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76 pages

English

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The Changing Faces of Antisemitism is Muriel Seltman's examination into the roots and causes of antisemitism. Starting with the Gospels and moving forward across time, she identifies the causes of modern, globalised antisemitism. It was Muriel Seltman's own experience of unwitting antisemitism that was the catalyst for her writing this book - the discovery that many well-meaning people, whose religious education has been Christian and who know that Jesus was Jewish ethnically, find it hard to accept that he was a devoutly religious Jew. The opening chapters deal with the Jewishness of Jesus and the Gospel treatment of the trial and crucifixion, showing that it was not the Jews who killed Jesus - it was the Roman secular authorities in collusion with the Jewish religious authorities who were responsible for the crucifixion. From then on, the Church set about distancing Jesus from his Jewishness and this was followed by the development of Christian, Muslim and secular antisemitism (including that of Martin Luther and Karl Marx), which persists today but in new forms. MurielSeltman, a nontheist with no personal religious agenda, investigates the roots and causes of antisemitism to find out what this tells us about the rise of antisemitism in the modern world.

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Philosophie et théologie

Religious intolerance

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Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 août 2015
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781784629816
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0200€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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The Changing Faces of Antisemitism
Muriel Seltman

Copyright © 2015 Muriel Seltman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study,
or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in
any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the
publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with
the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries
concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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I would like to thank my sister Ruth Goldsmith and my friends Janet Andrew, Elizabeth Hills and Maryam Namazie for their hard work in reading the typescript of this book, for their encouragement and for making helpful suggestions for its improvement.
Contents

Cover

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12
PREFACE
The principal aim of this book is to counter unwitting antisemitism in people who are unaware of their own deeply-conditioned prejudice. There are people, for example, who find the idea of Jesus as a devout Jew very difficult to accept, not to say distasteful. That is why considerable space has been given to the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth and their treatment by Gospel writers and others. In this way it is hoped to show the essential Jewishness of Jesus of Nazareth who has been made into a victim of antisemitism by distancing him from his Jewishness and, simultaneously, a tool of the antisemites by putting anti-Judaic words (bordering on antisemitism) into his mouth.
Three chapters are devoted to historical material on antisemitism which is far from being unwitting. Such material is provided as information for those unwitting antisemites who are unaware of the long history of suffering endured by Jews over the centuries since the crucifixion. The Holocaust was not an isolated incident. It was the climax of two thousand years of persecution.
This is not an academically rigorous work and the reader will notice a degree of ‘cherry-picking’ in citations. Such ‘cherry-picking’ is inevitable when dealing with what is called the New Testament, which suffers from alterations, additions and deletions of an unknown character. Nevertheless, the Bible as a whole may be considered as a primary source because existing translations have influenced people over the years and have been used to perpetrate antisemitic atrocities for over two thousand years.
Some elementary historical and other material has been included at the beginning for those who need this, for example for Jewish readers who have little or no background in the early life of Jesus.
I must acknowledge my debt to Geza Vermes from whose writings on the Jewish Jesus I learned so much and from which I was able to add many examples of observances carried out by Jesus; I have also taken examples of historic antisemitism from Malcolm Hay’s Thy Brother’s Blood: The Roots of Christian Antisemitism ; and must also acknowledge a debt to Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin for material from Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s book Kosher Jesus provided useful comparison material from the Hebrew Bible.
The words ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ are not used as they are seen by some to imply that the latter has superseded the former. The words ‘Jewish Bible’ or ‘Christian Bible’ are used and they refer to the ‘Old Testament’ and what is usually understood by ‘the Bible’, that is, both books.
The Revised Standard Version of the Bible has been used as it was the most convenient for the writer. Since all versions are dubious from the translation standpoint this seemed the most practical solution to the problem of which translation to use.
The word ‘antisemitism’ has been written instead of ‘anti-Semitism’ so that the word is treated as a whole and is seen as meaning against Jewish people and not against all Semites.
Finally, dating has been written in the modern way as BCE and CE (before the Christian era and Christian era) instead of BC and AD.
INTRODUCTION
This is a difficult book to write because the subject matter is so harrowing. Moreover, since antisemitism is the subject and is, therefore, the sole subject of discussion, it feels as if it is obsessive. Nevertheless, the need to express myself on this issue means that there is no alternative but to plough on irrespective of the difficulties. The term ‘anti-Semite’ was coined in 1879 by a certain Wilhelm Marr in order to give Jew-hatred a more respectable-sounding name. It means simply hatred of Jewish people and it was Wilhelm Marr who set up the League of Anti-semites, which was the first political movement whose only basis was hating Jews.
The initial motivation to write about antisemitism arose as a result of my reading the Gospels for the first time in 2011 when I was in my mid-eighties and discovering for the first time the truly, deeply Jewish Jesus. This knowledge was deepened by reading Geza Vermes’ wonderful book Jesus the Jew from which I was able to add much further evidence.
The next discovery was that some well-meaning people whom I know as friends, with impeccable anti-racist credentials, but who have had a Christian religious educational background, find it hard to accept this. It was the latter which led to much thought about unwitting antisemitism and, hence, this book.
Of course, everyone knows that Jesus was a Jew but this is normally seen as meaning that he was Jewish ethnically. Those who are liberal-minded take this in their stride with no problem. However, there is a common belief that Jesus was a Christian by religion, the founder of Christianity and was hostile to the Jewish religion, which he had divine backing to replace.
Jesus was a religious Jew. He was extremely devout and, except on one occasion in a very minor way (not washing his hands before eating), he never broke any religious law. His principal message was the need for individual repentance because he believed that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand (although the nature of this was never spelt out). All his teaching served this need. Jesus loved the very religion to which he was supposed to have been opposed. This is well known in the field of biblical scholarship. A great deal is known by biblical scholars which never seems to trickle down to the mass of the population.
There is so much in the Gospels that is hostile to Judaism and which is never questioned in churches that numbers of people who would be devastated to think that there was an antisemitic bone in their bodies find it very hard to accept that Jesus was not a Christian. It is as if the suggestion diminishes him and that to be a devout Jew is inferior to being a devout Christian.
Antisemitism is not new and has flourished for over two thousand years in West Asia, Western and Eastern Europe and elsewhere, championed and led by different varieties of Christian Church. Before this, from about the fourth century BCE onwards, there was what one might call anti-Judaism, hostility to Jews on account of their religion and its difference from other religions in the ancient world. The practices of Judaism isolated the Jews of the ancient world from other people. Judaism was monotheistic and did not recognise other peoples’ gods; there was circumcision, refusal to marry non-Jews and the dietary laws which prevented Jews from eating with others and cut them off from the rest of society in a way which was often found disagreeable and unacceptable. Such early anti-Judaism must be distinguished from antisemitism.
After the crucifixion, writers increasingly distanced Jesus from his Jewish roots, such distancing corresponding initially to understandable hostility between the Jewish religious authorities and the emerging, increasingly successful insurgent sect. Later, the accusation of deicide took over and Jews became the convenient Other of Christian society, turning anti-Judaism into antisemitism. Christian antisemitism climaxed in the Holocaust, in which twelve million people altogether were murdered, amongst whom were six million Jews murdered for strictly antisemitic reasons.
Meanwhile, in the Muslim world, under Muslim rule, from about the seventh century onwards, Jews and Christians were both treated as second-class citizens ( dhimmis) . Both Jews and Christians suffered the same indignities on the whole. However, there was a difference in that Jews were more subject to arbitrary material and physical attacks than were Christians under Islam. But however much humiliation and insecurity they were subject to, together with Christians, things were never as bad for Jews under Muslim rule as under that of Christian rule. What Jewish people suffered in the Muslim-ruled world was more like anti-Judaism than antisemitism (until recent times, that is). However, under both Christians and Muslims, it was possible to (almost?) cancel out your Jewishness by conversion.
Following on the Holocaust, it became temporarily unfashionable to be antisemitic, at least in the West, but recently there has been a resurgence of this form of racism even in Europe, including the UK. An editorial in the Guardian newspaper of 8 th August, 2014 w