism in the world, because it is endemic among non-Jews.[170]  Since Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, anti-Zionism says that the Jews have no right to freedom and self-determination unlike any other people on the earth.

Throughout the history of exile in non-Jewish countries, there has been always a small assimilated group, historically resembling the “Court Jew,” which denies and rejects their Jewish origins and usually identifies with the anti-Semite thinking of the host elite society.[171]  During the early twentieth century, hyper-assimilated German Jews despised the Ostjuden (East European ultra-orthodox Jews), although they all shared the same fate of the gas chambers.[172]  A Jew, embracing the anti-Semitic viewpoint, only reinforces and inflames the dominant prejudices.[173]

Jewish hostility to Zionism exists among leftist intellectuals, thinking that their actions of self-hatred will temper the anti-Semitic causes to the vestiges of history.[174]  Self-hating Jews, whatever their motives for betraying their own people and degrading its history, have throughout history provided significant encouragement for the anti-Semites.[175]

The current resurgence in Islam, powerfully reinforced by the European Left and the anti-Zionist rhetoric institutionalized for decades in the U.N., represents the primary threat to the security of Europe’s Jews and Christians.[176]  In the 1970s, a hostile environment toward Israel developed in the United Nations and Kurt Waldheim as secretary general encouraged that attitude.[177]  In 1974, Waldheim allowed Yasser Arafat to address the General Assembly wearing a pistol on his hip.[178]  Waldheim condemned Israel’s rescue of the passengers of a hijacked Air France plane, being held hostage in Entebbe, Uganda.[179]  In a visit to Yad Vashem, Waldheim refused to put on a yarmulke in the Hall of Remembrance, a consecrated site with the ashes of Jewish Holocaust victims.[180]  Later, the world discovered that Waldheim was responsible as a Nazi counterintelligence officer for the deportation of Greek Jews to death camps and he waged a criminal war against the partisans in Yugoslavia.[181]

Beginning in the mid-1970s, an Arab-Soviet-Third World bloc joined to form a pro-PLO lobby at the U.N.[182]  The U.N. General Assembly in November 1975 adopted the Muslim anti-Semitic Resolution 3379, declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.”[183]  The Arab Lobby was the instigator of the Resolution.[184]  In 1983, the Syrian Defense Minister Mustapha Tlas wrote the Blood Libel publicationThe Matzo of Zion and in 1991 the Syrian delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission recommended this book for the members to understand Zionist racism.[185]

The influence of Muslim immigration into Europe with its anti-Israel hatred creates hostility toward an Israelophobic culture by disinformation, hatred of America and Israel and vicious comments about Jews.[186]  Extraordinary reluctance especially by liberals to recognize the jihad terror to Israel and the West is probably driven by fear of Islamist terror in Europe.[187]

The methodology employed by the U.S. Arab lobby is totally contrary to democratic government, because it does not represent the will of the America people but rather the corruption of the Washington elite.  The most powerful part of the Arab Lobby is Saudi Arabia and the major oil companies and diplomatic lobbists who have joined together against Israel.[188] The Saudis have through billions of petro-dollars influenced U.S. policy through politics, economics and academics.[189]  Saudi Arabia denies human rights in its own country and spreads militant Islam, supports international terrorism, influences the worldwide oil addiction and finances actions designed to destroy Israel.[190]  Whereas, the Israeli lobbies represent the grassroots support of America Jews and evangelical Christians.

The Saudis for example buy U.S. influence by spending large amounts of oil dollars to hire former State Department officials, diplomats, White House aides and legislative leaders who become their elite lobbying force of anti-Semitism.  The Saudis informally advertise that if current government officials desire highly paid jobs upon leaving government that they need to promote the Arab position over Israel.  Thus, the anti-Israel policies of the U.S. State Department continue with its long history of anti-Semitism.

What has been, already exists, and what is still to be, has already been, and God always seeks [to be on the side of] the pursued.  Furthermore, I have observed beneath the sun: In the place of justice there is wickedness, and in the place of righteousness there is wickedness.  I mused: God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for everything and for every deed there. Ecclesiastes 3:15-17.

Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom Hashoah) and the Memorial Day for Israeli soldiers who have fallen in battle (Yom Hazikaron) are commemorated within days of each other and culminate in Israeli Independence Day (Yom Ha-atzmaut), a day of joy and freedom.  With these close remembrances, the Jewish people are painfully reminded of the need of independent statehood for their survival.[191]

 Hatikvah: The ANCIENT CHANT OF Hope (Israel’s national anthem)         

As long as deep within the heart,

The Jewish spirit yearns,

And forward to the East

To Zion, the eye turns,

Then our hope will not be lost,

The hope of two thousand years,

To be a free people in our land,

The land of Zion and Jerusalem.

(Naftali Herz Imber – 1877)

The hope of Israel’s national anthem is not an empty slogan, but a living reality for Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.  Every Jew in the Diaspora who claims a love of Israel, ahavat yisrael, must have a relationship with Israel, a relationship that can only occur at least travelling to Israel on a regular basis.[192]  The State of Israel emerged at a time in history when the Jewish people were under a threat of extinction and the doors of Christian nations were for the most part locked to them.[193]  Most likely if the Jewish state had not come into existence in 1948, the catastrophe of the Holocaust would have demoralized Jews worldwide and would have resulted in a devastating assimilation of Jews and the decline of Judaism.  Emil Fackenheim in God’s Presence in History said that if the reality of Auschwitz destroyed the reality of God, then Hitler would have a posthumous victory of destroying Judaism.[194]  Fackenheim said that Jews must survive as Jews to deny the Nazis a final victory for the sake of the “millennial testimony” of Jewish tradition.[195]

The Irish economist David Mc Williams remarked that “Israel is quite the opposite of a uni-dimensional, Jewish country . . . It is a monotheistic melting pot of a Diaspora that brought back with it the culture, language and customs of the four corners of the earth.”[196]  Israel’s population is composed of over seventy different nationalities with differences in language, education, culture and history and is bringing to Israel an immeasurable wealth of life unlike any other country.[197]  As summed up by Ben Zion Dinur,

the political rebirth of Israel is the very essence of Jewish history.  She absorbed into herself the experiences and activities of generations, the covenant of generations.  She renewed the covenant with the land out of a longing, through the creation of a new community, to develop the Covenant of Man into an Eternal Covenant.[198]

 

[1] Maurice M. Roumani, The Case of the Jews From Arab Countries: A Neglected Issue, (1^st ed. 4^th printing 1983), p. 22.

[2] Ibid., p. 41.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea- Memoirs, (1^st ed. 1995), p. 46.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad,(1^st ed. 2010), p. 716.

[8] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, p. 46.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Sasson Somekh, Baghdad, Yesterday: The Making of an Arab Jew, (1^st English ed. 2007), p. 7.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., p. 65.

[14] Martin Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 250.

[15] Ibid., p. 251.

[16] Ibid., p. 252.

[17] Ibid., pp. 253, 255.

[18] Ibid., pp. 258-259.

[19] Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 238.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Roumani, p. 59.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid, p. 43.

[25] Ibid., p. 59.

[26] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 313.

[27] Ibid., pp. 313-314.

[28] Ibid., p. 314.

[29] Ibid., p. 331.

[30] Leon Uris, The Haj, (1^st ed. 1984), p. 545.

[31] Roumani, p. 48.

[32] Ibid., p. 49.

[33] Norman Rose, ‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-1948, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 5.

[34] Roumani, p. 49.

[35] Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, Flight From the Reich: Refugee Jews, 1933-1946, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 361.

[36] Daniel Gordis, Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 100.

[37] Ibid., p. 134.

[38] Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, (1^st American ed. 2004), pp. 5, 36.

[39] Martin van Creveld, The Land of Blood and Honey: The Rise of Modern Israel, (1^st ed. 2010), pp. 91-92.

[40] Yablonka, p. 41.

[41] Ibid., pp. 42-44.

[42] Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 21-22.

[43] Ibid., p. 22.

[44] Yablonka, p. 42.

[45] Ibid,, p. 82.

[46] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 143.

[47] James Rudin, Christians & Jews Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future, (1^st ed. 2011), sp. 144.

[48] Ibid.

[49] Ibid., p. 145.

[50] Ibid.

[51] Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, (1^st ed. 2010), pp. 132, 135.

[52] Ibid.

[53] Karsh, p. 245.

[54] Ibid., p. 246.

[55] John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, (1^st ed. 1989), p. 335.

[56] Paul C. Merkley, Those That Bless You, I Will Bless: Christian Zionism in Historical Perspective, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 185.

[57] Ibid., pp. 185-186.

[58] Harry James Cargas, When God and Man Failed: Non-Jewish Views of the Holocaust, (1^st ed. 1981), p. 106.

[59] Elie Wiesel, One Generation After, (1^st English translation ed. 1970), p. 132.

[60] Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter Between Judaism and Christianity, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 36.

[61] Wiesel, One Generation After, p. 132.

[62] Herman Wouk, The Glory, (1^st ed. 1994), p. 3 (Prologue).

[63] Wiesel, One Generation After, p. 132.

[64] Ibid.

[65] Elie Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969 –, (1^st ed. 1999), pp. 16-17.

[66] Ibid., p. 17.

[67] Yaȅl Dayan, Israel Journal: June, 1967, (1^st ed. 1967), p. 103.

[68] Ibid. p. 104.

[69] Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 123.

[70] Elie Wiesel, A Jew Today, (1^st ed. 1978), pp. 25-26.

[71] Dayan, p.15.

[72] Yaacov Herzog, A People That Dwells Alone, (1^st American ed. 1975), p. 65.

[73] Abraham J. Heschel, Israel, An Echo of Eternity, (1^st ed. 3^rd printing 1969), p 14.

[74] Ibid.

[75] Ibid., pp. 5-6.

[76] Ibid.

[77] Littell, p. 103.

[78] Littell, p. 97.

[79] Avner, p. 396.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid., p. 397.

[82] Ibid., pp. 397-398.

[83] Ibid., p. 397.

[84] Ibid., p. 399; Herzog, p. 52.

[85] Herzog, p. 59.

[86] Jocelyn Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism, A Short History, (1^st ed. 2003), p. 223.

[87] Littell, p. 9.

[88] Ibid.

[89] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (2^nd revised and enlarged ed. 1964), p. 13.

[90] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 93.

[91] Ibid.

[92] Ibid.

[93] Ibid., p. 91.

[94] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 611.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Ibid.

[97] Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, (1^st ed. 1967), p. 207.

[98] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 93.

[99] Ibid., p. 94.

[100] Ibid.

[101] Ibid., p. 95.

[102] Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 260.

[103] Norman Cohen, p. 19.

[104] Lucette Lagnado, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World, (1^st ed. 2007), pp. 66-67, 90-91.

[105] Ibid., p. 92.

[106] Ibid.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Ibid., p. 94.

[109] Ibid., p. 151.

[110] Ibid., pp. 151-152.

[111] Van Creveld, p. 139.

[112] Ibid.

[113] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 100.

[114] Littell, p. 84.

[115] Ibid.

[116] Ibid.

[117] Ibid., p. 96.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, (2^nd 2003), p. 110.

[120] Alexander A. Mandelbaum, Redemption Unfolding, The Last Exile, the Final Redemption, and Our Role in These Fateful Times, (3^rd ed. 2007), p. 21.

[121] Ibid.

[122] Gilbert, In Ishmael’s House, p. 57.

[123] Mandelbaum, p. 21.

[124] Ibid., p. 44. As Rashi comments (Deuteronomy 1: 44) “. . . as the bees do – just as a bee stings a person and dies immediately, so when they strike you, they will immediately die.

[125] Ibid.

[126] David P. Goldman, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too), (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 75, 76, 79.

[127] Prager and Telushkin. p. 100.

[128] Ibid. p. 112.

[129] Wistrich, pp. 47-48.

[130] Prager and Telushkin, p. 112.

[131] Ibid.

[132] Ibid. p. 113.

[133] Elie Wiesel, Rashi: A Portrait, (1^st ed. 2009), pp. 88-89.

[134]Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 31.

[135] Ibid. pp. 31-32.

[136] Ibid. p. 44.

[137] Prager and Telushkin, p. 174.

[138] Ibid. p. 176.

[139] Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 147.

[140] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 53.

[141] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror, p. 147.

[142] Ibid.

[143] Hellig, p. 223.

[144] Ibid., p. 224.

[145] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 132.

[146] Hellig, p. 224.

[147] Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea, Memoirs, p. 320.

[148] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 100.

[149] Ibid.

[150] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 702.

[151] Liza M. Wiemer and Benay Katz, Waiting For Peace: How Israelis Live With Terrorism, (1^st ed. 2005), p. 58.

[152] Ibid.

[153] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 702.

[154] Ibid.

[155] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 224.

[156] Karsh, p. 254.

[157] Ibid.

[158]Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 725.

[159] Karsh, p. 257.

[160] Ibid.

[161] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 725.

[162] Ibid., p. 926.

[163] Ibid.

[164] Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, p. 199.

[165] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad., p. 927.

[166] Greenberg, p. 318.

[167] Louis P. Lochner, What About Germany?, (1^st ed 1942), p. 25.

[168] Hellig, p. 305.

[169] Ibid.

[170] Ibid., p. 311.

[171] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 515.

[172] Ibid.,p. 516.

[173] Ibid.

[174] Ibid., p. 542.

[175] Ibid.

[176] Ibid., p. 573.

[177] Tom Segev, Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 366.

[178] Ibid.

[179] Ibid.

[180] Ibid.

[181] Ibid., p. 370.

[182] Mitchell G. Bard, The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, (1^st ed. 2010), p. 358.

[183] Van Creveld, p. 146.

[184] Bard, The Arab Lobby, p. 358.

[185] Jonathan Sacks, Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century, (1^st ed. 2009), p. 105.

[186] Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad, p. 573.

[187] Ibid.

[188] Bard, The Arab Lobby, p. 344.

[189] Ibid.

[190] Ibid., p. 345.

[191] Hellig, p. 313.

[192] Wiemer and Katz, p. 166.

[193] Cargas, p. 106.

[194] Ibid., p. 83.

[195] Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey From the Rock, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 51.

[196] Dan Senor and Saul Singer, Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. (1^st ed. 2009), p. 17.

[197] Ibid.

[198] Ben Zion Dinur, Israel and the Diaspora, (1^st ed. 1969), p. 186.

 Martin M. van Brauman

 

Are the Jewish people, the elder brothers and sisters, fellow travelers under Judaism with the followers of Jesus on the way to the Kingdom of God?

For from Zion will the Torah come forth, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. Isaiah 2:3.

The Torah’s paths are paths of pleasantness and all of its ways lead to peace. Proverbs 3:17.  The Torah is the Tree of Life only to those who accept it as the immutable Word of God.[i]  Under the Christian Gospels for the non-Jew, Jesus is the manifestation of the living Word of God, the tree of life made flesh.

I thank You for You have answered me and become my salvation.  The stone the builders despised has become the cornerstone.  This emanated from the Lord; it is wondrous in our eyes.  This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad on it. Please, the Lord, save now! Please, the Lord, bring success now!  Blessed is he who comes in the Name of the Lord; we bless you from the House of the Lord. Psalm 118:21-26.

The Jewish “chosenness” is not a privilege, but a mission to open for all people the invisible and sacred doors that illuminate redemption.[ii]  Without the “chosen” status of the Jews, Christianity would lose its compass.  In serving the Jewish people both externally and internally and becoming the defender of the Jewish people, the Christian church bears witness to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.[iii]  In its witness to the unity of God, the Christian church owes its service to Israel and the Jewish people to show the oneness of the God of Israel.[iv]

As the Catholic theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote “the Christian messianic experience in Jesus was a Jewish experience, created out of Jewish hope.”[v]  The history of Israel did not end in 70 AD, but it continued in the numerous Diaspora, permitting Israel to carry to the world a witness of its faith to the one God while preserving the memory of the Land in their hearts.  The return of the Jews to Jerusalem signifies the presence of the Torah in the world and the sanctity of life in the world.

 Judaism and Christianity are both religions of redemption and salvation, which rests upon the saving grace of God.  Redemption, salvation and judgment are in God’s hands alone and not for man to decide by some church canon or doctrine.  Judaism and Christianity share the view of the world under the aspect of Creation-Revelation-Redemption.[vi]

The Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig (1888-1929) considered both Judaism and Christianity having distinct but equally important roles in the spiritual structure of the world and saw in both biblical religions approaches toward a comprehension of reality.[vii]  Rosenzweig stated that “God did not, after all create religion; he created the world.”[viii]

Judaism, staying with God (the “eternal life”), contrasts with Christianity, being sent out to conquer the unredeemed world by forever marching toward God (the “eternal way”).[ix]  Rosenzweig saw Judaism as the “Star of Redemption” and Christianity as the rays of that Star.  Since both Judaism and Christianity will exist to the end of time, Rosenzweig asked in The Star of Redemption whether Judaism and Christianity together constitute the Truth.[x]  Rosenzweig answered that:

Man can become aware of the Love of God (Revelation), he can fill the moments of his life with eternity (Redemption), but Truth is beyond man.  Only God is Truth, Man (Jew, Christian) is given a part in truth insofar as he realizes in active life his share in truth. The distant vision of truth does not lead into the beyond, but ‘into life.’[xi]

The Jewish people are a testimony to the reality of God, which is affirmed by the truth of human history.  The Jewish community’s salvation is the binding power of faith and God’s covenant with His people.  In Jeremiah 31:32, a new covenant, unlike the Mosaic covenant when God brought them out of Egypt, has been given to Israel and the Jewish people through the divine Spirit of God, in which the Torah shall be written on their hearts when Torah study and prayer replaces Temple worship.

Our goal is not to know God or his Plan for mankind, since we can never know God or his Plan, but to seek to know God and his Plan for our own life.  No eye has seen what God al

[i] Judea and Ruth Pearl, I Am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, (5^th ed. 2007), p. 209.

[ii] Ibid., pp. 183-184.

[iii] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 346.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History, (1^st ed. 2001), p. 104.

[vi] Glatzer, Nahum N., Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, (1^st ed. 1953), p. xxv.

[vii] Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, (1^st English ed. 1971), p. xiv.

[viii] Ibid., p. xv.

[ix] Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, p. xxv.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid., pp. xxv-xxvi.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

 

 

Why do we pray?  Prayer is an outpouring of the heart.  This outpouring is derived from a communion with God.  We ask for new strength, vision, hope and understanding.  We seek help to carry our burdens more stanchly, to face temptation more purposefully and to pray for spiritual uplifting.

In Deuteronomy 6:5 is the primary prayer of Jewish faith: Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is the One.  You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your possessions. It is the prayer for the morning, evening and bedtime.  It is the prayer inscribed within the mezuzah on every Jewish doorpost.  It is the final prayer uttered before death and it is the prayer on the lips of Jewish martyrs whether they were murdered by Catholics of the Inquisition, Hitler’s SS, or Muslim jihadists.  When the Pharisees asked Jesus what is the greatest commandment in the Law, from Deuteronomy 6:5 Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (Matthew 22:35-40).

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the synagogue became the predominant Jewish religious institution with its worship based upon God’s Word and prayer instead of the Temple with its worship based upon animal sacrifice.[i]  The synagogue is the home of the Jewish heart, the ultimate expression “that wherever we gather to turn our hearts towards heaven, there the Divine Presence can be found, for God is everywhere.”[ii] The Divine Presence lives not in a building, but in the human heart wherever its worshippers gather for They shall make a Sanctuary for Me – so that I may dwell among them – Exodus 25:8.[iii]

Since the destruction of the Temple, prayer not only takes the place and purpose of sacrifice, but is more important than sacrifice.[iv]  The purpose of the sacrificial service was to bring about a person’s closeness and dedication to Godliness.[v]  Prayer is the elevation of the soul unto God.[vi]

The Temple and Jerusalem were destroyed because the Law was followed strictly and carried out as ritual without the compassion and mercy of prayer.  In Matthew 23:13, Jesus said Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

When Jesus entered the Temple area in the court of the Gentiles during Passover and drove out those buying and selling at the animal pens and overturned the tables of the money changes, from Isaiah 56:7 Jesus exclaimed Is it not written: My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations? Mark 11:15-17.  From Jeremiah 7:11, Jesus further exclaimed But you have made it a den of robbers. Mark 11:17.  Earlier, the prophet Jeremiah called for repentance from the people of Israel, harking back to Shiloh and the time of the prophet Samuel and the corrupt priesthood.

Has this Temple, upon which My Name is proclaimed, become a cave of criminals in your eyes?  . . . For go to My shrine that is in Shiloh, where I caused My Name to dwell there at first, and see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people Israel.  So now, since you do all these deeds – the word of the Lord – and I have spoken to you, speaking repeatedly, but you have not listened; I have called out to you but you did not respond, I shall do to the Temple – upon which My Name is proclaimed, upon which you place your trust – and to the place that I have given to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh.  I shall cast you from My presence, as I cast out all your brethren, all the seed of Ephraim. Jeremiah 7:11-15.

By allowing the Temple’s court of the Gentiles to become a boisterous, putrid marketplace, the Jewish religious leaders were obstructing God’s desire for a house of prayer for all nations. God will remove obstacles that prevent dialogue between God and man, for God seeks engagement with man.

During the inauguration of the first Temple, King Solomon described future exiles of the Jewish people, but assured future generations that confessional prayer will replace the Temple for the atonement for all sin and God will hear their prayers.

When they sin against You – for there is no man who never sins – and You become angry with them, and You deliver them to an enemy, and their captors take them captive to the enemy’s land, faraway or nearby, and they take it to heart in the land where they were taken captive and they repent and supplicate to You in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned; we have been iniquitous; we have been wicked,’ and they return to You with all their heart and with all their soul . . . and pray to You by way of their land that You gave to their forefathers, and [by way of] the city that You have chosen and [through] the Temple that I built for Your Name – may You hear their prayer and their supplication from Heaven, the foundation of Your abode, and carry out their judgment, and forgive Your people who sinned against You, and all their transgressions that they transgressed against You, and let them inspire mercy before their captors, so that they will treat them mercifully.  

For they are Your people and Your heritage, whom You have taken out of Egypt, from the midst of the iron furnace [the oppression the Jews suffered in Egypt is compared to a furnace in which metal is purified]; may Your eyes thus be open to the supplication of Your servant and the supplication of Your people Israel, to listen to them whenever they call out to You.  For You have separated them for Yourself as a heritage from all the peoples of the earth, as You spoke through Your servant Moses, when You took our forefathers out of Egypt, O my Lord, the Lord/God.1Kings 8:46-53.

The Lord appeared to Solomon at night and said to him I have heard your prayer and

. . . [i]f I ever restrain the heavens so that there will be no rain, or if I ever command locusts to devour the land, or if I ever send a pestilence among My people, and My people, upon whom My Name is proclaimed, humble themselves and pray and seek My presence and repent of their evil ways – I will hear from Heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land. 2 Chronicles 7:12-14.

Today, Judaism is based upon faith in God and the study of God’s Word with prayer.  The basic function of prayer is not its practical consequences, but the metaphysical formation of a fellowship consisting of God and man. Prayer is not a series of requests to God, but prayer is an engagement, even a confrontation, with God.[vii]  God initiated dialogue with man at Sinai.  Through the Bible, God speaks to us and we speak to God through prayer and this dialogue is created by the linking of Bible study and prayer.

 

 [People] had never heard, never observed, no eye had ever seen a god – except for You – that acted for those who trust in Him. Isaiah 64:3

 

 

[i] Ignaz Maybaum, The Face of God After Auschwitz, (1^st ed. 1965), pp. 62, 198.

[ii] Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Exodus: The Book of Redemption, (1^st ed. 2010), pp. 190-191.

[iii] Ibid., p. 192.

[iv] David Patterson, Wrestling With the Angel: Toward a Jewish Understanding of the Nazi Assault on the Name, (1^st ed. 2006), p. 68.

[v] The Chumash, Genesis 8:20, commentary.

[vi] Patterson, p. 68.

[vii] Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 167.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

The serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die; for God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and bad.” Genesis 3:4-5.

The serpent cannot but lie for Adam now will surely die, mankind will pursue the sin of trying to be like God and condemn his soul and evil will be indistinguishable from good.  At creation in Genesis 2:7, “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and He blew into his nostrils the soul of life”.  With our effort to become as God come the loss of the soul and the loss of our humanity.[1]  The soul was created in God’s image at the time of creation.

God had just one commandment to Adam of not eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil.  The sin of the temptation to be as God continues since Adam.  Good and evil cannot be distinguished without God’s moral law.  Mass murder committed by the suicide of Islamic terrorists and martyrdom are blurred, because good and evil becomes indistinguishable as mankind attempts to be like God.

When God asked Cain, “Where is your brother?” in Genesis 4:9, God was asking Cain, “Where is your soul?”[2]  When God asked Cain, “What have you done?” in Genesis 4:10, God was asking Cain, “What have you made of your soul?”[3]  Cain set out to kill God by killing his brother and in killing Able killed his substance and identity, his soul, and evil is unmasked and it is ego.[4]

Anti-Semitism is the attempt to banish God from creation.  Anti-Semitism is an assault on the soul, which includes an assault on the body.  The body is but a moment in the life of the soul that is eternal, for the soul is not in the body but rather the body is in the soul.[5]  The killing of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob requires the killing of the Jewish people.  God chose the Jewish people as His witnesses to announce to the world the eternal presence of the one and only God.

For the last two thousand years Esau’s offspring, the ancestors of Edom, in their various manifestations have held sway and the Jewish people have been exiled from their land and former glory.[6]  Edom has signified Christendom with its anti-Semitic dogma, its crusades and persecutions and its underpinnings leading to the Holocaust.[7]

The Nazis were determined to destroy the soul, the divine spark within man from having been created in the image and likeness of God, before destroying the body.  Israel’s enemies doom their own souls as their souls will be hurled into eternal screaming pain as one shoots a stone from a slingshot. I Samuel 25:29.  The Holocaust was not just a genocidal attempt to destroy the Jews, God’s witnesses, but an attempt by the Nazis to destroy God Himself, deicide, and purge Him from the Christian churches of Europe forever.

There is an eternal struggle by Amalek, the consummate evil.[8]  Amalek’s enmity against Israel is based upon its legacy as the grandson of Esau and from what the Amalek’s nation represents.[9]

Now Esau harbored hatred toward Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him; and Esau thought, “May the days of mourning for my father draw near, then I will kill my brother Jacob. Genesis 27:41.  Edom’s . . . anger tore perpetually and he kept his wrath forever. Amos 1:11.

The prophet Balaam considered Amalek as the first among nations in Numbers 24:20, in which Amalek, the primary offspring of Esau, is the leading force of evil in the world and the struggle of Israel and Amelek is the eternal struggle of good versus evil.[10]  The only reason for Amalek’s cowardly and unprovoked attacks on the weak nation of Israel, traveling out of Egypt during the Exodus, is to “show its brazen denial of God and His power, which is a perpetuation of the ancient legacy of Esau’s hatred for Jacob.”[11]

The Amalekites were the Nazis who wish to obliterate every trace of morality from the world and now are the Islamic suicide bombers who target innocent civilians in cowardly and unprovoked attacks.  For God maintains a war against Amalek from generation to generation until the eternal swords of the enemy [Amalek] have come to an end, the name and memory of Amalek is completely eradicated by God’s wrath and God’s Judgment Throne is complete.[12]  For Balaam declared in his prophecies, Amalek is the first among nations, but its end will be eternal destruction. Numbers 24:20.  I shall surely erase the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Exodus 17:14.

As Rabbi Irving Greenberg said that it one thing to kill Jews, but it is something else to cut in half the gas supply per chamber in 1944 to bring down the cost to less than one-half cent per person to gas Jews while taking twice as long to kill in agony and then to save that one-half cent, they threw Jewish children alive into the crematorium.[13]  Such decisions go beyond murder to deny the image of God and testify to life’s worthlessness.[14]

Ultimately, the prophecy given to Rebecca between Jacob and Esau shall be fulfilled when “the might shall pass from one of them to the other” and judgment shall be rendered upon those who trace their greatness to the mountain of Esau and the kingdom will be God’s.[15]

 Extend the sickle, for the harvest has ripened! Come and trample [the grapes], for the winepress is full, the vats have overflowed! – for their evil is great. [Commentary: God is speaking to His agents of destruction, who are now to harvest the crops of Divine vengeance].  Multitudes upon multitudes [will fall] in the Valley of the [Final] Decision, for the day of the Lord is near in the Valley of the [Final] Decision.  The sun and moon have become blackened, and the stars have withdrawn their shine.  And the Lord will roar from Zion and will emit His voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and earth will tremble. But the Lord will be a shelter for His people and a stronghold for the Children of Israel.  Thus you will know that I am the Lord your God, Who dwells in Zion, My holy mountain; Jerusalem will be holy, and aliens will no longer pass through her.

 And it shall be on that day that the mountains will drip with wine, the hills will flow with milk, and all the watercourses of Judah will flow with water, and a spring will go out from the House of the Lord and water the Valley of Shittim.  Egypt will become a desolation and Edom will become a desolate wilderness; because of the robbery of the children of Judah, for they shed innocent blood in their land.  Judah will exist forever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.  Though I cleanse, their bloodshed I will not cleanse, when the Lord dwells in Zion. [Commentary: Though I will cleanse the nations by forgiving many of their sins, I will not forgive them for the bloodshed they perpetrated against Israel.  When the Lord dwells in Zion, at the End of Days, they will be punished.] Joel 4:13-21.

After biting into the forbidden fruit and hiding from God, Adam was called out by God in Genesis 3, Where are you?  It is the first question asked in the Bible and it is the primordial question.[16]  God knew where Adam was, the question was whether Adam knew.

The Jewish presence in the Land has metaphysical significance demonstrating the holiness of life and the truth of the Bible and Jerusalem signifies divine authority and the divine commandment to affirm the holiness of humanity.[17]  Professor David Patterson wrote that “Jerusalem is the lens through which God looks upon the world and puts to every human being the question He put to the first human being [Adam] in Genesis 3: Where are you?”[18]

Do you know where you are?  What does God want you to do?  Are you moving towards God, or moving away?  These are the fundamental questions of why are we here.

 

[1] David Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul, (1^st ed. 2008), pp. 140-141

[2] Ibid., p. 38.

[3] Ibid..

[4] Ibid., p. 138.

[5] Ibid., pp. 152-153.

[6] Chumash, Genesis 36:31 (commentary), p. 196.

[7] Alan L. Berger and David Patterson, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Drawing Honey from the Rock, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 24.

[8] Exodus 17:16.

[9] The Chumash, Exodus 17:8-15 [commentary].

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Exodus 17:14-16 (Rashi).

[13] Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity, (1^st ed. 2004), p. 169.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Chumash, Genesis 36:31 (commentary), p. 196.

[16] Elie Wiesel and Philippe-Michaël de Saint-Cheron, Evil and Exile, (1^st ed. 1990), p. 157.

[17] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 264.

[18] Ibid., pp. 264-265.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

In January of 2015, the mysterious death of Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman once again shows how the world ignores pure evil directed toward the Jewish people.  The next day, he was scheduled to present evidence of the government’s cover up of Iran’s bombing in 1994 of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, in which 85 people were murdered.  As expected based upon history, today’s Argentine president prefers to have trade deals with Iran, rather than reject the evil represented by Iran, the new Nazi Germany.

In June 1960, the former Argentinian president Arturo Frondizi protested about Israel’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Israel to stand trial.[1]  On June 22, 1960, Argentina lodged a formal complaint with the UN Security Council and the American representative John Cabot Lodge delivered a speech supporting the Argentinean position that Eichmann should be returned to Argentina and those responsible for his abduction be arrested and tried.[2]  Argentina’s UN representative, Mario Amadeo, was a Catholic nationalist who had supported Franco, Mussolini and the Axis powers.[3]  Amadeo declared to the UN Security Council that Israel’s actions threatened world peace and security and demanded Eichmann’s return.[4]  The UN still says that Israel’s actions in defending itself against Arab violence threatens world peace and security.

Although Eichmann was considered responsible for the Final Solution, it meant absolutely nothing to Argentina, a safe haven for Nazi criminals, and to the U.S. State Department and the enlightened democratic world that ignored the suffering of millions of European Jews who had nowhere to escape.[5]  Today, the world seems to be unhappy that the Jews do have a country of escape, Israel.  The world did not stand up to Herr Hitler in 1938 and today it is not standing up to Iran, as it develops nuclear weaponry to destroy Israel and dominate the Middle East.

The Holocaust demonstrated the power of propaganda, in which a history of hatred preached from pulpits and mosques can turn ordinary people into mass murderers.  The Russian czarist’s lie of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is still the most popular book in the Arab world. The medieval blood libel accusations against the Jews still flow from “educated” countries, such as Turkey.

For the Jewish people and all of those who support Israel and the Jewish people, all we can do is to cling to the Lord and we will be alive today. Deuteronomy 4:4. When God wills it, the return to Zion will be swift and without obstacle.

He gives strength to the weary, and grants abundant might to the powerless.  Youths may weary and tire and young men may constantly falter, but those whose hope in the Lord will have renewed strength; they will grow a wing, like eagles; they will run and not grow tired, they will walk and not grow weary. Isaiah 40:29-31. 

 

[1] Menachem Z. Rosensaft, ed., God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors (1^st ed. 2015), pp. 254-255.

[2] Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 42-44.

[3] Ibid., pp. 21-22.

[4] Ibid., p. 22.

[5] Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, (1^st American ed. 2004), p. 42.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

There is a spark of divine light in all things.  That inner spark of divine light is created to improve man’s spiritual and material existence and is to varying degrees found in different religions.[1]  The supreme light cannot be defined and it cannot be robed in letters of any expression, nor of any kind of thought.[2]

Under 1 Kings 19:11, we read that God is not in the wind, not in the earthquake, not in the fire, but is in that “gentle breeze” that “still, thin sound.”  “The divine presence can only be found in the unfathomable inner strength of those, who do not allow themselves to be dehumanized by evil.”[3]

Jews were chosen to represent the presence of God in history.  Thus, chosen by God’s enemies for extermination to deny His existence in the world.  The very existence of the Jewish people confirms the foundations of Christianity.

We are witnessing today the continued destruction of civilization by barbarism and the normalization of mass murder as during the Holocaust with the Jews again the primary target for destruction wherever they live.  Still today, we witness the failure of man to behave in the image of God.

Where can God be found during this destruction of humanity?  Wherever man lets God into his life.  Without God, we live in an otherwise meaningless world.

 

 

 

[1] Ben Zion Bokser, ed., Abraham Isaac Kook: The Lights of Penitence, the Moral Principles, Lights of Holiness, Essays, Letters, and Poems. (1^st ed. 1978), p. 273.

[2] Ibid., p. 274.

[3] Menachem Z. Rosensaft, ed., God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes. (1^st ed. 2015), p. xxvii.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

The Christian theologian Paul van Buren in his book A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality called “the Jewish-Christian reality” a mental territory that will not allow for being Christian without a relationship with Judaism. God’s election of Israel is the foundation for everything that Israel has to tell the world and for its continuing existence as His eternal witness.[i]

There is no precedent for a scattered people remaining a people, since for all of the other ancient tribes dispersion meant disappearance.  If the Jews were to be an exception instead of being bound by a king, a temple, or geography, they needed to be bound by something else and something portable.  For the Jews, they are held together by words – the Bible.  Around the world in every synagogue, the congregation reads the same passages in the same Bible each week.  Jews can go into any synagogue in the world and experience the same religious service.

Israel is that people to whom God gave His Torah from Mount Sinai and the Jewish collective for all eternity accepted God’s Torah at Sinai.[ii]  All Israel in every generation stood before Sinai and Israel became a free people, not at the Red Sea, but at Sinai.[iii]

For you are a holy people to the Lord, your God; the Lord, your God, has chosen you to be for Him a treasured people above all the peoples that are on the face of the earth.  Not because you are more numerous than all the peoples did the Lord desire you and choose you, for you are the fewest of all the peoples.  Rather, because of the Lord’s love for you and because He observes the oath that He swore to your forefathers did He take you out with a strong hand and redeem you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.  You must know that the Lord, your God – He is the God, the faithful God, Who safeguards the covenant and the kindness for those who love Him and for those who observe His commandments, for a thousand generations. Deuteronomy 7:6-9

Israel testifies of God by telling its own history as a people’s history with God.[iv]  The Jewish people understand themselves linked to God and so are witnesses to the eternal covenant between themselves and God.[v]  Every Shabbat observed, every kosher meal eaten, every mitzvah performed, every son circumcised, every act of solidarity among the people is another expression of that eternal witness.[vi]   Israel and the Jewish people bear witness to the living God and so to a living covenant that promises redemption to the world.[vii]

There would be no Christian church were not the covenant between Israel and God alive and working in the world.[viii]  If the Christian church is faithful to God and His covenant with His people, the proper mission of the Christian church to the Jewish people would be to help Israel to be what it is in the covenant by God’s election and to help it perform its witness to the world.[ix]

Judaism is based upon faith in God and the study of God’s Word with prayer.  The basic Jewish function of prayer is not its practical consequences but the metaphysical formation of a fellowship consisting of God and man. Prayer is not a series of requests to God, but prayer is an engagement, even a confrontation, with God.[x]  God initiated dialogue with man at Sinai.  Through the Bible, God speaks to us and we speak to God through prayer and this dialogue is created by the linking of Bible study and prayer.

During the inauguration of the first Temple, King Solomon described future exiles of the Jewish people, but assured future generations that confessional prayer will replace the Temple for the atonement for all sin.

When they sin against You – for there is no man who never sins – and You become angry with them, and You deliver them to an enemy, and their captors take them captive to the enemy’s land, faraway or nearby, and they take it to heart in the land where they were taken captive and they repent and supplicate to You in the land of their captors, saying, ‘We have sinned; we have been iniquitous; we have been wicked,’ and they return to You with all their heart and with all their soul . . . and pray to You by way of their land that You gave to their forefathers, and [by way of] the city that You have chosen and [through] the Temple that I built for Your Name – may You hear their prayer and their supplication from Heaven, the foundation of Your abode, and carry out their judgment, and forgive Your people who sinned against You, and all their transgressions that they transgressed against You, and let them inspire mercy before their captors, so that they will treat them mercifully.  

For they are Your people and Your heritage, whom You have taken out of Egypt, from the midst of the iron furnace; may Your eyes thus be open to the supplication of Your servant and the supplication of Your people Israel, to listen to them whenever they call out to You.  For You have separated them for Yourself as a heritage from all the peoples of the earth, as You spoke through Your servant Moses, when You took our forefathers out of Egypt, O my Lord, the Lord my God.1Kings 8:46-53.

The Jewish “chosenness” is not a privilege, but a mission to open for all people the invisible and sacred doors that illuminate redemption.[xi]  The Bible is the Tree of Life only to those who accept it as the immutable Word of God.[xii]  Under the Christian Gospels for the non-Jew, Jesus is the manifestation of the living Word of God, the tree of life made flesh.   There is a thirst for the living God, for the soul seeks its moorings in God.  The inner nature of the soul seeks

[i] Paul M. van Buren, A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part 2, A Christian Theology of the People Israel, (1^st ed. 1987), p. 116.

[ii] Ibid., p. 153.

[iii] Ibid., p. 156.

[iv] Ibid., p. 122.

[v] Ibid., p. 123.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid., p. 295.

[viii] Ibid., p. 331.

[ix] Ibid., p. 333.

[x] Patterson, Overcoming Alienation: A Kabbalistic Reflection on the Five Levels of the Soul, (1^st ed. 2008), p. 167.

[xi] Judea and Ruth Pearl, eds., I Am Jewish, Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl, (1^st ed. 2004), pp. 183-184.

[xii] Ibid. p. 209.

Martin M. van Brauman

 

 

During the end of the 19^th Century and the dawn of the 20^th Century, Theodor Herzl held a deterministic view of anti-Semitism as an eternal occurrence:

Perhaps we could completely assimilate into the people surrounding us if they left us alone for at least two generations.  But they won’t leave us alone . . . Only the pressure makes us emotionally cling to our origins, only the hatred of those around us makes us alien again.  Whether we like it or not, we have always been and still remain an historic community sharing a clear affiliation.  We are a people – the enemy forges us as a people against our own will – and thus it has always been in history.  In times of distress, we band together and suddenly display our strength.  And yes, we have the strength to build a state, even an exemplary state.  We have all of the means – human and material – necessary to achieve this.[1]

Herzl believed that anti-Semitism preserved the Jews and its disappearance could bring about the disappearance of Jews, who do not live in a sovereign Jewish community.[2]  During Herzl’s time, anti-Semitic activities in the world strengthen Zionist yearnings.  Today, identification with Jewish suffering in the world raises the level of internal Jewish solidarity in Israel.[3]  For Herzl and others around him, the Zionist movement and vision was more a result of the Jewish failure to integrate in the world rather than the 2,000 year old dream of the ingathering of the exiles to the Land of Israel.

The late 19^th and early 20^th century Zionists thought that once Jews possessed a land of their own they would become a normal nation like all other nations and anti-Semitism would fade away.[4]  However, Balaam’s prophecy foretold of the Jewish people as an eternally abnormal nation.[5]  The world cannot tolerate an eternally abnormal nation.  Former Prime Minister Golda Meir remarked when attending a United Nations session that “We have no family there . . . Israel is entirely alone there . . . But why should that be?”[6]  Is it because as Balaam, the prophet of Moab, foretold that “. . . it is a nation that will dwell in solitude and not be reckoned among the nations?” Numbers 23:9.  Balaam was paid by King Balak of Moab to curse the Israelites, but Balaam could not curse those blessed by God. Numbers 24:9.

Dr. Yaacov Herzog in A People That Dwells Alone wrote about this inseparable destiny of nation and faith in 1975:

The theory of classic Zionism was national normalization. What was wrong with the theory? It was the belief that the idea of a ‘people that dwells alone’ is an abnormal concept, when actually a ‘people that dwells alone’ is the natural concept of the Jewish people.  That is why this one phrase still describes the totality of the extraordinary phenomenon of Israel’s revival.  If one asks how the ingathering of the exiles, which no one could have imagined in his wildest dreams, came about, or how the State of Israel could endure such severe security challenges, or how it has built up such a flourishing economy, or how the unity of the Jewish people throughout the Diaspora has been preserved, one must come back to the primary idea that this is ‘a people that dwells alone.’  More than that, one must invoke this phrase not only to understand how the Jews have existed for so long; one must invoke it as a testimony to the Jewish right to exist at all in the land of their rebirth.[7]

Herzog has called the State of Israel a paradox, in which all the normalities have been proven baseless.  It is a nation that lives by faith, in which it lives in the present, but its rights go back to the past and everything is integrated and intertwined in a process of redemption that lies ahead into a new era of Jewish history, the ingathering of the exiles.[8]

During the end of the 20^th Century and the beginning of the 21^st Century, the trend was that the world began accepting the Jews and moving away from anti-Semitism and the wide gate of assimilation was open.[9]  Essentially, those who remained Jews did so since they remained part of a Jewish community in the Diaspora or lived in Israel.  Today, the cycle of anti-Semitism has returned to the radical levels of the 1930s in Hitler’s Europe and the world against the right of Israel to exist driven by Islamic radicalism.  Islamic radicalism denies the Holocaust and the Jewish history in Israel and Jerusalem.  The torch of anti-Semitism has been passed from Hitler’s Reich to the Islamic communities around the world.

Hatred toward the Jews is as old as the Jewish people with the first signs indicated in the Talmud at the time of the Revelation at Sinai.[10]  When God revealed himself at Sinai and entered into a covenant with them as His people, a midrash, or oral interpretation of the Bible, says that He gave the non-Jewish world Sin’at Yisrael, hatred of Israel.[11]  Elie Wiesel in Evil and Exile has stated that hatred of the Jews was born with the Torah before Christianity.[12]  The hostility to Jews in the Hellenistic pagan world was connected with Jewish monotheism and the fact that Judaism demanded a distinct separation of Jews from the general population.[13]

Before Christianity, pagan hostility to Judaism existed with Judaism’s rejection of the pagan gods and the pagan way of life.[14]  Jewish hatred was expressed as irritation, primarily as cultural anti-Semitism, resulting from Jewish separateness, rather than the distinct hatred that later characterized Christian theological anti-Semitism.[15]

Judaism has been the basis of the universality of anti-Semitism over thousands of years from Hellenistic and Roman times to today and into the future as foretold in Deuteronomy 28:37, 64-68 below.[16]

You will be a source of astonishment, a parable, and a conversation piece, among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you.  [“Astonishment” means that all who see you will see bewilderment over you.  “A parable” means they will say of a similar suffering befalling a person.  A “conversation” means they will retell of you.][17]

The Lord will scatter you among all the peoples, from the end of the earth to the end of the earth, and there you will work for gods of others, whom you did not know – you or your forefathers – of wood and of stone. And among those nations you will not be tranquil, there will be no rest for the sole of your foot; there the Lord will give you a trembling heart, longing of eyes, and suffering of soul.  Your life will hang in the balance, and you will be frightened night and day, and you will not be sure of your livelihood. In the morning you will say, “Who can give back last night!” And in the evening you will say, “Who can give back this morning!” – for the fright of your heart that you will fear and the sight of your eyes that you will see.  The Lord will return you to Egypt in ships, on the road of which I said to you, “You shall never again see it!” And there you will offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as slaves and maidservants – but there will be no buyer!

“[T]here will be no buyer” for the world in the 1930s and 40s did not want the impoverished Jews, stripped of their properties, possessions and citizenships trying to escape Nazi-controlled Europe, or whenever they were driven out from any country in the past or the present, Christian or Muslim.  Today, Israel is now that refuge for the Jewish people after 2,000 years of exile, when no other country will accept them.

With the rise of anti-Semitism today in Europe and elsewhere in the world, immigration to Israel is increasing with Jews wanting a safe place to exist, while Europe once again is no longer a safe place.  That is why immigration to Israel is not like immigration to any other country, but is known as Aliyah (“going up”), a reference to going up to read from God’s Word.  Eretz Yisrael and Jerusalem with the ancient reframe “Next year in Jerusalem” always have been the spiritual destination that enabled the existence of the Diaspora.  Today, the State of Israel is the spiritual center that enables the continued existence of the Diaspora and a refuge against anti-Semitism.  For the UN and many world leaders, the new code word for anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism, but no one can be an enemy of Zionism and be a friend of the Jewish people.[18]

 

 

 

[1] Yossi Beilin, His Brother’s Keeper: Israel and Diaspora Jewry in the Twenty-First Century, (1^st ed. 2000), p. 18.

[2] Ibid., p. xv.

[3] Ibid., p. 12.

[4] Yehuda Avner, The Prime Ministers: An Intimate Narrative of Israeli Leadership, (1^st ed. 2010), pp. 397-398.

[5] Ibid., p. 397.

[6] Ibid., p. 396.

[7] Ibid., p. 399; Yaacov Herzog, A People That Dwells Alone, (1^st Amer. Ed. 1975), p. 52.

[8] Herzog, p. 59.

[9] Beilin, p. xv.

[10] Elie Wiesel, And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969 –, (1^st ed. 1995), p. 48.

[11] Jocelyn Hellig, The Holocaust and Antisemitism, (1^st ed. 2003), p. 90.

[12] Elie Wiesel, Evil and Exile, (1^st ed. 1990), p. 38.

[13] Hellig, p. 105.  The Hellenistic period was inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great (365-323 B.C.E.). Ibid., p. 113.

[14] Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, (2^nd ed. 2003), p. 72.

[15] Hellig, p. 138.

[16] Prager and Telushkin, p. 72.

[17] Rashi’s Commentary.

[18] Franklin H. Littell, The Crucifixion of the Jews: The Failure of Christians to Understand the Jewish Experience, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 97.

 Martin M. van Brauman

 

In a suburb of Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960, Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann, the monster behind the implementation of the “Final Solution,” and brought him to Israel for trial.[1]  Vatican diplomats called on several UN member states to demand Eichmann’s return to Argentina.[2]  And why not.  At the war’s end, the Vatican and its associates helped thousands of Nazi war criminals escape Germany.[3]  A Franciscan monk in Genoa obtained a refugee passport in the name of Ricardo Klement and a visa for Argentina and in the middle of July 1950, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Buenos Aires.[4]

On June 22, 1960, Argentina lodged a formal complaint with the UN Security Council and the American representative John Cabot Lodge delivered a speech supporting the Argentinean position that Eichmann should be returned to Argentina and those responsible for his abduction be arrested and tried.[5]  Argentina’s UN representative, Mario Amadeo, was a Catholic nationalist who had supported Franco, Mussolini and the Axis powers.[6]  Amadeo declared to the UN Security Council that Israel’s actions threatened world peace and security and demanded Eichmann’s return.[7]  Still today, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority repeat the same anti-Semitic lie that Israel’s actions threatened world peace and security.

Adolf Eichmann believed in the eternal cycle of growth and decay as a natural occurrence with the doctrine of the inevitable final war of the races (Gottgläubigkeit) to justify the intellectual basis for genocide against the Jews as a natural occurrence.[8]  The Nazi term Gottgläubig, “god-believing,” attributed to “a higher Bearer of Meaning,” a god somehow identical with the “movement of the universe,” to which human life, in itself devoid of “higher meaning,” is subject.[9]

Although Eichmann was considered responsible for the Final Solution, it meant absolutely nothing to Argentina, a safe haven for Nazi criminals, and to the U.S. State Department and the enlightened democratic world that ignored the suffering of millions of European Jews who had nowhere to escape.[10]  Unfortunately, nothing has changed today with the UN and the US State Department still minimizing the killings of Jews as a natural occurrence.

After the Second World War, the camp survivors were referred as the anonymous “Displaced Persons” by news commentators who ignored the Jewish tragedy of the concentration camps.[11]  Unbelievably, there was not any emphasis on the Jewishness of the victims in the news coverage.[12]

The Nuremberg war trials did not expose the magnitude and horror of the Nazi extermination of the Jews.[13]  Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka and other death camps were minimized at the trials and even Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was only a defense witness at the Nuremberg trials.[14]  The concept of the Holocaust only became commonly known during the 1960s after the Eichmann trial.[15]

Today, Hamas and the Palestinian Authority continue to train up the next generation of Muslims to hate and kill Jews wherever Jews can be found.  They repeat the Islamic religious principle, in which murder equals righteousness as expressed by the Nazi war criminal and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin al-Husseini years ago:

 Slaughter Jews wherever you find them!  Their spilled blood pleases Allah![16]

The face of evil has not changed, for Islamic leaders make the same statements about their youth as statements made when another youth group was formed in 1926.

I begin with the young. We older ones are used up . . . But my magnificent youngsters!  Are there finer ones anywhere in the world?  Look at all these men and boys!  What material!  With them I can make a new world. Adolf Hitler.[17]

The Hitler Youth are alive and well in the Islamic world.  Islamic extremists seek the souls of the children with the education of their youth, beginning in kindergarten, by preaching virulent hatred toward Jews and Israel and the righteousness of killing Jews by their martyrdom.[18]  In Deuteronomy 18:10, God warned the Israelites against the idolaters in the Land (Molech worship – who causes his son or daughter to pass through the fire).[19]  The Islamic extremists use their children as sacrificial offerings to die a death and combine this suicide with the mass murder of innocent Jews.[20]

The Islamic jihadist evil exceeds the Nazi evil for they have combined murder and suicide into a single act of “martyrdom,” which represents two forms of abomination against God of murder and suicide.[21]  The Nazi assault on God took the form of mass murder against the Jews and the destroying of the soul of Israel.[22]  The Islamic jihadist takes the Nazi evil and reduces all men to surplus people and expects all men to be engaged in making all men equally superfluous by choosing and glorifying death over life.[23]

 For anyone who does these is an abomination of the Lord, and because of these abominations the Lord, your God, banishes [the nations] from before you.  You shall be wholehearted with the Lord, your God.  For these nations that you are possessing – they hearken to astrologers and diviners; but as for you – not so has the Lord, your God, given for you. Deuteronomy 18:12-14.

Israel and the existence of the Jewish people represent to humanity the “ancient testimony to the holiness of every human life,” which denies the salvation “truth” of the glorification of death by Islamic extremism.[24]  Even today, the UN and world leaders are silent to the deaths of innocent Jewish people at the hands of extremists driven by Islamic jihadists in Israel and around the world, since for the world it is a “natural occurrence.”

For one who finds me finds life and elicits favor from the Lord. But one who sins against me despoils his soul; all who hate me love death. Proverbs 8:35-36.

 

[1] Bettina Stangneth. Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer, (1^st ed. 2014), p. 347.

[2] Ibid., p. 355.

[3] John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications, (1^st ed. 1989), p. 309.

[4] Isser Harel, The House on Garibaldi Street, (1^st ed. 1975), p. 176.

[5] Hanna Yablonka, The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann, (1^st Amer. Ed. 2004), pp. 42-44.

[6] Deborah E. Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, (1^st ed. 2011), pp. 21-22.

[7] Ibid., p. 22.

[8] Stangneth, p. 224.

[9] Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (2^nd rev. and enlarged ed. 1964), p. 27.

[10] Yablonka, p. 42.

[11] David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, (1^st American ed. 2014), p. 284.

[12] Ibid., p. 283.

[13] Ibid., p. 294.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid., p. 284.

[16] David Patterson, A Genealogy of Evil: Anti-Semitism from Nazism to Islamic Jihad, (1^st ed. 2011), p. 34.

[17] Susan Campbell Bartoletti, Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler’s Shadow, (1^st ed. 2005), p. 7.

[18] Patterson, pp. 21-23.

[19] Ibid., p. 23.

[20] Ibid..

[21] Ibid., pp. 8-9.

[22] Ibid., p. 9.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., p. 14.