The House of David

"all your cities lie in dust"

Saturday, November 21, 2009

The Talmud as an anti-Christian tract


When the Von Brunn murder came to light, so did Von Brunn's opinions, and among these was a polemic against the Bavli Talmud of the Rabbinic Jews. I'm seeing similar opinions among Muslim trolls in MyPetJawa.

At the core of this polemic are the comments the Bavli, and not so much the Yerushalmi, Tosefta etc, levy against Jesus. Christian and Muslim antiSemites agree upon venerating Jesus, or at least upon using Jesus as a wedge between Jews and their Abrahamic cousins.

Peter Schaefer in 2007 published the definitive secular reading of the Jesus references in the Talmud. He found that the Bavli is hostile. There had been an anti-Jesus literature in Judaism for centuries, and Justin Martyr's correspondent Trypho and Origen's foil Celsus reported on their state as of the mid second century AD. The Bavli brought many of these together and canonised them for the Jews in Iraq.

The Bavli's comments on Jesus have been known to American evangelical Protestants since Josh MacDowell's Evidence That Demands A Verdict books. To MacDowell, the Bavli proves that Jesus existed, performed miracles, and was killed in Jerusalem. MacDowell didn't care that the Talmud was a hostile witness; he valued it as a memory of the Pharisaic indictment. MacDowell, author of Christian propaganda against Judaism, had the integrity not to complain about the existence of Jewish propaganda against Jesus.

There is something to be learnt from MacDowell's attitude. The existence of an apologetic, or evangelical, or even polemic literature among a group - here, the Jews - does not alone imply that the group must be wicked. For that the literature would have to recommend wicked means to solve the problem of the polemic's target. The Talmud supports no prescription along the lines of the Qur'an's qital. It just lays out a case against Jesus. It has to, or else it would become a Christian text itself.

In addition, the Talmud is not a Qur'an or even a Torah, and Jews can find a multitude of opinions in it, for and against almost every proposition. The Talmud preserves a second-century case against Jesus and carries it forward to the Talmud's own day in the sixth-century. Jews then were supposed to read that and to compare it to other accounts of Jesus; canonical Christian, gnostic Christian, Josephus's accounts of Jesus and James, and also pagan and Mandaean accounts which are mostly lost now. This is pretty much how Jews look at Jesus today - and it is not entirely a hostile look.

The Muslim / David Duke axis is entirely opportunistic. When the anti-Talmud trolls come into your comment forum, they're not there to make a principled case.

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posted by Zimri on 13:18 | link |

Josh MacDowell and the Jews


The Christian evangelical author Josh MacDowell had a section on the Jews in Evidence That Demands A Verdict. It's worthwhile to evaluate that evidence as it reflects upon MacDowell.

MacDowell's books were a major force in recruiting educated young people into Christianity. But he lost much of his influence in the mid 1990s with the rise of the Internet and one of its first websites, Infidels.org. This site fact-checked his books to smouldering ruins. (Disclosure - Around this time I was also fact-checking his books and I started my own researches, which you can read on the "J/X" link.)

MacDowell was an admirer of the Jewish people, insofar as they protected the Torah, agreed with his causes, and fulfilled (his interpretation of) Prophecy. MacDowell's views on Jewish doctrine were more nuanced. As I recall, he dismissed Reform Judaism as barely a religion at all and thought of Orthodox Judaism as Paul's Curse Of The Law writ large. Conservative Judaism, he treated as underdeveloped Christianity.

As a Christian evangelist, MacDowell has to promote Christianity over all forms of Judaism. As mentioned above, I am not a fan. But to call him an antiSemite would inductively condemn all Gentiles observant to their own laws as antiSemites. That would be, itself, a form of bigotry.

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posted by Zimri on 12:39 | link |

Friday, November 06, 2009

The moderate Muslim


I was trolling Jawa after they got a visit from a moderate-Muslim.

The moderate admits that mediaeval Islam includes qital (violent jihad). He even admits that Islamophobes are right about it. The moderate reports that moderate Muslims don't know about their faith's inherent ("orthodox") violence. When you get past the tu quoque, the moderate says:

the difference is that this "extremism" is still part of mainstream Muslim theology whereas it has already been pushed to the fringe in many other religious traditions...the saving grace is, the theology is not known to most mainstream muslims in any detail. sounds confusing, but its true

The moderate does not come to non-Muslim sites with a plan for Muslims themselves to "push to the fringe" the "'extremism' ... part of mainstream Muslim theology".

The moderate comes with a plea for "common sense". What is common sense? For the moderate - it's the end of "zionism", and the loss of "permanence" for the Jewish entity in "Palestine". (Yes, this particular moderate hit that theme three times.) He comes with demands.

The moderate is, also, in solidarity with the jihad against the infidel in "Islamic land". The moderate is, ultimately, a Muslim first.

We can commend the moderate for his willingness to present his case. We cannot treat his case as holding merit. And we cannot bargain with him. He is partly tribal, partly in thrall to a faith. He has not reasoned his way into this position.

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posted by Zimri on 19:05 | link |

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The Holocaust Museum is not a political football


If the last post seemed familiar to some, it should. Much of it was aired in the comments of... another green-themed blog. (I didn't keep a copy; and I expect the cowardly Stalinist who runs the place "[deleted]" it.)


The original controversy was about one Von Brunn, an 88 year old who shot up a Holocaust Museum. It turned out he was a S@#$%front member and all-around racist nutter. Certainly a cultural Rightist. Case closed... to the history-warping Stalinist.


Since I'm no longer under any man's censorship, I'm free to reopen the case.


When somebody shoots up a shrine sacred to Jews, that's not an expression of the cultural Right. It's not cultural Left, either, pace Goldberg. It's straight-up anti-Semitism.


For that, all anti-Semites have to take responsibility. All those in the media - and not just Von Brunn's old hangout - have added to the climate of Judenhass which led him over the edge.


How many references to "neo-cons" have we borne? How many mournful shots of teddy bears, set up just-so in the ruins of some Hezbollard's ammo dump? In Houston on Westheimer I saw "Free Palestine" bumper-stickers. Along the highway 59, inbound, just inside the I-610: a mammoth "Pray4Gaza" sign. Never mind what Hezbollards would do to Jewish children; never mind the prayers of HAMAS.


AntiSemitism is a major problem in the media today. It's the sewer in which rats like Von Brunn flourish.


It doesn't matter that Von Grunn was in the "far Right". That wasn't the story nor the proximate cause. A real "far Rightist" would have attacked the office of the ACLU. Von Brunn was a Jew-hater first.


(By making this out into some uniquely Rightist problem, LGF devolved into propaganda, and we all should have seen where it would lead, and I should have left that place then.)

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posted by Zimri on 19:27 | link |

Monday, October 12, 2009

The Protocols of the Elders of France


"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is notorious as an anti-Semitic forgery. What's a little less noted is that it isn't structurally anti-Semitic. Here is one fellow who has noted that feature, "Bunk X" from the blogmocracy:


I read the “Protocols” before I knew about the background of the hoax. BUT, while I was reading them, it occurred to me that they could have been written about any other group of people, in any major religious or racial category, and some folks would believe the hyperbole.


In any case, I didn’t buy into it, and I told my respected elderly arab friend, who lent me his copy, why. He was stunned that I’d been able to see through the propaganda.


This feature is a "textual seam" - evidence for an underlying text, anti-elite and probably not anti-Jew. It turns out that we have the original text, Dialogue in Hell by Maurice Joly; and, indeed, it was about ruling elites - in his case, Napoleon III in France. The forgers then rewrote it in Russian and replaced some of the figures.


Other readers of the Protocols have been shocked at how far the Elders' cynical view of the "Christian" commons seems to "ring true" for them. Of course it does! It is simply a caricature of how any elite looks upon any commons it views as separate and contemptible. That is what the Protocols took from Joly, and Joly from Macchivelli. "Christians" would then be the forger's interpolation, and indeed this word is not in the source by Joly.


For the Protocols, it would not be hard to replace the "Elders of Zion" with any ruling elite or other market-dominant minority. One might even be able to dig out this source, and to trace it to Napoleon III; although admittedly, when confronted with such cynicism, one would first think of Macchiavelli and wonder if he had written a secret book.


As an analogy, say that some loser took C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters and replaced Screwtape with "Herschel" and Wormwood with "Irving". Would it be anti-Semitic? Certainly. Structurally? Not really; it would be recognised at once as a crude plagiary, and (I hope) nobody would accuse Lewis of digging into anti-Semitic tropes.

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posted by Zimri on 21:05 | link |

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