In my previous post in this two-part series – there will not be any other posts unless Dawn Pine himself responds at significant length and I believe that the response merits its own full-length response – I provided the full commentary of one of my readers to an earlier article that I had written about the ways in which modern Judaism is apparently at odds with the teachings of the Pentateuch. Dawn Pine, a.k.a. The Male Brain, was kind enough to respond at some length and provide some corrections and clarifications to my original statements.
Once again, I really appreciate this. If I am wrong about something and one of my readers points it out, this is a very good thing. I look for Truth; the faster I get there, the better.
Today I want to look at one very specific point that I had raised earlier:
While European nations have often persecuted and demonised Jews, for a variety of reasons, the Catholic Church in particular has claimed that the Jews are God’s chosen people and are a protected group, ever since at least the time of Pope Gregory the Great, who issued a Papal Bull in reaction to the persecution of Jews in Palermo that stated very clearly that Christians have a religious and moral duty to protect Jews.
Dawn’s response to this was one of mild surprise:
That’s new for me. However somehow Jews were persecuted repeatedly and nothing of the sort helped them most of the time.
Yep. I understand quite well where the surprise comes from, given the ways in which Jews from around Europe were persecuted and forced to convert.
The most notorious and infamous examples of Christian persecutions of the Jews are to be found in Spain and Eastern Europe, by and large. In Spain, of course, it is well known that Jews were given the choice to convert – to become conversos, as it were – or leave the newly unified Spanish kingdom.
There are countless other examples of pogroms, massacres, blood libels, and forced conversions – which is in principle absolutely against Biblical behaviour – throughout European history.
While I do not attempt to excuse these persecutions, I merely note that the reasons behind them are considerably more complex than we were taught in high school. Those times were not proud moments in Christendom’s history, certainly, but they have to be looked at in context and with deeper analysis of the reasons behind them.
In light of the known persecutions of Jews by Christians, it is worth asking two questions:
First, were there not protections provided for Jews by Christians, repeatedly, throughout history?
And,
Second, if so, then why were Jews persecuted so often and so badly?
To answer the first question, we have to look in a number of places, starting with the original Scriptures.
To state the blindingly obvious, we Christians follow, well, Christ. Unsurprisingly, our forebears did not take particularly kindly to those who ordered the betrayal, capture, torture, and ultimate execution of our Lord, Captain, and King.
The four canonical Gospels are absolutely unequivocal on whether or not the Jews OF THE TIME bore guilt for Christ’s death:
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.” And all the people answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” Then he released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, delivered him to be crucified.
— Matthew 27:24:26, ESV
Now at the feast he used to release for them one prisoner for whom they asked. And among the rebels in prison, who had committed murder in the insurrection, there was a man called Barabbas. And the crowd came up and began to ask Pilate to do as he usually did for them. And he answered them, saying, “Do you want me to release for you the King of the Jews?” For he perceived that it was out of envy that the chief priests had delivered him up. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have him release for them Barabbas instead. And Pilate again said to them, “Then what shall I do with the man you call the King of the Jews?” And they cried out again, “Crucify him.” And Pilate said to them, “Why? What evil has he done?” But they shouted all the more, “Crucify him.” So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released for them Barabbas, and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified.
— Mark 15:6-15, ESV
But they all cried out together, “Away with this man, and release to us Barabbas”— a man who had been thrown into prison for an insurrection started in the city and for murder. Pilate addressed them once more, desiring to release Jesus, 21 but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!” A third time he said to them, “Why? What evil has he done? I have found in him no guilt deserving death. I will therefore punish and release him.” But they were urgent, demanding with loud cries that he should be crucified. And their voices prevailed. So Pilate decided that their demand should be granted. He released the man who had been thrown into prison for insurrection and murder, for whom they asked, but he delivered Jesus over to their will.
— Luke 23:18-25, ESV
When the chief priests and the officers saw him, they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him, for I find no guilt in him.” The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God.” When Pilate heard this statement, he was even more afraid. He entered his headquarters again and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” But Jesus gave him no answer. So Pilate said to him, “You will not speak to me? Do you not know that I have authority to release you and authority to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no authority over me at all unless it had been given you from above. Therefore he who delivered me over to you has the greater sin.”
From then on Pilate sought to release him, but the Jews cried out, “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” So when Pilate heard these words, he brought Jesus out and sat down on the judgment seat at a place called The Stone Pavement, and in Aramaic Gabbatha. Now it was the day of Preparation of the Passover. It was about the sixth hour. He said to the Jews, “Behold your King!” They cried out, “Away with him, away with him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” So he delivered him over to them to be crucified.
— John 19:6-16
(I am well aware that this is rather tedious for Christian readers, and a bit tendentious for most others. I am very much stating the obvious and historically established fact that the Jews of the time called for the death of Christ, even though He was innocent. Please bear with me, as it is an important part of a wider series of arguments.)
There is no ambiguity at all in the Gospels about who bears the greatest responsibility for the death of Christ. In descending order, the culprits are: the Pharisees, who feared and hated Christ for His words and miraculous deeds; the Jewish faithful of the time, who saw Yeshua as a dangerous heretic and blasphemer; and Pontius Pilate, who feared for peace and stability in the Roman protectorate of Palestine at the time and turned Christ over to the priests to be crucified.
The accounts of the Gospels are supported by a number of contemporary sources that are plainly quite hostile to Christianity. These sources include – perhaps surprisingly – the Jewish Talmud, which made it clear that, although Yeshua was (to them) the vilest of heretics and blasphemers, He did have a considerable impact on the Jewish community of the time and (again, to them) led a large number of Jews away from their faith.
The most famous accounts of Jewish responsibility for the death of Christ come from the pen of a Jewish priest and historian for the Romans, Flavius Josephus. Leaving aside some of the translation errors and blatant revisions and insertions into his writings, Josephus was just as clear and uncompromising as the Gospels were about who was to blame for Christ’s death.
Therefore there is no room for reasonable doubt that the Jews, again, OF THE TIME, wanted Jesus dead, and got their way. We have both hostile and sympathetic eyewitness testimony from that time period that corroborate and cross-reference the same events and yield the same picture repeatedly.
So we’ve dealt with the question of whether or not Jews are, or rather, were, guilty – a painful exposition, I am sure, for many, but one that had to be undertaken in order to get our facts right.
What about the protections afforded to the Jews by the writings of the New Testament?
The Pauline Epistles are clear that there is neither Jew nor Gentile in Christ, but that all are one. Moreover, the Letter to the Hebrews (not a Pauline Epistle, as far as we know) couched the Gospel of Christ into language designed specifically to persuade, not threaten, the Jews of the time and convince them through patient reason, careful Scriptural exposition, and gentle reminders that Jesus is the Messiah foretold by Jewish prophecies.
And there is a fairly strong case to be made from Biblical Scripture that the sons and daughters of Israel are to be protected by the followers of Christ. That has been true since the very earliest days of Christ’s ministry.
Therefore, just as the culpability of Jews of that period for the death of Christ is inescapable, so too is the fact that Christians are commanded to love and protect Jews.
These protections were reinforced repeatedly throughout European history. That, too, is beyond dispute. And, in fact, the strongest protector of Jews out of all of the Christian denominations has historically been the Catholic Church.
Pope Bl. Gregory I wrote in 598AD that Jews were not to be deprived of their religious privileges. Popes throughout history – Calixtus, Eugene, Alexander, Clement, Innocent, Honorius, and plenty of others – had enshrined the Christian principles of piety, forgiveness, and neighbourly love into their encyclicals, bulls, and decrees concerning the Jews.
Sometime before 825AD, a law was passed by the Frankish King Loius the Pious stating that no Jew could be condemned of a crime unless there were both Christian and Jewish witnesses against him. That is a level of legal protection almost unheard of for any other group at the time, and quite possibly since then too.
Perhaps the best example of Christian, or rather Catholic, protection of Jews is given by the Papal encyclical of Pope Bl. Gregory X in 1271, concerning Papal Protection of the Jews, which referenced all of the above and made the strongest case seen up to that point for Jewish protection under religious and secular law.
So that answers the first question. There can be no doubt at all that the Jews of Christ’s time betrayed, tortured, and murdered Our Lord. There can also be no doubt at all that Christians, or at least Catholics, throughout history since that time have been commanded to at minimum be patient with, tolerant of, and protective towards Jews.
It is therefore categorically false that Christian protections of Jews only popped up a few hundred years ago. Jews have been protected in one form or another by Papal commandments for at least 1,400 years – almost as long as the Talmud has been around in final form – and the behaviour of the earliest Apostles, as recorded in Acts and the Pauline Epistles, shows very clearly that Christian tolerance and acceptance of Jews as brothers and fellow travelers existed from the very start of the True Faith.
So what about the second question? Why was it that Jews were persecuted so badly by Christians?
There are several parts to the answer.
One large part has to do with the fact that, up until about 300 years ago, much of the Christian world tended to ignore the bits of the Bible and subsequent doctrine that said, “protect the Jews”, and stuck to the bits that said, “de JOOOOOS killed the Messiah!!!!!”. Note that this is a generalisation – there are very many significant exceptions to it.
Various Protestant denominations, particularly the Lutherans, were extremely zealous in persecuting Jews. And we know quite well that both the Greek and Eastern Orthodox churches historically took a very hard line about the fact that the Jews – more precisely, the Pharisees – bayed for the blood of Christ to be shed.
Why did they do so?
One answer has to do with what Christians themselves endured for the first three hundred or so years of the existence of the Faith, during which time Christians were subjected to absolutely merciless persecution across the Roman Empire at the hands of both Jews and Gentiles.
That sort of thing tends to leave scars on people’s collective memory. It is unfortunate but unavoidable.
Everyone knows the name of St. Paul the Apostle, author of more than half of the canonical books of the New Testament in the form of his Epistles. Not quite so many people remember the fact that St. Paul was actually a Pharisaical Jew named Saul of Tarsus – and an absolutely rabid and violent persecutor of the early Christians. It took him considerable time and effort to be accepted by the other Apostles and to convince them that he was, in fact, on their side, after all of his efforts to find, torture, and kill Christians for heresy.
The violent antipathy between Jews and early Christians is not surprising if you know something about the Biblical and Hellenic Judaism periods. Most people don’t realise today that, back before the Romans utterly crushed the Jewish rebellion in the 1st Century AD, destroyed the Second Temple, sacked Jerusalem, and sent the Jews fleeing into exile into the Diaspora, Judaism was in fact a highly aggressive, imperialistic, proselytising system of religious government – not merely a religion or faith, but a form of messianic politics.
(In fact, that aspect of Judaism – long since forgotten, because it was absolutely beaten and persecuted right out of the Jews in the centuries since – is precisely what serves as the foundation for the abominable Christian perversion of the Word that we know of as Islam. If you want more details, take a look here.)
Furthermore, the Christians endured terrible persecutions at the hands of the Romans for about 300 years. It was common for Christians to be fed to wild beasts in the Circus Maximus in Rome, and in similar orgies of bloodshed throughout the Empire, during their games. (This is one of the most horrific ways for a man to die, as humans have a built-in psychological terror of being eaten.)
So when Christians came to power after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, and finally built for ourselves an empire of our own, it was probably inevitable that some degree of persecution of the Jews would take place.
Subsequent events certainly bear that out. Constantine’s predecessor, Galerius, had issued an Edict of Toleration, in which all faiths were to be respected and given sanctuary under Roman rule – including Judaism and Christianity. But some time after Constantine converted to the Word, he began seriously clamping down on Jewish religious freedoms. And that carried on for quite some time after his death.
If you look at the words of the early church fathers, such as St. Augustine of Hippo or St. John Chrysostom, they went really far in calling for Jews to suffer. The latter argued that Jews were fit only for slaughter, which is a decidedly un-Christian thing to say.
This sort of thing carried on through the Middle Ages and into the time of the infamous Spanish Inquisition, perhaps the example that stands out most strikingly in collective memory as the ugliest of all of the anti-Semitic episodes in Christian history.
I make no attempt to excuse what happened. All I am doing is pointing out some historical facts. Remember that much of this took place well before the first Papal protections of the Jews were put into place.
Another answer has to do with the fact that a number of high-ranking clergymen were, at one point or another, given opportunities to read the Hebrew Talmud after its final compilation – and they were utterly horrified by what they found.
Remember that the Talmud was only “sealed” in its final form by around 500AD. This is why modern Judaism, which takes the Talmud as its primary source of authority and not the Pentateuch or Old Testament Scriptures, is actually a younger faith than Christianity.
Even for Orthodox Jews, the Talmud is really hard slogging. To the best of my knowledge, it is written in an ancient form of Hebrew, an extremely difficult version of an already very challenging language. But it has been translated into various languages other than Hebrew, and at certain points in time, Christian clergymen were able to read the Talmud.
One of those men was Martin Luther, the very man who sparked the Reformation. And he was absolutely appalled by what he saw. He wrote a book on the subject called Jews and Their Lies, which you cannot find easily because… well, (((they))) control quite a lot of the print media these days.
But you can still find excerpts of what Martin Luther wrote at the time. And it makes for stomach-churning reading for any Christian.
The claims of the Talmud – more precisely, the Babylonian Talmud – are a slap in the face to any follower of Christ:
- Yeshua worked His miracles through sexual magicks;
- He is now boiling in a vat of unholy excrement and human semen in the very lowest pit of Hell;
- The Pharisees were absolutely right to condemn Christ for His “crimes”;
- Calls the Virgin Mary a prostitute who had sex with many men, and may even have committed bestiality;
- Gentiles exist to serve Jews, are merely beasts in the shapes of men, and are inferior in every way to Jews;
Please note, this is not me attempting to attack, slander, or libel Jews. This is what their own legal and religious texts say.
These are not the claims of one deranged lunatic – and Martin Luther was nothing of the sort. These claims are backed up by the work of Dr. Israel Shahak, an ardent human rights campaigner who was vilified and turned into a pariah by his own people for the “crime” of speaking the truth.
You can read his full work, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, here, among other places. In that book, he makes a number of sensational claims about Jewish law says about how Jews must treat non-Jews, and most of them are deeply unflattering.
It is not possible for me to go into all of the details enclosed in that book – partly because I haven’t read it in full, and mostly because this is already turning into one massive post. I recommend following the link and checking out Dr. Shahak’s analyses of the writings of rabbis like Maimonides and Akiva, which make it perfectly clear that Jews and Gentiles are practically two different species.
Given that this is what Jewish canonical law said, is it any wonder, then, that Martin Luther became so hostile to the Jews?
Yet, even then, Martin Luther’s final words about Jews were not rabidly anti-Semitic as we are taught to understand the concept. They were, in fact, quite restrained.
This is what Martin Luther said about the way to treat Jews, just before he died:
“You, Milords and men of authority, should not tolerate but expel them. They are our public enemies and incessantly blaspheme our Lord Jesus Christ; they call our blessed Virgin Mary a harlot and Her Son, a bastard…
If they could kill us all, they would gladly do so; in fact many of them murder Christians, especially those (Jews) professing to be surgeons and doctors. They know how to deal with medicaments [sic] in the manner of the Italians—the Borgias and Medicis—who gave people poisons which brought about their deaths in one hour or a month…
As a good patriot, I wanted to give you this warning for the very last time…”
That was in about 1546, a good 50 years after the Spanish expelled their Jewish population. Martin Luther was a German cleric whose lines of argument against the Catholic Church had not yet caused serious upheavals in Spain. The Spanish expulsion of its Jewish population was therefore due to causes far greater than just one monk agitating for them to be thrown out of Europe.
Without going into too much detail or speculation, it should be noted that one of the major historical driving forces for Jewish expulsions from anywhere in Europe has to do with the perception, whether real or imagined, that Jews in those lands tended to act directly against the interests of their host nations. This is a common thread throughout Jewish history; whenever they find themselves outside of Israel, they band together, as is to be expected of a nation bound by both blood and faith, and unite against the majority population to preserve and protect their interests and faith.
Of course, this inevitably puts them in direct conflict with those who tolerate them in their own nations. And, eventually, a rupture always occurs. The result has been a long history of Jewish acceptance into a host nation, followed later by expulsions and pogroms.
The results of expelling Jews from particular nations are hotly debated. Jewish-sympathetic historians and Jews themselves have long argued that nations which expelled Jews saw economic decline and collapse as a result of a massive brain drain and the wrath of the Lord.
Yet, looking at the examples cited in that link, England in 1290 expelled its Jews and then went from strength to strength, culminating in the greatest empire the world has ever seen 600 years later; Spain reached the very zenith of its power, prestige, wealth, and influence in the 16th and 17th centuries and would not significantly decline until at least the 18th; Portugal became the world’s biggest trading empire for a time and its influence reached all the way out to Japan; and France and Germany both became rich, strong, powerful nations and empires over a period of 700 years following their expulsions of Jews.
So the historical record on the subject is not at all clear. It simply does not follow that expelling Jews from a nation results immediately, or even long-term, in that nation’s downfall.
Indeed and in fact, the track record of Jews in positions of power and influence in Gentile nations is very sketchy. Not for nothing were a large chunk of the original Communists (e.g. Friedrich Engels) and Bolsheviks (e.g. Lev Trotsky) Jewish, and it is not at all coincidental that some of the worst and most wrong-headed philosophies of the 20th Century, the most bloody and murderous so far in human history, were created by Jews.
Without for one moment excusing or whitewashing anti-Semitism, it is possible to understand the historical motivations for Christian rulers who persecuted and expelled Jews, despite the fact that doing so was not Biblical in any way.
But this explanation is incomplete. Yes, Jews murdered our Lord, who was innocent of the crimes with which they charged Him. Yes, Diaspora Jews have acted throughout history in ways that are directly opposed to the interests of their host nations. Yes, Jewish legal opinions and writings make hatred of Gentiles a core part of their teachings.
And yet even so, that is still not enough to explain how Christianity went from a basically very peaceful religion that mostly treated Jews well for about 900 years, to a religion that exhibited outright and extreme hostility to its progenitor. There is still one piece missing.
That piece is Islam.
Consider the evidence at hand. How is it that for the first thousand years of Christianity’s existence, the early Church fathers railed against Jews and made it clear that Jews were not to be trusted – and yet few, if any, serious mass slaughters or expulsions of Jews took place in any of the strongest Christian domains? Why is it that we only see evidence of pogroms, persecutions, and expulsions after about 800AD – in other words, only after the early establishment of the Moorish presence in Andalusian Spain?
The answer is to be found in the pages of an excellent book, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, by Dario Fernandez-Morera. Among the many revelations in its pages is the fact that the very first pogroms and expulsions of Jews from Europe were not Christian in origin.
Those first accounts of serious persecution occurred at the behest of, and with the direct intervention of, the Moorish Islamic rulers of Spain at the time.
It was they who fomented distrust and hostility between Jews and Christians, they who whipped up the fury of Christians using blood libels, they who sowed divisions between Jew and Gentile, and they who conducted the first serious extermination campaigns against the Jews.
And it is they who instituted the very first religiously based inquisitions against both Jews and Christians. The dreaded and feared Spanish Inquisition – which was considerably less terrible than most people suppose – was inspired directly by the example of the Moors in Spain. The Christians didn’t invent inquisitions and forced conversions; they actually copied the ideas from their previous conquerors!
None of this is taught in history class at school or, in most cases, university these days. Nonetheless, it is the truth. And that truth makes for very uncomfortable reading for most of those committed to the lie that Christians are mostly responsible for the persecution of Jews.
This wraps up the series, as far as I am concerned, unless anyone has substantive and difficult questions that need answering later on. It took a very long time to get around to writing this, due to all of the research and effort needed to do it, but I hope that it was illuminating in some way. As always, questions, comments, and substantive criticism are all welcome – stick it all in the comments section below.
And one final word to my Jewish readers, of which I think I have two or three:
If you got all the way down to here, I have no doubt that you were shocked and maybe even outraged by some of what I have written.
I make no apologies for this. The truth is what it is. It doesn’t care what you or I think of it.
Understand, though, that you are not my enemy, until and unless you choose, of your own free will, to stand against the truth and spread lies.
Your forebears crucified my Lord and King, who died for me, personally, but I bear no ill will toward you, your race, or your nation.
You are the original inheritors of the Word. You have borne witness to the Word of the Lord for well over 3,000 years. Your nation of Israel is a wonderful place for which I have great affection and respect, to which I would be honoured and privileged to return.
You are always welcome here, provided that you obey the Rules of the Blog. That was true from the day I started this blog, and it will remain true until the day I decide to quit – a day that may never come. Who knows, we will see.
2 Comments
I hate to point this out, but the Barr report came out pronouncing "Trump is innocent", while the American Empire folks are saying "Our hands are Clean" and the Jewish-run liberal media is hopping up and down screaming "Crucify him!".
And Today is good friday.
GOOD point…