May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

):
Tosefta Berakhot 6:18 teaches in the name of Rabbi Yehuda ben Ilai (mid-2nd c. CE) that every (Jewish) man is obligated to recite three blessings daily. These express gratitude for ones station in life through the negative statements: thank God that I am not a gentile, a woman, or a slave (or in earlier formulations, a boor). This language echoes Greek prayers preserved first by Plato. Especially because this text also appears as a legal dictum in the Babylonian Talmud, Menahot 43b, these blessings, which modern scholars call the “blessings of identity,” gradually became part of the preliminary prayers to the daily morning service. They are found in the earliest preserved Jewish prayer books, from the end of the first millennium, but not yet universally as public prayers.

121 Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life Is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl (New York: Schoken, 1952).

122 David Assaf, Untold Tales of the Hasidim: Crisis and Discontent in the History of Hasidism (Lebanon, New Hampshire: Brandeis University Press, 2010), 185.

123 Rosa Lehmann, Symbiosis and Ambivalence: Poles and Jews in a Small Galician Town (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), 124.

124 Ibid., 71–72.

125 Ibid., 84.

126 Polonsky, The Jews in Poland and Russia, vol. 2, 166–67.

127 Petrovsky-Shtern, The Golden Age Shtetl, 165, 166, 167–69.

128 Samuel C. Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), 21.

129 Ibid., 233.

130 Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), as quoted in Facing History and Ourselves, The Jews of Poland (Brookline, Massachusetts: Facing History and Ourselves Foundation, 1998), 40.

131 Ivan G. Marcus, “Honey Cakes and Torah: A Jewish Boy Learns His Letters,” in Lawrence Fine, ed., Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 116–17.

132 Judith Kalik, “Polish Attitudes towards Jewish Spirituality in the Eighteenth Century,” in Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, vol. 15 (2002): 80–81. On the portrayal of Jesus and Christian beliefs in the Jerusalem Talmud and Babylonian Talmud, see Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), 10–13. According to rabbinical teachings:
Jesus was not born from a virgin, as his followers claimed, but out of wedlock, the son of a whore and her lover; therefore, he could not be the Messiah of Davidic descent, let alone the son of God.
… sexual transgressions are involved because the Christian cult was characterized as enticing its members into secret licentious and orgiastic rites.
… details the halakhic procedure of Jesus’ trial and execution: Jesus was not crucified but, according to Jewish law, stoned to death and then, as the ultimate postmortem punishment reserved for the worst criminals, hanged on a tree. … The reason for his execution was because he was convicted of sorcery and of enticing Israel into idolatry.
The most bizarre of all the Jesus stories is the one that tells how Jesus shares his place in the Netherworld with Titus and Balaam, the notorious archenemies of the Jewish people. … Jesus’ fate consists of sitting forever in boiling excrement. … the story conveys an ironic message: not only did Jesus not rise from the dead, he is punished in hell forever; accordingly, his followers … are nothing but a bunch of fools, misled by a cunning deceiver.
Schäfer’s highly regarded study authoritatively discredits the claim that anti-Christian passages in the Talmud are merely inventions of anti-Semites, a notion that is increasingly commonplace in modern scholarship. For example, Magda Teter writes: “Following medieval anti-Jewish rhetoric again, many Catholic writers in Poland claimed that Jewish hostility toward Christians had its roots in the Jewish religion and in the Talmud. Polish clerics repeated old claims that in their rituals and prayers, Jews cursed and blasphemed against Christianity.” See Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland, 117, 119. It is only later—buried in an endnote—that Teter notes: “These claims were not entirely unsubstantiated. Jewish prayers did indeed contain some anti-Christian statements.” Ibid., 210, n.140. However, she does not retract from her position regarding the Talmud. Teter’s study is intended to be an expose of religious bigotry and the author admits to some of the biases she personally had to overcome: “… led me to expect to find in the archives abundant material filled with anti-Jewish sentiments and tales filled with hate. I expected to find countless sermons that disseminated these sentiments. But when I confronted the sources … I had to reassess my ideas. I did not find large quantities of anti-Jewish works … Jews were not even mentioned in the vast majority of the works I examined. … The Jews were one of the multiple concerns of the Church. … I expected to find Jews as a central focus of the Church’s thought and actions.” Ibid., xv. Rabbinic Judaism also played a large role in concealing the historical significance of Hanukkah, which in actual fact marked the revolt against and massacre of Hellenized Jews by armed Hasmonean priests and their followers, by turning it into a putative celebration of light. The miracle-of-the-oil celebration of Hanukkah was later invented by the rabbis to cover up a blood-soaked struggle that pitted Jews against Jews. See James Ponet, “Jew versus Jew: Hannukah’s miracle-of-the-oil myth covers up the reality of an ancient, blood-soaked civil war.” National Post, December 18, 2009.

Another scholarly work by a Jew that explores the notion of Jewish supremacy and traditional Jewish antagonism toward non-Jews is Sacha Stern’s Jewish Identity in Early Rabbinic Writings (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1994). Apologists claim that Jewish teachings about Christians, unlike Christian teachings about Jews, had no real impact on the behaviour of Jews toward Christians. This is demonstrably not the case. Elliott Horowitz’s book Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), shows that Jews harboured as much religiously-motivated animosity against Christians as Christians did against Jews. Horowitz discusses Jewish violence against Christians throughout the ages, and how information about it has been suppressed in Jewish historiography. A case in point is the massacre of between 40,000 and 90,000 Christians, for the most part by Jews, during the Sassanian Persian conquest of Jerusalem in 614. (The magnitude of this slaughter far surpasses the Cossack massacre of Jews in 17^th century Poland which scholars now estimate to be in the range of 10,000 victims.) The Jews burned churches and monasteries, killed monks and priests, and burned holy books. The avoidance of discussion of Jewish violence stems from the tendency to consider Jews as victims and not victimizers. Horowitz comments: “Evenhanded assessments of the reciprocal role of violence in Jewish-Christian relations were to become increasingly rare in post-Holocaust Jewish historiography, both in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora.” Ibid., 235.

Israeli historian Ariel Toaff made many of these same points in his book 2007 Blood Passover. Virtually the entire print of this book was destroyed soon after it was published, but the book has since reappeared. Toaff affirms the fact that the Babylonian Talmud (Gittin 57a) refers to Jesus Christ burning in hell in hot excrement, and that this teaching was especially prominent among the Jews of German origin. (P. 301.) He also affirms the fact that the Toledot Yeshu, which he dates to the 5^th–8th century, was a Jewish “Counter-Gospel”. (Pp. 273, 298, 301.) The author discusses Israel Jacob’s Yuval’s Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antquity and the Middle Ages. As a result of the Crusades, the Jews had developed an elaborate vindictive worldview that called for the destruction of not only those Christians that had persecuted the Jews, but of all Christians. The Jewish drinking of Christian blood was thus an extension of this elaborate vendetta. The Jews had a custom of roasting the Passover lamb skewered on a spit in a vertical position, with the head upwards. This was a creative mockery of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, in which He was the agnus Dei (Lamb of God). (P. 70.) Purim long included many visible manifestations of anti-Christian rituals. (For examples, see pp. 192–95.) Jews had many contemptuous terms for Christians. These included shekez, shekz, sheghez, sceghesc, and shiksa or shikse, etc. (P. 265.) As pointed out by Jan Peczkis in his Amazon review, Toaff contends that it is unlikely that the medieval notions of Jews conducting ritual murder were merely copied from similar accusations in Antiquity, as the latter were probably not widely known and disseminated in the Middle Ages. (P. 185.) Instead, they probably arose de novo. They developed out of gentile awareness of the Jewish vendetta against Christianity as a whole, as noted from the Yuval work mentioned above. The extensive Jewish involvement in the slave trade also played a major role in the medieval-era accusations of ritual murder. It induced Christians to think that Jews would kidnap Christian children. (P. 188.) The standard argument adduced against the validity of ritual-murder accusations is the one that consumption of blood is invariably and necessarily abhorrent to Judaism. Toaff shows that this was not necessarily so. (Pp. 152–55.)

Jewish antagonism towards Jesus Christ is usually understood in terms of the Talmud and the attitudes of religious Jews. However, secular Yiddishist thinker Zelig Hirsh Kalmanovitch, writing in 1920, actively juxtaposed traditional Jewish motifs against Jesus Christ with his antagonism to certain political opponents. He wrote, “those we were accustomed to see as virtually paragons of virtue now seem in my eyes as though they were bathed in the lake of Hell in which ‘that man’ [Jesus of Nazareth] was condemned. [The smell] carries, it seems to me, for a mile.” See Karlip, The Tragedy of a Generation, 170 (the brackets are Karlip’s).

133 Graetz, History of the Jews, volume 5: From the Chmielnicki Persecution of the Jews in Poland (1648 C.E.) to the Period of Emancipation in Central Europe (c. 1870 C.E.), 4, 5–6.

134 Stephen G. Bloom, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (New York: Harcourt, 2000), passim.

135 Salsitz, A Jewish Boyhood in Poland, 65, 163, 164, 177.

136 Interview with Gizela Fudem, December 2004, Internet: