I have had a number of Jewish readers of my blogs for some years. That is an excellent discipline for me as many things that I write touch on Jewry and Judaism and, not being Jewish myself, there are occasions when things I write on such matters are not as precisely expressed as they might be. And on such occasions, I rapidly get an email drawing attention to the lacuna concerned. I enjoy such emails greatly as they are undoubtedly the most intellectual emails that I receive. And I quite often respond by editing or updating what I have written to plug the apparent hole in my argument.
I was aware that my recent post about Islam as a "Jewish plot" could be misinterpreted as derogatory to Judaism but I retained that title because I felt confident that my Jewish readers would be smart enough to see that I was mocking the Left, not anybody else. And I was right. The title evoked no complaints.
There was however another point that I was conscious of not spelling out fully at the time but which I left stand for lack of time to add to it. And one of my readers of course picked it up. He wrote (quoting me initially):
"And other Jewish theologians have had no difficulty in also taking on board most of his ideas -- so that Paul has in fact humanized Judaism too. It is left to Islam to represent the "old" version of Judaism."
Judaism had no need for Paul to "humanize" anything; the Rabbis were long in the process of doing so already. Read "Pirkei Avot", "Ethics of the Fathers", which is one of the books of the Mishnah. The Talmud was filled with "humanized" law and parable.
I replied:
Yes. I expected a complaint of that sort -- which is part of the reason why I noted the humane elements in the Torah. Both Paul and Jesus were good Jews and almost all they said had precedents in the Torah. And I noted that Paul was only one figure in a long line of great Rabbis and prophets.
The point I think you miss and one I should have spelt out more is that Christianity gradually changed the whole culture of the European and Levantine world so that the influence on Jewish thinkers was more osmotic than conscious
That response cleared the matter up, with my correspondent agreeing that Jews have always tended to make big adaptations to the society in which they found themselves. The language we call "Yiddish" is in fact mainly a form of German!
I guess that this post is already a little rambling (my more rambling posts are usually written with the assistance of Mr. John Walker of Scotland but this one isn't, surprisingly) so let me ramble just a little further: The reader I have just mentioned bears a surname which in German means "The landlord of "The Sun"" -- where "The Sun" is an inn. As regular readers here may remember, I rather enjoy looking at what is behind personal names. So I noted something unusual in that surname. It is of course normal for Ashkenazi names to mean something in German but what such names mean is usually mocking. My favourite is "Kren" -- which is Southern German for "Horseradish". Can you imagine someone going around and being obliged to introduce himself as "Mr Horseradish"?
But being the landlord of "The Sun" is not at all unprestigious -- quite the reverse in fact. So somewhere way back there was a Jewish guy who took on the quite challenging job of being the landlord of an inn and who eventually came to be known by that name. Occupational surnames are of course quite common. In English, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Baker, for instance, must have had remote ancestors who were a tailor and a baker respectively.
And it's not only occupations that formed bases for surnames. One of my favourite non-occupational names is "Inglis" -- which is a Scottish surname that is pronounced as "Ingels". But what does it mean? It means "English". The original "Mr Inglis" was an Englishman from England who settled in Scotland and became known in his locality for that strange peculiarity!
There are also many English inns called "The Sun". Here is a link to one of them. Note the sign. Such signs date to times when few people could read and write -- so a simple sign that could readily be recognized was put up out front and used to identify a particular inn. "Bull and bush" and "Elephant and castle" are other well known examples of such signs in England. A German inn in the same category that most people will have heard of is Das Weisses Roessl, though most will know it in translated form as "The White Horse Inn" -- a popular operetta set in an Austrian inn that was identified by a picture of a white horse outside. You can see a small picture of the horse concerned here
And here is a link to an actual German inn called "Sonne" ("Sun"). Note the sign again.
Posted by John Ray
John,
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting point:
"Both Paul and Jesus were good Jews and almost all they said had precedents in the Torah."
I would disagree about Paul, since the theology he develops in the Epistles, with its emphasis on the incarnation of God as a young man who is betrayed by treachery only to be resurrected in the springtime, and in whose Passion (death & resurrection) the faithful worshipper is invited to participate and be likewise reborn, is I think absent from the Jewish tradition and has other antecedents.
On the other hand, I think that there is nothing in for example the Sermon on the Mount that a Jewish preacher would be embarrassed to preach to a Jewish audience, which is after all not surprising, since the Sermon on the Mount was preached by a Jewish preacher to a Jewish audience.
Islam is in no way shape or form a version of Judaism.
The key difference between Christianity and Islam, in my opinion, and the reason that Christendom has developed in a continuously improving direction while the Ummah has become increasingly impoverished spiritually, intellectually, and materially, is that Christianity maintained a connection with the Jewish tradition, in the form of the Jewish Bible, which the Christians call the "Old Testament." But even when Christians disparage what they allege are limitations of the Jewish tradition, they still maintain access to the Psalms, to the Prophets, and to the ethical conception of social and individual life enshrined in the code God prescribed for the Jews. Islam on the other hand represents a complete rupture with the Bible, and the Nobvle Qu'ran knows the Bible in a garbled and distorted fashion. In fact, Muslims claim that the text of the Bible is a late forgery. In this sense, Islam is farther away from the essence of Judaism than Christianity, even if that essence is in Christianity communicated through a theology which has its origins, in my opinion, in the Mysteries.
That JOOOOOOOOOOOO who preached on the Mount said this: "... by their fruits ye shall know them..."
ReplyDeleteHe was answering a question about future prophets and future FALSE prophets and how one might distinguish the two.
And what are the fruits of mhmmd?
I think we all know the answer to that! Binladen is no apostate - even Irshad Manji admits that!
Also:
Christians believe that God doesn't break his word - that God KEEPS His word and His covenants.
Hence, Christians (most these days) accept that the Mosaic Covenant is valid today for Jews.
Pope Benedict 16 has spoken about this. When asked how both Christianity and it's hope for the Second Coming and Judaism's hope for the FIRST could both be true he said it was a mystery he could not answer, but that he knew that God didn't break his Word.
CITATION:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/
mi_m1058/is_4_119/ai_83666792
In an authoritative document that took Jewish scholars by surprise, the Vatican has affirmed the "extreme importance" of the Old Testament and stated that Jews do not wait "in vain" for the Messiah. The 200-page study, The Jewish People and Their Holy Scriptures in the Christian Bible, was published in Italian and French last year without fanfare.
"The Jewish messianic wait is not in vain. It can become for us Christians a strong stimulus to maintain alive the eschatological dimension of our faith," said the document from the Pontifical Biblical Commission, which is attached to the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. "We, like them, live in expectation. The difference is in the fact that for us, he who will come will have the traits of that Jesus who has already come and is already present and active among us."
END CITATION
BUT...
Mohammedanism is predicated on believing that GOD BROKE HIS COVENANT WITH THE JEWS because the Jews didn't keep it.
God made a new covenant which abrogated the previous ones.
That is not the God of the Bible.
Not at all.
I would also say that history since the time of mhmmd shows God hasn't broken his covenant.
All nations which seek to destroy the Jews are themselves destroyed and the Jews are still here - restored to the Holy land.
Rome is gone. Nazis and Ottoman's gone. And so on.
And every nation GOOD to Jews thrives.
Persia is a good example: under the Shah it was good to Jews and thrived. No they are bad to Jews and suffer.
This goes back to the Abrahamic covenant: Genesis 12:3 -
"3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed."
The fact that Jews suffer because we are not always good Jews also PROVES the Covenants between us and God are still valid.