Sunday 13 March 2011

Why Are Jews So Angry?

Rabbi David Wolpe asks Why are Atheists so Angry? Good question. Would it be appropriate to ask why Jews might be angry too?

John's Gospel says:
42 Jesus said unto them [the Jews], If God were your Father, ye would love me: for I proceeded forth and came from God; neither came I of myself, but he sent me.
43 Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word.
44 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 speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.
45 And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not.
'Ye are of your father the devil'. Jesus says the Jews are the spawn of the devil.

Justinian Law in the 6th century outlawed non-belief in the resurrection, rendering Jewish belief illegal. St Augustine said:
But the Jews who slew Him, and would not believe in Him, because it behoved Him to die and rise again, were yet more miserably wasted by the Romans, and utterly rooted out from their kingdom, where aliens had already ruled over them, and were dispersed through the lands (so that indeed there is no place where they are not), and are thus by their own Scriptures a testimony to us that we have not forged the prophecies about Christ.
Blood libel became commonplace, as Christians persecuted Jewish communities nonsensically. Socrates Scholasticus reported that some Jews in a drunken frolic bound a Christian child on a cross in mockery of the death of Christ and scourged him until he died.

In 1171, Blois was the site of a blood libel accusation against its Jewish community that led to 31 Jews (by some accounts 40) being burned to death.

Thomas of Cantimpré wrote "It is quite certain that the Jews of every province annually decide by lot which congregation or city is to send Christian blood to the other congregations." Thomas also believed that since the time when the Jews called out to Pontius Pilate, "His blood be on us, and on our children" (Matthew 27:25), they have been afflicted with hemorrhages." - Bonum Universale de Apibus ii. 29, § 23

In February 1840, at Damascus, a Catholic monk named Father Thomas and his servant were murdered. The accusation of ritual murder was brought against members of the Jewish community of Damascus.

In 1882, the Jews of the village Tiszaeszlár, Hungary were accused with the ritual murder of a fourteen-year-old Christian girl, Eszter Solymosi. The case was one of the main causes of the rise of antisemitism in the country. The accused persons were eventually acquitted.

In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York, were falsely accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl in the Massena blood libel.

During a speech in 2007, Raed Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, accused Jews of using children's blood to bake bread. "We have never allowed ourselves to knead [the dough for] the bread that breaks the fast in the holy month of Ramadan with children's blood," he said. "Whoever wants a more thorough explanation, let him ask what used to happen to some children in Europe, whose blood was mixed in with the dough of the [Jewish] holy bread."

Accusations of host desecration leveled against Jews were a common pretext for massacres and expulsions throughout the Middle Ages in Europe.

Out of these centuries of Jewish persecution, the Holocaust sent 6 million Jews to their untimely deaths.

Yeah, so, on reflection I've a pretty good idea why Jews, and atheists, are angry at these things. The real question is: why doesn't Rabbi David Wolpe understand this?

H/T Sam Harris.

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