C
chosen_people
Guest
From a Jewish perspective, while it is easier for the Gentile then for the Jew to get into the world to come, any Jew who breaks his/her eternal covenant with God and adopts beliefs as those in Christianity, is cut off forever from God and from the Jewish people.
I would posit that neither the Catholic Church nor Catholics every truly sought or desired mass conversion of the Jews. The Roman pagans who became the Roman Catholics, who declared that they were now the “true” Jews and the new holders of the new covenant, created the image of “the Jew” as a malignant and detrimental force to Christianity and to Christian society. “The Jews” (a collective inclusive term in the Christian scriptures) were painted as having killed the Christian messiah, as killing Christian children for their rituals and for making matza, as desecrating the Eucharist. An early Catholic saint would write that these Christ killers were subhuman (as “beasts of burden”) deserving of death (“fit only for slaughter”). The Catholic Church would place the Jews in ghettos, make them wear special and humiliating articles of clothing marking them as Jews, deny and prevent them from sharing the same basic civil rights as those enjoyed by the Christian populace, deny and prevent any social or work interaction between Jews and Christians . The reasoning behind these acts was that contact of the Jew with the Christian was something to be avoided lest the Christian be tainted, lest the Jews succeed in undermining Christian faith and institutions.
It should therefore be of no surprise that the first Shoah, the massacring of some one half of European Jewry, occurred during the Crusades by Christian Crusaders on their way to decide which non Jews should occupy the eternal homeland of the Jews.
That is not to say that Catholic mobs rampaging and murdering Jews did not often shout “convert or die”. However, when a large group of Spanish Jewry, after some five thousand Jews had been murdered, responded to the Catholic pogroms by actually converting, the result was fear, hate, jealousy and mistrust by Catholics of these converts. The end result was the Spanish Inquisition and the total destruction of the one thousand year old Jewish community on the Iberian peninsula. Every Jew would end up be either being murdered, converted or expelled.
More than half a century after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews, the Church would introduce racial purity laws denying assistance to those Christians carrying “tainted” Jewish blood. The Jesuit order would require any Catholic who wished to join the order to show that they were free of Jewish blood back five generations. This requirement was only changed in 1946 after the Shoah.
Some posters feel that **not ** converting the Jews is “anti-Semitic”. This ignores the obvious. We Jews are apparently too deficient of character, or genetically marred or lacking in intelligence to understand the “Truth” staring them in the face, to know what’s good for them. This certainly was the basis for the Catholic justification of the Mortara affair.
So if treating Jews and Judaism with respect rather than disdain is anti-Semitic, then let’s hear it for the anti-Semites.
I would posit that neither the Catholic Church nor Catholics every truly sought or desired mass conversion of the Jews. The Roman pagans who became the Roman Catholics, who declared that they were now the “true” Jews and the new holders of the new covenant, created the image of “the Jew” as a malignant and detrimental force to Christianity and to Christian society. “The Jews” (a collective inclusive term in the Christian scriptures) were painted as having killed the Christian messiah, as killing Christian children for their rituals and for making matza, as desecrating the Eucharist. An early Catholic saint would write that these Christ killers were subhuman (as “beasts of burden”) deserving of death (“fit only for slaughter”). The Catholic Church would place the Jews in ghettos, make them wear special and humiliating articles of clothing marking them as Jews, deny and prevent them from sharing the same basic civil rights as those enjoyed by the Christian populace, deny and prevent any social or work interaction between Jews and Christians . The reasoning behind these acts was that contact of the Jew with the Christian was something to be avoided lest the Christian be tainted, lest the Jews succeed in undermining Christian faith and institutions.
It should therefore be of no surprise that the first Shoah, the massacring of some one half of European Jewry, occurred during the Crusades by Christian Crusaders on their way to decide which non Jews should occupy the eternal homeland of the Jews.
That is not to say that Catholic mobs rampaging and murdering Jews did not often shout “convert or die”. However, when a large group of Spanish Jewry, after some five thousand Jews had been murdered, responded to the Catholic pogroms by actually converting, the result was fear, hate, jealousy and mistrust by Catholics of these converts. The end result was the Spanish Inquisition and the total destruction of the one thousand year old Jewish community on the Iberian peninsula. Every Jew would end up be either being murdered, converted or expelled.
More than half a century after the 1492 expulsion of the Jews, the Church would introduce racial purity laws denying assistance to those Christians carrying “tainted” Jewish blood. The Jesuit order would require any Catholic who wished to join the order to show that they were free of Jewish blood back five generations. This requirement was only changed in 1946 after the Shoah.
Some posters feel that **not ** converting the Jews is “anti-Semitic”. This ignores the obvious. We Jews are apparently too deficient of character, or genetically marred or lacking in intelligence to understand the “Truth” staring them in the face, to know what’s good for them. This certainly was the basis for the Catholic justification of the Mortara affair.
So if treating Jews and Judaism with respect rather than disdain is anti-Semitic, then let’s hear it for the anti-Semites.
