Jews Thank The Pope

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Well known article written by David Greenberg, illustrating the “evolution” of Hanukka at the expense of Christmas

Christmas for Jews
**How Hanukkah became a major holiday.
**By David Greenberg

http://img.slate.msn.com/media/59000/59992/Frenkel_HanakkahTree.jpgThe holiday season is upon us. Not the “Christmas season” but the “holiday season”–a euphemism for “Christmas with Hanukkah (and, perhaps, Kwanzaa) thrown in.” If you place a tree in the town square, you need a menorah as well. We festoon offices with blue and silver Hanukkah decorations alongside Christmas trimmings, and on the Sesame Street Christmas special, Big Bird wishes Mr. Hooper a Happy Hanukkah. The only meaning of the phrase “Judeo-Christian,” it seems, is the fusion of these two otherwise unrelated holidays into one big seasonal spree.

The problem, as any rabbi will tell you, is that Hanukkah has traditionally been a minor Jewish festival. It commemorates the successful Israelite revolt in the second century B.C. against their Syrian oppressors, and their refusal to assimilate into the prevailing Hellenistic culture. Specifically, it celebrates the miracle in which, according to lore, a day’s worth of oil fueled the candelabra of the Jews’ rededicated temple for eight days. Until recently, this observance paled next to the High Holy Days, Passover, even Purim. So how did it become “the Jewish Christmas”? And is this good for the Jews?

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First, Christmas had to become Christmas, which originally wasn’t a big deal in America. The Puritans who settled Massachusetts made it a crime to celebrate the holiday (punishment: five shillings). Only with the arrival of German immigrants after the Civil War did it emerge as the major American feast. With the revolution in retailing–marked by the rise of department stores and advertising–celebrations focused on throwing parties, buying and giving gifts, and sending greeting cards (first sold in 1874, they became a million dollar business within a few years). The Coca-Cola Co. adopted as its logo a jolly bearded man in a red and white suit, and Santa bypassed Jesus as Christmas’ main icon.

Enter the Jews. Around 1900, millions of eastern European Jews came to the United States, congregating in urban enclaves such as New York’s Lower East Side. Most adopted American traditions, including the newly secularized Christmas. “Santa Claus visited the East Side last night,” the New York Tribune noted on Christmas Day, 1904, “and hardly missed a tenement house.” Jews installed Christmas trees in their homes and thought nothing of the carols their children sang in the public schools.

The second generation of American Jews challenged this embrace of a festival that, despite its secular trappings, was fundamentally Christian. But parents couldn’t very well deprive their kids of gifts or seasonal merriment, and Hanukkah benefited from convenient timing. Instead of giving the traditional “gelt,” or money, Jews celebrated with presents, so as not to fall short of their Christian neighbors. Prominent religious leaders, more secure with maintaining a Jewish identity in America, now urged schools to let Jews abstain from yuletide celebrations or to provide all-purpose holiday parties instead. Lighting the menorah proved a satisfying alternative to adorning a tree with colorful lights.

Zionism, which gathered converts in the years before World War II, also boosted Hanukkah’s stock. The holiday’s emphasis on self-reliance and military strength in the face of persecution dovetailed with the themes of nationalists seeking to establish a Jewish state. The warrior-hero Judah Maccabee, leader of an ancient revolt, morphed into a proto-Zionist pioneer. At first, Zionist organizations used the holiday as an excuse to prod individuals to donate coins to the cause. In later years they packed Madison Square Garden for Hanukkah fund-raising galas.
 
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CrusaderNY:
Well known article written by David Greenberg, illustrating the “evolution” of Hanukka at the expense of Christmas
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I don’t know that it’s well known but at least it’s an article not from an SSPX site. It is no secret that to religious Jews Hanukkah is a “minor” holiday. Almost every Jewish rabbi I have ever heard talking about it, starts out his remarks with the fact.

Outside of that I see nothing wrong with Jews in America deciding to include children in the spirit that was prevalent in their adopted country at Christmas time and to do so by utilizing whatever feast in their religious calendar was at the same time period.

Up until the last decade St. Patrick’s Day was a religious feast in Ireland vs. the party time and parade that many Americans have in this nation for it. So what?
 
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CrusaderNY:
And as far as writing X-Mas that is so offensive to Catholics that I would suggest you learn a little sensitivity to Catholics and I recommend that you go touch base with your patriarch.
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CrusaderNY: Hagia Sophia said she was Catholic. Her patriarch is the Patriarch of the West, the Pope!
 
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CrusaderNY:
Well known article written by David Greenberg, illustrating the “evolution” of Hanukka at the expense of Christmas

Christmas for Jews
How Hanukkah became a major holiday.
****By David Greenberg

.
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But, with respect, this is another example of a bad foundation for an argument: nothing in the article says that Jews did this out of malice for Christ, for Christmas, for Christians, nada! They did it so their kids wouldn’t be left out (according to the article that you posted).
 
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JKirkLVNV:
But, with respect, this is another example of a bad foundation for an argument: nothing in the article says that Jews did this out of malice for Christ, for Christmas, for Christians, nada! They did it so their kids wouldn’t be left out (according to the article that you posted).
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So, as long as there’s no admission of malice, Christians shouldn’t be concerned that Christ has been removed from public view on the date that commemorates His birth.

Is that your point?
 
John TE:
So, as long as there’s no admission of malice, Christians shouldn’t be concerned that Christ has been removed from public view on the date that commemorates His birth.

Is that your point?
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Now first, go back and look at post in which CrusaderNY placed an article by David Greenberg. When you’ve done that, look at what I said again:

But, with respect, this is another example of a bad foundation for an argument: nothing in the article says that Jews did this out of malice for Christ, for Christmas, for Christians, nada! They did it so their kids wouldn’t be left out (according to the article that you posted).
I state in my post that the article does not do what Crusader purports that it does, ie, demonstrate that Jews are somehow responsible for the diminishment of Christmas as a Christian holiday or that they are responsible for the word “Christmas” being written as “Xmas.” I state that nothing in the article says that Jews now celebrate Hannukah (indeed a relatively minor holiday in their reckoning) as a demonstration of malice to Our Lord and Savior, or to Christmas, or to Christians. I state that what the article implies is that Jews did it because they didn’t want their children to be left out of the general Christmas custom of gift giving and receiving. How would anyone, who had the vaguest aquaintance with the English language or the ability to read critically for the main idea (something I teach my 4th graders), then leap to the conclusion that I myself believe or would contend that “Christians shouldn’t be concerned that Christ has been removed from public view on the date that commemorates His birth?” I merely pointed out (and I used the term “with respect”) the fallacy of Crusader building his or her particular argument on that particular article. In case you don’t get the point, I believe that Christians should be very concerned *“that Christ has been removed from public view on the date that commemorates His birth.” *That was not, however, the main idea of my post nor did I intend it should be. God bless.
 
Just an exert from the Babylonain Talmud, same as that of the Palestinian, where there are numerous anti catholic and Jesus references throughout. Much of this verbiage was used to stone Catholics outside of the city wall of Jeruselam, and later on point out Catholics to the Romans who later killed them in many various forms. Since this language has done so much harm to us, and continues to be taught (ask any of your Jewish friends and they will agree), why have WE NOT demanded this stop?

**Teachings right from the Talmud:
**In order not to leave any loose ends on the subject of the Talmud’s reference to Jesus, to Christians and to the Christian faith aresummarized translations into English from the Latin texts of Rev. Pranaitis:

Sanhedrin, 67a – Jesus referred to as the son of Pandira, a soldier
Kallah, 1b. (18b) – Illegitimate and conceived during menstruation.

Sanhedrin, 67a – Hanged on the eve of Passover. Abhodah Zarah II – Referred to as the son of Pandira, a Roman soldier.

Sanhedrin, 43a – On the eve of Passover they hanged Jesus.

Schabbath, 104b – Called a fool and no one pays attention to fools.

Toldoth Jeschu. Judas and Jesus engaged in quarrel with filth.

Sanhedrin, 103a. – Suggested corrupts his morals and dishonors self.

Zohar III, (282) – Died like a beast and buried in animal’s dirt heap.

In the book of Mathew, our Gospel which we are to believe Word for Word, it is quite clear what was said when Puntius Pilate wanted to let Our Lord go, and every Lenten Season on Good Friday we repeat these words, but we even have changed the wording and “interpretation” of our most beloved document for PC and of course this was later put into the councilar documents of Vatican II. So I ask:
  1. Is there not an apology Owed to us
  2. Should this anti Jesus rhetoric be done away with.
  3. Have the Council documents not defected from the teachings and doctrine of the church?
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JKirkLVNV:
But, with respect, this is another example of a bad foundation for an argument: nothing in the article says that Jews did this out of malice for Christ, for Christmas, for Christians, nada! They did it so their kids wouldn’t be left out (according to the article that you posted).
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I think the problem here is that there are good jews and bad jews. not all of the jews believe the same thing. they are not under a universal spiritual authority like we are. the jewish anti-defamation leauge is clearly evil but i wouldn’t say they represent all of judaism. they are kind of like protestants in this way. i wouldn’t put an episcopalian and southern baptist in the same catagory just like i wouldn’t put a reformed or secular jew with orthodox jews. this link is a good example jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/Printer&cid=1106104800722
 
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CrusaderNY:
In the book of Mathew, our Gospel which we are to believe Word for Word, it is quite clear what was said when Puntius Pilate wanted to let Our Lord go, and every Lenten Season on Good Friday we repeat these words, but we even have changed the wording and “interpretation” of our most beloved document for PC and of course this was later put into the councilar documents of Vatican II. So I ask:
  1. Is there not an apology Owed to us
  2. Should this anti Jesus rhetoric be done away with.
  3. Have the Council documents not defected from the teachings and doctrine of the church?
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Quite frankly?
  1. That depends on the source of the document you cite above. If it is offered by a rabid, anti-semetic source that doesn’t have a well constructed argument based on historic facts and not emotion, then no. I’ve no knowlege of the Talmud, other than some notion that it is a commentary on the Torah, which doesn’t mention Our Lord at all, at least by name. Given your predilection for citing dubious sources, the best I can say is that my jury is still out.
  2. If this is accurate, yes! We should avoid people who slander Our Lord, avoid them, avoid them, avoid them.
  3. The Church cannot defect from her teaching. She can clarify it and expand upon it. I cannot comment on the Council’s documents. I am familiar with the Catechism, but haven’t yet begun to study the documents of the Second Vatican Council. I would say that the best arbiters of the documents and the intent of the Council are the Holy Father and the Bishops in union with him.
***In the book of Mathew, our Gospel which we are to believe Word for Word, it is quite clear what was said when Puntius Pilate wanted to let Our Lord go, and every Lenten Season on Good Friday we repeat these words, but we even have changed the wording and “interpretation” of our most beloved document for PC and of course this was later put into the councilar documents of Vatican II. ***
This I will comment on: I do not believe the Jews have any collective responsibility in the death of Our Lord and Savior. I do not believe in any way, shape, or form in the concept of “blood guilt” or the notion of “deicide.” I believe that the leaders of the Jews were responsible for the death of Our Lord, and that they were assisted in achieving this by the Romans (Gentiles). When the crowd cried out,“His blood be on us and on our children!”, I believe that this was done in ignorance, at the coniving of the same Jewish leaders. Something done in ignorance is mitigated, at least in theological terms. No Jew today is responsible for Jesus’ death. I believe with all my heart that Jesus’ death was foreordained before the foundations of the world, before the onset of time, in the vast echoes of all eternity, for the salvation of man. Further, as Our Lord is the Second Person of the Trinity, and as that Second Person of the Trinity called out from the Cross to the First Person of the Trinity and asked of God the Father, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”, I believe that the Jewish leaders, the Romans, everyone associated with the actual Crucifixion, were forgiven as the Father was asked by the Son. The Persons of the Trinity are perfectly united in Their Desire. Where Our Lord pleads for forgiveness, we should at least hesitate to condemn.
 
So then if you are saying then that it was the “Leaders” of the Jewish people that are responsible for the death of Our Lord, then I guess that it was the leader of the Nazi’s, Adolf Hitler and no Germans at all who were responsible for the death of millions of Jews and Gentiles, and I guess it was the leader of Russia, Josef Stalin , and no Russians whatsoever who killed millions in the Gulag…your theory just does not hold water, the liberal mentality that says it is society to blame for the growing prison population and not the person who carried out the hideous act of killing…It was a mob if I remember correctly who called for our Lords death, it was a mob, a Jewish mob, who stoned the first martyr to die for Christianity in St Stephen…where these people who stoned St Stephen only “the Leaders”?

Where is our apology???
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JKirkLVNV:
Quite frankly?
  1. That depends on the source of the document you cite above. If it is offered by a rabid, anti-semetic source that doesn’t have a well constructed argument based on historic facts and not emotion, then no. I’ve no knowlege of the Talmud, other than some notion that it is a commentary on the Torah, which doesn’t mention Our Lord at all, at least by name. Given your predilection for citing dubious sources, the best I can say is that my jury is still out.
  2. If this is accurate, yes! We should avoid people who slander Our Lord, avoid them, avoid them, avoid them.
  3. The Church cannot defect from her teaching. She can clarify it and expand upon it. I cannot comment on the Council’s documents. I am familiar with the Catechism, but haven’t yet begun to study the documents of the Second Vatican Council. I would say that the best arbiters of the documents and the intent of the Council are the Holy Father and the Bishops in union with him.
***In the book of Mathew, our Gospel which we are to believe Word for Word, it is quite clear what was said when Puntius Pilate wanted to let Our Lord go, and every Lenten Season on Good Friday we repeat these words, but we even have changed the wording and “interpretation” of our most beloved document for PC and of course this was later put into the councilar documents of Vatican II. ***
This I will comment on: I do not believe the Jews have any collective responsibility in the death of Our Lord and Savior. I do not believe in any way, shape, or form in the concept of “blood guilt” or the notion of “deicide.” I believe that the leaders of the Jews were responsible for the death of Our Lord, and that they were assisted in achieving this by the Romans (Gentiles). When the crowd cried out,“His blood be on us and on our children!”, I believe that this was done in ignorance, at the coniving of the same Jewish leaders. Something done in ignorance is mitigated, at least in theological terms. No Jew today is responsible for Jesus’ death. I believe with all my heart that Jesus’ death was foreordained before the foundations of the world, before the onset of time, in the vast echoes of all eternity, for the salvation of man. Further, as Our Lord is the Second Person of the Trinity, and as that Second Person of the Trinity called out from the Cross to the First Person of the Trinity and asked of God the Father, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”, I believe that the Jewish leaders, the Romans, everyone associated with the actual Crucifixion, were forgiven as the Father was asked by the Son. The Persons of the Trinity are perfectly united in Their Desire. Where Our Lord pleads for forgiveness, we should at least hesitate to condemn.
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CrusaderNY:
So then if you are saying then that it was the “Leaders” of the Jewish people that are responsible for the death of Our Lord, then I guess that it was the leader of the Nazi’s, Adolf Hitler and no Germans at all who were responsible for the death of millions of Jews and Gentiles, and I guess it was the leader of Russia, Josef Stalin , and no Russians whatsoever who killed millions in the Gulag…Of course not. The Russians and Germans who participated in these atrocities are culpable as well. But are Russians and Germans who didn’t participate, who weren’t even alive at that time, guilty of these atrocities? Your posts here and elsewhere seem to imply that you believe the Jews guilty of blood guilt. That puts you at dangerous odds with the Holy Father and the Magisterium of the Church. your theory just does not hold water, the liberal (sigh…there you go with the word liberal again. I’m not liberal) mentality that says it is society to blame for the growing prison population and not the person who carried out the hideous act of killing(YOU SAID THAT!!! YOU SAID THAT A WHOLE SOCIETY WAS TO BLAME FOR SOMETHING!!!)…It was a mob if I remember correctly who called for our Lords death (alright…I agree that they did. Scripture plainly says, in one of the Gospels, that they were incited by their leaders, however. I think a case may be made for them being ignorant of what they were doing), it was a mob, a Jewish mob, who stoned the first martyr to die for Christianity in St Stephen…where these people who stoned St Stephen only “the Leaders”?

Where is our apology???
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***No apology is owed us for the death of Our Lord and Savior because He died for all of US! Jewish leaders called for His death, Roman soldiers carried it out (they scourged Him, mocked Him, spat on Him, crucified Him…we’re not told that anybody wanted out of the whole thing except Pilate). Thus, Jews and Gentiles are both guilty of the death of Jesus. ***
**Watch me construct a “straw man” argument just like you did, as follows: "So are you saying that the Second Person of the Trinity didn’t mean it when He cried out, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?” Are you saying that the First Person of the Trinity would not hear the Second Person of the Trinity? Are you saying that the Members of the Most Holy Trinity are not united in Their Desires? Wow, that’s radically liberal!" **
 
American Jewish Committe Article
Originally stored at:
ajc.org/inthemedia/RelatedArticles.asp?did=933 but removed within days and now considered by them to be “an internal document.”

Google’s cache of the article is (as of 10 October 2003) at this URL: 216.239.37.104/search?q=cache:VDL9J_jZNF8J:www.ajc.org/
inthemedia/RelatedArticles.asp%3Fdid%3D933+&hl=
en&start=1&ie=UTF-8

Jesus in the Talmud

September 24, 2003
Steven Bayme, National Director, Contemporary Jewish Life Department

The recent controversy over the forthcoming release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion has reignited the longstanding debate over responsibility for the crucifixion of Jesus. This 2,000-year-old debate clearly has been a costly one for Jews. Statements attributed by the Gospels to Jewish leaders of the first century urging that Jesus be crucified and that responsibility for the act be laid at the hands of the Jewish people for all time form the basis for the charge of deicide against the Jews. More tellingly, historians have argued correctly that this “teaching of contempt,” casting the Jews as a permanently accursed people, often served to legitimate violence against Jews as the living embodiment of those who killed Jesus.

In the mid-1960s, the Vatican II Council was meant to relegate this teaching of contempt to the history books. The Church released a statement claiming that “what happened in His passion can not be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today”. Precisely with the leadership of groups such as the American Jewish Committee, remarkable progress in Catholic/Jewish relations has since been attained, especially concerning the portrayal of Jews and Judaism within Catholic textbooks. Gibson’s movie, intended to tell the story of the Gospels, has alienated many Jewish leaders, who correctly worry whether the movie’s graphic description of the crucifixion and its alleged overtones of a Jewish conspiracy to kill Jesus may ignite long-dormant Christian hostilities to Jews.

For this reason, the account of the Gospels, and its associations with anti-Semitism, needs to be honestly confronted, including the question of the relationship of church teachings to acts of violence against Jews. Yet it is also important that Jews confront their own tradition and ask how Jewish sources treated the Jesus narrative. Pointedly, Jews did not argue that crucifixion was a Roman punishment and therefore no Jewish court could have advocated it. Consider, by contrast, the following text from the Talmud:

On the eve of Passover Jesus was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, “He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Anyone who can say anything in his favor let him come forward and plead on his behalf.” But since nothing was brought forward in his favor, he was hanged on the eve of Passover. Ulla retorted: Do you suppose he was one for whom a defense could be made? Was he not a mesith (enticer), concerning whom Scripture says, “Neither shall thou spare nor shall thou conceal him?” With Jesus, however, it was different, for he was connected with the government. (Sanhedrin 43a)

This text, long censored in editions of the Talmud, is concerned primarily with due process in capital crimes. Standard process requires that punishment be delayed for forty days in order to allow extenuating evidence to be presented. However, in extreme cases, such as seducing Israel into apostasy, this requirement is waived. The case of Jesus, according to the Talmud, constituted an exception to this rule. Although one who enticed Israel into apostasy is considered an extreme case, the Jews at the time waited forty days because of the close ties of Jesus to the Roman authorities. However, once the forty days elapsed without the presentation of favorable or extenuating comment about him, they proceeded to kill him on the eve of Passover.
 
(cont.)

Three themes emanate from this passage. First, the charges against Jesus relate to seduction of Israel into apostasy and the practice of sorcery. According to the Gospels, the charges against Jesus concerned his self-proclamation as a messiah. The Talmud seems to prefer the more specific charges of practicing sorcery and leading Israel into false beliefs. One twentieth-century historian, Morton Smith of Columbia University, argued on the basis of recently discovered “hidden Gospels” that the historical Jesus indeed was a first-century sorcerer (Jesus the Magician, HarperCollins, 1978). In the eyes of the Talmudic rabbis, the practice of sorcery and false prophecy constituted capital crimes specifically proscribed in Deuteronomy 18: 10-12 and 13: 2-6.

Second, the Talmud is here offering a subtle commentary upon Jesus’ political connections. The Gospels portray the Roman governor Pontius Pilate as going to great lengths to spare Jesus (Mark 15: 6-15). Although this passage may well have been written to appease the Roman authorities and blame the Jews, the Talmudic passage points in the same direction: The Jews waited forty days, in a departure from the usual practice, only because Jesus was close to the ruling authorities.

Lastly, the passage suggests rabbinic willingness to take responsibility for the execution of Jesus. No effort is made to pin his death upon the Romans. In all likelihood, the passage in question emanates from fourth-century Babylon, then the center of Talmudic scholarship, and beyond the reach of both Rome and Christianity. Although several hundred years had elapsed since the lifetime of Jesus, and therefore this is not at all a contemporary source, the Talmudic passage indicates rabbinic willingness to acknowledge, at least in principle, that in a Jewish court and in a Jewish land, a real-life Jesus would indeed have been executed.

To be sure, historians can not accept such a text uncritically. For one thing, the Talmudic text, as noted, was written some 300 years after the event it reports. Secondly, it makes no acknowledgement of intra-Jewish tensions in first century Palestine in which Jewish sects proliferated, and Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots competed for Jewish allegiances. Jesus’s antipathy towards the Pharisees, of course, is well known from the Gospels, and the Talmudic rabbis, who presumably read these accounts, defined themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Pharisaic teachers. By contrast, the High Priest was, in all likelihood, a member of the Sadducee faction, which generally consisted of more aristocratic elements. What the Talmudic narrative does demonstrate is fourth century rabbinic willingness to take responsibility for the execution of Jesus.

What, then, are the implications of this reading of Jesus through the eyes of rabbinic sources? First, we do require honesty on both sides in confronting history. Jewish apologetics that “we could not have done it” because of Roman sovereignty ring hollow when one examines the Talmudic account. However, the significance of Vatican II, conversely, should by no means be minimized. The Church went on record as abandoning the teaching of contempt in favor of historicizing the accounts of the Gospels and removing their applicability to Jews of later generations. A mature Jewish-Christian relationship presupposes the ability of both sides to face up to history, acknowledge errors that have been committed, and build a social contract in which each side can both critique as well as assign value to its religious counterpart.

Bibliography for further reading:
Steven Bayme, Understanding Jewish History (KTAV), 1997
Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth (Beacon Books), 1964
R. Travers-Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (KTAV), 1975

Questions for further discussion:
  1. Given the climate in first-century Palestine, what threat did Jesus pose to Jews and to Rome?
  2. How should Jews understand Jesus today?
  3. What should be the terms of a social contract between believing Jews and Christians? How should adherents of each faith view the other?
 
Please find the time to read the following two books:
  1. GIDEON’S SPIES: The Secret History of the Mossad (c. 2000) by Gordon Thomas.
  2. BY WAY OF DECEPTION (c. 2002) by Victor Ostrovsky.
The first author, Gordon Thomas, uncannily predicted the Pope’s official apology in his book and suggested that a *quid pro quo *was reached by the government of Israel and the Vatican allowing the Pope access to the Holy Lands in exchange for a public apology for all the alleged past wrongs commited by the Church. The author further suggested that this meeting allowed the Mossad access to the Vatican.

Now there appears to be a reciprocal platitude with Jews thanking the Pope?
 
Regarding the posting of the Bayme article:
  1. It seems to be concerned with historical accuracy and scholarship. That’s the kind of stuff that needs to be posted.
  2. It states that Jewish leaders seem to be willing to accept culpability in light of Jewish jurisprudence. I, seeing with hindsight, would argue that: A) Fine, agreed, Jewish jurisprudence would still be at fault as Judaism did anticipate the coming of a Messiah. It didn’t treat all other Messianic candidates as it did Jesus, what few there were. AND B) As I’ve stated, I do believe the LEADERS of the Jews to have been responsible. They colluded, but the Romans still were the ones who actually put Him to death (OUR Gospels have the Jews saying,“We may not lawfully put a man to death.” Why? Was that priviledge of exercising their own Jewish jurisprudence taken from them by their Roman occupiers?). So they worked in tandem. This does not impute real, actual, juridicial guilt on Jews today, any more than on Gentiles descended from the Roman soldiers. I believe that article says as much (about the Jews, at least).
  3. It acknowledges that the Church is now more interested in the actually history of what happened: “The Church went on record as abandoning the teaching of contempt in favor of historicizing the accounts of the Gospels and removing their applicability to Jews of later generations.” That is all to the good. “What happened in His passion can not be blamed upon all the Jews then living, without distinction, nor upon the Jews of today”. We would do well to heed the voice of Holy Mother Church.
 
Is this or is this disturbing, that the Church has now equated the hatred of Zionism with that of Anti-Semitism
IMRA Newsletter

**Catholic Church equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism **

By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent

9 July 2004

www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=449338

The Catholic Church condemned anti-Zionism as a cover for anti-Semitism by means of a joint statement issued by a forum of Catholic-Jewish intellectuals this week.

The announcement was made at a gathering of religious, academic and other leading Jewish and Catholic figures in Buenos Aires.

“We oppose anti-Semitism in any way and form, including anti-Zionism that has become of late a manifestation of anti-Semitism,” the statement said.

This is the first time that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism have been equated by the Catholic Church.

The statement also includes a stern condemnation of terrorism, particularly terror in the name of faith.

“Terror is a sin against man and against God. Fundamentalist terrorism in the name of God has no justification and cannot be justified.”

Ilan Steinberg, director of the World Jewish Congress, one of the forum’s organizers, described the joint statement as “an historic moment.”

“For the first time, the Catholic Church recognizes in anti-Zionism an attack not only against Jews, but against the whole Jewish people.”

Senior Jewish figures called the announcement a significant, public statement of support by the Catholic Church in the face of anti-Zionism.

“In the past, Zionism was equated with racism, and this statement turns anti-Zionism statements to a form of racism,” a Jewish leader said in New York.

The statement joins a prior European Union announcement and UN declaration of war against anti-Semitism as part of a global front fighting the scourge.

Source: IMRA – Independent Media Review and Analysis
 
An excerpt from thought on Zionism by a Dissident Jew, the same Zionism that the Church has equated to Anti-Semitism to please Israel

Nearly 800,000 Palestinians would be displaced so as to allow for the creation of Israel: around 600,000 of whom, according to internal documents of the Israeli Defense Force, were expelled forcibly from their homes. At the time, these Palestinians, most of whose families had been living on the land for centuries, constituted two-thirds of the population and owned 90% of the land. Though some Zionists claim Palestine was a largely uninhabited wilderness prior to Jewish arrival, early settlers were far more honest. As Ahad Ha’am acknowledged in 1891:
 
Can it truly be said that the Jewish race is guilty of the sin of deicide, and that it is consequently cursed by God, as depicted in Gibson’s movie on the Passion?

The teaching of Sacred Scripture on this question is quite explicit. St. John explains that if Pilate sentenced Jesus Christ to death, it was only on account of the insistence of the Jews:
“When the chief priests, therefore, and the servants, had seen him, they cried out, saying: Crucify him, crucify him. Pilate saith to them: Take him you, and crucify him: for I find no cause in him. The Jews answered him: We have a law; and according to the law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” (Jn 19:6, 7)
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The Synoptic Evangelists state the same thing, e.g., Lk 23:22-24:
“Why, what evil hath this man done? I find no cause of death in him. I will chastise him therefore, and let him go. But they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might be crucified; and their voices prevailed. And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required.”
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The Jews were consequently directly responsible for the crucifixion. Deicide is the name given to the crime of killing the person who is God, namely the Son of God in His human nature. It is those persons who brought about the crucifixion who are guilty of deicide, namely the Jews.

St. Matthew’s Gospel states very clearly, not only that Pilate considered Jesus innocent of the accusations made against him, but also that the whole people of the Jews took the responsibility of his murder upon their own heads. Indeed, to Pilate’s statement: “I am innocent of the blood of this just man; look you to it,” the response is immediate: “And the whole people answering, said: His blood be upon us and upon our children.” (Mt 27:24, 25) The Gospel teaches us, therefore, that the Jewish race brought upon themselves the curse that followed the crime of deicide.

However, in what does that curse consist. Surely it cannot be that there is a collective guilt of the Jewish race for the sin of deicide. For only those individuals are responsible for the sin who knowingly and willingly brought it about. Jews of today are manifestly not responsible for that sin.

The curse is of a different nature, and corresponds to the greatness of the vocation of the Jewish people as a preparation for the Messias, to the superiority of their election, which makes them first in the order of grace. Just as the true Israelites, who accept the Messias, are the first to receive “glory, honor and peace to every one that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rm 2:10), so also are the first to receive the punishment of their refusal of the Messias: “Tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that worketh evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Greek” (Rm 2:9).

The curse is then the punishment for the hardhearted rebelliousness of a people that has refused the time of its visitation, that has refused to convert and to live a moral, spiritual life, directed towards heaven. This curse is the punishment of blindness to the things of God and eternity, of deafness to the call of conscience and to the love of good and hatred of evil which is the basis of all moral life, of spiritual paralysis, of total preoccupation with an earthly kingdom.

It is this that sets them as a people in entire opposition with the Catholic Church and its supernatural plan for the salvation of souls. Father Denis Fahey in The Kingship of Christ and Organized Naturalism explains this radical opposition. He describes “the Naturalism of the Jewish Nation” and the “age-long struggle of the Jewish Nation against the supernatural life of the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (p. 42)

He goes on to explain that “we must distinguish accurately between opposition to the domination of Jewish Naturalism in society and hostility to the Jews as a race” which latter form of opposition “is what is designated by the term, ‘Antisemitism,’ and has been more than once condemned by the Church. The former opposition is incumbent on every Catholic and on every true lover of his native land.”

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Father Fahey develops his explanation of the nature of this naturalism of the Jewish nation, detailing the two essential truths of the supernatural order that they refused in the time of Christ Our Lord, and continue to refuse to this day:
They refused, firstly, to accept that the Supernatural life of His Messianic Kingdom was “higher than their national life and, secondly, they utterly rejected the idea of the Gentile Nations being admitted to enter the Messianic Kingdom on the same level as themselves. Thus they put their national life above the supernatural life of Grace and set racial descent from Abraham according to the flesh on a higher plane than spiritual descent from Abraham by faith. Having put their race and nation in the place of God, having in fact deified them, they rejected the supernatural Messias and elaborated a program of preparation for the natural Messias to come.” (ibid. pp. 43, 44)
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It is indeed very sad that the post-Conciliar Church has forgotten the elementary distinction described by Father Fahey, namely between opposition to Jewish Naturalism and hostility to the race. The door was opened to this, and to the subsequent acceptation of Judaism as a legitimate religion in the Vatican II Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate.

After correctly pointing out that the Jewish authorities pressed for the death of Christ, and that neither all Jews at that time, nor today “can be charged with the crimes committed during his Passion,” it then continues with the outrageous statement, so contrary to Sacred Scripture, that “the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy Scripture.” (§4) It is consequently considered that since the Church reproves every form of persecution, then we must respect their false national religion, regardless of the fact that its very existence is the sign of the curse of the national naturalism that has fallen upon them.

The January 2002 statement of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, entitled The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible, likewise refuses to make the same elementary distinction. It apologizes, for example, that certain New Testament passages that criticize the Pharisees had been used to justify anti-Semitism.

This has never been the case in the Catholic Church, but that certainly do inspire us to stand against the hypocritical naturalism of those who refuse to convert. Our Lord is very explicit about the curse that the Scribes and Pharisees have brought upon themselves, repeating the curse “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees” no less than eight times in 17 verses in St. Matthew’s Gospel (23:13-29): “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men, for you yourselves do not enter in; and those that are going in, you suffer not to enter…” The Jewish refusal of the supernatural order, as of the Messias, has made their religion, true until the time of Our Lord, now a false one. Hence the malediction, and our opposition to their refusal of the supernatural order, which is not anti-Semitism.

From this follows the essential thesis of the above-mentioned document, namely that the Jewish concept of a future Messias does not conflict with the Christian belief in Jesus, for, it states, “The Jewish Messianic expectation is not vain.” How could such an expectation be not vain, given that they refuse Christ, the only Messias, who has already come? This means, if taken to its logical conclusion, that the refusal of the mystery of the Incarnation, of the birth of our Divine Savior in the flesh, is no longer a sin of infidelity, that is a grave sin against the Faith. If this were the case, how could it still be true for Our Lord to say: “I am the way, and the truth and the life. No man cometh to the Father but by me” (Jn 14:6)?
 
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