By Ron Nutter, Ph D
I wear a necklace made of silver created by a craftswoman in Carmel, IN. In my years of teaching philosophy and religion I would on occasion make a rhetorical point about Judaism and Christianity by holding up one side of the necklace, displaying the Christian Cross, and saying, “One cannot possibly understand the full meaning of this without a deep and abiding understanding of this,” whereupon I would flip my necklace and show the Star of David on the other side.
Over the years that little demonstration had greater and greater effect as I developed a course on the Shoah in which the first half of the semester was spent exploring Jewish traditions and beliefs with a guest rabbi, the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the early Church, and the anti-Jewish legislation of early Church councils and secular governments. Over time Jews were restricted in where they could live, how they might make a living, banned from owning land, ordered not to converse with Christians, prohibited from appearing in public during Christian holidays, denied education in the professions, forced to wear distinctive clothing so everyone would know them to be a Jew, and more.
All of this was long, long before Adolf Hitler came on the scene. In fact, with the exception of organized bureaucratic and technology-based extermination, there is hardly anything in the Nuremburg Laws against the Jews that was not passed in an earlier time by a Church council or a Church-influenced state government.
The course would come to the nineteenth century and discuss the progressive and scientific theories of race and eugenics, which were popular at the time. Up to then, the problem with Jews from a Christian perspective was “bad thinking” and “spiritual blindness and stubbornness” which leads to their ongoing rejection of Jesus Christ. Theories of race introduce the notion that it’s not bad thinking, but bad blood. Thus the anti-Jewish rhetoric of the past is transformed into anti-Semitism.
There is a logic – a tragic one – to hatred of Jews. The early Church essentially said, “You shall not live among us as Jews.” Thus the attempts to convert Jews to Christianity, sometimes forcibly. In the medieval period that was transformed to “You shall not live among us.” This was the period of either forced expulsions or the ghettoization of Jews. This was followed logically by the next step: “You shall not live.” Which brings us to Hitler’s attempt to exterminate Jews in the Shoah.
The second half of the course reviewed the rise of Hitler and the mechanics of the Shoah. Most students had some idea, having heard in general terms about the Holocaust, but nearly all were completely dumbfounded to learn of the anti-Jewish activity of the early Church and of the anti-Semitic views which came to influence many Western states and eventually dominate the politics of Nazi Germany.
I am now retired from teaching. I still wear that necklace, and have since the day I was married on August 21, 1982. Curiously, it is only now I am beginning to feel the weight of my necklace. Seeing the emotions unleashed recently during the conflict in Gaza I am fearful of what I once thought could never happen: Anti-Semitism again stalks the land looking for Jewish blood. What I have spent my life trying to expose so that it might never happen again seems to be back, often with a quite sinister and maniacal passion.
It is at this time of increasing anti-Semitic activity that I am compelled to write so that others might be aware of the long tradition of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic rhetoric and activity. This is needed so that all will realize that the current rise in anti-Semitism is not exclusively caused by Gaza or the Palestinian question or by Israel. Rather, it is simply an extension of what has gone on for 2,000 years.
It was a happier time when I first had the necklace made. I was a student at a Christian seminary at the time. Among classes I had taken was one co-taught by Clark Williamson, a Christian theologian, and Jonathan Stein, a Jewish rabbi. Spending a semester in intensive study of the Jewish religion was eye-opening and led to a great respect for the roots of Jewish beliefs and traditions. That course was followed by another taught by Williamson in which the history of anti-Jewish thought within the Church was exposed. More than eye-opening, it was a shameful legacy that Christians must bear, though I dare say most have no idea of the injustice and violence heaped on Jews through the centuries. It is for good reason that this anti-Jewish sentiment is known as The Longest Hate.
What I have come to learn in subsequent years is that anti-Jewish rhetoric is repeated, and expanded, by nearly all of the Church Fathers. Melito of Sardis, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Augustine, Tertullian, Origen, Hippolytus, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyprian of Carthage, and Novatian of Rome all expressed contempt of Jews and Judaism. And this is only a partial listing of those engaged in the Adversus Judaeus preaching of the early Church.
One voice of anti-Jewish rhetoric needs to be highlighted. In 1543 a truly malevolent attack on Jews was written by Martin Luther, the father of the Reformation. The title of the pamphlet was On The Jews and Their Lies. In it, using the most risible insults imaginable, Luther lays out what he believes should be done with the Jews. It was a seven-fold plan, including
1) the destruction of synagogues and Jewish schools,
2) that Jewish homes should be razed and destroyed and the Jews forced to live in a communal barn-like structure or barracks,
3) that all prayer books and Talmudic writings should be taken from them,
4) that rabbis should henceforth be forbidden to teach on pain of death,
5) that safe conduct for Jews on the highways of the land should be ended and they should be forced to remain indoors,
6) that usury should be ended for Jews as it is for Christians and that Jewish wealth through money-lending be confiscated, and
7) a recommendation that tools be placed into the hands of Jews and that they be forced to work.
When you look at that list, it kind of looks like a Nazi concentration camp, doesn’t it? Not an extermination camp, but the typical work camp. In fact, one of the defendants at the Nuremburg war crimes trial, Julius Streicher, editor of the notoriously anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, defended himself at trial by claiming he merely advocated and did what Martin Luther recommended be done.
Luther ended on a flourish, pleading:
[T]hat our rulers. . . . must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them, . . . I have done my duty. Now let everyone see to his. I am exonerated.
I have to say there is always fallout when one exposes for public view a man who is seen as a paragon of faith and virtue. Teaching my course there was a young woman who was a devout Lutheran. Learning what Luther had to say about Jews in class one day she was literally reduced to tears. There is no joy to be taken in seeing another’s ideals tarnished. I could only hope that in the wisdom of her years she is able to separate what theological wisdom Luther had to offer from his contemptuous disdain of Jews.
Simultaneous to the ravaging of Jews verbally and theologically there was anti-Jewish legislation passed by Church councils and synods as well as secular governments. To name just one, in 1215 at the Fourth Lateran Council it was proclaimed that all Jews in all provinces must wear distinctive clothing so that all who see them in public will know them to be Jews. This comes as a shock to those who think Hitler started that policy with his ordering Jews to wear the Star of David in public. Their rights being restricted or outright denied from state to state, region to region, Jews found themselves stateless, with few ways of making a living. The church and the state appeared to be working in concert to make the lives of Jews more and more impossible.
Some felt a justification was needed to attack the Jews, and indeed justifications were found in certain popular charges against Jews. One was the “ritual murder” charge, sometimes known as “blood libel.” The charge is that Jews would kidnap a young Christian boy and drain his blood for the making of matzos for holiday meals. The charge was first made in Norwich, England, in 1144. By the end of that century the charge was being made everywhere Jews lived among Christians. The charge has been made in the twentieth century in Germany, Russia, and even in New York State. Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer is based on the famous 1913 trial in Kiev,
Russia, of Mendel Beiliss. He was accused of killing a young boy, and a witness for the prosecution, a Catholic priest, explained the murder in terms of the “blood libel” ritual.
Unfortunately, as chronicled by The Middle East Media Research Institute, the ritual murder charge is still with us as Islamic Imams and Muslim media incessantly claim Arab children are kidnapped and their blood drained for the making of matzos. The Associated Press recently reported a variation of the ritual murder charge when it passed along the charge that Israel’s IDF soldiers were taking body parts from Palestinians killed in the recent Gaza fighting. The AP quickly removed the story, but no doubt it is still preserved in Muslim media archives.
Another popular charge against Jews was “desecration of the Host.” Interestingly, this charge never arises until after the Church establishes its teaching of Transubstantiation, which proffers that during the Eucharist the actual body and blood of Christ are present in the bread and wine. The desecration of the Host charge essentially says Jews would steal into Catholic churches and steal the consecrated Host and then stab it repeatedly, thus killing Christ again.
A third popular charge was that Jews were “poisoning the wells” of Christians. This is associated with the Black Plague of 1347-49. No one at the time understood the epidemiology of the disease, but they did see that Christians were being affected and Jews were not. Thus it was concluded that the Jews must be doing it. There is, however, a simple explanation for why Jews were not affected: they took baths. Personal hygiene among Christians was negligible to non-existent at the time. It is for good reason writers of this period would make much of a young woman with “sweet breath” because it was quite rare.
A critical turn in attitudes toward Jews takes place with the coming of theories of race in the nineteenth century. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau was an early nineteenth-century French aristocrat who became known for advocating white supremacy and developing a racialist theory of the “Aryan Master Race” in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races. He developed the term “Semite” to refer to Arabs and Jews in the Middle East who represented to him the bottom of the racial ladder. He set the stage for what came to be known as the “Nordic Theory.”
The Nordic Theory, prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Western Europe and the United States, was a major influence on Nazi ideology. The theory claims that Nordic peoples constitute a “master race” because of their “innate racial capacity for leadership.” The chief representative of the Nordic Theory in America was Madison Grant, who lived from 1865-1937. He was a eugenicist who employed the Nordic Theory in an effort to restrict entry into the U.S. of Mediterranean peoples. He declared the mixing of the races to be “race suicide.” Unless eugenics was practiced, he claimed, the Nordic race in the U.S. will be supplanted by the “inferior” races.
Grant was very influential among government policy makers and even in popular culture. The character of Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby is a clear and outspoken advocate of the racialist positions of Grant. Tom is reading a book titled The Rise of the Colored Empires “by this man Goddard.” This is a combination of Grant’s very popular Passing of the Great Race, written in 1916 and reprinted many times thereafter, and another book written by a close colleague, Lothrup Stoddard, titled The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Grant wrote the introduction to that book.
“Everybody ought to read it,” the character of Tom Buchanan explains in The Great Gatsby, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
The Passing of the Great Race, Grant’s very popular book, detailed the “racial history” of the world and affirms the Nordic Theory. It was the first non-German book ordered to be reprinted by the Nazis when they took power in Germany. Adolf Hitler later wrote to Grant personally to say, “The book is my Bible.”
It would be worthwhile to print a little of Grant’s ideas in his own words:
[Eugenics] is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.
This kind of thinking came to a head in the Supreme Court decision Buck v Bell in 1927. The issue before the court was whether a state had the right to compel sterilizations of those considered unfit “for the health and protection of the state.” The decision was seen as an endorsement of “negative eugenics” in that it allows the state to eliminate from the gene pool those deemed defective or otherwise unsuitable. Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the majority decision, including the classic line of eugenics: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.” He couched his decision as a health policy issue, declaring sterilizations were like immunizations against possible contagion.
The Nazis already had a contempt for the Jews. With eugenicist theory and putting it on the basis of health policy, the Nazis began their T4 program of killing the institutionalized feeble-minded and other “life unworthy of life” by gassing them inside compartments of trucks. Eventually, the problem of the Jews was presented by the Nazis as a massive health issue. This is why Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, would produce films comparing Jews to rats. One exterminates rats for health reasons, the argument would go, and so too should the Jews be exterminated.
One more figure in the development of race theory should be mentioned: Houston Stewart Chamberlain. In 1899 he wrote his most important work, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. The book grouped all European peoples — Celts, Germans, Slavs, Greeks, Latins, et al. — into the “Aryan” race, with the Nordic and Germanic people at the helm. According to Chamberlain, the Germanic people are the heirs of the empires of Greece and Rome. When Germanic tribes sacked and ended the Roman Empire it was already in decline because it was controlled by Jews and other non-Europeans. Thus, according to Chamberlain, the Germanic peoples “saved” western civilization from Semitic domination. The concept of an “Aryan” race was an ideal of a racial elite. Chamberlain’s works had a marked effect upon German nationalist movements, such as the NSDAP (i.e. the Nazis). Hitler was a student of his works, and praised him as “The Prophet of the Third Reich.”
During this modern period the Jew was being rhetorically ravaged on every level. If one was a defender of the capitalist economic system the enemy of all was the Jewish communist or socialist feeding the fire of revolution. If one was a member of the oppressed working class the enemy of all was the Jewish banker or capitalist oppressing the people. No matter where one stood on the political spectrum, the Jew was the universal enemy. There was no escape for Jews.
Even in popular culture Jews could not escape public contempt. Henry Adams, a Harvard historian and grandson and great-grandson of Presidents, was a leading intellectual in America. His Mont Saint Michel and Chartres as well as The Education of Henry Adams, while brilliant and insightful in many ways, also contain dyspeptic anti-Semitic references throughout. Adams felt marginalized in a world of growing industrialization, and preferred a medieval “universe” inspired by the Virgin to a “multiverse” symbolized by the Dynamo. He became particularly virulent toward Jews after the Panic of 1893, seeing the economic calamity as a result of the manipulations of Jewish bankers.
Adams wrote a very popular novel, Democracy, in which one of the main characters was named Hartbeest Schneidekoupon. He is described as familiar with “the mysteries of currency and protection, to both which subjects he was devoted.” He is described as rich, with “a reputation of turning rapid intellectual somersaults.” He is also said to be “descended from all the Kings of Israel, and … prouder than Solomon in his glory.”
Schneidekoupon’s goal is to befriend over dinner Senator Ratcliffe, expected to become the new Secretary of the Treasury, in order “to keep him straight on the currency and the tariff.” He complains when the Senator at first refuses to attend the dinner that Senators are “all like that. They never think of anyone but themselves.” The irony fairly drips from the page.
Adams then introduces what is described as “a much higher type of character” than Schneidekoupon in a Nathan Gore. Gore is then described by Adams as “abominably selfish, colossally egoistic, and not a little vain.” But, in Adams’s view, he is nonetheless “a much higher type of character” than Schneidekoupon.
Adams presents Schneidekoupon as capitalistic, materialistic, self-centered and carnal, whose “rapid intellectual somersaults” suggest a lack of steadfastness when it comes to inner spiritual or ethical principles. The not so subtle message is the anti-Semitic image that these are the intrinsic traits that indicate the nature and character of the Jew. The overall effect is to present the Jew as something less than human.
Here is an interesting little item: Can you figure out what the following list of words have in common – “usurer, extortioner, cunning, heretic, lickpenny, harpy, schemer, crafty, shifty.” They are synonyms for the word Jew listed in Roget’s Thesaurus at the turn of the twentieth century.
So why do I bring up this laundry-list of anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic activity? Because they each, in their own way, played a role in the greatest crime ever perpetrated on humanity, the Shoah. So why did I teach the course? Because I believed – still do – that exposing the truth will prevent it from ever happening again.
There are those, though, who claim the Shoah never happened. And they, unfortunately, are being heard more and more in our irrational age. I am reminded of Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
There are anti-Semitic voices currently in the land – not just in the Middle East but in Europe and the U.S. – demanding the blood of Jews. This may be as a result of a misguided support of “the oppressed” against their “oppressors” mixed with a belief in moral equivalency, or it may be the curdling voice of contempt spawned by generation after generation of hatred. Regardless, it is an anti-Semitic appeal to the bestial in the human heart.
Academia plays a role with its attempts to isolate Israel and its Jews though support of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. George Orwell, in a 1944 letter to John Middleton Murry, wrote that the test for intellectual honesty is a willingness to criticize one’s own position. It is that lack of intellectual honesty that is bothersome with academics pushing the BDS movement. Of course, they will say they are not anti-Jewish, but anti-Zionist. Well, to quote Shirley Temple in the film Fort Apache, “Pishtosh!”
The hypocrisy can be seen in the recent move by the Presbyterian Church USA to divest from companies doing business with Israel. Leading up to the vote by its General Assembly a program was put together titled Zionism Unsettled by a group called the Israel Palestine Mission Network. This “study guide” was written in consultation with various academics and Palestinian groups. Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, well known spokesmen for the Palestinian cause, are presented as authoritative voices in this document with no attempt to take a critical view of their positions. In fact, despite heavy criticism of Israel there is no criticism of the Palestinians. There isn’t even any condemnation of the terrorist acts against Jews. None. Thus for those Presbyterians who put this study together, as well as those who supported it, they have failed Orwell’s test for intellectual honesty.
Their unwillingness to criticize Palestinian views was replicated in the recent fighting between Israel and Hamas. No criticism of Hamas could be heard from those academics of the BDS movement despite the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli civilians with thousands of rockets and mortars. Indeed, all the criticism was directed only toward the Israelis.
This uncritical acceptance of the views and actions of Hamas while rejecting as genocidal the actions of Israel is documented in an August 31, 2014, American Thinker article by Cinnamon Stillwell. After noting various Hamas supporters among the professoriate, mostly in Middle East Studies departments, she writes that “such cheerleading for Palestinian terrorism and willful disregard of historical facts discredits the individuals who advance it and the academic culture of Middle East studies that rewards it. It is politicized rather than objective, propagandistic rather than principled. American interests at home and abroad are ill-served by these apologists for terrorists.” But what is truth, when anti-Semites are motivated and justified by centuries of hatred?
Speaking of Said, he is perhaps best known for his book Orientalism, in which he criticizes and condemns Westerners for unthinkingly adopting a “discourse” about the Middle East established by “experts” and reified in the scholarly tomes of Western libraries. According to Said, such discourse has marginalized the peoples of the Middle East, including the Palestinians, making them less than human in the eyes of Westerners. There may be something to that argument. All I would say is that there is a 2,000-year-old anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic “discourse” that has marginalized Jews through the centuries and made them something less than human. The current anti-Israel voices, whether knowingly or not, are drawing from that discourse of prejudice and hatred in their condemnation of Jews. They simply echo what has been with us from generation to generation.
I firmly believe the situation is better now than it was before World War II. Many have come to recognize how Jews have been victimized through the ages and have worked to make amends. But then I was brought up short one day by Yale professor and one-time diplomat Charles Hill. Reading about his experience in Asia during China’s Cultural Revolution it was demonstrated that whatever cultural strides are made can be undone in a generation.
That is my concern today. A new outbreak of anti-Semitism, having no knowledge of anti-Jewish thought and action through the centuries, and having no desire to know, is propagating a renewal of anti-Semitic discourse that will propel us to ever more tragic consequences if we are not mindful. One sees the evidence all around us, with reports world-wide of rising attacks on Jews and Synagogues in Europe and even in the U.S. The Guardian on August 7, 2014, published a lengthy article on the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe that is making Jews in Europe fearful of a re-play of their Nazi experience. On August 20 of this year the New York Times published a column by Deborah Lipstadt noting the acts against Jews in Europe.
The war in Gaza no doubt acts as a spark. But it also occasions a renewed use of long-time canards used against Jews, as when a Hamas spokesman again raised the specter of “ritual murder.” Even an established hoax like the pamphlet The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forgery put out by Russian agents to support the Czar against what were perceived as Jewish revolutionaries, is a staple of booksellers in the Islamic world. In that work one “learns” how the economic and political systems of the world are manipulated by secret Jewish cabals.
So I am concerned, and I feel the weight of my necklace around my neck. I know there are places in the world where wearing my necklace could cost me my life. Is that overwrought? I recall an interview of the novelist Mary Doria Russell in which she spoke of her conversion to Judaism. In it she remarked that her conversion was such that it could get her killed. I thought that was overwrought at the time. Now I am not so sure. Because I feel the weight of my necklace.
Ben Stein in a recent American Spectator article sums it up about as well as anyone. He comments how much we’ve learned this past summer: “We learned this summer that when terrorists kill Jews, that’s legitimate anger and frustration. When Jews defend themselves, that’s genocide. We learned that Europe, which Henry Ford called ‘that slaughterhouse of nations’ or something similar, is still chock a block with anti-Semites who are wildly happy to join hands with the emerging Muslim majority in Europe to torture the Jews. We learned that the elite media, especially the New York Times, will turn on Israel and the Jews and seek to curry favor with the enemies of Jews and of America in any way they can.”
God only knows what will come. I comfort myself by saying I am old and will soon depart this world, but then I think about my son. What kind of world will he have to negotiate and still maintain his integrity and a willingness to speak out against those who would do violence against Jews? I have tried to speak out in the classes I have taught, and can only hope my students are able to take what they learned and with integrity speak out on their own against those who would do violence against Jews. And I write because I want to continue to educate and do whatever I can to prevent unjust violence against Jews. I still believe that knowledge can be a balm to hatred.
We appear to be in a kind of limbo now that a ceasefire in Gaza has taken. Reports are that the West Bank and the Golan Heights are restive, contemplating open hostilities against Israel after seeing the Gaza fighting as inconclusive. Should such fighting break out, no doubt Israel will again be subject to worldwide condemnation as it yet again fights for its very life.
Israel will be subject to the new tropes of anti-Semitism extending 2,000 years of lies and hatred of Jews. It will be claimed that Jews are the “new Nazis” and that Gaza or the West Bank is the “new Auschwitz” and that Palestinians are the “new victims.” When that happens I shall again stand with Jews and Israel against the 2,000-year-old forces of darkness and hate, all the while feeling the weight of my necklace. It is what I must do.
yamit82 Said:
In Shmuel Am Yisrael demanded a king. This applies to FOREVER.
Moshiakh is the core of the tree, the pith
keelie Said:
I can’t seem to see the original post
What needs to be understood is that history is not a straight ‘timeline’ of events. In fact, at least in the history of the People Israel, history is a cyclical phenomena, and it repeats itself, though with significant variation.
However, this was recognised early, and for this reason much of the ‘future’ is already ‘written’, but not yet understood.
Having said that, the ‘devil is in the detail’ as the proverb goes. Worse, where this detail is pointed out by HaZaL, it is only done ONCE, so if it is missed, it stays missed. Much of this ‘historical detail’ is in the aggadata, which has largely been ignored by the ‘orthodox’ learning methodology over the past three centuries at least. Halakha is in fact the commentary to the aggadata, so the context for comprehension is entirely lost. The result is that people do things, but don’t understand why.
This has a significant impact on answering questions about Moshiakh because in the first place the language and MODALITY of thinking about aggadata is not logical but ‘literary’. However, if succeeding generations of bokhrim have been indoctrinated in thinking like Greeks (logic), they are incapable of making the cognitive ‘leap’ to the intuitive faculty required to deal with non-logical interpretations.
Moshiakh will not come from within the ranks of the orthodox. Very simply because the two most obvious previous Moshiakhs, Moshe Rabbeinu (a halakhic melekh though a Levi) and David HaMelekh did not come from the ‘obvious’ places in society.
Since we know that Moshiakh will be from shevet Yehuda, we can discount the Moshe ‘model’, that leaves us with David. Learn the live of David, and that will answer some questions.
We certainly know though that Moshiakh will fight wars. What the nature of these wars are is speculative, but the ‘orthodox’ CHOOSE the most obtuse explanation that suits them, that the wars will be ‘spiritual’. Why they choose to go for a sod-level explanation if they demand peshat for almost everything else is another question, but in fact they fail as ‘spiritual warfare’ also, and of course in every sod there is an element of peshat, so to know ‘spiritual warfare’ one has to have some understanding of warfare in the conventional sense. Will Moshiakh be a former IDF CoS newly conscripted by some political party? No. See David’s entry onto the leadership scene via his challenge of Goliath. He did it without a plan, and barely with any intention. It was his “Choosing the hard right over the easy wrong.” Yet closer analysis of that contest, something I found done by a non-Jew, reveals that he was a consummate professional, and in engaging Goliath left nothing to chance. David at 13 armed with a sling COULD NOT HAVE LOST THE FIGHT with Goliath, yet the conventional effect is WOW a 13 year old with a sling overcame a giant champion of the Philistines. He fulfilled the prophecy then and there since Philistines fled, and no lesson was learned from his victory, i.e. men did not learn warfare.
Will he do all the work we need to do?
I don’t know how you define work, but HaZaL defines it as the activities required to build the bet HaMikdash. However, these activities are not well understood, and not understood at all in th eaggadic sense.
Much of the ‘work’ will be done by Moshiakh as was the case with Moshe and David. By the time the assembly phase is required, he will be apparent to everyone, so no convincing will be required. People will do the work willingly, and fully cognisant of what they are doing because it will become obvious even to the least fit individual.
However, the work leading up to the building is arduous. Consider what Moshe and David had to go through to get to that phase. In the case of Moshe, consider a child of a slave, having killed a prominent American in the early 19th century, returning after the Civil War to demand from the President to allow all the descendents of African slaves to leave after they get reimburse for work and damages.
Or, consider some ROTC cadet applying for the job of the Secretary of Defence after he fortuitously manages to kill a would be terrorist.
@ ronnutter:
bernard ross Said:
Let me explain
From my perspective were someone to belong to a neo nazi or nazi movement I would immediately associate that persons membership with the past behavior of that club…. the same with the KKK. Strangely, neither christians nor Jews have the same reaction. It is automatically assumed that past members of the club who subscribed to the same ideology were simply misinformed, as if there were no institutional or structural defect, and not true believers like the current members.. However, personally I find this approach strange as I would normally expect moral people NOT to associate with clubs who have displayed such an unusually long immoral turpitude. I do not understand the logic, why not disband those clubs voluntarily and instead form new ones. For me it is absurd to state that “we are the NEW nazi party and are completely different from the old nazis”, or the new KKK who says they will now admit blacks and Jews. That’s how it appears from where I am standing. The question arises as to why a decent person would want to associate with that history? It becomes a bigger question when we observe the same behavior emerging again but simply, like the past, displaying new rationalizations for the aberrant behavior rather than the old ones. Everything else is the same.
Mr. Nutter is beginning to sound like John Irving. Now there’s some sophism for you!
“If you apply my test you will see that many of those claiming to be anti zionists ARE in fact anti semites. Furthermore, it borders on the absurd to separate Jews from Israel as it is at the core of the collective.”
Bravo, Mr. Ross. Well said. How’s that for “simplistic”?!
Quigley, you’re not half the man Yamit is. He’d kick your grass-fed ass all over the Negev. I heard they’ll be burning a lot of Trotsky’s books in Cuba in the next few days.
ronnutter Said:
My test is whether they apply double standards to Israel or Jews which they do not apply to other nations. If you apply my test you will see that many of those claiming to be anti zionists ARE in fact anti semites. Furthermore, it borders on the absurd to separate Jews from Israel as it is at the core of the collective.
ronnutter Said:
Yes, both have been participants and both continue to be participants. Although there are differences in these components in their dogmas they have exhibited similar behaviors in their relations with jews.
ronnutter Said:
although there are differences and exceptions between individuals and collectives it would be inaccurate NOT to recognize the collective similarities vs relations with Jews. This appears to have been a point of agreement. I believe that protestant sects have incited to the same murder and pogroms and today the protestant BDS mainstream churches are in the forefront of double standard anti semitism which they like to endow with the fig leaf of anti zionism. Anti zionism IS anti semitism and anti Israelism is also usually anti semitism as it is usually based on either outright lies or double standards.
ronnutter Said:
Actually, I disagree. There is no analogous behavior on the part of the Haredi or reform Jews. It is not a discussion of the ideology but rather a discussion of behavior. the relationship of the church to the Jews is unusual and abnormal but also of interest is the relation of church members to their church and behavior. There appears to be a disconnect, which I believe to be denial, between church ideology and dogma and the aberrant behavior. I am specifically discussing the church as a collective and their behavior over 2000 years towards the Jews. What is most important is NOT to focus on the exceptions and anomalies in this regard because there has in fact been no hiatus to this behavior on a collective basis. Through the centuries there has been less and more, intense and not, many churches and fewer churches but the totality is important because it has never ended. It is not of interest to avoid “totalizing” or generalizing because we would then be missing the extent of the behavior exhibited and its relation to the ideology. What is most disturbing to me is that the church still views itself as a moral class which to me from my perspective is ludicrous. I find it strange that anyone would want to belong to orgs and dogmas associated so serially with such behavior. The fact that it continues under the current fig leaves should give rise to a wondering. the rationalizations for the behavior are merely the same as the denial of a victim of addiction. I see similarities between the apparently serial chronic behavior and study of preponderance towards specific diseases, both physical and psychological, in modern-day genetics. The presence of certain genes does not necessitate the disease emerging but rather a percentage of inclination towards the disease.
“I argued that the latter argument was certainly better than that of mrg3105, but that it, too, was too simplistic.”
Actually, Mr. Nutter, meticulous historians and the murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators makes it very simple to delineate Christianity’s implicit role in that genocide. You wrote a nice piece, but it’s not real history. It’s an attempt to patch up an irremediable offense against the Jewish people. Sorry to tell you this, but that’s the way it is.
“Beliefs about Jews thus do not necessarily change more easily than do Christian precepts that have helped and continue to help people define and negotiate the social world. Indeed, in some ways, antisemitism has proven more durable. For much of western history, it was virtually impossible to be a Christian without being an antisemite of some stripe, without thinking ill of the people who rejected and reject Jesus and thus the moral order of the world derived from his teachings, from his revealed words. This is especially the case since Christians held the Jews responsible for Jesus’ death.” -Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, from ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’
@ yamit82:
Thanks for the video, yamit82. He does bring up a movement which troubles me greatly. Though not quite what I referred to as the “wacko Hagee” types, they are certainly in the same bailywick. That seminary course I took in seminary with Dr. Williamson and the rabbi, a student in later years who took the course with a different rabbi, a Conservative rabbi, went later to that rabbi and asked to be converted to Judaism. He talked her out of it saying, among other things, that Judaism didn’t need more Jews, but rather more Christians like Clark Williamson. I’d like to think I am in that tradition with Clark. And FYI, when I taught my course I used an Orthodox rabbi. He spoke in the first few classes about Jewish beliefs and practices. Then my classes were on the anti-Jewish rhetoric and legislation and practices a la what Bernard Ross just mentioned, before classes on Hitler’s rise and the Shoah. I would bring the Orthodox rabbi back for final couple of classes so students, now a bit more aware, could ask their questions of him. He and I would, at times, start debating differences between Christianity and Judaism. What I hoped my students saw was two religious traditions, each worthy of respect despite (I know this will sound weak to you) previous bad actions, and that they can each respectfully stand and speak with each other knowledgeably, passionately, and fully engaged in truly listening to the other. That, ultimately, is what I wanted my students to witness after learning what they did in class. Thanks again for the video. best, ron
@ honeybee:
This is a serious question???
Felix has been around here, off-&-on, for a long time, Twink.
— How do you suppose he came across the info — carrier pigeon?
You are an integral part of that clique (more like a posse, actually) — perhaps that’s why its existence isn’t so readily apparent to you.
@ bernard ross:
Thanks for a very good post. You’ve given me something to think about in my “shorthand.” Best, ron
keelie Said:
I can’t seem to see the original post
What needs to be understood is that history is not a straight ‘timeline’ of events. In fact, at least in the history of the People Israel, history is a cyclical phenomena, and it repeats itself, though with significant variation.
However, this was recognised early, and for this reason much of the ‘future’ is already ‘written’, but not yet understood.
Having said that, the ‘devil is in the detail’ as the proverb goes. Worse, where this detail is pointed out by HaZaL, it is only done ONCE, so if it is missed, it stays missed. Much of this ‘historical detail’ is in the aggadata, which has largely been ignored by the ‘orthodox’ learning methodology over the past three centuries at least. Halakha is in fact the commentary to the aggadata, so the context for comprehension is entirely lost. The result is that people do things, but don’t understand why.
This has a significant impact on answering questions about Moshiakh because in the first place the language and MODALITY of thinking about aggadata is not logical but ‘literary’. However, if succeeding generations of bokhrim have been indoctrinated in thinking like Greeks (logic), they are incapable of making the cognitive ‘leap’ to the intuitive faculty required to deal with non-logical interpretations.
Moshiakh will not come from within the ranks of the orthodox. Very simply because the two most obvious previous Moshiakhs, Moshe Rabbeinu (a halakhic melekh though a Levi) and David HaMelekh did not come from the ‘obvious’ places in society.
Since we know that Moshiakh will be from shevet Yehuda, we can discount the Moshe ‘model’, that leaves us with David. Learn the live of David, and that will answer some questions.
We certainly know though that Moshiakh will fight wars. What the nature of these wars are is speculative, but the ‘orthodox’ CHOOSE the most obtuse explanation that suits them, that the wars will be ‘spiritual’. Why they choose to go for a sod-level explanation if they demand peshat for almost everything else is another question, but in fact they fail as ‘spiritual warfare’ also, and of course in every sod there is an element of peshat, so to know ‘spiritual warfare’ one has to have some understanding of warfare in the conventional sense. Will Moshiakh be a former IDF CoS newly conscripted by some political party? No. See David’s entry onto the leadership scene via his challenge of Goliath. He did it without a plan, and barely with any intention. It was his “Choosing the hard right over the easy wrong.” Yet closer analysis of that contest, something I found done by a non-Jew, reveals that he was a consummate professional, and in engaging Goliath left nothing to chance. David at 13 armed with a sling COULD NOT HAVE LOST THE FIGHT with Goliath, yet the conventional effect is WOW a 13 year old with a sling overcame a giant champion of the Philistines. He fulfilled the prophecy then and there since Philistines fled, and no lesson was learned from his victory, i.e. men did not learn warfare.
Will he do all the work we need to do?
I don’t know how you define work, but HaZaL defines it as the activities required to build the bet HaMikdash. However, these activities are not well understood, and not understood at all in th eaggadic sense.
Much of the ‘work’ will be done by Moshiakh as was the case with Moshe and David. By the time the assembly phase is required, he will be apparent to everyone, so no convincing will be required. People will do the work willingly, and fully cognisant of what they are doing because it will become obvious even to the least fit individual.
However, the work leading up to the building is arduous. Consider what Moshe and David had to go through to get to that phase. In the case of Moshe, consider a child of a slave, having killed a prominent American in the early 19th century, returning after the Civil War to demand from the President to allow all the descendents of African slaves to leave after they get reimburse for work and damages.
Or, consider some ROTC cadet applying for the job of the Secretary of Defence after he fortuitously manages to kill a would be terrorist.
Felix Quigley Said:
How did you find this information ???
@ ronnutter:
I hope you like this video as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NUylyDsE-c
ronnutter Said:
thank you for your good wishes and I wish you and your family a Happy Christmas.
ronnutter Said:
I understand the need for shorthand but perhaps I can suggest what I consider to be a more accurately descriptive shorthand. “The Church’s teaching of contempt for Jews”
seems to me to be highly understated as an overall description of a 2000 year record of a relationship and I believe it would be more accurate to state a shorthand phrase as follows, or similarly:
“The Church’s serial libel and slaughter of the Jews” or
“The church’s 2000 years libel, swindling, torture and murder of the Jews”
these phrases are about the same length but make it clear that it is not just a matter of an educational or theological curriculum but a series of direct acts perpetrated serially over an enormously long time AND that these acts are of a consistently heinous nature.
I fear that you choice of shorthand tends to minimize the church’s role in the decimation of the Jewish people which you yourself have enumerated. In fact, I believe that such understatement is part of the ongoing problem of the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people and not necessarily todays membership and the Jewish people.
I feel that the “church” has not honestly met their responsibility and normally expected duties for the damage they caused. It appears to me that for the most part the church has simply acknowledged that perhaps the Jewish people are not as bad as they have painted them for 2000 years and that a continuation of those curriculums are unneccessary to Christianity. However, when considering that the church generally markets itself as a moral force I am surprised at the lack of “owning up” and “making right” which they likely exhort of their following. The church has not clearly presented to their members the horrific and despicable facts of what they did and the relentless evil of their endeavors. the US teaches their children of the evils of slavery committed by the US and its citizens to a much greater extent than the church. The US has attempted to take responsibility for the damage created with specific programs such as affirmative action. I see nothing like this of the churches, it’s as if merely acknowledging the minimum and moving on is enough. Even nazi germany has embarked on some concrete ways to help the Jews in acknowledgement of their past, which they don’t whitewash or understate. However, I see the church do almost nothing and many of those that do are doing it for selfish reasons. In fact, the Vatican still hides the truth in their vaults and still attempts to swindle the Jews out of their homeland while BDS church’s substitute anti zionism for their perennial replacement theology habits of anti semitism. Instead of helping the jews decimated by their churches they mainly either do nothing or continue their despicable habits. Hardly, the moral path after committing those crimes in the past.
@ mrg3105:
Felix is a Commie do you have those in Australia?
mrg3105 Said:
Are you fishing maybe trolling????
@ yamit82:
Correction it should read Shuvot not TShuvot.
Felix Quigley Said:
He?! And apparently gender-confused also.
ronnutter Said:
No Ron, its not a spelling mistake. The names of some individuals are corrupted in Jewish culture on purpose…the reason Ham!@#$an’s name is shouted down and stomped over during th ereading of the Megilla
And I’m telling you that NO economic model works without some pre-existing way to fund economic policy. I.e. it takes money to make money. Regardless of Schacht’s wholehearted acceptance of Keynes and the implementation of it in the Reich economy, the funding came predominantly from Jewish liquid funds and divested or stolen property.
And, what is worse, everyone knew it since the German central bank effectively defaulted on the US loans earlier, so the French, the British and certainly the Americans knew there was no money in Germany, yet, voila! suddenly there was. And the first to find out HOW this economic ‘miracle’ happened were the Swiss.
mrg3105 Said:
In Halacha T’Shuvot (Responsa) are more authoritative.
@ mrg3105:
33. And no longer shall one teach his neighbor or [shall] one [teach] his brother, saying, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know Me from their smallest to their greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will no longer remember. Jer, 31:33
@ bernard ross:
It’s not clear to me what you are “correcting.” I endorse most all of what you write here. That’s, in part, what my essay was about. In context, the little snippet you quoted from me was in a much, much longer post (#50 in the “earlier posts” page) arguing that M Devolin and keelie, along with mrg3105 earlier, all had explanations for the Shoah that were too reductionist. Mrg3105 said it happened because Hitler wanted to steal the Jews’ money to rebuild the army while M Devolin and keelie argued the Church’s teaching about Jews let Hitler know he could get away with it. I argued that the latter argument was certainly better than that of mrg3105, but that it, too, was too simplistic. Fact is, to my way of thinking, there were other factors as well to be considered when trying to explain the Shoah. I mentioned Hitler’s political ideology, racial theories popular at the time, and the teaching of eugenics. There are other factors as well. Bottom line, the Church’s teaching and actions against Jews along with these other factors were in confluence to bring about the Shoah. I am well aware of the Church’s teaching and actions against Jews. You may be interested in knowing the essay Ted published is a short version; the longer version gives chapter and verse of anti-Jewish rhetoric and legislative action against the Jews. I only pulled out Luther’s anti-Semitic tract and the Fourth Lateran Council in the essay you read. The longer version has extensive quotations from early Church leaders and many examples of the anti-Jewish legislation of the church. I also talk in the longer version about the killing of Jews carried out in the name of the Church. So trust me, I am well aware of the history. And I certainly do not mean to slight that history by responding to M Devolin and keelie the way that I did. Fact is, one can’t enumerate everything that can be said each time reference is made to the subject. One needs a shorthand way of expressing it. My shorthand way is to talk about the Church’s teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism. Hope that helps.
The only caution I would make to your comment is when you write: “The church is still active in the defaming, delegitimization (sic), libeling and swindling of the Jewish people and Israel AND fund and support those actively engaged in killing Jews through a network of NGO’s.” My test for those who claim not to be anti-Semitic but rather anti-Zionist is if, when pressed, they start talking about “the Jews” in the collective. Be careful when using totalizing terms like that, it melts individuals with all sorts of views and perspectives into one big stereotype. When you write the church (little c) are you including Protestant as well as Catholic? When I wrote the Church I capitalized it to note Catholic, also denoting the Church’s history of anti-Jewish teaching and acts. That’s not to diminish the anti-Jewish teachings of Protestant churches, to be very clear, but only in talking about the history of anti-Jewish rhetoric and activity, most of which occurred before the Protestant churches began. I may need to re-think that. After all, Hitler, while Catholic, lived in a sea of Lutheranism. Anyway, to totalize the “church” in the way you have is simply not true. Does the Presbyterian Church USA act in the way you describe? Arguably so. Does the Presbyterian Church US? Absolutely not. Does the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America act in the way you describe? Arguably so. Does the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod? Absolutely not. In general, the churches you describe tend to be “progressive” and “liberal” churches, and likely members of the World Council of Churches. More conservative churches — and I’m not talking about those wacko Hagee kinds of churches that support Israel only to get to the end times – do support Israel and do not engage in the activities of which you write. It would be as if I totalized all Jews for the views and actions of the Haredi, or, conversely, if I argued all synagogues acted like Reform synagogues. Hopefully you get my point. A simple solution like “some churches . . .” and then go on with your post and you would be absolutely right. My best wishes to you, Bernard.
WB Said:
But I didn’t. Mostly the concept of a messiah King was an interpolation based on the times, Prophesy and national and spiritual longing.
“Rav Nachman asked Rav Yitzhak, ‘have you heard when Bar Nafli will come? ’Rav Yitzhak asked, ‘who is Bar Nafli’…Rav Yitzhak said, the Messiah” [Sanhedrin 96b]
In the culminating of the three pilgrim feasts, all Israel unite to re-experience and affirm the teachings in the wilderness and to affirm that they will raise et Sukkat David HaNofelet, “the fallen booth of David” (Amos 9:11). From this verse the Mishnaic sage Rav Nachman derives a nickname of messiah (above).
@ WB:
superbus stultus!!!!!!
“Eloquent lips are unsuited to a godless fool– how much worse lying lips to a ruler!” Prov 17:7
Joseph Albo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Albo
mrg3105 Said:
write and put into “heart” and “inner parts”? Write into DNA?
Felix Quigley Said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlV3oQ3pLA0
ronnutter Said:
Two thousand years of defamation, delegitimization, libeling, swindling, torturing, slaughtering, revising Jewish writings and scripture, burning Jewish writings, etc etc etc is a great deal more than “church’s teaching of contempt”. A teaching and serial behavior are horses of a different color. Teaching contempt is not the same as killing, which is indeed a proactive behavior. The church is still active in the defaming, delegitimization, libeling and swindling of the Jewish people and Israel AND fund and support those actively engaged in killing Jews through a network of NGO’s. They clothe their despicable behaviors in a fig leaf of “humanitarianism” but their narratives, as usual, are based on lies.
yamit82 Said:
yamit82 – Interesting how you both negate and affirm in the same paragraph. Talmudic Sophistry. I’m not so sure you’re 100% correct in what you say; but I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to pilpul this with you much further. Would be more productive to pull taffy – but nobody does this anymore.
Doesn’t really matter anyhow. We’re not talking about a ‘savior’ (moshiach) but about a mashiach – a descendant of King David who will be annointed with oil and take the position of King in the restored Malchut. All the elements of this Malchut are repeated three times daily in the Shemona Esrei. The point is there will be a Kingdom, consisting of a King, Sanhedrin, and Temple.
Jerimiah 23:5 says:
Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will raise unto David a righteous shoot, and he shall reign as king and prosper, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. (quote from mechon-mamre online)
I admit I don’t know anything about the Rabbi you mention, and I’m not motivated to learn anything about him simply because of the insulting thing he says about Mashiach! Does he reject RaMBaM’s 13 Principles? Did he pray the Shemona Esrei? Is he, by chance, a Rabbi who told European Jews not to worry about the things Jabotinsky and others were warning about?
Whatever the case, at least you personally acknowledge (if only rhetorically) we’re supposed to have a King, although I think you’ll be among those who fiercely oppose him. I’m sure you know we’re not talking about a king like the one in Saudi Arabia, or other such places… but it seems this is the only way that most people think when we say the word ‘king’.
Always interesting to see your acerbic point of view. Other Latin words come to mind…. dolosus … tenebris. Non serviam!
@ WB:
None of the prophets in the Scriptures ever foretold the coming of a “messiah”. But they did prophesy that one day G-d will give back to Israel what He took away from us in the year 586BCE: our Temple, our sovereignty and independence, and our Monarchy.
The Jewish concept of the Messianic age is a Utopian ideal but..? According to R. Yosef Albo [Sefer HaIkkarim), If Judaism is likened to a tree, the messiah is not even a twig in relative importance.
mrg3105 Said:
At one time in our collective history, Torah-based learning centers competed with the Greeks. I can’t remember specifically when this was happening, but am certain it did.
It would be interesting to find out if the Greeks learned the art of sophistry from Jews, or if it were the other way ’round. Perhaps Zeno studied in one of the Jewish academies.
Whatever the case, it’s for sure a fact that Jews have spent more time splitting hairs, creating dialectical arguments, and engaging in sophistry and paradox than in any other general activity. Some interesting stuff has come from this… such as Shabbatai Zvi and Jacob Frank. But also other, more Torah-respectful things too.
But, at this time in our history, perhaps it’s time we found a way to get back to practical, reality-oriented thinking. You know… solving problems instead of finding more ways of perpetuating the problems we face.
Of course, living in Israel for a few years shows that this tendency to say the opposite of whatever somebody else says, or to find a minor error and turn it into a major flaw is a National habit… the Hilloni, Dati, Haredi all have mastered the art of ‘dog-in-a-mangering’ everything.
Moshiach is and always has been with us in every generation. One day, we’ll be mature enough to deserve acknowledging him and doing our part in restoring the Malchut. Until then….
@ mrg3105 #49:
Why? Kind of glib not to give a moderately rational explanation… What do you expect to happen? Where will the “Messiah” come from? Will he do all the work we need to do? Do you know something that the rest of us don’t?
@ Ted Belman:
Nicely done, Ted. Useful and interesting. Perhaps you’ll expand the essay and include more information. It would be a great documentary if only somebody would make it.
One question… you use the term ‘Palestine’ when referring to events before this name was forced upon the world by Emperor Hadrian after the nearly-successful Bar Kokhba rebellion (the last time we had real Jewish warriors until the time of Jabotinsky, Begin, and Stern). You’re usually doing things deliberately, and I wonder what purpose you had in applying this term in this manner.
Thank you.
@ WB #47:
I agree totally with what you say. People are people and they are subject to their own biases. If the “Messiah” does not conform to their idea of how he should look, what he should say, or even whether he supports the Ashkenazi/purely Halachic or, say, the Sephardic approach, those who feel slighted will take “appropriate action”.
The fact is, as you say, people want a magician and they want him to conform to their fantasies.
Mrg 3105
Yamit is not only a notorious insulter he is also as slippery as an eel and a seeker after truth to him is a foreign concept. As he loses his lies become more frantic. But careful he also operates a clique here
@ mrg3105:
Hi mrg3105. You wrote in reply #6 above, “So how would Hitrel (sic), writing in 1924-25 would know what the Keynesian economics are about?” I didn’t write anything about what Hitler did or did not know about Keynesian economics. What I wrote was that the economic recovery had to do with the work of Hjelmut Schacht, Hitler’s Minister of Economics in the 1930s, which were broadly Keynesian. Keynes published his influential book THE MEANS TO PROSPERITY in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. Germany, through Schacht, made use of Keynesian policies in Germany. Keynes’s greatest work, THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY was published in 1936. Did Hitler understand any of it? I doubt it. I don’t think any of the Nazis understood economics. But Schacht, who was not a member of the NSDAP, did understand, and he read Keynes, and he advocated and applied Keynesian principles.
You wrote, “Of course the actual looting started after Kristalnacht, and the slave labour later still as an economic necessity pointed out by Speer.” Exactly! Kristallnacht occurred in November, 1938. Schacht publicly repudiated the actions of Nazis that night. By then, he had already left his ministerial position, urged to do so by Goering, who apparently thought he could do better. By then, Schacht had already helped “right the ship” of the German economy. Certainly, as you say, Jewish property and wealth were confiscated, but that was but one of many factors sustaining the German economy and, as you write, it came later than the policies instituted by Schacht.
You are absolutely right to say I am not an economist. Personally, I can hardly imagine a more dreary pursuit. That said, I have to know something about economics to do what I do. I wrote the paragraph of mine which you highlighted in response to your claim that the reason Hitler killed the Jews was to steal their money to regenerate the army. Schacht’s policies had already done that by the time Hitler started pillaging Jews. I wrote that in the context, which is what the rest of my post was about, that the explanatory cause of the Shoah is not a simple one. It cannot be reduced to simply wanting to steal the wealth and property of Jews as you suggested, and it cannot be reduced to simply the Church’s teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism as M Devolin and Keelie suggested. I wrote about several factors, including Hitler’s political ideology, theories of race prevalent at the time, and the teaching of eugenics as social policy.
Have a good day.
mrg3105 Said:
@ mrg3105:
Hi mrg3105. You wrote in reply #6 above, “So how would Hitrel (sic), writing in 1924-25 would know what the Keynesian economics are about?” I didn’t write anything about what Hitler did or did not know about Keynesian economics. What I wrote was that the economic recovery had to do with the work of Hjelmut Schacht, Hitler’s Minister of Economics in the 1930s, which were broadly Keynesian. Keynes published his influential book THE MEANS TO PROSPERITY in 1933, the same year Hitler came to power. Germany, through Schacht, made use of Keynesian policies in Germany. Keynes’s greatest work, THE GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST AND MONEY was published in 1936. Did Hitler understand any of it? I doubt it. I don’t think any of the Nazis understood economics. But Schacht, who was not a member of the NSDAP, did understand, and he read Keynes, and he advocated and applied Keynesian principles.
You wrote, “Of course the actual looting started after Kristalnacht, and the slave labour later still as an economic necessity pointed out by Speer.” Exactly! Kristallnacht occurred in November, 1938. Schacht publicly repudiated the actions of Nazis that night. By then, he had already left his ministerial position, urged to do so by Goering, who apparently thought he could do better. By then, Schacht had already helped “right the ship” of the German economy. Certainly, as you say, Jewish property and wealth were confiscated, but that was but one of many factors sustaining the German economy and, as you write, it came later than the policies instituted by Schacht.
You are absolutely right to say I am not an economist. Personally, I can hardly imagine a more dreary pursuit. That said, I have to know something about economics to do what I do. I wrote the paragraph of mine which you highlighted in response to your claim that the reason Hitler killed the Jews was to steal their money to regenerate the army. Schacht’s policies had already done that by the time Hitler started pillaging Jews. I wrote that in the context, which is what the rest of my post was about, that the explanatory cause of the Shoah is not a simple one. It cannot be reduced to simply wanting to steal the wealth and property of Jews as you suggested, and it cannot be reduced to simply the Church’s teaching of contempt for Jews and Judaism as M Devolin and Kellie suggested. I wrote about several factors, including Hitler’s political ideology, theories of race prevalent at the time, and the teaching of eugenics as social policy.
Have a good day.
FYI I hadn’t looked in RaMBaM for at least a decade.
It is because I am “for real” that I tend to disregard RamBaM who, perhaps necessarily, because he was already part of the generations that lost mesorah entirely. IMHO RaSh’I was the last ‘spark’ of those pre-sevaraim generations, but he chose to ‘hide’ his thoughts in peshat…
Now if you were ‘for real’, you would cite HaZa’L, not mikra
@ mrg3105:
You found it easily enough and if you were for real you would have known without checking. 😉
yamit82 Said:
You should include attribution for anything not your own, i.e. the above to here
If you posted this for my benefit, I wonder why?
In any case, I have always been closer to RaMBaN’s POV
In any case, NOTHING is obvious
yamit82 Said:
Its not a minhag Yamit82, its mikra. Devarim 28:13
You will need to figure out how to talk with me off this forum for more.
‘Symbolic’ foods are not so simple as most people think. Its not for nothing that service in the bet HaMikdash was completed through consumption. When mekaballim changed the minhag from a ram’s head (consider the symbolism of that) to the fish, they MEANT something. Even in the choice of the fish species, they MEANT something, etc.
Its a delicacy not because someone likes minced fish, but because one UNDERSTANDS how to consume food…among other things. I wonder if the chief rabbi of Israel has ever observed Pesakh as intended.
yamit82 Said:
But you are Yehudi, so why say ‘Bible’?
And did you ever ask yourself why “Jews always disagreed…and interpreted Jewish scriptures in many ways”?
Schlepping is only difficult if you are from the United States where people drive to a minyan…all of three blocks, and complain they couldn’t get a parking right outside the door.
Wrong
Which website did you copy and paste from?
This is the ‘received wisdom’…NOT.
Like I’m supposed to accept this as a ‘gospel’ 😉
NT is the most edited set of texts in European history. Some suggest that editing didn’t stop until printing was invented because scribes were continuously blamed for ‘errors’ and ‘authentic’ copies sent to various parts of Christendom from Rome.
Isn’t there something in the forum rules about not insulting people?
And which part of what I said is ‘nonsense’?
@ mrg3105:
@ yamit82:
No “Christian source” makes either such claim.
The gospels certainly say nothing of the sort.
What the gospels DO say is that his family SAID to a gathering mob that he was “beside himself” (i.e., distraught, which is QUITE different from ‘mad’). [Mk 3:21]
More importantly, you cannot make the assumption that what they said to quell what clearly appeared to them an evident catastrophe in the making necessarily constitutes what they THEMSELVES actually believed about Jesus.
ronnutter Said:
Ron, evidently you are not an economist. Let me introduce you to an economic concept called “Show me the money”.
So how would Hitrel, writing in 1924-25 would know what the Keynesian economics are about? In fact we know that initially the plan was to recruit Jews to the Nazi cause, but this mostly failed.
After this the plan emerged very rapidly. Since much of the Nazi party included people who were otherwise failures in the society, the idea of stealing appealed. The JUSTIFICATION came later, and the CAMOUFLAGE in the shape of the Keynesian economics later still. Of course the actual looting started after Kristalnacht, and the slave labour later still as an economic necessity pointed out by Speer.
In the end though, when in the late 20s the Nazi Party entered mainstream politics, they had to grapple with the very simple question of funds. Germany was broke because much of th eAmerican loans were invested in capital, i.e. rebuilding the production facilities and machinery after the First World War, and not buying American (which is why the Great Depression happened). There was no pay-off in the short term, so borrowing was out of the question. Fortunatelly the Jews were known to keep large amounts of cash in banks based on the Talmudic financial advice, and Nazis were able to identify this via some early banking recruits. Here were funds, aka “the cash”, just sitting there doing nothing as far as the Nazis were concerned. The Jews were ‘sitting on their cash’ while Germans starved. Ergo ‘bad Jews.’
mrg3105 Said:
We do in Israel. Considered by some a delicacy. May not know the history or the reasons but it’s in some Jewish sects considered a tradition.
Still what’s your point???
mrg3105 Said:
Once all of the books and writing of the Tanach were canonized it’s proper in our colloquial discourse to call the Tanach the bible. Knowledgeable Jews understand it does not include the christian bible. I don’t care what gentiles think.
Jews always disagreed and either interpreted Jewish scriptures in many ways. I daon’t think there was ever a time when there was consesus about anything even the Temple and sacrifices. Jews built forbidden alters all over the place. Schlepping up to Jerusalem 3 times a year for most Jews was extreme hardship and I suspect most stayed home.
Ten northern tribes turned to pagan idol worship and split
So most of it is understood and there is almost no controversy over their plain text meanings others are still debated but we Jews have always used hermeneutics not to be cofused with christian hermeneutics. Differences are like night and day fire and water etc.
“Talmudical hermeneutics refers to Jewish methods for the investigation and determination of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible, as well as rules by which Jewish law could be established. One well-known summary of these principles appears in the Baraita of Rabbi Ishmael.
Methods by which the Talmud explores the meaning of scripture:
grammar and exegesis
the interpretation of certain words and letters and apparently superfluous and/or missing words or letters, and prefixes and suffixes
the interpretation of those letters which, in certain words, are provided with points
the interpretation of the letters in a word according to their numerical value (see Gema?ria)
the interpretation of a word by dividing it into two or more words (see No?ari?on)
the interpretation of a word according to its consonantal form or according to its vocalization
the interpretation of a word by transposing its letters or by changing its vowels
the logical deduction of a halakah from a Scriptural text or from another law
The rabbis of the Talmud considered themselves to be the receivers and transmitters of an Oral law as to the meaning of the scriptures. They considered this oral tradition to set forth the precise, original meanings of the words, revealed at the same time and by the same means as the original scriptures themselves. Interpretive methods listed above such as word play and letter counting were never used” as logical proof of the meaning or teaching of a scripture. Instead they were considered to be an asmakhta, a validation of a meaning that was already set by tradition or a homiletic backing for rabbinic rulings.
mrg3105 Said:
21″Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.
22You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.
23Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.
24God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.
26Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you–I am he.”
mrg3105 enough of your nonsense…What are you a Hebrew roots christian?
Ted Belman Said:
Not sure its my best shot, but ‘christ’ is not Greek for Meshiakh. khriein is the etymological root in Greek that means “to rub, anoint”, and in Russian is used verbatum, but in a culinary sense as Khren, what one puts on gefiltefish. There is a message here because the rabbis that translated were well aware of the etymology being derived from here ??? ?? ?????? ?????????? ???????, ??? ?? ??????? ??? ??????? ?????? ???????, ??? ???????? ????? ?????? (Theofrast) and refers to horseradish. The message is that for those that are not true claimants to the Malkhut such ‘anointing’ would lead to tears and bitterness. Gefiltefish is a medieval tradition that replaced the ram’s head with that of a fish at the Pesakh Seder seuda, with the head of the family taking the fish-head which is the part anointed first. While the cooking of gefiltefish is fairly well lost on most modern Jewish families, those that retain it will know that the head is NOT stuffed with mince, and has virtually no value as far as consumption is concerned; just a lot of bones as one would expect.
Saying “May we be at the head, and not at the tail” takes on a whole new meaning in this context. Most people will expect to be served the mid-sections. Most modern Jews, certainly in the USA have never had a real gefiltefish!
Ram’s head is worse since unlike the fish bones, the skull is not digestible. What remains edible are the cheeks and the tongue. And why can’t the kosher consumer buy the cheeks and ram’s tongue? Because usually they are taken by the shokhet since they are not ‘standard cuts’. The brain, also consumable, is discarded! All this will seem like semantics to a Christian, but its the sort of deeper symbolism and thinking about things Jewishly that epitomises the HaZa’L conversations. It is virtually impossible to translate literally or even to teach.
The problem with translation is that it is LITERAL of the mashah “anoint”, but the actual word and context are not understood, and are NOT to be literally interpreted.
You say that the two words don’t have the same meaning, but this is an understatement since meaning is derived from context, and here the two are so distanced as to be not even cognitively appropriate. The rabbis that did translation understood not only the Greek language, but also the Greek mind.
‘Christ’ is therefore a pun, and a warning.
Warning has a halakhic value.
yamit82 Said:
The ‘Bible’ says nothing. TaNa’Kh is something else.
One of the tragedies of galut is that ‘Jews’ have actually stopped thinking ‘Jewishly’ and therefore struggle to understand their ancestors who did.
Its the Seventh Bet HaMikdash…
Its construction is not understood because the navim struggled to understand what they envisioned for lack of a frame of reference. Therefore understanding the nevua statements is also very difficult. It’s like seeing something you have never seen before as a reflection in a clouded mirror.
Is that what it says?
Again, literalism is something Greeks use, not Jews…
However, this is literally true now! No army uses swords in warfare, and no one understands war.
So not actually united as ‘one’ because all of Humanity is not going to convert to Torah observance, are they?
Actually it says ben David, which doesn’t only mean ‘son’, but also ‘like’. The literalism again fails. In the immediate aftermath of the spread of Christianity to barbarians virtually every ‘royal’ house in Europe assembled a lineage to show how its king was a direct descendant from David haMelekh!
Picking out passages and quoting them out of context was a technique which evolved during the debates that prominent Jews were forced into before the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ was minted. The Church of course got it from the Talmud, but ChaZaL doesn’t use TaNaKh for statements (start of discussion), but rather as proofs (end of discussion)
This is an assumption again based in literalism. The conception of ‘king’ in Christianity is very different
But did ‘Jesus’ ever claim to be Messiah? The Church, in developing its dogma and doctrine took a lot form the Jewish culture, but they missed a lot also, if only because some of these concepts were not part of the mainstream learning.
Consider Christianity as something like high school curricula without the final year. Understanding the Mashiakh concepts is probably beyond PhD. There is an unbridgeable gap in understanding
@ WB:I linked the title to the article.Just click on it.
I had an interest in antisemitism and that brought me back to the first century. I read many books on that period and particularly about Jesus and the gospels. I came away believing that the Jesus of scriptures didn’t exist and that the Gospels were anything but the gospel.