After centuries of persecution, should jews take a deep look inside themselves and ask, could it be us?

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or it could simply be

Anti-Semitic accounts in the New Testament have taught mankind to hate the Jew. As long as the New Testament continues in print (at least in its present form) the Jew will be hated. Here are but a few verses from where Christianity borrowed its anti-Semitic sentiments.

“The children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8.12)

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” (Matthew 23.37,38) Then answered all the people (Jews) and said, “His blood be on us and on our children” (Matthew 27:25). 1 “But take heed to yourselves: for they shall deliver you to councils, and in the synagogues ye shall be beaten” (Mark 13.9)

“He that believeth not shall be damned” (Mark 16.16)

“Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And I say the truth, why do you not believe me? He that is of God heareth God’s words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God” (John 8.43-47)

“Stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so you do. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which showed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers” (Acts 7.51-53)

“It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing you put it from you and judge yourself unworthy of everlasting life, we turn to the Gentiles” (Acts 13.45-51)

“For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake ... wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith; not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men, that turn from the truth.” (Titus 1.10-14).

“The Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and have persecuted us; and they please not God and are contrary to all men: forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they might be saved, to fill up their sins always: for the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost.” (l Thessalonians 2.14-16)

“Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is an antichrist, that denieth the father and the son. Whoever denieth the son, the same hath not the father” (l John 2.22,23)

“I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan ...” (Revelation 2.9,10)

“Behold I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews and are not but do lie; behold I will make them to come and worship before thy feet...” (Revelation 3.9)

now examine the words of some Christian “saints” and leaders and notice how their anti-Jewish expressions are based on New Testament verses listed earlier in this article.

Origen: “Their rejection of Jesus has resulted in their present calamity and exile. We say with confidence that they will never be restored to their former condition. For they have committed a crime of the most unhallowed kind, in conspiring against the saviour.”

St. Gregory: “ Jews are slayers of the Lord, murderers of the prophets, enemies of God, haters of God, adversaries of grace, enemies of their fathers’ faith, advocates of the devil, brood of vipers, slanderers, scoffers, men of darkened minds, leaven of the Pharisees, congregation of demons, sinners, wicked men, stoners and haters of goodness.”

St. Jerome: “....serpents, haters of all men, their image is Judas ... their psalms and prayers are the braying of donkeys..”

St. John Chrysostom: “I know that many people hold a high regard for the Jews and consider their way of life worthy of respect at the present time... This is why I am hurrying to pull up this fatal notion by the roots ... A place where a whore stands on display is a whorehouse. What is more, the synagogue is not only a whorehouse and a theater; it is also a den of thieves and a haunt of wild animals ... not the cave of a wild animal merely, but of an unclean wild animal ... When animals are unfit for work, they are marked for slaughter, and this is the very thing which the Jews have experienced. By making themselves unfit for work, they have become ready for slaughter. This is why Christ said: “ask for my enemies, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them and slay them before me’ (Luke 19.27).”

St. Augustine: “Judaism is a corruption. Indeed Judas is the image of the Jewish people. Their understanding of the Scriptures is carnal. They bear the guilt for the death of the saviour, for through their fathers they have killed the Christ.”

St. Thomas Aquinas: “It would be licit to hold Jews, because of the crimes, in perpetual servitude, and therefore the princes may regard the possessions of Jews as belonging to the State.”

The teachings of Martin Luther:

“Know, 0 adored Christ, and make no mistake, that aside from the Devil, you have no enemy more venomous, more desperate, more bitter, than a true Jew who truly seeks to be a Jew... a Jew, a Jewish heart, are hard as wood, as stone, as iron, as the Devil himself. In short, they are children of the Devil, condemned to the flames of hell.”

“O Lord, I am too feeble to mock such devils. I would do so, but they are much stronger than I in raillery, and they have a God who is a past master in this art; He is called the devil and the wicked spirit.. They have transformed God into the devil, or rather into a servant of the Devil, accomplishing all the evil the Devil desires, corrupting unhappy souls , and raging against himself: in short, the Jews are worse than the devils.”

“What then shall we Christians do with this damned, rejected race of Jews? First, their synagogues should be set on fire, and whatever does not burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honour of God and of Christianity, in order that God may see that we are true Christians. Secondly, their homes should be likewise broken down and destroyed. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayerbooks and talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under threats of death to teach anymore.”

“Now whoever wishes to accept venomous serpents, desperate enemies of the lord, and to honor them, to let himself be robbed, pillaged, corrupted and cursed by them, need only turn to the Jews. If this is not enough for him, he can do more: crawl up into their...... and worship the sanctuary, so as to glorify himself afterwards for having been merciful, for having fortified the Devil and his children, in order to blaspheme our beloved lord and the precious blood that has redeemed us. He will then be a perfect Christian, filled with works of mercy, for which Christ will reward him on the-day of judgment with the eternal fire of hell (where he will roast together with the Jews).”

“In truth, the Jews, being foreigners, should possess nothing, and what they do possess should be ours.”

“...Cursed goy that I am, I cannot understand how they manage to be so skillful, unless I think that when Judas Iscariot hanged himself, his guts burst and emptied. Perhaps the Jews sent their servants with plates of silver and pots of gold to gather up Judas’ piss with the other treasures, and then they ate and drank his offal, and thereby acquired eyes so piercing that they discover in the scriptures commentaries that neither Matthew nor Isaiah himself found there, not to mention the rest of us cursed goyim..”

“If I find a Jew to baptize, I shall lead him to the Elbe bridge, hang a stone around his neck, and push him into the water, baptizing him with the name of Avraham!.. I cannot convert the Jews. Our lord Christ did not succeed in doing so; but I can close their mouths so that there will be nothing for them to do but to lie upon the ground.”

“I hope I shall never be so stupid as to be circumcised; I would rather cut off the left breast of my Catherine and of all women.”

“If we are to remain unsullied by the blasphemy of the Jews and not wish to take part in it, we must be separated from them and they must be driven out of their country.”

These anti-semitic words uttered by popes, priests, pastors and laymen, were put into action by unruly Christian mobs and later by Hitler’s followers.

Over time, Christian anti-Semitism acquired a racial dimension along with its religious thrust. This had significant consequences. After all, when Jew-hating was rooted in religion, a Jew could convert to Christianity and become, as it were, fully kosher. But when states began forcing Jews to convert—or face expulsion or execution—the authenticity of the Jews’ conversions became suspect. After Christians conquered Spain from the Muslims in 1492, they forced Jews and Muslims to convert, flee, or die. Many Jews converted yet practiced their old faith secretly, leading church officials to make new rules discriminating against all so-called conversos.

In the 19th century, anti-Semitism became increasingly racialized. The Enlightenment certainly made life better for Jews, at least in Western Europe, where religious tolerance took hold. Yet the Enlightenment also brought new “scientific”—or, as we now say, pseudoscientific—notions that human beings belonged to different races, some superior to others. Under these notions, Jews (as well as Africans, Arabs, and others) were deemed to be biologically and thus immutably inferior to white or “Aryan” Europeans.

Alongside racism, 19th-century Europe also saw the spread of nationalism: the idea that every people deserved its own state. Nationalism served to justify the repression of “alien” peoples, especially Jews—not just in eastern Europe, where Jews lived in ghettos, insulated from their Polish or Russian compatriots, but even in Western Europe, where many Jews were assimilated and considered themselves full citizens of their countries. This new form of ideological anti-Semitism—seeing the Jews as an alien and inferior people amid Christian European nations—finally got its name in 1879, thanks to an Austrian journalist named Wilhelm Marr.

By this point, the ideology of anti-Semitism had bred elaborate theories about the Jewish people’s evil. In some cases, ancient religious bigotries were updated, as in the “blood libel” that Jews killed Christian children to use their blood in making Passover matzot. (In Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ukraine, and elsewhere, Jews were actually tried in court on such charges.) In other cases, the slanders were new, as with the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document fabricated by Russian secret police that purported to divulge the Jews’ conspiratorial plans for world domination.

Until the late 19th century, anti-Semitism as an ideology remained largely absent from Arab and Muslim culture. In the Quran and in Islamic commentary, Jews are significant not for rejecting Muhammad but for succumbing to his followers. In Arab literature, they are sometimes portrayed as hostile or vindictive, but their humility and weakness is a much more common theme. Islamic governments did not often persecute Jews either, the way European states did, and when Jews faced discrimination, it was no different from what Christians endured. Unlike in Europe, Jews in Islamic lands were not expelled or forced to convert or, with a few exceptions, consigned to ghettos.

That all started to change around 1900. First, colonialism brought a growing European influence into the region, and both political and religious authorities from Europe promoted the idea that Jews engaged in ritual murders. Second, traditional Islamic authority was under challenge from Western liberalism, and the Jews provided a convenient scapegoat. During the 1908 Turkish revolution, the so-called Young Turks seized power in the Ottoman Empire and installed a constitutional regime that expanded freedom of religion. In arguing against the revolution, Muslim conservatives latched onto anti-Semitic propaganda, claiming that secret Jewish machinations lay behind the new regime.

Finally, there was Zionism. Starting in the mid-1800s, Jews turned to Zionism—their own nationalism—as a solution to escalating European persecution. Since biblical times, Jews had maintained a small presence in the ancient kingdom of Judea (which in the late 19th century Europeans began calling Palestine), and Zionists saw the land as the ideal refuge for them, a Jewish National Home.

Zionist immigration began in earnest in the 1880s, and soon Jewish settlers ran into conflicts with local Arabs. At first, however, the friction centered on grazing rights, land titles, and other property matters; it didn’t carry nationalist or religious overtones. Yet as crude anti-Semitic ideas circulated more widely, the view of Jews as greedy, devious, and bent on world domination became bound up with the Arab critique of Zionism. Possibly the first major expression of the now-common view that Jewish settlement was really a beachhead for a takeover of the region was published in 1909 by the Turkish journalist Yunus Nadi, who warned—without any evidence at all—that the Jews aimed to establish “an Israelite kingdom comprising the ancient states of Babel and Nineveh, with Jerusalem at its center.” The conspiratorial notion of the Jews as plotting to take over the world quickly developed.

Then came the Holocaust, which not only marked the pinnacle of European anti-Semitism but encouraged it in the Arab world as well. Because Arab leaders shared the Germans’ hostility to Britain and France—the dominant colonial powers in the Middle East—they were eager to make common cause with Hitler, despite Nazi belief that they, like the Jews, were inferior to Aryans. The mufti of Jerusalem, among others, actively spread propaganda about “Anglo-Saxon Jewish greed” while praising the Nazi war effort. Even years later, sympathy for Nazism could be easily found in Arab culture. When Israel apprehended Adolf Eichmann in 1960, a Saudi newspaper headline read, “Capture of Eichmann, Who Had the Honor of Killing Five Million Jews.”

If the Holocaust nurtured Arab anti-Semitism, it also helped to discredit such bigotry in the West. Indeed, it helped mobilize support for a Jewish state internationally. In 1948, Israel was finally granted independence. As if to welcome their new neighbor into the region, the Arab countries promptly invaded. Israel repulsed the attacks, and in the three Arab-Israeli wars that followed (1956, 1967, 1973), the Jewish state managed to survive and even to expand its territory. Most controversially, it took over the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan, which were home to large numbers of Palestinian Arabs.

With Israel’s military successes and its willingness to occupy Arab lands until a peace treaty could be struck, Arab anti-Semitism hardened into official doctrine, as it has remained for many decades now. Propagandists, looking to rationalize their losses to a supposedly inferior people, came to depict the Jews as craven lackeys of a mightier power—the United States—a theme that can be heard in Osama Bin Laden’s rhetoric today. And it was not just propaganda: Arab countries passed laws that discriminate not against Israelis or Zionists but against all Jews, simply for being Jews.

Islamic teaching, too, has been radically retrofitted to accommodate the new anti-Semitism. Whereas traditional Muslim accounts depict the fate of the Jews as tragic, that of a people too benighted to follow Muhammad the Prophet, current Muslim scholarship in the Arab world imaginatively rereads the Quran for evidence of the Jews’ devilish nature. Meanwhile, films showing sympathy for the Jews or depicting the Holocaust are censored, while staples of old-fashioned European anti-Semitism—cartoons portraying greedy hook-nosed Jews, popular novels with conspiratorial Jewish villains, public lectures drawing on phony scholarship like the Protocols—became staples of the new Arab culture....Show more

Cherry N why do you persist with repeating these Anti-Semitic lies? When will you learn?

Gibbs303 said: "And cherry_nova2: My dear girl... you do realize, don't you, that StormFront.org represents the views of neo-Nazis, klansmen, and other white supremacists?

Just checking..."

I think this answers your question. After centuries of persecution, Cherry N and all the Anti-Semites like her need to take a deep look inside themselves and ask, could it be us?

As Booby E said: Are Black people responsible for White people practicing Slavery in the USA?

Anti-Semitism or The Longest Hatred is a pathological condition and disorder that says much more about the people who practice it, such as Hitler, than it does about Jews.

Yours The Hebrew Hammer a.k.a. Mordechai Jefferson Carver

Fighting For Peace and Justice

"I'd Rather be a Hammer than a Nail" -- Simon & Garfunkel...Show more

Jews did do that. It was how the reform movement was invented. Soon after that Nazi Germany was invented. One of the things which the nazis hated were how the jews were trying to be just like everyone else. So, it appears that we can't change whatever it is about us which people don't like. That and other reasons lead me to believe that people hate us for other reasons. I think it's simply because we're successful and different. A bad combo. First to be blamed when there's a crisis....Show more

Jew hating is pretty much an artifact of Christianity... blaming Jews for the crucifixion of Christ... even though it was all a part of "god's plan". This is not a circumstance that should require Jews to self-criticize... it is just another reason for thinking people to detest Christianity....Show more

Contrary to the way it's mischaracterized in Christianity, which often talks about Jews worshipping the "angry old testament God" as opposed to the "forgiving new testament God", Judaism is a religion of forgiveness. We just had 10 days set aside to contemplate how to forgive all those who'd sinned against us in the past year after a month set aside to prepare for those 10 days. Forgiveness in Judaism, however, is more like forgiveness in a 12-step program than like forgiveness in Christianity. If I understand it properly, Christians just ask Jesus to forgive them and they're saved. In Judaism, while at the end of the day we actually are asked to forgive everyone, and it's part of the bedtime prayers to do so each day - forgiveness is more complicated. First, only God can forgive sins against God, and only humans can forgive sins against themselves. So, we don't ask only God's forgiveness for offending or hurting or persecuting someone. We ask the forgiveness of the person we've hurt. When we want forgiveness, we are expected to truly repent and to make amends where possible and to make an effort to avoid similar behavior in the future. As such, no, I do not forgive Christianity as an organization for the centuries of persecution. Not that organizations are what one forgives, but the fact that Christians aren't even taught about that persecution or about the Christian anti-Semitic roots of the Holocaust, or the role of Christians in the millions of murders not so long ago - but only about persecution of Christians - something is wrong there on an institutional basis. Christianity isn't a monolithic organization; you can read posts here every day with Protestants sniping at Catholics and at each other. But, bottom line to me, forgivenes or, more appropriately, reconciliation, comes when the anti-Semitism and persecution stop. They haven't. The anti-Semitism is posted here daily, and I could not safely live in France, otherwise one of my favorite places on earth, because of increased anti-Semitic violence in recent years. By Christians. Things are much better. To be cynical, this is partly because of the rise of civil governments; when the Vatican ruled Europe, Jews were in ghettoes. Read about the history of Jewish life in the 19th century, when territory was going back and forth between Napoleon and the Church, between democracy and the old ways, and Christianity doesn't look so good. To be less cynical and probably more realistic, Christian anti-Semitism has greatly decreased in the last 50 years, and that's wonderful. But until the European Christians support the right of those who survived the genocide committed by their grandparents to have their own nation, until Christian leaders in general rather than a few isolated Christian historians and theologians seriously address the anti-Semitism inherent in Christian theology and even some Christian scripture, and how this led to the Holocaust and leads to hatred and misunderstanding in today's world - Christianity is not all better. As individuals, again, forgiveness is easy to grant. I agree with the first poster who said they hadn't persecuted anyone. They don't need to be forgiven. Those who did in the past can only, in Jewish terms, be forgiven by their victims, not by me - it's not my place to forgive them. And those who are currently anti-Semitic aren't ready for forgiveness. I've forgiven those who have directed their anti-Semitism toward me in my life - but that's all I can do forgiveness-wise. Christianity as an institution has come a long way, but still has a long way to go to make sure such persecution never happens again....Show more