This could unite the two major religions :)

[meltzerboy]

I disagree and think that this is a prudential matter of discipline and not required theologically. I don’t think it is any kind of a sin for Catholic parents to circumcise their male infants.

Maybe not male circumcision per se, but in line with the Jewish ritual? I think that would be considered Judaizing. Baptism is the Catholic circumcision of the heart. Interestingly, the Jewish ritual of circumcision itself is not merely the external shedding of blood to be bound to the Covenant but also one that involves an internal transformation of mind, heart, and soul, as is putting on the tefillin (phylacteries), for example. Most every external Jewish ritual is accompanied by an internal process of change.

 

[DelsonJacobs]

Your last point is interesting, Delson, and I’ll look into that. I read an article about Archbishop Justin Welby, the fairly new head of the Anglican Church in the UK, who learned a couple of years ago that his father was Jewish. The article was in The Times of Israel, which is edited by a former editor of The Jerusalem Post. The Jewish writer ended the article by saying that Archbishop Welby, as an Anglican, would be able to live in Israel under the Law of Return if he ever chose to do so. That puzzled me. Possibly the change in the Law you’re speaking of has something to do with it, if the writer was correct. Welby, though, is of Ashkenazi descent, I think, since his family’s name was originally Weiler. At any rate, he’s definitely a first generation convert to Christianity, so .

As for the rest of your post, Delson, Delson, where’s the emoticon for when I don’t want to bang my head against a wall but I do want to hit my forehead with my palm…you completely misunderstood what I said all through your two middle paragraphs. I wrote briefly before that until fairly recently the CC did indeed require Jewish converts to give up all and any Jewish practice. If it appalls you now as a Catholic, how was this okay for most of Catholic history? I don’t mean to be difficult, but I don’t understand how you can be okay with Aquinas, the Twelfth Ecumenical Council, and the Council of Florence all requiring all cessation of Jewish practice by converts. Aquinas in particular gives theological seasons for the requirement, so it can’t be seen as merely a discipline for political reasons.

In between hitting myself, let me thank you for noting that in Acts 21 the the Apostles in Jerusalem said there “was no truth in the rumors” that Paul was teaching Jews to cease observing the Law. I asked about this several years ago on CAF, and just got the sound of crickets.

I’ll try to sort out the rest of our misunderstanding later.

No need for the emoticon. I understood everything. The past references you cite are not seen as dogmatically binding on the Church and have been disregarded officially since Vatican II.

As such I am not okay with those in the Church who used to require assimilation of the Jews because neither is the Church. It is just as important that we keep up with present Church teaching in the same manner that many tend to be with ancient Church teaching, as theology does change. The Catholic Church recognizes it performed a horrible wrong in the past toward the Jews with some of these past declarations indirectly contributing to the anti-Semitism that sparked the Holocaust. Just the other day the news was filled with reports of the Catholic Church in Austria officially apologizing for its actions before and during the Holocaust. Catholics realize that a lot might have played out differently had they not taught such things.

Consider that I am relatively young and born after Vatican II, so I’ve never known a Catholic Church that wasn’t anything but against demanding Jews to abandon their ethnic culture and customs. I was born into a Church that was already teaching that some of our past was not always on the right side of history, and how we needed to learn from our mistakes lest we repeated them again.

 

[AbideWithMe]

There was also a minority group at the time of Jesus, before the establishment of the Church, that called themselves Jewish Christians, who are now extinct. Perhaps Messianic Jews are a variation of that ancient group. However, I thought there are differences in belief among Messianic Jews themselves. According to my understanding, some of them identify as Jews who follow Christ, while others identify as Christians (mainly Protestants) who practice certain Jewish rituals. The latter variety, I think, is particularly what both Judaism and Catholicism reject: Judaism because they are merely dabbling in Jewish rituals while not regarding themselves as Jewish, and Catholicism because they are behaving as Judaizing Christians who do not adhere to the teachings of the Church, as opposed to Hebrew Catholics. Do you have any information on this?

You’re right that there are notable differences among Messianic Jews as the movement has continued to evolve and tries to figure out where they should fit in. They run on a wide spectrum.

The UMJC and the MJAA are the two main organizations in North America. The UMJC tends to be more moderate Evangelicals; while they don’t believe in dual covenant theology (something which the CC in the US has considered but ultimately rejected, IIRC) they do believe Jews are already in a faithful covenant with God, mediated in some unspecified way by Jesus (they are, after all, Christians, so they believe Jesus is involved), though they still believe some evangelism is appropriate.

The MJAA sometimes, but not always, tends toward the more conservative, and occasionally even fundamentalist, end of the spectrum. Then again, it also has quite a few charismatics, and they go on a range from liberal to very conservative.

Jews for Jesus is more involved with the MJAA in my observation, but they have an open discussion relationship with the UMJC. The wider church affiliation of JfJ is mostly, but not all, Baptist, and it’s from there that I’ve seen some members have an anti-Catholic stance while the UMJC does not.

As far as I know all Messianic Jewish groups consider members Jewish if they have a Jewish mother; some also if they have a Jewish father alone. Many Messianic groups are as observant as Conservative Jews; some as observant as modern Orthodox Jews. One of the main things I get annoyed with here is the adamant statement–not as enquiry or search for respectful understanding of others outside their group—by mainstream Jews that MJs are just pretending to be observant, or dabbling in token Judaism with a bit of Judaica around, either to make themselves feel better, or more sinisterly to entice unsuspecting disenfranchised Jews into their lair so they can be gobbled up by Christians pulling the puppet strings. That’s not the case. I’ll try to go into a bit of detail, and find some short links, if I have time later, but now I have to go take care of my horses.

Kaninchen, I mean this last bit (below) more to you. It may well be I’m getting a wrong sense of some of what you’re saying, so let’s try to clear that part up if I’m misunderstanding you. That should be within our reach…
I honestly mean no disrespect, but I wasn’t raised to fear outsiders as threats to my faith, and I guess that being raised in a way that I related positively with my German, Welsh, and Jewish family members, I lack a sense of possibly prudent caution brought on by a long racial history of understandably worrying about oppression. Heck, my German ancestors oppressed both my Welsh Quaker and Jewish ancestors, but they’re still part of my family makeup and I trust that part of my family.

 

[meltzerboy]

You’re right that there are notable differences among Messianic Jews as the movement has continued to evolve and tries to figure out where they should fit in. They run on a wide spectrum.

The UMJC and the MJAA are the two main organizations in North America. The UMJC tends to be more moderate Evangelicals; while they don’t believe in dual covenant theology (something which the CC in the US has considered but ultimately rejected, IIRC) they do believe Jews are already in a faithful covenant with God, mediated in some unspecified way by Jesus (they are, after all, Christians, so they believe Jesus is involved), though they still believe some evangelism is appropriate.

The MJAA sometimes, but not always, tends toward the more conservative, and occasionally even fundamentalist, end of the spectrum. Then again, it also has quite a few charismatics, and they go on a range from liberal to very conservative.

Jews for Jesus is more involved with the MJAA in my observation, but they have an open discussion relationship with the UMJC. The wider church affiliation of JfJ is mostly, but not all, Baptist, and it’s from there that I’ve seen some members have an anti-Catholic stance while the UMJC does not.

As far as I know all Messianic Jewish groups consider members Jewish if they have a Jewish mother; some also if they have a Jewish father alone. Many Messianic groups are as observant as Conservative Jews; some as observant as modern Orthodox Jews. One of the main things I get annoyed with here is the adamant statement–not as enquiry or search for respectful understanding of others outside their group—by mainstream Jews that MJs are just pretending to be observant, or dabbling in token Judaism with a bit of Judaica around, either to make themselves feel better, or more sinisterly to entice unsuspecting disenfranchised Jews into their lair so they can be gobbled up by Christians pulling the puppet strings. That’s not the case. I’ll try to go into a bit of detail, and find some short links, if I have time later, but now I have to go take care of my horses.

Kaninchen, I mean this last bit (below) more to you. It may well be I’m getting a wrong sense of some of what you’re saying, so let’s try to clear that part up if I’m misunderstanding you. That should be within our reach…
I honestly mean no disrespect, but I wasn’t raised to fear outsiders as threats to my faith, and I guess that being raised in a way that I related positively with my German, Welsh, and Jewish family members, I lack a sense of possibly prudent caution brought on by a long racial history of understandably worrying about oppression. Heck, my German ancestors oppressed both my Welsh Quaker and Jewish ancestors, but they’re still part of my family makeup and I trust that part of my family.

Thanks so much for this wealth of information!

 

[Kaninchen]

Kaninchen, I mean this last bit (below) more to you. It may well be I’m getting a wrong sense of some of what you’re saying, so let’s try to clear that part up if I’m misunderstanding you. That should be within our reach…

The thing is that I was getting quite swept up your picture of Messianics, hands together, with shiny circles around their heads, staring raptly up to heaven - as in some pre-renaissance fresco, until I remembered that my experience of them was really rather different from yours.

I think you should stick with your post #71.

 

[AbideWithMe]

The thing is that I was getting quite swept up your picture of Messianics, hands together, with shiny circles around their heads, staring raptly up to heaven - as in some pre-renaissance fresco, until I remembered that my experience of them was really rather different from yours.

I think you should stick with your post #71.

Hmmm…and this (your post below) looks to me like you’ve painted a picture of a group of Messianic Jews in a dimly lit room, huddled around The Protocols of the Elders of the Messianic Jews, with impressive use of chiaroscuro to heighten the dramatic effect.

I didn’t paint the picture you think you saw. Probably the converse is true of my perception of your picture. But, post #71 shall be back in play, though the invitation for further discussion stands from my end.

The thing is that we Jews are a “on the one hand, while on the other hand, meanwhile on yet another hand” people - it’s how it works, it’s who we are and one Beth Din will disagree with another Beth Din’s definitions, lengthily.

Now, the idea that deciding who is, or is not, a Jew should be the realm of other people other than Jews seems ludicrous but it’s not really when one considers why such a proposition might be put forward.

We’re a tiny proportion of the world’s population and it’s always been so but what to do with the pesky Jews has been a long-time obsession of so many people. We’ve been shunted around, expelled, walled-up, forcibly converted, slaughtered and nearly annihilated but, still, here we are.

I think it’s in that context that the idea of denying us the right of self-definition lies - if people can be convinced that pesky Jews are denying the right of people who, for example, think a bit of Judaica in their lives would be nice, to be considered Jews, then eventually we can be portrayed as really nasty deniers of the rights of others, leaving us to slowly disappear into being a kind of Amish relic in a context of a non-pesky, fully in line with Christianity but with a Menorah for Christmas, Jewishness.

The final solution to the Jewish problem.

 

[Moses613]

I’ll cite some relevant quotes from various posters:

You might consider a Christianized Jew to be Jewish, but that is not how a rabbi would feel about it. The rabbi would say that after his Christian conversion he is no longer a Jew.

In the case of people like my dad, who had all Jewish ancestors and was raised Jewish, when he became a Methodist, by Rabbinic definition he was no longer a Jew.

Further, so-called Rabbinic Jews do NOT reject other, “non-Rabbinic” Jews as not being Jewish, and no Rabbinic (Orthodox) rabbi will reject ANY Jew, Rabbinic or not. Some Orthodox rabbis (certainly not most) have some harsh words to say about the non-orthodox movements in Judaism (Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist) and their rabbis, but NOT about the members of these movements and congregations themselves. One final point: even within Orthodox Judaism, there are differences of opinion: for example Traditional Orthodox and Hasidic Orthodox, which itself has several subdivisions.

Well, meltzerboy hit the nail on the head with that last quote. Actually, according to us “Rabbinic” Jews, Jewish status is an innate quality of the soul that can never be destroyed, revoked or changed. This state is achieved by being born Jewish or undergoing a legitimate conversion. A Jew can never, in Judaism, return to being a gentile, despite any of his or her beliefs or actions. That is completely separate from whether their actions or beliefs are considered acceptable to traditional Judaism.

 

[Moses613]

In regards to the issue of various splinter groups like Karaites, Ethiopians, etc., the issues are: If a group that was originally Jewish has been socially and religiously isolated from accepted Jewish communities and law, and also has different definitions of what it means to be Jewish and what conversion is, can the traditional Jewish community accept with no doubts the Jewish status of these people? I doubt any rabbis would contend that the Beta Israel or Kaifeng Jews, for example, are surely not Jewish. The problem is a question of doubt, which under certain circumstances, according to certain rabbinical scholars, would require a conversion for the sake of being stringent.

 

[Moses613]

Young Ludovicus wrote:

They themselves might see non-Rabbinic Jews not as Jews, but as an outsider with no stakes in it, the Subbotnik, Kaifeng Jew, Karaite Jews etc. seem also Jewish.

I don’t get why you keep mentioning Subbotniks. They were totally gentile Russian peasants who took on Jewish type customs and practices without ever undergoing formal Rabbinic conversion. They don’t claim ancestry from Jews and, while they seem to be monotheistic, their religion is not Judaism.

 

[Young_Ludovicus]

Young Ludovicus wrote:

I don’t get why you keep mentioning Subbotniks. They were totally gentile Russian peasants who took on Jewish type customs and practices without ever undergoing formal Rabbinic conversion. They don’t claim ancestry from Jews and, while they seem to be monotheistic, their religion is not Judaism.

Russian official sources from the period, however, cannot be trusted implicitly, since the Subbotniks, like other Judaizing sects, carefully concealed their religious beliefs and rites from the surrounding Christians. They did not act so guardedly toward the Jews, however, with some communities referring to themselves as “Jews”. Over the course of the 19th century, some communities became indistinguishable from the Russian Ashkenazi communities, with whom they eventually intermarried.The Russian government carefully isolated the Subbotniks from the followers of either religion, but whenever the opportunity offered itself, the Subbotniks sought out Hebrew religious texts from the Jews. Apart from circumcision, they also slaughtered their food animals according to the laws of shechita wherever they were able to learn the necessary rules. Moreover, they clandestinely used tefillin, tzitzit, and mezuzot, and prayed in almost the same manner as the Jews; namely, in private houses of prayer, with covered heads, reciting their prayers from Jewish prayer-books with Russian translation. The cantor read the prayers aloud, the congregants then prayed silently; during prayers a solemn silence was observed throughout the house. On Saturdays, readings were also done from the Torah. Of all the Jewish rites and traditions, the Subbotniks observed Sabbath most zealously, whence their name. They were careful on that day to avoid work altogether; and they endeavored not to discuss worldly affairs.

There were those which were also a bit of christian but most seemed to practice Judaism the most.

It seems like the majority was gentile at first, though they religiously converted and later they intermarried with Jews.

I also think it’s kind of dubious. But that’s why I mentioned the Subbotniks as they are a strange case, just like I think the Kaifeng Jews and Beta Israel are.

 

[Moses613]

Let me clarify further regarding splinter groups, etc. The doubt is not even on the entire community, but rather on each individual separately. Let me give you an illustration. Let’s say there was a group called “Shevet Dan” that was found living in the interior desert regions of Chad. They kept all sorts of customs that seemed like they were Jewish and claimed to be descended from the tribe of Dan. Now, what if they really were Jewish, but over the years they started to accept patrilineal descent. At some point “Joseph” married a local gentile woman and the Shevet Dans accepted his child Ephraim as Jewish. Now, according to orthodox Jewish law, Joseph is Jewish and Ephraim is not. When this ancient tribe is discovered, we have no way of knowing who is a Joseph and who is an Ephraim, or descended from him. That’s one problem.

 

[Moses613]

There were those which were also a bit of christian but most seemed to practice Judaism the most.

It seems like the majority was gentile at first, though they religiously converted and later they intermarried with Jews.

I also think it’s kind of dubious. But that’s why I mentioned the Subbotniks as they are a strange case, just like I think the Kaifeng Jews and Beta Israel are.

Ok, thanks for the info, very interesting!