Ludicrous but fatal charges

In her series of lectures on "The Jew in World Literature," Livia Bitton-Jackson, Professor of Judaic Studies at CUNY, covered many topics. Here is a summary, emphasizing those aspects which have become standard fare in the anti-Semitic creed of Christians and Muslims:
1. "The Jews killed Christ": this is a particularly fundamental yet misplaced basis for Christian anti-Jewish hatred, since the crucifixion of Christ is an essential element in the Christian religion. It was undoubtedly carried out by the Romans; even if some Jews supported this action then, crucifixion was a Roman form of punishment, never used by the Jews. Furthermore, how it could be blamed on all Jews for eternity defies any logic. Nevertheless, religions are not logical, and the political need for early Christianity to overcome and supersede Judaism required a good measure of justification for hatred and killing. Supposedly this charge has been officially dropped by the Catholic Church since the 1960's, but it definitely lingers on.
2. Later on in the Middle Ages this charge was expanded to the killing of any innocent Christian child. It started in England in 1144 ce with the first recorded blood libel in Norwich, where it was alleged that the Jews had "bought a Christian child before Easter, tortured him with all the tortures wherewith our Lord was tortured and on Friday hanged him ..in hatred of our Lord." This then spread to Europe, and later in the 17th century the detail of supposed use of the Christian child's blood in making matzoh was added. The supreme irony is that orthodox Jews are totally prohibited from eating/drinking blood in any form, and in fact when I was a child my mother would throw away an egg if there was a spot of blood in it, and we were far from orthodox. I was also admonished if I sucked/licked a cut on my own body, which was not allowed. In 1840, there was a major "blood libel" trial in Damascus, for which many innocent Jews were tortured, and in the Beilis trial in Kishinev in 1912, the "blood libel" was charged, although the mother and step-father were later found to have killed their own child.
3. Desecration of the host. It was a regular feature of Christianity that Jews were supposed to sneak into the Churches at night and deliberately injure the host, the sacred wafer, that was supposed to actually be the "body of Christ." There were many cases when it was found that the wafers were "bleeding" and Jews were then massacred. Later on when Protestantism developed, they changed this belief to be metaphorical (trans-substantiation instead of con-substantiation), and the charge of desecration of the host was gradually dropped.
4. "The wandering Jew" or "the eternal Jew," this topic was covered in a previous message.
5. "The Plague": the "black death" of Europe starting 1347, that wiped out one third of the population, was blamed on the Jews. It was actually a rat-borne parasite known as bubonic plague. Due to the relative cleanliness/hygiene of Jews they died less in proportion than others, but were massacred in the belief that they deliberately started the plague by poisoning the wells.
6. As the power of the Church faded and modern beliefs began to spread, these "blood libels" and other ridiculous myths began to recede, but were replaced by a more political form of anti-Jewish hatred termed "anti-Semitism" by German political scientists. It included a firm belief that Jews controlled the media/commerce and industry and were deliberately exploiting Christians.
7. Anti-Semitism found its most modern format in the organized belief of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," that was described in a recent message.
All of these beliefs, as a package, were based on religious/racial hatred and were used as an excuse by Christianity and Islam to murder Jews. It should be asked how it is that supposedly humanitarian religions that announced that they had the answer to the world's needs, could so wholeheartedly and so widely engage in such despicable murders of millions of Jews based on obviously mythical justifications over a period of 2,000 years. That Christianity and Islam are both heretical versions of Judaism that seriously mangled its ethical message was a major basis for their need to destroy and supersede the original. How we Jews survived this constant and continuing history of murder is in itself a mystery. The continuing suicide bombing by Palestinian Arabs against Israelis is only the latest manifestation of this specific and despicable hatred.
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Some of Livia Bitton-Jackson's books are available thru Amazon, particularly her memoirs of her childhood in the camps and during the Holocaust. She is an excellent scholar and lecturer.